The first sound Merrily was aware of was the vibrating of the wires overhead.
It wasn’t much; if there’d been a breeze, it would have sounded natural. If these had been electric wires, it would have seemed normal. It was a thin sound, with an almost human frailty, a keening, that somehow didn’t belong to summer. The rustling overlaid it, as if all the wires were entwined with dried bines. This other sound belonged to winter. It sang of mourning, loss, lamentation.
The sounds came not from their alley, but the one adjacent to it and, as Merrily went to stand at its entrance, she noticed that it seemed oriented directly on the tower of the kiln, the poles bending at almost the same angle as the point of its cowl.
Merrily stood there with sweat drying on her face, edging past the fear stage to the part where she knew she was dreaming but it didn’t matter.
She waited. She would not move. She fought to regulate her breathing.
For here was the Lady of the Bines, approaching down the abandoned hop-corridor, drifting from frame to frame, and the sky was white and blinding, and the Lady moved like a shiver.
Simon St John came up behind Merrily.
‘What am I seeing, Simon?’
He didn’t reply. She could hear his rapid breathing.
‘Whose projection now?’ she said, surprised that she could speak at all. ‘Whose projection is this?’
She blinked several times, but it was still there: this slender white woman, pale and naked and garlanded with shrivelled hops.
Merrily put on her cross. Christ be with me, Christ within me…
The bine, thick with yellowed cones, was pulled up between the legs, over the glistening stomach and between the breasts. Wound around and around the neck, covering the lower face, petals gummed to the sweat on the cheeks.
Christ behind me, Christ before me…
The head was bent, as though she was watching her feet, wondering where they were taking her. She was not weaving, as Lol had described his apparition, but almost slithering through the parched grass and the weeds. And she couldn’t be real or else why was she affecting the wires?
When she was maybe ten yards away, the head came up.
Merrily went rigid.
The Lady swayed. Her eyes were fully open but hardened, like a painted doll’s, under a thickly smeared lacquer of abstraction. They were a corpse’s eyes, a ghost’s eyes. The end of the bine was stuffed into her mouth, brittle cones crushed between her teeth, and those petals pasted to her cheeks — grotesque, like one of the foliate faces you found on church walls.
She put out her arms, not to Merrily but to Simon, but he stepped away.
‘Stay back. For Christ’s sake, don’t touch her. Keep a space.’
The woman’s hands clawed at the air, as though there was something between them that she could seize. Her breath was irregular and came in convulsions, her body arching, parched petals dropping from her lips like flakes of dead skin.
‘Don’t go within a foot of her,’ Simon rasped.
‘It’s all right,’ Merrily said softly.
And she reached for the clawing hands, and waited for the cold electricity to come coursing up her arms all the way to her heart.