Help the Witch

by Tom Cox

  Helen’s breath caught. To her it felt sharp, almost like a shout, and she was surprised to find Rob still asleep beside her, the heat of his breath on her forearm. It was as if she assumed that he knew her so well that the turmoil in her mind would have woken him. She read the last entry again. Then she read on.

  3 May, 1984

  We sat on the clifftop at sunset tonight and it was beautiful. A night like this makes me want to paint the whole world. Found some lovely fabric at the market in Wadebridge on Saturday. I think I will make a dress from it.

  7 May, 1984

  John is ill. I will try to visit him tomorrow, and bring some shopping. Must get food for Henry too. Probably just offcuts from butcher.

  9 May, 1984

  For a friend who is imaginary – that is, if he is imaginary – Helen’s boy pal is very detailed. She said he is tall and has dark hair and that he is nicer than the boys at school, who always tease her. She said when he grows up he is going to be ever so tall – taller than her dad, or Mr Watkinson at the post office. She brought back a stick, which had a sharp, whittled end. She said he whittled it for her and his name is Peter. I took it off her and told her it’s too sharp to play with. I also told her that she mustn’t go near the well, but she said she doesn’t anyway, because Peter doesn’t like it. ‘How long have you known him?’ I asked her. ‘For always,’ she said. ‘But he wouldn’t let me talk to him when I was too little.’

  17 May, 1984

  Brown water coming out of the taps again. Apparently about a third of the village has it, not just us. Helen nagging me to read to her again. Always wanting more. I like it too, it’s such a pleasure to have a daughter who is so enthusiastic about stories and learning, but I could barely keep my eyes open.

  18 May, 1984

  Helen came in with the bottom of her dress ruined. She said she and Peter had crawled through a hole that led to a stone where King Arthur’s sword is and that he killed a dragon, and that Peter has a sword of his own, which is just as good. I think she has some of her information garbled. Must get her a pair of new trousers. Also need my shoes reheeling. Down to just one pair now, as others got ruined in the mud. Car needs MOT this week. It all comes at once.

  21 May, 1984

  Derek our postman must be at least sixty, probably older, but he still has an entirely full head of hair. I doubt he has lost one strand. We want to congratulate men when we see this, but why? It’s not like it involved any special effort on their part.

  29 May, 1984

  I am bored. Today I did something I have never done before: I went into the village pub. I didn’t even want a drink. I recognised a couple of faces in there, nobody by name. Everyone looked around as I walked in. A whoosh of air. I thought that only happened in stories and films. Bob the landlord knew my name, and where I lived. It’s not surprising: if you’re a single mother in a village this size, you don’t get away with anonymity. He seemed nice enough. ‘You’re next to the old Arnold place, aren’t you?’ I said I was, and talked about what a lovely kind lady Florence had been. He said he’d heard the family were selling it too, and he hoped that whoever moved in didn’t get put off by the history. I asked him what history. He said the drowning. I asked him what drowning. He said the boy who’d fallen in the well. It was a long time ago now. Back in the early fifties. The dad made tables. The woodyard had been his, once. Personally, that kind of thing wouldn’t bother him, when buying a house, but he knew it put some people off.

  8 July, 1984

  I don’t want to be here any more. It is so dark. It’s July, for God’s sake! Where is the light? I am keeping Helen in more (I say that like she is a dog). She is fidgety and upset.

  * * *

  After this, there was a four-month gap, and no more references to the dark house. Alice talked about her new teaching job, her garden, recipes, Helen’s first few days at her new school in Launceston. Her tone was different, less frustrated. Helen read each of the previous nine entries again, then again, then again. Each time, she felt that if she read hard enough, she might find some new clarification, an extra detail.

  She got up and went to the bathroom, had a piss, brushed her teeth. A grey streak had emerged over the last six months, in her fringe. Rob said it made him fancy her even more and had given her a new nickname as a result: the Sex Badger. She did not dislike the nickname as much as she pretended to. She remembered she’d left the heating on, went downstairs to turn it off. The curtains were open and the vast night stared back in at her. It took a while to grow accustomed to the sounds a house made at night and she was almost there.

