Dark Sister (15 page)

"Can I open it now?" said
Maggie. She was battling not to let him see how upset she was about the
children.

"I wish you would."

She tore open the wrapping paper. It was Bella's diary.

"I thought you'd burned it!"

"How could I—me, an
archaeologist—burn something like that?"

"Thank you for giving it back to me.
Happy
Christmas."

"Happy Christmas, Maggie."

She cried after he drove away.

TWENTY-FIVE

Christmas
Day was bleak. Maggie woke with a hangover and a
palate like a carpet
soaked in sticky liqueurs. She'd been out with Kate to a pub on Christmas Eve.
A drunk with Jesus Christ hair and the smell of vomit in his beard had spent
the night trying to kiss her. She'd turned down two offers of bed and one of
salvation when the Church Army had arrived with collecting tins just before
midnight.

Now all she had was the vengeance of the morning after
in her dismal bed-sit. Kate had gone home to her parents' house. Even the
thrash music (which hadn't started up again since she'd left her calling card)
would have been almost welcome. The house was as quiet and as chilly as a tomb.

Beginning to wish she'd taken up the offer to spend
Christmas Day with Kate's family, she switched on her gas fire and went to wash
in the bathroom. The fungus in the corner exuded
malintent
.
When she returned to her room, the gas had died. She emptied her purse onto the
table, finding not a single coin for the meter. She flicked on her portable TV
set. Every channel seemed to be showing cartoons. She got back into bed.

And there she stayed until midday when there came a
hammering on the front door. Maggie got out of bed and, tying the sash of her
dressing gown, padded downstairs and along the cold corridor.

"Ash!"
He was standing holding a gift-wrapped present. She hugged him, almost bowling
him from the step in her enthusiasm.
"Oh, Ash!"

"Didn't like to
think of you here alone.
Thought you might need
cheering up."

She took him inside and made him wait in
the kitchen while she dressed.

"Cold in here," he observed when he was allowed in the room.

"This is the worst Christmas Day of
my life. You've no idea what it's like to be on your own for Christmas
Day."

Ash looked at her strangely. "Put
your coat on," he said. "Time you met the wife."

"I couldn't intrude, Ash. It's not fair."

"Do as you're told. You're not staying here all day."

So she let him bully her into
spending Christmas Day at his place. She carried her still-wrapped gift to the
car and climbed in beside him. It was a half-hour drive along roads that were
almost empty.

Ash lived in a large, slightly
gloomy detached house with rampant ivy trailing the facing wall. The lounge
had a coal fire burning behind a brass fireguard. Ash moved the fireguard
aside and she took advantage of the warmth. Maggie made a quick assessment as
Ash poured them both a glass of sherry. It was a most conventional room,
disappointingly so with its
Dralon
suite and velvet
curtains and its brass ornaments grouped around the fire. She'd expected
something more ... bohemian, more eccentric.

"Cheers," said Ash, tipping back his sherry.

"Isn't your wife going to join us?"

"The wife.
Right.
Time for you to meet the wife.
Come through to the study."

Ash tugged her by the wrist and led her
down the hall to a room at the rear of the house. He opened the door and
propelled her into the room ahead of him. "Maggie, meet the wife."

Maggie looked back at him, perplexed.
There was no one. But every eccentric or bohemian detail she'd expected to be
exhibited in Ash's house had been crammed into this room. It was indeed a
study. There was a great leather-inlay desk the size of a sports field standing
against the far wall. A winking word processor suggested he'd spent some of
his Christmas morning at work. The walls were decked with large maps, studded
with pins and coloured ribbon connecting geographical positions. Otherwise
framed prints covered all available wall space.

The room was heavy with the
pungent smell of incense. And on shelves or on freestanding display tables was
an extensive collection of figurines, statuary, carvings, and fragments of bas-relief.
The room was a museum, but with the aura of a shrine.

"They're all—"

"That's right," said
Ash.
"The goddess, in all her different incarnations.
I collect them. Actually I study them. It's my hobby when I'm not in the
shop."

"And the maps?"

