Dark Sister

by Graham Joyce

  Meanwhile he had enough worries over the original project. An unearthed wall had collapsed; vandals had appeared one night and moved the markers on an entire section; and the dearth of positive results of the project was clouding its future. Alex was scratching his head, his mind not on the job, when Tania came up behind him. She was about to say something when he asked her if she could baby-sit that evening.

  "I can't do it every night, Alex."

  "Sure. 1 know. I mean, think about it, will you?"

  "I'll think about it. Anyway, we've found something. You'd better come and look."

  They'd excavated a length of narrow-bore lead pipe inside the dagger circle. It was disintegrating, but so far it was still in one piece. About three inches in length had been uncovered.

  "Is it old?"

  Alex looked closely at the white layer of oxidation on the surface of the pipe. "Oh, yes," he said. "Oh, yes. Let's have it out."

  "Can you give me a lift if I come round tonight?" said Tania.

  "I'm still keen to learn a few things," Anita said after Maggie had seen out a customer. She didn't seem to want to leave, and Maggie couldn't think how to get rid of her.

  "What things?"

  Anita gestured at the rows of shelves. "These things. Herbalism. Talismans."

  "What do you want to know?"

  "Lots of things. How to attract someone. How to repel someone. How to know what another person is thinking."

  Maggie looked at her. Anita had some question she desperately wanted to ask, but clearly couldn't. She gave the impression she was waiting for Maggie to open the subject. Well, she could wait. "Not easy, those things."

  "But you do have some knowledge."

  "Very little."

  "Don't bullshit me, Maggie Sanders. I'm not completely without insight myself, you know." Anita's eyes fizzed. "I know what you do."

  Maggie's laugh was like the silver bell above the door. "I don't know what you're talking about."

  "Alex is one thing. Bill is another. You'd better lay off."

  Maggie dropped what she was doing and turned round. "Anita, hadn't you better explain what you're talking about? Because I'm getting confused."

  But Anita, if she was about to explain, didn't get the opportunity, because Ash came in at that moment. "Afternoon, ladies!" he said, in his vaguely ironic and proprietary voice. Maggie introduced them.

  "I thought there would be someone," Anita said, getting up to leave.

  "Pardon?" said Ash.

  "On the scene." Ash looked at Maggie, and then back at Anita, who said, "Do you make magic together? Silly me. Of course you do. Well, this is nice, but I have to go." Anita turned and left the shop.

  Ash stared after her.

  "Alex's lover," said Maggie.

  "Oh," said Ash, as if that explained everything. "Sexy lady."

  "Some people think so," said Maggie.

  She held up her new talismans for him to see.

  THIRTY

  Maggie didn't give up trying to persuade Ash to fly with her, but he resisted stubbornly. She also tried to get him to talk about his own experience of flying, but all he would say was that it differed for different people, and that it was an experience he was most reluctant to repeat.

  She could understand that. Her own recent efforts had succeeded in poisoning her. Despite exercising great care, it had taken her two full days to recover properly from the effects of flying. The nausea, headaches, night sweats, and bowel disorders had been a grim toll. But she was convinced that the preparation had been fundamentally correct. What had failed, she suspected, was something in her mental preparation, some inability to transform the poisonous properties of the flying ointment. She thought it was something Ash might know about.

  Maggie stayed at his house occasionally, though not often. She'd made the mistake one night of giving over her best efforts to cure Ash of his impotence. The undertaking failed. She sucked him and squeezed him and teased him with her sharp fingernails and licked him from head to toe with her darting tongue, all to no avail. Though he pretended otherwise, she knew he was mortified. All she succeeded in doing was augmenting his anguish.

