‘I’ll be polite,’ I promised. ‘But nothing will come up, so please, just go, have a nice time, don’t worry.’
‘And you, take it easy and don’t hesitate to ring if you need to, remember?’
An hour later I was standing by the living room window waving to Dad’s car as it bumped down the rutted track to the main road, and out of sight.
He was gone. I was alone in the silent, watchful house. I’d been waiting for this moment for nearly a week – it was time to throw in my hand, sort this out once and for all.
As soon as I was sure Dad wasn’t coming back, I took the book out from under my bed. I couldn’t repress a shudder as I handled the heavy, crumbling mass of paper. It repelled me; the thick, curling pages like leathery skin, the crabbed scratchy writing, the lists of cruel necessities. As I leafed through the pages they sprang out at me; the tongue of a kitten, a child’s tears, three hairs from an adulterous woman, blood from a virgin girl.
‘To Brake of the Strongest Magick,’ I read under my breath, ‘a Darke Spell, onely to be Ufed in Great Need.’
Was this a case of great need? Nothing else had worked and I couldn’t condemn poor Seth to a lifetime of enchantment. The page was burned almost to ashes and in places the writing stood out silver against the blackened parchment. There were other marks: strange symbols in a witches’ alphabet, and dark, rust-red blotches. I tried not to think about what they were. At the bottom of the page I made out a faint note in a different hand: oh sisters Beware.
I shuddered, then pulled myself together. I could do this. I could do this for Seth.
‘Come on, Anna,’ I whispered aloud, and felt a litt Kd fit was tle courage return. But even so, the first line chilled me: Take of the Bloode of a Witch.
Well, there was no witch to hand, so I’d have to use the only blood available. Mine.
In the kitchen I took the sharpest knife I could find, shut my eyes and, steeling myself, I scraped my thumb down the blade. The rough metal bit into my flesh and when I opened my eyes a deep cut welled gore on to the kitchen table. It hurt, but I didn’t have time to think about that. Instead I grabbed a teacup and caught as much blood as I could before the wound clotted. Then, binding a tea-towel tightly around my thumb, I went back to the living room and read on.
Mix her bloode with earth & ashes & eat thereof. While Þe mouth still is thick with gore, speak the incantation.
Well, I had earth and I had ashes. I padded outside, ignoring the stones cutting into my bare feet and the heavy drops that were beginning to fall from the lowering sky. Purple clouds were racing in from the sea to join the ones already gathered on the mainland, and far off in the bay, white horses were whipping up. I shivered as the wind picked up, piercing my thin pyjama top, and quickly scooped up some earth from the path. Then I hurried inside, shutting the door against the wind and rain. On some superstitious instinct I shot the bolt as well.
There was plenty of soft white wood ash in all the grates in the house, so I took a handful from the study fireplace and added it to the mix. Then I went back to the living room hearth and stared down at the book.
Mix … & eat thereof.
I shuddered and stirred the cup with my finger. It squelched and ground and gritted, and a butcher’s smell came up. Nausea rose in my throat and the cut on my hand throbbed painfully, but I’d come this far, I might as well get it over. I put it to my lips and took a mouthful.
It was indescribably disgusting; a thick mixture like wet clay; a foul, clotted mass of grit and gore. My stomach heaved, trying to spit it out – but I fought down the wave of revulsion and managed to swallow a little and keep it down. I was pretty sure that ‘eat thereof ’ did not mean ‘put in your mouth and sick right up again’.
While my mouth was still clotted, I spoke the words of the incantation.
‘Hwat!’ My tongue was clagged with grit, my throat closing and heaving against the trickling ooze.
‘Hwat, storm-geboren.’
The taste was vile in my mouth.
‘Hwat, loathéd lyftfloga.’
I choked, but forced myself on.
‘Hwat, sceadu, Brimwolf.
Hwat, windræs.
Hwat, o Brimwolf.’
Nausea rose again, threatening to overwhelm me, and I gritted my teeth, drawing shuddering breaths in and out through my nose, trying to keep it together.
‘Hwat, o Brimwolf!
Come!’
When I finished there was silence. I waited for a moment, fighting the urge to crouch and wrap my arms protectively around myself – but nothing happened.
