Voirrey shuddered and turned away. She resolved that she would have to learn the secret of the special sauce's recipe and then dismiss the two sisters. They were old, after all, and would thus be dead soon, so she couldn't afford to rely on them too heavily.
Voirrey slept badly that night, her mind churning and restless. It shouldn't have surprised her that she dreamed of food, but it was disturbing how nightmarish her visions were. As she slept and tossed and turned, endless courses of meats revolved around her, all dark and rich and oozing juices, coated in sweet, sticky sauces. And everywhere, always, was the faint, almost indiscernible odour of cheese, becoming progressively more sickening and noisome as the dreams continued. When she woke in the morning, she felt worse than when she'd gone to bed. She also felt very, very hungry, a craving that would never be satisfied with her usual cereal and toast.
As she ate her breakfast, supplemented by three eggs (still not enough), she was irritated and then disturbed to receive several phone calls, routed through to her mobile from the restaurant, cancelling reservations for that night. Cancellations were one thing she did not need at this early stage in the business' life. They all had good reasons, though, involving accidents and family tragedies, they weren't just off the cuff cancellations, and she would be able to refill the tables easily enough. It was still galling, though.
She was cooking some bacon and sausages, as she was still hungry, when she heard a news item on the radio which seemed to shed some light on her mysterious cancellations. Apparently there had been an outbreak of severe cases of self-mutilation locally. In the last few hours, an unusual number of people had harmed themselves and were exhibiting signs of severe mental and emotional distress. Names were not being given, but Voirrey was willing to bet this strange mass hysteria was the cause of the phone calls she had received. It was all very unfortunate, of course, but she had more than enough people clamouring for tables to make up the shortfall. When all was said and done, people would do stupid things, it was no concern of hers.
It was another busy night at the restaurant. Voirrey still felt strangely hungry and she kept visiting the kitchen, hoping to help herself. But every time she opened the door, she recoiled. Mrs Mills would smile at her and invite her in, but one sight of the weird sister, now seemingly confined to a wheelchair, a shrunken lump of fungal flesh that stirred its pot of cheese on a low stove, caused her such instinctive revulsion that she could only retreat.
Voirrey could not sleep at all that night. There were more incidences of self-mutilation on the radio the next morning, plus the first case of a deranged person attacking their neighbours. Some still spoke of mass hysteria, whilst others now postulated the testing of some secret government mind control weapon. Protests were being organised. Voirrey didn't care.
She arrived at the restaurant, tired and with a rumbling stomach, a couple of hours before opening time.
She went straight to the kitchen and gagged as she entered. The stench was awful. Mrs Mills was there on her own. There was no sign of her bloated, ever-diminishing sister, and the other staff hadn't started their shifts yet.
“Is your sister not going to be with us today?” asked Voirrey, trying to sound nonchalant.
“Oh yes, dear. She's right over there, where she usually is,” insisted Mrs Mills, gesturing to the bubbling pot of cheese sauce, from which the foetid smell was emanating.
Voirrey frowned, then decided that the old woman was poking fun at her. She almost decided that enough was enough and fired her on the spot, but she couldn't bring herself to do it. This uncharacteristic reticence led her to realise that there were a few strange matters relating to the elderly sisters that had somehow managed to slip her attention. For instance, the women were working for her, indeed Mrs Mills had manoeuvred herself into actually running the kitchen and directing its staff. But Voirrey had never agreed a salary or working hours with either woman: they were simply there. No contracts had been signed. Moreover, she had never had to let them into the locked building prior to opening time. They simply appeared. How was it that she had never noticed these things before? It wasn't as if they were small matters, they were glaring discrepancies! Had this old woman been manipulating her mind? If so, she'd pay for it, she'd learn that Voirrey was a witch to be reckoned with!
She turned round to remonstrate with Mrs Mills, but when the old lady caught her gaze and grinned, all fight went out of Voirrey. If the woman was dumb enough to work without pay, why should she worry?
