Tonight, unusually, Monsieur Emietter had elected to serve British favourites, something he rarely did simply because he was French and it went against the grain. We offered Toad-in-the-Hole, both a meat and vegetarian version, with mashed potatoes, garden peas and gravy, or beer-battered fish and chips with mushy peas and a lemon wedge, or steak and ale pie with boiled potatoes and steamed cabbage.
After I’d served the last apple crumble with custard dessert, I was near to collapse. I took a seat at the bar so that ostensibly it looked like I was ‘managing’ my staff and the evening’s entertainment—refereeing squabbles about whether we should have nineties Madonna or early Lady Gaga for example—but really, I was resting my eyes.
Finally, after midnight, only Ezra remained, sitting on a stool at the bar drinking a pint of the local brew, Otter Ale, while Phyllis Bliss and Silvan occupied the table in the bay window and Mr Hoo perched on the high-backed chair next to the fire with his eyes closed. Silvan had been nursing the same whisky all night. He and his grandmother had been engaged in an avid conversation about one of Phyliss’s neighbours, to whom she’d evidently taken a dislike. Silvan nodded at appropriate moments and laughed when the situation seemed to warrant it. I didn’t sense any artifice on his part; he was a doting grandson indulging his ageing granny. Sensing me watching him, he caught my eye and winked.
I yawned and mimed turning a key, indicating I intended to lock up in a minute. He took the hint, standing and helping Phyllis to her feet. She’d had several glasses of red wine after dinner and now swayed a little on her feet.
Ezra, noticing movement, looked up. “Closing time?”
“It sure is,” I smiled. “Tomorrow is another day.” I gestured towards the rear of the inn where his car was parked. “I’ll see you out that way if you like?”
We strolled together down the passage and into the kitchen, where only the light above the stove and the fire in the grate gave off any illumination. “How’s The Hay Loft treating you?” I asked.
“It’s alright.” He didn’t sound overly enthusiastic. “Not as full of character as this place is, and the breakfast is a bit bland.”
Secretly pleased to hear that, I tried to look suitably dismayed on his behalf. “Skip their breakfast and have it here,” I said. “There’s always plenty to go around.”
“Sounds good to me, I’ll see you in the morning. Goodnight.”
“Excellent! We serve between seven and nine. Sleep well!” I waved him off, then closed and locked the door before walking the full circuit of the doors and windows on the ground floor. When I returned to the bar, Silvan was on his own, gazing at the elevator as though he’d never properly considered it before.
“Is this staying here?” he asked.
“No.” I joined him, looking at it with fresh eyes. I’d almost grown used to it being there. “It most certainly is not. I just have to find a way to get rid of it.”
Silvan drew his wand out, but I reached out to stop him before he banished the elevator—and anyone inside—to some black hole of infinite nothingness. “We haven’t figured out how to get rid of it safely yet.”
He stretched out with his wand hand, running it along the crack of the door and then along the top of the wooden cabin and around the floor.
“It’s spellbound,” he announced.
“In what way?”
“Whoever conjured this wanted it to stay here for a set amount of time.”
“How long?”
He shrugged. “I can’t tell. But I’ll wager it can only be removed by the person who put it here.”
Recalling my conversation with Archibald earlier, I groaned. “What if that person were dead?”
Silvan smiled. “Then you’d have inherited an elevator permanently.” He stroked the iron cage-work. “It would take some magician to get rid of this.”
“Great.”
I could only hope that it hadn’t been Delia’s work. Kappa Sigma Granma would be heading home in a few days. If this belonged to one of them—Agneta Caspersen maybe, although she denied all knowledge—then with any luck they would take it with them. If it didn’t belong to them, I’d have to burn the rotten thing down. “Can’t you get rid of it?”
“I’m good, but I’m not that good,” Silvan said.
He walked clockwise around it, studying the edges and joins with interest, then staring up into the hole in the ceiling. “Why is it here?” he asked.
What a daft question. “Presumably because some witches struggle to use the stairs.”