  A shift was taking place. There was stuff you couldn’t hold on to that you hoped you might. Friends from the other side of the country were falling away, not always intentionally. Life was rearranging its furniture and settling into a new rhythm. By the anniversary of Alice’s death, Helen had settled into a new role, working for a charitable arts foundation, based at a country house. It was a longish, worthwhile commute. Rob was retraining under a fairly well-known chef: an author, formerly the presenter of a now nearly forgotten TV show. They saw each other less, planned their time more carefully. After taking flowers to Alice, Helen thought about the unrealistic ways that death is packaged. Beneath the graves you could see in the churchyard, there were countless others, long forgotten: so many that it had changed the actual height of the ground. People bought into the unscientific idea that the troubled souls came back in spirit, and when they did, those people then expressed a scientific-seeming certainty that these souls were always frozen in the age they were at the time of death. Who wasn’t troubled? Or maybe there was a line between A Bit Troubled, and Truly Troubled? Who decided where it fell? Who adjudicated crowd control in the afterlife? There was a notice in the church foyer about bat conservation, explaining to people that bats were not actually evil. Who had originally decided that bats were on the side of the bad guys? Where was the hard evidence?

  The route from the church to home went past the site of Alice’s crash. Helen had not been able to drive that bit of road for over six months, and had sought out alternative routes, but now she took the direct route. Seven loose hens pecked about at the crossroads, near an old stone cross, on the site of an older stone cross. She slowed to a crawl as she turned into the drive, remembering the deep rut at the start of it and the increasingly brittle state of her car. Rob was out. He was always out, nowadays.

  The house’s walls were thick, but when she was inside, the growing wind of the evening felt like it was in there with her. She lit a fire and tried to hurry the flames along with Alice’s old bellows. She drew the blinds in the conservatory at the rear of the house, but always kept the curtains open on the other side, which looked out on to the mile of fields before the ocean. At the point where the first field ended there was a line of young trees. From this distance, in the final moments of dusk, they looked like thin nervous men, uncertain about adulthood, but if you went out to check you would discover that they were definitely just trees.

  FOLK TALES OF THE TWENTY-THIRD CENTURY

  OLD KING IDIOT AND HIS GOOSE

  It had been aeons since the country had experienced a genuine simpleton as its sovereign, so when Old King Idiot took over, he was a great talking point among the population. ‘Old King Idiot/Old King Idiot/Got a goose in his bed and a chapatti on his head,’ went the popular playground rhyme of the time, stemming from the rumour that Old King Idiot wore a variety of Indian breads as hats. ‘There goes Old King Idiot and his goose,’ the royal staff would chuckle to themselves, as Old King Idiot was seen strolling through the elaborate palace gardens, talking to his goose who, for some reason known only to him, he referred to alternately as ‘Colin’ and ‘Anna-Marie’.

  Old King Idiot might have been the official ruler of the country, but he was rarely trusted with anything important, and mostly just stayed at home while his cousins went about the real business of overseeing state affairs and fighting wars. His ascension to the throne was g
enerally thought of as an unfortunate accident, due to three of his siblings perishing – along with two thirds of the rest of England – in the second and most devastating of the Red Plagues. For the monarchy, it could be best viewed as a temporary blip, and it was just a matter of getting by as best they could. After all, Old King Idiot was very old and would die soon, as would his goose, who now had a noticeable limp. But little known to his family and the general public, Old King Idiot was not an idiot at all; he was an extremely shrewd and learned man: the most shrewd and learned, in fact, that the monarchy had seen at its helm for centuries. His outward asininity was just a facade to enable him to avoid all the royal duties he would have hated, such as posing for media photo shoots and opening malls. While his brothers and sisters and cousins did bullshit stuff like that, he had time to read books and hang around with his transgender goose, who was also brighter than any of the king’s relatives. It was a very nice life. Nice, that is, until the dawn of the Great War with America, when the life of everyone on the island – including King Idiot himself – became irrevocably threatened.

