by Alex Bell
Chapter Twenty-Five
Emma
I could feel the scream bubbling up in my chest and it took every scrap of willpower I had to suppress it. There was someone behind me in the dark, and I couldn’t see them but I knew they were there because my wheelchair was rolling briskly along the smooth wooden floorboards, and wasn’t that the click of footsteps I could hear? And the smell – just the faintest smell of burning flesh…
“Who’s there?” I cried out, twisting painfully in my seat to sweep my arms blindly behind me, trying to touch whoever it was, to grab their wrists and make them stop, but my hands only brushed air.
I reached out to the wall to stop the momentum and, by chance, my hands finally found the light switch. The darkness disappeared and sickly light from the wall sconces filled the corridor, illuminating the cellar door and the nearby monster staircase. I looked over my shoulder, filled with dread as to what I might see standing there behind me…
But there was no one.
Nobody behind me, nobody pushing the chair, nobody else in the entire corridor. Just an empty space stretching back to my room. The next second I realized why my chair had been moving by itself. It was the most obvious explanation, the one I should have thought of straight away: the corridor was on a slight slope.
And yet … I didn’t remember noticing that before when I went to my room. Normally, even the smallest slope was painfully obvious when you were wheeling yourself up it. Above my head, some old part of the building groaned softly but, somehow, it sounded more like the groan of a ship sinking than a building settling.
I told myself to stop being such a total idiot. Then I looked up at the corridor in front of me again and I knew – I knew – that it was just in my imagination but, honest to God, the corridor looked just a little bit more sloped than it had a moment before.
As if on cue, my wheelchair started sliding forwards again but, this time, I let it happen. From where I was sitting I could see that the restaurant door was open, even though I could have sworn I’d closed it earlier. Bailey must have gone through there. Perhaps he was out of earshot and that was why he hadn’t come back. As I reached the end of the corridor, I noticed that all the paintings hanging on the wall were tilting sharply to the left. What the hell was going on here?
Under the watchful gaze of the many staring eyes of the monster staircase, I turned my wheelchair into the restaurant and snapped on the light. My eyes were drawn instantly to the Waterwitch painting above the fireplace and, just for the briefest moment, it really looked as if the deck of the ship wasn’t empty but full of row upon row of sailors, all staring straight out of the canvas at me. Then I blinked and they were gone, they had never been there at all, it was just an empty deck and a deserted ghost ship, pale hands reaching out of the water below as the crew drowned in the dark.
“Bailey!” I called, but my voice came out a weird, strangled half-whisper. I cleared my throat and tried again. “Bailey!”
I scanned the restaurant, trying to see everything all at once, but it was difficult when the place was so full of nooks and crannies. I almost jumped out of my skin when my dog came bursting out from beneath a table.
“God, Bailey!” I said, gasping for breath. “You scared the crap out of me!”
He was totally hyper, running around and around in circles the way he did whenever he was really excited about something, and he was panting so hard that his tongue was hanging down out of his mouth and dripping drool.
“It’s OK, you daft mutt,” I said, leaning forward to soothe him as he frantically tried to lick my face. “Come on. I think that’s enough drama for one night. Let’s go back to bed.”
We left the restaurant together and went back out into the corridor. And the strangest thing was that, as I wheeled myself back to my room, the floor no longer seemed to be tilting at all. In fact, it seemed completely and perfectly flat. Flat as a damn pancake.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Shell
The birds woke me in the early hours of the morning.
It wasn’t yet 6 a.m. and still completely dark outside. I tried to push them away and pull the covers up over my head but the horrible creatures squirmed underneath, their clawed feet tangling in my hair as wings brushed over my face and beaks scratched at my skin. I threw back the covers and stumbled out of bed, dragging the struggling birds from my hair and flinging them to the floor.
Then I hurried out of my room and down the staircase. It was so early that I didn’t expect anyone else to be up, but when I approached the library, I saw soft light spilling out of the doorway. I walked in and was startled to see Jem there, fully dressed, sitting in the leather chesterfield armchair beneath the huge wooden Waterwitch light hanging from the ceiling. He wasn’t doing anything. Just staring straight ahead at the cold grate of the wood-burning stove. The sickly glow from the ship wasn’t enough to light the large room properly so he had turned on a couple of the table lamps, but shadows still danced in the corners.
“What are you doing up so early?” I asked.
Jem jumped at my voice, and turned his head towards me. The dark circles beneath his eyes were even more pronounced than usual. He looked terrible. I was vaguely aware that the birds had followed me into the room, their claws skittering over the wooden floorboards, but they weren’t pecking at me any more so I ignored them.
“Couldn’t sleep,” Jem said. “What are you doing up?”
I shrugged. “I couldn’t sleep, either.”
“Shell…” Jem said slowly. “I was just thinking. You never told me what happened the day Dad broke your arm.”
I was startled to hear him bring the subject up. We didn’t talk about things like this. We never had. It was almost a kind of rule of ours. If you didn’t speak of it, then you could pretend it didn’t really happen.
“I made him angry,” I said.
“Yes, but how did you make him angry?”
“It wasn’t me, really, it was the birds.” I looked at them gathered around my feet, pecking at the floorboards.
