by Kim Wilkins
No, don’t think of it. It may not be true. Just a half-remembered phrase he had heard from his father. The Reverend would prefer to believe that Flood was sinister but largely benign. That he performed his miracles through some kind of science that the rest of the world did not yet understand. Nobody suffered, or at least, only those who tried to stop him, and that was akin to self-defence.
Which brought his thoughts back to Maisie Fielding. What was he to do? He pulled himself out of his chair, turned off the lights and locked up the hall, then walked down the hill towards his own house. Sleep on it, that’s what he would do.
But, as always when he had an imminent meeting with Flood, he could not sleep. Around midnight, he gave up trying and rose, went to the kitchen to make a cup of tea. He filled the kettle and brought it down on the stove. His feet were cold so he wandered back to his bedroom for slippers. There he stopped a few moments to gaze out the window. The snow had been falling steadily, a fine layer spread out over road and pathways, collected on gravestones and the low cemetery walls. He looked towards Sybill’s cottage and something caught his eye, some light reflected on the snow on the far side of the house. Was it coming from the house itself? Something seemed curious about it, something seemed misplaced, and it made him nervous.
He was reminded of a time he had been walking down near the cliffs – it must have been nearly two years ago – and he had glanced up into Sybill’s garden from the road. He couldn’t even remember what he had been doing out so late. Perhaps, like tonight, it was merely sleeplessness that had driven him outside, but on that occasion it had been summer and pleasant to be near the sea in the balmy dark.
She had been standing under that old oak, a fire glowing before her, robed in grey, her hands over her head and calling out something…her words had been snatched from her mouth on a passing gust of wind. He had gone on his way – they already knew she was a witch – and been glad that only he had witnessed it. Others may have stoned her house or killed her cat or crossed one of those lines of legality which would draw attention to the village. But he hadn’t known at the time that Sybill wasn’t harmless. He hadn’t known at the time that she was making contact with the Wraiths, was, in fact, only a month or two away from succeeding. One of them, perhaps tired of waiting for Flood’s promise of embodiment to be fulfilled, had gone to her for help. It saw Sybill as its chance, told her things, laid plans with her. Plans which had, of course, been foiled.
The kettle whistling brought him out of his reverie. He went to the kitchen to take it off the stove. Without stopping to consider how cold it was out there, he opened the door and shuffled down his front stairs and into the street, stood on the cobbles and peered into the darkness for a better view of Sybill’s cottage. Snowflakes collected on his flannel dressing gown. Yes, some light in the back garden reflected on the snow lying on the curve of the road.
Surely things hadn’t progressed so far. Surely this young woman wasn’t trying to do what Sybill had done.
He went inside, wrapped himself quickly in overcoat, scarf, shoes. As loath as he was to go out in such inclement weather, he would have to make sure.
The cold could not have been harsher were he naked in it. He shivered and shuddered and, had his teeth been in, they would be jumping around between his trembling jaws. He walked purposefully, head down. He cut through the cemetery, looking quickly left and right for any sign of the Wraiths. They sometimes hovered about near their original graves, almost as though longing to go back to them. The Reverend found it impossible to think of them as having once been real people. They were to him monsters. In any case, they were nowhere in sight and he was nearly to the cliff’s edge. He turned, and peered back up the road towards Sybill’s garden. He could see nothing except the same reflected glow he had spotted from home. Yes, there was a light on outside. But it was not the flickering of firelight. So, the young woman was not performing some ritual of witchcraft. Still, he was outside now, and his curiosity led him to cross the road, stand close to a cluster of trees, and try to see exactly what she was doing. Maybe he was being an old fool. Maybe she had just installed an outdoor light in the hopes of keeping the Wraiths at bay.
He was not being an old fool. If it hadn’t been winter, if branches in his line of vision hadn’t been bare, he would never have seen them. But he did. The young woman and a man – perhaps the same fellow who had tended Sybill’s gardens, he couldn’t be quite sure at this distance – were digging a large pit behind the house.
The shock was electric. The Reverend jumped back into shadow, waited a few minutes to catch his breath, then crossed the road again and hurried home. Perhaps seeing a young couple digging in their garden at midnight would be looked upon as merely curious in other communities in the world. But in Solgreve, to dig up the earth was a far more portentous act. What on earth did the two of them think they were doing? And if they knew what they were doing, how on earth did they know?
Maisie’s arms and shoulders ached and, despite the howling January wind, she was growing uncomfortably hot. They had been at it for more than two hours. Now that they were deeper into the ground, they had switched the light on. After two hundred years, neither of them expected to find a full skeleton, and they had to keep a careful eye out for any remains in the ground. Sacha had removed far more soil than she, of course. The first half metre or so was nearly impossible – the roots of the old rosebush still held firm in some places. But as they dug lower, the roots became more and more decayed and dried out and the soil easier to cut through with the edge of the spade. Still, they were up to their thighs in a pit in the ground, and there was not a trace of Georgette.
Maisie took a brief rest, drove her spade into the ground and leaned on it. The snow was still falling, dropping a layer into the pit, clinging to the strands of hair which had escaped from her cosy hat.
“Sacha, what if we’re digging in the wrong place?”
