Witch Hunt

by Syd Moore

  When he entered Huntingdon he came across a man who was not convinced of his methods. This was the Reverend John Gaule who had uncovered some terrible occurrences; such as one accused ‘witch’ who, having been searched and no marks on her found, was swum. When examined again afterwards the woman was found to have been bitten on the neck and all over her lower body. The sign of a predatory sadist.

  Then there was the case of old Elizabeth Chandler. This one really upset me. The poor old love was so reviled and forlorn, she had no company at all, and to help her get through the misery of her existence she gave names to two sticks that she used – one, which she used to walk, the other, which she used to stir bowls of frumenty. I could almost picture her there, sitting with her stick between her skirts. But Hopkins insisted that these inanimate lumps of wood were imps and, as his word was the law, the lonely old woman was convicted and swung.

  Thank God at that point the tide started to turn. News of some of the dodgier witch hunting methods was spreading into London and worrying some of the educated sections of society. Feeling increasingly insecure, Hopkins raced back home to Manningtree.

  The fate of the Witchfinder was up for discussion. Some said that he was accused of being a witch himself and swum but drowned. Others say that he floated and so was duly executed by the mob. Good. I hope he was. Probably wasn’t though. Most felt that he probably died of bog standard tuberculosis.

  Such a short life, but so much damage.

  And how typical of someone like that to die in the comfort of his own home. He should have been held to account for his crimes. There was no justice, I thought as I typed, ‘Matthew Hopkins, the Witchfinder General, was buried in Mistley churchyard in August 1647.’

  I sat back and drained the last of my coffee. It had started to rain. Everybody outside was covered up in hats and umbrellas. I cursed the fact that I had neither.

  As my eyes returned to the laptop a charge of adrenalin ripped through my stomach. For there it was, back on the screen – the message box, the words flashing: ‘He wasn’t …’

  I pushed back from the table, frozen into the pose of an alarmed cat – stiffened shoulders, taut limbs, staring hypnotised at the message.

  The young woman sitting at the table in front turned round and asked if I was okay.

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ I rasped and she returned to her

  drink.

  But I wasn’t.

  Inside, my head was thawing out of its sudden panicked freeze. How could the sender know what I’d been writing? Was someone watching me?

  I looked around the coffee shop. There were only five tables. A couple in their sixties sat beside me reading the newspapers. The guy behind the counter was serving a customer with takeaway coffees.

  I got up and went to the window. The rain had turned heavy and forced most people inside. There was a young guy smoking in the doorway of the deli opposite. I watched as he was joined by a woman. They walked off arm in arm towards the church.

  I bit my lip and made towards to my table but one glance at the screen stopped me dead in my tracks.

  The message box was full of script. I crept closer to read it:

  ‘He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t’

  What the hell … ?

  I moved my cursor to the top of the Word document and saved what I’d written. Then, I slammed the lid shut and slumped into the chair.

  What was this? What was going on? No one could see what I was doing, let alone read what I had written.

  I swallowed down my trepidation and opened the lid again. My Word document was still there. I minimised the screen.

  There were no messages.

  Whoever was doing this had enough nous to make sure they were covering their tracks. But for what reason? To scare me? Or to make me look nuts and paranoid.

  Nuts and paranoid. Now, there was a thing. It was a phrase I’d used before. To describe my mum. She’d had an episode about ten years ago when she was sure she was being followed, and contacted by ‘beings’. In one of our long, hand-wringing sessions before she got sectioned, I’d lost patience with trying to follow her convoluted forays into reasoning and had told her to ‘pack it in’, that she was being ‘nuts and paranoid’.

  She was all right again in a month or so, but it took a while for us to rebuild our relationship. And after that I always sensed that she was holding stuff back from me, unwilling to fall into the trap that had got her banged up in the clinic.

  And now, here I was, aping her behaviour.

  But I wasn’t mad. I wasn’t making it up. I had seen it with my own eyes. That was no hallucination.

  And I wasn’t being paranoid. Someone was out there contacting me. Or frightening me. Both actually.

  Rationally it had to be some remote hacker who had got into my computer system and planted some ghost in the machine that was able to monitor my computer.

  The main thing to do was not to play into their hands again. To stay level-headed. What was it they said in the war? Keep Calm and Carry On.

  I shut my laptop down properly and made a point of adding some hardcore debugging software to my shopping list.

  I would sort this out, but for now, I was done in. I decided to call it a day and paid for my coffee.

  Though for the first time, behind my forced rationale,

  a tiny but very real seed of fear had been planted in my hitherto cogent mind.

  Chapter Twelve

  There are things in the darkness with me, moving around: skittering claws on stone, scurrying in the straw and filth.

  Why won’t he let me go back to the others?

  I promised to do what he desires.

  Something crunches and stops outside the door.

  A step. A breath, coming heavy from sick lungs.

  A pause, then a scrape of metal on the old wooden door.

  Another step. A shove, a scrape.

  Please God, don’t let him come upon me again. I cannot bear to feel his hot stink upon my face, his claw-like fingers on my breasts. And the cruel reek of the bone pipe he used on old Mother Clarke, to bleed her, find her mark.