  For two years the war raged, and it seemed that the United Kingdom would have to surrender, finally becoming America’s fifty-first state, after so many brave decades of resistance. As the USA’s great robot longboats encroached on the shore of Cornwall, the king’s family gathered for an emergency meeting in the palace’s Great Hall, but it seemed all was lost. Then, from a dark corner, an old croaky voice piped up. It was Old King Idiot.

  ‘Might I make a suggestion?’ he said.

  ‘Shut up, Old King Idiot,’ said Zirius, the most arrogant and square-jawed of the king’s fourteen arrogant, square-jawed cousins. ‘Nobody wants to hear from you. Go and play with your goose.’

  ‘No,’ said his slightly kinder niece, Delawney. ‘Let him speak. It will probably be just some surreal nonsense about leavened bread as usual, but we’ve tried everything here, so how can it hurt? Let’s see what the old crazy prat has to say.’

  What Old King Idiot said next amazed everyone. His words were precise, clear and erudite: the result of years of quiet learning, done well away from the spotlight. King Idiot read widely, and, having exhausted much of the rest of the library in the catacombs below the palace, he had over the last few years boned up extensively on robot warfare, and learned the codes needed to crack it. With his knowledge, the United Kingdom’s cyborg seal army was able to use the correct binary to thwart the American robot longboats. The nation was saved and went on to live many prosperous years under Old King Idiot, who died at the grand old age of 141, just one day after Colin/Anna-Marie. So was coined the popular saying ‘Never underestimate Old King Idiot, or his goose’, which is still used to this day in a wide variety of metaphoric scenarios.

  BIG LEV AND THE ORIGIN OF ‘UNLUCKY THIRTEEN’

  It was long into the time of the Self-Righteous Men, and England was divided: not by north and south, as it once had been, but by west and east. In the east, electricity remained, for the moment, and the greedy and dynastically entitled lived well, as they always had, but more so. In the rewilded west, weeds and trees burst through tarmac, and vigilantes roamed back and forth across the wood border, picking off rich travellers with the organic arrows from their organic crossbows, then taking back their spoils to large forest communes and distributing them under the eyes of fox and badger effigies. With the new hunting laws, any man pledging allegiance to Commander Michael under the eyes of God was permitted to hunt any creature, anywhere in England.

  One day, a party of seven young, wealthy graduates set off beyond the border to the Moorlands, scoffing at the dangers they had been warned about, as naive men who have never known suffering or hardship are wont to do. ‘We will stay in this wild land until we have caught thirteen brown hares,’ announced their leader, Godfrey. He had heard the legend of Big Lev, the giant hare who roamed the high moor, but had dismissed it as hokum put about by the pagans and tree fuckers of the New West. And, just as he expected, the first few days of the expedition went smoothly. The pagan highwaymen they had been warned about were nowhere to be seen. As for Big Lev, in their minds he was clearly nothing more than a fable straight from the overactive imaginations of the useless poor. After two days, a dozen hares had been neatly shot and roasted, Godfrey and his party posing with their carcasses and taking images of themselves using the magic boxes on sticks that were still prevalent in the east to send back to their wives and elders. He knew his father, Godfrey Senior III, would be proud of him.

  On the third day, the weather altered violently and quickly, as it often can on the Moorlands. Sleet and hail rat-a-tatted on the anorak hoods of the hunters so fiercely that they could not hear each other speak. A wind from the icy security gates of North Hell growled down over the high stones on the moor and screamed pisswords at the hunters’ chattering teeth.

  ‘Can we go now?’ asked Othelbert, the shortest and least entitled member of the party, as they struggled to set up their motorhomes following a fruitless third day. ‘What’s the difference between twelve and thirteen hares, anyway?’

