Lilian's Spell Book

by Toby Litt

  The way it looked to me, there was an invisible pane of glass, stopping the water going any further.

  The tunnel there was already more than halfway full.

  I hurried back until I was within touching distance of the divide. Then, aware that I might let loose a flood that would sweep me down the tunnel, possibly towards a dead end, I put my foot into the water.

  I couldn’t feel a thing, except where the join was. At that point I felt a strange difference that I couldn’t identify - not until I’d remembered sitting in the bath. This was that feeling of having no air around your skin.

  I knew that I wouldn’t be able to breathe, under this water, but I needed to try. I shuffled back until my ankles, knees, hips, tummy, breasts and then shoulders were immersed. Then – leaving the torch behind – I went further, and my head was in, too.

  My eyes were open, and I could see perfectly clearly. I opened my mouth, but there was no air. The strangest thing was the silence. No sounds at all, apart from those made by my body.

  I had a sudden fear of drowning, so scrambled forwards again, through the divide, into the open tunnel.

  I came out completely dry, of course.

  Now I had no choice, I had to go on. And if the tunnel was a dead-end, then I’d be trapped. Perhaps if I found a place with enough room to turn round, I could return going forwards – and I would have a chance to swim back to the cellar.

  I picked up the torch and put it in my t-shirt again. For a couple of slow minutes, I crawled on. The tunnel kept sloping downwards. Then, just as beneath the house, reached another metal grille above which it turned upwards at a ninety-degree angle. There was a metal ladder. I climbed it, as far as I could.

  But yet another metal grille, like the other two, was over the end of the tunnel. And when I tried to lift it, it didn’t move. The reason was simple – something cross-shaped was standing directly over the mouth of the hole. When I examined it with the torch, I could see that it was made of wood.

  I shined the torch through the gaps in the grille, to see what I could see. There was a ceiling in the shape of an arch.

  It was the chapel! The tunnel from the house came out into the chapel! I wondered who else knew about this? Father Trovato? Mr. Gatward? If I just stayed here, trapped by the water, Peter would eventually figure out where I was – with someone’s help, maybe. But that might be hours away. Hours when I wouldn’t be there to look after Mary and Jack.

  Even as I looked around, the light from the torch seemed to fade and go more golden.

  I climbed back down the ladder. There was just enough space for me to get down on my knees and bring my head down and around so that it was facing the way I’d come.

  In the failing light, I scrabbled back along the tunnel, not really caring about splinters or dust.

  I wanted to be back with my children, to know they were safe. If I had to swim without air for five minutes to get to them, I would.

  But when I reached the divide between old wood and new, the water wasn’t there. It had disappeared leaving not a drop behind.

  The torch failed completely, leaving me in the dark. Finding my way wasn’t difficult, though. And, when I got close to the ladder out, a faint light came down through the hole.

  I climbed out of the tunnel.

  ‘That you?’ asked Peter.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘It goes to the chapel,’ he said. ‘Doesn’t it?’

  I was incredibly annoyed by this. Even if he’d worked it out, he could have waited until I told him.

  ‘It does,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t get out the other end. There was a grille with something right on top of it – something cross-shaped.’

  ‘It’s a secret chapel,’ said Peter. ‘Pretty obvious they needed a secret tunnel to get to it. The family were Catholics – recusants. They needed that priest’s hole to hide their priest, in case anyone came looking for him. If he’d been caught, they’d all have been done for treason.’

  ‘I know all that,’ I said. ‘And now we know where the tunnel goes. But I was the one to go down in there. And I was the one who almost got drowned for the trouble.’

  ‘Was it flooded?’ Peter asked.

  ‘Flooded and then unflooded,’ I said. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘Where did the water come from?’

  ‘The house,’ I said. ‘Let’s go to bed. I’m exhausted.’ That was true, although I somehow still had the energy to be furious at the same time. The crawl down the tunnel, and the fear of drowning, had taken a lot out of me, but Peter’s reaction was stoking up my anger.

  I wanted to see Mary as soon as possible.

