Samain

by Meg Elizabeth Atkins

  Henry said, ‘She was never found?’

  ‘Never. I think after a while the police believed she was dead, and eventually they had to give up looking. Augustus didn’t. He went on for years, using enquiry agents, searching himself, travelling to — oh, the most outlandish places on the wildest clue, at the mercy of every crank and trickster who pretended to have some information. It was pitiful, disgusting, frightening. In time his health broke down, but that didn’t stop him. He’d become obsessed. He was convinced that she was, in some way, quite close to him, and he would believe anything, anything that would bring her that one step nearer ...’

  She fell silent, drawn down into her thoughts, then she sighed and looked at him with a deliberate change of mood. ‘This is the difficult bit, Henry.’

  None of it had been exactly easy. Neither was it, he could not help thinking, very healthy. What was she doing, living with a deranged old man? But he did not ask.

  She concentrated on stubbing her cigarette out in the ashtray, slowly, messily. ‘You see, he got it into his head — don’t ask me when and don’t ask me how — that your aunt knew something about Helen.’

  ‘What do you mean — “knew something”? And why should she?’

  ‘Well ... Cass looked at him with some trepidation. ‘Well, she was a witch, wasn’t she?’

  ‘Oh, God,’ Henry said wearily.

  7

  In the stillness of the day there was no breath of wind; but from the grasses, in the air, a sense of stirring: something frail and transient, filtering from the crown of the rise. The massive, upright stones defied all notion of movement, and yet they leaned, leaning into centuries, and the stirring continued about them. As if they breathed.

  ‘You feel a chill? It’s always the same up here, even on the warmest day.’

  ‘It’s autumn.’

  ‘Yes. Once, to the ancient people, a dangerous season, very much concerned with death.’

  ‘But all that ...’ behind the words lay a hint of uneasy irony, ‘... all that was a long time ago.’

  ‘Time. You think it progresses? Leaves thingsbehind? For our purpose you would do better to think of it in terms of accumulation. If you can.’ The answering irony, deliberate.

  ‘Oh, very well. It’s odd, this — coldness. The air should be heavier, there’s a storm on the way.’

  ‘We’ll be gone before it reaches us. Now, as I said, it’s as well for you to fix the geography in your mind, it will — assist you. We are above the house, look. Perhaps you could care to borrow my binoculars. It’s difficult, I know, the foliage obscures visibility, even though it’s thinning now — but can you see how the ground falls away, sharply, between the house and the river?’

  ‘Ye-es. I think so. So many trees, evergreens —they won’t thin out, and bushes. It is very ... secluded, very private. I wonder, all this — business — it isn’t dangerous, is it? It won’t get out of hand? Anything happen?’

  ‘What could?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know ... I suppose I’d better tell you. I’ve left a letter with a friend, explaining. Oh, I know you insisted on secrecy; so it won’t be opened — unless I don’t reclaim it by a certain date.’

  A restrained giggle, but a giggle nevertheless, and so gleeful it could not be anything but sincere. ‘Really, how melodramatic. But I suppose — yes — presented with a situation unexpected, unconventional, the normal reaction would be suspicion.’

  ‘Normal. Forgive me, but what would you know of normal reactions? Surrounded by this everlasting mumbo-jumbo?’

  ‘The preoccupations I have grown up with are normal to me. I may deplore them, but ... However, I am not here to make excuses. We are both here to ensure that you are — word perfect.’

  ‘Oh, I will be.’

  ‘I hope so, I should hate there to be any bungling. Now, listen ...’

  *

  It was Cass’s suggestion they take a walk. For once, she did not choose the route, she simply wanted movement and air, direction was irrelevant; and Henry agreed, it was better than watching her fidget about the house as she talked.

  They walked along the south side of the river and through the fringe of woods under canopies of gold, dense in the heavy light. Far away, the sky had a violent colour, Henry thought that it meant a storm. If Wanda had been with him he would have known if it was travelling towards them, she could sense storms hours before they arrived.

