Dark Sister (23 page)

At Omega, Ash was vainly trying to maintain an attitude of
business as usual. It was difficult. The evangelists took it in turn to press
their noses up against the window to see what he was doing. He was writing in a
ledger, and this was clearly causing speculation outside. He deliberately
affected a demonic grin, and made a great show of dipping his pen in the veins
of his forearm; but he was actually preparing no more than his accounts.

Lunchtime had come and gone and not a
single customer had passed through the picket. Then in the afternoon a young
man braved the storm. He was so enthusiastically received by Ash that he went
out and came in again.

Ash didn't know whether to close up
and go home, or grit his teeth and stay on. He thought that closing would be
giving in to them; on the other hand, by staying open he was only playing their
game. By late afternoon he'd decided to close early, but to confuse them by
leaving the window blinds up and the sign declaring the shop open.

He came out jangling his keys and the picket parted.

"Excuse me! Excuse me!"
It was a plump, elderly lady addressing him, a woman with a heavy overcoat and
a sweet, round face. "Would you be good enough to tell us if you're
closing now, because we don't want to wait here
unnecessarily.
"

Ash was astonished. Then he laughed out loud.

"Well, we can be civilized about
it, can't we?" she said. Ash was about to reply when the glimmer of a
silver brooch lying at her feet caught his eye. He picked it up.

"Is this yours?"

The old woman was taken aback. Then she
smiled at him and gently rested a hand on his arm. "Do you know, my
husband gave me that before he
died.
I must have
dropped it and I'd have been heartbroken if I'd lost it.
Heartbroken."
She was beaming at him.

Ash pinned it back on her coat.
"Well, at least one of you doesn't hate me."

The tall woman, "Lest Ye Forget,"
stepped forward. "You want to throw that brooch away, Mary, now he's
touched it. It's tainted. You want nothing to do with it."

The sweet smile died on the plump lady's
face. He saw her look from him to the interlocutor, and to the brooch. A tear began
to form in her eye. He was outraged. He stepped toward the tall woman.
"You," he said. "You'd have been there, wouldn't you?
Cheering them on at the hangings and the burnings.
It's how
people like you enjoy yourself.
It's
good sex for
people like you, isn't it? You'd have been at the front of the queue!"

Ash marched off along the catwalk, watched
all the way by the silent picket.

Maggie had cleared an area to make a
small, smoky fire, as instructed. Liz had told her to study the smoke from the
fire before beginning the ritual. She followed this with a relaxation exercise,
before commencing her serious
preparation.She
unzipped and emptied her bag. First she laid out her circle with the long
length of white rope leaving the ends open so that she could enter when the
time was right.

She lit incense and repeated her banishing
ritual.

Outside the circle she marked the four
points of the compass. At north, at the station of Earth, she deposited a
handful of soil she'd brought from the site of the Dancing Ladies, and she
spoke the name of
Uriel
. South of the circle, at the
station of Fire, she set a beeswax candle in a ceramic wind-protector. She lit
the candle and invoked the name of Michael.

At the station of Water, at the eastern
point, she set a jar of rain-water, earlier consecrated with salt. Here she
spoke the name of Gabriel. The last point, on the western side of the circle,
was the station of Air. Here she placed a sprig of mistletoe in flower. Liz had
told her that the seasonal fruit of the mistletoe was preferred, but that if
Maggie insisted on this particular time, then the mistletoe in flower would
have to suffice. It was dedicated to Raphael.

She still had an hour or so before dusk.
She sipped a little wine in which mistletoe had been steeped, and waited.

It was approaching five o'clock at the
site of the Maggie dig, and everyone wanted to stay on. After discovering the
absence of hands and feet on the skeleton, they'd pressed on to reveal that
some kind of device was attached to the skull. Alex held up that part of the
operation so that he might record the exact position in which it lay. Having
done so, he was ready to give permission for them to uncover the device.

He was as eager as everyone else to stay
on and work in the dark if necessary. But he had a problem.