Voirrey turned and made to leave the kitchen, then caught herself and walked cautiously over to the cheese sauce. The rank smell was strongest here, but still she began to salivate. She lifted out a ladle-full and gulped it down greedily. The smell might have been foul, but the flavour was subtle and sublime. The customers would never notice the odour, as it was carefully mixed into the other ingredients in small quantities to suit each dish.
The taste had only served to stimulate her appetite, so she spooned herself another huge mouthful. She then left the kitchen to check the evening's bookings and let the other staff in, who were now beginning to arrive. But this second helping had made her hungrier than ever. She groaned aloud and swore to herself that she'd eat every last morsel remaining in the pot when the evening's serving was finished.
It was just as busy as previously, every table full, to the extent that Voirrey was forced to rather rudely hurry some diners up who were taking too long to finish their meals. There was also a steady stream of people coming to the side door for takeaway orders.
Not all of the visitors to the restaurant that night were quite so welcome, however. As 8.30 in the evening approached and Voirrey was again engaged in trying to evict slower diners from their tables to make room for the next bookings, she felt a firm tap on her shoulder. She turned round to see a bullish, middle-aged man with a bristling moustache and a dark coat looking at her sternly. A younger man, similarly dressed, hovered behind him.
“Voirrey Kaneen?” the man demanded.
“Yes!” she retorted. “And who the hell are you? I'm busy, in case you hadn't noticed, I've a restaurant to run here.”
“Not tonight you haven't,” the man said flatly. “I'm going to have to ask you to close. I'm Detective Sergeant Shimmin, and this is Detective Constable Craine. I'm afraid we're going to have to ask you to accompany us to the station to answer a few questions whilst our colleagues search your premises.” He showed her a warrant.
Voirrey's heart sank like a stone. “Wait!” she protested. “What on earth is this about?”
“You may have noticed that the news has been full of incidents of people mutilating themselves and others for the past couple of days, miss. It has come to our attention that all of the victims had a single thing in common: they had all eaten at your establishment the night before they took their funny turns.”
Voirrey was left with no choice. Seething, she had to apologise to her customers, sending them home without paying for their meals, after the police had taken all their particulars, of course. This would ruin her! She would never recover from publicity like this!
She then went to the kitchen, where her staff were also having their details taken. They would all be questioned in due course, though she was the one under suspicion. After all, most of them had only been taken on after the pre-opening night, but apparently some of the guests from that had succumbed to the hysteria. That left the finger of suspicion mainly pointing at herself, as far as the police were concerned. No one else had been present on every night.
As she told herself this, she couldn't help feeling that something was wrong, that she was missing something, but she couldn't remember what it was.
All seemed in order in the kitchen. Some of the police were taking the details of staff and the search team had begun going through the place. Several of them were gathered around a big pot of goop that was bubbling noisomely in the corner. Voirrey wondered idly what it was.
There being nothing else for it, Voirrey left the farmho
use keys with the search team and allowed herself to be taken to Police Headquarters.
Voirrey was placed in a holding cell while the search team carried out their work. She sat impatiently on the very edge of the thin, plastic covered mattress, waiting until the search was finished and Detective Sergeant Shimmin would take her into an interview room for questioning.
She looked up as the cell door clicked open and a figure walked in. To her surprise, it wasn't one of the policemen; it was Mrs Mills. She closed the door behind her once again, locking herself inside the room with Voirrey.
“Mrs Mills,” said Voirrey. “How on earth did you get in here? And where did you disappear to when the police arrived at the restaurant?”
Mrs Mills smiled brightly. “Oh, I can come and go as I please, dear. Locks and bolts are no barrier to me. You see, I'm a witch. You like to think you're a witch too, don't you, dear? Shouting out all your angry little spells like you did? Well, we real witches got a little bit fed up with it, so I decided I'd intervene and give you what you wanted … but not in the way you wanted!”
“What did you do?” demanded Voirrey. “The police think the restaurant is linked to all of these disturbances, the people who have hurt themselves.”
