by Kim Wilkins
The Reverend faltered. “Mary Hartley?”
“Maisie Fielding. I’d better stay.”
Last night there had been a community meeting in the village hall, which was a draughty building at the end of Cross Street. The church’s finances were examined, village donations were made or promised, and enough money was found to make a significant down payment on Sybill’s cottage. The citizens of Solgreve would soon own it and, once and for all, they would be safe from witches. Nobody had asked yet if they would knock it down or rent it out (to a local family of course, not newcomers), but the Reverend knew there were a few in Solgreve who wanted to look inside, to delve into Sybill’s secrets as she had delved into theirs. The Reverend was not one of them. He doubted Sybill kept Satanic idols and shrunken heads around the house – he understood that most modern witches didn’t look or act like the ones in fifteenth-century woodcuts.
He lay the business card on his desk and reached for the phone. In a few moments, a receptionist took his call.
“Daniels and Young, how may I help you?”
“May I speak with Perry Daniels, please?”
“Who may I say is calling?”
“Reverend Linden Fowler from Solgreve.”
“Hold the line.”
He did as he was told, tapping his pen thoughtfully against his desk blotter.
“Hello, Reverend. This is Perry Daniels.”
“Hello, Mr Daniels.”
“What can I do for you?”
“It’s about Sybill Hartley’s cottage. Now that Miss Fielding has vacated it, we wonder if you might get in touch with her family for us. We’d like to make an offer to buy it.”
“I’m sorry, Reverend, you must be mistaken. Maisie hasn’t gone home yet.”
“But there have been no lights on for –”
“She’s in London with a friend. I believe she’s due back in a few days. But when she does go home, I’ll certainly pass on your offer to Roland and Janet.”
“Who?”
“The Fieldings. Maisie’s parents.”
The Reverend scribbled down their names, the disillusion overwhelming. They had been so sure this time. They had felt so safe. “Thank you, I’d appreciate that.”
“I’m glad I could be of assistance.”
They said their goodbyes and the Reverend turned to face Tony. “She’s coming back, she’s just in London for a few days.”
Tony shook his head. “Why on earth would she want to come back?”
The Reverend handed him the piece of paper with the names of Maisie’s parents. “Do you think Lester could track down a phone number or address in Australia for these people?”
“I’m sure he could.”
“Perhaps we should call them.”
“But even if they sell eventually, the girl’s coming back soon.”
“I don’t mean to phone them about the cottage,” the Reverend said. “I mean to phone them about their daughter. Perhaps if she can’t be persuaded to leave, her family can be persuaded to bring her back.”
Although she hadn’t really expected anything to happen on the first night, Maisie was disappointed when she woke up Monday morning and realised she could hardly remember dreaming at all.
She told Sacha the disappointing news as they walked down towards the British Museum.
“That’s okay,” he said, “it might take some time.” “I don’t know how much time I have. I’ll have to go back to Australia in a few weeks.” A deflating thought.
“Just keep asking yourself if you’re dreaming. And you don’t have to stop working on your ability when you leave the country, you know.”
Maybe she did know that, but she had such a strong sense that her return home might be an end to this adventure; that back home amongst the common details of her ordinary life, there was no place for psychic dreaming. It made her want to grab these moments with Sacha so hard that she might squeeze them to death. She pulled her hat down hard over her ears. A freezing wind was gusting up Gower Street. She relished it.
“Are you dreaming now?”
“Huh? Oh. Thanks for reminding me.” Am I dreaming now? Am I dreaming now? Sometimes she got it working so that the sentence kept repeating over and over in her mind, like background music to whatever else she was thinking.
They walked up the stone stairs and into the huge foyer of the building. Maisie had been here on her last two trips, but it never ceased to take her breath away.
“Come on, I want to show you something,” Sacha said, leading her up the stairs. They wandered through a few rooms until they came to the Elizabethan section. Sacha bent his knees in front of one of the glass cabinets and pointed to the display.
“See that? It’s John Dee’s magic mirror.”
Maisie found herself looking at a slab of shiny black rock, carved into a mirror shape. “What did he use it for?”
“For calling up spirits, I guess. Isn’t that what magicians do?”
“I don’t know.” Around the mirror were a couple of circular wax tablets, carved intricately with symbols and numbers. “How is it that he needed to do all this to get in touch with the psychic world and I, supposedly, can do it just by dreaming?”
Sacha straightened his back and they started to wander past the other exhibits. “Different people have different abilities. Nobody knows why. And you should be able to understand that better than anybody, being a musician. Why can one person sing while another can’t? Like Adrian.”
“I hadn’t thought of it like that. I’d always thought that if psychic power existed, then everybody must have it. It seems a bit unfair otherwise.”
“Of course it’s unfair. But when did you ever know life to be fair?” They were walking down the stairs now. “Greece? Or Egypt?”
“Um…Greece. Hey, is it true that gypsies originally came from Egypt?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m not in touch with my heritage. I grew up in England. I left Ma early to live like gadźo. Even Ma doesn’t really live like a gypsy any more. Though she still travels a lot.”
