Mother craned from her chair. Two crows scraped their beaks on the stone ledge outside. She ran to the window, knocking over the vase on the sill. Off they flew, leaving scratchy bird feet in the snow.
‘One for sorrow, two for joy,’ she said.
She sat, then got up, listening to the morning. Knock kno–… She flung the door open, a leathery fist hovered midair.
‘Come in.’
The witch came in without wiping her feet. I sat on the mat, inching behind the chair. The woman’s skin was dried meat, withered. The top of her spine was a question mark.
‘Is this the child?’ She squinted at me the way women at the market squeeze peaches, getting a feel for a bad patch under the skin. I looked at the rug. I don’t remember every rag in it. If I’d known, I’d have torn the colour of waistcoats and bodices from the mat, I’d have studied my mother, folded up the look on her face and put it in my pocket to read when I might understand it.
‘Stand up,’ the old woman said.
‘Go on,’ Mother said, ‘it’s best.’
I stood straight as a sunflower saluting the light. And, like a sunflower, I drooped, the curve of my spine refusing to let me stand as straight as I’d like. I crossed my legs, one foot in front of the other. The bad foot ballooned, still bigger than the other, whether I looked like a girl about to curtsy or not. The woman grabbed my hands, wiggled my fingers and turned my palms upside down.
‘Nowt wrong there anyway,’ she said.
‘Can you take her?’ Mother asked.
The woman nodded slowly, a burden weighting her pointy chin.
Mother grabbed the bundle of my clothes from under the chair. The witch took them, knotting her other hand around mine. I pulled away.
‘Ssshhh. Don’t fuss,’ Mother whispered. ‘Go, it’s for your own good.’
Outside, snow landed on my hair like salt rubbed into meat for the pot. Clamped to the woman’s hand, I walked down the path and looked back at the gate. Don’t make me go. Mother had already closed the door.
We hobbled over cobbles, past houses with half-drawn curtains, out past the big house and into the woods. Our feet bit into snow, our breath was rags in the cold.
‘Where we going?’ I said. ‘I want to go home.’
‘We don’t always get what we want,’ the witch said, fingers twined.
I knew she was a witch. What else could she be? She was ancient and ugly and there was a devil’s mark on her neck, a raisin of flesh. I’d heard what Mother’s visitors said. Bundled into the box bed when anyone came, I pressed my ear to the door.
‘Too much sickness,’ a man said. ‘Crops failing. Some reckon there’s a witch in the woods cursing us all. They say she can turn people to stone.’
The woods thickened. The sun lowered, spinning our shadows spindly on the ground. Somewhere, I could hear water. The trees we passed now were scarred. Hanged men dangled, scratched onto the bark. I looked back, but I didn’t run. It was some sort of spell, I was sure. I couldn’t let go of the witch’s hand. I remembered Mother closing the door: Go.
The house hunched in a clearing littered with stones. Looking close, I saw they weren’t just stones. Each one was something, a sleeping cat dusted in white powder, a bird that looked as if it had been flying over the house and fell out of the sky. On the rickety porch was a row of children’s clothes and small toys – all stone.
‘Wipe your feet, girl,’ she said.
I stamped into the house. Once a witch sets her eye on you there’s nowhere to run – a girl’s sugar and spice catches up with her in the end. The kitchen flickered with firelight. The smell of ginger cake drifted up my nose. And my stomach rumbled, obeyed. If the witch wanted to fatten me up, I was too hungry to resist. She took a knife and hacked a wedge of cake out of the tin on the range. I nibbled and sniffed, nibbled and sniffed. She handed me a cloth for my face. I was crying without making a sound, I knew no other way. Ssshhh, Mother always said, don’t fuss.
What have you heard about a witch’s house? Some of it’s true. It was higgledy-piggledy with bottles and jars, and bunches of herbs dangled from the shelves. Everything looked put out to dry, a string of wizened toads stretched like bunting over the fire. I stared at an iron pot, big enough to make children’s bone soup. The witch patted a fat chair. I sat, one eye on a cage by the door. It looked too small to fit in.
‘Feet!’ she said. She bent with a crack, mopping up clods of snow melting into water on the floor. I swallowed my last bite of cake and she began to unwind the leather wrapped around my feet. This was it. If she ate me, she was going to start at the toes.
‘You never had proper shoes?’ she asked, tossing wet leather at the fire. It sputtered and spat.
‘Mother said it’s best I don’t go outside.’
She squeezed my bad foot. It was purple, bound tight to make it look smaller than it was.
‘Does it hurt?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know.’
I couldn’t feel anything: my foot, my fear, Mother closing the door. The witch slopped water into a bowl and said, ‘Plonk your feet in.’ It was warm, steam sighed from my toes. When they were good and wrinkly she patted them dry and rubbed in something waxy-cold from a jar. I yawned, my eyes closing, refusing to keep an eye on her. She turned down the blankets of a small bed in the other room and tucked me in tight as a sausage in pastry. I slept well. All night I dreamed I was eating her house.
Porridge breathed on the wooden table. A jug of rosehip syrup sat next to it. I grabbed a spoon, poured and ate. Snap. Snap. Snap. A crunching outside like something wicked breaking bony necks. She came in, carrying sticks for the fire.