  ‘How’s your arm?’ Peter asked, as we climbed the stairs. He wanted to remind me of my stupidity.

  ‘Fine,’ I said. In truth, I hadn’t thought about it for several hours. There was no pain.

  Mary lay a little more curled up than usual. I turned her over on her back – she didn’t like that, though. A moment later and she returned to the position I’d found her. Mary hadn’t slept like this – foetal – since the first couple of weeks after she was born. It disturbed me to see her showing what I could only think was fear, insecurity.

  In the bathroom, after brushing my teeth, I decided to pull the bandage back and have a look at the scald beneath.

  I stuck my finger in, lifted the dirty fabric and tried to see where the unhurt skin ended and the white, bloated skin began. Further and further I peeled back, and still it all looked as if nothing had happened to it. Finally, I unwound the whole bandage, and saw that my arm was good as new.

  ‘Oh,’ I said.

  Peter came in without saying a word. He looked at my arm.

  ‘Can’t have been as bad as it looked,’ he said.

  ‘It’s healed,’ I said. ‘In half a day.’

  ‘No,’ said Peter. ‘It must just have gone down, like an inflammation.’

  ‘The scalding was really bad,’ I insisted. ‘I thought I was going to have a scar there forever.’

  ‘Well, you won’t,’ Peter said.

  We went and lay down. Same bed, different houses – different universes.

  Chapter 28.

  At three o’clock in the morning, Mary woke and I took her downstairs for a feed and a quiet chat with Lilian.

  ‘You don’t have to scare me,’ I said to the painting. This didn’t feel as silly as it had done before. The lines of communication between us were clearly open. I didn’t know whether Lilian was listening, but she was most definitely watching. ‘If you want to tell me something, you can just tell me. Very directly. I’m paying attention now. I think I’ve worked out a little of what you want to tell me. You wanted me to follow the tunnel to the chapel, didn’t you? And when you saw I was about to wimp out, you stopped me. You showed me where the tunnel was with the drip. The weird water means something, too. The water not touching me. I just don’t understand it yet. Can’t you be more direct? Can’t you write? Can’t you speak?’

  The painting didn’t speak.

  ‘It must be difficult for you,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry I’m so slow. I don’t know why you ever chose me? Peter might be a better bet. Maybe you’ll change your mind.’ Suddenly I felt panicked. ‘Please don’t do that – I’m really glad you chose me. It’s the most interesting thing that’s ever happened to me.’ And the best, I thought – then added, apart from Jack and Mary. ‘I’ll get there in the end,’ I said.

  For a moment I thought I heard something out in the hall, a footstep. Could Peter have come down to get a glass of water and overheard me talking to myself? Or just decided to check I wasn’t up to any more foolishness? No, he could never have made it down all those creaky stairs without me hearing him.

  Mary didn’t want much milk. As she was nodding off again, I undid her babygrow and took a look at her leg. The tooth marks from the fox were gone – no sign they had ever been there.

  I smiled at Lilian. ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  I could probably cut thi
s feed out, with a couple of nights of controlled crying. Then Mary might sleep through – particularly if I started to giving a big whack of formula last thing. It might be nice for Peter to get a chance to feed her. We had all the bottles and sterilizing stuff left over from Jack.

  I was thinking this, and nothing more elevated, when I walked into the hall. The place seemed brighter than usual – as if someone had turned on a light in one of the side rooms. It was only when I got to the foot of the staircase that I realized why: from top to bottom, each of the steps was covered with smooth and very shiny white ice – as if a flowing stream had been stopped by a sudden winter freeze. The wooden steps had been turned into a slope I had no chance of climbing – not with Mary in my arms. If I’d not had her, I might have been able to drag myself up, using the banisters as handholds. The message was pretty clear, though. Lilian didn’t want me to go upstairs just yet. She had something else for me.

  ‘Very impressive,’ I said, and it began to snow.