  The craft she kept in reserve. Liz had given her strict instructions on that, and Maggie was too afraid of seeing the craft fail to do otherwise. But she continued to press Liz on the use of the flying ointment. She was whipped on by overwhelming curiosity, yet too afraid to go it alone again. While Ash held out against her, she turned to the diary, where she found another of Bella's entries on the subject of flying. It was not helpful, and it only redoubled her store of anxieties. Last eve I did fly again and survived, but by the skin of my teeth, thanks be to Hecate, and ere I got what I wanted I was out of it. A. forced me into it though I'd not a mind for it. Why do I let her bully me? I'll have done with A. if there's a way for it. I'll kill her off, my dark sister, so I will. And though I don't feel poorly, the banishments being correct, my hands are all a-tremble at what I did see.

  Now at least I have some knowledge on A. for I seen HER dark sister and HER dark sister and so on, all in a line like tied with May blossom or something of the sort which I couldn't make out. But I'm done, and I'll not fly again, no.

  Maggie decided that Bella was a witch of little resolve, for there was another entry a few days later.

  / did fly again last eve though I'd said I'd not and I did intend but that I had A. tormenting tormenting tormenting me that I'd not SHIFT and I'd not used the flying ointment three times in the same moon, so since she was on her back but carrying water, the moon that is, I went along and did. A. left me alone a bit then, as she knows how I am towards her of late.

  A. says I'm not discreet enough and she says I'll pay. But things are not as they were.

  None of it was much help, except that the references to banishments were intriguing. There had been at least one earlier reference to banishments and something about "preservation from demons." Maggie understood these demons to represent the physical discomforts she'd endured, and put the question to Ash.

  "Don't ask me. She's probably referring to the banishing rituals."

  "What are the banishing rituals?"

  "I'm not telling you. It only encourages you to go away and do something dangerous.

  "Isn't it more dangerous if I don't know?"

  "There are all kinds of banishing rituals. The idea is that the ritual keeps away any undesirable forces and influences. Some of them are complicated procedures where you have to wave a sword at the points of a star and so on; others are just about the time of day it's safe to work—dawn, midday, dusk."

  "Can you make up your own?"

  "You shouldn't underestimate these rituals. It's something about keeping your intentions pure, and your mind unclouded."

  "I'm going to fly again. If you won't join me, will you at least watch over me?"

  Ash groaned.

  More artefacts were turning up at the archaeological dig, but they raised more questions than answers. Tania and her colleagues had found a metal handle with a back plate and screw holes. Then they unearthed another piece of metal, square-shaped, again a plate with screw holes, but with a circular hole in its middle.

  "These things were probably screwed to something wooden which has rotted," Alex told them. "See if you can find the screws. Also, take a section of earth and see if you can find anything in the soil which might suggest an imprint left behind by a wooden casket or something. Take it slowly."

  They found a second metal handle. It almost certainly belonged to a large box of some kind. The function of the other fragment, the holed metal plate, was more difficult to guess. Then Alex saw Tania troweling at the earth, her hair scraped back and tied in a pony tail, bending over in her tight jeans. He had a lewd thought. He packed her off to fetch the five-foot length of lead pipe they'd already unearthed. When she came back, the lead pipe fitted snugly inside the diameter of hole in the metal plate.

  Alex was supposed to have a lunchtime rendezvous with Anita that day
. Instead he invited Tania to join him for a drink at the Malt Shovel. She accepted, and if she was surprised that he didn't invite the others, she said nothing.

  He bought her lunch and a glass of white wine. "Can you come round tonight?"

  "I don't want to baby-sit for you again, Alex."

  "Not babysitting. I thought you might like dinner at my place. We could open a bottle of wine and speculate about what these objects might be." He narrowed his eyes on the word.

  Tania had wide-open brown eyes, and they didn't blink. "That would be nice," she said.

  Alex planned to have the kids in bed by eight o'clock and Tania in bed by eleven. He hoped she could do for him what Anita, lately, couldn't. He wondered, with vague feelings of guilt and suspicion, what Maggie would be doing that evening.

