by Kim Wilkins
“This house belongs to Chloe’s uncle. He’s in America on business.”
“Yes, but where is it? North of London? South?”
“I’m not going to tell you. We have one purpose in bringing you here, and that’s to give you the time and the distance to sort out this mess you’re in. What we really want to do is to perform the Ritual of Calith over you.”
“The Ritual of what?”
“Calith. I learned it on the thirtieth path of Resh.”
I felt myself squint in disbelief and disdain. “This sounds like a bad fantasy novel. The thirtieth path of Resh? Are you a complete moron? None of that is real, Neal. It’s all in your silly head.”
“Then if it isn’t real, you won’t mind if we do it for you. It’s a deep psychic cleansing ritual for those in extreme psychic danger. As you are.”
Extreme psychic danger. My stomach turned to water. I took two steps back and sat on the edge of the bed. “I refuse,” I said.
“The curse is making you refuse. You have to fight it.”
“No, I have to get out of here. I have an appointment which I don’t want to miss.”
Neal sighed and ran his hand through his hair. “Sophie, if the appointment is what I think it is, you must miss it. When you’ve heard the whole story, no amount of psychic cleansing will save you. You will be cursed.”
“Cursed? What does that even mean?”
He came to kneel in front of me. “An unending curse of misery. That’s what I’ve heard.”
“That’s what you’ve heard? You mean you don’t know for sure?”
“I’ve never met anyone who —”
“Ha! You don’t even know for sure!” My moods were spinning rapidly after my thoughts — from believing in extreme psychic danger to taking refuge once again in the gullibility of Neal and his friends — and my emotions could barely keep up. Crying suddenly seemed appropriate so I began to sob.
“Sophie, Sophie,” he said, trying to put an arm around my shoulder.
“Leave me alone!” I pushed him away and he fell on his arse.
He looked embarrassed as he struggled to his feet. “You should allow us to do this ritual as soon as possible, Sophie. You know you’re only going to feel worse tomorrow. All that suffering can be prevented.”
“I said leave me alone.”
He moved to the door. I watched him anxiously. He knocked on it twice and it unlocked and opened. I sprang to my feet and ran for it. Neal caught me, Marcus on the other side of the door pushed me. Neal slipped out and I was locked in again. This time I only kicked and shouted for thirty seconds. I was growing bored with my own desperation. I went to the chest of drawers and poured more coffee.
For the first time since I had left the old woman’s house, I caught my breath. I lay on the bed and tipped out the contents of my bag, put aside my tape recorder, notebook and pen, then scooped the rest — lighter, two bent cigarettes, keys, purse, old tissues, the adaptor for my tape recorder, a half eaten packet of mints — onto the floor. I stretched out with my arms over my head and closed my eyes. The itching, impossible feeling of deprivation seized me. She was expecting me and I wasn’t there. How long would she wait for me? Would she give up on me, refuse to see me another time? My burning anger with Neal and the others was fused with unbearable longing for the old woman’s voice and company, for the end of this journey she was taking me on, which I knew deep down had very little to do with the daughters of a famous poet and everything to do with who I was and what I stood for in the universe.
I opened my eyes, sat up and found the adaptor for my tape recorder, plugged it in and rewound the tape. The only thing for it was to write it all down.
It was oddly soothing to transcribe the tape, though a shadow of the relief felt when in her presence. The hours passed quickly and I didn’t notice that nobody had brought my dinner. I turned on the lamp next to the bed and treated the grumblings of my stomach with the mints from my handbag and a cigarette. Still no food.
I went to the door and called out: “Hey! I’m hungry. The least you bastards can do is feed me!”
A silence of carpeted hallways and stairs was my response. I listened closely, could hear nobody moving around, no clatter of pans in a far away kitchen.
“Neal?” I called. “Chloe?”
It seemed they had decided to starve me into submission.
