The Witch Queen

by Jan Siegel

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, feeling like a criminal. Technically she supposed she was one.

  “No . . . no. I’m sorry . . . I keep crying at people. They say it’s okay—therapeutic . . .”

  “Of course it’s okay.”

  “The psychiatrist’s very kind—she’s quite young, you know, and not patronizing like some I’ve had—but it’s so nice to talk to a real person.”

  “What about your friends?” Gaynor asked unguardedly.

  “Oh, a couple of them came down. They were excited about all the stuff in the papers and kept sort of looking at me sideways, to see if I knew something I wasn’t telling, but I don’t. And Georgie’s always fancied Luc, but he didn’t reciprocate, so she was mouthing off about him. My best friend’s in Australia, having a baby. She’s phoned several times, but she’s nearly eight months gone and she doesn’t want to fly. I might go over there after the baby’s born.” She mopped her face with the tissues and glanced up blearily as the tea arrived. She didn’t say thank you, so Gaynor said it for her. “Tell me about your friend—Fern what’s-her-name. You said she’d been in a coma like me.”

  “It was two years ago,” Gaynor said. “She was supposed to be getting married, and we went out for her hen night, and she drank too much and passed out and didn’t come around for a week.”

  “A week?” Dana sounded mildly scornful. “I was out for months.”

  “The thing is, there was nothing wrong with her. Like you. It was as if—“ Gaynor trod carefully “—her body was in suspension, and her spirit had gone . . . somewhere else.”

  Dana’s expression froze into sudden stillness. “That’s how it felt,” she said. “I had such awful dreams. I was shut in a jar, in this huge laboratory. I kept banging on the sides and shouting, but no one came to let me out. I felt like an insect trapped under a glass. I was terrified they were going to perform some horrible experiment on me.”

  Gaynor said: “They?”

  “There was this woman who would come and peer at me sometimes. She was huge, or maybe I was very small, and she had this big red smile full of teeth, and black eyes—really wicked eyes, like looking into a dark cave when you know there’s something dreadful lurking down there. She always seemed to be wearing evening dress; all wrong for a laboratory. And there were these other faces, nightmare faces, distorted and leering, like an illustration for ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ in a book I had as a child. That picture always scared me so much I was afraid to go to sleep, but now it was as if I had, and the picture had turned into reality, and I couldn’t wake up. I couldn’t wake up.”

  “Fern had bad dreams, too,” Gaynor offered. “About a pair of witches, and a gigantic Tree that filled her whole world.”

  “Sounds more fun than mine,” said Dana. “Lindsay—the psychiatrist—says it’s frightfully interesting and Kafkaesque.” A note of gratification flickered in her voice. “But at the time, it was so . . . not exactly real, but horrible, because I was stuck in the dream or whatever it was, and I couldn’t get out. Lindsay says it was symbolic, but it didn’t feel symbolic. Apparently it all has to do with my mother dying when I was young and my relationship with Daddy.”

  “I’m sorry about your father,” Gaynor said.

  “I can’t believe he would do anything against the law. He’s always been so aloof, and stuffy, and high-minded about things. It can’t all have been hypocrisy . . .”

  She sounded hopelessly bewildered, and Gaynor found herself thinking: She doesn’t love him very much, but she must have relied on him. He laid the rails that she had to go off.

  She couldn’t think of anything to say in the way of comfort.

  “How did you get out of the jar?” she asked eventually.

  “It’s funny, isn’t it?” said Dana. “That’s what Lindsay asked me. She said dreams of this kind have their own logic. I don’t know: I never had logical dreams before.”

  “But you do recall getting out?”

  “Not very clearly. All I know is, Luc was there. And someone else, I think, but I only remember Luc. His face was huge too, all bendy through the glass, and then it shrank back to normal size, and went far away, and I suppose after that I must have woken up. And now he’s gone . . .”

  “I’m sorry,” Gaynor said for the umpteenth time. “So sorry . . . I’m sure he would have done anything for you. Anything at all.”

  That evening, she gave Fern an edited version of the interview, and Will, later, a rather more detailed one.

