And then she slumps, her hair falling forward over her face.
Zoey opens her mouth to speak, but then hesitates. She lifts her hand as though to touch Len’s head, but at the very point that Len sprayed her own blood, something moves.
Zoey flinches when the movement becomes more rhythmic, until even the camera can make out a dark shape sitting on a rocking chair, moving back and forth, back and forth.
Zoey’s shoulders come up and she pulls her sleeping bag higher so that only her face peeks out. She glances between the shape in the chair and Len.
And then the shape begins to stand.
Zoey flinches again. Her lips part, and she whispers, “Not again… I don’t want to see this. I’ve seen this thing for years in my bedroom. I can’t… Len…”
Len lifts her head, ignoring Zoey. “Come into the light.”
The figure moves with unnatural stiffness, sometimes slow and languid, other times jerky and forced. But come, it does. The thing hesitates at the border between the shadows of the room and the dancing ring of light from the fire.
“I will guard you,” Len says, her eyes still closed. “Come into the light and reveal yourself.”
It moves its arm first, almost hesitant, and as it touches the light, the blackness falls away from it, upward like falling ashes in reverse, to reveal a slim, young hand.
Zoey sees the ring right away and she covers her mouth with both hands. It is an exact replica of the one she wears on her own finger. Her heirloom ring.
The figure steps forward and the ashes rise off her as she does, until Zoey is staring up at a young woman in a white dress with pale hair. She has a glow about her, and she isn’t quite corporeal.
She looks around in wonder, then at her own hands, and then, at last, at Zoey. She opens her mouth, but there is no sound. She looks to Len.
“She cannot hear you speak,” Len says to her. “It’s not within my power. But I hear you.”
There is silence as the woman sinks to the floor to kneel by Zoey. She makes to touch Zoey’s cheek, smiling, but stops mere inches away.
“She says ‘daughter,’” Len says. “She’s calling you daughter. Zoey, you can speak now.”
Zoey licks her lips. “D-daughter?”
“She says that she is your ancestor.”
Zoey laughs. “Really?”
“She says her name is… slower please. It’s too much. Okay, yes. Hermione.”
Zoey looks at the woman. “Hermione… I’ve read your journals. You’ve been watching me for a long time.”
“She has watched as many of you as she could over the years. She says you are one of the last. She watched your father as well.”
Zoey’s face falls. “Did you send him here too?”
Hermione nods.
“Why?” cries Zoey. “He went mad. Forgot everything!”
“Slow down,” Len mutters. “She’s showing me things. I can’t… Slow down, please.”
Len falls silent and Hermione stares.
“She wants to show us something. I… I don’t know how.”
Hermione draws an invisible picture in the air.
“Okay,” Len says. “Zoey, give me your hand.” Zoey does as instructed and Len picks up the piece of chalk. She draws something on Zoey’s palm, her eyes still firmly shut, and then takes Zoey’s hand in her own. The blood-soaked arm is still outstretched, dripping slowly. Hermione stands in the blood, touching nothing else.
“Close your eyes,” Len says, and Zoey does.
And each woman, mortal, immortal, and dead, goes still.
When I closed my eyes, I was on the mountain. I saw Hermione, as she is now, but somehow I knew she was alive. She looked pale, thin, and small. She seemed beaten. She was standing in a patch of darkness, looking all around, holding in her arms a torch, the flames of which illuminated the other cargo there.
A small infant.
Hermione kissed the child, her eyes red and swollen from long weeping, and she muttered, “I love you, my boy. Love you enough to give you away. But by God, I pray that you’ll never suffer as I have suffered. Never fall into the Devil’s hands.” She closed her eyes. “I curse you never to work the magic of your father. But if you do, I curse you to suffer for it, forever.”
Something moved in the distance and Hermione hesitated, but did not turn away.
“Huw?” she called. “By God, is that you?”
A boy hurried toward her. “It is I, lady. Well met. Where be your husband tonight?”
“Conjuring,” Hermione said darkly. “He works the Devil’s magic even now. Take him, Huw, and hurry. Begone, and safe away.”
She handed over the child, her whole body trembling, and then Huw backed away.
“Keep him safe!” she whispered as the two vanished into the night. “Take him far away… my little boy.”
And then she was racked with sobs that overcame her entire body, until she curled herself into a tiny ball in the dirt.
After a while, she got to her feet. Len and I followed her along the mountain, which was crystal clear in the night, nothing like the misty view we had known for so long. She approached a large tent, peered inside. It was empty.
Then she headed for the jagged part of the mountain, for the same little cave that Len and had I crawled out of days ago.
A small fire burned inside. Hermione crouched low as she approached and peeked around. I could feel the uncleanness of the air, not so much the smell of the fire, but the spiritual stink of foul magic.
Two men, one young and one old, sat before a tall mirror, conversing in a language that I couldn’t understand, but somehow recognized. Polish, or Russian, maybe.
“Dee, be not a fool,” the young man said. “Persist in the face of persecution. Continue to speak to your angels. And let them guide you to the language of God.”
