Hexenhaus

by Nikki McWatters

  The alarm rips through my stupid fantasies and I hear the rain on the roof, again. It’s going to be another wet day.

  VERONICA

  BAMBERG, FRANCONIA, 1629

  I needed the tonic of the wilderness. I had slept a little and woke as the mist rose from the meadows at dawn. We stopped as the morning frost began to melt in an open field of grass speckled with mulberry trees dotted with the early green buds of spring. Christoff unpacked some dried food that Frau Berchta had sent, along with a flagon of cool fresh water. I gulped it down like a parched dog, fiercely and desperately, and it tasted so good.

  The meadow ran down to a stream and a stretch of eager willows wilted to lap at the cool water. Christoff and I said very little. He could imagine the horrors I had known back in the prison and did not force small talk upon me or seek to ask me questions. I was still letting the idea of freedom settle on me as it had come so suddenly as to send me into a spiral of shock. The blast of colours from the new spring world was a flurry of brushstrokes against the pale grey canvas I’d become accustomed to and my eyes and ears were struggling to catch up.

  ‘I would like to wash a little before we set off,’ I said eventually, looking at the stream. ‘I don’t want to scare Hans and I think I might look quite frightful.’

  ‘No.’ Christoff smiled gently as he whittled a piece of wood beneath a sharp blade. ‘Even with your long hair gone and the smudge of bruises, you are beautiful. I will go for a walk and leave you to wash but call out if you need me. I won’t be far away.’

  I looked into his wide face and understood, with a weary joy, that I loved him.

  I sat at the edge of the water and let my bare feet, so bruised and scratched and filthy, rest on the smooth stones. The gurgle of freezing water tickled over them and I shut my eyes and let myself fall into the experience. After a few moments I opened my eyes and began to gently massage the dirt and ache from my small feet, watching them turn from sooty black to pink once again. The water was icy from the snowmelts upstream but it was refreshing and the cold numbed my open wounds and aching bones. I gave a little cry of shock as I splashed my face and ran some water through my short, patchy hair, working out some of the caked blood and sweat until it felt softer and silkier than it had for many months.

  I lay back on the cold grass and let the warmth of the sun dry my hair back to its golden colour and felt myself waking up and becoming Veronica again. I could see in the glare that some smaller bones in my hands and feet were broken and I would need to bind and rest them until they mended. The black in my leg wounds where I had been repeatedly burned would need to be scraped and bled, and I hoped that Frau Berchta would know how best to save my skin from too much scarring. Part of me wanted to stay with my riddled, gnarled mess of legs soaking in the soothing brook for the rest of the day.

  I watched two small red-brown weasels squeaking and chirruping as they wheedled and wrestled one another on the other bank across from me, playing in the small puddles of snow that had not yet thawed. There would be no more snowfalls and only the very last deeper dells were waiting for their snowy shrouds to bleed into the earth for another year. I heard the faint silvery warbles of a bluebird, tinkling down from the trees. The landscape was me and I felt it down to my bones. I suddenly knew more than ever that I was one with nature and realised that the secret of life was to learn to read it and listen when it spoke to you. As I watched the ribbon of water sparkling in the early morning sun, the murmur was of youth and joy and life. I had been dead, in hibernation in the Hexenhaus, just like the bears that slumbered through winter or the tiny plants that were buried beneath the snow throughout the long ordeal of dark months. Where only the day before there had been cold grey sheets of impenetrable ice in my life, there was now a calm hope reflecting from an early spring flashing blue water.

  Overhead a flock of birds flew by, the flap and squawk of them tumbling to the ground below, and from the slimy, melting banks of the stream a gurgle of frogs started up a honking choir.

  Slowly, still with pain but made more bearable with the promise of hope, I stood up and hobbled back to the cart and called for Christoff. He took my elbow and guided me through the grass, lifting me like a child in his strong arms to settle me into the back of the cart. Our eyes met and we froze for a few moments, looking into each other’s souls.

  ‘You saved my life, Christoff.’ I smiled. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘And you saved mine, Veronica,’ he whispered.

