Silvis led the way across town to the park, past the railway station and into the waste ground beyond. After a few minutes’ walk, they cut across through the wet grasses towards an old caravan, crooked with age and up to its wheel arches in the long grass. Silvis ran up a set of steps into it while Bea hovered anxiously outside.
‘I got her, Granddad. She’s outside. She called up brambles. They shot up out of the earth. She was— Oh!’ Silvis suddenly leaned out of the caravan door. ‘You’re fantastic!’ she yelled.
Bea looked up at the younger girl, covered in scratches from head to foot, and winced.
‘Your eyes turned blue,’ said Silvis. ‘Even the whites. It was amazing.’
An old man appeared in the doorway. He was so tall he had to bend down to get out of the door – a giant of a man, but bent and stooped with age. His long jaw was white with stubble, his white, shoulder-length hair hung untidily under a wide-brimmed, faded leather hat. His skin was brown and wrinkled with age and he had only one eye.
He looked grimly down at Bea, then pulled Silvis into view. ‘You did this to my granddaughter,’ he said in a gravelly voice.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Bea. ‘I didn’t mean it.’
The old man nodded. ‘You don’t make a life your own by saving it. You know that, don’t you? Don’t you?’ he enquired, sounding suddenly doubtful of his own remarks.
Bea nodded, although she had no idea what he was talking about.
The old man sighed. He came down to shake her hand and introduce himself as Odi, then invited her up into the caravan.
‘There are things you need to know.’
Bea climbed the steps into the carriage. Inside was arranged like some kind of workshop. There was a calor gas bottle connected to a single gas ring, a workbench, shelves on all four walls with various Tupperware boxes stacked up on them, and a baggy little sofa and an old armchair at the far end. All over the shelves and from the ceiling hung rows of little masks like the one Silvis had given her – like the one she’d used to scare away the dog.
‘Fetishes,’ said the old man, watching her. ‘The only way any of us can be safe around here. Hebden is infested with the Hunt.’
Bea licked her lips, which had gone as dry as stone, but said nothing.
The old man tapped his lip. ‘Now then, where are we?’ he muttered to himself.
‘Granddad – it’s now! It’s here!’ said Silvis impatiently, sitting herself down on the little brown settee.
‘None of that helps,’ he told her.
Silvis frowned and stuck out a lip. ‘He lives in all possible worlds,’ she told Bea. ‘He knows everything, but he gets confused.’
‘The question isn’t so much when or where – it’s which,’ Odi said. He turned to the shelves and selected a few Tupperware boxes, from which he added some herbs to a basin of warm water on the gas ring. He swished them around a bit, then got to his knees at Silvis’s feet. Very gently and tenderly, he began to wash her wounds. Poor Silvis was literally criss-crossed with deep bloody scratches. She winced and scowled and tried not to cry; it stung.
‘But I got her, Granddad,’ she said.
‘You’re a heroine,’ he told her. He turned to look at Bea with his one, soft, smoky-blue eye. She couldn’t meet it and dropped her gaze. ‘But you, Bea Wilder – you’re a danger. A danger to Silvis, a danger to us all. But most of all a danger to yourself. I would put the chances of your surviving without our help very low indeed. The Hunt is everywhere – you’ve seen that. You don’t know yourself and if you don’t know yourself, how can you control yourself? Every time you summon, you give yourself away. Only we can help you. But how can I ever convince you of it?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Bea; and that was the truth.
The old man nodded and turned back to his work, dabbing and wiping softly at Silvis’s scratches.
‘She has to believe us!’ exclaimed Silvis. ‘She’s seen it with her own eyes, haven’t you, Bea?’
‘She doesn’t just have to believe in new things – she has to disbelieve all the old ones too. How easy do you think that is?’ he demanded of Silvis, who shook her head. ‘Maybe she will choose to perish rather than do that. If you do decide to perish, Bea,’ he added, ‘we will respect your wish, even though you could be of great use to us. But we would rather save you.’ He got painfully to his feet, and sat himself down sideways at the workbench. ‘How can I make you believe? Seeing is not believing. Hearing is not believing. Thinking is not believing. Believing itself is mostly just made up.’
‘But then . . . how do we know anything?’ asked Bea.
