“I was ecstatic at first,” said Helen. “But as soon as we got to Wyldcliffe she changed. She said I wasn’t to tell anyone who I was, as it wouldn’t be good for her reputation. I would simply be known as a scholarship girl, an orphan. I soon figured that my mother wasn’t really interested in me, only in what I could do. She wanted to use my gifts for her own ends.”
“How did she know about them?” said Sarah.
Helen flushed, as though the words burned in her mouth. “My mother—Mrs. Hartle—is a Dark Sister, the High Mistress of the Wyldcliffe coven. She calls upon the elemental powers wherever they are and tries to subdue them to her own will and that of her master.”
“Who is that?” I asked faintly.
She looked at me with pity in her clear, bright eyes. “You know who her master is, Evie, don’t you?”
Yes, I knew. It couldn’t be anyone else.
“It’s Sebastian, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” Helen sighed. “I’m sorry, Evie. I really am.”
Forty-four
T
he water dripped around the statue of Pan. There seemed to be a thousand eyes watching me in the dark, waiting to see what would happen next. I felt as though an invisible net had begun to close in on me, trapping me in every direction. Something moved in a far corner, and I jumped.
“What’s that?” I said.
“Probably a mouse or a rat,” Helen answered. “There are old tunnels leading from the grotto into other parts of the grounds. I guess they’re inhabited.”
I suppressed a shudder and tried to concentrate.
“So your mother is one of these Dark Sisters?” asked Sarah, her eyes wide with apprehension. “What’s that all about?”
“There is a tradition of women who attach themselves to a master of the Mystic Way, feeding him, protecting him, gaining strength from their sisterhood. They can be healers and workers of good, bound by ties of loyalty and knowledge. But if the master is evil, the coven can turn to poison too.”
“Go on,” I said quickly. I needed to know everything.
“Evie, the Dark Sisters at Wyldcliffe are dangerous. They don’t care about healing or learning. They follow a corrupt master, binding themselves to him for selfish purposes. After Sebastian quarreled with Agnes, he collected a group of followers and promised that if he discovered the secret of immortality he would share it with them. In return they had to serve him unquestioningly.”
“But they would have died long ago,” Sarah pointed out.
“The Dark Sisters passed on their places in the coven to their daughters, and their daughters’ daughters. And through all the long years since Agnes died and Sebastian crossed into the Shadows, they have nurtured and supported him in secret. Their main purpose has been to help him search for the Talisman.”
“So, do you know who they are?” asked Sarah.
“Not definitely, no more than suspicions. Even in their rituals and meetings they are careful to hide their identities. They could be village women or farmers’ wives—or teachers here at the school, like my mother. All I know is that they are murderers.”
Sarah and I glanced at each other uncertainly. For a moment I wondered if Helen was making it all up. She sensed our hesitation.
“I’m sorry, but you have to know the truth,” Helen said. “If you don’t believe me, watch and listen. And don’t speak.”
She closed her eyes and raised her arms, drawing a circle in the air with the tips of her fingers. A cold wind sprang up from nowhere, and somehow, out of this rushing wind, a silvery globe of light appeared and hung in the air in front of our eyes. I cried aloud, and Sarah gripped my hand. Helen was chanting under her breath, and the weird globe of light spun faster and faster, until we saw figures, like living pictures, in its silvery depths. One of them was Helen, and the other was her mother—the High Mistress.
“You could be great amongst our kind, Helen,” Mrs. Hartle was saying. “You’re a natural. But you could learn so much more, if only you would let me teach you.”
“What can you possibly teach me?” replied Helen.
“Our Rites can lead to great power,” the High Mistress said impressively. “Even, for the favored few, eternal life.”
“The only power I want is the power to be myself. And I want to be free to live this life, not mess with your twisted schemes.”
“So you refuse? Let me tell you, I can make your life at Wyldcliffe very unpleasant.”
“I won’t let you! I’ll tell people who you really are; they’ll stop you!”
