The Daylight Gate (9 page)

Alice lay down on the big bed with a single candle and the fire burning low. She closed the bed curtains and closed her eyes. She was beginning to fall asleep when she heard someone or something moving about in the room.

From the cabin of her bed what she could hear sounded like water.

Not rain, not river. The strange combination of a being made of water. Something was treading about her room. Not as a solid – as a liquid.

Then she heard the sizzle and hiss of the wood in the fireplace as the fire was put out.

Her mouth dry; forcing herself to move, she swung out of bed and opened the bed curtains.

The room was not there.

Alice was standing on Pendle Hill. Black moor, bleak fell, straggling forest, sullen streams, a small tarn, a moss pool, heathy waste, morass and wood. Driving rain.

By a group of standing stones she saw Elizabeth Southern, her hair down, naked, smiling at her. Elizabeth was untroubled by the weather, pushing the hair out of her eyes as she used to do, seemingly not cold or wet. She stretched out her hand to Alice. Alice went towards her through the rain and the wind. If this was the end, then let it be the end, the end would come some time, today, tomorrow, or the next day.

Alice touched Elizabeth’s naked body, but as her hand stroked the skin she had loved so much, the skin gave way, like soaked paper, and Alice’s hand went through her, or, more correctly, into her. It was like reaching into black water.

Alice pulled back, her hand and arm dark and dull with the thick black viscous substance that was Elizabeth.

Elizabeth was laughing, and as she laughed, her
white
skin began to spot with dark eruptions. The firm white flesh became distended and pulpy. The eruptions burst like boils. Her hair turned grey, then loosened from her scalp, falling away from her like dirty water. The skin on her bones hung in useless folds. She had no teeth. She was laughing at Alice, her mouth like a gap. She was suppurating, liquefying.

‘As I am so shall you be.’

Alice covered her face with her hands. She stood in the howling gale and relentless rain trying to keep upright. She would not look at Elizabeth.

‘What do you want from me?’ she shouted into the wind and the rain. There was no answer. Forever, it seemed, in the wind and the rain, and there was no answer.

Alice was crying. Then there was silence. A sick dead silence.

When she looked up, she was in her room. The fire was lit low. Everything was as it had been before.

She was soaking wet.

At supper that night Potts was regaling the company with his ‘discovery’ of a nest of Lancashire witches now under lock and key at Malkin Tower. Alice lost patience.

‘There was no Sabbat – you stayed up all night on
Pendle
Hill and what did you find? Nothing! And nothing at Malkin Tower but a pack of desperate miserable spoiled lives.’

‘You are heated in your defence,’ said Potts, ‘though their lair is on your land and they are under your protection –’

Shakespeare interrupted: ‘What is a Black Mass? The rusty candlesticks and hasty altars you find in remote places, wild, and away from men, are the remnants of the Catholic High Mass, sometimes celebrated in secret, if it is to be celebrated at all.’

‘You do not believe in witchcraft then?’ said Roger Nowell.

‘I did not say that. I say that it suits the times to degrade the
hoc est corpus
of the Catholic Mass into satanic hocus pocus.’

‘It is all the same,’ said Potts.

‘It is not the same,’ said Shakespeare.

‘I wonder about your sympathies, sir,’ said Potts, ‘and you and your company of strolling players in receipt of the King’s generosity.’

‘We are the King’s Men,’ said Shakespeare. ‘And besides – I began this play
The Tempest
with a shipwreck in sympathy with the King’s own shipwreck by supernatural forces on his way back from Denmark to Berwick.’

‘Ah, the Berwick witch trials,’ said Potts. ‘There has
been
nothing as sensational until now. The Lancashire witch trials will be the first trials to be written as record. A great advantage in the pursuit of Diabolism.’

‘Are you doing the writing?’ enquired Shakespeare.

‘In my legal capacity, yes. I have written plays also, you know.’

‘I didn’t know,’ said Shakespeare, ‘neither does anybody else.’

