There was a metallic snapping sound followed by a faint and desperate wailing.
'Mrs Wagstaff…'
The voice was familiar. But it didn't matter.
This was a funny little house, bottles and jars on every ledge, even on the edges of individual stairs. Sprigs of this and that hung from the ceilings and circulated musty smells.
The witch's den.
He sat in silence at the top of the stairs. Unperturbed.
'Please, Mrs Wagstaff… let me in…'
Then silence. He smiled. As children, they'd clustered by the church gate and whispered about the witch's house, not daring to go too close. See the curtain move…? It's her. She's coming… '
It hadn't changed; only his perspective on it. The wicked witch. Perspectives changed. Now it was cool to be… wow, wicked! But Ma Wagstaff wasn't authentically wicked, never had been. Ma Wagstaff, let's face it, wasn't quite up to it and wouldn't be now. She'd conned them, generations of them.
Now I'm really rather wicked, he thought. If there's such a thing. Or at least I'm getting there.
He didn't move. His body didn't move.
The reason it didn't move was he didn't want it to. Suddenly, he had true self-control, and this amazed him. Or rather it amazed him to reflect on what a bag of dancing neuroses he used to be, so untogether he couldn't even regulate the sounds coming out of his own mouth.
Sher-sher-Shaw. Ster- ster-stuttering Shaw.
Amusing to imagine what he'd have been like if he'd been given this present task even a month ago, when he was still unconvinced. When he used to say, It's, you know… bad, though, isn't it? It might be fun, it might be exhilarating, but it's bad, essentially. Surely.
And were you good before, Shaw? Were you good when you were stuttering and dithering and letting your father dominate you? Is that your idea of what it means to be good? In which case, how does it feel to be bad'
Terminology. Nowadays Bad was cool, like Wicked. A step in the right direction.
How's it feel? Feels good. Alive. Quite simply that. I didn't know before what being alive meant. I said to her, haven't you got to be dead to be undead? And she said, what makes you think you aren't?
So I was dead and now I'm alive. I know that when I pull the handles, turn the switches, press the buttons… something will happen.
They'd told him he'd seen nothing yet. They'd told him there would be a sign. And now there was. And what a sign. Once again, Shaw couldn't resist it. He allowed his right hand to remove its leather glove and brush its palm across the top of his head.
A delicious prickly sensation.
The first time he'd felt it, he'd wanted to leap up and squeal with joy. But there was no need to do this any more. He could experience that joy deep inside himself, knowing how much more powerful and satisfying the feeling was if he didn't allow it to expend itself through his body, dissipating as he hopped about like a little kid, punching the air.
So Shaw Horridge's body remained seated quietly at the top of the stairs in Ma Wagstaff's house while Shaw Horridge's spirit was in a state of supreme exultation.
His hair was growing again! He was alive and he had made it happen.
Just a fuzz at first, then thicker than a fuzz – almost a stubble. He'd heard of men going to Ma Wagstaff for her patent hair-restorer, some claiming it worked. A bit. But not actually sure whether it had or not.
Not like this. No doubt about this. Where there'd been no hair, now there was hair.
All around him were Ma Wagstaff's bottles full of maybes. Maybe if the wind's in the right direction. If the moon s full. If there's an R in the month. Quite sad, really. A grey little world of hopes and dreams. No certainties.
Hair-loss was natural in some people, his mother said. But it had taken Therese to prove to him that you didn't have to accept something just because it was supposed to be natural. Acceptance was just spiritual sloth.
Being truly alive was about changing things. Changing people, situations. Changing your state of mind. Changing the 'natural'.
Being alive was about breaking rules with impunity. Men's rules. Also the rules men claimed they'd had from God. 'Natural' rules. This was what she'd taught him. Learn how to break the rules – for no other reason than to break them – and you become free.
Thou shalt not kill. But why? We kill animals to eat, we kill people with abandon in wartime. We kill for the Queen, we kill for the oil industry? Where does the taboo begin?
He stretched his arms and yawned. Settled down to wait, aware of his breathing, fully relaxed. How could bad be bad when it felt as good as this. Eventually, kneeling messily in the rain, Moira pulled her shoe out of the bog.
The shoe was full of water; she shook it out and put it on. By this time the old woman had hobbled to the edge of the Moss, where there was a gate leading into a field, beyond which was the pub and, further up, the hill on which the church sat.
The dead tree was still. It looked hard, heavy, almost stone-like. Too dense to move in the wind, even if there'd been one. But it moved for me, she thought, limping back to the car. And it moved for Ma Wagstaff.