“We’re digging in the right place,” he said, not looking up, concentrating on removing soil.
“But what if we’re just a fraction out and we miss her?”
“We won’t miss her.”
“But what if –”
“Maisie!” he said sharply. “It’s after midnight, it’s snowing and I’m very tired. Just dig.”
Maisie picked up her spade again, her face stinging with embarrassment. She bit back tears and kept plunging her spade into the ground.
“Sorry,” he said gruffly a few minutes later.
“It’s okay.” One more shovelful. And another. And…
“Sacha,” she said cautiously.
“Yes?”
“Is this a…” She dropped her spade and knelt in the pit to examine the pile of dirt she had been about to remove. She plucked from it a grey-brown splinter of bone and held it up. “Is this her?”
Sacha crouched next to her, examined the bone. “I suppose it must be. We’d better go carefully, we might miss what’s left of her.”
“What do you suggest?”
He was already on his knees, clearing the dirt with his hands, pushing it into the sides of the pit. She did the same.
“Here,” said Sacha, “is this her ring?”
He handed Maisie a dirty band of metal and she turned it over between her gloved fingers. “Yes, it must be.” She handed it back to Sacha, who slipped the ring into his pocket. For a few more minutes they combed through the dirt with their fingers, eventually uncovering a ragged curve of rib, and perhaps a plate of what was once skull. Maisie slipped her left hand out of her glove and touched what she imagined may once have been Georgette’s forehead. “So this is what it feels like to touch the past,” she breathed.
“I think this is all we’re going to find,” Sacha said, leaning back on his haunches. “The earth here is fairly limey, but it’s just been so long.”
“Still,” Maisie said, “it’s not the person, remember, it’s the soul. It’s in here somewhere in the soil.” She looked down again at the collection of frag
ments they had found. “Do you think she can hear us?” Maisie asked.
“I don’t know if souls can hear us. We’re on a different plane.”
“I feel like I should say something.”
“Go on. You never know.”
“Georgette,” she said, addressing the dirty piece of skull. She closed her eyes. “We’re going to use you to defeat Dr Flood. And then we’ll try to set you free.”
When she opened her eyes, Sacha was standing and climbing out of the pit. “I’ll go get the lantern.”
“Sure, okay.”
He left her sitting in the snowy pit with Georgette’s remains. Once again, she thought she ought to say something. “I read your story,” Maisie whispered. “It wasn’t your fault. None of it was your fault.”
Sacha was back in a few moments. He turned off the electric light, plunging the scene into darkness. He handed her the antique lantern and sat on the edge of the pit. “Are you ready for this?”
“I don’t know. I guess we’ll soon find out.” She pulled her other glove off and sat cross-legged in the pit just above Georgette’s remains. The lantern was in her left hand, her right lay over the piece of skull. She closed her eyes again. Her body was cooling rapidly. Her fingers were tingling sharply and her nose was frozen. She tried to shut it all out, went searching for that place inside her that Mila had shown her how to find. Maisie had spent most of the day in meditation so, despite the hours of physical labour, the pains in her shoulders and the icy numbness creeping into her joints, it wasn’t as impossible as she had feared.
When she felt ready, she said the simple incantation Virgil had written in his letter.
“Spirit flows from right to left.”
She had been expecting nothing to happen. So it was a surprise to feel a little charge, like a mild electric shock, pass from her right hand, up her arm, across her shoulders and down into her left hand. She heard Sacha gasp. When she opened her eyes, she understood why.
The lantern glowed dimly, pale blue like phosphorescence on waves. Maisie held it up to her face. “My god,” she breathed.
“Flood’s chamber,” Sacha said. “The glowing wall.”
And suddenly the memory came back to her: the night she had tried to contact her grandmother, the frantic beating against glass. “He has Sybill.”
Maisie showered, ready for bed, then carefully placed the lantern on the beside table. From between the covers, she continued to gaze at its faint glow. It was the colour of stars in distant galaxies, stars that seemed sometimes not to be there, but sometimes seemed to pulse palely in the night sky. When Sacha came in, he turned on the overhead light and the glow was no longer visible.
“I wonder,” said Maisie. “Is that why Flood works in darkness? Perhaps the magic is strongest when the light is strongest.”
“And the Wraiths only come out at night. Maybe soul magic only works in the dark.”
“That makes sense. Switch the light off again.”
Sacha did so, then climbed into bed next to her.
“I’m exhausted.”
“Me too,” she said. She could barely take her eyes off the lantern. “It was like she jumped in willingly, wasn’t it?” Maisie asked. “I’m sure I’m not that adept.”
“You might be,” Sacha said. “But yes, she did go in very easily.”
Maisie rolled onto her back. “You know what this means, don’t you? It means we have to do it. We have to go down there and…confront him.”
“Yes,” Sacha replied. “I know that.”
“I’m terrified of him.”
“Remember what Ma said, fight magic with like magic. We’ve got what he’s got.”
“But he’s so much more experienced, so much stronger.”
“It will be all right.”
“You don’t know that for sure.” Maisie sighed. “I’m not up to this.”
