Waywood

by Sarah Goodwin

  “Dan Nicols you are in detention with Natasha and Ben,” Miss Drew snaps. Dan groans.

  “Michaela,” Miss Drew says kindly, “are you alright?”

  I can feel the headache coming back. Now I know what it is; the energy inside me building, rising until I can’t control it. I can’t stay in the classroom, to tell the truth I don’t want to. If I could, I’d stop existing on the spot, fade away like a photograph left in the sun. I wonder what they’d think, if I just did that – left the world behind. Maybe they’d be sorry for what they’re doing to me.

  My gut says they’re never going to be sorry, they’ll keep torturing me until they get bored, then they’ll forget me altogether.

  I grab my bag and run past Miss Drew, ignoring her as she calls my name. I’m out of the Maths block and running around to the back of the Biology labs, to the little bit of woodland where no one can see what you’re up to – my old smoking spot. It’s cold and I don’t have my coat but I push my way under the low hanging branches and pick my way around the brambles until I get to the big oak with the thick branch a few feet off the ground, perfect for sitting.

  Wrapping my cardigan around myself I breathe out a cloud of frozen air. I feel better outside, the headache is subsiding. Maybe the trees are helping to ground me, absorbing some of my excess energy. I look around at the thick trunks and wet branches, sooner or later I’ll have to go back inside, but for now I just want to pretend that I’m down by the lake. I want to fool myself into thinking that Cray is somewhere nearby, that everything will be OK.

  Sham I’m the only person who doesn’t believe my lies.

  *

  The meeting with my form tutor, Mrs Goode, is at lunch. By the time I knock on her office door I’ve endured three more periods of people whispering and staring. Nothing’s been as full on as what happened in Maths. I’d like to think that it’s because most people aren’t interested in what I’ve been doing, that they don’t want to pick on me. It’s too bad that I know it’s because there’s no one brave enough to start anything after the bollocking my Maths class got after I left. According to the whispers I overheard in the hallway before French, Tasha cried real tears. I’m surprised; she gets steady Ds in Drama.

  Mrs Goode is older than Miss Drew, with grey hair and a wardrobe that seems to contain only one check suit, a green cardigan, a few white shirts and a hairy tweed skirt. I’ve never had a conversation with her in my entire life.

  “Michaela, take a seat.”

  I sit down in the second of two swivel chairs. Her office is tiny, lined with shelves of books and stacks of paperwork. She’s a German teacher, there are maps and pictures of the sixth-form Berlin trip stuck up everywhere.

  “Biscuit?” She offers me half a packet of Custard Creams. I haven’t had lunch yet, and I’m really hungry, so I take two.

  “Now, Miss Drew’s caught up with me and she told me what happened in Maths. Everyone responsible has been spoken to, but I understand that doesn’t make things any better from where you sit.”

  I gnaw on a biscuit, saying nothing.

  “If there’s anything you need to talk to someone about, that’s what this meeting’s for,” Mrs Goode says, looking at me over her glasses. “Things that you might find difficult discussing with your parents, or your friends.”

  “I don’t have friends.”

  She nods sympathetically. “I understand Tasha was one of the instigators this morning.”

  “She and Chloe hate me.” I don’t want to tell her anything but today’s already been so hard. Break time was almost worse than the lessons. At least when people were taking the piss I was involved in what was going on. At break I’d sat on the floor at the back of the library, waiting for the bell to go.

  “I’m sure they don’t hate you. What’s happened to make you fall out?”

  “We haven’t fallen out. They never liked me. But since I’ve come back they think I’m...weird.”

  “Do you think you’re different now?”

  “Yes.” I don’t want to get into it any further, but it’s hard to keep the words from coming out. “I never used to think I was worth more than how they acted around me.”

  “And now you know that you deserve better?”

  “I don’t know. I had friends, before I came back here. I had real friends who looked after me and who spoke to me like I was...” I stop myself.

  “Michaela?”

  “I don’t want to talk about them.”

