A group of women were sitting in the front room, drinking wine. Leah nodded and smiled at them as she followed Carol Lyle through to the kitchen. Here Carol thrust a huge glass of Shiraz at Leah, even before Leah had set down her crates. “I have white too if you prefer,” she said. “Or... juice or something?”
Leah took the glass and swigged. “This is great, thanks.”
She set the glass down on the counter and began to remove her cakes and sandwiches reverently from their packaging. Carol, meanwhile directed Amber and Rachel to two of the spare bedrooms where they could work. Then she returned to the kitchen as Leah was arranging an array of heavily iced, liqueur-laced cup cakes on a tiered stand.
“They look so beautiful,” said Carol Lyle. “I love the decorations.”
Leah removed her piece de résistance from the crate at her feet. “This is a present for you,” she said. “A birthday cake.” It was immense, robed in dark chocolate butter icing, fortified with Tia Maria and a lavish pinch of chilli. A mass of black and white fondant roses spilled across its surface in a tangled trail. On each stem, the dark green leaves and thorns had been carefully formed. And the tips of the thorns were red. Half hidden among the petals and foliage was a silvered plaque – again edible – with the words ‘For Carol, her birthday’ engraved upon it.
Carol’s eyes misted up. “Oh, that’s... oh, I really won’t want to eat it and spoil it.”
Leah laughed. “Take some photos, then eat it. That way you’ll have the appearance and the taste. Trust me, it’s scrumptious.”
“Later, then,” Carole said. “Thank you, Leah. I didn’t expect that.”
“My pleasure.”
AS WELL AS the array of teas, the cakes, the exquisite sandwiches, wine continued to flow. Leah later blamed this for what happened. When the birthday cake was carried ceremonially from the kitchen, now lit with tiny green candles, the women in the room gasped. One of them said, perhaps the mother, “It’s amazing, Carol, but rather like a funeral cake! That thing in the middle looks like a gravestone. And whatever made you choose those colours?”
Carol cast an embarrassed glance at Leah. “I... I didn’t. The cake was a present.”
The other woman laughed. “Really? I hope nobody wants you dead, love!”
“That was a horrible thing to say!” Carol snapped. “No one wants me dead. How could you say that?”
“It was just a joke,” the woman said.
“I made the cake,” Leah said smoothly, “and my taste veers towards the Gothic. I assure you there’s no bad intention in it.”
“It’s beautiful, and I love it, Leah,” Carol said hotly. “Now I’m going to eat a massive piece of it.” She brandished the cake knife with a humorous evil leer.
Everyone laughed and Carol cut the cake. Its innards were a dark treacly brown, plump with dates, spiced with cinnamon. Carol quickly dispensed portions round the room, even handed one to Leah. Then, after a moment’s silence, all the guests bit into their slice of cake. Leah left hers untouched.
“Oh my god, it’s amazing!” Carol cried. “What’s in it, Leah?”
One of the other women laughed, wiping crumbs from her lips. “Ah, she’s not going to reveal her secret ingredients!”
“On the contrary,” Leah said, smiling. “I can tell you that the main ingredients are strength and love.”
Everyone laughed again, clearly thinking she was joking.
PERHAPS IT WAS mention of the Gothic, the appearance of the cake, or the woman’s clumsy joke that instigated it, but somehow the conversation in the room veered towards the occult. Someone started talking about a friend of a friend who’d visited a fortune teller. “She was accurate to a tee,” the woman said. “Knew stuff she couldn’t possibly know.”
Another woman had just come back into the room, holding her hands out in front of her, since Amber had painted her nails. “I went to one,” she said. “Had the cards read. She told me about how I’d have Harry, although I’d no intention of having kids at that point. Was taking every precaution too!”
“I’d love to have my cards read,” Carol said wistfully. “I never have.”
“Hoping they’ll say kids for you too, Carol?” someone asked, giggling.
Carol pulled a sour face. “Fat chance of that.”
There was a moment’s silence.
