Dark Sister

by Graham Joyce

  Alex, of course, now wanted them to be friends. He wanted everything to be civilized. Whenever she called at the house, Maggie accepted his invitations to have a coffee, but thwarted his efforts at conversation with the frozen hostility of perfect good manners. She answered his questions with the briefest of replies and deliberately failed to pose any of her own. She would look at her watch intermittently, and made transparent excuses in order to leave. She played the part of the stranger who disguises boredom with studied politesse.

  Today she'd had to break the formality by asking Alex if he would agree to changing her day with the children. Even though he'd arranged to see Anita, Alex was perfectly amenable. He was happy, he said, for Maggie to see the children any time she wanted.

  Now Liz wasn't here. Maggie squinted through the windows at the gloomy interior of the cottage. Her first thought was that Liz might be ill, but Maggie could see her empty bed in the room adjacent to the kitchen, its crocheted blankets folded neatly. Liz never used the upper floor of the cottage; she slept in a bed downstairs to save her arthritic legs.

  The dog continued to bark. No, Liz was out. Maggie went back to her car. She would sit and wait. Liz had no transport; she couldn't have gone far.

  When Anita Suzman drove past the Sanders' home that morning she was disappointed to see Amy, Sam, and Dot playing in the driveway. Saturday was Maggie's time with the children; Anita had arranged to spend an uncluttered hour or two with Alex. But she was also puzzled to see an old woman, apparently watching the children from the gateway. As she drove past, she felt an irrational thrill of concern for Amy and Sam. Something seemed amiss.

  Anita was discreet enough always to park her conspicuous bright red Cabriolet two streets away. She locked her car and walked back to the house. As she approached, she could see the old woman still in the gateway. Anita hung back to watch.

  The grizzled old woman was beckoning to Sam. He didn't seem to want to go at first, then he stepped over to her. Amy and Dot had disappeared. The old woman stooped over Sam. She placed her hands on his shoulders, and was whispering in his ear. Then she produced something from the folds of her black skirts and hung it round Sam's neck. Sam tried to lift it off, but she pressed it back on him, hiding it inside his T-shirt.

  Anita didn't like the look of what was happening. She walked toward the gate, quickening her pace. The old woman, spotting her approach, stiffened and walked smartly away in the opposite direction. Anita watched her turn a corner and out of sight.

  "Sam, come here."

  Sam was playing with the string round his neck. Anita pulled it from inside his T-shirt. Dangling from the grey string was a neat little cloth sachet. Anita stretched out a hand, wanting to take a closer look, but Sam pulled away from her. "Amy!" he shouted, running back up the path in search of his sister. "Amy!"

  Anita followed him round to the back of the house, and stepped in through the back door. She found Alex up to his elbows in washing-up suds. She brushed her lips against his cheek.

  "Who was that old woman outside?"

  "What woman?" said Alex, drying his hands.

  "Outside the gate. Talking to Sam." She went through to the lounge and made herself at home.

  "I've no idea. Shall I go and look?"

  "She's gone. I think I chased her away."

  "What was she doing?"

  Anita never answered because the telephone rang. It was Maggie. She'd discovered she wasn't as busy as she'd expected, and wanted to know if she could have the kids after all.

  "Sure," said Alex. "No problem at all. When do you want to pick them up? About an hour? Fine. See you then." He put the phone down. "That bitch is playing games with me."

  "Why do you say that?" The old woman was forgotten.

  "First she arranges to have the children today, which is why I said I could see you. Then she phones this morning, desperately sorry, can't have them. Now she wants them again. She's testing my patience."

  "I'm sure she's not, Alex."

  "Yes, she is. Every time she comes here she does it. Very polite. Nothing to say. No emotion. No talk. Nothing."

  "What do you expect? She's still furious with you, and I don't blame her."

  Alex looked at her. No matter what time of day it was, Anita always looked as if she was about to hit town. She was utterly desirable in her tight-fitting black dress, black tights and heels. Her lips were glossed and her eyes painted. She was fork-bendingly beautiful. He put a hand into her honey-blond hair and kissed her.

