Valley of Nightmares Read online

  An arrested look crossed his features, and he stared at me briefly before looking up at the house. I had the feeling that my words had jarred something deep inside him. “Unless,” he murmured, talking more to himself than to me, “turning a blind eye was exactly the trait that was needed.” He turned back to the flowerbed and strenuously pulled up some thick strands of ivy that had strayed away from the house. The camaraderie of mere minutes ago was at an end. He was wrapped in his own world again, and I moved away to join Anika, who was enthusiastically, but not very expertly, pruning an overgrown rose bush.

  “Oh, and Lilly?” Gethin’s voice halted me in my tracks. I glanced back over my shoulder. “Your friends were wrong.” I frowned in confusion and he grinned again, melting my heart a little in the process. “When they said nobody wants a sexy governess,” he explained, his eyes dropping to take in my long, bare legs and exposed midriff. “They couldn’t have been more wrong.”

  My face was so red as a result of my exertions that the fierce blush his words provoked had no effect. Like a candle lit at noon. Or so I hoped.

  Ceri, rounding a corner of the house with a pile of twigs, had paused to observe this exchange. “Lilly’s a showstopper,” she agreed, nodding approvingly at me. Laughing, Gethin continued with his task while I attempted to regain a modicum of my lost composure.

  Afternoon was in its death throes when we returned to the house, tired but with a shared feeling of accomplishment. Like the house, the garden had given us back more than the sum of our efforts, Herculean though they were. Vidor and his helpers had scalped the hayfield and hacked back the choking brambles, nettles and weeds. In the process, they had unearthed a surprising find. Completely hidden by the wild climbing mayhem, a stunning white marble fountain of Italian design sat in the centre of the lawn. It made me think of Spanish carnivals and nights under jewelled Mediterranean skies. Gethin stared at it in silence before saying softly, “I didn’t know it was still here.”

  Anika and I had trimmed back the ivy that had taken the beds and borders by force. At last the brightly coloured flowers, free from oppression, were able to peep through. Some of these might well be considered weeds by the purist, but I liked the sprays of glowing goldenrod and white lacy frills of wild carrot. Wisteria formed a vivacious, sweet-scented tunnel in shades of violet and blue, and dainty clematis clambered over the trellis that led to the kitchen garden. The lilac-perfumed breeze was redolent with memories of early summer.

  Mounting the stairs, I had a feeling of satisfaction that the old house was starting—just starting, mind—to look like a home. The woodwork gleamed and the jewelled colours of the freshly scrubbed rugs lent warmer tints to the hall. Light, diffused by the stained-glass skylight, wandered in changing ribbons of colour across the floor. The scent of newly cut flowers, beeswax and freshly baked bread made my nostrils twitch appreciatively.

  Ceri ran up ahead of me toward the nursery, but she paused, with a gasp of horror, on the threshold. It looked like a tornado had blown through the suite of rooms while we had been outside. Her bed had been overturned, the bedding flung to the four corners of the room. Every drawer in the tall chest that contained her clothing gaped open, and the contents were strewn wildly across the floor. Her wardrobe had been ransacked. In the nursery, jigsaws were tipped from their boxes into a jumble in the middle of the rug, books had been hauled from their neat shelves and upended carelessly on the floor and wooden toys had been taken apart and then abandoned. Ceri’s dolls and stuffed toys had fared the worst. A sad pile of limbs and heads bore witness to a plaything massacre and kapok stuffing spilled sadly from the brutalised remains of Ceri’s beloved teddies. Rita lay on her back, her forever-sightless glass eyes raised heavenward. Ceri’s cry was pitiful. Her favourite toy had been slit open along her full length, and her innards lay in a heap next to her. I fell to my knees, scooping Ceri up into my arms, holding her close and whispering words of comfort. When I stood up, I frowned and brushed some familiar-looking green sparkles from my knees.

  My room had received similar treatment. Drawers were flung open, the wardrobe doors hung wide, my clothes and bedding had been strewn across the floor. Gethin appeared in the doorway, his mouth a grim line as he took in the devastating scene.

