Dark Sister

by Graham Joyce

  "Goddess," she breathed. "Hecate."

  Alex sat up in bed pretending to read a novel. He was only feigning to himself. It was well after one o'clock and Maggie hadn't returned. He was both annoyed and concerned for her safety. Scrambling from his bed, he tugged back the curtain. Outside, a faint white moonlight issued from a cloudless sky. New moon, Maggie had said. He thought the moon had a diseased look.

  He pulled on his dressing gown. There was something he wanted to check out while Maggie was gone.

  The spare room... He was convinced Maggie had been storing things in there, hiding something from him. Perhaps it was the excessive interest she'd shown in wanting to restore the room to some sort of order, or maybe it was the way in which the door had only lately been kept clicked shut that had tipped him off. He'd intended to confront her about it directly. So why hadn't he?

  The spare room, being no more than a tiny shoebox shape, was useful only as storage space. It had become a dump for old clothes, worn-out appliances, broken toys, boxes of books and papers—anything they couldn't bear to throw away. He went rummaging, unsure of what he was looking for exactly, but certain there was something to be found.

  He cleared a lot of old shoes from the foot of the wardrobe to get to a large cardboard box underneath. He had an allergy to the dust he was disturbing. It brought on a sudden perspiration and a fit of sneezing. His temperature shot up, making him angry with the box he was endeavouring to wrestle out of the wardrobe. It was wedged against the wooden uprights, and he tore at it to release it. When he finally ripped open a corner to reveal a length of white lace, he realized it was only the container for Maggie's wedding dress. He stuffed the box back in the wardrobe, hurling shoes on top of it.

  A kind of madness swept over him as he prowled the room, tossing clothes aside and tearing open sealed boxes of old archaeology journals and papers. Then he noticed the trunk. It was partly concealed by a pile of paperbacks stacked on top of its closed lid. He pawed the books to the floor and rattled the lid. It was locked. The key was normally left in the lock. He kicked the lid angrily.

  He hurried downstairs and came back with a file, easily snapping the lock. The trunk was over spilling with photograph albums and wallets of snapshots. He lifted all of them out before convincing himself they were hiding nothing, slamming the lid back down on the trunk.

  He was restacking the books on the trunk when another idea chased him back to the wardrobe. He lifted out the shoes and felt the weight of the wedding-dress box. He shook it. It rattled. He lifted it and something slid about inside. He had to stand the box on end before it would come out of the wardrobe.

  The long, white silk and lace dress was folded in half and wrapped in delicate tissue paper. Alex lifted it from the box as if it might disintegrate in his hands. Underneath was what he was looking for.

  The diary, plus a collection of other objects. There was the jar of handfasting oil—he failed to recognize it as the one from which Maggie had massaged him over a week ago. He took off the top, sniffed it, and stood it on the trunk. There were other items: a stone pestle and mortar; a wooden-handled knife; a brass incense pot; a wooden stick stripped of its bark; an enamel pot; a bottle of olive oil; a collection of coloured candles (some partially burned); an eyedropper; needles and cloth; and assorted candle holders. Alex sighed.

  In addition to all of this, and laid out in alphabetical order, were dozens of clear plastic sachets containing various herbs, all neatly labelled. There were also a number of miniature ceramic pots, stoppered and containing scented oils.

  A tiny hand tapped him on the shoulder.

  Alex leapt backwards in terror, scattering books and the jar of handfasting oil from the trunk. It tumbled to the floor, spilling its contents on the carpet. Amy stood in her pyjamas biting her thumb.

  "How long have you been standing there?" Alex had to put a hand on his drumming heart.

  "I was having a bad dream," said Amy. She looked about to cry.

  He sighed again, but this time with relief. All of his anger and confusion was dissolved instantly by the apparition of his daughter. Nothing was more important to Alex than the happiness and security of his children. He saw his duties as a father as a sacred calling, and any dispute with Maggie was a detail, a secondary matter. It could all be worked out later. He spread out his arms to Amy. "A dream, my darling? Come here, let me cuddle you. Is that better? I'm here to chase away all bad dreams. Shall I carry you back to your bed? Here we go. Or do you want to come to our bed?"

