The Limits of Enchantment

by Graham Joyce

  Chas approached me and rolled back my eyelid. ‘You sure you know what’s going on here, Jude?’

  ‘She’s fine.’

  ‘She looks green. What if she pukes?’

  ‘Stop whittling. If you won’t settle you’re going to have to go.’

  ‘You’re right, I should go,’ Chas said. ‘I’m going back to the farm. Maybe take the dogs out or something. Will I see you later?’

  ‘Possibly. Depends how this goes. Come on, I’ll walk you to the gate.’

  They went out and left the door open behind them. They were a long time parting, and while they were distracted I let myself out again.

  But no sooner was I outside than I was back in my soft den in the hedgerow, and I was startled awake by the sound of voices approaching. I recognised a voice amongst them. It was that of Bunch Cormell, walking the path with, all wrapped up, the very baby I had recently delivered for her. She was looking better than when I saw her last and the whole family was out with her, perhaps on their way to Market Harborough or just the next village. They had a dog, too, that I feared as it bounded on ahead. But the dog, though it sniffed near the hedge, chose to ignore me. The farrier and his wife were talking about money problems while the children argued about the sharing out of Bluebird toffees. A spat broke out amongst the children and the youngest boy, Malcolm, sulked and dragged his feet.

  I watched them pass by me, so close I could almost have reached out a hand from the hedge and touched them. But I was deathly still and they had no suspicion of my presence. Or wouldn’t have had if young Malcolm hadn’t loitered behind. He had a huge stick and chose that moment to toss it into the hedge where it landed close by. He stepped over the small ditch to retrieve his stick, and our eyes met.

  He froze, as if he knew I could see into his seven-year-old heart, which at that moment I could; and all I could see there was terror.

  ‘Malcolm, get and catch up with us and stop dawdlin’!’ shouted the farrier.

  But he couldn’t move. He was pinned. And the only way I could release him was by closing my eyes. I waited. And I waited more. There was a sudden flutter, like a bird departing from a twig. And when I opened my eyes again he was gone, and the Cormells – all of them – were far off.

  Whether he spoke about it to them or not I don’t know. If he did I trusted that they would think he was being fanciful because still sulking. Though I was angry with myself, because the rule is that you should keep your eyes closed when anyone draws near. That’s the rule, and that’s why it’s there.

  But after they had gone everything became quiet, and I waited in silence for above an hour. During that time the sun rose higher in the sky and someone else came along – a local farmer walking by with an unsteady gait that threw his boots out wide – chuntering and snuffling to himself. This time I closed my eyes and he passed by, and all became quiet again.

  At the stroke of noon something happened. The stillness of the place became a soundlessness and the sun locked into position in the sky, almost with a dull clonk like some kind of mechanism failing. It became like a painted sun on a canvas. It had hue and light but it had no texture.

  Then I heard them. Faintly at first. One or two, or three familiar calls of lapwings or peewits as Mammy called them. But they were so far away, almost in another world, or as deep as memory goes. Peeeee-wit! Perhaps more of a thought than a sound. Mammy would say listen, they are saying Bewitched! But then the calls were gone and I heard another sound, approaching fast.

  It was a feathering of the air. A rumour from the skies. A rustling, a shaking free and then suddenly, as if pouring from a tiny hole in the blue sky, was a gigantic flock of lapwings, hundreds and hundreds of them, diving in formation, twisting in the air like a long ribbon of black speckles and I could feel the fanning of their wings as they swooped over the hedge and my skin was popping, flushing and popping, and for a moment I thought: is this it? Is it the lapwing? And then I remembered that Judith had told me that first come the heralds, the harbingers, to mark the way.

  They played the air currents. The tumult of lapwings winged through the blue sky, twisting and spinning the long, unwinding ribbon of themselves, spiralling like the tail of a kite, dipping and rising again, and it was so beautiful and overwhelming I wanted to cry. A few of the birds would get flung out of the ribbon trail only to settle in the field, just a few feet away from my place in the hedge, and then they would fly up again, letting the air currents suck them back into the main formation.

