CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Maisie tried not to worry about wax dripping on the expensive carpet as she sat cross-legged with Sacha in a circle of candles. All electric lights were out, leaving only the amber glow to flicker around them. Sacha had a deck of small white cards which he was shuffling carefully.

“Now, remember what I taught you today?”

“Yep.” All day he’d had her doing breathing exercises, exercises to relax her body and open her mind. It had been difficult, and even a little boring, so the promise of candlelight and psychic experimentation was welcome.

“Concentrate in your third eye then.”

“Sure.” She tried to focus in her forehead.

“Okay. I’ll hold up a card so only I can see it. You’ve got to try to read from me which card it is. Look . . .” He lay five of the cards down to demonstrate what they looked like. “Stars, circles, lines, triangles and squares. Five out of twenty-five is average dumb luck. Any more than that and we’re in psychic territory. Are you ready?”

“I’m ready.”

He held up the first card so she could only see the smooth white back. “Now, see if you can read me.”

She closed her eyes and tried to reach out her mind for his. Nothing. She guessed. “Star?”

“And this one?” He held up another.

“Did I get it right?”

“I’m not telling you until the end.”

She guessed again. “Circle?”

On they went, through the pack. Every time she tried to reach out for his thoughts, and every time she couldn’t feel a thing so she guessed.

“So, how did I do?” she asked as Sacha lay the last card down on top of the pack.

“You got four right.”

“Four? Not even average dumb luck?”

“Sometimes when somebody is psychic and they’re that far out, we look for presentience. That is, whether you’re actually picking up what the next card will be, rather than the one I’m holding.”

“And?”

“That wasn’t the case.”

Maisie slumped over, ran her fingertips through the carpet pile. “Great. I’m not psychic.”

“But you are. You so definitely are. We just need to find where you’ve stored this ability for all these years.” He squared off the cards and put them aside.

“Are you still centred?”

“No. I’m annoyed and it’s hard to be ‘centred’

when I’m annoyed.”

“It doesn’t matter anyway. I don’t know what else to try. The Zener cards are usually a good indicator.”

“So I’ve failed already?”

“No. You know, your negative attitude is probably getting in the way.”

She felt a sharp retort on her lips, but bit it back. It wouldn’t do to get snappy with Sacha. “What can I do about it?”

“Try to stop being negative. Are you embarrassed by all this? Is that the problem?”

She considered. “Maybe. My family, Adrian, would all think this was terribly funny. If not a little looney.”

“Well, you’re not with them, you’re with me. And I’m a believer.” He unfolded his legs and stretched them out, one foot on either side of her knees. “Let’s try this. Can you cast your mind back to a time when you had a psychic experience?”

“Like, from childhood?”

“Yes. Anything you can remember?”

She thought hard. “I was about six when I dreamed that my neighbours bought a new dog – a golden retriever named Sandy. Two days later, it happened.”

“What kind of dream? Surreal? Realistic?”

“Just a dream. I don’t remember it standing out particularly – in fact, I forgot about it until the dog arrived. I guess that means I might not have dreamed it at all, that I may have thought I did after the fact.”

“Maybe. Any others?”

She brought her knees up under her chin, stretched her skirt out over them. “Yes . . . I had an auntie . . . Dad’s sister Jacqui.” Her mind reached for the memories. “I remember . . . being distressed for some reason, though I can’t remember what it was. And when Mum came to tuck me in, I said I couldn’t sleep because Aunt Jacqui was sick and dying.” She frowned. “I was right. She died two days later from chronic food poisoning.”

“Could you have known beforehand that your aunt was sick?”

“No. Nobody did. And now it’s coming to me a little clearer. I dreamed Jacqui was sick, and I woke up from it very upset. That’s why Mum was there. I’d had this nightmare about it. And you know, I think that might have been the first time I got sick from it. I had this awful headache before I went to bed, then the nightmare . . . no, I didn’t get sick until the day after. Until after we found out it was true.”

“Any other occasions?”

The memories were becoming clearer now as she concentrated on them. Being so sick after each occasion had served to push them far from her conscious mind.

“A couple. You know, Sacha, I think they were all dreams. And I’d get the headache before I went to sleep and . . . get sick after. I told Mum about the headaches and . . . I can’t really remember. I don’t think Mum liked it, and I’ve since found out why.” She looked up.

“Could it be I stopped having these dreams because I knew my mother didn’t approve?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t think it’s likely. Tell me about the dreams, again. Were you in them, or just watching them?”

“God, I can’t remember. Watching, I think.” Her forehead was tight with trying to concentrate. “I think.”

“Perhaps your Gift is remote viewing.”

“That doesn’t sound very glamorous.”

He ignored her comment. “It makes sense actually. If, for some reason, your psychism was driven underground, I mean repressed from your

consciousness, then dreams would be the obvious place for the premonitions to reappear.”

Something dark was scratching at the back of her mind, but wouldn’t come to light. A memory of something? She felt a vague sense of fear but was not sure why.

“Maisie? Are you okay?”

“Yes, I’m fine. I just feel like I’ve been

concentrating all evening. Maybe I’m overloaded.”

“Let’s take a break and go somewhere really mundane for something to eat.”

“Sounds good.”

They ended up in the KFC on Tottenham Court Road. Maisie’s chips were too greasy. She rolled them in napkins while Sacha looked on, amused.

“I hate it when they’re too greasy,” she explained.

“Sorry. Would you have preferred something

different?”

“No. I’m not a health nut or anything. I’m a big junk food fan. I wasn’t allowed to eat it as a child.”

The restaurant was noisy and the fluorescent lighting was harsh. But she felt a little more comfortable now. It had been such an intense evening.

Sacha asked her a question just as she took a huge bite of her burger. “Do you know what lucid dreaming is?”

She chewed and swallowed too quickly, nearly choking on a sesame seed. She had to slurp urgently from her Tango to stop herself from coughing. Real ladylike.

“I think so. Is that when you dream and you’re aware that you’re dreaming?”

“Yes, something like that. Once you’re aware that you’re dreaming, you can control the dreams. I think that’s what we’ve got to try next.”

“How do you do it?”

“You’re probably already very open to it. Before you go to sleep, you have to centre yourself and open up your energy centres. Then, as you go to sleep, tell yourself over and over that you’ll be aware when you’re dreaming.”

“And then?”

“Then, you can ask your dreams for information. Maybe even go places.” He grew excited, leaned forward on the table. “Yes, we can do an experiment.”

“What’s that?”

“I’ll write a note and leave it by my bed. You have to dream what it says.”

“Okay. We’ll try it.” Her excitement was shortlived. “What if I fail at this test too?”

“We’ll find something else. You underestimate my patience.”

“Thanks, Sacha. I really appreciate your help.”

“It’s my pleasure. The other thing you can do is, during the day, ask yourself over and over if you’re dreaming: ‘Am I dreaming now?’ Like a mantra.”

“What will that do?”

“If you get obsessive enough about it, you might find yourself asking yourself in your sleep. That’s another good way to start lucid dreaming. I’ll keep reminding you.”

“Okay, thanks.”

He wiped his hands on a napkin and stretched back. “Of course, the wonderful thing about you doing dreamwork is that it leaves our days free to hang out in my favourite pubs and cafes.”

“That sounds pretty good to me. But when do we have to go back to Solgreve?” It seemed like a million miles away.

“My father will call to let me know when he’s coming back. Perhaps the end of the week? I definitely don’t want to be here when he gets home.”

“Why not?”

“I try to avoid him as much as possible.”

“You hate him that much?”

He leaned forward and considered his answer. “I don’t think I hate him. Though I certainly feel antagonistic towards him.”

“That’s a shame.”

“Do you think so?”

“It’s the flesh and blood thing, Sacha. Don’t you ever wonder about your father? Wonder what kind of a person he is? What he thinks about? He might be a lot like you.”

“I doubt it.”

“You wouldn’t know if you never talk to him.”

Sacha fell silent, thoughtful. “Maybe you’re right.”

Maisie finished the last of her chips. “I wish I’d met my grandmother. I’m finding out we had a lot in common.”

“Yes, you’re a lot like Sybill. But smarter, I think.”

“Thanks.”

“Are you dreaming now?”

“What? No.”

“You’re not supposed to answer, you’re just supposed to remind yourself to think of the question. Get into the habit.” He pushed his tray of rubbish away from him and grabbed his jacket. “We should head home, I’m tired out from all that drunken carousing we did over New Year’s.”

Maisie stood and picked up her handbag. “Okay, let’s go.” She could hardly wait to get to bed and start dreaming.

Reverend Fowler sat at his scarred desk, carefully going through the drawers. He knew he’d kept the card from that solicitor, but couldn’t remember quite where. His memory wasn’t what it used to be.

“Do you still have it?”

This was Tony, standing by the window, blocking out the view of the cool, clear sky. “Yes, I do. Somewhere here.”

“Do you want me to help look for it?”

“No. Here it is.” He held up the white square in triumph. “You don’t have to stay, Tony. I’m capable of dealing with this business alone.”

“Do you remember the girl’s name? Sybill’s

granddaughter.”

The Reverend faltered. “Mary Hartley?”

“Maisie Fielding. I’d better stay.”

Last night there had been a community meeting in the village hall, which was a draughty building at the end of Cross Street. The church’s finances were examined, village donations were made or promised, and enough money was found to make a significant down payment on Sybill’s cottage. The citizens of Solgreve would soon own it and, once and for all, they would be safe from witches. Nobody had asked yet if they would knock it down or rent it out (to a local family of course, not newcomers), but the Reverend knew there were a few in Solgreve who wanted to look inside, to delve into Sybill’s secrets as she had delved into theirs. The Reverend was not one of them. He doubted Sybill kept Satanic idols and shrunken heads around the house – he understood that most modern witches didn’t look or act like the ones in fifteenthcentury woodcuts. He lay the business card on his desk and reached for the phone. In a few moments, a receptionist took his call.

“Daniels and Young, how may I help you?”

“May I speak with Perry Daniels, please?”

“Who may I say is calling?”

“Reverend Linden Fowler from Solgreve.”

“Hold the line.”

He did as he was told, tapping his pen thoughtfully against his desk blotter.

“Hello, Reverend. This is Perry Daniels.”

“Hello, Mr Daniels.”

“What can I do for you?”

“It’s about Sybill Hartley’s cottage. Now that Miss Fielding has vacated it, we wonder if you might get in touch with her family for us. We’d like to make an offer to buy it.”

“I’m sorry, Reverend, you must be mistaken. Maisie hasn’t gone home yet.”

“But there have been no lights on for –”

“She’s in London with a friend. I believe she’s due back in a few days. But when she does go home, I’ll certainly pass on your offer to Roland and Janet.”

“Who?”

“The Fieldings. Maisie’s parents.”

The Reverend scribbled down their names, the disillusion overwhelming. They had been so sure this time. They had felt so safe. “Thank you, I’d appreciate that.”

“I’m glad I could be of assistance.”

They said their goodbyes and the Reverend turned to face Tony. “She’s coming back, she’s just in London for a few days.”

Tony shook his head. “Why on earth would she want to come back?”

The Reverend handed him the piece of paper with the names of Maisie’s parents. “Do you think Lester could track down a phone number or address in Australia for these people?”

“I’m sure he could.”

“Perhaps we should call them.”

“But even if they sell eventually, the girl’s coming back soon.”

“I don’t mean to phone them about the cottage,”

the Reverend said. “I mean to phone them about their daughter. Perhaps if she can’t be persuaded to leave, her family can be persuaded to bring her back.”

Although she hadn’t really expected anything to happen on the first night, Maisie was disappointed when she woke up Monday morning and realised she could hardly remember dreaming at all.

She told Sacha the disappointing news as they walked down towards the British Museum.

“That’s okay,” he said, “it might take some time.”

“I don’t know how much time I have. I’ll have to go back to Australia in a few weeks.” A deflating thought.

“Just keep asking yourself if you’re dreaming. And you don’t have to stop working on your ability when you leave the country, you know.”

Maybe she did know that, but she had such a strong sense that her return home might be an end to this adventure; that back home amongst the common details of her ordinary life, there was no place for psychic dreaming. It made her want to grab these moments with Sacha so hard that she might squeeze them to death. She pulled her hat down hard over her ears. A freezing wind was gusting up Gower Street. She relished it.

“Are you dreaming now?”

“Huh? Oh. Thanks for reminding me.” Am I dreaming now? Am I dreaming now? Sometimes she got it working so that the sentence kept repeating over and over in her mind, like background music to whatever else she was thinking.

They walked up the stone stairs and into the huge foyer of the building. Maisie had been here on her last two trips, but it never ceased to take her breath away.

“Come on, I want to show you something,” Sacha said, leading her up the stairs. They wandered through a few rooms until they came to the Elizabethan section. Sacha bent his knees in front of one of the glass cabinets and pointed to the display.

“See that? It’s John Dee’s magic mirror.”

Maisie found herself looking at a slab of shiny black rock, carved into a mirror shape. “What did he use it for?”

“For calling up spirits, I guess. Isn’t that what magicians do?”

“I don’t know.” Around the mirror were a couple of circular wax tablets, carved intricately with symbols and numbers. “How is it that he needed to do all this to get in touch with the psychic world and I, supposedly, can do it just by dreaming?”

Sacha straightened his back and they started to wander past the other exhibits. “Different people have different abilities. Nobody knows why. And you should be able to understand that better than anybody, being a musician. Why can one person sing while another can’t? Like Adrian.”

“I hadn’t thought of it like that. I’d always thought that if psychic power existed, then everybody must have it. It seems a bit unfair otherwise.”

“Of course it’s unfair. But when did you ever know life to be fair?” They were walking down the stairs now. “Greece? Or Egypt?”

“Um . . . Greece. Hey, is it true that gypsies originally came from Egypt?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m not in touch with my heritage. I grew up in England. I left Ma early to live like gad´zo. Even Ma doesn’t really live like a gypsy any more. Though she still travels a lot.”

“And your accent?”

“I don’t have one.”

“Yes, you do. Just lightly.”

“Must have got it off Ma.” He glanced at her.

“Sorry, is that disappointing? Did you think you were with someone much more exotic?”

“Of course not.” He worked in a bakery, lived in a dingy flat and didn’t get along with his father. Not strange and romantic at all. Maisie headed for a chair in front of a marble statue, sank into it and contemplated the display. Sacha sat next to her. His proximity, as always, made her skin tingle warmly.

“Are you dreaming now?” he asked.

She sighed. Didn’t say anything for a long time. Then, finally she said, “Maybe I am.”

On the third night it happened. In that half-world between waking and sleeping, she could hear what sounded like her own voice asking over and over, “Are you dreaming now?” It seemed to echo around in her head and bounce off her skull. She became aware of a sound like a bell tolling down a long tunnel. Then she found herself in a great stone hall and she was very cold. She turned to look around her, but her vision lagged a second or two behind her eyes. She held up her hands in front of her face and they seemed only able to move slowly. Like moving through deep water.

“Are you dreaming now?” Her own voice. The

question didn’t seem to make sense, and then she realised that yes, yes, she was dreaming. She called it out loudly in her dream. “Yes, I am dreaming.” Her voice seemed lonely in the huge stone hall, and she could still hear the bell tolling far away. She looked up and saw that the hall did not have a roof. A flock of birds went past overhead, calling to each other. For some reason she felt very afraid.

Then she remembered again that she was dreaming and knew she had to try Sacha’s experiment. She watched as the walls of the great hall dissolved around her, and was afraid that the dream was unknitting (this was a word that her dream-self seemed to know) and that she would fall back into uninterrupted sleep. She willed herself to be back in the London apartment. There was a moment of black, then she found herself looking down at the layout of the lounge room. She was there!

Slowly and deliberately, like a child taking first steps, she floated towards Sacha’s room. She could still hear the bell tolling, and every tone frightened her. Even though she was somewhere familiar, she felt a desolate loneliness, cold-deep in her stomach. Nothing seemed quite real. Strange shimmers of light and dark washed around her.

As she moved towards Sacha’s room, the walls appeared to dissolve around her and she was all at once in a forest. The trees looked familiar, and she realised that it was the wood behind the cottage in Solgreve. This panicked her. It was cold and damp and she was shivering, and she was too old to be running so hard. Too old? She held her hands in front of her again, and saw they were the hands of an old woman. An enormous, black terror rose up within her. They are nearly upon me. The sounds of something chasing her, tiny branches snapping, the undergrowth being kicked up. And the bell on Solgreve church ringing, carrying across the cliffs and out to sea.

