“Give me the poppet,” she hisses.
I swallow, my mind ravelling and unravelling.
I glance at Cora, slumped helpless on the floor.
Ange’s eyes begin to gleam. Little by little the sharp point of the pin edges towards the doll.
At that moment a fearful sound thunders through the house — a deafening, grinding, groaning crunch of timber against timber, as if some massive structure in the roof is splitting apart.
I shoot a look to the staircase — see Ange’s head spin round.
Mimi seizes the second, springs up, lurches forward.
Ange whirls back, her face distorted, bloodred, the brooch pin high in one hand, the other hand an open claw — empty.
As Mimi bounds backwards onto the flagstones beside me, clutching the figure, the woman’s mouth stretches wide, crimson like a great gaping wound. With a screech she lunges forward, arms outstretched, hands grappling wildly at the air, and heaves herself over Cora towards the poppets …
… and passes over the bottle inside Cora’s coat.
Then it seems as if the wind ceases to roar, the rain to spatter, as if the water swirling through the house becomes motionless, silent, and glassy, as if the crystal-like drops falling from the ceiling have suspended themselves quietly in the air. The trickles and rivulets seeping down windows and ragged plaster hold themselves still and glittering, mirroring the points of fire and lamplight.
And in this instant of paused time, Mimi and I freeze too, watching horrified, openmouthed, as Ange, alone in the hushed moment, moves.
She struggles to crawl on hands and knees across the kitchen floor towards us, but her backbone is juddering crookedly, convulsing all along its length. She tries to stretch out one sinewy arm, then the other, but her elbows twitch outwards and collapse under her. She tries again, but her head drops and her chin cracks on the hard flagstones. Her face contorts, her mouth twists to a grimace through gritted teeth, and between them she grunts and moans and curses, before falling silent.
Her eyes remain open in her still, distorted face.
Behind her, something moves. I hear a quavering voice.
“It’s burning … burning… .”
“Cora!”
The wind is howling around the house once more, the water gushing along the floors, streaming out of the cracks in the ceiling. Mimi and I skirt round Ange and rush towards Cora. I sink to the floor, drenching my knees on the soaking carpet, and raise her head out of the water.
“It’s burning… .” She gasps. “The bottle …”
Her eyes flutter open, her hands fumble for her duffel coat pocket, twisted awkwardly under her where she fell.
“It hurts… .”
I shove the poppet of Mimi in my pocket, and half lift Cora up. Finding the curve of the witch bottle, I drag it out of her coat. It looks much as it did before, half glazed, Pepper & Beard’s Traditional Stone Ginger Beer, but it is scorching hot, even through my gloves, and almost pulsating, as if there is boiling liquid inside, about to blow off the cork. I flip it from one hand to the other.
“The fire …” hisses Cora, shaking her head, struggling to push herself up on her hands. “Get rid of it. Throw — throw it on the fire!”
In seconds I am at the staircase. A fleeting glance upwards shows huge jagged beams, the ripped ends of rafters, trapped in a jostling, watery heap on the bend of the stairs.
Heart in mouth, I hurry past and into the sitting room.
In the fireplace, sooty rain spatters black down the chimney, dotting the powdery grey ash that covers the red embers. Quickly I pick up the poker and push the ash through the iron basket, then blow gently. A few tiny sparks fly up off my breath. At last little yellow flames begin to lick over the back of the blackened logs. I turn them over, frantically stab at them with the poker. All at once, they flare, snapping into life.
I throw in the bottle.
At first it just sits glowing in the wood; then, as the fire rises leaping, swirling, and crackling around and over it, there begins a fierce hissing and spitting, and the bottle starts to radiate an intensifying, brilliant jewel-red in the engulfing flames.
Boiling in blood, searing and melting — razor-slicing glass, gripping, pinching, and piercing — scarlet-glowing iron nails, throttling hair — bubbling, blistering, purifying fire …
I begin to separate — all the tiny, scorching pieces are tearing apart … splitting, splitting, tearing …
In this sweet burning, the veil rips apart —
I see the halfworld …
… and beyond it, an opening, an enfolding darkness into nothing… .
