Then Père Leblanc caught up with us. He arrived with a woman he said was a nurse, but whose questions, repeated to me by Anouk, led me to suspect that perhaps she was some kind of social worker. I was out when they called—Paul had driven me to Angers to pick up some nappies and milk for Rosette—but Anouk was there, and Rosette was in her crib upstairs. And they’d brought a basket of groceries for us, and they were so kind and interested—asking after me, implying we were friends—that my trusting Anouk, in her innocence, told them far more than was wise.
She told them about Lansquenet-sous-Tannes and about our travels along the Garonne with the river gypsies. She told them about the chocolate shop, and the festival we had organized. She told them about Yule and Saturnalia, and the Oak King and the Holly King, and the two great winds that divide the year. When they expressed interest in the red good-luck sachets over the door and the saucers of bread and salt on the step, she spoke of fairies, and little gods, and animal totems, and candlelit rituals, and drawing down the moon, and singing to the wind, and Tarot cards, and cat babies—
Cat babies?
“Oh yes,” replied my summer child. “Rosette’s a cat baby, which is why she likes milk. And that’s why she cries like a cat all night. But it’s all right. She just needs a totem. We’re still waiting for it to arrive.”
I can only imagine what they made of that. Secrets and rites; unbaptized infants; children left with strangers, or worse—
He asked her if she would come with him. Of course, he had no authority. He told her she’d be safe with him; that he would keep her safe throughout the investigation. He might even have taken her away, but for Framboise, who came in to check on Rosette and found them sitting there in her kitchen, with Anouk close to tears and the priest and the woman talking earnestly to her, telling her that they knew she was afraid, that she wasn’t alone, that hundreds of children were just like her, that she could be saved if she trusted them—
Well, Framboise put an end to that. She sent them both packing with a flick of her tongue, made tea for Anouk and milk for Rosette. She was still there when Paul brought me home; and she told me of the visit from the woman and the priest.
“Those folk just don’t know how to mind their business,” she said scornfully over her tea. “Looking for devils under the bed. I told them—all you have to do is look at her face.” She nodded toward Anouk, now playing quietly with Pantoufle. “Is that the face of a child in danger? Does she look afraid to you? ”
I was grateful to her, of course. But I knew in my heart that they’d be back. Perhaps with official papers next time, some kind of a warrant to search or to question. I knew Père Leblanc would not give up; that given the chance, that kindly, well-meaning, dangerous man—or someone just like him, one of his kind—would follow me to the ends of the earth.
“We’ll leave tomorrow,” I said at last.
Anouk gave a wail of protest. “No! Not again! ”
“We have to, Nanou. Those people—”
“Why us? Why does it always have to be us? Why doesn’t the wind blow them away, for a change? ”
I looked at Rosette, asleep in her crib. At Framboise, with her wrinkled old winter-apple face; at Paul, who had listened in a silence that said more than he could have said with words. And then a flicker of something caught my eye; something that might have been a trick of the light, or a spark of static, or a stray ember from the fire.
“Wind’s up,” said Paul, listening by the chimney breast. “Wouldn’t be surprised if we had a storm.”
Sure enough, I could hear it now: the last assault of the December wind. December, despair. Throughout the night I heard its voice, keening and wailing and laughing. Rosette was fretful all night long, and I slept fitfully as the wind squalled and ratcheted the slates on the roof and rattled the windows in their frames.
At four o’clock I heard the sound of something moving in Anouk’s room. Rosette was awake. I went to see. And I found Anouk sitting on the floor in a badly drawn circle of yellow chalk. There was a candle burning beside her bed, and another one over Rosette’s crib, and in the warm yellow light she looked rosy and flushed.
“We fixed it, Maman,” she told me, bright-eyed. “We fixed it so that we could stay.”
I sat down beside her on the floor. “How? ” I said.