  On they went, testing the air streams, higher and higher, dipping and circling back towards me, trying for new formations until I realised they were looking for something. The formation changed, twisted, fattened and thinned. It was as if they were trying out new forms until suddenly I understood. It made me gasp.

  My senses were crossing over. The tumult of the birds was a kind of whisper in my ear that somehow folded itself into twisted shapes in the air, an alphabet for me to descry. The lapwings, the thousand peewits, were trying to spell out words for me. They were skywriting, but in sound. At first it wasn’t an alphabet I could recognise. It was like runes on ancient jewellery or the squiggles on stamps from exotic places, embossed on the air currents and hitting me like Morse code. Then at last the sounds fixed and set, and hung in the air, spelling out a brief message. I blinked up into the sunlit blue. Somehow in the tiny black speckles of the thousand lapwings was fixed a single word, simultaneously stitched into the sky and spoken to me in Mammy’s faint voice, and it said: ‘Listen!’

  And in the moment that I heard or read that single word the giant flock of lapwings wheeled and turned and were sucked back through the tiny hole in the sky through which they had first poured, and they were gone. Behind them was only an eerie stillness. And I was aware of the presence beside me.

  I’d entertained doubts about what mine would be. Though it had spoken to me that evening at the Cormells’ – and had not the farrier’s family been present this day? And had not William told me what mine would be? I never knew explicitly what Mammy’s was, because she’d never told me. But mine was always going to be this.

  The hare was poised next to me in the hedgerow, uncannily as though it had been there all along. It was a very large hare. Perhaps three feet tall to the tip of its ears. With me hunkered down in the hedge like that, it almost put us on a level. It sat erect, ears listening, resting on its powerful back legs, resting, but ready to spring away at the slightest start; quivering with a sense in which the next instant might change everything.

  I swallowed, but was almost afraid to in case the hare bolted. So far it hadn’t even looked at me, but it turned slightly and I felt a curious tickling inside my head.

  Then the hare spoke.

  The hare spoke not by moving its mouth, but by fixing its eye on me and whispering inside my brain, no more than an insinuation. The whispering corresponded to an increase in the pressure of the tickling inside my head.

  I knew that I was coming unstuck in time because the tickling turned into the sensation of someone running their hands across my shaved head and I opened my eyes to see Judith leaning over me. I don’t know when this was in the sequence of things, but Chas had now gone.

  Judith, I realised, had a damp flannel cloth and was running it across my head and my neck. She folded the cloth and dabbed under my eye.

  ‘Hope these are good tears, Fern,’ Judith said.

  ‘These are just the tears,’ I said, or thought I said. I was surprised that the faculty of speech had come back to me. But when I went to speak again I couldn’t manage anything. I could only lick my dry lips. Judith held the glass of water to my lips and I was able to swallow a few mouthfuls.

  I saw Judith glance at her wristwatch before looking at the door. Then she surveyed me thoughtfully, as if trying to make a decision. ‘I’m going to have to go out,’ she said. ‘I have an errand to run.’

  I tried to make a noise to detain her. I didn’t want to be left.

  ‘It’s onl
y for a short while. I’m going to lock the door, so you’ll be safe.’

  Judith went out and locked the door behind her. I heard a brick clang as she deposited the key beneath it. I closed my eyes.

  The hare told me how the world was made. It was a long story. The hare explained how the cracks between worlds had been fashioned the very first time a hare was chased across the fields by a dog and it had no option but to escape into another world; and it explained that if it wasn’t for the hares who kept these cracks open then no one would be able to cross over. The hare warned me that other animals and birds and men claimed that their species had made and maintained the cracks, but the truth was that it was the hares. It reminded me that hares could conceive a second time while already pregnant. This proved the point beyond all doubt, said the hare, because it had happened on the first time that the very first hare had occupied two worlds at once.

  As the hare spoke I hadn’t noticed it growing in size. Or perhaps I was diminishing. But after a while my clothes were hanging from me and I was little more than a baby girl, perhaps a yearling, perhaps two. I stepped out of my grownup clothes. I enjoyed being naked. I could stand up and talk after a fashion. I looked at the hare’s eye still fixed on me. Now the hare was almost twice my size.

