The Hell Hole

The Well Dungeon at Lancaster Castle measures twenty feet by twelve feet. It is sunk thirty feet below ground. It has no window and no natural light, save for a grille, slotted into the floor at ground level, but ground level is thirty feet above. Might as well be the moon away. And the moon looks in at night, high and pale, a cold light, but on full moon a light at least.

And better than the fat-drenched flare that drips its pig grease onto the filthy straw and lights up . . . what does it light up? Misery, emaciation, rot, suffering, rats.

The prisoners are not chained. They roam around their stall. Chattox paces like a show cat, back and forth, forth and back, muttering nobody knows what. Her daughter, pretty Nance Redfern, sits in the corner hating Alizon Device, her rival for food and a few brief hours out of this hell. The gaoler takes one or the other for sex most days. He washes them too, or at least the part that interests him. Therefore the two young women have fewer sores than the rest.

The place stinks. Drainage is a channel cut into the earth under the straw. Their urine flows away, their faeces pile into a corner. Old Demdike squats over the mounting pile and generally loses her footing and slips into it. Her dress is smeared in excrement. She has weeping sores between her legs. When the gaoler comes for one of the women, Demdike lifts her dress and leers at him, offering him her sores. He hits her. She has lost two teeth this way.

They are fed stale bread and brackish water twice a day. When the bread is thrown through the door, the rats squeal at it and have to be kicked away. There are four or five rats. There were more. The rest have been eaten.

Cold. The dungeon is cold and the women have only a couple of horse blankets to share between them. When it rains, the rain falls through the grating and soaks the straw underneath. Jane Southworth stands under the rain chute and tries to wash her face and hands, tries to wash between her legs, and the others laugh at her, but the rain is liquid sanity to her. It comes from outside and she tries to imagine that some of the outside enters this hellish inside and makes it bearable.

The wet straw adds to the smell of rot.

The walls have moss on them and strange dark fungus. Demdike knows her toadstools and scrapes what she can from the walls. The heavy iron manacles hung round the walls are rusted. When she has the fit on her, Demdike shakes the manacles with all her strength calling for her Familiar to come and save her. Greymalkin never comes, nor the small gentleman dressed in black that she used to know, nor the brown imp that lived in a bottle, nor the bird that told her where the grain was kept. Nothing human or not human enters this place. The gaoler never comes in and when the women are questioned they are called to come out by name. Every kind of disease is in these walls.

It is April. The women will be here until the August Assizes.

Chattox and Demdike hate each other. Their daughters Nance and Alizon hate each other. No alliances have been made. No sympathy each to each. Jane Southworth keeps herself apart. She recites the Bible and that enrages the others.

He will come, says Old Demdike, one night, on a moon-trail, he will come and I’ll be rid of the lot of you.

At first the rival families made spells and invocations. At first fire and blood were used to lure the Dark Gentleman. Now there are curses but no hope. Misery but no invention. Alizon wonders about Old Demdike’s power. Demdike swears he will come but she no longer believes it.

Day and night are the same. Fitful cold aching sleep, pain, thirst, tiredness even when asleep.

The straw moves underfoot with lice.

The air is stagnant. Breathing is hard because the air is so thick. Too much carbon dioxide. Not enough oxygen. Every breath keeps them alive and kills them off some more. One of the women has a fever.

The door opens. The gaoler is there with a dripping flare.

‘Nance!’ he shouts, and shoves the flare in the socket. He leaves them light while he takes the woman; it is his way of signalling something . . . what?

The flare throws grotesque shadows on the black stone walls of the cell. No, it is not the shadows that are grotesque; the women are grotesque. Shrunken, stooped, huddled, crippled, hollow-faced, racked and rattling.

Alizon uses her hands to make a play-theatre. Here is a rabbit. Here is a bird. Old Demdike sways back and forth in her soiled dress.

It is raining a little, and Jane Southworth goes to her station under the grille, opening her mouth to the rain. She lets the rain on her face be her tears. None of the women cry any more.

She thinks about Hell, and is it like this? She thinks that the punishments of the Fiend are made out of human imaginings. Only humans can know what it means to strip a human being of being human. She thinks the Fiend has a kind of purity that humans never have. She thinks that godliness is ridiculous because it exists to hide this; this stinking airless doomed cell. Life is a stinking airless doomed cell. Why do we pretend? She can smell strawberries. She knows she is going mad. Let the rain come.

A rat runs over her foot and drinks from the indent of her shoe.