“I can read the cards,” Leah said. She could have bitten off her tongue, but the words simply came out. Nothing could have prevented them. “I have a deck in my bag.” She had never removed them, since the days she’d carried them with her always on purpose.
“Ooh, do me!” someone said.
“And me!” cried another.
Leah glanced at Carol. “The hostess first, I think. Yes?”
Carol nodded. She wasn’t smiling now. “In the kitchen?”
“If you like.”
DON’T THINK ABOUT it, just do it, Leah told herself as she seated herself opposite Carol Lyle at the breakfast bar. She took the dog-eared cards out of their silk wrap and began to shuffle them. They felt familiar, like old friends. A musty scent of the rose oil with which she’d once perfumed the silk drifted around both women. Even though faintly spoiled, the smell wasn’t unpleasant.
Carol was leaning on her crossed forearms on the bar. “They look really old,” she said.
“They are getting on a bit,” Leah said, “seen a lot of use. Here, will you shuffle them too? Just empty your mind of everyday thoughts while you do. Do you have a particular question you’d like to ask the cards?”
“Yes,” Carol replied.
“You don’t have to tell me of it, just think about it.”
“I will.” Carol took the cards and closed her eyes. The cards slipped through her fingers obediently.
After a minute or so of silence, Carol opened her eyes and handed the cards back to Leah, who began to lay them out in a simple spread.
“Will you say if it’s bad?” Carol asked. “I mean, it must be awkward for you if what they say is bad.”
“I’ll tell you what I see,” Leah said, “but the cards are only a snapshot of now, really. Nothing they say is written in stone. If you like, they are sign posts on the road of life. You have the power to change your destiny, but sometimes the cards can help you clarify things in your head, make decisions.”
“That sounds like a get out clause to me!” Carol said, laughing. “What if I get the Death one?”
“That card means change,” Leah said. “Quite radical change, yes, a rebirth perhaps, but it does not mean you’re going to get run over tomorrow.”
The cards were laid out, face down. Now Leah was nervous of turning over the first one. Her hand hovered over it.
“Let me,” Carol said, and turned the card face up. “The Moon. What does that mean?”
As the cards revealed their story, one by one, Leah wondered whether she was impartial enough to read them accurately. Was she seeing what she wanted to see? A woman deluded, occluded, befuddled? A faithless man? She struggled to voice her interpretation. “You feel you are lacking facts...”
Leah was conscious of Carol staring at her. She knew she wasn’t reading very well; it was stilted.
Then Carol announced. “You must know why I hired you?”
“What?”
Carol rolled her eyes, took a swig of the wine by her left elbow. “Come on. I do know, Leah. At least... My question was, and is, what happened between you and my husband?”
Leah felt her face colour up. This was the last thing she’d expected. “I...”
“And why did you take the job, Leah? You knew it was me too.”
Leah made a helpless gesture.
Carol reached out and touched one of Leah’s hands. “It’s OK, I’m not mad at you. I just want to know.”
Leah sighed deeply. “I honestly don’t know. Curiosity... A compulsion...” She paused. “Why contact me now, after all these years?”
Carol shrugged. “I just always wondered, that’s all. I saw you,
this glamorous older woman, and he told me you were just a friend. I always wondered. It didn’t seem likely.”
An uncomfortable prickle coursed down Leah’s spine. “How did you see me?”
Carol laughed, rather bleakly. “It’s not that difficult nowadays, is it? Your web site, social media. Didn’t have to be a private detective lurking round corners. So tell me.”
“There isn’t much to tell, Carol. I was a fool, that’s all. Nothing physical happened between us that you’d call him being grossly unfaithful to you. It was a silly crush that got out of hand.”
Carol took another mouthful of wine. “I don’t believe you.”
“It’s true. I never slept with him.”
“I don’t mean that. I mean it wasn’t just a silly crush, was it?”
Leah met Carol’s gaze. “No. No it wasn’t.” She shook her head. “There’s no point saying I’m sorry, because I was so enraptured I didn’t care about you.”
