Aria Remains
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

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‘Chosen?’

Beckett looked at her, surprised.

‘Chosen?’ he repeated.

‘I just heard it, in my head. Like those shining people I saw earlier, speaking to me without speaking.’

’Ah, yes,’ Beckett said, nodding. ‘Of course, I had forgotten you have already met the ghosts of Easthope once or twice.’

’I have? That’s what they were? Ghosts? But…′ She took a breath, searching through the files of information, trying to replace her place again. ‘Hold on - did you say I’ve lived here for years? But still, I can’t see it? It’s hidden from me?’

‘You have seen flashes, I believe,’ Beckett said. ‘You have seen glimpses while you have been in this world, close to this world and close to this period. The reason it hasn’t appeared fully to you now is merely the work of the old woman, since she feels your significance even though she is not sure what that significance might be. And since,’ he went on, turning quickly to look at the crack in the wall, ‘she is aware that you are here.’

‘The witch?’ Aria asked. ‘Why do you never refer to her by name?’

Beckett shifted his position again and then looked back through the fissure that had opened in the wall of the cave. From what seemed a great way away, yet filling the cavern just beyond them, there came a low and ominous rumble, a sound like enormous objects being dragged across the rocks. They both listened to the great resonance in silence for several moments, before Aria asked what it was.

‘Since long ago,’ Beckett explained, still facing the wall, ‘many centuries before the events of which I have been telling you occurred, there have been enormous tunnels running below the earth on which Easthope stands. These tunnels, these enormous passageways, have been continually excavated throughout all that time, and the sound you hear now is still further mining.’

‘Mining?’ Aria repeated. ‘Who’s mining? What are they mining for?’

She watched him as he thought about his reply, still unable to free herself from the growing sensation that she knew him, that he was not just the man she had been seeing everywhere but that their pasts were entwined with a far greater depth and complexity.

‘I am almost hesitant to say,’ Beckett told her, ‘since it would only complicate matters and it is not necessarily something with which we need to concern ourselves. Not for very much longer, I would hope, anyway. You see, since the beginning of time, today and also this day as it was eons past, this plot, this acreage has been a place of sacredness. So much so that, for the longest of that time, it lay unseen, undiscoverable, as I have already mentioned. This seclusion, this sequestration was established by a collection of the most valued, most inviolable spirits and, having already understood the eminence of the land, they were tasked with ensuring its salvation, to see it enfranchised so that it could be at its most appurtenant. Still, however, a task was deemed necessary, an experiment began to ensure this land would be able to withstand any and all intrusion and complication from without.’

He turned to Aria, seeing her confused expression, her frown.

‘It would be most simple to say,’ he continued, ’that elements of both good and evil were released into these tunnels, opposite but interconnected forces that have pursued their task from that day, moving beneath the land, burrowing through the earth, working both with and against one another to guarantee the purity and sanctity of what we now call Easthope. On occasion these elements, these receptive and active principles, have been called to the surface, have interacted with those above and always they have strived, have moved slowly and judiciously, casting their spells and doing all else they can to maintain their delicate balance, so that all outward threats and interventions are destined to be denied. Born from chaos, as it were, the supreme ultimate state of absolute and infinite potential is, I believe, a concept later and most notably recorded in Zhouyi three thousand years ago. Their duality represents the individual whole, the shadow that cannot exist without light, as it were.′

Still looking at Aria, he saw that her face had grown slightly fearful, that she was still replaceing the sounds troubling.

‘Please,’ he said, ‘there really is nothing about which to be concerned. They are simply doing their work, as they always have and always will. Now, where were we?’

Aria thought for a few moments, trying to envision what these underground forces might possibly look like, then remembered what they had been talking about.

‘The witch,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you call her by her name?’

Beckett nodded. ‘There is a power in her name,’ he said, ‘and this is the one place, the only place she cannot see, cannot replace, and the only place in which we are safe from her.’

He cleared his throat and looked at Aria with a new and great intensity, and she turned back to him.