  Godfrey turned on him with eyes of smarmy purple fire. ‘I set out to slaughter and cook thirteen hares, and, by Christ’s Chin, thirteen is the number of hares I will slaughter and cook!’

  Another day of devil’s weather followed, with scant prey in sight. Even the one creature at which Godfrey got a clean shot, an adder, slithered away effortlessly into a hole. Coming over the brow of one of the Moorlands’ highest points, Hangman’s Tor, on exhausted horses, the men were surprised by a very sharp and sudden incline, and barrelled and zigzagged down it, horses slipping in the fresh mud. Riders and horses hurtled and skidded down the hill, some men holding on for dear life, some dislodged to roll on the peaty ground, clipped and clouted by rocks on their descent. When they finally came to rest, they found they were surrounded by several witches in dark green gowns: exactly as many, in fact, as they numbered men. The witches were gathered around a cauldron, which, in the maelstrom, had been turned on its side. Dark green juice bubbled out of it, onto the tight mossy ground.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Othelbert, pathetically. ‘We didn’t mean to.’

  ‘It was foretold, and you have arrived exactly on time,’ replied the head witch, although she was really just the witch who was best at public speaking, rather than the head witch in any official capacity, since the witches tended to think of themselves as a democracy.

  ‘We really are very sorry,’ said Othelbert.

  ‘It was foretold, and you have arrived exactly on time,’ repeated the witch with the great public-speaking skills.

  ‘Don’t apologise,’ said Godfrey. ‘They’re the ones who should be apologising to us. Look at them, wretched hags.’

  But Othelbert was not listening to him, and neither were the rest of Godfrey’s men; they were too busy watching a giant, long-eared form materialise from the green steam where the upturned cauldron lay, becoming clearer and clearer, more brown, and more towering.

  ‘Hi everyone! How you doing?’ asked Big Lev, as he became corporeal. ‘I’m Big Lev!’ And with that, he bit each of the hunters’ heads off, spat them out, and turned them into stones.

  You can still see the giant stones now if you are travelling the north moor. If you look closely, you will notice that the fine cracks that time has wrought on each stone resemble faces. Their expressions have been said to sum up ‘the exact moment where smugness turns into excruciating agony’.

  THE MINSTREL AND THE MAGIC SNOW

  Once, long before the Great Dark Era that ruptured civilisation, there was a young, awkward man who liked to play his banjo. He played his banjo everywhere he could: at home, high on wild forsaken hills, and in less reputable local taverns. His family encouraged his banjo playing, but none of them could tell him the truth, which was that it sucked in a fairly major way. They knew the man could never work in a conventional office or retail job, as he was too dreamy and impractical, so they figured that at least it was
a way of keeping him from the traditional nefarious pursuits of the idle young. He seemed happy, which most people on the border between youth and adulthood weren’t, what with the vain and troubling excesses of the electrical era. But with age often comes self-awareness, and one day, when playing his banjo to a raven on his favourite coastal path, and watching the raven fly away in apparent discomfort, an epiphany hit the man.

  ‘Oh woe,’ he said to himself. ‘I am not the musician I think I am. I am a deluded, untalented fool and I am never going to earn a living playing my banjo.’

  Then, curling up in a ball, right there in the middle of the path, he began to rock and weep in a gentle way. The sound he made was not particularly loud but it was nonetheless pathetic to hear, coming from a youth legally old enough to drink mead and ride a tractor, and even the gulls on the cliffs nearby seemed to cringe.

  The man rocked and wept in a ball for seven days and seven nights. When he opened his eyes, he looked above him, and there, surprisingly, was the raven that had flown away in fright earlier. It was perched on the arm of a very old, looming man, with a long white beard and a cape. The young banjo player couldn’t help also noticing that the clifftops were covered in snow, which was odd, since snow never settled in this region, due to the salty air and mild, damp climate.

  ‘I heard you playing your banjo last week,’ said the old man with the long white beard. ‘It wasn’t the kind of music I personally enjoy, to be honest, but I heard some potential there. Also, you fit into what we’re looking for right now.’