Am I dreaming now?

As soon as the question was asked she was back in London. It seemed she was slipping in and out of the lucid dream. But in the dream in London it was now daylight and the fireplace and bookshelves from Sybill’s cottage were here, and the clock from the hallway of her parents’ house, too. Sacha walked out of his room and said, “I suppose you want to know what I wrote on the note beside my bed?”

“Yes,” she replied. The bell still tolled in the distance, eerie and hollow.

“Here.” He held up a piece of paper with red letters on it. They made no sense.

“I can’t read that,” she said. “You’ve made it confusing because you like to see me squirm.”

“That would be cruel,” he said. “Try harder.”

Am I dreaming now?

“Can you hear the bell?” she asked.

“Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

“Then you can hear it too?” The sound created a tumult of anxiety in her stomach.

“How did Sybill die?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Neither do I. But I think she wants you to know.”

Again, she was back in the forest, being pursued, her old knees aching from the effort. She was so terrified she tried to wake herself up. Instead she found herself once more up near the ceiling of the London apartment; it was night-time and she was just outside Sacha’s room. This seemed suddenly more real, and she hung on to the feeling of reality to help propel herself through the door. She found him there, asleep in a bed too small for him. It was a kid’s room, his little half-brother’s, with Teletubby wallpaper and an overflowing toy box. She took a moment to watch him in the dark.

“Sacha?” she said. Her voice seemed to be a whisper coming from the walls. He stirred but did not wake. Beside his bed was a glass of water and a piece of paper. She focused on the piece of paper. He had written on it, Cupid is sitting on the skull of Humanity. She memorised the line, said it over and over in her head. Now, to get back to bed.

She moved out of Sacha’s room across the

apartment and to her own bedroom. The shock of seeing herself asleep down there heightened her sense of fear and loneliness. She was cold. Very cold.

“Wake up, Maisie,” she said to herself. Nothing was happening. She wasn’t returning to her body, and the girl on the bed hadn’t stirred. She began to panic. Should she go and try to wake Sacha again, get him to help her? Fear engulfed her, and the tolling began again . . . blood rushed past her ears and she kept running, running as hard as she could. Heavy breathing. Her own or . . .?

Maisie woke with a start. She could hear Sacha in the kitchen, washing up last night’s dishes. Weak daylight outside her window.

“Am I dreaming now?” she said in a breathy voice. The answer was quite definitely no. She sighed with relief, then remembered the note next to Sacha’s bed, threw back the covers and ran out to the kitchen in her pyjamas, all care for how she looked first thing in the morning forgotten.

Sacha turned as she came into the room. “Hi, Maisie. Want pancakes for breakfast?”

“Cupid is sitting on the skull of Humanity!”

He was momentarily struck dumb. “Maisie . . . you ...”

“Cupid is sitting on the skull of Humanity! And you wear blue pyjamas. I can do it!” she cried, barely able to contain her excitement.

“You can,” he said, nodding slowly. “You can.”

In the end they went out for breakfast – Maisie was so excited she had decided to use her credit card, which was something she almost never did. (Her mother’s voice in her head, “If you can’t afford it now, you can’t afford it later”, usually squashed the impulse). So they sat in a fancy Soho cafe with bacon, eggs, sausages, beans, toast and hot tea laid out between them.

“So where is the quote from?” Maisie asked, spreading marmalade on her toast.

“Which quote?”

“Cupid is sitting on the skull of Humanity.”

“Oh. I think it’s Baudelaire, an old girlfriend used to read it to me. I chose it because it sounded like something someone might say in a dream. And because it wasn’t a well-known quote. If I’d written

‘The cat sat on the mat’ and you’d got it right, I might have suspected you’d just made an educated guess.”

“God, it’s so exciting.”

“Tell me about the dream.”

“It was weird. I’ve only got a confused memory of most of it. Being in your dad’s flat is quite clear, because it wasn’t like dreaming. But the other stuff . . . No, I can’t quite remember. I think there was a bell ringing or something.”

“Are you going to do it again tonight?”

“Absolutely.” Even as she said this, though, she felt a vague fear.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong.”

“You frowned. You said ‘absolutely,’ then you frowned.”

“I don’t know . . . I felt afraid, suddenly. There was something cold and lonely about the dream.

Something to dread.”

“Well, you’re overcoming years of resistance. That would be unsettling.” He poured himself another cup of tea and stirred in two sugars. “Don’t let it put you off, this is exciting stuff. I can’t wait to tell my mother. She and Sybill always used to –”

“Sybill!” Maisie exclaimed, the rest of the dream suddenly swelling into consciousness. “I dreamt about Sybill.”

“What happened?”

Maisie caught her bottom lip between her teeth, going over the details in her head.

“Maisie?” Sacha prompted.

“I was in the wood behind the cottage, running away from something, but I was very old. And then I was back in your dad’s place, but it was daytime and you were asking me . . . you were asking me how Sybill died. And you said, ‘I think she wants you to know.’”

“But you do know. She got sick and went out looking for help, then collapsed on the way.”

“What kind of sick? Was she injured? Was it her heart, her lungs, her stomach?” Maisie laid both her hands, palms down, on the table. “Do you think it could have been a message from her?”

“I don’t know, Maisie,” he said, helping himself to some more bacon. “What do you think?”

“Something about it was terribly familiar. And that bell tolling away in the background. It was scary.”

“Dreams can be scary.”

“Yes, I know.”

“You’re entering a different world now, Maisie,” he said, leaning forward to touch her hand. “From now on you can’t flinch from nightmares.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“Morning, Reverend. I’ve got that number in Australia for you.” Lester Baines, hundreds of miles away safely on the other end of the phone.

The Reverend felt around on his desk for a pen and paper. “Thanks, Lester. Go on, I have a pen.”

Lester dictated the number and the Reverend read it back to check it.

“It was hard to get hold of, you know,” Lester said.

“A silent number. Apparently they’re both famous.”

“Really?” Visions of movie stars or politicians came to mind.

“Yeah. The wife’s a pianist and the husband’s a conductor.”

So the young woman had genes other than Sybill’s coarse witchiness. “Very interesting.”

“Why are you going to call them?”

“None of your business, Lester.”

“If you need me –”

“Thank you. You’ve done a great job.”

He put the phone down and sat back looking at the number, making calculations in his head: it would be early evening over there. This task had to be done just right. He had never made a threatening phone call in his life, and wondered whether the person on the other end of the line would find his thin, trembling voice comical rather than menacing.

Once more, he reached for the receiver. Soon, in a far distant land, the phone was ringing.

“Hello?” A male voice. The father.

“Hello. Roland Fielding?”

“No, it’s Adrian.”

Adrian? This threw him. Who was Adrian? “Are you Maisie Fielding’s brother?”

“I’m her boyfriend. Who is this?”

Her boyfriend. Perhaps this was even better. “This is somebody who cares about Maisie’s safety. She’s a long way away from you and there’s nobody to protect her.”

“What are you talking about? Is Maisie okay?”

“She won’t be for long. If you don’t get her home soon, something very bad may happen to her.”

“Who is this?” Good, he could hear desperation in the young man’s voice now. “What are you talking about?”

The Reverend’s finger wavered for a moment,

then pressed the button down. The line clicked. He replaced the receiver, aware that his heart was thumping violently. Was it excitement or fear? What if the young man made a complaint, and they tracked him down? He had visions of Interpol closing in on him, looking into his affairs, finding out his secrets.

Tony Blake opened the door, jolting the Reverend out of his morbid fantasy. “Sorry, Reverend,” he said.

“Didn’t mean to surprise you.”

The Reverend put his hand over his heart as though that could still it. “It’s all right, Tony. What can I do for you?”

“Have you heard back from Lester, yet?”

“Yes, and I’ve called Australia. I think we can expect something to give soon.”

“But you can’t shrink from your other promise, now.”

“What other promise?”

“When she gets back, you’ll have to send the Wraiths.”

The Reverend shuddered. He couldn’t stand to have that word used in the friendly light of morning. “Tony, you know I can’t send them. I can only ask and wait upon the providence of a greater power.”

“But you will ask?”

“We’ll see if it’s necessary. Now don’t mention it again. It unsettles me so.”

Tony gave him a look that said he grew weary of trying to understand the Reverend’s motives. “Why do you do it, Reverend?”

“Because it’s what my father and my father’s father did. That’s not so surprising, surely. Your father was a policeman, too, wasn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“We none of us fall so far from the tree that bore us,” said the Reverend, not meeting Tony’s eye. “I’m just fulfilling my destiny.”

***

Maisie was in the wood behind the house again. Why did the dream always start here? A submerged terror was rising up through her body.

Am I dreaming now?

Yes, she was, and she refused to have this horrible dream again.

She stopped running and asked, “Why am I having this dream?”

In front of her, Reverend Fowler materialised, attempting a friendly smile with those misfitting false teeth. “How did your grandmother die?”

“She was sick. She went for help. She didn’t make it.”

“You should run. They’re coming for you.”

Reverend Fowler disappeared. The sounds of the chase were approaching. But she was dreaming, nothing could hurt her. She turned and stood her ground. Two dark shapes were moving in the distance, darting between trees. She breathed out and saw her breath like fog.

“I’m not afraid of you. I know I’m only dreaming.”

Then why did her heart begin to pound, her knees begin to quaver?

The ringing phone woke her up. She lay in bed, grateful for the bland comfort of a ceiling and four walls. She could hear Sacha in the lounge room, answering the phone. In a few moments, he was knocking at her door.

“Yes?” she asked cautiously.

“Telephone for you. It’s Adrian.”

Adrian? She checked her watch. It was only seven o’clock. She threw back the covers, pulled on a robe and went out to the lounge room. Sacha had left the phone on the table and gone back to bed.

“Hi, Adrian.”

“Maisie, are you okay?”

“Of course I’m okay. Why are you ringing so early?”

“I tried to ring last night. Where were you?”

“Sacha and I went to the pub, then we had a late dinner,” she said, wondering why she felt guilty. “You sound frantic. What’s the matter?”

“Somebody phoned from England last night, saying that you were in danger.”

“What?”

“He said if you didn’t come home soon, something bad was going to happen to you.”

She was temporarily dumbstruck. Eventually she said, “Who was it? What did he sound like?”

“He sounded like he was putting on a fake voice –

kind of soft and high. Maisie, I want you to come home.”

Home? Now? “Who would do this? Why are you

so sure it’s somebody from England?”

“I . . . ah . . . I guess he didn’t actually say where he was from. But it was probably the same lunatic who put a brick through your window.”

Was this typical Adrian, overreacting? “Adrian, you’re not making sense. Sure the people of Solgreve are a bit mad but they’re not dangerous. They’re all fundamentalist types –”

“Who think you’re a witch.”

Maisie leaned her elbows on the table. “You know, Adrian, how would somebody in Solgreve get our number? For a start, it’s silent. How do you know it wasn’t someone else, someone in Brisbane, someone who knows I’m away and wants to upset you?”

“Like who?”

“I don’t know – our family has hundreds of

enemies. Mum’s not the most popular human being on the planet.”

“Maisie, listen to yourself. You’re being ridiculous. Just come home.”

“I’ll be home soon enough.”

“Come home today.”

Don’t tell me what to do. “No,” she said firmly. “I won’t be intimidated. I’m not finished here yet. I have to find out how my grandmother died.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It just seems impossible. You’re trying to tell me that the people of Solgreve, a bunch of dumb, backwater hicks, are international criminal masterminds who can find silent numbers in foreign places when they don’t even know my parents’ names. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“I’d be happier if you were back here,” he said softly. And it was his softness of voice, reminding her of all the reasons why she loved him, which moved her where his desperation couldn’t. She gave in a little.

“Okay, as soon as I get back to Solgreve I’ll phone and bring my return flight forward a couple of weeks. I’ll sort out a few more things, and I’ll try to be home around the same time you’re home from New Zealand.”

“And in the meantime, get somebody to come and stay with you. Cathy, or even that Sacha guy.”

“I’m sure Cathy would come for a while. And my grandmother’s house is like a fortress, believe me. Trust me to be smart enough to stay safe. And in the meantime, try to think of who else might be trying to upset you. Or Mum.”

“I can be back from Auckland on the eighteenth.”

“All right,” she said, even though it hurt her to say it. “I’ll be back the same day.” Less than a fortnight, a distance in time which was countable in days. Not really enough time for Sacha to fall in love with her, or for her to become a powerful psychic. Back to reality.

“I’m going to call you every day from Auckland. If you don’t answer I’m going to panic.”

“There will be no need for panicking. Have a good time at the summer school.”

“I love you, Maisie. Sorry if this has ruined your trip.”

Maisie said a half-hearted, “It’s okay.” The sky was gradually growing lighter outside. She watched rain drip off the eaves.

“It’ll be good to have you home,” Adrian

continued.

Home. The word closed around her and stuck to her skin. She felt as though she’d just been told that she’d spend the rest of her life colour blind. “Yeah,”

she said, not caring that Adrian would pick up her insincerity. “It’ll be good to be back.”

Janet listened to the whole story, nodding in that controlled, intellectual way she had. They sat in the airconditioned music room, a tray of tea between them, taking refuge from the unbearable humidity which clung to the walls in every other room of the house.

“What do you think?” Adrian asked. He had to get on a flight to Auckland in less than twelve hours, but couldn’t stop worrying. Perhaps he should cancel and rush over to England.

Janet tapped a fingernail thoughtfully on her knee.

“I think Maisie’s right to be sceptical about who called. It is far more likely that it was somebody who already has our number. We made it a silent number in the first place because of harassment calls.”

Adrian felt his tension ease a little. Janet could always see things clearly – at least, things that didn’t relate to her. “So you’re not worried?”

“Oh, yes, I’m worried. But the whole trip has been a terrible worry to me. If, as you say, she’s going to have a friend staying with her and she’s coming home early, I think you can head off to Auckland without too much heartache.”

“I thought about cancelling the summer school, going over to be with her.”

Janet sniffed dismissively. “Don’t be ridiculous. You know you’re not serious. Your profile will be lifted enormously by teaching this school. It’s probably one of the reasons Churchwheel’s have contracted you. You have far too much riding on it to cancel it at the last minute. Professional musicians must be professional.”

“You’re right.”

She leaned forward and refilled his teacup. “I’ll call my mother’s solicitor in York and tell him to keep an eye on her. Would that make you feel better?”

“Much better.”

“Then consider it done. Now, when is she coming home?”

“Around the eighteenth. Less than two weeks.”

“I’ll have a word to the director of the City Symphony, see if she can have her old job back. I don’t think they found anybody permanent to replace her, and her hand must be better by now.”

Adrian spooned sugar into his tea and stirred it absently. “What’s wrong with her hand?” As soon as he said it, he remembered the fake injury. He could feel his heart pick up a beat as Janet scrutinised him.

“Oh, that. I’d almost forgotten. Yes, I’m sure it’s much better.”

Janet’s eyes narrowed. “Adrian? Is there something you’re not telling me?”

Adrian felt as though he were being examined on the end of a pin. Nothing got past this woman, nothing. What now? Lie more and really dig his own grave? Or admit everything? “I … I don’t know what you mean.” He didn’t sound convincing and he knew it.

“Adrian, you’re lying to me. You live in my home, I treat you like a son, and you’re lying to me. I’d expect this from Maisie, but not from you.” Incredulous, accusing.

Adrian gulped. Don’t get anxious. “Janet, I . . .”

But he already knew he was defeated.

She smiled tightly, nodded once as if it had already been decided. “It would be better if you told me everything.”

“Should I try to contact my grandmother?”

Sacha looked up from his coffee. They were sitting in a crowded patisserie in Soho. A rowdy group of South African backpackers had taken over the table next to them, trapping them in a corner. From Maisie’s vantage point, there seemed to be no escape.

“That’s not too weird to ask, right? Trying to speak with the dead?” Maisie continued. She was so unused to talking about these things she always expected laughter or accusations of insanity. Sacha didn’t respond with either.

“You could try. I doubt if she’s still around. Sybill was very ambitious about her Afterlife.”

“What does that mean?”

The group next to them burst into loud laughter. Sacha waited until they had quietened down before proceeding. “Sybill spent a lot of time communicating with the dead.”

Maisie didn’t know why that made her feel queasy, but it did. “Is that so?”

“She had a theory about what happened after death. There are three places you could go. First, you could be earthbound, through psychic or emotional trauma.”