  I can see her trying to work me out, but all she says is. “OK, well, why don’t we talk about what it was like for you, when you were homeless.”

  “I wasn’t homeless,” I say, “we had a house and I wasn’t cold or sleeping under a duvet in the street. I was really, really lucky.” I don’t add that I’d rather have slept in the cold and the wet for months, it would have been better than losing Cray, costing everyone their lives.

  Mrs Goode is nodding like she understands.

  “Can we stop now?” I ask. “I don’t really want to talk about. It’s probably best to just forget about it.” As if I ever would. Really what I want to do is keep every memory for myself. Waywood was another world, it doesn’t belong here in this room full of ungraded essays and course books. As much as it hurts I want to keep it fresh, unfaded.

  “Michaela, I’m not going to force you to talk to me,” Mrs Goode says, “but if you want to tell me anything, you know where I am.”

  I feel suddenly very grateful to Mrs Goode. She’s the only person who’s been the slightest bit sympathetic to me all day. Even Miss Drew hadn’t really seemed like she cared about me, she was more interested in keeping order. I want to hug Mrs Goode, breathe in the smell of lavender and biscuits that clings to her cardigan; but outside two boys in the year below have stopped and started miming madness through the window. They roll their eyes and twirl their fingers around by their temples. Hugging a teacher in front of them would be asking for it. Besides, Mrs Goode is paid to care, she probably just wants me out of the room so she can tick me off her to-do list for today. ‘Bond with runaway junky teen’, check.

  I pick up my bag and let myself out of her office. Two more periods and I can go home. Somehow that isn’t as comforting as it should be.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  I make it through the last two lessons, barely. By the time last period comes around everyone’s worked up and bored and the rest of the class spends the entire lesson either calling me names, throwing stuff at me when Mr Trowler’s back is turned, or laughing at me. Or at least those that have the balls to act up. Trowler’s a bastard when he wants to be.

  Unfortunately, today is one of those days where Mr Trowler wants to mark oral coursework, so he sets us some French conversation exercises and puts his headphones in. I’m on my own.

  When the bell goes I’m the first person out of my seat, bag already packed. I don’t look at anyone as I walk quickly to the school gates. If anyone corners me on the way home, I’ve had it. As I walk the long way around, avoiding the shortcut alleyway and the park for obvious reasons, I try to work a blob of gum out of my hair. Most of it comes out on my fingers and I wipe it on a tree trunk.

  As I turn into my street I raise my eyes for the first time in hours. The car isn’t in the drive, which means Mum and Dad aren’t home. I lock the front door behind me and lean against it, dropping my bag on the floor and letting out a breath. The house is silent and dark, so I flip on a few lights on my way to my room. All I want to do is get out of my stupid school uniform and under my duvet.

  I open the door with my hip and kick it shut behind me as I turn the light on. My brain is exhausted, my whole body is numb with the tension of the day; forcing myself to sit still and not react all day has bruised the connection between my brain and my body. I want to sleep, forever.

  When something dark moves at the edge of my vision I turn towards it. For a second I don’t react to the sight of Cray sitting on the end of my bed, then I jump.

  “Hey,” h
e says tiredly.

  “Cray?” I take in his appearance, the rumpled clothes and tangled hair, the mud on his shoes and the leg of his jeans. There’s a graze on his knuckles and dark circles under his eyes. “Are you...”

  “I’m OK, starving though,” he glances at the door, “didn’t want to risk your parents catching me downstairs.”

  “They’re not home ‘til after five. I can get you something.” My brain is stuck between being amazed that he’s here, and horrified at the condition he’s in. “What happened to you? Do you need anything else?”

  “Aside from a really, really long shower?”

  I grab a spare towel from the back of my desk chair. “Have one. I’ll go find something to eat.”

  He takes the towel and I want so badly to ask him where he’s been, why he didn’t stay with me when I brought him back. Cray looks like he could sleep for a year, like he’s been kicked up and down the street – that’s the only thing that keeps the questions locked away inside me.

