Paint it Black, page 28
Agnieszka cocked her head to one side as if listening to distant music.
“I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous in all my life,” she said. “Mystic lakes in the middle of the Heath?”
“Mamusha!”
Gosha concentrated, picturing the ladies standing around her staring her down, disapproving, hoping to appeal to her mother’s sense of propriety, and released the image to the Between.
Agnieszka scrunched up her nose and grimaced as if tasting something unpalatable.
“Fine,” she sighed, raising her eyes to the heavens. “Let’s get it over with.”
Gosha led the pliant witches out into the foyer where Johnny, wrapped in a heavy overcoat with enormous shoulders and carrying a giant boom box, stood waiting as Eleanor instructed Adair in the functioning of the seal.
“It’s very simple, dear,” she said. “Facing the door, nothing gets in or out. Ten degrees to the left or right and the seal is broken.”
“Ready?” said Johnny.
“Yes, but do we really need the music?” said Gosha. Johnny had been drilling her as if helping her prepare an audition for a West End musical.
“Darling, your magical fairy witch told you to put on a show, so a show is what we shall put on. If I could come up with a lighting rig at such short notice, we’d be using that, too. Altar candles from Repton Oratory will have to do instead.”
He patted a drawstring duffel bag draped over one shoulder and turned to Adair to give him a kiss on the lips.
“Good luck,” said Adair.
“You too, lover,” said Johnny.
Adair, Rosamund, and the remaining barrow witches were to stay put behind the safety of the seal to continue working on the devices.
“This way, ladies.” Gosha guided the witches out to Shreya’s brightly colored VW Kombi.
Though it was after ten o’clock at night Gosha could see the inky-black flicker of widow’s weeds towering up into the night sky.
Gosha drove them as quickly through the night-time streets of Cheyne Heath as she dared. Eleanor was the first to be dropped off, but not before they all synchronized their watches. Twelve minutes to midnight was their target. Miss that and all could be lost.
“Are you sure that’s the right song?” said Gosha as Johnny wound the cassette back to just before the first staccato beats of rimshot and hi-hat of Bela Lugosi’s Dead by Bauhaus began. “It’s a bit macabre.”
“Are you going to make me explain to you,” said Johnny, checking his watch with an oversized chrome flashlight he intended to use on Gosha as an uplight, “that you’re a witch on the heath at midnight, summoning an ancient magical lake into existence to return the world to the primordial wild so you can defeat an evil sorcerer? Honestly.” He adjusted the lapels of her spiked leather jacket. “It’s like you haven’t been paying attention.”
He stepped back to assess her in the moonlight.
“You’re certain I can’t convince you to go naked? It’s very avant-garde.”
“Johnny!”
“Okay, fine.” He lit the last of the candles he had placed around the edge of the pond. “But touch up your lipstick. If we start now, the song will hit the crescendo at just the right time.”
He stepped back to admire the delicate flickering of candle flame and the reflection of the moon on the surface of the pond.
“Breathtaking.”
He turned to her, his expression of excitement plainly visible in the moonlight, and pushed play on the boombox.
“Showtime.”
The boombox was big and loud, powerful enough to project the music across the night. The staccato jittering of the song’s extended intro with its heartbeat pulse and mad, careening delay effects ticked its way into her limbs. She closed her eyes and allowed her head to roll with the beat, feeling the cold bite of the night air against her skin, the damp chill of late autumn in Cheyne Heath seeping through her clothes into her skin, into her bones. Without the gentle psychedelic effects of Elsie’s little helper, Gosha might have been too self-conscious to do this, even under the cover of night, but the high was real, her emotions full, her second sight amped up to high intensity by the synergy of the Between and her buzz.
She felt the Influence, the mana, in the air flow around her, responding to her elevated mood, felt it flow through the earth beneath her feet, deep through the earth, down below sewers and tube tunnels, down below unmarked potter’s fields and the bones of the ancient poor, the indigent and dispossessed, down below Roman roads and buried rivers, down below the bones of enormous beasts, down to a buried world that may have never existed in rock and earth and vegetation, but only in the minds of dreamers and poets.