"I'm tracing her movements, across
history. See? She started out here, in the Middle-East, and her influence
spread to Africa, to Asia and to Europe. Then with the migration of the
peoples.... only her name gets changed, she doesn't change."

"It's incredible!" She lifted a figurine from a table.

"That's the
Ephesian
Artemis. And it's original, in case you were wondering.
From
somewhere in Asia Minor about 1000 B.C.
You went straight to it. Clever
lady; I'm impressed. Most of the things you see here are reproductions. Some I
had specially made."

Maggie weighed it in her hand. The
lifelike representation had a dozen mammary glands. "It must be worth a
fortune!"

"Yep."

"But why do you ..."

"Refer to it all as 'the wife'?
Because it's here.
It's a good excuse, if ever I want
to get away from someone.
And because I spend so much time
with her....
Come on. Let's go back to the other room."

Maggie carefully replaced the
figurine on the table. He closed the door softly on the goddess and poured them
both another glass of sherry.

"So you're not married after all. You don't have a wife."

"I did have. She died in a motoring
accident three years ago." Ash looked into the fire. This was the sadness
Maggie had sensed in him from the beginning. "Actually there's another
reason why I call all that 'the wife.' Janie—my real wife—started all that
research. She was an academic, writing a book. I'm trying to finish it for her.
I don't have her brilliance. It's taking a long time."

He was trying to make light of it, and he
wasn't doing it very well. She could see he'd never let it out to anyone;
intuition told her he'd choked it all back. "Do you know," he was
saying, "people say time will help you get over it. Well, they're wrong.
When you lose someone, the world becomes a changed place. And it's changed
forever."

She wanted to hold him, but it wasn't
possible.

"I'm being morbid!" he said
brightly, suddenly.

"No, you're not."

"Yes, I am. Drink up! Open your
present! There's a turkey cooking. Can you smell it?"

Oh, yes. Maggie could smell the bird
cooking.

They pulled crackers and wore paper hats
and drained two bottles of claret and had a jolly dinner. It was self-conscious
jollity, but it was genuine. They were relaxed in each other's company, and
they were both desperately relieved not to have to spend the day alone.

After dinner they sat through part of a
lugubrious television church service, before Ash switched it off and put some
music on instead.

"Don't you believe in the miracle of
the Virgin birth?" Maggie asked, ironic

"No more than I believe Santa Clause
comes down that chimney with a roast chestnut up his arse."

"You don't like the Christian Church,
do you? I could see while you were watching TV."

"No, I don't. I despise it. Look,
Christ was possibly the greatest teacher ever.
A healer, in
more ways than one.
But if he was here today he'd have nothing to do
with the Christian Church." She'd got him on his subject. "Take the
Virgin Mary," he continued, "our most recent incarnation of the
goddess. But what did they
do,
these old patriarchs?
They took her sexuality away.
The virgin mother.
And
that's how they took her
power
away. Who do you think is that second
woman you always see standing at the crucifixion?"

"What? You mean Mary Magdalene?"

"That's right.
The
prostitute, so called.
The demoniac cured by Christ. She's the same
person, the same Mary. But they split off the two halves of the goddess. The
Magdalene is the sexy half. The virgin's dark sister, if you like."

Dark sister.
The
phrase rang bells. "Why did you say that?
Dark
sister?"

"Isn't that what she is? A shadow,
always in the background, but always present. Come to think of it, Jesus was
probably married to Mary Magdalene."

"Where do you get these outrageous
notions?"

Ash smiled and nodded toward the study.
"From the wife.
But what really makes my blood boil
about the Christian Church is the slaughter.
All of those
women in medieval times, literally millions across Europe, who were tortured
and slaughtered and burned.
Wise women.
Healers.
Simple herbalists, some of them, like me.
Some of them just lonely old antisocial women.
All put to
the torch. Actually, they used to hang witches in this country, not burn them.
But no one in the Christian Church, even to this day, seems prepared to show
the slightest remorse for this holocaust. And they're still trying to do it! Do
you know they had a campaign against my shop, because of some of the books I
sell?"