  I go downstairs and open the fridge. In the bathroom the shower comes on and I hear the glass door bang shut. I look into the fridge without really seeing anything. Cray looked so tired, so worn, like one of the homeless people begging with their heads down, sitting in a doorway with a paper cup of pennies. It’s been four days since I left Waywood, four days since I brought him back. Where has he been?

  I fry up a pack of bacon and make sandwiches with lots of tomato sauce on thick slices of white bread. With the whole lot on a tray alongside two cups of strong, sugary tea, I go back upstairs and find Cray sitting on my bed again, this time with his wet hair hanging into his eyes.

  “Breakfast for lunch,” I say, putting the tray on the bed and sitting down.

  “Thanks.” Cray takes a sandwich and starts to eat, barely stopping to chew. He’s on his second one while I’m still blowing on my tea.

  “Where’ve you been?” I ask, wincing when it comes out more judgementally than I’d intended.

  Cray shrugs. “Around. Thinking.”

  I decide not to ask any more questions, he’ll tell me when he’s ready. If he wants to. My mind is buzzing with things to ask, but the biggest question, the most urgent, is whether he’s planning on staying.

  Cray demolishes the sandwiches in no time and puts the plate on the floor, taking his cup of tea and crossing his legs. The shirt he’s wearing is rank. There’s nothing in my room that’ll fit him, apart from my games kit, it has a red polo shirt and grey joggers that might do. While Cray sips his tea in silence I try to think of a way to offer him the clothes without making him feel worse about his condition.

  “I went to my grave,” he says after a while. “In town. The big cemetery in Southdown, on the hill. I suppose someone must have found my body.”

  I want to take his hand, but I’m scared he’ll pull away from me.

  “Campion’s there too. Not Ilex though, he’s probably in the family crypt somewhere. If they found him.” He rubs a hand over his face. “I don’t know where Nara would be, she never told us her last name, neither did Chronicle. They could be anywhere.”

  “Do you want to find them?” It won’t be easy but there are ways we could find out, look at the pictures on the missing person’s website, even find copies of the local paper from where Chronicle used to live, and there are only so many schools in Bath, Nara must have gone to one of them.

  “It won’t make any difference,” Cray says, “I can’t bring them back. I can’t even do magic anymore.”

  “At all?”

  “Not since I woke up. I can’t do a single thing, not even a blinding hex,” he picks at the mud on his jeans, “that’s why I look so awful. I’ve been sleeping in the churchyard, didn’t fancy taking my chances in town.”

  He looks so empty and sad. Guilt makes my stomach turn, this is what I brought him back to, a world where his only friends are dead, where he has nothing.

  “I’m...I can get them back. I will,” I say.”

  Cray looks at me like I’m insane. “After what that spell did to you? You lost your hand Michaela, I saw. You think I’d let you lose the other one for Chronicle? And what would you give for Ilex, or Nara, or Campion? There’d be nothing left.”

  “But they’re dead because of me.”

  “They were already dead, a long time ago. Sophia killed them.”

  “It wasn’t her. There was something controlling her, a shade, from the astral.”

  Cray’s eyebrows shoot up. “How long had it been here?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it got here before Waywood ever existed. It wanted to kill descendants of other shades that made it here; ones that became Gods and Goddesses.”

  “So you’re...”

  I look down at my hands. “I think my family started with Ceridwen, with the son she had after killing that blind guy.”

  Cray stares at me, then shakes his head. “I used to think I understood magic, that I knew myself, the craft and...this is all new. I don’t understand it at all, and I can’t believe I left you to deal with it all alone. I just...I needed to work myself out.”

  “I’m not alone, I came home,” I put my hand on his arm and he looks at me. He doesn’t pull away and I feel my heart ache a little less. “I was worried about you. I didn’t know if I’d done the spell right or if you were angry with me. I thought maybe Sophia was controlling you, before.”

  “Before when I said I loved you?” Cray looks so sad that I wish I hadn’t said anything. “That was me. I meant it; I still mean it. I love you.”