  “Anika is tidying Ceri’s room. I’ve asked Ceri to sort out her toys so that we can see which might be mended.”

  He drew me to him in a comforting embrace, and I felt slightly reassured by his strong arms around me. I felt a few other things as well, but none of them were in keeping with the situation.

  “Why?” I asked simply, after a few minutes. Gethin’s chin was resting on my head, so I was forced to speak into the warm, musky hollow of his neck. It wasn’t a hardship.

  I felt him shrug. “Opportunists looking for something valuable.”

  I laughed without humour. “Pretty dim opportunists. Why would you look for valuables in the nursery and the governess’s room? I take it nowhere else has been touched?” He confirmed that suspicion, and I drew away from him to start gathering up my clothing. “And why do this in broad daylight?”

  “If they have been watching the place, they would know that you are always here at night,” he pointed out. This observation did not make me feel any better.

  “I just don’t understand how someone could get into, and then back out of, the house, while we were all in the garden,” I stated.

  “Lilly, you are not going to like this suggestion,” Gethin said sombrely, and I paused in the act of folding clothes to look at him. “The gypsies have access to the house, they knew we were occupied in the garden…”

  “No.” I shook my head vehemently. I wasn’t proud of it, but of course the thought had already crossed my mind. I had dismissed it instantly. Anika and Vidor were my friends. The whole caravan was grateful for the chance to stay on the field, rest their horses and affect any necessary repairs to their homes before travelling farther north for an annual fair that was held in Yorkshire. The elders would, I knew, exact dreadful retribution if any of the younger members of the group stepped out of line. The gypsy code of conduct was strictly enforced. I didn’t ascribe any false romantic notions to my new friends. They would, I was sure, steal if the necessity arose. Just not from me. And there were daily opportunities for petty pilfering of quite valuable objects from this house, if any of their number was that way inclined. But the gypsies were not stupid enough to do anything on this scale. My mind came back to, and circled around, the fact that, if robbery was the motive for this onslaught, the wrong rooms had been chosen.

  “You came outside some time after the rest of us,” I said to Gethin. I busied myself with continuing to pick up my clothing from the floor. “I don’t suppose you noticed anything?” He tensed slightly and I regarded him in surprise. He could not, surely, believe I was accusing him of doing this? “What a pity you have no motive,” I said in an attempt to reassure him and lighten the mood. “Since you appear to have had the best opportunity!”

  I had made a perplexing discovery. Some of my clothes had been deliberately and systematically slashed. I held a dress up to show the damage to Gethin. It had been slit from neck to hem. “Why did they have to ruin these things?” I demanded in outrage. The only items that had been ravaged were my Felicia clothes. “Why couldn’t they have taken a knife to the sensible ones?”

  I interrupted Gethin’s reluctant laugh to inform him of a new discovery. “They came in here first.”

  “How can you possibly know that?”

  I held up a blouse. It had been a particular favourite of mine. It was a soft green colour, adorned down the front with green sequins. A deep, diagonal cross had been cut into the front and the sequins were spilling onto the floor. “Some of these were in the nursery. They must have stuck to the intruder’s feet or clothing and been carried up there.” I looked around at the mayhem of my bedroom. “Whatever they were looking for, they thought they might find
it here, in my room.”

  * * *

  “Ceri?” I had to say her name twice because she was deeply engrossed in kneading dough for Anika. She looked so young and helpless when she finally turned to me with flour on her nose and in her hair that my heart quailed. But, although we were completely in tune, her psychic abilities were far in advance of mine. She knew and understood much more than most adults, let alone children of her own age. I pointed at the enormous dog, slumbering in a patch of sunlight. His heavy paws twitched, and he grunted as he acted out his canine dreams. “Why do you think Shucky came to us?”

  “To look after us,” she replied, without hesitation.

  “Do we need to be looked after?” I finished setting careful stitches in Rita’s tummy. I couldn’t say she looked as good as new, but Ceri seemed happy with the result.

