Dark Possession

by Carol Goodman

  I shuddered but somehow kept the thread moving through my fingers—as though I had to do something to keep the horror of Mordag’s fate at bay. Nor did I want to look at Nan when I asked her my next question.

  “Not that it really matters,” I said, trying to keep my voice casual, “because where I come from it’s not a crime … even if anyone believed in it … so I just wondered …”

  “If I’m a witch?” Nan asked, looking up from her spindle.

  The thread broke in my hand and I met Nan’s gaze. “Well, you see, I am, so if you are …”

  “Aye, I suppose you could call me a witch. My gram said we were wisewomen and buidseach. I wouldna ever do harm to anyone. That is one of the verra first rules I learned at my gram’s knee.”

  “An’ it harm none, do what ye will,” I quoted the Wiccan credo from one of Moondance’s bumper stickers. “Although I’m not sure all the witches I know abide by that rule.” I thought of my grandmother and the curse her grandfather had put on Nicky Ballard’s family.

  “Nay, not all do, but the harm they do always comes back on them.”

  “Thricefold,” I said. “Yes, I’ve heard that, too. I wonder how many of those convicted and killed by Endicott are actual witches.”

  “I do not know for sure. Some of the accused belonged to our circle and some did not.”

  “Your circle?”

  “Aye, our spinning circle, ye ken. Perhaps you’ll join us when ye’ve gotten your strength back.”

  “And this witch finder—Endicott—do you think he’s a nephilim?”

  “I dinna ken what he is, except he must be some kind of monster to do what he does to the poor souls he questions. It’s like he breaks something inside them.”

  “It’s the angel stone,” I said, stealing a look at Nan. She was watching me, but her eyes were on my hands, not my face. I had somehow gotten the hang of the spinning now, and the repetitive motion of feeding the wool into the wheel made it easier to go on. “The stone makes every transgression seem far worse. The story I heard from my colleagues was that the nephilim were elves that were thrown out of Faerie because of how they abused human women—although, now that I think of it, I don’t see how what they did was any worse than what the Fairy Queen did to William.” The spinning wheel whirred faster as I thought about the abuse William had suffered. “Anyway, when they came here to our world, they bred with humans, and their offspring were born … deformed somehow—monsters. They were so horrified that they disowned their children, and the children in turn were so ashamed of their fathers’ horror that they killed them. The last of their fathers shed a tear that became a stone—the angel stone. It’s supposed to be the one thing that can destroy a nephilim. It’s what I came here to Ballydoon to find.”

  “And that’s the stone Endicott was wearing?”

  “Yes, and he’s using it to force witches to confess. But if we can get the stone, I think we can use it against the witch hunters.”

  “That’s a mighty big if. How do you figure you can get the stone from Endicott? He always wears it, and he’s not likely to hand it over to you.”

  “No, but there is one thing that can break the stone’s power. Look there on the settle …” I pointed with my chin to the china saucer I’d put out on the bench in front of the fireplace. I didn’t want to break the rhythm I’d fallen into. Nan was right: the spinning was not only relaxing me, it helped me think. Nan gave me a curious look, then put down her spindle and picked up the two halves of the Luckenbooth brooch I’d left in the saucer.

  “While I was in my trance, William put my half of the brooch in my hand and it appeared in my hand in the vision. The inquisitor—Endymion Endicott—was scared when he saw it. I was able to break the stone’s spell with it and escape from him.”

  “Aye, but only in a dream …”

  “If it was that powerful in a dream, it will be more powerful in reality—and twice as powerful when the two halves of the brooch are fit together. There’s a space between the halves that’s just the right shape and size for the angel stone. If we can fit the angel stone into the brooch, it will become a weapon to use against them. And if we can figure out how to use the plaid, too, we can destroy the bastards.”