I couldn’t sleep for hunger and for my psychological distress, which were equally acute. I turned the light off and sat by the window, watching and watching. I was so tired that my mind started doing flips and arabesques around groups of words. I would find “extreme psychic danger” beating a rhythm in my brain, over and over like a mindless song one cannot excise. Then it would be replaced with “Ritual of Calith” or “path of Resh” — collections of vowels and consonants which meant nothing to the Sophie I was at the start of the summer, yet which now led me on an obsessive, head-aching path away from something lost, something which I could not even name. I gazed out at the huge ash trees, and I said, “I am experiencing a crisis of the soul.” And so I took up the echo of those words in my head, “crisis of the soul”, and they repeated until they made as little sense as a children’s nonsensical rhyme. I remembered being told once, recently, that words could cause pain but I could not remember where I’d heard it. The memory caused a vague stirring of fear and I leaned my head on the cool glass of the window and bumped it once, twice, three times before I caught myself and stopped.
And this is what it was really like; this was the reality of confronting the supernatural in a life where it had previously held no sway. A thousand thousand so-called ordinary people in a thousand thousand stories had seen ghosts or vampires or monsters and taken a few pages, a few breaths to accept it. But in reality, the confrontation was an impossible grinding pressure on my brain and it was making me deranged and dizzy.
I smoked the last cigarette when grey dawn bled into the room, and fell into an uneasy doze in my chair.
I was, of course, beset by nightmares. Most were unpleasant, but ridiculous and fragmented, shards of scenes from the old woman’s story interwoven with the awful cravings of my immediate situation. So I would be sitting with Deborah at the kitchen table while she ate and I starved; or I would be fighting my way through fire to a great church where all the coffee and cigarettes in London were stored. But the worst dreams were not even formed into narratives. I would find myself in a grey darkness, surrounded by small, sharp objects which I knew were words but live words, and they would rise up through my body and lacerate my skin, work their way into my veins and pulverise my joints. I could not speak, all meaning was lost. Over and over I returned to this dream as I slept, and my eventual wakefulness was such a relief that I had to leap out of my chair and run to the bathroom to throw up.
Everything hurt. My gullet and throat stung, my neck and shoulders ached from sleeping crooked, and my very spirit was twisted in a knot. I simply could not spend another moment in this place.
I strode to the window, picked up the bronze statuette and hurled it at the glass. With a loud smash it splintered. The statuette thudded to the ground below. I picked up my towel and wrapped it round my hand, used it to poke out the remaining glass. A gust of fresh morning air rushed in and my lungs sucked at it gratefully. I leaned out the window and with all the energy I could muster, screamed, “Help! Help!”
My screams were deafening to me, and yet they reverberated off nothing outside. They seemed, instead, to be soaked up by the trunk of the nearest ash. I screamed again, no louder because I was already hoarse and years of smoking had seriously reduced my lung capacity. Silence answered me. A moment later a bird called, almost as though it had heard my cries and was curious for a translation.
Grey clouds scudded over and threatened rain, and I realised how foolish it had been to smash the window. Somehow the flesh of my right palm had been cut shallowly. Disastrous. Absolutely disastrous.
No food. No coffee, no cigarettes, no old wo
man. I was ready to bite my own fingers off in frustration. I went to the door and called out to the empty staircase over and over again. The day ticked on. My stomach was grumbling and I was light-headed, achey and anxious. I returned to the tapes, proceeding with the transcription, going over parts again and again just to hear the inflections of her voice, the rhythm of her words.
Finally, around five o’clock in the afternoon, I heard sounds from downstairs. By this stage I was whimpering at the door like a family pet. “Hey!” I shouted. “I’m starving up here.”
They didn’t respond immediately, but after half an hour I heard footsteps coming up the stairs. If they thought they had made me too weak to run, they were mistaken. I waited at the door, ready to make a dash.
“Sophie, it’s Chloe,” she said from the other side of the door. “Neal and Art are with me. I’ll only bring your food in if you promise not to run.”
“I promise.” Like hell.
