The Soprano

by England, Sarah

  Meddling with the natural order of things was never to be taken lightly and her fingers shook slightly as she cast a circle of protection and lit the candles, knowing how this may well come back to haunt her as she prepared to focus her intent and invoke Hecate – the triple goddess found where the energy lines crossed and the magnetic force was strongest. The new moon was in Taurus, which meant the spell would last the longest and be hardest to change; followed by the waxing phase during which the power would grow daily as the spell come to fruition. Tomorrow the foundations for the Methodist Chapel would be laid and within days the first stones would descend on all that lay beneath. There would be a celebration and an opportunity for Aaron Danby to lay eyes on her daughter, Agnes – who would appear to him as a captivating beauty – and to whom he would then be irrevocably bound.

  Once fully prepared, and on the hour of Saturn at three a.m. she summoned the dark moon goddess, Hecate.

  “Crossroads Goddess!

  Scared fire!

  I invoke the Hecate!

  This dark hour

  Grant the Magick

  Bind him with fright

  Call of my familiar owl in flight

  Bind my enemie

  Make him weak

  With spells of woe and curses bleak!"

  Her eyes shone with an unearthly fire as finally, with the full might of Hecate behind her, magic crackled through her veins and she set to work.

  Driving the first silver pin through the doll’s head, she then drove another into the right arm, the third into the left and the fourth to where the heart should be.

  “As this pin is driven into the heart of this image, so may love of Agnes be driven into the heart of Aaron Danby, so that he cannot sleep, wake, rest, stay, go - until he burns with love for her.”

  The fifth pin she stuck into the navel, the sixth in the groin, the next into the right side, then the eighth into the left side and so on until every part of the body had been pierced and every pin accompanied with an instruction. “I command as follows – your head, your hair, your eyes, your ears, your organs, limbs, sides and ribcage, your whole self…”

  When every part of the poppet was pierced with pins and every energy line of the body committed to purpose, Annie stood and raised her arms to the sky. “I command Aaron Danby, your whole essence, so that you cannot sleep nor settle nor rest nor have any skill at anything until you have fulfilled this erotic purpose.”

  When it was done, she sat back on her heels and lifted her face and hands to the fresh, clean rain emptying from a burst of cloud. It dripped from the leaves and plopped onto the bare earth, and she closed her eyes in awe. Excitement filled her; and she knew as sure as she had ever known anything, that the deed was done.

  “This is my Will…so mote it be.”

  ***

  Chapter Eighteen

  1951

  Louise – two days after the blizzard

  When we woke the next day it was snowing again – steadily and solidly, the air thick with snowflakes settling onto the packed layers already there. On and on it snowed, several feet deep in the drifts and still it kept on coming, entombing the landscape as far as you could see in glacial whiteness. I don’t think any of us had any inkling at that point, just how long it was going to last and how totally isolated we would become. To us children it was still exciting: we built snowmen using lumps of coal for eyes and carrots for noses, threw snowballs, and took tea trays up to the slopes for sledging.

  That morning Dad cleared the front path before setting off early for Grytton to check on Grandma Ellen, and we kids were at the table having breakfast, eyed as always by Auntie Flo and Auntie Connie.

  “Not another one,” my mother snapped at Iddy. “One dip of syrup per slice. What have I told you about being greedy? There’s others you know, not just you.”

  Iddy grew red in the face as he always did when he was told off, although he still crammed the toast in his mouth.

  “Greedy guts,” said Arthur, watching the excess syrup dribble down his brother’s chin.

  Iddy couldn’t answer back because his mouth was full so I took the opportunity to swipe one of the illicit fingers of toast left on his plate, and the next minute he had me pinned to the floor. “Spit it out, Louise.” He was trying to get it back out of my mouth before I swallowed it.

  “Cut it out!” my mother shrieked. “Get back on your chairs and sit at the table properly or you’ll all three get a good hiding. Now behave!”