  Nan looked up from the brooches to me and grinned. “Aye,” she said, “I think ye may be right. And I’ve got an idea about that magic plaid you’ve been nattering on about.” She lowered her eyes to the bobbin on my wheel. I followed her gaze … and gasped, breaking off the thread. The undyed wool I’d been spinning had turned fiery red on the wheel and was glowing.

  That evening, when William came home, I had the table set for his supper. I’d made bannocks and a stew from some mutton and carrots Nan had brought. I’d swept the hearth and scrubbed the wide-planked floor and arranged some dried heather in an earthenware jug—although I supposed since William spent his days in the heather he might be tired of looking at it. But I wanted the house to look and smell nice.

  “What’s all this?” he asked, his cheeks ruddy from the cold, his dark hair dusted with a sprinkling of snow. He reminded me of Liam when he would come in from his walks in the woods, and I found myself leaning toward him to catch the scent of pine and wood smoke that had clung to Liam’s clothes. But William smelled of heather and peat and sheep.

  “I know you’ve been working so hard,” I said. “I wanted to do something for you.”

  “That’s very kind of ye, lass, but you shouldn’t trouble yourself. I see you’ve been spinning with Nan …” He cast his eye toward the spinning wheel. The yarn had stopped glowing after a little while. I wasn’t sure yet how to make it glow again, or how we would make a magic tartan, but Nan had promised to come back tomorrow for us to spin some more.

  “Yes, she taught me to spin,” I said, spooning out a bowlful of stew. “And I told her about the angel stone. We think we might have a way of getting it.” I told him about the magic tartan that the Stewarts had used in my time.

  “You mean it’s like a pen you’d make for your sheep—only made out of glowing thread?” he asked skeptically.

  “Yes, and in my time the Stewarts were able to use it to keep the nephilim out of the circle long enough for me to open the door …” I paused, wondering what had happened after I’d disappeared from the circle. Had the tartan held—or had my friends been overwhelmed?

  “You’re back with them, aren’t you?” William said softly.

  “What?”

  “Worrying about your people.”

  “Yes,” I admitted. “I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t have to be sorry, lass. I understand. I’ve been thinking how ye being here must be a wee bit like me being trapped in Faerie. It isn’t the place you’re meant to be, is it?”

  “No,” I admitted, taking a quick swallow of the ale Nan had brought.

  “Aye, I suspected as much. I know verra weel what that’s like. In fact, I have a wee confession to make.”

  “Oh?”

  “Aye. When I was taken by the fairies seven years ago, I wasn’t in the Greenwood just to see what would happen there on All Hallows’ Eve. I was on my way out of town, heading for Edinburgh.”

  “You mean you were planning to leave Jeannie at the altar?”

  William blushed. “I know it’s no’ honorable, but, aye, I saw what my life would be like tied to her and the MacDougals, and I knew that I wanted something different. I wanted …” He leaned forward, his eyes shining in the candlelight. “My plan was to go to Edinburgh and ship out aboard a merchant vessel, although I would not have been averse to joining up with a band of pirates if I happened upon them. I suppose that sounds foolish.”

  “How old were—are—you?”

  “I was nineteen when I was taken, so I suppose I’m twenty-six now, although sometimes I feel I lived a hundred years, not seven, in Faerie.”

  He was a year younger than me. At nineteen, the age when he’d run away from Jeannie, I was in college at NYU. My biggest decision was what class to take and
what major to declare.

  “I guess you got an adventure after all,” I said.

  “Aye, but not the kind I wanted. Being slave to the Fairy Queen wasn’t so different from marrying Jeannie MacDougal after all. So I understand what it’s like to feel trapped. I want you to know that what happened between us that first night …” He blushed and looked away. “Well, I understand you were most likely thinking of your fellow from your own time—Bill, ye called him?”

  “Yes, Bill,” I said through a tightness in my throat.

  “And I know I look like him, even that someday I’m supposed to be him, and that’s why you … er … might have confused the two of us. But I know I’m not him and this is not your time and place … so you needn’t fash yourself about me. I won’t stand in your way. I’ll help you get the stone you need from those bastards, and after we’ve run them out of Ballydoon I’ll help you get back to your own time, to your friends.”

