Witch’s Honour

Until now.

She got up, shivering, and went into the kitchen, and made herself cocoa with a generous measure of whisky, and a hot water bottle. It seemed a long time till daylight.

II

At Wrokeby, the house-goblin was no longer playing poltergeist. He lurked in corners and crannies, in the folds of curtains, in the spaces under shadows. The newcomer did not appear to notice him but he sensed that sooner or later she would sweep through every nook and niche, scouring the house of unwanted inmates. He watched her when he dared, peering out of knotholes and plaster-cracks. He was a strange wizened creature, stick-thin and undersized even for a goblin, with skin the colour of ageing newspaper and a long pointed face like a hairless rat. His name when he had last heard it was Dibbuck, though he had forgotten why. The piebald cat which prowled the corridors could see him or scent him, and hunted him like the rodent he resembled, but so far he had been too quick for her. He had known the terrain for centuries; the cat was an invader, on unfamiliar ground. But the presence of Nehemet made him more nervous and furtive than ever. Yet still he crept and spied, half in fascination, half in terror, knowing in the murky recesses of his brain that the house in his care was being misused, its heritage defiled and its atmosphere contaminated for some purpose he could not guess.

The smaller sitting room now had black velvet curtains and no chairs, with signs and sigils painted on the bare floor where once there had been Persian rugs. A pale fire burned sometimes on a hearth long unused, but the goblin would not enter the room then, fearing the cold hiss of its unseen flames and the flickering glow that probed under the door. Instead, he ventured to the cellar, hiding in shadows as old as the house itself. The wine racks had been removed and shelves installed, stacked with bottles of unknown liquids and glass jars whose contents he did not want to examine too closely. One bottle stood on a table by itself, with a circle drawn around it and cabalistic words written in red along the perimeter. It had a crystal stopper sealed in wax, as if the contents were of great value, yet it appeared empty: he could see the wall through it. But there came an evening when he saw it had clouded over, filled with what looked like mist, and in the mist was a shape that writhed against the sides, struggling to get out. He skittered out of the room, and did not return for many days.

On the upper floors he found those Fitzherberts who had stayed this side of Death, their shrunken spirits rooted in age-old patterns of behaviour, clinging to passions and hatreds, the causes of which were long forgotten. They dwelt in the past seeing little of the real world, animate memories endowed with a glimmer of thought, an atom of being. Yet even they had felt an unfamiliar chill spreading through every artery of the house. ‘What is this?’ asked Sir William, in the church tower. ‘Who is she, to come here and disturb us—we who have been here so long? This is all that we have.’

‘I do not know,’ said the goblin, ‘but when she passes, I feel a draught blowing straight from eternity.’

The ghost faded from view and the goblin skulked the passageways, alone with his dread. At last he went back to the cellar, drawn, as are all werefolk, by the imminence of strong magic, mesmerised and repelled.

She wore a green dress which appeared to have no seams, adhering to her body like a living growth, whispering when she moved. There were threads of dull red in the material like the veins in a leaf. Her shadow leaped from wall to wall as she lit the candles, and her hair lifted although the air was stifling and still. The cat followed her, its skin puckered into gooseflesh, arching its back against her legs. There was a smell in the cellar that did not belong there, a smell of plants and earth and uncurling fronds: the goblin was an indoor creature so it took him a while to identify it, although his elongated nose quivered with more-than-human sensitivity. He avoided looking at the woman directly, lest she feel his gaze. Instead he watched her sidelong, catching the flicker of white fingers as she touched flasks and pots, checking their contents, unscrewing the occasional lid, sniffing, replacing. And all the while she talked to her feline companion in a ripple of soft words. ‘These herbs are running low…the slumbertop toadstools are too dry…these worm eggs will hatch if the air reaches them…’ At the end of one shelf he saw a jar he had not noticed before, containing a pair of eyeballs floating in some clear fluid. He could see the brown circle of iris and the black pupil, and broken fragments of blood vessel trailing around them. He knew they could not be alive but they hung against the glass, fixed on her, moving when she moved…

