by Kim Wilkins
“My god, my god,” Maisie said, checking out the window again. A surge of impossible-to-place feeling: pride? confidence? power?
I did it. She had made herself safe.
She turned and wandered back to bed, but stayed awake for a long time, staring into the dark. A first glimmer of understanding, of what her psychic ability was capable of. It had felt so natural, so meant-to-be. Her excitement was like delirium. It kept her awake nearly until dawn.
But when she finally drifted to sleep it was with a feeling of absolute security.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Gloomy morning didn’t dawn at all. The rain was back as a light drizzle. When Maisie checked her watch she was horrified to see that it was already ten forty-five: she was due in Dr Honour’s surgery in fifteen minutes. She jumped out of bed and dressed, brushed her teeth quickly and fed the cat. The lounge room was still a mess from her adventure last night – books lay everywhere, candle wax had dribbled onto the carpet. The site of her first major psychic success. She remembered what had happened as though it were a dream. It was almost too much to contemplate – the awful dark shadows in her back garden, somehow sentient and yet not of this world. But at least she was safe. Grabbing her raincoat and umbrella, she left the house and closed the door behind her.
The sky was leaden. Every tree along the street seemed to be sagging under the weight of it. The sea was a dull pewter, white caps visible in the distance. The line where the sky met the water was invisible. It was all one gloomy shade of grey as far as the eye could see.
She checked her watch and hurried her steps. She couldn’t give them the slightest reason to cancel her appointment. And today she wouldn’t be nervous and flustered like she was with the Reverend. Her questions were perfectly valid, and if the doctor had nothing to hide he would answer frankly.
She reached the surgery with about five seconds to spare, pushed the door open and went straight to the counter.
“Good morning, Miss Fielding,” the receptionist said. “The doctor will see you in a moment.”
“Thanks,” Maisie said. She sat down in an uncomfortable plastic chair and picked up a copy of Hello magazine that was a few years old. She flicked through an article on the Spice Girls when they were still the full complement. After a few minutes, a voice announced her name.
“Maisie Fielding?”
She looked up. Standing near the receptionist’s desk was a thin, stooped man without a hair on his head, and with old-fashioned horn-rimmed glasses. Like Reverend Fowler, he must have hailed from around the class of ’24.
“Are you Doctor Honour?” she asked.
“Yes,” he replied, dourly. “Come through.”
She stood and followed him past the receptionist’s desk and into the back hallway. He led her into a small room which smelled like the doctors’ surgeries of her childhood. Old carpet, damp corners, medicine. The benches were cold stainless steel. A giraffe growth chart, with colours that had probably been faded since the sixties, hung on one wall, its edges curling up.
“Take a seat, Miss Fielding,” Dr Honour said. He gestured to a chair only marginally more comfortable than the one in the waiting room, then sat behind his desk and made a pretence of heading a new file card with her name.
“What’s your date of birth?” he asked.
“I’m not here about me.”
He dropped his pen and fixed her with his rheumy eyes. “Oh?”
“I’m here about my grandmother.”
“Your grandmother?”
“Sybill Hartley.”
“I remember Sybill. What can I help you with?”
“You signed her death certificate.”
“That’s right.”
“I want to know what she died of.”
He leaned back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling, as though thinking. “I believe the cause of death on her certificate was listed as heart failure. It usually is in cases of old age.”
“And you examined her body?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Were there any injuries? Any…cuts or bruises?” She was thinking of the mad chase through the wood which she always dreamed of. Surely that would have made a few marks on the old woman.
“Yes, there were. She collapsed in the street and injured herself in the fall. She had grazed her forearms and her knees.”
“No other injuries?”
“No. Miss Fielding, if I may ask, why do you want to know this?”
She wouldn’t be intimidated. “I didn’t know my grandmother at all, Doctor Honour. I’m just trying to find out as much about her as possible.”
“Is that really all? You’re behaving almost as though you expect for there to be suspicious circumstances around Sybill’s death. I assure you there weren’t.” He rose from his seat and moved towards a grey filing cabinet, decorated sadly with peeling stickers advertising medicines. “I have a copy of the death certificate if you wish to see it.”
“No, don’t bother,” she said, rising from her seat. She knew it would read exactly as he told her.
“I’m not an unfeeling person, Miss Fielding. None of us in Solgreve are. It’s unfortunate that you and your grandmother never met, and it’s unfortunate that she’s no longer alive, but she was eighty-three. She was an old woman. There’s nothing unusual about an old woman dying.”
Maisie paused, her hand on the door handle. She looked him up and down. His patronising voice and affected calmness made her furious. “Yeah. And how old are you Doctor Honour?”
“I…”
“Don’t bother answering that.” She pushed the door open and left, back into the wet street.
She tried calling Sacha in London but got his dad’s answering machine. She wanted to brag about her successful spell to him, and she was desperate to hear his voice. Depression began to stalk her. She called Adrian, woke him up but didn’t care. Unleashed a little of her anger on him. He apologised a million times for letting slip about her deception to her mother, but didn’t seem to realise that his worst crime was not warning her in advance. Then she called Perry Daniels in York but he wasn’t in so she left a message. Maisie knew she was avoiding calling Cathy because she’d left her hanging over New Year’s, so she gritted her teeth and did it.