She allowed the rhythm of the song to move her, allowed herself to be carried along in a herky-jerky dance, waves of movement thrusting up from the earth, through her feet, through the cavities of her chest and animating her arms into sharp and thrusting spears. She spun and rocked around the pathway of candlelight at the edge of the pond, the Influence in the air swirling around her, caught by her flailing limbs and whipped up into a mounting frenzy.
She opened herself to the twilight glow and, with her inner eye, looked into the Influence around her and into the earth, saw the other plane, the non-world of the Between, flickering through the cracks, the delicate spaces between the threads of the fabric that separated the world of day from the witches’ dream, a faded photographic peepshow impression of a world that never was, pictured the lake, the Loe, and its lady, shining in the moonlight, the sky above glistening with stars, free of the crackling arc light of the Lords and Ladies and their storm, free of the tyranny of spheres and sorcerers and oaths, free of the obligations of enforced power, and rich in the web of connection between all living things, a power greater than any man or woman could force into existence with ritual or spell or the sheer power of desire.
The song grew in intensity, the lead singer painting in his somber baritone a scene of adulation toward an icon of the dark, a scene of mourning and exultation. She turned his plaintive cry for a long-dead actor of silent screen into a summons, a call across the veil, across the membrane that separated her from Nimuë, that separated her from freedom. As the song peaked, she reached into the earth with every ounce of her will, reached into the air, reached through the cracks in the veil into the twilight.
“Hear me twilight,” she shouted into the night sky, her voice booming louder than any electronic amplification could have given it, its resonance penetrating the earth. “I summon forth the Loe! I summon forth the ancient lake, the source of all witches’ power. Enter this protected enclave where no saint of Authority may walk, where its Lord must rage unheeded like any demented madman. Enter this walled manor where your daughters, your sisters, your grandmothers and aunts struggle to survive, struggle to save the innocent and downtrodden, struggle to save the very saints from the disaster they themselves have wrought with their deceit and their greed and their unbridled lust. Grant us a sanctuary where your daughters may be protected and where you, yourself, may be replenished, free of the tyranny of saints!”
Influence surged through her, an angry tide that beat against her, though she held her ground, burning out every last trace of Elsie’s drug in her system until her second sight faded, exhausted. The song unwound, spent, and she and Johnny were left alone in the cold and dark night, with only torchlight and candle flame to reveal their faces to each other in the gloom.
“Did it work?” asked Johnny, after the silence grew deafening in their ears.
All Gosha could do was shrug.
They hugged each other tight for comfort and for warmth, and Gosha wondered how long before she could be sure she had failed.
“Look,” said Johnny, just when Gosha was ready to blow out the candles and head home. “The water.”
Light shimmered deep beneath the surface of the pond, a delicate ripple and sway that Gosha thought, at first, was a remnant hallucination from Elsie’s lozenge, but it grew stronger, brighter, until the entire pond glowed. The water swelled, bursting its banks, flooding the grass around it and dousing out all the candles.
Johnny grabbed his boombox, and they ran back to the path, away from the advancing waters, and watched as the pond doubled, then tripled, its size. Above them, the seven towers of widow’s weeds Gosha could see imposed over the night sky winked out as her lipstick, tucked away in her bra, cracked loudly, the vibration echoing through her chest, and her second sight flooded back, the ambient Influence drifting serenely across her skin.
A woman’s laugh, deep and triumphant, echoed across the heath.
36
The growing complement of witches in the van cheered with triumph and rejoiced anew with every addition to their number as Gosha drove around the border of Cheyne Heath to retrieve them from their stations for the ritual. The massed jubilation condensed into the tiny van wasn’t enough to penetrate the fog of worry that seeped through her gut and lungs and into her brain until she could barely string two thoughts together.