‘Over the centuries,’ he said, ‘she has become two different things. On one hand she has, largely due to my influence, although not solely because of it, my pretence of wanting to help her and through the discussions we have had, she has softened somewhat, has been able to see the value of life, the importance of compassion and empathy. But, on the other hand, she has collected such a number of souls, has garnered such terrifying power, that she could destroy everything, could destroy worlds, galaxies, with nothing more than the flick of her hand. She revels in this power, in this strength. And I fear that, even here, in this place so heavily warded against her, so carefully veiled from her for all these years, that the mere mention of her name may allow her to seek us out.’

Aria thought for a time, watching the light of kumulipo again, then said, ‘So, when did this happen? When did William and the others leave, so that the village could continue?’

‘That was 1624, the year of its centenary.’

‘And throughout all this time you have been here, you have experienced all of these things?’

Beckett nodded. ‘Most often from a distance but yes, I have been here.’

’But the way you talk, the language you use is so modern. I mean, it’s not all thee and thou like those… those ghosts.′

‘J’ai appris à adapter mon langage pour pouvoir être contemporain dans n’importe quelle situation, à n’importe quel moment,’ Beckett told her, smiling, allowing himself a small enjoyment.

Aria looked at him blankly with a small shrug of incomprehension.

‘I have learned to adapt my language so I can be contemporary in any situation, in any time,’ Beckett said, now embarrassed by his display of pomposity. He looked to the floor, saying feebly, ‘Perhaps that particular example was poorly timed, poorly chosen.’

Aria, too, lowered her eyes, thinking about what he had said, the threat from the witch and the tunnelling beings, the date of Easthope’s centenary and then, looking at the ceiling of the room as she calculated the dates, said, ‘So, hold on a minute. That would mean that… five hundred years just passed. I mean, it was just last year. Does that mean the village survived, that it still exists?’

‘It does,’ Beckett replied, ‘but for how much longer I cannot be sure.’

‘What do you mean? I thought you said everything was settled, that the future of the village was assured?’

‘That is true but, as I have just said, the old woman is currently two different things, and I am beginning to feel concern that the ugly, capricious side of her nature is rearing its head again, that it might only be a matter of time before she decides she is done with the entire thing, that she just wants to exert her power, just to see how it would feel. She has left them alone for many years while she festered and wallowed in her abstraction and now, I think, she may have had enough of it all. She is not one for absolutes, for fair dealing, and that is something I know only too well. And that is why I have been trying to replace you since, I believe, it is only you who can save the village, can save all those who reside there.’

‘Me?’ Aria asked, incredulously, pointing at herself just to make sure she had heard correctly.

Beckett nodded.

‘But, why me? What’s so special about me?’

Beckett looked at her closely, deciding what he should say next, how much would be too much for her to hear, at least for now. They stayed like this, watching one another, for several long moments.

‘I told you that you have lived here for many years?’ he asked at last.

‘Yes,’ Aria nodded, even though she was still not sure she believed him, that it could be possible.

‘And that, even though she does not know exactly why, she is aware of something about you that is important, that can bring about a great change?’

Aria was beginning to worry, the pace of her heartbeat increasing. She wasn’t certain she wanted to hear what was coming next but, still, she said, ‘Yes.’

‘There is something,’ Beckett began, ‘that no one else knows, that no one has ever known except for one other person, a person who has long since passed.’

’But you know?’

‘It is something I learned several years ago, and yet could not be certain that it was true. Even now, as I see you here with me, I cannot quite believe it. But I have my ways, I have my faculties and, through the many decades I have spent with the old woman, I have learned to harness my capabilities so that I might be able to use them, so that I might be able to set things right.’

‘What do you mean?’ Aria asked. ‘What is it that you’re trying to tell me?’

’I have come to believe that the role you have played in the history of Easthope, the history of William and his family, has been far greater and more important than even I had previously considered. When I told you that you had lived here for many years, I neglected to say that you have lived many other lives for many years, each one tightly aligned with the village and its fortune.’