  We set off, keeping away from any well-trodden paths. Sometimes we had to go very slowly with Christoff jumping down to clear logs and rotting wood that had lain soaking in the cold over winter. It was a slow journey but I was not strong enough to walk the narrower paths that cut a quicker swathe to Frau Berchta’s cottage.

  It was the fading lilac of the day when the scenery began to look familiar and it was with such joy and gratitude to both my God and Frau Berchta’s Goddess that I pricked up my ears at a shrill sound ringing high through the woods. It was a song with strange words, high and melodic, a song from the land of the long shadows. I stopped Christoff at the top of the meadow as soon as I could smell the wood fire in the air, the song much closer.

  ‘Will you help me walk down the hill?’ I asked him. ‘I want to be on my feet when I see my brother so that he doesn’t know just how broken I am.’

  Christoff pulled up the horse and gave him a handful of corn to munch on. Then he came to lift me from the back of the cart. My feet were cold and numb on the ground but that only helped me to walk a little stronger as the numbness ate away at the pain.

  We began to step together, Christoff with one arm snaked back around my waist and me gripping his elbow to try my best to appear stronger than I was. I cannot tell you what it was like to be walking through the stiff grasses, down toward the stream that ran like a moat before the cottage, to smell garlic and timber in the early night air. There was nothing in this world like it.

  I was home.

  The door flew open and a little man in breeches squealed and jumped, his hands pumping the air. He tumbled and ran and leapt like a puppy, straight through the stream without stopping to take off his boots.

  ‘Veronica!’ he screamed and although I could see a pale white shadow in the doorway beyond, I only had eyes for Hans.

  I sobbed into his lemon-yellow hair as he hugged me as tightly as if I were a precious gift, and I held him back with as much strength as my arms could muster, holding my brother, feeling his warmth, smelling his sweet, syrupy scent.

  ‘Hans,’ I whispered.

  Inside, Frau Berchta had a brew ready for me and she took me to her own bed so that I did not have to climb the stairs. She sat with me while the boys made tea and served up bowls of pungent broth. I could not eat too much as my belly had shrunk past starvation and more than a few mouthfuls made me sick. No one asked about the ordeal but I smiled, leaning back against the soft plump of pillow as Christoff reported proudly how he had taken out seven guards with his kegs of beer. I heard some singing and felt the warmth of the fire in the cottage reddening my cheeks and I fell asleep to the gentle caress of the old woman’s hands, rubbing ointments and unction into my leg wounds. I left her to heal me, knowing and trusting that she could. In the dim light of the night, through a dreamy haze of delirium from the brew she had given me, I felt Hans bend and coil into the folds of my sleeping body, patting my hair. There was something else in the wide bed and before dawn I opened my eyes and was fairly certain it was a sleeping hedgehog. I smiled. Ambrose the hedgehog.

  KATHERINE

  RENFREWSHIRE, SCOTLAND, 1697

  It wasn’t death so much that frightened me. Everyone knows that they must die one day, but it was the fear that when it came I would not meet it well. Most, unless they died as bairns, had a long illness and a bedridden time to contemplate their impending demise. But a condemned witch, without need for the foresight of the devil, kn
ew exactly what day she would have the life taken from her, snuffed out quickly, if she was lucky, like a crushed candlewick. The greatest fear I harboured was the burning. The clergy loved to burn things. Incense. Candles. Banned books. Outlawed monasteries of faiths that were no longer acceptable. And witches. It had something to do with purification.

  I had heard tell of people being burned alive at the stake and the thought tightened the breath in my chest. I had burned myself cooking and tending the hearth and even a small singe left a nasty blister and pained terribly for days on end. It was a pain unlike others, raw and deep. To live through a long, melting, blistering burn was a torture too great for any creature on God’s earth, witch or not. But my sentence meant that I would be hanged first and then have my lifeless body thrown on the flames to sizzle and pop until I was nothing more than a charred frame. I only hoped they wirried me fast and hard so that it would be quick.

  In the hot cell I now shared with all the condemned women – Agnes, Margaret Lang and the madwoman, Peg Fulton – the flies whizzed about, drunk with humidity, and the floor was sticky underfoot. There was little to do but sit and arrange the pale brown strips of hay on the floor into patterns and I had made some amazing creations. I recreated scenes: my Highland cottage, faces, birds.