“Oh, it is, dear,” said Mrs Mills. “You should be very careful that the ingredients you use are always the freshest, and that you know where they've come from. Dear me, you have been lax, haven't you?”
“The cheese sauce that your sister added to everything,” whispered Voirrey. “What was in it?”
“The police are just finding out for themselves what was in it,” said Mrs Mills, “and they're not feeling very good about it, let me tell you. Positively queasy, in fact. You see, dear, that woman wasn't my sister, and that cheesy goop was no dairy product.”
“Not your sister?” asked Voirrey weakly.
“Did you know that graveyards are full of worms and maggots, dear, feasting and growing fat on the flesh of the corpses buried there? We witches can conjure such things, giving them sentience and bringing them under our control. All they know is hunger, and they obey as long as we feed them. We use them to burrow into dead bodies. They infest the brain and nervous system, giving movement and animation back to the corpse. We use these shuffling dead things as servants, fetching and carrying for us. The woman who was my 'sister' was an old lady who died three weeks ago.”
Voirrey recalled the horrible, porridgy consistency of the skin, the shuffling gait, the ghastly black drool, and the odour. The hideous woman had been decomposing, called out of the tomb, controlled by hellish grave worms to stir that pot in the kitchen. “What … what was in the pot?” Voirrey whispered. “What was in that cheese sauce?”
“Haven't you guessed yet, dear?” teased Mrs Mills. “Haven't you realised what that thick, yellow curd was, or why it smelled so bad? Didn't you wonder why my 'sister' got smaller and more deformed each day, till finally she wasn't there at all? But I told you she was still in the kitchen: she was in the pot! Didn't you realise that rotting body fats could taste so good, be so addictive? And as she stirred more chunks of her flesh into the pot, dissolving into that thick, cheesy muck, the worm that animated her hungered and slavered. Its essence went into the pot too, so everyone who tasted it was infected with its hunger, till they started cutting off parts of themselves to eat, feasting on their own flesh.”
“They'll throw the book at me for this,” moaned Voirrey pitifully. “Why did you do this to me, you vicious, spiteful, scheming cow?”
“I did it to you precisely because you're a vicious, spiteful, scheming cow,” smiled Mrs Mills sweetly. “And now I'm going to leave you to your fate. Don't worry, though, they won't get the chance to throw the book at you. There won't be enough of you left. You ate the cheese sauce too, remember, and lots of it, straight from the ladle. The worm is ravening inside you. Bon appetit!” And with that, she was gone, leaving Voirrey alone in her cell.
Voirrey had forgotten Mrs Mills within moments of the witch leaving her cell. Her stomach was growling and she was slavering uncontrollably, her mind flooded with the desire for food, for fresh meat, raw and dripping from the bone. She raised her forearm before her face and sighed in delight as she sank her teeth into her juicy flesh.
· The Wind That Shakes the Blackthorn
Along the West Baldwin road, close to Injebreck, there stands a line of beech trees. These trees grow along a bank above the road, and they catch the terrible wind that comes howling down from the heights. Passing motorists are no doubt pleased by the shelter the trees afford from the fury of the gale, but the trees suffer for it: all are gnarled and twisted, bent almost double by the force they have to endure. All of their branches lean out in one direction, stretching over the road, while their other sides are utterly blasted by the wind, leaning over like frail old men.
It is not only the beeches who bear the wrath of the wind, sheltering travellers in their beneficence as they do so. Further down the hill stands a tangle of blackthorn. And the blackthorns bear their suffering ill.
The blackthorn is quite a beautiful tree. It bears lovely white flowers and the sloes it carries as fruits are a deep bluish-purple in colour. But beneath this surface beauty, the wood is as dark as treacle and wickedly thorned. The blackthorn is beguiling and charming, but its heart is as black as its bark and it has an evil reputation.
