Mr Mandeville went quietly to the nearest window and looked out over the lawn to the burnt hills. Which way had they come? Was that the fringe of gum trees he remembered? Mary Boyd’s voice soared up:
“Which way did my husband ride?”
Vivien had come up behind Albert; they stared out of the window together. The black horse and its rider stood quite still behind the trees.
“I can’t make out . . .” whispered Vivien.
“What?”
“What he has across his saddle.”
“A rifle!” snapped Mr Mandeville.
“Are you afraid?” asked Vivien, pressing her fingers into his arm.
“I don’t like it,” said Mr Mandeville. “Family quarrels are the devil. How do we know . . .?”
“Are you afraid we won’t get the money?”
Mr Mandeville drew back in astonishment.
“Vivien!”
“Where is everybody?”
Mary Boyd was calling from the dining room. Vivien went bustling back to her client.
“Now you must take me to your son’s room,” she said, putting an arm tenderly around Mary Boyd. Her left foot signalled with a barely perceptible kick: “shut the door” Mr Mandeville obeyed, shutting the door of the den, his ear cocked for the sound of hoofs in the courtyard.
“You want to go to his room?” echoed Mary Boyd foolishly.
Lines of grief had deepened upon her face.
“Of course,” said Vivien. “His room in the old house.”
She collected her handbag and gloves from a chair. Mary Boyd hesitated for an instant and Mr Mandeville recognized the crisis of the case. Many clients drew back before the possibility of truth, of certainty. She said at last:
“I must find out!”
She led the way down a polished corridor to a side door with massive baronial hinges. The heat seized them as they stepped outside. In the distance Mr Mandeville thought he heard some commotion but Mary Boyd urged him on between the thorny bushes and the wattle trees.
He flung up his head and was able to make out the old homestead: a great scarecrow of a house, built of sandstone and weatherboard. He judged that it might be eighty years old. The family had been fools to leave it, of course, but for an antiquarian it had as much atmosphere as a telephone box. Mr Mandeville took out a handkerchief and mopped his brow – why did he look back? He quickened his pace as Vivien stepped proudly across the worn threshold.
He was prepared to skulk about on the dusty ground floor but Vivien leaned over the banister to summon him. He plodded upstairs behind the two women, admiring the sweep of the double staircase. Sunlight streamed on to the bare landings through the uncurtained window panes. The boy’s room, still half-furnished, had old cretonne pinned up to keep out the harsh light. Someone – his mother – had placed a vase of bush flowers on the chest of drawers. Mary Boyd came to the old house: it was easy to imagine her seated on the sagging bed, as she was now, staring at the photographs and pennants on the wall.
“He called this his clubhouse,” she said. “He liked it better than his bedroom in the villa.”
Mr Mandeville settled Vivien into a cane chair, back to the window, right hand flat on the arm of the chair. Index finger tapping. The signal read: “interview”. He went smoothly into his routine. Where did the boy, Fergus, go? Why had he gone? What was the last reliable news of him?
Mary Boyd gave answers which they all knew well enough but her replies gained substance from the stifling room, with its crumpled textbooks and university photographs. Fergus Boyd – who was a young man, not a boy – had taken his pack and his compass and gone back, for the third time, to the jungles of northern Queensland, a thousand miles from his home. It was eighteen months since he had last been officially sighted. Relatively speaking he was sane; one day he would be very rich. “Going bush” was just an idea he had, Mary pointed out helplessly; there was a deep rift between the boy and his father.
Mary Boyd went on with her halting explanations but Mr Mandeville held up his hand; Vivien was concentrating deeply. Her breathing was loud and slow. He looked about for a pillow to make her more comfortable, as he often did at this stage, but in the dismantled room there was nothing. She began to speak in a faint light voice:
“So hard . . .”
She ran her tongue over dry lips.
“There is malice – dreadful malice.”
Mary Boyd writhed her hands together.
“Please . . .”
The light grew on Vivien’s face as she received some response.