“Well, of course. I’m never in the way.” Carol frowned. “The problem is, Leah, I still love the bastard. I know he has this thing with women. It’s happened many times. But somehow... recently... I don’t feel I can hide behind the fancy curtains of this house any more. I feel I’m married to a ghost, who’s not really here. He’s never been bad to me, always generous, always pleasant. That’s what’s made it so hard for me. There was nothing for me to put my finger on, except for my hunches, and the women he befriended. He never hides that, you know. He always tells me about them, his friends. It’s almost like he makes it easy for me to look them up, as if he even wants me to. But I never get to meet them, as you’d expect with friends, if they really are just that.”
Leah nodded. “You’re right,” she said simply. “They’re not just friends, but neither are they lovers. I would call them... victims... prey.” She grimaced. “No, let’s keep this sensible. He likes the attention. No doubt there’s some reason for that, buried in his past. He’s stayed with you, Carol. He hasn’t exactly strayed. I think to him it’s all only a game.”
Carol sighed, stared at the counter. “I wasn’t sure whether I’d fess up like this to you. I had this urge to meet you, that’s all. Someone told me about you, your party thing, and it seemed the right time. Strange, really.”
Leah found she didn’t want to tell Carol Lyle about the destruction her husband tended to leave in his wake, the tarnished lives. “You want it to stop, of course,” she said. “You don’t want to leave him, do you?”
Carol looked up. “I want my husband to want me,” she said. “I wish he didn’t need all these... dalliances. I suppose I’m scared that one day he’ll meet someone who somehow tips him over and then he’ll be gone. He can’t be happy, can he, if he has to have this attention, as you called it?”
Leah paused. “Was there another reason why you wanted to speak to me particularly?”
“I think you know the answer to that. I know quite a lot about you.”
“You want it to stop.”
“Yes. I think you have a responsibility.”
Leah closed her eyes briefly. “OK.”
“You didn’t eat your cake,” Carol said. “Why not? What did you put into it?”
“Strength and love, like I said,” Leah replied. “They were for you, not me.”
Carol lifted her wine glass, gestured with it. “In vino veritas,” she said. “It can be a git, can’t it?”
‘Definitely,” Leah said. She lifted her own glass, clinked it with Carol’s.
AS LEAH WAS driving home, having dropped off her assistants, she noticed that the moon, so clear in the sky, had lost her first slice; the dark was on its way. Leah’s mind was empty of busy thoughts, or even analysis. She felt only a pure conviction. Carol Lyle might say she felt haunted by a husband who was barely there, but Leah felt she had seen the true ghost in that relationship. It lived in Carol’s eyes, in her nervous gestures, the joking yet bitter reference to having no chance of children. Meanwhile her husband was no doubt off somewhere, telling some woman, perhaps the unfortunate Cassy, how their friendship was special, how it sustained him. His piercing gaze would be holding hers; full of unspoken longings. Words and a gaze that were a trail of delicious crumbs leading only to a spiked pit. Brett Lyle made ghosts of his victims without a single killing. He’d had it all his own way for far too long.
In her house, Leah acted decisively, as if guided by an outer force. In her workroom, she sat down to meditate and fashioned a bullet purely from thought and intention. Into it, as into the most careful of her baking mixtures, she poured a purpose. The bullet was as silver-white as the moon; a lunar dart. Leah did not feel a magical mirror was the answer for Lyle; his armour needed to be pierced. So she fashioned the bullet and gave it to a dark angel with a gun.
CAROL LYLE HAD tried not to think about Leah all the time, but it had proved difficult. On that birthday evening, Carol had taken action for the first time, been someone different. Just that moment of saying to Leah “you must know why I hired you” had been empowering. And then the pivotal moment when Leah had closed her eyes for a second, her murmured word “OK”. Carol knew that Leah had meant it. She just didn’t know how she meant it.
