by Katie M John
Fox shuddered, a reaction to the unnerving feeling that somebody was watching her.
“Are you alright, Miss Meadowsweet?”
She startled, surprised to hear somebody speaking to her.
“You look miles away.”
She scanned the structure of the well, finally finding the source of the voice. Reverend Stewart was up a ladder, pinning white and green bunting. He scrabbled down and crossed over to where she was standing. He stood next to her, looking proudly at a tricky job well done.
“I was just thinking about tomorrow night and… Martha,” she said in a fading sentence.
“Ah!” he said, nodding his head. “Her mother is so worried. It’s been quite a shock to all of us – them running off like that.”
Fox turned to him, “Is that the official line?”
He sighed. “It would seem so. We knew they were very fond of each other but we had no idea how serious it had all become. I’m sure God will return them to us soon.”
“What if it isn’t like that?”
“Pardon?” He’d been distracted by something.
“What if them running away together is just a terrible assumption? They could be in danger.”
Reverend Stewart walked away from her and fiddled with one of the electrical wires. He turned and flashed her a smile. “You mustn’t worry yourself. Things like you see on those terrible crime shows don’t happen to children from Heargton!”
Fox shook her head in frustration. She knew he was trying to be reassuring but he was being totally blind to any other possibility; and if this was his standpoint, she guessed it was the same with the police, too.
“Who’s going to be Queen of the Flame now?” Fox asked, not really that interested but unwilling to give up the conversation quite yet.
“I guess you’ve not been home yet?” he laughed. “We’ve asked your sister, Bunny. She’s very excited!”
Fox rolled her eyes and sighed. “Yeah, I bet she is.”
“Anyway, lots to do. Nice chatting with you Miss Meadowsweet. It would be nice to see you at service once in a while if you can make the time.”
She raised a hand in farewell and offered him a smile, which quite clearly told him it wouldn’t be happening any time soon.
*
Jeremiah finished the chapter he was reading and then packed his bag. He was just about to leave when he saw Fox talking with the Vicar. In light of their mother’s shop, Jeremiah found it strange Fox should know him; they hardly struck him as the most likely Christians; in fact, there was something about the Meadowsweet sisters that was decidedly… pagan. He smiled to himself. He was beginning to see Witches everywhere, just like his Uncle Daniel.
He hadn’t heard from Daniel in a couple of days, which wasn’t a particular surprise being he was still somewhere in South America on “business.” Jeremiah had a deep affection for Daniel, who would turn up at the family office in his “Indiana Jones kit” (as his father would call it). Daniel had a battered leather knapsack, which as far as Jeremiah could tell, was the only thing he ever carried on his travels. However, the bag was like the one from Mary Poppins - endless treasures and spoils came out of that bag, which always included chocolate, as well as a small battered bible and a crucifix. Daniel wasn’t an overtly religious man – he certainly wasn’t the kind who would stand on a street corner and preach, but he had a deep faith, which meant a meal never passed without him saying a private grace, or that every move he made, he believed was done with the knowledge and blessing of God.
Jeremiah’s father found his brother’s belief in God a thing to mock; his only god was the god of capitalism. But it was no surprise that at least some of the family bloodline should follow in their ancestor’s footsteps. Jeremiah had no real leanings either way – he’d been having far too much fun to consider it. He sure wasn’t a puritan in any of his tastes, but being brought up in the lap of luxury surrounded by excess, he could hardly be blamed.
There was much about Daniel that Jeremiah didn’t know; he’d got what little knowledge he did have through random snippets of information picked up over the years. In this way, Daniel was much like a collage; a picture of composite parts, which when you got too close, dissolved into randomness. Jeremiah knew Daniel was a Witch Hunter. A totally surreal job for anyone in the twenty-first century, not alone for a man who, as first born son, had been destined to inherit a multi-billion dollar business.
Jeremiah had refused to believe this could be true for a while, thinking Witches were something that only existed in the pages of children’s books. He had changed his mind when he’d come face to face (well, it was more body to body) with a Witch after a particularly wild party in downtown New York City. At first, he thought it might have been the drugs – he’d gone through a stupid experimental phase, which lasted all of a year before his father found out and had sent him on some intensive screwy rehab session where he was forced to live with addicts for a month and see first-hand the damage drugs did. It worked.
