A Great and Terrible Beauty

Page 5

There's something coiled, waiting in the shadows at the back of the shop. It's as if the dark has begun to move . How can it be moving? But it is, with a cold, slithering sound that makes my skin crawl. A dark shape spreads out from its hiding spot. It grows till it reaches all around. The blackness in the center of the thing is swirling and the sound the most ghastly cries and moans come from inside it.
The man rushes forward, and the thing moves over him. It devours him . Now it looms over my mother and speaks to her in a slick hiss.
" Come to us, pretty one. We've been waiting "
My scream implodes inside me. Mother looks back, sees the dagger lying there, grabs it. The thing howls in outrage. She's going to fight it. She's going to be all right. A single tear escapes down her cheek as she closes her desperate eyes, says my name soft as a prayer, Gemma . In one swift motion, she raises the dagger and plunges it into herself.
No!
A strong tide yanks me from the shop. I'm back on the streets of Bombay, as if I'd never been gone, screaming wildly while the young Indian man pins my flailing arms at my side.
"What did you see? Tell me!"
I kick and hit, twisting in his grip. Is there anyone around who can help me? What is happening? Mother ! My mind fights for control, logic, reason, and finds it. My mother is having tea at Mrs. Talbot's house. I'll go there and prove it. She will be angry and send me home with Sarita and there'll be no champagne later and no London but it won't matter. She'll be alive and well and cross and I'll be ecstatic to be punished by her.
He's still yelling at me. "Did you see my brother?"
"Let me go!" I kick at him with my legs, which have found their strength again. I've gotten him in the tenderest of places. He crumples to the ground and I take off blindly down the street and around the next corner, fear pushing me forward. A small crowd is gathering in front of a shop. A shop where dried herbs hang from the roof.
No. This is all some hideous dream. I will wake up in my own bed and hear Father's loud, gravelly voice telling one of his long-winded jokes, Mother's soft laughter filling in after.
My legs cramp and tighten, go wobbly as I reach the crowd and make my way through it. The organ-grinder's tiny monkey scampers to the ground and tilts his head left and right, eyeing the body there with curiosity. The few people in front of me clear away. My mind takes it in by degrees. A shoe upturned, the heel broken. A hand splayed, fingers going stiff. Contents of a handbag strewn in the dirt. Bare neck peeking out from the bodice of a blue gown. Those famous green eyes open and unseeing. Mother's mouth parted slightly, as if she had been trying to speak when she died.
Gemma.
A deep red pool of blood widens and flows beneath her lifeless body. It seeps into the dusty cracks in the earth, reminding me of the pictures I've seen of Kali, the dark goddess, who spills blood and crushes bone. Kali the destroyer. My patron saint. I close my eyes, willing it all to go away.
This is not happening. This is not happening. This is not happening.
But when I open my eyes, she's still there, staring back at me, accusing. I don't care if you come home at all . It was the last thing I'd said to her. Before I ran away. Before she came after me. Before I saw her die in a vision. A heavy numbness weighs down my arms and legs. I crumple to the ground, where my mothers blood touches the hem of my best dress, forever staining it. And then the scream I've been holding back comes pouring out of me hard and fast as a night train just as the sky opens wide and a fierce rain pours down, drowning out every sound. London, England. Two months later.
CHAPTER THREE
"Victoria! This is Victoria Station!"
A burly, blue-uniformed conductor moves through on his way to the back of our train, announcing that I've arrived in London at last. We're slowing to a stop. Great billowing clouds of steam sail past the window, making everything outside seem like a dream.
In the seat across from me, my brother, Tom, is waking, straightening his black waistcoat, checking for anything that isn't perfect. In the four years we've been apart, he has grown very tall and a little broader in the chest, but he's still thin with a flop of fair hair that droops fashionably into his blue eyes and makes him seem younger than twenty. "Try not to look so dour, Gemma. It's not as if you're being sent to the stocks. Spence is a very good school with a reputation for turning out charming young ladies."
A very good school. Charming young ladies. It is, word for word, what my grandmother said after we'd spent two weeks at Pleasant House, her home in the English countryside.