“But, as beautiful as it is, it’s big and it’s boxy.” He pressed the call button.
Ting.
A clank and a whirr and the elevator started to descend to our floor.
“Why not just use a broomstick, or a transportation spell, or even conjure a stairlift?” he asked.
Ting.
The doors opened. Holding his wand out in front of him, Silvan stepped forward. He scrutinised the inside, the beautiful walnut panels and Art Nouveau glass, the brass buttons and the gilded mirror—without stepping in.
“Have you ridden it?” he asked.
“No. Why would I? I’m quite able to use the stairs.” Not tonight maybe. My calf muscles were as solid as rock after all the exertion of the day.
He sidled into the lift, half in and half out, his wand held steady. His whole demeanour, watchful and defensive, sent a ripple of unease down my back.
“Where does it go?”
“My office, most annoyingly,” I said, “and then the second floor and the attic.”
He peered more closely at something I couldn’t see. “Ground, first floor, second floor, third floor, right?”
“Right.” I moved closer to him, trying to see what he was looking at.
“That’s four buttons.”
I was tired and beginning to lose patience. “Yes.”
“So why are there five buttons on this panel?”
“Does it go down to the beer cellar?” I asked, craning my head around him to see.
He grabbed me by the top of the arm and hauled me away from the door. “Be careful. I don’t want you going anywhere without me.”
“Ow.” I stared at him in surprise. What did he mean? “Go anywhere? Do you know how many people have used this lift since it first appeared? Dozens,” I told him. “And no harm has befallen any of them.”
“That’s good news at any rate.” He scanned the rest of the lift with his wand again, before returning his attention to the panel. “The buttons are labelled in the European way. G, one, two, three, four. No mention of a basement, or a cellar, or an underground, or anything else. Where does button number four take you?”
“But if G is this floor and three refers to the attic, it can’t take anyone anywhere.”
“Nobody has mentioned this mysterious button to you?” he asked.
I shook my head.
Silvan pursed his lips, staring at me without really seeing me. “Interesting,” he said. Without further ado, he stepped into the elevator. “Coming?” he asked me as the doors began to slide shut.
Instinctively I put my arm out to stop them closing completely, but still I hesitated.
“You said no harm has befallen anyone who has used it,” Silvan reminded me, and his eyes shone with devilry. “What’s the worst thing that can happen? We end up on the roof and freeze to death?”
“That sounds fun,” I grumbled. “Should I get my coat?”
Silvan grinned. “Well?”
“Hooo-oooo.” Mr Hoo had suddenly woken up. I heard the flutter of his powerful wings and he soared across the bar. I barely paid attention to his warning.
“Oh, alright,” I said, reluctant but intrigued all at once. “In for a penny, in for a pound.” I stepped over the threshold.
“Hoooo!” More urgent.
The door slid smoothly closed behind me before I could turn and speak to my owl.
Ting.
The elevator lifted and I heard the whine of the mechanism ab
ove us. The ride itself was smooth.
Ting.
I could imagine my office on the other side.
Ting.
The corridor on the second floor.
Ting.
The attic, where dozens of the Whittle Inn ghosts would be whiling away their afterlives.
Ting.
The elevator began to slow, before shuddering to a halt.
Silvan aimed his wand at the doors and, feeling a deep sense of unease about the unknown, I reached into my pocket and grabbed my own as the doors began to slide open.
“Speckled Wood?” Silvan asked.
I scrutinised the landscape before us. Skeletal trees beneath a black, starless sky. Wisps of winter mist rising from the ground, a frozen layer of permafrost covering the botanical debris left over after the long, wet autumn we’d endured.
“No,” I said, and my wand tingled in my hand. I glanced down at it, fabricated as it was from a branch that had fallen from Vance, the Ent that lived deep in the marsh at the centre of Speckled Wood. If this had been Speckled Wood, I’d have known it. “Definitely not.”
“Shall we?” Silvan motioned towards the trees.
My muscles had tensed up. I held my wand out directly in front of my chest and nodded.
