Hexenhaus

by Nikki McWatters

  I look at Brent. He’s a solid, muscly boy, with a dark thatch of short hair and a honey-melt smile that does the girls’ heads in. He’s Ben’s best mate and a good guy. He is also the last person on earth I can imagine organising a new-age festival.

  ‘I think Isaiah’s just doing this for attention,’ Brent says dismissively. ‘When he gets hungry and cold enough he’ll come skulking back. Can’t your mum tell the future, Paisley? Isn’t she a psychic or something? She should use her magic cards or whatever to find him.’

  ‘Do you even know what tarot cards are, Brent?’ I laugh.

  ‘Um.’ He laughs back. ‘Not really, but I know I’m a Pisces. That’s a fish, isn’t it? Which is kind of stupid because I hate water. Don’t even like getting in a bath. I’ve always had a phobia about being sucked down the plughole.’

  It is at this point in the conversation that Mrs Digby strides up, flanked by two other local mothers.

  ‘Ben,’ she says, glaring at him. ‘This is a make-or-break year for you at school and I will not have you wasting your time on such a ridiculous fancy.’

  Ben’s dad is the local butcher and his mum works there sharpening the knives and cleaning down the benches. As a vegan sort of household I have little call to go in there. I pipe up although I probably shouldn’t given the palpable animosity in the air. And I’m thinking of her with those carving knives.

  ‘It will really be good for all the local businesses,’ I tell her. ‘It will help book out all the local guesthouses and motels and those people will all need to be fed, so the hotel and all those places will be stocking up on a lot more meat.’

  She looks at me as if I’ve just stabbed her in the eye. She blinks rapidly.

  ‘Ben,’ she snaps, her eyes not leaving mine. ‘We’re going home now.’

  ‘I’ll walk,’ he says.

  ‘Ben, we’re going home now,’ she repeats.

  ‘Come on, Paise,’ Ben says. ‘Guys. I’ll be home later, Mum. I’ll grab a pizza with the committee and have a little meeting and I’ll see you at home.’

  We turn our backs on the three women who stand there, arms folded like overgrown mean girls, shaking their heads disapprovingly at us.

  We stop in at the Primula and order pizzas, which Brent shouts us because he’s now working at McDonald’s on the highway.

  ‘Good to see you,’ the very exuberant owner says, welcoming us. ‘You’re not going to put a hex on us, are you, Paisley?’

  ‘That used to be funny, Pete.’ I sigh. ‘Not so much these days.’

  I order a vegetarian pizza. I’m not as hard-core vegan as Mum and lash out on a cheese fest now and again.

  ‘So what the heck are we doing?’ Brent laughs after putting his order in for two meatlovers for the boys and a Hawaiian for Em. ‘Does this make us honorary wizards or something?’

  ‘Oh, definitely.’ I grin. ‘Look. It’s just a one-day thing to celebrate the shortest day of the year. It was a big day in pagan societies, to do with crops and harvests, or something, and, in case you don’t know, the old ways, the pagan ways, are actually as much your ancestral heritage as the whole Judeo-Christian thing that the Western world subscribes to. You’re all a lot more pagan than you realise.’

  ‘Yeah right.’ Ben laughs. ‘How so? I don’t actually even know what star sign I am and as if being a crab or a bull or something is actually going to affect my personality. I’m about as pagan as a can of Coke or an Xbox. Yeah, that’s it, I was born under the sign of Zelda.’

  ‘Do you and your family put up a Christmas tree?’ I ask them, a little more seriously than I mean to. ‘Eat Easter eggs? Saying “bless you” when someone sneezes? All pagan stuff.’

  ‘Get the girl a soapbox to stand on.’ Ben claps his hands.

  ‘And a wreath of daisies for her hair,’ Em adds. ‘Bloody hippy!’

  I have to laugh and put my head in my hands. I’m sounding just like my mother.

  ‘We’ll make this the best festival ever,’ Brent says. ‘It sounds like fun and maybe we could get a band and have some great entertainment. And a magic show, like with sawing someone in half and all that, like in Vegas.’

