Aeonian: Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Forty-Nine
The streets of the village were chilled, a bitter wind sweeping through them, blowing unsuspecting umbrellas and coats awry, wailing down busy streets between crammed-in last-minute shoppers who seemed to have all decided to grace the streets that day. Perhaps they all had the same plan as us, to not shop entirely at the last minute, and since there appear to be few original thoughts amongst the population as a whole, all of us ended up there on the same day, trying to avoid the exact situation we’d entered into willingly. The odd crisp packet skittered past, an ungainly kind of tumbleweed, vanishing up side streets. Birds perched on lampposts and walls gazed curiously at the people passing by, wondering on the collective insanity of humans.
I pulled my coat tighter around my body, putting down heavy bags of shopping for a moment to do up the zip. Martha had deserted me to buy my Christmas present after having, it seemed, bought absolutely everything she had seen as we trailed around the food stores. Her enthused predilection for almost every morsel and treat which we had come near to had left me with arms that ached from having to carry all her purchases. A great deal of what I was carrying seemed to be cheese. For my part I tried to enter into the spirit of Christmas willingly, but my mind was half-fogged, and cast in shadows.
The thought of my hazily remembered wild abandon in the dream, if a dream it had been, brought fire to my cheeks and dread to my stomach. I was finding the smells of various meat and vegetable counters we visited nauseating, and the relentless, cheerful Christmas music played in each shop irritating in the extreme. I was also fighting with an overactive sense of guilt for not entering into the spirit of the holiday, even as I resented that guilt too, for impinging on my own troubles.
With Martha gone, scurrying into the bookshop, as I had suspected she would, I set the bags down in a more secure spot, and flashes of the dream of last night once more hovered, waveringly, into my thoughts. I tried to shake them off, to find an explanation for the events of the morning which didn’t come from the pages of the journal.
The blood on the nightshirt… how had it got there if the dream had not, in fact, been real? The mud, rainwater which caused the shirt to still be sodden and soaked through in the morning, how had all that happened if I hadn’t been lured out into the gardens to do goodness-knew-what on the lawn of the house with some mythical creature with violet eyes? I flushed again, as if the people around me could see and hear all that I was thinking.
Perhaps there was a rational explanation. Perhaps I had, in fact, sleepwalked outside. Perhaps I’d cut myself on a sharp thorn or stone and that was where the blood had come from? But I couldn’t find a cut nor bruise on my skin. No sign as to where and how the blood had come to be on my nightshirt. The two things didn’t add up.
Should I trust my sleeping mind, or my waking one? I had no idea. Both seemed unreliable at the moment.
Martha emerged from the bookshop with a brown paper package under one arm and an expression of sly excitement painted on her face, and nodded to me as we switched over; her guarding the bags and me entering the little bookshop to what felt to me in the present state of mind I was in, an entirely inappropriate cheery tinkling of the bell over its door.
The shopkeeper looked up and smiled that odd, peaceful smile that good booksellers always seem to possess. None of the outlandish and odd overt jollity of the high-street chain bookshops, where staff are no doubt taken into dark backrooms and commanded at gunpoint to be pleasant and happy to all customers, existed here, but rather a serene quality which comes from actually loving the job you have. In high-street book chains I always gained the impression that the books were being paraded like girls at a beauty pageant, thrown in the face of the customer with the shrill cry of, “Admire me! Admire me!” as their authors wept tears of humiliation for their books being forced to prostitute themselves in order to make a living for them. In small independent bookshops, and second-hand bookshops, an air of mystery and respect is maintained, and I get the notion that rather than parade volumes before the customer, like so many horses at market, the books are discreet, patient, waiting for the customer in dark corners like wonderful tiny surprises, all guaranteed to bring joy. When reader and book find one another, it’s a little story in itself, the start of a romance or a tragedy, only time will tell.
Don’t get me wrong. I go into all bookshops, high-street ones, chains, little pokey second-hand shops, market stalls brimming with thick romances with half-naked men baring their nipples on the cover (and why not? I sometimes asked myself, since women used to always be the ones baring nipple, the men ought to have a go if they so wished). I buy from discount bookshops where gems are often hiding behind oh-so-many volumes on cooking and domestic tips, but I feel better when I walk through the door of shops such as the one I entered that day. I feel better about myself perhaps, cleaner. It feels as if the books are loved in shops such as this, as though the selling of one is almost a process of adoption; a beloved child being handed with care from one trusted person to another. I never get that feeling in high-street chains, and it perhaps devalues the poor books that I buy from them, in my eyes at least.
Or, I might just be odd in the mind, I thought.
I was talking about books as if they were not inanimate objects, because to me they are not. They are animate in a way I can’t explain, and science wouldn’t accept. They’re filled with the thoughts of human beings, part of the person who wrote them, part of the readers they touch. There is a touch of the soul in books, both of writer and reader.
There are books I like and books I don’t, but then there are people I like and people I don’t. Everyone is entitled to enjoy what reaches out and touches them on a personal level, and for every reader there is a writer who does that for them. When you find them, you hold on to the vessel in which their thoughts are contained. That’s why people collect books. Books are parts of our souls; laid bare yet swathed in mystery, written in black ink and on solid page, yet which allow parts of our minds to be woken into glorious colour, and insubstantial, yet seemingly entirely real, fantasy.
