by Jon Jacks
He had found the key by accident when searching for some dried noodles in one of the kitchen cupboards.
It had been taped up inside a gap where the cupboard’s walls didn’t quite fit together the way they should. The tape was loose, the key dangling slightly.
As soon as he saw it, he knew what it was.
He didn’t have time to go rooting around in the trunk just then, so he swiftly made an impression of it in a bar of soap.
That’s how he had come to have the copy.
It worked too; he had tried it on a day when Beth’s mum was out. He had filed it again and again until it fitted perfectly and the lock gave a loud, satisfying click when he turned it.
But the lid wouldn’t open.
There was still something holding it in place, perhaps a secret mechanism of wood blocks that needed sliding aside.
Or, perhaps, another lock that was hidden away somewhere.
Whatever it was, he had never found it, never worked out how it could be opened.
Which, Beth regretfully realised, might mean it’s imposs–
‘O little girl called Bethlehem…’
Beth froze as she heard the familiar refrain coming from behind her,
She spun around, both knowing and dreading what she would see.
Donna, Claris and Kate.
‘…how still we see thee lie…’
*
The singing was terrible, patchy, off key.
Yet all this only added to its edginess, jangling Beth’s nerves all the more.
Donna, of course, was in the centre, her jaw set determinedly.
It brought out the squareness of her face, in turn emphasising the sturdiness of her body.
Then there was the dull, heavy blond hair.
It all created the effect of a TV series high-school cheerleader, squashed and malformed by the wrong viewing settings.
Claris towered over her, an obelisk of a woman. Black pigtails seamlessly blended her head into a wide chest, broad hips, and ridiculously thick legs.
Kate, small, skinny, and pallid, had dyed, frizzy hair, as if a violently shaken and exploding bottle of coke had been her inspiration.
Beth closed her eyes tight. Partially in dismay. Partially in the hope that when she opened them, it would turn out she had been simply imagining her tormentors all along.
No such luck.
They were drawing nearer. Spreading out. Preparing to encircle her.
‘…we always think you’re half asleep…’
Beth quickly glanced about her.
Should she try running away?
They would chase after her. She might be caught.
Even if she wasn’t, they would find her later. Make things worse for her for running away.
It would give them a great deal of pleasure to see her scared and running away.
She stood her ground, hoping that whatever they had got in mind for her would all be over quickly.
‘…so we all just pass you by!’
They were on three sides now, making Beth whirl, trying to figure out where the first strike would come from.
They all grinned, relishing the fact that she was in their power again.
They started to repeat their favourite line from the song.
They were spitting it out now, stressing the words harder and harder until it became a tribal chant.
‘…how still we see thee lie…how still we see thee lie…how still we see thee lie…’
Suddenly, Beth was itching, itching badly.
Itching badly everywhere.
She couldn’t help but begin to scratch. Scratching her arm, her shoulder, her leg.
She spun around, glaring accusingly at them all.
One of them must have thrown some itching power on her while she’d had her back to them.
‘Hey, look! She’s got fleas!’
‘Better stay away from her!’
‘Yeah, we don’t want to catch anything.’
‘We don’t want to go catching fleas!’
They all taunted her, grinning, laughing.
Beth couldn’t control the itching. It was getting worse, her scratching only serving to make it worse, sharper, more painful.
The more violently she scratched, the more her skin tingled like it was getting hotter and hotter.
Her eyes opened wide in horror as sparks began to leap up from her arms, crackling like small electrical charges.
The sparks arched from one place to another, gaining in intensity with each leap.
They glowed blue, red, orange and even gold, swiftly covering her.
They hurt now, as if each one were a hot needle probing into her flesh, her muscles.
‘Arrrggghhhhh! What are you doing? How are you doing this? Stop it, please! It hurts, it hurts! And it’s getting worse, worse. Yyyyarrgghhh!’
Her growing agony only made her tormenters leap with glee.
You can stop this!
A voice throbbed deep within Beth’s own head.
You can stop this easily, you fool!
Beth couldn’t understand what was happening.
She was admonishing herself. Calling herself a fool!
It was like she no longer had control of her own mind!
Was this it? Was this how it started?
Was she already going crazy like her mum and gran?
*
Chapter 15
‘See what I can do to you now Bedlam?’
Donna circled around Beth, waving her arms in an exaggerated fashion as if casting spells.
‘It hurts! Hurts more than you think! Stop it Donna, please!’
Don’t beg! Deal with it!
Beth was holding and pressing hard on either side of her head now, a fruitless attempt to reduce the sense that her brain was frying, boiling.
Her teeth were clamped firmly together. The electrical charges were streaming through them as if she had a mouth full of painfully hot, molten metal.
She was crumpling to her knees.
Why are you letting us suffer like this? It’s humiliating, stupid!
‘Bow to me Bedlam! Bow to your superior and I migh– arrgghhh! No, no! Not me too, arrgggghhhh!’
