A Witch Alone

by Ruth Warburton

  Suddenly I couldn’t do this any more. Watching helplessly from across the ocean was too hard. I closed my eyes, shutting out the thin figure beneath the white sheets. Then I raised my head from the bowl and rubbed the tears fiercely from my eyes and nose.

  When I opened my eyes, the sun had gone in, thick grey cloud was blanketing the sky and rain speckled the window. I jumped as a knock came at the door. It opened suddenly, crashing against the chain, and Emmaline’s face peered through the gap.

  ‘Can I come in? Why have you got the chain on?’

  ‘Sorry, sorry.’ I jumped up and pulled back the chain to let her in. ‘Of course you can come in. I didn’t mean to be weird earlier. I just can’t …’

  ‘It’s fine. I get it. All OK on the home front?’

  ‘No. Sort of. No worse, I guess. How are the boys?’

  ‘Abe’s asleep – Marcus has gone out. What shall we do?’

  And suddenly I knew. No more waiting. No more brooding on what was going on in London. I had to do something concrete. Fearless.

  ‘We’re going to the library to get that book.’

  ‘You think?’ Em chewed at a piece of her hair uneasily. ‘Shouldn’t we wait for the others?’

  ‘Why? What’s the point in waiting?’

  ‘Well … I don’t know. We don’t speak Russian for a start.’

  ‘We’ll give it a try,’ I said firmly. ‘If it doesn’t work, we can come back with Marcus.’

  ‘I really don’t know,’ Em said. She bit her lip and then yanked off her glasses and polished the lenses crossly. ‘It just seems a bit … I mean, people keep getting killed for God’s sake!’

  ‘Scared?’ I said sweetly. ‘We can wait for the boys if you prefer.’

  Em’s jaw set like concrete and I knew I’d hit the right button.

  ‘Not on your bloody life. Get your coat, Anna Winterson.’

  The wind whipped along the river, turning my hair into rats’ tails and making my eyes water. It would take me hours to comb out the tangles. Emmaline had tied her scarf around her head and looked like a Russian Babushka doll. It didn’t feel like early summer – nothing like it.

  At last we reached a tall, columned entrance and Emmaline looked down at her map and up at the portico.

  ‘I think this is it.’

  We climbed the steps, the doors towering above us – ten, twenty feet high, like an entrance not for people, but for giants.

  My breath came fast, the sound whipped away by the wind. I put my hand out to the brass knob and turned it.

  Nothing happened. I tried turning it the other way.

  ‘Is it locked?’ Em asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’ I peered through the window to one side of the door, but it was hard to see through the dirty panes. ‘I think it’s closed.’

  A voice rang out from behind us in Russian and we both jumped. A man in a security uniform was coming up the steps.

  ‘I’m – I’m sorry,’ I stammered. ‘I don’t … Do you speak English?’

  The man said something else, more slowly, but equally incomprehensibly. Out of the corner of her mouth Emmaline muttered, ‘Don’t blame me. I said we should have waited for the others.’

  ‘Oh shut up,’ I growled. ‘Spasiba,’ I said to the man and then I dragged Emmaline round the corner, out of sight of the entrance.

  ‘Invisibility. Now.’

  ‘Gawd …’ Em groaned. ‘Can’t we do this the normal way?’

  ‘No.’ I didn’t know why I felt so antsy about it – only that it was itching me to be so close to the end of the trail and not have the page in my hands. ‘I’m not waiting. Come on, you were the one who was always telling me to embrace my witchcraft.’

  ‘OK, OK.’ Emmaline looked up and down the deserted street. There was a moment’s pause and then she shivered out of view. I whispered a charm under my breath and looked down at my feet.

  ‘Do I look all right?’

  ‘I can’t see you –’ Em’s disembodied voice was almost drowned by the sound of the wind ‘– if that’s what you mean. Come on. I’m knackered. I don’t want to keep this up too long.’

  An alley led off from the side street into a courtyard behind the main building. We ducked down there and I looked around, searching for a door, a grille – anything. The courtyard was silent, empty. It was more sheltered from the wind here and papers and leaves danced in the trapped eddies.