“I told the wind we were staying here. I told it to take someone else instead.” “It isn’t that easy, Nanou,” I said. “Yes it is,” said Anouk. “And there’s something else.” She gave me a smile of heartbreaking sweetness. “Can you see him? ” She pointed to something in the corner of the room.
I frowned. There was nothing. Well, almost nothing. A fugitive gleam—a flicker of candlelight on the wall—a shadow, something like eyes, a tail—
“I don’t see anything, Nanou.”
“He belongs to Rosette. He came on the wind.”
“Oh, I see.” I smiled. Sometimes Anouk’s imagination is so infectious that I find myself almost carried away, seeing things that cannot be there.
Rosette stretched out her arms and mewed.
“He’s a monkey,” said Anouk. “His name is Bamboozle.”
I had to laugh. “I don’t know how you think of these things.” And yet even then I felt uneasy. “You know it’s just a game, right? ”
“Oh no, he’s real,” said Anouk with a smile. “Look, Maman. Rosette sees him too.”
In the morning, the wind had dropped. An evil wind, a tornado, the locals said, felling trees and leveling barns. The newspapers called it a tragedy and spoke of how, on New Year’s Eve, a branch from a tree had dropped onto a passing car as it drove through the village early that evening. Both driver and passenger had been killed—one of them a priest from Rennes. An act of God, the papers said. Anouk and I knew otherwise. It was just an Accident, I repeated as she woke up crying night after night in our tiny flat in Boulevard de la Chapelle. Anouk, those things aren’t real, I said. Accidents happen. That’s all it was. And as the year turned she began to believe. The nightmares stopped. She seemed happy again. But still there was something in her eyes—a shift from the summer child she was—something older, wiser, stranger. And now Rosette—my winter child—seeming more like Anouk day by day, imprisoned in her own little world, refusing to grow like other children; not speaking, not walking, but watching with those animal eyes. . . . Were we responsible ? Logic says not. But logic goes only so far, it seems. And now that wind is here again. And if we do not obey its call, then whom will it choose to take in our place?
There are no trees on the Butte de Montmartre. For that at least I am grateful. But the December wind still smells of death, and no amount of frankincense can sweeten its dark seduction. December was always a time of darkness; of ghosts holy and unholy; of fires lit in defiance against the dying of the light. The gods of Yule are stern and cold; Persephone is trapped underground, and spring is a dream, a lifetime away.
V’là l’bon vent, v’là l’ joli vent V’là l’bon vent, ma mie m’appelle—
And in the bare streets of Montmartre, the Kindly Ones still roam abroad, shrieking their defiance to the season of goodwill.
Tuesday, 11 December
After that it came easily. she told me their little story in full: the chocolate shop in Lansquenet; the scandal that followed; the woman who died; then Les Laveuses, the birth of Rosette, and the Kindly Ones who had tried and failed to take her away.
So that’s what she fears. Poor little girl. Don’t think that because there’s something in this for me that I am entirely heartless. I listened to her disjointed tale; held her when it became too much; stroked her hair; and dried her tears—which is more than anyone did for me when I was sixteen and my world collapsed.
I reassured her as well as I could. Magic, I said, is a tool of Change; of the tides that keep the world alive. Everything is linked together; an evil done on one side of the world is balanced by its opposite on the other. There is no light without dark; no wrong without right; no inju
ry without revenge.
As for my own experience—
Well, I told her as much as she needed to know. Enough to make us conspirators; to link us in remorse and guilt; to sever her from the world of light and draw her gently into the darkness—
In my case, as I said, it began with a boy. It ended with one too, as it happens; for if hell has no fury like a woman scorned, then there’s nothing on earth like a cheated witch.
It went pretty well for a week or two. I queened it over the other girls, enjoying my newfound conquest and the sudden status I had achieved. Scott and I were inseparable; but Scott was weak and rather vain—it’s what had made him so easy to enslave. And very soon the temptation to confide in his locker-room friends—to boast, to strut, and finally, to mock—became too much for him to resist.
