Minor detail in this ghost story is driving me crazy
July 16, 2024 4:08 AM Subscribe
[WARNING: major spoilers behind the cut for Will Maclean's 2020 novel The Apparition Phase.]
Towards the end of the novel, the author brings our attention to a strange detail whose meaning I still cannot understand. If anyone has read the novel, can you enlighten me? Or at least share your own opinion?
[SPOILERS START HERE]
****************************
[CW: murder]
At the end of the novel, Tim finally stumbles upon Abi's remains in the woods in Cambridgeshire, after running all night from whoever/whatever he's seen pursuing him. In addition to whatever supernatural/psychic stuff may be guiding him, he recognizes the skeleton partly because of its clothing and the belongings scattered nearby. Okay. Got it.
But Maclean spends a bit of time building up to it, allowing us to share Tim's mounting certainty and horror by describing the following (pp 388-389 in my Kindle edition, emphasis mine):
"Twenty feet or so away, tied to the trunk of a dead elder, was a scrap of cloth. It had been very deliberately tied there, very neatly, secured with a series of tight knots. Coming closer, I saw that it was, of all things, a tie. [...] I approached it with a sense of something important happening, and I was suddenly terrified I would miss it, fail to grasp its significance.
Some way away, hanging from a tree, a rotting green satchel turned and turned, as it had surely turned for a long time, hanging from the tree by a single frayed strap."
WHY are the school tie and the satchel secured to the tree, apparently deliberately?
Are we to understand Abi may have done it, presumably after being injured and left for dead by her abductor, to try to attract attention?
That the murderer did it so that her body would eventually be found?
Something else?
[SPOILERS START HERE]
****************************
[CW: murder]
At the end of the novel, Tim finally stumbles upon Abi's remains in the woods in Cambridgeshire, after running all night from whoever/whatever he's seen pursuing him. In addition to whatever supernatural/psychic stuff may be guiding him, he recognizes the skeleton partly because of its clothing and the belongings scattered nearby. Okay. Got it.
But Maclean spends a bit of time building up to it, allowing us to share Tim's mounting certainty and horror by describing the following (pp 388-389 in my Kindle edition, emphasis mine):
"Twenty feet or so away, tied to the trunk of a dead elder, was a scrap of cloth. It had been very deliberately tied there, very neatly, secured with a series of tight knots. Coming closer, I saw that it was, of all things, a tie. [...] I approached it with a sense of something important happening, and I was suddenly terrified I would miss it, fail to grasp its significance.
Some way away, hanging from a tree, a rotting green satchel turned and turned, as it had surely turned for a long time, hanging from the tree by a single frayed strap."
WHY are the school tie and the satchel secured to the tree, apparently deliberately?
Are we to understand Abi may have done it, presumably after being injured and left for dead by her abductor, to try to attract attention?
That the murderer did it so that her body would eventually be found?
Something else?
Response by poster: Ah, thanks blnkfrnk, that both makes sense and is more spine-chilling than anything I had initially considered! (If anyone coming along later has a different interpretation though, I'd still love to hear it!)
posted by peakes at 2:47 PM on July 17 [1 favorite]
posted by peakes at 2:47 PM on July 17 [1 favorite]
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posted by blnkfrnk at 1:55 PM on July 16 [2 favorites]