Savage Magic

by Lloyd Shepherd

  He almost falls as he steps into the field, which is somewhat below the level of the road. It is as if a ditch has been dug all the way around the place at some point in the preceding centuries, and has been slowly filled in, leaving only a declivity in the ground as an echo of former works. He steadies himself. He has drunk a good deal of ale, and has become something of a friend to those men in the Pipehouse. Only Bill remained sullen, embarrassed by his outburst, determined to prove his own sanity but equally determined not to be drawn into Horton’s dealings. His fat friend Hob had slept with his head on the table, snoring out clouds of beer fumes into the crowded saloon.

  He walks a way into the field, and kicks around with his boots for a moment or two before hearing the sound of glass knocking against stone. He squats down and picks up an empty wine bottle. So, the first part of Bill’s story is confirmed, at least potentially. Someone has at some point sat here drinking wine and looking at the stars. Horton sits down himself and looks back at the hedgerow, as Bill claimed to have done.

  It is true – the dip in the ground here does give the impression that the hedgerow has great height. Not even trees are visible on the other side, only stars. He can imagine, rather more vividly than he would care to, the silhouette of a witch skittering across the sky along the top of that hedge, her dark skirts fluttering behind her. He can almost hear a malicious chuckle floating down from the night sky as she watches him, sitting there in the field, beer in his brain and a sudden, inexplicable, inescapable belief in the possibility of maleficium.

  He shakes his head to restore himself, but is then shaken once again as a shape does, in fact, fly across his vision, scudding across the top of the hedge. For a moment he has a view of outstretched arms, of a gleeful gliding, and then he recognises another owl, perhaps even the same one as before, entertaining itself on the warm night’s updraughts.

  Mistaken identity, then? Had Bill just seen a bird?

  But no. Bill had spoken to the witch. Or at least, she had spoken to him. She had stopped her flight and turned back, and hovered on top of the hedge with impossible intent, and had mocked his cowardice.

  Look at you, little fool. Look at you. Pity the man sitting in the field drinking cheap wine and spying on witches. Elizabeth sees you, little fool. She sees you. And she remembers.

  She had laughed, then, and turned back on her course, flying off into the night, leaving Bill chattering with fear, full of his story, desperate to unleash it upon his fellow villagers. He’d run back to the Pipehouse, and had burst in with the news that there was indeed a witch at Thorpe Lee House, he had seen her and she had spoken to him, and her name was Elizabeth.

  Horton stands up, somewhat shakily, and makes his way back to the road, clambering up the steep little bank at the edge of the field. He turns down the road towards Thorpe village and walks a little way in the starlight, glancing back towards the Pipehouse once or twice, unable to shake the overwhelming feeling that he is being watched.

  After perhaps fifty yards, he stops, and turns back. It is impossible to see anything, even with the starlight. He will return in the daylight on the morrow; besides, the night-time has lost all its congeniality. He feels more than ever the watchfulness of unseen entities, and walks back to Thorpe Lee House, considerably faster than he left it.

  It is impossible to sleep, even with a great quantity of ale in his belly. Horton feels himself prey to an itching discomfort which reminds him of childhood fears. The horror of what might wait behind his closed eyelids. He leaves his candle burning for an hour or more, listening to the sounds of the house and those within it: a light step-step-step somewhere nearby (Ellen?); a giggle followed by a shush (Peter and Daisy?); a muttered prayer. The previous two nights these sounds were intriguing; tonight, for no reason he can account for other than the Pipehouse’s ale, they carry malicious intent.

  The old house has thin walls, or its cavities carry sound peculiarly clearly. Or perhaps the house itself has things it wishes to say.

  He steps to the window half-a-dozen times, looking out onto the lawn before the house, the swoop of the driveway, the shadowed fingers of the trees. The noises of the house recede, and a great and, to Horton, shocking silence wells up. Never such a silence in London, where the river breathes in creaking masts and illicit splashes. The silence is strange beyond words, stretching out over the lawns to the flat fields behind, as if waiting for something to happen.