  There was a funny atmosphere and everyone was fractious. At eight in the morning it was still dark and the coal fire was blazing, flames leaping up the chimney as if it was night time. None of us wanted to go out into the freezing, wet day but we’d tried tummy ache and ‘feeling sick’ to useless avail. So we sat suitably chastised, lingering over the last dregs of tea, delaying the moment we’d have to go out into the cold again.

  “That’s not fair, he—”

  Arthur shot me a look and put his fingers to his lips. It seemed something was wrong – something important – and he wanted to know what it was.

  Mum was certainly very preoccupied, as were the aunties, with waiting for the news broadcast on the wireless. All of a sudden the pips sounded.

  “Shush,” Mum said, turning up the volume.

  The man with the urgent sounding voice was speaking. There was still no word about Hazel Quinn, the woman who’d disappeared in the blizzard two nights ago. Last seen leaving her home in Danby by car there had been no further sighting and the police were becoming increasingly concerned for her safety. Driving conditions on the night she went missing had been atrocious with many roads unpassable. Local police speculated she could not have got far and people were urged to keep their eyes open for a car stuck or abandoned in the area, and for a lone woman who could have become lost or disorientated. The longer time went on, said the man, the more unlikely it was she could survive. Interviewed by police, one of the neighbours had described Mrs Quinn as keeping herself to herself and rarely going out, if ever, on her own. It seemed odd, the witness said, that she’d attempted to drive in such dreadful weather too. Not only that, but she’d been dressed in heels and evening dress with nothing more than a fur stole to keep her warm.

  My mother’s face was white.

  “Well ou couldna ’ave got far,” said Auntie Flo. “Not in this weather.”

  Mum nodded. Danby, although in a valley, was surrounded by moors on all sides and was only escaped by steep winding roads, all of which would have become blocked with snow very quickly.

  “Still snowing an’ all,” Auntie Flo added, somewhat unnecessarily.

  We watched as she took a long drag on her cigarette. Sometimes the smoke came out of her nose nearly a whole minute later. Arthur said he could do that too – talk with the smoke still inside his lungs and then let it out later – without coughing.

  The man with the excitable voice went on to announce that the woman’s husband had been taken in for questioning by the Danby police.

  Mother and the aunties all said, “Ooh!”

  “Fancy setting off in this, though,” said Auntie Connie.

  “I bet ’er got th’ car stuck and then ’er came a cropper.”

  Their accents were getting thicker the more animated they became.

  “Mum, what’s a cropper?”

  “Never you mind, Louise. And what have I told you about listening in to adults’ conversations?”

  After the news finished she turned off the wireless and took a cigarette from Auntie Flo. “Ta, duck.”

  “Well then—” said Auntie Connie.

  “He’ll ’ave murdered her I reckon,” said Auntie Flo.

  “’Er ’usband?” said Auntie Connie.

  “Oh, aye, it’s always th’usband.”

  “Mum, what’s murdered mean?”

  “Be quite, Louise. Aren’t you done yet? Get down from the table and get your clean socks from the warmer. Arthur, duck, get them ready for school or you’ll be late.”


  It snowed for the rest of the week with no let-up; and every morning Dad and the other men in the street began the process of digging out a path, the sound of shovels grating on the road a sound we became accustomed to waking up to. That scraping, the darkness, the freezing air and the sooty smoke of the coal fire will always haunt snowy mornings for me. I remember the painful numbness in my itchy, swollen toes, and the sight of the bedroom wallpaper peeling away with damp. And two doors down the wailing of Uncle Lloyd’s euphonium and Auntie Flo’s coughing. Above all though, I remember the light: the blinding, brilliant clarity of blue-white light.

  On and on it snowed. Until food supplies started to run low and the shelves at the Co-op were almost bare. There’d been no bread or fish van round for weeks. The milk delivery that usually came by pony and trap, ladled directly from the churn into a jug, Mum fetched from the farm on her way home from work; and the hens in the back yard had stopped laying. Although we had plenty of coal in the cellar, only one scuttle of it was to be used per day in case the next delivery couldn’t get through. Arthur said he could see the stone floor of the cellar now and was shovelling up more coal dust than coal. Few people had cars back then but not a single one had passed through the village in weeks – everyone was on foot and even then the going was slow with people slipping, bruising hips and twisting ankles. Phone lines were still down and a raw wind blasted off the moors, drifting the snow into hazardous piles that had you up to your neck before you knew it. And on the lanes cleared by tractors the edges were now too high to see over. We were land-locked.

