Richie swallowed hard and tried to stop himself from shaking. ‘You’re... quite sure about that?’ he asked, still desperately searching through the satchel.
The shimmering blur coalesced, with a rush of cold air and a musty, damp smell like the carpet of an antique shop. A wizened face appeared, twisted like bark, and ancient limbs, and a frail, hunched body swathed in grey robes. Piercing, angry blue eyes fixed on them from behind a tangle of knotted white hair.
The figure grinned - or at least, its chipped, yellowing teeth twisted themselves into something resembling a grin - and it raised its gnarled finger to point at them.
Finally, Richie found what he was looking for - his phone. ‘Right!’ he said, pointing it straight at the intruder. ‘Smile, please, spook. Lovely!’
Jess realised what he was doing. ‘Get a few of those,’ she said.
Richie was saving shot after shot on his phone. ‘Don’t worry, I will.’
Suddenly, he let out a yelp as something landed on his shoulder - but it was only Anoushka, arching his back and gripping on tightly to Richie with his sharp claws.
‘We can get out through the crypt!’ Jess yelled. ‘This way, come on!’
They spun around - to find a second figure, taller and broader than the first, blocking their way. This one was hairless and toothless, and its lined face bore an expression of contempt.
They turned slowly to look at one another. Around them, the Cathedral became darker still, and the singing reverberated through the very stone.
They backed away.
‘All right,’ Richie said. ‘Any more bright ideas?’
Anoushka was purring quietly, like a car engine turning over.
‘One,’ said Jess quietly.
She reached for the nearest pew and pulled out a leather-bound Bible, embossed in gold with the sign of the cross.
‘You’ve got to be kidding!’ said Richie nervously. ‘You’ve been watching too many bad vampire films.’
‘You may think so,’ Anoushka murmured in his ear. ‘But in folklore, it isn’t the symbol that repels them, it’s the essence. The impenetrable field of belief in a higher power that you set up around yourself. One of the ways to banish a witch is to create a barrier, one it can’t cross.’
Jess lifted the Bible slowly, meeting the cold gaze of the creatures. ‘Might be a good time to start having a little faith,’ she murmured.
Richie swallowed hard. ‘Listen, I went to Sunday school and didn’t get it, right? I used to sit at the back and read comics.’
Holding the Bible up like a shield, Jess swung it round to face each of the witches in turn. They showed no sign of weakening or of slowing their advance.
‘Not working, is it?’ Richie muttered. Although they were almost in complete darkness now, he could see the concentration on Jess’s face as she gripped the Bible intently, fingers turning bone-white. ‘Well?’ he said desperately.
Jess’s eyes snapped open, and he could see the despair on her face. She shook her head. Her grip on the Bible was beginning to weaken. ‘It’s no good,’ she whispered. ‘I can’t do it.’
‘You can’t? Why not?’
‘Isn’t it obvious?’ Jess glared at the embossed gold cross on the front of the Bible. ‘It doesn’t mean anything to me. My faith isn’t strong enough.’
The witches, crackling and glowing with energy, stepped forward, bony fingers reaching out to touch them.
‘Over here!’ shouted a strangely familiar voice.
They looked over to their right.
The doors had burst open and the dimness of the street-lighting was filtering in, along with flurries of autumn leaves which seemed to crackle as they touched the darkness. Standing in the doorway was a tall, white-haired figure in a pinstripe suit, beaming and beckoning them.
Jess’s jaw dropped. ‘Professor Ulverston!’ she exclaimed. She and Richie exchanged a brief look of astonishment.
The witches, distracted, rounded on Ulverston with a synchronised hiss, their twisted faces white and cold and their yellow teeth bared in anger.
‘Aha!’ Ulverston exclaimed in amusement. ‘You ladies really shouldn’t intimidate people, you know. It won’t help you to get a good name in the Earthworld!’
Richie and Jess retreated to the doorway.
Ulverston gripped the great brass handles firmly with both hands. Just as he began to pull on the doors, Jess turned and, with the action of a shot-putter, hurled the Bible straight at the nearest of the witches.
