The Furies

Copyright

HarperVoyager

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

Copyright © Katie Lowe 2019

Cover photograph © Lysandra Coules/Arcangel Images

Cover layout design by Micaela Alcaino © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

Katie Lowe asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008288976

Ebook Edition © February 2019 ISBN: 9780008288990

Version: 2019-02-22

Dedication

For Maria

Epigraphs

While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist’s hands, or the face of one’s friend. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening.

Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, 1868

Observe these generation of Witches, if they be at any time abused by being called Whore, Theefe, &c, by any where they live, they are the readiest to cry and wring their hands, and shed tears in abundance & run with full and right sorrowfull acclamations to some Justice of the Peace, and with many teares make their complaints: but now behold their stupidity; nature or the elements reflection from them, when they are accused for this horrible and damnable sin of Witchcraft, they never alter or change their countenances nor let one Teare fall.

Matthew Hopkins, The Discovery of Witches, 1647

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraphs

The strange thing …

Autumn

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Winter

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Spring

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Summer

Chapter 17

Autumn

Chapter 18

Acknowledgements

About the Publisher

The strange thing, they said, wringing their hands and whispering as though we couldn’t hear, or weren’t listening through extension phones or cracks in the walls, was that there was no known cause of death.

Inconclusive, they said, as though that changed the fact of it, which was this: a sixteen-year-old girl, dead on school property, without a single clue to suggest why or how. No unexplained prints on the body, the forensic examination finding no trace of violence, nor rape, nor a single fibre that could not be linked to the girl, her friends, or her mother, whom she had hugged for the last time that morning as she left for school. It was as though her heart had simply stopped, her blood stilled in her veins, preserving her forever in a single moment, watchful as the dawn.

The papers blurred it out, took suggestive photographs of the screen the police erected around the scene, an implicit acknowledgement of the horrors that lay within. But by that time, I’d already seen it. I see it now, sometimes, when I’m struggling to sleep. It’s etched there, in my mind, not because it was horrific, nor due to some long-standing, unresolved trauma. No, my feeling is quite the opposite: a thrill, cold and sweet, in the recall.

I think of the scene, now, because it was so perfectly composed, like a Renaissance painting, the girl’s neck angled slightly, like La Pietà, though I did not see that, then. It was over a decade later, on a tour of the Vatican, that I first realized the likeness. My students, for obvious reasons, thought that my solitary teardrop as I explained the history of the sculpture belied some exquisite taste on my part, a visceral response to the beauty of Michelangelo’s work; I did nothing to disabuse them of that notion.

She was beautiful when she was alive – a child just discovering her power, knowing herself, all collarbones and blooming flesh – but death, it must be said, gave her something of the sublime. A little like the poem, ‘La Gioconda’ by Michael Field: ‘Historic, side-long, implicating eyes; / A smile of velvet’s lustre on the cheek; / Calm lips the smile leads upward; hand that lies / Glowing and soft, the patience in its rest / Of cruelty that waits and doth not seek / For prey …’ An underrated duo to my mind. How I love those words, even now.

In this pose they found her, eyes open, sitting upright on a swing. Immaculately put together, alive but for the blue threads of deoxygenated blood in place of youth’s blush; the impossibly delicate silver threads that tied her hands to the chains, the stiffness of her back, the result of rigor mortis, by the time she was found on the still gently rocking swing. Feet crossed at the ankles, ladylike, though one of her shoes had fallen to the ground below. All this, in a thin, white dress, turned almost see-through by the morning dew. A modern masterpiece, precise and profound.

‘So tragic,’ they said. ‘Another angel taken home,’ written on cards taped to store-bought bouquets, ink dripping in the rain. In the markets, beet farmers and fishermen muttered under their breaths; the local newspapers – whose usual focus was limited to the town’s growing seagull population and the many, endless failures of the one-way system – were filled with photos of her for weeks, her school photo tacked on their banner, ‘Never Forget’, in an incongruously jaunty font beneath. The news reporters – the real reporters, national, international, such was the allure of the image – lurked among the townspeople for weeks, listening for hushed conversations, searching for clues. Hotels saw a dramatic uplift in room occupancy; restaurateurs joked grimly that death should visit more often. That it had been, by all accounts, a very good year.

‘Every possible measure will be taken to get to the bottom of this case, and to prevent anything like this happening in our community again,’ the police chief said, chest puffed, parading peacock-like for the camera. I watched it with my mother, first, and then years later, at home, alone, after an unknown voyeur uploaded it online, grainy in a way that echoed the great tragedies of the TV era. Something about it reminded me of a video I’d found of the Kennedy shooting, the solemn delivery, the echo of the head thrown back. ‘We will investigate every angle, every lead, and every person in contact with this young lady to ascertain the exact circumstances leading up to her tragic death,’ he said.