Mrs. Hartle laughed coldly. “Crazy Helen Black complaining about the revered High Mistress of Wyldcliffe Abbey School? What are you going to tell them—that I am some kind of witch? I don’t think so. It will be you they’ll be locking up, not me. You really have no choice, Helen. You are one of us. It’s time for you to accept your destiny.”
Then the scene changed. Helen was dressed in a long cloak and hood that showed just a glimpse of her bright hair. She was in a dark underground place with many other women, all dressed in black robes. They were chanting in a circle. I saw an eye, a mouth, the slant of a cheek that I thought perhaps I recognized: a teacher, a cook, a cleaner. These were the women of Wyldcliffe, gathered in the coven, and Helen was among them. My mouth was dry. I knew that I had seen them before, those terrible hooded women, or at least some kind of shadow of them. They had been reaching out for me in my frenzied panic in the lake that night with Sebastian. I wanted Helen to stop. I didn’t want to know any more. But I had no choice but to watch the mesmerizing sphere of light and the scene that was being acted out inside it.
“Our Master has not yet found the thing we seek,” intoned the voice of the High Mistress. “He is beginning to fade, according to the laws of the Unconquered. If we do not sustain him, an end will come of all our hopes. We have already fed him with our very life force. Each of the Dark Sisters has given a year of her own life to prolong his. That is all we are permitted to give. Now we must find other, less willing victims. We will become Soul Stealers.”
The image dissolved and was replaced by Helen and her mother glaring at each other.
“I won’t allow you to do this!” Helen shouted. “This soul-stealing stuff is evil; you’re like vampires….”
“Indeed,” Mrs. Hartle sneered. “Just as vampires suck blood, the coven will suck life from whoever lies in our path and use it to feed our Master. Fortunately we have a source of fresh young life so conveniently at hand—the Wyldcliffe students. Any girl foolish enough to acquire three demerits will be sent to me for punishment, but not for the detention that she expects. We will be ready for her. She will wake up the next day knowing nothing about it, but part of her life force will have been transferred to our Master.”
“You’re insane! And I won’t help you do this; I refuse.”
Then the pictures changed rapidly. I saw Laura being handed a demerit card by Miss Raglan; then she was knocking on the door of Mrs. Hartle’s study, and then she was lying asleep in some kind of underground crypt, with the robed figures swaying and chanting around her. She was pale, as pale as death. Then one of the women pushed in front of the others and tried to shake her, but she didn’t wake up. “Laura, Laura! My God, you’ve killed her….” The woman’s hood fell back. It was Helen, and she was crying uncontrollably over Laura’s cold body.
“We drank too deep,” said the High Mistress in an expressionless voice as she examined Laura’s white face. “She is of no more use to us now. Take her body and throw it into the lake. It will seem as though she has drowned there.”
“You can’t do that!” screamed Helen. “I hate you, I hate you.”
Then I heard the real Helen give a long, shuddering breath. She dropped her hands, and the globe of light vanished. She looked at us, red-eyed and scared.
“I was there,” she said. “I couldn’t do anything to stop it. I saw Laura’s face; I saw her eyes after the life had drained away. I watched them throw her body in the lake.” She
was struggling not to cry. “And that’s the woman I have to call my mother! She didn’t care what had happened to Laura so long as no one discovered the coven’s secret. I threatened to go to the police, but she just laughed.”
I gasped. “So Celeste was right.”
“Yeah,” Helen said, wiping her face on her sleeve. “Celeste is mean and snobby and all the rest, but she was right about that. I tried to hint to her that Laura hadn’t drowned, but she started to accuse me of all sorts of things, so I clammed up. But Celeste was right to blame me! I knew what was going on, and I should have done something to stop it.”
“There was nothing you could have done,” Sarah said quietly.
“At least I told her—Mrs. Hartle—that there was no way I would ever be part of her coven again, whatever she did to me. And she knows I’ll never change my mind.”
I felt totally sick. So that had been Sebastian’s connection with Laura. “How could Sebastian have agreed to any of this?” I cried.
