Jan Siegel - Witch’s Honour

He drew back, covering his face, afraid even to brush her thought with his crooked stare. When he looked again, she was standing by a long table. It was entirely taken up by an irregular object some six feet in length, bundled in cloth. Very carefully she uncovered it, crooning as if to a child, and Dibbuck smelt the odour more strongly—the smell of a hungry forest, where the trees claw at one another in their fight to reach the sun. Her back was turned towards him, screening much of it from his view, but he could make out a few slender branches, a torn tap-root, the leaves that trembled at her caress. She moistened it with drops from various bottles, murmuring a sing-song chant which might have been part spell, part lullaby. It had no tune but its tunelessness invaded the goblin’s head, making him dizzy. When she had finished she covered the sapling again, taking care not to tear even the corner of a leaf.

He thought muzzily: ‘It is evil. It should be destroyed.’ But his small store of courage and resource was almost exhausted.

‘The workmen come tomorrow,’ she told the cat. ‘They will repair the conservatory, making it proof against weather and watching eyes. Then my Tree may grow in safety once more.’ The cat mewed, a thin, angry sound. The woman threw back her head as if harkening to some distant cry, and the candleflames streamed sideways, and a wind blew from another place, tasting of dankness and dew, and leaf-shadows scurried across the floor. Then she laughed, and all was quiet.

The goblin waited some time after she had quit the cellar before he dared to follow.

He knew now that he must leave Wrokeby—leave or be destroyed—yet still he hung on. This was his place, his care, the purpose of his meagre existence: a house-goblin stayed with the house, until it crumbled. The era of technology and change had driven some from their old haunts but such uprootings were rare, and few of goblinkind could survive the subsequent humiliation and exile. Only the strongest were able to move on, and Dibbuck was not strong. Yet deep in his scrawny body there was a fibre of toughness, a vestigial resolve. He did not think of seeking help: he knew of no help to seek. But he did not quite give up. He stole down his native galleries in the woman’s swath despite his fear of Nehemet, and eavesdropped on her communings with her pet, and listened to the muttering of spells and schemes he did not understand. Once, when she was absent for the day, he even sneaked into her bedroom, peering under the bed for discarded dreams, fingering the creams and lotions on the dressing-table. Their packaging was glossy and up-to-date but he could read a little and they seemed to have magical properties, erasing wrinkles and endowing the user with the radiance of permanent youth. He avoided the mirror lest it catch and hold his reflection but, glancing up, he saw her face there, moon-pale and glowing with an unearthly glamour. ‘It works,’ she said. ‘On me, everything works. I was old, ages old, but now I am young forever.’ He knew she spoke not to him but to herself, and the mirror was replaying the memory, responding to his curiosity. Panic overcame him, and he fled.

On the tower stair he found the head of Sir William. He tried to seize the hair but it had less substance than a cobweb. ‘Go now,’ said Dibbuck. ‘They say there is a Gate for mortals through which you leave this place. Find it, before it is too late.’

‘I rejected the Gate,’ said the head, haughtily. ‘I was not done with this world.’

‘Be done with it now,’ said the goblin. ‘Her power grows.’

‘I was the power here,’ said Sir William, ‘long ago…’

Dibbuck left him, despairing, running through the house uttering his warning unheeded, to the ghosts too venerable to be visible any more, the draughts that had once been passing feet, the water-sprites who gurgled through the antique plumbing, the imp who liked to extinguish the fire in the Aga. In the kitchen he saw the woman’s only servant, a hag with the whiteless eyes of the werekind. She lunged at him with a rolling-pin, moving with great swiftness for all her apparent age and rheumatics, but he dodged the blow, and faded into the wall, though he had to wait an hour and more before he could slip past her up the stairs. He made his way to the conservatory, a Victorian addition which had been severely damaged fifty years earlier in a storm. Now, three builders were there, working with unusual speed and very few cups of tea. The one in charge was a gypsy with a grey-streaked ponytail and a narrow, wary face. ‘We finish quickly and she’ll pay us well,’ he told the others. ‘But don’t skimp on anything. She’ll know.’

‘She’s a looker, ain’t she?’ said the youngest, a youth barely seventeen. ‘That figure, an’ that hair, an’all.’

‘Don’t even think of it,’ said the gypsy. ‘She can see you thinking.’ He stared at the spot where the goblin stood, so that for a minute Dibbuck thought he was observed, though the man made no sign. But later, when they were gone, the goblin found a biscuit left there, something no one had done for him through years beyond count. He ate it slowly, savouring the chocolate coating, feeling braver for the gift, the small gesture of friendship and respect, revitalised by the impact of sugar on his system. Perhaps it was that which gave him the nerve to investigate the attics.

He did not like the top of the house. His sense of time was vague, and he recalled only too clearly a wayward daughter of the family who had been locked up there, behind iron bars and padlocked doors, supposedly for the benefit of her soul. Amy Fitzherbert had had the misfortune to suffer from manic depression and what was probably Tourette syndrome in an age when a depression was a hole in the ground and sin had yet to evolve into syndrome. She had been fed through the bars like an animal, and like an animal she had reacted, ranting and screaming and bruising herself against the walls. Dibbuck had been too terrified to go near her. In death, her spirit had moved on, but the atmosphere there was still dark and disturbed from the Furies which had plagued her.

That evening he climbed the topmost stair and crept through the main attics, his ears strained for the slightest of sounds. There were no ghosts here, only a few spiders, some dead beetles, a scattering of mouse-droppings by the wainscot. But it seemed to Dibbuck that this was the quiet of waiting, a quiet that harkened to his listening, that saw his unseen presence. And in the dust there were footprints, well-defined and recent: the prints of a woman’s shoes. But the chocolate was strong in him and he went on, until he reached the door to Amy’s prison, and saw the striped shadow of the bars beyond, and heard what might have been a moan from within. Amy had moaned in her sleep, tormented by many-headed dreams, and he thought she was back there, that the woman had raised her spirit for some dreadful purpose, but still he took a step forward, the last step before the spell-barrier hit him. The force of it flung him several yards, punching him into the physical world and tumbling him over and over. After a long moment he picked himself up, twitching with shock. The half-open door was vibrating in the backlash of the spell, and behind it the shadow-bars stretched across the floor, but another darkness now loomed against them, growing nearer and larger, blotting them out. It had no recognisable shape, but it seemed to be huge and shaggy, and he thought it was thrusting itself against the bars like a caged beast. The plea that reached him was little more than a snarl, the voice of some creature close to the edge of madness.

Let me out …

Letmeout letmeout letmeout letmeout …

For the third time in recent weeks Dibbuck ran, fleeing a domain that had once been his.