  She nodded, but her nose wrinkled. “I don’t know why,” she said, pre-empting my next question.

  I steeled my nerves to interrogate her further. “Ceri, when did you first see me in your dreams?”

  She stopped, her sticky hands poised in midair above the bowl. A tiny frown appeared between her brows. “It was just after…you know…my parents…” Her hands fluttered helplessly and a blob of dough fell onto the table. She stared at it as if in shock.

  “When they died?” I asked gently, and she nodded, her eyes bigger than ever. “And when did you first see the Hunter? Was it at the same time?”

  Her hair danced wildly as she shook her head. “No.” It was emphatic. “I’ve always seen the Hunter. For as long as I can remember.” She gave the dough a vicious thump.

  I took my cup of tea outside and sat on the bench beside the kitchen door, lost in the darkness of my thoughts. Our dreams—Ceri’s and mine—although they overlapped at this point in time, seemed to have taken divergent paths until now. She had dreamed about the Hunter for as long as she could remember, but I had first seen him only about four months ago, exactly the same time at which I had first appeared in Ceri’s dreams. The reminder that Ceri had always featured in my nightmares niggled at me.

  The more I puzzled, the more the answers eluded me. Like a ghost hunter searching for phantoms where none existed, I was attempting to make sense of that which had no logic. But one thing was clear: whatever the reason for this strange convergence of our slumbering consciousness, it could be traced firmly back to one specific point in time… The moment when Bryn Taran’s car left an Austrian mountain road and plunged into a mountainside, killing both its occupants.

  I was so deep in thought that I did not notice Gethin turn the corner of the kitchen garden. I didn’t know how long he had been standing there watching me before he said quietly, “Penny for your thoughts, Lilly Divine?”

  “They are worth considerably more than that,” I informed him lightly, glad of a distraction. I shuffled along the bench, and he came to sit next to me. I was, as always, utterly intoxicated by his presence, instantly powerfully, achingly aware of him. His profile, hewn from the same unyielding granite as the crags above us, revealed the silhouette of his perfect features against the dying light.

  “It is so beautiful.” I dragged my eyes away and gazed out across the dramatic, disquiet valley. The river played its babbling music to the accompaniment of the late-evening birdsong. “How sad that your brother did not love it as you do.”

  “My brother was not capable of loving anything. Or anyone.” He spoke almost as one in a trance. “Beauty meant nothing to Bryn. But wherever there was evil, that was a different matter. That is where he would be drawn.”

  I paused to consider this new layer in the shadowy picture I was building of Bryn Taran. “But surely he loved his wife? And Ceri?”

  “Perhaps.” His face was inscrutable.

  “How terribly sad that they died in such a way.” I shifted position slightly so that I was looking at him again, instead of out across the garden and over the valley. “Was your brother driving the car?”

  He was silent for so long that I began to think he would not answer at all. Eventually, he said, “The vehicle was found, burned out, at the side of the mountain track. The occupants were badly burned, but the authorities were able to ascertain that a man was in the driving seat and a woman was the passenger.”

  Impulsively, I put my hand over his where it rested on the bench between us. He glanced down at it and turned his palm so that he could return my clasp. “I suppose the gossipmongers have been at work, so you already know that Christina was engaged to marry me before she met Bryn?” I nodded. “She rang me the day she died.” His voice had a faraway, dreamlike quality. “I hadn’t spoken to her for years, but that day—of all days—she telephoned my office to say she needed to talk to me urgently and that she was coming to London. She wouldn’t say what it was about, but she sounded distraught.”

  “Were they happy?” I asked. I was intensely aware of the warmth of his hand gripping mine. I didn’t know much about the protocols of this sort of situation, but I did wonder if holding hands with the boss was appropriate. As if he read my thoughts, he lifted my hand, twining his fingers more firmly between mine.