  "You can hide upstairs when she comes," he said.

  "No, I'm not staying. That's what I've come to talk to you about."

  "What are you saying?"

  "It's over. It has to be."

  Alex looked away.

  "Bill suspects something," Anita went on, "and I think we should quit while we're ahead. Anyway, you know it was running out of steam, don't say it wasn't."

  Alex wasn't saying anything.

  "It was good while it lasted, Alex. It was good, wasn't it? Wasn't it, Alex?"

  THIRTY-SIX

  Sunday morning Maggie was back at her bed-sit. She was lying awake in bed, staring at the ceiling and thinking about Ash. The previous day, after failing to find Liz, she'd spent a few hours with the children before returning to Ash's house. There she'd made a big mistake.

  "Ash, I intend to get my children back by any means."

  "Please! Not again, Maggie."

  "By any means."

  Ash was making her a casserole. He stopped chopping vegetables. "I can't argue with you while I'm cooking. All that confusion, it goes straight into the cooking. And then you eat it. Did you know that?"

  Maggie knew that. "You said to me you'd be a friend whatever happened, Ash. I believed you when you said that."

  "And I meant it. And I always will. But to be a friend to you now is to tell you to drop this stupid idea. These methods will not bring your children back to you. They will only poison your own mind. If you want them back, you have to go and talk to Alex and work at it."

  "I can't believe I'm hearing this!"

  "Maggie, if you try to work something against Alex you might even succeed in hurting him. But you've forgotten the first principles of this business. It's wrong path. It will return on you threefold. I believe that. It's the scariest thing about it."

  "I don't intend any direct harm."

  "I know exactly what you intend! You want to try this shapeshifting because you think it will bring you access to the children and some kind of special influence over them. I've been to the places your mind is going, Maggie! I know what I'm talking about!" Ash collected up the chopped vegetables and threw them all away. The meal was ruined before it had so much as simmered.

  "It can't hurt anyone, Ash. I'm going to ask you one more time to help me."

  "Are you deaf?"

  "I need your help. Please don't let me down when I need you most."

  "I said count me out!"

  "Ash, if you're not with me, you're against me."

  Ash looked stung. He grabbed her arm. "Don't try to lay that on me, Maggie. Don't you ever!"

  It was their first dispute, and it was deeply acrimonious. She felt betrayed.

  The door swung open and Kate entered the room. She was holding a copy of the Sunday World, a tabloid with a nasty editorial line and a high circulation. "Have you seen this?" Kate hissed.

  Maggie sat up in bed as Kate laid the pages before her. It was a double-page spread, with a banner headline trumpeting COVENS OF ENGLAND. There was a large photograph of a smiling, pleasant but dotty-looking elderly woman in a Queen of the Nile headdress. She claimed to be—or the newspaper proclaimed her to be—Empress of the Witches of England. There were other photographs. One of them clearly depicted Maggie and Ash frolicking naked within a stone circle. Maggie was named, Ash was named, and Ash's shop in the Gilded Arcade was named.

  "But where did they get the pictures?" Kate wanted to know.

  Maggie groaned.

  THIRT
Y-SEVEN

  Spring Equinox, 21 March, a Monday morning. Alex was struggling to get the children ready for school and childminder, chivvying, coaxing, bullying, rummaging for clean clothes which weren't there because he hadn't washed them, dishing up a dog's breakfast because he hadn't shopped for a week, trying to let the real dog out and bring the milk in, to iron a blouse for Amy, pour a mug of tea for himself, find the minder's overdue cash, locate Amy's schoolbook which she couldn't go without...

  Alex wasn't coping.

  Anita had had enough of him. Tania, tired of playing the surrogate mother, had refused to help him all weekend. And the children's real mother had deserted him.

  Maggie! Where are you, Maggie? For God's sake, Maggie!