  And then, something does.

  A figure appears from the house, walking out onto the lawn. A woman, dressed for sleep and not for garden walking. Sarah Graham. She walks out towards the middle of the lawn and then stands, perfectly still, watching the trees that ring the lawn.

  Nothing happens. The moment stretches out. Horton breathes quietly, as if he were standing behind Mrs Graham, looking over her shoulder into the unresponsive trees.

  After a while, he begins to count, slowly and deliberately. He reaches a hundred, then two hundred, three, four, five hundred. And then, as six hundred goes by, Mrs Graham turns and walks back to the house. Her face is up and her eyes open, and she looks directly in front of her, but in the same unseeing way as a blind man walking across an empty room. She disappears below the line of the house, and he hears (because he is waiting for it) the door close, with a clandestine thud.

  He walks to the door, and opens it slightly, and sees Mrs Graham in the gloom of the hallway appear at the top of the stairs and then turn into her chamber. At no point does she look right or left. She is, it seems, unaware of her surroundings, yet she opens and closes her bedroom door without mishap.

  Horton closes his own bedroom door, and walks back to the window to close the curtains. But he stops there.

  Another woman is standing on the lawn.

  She is at the edge, just in front of the ring of trees, as if she has just stepped through them. Unlike Mrs Graham, this woman is agitated; she takes little steps to and fro, and keeps walking towards the house, and back again. As she comes closer on one of these little attempted visits, Horton sees her face clearly.

  It is Elizabeth Hook.

  He ponders opening the window and then calling down to her, but cannot bring himself to do so. It is as if she were floating above the hedge on the road, waiting to speak to him. But this is not in keeping with what the woman herself does. Elizabeth spends five minutes (he counts them, again) in agitated movement on the lawn before turning around and walking back into the trees.

  The enormous still silence descends again. From somewhere he hears an owl, as if it were calling to him like one of his watching Wapping boys, alert to Elizabeth Hook’s progress.

  She’s here! She’s here! She’s here!

  A Treatise on Moral Projection

  To find oneself sitting in a chair and to have no idea as to how one arrived there – such a feeling is almost indescribable. But to be one such as I – one who has made the examination of mankind’s impulses and perceptions his lifetime’s work – is to be more than confused. It is a moment to shake one’s own mind like the earth is shaken by a violent quake. Suddenly, one’s own Mind is an Entity, something to be observed and even feared. For how can one’s perceptions work so counter to one’s reality? Was I, in short, going mad?

  I sat in that old chair, staring at John Burroway. What was he doing there? How dare he come into my rooms? I asked him how I had come to be there, and I was no doubt forthright in my irritation with him. I well remember the look of confusion on his face as I spoke to him, and I know now it must have mirrored the picture of complete consternation that had been on mine own.

  Tears sprang into his feeble-minded eyes, and he begged to know why I should speak to him like this. He had walked to my rooms with me. We had come there together. Why was I now asking how he came to be there? Had I forgotten?

  Now we come to the heart of the matter. And it is a dark heart, one which many of my readers will find it impossible to account for. For I had, indeed, forgotten all that had transpired immediately be
fore finding myself in my old chair.

  I have told you of my visit to Maria Cranfield’s cell, and of the strange sense of compulsion that I experienced there. I have told of how I was forced from that room, seemingly without any volition of mine own, and only came to myself once I was outside.

  But I must tell you now: in the immediate aftermath of these events, I had no recollection of them at all. I remembered leaving my consultation room to go to Maria’s cell – but the next thing I knew, I was sitting back in that room, in that old chair, staring at John.

  It was this one moment that shaped the next thirty years of my life. It is my attempt to understand what happened in that cell with Maria Cranfield, and the way that my mind responded to it, that is the reason for this paper. I will try to explain what actually happened, and from this draw out my own theories.

