Dark Sister (12 page)

TWENTY

Alex
called his team together the following morning. He wanted
to give
them a pep talk. The dig was working out badly, discipline was awry and morale
was plummeting. He felt responsible.

His normal style of managing a dig
was through the device of what he called "pretend panics." If he felt
things slipping, he would gather everyone together, tell them there was a
threat of bogus authorities threatening to close the dig, call for greater commitment
to prove everyone else wrong, and then hand round the cigarettes. It usually
did the trick.

But this was different. He felt
depressed about the work and about his relationship with his team. To the
volunteer diggers and students alike he seemed as approachable as a pit of
snakes. He got wind of the fact that they referred to him, in whispers, as
Vlad
the
Impaler
. He decided to
do something he'd never done with subordinates before. He decided to take them
into his confidence and be open and honest.

The team stood around in a loose
half-circle at the site of the dig, bored and barely awake, waiting for him to
say his piece and get it over with.

"Let's sit down a minute, shall
we?" said Alex. He squatted on his haunches. They exchanged a few looks
before following his example.

"I wanted to have a few words with
you before we started work today. Things haven't been going well and I wanted
to make an apology to you all." Faces that had been looking away suddenly
stared at him. They'd been expecting a collective bollocking, an exhortation
to work harder and laugh less often. "That's right, an apology. I've been
behaving like an arsehole lately and I haven't been the help to you I should've
been. At first I blamed them upstairs, because of some of the pressures on
this dig to succeed. But that was only because I wasn't honest enough to admit
to myself that I've got problems at home, and that's why I've been taking it
out on you. So I apologize and it won't happen again, okay?"

A few people looked nervously at each
other. Mostly they stared at the ground.

Alex smiled. "Just to show I mean it,
I'm buying the beers at lunchtime for anyone who'll join me and
Vlad
the
Impaler
at the pub.
That's all. Let's get on with it. Anyone want a ciggie before we start?"

Well, it worked, up to a point. The team
rolled up their sleeves and went to work in a relaxed sort of way. One or two
students came up to him with suggestions. Richard, the boy with the ponytail
working on the Maggie dig, suggested they strike back from the marked triangle
of daggers instead of away from the apex. Alex approved and offered advice.

He was good to his word and bought
everyone foaming beers at the Malt Shovel. He laughed along with his crew in
all the right places, and spread a bit of gossip about some of the local museum
staff. By pretending to be relaxed, he could almost become relaxed. He enjoyed
it; he was sitting next to a very pretty student called Tania, and the beer was
going down well. When everyone started to shuffle and look at their watches, he
extended the lunch break by calling in another round.

"Crush the leaf and the berry together.
Then make
an oil
out o' that. Seven days."

"How
much?"

"Much as you like."

"And the
dwale
?"

"Four or five berries crushed up, fresh, on the day."

She'd brought Sam with her to see Liz. The
boy crawled on the floor as Maggie's inquiries took on a new note of
seriousness. There was
an urgency
in her voice
discomforting to Old Liz. Maggie was impatient. She wanted it all too quickly.

Maggie had all the information she needed from the
diary, but what disturbed her, and why she sought some kind of sanction from
Liz, was the ambivalence of the reports. Accounts of wonders were scrambled
with dire warnings. Abuse
Hecate
and she will imperil
your soul.

Maggie had hoped for approval, encouragement, advice
from Old Liz. She wasn't getting it. Liz answered her questions directly, but
with a pursed mouth and a firm neutrality that did nothing to ameliorate
Maggie's fears. She stuck to the bare facts, the cold ingredients. She steered
away from all discussion of effect, and refused to be drawn into talking about
the diary's promise of revelations and terrors in equal measure. This was a
speculation in which Maggie was on her own, with only the diarist's obscure
accounts to excite her hopes and inflame her fears.

