The Witch Queen (5 page)

He came there late one night after a party—a party with much shrieking and squirting of champagne and dropping of trousers. He had drunk as much of the champagne as found its way into his glass, but it did not cheer him: champagne cheers only those who are feeling cheerful already, which is why it is normally drunk solely on special occasions or by the very rich. At the nursing home he sat in his usual chair, staring at his sister with a kind of gray patience, all thought suspended, while his life unraveled around him. There were goals that had been important to him: career success, a high earning potential, independence, self-respect. And the respect of his father. He had told himself often that this last need was an emotional cliché, a well-worn plotline that did not apply to him, but sometimes it had been easy to lapse into the pattern—easier than suspecting that the dark hunger that ate his soul came from no one but himself. And now all the strands of his existence were breaking away, leaving nothing but internal emptiness. The excess of alcohol gave him the illusion that his perceptions were sharpened rather than clouded and he saw Dana’s face in great detail: her pallor appeared yellowish against the white of the pillow, her lips bloodless. He did not touch her, avoiding the contact with flesh that felt cold and dead. Somewhere in the paralysis of his brain he thought: I need help.

He thought aloud.

The unfamiliar words touched a chord deeper than memory. Without realizing it, he drifted into a daydream. He was in a city—not a modern city but a city of long ago, with pillars and colonnades and statues of men and beasts, and the dome of a temple rising above it all flashing fire at the sun. He heard the creak of wooden wheels on paving, saw the slaves shoveling horse dung with the marks of the lash on their backs. There was a girl standing beside him, a girl whose black hair fell straight to her waist and whose eyes were the pure turquoise of sea shallows. “—help,” she was saying. “You must help me—“ but her face changed, dissolving slowly, the contours re-forming to a different design, and he was in the dark, and a red glimmer of torchlight showed him close-cropped hair and features that seemed to be etched in steel. The first face had been beautiful, but this one was somehow familiar; he saw it with a pang of recognition as sharp as toothache. There was a name on his lips—a name he knew well—but it was snatched away, and he was jerked abruptly, not knowing where he was, reaching for the name as if it were the key to his soul.

One of the male nurses was leaning over him, clasping his shoulder with a scrubbed pink hand. “You called out,” he explained. “I was outside. I think you said: ‘I need help.’ “

“Yes,” said Lucas. “I did. I do.”

The young man smiled a smile that was reassuring—a little too reassuring, and knowing, and not quite human.

“Help will be found,” he told Lucas.

A damp spring ripened slowly into the disappointment of summer. Wizened countrymen read the signs—“The birds be nesting high this year,” “The hawthorn be blooming early,” “I seed a ladybird with eight spots”—and claimed it would be hot. It wasn’t. In London Gaynor moved back into her refurbished flat and stoically withstood the advances of her host of New Year’s Eve in his quest for extramarital sympathy. Will Capel returned from Outer Mongolia and invited his sister to dinner, escorting her to the threshold of the Caprice before recollecting that all he could afford was McDonald’s. Fern drank a brandy too many, picked up the tab, and went home to dream the dream again, waking to horror and a sudden rush of nausea. In Queen Square, Dana Walgrim did not stir. Lucas devoted more time to the pursuit of venture capitalism, doing adventurous things with other people’s capital, but rivals said he had lost his focus, and the specter that haunted him was not that of greed. And at Wrokeby the hovering sun ran its fingers over the façade of the house and poked a pallid ray through an upper window, withdrawing it in haste as the swish of a curtain threatened to sever it from its source.

It was late May, and the clouds darkened the long evening into a premature dusk. The sunset was in retreat beyond the Wrokewood, its last light snarled in the treetops on Farsee Hill. Three trees stood there, all dead, struck by lightning during the same storm that had shattered the conservatory at the house, and although there was fresh growth around each bole, the three crowns were bare, leafless spars jutting skyward like stretching arms. Folklorists pointed out that Farsee Hill was a contraction of pharisee, or fairy, and liked to suggest some connection with an occult curse, the breaking of a taboo, the crossing of a forbidden boundary, though no one had yet come up with a plot for the undiscovered story. That evening, the clouds seemed to be building up not for a storm but for Night, the ancient Night that was before electricity and lamps and candles, before Man stole the secret of fire from the gods. The dark crept down over wood and hill, smothering the last of the sun. In the smaller sitting room, another light leaped into being, an ice-blue flame that crackled and danced over coals that glittered like crystal. On the floor, the circle took fire in a hissing trail that swept around the perimeter at thought-speed. The witch stood outside it, close to the hearth. Her dress was white, sewn with sequins or mirror chips that flung back the wereglow in tiny darts of light. But her hair was shadow-black, and her eyes held more Night than all the dark beyond the curtains.

