Once Luther’s secured to the table, I waste time. Not that there’s a surfeit of it, but because this moment which has taken so long to arrive feels like it’s here too soon. All the planning and preparing could not give a sense of what it would be like, here. For this now to actually occur. To see the jar on the benchtop, that fragment – call it what it is, Asher, gobbet – of my mother floating therein with a white mist bubbling and roiling in the free inch between the liquid preservative and the lid. To see all those herbs lined up and ready. To see the star in the circle I’ve drawn on the floor with chalk, overlaid with a line of salt just to be extra safe because you never know how strong what you summon might be, what else might come through with it. The Witches warned about that.
I have the piece of paper on which I wrote the spell, the instructions from the Witches’ dark book. It all seemed so simple, so unreal then, when they sent me forth with admonitions and blessings and coin. I was like a child who prepares for something in hope, but deep down has no true belief it will come – then, suddenly, the shock of fruition.
I am waiting for Luther to wake.
There are things that must be said after all these years; not to say them would be a waste.
But I get tired of waiting, so I wave smelling salts beneath his nostrils, and he coughs to alertness. As he focuses on me, he tries to move but finds himself tied down. He stares and says once more, ‘Heloise.’
I shake my head. ‘No. Asher.’
‘But—’
‘Asher Todd, daughter of Heloise Morwood and a shitty god-hound. Sent forth by her family with nothing but a few coins and a babe in her belly,’ I say. I drag a chair over to sit; he twists his neck to watch. I say, ‘Asher Morwood.’
‘Asher Morwood.’
‘Do you know how many times I have tried on that name? I had a notebook when I was small and I wrote it over and over in the back pages so Mother would not notice and get angry. I’d change my script to see which one looked right. I thought, if I got it right on paper, it would feel right on me. It never did, Uncle. Why do you think that was? When Heloise found that book, she burned it and beat me.’
‘Asher.’
‘My mother would tell me tales of her life here, of what was done to her, how she was cast out. How in her desperation she confided in her brother, and he went straight to their mother and told like a little tattletale.’ I examine my hands, such strong square things, they’d have no trouble wielding a scalpel. ‘I should cut it out, that tattling tongue.’
‘Don’t hurt me!’
‘Oh, don’t worry. You’re no good to me voiceless.’ I run a hand through my hair. ‘She didn’t tell me you’d gone to Whitebarrow, though! How strange, don’t you think, that she’d keep something like that from me when she told me so much else?’
‘Please.’
‘I’ve been thinking about it, a lot. Perhaps she didn’t tell me that because she thought it strange she’d gravitate towards the scene of your greatest failure. I don’t think it strange at all, Uncle. For the awful life we had, I think being where she knew you’d ruined yourself made her happy.’
It finally occurs to him to shout. He does so until he’s hoarse, and then he seems to realise how untroubled I am by his noise. Luther Morwood looks at me.
‘No point yelling. No one will wake.’
‘Have you killed them all?’ And this man, this brute, is horrified. Terrified.
‘What do you think I am? Some sort of monster?’ I can’t hide my amusement. I know precisely what I am. ‘They’ll sleep until I wake them. Hands of glory are terribly useful things.’
He blanches – perhaps he knows how they’re made, the left hands hacked from men swinging on the gallows, turned into candles. I lit two in the kitchen, six fingers, the name of each sleeper whispered above the flame – only Luther left unspelled. Another outside Eli’s cottage door. Perhaps my uncle thinks I created them myself, but they were purchased from women in Whitebarrow who specialise in such things and carried around in the carpet bag along with the jar containing my mother’s heart. Finally put to use. By the time the night’s over they’ll have served their purpose, and I’ll destroy the things rather than risk being found with them.
‘I have wondered why you did it, told on her – Heloise said you were not bad friends growing up. But perhaps when you returned from university in such shame she laughed?’
He nods slowly, reluctantly.
‘It’s the sort of thing she would do. And I don’t imagine Leonora was very understanding. I imagine she told you exactly what she thought of you when so many sacrifices had been made to send you to your dream. The cost to convert this little surgery for you, to stock it with the finest instruments.’ I gesture to the walls around us, the roof, the everything. ‘So many sacrifices. Your father gambling money away hand-over-fist. Then he died and you were blamed for that too. You should have been able to make a living here, not a grand one, but a decent one. Yet all your potential spilled. Wasted.’ I clasp my hands, as if praying. ‘And my mother would have laughed, and you kept that anger and embarrassment warm. When the chance came to make her hurt…’
‘Where is she?’
