by Kim Wilkins
Maisie didn’t answer. She heard the front door close behind Cathy then got up to go to the phone. Nobody was home at Sacha’s. He must be at work. She looked up bakeries in Whitby in the phone book, tried two before she got the right one.
“Hi, I’m looking for Sacha Lupus.”
“Just a second.” In the background she could hear trays clattering, someone whistling loudly, the electronic beeping of a cash register. Sacha’s work. A whole life that he lived when she wasn’t around.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Sacha, it’s Maisie. I’m so sorry to call you at work, but I’m a little desperate.”
“What’s the matter?” She could hear no concern in his voice, but he was notoriously inept on the phone. She had learned that by now.
She quickly explained what had happened the previous night, and how she was certain the protection spell had kept her safe. “Cathy’s freaked out and gone back to York, and I don’t know what to do. Should I get out of here?”
“Do you want to leave?”
“No,” Maisie said emphatically. “I know it sounds ridiculous but I don’t. I don’t want to go home. I don’t want to go to York and hang out with Cathy. I still don’t know how Sybill died and I know that the cottage is safe.”
“Then don’t leave. I’m not working this weekend. Do you want me to come and stay?”
“Would you?” she asked quietly.
“Yes, if you want,” he said. “I’ll be there tomorrow morning. Will you be scared tonight by yourself?”
“Maybe. But I’ve got Tabby for company.”
“I have to go, Maisie. I’m supposed to be serving customers.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. I’d rather talk to you than serve customers, but a man’s got to earn a living.”
She laughed, vain, pleased with herself.
“Maisie, you haven’t tried the most obvious way to find out how Sybill died,” he said quickly.
“What do you mean?”
“Dream it. That’s where your Gift is evident. Dream how she died. I’d hate to think we did all that work in London for nothing.”
The idea hadn’t occurred to her. Or maybe it had, but she had rejected the notion before it made it into full consciousness because it terrified her. Every time she had started to dream about the wood she had woken herself up, or tried to escape from it somehow.
“It wouldn’t be a dream,” she said. “It would be a nightmare.”
“Be brave,” he said. “I’ll be there tomorrow.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
When the bell began to toll Maisie realised that she was dreaming – its echoes reverberated in uncanny jolts and eerie whispers as if being sounded down a long, iron tunnel.
“Am I dreaming?” she said, and the echo of the words appeared to come before them, rather than after. Yes, she was dreaming. She was dreaming the dream of the wood again, the dark shadows and the panting breath and the elevated heartbeat, all with the bell tolling dimly in the background. Just as she had intended to dream it.
Before bed, she had surrounded herself with photos of her grandmother, objects that she had owned, laid her ceremonial robe over the top of the bed covers, done everything she could to make some kind of contact with this memory. And over and over, as she had fallen asleep, she had asked, “How did my grandmother die?”
“How did my grandmother die?” she asked now in the dream. In an instant, she found herself up near the ceiling of the cottage, somewhere near the back door. An old woman – sturdy, calm, white-haired and with pale grey eyes – came in to the laundry.
“Sybill!” Maisie’s voice echoed in her ears, but her grandmother didn’t hear her. A strange dislocation of the senses took place, and suddenly she was the old woman, boldly opening the laundry door and striding out. She turned and locked the door firmly, then moved towards the back of the garden.
No, don’t let’s go there, Maisie thought. She was at the same time both herself and Sybill.
But Sybill kept walking. Her feet were bare and cold, even though she was otherwise fully dressed in thick woollens. Bare feet for her witchcraft. To forge the bond with the earth. Maisie didn’t know how she knew this, but she knew. At the rosebushes, she stopped and slipped her house keys under a rock. Hiding them from the nosy villagers. Then she stood and straightened as though gathering determination, and they went together into the wood.
Not that.
Maisie swung up and out of Sybill’s point of view, hovered somewhere in the upper branches of the oak tree, watching the pale figure move between trees. The wood was slightly different from how Maisie knew it. Most of the trees still had their leaves, it smelled fresh and sweet. She swooped down closer, seemed to be in the air about a metre above and behind Sybill as she walked right into the heart of the wood. Then stopped and centred herself.
It took an age, and Maisie desperately hung on to the dream. Other dreams wanted to be dreamed, and they were eroding the edges of this one. She thought she saw an owl fly past above and suddenly it was daylight, then she thought she heard a car pull up and knew that Sacha was coming. She pushed these dreams aside, concentrated hard on watching her grandmother. Deliberately dreaming the night Sybill died.
Sybill started to speak. Maisie could make no meaning of what she was saying – as though it were another language or too far away to hear. With purpose, she felt herself swing back into the old woman’s viewpoint. The words now seemed to be springing from her own lips.
“Ic eom openu þære yflan deorcnes. Com! Ic eom þinu geornful lac.” Maisie tried to memorise it with the muscles of her mouth, desperate to remember it when she woke in the morning. Ic eom openu þære yflan deorcnes. Com! Ic eom þinu geornful lac.