  He shook his head again. “No, not even in the early days. Christina was Bryn’s trophy. I don’t think he ever loved her. She was just one more thing he had won from me. He was competitive and, well, we never really got on, even as children. Oddly, for twins, we may have looked alike, but our personalities were complete opposites. We never had that empathy that people expected us to show. He took great delight in wooing Christina away from me. And she…well, I suppose he did me a favour by showing me her true colours.” His words may have expressed gratitude to his dead brother, but his voice did not. “Bryn wasn’t capable of being faithful to Christina—or to anyone—he had a string of mistresses before they married, and he continued in the same way after. Morality meant nothing to him. Vice, promiscuity, he would laughingly call them the ‘new virtues’. I heard rumours that, once Ceri was born, Christina had affairs, as well.”

  I wanted to ask Gethin if he was still in love with his brother’s wife, but it was too personal. And I didn’t want to hear the answer.

  “Were they buried in Austria?” I asked.

  “No, I brought the bodies home, and they were buried in the churchyard in the village.”

  I searched around for a morsel with which to console him. “So they are resting in peace here in the valley.” It felt like I was trying to issue a pardon when the execution had already taken place.

  “Perhaps.” There was that word again. Absentmindedly, his thumb traced a slow, circular pattern around my palm. I gave myself up to silence, and the maddening sensations his featherlight touch provoked. He stopped, staring at my hand as though he was surprised to see it there. “Lilly, I wish the past was dead, but it is not…” He let my hand go and I felt bereft. Emotion flickered in the dark depths of his eyes, like seaweed moving below the surface of a stormy sea. “I’m so sorry.” I couldn’t tell whether he was saying it to me, to himself or to someone else. Someone who wasn’t there.

  Chapter Eight

  I am at the waterfall’s edge watching the green-and-white stream fall in a cascade of mossy wishes. The unrelenting flow wildly attacks the jagged rocks and tumbles smooth pebbles. The sky above me is the colour of old copper streaked with lurid pink. I can taste the looming thunderstorm. Ceri, trapped in the maelstrom of the plunge pool, splutters as she tries once more to call my name. The water pulls her under again, and I wonder, in an idle, disinterested way, how long she can last against this violent demonstration of nature’s temper.

  I hover there, just above the ground, my dreaming view showing me so much more than any wakeful moment will allow. The Hunter stands to one side. Watching. The water changes. Darkens and thickens. When Ceri lifts her hand in supplication toward me, it is coated in thick crimson. She is drowning in a river of blood.

  I sat bolt upright with a gasp.
My skin was coated in a sheen of sweat, and I felt my heart beating in my throat. This dream was different. Always before, Ceri and I were fleeing from the Hunter. We were united against him. This time, I was neutral, an observer. Worse, by not acting to save Ceri, I was siding with the Hunter.

  Ceri’s screaming penetrated the thudding in my ears. This time it was real, and I pushed aside my bedcovers, grabbing up a candle as I bounded up the nursery stairs.

  She was standing beside her bed, her eyes huge in the pale oval of her stricken face. I made shushing, comforting noises. “Why? Why didn’t you help me, Lilly?” she sobbed. “You didn’t even try to get me out of the water. You just watched me—you and the Hunter were together. And there was blood…”

  As I knelt beside her and held her close, I could not tell where her violent trembling ended and mine began.

  * * *

  “What brought you here, Lilly Divine?” Gethin asked with sudden sharpness. We were sitting in the parlour. It was my favourite room, with windows that descended to the floor and opened onto the lawn adorned by the pretty fountain. It had become a routine for us both to retire here once Ceri was in bed. I wouldn’t admit, even to myself, how much I enjoyed those hours spent—often in mellow silence—both of us reading or playing the occasional game of cards. Sometimes, I would work on the chair cushions—a task I believed might well become my life’s work. And, oddly, I never heard any disquieting noises from the attic when I was with Gethin. As he gazed at me, I was aware that I was sitting curled into a cushiony corner of the sofa, with my legs tucked up under me. It was not exactly commensurate with my professional status, I decided, and unfurled myself.