Help the Witch

by Tom Cox

  My foot aches and my hair is a pile of straw.

  1 MARCH

  They came for them at the last moment that dusk was still dusk, carrying burning sticks. Around thirty in total, two of them on horseback at the helm. All men, except for one near the rear. The man on the front horse wore a jacket with an owl sewn into it. She hadn’t been ready – neither of them had – but when it happened, she felt a wave of acceptance come over her, like she had known all along that it was coming.

  Joan struggled more. Jars and pots were kicked over. A chunk of her hair could still be seen on the floor weeks later, until sparrows finally forged their way in through the hole in the roof and used it for their nest. By 4 a.m. it was all over. It ended on the top of the hill, and the light from the fire was such that she could see right down the valley to the new big house, whose walls were now almost complete. The man who was going to live there had once come to her at night with stomach pains, and she had sent him away with a remedy. He had not been back, so she had made the deduction that it had been successful.

  ‘Why don’t I meet her? Joan?’

  ‘You have. She’s different from me. She doesn’t talk. She has been here less lately.’

  ‘My nightmares?’

  ‘Yuss.’

  ‘I’m so tired all the time.’

  ‘I’m sorry. My fault, a bit. You won’t be, soon.’

  5 MARCH

  It’s different down in the valley. It’s hard to explain exactly how it works to somebody who’s not lived up here. A person who knew that I’d moved here might drive along the river road and think, ‘This is where Jeff lives,’ but they’d be incorrect. I live on top of the mountain and that is a different thing. I could live in an entirely different country, and it might have more in common with the valley than this place does. Down there the big freeze is already a distant memory. People are sitting on the rocks in the woodland, eating pots of yoghurt, with their sleeves rolled up. A woodpecker is doing a roll on its wooden drum to herald the lighter days. Up here, though, the fangs in the air remain. Snow bones are clinging stubbornly to the fields. The light is still dark white. I watch the forecast, anxiously, every day.

  Yesterday, Mark and Carla arrived unannounced with a huge Le Creuset pot of homemade soup. ‘Bloody hell! Grizzly Adams!’ said Mark, as I opened the door. I think I might have talked too much, expending all my stored-up voice. Carla mentioned her friend was leaving a two-bed terrace on the north-west side of Sheffield, which was up for rent. ‘Not that I’m assuming you’d be looking,’ she said. ‘We just thought in some ways it might be easier.’ She said it was a very up-and-coming neighbourhood. Some great pubs. Rosie lived just around the corner, too. Did I remember Rosie? I said I did, then asked them if they knew the actual statistics for how many Grindlow villagers died in 1666: an average of twenty-one per week. Twenty-one! When they had left, the house felt very quiet. Catherine is out, I think.

  7 MARCH

  More blackbirds are arriving every day. I can’t get the seeds and fat balls out there for them quick enough. I remember the first day I came here and explored the village. I stood outside the pub, consulting my map and noticed a blackbird puffed up, beside my feet, quivering. I walked on. I have often looked back and felt there was something I should have done at that moment. But what? ‘Maybe not move to a haunted mountain?’ I can hear Matthew saying. When I got back from the village today there was a bag of firewood waiting outside my front door. I thanked Winfield, but he said it had nothing to do with him. Later, when I was closing the living-room curtains, I spotted Conkleton limp by, and, uncharacteristically, he waved.

  9 MARCH

  ‘Do you blame him for it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But he is in some way part of what happened to you? A remnant of it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you’ll be here until he’s gone?’

  ‘We’ll be here after that. That doesn’t end it.’

  ‘So you’re not here to hurt him?’

  ‘No. That’s not why we’re here. We will always be here. We need to be.’

  ‘It’s not revenge, then?’

  ‘It’s much more complicated than that. But we have to be here. It’s part of the balance. People want simple explanations. That’s another one of the big problems in life.’

  Again, I resist adding, ‘… and in death?’