I feel an agitated pulling on my sleeve, then become aware of a long, low roaring, like the sound of a monstrous distant engine — from outside, from across the marshes.
“The water’s coming, Roger!” It’s Mimi. “We’re going to be drowned! We’ve got to help Cora!”
I turn to see Cora drooping weakly against the doorway at the far end of the hall.
Over the lintel above her head a thin black line is slowly creeping down the plaster, and a sputter of water begins to ooze through it.
“Quick, come on!” I whisk Cora’s poppet out of Mimi’s hand and squash it into my pocket with the other, then pull her into the hall.
On our right, the kitchen door is open. Through the window, beyond the shiny new enamel and gleaming chrome and the drenched orange curtains, there is no garden, no marsh, just a black wall of water.
My heart begins to pound wildly.
I rush over to Cora, who is wiping her blood-smeared face with her sodden gloves. I throw my arm around her shoulders. She leans against me, shivering.
“Can you walk?” I ask urgently.
“Think so … Yes, yes.”
“We’ll have to go out the front.”
I look up. “Mimi, we have to — Where are you?”
In the dim light from the hurricane lamp, the last drops of paraffin feeding the tiny, fading flame, I see Mimi kneeling by Ange’s head on the old kitchen floor, stroking the tangled hair off her face.
“Mimi,” Ange croaks, raising her shaking hand to touch Mimi’s cheek.
Mimi looks up at me, tears welling. “We — we can’t leave her here to drown,” she says. “It’s Ange. The witch has gone in the bottle. It’s really Ange.”
She lifts a strand of Ange’s dishevelled, wet hair, then looks over at the rattling window and lets out a squeal of alarm. She thrusts her hands under Ange’s trembling shoulders and frantically tries to lift her. Ange half rises, then crumples.
“I’m all right,” Cora says, propping herself against the wall. “Just a bit dizzy. I’ll try and open the front door. You help Mimi… .”
I rush to Ange, lift her in my arms. She feels weightless, like an empty shell. Even through my coat I can feel her bones, brittle like a bird’s, sharp against me as I place her arm over my shoulder.
As we hurry back into the hall, a mighty crash rocks the house.
Just behind us in the old kitchen, something heavy cracks and thuds against the table: a forked branch, ripped, torn, and blown from some battered tree, has smashed the diamond panes inwards across the old stone sink. The lamp falls and sputters out. At the same moment a torrent of rainswept wind blasts across the kitchen, whirling splinters of glass and twisted lead through the air and along the flagstones.
We splash along the hall floor to the huge front door of studded oak.
Cora is there before us. Swaying slightly, she raises a trembling hand to the iron bolt above her head and manages to push the bar aside.
In every part of the house, wood is splitting and beams groaning. From the top of the staircase above us comes an ominous shifting, creaking, and rolling. The crisscross of crunching, tangled timbers on the bend of the stairs is beginning to move slowly forward.
Cora snatches the huge iron key from its hook, pushes it into the lock, grips it hard, and turns it with both hands.
The rumbling of the d
ammed wood becomes a monstrous, thunderous roaring. A torrent begins to gush down the stairs, bubbling, frothing, and tumbling.
Cora and Mimi together drag the ancient door open. A surge of liquid mud comes pouring through the gap, rushing in swirling eddies over and around our boots, sprawling its way along the length of the hall and into every room. The freezing, roaring wind blasts us back into the hall, our wet faces lashed by the rush of cold air.
I grasp Ange as tightly as I can, then, pushing Cora and Mimi ahead, plunge forward myself through the flooded porch and out into the churning water. Behind us, the broken wooden beams burst free and hurl themselves headlong down the stairs and lodge across the open doorway.
We splash desperately towards the Chase. A booming sound rises above the gale — the growling, snarling roll of the gigantic incoming wave.
Drenched, heads bent forward against the whipping wind, branches and broken roof tiles flying perilously around us, we hurry on. The flood water is so high it is almost impossible to make out the curved line of the creek. We must be nearly at the bridge, though can see nothing but an endless wash of dark, gurgling water.