  “You don’t have to say that just because I brought you back.”

  “I’m saying it because it’s true.” He takes my hand a squeezes it. “I left because I woke up not knowing what I was. For months or, maybe even years I’ve been a fetch, and I never even knew it. I didn’t even know if what happened with my parents, with...everything that happened on the street, if that was real or just something that Sophia made me believe. I thought maybe my parents were looking for me, that I’d just gone missing one day and they still wanted me back.”

  I imagine his confusion, how he must have felt, not knowing who or what he was. I’d felt the same when I woke up on the floor at the house in Bristol; my world had changed entirely and I’d been so lost.

  “I went to an internet café, that’s how I found my grave,” Cray says, “once I knew it was true, that Sophia killed me, that the police found my body...I had to go see my parents.” He closes his eyes, shaking his head like he can’t believe it himself. “I should have known; it was true. All of it. Me running away, my parents not bothering to stay around long enough to find me. I looked it up online; they were on holiday when my body was pulled out of the Avon. It was in the paper.”

  “Cray, I’m so sorry.”

  “I almost came back,” he says, “almost came to find you right away but...I’ve been remembering things. Things I did for Sophia. I didn’t just take blankets and books to the Bristol coven, I helped take witches there too. I helped Ilex and Chronicle and the others to hide the bodies after Sophia was done with them.”

  He blinks and tears start rolling down his face. I can’t stop myself from pulling him into a tight hug. His hands are desperate as they grab me back and I press my cheek against his, letting him cry out whatever horrors he can’t bring himself to tell me. In a weird way I’m glad the others are dead, finally at rest and not having to go through this. I can’t imagine poor Nara having to carry around the memories of digging graves, of dragging dead witches into holes in the ground. I don’t want to think of the amount of whisky Ilex would drink if he could remember scrubbing blood off of the floor.

  I remember Campion telling me about the Summerlands. It’s the pagan afterlife, where your soul goes to be with the Goddess and the God, to one day be reincarnated. She described it like a personal heaven, where you could rest and meet the people you loved who were already with the Gods. I hope to myself that they find each other, Chronicle, Ilex, Nara and Campion. For them at least
, Waywood and what happened there, is over.

  I promise myself there and then that for as long as Cray wants to stay with me I will take care of him, the way he took care of me when I had no one.

  After a while Cray pulls back and wipes his face with his sleeve.

  “Sorry,” he mutters.

  “It’ OK...I can’t imagine what it feels like, remembering that.”

  “Pretty fucking terrible, but...I know I didn’t want to do those things. That’s what I keep telling myself.”

  “You’re right. But Sophia’s gone and, the shade’s dead too...I killed them. It’s over.”

  Cray looks at me for a moment, then shakes his head. My stomach turns cold.

  “There’s more,” Cray says, echoing the ghosts of the forty sacrifices. “You said it yourself, Sophia was trying to kill the descendents of shades, if forty of them made it here, plus the one in Sophia, how many others do you think will come from the astral wanting exactly the same thing? How many are already here?”

  “I don’t know,” I say quietly.

  “What if we’re the only ones that know?” Cray says, “and there’s all these people out there with targets on their backs, people like you. And they don’t even know it.”

  “You’re making it sound like a...quest, or something. Like we have to help them.”

  “Well, somebody should. And you’re the one with all that power. You brought me back from the dead.”

  “I took this power from Sophia, to stay alive. The power of all the witches she killed, of that shade? It’s in me now.”

  “I guessed.”

  “Well, then you know I can’t use it. It’s too strong and...it scares me,” I can feel myself choking up. “Waywood, and magic and everything that’s happened, scares me. Today at school I felt it trying to get free, it started changing things around me.”

  “But you’re still here, you controlled it.”

  “For how long?”

  We stare at each other in silence. I can see Cray thinking, trying to piece everything together, but he’s tired, and after being plagued at school and hearing his awful story, I just want to sleep, for about a year.