  Cass talked in rushes of eloquence or, her manner changing, she became defensive, her words few and grudging. ‘I knew you’d be offended, Henry, because she was your aunt. I suppose you find the mere idea of witchcraft worse than a blight. Outrageous, unnatural, an insult to your common sense.’

  ‘I don’t find it offensive — the subject — associated with my aunt or not, its range goes a long way beyond the obvious. What I do maintain is that modern witchcraft, so called, has moved too far from its origins to be anything but decadent, its practitioners no more than credulous, sensation-hungry misfits. Somehow, I can’t see my aunt in that category. But I don’t dismiss the supernatural, the extra-sensory, not at all.’

  ‘Don’t you?’ She halted in surprise; then, with her quick intelligence, looking at him, narrowing her eyes, ‘Why? You must have a reason, someone like youhas to have. And by reason I mean experience.’

  ‘Not necessarily.’ He had reasons she could never guess at — experience, too, incredible, searing, causing the reaction she took for contempt; the past had rushed at him and for an instant he had been helpless against its despair. But it was not his place to explain himself to her, and he was not going to let her manoeuvre him into a position where he had to deal in evasions and excuses. He had noticed how sometimes she responded to his questions with an awkwardness that indicated inner confusion, and after a great deal of talk he was no nearer to discovering what lay behind Augustus Wynter’s conviction that his aunt had some kind of knowledge of the child Helen’s disappearance.

  Cass could not help, her despondency as she reiterated this was genuine enough. ‘There doesn’t have to be a reason, not now, he’s past being rational about it. Over the years he’s suspected everyone, everyone, he’s nursed his suspicions slowly, erratically, abandoning them, returning to them. He’s not mad, not at all in the certifiable sense, but time is all — clouded to him. When his fixation about your aunt started, I don’t know — before I came to live here. Possibly it was just her reputation that sparked it off. She was known to have remarkable success reading the tarot cards; so in a sense it was natural enough for him to assume that through them she could discover something about Helen.’

  Natural was scarcely the word Henry would have used, but ... But in the attic of the house, amongst the fascinating, forgotten, stored-away remnants of one woman’s lifetime, there was a pack of tarot cards. He had come across them one day when he was moving some old suitcases, they had slipped out of the cloth that wrapped them and showered about him as he knelt on the dusty floor. Beautiful things, but violent and strange, surrounding him in a bizarre gallery of symbols that for all their painted stillness hinted at the never-ceasing, never perceived interchange of violence and mystery behind life itself.

  With an effort he returned his attention to Cass. But there was a split second in which the recollection of that past moment intruded upon the present and something too distant and obscure to be named, too fragile to live beyond the instant in which it occurred, touched the superstitious boundary of his mind with a flicker of foreboding.

  He said, ‘So he approached my aunt?’

  ‘Not directly. He’s — secretive in his dealings, he has a dread of exposing himself to strangers. He never leaves the house except ... Henry, just please accept the fact that I’m talking about someone who by normal standards isn’t — normal. He just doesn’t do things the way other people do. When he wants to approach anyone, he does it through us.’

  ...he never leaves the house except ... It had not escaped him: the pause, the abrupt way she had gone
on without finishing the sentence. Except when? Or why?

  He stored these questions away and asked the more immediate one. ‘Us?’

  ‘Myself. Mandy — the little plump woman. She’s lived with him for years, looking after him — in her fashion. And my sister, Evelyn, you saw her this morning.’

  ‘Your sister ... Yes, I’ve seen her about the village occasionally.’ The big, handsome woman who, except for her height, bore no physical resemblance to Cass.

  ‘She lives in one of the houses across from the church. She’s married, her husband teaches at the college outside town. Evelyn’s a very solid, respectable, common-sense sort of woman, I’m afraid Augustus and his — eccentricities are a trial to her. She ... Well, anyway, she should have gone to see your aunt, it would have been better. Unfortunately, Mandy went, and she doesn’t always make a good impression.’

  She made a bloody awful one on me, Henry almost said. But that maddening, prattling woman who had led him out into the dark was no more the real woman than the overpowering Mrs Enderby-Smythe was Cass. Their talent was considerable, if misapplied, and it was galling for him to think how he had been hoodwinked. If he had not chanced to see them together that morning, if his power of observation had been less professionally developed, if there had not, from the first, been some subliminal tug of recognition whenever he looked at Cass ...

