The Village Witch

by Davies, Neil

  The Village Witch

  By

  Neil Davies

  Omnium Gatherum

  Los Angeles

  The Village Witch

  Copyright © 2015 Neil Davies

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author and publisher. omniumgatherumedia.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  First Electronic Edition

  To my brother, Colin, who created the original Professor and Tim way back in 1975. While they may not be quite the same, they were definitely the inspiration.

  To Cathy, Jonathan and Rhianne for still being there for me.

  AELLO

  She sat on the headstone, claws flexing, wings furled, as she had sat for almost four centuries.

  Patient.

  Waiting.

  She felt the stirrings of her strength returning.

  Soon.

  CHAPTER ONE

  1

  The priest screamed for his God as his eyes were gouged from their sockets.

  Through burning agony, he heard the laughter of his torturers, the jeering, the mocking.

  Barely conscious, he felt the cold sharpness of the knife at his throat. The searing pain of the blade slicing through flesh, muscle, windpipe. The heat of his blood pouring forth. The final, dark, smothering approach of death.

  And at the very end he doubted his faith. Doubted a God that would allow a faithful servant, who had worshipped Him his whole adult life, to suffer in this way.

  2

  A shroud of icy rain fell across the village of Byre.

  Death was here. It hung in the air, almost palpable. Tim Galton felt that if he closed his eyes, reached out his hand, he could touch it. Death. At least, the memory of death.

  He hurried past the locked library doors and sheltered under the concrete overhang, a single wooden bench stretched along the wall, not quite out of reach of the weather. Ignoring the acrid stench that came from the adjacent public toilet, he huddled down into a relatively dry corner and smiled at his own misjudgement.

  He should not have sent the taxi on ahead with his suitcases.

  He’d had a sentimental, perhaps morbid, desire to encourage the memories that had returned with such force as he crossed the boundary into Devon. To remember his parents, to find nostalgia in the countryside of his youth. Now it was nearing midnight and he was still over a mile from his new home, sheltering from the rain alongside the most pungent lavatory he had ever encountered.

  Twelve years he had been away. Twelve years of army life, of sweating and freezing in some of the world’s most inhospitable and dangerous places, of facing well-armed, well-trained and, at times, suicidal enemies, and the English weather had him running for cover.

  He smiled, an easy, broad smile, in the dim light of the solitary lamppost at the road’s edge. The irony amused him as he rubbed his hands together for warmth and peered out at the dark sky, blinking as rain ran from his sodden, short black hair down his forehead. He stroked thoughtful fingers over his chin, feeling the unfamiliar bristles of the goatee he had cultivated on the journey home.

  Give it another few minutes and I’ll start walking. To hell with the rain. I can only get wet.

  A flash of lightning ripped through the overcast sky with a suddenness that made him flinch. The roll of thunder that followed some seconds later was distant. His smile returned.

  It was all so unbearably Gothic.

  He laughed, pulled his short-length cotton jacket closed across his chest and, hunching his shoulders against the rain, stepped out from the slight cover of the library.

  “Come on Tim, almost there.”

  He hardly heard his own words as they were dragged away from his lips by a sudden gust of wind.

  Sheet lightning ran across the underside of the clouds, pulling his head up, his eyes away from the pavement, and a memory tumbled into his thoughts.

  The field on his right in mid-summer, misty with insects, itchy with the heat, and his mother and father leading him across it. His mother, with a bag slung over her shoulder, heavy with sandwiches and drinks. His father, with his sunglasses and a sweater clutched in his hand. Always a sweater, however hot the day, because you never know what it’s going to be like later.

  Thunder rumbled, pulling him back to the rain-sodden field of the present, boundary hedges nothing but faint silhouettes against a storm-heavy sky, and he was suddenly aware that the home he was now heading towards was not his real home at all. That building lay a mile or so on the other side of the village. Empty.

  The Big House.

  His father had been proud of the house handed down through generations of his family. Proud of the size, the aged splendour, the history. His mother was usually less complimentary. He remembered arguments: his mother shouting about not being able to afford the maintenance, his father insisting the house was part of his family, his history. He would never move, he said. The work needing to be done must be done however much it cost. The arguments had become more frequent as the house and its occupants grew older. Not that Tim minded the age of the house, or noticed the wood-rot, the damaged plaster, the rising damp. The size of the house made it an imaginative child’s dream, a huge maze of corridors and rooms to populate with imaginary friends and enemies. Mostly he was too young to see or understand the problems, but he hated the arguments.

  They had been arguing in the car moments before the crash, so eyewitnesses said.

  Tim had been in his final year of Grammar school. They pulled him out of Geography to give him the news.

  Another flash of lightning illuminated the signpost in front of him and he was not sorry to leave the memories behind.

  Fairlane Chapel.

