A sea of palefaces.
“What do we do with witches in this town?” Bert calls, dark and smoky. The reply, massed voices lifted to the sky, heads up.
“Run them out!”
“Run them out!”
“Run! Them! Out!”
The last is distorted by screaming, straining necks, heads lifted to the sky. The bonfire flames are sinuous, mesmerizing. The crowds are cheering and catcalling, voices so loud they drown out the crack of thunder. The wind is picking up, stripping petals from my crown. Someone is shrieking and clapping. Excitement or fear, it’s hard to tell. People are holding hands and linking arms, lifting glasses of cider and cloudy beer, voices raised. There is Sam, standing slightly apart from the group, his face set miserably in the flickering light. He is looking at me with eyes like frozen puddles. I see a small huddle of children—the eldest can’t be more than ten years old—running in circles around the fire, throwing handfuls of grass at each other. Faces shiny with excitement. A small figure detaches from the group and walks toward me. I know her. It’s Stevie. She is holding the same plastic gun she’d had the day Sam and I had arrived. Her hair is tied in bunches and when she smiles I see she has lost another tooth. She looks up at me, pointing the barrel at my head.
“Bang!” she says, and pulls the trigger.
FORTY
The flames of the four bonfires shade everything in capering shadows and waxy orange light. I watch as figures begin to detach from the crowd and leap through the flames, landing on the other side of the fire like smoking, twisted wreckage. There is a chorus of cheers and yells as they emerge with their hands patting at their smoldering clothing, reddened faces twisted into howls and roars and a deep guttural barking. The air is boiling with noise, itseetheswith it; screaming and whistling and the pounding of feet.
A hand on my shoulder, I flinch. It is Bert, looking twenty feet tall, teeth strong and white as marble tombstones, smiling wickedly down at me.
“It’s time,” he says.
I want to tell him no but my mouth won’t work, my throatlocked. Some instinctive, primal part of me lights up with fear. His hand grasps my arm as I stagger under the weight of the hagstones, feet dragging over the grass, inhaling smoke and grease and sulfur. He is leading me away from the bonfires, moving into the shadows beyond, to where the rushes at the pond’s edge grow as tall as my waist. People part to let us through, the crowd moving like a murmuration, sealing back up and blocking an escape. Even over the smoke I can smell the water; silt and copper and rich black mud. As he shoves me into the shallows, I can feel something essential slipping away from me, some hold on the situation, the danger spilling over. Bert knew all about witches, Alice had told me. They tortured them and hung them or drowned them in the pond.
“Bert, I—”
He shushes me gently, putting his mouth to my ear so I can hear him say, “You wanted an old-fashioned Riddance, Mina. You don’t get more old-fashioned than a good tongue splitting.”
The dark water shimmers. It is cold, brightly, lip-bitingly cold. The mud oozes and sucks at my bare feet. My dress is growing so heavy I can only stand helpless as the weight of it pulls me down as if the water is full of grasping hands. I’m trying to run but it’s awkward, the mud too soft and viscous. Bert knows it, of course he does, how can I run with these stones around my neck. I’ll only work myself deeper into trouble. Now the water reaches almost to my waist. He wades out toward me, lifting his robe slightly so he can reach beneath it. Behind him the fires are sending sparks into the sky on thermals of searing air. I am shivering, searching around for something to ward Bert off. He plants both hands on my shoulders and shoves me down into the water. I stumble and splutter, gagging at the taste. The hagstones drag at my neck, threatening to sink me.
“You need to open your mouth, Mina. The Devil’s in there and I need to get him out.”
Bert has produced something from beneath his robe. It’s the pincers, the blackened forceps I found in the Devices box. I’m on my knees, sinking into the mud. Algae blooms around me, a thick green carpet. Bert’s eyes blaze with some sort of faded glory, some long bygone triumph that died with the witches of Salem and Pendle Hill.
“You know in the old days people like me were valuable,” Bert says, moving closer. “We were considered wise and knowledgeable. In a town like this, three hundred years ago, I would have been venerated, and girls like you would have been crushed underfoot.”
The rushes bend and sway like nodding heads in the rising wind.Yes,they seem to be saying,yes, yes.Bert’s hair is a silver corona, his eyes scorched holes in paper. He looms over me, resting the pincers against my cheek as he takes my throat with his free hand, squeezing. My stomach contracts like a fist. My hands are at the knot of the Riddance dress, desperately trying to untie it. I have to shed this weight. The mud is cold and thick as glue. The water seeps into the fabric as I sink down, down into the water. It is up to my chest now, cold, despite the heat. It is making me breathless.
“That’s the trouble with Riddance girls, Mina. They think they’re special. They think the Devil chose them. But it isn’t the Devil. It’s me.”
Bert’s hand tightens on my throat and my mouth bursts open, gasping for breath. He slides the pincers between my teeth, levering my jaw open. I taste cold metal, silt water sour as bile. I am flooded, pinned down. The fabric of the dress has grown so heavy I can barely keep my head above the surface ofthe water. I try to pull away and that’s when the pincers clamp on my tongue, the pain instant and brutal as Bert jerks his hand back as if to tear it right out of my mouth. My head is propelled abruptly forward with an agony I feel zipping up the back of my skull like metal teeth. My tongue stretches like elastic. Bert’s hand tightens at my throat and each breath is a drag, a thin, dusty suction. Filmy water seeps between my fingers. Bert twists the wrist of his right arm slowly and the pincers with it, and I see neon lights, sparks on the surface of the water. The root of my tongue is red-hot and burning. I can’t move, I can’t breathe. The water level has risen to my chin as I sink slowly beneath the surface. I slide my eyes away from Bert and his big, wide smile, his expression of captivation and something like disfigured joy. I don’t want him to be the last thing I see when my bloated, swollen tongue rips free.