However, on this particular coke-filled evening, it went from sexy to crazy in the space of an hour, when he found himself unwittingly tied up in the woman’s basement, which was some form of temple dedicated to the gods of darkness. Thankfully – but not entirely by coincidence – Daniel had been in town and, ‘happened to be passing’. (Well it wasn’t quite like that, but Daniel would never reveal the reasons why or how he had magically turned up.) It had all ended weirdly - to the point it had all seemed like some crazy drug-induced trip, which the mind refused to accept as a proper memory. Jeremiah had woken up on Daniel’s battered Chesterfield sofa to an empty flat and a note, which told him to get his act together by the next time his uncle was in town.
Jeremiah watched Fox with curiosity. He couldn’t figure out what it was about her that was so… He shrugged and sighed, resting his head against the frame of the library door. He was having difficulty ordering his thoughts around her. He didn’t think he fancied her – not in the way he’d been attracted to other women, but there was something elemental when he was with her – something he didn’t quite understand. He had an overwhelming desire to kiss her but then a barrier came up when his thoughts began to stray anywhere past that. His heartbeat skipped about when he was with her, and he found himself flirting with her even though he knew it was a totally pointless exercise. He continued to watch her as she said goodbye to the vicar and walked through the village towards the family shop, ‘Moonstone’. Swan was coming out of the door and the sisters exchanged a brief conversation in which Swan seemed to be offering Fox some kind of comfort before they shared a joke and walked off down the road. They were a pretty family, he gave them that; they reminded him of the women from Waterhouse’s ‘Hylas and the nymphs; it was a purity of prettiness, far removed from the constructed looks of the New York girls – even those who sought (too hard) to defy convention.
He continued to watch the vicar busying around the well, hanging up the bunting. The light was fading. Jeremiah had already ensured the last leg of his walk through Chase Woods would be in the dark – something he didn’t particularly relish, not since the weird events had started at Coldstone House. He smiled and let out a little laugh at his own silliness. He shuffled his satchel onto his shoulder and headed down the south road, away from the village.
Within minutes, it was raining; not heavily, but enough to get him soaked on the mile-long walk. He stepped a little way into the woodland, which flanked the roadside, seeking some protection from the rain and hurried his step. Several cars passed as the commuters from Lancaster returned to the village. They were a welcome connection with civilisation. The contrast between his life in New York just one month ago and here in Heargton was enough to de-rail anybody.
He was nearly home when the sound of laughing children stopped him in his tracks. He turned to the source of the noise, expecting to see them running through the trees, playing. There was no one there and it was certainly too late for young children to be out on their own. He stood
for a minute, listening hard, but there was nothing more. He forced his heartbeat to calm and tossed the idea away, putting it down to a trick of the time and environment. All at once, he felt very alone. He made a silent prayer for the reassuring headlights of a car to come past, but the road was empty and dark. He picked up his pace and was flooded with relief when ten minutes later, the trees ended and he hit the manicured lawns of Coldstone House.
He continued his jogging pace up the oak stairs, avoiding the attention of Aunt Penelope, who was fiddling with the flower arrangement on the hall table, with a shout of, “I’m off for a shower, I’ll see you at dinner, Aunt!”
He could hear her muttering to herself. It was pretty evident his youthful presence was an imposition in the quiet world of Coldstone House, although Jeremiah had to admit he was beginning to quite like the old dear.
He was still spooked enough by the weird sounds in the woods that he wasn’t fully looking where he was going and with his over-hyped sensitivity, he emitted a yelp as he knocked into a woman who was coming out of the bathroom and was evidently not expecting to come across anybody, judging by the use of a towel that barely covered her essentials. It took him a moment of flustered apology and rambling questions before he realised she was far from embarrassed. In fact, she was looking at him directly in the eye with a certain look of wicked playfulness. Then, her towel was on the floor around her ankles and she leaned her head coquettishly to one side before offering a belated, “Woops!”
