by John Booth
“What’s going on, Len? Has the delivery van broken down?” Len pointed me to the phone next to the till.
“You ring the wholesalers and ask them will you, lad? The number’s on the pad there.”
This was a highly unusual request as Len liked to ring up and whine at the wholesalers whenever he gets the chance. He feels they charge him far too much to get the papers to the village. Still, if he wanted me to ring them for him, who was I to argue? If I’d known then what I know now, I think I’d have run somewhere and hid away. Not that it would have done any good.
I picked up the receiver and tapped out the number on the pad. The phone rang at the other end. After five rings, it was picked up and a pleasant female voice announced the name of the wholesalers.
“I have an enquiry about a late van delivery,” I said
“Hold the line while I transfer you to Dispatch,” the woman at the other end told me and a really bad recording of ‘Greensleaves’ blared in my ear. Len twisted his hands together in agitation as I waited, which struck me as very odd indeed. A voice said ‘Dispatch’ and I prepared to tell him about our lack of newspapers.
“It’s okay, sorry to bother you. It’s a false alarm,” I said and put the phone down.
Len grinned at me in something that might have been relief.
“You too then. I thought at first it was just me who couldn’t ask them, and I was sure I’d gone crazy.”
“What just happened?” I asked him as I reviewed the conversation with the wholesalers in my mind. I had rung Dispatch to ask where the papers were and they had said… no I asked… No I told them it was a false alarm and rang off. That was just plain stupid. I must be going off my head.
“Sorry, Len, I must have had a senior moment. I’ll ring them back and find out what’s happened to their van.” I picked up the handset to call, but Len pushed the phone down onto its cradle.
“Don’t bother, Andrew. I tried three times and you’ll find you can’t do it. You’ll say ‘good morning’ or ‘have a nice day’ and put the phone down again. I know all about it, I’ve been trying to tell them their van hadn’t arrived for over an hour now.”
Of course, I didn’t believe him and picked up the phone again to dial the wholesalers, but he turned out to be right. I couldn’t even tell the operator at the other end the name of the post office.
“Have we both gone crazy?” I asked.
Len shook his head. He mumbled something about geese. Well, that was what it sounded like. Then he pulled himself together and smiled at me.
“Go home, Andrew. Maybe it will pass if we ignore it. The village can live without newspapers for a day.”
While I’d been trying to make the call on the phone, Len had been writing a notice. It read, ‘Closed due to unforeseen circumstances’ and he stuck it on to the front door with the message facing out though the glass.
“Off you go now, Andrew. I’m going to close up for the day and go to bed. I advise you to go home and do the same.”
Dad had set off for work by the time I returned to our house and collected my school things. I certainly wasn’t going to stay home, we had maths today and I was looking forward to it. For the first time in a couple of weeks, I was going to be early for the bus.
The usual suspects and Kylie were already there when I arrived. Kylie was in earnest conversation with Sally and Jane, and for once, they stayed there as I approached them.
“I didn’t mean to hurt him that bad, honest.” Sally blurted out at me as soon as I got within earshot.
“Me neither, Andrew,” Jane echoed. Both girls looked really upset.
“What’s going on?” I asked, as usual I felt completely out of the loop. Sally came to me, hung onto my left arm, and tried to cuddle up to me. Jane, not to be outdone, immediately moved and clung to my other side. I wanted to shake them off but they looked so upset that I didn’t have the heart to.
Kylie gave me a sympathetic look, but waved at the girls to tell me what was bothering them.
“Brian’s going to lose both his testicles.” Sally told me, almost in tears.
“They operate on him in Sutton Hospital later today,” Jane continued, her voice quivering.
“You should punish us, Andrew, punish us really hard,” Sally said, looking up into my eyes plaintively.
“Yes, whip us until we can’t even scream anymore,” Jane continued, having obviously thought about it in far too much detail.
“Sorry girls,” I said with real sympathy. “It looks like you two are doing a good job of punishing yourselves without any help from me.”
While I regretted what was happening to Brian, I reminded myself he tried to get some innocent lads to kick me to death and so my sympathy for him was fairly limited. I managed to get Sally and Jane to let go of me without actually scraping them off of me and went to stand alongside Kylie.
“Guess Brian didn’t have a ball yesterday, did he?” she whispered to me with a twisted grin on her face. I tried hard to stifle a giggle, but failed.
Jane and Sally looked at us disapprovingly and I saw Sally bunch up her fists.
“Don’t even think about using your powers on us,” I said warningly. Sally looked at us with sudden fury in her eyes.
“We tried that right at the beginning. Our powers don’t work on either of you. If they had, I would have made you have me on day one and Brian would have known you were mine. It’s your fault he attacked you and we had to hurt him.”
Sally and Jane stuck their tongues out at us and stomped back to the usual suspects, whereupon the clan started whispering among themselves.
“It’s all my fault?” I asked, because once again, I was lost in my lack of understanding of the workings of the female mind. “How come?”
Kylie shrugged, “They need someone to blame and I guess you’re it right now. That little bastard had it coming though. It serves him right for killing that cat.”