Indicating he would go first, Silvan stepped over the threshold, his head swivelling, searching for obvious danger. He reminded me of the action heroes I’d seen in the movies, ex-special forces soldiers who’d been trained to sweep their environment seeking out enemy insurgents. Where had he gained his knowledge and experience from? Not for the first time I wished he wouldn’t be so secretive about his life.
Unlike mine, his movements were fluid, his breath deep and regular. My heart beat hard against my rib cage, my intestines twisted in knots. I took a deep breath, willing myself to relax, but memories of Castle Iadului and the ledge we’d clung to when I was sure we’d both die, invaded my thoughts, sapping all my confidence away.
“Alfie?” Silvan’s voice, soft and loving, broke into the doubt, fear and chaos partying in my head.
He had trained me better than this. I owed it to him to keep it together.
“Coming,” I said and stepped out of the sanctuary of the elevator.
A harsh, icy breeze slapped my face and I recoiled. Colder than Transylvania in October.
Ting.
I spun around, my breath catching in my throat. The lift doors had closed. I panicked, reaching out to call it, worried that it would disappear and we would never find our way back to my wonky inn again.
Ting.
The call button lit up and the doors opened once more. The elevator wasn’t going anywhere.
“Do you want to back?” Silvan asked. I loved him for sounding more concerned than judgemental despite my evident weakness.
Yes.
“No.” Get a grip, Alf!
I backed away from the elevator, watching the doors slide gently closed once more. When I was sure it would stay where it was, I turned to face him. “Where are we?”
He shrugged, his eyes busily scanning the trees ahead of us. “If this isn’t Speckled Wood then I have no idea.”
“How is it possible? That the lift brings you somewhere completely external to the inn?” I puzzled.
“Remember Gorde’s Gimcrack?” Silvan reminded me.
“Do you think we’ve travelled back in time?”
“It’s a bit difficult to tell. It’s impossible to know whether we’re still in Whittlecombe or somewhere else entirely.” He was right. All we could see were trees in front of us and the elevator behind us, the shaft buried in the earth. There was no going up from here, only down—presumably to return to the safety of my inn—or into the woods. “I’m thinking we’ve accessed some sort of portal. Whether we’re in the same time zone as Whittle Inn or not, we may find out.” He illuminated the tip of his wand. “It looks like there’s a trail, see?” He swept the light in front of me and I spotted the rough path. It seemed well worn. Other people had been here before us.
He reached out with his free hand and took my elbow, pulling me gently towards him and kissing my forehead. “You can do this,” he breathed into my hairline. I leaned against him, momentarily, drawing on his strength. I knew he understood. The trauma I’d experienced in Transylvania had been hard to work through. It had robbed me of self-belief.
“I can,” I said, but my voice seemed to stick in my throat. Words have power, Alfhild, I could hear Gwyn say. Magick is all about intent. You have to imbibe every word with meaning. “I can,” I repeated and this time my words were loud in the clearing. I nodded at Silvan with more certainty. “Let’s investigate what this is all about.”
The wood-that-wasn’t-speckled was as silent as the grave. Not a hint of animal life, nothing scurrying in the undergrowth, nothing sheltering in the trees. Given the frequency of my visits to my own wood—come rain or shine, night or day—I knew what sounds I expected to hear, and their absence gave me pause.
“I’ll go first. We’ll take it steady.” Silvan slipped ahead of me, holding his wand out to light his way. I lit the top of mine and followed in his wake.
Besides the silence, the oddest thing was the lack of evergreen trees. Every tree in this wood was deciduous. The majority were silver birches but with a scattering of oak and sycamore, and the odd beech. There were no alders either, which suggested to me that this wasn’t a marshy land in the same way that Whittlecombe was. We could be high up, which might explain why the land was drier, but I couldn’t tell in the darkness, and the light on my wand only illuminated a circle of around five or six feet.
Most unnerving and unnatural of all, the mist moved around us, drifting here and there, defying the breeze blowing steadily in from the east.
How could it do that?
