Paint it Black, page 26
“Shreya, I’m looking for Alfie. Did he come here to take you back to our house?”
“Beta! What a lovely surprise.” Shreya looked up from her sewing machine. “I’m just up here hiding from the madness downstairs. No, you’re the first person to disturb me all day.”
She finished the seam she was working on, cut the threads, and laid the shirt out on the table.
“Let’s see if any of the blighters downstairs can tell us anything.”
Gosha was glad removing the part of her that was a witch hadn’t changed Shreya from the gracious, generous person she had always been.
Down in the living room they found all nine grandchildren, surly teenagers included, being led in a rousing rendition of “Doe, a Deer” from the Sound of Music by Mei, two of Shreya’s daughters-in-law watching on in amazement. Shreya exchanged whispers with them and came back to Gosha.
“No. No sign of him, I’m afraid.”
“Gosha!” Johnny ran in from the street through the open front door. “I’ve found the Mini.”
Gosha left Shreya watching the performance in the living room, and followed Johnny three doors down the road where the Mini Cooper was parked, the keys still in the ignition.
All the worry that had been nagging at the back of Gosha’s mind leaped to the surface and seized her in its grip. Her heart pounded in her chest, and her breath shortened. She looked up and down the street as if she might see him, even though the engine of the Mini was stone cold.
“I need to see what happened.” She laid the camera in its case on the roof of the car as she rummaged in her pockets to take out Elsie’s psychedelic lozenges, but had second thoughts. Who knew how strong they would be? She couldn’t risk losing control.
She unclipped the camera from its case and held it up to her eye.
“Stand back, would you?” she asked Johnny. “I don’t want to get confusing messages.”
She took a step back with Johnny behind her so she could get the whole car in the camera frame and took a snap. The shutter swiped across the viewfinder to reveal a ghostly blur of a figure sitting in the driver’s seat, as if Gosha had accidently double-exposed a frame of film. The blurs of light and dark behind the wheel Gosha recognized as Alfie taking the key out of the ignition. She snapped again, and the shuttered cleared to reveal the blur of another figure coming into frame. A third snap, and the figure approached Alfie as he got out of the car.
The fourth time she clicked the button, the shutter moved across the frame in slow motion. When it pulled back, it was as if the camera had disappeared, though she still felt it in her hands, still felt it pressed against her eye. This time, she was prepared for the vision and held herself fast against the compulsion to let everything go and fall to the floor.
The figure approaching the car was a man in his early forties dressed in a cheap brown polyester suit and a turtleneck. He walked up to Alfie in a casual manner as Alfie got out of the car, and spoke in a friendly way, though Gosha couldn’t hear what he said. Alfie answered him, only half paying attention as he locked the car door. The man lunged at him suddenly and violently in an attempt to wrestle him into a one-armed hold, but Alfie reacted sharply and twisted out of the man’s grasp. He swung and landed a solid punch on the side of the attacker’s head. The attacker touched the bleeding split in his face as Alfie went on the offensive, swearing at the man at the top of his lungs in a challenge Gosha could see was meant to put the attacker off balance, but the tactic failed. The attacker snarled and swiped at Alfie, a tight, powerful blow that Alfie was only just able to jerk back away from.
The attacker pushed forward, but his blows were only a distraction. Three more men in equally dubious suits jumped from a large black sedan parked a few feet down the road and ran at Alfie, seizing him from behind.
“Alfie!” Gosha blurted out, uselessly, as the three men held him, one with an arm wrapped around his neck, the other two holding his arms back as the fourth thug whaled into him with blow after blow to his torso and head until Alfie was dazed enough for them to bundle into the boot of the sedan. The four thugs piled in and drove away.
The shutter fell across her sight, and the vision was gone.
“Alfie!” she screeched, all cool and self-possession gone at the thought of the man she loved at Dropnick’s mercy.
33
She barely noticed the commotion of witches in the house as Eleanor mounted the seal behind her and a score of barrow witches remembered what had been stolen from them.