“And your accent?”
“I don’t have one.”
“Yes, you do. Just lightly.”
“Must have got it off Ma.” He glanced at her. “Sorry, is that disappointing? Did you think you were with someone much more exotic?”
“Of course not.” He worked in a bakery, lived in a dingy flat and didn’t get along with his father. Not strange and romantic at all. Maisie headed for a chair in front of a marble statue, sank into it and contemplated the display. Sacha sat next to her. His proximity, as always, made her skin tingle warmly.
“Are you dreaming now?” he asked.
She sighed. Didn’t say anything for a long time. Then, finally she said, “Maybe I am.”
On the third night it happened. In that half-world between waking and sleeping, she could hear what sounded like her own voice asking over and over, “Are you dreaming now?” It seemed to echo around in her head and bounce off her skull. She became aware of a sound like a bell tolling down a long tunnel. Then she found herself in a great stone hall and she was very cold. She turned to look around her, but her vision lagged a second or two behind her eyes. She held up her hands in front of her face and they seemed only able to move slowly. Like moving through deep water.
“Are you dreaming now?” Her own voice. The question didn’t seem to make sense, and then she realised that yes, yes, she was dreaming. She called it out loudly in her dream. “Yes, I am dreaming.” Her voice seemed lonely in the huge stone hall, and she could still hear the bell tolling far away. She looked up and saw that the hall did not have a roof. A flock of birds went past overhead, calling to each other. For some reason she felt very afraid.
Then she remembered again that she was dreaming and knew she had to try Sacha’s experiment. She watched as the walls of the great hall dissolved around her, and was afraid that the dream was unknitting (this was a word that her dream-self seemed to know) and that she would fall back into uninterrupted sl
eep. She willed herself to be back in the London apartment. There was a moment of black, then she found herself looking down at the layout of the lounge room. She was there!
Slowly and deliberately, like a child taking first steps, she floated towards Sacha’s room. She could still hear the bell tolling, and every tone frightened her. Even though she was somewhere familiar, she felt a desolate loneliness, cold-deep in her stomach. Nothing seemed quite real. Strange shimmers of light and dark washed around her.
As she moved towards Sacha’s room, the walls appeared to dissolve around her and she was all at once in a forest. The trees looked familiar, and she realised that it was the wood behind the cottage in Solgreve. This panicked her. It was cold and damp and she was shivering, and she was too old to be running so hard.
Too old? She held her hands in front of her again, and saw they were the hands of an old woman. An enormous, black terror rose up within her. They are nearly upon me. The sounds of something chasing her, tiny branches snapping, the undergrowth being kicked up. And the bell on Solgreve church ringing, carrying across the cliffs and out to sea.
Am I dreaming now?
As soon as the question was asked she was back in London. It seemed she was slipping in and out of the lucid dream. But in the dream in London it was now daylight and the fireplace and bookshelves from Sybill’s cottage were here, and the clock from the hallway of her parents’ house, too. Sacha walked out of his room and said, “I suppose you want to know what I wrote on the note beside my bed?”
“Yes,” she replied. The bell still tolled in the distance, eerie and hollow.
“Here.” He held up a piece of paper with red letters on it. They made no sense.
“I can’t read that,” she said. “You’ve made it confusing because you like to see me squirm.”
“That would be cruel,” he said. “Try harder.”
Am I dreaming now?
“Can you hear the bell?” she asked.
“Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
“Then you can hear it too?” The sound created a tumult of anxiety in her stomach.
“How did Sybill die?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Neither do I. But I think she wants you to know.”
Again, she was back in the forest, being pursued, her old knees aching from the effort. She was so terrified she tried to wake herself up. Instead she found herself once more up near the ceiling of the London apartment; it was night-time and she was just outside Sacha’s room. This seemed suddenly more real, and she hung on to the feeling of reality to help propel herself through the door. She found him there, asleep in a bed too small for him. It was a kid’s room, his little half-brother’s, with Teletubby wallpaper and an overflowing toy box. She took a moment to watch him in the dark.
“Sacha?” she said. Her voice seemed to be a whisper coming from the walls. He stirred but did not wake. Beside his bed was a glass of water and a piece of paper. She focused on the piece of paper. He had written on it, Cupid is sitting on the skull of Humanity. She memorised the line, said it over and over in her head. Now, to get back to bed.
She moved out of Sacha’s room across the apartment and to her own bedroom. The shock of seeing herself asleep down there heightened her sense of fear and loneliness. She was cold. Very cold.
“Wake up, Maisie,” she said to herself. Nothing was happening. She wasn’t returning to her body, and the girl on the bed hadn’t stirred. She began to panic. Should she go and try to wake Sacha again, get him to help her? Fear engulfed her, and the tolling began again…blood rushed past her ears and she kept running, running as hard as she could. Heavy breathing. Her own or…?
Maisie woke with a start. She could hear Sacha in the kitchen, washing up last night’s dishes. Weak daylight outside her window.
“Am I dreaming now?” she said in a breathy voice.
