Ann Pilling - The Witch of Lagg

“I’m right you know, Oll. Someone has been along here. You should tell your father, Duncan. Mr Grierson’s got intruders.”

“What? Here in the wood? That’ll be holiday folk from yon tents in the long field.” He shrugged. “Ye canna do ower much aboot that. It’s no’ agin the law to trespass here in Scotland, unless harm’s done.”

“But they have ,” said Prill. “They’ve been lighting fires. Can’t you smell anything?”

Duncan sniffed. Someone had certainly been burning something, and close at hand. It was a warm day with no wind, yet you could smell smoke drifting over from somewhere.

“It’s like this all along the path,” Prill went on, “Right back to Lochashiel. It looks as if someone’s been along here with a blow-lamp, or something. Look at the ground.”

Underfoot the moss was ashy, turned to black velvet then all broken up into crumbly pieces by their feet. On both sides of the track the low bushes were brown and scorched, their leaves hanging off them limply, like dirty twisted ribbons.

Duncan pulled a face. “I must tell ma faither aboot this. If his plantations take light I don’t doubt yon Grierson’ll have a fit, then we’ll be oot in a crack. Looks like there’s some daftie hereabouts. Colin heard snickerin’ when he tripped wi’ yon stanes.”

“ How did you trip?” said Oliver suspiciously, examining the path. “It’s quite smooth here. I can’t understand it.”

“Those stones are heavy,” Colin replied, quite savagely. “You’d know, if you’d actually bothered to help. It … I just fell sideways, and the whole lot went flying.”

“But I still can’t—”

“Oh shut up , Oll,” Prill said anxiously. She didn’t like the look of Colin at all. He kept rubbing at his back and his neck, his face was very white, and he was shivering. She hoped the dreaded flu bug hadn’t followed them up to Scotland.

She felt cold herself as they all helped push the last barrow-load down to the field. But the cold didn’t seem to come from the woods. It was uncanny. It was at their backs, all the way along the blackened track, yet it was a warm day and the trees were dangerously dry, according to Duncan. The path was so withered and burnt it was hard to believe that anything green would ever grow here again.

Oliver looked at the scorched bushes in uneasy silence and when he thought of that great stone cairn he felt frightened. They’d disturbed something today, something very ancient and perhaps sacred, something no one had meddled with for years and years. He didn’t like this uncanny icy feeling in the middle of the sun-dappled woodland, and he didn’t like Colin’s accident, or the sound of that crazy laughter either.

What had they done? What had they started? Oliver had the distinct feeling that this episode in the forest was only the beginning.

“I feel like the Salvation Army,” said Colin. “All I need’s my trombone.”

They were walking slowly down the long dark drive of Lagg Castle, away from the house. He was carrying a pan of hot soup and Oliver held a complete dinner covered up with a plate. Prill had their red setter Jessie on a lead in one hand, the other grasped her little sister’s arm firmly. There was quite a fast road at the bottom of the drive. It’d be just like Jessie to see a rabbit and bolt across after it, and Alison might run straight after her.

“Look to the right, look to the left, and over we go,” chanted Oliver, leading the party with his meat and two veg. Colin and Prill grinned at one another slyly. He was just like his mother. Now they knew where all those irritating little quotes of his came from.

They were taking some dinner to Granny MacCann. “It’s your good deed for the day,” Aunt Phyllis told them. “She’s been rather poorly.”

“Thought we’d done our good deed,” Colin had whispered to Prill as the dinner was arranged on its plate. “What was this morning’s caper? A picnic or something? And when’s she going to let us off the hook? I want to explore. Duncan says there’s a marvellous beach nearby, and there’s a castle somewhere, on a little island.”

“Well, it gets us out of washing up.”

“Yes, but she’s roped Dad in to do that, then Mr Grierson’ll be ringing his bell and he’ll have to go running back up to the studio. It’s like training for the Army.”

The spindly legs of their young cousin had already disappeared up the woodland path, though they could see the dinner plate, flashing in and out of the trees. The main road cut through the Forest of Lagg. The woods went on for miles on this side. Granny MacCann lived half a mile along the lower track quite near Lochashiel, in a cottage with a small field sloping up to it from the road, where sheep grazed and the afternoon sun dappled the trees above. From here Carlin’s Crag was a terrifying overhang. The strong light made it gleam smooth and white like an enormous polished skull. The tiny cottage below was tucked in, under its shadow, and there were stones on the roof, Colin noticed. Bad weather must have brought those down from the Crag. What a place for an eighty-year-old woman to live, all alone.

Granny MacCann had been cook and housekeeper at Lagg for years, and she’d gone on doing it into her seventies. Nobody had been satisfactory since she’d left, according to Grierson. People never stayed longer than a month or two. The children hadn’t met Hugo Grierson yet but they didn’t much like what they’d heard about him. He was obviously very mean with the Rosses and they resented his attitude to their father too. He’d had an electric bell rigged up in the basement and Mr Blakeman was supposed to go running up to his rooms the minute it rang. Mr Grierson seemed to think he could buy people, body and soul, and do just what he liked with them.

Granny MacCann was one of the few people around that Grierson didn’t interfere with. She’d rocked him in his cradle up in the old nursery at Lagg, and there was nothing she didn’t know about him. He never went to visit her but he did keep her in firewood, and the Rosses were sent down to check on her when the weather was bad. Occasionally he even had the odd repair done to her cottage and Hugo Grierson rarely spent money on anything, unless, like this portrait, it added to his own grand image of himself.

Granny MacCann was enthroned in a big carver chair by a small fire. There was nothing faint or feeble about the strong Scots voice that bade them, “Come along in wi’ ye,” when they knocked. In fact something in the harsh tone of command was a bit frightening, and when Oliver pushed the door open, and they all crept inside, they were frankly terrified.

Aunt Phyllis thought she was eighty plus, but she was surely into her nineties. Her long pendulous nose drooped down, her sharp old woman’s chin curved up to meet it, and in between was a black hole of a mouth displaying three yellow teeth. She was looking at them curiously, with eyes of the oddest whitish-green colour; little eyes they were, like chips of pale stone in her worn mahogany face, eyes that missed nothing.

The old woman had hardly any hair. What was left strayed out from under a little knitted cap and, in spite of the fire, she sat swathed in layers of woolly shawls. She wore grey mittens and her fingernails, greeny-white like her eyes, had grown so long they curved right over, like something in a horror comic. If it hadn’t been for the television in one corner, and the fact that her stout little legs were encased in trendy striped warmers, Oliver really would have said she was a witch.

Colin and Prill were thinking of witches too, Colin of his grandmother’s Arthur Rackham fairy book which he’d always had to read with very clean hands, and Prill about Hansel and Gretel and the witch roasting children in her oven. She wanted to give the old woman her dinner and make a quick exit. The pretty cottage, approached across a burn through a small grove of rowan trees, was much less appealing inside, and as for Granny MacCann herself …