‘So, what’s the real story?’ I was using the contraband corkscrew to attack the wine bottle we’d nicked from the cupboard under the stairs. The cork was stuck and had started to crumble.
Mally had given the skull in its jar of bleach a cursory inspection, and we agreed that it was ready for washing. I wanted to ask him about the relics, about digging them up again so that I could give the Creed the power it needed to get back at Tracy Powell, but he seemed preoccupied. I thought he might be upset about his mother’s confrontation with the beetle man.
‘What do you mean, “the real story”?’ He didn’t look at me, just flung himself onto my bed and stared up at the ceiling, arms behind his head.
‘Well, all that stuff your mum told my dad, about them not liking you just because you’re different? That’s not quite everything, is it?’ I managed to get the corkscrew in far enough to gain traction, and pulled at the cork. It came out with a pathetic plop and I took a mouthful. It tasted vinegary and vile. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand.
‘You told me about your ancestors being the ones who brought the plague to the village. I know about that. But that doesn’t explain what Lyndon Vaughan just said to my dad. He said your mother was evil. Why would he say that?’
Mally sat up and grabbed the bottle from me. ‘It’s complicated,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’
He took a massive swig from the bottle, then handed it back. He went and stood at the open window and took a packet of Benson and Hedges and a box of matches from the back pocket of his jeans. The flame was almost invisible in the stream of bright sunshine and the cigarette glowed a dull red when he took a drag. He leant out of the little window and blew out a steady stream of smoke. I stood next to him and together we looked down on the patch of grass at the front of the chapel, and the parking area where Lyndon Vaughan and Mr Beynon and the chapel-goers had congregated. The scent of the honeysuckle was clotting the the air again, languid and sickly.
‘When we first moved here all sorts of heavy shit happened,’ Mally said, and his voice was quiet and steady.
‘What sort of shit?’
He took another drag on the cigarette and held the smoke in his lungs for a moment. He pushed his head out through the window before he exhaled. Then he handed me the fag.
‘It was like they’d already made up their minds to hate us, before we even moved in. Like they knew who we were and didn’t even give us a chance.’
‘Like they knew about your ancestors?’
He nodded. I tapped the end of the cigarette on the outside window sill, and we watched as the little log of ash rolled away and disappeared over the edge.
‘What happened to them?’
He didn’t reply at first. He grabbed the wine bottle out of my hand and took a huge swallow. It was like he was steeling himself for something, and what he said next made me realise why.
‘They said they were witches.’
‘Witches?’ He nodded.
‘That’s a bit extreme, isn’t it?’
‘Not really. This was 300 years ago, remember. People were nuts back then. Thought any woman who was a bit different or who acted strangely was a witch.’
I was quiet for a while, processing this information.
‘But why would Lyndon Vaughan and the others hate you because of your ancestors? Surely they can’t believe in all that?’
Mally took another swig of wine.
‘It’s…weird. After we moved here, back in January, strange things started to happen. People got sick and stuff. They started finding dead animals lying around, with no signs of how they’d been killed. You know, all that Hammer Horror bullshit.’ I could tell he was trying to make a joke of it, but there was a tremor in his voice.
‘Go on,’ I said.
He took another drag on the cigarette then leant out of the window. When he spoke, his voice was so quiet that I had to strain to catch his words before they disappeared into the still air.
‘Then they started saying that my mother was bewitching people.’ He made little inverted commas in the air with his fingers. ‘You know, making them fall in love with her. And it’s true. There were lots of blokes in the village that did fancy her, including Beynon.’
I must have looked shocked, because he smiled briefly before he carried on.
‘Some people in the village think my mother tried to seduce old Mr Beynon, that she tried to get him to screw her. They said that my mother wanted to shag that old man.’ Disgust clouded his face. ‘As if. He was the one hanging round her all the time, trying to get into her knickers.’ Before I could say anything, he went on.
‘Lyndon Vaughan backed him up of course, said he’d seen my mother collecting herbs at midnight under a full moon, or whatever other shit he’d seen on the telly. Honestly, it was like there was a witch hunt.’ He stopped himself, realising what he’d said, and I was relieved when his scowl transformed into a grin. ‘It was. It was just like a witch hunt. Whenever we left the house they’d be there, Beynon and Lyndon Vaughan, staring at us, not saying anything. And then they started doing this weird thing, shaking branches at our house and what-not, saying they were going to cleanse it.’ He was rolling the cigarette in his finger and thumb, twisting it backwards and forwards.
