Darkwells

by R. A Humphry

  “Don’t run, Heather. Don’t be scared. I just wanted to show you how pretty you are,” he said, advancing on her with a predatory stalk. Heather backed into a corner, her breath quickening. Max loomed over her and his hand caressed her cheek. “Don’t pretend this doesn’t excite you.” he said as he drew her face forward.

  She tried to knee him in the groin but he expected the move and blocked with his other hand with frightening speed. He planted a wet kiss on her mouth with inexorable strength and then ran his tongue down her neck causing her to whimper.

  “Please,” she croaked, “don’t make me scream rape.”

  “Oh, I’d love to make you scream,” Max replied, running his hand up her body to grab a breast.

  A terrible cold foreboding rose up in Heather as she realised quite how powerless she was. Would anyone even hear her if she screamed? Was anyone still in the building? How could this be happening? Horror was gripping her as a dark shape appeared in the doorway.

  “What is going on here?” asked a voice with whip-crack command. Max stood bolt upright and turned on his heel at the sound.

  “Nothing Mr. Killynghall, Sir. The lady was taking measurements for my costume, Sir.”

  “Mr Bolton, for being out of uniform outside Marlborough without a member of staff, you are to run the hedges before dinner. You are dismissed.”

  “Yes Mr. Killynghall,” Max replied, gathering his clothes and slinking out of the room. The imposing teacher turned on Heather with his cold eyes.

  “As for you, young lady. Please remember that this is a six hundred year old school, not a local comprehensive where it might be acceptable to have sex in the toilets. You will control yourself in future while you are on our grounds.”

  With that he turned and left and Heather finally burst into hot, frightened tears. The rain pounded down outside and it was a long, lonely journey back to The Black Swan.

  Chapter Eleven: The Earl

  Henry sat fidgeting with his cuff-links staring at the empty seat across from him in the otherwise heaving Beech and Bramble. Heather was late. More to the point, Heather was so late that she was not coming at all. Henry allowed himself a generous amount of time to come to terms with this before he sighed and gave up, picking up his cane, paying and starting his limping way back up towards Princes.

  His mood was melancholy. Darkwells continued to be a struggle for him, despite what his mother had told him before the madness took her. Being the last of the Grenvilles didn’t carry as much importance at the school as they had all remembered. It didn’t seem to carry much importance anywhere, apart from the money. So he had struggled on, trying hard not to despise a place that he should have loved. He strove to keep his patience with teachers who should have been dazzling him, illuminating him. He failed to make friends with students who should have seen through the stuffy titles and his dodgy leg to see the sparkling mind and generous spirit, but instead saw him as at best a crippled curio or, worse, as an archaic left-over of a time better swept away. He limped grimly on.

  Heather had been the first person he could call a friend in his time at Darkwells and she wasn’t even a student. Oh there were other people that he talked to, of course. Fawad Khan from Lions had a brilliant mind and the two of them enjoyed jousting against one another in classes. He was a smiley, bubbly sort with a quicksilver wit and Henry got the sense that they were quite close to being good friends, without ever quite managing it. Much later he would discover that Fawad struggled under enormous pressure to succeed as his parents had sacrificed a great deal to afford even the subsidised fees that his scholarship required. As a consequence, Fawad was never to be seen outside the classroom as he was always holed up in one of the libraries in the inner court buildings, studying and studying.

  Alex Jacobs was just the opposite of Fawad but decent enough, Henry supposed. He was dopey and plodding during school but came alive after the bell rang. He was a social butterfly who was involved in almost everything that happened in the school that didn’t involve books or sport. He was forever urging Henry to join him at this or that restaurant in North Camland for lunch or to come to what’s-her-name’s party in a house off Sloane Square during the exeat weekend. Music recitals, plays, concerts and an intimate knowledge of everyone else’s business were Alex’s especial delights. Henry sensed that Alex didn’t see him when he talked but rather saw a floating version of the Grenville coat-of-arms or just his title hovering and flashing in mid-air. He began to avoid him.