  The smell of its animal fur was overwhelming, but not unpleasant. I reached out to stroke the fur but the hare shifted, inching away, tolerant, but unwilling to be touched. It continued with its tale.

  The hare told me that we had moved into the time of Man and that this was not a good thing, not even for men and women. It complained bitterly of the leverets killed in the blades of combine harvesters. It asked me if I had any idea how many combine harvesters there were in the country, and when I shook my head it specified an exact figure. The corn bleeds, it said pointedly, we bleed. I cried hot tears of guilt and I said I was very sorry, and the hare told me it wasn’t my fault.

  Then the hare began to tell me why the hare chose not to burrow and of the making of the very first form and how it got its powerful hind legs. At some point the hare’s voice became Mammy’s, and the hare was repeating all of the things Mammy had told me over the years.

  It repeated things I hadn’t entirely understood. That Mammy had been kept in that hospital for three long years. That sometimes they tied her arms and legs. The hare repeated all this in Mammy’s voice. There were other young women in there, it said in Mammy’s voice, for no other offence than for having children out of wedlock. Or for moral depravity, which she said meant being caught for doing what every woman wants to do and what men do with impunity. But Mammy’s crime, and the reason she’d been put there, was because she’d threatened to tell.

  The hare, in Mammy’s voice, told me the list of names. The names of the fathers, and the names of the disowned, and the names of the cuckoos. It was a very long list, and I became confused, and perhaps I dozed or became stuck. Because when I lifted my head I was in hospital with Mammy and she was speaking to me now with urgency. ‘Too much for you to know, all this,’ Mammy said. ‘Oh the leverets, caught in the blades. And these are the names. You know why they put me in here, Fern? Because I threatened to tell. So let me tell you.

  ‘Knowing this,’ Mammy said, ‘is the only thing that stands between me and them. They hate the fact that I know it. It galls them. But it keeps them afraid of me. It’s my ticket, d’you see? But the time has come for me to pass it on to you. It’s a burden, and one I’ve been keeping from you, but now it’s a burden of knowledge you have to take on. And here are the names.’

  And I listened, and I listened hard, and it was such a long list, and by the time she’d got to the end of the list Mammy had become the hare again. But then the hare stopped talking abruptly. I saw its huge ears stiffen. I asked why it stopped. Now Mammy’s voice had gone and inside my head the hare said, ‘Hearken!’

  I listened hard. Far away, in another field, I heard the baying of two or more dogs.

  Still inside my brain the hare said, ‘Now it begins.’

  I felt the prickle of its fear. ‘What begins?’ I said. I felt frightened myself.

  ‘Are you ready? I do so hope you are.’

  ‘Ready for what?’

  ‘You must do it now. You have very little time.’

  ‘I don’t understand!’ I complained. My voice cracked. I was crying. ‘I don’t know anything about this!’

  ‘Are you ready to make the change?’

  ‘What change?’ I cried.

  ‘Oh! You needed to be prepared! You’ll be torn to pieces!’

  My breath came short. Terror rippled through my skin, a cold wave on a colder sea. I panicked. I began hyperventilating.

  ‘Breathe slowly!’ the hare urged. ‘You will lose all your strength. Surely you know how to change!’

  I heard the dogs again, a little nearer. Three of them, barking clear. The hare flexed its hind legs. It was getting ready to leave.

  ‘No,’ I wailed. ‘No one has told me. Please don’t leave me here.’

  ‘You have to remember.’

  ‘How can I remember what I never knew?’ I sobbed.

  ‘You’re a chanter, aren’t you?’ said the hare. ‘Everyone can, at least, say the rhyme.’

  And though I didn’t know any rhyme I heard myself clearing my throat, half-singing, half-croaking the words:

  I shall go into a hare

  With sorrow and sighing and mickle care

  I shall go in the devil’s name,

  An’ while I come home again …

  ‘Good. Now I will give you something to help you.’ The hare moved closer. It licked the tears from my eyes. Then it opened its mouth and spat into my mouth. I smelled the grass and the corn on its saliva. Then it stepped back. ‘Time is running out. If you don’t change I will have to leave you. Now, remember.’