  Sam was being a brat, refusing to get out of his pyjamas, shouting and standing on a stool pressing the timer pads on the microwave oven. Alex could have cheerfully shut him inside it and switched to hi-power. Instead he dragged him off the stool and gave him a vicious slap across the leg. Sam started howling.

  "Shut that before I really give you something to cry about," Alex growled. Sam obviously thought he'd already got something to cry about, because he didn't let up. Alex grabbed a pullover and took off Sam's pyjamas.

  "What's this?" he demanded, spying for the first time the new, blue sachet hanging on a grey string round Sam's neck. "Did your mother put this dirty thing on you?"

  "Noooooo hoooo hooo," howled Sam.

  Alex showed him the back of his hand. "What have I told you about telling me lies? What have I told you?"

  "Nooooohooo, she didn't."

  "What? I said did your mother?"

  "She didn't," said Amy.

  "You shut up," said Alex sharply, and Amy shut up.

  "Noooo," wailed Sam, and, seeing no way of avoiding another slap, wailed, "yes, noooooo, yes."

  Alex pulled the string over Sam's head and tossed the sachet into the rubbish bin. Amy went to retrieve it until Alex shoved her roughly out of the kitchen. "Leave the filthy thing where it is. Go and get dressed before you get the next slap."

  So Amy started crying too, and Dot came back in barking furiously at Alex, until Alex kicked her and she went whimpering into the garden. Alex looked around him at the detritus. The breakfast room was like a disaster area. He surveyed the failed breakfast and the piles of dirty laundry and his wailing children looking back at him through tears, and he felt like crying himself.

  Amy defied her father and recovered the sachet from amid the rubbish. This time Alex ignored her. "Maggie," he said softly, "Maggie.

  Spring Equinox, and Maggie was preparing. She was careful to combine all the elements of magic she'd learned with some she didn't understand. She was confused about the significance of planetary alignment (something Liz dismissed with a gesture), but with Venus exalted in Taurus, she blindly hoped this would offset her malefic intention.

  For she admitted malefic intention. She wanted possession of her children, by any means. She wanted unhappiness and disgrace to fall on her husband. She believed that the rite of shapeshifting would confer on her the power to achieve these things.

  After reading about herself in the newspaper, she'd returned to Liz's cottage. The old woman was again sharpening knives on the doorstep. Liz had been evasive about where she'd been the day before, saying only that she'd had an "errand" to run, something that couldn't be neglected. She had also seemed unwilling to let Maggie cross the threshold. She didn't want her in the house. It wasn't that she was in any way unfriendly; she just whistled up her collie and insisted that they go for a "blow" across the fields.

  "Are you going to tell me what's to be done, or am I going to have to go it alone?" Maggie asked her, fearing further evasion.

  "Oh, I'll tell you," Liz said, hobbling along the grass pathway with her stick. She said her feet were bad from having walked a "step." "Because it's in you, and it wants out. So we must have it. And it might be the only way."

  "What do you mean, the only way?"

  But Liz only pointed with her stick to a bush in the hedgerow. "Mistletoe. In flower. Cut a piece; you'll need some."

  Maggie got that and other more complicated instructions, plus a new oleum magicale, different to the flying ointment. On the way back from visiting Liz, she called on Ash to show him the newspaper. He held his head in his hands.

  "I'm sorry, Ash; I've brought this on you."

  "No, you haven't," he said. "No, you haven't."

  She returned to her bed-sit, going to bed without eating. Liz had told her that the rite of shapeshifting required lengthy preparation and that she should fast for twenty-four hours

  Alex eventually dropped Amy at school and Sam at the childminder’s. He arrived late at the site to find everyone in a state of excitement. There had been a spectacular find under the pentagram.

  Tania and her crew had cleared the area of the staked circle. Initially the area close to the circumference of the circle had yielded nothing. But toward the centre, by working more boldly across the diameter of the circle, they found what for some days now everyone had expected. It fulfilled certain fantasies of the type Alex had tried to suppress. They'd discovered human remains. First to come to light was a rib cage

  Everyone stopped working on the main dig and either joined the effort or stood around watching.

