Dark Sister (18 page)

But Anita, if she was about to explain,
didn't get the opportunity, because Ash came in at that moment.
"Afternoon, ladies!" he said, in his vaguely ironic and proprietary
voice. Maggie introduced them.

"I thought there would be
someone," Anita said, getting up to leave.

"Pardon?" said Ash.

"On the
scene."
Ash looked at Maggie, and then back at Anita, who said,
"Do you make magic together?
Silly me.
Of course
you do. Well, this is nice, but I have to go." Anita turned and left the
shop.

Ash stared after her.

"Alex's lover," said Maggie.

"Oh," said Ash, as if that explained everything.
"Sexy lady."

"Some people think so," said Maggie.

She held up her new talismans for him to see.

THIRTY

Maggie
didn't give up trying to persuade Ash to fly with her
,
but he resisted
stubbornly. She also tried to get him to talk about his own experience of
flying, but all he would say was that it differed for different people, and that
it was an experience he was most reluctant to repeat.

She could understand that. Her own recent
efforts had succeeded in poisoning her. Despite exercising great care, it had
taken her two full days to recover properly from the effects of flying. The nausea,
headaches, night sweats, and bowel disorders had been a grim toll. But she was
convinced that the preparation had been fundamentally correct. What had failed,
she suspected, was something in her mental preparation, some inability to
transform
the poisonous properties of the flying ointment. She thought it was
something Ash might know about.

Maggie stayed at his house occasionally, though not
often. She'd made the mistake one night of giving over her best efforts to cure
Ash of his impotence. The undertaking failed. She sucked him and squeezed him
and teased him with her sharp fingernails and licked him from head to toe with
her darting tongue, all to no avail. Though he pretended otherwise, she knew he
was mortified. All she succeeded in doing was augmenting his anguish.

The craft she kept in reserve. Liz had given her
strict instructions on that, and Maggie was too afraid of seeing the craft fail
to do otherwise. But she continued to press Liz on the use of the flying
ointment. She was whipped on by overwhelming curiosity, yet too afraid to go it
alone again. While Ash held out against her, she turned to the diary, where she
found another of Bella's entries on the subject of flying. It was not helpful,
and it only redoubled her store of anxieties.
Last eve I did fly again and
survived, but by the skin of my teeth, thanks be to
Hecate
,
and ere I got what I wanted I was out of it. A. forced me into it though I'd
not a mind for it. Why do I let her bully me? I'll have done with A. if there's
a way for it. I'll kill her off, my dark sister, so I will. And though I don't
feel poorly, the banishments being correct, my hands are all a-tremble at what
I did see.

Now at least I have some knowledge on A. for I seen
HER dark sister and HER dark sister and so on, all in a line like tied with May
blossom or something of the sort which I couldn't make out. But I'm done, and
I'll not fly again, no.

Maggie decided that Bella was a witch of little
resolve, for there was another entry a few days later.

/
did fly again last eve though I'd said I'd not and I did intend but
that I had A. tormenting
tormenting
tormenting
me that I'd not SHIFT and I'd not used the
flying ointment three times in the same moon, so since she was on her back but
carrying water, the moon that is, I went along and did. A. left me alone a bit
then, as she knows how I am towards her of late.

A. says I'm not discreet enough and she says I'll
pay. But things are not as they were.

None of it was much help, except that the references to
banishments were intriguing. There had been at least one earlier reference to
banishments and something about "preservation from demons." Maggie
understood these demons to represent the physical discomforts she'd endured,
and put the question to Ash.

"Don't ask me. She's probably referring to the
banishing rituals."

"What are the banishing rituals?"

"I'm not telling you. It only encourages you to
go away and do something dangerous.

"Isn't it more dangerous if I don't know?"

"There are all kinds of banishing rituals. The
idea is that the ritual keeps away any undesirable forces and influences. Some
of them are complicated procedures where you have to wave a sword at the points
of a star and so on; others are just about the time of day it's safe to work—dawn,
midday, dusk."

"Can you make up your own?"

"You shouldn't underestimate these rituals. It's
something about keeping your intentions pure, and your mind unclouded."

"I'm going to fly again. If you won't join me,
will you at least watch over me?"

