Jan Siegel - Witch’s Honour

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Lucas Walgrim sat at his sister’s bedside in a private nursing home in Queen Square. Their father visited dutifully, once a week, going into prearranged huddles with various doctors, signing dutiful cheques whenever required. Dana was wired up to the latest technology, surrounded by bouquets she could not see, examined, analysed, pampered. The nursing home sent grateful thanks for a generous donation. Nothing happened. Dana’s pulse remained steady but slow, so slow, and her face was waxen as if she were already dead. Lucas would sit beside her through the lengthening afternoons, a neglected laptop on the cabinet by the bed, watching for a quiver of movement, a twinge, a change, waiting until he almost forgot what he was waiting for. She did not toss or turn; her breast barely lifted beneath the lace of her nightgown. They combed her thick dark hair twice a day, spreading it over the pillow: there was never a strand out of place. In oblivion her mouth lost its customary pout and slackened into an illusion of repose, but he saw no peace in her face, only absence. He tried talking to her, calling her, certain he could reach her wherever she had gone; but no answer came. As children they had been close, thrown into each other’s company by a workaholic father and an alcoholic mother. Eight years the elder, Lucas had alternately bullied and protected his little sister, fighting all her battles, allowing no one else to tease or taunt her. As an adult, he had been her final recourse when boyfriends abandoned her and girlfriends let her down. But in the last few years he had been busy at the City desk where his father had installed him, and she had turned to hard drugs and heavy drinking for the moral support that she lacked. He told himself that guilt was futile, and she had made her own decisions, but it did not lessen the pain. She was his sister whom he had always loved, the little rabbit he had mocked for her shyness and her fears, and she had gone, and he could not find her.

At his office colleagues eyed his vacant chair and said he was losing his grip. The malicious claimed he had succeeded only by paternal favours, and he did not have a grip to lose. His latest girlfriend, finding him inattentive, dated another man. In the nursing home the staff watched him covertly, the women (and some of the men) with a slight degree of wistfulness. Purists maintained that he was far from handsome, his bones too bony, his cheeks too sharply sunken, the brows too straight and sombre above his shadowed eyes. But the ensemble of his face, with its bristling black hair and taut, tight mouth, exuded force if not vitality, compulsion if not charisma. Those who were not attracted still found themselves intrigued, noting his air of controlled tension, his apparent lack of humour or charm. In Queen Square they thought the better of him for his meaningless vigil, and offered him tea which he invariably refused, and ignored the occasional cigarette which he would smoke by the open window. He was not a habitual smoker but it was something to do, a way of expressing frustration. The bouquets came via florists and had little scent, but their perfume filled his imagination, sweet as decay, and only the acrid tang of tobacco would eradicate it.

He came there late one night after a party—a party with much shrieking and squirting of champagne and dropping of trousers. He had drunk as much of the champagne as had found its way into his glass, but it did not cheer him: champagne only cheers those who are feeling cheerful already, which is why it is normally drunk only on special occasions. At the nursing home he sat in his usual chair, staring at his sister with a kind of grey patience, all thought suspended, while his life unravelled around him. There were goals which had been important to him: career success, a high earning potential, independence, self-respect. And the respect of his father. He had told himself often that this last need was an emotional cliché, a well-worn plotline which did not apply to him, but sometimes it had been easy to lapse into the pattern—easier than suspecting that the dark hunger which ate his soul came from no one but himself. And now all the strands of his existence were breaking away, leaving nothing but internal emptiness. The excess of alcohol gave him the illusion that his perceptions were sharpened rather than clouded and he saw Dana’s face in greater detail: her pallor appeared yellowish against the white of the pillow, her lips bloodless. He did not touch her, avoiding the contact with flesh that felt cold and dead. Somewhere in the paralysis of his brain he thought: I need help.

He thought aloud.

Without realising it, he had fallen asleep. The unfamiliar words touched a chord deeper than memory. He was in a city—a city of long ago, with pillars and colonnades and statues of men and beasts, and the dome of a temple rising above it all flashing fire at the sun. He heard the creak of wooden wheels on paving, saw the slaves shovelling horse-dung with the marks of the lash on their backs. There was a girl standing beside him, a girl whose black hair fell straight to her waist and whose eyes were the pure turquoise of sea-shallows. ‘—help,’ she was saying. ‘You must help me—’ but her face changed, dissolving slowly, the contours re-forming to a different design, and he was in the dark, and a red glimmer of torchlight showed him close-cropped hair and features that seemed to be etched in steel. The first face had been beautiful but this one was somehow familiar; he saw it with a pang of recognition as sharp as toothache. There was a name on his lips—a name he knew well—but it was snatched away, and he woke abruptly not knowing where he was, reaching for the dream as if it were the key to his soul.

One of the male nurses was leaning over him, clasping his shoulder with a scrubbed pink hand. ‘You called out,’ he explained. ‘I was outside. I think you said: “I need help.”’

‘Yes,’ said Lucas. ‘I did. I do.’

The young nurse smiled a smile that was reassuring—a little too reassuring, and knowing, and not quite human.

‘Help will be found,’ he said.

A damp spring ripened slowly into the disappointment of summer. Wizened countrymen read the signs—‘The birds be nesting high this year’—‘The hawthorn be blooming early’—‘I seed a ladybird with eight spots’—and claimed it would be hot. It wasn’t. In London Gaynor moved back into her refurbished flat and stoically withstood the advances of her host of New Year’s Eve in his quest for extramarital sympathy. Will Capel returned from Outer Mongolia and invited his sister to dinner, escorting her to the threshold of the Caprice restaurant before recollecting that all he could afford was McDonald’s. Fern drank a brandy too many, picked up the tab, and went home to dream the dream again, waking to horror and a sudden rush of nausea. In Queen Square, Dana Walgrim did not stir. Lucas devoted more time to the pursuit of venture capitalism, doing adventurous things with other people’s capital, but rivals said he had lost his focus, and the spectre that haunted him was not that of greed. And at Wrokeby the hovering sun ran its fingers over the façade of the house, and poked a pallid ray through an upper window, withdrawing it in haste as the swish of a curtain threatened to sever it from its source.

It was late May, and the clouds darkened the long evening into a premature dusk. The sunset was in retreat beyond the Wrokewood, its lastlight snarled in the treetops on Farsee Hill. Three trees stood there, all dead, struck by lightning during the same storm that had shattered the conservatory at the house, and although there was fresh growth around each bole the three crowns were bare, leafless spars jutting skyward like stretching arms. Folklorists claimed that Farsee Hill was a contraction of pharisee, or fairy, and liked to suggest some connection with an occult curse, the breaking of a taboo, the crossing of a forbidden boundary, though no one had yet come up with a plot for the undiscovered story. That evening, the clouds seemed to be building up not for a storm but for Night, the ancient Night that was before electricity and lamps and candles, before Man stole the secret of fire from the gods. The dark crept down over wood and hill, smothering the last of the sun. In the smaller sitting room, another light leaped into being, an ice-blue flame that crackled and danced over coals that glittered like crystal. On the floor, the circle took fire, in a hissing trail that swept around the perimeter at thought-speed. The witch stood outside it, close to the hearth. Her dress was white, sewn with sequins that flung back the wereglow in tiny darts of light. But her hair was shadow-black, and her eyes held more Night than all the dark beyond the curtains.