“Like a ghost?”

“Exactly. She spent a lot of time working on helping earthbound spirits into the next life. Because that’s the second option, to be born again as somebody else.”

“Reincarnation.”

“Right. But it’s not an endless cycle of death and rebirth. Not according to Sybill. When you’ve collected enough psychic lessons, you go beyond that cycle. To a realm of perfection: heaven, or nirvana, or whatever you want to call it. Most people plug away at it for centuries, life after life, learning all the facets of humanity. Sybill was hopeful that she was approaching the end of the cycle. And to speed her passage, she was doing everything she could to develop her own psychic powers. With enough energy, she thought she could drive herself all the way across. She wanted her life as Sybill Hartley to be her last life.”

“Do you think she managed it?”

“If anyone could, it would be Sybill.” He took a sip of his coffee and leaned back in his chair. “Or you.”

“Me?”

“Sybill believed that intense psychic ability was a sign that the cycle was closing down.”

“You’re scaring me. I don’t want to think about dying.”

“Sorry.”

“You mean that I’m on my last life?”

“Sybill would say so. But let’s not think about it.”

“I don’t feel particularly enlightened. I don’t feel like somebody who has learned everything.”

“I thought you didn’t want to think about it.”

“I’m so unprepared for all this weird stuff.” She looked down at her half-finished caramel tart. “Last night, I lay awake most of the night all panicked and bewildered. It’s overwhelming, the things I’ve seen and done. Dream-travelling, and evil spirits in my grandmother’s house, and finding out I’m psychic.” She raised her head, met his gaze. “You know, my family and Adrian aren’t just on another continent, they’re in another universe, one with different rules and laws of reality. They wouldn’t understand any of this.”

“They might understand. You don’t know.”

“I know. I know them. Part of me wants to run home and not be scared any more, but part of me is so afraid that if I do, things will return to normal and I’ll be miserable and unfulfilled for the rest of my life.”

She pushed her hair behind her ears. “This psychic thing is the only thing I’ve ever had that didn’t come from them. It’s mine. It’s not in the Fielding how-tolive guide. I’m desperate not to lose it.” Coincidentally, she felt exactly the same way about Sacha himself.

“Don’t be desperate. You’ll be a better psychic if you learn to relax,” Sacha said with an indulgent smile. “Do you want another coffee?”

She didn’t really – it was expensive and a little too strong. But she said yes anyway because Sacha was half out of his seat and on his way to the counter. He picked his way through the backpackers. One of the girls looked at him admiringly. Maisie broke a piece of crust off her caramel tart and popped it into her mouth. The dreams were getting to her. They insisted that she find out for sure how Sybill died, but she didn’t know where to start. She was hardly equipped for private detection, and she had a vague notion that the whole project might be misguided and . . . well, stupid.

Sacha returned shortly with two more cups. “So, you don’t think you’ll play cello any more when you go back to Australia?” he asked, moving the empty cups to the edge of the table and setting the fresh ones down.

“I don’t want to.”

“Why not? Just because you’re not passionate about it?” He edged into his seat.

“Yeah, that. And the people. I never really felt like I fitted in with the orchestra.”

“No?”

“No. I mean, they all expected me to be a genius or a snob because of who my parents are, but I’m neither. A lot of them are geniuses and snobs though. They’re either incredibly out of touch with the real world because their whole being is consumed with music, or they want to pretend they’re that way. There was this one girl, a violin player, who really pissed me off. She always used to say that she’d never seen a Hollywood movie, and she was really proud of that. It’s so boring. It’s so elitist. And I think a lot of them disliked me even before they met me, because they thought I only got the job because of my dad.”

“Are you sure you weren’t just being paranoid?”

Maisie shrugged. “Maybe. But I still felt bad about it. I can’t help the way I feel.”

“What will you do instead?”

“I don’t know. I’m desperate to stay out of the orchestra, but I bet that even as we speak my mum is making a deal with the management to get me back in. That’s going to be the hardest part, telling Mum to butt out of it.” She looked up, and noticed that he was staring past her shoulder and out the window. She guessed she’d bored him. “Did you ever have aspirations to do something different?” she asked carefully. He returned his attention to her, smiled and said deadpan, “No, working in a bakery is my life’s dream.”

She laughed out loud.

“With me it’s never been about career,” he

continued, more seriously. “It’s always been about people or places. I don’t really care what I do as long as I’m where I want to be, or with whom I want to be with. I like living across the road from the sea. I like Whitby, and I have friends nearby. It wouldn’t really matter what I did. I don’t need much money or fancy things like my dad does. Just enough to keep my van running and have a few drinks with the lads from time to time.”

“It sounds very uncomplicated.”

“Yeah, well life doesn’t have to be complicated.”

Maisie thought about this. It sounded good but she didn’t believe it.

“My dad’s coming home tomorrow night,”

Sacha said.

“Oh? So we have to leave?”

“I’m afraid so.”

The thought of returning to Solgreve made her fearful. She tried to analyse it, figure if it had anything to do with Adrian’s warning about the threatening phone call. But the fear seemed to be centred around the wood behind the cottage which she kept dreaming about.

“Maisie . . .” Sacha started, then trailed off as if it was too difficult to say what he had to say.

“What?” she asked.

“You know what you said about how I should get to know my dad?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve thought a lot about it and I’ve decided you’re right. Would you mind terribly if I stayed a couple more days to talk to him? It would mean you have to go home alone.”

Alone was the last thing she wanted to be on returning to Solgreve. And what if Sacha and his dad got on so well that he never came back? Who would teach her to be psychic? She couldn’t stand the thought of not seeing him again.

“Maisie?”

“Of course I don’t mind.”

“I’ll give you Chris’s address and you can pick up Tabby and my van so you can drive straight home.”

While the idea of driving a strange vehicle along strange highways was kind of scary, at least if she had his van he would have to come back for it, right?

“That will be fine.”

“Great. I’ll ring Chris beforehand so you’re expected. You’re a good sport, Maisie.”

She didn’t know how to respond, so she said nothing.

***

Maisie emerged from her bathroom and sat down cross-legged on the floor in front of the mirror to brush her hair. Going back to Solgreve tomorrow. Last few hours with Sacha. She put down the brush and stared at herself in the mirror. Hardly even recognised herself because she had dissected that face too many times: eyebrows, all wrong; mouth, too small; eyes, too dark; colouring, all the same. But all around her trembled the promise of seeing herself as desirable if only Sacha would look at her as if she were. He was probably asleep now, separated from her by two closed bedroom doors which would be easy enough to open. In less than two weeks she would have to leave England. Who knew how long he would stay with his father? Perhaps she should march out there right now, wake him up, tell him that she was his if he wanted her and damn the consequences. Damn the future, damn loyalty and all those other things that kept her suspended in one position, from where every other position looked more satisfying. She closed her eyes, thought about the way his top lip seemed to turn up a little in the middle, making it wide and flat. The thought of that tiny spot, less than a square centimetre of flesh, made her feel wild, desperate. As though all the answers to life beckoned there; if she could just touch it once with her own top lip, or her bottom lip, or even the tip of her smallest finger. This was a desire like lunacy. But she didn’t leave her room to seek out Sacha. And she wouldn’t, she knew that. She would return to Solgreve tomorrow, and then a week or so later she would return to Brisbane and her life would pick up again like an orchestra returning from a coffee break. Crescendos and decrescendos in place, movements following on from one another as they had already been written down, the notes carrying her inexorably to the final cadence. Adrian, expensive wedding, upper-middle-class suburbia, children with good teeth, obligatory European trips, teaching music in hushed rooms, illness perhaps, then death.

Thanks for coming.

Clutching Sacha’s hand-drawn map, Maisie walked up from York train station looking for the street where Sacha’s friend Chris lived. She hoped he was home. She hoped he wasn’t like Curtis. Leaving Sacha in London had been a wrench; as they waited on the platform at King’s Cross Station he had confessed he didn’t know when he’d be returning for his van, but he hoped it would be before she left the country. If not, she was to leave the van keys under a certain rock in the front garden for him. As well as she could, she hid the despair that the thought of never seeing him again awoke in her. When it was time for her to board the train he’d hugged her briefly, pressed his lips into her right cheek, and stood back to wave goodbye. As though it might be forever.

Maisie looked up and checked the house number. This was where Chris lived. She took the stairs slowly and knocked at flat number eight. Her next challenge was managing to get the van home without too much drama or embarrassment. She waited by the door and within thirty seconds a short woman with a blonde ponytail answered it.

“Hi,” said Maisie. “I’m looking for Chris.”

“I’m Chris. You must be Daisy.”

Okay, so Chris was a girl. No need to panic.

“Maisie,” Maisie corrected her. A grey cat and a white cat twined around the girl’s ankles. “I’m here for Tabby and Sacha’s van keys.”

“Sure,” Chris said. “Come in.”

Maisie followed her inside the tiny, but modern, flat. It smelled strongly of old cat litter and the heating was up too high. Tabby glanced up and wandered over at her own pace to say hello.

Chris was looking in a drawer for the keys. “So Sacha decided to stay in London with his father?” she asked. She said the “th” in father like a “v”.

“Yeah, apparently they don’t get on so well.”

“I know.”

She knew. Maisie looked around, wondering if she’d be staying long enough to remove her hat and gloves.

“Here they are,” Chris said, pulling out the keys and slamming the drawer with her hip. With a smile which Maisie suspected was one hundred percent false, Chris handed her the keys.

“Thanks.”

“You were expecting a man, weren’t you?”

“I’m sorry?”

“You were expecting a man to open the door. I saw you were surprised.”

“Well, Sacha only referred to you as his friend Chris, and I guess that’s a man’s name.”

“His friend?”

“Yes,” Maisie said slowly, wondering what she was implying.

“I’m his girlfriend.”

“Oh.”

“He didn’t tell you that?”

“No.”

“We’re on a break. You know, having a bit of time apart.”

“I see.” A vague nausea sat in her stomach. And anger. Why hadn’t Sacha told her? But then, why should he tell her? Chris was still looking at her, chin slightly raised as though in challenge.

“I’d better take the cat and go home,” Maisie said.

“If you want a good home for Tabby when you go back to Australia, I’ll gladly take her. I’ve already got two but I could look after three.” Pronounced “free”.

“I’ll keep that in mind.” Maisie bent over to pick up Tabby who squeaked in protest but didn’t try to run away.

“Do you want some help starting the van? It’s a temperamental old thing.”

Temperamental old “fing” or not, Maisie did not want this woman around her, demonstrating her intimate knowledge of Sacha and his possessions. “No, I’ll be fine. Thanks anyway.”

Downstairs, cooling off in the winter late afternoon, Maisie put Tabby in the van and got into the front to start the engine. Sacha had instructed her to let it warm up for a good five minutes. She did so, finding indicators, heating vents and windscreen wipers, and experimenting with levers to move the seat forward. She hadn’t driven a car with manual transmission in two years. She and Adrian shared a shiny Japanese coupe with an automatic gearbox and power steering. The drive back to Solgreve was going to be a trial. She checked the other side of Sacha’s map, where he had written

instructions for which entries and exits to take to get home, and memorised them as best she could. When she was sure all was okay, she checked Tabby in the back (even the cat looked nervous), put the car in gear and drove as smoothly as possible away from that awful Chris woman and her smug smile and mispronounced consonants. Wondering what Sacha ever saw in her. Maybe it was the unfamiliar car and the unfamiliar road; maybe it was the dark clouds building on the horizon, threatening rain; maybe it was the way the wind became gustier the closer she got to Solgreve. For some reason, anxiety began to drift around deep inside her on the last few kilometres home. She became aware of her own pulse in her throat, she couldn’t stop nibbling her fingernails, and she had a vague, jittery feeling. She took deep breaths to try to fight it, but as she took the last turn-off before Solgreve’s main street, she realised she was almost frantic with fear.

Something bad is going to happen.

This was unbearable. She wanted to turn the car around and drive straight to Heathrow. Instead, she drove down past the bus stop and the church and the cemetery and the ghostly remains of the abbey, took the right-hand turn into St Mary’s Lane, and pulled up outside the cottage. Killed the engine. She leaned for a moment on the steering wheel, looking at the front of the cottage. It looked the same as it always had: no broken windows, no pentagrams painted in pig’s blood, no axe-wielding shadows moving around inside. Situation normal. This anxiety was not presentiment. Tabby was already scratching at the door.

“Okay, cat. Let’s go in.”

She opened the back and retrieved her suitcase. Tabby scampered out and, within seconds, was mewing at the front door. Maisie followed the cat down the front path to the house and unlocked the door.

Almost as soon as the door swung inwards, she was overcome with acute dizziness. A sudden shift in her perception popped in her ears. She let go of her case and cried out. Hands to her temples, she gulped for air. She dropped to sit on the doorstep, her mind reeling. Every sound in the street and beyond – the sea, the wind, every branch moving on every tree – was screaming at her. Every colour’s brightness had been turned up, every scent on the air was acrid in her nostrils. And the horrible fear she had experienced indistinctly all the way home suddenly became an agonising black barb to her mind, the kind of terror one might feel on Judgement Day. Not just fear for her life, but fear for her eternal soul. She wondered for a split second whether she could live through this feeling. Then as fast as it had hit her it was gone again, but she was left with the impression that her sensations were somehow magnified. The paint under her

fingertips on the doorframe felt particularly smooth, the tickle of a strand of hair on her cheek particularly keen, the smell of the house behind her, musty from being locked up and unlived in for a week, particularly cloying. She knew, with certainty, that this had to be some kind of after-effect of all the psychic work she had done in London. She shakily rose to her feet and closed the door behind her, stepped gingerly into the lounge room afraid that the act of entering a new room may set the feeling off again. No, she was fine. The hammering of her heart had begun to slow. She forced herself to make a fire, practical steps one after another, willing herself to return to normal. In the kitchen, Tabby was headbutting the cupboard where her food was kept. Maisie fed her, then went through each room in the house, reassuring herself that she was safe, that the awful feeling wouldn’t come back again. She ended up in the laundry, peering out the back window, looking at the dark wood behind the garden. The wood she kept dreaming about. The sky was dimly overcast, but full darkness was still about an hour away.

How did Sybill die?

She opened the back door and strode across the back garden with more confidence than she felt.

Still daylight – nothing was going to jump out and say boo to her. And while she was in this heightened state of sensitivity, perhaps there was something the wood could tell her.

Her strides became slower, less confident as she moved through the gap in the rosebushes. She braced herself for that awful feeling again, took a careful step, another. Past the first small trees, leaves spongy underfoot, grey clouds of tiny branches around her. Slowly, the sense of dread began to return. Every patch of moss looked like a portentous pattern, every branch tensed in waiting for some horror. She tried to keep her breathing deep and regular, to remain centred as Sacha had shown her. Rain started to spit from the sky and a half-second later the wind picked up, making the tree branches sway crazily. She moved further into the woods, reached out her hand towards a tree trunk. Like an electric shock, a dark, cold energy shot up her fingers and into her brain. She pulled her hand back instantly.

“This is impossible,” she said aloud, her breath making fog. She reached out her fingertips again, let them rest on the tree trunk, and closed her eyes bravely. The dream images came back to her – she was an old lady running for her life from some

unspeakable terror – here among these trees, which had somehow remembered her fear. She tried to keep her eyes closed for as long as possible, to experience as much of the scene as she could, but she felt she would explode from the terror. She opened her eyes and withdrew her hand, shoved it in her pocket. The rain grew heavy and she pulled up her collar; the wind crushed her breath in her throat. Enough. Her scepticism was misplaced. She knew what the dreams, what the trees here in the wood, were telling her. Her grandmother had died in fear, been pursued to her death in this very wood. But by whom, and for what purpose? She turned and walked back to the cottage. There was only one way to find out for certain the circumstances of Sybill’s death.

She would have to ask the old woman herself.

CHAPTER TWENTY

With the fire at her back, with Tabby curled up on her favourite armchair, and with a circle of thirteen candles around her, Maisie went through the preparations for psychic ritual which Sacha had taught her. Opening energy centres, focusing, breathing. She was flying without a safety net now; nobody was around to encourage her or save her. It was both frightening and exhilarating. Rain beat on the eaves and wind shook the panes. Though only early evening, it may as well have been midnight on doomsday outside. She really had no idea what she was doing as she closed her eyes and tried to sketch in her mind Sybill’s face. As she had only ever seen photos of her grandmother, she found this difficult. For fifteen minutes or more she tried, but nothing happened. The problem was she had no memories of Sybill to draw upon. She climbed to her feet and carefully stepped outside her circle of candles. In her bedroom she found the few pieces of Sybill’s jewellery that she had kept, and selected an amber brooch. Perhaps this could provide the connection with her grandmother she needed. Unless Sacha was right. Unless Sybill had already gone across.