The book crackled with energy as it bounced off her grey body, and was held, twisting, in the air for a second. Then, it glowed icy-blue and began to strip away, layer by layer. First the leather cover, ripped from its binding, curled up and fell like a withered leaf to the dark floor. One page after another peeled off, the book turning banana-yellow and crumbling to dust in the aura around the witch.
Jess, rooted to the spot, stared in horror, but Richie pulled her away. They ran for the doors, hair whipped by the wind. Professor Ulverston gave one last heave on the doors and slammed them shut.
The sounds of singing, screaming and hissing from within the Cathedral suddenly cut off, as if someone had thrown a switch.
Richie, blinking, suddenly realised that they were standing in the cold drizzle outside. Cars swished by on the distant ringroad, headlights scattering in the sheets of water. He shivered, looking around for the Professor, but he was nowhere to be seen.
Jess, who was staring down at her empty hands as if she had just lost something of enormous value, slowly looked up at Richie.
‘Was that,’ Richie said, ‘who I thought it was...?’
She swallowed hard and nodded. ‘I... think so. Better not tell anyone about this one, eh?’
Both of them, instinctively, looked around for Anoushka - but the cat had disappeared into the darkness of the night, as quickly as he had come.
Richie patted his phone. ‘Never mind. I’m looking forward to seeing what Facebook makes of these.’ Jess raised her eyebrows at him. ‘Joke?’ he said. ‘We’re going to give them to Emerald, right?’
As they hurried away, Richie heard a rumble of thunder and saw the meanest, darkest clouds beginning to gather right above the Cathedral. For an instant, he thought he saw a pinstripe-suited figure reflected upside-down in one of the big puddles of rainwater, but it could have been a trick of the light.
And a sleek, black Mercedes, picking out the raindrops in the cone of its headlight-beam, emerged from the shadows of the Bishop’s house and slowly followed them.
The moon was high over Meresbury.
An observer high on the moors would have seen humanity’s influence slowly fade from the landscape as night grew deeper.
The glittering tower of the Cathedral stood proudly in its honey-golden floodlights until midnight precisely, when the lights went off and the edifice blinked out of sight as if swallowed by the darkness. Other yellow lights, evidence of pubs and restaurants, winked out, and the noise of music and cars diminished to just the odd passing whisper.
Further down the valley, the purple neon sign for the multi-screen cinema also went dark, as did the floodlights at the stadium. Only the orange specks of the streetlamps kept up their vigil, while winking dots of green and amber and red showed the endless loop of the traffic-lights.
It was silent and still on Scratchcombe Edge, where the Ten Sisters stood like eternal guardians in the moonlit mist.
It was silent and still within Meresbury Cathedral, where clusters of candles burned for the dead and the lost, and strange shadows still flickered high above the nave.
It was silent and still in St Agnes’ School, where chairs were stacked on desks, the rafters sang in the wind and night-lights bathed the inert computers in a blood-red glow.
It was silent and still at the
Darkwater, where the glassy lake showed only the gentlest of ripples and the pine-trees hissed softly in the lightest of breezes.
And at the edge of the lake, a slim figure in a green anorak, holding a small hand-held mp3-recorder, slipped out of the undergrowth and headed back up the path towards the forest.
Part Three
The Time Of Becoming
7
Nexus
‘Absolutely nothing!’ exclaimed Emerald Greene in frustration.
Jess, entering the dining-room with two steaming mugs of tea, stopped in her tracks. ‘You must be joking! Richie took dozens of shots!’
Emerald held up Richie’s phone disdainfully. ‘Nothing in the memory,’ she said. ‘Not a single image.’
That afternoon, the house was pungent with paint fumes. Gabi, having decided that she wanted the Mint Seashell bathroom she’d seen on Rooms For Life, was upstairs on the stepladder, painting and singing happily along to an Abba CD.
‘I don’t get it,’ Jess said faintly, as she sat down. ‘He took pics of everything. The witches, Ulverston, the lot.’