  11 MARCH

  I can picture it quite vividly. It’s that glorious intersection of season and sunlight when the leaves throw their warm shapes on the pavements, making them less prosaic places to be. We’ve been walking for two hours and haven’t realised it, and we’re in a new corner of the city that neither of us even knew was here. If you looked at it practically, you’d say slow down, don’t run out of the good stuff: we’ve been telling it all too quickly, when really there’s months to do it, years maybe. But one topic of conversation leads feverishly to the next. We grab each other’s arms a couple of times, and it’s pure enthusiasm, nothing affectedly flirty. It’s not that we’re pretending to like all the same things. We’re not that green. But it feels like we’re agreeing on the topics we disagree on, because we’ve established an initial kind of agreement in the angle that we look at everything, and it’s making us look at our differences more open-mindedly.

  She checks the time and says shit, she has to go, and it already feels painful, the eleven and a half hours until next time, even though this time – the time before next time – isn’t yet over. And you know it won’t always be like this. It might not even be a quarter like this. Something will come along, an obstacle, maybe not even created by us, and it will make everything harder. But is that a reason not to be here at all, not to even begin?

  I turn back to my phone, and delete the text message I have started to compose.

  13 MARCH

  ‘Jeff. Oh my God, it’s you again. You just will not stop calling, will you?’

  ‘Hi. I’m sorry. I’ve had a lot on.’

  ‘Consorting with the ghosts? I guess it must be quite hard to get signal up there too, what with that big haunted phone mast at the top of the mountain?’

  ‘So I was wondering. You mentioned a while ago, about maybe doing something. Getting a drink. Might that offer still stand?’

  ‘Hmm. I dunno. I suppose I could bring myself to open the offer up again, despite the fact that you vanished off the face of the earth without saying a word.’

  ‘When would be good for you?’

  ‘Friday isn’t too bad.’

  I look at the weather on the computer screen in front of me. The yellow symbols.

  ‘Can we say next week? How about Thursday?’

  ‘OK. If you sure you’re actually real. Are you a real person? Tell me that, Jeff. Are you? Are you real?’

  ‘I think so. Most of the time.’

  15 MARCH

  It’s coming in again, from the north, straight down the Shit Weather Corridor. I can see it less in the sky and more in the colour of the space between the sky and the ground, and a feeling in the air. It’s like when you’re in a room and you realise you’ve left the fridge open, before you’ve actually checked and got backup visual evidence to prove that the fridge is open. But I can feel that something’s turned over, too. Near the dry-stone wall beyond the garden, where some of last week’s snow still hides, through the gap in it which weather or sheep or the foot hunt made or some combination of all three made, there’s a single primrose. Maybe this will be the last of the snow and, if it’s not, the lot after it will be. If I listen closely to my bones, I can know it. I just have to wait it out.

  Before the first flurry assaults the north wall of the house, I walk out over the back field, avoiding the really rough bit of ground where the old roots, as if sentient, snag and lick at your legs. There are no public rights of way here, not for another mile. Paths are still a debate. I turn east, up the last bit of hill, to the very highest point of the whole valley. Some of Winfield’s sheep are permitted to go semi-
nomad up here on the spongy moor turf, feasting on small mountains of hay that steam from their molten core, even in this biting cold. A little blue-orange pouting mouth of light going down over the rock edge on the other side is staving off the gloom. From the top I can see the remains of a Saxon cross, then down the valley, past a vast eighteenth-century manor house, to the kink in the river. I turn back for home and my home comes into view: a big grey monster, bulky and mean and alone. Nobody could have been thinking about calming anybody down when they made it.

  Night is coming in now and I’ve not left any bulbs on. But in the lower window I can see the comforting light from the fire. I will walk towards that orange glow for minutes before any detail about the scene around it emerges. It’s just a window gently full of fire. It’s a scene that could be from any point in a long, long time. If you’d been dropped here out of nowhere, you’d be able to predict nothing about what else you’d find in there. You’d just see the light, and follow it.