  Ash had agreed, under protest, to supervise Maggie's flying experiment that evening. He made his study available, knowing how uncomfortable her bed-sit could be. He also told her what he knew about "banishments" and fashioned a ritual for her, half from memory, half invented, but in any case a precise order of events which they rehearsed twice in order to get clear.

  They'd agreed to begin the process at dusk. The flying ointment was prepared. Incense was ignited in Ash's study, already smouldering in brass bowls as the sky began to darken outside. Maggie began to feel the itching, the claw squeezing at her bowels as the hour approached. Why am I doing this? she asked herself again. What's driving me? A bitter taste lined her palate, as if the memory of her first flying experience was a metallic dust secreted in her saliva. Deposits of anxiety. Ash felt her jitters.

  "You don't have to, you know. No one's making you."

  "I don't know why; but I must."

  "I'll make you some herb tea. Settle your stomach."

  Maggie saw her chance. "Good idea. You sit down. I'll do it."

  She made the herb tea, but not one Ash had ever drunk before. This was one of Liz's. She sweetened it with honey.

  "Mmmmm. Good. What is it?"

  "My secret," said Maggie. "I'm going to take my bath."

  "Don't be long. It's almost dusk."

  Maggie took a perfumed bath. She knew enough about aromatherapy by now to scent the gardens of heaven. She'd made her own bathing mixture from sea salt, rosemary, frankincense, and cypress. After drying, she anointed herself with the protective oils of hyssop and basil.

  Liz had also passed on a love scent. The old woman had made it up for her and had given it to her with a wicked smile and instructions to use it sparingly. Maggie had to beg her to reveal the formula. It contained jasmine, red rose, a minute quantity of lavender, a bit of musk, and ylang-ylang oils.

  She came from the bathroom wearing her dressing gown. Ash was in the study wearing a loose-fitting jogging suit. He lit tall red and white candles. The incense was a specific compound of sandalwood and rosemary, pungent and sweet, streaming from the brass bowls and coiling in the air like snakes. He saw she was wearing one of her engraved copper talismanic charms.

  On the rug Ash had made a large circle out of a length of clean, white rope. The circle was broken at the two ends of the rope. "Just remember," he told her, "that a rope on the floor is not a magic circle, it's just a rope. But it prompts you to maintain the circle in your mind." Outside the circle stood a bottle of mineral water to answer the ravaging dryness of Maggie's first experiment. Inside the circle was a bowl of water for washing and the jar of flying ointment. Maggie gave Ash a nervous smile, slipped off her dressing gown and stepped into the circle. She sat cross-legged on the rug, naked but for her talisman. Ash closed the circle behind her by overlapping the two ends of the rope.

  Maggie composed herself. She dipped her finger in the water and touched her forehead. Repeating the words Ash had taught her, she made her dedications to Hecate and asked for protection: I have purified myself and my heart is filled with joy. I bring gifts of incense and perfume. I anoint myself with unguents to make myself strong.

  Outside the circle, Ash watched, fascinated. The perfume from the censers hung heavy in the room. Her hair was like burnished copper in the flickering candle light and her skin flushed rose-pink from her scented bath. Her eyes were half-closed as she repeated the ritual dedications, a slight bloom of perspiration on her brow. She reached for the jar of flying ointment and began to massage it into her wrists. She rubbed it into her temples, her ankles, round her throat and finally put her fingers inside her vagina.

  "Wait!" said Ash. He slipped off his tracksuit, opened the rope, entered the circle and closed it behind him. He crouched down beside her, dipping his hand in the water and touching it to his brow, exactly as she had done.

  "Ash! What are you doing?"

  "Wherever it is you're going, I'm coming with you."

  He repeated the words, massaging the flying ointment into his ankles, wrists and throat: Grant me the secret longings of my heart.

  "No cheating," said Maggie. She put her fingers in the jar of ointment and smeared it on his cock, then reached behind him and pushed her forefinger up his anus. Ash gasped. Then she kissed him full on the lips and smiled grimly. "Now wait."

