The Golden Key

by Marian Womack

  He got up with a jerk, his chair falling behind him with a loud clatter. Miss Collins flared up.

  ‘You can’t break the circle! What do you think you are doing, young man?’

  He resented her calling him that—surely she was barely older than he was!

  ‘Mr Moncrieff! If you do not sit down now I will have to ask you to leave!’ she insisted.

  ‘Miss Collins, for goodness’ sake! Madame Florence is in obvious distress!’

  Madame Florence shifted, as if on cue.

  ‘You see? Madame is fine. Now, sit!’ Miss Collins indicated, as if talking to a poodle. Sam found his chair, and sat down. He felt his cheeks burning.

  ‘Dear one? Is Kitty here?’ asked Miss Collins, closing her eyes and rolling her head. Sam was no longer sure what he was witnessing. His detachment from the proceedings was faltering at an alarming speed.

  ‘Kitty, dear one! Are you here?’ insisted the woman.

  Then something took place, of which there would be several accounts later on: contradictory, embellished, truthful. Impossible.

  In plain view of all those present, Madame Florence shrank.

  The woman’s body lost its gravitas, as a child’s balloon loses air; her small hands disappeared up her frilly sleeves, freeing themselves from the ropes as they did so, and the skin of her deathly face sank further into her cheeks, transforming her into a veritable skeleton. Unexpectedly, this uncanny vision started to levitate, and moved, hands free of the ropes, slowly manoeuvring itself out of the cabinet. The medium’s old-fashioned dress, the full black skirt, the sleeves, hung loosely around her, a shell; her face had changed beyond recognition, impossibly wrinkled, as white as paper among the expensive black frills.

  Charles gagged as the floating figure approached the table. The stench it spread was overpowering and sweet and incoherent. It put one in mind of wet, freshly turned earth. It put one in mind of the metallic smells of a hunt, when the powder and the blood and the fear mix together.

  Miss Collins grabbed the hands of the two people next to her, and pressed them hard, instructing the others to do the same. Sam could sense the alarm in her voice when she spoke next.

  ‘Who are you? Who is here with us? Are you friend or foe?’

  The medium, levitating a few feet from the floor, her arms extended and her head lopsided, opened her eyes, and they were dark and deep as a well, as a cave, as the waters of the Isis.

  ‘Speak! Friend or foe?’ Miss Collins insisted bravely.

  The figure was sweating what looked like a muddy liquid. She opened her mouth to reveal an engorged tongue.

  ‘Fff—’ came the dark black voice.

  ‘Foe…?’

  ‘Of course she is! What a stupid question!’ exploded an indignant Mr Woodbury.

  ‘What do you want with us? Why are you here? Tell us!’

  The medium’s ghastly doppelgänger turned to stare at Sam, and spoke again.

  ‘Fffff —’

  ‘Foe, yes, foe, what do you want to tell us—?’ interrupted Miss Collins, to which Madame Florence, or whatever had taken possession of her, exploded:

  ‘FLORA!’

  After uttering that word she fell heavily onto the floor. Sam and the milliner got up, and both rushed to her. When Sam knelt by her side Madame looked normal again, her old self miraculously restored; but a faint green mist, like fairy dust, seemed to be leaving her mouth. Hell-breath.

  All the sitters were now getting up with trembling movements.

  ‘Is Flora someone you have lost?’ ventured Miss Collins in Sam’s direction, trying to salvage whatever she could from such an unexpected turn of events.

  But Sam wasn’t listening; that farce had gone too far. All his attention was directed at Madame Florence.

  ‘Water, now, please,’ he ordered.

  ‘I was told not to attend a séance in Lent. I should have listened …’ murmured the milliner, the longest sentence she had uttered all night.

  ‘Mr Moncrieff!’ Miss Collins insisted. ‘Do you know anyone called Flora? Is she someone you lost? Pray tell us, I beg you! This is a circle of trust!’

  ‘What are all these theatrics?’ protested Mr Woodbury. ‘Is this everything? No flutes and ghostly hands playing levitating violins? No Kitty and her flowers?’