  ‘My mother was a witch,’ Agnes said one day, and Margaret Lang and I looked up sharply at her to see the old woman hunched into a ball, rocking in the dim corner of the room, her white hair plastered down in clumps, her green eyes clouded by early blindness.

  ‘What do you mean by that, old woman?’ Margaret asked.

  Peg Fulton had bunting for brains. The imprisonment and interrogations and tortures had seen her spirit, a wild one, flitter from her to evaporate and disappear. Peg was no more. She had long gone and only some ghost of her remained. She had become childlike and sang and skipped on the spot and spoke of fairies.

  ‘My mother knew how to make things happen,’ Agnes cackled from the corner. ‘She knew the old arts, taught to her by her mother and her mother before her. She could fell kings and build up princes. She and her wayward sisters, the three, knew that fair is foul and foul is fair.’

  ‘What gibberish are you talking?’ I scolded.

  ‘I’m saying that in good there is evil and in evil, good.’ She smiled, showing where her teeth were beginning to crumble to grey dust. ‘These men of God are seeking out the devil but in doing so become guilty of the sin thou shalt not kill. It will be their souls that will burn for eternity. We know that we are God-fearing women and yet with lies and cruelty, intentional too, we are marked as the devil’s women for all of eternity. Our names will not be remembered for who we loved or what gentle kindness we showed to strangers. We will be witches, those evil women who sought to dance with the devil and ended up on a pile of ashes.’

  I thought about the old hag’s words. Who would be left to remember me? My parents were gone, butchered before me. My sister had betrayed me and quite possibly believed the nonsense that I was an evil conniving sorceress. John had abandoned me, too, and that was my greatest pain. For some nights since the trial I had clung to the hope that John would honour his promise of sending someone on a horse to rescue me from the gallows, but good reason had settled. I knew that the opportunity to save me in the courtroom with the evidence of Reverend Brisbane’s meddling with the possessed child’s mind had not been summoned, and there was good reason for that. John could not save me or, worse, would not save me and had only made sweeping promises in the hope that I would, in turn, not mention his name.

  ‘Why have you protected John?’ I asked Agnes Naismith, pulling my chain behind me as I came closer to the woman. ‘You could have mentioned his name and escaped this fate but you did not.’

  The old woman continued to rock on her haunches, smiling. ‘He has a job to do that will change all of Scotland and for that his freedom is more important than my own,’ she whispered. ‘But more than that, I made a promise and I am an honourable woman. They mean to kill us all and it is not his fault that they have us here. What would dragging him down do for good? Naught.’

  I pondered on that.

  ‘It is always the way with these things,’ Agnes went on. ‘We are small ones that don’t count on our own. Weak women. Poor men. Outsiders and agitators for something better, something fairer, more tolerance. Sometimes to understand the true need for peace there must be war. To understand why people should not be persecuted for believing outside of the one church, or the one crown, to wave the flag for tolerance, some must burn.’

  I sat beside the crumpled woman and held her wrinkled, mottled, bony hand and began to cry. ‘I don’t want to die,’ I sobbed, a knot of pain lodging in my throat.

  ‘No one wants to die,’ the old woman soothed. ‘But die we all do, lassie. Every one of us.’

  ‘But I’ve done nothing wrong,’ I moaned, tears streaming down my dirty face. ‘I loved a man and was moved by his words and passion but I’ve not harmed a hair on anyone’s head. I kept my tongue when I could have saved myself by condemning him, because by doing so I would be no better than them by causing a man’s death.’

  ‘God will know my truth and he will judge our souls,’ Margaret Lang called across to us. ‘I look forward to meeting him to set this right.’

  Peg sang a song and plaited hay, sounding like a carefree child. I longed to be in that place and through my tears my mind skipped back over the years to my happy childhood on the Scottish hills, playing on an open roll of hills, dusted with purple heather, with the wind singing in my long wild hair. My mind scrambled over the clash of swords and the hungry times and the charred sticks of bone that my mammie became, then I sallied forth through time to John Erskine and the light in his eyes, the warmth of his touch and the fire in his words.

