Help the Witch

by Tom Cox

  WOOD HOUSE

  When I am in bed I hear the timbers on my house expand and crack. It’s not an eerie crack, but I suppose it could be, one day, if somebody died in the house, and the house had some wisdom to impart about that. Nobody has died in the house so far. I am sure of it. Only Klaus and Rebecca lived in the house before me, and they are alive. I saw them just last week at the Lamb Feast in the village. The crack of my house sometimes wakes me up, but I never resent the disturbance. I listen to the house crack and then I stretch out in bed and hear the answering crack of my bones. It’s an appropriate house to live in when your joints are beginning to decline. They don’t just crack because I’m old, though. They cracked when I was young, too. I’d bend down in a bookshop to reach a novel on a low shelf and the ligaments in my knees would snap in an antisocial way, and if there were other people in the shop they’d turn around and wince. ‘Oof, are you OK?’ they’d sometimes ask, and I’d assure them that I was fine, that it didn’t even hurt, not a bit, because it really didn’t, and then I’d reach for the book I wanted, which was often about older people halfway across the world in wooden houses who lived lives that I wanted to understand and didn’t but now do.

  METAL HOUSE

  I drove to the house for the first time in the billowy dark of a country night by the jagged steep coast and it felt like driving down a chasm into a place that belonged only to itself. The next morning, after waking everyone up by shouting in excitement at the sea in the way that only the natively landlocked do, I cooked three terrible eggs on an old electric oven, probably similar to the electric oven the band who’d recorded there in the seventies had cooked terrible eggs on. I was still wearing my coat at the time, having gone to bed with it on.

  My dad had been in the band, but I never had known him, and I grew up avoiding his records. Now I listened to them a lot, but my mum didn’t know that, and didn’t need to. This weekend she thought I was in Banbury. She probably wouldn’t check whether I was or not. Why would she? I was twenty-eight. Before bed there had been a collective scramble for firewood to make the big rooms warmer and I later remembered someone breaking an old chair and putting it on the fire but have realised this probably didn’t happen and is in fact a memory of a scene from one of my favourite films, which has also made me question all sorts of things about memory, and by extension about history itself, which is often written by overimaginative people, and by wise people whose memories are failing.

  An old wise person whose memory was probably failing and who hadn’t been there anyway once wrote in a book that my dad broke down one of the doors of this house with an axe when he was under the influence of alcohol and hard drugs, but who was to say if that was true? I slept well in the house. I did not know if my bedroom was the one whose door my dad might or might not have broken down with an axe. It could have been. There was a one in six chance. The flagstone floor featured a carpet of dust and there were unpacked boxes everywhere, but the beds were perfectly made and the sheets felt expensive. The morning was cold as we drove back up the chasm, listening to the record made in the house, which from then on would always sound like cold and dust and terrible eggs to me, in the best way possible.

  PROGRESSIVE HOUSE

  As long as the electricity lasted, the house ran very smoothly and nobody got upset. Popular jargon was repeated, prompting a sound like laughter, and decisions were made by committee, without undue emotion. Nobody did anything unwise that they later regretted. Outside, the seasons continued their fade into each other until finally they were an indistinguishable whole.

  MOOR HOUSE

  We went to bed and about five minutes later we heard a loud slamming noise downstairs. I leapt from under the covers and ran downstairs to find the kitchen door open to the silent late summer night. I had checked the kitchen door was locked, even though we hadn’t used that kitchen door; we had used the other kitchen door. This kitchen door had definitely been locked, with a key turned on the inside. Now it was open. What it opened on to was a garden, a sloping field of messy geriatric August wild flowers and moorland: a space of around half a mile before you reached the neighbour’s house.

  The next day the air in the garden was thick and sparkly. Swallows and house martins dived under the eaves. We decided not to stay a third night. I didn’t tell my friend, who had been loaning the house to us, about the door. I felt it would have been somehow ungrateful. We didn’t talk about it until years later. By that time she had left the house. She said it had been creeping her out; her boyfriend particularly didn’t like the ghost of the old woman, dragging her leg along the upstairs corridor every night.

