EPILOGUE

‘Ashes in the water, ashes in the sea. We all jump up with a one, two, three.’ Amber didn’t know how long she had been singing to herself, but stopped when her throat was dry enough to reduce her voice to a whisper.

Once the sun had gone down, the blue-black tumult below the passenger decks faded to black. Of the ocean she could see nothing, but the great heaving and occasional wallops against the hull of the ship, so far below Deck 12, remained constant. Above her, the same infinite dark stretched, only pinpricked by stars so distant her dad had once told her that they were already dead. At the time she had found the idea both awful and sad.

Despite her jumper, coat and the blanket she had wrapped around herself, the mid-Atlantic night air still beat against her body, bit her nose with cold, and stiffened her joints. But she continued to sit alone on the balcony outside her cabin, content to stare into the darkness out there and inside herself. Only here, in such a cold and lightless place, did her thoughts find the right space in which to expand and to cope with what had happened.

From the newspapers that had been brought on board in New York, she could see the story had now vanished from every tabloid and broadsheet. And for that she was glad. The story had never made the front pages anyway. To her satisfaction, the fire in her home had only been treated as a novelty piece. Greater scandals and tragedies occupied the more prestigious and significant column inches. The Times had shown a photograph of the blackened ruin of the farmhouse, the old picture of her walking into the inquest, and a still of the actress who played her in Nine Days in Hell. The photographs were augmented with the headline: TRAGEDY CONTINUES FOR EDGEHILL ROAD GIRL. FIRE DESTROYS LUXURY HOME.

The articles mostly mentioned her success as a film producer, bestselling author, her reclusive existence following her escape from the notorious North Birmingham house, and the tragedy that befell her plans to settle in South Devon. For once the media didn’t know anything else and appeared disinclined to just make things up.

Her representatives had said little and the journalists were probably too fatigued by her story to revisit her life in any great detail over a house fire. Online trolls had claimed the fire was an obvious publicity stunt now that the theatrical run of her film was over, and that her exploitation of her story was exhausted. Others remarked upon the evidence of a curse without ever knowing how close to the truth they were.

Remnants of what she and Josh had burned before the farmhouse would never be found. The ashes of her nemesis and its acolyte they had scattered in the Teignmouth Estuary to wash out to sea. It was a measure they had devised in the hope that they could prevent such foul seeds taking root on land again. Perhaps they had even buried a God at sea. When she’d shared this thought with Josh, he’d not said anything.

Josh had only begun to speak again two days after the sun had risen and bleached away that last night in the presence of the Maggie. And when he began to communicate he hadn’t questioned Amber’s wishes to destroy the property. Instead, he had rediscovered those concealed resources that had performed so well for him in service, and had committed himself to a silent, methodical, critical path that began with the disposal of an unnaturally long human body, and what was left of the effigy that had been obeyed so faithfully. The miserable trophies of the thing’s constituency, that they had separated from the blackened effigy, they’d concealed inside a shoebox and buried the box in the corner of a local churchyard.

She and Josh had burned Fergal’s emaciated remains, and the charred remains of the idol of old Black Mag, in a metal skip. Josh had located the skip inside an empty feed barn near Newton Abbot. Amber had not watched the cremation. Nor had she been expected to watch Josh’s smashing of the bones and teeth of the effigy that had survived incineration. Because it was not sawdust or stuffing that they had found inside the burned idol. Amber had assisted Josh, with her face masked throughout the operation, with the sweeping of the ashes of their foes into dust pans, and then into the plastic bags that they had later emptied into an outgoing tide from the end of a deserted jetty.

They left nothing behind.

Josh had then made sure that the fire in the farmhouse began in the kitchen, close to where she had lain. The incineration of Amber’s home was not viewed as suspicious by the police; Josh’s expertise in such matters ensured the subtle tracks were covered. Amber’s solicitor was dealing with the insurance company over an electrical fire.

She had briefly wondered whether a priest could be paid to bless the ground, but had then realized that what had been buried in her home was probably much older than Christ and had been served before the first Roman footfall on British soil. She was left hoping, desperately, that her salvation had been determined by something as crude as the exhuming and incineration of the relics and remains that had followed her to Devon.

After they’d finished off her home and its unsightly intruders, Josh began his leave of absence from work. He’d didn’t know whether he would return to security duties, or what he might do instead. Neither of them had been sure what they would do next. They had resided, mostly in silence and away from each other, in neighbouring hotel rooms for one week, and they had waited, and waited, each dreading the fall of night to see what might happen in the darkness about their beds.

Nothing had happened. No nightmares had opened inside Amber’s dreaming mind, no desolate voices had called from beneath her windows, and no long, grubby figures had stood upright and raised their blackened faces to grin at her. On the first night she’d slept eighteen hours. Only waking once when Josh checked on her.

Josh had struggled to communicate what he had experienced in the garden of the farmhouse. He had tried, but Amber realized that he was currently being forced to do what she had been forced to do many years before: to question everything he had taken for granted, and believed, in life. And he too had been driven to wonder what else was out there, around them; where this torrid and uncoordinated journey through life was headed, and what lay at the end of it. A man’s thoughts could not get much bigger.

But Josh had admitted that after they had left the garage that night, he had seen Fergal and Arthur Bennet, and other things that may have once been people; forms that no handgun offered any protection against; things that were not there after the garden and sky had been briefly lit with a false red dawn.

Nothing had ever frightened him as much as what came to them within the darkness outside the rear walls of her house; nothing in the call of duty had shaken him in the same way before. His presence had enraged Fergal and Bennet, he knew that much. And he had been sure that he had been only a boy when he could no longer find Amber in the darkness. He’d hoped to prevent them from reaching her, but only half remembered being knocked around, then down, and finally savaged by what might have been dogs, or what had once been men, on a stone or cement surface that should have been a grassy lawn beneath his body. He’d told Amber in the only way that seemed available to him, that he had ‘unravelled. Lost it. Thought I was a kid at school again. I was dragged around the ground by someone with cold hands. My shirt was ripped off. I thought I was dead. They hit me hard. Think it was with a house brick. But I could still think, but not see. I thought I’d been blinded. It was like hell.’

The bruises and gouges on his flesh had eventually faded. The septic bites she had cleaned and dressed for him had now healed. But Josh did not know where exactly he had been during that night; he was certain he had not been in the garden that they had run into from the garage. Nor did he ever want to visit such a place again, and so he had agreed without complaint to the destruction of the building where such impossible things had reappeared in his client’s life.

Eventually, Amber rose from the balcony lounger on stiff legs and sniffed. Brought a tissue to her eyes and nose. And slowly made her way back inside to the light and warmth of her cabin. She would continue to sleep and eat inside there, to pass the time with small distractions, to accept sleep warily as if she was a sentry on watch for an unpredictable, patient enemy, and she would let this ship take her wherever it went before she boarded another. And she would wait, and wait, and wait, until she knew where to go and what to do next.