Echoes Read online

  She reached into the case and removed something rectangular and heavy, something I hadn’t packed, something that didn’t belong. I froze as she turned it in her hands. The frame was broad-edged and silver-coloured. I had seen it before; I didn’t want to look at it again, but the smiles flashed at me as she tilted it, two girls beaming out.

  Cold fingers brushed the back of my neck.

  “That’s so sweet,” Mum said, putting it back. “Come down when you’re ready.”

  I think I nodded, but couldn’t be certain. My face barely felt like my own any longer. I flipped the photograph over, hiding the picture. How had it got there? Even if I’d wanted some reminder of Sophia—which I hadn’t—I would never have packed something so bulky. It must have been him, I decided. For some crazy reason of his own, my step-dad had slipped the picture into my suitcase—but why? Had he thought he was doing something nice?

  I went to the door, pushing it closed. Then I grabbed the photograph and hid it in the back of the wardrobe, shoving it in among the blankets. There. I’d have to think about Sophia anyway if we were going to relive some old memories, but that must be enough; I didn’t have to look at her too.

  I found the others ready to go for a walk and we stepped out into evening sunshine and the constant humming of bees. We strolled, not talking about Sophia, but she was there: I saw where she’d once pressed up against the hedge as a busload of grey-haired trippers squeezed past. I saw where she’d leaned over a fence, her athletic legs swinging. And I saw her walking ahead of me, putting her arms around her dad and my mum, leaving me to follow.

  And yet this, if anywhere, was where we’d been the closest. With nothing else to do and no one else to see, we’d actually spent some time together, splashing into crystal clear waves, running our fingers through white sand. We’d been the image of girls on holiday then: July girls, my mum called us. And we’d walked along these lanes, complaining of how boring they were, the endless hedges making everywhere look the same.

  I thought of the photograph that had followed me from home. Those two smiles, shining out—but we had been like that, hadn’t we, when we were here?

  And maybe Sophia was here. A part of me couldn’t believe, even then, that her dad had sneaked the picture into my suitcase. I couldn’t shake the thought that she’d brought it here herself; that maybe she was trying to tell me something. She might have liked to smile at me now, to let me know that, despite our arguments and bitchy comments, it was all right.

  Then we turned a corner in the lane and I saw the opening in the hedge which led to a path I remembered, and I stopped dead.

  “Are you all right, love?” Mum’s tone was all concern.

  I told her I was just tired and she nodded and walked on, linking arms with my step-dad, but her stride was different, clumsy, and she suggested we turn back. I didn’t look at the path when we passed it again but I could see it still: the nettles and rosebay willow herb hemming it in, the KEEP OUT sign, the clearing beyond.

  By the time we reached the cottage the light was fading, chill shadows clawing their way along the narrow lanes. The glowing lamps and cosy sofas banished it all, as did our laughter and the familiar burble of the television, and I said good night and made my way up the stairs.

  I saw the picture as soon as I opened the door. It was now on my bedside table, those two smiles shining out, like sunshine; like summer. And I whirled because in the corner something coalesced, a shadow a little like a figure.

  I blinked. Nothing was there, never had been—only the picture, which had no reason to be there either. Had my step-dad come up here, searched my room, moved it from its hiding place, and put it by my bed? I tried to picture him rummaging through the depths of the wardrobe and couldn’t.

  But he must have; it was the only explanation. I went to the picture and gripped it, the frame digging into my hands as I thought of another explanation, one that wasn’t even possible, and I yanked open a drawer. It was almost empty apart from a Bible, left for the edification of any visitor who cared to read it, and I shoved the picture in underneath, wondering—or hoping, perhaps—it might keep her from coming back again.

  I sat on the bed and stared into space for a long time. I didn’t see the room. I only saw Sophia: her perfect skin, perfect teeth, perfect life. What the hell had she ever known about me? She hadn’t known what it was like to walk into school and see the stares, to know every time she looked into the mirror of other people’s faces that she wasn’t good enough.

