Dark Sister (22 page)

THIRTY-SEVEN

Spring Equinox, 21 March, a
Monday morning.
Alex was
struggling to get the children
ready for school and childminder, chivvying, coaxing, bullying, rummaging for
clean clothes which weren't there because he hadn't washed them, dishing up a
dog's breakfast because he hadn't shopped for a week, trying to let the real
dog out and bring the milk in, to iron a blouse for Amy, pour a mug of tea for
himself, find the minder's overdue cash, locate Amy's schoolbook which she
couldn't go without...

Alex wasn't coping.

Anita had had enough of him. Tania,
tired of playing the surrogate mother, had refused to help him all weekend. And
the children's real mother had deserted him.

Maggie! Where are you, Maggie? For God's sake, Maggie!

Sam was being a brat, refusing to get out of his pyjamas,
shouting and standing on a stool pressing the timer pads on the microwave oven.
Alex could have cheerfully shut him inside it and switched to hi-power. Instead
he dragged him off the stool and gave him a vicious slap across the leg. Sam
started howling.

"Shut that before I really give you something to
cry about," Alex growled. Sam obviously thought he'd already got something
to cry about, because he didn't let up. Alex grabbed a pullover and took off
Sam's pyjamas.

"What's this?" he demanded, spying for the
first time the new, blue sachet hanging on a grey string round Sam's neck.
"Did your mother put this dirty thing on you?"

"
Noooooo
hoooo
hooo
," howled Sam.

Alex showed him the back of his hand. "What have
I told you about telling me
lies
? What have I told
you?"

"
Nooooohooo
, she
didn't."

"What? I said did your mother?"

"She didn't," said Amy.

"You shut up," said Alex sharply, and Amy
shut up.

"
Noooo
," wailed
Sam, and, seeing no way of avoiding another slap, wailed, "yes,
noooooo
, yes."

Alex pulled the string over Sam's head and tossed the
sachet into the rubbish bin. Amy went to retrieve it until Alex shoved her
roughly out of the kitchen. "Leave the filthy thing where it is. Go and
get dressed before you get the next slap."

So Amy started crying too, and Dot came back in
barking furiously at Alex, until Alex kicked her and she went whimpering into
the garden. Alex looked around him at the detritus. The breakfast room was like
a disaster area. He surveyed the failed breakfast and the piles of dirty laundry
and his wailing children looking back at him through tears, and he felt like
crying himself.

Amy defied her father and recovered the sachet from
amid the rubbish. This time Alex ignored her. "Maggie," he said
softly, "Maggie.

Spring
Equinox,
and Maggie
was preparing. She was careful to combine all the elements of magic she'd
learned with some she didn't understand. She was confused about the
significance of planetary alignment (something Liz dismissed with a gesture),
but with Venus exalted in Taurus, she blindly hoped this would offset her
malefic intention.

For she admitted malefic intention.
She wanted possession of her children, by any means. She wanted unhappiness and
disgrace to fall on her husband. She believed that the rite of
shapeshifting
would confer on her the power to achieve
these things.

After reading about herself in the
newspaper, she'd returned to Liz's cottage. The old woman was again sharpening
knives on the doorstep. Liz had been evasive about where she'd been the day
before, saying only that she'd had an "errand" to run, something
that couldn't be neglected. She had also seemed unwilling to let Maggie cross
the threshold. She didn't want her in the house. It wasn't that she was in any
way unfriendly; she just whistled up her collie and insisted that they go for a
"blow" across the fields.

"Are you going to tell me
what's to be done, or am I going to have to go it alone?" Maggie asked
her, fearing further evasion.

"Oh, I'll tell you," Liz said, hobbling
along the grass pathway with her stick. She said her feet were bad from having
walked a "step." "Because it's in you, and it wants out. So we
must have it. And it might be the only way."

"What do you mean, the only way?"