I nodded. Killing innocent animals somehow seemed far worse than trying to kill me. After all, it had done nothing to him. The change of subject brought my encounter with Len to mind.
“There’s something strange going on, Kylie. The newspapers didn’t arrive this morning and when Len and I tried to contact the wholesalers to find out where they were, we couldn’t.”
“You mean the phone lines are down as well?”
“No it’s weirder than that. Whenever we tried to ask them what was going on, we ended up putting the phone down on them. It was like we’d forgotten why we’d rung them.”
“You must be going senile. This was both you and Mr. Barrowclough?”
“Yeah, it was really and truly weird.”
Kylie had no answer and we stood in silence, lost in our thoughts.
Eventually Kylie checked her new watch, “The bus is late today.”
I looked at mine and it was true. The bus was getting on for a quarter of an hour late.
“That’s strange. There must be an accident holding it up.”
We stood there for another forty minutes. The usual suspects gave up on waiting and headed back to their homes. Then I spotted a familiar car coming down the road and waved it down.
The driver lowered the door window to talk to me.
“Dad, what are you doing back from work? Is the road to Darcester blocked as well as the road to Sutton?” My Dad gave me a puzzled look.
“How did I get back here, Andrew? I was on my way to the office and suddenly I find I’m back in the center of the village. Why aren’t you two on the bus?”
“Dad, the school bus hasn’t turned up. We thought the road must be blocked.”
“You’d better both get in. I’ll drop you off at school and then make my way to work. That’ll give me time to figure out how I ended up back here.”
Kylie and I sat in the back which saved him the trouble of moving his briefcase from its usual pride of place on the front passenger seat. Driving up the pass isn’t as much fun in a car as it is in a bus. You’re too low down t
o get the feeling you’re going to fly over the walls, so Kylie and I started talking about one of the mathematics problems the teacher had set. It involved differential calculus, which I usually get on with, but in this particular case, I couldn’t quite see what the answer was.
When we looked up we found we were back in the pub car park and Dad was looking very worried indeed.
“I think I may be having a stroke or something, son. Perhaps we should go back home.”
“Dad, there’s something strange going on. Try and drive us to Sutton and this time Kylie and I will pay attention to where we’re going and will tell you if you go in the wrong direction.”
Dad looked relieved at this idea though I could see he was still pretty worried. He’s fairly old and I know he’s always feared going senile. Kylie and I watched the road carefully as he drove. Both of us were intent on making sure we followed the familiar bus route without deviation.
So it was something of a shock when we drove past the pub car park again. Dad stopped the car and ordered us out.
“I’ll take the car back home, Andrew. I’ll feel safer if I do it without you and Kylie in the car. You take Kylie home and we’ll try and sort this out when you get back to the house.” He drove off down the road so slowly we could have overtaken him on foot.
“Do you think your Dad’s all right?”
“It’s affecting us as much as him. Do you know how we ended up back here?”
Kylie shook her head.
We began walking through the village. I got this strange feeling we should go to the village hall. The village hall is the center of village life and is where we put on all functions that aren’t religious, which is most of them, as we aren’t a particularly religious community. I suspect those that turn up to church on Sunday do it to stop the Vicar feeling lonely. Village functions aren’t plentiful in early summer and I’d never shown Kylie around the place.
“I think we should go to the village hall,” Kylie said, but as soon as she said it, she gave me a confused look.
“That’s funny, because I was just thinking we should go there.”
“What’s funnier is that I didn’t know there was a village hall,” Kylie replied. “Perhaps we should avoid it?”
She had a point. If something wanted us to go to the hall; that was the last place we should go.
“I agree. Things are getting far too weird. Come up to my house. After all, Jen will be at work in Darcester by now.” I said. We set off up the hill, almost running.
We were at the gate in front of the village hall. The village hall was in the opposite direction to my home from where we’d started, but there we were, staring at its gate.
“How did we get here?” I asked.
“I was following you up the hill.”
“But this is at the bottom of the hill.”
“We were walking up hill the whole time,” Kylie said.
She was looking scared. I suspect I was looking the same, because that’s exactly how I felt.
“Let’s go to my house,” I suggested for the second time and we held hands and looked ahead in the direction of my house as we walked. We set off at a fast and determined pace.
I opened the door to the village hall and stood to one side to let Kylie in. I grabbed her before she could enter as I realized where we were. We stepped back from the door and I could feel my hands shaking. Kylie hands were probably shaking as well, but it was difficult to tell.
Kylie sighed.
“It’s no good, Andrew. We’ll have to go in. We don’t seem to have a choice.” Kylie grabbed my hand and pushed me in front of her into the hall.
The village hall looks exactly like you might expect. It consisted of a large open room with a stage at one end. The toilets and a small kitchen facility are hidden behind the stage. It’s a very old building and has only one floor, though the walls and roof combined are the height of a three story building. You can see the big oak beams and the roof when you look up. The windows are narrow and tall like those of an old church, stretching fifteen feet or more upwards from three feet off the ground.
