Dark Sister Read online

  What was extraordinary was the unearthing of artefacts below the wall's remains: artefacts some five hundred years more recent than the building of the wall. Of the several explanations for this, Alex favoured slippage of land. The "Maggie dig," as he came to call it, was after all adjacent to a hollow in the grass, and successive generations of coal mining immediately below the site had caused considerable subsidence over the years. But he later dismissed this and theorized that the new finds were some kind of intrusion on the site.

  Apart from shards of pottery and glass, the first artefact to show up was a rusted dagger. It was ceremonial rather than martial, with a long blade and a cumbersome, wrought handle. The knob of the handle was a grinning gargoyle head, with half-folded wings projecting back. The implement was cast in a rough bronze material and studded with three tiny red stones, something like fire-garnet. It had no place among the debris of a Norman wall.

  Then its twin turned up not three feet from the first. Alex temporarily abandoned the main venture and flung himself into the Maggie dig. He personally turned up half a tin plate and a few coins which were easy to date as sixteenth century.

  Maggie crowed. "You should have listened to me in the first place." She glowed with pride: with deep, private satisfaction, and with secret vindication.

  "A lucky guess." Alex laughed. "There's stuff littered all over that mound. How could you have known?"

  "Instinct. Don't knock it. I just had this tremendous feeling about it."

  Instinct? Maggie didn't know what to call it. But she accepted it as a gift from her recent handfasting ritual. She didn't want to compromise the gift with too many questions. It was an important confirmation that powers were aggregating to her.

  "Well, I'm going to throw a couple more people into it tomorrow. See if there's anything worthwhile."

  Alex was always easier to be with when his work was going well. And for that Maggie secretly thanked her handfasting oils {even at that moment drawing down the moon's soft rays). It was a circuitous means of recapturing affection, certainly, but she didn't mind how it worked. Alex wouldn't admit it, but he was grateful to Maggie for giving him a diversion from his otherwise unproductive dig.

  He kissed her hand before getting up from the table, and she thought again of her jars of oil standing on the bedroom windowsill. Maggie felt she had learned something about the extraordinary lightness, and indirection, of magic.

  "So it was a ritual knife?" Anita Suzman was fascinated. Alex and Maggie had asked the Suzmans over to dinner. Alex had been regaling them with accounts of the dig—the principal dig—and had broken off to tell them about his most recent discovery.

  They all got down from the table and sat round the roaring fire. Alex shrugged. "Certainly looks like that to me. But for what kind of ritual, who can say?"

  "What made you break off from the main dig?" Bill said, stroking Anita's arm.

  Alex irritated Maggie by leaning back in his chair, thrusting his hands in his pockets and modelling an expression of sagacity. "There were impressions in the earth around that spot. Looked like it had been interfered with at some time, but not enough to be obvious."

  "Was it what you people call a hunch?" said Anita. Maggie noticed how she couldn't take her eyes off Alex. Alex looked sheepish.

  "More wine for anyone?" said Maggie.

  "Actually, I'll have to come clean. It was Maggie who told us where to dig."

  Anita and Bill's attentions swept to Maggie like the minute hand on a civic clock. "I can't explain it," she told them.

  "Maggie's gone a bit fey lately."

  "Fey?" Bill look puzzled.

  "Oooh," Anita said, a teasing note. "Perhaps she is a witch after all." Maggie wondered what she meant by "after all." She glanced over at Alex.

  The wine had reddened Bill's cheeks. His eyelids sagged. "Eye of toad," he said vapidly. "Wing of bat."

  Maggie challenged him a little sharply. "What is eye of toad?"

  "Eh?"

  "I thought so. All those things like eye of toad are code names for different plants and herbs. Eye of toad is camomile. Bloody fingers are foxgloves. Beggar's buttons are just burdock. That's all. No big mystery. Except to the ignorant."

  "Consider yourself told," Anita said.

  "I do," said Bill.

  "Our kitchen's like a herbalist's grotto these days," Alex offered glumly. No one said anything. "An alchemist's chamber."