  John Burroway was, as I said, tearful and scared in the face of my anger with him. Thankfully I have learned how to act in such situations, and I fell back on the techniques of moral therapy to deal with his weak mind. He needed to submit to my mastery, but he also needed to be made comfortable with that submission. My mind was beginning to clear by this stage, and I was able to assert myself in a more helpful manner.

  Slowly, over perhaps an hour, John told me, in his own rambling way, what had taken place in Maria Cranfield’s cell. John’s own memories were impressively sharp, given his hitherto blunt faculties. As my chain of thought reasserted itself, I perceived something within my own mind: a blank spot, at the centre of my thoughts. I realised there was a distinct empty space in the pattern of my memory.

  I still did not precisely picture the story I have described here; it relies strongly on John’s own recollection. But as we talked, I began to perceive that empty spot filling up again, not with the solid shapes of a well-educated mind, but more with shades and impressions, perceived as it were through a fog. These memories had not been wiped away like dirt on a glass, I began to see; they had rather been obscured by some intervention into my own mind.

  Maria Cranfield had, it seemed, reached into my head and obscured me from myself. I thought back to what Delilah Underwood had said to me before I went up to Maria’s cell: she gets in your head, and once she gets in there, you can’t get her out. This did not quite describe what I was now experiencing, but the symptoms had some close association.

  I felt I had stumbled upon some huge hidden truth about the mind of man. From this point on, I became obsessed with the matter. I recorded every single detail relating to Maria that I could remember. I wrote down everything.

  Including, of course, the peculiar case of John Burroway. His simplicity – the damage done to his brain in childhood, which had reduced his faculties through some kind of physical injury to his brain – in some way protected him from whatever it was that Maria had done to my own memory. But it did not prevent Maria from forcing him into actions against his will.

  What was this power? Where did it stem from? These questions began to haunt me, and have obsessed me ever since. I shall now turn to what I believe that power to be, which is the substance of my contribution to human knowledge.

  BROOKE HOUSE

  ‘What did you do, Maria?’

  They are the first words Abigail speaks once the two men have left the room – or rather, once the two men have been pushed out of the room, by whatever force emanates from the dark-haired slender frame which now sits hunched against the wall, uncomfortably so, the harsh line of the chain presumably biting into her back.

  Maria does not answer for a time. Her breathing is ragged, as if she has run a great race. Abigail asks the question again, trying to keep the galloping panic out of her voice, trying to stay calm.

  ‘What did you do, Maria?’

  She had moved from the bed to the chair, once Bryson and John had left the place. When she’d first come into the cell, and seen Maria’s eyes locked upon Bryson’s – but, more than this, seen the look on Bryson’s face – when she’d seen that, she’d sat down on the bed without thinking, her old training as a nurse coming back to her. There was frenzy in the air, and it poured out of Maria like heat from a stove, and it needed to be calmed. Whatever else was happening, that needed tending to first. So she sat on the bed and put an arm around Maria and whispered consoling words to her, meaningless words, full of empty comforts. But it had calmed Maria and whatever hold she had on Bryson – however that hold was expressed over the gap between them – was dropped.

  And then the two men had left, their eyes confused and angry, unable to understand what compelled them. And Maria never said a single, solitary word.

  I did, though. I said, Leave us. And they did. As if I had commanded it.

  Imagine. Having such power over men like Bryson.

  Or, to put it better: imagine if the hating rage she felt towards Bryson after the previous evening could be turned into something tangible …

  ‘I don’t know what I did.’

  The first words Maria has ever spoken to her are quiet, precise, in a strong accent – Suffolk, perhaps? She does not raise her face when she speaks. But then she does. And any fear Abigail might have felt towards her, and towards what she can apparently do, cannot survive that look. The girl’s eyes are full of longing, no madness in them at all, like the clear windows onto a workhouse, with children in rags inside licking out filthy bowls.

