Lili walked to the window and looked out at the storm. So hard was it raining, she could barely make out the lights from the shops and houses across the road. She shivered. The rain was unrelenting, sudden gusts of wind throwing it at the glass in wintry flurries. Lili pulled the curtains closed and turned away, going to the comfortable beige armchair that faced the television screen. The window behind her rattled in its frame.
She sat, sipped her wine and brooded. Too many evenings like this. Alone in her little flat above the shop, drinking wine, sometimes 'til a whole bottle was empty. Lili never got drunk, though. No matter how many glasses of wine she had, she always ended up sober. The second or third glass might give her a lift, but it invariably led downhill to depression after that. She wished it had a different effect, wished it would wipe out certain memories. Never did, though. If anything, consumption of wine revived them. So why did she drink? A shrink might know.
Placing the glass next to the wine bottle on the low coffee table, she relaxed back into the chair. Something else that rekindled times past. She was looking down at one of her wristbands. With a deliberate shrug of her shoulders as if to say, 'Who cares?' she pulled off the coloured band and stared at the thin, fading scar across her wrist. There was another one hidden on her other arm.
Stupid cow! she thought, not because she had tried to bleed to death, but because she'd done it all wrong and had been saved by a young Asian doctor in the Surrey hospital's A and E department. Seven years ago. Since then, she had learnt that the most successful way to slit your wrists was down the veins, not across them.
So she had been saved and made to feel foolish in the process. Why kill yourself just because an affair that had been doomed from the start had ended predictably badly? Don hadn't been worth it; his wife deserved him. For three years they had been lovers and in the end he'd refused to leave his wife as he had promised. It was not even that there were children involved: his wife (Don had complained) was barren.
Lili had fallen in love with him at the minor pharmaceutical publicity agency where she'd found her first job after leaving art college. She had been a junior art director, Don was the marketing manager. Love very nearly at first sight. Ha-ha, witty, because she was psychic and had the power of second sight. She should have known the outcome from the beginning then.
In the end, he had chosen Marion, his wife, but even so, Marion was not satisfied. The bitch had made Lili's life hell after she discovered where she lived. Phone calls, hate mail, threats and even physical confrontation—Marion would not leave Lili alone. Marion the mad woman. Who wanted revenge. Soon to die of cancer.
After her swift but ghastly death, Lili and Don had not tried to rekindle their love for each other: she because he had let her down irrevocably, had turned his pledges into lies; he because he was weighed down by too much guilt. So Lili had changed her life. Certainly they could not work together in the same company, which was too small to get lost in, and he was not going to turn his back on a good job, especially after such a profound tragedy. No, Lili had been the one to leave. It seemed inevitable to her, the only thing to do.
So her father had helped her financially, as had the bank, which thought her idea was sound (it was at a time when banks were practically throwing money at borrowers in order to hook them for life with an almost scandalous payback interest rate). She had enough money to lay down a deposit on the charming little high-street shop in Pulvington, North Devon, that had been advertised in the property section of The Times. The mortgage she took out was from a building society that had an office in the same town. The shop had previously sold ladies' high fashion, which apparently had low appeal to the local women, but Lili had fallen in love with it the moment she stepped through the door.
The town was crammed with tourists in the summer and Lili had the idea of selling craftworks, light hats, paintings and exquisite but not too expensive hand-tooled ornaments and jewellery. All executed by herself and local artists (who were easy to find by placing ads in the local press). Tourists always wanted something to take home from places they visited, either as gifts or keepsakes; also the indigenous population would be interested if the work was quality and the price right.
And her idea appeared to have merit—the shop attracted a lot of customers in the first few summer months. Unfortunately, she hadn't given much thought to the winter season, when most of the tourists had disappeared and dark days did not encourage locals to buy what might be regarded as frivolities. So as a sideline, and to help make up for loss of trade, Lili returned to giving psychic readings, again putting ads in the local newspapers and her card in shop windows.
Both occupations balanced out well—readings could be given in the evenings or on half-day-closing afternoons, so they never interfered with the day-to-day running of the shop—her reputation as a psychic soon established itself locally.
Unfortunately, the past had not been left behind.
It was on a Tuesday evening that the dead wife of her ex-lover had returned for more revenge. Lili was at an elderly woman's small bungalow on the outskirts of the town, her client a widow of several years who had come to wonder if her late husband was in a happy state of being (apparently he'd been generally disgruntled for most of their married life) wherever he was now, or if gloom had followed him into the next world. Older women usually wanted to know about relatives or loved ones who'd passed over, while younger and middle-aged females (nearly all her clients were female) generally wished to discover their own futures, good or bad (Lili only relayed the good, unless the bad was a warning of some kind that could be acted upon).
This was the second visit Lili had made to this particular woman, a Mrs Ada Clavelly by name, the first time being only a partial success—her husband had come through and given indications that he truly was Ada's late partner in life by referring to things only he and his wife would know about, but his voice had been distant, as if from a long way off (which, of course, in a metaphysical sense it was), and Lili had hoped for a clearer 'sighting' this time.
On that particular late-spring night, however, something occurred that had almost destroyed her confidence as a 'seer'. In fact, something happened that terrified both her and her sitter.
Instead of the spirit or voice of Ada's long-departed husband coming through, Marion, Lili's ex-lover's wife, had made her presence known. Through Ada, herself.
Sometimes Lili could talk to a spirit as if it were in the same room, but on rare occasions it might speak to the client through Lili's own mouth—it had happened to Lili only twice since she'd known she was psychic and clairvoyant, and she had never encouraged the phenomenon, it just happened that way. But this time, the spirit had used Lili's client, Ada, to speak through.
Lili could only stare as Ada's very features seemed to alter. Even though she was sure that this was an illusion conjured by a voice that was instantly recognizable for its husky venom—Lili still clearly remembered the phone calls and the face-to-face confrontations between herself and Marion five years before, the low threatening voice that had risen through the octaves to evolve into a shrill shrieking—it seemed so real. With Marion's words came her visual image, transmuting another living person's features into her own likeness. It was incredible and something Lili had never before experienced. She was stunned by it.
The possessed woman lunged across the table between them and spat and hissed into Lili's face. Ada's grey hair had stiffened as if charged with static (Lili actually heard the faint crackle of electricity coming from Ada's hair) and the room itself sank to a wintry coldness that frosted breaths.