“Evie, I swear he didn’t know about it. The coven had told him that the life force they fed him was their own and that they were willing to give it. They said they would be amply repaid when Sebastian found the Talisman and led them all to immortality. When Sebastian found out what had happened to Laura, he refused to take any more sustenance from the Sisters. He and my mother had a blazing fight. Sebastian said he was sickened by what they had done and that it was better for him to accept his fate and let himself fade into what he would become. But she screamed that he had promised them immortality and she would hold him to his promise. Since then the coven has been even more desperate to find the Talisman. Mrs. Hartle thinks she can force Sebastian to use its powers, if he’s unwilling. As Sebastian gets weaker and weaker, I’m not sure he’ll be able to control them.”
This was the thing Sebastian couldn’t bring himself to tell me—the cold-blooded destruction of an innocent girl. Agnes’s death had been a terrible accident, but this was something else. Laura’s death had been Mrs. Hartle’s twisted gift to Sebastian. I didn’t know who I wanted to weep for most: Laura or Agnes or Sebastian. I had no tears left for myself.
“Evie, when you arrived at Wyldcliffe, I knew there was something different about you. I couldn’t afford to be friendly; I didn’t want to draw Mrs. Hartle’s attention to you. So I started spying on you secretly, following you at night, watching you everywhere you went. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.”
“So it was you that day at Fairfax Hall!”
“Yeah,” she said with a rueful smile. “I thought myself over there to check on you without anyone knowing. And I’d gotten you into trouble the night before to try to frighten you into giving up your meetings with Sebastian. I wanted to warn you outright about him, but I never knew who would be secretly listening to us. Anyway, my efforts didn’t work. I watched you get drawn in deeper and deeper. I heard what you and Sarah said about your possible connection with Lady Agnes. And I was almost crazy with worry when I found out you had the Talisman.”
“How could you know—?”
“I was watching in the garden that night when Sebastian touched the necklace. After that I was sure what it really was. I’m terrified of what will happen if my mother or Sebastian find out that you have the very thing they have been searching for all these years. You mustn’t ever tell him.”
My heart was jumping. I looked at Sarah’s and Helen’s white faces. “He knows already,” I confessed. “But he promised that he would stay away. He doesn’t want it.”
“Evie, you can’t trust him! As he fades further the desire to cling to human life will grow until it’s an intolerable hunger. In the end Sebastian’s desire for the Talisman will be far stronger than any feelings he has for you.” Helen looked at me with pity. “From now on, you have to treat him as an enemy.”
“Tell me something I don’t already know. Sebastian and his pack of Dark Sisters could kill me at any moment. And there’s nothing I can do about it.” My flippant tone was a poor disguise for my fears.
“There is,” said Helen. “I might be able to help you.”
I looked up, a stirring of hope fluttering inside me.
“There’s only one thing you can do. You possess the Talisman. Use it to release your own powers, Evie.” Her eyes glimmered in the shadows. “Follow the Mystic Way.”
Forty-five
I
stared at Helen. “You must be joking.”
“Of course I’m not.”
“I’m not getting mixed up in all that stuff. That was what started all this trouble in the first place. And besides, I just couldn’t do all the chanting and rites and dancing around the maypole, or whatever they do….”
“You mean all that mumbo jumbo?” said Sarah with a faint smile.
I grinned back weakly, but it wasn’t funny anymore.
“Evie, haven’t you learned anything yet?” Helen said impatiently. “It’s not mumbo jumbo. It’s as real as the ground we’re standing on. And you’re already mixed up in the Mystic Way. It’s in your blood.”
I said nothing. The damp and cold of the cave seemed to be seeping into my veins, freezing my mind. I couldn’t think.
“So what are you going to do?” she persisted. “Just wait until Sebastian or the coven comes after you?”
I tore the ribbon from my neck and held up the innocent-looking necklace. “I’ll stop wearing this thing. I’ll send it away, back to Frankie….”
“And put her in the same danger?”