  Then I spotted a crumbling wooden door tucked away in the corner of the courtyard. I dragged Emmaline across and put my hand to the lock, feeling it click and grind beneath my fingers.

  The door swung open, Emmaline and I glanced around, and then we ducked inside, out of the wind.

  Inside it was hot – extremely hot – and I realized that we were in the basement of the building. Lagged pipes ran along a dimly lit corridor, clunking and groaning as we passed. We turned at random up another passage. After just a few minutes Emmaline’s hand was hot and sweating, and I guessed mine must feel equally sticky in hers.

  A wooden panelled door suddenly appeared on our left and I skidded to a halt. I looked at the door, then back at Emmaline’s invisible presence in the air.

  ‘Shall I?’ I asked, my heart thudding with anticipation.

  ‘Go on,’ Em said.

  I turned a handle. And suddenly – just like that – we were in the Library of Peter the Great.

  We were standing at the edge of a huge galleried hall – shelves rising all around, twice as high as a man, and above that, a gallery with more tomes. The air was heavy with the smell of ancient books and crumbling leather bindings. I stood, looking in awe at the hundreds upon thousands of books that lined the walls of the vast library. One of them might contain ‘The Riddle of the Epiphany’. But which?

  There was not a single reader, not one person at the long rows of desks that stood beneath the high windows. Dust motes floated in a brief shaft of sunlight and then disappeared as another cloud drifted across. Beside me I heard Emmaline let out a sigh and I knew that, like me, she was gazing round at the vertiginous stacks of books and wondering where to start.

  Then I felt her hand tug on mine and together we began to walk slowly through the reading rooms, looking for something – some clue. The rooms unfolded – mile, after mile, after mile of books. We walked through rooms of huge books, rooms of slim books, past shelves of pamphlets and maps. There were ancient books, modern ones, illustrated ones, and ones bound in gilt with huge ridged spines. Books with titles written in Cyrillic and ones in …

  I stopped.

  ‘Em, this room – it’s all foreign editions. Not Russian books. Do you think it could be here?’

  ‘Well, let’s start looking,’ Em said. There was a ripple in the air, like a heat haze, and she shimmered back into view.

  ‘Is that a good idea?’ I bit my lip.

  ‘I’m bloody knackered. This is going to wear off soon one way or another. Anyway, there’s no one around.’

  ‘OK.’

  I let myself come back into view, though I couldn’t stop myself glancing nervously over my shoulder. Still, if anyone came in, it would look a lot better for them to see me and Em in plain view, rather than piles of books mysteriously unshelving and reading themselves.

  I threw my bag on a desk by the door, then looked around at the stacked shelves, the thousands of volumes stretched around the room.

  ‘Where shall we start?’ Emmaline asked.

  The scale of the task was overwhelming. It seemed ridiculous that out of all the spells I’d learned by rote, not one was for something as useful and sensible as finding a lost book. Bloody witches! Too busy messing around with the weather and each other’s feelings to think of anything as useful as a spell to …

  I stopped, remembering something my grandmother had shown me, almost light-heartedly, one time when she’d lost her keys.

  We’d been in the kitchen and she’d used chopsticks, I remembered. I cast round for something equivalent. A couple of pencils were ly
ing on a desk by the window and I hurried across and picked them up.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Emmaline said impatiently. ‘I hardly think this is the time to start taking notes.’

  ‘Hang on, let me just try something.’

  I held them in my fingers, loosely, trying to clear my mind, chase away the panicky thought of someone coming in, asking us what we were doing here, throwing us out …

  Slowly I turned in a circle, watching, watching … I kept turning, trying not to lose concentration as I heard a police car passing in the street, siren wailing. But it didn’t stop and I carried on turning … turning … ignoring Emmaline’s sceptical gaze, trying to focus my mind on the poem’s title, the heavy black type in the fragment I’d seen.

  Nothing happened. I focussed harder, channelling every nerve into visualizing the fragment ripped from Caradoc’s fingers. Then suddenly the pencils twitched. I took a step forwards; they twitched again, more eagerly.

  ‘It’s working!’ I called to Em. The pencils tugged furiously and I hurried across the floor, back the way we’d come, back towards the main reading room.