‘Did you sleep well?’ she asked.
I smacked sticky lips painted shiny by syrup. ‘Yes.’
She nodded and laid a sheet of paper on the floor.
‘Stand there,’ she said.
She bent down and drew around my feet. The pencil tickled, but I didn’t laugh. When she was done drawing, she cut out my paper footprints, laid one on a rabbit skin and started to stitch, pins in her lips.
‘Try it,’ she said, handing me the rabbit-skin boot.
I walked unevenly. One foot bare.
‘How does it feel?’
‘Soft. Warm.’
‘Not too tight? I need more skin for the other foot,’ she said, picking up the cage by the door.
The snow landed white, speckling her dark shawl as she set the trap. I stood in the doorway looking at the stones on the porch. One was shaped like a doll. One looked like a girl’s bonnet, another was a small stone boot. I looked down at my bare foot beside the one covered in fur. I could try to run, run back to Mother, but not today. I’d wait until I had another rabbit foot, then I’d hop away.
Each morning we collected wood, set traps and hacked vegetables out of the frozen soil behind the house. I walked past the stone shoes and bonnet and shivered. The wind swept snow over the footprints of birds on the ground. Looking out at the woods, I was no longer sure which direction was home.
‘You can eat,’ she said, watching me lick a bowl clean. ‘Well, the more you help out, the more food there is.’
And I did help. She chopped wood, I bundled sticks. She kneaded bread, I greased the tin. She rolled pastry for me to squish frills around raven pies and apple tarts. The small house was jammed with mouth-watering smells. Sometimes I thought about my mother, then the witch laid out a tray of parkin. The sugary crust glistened, coating my fingertips in sticky gold. I ate until only my stomach ached.
Winter crumpled to spring, spring opened into summer. It was hot, the shhh splash of water washed my ears. I followed the witch with her pail. She held up one hand and took a knife from her boot.
‘You can’t go any further,’ she said, carving a star onto an oak tree.
‘Why not?’
‘Too dangerous. There’s a cliff where the water falls into a pond. Children who stray there are never seen again.’
‘What happens to them?’
‘No one’s survived to tell. Some say they fall. They say the pond is the devil’s mouth – chews you up.’
She chomped, showing several teeth.
The star carved into the oak wept sap. I waited for her to weave back through the trees, bent over the bucket, water sloshing on the grass.
‘Don’t just stand there, lass, give me a hand.’
The snap of a stick, the rusty gate. Who’s that? Sometimes someone came to the house. Occasionally, they made it to the door, braving it past the stone cat and bird sleeping on the path. The witch got out the eggs and a jar full of crow feathers. She cracked shells to tell people their future, set fire to a feather and said, ‘Your husband will not fly far from home.’ Mostly, people came to cure a cough, make someone love them, or help them get to sleep. She crushed herbs into honey in a jar and accepted bags of flour and balls of twine from women with their worries packed into the bags under their eyes.
‘Was that a spell?’ I asked when they left.
‘If a spell is making someone sleep easier and I get what I need for doing it…’ the witch said, whisking the fortune-telling eggs into omelette. ‘Now, pass me the pepper.’
She smiled, putting her cackle back on the shelf with the feather jar. It didn’t always stay there long. When a visitor told us about raised taxes, illness or failed crops in the village she got ready for business.
‘Looks like we’ll be run off our feet, lass,’ she said, stitching chicken legs to a wild boar and letting it spit over the fire. She boiled sugar with blackberries, dipped in sweetbreads and left them to dry. I stuck little stalks into the tops. When the sugary purple coating was dry, I rubbed in the flour. I’d offer the purple fruit to our guests and watch their eyes grow, wide with amazement at the ‘plum’ that tasted of meat.
‘“That witch has a tree that grows meat,” they’ll say. “She curses chickens into hideous beasts!”’ she laughed. ‘They’ll be piddling themselves all the way home!’
‘Why’s that a good thing?’ I asked.
‘You’re too young to know.’
With each year that passed, I learned a little more. She told me the benefits of each herb, and how to cure a rabbit skin, but nothing about herself.
‘Were you always a witch?’ I asked. ‘When you were little, did you roll down hills and get grass in your hair? Were you like me?’
‘I was never little,’ she said, laying a cold hand on my fever. She folded a wet cloth onto my head, smoothing away sticky strands of hair. I shivered under a deerskin, soup-filled and sick. I patted her hand. She pulled away like it stung.
‘Sooner you’re better, sooner you start pulling your weight around here,’ she said.
Her scowl was too late. I’d already seen something that on a pretty lady would have looked like kindness. Over the years, I saw it sometimes, a glimpse of worry, amusement or pride at something I did. There, on her face, then snatched away.
The year I turned fourteen, I was sure I’d imagined it. The woman wasn’t kind. One day at a time, she was turning me from a girl into a witch. And I hated it. Everyone knew what happened to witches. Warts and moles sometimes came to the house attached to women afraid of someone getting the wrong idea. The witch poked warts with a flame, and they let her, less scared of the pain than what could happen otherwise. Yet still she talked about me the way she did.
