The Past

The unhappy band disappeared down the slope away from the tower. Alice walked round it, looking for the herbalist, but she had gone. Alice stood by the bush that concealed Jennet Device, but the child was still as a toad. Only her watchful eyes moved.

God, it was a dreadful spot. Alice hated it. She should have pulled it down. She would have pulled it down if Old Demdike had not begged her to leave it where it stood.

And Demdike had reason – of a kind. Her grandmother and her mother had taken refuge here.

Malkin Tower was the wild and forsaken place where Isolde de Heton had come with her baby when she was an outcast from the abbey at Whalley, a fallen woman, a Sataniser.

Here, with her fierce lover Blackburn, she had raised her child, shunned by all society. She was a noblewoman but they shunned her.

Here, days, nights, weeks, months, alone, she taught her child Bess Blackburn to scorn the crowd and to exult in loneliness. When Blackburn himself came back on his infrequent visits from raiding and robbing, the tower was lit up, and fearful passers-by claimed they saw imps circling the tower like bats. There were strange noises, laughter, shouting. And whenever Blackburn departed again, Isolde and Bess had new clothes and fresh horses and they rode about Pendle Forest and Pendle Hill away from the paths and tracks. If you saw them they would not speak to you.

Isolde died – or was spirited away, some say – by her demon lover. Her daughter Bess was sixteen then and, tiring of a solitary life, took the money piled in the tower – a substantial sum – and used it for a dowry to marry a man in Whalley.

Bess Blackburn gave birth to one child. A daughter. She christened her Elizabeth after herself, though some say that Old Demdike was christened twice, once for God and once for Satan, in the black pool at the foot of Pendle Hill.

Alice walked quickly round to the front of the tower. She entered, and stood in the awful room. The walls were black with smoke, shiny with grease, green with mildew.

She noticed a recess in the wall of the tower with a sack curtain drawn across it. Alice pulled back the curtain. It concealed a sleeping compartment, surprisingly clean and made comfortable with clean straw. The walls were drawn from top to bottom with alchemical drawings and hieroglyphs.

Alice studied the wall. She could read it. For a moment she forgot where she was and thought she was back at Bankside and she and Elizabeth were casting planetary conjunctions.

Here on the wall were moon calendars and calculations of the stars. Here was Demdike’s own astrological nativity. And here underneath it was Alice’s nativity, though not her name. With a shock Alice saw that the date of her death had been numbered too.

She backed out of the recess and drew the curtain. She was sweating. She turned into the room. It was dusk. The Daylight Gate.

There was a faint green luminescence coming from the rough table. It was the head.

She could not believe what she was looking at. The empty eye sockets, the collapsed nose, the fetid boiled skin that hung in strips off the skull. The mouth hole propped open with a stick, and the fat black tongue protruding out. Robert Preston’s tongue.

Alice had to hold herself upright and not vomit. There was no sound but her own short breath.

The loose mouth on the head seemed to twitch. The black tongue moved slowly up and down in the belched hole.

Then the head spoke. ‘Born in fire. Warmed by fire. By fire to depart.’

Alice cried out and ran from the tower, unhitched her pony and galloped down the slope without looking back.

The child Jennet Device poked her head up from the cellar and went up to the head. She patted it. She put the baby’s hand in front of its sagging mouth and sat down with her back against the wall to finish her chicken, singing a lullaby to herself that she knew from somewhere.