“The file from Waterford,” she blurted out as she pushed through the crowd, the most people she’d had in the house since New Year’s 1979, the last party she and George had thrown together. “Where’s the damn file!”
The jumble of newspapers and magazines that usually lived on the kitchen table had been stacked neatly on the floor in the corner to make room for the workspace of many witches. Gosha ripped it apart, scattering papers everywhere as she looked for the accordion folder the Lords of Fate and Fortune had given her in search of any clue that might tell her where Alfie had been taken.
“Małgorzata!” Agnieszka pushed her way into the kitchen. “Behave yourself! Why are you acting like a madwoman?”
“It’s Alfie,” said Johnny at her shoulder. “He was beaten up and kidnapped. She thinks it was Dropnick.”
“Oh Goga, dear.” Agnieszka dropped her usual imperiousness to let uncharacteristic compassion flow through.
Unable to find what she wanted, Gosha pushed past her mother and Johnny and stalked upstairs to her studio, Agnieszka fast on her heels.
“Where is it!”
“Małgorzata! You’re acting a fool!”
Gosha stormed into the studio and began pulling down books and papers stacked on the surface of the filing cabinets lining the room that housed her photographic archives, scattering them across the floor. Adair and Rosamund, who had been working diligently over the now-dismantled device, stood and huddled back against a wall, shocked by her raging.
“Where is the bloody file!”
Gosha felt herself fray at the edges, desperation loosening her grip on reason as she yanked drawers from their tracks and upended their contents onto the floor.
Agnieszka grabbed her firmly by the arm and yanked her around.
“Małgorzata, you must stop behaving like this!”
Gosha twisted her arm free and pushed her mother away, but Agnieszka dug her heels in and wouldn’t be budged, grappling with her as she tried to seize Gosha’s arms and hold her still.
“He took Alfie! The bastard sent his stormtroopers to take him in broad daylight!”
Agnieszka drew her arm back and struck Gosha, slapping her hard across the face. A palm-shaped welt spread across her cheek.
“Stop!” she shouted.
Inside the house, with seal mounted and Gosha’s lipstick pressed against her skin, the Influence around them thrummed with emotional charge. She reached for it with her will and it whipped up into a vortex that blew around her, ready to do her bidding.
“Get out of my way, old woman,” she growled. The rest of the world blurred as all her focus bore down on her mother. The filing cabinet drawers rattled and a crack spread across the ceiling, plaster dust drifting from it to the floor. “I will find him.”
Agnieszka slapped her again, but all it managed was to incense Gosha further. Her mother reached up to touch her talisman, the acorn pendant she always kept around her neck, pointed the tips of three fingers of her other hand at Gosha, and spat.
The room tilted sharply ten degrees to the right, and Gosha was lifted off her feet. In slow motion she tumbled backward, arms flailing as she tried to right herself, only to fall to the floor among the wreckage of papers, photographic slides, and negatives.
“You will not find him,” Agnieszka stood over her with hands on hips, “racing around unhinged like a virgin lost in the woods. If you are to find him, your heart must be hard as steel. Your blood must flow cold. Your bile must burn deep in the pit of your stomach. How do you think I saved your father from the Communists? How do you think I pierced the heart of the witch hunter who took you from me! You are a witch, daughter. Now get up and act like one!”
The look of burning embers in her mother’s eyes knocked all the fight out of Gosha, leaving behind it heavy sobriety.
“Yes,” she said, shaken. “Yes, you’re right. You’re absolutely right.”
Agnieszka rolled the acorn in her fingertips and opened her mouth to speak, the words rolling out of her like the voice of a goddess that boomed through the house.
“I SUMMON ALL HARD-WORKING WOMEN TO THE DINING ROOM, IMMEDIATELY. You, too, pretty boy,” she said to Adair in her normal voice as she turned and swept out of the room. “And rouse sleeping beauty upstairs from her slumber. If she’s to enjoy sanctuary under this roof, she can damn well pitch in.”
As Gosha followed her mother downstairs, Margie stuck her head out of the door to the boys’ bedroom.