“Maisie! I was wondering when I might hear from you.”
“I only got back from London the day before yesterday,” she said. “Sorry about New Year’s.”
“It’s okay. I kept myself busy. And I did abandon you at Christmas, don’t forget. So now we’re even.” She sounded stuffed up and croaky, like she might have a cold.
“So why don’t you come and visit me? I’ve got a warm cottage and a bunch of hostile villagers waiting for you. And it sounds like you could use a nurse.”
“Yes, it’s the kind of cold that could kill a brown dog. Do you know, nobody knows that expression over here?” She stopped to cough then came back to the phone. “I can be there tomorrow.”
“Great. There should be a bus coming through tomorrow. It goes from Whitby at twelve o’clock.”
“I’ll be on it. Meet me at the bus stop?”
“Of course.”
“Someone’s waiting for the phone. I’ve got so much to tell you, Maisie. I found out heaps of information about Solgreve. You’re going to be fascinated.”
“Don’t tease me. Tell me some stuff now.”
“No, gotta go. This guy’s about to turn purple. See you tomorrow.”
“Okay, bye.” Maisie hung up and went to the bedroom. An old camp bed was folded up in the cupboard. She set it up in the back room. Knowing that linen wasn’t her grandmother’s strong point, she half-heartedly searched for single sheets then decided to go out and buy some.
On her way home, she counted street numbers along the main street and tried to figure out where it was her grandmother had supposedly collapsed. Outside number forty, Elsa Smith’s house, she paused and walked out to the middle of the road. She crouched down and lay her fingers on th
e bitumen, waiting to see if she got any kind of psychic feeling like she had in the wood the other day. Nothing. A car engine approached so she stood and walked to the side of the road again, watching the street. She needed to talk to Sacha, needed to ask him if she could trust to this conviction that there was something suspicious about her grandmother’s death. And if Sybill had been pursued to her death, who had pursued her? Even though the people of Solgreve seemed reluctant to talk about Sybill, alive or dead, she couldn’t imagine any of them actually being responsible. Covering it up, perhaps, but not causing the blind terror which the old woman had experienced before she died.
Cars passed. Rain descended. Understanding came no closer. She looked up at Elsa Smith’s house: old, grey stone and sagging roof tiles. A curtain moved. Somebody had been watching.
Maisie crossed the road and rapped at the door. No answer. She knocked again, louder and longer.
Finally, a little voice from the other side of the door. “Who is it?”
“My name’s Maisie. I wondered if I could ask you a couple of questions.”
“Go away.”
“Please, Mrs Smith. I just want to ask you about the night Sybill died.”
“I’ll call the police if you don’t leave.”
“You don’t need to be frightened of me. I’m not Sybill.”
The door opened a crack. She got a glimpse of a cluttered lounge room, a brief whiff of old vegetable peelings and floral air freshener. A white-haired woman with a face like a fox peered out.
“Can I come in?” Maisie asked.
“No. Go away. Your grandmother was a bad woman and the village is better off without her here.”
“She wasn’t a bad woman, Mrs Smith, she was just –”
“She was evil. If you know what’s good for you you’ll get out of that cottage and go home. The old witch is probably still haunting the place. There was nothing kind or generous or loving about that woman. You’d have been better off with Baba Yaga for a grandmother.”
Maisie put her hands up and took a step back. “Okay. Sorry to bother you.”
The door slammed. Baba Yaga? Was that the child-eating witch in Russian legend? At least the insult was imaginative.
She headed home. The phone was ringing as she let herself into the house. Sacha! – it had to be Sacha phoning to tell her he was coming back. She ran to answer it.
Not Sacha. Perry Daniels was on the other end of the line. They talked briefly about the insurance claim and the weather in London. Maisie had spent most of the day so far in private investigator mode so she thought she might as well ask the solicitor if he knew anything about Solgreve.
“Did Sybill ever indicate that she didn’t feel safe here in Solgreve?”
There was a brief silence as he thought about it. “No, I think she felt safe. She knew she was unpopular, but your grandmother had a sense of self-assuredness that was almost…well…smug.”
Smug? At least he didn’t imply she roasted and ate children.
“I get the feeling they can’t wait for me to leave,” Maisie said.
“And I think I know the reason for that. While you were away the local Reverend called here, wanting to make an offer to buy the house. This may just be a real estate issue.”
“Why would they want the house?”
“Who knows? Perhaps they think there’s buried treasure beneath it. In any event, Maisie, I wouldn’t worry about it. If the most aggressive person they have on their team is Reverend Linden Fowler, I’d say that you’re safe.”
Perhaps the solicitor was right – maybe the villagers were too meek to have had anything to do with Sybill’s death. Clearly they had hated her, had been afraid of her, but that didn’t equate with murderous intentions. If they had been glad when Sybill died that would explain their guilty reaction to Maisie’s questions.