Jeremiah was used to bold women; he certainly wasn’t the flustering virgin type and now she had drawn a clear battle line between them, he breathed in deeply and relaxed, flashing her a charming and flirtatious smile.
“Oh, dear, how…” he leaned in and traced his finger down the side of her stomach, “unfortunate.”
“Would you mind being a gent?”
Jeremiah ran his thumb over her blood-thickened lips. They were impossibly soft, almost as if they weren’t there at all. He had to admit these events were taking him to a place beyond surprised, and there was something very intoxicating about that.
She let out a small moan. “I don’t believe we have met yet. My name is Paulina.”
It would be easy to take complete advantage of the fortuitous situation, but he understood enough about desire and pleasure to know the promise was often sweeter than the offering. This moment, left now as it was, would fuel his appetite for much longer than it would should he push her back into the bathroom and accept her invitation.
He cupped her naked hip in the palm of his hand and turned her sideways, allowing space for him to pass by. He stopped momentarily as their bodies pressed together in the doorway. She had her head tilted upwards, her lips parted. She was full top to toe with desire. He moved his lips onto hers in a brief, chaste kiss and whispered,
“What a beautiful and sweetly surprising invitation, Paulina. Thank you, but not today!”
Her face wrinkled with confusion; she’d clearly assumed things were going to end differently. Hurt flashed in her eyes, followed by a brief look of humiliation. He ran his hand up over her throat and kissed her full on the lips, offering her enough of him for her to know her advances were not rejected but a future possibility. She wrinkled her nose and pouted her lips, but he had nothing more to give her at that point. He shut the door and fell back against it, trying to steady himself. His mind refused to ignore the image of Paulina’s pale and athletic body bending over to retrieve her towel. A part of him even considered opening the door on the scene, but he knew that would leave him in a trickier situation than he’d already gracefully navigated.
He flicked the shower to hot and let the room warm from the steam before stripping off his wet clothes and leaving them in a dishevelled pile on the floor. How he missed the walk-in power-shower of the New York apartment, all nozzles and blue LED lights. The dribble that came from Coldstone’s ancient wood-fuelled heating system was a poor relation (as it seemed was everything at Coldstone House). Thoughts of Paulina swam lazily through his imagination but every time they started to get interesting, thoughts of Fox cut them off. They were images of her running through a meadow, the sunlight streaming through her hair making it look like spun copper. The cottons of her skirt swished through the grass. He was chasing after her - but something was wrong; he had thought that when she turned to him, she would be smiling or laughing, but instead, she looked full of fear. He understood he wasn’t chasing her, he was hunting her.
The water switched to freezing cold and Jeremiah leapt out of the bath, forgetting his disturbing thoughts. He held his hand under the shower, hoping it was just someone running the kitchen tap, but after a minute or so, it became evident the storage boiler had been emptied.
“Great!” he grumbled.
He gathered the towel from the radiator and wrapping it around his waist, made his way to the sink. He shivered violently, caught by the sight of writing in the steam of the mirror that read, “SAVE ME.” Fear gave way to uncomfortable laughter as he came to the conclusion Paulina had played a skillful practical joke. What other explanation could there be? He wiped the writing and steam away from the mirror, part expecting the sight of some Halloween freak standing behind him, and sighed with relief when aside from his own spooked face, the reflection remained empty. His heart hammered and his body went from ice-cold to burning hot in one swift flush. He ran the cold tap and splashed the water over his face. He chastised himself for being such a city boy and letting the spooky, old house get to him. It was old and there were perfectly rational reasons for all of the events that had happened – although at that moment, he couldn’t quite fathom what they were.
Once back in the safety of his bedroom, he dressed and settled at his desk, opening the lid of his laptop. He wasn’t entirely sure what he was about to look up but there was something niggling him and he hoped some random surfing might enable fate to offer him an answer. His mailbox pinged. It was Daniel. He was nearly finished in South America and would be travelling to London for a conference later that month; he hoped he could fit in a visit to Coldstone House. For the first time that day, Jeremiah found himself feeling genuinely happy. He replied with a simple emoticon, knowing Daniel was very rarely in a position to sustain a conversation.
