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IV
The Kiss
Shadow helped Moira. He walked down to the village shop and bought the items on her shopping list while she stayed in the house, writing at the kitchen table or hovering in the hallway outside the bedroom door. Moira barely talked. He ran errands in the white Range Rover, and saw Oliver mostly in the hall, shuffling to the bathroom and back. The man did not speak to him.
Everything was quiet in the house: Shadow imagined the black dog squatting on the roof, cutting out all sunlight, all emotion, all feeling and truth. Something had turned down the volume in that house, pushed all the colours into black and white. He wished he was somewhere else, but could not run out on them. He sat on his bed, and stared out of the window at the rain puddling its way down the windowpane, and felt the seconds of his life counting off, never to come back.
It had been wet and cold, but on the third day the sun came out. The world did not warm up, but Shadow tried to pull himself out of the grey haze, and decided to see some of the local sights. He walked to the next village, through fields, up paths and along the side of a long drystone wall. There was a bridge over a narrow stream that was little more than a plank, and Shadow jumped the water in one easy bound. Up the hill: there were trees, oak and hawthorn, sycamore and beech at the bottom of the hill, and then the trees became sparser. He followed the winding trail, sometimes obvious, sometimes not, until he reached a natural resting place, like a tiny meadow, high on the hill, and there he turned away from the hill and saw the valleys and the peaks arranged all about him in greens and greys like illustrations from a children’s book.
He was not alone up there. A woman with short dark hair was sitting and sketching on the hill’s side, perched comfortably on a grey boulder. There was a tree behind her, which acted as a windbreak. She wore a green sweater and blue jeans, and he recognised Cassie Burglass before he saw her face.
As he got close, she turned. ‘What do you think?’ she asked, holding her sketchbook up for his inspection. It was an assured pencil drawing of the hillside.
‘You’re very good. Are you a professional artist?’
‘I dabble,’ she said.
Shadow had spent enough time talking to the English to know that this meant either that she dabbled, or that her work was regularly hung in the National Gallery or Tate Modern.
‘You must be cold,’ he said. ‘You’re only wearing a sweater.’
‘I’m cold,’ she said. ‘But, up here, I’m used to it. It doesn’t really bother me. How’s Ollie doing?’
‘He’s still under the weather,’ Shadow told her.
‘Poor old sod,’ she said, looking from her paper to the hillside and back. ‘It’s hard for me to feel properly sorry for him, though.’
‘Why’s that? Did he bore you to death with interesting facts?’
She laughed, a small huff of air at the back of her throat. ‘You really ought to listen to more village gossip. When Ollie and Moira met, they were both with other people.’
‘I know that. They told me that.’ Shadow thought a moment. ‘So he was with you first?’
‘No. She was. We’d been together since college.’ There was a pause. She shaded something, her pencil scraping the paper. ‘Are you going to try and kiss me?’ she asked.
‘I, uh. I, um,’ he said. Then, honestly, ‘It hadn’t occurred to me.’
‘Well,’ she said, turning to smile at him, ‘it bloody well should. I mean, I asked you up here, and you came, up to Wod’s Hill, just to see me.’ She went back to the paper and the drawing of the hill. ‘They say there’s dark doings been done on this hill. Dirty dark doings. And I was thinking of doing something dirty myself. To Moira’s lodger.’
‘Is this some kind of revenge plot?’
‘It’s not an anything plot. I just like you. And there’s no one around here who wants me any longer. Not as a woman.’
The last woman that Shadow had kissed had been in Scotland. He thought of her, and what she had become, in the end. ‘You are real, aren’t you?’ he asked. ‘I mean . . . you’re a real person. I mean . . .’
She put the pad of paper down on the boulder and she stood up. ‘Kiss me and find out,’ she said.
He hesitated. She sighed, and she kissed him.
It was cold on that hillside, and Cassie’s lips were cold. Her mouth was very soft. As her tongue touched his, Shadow pulled back.
‘I don’t actually know you,’ Shadow said.
She leaned away from him, looked up into his face. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘all I dream of these days is somebody who will look my way and see the real me. I had given up until you came along, Mr American, with your fu
Shadow’s hands held her, feeling the softness of her sweater.
‘How much longer are you going to be here? In the district?’ she asked.
‘A few more days. Until Oliver’s feeling better.’
‘Pity. Can’t you stay forever?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘You have nothing to be sorry for, sweet man. You see that opening over there?’
He glanced over to the hillside, but could not see what she was pointing at. The hillside was a tangle of weeds and low trees and half-tumbled drystone walls. She pointed to her drawing, where she had drawn a dark shape, like an archway, in the middle of a clump of gorse bushes on the side of the hill. ‘There. Look.’ He stared, and this time he saw it immediately.
‘What is it?’ Shadow asked.
‘The Gateway to Hell,’ she told him, impressively.
‘Uh-huh.’
She gri
Shadow examined her drawing. ‘So what do you know about big black dogs?’ he asked.
‘The one in Shuck’s Lane?’ she said. He nodded. ‘They say the barghest used to wander all around here. But now it’s just in Shuck’s Lane. Dr Scathelocke once told me it was folk memory. The wish hounds are all that are left of the Wild Hunt, which was based around the idea of Odin’s hunting wolves, Freki and Geri. I think it’s even older than that. Cave memory. Druids. The thing that prowls in the darkness beyond the fire circle, waiting to tear you apart if you edge too far out alone.’
‘Have you ever seen it, then?’
She shook her head. ‘No. I researched it, but never saw it. My semi-imaginary local beast. Have you?’
‘I don’t think so. Maybe.’
‘Perhaps you woke it up when you came here. You woke me up, after all.’
She reached up, pulled his head down towards her and kissed him again. She took his left hand, so much bigger than hers, and placed it beneath her sweater.
‘Cassie, my hands are cold,’ he warned her.
‘Well, my everything is cold. There’s nothing but cold up here. Just smile and look like you know what you’re doing,’ she told him. She pushed Shadow’s left hand higher, until it was cupping the lace of her bra, and he could feel, beneath the lace, the hardness of her nipple and the soft swell of her breast.
He began to surrender to the moment, his hesitation a mixture of awkwardness and uncertainty. He was not sure how he felt about this woman: she had history with his benefactors, after all. Shadow never liked feeling that he was being used; it had happened too many times before. But his left hand was touching her breast and his right hand was cradling the nape of her neck, and he was leaning down and now her mouth was on his, and she was clinging to him as tightly as if, he thought, she wanted to occupy the very same space that he was in. Her mouth tasted like mint and stone and grass and the chilly afternoon breeze. He closed his eyes, and let himself enjoy the kiss and the way their bodies moved together.