“The birds,” Jem repeated in a flat voice. “Right. What did the birds do then?”
“They … they…” I swallowed hard. “One of them tried to peck Dad’s eye out.”
A strange look came over my brother’s face. “What do you mean by that exactly?”
“I was making dinner and Dad got angry because it was late. He came into the kitchen and started shouting – you know – like he does sometimes, at … at the top of his voice.”
Jem nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I know. Go on.”
“And I think … I think the birds don’t like loud sounds so they … they flew at him and one of them was heading straight for his face.” I trembled at the memory. “It was going to peck his eye out. So I reached out to grab it but I’d been chopping vegetables and I still had the knife in my hand and I think Dad must’ve thought I was trying to stab him with it.” I shook my head and said, “I was only trying to help him. I was only trying to protect him from the bird. It dug its beak into the skin below his eye – that thin skin where you can see the veins running underneath – and it drew blood. But Dad thought I was responsible. He thought it was me.”
Before Jem could reply, the light from the ship model above flickered and there was a buzzing sound as if an internal wire had just come loose. Then, in a shower of plaster, one of the hooks suddenly ripped out of the ceiling. The remaining cords couldn’t take the additional weight and their hooks were torn free as well. The lights in the ship went out as the entire thing plummeted downwards, straight towards Jem.
I started forwards but I could see that I would never reach him in time. He was already halfway out of the chair but it wasn’t going to be enough. Time stopped and I saw, with total terrifying clarity, that the huge wooden ship was going to smash right on top of him.
But then the air filled with wings and the birds were flying past me and their claws were digging into the back of Jem’s T-shirt. They yanked him forwards a
nd he sprawled across the floor at the same moment that the ship landed on the armchair, the prow ripping right through the leather.
I stared at it in horrified silence. If Jem had still been sitting there – if the birds hadn’t dragged him out of the way just in time – then he could have been seriously hurt. I hurried forwards to help him up and when he saw what had happened to the armchair he’d been occupying moments before he paled and said, “God, that was … that was lucky. Good thing I tripped.”
I looked at the birds ruffling their feathers at our feet and knew that his near miss had nothing to do with luck.
“Are you OK?” I asked.
“Yes, fine.” He dusted off his clothes and looked up at the ceiling. “This place needs some proper maintenance work doing to it.”
Together, we managed to drag the ship free from the armchair. It was too heavy for us to carry, even between us, so we propped it on the floor beside the chair, and then swept up the pieces of plaster in silence.
“Jem,” I said at last, my voice so quiet it was almost a whisper.
“What?”
“Do you think it’s my fault Dad broke my arm?”
“Of course I don’t,” he said, but I noticed he wouldn’t look at me. “How can you even ask me that? Look, just forget it. Let’s not ever bring it up again. You’re out of there now. It’s over.”
He went back upstairs then, saying he might try to catch an hour’s sleep. For long silent moments after he’d gone, I stared at the birds and the birds stared straight back at me with their bright, shining eyes.
“Why did you do that?” I finally whispered. I’d always thought of the birds as a menacing, malicious presence, troubling me, tormenting me, haunting me. So this – what I had just seen them do, saving Jem – it didn’t make sense.
The birds rustled their wings and then they melted back into the shadows and were gone. I turned out the lamps and went back to my room, still feeling shaken. When I got up there I lay down on my bed to think it all over.
Perhaps the birds weren’t evil, after all. How could they be when they had saved the life of the person I loved most in the world? But they were no ordinary birds, either. Maybe they were familiars? Mum had had one. A black cat called Smoke. She told me that he wasn’t a normal pet, but a cat-shaped spirit sent to help her with her magic.
I could see Smoke, though – everyone could. From the outside he looked just like a normal house cat. My birds weren’t like that. No one else ever saw them. But were they trying to haunt me? I didn’t know what to think any more.
Finally, I closed my eyes, intending to rest them just for a moment but, before I knew it, I was asleep.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Shell
I woke up to sunlight streaming in through the windows, lighting up the witch balls and making them beautiful in their baskets, winking all their different colours back at me. I sat up and my thoughts went straight to the birds and what they had done earlier this morning.
I picked up a purple witch ball from the side of my bed and looked at it thoughtfully. I hadn’t been entirely truthful when I told Emma I wouldn’t know where to start trying to find out about the witch. I’d been looking for her in the witch balls since I first arrived but with no success. I’d seen the Waterwitch floating on the surface of the ocean, and lost sailors had appeared in the glass a couple of times – but never the witch herself.
I tried it again now but the birds made it hard to concentrate. I could hear them over in the corner, pecking at the balls in their baskets. Their beaks rang out sharply against the glass and I was afraid they’d shatter them if they kept on like that.
Instead, they upended the basket, and the witch balls went rolling off in every direction. I got up from the bed, walking between the birds in my bare feet, trying to avoid treading on them while scooping up the glass balls. The birds skittered away from me, their claws tapping across the floor, but then, strangely, they all gathered around a single red witch ball.
“You want me to try this one?” I asked, picking it up off the floor.