  Heather though… Just the thought of her wild eyes and glossy hair made his heart rate quicken and so he suppressed it. Life was, for people like him, best kept under a close reign. Disappointment and rejection were as inevitable as death and just as well kept clear of. A Grenville at Darkwells couldn’t afford the tempestuous passions of others and for Henry that went a thousandfold.

  As he neared Princes Road he felt the familiar thrum of energy from the silent Guardians and had to restrain his perpetual urge to ferret about trying to figure out how it was done. Such a strange enchantment, he thought, although at Darkwells that was true of almost everything. The bizarre and mind-bogglingly complex arcane works that lay on all the old surfaces of the school was a large part of what had kept Henry going. It was a masterpiece, built in an age when the art was at its zenith. He always marvelled at the throngs of students and masters who were living, eating and learning in these exquisite cathedrals of interwoven spell-work without the slightest notion that there was anything other than dull worn stone around them. They sat in the Sistine Chapel of English magic and had never once looked up. And as for the swirling vortex in the ruins by the wells…

  But that is the world today, Henry thought as he turned and started down the Princes Road. The English rush about trapped in mundane illusions of modernity and are blind to the basic wonder of quite how beautiful and bewitching their island really is. Or at least that is how it was to Henry who drank deep of the clear West Country air and allowed himself a smile as he looked out along the open fields to the distant cricket pavilion with its pristine, billiard top pitch. Nearer was the Equestrian Centre where Henry could hear the comforting noises of the horses in their stables on quiet nights from his room.

  A score of strides from the blocky front of Princes Henry stopped and turned to glance at the sky, which was clear and blue and cloudless. This made him frown as he started off down the road again. He could not shake the feeling that a storm was brewing. His weather sense had always been abnormally strong ever since he botched the casting of Reuchlin’s Schützen -resulting in the spell bouncing off the walls of the wine cellar, vaporising a full quarter of his step-father’s favourite vintages and embedding itself into his flesh with worrying, unpredictable results. Thankfully this had manifested itself in a benign ability to anticipate inclement weather but sometimes it seemed to do other things, or fail him completely, as it was doing today.

  Henry shrugged, something was wrong. He wished, for a fleeting moment, that he had not lost his temper with the Order. Useless and inert as they were, they did at least have a much stronger grip of magical theory. He could have at least asked the Adeptus Exemptus if he had seen anything in the ritual Kingdom Scry that the Order sill performed twice a year at the solstice. He might even have asked the Magus if there was any way he might undo Reuchlin…

  But no, that was not a real possibility. The Magus would be outraged that a mere Dominus was attempting such high level spells. The Adeptus would laugh in his face and Henry would lose his rag and say that the reason he had seen nothing in the scry was because he was incompetent and unable to cast even the most basic spells (which was true of a sad majority of the Order). No. That bridge was burned long ago and he was better off away from that collection of dull old men and charlatans. Besides, he had the Grimoires. He had made such remarkable progress without the Order. His mother would have been proud.

  #

  Once back in his room Henry locked the door and re-set his enchantment of diversion by drawi
ng the symbol in chalk and hanging a sprig of holly in the centre. Then he moved over to his closet and stood in front of it muttering the complex forms of Zoroaster’s transporter. His face screwed up in concentration; this was a spell he did not want to screw up. Again. He was still not sure what had happened that time. Where had he ended up? Norway? New Zealand? He wasn’t sure and didn’t like to think about it.

  After completing the steps he raised his walking cane, which was now radiant with glowing glyphs, and tapped the closet door once. Then he stepped through and into his wood-panelled library at Hawksworth Hall overlooking the tranquil waters of Conniston in the Lake District, hundreds of miles north of Darkwells. He hobbled up to a wall, pulled the chord to a bell and Watkins appeared with a tray of tea and scones.

  “Thank you Watkins. Could you get me the mirror and some lake-water?”

  “Certainly Sir, we have some water ready in the stone-jug already. Looking for your Warden again?”