They didn’t, of course. They ruled out the usual suspects – boyfriends, ex-boyfriends, a deranged parent – all to no avail. Even now, if you search for her name, you’ll find amateur sleuths on message boards posting their own theories – sometimes unhinged, sometimes surprisingly accurate. In the small hours of the night curiosity leads me there, when the darkness falls heavy and my need to see her swells. I’m grateful to the voyeurs of the internet, to the stranger who uploaded the crime scene photos, decades after the fact. They turn my nerves electric, the memory radiating white hot, clear.

For, despite all that followed – the investigation, the questions, the on-camera tears and plaintive words wailed at drooling reporters – even after all these years, I struggle with this one, unspeakable truth: I don’t feel bad about what we did. Any of it. Somehow, I can’t. It’s a crime, of course, and the fear of retribution naturally haunts me. But still, guilt is not the feeling I associate with her death.

Because, in the year I knew her, and in all the events leading up to her death – her murder – I felt more alive than I ever have, before or since. ‘To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame—’ a quote I repeat to my students regularly, though it never seems to capture their imaginations as it did ours – that, Pater said, is success in life. And in the memory of her, I feel that flame burn, hard and bright.

We were close to the divine. We touched gods, felt them flow through our veins. Felt lust, envy, greed, quicken our hearts – but for a while, we were truly, spectacularly alive. It might have been any of us, sitting there like the Madonna on the gently rocking swing. Sheer luck made it her, not me.

Chapter 1

Visitors joked that it was the kind of place people came to die. A town at the end of the world, at the end of the century: the absolute end of the line.

The population ageing, sick and tired: the remains of the old brickworks hollowed by the wind. A little south, a well-known suicide spot, white cliffs that drew the despairing up and then over into the cool, grey sea. Train tracks that stopped abruptly, roads that led to no place but here … These were the obvious signs, I suppose: the root of the joke. But it wasn’t just that.

It was the rain-battered shop fronts with peeling signs; pavilions caked in bird-shit and graffiti. The grey beaches, equal parts sand and shards of glass, crumpled beer cans and plastic bags. The arcades on the promenade, Caesar’s Palace, Golden Ticket, Lucky Strike, carpets damp with beer and bleach, copper coins rattling on tin; men smoking in the fruit machines’ lurid glow, hypnotized by the roll and ring. The pale fields of burned grass, barbed wire and brick. The shipping yards, great metal tombs arranged by mechanical beasts; the wilful, leering stench of the fish market. The corrugated bomb shelters, the stone mermaid, face worn away by the wind.

This is where I spent my youth, and found myself fixed, like a figure painted in oils; decay still rolling on, the shore dragged away by the sea. One day it will all be gone, and the world will be better for it.

There is little to tell of the years before I turned fifteen, my childhood quiet and dull, days and years blurring without consequences. My mum stayed home, taught me to read, watched me grow; my dad ran a small shop which, as far as I could tell, sold everything. I would hide in the cool, dark storerooms, plucking neon pens and glittering pencil sharpeners from scratched plastic trays and damp cardboard boxes. Board games, tested by me, playing my shadow. Books read, carefully, spines unbroken, pages held lightly as ancient runes. It sounds lonely, I imagine, but it was a comfort.

When I was eight, Mum said we’d been blessed with a special Christmas gift, and rubbed her swollen belly. I went to the encyclopaedia. Imagined her insides stretching, fists clutching tendons, amniotic sac bursting, tiny fingers crawling out. It’s one of the only Christmases I remember now, as an adult.

It was a girl. A writhing, red-faced, screaming girl with a mass of black hair and cold, grey eyes. She was possessed, her whole life, with a look that suggested she knew more than she let on, little keeper of secrets. She was seven when Dad’s car slipped under the wheels of a truck as he drove us to the beach. He died instantly, she lingering for four days, though she barely looked like herself. Barely looked like a person at all, really, her skin mottled blue, wet stitches carved into her skull.

I, for my part, climbed out of the car, a smudge of blood on my arm (not mine), plucked a damp fragment of bone from my hair (nor this). Brushed away the frost of glass that clung to my skin. Walked away, feeling like I’d woken from a long, dull, dream.

And that, I suppose, was the end. Or the beginning, depending on how you look at it.