But it
raise
me up. Oh the wonder! And to
have all questions answered. It
raise
me up and it
breaks my heart. How terrible her wrath! Sleep, coma and death walk behind. Now
there are toadstools in the woods, but A. cautioned me against, for they enfeeble
the will for flying whereas I need all strength. I stuck to A's direction and
stayed within her compass and I have A. to thank for saving me from ruin and
demons. We must help one another, and I see a good side to her. I have A. to
thank for the banishments, and here they are.

The diary contained an exact formula for the flying
ointment, the proportions of deadly nightshade described as
dwale
,
the
wolfsbane
, cinquefoil, and soot, mixed in a
carefully described oil base.
Hogsfat
was mentioned.
There were precise specifications of when to collect the herbs. Finally there
was a string of words and phrases described as "banishments."Beneath
all of this was written:
Never abuse her.
Never
never
never
.

A light passed from Liz's eyes. They reset like hard, black
beads, fixed on the younger woman. Maggie felt probed. If ever she'd been
underestimating Old Liz, it stopped there.

"I see as
you's
set on
it, girl."

There was a moment of heavy silence. Maggie picked up
where she'd left off. "So, the
wolfsbane
as
you've
said. What's this about
hogsfat
?"

"That's just for keeping warm, that's all that
is." Liz suddenly stiffened and looked over at Sam. "Here! Call '
im
out o' there

That's no place for little boys!”

Lifting her stick she jabbed it in Sam's direction. He'd
managed to crawl over to the curtain closing off Liz's pantry. He was on his
hands and knees, with his head behind the curtain, when Maggie lifted him out
by his belt. Liz darted a hand down the side of her chair and pulled a humbug
out of a grubby paper bag.

"Here," she said to him, "bit o'
suck." Sam trotted over to her to collect the sweet, but Liz grabbed his
outstretched hand. She put her face close to his. "Keep your nose out o'
them lady's petticoats. You hear me? No place for a little boy to be
lookin
'.
Them's
lady's petticoats. You hear me?" She let him go. Sam was terrified. He
skittered to the safety of his mother's side.

"Well, you shouldn't go nosing in other people's
things," Maggie said.

"Rooting, he was. Does a little boy good to be
frit anyhow, and it'll keep him down when he's older.
Wouldn't
hurt you to be frit, either."

"What do you mean?"

"I've looked at you, girl. You want it too quick.
You
wants
it all now. Well, you can't have it now.
Listen here, I've thought maybe I'll give you a bit of this and that. We all
need a little sister. There's not many more years left in me, I know that. And
maybe I
shoulda
done more in this, but it's the
little sister as comes to you, that's the way it was with me, that's the way it
is. And I need a little sister to give this and that before I
moves
on. But I look at you, girl, and, well, I just don't
know.

"No, I just don't know." Liz shook her head.
"You've got
summat
settled on your shoulder. And
I
wants
to say, here! Knock it off! But it won't be
knocked off easily. It's of your own making, and it might suck you dry afore
you're through with it. So maybe you are the little sister, come as you '
ave
to me, but I don't know."

Maggie was unable to answer any of this. Instead she
offered Liz a determined look. "So this
hogsfat
,
it's not necessary?"

Liz shook her head again, perhaps in exasperation.
"You
wants
something
as'll
keep you warm if you're in your birthday suit."

"But what if you're indoors?"

"How you going to fly if you're
indoors?"
Liz chuckled.
"How you going to do
that?"

"But you don't really fly," said Maggie.
"Not really. I know that much."

"
Psssshhhhttt
!!"
said Liz.

Despite a late start, the afternoon went well. Nothing
new was unearthed, but the mood of the dig had lightened. The day was
unseasonably warm and the scent of disturbed soil streamed with history and
broken clay. Alex was much happier now that he was able to share a joke or two
with his team. He winked at Tania, and he made free with the smokes.

"Watch out for your fingers.
Have a bowl of water to wash your hands clean. When you fly you get a tingling
in your fingers, and they go into the mouth, and then you're in a mess. You
take care and have that water by you."

"I'll remember," said Maggie.

"Rub it all over."

"Sky clad."