I force myself to look toward the heavens for Hydra and Orion’s Belt and Venus. I want to watch beauty as I go under. Bert grunts with the effort and pulls harder on the pincers. Something tears, the warmth of blood flooding my mouth, copper in my throat, pain spreading roots through my nervous system. My blurry eyes find the nearest bonfire and the spiraling columns of flame, and I see the dark outline of a figure leaping through it, knees almost as high as their ears. They are trailing sparks as they land on the soft grass, their silhouette slightly smudged against the flames, a comet with a long, smoking tail. Then they are running toward us and I can see long flaxen hair, that dumb T-shirt that reads in big, cartoon letters—POBODY’S NERFECT!
My mouth is a mess of shredded muscle, tongue engorged and mutilated. I cannot speak, can only make a wet gargling sound in the back of my throat, but even with the pincers forcing my jaw open I still manage a gory, humorless smile. Blood seeps betweenmy teeth and down my chin where it billows in the water like storm clouds. Perhaps it is the change in my expression or perhaps Bert feels the pounding of feet through the earth and senses the undertow of danger. Whatever the reason, his face suddenly contorts into an expression of confusion; nostrils flaring, eyes bulging. Shock drops his mouth to his chest. There is a moment in which his eyes meet mine and he makes a single, guttural sound—urk!—and that’s when I notice Alice standing behind him, teeth bared, her hand slicing through the air.
Bert tries to twist around, hands groping for purchase. There is something jutting from his neck, a wooden handle with gilded lettering. I don’t have to be able to see it to know what it reads:DAEMONIA EICERE. The pricker. Bert’s hold on me falls away and his hands reach up to clasp over the handle, blood weeping through his fingers as he does so, staggering and turning and sweeping at the water. As the pressure on my throat is released, I draw in a gulp of air, blood gurgling in my throat. My tongue throbs.
Bert staggers out of the pond and across the damp grass, swaying from side to side. He has one hand clamped over his neck, the other reaching out in front of him as if blindly groping in the dark. Around him the cheering and the singing start to fade, slowly at first, then almost completely, like a siren winding down. Someone shrieks as he stumbles into them, his bloodied hand grasping for their face, trying to keep himself upright on trembling, weak legs. His purple robes swirl as he gracelessly staggers backward in a move that is almost comical—arms flailing, legs cycling uselessly beneath him—the pricker protruding from the side of his neck like a dart. It’s beautiful. I will never forget it.
“Mina, come on.” Alice is trying to help me to my feet but I’m too heavy. I’m pulling her down with me, like gravity, likea black hole. Her face is pale and beaded with sweat, her hair smelling of ash and smoke. “Hurry, Mina!”
I can feel her shivering beneath the thin cotton of her T-shirt as I bat her hands away. She looks down at me confused, her mouth working as if to find the right words to get me moving. But there aren’t any. There are no words. There is only the ice. I pull her a little closer, blood sluicing as I try to speak, lips numb.
“Run,” I manage. I push her away from me with all the strength I have left, watching her stagger backward in the claggy mud, almost stumbling in the shallows, just about righting herself in time to look back at me with an expression of confusion and sorrow. That’s when Bert falls into the fire.
By now the only sounds across the green are those of the wind and the flames of the towering bonfires. The crowd is staring at Bert, open-mouthed. Good ol’ Bert, beloved of Mary, fine, upstanding citizen of Banathel, historian, babysitter, witch-hunter. His steps falter as he manages to grasp the handle of the pricker, tugging at it until it works free, releasing a jet of blood in a liquid black arc. He looks at his smeared hands with a frown and then his eyes seem to roll backward into his head. Bert takes a few faltering steps back, his arms spread as if to receive a host. He sways on the spot for just a moment, long enough for me to thinkhurry up and die you fuckerbefore he falls backward into the flames.
I look back for Alice but she is gone. In that moment of perfect, blurred confusion, someone screams high and loud and panic seems to spread across the grass as if it were the flames themselves. I lurch toward the banks, tugging at the folds of my dress but they’re soaked through, the material so waterlogged I can barely move. My head slips under the water’s surface, hands groping beneath me for something solid to hold on to but it’s just black mud, slick and heavy and lethal as setting concrete.My mouth fills with cold water. It tastes like swamps, like green things decaying. The pain of it against my ruptured tongue is as high and shrill as an aria. I manage to just lift my head above the surface, gasp in a lungful of smoky air. Blood and drool pendulums from my chin and stains the water around me in a fan shape. In the distance, sirens. That means there will be questions. More questions, just like before. The policemen leaning forward in their chairs and saying,Tell us about what happened when your brother got sick Mina his eye was full of blood that’s called petechiae and that’s why we have to ask these questions, do you understand, nod if you understand.