by Ian Watson
“Hubert will … understand, I’m sure.”
Maggy invited Alicia to come home with her for a few days after the funeral. “A change of scene? You too, Paul,” she added. Alicia shook her head, unable to decide.
After a buffet lunch Paul carried plates to the kitchen to escape the conversations. The window was steamed up; raindrops ran down the outside. Occasional beads of condensation slid down the inside of the glass, clearing thin strips of view like those in a mirrored security window. He watched the race between blobs of moisture, betting on one, then another. Tiny pools lay on the inside paintwork.
He poked a pool with his finger. Drops of water began to run from it, up the glass. Up. The beads wrote raggy letters in the steam.
SAL WELL.
Trembling, he seized a tea-towel and wiped the window clean. He must have written the message himself with the tip of his finger. Some part of his mind had directed his hand without his knowing, without his seeing it happen.
“Sal well.” What kind of “well”? She still survives? Or, she’s down the well?
He fled from the kitchen; but found himself returning every ten minutes to check the window. A few times he wiped fresh condensation away, then quit doing this, realizing that he was creating a porthole on the rain-sodden garden and the distant well.
He ought to tip rubble down the well. Old stones and broken bricks. Buckets of rubble to cover the body! Alicia might spot him; someone might. What excuse could he have? Nobody would go near the well all winter long, and it was almost winter already. Long wet grass, rain, chill, mud.
“Better leave well alone! Wait till spring.” He shivered at the confusing ambiguity of his thoughts.
Later, the same Inspector Horrobin called with his constable driver. The post-mortem on David Gordon, performed early that morning, had produced no adequate explanation other than a massive allergy reaction. Though to what? And why had Hubert Smythe also been affected so dramatically?
“I gather you’re aware of the possible theft of a dangerous substance from Whitney’s, sir?”
“Mr Davies told me.”
“I wanted to reassure you—not that it’s any consolation, sir—that there’s no conceivable connexion. The liquid in that font was ordinary water. Whitney’s and the police lab both tested it.”
Ordinary: Paul had known it.
Not ordinary, no. Evil water. Witch water.
He nodded.
“In view of Mr Davies’ suspicions, we’d prefer to avoid ungrounded speculation.”
“Softly, catchee monkey; is that it? If there is any monkey; or magpie.” Really, Paul ought to keep his mouth buttoned.
Horrobin frowned. “Between you and me, sir, one of the village lasses who works at Whitney’s has gone missing. Probably she’s staying with some friend; didn’t bother telling her parents. Or else she’s skipped it to London with a lad. In view of Mr Davies’, hmm, allegation we’re making some enquiries. I’m sure, after the lab analysis, you’ll appreciate there’s no link between that and your … tragedy.”
Ought he to ask, “Which girl?” Would that lead naturally on to Horrobin asking Paul’s opinion of Sally Dingle? Policeman liked to accumulate information, didn’t they? So Paul refrained from asking. He tried simply to look numbed by the whole business. After Horrobin and Constable Cresswell left, Paul hurried into the kitchen, where the window remained a blank.
*
The funeral took place two days later at the crematorium in Lederbury. Alicia had decided against going to stay with Maggie and Bob for a few days, though Paul urged her to; nevertheless Maggie and her husband drove back to Hollyhocks, along with others of the family, so that the house would be comfortingly full for a while … before it became empty.
It was dark by four, and the curtains were closed. At six, Maggie and Bob were in the process of leaving. Light flooded from the front door over shingle and parked cars. The moon was up. Mrs Badgot bustled in from the road.
“I don’t mean to intrude! I saw you all at the door.”
“Thank you for what you tried to do for David Gordon,” Alicia said.
“Think nothing! I don’t want to upset you but … have you looked at the bottom of your garden?”
Paul froze.
“I hope it’s still there. I’d feel a fool.” Mrs Badgot took Alicia by the arm. Footsteps crunched the shingle as everyone walked along to a vantage point. A couple of hundred yards away Pook Pond glowed mistily by moonlight. Somewhat closer—where the well was—a white foggy figure writhed.
“Isn’t it just like a soul dancing in paradise?” whispered Mrs Badgot. “An angel!”