  VANISHED HOUSE

  After university Stephanie worked as an estate agent and it never felt right – not that she had ever expected it to. People thought being an estate agent made her a bad person, but what it actually made her was a person who was successfully paying off her student loan. She felt awful fleecing people – some of whom she grew to like – of cash, so she transferred from sales to lettings, until she realised that as a department this was arguably even more venal, with its intangible hidden fees, materialistic water-cooler car chat and dumbo snobbery. But she would always feel oddly grateful to the property world as, had she never been in it, she would never have recoiled from it in such a way that prompted her to boldly do something she had always really wanted to do, which was dye her hair blue and play the harp. Nobody paid her money for dyeing her hair blue, but eventually a small income began to emerge from her harp, which she played to old people and unwell people. She also sometimes walked over the back fields to the farm cottage where Mr Blackwood lived and played the harp for him, but she didn’t charge for that.

  One time Mr Blackwood, who was eighty-one, had to have stitches in his head after falling down the stairs. The stitches were blue. ‘Look!’ he said to Stephanie. ‘Just like yours. Does that mean I am alternative now and can join your gang?’

  It was fine carrying the harp over the fields to Mr Blackwood’s but she wouldn’t have liked to have to lug it any further than that. She rarely saw anyone else on the walk there or back. One day she was passing around a drumlin with a copse on top of it at the edge of one of the fields and was surprised to walk past a lady of about her age and height. They said hello to each other, shyly. The lady did not have blue hair or a harp, but her body language in greeting was similar to Stephanie’s: the same half-smile, the same left-leaning dip of the head. As the day went on Stephanie became more and more aware of just what an uncanny resemblance the woman had to herself. ‘I think I walked past me in a field earlier,’ she joked to her friend Kazza in the pub that Friday.

  Stephanie did take an interest in local history, but not a thorough or time-consuming one, so she didn’t know that the field behind the drumlin had been the site of a farmhouse until around the time of the Civil War. For the last century that it stood, villagers had avoided going near the farmhouse because of a story about a woman who had shut her sister in the house and set fire to it after a fight over a man. They said that after the sister burned to death, her bones had been interred in the walls of the house when it had been rebuilt, the smaller ones arranged to form runes, and her voice screamed down the chimney in agony every night. Apotropaic scratches and patterns were found on lintels and door frames by future tenants. People were surprised that it had been the fair sister, not the dark sister, who failed to get the man, then did the murdering.

  Some minor parts of the house’s structure remained to this day, but they had been pressed deeper into the ground over the years by weather and the hooves of sheep and five or six horses. All you could see now was grass and dandelions and dog’s mercury. In town a couple of the older folk in the less pretentious pubs remembered the story about the sisters, which they’d been told by their grandparents, with some details fabricated. It was still mentioned in a couple of the rowdier pubs, where you still heard accents, but there wasn’t much of that kind of talk in town. It was a gentle place now. Stephanie knew
the place had its drawbacks, but she had grown to like it more, partly for the very fact that she’d once gone away. It was just about right for her. It had a harp shop, but not a guitar shop, and she thought that said a lot about the kind of place it was.

  PARTY HOUSE

  The house looked extremely well kept and even sparkly in the estate agent’s photos, but when we moved in we gradually began to realise how rampantly it had been enjoyed by the previous owners. We felt a little like people who had bought quite a high-grade second-hand car without realising its previous driver had been a boy racer. Except it wasn’t just a car; it was our house. It was the main place we wanted to be, not just a machine we used to get to places we wanted to be.