‘Do not be alarmed,’ said Emerald cheerfully.
She had a sheet of newspaper spread on the table and was tinkering with odd bits of electrical equipment. Her glasses lay beside her and Jess could see her bright green eyes glowing like the jewel on her necklace as she prodded circuits with a screwdriver. Jess wasn’t quite sure what she was doing, and didn’t like to ask.
‘It is often the case,’ Emerald went on. ‘Image resonancing can be blocked by bipolar frequency oscillation.’
‘It can?’ said Jess levelly.
‘Oh, yes. Indeed. With digital data, the sub-etheric frequencies can cross-polarise and cause transitional interference, resulting in a null amplitude.’
‘They... can?’ Worse than Science homework, Jess thought grimly. She scrabbled around and tried to make sense of Emerald’s techno-babbling. Frequency. Blocked. Interference. ‘What you’re saying is,’ she ventured, ‘our stuff got... zapped by their stuff?’
‘Well... it is a little more complex than that.’ Emerald pulled a face.
‘But in a nutshell, that’s it, yeah?’ Jess persisted.
‘I suppose so,’ said Emerald Greene, perching her glasses back on her nose. ‘Putting it crudely.’
Jess grinned. ‘You just don’t like the fact that I almost get you for once.’
Ignoring her, Emerald took out the Ordnance Survey map of the Meresbury area and spread it on the dining-room table. She pointed to the Darkwater, which was marked as a big patch of blue. ‘This lake,’ she said, ‘you know what is so odd about it?’
Jess answered immediately. ‘Yeah, it’s artificial.’
‘Very good, yes. But do you know what was there before?’
‘A valley,’ said Jess. ‘Wasn’t there a village there once?’
Yes,’ said Emerald softly, and she sat still for a second with her palms together.
Jess kept a respectful silence. It was difficult, because she could hear Gabi upstairs, belting out ‘The Winner Takes It All’ as she painted.
‘Sorry,’ Jess said eventually, ‘are we praying?’
‘What? Gracious, no. Just thinking.’ Emerald leaned forward again. ‘There was a village in that valley, called Hexbrook. That means Witches’ Stream. And you know why it is called that?’
Jess shook her head. She could feel her fingertips beginning to tingle. She knew Richie still didn’t trust Emerald Greene - but Jess herself was comfortable with her new friend now. She’d been proved right about Ulverston, hadn’t she? And when Emerald Greene told you something, it was always important, and always relevant.
‘It was a plague village in the 17th Century,’ said Emerald. ‘It had another name back then. Nobody seems to know what it was... But it was a village where every single inhabitant died of the Plague.’
‘The Black Death,’ said Jess, nodding. ‘I know about that.’
‘The place was abandoned afterwards. Nobody went near there. They called the village Hexbrook, because they thought witches had poisoned the stream to bring the Death to the village.’
‘People believed... all sorts of stuff back then,’ said Jess, shivering inside.
‘Well, yes. But belief in witchcraft never really went away.’
The sunny afternoon outside seemed no longer to exist, and there were no sounds but Jessica’s own steady breathing and Emerald’s low, urgent voice.
‘It’s happened throughout history,’ Emerald went on. ‘A girl who was in any way unusual - say she had a birthmark, or she was prone to visions or talking to animals - could end up being accused of witchcraft... But Hexbrook was not an empty village for long. It became known, you see. Known as a village of death where nobody would go.’
She leaned slowly back, nodding.
Jess held her breath as Emerald added, so softly that she almost couldn’t hear her:
‘Nobody but the witches.’
Richie cracked his knuckles. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Time to test a theory.’
He was sitting in front of his computer, in his bedroom at home. He’d scanned in a picture of the Meresbury map, and zoomed in on the section he wanted.
Richie clicked the mouse a couple of times and fixed a small, glowing disc over one point. The lake, known as the Darkwater. Then he did the same thing again, this time putting a disc over the top of Meresbury Cathedral. And then, finally, he zoomed the pointer over the Ten Sisters at Scratchcombe Edge, the stone circle where, just days ago, Professor Edwin Ulverston had vanished into thin air.