“What about Edmund and Timothy?”
“Bring them, too,” shouted Agnieszka, already halfway down to the dining room. “It’s about time they saw for themselves what goes on around here.”
It took only a few minutes for the household to assemble, thirty people crammed in the space around the dining table. Gosha winked and blew kisses at Edmund and Timothy where they stood to one side watching on. Eyes wide with quiet awe, Margie crouched between them and answered their whispered questions.
“My daughter’s husband has been kidnapped—”
“He’s not my husband,” said Gosha, worried at what the boys might think of him being called that.
“Shush, dear,” said Eleanor, next to her. “It’s just Cant. Everyone knows what she means.”
Agnieszka cleared her throat and shot Gosha and Eleanor an irritated glare before continuing.
“My daughter’s husband has been kidnapped. We are trapped here unable to do anything useful and, in three days, the Houses of Parliament will fall. Shreya, I am overjoyed that you have returned to us. What must we do to liberate ourselves from this predicament?”
Shreya scowled in concentration, her eyes flickering, unseeing, as she considered all the elements of the problem.
“Our first priority must be to free ourselves,” she said, finally. “There is only so much a hard-working woman can do confined to her kitchen. Sister Rosamund, where do we stand on the infernal devices?”
“The big bruiser and I understand the theory behind their function,” said Rosamund, “but the application is beyond us.”
“Us, too,” chimed in Iron Jenny from amid the other barrow witches. “The craftsmanship of the blighted thing is excellent, but the nature of the Craft that forged it is nothing any of us has seen before. None of it makes sense.”
“A headlong assault on the devices,” said Shreya, “may not be our best option, then. Investigation into their workings will continue, but we must consider a parallel inquiry. If we cannot crack the nature of their Craft, can we undermine them with our own?”
“But how,” said Elsie, “when we can’t step outside the house? And with the seal up, nothing we do will work out there.”
“What about the fairyland you two keep banging on about?” said Mei to Eleanor and Gosha as she brushed remnants of dumpling flour from her shirt.
Gosha nodded and took out Elsie’s psychedelic lozenges from her pocket, mad at herself for not thinking to use them to access the kind of visions she had when buzzed on marijuana at Adair’s flat.
“That’s a good idea,” she said. “Rosamund, can you reassemble the device?”
“Easy as a game of snap.”
“I’ll get the pieces.” Adair made his way through the crush to the dining room door and disappeared upstairs.
“Bottom’s up,” said Gosha, unwrapping one of the lozenges.
“No!” Elsie, half her attention on the transformed cards of Gosha’s telling deck she shuffled in her hands, realized what Gosha was about to do and, climbing across the table to reach her, slapped the lozenge out of her fingers. She giggled manically. “Not a good batch, unless you want a severe case of the runs. I’ve a better one.”
She carefully retrieved each of the suspect lozenges and placed them in the pocket of her cardigan before extracting herself from the crowd to head to the kitchen, leaving the cards of Gosha’s telling deck spread face up on the table.
“May I see those?” said Pauline.
She picked them up without waiting for consent and shuffled them with all the dexterity of a casino dealer.
Elsie and Adair returned quickly.
“It will take effect almost instantly.” Elsie held up a glistening lozenge in her palm with gleeful awe. “The high is mild, but consistent, and the come-down is gentle with very little after-effects. All in all, a delightful experience, if I do say so myself.”
“Elsie, you stoner!” Mei cackled with delight. “Share with the class, please.”
The taste of the lozenge was sweet and citrusy on Gosha’s tongue. Her worry loosened within seconds as the colors in the room brightened and deepened. As people moved, they left the faintest trails behind them like a special effect from a music video on Top of the Pops. As her altered perception deepened, it began to interact with her lipstick/enhanced second sight to create delicate ghost images in the eddies and currents of Influence that flowed around the room.
Gosha watched as Rosamund reassembled the device, working with efficient precision, Adair at her elbow, a diligent assistant responding quickly and selflessly to her requests. Between them, they had it reconstructed and armed with the dangerous card that powered it in under a minute.