I closed the book with a sigh. Probably I’d missed some vital step, or you needed the blood of a real witch. Probably I’d pronounced the incantations wrong. Let’s face it – it was most likely all rubbish anyway.
Feeling flat and depressed, I washed out my mouth at the kitchen sink, then went up to my room to lie down. I put the spell book on the window sill. I’d return it to its hiding place later, I thought wearily, but right now I was more drained than I’d have thought possible. The wind shrieked and howled in the chimney as I climbed into bed, but I didn’t care. My head hit the pillow, and I slipped into the cool abyss of sleep.
I awoke with a jump, to the sound of a crash in the meadow outside. Somewhere a gate had blown loose and banged with a ceaseless, monotonous rhythm. The wind was mounting, and there was something in its voice that made me shiver and huddle deeper into my duvet. It was a strange howling, a shrill booming roar. At last I gave up trying to ignore it and went to the window.
The forest stretched out, dark and lush, and beyond that the restless waters of the bay. Far out, over the water, a shadow was racing over the sea, darkening everything in its path. It looked like a great dark stormcloud, but I’d never seen a cloud move so fast. The shrieking grew louder, and the shadow spread and darkened until the whole bay was almost as dark as night, only the pathetic glint of the lighthouse piercing the murk. There was a terrible crash far away, like a rock fall into the bay, and a tearing, rending sound. I shivered, thinking of all the fishermen out in their boats in this dreadful weather.
The wind grew louder still, and its note had a wailing, keening sound, like children crying, or seagulls mewing, though there wasn’t a single bird to be seen in the sky. Even the rooks had fled the great beech tree and the branches were clean and bare, for the first time since I’d come to Wicker House.
The dark cloud was coming closer and closer. First the forest was covered in its shadow, then the meadow, and now the windows of the house were darkening. I backed away, an inexplicable panic rising in me. I heard my own voice, thin and weak against the shrieking din, repeating, ‘It’s just a storm, it’s just a storm, it’s just a storm.’ But finally I couldn’t even hear my own voice, only the cacophonous wind, screaming at me: Anna, Anna, Anna!
A face – a face at the window, a Kthed lush, a terrifying, shapeless face that eddied and surged with the gale. An open, screaming mouth full of swirling storm-tossed debris, and sightless, empty eyes filled with leaves, dust and the feathers of birds. Anna! screamed the mouth. The voice was dreadful, it was all the voices of my nightmares rolled into one, it was shrill and deep and it entered my wounded skull, throbbing inside my head.
I tore the curtains shut and ran, blundering into doors and furniture, not knowing where I was heading. Behind me I heard the crack and shriek of wood, smashing glass, and knew that the storm had broken through the window. I could hear the panes swinging to and fro, cracking against the walls with shocking violence. Shards of glass and storm debris scudded before me along the corridor and my breath tore in my throat.
When I reached the shelter of Dad’s bedroom I slammed the door and leapt on to his big double bed, where I cowered beneath the covers in the foetal position, pressing thick wads of duvet to my ears and eyes, trying to shut out the terror and contain my trembling. There was blood running down my shin, but I couldn’t feel the pain.
It was quieter now. The storm’
s violence was muffled by the thick stone walls of this part of the house and Dad’s heavy oak bedroom door. The loudest sounds beneath the duvet were my tearing breaths, the thumping of my own heart, and the roar of blood in my ears.
Then the oak door began to creak. Peering out from under the duvet I saw the thick, ancient planks were bending, warping. Dead insects, stones and small bones began to skud under the doorway, tendrils of dust reaching across the floor like searching fingers.
I pulled the duvet back over my head, stifling a whimper with its folds, and shut my eyes against the cotton darkness. The door rattled, shaking in its frame, and I heard the wind whistle through the gaps.
Nothing could keep it out. It was in the room. It was by the bed. Something was pressing on me, feeling for my shape beneath the duvet.
A wordless moan of terror came from my lips and I heard an answering scream from the storm-thing, so close the bed shook. Even through the covers I could smell its stench: bladderwrack and rotting driftwood. My stomach seemed to turn to water and the thing screamed again, ripping at the duvet.
