Witches of Lychford Series, Book 1

by Paul Cornell

  She’d been moved, at the company’s expense, to a nice new house near a local hub in Swindon, where she’d become part of an unusual sales strike force. They were called upon to do the weirdest things, most of which turned out to be a laugh, like today, where they’d been drawing the company logo on people’s doors. Alec, her immediate boss, had said nobody would mind or notice, and they hadn’t. Jade felt she’d learned a lot about human nature since joining the strike force. Now she was doing one last sweep before they all went back to the hotel, then off to a club in Gloucester, where hopefully there’d be some snort to be had, because she was knackered.

  She’d finished her list, and she’d been told to also look out for houses not on it which now displayed anti-Sovo posters, the floating voters. There was one now, to her annoyance, in the window of . . . a shop that sold magic things. Used to the idea that nobody would object, Jade opened her pot of paint that smelled like the most gorgeous coffee, dipped in her brush, and made to mark the door.

  Which was when some black girl in an amazing dress and a bomber jacket opened the door and grabbed the pot and brush. “Not today, thank you,” she said, and before Jade could react, her tools had been snatched inside and the door slammed in her face. Jade hammered on it, horrified at the thought of what might happen to her if she had to go back and tell Alec she’d lost her tools.

  “Any trouble here, ma’am?”

  She turned to see a policeman looking at her, a wry look on his face. She considered for a second saying she’d had some things stolen, but then she’d have to explain what she’d been doing. Alec didn’t have to know. They just threw the stuff into a bin bag anyway, to be taken back to central office. Not telling him: that was looking after number one. “No trouble,” she said, and headed off, wanting to put distance between her and that shop, and looking forward to her night out.

  Lizzie was looking around at a workshop full of bubbling test tubes and beakers with things dripping into them. There were what looked like ancient diagrams Blu-Tacked to the walls, but the back room of Autumn’s shop looked more like a school science lab than a wizard’s chamber. A moment ago, Autumn had returned triumphant, the pot of paint and brush in hand. They’d had to wait an hour, the lights on the shop front turned off, before someone had taken the bait. Lizzie applauded, and Judith nodded, one eyebrow raised, in appreciation. “So,” Lizzie went up to her, gesturing to the equipment, “this is where the magic happens.”

  “How long have you been waiting to say that?”

  “Since you told me you owned the shop. But, you know: trauma.”

  “I had the workshop set up in my old house before I had the shop. I like making my own potions.”

  “It’s all too scientific,” said Judith.

  “What do you use? A cauldron?”

  “Obviously.”

  Lizzie picked up the brush, sniffing the red goo. The pungent smell made her cough. “We need to do some sort of chemical analysis,” she said, “find out what’s in this stuff. I can’t . . . see . . . anything weird, not with my new senses, I mean.”

  “It’s mostly red paint,” said Autumn, “with a few herbs I stock in the shop.”

  Lizzie was impressed. “How did you work that out so quickly?”

  Autumn held up the tin and pointed. “List of ingredients.”

  Lizzie saw she was right. “Wow. The powers of evil are kind of thorough.”

  “And it turns out, according to this, that the same herbs which went into my invisibility potion really can make something invisible.”

  “With the proper incantations and sacrifice during mixing,” said Judith, “and the force of belief, which you wouldn’t have been able to add.”

  “You sold an invisibility potion?” asked Lizzie.

  “It was designed to provide solace, comfort, a sense of getting away from it all . . .”

  “But not invisibility,” said Judith.

  “There was a disclaimer on the bottle,” said Autumn. “Can we get on?”

  Judith picked up a piece of paper and began to draw. “If what’s in this stuff is just to make it invisible, then there has to be summat else going on to add other effects, like harming anyone who’s got it on their door. Sacrifice and incantation will have gone into setting that up. The shape of the symbol might be important.” She held up a drawing of the Sovo logo. “It has an unsettling aspect.”

  “Meaning—?” asked Lizzie.

  “That’s the sort of thing I say when I have no idea what I’m going on about.”

  “We can’t get rid of the marks,” began Lizzie.

  “And painting over them won’t make any difference,” said Judith.

  “And if this isn’t about the paint, no amount of analysis can help us,” said Autumn.

  “We’ve got three days until the meeting,” said Lizzie. “Sovo seem to be going to do something terrible to those planning on voting against, or maybe just stop them leaving their houses. If Dave Cummings gets his way and the new store gets built, it sounds like it might literally be the end of the world. So . . . what can we do?”

  They looked at each other. None of them had an answer.

  The following evening, Shaun Mawson decided he’d go to sample one of Sunil Mehra’s excellent chicken dansaks, and also perhaps two or three Cobra beers, rude not to, and at the same time, have a chat with the proprietor. So they found a table, and Shaun, while liberally distributing lime pickle on his papadum, made his position clear. “Okay, so she might be mad as toast, she believes a lot of weird stuff, her cooking’s terrible, and she wears the same cardigans for weeks, until they smell like diesel, for some reason—”

  “You’re talking to me about your mother? Oh, dear.” Sunil raised a hand to his waiter. “Keep the Cobra coming for PC Mawson.”