  “She seems pretty self-absorbed,” Gaynor told Fern. “She didn’t appear very interested in what might have happened to you. As far as I could make out, her psychiatrist thinks she had some sort of dream sequence symbolizing her relationship with her father.”

  Fern attempted a rather shaky laugh. “If the Eternal Tree was a hallucination,” she said, “what the hell does that say about my family background?”

  “The point is,” said Will, “there’s nothing you can do for her. She may be confused and upset, but she’s well off, well looked after, and in a month or so she’ll be winging her way to Bondi Beach to forget. You don’t need to agonize over her.”

  “No,” said Fern. “After all, I killed her brother. There isn’t a lot I can do to make up for that.”

  “You had no choice,” said Will.

  How often had she heard that phrase? Her face twisted. “There’s always a choice,” she said.

  She had been back at work for a while now, struggling to concentrate although the world of PR appeared completely surreal. The launch party for Woof! magazine was due in a few days, with a full complement of celebrities and their pets, most of which seemed to have even more rarefied tastes and eccentric habits than their owners. Fern felt so detached from the action, she found it curiously easy to retain what was left of her sanity. But the nights were difficult. She would lie staring vacantly into the darkness, trying not to relive that final moment, blanking out the terrible wonder of their lovemaking, thinking about nothing till her head ached from the strain of it. Every evening she drank a glass of wine too much in the hope that it might soothe her, or warm her, or chill out the pain. If it was pain. Mostly, it seemed to her that her life had ended when she ended Luc’s, and the rest of her days would be filled with emptiness and the taste of dust. Gaynor dosed her with Mogadon, and Rescue Remedy, and kava kava bark, all of which Fern took meekly, and then she would laugh a little, or cry a little, or sleep a little, but the emptiness inside her devoured both laughter and tears, and sleep would not drive it away.

  “I’m really glad about you and Will,” she said once, with something approaching true feeling. The two of them were alone together; Will was out charming a commissioning editor.

  “I didn’t know you’d noticed,” Gaynor said candidly.

  “Of course. I suppose . . . I’m afraid to say too much. Everything I touch turns to ashes these days.”

  Later that evening, Skuldunder arrived. Fern didn’t notice him before he materialized, perhaps because she didn’t want to look.

  “The queen is coming to see you,” he announced from under his hat brim, his one visible eye straying toward the chardonnay on the table. Evidently he had acquired a taste for it.

  Gaynor glanced at Fern, who said nothing, and spoke for her. “We will be honored.”

  Mabb duly appeared, garlanded with dying flowers and carrying a particularly vicious thistle stem by way of a scepter. Her eyelids were painted purple with iridescent spots that spread over her temples, and her customary rank odor was mingled with overtones of what might be Diorissimo. Gaynor saw Fern flinch slightly as the smell hit her. (“The perfume was a mistake,” she admitted afterward.)

  “Greetings, your highness,” she said, adding bravely: “You are most welcome.”

  “I show you great favor,” Mabb declared, perching herself on an armchair. “My loyal subject here, the Most Royal Burglar Skuldunder, has told me how you commended him for his courage in the witch’s house.”

  Th
ere was a note of doubt in the assertion, so Fern responded: “Yes.”

  “I have also heard how your companion slew the giant spider, aided by my burglar, and how, with Skuldunder’s help, you stole the demonic head from a sapling of the Eternal Tree.”

  “Absolutely,” Fern said faintly.

  “And now the witch is dead.” It was not a question. News of the events at Dale House, or some of them, had obviously reached Mabb. “It was a great feat,” the queen continued. “She was mighty among witchkind, but you proved mightier.”

  “Not really,” said Fern. “Everyone has their weak spot. I found hers. I am not—“ she shivered “—in the least bit mighty.”