  ‘However ... your aunt read the cards, but she couldn’t see anything, anything at all. So Mandy went back and told Augustus. But he didn’t believe it; the idea had got hold of him and wouldn’t let go. He asked your aunt to go to the house and read the cards there. She refused. He saw her refusal as an admission of some kind, he tried ways to persuade her —’

  ‘Intimidate her, you mean.’

  Uneasily, after a moment, she replied, ‘He’s a strange man: that might have happened. I think she must have been a woman of character and strength, she would have resisted him not through fear ... disapproval, maybe, even contempt’ With sudden urgency she put her hand on his arm. ‘Henry, please remember — this was before I came here.’

  ‘How long ago was that?’

  ‘Oh, a while,’ she was always vague about time.

  But he pressed her to be more accurate; eventually she settled for ‘about a year’ and the urgency crept back into her voice when she went on to say that something had happened in the past — she did not know what — that made them enemies. Her concern that he should not hold her accountable touched him distantly; in his mind was the picture of a black labrador dog lying with its throat cut, and a question: how unbalanced was Augustus Wynter? How viciously revengeful?

  Cass said, ‘He wouldn’t let the matter rest, right up until her death. And then ... Do you know what aBook of Shadows is?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She turned her face to him, startled, a little doubtful, as if somehow she had not expected him to answer so unhesitatingly.

  He went on, ‘Allegedly a record kept by members of a witch coven of their practices.’ Her glance turned away from him as he said deliberately, ‘How feeble, farcical and squalid. You thought my aunt had one; you thought it was in the house. You came to steal it. First, you broke in before I arrived and searched the place — very amateurishly —’

  ‘Well thank God for that. At least it shows I don’t do it for a living.’

  ‘And then, when that yielded nothing — I suppose because Wanda barked and frightened you off ...’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes. I came a second time, that time with Mandy.’

  ‘It was a stupid scheme.’

  ‘Yes, wasn’t it,’ she agreed ruefully. ‘But I just couldn’t think of anything else. And Mandy never can. Think. Evelyn wouldn’t have anything to do with it. Henry, I’m sorry it happened. I’m not going to wear sackcloth and put ashes on my head — but I am sorry. You know that’s true, don’t you?’

  Yes, he knew. Just as, knowing her love of clowning, her mocking dramatisations, her perpetual games of pretence, he could imagine her delight in the escapade ... And that mercurial nature, the intriguing shifts of mood, the teasing wit — it was what fascinated him, drew him and held him.

  How can I blame her for being what she is?

  He said coolly, ‘And whose idea was it for you to come and insinuate yourself into my affections?’

  ‘Everyone’s,’ she said wildly, then, calming, ‘Well, we’d had two goes: one illegal and one theatrical. It was Evelyn who suggested we try the last resort — common sense. I was to come to you, tell you what the situation was, and ask you if you’d found it — theBook of Shadows. If you would let us look at it.’

  ‘It doesn’texist. I hope you’ve got that into your head by now. If it ever did — except in a mad old bugger’s imagination — it doesn’t now. I’d have found it. I’ve had the house apart.’

  ‘I know,’ she agreed gloomily.

  ‘But why didn’t you? That evening ... follow your sister’s advice?’

  She looked at him, half exasperated, half apologetic. ‘Itold you. I lost my nerve.’

  ‘Umm,’ he said dubiously. It could be true. It could also be true that she now saw an ingenuous confession as an excellent means of concealing any other motive she might have.

  ‘Well all right.’ His doubt provoked her, but the glance she gave him was cool, and rather wicked. ‘I didn’t lose my nerve in the sense that I panicked. I felt a fool. So I calculated. There you were — a polite, sensible, sexy man ... and there was I — a strange woman with a crazy tale to which you would have listened, very seriously, very politely. And — either furious that I should be offensive about your aunt, or convinced I was insane, or both — shown me the door. I didn’t want that. I wanted to stay. I wanted to see you again. I wanted you, Henry.’

