Rites of Spring by Anders Motte (life books to read .txt) 📗

opens the front door. The rain is hammering on the gravel and the decking outside.

‘Emee!’ she shouts, but her voice doesn’t even carry across the courtyard.

‘Both the fire alarm and the intruder alarm have gone off,’ David informs her. ‘Probably a short circuit. We need to get up there right away.’ He rummages in a drawer, digs out a torch.

‘But what about Emee?’

‘I’m sure we’ll find her on the way. Let’s go!’

He runs across to the car, shoulders hunched against the storm. After a few seconds’ hesitation, Thea pulls on her shoes and jacket and follows him.

It’s only two hundred metres from the coach house to the castle. David puts his foot down, steering with one hand and chewing at the thumbnail on the other. Thea keeps a lookout for Emee, afraid that David will run over her. But Emee is a street dog, she reminds herself. She knows all about the dangers of cars.

Somehow the castle looks even blacker than their little house, as if the high walls, turrets and steeply sloping roof make the darkness even deeper.

David slams the brakes on by the kitchen door in the east wing. Holds the torch in his mouth as he struggles with the key. The sound of the alarms bounces off the stone walls inside.

‘There’s a portable emergency light in the kitchen – just follow the glow,’ he calls over his shoulder as he hurries down the cellar steps.

Thea does as she’s told. She finds the light, switches it on and runs with it through the service corridor leading to the main dining room. Could Emee have crossed the bridge and run off into the forest? If so, Thea ought to be able to spot her from the terrace at the back.

The alarm stops abruptly. The dining room is deserted, of course. The new tables and chairs are still stacked in a corner. The walls are covered with gilded panels which have recently been cleaned. She directs the beam of the powerful light up towards the ceiling. Greek motifs, young women in long robes in a forest, surrounded by creatures such as satyrs, centaurs, and others she can’t name. Some of the trees look like living beings. She remembers the face on the Gallows Oak, the Green Man to whom she made her offering of wood anemones. A ridiculous idea, with hindsight.

She opens the glass doors. The cloudburst has abated slightly, and is now an ordinary spring downpour. She pulls up her hood and goes out onto the terrace. Sweeps the beam across the low hedges in the box garden, across the grass.

‘Emee! Emee!’

A flash of lightning illuminates the whole garden, a blue-white core with red edges that slices through the night and comes down in the forest on the far side of the moat. The thunderclap is almost simultaneous, and so loud that it takes her breath away.

The nightmare returns. The blast wave, the panic, the feeling of not being able to get up, of suffocating. Her body begins to shake again. She crouches down, lowers her head, tries to slow her breathing.

In, out. In . . . out.

Something nudges Thea’s back. It’s Emee. The dog pushes her nose into Thea’s hand and whimpers. Thea pulls her close, and to her surprise Emee doesn’t object, but simply allows herself to be embraced.

The rain seeps inside Thea’s jacket. She continues to take deep, slow breaths, and after a couple of minutes the panic attack is over. She wipes away the tears and the raindrops with her sleeve.

‘Good girl,’ she murmurs in the dog’s ear. ‘It’ll be all right in a little while. Nothing to worry about.’

A light flickers in her peripheral vision. It’s coming from the west wing, and for a moment she assumes it’s David. But he doesn’t have access to the west wing, and even if he did, he couldn’t have got there in such a short time. Plus the glow is too faint and unstable to come from a torch.

Someone is standing at one of the windows up there – a little man holding a candle. He is half-hidden behind a curtain. Their eyes meet through the rain.

Thea recognises the look in those eyes – she sees it in the bathroom mirror every morning and night.

Sorrow.

The man nods to her, then blows out the candle and is swallowed up by the darkness.

5

Walpurgis Night 1986

In Tornaby no one can escape the past. Everything repeats itself, over and over again, but with different faces. Like one long ritual.

But tonight that will all change. Things have been set in motion, and the Green Man is riding through the forests.

Can you hear him coming? Can you hear him whispering my name?

Elita Svart, Elita Svart . . .

Arne turned off for Tornaby, wound down the side window and rested his arm on the sill. He deliberately drove slowly, nodding casually to everyone he met and receiving surprised nods in return. The ironmonger, the painter, the bad-tempered woman from the post office. People who would never usually dream of acknowledging him. He turned the car around and drove up and down the street a couple more times, then parked outside the bank and got out.

Two other cars were already there: the count’s green Land Rover, and the white pick-up belonging to Erik Nyberg, the castle administrator. Under normal circumstances, Arne wouldn’t have gone in. He’d been afraid of Rudolf Gordon ever since he was little. The older kids had scared one another with stories of how the count had chased them when they were playing in the forest near the castle, how he’d set the dogs on them and come after them on horseback. Some even claimed they’d seen him riding through the trees dressed as the Green Man on Walpurgis Night.

However, neither ghost stories nor dried-up old men frightened the new Arne Backe. He put on his peaked cap, adjusted his white belt and shoulder strap and entered the bank.

The three tellers who worked for Bertil looked up from behind the glassed-in counter. Gave a