‘Don’t look directly at the lass, she might give you the evil eye. When she was a baby she flew out of her crib. The devil’s playmate, born on a full moon.’
I looked down, cheeks burning. No one would look me in the eye.
‘Careful. If she doesn’t like the look of you, she’ll turn you stone,’ the witch said.
The stammering boy who came for a love spell dropped his smile and raced down the path past the stone birds, cats and clothes.
‘Why did you say that?’ I asked.
‘He’ll be running home telling stories,’ she grinned. ‘“Sin ugly,” he’ll say. “If you touch that lass, she’ll petrify your hand.”’
I gave her the sort of look people supposed would turn them to stone. As soon as spring came I’d run away.
Orange leaves were frosted to the grass. A slight woman crunched to the door in a rustling skirt. I looked out. Mother! Mother was coming to take me home, after all these years, just when I most wanted to go. The woman knocked, I ran, a half-limp, half-run. She was young, ash-blond wisps of hair frayed out of her bonnet like smoke. I could hardly recall my mother, but this wasn’t her. This woman was barely more than a girl. She held an infant in her arms.
‘Will you help me?’ she said. ‘Look.’ She unwrapped the infant’s sheet and held up his arm. Six fingers curled on one hand.
‘Can you do something?’ she said.
Even for a visitor, the old woman didn’t get out her cackle and hiss. Extending a finger, she stroked a small bump of bone on the baby’s forehead and sighed. She looked more woman than witch.
‘It’s a third eye! Fix him,’ the young woman said, ‘please.’
‘There’s nothing I can do.’
‘You take him, then. I can’t keep him like this. People will…’
She pushed the baby towards the witch. The witch folded her arms, not taking a thing.
‘You’re his mother,’ she said. ‘You need to do right by him.’
The woman cried then nodded. Holding the infant, she left with a whisper. ‘It’ll be alright, I know I can make everything be alright somehow.’
We found the bundle out in the woods. The white sheet stuck hard to the frost, the witch peeled it off the ground with a crack.
‘Not a pick on him,’ she said, holding the infant in her wrinkled hands.
‘Shall we bury him?’ I asked.
She shook her head, the way she did when we found the dead feral cat. And like the cat, she walked away now, towards the sound of the water, cradling the cold baby in her arms.
‘Get on with the kindling, lass,’ she said.
She weaved past the tree I was forbidden from straying beyond. I stroked the moss on the star carved into the bark and followed as quietly as I could.
The water hissed, throwing itself over the precipice, hammering the rocks in the pool. The witch placed the infant in the pool. I moved closer, my rabbit-skin feet crushing frosty leaves. She turned sharply, listening, always listening for footsteps. She saw me approach and didn’t say a word.
I stood beside her, looking up at the waterfall. The ivy on the rocks was green where no water touched it. Further down, splashed by falling water, it was white. Dandelions clung to holes in the cliff face, their flowers pale as bones.
‘It’s the water; something in the ground makes everything it touches turn to stone,’ she said, dipping a hand in the water and looking at her wet palm. No different to any other woman’s hand, just older. ‘It takes time, drop upon drop, year after year.’
‘Did anyone ever fall into the water and disappear?’ I asked.
‘No.’
I looked down at pale shapes in the water. The feral cat freckled in lime. The cloth doll I once cuddled, its button eyes now stone.
‘Everything was here? The bird, the shoes near the house…’
‘You know any other way to make people think you can turn them to stone?’ she said.
I didn’t. For years I’d looked away whenever I passed the small stone clothes and toys outside the house, afraid to ask where they came from. I didn’t want to know.
‘Come,’ she said. She walked around the cliff face to a crack in the rock. It was dim, water seeped and dripped into the cave onto several large rocks, all chalk white. The witch walked among them, stroking each. One was a girl asleep. One hand bigger than the other, her palms were together, pressing a prayer to her cheek. Beside her, a younger girl sat hugging her knees, one hand with six fingers clutching creases in her skirt ironed into place by lime. Everywhere, there were imperfect children – all stone.
‘You’re not the first girl I took in,’ the witch said. ‘Their mothers were fallen, simple, superstitious. They asked me to cure their cursed children. And when I couldn’t…’
‘You took them in to make them witches?’ I said.
She rubbed her head like it ached.
‘There’s two ways to be a witch, lass. You can not know it until they come with torches, or you can be ready. If folk fear you enough, they won’t touch you. Come plague or taxes, when people look for someone to blame, you’ll be safe.’
She ran a hand over stone tangles on the sleeping girl’s head. ‘It’s not much of a life, being a witch, but it’s a life,’ she said. ‘I did all I could.’
‘What happened to them?’
‘I didn’t do enough. Some died in the woods trying to escape, others got older and lonely for love. They wasted away. They were witches who just wanted to be girls.’
I thought of how she never held me as a child, all the times she snatched her hand away. I was like that feral cat she left food out for but never spoke a good word about. She knew he could go at any time.
‘Why didn’t you ever tell me?’ I said, looking around at the stone girls: so many clubbed feet, crooked spines and small hands like mine.
‘How could I?’ she said. ‘How?’