  LISTINGS

  FOR SALE

  Stunning three-bedroom executive home. Would suit professional couple. Woodland views. Jack and Jill bathroom with his ’n’ hers sinks. Landscaped garden with ornamental pond. Subterranean enthusiasts please note: unique feature of ‘cave’ beneath house! Second bathroom with heated towel rail, recessed ceiling lighting and low-level WC. Seller will pay stamp duty for quick move.

  TO LET

  Three-bedroom executive home. Two bathrooms. Large, attractive garden, backing onto woodland. Strictly no smokers, DSS or pets. The tenant will be required to pay a deposit equivalent to two months’ rent, plus an admin fee of £150, plus a checkout fee of £200. Please note that there is no access for tenants to the cave beneath the property.

  TO LET

  Three-bedroom executive home. Two bathrooms. Large, attractive garden, backing onto woodland. Strictly no smokers, DSS. Pets considered. The tenant will be required to pay a deposit equivalent to one month’s rent. No admin fees for December move-in. Please note that there is no access for tenants to the cave beneath the property.

  RESIDENCE DESTROYED BY FIRE

  In the early hours of Sunday morning a Somerset police and fire rescue team was called to a blaze at a three-bedroom house on the outskirts of the village of Chagdon. Mr Edward Richards and Mrs Charlotte Richards, the tenants of the house, first became aware of the problem when Mrs Richards woke to the smell of smoke and discovered flames licking up from the cellar immediately beneath the house’s open-plan Shaker kitchen. Mr and Mrs Richards were able to safely evacuate their two children, Finn and Martha, and no injuries were sustained. Mr Richards then returned to the house to rescue the family’s pet labradoodle, Rollo, who was found unconscious in the kitchen, with lacerations to his neck, and is currently in a stable condition at Blackdown Veterinary Practice. The cellar – which according to Mr Richards is ‘more like a cavern’ – was an original feature of an earlier house on the site, Pepper Farm, which fell into disrepair during the last quarter of the last century, before being redeveloped by the Orchard Homes company, along with much of the west side of Chagdon. The cause of the blaze remains unknown.

  LAND FOR SALE

  ‘Limefields’. Build your dream! One-off development opportunity. Quarter-acre of woodland. Edge-of-village location. Good road links. Auction will be held at Chagdon village hall, 3.4.2017. Starting bids of £450,000.

  GOBLIN

  One of the most fearsome of the West Country goblins is Tunk. Short and hard-bodied, with a wide and sheeplike head, Tunk is said to dwell in various cavernous locations between the Blackdown Hills and the southern reaches of the Mendips, subsisting on hares, dogs, badgers, owls and deer. Often accompanied by sparks and strange clouds of gas, Tunk can seem angry and belligerent on first appearances but is unlikely to do any harm to any human of humble means, provided that at his approach they turn their pockets inside out or find another way to prove to him their lack of wealth. It has been said that Tunk is not a mythical creature at all, but a working medieval farmer who, having been cheated out of his wife and his worldly possessions by a local nobleman, retreated underground to die. Instead of expiring, he continued to age, growing stouter, wartier and fatter-headed with each passing century.

  PUB

  Take a very short detour to stop at The Gambler’s Rest to fortify you for the final climb through ancient woodland to Boggart’s Mount. Cask ales are on offer in abundance plus bar snacks and Sunday lunch and a comprehensive vegan menu, all to be enjoyed on the sun terrace or in the unique ‘Cavern’ area below the main bar. Strictly no dogs.

  MISSING PET

  None of us have seen our black lab John for three days now. Please inbox us if you have seen him; we are very worried. We was walking him down Bogart’s Reach where Gambler’s Rest used to be then he went off after his ball an never came back. Suzi x.

