Waking the Witch (The Witch of Cheyne Heath Book 1)

by W. V. Fitz-Simon

  “Tell me.” He leaned in close to the grate. “Tell me what happened to you that left you so without hope?”

  She thought about the times her mother used Craft against her, making her sit and watch her work from the stool by the fridge when she became too rebellious. And then there was the handsome stranger who forced her into a cellar to act as bait for her mother so he could kill her. Some things were too dangerous to speak out loud, especially to a priest, in a confessional, in church.

  She rested her head against the wall and closed her eyes. Her headache was gone.

  “Thank you for your time, Father.”

  She opened the door. Squinting in the daylight, she slipped out of the booth.

  “Wait, my child.”

  The priest followed her out, but she was outside and away before he could catch her.

  The afternoon air was sweet and fresh, the fickle September sun bright enough to warm her cheeks. She could put George to one side for the time being. Let him have his fun with that girl. He was so immature, she’d tire of him, eventually. A call to Sally when she got home would set the ball rolling on the divorce. Mick had reached out to her from beyond the grave. If no one else would help him, it was up to her. But with no one to turn to, where could she begin? And what would she do if she found something?

  She remembered her camera and all the photos she took at the shoot. There might be something in them. If not, she could talk to Johnny and the rest of the band. They could tell her more about Mick and who he’d been involved with. If she could figure out what was going on and come up with proof of conventional wrongdoing, perhaps she could go to the police.

  13

  She stood in the bathroom doorway, half-hidden from Cressida and the boys, listening to the squeals and splashing of bath time. This morning, Gosha could have beat the girl about the head with a frying pan, she’d been so angry. Now, with her head calm and the awful disorientation from the visions of Mick’s death dissipated, all she felt was contempt.

  Good luck to the pair of you.

  Cressida spotted her out of the corner of her eye and jumped with shock.

  “Mrs. Armitage! I didn’t see you there.”

  “Mummy, Mummy!” The boys squealed, their hair sculpted into mohawks and horns by soap suds.

  She dropped her handbag with the rolls of exposed film from the shoot inside, and kneeled by the tub, pushing Cressida out of the way. She wanted more than anything to fire the girl and get her out of the house, but she couldn’t take care of the boys on her own and dig into what happened to Mick. Perhaps she could get Mrs. Dearing to come in and look after them.

  “Give us a kiss.” She spread her arms to hug them, but they squealed and made noises of exaggerated disgust as she tried to plant kisses on them. “Come on, boys. I won’t take no for an answer.”

  For two minutes of bliss, she chased them around the tub, threatening them with kisses, splashing water everywhere.

  Let her clean up the mess.

  “Be good, boys. Mummy has work to do. I’ll come up to your room later and tuck you in.”

  Edmund scrunched up his nose and blew a raspberry at her, Timothy joining in, as she grabbed a towel and dried herself off.

  “How was your day?” said Cressida, hovering behind her.

  George must have told her what happened at the shoot. The last thing Gosha wanted was sympathy from this little tart.

  “It was lovely, thanks.” She couldn’t mask the edge of bitterness in her voice, but didn’t much care. “How about you? How was your friend?”

  Edmund threw a plastic fish at Timothy. The toy splashed soapy water into his brother’s eyes. Timothy scrunched up his face as if preparing to bawl, but instead he opened his eyes and mouth wide, growled, and splashed at Edmund.

  “Sea monster!” he cried.

  So unflappable. I wonder how he’ll cope with the divorce.

  “We had a lovely visit,” said Cressida. “It was so nice to see him.”

  “Have you heard from George?”

  “Edmund, careful.” Cressida snatched a large seahorse he was about to use to vanquish his brother, the sea monster, from his hand. “No, Mrs. Armitage. Not a thing.”

  “If he calls, it’s important I speak to him.”

  She wouldn’t attack him with accusations of infidelity, but she wanted an explanation for the dossier on his father and why he’d disappeared. If it turned out he was up to something dangerous, she’d have to change the locks before he got back.

  Gosha picked up her handbag, went down to the kitchen and dumped out the contents on the table. There were over a dozen rolls, the entire supply she’d brought with her to the shoot, all of them unmarked. She would never normally be so sloppy, but working in such a frenzy, she hadn’t bothered to take notes of what was on each roll. She’d have to develop them all.

  Her darkroom was in the kitchen of the basement flat. Any color film she took she sent out to be professionally developed, but the black and whites she always took care of herself. An adequate but enthusiastic cook, developing film required a similar balance of rules and creativity that she always loved. When she entered the darkroom, the wild work was over, the danger and spontaneity of coaxing a subject to reveal themselves passed. In her darkroom she could be analytical and methodical. In the quiet darkness, with only the extraction fan humming in the background, she could coax art out of chemicals, light, and paper.

  She would have to be strategic, she thought, as she laid out the rolls of exposed film on the counter. She had enough reels to develop everything in one go, but it would take time. Each roll of film had to be transferred onto a reel in complete darkness, a fiddly job that was her least favorite part. After that, it had to be processed with developing chemicals before being washed with a stop bath to end the reaction that extracted the image, then fixed with another chemical to render the coating on the film inert. Once it was rinsed and hung up to dry, she could make prints. It would be a long night.

