The Witch in the Lake (2 page)

Merilee had a sudden glimpse of herself long ago, running through Leo's house, playing hide and seek
. Is he under the bed, in the old chest, behind the big cooking pot?
she'd whisper, laughing, her feet clattering on the stone floor, the tension building in her chest so that she could hardly bear it. And then she'd hear Leo's giggle, from somewhere you'd never believe, and there'd be the rushtumble as they raced towards bar—the safety of the hearth.

But that was years ago, when Laura was still alive, and Merilee had dashed in and out of Leo's place as freely as if it were her own.

‘My own sister,' she said quietly.

‘Oh, Merilee,' said Leo, flinging an arm around her shoulders. He stared at the ground. ‘I'm sorry, I just don't think, do I?' Leo looked up into her face. ‘But don't you see, all we've ever really known is that Laura disappeared. We don't know that it was the lake, do we? No one saw. Or at least, no one
told
.' Leo frowned.

‘Oh, come on, let's go,' Merilee said tiredly, pulling away, ‘I'll probably be skinned alive as it is.
Dio
, where will we say we've been?'

Leo groaned, but he ran after her, overtaking her, and they crashed through the forest breaking sticks under their feet and crushing herbs so that the smell of wild mint was everywhere.

When they reached the clearing, where the narrow cobblestone road began, Leo stopped. ‘I'm sorry, Merilee,' he said, panting. ‘I'm so sorry that we're late and I scared you. I didn't mean to, I didn't think, and now you're going to be in trouble.' He pulled at his hair, wondering. ‘Could you say that you were looking for some plant in the forest to make a potion, you know, something useful that your aunt would appreciate like, like—'

‘Like deadly hemlock—I could put it in Aunty's wine!'

Leo gave a crow of laughter. ‘No, you'd be found out and taken to the gallows and I'd have to come and rescue you, and you know how I'm always late—'

Merilee giggled. Then she held her breath. ‘Listen,' she whispered. ‘Can you hear anything?'

There was just the dark of the forest behind them and the soft gleam of the polished stones on the road ahead.

‘No, it's gone,' said Leo. ‘I'd better leave you here. Good luck, Meri.'

‘We'll see each other at the tree, Saturday?'

‘Surely. You'd better go now. And Meri?
Lavender
. Say you were collecting lavender.'

‘
Ciao
, Leo,' said Merilee, feeling lighter, but as she went to kiss his cheek, she suddenly stopped. Little prickles of alarm scurried down her back. Leo's face was shining with energy. She could practically see an idea painting itself in bold passionate colours all over his brain. She turned away and began to run towards home, but his voice carried over the stones, clear as a bell tolling.

‘We'll hear it again, Merilee,' he called fiercely, ‘and when we do, I promise you it'll be for the last time!'

It will be, for sure, thought Merilee grimly, because no one hears anything ever again from the bottom of the lake. And she shivered deep inside even as she saw the piazza opening like welcoming arms and the church spire shot with moonlight and the warm golden stone of the houses all huddled cosily together. The lake had a voice now, as black and hungry as death, and she could hear it whining pitifully, persistently, deep in her skull, and now that she'd heard it she knew she would never get it out.

Leo watched Merilee hurry round the corner, into the square. He could imagine her trying to melt into the shadows as she ran. No trace of daylight was left in the sky. He bit his lip. Stars were strewn above him, as if someone had tossed a handful of jewels, like dice, and left them where they'd fallen. Sometimes he felt his life was like that.

Just look at all that space up there, unrolling forever. Did the sky ever stop? What happened at the end?

Leo breathed in deeply. He wanted to hold all the beauty of the night in his chest. There was such silence that you almost couldn't remember what sound had been like. Leo kicked a loose stone. Why couldn't he share this with Meri? Imagine if they could just sit on a bench, right now, and look at the stars, and talk till their throats gave out? Like they used to.

Meri was
his
. Always had been. He felt things more fiercely when he was with her. Only she knew his secrets. When he was with Meri, Leo didn't notice what a prison this little village was. Everything seemed bigger somehow, and anything seemed possible.