Such things were almost invariably subjective. Like, how often did two people see a ghost, at the same time, together? Ghosts and related phenomena were one-to-one. You saw it and the person with you said, hey, what's wrong with you, what are you staring at, why've you gone so pale?
But the tree moved for Ma Wagstaff. And it moved, no question, for me…
She climbed behind the wheel and sank into the seat, drained. The cassette tape had ended. She slipped it out of the tape deck.
Ma Wagstaff understands, the old bitch. She says to me, 'We can help you help him. But you must purify yourself…'
I am not getting this. Matt. What were you into, you and Ma?
And then… whuppp.
Moira reeled back in the seat as something hit the windscreen. Like a big bird, covering the sky, darkening the car, it flapped there, wriggling and beating at the glass.
'Holy Jesus.'
It was snagged in the wipers, but it wasn't a bird… only a dark blue woolly shawl. Ma Wagstaff's shawl, snatched from her by the devil-tree. Blown across the Moss. Blown hard, directly at the car, like it had been aimed.
Moira began to pant, closing her eyes tight, squeezing on the steering-wheel until it creaked.
When she opened her eyes the shawl had gone, and the vertical rain showed there was still no wind.
OK. Move.
She switched on the engine; slammed the BMW into reverse, pulled it back on to the causeway, pointing it at Bridelow. The sky was dirty now, but she wondered if it would still be white through the eyeholes in the thing of wood on the Moss.
Ma said. You've got to purify yourself. But there's a kind of purity in intensity of feeling, isn't that right? Pure black light.
Right. Get off my back, Matt. You're sicker than I figured. Just get the hell off my back.
Moira drove erratically into the village street, bumping carelessly along the cobbles and over the kerb. Nobody about. No sign of the old woman. The cottages featureless and damp, in a huddle.
Pure black light.
Black light? White light? What is this shit? Wished she could call the Duchess, but the Duchess wasn't on the phone. The Duchess wants to contact anybody, she doesn't mess with phones.
Moira sat in her car at the bottom of the street, ploughing her fingers through her hair. Exposed. And scared?
Oh, yes.
And maybe half-deranged. Couldn't properly express in words what she was doing here. Like she'd been sucked into the smoking fireplace that night at the Earl's Castle and gone up the chimney and been spit out cold on Bridelow Moss.
Now everything was pointing at Ma Wagstaff, but Ma Wagstaff had run away.
She left the car in the street, squelched to the Post Office, peat water oozing out of her shoes.
'Willie's not in,' she panted at the big, flowery Girl-Guide postmistress. 'Where would I find his mother's place?' Weak as a kitten, Ma felt. Weak as a day-old kitten, its eyes not open yet. Weak and blind.
Help me, Mother.
Ma followed the river back, gratefully leaving the Moss behind. There was a crack starting in her walking stick where the black tree had snapped off the metal tip. Soon the stick wouldn't support even a skinny, spidery owd thing like her, and what would she do then?
It got her to the churchyard, God alone knew how, and she propped her old bones up against a stone cross. Looked up at the church porch, and it hit her like an elbow in the ribs.
Desecrated!
Oh, Mother. Oh, Jesus!
Over the door… a mess of crumbling old cement.
That vandal.
The Goths and the Vandals and the Angles and the Saxons and the Romans and the so-called Christians. All them raiders Bridelow had fought off over the long centuries. And the buggers still at the door with their battleaxes.
Inside the church, little Benjie's Autumn Cross all smashed. And the vile thing growing out on the Moss, waving Ma's lost shawl like a banner. And the seeping sickness within that saps health and takes jobs. And now Our Sheila smitten from the wall, thrown away like she was nowt more than one of them dirty magazines.
Grinding, in pain, the few teeth she'd got left to grind, Ma Wagstaff staggered through the graveyard, up to the top end, where Matt Castle lay, the earth still loose on him, covered by wreaths, already bashed about by the weather, petals everywhere.
The witch bottle lay in her coat pocket. Dead.
Moving like an owd crab on a pebble beach, Ma staggered by Matt's grave without stopping. The earth loose around him – not buried proper, not yet. Still air holes in the soil. Poor bugger might as well be lying stretched out on top.
The rain had stopped, but the clouds still bulged like cheeks full of spit. Ma stumbled out on to the moor, through the top wicket gate, between two tattered gorse bushes.
This was not the real moor; this was still Bridelow. Until you got over the rocks.
Below the rocks was the holy well, the spring, water bubbling bright as lemonade into a natural-hewn stone dish. The well they dressed with flowers in the springtime to honour the Mother and the water. Long before she reached it, Ma could hear it singing.
A rock leaned over the spring, like a mantelpiece over a hearth, above it the moor, which was not Bridelow.
