by Alex Bell
Then a hand clamped down on my shoulder, fingers pressing into my skin, and I thought it was Dad and I jerked away from his touch out of instinct, my heel crunching on the broken glass on the floor.
“Don’t!” I raised my arm to try to protect my face from the force of the blow. Only it wasn’t Dad standing in front of me, of course, it was Sam, because I was still at the Seagull, wasn’t I? It felt more like a dream, perhaps I was asleep, perhaps my shift had finished hours ago and now I was in bed and having some kind of weird nightmare…
I wasn’t sure, I couldn’t think properly, I couldn’t remember what I was supposed to be doing.
But I must be asleep after all because I was lying down, definitely lying down, in bed.
Except the bed felt a lot harder than usual and someone was saying my name and I knew I had to open my eyes and find out what was happening because it might be Shell and she might be in trouble.
I struggled back up to wakefulness and then the hands came, and it felt like they were crawling all over me. There was one on my arm, another on my shoulder, another on my leg, and I knew that, at any moment, those hands could turn into fists that would punch and pummel and thump, hammer and hit and beat—
I got control of my limbs back, finally, and jerked upright, pushing the hands away before they could punch me in the face, or break my nose, or knock out a tooth.
“Jem, mate, you’re OK,” someone said, and I realized I was on the floor of the Seagull and that there were several people clustered around me, but the first person I saw was Emma, and she looked pissed off for some reason.
“Looks like I got here just in time,” she said, leaning forward a little in her wheelchair with a grim expression on her face. “Jem Penhale,” she said, “you are going to tell me everything.”
Chapter Fifteen
Emma
Luckily, the owner of the Seagull saw what happened and came straight over to tell Jem that he definitely could not go straight back to clearing tables and that he should go and rest in the kitchen and eat something. No arguments.
“I’ll wait for you in the lounge,” I said. “Come and find me once you’re done.”
The lounge was deserted by then and Bailey and I settled down by the log fire that was popping and spitting in the grate. Jem appeared soon afterwards, slouching sheepishly with his hands in his pockets. I was relieved to see that he looked a little better – at least a bit of colour had come into his face and he wasn’t pale as death, like he’d been most of the evening.
“This is so embarrassing,” he began. “But I really am fine. I think it was probably just—”
I shushed him. “Sit there,” I said, pointing at the armchair next to me. He did as he was told and I was pleased that I hadn’t forgotten how to use my bossy voice. I pointed a finger at him. “You lied to me earlier,” I said. “When I asked if you were all right.”
“I am all right!” he protested.
“Stop fibbing. I always could tell when you were fibbing. Come here a second.”
“What for?”
“Just do it, Jem.”
He sighed and leaned forwards. I threw my arms around him and hugged him tight. After a moment, Jem returned the hug and I rested my head against his shoulder. “I wanted to do this before,” I said, “at the Waterwitch. But everything felt weird between us so I didn’t.” I drew back, looked into his face and said, “I know we haven’t seen each other for a long time, but I’m still your friend. Tell me what’s going on. When I said something to Gran about you being the caretaker at the Waterwitch she was horrified. She told me that you asked but she said no.”
Jem gave me a startled look. “She did say no to begin with, but then she changed her mind. The keys arrived the next day in the post. She must have thought about it and decided to give me the job after all.”
“Gran sent you the keys in the post?” I asked. “Did she put a note in there or anything to say why she’d changed her mind?”
“No, it was just the keys. They arrived just over a week ago, in an envelope addressed to me.”
“But Gran gave me her keys when I went to see her yesterday,” I said. “She told me they were the only ones – that the spare set got lost.”
“She isn’t very well, Emma. I think she’s getting confused about things. I mean, she must have sent me the keys. Who else would have?”
I said nothing for a minute. Gran certainly had seemed confused today. Perhaps she had just forgotten, like she’d forgotten that Mum hadn’t come with me to visit her.
“I tried to phone her a couple of times,” Jem said, “to say thank you and to sort out how I’m going to be paid and stuff. But every time I called the hospice they told me she doesn’t want to take any phone calls. I was going to go down there and visit her but I’m not sure that’s such a good idea any more. I don’t want to somehow give away that Shell and I are staying at the Waterwitch.”
“The Waterwitch? You mean you’ve left home?”
“We had to. Dad broke Shell’s arm,” he said. “She told the doctors that she fell down the stairs and they believed her. I couldn’t let her go back after that. And now Shell is… Where do I start? Do you remember how she used to have those imaginary birds?”
I nodded slowly.
“Well, it’s getting worse. The birds are a constant thing with her. She really believes she can see them. It all started the day Mum killed herself. When I found them in the garden there were all these birds on the branches of the apple tree, and Shell had been sitting out there by herself for God knows how long, and I think it scarred some part of her brain. And, before Mum died, she was always filling up Shell’s head with all this nonsense about how her family came from a long line of Cornish witches.