But she had to try.

She switched off the bedroom light and went back to the circle. With the brooch closed tightly in her fist, she sat down and began the whole process again. Breathing, centring, focusing, lining up the coloured lights along her spine.

“Okay, Sybill,” Maisie said, a little embarrassed about speaking to herself in the dark. Then she remembered what Sacha had said, that her negative attitude might be holding her back. She breathed deeply and closed her eyes. “Sybill,” she said, more confidently. “This is your granddaughter, Maisie. I’m trying to contact you . . .” She trailed off, not quite sure what else to say. A cold breeze tickled at the base of her spine and she thought of getting up to close a window when she realised that she had no windows open. The cold must be coming from elsewhere. Her first instinct was to open her eyes, but instead she kept them closed.

“Sybill? Are you there? Can you speak to me?”

Suddenly, the cold engulfed her and a vision flashed into her mind: fists beating against a window, a mad flapping as though of wings, a muffled cry for help. Maisie’s eyes flew open. Safely back in the quiet, firelit lounge room.

More deep breaths.

She closed her eyes again. “Sybill?” Her voice sounded thin, fearful. “Do you have a message for me?”

Again the frantic beating as though from behind a thick glass barrier. A muffled scream of terror. It went on and on, and once more Maisie had to break the trance. The sound was too horrible, too desperate and frenzied. She shook herself, stood and turned on the light. Had she made contact with Sybill? Was hers the voice of that awful smothered scream?

She blew out all the candles and placed them carefully on the hearth. If it was Sybill, why was she trapped? She cast her mind back to Sacha telling her how Sybill had died. He had said that Reverend Fowler brought him the news. Perhaps she should pay a visit to the Reverend tomorrow morning. He may know more than he let on.

“Sorry, Reverend. You know I’m no good with figures.”

Tony Blake passed the church ledger back to him and raised his hands, palms up, in a gesture of defeat. Every month they went through the figures together, and every month Tony’s dodgy adding-up made the Reverend think he either had more in the bank than he had anticipated, or that he was going to run out of money in a fortnight. The Reverend suspected the blame lay with Tony’s big, bear hands: his fat, round fingers couldn’t manage the small keys on the calculator.

Tony sat in silence while the Reverend added columns of figures again, checking totals off and making neat ticks in the appropriate columns. “All right,” he said at last, “what kind of expenses will we have to cover this month?”

The big policeman was about to open his mouth to answer when there was a knock at the office door. The two men exchanged glances.

The Reverend stood and crossed the room, mindful of his sore knee joints which seemed to get worse in wet weather. He opened the door to Sybill’s granddaughter.

“Good morning,” she said. She had a long, black raincoat on and clutched an umbrella. Behind her, rain drove diagonally across the cemetery and cliff-top.

“Good morning,” he replied, jolted by seeing her.

“Can I come in? It’s wet out here and I need to talk to you about something.”

The Reverend stood aside and let her in, closed the rain out. He walked back to his desk while she slipped out of her raincoat. She was dressed all in dark grey.

“Good morning, Constable Blake,” she said. Tony stared up at her suspiciously. She pulled off her gloves and hat and stood expectantly in front of the Reverend’s desk.

“How may I help you, Miss Hartley?” the

Reverend asked.

“Fielding. Hartley was my grandmother’s surname.”

“Of course.”

“And anyway, call me Maisie.”

“How may I help you?” he asked again.

She cast a significant glance in Tony’s direction.

“Could I speak with you alone?”

Tony’s eyebrows shot up. The Reverend hesitated. What did she want with him?

“Tony, would you mind waiting in the church?” the Reverend asked.

Tony responded with a gruff affirmative, stood and then disappeared through the side door which led to the nave. When the door was shut behind him, the Reverend gestured to the vacated chair.

“Sit down.” He studied her as she sat. She seemed anxious about something. Her nails were bitten to the quick, her fingers laced and unlaced in front of her until she was properly settled.

“It’s about my grandmother,” she said at last. A cold shock to the heart. What did she know? “I might not be able to help you. I didn’t know Sybill very well at all.”

“Who found her?”

“I’m not sure I follow.”

“Who found her body?”

“Oh.” Tread carefully now. This could be bad. How had the story gone? He cursed his poor memory. “Now, I don’t know if I remember right. It was nearly a year ago.”

“It was September.”

“Oh. Let me see.” He tapped a finger thoughtfully on his desk blotter, trying to buy time.

“Sacha said that you told him she was found face down in the street.”

That triggered his memory. “Ah yes. It seemed she grew ill at home and was coming down to the village to get help.”

“Was it daytime or night-time?”

“I don’t rightly remember. But it was Elsa Smith who spotted her first as she collapsed right outside Elsa’s house. Elsa phoned Tony and he recovered her body.”

She leaned forward, fixed him with a keen gaze.

“Where does Elsa Smith live?”

This was a nightmare. Questions like these could get him – get all of them – in a great deal of trouble.

“On the main street. Number forty, I think.”

“And was she injured? My grandmother? Was she injured or just . . .”

“I’m sorry, Miss Fielding. I wasn’t there. Why don’t I call Tony in? He might be able to help you.”

She nodded once then leaned back in her seat. Again, the lacing and unlacing of fingers. She was nervous, which was a good sign. At least it meant she wasn’t sure about what she was asking. Not like Sybill with her trick questions and conceited confidence. He rose once more and went to the side door. Tony was sitting in one of the pews and the Reverend beckoned him back to the office. In a few moments, Tony was seated on the edge of the desk and the Reverend stood uneasily by the window.

“Miss Fielding wants to ask about the night her grandmother died,” the Reverend said. He could see Tony’s shoulders tense, but when he answered, it was easily and confidently.

“She collapsed out on the street around two a.m. Elsa Smith noticed her and called me. When I got there she was already dead. I called the doctor and we took her back to his surgery. He pronounced her dead and wrote up the death certificate. We knew she didn’t have family so the church paid for her interment.”

“Why didn’t this Elsa Smith go out to help her?”

Tony cleared his throat. The Reverend jumped in.

“I’m sure you’ve learned by now that your

grandmother was held in some fear by the locals.”

“Okay. But why was she up at two a.m.?”

“Nobody knows why Sybill left her house that night,”

Tony began, “but she had locked all her doors and –”

“No. Not Sybill. Why was Elsa Smith up at

two a.m.?”

Silence. The Reverend cast a glance over his shoulder at the cemetery and the sea beyond. It was Tony who finally answered.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe she heard a noise. Maybe your grandmother cried out. I never asked her.”

“Perhaps I will.”

“Now, don’t you go disturbing the –”

“It’s all right, Tony,” the Reverend interjected. “I’m sure Elsa would be happy to answer Miss Fielding’s questions.”

“And who is the doctor who signed her death certificate?”

“Dr Honour on Cross Street,” the Reverend

answered.

“I might go see him too.”

Tony’s knuckles had tightened on the edge of the desk. The Reverend felt just as tense but was trying not to show it.

“Again, I’m sure he’d be glad to answer your questions,” the Reverend said. “But, may I ask, why are you interested in Sybill’s death?”

It was clear she wasn’t expecting this question and she stumbled over the answer. “I . . . ah . . . I just wanted to know. You know, if it was cancer or liver disease or . . . you know, in case it’s something hereditary.”

Comforting to see someone else in anxious turmoil rather than himself. “Your grandmother was an old woman, Miss Fielding,” he said, trying to sound kind.

“And I’m afraid that dying of old age is undeniably hereditary.”

She stood and reached a hand out to shake Tony’s. The Reverend stepped forward and shook her hand too. She dipped her head nervously and left, closing the door gently behind her.

“This is very bad,” the Reverend breathed at last.

“Why is she asking these questions?”

“I don’t know. But it’s very bad. You call on Elsa, I’ll phone Doctor Honour. If our stories are straight, if it’s all watertight, she can’t suspect anything.”

“I hope you’re right, Reverend,” Tony said, pulling his car keys out of his pocket with a jingle. “Because if you’re wrong, we’re all undone.”

Maisie found the doctor’s surgery a few minutes later. The rain was gushing in gutters and along the cobbled streets, and the wind had blown her umbrella inside out twice. Her boots were starting to fill up with water, and each step made a squelching noise. She thankfully pulled open the door and entered a warm, dry waiting room which smelled of old paper and wood panelling. The receptionist was on the phone, and looked up as she came in. Maisie had the distinct feeling that she was expected. She walked up to the counter and waited.

“Yes … yes … I see. No, it isn’t a problem at all. Thank you for calling … yes, goodbye.” The

receptionist, a middle-aged woman with pink cheeks and salt and pepper hair, replaced the phone carefully then looked up at Maisie with a half-smile. “Yes?

Can I help you?”

“I need to see Dr Honour,” Maisie replied.

“He doesn’t see patients without an appointment. Unless it’s an emergency.”

“Then I’ll make an appointment. I can sit here and wait.”

“I’m afraid the doctor is completely booked out today.”

Maisie opened her mouth to ask how the

receptionist knew that without checking her appointment book, but she stopped herself. Perhaps she was being paranoid and the doctor really was busy.

“Okay, I’ll make an appointment for tomorrow.”

“I’m afraid that tomorrow –”

“Can you just check your appointment book?”

“I . . . ah . . . just a moment.” The receptionist flipped open a small, leather diary in front of her. Maisie leaned forward on the counter and saw her find tomorrow’s date – plenty of blank space.

“Ah, it seems we have some time free in the morning. About eleven?”

“I’ll be here at eleven.”

“Your name?”

“Maisie Fielding.”

“Thank you, Miss Fielding. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Maisie braved the rain once more, headed home with sodden boots. These people had something to hide, she knew it. But if they were all in on it together, including the local constable, how could she ever get to the bottom of it?

In dry socks, sitting in front of the fire, she phoned the airline. They put her on hold and she listened to bland music and wondered why she had so many misgivings. There were good reasons for organising her return journey sooner. She had promised Adrian she would bring her flight forward; she was running out of money; Sacha might not be coming back. But, more importantly, she was becoming too scared to stay. In daylight she was fine, but as soon as night began to close in her imagination made evil spirits out of every creak or half-glimpsed shadow.

“I’m sorry.” A human voice interrupted the song mid-chorus. “We have no seats left for flights on the sixteenth.”

A reprieve.

“Would you like me to put you on a waiting list, or would you like me to check the seventeenth for you?”

Was it a reprieve? Or a curse?

“Miss Fielding?”

Maisie didn’t know how to answer. “I . . . um . . .”

“I can check the seventeenth for you.”

She couldn’t decide. “I . . . I’ll call you back.” She hung up. Her fingers twitched. Adrian would be angry, she should have put her name on the waiting list. The phone started to ring. Surprised, she scooped it up.

“Hello?”

“Maisie, it’s your mother.”

“Hi, Mum. I was just about to call Adrian in Auckland.”

“Why did you lie to me?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Why did you lie to me?”

Maisie’s blood dropped two degrees. Her mother’s anger could still do that to her. “Why did I lie to you about what?”

“Your hand.”

The pit of her stomach felt hollow. How had she found out?

“I . . .”

“Adrian told me everything. Don’t try to get out of it. You lied to me. Why?”

Maisie took a breath. “Because I didn’t think you’d understand if I said I just wanted a break.”

“A break? For what? So you could run off to England and track down a mad, criminal, cruel old woman just because she happened to be related to you?”

“Mum . . .”

“Well?”

“No. I don’t enjoy playing cello, Mum. It’s what you wanted for me, not what I wanted.” She tried to keep her voice gentle, reasonable. Her mother’s, however, was icy and demanding.

“What are you saying? You’ve been playing music all your life. What’s changed to make you say you don’t like it any more?”

“Because I’m an adult now. Because I don’t want it as a career.”

“But your father and I have invested so much time and money in it. Perhaps we’ve spoiled you.”

“Mum, please be reasonable –”

“Reasonable!” Her voice was a shriek down the telephone line. “You lied to me, you lied to all the doctors, you . . .” Dawning realisation. “There were no doctors were there?”

“Mum . . .”

“This is the most elaborate lie anyone has ever told me. Why go to all this trouble?”

“Because I couldn’t tell you the truth.”

“I don’t even know who you are. Perhaps it’s fitting that you’re over there in my mother’s house. It seems you’re more like her than us.”

“Please, Mum, don’t be so angry. I’m sorry if I hurt you, but you’ve got to understand that you overreact to things and it makes it hard for people to be honest with you.”

“How dare you blame me for your lies! As

though I deserved them!” Janet’s words were now pouring out in rapid confusion. “Maisie, don’t come home. Just stay there. With a bit of luck the old woman will come back from the dead and you’ll find out what kind of person she was and then you’ll be sorry that you lied to me. I only ever wanted what was best for you, and your father is going to be devastated. Devastated. I don’t even know who you are. Tell Adrian not to come back either. Both of you are out, it’s better if you stay away from me because I can’t bear to look at either of you.”

Click.

She had hung up.

Her mother’s anger had made her feel about eight years old again, and terrified. She carefully replaced the receiver. Maisie, don’t come home. She would cool off. She didn’t mean it.

Damn Adrian. Why the hell had he told Janet about the lie? What was he thinking? Knowing Adrian, it had slipped out by accident and then he was too afraid to call and warn her. That was a typical Adrian way to handle things, or rather, not to handle things at all. She was too angry with him to phone him now. Let him think that she’d run off with Sacha on the way home from London, or that the local witch-hunters had been waiting for her to burn her at the stake.

Let him worry, let him get hysterical.

In the early hours of the morning she began to dream. She was outside the cottage, hovering a few metres above the roof. She was frozen to the bone. Weird shifting shadows and dull rainbows glinted off objects below her. The peculiar deserted feeling of the early morning hours told her that the world was asleep all around. Stillness lay over treetops apart from the occasional breath expelled from the lungs of the sea.

“What am I doing here?” she asked.

Silver sparks began to form around the cottage. She watched as they created an aura that encircled the walls, windows, roof. It must be Sybill’s spell to protect the house. Perhaps the dream was telling her she could feel safe. The aura was dazzling, beautiful. But then she noticed areas in the silver that were dull, or thin. Weak points in the spell. She realised the back door was almost completely barren of protection. At the same moment she saw a shadow shiver in the wood behind the house and seem to move slowly towards her. The hooded figure!

“But how can I fix the spell?” she cried out. And what would happen to her sleeping self if the dark shape got to the back door before she awoke? The black panic that seized her almost pulled her up into consciousness, but she knew her only chance to find out how to fix her grandmother’s spell lay in staying in this dream.

The wall of silver light collapsed below her. She parted her hands and found between them a blue book. Before she could open its cover to see what was in it, the dark shape broke free of the wood. It moved without seeming to touch the ground, slid through the gap in the rosebushes and hovered there at the back of the garden. Its head moved back and Maisie realised it was looking at her. She caught a glimpse of bone and shadow, but her terror jolted her back into her body and she woke up with a start.

She sat up and clutched at her chest. Her heart was racing. Calm down, perhaps it was only a dream. She threw back the covers and made her way down to the laundry. Tabby sat atop the washing machine, tail frantically swishing. She looked around when Maisie arrived, chattered her teeth with a frustrated growl. Maisie crouched next to the washing machine and slowly stretched her neck up to peer out the bottom of the window.

The dark figure stood where she had last seen it in the dream, unmoving, as though waiting. Her heart was thundering under her ribs now. She was frozen to the spot, willing it not to move any closer to the house. Then, a slight disturbance of the trees in the wood behind it caught her eye. For a moment Maisie thought it was only a sea breeze, but then, to her horror, an identical dark figure emerged from the wood, moved past the rosebushes, and joined the first figure in the garden. It was all she could do to stop herself screaming.

She jumped back from the laundry window and ran to the bookshelf in the lounge room. The dying embers of the fire glowed weakly. She hit the light switch and started searching for a blue book. Despair clutched at her stomach: the way her grandmother kept house, the blue book from her dream could be anywhere. Still, she pulled every book with a blue spine from the shelf and gave it a cursory inspection. Not Native Birds of Yorkshire. Not The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. Not Eighteenth Century Philosophers. One by one she threw the books on the floor, more and more frantic. Every minute felt like an hour.