  “I’m here to say I think Mum needs something more in her life. Even more so at the moment. I’m here to say . . . don’t get discouraged. Okay?”

  Sunil looked as if he was having trouble formulating a response, but before he could, someone else arrived at the table. It was Maureen, the mayor. Shaun had noted her on the way in, eating on her own, looking like she hadn’t slept in days. She’d barely acknowledged his greeting. These days, every such hello must for her be either a gesture of support or the start of a row. “Excuse me,” she said, “I couldn’t help overhearing. This is difficult—”

  Sunil had a chair brought over. “Please,” he said, “it’s everyone’s night for difficult conversations. If you’d like me to leave you two to talk . . . I’d be delighted.”

  “No, because, well, I gather you and Judith are great friends, Mr. Mehra, and like Shaun I’m glad to see that. I just wanted to ask . . . oh dear, I shouldn’t—”

  Shaun had heard what everyone else in town had, that Maureen had taken money to support Sovo. He’d waited for anyone to allege it to him or to his superiors on an official basis, but the lack of such an approach had presumably meant that those opposed to the store had failed to find anything solid they could offer him. He’d always liked Maureen, because his mum had, to the tiny degree she liked anyone, but now he wasn’t feeling especially gracious toward her. “If you’ve got something to say about Mum—”

  “I saw her yesterday evening, going around town, looking at people’s doors. Just going right up to them and staring at them. She was dragging the new vicar and that girl from the magic shop around with her, like she was trying to persuade them about something. I’ve seen her talking to someone who wasn’t there—”

  “I’m not sure I want to hear this.” Mum hanging around with those two fitted in with her usual eccentricities, and when she’d called him about the magic shop the other day, there really had been someone trying to get in, though it had taken Shaun’s eyes a moment to adjust to the gloom and see her, just like Mum had, oddly, said it would.

  “No, please, I’m not saying she’s like that all the time, I know she isn’t, she’s just . . . tough and a bit eccentric, and I like that. I just think . . . it’s
getting to all of us. So many people in this town are breaking under the strain, and I . . . I don’t know what to do. What I’m saying is, she needs someone to talk to right now, and the way she looked at me the other day I know I can’t . . .” She trailed off, then closed her eyes, as if trying not to cry, then had to quickly get up. “Excuse me,” she said. “I’ve left some money.” Then she was off and out the door.

  Shaun looked carefully back to Sunil. “Now, that made what’s happening with Mum sound a bit more serious than it is . . .”

  Sunil sighed. “How long have I known your mother? Business as usual, by the sound of it.”

  Shaun made himself smile, but he wondered—given what he’d seen in the town just lately, with rows breaking out in the queue for the post office, people getting hate mail, postings on the town’s website forum that had for the first time made the webmistress decide on a moderation policy—if whichever way the vote went, any of them could look forward to business as usual.

  Lizzie took time, in the days before the meeting, to go and see her parishioners, particularly those she knew had symbols painted on their doors. What she most heard was a formless anger about how things were changing so fast, how someone had to stand up to the big companies who thought they ran everything. With her collar on, Lizzie still didn’t feel able to agree out loud.

  Those she talked to who wanted the store to come here had hardly embraced evil. They talked about how hard things were, how they needed to shop more cheaply without spending a lot of money on petrol, how they and their relatives needed the jobs Sovo would provide. There was something of a class divide there. Those who weren’t well off tended to back the store on the basis of economic survival.

  As Lizzie had seen so many times with victims, the harder your life had been, the harder it was to give yourself room for ethical choices.

  So were born cycles of abuse.

  Both sides had friends across the divide, people they were having trouble talking to. Lizzie went door to door, causing many raised eyebrows about her sudden presence on the doorsteps of especially the elderly. Everywhere she went, she asked people to keep talking to her.

  She saw occasional wonders, with her new senses, in peoples’ homes: animated love of beloved teddy bears, figures of departed loved ones with stony or caring faces. Those had scared her, though she hadn’t shown it. She’d gone back to the vicarage, after leaving Autumn’s workshop, wondering if she’d see Joe there, almost hoping. He hadn’t been there. Something had changed, though: she now had a Sovo symbol on her front door.

  They listened closely, and they worked fast.

  She kept in touch with Autumn and Judith, heard they were both researching, trying to discover what exactly Sovo was attempting to do. All Lizzie could think of was how useless research would have been in the week before Passover. All she herself could do was attempt to pray, and she found she still didn’t have it in her to do that. She wanted to go and take the money that still sat untouched in the collection plate and give it to the poor. She still couldn’t, though Joe, in her dreams, was now yelling at her that she should.

  “Are you my conscience now, my whole religion?” she angrily asked the memory of Joe, when she woke on the day of the council meeting and the deciding vote. “Is a single push of my hands why I do things now?”