  ‘I don’t want it to be Vegas, Brent,’ I smile at the guy who is bouncing in his seat. ‘Let’s make the theme be community and inclusion. Accepting differences and stuff. Maybe if we’d been more inclusive of Isaiah he wouldn’t have had a breakdown and run away.’

  For the first time in a month I feel like I am treading water again instead of drowning. Mum is not in the clear yet, not even in the shallows, but with Ben looking at me the way he is right now, like I am a chocolate croissant straight from the oven, life is looking up and I am feeling like the glass is half full again. I’m surfing on the possibility that everything will be all right. Isaiah Hooper will turn up, remorseful after a bit of soul-searching, and he’ll tell everyone it was just a prank and we will all live happily ever after.

  ‘There’s a lot of fear in the town about Mum and what is happening with the Hoopers,’ I tell them. ‘This festival can heal that and bring us all closer together again. I have to do this for Mum. So, thanks, guys.’

  I have been dragged from town to town since I was little and for the first time tonight, with this group of friends standing up to support Mum and me, I feel like a part of a bigger family. It feels really, really good.

  At home I check Facebook and see that someone from school, Millie Jameson, who I barely know except to say hi to, has shared a link to a page. I feel a creeping sense of dread as I click on it. The page is called The Bundanoon Witches. There is a picture of my mother and me. We are on broomsticks. I feel my heart beginning to hammer as I read some of the comments. Someone I’ve never heard of has written that Ben Digby is only going out with me because Brent dared him to kiss the witch girl. I inhale sharply and shut my eyes seeing the tiny explosions of light beneath my lids. My mouth is dry. It’s nonsense. It’s just trolling. It’s not real. But now I am thinking that Ben didn’t show any sign of asking me out or being romantically involved until the day after Isaiah made his accusation against Mum. It couldn’t be true. Paranoia begins to haunt me.

  And the night that was panning out to be really great just takes a dive into really horrible again.

  VERONICA

  BAMBERG, FRANCONIA, 1629

  Curled up on the wooden floor with nothing but the threadbare, lice-infested square of blanket for warmth, pressed up like a child against Kristina, I had slept that first night like a small boat on a choppy sea. Every noise startled me, ripping me from the lapping of sleep: the sound of footsteps, the scrape of a chamber-pot on the floor, the heaving rattle of chests, the dried chortling snores and the murmurs of the slumbering souls, jabbering through their nightmares.

  Somewhere among the turbulence I managed to dream of Hans and my parents. It was summer and the light was orange. The tang of salt was in the air as we sailed on a large wooden ship. Upon waking I could not remember if I had dreamed of a real trip that we might have taken when I was smaller or simply some fantastical imagining of my own. I knew that I had once been on the water, sailing through the scales of waves, but I could not recall when or where. Another tattered ribbon of a dream had me picking lilacs from a well-flowered bush, inhaling the sweet scent of spring. The dreams were sewn together with jolts of terror as I woke to the stench of urine and body grease.

  Kristina began moaning and I sat up for a moment startled and confused, not immediately aware of my surroundings. Then came the sinking realisation like a heavy blow to my heart that this was not all just a bad dream. With the faint, lingering aroma of lilacs from my dream I thought again of Mutti and Papa and then, sadly, I remembered what had happened to them. I looked about the dim expanse of misery and felt the shadow of my mother who had struggled through the ordeal in this very Hexenhaus only to be burned alive. She could have been spared the horror by having her he
ad first severed but was instead dealt a sterner fate because she had not named her accomplices. My teeth clenched tightly and my eyes leaked hot salty tears as I thought of my beautiful, regal mother. I prayed that she was looking over me from Heaven, looking down from the angelic sky to her own daughter, who now lay in filth in the very bowels of Hell.

  ‘Oh, Lord,’ Kristina moaned, her voice so small and shrivelled it was hard to hear. ‘Not another day. Every night I pray that the good Lord will take my soul from this place and set me free.’ She looked across at me and squinted, her bad eye more swollen and lost in a pillow of black.

  ‘I thought I’d dreamed of you, Veronica, but here you are. Where is Hans?’