The old man smiled and touched the rim of his hat to her. ‘Good question!’ he said. ‘Maybe you will become one of us after all. Now then. You threw away the fetish I made you.’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll make you another. Now that one of their dogs has held you in its jaws, maybe you’ll take better care of it.’ He turned to his bench and gathered some of the Tupperware boxes in front of him. Inside them were little collections of stuff – dirt, clay, a dish of little bones, shards of mirror, feathers, seeds – and began to mould her another little mask. As he worked, the masks arranged around the ceiling and shelves began to mutter. Bea sighed. Already she was getting used to masks that talked. What next?
She watched the old man at work a while. ‘The Hunt,’ she said suddenly.
He turned to look at her. ‘The Hunt,’ he agreed.
‘Who are they?’
‘Another good question.’ The old man considered. ‘The leaders – we’re not sure any more. Powerful people. Business people, politicians. People with power.’
‘Tell her about the Huntsman,’ said Silvis.
‘Yes, the Huntsman. You met him,’ he said, working deftly at the filthy clay with his big fingers. ‘The big man who tried to get you out of the car that time. If you’d done what he wanted, you wouldn’t be here now.’
‘Who is he?’
‘The question is, what is he? He’s a golem. Most of the Hunt that you actually get to see, the ones who chase us down, they’re nearly all golems – people who’ve had their spirits stolen and replaced with something else. Sometimes it’s the spirit of another person but more often an animal, a dog usually, since they’re so easy to train. They can do it with clay too.’
‘Not just clay,’ said Silvis. ‘They use resin and plastics these days. You can’t tell it’s not a human being until you touch them.’
Odi nodded. ‘Have you ever heard of Matthew Hopkins?’ he asked Bea. She hadn’t. ‘He was a witch-finder from long ago. We think the Huntsman houses his spirit. His body died long ago but the Hunt has found ways of passing his spirit on to other people, or into clay or resin golems over the years. He can track us, you see. He can sniff out our spirits. Hard to hide from.’
‘If he can track witches, isn’t that like being a witch himself?’ asked Bea.
‘Exactly,’ said Odi, smiling at her. ‘He thinks it’s a gift from God,’ he added, and shrugged. ‘When people learn to hate, it’s often themselves they hate most of all. He’s dangerous. But not the real leader, we think.’
‘But who is?’
‘No one person probably.’ He raised his hands in the air. ‘They remain hidden.’
Bea shook her head irritably. Was there no clearer answer than that?
‘I’m afraid not,’ said Odi.
For a little while he worked at his fetish in silence. Bea looked across at Silvis, who was half dozing on the old sofa at one end of the caravan. The medicine he had bathed her in was making her dopey. Already her scratches were fading. That was good. Bea had hated herself for hurting her.
‘But what do they want?’ Bea asked.
‘They used to kill us when they first started,’ said Odi quietly. ‘These days, they don’t like us to go to waste. These days, they harvest us for our spirits.’
Bea pulled a face. ‘I don’t even believe in spirits,’ she said.
‘Every living thing has a spirit,’ the old man told her. ‘Everything, no matter how tiny. Each ant, each germ, each egg, each fleck of life, every man, woman and child. The spirit is what gives us life. You could say it is life itself. Even the woods and the rivers have a spirit – but not you, apparently.’ He turned to look at her again. ‘For most people it’s a hidden world, but we witches have a connection with it. Do you doubt it?’ he asked. ‘How can you when you’ve seen it with your own eyes?’
Bea thought of the brown and silver boy running down the river, of the faces in the bushes, the tiny children at play in her father’s vegetable garden. She thought of the wicked woman of brambles who had attacked poor Silvis.
‘Why do they want your spirits then?’
Odi shrugged. ‘The usual suspects: power and wealth. Some people will do anything to win it, to hang onto it and to keep it from others. If you capture a witch’s spirit, you capture their witch gift as well. That’s what they’re after. They can power their weapons with our gifts, fight their wars, manage their businesses. How do you think those quads on the moors crossed the fields in the dark so easily? Where do you suppose the light in the air came from that night? Those gifts were powers once held by living witches. Now their spirits are kept enslaved inside machines and golems. Some witch gifts can change what you think and feel. With the right gifts they can manipulate who you vote for, what you buy, what you think. They can re-make the world as they want it.