  Maggie got up. "I'll go and wash the dishes."

  Anita followed her into the kitchen. She insisted on helping while the men swilled the last of the wine and chortled like schoolboys.

  "I'd like to know something about herbs," she said.

  "Oh." Maggie shrugged. "I don't know that much about it myself."

  Anita flapped a tea towel and looked annoyed.

  After the Suzmans had gone home, Maggie went upstairs and waited for Alex. It was after midnight of the seventh evening of the blending of the handfasting oils. The moon outside the window was strong and bright. She held one of the jars up to her eye, and the moonlight became a starburst in the opaque glass. Silver light ran from the bottle like drops of mercury.

  "Yes," she breathed. "It might."

  She poured the oil from this jar into a second. Then she took the empty one and hid it in her secret chest. After undressing in the moon's soft light, she anointed herself with some of the newly blended oil. She sniffed at the perfume still glistening on her skin; a deep, sensual draught. It thrummed her nerves and her muscles were treated to an involuntary spasm.

  It affected her. She felt strong.

  "What are you doing in the dark?" Alex said as he came into the bedroom.

  "Don't put the light on."

  He was slightly tipsy. The wine had made him perspire, and he smelled good. It was an attractive manly odour she thought she'd ceased to appreciate through familiarity. He stood against the bed, fumbling with the buttons on his shirt.

  Maggie flung herself on him.

  Alex gasped, bouncing against the mattress with Maggie astride him. She tore the shirt off his back, buttons bulleting across the room. Alex strangled a protest as she rained bites and kisses on him, pinning him by his arms. A strange noise was coming from her throat. It made him want to laugh. Giggling, he tried to throw her off, but she was amazingly strong. She was gulping loudly between biting and kissing and sucking at his neck and shoulders. Pinning his chest with one hand, she tore at his trousers with the other, scratching him with her sharp fingernails.

  Then he was completely naked and she was stretched over him. It was as if someone had thrown open the door to a white-hot furnace. There was a roaring in his ears. Maggie was drenched in perspiration and some incredibly strong scent. Her moist skin glittered in the moonlight. Still a strange rasping came from her throat as she licked and kissed and sucked the length of his body, scalp to toe, her tongue rough like a cat's. It seemed to him she had momentarily lost awareness of who and where they were.

  He was massively aroused by the fury and ardour of her attack. He tried to turn her over, to turn her on her knees so he could penetrate her from behind, but he couldn't find the strength to shift her.

  "Maggie," he said. "Maggie!"

  She slipped his cock inside her mouth and sucked until it hurt, drawing her sharp nails from his shoulders down to his feet. Energy crackled from her like a discharge of electricity. She settled herself with a shimmy, and he felt the furnace heat of her as she lowered herself onto him, flinging her head back as his full length went inside her. She convulsed at the penetration, her breasts shivering in the liquid light, nipples erect to the moon. There was an overpowering odour of sex and sweat and scent, and a moment when Alex thought he was going to pass out. She pressed her hands on him, cooling him with her fingers. She stretched herself across him and the contact of her nipples and her skin made him hallucinate briefly, seeing and feeling her as eels of warm light.

  "What are you doing to me!"

  She went on until he was
exhausted, exhausted and sore. No one had ever performed on him like that. He lay back on the bed, panting, with Maggie still sitting astride him, herself panting, finished, the sweat gleaming on her back and on her flanks, drops of perspiration pearling the moonlight. Her face was in shadow, but her teeth were white and sharp. The whites of her eyes glittered with lunar light, flashing in the dark. She looked frightening, like a goddess, or a demon.

  "Now," she said when she'd recovered. "How long have you been fucking Anita?"

  FIFTEEN

  Alex denied it. He told Maggie she was insane. What could she say? That the trees told her? That the wind in the bushes had whispered in her ear one day when she was naked in the woods? That she knew the trees sometimes lied in order to help, but that this time she believed them? She had no evidence with which to confront him, and nothing at all to go on other than her instincts.