The old man grunted, and nodded. “I must return to Jane and the children. She cannot sleep until I am with her.” He stood, but then looked back at the mirror. “You have shown me much, John,” Dee said.
“There is more to be discovered,” said the young man. “Good night, John.”
Two Johns. John Smith, and the Queen’s most famous Conjurer… John Dee.
The older John walked past Hermione without seeing her, heading for his tent, his wife, and his children, and Hermione looked in again.
“You are out of bounds, wife,” the younger John said.
“And you,” she said, stepping into the light of the cave, “have been working with the Devil. Tell me, husband. Have you signed over your soul? Is that how you work such evil?”
John smiled and turned to Hermione. “Yes.”
Though she had, perhaps, expected this answer, she still shook her head and backed away.
“How can you, John? Do you have no fear of God?”
He smiled. “I spit on your God.”
“Damned,” she said, still shaking her head. “You are damned!”
He sighed. “I know.”
Hermione spun around, and tried to run, but with a few words and a dance of his fingers, she was caught in midair, as though by a spider’s web.
“Shh,” he whispered. “You’ll wake what’s left of my workers. And I need them. I’m still looking.”
After that we melted away and I thought it was over, but there was worse yet to come. Hermione was being dragged over the mountain, pulled along by a group of men and women who had tied her hands.
John stood silent at the crest of the rocky part of the mountain, where a pyre had been constructed.
I went cold.
I couldn’t look away as they tied her to the stake. She was beaten and bloody.
“Tell us, witch!” one of the women yelled. “Where is the child? Where?”
Hermione looked up to heaven and began to pray.
“She is witching us,” John said.
The hysteria was intense. “She is in league with the Lancashire witch!” someone cried.
“Let not her speak!” y
elled another.
And then someone threw a torch.
In the movies, they make it seem so fast. The fire erupts, the body screams for a second or two, and the person vanishes.
This was not that.
The fire took a long time. More torches were thrown. Hermione’s eyes bugged out in terror and she was screaming long before the first lick of flame touched her.
The hem of her dress finally caught, and her screams became something else entirely. I never want to hear that sound again.
The burning took a long time. The fire remained low, never reaching her head, the wind blowing away the smoke.
It took hours.
We saw it all. We couldn’t leave.
She kept moving even after she stopped screaming.
We heard it all.
The crowd cheered long after the end of it, and then they went back to their beds and fell asleep feeling satiated and safe, while Hermione’s body still simmered in the dregs of the fire.
And then we were back in the room. The camera had died already.
Hermione was gone.
“She told me how to do it,” Len said, smiling faintly when she finally opened her eyes. Her arm was already healed. “I know how to get us out.”
You learn something new every day, I guess. Len said that we hadn’t destroyed the wheel. Not in the way that counts. We have to go back down there. HA-HA-HA. Len’s working on a way to do it from here. She’s studying this great fat book she never told me she had. It’s got the language in it. After hearing some of it and seeing her using it, I’m not so sure I want to learn anymore.
The new thing I learned is: nightwalking. Astral projection, seems like. Apparently we have to destroy the wheel in the nightwalking plane. The physical wheel was just an anchor—blah, blah.
And now I know that the shape at the foot of my bed was Hermione all along. My ancestor. Except now it doesn’t seem too important anymore.
I’m so tired. I’ve been sleeping a lot.
Len keeps waking me up.
Roan stirs.
It is a foggy morning. The sun has not yet risen.
It is raining.
No.
Snowing.
No…
Ashes are falling from the sky.
She smells like fire, and is blackened with soot. She has no clothes, no hair. But her skin is whole. She sees the ruins around her, and then she screams. Rapley is gone. She looks at the sky. Is he falling down around her, she wonders through her red tears. She can see the rips in reality now too. They float around her like so many eels.
He awaits her on the mountain. The ram.
She stumbles to her feet, and goes to meet him. A warm blanket lies beside him. He looks at her with a penetrating gaze, and she hears the Devil’s language in her mind.
Come now, daughter of the night. Let us go.
And then he turns and walks slowly on.
Roan stares at the house, which looks so untouched from this distance, and feels nothing. Her rage is gone. Her love is gone. Everything is gone.
Fostos—is gone.
And then.
A carriage on the road far below her, speeding away.
Fostos.
Alive. Alive after all.
The nothing inside her bursts into a feeling… Her rage is limitless.
She must hide, she knows, before dawn brings the sun. She is now a creature of the night, just like Fostos. No more sun. No more food. No more life. Centuries before her.
She vows revenge.
There is time. Too much time. Already her teeth are growing sharp.
She turns and stumbles away, and as her new heartbeat echoes through the mountain, a smaller heartbeat echoes inside her.
ZOEY
NOW
My name is Poulton. I’m writing this for Zoey.
There are parts that I don’t remember. She’s telling me those. After that, I’ll take up what I remember.
From Zoey:
Learning about nightwalking was like remembering a forgotten recurring dream. Everything was vaguely familiar. Len told me how she did it—what she saw when she did it, and how she had learned the sigils to make it happen. Now she was going to teach me.