Now Donna, like Beth, was writhing in agony.
A thick layer of arching charges leapt and curved around her body.
Now it was just Kate and Claris who were laughing.
Laughing harder, more gleefully, than ever.
‘Stop it, stop it Kate!’ Donna yelped and screamed. ‘I’m telling you to stop it now, or I’ll get my brother– arrgghhhh! No, no, Kate! Please stop it, stop it!’
‘Get your brother to what Donna?’ Kate guffawed. ‘Can he do this?’
Beth and Donna’s backs arched involuntarily as a wave of pain ran from feet to head and back again.
Why are you letting them treat you like this? Let me deal with it!
‘Can he, can he?’ Kate shrieked with joy. ‘Or this?’
The waves of pain surged again and again against Beth’s inner layers of nerves, like an unstoppable tide of agony.
‘Look at them, squealing like pigs!’
Claris’s laugh was deep, baritone, and strangely unconcerned.
‘Can he Donna? Be honest now. We wouldn’t want you to be a liar like Bethlehem Jones here now, would we?’
Donna jerked and thrashed, her arms and legs flailing at ugly angles.
‘No, no he can’t, he can’t! He can’t do what you can Kate!’
Her voice vibrated mechanically and stiffly. She had to force out every word.
‘Please, please, please stop it Kate!’
‘Hey, hey! What’s going on here?’
The shout came from lower down the street.
Beth and Donna could hardly hear it.
Kate and Claris petulantly turned to see who was intending to spoil their fun. They swapped conspiratorial grins.
A blond, tousled-haired boy, not much older than them, was running up the road, heading their way.
The boy’s eyes were fixed on Donna and Beth’s macabre dance.
‘Hey, are you using–’
No one heard the rest of his sentence as a hot, white glare burst around him.
Abruptly, the arching electrical charges suffusing Donna and Beth’s bodies vanished.
The girls sighed and gasped with relief, almost flopping to the ground in their exhaustion.
Hah! How embarrassing! We have to be rescued!
Kate momentarily looked confused, even hurt.
She obviously didn’t understand why the boy wasn’t rolling around in agony in the same way that she had made Beth and Donna suffer.
She stared hard at the oncoming boy, focusing all her attention on him.
She raised her arms and hands theatrically, no doubt hoping that this would somehow concentrate her powers.
But, whatever her powers were, they proved useless against the boy.
Once again, they were deflected by some form of invisible shield.
The spell was transformed into nothing more than a sparkling, crackling glare that burst ineffectively around him.
Kate frowned in frustration. Claris gawped in surprise.
Donna smirked, like she was glad to see Kate’s new found powers being thwarted.
Beth wasn’t quite sure what happened next.
But, suddenly, the three girls were being bowled over, like they had been hit by an incredibly strong wind.
Their hair, their clothes, flapped violently and uncontrollably around them as they were sent rolling cross the ground.
It was as if they had been caught in a miniature hurricane, affecting nothing but them.
Beth felt nothing.
Not even a strand of her hair moved, even though she could clearly see the effects of the powerful blast of air gusting about her.
At last! There’s some sense in this dull brain of yours after all!
As the boy rushed towards them, he stared at Beth in confusion.
Just as Kate’s own bewilderment had allowed Beth and Donna a respite from her painful magic, the boy’s momentary confusion caused the wind to abruptly drop off.
The girls, shaken and bruised, began to painfully pick themselves up off the floor.
The boy was no longer interested in them.
‘But you’re a...a…’
His voice trailed off as he stared quizzically at Beth.
The three girls swapped urgent glances, each of them wondering what to do next.
Kate turned, broke into a quick trot, shouting behind her, ‘Come on! Let’s leave them!’
Donna obeyed the new leader of their group, whimpering with pain as she limped after Kate and Claris.
‘Thanks,’ Beth said to the boy. ‘I don’t know what happened just then bu–’
The boy was disconcertingly staring into her eyes.
He was looking at her as if she were the most confusing thing he had ever come across.
‘But if…then why didn’t you–’
Unable to avoid staring back into his eyes, Beth saw them abruptly widen, the pupils instantaneously dilating.
He jumped back, his previously handsome face now contorted in a mix of horror and total bewilderment.
‘But you’re–’
He was interrupted by a low, rolling snarl.
Their heads snapped around towards the growling.
A wolf, its head lowered as if ready to pounce, was confidently loping its way towards them.
Startled, Beth looked back towards the boy.
‘A wolf! We’d better run–’
‘No, she doesn’t mean you any harm.’ The boy spoke with stern authority.
Even as he turned to run he glanced back, giving Beth yet another quizzical look.
‘I’ll try not to harm her!’ he shouted back at Beth as the wolf, picking up speed, began to chase after him.
‘No, stop! Wait!’ Beth cried out.