‘Go away!’ The words were ripped from me, sobbed into my knees: ‘Please, whatever you are, go away!’
‘Noooooooooo!’ it screamed, a long drawn-out howl of thwarted fury.
‘G-go away! P-please go away!’
There was a dreadful sucking, hollow sound, the vortex of the storm drawing in on itself, and the thump and screech of furniture dragged across the wooden floor. And then … nothing.
I lay in Dad’s bed with my forehead pressed to my knees, shivering and listening as the din slowly quietened to an ordinary sto K orn Drm. Then, with a suddenness that made me jump, I heard a battering from downstairs. Every bone in my body just wanted to huddle down and ignore the noise, but then I remembered the bolted front door. It might be Dad, trying to get in.
Stiffly, my limbs trembling with cramp, I got up, pulling the covers on the bed straight. There was a dead robin on the duvet and I picked it up sadly, wondering what to do with it. The battering came again.
I checked my face in the mirror, wiped a smear of earth-clotted blood off my chin, and tiptoed downstairs, holding the bird in my hand.
At the front door I drew the bolt, then belatedly remembered my London caution about answering the door to possible strangers.
‘Who is it?’ I shouted through the thick wood. The answer made me gape, then hastily pull back the lock.
Emmaline Peller and her mother stood on the doorstep, draggled and dripping, both with grim expressions. In the darkness I could dimly see broken branches and ripped-up trees strewn across the meadow.
‘Come in!’ I said, astonished at their appearance. I’d never met Mrs Peller but she looked exactly like Emmaline, only twenty years older. They had the same serious, angular face, the same long black hair, even similar glasses. Only the faint lines on her mother’s face gave away her age. ‘Are you OK? What happened?’
‘We came to tell you, you have to stop,’ Emmaline said, slamming the door shut behind her with a force that made the hallway mirror jump and rattle against the wall.
‘Emmaline, that’s enough, let me sort this,’ her mother said with a look. She turned to me. ‘Anna, I don’t know why you’re doing this, but Emmaline’s right, you have to stop. What the hell were you doing with that storm? Do you realize you could have been killed? You’re putting everyone in danger – including yourself. What are you trying to achieve?’
‘I – I don’t understand.’ I quailed before her stern look.
‘Please don’t play games.’ She looked very tired all of a sudden. ‘We know what you are. We’re admitting what we are. Let’s just come out and call a spade a spade and we can discuss this properly.’
‘W–what am I?’ I asked, suddenly not sure if I wanted to hear the answer. Mrs Peller hesitated, as if a word hovered on the edge of her tongue, a word she was reluctant to use.
‘A witch,’ Emmaline spat into the silence. ‘You’re a witch, OK? We know. We know it’s you doing this, we’re not stupid. We’ve lived here all our lives; we’ve made peace with this community. How dare you waltz down from London and put us all in danger? You may be powerful but—’
‘Emmaline,’ said her mother with force. She turned back to me and studied my face, my trembling hands, the scab on my forehead. When she spoke her vo K spsaiice was soft. ‘Child, is it possible … did you not know?’
Somehow I was seated at the kitchen table, Emmaline’s mother plying me with tea, a worried little frownline etched between her narrow black brows.
‘Well, you’ve clearly been in the wars, Anna. Why don’t you tell us the whole story? Oh, and please stop calling me Mrs Peller. My name is Maya.’
I nodded, looking down into the steam of the mug, shame prickling at the back of my neck and heating my cheeks. It had been hard enough to justify my actions to myself; spelling it out in black and white to this lovely woman, especially with Emmaline’s suspicious gaze at the other end of the table, was going to be excruciating. I had so many questions: how had this happened? How could I help Seth? Why me? But the first question I asked was none of these, it came to me with a shiver as the wind howled again in the chimney.
‘What,’ I shuddered slightly and wrapped my hands more tightly round the scalding mug, ‘what was that … that thing?’
Emmaline echoed my shudder involuntarily and Maya’s face darkened.
‘One of the forgotten powers. There are many out there, some roaming, some trapped, waiting to be called on. Some people call them elementals or demons. They’re very old, very dark, and very powerful. Once they were worshipped – now they’re ignored by men, and it angers them.’
