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

by W. V. Fitz-Simon

  “What kind of leader would feed on his own followers like that?” said her mother. “Elsie, any more luck with this Margrave?”

  “He is a tricky one.” Mrs. Dearing turned over a random selection of cards. “I can only find hints and suggestions of him. He’s definitely a saint. An acolyte wouldn’t have that much skill.”

  “An acolyte?” asked Gosha.

  “There’s only one saint for each Sphere,” said Mrs. Dearing. “Acolytes give their oath to the saint and the saint doles power out to them. It’s all very feudal.”

  “Which Sphere do you belong to?” Gosha asked her mother.

  “We’re witches, girl. We don’t belong to anyone but ourselves.”

  “So how do you get your power?”

  “We steal it. You’ll see.”

  Mrs. Dearing let out a high-pitched squeal of frustration and pushed back from the table.

  “I nearly had him. I had his weft, but just as the warp came together, he slipped between the threads.”

  “Oh, Elsie,” said her mother. “You and your metaphors. They make no sense.”

  “Not a word from you, Agnieszka. This is serious. I have a reputation.”

  “The mouse becomes a tiger when her tail is tugged.”

  Her mother elbowed Gosha in the ribs with a glimmer in her eye.

  “Clear the table, please.” Mrs. Dearing gathered up her cards and patted them back into a neat stack. “We must do this properly.”

  “Here.” Gosha’s mother picked up her cup and the milk jug. “Help me with these things. This will be a treat for you. No one performs a divination like Elsie.”

  Under her mother’s direction, they put away the tea paraphernalia and moved the kitchen table away from the wall into the middle of the room.

  “May I use a bowl?” said Mrs. Dearing.

  “Whatever you need.” Gosha’s mother took a purple glass bowl out of a cabinet by the sink and handed it to Mrs. Dearing. “Will rainwater do? Or I have bottles of spring water in the cellar.”

  “Rainwater, please.”

  Mrs. Dearing placed the bowl in front of her and laid her hairbrush next to it.

  “There’s a bucket of rainwater outside,” her mother said to Gosha. “Fill up a jug. They’re under the counter.”

  “Candles, Agnieszka?”

  “In the cabinet above the toaster.”

  Her mother and Mrs. Dearing took no time at all to prepare the table. In the bowl, with the rainwater that Gosha scooped up from the bucket on the patio by the back door, Mrs. Dearing placed three smooth, round stones. Around it, she arranged four candles. From the garden, her mother brought in cut flowers, bundles of gorgeous purple, white, and yellow blooms which she scattered across the table.

  “Lovely,” said Mrs. Dearing. “It’s a tad unorthodox to do it this way, but we know with certainty that he was in Canterbury Gardens earlier this evening. We must find him then and follow his trail from there.”

  She riffled through her telling deck to find a blank card and placed it on the table across from her on the other side of the bowl.

  “Thoroughly unsatisfactory, but it will have to do,” she said. “I would rather a better representation, but he is unknown to us, so the Unknown shall have to suffice. We’re lucky I’m so familiar with your lovely home, my dear. It will make the process much easier. Stay back. It might sparkle.”

  She rubbed her palms together and blew on them as if to warm them and held them up in an attitude of benediction.

  “Oh, great spirits of darkness,” she said in her sing-song voice, her eyes closed, her head thrown back, “we gather before you this night of nights—”

  “Elsie.” Gosha’s mother patted Mrs. Dearing’s arm with the back of her hand. “Come on. No amateur dramatics. She’s family.”

  Mrs. Dearing broke out into twittering laughter.

  “Force of habit. So sorry.”

  She gripped her hairbrush, slapped the back against her palm and snapped her fingers over the bowl. The water on the surface rippled as if someone had dropped a pebble in its center. The tiny waves spread out to the edges and bounced back across themselves until the reflective surface became choppy and opaque.

  “Oh no, you don’t.” Mrs. Dearing struck her palm with the back of the brush three times and the water’s surface returned to slow, elegant ripples. “What time was he there?” she asked Gosha.