“Yes, you are,” he said, leaning over to kiss her forehead. “Come on, try to sleep.”
She snuggled against him, he smoothed her hair with his hand. Yes, she was exhausted enough to sleep, despite the new terror growing in her stomach. Within minutes she felt herself beginning to drift away on a dark tide of slumber.
“Maisie, are you awake?” Sacha whispered. She heard him but couldn’t quite make her tongue move to say yes, so she supposed she wasn’t awake at all.
He drew his hand away and she felt him kiss her cheek gently. Right before sleep claimed her totally, she thought she heard him say, “I love you, Maisie.” But she might have been mistaken.
Reverend Fowler went just before dawn to see Flood. He hadn’t slept all night and besides, it always seemed more appropriate to visit him in darkness. This way, too, it was less likely that somebody would see him disappearing into the ruins of the abbey. The villagers didn’t like to be reminded that something sinister and obscure was going on in the foundations. Fewer than a dozen who knew of Flood’s work even knew his name.
He descended the stairs carefully, one hand extended to brush the cold wall. In his head, he had replayed the vision of the two young people in Sybill’s garden last night. What if he was wrong? What if they’d had an emergency plumbing problem, or if they were doing something harmless like planting marijuana and naively thought to do it at night? There was no reason to believe that a body had ever been buried behind Sybill’s house. If there had been, well, surely Sybill herself would have dug it up rather than risk being caught in the cemetery three times. While his sense of duty told him he should inform Flood immediately, he wanted to hold off until he was certain. The villagers may have cast-iron consciences, but he didn’t. The girl was not going to be killed. Today he was going to make sure of it, and if it meant telling lies, then so be it. It wouldn’t be the worst thing he’d ever done. And if he found, later on, that the girl was involved in something which could threaten them, it would take only one visit to Flood to sort it out.
Reverend Fowler knocked warily. Courage now, Linden. Flood had power to read thoughts, but it was limited: not intentions or passing fancies, but solid facts that were embedded in the fabric of the mind. The Reverend would have to keep what he knew well-hidden. It wasn’t impossible. He was trained in the ways of the spirit; he was capable of these things if he kept a cool head.
The door opened a crack. “Come, Reverend.”
The Reverend ventured into the shadowy chamber.
“What is it?” Flood asked, moving back into the dark.
“A community meeting was held yesterday,” the Reverend said. “To discuss whether the Wraiths should still be sent after the young woman on Monday night.”
“Oh?”
“There were doubts,” the Reverend said quickly. It was true, though the doubts were his only. “The decision was no longer unanimous and so I’m here to ask you to defer that action until a decision can be made.”
“Certainly,” Flood said, turning his back on the Reverend and fiddling with something on one of his benches. “You know I try to comply with the village’s wishes.”
Easy. The Reverend turned to go. “Thank you, Doctor.”
“You must be pleased, Reverend. I know you didn’t want the girl to suffer.”
The Reverend hesitated, turned back. “No. No, I didn’t. She’s not Sybill. She’s quite a pleasant young woman.”
Flood turned around. “You must be very sure that she’s no threat to the village?”
“Yes, I’m sure.” He could hear his own voice waver and a flutter of panic rose up in his chest. Perhaps he shouldn’t have relied on himself to be dishonest.
“Good day, then, Reverend,” Flood said.
Relief. Flood hadn’t noticed. “Yes. Good day.”
He was halfway to the door when Flood said. “It may take you some time to earn my trust again.”
The Reverend paused, looked warily over his shoulder. “I…”
Flood stood there, head tilted to one side, a hulking figure in the gloom. “You saw her digging a pit and you weren’t going to tell me
?”
“I don’t think it was –”
“She won’t die on Monday. She’ll die tonight. I’ll send the Wraiths.”
“But –”
“Reverend, my trust is not easily bestowed. Do not abuse it again.”
The Reverend nodded.
“There is something you can do to please me.”
“What is it?” the Reverend asked, dreading the task but longing to be restored in Flood’s favour. The Doctor was not a man one wanted as an enemy.
“Make it easy for them to get in.”
“How can I –”
“She’ll open the door to you. Go to the cottage, knock, tell her your name. Then step aside and let the Wraiths do the rest.”
The Reverend could feel his jaw tremble. To do as Flood asked was unimaginable. To be so near when it happened…
“Reverend?”
“Yes,” he said firmly.
“Will you do it?”
“Yes.”
“Good. The Wraiths will come for you after dark. Make sure you keep your promise.”
“My promise,” the Reverend said. “Of course, of course. I’ll go to the cottage.”
Maisie woke to the sound of knocking. Sacha stirred in his sleep next to her. She blearily rose and grabbed her robe from where it hung over the end of the bed. The knocking came again, more urgent, as she stumbled towards the front door.
“Okay, okay,” she muttered, then paused before opening it. “Who is it?” she called in a croaky voice.
“Reverend Fowler. It’s important.”
Reverend Fowler? Maisie remembered the letter. She pulled her robe closer about her and opened the door.
Daylight dazzled her. The sky was white, the road was white, tree branches and stone fences were all white. The world appeared to have turned to snow. Reverend Fowler stood in front of her, the sole black figure in the scene.