I took it back to the bed and the birds followed me. It was a deep red, the colour of the sea during a blood-sunset. There were six or seven birds on the bed with me now, all rustling their wings and clicking their beaks in this eager, excited kind of way.
“OK,” I whispered, and the shining black beads of their eyes all stared back at me, waiting.
I cupped the witch ball in my left hand and looked into it. At first, all I saw was my own face reflected back in the glass, along with the birds fluttering to and fro behind me. But then there was a shift and I saw something else – something inside the red glass sphere. I thought it would probably be another sailor but, this time, the ball showed me something else: a woman sitting on a clifftop during springtime. I knew it was late spring because of the masses of wild coastal flowers in full bloom around her, all along the sea slope. Splashes of yellow and red, great sprays of pink and orange and blue. An entire carpet of ox-eye daisies and rock sea spurry, sea carrot and spring squill spread out all around her, as far as the eye could see. I almost thought I could smell that floral scent, mixed with the salted tang of the ocean roaring in rhythmic whispers below.
The woman was incredibly beautiful, with long, dark hair that tumbled loose down her back, and she wore a simple, cream-coloured dress. She looked familiar somehow, and I wondered if I could have seen her before somewhere when, suddenly, it struck me. She bore an uncanny resemblance to the dark-haired figurehead in the giant oil painting of the Waterwitch downstairs, only without any hint of that terrible madness.
I thought she was alone at first but then I realized there was a little girl with her, about three years old. I couldn’t hear anything from the witch ball but I could see that the woman and the girl were laughing together as they made flower chains out of egg-yolk-coloured yellow flowers that had to be bird’s-foot trefoil. No other flower in the world was as yellow as that.
Then the woman looked up, as if she’d heard something that had startled her, and I saw a look of awful fear come over her face as she got to her feet. A moment later I saw what she had seen – six uniformed men approaching across the clifftop, all carrying muskets.
It was hard to watch the woman being dragged away from her daughter and hard to watch her pleading with the men and hard to watch them shaking their heads at her like they just didn’t care. From the way the woman was gesturing at the little girl clinging to her skirt I guessed she was trying to tell them that the child was too small to be taken away from her.
But they pulled them apart anyway and, when the girl tried to get back to her mother, one of the men gave her a backhanded slap that split her lip and left her sprawled amongst the wildflowers. I saw the woman struggling in their grip, screaming and fighting, the yellow petals tumbling down out of her hair. But it was no good, nothing she did made any difference. She was dragged away in one direction, while her daughter was led off in the other, getting further and further away from her…
“Shell? Are you up?”
I jumped as I heard Emma’s voice calling me from downstairs and the image in the witch ball vanished.
“Yes,” I called back. “I’m up.” I shoved the birds aside, ignoring their squawks of protest, and walked out to the end of the staircase. Emma was there at the foot of the stairs, Bailey at her side.
“Do you want some breakfast?” she asked. “We’ve got toast and—”
“Jem said you can drive,” I interrupted. “And that you have a car?”
Emma paused, then said, “Yes. Why? Did you want to go somewhere?”
“Would you take me to Boscastle?”
“What’s in Boscastle?”
“The Witchcraft Museum. I… There’s something I want to look at there.”
“All right. What is it that you want to—”
“Great! I’ll just get my coat. Where’s Jem?”
“He already left. He said that the Seagull doesn’t have any more
work for him so he’s going to spend the morning taking his CV to other pubs.”
“Oh.”
That was bad. We’d thought Jem might get another couple of weeks out of the Seagull before the low season really kicked in.
“No wonder he couldn’t sleep last night.” I looked back down at Emma and said, “Did he tell you what happened in the library?”
“Yes. That must have been horrible. It’s a good thing he managed to get out of the way in time.”
“Mmm.”
“Shell?” Emma said. “Were you … did you drop a witch ball out here last night?”
I shook my head. “No. Why?”
“There was one on the floor outside my door,” she said. “Then Bailey ran out of the room and, by the time I brought him back, the witch ball had gone.”
“I told you,” I said quietly, “they move around at night sometimes.”
“Or perhaps the building moves,” Emma said.
“What?”
“Never mind. Let’s have breakfast and then I’ll go and fetch the car.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Emma
It was about an hour’s drive to Boscastle, on the other side of Bodmin Moor. I’d forgotten what a lonely place it was, with towering granite tors and windswept marshes, pitted and scarred from so many years of mining and quarrying.
I remembered Mum and Dad taking me for a drive to see the Stripple Stones on the south slope of Hawk’s Tor once. Of the original twenty-eight stones, only fifteen were left.
“No one really knows for sure what the standing stones were supposed to be for back in the Stone Age,” Dad had said. “That’s what makes them so interesting.”
We didn’t pass the Stripple Stones this time but I did spot the Hurlers in the distance when we were about halfway across the moor, tall and morose against the natural granite skyline of the Cheesewring.
Shell and I didn’t talk much during the drive but it wasn’t an awkward silence, and soon we had reached the Witchcraft Museum. I knew we were in the right place because of the picture of the broomstick-riding hag outside. There was even a sign warning that children, or people of a nervous disposition, might find some of the exhibits in the museum upsetting.
