The Affair of the Mysterious Letter

by Alexis Hall

  Having returned both literally and figuratively to earth, and reassured myself that my limbs and vital organs were relatively intact, my thoughts turned to the unacceptably shambolic figures we would cut as we entered Vedunia. We were both soaked to the skin, my doublet was torn in a dozen places, my hat was missing, I’d lost a buckle from one shoe and the entirety of the other, and my stockings were more run than they had any business being in public. Ms. Haas’s attire, being altogether composed of more durable materials, had fared rather better, although she herself had not. She lay worryingly still, her hair matted, her fingertips charred, and blood running freely from a gash on her forehead. But she was, at least, breathing.

  Finding myself unable to rouse her, and leery of the dangers inherent in leaving an unconscious woman alone in a foreign woodland, I took the rather uncomfortable and not altogether seemly decision to carry Ms. Haas to Vedunia. This proved less difficult than I had anticipated; I had some experience of lifting fallen comrades, and Ms. Haas, though taller than I, was lighter than she appeared, as I should perhaps have expected, given that she subsisted on a diet of oysters and laudanum.

  I had some sense of the way to Vedunia and it did not take me too long to emerge from the forest onto the road. There I turned and walked towards the city in the hopes that I would soon pass some kind traveller who could assist me in conveying my friend to a place where we might find help. I had not gone very far at all when I heard hoofbeats behind me. And, standing aside to avoid making a nuisance of myself, soon I observed the approach of a low cart, drawn by a donkey and driven by a hunched old woman in a cloak. Setting Ms. Haas down, I attempted to attract the traveller’s attention, a relatively simple matter, considering our current predicament.

  She came to a stop beside us and eyed me speculatively from beneath her hood. “How can Granny help you, dearie?”

  Her voice was peculiar in two ways. Firstly, it was possessed of an unnatural shrillness that made even the kindest of sentiments feel sinister. Secondly, she spoke in flawless Eyan. Despite these uncanny nuances, my circumstance was one of begging rather than choosing.

  “My companion is injured,” I said. “And I would be most grateful if you were to provide us with passage to town and directions both to a reputable apothecary and to somewhere we can rest.”

  “Come up beside me.” The old woman shuffled over and patted the seat next to her. “Whatever your heart desires, Granny will see you right.”

  I was beginning to suspect that this stranger would pose more problems than she would solve. “Madam, if I might ask, would you by any chance happen to be a witch?”

  She grinned, displaying an impressive snaggletooth. “What cynical times we live in. I am but a harmless old woman on my way to market to sell a few simple herbs and trinkets.”

  I was not sure if the lady’s intent was to confirm or allay my suspicions, but ultimately it made no matter. I lifted Ms. Haas again and transferred her as gently as I was able into the back of the cart. Not wishing to give this clearly untrustworthy person any opportunity to drive away with my insensible companion, I immediately hauled myself in as well, settling down against a bale of straw.

  The witch turned in her seat and gave me a wounded look. “Why so nervous, dearie? Poor Granny means no harm to you or your pretty compan—oh.” She paused, staring at Ms. Haas, and then went on in quite a different tone. “Who are you and why are you travelling with Shaharazad Haas?”

  “My name is John Wyndham. Ms. Haas and I live together and are presently engaged on business of some urgency in Vedunia.”

  “And why is she unconscious?”

  Once again, I was in the difficult position of wishing neither to lie nor to inadvertently give away information that might endanger others. “We fell from the sky.”

  “How like her.” Then, before I could stay her, the witch snatched a handful of blackish powder from a nearby basket and cast it into Ms. Haas’s face. “Shaharazad. Wake up, Shaharazad. Granny’s got a bone to pick with you.”

  My companion’s eyes flickered open. “Is that you, Liesl?” she murmured, still sounding somewhat fatigued. “I thought I’d killed you.”

  That made the old woman cackle. “Don’t be silly, dearie. If I died every time a teenage girl stole my books, cut off my head, and set my cottage on fire, I’d have been gone centuries ago. It was very unimaginative of you. I hope you’ve done better since.”