“Do you get the sense this place is enchanted?” I called. Silvan had outdistanced me. I could see his light but not him. He paused, waiting for me to catch up.
“I thought the same,” he agreed.
“I’ve never known a wood with such a limited assortment of trees.” I held my wand up and we craned our necks to stare up at what would be a leafy canopy for seven or eight months of the year. But in February, and without any coniferous trees, we were in an entirely barren land. “And this mist—”
“Doing its own thing.” I heard something in his voice. A minuscule ounce of trepidation. I was reminded of the tic by his eye when Elise had asked whether he recognised the photo of Delia Cuthbert. What did Silvan know?
We remained in place, listening to the silence. My breath sounded strangely loud. Silvan peered into the darkness. Eventually he huffed out a tense breath. “Come on. Let’s keep going.”
We moved off again, and this time I kept up. It wasn’t that I thought anything was chasing us, because I really didn’t. I couldn’t sense anything breathing, anywhere. Not a rabbit buried deep in its burrow, or a badger in its set. Nothing huddled beneath the earth, waiting for the spring to come. Nothing alive at all, except for us.
We tramped on, the cold biting. Fortunately, I’d donned thick robes that morning, with black woollen tights and sensible shoes, the uniform I tended to wear around the inn. However, I’d have preferred my winter coat, walking boots and even Millicent’s badly knitted mismatching gloves.
I stopped to get my breath and leaned against the nearest tree, a horse chestnut. Had this been Speckled Wood, I would have felt the heartbeat of the tree beneath my hand. I’d have sensed the vibration of thousands of tiny beetles and other insects attending their daily business. But there was nothing. This was a wood devoid of life. A world where nothing existed.
“What is this place?” I wondered aloud, but Silvan had moved ahead again, and I spoke only to myself, my breath wafting away, mingling with the mist. “Eerie,” I shuddered, and scampered after him once more.
He heard my footsteps clumping up a short incline towards him and stopped to wait. The light of his wand illuminated his face, his welcoming smile.
We’d walked into a carpet of hedera, a woody vine that Ned often used in our raised borders in the grounds of Whittle Inn. This was the first hint of life we’d found. It sprang from the base of the trees, growing thick, as it liked to do, but it hadn’t climbed the trunks as other ivy would have. I found it oddly welcoming, a hint of life and colour in an otherwise monochromatic world.
Without warning, Silvan shot a dense beam of energy at his feet. “What—” He fired off a second round. “Ouch!”
“What is it?” I targeted my own wand at the ground. The hedera around his feet trembled.
“Get back, Alf!” he urged me. “Move away!”
“Let me help!” But as I reached out to him, not really understanding what was happening, his feet were pulled away and he fell, landing on his rump. “Silvan!”
“Alf—” He started to say something else, but no sooner was my name out of his mouth, than he’d been yanked away, over the edge of the rise where we stood. His shriek chilled my blood, and I screamed too, clamping my hands to my mouth, dropping my wand. What little light there’d been, went out. I fell silent, listening as Silvan’s shriek died away.
Shivering with fear more than cold, I squatted on the ground, panting painfully.
“This isn’t happening!”
I grappled around among the hedera, my skin crawling as I felt thin threads brush against my fingers. Something curled around my little finger and I yanked my hand sharply upwards, freeing it by snapping the fronds that tried to hold me in place.
“I need my wand!”
With nothing else for it, I plunged my right hand down into the hedera once again, scrabbling about until I touched something hard and warm.
My little piece of Vance.
I plucked it up and rolled backwards out of the way of the intrusive ivy, shining my wand in the direction Silvan had fallen, my breath exploding out of me in short wheezes.
From behind came the sound of dull thudding. Footsteps. A man. Heavy boots on the packed icy earth. Someone was coming. Not knowing whether he would be friend or foe, I edged sideways. Off the trail and behind a wide oak. I held my breath as the footsteps came closer and craned my neck to peer around the trunk. A circle of light travelled my way.
A Gaggle of Ghastly Grandmamas: Wonky Inn Book 9 Page 15