"
Psshhtt
!
I
never
calls
it that.
Daft talk.
Rub it all over."

Liz made a massaging motion at her
temples and on her throat and wrists. "Here. And put some in your money
box."

"How much time?"

"Oh. You want a full night."

"As much as that?"

"And a day to get over it.
Oh yes."

"Oh," said Maggie. That was the kind of time she didn't have.

TWENTY-ONE

Find
it! Find it! She had to find it!

She went back to the wedding-dress
box and broke two fingernails trying to heave it clear of the bottom of the
wardrobe. It wouldn't come free. She grabbed at the old shoes littering the
foot of the wardrobe, slinging them angrily across her shoulder. Crack! They
hit the far wall.

She stopped for breath, sucking at
a broken fingernail. Then she reached inside the wardrobe and tore frantically
at the cardboard until the lid ripped in half. She stripped out the soft tissue
lining paper, flinging it aside before dragging out the wedding dress. She
balled the dress and hurled it across the room, where it landed, draped like a
weeping bride across the closed trunk. Then she tore the rest of the empty
cardboard box to shreds.

She waited for a moment,
listening, breathing heavily.

Scrambling across to the trunk,
she flung open the lid, scattering books, toys, and the dress before
proceeding to empty it of its contents. Files, photographs, and documents were
scooped onto the floor.

Maggie wanted to cry with
frustration, but she was in too much of a rage for tears. And she couldn't find
the diary.

She thumped heavily down the
stairs and marched into the lounge.

"What the hell have you done
with it?"

Amy looked up. Sam looked up. Even
Dot, sprawled before the fire, looked up. Alex, to whom Maggie's fury was
addressed, did not look up. He didn't even let his newspaper dip.

"I said what have you done
with it?"

"Done with what?"

Maggie lashed the newspaper out of
his hands. "You know perfectly well what I'm talking about. I want to know
where you've put it!"

Alex had been waiting for Maggie to
make the discovery. It had only been a matter of time. He'd gone into the spare
room, removed the box from the bottom of the wardrobe, and emptied its
contents. He'd replaced only the wedding dress, so that a cursory glance might
not betray the deed.

He neatly reassembled his
newspaper, smoothing out the creases before answering. "I don't want it in
the house."

"I don't care what you want
or don't
want,
I asked you what you'd done with
it." Maggie stood over him. The children watched.

"And I've told you, I don't
want it in the house. It's not healthy for the kids. I've destroyed it. Don't
bring anything else like it into the house, or I'll destroy that too."

"The diary?
What about my diary?"

"I've told you. I burned the
whole bloody lot. That's an end to the matter. Now stop shouting and give us
all a break."

"Give you a break? After what
you've done I wouldn't piss on you if you were on fire!" Maggie stormed
upstairs. Moments later she clattered down the stairs again and went out. Alex
heard the car drive off. He saw his children staring at him, and he hid his
burning cheeks behind his newspaper.

Maggie drove blindly. It was a
misty night, and she drove with her lights full up, ignoring the flashing
headlamps of oncoming traffic. Her own rage at finding the diary removed had
taken her by surprise. She'd panicked, actually panicked on discovering it had
gone; then she'd lost control of herself when Alex said he'd destroyed it.

At times she'd thought this
compulsion—to experiment, to probe, to push at the envelope—was motivated by a
rebellion against Alex's heavy-handed control. But now she knew it was much
more than that. She'd felt invaded, violated by the idea of Alex laying his
hands on her secret store. The diary was
hers,
and
hers alone. She wanted it back, wanted to feel its leather covers in her hand.

She drove with a growing sense of
direction. And as she drove, she had to face something about herself for the
very first time.
This business with the diary.
These experiments.
Up until that moment she'd considered the
enterprise to be a kind of flirtatiousness.
Something to be
dropped when a more interesting attraction came along.
She'd been
fooling
herself,
she now appreciated, for some time.
It was real. It was serious.
She
was serious. For the first time in her
life she felt utterly serious about something.