  “I’m lying in a cart full of dung because my nauseatingly soft-hearted housemate convinced me to rescue a fishmonger from a vampire.” She flung an arm across her forehead. “I’ve done magnificently.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Well now,” said the old woman finally. “Isn’t it lucky Granny found you?”

  Ms. Haas twitched her fingers wearily. “That rather depends on whether you’re going to make another attempt to carve my still-beating heart out of my chest and eat it in front of me.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself, Shaharazad. You’re not the succulent young thing you once were.”

  I cleared my throat politely. “If you could just take us to Vedunia, that would be more than amply helpful.”

  “You, on the other hand”—Granny’s glittering eyes alighted on me—“would make an excellent filling for a pie. So sweet and tender.”

  “That’s terribly gratifying, but we really do need to get to Vedunia as soon as possible.”

  “Actually,” Ms. Haas observed, “we likely have several hours before the train departs. Which is fortunate because I am not feeling quite myself. Besides, we have little hope of infiltrating the Austral Express looking like the last survivors of Sarnath.”

  Granny reached down and raked her fingernails through Ms. Haas’s hair in a gesture that seemed strangely affectionate. “Not yourself? Why, Granny is just a simple old woman who lives in the woods and even she can see that you have a concussion, at least two cracked ribs, and a broken leg. To say nothing of the storm-shredded tatters you seem to have made of whatever passes for your soul.”

  “Don’t fuss me, Liesl. I’ve fought dragons with worse.”

  “Ah, my pretty Shaharazad, you haven’t changed in thirty years. Always wanting too much too quickly. Always thinking you can do everything.”

  “Well, I usually can.”

  “Then why don’t you stand up, dearie. Show Granny how little you need her help.”

  “Ms. Haas,” I said quickly, “I really wouldn’t—”

  I did not have time to complete my warning, although I doubt it would have made any difference. None of the others ever did. My companion steadied herself against the edge of the cart and rose to her feet with a grace that was quite breathtakingly impressive for the moments it lasted. But moments they were, and then she collapsed. I managed to catch her as she fell, returning her to the floor of the cart without too greatly exacerbating her existing injuries.

  She propped herself up on her elbows and directed a torrent of remarks at myself and Granny Liesl that I shall forbear from repeating.

  “Such harsh words,” cooed Granny, “for somebody who has only ever wanted to look after you.”

  Probably I should have held my tongue, but I felt it only right to come to Ms. Haas’s defence in this matter. “Did you not also try to eat her heart?”

  “Yes, but only out of love. And a desire for immortality.”

  “I’m not sure I consider that kind of love entirely praiseworthy.”

  “Oh, dearie.” She brushed a gnarled hand down the side of my face, in a manner that made me feel oddly violated. “So kind and yet so stern. But what use is your love or that of your blind, idiot god? Will it give your friend the strength she needs for the task that you have set her?”

  Ms. Haas knocked the old woman’s arm away. “Enough, Liesl. Only I am allowed to torment Mr. Wyndham. I will admit I need your help. Now help us.”

  Gra
nny leaned over and reached into one of the many sacks that filled the back of the cart, producing at last a dusty bottle full of murky green liquid. “A potion”—she proffered the phial to Ms. Haas—“that will restore your strength, but only until the stroke of midnight.”

  Unstoppering the container, Ms. Haas sniffed cautiously at the fumes. “Asphodel, maiden’s sorrow, bloodstone, and wolf’s tooth stirred with a glass spike and sung over at moonrise.” She resealed the bottle. “Not, I think, the correct potion.”

  “I’m sorry, dearie. Can’t blame an old woman for trying.”

  She offered Ms. Haas a new draught. This one was red-brown in colour and sealed inside a round-bottomed flask. My companion repeated her inspection. “Deathwort, plague-fly wings, hangman’s eye, hellblossom, needlefish eggs, and murderer’s tears, boiled in a black cauldron by the light of a red candle. Now that’s the stuff.”