  “Oh, I will try. Darkwells is a hard place to penetrate though, the old buildings in particular. I think I glimpsed him in Dukes, so maybe I’ll try there.”

  “Very good, Sir.”

  His mother’s pearl and silver scrying dish arrived and Watkins placed it on the yew and rowan tripod with practised efficiency. Henry bit into a scone and then poured the water from the stone jug into the dish. He dipped his finger and placed it on his forehead and waited for the water to still. When it did it resolved into an image of the interior of The Black Swan. Heather was sat at a table with bundles of cloth all around her and a desolate expression on her face. Henry could actually see the waves of misery rolling off her in an unconscious manifestation of her latent talent. She was performing a very basic, very localised version of the melancholia spell without any conscious effort or understanding. It was one of the things Henry has noticed when they had first met. The girl was a towering natural talent. Her genius for design and her skill with her hands were the natural outlets for her ferocious inner fire. With the right teachers she could be anything, Henry thought. At least as strong as La Voisin and much less mad and French.

  He didn’t admit it to himself, but he had started to entertain a fantasy where he taught Heather all the ways of the art and they rose together as the greatest magicians of the age. He imagined her dressed in his mother’s jewels of power smiling back at him as she cast some new invention of hers across the lake. They would restore the Order and heal the splinters. They would reclaim the abandoned reaches and artefacts lost and broken at Empire’s end. They would re-introduce the clinical and sterile world back to magic, back to wonder and messy chaos. Science and magic, reason and spirituality re-united to remind the people of the vast tracts of their complex souls. Maybe then the country could start to heal itself. Maybe then his peers would rediscover their purpose, the long lost and much derided spirit of stewardship long since abandoned to hedonistic, shallow self indulgence and crazed worship at the altar of greed. Maybe everyone would turn from the headlong flight into nihilistic oblivion or crazed fanaticism.

  Henry shook himself and the fantasy dissolved with the image in the dish. He felt ashamed. He shouldn’t spy on people in their private places. He knew that. His mother would have been very disappointed. Self control is the basis of all power, he reminded himself. If he indulged himself in this, where might it lead him? He might end up like Crowley or worse. Remember your leg, Henry reminded himself ruthlessly; remember your mother.

  He walked away from the mirror and did a round of the library to clear his mind. He passed the enchanted, waist high globe that doubled as a potions cabinet, which at the moment held very expensive whisky. The globe was covered with lines that were not the symmetrical latitude and longitude of conventional maps. They were the major ley-lines and power points according to John Dee’s ancient theorems. There were convergences and monuments marked out. The Tor and Stonehenge were crisscrossed. As were other historic site such as the Valley of Kings, Machu Picchu, Torres del Paine, Ayres Rock, Skellig Michael and other, less tourist infested, cluster-points. Henry watched the map and noticed that many of these areas were covered in storm clouds and flashes of miniature lightening. Large tracts of East-Africa seemed to be on fire with only small pockets of calm. Henry’s eyebrow rose. The globe was never this active. It was another puzzle for him to ponder. He walked back to his original position and cleared his mind.

  Discipline restored, Henry conjured up an image of Dukes in the scrying mirror. He peered around the dining hall at the various faces all crouched over their homework but didn’t see his target. He moved his invisible eye out of the hall and up the stairs, passing the stern faced portraits of former house-masters up each step. He meandered down the halls until he came to the lower rec-room where he found him.

  His Warden was not playing pool with the group gathered in the corner. He was not playing table tennis against the twins by the window. Nor was he in amiable conversation with the other boys in his year. He was, in fact, being pointedly ignored by everyone. This was surprising seeing as he was in the middle of doing what Henry counted as his fifteenth pull up, hanging full length from the door frame gripping the wooden protrusion at the top. Any macho display of strength like this would be mana-from-heaven for the bored, testosterone filled boys of the house. On the courtyards of Divinity, when Max had undertaken similar feats, there was always a baying crowd who placed bets. Yet here, in Dukes, where the sporty rugby types lived, the strange mixed-race boy was being ignored as he smoothly pulled his athletic frame up to his chin and down again.