One week following the party, Brett was home for the evening. He was camped in the front room, shorn of the mask he wore for his female ‘friends’, playing a video game. In the kitchen, preparing dinner, Carol could hear the blast of machine gun fire and the cries of computer men as they died. These sounds annoyed her; they always did. There was no good reason for him to have the volume turned up so loud. Carol threw a half peeled carrot into the sink, dried her hands and marched towards the living room. She saw Brett sitting cross legged on the carpet, looking like a boy. He did not glance up at her, hunched as he was over the game pad he was holding. On the screen, men exploded in red gouts amid loud explosions that shook the walls. Carol’s mouth opened to complain.
And then he folded out of the corner of the room. Dressed in black leather, immensely tall, a face pale like moonlight. And he held a gun. Carol saw the blue-black sheen of the weapon as he raised it; almost organic in appearance.
The shot was white, like a sky full of fireworks; it was a sound that had an image. And then her husband’s head had exploded; red splashes and gobbets over the TV screen, up the walls, all over her. Carol heard herself screaming, the kind that will never stop, saw the pale-faced assassin glance at her once. He bowed to her, walked backwards through the wall.
“WHAT THE HELL is wrong with you?” Brett was holding her, shaking her, perhaps seconds away from slapping her face.
Carol was utterly disorientated for a moment, then reality somehow see-sawed back into focus. She saw her husband in front of her, unmarked, and clearly not sure whether to be angry with her or amused. “You were shot!” Carol cried. “You were dead!”
Brett Lyle laughed, let her go. “Idiot,” he said amiably. “What are you talking about? It’s only a game.”
Carol stared into her husband’s face. She saw a red fleck amid the blue in his left eye. Had that always been there? “It’s not always a game,” she said in a low voice, “not to everyone.”
He pantomimed a double-take. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You know,” she said and headed back towards the kitchen.
“Well, no I don’t, actually,” he said, in a stiffly offended tone.
Carol wheeled on him, spoke harshly but evenly. “Yes. You do. I’ll always be there now, Brett. Remember that. You’ll never be alone.”
She didn’t need to say any more than that, and wouldn’t, no matter how hard he pressed her, even when the crazy dreams started happening, when uncertainty seeped into his mind. Remember what ghosts do, she would whisper into his sleep. They haunt you.
BOTTOM LINE
LOU MORGAN
Magic is power, and there will always be those who wield power for the wrong reasons, or become corrupted by the power itself. Here is a tale of addiction, but it is also a what if? st
ory. Lou asks what would happen if gangsters started to use magic to facilitate their illicit practices. The answer is chilling, but there is also a poignant denouement to this tale that will leave it lingering in your mind for a long while.
THERE’S A DOG in the middle of the road, just running. Right down the centre line, straight as an arrow. One of those little ones: the kind that resemble a handbag on legs and mostly seem to be owned by people who don’t actually like dogs all that much. It can shift, though: the way it’s going, you’d think the devil was after it.
The car closest to me pulls up; the driver winds down the window.
“Is that your dog? Aren’t you going to do something about it...?”
“Does it look like it’s my dog?” I can see him looking me up and down, figuring that one out for himself. He obviously decides not, and winds the window back up. A moment later, a blonde woman comes pelting round the corner, waving her arms and clutching a pink lead. The dog’s still running. I can sympathise.
I’m tempted to hang around to see how the dog drama turns out, but frankly, it’s more excitement than I can handle at this time of the morning. Besides, I’m late enough already, and however relaxed my boss is about life in general, opening up late is more than my life’s worth. Before I can do that, I need coffee so I tear myself away from the street theatre and make for the café on the corner. They’ve got my coffee waiting – same as always, sitting on the counter in its little cardboard cup. It’s too milky – again, same as always – and they’ve forgotten the sugar, but I wouldn’t go anywhere else. Partly because this place is the closest to the shop, and partly because I’d have to pay for it. As it is, I get away with a wave of my hand in the general direction of the till and I’m gone.
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