by Alex Bell
I wasn’t surprised when Jem took me aside and said, “I think you need to go to the police station. If you don’t speak to them then they might think you had something to do with what happened to Kara. If they ask for your address, tell them that we’re staying at the Seagull at the moment and that we’re going to register with the council for homelessness assistance today.”
“Maybe we can go back to the cottage?” I said hopefully. “Now that Dad’s gone?”
“Maybe,” Jem said, although he sounded doubtful. “But Dad changed the locks, remember? I don’t know what’s going to happen next, Shell. I don’t know how this is going to work. We’ll just have to wait and see.”
I didn’t care about what happened next. The only thing that mattered was that we were out of the Waterwitch. We left Emma at the Seagull and Jem and I went to the police station and I gave my statement. Jem told them that I would have been in before but that our father had died unexpectedly that morning. It felt weird hearing him say that and, for a minute, I didn’t believe him. It still didn’t feel like something that had actually happened. When I tried to think about it – about what the birds had done to him – my mind just slid away from it.
By the time we’d finished at the police station, the council offices were closed, so Jem said we would have to go and see them about housing the next day. We returned to the Seagull and had dinner in the restaurant with Emma. It felt wrong seeing her without Bailey and I was sure she must miss him unbearably.
After dinner we sat quietly together in the lounge for a little while but, even though it was still fairly early, Jem was practically falling asleep in his chair.
“Why don’t you go to bed?” Emma finally said. “You look like you’re about to keel over.”
She was right and I felt a cold niggle of worry. But Jem would sleep better now that we weren’t in the Waterwitch, I was sure of it. We all would.
“I think I will, actually,” Jem said. He tried to smile and said, “Long day.”
“I’ll go with you,” I said, standing up.
We said goodnight to Emma, agreed to meet for breakfast the next morning, and returned to our room.
“It’s weird, isn’t it?” I said as I walked in.
“What is?”
“Dad being gone.”
Jem paused. “Yes,” he said, closing the door. “It is weird.”
I remembered how he had tried to ask me how I felt about it earlier but it hadn’t occurred to me to ask him back. I did so now.
“I don’t know,” Jem replied. He looked at me and said, “It’s complicated, isn’t it?”
I nodded. It was always complicated with Dad. Always.
Jem sighed. “I just wish he could have been less difficult. I wish that it hadn’t ended … like that.”
I felt a painful flash of guilt. It was my fault. It was my birds who’d killed him.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have taken his keys that night after all,” Jem muttered. He shook his head and said, “I don’t know. I’m going to bed.”
I went into the bathroom to brush my teeth. By the time I came out, Jem was already asleep. I crawled into the other bed and switched off the lamp.
I woke up just a few hours later and, for a moment, I wasn’t sure where I was. The shadowy room seemed unfamiliar in the dark so I switched on the light, and remembered we were in the Seagull. We were safe.
And then I heard the buzzing. The frantic droning buzz of an enraged insect. I gazed around in confusion, and quickly saw it: there was a water wasp on Jem’s pillow, wriggling around on its back, trying to right itself. Suddenly, it managed to flip over and then, to my absolute horror, it scuttled straight up the side of Jem’s face and disappeared, wriggling and squirming, into his ear.
“No!” I cried, throwing back the covers. My bare feet landed on the floor with a horrible soft crunch. I looked down and saw that the floor was swarming with water wasps, their large red eyes gleaming like blood in the lamplight. Their brown bodies squelched and their red eyes popped beneath my feet; they crawled up my ankles, biting and stinging, but I didn’t care as I ran towards Jem’s bed.
My birds flapped into the air to help, gobbling up the wasps on the floor, pecking them from my feet, but there were so many of the insects and they weren’t slow and lumbering like the spiders, they were lightning fast. I couldn’t get to Jem’s bed quickly enough. The wasps were heading straight for him and – even as I screamed out his name – I saw three, four, five more of the terrible, awful things crawl into his ear and disappear.
I snatched my hairbrush up from the bedside table just as he opened his eyes, and brought it down as hard as I could on the pillow, crushing one of the wasps.
Jem jerked back, instantly wide awake. I raised the hairbrush to swat another wasp that was wriggling its way up the duvet but Jem tore the brush from my hand and threw it into the corner of the room.
“What the hell are you doing?” he gasped. “Have you completely lost your mind?”
“There were wasps!” I said. “Water wasps everywhere!”
But when I gazed around, they had gone, and so had the birds. The room looked completely ordinary. There wasn’t even a squashed wasp on the pillow.
“Some of them crawled right into your ear—” I started to say.
“For God’s sake, Shell, you were dreaming again,” Jem snapped. “Please, just go back to bed.”
He yanked the quilt back up to his neck and then rolled over, facing the wall with his back to me. I looked down at my feet, expecting to see angry red sting marks where the skin still throbbed, but there was nothing there.
I crossed the room and drew back the curtains, intending to look out at the Waterwitch. Only I couldn’t because something was covering the window, and I couldn’t work out what it was at first. Then I saw that the glass was crawling with hundreds of water wasps. Their horrid brown undersides were pressed up against the glass, exposing the thorax and abdomen, their six hairy legs flailing all over the place as they sought for purchase on the slippery surface.