‘And you, Bea . . . you are not just any witch. You are a summoner. It’s been many generations since someone with your gift was among us. You can call up spirits from the past and no doubt from the living too, if you learned how. The Hunt wants your summoner’s spirit. At the moment they have to use a machine to steal our spirits, one at a time. It’s slow. If that machine had a summoner’s spirit gift inside it, their power would increase a thousand times.’
He looked steadily at her. ‘The Hunt cannot tolerate any power that’s not in their hands. They will do everything they can to make yours theirs.’
‘You have to come home with us,’ demanded Silvis.
Bea glanced at the door. What if these two were dangerous? Look at all the crazy things they believed in!
Odi frowned. ‘If you want to run to your own destruction, I won’t stop you. I can’t answer for Silvis, though.’
‘I won’t let her,’ said Silvis. She grinned fiercely at Bea, who smiled warily. She wasn’t sure if this was a joke or not.
Odi smiled sadly at her. ‘It’s hard to discover that you are not who you thought you were, and that the world is not what you thought it was. But, Bea, is it so surprising that there’s more to the world than you ever dreamed? Isn’t that only to be expected? Don’t you think?’
Bea shrugged. She thought that maybe what he said was true, and that maybe she would agree with him at some point in her life. Only perhaps not just now . . .
‘If it’s only the things we understand that are true, what a small place the world would be,’ said Odi.
As he spoke, the old man was putting the finishing touches to the little fetish he was making her. He’d made it with eyes of blue and teeth of yellow, and it looked as ugly as sin itself. He reached over suddenly, looped his finger around a few strands of Bea’s hair and tugged.
‘Ouch!’ yelled Bea.
Silvis burst into a peal of laughter. ‘He always does that,’ she said.
‘Sorry,’ said Odi. He worked the hairs into the back of the face. ‘It’s better with something of you in it,’ he explained. He smoothed the surface down with his finger, held it up to inspect it, and nodded. Then he breathed on it slowly. The mask pursed its lips and began chattering quietly to itself. Odi stood up and hung it up among the others above his head.
‘It needs to cure with its friends for a little while,’ he said. ‘It’ll be better than the other one. Half an hour or so, it’ll be done.’
Above his head the masks murmured to one another. Another moment and they began to chant softly.
‘It will hide you from the Hunt and protect you from harmful spirits,’ Odi continued, ‘but only so long as you wear it at all times – at all times, Bea! You understand? Your life depends on it.’
Bea nodded. Odi leaned over and took Bea’s hand in his. She pulled away quickly. He sighed.
‘This is hard, so hard, I know,’ he said. ‘But you have very little time. The Hunt is on your tail.’
Bea nodded, even though she had no idea what to believe.
‘And now I must tell you the hardest thing of all. If you want to be yourself, you must join us. You must put away everything you know, everyone you love, and you must follow us.’
‘What about my family?’ said Bea.
‘You must leave them.’
Bea backed off. Crazy talk – dangerous talk! ‘I won’t leave my family,’ she said firmly.
‘But you must!’ wailed Silvis. ‘Don’t you see? The Hunt will come again, Bea. They will get you.’
‘Of course you’re loyal,’ said the old man. ‘I would expect nothing else. But you must understand that you’re a greater danger to your family if you stay. When I say you must leave them, it’s not just for your own good. The Hunt will take them too, once they find out who you are.’
Bea was thirteen years old. She loved her family and they loved her. To throw them away just like that? It was impossible! Even if she believed every word he said, it was still impossible. That much she knew for certain.
She looked towards the door.
Odi sighed. ‘On the moor that day, Bea, you looked into my eye. Now look again. I want to show you the world as it really is.’
The old man tapped under his one remaining eye. Bea followed his command and gazed into it. It was watery, as pale as ash, but bright with light. He leaned down, so that his face was on a level with hers. Her gaze, against her will, was drawn into that eye. And she saw . . .
Worlds within worlds upon worlds . . . worlds without end. More worlds than there are stars in the sky or atoms in your eye . . .
Bea had seen those worlds before, by the side of the road on the high moors, looking up at her through the eye of a hare. She turned away; it was time to leave. This was crazy. She took two steps out of the door – and was confronted with a world she had never imagined existed.