But Liz only pointed with her stick to a
bush in the hedgerow.
"Mistletoe.
In flower.
Cut a piece; you'll need some."

Maggie got that and other more
complicated instructions, plus a new
oleum
magicale
,
different to the flying ointment. On the way
back from visiting Liz, she called on Ash to show him the newspaper. He held
his head in his hands.

"I'm sorry, Ash; I've brought
this on you."

"No, you haven't," he
said. "No, you haven't."

She returned to her bed-sit, going
to bed without eating. Liz had told her that the rite of
shapeshifting
required lengthy preparation and that she should fast for twenty-four hours

Alex eventually dropped Amy at
school and Sam at the childminder’s. He arrived late at the site to find
everyone in a state of excitement. There had been a spectacular find under the
pentagram.

Tania and her crew had cleared the
area of the staked circle. Initially the area close to the circumference of the
circle had yielded nothing. But toward the centre, by working more boldly
across the diameter of the circle, they found what for some days now everyone
had expected. It fulfilled certain fantasies of the type Alex had tried to
suppress. They'd discovered human remains. First to come to light was a rib
cage

Everyone stopped working on the
main dig and either joined the effort or stood around watching.

The archaeologists worked sideways,
sweeping across from the rib cage, to mark the parameters of the find. Most of
the skeleton was still firmly embedded in the earth. They dusted off extruding
shoulder and knee bones. It was small enough to seem obvious what they were
dealing with.

It's a child.
The words
swept around the group.
A child.

Alex made them slow down the
operation. There was too much excitement about the find, and he was afraid
clumsy strokes might break up the skeletal pieces. He got everyone working with
fine brushes. Those involved looked more like they were painting the bones than
excavating them. Soon the watchers grew bored at the slow rate the thing was
surfacing and went back to their own jobs.

The bones got nicknamed Minnie.

Alex supervised, fussily. By
lunchtime they had exposed the entire flank of the rib cage, and Alex began to
have doubts. The rib cage was too large to have been a child's, and he said so.
There was something unnatural about the position in which other bones were
coming to light. They were compressed into an extreme foetal position. The
thigh bone was drawn up, and the skull, which they had just begun to touch,
seemed slumped forward.

"I want an exact record of the
position in which the skeleton is found. There's something odd about it. Go
extra careful, please, this is not a sprint to the finish."

They proceeded now to work across
the top of the remains, so as not to disturb the earth on which the bones
rested.

Spring Equinox and Ash, as usual, took the
lift to the fourth floor of the Gilded Arcade. On stepping out of the lift he
realized some sort of commotion was going on outside his shop. There was a
picket.

About nine ladies of
pensionable
age and a sad, solitary-looking gentleman in a
dark suit crowded the doorway of his shop. Some held placards. One proclaimed
NOT IN THIS TOWN. Their chatter generated a hubbub of excitement.

"Morning,
ladies!
Morning, sir!"
Ash called
cheerfully, gently shouldering his way through the white-haired scrum. The
hubbub stopped. They moved aside for him and stood in a silent half-circle,
watching as he took out his keys. No one said anything. Their eyes scoured him
from head to toe, searching for the mark of the beast. At last Ash had the door
open. He turned before going inside. "Bit of rain in the air," he
said.

A tall woman with white cropped hair
stepped forward. She had the sparkle of the mad evangelist in her eye.
She.
carried
a placard which read
LEST YE FORGET. Ash, at least, couldn't remember the reference.
"Satanist!" she said.

Ash smiled pleasantly. "Please. If
you're going to call me names, can't you at least find some accurate
ones?" He stepped inside and closed the door behind him.