  I am so afear’d he will turn it on me. No, it cannot be. I cannot endure …

  The door creaks open wide and I see his eyes, red, come inside.

  ‘No more. No … Please.’

  I was upright again. In bed. Another nightmare still had me in its grip.

  This one stayed with me for a full minute before it started to recede into the impermeable darkness of my mind.

  The room was black. It wasn’t yet morning. Outside, the cloudy sky blotted out any starlight.

  Beads of sweat trickled down my forehead. Fast noisy panting laboured my chest, drowning out other sounds. Though as they slowed I picked up another noise in the flat. A sort of cooing, like a pigeon trapped up the chimneybreast. Though it was louder than that – with more strength. I listened to it.

  Was it sobbing?

  Following me from the dream?

  I tracked the direction of the sound out to the hallway.

  What was it?

  A wounded dog? I listened intently and prayed that there wouldn’t be another sound.

  But there was.

  A yelp. It was definitely coming from my front room. The suggestion flashed across my brain that there was someone up my chimney.

  No, that was impossible.

  But the voice kept on sobbing.

  I swivelled my legs over the side of the bed and considered the situation. Perhaps I should phone Joe? I was too worried now to give a toss about how I came across to others. I looked for my mobile on my bedside table. It was too dark to see anything and I didn’t want to make any noise for fear of drawing the weeping thing’s attention.

  ‘No.’ The word echoed thro
ugh the living room into the corridor to me, sitting rigid on my bed.

  Okay, that was real. That was human. There was someone in here.

  I fumbled around for something heavy. Nothing came to hand but a stiletto shoe. It’d have to do.

  Slowly I eased myself off the bed. Should I switch on the light or might that alert the intruder? No, darkness could be my cover. Stiletto in hand, I inched across the room. The black fog of night made it hard to navigate but soon I felt my bedroom door and opened it onto the small corridor between the living room, bedroom and kitchen.

  The sobs were getting louder. More gut-wrenching. Like someone was becoming hysterical.

  The living room door was the nearest to me. Silently I squeezed the handle and crept into the room.

  At first everything appeared normal; the room was empty. But then my eyes cast over the far wall and stopped.

  Something strange had happened to the mirror.

  There was a glow, a sort of greenish luminosity, emanating from it.

  I stared at it for a long moment, trying to take on board the unreal sight. My first thought was that it could be some kind of optical illusion caused by the glow of the streetlights outside, so I closed my eyes and changed position slightly.

  When I opened them it was just as before.

  Then the sob came again. From directly behind the mirror.

  Curiosity briefly overcame terror and I stumbled forwards. Now I was in the middle of the room facing it.

  Inside the mirror it was pitch black.

  I couldn’t see any kind of reflection.

  Then came the voice, ‘Who’s there?’

  I scanned the mirror. Nothing. Only a depth of jet black. Yet it seemed like the sobbing had come from within.

  This is stupid, I told myself. I’m dreaming.

  I took a Bambi step forwards and suddenly a face rushed up into view – ghostly white features with terrified coal eyes, surrounded by wild twisted hair.

  I shrieked. She shrieked.

  I jerked back and hurled my shoe at it. The mirror

  fractured on impact. Swiftly, I turned on my heel and dashed out of the living room back to the bedroom.

  Did I imagine it or did I hear a voice say ‘I’m sorry’?

  I didn’t know.

  I was too strung out. Whimpering and crying, I hugged myself in the middle of the bed, pulling the duvet over my body, tense, waiting for the thing in the mirror to get me.

  It never came.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I knew I couldn’t keep this to myself any more. I had to share it; had to sound out what was going on with someone else. The hacker, well that was one thing. This, the thing in the mirror, was something else entirely. I just wasn’t sure what.

  I’d forced myself into the living room at some point

  in the early hours of the morning. The sun wasn’t fully

  up but there was enough insipid grey lighting there to see, sure enough, fragments of mirror scattered across the

  carpet.

  I did my best to clear them up by hand then got the vacuum out. By the time I’d wrapped the glass up in paper and stuck it in the bin, dawn had broken across the estuary, filling the room with tawny hues. It looked cosy, normal. And for about five minutes, I did sit down and wonder if I had been sleepwalking. Or perhaps the hacker had won his mind game and infiltrated my subconscious?

  Though I was aware that the sobbing had been female, had got the distinct impression that the hacker was male. But that might just be my own prejudices converging. Anyway, my head was too wired for me to sort through it rationally, so I decided to pay a visit to someone who

  could.

  She was sitting in the main office with Felicity when I walked through the door. There were only the two of them there. The place felt like it hadn’t woken up properly yet. Maggie looked surprised to see me, but once she saw the expression on my face, she excused herself and showed me into her office, just off the main room.

  I followed her in.

  ‘You all right? You want a coffee?’

  I told her yes please. ‘I don’t know if I’m all right though, Maggie.’ Then I spilt it – from the first message, to the strange nightmares and then the woman in the mirror.

  Maggie listened carefully as she pottered about the room, filling the machine with coffee beans, wiping a couple of mugs. For the most part she stood by the filing cabinet nodding her head in time with my speech, encouraging me on.