Nothing.

“Okay, Maisie, don’t panic.” Blue books didn’t always have blue spines. She closed her eyes and tried to remember how thick the book in the dream had been, felt its weight in her hands. Opening her eyes, she began to scan the bookshelf again. Pulled out a book that matched the description here and there. The third book she pulled, with a dirty grey spine which was falling into disrepair, was entitled Basic Magical Spells. Basic? Would basic magic be enough? But the cover was blue, and it was about the same size and weight as the book in her dream. She went straight to the table of contents, her shaking fingers gliding down the page as though they were trying to read ahead of her desperate eyes. Spells of blessing, love spells, spells for finding lost items. She was tearing through the list so fast she almost missed it. Spells of protection. Maisie flipped to the page. Protecting the self. Protecting a friend. There: protecting a house. She quickly skim-read it: psychic preparation – lucky she was becoming an expert at that – then visualisation, the silver wall of stars that she had already seen in her dream, then . . . on the next page, the spell. But her grandmother had crossed out the simple spell printed in the book and had written in its place a few lines in a language Maisie had never seen before: inne ære stowe e ic bregde mid issum steorran higes, anra gehwelc sie gesund of ære ealdan deorcnes. She read it through a couple of times, trying to commit it to memory. She wasn’t even sure how to pronounce some of the letters, but did her best, repeating it in her head as she lit and set up the circle of thirteen candles and turned out the light.

inne ære stowe . . .

She said it to herself over and over. Before she sat in the centre of her circle, she raced back down to the laundry and took another quick peek through the window. The two figures were standing together now, and she could see that they weren’t quite identical. One was slightly taller and thinner than the other. They were turned towards each other, almost as though in conversation. She took a step back from the window and accidentally kicked the washing machine

– the bump was loud in the early morning darkness, and she was certain she saw one of the figures turn quickly in her direction. She backed away from the laundry and returned to the lounge room, to her burning circle of candles. The task of centring herself and focusing on anything but the two shadows in her garden seemed impossible in her state of panic, but she forced herself to try.

Deep breaths, imagining the coloured lights. inne ære stowe . . .

And then, as though the words themselves had taken over, she felt her body slump and her throat open. The words came out and they sounded strange to her ears, a language she had never heard before but that she knew she was instinctively pronouncing perfectly. In her imagination, almost as vividly as she had seen in the dream, she could see the silver stars collecting around her house, pouring into the weak places. And she could also see the two dark shapes look up in surprise, move quickly towards the cottage, but pause a few metres back as though afraid to come any closer.

Over and over, in a stream, the words kept

springing from her lips, the silver aura around the cottage became stronger and brighter in her mind’s eye, until finally – it may have been moments later, it may have been as much as an hour – the words stopped and she could once again sit up straight and look around her.

She stood, shakily, and moved down to the laundry. Tabby no longer sat on the washing machine. Outside, the garden was empty.

“Did I do that?” she asked the dark laundry. Had she got rid of the two dark figures? Had she made the spell work?

Her breath caught in her throat.

I did it.

She put a hand to her forehead. A spell. She had cast a spell of protection and it had scared off the dark figures.

“My god, my god,” Maisie said, checking out the window again. A surge of impossible-to-place feeling: pride? confidence? power?

I did it. She had made herself safe. She turned and wandered back to bed, but stayed awake for a long time, staring into the dark. A first glimmer of understanding, of what her psychic ability was capable of. It had felt so natural, so meant-to-be. Her excitement was like delirium. It kept her awake nearly until dawn.

But when she finally drifted to sleep it was with a feeling of absolute security.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Gloomy morning didn’t dawn at all. The rain was back as a light drizzle. When Maisie checked her watch she was horrified to see that it was already ten forty-five: she was due in Dr Honour’s surgery in fifteen minutes. She jumped out of bed and dressed, brushed her teeth quickly and fed the cat. The lounge room was still a mess from her adventure last night –

books lay everywhere, candle wax had dribbled onto the carpet. The site of her first major psychic success. She remembered what had happened as though it were a dream. It was almost too much to contemplate – the awful dark shadows in her back garden, somehow sentient and yet not of this world. But at least she was safe. Grabbing her raincoat and umbrella, she left the house and closed the door behind her.

The sky was leaden. Every tree along the street seemed to be sagging under the weight of it. The sea was a dull pewter, white caps visible in the distance. The line where the sky met the water was invisible. It was all one gloomy shade of grey as far as the eye could see.

She checked her watch and hurried her steps. She couldn’t give them the slightest reason to cancel her appointment. And today she wouldn’t be nervous and flustered like she was with the Reverend. Her questions were perfectly valid, and if the doctor had nothing to hide he would answer frankly.

She reached the surgery with about five seconds to spare, pushed the door open and went straight to the counter.

“Good morning, Miss Fielding,” the receptionist said. “The doctor will see you in a moment.”

“Thanks,” Maisie said. She sat down in an

uncomfortable plastic chair and picked up a copy of Hello magazine that was a few years old. She flicked through an article on the Spice Girls when they were still the full complement. After a few minutes, a voice announced her name.

“Maisie Fielding?”

She looked up. Standing near the receptionist’s desk was a thin, stooped man without a hair on his head, and with old-fashioned horn-rimmed glasses. Like Reverend Fowler, he must have hailed from around the class of ’24.

“Are you Doctor Honour?” she asked.

“Yes,” he replied, dourly. “Come through.”

She stood and followed him past the receptionist’s desk and into the back hallway. He led her into a small room which smelled like the doctors’ surgeries of her childhood. Old carpet, damp corners, medicine. The benches were cold stainless steel. A giraffe growth chart, with colours that had probably been faded since the sixties, hung on one wall, its edges curling up.

“Take a seat, Miss Fielding,” Dr Honour said. He gestured to a chair only marginally more comfortable than the one in the waiting room, then sat behind his desk and made a pretence of heading a new file card with her name.

“What’s your date of birth?” he asked.

“I’m not here about me.”

He dropped his pen and fixed her with his rheumy eyes. “Oh?”

“I’m here about my grandmother.”

“Your grandmother?”

“Sybill Hartley.”

“I remember Sybill. What can I help you with?”

“You signed her death certificate.”

“That’s right.”

“I want to know what she died of.”

He leaned back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling, as though thinking. “I believe the cause of death on her certificate was listed as heart failure. It usually is in cases of old age.”

“And you examined her body?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Were there any injuries? Any . . . cuts or bruises?”

She was thinking of the mad chase through the wood which she always dreamed of. Surely that would have made a few marks on the old woman.

“Yes, there were. She collapsed in the street and injured herself in the fall. She had grazed her forearms and her knees.”

“No other injuries?”

“No. Miss Fielding, if I may ask, why do you want to know this?”

She wouldn’t be intimidated. “I didn’t know my grandmother at all, Doctor Honour. I’m just trying to find out as much about her as possible.”

“Is that really all? You’re behaving almost as though you expect for there to be suspicious circumstances around Sybill’s death. I assure you there weren’t.” He rose from his seat and moved towards a grey filing cabinet, decorated sadly with peeling stickers advertising medicines. “I have a copy of the death certificate if you wish to see it.”

“No, don’t bother,” she said, rising from her seat. She knew it would read exactly as he told her.

“I’m not an unfeeling person, Miss Fielding. None of us in Solgreve are. It’s unfortunate that you and your grandmother never met, and it’s unfortunate that she’s no longer alive, but she was eighty-three. She was an old woman. There’s nothing unusual about an old woman dying.”

Maisie paused, her hand on the door handle. She looked him up and down. His patronising voice and affected calmness made her furious. “Yeah. And how old are you Doctor Honour?”

“I . . .”

“Don’t bother answering that.” She pushed the door open and left, back into the wet street. She tried calling Sacha in London but got his dad’s answering machine. She wanted to brag about her successful spell to him, and she was desperate to hear his voice. Depression began to stalk her. She called Adrian, woke him up but didn’t care. Unleashed a little of her anger on him. He apologised a million times for letting slip about her deception to her mother, but didn’t seem to realise that his worst crime was not warning her in advance. Then she called Perry Daniels in York but he wasn’t in so she left a message. Maisie knew she was avoiding calling Cathy because she’d left her hanging over New Year’s, so she gritted her teeth and did it.

“Maisie! I was wondering when I might hear from you.”

“I only got back from London the day before yesterday,” she said. “Sorry about New Year’s.”

“It’s okay. I kept myself busy. And I did abandon you at Christmas, don’t forget. So now we’re even.”

She sounded stuffed up and croaky, like she might have a cold.

“So why don’t you come and visit me? I’ve got a warm cottage and a bunch of hostile villagers waiting for you. And it sounds like you could use a nurse.”

“Yes, it’s the kind of cold that could kill a brown dog. Do you know, nobody knows that expression over here?” She stopped to cough then came back to the phone. “I can be there tomorrow.”

“Great. There should be a bus coming through tomorrow. It goes from Whitby at twelve o’clock.”

“I’ll be on it. Meet me at the bus stop?”

“Of course.”

“Someone’s waiting for the phone. I’ve got so much to tell you, Maisie. I found out heaps of information about Solgreve. You’re going to be fascinated.”

“Don’t tease me. Tell me some stuff now.”

“No, gotta go. This guy’s about to turn purple. See you tomorrow.”

“Okay, bye.” Maisie hung up and went to the bedroom. An old camp bed was folded up in the cupboard. She set it up in the back room. Knowing that linen wasn’t her grandmother’s strong point, she half-heartedly searched for single sheets then decided to go out and buy some.

On her way home, she counted street numbers along the main street and tried to figure out where it was her grandmother had supposedly collapsed. Outside number forty, Elsa Smith’s house, she paused and walked out to the middle of the road. She crouched down and lay her fingers on the bitumen, waiting to see if she got any kind of psychic feeling like she had in the wood the other day. Nothing. A car engine approached so she stood and walked to the side of the road again, watching the street. She needed to talk to Sacha, needed to ask him if she could trust to this conviction that there was something suspicious about her grandmother’s death. And if Sybill had been pursued to her death, who had pursued her? Even though the people of Solgreve seemed reluctant to talk about Sybill, alive or dead, she couldn’t imagine any of them actually being responsible. Covering it up, perhaps, but not causing the blind terror which the old woman had experienced before she died.

Cars passed. Rain descended. Understanding came no closer. She looked up at Elsa Smith’s house: old, grey stone and sagging roof tiles. A curtain moved. Somebody had been watching.

Maisie crossed the road and rapped at the door. No answer. She knocked again, louder and longer. Finally, a little voice from the other side of the door. “Who is it?”

“My name’s Maisie. I wondered if I could ask you a couple of questions.”

“Go away.”

“Please, Mrs Smith. I just want to ask you about the night Sybill died.”

“I’ll call the police if you don’t leave.”

“You don’t need to be frightened of me. I’m not Sybill.”

The door opened a crack. She got a glimpse of a cluttered lounge room, a brief whiff of old vegetable peelings and floral air freshener. A white-haired woman with a face like a fox peered out.

“Can I come in?” Maisie asked.

“No. Go away. Your grandmother was a bad

woman and the village is better off without her here.”

“She wasn’t a bad woman, Mrs Smith, she was just –”

“She was evil. If you know what’s good for you you’ll get out of that cottage and go home. The old witch is probably still haunting the place. There was nothing kind or generous or loving about that woman. You’d have been better off with Baba Yaga for a grandmother.”

Maisie put her hands up and took a step back.

“Okay. Sorry to bother you.”

The door slammed. Baba Yaga? Was that the childeating witch in Russian legend? At least the insult was imaginative.

She headed home. The phone was ringing as she let herself into the house. Sacha! – it had to be Sacha phoning to tell her he was coming back. She ran to answer it.

Not Sacha. Perry Daniels was on the other end of the line. They talked briefly about the insurance claim and the weather in London. Maisie had spent most of the day so far in private investigator mode so she thought she might as well ask the solicitor if he knew anything about Solgreve.

“Did Sybill ever indicate that she didn’t feel safe here in Solgreve?”

There was a brief silence as he thought about it.

“No, I think she felt safe. She knew she was unpopular, but your grandmother had a sense of selfassuredness that was almost . . . well . . . smug.”

Smug? At least he didn’t imply she roasted and ate children.

“I get the feeling they can’t wait for me to leave,”

Maisie said.

“And I think I know the reason for that. While you were away the local Reverend called here, wanting to make an offer to buy the house. This may just be a real estate issue.”

“Why would they want the house?”

“Who knows? Perhaps they think there’s buried treasure beneath it. In any event, Maisie, I wouldn’t worry about it. If the most aggressive person they have on their team is Reverend Linden Fowler, I’d say that you’re safe.”

Perhaps the solicitor was right – maybe the villagers were too meek to have had anything to do with Sybill’s death. Clearly they had hated her, had been afraid of her, but that didn’t equate with murderous intentions. If they had been glad when Sybill died that would explain their guilty reaction to Maisie’s questions. Okay, so if the villagers were innocent, then who?

She had seen the two dark, hooded figures in her back garden with her own eyes, and she knew that there was something sinister about them. What were they? If she was going to work out the circumstances of Sybill’s death and what was happening to her in her Afterlife, maybe that was the next question she had to answer.

“God, this place is wonderful,” Cathy enthused, dropping her bag in the lounge room and looking around. It was early afternoon and Maisie had just met her friend at the bus stop.

“You should have seen it when I first arrived. An absolute mess. It’s still very cluttered and I haven’t even opened some of the cupboards yet.”

“It’s so cosy. And what a location. Can we walk down to the cliff a little later on?”

Maisie didn’t know if she was comfortable walking through the wood any more, but perhaps in broad daylight and accompanied by a friend it wouldn’t be so bad. “Sure. But you promised me you’d tell me what you found out about Solgreve.”

“You have to feed me first. I haven’t had lunch.”

“Come through to the kitchen then.”

Maisie made sandwiches and a pot of tea. Cathy pulled a ring-binder out of her bag and laid it in front of her on the table, positioned a box of tissues next to it.

“Okay, here’s food. Now tell me.” Maisie sat opposite her.

Cathy blew her nose and tucked the tissue into her sleeve. She opened the folder. “Well, where do we begin? How about at the beginning. Settlement here dates back to five forty-three A.D.”

“That long ago?”

“Yup.” Cathy reached for a sandwich and took a bite.

“So how did you find that out?”

“I had a whole university library to myself and no company over New Year’s,” Cathy replied. “What else was I going to do?” She sipped some tea then continued. “The name Solgreve is a bastardisation of the original title, ‘Sawol Græf.’ Do you want to guess what that means?”

“No.”

“It’s Anglo-Saxon for ‘soul’s grave’.”

“That sounds kind of –”

“Creepy?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m sure it’s not. It’s probably to do with some kind of Anglo-Saxon religious rite.”

Maisie leaned over and peered at Cathy’s notes.

“So that’s Anglo-Saxon language?”

“Yes. Sometimes called Old English. I’m learning it as part of my degree.”

“Wait here. I want to show you something.” Maisie rose from the table and went to the lounge room. She found the blue spellbook she had used the other night and brought it back to the kitchen.

“Is this the same language?” She opened the book to the house protection spell and turned it so that Cathy could read her grandmother’s writing.

“Yes. Where did you get this?”

“What does it say?”

“It says something like . . . ‘within the space I draw with these stars of the mind, everything or everybody will be free of the ancient darkness.’ Where did you get this?”

“It’s my grandmother’s handwriting. It’s a spell of protection for the house.”

“Fascinating. Your grandmother must have been an Anglo-Saxon scholar.”

“It wouldn’t surprise me to find out my

grandmother shot JFK. She just gets more and more interesting.” Maisie closed the book and put it aside.

“Go on. More information.” She reached for a triangle of cheese sandwich.

“All right. Sawol Græf was a sacred site for pagan worship. In fact, it was one of the last places to convert to Christianity which it did in six hundred and eighty-eight – that’s down in the early church records. Saint Junius is responsible for that, along with other things like getting himself eaten by a lion, supposedly in Cornwall. Because Sawol Græf had always been a site of worship a church was built on it, and then the original abbey was built in the same spot in twelve thirty-five. By then it was in the records as Solgreve. A lot of other old places like this have had their cemeteries dug up and built on over the years, but Solgreve is remarkable for having preserved the cemetery as it now stands since earliest settlement. That’s why it’s so big. The archaeologists at the university are dying to get in there and have a look . . . excuse the pun.”

