CHAPTER 99
There was an avenue of yew trees straight ahead and the echo of an old path. It seemed to lead nowhere, but as Meredith looked closer, she could see the outline of foundations and a few broken stones on the ground. There was once a building here.
This is the place.
Holding the box containing the deck of cards, she walked slowly towards where the sepulchre had once stood. The grass was damp under her feet, as if it had recently rained. She could feel the abandonment and isolation of the place through the soles of her muddy boots.
Meredith bit back her disappointment. A few blocks, the remains of an outer wall, otherwise just empty space. Grass as far as the eye could see.
Look closer.
Meredith looked into the space. Now she saw that the surface was not entirely flat. With a little imagination, she realised she could just about work out the footprint of the sepulchre. A patch of ground, maybe twenty feet long by ten feet wide, like a sunken garden. Clutching the handles of the box a little tighter, she stepped forward. Only as she was doing so did Meredith realise she’d lifted her foot.
As if stepping over a threshold.
Straight away, the light seemed to change. To grow denser, more opaque. The roaring of the wind in her ears was louder, like a high repeated note or the buzz along telephone wires in the breeze. And she could detect the slightest scent of incense, the heady smell of damp stone and ancient worship hanging in the air.
She put the box down, then straightened up and looked around. Some trick of the air made a soft mist rise from the damp soil. Then pinpricks of light began to appear, one by one, hanging suspended around the periphery of the ruin, as if some invisible hand was lighting a set of tiny candles. As each halo of light connected to the rest, they gave shape to the vanished walls of the sepulchre. Through the veil of thin cloud, Meredith thought she saw the outline of letters on the ground – C-A-D-E. As she stepped forward, the surface beneath her boots felt different too. No longer earth and grass, but hard, cold flagstones.
Meredith knelt down, oblivious to the wet seeping through the knees of her jeans. She took out the deck and shut the lid. Not wishing to spoil the cards, she took off her jacket and laid it, inside out, across the workbox. She shuffled the cards, as Laura had showed her in Paris, then cut the deck into three separate piles with her left hand. She put them back together – middle, top, bottom – and placed the entire deck face down on her makeshift table.
I cannot sleep.
Meredith could not possibly attempt a reading for herself. Every time she read through the notes she’d made, she was more confused by the meanings than before. She just intended to turn the cards – perhaps eight, respecting the relationship of the music with the place – until some pattern emerged.
Until, as Laura promised, the cards told the story.
She drew the first card and smiled to see the familiar features of La Justice. Despite the shuffling and cutting of the cards, it was the same card that had been on the top when she found the deck in the cachette in the dry riverbed.
The second card was La Tour, a card of conflict and threat. She placed it beside the first, then drew again. The clear blue eyes of Le Pagad looked up at her, one hand pointing to heaven and one to earth, the infinity symbol above his head. It was a slightly menacing figure, neither clearly good, nor clearly bad. As she stared, Meredith started to think she knew his face, although she could not yet recognise him.
Card four made her smile again: Le Mat. Anatole Vernier, in his white suit, boater and walking stick in hand, as painted by his sister. La Prêtresse followed him, Isolde Vernier, beautiful and elegant and sophisticated. Then Les Amoureux, Isolde and Anatole together.
Card seven was Le Diable. Her hand hovered over the card a moment, watching while the malevolent features of Asmodeus took shape before her eyes. The demon, the personification of the terrors and mountain hauntings related by Audric S. Baillard in his book. Stories of evil, past and present.
Meredith knew now, from the sequence she had drawn, what the last card would be. Each of the dramatis personae were here, portrayed in the cards Léonie had painted, yet modified or somehow transformed to tell a specific story.
With the smell of the incense in her nose and the colours of the past fixed in her imagination, Meredith felt time slipping away. A continuous present, everything that had come before and everything that was yet to come, joined in this act of the laying out of the cards.
Things slipping between past and present.
She touched the final card with the tips of her fingers and, without even turning it over, Meredith felt Léonie step out of the shadows.
Card VIII: La Force.
Leaving it still unturned, she sat back on the ground, not feeling the cold or the wet, and looked at the octave of cards laid out on the box. Then she realised the images were starting to shift. She found her eye drawn to Le Mat. At first it was just a spot of colour that had not been there before. A speck of blood, almost too small to see, growing larger, blossoming, red against the white of Anatole’s suit. Covering his heart. For a moment, the painted eyes seemed to hold her in his gaze.