Okay, so if the villagers were innocent, then who? She had seen the two dark, hooded figures in her back garden with her own eyes, and she knew that there was something sinister about them. What were they? If she was going to work out the circumstances of Sybill’s death and what was happening to her in her Afterlife, maybe that was the next question she had to answer.
“God, this place is wonderful,” Cathy enthused, dropping her bag in the lounge room and looking around. It was early afternoon and Maisie had just met her friend at the bus stop.
“You should have seen it when I first arrived. An absolute mess. It’s still very cluttered and I haven’t even opened some of the cupboards yet.”
“It’s so cosy. And what a location. Can we walk down to the cliff a little later on?”
Maisie didn’t know if she was comfortable walking through the wood any more, but perhaps in broad daylight and accompanied by a friend it wouldn’t be so bad. “Sure. But you promised me you’d tell me what you found out about Solgreve.”
“You have to feed me first. I haven’t had lunch.”
“Come through to the kitchen then.”
Maisie made sandwiches and a pot of tea. Cathy pulled a ring-binder out of her bag and laid it in front of her on the table, positioned a box of tissues next to it.
“Okay, here’s food. Now tell me.” Maisie sat opposite her.
Cathy blew her nose and tucked the tissue into her sleeve. She opened the folder. “Well, where do we begin? How about at the beginning. Settlement here dates back to five forty-three A.D.”
“That long ago?”
“Yup.” Cathy reached for a sandwich and took a bite.
“So how did you find that out?”
“I had a whole university library to myself and no company over New Year’s,” Cathy replied. “What else was I going to do?” She sipped some tea then continued. “The name Solgreve is a bastardisation of the original title, ‘Sawol Græf.’ Do you want to guess what that means?”
“No.”
“It’s Anglo-Saxon for ‘soul’s grave’.”
“That sounds kind of –”
“Creepy?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m sure it’s not. It’s probably to do with some kind of Anglo-Saxon religious rite.”
Maisie leaned over and peered at Cathy’s notes. “So that’s Anglo-Saxon language?”
“Yes. Sometimes called Old English. I’m learning it as part of my degree.”
“Wait here. I want to show you something.” Maisie rose from the table and went to the lounge room. She found the blue spellbook she had used the other night and brought it back to the kitchen.
“Is this the same language?” She opened the book to the house protection spell and turned it so that Cathy could read her grandmother’s writing.
“Yes. Where did you get this?”
“What does it say?”
“It says something like…‘within the space I draw with these stars of the mind, everything or everybody will be free of the ancient darkness.’ Where did you get this?”
“It’s my grandmother’s handwriting. It’s a spell of protection for the house.”
“Fascinating. Your grandmother must have been an Anglo-Saxon scholar.”
“It wouldn’t surprise me to find out my grandmother shot JFK. She just gets more and more interesting.” Maisie closed the book and put it aside. “Go on. More information.” She reached for a triangle of cheese sandwich.
“All right. Sawol Græf was a sacred site for pagan worship. In fact, it was one of the last places to convert to Christianity which it did in six hundred and eighty-eight – that’s down in the early church records. Saint Junius is responsible for that, along with other things like getting himself eaten by a lion, supposedly in Cornwall. Because Sawol Græf had always been a site of worship a church was built on it, and then the original abbey was built in the same spot in twelve thirty-five. By then it was in the records as Solgreve. A lot of other old places like this have had their cemeteries dug up and built on over the years, but Solgreve is remarkable for having preserved the cemetery as it now stands since earliest settlement. That’s wh
y it’s so big. The archaeologists at the university are dying to get in there and have a look…excuse the pun.”
“You’re excused. Have another sandwich.”
Cathy took another triangle and held it in her right hand while she talked. “Nothing notable on the record about the place until fifteen seventy-six. Solgreve was the site of one of the most severe punishments of witchcraft in England. Usually, we associate witch hunts with Catholicism and continental Europe. They didn’t burn witches in England – except for up here.”
“They burned witches?”
“Yes. They weren’t supposed to but they did. It was kind of a community-generated project.”
“I have no trouble believing that.”
Cathy sneezed violently, then took a moment to compose herself. “The village was a lot bigger back then. Around eighteen hundred people and quite a busy fishing town. That year they sent one hundred women to trial for witchcraft. Most were driven out of town with nothing but a warning. Twenty were hanged. And they lit up three women of a group of four who refused to testify.”
“What happened to the fourth?”
“She confessed under torture at the last moment. The transcripts are on microfilm at the library. She said the four of them had been trying to lift an ancient curse on the town.”
“What kind of curse?” Maisie’s tea was going cold in its cup.
“I copied a bit of this down, but it doesn’t make much sense.” Cathy turned a few pages and read: “‘For the ground in this village is cursed, and all the folk within are blighted and must be driven out.’” She looked up. “Can you figure that out?”
“Nope. You?”
“No idea. You want to know what happened to her?”
“Who?”
“The fourth witch, the one who confessed under torture. They didn’t burn her with the others.”
Maisie shuddered. “I don’t think I want to know.”
“They buried her alive.”
“Yuk.”
“I agree,” Cathy said. “If we could get into the cemetery at some stage, we could probably find her grave.”