Their lives ended, and Mum’s life stopped. Even decades later, when I returned to clean the house after her death, everything remained as it was that day. Wallpaper greying, carpets scorched with wear. The same books on the shelves, same VHS tapes unboxed under the old TV, still emitting a low, static hum. Same tie hanging in a loose knot on the bedroom door, same crumpled papers in the bin, the same last words abandoned mid-sentence on a yellowing page.

‘Perhaps we might consider an alternative approach,’ my dad’s last recorded thought in smudged, black ink. Everything was placed there with memories attached, my dad’s fingerprints and sister’s laugh still covering everything, like a skin that wouldn’t shed.

I, however, felt nothing. Leaving the hospital, nothing; throwing a clod of damp soil into the pit, soft thump on varnished pine, nothing. Mum weeping on the sofa, clawing at my hair, pressing damp, hot palms to my face, clinging to my life: still, nothing.

Weeks later, I woke on the sofa to find her staring at me as one might take in a half-expected ghost, lip bitten to the jelly beneath. ‘I thought she was … I thought you were gone too,’ she said, her eyes wet with tears, pointing at a face on the screen that looked like mine, but for the details. Hair dull blonde, hers shining, mine textured, split, like old rope; eyes close as one might find to black, but for a chink of amber in her left iris; lips round, always a little too full for lipstick, which gave me the distinct look of a circus clown. Mine were chipped and ridged white with medicinal balm, a compulsive picking I couldn’t shake, hers blush pink, smooth and smiling to reveal white, un-chipped teeth. I thought, watching her face flicker on the screen, that she was a better version of me – the one I longed to be. The artist’s ideal, brush softly smoothing my faults, delicate touch between the lines.

‘Renewed concerns for the missing teenager Emily Frost, who disappeared exactly one month ago today. Her whereabouts remain unknown, and her family have issued a new appeal for any information relating to her disappearance.’

I watched the stock footage, the familiar cliffs, the too-familiar edge. Nobody bothered to count the suicides these days. Emily had last been seen walking there, at the highest point.

‘Mum, I’m here. That isn’t me. She’s just a jumper,’ I said, reaching for the remote. ‘They always are.’

‘We just want you to come home,’ her dad said, staring down the lens. ‘We miss you, Emily. Please, please come home.’

I changed the channel and went back to sleep.

If there can be said to be an up-side to miraculously surviving a car wreck, apart from the immediately obvious, it’s that nobody expects you to go to school.

‘Not until you’re ready,’ Mum said. The therapist nodded sagely behind, a cornflake stuck to his moustache, a fat fingerprint smudge on his glasses. ‘You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. Just take your time.’

And so I did. I took my time: skipped school right through to my final exams, declaring myself ‘home-schooled’. I sat in a silent hall, surrounded by people I knew, my former classmates whispering as I walked in and right out again: ‘I thought she was dead,’ one said, pointing at me with a bloody, bitten nail.

I had already planned my future, or at least, had drawn a basic sketch. I would leave – though where to, I wasn’t sure. I’d get a job. A waitress in a quiet café, where interesting visitors would tell me thrilling lies. A bookshop clerk, offering new worlds to bored children; an assistant in a gallery, maybe. I could learn to sing, or play guitar. I could write a book, life ticking quietly along around me. It wouldn’t be glamorous, sure, but it would be enough. Anywhere, really, would be better than here, this town in which the greys of the old houses, sky and sea seeped into your heart and turned irreparably it black.

But on the day of my results, I came home to find Mum at the kitchen table, papers clenched in white-knuckled fists. ‘It’s what they would’ve wanted,’ she said, handing me the entry forms for Elm Hollow Academy – a private girls’ college on the outskirts of town. ‘It’s a privilege,’ she said: one afforded to me by the unspeakably large settlement offered by the haulage company under whose articulated truck our car had been crushed.

School, to me, was all taped-up windows, boxy buildings cracking at the edges, grey even in sunlight; freezing portacabins, graffitied bathroom mirrors and the loamy stink of teenage sweat. ‘I don’t want to,’ I said, and left.

She didn’t argue. But the papers sat on the kitchen table for weeks, and each time I passed I found myself drawn to the glossy pictures on the cover of the brochure: looming, red-brick buildings set against a too-blue sky, sunlight needling through pearly clouds behind a Gothic arch. There was a decadent, honey-sweet richness to it – one that I knew wasn’t for me, but seemed, in the flickering kitchen light, the stifling damp in the air, to be another world entirely.

And so – reluctantly, at least as far as my mum was concerned – I agreed to give it a try. Our dilapidated Volvo purred behind me at the gates, and I turned to wave her away, though she – thinking herself unobserved – was staring down at the steering wheel, grin a steely rictus beneath strings of dirty hair. I winced, and turned away, catching the eye of a passing girl watching, embarrassed for us both.