But it was the wolf, not the boy, who stopped running.
She looked back at Beth, like a dog following her mistress’s orders.
And, in the blink of an eye, the wolf was a dog.
An Alsatian that gave a gentle ‘woof’ before silently ambling away.
‘Your name!’ Beth shouted after the boy swiftly disappearing down the street. ‘What’s your name?’
The boy spun around, running backwards for a short while as he cried back;
‘Green! Galilee Green.’
*
Chapter 16
Galilee Green?
Had he been called that for the same bizarre reasons she had been called Bethlehem?
What was it her mum and dad had said?
That all her family had been given Biblical or religious names, hopefully to act as a form of protection?
Protection from what?
And Galilee seemed to have some sort of power, using the wind to bowl Donna, Kate and Claris over.
Kate too – she’d also had some dreadful, agonising power!
Magical powers?
Where had they come from, these magical skills?
Kate hadn’t been able to do anything special like that the last time Beth had seen her.
And the wolf; how did that fit into all this?
And the voice?
That was, perhaps, the worst thing of all.
Was she going crazy, like her mum?
Isn’t that what all crazy people say?
That they can hear voices inside them?
Talking to them. Telling them what to do.
Telling them off.
Now that Beth had time to think about it, the voice hadn’t just come from somewhere inside her head.
It had seemed to be screaming at her from every cell of her body.
*
Beth almost collapsed with relief when she finally arrived at the front door to her house.
As she had made her way back home, she had feared the unexpected reappearance of that frightening, uncontrollable inner voice.
Sure, she had tried to conjure the voice up once more, daring it to show itself.
But she had done it in the hope that she would find she could control it after all.
She had tried to find out where it was hidden away, probably somewhere inside her mind.
She had tried to beat it out into the open with accusations of cowardice.
Nothing. She had found nothing.
Thankfully.
Perhaps she had simply imagined it.
Perhaps it had simply been her mind screaming for help, for relief.
Kate had been torturing her with those weird electrical charges after all.
And, come to think of it, couldn’t Kate have created that whole electrifying effect using one of those Taser things?
They shot out cables that hooked onto your body. Cables that carried a strong electric charge from the batteries contained in the handle.
And, when Kate and the others had been bowled over, wasn’t that just a freakishly powerful gust of wind?
And the wolf?
Well, what’s the difference between a wolf and an Alsatian anyway, eh?
So, yeah, everything can all be neatly, naturally explained with a bit of calm, considered thought, right?
So, when the boy jumped back like he had seen something horrible inside her, that was–
Yeah, what was that?<
br />
What had he seen?
Nothing!
He had seen nothing of course!
How could he possibly have seen anything inside her?
He was just a boy! Nothing more!
Just a boy!
A stupid boy who had tried to scare her with a silly face!
*
The door to her mum’s house was locked, but Beth had her own key.
‘Mum! I’m home!’
There was no answer.
‘Mum?’
She shouted up the stairs. Still no answer.
‘Are you in mum?’
She felt a bit stupid when she realised what she had just shouted. Would anybody shout back, ‘No, I’m out love!’?
In the kitchen, she saw that her mum still hadn’t got around to washing the laundry. Despite Beth’s bizarre warning, her mum must have decided it could wait.
There was a handwritten note on top of the sheets piled on the kitchen top.
Her mum was out. She had ‘just popped down the shops’.
Beth wondered how long she would be.
She wondered if it would be long enough for her to…
She found herself staring up at the ceiling.
She was staring up at it as if she could see through it.
As if she could see through the ceiling of the upstairs rooms. See directly into the loft.
The trunk was there.
And, in her hand, she had the key that fitted it.
That opened it.
*
Chapter 17
It would just be a quick look. Just to see if she could open it.
Nothing more.
She took hold of the hooked pole used to grab the handle of the trapdoor leading up into the attic. She pulled the catch free.
The trapdoor fell down, revealing the edges of the wooden steps.
Using the hooked pole once again, Beth caught hold of the steps and dragged them down into position.
She scrambled up the steps, wheezing as she disturbed the accumulated dust and cobwebs.
She glanced about her, trying to recall where she had last seen the trunk when she had come up here as a child.
There it was!
It was buried under even more things than she remembered.
Everything mum had cleared out from the rooms below seemed to be piled around it: the statuettes of witches and knights; the framed, colourful pictures depicting scenes from Arthurian legend; the curtains and cloth shimmering with bright embroidery and lively, faux medieval designs.
Beth searched for and flicked the light switch, the brightness of the bare bulb temporarily blinding her.
She made her way towards the trunk, sending up thick clouds of fluffy dust as she began to swiftly move aside the statuettes, pictures and sheets of cloth.
There were packs of Tarot cards, incense holders, runes, books on Merlin and Morgan le Fay.
There were also what looked like cardboard boxes full of more easily breakable items like crystals.