  I stared at William. I’d spent the whole day working up speeches to explain how I couldn’t get attached to him because I had an important mission and would have to leave when it was accomplished. And he—for all intents and purposes a nineteen-year-old boy who’d run away to join the pirates—had beat me to it. Clearly if he could be practical enough to see we shouldn’t fall into each other’s arms, I should be.

  “Thank you, William,” I said, the words feeling as cold in my mouth as the cooling stew. “I appreciate your understanding and your offer of help. We’ll need it. Nan and I are going to learn how to weave the tartan to protect us, then we’ll need as many men and women as we can find to carry the tartan to the castle. I’ll use the brooch to get the stone away from Endicott, then I’ll destroy the nephilim and free their prisoners. It will be dangerous.”

  “A raiding party against a castle guarded by a host of winged monsters?” William grinned. “It sounds better than being a pirate any day.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  THE DAYS SEEMED to move faster once William and I had made our pact to work together to defeat the nephilim. We may not have been a romantic couple, but we were united in a shared mission. He proved to be a far better roommate than most of the ones I’d had in college, one of whom had borrowed my clothes and left them in stained clumps on our suite floor, and another who hacked into my Facebook account and posted spurious nude photos on it. William was courteous and neat, sleeping each night on a sheepskin pallet by the fire, which he rolled up when he left in the morning. Most mornings he rose before I did and headed out to milk the cow. When I heard him go out, I got dressed and made our breakfast. He’d have built the fire up and drawn a pail of water from the well, so all I had to do was set the oatmeal to cooking over the fire and make the bannocks, which I’d discovered were the mainstay of the local diet.

  Soon after William left with the flocks, Nan would appear on the doorstep with her basket of wool and sundry gifts of food. I had the feeling that she waited until William was gone to give us some privacy, although I’d tried a number of times to make clear to her that our relationship was platonic, lest she get the idea that I was planning to stay in Ballydoon or that I was taking advantage of her nephew.

  “I’m not blind or daft,” she complained one day when I’d pointed out for the eleventh time the pallet where William slept. “I can weel enough see that a city-bred lass such as yourself would have no truck with a simple country boy such as young William—although he’s a good lad now that he’s gotten his silly notions of being a pirate out of his head.”

  I laughed and broke the thread I was spinning, which I was trying to get to glow again. We’d spun baskets full of wool, attempting to replicate the glowing multicolored thread I’d spun the first day, without success. Nan had me trying a hand spindle now. “You knew about that?”

  “Och, aye, when he was a wee boy he used to make ships out of bits of wood and scraps of my best linen and launch them on the Boglie Burn while singing shameless sea chanteys he’d picked up hanging around the tavern.”

  I laughed at this image of a young William, which brought to mind how Liam would collect twigs and stones on his walks in the woods and bring them back to Honeysuckle House. The story also reminded me of a song I’d heard Bill singing once.

  “Did any of those chanteys sound like this …” I hummed the tune. The words had been in another language I couldn’t reproduce.

  The thread broke in Nan’s fingers and her face softened. “Och, that’s no sea chantey but only a lullaby my sister used to sing to him when he was a bairn.” Picking up her thread, Nan began to sing, keeping time to the rhythm of the song with the foot pedal of her spinning wheel. She sang it first in Scots and then in English.

  “Hush, hush, my bonnie sweet lamb.

  Tho’ my ship must sail in the morning,

  I will be with you

  When the salt spray fans the shore,

  I will be with you

  When the wind blows the heather,

  I will be with you when the dove sings her song,

  Sing ba la loo laddie, sing ba la loo dear

  Hush, hush, my bonnie sweet lamb.”

  Nan’s eyes were shining when she came to the end of the song. For a few moments, the only sound in the room was the pedal knocking against the floor and the whir of the spinning wheel.