I walked towards the school quickly, looking up at the looming clock tower – the Campanile, I would soon be corrected, inspired by the reds and creamy whites of Tuscan cousins, gleaming in sunlight – and dipped under the arches, into the main building. Students gathered on the steps in clusters, whispering.

I passed wholly unnoticed, and told a stout, grey-haired woman – Boturismo made flesh – my name three times. She stared at me, blankly, through the glass partition, muddy with prints and unsettling scratches. Without a word, she slid a sheaf of papers through the gap and pointed to a row of seats. As I sat staring numbly at the endless list of extra-curricular activities and advanced classes, none of which I had any interest in taking, a girl loped by, hair bottle-red, ladders torn artfully into her tights. She waved with two fingers and smiled, a rolled-up cigarette teetering on the edge of her lip. I stared until the last second before she disappeared into the crowd, when I at last mustered a weak, lost smile.

She must’ve been smiling at somebody else, I thought. But as I looked around, back to the wall, this seemed unlikely. I sat, dazed, among the marble busts and gloomy portraits of long-dead headmasters until the bell rang, and the crowd dispersed. I waited, peering down the empty corridors, wondering whether I might have been forgotten.

A door creaked behind; I heard my name, and stood. The man in the doorway was tall, though not imposingly so, a little pot-bellied; tweed and sweater, horn-rimmed glasses; skin possessed of the waxy paleness common to those who spend too much time indoors. He stared at me, blinked, coughed; held out a hand, fingers clubbed and ink-stained. ‘Come on in,’ he said, softly.

He moved a stack of books and spilled papers from a wide, worn armchair next to the desk and I took a seat. The office was warm, if a little stuffy, books piled high under sediment layers of dust, framed prints of medieval etchings covering the walls. ‘Cup of tea?’ he said. Caught staring, I shook my head and picked at a loose thread on my folder.

‘So, let me begin with my usual spiel, and then we’ll get to know each other,’ he said, taking a seat by the desk and leaning forward, his elbows resting on his knees. He took a deep breath: tang of stale coffee on it, sour.

‘On behalf of the faculty of Elm Hollow, I’d like to welcome you to our student population.’ He paused, smiling. ‘We’re a small school with a varied and prestigious history, and we’re proud to have among our alumni leaders across a range of disciplines, including the sciences and the arts.’ There was a brief pause as he waited for me to respond; I nodded, and he went on, his smile the kind one might offer to a well-trained dog.

‘Our teaching staff includes many of these professionals, and our students are given the opportunity to follow in their footsteps with a wide array of curriculum-based and vocational courses. My name is Matthew Holmsworth, and I’m the Dean of Students here at Elm Hollow. I teach among the Medieval History faculty, primarily, but I’m also responsible for ensuring welfare among the student body, and, of course, welcoming new students such as yourself. You can call me Matthew – though I’d suggest calling the rest of the faculty Dr Whatever-Their-Name-Is until you’ve reached that level of informality, though, to be quite honest, that isn’t likely to happen with all of them … I, however, prefer to be called Matthew.’

He paused, drew breath, and smiled again. I looked away. In the weeks and months after the crash, I’d become somewhat accustomed to people looking at me like this, the ‘tragic miracle’ look, as though the fact of me confused them. I found it nauseating. ‘So what brings you here, Violet?’ he asked, though judging by this look, he already knew.

‘I need to get my A-Levels,’ I said, flatly, voice little more than a croak.

‘Great. That’s great. I’m told you were self-taught last year – is that right?’ I heard the creak of his chair as he leaned farther forward, and looked up.

‘Yeah. I … Yeah.’

‘That’s a very impressive achievement. You must be quite proud.’ I nodded. He looked down at my file, and almost imperceptibly raised his brow. I knew, for all my teenage claims of apathy that I’d done well; better, certainly, than anyone had expected. ‘Well, I can see you’ve got an interest in the arts,’ he continued, apparently choosing not to comment. I blushed at having expected more, a knot of shame coiling, sharp.

‘We have an outstanding arts faculty – our English programme is second to none, and most of our Music students go on to spectacular things at various conservatoires here and in Europe, so both of those would be solid choices. You might also consider one of our Fine Art courses, too – Annabel is highly selective, but I’d be happy to recommend she review your transcripts, if you’re interested …’

As he spoke, he ran a finger absent-mindedly over the glass of a framed etching lying on the desk. I followed the path, black ink on creamy paper: a woman tied at the stake, staring into the eyes of some great hulking beast with curling, twisted horns and broad wings. Behind her, three ghouls, arms reaching for her neck.