Dark Coven

by Nick Brown

  Arrangements were made for a procedure that would not contaminate the ambient spirit of the house, and which would be strictly ceremonial. Kelly was allowed to see a picture of the donor, who looked presentable but resembled a member of a prog rock band from the 1970s. However, any idea she had of a private half hour in bed with him was soon dispelled. The act would take place clothed in the middle of a circle formed by the community holding hands and chanting sacred incantations. Rose and Ailsa were against this but were outvoted.

  Kelly was allowed a few minutes to familiarise herself with the donor, Cadellin. He had long hair and a wispy sandy beard but was otherwise a reassuring presence. His earth name, he told her, was Keith. The act itself, for which she wore a long robe with a slit up the front, was embarrassing, and during the course of it she kept her eyes tightly closed. She realised that the ordeal had ended when Keith tensed and then emitted a stifled grunt, followed by a polite round of applause from her house sisters.

  Keith’s performance of the sacred fertility rite had the merit however of being thankfully brief. In that respect, if in nothing else, Keith/Cadellin lived up to his testimonials and once he was out and had readjusted his robe he left the house. Unorthodox and embarrassing as the rite had been, it catapulted Kelly into a position of status in the community. She was, if anything, more petted and treated as the baby of the house as they waited to see if the magic worked.

  Now, as she sat on the plinth in her sleep shirt enjoying the tickle of the carpet on her bare legs she prayed that the test would show positive. She prayed not only because she didn’t want to go through the performance with Keith all over again, but also because the community needed some good news. There had been elements of discord inching into their lives, some of them creepy. Although the others tried to keep Kelly out of this they often failed to notice her and she watched and listened, missing nothing.

  Margaret was particularly edgy. Kelly heard her talking to Olga late one night in the kitchen after dinner when the two of them stayed on drinking wine after the others had drifted off. Kelly had been sitting alone in the large, wrought-iron framed conservatory that led off from the kitchen with her Iphone, networking. Now she tuned in to the end of her housemates’ conversation.

  “No, Olga, I’m sure it’s not coming from the Wiccan scene in Macclesfield or Bramhall: we know most of them, they’re okay. Maybe more traditional than us and we’ve had our run ins, but they wouldn’t do this. Why would they need to? We may be much richer than them, but we’re no threat. Well, not enough for them to do this.”

  “Even the ones who think they’re vampire witches? Anyway, who else could it be? Who else have you cut across badly enough for them to want to do something like that?”

  “Nothing: that’s just it, we’ve haven’t hurt anybody. We weren’t involved in whatever went on at Skendleby and messed Rose up.”

  “Funny it all seemed to start up after she arrived though, isn’t it?”

  “Rose has nothing to do with this Olga. Whoever’s doing this is sick.”

  “Well, why we don’t try the police.”

  “And say what? That we’ve had a curse put on us. Oh yeah, I can see them taking that seriously.”

  “But we’re really isolated out here.”

  “Leave it now, it’s getting late, come to bed.”

  Kelly heard them get up and leave the kitchen. She sat on alone for a while wondering what it meant. That had been two nights ago and new electronic gates had been ordered like the ones sealing off the mansions of the footballers that littered the surrounding landscape. She decided she couldn’t wait any longer and dropped down off the plinth, heading for the bathroom.

  The results confirmed her expectations; she was pregnant. Her world had changed and now she would change. There was no one else in the house: the others were out making money or, in Rose’s case, negotiating a return to work package. The day was beautiful - she would go out and walk through the fields. She set the alarm system, double locked the front door behind her and then cut round the back of the house and climbed over the stile onto a footpath.

  Her head buzzed with ideas and fantasies as she crunched across the frost covered fields. She lost track of both herself and time until she was surprised to find that she’d reached the cricket club; she’d no idea that she’d come so far. The cricket ground, shrouded for the winter, looked vaguely threatening and in normal circumstances she would have turned back but today, in the sun and fired up with dreams of the future, she still wanted to walk.

