“Perhaps. But this town doesn’t help. Hagstones, apotropaic marks—Banathel has a real problem with witches, doesn’t it?”
Bert laughs softly. “Once upon a time, maybe. The witches were drawn here by the Devil, if the old stories are true. About a mile west of here is a ring of stones, said to be a coven turned to stone for dancing on the Sabbath. Thirteen stones for thirteen bewitched women. As kids we always kept away from them, even on bright and sunny days. There’s something about them that is… sunken, I suppose. There’s just some places that feel like that, isn’t there? Like there is a thinness to them, something unreal.”
I think of the house on Tanner’s Row and nod. “You a historian, Bert?”
He laughs, slightly abashed. “God, no. I’m something of an amateur at best. I dabbled in it when I became interested in genealogy—people and places are often tied together, so researching one naturally led to looking into the other, I think.”
Bert turns to look at his house, the garden neat and tidy and squared away, lawn trimmed to a dark green inch, and sighs.
“I’d better go and see how she is. Mary likes having Stevie over—she always did enjoy the company of children—but it exhausts her now.”
“Have you any children of your own, Bert?”
“No. We just took in the waifs and strays. It’s not so easy these days with Mary so ill and my arthritis playing up but we manage. It fills the house, having children there.”
He looks morose for a moment, deep in thought. I wonder what it must be like to watch the person you’ve spent your life with—your love, your comfort—fading away. It must be a soft pain, slowly blooming. Flowers and thorns.
I watch as he walks up the pathway to his house and lets himself in through the front door, raising a hand to Sam and me as he closes it behind him. Then I tilt my head back and look up. A plane is slowly crossing the sky, trailing a white cloud of vapor. I watch it a moment and think of Crete, and swifts’ nests and yellow dresses and my dead brother reaching for me in a photograph, his mouth partly open as if sayingTell me about the ice.
SIXTEEN
There is a frozen lump of meat on the kitchen table, wrapped tightly in plastic. A leg of something. A haunch. Paul brings them back with him from work, Lisa said. Hocks and cheeks and briskets, flabby pink snouts. The haunch is a livid pink color, marbled with fat. It is so tightly wrapped that I can see the blood slowly defrosting and pooling against the plastic surface. Sam moves it aside so that I can unpack the witch’s bottle carefully, spreading it out across the table. The house is quiet, the two younger children in the sitting room, Paul at work. Sam leans over me, cigarette clamped between his teeth.
“Do we tell Alice about this?”
I pick up a piece of thick, blue glass and hold it up to the light.
“Yes. That’s the reason I brought it back here. So she can see for herself it is a material object and nothing else.”
“A broken bottle of piss and wax. We sure know how to have a good time, huh?”
“Shhh,”I say, not unkindly. I’m concentrating, turning it over in my fingers. The glass is old and ridged, some raised lettering still visible on the broken neck.
“You know who else pisses in bottles? Truckers. Drunk kids.” He is grinning, eyes narrowed against the smoke as he reaches down and picks up one of the small balls of wax. It is pricked with holes like a pomander but only as big as a holly berry in his palm.
“What’s this?”
“I don’t know. It was stuck to the glass on the inside. There’s a few of them, look.”
He examines it, scraping at the wax with his thumb.
“It looks like voodoo, all these holes. Maybe a curse of some sort. What’s inside it?”
My head snaps up. I hadn’t considered that the wax was concealing anything. I feel that strange sensation again, like cotton stuffed into my throat.
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what?” he says.
“Put it down. Don’t open it.”
“Why not?”
I don’t know,I want to tell him. It’s just a feeling. A bad feeling, like the one you get in a cold spot in the sea, legs cycling over a long depth of frightening, terminal dark. It’s the same feeling I had in the house on Tanner’s Row standing beneath the chimney and seeing that small shoe in the drift of soot.Because it’s a trap.
At that moment the kitchen door opens and Lisa is standing there, hands twisting together in front of her, face strained. Hereyes pass over me and settle on Sam, her lips drawn in a quivering frown.
“There’s trouble,” she says.