“This is the second week we’ve been at the Waterwitch, and the first one wasn’t so bad because she was going to school. But now it’s half-term, and there’s been work at the restaurant so I haven’t been there as much. She just wanders around the inn all day and I guess all the ghost stories about the place are getting to her. She’s seeing things, hearing things.” He put his head in his hands suddenly. “I know she needs help but no one understands her like I do. I can’t risk her being taken away. If I go to the authorities then that’s what will happen. They’ll take her and they won’t know how to look after her.”
“So what’s your plan, then?” I asked.
Jem looked up. His green eye still caught me by surprise. “I’ll be eighteen soon,” he said. “I can look after her. I just need to save up enough money for a deposit before we move out of the Waterwitch.”
“Shell’s always been a bit different,” I said. “And all that crap with your dad probably made it worse. Now that it’s just the two of you, she’ll get used to feeling more safe and then maybe she can relax a bit more. She just needs time, that’s all.”
“I hope you’re right,” Jem replied.
“So that must have been Shell’s candle I saw in the window of the Waterwitch last night? And her footsteps I heard upstairs. It was like an ice box in there. I suppose you don’t want to light a fire because people will notice the smoke?”
“No one can know we’re there,” Jem said. “It was hard enough to convince your gran to let me come in a couple of times a month to check the place over. She’d never agree to us living there.”
“OK, here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to move into the Waterwitch with Bailey. It’s my grandmother’s inn – no one will think it’s weird that I’m staying there – and that way I can keep Shell company during half-term and you can light the fires and not freeze to death.”
“Would you really do that?” Jem asked.
“Of course,” I said. “I’ll come over there tomorrow.”
“That would … that would be a massive help,” Jem said. “Thanks, Em. Really.”
“You don’t need to thank me. I’d love to see Shell again anyway.”
“I know she’d love to see you. And if she’s not there all b
y herself then perhaps her imagination won’t run riot any more. It’s a lot easier to imagine things when you’re alone in the dark.”
Chapter Sixteen
Jem
I said goodnight to Emma and headed home. As soon as I stepped out of the Seagull, I saw that there was a light on in one of the rooms on the top floor of the Waterwitch. That single gold rectangle was painfully bright against the dark façade of the building and I groaned aloud. Shell seemed to find it completely impossible to remember that she mustn’t go around turning on lights at night. Still, at least that wouldn’t matter any more when Emma came to stay with us tomorrow.
I let myself in through the back entrance, went upstairs to the bathroom and locked the door. Had I actually just fainted at the Seagull? In front of everyone? In front of Emma? I pinched the bridge of my nose. This really was not the way I wanted her to see me at all.
Emma had been my one true friend at school, the only one who had stuck by me through everything – Dad’s drinking, Mum’s suicide, all the gossip that came afterwards. The Penhales were a rotten bunch, everybody said so, everybody knew they were trouble and that you stayed away from them. If a supply teacher ever took our class, the moment they discovered my second name they would watch me, waiting for me to disgrace myself somehow – perhaps by stabbing another child in the eye with a pair of scissors, or flushing the pet hamster down the toilet, or setting the building on fire.
It was different with Emma. She didn’t seem to care that I was a Penhale. She didn’t see me that way at all. After we became friends, it became a bit easier with some of the other kids, and we even became friends with a boy called Ben, who joined our group and made us into a threesome for a while. The whole time I was at school I only had a friend round to my house to play once. It was before Mum died, when I was about seven years old. I wanted to invite Emma but Mum said that Dad would be more likely to agree to it if I asked a boy, so I asked Ben. We played in the garden and Mum made us fish fingers for tea. It was nice. It was normal.
Until Dad got home from work. We all knew the moment he arrived because he slammed the front door so hard that the walls shook. Ben jumped in his seat and dropped his fork. I remember crossing my fingers and trying to cross my toes inside my slippers, hoping and hoping that Dad wouldn’t shout while Ben was here, that he would wait until my friend had gone home.
But Dad didn’t care that Ben was there. He’d just picked Shell up from her friend’s house and there’d been some upset when the other girl wouldn’t believe Shell about being a witch. The friend’s mother had had a word with Dad about it and now he was livid, like he always was whenever the subject of witchcraft came up in our house.
“Do you want us to be the laughing stock of the whole town?” he screamed.
Ben was staring at him open-mouthed and I remember thinking, God, don’t stare, don’t make eye contact, don’t draw attention.
But Dad wasn’t interested in us just then. He grabbed Mum by the hair – it was always her hair; never her arm or her hand. She’d plaited it with some of her favourite flowers – bird’s-foot trefoil with their bright, butter-yellow petals – but the flowers fell loose as he dragged her out of the room. I remember staring at them on the floor as Ben and I listened in silence to the sound of Dad slapping her in the living room.
Three times.
Slap.
Slap.
Slap.
The most terrible sound in the whole world.
“I don’t care if you really believe all that witchcraft crap, just keep your mouth shut around the kids, you stupid bitch,” Dad said – quietly this time – but we still heard him from the kitchen and his quiet voice was just as bad as his shouting one, the soft words echoing over and over again inside my head as I sat there at the kitchen table.
Stupid bitch.
Stupid bitch.
Stupid bitch.
How could he speak to her like that?