The woman who stood at the counter nodded to me with a knowing smile which meant, I supposed, that my aunt had mentioned we were both buying our gifts here. She didn’t seek to wish me a good day, nor start poking me towards the books that she wanted sold, as some shop staff are apt to do if you dare to meet their eyes, but gave me her peaceful smile and let me wander off into the dim corners of the shop. Lit as the place was with a peaceful, warm light, and blissfully free from annoying music, I felt my shoulders lift a little, my breath exhale, bathed in happiness. I folded myself into the dark recesses of the bookshop with a shiver of pleasure.
For a few moments, I quite forgot my dreams of the night before as I trailed a hand over spines of second-hand books at the back of the shop, looking over faded covers of classics to see if there were any of attractive binding or a different edition that Martha might like. In a case at the back there were collectable editions; some first editions, some third or fourth editions of famous titles, entirely out of the reach of my pocket. I thought over what I should get in a bookshop for the woman who seemed to have read everything there was to read in the world, and decided on a radical solution. I would buy Martha a little selection of books that I knew she had not read, including a few authors I knew she disapproved of. I liked the plan so much that I smiled to myself and went back into the more modern catalogue, seeking out titles I had read and enjoyed, and which she would ordinarily pass by.
I took my selection to the lady at the counter, who took the books in her hands and looked over each of them as she rang them through. “Your aunt said that you would be coming in,” she told me, “I must warn you, she would never have picked these books for herself, if they are a present for her.”
“Exactly my devious plan,” I confided with a wry smile. “To convince my aunt to read something published after 1945.”
The bookseller chuckled and said no more. She wrapped the books in brown paper, much as she had with Martha’s and handed them to me. “I hope you have a good Christmas,” she said, and unlike any of the staff working in high-street chains, who are no doubt ordered to wish customers such things by a manager hiding under the desk with a knife to their femoral artery, I believed she meant it.
“You too.” I left the shop, feeling happiness wash over me in place of unrest and confusion. The snug package rested merrily under my arm as I went outside to join Martha.
She was standing by our bags, looking worryingly cold. Her skin was pale as a pond under ice and her lips were a little blue. “We should get home,” I said. “Surely we have all that we need now?”
Martha nodded, teeth chattering. “I’d like a hot bath.”
“I’ll draw you one when we get in. Tomorrow I’ll make a start on the food, and you can do your mulled wine.”
She made off up the high street to the car park at the top. I heaved the bags into my hands once more and followed her like an ungainly donkey. The bags cut into my cold fingers, bounced off my legs. Not for the first time in my life, I felt glad that I was getting off the high street at Christmastime. It makes you appreciate how lovely and peaceful home is, and even if your house is filled with sugar-crazed, hyperactive children at least it’s not the madness which seems to infect the shops just before Christmas.
I drove us back quickly. Martha’s car didn’t have a heater, or if it did it didn’t work. When the car misted up with our conjoined breath, we had to open a window, and my aunt was cold enough before that. Martha was looking thoroughly chilled through by the time we got back and, worried for her strength and health, I hurried upstairs to run her a bath.
I hadn’t been in the bathroom a great deal since I had seen the vision of the woman in the mist. Obviously, I’d gone to the lavatory, but that was it, and I’d tended to head to the one which was just a toilet on another floor, rather than this one. As I ran the bath, slipping my fingers into the water to test the temperature, I kept looking behind me. I was glad when hot water came burbling noisily from the tap and I could rush out of the room to fetch fluffy towels from the airing cupboard.
Martha came up with a cup of tea in her hands and smiled gratefully. “I made you one,” she informed me, nodding at the tea, “it’s on the table in the kitchen.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll stick the food away and make something for tonight.”
“Do you want to watch one of the films we got after dinner?”
“Sure.” I felt my heart drop a little at the thought of watching a film rather than reading the journal. I didn’t want to be impolite though, or ruin her Christmas.
She entered the swirling mist of the bathroom, shutting the door behind her. I went to walk downstairs, then realised I still had the towel I had been fetching for Martha in my hands. I walked back to the bathroom, and was about to knock, when I heard my aunt speaking softly through the door.
But she wasn’t speaking to me.
“She is a good woman, Philomena,” said the voice of my aunt, soft and low from the other side of the door. “She has a good heart and a courage to match yours. Do not fear for her. She is the one. When the time comes, when she is tested, she will make us proud.”
I froze at the door, the towel still in my hands. From inside I heard no more, but instead heard the sound of my aunt lowering herself into the bath with a sigh of pleasure. I put the towel down on the floor and trod on sneaking steps back to the stairs where I made for the kitchen with great haste. I was shaking when I reached the steaming cup of tea on the table in the kitchen. I was shaking as I put the Christmas food away on autopilot.
Had I really just heard my aunt talking to the same vision I had seen within that room? Had she been talking to Philomena? My aunt knew that her spirit was within this house? My aunt was on speaking terms with the spirit of the long-dead governess whose story had somehow brought the dark gothic of the past into my waking days?
When all the food was away, I sat down heavily at the table and put my head in my hands. I would have cried over the confusion in my mind, if unrest hadn’t already robbed me of that blessing. More than anything, I felt numb, and confused.