I sensed it at once—the change of balance. Scott had talked a little too much, and the rumors chased one another like dead leaves from one end of the school to another. Graffiti appeared on shower-room walls; people nudged one another as I passed by. My greatest enemy was a girl named Jasmine—scheming, popular, and picture-pretty modest—who launched the first wave of rumors. I fought them with every dirty trick at my disposal, but once a victim, always a victim, and I soon returned to my usual role, a target for every snide comment and joke. Then Scott McKenzie joined the other side. After a series of increasingly half hearted excuses, he was seen out openly in town with Jasmine and her friends; and finally was pushed, cajoled, shamed, and taunted into a direct assault. On my mother’s shop, no less; long since the butt of ridicule with its displays of crystals and books on sex-magic, now once more the target of their attack.
They came by night. A group of them, half-drunk and laughing and shushing and pushing one another. A little too early for Mischief Night; but the shops were already full of fireworks, and Hallowe’en was beckoning with long skinny fingers that smelled of smoke. My room looked out onto the street. I heard them approach, heard sounds of mirth and tautened nerves; heard a voice—go on, do it!—a muttered response, another voice saying urgently—go on, go on—then ominous silence.
It lasted almost a minute. I checked. Then came the sound of something exploding, very close by, in a confined space. For a moment I thought they had put firecrackers in the garbage bin—then the scent of smoke reached me. I looked out the window and saw them scatter—six of them, like frightened pigeons—five boys and a girl, whose walk I recognized. . . .
And Scott. Of course. Running ahead of the pack, his blond hair very pale in the streetlight. And as I watched, he looked back at me—and just for a moment, our eyes might have met—
But the glare from the shop window must have made it impossible. That red-orange flare as the fire spread, leaping and tumbling and somersaulting like an evil acrobat from a rail of silk scarves to a trapeze of dream catchers and finally to a stack of books—
Shit. I saw his lips move. He halted—the girl at his side pulled him on. His friends joined in—he turned and ran. But not before I had marked them all; those sleek and stupid teenage faces, fire blushed and grinning in the orange light—
It wasn’t much of a fire, in the end; out before the fire brigade came. We even managed to salvage most of the stock, though the ceiling was blackened and the place stank of smoke. It had been a rocket, the firemen said; a Standard rocket poked through the letter box and set alight. The policeman asked me if I’d seen anything. I said no.
But the next day, I began my revenge. Claiming sickness, I stayed at home, and plotted, and worked. I made six little dolls from wooden pegs. I made them as realistically as I could, with hand-stitched clothes and faces carefully cut out of that year’s class photograph and glued into place below the hair. I named them all, and as the Día de los Muertos approached, I worked and schemed to have them ready.
I collected stray hairs from coats on pegs. I stole clothing from the locker room. I tore pages out of exercise books, ripped tags from satchels, raided bins for used tissues, and removed well-chewed pen lids from desktops when no one was looking. By the end of the week I had enough material of one kind or another to invest in a dozen peg-dolls, and on Hallowe’en, I called in the debt.
It was the night of the half-term school disco. Nothing had been said to me officially, but it was well known that Scott was taking Jasmine to the disco, and that if I was there, there would be trouble. I didn’t intend to go to the dance, but I certainly intended trouble; and if Scott or anyone stood in my way, then I could guarantee that they would get it.
You have to remember, I was very young. Naïve too in many ways, though not as naïve as Anouk, of course, or indeed as prone to guilt. But I came up with a two-pronged revenge, one that satisfied the demands of my System while providing a solid underpinning of practical chemistry that would add authority to my occult experimentation.