To Paul’s aghast eyes the luminous shape looked more like a soul in torment.
“I think,” said Mrs Badgot, “it’s a sign from your poor baby—not to grieve, because he’s blessed. The wee mite did die baptized.”
“That’s mist,” Alicia said sharply. “Mist drifting out of our well. Hubert already told me about all those oafs who saw ghosts down by Pook Pond. Mist, Mrs Badgot, mist!”
“I never saw the like of that.” Mrs Badgot sounded offended. “I’ve looked down your garden lots of times through that gap in your hedge.”
“I believe you have!”
“A well, is it?” said Bob heartily. “Why don’t we take a gander? Meteorological oddity, eh? Does look a bit like a faceless apparition. Got a torch handy?”
“No,” croaked Paul.
“Got one in the car.”
“No! Can’t you see how this is upsetting Alicia? Go away, Mrs Badgot, please! I don’t know what you were thinking of.”
“But it’s there,” she insisted. “It’s a sign.”
“No, it damn well isn’t. It’s a trick of the moonlight.”
“Fair enough,” said Bob. “C’mon, Maggy, time we went.”
In any case, the wraith above the well had already started to fade.
What would Alicia see if she went down to the well the next day? If she had the wit to take the torch to shine down into the depths. A pair of heels? Legs? As soon as he could, Paul emptied the good batteries out of the torch by the back door and hid them. In their place he put used ones which he hadn’t bothered to throw away. The bulb produced but a poor glow now.
It was a week later, a Saturday. Paul had witnessed the wraith once more, dancing for a while upon the well. Alicia hadn’t mentioned seeing anything.
At half-one he arrived home from Lederbury to find a white police car parked outside. He ran indoors. Alicia and Constable Cresswell were talking in the sitting-room. Relief welled up.
“Darling, Inspector Horrobin called—”
“Where is he? I don’t see him.”
“He’s in the garden. Mrs Badgot must have been gossiping about that funny mist we saw; though the Inspector wouldn’t say who. He asked to have a look at our well.’
“In connexion with that theft from Whitney’s,” Cresswell overrode her, “which Mr Philips knows about. Someone may have dumped the stolen whatsit down your well—it’s close to the field. A gas may be leaking.”
“A gas—from a bottle of hormone? That’s preposterous.”
“I’m no chemist, sir. Are you?”
“You make Whitney’s sound like a weapons factory!”
“You seem agitated, sir. Relax. The Inspector knows what he’s doing.”
Very likely. Theft from Whitney’s. Baby killed in church. Local girl goes missing same evening. Spook spotted in bereaved parents’ garden. Is there a link? Ignoring Cresswell’s advice, Paul hastened through to the kitchen and stared out. It had started raining. An expressionless Inspector Horrobin was treading back towards the house. His overcoat pockets could hold half a dozen torches. Paul wrenched the back door open.
“Ah, Mr Philips. There appears to be a body down your well. Wouldn’t have any idea how it got there, would you?”
Paul said nothing.
“Ankles look to be roped together. Body’s upside-down, you see. That should expedite re
covering it, with a grapnel and winch. If the knots were properly tied. Were they, Mr Philips?”
Rolled-up drainage piping lay on the field the police car was passing, looking like huge millipedes which would presently burrow into the soil, sucking at its black water. The segmented, flexible pipes, now slicked with rain, seemed alive, about to uncoil and squirm.
At university a friend had once persuaded Paul to drop half a tab of acid with him—the way they persuaded you to drink halves, and halves, in the White Hart. Paul hadn’t enjoyed the experience; the LSD had invaded him, taken him over for hours like a parasite, a bright monkey sitting in his brain. Now, slumped in the back seat beside Horrobin, he felt that he was undergoing a worse drug-trip.
Except that he had taken no drugs. He realized that he had become insane. Now that he was mad, the world was much sharper and clearer than ever it had been when he was sane. Before, the world had been fuzzy; he hadn’t needed to pay full attention, could take reality for granted.
The sodden verge along the roadside glowed luminously. Tree skeletons etched against the sky were bodies whose flesh had rotted away, leaving branches of naked nerves. A ploughed field was ten acres of chunkily knitted brown wool; or dog turds.