  ‘For goodness’ sake, Mr Woodbury!’ cried an offended Thomas Bunthorne. ‘We have seen a full-figure levitation here tonight! Perhaps for the first time in British Spiritualist history! What on earth more do you want, my good man?’

  Sam found himself agreeing with Mr Bunthorne. Did that mean he was a believer now? He was only sure of one thing: Woodbury was a fool.

  Mrs Ashby got up unexpectedly, and headed resolutely for the door. Sam noticed that she exchanged a look with Charles, who also looked yellowish, as if he were about to vomit.

  ‘Mrs Ashby! Please, wait!’ said Miss Collins. ‘We ought to sing another hymn, to thank the spirits for the successful deliverance of our friend.’

  ‘Excuse me, but my business here is done,’ answered the old lady with an unexpected American twang. ‘I’m sure you can sing without me.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘I’m sorry, Miss Collins, but I have seen enough of— this.’ The woman waved her hand vaguely. ‘I will personally see that your circle is amply compensated, and will give you the necessary funds to settle Madame Florence in England with immediate effect.’

  Miss Collins lost her tongue for a second, but quickly composed a professional smile.

  ‘That is most generous, madam.’

  Mrs Ashby opened the door, and was gone in a second.

  No one said anything for a few moments. As soon as propriety allowed, Mr Woodbury rushed to inspect the cabinet, frantically looking for some hidden mechanism, levers and ropes, which of course he didn’t find, except the ones used to tie up Madame. Slowly, one by one, all the participants in the evening’s pastime started to gather themselves, each of them wondering in silence what had happened, what dark magic they had just witnessed.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The doll was abandoned in the garden. She wondered how it had got there; she hadn’t played with dolls in twenty years at least. And she didn’t think Mrs Hobbs even noticed the things, except for dusting them, which didn’t happen very often. Still, she was slightly put out: it was a valuable object, like all the others. They were all that remained of her mother in this godforsaken place.

  The garden was empty of sounds, looked after by the housekeeper’s husband, with the heavier tasks undertaken by a man who came from the village once a week. And those were all the people she ever saw, from Sunday to Sunday. Church offered more variety of faces, although they all looked so similar somehow. There was Peter, of course, her elder cousin, now a serious village doctor. When she looked at him she still saw the same little child she used to climb trees with, play with next to the canals. His was the only presence that prevented her loneliness. She had always felt so lonely in this place.

  At least she would have the garden from now on. For the past two weeks of rain it had been a dead, messy thing.

  She looked through the window at the abandoned doll, so like an abandoned boat after a flood. The glass gave her back her own reflection, paler than usual, the untamed wheat-blonde hair, the tiny curls stuck in an unmanageable tangle. She hadn’t taken care of herself properly in weeks, and didn’t plan to do so. Who cared? She looked no better than the doll, she thought. Secretly, she felt happy about the doll’s fate. She despised them. The French Jumeau, with its sad porcelain face, long eyelashes drawn on its forehead, and its real, dead hair. The mechanical baby from the Steiner house, the most valuable thing in that cottage, although none of its occupants was aware of the fact. The distracted grimace of the little blonde doll, bought in Paris in another lifetime.

  Each morning, Eliza wrote. She put down her observations of the mysterious disappearances in nature in her notebook, and she worked on her monograph, the book that would bring back Eunice F
oote to everyone’s attention. After a while, she opened another, secret drawer, and took out another, secret notebook, a second one. Other things went in it.

  It had started as a pastime, many years ago. It was abandoned while she and Mina were together. She had taken it up again, not knowing why; perhaps because she craved simpler times: write line upon line of your own name on a piece of paper. An old incantation, for dreaming the name of her future companion. A useless, inanimate list of Elizas conquered the white day by day, no single space left for indeterminacy. It was difficult to believe there would be a companion. She dreamed of Mina’s soft curls falling like sand between her fingers every night. And of them both, falling together. The silliness helped pass the time, nonetheless; it was like automatic writing, and it brought ideas, associations, to her inquisitive mind. It was also vaguely comforting, like eating marmalade sandwiches, laughing with Mina in front of the fire, playing with dolls when she was little. But she was a woman now, and she was alone. Perhaps it was an exercise in reaffirmation: I exist! I am here!

