Such theater.
I called Mum and she didn’t pick up so I tried the main number for her ward. Cell service at the cottage was poor, which was frustrating, but eventually I spoke to a nurse who reassured me that Mum was stable and settled for the night.
I wondered whether to tell Viv. She’d want to know, but she needed rest as much as I did. I opened the door and saw that the light was still on in her bedroom. I could hear faint voices, as if she was listening to something. I crossed the landing. It sounded like a podcast. I heard: “Manifest your perfect partnership.”
I rapped on her door softly. “Viv, sorry to interrupt, but I just spoke to the nurse and Mum’s stable.”
The voice went immediately silent. She’d muted it. “Thanks,” she said.
“I thought you’d want to know.”
I stood there for a moment, but she didn’t say anything else. I imagined her waiting for me to leave. She felt so much like part of the family that sometimes, I forgot we paid her to look after Mum, that I should respect her boundaries. Perhaps I shouldn’t have disturbed her. “Good night, then,” I said.
“Good night.”
I crept back to bed. Sid called.
“Hey,” he said. “Are you at the airport?” His voice was muted, and I heard background noise, as if he was out somewhere. I checked the time. It was almost eleven.
“No, I’m at the cottage. I had to miss my flight. Mum’s in the hospital again.”
“Oh, God. What’s happening?”
I told him. Reception was lousy again, so we kept losing each other. I didn’t want to try to explain about Magnus over a bad line.
“Where are you?” I asked.
“I’m at the computer science department.”
“Oh,” I said. “That’s nice.”
“Listen, I’ll come and join you,” he said.
“You don’t need to. It’s okay.”
“I’ll book the morning flight to Bristol.”
“Sid, it’s okay, really. I’m okay. Why don’t we speak in the morning? She could have turned a corner by then. I’ll call you from the hospital. It’ll be better reception.”
“I’m coming.”
It wasn’t worth arguing about and I was secretly pleased. After we hung up, I took some more painkillers for my foot, and as soon as they kicked in sleep snatched me and dragged me into Boschiannightmares where my mother was screaming and all the shadows had eyes, and when I startled awake in the small hours I didn’t know if they were a reaction to what I’d been through that day or a premonition of worse.
Sid
As soon as he got off the phone with Anya, Sid booked a flight to Bristol for first thing the next morning.
The lab was emptying out. It was too early in the academic year for students to be pulling all-nighters. Sid planned to stay there until he found some answers.
He bought himself a refrigerator-stunned sandwich and an energy drink from a vending machine. When he sat back down, he realized he hadn’t done any digging on Paul yet, so he typed “Paul Fields,” hit the search button, and found a Facebook page.
One year ago, Paul had been working for a local climbing company and was listed as a guide. Before that, he’d been based in Anglesey for a few years. And before that, in Northern Italy. Sid wondered if it was where he’d met Giulia. He found only one post from the past year: a bleak shot of the ocean, from the beach in front of Paul and Giulia’s house, captioned: “Gray days.” It was a literal description of the scene but a sharp contrast in tone from the upbeat posts of previous years, where Paul showed off his travels and his climbing achievements. Sid searched the other social media platforms, but Paul was absent.
He thought of the broken man he’d just met with. The drop-off in activity on Facebook matched up with the timeline Paul had given for his decline in mental health. It made him more plausible. Sid rubbed his eyes. What happened to people when they came here? Was it going to happen to him and Anya?
He expanded his search to the deep web, which didn’t tell himanything new. Then, to the dark web. As before, he ran spiderweb searches for a range of terms: Diana Cornish, Anya Brown, Sarabeth Schilders, Giulia Orlando, Karen Lynch, Institute of Manuscript Studies St. Andrews, Paul Fields, Folio 9, Alice Trevelyan, and Minxu Peng.
The only one that threw up interesting results was Folio 9. A few usernames were associated with the term across a range of forums. The search did its work of finding out where they congregated. It was in a private, invitation-only forum called “Suspicious Minds.”