Aria swallowed hard and stared at him. A cold sweat developed across her brow, dispatching an advance around her neck and tracing the striation of her spine. Her muscles tightened, her mouth became a desert.

‘You remember I told you about my sister, the way she accused the old woman of witchcraft?’

‘Yes.’

‘And I said that she had already dabbled in medicine, that she was already familiar with the ways of magic and mysticism prior to the trial my mother and sister faced?’

Aria nodded that yes, she remembered. Her left temple was beginning to throb and she could feel that her bones were hurting as though being scratched and distorted by a thousand termites trying to reach their surface so they, too, could perceive the story.

‘As I mentioned a few minutes ago, her mother had become engaged in a dispute with another,’ Beckett said, ‘a terrible old harridan, a vile bint, and she had cursed them both, committed them both to a lifetime of malfeasance. She had, in short, literally bewitched them both. The old woman, the woman who has me snared, fought it at the beginning, having no desire to follow such a life. But, over time, after her mother had passed following an invasion of beetles that ate what they could of her and then dragged the remainder of the body away, and after she had become embroiled in the trial, her secret unwittingly revealed by my poor sister, she began to lose that part of her and, instead, began prowling a much darker path.’

‘Yes,’ Aria said weakly. ‘You kind of already said this. Just say what it is you’re trying to avoid.’

‘Very well,’ Beckett replied, standing from his seat that had been carved from the rock and walking across the room. The glow from kumulipo trembled as though it were a candle set before a draught.

‘There was something more that the old woman and her mother, who now lays buried beside that putrid hut in which they lived, in which the old woman continues to subsist to this day, something they were both cursed to forget by the woman with whom the mother had argued. And yet, as the years went by, as the old woman became consumed with the collection of souls, hoping they would fill the emptiness of her existence, the chasm in the arid remnants her heart, she began to see fragments of this stolen memory, began to feel that there was something missing, although she could never be certain what that was. It was partly this, I believe, that helped moderate her, as I mentioned before. A feeling grew within her that she had, in fact, once been someone better, bringing with it a desire for her to regain that person she had once been. That person who had only wanted to do good, who had only wanted to help those who needed it. But that was not it, not entirely. She was close to lighting the shadow, yet it remained a distant echo of the past, the reverberation of a sound she had not yet heard.’

He turned to face Aria and she saw that he looked nervous, almost afraid, and that he could not quite bring himself to look her in the eye.

‘The occultist with whom the old woman’s mother had argued did a great deal more, released upon them a far greater misery than simply the curse that led to their damnation. You see, she took their memories, took their past away from them, so they would not be able to remember the most important thing she stole from them.’

‘And what was that?’ Aria asked, wondering now if she, too, should stand, or if she would be better served in her seat. The lower half of her body was starting to numb, her pyjama bottoms achieving little in their battle against the frigid rock.

‘She took the old woman’s sister,’ Beckett said sadly, now forcing himself to look directly into Aria’s eyes. He looked at her with such significance, a blend of pity and trepidation so resonant it even caused the salamander, who had found their hiding place and had squeezed through the narrow aperture that was all that remained of the opening, to stop its journey and gaze directly at him.

‘Well,’ Aria began, ‘yes, that’s terrible, of course, but I don’t see what that’s got to do with…’

Her words trailed away at the terrible realisation of what Beckett was really saying, the flaxen beam of its meaning, its ghastly inference, clambering over the boundary of her world.

‘No,’ she said, deciding now she should stand or, rather, that she was no longer able to sit. ‘No, there’s no way.’

She waved her arms in front of her body, a movement to underline her refusal, a dissenting gesture designed to ward off any chance that what Beckett had not yet said could be true. Beckett, his eyes still heavy with the knowledge they now both shared, could do nothing but stand and watch as she began to crumble, the weight of awareness bearing down on her, narrow cracks opening beneath her eyes so her tears had a way of escape.

‘No,’ she said again. ‘How can that even be possible? How would I not remember something like that? That I have a sister, and that my mother didn’t die in a car crash, and that they were witches, and that all of these things happened hundreds of years ago? It’s all just such…’ She threw her hands into the air in despair, in anguish.