  “What happened to her?” I asked. “William’s mother … your sister.”

  “Ah, Jenny. The pest carried her away, along with William’s father. William was only a wee lad. I took him to live with me and did my best, but it’s never the same, is it?”

  Having lost my own parents when I was twelve, I knew that well. “At least he had you. I went to live with my grandmother after my parents died, and she was not half so kind. I can see you really care for William.”

  “How could I not, him looking so much like my poor little sister.” Nan’s voice grew hoarse, but instead of lapsing into silence, she sang the lullaby again, this time in a stronger voice, as if she were singing it for her lost sister. I thought of Bill singing that song more than three hundred years later—remembering it across time and all the shapes he had assumed—and felt an electric charge that ran from the back of my neck to the tips of my fingers and down the thread I was spinning … which began to glow a brilliant crimson. I looked over at Nan to see if she’d noticed. She had stopped spinning and was staring not at my thread but at hers. It was glowing a deep emerald green.

  “The color of Jenny’s eyes,” she whispered. “That’s what I was thinking on.”

  I plucked a length of the scarlet thread from my bobbin, and Nan, understanding, unspooled an equal length of hers. We held them alongside each other—the red and the green thread, my love for Bill and hers for her sister—and they clung like socks just out of the dryer and then coiled around each other, forming a multicolored thread. Nan gave it a tug.

  “It’s strong,” I said. “Stronger than one by itself.”

  “Aye,” Nan said. “But to make that tartan, we’ll need more than the two of us.”

  Nan left early that day, telling me she had an idea or two of who she might ask to spin with us. We had to be careful with our choice. Any one of the women might turn us in to the witch hunters for doing magic. “Folks are scared,” she said, “but some are also weary of being scared. And there are those whose mothers or daughters are amongst the accused, who will take the risk to save them.”

  After Nan left, I decided to walk out to meet William as he came down with the sheep. I’d watched him often enough to know where to find him, and I needed the air and exercise. I was excited about the progress Nan and I had made but a little tired of being indoors, doing “women’s work.”

  I wrapped my shawl around my shoulders against the cold and tucked its ends into my skirt, as I’d seen Nan do. I walked briskly across the meadow and up the path William took into the hills, my bootheels crunching the dried stalks of heather. The air had a bite to it, with a tang of peat smoke and snow coming. There was already snow on the mounta
intops rising above us in every direction. Ballydoon was in a valley—or a glen, as it was called here—protected by those steep mountains. One road connected it to the outside world. Behind me, to the north, the road curved between two hills and led to Edinburgh. In front of me, the road twisted through the village of Ballydoon and then headed toward England. Looming over it, above a dark ravine that looked like a gash in the hillside, was Castle Coldclough. Its stones, turned black with time, seemed to have grown out of the native rock, but it didn’t look as if it belonged in the peaceful valley—it looked like a malignancy that had grown on the hills. Even the ravine below it, cut so deep in the rock that it served as an impassable moat between the village and the castle, looked as though nothing had ever grown in it—as if the earth had shriveled under the cold hard stare of the nephilim’s castle.

  “Do ye know what Coldclough means?”

  I turned to find William standing behind me.

  “The word makes me imagine a beast with icy claws,” I said, “but I don’t suppose that’s what it really means.”

  “A clough is a narrow ravine,” he said, pointing to the deep rift below the castle. “That bit o’ land afore the castle has always been a queer place, colder than everything else surrounding it, even the higher mountaintops. The sun never reaches the bottom, and nothing ever grows in it. Some say it’s where Lucifer landed when he fell to earth.”

  I shivered looking at it, and William unwound his scarf from his neck and draped it around my shoulders. It held the warmth from his body and the smell of dried heather. “No wonder the nephilim chose it for their stronghold,” I said. “We’ll have to go through it to reach them.”

  William shook his head. “You’ll no’ find anyone from these parts willing to step foot in it, even with your magic plaid. How is that progressing, by the by? Have ye worked out how to make it?”