In another second she was going to grab Amanda with those intricate hinged hands.
Her painted eyes were blank, yet curiously avid. When Amanda turned to run, she found herself pressing against the rubbery flesh of one of the trees that surrounded the cottage. The skin was gray and weak and it gave way. Inside something sucked and swarmed about on itself—a fat, brown serpent of a thing lubricated with yellow mucus.
It had the head of a human being. She thought, perhaps, the face was familiar. Was it Hitler? Stalin? She couldn’t be sure. It bubbled words, “Help me, he-e-e-lp me…” Then it snarled, its body whipped out, and in an instant coils as hard as iron had swarmed around her.
She saw flashes, she heard an old song, “Lili Marlene,” a German song from World War II. And she felt hot wires digging into every part of her body, digging and exploring.
She felt herself disappearing, becoming less than nothing.
The wires were its teeth: it was eating her soul.
But then there came a rippling surge in the rock flesh, and the song changed to hissing, spitting invective, a Götterdämmerung of gutter German. It spat.
Then Amanda was free.
Mother Star of the Sea: “Don’t go near those trees!”
“I didn’t know!”
“Now, will you please come with me? The class is waiting.”
“The class?”
“Of course, Our Lady of Grace is a school, isn’t it? Therefore we have classes, or haven’t you put those two amazingly unrelated facts together yet, my bright girl?” She clamped Amanda’s ear into one of her mechanical hands and started dragging her toward the cottage. “These woods are really far more dangerous than any place on earth. There you can do no worse than die. But here—oh, dear!”
Our Lady of Grace had been a grim place, a Gothic pile full of pale nuns and semidelinquent girls in jumpers and oxford shoes. “But I went to public school!”
“Not when you were eleven. We had you then.”
That was true. “It was only a few months.” Mamma had gotten hepatitis that year and Dad couldn’t begin to cope: they weren’t Catholic, but Our Lady was the closest place Amanda could be stashed.
Mother Star of the Sea clapped her hands. “I’m in the hells of all my girls’ It’s so nice to be needed.”
Amanda had hated Our Lady. Sausages were called bangers there and you had to eat them especially if you thought they were greasy and awful, and you had to kneel before the Madonna of the Upstairs Hall when you were bad. And they gave tongue-tashings that made you feel guilty for just being alive.
“You taught me music.”
“And you’re still dancing to my tune!”
“No.”
“All right, now, in you go.”
The cottage was really a classroom. That classroom. It was the most terrible place in her life, so terrible that she had crusted her memory of it with thick amnesia. There she had learned injustice, she had learned to hate, she had learned what evil is.
“Or was it that simple, my dear? Didn’t I love you?
Didn’t I hold you when you cried, sent to school by your father with a black eye? Amanda, you’ve hurt me. You’ve wronged my lovely name. Aren’t you ashamed?”
The chalk-dust smell of the classroom made her clench her fists. She remembered that Bonnie Haver had once stolen her crayons. When Amanda complained. Mother Star of the Sea blamed her for not finishing her work, and punished her while Bonnie went free.
“I was afraid of Bonnie, dear. She destroyed me, you know. I couldn’t punish her, I had to let her go.”
That afternoon after gym Bonnie and two other girls, Daisy and Mary, had—
“They drew on me with crayons! They drew all over me and you made me kneel to the Madonna of the Hall because I was a filthy, dirty little girl. They drew on me with my own crayons, and you punished me, you punished me again and again and again, and I said one day I would see you burn in hell, you evil, sadistic old bag of bones!”
“So here you are, feeling guilty for hating me. As you should. And punished you will be!” Her voice got lower, like the growl of a hunting cougar. “Sit down.”
“The desks—they have straps. I don’t think—”
“Have a goddamn seat! I’m your teacher. You’re here to learn about yourself. Now, sit in the desk.”
Amanda sat. With a great clatter of fingers Mother Star of the Sea strapped her into the chair. “There.
Bonnie dear, time to come out and play.”
“Oh, no, not her. Not that—”
“Bully? Yes, she was a bully when she was eleven. Too bad you didn’t know her more recently. She’s gotten really mean.”
Amanda writhed. She really didn’t understand this at all. Why was she here? This wasn’t her hell. She hadn’t done anything to be ashamed of at Our Lady. She’d been a good girl.
“You shouldn’t have despised me. It’s a sin called calumny.”
“You deserved it! You did!”
“I deserved compassion. It would have soothed me like rain.”
What little evil she had done, she had done in those months at Our Lady. There she had hated and hurt, and spread disappointment—but only because she was herself so sad.
Bonnie pranced down the aisle, blond and delicious in her schoolgirl greens, her ponytail flouncing behind her, a vicious-looking ruler in her rattling hand.
“Open your palms.”
“I haven’t done anything.”
“No, but I’ve got a right to my fun. Now, open your palms. This is going to hurt you more than it does me.”
This was crazy. She was getting the same kind of injustice she had gotten at Our Lady, and for no better reason.
“Both hands. Perhaps we can beat some sense into you. Remember, dear, we just might be your friends.”