  She knew that if she crossed the ground there was another footpath that swung round in a great circle and passed within a mile or so of the house. She’d been told that from this path it was possible to see Sutton Mound, a sacred burial site where two lines of earth power intersected.

  Although the jobsworths at the archaeology unit, who Rose worked with, said it was just a bog standard Bronze Age bowl barrow and there were no such things as lines of earth power, Kelly knew different. Margaret had explained that it had been a centre of pagan spiritual energy for millennia and, for those who knew how to look, energy could still be found. She crossed the pitch, walked past the boarded up pavilion and climbed the stile.

  On the other side the land fell away and the low lying waterlogged fields were covered in a series of frozen pools of water, some as big as boating lakes. It seemed warmer this side and a miasma of mist was rising off the ground. Down here the day seemed a lot less cheerful. But it was only after she had crossed three of these fields that Kelly became aware of the noise the fields were making. A sound of shifting and cracking: it seemed to emanate from the ground itself. Kelly thought about turning back but didn’t want to retrace her steps to where the noise had started, so instead she increased her pace.

  And there was something else; the mist was gathering behind her, closing off her retreat. She carried on through a landscape that suddenly began to feel hostile, listening in alarm to the snapping and cracking sounds all around. The brightness of the day was gone, replaced by a shadowy, obscure world, misty and insubstantial. All ideas of Sutton Mound disappeared and she had to concentrate hard on following the path. She didn’t want to get lost so she lumbered on through the shifting gloom with the still silence punctuated by the sharp dislocated cracks.

  Time and distance seemed to have lost meaning as she moved, or seemed to move through this strange quantum miniverse. Then her foot landed on something slippery without purchase and went from under her; she hit the ground with a jolt.

  Ice: she’d fallen on ice. Now she recognised the source of the disorientating noise. The ice was expanding and beginning to break up. She laughed at the realisation, laughed at herself, at how pathetic she had been to frighten herself like a child. She got up, brushed herself off and moved on.

  The ground began to slope upwards. Bit by bit the mist dispersed and within minutes she was able to recognise where she was. The path split and she took the left fork which narrowed to run between low fences. To her right she could see a large old house at the far end of a paddock. To her left were great rolls of waist high bramble, like barbed wire. The fence ended at a stile which she crossed, but the bramble continued on the other side.

  She hated bramble like this, had ever since she was little. There had been some on wasteland by the house where she lived with her mother before social services had taken her away. Once some bigger girls had pushed her into it and she had hung there, caught fast by the sharp thorns catching on her dress. It had seemed like she had hung there for hours, cut and torn by the thorns, listening to the rustling sounds from deep inside the thicket.

  She forced herself to look straight ahead, away from the tunnel of thorns. That’s when she saw the hooded figure walking towards her. There was something about it that made her want to turn and run: an instinct to preserve the new stirrings of life within her. She began to turn round but then common sense kicked in: it would mean going back past the brambles and down into the mist and crackling ice. So she just
carried on and quickly realised she’d done the right thing. The figure ahead wasn’t that much bigger than she was and the threatening hood was just a hoodie over a running top. She laughed at herself for a second time, everything was alright.

  The figure was close now and had pushed the hood back off. Kelly’s relief was complete, she knew this person. They approached each other smiling and Kelly put her cheek forwards to accept the kiss of greeting, slightly surprised as this was only a chance acquaintance, someone she’d only met a couple of times at pagan fairs. Still, she went through the respected response and turned the angle of her face to accept the proffered peck on her left cheek.

  The brambles came back into focus with the sideways movement of her head and held her attention for a fleeting instance. The mouth darted away from her cheek as she stared at the sharp points of the brambles and moved upwards. There was a searing pain, something tearing in her left ear, then a hard punch in her stomach. She staggered back, her hand moving from ear to belly. She felt something wet, saw blood on her hands. How could that have happened? The pain from the ear was worse. She looked up and saw that there was a bloodied blade that looked like it was made of stone in the hand of this casual acquaintance of hers. She wondered what had happened and if she could wind it all back, like on Sky Plus. She couldn’t understand what was happening, her mind wouldn’t work: it was like this was being done to someone else.