  They sat in complete silence for ten or fifteen minutes before she began to feel the faint dizziness and the perspiration on her brow. There was a taste somewhere in the back of her sinuses reminding her of her first experience. Again a burning, in her bowels and throat and inside her vagina, the dry heat which made her want to retch. But this time she saw the heat as a silver light climbing up the column of her spine. She visualized the heat as a silver sword, tip of the blade extending, as if she could control it, transform it, neutralize its poisonous properties, make it useful. The shimmering blade of light climbed up her spine and inserted itself into the tenderest lobes of her brain. Suddenly there was a wild knocking inside her—from her heart, it must be the heart— and then a strontium flash inside her brain, shock waves producing a profound numbness throughout her body.

  Suddenly her head swelled, balloon like, racing outwards at speed until it jerked to a stop, two inches from the ceiling and the walls of the room. She touched the ceiling and her fingers stuck to it like suction pads. She realized she was on the ceiling, not hanging from it, but on it, inflated massively. Her head and hands were so large, she could see nothing of the room. Ash? Where was Ash? She blinked and saw Ash, also on the ceiling with her. He was looking back at her with hugely dilated eyes. Their bodies were gargantuan, obstructing all view of the study. She put a hand on Ash's arm and instantly there was an explosion as he shot away, a distance of a million miles in a fraction of a second, leaving a laser trail of light like a spaceship from a science-fiction movie.

  Then another explosion as he was back with her again. She looked into his eyes. They were stormy black holes, clouds racing across them chased by high winds, arcs of light, magnesium flares, moving landscapes. She went into them, passed through them, and he was already inside there, waiting for her. They held hands and went hurtling through lilac skies, buffeted by hot spice winds, until they came to an abrupt stop.

  They were together in that grey corridor she had visited before. She tried to speak to Ash but couldn't make words come. Gray and black shapes drifted past her vision, dissolving, reforming. Then the familiar face was beside her, the face that had helped her before, questioning without words. Maggie told her she had a gift to offer.

  The face disappeared and in its place was a familiar scene within a parting in the grey corridor. It was Alex, raising Anita to her knees. Maggie didn't want to witness the event a second time. She waved it away and it changed. Alex was still there. This time he was at home. He was lying on his back, in bed. Tania was with him.

  Nothing was happening. Tania was also lying on her back, sheets drawn up to her waist, her doe-eyes gazing at the ceiling.

  "Perhaps you're trying too hard," she said.

  Alex turned over and bit the pillow. Tania's sympathy was even more provoking than Anita's

  Hitherto, the evening had gone well. Tan
ia had turned the kids on to something called "Cowboy's Glory", which was nothing more exotic than the beans on toast Alex could never get them to eat. The children, by now accustomed to Tania's presence, had gone to bed without too much fuss. Alex's party-piece lasagne had turned out well, and the first bottle of claret had given way to a second. Then Amy had come downstairs at the wrong moment to find her daddy removing Tania's blouse and sucking Tania's brown nipple.

  "What are you doing?" Amy had wanted to know.

  After Amy had been settled again, Tania and Alex removed to the master bedroom. But there, despite a lot of spirited wrestling and imaginative foreplay, the point had somewhere been lost. And though his body couldn't give him an erection, his mind was still ablaze with lust. Alex didn't want Tania's sympathetic clichés or her banalities; he wanted a night of deep sex. The kind of sex that went on until the early hours, and then even further, the kind of sex that left you sore. He wanted Tania to help him prove that Anita had a problem and he didn't; that Anita was being passed over by the angels of lust and he wasn't; that where Anita exuded something dispiriting and deflatory, he was still clean.

  At first he felt this was some kind of punishment cooked up for him by Anita. Then he changed his mind and thought it was all Maggie's doing. Then he wanted to blame Tania. He felt angry at her, lying there staring up at the ceiling, but he couldn't think why. So he settled for a compound resentment of all three women, lying in the dark in a sullen, curdled silence; but of the three, mostly he cursed his wife.