  Ms. Haas raised the potion to her lips and, as my varsity friends were so fond of saying, downed it.

  Granny smiled. “All better now?”

  “For the moment. Although you know as well as I do that the side effects will be miserable.”

  “Everything has a price, Shaharazad. That was the first thing I taught you. Of course, now we’ll need the second thing I taught you.”

  I was not altogether keen to learn the nature of any of the lessons that Granny Liesl had passed on to Ms. Haas. “I think you’ve done quite enough. Thank you so much for your kindness.”

  “Mr. Wyndham, would you like to know the third lesson I taught Shaharazad?”

  “I would rather not, if it’s all the same to you.”

  “It was, never refuse a gift from a witch. Now, let’s do something about those wet clothes.”

  CHAPTER FORTY

  The Cottage in the Woods

  All of my instincts told me that permitting a self-confessed witch to lead us away from the road that we knew would take us to our destination and into an unknown part of a foreign woodland was most assuredly inadvisable. My misgivings were far from assuaged when I spied through the trees a low, ramshackle cottage decorated, I could not help but note, with human-seeming bones and supported above the ground by what appeared to be a pair of bird’s legs.

  “There now, love,” Granny Liesl said to my companion. “Isn’t it nice to be home?”

  Ms. Haas curled her lip. “It wasn’t nice thirty years ago. Now it’s positively gauche. Nobody’s hanging skulls from their eaves anymore and chicken feet are utterly impractical.”

  “Always so headstrong. Always so certain you know better than your elders. Granny was here long before you and she’ll be here long after you’re gone.”

  “And she’ll still be talking about herself in the third person.”

  The witch smiled in a fashion that was hard to read, having all the character of affection but coming from a face designed for nothing but malice. “Ah, but you have learned some pretty words.”

  Ms. Haas responded to this with a few words that were not at all pretty, causing the old woman to laugh in a way that can only be described as cackling.

  “There’s the girl I knew. A workhouse brat, an alley cat, a starveling rat, but more than that.” I was not certain I was following her train of thought any longer, but she seemed very much to be enjoying herself. “You have come far, Shaharazad. But not perhaps as far as you think.”

  This proved the first of the two and a half occasions on which Ms. Haas permitted another person to have the last word in an argument. The second would not come for some years.

  Granny Liesl brought us inside her cottage, and I was struck at once by the unnerving similarity it bore to the sitting room at 221b Martyrs Walk. Its style of furnishing was, of course, wholly different, but it had the same air of barely corralled chaos, the same scent of unknown connotations, the same scattering of mysterious and forbidding artefacts. While Ms. Haas’s chaise longue was the most striking feature of our own parlour, here it was a black and forbidding cauldron that occupied a central position atop a stack of firewood, currently unlit. I settled myself nervously onto a wooden stool and waited to see what our hostess would do next.

  “One gift I have given you already.” She raised a single bony finger. “Two more is customary, but you know that Granny hates it when people take and give nothing in return.”

  I was ill at ease with the turn events seemed to be taking, but out of deference for the long acquaintance between the two ladies and an awareness that my companion was far more qualified to understand the dangers of our predicament than I, I kept my peace.

  “What do you want, Liesl?” she snapped.

  Granny’s eyes glittered. “A kiss, a wish, and a lock of your hair.”

  All of those things sounded terribly innocuous and, from what little I knew of magic, this suggested that they should in no circumstances be parted with. “If I might,” I asked, “what are we to receive in return?”

  “Oh, my dear sweet child.” The old lady hobbled towards me, her fingers making acquisitive motions in the empty air. “Have you not been listening? You will receive nothing in return. I offer gifts to you. It is polite for you to offer gifts to me. You can choose to be impolite, and many have made just that choice.”

  I could not help but find my eyes drawn to the rows of skulls that decorated a number of the cottage’s shelves and windowsills and thought it best that I return to my earlier policy of silence.