He drew back, covering his face, afraid even to brush her thought with his crooked stare. When he looked again, she was standing by a long table. It was entirely taken up by an irregular object some six feet in length, bundled in cloth. Very carefully she uncovered it, crooning as if to a child, and Dibbuck smelt the odour more strongly—the smell of a hungry forest, where the trees claw at one another in their fight to reach the sun. Her back was turned towards him, screening much of it from his view, but he could make out a few slender branches, a torn tap-root, the leaves that trembled at her caress. She moistened it with drops from various bottles, murmuring a sing-song chant which might have been part spell, part lullaby. It had no tune but its tunelessness invaded the goblin’s head, making him dizzy. When she had finished she covered the sapling again, taking care not to tear even the corner of a leaf.

He thought muzzily: ‘It is evil. It should be destroyed.’ But his small store of courage and resource was almost exhausted.

‘The workmen come tomorrow,’ she told the cat. ‘They will repair the conservatory, making it proof against weather and watching eyes. Then my Tree may grow in safety once more.’ The cat mewed, a thin, angry sound. The woman threw back her head as if harkening to some distant cry, and the candleflames streamed sideways, and a wind blew from another place, tasting of dankness and dew, and leaf-shadows scurried across the floor. Then she laughed, and all was quiet.

The goblin waited some time after she had quit the cellar before he dared to follow.

He knew now that he must leave Wrokeby—leave or be destroyed—yet still he hung on. This was his place, his care, the purpose of his meagre existence: a house-goblin stayed with the house, until it crumbled. The era of technology and change had driven some from their old haunts but such uprootings were rare, and few of goblinkind could survive the subsequent humiliation and exile. Only the strongest were able to move on, and Dibbuck was not strong. Yet deep in his scrawny body there was a fibre of toughness, a vestigial resolve. He did not think of seeking help: he knew of no help to seek. But he did not quite give up. He stole down his native galleries in the woman’s swath despite his fear of Nehemet, and eavesdropped on her communings with her pet, and listened to the muttering of spells and schemes he did not understand. Once, when she was absent for the day, he even sneaked into her bedroom, peering under the bed for discarded dreams, fingering the creams and lotions on the dressing-table. Their packaging was glossy and up-to-date but he could read a little and they seemed to have magical properties, erasing wrinkles and endowing the user with the radiance of permanent youth. He avoided the mirror lest it catch and hold his reflection but, glancing up, he saw her face there, moon-pale and glowing with an unearthly glamour. ‘It works,’ she said. ‘On me, everything works. I was old, ages old, but now I am young forever.’ He knew she spoke not to him but to herself, and the mirror was replaying the memory, responding to his curiosity. Panic overcame him, and he fled.

On the tower stair he found the head of Sir William. He tried to seize the hair but it had less substance than a cobweb. ‘Go now,’ said Dibbuck. ‘They say there is a Gate for mortals through which you leave this place. Find it, before it is too late.’

‘I rejected the Gate,’ said the head, haughtily. ‘I was not done with this world.’

‘Be done with it now,’ said the goblin. ‘Her power grows.’

‘I was the power here,’ said Sir William, ‘long ago…’

Dibbuck left him, despairing, running through the house uttering his warning unheeded, to the ghosts too venerable to be visible any more, the draughts that had once been passing feet, the water-sprites who gurgled through the antique plumbing, the imp who liked to extinguish the fire in the Aga. In the kitchen he saw the woman’s only servant, a hag with the whiteless eyes of the werekind. She lunged at him with a rolling-pin, moving with great swiftness for all her apparent age and rheumatics, but he dodged the blow, and faded into the wall, though he had to wait an hour and more before he could slip past her up the stairs. He made his way to the conservatory, a Victorian addition which had been severely damaged fifty years earlier in a storm. Now, three builders were there, working with unusual speed and very few cups of tea. The one in charge was a gypsy with a grey-streaked ponytail and a narrow, wary face. ‘We finish quickly and she’ll pay us well,’ he told the others. ‘But don’t skimp on anything. She’ll know.’

‘She’s a looker, ain’t she?’ said the youngest, a youth barely seventeen. ‘That figure, an’ that hair, an’all.’