‘There are many, many things you do not remember,’ Beckett replied softly, ‘but that doesn’t mean they are not true, that they are not possible.’

She returned to the rock seat, bending forward, covering her face. Beckett came to sit beside her, watching as her sobs caused her body to shudder, unsure whether he should offer consolation. But then, he reasoned, how does one console a person, an innocent person who has become embroiled in such a bewildering mess, when you have just made the situation so much worse by telling them they are the abducted sister of a centuries-old witch?

After a short while, a period in which the salamander returned to the cavern beyond the small, secret room, and after the rumble had ceased and the bats had finally been able to settle themselves once again and, far below them, a group of beetles, the descendants of those who had carried the half-eaten mother of the old witch as far as they could before the work became too much for them to stand, came together to examine the threads of the pyjama bottoms that had snagged on the wall, Aria spoke again.

‘But how is this possible?’

She spoke so quietly, her face still hidden behind her hands, that Beckett had to allow himself a few seconds to be sure he had heard her correctly.

‘I am very sorry,’ he said, ‘but I don’t know that I can explain any more clearly than I have already tried to do.’

He was speaking slowly, gently, as though he didn’t want her to be able to hear him, didn’t want his words to bring her any more pain.

‘It is just how it is. It is how the world is, how the universe is. Far greater minds than my own have attempted to unravel these mysteries, to replace answers as to why time works in the way that it does, how the light from the stars can be so old and yet, at the same time, so contemporaneous. How a lifetime can stretch to encompass hundreds of years and yet, at the same time, be happening both now as then, be as much a part of the past as it is of the present. All I know for certain is that this is the way it is. And that, although I know you are not yet ready to hear it, we still have work to do. We have one final thing to accomplish and that is why I have been searching for you. That is why I needed to bring you here.’

Aria raised her head and looked at him, her eyes flushed with pain, the skin of her cheeks scarred by the tears of loss and helplessness, of dubiety and confusion.

‘Has it been you?’ she asked, her voice still barely more than a broken whisper. ‘Has it been you all along, putting all these dreadful things in my mind, making me think I was going insane? Making me see such terrible things, seeing my best friend lying dead on the floor. That was all your doing?’

‘No,’ Beckett replied, ‘no, it wasn’t me. It was she, it was the old woman. Or, at least, she was responsible for part of it.’

’You mean, my sister?’ Aria said, almost snarling.

‘I think, now,’ Beckett continued, ‘that she knew what I was doing all along, even though she had no idea why. I think she must have thought I was just trying to escape from her, that I was trying to hide from her. I don’t know if she has any idea who you are, if she remembers you. Not as her sister - I know she does not know that. But she has been with you, around you, many times in the past. Although,’ he broke away, sounding contemplative, ‘I suppose she must not have recognised you. I suppose that, to her, you were just another soul, a soul I was trying to replace for some reason she didn’t understand, and I imagine she was just playing with you, planting these visions and dreams in your mind just for her own enjoyment. She knew I would never be able to replace you, not there, in that other place, because she had already cursed it to be so.’

’Playing with me?’ Aria asked, incredulous, standing again and walking toward kumulipo. The glowing object appeared to grow stronger as she approached it, as if it had awoken from slumber and that it wanted her attention, that it wanted to help. She glanced at it, then turned back to Beckett.

‘And so, now what? What am I supposed to do with this information? How do you expect me to deal with the fact that I have lived all these lives, lives that reach back centuries that I have no memory of, and that my mother was a witch and that my sister has the power to destroy the universe? Or maybe,’ she went on, growing angry, gesturing with her hands, ‘maybe it’s already happened, since there’s no such thing as time and that, for all I know, there’s nothing left outside apart from some giant black hole because everything is already over. And what do you mean, we still have work to do? What can you possibly expect me to do?’