Then the weak moon appears again among the frayed edges of the tumbling black clouds, and the tips of the foaming waves glisten in its feeble light.
Quickly I hoist Ange up and bundle her over my shoulder, grab Cora’s hand and pull her stumbling along.
Mimi turns towards me, then freezes, her eyes fixed somewhere over my shoulder.
I twist my neck.
A great foaming surge is gushing round the corners of both wings of the house. Huge branches, the long brown straps of reeds, bits of fencing posts, tiles, are rushing towards us, tossed and pitched effortlessly on the frothing swell.
“Run, Mimi!”
The dark silhouettes of the two old farm cottages over on the Chase loom up ahead of us out of the darkness.
“Where’s the bridge?” Mimi yells.
“Guess!” I shout. “We can’t wait!”
Mimi launches herself into the water. Mercifully it comes just short of the top of her boots. She steadies herself against the flow, then flounders across the submerged planks to the other side.
I brace myself, lock my hand in Cora’s, and charge forward behind Mimi. Though we are unbalanced for a moment by Ange’s dangling body, our feet land on the planks a few inches below the surface. We steel ourselves against the buffeting wind, which nearly blows us into the swollen creek, then stagger across.
A second later, the immense rolling, freezing wave slams into our backs with a howling roar, hurling us forward, slapping out our breath. Cora’s hand is wrenched away from mine.
A blundering roar, a thundering hiss.
The flames are quenched in an icy torrent.
The halfworld slips away from me.
In my narrow prison I am lifted, tossed, and plunged into a whirling swell.
I try and turn towards Cora, struggle to stretch out my hand, but am stunned by the force and weight of the churning water, lifting me off my feet for a few terrifying seconds, threatening to sweep Ange off my shoulder. My clothes, instantly saturated, drag me along with the surge.
The wave washes away from us. I choke filthy water out of my throat, swing Ange, sluggish and drenched, off my back and into my heavy arms, where she splutters and retches. I look around in a panic for Cora, and with a rush of relief see her, panting and coughing, trying to steady herself, a few feet away. I stagger towards her. She clutches at my shoulder, holds on.
“Mimi … where’s Mimi?” she cries, a line of fresh blood escaping from under her hat and down her wet cheek.
I squint into the darkness. Mimi is ahead on the other side, wading through the deep, thick mud by the cottages at the bottom of the upper field, which rises steeply up to the edge of Glebe Woods, where the trees curve away from the brow of the hill in a black, wind-tossed mass.
“She’s there, Cora — over there!”
Mimi looks up. “Quick! Quick!” she barks from across the Chase. “The water’s coming back!”
Cora and I lurch forward in our leaden boots and sodden, cumbersome coats, Ange limp and soaking in my arms. Knees and ankles aching, hearts thumping, we stagger up the slope through the sludge of mud and grass, tripping and stumbling, up towards the trees, the wind lashing our wet hair against our cheeks.
Below us, the vast, unstoppable flood crashes once more over the ancient house, then races on over the swollen creek to wash through the two old cottages.
For a time only the roof timbers of Guerdon Hall are visible above the heaving, frothing swell. When the water pulls back for a moment, the house seems to sway in a bubbling, gurgling dance to the groaning of collapsing walls and the crunch of timbers scraping against one another in the submerged rooms and passages.
Over the swirling surface of the water, the foam lifts off the wave crests, arching and feathering into the air like departing ghosts.
And distantly, above the bellowing of the wind, we hear the passing bell of All Hallows church, clanging alone in its empty tower.
Exhausted, my arms straining, I hoist Ange up over my shoulder once more as we stand huddled together gazing down the slope, unable to turn our eyes from the wreckage below.
“I lost Aggie,” Mimi says. “She floated away.”
I am bobbed and buffeted by the gurgling water — for how long I do not know, cannot sense the passing hours, or when night becomes day. It is all the same — Aphra sightless and silent, carried close and confined for whatever passes for time on the foam of the sea.