"I'd heard about that, yes."

Ash waved a hand through the air, as if he
wanted to swat a barmy world.

In the evening they played a round of
Scrabble and drank more claret and a few glasses of brandy. Then just to prove
how committed to Christmas he was, in a deep down sort of way, Ash produced a
packet of dates, and they were in such good spirits they ate them all.

It seemed perfectly natural they should
snuggle on the couch to watch a late film on the television.

"Would you like to stay
here?" Ash asked her sleepily. She nodded. "You can have my
bed," he said. "I'll make a bed up on the couch."

"That's not necessary. I want you to sleep with me."

He kissed her lightly, but then
looked at her hard. "I'll stay on the couch."

"Why?"

Ash vented a deep sigh. "Let me tell you
something. One of the greatest, most remarkable pleasures for a man in this
world is the secret pleasure of an erection. After my wife died, the goddess
took that pleasure away from me. I'm waiting for her to give it back."

Maggie felt a surge of love for
Ash. It effervesced in her, like something foaming at the lip of the vessel.
She felt the need to hold him, to cradle him, to impart love.

"It's all right," she
said. "I want you to sleep with me anyway. Just to be with you.
Just to hold you."

Maggie knew Ash had some crying to do, and
she wanted to help him
do
it.

TWENTY-SIX

Boxing Day blues
.

Ash left to fulfil a promise to visit his
dead wife's parents. He went around midday, and though he suggested Maggie should
avail herself of the house, she found herself wandering back to her bed-sit.
The place was still empty apart from her; then in the afternoon the thrash
music started up again from the ground floor.

Maggie telephoned Alex. Alex's
mother answered stiffly before putting him on. He was amenable.

"What have they said? Have they taken your side?"

"What do you expect?" said Alex. "Let's not get into it,
eh?"

"Have the kids been behaving?"

"Amy is
queening
it over everything and they're spoiling her to death; Sam has been a little
swine since the moment he got here. He's crying for you all the time and he's
smashing anything that's put in front of him. Mum and Dad bought him an indestructible
toy truck and he threw it on the fire."

"Let me speak to them."

Maggie asked Amy to share her toys with
Sam, and she asked Sam to be a good boy.

"How's your Christmas?"
Alex said when he came back on the line.

       
"Quiet."

       
Maggie broke a long pause by asking, "When are you leaving there?"

"Couple more days.
Will you be home when
we get back?"

"No ... Maybe. I'm thinking about it."

"Yes. Think about it." Alex put the phone down.

Maggie was thinking about it. She
wanted her home back. She wanted her children back. About Alex she wasn't so
sure. There was one particular question about Alex to which she wished she had
an answer. She'd confronted him with her suspicions, but it wasn't enough. She
wanted to know.

Maggie returned to her room and fed
coins into her gas meter. She wanted the place to be warm for what she was
about to do. First she set up her table with the altar cloth and the implements
she'd consecrated on
Wigstone
heath. She unboxed her
Christmas gift from Ash, three ornate brass incense burners, which she set out
in a triangle around the room, and set cones of incense smouldering.

Then she proceeded to mix her flying ointment.

She operated partly on information from
the diary, partly on the basis of warnings and tips delivered by Old Liz.
Getting information out of Liz was never easy, in that it came either in
fragments or sudden outpourings. Checking or recapitulating anything was out
of the question. It was like trying to catch rainfall: you collected only what
went straight into the vessel.

It scared her deeply. Yet she wanted
to do it, had to do it. She needed more than ever to prove to herself she was
not some feeble spirit to be fisted around the house. The recollection of
Alex's stinging blows came to her. It gave her the strength to proceed.

Using a base of almond oil she
mixed her quantities with the precision and care only fear could marshal. Her
hands trembled; her throat was dry even as she used her mortar and pestle to
grind the ingredients. She invoked the name of a protective spirit given to her
by Ash.

Once, when she was a girl of
twelve, she'd ascended the ladders to the top diving board at her local
swimming pool. She'd never faced the top board before. Up there she found a
short queue of dithering boys of her own age, all failing to pluck up the courage
either to jump or make the dive. Two boys walked to the extremity of the board
and came back. They couldn't do it.