She didn't want to take her rage to the
woods. It would pollute the place; it would rob it of its hitherto blameless
associations. Instead she drove north, twenty-five miles, to
Wigstone
Heath where she'd walked with Ash and the
children.

The fire in her head was still
raging when she parked the car and got out. The moon was pale, obscured by fine
mist hanging before her like delicate webbing. There was barely enough light to
make out the path in front of her, but she had to walk. She passed the dark,
hunched shapes of stunted bushes and the smooth-shouldered outcrops of rock,
threading a route toward the Dancing Ladies.

She wandered off the path,
reclaiming it again later. Her feet became sodden with the moisture from the
grass, and as she put distance between herself and the car, so her anger began
to blend with remorse. What Alex had done was unforgivable; but her words to
him, for their children to hear, were possibly even worse. She could imagine Sam
repeating them to De Sang, or Amy using them at school. Words like sharp
knives, given to small children to play with unsupervised. The words whispered
back at her, razors inside her head, and what hurt her even more deeply was
that at the moment she'd spoken those words to Alex, she'd meant every
syllable.

She reached the Ladies, the dark
stones leaning at angles, cold,
damp
, impassive as
gravestones. Maggie leaned her back against one of the upright boulders and
wept.

Alex, tight-lipped, a choking stone
in his throat, put the children to bed. They knew that this evening was not a
night to argue. Sam asked to sleep in Amy’s room and she agreed without a
murmur.  They undressed and got into bed.

"Can we have a story?"
Amy asked, so tentatively that Alex thought his heart would break. He read them
a tale from an anthology of fairy stories, but mechanically, and without his
usual fun and playfulness with the characters' voices. It was unsatisfactory,
but he completed the story. He closed the book and looked at his two children.
Far from being asleep, they stared at him wide-eyed.

They seemed distant from him, like
someone else's children, or, worse, like offspring of another species, a
life-form very similar to humans but not the same. Alex suddenly felt a terror
for them and for the long lives stretching before them. "Go to sleep
now," he said, switching off the light.

"Can we have the light
on?" said Amy.

Alex conceded, switched the light
back on, and closed the bedroom door behind him. He went downstairs and poured
himself a large whisky. All he wanted was to protect his family. He worked
hard for them; he wanted to love his wife and children and to be loved by them
in turn. This was hardly, he was certain, a complicated set of aims.

He knew he'd provoked Maggie
beyond measure, but he'd been astonished by her vehemence. She'd been angry
with him before, sure enough, but Maggie's recent behaviour had been surprising
in many ways. He wondered who exactly had been teaching her these new tricks.

Tricks like choice phrases. Like a taste
for midnight strolls from which she returned with clothes dishevelled and grass
in her hair. Like afternoons spent in mysterious places which made her forget
her responsibilities toward her children. And suddenly discovered tricks in
bed.
Most of all the tricks in bed.

Alex poured himself another hefty Scotch, and stared into the fire.

Maggie sat at the foot of one of the standing stones.
Her head felt clearer. Sometimes weeping worked like a release of sexual tension,
giving vent to energies which might otherwise go spiralling destructively
inside. Or sex, looked at in a certain way, could seem like crying. And it
seemed to her that the stones had wept in sympathy—not with tears, of course,
but with the formations of moisture deposited on them by the mist. The clouds
had parted slightly to give the moon a keener light, sparkling on the droplets
collected on the stones.
Nine ladies weeping.

A preternatural
circle.
Stones hominoid in shape.
Certainly feminine.
Dancing ladies.
What were the names of the nine muses? She knew she could hang her unhappiness
on them, or any other feeling for which she needed to find resolution. They
would take it, dance with it, convert it,
give
it
back. Was that their true purpose?
To make a pool?
A
well you added to, or took something from?

But this feeling!
Moonbathing
, that's what she was doing. She was
asking to be
moonburned
as she stalked round the
circle. The
moonbright
droplets glittered on the
east-facing shoulders of the stones.