  After thinking this over he responded, straight-faced, ‘A subtle appeal to my vanity.’

  The half smile faded from her mouth. Halting, she took his hand and tugged it with some urgency. ‘True. You know it’s true. There are some things you trust in me, and that’s one. How much I want you. Isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, because it was.

  They walked on. The trees thinned as they began to climb the incline of the gentle hill that curved about the village. She said, ‘I know what you’re thinking — about that night I came with Mandy. Why did we go through the whole business? Why didn’t we just go back to Augustus andpretend we had.’

  Clever Cass, disarming him with explanations before he had even asked.

  ‘Well, we couldn’t pretend — because he’d know. Don’t ask me how, it’s uncanny. So I had to.Don’t laugh— but I’m not good at telling lies, not about real things. I can’t invent. Neither can Mandy, not very well, and anyway, she’ll do anything for him, anything, without question. Oh, there are times when we deceive him, sort of games — charades — he needs the atmosphere of drama to sustain him. But his world isn’t all hallucination, he does have extraordinary perception, almost telepathy ...’ Her voice trailed away; she was silent for a while, perhaps finding reassurance in his lack of response, giving her head a shake, ‘Enough now. Being with you is an escape into something normal. My background isn’t exactly — conventional, or anything to be proud of. Can you understand why I never wanted to talk about it?’

  ‘You’re entitled to live as you choose.’ He was noncommittal. Eccentric — not to say grotesque, as her circumstances were, the choice was hers. And he knew she had given him only a glimpse, there was more ... She had made a fool of him; yet he could accept, with only incomplete understanding, her sincerity in finding escape in her relationship with him, and he was surprised to discover how much this meant to him. But he was on his guard, and not a little vengeful. There were things he wanted to know; the score would be even when his curiosity was satisfied. She could be evasive, but he could be persistent; her quick and limited inventiveness would flag long before his patience ran out.

  She held his hand as they walked up and along the broad summit of the hill, asking, idly inqui
sitive, ‘What were you doing in town this morning?’

  ‘Taking Lydia to the station,’ he answered, and was quick to sense the change in her manner, although she asked casually enough, ‘Why? That wasn’t where you saw me — the railway station?’

  He answered her ‘Why?’ by telling her about Lydia’s sick aunt, in whom she simulated interest; by her questions it was apparent she was concerned only about where and when he had seen her, who she had been with.

  Below them lay the clustering houses of the village, the trees, the river, the winding lanes dipping in and out of hollows. The sky was closing down with a lowering storm glow, distorting light and distance and spreading an immense shadow, like a stain, across the opposite hill where the stones stood.

  Two figures walked there, discernible but not recognisable across the distance; he saw how Cass looked towards them and moved her hands together uneasily. It might simply have been her general edginess; but he thought for a moment there was something intense in her gaze, as if she sought to recognise them, and was satisfied.

  He said, ‘There’s a local superstition they can’t be counted.’

  She knew he meant the stones, and answered inattentively, ‘Mmm. But they can. There are three sevens.’

  It was a strange way of sayingtwenty-one, there was an echo of the arcane about it, a hint of familiarity with the magic properties of numbers. ‘Have you counted them?’

  ‘No, not me,’ she said in the same tone, disclaiming interest.

  ‘It’s a common fallacy — all over England, wherever there are stones in circles or rows — that they can’t be counted.’

  ‘Are you going to start airing your folklore again?’ she said, pretending forbearance.

  ‘Not if it bores you,’ he answered, very politely.

  ‘They do —’ she nodded towards the opposite hill.

  He wondered, though, if perhaps they did not bore her so much as cause her some strange disquiet. His mind turned on the thought of the film Wynter had abandoned, on the old man himself, living within sight — within the path, it might be said — of those gaunt monoliths and their continuing, inescapable connection with death and disappearance. Why are you there? he wanted to ask; but the question would merely reveal his distaste, and put her on the defensive again. Instead, he stood quietly with her, looking down into the valley, saying at last, ‘Lydia gave me raspberries from her garden.’