There is a house on most streets where children dare not go, on Christmas it is dark and sombre and on Halloween the trick or treating children avoid it. Often the lawns are overgrown, and the back yard has the taste of jungle about it, but sometimes the opposite is true because the reason for the avoidance isn’t the way the place looks; it’s the way the place feels.
28 Pinker Street was that kind of house. In this case the lawns were neatly trimmed, and the building meticulously maintained. In the windows its curtains were always clean, sometimes smoke wafted from the chimney and when night came lights switched on inside. In fact, the only peculiarity of the place was the visitors; there weren’t any.
The neighbours of number 28 never saw anyone arrive or leave at the place; neither did anyone ever witness the lawns being mown or the building undergoing maintenance. Onlookers would say that the place may as well be inhabited by ghosts, but most agreed that this was a foolish notion, which was good because the inhabitant was actually a witch.
A glamour had hidden her for all time, blending her home with the surroundings as a chameleon would shift its colour. In times gone by her home had been a shack, or empty fields, or even a small semi-detached but always to her it had been the same.
One simple room lay inside, a large bed and an equally large block of shelves for her potions. At first glance this was everything, but a second look would present the viewer with the half-hidden door next to the shelves in the farthest corner from the entrance.
This door was strange in so many ways, but the first thing noticed by an observer would be its scarcely-there existence. It looked more like a faded painting of a door where the wall behind it had begun to wear through in places and the more a viewer concentrated on it the more ethereal its existence seemed to be.
The best way to actually see the door would be to focus passed it, or to catch it out of the corner of you eye; but if you looked directly at it then it would shimmer, the old glamour placed upon it twisting it out of perception.
The witch had no such problem.
Anna tied the slim laces to her shoes and stood, brushing down her red blouse and knee length black skirt. Down past the hem of her skirt the woman’s calves were on full view and she marvelled at this for a moment. There were times when those calves would’ve gotten her stoned as quickly as any accusation of witchcraft.
She looked far less like a witch and far more like a business associate, a modern upwardly mobile woman of means; and in many ways this was also true of her. She brushed her mane of red hair and examined herself, she didn’t use a mirror for this, she just wished it, and it became. For a moment, her line of sight was that of something unseen that was stood a few feet in front of her, surveying a woman who looked unusual only for her beauty. A moment later her sight switched back to herself.
Magic was like that, no more mysterious than a change of focus, or a moment of clarity while most are in confusion. She pondered this as she made her way to the shimmering door, it’s glamour-laden shimmer undulated as she approached and dropped to invisibility for the barest moment as Anna muttered an ancient spell.
The door opened of its own accord, revealing a long flight of stone steps into the darkness below. The stairwell was far wider than the width of the door would indicate and deeper than man could ever measure.
Anna stepped through and the door closed behind her feeling the familiar tug in her stomach as gravity shifted and she suddenly found herself in a far-off place. A pale purple glow, soft at first but growing in intensity, spread across the irregularly domed ceiling above her. The stairs had been hewn out of the very rock and the glow emanated from the living creatures that grew like lichen across all the exposed surfaces near doorways to the open air of the world above.
Her hard heels clipped along the stone steps, polished to a shine from hundreds of years of traversing feet.
She was now deeper in the earth than anyone had ever tunnelled and deeper than even the most advanced equipment of the technologically obsessed world above could measure. The purple moss that gave the place light existed nowhere else, neither did the bugs and small animals that made their homes in the cracks and crevices of the small network of caves in this Hidden Place.
The stairs led to the Oval Walkway that encircled the enormous cone of empty space that was the core of the Hidden Place. A half dozen walkways, the stairs just one, leading off like spokes of a wheel from this near silent hub.
Anna’s footfalls echoed, rolling around the cavern like cannon fire.
Around the Oval Walkway steps led down to the floor of the cavern where the others stood in wait.
“You’re late Sister.” The blonde woman muttered; her words amplified by the caverns shape. Far above animals resembling bats fluttered between roosts in response.
Anna unconsciously tugged at her blouse then run her thumb around the waistband of her skirt, checking her appearance by touch alone.
“My apologies my Lady.” The witch heard herself say. “The world above has its own tugs and restraints at times.”
“Hmm, so it does at times Sister.”
Anna heard no warmth in the other woman’s voice, the use of the word “sister” just short of a mockery.
“So, I was called? What is it that’s asked?”
Anna noticed movement and became aware of the others stood in a semi-circle around the caverns centre. Much like the glamour-laden door above them (so far above them it made Anna’s stomach clench to think of it) they had seemed invisible for a moment. Though the witch knew this was nothing to do with anything mystic in origin; this was because of the magnetism of she who was at the centre of it all.