But the swollen tide turns, lifts me in its hurtling, rushing surge back to the land. I am pounded, struck, shattered into fragments, flung out, scattered among nails and glass, up into dazzling light, down into green-black bubbles, whirled and pulled and twisted. A monstrous, jagged branch rolls past, rocks and swells close by, then drops slowly and comes to rest with me on the soft, drowned earth as the water ebbs away.
But the surface will not hold me. I begin to sink into the soil. I have no hands to feel, no bone or sinew, no skin in which to wrap myself. The woman has gone too far from me, but why do I still sense the iron-smell of her blood? It pulls at me, draws me onward. I gather speed and rush along, formless, through the soaking ground.
The hawthorn stretches out its gnarled, twisted roots to loop and snatch me.
Light, airy voices come to me — Matty the Boy, Little Clim, Dorcas Oates.
“Play with us, stay with us, Aphra… .”
The ringing, spiteful laughter of Tilly Murrell.
“You are betrayed, Aphra. Your curse has betrayed you… . The spell went crooked, Aphra… .”
They fade into the space between worlds — the little colourless faces, the pale limbs …
Still I am hurried on.
Pierced and broken, I peer through the earth for Zillah and Damaris, but in vain, for water did not come and lift them out of the fire that second time, as it did me. The water should not have come, the charm was not in accordance — “The spell went crooked, Aphra… .”
I search for him in this place, for Cain Lankin, but know he is nothing more than dust in the heavens.
Then I am sucked up — up out of the sodden ground, between the wet clumps of matted grass, among tangled and broken briars — and come to lie motionless, helpless in the watery mud, under a wash of cold, grey light… .
Once more I can see the church tower capped by its small spire, and the opening of the belfry window set among the solid stones.
I remember the cutting of the iron anklet, the dragging of the chains, the oozing sores, the gnawing hunger. I looked out from the gap of window there, watched them fetch the wood. I hear again the drummer on his stool, sounding out the heartbeat of my last hour. I see Lord Myldmaye, my judge, and Edmund Guerdon on their high horses, talking together so as not to look upon me, and the priest, Hillyard, muttering his prayers in the bitter cold for my salvation.
And in the high hook of the tree he sits g
azing down at me, my own Cain Lankin, disfigured and spoiled.
That day, for his sake I did not want to die, and since then I have suffered the torment of perpetual life.
My curse still holds me here.
But how can I be held by her blood?
The witch bottle shattered in the water. What is this prison that confines me now?
The stitches pull and prickle. My head throbs.
The wind rattles Roger’s bedroom window, thuds and scuds around the house. I hold every muscle taut, hide under the blanket to shut out the noise, lie there shivering, crawling with sweat, trying to unravel the snarled threads.
Ange clammy, ash-grey, breath barely fluttering under the red blanket, the district nurse stroking her forehead, timing her pulse against her watch. The shrill ringing of the bell as the ambulance pushes back through the water swilling over Fieldpath Road, trying to get Ange to hospital by way of North Fairing to avoid the flooded Lokswood road.
Whispering. Frowning.
“Can’t have Roger and Pete sleeping in the sitting room indefinitely,” says Mr. Jotman. “Pam had better come in with us, and the boys can go into the loft for the time being.”
Pete storming off to sit by himself in the kitchen.
Telephone calls made and received in hushed voices.
The air hanging heavy with questions.
Mr. Jotman battles through the squall to fetch the camp bed from the shed.
“Honestly, Rex, we can’t let anyone sleep on that old thing,” says Mrs. Jotman. “It was my father’s. It must have seen action in the trenches.”
Pete comes in, his face a frown. “Well, I’m not sleeping on it, for a start!”
“You can have Pam’s bed, then. Roger won’t mind.”
The district nurse’s rustling, navy-blue bosom, thermometer, surgical spirit, gleaming scissors. Jerky, spiky stinging, aspirins, iodine, bristling tears, lint and bandage on head and hand.
“Let Mrs. Jotman know if you feel sick or dizzy.”
I feel both.
The Mark of Cain Page 31