  THE ARCHITECT CATHERINE SAMUELS

  Samuels is tired, like me, from a transatlantic flight when she opens the door of her spacious mountaintop Colorado home, but in the three hours since she got back she has already been out to forage for nettles and a rare strain of orange-berried sagebrush native to the area, both hardy post-Cloud Era survivors, which she uses to make tea for us. She has slender artist’s fingers and a longish face that wears a permanent look of slight suspicion, but her complexion and hair are both that of a woman fifteen years her junior. She did not design her own house, which is over ninety years old and of a classic mid-twentieth-century modernist style, but she has made significant alterations to it in her decade here, particularly on the lower floors, which now stretch back further into the rock face.

  It is this for which Samuels is best known: creating deep spaces that make an indoor dichotomy of unclean lines feel even more indoors, in an inversion of the more common ‘exterior interior’, which interacts with a natural unroofed space constructed by nature itself. It was in fact her husband, the actor Michael Gondrum, who found the place, which was roofless and near derelict at the time and occasionally occupied by wolves and brown bears.

  ‘In an ideal world, I’d have gone for something a little darker and closer to sea level, but I like it fine enough,’ she tells me in an accent that seems to occupy a fictional landmass, 400 miles west of Ireland.

  Was there anything formative in Samuels’s childhood that helped develop her taste for underlands? She says she grew up in a succession of fairly dull houses in the south-west of England – ‘identikit execuhomes, selling a sub-rural dream while slowly killing any notion of said dream by the very fact of existing’ – but does remember one place which ‘had a sort of cave in the basement’ which, against the wishes of her family, she used to go and play inside.

  ‘My mum told me much later that I used to have a fictional friend down there, who I called “Mr Sheep”, but I personally have no recollection of it. I was a very imaginative child, always off on my own, capable of amusing myself in myriad ways. My mum would always say to me, “If you’re going anywhere, write it on the kitchen table, so we know.” She’d leave a notepad there, but I’d take the instruction literally, and scrawl my whereabouts on the table itself.’

  MISSING PET

  Pepper. Springer spaniel. Black-and-white markings. Partially deaf. One black ear, one white. Last spotted: Bridgwater Lane area. We have not seen Pepper since early on Saturday evening and we are VERY WORRIED. Our children Jane and and Ben are distraught and would just like their much-loved pup back. Please check your sheds and listen for whimpering near any warrens or badger holes around your property, and report any sightings to us on 01761 563820 or at JimandJules@freedombridge.com.

  PARTY

  Please help Mephisto and Isobel to celebrate their joint thirtieth birthdays and two decades of wonderful friendship in one of the most beautiful areas of rewilded Somerset. Join in with the dancing, giant Scrabble and a Vietnam battle reconstruction, or just chill out and watch the local wildlife in the swamp and woodland below, including herons, beavers and wild pigs. We have hired o
ut five eco lodges at Boggart Farm and the adjoining campsite and hope to fit everyone in. PLEASE LET US KNOW ASAP if you would like a space in one of the lodges, each of which comes fitted with hot tub and wall-width iFace hook-up screen, and contact Isobel to arrange advance payment. Can’t wait to see you all!

  OBITUARY

  … but while his wealth came largely from controversial apps such as Loin Cloth and Celebrity Deathwatch, what Francis will perhaps remain best known for is the pro-hunting marches he organised during the beginning of the last decade, following the re-banning of fox hunting and badger baiting. He later redacted his pro-bloodsport stance, and in the last three years of his life made public donations to several animal rights groups, although remained friends with New Rural Alliance leader Will Park, who was in attendance at the party at which Francis and his husky, Ali, were last seen walking towards an area of reclaimed swampland near Chagdon. Francis remained estranged from his father, the folk musician Ian Francis, until his disappearance. He is survived by his wife, Cheryl, and son, Pontius.

  Mephisto Francis (2024–54)

  REDEVELOPMENT OPPORTUNITY

  Five acres. ‘Bogle Marsh View’, Chagdon. Potential planning permission to construct new home on site of five existing one-storey dwellings, subject to application.