‘Don’t even think of it,’ said the gypsy. ‘She can see you thinking.’ He stared at the spot where the goblin stood, so that for a minute Dibbuck thought he was observed, though the man made no sign. But later, when they were gone, the goblin found a biscuit left there, something no one had done for him through years beyond count. He ate it slowly, savouring the chocolate coating, feeling braver for the gift, the small gesture of friendship and respect, revitalised by the impact of sugar on his system. Perhaps it was that which gave him the nerve to investigate the attics.

He did not like the top of the house. His sense of time was vague, and he recalled only too clearly a wayward daughter of the family who had been locked up there, behind iron bars and padlocked doors, supposedly for the benefit of her soul. Amy Fitzherbert had had the misfortune to suffer from manic depression and what was probably Tourette syndrome in an age when a depression was a hole in the ground and sin had yet to evolve into syndrome. She had been fed through the bars like an animal, and like an animal she had reacted, ranting and screaming and bruising herself against the walls. Dibbuck had been too terrified to go near her. In death, her spirit had moved on, but the atmosphere there was still dark and disturbed from the Furies which had plagued her.

That evening he climbed the topmost stair and crept through the main attics, his ears strained for the slightest of sounds. There were no ghosts here, only a few spiders, some dead beetles, a scattering of mouse-droppings by the wainscot. But it seemed to Dibbuck that this was the quiet of waiting, a quiet that harkened to his listening, that saw his unseen presence. And in the dust there were footprints, well-defined and recent: the prints of a woman’s shoes. But the chocolate was strong in him and he went on, until he reached the door to Amy’s prison, and saw the striped shadow of the bars beyond, and heard what might have been a moan from within. Amy had moaned in her sleep, tormented by many-headed dreams, and he thought she was back there, that the woman had raised her spirit for some dreadful purpose, but still he took a step forward, the last step before the spell-barrier hit him. The force of it flung him several yards, punching him into the physical world and tumbling him over and over. After a long moment he picked himself up, twitching with shock. The half-open door was vibrating in the backlash of the spell, and behind it the shadow-bars stretched across the floor, but another darkness now loomed against them, growing nearer and larger, blotting them out. It had no recognisable shape, but it seemed to be huge and shaggy, and he thought it was thrusting itself against the bars like a caged beast. The plea that reached him was little more than a snarl, the voice of some creature close to the edge of madness.

Let me out…

Letmeout letmeout letmeout letmeout …

For the third time in recent weeks Dibbuck ran, fleeing a domain that had once been his.

* * *

Lucas Walgrim sat at his sister’s bedside in a private nursing home in Queen Square. Their father visited dutifully, once a week, going into prearranged huddles with various doctors, signing dutiful cheques whenever required. Dana was wired up to the latest technology, surrounded by bouquets she could not see, examined, analysed, pampered. The nursing home sent grateful thanks for a generous donation. Nothing happened. Dana’s pulse remained steady but slow, so slow, and her face was waxen as if she were already dead. Lucas would sit beside her through the lengthening afternoons, a neglected laptop on the cabinet by the bed, watching for a quiver of movement, a twinge, a change, waiting until he almost forgot what he was waiting for. She did not toss or turn; her breast barely lifted beneath the lace of her nightgown. They combed her thick dark hair twice a day, spreading it over the pillow: there was never a strand out of place. In oblivion her mouth lost its customary pout and slackened into an illusion of repose, but he saw no peace in her face, only absence. He tried talking to her, calling her, certain he could reach her wherever she had gone; but no answer came. As children they had been close, thrown into each other’s company by a workaholic father and an alcoholic mother. Eight years the elder, Lucas had alternately bullied and protected his little sister, fighting all her battles, allowing no one else to tease or taunt her. As an adult, he had been her final recourse when boyfriends abandoned her and girlfriends let her down. But in the last few years he had been busy at the City desk where his father had installed him, and she had turned to hard drugs and heavy drinking for the moral support that she lacked. He told himself that guilt was futile, and she had made her own decisions, but it did not lessen the pain. She was his sister whom he had always loved, the little rabbit he had mocked for her shyness and her fears, and she had gone, and he could not find her.