  I heard the dogs again, and I thought I heard a man’s cry, too. I despaired. The warm saliva of the hare made me feel dizzy. I sat back on my haunches, very afraid. My stomach was in riot. In terror and desperation I looked into the black staring pupil of the hare’s eye. In the shining polished mirror of its eye I could see myself as a baby girl, but distorted. My knees were drawn up to my chin. My feet seemed enormous. And my skin was bristling and quivering.

  I gasped. But I had no time to speak. I heard the yammering of the dogs as they broke into the field and raced up the track. The hare leapt from the hedge, and I with it, and we were sprinting across the field and I could keep up. I had speed and grace. But the dogs were big and strong. Two were old greyhounds and one was a whippet-cross and they too had speed. And they were gaining.

  I heard the brick moved aside and the sound of the key inserted in the lock from the other side of the door, and I thought with some relief that Judith had returned from her errand. But it wasn’t Judith who came in. It was Chas. I wanted to say, ‘Where is she? What are you doing here?’ But though my tongue worked in my mouth I still couldn’t speak.

  He sat down in the chair opposite me – Mammy’s chair – and proceeded to roll himself a cigarette which he spiked with pot. He lit up, sucked back the smoke and then after he’d exhaled it he said, ‘Judith got a bit caught up with things so she asked me to come and keep an eye on you. Make sure you were still alive, sort of thing. You are still alive, aren’t you?’

  I blinked.

  ‘Good. Don’t mind me. You trip out. I’ll just relax. Keep an eye on you.’

  I didn’t like him being there. I didn’t like the smell of him. I didn’t like the smell on him.

  He sat back, smoking, regarding me steadily. At last he got up and came towards me. ‘You’re drooling,’ he said. ‘Not very becoming, is it?’ He used the ball of his thumb to gently wipe at the corner of my mouth. ‘There.’

  Then he did a very odd thing. He examined the small amount of spittle he’d collected from my mouth on his thumb, and he licked it. Kept his eyes on me and licked it thoroughly, like he was drinking it. Then he sat down in his chair again.


  ‘Know what? I think I like you with your hair shaved like that. It’s sort of foxy.’

  I closed my eyes so I wouldn’t have to look at him leering at me, and I was back in the field. I opened my eyes again and my vision had fanned out to spectacular effect: perhaps to the two hundred and seventy degrees one associates with prey animals and I could see, behind left, the dogs kicking up the earth as they sped towards us and, behind right, the cover of the wood. The dogs were yammering behind us now, drool stringing from their open jaws. My instinct was to go to the woods but the hare ahead of me made a direct line across the fields and so I followed, only inches behind, matching it for strength and speed.

  But the dogs were big, and with their greater stride they came upon us fast. Fear drenched my veins and my muscles turned to useless slush, and for a moment I was ready to surrender: to just stop and be ripped apart. The lead dog came up on the right, snapping, inches from my hindquarters. Glistening saliva streamed from its jaws in a silver ribbon, sparkling in the sun. But then the hare turned at an astonishing ninety degrees, a perfect right angle turn, and somehow I knew how to go with it.

  The dogs couldn’t match the turn. They went headlong three or four yards, trying to skid to a turn, crashing into each other until they could swing round and pick up the race again, and by that time we had already gained several yards. And I thought how strong! How agile and beautiful! And though I ran in terror, in dread and anguish, I knew that my nature had given me an advantage. I was nimbler. I was quicker. I could fool them.

  But the size of their stride soon had them snapping at my legs again, and we made a second turn. This time the dogs yelped with frustration as they tangled once again. But now we were running towards the dog’s owner. I could see he was a poacher, with a poacher’s bag hanging over his shoulder, and I knew he carried a knife somewhere and that he wanted to rip my skin from my bones. I could smell him: that hot odour of a man, so unlike anything else that moves on the face of the earth. And then I saw his face, and I knew this man.