  Excitement nipped at her to rush and cut corners, but she’d been working with film long enough to stop and take a breath whenever she started getting sloppy. She had all the rolls in the cabinet to dry by one in the morning.

  As she waited, she rummaged around the kitchen to find Mrs. Dearing’s supply of tea and wondered what she would find on the developed film. The impressions her second sight captured were often only twists of light and dark in the background, or slight distortions of her subject, molding their features into the version of themselves they held closest to their hearts, either what they feared they were or what they yearned most to be. Only once had she tried the experiment of shooting film amid the full turbulence of an episode. The first twinges came on one afternoon as she sat in the park eating a sandwich. The results were alarming. Layer upon layer of ghost images embedded themselves in the emulsion, leaving a jumbled mess of overexposed film. She never tried it again.

  With the negatives dry, she made contact sheets and spread them out, still wet, on a light box to examine them with a loop. Out of the several hundred photos she found twenty of Mick. She made blow-ups of each of them, shoddy, quick prints she would never allow if she were working properly, but these were only a first pass to help her narrow down her prospects. Five held promise: single shots of Mick with plenty of space around him. She reworked them into clean, crisp images.

  Once she had them clipped to a string of washing line tied along the length of the kitchen, she turned off the dim red safety light to inspect them further. They were good shots, fresh and full of personality. Mick looked happy, engaged, dynamic. If this had been a regular shoot, she would have been proud to show them.

  She spent what seemed like an hour staring at the prints from every angle as they dried, up close with a loop or a giant magnifying glass or stepping back to see them from afar. In each print was a dark smudge from blemishes on the emulsion, like the smudges of tea leaves in the bottom of the cup when people asked her mother to tell them their future. To Gosha they
never held meaning the way they did to her mother, the sediment never creating more than abstract shapes.

  When they were dry, she took the prints down off the line and put them on her light box one by one. The brightness shining through the prints yielded much better results. Each blemish had variations where the smudge was darker or lighter. If she blew up and underexposed those parts of the negative, she might get a better image.

  Four of the prints yielded nothing, but the fifth, a shot of Mick in a quiet moment, held promise. She must have snapped it between takes. His fingers spread flat across the keys of his synthesizer, his head bowed and eyes closed as if in prayer. In the streak above him floated the suggestion of a figure. It was tiny, as if miles off in the distance. She had to expose it for less than a second to make out any detail, blowing up an inch of the original to fill the print paper.

  She made three prints, blowing each up a little more and watching patiently as she swirled the exposed sheets around in the chemical bath with a pair of rubber-tipped tongs.

  In the first, under the red safety light, she could see that it was a figure, perhaps male, with its back turned. Long limbs snaked out of a rangy torso, the head irregular and disfigured. Was this an impression of how Mick thought of himself projected onto the emulsion?

  Once she fixed and rinsed the print, she clipped it up on the line to dry and went to the next. To her surprise, as the paper darkened to reveal the image, the figure no longer faced away, but instead stood in three-quarter profile as if turning toward the camera.

  She dropped the print in the stop bath without bothering to rinse it first. It would contaminate the bath, but she didn’t care. She had plenty of chemicals and she needed to inspect it up close.

  She wasn’t mistaken. The figure was blurry, but she had blown the shot up to the greatest resolution of the paper. The figure had changed position. Had she lived a more rational life, she might not have believed it. It went against everything she knew about science and technology. But, no matter how much she might resent it, her life had been anything but normal. The photograph did not faze her one jot.

  The third print she exposed the lightest of all to give her the most detail. As the image darkened, she could see the figure had turned to face the camera, its long limbs like knobbed branches reaching out toward her. Seconds stretched out to feel like hours as the chemical reaction darkened the image.

  The limbs came in first: jagged streaks with fingers sharp as knives. Its body was twisted, its legs breaking at the knees in the wrong direction. The face was last of all, defining itself from the edges in, gnarled protrusions sticking out of its head like a garden of horns. Angry eyes with evil intent materialized above a jagged snout.

  In the gloom of the safety light, the hair on the back of Gosha’s neck stood on end, her heart pounding in her chest. As she sloshed the paper back and forth in the shallow bath of liquid, the instinctive part of her wanted to drop the tongs and run from the room, but she stood her ground, determined to see the process through to the end.

  The image on the paper moved, the lips curling back to display jagged, rotten teeth. The head turned, and the eyes focused on her.

  Gosha screamed and ran, knocking the darkroom door open as she fled, and scrambled up the stairs on all fours like a dog, slamming and locking the door of the studio. She wedged herself, shaking, into a corner, crumpled herself into the smallest shape possible, and buried her head in her arms.

  14

  It’s the end of October and Gosha is nine. The day is clear. The sun is out, but the temperature is turning chilly as she and her friends walk home from school. Dressed in her overcoat and stockings, she wishes she had thought to wear the pretty cardigan her babsha knit for her last winter.