  Perhaps she hoped that the catastrophe to come, or preventing it, would confirm her faith, though she knew that was a selfish thought. The letter to the bishop remained unsent, but still sat in the out tray on her desk.

  Judith was getting increasingly desperate. She found the strain of it getting to her old body, making her shoulders ache, making her want to weep. The combination of incantation, purpose, shape, and whatever sacrifices had gone into the symbols on the doors was a code she couldn’t crack. Nor could she think of anything which might get, for example, everyone who was for Sovo to leave town before the vote. It would take power beyond hers, and what little the novices could add, to get people to act against their own fervent wishes.

  Sovo seemed to be doing only one thing, hinging everything on the mundane matter of tonight’s vote, and presumably trying to influence it, exactly the sort of drama one expected from the major powers.

  She had extended, through potion and ritual, all her senses, and found nothing sinister about the company or their representatives, apart from Cummings. So whatever they were doing depended on him. There were three approaches one could take: sacrifice, appeal to a higher power, or manipulation. She tried some experimental sacrifices: she pulled a tooth from her mouth and gave the pain to the forge of the fates. She prostrated herself before the aspects of the Goddess, before Lugus of the Skilful Hand, before, in final desperate gestures, T.S. Eliot and Ringo Starr. She could not think of any means to achieve manipulation.

  She would pull some ancient thought out of her feeble excuse for a brain, then find it connected to nothing useful. She had made the mistake, for so many years, of keeping her knowledge in her head. So this morning she had decided she had almost certainly forgotten something important, and had gone up into her attic and found her old trunks containing the diaries she’d kept as a youth. She’d indexed them, she remembered. She was pretty sure that everything in the index had long ago become second nature to her. Certainly there was nothing under P for Protection that she didn’t now do offhandedly, and nothing that could be applied to those doors to counteract whatever nastiness Sovo had planned for those inside. She ran her finger down the alphabet, and stopped at K.

  K for Kill.

  She found she was holding her breath. She flipped to the entry, and found something pressed between the pages. A twig. She’d remembered, she’d realised, somewhere at the back of her head. She’d tried to forget the boy, what he’d done to her. His name had been Robin. It was his fault . . . she didn’t want to think about the curse he’d placed on her. She didn’t need to. She lived with it every day. Robin had been from Lancaster, and he’d boasted of what he could do, and she’d been so bloody impressed, hadn’t she? She’d gotten him to show her. They’d buried the squirrel together, buried it deep.

  Could she do this? She had only this day left, and no other ideas. No time for second thoughts, no time for conscience. She came down from the loft and went to get a spade.

  On her way out, the implement over her shoulder, she checked in with Arthur. He was on the verge of his afternoon nap. She wondered, distantly, what an invasion of all that was impossible would mean for him. “What would you do tonight,” she asked him, “if you were me?”

  “Stay home and look after me, you old cow.”

  “Right. Now I know what not to do.” Before he could start to yell, she was out the door and heading for the woods.

  Autumn had felt that the most obvious way to learn about the Sovo symbol was to experiment on the one on her own door. She used every incantation and aid to focus she knew about, now with, she had to admit, an added expectation that they might have results in the physical world. Nothing changed the marking. She tried to cool it, using everything from ice to fragrances that suggested winter. Nothing worked. She had a sudden thought of corporate espionage, hacking into Sovo’s computer, like in the movies, though she didn’t know anyone who could do that, and looked up where the label said the paint was made, but it turned out to be somewhere in Taiwan, with a website that defied Google translation. The ingredients listed on the tin were reasonably rare: amaranth, Spanish Moss, mullein, valerian root, vetivert . . . you could find galangal in Waitrose, and a few of the others in Holland & Barrett, but most of them in processed form, not the originals that the recipe seemed to demand. In parts of the United States you could go out and pick Spanish moss, but that wasn’t true in Britain. Still, the Internet would bring everything to one’s door.

  She checked her ingredient wholesalers online, and found to her surprise that supplies of several of the herbs had been reduced to zero, with the red “reordering, more soon” lettering beside the checkboxes. She made a couple of calls
and found that bulk purchasers had raided all the major depots. Would Sovo really need that much of this stuff to daub even every door in one small town? It wasn’t like they were doing this all over the country. Judith had gone on about how unique Lychford was. She checked her own shelves: there were only small amounts of a few of the relevant ingredients.

  Then she realised. All those new customers in the last couple of weeks, all seeming to want the ability to vanish. They hadn’t been here as individual shoppers, they’d been Sovo workers, buying up her stock to write invisible signs on doors. She slumped on the work bench, annoyed at how that had gotten past her, but then a new thought came to her. Sovo didn’t need this stuff themselves. They just didn’t want anyone else having it. Which meant there must be some way it could be used against them.

  She went to the paint pot, and found almost nothing left in it. She’d used up a lot of it in her experiments. Still, it didn’t matter how much she had if she didn’t know what to do with it. The idea of what she could actually do, and the idea of where she might get the ingredients to do it came together in her mind in one terrible moment. She had to put a hand onto the bench to support herself. How could she even be contemplating this?