  I shook off the self-pity. I didn’t need it. This was my place now, my time. She never had wanted to share anything with me. Now I supposed I had everything after all. I was sleeping in the second biggest room. Our parents were mine. I could have anything I wanted that had once been hers, and there wasn’t a damned thing she could do about it.

  A photograph was only that. It didn’t mean she was still here. I might even have brought it to Cornwall myself, acting on some unconscious impulse. There was nothing unnatural about it—and she wasn’t going to scare me.

  Later, I awoke in darkness more complete than I had ever experienced at home. I couldn’t see a thing and yet all my reassurances drained from me, because I could feel someone standing in the room. I opened my mouth to whisper, “Mum?” and closed it again. It wasn’t her. I knew that. I could feel it in the silence, heavy and watchful and full of intent.

  I reached out to switch on the lamp and hesitated as an image of my step-sister rose before me. She wasn’t smiling. It was Sophia as she truly was: dead. Mutilated, as she had been when her stupid boyfriend turned his motorbike over, skidding along the tarmac, dragging his passenger with it. She hadn’t been wearing a helmet. That wasn’t her style; I suppose she liked to have that golden hair flying behind her in the breeze.

  From the fragments I’d overheard afterwards, she’d been scraped raw.

  No one had knocked on the door. No one called out or whispered my name. They simply stood on the other side of that darkness—and I pictured her face flayed and bloody, but still with that lovely hair, still with that look in her eyes.

  My hand snapped out and I switched on the lamp. The room was empty.

  The picture, though, was back. I must almost have touched it when I reached for the lamp. I peered at it, fearful that it would have changed somehow, showing her as she was after the accident; but Sophia was still there, in all her beauty. I stared into her face, trying to make out what lay beneath.

  When I could bring myself to move, I crept into the hall and peeked in at Mum’s bedroom door. There lay two covered mounds, so deeply entrenched in sleep I couldn’t believe they’d ever woken. It wasn’t my step-dad who’d moved the picture. I don’t think I’d ever truly believed it was.

  • • •

  I awoke the next morning before anybody else. I wasn’t in my room; I hadn’t wanted to go back there, and so instead I’d slept on the sofa. Light flooded in through the open curtains and I stretched my stiff limbs before going towards the stairs. Why had I allowed myself to be spooked? I wasn’t afraid of a picture. What harm could it do?

  And Sophia was gone.

  When I opened my bedroom door I thought the picture had moved again after all, but of course it hadn’t; the image was simply blanked out by reflected light. I had to go closer to confirm that the image hadn’t changed. There she was, that look in her eyes that said the whole world was hers—and yet it wasn’t, not now. It was mine.

  Still, I couldn’t dispel the thought that I’d spent the night camping on the sofa, just as if she could take it all away from me any time she wanted.

  I cast my mind back to our last holiday in this place. It had been Mum who’d told us to go for a walk, tired perhaps of the sour looks and tension that so often hung between us. I suppose she’d thought we might come back best friends. Adults could be so very unrealistic.

  Sophia and I had met Lucy before we’d even gone out of the gate. About our age, her blonde hair was so sun-bleached it was almost white
, and her eyebrows stood out against her tanned skin. She told us she lived here year-round, in a broken-down farmhouse her dad was restoring. “It’s a complete tip,” she’d said, “and there’s nothing to do. Except . . .”

  It was that “except” that led us along the lane and towards the path, swatting away midges as we went. Sophia and Lucy went in front, talking about their lives, a thinly disguised game of one-upmanship. We didn’t pause at the path, just pushed our way along it through waist-high weeds until we reached a copse, low branches barring the way, as did a chain with a KEEP OUT sign hanging from it, the letters roughly painted.

  It was Sophia who said, “Where the hell are we going? This where you hide your wacky baccy or something?”

  Lucy grinned, stepping over the sagging chain. She ducked under the branches, pushing the undergrowth aside, and gestured towards a clearing. A large mound of earth rose at its centre, covered with tussocks of grass. There was nothing else, no sign saying what it was supposed to be, but it didn’t look natural.

  “It’s a fogou,” Lucy said.

  “Oo-ooh.” Sophia was all sarcasm.