  It had been too good a bargain to pass up. An old Wesleyan chapel, deserted in his childhood, now converted into a home and available to rent. Once, he and his friends had dared each other to look in through the old, black-leaded windows at night, their imaginations filled to overflowing with tales of ghosts and monsters. Any deserted old building in a small village like Byre would attract such stories, but add that it was once a chapel and it became a paradise of adolescent fear and bravado. Now it would be his home.

  Dripping with rain and shivering with cold he hurried down the narrow road.

  3

  Across the street from the library, a curtain shivered with the presence of a hand then dropped.

  Katrina Bayley knew everyone in the village well enough to recognise them, even in the dark and even at such a distance. The man sheltering from the rain was a stranger, although there had been something tantalisingly familiar in his gait and presence.

  “Trouble?”

  Katrina turned from the window, a smile lifting one corner of her lips.

  “No Mark, no trouble. Just a stranger across the way.”

  Mark Bullough shuffled nervously on his feet in the centre of the dark living room, the lamp on the telephone table casting his shadow over the armchair he had been sitting in moments before.

  “We don’t need a stranger screwing things up now, not when we’re so close.”

  Katrina closed her eyes, counselling herself to remain calm and patient. Mark was almost ten years her senior but, at times, she had to treat him like a frightened child.

  “No one is going to screw it up Mark. It was just a stranger taking shelter from the rain before carrying on out of the village.�
��

  “The way you hurried to the window I thought…” He let the sentence trail off.

  For a moment, Katrina said nothing. It amused her that, after all these years as her follower, Mark still did not like talking of her abilities, her power. She knew he loved her, was devoted to her, but he was still afraid of her. She liked that.

  “I knew there was someone out there, that’s all. I was curious.” She forced a patient smile. “Just a stranger. Nothing to be concerned about.”

  I sensed something familiar.

  Mark sat back down, his movements slow, uncertain, perched on the edge of the leather armchair. He was always uneasy.

  Katrina turned away in case her expression revealed her thoughts, good as she was at masking them. How much longer could she put up with Mark’s doubts and fears? There had to come a point when the liability outweighed the usefulness.

  To calm herself and lift her spirits, she stepped towards the far corner of the room where the lamplight barely reached the deep shadows.

  There, slumped like a broken, discarded rag doll, sat a bruised and bloodied body. Fresh blood dripped from the gash in its throat. Black gouged eye sockets looked back at her, sending shivers of excitement through her stomach and between her legs.

  Her eyes focussed on the blood stained priest’s collar lying at the foot of the corpse and she felt satisfied.

  Aello would be pleased.

  CHAPTER TWO

  1

  Professor Alexander Hall studied the letter in his hand carefully, re-reading several passages as he went. An occasional sigh broke the otherwise oppressive silence of the room.

  He sat at his old mahogany desk, the ring-stained wood lost beneath overlapping waves of paper that threatened to overwhelm the in and out trays balanced at one edge. A blue plastic desk tidy, a well-meant but ultimately futile gift from a concerned student, stood at the back of the desk and contained the one pencil that had not mysteriously disappeared during the first few weeks of the college year. In the far corner of the room a kettle boiled, gently rocking the small table it stood on, pouring steam into the air before clicking off. He had intended to make tea, but the letter had drawn him back, distracting him as it had done ever since it arrived earlier that morning.

  From outside, the voices of students walking beneath his first floor window drifted into the room. They were strangely muted, as if the rows of books that lined each wall sucked the vibrancy out of the sounds and blunted their edges. If ever an atmosphere could be described as “musty” then this room had it.

  The Professor stretched arching his thin frame. He was as integral a part of the room as the faded carpet and the creaking chair. In his eyes there was an anachronistic spark, a suggestion of the intellect that lay inside the balding head, the merest hint of the sense of adventure and love of mystery that drove him on day after day. These things the students in their Halls of Residence, the other side of the old door, never saw. Things that those attending his history lectures never suspected. Just as none of the student visitors to his room had ever noticed that, above the shelves of history books, so high that the tallest volumes touched the ceiling, was a row of books on a subject that they would never have associated with the Old Professor— The Occult. They would have been even more astonished had they noticed that several of the titles bore the name of Professor A. Hall as their author.

  He placed the letter on the desk and pressed his hands together, fingertips touching his lips, as if in prayer. With a heavy sigh, he slid his hands up to cover his face and pressed them tight over tired eyes. That letter meant trouble. He could feel it in his aging bones, alongside the intoxicating thrill that shivered through him at the thought of another investigation. At sixty-three years of age he still craved that excitement.

  If only Mary were still here to share it.