Three discs. Three corners. A triangle.
One more click, and he had linked all three places with red lines, corresponding to the ley lines Emerald had told them about. That was easy enough. The three locations stood in a rough triangle - not quite an equilateral one, if he sized it up - which framed the city within its borders.
The red triangle over Meresbury sat there on Richie’s screen, defying him to think.
He was missing something.
They were all missing something.
It had been nagging at the back of his mind ever since Emerald had shown him those lines on her original map, and he just couldn’t think what it was.
‘A village of witches?’ whispered Jess.
Emerald’s eyes opened wide and she smiled. ‘Yes,’ she said softly. ‘Quite an unsettling thought, would you not say? Exiles, outcasts, all of them. They made their home in the village of death, because nobody else would.’
‘Makes sense.’
‘All kinds of things were said about Hexbrook. People said that they turned the church into a kind of parliament hall - full of runes, spells, pungent odours drifting up the church tower, and dark, ancient singing at moonrise. They would ring the bell at midnight. Just the tenor bell, long and slowly, to call the witches to council. It was said that they turned the altar into their own shrine, where they would summon Hecate, their goddess... Some people said they used to breed strange animals in the schoolhouse, misshapen halfbreeds which only came out to prowl at sunset and never lived more than a few weeks... And that they burned the Green one night, consumed it all with fire until the earth was ashes - and called it the Black from that day. Some said they put a barrier around Hexbrook, too, a kind of magic shield over the village so that nobody could enter or leave without the correct spell, and that anyone who tried to leave was frozen by the barrier, the blood and water in their bodies turning to ice.’
Jess had been listening, spellbound. ‘Wow,’ she said eventually.
Emerald shrugged, smiled. ‘People fear what they do not understand. They fill the gaps in their knowledge with feverish imagination and stories.’
‘But you believe,’ she said softly.
‘I believe in the truth of other realms,’
said Emerald softly.
‘So - Hexbrook,’ Jess said. ‘It’s gone, yeah?’
‘Not completely. It stayed unoccupied for years. People gave it a wide berth. People said the land for two miles around Hexbrook was a cursed place, and that no child was born even near to the village... Then - as far as I can tell from my research - in the 1930s, people started wanting to build dams and reservoirs, and that is when it happened. The authorities took the decision to flood the valley, creating an artificial lake. They flooded Hexbrook.’ She nodded, slowly, leaning back in her chair. ‘Hexbrook is still there, beneath the water. The church, the schoolhouse, the houses, the streets... all still there, submerged in the Darkwater. And you know what, Jess?’
‘What?’ asked Jess softly.
‘You can hear it.’
This would have seemed laughable to her a few weeks ago. It would have seemed as silly as talking cats and eagle librarians, or a man disappearing in a blaze of light, or a girl from the future living in a house from the past. Now, it was almost normal.
‘What can you hear, exactly?’ she whispered.
‘Restless, chattering voices, echoing through the night. Sometimes the church bell tolls, deep in the water - it is muffled by the lake, but it is the bell. And that singing.’
Emerald slid something across the table, and for a moment Jessica jumped. It was a recordable CD in a flat, square case.
‘In case the authorities ask me questions,’ she said, ‘I want deniability. Please have it. Conceal it somewhere here. But do not attempt to play it on conventional equipment. You could do untold damage.’
Jess reached out. She hesitated.
What was it she had said? Not wholly good nor wholly evil? Emerald Greene, wherever and whenever she was from, had told her in no uncertain terms that witches were capable of evil. That they had to be defeated. Maybe something evil had been at work on that horrible day back when she was six months old. That terrible, black afternoon which had taken her mother and father away from her. Maybe this recording, whatever was on it, could help to keep evil out of the world. To banish it. And if she could help by doing as Emerald asked, then...
Emerald Greene and the Witch Stones Page 12