‘She’s dead. Of course. You don’t need the details of her life or death, you don’t merit them.’ Because if he knew how she’d survived, what she’d done, he’d merely think she deserved what she did; that she was already inclined to be a whore anyway. ‘But she left me in the world and made me promise to bring her home.’
‘You can’t kill me. They will look for me.’
‘No,’ I say, ‘they won’t.’
And in the end it’s such a simple thing.
Light the candles at each point of the star, whisper the words to make what is needed, watch as a lattice of smoke rises and creates a dome above us.
Take the other jar, the one that’s filled only with lavender because lavender keeps ghosts at rest. Speak more words, the spell, and watch as his soul seeps from his mouth, a grey-white mist, and goes into the open jar, settles amongst the purple blooms. Tighten the lid. Watch the body judder and jerk for it lives without an animating, directing spirit. Open the next jar: this one contains my mother’s soul and the heart I plucked fresh from her dead chest so the soul had something to attach to – something to coax it to remain. Speak the next litany and watch as the mist shoots from that vessel, away from the heart, and goes to the nostrils and mouth of Luther’s form, seeps in as quick as a mouse through a gap in the wall.
After all these years as simple as that.
And this is what Archie did not understand: to do this, the empty shell must come from a relative. Something to do with like calling to like. I read the notes in that dark book: there are other means, but the result will not be human, will not look human. Archie would not have wanted to cuddle with his wife’s animated bones – or I cannot imagine so anyway.
I’d promised my mother I would bring her back to Morwood. Home. That I would find the means to give her life again. I knew I would need a cadaver for her, but Leonora – how many years might she have left? And the children had done nothing to deserve this fate. But Luther. Luther would give her the power she’d been deprived of in life. Luther was sure to inherit. Luther, the brother my mother cursed with her dying breath, the one she said Give me his life and I promised.
Or he was until I gave Leonora back her sight, her ability to fight against him.
The body on the table stops shuddering, takes in a breath as if it’s the first in a very long time – and it is, really. The eyes flutter open; there’s no change in them, they are the same colour, the same shape, but somehow I can see Heloise staring out.
‘Mother?’
‘Asher? My Asher?’ Luther’s voice, but softer, with a lilt, that musical tone her clients so liked, that helped her get her way when she felt like being charming. Drops of liquid appear on her face – his face – and I realise I’m crying.
‘Mother. Mother, I did it.’
‘Oh, my cleverest girl.’ She – he – laughs. ‘My strange, clever girl!’
She wriggles, and I undo the bindings, help her – him – sit on the edge of the table.
‘Oh, my.’ She looks down at her new body, at the large hands, the striped nightshirt, the long hairy feet. She puts one hand to her – his – crotch and squeezes, looks surprised. ‘This will take some getting used to. Although, far more convenient to piss.’
I help her stand. She – he – wraps her arms around me, not knowing her new strength. I squeak and she apologises.
‘How do you feel, Mother?’
‘Alive. Exhausted. Displaced. Elated. All of the things, my Asher. I feel everything.’ She laughs, and it seems lighter than Luther’s booming laugh.
‘You should sleep. You’ll be exhausted and need time to – settle in.’
‘I’ve been floating in a jar for longer than I care to think, I should have energy to burn, but you’re right, I am tired. Bed will be welcome.’ She kisses me on the forehead.
‘Come, Mother, we can talk in the morning.’
‘Yes! We have years to catch up!’ she says and I smile in spite of everything. I smile because deep inside is the sense that this will be the relationship I always wanted, needed from my mother. That at last Heloise will love me enough. I have done this thing for her – this greatest and most terrible of things! – how can she not love me now?
I take the mourning ring from my pocket, slide it on my finger, slip back under cover of my false face. My mother-uncle smiles in wonderment. ‘That I birthed such a clever daughter!’
After she’s settled in Luther and Jessamine’s bed, asleep almost before I close the door, I check the bedroom that my mother once, twice, inhabited, just to make sure. It’s empty, the border of salt undisturbed. The ghost of her is gone. It’s gone because Heloise is no longer dead.
I return to the surgery and tidy away every sign of what has been done. In the garden, I dig two deep holes and bury the jar with Luther’s soul in one. I spit on it before I heap dirt over what remains of my uncle. Then, when there is nothing else left to do, I extinguish the hands of glory. I bury them, with more dried lavender sprinkled over the top. Buried separately from the soul jar because there’s no point risking such things in proximity.
And when everything is done, I go to my bed and sleep the utterly dreamless slumber of the damned.