  “It’s a hidden chamber,” Lucy went on as if Sophia hadn’t spoken. “No one comes here; no one’s bothered. There’s a better one at Carn Euny, and a few others. This one’s all ours. If you dare, that is.”

  “Dare?” Sophia sounded interested at last. I felt something twist in my stomach.

  “No one knows what it was for. I reckon it’s a burial chamber.” Lucy didn’t quite respond to the question, and yet I thought she’d answered the one in my mind anyway. And I saw that the mound wasn’t quite complete, after all. A small opening, maybe a foot high, was lined with crooked stones, like teeth. I imagined lowering myself to the ground and crawling into that hole. I shuddered. That couldn’t be what she meant. It was probably dangerous. It looked as she had said, like nobody cared, like nobody had been here in years.

  “It’s Iron Age,” Lucy went on, as if she’d turned tour guide, as if it mattered. “Some call them holts, or fuggy holes, or vows. It’s not far to the chamber. But first there’s the creep.”

  Sophia’s gaze shot to me, a new kind of amusement in her eyes.

  “Some say the little folk still haunt it. Pixies. Piskies.”

  “Pigsies,” Sophia said, her gaze still on me, and she giggled.

  I looked away, casting my eyes around the lowering branches that hemmed us in, the pure whiteness of the clouds scattered across the sky. The air was so clean here. It had been one of the first things I noticed about Cornwall. It felt impossibly distant from cities or factories, and this place felt even more so, as if it existed outside time itself.

  “Does she talk?” Lucy nodded towards me and Sophia let out a trill of laughter.

  “You don’t want her to. Bo-ring. So, what’s the dare?”

  Lucy didn’t say anything, didn’t have to. She turned and pointed to the hole.

  Sophia fanned out her hair, showing off its clean fineness, as if to say, Really?

  “It’s a squeeze,” Lucy said. “Some reckon it was a proper passage once, but it’s partly filled up with dirt over the years. There’s no mortar holding the stones together. There’s one bit—the roof comes down. You have to wriggle.”

  I still didn’t say anything, but I think my eyes opened wider.

  “Come on, then.” Sophia’s voice was loud. I looked up sharply and realised she was watching me. Of course she was; that was what we did, wasn’t it? We watched each other. And I’d been off guard. She had seen my fear. Now she would push at it, see how deep it went.

  “The moss inside glows.” Lucy seemed oblivious to our hostility. “It’s phosphorescent. It’s not that rare, it’s just you don’t normally get to see it like that. Like magic.”

  Sophia waved a hand, a “who cares” gesture. But I did care. Glowing moss? That was something I would like to see, but there was no way in hell I was getting down on the ground, putting my face in the dirt, and wriggling inside.

  Sophia didn’t pause. She knelt in front of the hole, then turned and looked at me. And yet it wasn’t her usual look. There didn’t seem to be anything hidden in it, and she smiled—a real smile—and said, “Come on, sis. Why not? An adventure.”

  I didn’t answer, partly from surprise, but mainly because I was afraid. I knew that Lucy must have been in the chamber lots of times. But I wasn’t her, and I wasn’t Sophia. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t give up the clean air and the sun for whatever adventure lay inside that hole, not for anything—not even for her, to mend whatever it was between us.

  Sophia shrugged before she slid, neat as an eel, into the hole, her legs wriggling as she disappeared. Lucy didn’t wait for me either. Looking annoyed that she hadn’t led the way, she hurried after and I watched as she too slithered inside and vanished into the dark.

  I sat on a fallen branch and I waited. Above me the clouds went by, time passing, in another world. Here, there was silence. I couldn’t even hear birds singing or insects humming or distant cars in the lane. There was nothing, and I was alone, and I wished suddenly I’d gone with Sophia, reached out maybe, and taken her hand.

  My seat was becoming uncomfortable, another sign of time passing. And the thought struck me: What if they don’t come out? There was only me who knew where they were. I’d have to go after them. I thought of crawling into the hole, feeling for them blindly in the dark, and finding Sophia’s face under my hands, unconscious perhaps, overcome by the stale air. I’d have to get her out. I imagined wriggling backwards, trying to pull her with me, and not being able to move her. I pictured Lucy in the chamber behind Sophia, wedged in, helpless; Sophia—the body—between us; and me, stuck in the place where the roof came down, unable to go forward or back.

