Twenty-nine-year-old Kate is dissatisfied with her life. Her half-sisters vanished many years ago in mysterious circumstances, and her best friend spoke of a supernatural world before disappearing, never to be heard from again.
Left behind in our world, Kate experiences puzzling glimpses of this other world in her dreams, while trying to find love and build a career as a solicitor. However, fate takes her away from the ex-boyfriend she pines for to a job at an archaeological dig, where she encounters more mysterious happenings and tight-lipped colleagues.
But what are her new co-workers hiding, and might Kate’s dreams come true in the world of the Westlands and the Woldsheart?
Sample – Another Green and Pleasant Land
I stared at my friend with wide eyes, scarcely able to believe what she was telling me. Marnie had woven a spell with her words and taken me from her bedroom, where we were ensconced whispering to each other, to somewhere quite fantastical yet also familiar.
Marnie and I had known each other since the January of the year before, when we met at a group therapy session for anorexic teenagers. My struggles with food and the consuming of it began in the months after my sisters disappeared. I often felt too anxious and guilty to eat as much as I wished. How could I stuff my face when I had no idea if Leonie and Sophie had enough to eat or clean water to drink? How did I know they had not starved to death long ago?
This unhappiness might have stayed at a small appetite had I not gone to France with my parents for a holiday the summer before I turned thirteen and eaten a dish containing seafood, butter and bacteria. I had a humiliating and public attack of food poisoning which distressed me sufficiently to become vegan and reduce what I ate to a dangerous degree. I became obsessive about my weight, my diet, my exercise routine and the search for my sisters. Very soon my parents became desperately worried and made me go to the doctor. In January 2003 I spent time as an outpatient at a local hospital. It was there that I met Marnie Cadwallader.
Marnie and I both stood out in the group therapy sessions, although everyone was pleasant towards us. We were the tallest girls there. Everyone else was both white and local. Marnie was white, Welsh and beautiful. I developed a strong crush on her almost straight away. She later learned I was bisexual, but as far as I know, she never discovered my true feelings towards her. We formed a deep, close friendship, which was what we both needed at that time.
There was much to admire and like about Marnie. She was intelligent in a way that I was not, she was creative and intuitive. Her talents lay in words, drawing and music. She had a warm, open heart and a good sense of humour, despite her illness. When people spoke, she really listened, and she seemed to hear more than other people. She was beautiful inside and out. She was slightly shorter than me and built like a fairy with the face of an angel. Her skin was like a pearl against the bright blackness of her long, heavy hair, and her eyes were the colour of polished jade.
The therapists and nurses were happy for us to pair up because we did no harm together. Instead, we recovered as a pair. We gained weight steadily, gradually unravelled our demons and learned how to live healthily.
Over time, I learned Marnie’s history, and why she developed an eating disorder. She was an only child, and her parents were still together. They were loving and supportive towards each other, but in therapy, Marnie was beginning to understand that she had always experienced emotional neglect and emotional abuse from them. The idea of approaching them for advice was laughable, they seemed only to notice her to criticise her, and she could not believe that they loved her. Saying the words and showing their meaning were two completely different things. Only the near-constant presence of her beloved grandparents, who had lived on the same street, had saved her.
The previous summer everything fell apart for Marnie too. Her grandmother died of a stroke, and her grandfather had died the winter before. Her parents moved from Cardiff to Derby as they had planned due to her father’s new job. The higher salary outweighed his daughter’s distress. Marnie controlled her food because her life had spiralled out of control.
I met her parents on two occasions, as part of group therapy sessions, and immediately appreciated my own. They were charming towards others, devoted to each other and alternately disinterested in or irritated by their daughter. Marnie’s wish for them to attend group therapy was an attention-seeking waste of time in their view.
Marnie and I stayed in touch as we began the next stage of our recovery. We discovered we attended the same school, but we had no lessons together. We met up as often as we could and confided our every secret in each other.
She knew my sisters had vanished, although she did not know all of the details, and she told me an interesting story of her own.
From around the beginning of April of 2004, she began to tell me about a boyfriend. At first I thought she was telling me a story, she often made up tales to amuse us both and had a vivid imagination, but after a while, I was not so sure. I did not ask her because I did not want to break the spell of whatever was making her so happy.
She had met this boy in early March, and he was unlike any lad she had ever met before. She had never been on a date nor so much as kissed a boy before, but she could still state this. He was seventeen to her fourteen, black and half a head taller than her. He was handsome and wore his hair tied back at the nape of his neck, which revealed pointed ears, almost like an elf’s in a sci-fi film.
