Dark Sister

by Graham Joyce

  "Maybe you wouldn't mind lending it to me for a while."

  She felt, not for the first time, the thrill of possessiveness. "No. That's not possible."

  Ash looked up from the pages and into her eyes. "Not even for one night?"

  "It's not possible."

  Something told him not to push the matter. He nodded. "I'll make some notes. If that's all right by you."

  They chatted about the contents of the diary as Ash scribbled down some of the formulae. Much was already familiar to him, but one or two concoctions took him by surprise. "Bella was into listening to the wind. Have you tried it?"

  "I have," said Maggie.

  He looked up again. "Tell me about it."

  Sam was happily playing on the floor with his puppet. He wasn't dextrous enough to manipulate the strings, but he cheerfully dragged the wooden doll across the floor and gave it a half-formed voice. The doll told him it was sleepy, so he laid it on the floor beside him and felt sleepy himself. He could hear his mother and Ash murmuring at the back of the shop. Their soft, lilting voices retreated slowly, grew muffled and far-off, and the distance between him and them seemed to expand. Their presence diminished and grew cloudy, and his eyelids became heavy.

  His arm holding the doll lifted slowly into the air. The strings were held taut, the doll's feet lightly brushing the floor. He felt a slight tug on the strings, and then another tug, in the direction of the door. The door stood ajar. Sam looked up at the tiny, silent bell. Then he looked out of the door and saw her.

  It was the old woman. The old lady who had stolen the doll from him last time they came in here. She was outside on the catwalk, squatting, her back to the painted safety railings. She was looking directly at him. She held out her hand with her index finger crooked toward him. She made a trigger movement with her finger, and the puppet strings went taut again, and tugged in her direction. Sam looked from the puppet to the old woman. She repeated the gesture, and the doll seemed to want to walk toward her. Dragging the puppet, Sam left the shop and walked over to her. The sound of shoppers' activity on the level below echoed strangely in his ears. Sounds, shouts became frozen.

  Her eyes seemed washed out, only vestigial traces of hazel colour remaining. She waited until Sam approached her; then she moved her outstretched finger to her nose and pressed it. Her tongue shot out. Sam giggled. Then she grabbed the loose flesh under her chin, tugged it, and her tongue disappeared back into her mouth.

  "Can you do it again?" said Sam.

  She did it again. Sam was enchanted. Then the old woman straightened her back, beckoned him to follow her, cocked her leg over the safety railings, and jumped.

  They were four levels up. Sam leapt at the railings and pressed his head to them. Down at ground level he could see dozens of tiny people walking to and fro. They were the size of his toy soldiers. He could also see the old woman. She was suspended in midair, only a few feet below the catwalk.

  She took two steps, walking on air. She looked back at him, beckoning him to follow. Sam giggled, and climbed up on the railings.

  Ash took a slurp of tea. "My wife and I are going to take a walk on Wigstone Heath on Saturday. Why don't you come? Bring the kids."

  "That would be nice," Maggie said. “I’ll ask Alex. Though I don't expect you'll have much in common."

  "That doesn't matter. We can have a picnic if it's not too cold."

  Maggie was delighted at the thought of new friends, what's more her own friends. Everyone she knew was connected through Alex. Maybe she would lend Ash the diary for a night after all.

  There was a fluttering at the window that made her look up. It was a bird, fanning its wings and swooping at the window, as if it was trying to get inside. Its beak and claws tapped against the window as it hovered against the glass.

  "Christ!" Ash shouted. He pointed at something outside and leapt to his feet. Maggie saw he wasn't pointing at the bird, but at Sam, who had cocked a leg over the railings on the catwalk, and was preparing to swing himself over the edge.

  Ash vaulted the counter and rushed out. He flung himself at the rails and collected Sam in his arms just as the boy was about to let go. Maggie, coming up behind him, ran at the rails. She could see shoppers huddled on the ground fifty feet below, pointing up at them. The sight of the drop flashed like a blade, and she wanted to vomit. She looked up and saw the bird, fluttering at the windows roofing the arcade.