The table roared with laughter. Potts looked red and angry. Alice was enjoying his discomfort.

‘I wonder you dare venture out of doors in Lancashire for fear of meeting a witch or a priest,’ said Alice.

‘What do you mean by that?’ said Roger Nowell, looking not at Potts but at Alice.

‘Whatever she means,’ said Shakespeare, ‘this man’s a fool.’

This was sufficient to drive Potts from the supper table. Roger Nowell laughed with the rest, but he was uneasy too. Potts had found no flying witches. He was looking for a hiding priest.

It was late and Alice was getting ready for bed when she heard a soft tap at the door. She opened it to find Shakespeare standing outside in his gown and slippers. He put his finger to his lips. She let him in.

‘A word of advice from a man who has seen much. If you do not want to find yourself in the Well Dungeon at Lancaster Castle, leave England soon. Christopher Southworth must go with you.’

‘Why do you speak of him?’

‘Take heed what you are told. Take heed what you tell.’

Shakespeare opened the door. He said, ‘Often-times, to win us to our harm, the instruments of darkness tell us truths, win us with honest trifles to betray in deepest consequence.’

Alice did not sleep well. When she was ready to leave at the agreed hour of 9 a.m., she was told by a servant of the house that the fog was too thick and she and her party must wait until noon. Roger Nowell was nowhere to be found. Potts was dozing in the library.

She waited, restless, finally calling her maid, and going herself to order their horses. It was eleven o’clock. The groom who saddled her copper mare told her that Roger Nowell had ridden away unaccompanied at 6 a.m.

She had been tricked.

A Tooth for a Tooth

ROGER NOWELL AND
Constable Hargreaves were standing in the thick fog in the graveyard of Newchurch in Pendle. They looked down in silence. The turf had been flung back and the shallow earth disturbed. The body within was partially uncovered; bones showed in the earth and above ground. By the side of the grave was a skull, dry and bleached. The skull had been smashed at the jaw to remove the teeth. Bits of chipped bone were scattered about. The teeth had been carefully collected in a mound.

At another grave the ground had been re-dug but the body it held had not yet rotted to the bones and the mouldering flesh was exposed, with its busy colony of worms. The corpse had been mutilated. The head was gone, leaving only the black stump of the neck.

‘Happened last night,’ said Hargreaves. ‘They made off with the head and left the teeth. Must have been disturbed at their work.’

‘Aren’t the Demdike and Chattox locked up?’

‘All but James Device who is prepared to give evidence against his kin. He is dead drunk at the Dog.’

‘Then we cannot blame him. And much as you would all like to do so, we cannot blame Alice Nutter. She was with me.’

‘Her spirit can go abroad. The spirit of a witch can go abroad anywhere,’ said Hargreaves.

Roger Nowell did not answer that. ‘Did you search the Rough Lee?’

‘We did. I have a servant in my pay now. We found no Christopher Southworth nor any sign or sighting of him. But we found this.’

Hargreaves pulled out a silver crucifix on a neckchain. ‘In the bedchamber … In the bed.’

Roger Nowell looked at it closely. ‘Does she use it because she is secretly a Catholic or because she is secretly a witch? Does she kiss it or does she blaspheme it?’ He put the heavy crucifix in his pocket. ‘It is valuable evidence.’

‘James Device says he will testify against Alice Nutter.’

Roger Nowell shook his head. ‘His drunken word
would
not stand against a woman like Alice Nutter. And we have enough work to do, Hargreaves. I want the wretches in Malkin Tower brought to me this evening to make statements. Potts will be present, I am sure. And get these graves decently laid.’

‘Yes, sir. And Alice Nutter?’

‘I have said not yet.’

Hargreaves was not pleased but he could not argue.

The men walked slowly from the churchyard. Jennet Device, who had been watching them from the bushes, ran up to the open graves, scooped up the teeth in both hands and made off towards Malkin Tower.