  But she was determined to find out.

  "You be careful," said Ash. "You just be careful." He dropped the catch on the shop door to make sure Sam didn't find his way out onto the catwalk. He could live without a repetition of recent events.

  "I've spent all my life being careful. That's the trouble."

  "But you're getting into a dangerous game here. This isn't like making an herbal pillow."

  "That's why I'm asking you to help me."

  Ash looked hard at her. She looked pale. Her copper hair was drawn back fiercely into a Scandinavian plait; her blue eyes were damp. "This is not an under-the-counter sale you're talking about. I don't even stock these things. They're poisons."

  "Listen to this." She read from the diary. "All questions will be answered and all matters settled. Take care to gather only on the moons as I have said and make the banishments which A. assures will keep us from the harm of demons. Honour Hecate, she says, and she will love you for her own; abuse her and she will imperil your soul. And all this can I testify. All questions will be answered and all matters settled, but that you fly.'" She put down the diary. Sam was hanging from her arm, looking into Ash's eyes. "But you see it, don't you? This flying ointment. It's an aid to clairvoyance, isn't it? That's what they mean by flying! That's all it ever meant!"

  "I know all that, Maggie, but what I'm telling you is the ingredients are all highly toxic, deadly even. I mean that's what all that stuff about Hecate is saying: Watch out, she'll kill you!"

  "Not to those who treat her with respect." Maggie was urgent. Ash had never seen her so animated. "And anyway. You've done it yourself. Once or twice."

  He was shocked. "How do you know that?"

  She narrowed her eyes at him; a strange, seductive gesture. "The trees told me."

  He looked away, his cheeks burning. Her intuition was strong, -and it was correct. He had experimented with the flying ointment, and had singed his wings. But what made him blush was something else. If her intuition about him was so strong, then she would also have guessed his instincts toward her.

  "Fly with me, Ash."

  He turned his back on her, busying himself, aligning jars on shelves. He couldn't look her in the eye.

  "You could show me how, Ash."

  Alex went back to his dig and tried to shut the events of the previous night out of his mind. The discovery of the ritual daggers had been reported locally, producing a trickle of extra visitors to the site. The presence of these spectators only irritated him further. He marched along the specially erected boardwalks in his heavy, muddied Wellingtons, saying, "Excuse me," yet all but bundling the visitors out of his way.

  He was conscious of the scratches and the bruises and the bites Maggie had imprinted on his body. She'd acted like a wildcat; he'd never before seen her like that. She'd been possessed by uncanny strength. Plus there was her insistence about Anita. He'd denied it a dozen times, but she was implacable. For the first time in their marriage she'd done something that made him slightly afraid of her. No, that was untrue. There had always been something in her to make him a little afraid. A reckless streak. A promiscuous gap in her integrity that he felt would one day be used to take her away from him. It was a demon-worm that had always gnawed at him over the years, despite his best efforts to deny its existence.

  Some of the things she'd done to him last night made him marvel. It occurred to him she might have been taking lessons from someone else.

  "No," said Ash, "I can't help you."

  "Then I'll do it myself." Maggie tapped on the diary. "I've got all the information I need."

  "It's dangerous. Leave it alone."

  "That's why I asked you to help me."

  "I'm not going to. Don't ask me again."

  "Come on, Sam." Maggie slipped the diary into her bag and got up to go. She tried to open the door, but couldn't manage to release the catch. Ash had to open it for her.

  "Wait. If you're serious about it, let me make a suggestion." He rushed back to the counter and took out his address book, copying something onto a scrap of paper. "Do you know the village of Church Haddon? There's someone there you might go and see. Old Liz. She's a strange soul but don't let her frighten you. At least she won't let you come to any harm. Just see what she's got to say, first- Please."

  Maggie shrugged and put the address in her coat pocket. Ash watched her dragging Sam along the catwalk to the stairs, and felt sad.

