Witchfog

by Isobel Robertson

  Monsters in the Dark

  I awoke a little after midnight. My dreams might have been slipping out of my control in this wretched house, but I could still wake when I wanted. I wrapped myself in my warmest dressing gown and pinned my braid up on top of my head. Shivering a little, I carefully lit the lamp that sat on my bedside table, and shuffled out into the corridor. There would be no one to stop me at this hour. I had even spotted Mrs Pender going into the abandoned wing earlier that afternoon, so I knew that the door had been unlocked. With any luck, it remained that way.

  Too dangerous to enter, indeed. I doubted that Mr Amberson would dare tell Mrs Pender what to do.

  The corridors of Killston Hall seemed longer at night, full as they were of shadow. There were no windows to let in the moonlight, so, outside my small circle of lamplight, the house was entirely black. All the unusual charm it displayed during daylight hours had evaporated, replaced by looming, threatening darkness. I made my way down the stairs hesitantly, feeling for each step with my slipper. It would not do to fall and wake the household.

  Even the kitchen was dead and dark, with only the tiniest flicker of light glowing in the hearth, the banked fire almost extinguished. The air in this room held no more warmth than the corridor above. I pulled my dressing gown closer around me, for all the difference it made. I missed the all-night fires and gas lamps of my home. Evidently I was far more accustomed to luxury than I realised.

  The hall was perhaps the most threatening room of all in the dark. I could not even look at the great tapestry of Wayland Smith, too afraid to see what the darkness did to its already fierce figures. Instead, I made straight for the door that had been frustrating me all day. By now, I wasn’t surprised when I found it locked - but I was angry. Someone knew that I hunted for something important and kept trying to stop me. I would not let them.

  I traced the now-familiar route out of the house and round to the outside of the wing. I could have taken the opportunity to search another room, such as Sir Philip’s study, but by now the abandoned wing was becoming something of an obsession. I wished that I had paid more attention to Daniel’s lessons on lock-picking.

  Trying another approach, I found that the outside door had also been locked. I tried shoving at it with all my might, but it was definitely a lock rather than a stiff hinge. Out of breath, I stood panting a little in the cold night air, my breath fogging in front of my face.

  Well. I was not defeated yet. I scanned the dark stone walls of the abandoned wing, looking for an open window. Nothing. I moved around the side of the building, checking all the windows as I went, until I stood on the front drive frowning up at the dark facade. Not a single open window in the entire wing. Obviously, the maids had been careful to shut everything after they finished cleaning. It looked like I was defeated after all.

  Then I saw a light.

  Not from the abandoned wing; this was nowhere near it. Just a coincidence that I had been on this side of the house at all. It was a small, bright, pulsing light out on the moors, up high on the hill but close enough that I could see it clearly. How strange. Surely we were too far inland for smugglers. I knew that I should probably ignore the light and head to bed, ready to continue my mission in the morning, but curiosity got the better of me. Still in my dressing gown, I set off down the driveway and on to the road.

  The light didn’t move as I headed up the dark road and away from the house. It continued to flicker, but it remained in the same place and stayed as bright. I felt drawn to it like a moth to a flame, and somehow my feet seemed to find their way on the black surface of the road. Cloud covered the moon, so it should have been too dark for me to walk comfortably, but even in my clumsy slippers I seemed to have no trouble heading towards that light.

  I lost track of time. I do not know how long I walked for. Perhaps only a few moments. I realised that the light hovered directly above me now, straight up the hillside, and that I could not reach it by continuing along the road. I hiked up my dressing gown and stepped into the long grass on the side of the road, immediately feeling myself soaked up to the knees. I pulled off my slippers and held them in one hand while I grasped my dressing gown skirt in the other, and set off up the hill, stumbling and crashing my way through the ever-taller undergrowth. Now I had to watch my feet, although in the rich, oppressive blackness of a cloudy night, it was almost impossible. I could barely see a thing.