  The flakes didn’t all start falling from the ceiling. Some materialized only an inch or two from the ground. They were huge and soft, the size of Peter’s thumbs. There were thousands of them – millions maybe – extremely close together. I couldn’t see the walls. The floor beneath my bare feet must have been freezing – every snowflake that landed settled – but I couldn’t feel anything. And this feeling nothing, with my eyes telling me it was all frozen, was the strangest feeling of all.

  Mary and me were almost instantly in the middle of a square of the purest white I’d ever seen. Or, at least, that’s what I thought until I turned round, away from the staircase, and saw that the floor was clear here – a straight path back to the dining room. It wasn’t that the snow wasn’t settling on this, it wasn’t falling on it. When I looked up, I could see a clear, high, empty space. It was like being inside the bottom of a transparent wall.

  I walked back the way I’d come.

  On either side of me, the snow was already piled up in drifts of six or seven inches.

  At my first glimpse into the dining room, I really did think I was seeing a ghost. A white shape was there, human-sized, human-shaped. I stopped, terrified, and waited for it to move.

  The snow around me was falling in very straight lines to the ground. There was no breeze. I tried to allow this to calm me – some hope.

  The white figure was completely motionless.

  I approached it slowly, fearing that it would suddenly fly towards me with a scream and a huge open mouth full of teeth. That’s what would happen in one of Peter’s beloved horror films.

  The figure was wearing a dress – one that I recognized now, and should have recognized before.

  I hurried forwards. This was Lilian, come down off the painting. Not in the same pose.

  I came and stood in front of her face. I can honestly say, without any doubt, that this was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. It was a miraculously detailed snowman, snowwoman, impossible for even the greatest sculptor to make. (Snow, not ice, for its colour was white not grey or blue.) The lace on Lilian cuffs was there – every single detail of it. And every strand of her hair could be picked out, even a few stray ones that had escaped around her headdress. Everything was so lifelike – the face and hands so real – each eyelash, the ridges on the fingernails – that really the most amazing thing was, the statue wasn’t moving.

  I stood facing her, feeling terribly underdressed in my baggy nightclothes. Lilian was half a head shorter than me. But I felt her presence now in a different way to before, standing in front of the painting. Although she was still incredibly distant, she had come down to my level. It was easier to imagine having a conversation with her – a normal conversation, not the mad conversation we were having with my fumblings and her special effects.

  The breath from my mouth went into clouds that caressed her face. Mary was gazing at her, too. I wished for Mary to remember this when she grew up – even if only as a wonderful dream.

  ‘You were very lovely,’ I said. ‘And such lovely clothes.’

  In Lilian’s perfect hands, clasped in front of her bosom, was a small book, hardly bigger than one of her palms. I bent down and looked closer. A ribbon came out from top of it, just as in the painting, and went behind the book, just as in the painting, but because the figure was now in three dimensions I could, by moving round to the side, see what was on the end of this twisted ribbon – a tiny white carving of a phoenix surrounded by flames. It was identical to the one carved on the back of the house.

  ‘Is this it?’ I asked. ‘Is this what you wanted me to see?’

  There was movement around Lilian’s head. At first I thought flames were forming in a halo, but then I saw it was snowflakes and that they were now falling upwards – and, as they did, her head-dress began to disappear. It looked like the snow she had been made of was going backwards in time, returning to what it had been before.

  I watched as Lilian’s forehead, eyes, nose, mouth all flew in long lines into the ceiling. My own eyes hurt at seeing such beauty just evaporating, and no one in the world but Mary and me would ever see it. I didn’t feel… I suppose worthy is the word. I started to cry, very hard, and then Mary did, too.

  Lilian’s head was gone. The figure looked even more ghostly now. Perhaps this was Jack’s headless ghost. But I couldn’t see very clearly because white shapes were fluttering in front of my eyes. I tried to bat them away with my free hand. Then I realized that these were another kind of upwards-flying snowflakes – snowflakes formed out of the tears on my cheeks.

  I looked upwards and my eyes cleared, as the flakes were no longer rising past them but taking straight off for the ceiling.

  Another couple of vertical lines of flakes were there, to my left. I held Mary up and saw that, yes, her little tears were turning into snowflakes, too.

