Chapter Fifty-Three

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

Six months ago

ERIN

“I’m thinking of leaving the Triskele,” Erin says.

“What?”

Arlo turns over in bed and looks at her. Their daughter, Freya, is between them, just nine months old. He has one of her little feet in his hands and is staring down at it.

“I don’t know,” she says. “I just don’t feel the same about it. I liked it at first but…” She tails off, trying to gauge his own feelings.

“It feels less fun,” he says. “Doesn’t it?”

“Yeah. More and more like being told off.”

The previous weekend, they’d asked Clem to babysit while they went to the meeting in the Trossachs. The Brother asked Erin to hold an art workshop. She tried to explain that Freya was still feeding all night, that she still felt ragged, but he got arsey with her. Started bringing up the scholarship and how she was indebted to him, how the money she paid in each month didn’t even cover the basics. She wanted to scream at him. She was handing her maternity pay over to this man, who didn’t work, but somehow drove a Land Rover. She sensed the only reason he asked her to give the art workshop was to ensure she felt part of something. She had missed the last nine meetings because of the baby and he was pissed off about it.

That weekend, when she saw a thin, balding man walking across the grass, she didn’t recognize him until he spoke. It was the Brother. She’d not seen him for months, and in that time he’d shaved off his long hair and beard and lost a ton of weight. His eyes were no longer soft and kind, and he looked haunted, dark circles beneath his eyes. She wondered if he had a terrible illness.

He spent two hours shouting at the whole clan, telling them they were blind, they were stupid, they were going to be punished for how lazy they were. And then she stood at a table under a shoddy gazebo teaching new recruits how to make a poster while her breasts filled with milk and her body ached. Her own poster said protect me from what i want , and she stared at it, realizing that she was telling herself something.

“I’ll leave, too,” Arlo says.

“You don’t have to do that because of me.”

“Actually, I’ve wanted to leave since you got back in touch,” he says. “Since you told me that Freya’s definitely mine.”

“Rubbish,” she says, though her heart swells at his words.

“It’s not rubbish,” he says with a smile. “I only stayed because I thought you wanted to.”

“It is a cult,” she says then, and finds she’s relieved to say this out loud. “Senna made this big deal about how it wasn’t a cult when I first went along. But it is. They control everything we do.”

She holds his eye, feeling flooded with relief. How glad she is that he feels the same. “I wanted to be part of something,” she says quietly. “I think I wanted a family. But the Triskele wasn’t it.”

Arlo and Freya were.

“I want to give back the book,” she says, kissing Freya’s head. “It’s creeping me out.”

She thinks back to when she met the Brother at the derelict castle in the Trossachs and he convinced her to keep the baby.

The least you can do is take this thing out of my fucking hands.

She took it, albeit reluctantly, and tucked it under her bed. But since then she has felt haunted. Terrible whisperings in her head, in her bones, in her heart. And a few months ago, she woke up to find herself standing over her mother, scissors in her hand, imagining the thrust of them into the soft flesh between her jaw.

She has to get rid of the book.

···

Later that morning, while Arlo takes Freya in the stroller to the corner shop, she messages the Brother via WhatsApp. He doesn’t reply. Impatient, she messages the Triskele group chat, which was now at over two hundred members.

Erin: Hey @TheBrother, I need to see you asap.

Rodge: Not possible. Can I help you?

Erin: Why isn’t it possible?

Lois:

SJ_Clarke:

Roadman_2005: OMG soooo sad

Her phone starts to vibrate with messages and emojis that she doesn’t understand from various members of the Triskele. A few moments of confusion before Rodge videocalls her. She can see supermarket shelves behind him, a flash of a yellow vest. He’s at work.

“The Brother is dead,” he says.

“What?” She can’t believe it, both literally and emotionally.

“Suicide. Monday night.”

“Oh my God.”

“I’ll message you about the next weekender. There’s going to be a shift in how the group works.”

A colleague interrupts him, and he tells Erin he has to go.

“Wait, Rodge!”

“What? I’m at work.”

“I want to give the book back!”

He hangs up. She drops the phone and holds her head in her hands. The Brother killed himself. What the actual fuck? She stands for a moment, staring at a spot on her bedroom wall, feeling the ground beneath her move a little, the air ionizing with the impossibility of this news. Is it real? She doesn’t know what to do.

She pulls the shoebox from underneath her bed and opens it, then takes the book out. She is shaking now, bile rising up her throat. Sometimes she can feel the book’s presence in her room, like another person, and she can feel an energy coming off it, as though it has thoughts. But today, it’s just a book. It’s such a gnarly old thing, too. So…ugly. The bark is old but not worn, bits of lichen falling off it and a fresh shoot poking out from the spine as though it’s still growing. Carefully, she opens it and looks over the black pages. Hard to say what they’re made of—like fine charcoal paper that she expects to leave marks on her fingers. They don’t.

With a sigh, she puts the book back in the shoebox. Fuck the Triskele. The rumble of a bin lorry sounds, and she springs to her feet, the shoebox under her arm. The idea is bright in her mind, the chance to be free of the weird dreams and the strange pull she feels to the book, its horrible whispers.

Maybe she’s just going mad.

She runs downstairs and outside before she realizes that she’s made a decision, and throws the shoebox into the back of the lorry, delighted by the sight of it tumbling amidst the trash. She waits until the lorry has emptied all the bins on the street, watching it pull away into the distance.

“You look pleased with yourself,” a voice says.

It’s Arlo, returning from his walk. He kisses her, and she looks inside the pram. Little Freya is still asleep. For a moment she forgets the news about the Brother, the shock of it momentarily removed by the book finally being carried off down the street. Gone, forever.

“I am pleased,” she says, and he kisses her.

Hand in hand, they head back to the house, where she will find the book waiting for her on the bed, fully intact, as though she never threw it in the lorry at all. All its shadows and whispers as tantalizing and inescapable as ever.