At his office colleagues eyed his vacant chair and said he was losing his grip. The malicious claimed he had succeeded only by paternal favours, and he did not have a grip to lose. His latest girlfriend, finding him inattentive, dated another man. In the nursing home the staff watched him covertly, the women (and some of the men) with a slight degree of wistfulness. Purists maintained that he was far from handsome, his bones too bony, his cheeks too sharply sunken, the brows too straight and sombre above his shadowed eyes. But the ensemble of his face, with its bristling black hair and taut, tight mouth, exuded force if not vitality, compulsion if not charisma. Those who were not attracted still found themselves intrigued, noting his air of controlled tension, his apparent lack of humour or charm. In Queen Square they thought the better of him for his meaningless vigil, and offered him tea which he invariably refused, and ignored the occasional cigarette which he would smoke by the open window. He was not a habitual smoker but it was something to do, a way of expressing frustration. The bouquets came via florists and had little scent, but their perfume filled his imagination, sweet as decay, and only the acrid tang of tobacco would eradicate it.

He came there late one night after a party—a party with much shrieking and squirting of champagne and dropping of trousers. He had drunk as much of the champagne as had found its way into his glass, but it did not cheer him: champagne only cheers those who are feeling cheerful already, which is why it is normally drunk only on special occasions. At the nursing home he sat in his usual chair, staring at his sister with a kind of grey patience, all thought suspended, while his life unravelled around him. There were goals which had been important to him: career success, a high earning potential, independence, self-respect. And the respect of his father. He had told himself often that this last need was an emotional cliché, a well-worn plotline which did not apply to him, but sometimes it had been easy to lapse into the pattern—easier than suspecting that the dark hunger which ate his soul came from no one but himself. And now all the strands of his existence were breaking away, leaving nothing but internal emptiness. The excess of alcohol gave him the illusion that his perceptions were sharpened rather than clouded and he saw Dana’s face in greater detail: her pallor appeared yellowish against the white of the pillow, her lips bloodless. He did not touch her, avoiding the contact with flesh that felt cold and dead. Somewhere in the paralysis of his brain he thought: I need help.

He thought aloud.

Without realising it, he had fallen asleep. The unfamiliar words touched a chord deeper than memory. He was in a city—a city of long ago, with pillars and colonnades and statues of men and beasts, and the dome of a temple rising above it all flashing fire at the sun. He heard the creak of wooden wheels on paving, saw the slaves shovelling horse-dung with the marks of the lash on their backs. There was a girl standing beside him, a girl whose black hair fell straight to her waist and whose eyes were the pure turquoise of sea-shallows. ‘—help,’ she was saying. ‘You must help me—’ but her face changed, dissolving slowly, the contours re-forming to a different design, and he was in the dark, and a red glimmer of torchlight showed him close-cropped hair and features that seemed to be etched in steel. The first face had been beautiful but this one was somehow familiar; he saw it with a pang of recognition as sharp as toothache. There was a name on his lips—a name he knew well—but it was snatched away, and he woke abruptly not knowing where he was, reaching for the dream as if it were the key to his soul.

One of the male nurses was leaning over him, clasping his shoulder with a scrubbed pink hand. ‘You called out,’ he explained. ‘I was outside. I think you said: “I need help.”’

‘Yes,’ said Lucas. ‘I did. I do.’

The young nurse smiled a smile that was reassuring—a little too reassuring, and knowing, and not quite human.

‘Help will be found,’ he said.

A damp spring ripened slowly into the disappointment of summer. Wizened countrymen read the signs—‘The birds be nesting high this year’—‘The hawthorn be blooming early’—‘I seed a ladybird with eight spots’—and claimed it would be hot. It wasn’t. In London Gaynor moved back into her refurbished flat and stoically withstood the advances of her host of New Year’s Eve in his quest for extramarital sympathy. Will Capel returned from Outer Mongolia and invited his sister to dinner, escorting her to the threshold of the Caprice restaurant before recollecting that all he could afford was McDonald’s. Fern drank a brandy too many, picked up the tab, and went home to dream the dream again, waking to horror and a sudden rush of nausea. In Queen Square, Dana Walgrim did not stir. Lucas devoted more time to the pursuit of venture capitalism, doing adventurous things with other people’s capital, but rivals said he had lost his focus, and the spectre that haunted him was not that of greed. And at Wrokeby the hovering sun ran its fingers over the façade of the house, and poked a pallid ray through an upper window, withdrawing it in haste as the swish of a curtain threatened to sever it from its source.