‘Did you send it away?’
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘I doubt we could have controlled it. It was summoned by you – did you command it?’
‘I don’t think so …’ I tried to think back to the nightmare screaming wind and my sobs. ‘I might have begged it to go away.’
‘It was fortunate if that’s what you did say. I think it was bound to your will and obeyed you. You were lucky, Anna. You might not be so lucky again. How did you come to summon it – why?’
I hardly knew how to answer that, but I tried.
‘It all began when I found this book. I was with some other girls from school and we decided to try one of the spells, as a joke. We did a …’
I blushed and faltered and Emmaline said sarcastically, ‘We know, a love spell. We saw the effects.’
‘Yes. But I didn’t think it would work – I mean, why would it? I don’t believe in any of that r—’ I stopped myself just in time from saying ‘rubbish’ and amended it to ‘really’.
‘But it did,’ prompted Maya. I nodded unhappily, feeling the weight of it press down on me.
‘Yes. I didn’t know what to think – I hoped it was a joke, or that it would wear off. But it didn’t, so I decided that I had to try something else.’
‘And it didn’t work?’
‘No.’
‘Did you check?’
‘Yes! Of course. He was just as obsessed as ever. The first one, nothing happened. The second one our chimney collapsed and I got hit on the head.’ My hand crept up to touch the scar on my head. ‘I wanted to stop after that but I promised myself I’d give this last spell a try, and if it didn’t work I would … I don’t know. Accept defeat. Put Seth off some other way.’
Maya sighed and ran her hands through her hair.
‘Well, so much for this. I can understand how it all came about. Although I don’t know why you’ve failed to break the charm. You’ve power enough; you’ve proved that.’
‘But I don’t understand at all,’ I said desperately. ‘Why did it work for me but not the others? No one’s following them around like love-lorn sheep.’
‘Because,’ Emmaline said with exaggerated patience, ‘they have no powers. You do.’
I put my hand to my head. It was aching badly. Was this all real, or had I hit my head
again in the storm? Surely I wasn’t sitting around my kitchen table being accused of witchcraft by my school friend and her mum.
‘So what are you?’ I said at last.
‘What do you mean?’ Maya said.
‘Well, at the door you said, “We know what you are, we’re admitting what we are.” What are you?’
‘We’re,’ Maya bit her lip, ‘well, witches too.’ She rubbed at the bridge of her nose and suddenly looked very tired and very weary. ‘But not, apparently, as powerful. After you showed your hand with that little love spell, Emmaline and I did everything we could to put a dampener on your magic. We were terrified of what you might do next. But clearly it didn’t work.’
‘Do you think that might be why my counter-spells didn’t work?’ I asked, knowing that I was clutching at straws, but trying anyway. ‘Do you think you somehow stopped them working?’
‘Oh no, they worked.’ She looked grim. ‘If you could summon that storm demon then there’s no way a simple little counter-charm would have failed. You’ve removed most of the protective enchantments on this house for a start – it was magic keeping the chimney up.’
‘So it really is all my fault,’ I said dully. ‘Everything. Seth. The chimney. My head.’
‘More than that,’ Emmaline said acidly, but just then there was the sound of a key in the lock of the front door and Dad’s voice called:
‘Hi love, I’m back.’ The front door slammed, and we all sat in silence, listening to him pulling off his boots. ‘What’s with all the branches in the lane and why’s there a dead bird in the hall?’
He came into the kitchen and did a double-take, but was too polite to show his surprise. He only said mildly, ‘Well, this is an unexpected pleasure. Who are your friends, Anna?’
For a long moment I was paralyzed with indecision, too spun out by the whole surreal situation to come up with a reply. What could I say: ‘Hi, Dad, meet the local coven’?
Maya saved me. She stood, holding out her hand.
‘Hello, you must be Anna’s dad. Pleased to meet you. I’m Maya Peller and this is my daughter, Emmaline. She’s in Anna’s English class and promised to drop over the homework assignments so Anna doesn’t get too far behind while she’s sick. We called past to post them through the door but Anna was nice enough to ask us in for a cuppa – particularly as the weather was so appalling.’
A Witch In Winter Page 7