  Then instinct kicked in and she did what she should have done before; she turned to run. But now there seemed to be something wrong with her legs, they began to sag under her. Hands grabbed her by the shoulders and turned her round, the face she looked into was smiling at her and she saw the knife rise again. Her eyes seemed to be losing their focus. She tried to think what to do but couldn’t. Then the surface of the earth shifted and she was tipped into the brambles, left hanging there. This wasn’t fair. Why did things always happen to her? She began to cry, the pain was excruciating, but fortunately it didn’t last; soon, like everything else, it just slipped away.

  Chapter 2: Should Have Left Them Buried

  “Stop it, stop it, for God’s sake, turn the fucker off, turn it off, them’s bones, them’s human bones.”

  The digger didn’t stop. Just kept on coming with the massive shovel ramped up to take its next bite of earth as it worked remorselessly towards the old chapel. Dave didn’t dare get in front of it so he just kept on shouting and waving his arms.

  Must have had some effect because with a choke that ended in a whine the engine died and he was confronted with the furious red face of Jed Gifford glaring at him from the cab. Dave wished not for the first time that the economy would pick up so he could move on to a proper job and away from Jed. You only worked for him if you were bent or desperate: he was known for his brutality even in the rough end of Bollington. He knocked his missus about and she was a saint. Dave couldn’t understand why she stuck with him.

  These were, in fact, the qualities that had got Jed working for Si Carver. No one else round here would work for that bugger and certainly no one would have taken on this job. So Carver had to pay over the odds to get the area between the side of the Hall and the crumbling chapel of the Davenports cleared. Carver wanted to build a heated swimming pool that would start under the hall and then emerge covered in glass, which on sunny days would roll back at the click of a switch and become an outdoor pool.

  Carver’s wife, Suzzie-Jade, had seen one featured in Hello magazine and thought it would add class to the estate. There were problems of course, the chapel was listed and shouldn’t be touched: one attempt to demolish it to make room for another hole for his golf course had already been scrapped when local busybodies complained to the local authorities. Carver hoped that the construction of the pool would structurally weaken the chapel sufficiently to give him a valid excuse to pull it down and replace it with a bar and pool changing suite.

  Carver hadn’t told Jed all this of course, but had said enough for him to understand that if the chapel were, unfortunately to be irretrievably damaged, then there would be a bonus coming his way along with the contract for the new building. Jed knew he could drive a hard bargain: Carver no longer had a tame councillor in his pocket to help with planning, the last one having killed himself. Jed also understood that part of his being paid considerably over the odds for this work was for his discretion.

  Jed might be bad and bent, and he was both, but he wasn’t stupid and he knew how to keep his mouth shut if it paid enough. He also understood that Carver was not a man to cross. As he often said to his cronies in the pub, “takes one to know one”.

  What Jed wasn’t privy to was Carver’s real motive. The chapel scared him, or rather what he thought lurked inside it scared him. He hadn’t exactly seen it but he’d seen where it had been: noticed its absence if that made any sense. Most of the time it made no sense to Carver, but all the same he knew it was there and he knew that it knew he knew: and in a way that made it worse, even after he’d had a few whiskeys. During the goings on with the Skendleby mound last Christmas it had got so bad that he’d had to take tablets for his nerves: like losers did.

  Dave knew enough to know that finding something dodgy underground near the chapel would not go down well with Jed, and he was right.

  “This’d better be good or you can say goodbye to this job.”

  “Look down there, towards the chapel wall.”

  “So what, you find bones underground all the time, innit.”

  “Yeah, but not like this. Look, there must be more than one body.”

  “So, it’ll be a fucking graveyard.”

  “Don’t think so, Jed, the crypt thing is round the other side. And look at them bones, them’s been badly knocked about. See that skull, it’s like it’s been smashed in. This isn’t natural.”

  “So, no harm done then, only us seen it.”