  The kitchen sink was choked with fat and when the plumber took the pipes apart we struggled not to retch at the smell. The door to the downstairs toilet fell off its hinges, almost crushing Judith Lawless when she visited with a stepladder and cake. I moved an old shelving unit in the garage, to replace it with my newer shelving unit, where I liked to keep my tools, and discovered that somebody had drawn a bulbous cock on the wall behind it, with some semen coming out of it, but not a lot. We both thought the cock looked tired, maybe from weeks of non-stop hedonism and overexertion. When we opened drawers and cupboards in the house, our hands often stuck to them. We began to picture gatherings of thirty or forty people where syrup was prevalent, if not mandatory.

  In the garden, under a thin layer of fool’s compost, we found a space hopper, dozens of bricks, five bags of sand, half an old rusty barbecue and a bike. It wasn’t until a week or so in that we started finding the masks. We discovered seven in total, over the course of eleven years. We found them beneath the lining of drawers, in the crevices between kitchen units, behind the front panel of the boiler. One I found taped to the underside of the grate covering our septic tank when it got blocked and I had to open it up. It was soggy and faded, but I knew what it was. All the masks were the same: a black-and-white photocopied photograph of a man’s face, with the eyeholes poked out. The man had floppy, confident, shoulder-length hair and was grinning, but, without the eyes to back it up, it wasn’t a proper grin that you could trust.

  We told ourselves stories about the night of the masks: the moment when the man, whose birthday it was, had returned to the room, and his friends had all put the masks on and sung ‘Happy Birthday’ to him. He’d had to pretend to enjoy it, but hadn’t, at all. Later, when he’d passed out, his own eyeless face staring back down at him from the tallest leaves of an umbrella plant, the hiding had commenced, fuelled by a specific auxiliary creativity that comes only from drunkenness. Guests scattered to all points of the house. A couple who didn’t know the man well took a couple of masks home and one surprised the other by entering their bathroom naked save for the mask, which turned out to be one of the small final straws in the decline of their relationship.

  The man whose face was in the mask was an actor and I hadn’t heard of him at the time, but when he died many years later I recognised his face, even with its new eyes. They were surprisingly bright eyes, despite the fact that the photo the newspaper had used was from a sad time when he had been caught drunk driving and briefly vilified for it on social media. I suppose that might have been all relative, though. Even sad eyes look bright compared to no eyes. Only a couple of years before that, I’d received a message from the people who bought the house from us to say they’d found another one of the masks in the loft. They asked if it was important and I said it was and requested that they send it to me at the address I’d given them for all mail and other future correspondence.

  THE POOL

  Here they come, the Lankester brothers, bouncing along the woodland path, and it’s not like just any brothers you might see bouncing along a woodland path. It’s a spectacle. Nobody’s there to see it right at this moment, but it’s still a spectacle. If you witnessed a squirrel stop what it was doing to gawk, it would be totally understandable and not a cause for questions. Spring happened, properly, finally, just today, after weeks of rain, and few humans have ever looked as correct in spring’s rush as the Lankesters. Twenty and twenty-two. They seem a central part of the season’s ruddy health. Celandines, wood anemones, and the Lankesters. As they follow the river’s curve, their feet thump hard on tree roots and the very last of autumn’s leaf mulch. There are casualties, inevitably. Over the course of a mile and a half, five oil beetles perish. A money spider flees the shadow of one of Simon’s size-eleven trainers, only to run directly into Dylan’s path. It was ailing, already two legs short of a full set, and would have died by nightfall anyway. You don’t get abundant life like this without death. Any idiot knows that.

  How many humans achieve a smoothly functioning body, of popularly desirable dimensions, in adulthood? If you researched the matter and looked at the hard data honestly, you might find it stark. But right now the Lankesters appear to have done as well as anyone in the big genetic shake-up. They are tall, but not above the height where tallness can become awkward. Other men have been known to stop in their tracks and stare, coveting their hair density. Their beard lines are consistent, unpatchy. Their complexions speak of Duke of Edinburgh awards and adventurous gap years and nutritional awareness. There is no sense that either of these boys – and they are still boys, despite what they believe – could ever become stooped or waylaid by a paunch. In the last year, Simon, the eldest, has just begun to suffer very slightly from irritable bowel syndrome and become afflicted more noticeably with his dad’s crooked nose, but Dylan, an inch taller, when seen from a distance of anything more than a yard, appears to be a blemish-free and quirkless physical specimen. Looking at him, it’s possible to believe he doesn’t even have ancestors.