At sixteen, my knowledge of poisons was not as advanced as it might have been. I knew the obvious ones, of course; but so far I’d had little chance to see them in action. I intended to change that. And so I made up a compound of all the most virulent substances I could lay my hands on: mandrake, morning glory, yew. All on sale in my mother’s shop and, if dissolved or infused into a quantity of vodka, rather difficult to spot. I bought the vodka from the corner shop; used half of it for the tincture, then added a few extras of my own—including the juice of an agaric mushroom that I had the good luck to discover under a hedge on the school grounds. I then strained the tincture carefully back into the bottle—marked now with the sign of Hurakan the Destroyer—and left it in my open schoolbag, where I was certain karma would do the rest.
Sure enough, by break it had gone, and Scott and his friends had acquired a collective smirk and a furtive manner. I went home that night almost happy and completed all of my six peg-dolls with a long, sharp needle through the heart as I whispered a little secret to each.
Jasmine—Adam—Luke—Danny—Michael—Scott—
Of course I couldn’t possibly have known that for sure, just as I could not have known that instead of drinking the vodka themselves, they would use it to spike the bowl of fruit punch at the disco, thereby spreading karma’s bounty even more generously than I could have hoped.
The effects, I heard, were spectacular. My brew induced projectile vomiting, hallucination, stomach cramps, paralysis, kidney dysfunction, and incontinence—affecting over forty pupils, including the six original perpetrators.
It could have been worse. Nobody died. Well, not directly, anyway. But poisoning on such a grand scale rarely passes unseen. There was an enquiry; someone talked; and at last the guilty parties confessed, incriminating themselves—and me—as each tried to put the blame elsewhere. They admitted to pushing the rocket through our letter box. They admitted to stealing the bottle from my bag. They even admitted to spiking the drinks—but denied all knowledge of the bottle’s contents.
Predictably, the police came to our house next. They expressed a good deal of interest in my mother’s herbal supplies and questioned me rather closely—with no success. I was an expert in stonewalling by then, and nothing—not their kindness, nor their threats—could make me change my story.
There had been a bottle of vodka, I said. I’d bought it myself—reluctantly—and on Scott McKenzie’s express instructions. Scott had big plans for the disco that night and had suggested bringing a few little extras to (as he said) liven up the party a bit. I’d taken this to mean drugs and alcohol; which was why I’d chosen not to go rather than betray my lack of enthusiasm for his plan.
I admitted that I’d known it was wrong. I should have spoken up at the time; but I’d been afraid after the rocket incident, and had gone along tacitly with their plan, fearing possible repercussions.
As it happened, something must have gone wrong. Scott didn’t know very much about drugs, and I guessed he must have overdone it. I wept a few crocodile tears at the thought; listened earnestly to the officer’s lecture; then looked relieved at my lucky escape and promised never to get invol
ved in anything like that, ever again.
It was a good performance, and it convinced the police. But my mother had her doubts all along. Her discovery of the peg-dolls did much to confirm this, and she knew enough about the properties of the substances in which she dealt to have more than an inkling of whom and what.
I denied it all, of course. But it was clear she didn’t believe me.
People could have died, she kept saying. As if that hadn’t been my plan. As if I cared, after what they’d done. And then she began to talk about getting help—about counseling and anger management and maybe a child psychiatrist—
“I never should have taken you to Mexico City that year,” she kept saying. “You were fine till then—a good little girl—”
Crazy as a coot, of course. Believing in every crackpot notion that came her way, and now, this growing delusion that somehow the obedient little girl she’d taken to Mexico for the Día de los Muertos had been taken over by some evil force—something that had changed her and made her capable of these terrible things.
“The black piñata,” she kept repeating. “What was inside ? What was inside ? ”
But by then she’d grown so hysterical that I hardly knew what she was trying to say.
I didn’t even remember a black piñata—it was such a long time ago, and besides, there were so many in the carnival. As for what was inside—well, sweets, I suppose, and little toys, and charms, and sugar skulls, and all the usual things you’d find inside a piñata on the Day of the Dead.
To suggest that it might have been anything else—that perhaps some spirit or little god (perhaps even Santa Muerte, greedy old Mictecacihuatl herself ) had entered me during that Mexican trip—