"No, I won't," said Tania.
"I'm not missing this. What do you take me for anyway?" She thought
Alex was just using her.

"No, I can't," said his
childminder when he telephoned. She thought it was high time Alex faced up to
his responsibilities.

"No, I'm sorry," said Anita,
when she too received his telephone call. She thought it was Alex's way of
trying to rekindle things.

"Not even for old times' sake?"
he pleaded.

"Especially not for old times' sake.
Have to go; Bill's due back."

Amy had already been picked up from school
by the child-minder and was waiting to be collected along with Sam. That was
the arrangement. Alex was running out of options. In desperation he tried to
ring Maggie. First he rang the telephone in the hall of her bed-sit. Someone
answered but told him Maggie was out. Then he looked up the number for Omega in
the Gilded Arcade. There was no reply.

He went back to Tania.

"No, Alex.
Absolutely
not."

He drew her away from the others.
"Please, Tania. I'm going to make a big media buzz out of this and I
promise I'll tell them it was your dig. You'll get a job somewhere on the back
of this. It'll look good for you. Think about it. Please help me out."

"I don't need this pressure,
Alex."

"Please. I'll never ask you again."
He held out the keys to his car. Tania looked back at the dig, and then at
Alex. Her cheeks were burning. She snatched the keys from him.

"This is absolutely the last
time." She was already marching away across the grass.

"You're a life-saver!"

"Fuck off, Alex," she shouted
over her shoulder.

He turned back to his skull, rubbing his
hands together in satisfaction.

Tania collected Amy and Sam from the
childminder and drove them back to the house. At least she knew they'd become
fond of her and were better behaved for her than ever they were for Alex.

"Can we have Cowboy's
Glory?" Amy said, climbing out of the car.

"Yes, you can have Cowboy's
Glory." Tania was too good-natured to dump her anger on the kids. So she
opened cans and knocked out rounds of beans on toast. When they'd finished eating,
she sent them off to play so she could get on with some clearing up. The house
was a shambles. Sam reluctantly followed Amy down into the playroom.

Liz stood on the doorstep of her
cottage. She was chewing something. Chewing, and staring out across the fields
into the gathering dusk. The cottage door was flung wide open. Behind her, the
old collie sat whimpering. Liz turned slowly, and silenced the dog with a look.

She was afraid for them. She'd
worn herself out walking that great distance to the Sanders' house on Saturday,
and then back again. It was too much at her age. She'd done her best to help
Sam. But she'd been disturbed by the arrival of Alex's lover. That had been
unfortunate. She just hoped that she'd done enough.

Liz turned her attention back to
the grey horizon, across the fields, and to the graded advance of dusk.

Dusk came into the woods with
stealth, insinuating itself into the smoke of her small fire. Maggie tied back
her hair, slipped off her clothes, and stepped inside the rope, closing the
circle behind her. It was cold, as she'd anticipated. In preference to the
hogsfat
mentioned in Bella's diary, she rubbed herself
with an
embrocation
fluid, which numbed as well as
warmed her. Liz had sanctioned this variation.

She performed her banishing ritual
for the third and final time.

She
unstoppered
her new
oleum
magicale
.
It was filmier than the flying ointment, more opaque, highly scented with
sandalwood and wisteria. She applied it to her body as before, to her temples,
wrists, ankles, glandular points,
intravaginally
, but
also a smear under her
eyes,
and a single drop on her
tongue. Already the oil on her face stung her eyes. On contact with her skin it
released strong vapours. She was forced to close her watering eyes as a bitter,
acrid taste spread over her tongue, numbing her mouth and depositing a pellet
of bile in her throat.

She struggled to open her eyes
against the vapours. She needed to stay alert to what was happening in the
physical world around her. Liz had told her that she must respond to the first
thing to appear.

"What if nothing comes?"
she'd asked.

"It will," Liz had said.
"It will."