Unwillingly, sure she was making a mistake, Amanda did as she was told. The ruler whistled a familiar tune, then came down cr-a-ack across two quivering palms.
“That’s one?”
From the front of the classroom Mother Star of the Sea commenced a wooden rumble of applause.
Again the ruler snapped. Despite herself, Amanda yelled. It fell once more. Then another time and another and another. Her palms became purple. The room was echoing with her cries and the laughter of her tormentor.
“Oh,” Bonnie said, pushing an akimbo curl out of her left eye, “that was fun.”
So this was how the demons torture the damned in hell, very artfully. “Please let me out of here!”
“What? Let the pig out of the slaughterhouse? Come on, dear, there isn’t a chance of escape. Smile, or we’ll feed you to the trees.” Bonnie glared down at her with sparkling, furious eyes. “This cottage is the heart of the forest. And Mother Star of the Sea—she’s Satan herself.”
Amanda looked at her pulsing, agonized hands. “If she’s Satan, who are you?”
“I’m her wife.”
The straps were tight. Amanda bowed her head in defeat and sorrow. She wept, and her tears were real.
They were the first sign of life in the basement where her body lay, a miracle in the secret dark. They fell from the dead, open eyes of her corpse, rolled down her cold cheeks, and dripped onto one of the Bic pens George had dropped when he was doing his own dying.
They dripped also onto the Covenstead, in the sorrow of the afternoon, onto Ivy’s cottage. They made their way through the thatch and pattered down in front of Robin, who sat frozen with grief, staring at the tabletop, and at nothing at all.
Chapter 23
As far as Ivy and Robin were concerned, a drip of perfectly ordinary water spattered on the oilcloth table that stood in the middle of Ivy’s cottage. “I hate thatch,” she muttered. From the hollow of his loss Robin lifted his eyes and watched his sister stomp about. “Damn,” she said, “double damn!”
“Water bind it, no one find it.”
“I’m not angry, Robin!”
“I didn’t say you were.”
“Oh,
no. You just recited the last two lines of the anger spell instead. Anyway you’re right. Of course I’m mad. A man got burned to death and my thatch is leaking and we lost Amanda!”
Robin got up from the table and put his arms around her. He kissed the tears that were forming in her eyes. She laid her head against his chest. “How are we going to go on without her?” she whispered.
The question intensified Robin’s own grief. Outside, the evening wind whispered through the grass.
Constance had carefully prepared him for her coming so that when he finally met her he felt a kind of ecstasy. She was a luminous woman, worth the year’s anticipation, all the rituals, and the long hours of instruction. He did not love her, although she was physically appealing. Not until the Wild Hunt did his heart open to Amanda. It was not her increasing power that won him, but rather the open, innocent way she threw herself into the ritual hunt, doing her best to succeed. Her courage and her vulnerability were what made him love her, as well as the old tales and the dim memories… when he was Robin to Maid Marian, so very long ago.
“Now she was dead, and his grief was like a brown cloud spreading not only through his new love but through his hopes for the future as well.
The unstated truth lay in the silence that had fallen between Robin and his sister. The combination of the pressures from Brother Pierce and the death of Amanda could kill the witches’ dream. You could feel as a sort of weight on the air that the heart of this place was beating more weakly than it ever had before.
Robin took a deep breath. He could never stand this kind of silence for long. “If we’re real witches, maybe we can do something about it.”
“Like what, aside from burying Amanda?”
“What if we raised the cone of power?”
“In our present state of mind we’d never succeed.”
“Then we’d better change our state of mind! Look, what if the Vine Coven raised such a cone of power you could see it with your eyes closed on a sunny day. Then what?”
“So what do we do with it?”
“Don’t you see—we raise it over Amanda’s body, and we send a wish with it, for her to return to life.”
“Bill—”
“Please use my right name. We’re still witches.”
“Sorry, Robin. Amanda Walker is really, truly dead. Her body is rotting in a basement over on Maple Lane. We don’t even know if there is a life after death, in the final analysis.”
“You sensed her in the cauldron circle this morning-. We all did.”
“We felt something. The same kind of strange, enigmatic something we always feel.”
“It was Amanda—I could even see her, sort of.”
“You understand, don’t you, that this whole business of witchcraft could just be—I don’t know—sort of self-hypnosis.”
“Oh, no, it’s not. It isn’t hypnosis at all. You know as well as I do that it’s magical thinking, which is a very different thing. The Leannan’s power stems from magical thinking. You and I can do it, to an extent.
We can create vivid visions in our minds, which affect reality. You know, you do magic.”
“I know, I guess I’m just losing heart. I feel like I’ve been kicked in the stomach.”
“We’ve got to try!”
“But you’re talking about raising the dead. That’s a lot more than magical thinking. That’d be a true miracle.”
“I can’t think of her as dead. She was so alive. When I heard her on the Wild Hunt, that unchained voice echoing through the whole of Maywell—well, I discovered how powerful a sudden love can be.”
“Robin, if we try and fail, don’t you see that it’ll demoralize the Covenstead even more? People are in despair. Not only that, they’re scared to death of Brother Pierce. They’re saying we’re under a curse, and I for one think they’re right.”
