The Witch in the Lake (19 page)

Shadows and ducking shapes flitted past him as he searched. He drifted deeper and deeper into the dark, his heart trembling with the fear of losing his way. But still he went forward, wading through terror that clung like quicksand. As he moved into the heart of the tunnel, the glow of his power grew and in the golden light of it he saw a child's face.

Green-eyed, red-haired, just for a second he glimpsed it, and then another came and another, flying through corridors of darkness, such little sobbing creatures that the witch had taken. Wisps of their garments caught in his light—sky-blue, scarlet—they were passing before him like dreams and his heart turned over at the sight of them.

The dark writhed around the souls of the lost children, clotting and loosening, so that for whole seconds he saw the pale figures crouching, then falling away. The witch's moaning became a piercing scream as he dug at the darkness inside her. She thrashed at the water like a ship struggling in a storm and he heard Merilee cry out in terror.

He glanced at the boiling waters of the lake. He saw the poor souls of the children peeling away, lying free on the surface like the transparent skins of an onion. Then they melted into the night, leaving small silver stains on the water.

His gaze scurried between them. He saw how the water became clear and pure where the silver touched, and moonlight dived down there, into the depths. But Merilee was crying behind him. And there were more souls, deep inside the witch where the dark hid. He searched and searched, wanting to free them, catching the hem of a cloak, a strand of hair and then he saw the face that he'd been looking for. It almost stopped his heart.

A girl in a yellow cloak hovered at the edge of his vision. As he concentrated his light, swooping it over her, he saw a sprig of lavender in her hair.

‘Laura!' he cried and she looked up and it was her.

But the dark was massing around even as he called her name, and the yellow cloak was fading. Other figures drifted past his eyes, reaching out, confusing him. His heart roared in his chest. Fear pounded through his veins. He felt his power weakening as the fog crept in at the sides of his eyes.

‘She escaped me, son,' his father's words came. ‘Slipped away like a stone from a peach.'

The dark was numbing the outline of Laura. He was losing her.

‘Are you afraid?' his father had asked him.

Now there was only the hem of the yellow cloak. He couldn't see the shape of her beneath it.

‘You must become the thing for a moment yourself, in order to understand it.'

Leo grasped at the scrap of yellow. But it kept slipping away, like water running into a crevice.

‘That's where you can get lost—you must never lose your grip then.'

For an instant Leo saw the grief and defeat in his father's face. He remembered how strong he, Leo, had felt, how certain he'd been that he could right the world. He thought of Merilee, and the shutters opening, and how she'd seen the light of herself shining in between.

‘How do you know if you can be a good wizard if you don't try?'

Leo knew that this moment—standing on this rock in the middle of the lake—was what he'd been waiting for all his life. This is who I am, he thought. This is what I'm for.

He hooked the yellow cloak with his vision and raked it in. The yellow deepened into gold. As he concentrated his gaze, the colours of Laura emerged, like the ripening of a sunrise. Her outline grew more certain. He saw the pale skin of her throat rising up from the collar, the hair swept up off her neck, and her eyes.

The power travelled like a lit fuse up the centre of his body. He knew every bit of her—suddenly!—she was so clear for him, dazzling there under his gaze. He saw the little frozen girl inside her, and he took her, and laid her down in the palm of his mind, tight, like a pearl inside an oyster. He kept her, all of her, lying there in his mind and he pulled her towards him along the line of his vision. She was riding on the golden line, and he never let go, never relaxed a muscle, never thought of anything else but the whole of Laura.

A sound came from the shore, the roaring of a crowd that had gathered. The lake was screaming so that it seemed the sky would tumble but still he reeled her in, not listening for anything but Laura's heartbeat.

And there now, in the water, she was struggling, her arms up, pearled with moonlit bubbles. She was reaching out and Merilee was running towards her, laughing, crying, shaking her head, calling and bending down on the hard rock, cutting her knees to shreds and pulling her own dear sister out of the lake, up into life.

When Leo touched her she was still cold. Her skin was so pale it was translucent.

