Waking the Witch (The Witch of Cheyne Heath Book 1)

by W. V. Fitz-Simon

  The jagged fire between her temples refused to go away, twisting and turning the house around her, her stomach lurching with each turn. She ran to the bathroom and got to the toilet just in time. Three sharp retches brought up what little was left in her stomach from dinner the night before. She slumped back against the wall and sat quietly for a moment in case she was hit once again, but the pain and nausea began to subside.

  Downstairs, the phone rang twice before Cressida picked up in the kitchen. Gosha crawled on her hands and knees out onto the landing, but could only hear indistinct mumbling, so she risked going down.

  “Was that George?” she asked from the bottom of the stairs as Cressida put the receiver down on its cradle. The girl jumped and laughed with surprise.

  “Oh, Mrs. Armitage, I didn’t think you were home.”

  “Was that George?” She took out a glass from the cupboard and ran herself some water from the sink to wash out her mouth.

  “No, it was a friend of mine in town for the afternoon. Do you mind if I slip out to see them? I promise I’ll be back in time to get the boys home and give them their tea.”

  Gosha wanted to drag her by the scruff of the neck and throw her out into the street, a terrible idea, no matter how satisfying it might feel. Instead, she took the lipstick out of her pocket and spread a thin smear of pigment across her lips in provocation, pressing them together to even it out. Cressida gave no sign of recognition, and Gosha felt like a fool.

  “Yes, of course.”

  With a bright and cheerful thank you, Cressida ran upstairs.

  If George and Cressida were planning stolen time together, it made no sense for him to vanish and leave her to slip out of the house for to meet for a tryst. How would that not draw attention? And yet it was too great a coincidence that, all of a sudden, the girl had a friend in town when George had made himself scarce.

  She made herself a hurried sandwich with fish paste for the boy’s tea and ran upstairs to finish dressing before Cressida made it out of the house. Her Doc Martens boots would take too long to lace up, so she slipped on a pair of snakeskin flats and grabbed a black canvas smock coat from the cupboard. The view from the bedroom window was a perfect lookout. The moment the girl closed the front door, Gosha was down the stairs like a shot. She grabbed her house keys and wallet from her handbag and opened the front door a crack to peer out and watch Cressida walk down the street. Half-finished sandwich in hand, Gosha pulled the door shut and set out to follow.

  With no idea how to tail someone, she hung too far back and almost lost Cressida in the throng of market shoppers, though it quickly became clear the girl was headed for the tube station. Too used to driving, Gosha fumbled with change at the ticket machine. She almost ran onto the wrong platform when two trains going in opposite directions came in at the same time as she passed through the barrier. Once she was sure she was on the right train, with eyes on Cressida in the next car, she collapsed breathless into a seat.

  She followed her on the Central Line to Baker Street, changed to the southbound Bakerloo Line and got off three stops later at Piccadilly Circus, where Gosha nearly lost her again in the throng of a protest against Margaret Thatcher’s government. To her surprise, Cressida walked into Fortnum and Mason and went up to the tearoom. Gosha huffed and puffed behind her up the endless stairs, feeling a decade or two older than her thirty years of age.

  In the tearoom she stood out like an undertaker at a children’s party, all dressed in black as she was against the Disneyfied cream and turquoise decor. The restaurant was busy, making it easy for her to hang back by the entrance and not be noticed by Cressida or the staff. The girl made her way to the far end of the room, where an older gentleman rose to greet her. Dressed in an expensive dark suit softened by a jaunty cravat and pocket square, the older man had a soft, kindly face. He greeted Cressida with affection, hugging her and kissing her on the cheek. George was nowhere in sight.

  For a moment her brain refused to accept what she was seeing. So convinced had she been that George would be there, expectation refused to give way to reality, the jarring discrepancy between the two turning her stomach. She staggered and reached out to the nearest wall to steady herself. What a mad fool she was. What was she thinking? Had she manufactured all the evidence that pushed her to this dreadful low?

  “Are you okay, Ma’am?” said a waitress, approaching with a worried look on her face.

  * * *

  Light pours out of everyone and everything around him. The room is packed, every person a rigid statue, gazes turned toward heaven, faces transformed with ecstasy. His chest is ready to burst with so much love. The sensation builds within him as the glow brightens, blotting out his vision, wiping away all memory, all doubt, all pain, all sense of himself.

  * * *

  She awoke on her back with a pillow under her head and the waitress who had approached her fanning her with a napkin. Waitstaff huddled around her, blocking her from the view of the diners.

  “I’m so sorry.” Her face flushed with mortification. She scrambled up off the floor, shrugging away the halfhearted attempts of the staff to help her. “I’m so sorry.”

  She ducked her head, fled down the stairs and out into the street.

  What a mess.

  She shivered with the aftermath of her embarrassment as she stalked down Haymarket as fast as she could, desperate to get as far away as possible.

  What was I thinking, she thought as she took a left toward Trafalgar Square. She had never, ever done anything like that before.

  Her head throbbed with a pulse that strengthened with each beat of her heart.

  It must be these visions. They’re addling my brain.