“You’re excused. Have another sandwich.”

Cathy took another triangle and held it in her right hand while she talked. “Nothing notable on the record about the place until fifteen seventy-six. Solgreve was the site of one of the most severe punishments of witchcraft in England. Usually, we associate witch hunts with Catholicism and continental Europe. They didn’t burn witches in England – except for up here.”

“They burned witches?”

“Yes. They weren’t supposed to but they did. It was kind of a community-generated project.”

“I have no trouble believing that.”

Cathy sneezed violently, then took a moment to compose herself. “The village was a lot bigger back then. Around eighteen hundred people and quite a busy fishing town. That year they sent one hundred women to trial for witchcraft. Most were driven out of town with nothing but a warning. Twenty were hanged. And they lit up three women of a group of four who refused to testify.”

“What happened to the fourth?”

“She confessed under torture at the last moment. The transcripts are on microfilm at the library. She said the four of them had been trying to lift an ancient curse on the town.”

“What kind of curse?” Maisie’s tea was going cold in its cup.

“I copied a bit of this down, but it doesn’t make much sense.” Cathy turned a few pages and read:

“‘For the ground in this village is cursed, and all the folk within are blighted and must be driven out.’” She looked up. “Can you figure that out?”

“Nope. You?”

“No idea. You want to know what happened to her?”

“Who?”

“The fourth witch, the one who confessed under torture. They didn’t burn her with the others.”

Maisie shuddered. “I don’t think I want to know.”

“They buried her alive.”

“Yuk.”

“I agree,” Cathy said. “If we could get into the cemetery at some stage, we could probably find her grave.”

“You know that’s not possible. They’d have a SWAT

team on us before you could say ‘parochial idiots’.”

“That’s a shame. I love it when I can touch a piece of history.” She flicked back through her pages.

“Is there more?”

“A little. The new church was built in seventeen hundred and two on the site of the old abbey, which had been sacked and largely destroyed when Catholicism was driven out of England. That’s the church that’s still there – still on the ancient pagan site.”

“That seems paradoxical.”

“A lot of the Christian holy places on this small, wet island are actually old pagan sites. It made it easier to convert people.”

“So, it’s an Anglican church, right?”

“Wrong. It was Anglican right up until eighteen forty-eight. But then the local parish cut all ties with the Anglican church and called themselves an independent reform church. But as you can see, they still look and behave like Anglicans.”

“Does that mean they’re fundamentalists?”

“Now this is the bit I had trouble finding out. Nobody really knows except for the people who belong to the church. Definitely not associated officially with the Anglican church. Most people I spoke to said, yes, they’re fundamentalist

Christians. But one of the post-grads in archaeology said the church was closer to a graveyard cult, because they really are so obsessed with that cemetery. But, and this is the weird thing, hardly anybody who actually resided in Solgreve during their lives is buried there.”

“What? My grandmother’s buried there.”

“She’s one of the rare ones. They usually run their corpses into other towns nearby.”

“Are they trying to preserve the space?”

“Maybe. But why not just build another cemetery?

There’s plenty of room on the other side of the village. And they do occasionally inter people from out of town. Some people have requested graves near the sea, and the village charges the family a small fee to have them buried here.”

“But that’s so weird.”

“Don’t ask me what it means. But that’s why the suggestion that they might be a graveyard cult came up.”

“They’re so ordinary, Cathy. They’re such

ineffectual, small-minded people. I just can’t imagine it.” She picked up her tea, realised it was cold and took it to the microwave. “You want me to zap your tea?”

“Yeah, thanks.” Cathy handed Maisie her cup.

“Are you ready for more?”

“There’s more?”

“I guess this last bit isn’t too weird, but since the new church was built, in seventeen hundred and two, there have been five Reverend Fowlers.”

“Go on.”

Cathy read from her notes. “Reverend Tristran Fowler, died in seventeen sixty-eight aged ninety-two. Passed it on to his great-nephew Reverend Brodie Fowler, died in eighteen twenty-nine aged – wait for it –

one hundred and four. His son Charles was in charge until he died in nineteen hundred, followed by his son Philip, who is the current Reverend’s father. They all lived until ninety or beyond except for Philip, who died at seventy-four. Good genes, huh?”

“Might be something else.”

“Something else?”

“I’ll explain later. Any more to tell me?”

“That’s it. Does it clarify anything?”

The microwave pinged. Maisie pulled out their tea and settled down across from Cathy. “No. It only raises more questions. This place is full of secrets.”

“But what small town isn’t? I mean, it’s isolated, it’s tiny, probably half the locals are inbred. And so what if they’re superstitious about burial? It’s human nature to be worried about death and the soul’s progress. Perhaps they just express it more openly than most people.”

“I don’t think my grandmother died of natural causes.”

Cathy raised her eyebrows. “And you think the villagers had something to do with it?”

Maisie shook her head. “Not as such. But they might know the truth and be covering it up. They’re certainly delighted that she’s gone.”

“How do you think she died?”

“I think she was pursued to her death by evil forces.” Maisie smiled, embarrassed. “If that doesn’t sound too wild.”

Cathy watched her steadily, blue eyes round with anticipation. “Okay,” she said. “You’d better tell me everything.”

Sacha phoned at eleven o’clock.

“I’m coming home tomorrow.”

“How did it go with your father?”

“Is it okay if I pick my van up in the afternoon?”

“Sure. My friend Cathy’s here.” She glanced over at Cathy, who had her nose deep in a book about elemental spirits. Her friend had not reacted well to the suggestion that evil forces were afoot in Solgreve, and was desperately seeking evidence to prove that no such thing existed. “Perhaps you can stay for dinner.”

“Maybe.” A sigh. “I’m pretty tired.”

“Well, the offer’s there.” She was dying to ask him about Chris, but he seemed so distant, like he wasn’t even really listening to her. That closeness they had shared in London seemed to have evaporated.

“I’ll see you tomorrow. Around five.”

“Okay, then –”

The phone clicked before she could say goodbye. The village hall on Cross Street was not the Reverend’s favourite venue. The cracks in the walls made a mockery of the heating, causing everybody to be wrapped up in scarves and overcoats. The room was illuminated by one flickering fluorescent light and one ordinary bulb which hung inside a dusty orange shade. The Reverend looked around him. A circle of concerned citizens – around seventy in all – sat in rickety stackable chairs, gossiping among themselves. He hated community meetings. Speaking publicly, defending his decisions, dealing with the egos – it was all too much for him. He’d rather be home in bed. He turned to Tony Blake, who sat next to him.

“Shall we begin?” he said.

“I think so.” Tony cleared his throat and said loudly, “Everybody, let’s start.” He waited for conversations to end and a few shushes to be passed around the circle. When it was quiet he said, “Elsa, you wanted this meeting called. Perhaps you should open.”

Elsa Smith stood. She held her index finger aloft and began to speak in sharp tones. “First, the girl’s been asking Doctor Honour, the Reverend, and Tony about how Sybill died. Second,” the second finger went up, “she turned up at my house the day before yesterday, asking me the same thing, being very aggressive and demanding. I was afraid for my safety.” Finger number three joined the other two.

“Third, she met a friend at the bus stop yesterday morning. The friend had a duffel bag and hasn’t left yet. And this afternoon I saw another friend walk up towards her place. Who knows how long these people will be staying or what they’ll get up to? We can’t have it, and I propose that Reverend Fowler,”

his name was spoken heavily and accusingly, “live up to his earlier promise and do something about getting rid of her.”

“Hear, hear,” the Kings echoed loudly.

The Reverend resisted the urge to shrink down in his seat, and for all the world he wished he was a parish priest in a sunny alcove in some other part of the world. The eyes of the group were upon him as they waited for him to speak. He read hostility on their faces, or perhaps desperation. For hundreds of years Solgreve had kept its little secret and thousands of people had benefited from it. Those here were afraid they might be the first generation to face an old age full of pain and suffering, the first generation to expect death any time from seventy onwards. And because of Sybill that possibility had veered so close. They were all still skittish from the shock of finding out how close, and they were projecting their fear onto the girl.

He waited for Elsa to sit down. Her eyes were beady – that was the word, wasn’t it? He supposed he should be thankful for such a concerned and involved parish. Other men of the cloth had to deal with indifference or the disavowal of responsibility. He straightened his back but did not stand, and tried to put as much power behind his voice as possible.

“I understand that you are concerned. But this girl is not her grandmother. She’s a young woman on a holiday and she’ll go home soon enough, and her friends will go home too. I think we should just wait it out.” Was he cutting his own throat? He, too, was afraid that the girl would find out Solgreve’s secret and ruin it all for them – and because he was so implicated, he dreaded to think what his fate would be in such a situation, should he even live through it. But he knew what they were going to ask him to do. They were almost baying for her blood, they would like to see her disposed of as Sybill had been disposed of.

“Wait it out?” Elsa again. “Are you mad?”

A general murmur of belligerence went around the circle. Even Tony lowered his eyebrows at the Reverend.

“Come on, Reverend. You made us a promise once before. You have to use your . . . influence,” the constable said. “The Wraiths should be all over that cottage. She’d be gone in a matter of days.”

Approval ran round the circle now. The Reverend considered telling them about the threatening phone call to her family, but that would only highlight his inadequacy. Because nothing had come of that phone call. He couldn’t sound threatening and he knew it. Perhaps he should have had Lester make the call. No, his fate was sealed. Tonight he would be walking down the cold staircase into the foundations of the abbey.

“Very well, I shall ask. And you know I can only ask.” He added this last to remind them that he was not superhuman. His power had always been derived power.

“We need other reassurances, though,” said

Margaret King.

“In case she doesn’t go,” her husband said to clarify.

“What other reassurances can I give you?”

“Give her until the end of the month. If she’s still here . . .” Margaret trailed off, almost as if voicing her idea out loud had made her realise its import. Her husband nudged her. Elsa Smith glared down upon her. Clearly these speaking parts had been worked out in advance. Reverend Fowler wondered what chance he had ever had against these people.

“If she’s still here after the thirty-first of January, she gets what Sybill got.”

“Now, wait,” said the Reverend, “that’s a bit extreme. Sybill had been involved in –”

“I suggest we put it to a vote,” Elsa Smith declared.

“Those in favour raise a hand.”

He didn’t need to count to see he was outvoted. What was he to do? This was the way decisions had been made in Solgreve for generations. He couldn’t warn the girl without incriminating himself. He had to hope that she would respond to the visits of the Wraiths.

“It’s decided,” Elsa Smith announced triumphantly.

“At the end of the month.”

“I’ll go to him tonight,” the Reverend said, his shoulders slumping forward. “If that’s what you want, I’ll go to him tonight.”

***

The Reverend stood on the cliff’s edge in the dark. All the villagers had gone home and now he was alone with this task. Somewhere to the north, past headstones and trees and houses, was Sybill’s cottage. He longed to take the cliff path up to the house, knock on the door, go inside where it was warm and explain everything. “You must leave,” he would say, “because you may very well die if you do not.” But this wasn’t possible. Not only would it be a betrayal of his calling, it would be an admission of his awful, awful guilt. No man should know what he knew and be able to withstand the pressure of self-condemnation. But then, he could be wrong, he could have misheard those old stories which had placed a chill in his stomach. He was putting off the inevitable.

He walked to the abbey, found his keys and let himself into the spire. Opened the hatch, down the stairs, one at a time. Cold, cold earth. A glimmer under a door at the end of a tunnel. He knocked loudly. The door moved a crack, crepey fingers, like pallid worms, holding it open. Darkness within but for a strange, phosphorescent glow.

“I have a favour to ask from the villagers,” he said, forcing his voice over the fear he felt, the fear he always felt no matter how often he came here.

“Come in, then.” A croak, an impossible voice.

“Thank you, Doctor Flood.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

What a relief not to have to think of spells and psychic dreams and the possibility of evil spirits. How comfortable just to sit by the fire with two friends and a bottle of spiced mead (Sacha’s contribution to the evening) and feel safe, warm and . . . well, perhaps a little bit drunk.

“That was a damn fine meal,” Sacha said, for the third time. Maisie wished she could take credit, but Cathy had cooked it. She was a committed vegetarian and had an amazing way with eggplant. Maisie had never cooked anything with eggplant in her life. Cathy sat cross-legged on the hearth, hands stretched out towards the fire. “Do you know, Sacha, that when I arrived all she had in the cupboards were instant noodles and canned soup?”

Maisie squirmed in her chair. Sacha, who sat opposite, smiled at her. Her heart flipped over in her chest. It had been doing that all night.

“So you still haven’t told me how it went with your father,” she said to him.

“It went all right.”

“Just all right?”

“Yes, just all right. We didn’t shed tears and vow our undying love to each other. Sorry to disappoint.”

“But are you glad you stayed to talk to him?”

“I suppose so. Our relationship is slightly improved.”

“Meanwhile, my relationship with my mother has taken a serious nosedive,” Maisie said.

Cathy looked up. “Why? What happened?”

Maisie sighed. “Oh, it’s boring.”

“No, tell me. You should meet Maisie’s mother, Sacha. She’s the scariest woman on the planet.”

“Is that right?” Sacha replied lazily, suppressing a yawn.

“I kind of . . . well, I wanted a break from the orchestra and I knew I couldn’t tell her that, so I kind of faked an injury. And Adrian let it slip the other day.”

“Was she angry?” Cathy asked.

“Indescribably. Adrian and I have been requested not to come home.”

“You live with Adrian?” This was Sacha.

“Yes.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Was she serious?” Cathy asked, ignoring the exchange.

Maisie kept her eyes on Sacha, who was now

refilling his glass.

“Maisie? Was she serious?”

“I doubt it. She wouldn’t kick us out. But I don’t want to go home until she’s cooled off a bit.”

“How long will that take?” Cathy asked.

“Couple of hundred years, knowing my mum.”

“Are you going to marry Adrian?” Sacha asked. Before Maisie could answer, Cathy interjected. “Oh, they’re meant to be together. He’s such a sweetie, she’s so lucky. And her parents love him, don’t they, Maisie?”

“I think they’re annoyed with him at the moment, but yes, they think very highly of him. Though he hasn’t asked me to marry him,” she replied. But it was implied. Buy a house together, get married, start breeding. She felt suddenly short of breath.

“You’re so young. I always think those decisions should be put off as long as possible,” Sacha said.

“I agree.”

“But I think she’s so lucky to have met the right person so early,” Cathy said, flicking long hair off her shoulders. “Come on, Maisie, admit it. Can you think of anyone better than Adrian?”

Maisie took a gulp of her drink. “He’s certainly very special,” she answered softly. Sacha was gazing into the fire now, as though he wasn’t listening. Cathy’s eyes darted from Maisie to Sacha and back again, a small frown playing the corner of her mouth. Maisie felt a vague discomfort. Even though Cathy was here in Yorkshire, she was really part of Maisie’s other life, her real life with famous parents and Adrian and the orchestra. She didn’t like the idea of Sacha being touched by anything from that life – as if it would spoil him somehow. She watched his hands circling the glass, could see fine black hairs on his wrist beneath the cuff of his black pullover.

“I’d better go home,” he said, draining the last of his drink and putting the glass down beside his chair.

“It’s still pretty early,” Maisie said.

“I have to work tomorrow.” He stood and stretched his arms over his head. For a tantalising second she caught a glimpse of the skin on his stomach, but he soon readjusted his pullover. “Do you have my car keys?”

“Sure.” Maisie rose from her chair, placing her glass by the phone. The keys were on the mantelpiece. She picked them up and held them out to him. He plucked them out of her hand, almost as though he were being careful not to brush her fingers with his own.

“You left a jacket at my dad’s place,” he said.

“Oh. Was it my brown suede one?”

“It’s brown, yeah. I’ll bring it back before you go.”

“Well, you know you’re always welcome.”

“I should have brought it with me tonight, but I forgot.”

“That’s fine.”

“Okay. Well, I should get going.”

Maisie sneaked a quick look at Cathy, who was gazing into the fire. “I’ll walk you to the van.”

“There’s no need. It’s freezing out there.”

“No, it’s okay. Back in a tick, Cathy.”

“Sure,” Cathy said, not looking up.

Maisie closed the door behind them and followed Sacha up the front path. It was a still, icy night. Stars glowed far above, and she could hear the soft, regular swoosh of the sea in the distance.