The hall is easily capable of holding a couple of hundred people, which was fortunate, because there seemed to be about that number of people in it. Someone had put out the chairs that are usually stacked against the wall so people could sit down facing the stage. It looked just like a concert or a play was about to start.
The first thing I noticed on looking around more carefully was that Sally, Jane, and Peter of the usual suspects stood a little way away from the back door and were pointedly ignoring us. The second thing I noticed was that apart from Peter and me, everyone else in the room was female.
Someone had put six or seven chairs out on the stage at the far end of the room. A number of women were up on the stage talking to each other in an animated fashion. There was a general hubbub in the room. I could feel the tension building and I suspected that everyone knew we had been summoned here and were trapped.
“That’s your Mum talking to Mrs. Kelly up on the stage,” Kylie pointed out.
“I know, I just spotted them,” I said, not at all surprised to see them here. I had spotted a pattern that Kylie couldn’t, because I’d read the book with the names of the members of the Women’s Association. This room contained the current forty nine members, the retired members still alive, and the female children and grandchildren of the current members. It was with a sense of relief that I spotted Jen Lord a few yards away, as I knew these people were going to need her soon, even if they didn’t know it yet. Jen spotted Kylie and waved frantically at us before pushing through the crowd to join us.
“Thank God you’re safe. Something strange is going on. I tried to go to work this morning, but ended up here instead. Every time I try to leave, I end up right back here. I’d think I was going mad except everyone else is having the exact same problem.”
“We’ve been having that problem too,” Kylie told her and was about to say more when my Mother switched on a microphone and said, ‘Testing, testing’ very loudly, quite probably deafening the women foolish enough to be standing near the speakers.
“Can everybody sit down so we can talk about the situation?” Mum said in what appeared to be a calm and steady voice. I guess only Dad and me would recognize the stress in her voice. I could tell she was close to losing it despite her apparent calm.
The crowd found places to sit. Kylie, Jen and I ended up in a dark spot at a far corner of the hall relative to the stage. The florescent strip-light above us was faulty, and the hall windows were too narrow to provide enough light even during the day. It suited me to stay unnoticed because I thought I knew what was going on. If I was right, then we still had some time until the final missing person arrived, maybe all day or longer.
Mum coughed and started talking.
“As you all know we don’t seem to be able to get out of the hall. But as we are members of the sisterhood, past, present and future we should be able to use our gifts to try and break this strange geas someone has placed upon us.” Mum did not sound hopeful. She deferred back to Mrs. Kelly, passing her the microphone.
The speakers made deafening noises as Mrs. Kelly started to talk with the microphone too close to her mouth. Mum helped her hold the microphone at the right distance, but I could see Mrs. Kelly getting angry with her for treating her like a child.
“Fellow sisters, we face a grave crisis. As you know, the Banishment Tree has fallen,” she paused at this point, as there was some muttering around in the hall. I noticed the younger women nodded as if they already knew about it and all it implied.
Jen started to stand up to say something, but Kylie pulled her down and gestured that she should stay unnoticed. I was surprised when Jen did what Kylie suggested.
“The spell that holds the three has been weakened if not destroyed and I suspect this crisis is their doing.”
This statement caused consternation among the older women, but the younger ones just nodded. Mrs. Harris stood
up and addressed the stage.
“Can’t we just remake the spell binding them?” There was a certain amount of tittering from the younger women in the hall.
Mrs. Kelly looked at her in a kindly, but slightly patronizing way.
“In my mother’s time, perhaps we could have, but we are only forty-nine and all the female lines must be present to summon the Goddess. The circle was torn asunder over a hundred years ago and none of the missing line still live.”
I took this as my cue to say something and stood up, “Excuse me, Mum?”
Mrs. Kelly was outraged at my interruption and became even more so as she spotted Kylie and Jen sitting next to me.
“Andrew, what on Earth are you doing here?” Mum said snatching the microphone away from Mrs. Kelly before she might say something she might regret.
I walked forward and clambered up the steps at the side of the stage.
“Sisterhood of the Moon, I watched your Goddess imprison three spirits in my dreams.” That got their complete attention. “You have failed in your mission and your children have betrayed your Goddess to boot.” That caused some murmurings, but not everybody looked as surprised or as distraught as I thought they should have.
“I suggest you remake your circle before the spirits succeed in bringing all the people they require under this one roof.”
My mother said, looking thoroughly annoyed with me.
“Andrew, I don’t know how you know what you know, but we can’t remake the circle.”
“Yes you can, because Jen Lord over there is a direct female line descendent of Anna Murdock.” I smirked, because it can be fun to get one over on a lot of women at the same time. I suspected we were all going to die in that hall, but you have to take your opportunities when you get them.
“Anna Murdock’s kin are tainted by her crime,” Mrs. Kelly intoned and spat on the floor.
“Exactly what crime is that, Mrs. Kelly?” I asked, because the book hadn’t explained what Anna Murdock did to deserve having her house burned down.
Mrs. Kelly looked taken aback and looked for support from my Mother and the other women in the hall. But they just looked on, obviously as interested in the answer to my question as I was. Whatever she did must have been a big secret, if none of them knew what it was.