  The sourness of bile rose to the back of my throat. I stood and walked over to the hole in the ground, listening, feeling a breath of cold air on my cheek. There was no light in there—couldn’t they have used their mobile phones?—and there were no voices. There was nothing at all, and then, distinctly, I heard the scratch and flare of a match.

  Was that a greenish glow, coming from somewhere within? I blinked and speckled light danced in the tunnel, playing tricks on my vision. I thought of Cornish pixies, elusive and mischievous, and I heard laughter, distorted as if coming from a great distance away. It echoed from stone to unmortared stone, until I couldn’t be sure how many voices there were. It was like something from a fairy tale and I thought of a little palace inside the rock, lit by that glowing moss. But it wasn’t a fairy tale. Even if it had been, there was never a step-sister in any of those stories who actually got on with the heroine—with the real daughter.

  Something moved in there. I started back and they came spilling out, and it was over. They were laughing, out of control, frightened and relieved and together—bonded, the two of them, like sisters.

  “God, that bit . . . !” Sophia squealed then laughed again, clutching her belly. She leapt to her feet and reached out her hand, and without a second’s thought Lucy took it and Sophia pulled her to her feet. They didn’t look at me. Sophia didn’t talk to me all the way home.

  • • •

  I came to myself sitting on the bed, clutching the photograph in my hands, wondering how things would have been if it was me who’d gone with her, if I’d taken her hand. Another image came: Sophia, sneaking out of my window. If I’d snitched on her then, everything would be different. She wouldn’t have been in the accident.

  I felt hands close around mine and the picture was lifted from me. I caught my breath and looked up to see my mother’s face. By her expression, I knew she believed that I’d brought the picture here myself, that I’d done it out of love for Sophia, and I couldn’t bear it.

  I blurted, “She hated me.”

  “What, love?”

  “I hated her, too.”

  She sank down onto the bed next to me, cradling the picture as if it were a child. “Oh, sweetie. I know you didn’t always get on,
but people don’t, and—it doesn’t mean they can’t find a way to live togeth—it doesn’t mean they don’t love each other.”

  I leaned against her and she rubbed my back, just like she had when I was little. She had to be right, didn’t she? Maybe she wasn’t so unrealistic after all. It had only been pettiness and jealousy, and we’d have got past it sooner or later. Wasn’t Sophia beyond it already?

  And she was dead. I surely couldn’t think so badly of her any longer.

  • • •

  We spent the next day by the sea, every wave glittering, the sands shining so whitely in the sun I had to shield my eyes. It reminded me of Sophia and me at our best—the July girls—and the salt air gave me an appetite and a good kind of tiredness, but I wasn’t about to rest. It was still hours until sunset when we got back to the cottage and without telling anybody, I packed a few items in a backpack and crept down the stairs. I could have said I was going for a walk, but it seemed more appropriate to Sophia’s memory to sneak out.

  I slung the backpack’s straps around my arms and hurried along the lane. It was cooler than it had been, and quiet. I didn’t know what I’d find at the fogou; the chamber might have been sealed or fenced in since I’d seen it last.

  The willow herb grew higher about the path than I remembered and I pushed through it, everything smelling of sap and growth and nectar. When I emerged near the trees the sign was still there, hanging from its chain. The only difference was that its letters were a little more faded than before, but their intention remained clear enough. I didn’t pause, just stepped over. I hadn’t seen anyone else, and I wondered if Lucy still lived here or if she’d moved on, as people did—at least, those who were still alive.

  My arms were bare and it was cooler at once under the shadow of the trees. Low branches clawed and scraped and I felt them in my hair, like fingers, trying to make me stay. I tried not to think too much about what I was doing. I told myself it would be all right. Sophia had laughed in the face of this; it had been easy for her. She’d asked me to go with her then, and I’d refused, but I wouldn’t refuse now.