“Hop in while I warm it up,” he said casually, letting himself in. He leaned over to unlock her door and she did as he said. Soon they were both sitting in the van – only marginally warmer than outside – with the engine running. Maisie glanced back at the house then at Sacha, whose head was bent over, looking at the dash instruments.

“What’s the matter? Trying to see if I ran up extra kilometres?” Maisie said.

“No. Just checking the fuel gauge. I should have asked you to put some diesel in. This thing always says it’s full when it’s not. You have to tap it a few times.” He did so, then leaned back. “It’s fine. I’ll make it home.”

The quiet, the intimacy, were overwhelming her. Her hand, as though it had intentions of its own, wanted to reach for his.

“Thanks again for dinner,” he said.

“I’ll tell Cathy. She did a great job.”

“Yeah.”

“She’s nice, isn’t she,” Maisie said, because she couldn’t think of what else to say.

“Yes, but she’s not like you.”

Maisie had to turn her face away to hide a stupidly delighted smile. “I guess not. She’s so . . .”

“Uncomplicated.”

“She’d probably hate for me to say it, but yes. I think she’s uncomplicated.” She turned back to him.

“Do you think I’m complicated?”

“You told me so yourself.”

Had she? She didn’t remember that. This wasn’t getting her any closer to finding out what she really wanted to know, and luckily she’d drunk sufficient to be bold enough to ask. “Why didn’t you tell me Chris was your girlfriend?”

He blinked in surprise. “What?”

“I was expecting a guy. But I got your girlfriend.”

“She’s not my girlfriend. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you she was a girl, but she’s not my girlfriend. Is that what she said?”

“Yes. That you were taking a break.”

He shook his head. The lights on the dashboard illuminated the right side of his face in soft blue. “No. Chris is just a friend.”

“Then why would she say that?”

“It’s complicated.”

“So am I – I’m sure to understand,” she said, smiling.

He shrugged, a you-asked-for-it gesture. “Earlier this year we used to . . . well, we um . . . every time I was in York we’d have sex.”

A hot flush spread up her body. Jealousy and excitement warred in her blood. “Oh. I see.”

“But I made it clear it was nothing more than . . . than that. She knows she’s not my girlfriend. And she’s not some poor, sad creature who’s been used and abused by me. We haven’t done it for months, so . . . anyway, she was probably just being mischievous. She’s like that.”

Mischievous? Why didn’t he call her stupid?

Deluded? Cretinous? But his voice was coloured with fondness, and now she had to cope with knowing that the short blonde girl – Janet would have called her

“common” – had enjoyed in real life what Maisie had only daydreamed about.

“Maisie?”

She looked up.

“You’ve gone all quiet,” he said. “Do you think I’m a bastard?”

“No, of course not. What you do is none of my business.” Try as she might, she couldn’t make her voice sound natural. It baffled her. She was so disappointed in him.

Sacha smiled at her. One of his hands left the steering wheel and was making its way to her cheek when he stopped suddenly, his gaze going past her to the house. She turned to see that Cathy had opened the door and stood in the hallway, peering out at them. When Maisie turned back, his hand was once more on the steering wheel.

“When are you going home?” he asked.

“I still don’t know.”

“I thought you were changing your flight.”

“I didn’t. As it stands, my return flight is in midFebruary.” She glanced over her shoulder again. What was Cathy doing? Keeping an eye on her? “I should go inside.”

“Sure. I’ll see you soon.”

“Bye.” She opened the door and stepped out into the cold night. As Sacha drove off, she made her way down the path to the front door where Cathy was waiting for her.

“It’s cold out here,” Cathy said.

“You could have waited inside.” She immediately regretted the snap in her voice.

“I wondered what had happened to you. You were gone so long.”

They went into the house and Maisie closed the door behind them. “He was warming up his car.”

“I’m making caramel rabbits. Go wait in the lounge room. I’ll get them.”

Maisie settled in the lounge chair while Cathy pottered in the kitchen. She stared into the fire, and in her mind the scene played out as it hadn’t in reality. Sacha had touched her cheek, leaned in to kiss her, that amazing top lip coming to rest on her own. Beyond that, she didn’t care. Just one kiss would do her. And a kiss wasn’t cheating on Adrian, not really. She closed her eyes and felt a humid warmth spread through her lower body.

“Here you are.”

Maisie opened her eyes. Cathy held out a mug, the one with “best friend in the world” written across it. She hoped Cathy hadn’t chosen it on purpose.

“Thanks, Cathy.”

Her friend settled in the chair Sacha had sat in, nearly kicking over his empty glass. For a few minutes they joined in reverie, staring into the fire and sipping their warm drinks. Tabby came into the room, fresh from an evening nap, stretching one leg then the other behind her. Maisie dropped her right hand down the side of the chair and the cat rubbed her whiskers on Maisie’s fingers.

“I thought you said he was good-looking.”

Maisie looked up in surprise. “Don’t you think he’s good-looking?”

“He’s okay. But his eyes are too close together, his nose is kind of pointy, and his lips are way too big. And he’s too skinny.”

Maisie stared at her in astonishment. In what alternative universe was Cathy living?

“You obviously disagree,” Cathy said from behind her mug.

She feigned a shrug. “It hardly matters anyway.”

“Don’t pretend, Maisie. You couldn’t keep your eyes off him. I’ve seen starving men look at threecourse meals less avidly.”

“That’s not true. I like him but it’s not . . . you know, out of control or anything.” She almost laughed, realising she had just said the exact opposite of the sick, sad truth. “Why are you worried about it, anyway?”

“Because I know and like your boyfriend. Who, by the way, is ten times better looking, more talented and smarter.” Cathy nursed her mug between her fingers.

“I just don’t want you to have an emotional accident.”

“An emotional accident? What the hell is that?”

“You’re getting grumpy with me.”

“No I’m not. Really, I’m not. I just don’t know what you’re talking about. Sacha’s just a friend, I’m not in any danger.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure.”

They fell silent. Maisie drained the last of her drink.

“It’s a bad term, anyway.”

“What is?” Maisie asked.

“Accident. An affair can’t be an accident.”

“Will you stop it?” Maisie said, forcing a laugh.

“I’m not having an affair.”

“Because there are too many decisions to make along the way. People are always saying, oh, one thing led to another and before I knew it we were having sex. It’s like they can’t help themselves. But they forget they can stop at any point. That there’s about a hundred conscious decisions along the way.” She shook her head. “It’s not an accident. It’s always an act of deliberate disloyalty.”

“Is the lecture over now?” Maisie asked.

“No lecture. Just making an observation.”

“Adrian is in no danger of losing me, Cathy. I don’t know where you got the idea from.”

“I guess it’s a mystery,” Cathy replied, turning her attention to the fire again.

Maisie sipped her drink, tried to slip back into her semi-drunken reverie.

“How long have you and Adrian been together anyway?” Cathy asked, casually.

Maisie calculated in her head. “Just over four years.”

Cathy leaned forward, stretched her hands out to the fire. “Was he your first serious boyfriend?”

“No.” Maisie said. “I had a boyfriend in high school. And then I was going out with this other guy when I met Adrian. Why all the questions?”

“Just curious. God, you’re not good at this girly talk stuff are you.”

Maisie laughed at herself. “I guess not.”

“So tell me. How did you meet Adrian?” Cathy drew her feet up onto the chair.

“My father brought him home. They were working together and Dad had him over for dinner.

I

was

smitten.” She smiled in the firelight,

remembering the first time they saw each other.

“He was smitten.”

“Love at first sight?”

“Maybe it was. In any event, the boyfriend didn’t stand a chance. Adrian and I were just friends for a few weeks, but I couldn’t get him out of my mind. We eventually both broke off the relationships we were in and got together.”

“Your dad must have been happy.”

“Both my parents were. I think it was the first time I got something right in their eyes.”

“Oh, nonsense, your parents are crazy about you.”

“Cathy, what can I say? You’re making judgements on what you see on the outside. Yes, we all get dressed up and head out to concerts together like a happy, affluent family. But they’re so disappointed in me. My mum’s a genius, my dad’s a genius. I’m just a girl.”

Cathy fell into silent reverie. Maisie warmed her hands on her cup.

“Do you want to know what my parents did?”

Cathy said softly.

Maisie wasn’t at all sure she did want to know.

“Yes.”

“My mum got pregnant with me when Sarah was only two months old. Dad told her to get an abortion but she wouldn’t, so he tried to do it himself.”

“What do you mean?”

“He punched her in the stomach and pushed her down the stairs.”

“Oh, my god.”

“Luckily, I was a tenacious little foetus. Mum went to stay with her sister until I was born, but then Dad wanted us back so Mum returned.”

“Why?”

“She didn’t know any better,” Cathy said. Her voice was too even, almost as though she were suppressing the real horror of her origins with an affected calmness.

“Dad got paid once a week. He’d drink half his pay cheque, come home, and beat Mum up. The next day we would go shopping for groceries. I came to understand that if my mum was bruised and stiff, it was time to go shopping.” Her voice dropped. “Mum put up with it for four years and then one night, Dad crossed the line.”

“What did he do?”

“He beat up on Sarah. She was only five. It was bad enough to put her in hospital. I remember the night so clearly. Waiting at the hospital, Mum’s sister coming for us, talking to welfare people, being told we weren’t going to see Daddy again.”

“I’m so sorry.”

Cathy flicked her hair off her shoulder, almost nonchalantly. “So we lived with Mum’s sister for a while. Mum was a mess, she couldn’t work. Mum’s sister had us doing the housework as soon as we were old enough to hold the vacuum cleaner. But then we met a really good teacher in grade five. Sarah and I were in the same year at school, and this teacher saw that we were a bit ragged and unpopular, and she encouraged us. We sang in the choir and we got better grades . . . I guess that was a turning point. Mum and her sister had a fight soon after that and we had to move and change schools, but we’d already had some sense of what it was like to be involved in things or to achieve something. Sarah and I moved out together after high school and went to uni together, and we’ve both made our lives okay.”

“Wow. I had no idea it was so bad.”

“So, I don’t know what it feels like to disappoint your parents,” she continued. “Mine never had any expectations in the first place.”

Maisie finished her drink and placed the cup beside the chair. “I guess you must think my problems are pretty insignificant.”

“Not at all. It’s relative. I’d say, despite everything, that I’m a happier person than you.” Cathy’s drained her drink. “Do you want me to take these empty cups to the kitchen?”

“Not yet. We can talk some more if you like.” Maisie wasn’t quite sure what to do with Cathy’s story. Should she offer comfort? Encourage her friend to express her rage? Ignore it and hope it went away?

Cathy yawned. “So, tell me the real truth

about Sacha.”

“What about him?”

“Come on, Maisie. What do you really think

of him?”

Maisie hesitated. Cathy had just opened her heart and told her the awful story of her childhood, so Maisie felt she owed a little honesty. And really, where was the harm? Cathy was in Yorkshire. Her family was in Brisbane. Opposite ends of the planet. “Everything I say is strictly in confidence,” she said quietly.

“Of course. That goes without saying. So you really do like him, hey?” Cathy wriggled in her chair. “I knew it. I could tell.”

“Well, I hope he can’t. I don’t want anything to come of it.”

“You’d never cheat on Adrian, would you?”

“Of course not.” Just a little kiss – that wasn’t cheating.

“I just don’t understand, though. Adrian should be enough for any girl.”

“Adrian’s wonderful. But . . . when you’ve been with the same person for so many years . . . I don’t know, it’s like having a bottomless packet of your favourite biscuits. After four years, it’s still your favourite biscuit, but they’ve gone a bit stale because the packet’s been open so long. But you’re not supposed to be greedy enough to open another packet, because you have a bottomless packet right there on hand.”

Cathy giggled. “Let me get this right, then. Sacha’s a fresh packet of biscuits?”

“Yes. I guess so.”

“What kind of biscuit?”

“What do you mean, what kind of biscuit?”

“Use your imagination. Like, a Tim Tam? Or a Scotch Finger?”

“Ooh, something chocolaty and exotic and rich.”

“And Adrian’s one of those honey biscuits with the white icing.”

“Exactly, a Honey Jumble.” Maisie laughed, then she stopped herself. “This is awful. Poor Adrian. I shouldn’t talk about him this way.”

“Hey, some people love Honey Jumbles. Don’t feel bad.”

“Well . . .” Maisie had begun to feel unsafe, opening herself up like this. “I think it’s past my bedtime. I’m going to have a shower.”

“Okay then.”

Maisie went to the bathroom, wished for a long, hot, steamy shower, but only got a disappointing trickle which left a red burn on one side of her body while the other side was all gooseflesh. Afterwards, she pulled on her pyjamas and a dressing gown and made for her bedroom. Cathy stopped her in the hallway.

“Don’t be cross, but I’ve broken your spare bed.”

Maisie laughed. “How on earth did you do that?”

“I sat too close to the edge and one of the legs kind of buckled. Sorry.”

“It’s okay. But where will you sleep?”

“I’ve dragged the mattress in front of the fire – and I found this. Look.” She held up a skinny exercise book. Maisie took it from her and opened it.

“Is it your grandmother’s handwriting?”

“Yes, it is. It looks like she was taking notes about something.” Maisie flicked through the pages, scanning quickly. “It’s her notes about Solgreve. It’s all here by the look of it – the witch burnings, everything.”

Cathy yawned. “Well, tell me if you find anything in there I didn’t know about. I’m off to bed.”

“Okay. Goodnight.”

Maisie took the exercise book to read. Mostly scattered notes, obviously scribbled down as things occurred to her, or as she found them out herself. Maisie read for pages without finding anything new. There were references throughout to Georgette’s diary, with the occasional question mark in the margin, or an underlined word. Shortly after Sybill’s notes about the witch burnings (where she had underlined “cursed ground” with intensity), Maisie came across some jottings which awoke her curiosity.

Virgil and the Wraiths (cemetery) – Anglo- Saxon/pagan: religious ritual? (Diary no. 3). [AS: Magical; pantheistic; earth/trees/space; Jutes (?); priests perhaps; possibly imported Scandinavian gods; tree spirits; power of chaos.] MAKE CONTACT. Maisie read it again, trying to figure it out. At least she now knew for sure that there was a third section of the diary. But what were these “Wraiths” in the cemetery? She remembered the last part of the diary, where Virgil spoke of the dark shapes he thought had pursued him at his work. The dark shapes who were still hanging around Solgreve. So, was all the information about Anglo-Saxon paganism an attempt to explain what or who they were? Perhaps it was already explained in the diary, which made Maisie twice as eager to find it.

The last, underlined, scrap of note had captured her imagination the most, however. Make contact. Sacha had told her that Sybill’s specialty was communicating with the dead, and Maisie herself had read the spell in the trunk. Had the old woman tried to speak with the Wraiths? If she did, and if she learned anything from it, it wasn’t written in this notebook. The rest of the pages were mutely empty. Maisie scanned each one carefully, but they were all blank. She rose from her bed to place the notebook on the dresser, and turned the light off. She lay in the dark for a while, looking up at the ceiling with her mind bouncing between two chains of thought: Sybill and Sacha. Neither thought brought her any peace.

From his bedroom window, Reverend Fowler could make out the lights burning in Sybill’s cottage. He could never sleep after one of his pilgrimages below the abbey, so he sat up in front of the radiator, watching through the dark. With that special attunement which men trained in the ways of the spirit had, he could sense some kind of protective veil over the house. Did that mean Sybill’s protection spell was still working? Was that possible? The other explanation was that the girl was a witch too, but surely not powerful enough at such a young age to make the spell work. It didn’t matter anyway. The point was just to scare her, not to injure her. The last yellow light at the cottage extinguished. He wondered how long they would wait before they came. Not long. An hour or two, perhaps. He supposed he could watch, sitting there in the dark, for the lights to come back on. That would tell him that his request had been granted. But if he did watch, he’d feel too much a party to it, and he’d rather pretend he wasn’t. So he climbed back into bed and closed his eyes, knowing he would not be the only person whom sleep would shun that night.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Adrian put off calling Janet as long as he could. But knowing Maisie was getting angrier and angrier at him for not sorting the whole business out, he finally summoned his courage and marched down to the public phone in the foyer of the Auckland Music and Arts College where he was teaching. He inserted a fresh phone card, and dialled Australia. As he was due home in less than a week, it would be wise to ensure he still had a home. Roland answered, and Adrian nearly lost his nerve.

“Ah, hi, Roland, it’s me.”

“Hello, Adrian. I thought you might call.”

“I guess I should talk to Janet,” he said, fiddling with the phone cord, “but I’ll be easily talked out of it if you don’t think it’s a good idea.”