“If you try to run we’ll put you right back where you are and you’ll get no food.” This was Art, clearly more comfortable with playing tough guy than Chloe.
“Okay, okay, I promise.” Really promised the second time because I was starving and now they’d returned I was confident I could find another way to escape. Cutting my wrist on the broken glass in the window, for example, so they had to call an ambulance. I stood back from the door. “Okay, bring it in.”
The door opened a foot, the tray was shoved in, the lock fell back into place. I didn’t even bother to pick up the tray. I sat on the floor, right there next to the door, and I had half a cup of coffee in me before I even lifted the lid on the plate. Ravioli, huge fat pillows of it swimming in chunky tomato sauce. I gulped it down. After more coffee I demolished the apple pie and icecream and sat back to contemplate.
But couldn’t quite contemplate. I felt very fuzzy suddenly, which was odd because I had hoped food would nullify the dizziness.
I tried to stand up but found myself grabbing the bedpost to stop myself falling.
Damn them, they’d poisoned me. They were lunatics after all, and they thought I was cursed so they’d poisoned me after starving me for two days to make sure I took the whole dose. I tried to call out but my tongue was a stone. I collapsed on the bed, blinking rapidly against what I had convinced myself was my death. A low buzzing sounded in my ears and I tried to prop myself up on my elbows with no success. My fingers were clutching at the bed covers as the world turned grey.
When I became aware of voices, I realised I wasn’t dead. I tried to open my eyes, but my eyelids were very heavy so I squinted at the scene in dazed fear. Black figures surrounded me: two on either side of me and two at my feet. It seemed as though I had been suspended by a long cord threaded down my spine, and my neck felt like it had hardened into porcelain. But when my fingers moved over the bed covers beneath me, I knew that I was still exactly where I had collapsed. The black figures were speaking, but I couldn’t make any sense of what they were saying, and it put me in mind of my terrible dream about the words which rose up through my body and injured me. I panicked, but I had been drugged and all the anxiety was contained within a couple of wheezy grunts and an unsuccessful struggle to raise my head. I felt my eyes roll as I surveyed each black figure in turn. A light came from somewhere nearby and as I looked at it my eyes hurt so I closed them.
“Magister, the candidate is prepared for the ritual.”
“She must pass through the fire of Calith for cleansing.”
The word fire jumped out at me and became confused with the fire in the old woman’s story. I struggled, believing I would be trapped in St Paul’s as it burned, and then some word of relief came to me but I couldn’t place it. Paratax. A nonsense word.
“This is one who has suffered extreme psychic damage. I commit her to your care and command that you lead her through into the pure light of knowledge.” This voice came from my right, and I was trying to look in that direction when my arm was grasped from the left. “Come, hear the voice of light on your path of darkness.”
My other arm was grasped and one of the figures at the foot of the bed began to sprinkle water on me. One of the drops landed on my lower lip and trickled into my mouth. In my addled state I believed it to be more poison. A strong smell of incense was clogging my lungs, and smoke floated over me.
The figures continued speaking to each other, like dark ghosts muttering incantations. Nothing made any sense and I was anxious and bewildered. But then I felt something move inside me; deep inside me, not within my skin or within my organs, but somewhere else, and the anxiety turned to terror. For suddenly, I felt something about myself begin to change, something crucial to my identity. It had been found and was being pulled out of me on a hook.
“No!” I managed.
“We must be getting close,” one of them said, a woman.
The squirming feeling plagued me, and I knew that I would lose something I cherished any second. The old woman’s face came to me, and it was deathly sad. Would I never see her again? The thought was too painful to contemplate. A sick feeling of inevitability overwhelmed me and I began to surrender myself to it, almost relieved.
Suddenly, though, there was a loud crack and the room was plunged into darkness. Three or four of the voices called out in pain, their hands jumping off my body. I tried to look around me but couldn’t make out anything clearly in the dark.
“What happened?” a woman asked.
“Psychic shock. The electricity’s gone out, my watch has stopped.”