  ‘They will learn one day that the devil doesn’t lurk on the moors or in the groves and he doesn’t fly through the air on pigs or broomsticks,’ Agnes said in a soft voice, level and even, without any fear or anger. ‘They will see that those with the burning sticks decrying the evil in others, they be the devil. The devil wears a bonnet and a cassock and a crucifix as often as not and the devil builds gallows and bonfires.’

  ‘That James Brisbane,’ I spoke up, sniffing back my salty tears. ‘He is the devil and all those like him who dare to judge the souls of the likes of us. There is but one judge and that is the God my mammie gave me. I can tell you I sleep well and straight and do not have any fear for my eternal soul, but that clergyman will be rebuked by his maker for his hand in this possession of the child, little Christian Shaw, of that I have no doubt.’

  ‘I do not blame the child.’ Agnes shook her head. ‘She does not know how she has been possessed, but possessed she has been.’

  ‘By fear and by terror she has been possessed,’ I agreed. ‘And the poor girl looks for the cause in the only things her little eyes can see: us, those around her who are different, not well dressed with fancy words. Her mammie and da are nobles. She has night sweats and terrors from the terrible tales that minister of God has told her and she ascribes them to us. For who else could it be? The girls at Salem blamed their maids, the old, the infirm, aye, those most unlike them when, of course, they were actually possessing themselves.’

  PAISLEY

  BUNDANOON, AUSTRALIA, PRESENT DAY

  I look out through the windshield. Brent is driving and Ben and Em are in the back of the car. It’s a dodgy old yellow bubble car and I am in the front because I have the most pathetic and chronic sensitivity to carsickness that it’s almost crippling. Unless the driver wants to stop a trip every five minutes for me to take in the fresh air or throw up into the gutter, I have to sit up front. I stare like a bird-watcher out the front window, training my eyes on the furthest point in the distance that I can find. Today it is a gum tree along the winding road out to Penrose.

  ‘So I wonder what the boyfriend will be like?’ Em says, leaning
in from behind to the middle section, talking to Brent.

  ‘He’s apparently some DJ, so I don’t know what he’s going to make of this backwater no-man’s land. Penrose. The end of the world,’ he says without taking his eyes off the road.

  Brent’s the only one of us who has his Ps so he’s the designated driver but his mother is paranoid and doesn’t usually let him take passengers. Not very often anyway. She doesn’t want to risk him being distracted by anything other than the road, but because his older sister Claire is coming back from a one-year stay in London with her English boyfriend, Mrs Carey has insisted that we all go out to Claire’s ramshackle farm and get it ready for her.

  ‘I don’t know how long this guy’s going to last out here,’ Brent says as he drives. ‘There’s nothing but bush. Nothing to do. He’ll be bored to death.’

  ‘I couldn’t live out here,’ Ben says, and Em agrees.

  I think about it. Sometimes the idea of being a recluse, living in my own little space in nature, sounds quite appealing. I could read and garden and listen to music and yes, well, they have a point, there isn’t really much to do in Penrose. There is lots of acreage and the houses are far and few between, hidden down dirt tracks and winding laneways. One corner shop on the dusty main road cuts down the back way to the highway and then on to Goulburn and further along to Canberra.

  ‘Considering that I’m wanting to go to university in Sydney next year,’ I say, ‘I don’t think I’d be much of a Penrosian.’

  ‘Claire paints, though, doesn’t she?’ Ben asks as we wind around the forest road.

  ‘Yeah.’ Brent nods. ‘She likes painting bush and gum trees. It’s a bit boring but not as boring as fruit, I guess.’

  I’ve met Claire. She is tall, dark-haired and very artistic. We take a left into Teudts Road and rumble down the wide, dusty gravel road with saplings and scrub hugging the way. The old car rattles and clanks and we feel every bump. It’s sunny but cold and I’m wearing my new yellow bumble-bee jumper, which is retro. I’ve got my hair in two tiny little pigtails, barely as big as a bug’s ears. Ben leans forward and begins to rub my shoulders and I feel that familiar rumble in my lower belly that I get every time he touches me. His hands generate sparks of electricity.