“Actually, I think it’s a very good idea. She’s just finishing up with a pupil.”

“Is she still angry?”

Roland gave a light laugh. “Of course she is. It’s what she does best. But don’t worry too much. You’re welcome to come back as far as I’m concerned.”

“Thanks, Roland.”

“Have you heard from Maisie?”

“Yep, she’s safe and sound. I’m still trying to convince her to come home. That’s why I’ll have to sort things out with Janet.”

“Yes. Well, she’s just here. Hold on.”

Adrian could hear Roland explain to Janet who it was. There was an urgent, whispered exchange which he couldn’t make out. He watched a pigeon land outside the double glass doors and peck at the ground. In the distance, up the stairs, somebody was practising endless scales on a piano.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Janet.”

Silence.

“I owe you a very large apology,” he said.

“Yes, you do.”

“I hope you can understand that I was in an unfortunate position. I couldn’t betray Maisie so I –”

“Betrayed me?”

Adrian sighed. “I guess you could say that.”

“Tell me something, Adrian. Do you agree with what she did?”

“Agree with it? What do you mean?”

“Leaving the orchestra. Do you think she made the right decision?”

“Of course not. But Maisie’s not like you or me or her father.”

Janet sniffed derisively. “Of course she is. She’s just having one of those mid-twenties indecisive periods, she’ll come around. But I’m concerned that when she does, it will be too late. If she loses her place in the orchestra now, she might not get it back. You know our Maisie’s not . . .” She paused, as though searching for the right words. “You know she isn’t an outstanding talent.”

“I still think she should be allowed to make that decision.”

“What else can she do?”

“She could do anything. She’s smart, she’s

attractive.”

“She has a music degree and no other experience. She can’t even type. Do you want her to go and work in a record store? There’s no money and no future in that. You know I’m right.”

Adrian wished Janet didn’t have such a knack for expressing things that he felt but would never voice. Even though Maisie was dissatisfied with her job, Adrian couldn’t help thinking she should stick with it – plenty of people went through periods of disenchantment with their choice of career, but managed to get through them. It was a matter of being adult, responsible. “I must admit I’ve thought it from time to time.”

“You can come back, you know. I was angry when I told Maisie to stay there. In fact, I want her back quite badly.”

“Thanks, Janet.”

“But I want you to do something for me.”

He knew there would be a catch. “What is it?”

“I want you to do your best to convince Maisie to rejoin the orchestra. I spoke to the director. The autumn season starts rehearsing in the second week of February. If she’s back in time, her job is safe.”

“Okay. I’ll mention it to her.”

“I think it’s better coming from you than from me. I’ve already told him she will come back, but you’re not to tell Maisie that. Let her think it’s her decision.”

Adrian didn’t reply. This was too much like plotting against Maisie while she wasn’t around. It made him uncomfortable.

“So, is she all right? Has anything come of the threatening phone call?” Janet asked.

“No. She seemed well and happy when I last spoke to her.”

“I’ve said all along, the big danger she’s facing over there isn’t material.”

“You mean her grandmother?”

“Yes.”

“But she’s dead.”

“Her influence could live well after her.”

“I find that a little hard to believe.” Or did he?

Since Maisie had been in Yorkshire, she had spoken oddly, had been too eager to talk about supernatural things and psychic powers. Though she had stopped around the time she went to London with the gardener.

“I know it’s hard to believe, Adrian.” Her voice dropped almost to a whisper. “When you come home I’d like to tell you something about my mother.”

“What about her?

“Well,” now her voice was normal again, Janet Fielding at her confident best, “we’ll have to see. Do you want us to come pick you up at the airport?”

“No, I’ll catch a taxi.”

“We’ll see you on Tuesday then.”

“Okay. See you Tuesday.”

The phone beeped as he hung it up, and he

withdrew his card. The piano scales had stopped upstairs. He turned to the staircase and prepared to return to class, wondering what Janet planned to tell him about Sybill. He was dying to know.

The soft yet insistent knocking at Maisie’s bedroom door woke her in the early hours. She sat up sleepily, wondering what Cathy’s problem was this time.

“Yes?”

“Maisie, it’s me. There’s somebody at the door.”

“What?” Comprehension eluded her.

The bedroom door opened a crack. “I know you think I’m an idiot, but it sounds like there’s somebody knocking at the door.”

“I didn’t hear anything.”

“The back door.”

Maisie cast the covers back and climbed out of bed.

“What time is it?”

“It’s just after one. The cat’s in the laundry and she’s all agitated, and I swear I heard someone knocking at –”

“Tabby’s in the laundry?”

“Yeah.”

A chill crept into her stomach. But no, she wasn’t to worry. The spell was active, they were safe. She flicked on the light and pulled on her robe, joined Cathy in the hallway. Firelight glowed in the lounge room.

“What are you going to do?”

“Wait here.” She crept quietly down the hallway to the laundry. Tabby was sitting on the washing machine watching out the window, her head moving quickly this way and that as though she was looking for something. Maisie edged up to the window. Nothing under the tree. Nothing near the rosebushes. She turned around, relieved. Cathy must have been dreaming.

“Maisie?” her friend called from the other end of the hall.

“I think you must have –”

Three sharp knocks at the laundry door. Maisie jumped, couldn’t help letting out a little cry of surprise. She turned to the door and stared at it, wished she could see through it.

“Who’s there?” she called, trying to sound braver than she was.

No answer.

Cathy had edged down the hallway and was

standing near the entrance to the laundry. “Who is it?”

“Either really rude visitors or really polite ghosts,”

Maisie replied, not taking her eyes off the door.

“Shall we open it?” Cathy asked in a breathy voice.

“Hell, no. No way.”

“Then put your ear to the door. Maybe you’ll hear something.”

Maisie leaned close to the door, tentatively put her ear against it. The knocking came again, sending her two embarrassed steps into Cathy’s arms. They clutched each other’s forearms.

“Who is it?” Cathy called this time.

In response, a hideous hissing noise. Cathy let out a short, sharp shriek, ran out of the laundry. Tabby jumped, tail bushy, off the washing machine and raced away to hide. Maisie backed up the hall, found them both in the kitchen taking comfort in the electric light.

“What the hell is it?” Cathy asked. All the colour had drained from her face, and she was desperately clutching the edge of the sink as though it could anchor her to a more predictable reality.

“Don’t worry, we’re safe,” Maisie said, realising that she didn’t sound as confident as she should. “I put a protection spell over the cottage. As long as we don’t open any doors or windows, it can’t get in.”

“Get in? Why does it want to get in?”

Why indeed? She suspected that these Wraiths were capable of causing more than just fear. “I don’t know. But don’t worry. It can’t get in.” Then why were her hands trembling? She locked them inside one another to still them.

“Didn’t you say you saw two of them the other night?”

“It doesn’t matter if there are two or two dozen. The house is protected. We’re safe as long as we stay inside.”

Cathy clenched her jaw as though she were trying to stop herself from crying. At that moment, the lights flickered and went out. With a desperate leap Cathy launched herself from the sink into Maisie’s arms. “I’m scared,” she whispered.

Maisie held on to her thin body. “I’m scared too.”

“I didn’t believe you about . . . about bad spirits.”

Another knock. Both of them flinched. Tabby was gone, probably under the bed. Maisie was starting to think it wouldn’t be such a bad place to wait this out. At the same instant, movement caught her eye in the kitchen window. She glanced up to see a dark shape on the other side of the glass.

“Christ!” she shrieked.

As quick as it had appeared it was gone. Again, she’d had the impression of seeing dirty bone among the shadows under its hood, and the thought awoke fresh terror in her heart.

“What? What?” Cathy said, looking desperately around.

“I thought I saw something. Come on, let’s go to the bathroom. There are no windows there.”

“Was it at the window? Was it looking in? I can’t bear this.” Cathy was almost in tears. “Can’t we call the police?”

“This is Solgreve, population three hundred and twelve. The police constable doesn’t answer the phone at this time of night.”

“Then let’s get out of here. Let’s run and get help.”

“We are not leaving the house.” Maisie gave Cathy a little shove. “Come on. Bathroom.”

They went to the bathroom and shut the door behind them. Cathy perched nervously on the edge of the toilet seat, Maisie shifted from one foot to the other near the door.

“What now?” Cathy asked.

“We wait.”

“For what?”

“For it to stop.”

Cathy ran her hand through her hair and groaned softly. All was silent for a few moments. Maisie tried not to think about what those faces must look like beneath the hoods. She tried to compose herself. I’m safe, I’m safe, I’m safe.

“What’s that?” Cathy said suddenly.

“I can’t hear anything.”

“It sounds like something scratching.”

Maisie strained her ears. She could hear it, too: an awful rasping of something sharp on glass. “It’s scratching at the window,” she said.

Then, a quick, scuttling sound up the side of the house. Maisie would not allow herself to picture how that sound was being made.

Cathy’s mouth moved but no sound came out.

Finally, she swallowed hard and managed to say,

“There’s two of them.”

“I think you’re right.” Because she could still hear the scratching on glass, and now she could hear light, dreadful footsteps on the roof.

“What’s it doing on the roof?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maisie, you said it could only get in through an open door or window.”

“Yes.”

Cathy gulped. “The chimney . . . the chimney is . . .”

Maisie’s stomach turned to water. Cathy was right: the chimney was an opening in the roof, though only a small one. Could it get in? Could it turn itself to vapour and slide down the flue? She opened the bathroom door a crack and leaned an ear out. The scratching at the window had stopped. Now she could hear a quick, hard, rasping noise from the lounge room. From the chimney.

“Please no, please no,” she said under her breath. Every corporeal instinct she possessed was screaming at her to run from the house, even though she knew it was the worst thing she could possibly do. The rasping noise continued, slower now, almost methodical. Maisie felt as though her skin was alive with wild, wild fear. Finally, it stopped, and the footsteps thudded lightly back across the roof then stopped. All was quiet. The moments ticked by silently, slowly. It had tried to get in the chimney and failed. Before she could allow herself a gasp of relief, she heard a slither, a light thump. She looked down, saw her feet, enclosed in their stupid woolly socks, rooted to the floorboards.

She turned, saw that Cathy was also looking at the floor. “Did that come from down –” Before Cathy could finish the question, an uproar of banging and grating started below them. Cathy screamed, and the thing, whatever it was, screamed back, a nightmare sound. They both sprang from the bathroom and ran up the hall to the lounge where the floor was carpeted. Maisie could hear the presence dragging itself along below the floorboards then stop. Cathy leaped up onto a chair and stood there. The front of her nightdress was wet with urine and she clutched it between her hands, crying like a tiny child. The screaming had stopped, but now there was a wet, breathing noise coming from below them.

“Make it stop, make it stop!” Cathy howled.

“I don’t know how.”

Dark movement on the periphery of her vision, in the crack where the drapes didn’t quite meet. Cathy turned to the window and screamed. The shape was gone an instant later. Maisie fumbled with the curtains, pulled them closed and pinned them there with the back of a chair.

“We’re going to die,” Cathy gasped.

“We’re not going to die. If they could get in, they would be in by now.”

“Did you see it? Did you see it?”

“Only briefly.”

“It had no face . . . it had no –”

Bang. A huge echoing thump on the side of the house.

“That’s it!” Cathy shrieked. “That’s it, I’m going home.” She marched towards the door but Maisie caught her round the wrist. In the dark, Cathy’s eyes looked black with fear.

“No!” Maisie cried. “Are you fucking mad? You can’t leave the house while they’re out there. That’s what they want.”

Maisie noticed that beneath her hands Cathy seemed to have turned to rubber. As though her thin bones had melted with fear. Her pale face seemed tiny and so terribly afraid. She began to sob. “But they’ll get in, they’ll kill us.”

“They can’t get in.” Maisie tried to recall how confident she had felt the night she cast the protection spell. It made her angry that her faith had been so easily undermined. She took a step away from Cathy and shouted, “Hear that? You can’t get in. The house is protected so leave us alone.”

More footsteps on the roof. Thumping, loud

breathing, outside. And, awful sound, something like a croak of anger, a gasp of diabolical indignation. Maisie almost lost her nerve, but pounded all her fear down low inside. “I’m not leaving!” she called. “I’m not going fucking anywhere, so leave me alone.”

Cathy hiccoughed a pathetic little sob. Maisie encircled her in her arms. Her friend clung to her. She smelled like pee, but Maisie hung on tight. They stood like that for what seemed an age. Then the awful breathing stopped. A light slither from beneath the hall told Maisie that they were withdrawing. The lights flicked back on. Maisie tensed, waiting for more noises from some other part of the house. Minutes ticked past. Cathy’s breathing grew more regular. Tentatively, Maisie drew away from Cathy and looked around. She could barely resist smiling with self-pleasure. The Wraiths had gone.

“I think it’s over.”

Cathy turned her tear-stained face up. “Can I sleep with you tonight?”

“Of course.”

When Maisie next opened her eyes it was morning. Pale daylight glimmered through open curtains, and Cathy wasn’t next to her. She sat up with a start. “Cathy?”

In a moment, Cathy stood in the doorway. She was fully dressed, overcoat, gloves, scarf, and held her small suitcase in her left hand. “Sorry, Maisie. I’m not staying.”

Maisie rubbed her eyes. “What time is it?”

“It’s nine-thirty. The bus goes through in fifteen minutes.”

“But Cathy . . .”

“Last night you asked me if I was mad. I’d like to ask you the same thing. You can’t stay here. For heaven’s sake, Maisie, an evil presence tried to get into the house. God knows what its intentions are.”

“It can’t get in.”

Cathy put down her case and came to perch on the end of the bed. “Come with me.”

“I’m not coming with you.”

“Why would you want to stay here?”

Because it’s close to Sacha, because I still don’t know what happened to my grandmother, because there’s a third piece of the diary around here somewhere, because I desperately don’t want to stay in York with Cathy who is part of my old life. But she didn’t say any of these things. Instead she said, “I think my grandmother has me under a spell.”

“Last chance. I’m about to leave.”

“Do you want me to walk you to the bus stop?”

Cathy leaned over and hugged her. The kind of hug you might give someone if you thought you may never see them again. “Please take care. And you can come stay with me any time.” She stood, picked up her case again. “I’m going. Think about what you’re doing, Maisie. Your family, your boyfriend, your life back home in Australia – they’re real. They’re what matters. All this stuff here is mystery and excitement and the supernatural, but it’s not your real life.”

Maisie didn’t answer. She heard the front door close behind Cathy then got up to go to the phone. Nobody was home at Sacha’s. He must be at work. She looked up bakeries in Whitby in the phone book, tried two before she got the right one.

“Hi, I’m looking for Sacha Lupus.”

“Just a second.” In the background she could hear trays clattering, someone whistling loudly, the electronic beeping of a cash register. Sacha’s work. A whole life that he lived when she wasn’t around.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Sacha, it’s Maisie. I’m so sorry to call you at work, but I’m a little desperate.”

“What’s the matter?” She could hear no concern in his voice, but he was notoriously inept on the phone. She had learned that by now.

She quickly explained what had happened the previous night, and how she was certain the protection spell had kept her safe. “Cathy’s freaked out and gone back to York, and I don’t know what to do. Should I get out of here?”

“Do you want to leave?”

“No,” Maisie said emphatically. “I know it sounds ridiculous but I don’t. I don’t want to go home. I don’t want to go to York and hang out with Cathy. I still don’t know how Sybill died and I know that the cottage is safe.”

“Then don’t leave. I’m not working this weekend. Do you want me to come and stay?”

“Would you?” she asked quietly.

“Yes, if you want,” he said. “I’ll be there tomorrow morning. Will you be scared tonight by yourself?”

“Maybe. But I’ve got Tabby for company.”

“I have to go, Maisie. I’m supposed to be serving customers.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. I’d rather talk to you than serve customers, but a man’s got to earn a living.”

She laughed, vain, pleased with herself.

“Maisie, you haven’t tried the most obvious way to find out how Sybill died,” he said quickly.

“What do you mean?”

“Dream it. That’s where your Gift is evident. Dream how she died. I’d hate to think we did all that work in London for nothing.”

The idea hadn’t occurred to her. Or maybe it had, but she had rejected the notion before it made it into full consciousness because it terrified her. Every time she had started to dream about the wood she had woken herself up, or tried to escape from it somehow.

“It wouldn’t be a dream,” she said. “It would be a nightmare.”

“Be brave,” he said. “I’ll be there tomorrow.”