“Then I’ll just get rid of it! I’ll…I’ll throw it in the lake, or chuck it down one of those old mine shafts on the top of the moors.”
“So that they can pick it up at their convenience? You can’t abandon the Talisman, and it will be impossible to destroy.” Her pale face looked more ethereal than ever as she stood in front of me, urging me to believe her. “Just open your mind, Evie. Learn how to use it.”
“But I don’t know how!”
Helen placed her hand on mine. A flash of blue light flamed out of the Talisman and lit up the cave, making the mosaics spring to life with a thousand reflections.
“You see? The Talisman is ready to awaken, if you’ll let it.”
“But I haven’t got any powers,” I argued. “I’m not like you.”
“You saw Lady Agnes, though,” said Sarah. “And you could see Sebastian.”
I couldn’t deny it. I looked down at the Talisman, lying there in my hand. What would it demand of me? Agnes had died because of the Mystic Way, and it had lured Sebastian to his doom…. Would I be able to do any better? Helen and Sarah were looking at me expectantly. I was standing on a precipice, hovering between two worlds.
“Can you really teach me what to do?”
“I can try,” Helen replied. “Some things I have learned since being at Wyldcliffe; others I just kind of knew from the beginning. But I think that everyone has a voice inside them, telling them the story of their own power; it’s just that they just don’t bother to listen to it. Look at the girls here at Wyldcliffe. All they care about is being popular and getting invited to the right parties at the holidays. They don’t listen to what’s really going on inside them. Some people are naturally more sensitive, though, like you and Sarah.”
“How do you mean?” asked Sarah.
“I’ve often felt your mind reaching out to mine. I had to work hard to keep you out sometimes. No one has taught you how to develop your instincts into power, but I know you could do it. And, Evie, you can’t deny what you have experienced. You both have huge potential to awaken your real selves. And the Mystic Way is a sort of key that can unlock that potential.”
“But not everyone can do this weird magic stuff, levitation and healing and all that,” I said.
“It’s not magic!” She laughed. “This isn’t a fairy tale, Evie. The stuff I can do, and what Agnes could do—it’s all part of the mystery of nature. We think we have all the answers, but our very existence is a miracle. What do you really understand about th
e universe and the stars and the ocean, and, oh, I don’t know…electricity and magnetism and string theory and quantum physics? Isn’t all that ‘unbelievable’?”
“That’s different,” I objected.
“Is it? When people first taught that the earth went around the sun, and not the other way around, they were regarded as dangerous lunatics. But now it’s accepted. And it’s the same with this. People will understand it one day.” She fell silent, then shrugged. “This isn’t about some philosophical theory, Evie; it’s about survival. How else are you going to protect yourself? Agnes left you the Talisman. She must have wanted you to use it.”
“That’s why she has been trying to contact you,” said Sarah seriously. “I’m sure Helen’s right. You’ve got to do this, Evie. Just open your mind to it.”
You can do it, Evie; you can do anything you want. I seemed to hear another faint echo of my mother’s voice, and the thought flashed through my mind that if I could use the Talisman to help myself, then maybe I could use it to help Sebastian. It was the tiniest chance, but it was enough.
“Okay,” I muttered. “I’ll give it a go.”
“What about you, Sarah? Evie needs all the support she can get.”
“Sure.” Sarah quickly squeezed my hand. “I believe in the unseen world. Count me in.”
Helen’s beautiful smile lit up her face. “Great. We’ll need to start from the very beginning, with the Circle. And we’ll need some candles.”
I groped in an alcove behind the statue of Pan, remembering my last visit. The candles and matches that Sebastian had used were still there.
“That’s perfect,” said Helen. She lit the candles, and their warm yellow light danced across the grotto’s walls. Then she fumbled in her bag and found a piece of chalk in her art supplies.
“Put the Talisman on the ground.”
I did as Helen asked. Sarah placed the flickering candles around it. Then Helen drew with the chalk on the floor, marking a circle to surround the three of us, with the Talisman in the center.
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