Sybill stood, calm – no, more than calm: self-possessed, almost arrogant – and waited for her spell to work. A noise broke in the bushes behind her. She turned to look, saw a dark shape. Puzzlement. Then bewilderment. Then fear, oh, awful fear. The thing approached, its companion a metre behind it. It turned its head up and faint moonlight fell for an instant on its –
Maisie was up and out of Sybill again. She could not bear to look upon it. The old woman yelped and turned, began to run. Desperate, flailing limbs; running between branches and the two hooded beings on her trail closely. No contest. Maisie wanted to wake up. She could feel consciousness seeping in. But she had to hold on to the dream, see what happened. Moments passed but felt like hours. Sybill was growing tired. Momentarily, Maisie would be in and then out of Sybill’s viewpoint, too terrified to take part in the awful chase.
Sybill stumbled, leaned over. An open target. Maisie wanted to scream out to her, but it was a dream, a memory of something past. She couldn’t change it no matter how much she wanted to.
The beings were upon her in an instant. Maisie hovered around the back of them, not wanting to see, but unable to look away. She was horrified by the violence with which they attacked the old woman. One of them seemed to have split open her back with those strange, bony claws it used to tap at windows. The other pulled her up straight, held her face in its hands.
As these things happened, Maisie had an incredible and profound sense that she had witnessed this before, that she knew what was going to happen next. Maisie saw Sybill open her eyes to look at it. An expression of pure, hellish terror came over her, and she screamed so loudly, so horribly, that it could have woken Maisie up, had she not been prepared for it. And as the two creatures moved in close, one with a suffocating hold around her chest, the other effortlessly twisting her head so her neck snapped, Maisie saw it as the awful confirmation of something she had known all along. Something she had dreamed once before.
The dark shapes receded, leaving Sybill’s body in the wood. Maisie hovered nearby, nightmare fear and aching loneliness blowing cold around her, waiting for what would happen next. Time ticked on. Once again she had to fight off other dreams and wakefulness. Perhaps an hour passed before she heard movement in the trees. She ga
thered herself and saw Reverend Fowler and Constable Blake approaching.
“Is there a lot of blood, Tony?” the Reverend was asking, his voice a nervous squeak.
Tony approached Sybill’s body and looked around. “Quite a lot. Don’t worry, I can manage this myself.”
“I feel just sick about this,” the Reverend said.
Tony glanced over his shoulder. “You hated her. We all did. She deserved this. She knew too much.”
“Everything could have been changed forever,” the Reverend said, as though convincing himself that Tony was right.
Maisie wanted to keep dreaming, to hear the rest, but an insistent ringing noise pulled her up and into consciousness. It was morning. The phone was ringing.
She lay still, trying to recall every particular of the dream, knowing that if she got involved in a phone conversation the details would fade. It rang out. She relived the whole horrific experience in her mind: the spell her grandmother had said in the wood, the way the Wraiths had closed in on her and killed her as though they were hunting. A tear slipped slowly down her right cheek. Sybill. Dying in fear.
And so the villagers here were not blameless after all. This was by far the most disturbing element. Here she was thinking they were harmless ninnies, but they had clearly had some foreknowledge of Sybill’s death, were covering it up even now.
Unless it was just a dream. Just a product of her imagination. The phone started ringing again. She ignored it and got out of bed, pulled on some clothes and shoes and went down to the garden. One small piece of proof would tell her if the dream was accurate or not. Below the rosebushes, under a round, smooth stone, she found Sybill’s house keys – two of them, tied on a piece of pink string. Yes, it had been real. She held the keys in her clenched fist and her eyes wandered into the wood. It was around eight o’clock but becoming darkly overcast. The wood was shadowy and foreboding. She turned her back on it and returned to the cottage, locking the door behind her. The phone was still ringing. This time she answered it.
“Maisie?” It was Cathy. “Thank god you answered. I thought something had happened to you.”
“No, no, I’m fine.”
“Did they come again?”
It took a moment for Maisie to understand what Cathy meant. And it was only then she realised that she had slept right through with no visitations from evil spirits. Except in her dreams. “No. No, they didn’t. Must have got fed up.”
“Or they were trying to chase me away.”
“Cathy, if I tell you some more Anglo-Saxon, can you translate it for me?”
“Probably. It’s my best subject.”
Maisie repeated the sentence her grandmother had said in the dream. “Ic eom openu þære yflan deorcnes. Com! Ic eom þinu geornful lac.”
“Say it again?” Cathy gasped.
Maisie did so.
“Where did you get it from?”
“I dreamed last night of Sybill’s death. She went out into the woods and said that. I presumed it was another spell. Why? What does it mean?”
“God, Maisie, don’t go saying that when those monsters are around the house. It means, I am open to the evil darkness. Come! I am your willing sacrifice.”
Maisie’s heart stood still. “What?”
“I’m certain of it.”
“But why would she…?”
“I don’t know. It’s madness, isn’t it? Unless she didn’t know what she was saying.”
“But then, where did she get the words from?” Silence at the other end of the line. Moments ticked by as Maisie considered, but couldn’t figure it out. “You know,” she said slowly, “I bet there’s some information in the third diary piece about all this.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Sybill made some notes about the third piece, and about Anglo-Saxon religion. But I have no idea where to start looking.” She checked her watch, thought she’d better shower and dress properly before Sacha arrived.