  Preoccupied for a few minutes with a particularly difficult patch of brambles, I took my eyes off the light. When I looked up, it was gone. I felt a sinking sense of disappointment. I had to know the nature of that light, had to learn why it was there. How could it have disappeared when I was so close? I huddled in on myself, wet, cold and hopeless. What a disaster this had been. I stood there on the hillside considering my options. Should I carry on up and look for evidence of the light? Or should I go home?

  I couldn’t see anything around me, but I felt increasingly uneasy. Someone - or something - watched me. A gaze pierced my spine, trickling along the tiny hairs on the back of my neck. I spun around, but there was no unevenness in the blackness that surrounded me, no outline or silhouette discernible. I could be inches away from another human being and my eyes would not be able to tell.

  I staggered back down the hill, but fear made me even clumsier, my leaden feet stumbling over every unseen obstacle. I fell, crashing into the bracken. Thorns dug into my hands and arms but I pushed myself up and kept moving, ignoring the mud that now coated me all over. It felt incredibly important that I reach the road as quickly as possible and get away from those watching eyes. The light had still not reappeared.

  At last, I stumbled over the last of the long grass and onto the hard gravel of the road. By some miracle I still held my slippers, and I pulled them back on to protect my feet from the worst of the rough stones. I stood there on the road for a moment longer, looking up at where the light had been.

  Then the monster appeared. For a fraction of a second, the clouds drifted away from the moon, so that the huge figure beside me was illuminated, its massive shaggy body and ferocious head, its long legs, its flashing white teeth gleaming in the moonlight, its bright eyes boring into mine. I ran. No time for thought, no time for reason. This was a creature of pure nightmare, and once I knew that it was watching me I could do nothing but run.

  My slippers fell off as I raced along the road, leaving my poor bare feet to pound into the rough gravel. My breath rasped and shook, and I heard the creature right behind me. I knew that I ran decently enough, but it must only be inches from me, and hundreds of feet lay between me and the house. I had barely reached the property boundary - and then it was gone. I heard its harsh, slavering breath behind me, but no more running footsteps. I whirled round, but I could see nothing in the darkness. The sounds stopped. Whether or not the monster was gone, it did not seem to be following me over the property line.

  I backed up slowly, unwilling to turn my back on the monster again, but nothing stirred in the blackness. I made it all the way along the driveway with no more noise. I hid in the porch for perhaps half an hour, knowing that the front door was locked, but unwilling to abandon even this partial sanctuary. At last, when I surmised that the monster had most definitely gone, I made my way back around the house and in through the door I had left by.

  What manner of beast had that been? Unwillingly, I thought back to my first day on these moors, the day I saw the creatures Mr Amberson called witches. But no, they could not be connected. This had been a wild wolf, perhaps, or a big cat escaped from some lord’s menagerie and turned feral. I could not possibly have stumbled into the world of the supernatural.

  I lit a candle when I reached the great hall and swore softly when I realised that my battered feet had left a faint trail of blood. Luckily, I was prepared for this. I washed my feet gently in the kitchen and wrapped them in an old rag.

  Then I made my way up to my room and carefully extracted a small glass vial from the secret compartment in my bag. D
aniel and I had concocted this recipe together for the very purpose of removing bloodstains. I retraced my steps through the house, sprinkling the tiniest amount of the liquid over the bloody trail. All traces of blood faded away, dissolved by the special nature of the essence. Some might have called it magic, but Daniel and I knew it was science.

  I used a little more on my body, then washed off the last of the mud and blood in the kitchen. I hoped no one would comment on the empty water bucket in the morning. Finally, I used a few drops of Daniel’s special healing salve on my many cuts and bruises, changed my nightgown, and slipped into bed for an hour or two of exhausted sleep before breakfast.