Maggie retraced her steps to the
car and returned with a plastic film canister she'd found in the glove
compartment. She went from stone to stone, collecting tiny droplets of moisture
from each one in the plastic container. The act was entirely whimsical, inspired
by the moment. The droplets no more than covered the bottom of the canister,
but it was nonetheless precious.
Moon-blessed.
Holy water.

She left the circle and paced out the
distance to the solitary standing stone. Already she'd resolved to replace the
collection of herbs and plants and oils destroyed by Alex. Everything could be
restored. The diary was a great loss; that much was irreplaceable. But now she
had Liz to help her, to see her through.

Everything was going to be all right,
Maggie decided, as she approached the solitary standing stone, the eponymous
Wigstone
. Ash had explained to her the origin of the name.
Wikke
was the Anglo-Saxon word for the craft
of the wise: witchcraft. It derived from the word for the willow tree,
wither
,
still used to describe basket and
other woodcraft. The subtlety and pliability of the wicker branch paralleled
the mental prowess and agility of the true witch: the ability to manipulate not
by strength but by the subtle stroking and weaving of existing force. And here
was the power stone, the Witch's Stone.

It was almost twice the height of the Nine
Ladies, mysteriously connected, but distant, withdrawn and watchful. Maggie
collected more moisture from the rough-hewn block, squeezing the beads of
water into her canister. She was intimidated by a sense in which she was
intruding, pillaging; but somehow felt it was all sanctioned. As if this theft
was permitted.

Sanctioned? Permitted?
By whom?

No sooner was the question considered than
she began to feel the presence.
The presence.
It was unmistakable, a richness of moment, exactly like the time in
Osier's Wood.

But stronger.

The voice inside
the silence.
The slender, teasing fingernail extending
out of the darkness to touch her spine below the neck.
The prickling of the skin which was her due.
Maggie gasped.
She slipped and reached to steady herself on the stone, accidentally scything
her finger on a sharp flake of granite. The blood trickled into her canister.

There was a new stirring.

No accident.

Once again, words. Where did they come
from? Was it her heart speaking?

As she turned away from the stone, the
mist on the ground flapped like the hem of a long skirt,
then
settled. It formed in a circle round the Dancing Ladies. It rolled, slowly,
like a living thing. A breeze picked up and brought in a smell of spice, a hint
of incense.

Yes, stronger than the encounter in the
woods. Maggie knew she had raised it with rage, with tears, and finally with
resolution. It was terrifying to be able so to do. It was chilling. It was momentous.

"You are everywhere," said Maggie.

Again words came back to her:
Just to look at you.

Words.
Speaking from the back of her brain.
Words
soft and indistinct like the mist, but undeniably real, and insinuating.
Maggie froze. Her flesh crawled. It was stronger than ever and she wasn't
ready. Something was going to happen, and it was too soon. She was unprepared.
Not ready, she thought. I'm not ready to see your face. Not yet.

The encircling mist wavered. Maggie moved
away from the stone and ran across the brooding heath. She raced along the
unlit path, careening into stunted shrubs, bouncing off boulders along the way.
Her hair streamed out behind her. The muscles in her thighs seemed to lock,
heavy as tree roots. She struggled to lift her legs. She ran in the direction
of her car through the mist, panting with exhaustion and delirium.

She ran in terror, an involuntary
strangled murmur emitting from her vocal chords. But through it all was a
strange delight. When she reached the car she was almost giggling hysterically,
the way a small child might if pursued by a grownup in some game.

The living-room light was still on
when she got back to the house. She sat in the car for a moment, composing
herself.

Letting herself in she went through
to the lounge. Alex was seated with his back to her. He gazed into the dying
red embers of the fire and was nursing a tumbler of whisky. An empty bottle
stood on the mantelpiece. .

Alex got up slowly, clutching his
glass. He turned to face her and took a step toward her, swaying slightly. He
tilted his head and smiled, almost genially, but Maggie recognized a warning in
it. "Been with your lover?"