“He is there. He has been carried northwest. I see an old scar on his knee – infected. The trees have all gone away. Sense of loss. A whiteness makes him shut his eyes. Pain, severe pain – they give him something for the pain.”
Vivien clasped her upper left arm with the fingers of her right hand.
“He thinks of his home,” she said.
Her eyes flew open; she stared at Mary Boyd.
“You have been cruelly deceived!”
Downstairs a door slammed; they heard Dougal Boyd come up the shaking stairs at a canter. Mary Boyd turned red, then white. “Prepared to brazen it out,” thought Mr Mandeville. He was pleased that no money had changed hands; sceptical husbands were not unknown. He remembered old Billy’s warning: Vivien should not tell the truth. He gave a cheerful grimace behind the client’s back to dispel his unease.
Dougal Boyd edged into the room quickly, without bluster, but at the sight of him they all flinched. His photographs did not do him justice. He was immensely strong and thick-set; his forearms and the column of his throat were burnt to a deep red-brown, the colour of his riding boots. His firm dark face was beyond reason; his voice shook.
“Get these bloody frauds off my property, Mary!”
“No!” cried Mary Boyd. “Let her tell me!”
They began to wrangle at the tops of their voices, a familiar quarrel to Mr Mandeville, punctuated with cries of “It does no harm!” and “Mumbo-jumbo!”
They were at such close quarters in the stifling room that the Mandevilles could do nothing short of stopping their ears. Albert was hot and bothered. He stood behind Vivien’s chair waiting for a lull so that he could get her away. The accusations became more harsh; the Boyds were dreadfully accomplished at quarrelling. It was enough to drive a sensitive son from his home.
“So I told him good riddance!” roared Dougal Boyd. “Ungrateful young mongrel!”
“So you admit it, you admit you sent him away!”
“Too right I did! Couldn’t these friends of yours tell you that?”
“Fergus could be dead! Don’t you care if he’s dead?”
Dougal jerked his head towards Vivien.
“Ask her if he’s dead!” he whispered, grinning. “Then you’ll be satisfied.”
Vivien kept her eyes fixed steadily upon Dougal Boyd, but stretched out a hand to his wife.
“You know he is not dead,” she said in her sweet light voice.
Dougal Boyd faltered for the first time.
“You have his letters, Mr Boyd,” said Vivien evenly. “From some distant place where Fergus is recovering from his fever. I get the word station.”
Mary Boyd gave a choking cry.
“All this time . . . you had letters!”
Dougal Boyd glared at Vivien in furious astonishment and flung himself out of the room. His wife flew after him. Albert Mandeville saw them go down the stairs, the man clinging to the banister, the woman, disfigured by grief and anger, raging after him at every step. He knew that this was the truth that should not have been told.
“Why would he keep back the letters?” he asked. “Why would he do such a thing?”
“Husbands torment their wives,” said Vivien. “He’s mad. We must get away from here. There is not much time.”
“The son was hardly lost at all,” grumbled Albert. “It’s a damnable family row!”
“Go on! Get me away from here!” cried Vivien.
She gave him a push and they tumbled out on to the landing. Far below they heard Mary Boyd shout:
“Put that thing down!”
Albert Mandeville thought: “He has been driven too far!”; then the first shot was fired. Dougal’s voice rose up out of the swirling dust and shaking timbers of the old house.
“. . . show you who’s boss!”
Mary Boyd raced up one side of the double staircase; she fell heavily then struggled on. From where the Mandevilles cowered on the landing only one side of the staircase was visible, but the window on the first landing had become a mirror. In it they saw Dougal Boyd rush into view and fling himself down like a sharp-shooter, bringing his rifle to his shoulder. As he waited for Mary to come into range he seemed to be aiming at his own reflection – a madman aiming at himself in the glass.
“Go back! Go back!”
Albert Mandeville, squawking like a guinea-fowl, ran out to warn Mary Boyd. He saw her turn and run down the stairs again; Dougal’s shot crashed into the landing window. They heard him roaring across the stairwell.