  The archaeologists worked sideways, sweeping across from the rib cage, to mark the parameters of the find. Most of the skeleton was still firmly embedded in the earth. They dusted off extruding shoulder and knee bones. It was small enough to seem obvious what they were dealing with.

  It's a child. The words swept around the group. A child.

  Alex made them slow down the operation. There was too much excitement about the find, and he was afraid clumsy strokes might break up the skeletal pieces. He got everyone working with fine brushes. Those involved looked more like they were painting the bones than excavating them. Soon the watchers grew bored at the slow rate the thing was surfacing and went back to their own jobs.

  The bones got nicknamed Minnie.

  Alex supervised, fussily. By lunchtime they had exposed the entire flank of the rib cage, and Alex began to have doubts. The rib cage was too large to have been a child's, and he said so. There was something unnatural about the position in which other bones were coming to light. They were compressed into an extreme foetal position. The thigh bone was drawn up, and the skull, which they had just begun to touch, seemed slumped forward.

  "I want an exact record of the position in which the skeleton is found. There's something odd about it. Go extra careful, please, this is not a sprint to the finish."

  They proceeded now to work across the top of the remains, so as not to disturb the earth on which the bones rested.

  Spring Equinox and Ash, as usual, took the lift to the fourth floor of the Gilded Arcade. On stepping out of the lift he realized some sort of commotion was going on outside his shop. There was a picket.

  About nine ladies of pensionable age and a sad, solitary-looking gentleman in a dark suit crowded the doorway of his shop. Some held placards. One proclaimed NOT IN THIS TOWN. Their chatter generated a hubbub of excitement.

  "Morning, ladies! Morning, sir!" Ash called cheerfully, gently shouldering his way through the white-haired scrum. The hubbub stopped. They moved aside for him and stood in a silent half-circle, watching as he took out his keys. No one said anything. Their eyes scoured him from head to toe, searching for the mark of the beast. At last Ash had the door open. He turned before going inside. "Bit of rain in the air," he said.

  A tall woman with white cropped hair stepped forward. She had the sparkle of the mad evangelist in her eye. She. carried a placard which read LEST YE FORGET. Ash, at least, couldn't remember the reference. "Satanist!" she said.

  Ash smiled pleasantly. "Please. If you're going to call me names, can't you at least find some accurate ones?" He stepped inside and closed the door behind him.

  Maggie spent the day preparing. She fasted, meditated, rep
eated her mantras, sipped water, brought her purpose to mind. She had decided that, when the time came, she would go out to Osier's Wood. She would have preferred to conduct the business within the safety of Ash's house, or even at her own bed-sit, but she knew it wasn't possible. The woods had been the place where she'd had her first real scent of the possibilities within her; her first encounter with the spirit of the goddess. Her room constrained her; it had neither power nor resonance. Hecate was choosy. Hecate was careful. Hecate preferred the seclusion and deep mystery of the woods

  At noon Maggie lit candles and incense and repeated the banishing ritual she had employed when flying with Ash. It had protected her then. She would repeat it again at dusk, when the moment was right.

  She practiced mental projection of the things she expected to happen, exactly as Liz had told her.

  At one o'clock she rehearsed relaxation and breathing exercises.

  At two o'clock she drank a little saline water and gathered together everything she would need. Before leaving, she concocted her "listening" brew, and filled a thermos flask. She climbed into her car and drove out to the woods.

  It was a dry, sunny day, warm for the time of year. She parked her car at a distance of half a mile from the woods and walked the rest of the way.

  Deep in the woods, she found her spot, the hidden place she had discovered before, the tree-ringed tiny glade where Hecate had made her presence felt. She still had three hours before dusk. She settled down and spent half an hour practicing her visualization exercises. Then she opened her flask and inhaled the listening brew. It relaxed her, and she sat back to listen to the sound of the wind in the trees