The Celtic settlers to this Isle knew the tales of the blackthorn. They named their letters – the ogham – after the trees and their lore, and they concealed many mysteries in their ogham carvings. To the blackthorn was allotted the letter named straif, which stood for the 'Z' sound in their Gaelic tongue. It was a letter that encoded the mysteries of control, domination and coercion, and was linked with sulphur. It spoke of evil magic that controlled the minds of others, stealing away their free will. The magical wand or staff of a black magician was always carved out of blackthorn.
Bob Cowley worked in a clothing store in Douglas and his wife Carol had a job in the bookshop just a few doors further down from him. But they both lived in the country, in a little old cottage near Injebreck, where Bob's parents had lived before them and where Bob himself had grown up. They were modern folk, and their cottage was fitted with every convenience they might need, but they loved to live here, out of town, a retreat from the hustle and bustle.
On a summer's afternoon at weekends, they would sit outside and enjoy the sun's rays and the cooling breeze that blew down the river valley. In winter, when the wild winds blew and the beeches thrashed and groaned, they would shelter in their cottage, surrounded by its thick stone walls, content to listen to the tumult from their chairs in front of the fireplace. Neither of them had the slightest desire to live anywhere else in the world.
So it was all the more surprising when one day, quite out of the blue, they arrived home to find a letter waiting for them from a firm of advocates representing a Mr Eric Cain. Apparently, Mr Cain wished to purchase their cottage and land and was willing to pay them a very handsome sum for it. Would they kindly telephone the office at their earliest convenience to make an appointment to confirm the agreement?
“What do you make of that?” Bob asked his wife in bewilderment. “I've never even heard of this Cain guy, but he goes and gets his lawyers to send us an offer to buy the house just like that.”
“I hope you're not entertaining the idea,” said Carol immediately. “The cottage isn't for sale, Bob. It's been in your family for three generations now and we both love it. No amount of money could replace it.”
“Oh no,” said Bob hastily. “Perish the thought. I wouldn't consider selling for one minute. I was just wondering what sort of person sends an offer like that in the mail, completely out of the blue?”
“A bloody arrogant one,” snapped Carol bluntly. “Look how the thing's worded, it just assumes we're going to accept, as if we haven't a choice. 'Telephone the office to confirm the agreement', my arse!”
“I'm sure that's just a marketing ploy, dear
,” said Bob. “You know, using assertive language to try to strengthen their position. I'll call them tomorrow and find out exactly what's going on.”
“You bloody well won't!” snorted Carol. “We're not being spoken to like that. We don't know this person and we don't owe him or his lawyers anything. You're too soft with these matters, Bob, you'll let them twist you around their little fingers. You always bow down to people who act all superior, so we're cutting this dead – right now – and that's final!”
She took the letter and screwed it up into a ball. She then leaned forward, opened the stove door and tossed it on, watching as it immediately ignited and burned up. “And that's the end of that!” she said with a satisfied nod.
“Whatever you say, dear,” laughed Bob. “I'm sure you know best, it was a very odd and unexpected letter.”
And they both got back to their cosy activities on their comfortable evening. Bob read his book and Carol returned to her cross stitch, putting her headphones back on so that she could listen to her music while her fingers darted back and forth.
The letter was rapidly reduced to ashes in the heart of the stove. The smoke from its burning rose up the flue and wafted out of the chimney of the cottage, where the wind caught it and whirled it, whisking it down near ground level, where it passed through the stand of blackthorn located near the cottage. The dark, spindly limbs quivered and waved, as if in recognition.
Life for the Cowleys went on at its usual peaceful pace much as normal for the next two weeks, and they gave no thought to the mysterious letter and its offer. But one Sunday afternoon, they were returning home from a drive and as they parked the car, they realised that something was amiss. The little gate that led into their garden was open, but they always closed it. There was always the chance of a sheep getting loose and wandering into the garden, eating their plants. There was no way either of them could have forgotten to shut that gate; it was just too deeply ingrained a habit. They didn't have to say a word; they just looked at each other, both having reached the same conclusion. They had had a visitor while they were out.
The Eldritch Isle Page 6