Then they dropped away from the window all together at the same moment, swarming away across the street, heading directly for the Waterwitch. A single solitary light shone from one of the windows, turning the figure there into a dark, still silhouette. All I could make out was the long hair over her shoulders as she stood motionless, staring across the street at us. The water wasps went straight to the same window, squirming in through the little cracks in the brickwork and the small spaces around the windowpane.
Slowly, she raised her hand and smeared blood across the window with her bleeding fingertip until one word stared back at me, thin trails running down from the red letters:
Exodus 34:7.
Then the light went out and the woman was lost from my view, but I could still feel her over there – could feel the burn of her stare, prickling over my skin even after I yanked the curtains closed and stumbled back a few steps.
I knew about the Book of Exodus from the Bible because it was the one that the witch hunters had relied on all those years ago, the one with that hateful, poisonous verse: Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.
I took out the Bible left in the top drawer by the side of the bed but it was a New Testament. The Book of Exodus was in the Old Testament, so I picked up my phone and Googled it. The first page of search results came back with one phrase that repeated over and over again: generational curse.
Fear crept down my back as I clicked on the first result and read the verse for Exodus 34:7:
“Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but that will by no means clear the guilty. Punishing the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, unto the third and the fourth generation.”
Kara’s words played over and over again inside my head as I switched off the phone: The witch’s curse will follow you to the ends of the earth…
Once you’re cursed there’s no hope. No hope at all…
When I woke up the next morning, I knew instantly that something was wrong. Jem’s bed was empty but I could hear him in the bathroom, and it sounded like he was being sick. I sat up in bed and instantly saw the birds, all gathered on the floor around the wardrobe. But they weren’t pecking at it frantically like last time. Instead they were just staring up at it in silence, and that made me feel more afraid somehow. It was as if they knew there was no point in freaking out and trying to get my attention because something bad had already happened and it was too late to do anything about it…
I walked over, opened the door and punched in the combination code to the safe. Then I heard myself make this awful moan at the sight of the poppets. In my head I could hear Jem asking me again about the missing nails from the cellar door:
Did you pick those nails up off the floor? I can’t find them…
Well, now, here they all were. There must have been twenty nails stuck into the poppet I had made of Jem. They’d been driven through the head, the arms, the stomach, the face, everywhere. I felt my eyes fill with tears as I grabbed one of the nails and tried to tug it free but it wouldn’t budge. When I kept pulling, the fabric of the doll started to tear, but no dried herbs or lavender spilled out like I had expected. At first I thought the cold things falling through my fingers were pins and needles but then I realized what they actually were: coffin nails – only ever used in the darkest spells of malice. You didn’t use them if you just wanted to hurt someone.
You used them when you wanted them dead and decaying in their graves.
Chapter Forty-Two
Emma
I knew it would take me longer than usual to get ready in the morning without Bailey’s help so I set my alarm early. When I was finally dressed I went next door to meet the others. But when I knocked on the door, Shell answered and I could tell instantly something was wrong.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“It’s Jem,” she almost whispered. “He’s not well.”
He came out of the bathroom just then and I was startled to see that his eyes were bloodshot and his T-shirt was actually stuck to him with sweat.
“I think I’ve got the flu,” he announced, staggering over to the bed.
Shell hurried over to him and when her hand brushed against his skin she gasped. “You’re burning up!”
“That’s what happens when you get flu,” Jem said, pushing her hand away. “Don’t touch me. You don’t want to catch it.”
“Is there anything we can do?” I asked.
“No, I think … I think I’m just going to lie here,” Jem said, crawling back beneath the covers. We left him shivering in his bed and went downstairs to the breakfast room.
“He’s just got flu,” I said gently to Shell, seeing how distressed she looked.
“He’s been ill-wished,” she replied. “It’s the wasps. The water wasps in his head.”
“Wasps?” I stared at her. “What wasps?”
“I saw them crawl inside his ear last night. The witch sent them. And she attacked his poppet. It’s the curse.”
“Shell, look—”
“I have to go back to the Waterwitch,” she said. “I have to face the witch. It’s the only way.”
“If you want to go back then I’ll go with you,” I said. “Why don’t we have some breakfast and then the vet’s will be open and I can call for an update about Bailey. After that we’ll go across together. OK?”
Shell shrugged but I decided to take that as a yes. She didn’t want any breakfast so I ate by myself and then left her in the lounge while I went back to my room to call the vet. The receptionist answered the call and then put me on hold while she went to find the right person. As I sat there waiting, my heart sank as I looked through the window and saw Shell go across the street, straight to the Waterwitch. She must have taken the keys from Jem’s bag because she disappeared inside, closing the door behind her.
I sighed. She’d be all right over there by herself for a minute. I’d just have to catch her up once I got off the phone.
Chapter Forty-Three
Shell
When I walked into the Waterwitch, I took Jem’s poppet from my pocket and tried once again to pull out those dreadful nails but they were driven in so deeply that I was afraid forcing them out would rip the entire doll to shreds. Perhaps that was what the witch wanted me to do. I shoved the poppet back in my pocket and reached out for the cellar door instead.