‘You’ve seen the circles they’ve scratched on our gatepost? The overlapping ones, all different sizes? They come along and make them with a compass, for fuck’s sake. They call them witch marks. Say they’re to ward off evil.’ He’d grown angry again, and both his fists were clenched at his sides, the cigarette crushed between his fingers. The sinews stood out taut on his arms.
‘They’re like the circles in the pub,’ I said. ‘The ones over the fireplace. They’re the same, scratched into the wood: sets of concentric circles that overlap. Did they put them there, as well?’
‘They’re old ones. Ancient. They’re probably here from when our lot first moved here. The Derbyshire lot. This village has a long history.’
Mally had said that the chapel-goers thought that his ancestors were evil, that they practised witchcraft. Did they think that Janet was the same? Were they trying to defend themselves using their own type of magic? There was nothing overtly Christian about the ritual I was witnessing; it was more basic than that. The actions they were performing—the herbs and the water—were more like an ancient pagan ceremony, with none of the trappings of religion I’d grown used to when I went to church.
‘I’ve seen them doing all that stuff. Making the circles and the stuff with the leaves and water.’
Mally nodded.
‘What happened to make them start doing it all? Something must have happened to set them off?’
He took another swig of the wine before he went on. ‘There was this…accident. Or…not really an accident. More of an incident. One day old Beynon woke up and he couldn’t see anything. He’d got cataracts in both eyes and he just literally couldn’t see. I mean, how does that happen to someone?’
Mally was holding the bottle in one hand, and I could see that it was nearly empty now, even though I’d only had one mouthful.
‘He went to the hospital and they just told him to wait and see if he got his sight back. That was at Easter and the old guy’s still blind as a bat.’ He raised the cigarette to his mouth with his other hand and took a drag. There was a vertical furrow between his eyebrows, something I hadn’t noticed before, and it made him look tired and cross, and older.
‘Of course, they said it was our fault. That my mother was a witch, like her ancestors, and she’d put a spell on him to make him go blind. Can you believe that? In this day and age? For fuck’s sake, Nif. It’s 1976!’
I remembered what the beetle man had said to Janet outside the cottage, how he’d referred to her dowsing rod as a witch’s stick, and how he’d warned my parents away from her.
‘And what do you think?’
‘Me? What do I think? I think that’s ridiculous. She’s my mum. She’s not a witch for fuck’s sake!’ He stood at the window smoking angrily. After a couple of minutes, he stubbed the cigarette out on the window frame and strode over to the mantelpiece. He picked up the jar with the raven’s skull in it. He held it up to the light and looked at it intently for a few moments.
‘Tell me the incantation,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘The incantation. Teach it to me. If you trusted me, you’d tell me.’
I turned this over in my mind. Part of me wanted to keep the Creed for myself. It was mine: it had chosen me. But the other part of me felt that Mally deserved to be in on it. He’d given me the crow’s skull, the final relic which allowed me to complete the incantation, and now the raven’s skull which was going to help me get revenge on Tracy Powell. Surely I could trust him?
I turned to face him. His hands were cool when I held them. I looked right into his eyes and started reciting. ‘Robin’s egg, magpie’s egg, duckling bill and bone. Blackbird’s egg, feathers of wren, the skull of a crow.’
He repeated it after me, and when he faltered a couple of times I corrected him. We said it together until he knew it perfectly, and then we chanted it over and over again, feeling the words surging around us. They melded together into something palpable, something greater than the sum of its parts. We bounced on the bed, chanting the incantation. We sang it and we shouted it and then we lay down, facing each other, laughing. There was something magical about it, about the two of us, there and then. There was an energy in the room, a feeling of anticipation, of something momentous about to happen.
When Mally put his hand under the waistband of my shorts, I was already expecting it. His long fingers inched lower, burrowing, searching, and then his hands moved round to my hips and deftly slid my shorts and my pants down, so that they bunched around my thighs. My fingers danced over his Orion’s Belt of moles, and he grabbed at his belt and undid it in one movement, sliding it out of the belt loops and throwing it to the far corner of the room. It hit the chair with a loud clanking sound.
He rolled me onto my back and lay on top of me, his body surprisingly heavy for someone so lithe. I could feel him digging into my belly. I knew there was no turning back.
‘Ready, Nif?’ he asked. The sun was coming through the window and casting his face into shadows—and I thought then that was the reason the sun was so bright; it was to make the things in the shadows so much darker and hold their secrets away from the light—and then that little half-smile was back on his lips.
‘Do you trust me, Nif?’
I nodded and his fingers were moving and there was the slow slide of denim against skin and then he was inside me.