  ‘When he came in here – the doctor – I wanted him to feel some of the pain I feel. I wanted to hurt him. And I wanted you to see me hurting him, so then I made the other man go and fetch you. You were crying last night, you see. You cried, and you said his name – perhaps you were sleeping, perhaps not. His name, and Charles’s name. You say Charles’s name a lot, don’t you? I would like to meet Charles.’

  Abigail moves back to the bed. She is not a doctor, and Maria is not a patient. They are women, on their own, facing – what, exactly? The indifference of men? The cruelty of fate?

  ‘But, how did you do it?’

  ‘I know not. I did it. That is all.’

  ‘The woman who visits you, the one I hear through the wall. Did she tell you how to do it?’

  Maria turns her head to look at Abigail, and Abigail feels something between her temples: a slight tightening, as if an old sponge were being gently squeezed between unseen fingers. And then it is gone. Maria looks away. Abigail cannot help herself; she inches along the bed away from the other woman.

  ‘I must go and speak to Bryson,’ says Abigail. ‘And I must fetch my husband.’

  ‘Bryson will not remember what happened for some time.’

  Abigail frowns.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘It is something I have been told. And besides, the door is locked.’

  Maria smiles, as if at a little private joke.

  ‘I made John lock the door. Until he comes to unlock it, we must stay in here.’

  And then the smile disappears, and misery takes its place.

  ‘What has happened to me?’ she whimpers. ‘Surely some demon has come into me. Why hast thou forsaken me, Lord? Why hast thou forsaken me?’

  Abigail reaches out, instinctively, to take the girl’s hand, forgetting that her hands and arms are bound inside the strait waistcoat. Maria keeps her eyes averted.

  ‘I saw it,’ she says. ‘I saw it all. They were cutting him to pieces, there, in his bed. I saw it all. What are these visions? What are these terrible visions?’

  She looks at Abigail then, and her eyes show no power of persuasion or suggestion. They are only full of despair, and loss, and agonising fear.

  ‘Why has my God abandoned me?’ she says.

  6 September 1814

  Bow Street Public Office, Westminster

  Dear Sir

  This letter is being sent, immediately and by hand, to a number of gentlemen. I must beg your forgiveness for the forthright and impolite nature of the communication, but feel it is essential to warn you without delay that your life may be in some considerable danger.
<
br />   You may have heard, from any number of sources, of the recent terrible deaths of Edmund Wodehouse and Sir John Cope. Both of these men have been killed, we do believe, by the same person or persons unknown. Although we can find no immediate motivation for the deaths of these men, we are conducting an investigation based upon a particular theory; that both these men were members of a society calling itself the Sybarites, and that their membership of this society was in some unknown way connected with their deaths.

  It has come to our attention that you, the recipients of this letter, are members of this society. I make no judgement on this situation. I simply warn you that, if our hypothesis proves to be correct, it may become dangerous for you in London. While we seek to clarify this matter, it may be a sensible precaution for you to leave the Metropolis for the country, while we continue this investigation.

  In the meantime, the constable who has carried this letter to you will remain, this coming night, in observation of your household. Please allow him to investigate the premises, and to check all points of entry. He will remain outside your residence for the night, and ensure no intruder creeps inside.

  Please note, however, that this arrangement can only possibly be preserved for two or perhaps three nights. My resources do not stretch themselves to providing individual guardianship of all the houses of those receiving this letter. For reasons of individual privacy, I am also not revealing the full list of those receiving this letter to anyone on receipt of it. No doubt, though, if your Society is still extant, communication will occur between you all.

  I remain

  Yours sincerely

  GRAHAM, A. – Magistrate, Bow Street Public Office

  NORWOOD

  The coppice at Norwood is thick and ancient and now, thanks to the ministrations of ministers and commissioners, almost entirely enclosed. Land now owned by Lord Thurlow pinches down from the north, while the trees which once whispered within the Great North Wood are now the property – roots, branches and memories – of the Archbishop of Canterbury.