  The stranger sits on a stone wall by the lane. Younger than her father, he is handsome with his hair slicked back, dressed in clothes much finer than any of the men in the village. Mateusz, her cousin, and he are perhaps the same age, but Mateusz is a mechanic and has dirty hands and burps and farts a lot. This man’s hands are refined and sensitive, and he smells of sandalwood and whiskey.

  The handsome stranger wishes them a pleasant day as they pass and hops off his perch to engage them in conversation and asks about the village and the surrounding country, about their parents and their families.

  Strangers rarely come to these parts. Fresh faces are a delight. But the stranger is a man. Men, strange or otherwise, cannot be trusted, or so her mother has drilled into her, and she is reluctant to answer.

  His smile is lovely, however, genuine and open. The girls answer all his questions without hesitation. Gosha joins in, which surprises her. She would never go against her mother, but there’s something so trustworthy about this stranger that she feels her mother could only approve of Gosha being friendly with him.

  He asks about the special people in the village, the ones that everyone tells stories about, what they’re like. He asks how many people are in their families and where everyone lives. When the girls tell him about her mother, he loses interest in them and turns his lovely smile on her. Starved of attention at home, she feels an emotion she has never felt before, a thrill of pleasure at being seen as special.

  The questions become more difficult. They brush up against things she knows she should not tell, so she makes her answers vague, but it’s clear he knows about her mother. The other girls are quick to betray her and tell him about the things her mother and grandmother and aunts are famous for all around the countryside.

  Smiling at their stories, he raises a hand. The girls, who would chatter through a funeral, fall silent, perhaps the first thing that tells Gosha something is very wrong.

  “Go home, girls,” he says, “and forget all about this. You left school before your friend and don’t know where she is.”

  They nod obediently and walk off down the lane, resuming their chatter as if she and the stranger had never been there.

  “Now, my little witchlet.” He crouches before her. “You are too young to have been indoctrinated into your mother’s foul sisterhood, but I have no doubt she has set more than a few traps about your person. Be sure that I will use no Influence against you, but I have other ways to get what I want.”

  He lets his jacket slip open. Under his arm is a gun in a holster. She has only ever seen such a thing in the movies they show every month in the village hall and her eyes widen with fear.

  “I could take you to the middle of the town square in front of your entire village, take out my gun and shoot you right between your eyes.”

  He reaches out a finger and taps her there. She flinches.

  “Not a single soul would do anything. They wouldn’t even see it happen. No one would even remember you existed, just like your little friends. So you see, it makes no sense for you to cry out for help, or try to escape. Do you understand?”

  She nods, unable to move, though if it’s because of something he has done or because of her own fear, she doesn’t know.

  “Good. Come with me and be a good little girl.”

  It is neither a question nor a command, but a statement of fact, and she is too terrified to contradict him.

  The stranger walks her through the center of the village, and not a single person notices them. Mateusz, at work on the village priest’s motorcycle, doesn’t acknowledge her in the slightest, even though they walk right in front of him.

  He walks her to an old barn by the river, takes her down into the cellar and handcuffs her wrists behind her back.

  “Sit.” He points at the packed earth floor. “We will be here until your mother returns. Don’t worry. She will know where you are. I want her to find you. You will see her and your father again before I kill them.”

  By now, Gosha is crying, sobbing so hard she can barely breathe.

  “Your mother is an abomination, did you know?” He looks around, inspecting the cellar. “She has broken a solemn oath to her queen and stolen power that was given to her with generosity and love.”r />
  He finds himself an empty apple crate and turns it on its side, placing it by the wall across from her, and sits.

  “This is the way with witches. This is the reason they are damned and must be killed without hesitation or mercy.” He leans forward, rests his arms on his knees, and peers at her through the gloom. “When your mother comes, I will kill her. I will kill your aunts, for they are witches, too. You are not a witch yet, but you might still become one, so I will kill you when you have fulfilled your purpose and led your mother to me. And I will also kill your father, for consorting with witches.”

  Settling back against the earthen wall of the cellar, he takes out an apple from a box and eats.

  “He’s the reason I found you and your mother,” he says between bites, wiping juice from his chin with the back of his hand. “Because of him you will all die. This country is in upheaval. Ignorant people think they know better and protest and riot against my superiors. Your father is one, but not very good at it, as freedom fighters go. He is hardly a man at all. He needed your mother to come and rescue him from his jailers. My superiors tolerate scum like your mother. I wouldn’t. I would kill every witch I set eyes on if I was allowed. But they will not tolerate witches using their stolen power against them, and so they have allowed me to kill you.”

  For a night, a day and one night more, they sit. He drones on and on, without cease, not allowing her to eat or drink, no matter that she begs him. He does not allow her to go to the bathroom even though he gets up from his post to relieve himself outside whenever he needs it. She holds it in until she can’t any longer and then she soils herself, but he seems not to notice or care about the stench. He rambles on about the evil of witches and how he loves to kill them, listing off the many women he has murdered and the clever ways he has killed them that absolve him of the deed to avoid the wrath of his lord.

  On the morning of the second day she is delirious with hunger and thirst. The handcuffs have dug into her wrists, making them slick with blood, and her body is smeared in her drying feces. Finally, he stops talking, takes his gun out of his holster and goes upstairs to the surface.