An Eye for an Eye

The speediest way to take a man’s life away by witchcraft is to make a Picture of Clay, like unto the shape of a person whom they mean to kill, and dry it thoroughly; and when they would have them to be ill in any one place more than another, then take a thorne or a pinne and prick it in that part of the Picture you would so have to be ill; and when you would have any part of the body to consume away, then take that part of the Picture and burne it. And when they would have the whole body to consume away, then take the remnant of the said Picture and burne it; and thereupon by that means, the Body shall die. The same can be wrought by means of a Doll or Poppet
.

ELIZABETH DEVICE WAS
in the cellar of Malkin Tower. She was tending a cauldron coming to the boil over a dirty fire. A rough altar, a pair of sulphurous candles and a skeleton still chained to where its owner’s body
had
left it, completed the furnishings of the cellar.

Mouldheels was nearby, busily sewing the legs onto a headless doll.

There was a shout from outside. Elizabeth Device went across the cellar and dragged away a large stone from a small hole. Fast as a ferret, Jennet Device crawled through, a small cloth bag in her mouth.

Her mother emptied the bag of teeth onto the altar. She gave Jennet a scrap of bread. While her daughter was eating, Elizabeth unwrapped from a cloth the severed head from the graveyard. Then she laid out Robert Preston’s tongue.

‘Mouldheels! Sew the tongue into this head. The teeth are going into the pot. I have used everything. All of Demdike’s stored arts must be used for the spell.’

‘What do you do?’ asked the child.

‘What do I do? I’ll tell you what I do. That poppet Mouldheels is finishing will serve to injure Roger Nowell until he cries for mercy. We have no clay but we have rags enough make a doll like your grandmother showed you, didn’t she? With the pins and the thorns?’

The child nodded.

‘And we will cause this severed head to speak. A spirit will speak through it and guide us.’

Mouldheels had the grisly half-rotted head on her
knee
. ‘Jennet! Hold open this mouth while I do my sewing.’

Jennet came and pulled open the slack blue mouth of the corpse-head. ‘There’s a worm in there, Auntie.’

Mouldheels looked. ‘Worms everywhere, poppet, we live as best we may in a world of worms, but wait till this good head speaks.’

Elizabeth was back at her pot. ‘Jem didn’t come back. You seen him, Jennet?’

The child looked away. ‘He was frightened in the churchyard. He left the teeth.’

‘Where did he go, Jennet?’

The child shrugged and concentrated on the damp empty sockets of the head. Mouldheels was sewing the tongue to what was left of the roof of the mouth by making big stitches through what was left of the nose. ‘Not much to anchor my line here,’ she said. ‘Lucky we had a fresh tongue. The tongue rots first. And the eyes o’course.’

‘What is the pot for, ma?’

‘Nothing to eat if you were thinking it so. When the head is ready we shall boil it in the pot and then we shall boil the doll in the pot so that our spell is good on both.’

‘What did you put in it? Sheep brain?’

‘No, child. I made the sacrifice and used the baby in the bottle.’

The child Jennet let out a great wail, so much so that the trapdoor above was pulled back for a second and someone called to see what was the harm.

‘That was my toy.’

‘It was your toy, I know it well, and I had to smash the bottle to get the baby out, but she will set us all free and give us power and then you will get another toy as much as you like,’

‘I shall have nowt to talk to now the baby is boiled.’

‘You will talk to the Head, my dearie, and the Head will talk to you. The baby couldn’t talk, could she?’

Tears running down her filthy face, Jennet shook her head. She was a sad sight, dirty and torn and bruised, her blonde hair in knots, her skin calloused from crawling and hiding. ‘I gived you the tongue of Robert Preston from under the bush. You said you’d give me something for it.’

‘And I will!’ said her mother. ‘Soon all this will change.’

Mouldheels had finished her gruesome sewing. The swollen black tongue protruded from the mouth cavity of the head.

She plunged the head into the stew. The cauldron boiled over in a sickening froth.