  "Your bed."

  "Anything you want, my darling. Anything you want."

  Alex carried Amy back to his room and tucked her into bed. He stroked her hair and promised to return to her in a few minutes. Then he went back to the spare room, replacing everything as he'd found it. He located the jar he'd knocked to the floor and cleaned up the mess. He even tried to disguise the accident by refilling the jar with a drop or two of the olive oil. The box was restored to the foot of the wardrobe and layered over with shoes. He switched off the light, returned to his own room, and climbed into bed beside Amy.

  Maggie arrived half an hour later, by which time Amy was asleep. Alex also pretended to be asleep. She slipped into bed beside him, and he felt a wave of cold pass from her. A draft of woods and earth smells came from her hair.

  EIGHTEEN

  The Maggie dig turned up a third knife identical to the first two, and another half a tin plate. Alex was having to keep an eye on both archaeological efforts simultaneously. He didn't entirely trust his mainly volunteer crew to do a decent job. He needed to be in both places at once. He was afraid they might miss some vital but unspectacular piece of scientific information in their eagerness to turn up museum-quality artefacts.

  "Just slow down, for God's sake!" he was always telling them. "It's the fine details that count." He'd started bawling people out, and never heard himself until it was too late.

  When the third dagger and the second half-plate appeared, he marshalled the crew into working around the objects with a fine brush until he—and only he—could lift them out. The half-plate was a perfect match to the first, cleanly sliced down the middle. It was found at a distance of eighteen inches from its other half. The first two daggers had been set at approximately two feet apart. The third was two feet from the second dagger and four feet from the first.

  Alex marked the points of each find and connected the markers with a line of tape. It produced an isosceles triangle, its equal sides each intersecting the position in which the half-plates had been found. Alex instructed the three student volunteers he'd assigned to the job to dig round the apex of the triangle.

  "WHAT'S THAT?" he screamed at one of the students, a youth with his hair tied back in a ponytail.

  "This?" said the student, holding up a delicate trowel.

  "Yes! That, that, that stone-breaking implement! What is it?"

  The boy looked at the object in his hand as if someone else had put it there. At length he said, "It's a trowel."

  "This is not a fucking quarry! This is surgery! Use SOMETHING ELSE!"

  Alex stormed back to his main dig, leaving the students to exchange looks.

  In the playroom Maggie was prising up wooden tiles. Every evening Amy took a great delight in checking on the worsening stain under the rug and reporting back that it was taking on the semblance of a face more and more with each passing day. Maggie made a great show of scoffing at the idea to Amy, but admitted to herself that it was indeed easy to discern a face in the pattern of the staining.

  She'd moved the rug aside herself from time to time and saw what was unmistakably a pair of eyes (though rather far apart), a nose (though set at something of an angle) and a mouth turned back in an expression of sadness and suffering.

  Alex had already established that there was no damp rising through the floor. There was nothing spilled or running between the tiles. Now Maggie had decided to leave the stained area untiled. Beneath the tiles was the bare concrete which Alex
had put down over the original cellar floor. She simply laid the rug across the exposed concrete and tossed the stained tiles in the bin.

  While his mother was upstairs discarding the tiles, Sam charged around the playroom brandishing his plastic sword. He hacked and slashed at an opposing army, single-handedly putting them to flight, ran his sword through a few small enemies, and stabbed a bean bag for good measure. Then he slumped on the bean bag, recovering his breath while deciding what to do next.

  Something moist struck him sharply on his cheek.

  Something had spat at him.

  He heard a hiss. He stood up from the bean bag and turned unsteadily. Slap. It struck him again, stinging and wet on the cheek. It burned like a smack to the face.

  He knew where it was coming from. He turned to face the potted geranium.

  Inside the plant was a living, full sized face. An old woman's face. Sam recognized her. She leered at him and grinned, blinking her eyes. Her face was made of leaves, her skin green, wrinkled, and veined like the leaves of the geranium, her teeth yellow.