“His name is Rickynd, Rickynd of the house of Ishelmer, of the Woldsheart,” she told me as we sat in her room one Saturday afternoon. “The Woldsheart is a kingdom in a world that is not ours but is still very like ours in some ways. In this world, the British Isles are divided into ten small kingdoms, each populated by multiple aristocratic houses and those who owe them their allegiance. The Woldsheart is made up of what is East Anglia, Cambridgeshire and most of the Midlands in our world. The aristocratic houses who rule there are the houses of Lothwold, Ishelmer, Kurtrissel and Sharman. One dialect of one language is spoken in the Woldsheart. Other dialects and different languages are spoken in the other nine kingdoms. The Woldsheart is a translation of the name of his kingdom. I can’t pronounce its name in Rickynd’s language.”
“How do you communicate if you can’t speak his language?”
“Oh, he always speaks English to me.”
Very convenient. We both know that English is the only language you speak fluently.
“He’s also told me a lot about the history of his world. The earliest parts of its history are shared with our world.”
Entranced by her story, I continued to listen.
Over one hundred thousand years ago there were many different worlds, including his and ours. The gods then merged them into two, his and ours. At that time his world was populated by twelve species of humans or folk. They included us, or Homo sapiens, Neanderthals and Fairy Folk.
About ten thousand years ago these twelve species merged into one, but there remained variations across their world, a little like different ethnicities in ours. Several thousand years ago this one species established kingdoms and ruling houses across the world.
For approximately one thousand years the ten kingdoms of what I might call the British Isles had fought on and off with each other. There had been waves of war across the world ever since the twelve folk became one. However, a lasting peace was now being spoken about in the ten kingdoms.
I listened spellbound as Marnie told me tale after tale about Rickynd and his world. He trained fantastical animals for their army and had seen action. He told her about his family, which sounded far happier than hers, war or no war.
As the weeks passed, she told me how they were becoming closer. I assumed this was fantasy. She described kissing, touching and declarations of love but no more. I assumed that at fourteen she was not ready for more, either in her dreams or in real life.
By the summer, Marnie spoke of being engaged. This worried me. In my mind, it went too far. I was her only close friend at school. Her accent marked her as different, and she was considered stranger still because she had an eating disorder when she arrived at the school. It was different for me. I was born in Derby and had not been ill for all of my time at the school. She had lost touch with her friends in Wales, and her parents had only been sufficiently affected by her anorexia to hold it against her. They thought she was an attention seeker, and a dull one at that.
I was pondering how to approach this when Marnie produced a map that she had drawn. It showed the British Isles, divided up as she had previously described, with place names in runes. This surprised me. Marnie was articulate in English, but she struggled to pick up any other language, be it Welsh from her schooling in Cardiff or French from her time in Derby. How could she invent a language? Or were what I took to be runes nothing but made-up doodles?
“He will come for me, Kate,” she promised as she pointed out the Woldsheart. “And when he does, I will be ready. God knows, I will be sorry to leave you, but it is only you who I will miss. I have no other ties to this world.”
This disturbed me, but I was not sure to whom I should turn. I vowed to confront Marnie, to tell her that her fantasy went too far, when I next saw her. However, when we next met, three days later, she had something else to show me. A silver ring on the third finger of her left hand. It had no stone, but it was decorated with complex engraving.
I stared at her. This was real. Definitely real. How had she acquired it? Her parents were not poor, but they controlled what possessions she owned and what money she spent far more strictly than other parents I knew. They had a constant fear of spoiling her.
“How did you get that?”
“From Rickynd, of course. When he proposed to me. He is of noble birth, so he may wear silver. I will take his rank when we marry. Men in his world don’t usually propose with rings, but he knew men in our world do, and so he got this for me.”
I stared at her open-mouthed. She laughed at me but not unkindly.
“Yes, Kate, it is all real. Just as real as we are. When the time is right, he will come for me.”
An idea struck me.
“Could I meet him?”
She did not miss a beat.
“Yes. That would be lovely. I will try to arrange it.”
She could not arrange it. Rickynd was busy, I was busy, or she could not leave the house without arousing suspicion. I became suspicious once more, yet her owning the ring still puzzled me. As far as I knew, Marnie only owned her watch, a pendant given to her one birthday and a few bracelets inherited from her grandmother. Her mother kept the pendant and bracelets safe. She had to ask her mother when she wanted to wear her jewellery. This was usually only permitted on special occasions.
The next week, the beginning of September, she rang me in floods of furious tears. Her parents had found the ring and had forced her to hand it over. They told her that she must have stolen it and threatened her with the police.