  “About six, I suppose?”

  “Six o’clock in the evening, number sixty-four Canterbury Gardens.” Mrs. Dearing slapped the back of the brush against her palm once more. “It’s a very specific request. I couldn’t be more clear.”

  Gosha used that tone with Edmund only the other day when he refused to put on his socks.

  The ripples subsided and the water in the bowl became clear again, except this time, instead of the reflection of candles, Gosha could see the foyer of her house.

  “There we go.” Mrs. Dearing leaned in over the surface of the bowl.

  The view drifted lazily from side to side, rising and falling as if a camera suspended by a helium balloon took the image. Mrs. Dearing patted the air around the bowl with her free hand and the image shifted, following her gesture, panning across to the dining room and the staircase where Margrave and George talked. Margrave held the wooden box.

  “Is that him?” asked her mother.

  “Yes, that’s Emerson Margrave.”

  “Hmph. Never seen him before. He’s handsome for an old man.”

  No sound came from the bowl, but Gosha remembered the moment with perfect clarity from her vantage point at the kitchen table. The men finished their conversation, said their goodbyes, and Margrave turned to go.

  “Stay with him, Elsie,” said her mother and Mrs. Dearing flapped her hands around to keep the image moving.

  George opened the front door. As Margrave stepped through, he stopped and turned as if to stare straight at them through the bowl.

  “It didn’t happen like that,” said Gosha. “I could see everything from where I was.”

  The image of Margrave curled his lip into a sly smile and raised a finger, wagging it as if to say ‘no.’

  “What’s happening?” said her mother.

  Margrave stabbed his finger at them, and the bowl shattered. Water poured everywhere, soaking the tablecloth and splashing onto the floor. They all took a step back.

  “The water, the water.” Her mother ran around with tea towels to sop up the mess. “Get towels from the downstairs loo.”

  “I’ve never seen such a thing,” said Mrs. Dearing, mopping furiously.

  As Gosha swept the broken glass and waterlogged flowers off the table with a dust brush from under the sink, she noticed the single blank card lying on the table had somehow remained dry.

  “Look at this.”

  She reached for it without thinking and stopped herself before picking it up. She knew better than to touch her mother’s special tools. Mrs. Dearing was sure to feel the same about her own.

  Before her eyes, the clean white surface of the card darkened through shades of gray into a black so absolute it could have eaten away the card itself.

  “Mamusha.” She turned to her mother who was wringing a towel out over the sink. “Something’s happening.”

  A snaking tendril with five twig-like fingers emerged from the blackness of the card and wrapped itself around her wrist.

  She screamed.

  27

  As the hand of twisted bark pulled her toward the card, a second emerged and reached for her neck. Before it made contact, the silver glitter of a kitchen knife sliced clean through both. Her mother hissed a word in her secret language. The hand shriveled as it fell. She spun the blade around her fingers to switch her grip and, with another hissed word, impaled the card on the table backhanded, slicing it in two.

  “Sorry, Elsie.” She spun the blade to a forward grip. “Best take care of the pieces.”

  Mrs. Dearing snapped her fingers once over each fragment and utt
ered something Gaelic in her impenetrable Scottish accent. The card stock ignited and burned into embers that drifted away in their own heat.

  A groan and a shudder shook the kitchen. In every uncovered pane of glass, the image of a gray and gnarled face with diseased yellow eyes stared out at them. The glass warped and bulged inwards.

  “Cover your faces,” said Gosha’s mother.

  With fingers wrapped around her acorn pendant, she traced a circle in the air with the tip of her knife and repeated a whispered two-syllable word. Mrs. Dearing dropped to a crouch and grabbed Gosha by the sleeve to pull her down with her. The air around Gosha’s mother pulsed and radiated outward above their heads, rippling and refracting the light in the room as if through a prism.

  The glass in the windows bowed in to the point of breaking. Her mother stabbed out with the knife and all the glass shattered, pushed outwards away from them into the night.

  “Salt!”

  Her mother ran to the cupboard under the stairs and grabbed an armful of boxes of table salt before darting out into the garden.