  It was the old woman who had stolen his doll. Who had beckoned him along the catwalk at the Gilded Arcade. She hissed at him. She produced hands out of the branches of the plant, brown hands with cracked yellow fingernails. She hissed again and opened her mouth. Her long black venomous tongue unfolded from between her cracked lips, a foot long, like a snake, inching toward him.

  Sam's screams brought Maggie running down the cellar steps. She found Sam stamping his feet, screaming in an hysterical high-pitched wail, sucking in air in huge gulps between screams, his eyes streaming. He was hacking violently at a plant on a low table with his plastic sword. Maggie scooped him up in her arms, but he did not stop screaming or swinging his plastic sword.

  "What is it, Sam?"

  He only shrieked more hysterically.

  Maggie carried him out of the playroom and up the stairs. The leaves and broken branches of the geranium lay in an untidy scattering at the foot of the low table.

  NINETEEN

  "Never put a geranium where there's a child." This was Old Liz's advice.

  Maggie had changed her mind about not visiting her again. It bothered her that there was simply no one to whom she could turn for support; at least no one who could remotely understand what she had to say, let alone help her to say it. Alex wouldn't begin to listen. Ash at the shop was sympathetic, but somehow always on guard. However senile or even lunatic the old woman had originally appeared, Maggie decided she was the nearest to a kindred spirit available.

  If there was a conclusion to be drawn from that, Maggie had steered away from it and had returned to Old Liz's house to recount the episode with Sam and the plant. Ash had told her Liz had a taste for sherry, so Maggie had brought her a bottle. The old woman had accepted the bottle without a word, setting it down and withdrawing from her pantry a bottle of homemade elderberry wine. "As for geraniums, no child will thrive with one. I know that. And you should know that."

  "Why should I know that?"

  Liz took a sip of blueblood elderberry wine. "Why, she says?" tapping her stick on the rug. "Why? Because you're a one as knows, or says you are."

  "I've never said anything!" Maggie protested.

  Liz grinned and made the same melodramatic gesture she'd made on Maggie's first visit, hugging herself like some deeply repressed thing. "But," she said, dropping the pose, "I see you're opening. Like a flower."

  Liz pulled such faces when she spoke that Maggie wanted to laugh. "Is that what you see?"

  Liz became serious again. "A one's got to be open to the world if a one's goin' to find her way. That's why you've got a money box. Open to the world." Maggie smiled. She hadn't heard it called a money box since she was a girl.

  Liz uncrooked a finger and jabbed it at her, backwards and forwards. "Stick it in, stick it in, stick it in. That's all those fellas can do. Stick it in. Good for nowt else. That's why they don't know anything. They can't."

  "Don't you get men who ..." Maggie picked up Liz's circumspect language. "Who are ones. Can't men be ones?"

  "Oh, you do get 'em. Oh you do. You do." The old woman leaned forward. "Some."

  "Is Ash one?"

  "Pssshhttt!!!" Liz waved her stick. "What you want to talk another for? Eh? You don't talk another! Eh?" She seemed quite angry.

  The rebuke made Maggie feel like a little girl. She couldn't understand why Liz tolerated her when her presence so easily inflamed the old woman. And then her acid manner would dissolve instantly, with equal unpredictability. She began to suspect the old woman might be teasing, playing with her.

  "I'm sorry—"

  "Do you like it? I said do you like it?"

  Maggie realized she was referring to the elderberry wine. "It's lovely. Do you make it every year?"

  "Take one o’ them bottles for that husband o' yorn."

  "That's very..." Maggie tailed off. She'd suddenly spotted a way in. "Would you show me how to make it as good as this?"

  "How much will you give me?" Liz said, in a flash

  "Whatever you want."

  Liz rocked with laughter. She pulled a grubby handkerchief from her sleeve to wipe the tears from her eyes. "There's a good un! That's a good 'un, ain't it?" She laughed again, a high-pitched laugh. "That's what Ash says." She recovered. "I might show you. I might. There's a lot to know about the owd gal."