  She had to get rid of them. The religious paraphernalia in her countermeasures kit wouldn’t be enough. Needing to attack the problem with something bigger by orders of magnitude, she stuck out her hand and hailed a cab to take her to her favorite church.

  12

  Repton Oratory was always her chosen haven, a sober and tranquil shelter when the intruding remnants of fractured souls became too substantial and insistent, and forced her to seek refuge away from her home, away from places where others had lived too strongly and died in sorrow, or in pain, or in fear. It stood, majestic, over the depressed streets at the south end of Cheyne Heath, its grandeur somewhat tarnished around the edges by an endless onslaught of pigeon droppings. A Victorian Neo-Classical building, its stone columns, dark wood fixtures, and gold leaf embellishments towered above her as she dipped her fingers in the tiny font of holy water. She patted it on her forehead, but the cool water, so effective in the past, did little to soften the throbbing behind her eyes.

  She found a place in one of the back pews, the altar a distant splash of white, green, and gold at the end of the long nave. A pipe-organ played, the angular music echoing around the high, domed ceilings, doubling the sense of vast stillness that held the church and everyone in it in awe. At other times, the stillness opened up a reservoir of calm within her, but today all she felt was nausea, worse even than when she was pregnant.

  She came here the first time a dozen years ago in a moment of desperation after seeing her first phantoms. A flickering tableau of murder, a woman in rags strangling a man to death in the two-room flat she had shared with Miranda scared her half to death. Any sane person would have run from the house screaming, but she, her mother’s daughter in ways she only resented, was outraged.

  She told Miranda she'd seen a ghost, the closest Gosha ever came to telling her the truth about what she was. Miranda, a devout Catholic, insisted they call a priest to bless the flat. The prayers and holy water dispelled the phantom murderer and her victim and gave Gosha her first clue of the powers of religious paraphernalia over her condition. One particularly bad month, she accompanied Miranda to mass at Repton Oratory and fell in love with the old building. Since then it was her refuge whenever the flickering at the edges of her perception threatened to drive her batty.

  A dozen p
eople milled about the vast space, some praying, some lighting candles. To her left, the door to a confessional opened and out stepped an elderly woman who slid into the nearest pew and bowed her head to pray. Gosha took out a prayer book from the pew in front and flicked through it, landing on a prayer to the Virgin Mary.

  Hail holy queen, mother of mercy, hail our life, our sweetness and our hope.

  It had a nice ring to it, but reciting the words to herself did nothing to clear her head.

  The confessional the old woman emerged from was a cupboard-like structure in dark wood, the size of three huge upended coffins stacked next to each other. A tiny green light glowed above the nearest door. She waited to see if anyone else went in, but no one approached, so she made her way over, hesitating at the door. She never had the courage to go this far before, but she needed these visions gone if she was to think straight.

  Inside, the smell of the wooden walls mingled with frankincense that filled the air. A wooden chair next to a mesh guard mounted on one wall was the only furnishing. There wasn’t even a light. She pulled the door shut and sat in darkness.

  A panel slid open behind the mesh. On the other side loomed the vague shape of a robed priest in the dimness.

  With no idea what should happen next, she sat in silence.

  “You may begin, my child,” said the priest after a time, his baritone voice colored with a hint of an Irish accent.

  What does one say in a confessional?

  “I’ve come to confess my sins, Father.”

  She grimaced, never having involved someone else in her pantomime of religious devotion before. How far did she have to go for the relief she needed?

  A long and awkward pause stretched out between them.

  The priest coughed.

  “Very good, my child. How long has it been since your last confession?”

  Well, that was taking the bull by the horns. Should she lie?

  “I’ve never been before.” The warm quiet of the booth made it easier to be honest.

  “Are you Catholic?”

  “No, Father.”

  Beyond the screen, the priest exhaled a sigh.

  “If you’re not Catholic, I cannot hear your confession, my child.”

  “I’m sorry, Father. I didn’t mean to waste your time.”

  “No wait,” he said as she began to rise. He opened the door on his side of the booth and stuck his head out. The sudden brightness on his side of the screen caused a stab of pain to lance through her temples.

  His black robes rustled as he sat back down and closed the door behind him, plunging them again into darkness.

  “You appear to be my last customer. How may I help you?”

  The longer she sat in the booth, the more the headache and nausea subsided. The weave and clatter of her thoughts grew less frenetic. If she could string this audience out a little longer, she would be steady enough to return home.

  “What do people usually talk about?”

  He chuckled.

  “In the confessional, they usually confess their sins.”

  “And what counts as a sin, Father?”

  “Well, there are the big seven, the deadly sins. I’m sure you’ve heard of those. Wrath, lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, envy, and pride. A sin is any offense against God, or another person.”

  God. Even though Poland was a prodigiously Catholic country, there was never any talk of God in her family, even among the men. Church was for the foolish people who lived across the hills, who came to the kitchen doors of her mother and aunts for help when their prayers turned up nothing. There was a priest with a tiny Parish in the village, but he knew better than to meddle in her mother’s affairs.