  The sound of his name brought a rush of terrible images of Hans being captured and imprisoned in the cell across the corridor. The room I was in already had a handful of children his age or younger. I looked at her yellowing face in the fetid gloom and spoke with a wary restraint.

  ‘He is safe,’ I answered, revealing no other information to her.

  The hunger gnawed beneath my ribs and I unwrapped the corner of tough bread and the slimy cheese and broke what I had in two to share it with Kristina. I held it out to her and she shook her head.

  ‘You will have to put it in my mouth, sweet girl, as my arms are useless, broken and torn from the shoulders. Even if they released me now I could not walk out of here.’

  I looked at her and realised that I had not seen her sit upright, not once. She lay in a crumpled mess on the floor like an airing blanket fallen from a strung line to a pile on the ground. Her head moved and her eyes moved and her hands trembled but her arms were slack and lifeless and her feet turned in on themselves the wrong way. I realised with a wave of vomit to my throat that many of her bones were broken or crushed.

  ‘Oh, Kristina,’ I began to cry. ‘What have they done to you?’

  ‘Don’t cry, child,’ she said in a soothing voice. ‘I will be out of my pain soon enough. They have beaten a confession out of me so it will soon be my turn to take the wagon to the square. I only pray that the swordsman will be quick and that I will not be able to still see when my head rolls. I’ve heard others say that the eyes of a dispatched head still turn and blink for some time.’

  ‘Shh,’ I whispered and broke the small chunks of food into smaller morsels and put them to her mouth.

  ‘They picked me up after I took a job with Dr Haan’s widow and her children but they too were implicated after your father’s and Dr Haan’s deaths and executed. And then the inquisitors asked after you and Hans. In the searing pain of torture, I am sorry that I might have said that I thought you were on the road to Würzburg. Is that how they found you? I am sorry.’

  ‘No,’ I replied. ‘They do not know my name and picked me up as a vagrant in the marketplace at Ebrach.’

  I finished my cheese and remembered that the guard had told me that there would be no food. This cheese and bread would be my last meal.

  ‘How have you survived so long without food?’ I asked Kristina.

  ‘The people from the pauper house come by once a week and throw the scraps in at us like pig swill. We get by on knobs of carrots, green potatoes and stones of bread that we spit on to soften. Between the slop, I grit my teeth a lot. And there is a tub of water refilled every day that we all have to drink from with our hands. There is not enough for washing. There was a woman who brought me water in her own mug but she died yesterday. They have already taken her rags, stone plate and mug and burned them.’

  I stroked the mottled arm of my dear Kristina with her cheeks hollowed, her temples melted and her swollen eye. Her wrist and forearm were so frail and her crooked back, beneath the filthy slip, was a ladder of bones.

  When the sun reached the grill in the window, the heavy doors, barred with iron, opened and let a small breath of cleaner air into the room.

  ‘Those of you who arrived yesterday stand up and come out into the hallway,’ a guard ordered.

  I was not going to disobey. Looking down at Kristina’s broken body was encouragement enough to do my best to be agreeable and keep my head down.

  The guard was young and his rough blond hair stuck up in oily tufts. A rash of pimples punctuated his jawline. He was little more than a boy. A baker’s dozen of us shuffled into the harsh white light of the corridor where streams of the sun’s rays beamed through the window at the front of the building. I blinked, momentarily blinded, and could only make out a blackened silhouette standing before us.

  As my eyes focused and cooled I saw a short, fat man in fine black velvet clothes with a plumed hat upon his head. He took it off and brushed at the black feather absently.

  ‘So this is the new gaggle of the devil’s geese? A sorry lot,’ he said, casting his eyes over us. I was struck immediately by the familiar voice and cabbage-round face.

  This was the Hexenbischof himself, the man who had ordered the death of my parents and most of the other mayors of Bamberg along with their families, and somewhere in the vicinity of a thousand other lives.

  I remembered, now, that he had once been to our house. I believe it must have been our country estate with the spread of fruit trees bordering it. He had come with a flourish some years back, maybe five or six years, when he was first appointed to his role. He had come to meet my father, the Burgermeister, to confirm his allegiance. I shivered under his gaze.