He felt the fury rise up in him again. Beautiful things, frightening things, madly interesting things—if they just had enough time, he and Meri, endless time like the sky up there, why, he was sure they could find their own answers.

Like now,
now
—couldn't he still hear that ghostly voice, drifting up like smoke over the water? Or was it just in his mind? But they'd had to go home, hadn't they, as if nothing had happened, and wait three more days till they could see each other. By then, maybe he'd think he'd imagined it. Maybe Meri wouldn't want to talk about it. There was no one else to tell, was there, no one to help him know what was real.

The smell of wood fires caught in his throat. Everyone was inside, cooking, eating. He hoped Merilee was almost home. In his mind he saw her so clearly, scampering through the narrow lanes, out of the village and into the fields. The ground would be soft with spring grass, stony in patches. He grimaced. She had further to go, with her house on the outskirts of town. He wished he'd been able to walk her home.

He used to do that, almost every night. Stopped for dinner, too.

Leo braced himself as he thought of his father. Winding through the alleys, his feet sliding silently over the stones, he made up his own story of the last two hours.

‘Well, this is a fine time to come home, my boy,' Marco Pericolo said, looking up with a start, his voice booming out over the quiet of the house.

But Leo couldn't help smiling. He'd been standing there for five minutes already, and his father hadn't even noticed him. The fire hadn't been lit for supper, and the big iron pot that hung over the hearth wasn't yet filled with water for their
minestra
.

When Leo crept in, Marco had been huddled over his notebook, glancing feverishly at sheets of paper scrawled with diagrams of the human body. He'd been making frantic notes, muttering to himself in excitement, sharpening his quill and saying ‘
si, si!
' every few seconds.

Marco saw the smile and grinned sheepishly back at his son. He waved in the direction of the fireplace and shrugged. ‘The thing is, Leo,' he said, ‘there's so much work to be done. Important work.'

Leo nodded. He began to bundle up the kindling and dried leaves.

‘See, I've got hold of this extraordinary manuscript. You should see some of the drawings.'

Leo chose a log and placed it on the fire. He looked up at his father's face. His dark eyes were sparkling with lamplight and his silver hair was curling up in wiry spirals where he'd been winding it round and round his finger. Merilee had often said that Leo was just like Marco.

‘I know, I know,' Leo had sighed, ‘it's the hair.'

‘No,' she'd grinned, ‘it's much more than that.'

It was true, thought Leo, looking at him now, we can talk about anything—anything except Merilee and the witch in the lake.

‘I've never seen this before, Leo.' His father swung round his chair to face him. ‘Probably almost no one has. Look, here are the little vessels of the heart. Can you imagine? The diagram shows what it looks like, right inside a human heart. Come and see!'

Leo came and pored over the drawings with his father. He'd let him talk, he decided, and marvel with him, and soon Marco would forget that Leo had ever been late and then they'd get hungry and eat and add more wood to the fire for the morning, and Leo would go to bed. From his dark corner of the room, behind the tapestry curtain from Florence, he'd hear the sounds of late-night Marco—the whispering, the trickle of the water being added to his glass of wine, the riffling through pages.

Marco never went to bed before dawn. He'd done that ever since Leo was a baby, when his wife had died of fever, and Marco had begun a life's study to find out why.

Leo's father had been born with silver hair. It was the first sign of wizardry, and it ran in all the males of the Pericolo family, just like brown eyes or bad temper runs in others. Marco told Leo that he was a wizard on his fifth birthday.

‘Good,' said Leo. ‘Are you a wizard too?'

‘Yes,' said Marco. ‘But I was never a very good one. I don't have the twin signs, and then . . . I think you'll be a much better wizard, Leo. Maybe, one day, you'll be as good as my grandfather. He—' Marco frowned suddenly and raked his hand through his thick bush of silver hair. ‘Anyway,' he went on brusquely, ‘let's not dwell on the past—we've got your future to think of, my boy. I'll teach you the little I know, and guide you as you grow.'

‘I'll be a better wizard than
you?
' asked little Leo in wonder. He looked at his father with the big face he couldn't even hold in his hands, and felt a shiver of delight.