Ash groaned.

More artefacts were turning up at the archaeological
dig, but they raised more questions than answers. Tania and her colleagues had
found a metal handle with a back plate and screw holes. Then they unearthed
another piece of metal, square-shaped, again a plate with screw holes, but with
a circular hole in its middle.

"These things were probably screwed to something
wooden which has rotted," Alex told them. "See if you can find the
screws. Also, take a section of earth and see if you can find anything in the
soil which might suggest an imprint left behind by a wooden casket or
something. Take it slowly."

They found a second metal handle. It almost certainly
belonged to a large box of some kind. The function of the other fragment, the holed
metal plate, was more difficult to guess. Then Alex saw Tania
troweling
at the earth, her hair scraped back and tied in a
pony tail, bending over in her tight jeans. He had a lewd thought. He packed
her off to fetch the five-foot length of lead pipe they'd already unearthed.
When she came back, the lead pipe fitted snugly inside the diameter of hole in
the metal plate.

Alex was supposed to have a lunchtime rendezvous with
Anita that day. Instead he invited Tania to join him for a drink at the Malt
Shovel. She accepted, and if she was surprised that he didn't invite the
others, she said nothing.

He bought her lunch and a glass of white wine.
"Can you come round tonight?"

"I don't want to baby-sit for you again, Alex."

"Not babysitting. I thought
you might like dinner at my place. We could open a bottle of wine and
speculate
about what these objects might be." He narrowed his eyes on the word.

Tania had wide-open brown eyes, and they
didn't blink. "That would be nice," she said.

Alex planned to have the kids in
bed by eight o'clock and Tania in bed by eleven. He hoped she could do for him
what Anita, lately, couldn't. He wondered, with vague feelings of guilt and
suspicion, what Maggie would be doing that evening.

Ash had agreed, under protest, to
supervise Maggie's flying experiment that evening. He made his study
available, knowing how uncomfortable her bed-sit could be. He also told her
what he knew about "banishments" and fashioned a ritual for her, half
from memory, half invented, but in any case a precise order of events which
they rehearsed twice in order to get clear.

They'd agreed to begin the process
at dusk. The flying ointment was prepared. Incense was ignited in Ash's study,
already smouldering in brass bowls as the sky began to darken outside. Maggie
began to feel the itching, the claw squeezing at her bowels as the hour
approached. Why am I doing this?
she
asked herself
again. What's driving me? A bitter taste lined her palate, as if the memory of
her first flying experience was a metallic dust secreted in her saliva.
Deposits of anxiety.
Ash felt her jitters.

"You don't have to, you know.
No one's making you."

"I don't know why; but I
must."

"I'll make you some herb tea.
Settle your stomach."

Maggie saw her chance. "Good idea.
You sit down. I'll do it."

She made the herb tea, but not one
Ash had ever drunk before. This was one of Liz's. She sweetened it with honey.

"
Mmmmm
. Good.
What is it?"

"My secret," said
Maggie. "I'm going to take my bath."

"Don't be long. It's almost
dusk
."

Maggie took a perfumed bath. She
knew enough about aromatherapy by now to scent the gardens of heaven. She'd
made her own bathing mixture from sea salt, rosemary, frankincense, and
cypress. After drying, she anointed herself with the protective oils of hyssop
and basil.

Liz had also passed on a love scent. The
old woman had made it up for her and had given it to her with a wicked smile
and instructions to use it sparingly. Maggie had to beg her to reveal the
formula. It contained jasmine, red rose, a minute quantity of lavender, a bit
of musk, and ylang-ylang oils.

She came from the bathroom wearing her dressing gown.
Ash was in the study wearing a loose-fitting jogging suit. He lit tall red and
white candles. The incense was a specific compound of sandalwood and rosemary,
pungent and sweet, streaming from the brass bowls and coiling in the air like
snakes. He saw she was wearing one of her engraved copper talismanic charms.