  “Salt?” Gosha followed Mrs. Dearing to the cupboard.

  “Take this.” The housekeeper handed Gosha a large container of salt. “We need to create an unbroken circle around the entire house. Quick.”

  Nowhere in London ever reached full dark at night. Outside, the thick white line of her mother’s salt trail glowed yellow under the streetlights across the back garden and stopped at the neighbor’s garden fence. Her mother’s white coif of hair disappeared around the far side of the adjoining semi-detached.

  “Go the other way.” Mrs. Dearing passed two more boxes of salt to Gosha. “I’ll hold it off until you close the circle.”

  Two minutes later, Gosha met up with her mother at the other side of the house and joined their two trails of salt.

  “All done?” asked her mother.

  “Yes, it’s enclosed.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, Mamusha!”

  “Step over, but be careful.” Her mother waved her across the circle and stooped to pick something up from beside the front door. “Don’t break the line.”

  To Gosha’s surprise, it was a whimsical stone gargoyle with a finger stuck up its snout. Her mother placed it on the ground at the edge of the circle and patted it on the head, its round face staring out into the night. Gosha could almost take the terrifying events in the house in her stride compared to this bizarre, softer side of her mother.

  “That’ll do it.” Her mother brushed off her hands, satisfied, and went back into the house.

  Mrs. Dearing was, as usual, cleaning up in the kitchen, although all the broken panes of glass were once again whole and in their place.

  “Elsie, stop tidying.” Gosha’s mother snatched the dustpan and brush out of her hands. “You have a compulsion.”

  “Sorry, sorry. The glass wasn’t tainted, so I put it all back together for you.”

  “Bless you, you’re a dear.” Gosha’s mother collapsed into a chair. “I’ll take care of this tomorrow. Let’s get to sleep. It’s only a few hours before dawn. Elsie, you bunk with me. Goga, take the couch or try your luck upstairs with the boys. I’ve seen what they get up to in their sleep.”

  Up in the boys’ room, Gosha stripped down to her underwear.

  Goga, she thought as she slid under the covers next to Timothy. No one’s called me that since I was a little girl.

  She was dead to the world within seconds.

  * * *

  She awoke from a dreamless sleep. The sun was up, and the morning chorus chirped outside the window.

  “Come on,” whispered her mother from the edge of the bed. “Up. We have a long journey ahead of us.”

  “Where are we going?” Gosha asked as she pulled on her clothes.

  Her mother shushed her. The boys were still asleep.

  “Everything you need to get ready is in the downstairs bathroom,” said her mother from the stairs. “Clean yourself up. And take off all that makeup. What you’re wearing won’t do either. You look like you came from beheading a Frenchman.”

  Exhausted, groggy, and very cranky at her mother for having a dig, she pushed her irritation down and went to brush her teeth.

  The shower’s water pressure trickled anemically over her, but she did her best and stepped out the bathroom refreshed. Her mother greeted her in the front hall holding a miserable tweed skirt and a blouse of a style the Queen Mother might wear.

  “Put these on. Quick. The bus leaves in less than an hour.”

  “Are you kidding? These are the most hideous clothes you could find. You won’t even wear them.”

  “Doesn’t matter what I would wear.” Her mother thrust the clothes into Gosha’s arms. “Where we’re going, you must project a specific image. You’re the photographer. You should know all about that.”

  “And where are we going?”

  “Come into the kitchen and sit.”

  Claustrophobia gripped at Gosha’s heart. Coming from her mother, those words were never good.

  The kitchen was clean and tidy, all signs of the mysterious and shocking goings on of the night before gone.

  “Sit, sit,” said her mother as she took a seat on her preferred side of the table. Gosha sat across from her, the hideous clothing draped over her lap. “Time for you to embrace who you are, what you are.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean, Małgorzata. It is not ideal. I did not get to train you as I would have liked, but the situation requires it. You are my daughter. I know you will rise to the occasion.”

  Realization coalesced in Gosha’s precaffeinated mind.