Albert grasped Vivien by the wrist and they ran through a maze of empty rooms to the front of the house. They looked through the corner of a window at Mary Boyd stumbling across the rough grass; she fell and scrambled up and ran on. Then the noise of the third shot came boring up from under their feet. Mary Boyd flung up her arms and crashed face downwards into a bush of long thorns.
Mr Mandeville sank down beside his wife on the dusty window seat and gazed at her pale, unmarked face.
“Vivien – why, why on earth?”
He meant “How did it happen?”; but the diffuse guilt that had settled upon him, the anguish of the staff officer, did not afflict her.
“I found their son!” she said. “It was what I set out to do.”
They heard the door shut, down below, as Dougal Boyd came back into the house.
When one listened too hard the place was alive with stealthy footsteps. For the first time in his life Albert Mandeville experienced a mortal terror. He had watched by the newly dead, probed ancient crypts, passed whole nights alone in dungeons where men and women had died screaming, had caught in his hand a cup flung by a poltergeist. Now at last that clammy fear which had been his stock in trade for so long rose up to claim him. A man was stalking them with a gun.
“We must get away!” Vivien was shaking him. “Albert, you look so strange . . .”
He knew what she meant: he looked as if he had seen a ghost.
A door slammed nearby. Albert hoisted Vivien to her feet and they staggered as silently as they could into another of the high rooms, then into another, bare and terrifying as the first. They crossed a passageway into another room, almost a cupboard, and out again into the room next door, a horrid room where there was another door, its chipped china handle slowly turning. They rushed down a passage and found themselves at a dead end, hard up against a broken window. While they stood gasping for breath there came the long, oiled snick of a rifle bolt and they fled, still breathless, and tumbled down a narrow flight of stairs.
Vivien fell in a heap on the floor of the old kitchen.
“Get me outside . . .” she panted.
“All my fault,” said Mr Mandeville, picking her up. “You couldn’t have known.”
“Of course I knew!”
Vivien’s eyes blazed with malice.
“I knew there was danger. But why should I let you shut me away?”
As he dragged her towards the gaping doorway she chattered venomously: “Stifling my gifts . . . compromised by your bloody trickery . . .”
They heard a great voice cry out in the old house:
“Frauds! Bloody frauds!”
The gun went off and they bolted like rabbits.
They were running over unwatered grass towards the corner of a stone fence. Albert Mandeville clutched a gum sapling; his heart was bursting with fear and grief. “Now I must make a stand,” he thought. “Now I must save her.” He stared at the house waiting for Dougal Boyd to erupt from the back door after them. He composed himself, like an Indian brave about to sing his death chant and ride into a hail of bullets. Even this release was denied him: behind his back Vivien gave a scream.
He turned and saw Dougal Boyd lope round the side of the house. Arms outstretched Albert Mandeville ran towards his wife, but it was too late. He could not interpose his body or deflect the madman’s aim with his shouting. At the next shot she reeled sideways into his arms and he felt a second bullet thud into her body. On Vivien’s face there was an expression of complete surprise.
Mr Mandeville sank to his knees, holding her close to him; it had been the last bullet, there were no more shots. After a long time, when he raised his eyes from his wife’s face, he saw Dougal Boyd fling aside his gun, like a man in a dream, and walk away, staring up at the sky. A stockman came from nowhere and picked up the gun; the station people began to appear shyly. Albert Mandeville saw that a strange blanket of cloud had come up, hiding the sun. Rain was coming; it had grown much darker; he had not imagined the loss of light.
STEVE RASNIC TEM
A Hundred Wicked
Little Witches
STEVE RASNIC TEM is a prolific writer of short fiction, and his work has been nominated for the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award, while he won the British Fantasy Award in 1988 for his story “Leaks”. Ocean View Books has published his anthology High Fantastic, an illustrated collection of Colorado’s fantasy, dark fantasy and science fiction, and his stories have appeared in such recent anthologies as The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, The Anthology of Fantasy and the Supernatural, Dark Terrors 2, Forbidden Acts, Dante’s Disciples, It Came from the Drive-In and The Ultimate Super Villain, to name only a few. Also, Unnameable Press is publishing a collection of his poetry.