The boys had turned and,
shamefacedly, had parted for her. Followed by their eyes, she'd stepped to the
edge of the board. The cries and the splashes in the pool below had become
remarkably hollow, had seemed to come from another world. Aware of the
shivering boys behind her she'd offered a secret prayer, not to God but to
Mother Nature, before dropping off the board. Then she was slipping through the
air, plunging, seemingly forever, toward the water.

Emboldened by her example, the
dithering boys were now all leaping from the top board. On reaching the side of
the pool, she'd felt a pull inside herself. She climbed out of the pool and
went immediately to the changing rooms. Her first menstrual period had started.

Now, whenever she was afraid of
doing something new, she always replayed that moment.

She mixed belladonna, juice of
wolfsbane
, poplar leaves, wild celery, and cinquefoil. To
this she added a tiny ball of black resin which Liz had given her, and followed
Liz's advice that she
compound
a kind of cold cream
rather than an oil. Liz had told her that she should blacken the cream by
adding soot, though she hadn't explained why. Maggie did as instructed.

These were different waters,
darker waters, and they scared her far more than that leap from the top board.
Far more, even, than had the red, lissom trickle heralding a new phase of life.
But now, as then, she was busy disguising her fears from herself.

Even though she'd had her oils
awaiting
enfleurage
_y
the operation took her two hours. She placed a bowl of water and a towel
beside her. Then she was ready.

She locked the door.

She undressed and sat naked on the
floor, inside the triangle of incense burners. She sat with her eyes closed for
ten minutes, trying to address her mind to the matter. Music thumped from the
room below, but despite this distraction she found she could easily come back
to her question. When she was satisfied, she opened her eyes and reached for
the prepared ointment.

It wasn't easy, because she was
afraid. Her stomach squeezed. Her hand shook. Her mouth was dry.
Why am I
doing this?
she
thought.
Why? Why?
She
looked at the black paste she had spent so long mixing. The incense in the room
hung in heavy, serpentine coils. She felt nauseated. The black pool beckoned.
Because
you must,
came
the answer from inside her head. It
was a voice she'd heard before, in the woods, on the heath; female, intimate,
insinuating.
Because you are what you are.

She smeared the paste across her
forehead, into her temples, on her throat and round her wrists. She massaged it
thoroughly into her skin, but only at these precise points. Then, as Liz had
insisted, she took a quantity of the paste on her fingers and pushed it up
inside her vagina. It seemed a perverse act, but Maggie knew of other
intravaginal
treatments. She wiped her hands on her thighs,
daubing them in the process with sooty streaks, before washing her hands in the
bowl of water. Then she sat back to concentrate again on her question.

She was perspiring heavily; even though
she was fully committed now, the fear had not diminished. Someone had once
taught her to meditate; so she tried to slow her racing heart by closing her
eyes and silently repeating a mantra to herself, without losing sight of her
question.

The meditation technique relaxed her a
little. She vented a huge sigh, a discharge of anxiety, and started to feel strangely
languid. It was a pleasing sensation, almost
a numbness
,
a distancing from her body. It lasted for ten or fifteen minutes, though she
was already losing her sense of time.

Then suddenly her heart rate
rocketed. It started knocking heavily inside her, and she was engulfed by a
terrible, blinding headache. She opened her eyes and was astonished to see
great blisters of sweat oozing from her body, the perspiration glittering like
moonlight on frost. Her vagina was burning
  and
her throat was parched. She instinctively reached for the bowl of water,
then
remembered having used it to wash her hands. She tried
to get up, but the movement made her vomit. She was sick into the bowl of
water, twice, three times, until she was retching, unable to produce anything
and at the same time incapable of drawing breath.

Then the retching stopped, and a profound
numbness swamped her body. The pain in her head receded, as did the burning in
her throat and vagina. She was breathing heavily, feeling only overwhelming
relief that the pain had gone. She drew herself upright, her legs folded under
her, her eyes screwed shut. Although she was still panting heavily, the
frightening heart rate was beginning to slow. Instinctively, as if to give her
lungs more room in which to work, she thrust forward her chest and pushed her
arms back behind her. Then she tried to open her eyes.