  The housekeeper had caught her at this exercise in repetition. Mrs Hobbs probably did not know the reasons why Eliza had set up house by herself, why she had insisted on making habitable again the old family carstone cottage. She did not know, obviously, that Eliza had lost her life companion to a quarrel; she did not know, for she had got it into her head that Eliza was invoking the face of her future husband of all things.

  ‘You are still young, miss, if you don’t mind me saying so,’ she would point out. ‘And there are other things that a woman can do to find out.’

  ‘What other things?’

  ‘If what you want is to see his face, if you take my meaning, miss.’

  Poor woman. She was quite insistent on this husband business. It was only a game, after all. And so Eliza let Mrs Hobbs impart her wisdom; who knew what she might learn? It was only an experiment, an exercise in opening up the realms of the possible. Wasn’t that what scientists were meant to do?

  Take new wax, and the powder of a dead man, make an image with the face downward and in the likeness of the person you wish to have; make it in the new moon; under the left arm place a swallow’s heart, and its liver; you must use a new needle and a new thread; you need to say his name, confess his sins, speak his character.

  Eliza felt strangely guilty. Deep down, she despised all that nonsense: mediums, clairvoyants, magicians and their tricks; but there could be something in rural notions, she thought, some dark knowledge of preterite times, some strange form of science, or at least of harnessing the powers of nature. She wanted to learn it all, and so she listened to Mrs Hobbs. But this? Nonsense. Where to find a dead man? How to give shape to powder? How could someone wait until the new moon? And a swallow? Absolutely useless.

  The dolls observed her from the wooden shelves. In the daguerreotype she still kept, her mother looked like another doll, one among many, sitting among the crates and chests and boxes of her luggage. She was going to China, Eliza thought, Mongolia afterwards.

  Each morning Eliza had breakfast, and then went back to her room to write. And each morning she would add to that other, secret knowledge. What would Eunice think? The notebook she kept hidden in a little drawer, locked with a little key. It was mere chance that she had the key, for there had never been closed doors in the little carstone cottage, secrets. As if she had any. Everyone, she thought, would have heard about Mina by now, everyone from here to China; everyone, except poor Mrs Hobbs. But everyone thought that this particular drawer had been locked forever, and the key lost. There had never been any secrets here. They would come for holidays when she was little, and she would always hear it at the back, the grumbling, shaky noise that her parents’ fights used to carry, her mother shaken around like a doll, thrown against the walls, hitting the wooden doors. It would invariably happen at dusk, her father’s change of mood. She had never known why this precise moment, out of all the possible moments. And her mother pretending afterwards, a set, manic smile on her beautiful, doll-like face.

  A woman must take an orange, prick it all over in the pits of the skin with a needle, and sleep with it in her armpit. The next day she must see the man she loves eat it.

  When she was four, Eliza’s game was that a baby doll killed a mammy doll when it was born, although she didn’t understand the mechanisms that put that death in motion. At six she understood better, and the game was abandoned. What she wanted was to find a game in which the father died, not the mammy. She never knew how to make this happen.

  Now, each morning, Eliza wore one of her mother’s old dresses, so similar to the ones the dolls were wearing. Money was tight, and she had finally fully grown into them. They came from a box in the attic, smelling of damp and naphthalene patches. It was possible that her father had expected her mother to be preserved like a doll, to behave like a doll. Moved from here to there and back again, uncomplaining. It was possible that she herself was one more doll in the doll’s room, but she hadn’t noticed because Mr and Mrs Hobbs were keeping the secret from her. Eliza opened the locked drawer, hoping to see Mina’s face; Mina, who would come to rescue her, who would forgive her for what she had done. And she daydreamed that she was a doll and that someone, thinking her dead, had abandoned her outside.