No drugs. Something had reached into him, flooding, touching every cell in his body, invading and corrupting them.
Now he understood the why and wherefore of witchcraft: it was to gain this clarity, this power of vision, this immanence. He was roused from everyday slumber, awake to existence. Other people only acted the role of being alive—of driving a car, of behaving like a proper police inspector—grotesquely and clumsily.
Horrobin leered at Paul. “Mrs Dingle thinks her daughter ran away because she was pregnant.”
“What?”
“Mrs D used to restock the girl’s towels. Kept a count. Not enough got used last time. Sally must have missed her period and didn’t flush enough clean ones away to put her mum off the scent. I’ll wager the autopsy’ll show she was pregnant, once she’s hauled out of your well. Someone killed her because she was having their baby. She’d have made big trouble for you, Mr Philips. That sad business with your other baby put us off the trail.”
“She was what?”
“In the family way. Bun in the oven. We’ll soon know. How surprised you sound. Shame you never went on the stage.”
“How many months did her mother think?”
“Consulting your mental diary? Wondering if anyone else had a poke?”
“No!”
It was only a few weeks since they’d made love. She would hardly have known yet. Unless some young farmer had knocked her up, previous to that, at a disco. … Unlikely; she didn’t go in for boyfriends. Mrs Dingle must have been talking rubbish. It was just the kind of thing that would appeal to a policeman. Houses of cards formed and collapsed in Paul’s head.
Rain dotted the windows, running jerkily across. The wipers swished. The car halted at a junction to let a bus race by on the main road. Drops changed direction, downward. Beside Paul’s face a single fat raindrop was climbing smoothly up the glass.
Sally was dead, but the water remained. Anywhere in this area! In the sky, in the fields. It cycled round and round, pervading the neighbourhood over the centuries like a blot spreading outward, always refreshing itself from the source. From Pook Pond, from the well. There where the witch had been boiled alive; where Humphrey Barton had clung to a stone succubus and drowned himself; where other events must have happened too—all of them increasing the evil power, no, the primeval power, that visionary power which awoke its devotees from the rubbery idiocy and banality of the everyday world.
As the car speeded up in the traffic stream bound for Lederbury, that single drop continued to march defiantly up the window, which was slightly open. Paul shrank from the glass.
But of course the water had already entered him long since. It sought a human presence in the world. A viewpoint. A raindrop was quite like an eye. Perhaps it had found Sally deficient.
Insane thoughts.
Being proved insane in court was his only escape route from an ordinary, brutalizing prison where “sex offenders” weren’t at all popular. So: a psychiatric lock-up? Basket-work therapy, drugs, indefinite detention rather than an eight- or ten-year sentence? Even so, that might be preferable. Now was the time to choose.
Paul said to Horrobin, “Sally was a witch. I mean that literally; she was a reborn witch. A water-witch. I think they all were, really, in ancient times. On the Continent they burnt witches to get rid of their wicked water, to convert them into dry blazing husks. Because God created the solid earth out of liquid, and a witch sought to dissolve what was solid and ordinary and reform it magically. Make reality more fluid. So that you could master it directly. They didn’t burn witches here; they hanged them with rope. Maybe afterwards they burnt the bodies or buried them in lime. It was a mistake to boil Sally in the cauldron, when she wouldn’t drown in Pook Pond. Afterwards the water was poured like greasy soup on to the green, into the duck pond. The ducks laid eggs; cows drank their fill from the pond, and their udders swelled with milk. The boiled loose meat of Sally was fed to screaming hogs for their supper. Thus in many ways she re-entered the village.”
“So he’s a fucking fruitcake,” Cresswell commented over his shoulder.
“Or else he’s trying to con us that he is,” replied Horrobin.
Witchcraft wasn’t only the ability to see the world; it was also the capacity to alter the world with one’s will, one’s desires, one’s imagination. Paul concentrated on the errant raindrop.