They arrived at Canterbury Gardens to find the front door thrown open and the witches who had remained behind, accompanied by Adair and Pauline, on the front steps staring into the night, quiet and awed by the change Gosha had wrought upon the streets of Cheyne Heath. Stepping out of the parked van to join them, Gosha allowed herself to feel the Influence in the air for the first time as she joined the other witches on the steps in silent communion. The ambient flow of power was as thick and strong under the moonlight as ever, but the quality of it, the texture and taste, was different, richer, more pungent. It stank of the wild, of rot and decay, but also of abundance, a riot of fragrance, thick and spicy, filled with complex emotions that bled and mingled, spawning new passions and fears, new tendernesses and furies. The air was filled with power: unclaimed, untapped, untamed.
The chill of night began to penetrate even the sturdiest of them. Skin began to shiver and lips tinged blue as hands were thrust in pockets and arms held tight to keep in what little warmth remained.
“Sisters,” said Shreya from the top of the steps and all faces turned toward her, “and brothers. A great thing has been done tonight. The consequences of this we cannot yet know, but let us be content that we have achieved a victory over the darkness. Yes, the victory is small, and there is more we must do before we can rest easily in our beds, but rest we must. I suggest we all get the best sleep we can and reconvene here in the morning to continue our fight.”
“Yep,” said Iron Jenny. “I’ll head back to my yard and check in with friends, see what’s become of them. We don’t know how many might still be out there, beyond the barrier of this sanctuary you made for us.”
“Yes,” said Shreya. “We should all do that. Contact as many of your sisters as you can. Let’s see how many we have been able to free and how many are still lost to us. Perhaps we can ascertain the outer limits of our adversary’s sway.”
Iron Jenny made her way down the steps, joined by the other barrow witches.
“You coming, Rosie?”
“I’d like to stay, if I may.” She turned to Gosha. “I have a few more things I want to try with the damned box before I sleep.”
“Of course,” said Gosha. “We have plenty of beds.”
“I’ll stay, too,” said Elsie, a murmur of agreement spreading through the ladies. “I just need a little shuteye, and there’s still so much to do.”
“I need to check on my colleagues,” said Adair, “and make sure everyone’s okay. A large chunk of us commute in from other parts of London. I’d hate to think how many are under attack from those infernal devices.”
When Gosha rescued Adair, he’d only been paralyzed in Dropnick’s trap for a couple of hours. Now, after a day of assault, she dreaded to think what might have become of his colleagues.
“Johnny, will you come with me?”
Adair, Johnny, and the barrow witches said goodnight, Adair promising to return in the morning with as many of the firm as he could round up. As Gosha led them back in the house, she passed Pauline on the stairs, Gosha’s telling deck in her hands.
“May I stay, too?” She held up the deck. “The cards speak to me. I don’t want to leave them.”
“Come on in, but it’s going to be a tight fit. How are you feeling?”
“Honestly?”
She closed her eyes as she crossed the threshold, a smile of serenity spreading across her face.
“Wonderful. To look up at the moon and not hear her droning on at me. It’s bliss.”
“Droning on at you?”
“Ugh, it’s a nightmare, like having an angry mother-in-law in your ear nagging at you all the time, demanding her needs be fulfilled every second of the night. If I’d known what I was letting myself in for when I took the oath, I would have become a schoolteacher like my mother always wanted. I think I might never leave the neighborhood again.”
As the throng of houseguests discussed sleeping arrangements, Gosha retreated to the kitchen and set about casting every finding spell she could muster. When she had exhausted all traditional avenues of Craft, including the many suggestions of the ladies as they passed through the kitchen on their way to their night-time ablutions and to sleep, she tried the Between with every wish she could think of in search of Alfie, but came up with nothing, the same absence of result that had plagued her for the past year and a half in her search for Dropnick. Finally, she gave up and turned her attention to the file from Waterford, Wakefield, Winston, and Whorl, hoping to glean something from the confusion of data.