Dibbuck crouched in the passage, watching the flicker beneath the door. He heard her voice chanting, sometimes harsh, sometimes soft and sweet as the whisper of a June breeze. He could feel the slow buildup of the magic in the room beyond, the pull of power carefully dammed. The tongue of light from under the door licked across the floorboards, roving from side to side as though seeking him out. He cowered against the wall, shivering, afraid to stay, unable to run. He did not fear the dark, but the Night that loomed over him now seemed bottomless as the Pit; he could not imagine reaching another dawn. Within the room the chant swelled: the woman’s voice was full of echoes, as if the thin entities of air and shadow had added their hunger to hers. There was a
whoosh
, as of rushing flame, and the door flew open.

The wereglow sliced down the passage like a blade, missing the goblin by inches. It cut a path through the darkness, a band of white radiance brighter than full moonlight, stretching down the stair and beyond, piercing the very heart of the house. And then Dibbuck heard the summons, though it was in a language he did not understand, felt it reaching out, along the path, tugging at him, drawing him in. He pulled his large ears forward, flattening them against his skull with clutching hands, shutting out all sound. But still he could sense the compulsion dragging at his feet, and he dug his many toes into crevices in the wood and wrenched a splinter from the wainscoting, driving it through his own instep, pinning himself to the floor with a mumbled word that might have been flimsy goblin magic or a snatch of godless prayer. He had closed his eyes, but when his ears were covered he reopened them. And he knew that if he endured another thousand years, he would never forget what he saw.

There was a mist pouring past him along the beam of light—a mist of dim shapes, formless as amoebas, empty faces with half-forgotten features, filmy hands wavering like starfish, floating shreds of clothing and hair. Even though his ears were blocked he seemed to hear a buzzing in his head, as if far-off cries of desperation and despair had been reduced to little more than the chittering of insects. He wanted to listen, but he dared not lest he respond to the summons and lose himself in that incorporeal tide. He saw the topless torso of Sir William grasping his own head by its wispy locks: the eyes met his for an instant in a fierce, helpless stare. He glimpsed the tonsure of a priest slain in the Civil War; a coachman’s curling whip and flapping greatcoat; the swollen belly of a housemaid impregnated by her master. And among them the fluid gleam of water sprites and the small shadowy beings who had lived for centuries under brick or stone, now no longer able to remember what they were or who they had once been. Even the imp from the oven was there, trailing in the rear, clutching in vain at the door frame until he was wrenched into the vortex of the spell.

When the stream of phantoms had finally passed, Dibbuck plucked out the splinter and limped forward, still blocking his ears, until he could just see into the room. The pain in his foot went unregarded as he watched what followed, too petrified even to shiver. Within the circle, the ghosts were drawn into a whirling, shuddering tornado, a pillar that climbed from floor to ceiling, bending this way and that as the spirits within struggled to escape. Distorted features spun around the outside—writhing lips, stretching eyes. The witch stood on the periphery with her arms outspread, as if she held the very substance of the air in her hands. The spell soared to a crescendo; the tornado spun into a blur. Then the chant stopped on a single word, imperative as fate:
“Uvalé!”
And again:
“Uvalé néan-charne!”
Blue lightning ripped upward, searing through the pillar. There was a crack that shook the room, and inside the circle the floor opened.