  The Science of Blood

  The blood ointment was one of the first projects that Daniel and I worked on together. In our branch of the natural sciences, blood posed something of a problem. It was often a vital ingredient for any experiment requiring a spark of life force. Obviously, it could lead to awkward questions if blood came to light in unexpected places, even when it was only a few drops of my own blood. I had grown used to thorough preparation and cleaning as part of any scientific method which required blood. It had been Daniel who suggested that we use our own expertise to make the entire process far more streamlined. We spent weeks holed up in my laboratory, testing combination after combination until finally we found it - the perfect solution for dissolving blood into thin air.

  It was a detailed and complex procedure that we had repeated only three times. As with many of our experiments, full moon appeared to be the most effective time to prepare the solution. The ingredients were rare and expensive. It was only because of our vast knowledge that we had arrived at the correct combination in a matter of weeks rather than decades.

  Daniel and I had years of scientific experience between us. Not just any science, though: we practised life sciences. Developed by alchemists in ancient Egypt, this age-old art was almost forgotten. Only a few practitioners survived. It was not taught in universities, or in schools. Only a few carefully chosen initiates were accepted as students by masters of this science. Even for those lucky few, the apprenticeship was long and hard.

  I found my master at the age of sixteen. Thanks to my string of well-educated governesses, I already had a firm educational grounding. I understood much of the necessary science, as well as the mathematics, the philosophy, and the languages. I also had a good knowledge of religion and mythology. This was important; the life sciences often manipulated the physical world through the power of human thought.

  It was Delphine, an elegant French noblewoman with a fondness for fine clothes and jewels, who first introduced us to Monsieur Lavelle. He was her exotic continental lover, an older man with sleek grey hair and piercing dark eyes. Sophisticated though Delphine was, she still fawned over the man, hanging on his every word. She brought him to my weekly salons, which were already the talk of educated London. I may have been only sixteen, but I was intelligent beyond my years, and loved being surrounded by people at the cutting edge of modern science and art. Monsieur Lavelle was outside my usual circle, but we quickly became friends, and he recognised my potential. By the time he and Delphine finished their brief romantic relationship, I had become his student. Daniel followed closely behind me.

  I learnt a great deal from Monsieur Lavelle. He instructed me well in the foundations of our discipline and then gave me free will to experiment and explore. I invested in my own laboratory at home, ripping out an entire guest suite for the purpose, and even employing a boy as a laboratory assistant. By the time I turned nineteen, six months before this story began, I was an accomplished scientist in my own right, with a keen understanding of the natural elements, the stones of power and the ancient runes that underpinned life science. Some might have called it magic, but I knew better. It was rational science, pure and simple.

  And I had journeyed to Yorkshire in order to solve the world’s greatest scientific problem.

  I was going to bring back the dead.

  Secrets

  The rest of the week passed with the same sense of smothered frustration. My efforts to search the house were thwarted, and my objective, once almost within my grasp, seemed to be slipping through my fingers. One improvement, at least, was that the weather had taken a turn for the better. The fog did not reappear although the clouds were heavy and the sky rarely blue.

  I no longer felt any doubt that Sir Philip was watching me. Our shared meals remained cordial, even friendly, but he suspected me of something. I had no idea what I might have done to rouse such suspicion - I had been extremely careful - but I knew I could not trust him.

  “There’s a storm coming.”

  I sat in the library with Sir Philip and Mr Amberson. It was the latter who had spoken as he gazed out of the window to the moorland beyond. Over the last few days, Sir Philip had grown rather attached to the younger man, twice inviting him to take breakfast with us. It was not entirely proper, but no one would comment out here in the wilds of Yorkshire, and Sir Philip seemed deprived of male company. Still, it made me a little suspicious of Mr Amberson as well.

  “I’ve been saying that all week,” Sir Philip replied. “It’s overdue now. I would say there’s some terrible weather on the way.”

  “Tomorrow,” Mr Amberson said. “That would be my guess.”

  I already tired of how much discussion of the weather dominated the conversation at Killston Hall.

  “How do you fancy seeing a Yorkshire storm, my dear?” Sir Philip asked me.