Maggie spent the day preparing. She
fasted, meditated, repeated her mantras, sipped water,
brought
her purpose to mind. She had decided that, when the time came, she would go out
to Osier's Wood. She would have preferred to conduct the business within the safety
of Ash's house, or even at her own bed-sit, but she knew it wasn't possible.
The woods had been the place where she'd had her first real scent of the
possibilities within her; her first encounter with the spirit of the goddess.
Her room constrained her; it had neither power nor resonance.
Hecate
was choosy.
Hecate
was
careful.
Hecate
preferred the seclusion and deep
mystery of the woods

At noon Maggie lit candles and incense and
repeated the banishing ritual she had employed when flying with Ash. It had
protected her then. She would repeat it again at dusk, when the moment was
right.

She practiced mental projection of the
things she expected to happen, exactly as Liz had told her.

At one o'clock she rehearsed relaxation
and breathing exercises.

At two o'clock she drank a little saline
water and gathered together everything she would need. Before leaving, she
concocted her "listening" brew, and filled a thermos flask. She
climbed into her car and drove out to the woods.

It was a dry, sunny day, warm for the time
of year. She parked her car at a distance of half a mile from the woods and
walked the rest of the way.

Deep in the woods, she found her spot, the
hidden place she had discovered before, the tree-ringed tiny glade where
Hecate
had made her presence felt. She still had three
hours before dusk. She settled down and spent half an hour practicing her
visualization exercises. Then she opened her flask and inhaled the listening
brew. It relaxed her, and she sat back to listen to the sound of the wind in
the trees

Alex had ordered a U-shaped trench to be
dug round the skeleton so that it could be worked on from three sides. Now the
bones stood out on a promontory of earth, a clay bed attended by a team working
in hushed concentration. Something other than a dig now, the enterprise had
become an operation of delicate flensing of the earth around and between the
bones.

It had become clear that Minnie was not an
infant or a child after all. It was an adult of small stature, whose awkward
burial posture was due to having been squeezed into an unnaturally small space.

"Stop!" said Alex.

They all stopped.

"What is it?" asked Tania.

"What's up?" said Richard.

Alex stroked an imaginary beard and looked
hard at the earth on one side of the remains. Then he walked round the other
side, crouched, touched the soil, and then straightened his back. "Carry
on," he said.

The delicate flensing resumed. Alex had an
irritating habit of letting ideas boil inside his head. He distracted everyone
by jogging from side to side, getting in close, stopping individuals with a
gesture and then retiring without a word.

"Shit!" he said.
"Stop!
Everybody stop!"

Everyone let their brushes and
implements hang at their sides. Alex got in close, eyeballing the earth near
the still-covered skull.

Tania exploded on everyone's behalf.
"For Christ's sake, Alex!"

Alex rubbed sweat from his eyes.
"It's not your fault, it's my fault."

"WHAT isn't our fault?"

"Just nobody touch anything
for a moment." He folded his arms and stared at the trench. Tania turned
away and mouthed silent words at the sky. He saw her. "Come here. What's
this?"

He pointed at the earth below the back of
the skull. Tania got in close, everyone else huddled behind her. "I don't
see anything."

"Exactly."

"What do you mean, 'exactly'?"

"I mean you can't see
anything, but I can. I should have noticed it before. See this ragged pattern
in the soil?
The dark stain?
It's the imprint left by
rough-grained wood. Packed hard against the earth, see? Where wood has rotted
and compacted into the soil. Everywhere else it's been broken up by worms and
the like.
But not here.
Or here.
And we've been so eager to get at the old bones we've ruined any traces of
whatever it was buried in."

"Is that a tragedy?" said
Tania.

Alex looked at her as though she
were a child. "Minnie here was a full-grown adult squeezed into a small
box. Some information about the box would have helped."

"We haven't disturbed the area behind
the skull," Richard put in. "Or underneath. That might turn up some
information."

"Let's hope so," Alex said
glumly. It was true. He should have known better.

By late afternoon, another
discovery was made. The set of bones was missing its left hand. Attention
turned to the other side to reveal the right hand was also missing. The two
feet had also been amputated before burial. They'd each been lopped off with
blade strokes that cleanly severed bone.