It was late May, and the clouds darkened the long evening into a premature dusk. The sunset was in retreat beyond the Wrokewood, its lastlight snarled in the treetops on Farsee Hill. Three trees stood there, all dead, struck by lightning during the same storm that had shattered the conservatory at the house, and although there was fresh growth around each bole the three crowns were bare, leafless spars jutting skyward like stretching arms. Folklorists claimed that Farsee Hill was a contraction of pharisee, or fairy, and liked to suggest some connection with an occult curse, the breaking of a taboo, the crossing of a forbidden boundary, though no one had yet come up with a plot for the undiscovered story. That evening, the clouds seemed to be building up not for a storm but for Night, the ancient Night that was before electricity and lamps and candles, before Man stole the secret of fire from the gods. The dark crept down over wood and hill, smothering the last of the sun. In the smaller sitting room, another light leaped into being, an ice-blue flame that crackled and danced over coals that glittered like crystal. On the floor, the circle took fire, in a hissing trail that swept around the perimeter at thought-speed. The witch stood outside it, close to the hearth. Her dress was white, sewn with sequins that flung back the wereglow in tiny darts of light. But her hair was shadow-black, and her eyes held more Night than all the dark beyond the curtains.

Dibbuck crouched in the passage, watching the flicker beneath the door. He heard her voice chanting, sometimes harsh, sometimes soft and sweet as the whisper of a June breeze. He could feel the slow build-up of the magic in the room beyond, the pull of power carefully dammed. The tongue of light from under the door licked across the floorboards, roving from side to side as though seeking him out. He cowered against the wall, shivering, afraid to stay, unable to run. He did not fear the dark but the Night that loomed over him now seemed endless; he could not imagine reaching another dawn. Within the room the chant swelled: the woman’s voice was full of echoes, as if the thin entities of air and shadow had added their hunger to hers. There was a whoosh, as of rushing flame, and the door flew open.

The wereglow sliced down the passage like a blade, missing the goblin by inches. It cut a path through the darkness, a band of white radiance brighter than full moonlight, stretching down the stair and beyond, piercing the very heart of the house. And then Dibbuck heard the summons, though it was in a language he did not understand, felt it reaching out, along the path, tugging at him, drawing him in. He pulled his large ears forward, flattening them against his skull with clutching hands, shutting out all sound. But still he could sense the compulsion, dragging at his feet, so he dug his many toes into crevices in the wood, and wrenched a splinter from the wainscot, driving it through his own instep, pinning himself to the floor with a mumbled word which might have been flimsy goblin-magic or a snatch of godless prayer. He had closed his eyes but when his ears were covered again he reopened them. And he knew that if he endured another thousand years, he would never forget what he saw.

There was a mist pouring past him along the beam of light—a mist of dim shapes, formless as amoeba, empty faces with half-forgotten features, filmy hands wavering like starfish, floating shreds of clothing and hair. Even though his ears were blocked he heard a buzzing in his head, as if far-off cries of desperation and despair had been reduced to little more than the chittering of insects. He wanted to listen but he dared not, lest he respond to the summons and lose himself in that incorporeal tide. He saw the topless torso of Sir William grasping his own head by its wispy locks: the eyes met his for an instant in a fierce, helpless stare. He glimpsed the tonsure of a priest, slain in the Civil War, a coachman’s curling whip and flapping greatcoat, the swollen belly of a housemaid, impregnated by her master. And amongst them the fluid gleam of water-sprites and the small shadowy beings who had lived for centuries under brick or stone, no longer able to remember what they were or who they had once been. Even the imp from the Aga was there, trailing in the rear, clutching in vain at the door-frame until he was wrenched into the vortex of the spell.