It could be an adder. It could be
a bird. She would know when it approached the circle. But it would not enter
the circle until she invited it in. She forced her eyes open against stinging
tears. She waited, gazing at the smoke from her small fire as Liz had
instructed her, visualizing forms rising from the smoke, weaving smoke and
dusk into a single grey tapestry.

The most hideous feature of the
discovery was not the amputation of limbs, but what was strapped to the skull's
head.

Alex had decided to get the
generator going and fix up a floodlight before allowing any more progress on the
excavation. When everything was set up, they had returned to exposing the back
of the skull and discovered the
brank
—a metal cap,
fitting like a cage across the skull and face, with a cruel spike protruding
from the
brank
into the open mouth. A V-shaped lip
extruded a few inches from the
brank
at the other end
of the spike.

With the skull itself half-bedded in the
earth, Alex crouched down to take a close look. He'd seen a
brank
before, but not one quite so vicious as this. The floodlight scored stiff shadows
on the white skull behind the bars of the
brank
.

"What's it for?" someone asked
him.

"For keeping the victim quiet, I
should think."

Turquoise light.
Everywhere, turquoise light, shot through with deep blue veins. Maggie's heart
hammered.
A numbness
coursed through her body, leaving
only the sensation of a thrumming heart. Her body was anaesthetized, but her
senses were keen. She had to keep her head still; any swift movement brought
white-hot knives of pain. Despite the ethereal light, she could see every leaf,
every branch,
each
blade of grass with absolute
clarity. Details took on an artificial, plastic quality, an imprint of design,
as if placed there by some unseen hand; but her eyes had been sharpened to the
uniqueness of each leaf, each fern and log.

Waves.
The woods
were subjected to a gentle swell and fall like waves, a swell and fall she took
to be the rhythm of her own breathing. The waves rippled in sympathy with her,
as if part of her; she could no longer feel the extremities of her physical
form. Her sensations extended as far as the range of her vision. She was what
she could see. If an upper branch swayed in the wind, she felt the movement
deep in her bowels. If a fern moved in a breeze, she felt a string drawn
through her heart. The rotting of a log she savoured as an infinitely slow burn
somewhere inside her belly.

The upper fronds of the closest ferns
waved, and she sensed a slow, sinuous progress along the earth toward her. A
cold underbelly pressed to the leaf mould, moving closer. A sinuous rippling
through the dead leaves. Would this be it? The first thing, Liz had
said,
the very first thing. The slippery, gliding sensation
continued through the ferns, moving closer to the rope circle. Then it stopped,
suddenly.

It had been beaten. Something else
alighted outside the circle ahead of it.

It was a bird.
A
blackbird, but seeming brilliant blue in the turquoise light.
Sleek
feathers, still moist from the day the world was first made. It had stopped at
the edge of the circle, head cocked, looking at her,
eye
to eye. Maggie knew this creature. She'd known it for a long time.

"Come in," she said.

The bird hopped inside the circle.

Maggie felt an unexpected wave of sadness
inside her, and a hot, salt tear squeezed from her left eye, nestling on her
cheek. She could see the moisture there,
lensing
turquoise light. The bird flew at her, hovering near, wings vibrating the air
and fanning a wind at her face; beak dangerously close to her eye, it dipped
and sucked the teardrop into its beak. Then it was gone.

Maggie stood up and looked around her,
around the circle. The objects she had placed outside the circle remained in
place, but there was no bird. It had gone, and with it, she thought, her
chance. She felt unsteady on her feet, so she crouched down again, her knees
drawn up to her ears.

A scorching pain racked her body and she
had to spit a string of black bile from her mouth. Then an abdominal pain, of
the type she'd not experienced since the birth of her son. She found she could
relieve the pain by puffing her rib cage up and out and forcing her arms behind
her back. Her body trembled violently. Sweat broke out on her brow and she
couldn't stop the shivering. She puffed her chest out again and hawked another
string of blue-black bile from her throat.