Jeremiah continued to flick through sites pulled up from the search engine. There was little of interest, except for the rather lurid history of The Heathmoor Witches, which once you knew the story of the Salem Witch Trials through first-hand family legends, offered little more than curiosity.
Just like Salem, the witches had been hanged for their crimes. Rather ritualistically, the villagers had bypassed the legal system and done it themselves, hanging them over the Heargton Well. What made the case of the Heathmoor Witches slightly more interesting was, unlike the infamous Salem trial (at which his forefather had undertaken a lead role), the Heathmoor Witches’ trial had been by rather more arcane methods; they had been tried in the old way, through torture rather than through a court.
Documentation about the case was prolific; clearly, the town clerics had been proud of their duties. Jeremiah read the translations of the Middle English in detail. The three Heathmoor sisters had been accused of attempting to raise the Devil through the ritualistic murder of several innocent village girls. They were further accused of being the reason the harvest failed and causing several random cases of sick livestock. By the time they came to trial, a whole list of other minor village mishaps had been added to their crimes.
They’d been taken from their farmhouse during the dark hours and held for questioning. When these intimidation tactics had failed, they were paraded at dawn into the village, where an audience had gathered in anticipation of a coming spectacle. They were not disappointed. Each woman was stripped naked, ducked, and slashed to check the colour of her blood. She was then force-fed a poisonous herb to bring about a bodily evacuation, and when that failed, she was whipped to bring out the demons. One rather more artistic cleric had provided a series of sma
ll black and white sketches of the events. The women were portrayed as young and slim with pretty features. It was no wonder the wives of the village were so keen to see them get their comeuppance, Jeremiah thought skeptically. At last, when the women confessed their crimes, they were hanged from the rafters of the well, where it is reputed they hanged all day by the neck until sundown, when their bodies mysteriously disappeared. The belief was the Devil had come to claim his own, which added a nice melodramatic twist to the tale and vindicated the villagers’ torture of three young and beautiful women.
As well as many hits on the documentation of the “trial”, there were thousands of pages of paranormal sites that had links to Heargton and the surrounding area. This made looking for details about the old lunatic asylum, The Rookeries, rather difficult to find. After several challenging attempts at the advanced search option, he finally found a couple of hits that promised to be of some use; strange in itself that such a prominent socially historical building should have so little web presence – almost to the point it was suspicious. He sat up and leaned forward, suddenly finding something that truly captured his attention.
The Horrors of The Asylum. Rookeries The.
www.SamstheMan/heargton/ The Rookeries/34gZ/blogspot.com
….a history of terrible abuses and tortures at the hand of doctors and orderlies. The authorities were forced to investigate the Rookeries Hospital after local vicar raised concern about Satanic practices taking place in the Rookeries Hospital, Heargton…
He clicked the link, not expecting much from ‘SamtheMan,’ and was surprised to find a very detailed and serious looking post. Sam, whoever he was, had clearly done his research, including having taken some rather spooky looking photographs of the asylum. The flaking, crumbling walls were plastered with freaky (and slightly witty) graffiti; a series of red, bloodied hand prints had been placed “walking” along the wall, pentagrams and demonic third eyes covered wall after wall. Scratchy looking writing spelled out words from horror films. Then Jeremiah stopped smiling wryly to himself and peered closely into the screen – there in the background of one of the pictures was a fireplace with a mirror, covered in a film of dust. Written into the dust were the two simple words, exactly as he had seen them written on the bathroom mirror: “SAVE ME!” Jeremiah snapped down the lid of the laptop and inhaled deeply. He knew it was just as clichéd as the rest of the decorations, but something in his gut had turned sour and a certain knowledge refused to be ignored – the same person who had written that, had written the words in the bathroom at Coldstone House. Just then, the sound of a children’s musical box floated under his door. Jeremiah walked over to the door, angry at his own nervous reaction. He opened the door and the music stopped. He peered left and right into the gloom of the hallway. There was nobody there. Then he looked down and saw the little push-mechanical merry-go-round sat neatly at his feet. It was still spinning.