Then his father had taken him by the shoulders and looked deep into his eyes. ‘My magic is weak,' he said, ‘it's untutored and without power—I have never saved anyone. But you, Leo, you will be different. You have the two signs of wizardry, my boy—silver hair and golden eyes. You have the sun and moon within you.'

Leo often remembered that day. The day his father had told him about the two signs, the way he'd looked into his face. ‘You can do anything,' he'd said, making Leo's stomach rumble with pride and terror.

Since then Leo had often comforted himself with those words of his father's. Because it was hard to keep faith. The exercises they practised every Thursday were hard and often boring. For a whole hour, sometimes, Leo would have to sit on the wooden stool, staring at an object so that he ‘understood its true nature'.

On Leo's seventh birthday, Marco told him that the Pericolo family specialised in a particular brand of magic—the magic of Metamorphosis.

‘That's where one thing is changed into something else altogether,' Marco explained. ‘It's perhaps the most powerful kind of magic. It can create all that is good, but it can call into being the most unimaginable evil.' Marco's face closed in then, darkening around some secret storm.

Leo had stared into his face. ‘Tell me.'

They were hunched close together at the table, sharing the circle of lamplight and their long shadows had danced across the walls. Leo kept silent, holding his breath, desperate with wanting to know. He could see there was some private landscape behind his father's eyes—a time before he, Leo, was born, and Marco had had this whole other life, where maybe, just once, he'd touched evil. ‘Tell me,' he whispered again.

But Marco shook himself, making the shadows shudder. ‘There's nothing to tell,' he'd said abruptly. ‘But I'll warn you, Leo. Although you may go way beyond me with your magic, you must always stop when I tell you. You must listen to me. I don't have the power you do, but I have the years and the wisdom to know—'

‘What?'

‘To know the places you mustn't go, the forests of wizardry that are too dark to explore.'

Leo didn't answer. He felt hushed, in awe, as if someone had touched his naked back with a drop of ice.

‘You must always obey me,' Marco said. ‘Otherwise you will get lost. Is that understood?'

Leo had nodded. He had never seen his father so serious. His voice was deeper, so certain—it didn't jangle with outrage or passion the way it often did. And strangely, from then on, Leo found the lessons more interesting, absorbing even, and hours floated by while he sat, mesmerised on his stool, his mind travelling to other places entirely.

To practise the art of Metamorphosis, Marco told Leo early on, you have to be able to see.

‘Well of
course!
' Leo laughed. ‘What do you think I am, an idiot?'

‘No, I don't,' smiled Marco. ‘But there are ways of seeing, son. In order to transform something, you have to
see
it first. You have to look straight to the heart of that thing, before you can change it.'

‘You mean if you only see its outside, then only that will be changed when you do the spell? I mean, it will
look
changed, but the heart of the thing will be the same.'

Marco gave a little jump of excitement. ‘Yes, Leo, that's it,
bravo!
The object's real nature has to be understood, all its history, its deepest soul, even the making of it, has to be seen and held in your grasp. Once you do that, you may learn to change its deepest nature. And then, Leo, you will be practising the Metamorphosis of the Pericolo family.'

Leo glanced around the room, thrumming his fingers on the table. ‘What about Pidgy? Could I change him, say, into a wolf?'

Leo's pigeon, which he'd rescued in the forest two years ago, perched on the arm of a chair. He blinked back at Leo, as if amazed at the suggestion.

‘Consequences,' said Marco. ‘Think of the consequences first. Ask yourself, what will happen if I do this? Would I rather have a pet wolf? Should I take the power of flight from my good friend?'

Leo watched Pidgy flutter his wings. ‘Oh, no,' said Leo, in sudden horror. ‘Pidgy would hate being a snarly, earthbound creature. Oh, Pidgy, I wouldn't do that to you,' and Leo put out his finger for the bird to perch upon.

‘One of the first things to learn,' said Marco, his voice suddenly deep and heavy, ‘is that you never use your power for its own sake. It's not a toy to be played with—and you must never discuss it with anyone. It . . . annoys some people.'