Sara stood up slowly, holding the match high, and looked around. A long desk ran down the shorter side of the oblong-shaped room. The wallpaper seemed to be flaking above it, so seriously that it gave the appearance of feathers pasted to the wall. The desk was covered with papers too, and in the fraction of time before the match went out, Sara saw an old gas lamp sitting at the edge of the table.
She took out the final match, desperately hoping that it would light.
She struck it and felt euphoria flow through her when the flame flared up. She gently lit the wick, then closed the glass hatch to the lamp. A rosy glow flooded the room, causing the darkness to retreat to the four outermost corners.
She looked at the eyes. They were remarkable: an entire gallery watching her every move. Each of them a ring-within-a-ring-within-a-ring. Sara knew the same symbol was also a protection against harm. Perhaps whoever painted these eyes felt they were creating a sanctuary here.
Suddenly, a force began shaking the room, like an earthquake. Dust fell from the ceiling, and a high-pitched whine pierced the air. Sara grabbed the desk, which had begun shaking. The noise changed into something thunderous.
Sara braced herself for what was coming.
Something huge and moving fast slammed against the side of the wall and flew past.
The noise mutated again into a clatter-clatter of a train flying past at close range. The tube tracks must be close. A minute later, the end of the train whizzed by, and the sound began to recede.
A final scattering of dust fell from the ceiling as the train’s clattering died away. She lifted up the lamp and shone it in the direction of the dust fall.
In the corner of the room near the hole she had created. She could see it now. A steel ladder fixed to the wall. Heading up through a hole in the ceiling. At least she knew what might be her exit route.
Sara pulled her attention away and looked again at the desk. The closest thing to her was a framed, sepia-stained photograph of a statuesque woman in her fifties staring off camera.
Sara looked closer at the photograph. It was not an unkindly face. Black-and-white photography always lent images an innocence.
On the base of the frame, inscribed in the wood, were the words HELEN DUNCAN.
There was something in that face that mesmerized her. It lacked the element of presentation that other portraits have: there was no effusion or bravado. There was only one emotion that flickered across Helen Duncan’s face: apprehension.
Sara turned her attention to the materials on the desk. Pushed up against the wall were ten stacks of identical moleskin notebooks, five books in each stack. From the side, she could see the journals were padded, so they looked like they were stuffed with something.
Old newspaper cuttings were strewn across the surface of the desk, around a blotting pad and a nib-and-wick fountain pen.
Sara picked up a press cutting from the desk. On it, there was a photograph of Winston Churchill. Underneath, a bold headline stated:
Mr Churchill visits convicted witch Helen Duncan in prison.
Sara stared closer at the photograph of Duncan. There was something around her neck. She peered closer until she could get a better view, although up close the definition was lost as the image dissolved into a pixelated blur.
It looked like Sara’s locket.
Sara picked up the closest of the moleskin notebooks and opened it. On the inside front cover, the owner had written her name.
Helen Duncan
1944
She flipped open the book to a random page. A date, 28 August 1939, was carefully inscribed in the corner, and underneath, in a spidery hand, was written:
The Beast will move, first to the East then to the West.
Slipped into the space between the pages was a clipping from a newspaper, the Daily Mail, dated 3 September 1939. The headline screamed: ‘WAR!’
Great Britain and France are now at war with Germany. We now fight against the blackest tyranny that has ever held men in bondage.
She picked up the moleskin books one by one. Each was stuffed with clippings, filleted from newspapers and placed alongside an accompanying entry. The notepads were chronologically laid out, from left to right. She reached for the pad furthest away and opened up the first page.
1 January 1908
It will rain 128 days this year.
Based on the date, and the photograph in the initial clipping, the entry must have been written when Duncan was a child. The notepads seemed to be the journals of Helen Duncan, from her earliest childhood. They ended only when she was imprisoned for witchcraft during the Second World War. Sara lifted her finger and touched the locket around her neck.
This room, with its talismans and protections, was her great-grandmother’s way of making sense of her power. A pre-modern context for what now came up in MRIs and mind-mapping techniques. Salt said military intelligence had wanted to find the gods of the other side of the mind, but in Helen’s time the world wasn’t ready, so they called what they found a witch instead.
It was as she began to search the desk again that she saw something below it on the table. It was propped up against an ancient letter stamp.
It was an envelope.
She reached over until she could read the word clearly written on its front.
SARA.