The answer was quite definitely no. She sighed with relief, then remembered the note next to Sacha’s bed, threw back the covers and ran out to the kitchen in her pyjamas, all care for how she looked first thing in the morning forgotten.
Sacha turned as she came into the room. “Hi, Maisie. Want pancakes for breakfast?”
“Cupid is sitting on the skull of Humanity!”
He was momentarily struck dumb. “Maisie…you…”
“Cupid is sitting on the skull of Humanity! And you wear blue pyjamas. I can do it!” she cried, barely able to contain her excitement.
“You can,” he said, nodding slowly. “You can.”
In the end they went out for breakfast – Maisie was so excited she had decided to use her credit card, which was something she almost never did. (Her mother’s voice in her head, “If you can’t afford it now, you can’t afford it later”, usually squashed the impulse). So they sat in a fancy Soho cafe with bacon, eggs, sausages, beans, toast and hot tea laid out between them.
“So where is the quote from?” Maisie asked, spreading marmalade on her toast.
“Which quote?”
“Cupid is sitting on the skull of Humanity.”
“Oh. I think it’s Baudelaire, an old girlfriend used to read it to me. I chose it because it sounded like something someone might say in a dream. And because it wasn’t a well-known quote. If I’d written ‘The cat sat on the mat’ and you’d got it right, I might have suspected you’d just made an educated guess.”
“God, it’s so exciting.”
“Tell me about the dream.”
“It was weird. I’ve only got a confused memory of most of it. Being in your dad’s flat is quite clear, because it wasn’t like dreaming. But the other stuff…No, I can’t quite remember. I think there was a bell ringing or something.”
“Are you going to do it again tonight?”
“Absolutely.” Even as she said this, though, she felt a vague fear.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong.”
“You frowned. You said ‘absolutely,’ then you frowned.”
“I don’t know…I felt afraid, suddenly. There was something cold and lonely about the dream. Something to dread.”
“Well, you’re overcoming years of resistance. That would be unsettling.” He poured himself another cup of tea and stirred in two sugars. “Don’t let it put you off, this is exciting stuff. I can’t wait to tell my mother. She and Sybill always used to –”
“Sybill!” Maisie exclaimed, the rest of the dream suddenly swelling into consciousness. “I dreamt about Sybill.”
“What happened?”
Maisie caught her bottom lip between her teeth, going over the details in her head.
“Maisie?” Sacha prompted.
“I was in the wood behind the cottage, running away from something, but I was very old. And then I was back in your dad’s place, but it was daytime and you were asking me…you were asking me how Sybill died. And you said, ‘I think she wants you to know.’”
“But you do know. She got sick and went out looking for help, then collapsed on the way.”
“What kind of sick? Was she injured? Was it her heart, her lungs, her stomach?” Maisie laid both her hands, palms down, on the table. “Do you think it could have been a message from her?”
“I don’t know, Maisie,” he said, helping himself to some more bacon. “What do you think?”
“Something about it was terribly familiar. And that bell tolling away in the background. It was scary.”
“Dreams can be scary.”
“Yes, I know.”
“You’re entering a different world now, Maisie,” he said, leaning forward to touch her hand. “From now on you can’t flinch from nightmares.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“Morning, Reverend. I’ve got that number in Australia for you.” Lester Baines, hundreds of miles away safely on the other end of the phone.
The Reverend felt around on his desk for a pen and paper. “Thanks, Lester. Go on, I have a pen.”
Lester di
ctated the number and the Reverend read it back to check it.
“It was hard to get hold of, you know,” Lester said. “A silent number. Apparently they’re both famous.”
“Really?” Visions of movie stars or politicians came to mind.
“Yeah. The wife’s a pianist and the husband’s a conductor.”
So the young woman had genes other than Sybill’s coarse witchiness. “Very interesting.”
“Why are you going to call them?”
“None of your business, Lester.”
“If you need me –”
“Thank you. You’ve done a great job.”
He put the phone down and sat back looking at the number, making calculations in his head: it would be early evening over there. This task had to be done just right. He had never made a threatening phone call in his life, and wondered whether the person on the other end of the line would find his thin, trembling voice comical rather than menacing.
Once more, he reached for the receiver. Soon, in a far distant land, the phone was ringing.
“Hello?” A male voice. The father.
“Hello. Roland Fielding?”
“No, it’s Adrian.”
Adrian? This threw him. Who was Adrian? “Are you Maisie Fielding’s brother?”
“I’m her boyfriend. Who is this?”
Her boyfriend. Perhaps this was even better. “This is somebody who cares about Maisie’s safety. She’s a long way away from you and there’s nobody to protect her.”
“What are you talking about? Is Maisie okay?”
“She won’t be for long. If you don’t get her home soon, something very bad may happen to her.”
“Who is this?” Good, he could hear desperation in the young man’s voice now. “What are you talking about?”
The Reverend’s finger wavered for a moment, then pressed the button down. The line clicked. He replaced the receiver, aware that his heart was thumping violently. Was it excitement or fear? What if the young man made a complaint, and they tracked him down? He had visions of Interpol closing in on him, looking into his affairs, finding out his secrets.