“Everybody ready?” said Rosamund with the carved wooden box in her hands, one finger over the brass lever that would activate it.
Everyone looked at Gosha.
“Yes, do it.”
Rosamund flicked the lever and disappeared. A buzzing pressure clamped around Gosha’s skull and, apparently, around everyone else’s. Everyone in the room groaned and clutched their heads.
Gosha searched for the Between, but the twilight glow failed to manifest.
“I’m getting nothing.”
“It’s the seal,” said Eleanor. “The bubble is absolute. The world could end outside and we’d never know it. You did too good a job, Agnieszka.”
Agnieszka grunted, pleased with herself. “When I do a job, the job is done.”
“Rosie,” said Iron Jenny. “Turn that awful thing off. It’s doing my head in.”
The nauseating pressure stopped, and Rosamund reappeared.
“The cards have spoken,” said Pauline standing at the table’s edge, the cards spread out in a pyramid formation with the point closest to her.
The witches in the room grumbled and tutted among themselves at the affront of a non-witch, and a saint to boot, lecturing them at their own game.
“An oath-bearer’s sorcery,” she pointed out one row of the pyramid as if the strange cards arrayed there said it all, “is a rigid control of Influence, an imposition of will over the raw, psychospiritual power.”
“An affront against nature, is what it is,” muttered one of the barrow witches at the back.
“A witch’s Craft,” continued Pauline, rolling over the interruption, “is an acknowledgment of the delicate interplay between forces. It is an evocation of affinity and relationship, a coaxing of what already exists to do what the witch asks.”
An approving murmur spread through the crowd, the witches liking what they heard about their beloved Craft.
“But this device digs deep into the source of Influence, beyond the subconscious to the fundament of reality, into the very structure of the Spheres. This man has found a way to mold a person’s perception, and, in so doing, reshape reality itself. And he has used trauma and suffering to achieve it.”
The room fell silent as the meaning of her words sank in.
“The very structure of the Spheres,” Gosha mused aloud, remembering her passage down the hill back through history, and the ring of shapes cut into the ground of the Between with the stone at its center that blocked the pathway to Nimuë and the Loe.
There was a time before the Spheres, she thought. A time when Influence was wild, and there were no spheres, no Lords and Ladies, no oaths of fealty, only the Between.
“The final spell in the rhyme you told me, Elsie,” she said, an idea forming in the back of her mind, still shrouded in fog, a glimmer of its shape glistening through the mists with the reflected light of awareness. “A final spell to use but once, when all is lost and darkness comes. The spell that wipes away the spheres. Could we use that?”
A murmur of concern spread through the witches.
“Too dangerous,” said Agnieszka. “And its effect is limited.”
“I’ve boosted it before, with the wode sump Rosamund gave me.”
“Rosie!” said Iron Jenny. “You never!”
“I gave her it as a charm against a hant,” said Rosamund, indignant. “I meant it only as a stopgap to keep her safe until her witch-mother could do her rightful work.”
Rosamund looked to Agnieszka and gave her a nod of respect, causing Agnieszka, ever concerned with propriety and reputation, to stand a little taller.
“What I gave her would never be able to increase the power of a spell.”
“That would be my doing,” said Elsie, sheepishly. “I tinkered with it to absorb any Influence directed against her.”
“Foolish witch!” said Iron Jenny. “Why would you attempt such a dangerous thing? It could have done untold damage!”
Elsie wilted under the disapproving stares of the barrow witches.
“Yes, Elsie,” said Agnieszka. “Why would someone attempt something so desperate? Only if the life of a hard-working woman’s daughter was in jeopardy, or a sister-in-Craft was under threat from a saint, would such an act be thoroughly acceptable.”
Agnieszka winked at Elsie to show her support, and Iron Jenny grunted.
The grunts of witches are a language even more arcane than Witch’s Cant, thought Gosha
“Whatever happened to the wode sump, anyway?” said Rosamund.