  Old girl. That was a term Bella used for elder in the diary. Maggie took the diary from her handbag and tried to show it to Liz, but the old woman seemed to grow annoyed. She waved it away. "Books! You don't want books! Books'll do you no good at all, and no one any good. Them as write 'em is the worst, and them as read 'em; there's no good in any of 'em. Books!"

  It seemed important to put up some kind of argument. "There must be some good books! What about the Bible?"

  "Bible? Eh? That only gives the worst ones an excuse to argue. Did it mean this, did it mean t'other? No. We don't want these books."

  Maggie slipped the diary back inside her handbag. "When do you pick the elder? For the wine, I mean."

  "Owd gal, well now . . ."

  The old woman was a fund of both lore and practical information regarding the virtues and vices of the magnificent elder. Not only concerning the making of wine, but also of jam, and a lot more besides. It was a plant, she observed more than once, "as runs both ways." Maggie took this to mean it could have both beneficial and malign properties, something Liz had also said of the geranium. She wouldn't have elder wood in her house, and said a child's cradle should never be made of elder. Maggie wondered if Mothercare knew about these things. But the leaves kept flies away from a house, Liz maintained, and were useful for toothache and depression. Pinned on a stable door it would stop any horse from being hag-ridden, and before Maggie could ask about that, Liz told her an elder cure for warts and a conciliatory rhyme used by woodcutters:

  Owd gal give me some o' thy wood

  And I'll give thee some o' mine

  When I grow into a tree.

  Maggie's head was spinning with information when the old woman surprised her by suggesting they go out and pick some from the hedgerows.

  "Can you get about on your stick?"

  Liz chuckled and pulled herself to her feet. "We'll see. Pull that door to behind. Let's look to the owd gal. Come on, what're you waiting for?"

  Alex was fast losing patience with the volunteers at the dig. He claimed they were drifting from the precise spot where he'd instructed them to work. If he didn't supervise them on the original dig, they disturbed and confused his sophisticated system of depth markings; if he neglected to oversee them on the Maggie dig, they started hacking at the earth like navvies.

  "You do understand plain English?" he'd shouted.

  "Yes," said the boy with the ponytail, "I've secured a place at Oxford University to study the subject."

  Alex glowered. The other students turned away to hide their smirks. He was livid, clenching his fists at his sides until his knuckl
es turned white. Someone came up behind him and said he was wanted on the telephone.

  "What?"

  "Said it was urgent." The man from the ticket office pointed across the site. "You'll have to take it in my pay box."

  Alex had to walk fifty yards to the ticket office. He snatched up the phone. It was their childminder.

  When they returned from the field, Maggie looked at the clock and let out a groan. "Oh no. I'm going to be late for Amy and Sam!" She laid her bag of elderberries on the table. "I'm going to have to fly!"

  "Eh? But you've only just got here." Liz protested. "What's the use o' coming if you're going to go before you've arrived?"

  "Can't be helped!" Maggie swept out of the door.

  "Bugger off then," the old woman shouted.

  She followed as far as the gate and watched Maggie scurry down the cinder path, climb into her car, and speed away. "Aye," she said to herself. "You might or you might not do."

  When Maggie arrived home, Alex and the children were at the kitchen table, eating sandwiches.

  "Sorry," said Maggie. Alex remained tight-lipped. She brushed Amy's hair from her eyes. "You all right?" she said. Amy nodded, holding a crescent of a sandwich to her mouth. Sam, too, was all right. Everyone was all right. Except Alex.

  Maggie put a hand on his shoulder. "Alex, it's just that I met this wonderful old lady and she wanted me to go for a walk with her ... I know I've let you down again."

  Alex spoke so calmly, and in such measured sentences, it was obvious he was boiling inside. "I was summoned today, summoned, from my place of work, by no other than my son's child-minder. I had to leave off the responsible task of supervising several incompetent and insolent layabouts, risking the project and thus my professional reputation, in order to mollify said angry childminder ..."