We spent hours going over the symbols in chalk. I was slow and clumsy, thick-headed and thick-tongued. But by that night, I had it. She told me I would see something different. She warned me. It might not look, as it did for her, like a carousel that she had to climb onto while it spun before her.
I drew the symbols with a level of concentration I had never before exerted. Len told me that if I got even the smallest thing wrong, I could end up somewhere else. Sure, I’d wake up in a few hours, but who could tell where I would have to spend those hours.
I lay back and went to sleep.
For me, the nightwalking access vision was a black mountain, not a carousel; a sheer face towered before me. And halfway up: a spot of red.
I touched my legs—I was standing. I gave a laugh—it was loud, harsh. I could walk. I started climbing right away, my hands finding the right niches and dents, the rocks they needed to find. Up, up—I felt like I was flying. I was half tempted to let go to see if I could, but the thought of losing my legs again sobered me up pretty fast.
The spot of red became, at last, a door. It was open just a crack.
I climbed up beside it, pushed, and it creaked open onto a dark nothing. I looked out at the landscape below me, rocky and barren, but beautiful, then up at the gray, rolling clouds above; I tumbled through the doorway.
I was hovering over my body. Len was beside me, her arm slung over me as though for protection. I smiled. And then Len, the noncorporeal Len, was beside me.
She grinned.
Unreal.
We didn’t move, as such. We didn’t really fly. We just sort of thought of where we needed to be, and were there.
The second wheel—the spiritual wheel—stood perfect and unbroken, superimposed upon the destruction we had wrought in the waking world upon the physical wheel. We had destroyed the wheel made of wood and iron, but in the nightwalking world, the wheel turned, slow and proud. Every inch of it… was covered in people. Dusty white, the wheel was a teeming mass of heads, arms, hands, legs—contorted together—and the cries were so loud and so pained, it was agony to hear it.
Now and then, one of the people would break away from the wheel and move beyond it, as though straining against an elastic, only to be pulled back again and jumbled in with the others.
This was why, I suddenly knew, there had been no ghosts in the house. These were them… They were trapped.
It was far simpler to draw the symbols in the nightwalking plane. I watched Len draw right onto the bodies of these men and women. I watched glassy-eyed, and spotted, for a moment, Hermione among them. Then she was swallowed up by the limbs and faces around her.
When Len used the words as we floated there, she whispered them.
I opened my eyes. Back in the Red Room.
And I knew it was over.
I came to at that moment, tied to the red piano. I had never felt so cold, so hungry, nor so sick in my life. My stomach rolled over and I vomited. I heard her say my name, tentatively.
I answered that it was me. Poulton. I was Poulton again.
And I remembered everything.
Len untied me and brought over a sleeping bag. I thanked her. Moving was agony. Knives in every joint. Worse. I crawled over to Zoey, wanting to hug her, to say how sorry I was—but she just lay there on the ground, crying. Her tears fell, but she didn’t sob.
And I guess Len realized why before I did.
She cried, “No!” But I didn’t yet understand. Not until Len pulled Zoey onto her lap and began to sob.
So that’s why I’m writing this for her. Because she can’t. Zoey hasn’t moved more than her chest or her head since that day. She’s quadriplegic.
After a while, she kept saying, “I can’t live like this.” Over and over she said it, and over a
nd over Len said she could. That she would learn. I was numb with shock. I couldn’t take it.
I remember the way Len said, “They’re gone. The ghosts are gone,” and she looked around as though she could see them walking away. Then, without another word, she got to her feet.
“Get dressed,” she told me.
I didn’t need telling twice.
I clothed myself, as best I could. Got on my boots. She had to tie my laces.
Then she hauled Zoey onto her back, still in her sleeping bag, and walked right out of the house.
We walked back to town and beyond it. I followed. We stopped a lot at first, but after a couple of nights with warm food, water, and a bed, I was able to keep up much better.
I won’t say where we went, or where we are.
Zoey kept asking why. What the point was.
Until one night Len finally answered.
“I’m taking you to my mother. She can help you.” Then she looked at Zoey and said, “Her name is Roan.”
Len—Raplen—was born in 1852 to Roan Evelyn Eddington and Rapley Setters.
So we go on. A new journey begins.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First, big congratulations to the two lovely readers who won my Instagram giveaway, the prize of which was a character in my next novel named after them. So, Emma Petfield and Hermione Simpson, these girls are for you. Hope you like them!
Books are never made in isolation, and I had an amazing team of people who brought Teeth in the Mist into the world. Huge and heartfelt thanks to Alvina Ling, my editor from the start, who saw my weird found-footage book (and loved it), who loved my creepy tree novel, and who allowed me the time and mental space for Teeth to form. Thank you for always bringing out the very best in my writing, and for understanding my unusual methods and unconventional stories. It’s an amazing thing to feel like you’ve come home.
Thanks to Kheryn Callender for answering all my questions, for keeping me in the loop, and for being the kindest soul; thank you to Ruqayyah Daud (also the kindest human being) for the contact, jokes, and smiles. To my badass agents, Sarah Davies and Polly Nolan, who always do the very best for me, and whom, I am convinced, are actual badass witches. You’ll have to tell me what your Conjure is one of these days.…
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