‘Keep holding her,' he told Merilee. He watched the moon sparkle on her as if she were made of glass. ‘Give her your warmth. Take her back over the rocks, along the top of the promontory, where she'll be safe.'

‘Come with me, please, Leo,' begged Merilee.

But Leo had already turned back to the lake. He knew he wasn't finished.

The dark mass of the witch raged at him. She hulked against the sky, ravaged and bellowing. He could see no flicker of light in her now. She was empty of souls, and the terrible hunger in her moved over him, blinding him with her darkness.

Then the towering shape hollowed and he saw her seed and husk. He drew in his breath in terror.

Like corn rotting in the field, the core of her was a putrid black. It gathered all the darkness into itself, showing him a rage as deep as the lake. Leo shivered at the sight of it. What wickedness did Illuminato have in him that he could have created such a thing? This evil at her centre had no voice, it was mute, contagious, feeding on souls. It seeped into Leo and he felt the blackness start in his own heart.

It stole up into his fingers and toes, a raging hatred. He thought of Beatrice, and how she'd spoilt his life and robbed him of love, and there she was in front of him now, the dark twisting into her exact shape, making her face come alive so that he wanted to dive into the lake and smash it for her. She laughed at him, snakes coiling on her head, her eyes flecking green. Then she poked her forked tongue out at him and he wanted to stab her to the heart.

Rage flooded him, filling him with poison. He hated Beatrice, he hated every living thing. He hated the earth, rain, wind, lightning, all things that were part of a world that dangled love before him and snatched it away. Most of all he hated himself. In that moment he knew, kneeling at the pit of darkness, that
this
was what Illuminato had felt all those years ago. Illuminato had drowned in this rage. He had surrendered.

‘You must become the thing itself, before you can transform it. That's where you can get lost.'

Leo leaned into the darkness. He wanted to let go, fall blind. Hatred throbbed through his veins. He closed his eyes. Behind his lids he found memories. Scenes from his childhood streamed like coloured ribbons against the black. There was the cave where he had stood only hours ago. He remembered the glow of the stone wall, fragile now as a candle flame. But as he looked he saw again the leaping animals within it, the ancient people, the beginnings of life. A tenderness arose in him for those living beings of long ago, and he remembered how Illluminato had once stood in the same place, showing his grandson these miracles of life. Illuminato, the man who could reveal a pulse beneath a cave wall, who could bring back life to a dying boy.

In that second Leo felt at one with his ancestor, as if he had lived through every moment of Illuminato's life. He felt the power of his hatred, the enormity of his love. But he knew, too, that it was now he, Leo, who had to choose between them.

His toes inched back from the edge. He felt the hard cool rock under the soles of his feet. And he let the living light of the cave fill his heart.

As he looked back at the lake he saw the waves thrashing all around him. He gritted his teeth. He would watch and let it all pass in front of him, like a dream. And there, tall as the sky, he saw the shape of Beatrice swirling and stretching, changing into Francesca. She was chuckling as she threw dirt into a grave—his own. Leo's stomach clenched. But he didn't look away. He saw his mother running from him, a village burning, people clambering over the plague-ridden bodies of others, stealing their rings, their shoes, their clothes. There before him the witch played out scenes of human cruelty and cowardice that he would never forget.

Leo watched with all his attention. He noticed every detail because he knew he would need it. Each illusion provided information to hold in his mind. Hours, minutes, the seed of Illuminato's evil twisted and grew into countless shapes and still he watched, holding fast to the edges of himself.

But it was enough to make you want to die. To never go back and belong to the human race. That is, if you became forever what you saw.

He felt very old, standing there on the rock. If he survived he knew that, at least in his heart, he would never be the same again.

Leo had reached deep inside the seed. As he travelled further the images began to blur, rushing past him so that he could hardly take them all in. He was approaching a nugget of dark that swept everything into itself. It painted no pictures, spoke no words. Whirling like a tornado it expanded and shrank before him until, for just one moment, it held still.