On the rug Ash had made a large
circle out of a length of clean, white rope. The circle was broken at the two
ends of the rope. "Just remember," he told her, "that a rope on
the floor is not a magic circle, it's just a rope. But it prompts you to
maintain the circle in your mind." Outside the circle stood a bottle of
mineral water to answer the ravaging dryness of Maggie's first experiment.
Inside the circle
was
a bowl of water for washing and
the jar of flying ointment. Maggie gave Ash a nervous smile, slipped off her
dressing gown and stepped into the circle. She sat cross-legged on the rug,
naked but for her talisman. Ash closed the circle behind her by overlapping the
two ends of the rope.

Maggie composed herself. She dipped her finger in the
water and touched her forehead. Repeating the words Ash had taught her, she
made her dedications to
Hecate
and asked for
protection:
I
have purified myself and my heart is filled with joy. I
bring gifts of incense and perfume. I anoint myself with unguents to make
myself strong.

Outside the circle, Ash watched,
fascinated. The perfume from the censers hung heavy in the room. Her hair was
like burnished copper in the flickering candle light and her skin flushed
rose-pink from her scented bath. Her eyes were half-closed as she repeated the
ritual dedications, a slight bloom of perspiration on her brow. She reached for
the jar of flying ointment and began to massage it into her wrists. She rubbed
it into her temples, her ankles, round her throat and finally put her fingers
inside her vagina.

"Wait!" said Ash. He slipped off
his tracksuit, opened the rope, entered the circle and closed it behind him. He
crouched down beside her, dipping his hand in the water and touching it to his
brow, exactly as she had done.

"Ash!
What are you doing?"

"Wherever it is you're going, I'm coming with you."

He repeated the words, massaging the
flying ointment into his ankles, wrists and throat:
Grant me the secret
longings of my heart.

"No cheating," said Maggie. She
put her fingers in the jar of ointment and smeared it on his cock, then reached
behind him and pushed her forefinger up his anus. Ash gasped. Then she kissed
him full on the lips and smiled grimly. "Now wait."

They sat in complete silence for
ten or fifteen minutes before she began to feel the faint dizziness and the
perspiration on her brow. There was a taste somewhere in the back of her
sinuses reminding her of her first experience. Again a burning, in her bowels
and throat and inside her vagina, the dry heat which made her
want
to retch. But this time she saw the heat as a silver
light climbing up the column of her spine. She visualized the heat as a silver
sword, tip of the blade extending, as if she could control it, transform it,
neutralize its poisonous properties,
make
it useful.
The shimmering blade of light climbed up her spine and inserted itself into the
tenderest
lobes of her brain. Suddenly there was a
wild knocking inside her—from her heart, it must be the heart— and then a
strontium flash inside her brain, shock waves producing a profound numbness
throughout her body.

Suddenly her head swelled, balloon
like, racing outwards at speed until it jerked to a stop, two inches from the
ceiling and the walls of the room. She touched the ceiling and her fingers
stuck to it like suction pads. She realized she was on the ceiling, not hanging
from it, but on it, inflated massively. Her head and hands were so
large,
she could see nothing of the room.
Ash?
Where was Ash? She blinked and saw Ash, also on the ceiling with her. He was
looking back at her with hugely dilated eyes. Their bodies were gargantuan,
obstructing all view of the study. She put a hand on Ash's arm and instantly
there was an explosion as he shot away, a distance of a million miles in a
fraction of a second, leaving a laser trail of light like a spaceship from a
science-fiction movie.

Then another explosion as he was
back with her again. She looked into his eyes. They were stormy black holes,
clouds racing across them chased by high winds, arcs of light, magnesium
flares,
moving
landscapes. She went into them, passed
through them, and he was already inside there, waiting for her. They held hands
and went hurtling through lilac skies, buffeted by hot spice winds, until they
came to an abrupt stop.

They were together in that grey
corridor she had visited before. She tried to speak to Ash but couldn't make
words come. Gray and black shapes drifted past her vision, dissolving,
reforming. Then the familiar face was beside her, the face that had helped her
before, questioning without words. Maggie told her she had a gift to offer.

The face disappeared and in its
place was a familiar scene within a parting in the grey corridor. It was Alex,
raising Anita to her knees. Maggie didn't want to witness the event a second
time. She waved it away and it changed. Alex was still there. This time he was
at home. He was lying on his back, in bed. Tania was with him.