Carved out of the stone, a hollow, with a little shelf.
On the shelf a statue.
'Mother,' Ma said breathlessly.
The statue was plaster. She wore a robe once painted blue, now chipped and faded. Her eyes were uplifted to the sky beyond the shelf of rock, her hands turned palms-down to bless the water trickling from the rock below her feet.
'Oh, Mother.' Ma dropped her stick. She'd made it home.
She fell down upon the stone, the edge of her woollen skirt in the rock pool; began to cry, words bubbling out of her like the water from the rock. 'I've brought thee nowt… Forgive me, Mother. Not properly dressed. Dint know I were coming, see.'
She sat up, crossed herself, closed her eyes, all hot and teary. Cupped her hands into the pool and brought the spring water to her eyes. And when they were touched by the water, she saw at last, through her eyelids, a warm, bright light.
Ma lifted up her hands into the light, and felt them touch the hem of the radiant blue robe of the Mother, the material that felt like a fine and silken rain.
She began to mumble, the old words dropping into place, words in English, words in Latin, words in an olden-day language that was neither Welsh nor Gaelic, words from the Bible, power-words and humble-words. Words to soak up the light and bring it into her blood. Come into me, Mother, give me light and give me strength, give me the holy power to face your enemies and to withstand…
The shadow fell across her.
The bright blue gauze dissolved. Ma's eyes opened into pain.
The curate stood astride the sacred spring. Big and stupid as a Victorian stone angel.
'So,' he said. 'This is it, is it?'
He kicked a pebble into the pool. 'It's even more tawdry than I expected, Mrs Wagstaff.'
'Go away,' Ma said quietly, looking down into the pool. 'What's it to do wi' you? Go on. Clear off. Come back when you're older.'
'What's it to do with me?' He stood there thick and hard as granite. 'You can ask that? Where did you get this?' With a hand like a spade, he plucked the Mother from her stone hollow. 'One of these Catholic shops, I suppose. Or was it taken from a church? Hmm?'
He held the statue at arm's length. 'Hardly a work of art, Mrs Wagstaff. But hardly deserving of this kind of grubby sacrilege.'
Ma was on her feet, blinding pain ripping through every sinew. 'You put that back! That's sacred, that is! Put it back now! Call yourself a minister of God? You're nobbut a thick bloody vandal wi' no more brains than pig shit!'
'And you,' he said, tucking the statue under an arm, 'are a poor, misguided old woman who ought to be in a Home, where you can be watched over until you die.'
Ma Wagstaff tried to stand with dignity and couldn't.
Joel Beard bent his face to hers. 'You're a throwback, Mrs Wagstaff. A remnant. My inclination as a human being is to feel very sorry for you, but my faith won't allow me to do that.'
Behind his eyes she saw a cold furnace.
'Thou shall not suffer a witch to live!'
The statue hefted above his head like a club. Ma cowered.
'Oh, no…'He lowered the statue to chest-height. 'Don't cringe, Mrs Wagstaff. I wouldn't hurt you physically. I'm a servant of God. I merely remind you of the strong line the Bible takes on your particular… sub-species.'
Joel Beard put out a contemptuous hand to help her up. She looked at the hand and its fingers became a bundle of twisted twigs bound roughly together, and the connection was made with the thing on the Moss, two opposing terminals, the black and the white, each as dangerous and Ma stranded in the middle.
'Gerraway from me!' She shrank back, feeling that if she touched his hand she'd be burned alive.
'What are you afraid of, Mrs Wagstaff?'
'I'm afraid of denseness,' Ma said. 'Kind of denseness as rips down a child's offering, smashes it on t'stones…'
'But… but it was evil,' he said reasonably. 'Can't you people see that? Primitive. Heathen. It insulted the true Cross.'
Ma Wagstaff shook her head. 'Tha knows nowt. Tha's big and arrogant, and tha knows nowt. Tha's not fit to wipe Hans Gruber's arse.'
Joel Beard raised the statue of the Mother far above his head. His face severe. His golden curls tight as stone.
'All right, then,' he said. 'Be your own salvation, Mrs Wagstaff.'
Ma grabbed at the air, eyes widening in horror. She began to whimper. Joel smashed the Mother down on the rocks and her head broke easily, pounded to plaster-dust
Ma Wagstaff cried out. The cry of the defeated, the gutted, the desolate.
Gone. Nowt left. Gone to dust.
Beating the plaster from his hands and his green hiking jacket, Joel Beard strode away across the dirty-yellow moorgrass. Fragments floated in the centre of the pool until the springwater scattered them, making widening circles over the Mother's headless body.