  “I am sure it would be delightful,” I said dryly. On the other side of the room, Mr Amberson tried to choke a laugh.

  I had spent little time with him over the past few days, but that small amount served only to confuse me more. I didn’t trust him; he had become too close to Sir Philip too quickly. But I still had vague, troubled memories of that day on the road, and I could not shake the belief that I owed Theodoric Amberson my life.

  Sir Philip laughed too, although it was far more restrained and polite.

  “Well, my dear,” he said, stretching his legs. “I think I must attempt some more work before lunch, so I will leave you now.”

  I rose as well. “I have a few things to see to myself, and I suspect Mr Amberson should be getting back to work.”

  Mr Amberson bowed, looking up at me with those dark eyes, the grey clouds looming behind him. In the gloom of the library, the firelight turned his open, friendly face into something hidden and mysterious. He reached to take my hand, but I childishly pretended not to notice. Bidding farewell to my uncle, I bustled out of the room without another word to Mr Amberson. I went straight through the kitchen and up the stairs to stand outside my room. I waited there, pulling myself back together and listening until I heard both Sir Philip and Theodoric leave. Then I slipped into my room, picked up my carefully prepared excuse and set off back down the stairs.

  There were two small rooms off the main corridor that I had yet to check. I suspected that they were just storerooms, but I wanted to have a look, anyway. I might as well inspect the rest of the house while I worked out how to access the abandoned wing.

  The two doors stood side by side a short distance from Sir Philip’s office. I tested the handles and found, to my relief, that they were both unlocked. I pushed open the door to the first room and stepped inside. The room was far larger than I had anticipated - not huge, to be sure, but certainly not a storeroom. A music room, I supposed, although the only instrument was a single old piano, lit by a narrow window high in the wall. I squinted down at the music on the stand, but I did not recognise it. In the gloom, I struggled to even read it. I wondered how long it had been since anyone played this piano; I could hardly imagine Sir Philip as a keen pianist.

  There was nothing else in the room; no cabinet, no wall panelling to conceal secrets. Just to be safe, I lifted the lid of the piano and looked inside, but I could see nothing amiss. The room did not even contain a second piece of sheet music. What a strange, empty little room.

  I step
ped back into the corridor and closed the door behind me. I tried to open the second - but it was locked. During my time in the music room, someone had come and silently locked this door.

  “My dear? Can I help you?”

  “Oh, Sir Philip!”

  I spun round in surprise. How could the old man move so quietly?

  “I was looking for a maid. This needs repairing.” I held up the torn nightdress that I had brought down from my room.

  “Oh dear,” Sir Philip said, frowning down at the tear. “I’m sorry that the girls aren’t easier to find. Mrs Pender does tend to send them off on errands. If you wait in the kitchen, someone should be with you before too long.”

  “I’ll try that then,” I said, and smiled at him until he smiled in return and backed away to his office.

  I wandered to the kitchen and sat down by the hearth to wait for a maid. I was in no doubt now: Sir Philip was actively trying to stop me. Did he know what I searched for? Perhaps he kept secrets of his own, unrelated to mine, but that was somewhat unlikely. It appeared that we were on opposite sides.

  Cheating Death

  Cheating death had been Monsieur Lavelle’s overwhelming project for years before I met him. He had other interests, but he was an ambitious and talented man, and this was the ultimate pinnacle of the life sciences. We knew how to prolong life, to preserve it - and, of course, how to end it - but we did not know how to return it. Monsieur Lavelle always scoffed at the idea it was impossible, or reserved only for God.

  “Science will find a way,” he would say, then laugh. Few people maintained their doubts after spending more than a few moments with him.

  As for me, I had never been a sceptic. I knew just what incredible things he was capable of, and the depth of his knowledge and power. If he believed the dead could be returned to life, I believed it. Still, he would not allow me to become directly involved in these darker experiments until I turned eighteen, the age at which he considered me to be an adult.