“Want some tea?” offered Elsie from the stove. Unwilling to go to bed, she continued to make lozenges for Gosha as Gosha pored over the papers and the minutiae of meaningless details.
The tea gave Gosha a boost, but by two in the morning even the caffeine and the other substances Elsie plied her with couldn’t keep her awake. She bid Elsie good night, gathered up the papers and headed upstairs, hoping to find a comfortable surface she could collapse onto, but every bed was full, her own taken up by Eleanor and Pauline. She tiptoed into the bedroom without disturbing them, retrieved herself a blanket and pillow from the cupboard, and retreated to the couch in George’s study.
Its leather hard and buffed to a sheen, the couch was supremely uncomfortable. After fifteen minutes of struggle, she gave up trying to sleep, spread the papers out across the coffee table, picked one at random, and lay back to read about the mundane comings and goings of one Robert Catesby, Oxford-educated Catholic, a solicitor with a wife and two children. One page into the report, she was dead to the world.
She slept, but her sleep was so troubled with worry for Alfie that she thought she was awake, dreaming he lay in the bedroom cursed by a spell to sleep for all eternity. No matter what she did, no matter what spells she cast or recipes she cooked up in the kitchen, nothing would rouse him.
The dream held throughout what remained of the night, no matter how much she tossed and turned, trying to get comfortable on the damnable sofa. When the morning light streamed in through the window, she thought herself awake, but when Edmund came in, she tried to move, tried to get up and wrap her arms around him, but found she couldn’t, couldn’t even cry out no matter how hard she tried. Only when he kissed her on the cheek did she fully awaken.
“Why are you reading about the Gunpowder Plot?” he asked as she, groggy, tried to rub some alertness back into her brain.
“What do you mean?” she croaked, her throat dry.
He picked up the stapled papers Gosha had been reading when she fell asleep off the floor.
“Robert Catesby started the Gunpowder Plot.”
Edmund looked through the scattered papers and selected three more.
“He recruited John Wright and his brother, Christopher. They planned their conspiracy at the Duck and Drake pub.”
He found another report.
“Thomas Wintour recruited Guy Fawkes.” He rummaged through the remainder of the files. “There’s no paper for Guy Fawkes.”
“How do you know all this?” Hot urgency burned through her tired mind, lurching her to full wakefulness as she struggled to make sense of what he was telling her.
“We just did it in history. But the dates are all wrong. Why do they say this year? The Gunpowder Plot took place in sixteen-hundred-and-five.”
“Someone’s been playing games.” She gathered up the papers. “Come on, Mummy needs a cup of tea.”
She looked at the clock on the wall. Seven.
“Did you have breakfast yet?”
He shook his head. “We just woke up.”
“Let’s get you some, then, shall we?”
“Can I have eggs?”
She led him out onto the landing, looking into the bedroom in search of Eleanor, but the bed was empty, as were all the other upstairs rooms in the house. They found Timothy at the kitchen table watching Pauline shuffle and deal Gosha’s telling cards.
“They’re different,” said Timothy as Pauline turned over a three-card spread. “How did you do that?”
“They’re magic,” said Pauline. “They change every time you deal them. Well, some of them do.”
She picked up the card that represented Nimuë.
“This one always stays the same.”
Outside, in the garden, a hundred people stood around the wooden bench at the back looking up at Shreya: more witches than Gosha had seen assembled since Turncoat’s Gate. The witches stood on one side of the garden. On the other, Adair and many familiar faces Gosha recognized from the firm. Shreya used the second device Alfie had buried in the back of the garden as a prop with which to hold her audience mesmerized.
“Gosha, dearest,” trilled Elsie. “You’re up! Let me make you breakfast.”
She beamed, her eyes manic and a little frightening.
“Have you been up all night?” said Gosha.
“Busy, busy.” She twirled a wooden spoon in her fingers like a baton.
