9

Dave had a supply of mandrake. It was in a safe box along with a stash of blotters containing acid at the back of one of the filing cabinets in his study. Susanna and Felicity discovered it after an hour of rooting through the chaos of dusty files. By that time the darkness outside the windows was absolute; when Susanna looked at it, it seemed to freeze the blood in her veins. The house was lit up but they could hear the sounds commencing on the floors below them: the subtle creaks and groans, the soft padding of feet on the staircase, the sound of snuffling breath and whining. And then the sudden sharp scent of upturned earth, pricking at their noses. Without realising, they were almost touching in the small room by the time they found the drugs.

“I don’t understand how we can possibly engage in a magical ritual when we have no idea what we’re doing.” Felicity’s voice was small and brittle against the silence. She was aware that she had no other option other than this blind attempt to undo what Dave had brought into the world; it was why she hadn’t simply fled as the darkness took hold, and instead had followed Susanna back into the house and upstairs. There was nowhere to run. No place that it wouldn’t follow. The normal rules didn’t apply to this thing. It could be anywhere. It haunted you because it was guilt and it was grief and it was shame and fear manifested and anthropomorphised; it was everything that Dave and Susanna and Felicity had carried around with them already. How could you remove that from the world?

“Dave didn’t understand what he was doing either,” Susanna said. “That was why he made such a mess of things.”

“So we take mandrake and what?” Felicity said. “Strip off and dance naked in the garden until the little fucker goes back into the ground?”

“I don’t bloody well know!” Susanna said. “I don’t know. I think the mandrake will suggest what it is we have to do.”

Felicity was standing at the threshold of the study, staring into the pool of shadows in the stairwell. Susanna suddenly felt a strangely maternal instinct towards the woman, despite herself. It didn’t matter how worldly she appeared, how full of people and places her life was, she was, like Susanna, a frightened woman struggling with the decisions she’d made for herself. Well, they were in this together now. Dave was gone from their lives and they’d have to trust in each other. She handed Felicity the mandrake. “Take this and prepare it,” she said. “Let’s get started.”