“It hurt.”
“What does it mean?”
“She has an object from the Wanderer. The Wanderer has protected her with something.”
I closed my eyes and the sheet of unconsciousness was slowly pulled back up. I felt my body relax as their panicked voices swelled and fell around me. Somehow I knew that I was safe, that they wouldn’t be able to steal that crucial part of me. The relief had me drifting off again, into an unnaturally deep sleep.
Bright daylight woke me, or maybe it was the presence of Neal sitting on the end of the bed. I noticed in one glance that the broken window had been covered in plastic and that Neal held a packet of cigarettes. I could smell coffee. I sat up and rubbed my head.
“Why the hell did you do that?” I asked.
“We thought it was the best thing for you.”
“The list of grievances I’m taking to the police is going to be long. I’m glad you and Chloe are loaded because I’m going to sue you until you bleed.”
He offered me a cigarette and I took it. While I lit it he poured me coffee. I eyed the clock. “It feels later than that.”
“The clock stopped. Every clock in the house stopped, and the electricity’s gone off. The ritual didn’t work,” he said.
“I figured that bit out for myself. I’m one giant craving. Why don’t you just let me go to my fate, whatever it is?” Because it couldn’t be something too bad, because all of this was nonsense, right? I felt like a climber who had just put her foot on an empty space instead of a rock.
“Do you have some object, some gift from the Wanderer?”
I shook my head, but at that precise moment remembered the piece of metal. The demon key. A crack was opening up in my mind.
“Are you sure?” he asked, peering at me closely.
“Please just let me go.”
“I have to talk to the others.”
“It’s none of your business.”
“It is. It’s our fault you’re in this mess.”
I had woken up sufficiently by now to feel the weight of longing on my heart, and I shook my head. “I just want to go home.”
“You want to go to the Wanderer.”
“The Wanderer! She’s just an old woman.”
“You know she’s not. Sophie, you know she’s not.”
I sagged forward, dropping my cigarette in the ashtray. My hands went to my forehead and my hair spilled through my fingers, and I felt utterly terrible. Neal’s fingers brushe
d my own and I grasped them desperately.
“Please,” I said lifting my head. “Please help me.”
“We’re trying to help you.”
I sank into his arms and found that I had no tears left, just a soggy numbness. His comforting pats on my back became loving caresses and I responded to them as any strung-out, melancholy, half-crazed, unsatisfied woman under a curse would. I pressed my body against him and I longed for him to continue. I longed for some kind of bodily distraction from the turmoil in my mind. Despite the fact that I hadn’t brushed my teeth for days, I turned my face up to kiss him. He took the opportunity hungrily, and I let the warm swoon of desire take over my body. His hand was under my shirt, his fingers cool on my breast when the door opened and Chloe walked in.
“Neal?” she said querulously.
Neal leaped from the bed, leaving my arms empty. He was out the door and it was locked before I could rearrange my shirt. Damn Chloe.
I lit another cigarette, forgetting the one in the ashtray, and went to the bathroom. In the corner I found my dirty jeans and I felt in the pocket for the piece of metal on the nylon string. I was still resisting calling it the demon key, but I think at this point the crack in my mind had opened wide enough for some belief to trickle in. I think at this point I could no longer cling to my scepticism.
I lay on the bed and studied the key for hours. The word that had been plaguing me during the ritual last night came back to me: Paratax. It was the demon Deborah had called on to escape the burning church. I eyed the door and thought about whether or not I would use the demon key, and what it would signify if I did. If I burst out of my room now, Neal or Chloe or the others would be bound to catch me, and then they might confiscate the key. But if I waited until dark, until everyone was gone or sleeping, I could slip out unnoticed.
But I didn’t really expect it to work, did I?
I groaned and put my hands over my eyes. It was all too complex and the worst was yet to come. Because if I listened to the rest of the story I would receive some kind of psychic punishment, which was okay by me as long as I was a sceptic. But if I was going to bust out of here with a demon key …