“Surely people who’re willing to believe in curses are willing to believe the dead can be raised.”
“She’s been dead for hours!”
“It’s been done in history. Not often, but it has been done.”
“History is a tissue of lies.”
There were voices outside, latecomers back from their day’s commute. Their laughter was comforting.
As soon as they heard the news, though, they became as silent as the rest of the witches.
Soon the six o’clock gong rang. There were no cooking odors among the cottages, and no lights in the night of mourning.
Despite Ivy’s arguments, Robin made the decision that they were going to try this impossible thing. But he had to be careful. Ivy wouldn’t be alone in objecting. People didn’t like to attempt things they thought were beyond their power. Failures weaken magic, and too many failures destroy it.
He had to handle this very carefully. “It’s time to go in and get her,” he said, “if we’re going to bury her here on the Covenstead.”
“Up on the mountain. Near where she saw the Leannan.”
“Yes, there.”
He went out into the village, knocking on the doors of the dark houses until he had the Vine Coven assembled. Some of the others wanted to come, too, which was fine with him..The only trouble was a lack of transportation. “Why don’t (he rest of you prepare a lying-in-state?”
“At me house?” a voice asked from the dark.
If he sent them up to the house, they would all discover the secret of how dejected Connie had become.
She had retreated there, he knew, to hide that fact from her people. “I have a feeling Amanda would have preferred it on the Fairy Stone.”
There was general agreement to that. The Vine Coven set off, going in the Covenstead’s two station wagons. As they drove out through the silent farm, past the blackened field that Brother Pierce and his men had burned, Robin wondered if they might really have somehow brought a curse down upon themselves.
They reached the edge of the farm, then the limit of the estate itself. The lights of the cars played on the scar of the fire, and then on the purple stains in the road. He still had stickers in his hands from picking those blackberries.
There was a sharp ping from the hood.
Ivy, sitting beside him, peered forward. Just then there was another one. This time a long crack slit the windshield.
From the back seat somebody screamed.
Robin hit the horn to warn the wagon behind them and jammed the accelerator to the floor. The car lunged and slurried until the tires caught the asphalt. Then it shot ahead, its old engine roaring and rattling.
Somebody shouted a charm. “Things of the night, take flight.”
Robin was forced to slow down out of fear that he would lose control in the turn. People in the car were silent, stunned by surprise and fear. “They weren’t actual bullets,” he said, “or the windshield would be shattered. Pellets or even BB’s. We weren’t in any real danger.”
He did not add what they all knew, that it was only a matter of time before this sort of thing escalated to open warfare. The people lurking at the gates were building courage.
“They must have somebody there all the time. I hadn’t realized that.”
“We’ll post guards,” Wistena said. “We’ll have to.”
Robin pulled over, motioned the following wagon to come parallel. “You folks all right?”
Grape was driving. She gave him a tight smile. They went on, down West Street to Main, then up Main and across Bridge to The Lanes. There were a lot of cars in front of 24 Maple Lane.
From the house there came soft singing. The town covens must have assembled there spontaneously as soon as Constance had called them with news of the tragedy.
It occurred to Robin that he was going to have to see Amanda’s dead body in a few minutes. He feared for his own ability to believe in her life, then. Ivy touched him. “You’re trembling, brother.”
From behind, Wisteria put her hand on his shoulder. “We’re all with you, Robin. Remember, she’s in the Land of Summer now. The Goddess is taking care of her daught
er.”
It was very hard, this new experience of grief.
Sky-flower opened his door for him. They had been initiated on the same day, he and she.
Robin began to approach the house. It was full of people, of course, not only the town witches but a large part of the Christian community as well. Most of the genuine Christians of Maywell viewed the witches with wary respect. Only Brother Pierce’s followers hated, and Robin did not think of them as Christians.
A queen had died, and she would be honored among all the good people of this town. He could hear that they were singing one of the Covenstead’s own songs, one of the most beautiful.
“Somewhere there is a river
Somewhere there is new youth.
Oh, let me drink the cooling water
Let me bathe my soul in truth.”
Just as the song ended, Sheriff Williams came tromping up the basement stairs. “Evening, Robin,” he said. He embraced Robin, pressing him against his cigar-smelling shoulder.
“We got shot at, Sheriff. Just at the entrance to the estate.”
“I’ve got my deputy out there.”
“We didn’t see him.”
“Well, I’ll talk to him about it.” He looked at Robin out of stricken eyes. The sheriff had given up a great deal for his beliefs and his lifelong love of Constance Collier.
“You going down to the basement, Robin?”
“I’m going down.”
To get through the house they had to step over people, covens sitting close to one another, clustering around their priestesses and priests, and Catholics and Episcopalians and Methodists with their pastors.
Even people who had not known her sensed the wonder of her.
When they reached the mudroom and Robin saw the ugly little hatch to the cellar, his throat constricted.
She had gone down into that dark place to face death.
“She tried to get away,” the sheriff said laconically.
“Made it as far as her car. He dragged her back.”
Robin could hardly bear to listen.
“Fred, we’re coming down.”
“Okay.”
“Robin?”
“Yes, Sheriff?”
“Look, it’s kind of bad.”