  “No.” Got to her feet and threw the clothes on the floor. “No, I won’t do it.”

  “Sit down, girl.”

  “Mamusha, I’m a grown woman. I’ve made choices about how I live my life. I have two children, a job and a…”

  The word ‘husband’ refused to come out of her mouth. She felt herself deflate as the full weight of what happened with George descended upon her and sank back into the chair.

  “You have crossed a threshold.” Her mother folded her hands and regarded her from across the table. “There’s no pathway back. I said I would help you, and I will. This is the best help I can give you. You are weak. You have no way to protect yourself. Look what that wretch of a husband did to you. You couldn’t stop it. Time for you to take the Betrayal. Time for you to become a witch.”

  Gosha realized her face was wet with tears. She was crying and hadn’t even noticed.

  She’d always dreaded this moment, knowing in the back of her mind it was inevitable. Ever since the dark cellar, she’d told herself her mother’s kitchen was a place of danger where her mother dabbled with powers no one should control. Her mother stripped everyone who came to her kitchen of all humanity. She reduced them to their shortcomings and petty flaws, turning them into handicaps to be managed and problems to be solved. Telling herself her mother’s work was the ignorant superstition of the Old Country that preyed on the foolish and vain, she convinced herself the only way she’d ever be happy was to flee to London and turn her back on her mother’s traditions. Asked about her feelings even a week ago, that would have been her story. Now, sitting in her mother’s kitchen in the spot always reserved for visitors, she felt the hot flush of anger: anger that she had been so stupid as to fall in love with a murderer; anger at the death of such a beautiful soul as Mick; anger at the supernatural monster that threatened to consume the life of her dearest friend.

  And with that anger came a cold, clear certainty she had to do all she could to stop them. No matter that it meant returning to the world of the dark cellar. No matter that she might never be out of her mother’s grasp. There wasn’t even a desire for vengeance in her heart. George and Margrave had to be stopped. That was all that mattered.

  “Yes,” she said. “What do I need to do?”

  28

  They reached the coach with bare
ly enough time to spare. Gosha tucked the tweed skirt around her legs as they settled into their seats and ran a finger inside the frilly collar of her blouse in a vain attempt to loosen it. Her reflection in the mirror by the front door on Alder Lane as she put on a shapeless canvas coat handed her by her mother shocked her. Without makeup or gel in her hair and dressed in this dowdy outfit from god-knows-where, she was unrecognizable even as her mother’s daughter.

  “Where are we going?” she asked as the half-empty coach pulled out.

  Her mother grazed her acorn pendant with her fingertips and whispered a word in her secret language.

  “There,” she said. “Now no one will hear us.”

  She took an orange out of her handbag and peeled it.

  “The Betrayal begins every witch’s journey in the Craft. It has always been this way. It’s the same everywhere. A woman may be born with an affinity for Influence. She may have certain gifts, like you. And yet there’s no real Craft without giving an oath of fealty to a saint, but a witch is a free woman who takes orders from no one, so there is no Craft without the Betrayal.”

  As she spoke, she separated the orange into segments and passed half to Gosha.

  “I imagine it might be possible for a witch to steal her power from another Sphere, but only one tolerates us: the Sphere of Mystery. There are many stories why, but the true reason is politics. Poland and Britain are the same. The Saints and their servants cannot kill, or they will be cast out by their lords, so they must be devious. Who is more devious than a witch? Our existence must suit the Queen of Secrets. And we serve an important function. Few who sit in my kitchen have not been misused by Influence. Eat your orange. It’s very good.”

  Holding forth to a captive audience, her mother was in her element. When Gosha was a girl, she hated these lectures and yearned to get away from them, but who knew what hex her mother might have cast on her if she tried to escape? She always thought her mother to be full of herself, taking advantage of her power over Gosha to drone on, enraptured by the sound of her own voice. But now, as her mother looked through her handbag to find a tissue to mop up the juice that burst over Gosha’s fingers as she bit into the segment of orange, she realized how much love there was behind her mother’s words. This wisdom was a gift freely given, not a demand of obligation.