I looked up and saw that Ben was watching me with a mixture of horror and fascination, like I was some awful bug that had crawled out from underneath a rock.
Mum came back into the kitchen a moment later. There were no flowers in her hair any more but she tried to disguise the fact that she’d been crying as she said in her fake-cheerful voice that it was time for her to take Ben home.
When we got to his house, the car had barely stopped moving before he was leaping out of it and running up the front drive without a backward glance. I didn’t blame him, but I wished I’d never invited him round for tea.
Mum sighed and rested her hand gently on my knee. “I’m sorry, Jem,” she said.
I knew she meant it, that she really was sorry, and it made me feel sick that Dad had hit her again and that I hadn’t even tried to help. But, still, in that moment, I hated Mum a little bit, too, for doing and saying the things she must surely have known were guaranteed to make Dad go berserk. She shouldn’t have told Shell she was a witch, she should never have mentioned witchcraft at all. I couldn’t forget that look I’d seen on Ben’s face – that disgust mixed with fear. As the car pulled away I stared out of the window at Ben’s cosy-looking home and wished I was in there with him, wished I never had to go back to my own house again.
The next day, the whole school knew about what had happened. Kids kept running up to me, laughing and teasing me about Mum being a witch and Dad being a criminal.
“He’s not a criminal!” I said, even though I had no idea why I was defending him.
Ben avoided me all morning, moving right over to the other side of the classroom. Every time I looked at him, he was whispering to other kids, and looking over at me. And sniggering.
It was the sniggering that hurt the most. It wasn’t funny to me – in fact there was nothing in the entire world that was less funny than Dad in one of his rages – but maybe it was something you could laugh at when you didn’t have to live with it.
“What’s wrong with Ben?” Emma had asked. She was sitting next to me, helping me paint a giant picture of a car.
“I don’t think we’re friends any more,” I replied, before grabbing a paintbrush and bending over the painting so that I wouldn’t have to look her in the eye.
I knew that Ben would tell Emma about what had happened and then I’d lose her, too. Sure enough, at break time, he came over to where the two of us were sitting on the grass and said he wanted to talk to Emma. Alone.
Emma gave me a puzzled look but she got up and walked over to the other side of the playground with him. I watched him talking to her, helpless to stop it. Emma would find out what had happened and then she probably wouldn’t want to be friends with me, either.
But then, to my astonishment, Emma suddenly lifted both hands and shoved Ben so hard in the middle of his chest that he fell straight down, skinning his elbow on the ground.
“You’re a rubbish friend,” she shouted. “I never liked you anyway! You’re mean!”
Seeing the blood on his elbow, Ben instantly burst into tears and a teacher soon came running over to help him up and scold Emma. I couldn’t hear what they were saying but I saw Emma cross her arms over her chest, stony-faced, and shake her head and I guessed that she was refusing to apologize.
Finally, the teacher took Ben, still crying, inside, and Emma came over to throw herself back down on the grass beside me.
“We’re not friends with Ben any more,” she announced.
“Was he telling you about last night at my house?” I said.
She nodded.
“It’s true,” I whispered. “Dad went crazy again.”
“So what? I’m never speaking to him again. I like it better when it’s just us.” She threw her arms around me and said, “You’re my most favourite friend, anyway. My best friend.”
I gripped the sink and stared into the bathroom mirror and my green eye seemed like it belonged to someone else – even after all these years I hadn’t really got used to it, still didn’t expect to see it there in the glass – and I couldn’t b
elieve, I just couldn’t believe that I had made such an idiot of myself in front of Emma tonight.
But staring despairingly into the mirror wasn’t going to help with that so I finally picked up my toothbrush to clean my teeth. I was just reaching to turn the tap off afterwards when I froze.
For a moment – for just this one crazy moment – it looked like there were faces in the water swirling around the bottom of the sink. Faces that gurgled and spluttered down the plughole, carried away into the drains.
God, what was the matter with me? For a while back there at the Seagull, I really hadn’t known where I was or what I was supposed to be doing. Now I was seeing faces in the sink. Perhaps Shell wasn’t the only one who was cracking up. Perhaps it was happening to both of us, only I just couldn’t recognize it in myself.
It was definitely a good thing that Emma was coming tomorrow. With her around, things could only get easier.
Chapter Seventeen
Shell
I went to bed after Jem arrived home from the Seagull but, just a few hours later, I was woken by a noise from downstairs. I got up and went straight next door to Jem’s room to tell him there was someone in the inn with us, but his bed was empty and didn’t look like it had been slept in at all. It must have been him who’d made that noise. Wondering what he was doing up in the middle of the night, I went down to the restaurant and instantly saw light spilling out from the open kitchen doorway.
I walked past the empty tables and into the kitchen. For a confused moment I thought it was full of sea mist, but then I realized it was actually steam. The bright neon strip lights above were switched on and I saw Jem, standing at the far side of the kitchen with his back to me. He was fiddling with one of the kitchen appliances – one of the big gleaming metal ones that hadn’t been turned on since the Waterwitch closed down.
“You scared me,” I said, wondering how long he had been here. “What are you doing?”