His mind closed around it fast like a fist over a coin. It throbbed, a living thing, against the walls of his mind. The pain was searing—a blacksmith's hot iron on the skin. He couldn't hold it for long.

The only way was to transform it. ‘Then you'll be practising the art of Metamorphosis, my boy!'

Leo was sweating all over his body. His heart thundered in his ears. The dark mass pulsed in his head. He tried to close his mind tighter. But his light was dimming. He knew he had to stop Illuminato's dark from spreading.

Under his feet was the cool grey rock. He imagined a stone in his hand. A piece of granite. He saw tiny crystals sparkling on its surface. He knew by heart, from all his study in the forest, the millions of grains of quartz and other minerals that lay inside.

He held the two things in his mind. The nugget of darkness and the stone. He looked at them both and understood every particle of their beings. His mind balanced them perfectly for a second, as if he were a scale, weighing them, judging them. And then the choice was easy, as easy as water flowing down a mountain. He opened the fold of dark in his mind and in that instant he slid the essence of his ancestor's evil into the stone.

A groan like the cracking of a mountain roared through the sky. The waters of the lake churned, sending up spray that leaped over Leo's head. He saw it sparkle as it shot through the air, then settle back on the surface of the lake in a patch of silver that glowed, for a moment, more brightly than the full moon.

Leo felt a gladness spread through his body. He looked down and saw the stone, a real piece of granite in his hand. It had been born in his mind, and he fingered it now with amazement, examining its coarse-grained, greyish coloured texture. It lay there in his palm unmoving, ordinary. The air sighed all around him, and Leo looked up from the stone and saw there above him, where the witch had been, it was as bright as day. The sky shimmered with the light of her soul released, and he was content.

He gazed out at the lake, gentle and smooth as glass. Then, still holding the stone, he turned and started the long climb over the rocks, back towards the people he loved.

On the night that Leo returned with the stone and the lake was set free, celebrations broke out in the piazza. The sky was alight with burning torches but as the dawn came the villagers grew quiet, watching the sun rise over a new morning.

Marco had been amongst the crowd gathered at the shore that night. When Leo embraced him, it was as two grown men, father and son. Leo felt the line of his power reaching back in time and galloping forward, and he'd whispered, ‘Why didn't you ever tell me that it was Illuminato?'

‘Why should a child start his life in shadow?' Marco had replied.

But then he'd begun to tell Leo, there on the pebbly shore, as the crowd drifted back to the village, about Manton, his father, and how he'd returned, raving from the lake when Marco was only ten years old. Raving about the witch—the horror that Illuminato had created. ‘And I am his
son!
' Manton had wailed, and he'd started beating at himself, tearing at his skin so that Marco had to bind up his hands with cloth. They'd never gone back to the cave again. Those were the last words ever spoken between them.

‘And Illuminato?' Leo had asked.

Marco had shrugged, helpless. ‘How can you justify evil? My grandfather was born with an unimaginable power. Blessed or cursed, whichever way you want to see it. He loved a woman who was not his wife. Loved her always, even when she married someone else. He kept his rage locked up, I suppose, like a monster in a cage. Until the day she wouldn't see him any more.' Marco looked down. ‘Poor Caterina,
poverina
.'

Leo had brought out the stone then for Marco.

‘We'll bury it, Leo,' Marco told him. ‘Deep in the earth where stones belong. Only you and I know it exists, and when we die, it will exist no longer.'

‘Do you believe that, Papà? That if no one has knowledge of a thing, then it doesn't truly exist?'

But Marco had begun to sag against Leo, his breath rasping. He'd grabbed Leo's wrist. ‘When you were born and I saw what was inside you, I swore that you'd never walk in his shadow the way I did. I wanted you to use your powers proudly, and fulfil your destiny.'

Leo had looked up at his father. ‘What did you see?'

‘I think you know.'

Leo had nodded then, smiling so that he'd felt his face might just split in two. For there, under the tiredness, the power of a lion was resting. It had helped him roar at the dark, and bring back life, and he could feel it still inside him, waiting, ready.