“I hate them! I can’t wait to go through the portal and join Rickynd for ever. What will he say when he hears how I have been treated?”
“What portal?”
She blew her nose.
“It’s the link between his world and mine. It’s hard to see, it isn’t always there. It’s a bit like glass, but it’s not solid. It is like a prism because it produces different colours of light, but it isn’t a prism.”
I gasped, quite unable to speak.
“What is it, Kate?” There was a commotion in the background, and I heard her mother shouting at her to get off the phone. She had no choice but to obey.
The following week, I saw her at school. Triumphantly, she showed me the ring.
“How did you get it back?”
“Let’s just say that Rickynd sent a very strongly worded message. I can’t say any more. He would not want me to.”
“I don’t understand. Why didn’t he just come to your house?”
“He doesn’t like to be seen. He isn’t meant to travel between the worlds. Instead, he sent messages. Dad gave me the ring back but said now they don’t trust me. However, I know they never did, and they are now scared of me.”
The bell rang, and we had to go in different directions to get to our different lessons.
Later I asked her about the portal, and for the first time, I told her what I and my sisters had seen. She was adamant it was the same thing, a portal between the two worlds that only appeared at certain times.
“Can I come with you one time? I want to meet Rickynd.”
“Of course.”
However, that never happened. Instead, Marnie’s parents contacted the police and the school about this older boyfriend, whom they had never met, but whom she said had given her the ring. He had written them a letter, insisting that they return Marnie’s ring and let her be with him. When they ignored it, he engraved the same message in a mirror. When that failed, he burned it into a carpet on a day when all of the family was out. They could believe that Marnie had sent the letter and carved into the mirror but not that she had burned the carpet. A police officer spoke to me, and I told him everything Marnie had told me because I was now scared for her. I did not mention that I already knew about the portal because of my sisters. Out of fear of being called mad or a liar, I made out that this was the first I had heard of it.
The policeman raised his eyebrows. He asked if I had ever seen Rickynd or known Marnie to steal. Truthfully, I told him no. He asked if I had seen her with other older boys or men. Again, I told him the truth and said no.
Marnie was taken out of school during our second week back after the summer holidays. She was threatened, for want of a better word, with inpatient treatment. I could not understand why because her recovery was good. However, her parents had persuaded the hospital to admit her. I was allowed to see her on the evening of Tuesday 21st September. She was due to be admitted on Thursday the 23rd.
We sat in her bedroom, whispering in case we were overheard. I did not tell her what I had told the policeman for fear of seeming disloyal. I was anxious, but she was zen-like.
“Don’t worry, Kate. I will be fine. Rickynd has promised to come for me, so he will.”
The next day she vanished. Her parents had forbidden her from leaving the house and left her locked in without a key when they went to work. They rang their landline every half hour to check on her. However, between half-past eleven and midday, she left their house without unlocking a door or opening a window.
CCTV footage saw Marnie with a figure which appeared as a smudge. They were heading towards the field where I saw the prism. It was impossible to tell if her companion was a man or a woman, their age or their ethnicity. This baffled the police, to whom she had been reported missing. Marnie was interacting with the figure, laughing and smiling, even leaning in for a kiss. She showed them her ring with a triumphant smile.
No trace of her was ever found, nor was the figure ever identified. I was interviewed. Her parents were interviewed, and, to my surprise, they looked genuinely worried. A missing person’s appeal was launched, but it proved as fruitless as the one launched for my sisters.
My parents worried that Marnie’s disappearance would plunge me back into anorexia, but it did not. Deep down, I believed she was safe. Shortly after she went, I had visions of her and my sisters when I was asleep at night. They were more than dreams. They were such intense experiences that I could only call them visions. I did not share these experiences with anyone. The fact that Marnie spoke of a prism so like what I once saw was a further comfort.
Anorexia left me with the bones of an older woman and deafness in one ear, following an infection my body was too ill to fight successfully shortly after Marnie vanished, but it did not take me. I remained very tall for my age, and I was slim, with a naturally slight frame and long limbs, rather than unnaturally skinny. People noticed my clear skin and sharp cheekbones and asked if I had ever considered modelling, instead of staring at me with pity or repulsion. I turned the energy I once spent on my disease onto my school work, my ambition to become a solicitor, and my passion for environmental issues. I even managed to make more friends and fall in love.
Love, however, was proving to be a cold comfort. I was to fall in love three times, twice with women and finally with a man, but each break-up caused me and them more pain than the last.