I could barely see the letters towards the end, but not because they were fading.
“Are you crying?” said The Nothing. “Please don’t. It makes her angry. I’m not allowed to cry, but I can’t help it. I try and I try, but I can’t stop myself. It gets worse when I sneeze, and when I feel sad. But I’m always crying a little.”
“I’m not crying,” I insisted. “I just have… tears in my eyes.”
“Why?”
“Because… it must be awful if the people you love can’t see you any more. That they’ve forgotten you even exist.”
“Yes,” was all she said.
Aunt Isa stared at the pages in the book.
“I still can’t see anything,” she said. “I heard what you read out loud, but…” She got up abruptly. “Go away,” she said, pressing her fingertips against her forehead. “I want to be allowed to remember!”
Then she grabbed a handful of soil from one of the dead pot plants and sprinkled it carefully on the dusty copper plate which protected the floor against sparks flying from the fireplace.
“What are you doing?” Oscar was intrigued.
“Fighting back,” she said through gritted teeth. “I’ve absolutely no intention of letting some four-hundred-year-old ghost decide what I can or can’t remember. I want this curse out of my head, and I want it now. Fire…” She looked around. If there had been any candles in the old candlesticks, the mice would have eaten them long ago. Instead she raked one of the glowing coals out of the fireplace with a poker. “This will have to do,” she muttered, and prodded it until it lay beside the pile of earth. “Air…” she looked at The Nothing. “Please may we borrow a feather from you?” she asked.
The Nothing looked surprised.
“You want something from me?” She was simultaneously taken aback and proud at the thought and immediately reached up an awkward fingerfoot to pluck a feather from her chest. “Here you go! Is one enough? You’re welcome to another one. Or several. I mean…” She sneezed and pooed on the rug. “Whatever you need. I so want to be useful!”
“Thank you,” Aunt Isa said in an unusually soft tone of voice. “One will do. You’re a great help.”
The Nothing looked several inches taller and sneezed happily.
Aunt Isa spat on her forefinger and dipped it in the ashes in the fireplace. Then she carefully drew a cross with four lines exactly the same length and then a large circle around the cross and a tiny circle in the centre. A wheel. A wheel with four spokes that divided it into four quarters. Just like the wheel embossed into the leather of the book. In each of the three quarters now lay the soil, the coal and the feather. She spat again so that the last quarter circle now contained a little bit of water.
“The hub…” she mumbled. “If this is going to work, then…” She looked up at me. I had followed her actions with interest because somehow it was so very unlike Aunt Isa. I had absolutely no doubt that my aunt was a witch, but not that kind of witch – not the sort to draw mysterious patterns on the floor and perform complicated rituals. Her witchery was more natural: seeing a little deeper than anyone else, helping nature along with wildsong and herbs, walking the wildways like animals who appear and disappear without your ever seeing how they do it. More sense and instinct than chants and rituals.
“Clara,” she said. “I’m afraid I have to ask you for a drop of blood.”
“What are you doing?” I said.
“I’m trying to save Vi… Viri… that poor dead woman from oblivion.”
“Viridian.”
“Yes. Her.”
“Can’t you even say her name?”
“Not yet,” Aunt Isa said grimly. “It takes all my concentration just to remember what I’m trying to do.”
“And my blood will help.”
“Yes. It will make the hub of the wheel – its centre. It’s the hub that gathers together the wheel and makes it complete. Do you understand?”
“Sort of.” Though I didn’t really. I mean, I could see that that small circle in the middle of the wheel was its centre, but it was harder to understand why it made all the difference.
“The fulcrum,” Oscar exclaimed. “Can’t you see it, Clara? If it was a real wheel, not just a drawing, then the hub would be the point where the wheel connects to the axle, the point that the whole wheel would revolve around. If a wheel doesn’t have a hub, then it isn’t a wheel at all, just… eh… a circle.”
“OK…” I said slowly. “I guess it kind of makes sense.”
“Of course it does,” Oscar said. “This will be so cool. Come on, Clara, prick your finger or something.”
It was Oscar, naturally, who had once thought it a brilliant idea that we should mix blood. Now he looked at me with the same enthusiasm. It really was a shame that it wasn’t Oscar who had a wildwitch aunt. He would have loved learning all the stuff that terrified me.
No one had a knife or needle. We ended up using a shard of glass from the broken windows to make a small cut in my ring finger. It stung, the cut ended up being deeper than intended, and my finger started to bleed profusely.
“Hold it over the hub,” Aunt Isa said. “And speak Vvv… her name.”
Remember Viridian. If ever a message had been drummed into me, I guess it would be that one.
I knelt down beside the wheel and held my finger over the centre. There was no need to squeeze my fingertip to get the blood out, it flowed all by itself, glossy, dark red drops trickling over my fingertip and nail and dropping, almost in slow motion, I thought, onto the black hub of the ash wheel.
The first drops hit it without making a sound. I stared at the blood that slowly filled the whole of the hub without spilling over the lines, forming a perfect blood-red circle. I totally forgot I was meant to say something as well. It was just like when Lop-Ear accidentally pierced the skin on my neck. A part of me was looking at the blood, but at the same time I was still in the blood, I was both inside myself and outside, but more and more outside with each falling drop.
“Clara! Say it!”
Aunt Isa’s voice sounded strangely distant. The drops kept falling. I fell with them. The wheel started turning around me. I was at the centre. Everything else was spinning. The fulcrum, Oscar had said, and that was exactly what I was. I stood still. Everything else moved faster and faster until blurred by the speed and then I couldn’t see anything. Nothing at all.