  It was a blackbird. It escaped through the open skylight.

  ELEVEN

  De Sang was expecting her. His receptionist told Maggie to go right in. She pushed open the door to see the white haired psychologist lying facedown on the carpet, blowing out his cheeks and making slow progress across the floor with a breaststroke motion. Also blowing out his cheeks was Sam, happily swimming beside him.

  "Come and join us," said De Sang. "We're having a race to see who can get to the other side the slowest."

  "To the island," shouted Sam between gulps of air.

  "I mean to the island."

  Sam was having a great time. Maggie might even have joined them, but she'd put on a new skirt to come and collect Sam. "I don't want to get wet," she said.

  De Sang didn't get up, so Maggie took a seat. She bit her nails. "Are you getting some clues to his character?"

  "No," gulped De Sang. "We're just playing."

  Maggie crossed her legs and looked around the room. On the walls hung a grey diploma, almost obscured by lots of kids' paintings in bold, primary colours. "Is this how you win their trust?" She was trying hard to sound friendly.

  De Sang mouthed at her like something inside a glass tank. "No. Just playing."

  "No talking!" Sam shouted.

  De Sang reached the wall and got to his feet. "I win so I lose," he told Sam. "Time to go home."

  "NO!" screamed Sam.

  "Captain Hook," he said. Sam looked thoughtful and stared at the carpeted floor. "Swim outside and get your coat." Sam did as he was told, breast stroking toward the reception. De Sang was red in the face from his exertions. He perched on the edge of his desk, drying off. "Great exercise," he said.

  Maggie watched Sam swimming out of the room and, against her preference, laughed. Then she became serious again. "So can you tell me why he tried to throw himself over the railings?"

  "No idea. Can you?" He smiled.

  "How much are we paying you?"

  "Lots. Hope I'm worth it. Who is Mr. Ash?"

  "The shop owner. The one who grabbed him in time. Ash saved his life." He looked at her. "No, I'm not having an affair with Ash."

  "Good Lord. Did I suggest you were?"

  "No, but you gave me a look. A psychological look."

  "In that case I'll have to be more careful."

  It was Maggie's turn to offer him a searching look. His face was wreathed with lines. He managed to make a virtue out of his scruffiness, and for this reason she thought she could like him after all. "Somehow we got off on the wrong foot, didn't we, Mr. De Sang? After all, we both want the same thing."

  "We're making progress already." He smiled.

  Alex declined to go walking with them on Wigstone Heath. It was a blustery day, and he preferred to curl up on the sofa in front of the TV, sipping lager from the tin. Maggie festooned the kids with hats and scarves and took Dot along with them to meet Ash at a prearranged spot. When they got there, he was sitting in his car alone. His wife, he explained, hadn't felt well enough to come. Maggie wished she'd left the children with Alex.

  Wigstone Heath was a wind-blasted stretch of moorland, dotted with stunted bushes and outcrops of rock eroded into eerie shapes. A prehistoric stone circle called the Dancing Ladies commanded the elevated middle of the heath; and at some distance, leaning slightly into the wind, was a large single standing stone, the Wigstone from which the heath had taken its name. It was like a solitary broken tooth. They headed for the stone circle.

  The wind was as sharp as a scythe. It made Maggie's ears ache. Dot, at least, seemed to en
joy herself, running ahead and sniffing the path in front of them. Maggie told Ash about De Sang.

  "All he seems to do with Sam is play with him."

  "So?"

  "Well, I could do that."

  "Then why don't you?"

  Maggie wondered why she didn't.

  The children ran round the stone circle, attempting to leap from one stone to another. Dot cocked her leg against one ancient megalith.

  "What is it?" Amy wanted to know.

  "It's a stone circle."

  Amy sighed as if her mother was an idiot. "But what's it for?"