  “Think about it, Jed, this can’t be kept secret. The villagers know what we’re doing here, they’ll have clocked the JCB. Davenport and the vicar saw us yesterday.”

  “So?”

  “So, they’ll ‘ave reported us to the council already; we could get a visit any time and if they find out we’ve tried to cover this up it could be real bad for us and…”

  “And what?”

  “Well, remember them attacks last year? Police never cleared them up, they’re not even sure they found all the victims, and seeing how a lot of it went on round here, we don’t want to…”

  Dave trailed to a stop, but he’d said enough - Jed got the drift.

  “Shit, just what we fuckin need. Carver’s out, better go and tell Jordan.”

  Carver’s wife, Suzzie-Jade, was referred to as Jordan on account of her alleged resemblance to the erstwhile lingerie model: not to her face, of course, although she would probably have been flattered.

  Inside the Hall, Suzzie-Jade was at that moment relaxing after a session with her personal trainer. She was customising her fingernails to match the new furniture in the much altered banqueting hall. The Hall had already been greatly improved by having most of its clunky and depressing internal features ripped out and replaced with more streamlined modern ones. It was part of her project to try to get Hello, or maybe, to be realistic, one of the lesser mags to cover her makeover.

  The emphasis in the space was now chrome and white wood, with violet furniture in a neo-sixties G plan design. It was good but still lacked something and Suzzie-Jade was wondering if a Banksy-type street life mural would make it complete. She was disturbed by a banging outside followed by one of the staff, Marika she thought her name was, entering the room.

  “Men outside, say there is problem and would you please come to see.”

  Suzzie-Jade had never actually seen the men up close before and wasn’t impressed by Dave, who she thought looked like that meerkat off the adverts, but she followed him, tottering round the site workings in her heels. She was even less impressed with Jed who, despite his attempts at ingratiation, came across as his brutal self. Bu
t it was obvious from their furtive manner that something was wrong, something that Si wouldn’t like. The bones didn’t look particularly interesting to her but now the men and the servants knew about them she knew she’d have to do something. She tried Si’s mobile but got no answer so told Marika to call the police.

  *******

  When the call from the council came through to the archaeology unit, Dr Giles Glover wondered what he had done this time. Since his suspension for professional misconduct over the Skendleby excavation he’d never been able to feel easy, aware that his reinstatement had been touch and go and that he had influential enemies both in the university and at the town hall. He’d even been warned by the chief of planning that if he ever got the slightest opportunity he’d have him out of his job.

  “Just make one mistake, Glover, and you’re finished, and with all the cuts no one will stand up for you next time.”

  And Giles knew he was right. But the call wasn’t about that, it was worse; it was about Skendleby, and if there was anywhere he never wanted to see again it was that place. It didn’t make it any better that he’d been half expecting it; Ed Joyce, the parish vicar, had rung him a couple of days earlier to say that things were going on there that shouldn’t be. So he took the call with some trepidation.

  “Hello, Giles Glover speaking.”

  “Sam Mendes from the Liaison Unit. We’ve had a request from the police for someone to go and look at some remains they’re examining at Skendleby Hall. Can you get across there now?”

  “What? At such short notice? We’ve loads on here.”

  “It’s not a request in the literal sense, you know how it is.”

  So, ten minutes later, Giles was steering his car towards a place he’d hoped never to set eyes on again. But he didn’t have time to brood on it as driving was more difficult than he’d expected. The cold frost that started the day was now augmented by a sporadic mist rising from the ground and forming dispersed patches that he drove in and out of. He’d just negotiated a particularly dense clump on a sharp bend where the road first met the estate boundary when he was passed at speed by a black Range Rover with opaque windows. As it accelerated onto the straight he was able to read the number plate. It bore the legend ‘SI 2’, he knew its owner: a man who, like the hall, he never wanted to see again. The black car slowed slightly to negotiate the turn into the estate, but had to stop as the electronic gates had not quite opened. This enabled Giles to follow it unseen down the drive. Parked in front of the Hall’s front door were a couple of police squad cars and a scene of crime van.