  SIXTEEN

  Alex had been charged with collecting Sam from De Sang's clinic the following afternoon. De Sang maintained an open-door policy, so that parents need not feel excluded from some esoteric process going on behind lock and key. The receptionist smiled at Alex as he passed her desk and stepped inside De Sang's room.

  De Sang was seated in a hard-backed chair in the middle of the room. His hands were tied in front of him, his face was painted an assortment of vivid colours, and his trousers were round his ankles. Sam, face also painted, was running round the chair whooping and waving a paperknife he'd found on De Sang's desk.

  "Come in! Come in!" De Sang shouted. "Pull up another chair!"

  Sam had already found a chair and, shrieking with delight, was drawing it alongside De Sang. Astonished, Alex dropped into the proffered seat. "Hands, Daddy! Hands!" shouted Sam. Alex looked at the psychologist.

  "Hands!" Sam screamed angrily. He'd found more string.

  "Better do as he says," said De Sang. "Looks like he's got us.

  Sam looked furious with his father. Alex held out his hands, and Sam wound the string round them so many times he didn't need to tie a knot. "You don't mess with Peter Pan," said De Sang, in a stage whisper. His face was a garish patchwork.

  "Peter Pan!" yelled Sam. "Peter Pan! Trousers!"

  "Sam made a discovery while he was here today. He went to the toilet and was so eager to get back in here he forgot to pull up his trousers. Result: he fell over. We made it a learning experience: man with trousers round his ankles can't go anywhere."

  Alex tried not to blink.

  "Trousers!" bellowed Peter Pan.

  "He's Peter Pan. I'm Smee."

  "Who am I?" said Alex.

  "Oh. Just one of the nasties."

  Peter Pan picked up the paperknife and waved it menacingly.

  "Better do as he says," De Sang said again.

  "How can I put my trousers down with my hands tied?" Alex was serious.

  Sam looked disgusted. He put down the knife. "Come here, Daddy. And no tricks. No tricks1"

  "He knows all the tricks by now," said Smee, "so there's no use trying anything."

  Sam unwound the string from his father's hands. Alex lowered his trousers, sat down again, and allowed his hands to be bound once more. Armed with greasepaint pencils, Sam set to work on Alex's face.

  Alex wasn't too comfortable about it all. "Made any progress today?" he tried to sound casual.

  "Not really. We've been playing most of the time," De Sang said chattily. "Although we did have a little sleep earlier on, didn't we, Sam?"

  "Sleep?" said Alex.

  "Keep still!" Peter Pan bellowed.

 
Then Alex noticed, amid the children's paintings on the wall, a framed diploma qualifying De Sang as a hypnotherapist. "Oh," he said, realizing. "Look-into-my-eyes sleep."

  "Pardon?"

  "Hypnosis."

  "Good Lord, no. I mean sleep sleep. I was a bit tired and so was Sam, so we lay down on the floor over there and had a ten-minute nap."

  Alex felt stupid. "I mean, were you looking for dreams or ... something."

  "No, we just wanted a nap. Good lord, man," Alex could see De Sang's grin behind the swirling clouds of smudged colour, "you don't hypnotize or dream-analyse a three-year-old. It's all there on the surface. It only gets buried as we get older. Good lord."

  Alex wanted to ask what was there on the surface. He'd suddenly remembered how much he was paying De Sang for all of this when they were interrupted by the receptionist entering the room. If she was at all surprised by the sight of two men sitting with their trousers down, she made a good show of disguising it.

  "Your next clients are here. You might want to wash your face."

  "Thanks Sheila!" chimed De Sang. "Time to go home!"

  "No!" shouted Peter Pan.

  "Sam," said De Sang. "Captain Hook."

  Sam looked hard into De Sang's eyes before cheerfully resigning himself, and unbound the psychologist's hands, grudgingly doing the same for his father. Without being asked, he trotted off to find his coat.

  Alex and the psychologist pulled up their trousers.

  "Are we making any progress?" said Alex.

  "Early days." De Sang looked hard at him, smiling.