  “Do you feel you’ve committed a sin?” asked the priest.

  She thought about the way she’d been carrying on since she awoke this morning, allowing her raging emotions get the better of her, and shrank down in her chair, grateful to be in the dark confines of the confessional, safe from the judgment of anyone who knew her.

  “Wrath, pride, and jealousy spring to mind off the top of my head.”

  “Ah, yes.” He laughed, a warm and comforting rumble from deep within him. “The classics. Human beings are wonderfully complex creatures, are we not?”

  Human beings. Was a witch human in the eyes of God?

  As her sight adjusted to the dim light coming from a mesh panel high on the priest’s side, she saw the crucifix above the grate. Jesus’ head hung in anguish. She knew the feeling.

  As her headache, and the jumbled mess it made of her emotions, subsided, her cooler head granted her some perspective on George and Cressida. Why did she continue to cling to him? He kept proving himself to be so much less than the man she thought he was when they first met. Of course he was having an affair again, regardless of his promises to her. It was perfectly in character for him.

  “My husband’s cheating on me.” The words came out hot with an anger she didn’t expect.

  “What makes you think that?” His tone remained level, with no hint of surprise or concern, as if he heard such things every day.

  She didn’t just think it. The evidence had always been there in the furtive looks and quiet conversations, in the brightness of the girl’s smile whenever she saw him. The signed albums in Cressida’s room were all she needed to be certain.

  “His behavior. He’s different with her. And I’ve found things. Gifts he’s given her.”

  “Ah, I see.”

  “Today I followed his mistress hoping to catch them.”

  “And did you?”

  She laughed, though it was at her own expense. “No, and now I feel like an idiot.”

  “That’s good. Remorse is a sign of a healthy conscience. It means you’ve let God into your soul, if only a tiny amount. That’s often all it takes. What would you have done had your suspicions been confirmed?”

  “This morning? Probably make a scene, throw a few plates, break a few bottles, that kind of thing.”

  “Our Lord, Jesus Christ, teaches us that we must turn the other cheek.” His inflection changed, all trace of Irishness melting away. “But that, at its simplest, means we must not respond to those who challenge us with anger in our hearts. We mustn’t compound sin with more sin.”

  This must be what he sounds like when he’s preaching.

  She pulled her coat around her. It was warm in the confessional, but the memory of George’s desk and all that information about his father sent a chill through her. Any involvement George might have with Robert Armitage, good or bad, would bring Influence rushing back into their lives. She stayed with him for the good of the boys, but this would put them in jeopardy. It was time for her to buck up and seriously think about leaving him. Sally was sure to know a good divorce lawyer.

  “Yes, you’re right. I wasn’t myself. A colleague of mine died yesterday. I found the body.”

  “That’s tragic.” His voice softened with concern, his accent thickening. “I am so sorry for your loss. How did he die?”

  A supernatural force sucked the life out of him. How could she admit that to a priest in a confessional? What did they do to witches these days?

  “What if you suspect someone’s done something terrible? If you do nothing, is that a sin?”

  On the other side of the mesh, the priest was still.

  “How bad an act are we talking about?” he said, eventually.

  “My colleague might have died at the hand of another.”

  “Might have? Can you be sure? Do you have proof?”

  A memory washed over her of fetid breath and pus-weeping eyes looming over her as she lay dying on the bathroom floor, her vision of Mick clear and fresh as if she’d experienced it herself.

  “He was involved in…” She couldn’t say the word ‘magic’ even after all these years. Her mother trained her too well. “In something dark.”

  “Dark? Was it drugs?”

  Of course, that would be his first response. The smack epidemic raging
through Britain was all anyone was thinking about these days.

  “No, not drugs. Religion.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Someone, I don’t know who, led him to believe he was going to transcend to another plane of existence, but the ritual killed him.”

  “That doesn’t sound like religion to me, my child. That sounds like witchcraft.”

  Now it was her turn to be still. That word coming from the priest’s lips twisted the comforting embrace of the booth into the confines of a prison cell. Memories of her mother’s stories of grandmothers drowned, cousins hanged, and aunties burned at the hands of the Church rushed into her mind.

  “Witchcraft? Is that real?” She tried to play it cool, but her voice cracked as she spoke.

  “Witchcraft is the work of the Devil, my child.” All warmth and humor drained out of his voice. “The Devil is very real in the hearts of men and women. He gives them the idea that they are above God, that they know a better way to the salvation of the spirit. Following that path will take you further away from God, not closer. Just like the path of sin. If you’re involved in something like that, if you suspect that your friend died because of it, then you should go to the authorities.”

  “I want it all to go away.”

  She clutched her arms around her against a sudden chill that gripped at her shoulders, even in the confined stuffiness of the booth.

  “If you know that a sin is being committed and you turn a blind eye, you become complicit in that sin.”

  “What if there are no authorities? What if there’s no one?”

  “I don’t understand. There’s always a higher authority. The police, the law, the government, the Church. There’s always someone you can turn to.”

  “You’re wrong there, Father.” She shook her head. “There’s no one. There never has been. There never will be.”