As for “A Hundred Wicked Little Witches”, Tem reveals: “The writing I enjoy doing most is of the playful, improvisational sort, when I don’t know where I’m going, but I have this naïve faith that there’s a story to be found in this material, somewhere. Oftentimes these improvisations take the form of lists or catalogues or namings of the inconsequential or nonexistent. These writings usually occur late at night, when I’m asking myself such compelling questions as, ‘Who better to tell the tale of our attic door?’, when I’m juxtaposing words randomly on pieces of paper and wondering, ‘What’s the story behind the whispering soap?’
“ ‘Witches’ came out of one such late-night session, as I was thinking about a young friend of mine and his problems with women, and the various theories he had about what made women tick (and why they didn’t like him more). I didn’t agree with any of his rather far-fetched theories, but it reminded me of how so many of us live our lives in fantasy-based worlds.”
“THAT’S ENOUGH, THAT’S enough now,” Jack whispered to the witch of wallpaper, whose face stared at him from every inch of the wall, her eyes bright and piercing as needles, her mouth a thin line of disapproval. But like all the others, she would not stop.
They would not stop: the witch of belly, the witch of walk, the witch of tongue. They had no sense of caution, of precaution, of decorum. They had no sense of the limits of a man’s toleration, the limits to which a man might go. They had no, made no, sense. Jack tried to forget them, tried to manage without them. But they had the power, and only they could make the decision to let him go. The witch of charms might encounter him on the street, and she might force him to follow her blocks out of his way, simply on a whim. The witch of a glance might distract him at work, denying him promotions and the respect of his peers. The witch of lingerie might keep him awake all night, his mind so filled by the unobtainable that there was no room for sleep.
And if he objected, if he balked, if he shouted that he’d had enough, his fellow passengers on the bus, or the pedestrians sharing his sidewalk, would turn, would look uneasy, and gazing past them he would inevitably encounter the icy stares of fourteen highly annoyed witches. He knew this for sure. He’d c
ounted. Each and every time, he’d counted.
Women were like that, as his father had told him. All of them witches, as his father had told him. Each with her own special power. Each with love to give and love to withhold. Each with the talent to destroy him in a hundred little ways. The witch of impatience and the witch of boredom. The witch of adultery and the witch of dissatisfaction. The witches of intolerance, aggravation, and greed.
Jack’s own mother had been a witch of neglect. After she had him she didn’t want anything else the rest of her life, including – most especially – him. She became a sad waitress during the day and a witness to street accidents at night. The only times he could remember her actually speaking to him before his father finally came back one day to take him away was when she told him how to handle strangers: “Go away with them. Do what they want to do. They always tell better stories than the ones you hear at home.”
When Jack was a small child the witches were appropriately small and enigmatically sinister. The witch of holes might lead him into the smallest place, even though he was much too large to fit. The witch of food gave him stomach aches even with his favorite meals. The witch of whispers told him secrets he’d be better off not knowing. They were full of tricks, misrepresentations, and disappointments, these witches. They taught Jack what he might expect the rest of his life. The witch of shadows filled the darkness with an impossible number of presences, breathing unseen and speaking in code. The witch of kisses filled him with an intangible longing. The witch of silences refused to answer any of his essential questions.
“Answer me! Talk to me! Say anything!” Jack shouted into the darkness, but the witch of solitude was not to be seduced.
During his teen years Jack dated every witch on the menu, and some other witches none of his friends could imagine. He followed the witch of legs one day until she lost him in a field of dining rooms. He kissed the witch of mouths so long and fervently that she stole his voice and used it to make crank phone calls. He fell asleep with the witch of smells and woke up with the witch of what’s left.
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