It changed direction, began creeping stubbornly against the wind towards the front of the car. How would it cross the gap between the doors? Paul imagined a raindrop-size bridge. The drop reappeared on the driver’s window, which was also open slightly. That was the same raindrop; he knew it well. He sensed its wetness, its liquid tension, the swarm of animalcules swimming inside it, eating molecules of suspended chemicals—and eating each other. Mating, giving birth, dying. He intuited the life in the water, the spirit which was mirrored in himself. He urged that bead of water to climb the window towards the inch of ventilation.
Briefly the drop hung at the very top of the glass. It gathered, and launched itself. In slow motion he saw the drop fly at the driver’s face.
Cresswell screamed deafeningly. He clapped a hand to his eye. His other hand leapt free of the wheel, clawing at that blob of boiling water which was eating its way like molten lead into his tear duct. Horrobin grabbed over the back of Cresswell’s seat for the wheel, but the car was already careering, skidding, over the centre line, and a bulk flour truck—oncoming, giant-size—was only yards away.
He was a puddle of rainwater on the verge, reflecting a small patch of blue sky. He was an eye which stared up bleakly, an eye in which reflections formed: of rain-clouds, and of crows. Crows were clever scavengers of roadway carrion who never let themselves be clipped by traffic no matter how late they left it to flap out of the way of wheels. What carrion were those black birds eyeing now? A dead driver, thrown through a splintering window? Cresswell had stopped screaming.
In fact there was absolute silence. What sounds could a puddle hear? That’s all he was: a pool of water which would presently soak into the turd-like soil.
No. “I won’t dissolve!” He couldn’t feel anything because he had broken his neck, snapped his spine, when he was thrown clear; that’s why he couldn’t turn his head away from the sky. His eardrums had ruptured; that was why he couldn’t hear the hiss of air-brakes, horns, voices, a distant ambulance siren. Ambulance men would load him carefully. He would spend the rest of his life—long or short—in a bed unable to bat an eyelid or twitch a finger, while inside his body all the waters would pulse with secret, dark activity. … “But I shan’t dissolve!”
Paul shook his head. The car was still driving along the road. Cresswell muttered, “Bugger it,” and rubbed his eye, carrying on steering casually, expertly. The wipers sw
ished.
To alter things … meant to see an alternative event with a vision so compelling that the event became entirely real; at least for a while. The insane dwelled in a world where alternative events continued on and on forever. Possession by evil—by primeval vision—must be very like possession by madness.
Paul stared into his lap at the twin bracelets he wore. One was surely a stainless steel watch strap. The other, a chain and shield inscribed with his allergy to penicillin. For some reason chain and strap had fused together, bonded by powerful magnetism. He couldn’t move his wrists apart.
Now he knew why those ignorant medieval powers-that-be had been able to torture and execute witches; why a demon never came to the witch’s rescue. That was because a witch saw the demon coming to her aid so vividly it was as if this had already occurred—until the hot iron tore her flesh, or the faggots blazed, or the water began to bubble. Until she suddenly lost faith and screamed. It was that loss of faith in her vision which was fatal.
Sally’s vision sustained her while she floated on Pook Pond. It failed when the peasants boiled her. Had it failed her again when he hit her and drowned her? Perhaps. But perhaps the vision had passed from her to Paul, given away gladly. Why, she hardly had struggled. Had grinned up at him from underwater. Or was that an alternative event?
People were made of water. In their organs, glands, and limbs. In the brain. Because of all the vulnerable water in them, people could be controlled by a master or mistress of magic. Could be made to dance to the song of water—as he had danced to Sally’s tune. Now she was free of the fierce, luminous vision, in which you must either believe totally or be destroyed.
Since she had come back from the dead, why so would he. He had drunk the water of immortality.
The car sped into the outskirts of Lederbury.
The cell, with its single light bulb protected by a grille, was bare apart from a bolted-down bed and the toilet bowl which lacked a seat: a china cauldron.
As Paul sat on the cold ceramic rim he stared between his parted legs into the water.
Sally had immersed herself in Pook Pond, baptized herself, drowned herself. Her flesh had dissolved in the water of the cauldron. She had drunk the well into her lungs. Dying was dissolving, was it not? He had fought against dissolving. That had been his mistake, when he sat handcuffed in the police car. His failure of faith.