  “You don’t look mighty,” Mabb agreed. “You have not my regal presence, or the mien of one of the great. But by your deeds you are known. You will be the most powerful and most dreaded of Prospero’s Children—you will be as Merlin, as Zarathustra, as Arianrhod of the Silver Wheel. None will be able to stand against you. Therefore I salute you, and cement our allegiance.” She made an imperious gesture, and Skuldunder disappeared, reappearing an instant later holding a curled shard of tree bark piled with herbs, a few wildflowers, and a small green apple.

  “Thank you,” Fern said. “I’m afraid I haven’t anything for you right now.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Mabb declared magnanimously. “You were unprepared. You may send your gifts later, with my subject here. This apple is from my special tree,” she added. “No other in the world has the same sweetness.”

  “Thank you,” Fern said again.

  Gaynor felt it was time to rush into the breach. “How is the house-goblin—Dibbuck?” she asked. “Will he be able to go back to Wrokeby now?”

  Mabb’s face seemed to darken. “None of goblinkind will go there for an age and more,” she said. “When all the spirits are driven out of a place by some great evil, it brings the abyss very close. Sometimes, it is an act of sorcery; sometimes, a mortal deed. Mortals talk loudly of honor and chivalry and the code of war, but they surpass werefolk in evil, when they wish. Are not the witchkind mortal, at birth?”

  “We are always mortal,” Fern said bleakly. “We just forget.”

  “About Wrokeby,” Gaynor said hastily.

  “Even the birds will not go back there for a long while,” said Mabb, “or the little nibblers and scrappickers who live in old houses. Only malignant elementals will roost in its rafters, the kind who are drawn by the nearness of the void and the black humors that gather in such places. If the house-goblin returned, they would send him mad.”

  “Will he be all right with your people?” Gaynor inquired.

  The queen shrugged, twitching her wings. “Maybe; maybe not. He is not strong like us wild goblins. He pines for his lost wardship. He may pine away until he loses his hold on existence and sinks into Limbo. Or he may live, and brood, and wither slowly in a long, long autumn. Who can say?”

  “I wish him well,” said Fern. “Tell him that.”

  Unexpectedly, Mabb inclined her head in acknowledgment. “The wish of so great a sorceress is a potent thing,” she said. “I will tell him.”

  Gaynor saw Fern suppress a wince.

  The queen declined a glass of wine, to Skuldunder’s disappointment, and departed, leaving behind the barkload of gifts and the lingering reek of Dior and dead fox. Studying Fern’s face, Gaynor replaced the chardonnay with gin.

  “Mighty,” said Fern, almost musingly. “Such a horrible word. It sounds heavy, like a mailed fist. Mighty is righty. I don’t look mighty, I don’t feel mighty, but I am a great sorceress. I destroy my enemies even when they think they are invulnerable and I slay my lovers lest I grow too fond of them. That is what I have become, or what I will be. It is written.”

  “Written where?” said Gaynor.

  “In the annals of Time—in a prophecy of stone—in the rushing wind and the running water.”

  “In other words, nowhere,” said Gaynor, determined to be pragmatic. “Nothing is written till we write it ourselves.”

  “Who said that?”

  “I think I did.”

  “It’s a good one,” said Fern. “I like it. But I already wrote my fate. In blood.”

  At work the following day, a prolonged session with the creators of Woof! magazine did much to take the edge off her mightiness. Hitches sprang up like toadstools: Gothic rock star Alice Cooper, invited to the launch because he was rumored to sleep with a couple of pythons, admitted to a snake phobia, and writer Carla Lane had gone into print to boycott the party since so many of the superstar pets were endangered species. A joke memo circulated the office saying that Richard Gere would be bringing his collection of gerbils, Freddie Starr a born-again hamster, and Tara Palmer-Tomkinson her new coat. (The last item turned out to be true.) Fern did not smile. She was about to quit her desk for an unavoidable stint in the Met of socializing with clients when the phone rang. Her hand hovered, hesitated, lifted the receiver. She wasn’t looking forward to the bar.

  “Can I speak to Fern Capel?”

  “Speaking.”

  “Dane Hunter.” Of course: the American accent. A little to her surprise, she remembered him at once. “I’m the archaeologist you met at the site in King’s Cross. You were right about that inscription. We won’t be working there much longer—the developers never give us enough time—but I thought you might like to come and have a look before they build over it.”