  Lifting an old, scarred pipe from the desk, he placed the stem firmly between his teeth. The university’s no smoking policy prevented him from lighting up, but the act of caressing the bowl in his hand and of imagining the strong aroma of his favourite tobacco, was a useful distraction technique. It helped him shrug off the threatened cloud of depression thoughts of Mary often brought upon him. There was no good in dwelling on what might have been. He needed to concentrate on what lay ahead. It was the same advice he gave his students if they failed one of his regular, and notoriously difficult, tests. Besides, he would not be facing this adventure alone. At his age a younger, more physically able companion was an unfortunate necessity. That she was his daughter threatened, at times, to seriously depress him. Apart from anything else, it made her next to impossible to control.

  2

  Susan Hall pressed the key fob, listened to the beeping, watched the flashing of lights and then, to be certain, pulled the car door handle to check the red Rover Metro was locked. Satisfied, she dropped the keys into her coat pocket and adjusted the shoulder strap of the newly bought handbag, making it sit more comfortably on her shoulder. She checked her coat wasn’t in the way, since the floral design bag was easily the more expensive of the two, and turned to look towards the library that bordered one side of the car park. From there she could see across the football field to the Halls of Residence and, beyond them, the tower that housed the latest lecture theatres to be added to the sprawling campus of Waleton College. Somewhere beyond all that, she could hear the drone of traffic heading up into the Derbyshire town that gave the college its name.

  Coming here always brought back memories.

  She turned, looking down the far end of the car park to where the canal made its idle way towards the nearby marina. It was the wrong time of year for the canal barges, but she could remember vivid summer afternoons sitting on the bank, studying in the company of a few friends, and waving at the commercial and holiday barges as they drifted by.

  Only three years ago, but it seemed a lifetime.

  She thrust her hands into her coat pockets and hunched her shoulders as if feeling the cold for the first time. The wind raised itself for a moment and pushed brown hair across her face and into her mouth. As she pulled it to one side she wondered if she should have tied it back that morning… or just cut it. She’d never let it grow this long before, and she only did it this time for Richard.

  Richard.

  She bowed her head against the gusting wind and trudged towards the Halls of Residence. The last person she wanted to think about right now was Richard.

  3

  “Susan, come in.”

  Susan pushed open the door to her father’s room and smiled.

  “How did you know it was me?”

  “None of my students have the nerve to knock so loudly, and none of the faculty ever visit me here.” The Professor looked at the clock standing on the window ledge. “Plus, you said you would be here at this time and you’re always punctual.”

  “How boring of me. Remind me to be fashionably late next time.”

  She closed the door behind her and sat in the only other chair in the room, a small armchair huddled in a corner, used by her father for reading and making awkward students ill at ease. To most people, the towers of books either side, which seemed to lean in towards the seated person, generated an intense feeling of claustrophobia. To Susan, they were a comfort. But then she had grown up in a house little different from this room.

  “I’ve always wondered. Where do you sit the students who aren’t awkward?”

  “In my experience all students are awkward,” said the Professor. “It goes with their age. However, in the rare case of one who isn’t, they sit at my desk and I stand in impressive silhouette in front of the window, looking every inch the academic giant they seem to think I am.”

  “I’m sorry I asked. Now, to business. Why did you call me at some ridiculous hour this morning, waking me up I might add, and request my presence here as soon as possible?”

  “I’m sorry I woke you. Did I wake Richard as well?” There was a mischievous twinkle in his eye that Susan did not fail to no
tice.

  “No, my disgusting, filthy minded father, you did not wake Richard. You have never been in danger of waking Richard when phoning me in the past because he has never stayed overnight, and after last night you don’t need to worry about waking him at any time in the future either.”

  The Professor stood and crossed to the kettle, checking the water level before switching it on.

  “Tea?”

  “Yes please. I rushed out. Didn’t get a chance for one earlier.”

  The Professor’s mind, as was often the case, skipped back to a comment made earlier.

  “What do you mean about last night? Did you and Richard have another argument?”

  Susan sighed. Her father’s intense, if sometimes erratic, ability to listen while seeming not to was legendary at Waleton College. Many a student had found an apparently unheard remark thrown back at them later, sometimes hours later, by the Professor. At that moment she sympathised with them.

  “Me and Richard had the argument, and I finally came to my senses and told him to get lost.”

  She took the offered mug of tea as her father sat back at his desk, encircling his own with long fingers.

  “What was it about this time?”

  “Oh, the usual.” She took a sip of the tea. Strong, as her father always made it. She let the warmth of it spread through her chest before continuing. “Why wouldn’t I move in with him? The work I do with you. Why couldn’t he move in with me? And so on.”

  “The moving in thing I can understand, poor desperate man that he is. It’s not easy having a relationship with somebody as independent as you strive to be. But what didn’t he like about the work you do with me?”

  Susan took another drink of tea, a delaying tactic at best. This was not a conversation she wanted to be having, but she knew her father well enough to know that he would not let it rest until she told him everything, or at least everything he wanted to know. He had never shown any interest in the details of her romantic life, thank God, other than suggesting, before Richard came along, that she should have one more often.