  Ms. Haas strolled quite nonchalantly towards us, a manoeuvre which happened to place her physically between me and the witch. “I’d have thought,” she remarked, “that you already had enough pieces of me to last a lifetime.”

  “One can never have too much of a good thing, my pretty.”

  There followed a long but very tense silence that reminded me uncomfortably of the last time I had spoken to my father. I was not certain, should the matter devolve into direct magical confrontation, which of the ladies would be victorious, an uncertainty which I suspected they shared.

  At last Ms. Haas nodded. “Very well.” She stepped forward, stooped, and kissed Granny Liesl gently on the lips, a gesture that—from my somewhat awkward vantage behind my companion—seemed almost to speak of genuine fondness. Then she retrieved one of the many, many knives that lay here and there throughout the room and cut off a lock of her hair, which she handed to the witch somewhat defiantly.

  “And my wish?” The old woman had an almost triumphant air that did little to reassure me about either her nature or that of the present exchange.

  For the first time since we had met, I saw my companion hesitate. Then at last she said, “I wish for the moon.”

  Granny Liesl gave her a look of exaggerated disappointment.

  “I wish for a million wishes.”

  “Don’t play games, my love. You know they only make Granny angry.”

  “Have it your way.” Ms. Haas straightened her spine haughtily. “I wish that I regretted.”

  The witch nodded. “Acceptable.”

  “With apologies for my continued interruption,” I said, increasingly eager to be anywhere but where I was, “what happens now?”

  The witch clapped her hands and the wood beneath the cauldron caught light. “Well, we can’t have you traipsing around Vedunia looking like two drowned rats in a pickle jar.” I was very much aware that the detritus on a nearby table did, in fact, include two such animals in just such a receptacle. “And we can’t have you running off to fight a vampire with nobody watching over you.”

  “I’m not entirely sure that answers my question.”

  “It wasn’t intended to. Now hold still.”

  Granny Liesl began snatching ingredients from the nearby shelves and casting them into the cauldron. Ms. Haas, I observed, was watching her with an intense scrutiny—doubtless sensible that our hostess might be about to betray us utterly—but seemed to see nothing that gave her
cause for concern.

  As the cauldron began to boil, the witch cast in a pair of gossamer wings and a set of small, shrivelled objects that looked quite horribly like human fingers. She then began to chant in a low, guttural tone that rose ever louder as the ritual progressed. Smoke began to billow from the cauldron, and I became acutely aware of something crawling on my skin. I shivered, but resolved that I would take no actions unless my companion advised me to do so. I was not, after all, a witch hunter, and to act in panic when one is the subject of an unknown spell might doom one.

  The room was now so filled with smoke that I could see nothing, but I felt dozens of sets of claws crawling over me, tiny teeth nibbling at my extremities. I was conscious of my garments falling away and of their being replaced with something else, an experience I found singularly unsettling despite the relative lack of danger it posed to my actual person. Once the clouds had dispersed I found myself attired in a manner which, I presumed, was more appropriate for Vedunia and the Austral Express. It was not, however, at all in line with my personal sensibilities. While the colours Granny Liesl had chosen were appropriately modest, being for the most part blacks and silvers, she had chosen a luxurious fabric and an ostentatious style: a full-skirted velvet frock coat, decorated with the kind of delicate embroidery I had been raised to believe constituted the worst sort of frivolity. This she had combined with matching breeches, a white lace cravat, silk stockings, and black satin shoes. These last were ornamented with silver bows and small diamonds and had the elevated heels that were currently modish amongst the well-bred gentlemen of the Hundred Kingdoms, although they were considered somewhat old-fashioned in the south, and nothing short of a personal affront to the Creator in Ey. I found them most impractical.

  Ms. Haas, for her part, was now dressed in a swirling gown of crimson silk, decorated with golden flowers. Something similarly extravagant had been done with her hair, the dark locks bound up with ribbons, feathers, and an elaborate structure on which perched a live jackdaw, its grey eyes seeming to watch me with a malign intelligence. She seemed far more at ease with her new wardrobe than I was with mine.