“I want to say I’m sorry, Mina. About Bert. I didn’t believe you. I should have listened.” She looks down at her hands, and a tear rolls down her cheek. “I was so scared when you mentioned Stevie—that he might have—he looked after her for me all the time, Mina.”
She sniffs, swiping her tears away with the back of her hand.
“You know the first thing I thought of? How he used to call her ‘Stevie-Beans.’ She wouldn’t let anyone else use it, do you remember? Only Bert. His special name for her. What does that say about me as a mother? That I let my daughter visit every day with that monster? I was angry when you said it but not at you, not really. I was mad at me and I just felt so sorry for who I was back then. That messed-up little girl in the photograph. I wish I could go back and save her.”
She lifts her eyes to the ceiling, catching her breath.
“I don’t remember picking up those Polaroids but I must have done because I took that envelope upstairs and threw it right in the bin. I tried to forget it but like the heart in that Edgar Allan Poe story, it just kept right on beating, reminding me it was there, so I pulled it back out again and then God help me I opened it. I looked at those pictures for a long time, long enough for Stevie’s bathwater to get cold. By then I was shaking all over. It was in my jaw and in my legs, I couldn’t stop.”
Fern picks at the bedsheet anxiously. I can hear the tremor in her voice.
“After that I made Lisa look at them. I think I scared her. I admit it. I meant to, because shehadto listen to me right the first time. I asked her straight out about the Bertinis and the headaches and the holes in our memories. I told her what you’d told me and her face lost all color, like she was about to throw up. She kept saying Bert wouldn’t do this, he wouldn’t, not Bert, until the tears started. I didn’t hear when Alice came in but we both turned around when she said, ‘Mum?’ She had something in her hand. Something about it made me feel queasy, like I’d seen it before, only in a bad dream.”
“The pricker,” I mumble. She snorts.
“Is that what he called it? Horrible thing. I didn’t know where Alice found it—I just know she held out her hand, palm facing up, and said, ‘Mum look at this,’ and then she drove the needle down hard into her hand.”
I flinch. I remember how it felt when it had skewered into my side. I can even look down and see the wound on my arm, clotted over with a nasty scab.
“But here’s the thing. The needle went into her hand—all the way in—but nothing happened. Alice just stood there, pulled it out, pushed it slowly back in. Lisa didn’t get it, but I saw what it was straightaway.”
I think of Alice driving it into my leg and how it had left no impression.
“Witches don’t feel pain,” I slur. I don’t know if she understands me but Fern nods all the same.
“Oh, they do. But this was a trick. The pricker has a mechanism—a simple thing really, no more than a switch—that allows the needle to retract inside the handle. When Alice hit her hand, the needle disappeared, but the mechanism made it look as if it had gone right in. If you flipped the switch the other way,the needle locked in place. Lisa was staring at it with horror and I suspect she’d been on the blunt end of that instrument more than once while staying with the Roscows.”
We both fall silent. I keep remembering the way Bert handed Alice the witch pricker, how carefully he placed it in her hand. He must have flicked the switch as he did so, mindful that when she drove it into me it would then retract, making it seem as if I were impervious to it.
“Did Alice see the photos?”
Fern nods.
“I hadn’t meant her to, but it was like trying to hold back a tide. Something happened to her that night, Mina. She changed. It was like watching a Valkyrie rising. Something took over her.”
My brain skips, skimming like a stone. I can see the expression on Alice’s face as she drove that pricker into Bert’s neck, the brutal, boiling rage.Daemonia eicere.
“Is Alice okay?” I manage. A runnel of spit runs out the corner of my mouth and I wipe at it, alert enough to feel self-conscious.
“The Webber family haven’t been seen since the Riddance. At some point that night their house caught fire and carried on burning till morning. The statement from the fire department claims it was a chimney fire but that can’t be right. No one was having log fires in the middle of a heat wave.”
I think of the clicking of old bones, the pattering of soot. Alice saying“She watches me through the cracks in the bricks.”I am numb, at the edge of sleep I think. Drifting.
“Where’ve they gone?”
I open my eyes and turn to face her, wincing at the throb of pain on my right side.
“The police say the younger two were picked up from thegrandparents about half eleven that night and then the family drove north. That’s as much as I know. What remains of the house is boarded up but already a lot of ghouls have been in there taking photographs and souvenirs. Hey, that reminds me—this came to the video shop this morning.”
She hands me a postcard and at first I think,That looks like me,and then I see itisme, me in my yellow dress in Crete a million years ago with Eddie reaching toward me. My photograph, slightly creased. When I turn it over, I discover it has been stamped and postmarked and the writing on the back is brief.
He 4gives U!
The photographs in Alice’s bedroom, the writing beneath them in the same curved, giddy swirls.Best M8s 4 Ever!
He 4gives U!
I make a sound, somewhere between a laugh and a sob. Fern’s eyes widen in alarm but I’m smiling. I take a look at the postmark but it is smudged and illegible. Probably just as well. I’m near the edge of sleep now. Everything is getting heavy. The lights are fuzzy, haloed. But I have one more question for Fern, one more answer I need.