Light hit her like a slap in the face. The instant she
tried to open her eyes, she felt as if she had been grabbed by two giant claws,
one round her neck, one squeezing her buttocks, and flung up, up, up into
blackness, hurtling against a hot cinnamon wind. It was like being shot out
of a
cannon. White hot sparks exploded and buffeted her as
she travelled through the blackness, detonating behind her closed eyes. Her
blood roared in her ears.

Then she suddenly came to a stop. She was
suspended in midair. All pain had gone, all sense of heat and odour, all sound.
This time she could open her eyes. She was in a grey corridor, unable to
discern whether indoors or outside. All was muffled as she drifted slowly along
the corridor. Grey or black shapes, ambiguous things, fracturing shadows,
drifted by her with languid movements like fish in an aquarium. Sometimes the
shapes stopped, disappeared, reappeared,
moved
on.
They could be geometric in form, or irregular. Maggie felt confused, lost.

She reached out at one of the shapes, and
as her hand passed into it, the shape folded, quit. It changed into a face,
mouthing words at her, words she couldn't hear.

The face was very old, androgynous,
perhaps
female, Maggie couldn't be sure. It hovered
close, mouthing silent words, chilling but not threatening. Maggie moved away,
but the face followed at her shoulder. Trying to speak was useless. It took her
an age simply to turn and look into the eyes of the hovering face; then a long
stand-off as she looked back without result, without consequence. Again Maggie
moved away, and again she was followed. The face mouthed its words again, and
again, until slowly it penetrated.
What do you want? What do you want?
the
face was asking her. It wanted to help her.

Maggie tried to remember her question. It
seemed a long way from here. She'd forgotten it. She would have to go back to
her room to remember her question, and it was too far... too far away.

Then she recalled the question. She
deliberately brought it to mind. The face disappeared immediately, and in its
place, like a parting in the fabric of the grey corridor, was a scene. Maggie drew
closer.

An elegant pair of hands, jewelled
hands, a woman's hands, were carefully wrapping a Christmas gift. All Maggie
could see were the hands, the gift, and the wrapping paper. The paper was
expensive, pretty green-and-red material shining and winking in the pearly
light. The gift was Bella's diary. The hands finished wrapping the gift, and
now Maggie could see to whom they belonged. Anita
Suzman
.
She was talking to someone behind her. Anita was naked, spread across a bed,
lying on her stomach. She waved the gift in the air looking across her shoulder
as she spoke. A man's bare forearms slid under her stomach, lifting her from
beneath her belly, raising her onto her knees. It was Alex. He parted her legs
and Maggie could see his erection as he moved closer to Anita, slowly
penetrating her as he leaned across her arched back. Anita's eyes closed and
her head dropped forward in pleasure.

Anita slipped out her languorous tongue
and licked the pretty bow decorating Alex's Christmas gift to Maggie as he took
her from behind.

The sound of someone hammering on the door brought
Maggie round. She came to on the floor, flat out on her back. She had her hand
in a bowl of water and vomit. The gas fire had gone out and she felt cold.

"Maggie! Maggie! Are you in there?"
The hammering got louder.

"Who is it?" Maggie
croaked. She was beetled, unable to get off her back.

"It's Kate. What're you doing?"

Maggie hauled herself to her feet.
She felt weak. She slipped on her dressing gown, sat on the bed and put her
head between her knees.

"Maggie!"

"I'm all right!"

"Then open the door."

Maggie staggered over to the door and opened it a few inches.

"God!
Look at you!" said Kate. Maggie suddenly remembered the sooty flying
ointment.

"Run me a bath if you want to do something for me."

Kate did as ordered and stood back
as Maggie staggered by with the bowl to tip its contents down the toilet.

"Must have been one hell of a party," Kate said nervously.

Maggie looked back at her through
a stray curl, but with a baleful eye.