‘That’s what some of those visions were,’ Beckett answered, keeping his voice calm in the hope it would have the same effect on her. ’Not all of them were put there by the old woman. Some of them were, I believe, flashes of recollection, snippets of memory. You were seeing part of your life, of your other lives. It seems that it was all to do with that malevolent old hag who originally cursed them, the old woman and her mother. Although, there are some parts of the story, of your story, where I’m not entirely sure what happened.

‘I’m not sure you supposed to have been here at one particular time,’ he continued thoughtfully, ’when you washed up on the shore. I’m not entirely sure what happened, what it was that brought you there, but it changed something, caused something strange to happen. It was as though, despite everything that has happened, all the things we have experienced that occurred at her hands, it was something stronger, something beyond even her control and the control of the woman who first brought the curse upon the old witch that was responsible. There was a greater force at play that ensured certain things would happen, certain meetings would take place, so that our destinies were linked, so that we would eventually replace ourselves here, now. And, myself and others came to learn, those meetings and the time you spent with the old witch from whom we now take shelter came to be a very important and significant period. It brought with it great change and opened new possibilities that would not have been there before, and had an immense effect on what happened later.

‘I think,’ he told her, clearing his throat, ‘you were taken from the old witch just so she and her mother would feel even greater distress. But then, as the sorceress who held you realised that she would never return you, and not wanting a child of her own, yet not wanting to dispense with you…’

‘You mean, kill me?’ Aria interrupted, now glaring at him, hands on her hips, fire in her eyes.

’Well, yes, but rather than doing that, I have learned that she came upon an even greater, even more tormenting plan. She would keep you alive, would allow you to live your life as it would be lived without supernatural interference and then, when it came time for you to depart this life, to be carried on and away, back to the stars from where we all came, she would have you born again, in an entirely different time, an entirely different place, knowing that the old witch would become aware of you yet, despite knowing she felt something, had some kind of link to you, some kind of affinity, she would forever be precluded from knowing who you really were. For her own amusement she dangled you before the old witch like a dream just out of reach, a prize too far away, the destination at the end of a broken, impassable road.’

‘And who did you learn all this from?’ Aria asked, still standing as though she had been carved from the rock itself, that she had become a part of the cave, preserved in its walls.

‘There is a source, hidden away, from which all can be seen. All that has passed, all that is happening and all that is going to happen, it is held within this source. It is where we go when we die, as we journey into the universe, as we dance between the stars and the galaxies. It is where the ghosts of Easthope went, where they discovered the truth about the future of the village that, through their strength of will and determination of duty, they then passed on to William East.’

Aria sighed deeply. The scowl that had been holding her face captive had receded, her eyes had softened. She saw that Beckett had done nothing wrong and that, in fact, he was doing all he could to help her. He was providing the answers she had been searching for and, despite them not being what she had expected - not that she knew what she should be expecting - and even though these answers only brought a thousand new questions, still she felt a fresh compassion for him.

She moved close to him, then took her seat.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t have been angry with you. It’s just that… it’s just so much to take in, so much to try to understand.’

‘Of course,’ Beckett said, nodding his understanding.

‘What is it?’ she asked faintly, after they had been looking at the ground for almost a minute.

Beckett knew what it was she wanted to know. He looked to the crack in the wall, where they and the salamander had entered and where, now, only they remained. He considered whether he should tell her, whether he should say the name aloud and, if he did, what consequence it would hold for them. But, he decided, they were so close to kumulipo that, if they needed to make their escape, if the old woman came for them, it would only take them a few seconds to leave this world, to break free, to replace safety.

‘Her name is Alice.’

Before Aria had even comprehended the word, before Beckett had closed his mouth around its second syllable, kumulipo sparked and was extinguished and the fissure in the wall began to crack wider, allowing a swirling breeze to rush into the room. The bats began squawking, a bright light filled the chamber beyond and a feeling of dread, of the colossal damage that was about to be done to the whole of the world came over the two of them, soaking them in terror, drowning them within an affliction as deep and impenetrable as the rock of the cave.

Alice had found them.

Had come for them.