Meredith caught her breath, appalled yet unable to tear herself away, as she realised she was watching Anatole Vernier die. The figure slipped slowly to the bottom of the painted ground, revealing the mountains of Soularac and Bézu visible in the background.
Desperate not to see more, yet at the same time feeling she had no choice, a movement on the adjacent card drew her. Meredith turned to La Prêtresse. To start with, the beautiful face of Isolde Vernier looked calmly up at her from card II, serene in a long blue dress and white gloves that emphasised her long, elegant fingers, her slim arms. Then her features started to change, the colour shifting from pink to blue. Her eyes widened, her arms seemed to glide above her head, as if she was swimming, floating.
Drowning.
The echo of Meredith’s own mother’s death.
The card seemed to become darker, as Isolde’s skirts billowed in the water around stockinged legs, shimmering silk in the opaque green underwater world, slimy fingers slipping the ivory shoes from her feet.
Isolde’s eyes fell shut, but as they did, Meredith saw that the expression shining out of them was release, not fear, not the horror of drowning. How could that be? Had her life become such a burden to her that she wanted to die?
She glanced to the end of the row, at Le Diable, and smiled. The two figures imprisoned at the feet of the demon were no longer there. The chains hung empty around the base of the plinth. Asmodeus was alone.
Meredith gave a deep breath. If the cards could speak the story of what had happened, what of Léonie? She reached out, but still could not bring herself to turn the last card. She was desperate to know the truth. At the same time, she feared the story she might see in the shifting images.
She tucked her nail under the corner of the card, closed her eyes and counted to three. Then she looked.
The face of the card was blank.
Meredith rose up on her knees, not trusting the evidence of her own eyes. She picked it up and turned it over, then back again.
The card was still blank, completely white; not even the greens and blues of the Midi landscape remained.
At that moment, a sound broke into her reflections. A broken twig, the crunch of stones knocked out of place on the path, the sudden beating of a bird on the wing as it flew up out of the tree.
Meredith stood up, half glancing behind her, but could see nothing.
‘Hal?’
A hundred thoughts flashed into her mind, none of them reassuring. She pushed them out. It had to be Hal. She’d told him where she was going. No one else knew she was here.
‘Hal? Is that you?’
The footsteps were getting nearer. Someone walking fast through the woods, the swish of displaced leaves, the crack of twigs underfoot.
If it was him, why wasn’t he answering? ‘Hal? This isn’t funny.’
Meredith didn’t know what to do. The smart thing would be to run, not stick about waiting to figure out what the person wanted.
No, the smart thing is not to over-react.
She tried to tell herself it was just another guest out for a walk in the woods, like her. All the same, she moved quickly to pack away the cards. Now she noticed that several others were blank. The second card she’d drawn, La Tour, and Le Pagad was empty too.
With fingers made clumsy by nerves and the cold, she snatched at the cards to pick them up. She had the sensation of a spider running over her bare skin. She flicked at her wrist to get it off but there was nothing there, although she could still feel it.
There was a different smell now too. No longer the scent of fallen leaves and damp stone or the incense she’d imagined a few minutes earlier, but the stink of rotten fish or the sea on some stagnant estuary. And the smell of fire; not the familiar autumn bonfires down in the valley, but hot ash and acrid smoke and burning stone.
The moment passed. Meredith blinked, suddenly pulled herself back. Then, out of the corner of her eye, she noticed a movement. There was some kind of animal, its fur black and matted, moving low through the undergrowth. Circling the glade. Meredith froze. It looked the size of a wolf or a wild boar, even though she didn’t know if they still even had wolves in France. It seemed to spring from leg to leg. Meredith clutched the box tighter. Now she could make out obscenely misshapen front legs, and leathery, blistered skin. For a second, the creature turned its piercing blue gaze on her. She felt a sharp pain in her chest, as if the point of a knife had been jabbed into her, then the creature turned away and the pressure on her heart was released.
Meredith heard a loud noise. She looked down and saw the scales of justice slip from the hand of the figure on card XI. She heard the clatter as the brass dishes and iron weights fell to the stone floor of the painting and scattered.
Coming to get you.
The two stories had merged, as Laura had predicted they would. The past and the present, brought together by the cards.
Meredith felt the short hairs on the back of her neck stand on end, and realised that while she had been staring into the woods, trying to see what was out there in the gloom of the forest, she had forgotten the threat from the opposite direction.
It was too late to run.
Someone – something – was already behind her.