  There you are, Henry thought with excitement. The boy dropped to the ground and gripped what looked like a piece of bronze at his neck. A tall dark figure entered the scene and spoke to the boy, who nodded and moved off. Henry jumped as Killynghall’s frosty eyes flicked up into what should have been, to him, empty space and looked directly at Henry. Killynghall waved a hand and the image in the mirror vanished with a crack and a puff of smoke. “Whoa!” Henry wafted his hands and rang the bell for Watkins, “What was that?”

  Watkins rushed to open the windows and let out the smoke. Henry paced the room. He had sensed the presence of another practitioner at Darkwells but had never been sure. There had always been a refinement, a subtly, to the art that he had detected that had half convinced Henry that he was just picking up remnants from the original builders of the school in the golden age. But no longer. So it was Killynghall, he thought. That didn’t cheer him. Of all the Housemasters the Deputy Head was by far the most intimidating and unyielding. His easy discovery of Henry’s scrying spell and the contemptuous way in which he dismissed it spoke of formal training. He was no amateur. One of the Order perhaps? Maybe a Magister or even a Magus? Maybe a different order?

  That idea both excited and frightened Henry. There were so few practitioners but… he remembered his leg, he remembered his mother. Yes, best to be cautious. Who knew what Killynghall’s game was? It could be no accident to have someone like him in Darkwells. He would have to be more careful.

  Chapter Twelve: Drunk

  When Heather failed to show up at the Beech and Bramble a second time, Henry took more direct action. Turning up at The Black Swan violated some unspoken code of conduct between the two of them, Henry knew, but he felt he had little choice.

  He was tired and hot and sweating in his long coat and scarf after the hobble down the tow path and he knocked on The Dark Swan’s side with his walking cane, calling out: “Hullo? Heather?”

  There was a moment of silence and then the sound of movement from within the boat followed by a sheepish looking Heather emerging from the door. She was huddled in a thick wool cardigan and was visibly trying to work herself up into a state of outrage at the intrusion.

  Henry waylaid her, “sorry to bother you here but without your protection in the Beech and Bramble I find myself under siege by all sorts of women throwing themselves at my feet trying to become the next Lady Grenville.” He brought out the bunch of flowers he had concealed b
ehind his back. “It is most distracting.”

  Heather flashed a shy smile and accepted the flowers, placing them in an empty vase as she stepped off the boat. “Trust you to find totty in a tea-house Henry. Underwear models were they?” she asked as she took his arm and led him down the tow-path.

  “Centrefolds the lot of them,” Henry said, adding after a pause, “for obesity.”

  Heather laughed and placed her hand on her chest in an expression of faux shock. “Lord Grenville, you scandalize me with your prejudice against the more amply proportioned lady. Would you make an exception for me if I succumbed to my weakness for chocolate truffles?”

  “Who says I haven’t already?” Henry countered, earning a playful punch on the shoulder. They walked companionably along for a minute before Henry asked, “I take it you have been busy, then?”

  “Oh I’m sorry Henry, I am. I’ve just… there have been some personal issues and I didn’t want to be around anyone for a while. I’ll try to make it up to you. In fact,” she asked, an idea forming, “can you slip away this evening, or are you busy?”

  “Well, Fawad wants me to set him quadratic equations to solve and Alex says that we might be able to sneak into the wine and cheese club.”

  “Don’t pretend you have friends other than me Henry, you are a terrible liar.”

  He knew that it was a bad idea. The enchantment he would have to engineer was a complicated, powerful piece of magic. Killynghall would be almost certain to sniff it out if he came close enough. There were other factors as well. He had received an urgent and cryptic message from the Order, which was unprecedented. Something important was happening and they had fixed tonight as the time for a mass commune from Neophyte to Ipsissimus to discuss what was happening. It would be the largest communication between practitioners in fifty years. The cant of calling that had come with the letter was elegant and precise and enticing.