  I laughed. This was a gift unlike any other. I didn’t want to stop crying. I wanted to be able to show this magic to Peter and Jack.

  For a while longer, tears kept lifting from my eyes – a mixture of joy at the beauty of this vision and sadness that was coming to an end.

  The snow-Lilian was disappearing faster and faster. Only the bottom half of her was left, from the hips down.

  I waited until the very end. Her feet were in tiny shoes, and then it was only the shapes of the soles of them, and then all the snow was gone.

  The hall was also just as it had been before.

  A little shaky, I carried Mary back to bed. Peter was there, fast asleep, but nothing he might ever dream could come close to what I’d just experienced. I felt so, so sorry for him.

  Chapter 29.

  Mr. Gatward arrived at nine o’clock sharp. We had been up for a couple of hours. Because we wanted to see where the tunnel came out, and because I’d promised Mr. Gatward a view around the chapel, we all set off for it together – Jack leading the way.

  Hot sunlight came down onto the path in narrow beams. Mr. Gatward said, ‘It’s unpleasantly hot, isn’t it?’ Mary was in my arms, wide awake, quite content. This surprised me – she hadn’t fed very well. In fact, none of us seemed to be all that hungry. Half a slice of buttered toast was enough for me. And Jack left most of his cornflakes.

  As we walked round from the house, Peter was sorting through the keys, making sure he had the right one ready.

  The chapel didn’t seem so far away, now. If the trees hadn’t been growing so thickly, it would easily have been within sight of the house – maybe fifteen or twenty yards.

  I looked down at the ground, imagining the rough wooden tunnel directly beneath my feet – and myself crawling through it, full of fear, only the night before.

  ‘Here,’ said Jack, and stamped on the echoey door.

  ‘Careful,’ said Peter, ‘we don’t know how strong it is.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Mr. Gatward. ‘I never thought I’d live to see it.’

  Peter knelt down and undid the bolt. The key turned easily. Then he pulled back the door.

  �
��I’ll go first,’ he said.

  ‘Me next,’ said Jack.

  ‘No, let Mr. Gatward go,’ I said.

  ‘I can wait,’ said Mr. Gatward. ‘It’s been more than half a century. A few seconds more don’t matter.’

  ‘I’m going to wait up here,’ I said. ‘With Mary.’

  ‘How is the dear little thing doing?’ asked Mr. Gatward. Mary winced a little as his dry fingers touched her face.

  ‘The fox didn’t bite very deeply,’ I said. ‘She’s fine.’

  ‘But what a fright,’ said Mr. Gatward.

  ‘We’re down!’ shouted Peter. The lights came on.

  ‘Poor thing,’ said Mr. Gatward, but I could see he was already thinking of what he might see underground.

  Very carefully, he lowered himself down into the hole. With his curved spine, I wasn’t at all sure that he’d be able to make it down the ladder. Everything but his straw hat slowly very gradually disappeared, and then that was gone, too.

  ‘Morning, Mrs. Jonson,’ said a rough voice, almost immediately.

  I turned round and saw a dead fox hanging up by the tail, then, behind it, holding it, Robert Mew.

  ‘Laid a trap last night. Little bugger wasn’t expecting to get caught like that. Mr. Jonson used to feed it quite regular. Cost me a decent leg of chicken, but I got it.’

  ‘Good,’ I said, although the black blood around the fox’s nose made me feel both sick and sad. ‘You’re sure it’s the same one?’

  ‘No doubt,’ said Robert Mew. ‘It’s got a broke rib. But I’d’ve known it anyway. I have nicknames for them all. This one’s Rommel, because I seen him in the empty cornfield that’s like a desert. Desert fox, see?’

  ‘What are the others?’

  ‘Esmeralda, Thor, Homer, The Count and Marcel Marceau.’

  ‘Marcel Marceau’s quiet, is he?’

  ‘Absolutely silent.’

  I wasn’t sure what else there was to say.

  ‘Well done,’ I said. ‘What do you do with the body?’