  * * *

  This dismal place wasn’t a new landscape. Eliza’s father was from around here, from a place called Waltraud Water; and so she had spent a few years of her childhood coming down from Lincoln to the cottage for little holidays, all year round and in all kinds of weather. She knew of young college men skating in winter or sailing in summer all the way up to Ely, usually to find some girl or another. The short sailing boats with two cabins, climbing up the Little Ouse. Those were the memories of youth, she thought now, kinder than a summer’s breeze. Her father had recounted it with pride, that long-gone world of fishing, fowling, of common wetland that was self-sufficient, well managed, cared for. Of the domestic geese that supplied the whole country with quill pens, those long feathers she marvelled at when she was little. Wildfowling season, from May to September, ‘fen slodgers’ carrying their decoys, and their tame ducks. The overabundance of pasture. The dykes dug up among the reeds, practically unseen when covered by snow or grass. And the moments when the snow started to melt, with those spring tides in motion. And the lost children, and the children that died in the eerie floods, and the children who were lost even before being born. For of course, there was no fairy tale here, and those were treacherous roads, deadly if misunderstood.

  Crumbled churches like the one at Wicken Far End were a reminder that nature would reconquer, eventually. Or would she?

  The Matthews’ abbey was nearby, and Eliza sometimes walked there in her morning stroll. As soon as she left behind the tamed landscape of its grounds, still holding some shape even after years of neglect, the view of the world changed immensely. From time immemorial, that countryside had been composed of those same fields of faded green, all of them covered by marshy reeds, unkempt patches scattered here and there, surrounding little islands of sturdier land. It was difficult to imagine all that expanse submerged, but that is how it had been. The fenmen had reigned over the water, conquering it. As the land had been drained, all that had changed forever. When the land was dried and cut and divided into those disorientating fields, traversed by thin unmoving rivers, what had happened to it? It had gone to men like Sir Malcolm Matthews’s ancestors. Eliza thought she understood that this countryside was haunted, by the bitterness, by the sorrow, by the suffering that went into its making. The same men who were forced to drain it lost their way of life while they did it. They had not benefited from the change. No one had given them a piece of land to grow crops and feed their families. Was it possible that the land itself was furious, as those men might have been?

  The scientist in her was recounting the missing birds, the spring that didn’t want to come. It had begun by mere chance, this exercise in vanishings. She had failed to find the tern, at a ti
me when it should be here. There were other oddities: lack of some insects, strange pulpy grass, and, worst of all, some places where you could hear no birds at all. Something was going on. She had seen an eerie green light moving over the marshes as well. It seemed that all living creatures were making themselves scarce, getting away from its path; as if they knew that it was an uncanny thing, something that had no business being here… But of course, she insisted to herself, these were only fancies. There must be a scientific explanation, cause and effect, a reason behind those absences, removed from those strange green shades that seemed intent on advancing inland, intent on devouring it all.

  Following it, she had got to what she thought was its source, a ruined Tudor manor house by the North Sea. It wasn’t very imposing, but almost cosy and small; nonetheless, Eliza had felt a creeping unhappiness there, as if her life had no meaning somehow, as if she had founded all her beliefs on lies until that moment. There was a white sticky substance floating around the ruin, posing on places where multicoloured fungi sprouted; she did not have a lot of mycological knowledge, and thought of Peter. She would have to ask him. If she ever were to return to the place; for what she had felt, more than anything, was as though an invisible boundary between two places was slowly lifting, and was going to trap her at the wrong side.

  She needed to breathe, and had walked around the odd structure, looking for the flat sea. The marshes, the reed swamp, the open water at the end. In a moment, a wrong vista had revealed itself.

  The tide had freakishly receded, and the water, distant in a flat, eerily never-ending expanse, was nowhere to be seen. At the end of her vision, the same soft greenish mist, but no clear line where the water and the land touched. The ground itself also seemed to have been taken back by the water, to have sucked itself up and out of place—and then she saw it. Enormous, shining black and green, traversed by unexpected orange streaks, the largest seam of umber green rhyolite, the stone that, she knew, was found in Madagascar, Oceania, the Pyrenees, Germany, Iceland, and in this particular stretch of the coast of East Anglia. A black and green sea of hardened stone, as hard indeed as a witch’s heart.