  "It's a mystery," said Ash. "Sometimes it's more fun when we don't know the answer. Then it can be anything we want it to be." Amy looked less than impressed with this. "All right, I'll tell you the legend. There were these nine ladies. They were dancing naked here one midsummer night. And a wizard put a spell on them, so that if they were still dancing when the sun came up they'd be turned to stone. Well, the night was so short, it took them by surprise. But they were so beautiful the wizard couldn't take his eyes off the dancing ladies, and he got turned into stone too." Ash pointed over at the solitary standing stone across the heath. "There he is."

  Amy counted the stones in the circle. They seemed to confirm Ash's story. She walked over to the single stone. "She's happier with that explanation/' Maggie said.

  "But it subtracts from the mystery, don't you think?"

  "I'm sure there's some deep meaning to it."

  "Yes," said Ash. "I'm sure there is."

  They all sat in Ash's car and ate sandwiches and had tea from a flask.

  "You didn't forget to bring the diary, did you?" Maggie asked him. It had been on her mind all day.

  "No, I didn't forget." He produced it from the dashboard. "And I've got something to show you." He flicked open to a page which was blank but for a few herb names written on the first two lines. "What do you see?"

  Maggie took the diary and held it up to the window. She could see nothing more than what was obvious. She shrugged.

  "Watch." He took the book from her and pressed his palm down on the page. After a minute he took his hand away and half a page of faint pencil writing had appeared, barely decipherable.

  "How?"

  "Some trick with the pencil graphite and chemicals, I suppose. More successful at hiding it on some pages than on others."

  "That explains why I kept finding stuff on pages I'd already looked at."

  "You probably surfaced some of it just by keeping it in a warm, moist place, or by exposing the pages. You'll find more in there than you thought."

  "Have you read all of it?"

  "I haven't had it long enough. I was about to ask. Though I suppose you'll want it back for a while now I've showed you that little trick."

  "I suppose I will," said Maggie, already engrossed in the phantom writing.

  "Be careful with it," said Ash. "Strong stuff."

  "Yes."

  Be careful.

  So why am I afraid? When I take such care?

  Is it A. whom I fear? Or is it this craft that seduces me? When it steals my every thought? And though I have this and that to attend to, always I think the craft, the craft, and return to it, and when so many wonderful things are shewn to me that I cannot otherwise. Wonderful things, falling one upon the other.

  And may I do good with it, that's the best of all.

  But A. torments me and says I play and am not true to the path. Why do I let her abuse me? Why listen? But she says I have not yet come to my fork in the path, as all will and must, says A. Then she flatters me and says I must come to my fork in the path early because I am this and I am that. And it is at the fork I must make the DECISION.

  In her few quiet moments Maggie read and reread the new pages of the diary as Ash had revealed them to her. Recipes for salves and ointments and healing herbs were numerous; but more mysterious were the diarist's outpourings over her misgivings, and the strange courtship with the unnamed A. Maggie did not understand the meaning of these fretful passages but felt in some way they were speaking to her. They were at times like an echo of her own doubts, and yet like the diarist she felt the irresistible seduction in the unfolding mysteries promised behind the words.

  Certain passages made her blood quicken.

  There is a fork in the path in the woods as I now see, and one is the way out, and one is bathed all in the blue light. This is the path of DECISION as I take it. But howsoever A. will have it, I say I am on the path of the blue shining, and the DECISION is made. But A. says I will never do at that.

  No, I would not go naked. There's an end. I am resolved not to be put off, nor teased, nor threatened nor bullied no more by A. For now I see she wants me for her own uses, to do this or that EXTREME thing.

  Though she struggled to assemble a coherent picture from these entries, Maggie had, at least, discovered some continuity.

  In spite what I wrote a few days ago, today I went naked for the LISTENING, and there is an end to all talk of play. It was the blue lighted path, but not lighted in a common sense, and even A. says yes and how yes was the DECISION. And it is made. And it shut her mouth for a while, and I'm glad of a bit of peace so I am.