  He now walked his ample frame, more rolling than walking, down past each one of us inspecting us, lingering on the youngest of us and simply pulling a face like he had a rancid oyster in his mouth upon looking at the one old, toothless mad woman among us.

  ‘Life is short and cheap,’ he said in a booming voice, ‘and for the protection of the people of this district, we have legislated laws to counter the wave of witch terror that the likes of you and your fellow-accused are guilty of. You were picked up without warrant and do not have access to legal representation. You will be kept here until you confess whatever sins you are hiding.’

  His dangerous words made me feel like an unprotected animal or child.

  He thundered on. ‘An army of witches is actively working against our community. This Godly house, sanctified by myself, a true representative of God on earth, was established to force confessions from the guilty. We want to know what pacts you have made with Satan and who your accomplices are.’

  I held my breath as he came back to me and stared openly.

  He rubbed his sausage hands up over his high dome of a head, screwed his eyes up a little and pressed his tongue between his teeth before speaking again. ‘You look familiar,’ he growled. ‘What is your name?’

  I stayed silent, my eyes darting everywhere but toward his. I panicked and was just about to babble some lie when the second guard, the one who had brought me to this place, piped up.

  ‘Rosa of Bamberg.’ He laughed. ‘She will not tell us more so we call her Rosa the Pretty.’

  ‘Your father’s name?’ the Hexenbischof demanded.

  I could not think of a single thing to say. I did not want to share my name because both Rosa and Johannes Junius had passed through the Hell-house to their deaths and the damning letter from my father had been confiscated from my possessions back in the paddock where we had last seen our horse. I would be condemned by my name. But I was also afraid to draw too much familiarity between me and the Kilian name for fear that they would bring the widow, Christoff’s mother, in for questioning. For fear of saying the wrong thing, I stayed quiet and in those moments my silence hummed like the noise of background insects rubbing their wings together.

  The man grabbed my hands in his and turned them over, kneading my flesh with his fat fingers.

  ‘These are not fingers that have spent a life of labour,’ he spoke, frowning.

  My hands had worked hard over the past months, gardening and tending to the chores around Frau Berchta’s farmlet, but he was r
ight, they were not cracked and calloused like they would be on a scullery maid or farm girl. For almost all of my seventeen years I had been mollycoddled by nannies and servants, having been the daughter of a wealthy man. Only after my mother was spirited away in the witch cage did the groundsman and the maids leave. But Kristina stayed, even when my father was taken, and I had only small pouches of coins to give her.

  ‘These pretty soft hands belong to a family of some standing not some slovenly servant,’ he said with a leering smile and continued to roll my hands in his. ‘You look very similar to another Rosa we had as a guest here. I remember every pretty one. They always put up more of a fight. I believe they are deeper in league with the devil. Perhaps he favours the most pleasing ones. They are more defiant and that’s not such a Godly thing for a woman to be. Don’t be defiant, girl. Your name! Let me have it.’

  I should have just told him. I should have just been proud to be my parents’ daughter. But he was right. I was defiant. He had killed my parents and been indirectly responsible for shattering the body of my brother’s nurse, a woman no more a witch than a cuckoo. Simply because he wanted me to give him the name, I did not.

  ‘Take her now,’ his mouth smacked out the words. ‘Push her until she breaks and gives us a name.’

  He dropped my hands and clicked his fingers at the droopy-eyed cruel guard. ‘Horst!’

  The guard stepped forward, a disturbing smile playing on his lips.

  ‘How hard should I push her, my Lord?’ he asked.

  I felt a shiver of dread run down my spine.

  ‘Hard and fast,’ the Hexenbischof answered. ‘We are taking the cart to the square for a bonfire this afternoon. Three are to be dispatched today. We will need you back in the yard at midday. So short and sharp. No time to waste.’

  Breathless with fear, I was dragged out of the line-up, pulled toward the narrow staircase and then shoved downwards, tripping on my skirt, my bare feet numb with cold against the wooden steps. I was pushed, wordlessly, down two flights of stairs to the ground level and past a room that looked like a chapel to another room wedged toward the back of the building.