  ‘Anna, you genius!’ Em crowed. ‘How did you think of that?’

  I didn’t answer. I was too busy concentrating on the pencils. I was almost back to the corner where we’d shrugged off our coats when the pencils ripped themselves furiously from my grip and flung themselves, clattering, to the floor, right beneath the desk where my bag was lying.

  For a minute we both just stared, nonplussed. And then I groaned.

  ‘The bit of paper. It’s in there. That’s what the pencils found – the ripped corner Caradoc was holding.’

  Emmaline said nothing; she just let out a long, frustrated sigh. Then we began to search the shelves.

  It was back-breaking, boring work, scouring the room, volume by useless volume. I don’t know how long we kept it up – hours, it felt like – but at last I straightened, rubbing my stiff neck.

  ‘Em, this is pointless. Let’s come back with Marcus tomorrow.’

  ‘Ugh!’ Emmaline stood and stretched so that her back and hips clicked horribly. ‘I’m so effed off. This is ridiculous. It’s here. It’s got to be. I won’t be defeated by a poxy filing system. I will find that poem, if it’s the last thing I do.’

  ‘Can I help you?’ A voice came from behind us, female, softly accented.

  Emmaline and I both froze, her horrified expression mirroring my feelings so exactly that I knew my own face must be stuck in the same mask of shock.

  A slim, dark-haired woman was coming towards us across the parquet, her heels clicking softly. She held out a hand.

  ‘I am Elena Bolshakov, the Foreign Collection Librarian,’ she said. ‘May I assist with your research?’

  For a moment I only stood, gaping. Emmaline recovered first and took the woman’s hand, with a kind of gulping noise.

  ‘Th-thank you,’ she said as they shook. ‘That would be excellent.’

  ‘Are you students here?’ The woman shook my hand in turn and I felt a scarlet blush begin to creep up my throat and cheeks. God, I was a terrible liar.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Sort of. It’s a project. For school. A student project.’

  Don’t elaborate, Emmaline’s voice said furiously in my head. You’re babbling. Stop babbling.

  ‘And … that’s it …’ I trailed off lamely. Luckily the woman didn’t seem to notice anything strange. She only nodded.

  ‘I see. And you are looking for a book? One in particular?’

  ‘A p-poem, actually.’ I managed. ‘I was told that you had it, in translation. It’s called “The Riddle of the Epiphany”.’

  ‘Ah,’ the woman said. ‘And you do not know the name of the collection?’

  I shook my head and she frowned.

  ‘I see. That will be difficult. Let me see what can be found on the computers. Wait one moment please, I will return.’ She disappeared and Emmaline sank on to a bench and let out a shaky breath of relief.

  ‘Bloody hell! I thought we were goners.’

  ‘I thought the place was closed,’ I whispered back. ‘Why hasn’t she challenged us?’

  ‘Maybe she thinks we got a special pass? Who knows? Don’t knock it.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  I sat down beside her and we waited and waited. My hands were wet with sweat and my palm slipped suddenly on the leather material of the bench, my arm skidding out from under me so that I lost my balance and jolted into Emmaline.

  ‘For God’s sake—’ Emmaline snapped and then broke off. We both heard the cheerful click-clack of heels trotting down the corridor towards us.

  I stood. I couldn’t help it. My fingers twined together, mimicking the tight, griping knot in the pit of my stomach.

  And? I wanted to shout. Did you find it?

  ‘Alas,’ she was holding something in her hand, but it wasn’t a book. It looked like some kind of printout. ‘It appears the volume in question, a volume of translated Old English poems and riddles, was victim to the 1988 fire.’

  ‘The what?’ Emmaline asked.

  ‘The library was decimated by a very dreadful fire some years ago – many thousands of volumes were lost. It seems these poems were among them. The volume is gone.’

  No. No.

  My knees were suddenly weak and I groped for the leather bench and sat, the blood roaring in my ears.

  Beneath it I could hear the woman’s cheerful voice. She was saying something to Emmaline, but it was all so unimportant compared with that one, simple, immutable fact: the poem was gone.

  ‘… no substitute for books of course, but in conservation terms they are extremely useful,’ she was saying.