The swirl of ghosts was sucked down as if by an enormous vacuum, vanishing into the hole with horrifying speed. The goblin caught one final glimpse of Sir William, losing hold of his head for the first time since his death, his mouth a gape of absolute terror. Then he was gone. What lay below Dibbuck could not see, save that it was altogether dark. The last phantom drained away; the circle was empty. At a word from the witch, the crack closed. On the far side of the room he registered the presence of Nehemet, sitting bolt upright like an Egyptian statue; the light of the spellfire shone balefully in her slanted eyes. Slowly, one step at a time, he inched backward. Then he began to run.

“We missed one,” said the woman. “One spying, prying little rat. I do not tolerate spies. Find him.”

The cat sprang.

But Dibbuck had grown adept at running and dodging of late, and he was fast. The injury to his foot was insubstantial as his flesh; it hurt but hardly hindered him. He fled with a curious hobbling gait down the twisting stairs and along the maze of corridors, through doors both open and shut, over shadow and under shadow. Nehemet might have been swifter, but her solidity hampered her, and at the main door she had to stop, mewing savagely and scratching at the panels. Outside, Dibbuck was still running. He did not hesitate or look back. Through the Wrokewood he ran and up Farsee Hill, and in the shelter of three trees he halted to rest, hoping that in this place his wild cousins of long ago might have some power to keep him from pursuit.

The conservatory was completed; the gypsy and his coworkers had been paid and dismissed. “You have not found him,” Morgus said to the sphinx cat. “Well. It is not important. He was only a goblin, a creature of cobwebs and corners, less trouble than a dormouse. We have greater matters at hand.” It was now four days since the exorcism, and the house grew very still when she passed: the curtains did not breathe, the stairs did not creak. Somewhere deep in its ancient mortar, in the marrow of its walls, the house felt lonely for its agelong occupants, lonely and uncomprehending. It sensed the invasion of alien lights, the laying down of new shadows, the incursion of elementals lured by the force of dark magic. It missed the familiar ghosts, as a stray dog given a well-meaning bath misses its native fleas. Inside, the atmosphere changed, becoming bleak and watchful, though no one was watching anymore.

The prisoner in the attic felt it, if only because there was nothing else to feel. Morgus rarely visited him anymore, even to gloat, so he would talk to himself, and the house, and a moth that was slight enough to slip past the spells, until he grew impatient with it and crushed it in one vicious sweep of his hand. He had the strength to wrench the iron bars from their sockets and snap the chains that bound him as if they were made of rust, but magic reinforced both chain and bar, and though he tugged until his muscles tore, it was futile. “What is she doing?” he would ask the house, and when it made no answer he could sense the new silence and stillness permeating from below. He lay long hours with his ear to the floor, listening. He knew when the ghosts were gone, and he heard the padding of Nehemet’s paws as she hunted, and the softest rumor of Morgus’s voice grated like a saw on his thought. Sometimes he would howl like a beast—like the beast he was—but nobody came, and the sound bounced off the walls of his prison and returned to him, finding no way out. Sometimes he wept, hot red tears of frustration and rage that steamed when they touched the ground. And then he would curse Morgus, and the attic prison, and the whole world, until he was hoarse with cursing, and in the silence that followed his lips would shape the name of his friend—his one friend in all the history of time—and he would call for help in a mothlike whisper, and crush his mouth against the floor in the anguish of the unheard.

In the reconstructed conservatory, Morgus was planting the Tree. It was midnight, under the pale stare of an incurious moon. The triangular panes of the roof cast radiating lines of shadow around the stone pot in which Morgus placed the sapling. Here was a different kind of magic, a magic of vitality and growth: the air shimmered faintly about the bole, and the leaves rippled, and the sap ascended eagerly through slender trunk and thrusting twig with a throb like the beat of blood. Morgus crooned her eerie lullabies and fed it from assorted vials, and the cat sat by, motionless as Bastet save for the twitch of her tail. “We are on the soil of Britain,
my
island, my kingdom,” said the witch. “Here, you can grow tall and strong. Fill my flagons with your sap, and bring forth fruit for me—fruit that will swell and ripen—whatever that fruit may be.” She gathered up the discarded wrappings and left the conservatory, Nehemet at her heels. Behind them, unseen, the heavy base of the urn began very slowly to split, millimeter by millimeter, as the severed taproot forced its way through stone and tile, flooring and foundation, down into the earth beneath.