This time, I gripped the handle firmly and pulled the door open, exposing the bare stone staircase that led down into the dark. Inexplicably, there was a glass witch ball right behind the door – one of the blue ones – and my movement caused it to roll forwards, falling from step to step with a crash, like a strange and beautiful slinky, all the way to the bottom where it rolled smoothly and silently into the cellar.
I stepped on to the staircase after it and the birds followed me, flowing down the steps like a dark river. With every footstep, I expected to see her appear there in the doorway, the witch’s bridle spitting blood and red-hot ash. But it remained quite empty, although the chill in the air deepened with every step. And this was no ordinary chill – it wasn’t the chill of cellars and inns but the darker, colder chill of the sea and the shipwrecks rotting at the bottom of it. How did the old rhyme go?
From Pentire Point to harbour light, a watery grave by day or night.
There were six thousand wrecks off the Cornish coast. The gales could be ferocious and the water could be treacherous even without smugglers deliberately shining false lights to wreck boats on the rocks. And here we had our very own shipwreck on dry land and it seemed wrong all of a sudden, disrespectful somehow, to have salvaged the wood from the seabed like that, almost like plucking bones from a grave.
By the time I reached the doorway at the foot of the stairs, the coldness had intensified unbearably. The room was full of witch balls. They glinted their jewel colours back at me out of the darkness, scattered about in random piles. This must have been where they went at night, drawn to Cordelia like iron filings drawn to a magnet. Beyond the balls I could see the witch bottle, lying on the floor in the far corner of the room. It didn’t seem to be broken.
I kept my eyes fixed on it as I stepped forward. If Cordelia was here then the trick was not to look at her, not to see her face.
But even though my eyes were fixed on the bottle and I was deliberately not looking around the room, I knew that she was in there with me, over in the opposite corner, staring and staring and just daring me to look back. The birds must have understood the danger because they rose up together in a kind of protective wall all around me, shielding me from the witch with their wings so that I couldn’t give in to the temptation to look at her.
My trembling fingers closed around the cold neck of the bottle and I snatched it up before turning on my heel and sprinting back across the room and up the stairs two at a time, dark wings flapping around me all the while. I kept expecting to feel a cold hand suddenly grip my ankle and yank me back down – I could almost see Cordelia dragging herself up the steps behind me, blood dripping out from underneath her mask – and it took all my willpower not to look.
But then I was on the last step, and I was tumbling out into the corridor, and I was out of there and I had done it, I had really done it!
The relief and triumph that surged through me lasted only an instant, though, before I heard her laughter above me. She was right there on the monster staircase. I knew that I absolutely must not look at her, but, somehow, my eyes found her face in the shadows with an awful inevitability.
The witch’s bridle was still fastened around Cordelia Merrick’s face and the smell of burning flesh and hair filled the air and filled my mouth and filled my head. Her green eyes glittered out of the dark at me but they were the only human thing left about her. The skin around the metal muzzle was a mixture of livid red and burnt black. Her eyelids had drooped and her eyes didn’t seem to fit properly in their sockets any more. The lower pa
rt had sunken in, fallen away to expose a pink jelly-like substance between her eyeballs and the inflamed skin of her cheeks.
For the longest time I thought I was screaming but, in fact, there was no sound coming out of my mouth. A patchwork of bloodstains marked the front of her dress – from fresh scarlet to old brown. Her hands hanging at her sides were marked, too, her fingers red, the nails torn away from where she had been clawing and tearing at the door of Room 9.
As I stared, wanting to scream but too afraid even to do that, Cordelia tried to speak but all that came out was a pained gurgle, followed by a fresh trickle of red dribbling out from the small, square mouth hole. I could almost feel the prongs cutting up her cheeks, and the spikes impaling her tongue, and I wondered how much of it was left after all these years. It must be sliced to ribbons by now.
Cordelia tried once more to speak but no words came out of her ruined mouth, only blood and saliva, chunks of gum and chips of broken tooth. Then she tipped her head back and laughed and laughed. A couple of bird’s-foot trefoil fell from her hair as she melted back into the shadows, the yellow petals scattering on the steps, so pretty there in the dark.
A red mist seemed to fill my vision and I rubbed my eyes, wondering if I had blood in them. All of a sudden the witch bottle didn’t seem so important any more. All that mattered was never, ever, ever hearing that laugh again.
“Make it stop,” I whispered to the birds that were suddenly lined up along the stairs, peering at me through the banisters.
I tried to tell myself that I must not let the witch’s madness creep into my brain, I must not let my thoughts turn to suicide and death. I didn’t want to die, I didn’t. I mustn’t let her trick me into thinking that I did. But then the laugh started up again and I clamped my hands over my ears and groaned aloud. I couldn’t bear hearing that sound any more. It was an agony, like something that was trying to hollow me out from the inside – like that boning knife Dad had been brandishing around yesterday. I’d seen him using it on fresh catch before down at the docks, pulling out those fish spines in a single sweeping movement that only came with years and years of practice.