  Dad did manage to reach Grytton that morning, though, and when he returned the relief was palpable. Mother did that dramatic collapsing into a chair thing with her hand on her chest. Auntie Rosa and Auntie Marion had made it home sometime in the early hours, although he said both had horrible colds; but Grandma wasn’t at all well after falling on the ice.

  “Falling? What do you mean, falling on the ice? Why was she outside?”

  “I don’t know, Viv. She had some vague idea of going out looking–”

  This set Mum fretting, wringing her hands and pacing up and down. “Oh, if only it would stop bloody snowing I could get down there…”

  But we couldn’t get down to Grytton or anywhere else outside of the village after Dad’s first visit, because the roads and lanes became completely impassable. Everything was postponed or cancelled because of the treacherous conditions. Apart from Chapel. And would you believe – school? Much to our dismay they managed to keep a single track dug out every single day so we could get there and back. Even in the absence of heat and light, and long after school dinners ran out, we were simply told to bring candles and sandwiches and get on with it.

  My mother still got to the mill for work too. If the workforce didn’t go they didn’t get paid so she made sure she got there and set off earlier. But Dad spent much of his time digging other people out and helping those who were too old or sick to look after themselves. Brittle bones could not afford to slam and fracture on the ice. And there were no funerals held for three weeks in total. ‘Apparently’, Mum said. ‘The bodies were piling up.’

  Bodies piling up.

  Well, that gave me, Arthur and Iddy something to think about.

  A week later, though, two full weeks after Hazel Quinn had originally been reported missing, an abandoned car was sighted up at Castle Draus. Buried in deep snow only the top was visible, its metallic roof spotted glinting in a rare shaft of sunlight.

  “I can’t believe it,” Mum said to Dad. “I mean, how the dickens would she have got the car right up there? It’s a trek at th’ best of times…”

  Dad shrugged.

  “And it is definitely her car, they say? Why, though? Why up there? It’s in the middle of bloody nowhere. Why would anyone in their right mind go up there?”

  “Perhaps she weren’t in ’er right mind?”

  I struggled to understand. “What’s happened?”

  “She must’ve driven up there that first night,” said Dad. “Not impossible if you keep going in a good car like that.”

  “Mum, what’s happened?”

  “I suppose they’ll have to dig it out and see if she’s still in it? Dear Lord, she must ’ave been buried alive.”

  “Mum, what do you mean by, ‘buried alive’?”

  “We’re going up first light,” said Dad.

  “Who? You and who’s army?”

  “Me and Jack, Lloyd, Handel, Bill—”

  “And who were it who saw th’ car? Must ’ave been Bill, then?”

  “Aye, and purely by chance an’ all. He were out searching for sheep, most of th’ poor beggars dead and buried like, but anyhow he’d been out all night – got as far as th’ castle walls when he saw a flash of metal.”

  “And it were ’er car? Up to th’ roof in snow? Well I never, and then…”

  “It’s looking that way, duck.”

  “But they said she left after dark? It were a raging blizzard up ’ere, though. You couldn’t see a thing. Marion and Rosa couldn’t even get ’ome in it. So how the divil she got a car up there I dunna know. Folk have got stuck on a fine day—”

  “Or why,” Dad said.

  “Yes and why? Do you reckon as it were suicide?” Mum wailed.

  “What’s suicide?”

  “Shut up, Louise!”

  “We’ll know more when we get up there tomorrow,” said Dad. “Bill only came down and told us all an hour ago—”

  “Lucky you were in th’ Quarryman then?”