“Maisie, why don’t you get out of Solgreve for the weekend?” Cathy said. “You need a break from all this. Do you want to come down here for a couple of days?”
“No. Sacha’s coming over this morning. He’s going to stay.”
“Oh,” said Cathy. “Well, be careful. Protect yourself.”
“The whole house is under a protection spell,” Maisie replied.
Cathy laughed. “I didn’t mean from monsters.”
At the bottle shop, at the grocery store, Maisie couldn’t stop thinking it. Who knew? The plump, middle-aged woman who unsmilingly shoved her two bottles of wine in a paper bag – did she know how Sybill had died? Had she wanted it as much as the Reverend and the village constable had? And how about the grey-haired octogenarian at the counter ahead of her, buying cornflakes? And how about the fifteen-year-old girl who rang up her purchases? Had all of them known? For the first time, she honestly didn’t care how unfriendly the locals were towards her. She had far more reason to hate them than they did to hate her. But what could she do about it?
She headed back up the main street towards the cottage. She couldn’t go to the police unless she wanted to be certified insane: I dreamed that ghosts in brown cloaks killed my grandmother and the local Reverend knew all about it. In fact, there was nothing she could do about it unless she found out why her grandmother had been killed. In her dream Constable Blake said that Sybill knew too much, and the Reverend said that she could have changed things forever. So Maisie had to find out what Sybill knew. She shuddered as she thought about where that knowledge had led to for Sybill. But then Maisie wouldn’t be stupid enough to go stand in the wood and proclaim that she was the willing sacrifice of the evil darkness. That was completely baffling. As Cathy had suggested, Sybill simply mustn’t have understood what she was saying. So why did she say it? Where did she get it from?
Maisie stopped, realising she was opposite Elsa Smith’s place again. She stood for a moment, gazing at the front of the house. The old bitch was a liar. Sybill hadn’t collapsed out here in the street, Elsa had never spotted her body or phoned the police. It was all make-believe to cover up the truth, the horrible reality. Maisie watched the windows for a while hoping Elsa would see her and scare herself. But then a white van sped up the street and stopped in front of her. Sacha.
“Want a lift?” he asked.
Maisie smiled and ran around to the other side of the van to climb in. “I wasn’t expecting you this early,” she said.
“What have you got there?” he said, putting the van in gear and heading towards home.
“Wine and foodstuffs. In honour of your visit.”
“Great. How did it go last night?”
“No nasty visitors, but I did dream about Sybill.”
“Any answers?”
“All the answers,” she replied. “But a few more questions with it. I’ll tell you about it inside.”
Tabby wound around between Maisie’s legs as she made tea. Sacha waited for her in the lounge room. When she’d left him there, he’d been sagging forward, elbows on knees, distraught. The truth about Sybill’s death had affected him more than she had anticipated. “You expect old people to die,” he had said, “but you never expect them to suffer. Not like that.”
She returned to the lounge room. He was sitting up now, staring into middle distance. She handed him a mug of tea and settled opposite him.
“Thanks,” he said. He took a sip and then looked up. “I suppose now you’re getting a real sense of what you’re capable of. Your psychic ability, I mean.”
“Yes,” she replied. “Though if I go into business as a psychic, I’ll have to find a more efficient method than dreaming people’s futures.”
Maisie sipped her tea. She was using the “best friend in the world” cup, and he pointed to it.
“That’s mine,” he said.
“Yours?”
“Sybill bought it for me to use when I was over here.”
“She thought you were her best friend in the world?” Maisie
said, smiling.
Sacha shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe she was just being funny.” He looked down again. “You have to find out why they did it, Maisie,” he said.
“I’m working on it,” she replied. “I’m sure there’s stuff in the third part of the diary, but I don’t know where it is.”
“I want to go up there to the church and smack that Reverend Fowler in the jaw. He lied to me. I was planting some bulbs and he came here and said, ‘Sybill is dead.’ And when I asked him how, he told me that lie.” He ran his hand through the front of his hair, leaving a few strands standing up. “I’m sorry, Maisie, I know you didn’t know Sybill as well as I did. This really hurts me.”
“I understand.” She leaned forward, reached out and smoothed down his hair. He seemed not to have noticed.
“My mother’s going to be inconsolable. I’ll have to track her down. When she hears this, she’ll be up here in a flash. You’re not alone in this, Maisie.”
“Thanks. It’s nice to know that.” She watched him watching her, let her eyes drop for a moment to that top lip of his, then back to his eyes.
Their eyes met and some kind of charge seemed to pass between them. She could see his pupils dilate, and knew hers were doing the same. Then he stood up, put his back to her, and started looking at books on the shelf above the mantelpiece.
“What are you looking for?” she asked, her voice straining for normality. In that instant, it had seemed possible. Rather than being a daydream, having Sacha had been something that could be real in her world. She felt dizzy.
“Here,” he said, pulling a book from the shelf. “You should read this.”
It was a book about the tarot. “Thanks.”
He shrugged. He seemed uncomfortable. “I think you should learn it. If you’re really serious about not going back to the orchestra, serious about the psychism.”
