Slowly, minute by minute, she tantalisingly showed me the darkness, as if I watched a curtain pulled teasingly apart by ghostly fingers, quietly, gradually, so as not to alarm me. But as each drape was drawn tenderly aside, I saw more. One by one, tiny glinting fragments opened up the magic moonscape, and there it was, the whole fantastical landscape, stamped on my heart like an impossible fairytale postcard.
And Cornwall suddenly burst upon me.
For all the jolly days we’d had on the beach since we’d arrived, the spirit of this magic place had not yet touched me. I had been out of its reach for years.
Now in the silver, shadowed garden, the essence of Cornwall at last stretched out its arms, its limbs, wrapping itself around me so tightly I could barely breathe. Tendrils of sea mist seeped into my head, swirled around my brain. I was back, claimed once more by the strange, mythical home which had sung seductively in my soul until the day I lost my son.
I’d re-entered this mystic realm, I’d returned, and now all things were possible. I felt I could touch Joey. He was here, next to me. I could feel him, smell him, almost see him. I could certainly hear him.
And what I heard was a long, soughing sigh. What I heard, or thought I heard, was one word:
‘Mother.’
Could this be happening? I listened with every nerve I had, every sensory receptor in my body trembling with fear and pain. Was he trying to reach me? Please God, make it be so.
And his voice came again. Plaintive, pleading, dying, sighing on the breeze. ‘Find me. Find me.’
He sounded so sad. I cried out: ‘Joey. Where are you? Tell me. Help me. Please, Joey. I’m coming, darling. I’ll find you. Wait for me.’
I sank down onto a white stone bench. I sobbed, but I felt happier and more alive than I had in years. He had found me, my boy, at last. As I had prayed he would. He was here. Close, in Cornwall. I would find him even if it killed me.
And I knew this strange, haunted county had stirred again, as it does when the need is great. Cornwall had waited a long time, but until now I couldn’t hear her. The remote landscape of the far West Country had failed to reach me while I mourned my loss in Manchester, the northern town where Joey was born. I had to come back here, to the place he went missing, to be wrapped tightly in its flowing spirit-haunted cloak. Who knew what was real in this land of legends?
That night, wrapped in Faerie, I dreamed about an island. I was puzzled. In my dream I knew where it was. I had been there, surely, in the past? What enchantment had guided me? Something had taken me there, had held me in its spell for many days. So why was the place so mysterious to me? The image of the island cocooned me in enormous grief. Where was it, and when had I seen it? I had to tune in to this new sensibility, the wave of thought that had suddenly presented itself. If I could, I would know the answer to Joey’s fate. If I didn’t, he would be forever lost to me. I had no choice. I had to listen to Cornwall’s beckoning song. I had to let myself be haunted.
Chapter Eight
None of this made any sense in the morning. I had gone to bed, snuggled up to Adam and found comfort in the warmth of his body. But when I woke up I felt bereft, my stomach nauseated with what felt like a hangover. I knew this had nothing to do with alcohol. My brain was sick, scoured, scavenged. As Edie ate her breakfast porridge, I tried fiercely to concentrate on her, this gorgeously predictable little child pulling her usual wake-up faces, making her lovely tiny noises, communicating as always with the adults she knew would never disappoint her. The parents and grandparents who formed the boundaries of her happy baby life, the small circle of security she knew would never fail her.
But, much as I loved her, my mind was elsewhere, pinging off walls of doubt and uncertainty. What had happened in the garden last night? Somehow I had found Joey, I thought.
Douglas Preston, Lincoln Child