  Both brothers really own rooms when they walk into them. They are not presently about to walk into a room; they are about to walk into a small clearing beside an inlet of the river, where a shelf of granite extends over the water, and the sun, while largely blocked by foliage, shines down fiercely on the rock through one shaft of space between the oaks. But they are about to own that too. Michael, a person with a tendency to really rent a corner of a room when he walks into it, is the first to hear the voices of the Lankesters and, though he joins in when Ella and Rach hear them too and Rach shouts, ‘Yay! They’re here!’ and runs in their direction, his heart sinks a bit. For the last twenty minutes, he has had the girls’ undivided attention. Ella has been sitting behind him on the rock shelf, her legs straddling him, grooming his neck, picking at invisible abrasions and pimples in a way that has been surprisingly pleasant. Rach has been a captive audience while he has described the plot of the film script he is writing. The film is about a gangland killing and she has listened intently, not voicing her main thought, which is that Michael is possibly the person she has met least likely to have any inside knowledge about a gangland killing.

  ‘Oh my God. You would not fucking believe what just happened,’ says Dylan, placing his bag and the camcorder on the ground.

  ‘What?’ says Rach.

  ‘Seriously, man,’ adds Simon. ‘I don’t think you want to know.’

  ‘Come on – you can’t say that then not carry on,’ says Ella. She offers Simon an open bag of nuts. ‘What happened? These are addictive. They’ve got this spicy jalapeño covering. Once you start, that it’s. It’s all over. You’re fucked.’

  ‘Shall I tell them?’ says Dylan. ‘No, you tell them. You saw the guy first. You were the one who filmed it.’

  ‘OK,’ says Simon. ‘So Dylan already went in the river …’

  ‘What?’ says Ella. ‘We haven’t been in yet! We were waiting here patiently for you. That’s not fair.’

  ‘Not fair at all,’ mumbles Michael into his espadrille. He is the kind of person who rarely feels listened to by the world, which has the effect of making his voice lower, compounding the problem. People are always finding bits of lint on his face and picking them off, just as he’s telling them something that really matters to him.r />
  ‘I just went in once,’ says Dylan. ‘It’s no big deal. And it doesn’t really count.’

  ‘We went up Parsley Hill, the other way, down by Brick Kiln Lane,’ says Simon. ‘That’s why we’re late. I was just driving past there the other day and remembered those stairs that Johnno hammered into the tree trunk. Remember? About five years ago? No. You weren’t here then. But you remember, Michael, right? Anyway, we walked up that way, and guess what, they’re still there! So Dylan climbed up to the top branch, and I started filming it. You have to get the jump just right and hit this bit where it’s really deep, otherwise you’re buggered. Anyway, I’m still filming and then I spot something in the field on the other side of the river—’

  ‘You will not fucking believe this, right.’

  ‘Am I telling the story, or are you? So there’s this field over there. You know? It’s like this little nature-farm-type thing, and they have these weird sheep with massive horns that look like the bounty hunters in Return of the Jedi, and these tiny pigs. And, like about five or six goats, too, small ones.’

  ‘Oh, goats are weird. I don’t like their eyes.’

  ‘Well, some people do. A lot. I mean, really a lot.’

  ‘What are you on about?’

  ‘So I’m filming Dylan in the water and then I see over in the field there’s this goat, and there’s this guy just sitting behind it. And I thought, “That’s fucking weird. Why would you just sit behind a goat?” So I zoom in.’

  ‘You would never fucking believe what he was doing.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He was having a wank. Stretching the meat. Totally pulling himself off, right there.’

  ‘Eeeeeugh.’