  “Yes,” she found herself saying. “Yes, I would.”

  XII

  Fern went to King’s Cross the next day, stretching her lunch hour. It was raining in a thin, drizzly, disheartened manner, but despite rat’s-tail hair, dripping noses, and crumpled windbreakers the volunteers were still working with enthusiasm. Dane came to meet her in a damp sweatshirt and straggling ponytail, his tan faded to sere in the gray of a British summer, his smile switched on a little too late, as if something about the sight of her disconcerted him. He was thinking she had lost weight and looked indefinably more fragile, less perfectly composed than before. He said: “Those shoes won’t do.” She wore high-heeled mules that seemed to hang loose on her feet; even her ankles appeared brittle.

  “Damn,” said Fern. “They’ll have to. I forgot to bring any others.”

  He took her arm to assist her over the rough ground.

  “How did you get my number?”

  “You wrote out the inscription on the back of your business card,” he reminded her. “I hope you didn’t mind my calling.”

  “No, of course not.”

  “I tried you two or three weeks ago,” he went on, “but they said you were on holiday. Since then, things have been a bit busy. I’ve been attempting to convince the developers this site is important enough to be preserved, but we can’t get any backing from English Heritage—they say it’s ‘interesting’ but there isn’t enough here. What they mean is, there’s nothing to pull the tourists. And no one but you has been able to decipher the language on the stone. Take a look.”

  The trench was much deeper now, the fallen stone raised so that the engraved lettering was visible on the side. Dane sprang lightly down and, without asking, lifted Fern after him. She leaned closer to read the words she had already seen in her mind. The script was Roman, not the far older Atlantean alphabet that is similar but more complex, including a separate sign for th and several different vowels for variations on e. “Uval haadé. Uval néan-charne.” A tremor ran through her as she recalled what Mabb had said about Wrokeby. “I think . . . something happened here a very long time ago, maybe thousands of years. It’s left its mark. It isn’t a place for the curious to stand and stare.”

  “My team don’t seem to mind,” Dane said. “At least . . . one of the girls was diagnosed with depression, but she probably had it anyway. Someone fell in a trench and sprained his ankle, we had the usual cuts and bruises, and one guy’s eczema came back. Is that enough to justify a curse?”

  “Not a curse,” said Fern. “Just . . . leftover evil. The a
ftertaste of emptiness.”

  He didn’t mock. “I guess I know what you mean. I always need a drink when I quit the site. But that’s pretty standard, too.” He scrambled back up out of the hole and reached down to swing her up after him. “I could use a beer now. How about you? There’s a pub around the corner.”

  “I have a meeting at three-fifteen.”

  “That gives us at least an hour.”

  The pub was small and poky inside, yellowed with cigarette smoke, patronized by a handful of barflies who looked as if they had been there since the Stone Age, or so Dane said in a murmured aside. “So has the beer,” he added.

  “I don’t drink beer,” said Fern. She asked for a mineral water.

  “No alcohol at lunchtime?”

  “Not really. Oh all right, a G and T. Thanks.”

  The barflies stared at Fern, but were evidently accustomed to Dane. He paid for the drinks and led her to a corner table. “If you’re hungry they do sandwiches, but they’re not very good.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Excuse me if I’m being too personal, but have you been ill lately? You look kinda thin.”

  “Stress,” said Fern. “Lots of stress.”

  “I thought witches could just wave their wands and magic their problems away.”

  “I left my wand on the tube,” Fern said with the flicker of a smile.

  “Must be real easy to do. Like umbrellas. When I first came to England I always carried one, but I kept leaving them everywhere.”

  “You go through a lot of wands in my business,” Fern affirmed. “I don’t see you as an umbrella person, somehow. More a getting-wet person. Like now.”

  Dane grinned, pushing back a damp forelock. “Maybe I exaggerated a bit. But when you come from California, and you’ve heard so much about English rain . . . well, I did have a couple of umbrellas to begin with. Till I lost them.”