The Lighthouse Witches(7)
If Sean had been her real dad, her mum would have let her stay. She’s sure of it. But because he wasn’t, she was told to leave, and therefore the precious chance to hold his hand as he slipped into the next world was ripped from her forever. He died without knowing how much she cared. She will never, ever forgive her mother for that.
A sob forms in her throat as she stumbles on blindly toward the clutch of trees across the road, hugging the grimoire to her chest.
II
She slips inside the cool of the forest, noticing the mineral smell that has replaced the saltiness of the bay. Things grow in the forest, she thinks, but die on the beach. The forest floor feels soft underfoot, quilted by pine needles and leaf litter, the view above her a watercolor of greens and blues. Within a minute she’s feeling better, now that she’s hidden away from everyone.
She weaves her way through the barcode of trunks, her anger lessening as she spies squirrels zipping into the branches. She finds a river, and beside it is an animal, crouched down. As though it’s waiting for something. The copper fur and long white tail tells her it’s a fox. She’s never seen a fox, not in real life. She approaches carefully, not wanting it to dart off. Only when she’s within touching distance does she realize that the fox is dead. Someone or something has cut it open.
Creatures squirm inside it.
She backs away, rubbing her hands on her jeans as though the very air around the dead animal might be infected. She turns in the opposite direction and finds an old wooden hut, hidden in a far corner of the wood. It’s like it’s been waiting for her. Inside it’s dry and small, maybe an old hut used by a forest ranger or something. There are cobwebs and dried leaves in corners, an old mug stain on a wooden bench. She sets the old grimoire down and arranges herself in a reading position, the small of her back pressed against the wall, knees to her chest.
Outside, it begins to rain, a heavy shower that bends the branches on the tree closest to the hut. The rain drums against the roof and the ground outside crackles and hisses, but no water comes inside her hut. A feeling of panic arises—what if the door has jammed? What if she’s trapped? She gets up, checks that she can open the door. On finding that she can, she closes it with relief behind her.
Then she returns to her book.
The GRIMOIRE of Patrick Roberts
I ought to start at the beginning, right at that first meeting.
My father moved us all to the north when we were very young—I was just turned eleven, my brother was nine, and my mother was pregnant with our sister—and I remember how suspicious people were of us, as though our forlorn and scabby arrival into the town marked some kind of siege. It took a while for people to be friendly, but I remember one family, the Hyndmans, going out of their way to make us feel welcome and help us find our feet. They’d moved there the year before and conveyed how they’d experienced a similar reception. “They’re strange around here,” the wife said. Finwell, she was called, and the husband was called Hamish. Hamish and my father formed a strong bond, he helped my father find work, and when my mother gave birth to my sister—a stillborn—Finwell spent a lot of time at our house, bringing meals and consoling my mother, who was devastated. She named the little girl Elizabeth, after my grandmother. I remember holding her little hand. She was perfect, my mother kept saying. There was no visible reason at all why my sister should have died a day before she was due to be born, but of course such things happened and still happen. I don’t believe my mother was ever the same after that.
Finwell’s daughters helped out, too. Jenny and Amy. Jenny was thirteen, a long dark plait like a muscle down her back, a face like stone, and a hard way about her. Amy was a few months older than me and preferred playing with me rather than helping her mother with preparing food and cleaning our house. She was a feral-looking child, like something raised by wolves—she was small and scrawny with a mane of crow-black hair that never seemed to be brushed and stuck out in all directions, usually snagged with berries and leaves as though she’d been dragged through a bush. She had piercing moss-green eyes that shone out of her face like a mystic. Her skin was pale as fresh milk and her front teeth had grown in at weird angles. She was usually laughing at something or other, baring all her angled teeth. When I think of her as a child, I see her mid-cackle, her head thrown all the way back, her two scrawny legs like twigs. Somehow she always had muddy knees—her mother made a point of complaining about it every time she set eyes on her—and her clothes were perpetually ripped and stained.
We lived our lives by magic. I was prone to nosebleeds, and my mother would often gather her friends to hold a ceremony to stop them. The stream where we gathered our water was a fairy stream, and if you drank it and told a lie, you risked your tongue swelling until it filled your mouth. A sheep’s skull smeared with blood and tar could show you the way to treasure if you threw it on the ground without fear of the demons that stood near, wanting to hide the treasure from your grasp. Few of us could do this—to not fear the beings that existed beyond the veil was difficult.
Most of us used the methods of magic as tools, but some were gifted and used their gifts to help others. Amy’s mother was gifted. A midwife renowned for preventing death in childbirth, she also had a reputation for being able to transfer the pains of childbirth from the laboring woman to her spouse, if so desired. Although this was never proven, I was aware of her being paid more than any other midwife in the village for her services, with mothers not only surviving childbirth whilst in Finwell’s care, but in raptures about it.