  “Very,” said Dad, with a tiny smile. “Any road, he and Jack are on their way down to Puffer Jud’s now. It’ll be a police job, like…Mind you, they’ll not get a motor up there—” He frowned. “And Puffer Judd won’t make it on foot will he, the fat sod?”

  “Mum, what’s Puffer Judd?”

  “Oh, my Lord, it doesn’t bear thinking about – what you’ll find, I mean. Have you thought? Have you thought about what you’ll likely find?”

  “Mum, what’s a Puffer Judd?”

  “Louise, pipe down, duck,” Dad said.

  Arthur was the one who explained it later, after dark.

  The three of us were in bed buried under a weight of covers. He flicked on his torch.

  “Right, what’s happened then, our Arthur?” I asked.

  “All I know is it’s about a woman from town called Hazel that drove off and never came back. It were on that night we ’ad that really bad snowstorm, do you remember – when we walked ’ome from Chapel after Grace Holland were singing? It were that rough we could ’ardly walk?”

  Iddy and I nodded. “Yeah, it were an’ all.”

  “Well, then after that no one could find ’er and they started to think as it were th’ usband as killed her and put ’er somewhere. But now Crocker Bill’s seen a car up at Castle Draus and they think as it’s ’ers. But nobody can get up there to find out, and if it is ’er then she’s been buried alive.”

  “You mean like she’s alive but stuck in the car? Won’t she be cold?”

  “Lou, it means she’ll be dead. Gone. Kicked th’ bloody bucket.”

  “How do you mean? What bloody bucket?”

  “He means dead and all blue and mottled purple,” said Iddy, who had once seen a corpse being brought into the funeral parlour and never forgotten it.

  “Has our Dad got to dig her out, then?”

  “All the roads are blocked from town,” said Arthur. “So he’s going to go and see if she’s in th’ car. Me an’ all.”

  “Are you going, our Arthur? Really? Aren’t you scared?”

  “Course not.”

  “She’ll be all blue and purple patchy and her eyes will be wide and staring and her fingers like claws, and then she’ll see you and suck your blood to get her life back… and then float into the night looking for more children—”

  “You’re daft in the ’ead, our Iddy.”

  “Why, though?” I said. “I mean, why did she go up there?”r />
  Arthur shook his head. “Could be suicide.”

  “What’s suicide?”

  “It’s where they chop their own heads off,” said Iddy.

  ***

  Chapter Nineteen

  Lake View Villa

  Ellen Danby

  Where, she thought, did dreams end and reality begin? And how had she floated so seamlessly through the veil – from deep involvement in another life – to this, a calm, powder blue bedroom laced with spidery shadows? It looked as if it might be late afternoon. At first, with the house so piercingly quiet, Ellen wondered if she was still alive at all or had in fact, become a spirit trapped between two worlds. But then a confetti-hand of snowflakes blew against the window and a gust of soot wafted down the chimney, filling the room with the acrid smell of coal dust.

  She closed her eyes. Yes, she was still alive. Nothing in heaven could surely feel this cold and dead?

  There was no strength in her arms to either pull up the covers or turn her head, and sleep weighted her down once more, a surge of memories and fears rushing into the void. Helpless to stop it, she cried out in her sleep. “No, not to that place again. Don’t take me there. No…” In vain she fought to surface from the depths of her nightmare, the feeble fingers of her rheumatoid hands clawing at the sheets, dimly aware of faces peering down at her, of voices gurgling her name in a pool tide of ripples. Again she called out but it may as well have been from the bottom of a lake because no sound came from her lips, and now the current was pulling her along, to where it was warmer and easier to simply float away.

  He was there in the sunlit dapples among the gently swaying reeds, more real to her now than ever, reaching out with the softest of touches…brushing tendrils of hair from her face, caressing her brow, stroking the oyster smoothness of her eyelids. A frisson of pleasure tingled through her whole being and she swam into his embrace as naturally as a mermaid. “I love you, come to me, it’s time—”

  “I want to but I’m afraid.”

  “There’s no need. I’m with you, Ellen. I’ve come for you.”