  I'd just as lief not prove her right but it brings me such reward my heart hammers to tell of it. And dangers, there are dangers I never guessed, but such reward! My heart is like a scales, up, down, I don't know.

  I am still afraid and A. says that is proper.

  What was it that had pitched the diarist into such raptures? Maggie wanted to know what great step it was that appeared to have been taken. There was the listening mentioned again, which Maggie had already been seduced into sampling the afternoon she'd forgotten to collect the children. Extraordinary things had happened, in their small way, and certain emotions had been excited; but there were no blue lights or shining paths or spectacular decisions to be made.

  Meanwhile she found a preparation for treating Amy's eczema; and an inhalant for treating her own sinus complaint, which she used with some success. She had an itch for the creativity of the thing, and she cast around for subjects. But it wasn't ointments and herb baths she wanted, it was more. The diarist's excitement infected her.

  Maggie had never had an affair since marrying Alex, though she had once come close. But, in hiding her herb collection from him, in poring over her diary in secret moments, and in plotting snatched intervals away from her family, the entire enterprise felt a little like that. She was cagey about what she'd been doing and careful not to let anything slip. Meanwhile curiosity pulled like desire.

  The diary was full of mysteries waiting to be undressed. Her work with oils was deeply sensuous; streaming with exciting, public perfumes and with private, arousing musky odours. Her secret world flowed with refreshed moods and new histories, and was charged with possibility. It was a potent, dangerous seduction; and Maggie was seducing herself.

  One morning, about half an hour before dawn, Maggie woke up as indeed she'd asked herself to before falling asleep. She slipped out of bed and dressed hurriedly. Alex snorted and turned in his sleep but didn't waken.

  In the kitchen she shredded and boiled her concoction of bay laurel, mugwort, and cinquefoil, inhaling the fumes before pouring the brew into her thermos flask and carefully disposing of the dregs. She got in the car and drove through the empty streets.

  Grey light was peeling into dawn when she arrived at Osier's Wood. She parked the car and took her flask and a blanket. There was a heavy dew and mist, a will o' the wisp streaming from the woodland and across the distant meadow. The woods were eerily silent. Trees stood in dark ranks, prodding branches at her in strange, silent gestures. They enfolded her, tree trunks closing behind her like gates.

  She found her way to the middle of the woods, dawn light creeping dimly through the fenestrations of the trees. She listened. There was nothing but the occasional drip of dew from a branch. Then the moistness of the trees and the leaves and the earth became a kind of sound to her
, a dull harmony. Black and grey and green branches twisted and drew around her like an exotic alphabet she hadn't yet mastered, but which she could learn. She put down her flask and her blanket and took off her coat. The decision had been made. She glanced around her before starting to undress.

  It was cold, October-dawn cold, but she stripped and stood naked, looking up at the trees, as if waiting for something. Leaf mould oozed between her toes, her nipples became erect. A shaft of light lit up the dew on the bark of a tall silver birch. She moved to it, collecting dew on her fingers and putting the droplets to her mouth as if they were honey. They tasted strangely sweet. The glinting silver birch took on a lavender hue. She put her tongue to the bark. She licked, inhaling the deep smells of the bark, the smells of moist, old wood, and the fungal odours.

  A breeze rippled through the woods and she shivered. She threw the blanket round her shoulders and sat at the foot of an oak. Opening her flask, she inhaled the steam, and it made her feel drowsy. She ran a hand through her long hair, tossed back her head, and listened.

  The wind in the tree told her many things.

  It told her true things and false things.

  It was a friend and a false friend. It told her secrets and lies.

  It whispered what she must do to love her husband, and what she must do to kill him.

  TWELVE

  Alex, Amy, and Sam were sitting quietly round the table having breakfast when Maggie got back to the house. Dot slunk away as she entered the kitchen. She was greeted by silence.

  "I've been for a lovely walk," she announced, a trifle too enthusiastically. "You should all do the same if you know what's good for you."