  We were sitting either side of the desk when I finished.

  She gulped down a lungful of air before she spoke. ‘I don’t want to sound trite, or like in any way I’m trivialising your experience …’

  I cut in, ‘Just say what you think.’

  She put her mug carefully back onto the table, and clasped her hands together. ‘You’ve been through a lot lately.’

  I had a hunch that she was going to say something like that and a small, exasperated sigh escaped me.

  She stopped then shrugged. ‘You did say …’

  ‘I know, I know,’ I waved my hand at her. ‘Go on.’

  ‘People deal with grief in different ways. The messaging for instance – you said the person on the other end was saying that they were sorry?’

  ‘That was one of the things they said …’

  ‘When someone dies, it’s very common for those left behind to feel guilt of some measure – to feel you could have done more, seen them more often …’

  ‘It’s not like that,’ I snapped. ‘I’m not doing this to myself. I couldn’t have sent those messages to myself. This is not some crazy Fight Club plot twist. This is real.’

  ‘But, Sadie, listen to what you’re saying. Joe’s not found any evidence on your laptop. These things have been happening when you’ve been alone. When you’ve been tapping away at the computer in a semi-alert, semi-meditative state. Also, and I think this is pertinent, it’s happened when you’ve been researching Hopkins. Do you think perhaps you are projecting some of his guilt? Perhaps as a distraction from your own?’

  My face was screwed up into an expression of contempt. ‘You’re joking, right? Why on earth would I empathise with him?’

  ‘I didn’t use that word. I’m saying it might have a psychological root. All that horrid Hopkins research at a time when you’ve just lost your mother, for God’s sake. Perhaps you’ve drifted into some dark place. It’s a metaphor, but … It wouldn’t be unusual for someone bereaved to do that. And, you know, you should make time to heal yourself. Maybe take a break? Go on holiday. Grab some sun? Let your mind have a rest.’

  I collected my thoughts and reformed them so that I didn’t come across as petulant. ‘I don’t think I’m imagining any of this. I think,’ I lowered my voice, kept it firm and stable, ‘whatever is happening is coming from an outside entity. I’m not sure who. I’m thinking this hacker has fixated on me. And he’s clever about what he does. The fact I’m going through emotional upheaval is irrelevant.’

  Maggie bit her tongue, then she said, ‘Can you hear yourself, honey? Do you know how you sound? You are so very ready to dismiss the idea that some of this could be an externalisation of your current state of mind. It smacks of self-denial. In your heart, you know that. Give yourself a break. It doesn’t mean you’re going round the twist. It just means you’re stressed out. And that, my dearest Sadie, is quite natural in your present circumstances.’

  I frowned. She was starting to sound convincing – though I still didn’t believe her. I couldn’t be hallucinating the interaction with the hacker, could I? Or could I have absently switched off and let my hands doodle across the keyboard while my mind focused on other things?

  It was uncomfortable but it was one answer. Maggie was right about Joe and Lesley not finding any evidence …

  I put my head in my hands and propped my elbows on her desk. ‘So the woman in the mirror, you think is … ?’

  Maggie saw I was catching her drift and let the certainty of her conviction ease
into her voice. ‘You woke up from a nightmare, walked into the living room and looked in the mirror. There you saw a woman with a stricken white face and black hair. Someone who was screaming.’

  I nodded.

  ‘I think you may have been looking at yourself, sweetheart.’

  ‘I wasn’t. It didn’t …’ My voice cracked with new doubt. ‘It looked like someone else …’

  Maggie continued on: ‘You were tired, half asleep, maybe even still dreaming …’ She tailed off and let me think on that a bit.

  There was logic in it.

  Argh. My conviction was wavering.

  Crap.

  Maybe it had been me who was crying. It didn’t sound like that but it was plausible that the nightmare had disturbed me and that I had experienced the darkness of night, the acoustics of the flat, in some hypnogogic state, which had then got my imagination going into overdrive.

  ‘Just get some sleep, some counselling and some new software,’ she was saying. ‘If you won’t go for all three, make sure you get the last. I think it’s fairly unlikely that you’ve been hacked in the way you’ve suggested but if there is someone interfering with your computer you should sort that out as a priority. Especially in your line of work. You don’t want anyone nicking your ideas or corrupting your files, do you?’

  ‘Nope. Most definitely not.’ That was a good point.

  ‘Make sure you’re backing your work up, yeah?’

  I nodded. ‘Yes, definitely. I’m going to get a virus check too.’

  My confusion over the mirror woman was beginning to ebb. Of course, I could have dreamed it; after all I was having lots of strange dreams. This was a new twist in the nightmares. I should monitor myself and if they got worse or more physical I’d start using the sleeping pills the doctor had prescribed when Mum … I still couldn’t say it or think the word.

  Maggie must have seen my expression, as her forehead wrinkled and she sent me a look of immense compassion. Her red hair clouded round her face, brushing her shoulders and paisley pashmina. ‘Okay?’

  I nodded again, relaxed my brows and poked my forehead. ‘Brain working again.’