  Emmaline took the piece of paper, her face blank, incredulous, as she turned to me.

  ‘Th-thank you!’ she stammered. There was something strange about the way she held the paper – as if it might burst into flames or disintegrate in her hands. ‘Thank you – this is incredible. Anna … Anna, did you hear?’

  ‘Hear what?’ I said dully.

  ‘The book was destroyed, but they’d made a microfiche copy. Miss Bolshakov has printed us out a copy. Anna – we’ve got it. We’ve got the poem. Now let’s get out of here.’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  ‘I can’t believe it.’

  I looked again over my shoulder. The street was empty.

  ‘Go on then – read it!’ Em urged. I shook my head.

  ‘Not now. I can’t. Not here.’

  ‘OK, well then, give the paper here,’ Em said. I frowned and she clicked her fingers impatiently. ‘Come on. This is the last known copy of the poem and possibly the answer to all our questions – aren’t you even just slightly afraid it might go west?’

  ‘Yes, of course. But are you sure—’

  ‘Psh.’ She made a snorting sound that was halfway between irritation and dismissal and twitched the paper out of my fingers. It fluttered in the wind and she began to prise off her boot.

  ‘What are you … ?’ I started, but then began to laugh shakily as Em folded the thin printout and slid it inside her shoe. ‘Have you been watching too many spy movies?’

  ‘Shut it, Winterson.’ Em eased her boot back on and frowned. ‘Ow, this is bloody uncomfortable actually. If I get a blister, I’m calling on you for a foot massage.’

  We began to walk again, towards the grey expanse of river. In spite of the promises about near-twenty-four hour sun, we’d seen precious little sunlight since this morning. Black clouds had been pouring in from the sea, chased inland by the ceaseless wind. Now they were stacked across the skyline in towering mountainous ranges – like a thick, lead-grey duvet spread across the sky. A few more drops of rain spattered down as we stepped out on to the main road that ran alongside the Neva River. Em shivered and wrapped her coat more closely round herself.

  ‘Well this is super miserable,’ she said with faux-cheery bitterness. ‘Bang goes coffee in the square.’

  ‘I don’t want to hang around anywa
y,’ I said. ‘I’d rather get the you-know-what back to the hotel.’

  ‘Subtle, Anna, very subtle,’ Emmaline drawled. ‘Perhaps we could think of a code word. The Underpants, maybe. I’ve got to get the Underpants back to the hotel.’

  ‘The Scotch Egg,’ I said with a slightly hysterical nervous laugh.

  ‘That’s not embarrassing enough. How about, the Hot Stranger. I won’t feel happy until I’ve got the Hot Stranger back to my room.’

  ‘No wait,’ I giggled, pulled in in spite of myself. ‘I’ve got a better one—’

  But before I could finish, a biting wind gusted down the road, bringing with it a cloud of dust and grit – crushed twigs and leaves and bits of debris. It swirled around our heads and we stopped, hunching our backs to the blast, hands over our faces, trying to shield our eyes.

  ‘Damn,’ Emmaline had her glasses off, rubbing at her face. ‘I can’t see a thing.’

  But I could – just. As my swimming vision cleared, I saw that the swirl of rubbish wasn’t dispersing, but getting thicker and closer, and more defined. It seemed to have a shape, almost. The shape of a person, a woman – crouched as if to spring.

  ‘Em!’ I shouted. ‘Run!’

  But it was too late.

  The woman stood in front of us – barring our way, her arms spread. She was beautiful, but dressed in rags and scraps stitched together into a threadbare shift and she didn’t seem to feel the cold. Her eyes were speedwell-blue and her hair blew out behind her, a Medusa’s mane of white serpents whipping in the wind.

  She shouted something in Russian, followed by a word that sounded like ‘Stop!’

  Emmaline and I turned on our heel and began to pelt the other way. I glanced over my shoulder.

  ‘Stop!’ the witch screamed, running after us. She shouted a spell in Russian and suddenly my feet dragged on the pavement – I stumbled – they felt slow and impossibly heavy, as if my shoes had turned to lead. Beside me, Em tripped and fell and I grabbed her hand, dragging her back to her feet.