The woman spoke again.
“A friend of ours has fallen, and I wish for you to help him to his feet.”
The woman motioned with her hand to the centre of the room. It was a simple gesture that reminded Anna of swimming underwater for some reason; but this notion disappeared as soon as it had come when Anna saw the body lay in the huge bowl of stone carved out of the rooms centre.
Over it was laid a purple cloth of silken material.
“I… I am no doctor…”
“He’s fallen further than that”
The words came like a whisper in Anna’s ear, and she snapped her head around to see the woman five strides away. She was looking intently on the covered body with a look of intensity that bordered on hunger. Anna seemed the furthest thing from her mind.
The figures around the two women converged, each anonymous robed man – at least Anna assumed they were men, she had never seen their faces – taking up a position roughly congruous with the half a dozen walkways that radiated out around them. Each muttered a single phrase of some near forgotten language, the man next taking up the call, as did the next; the six of them completing the chant so no one of them could be held singularly accountable.
Anna felt something in the caverns awake.
The horror of anticipation crept into the witch-woman.
She knew her own powers, as she knew the powers of some of the gifted people walking the world above; but the creature the blonde woman had found in these caverns so many years before made her feel so utterly alone that words could not express the feeling.
The touch of this creature’s consciousness made Anna know Hell.
“She wakes… Anna, the spell…”
Anna stepped forward and placed her hands on the silken material that covered the body before her. She called to dark entities that she swore daily to recant. She felt moths under her skin fluttering in a mad search for light. Her blood grew warm, then hot, and then her flesh began to cook.
Then the creature’s powers reached out to brush her.
Anna’s skin steamed, and then split. Blood boiled from the rips.
The witch-woman raised her face to the heavens and shrieked.
The blonde woman watched as the witch fell to the floor, her blood already cooling to congealed scabs over the fresh wounds.
A hastily raised hand silenced the chanting men.
“Take her back to her shack, and then find yourselves gone.”
The monks became stretcher bearers and all that remained of Anna was a single smear of her blood on the rough rock.
The silken sheet shifted.
It slid with a whisper.
And the body beneath rattled in a breath.
Alone now the blonde woman took a nervous step forward and the sheet slid completely aside. The man who was lay beneath it shuddered, the fingernails of one hand rapping spasmodically on the stone.
When the man raised his head and climbed painfully to his feet the blonde woman nearly cried out despite herself.
Cain brushed his long hair from out of his piercing eyes.
She looked at him for a time and Cain looked around the cavern. The carved Oval Walkway, the six exits to God knew where and the pinnacle high above. He knew this was a special place, a Hidden Place; perhaps even a Hidden Cathedral to something dark and unspeakable. He felt her hand on his side and he looked down into her eyes. Her eyes were soft now, wide, and childlike.
“What happened?” He asked, his voice weak.
“It does not matter,” she replied in a voice that would be unrecognisable to Anna, “it never matters; I would stop the world for you.”
He smiled a smile that could freeze oceans.
“Thank you, my love.” He said and kissed her.
Anna woke with a scream caught at the back of her throat. In the muddled moments after waking, she thought that she had dreamt of dark unseen things writhing under her flesh; and of her red hair burning from the heat within her.
It felt like a dream, but she knew it had been real.
Her waking hours were the nightmare.
Her arms were raw as though she’d been boiled and across the bed on which she’d been lay were scattered flakes of congealed blood like hell confetti.
She rose slowly.
The door shimmered opposite her.
Though it was childish Anna couldn’t stop herself giving it an accusatory glare.
Beside it she rifled through the shelves of potions, hastily mixing a well-practised concoction that she applied to her burning skin; within moments the pain dulled to faint discomfort by which time Anna felt the first tears on her cheeks and feelings once alien to her stabbed her heart.
Frustration.
Fear.
Shame.
The shame was the worst.
She had been so feared once. That very same woman had cowered before her at one time practically begging her for aid to return what had been taken from her, and she had relented: again, and again. Through it, Anna had seen something beautiful, something she knew she had wanted all her long life. Something she would wish for in those solitary moments when all others slept, but something she would never say aloud because she knew that need was the same as weakness.
Once again, the glamour on the door shimmered and it dropped it invisibility as Anna muttered to it, but this time a dimly lit corridor stood on the other side. A maroon carpet covered the floor, thread bare in places, and the walls were painted a deep yellow that bore a darkened streak where many shoulders had brushed against it over the years. The joins between the wallpaper had flaked apart now, the paper peeled at its corners here and there. The carpet had its own carpet made of dust where the only trail of feet for many years led from the door, she would soon leave to the door she would soon walk through.
Anna stepped through and, this time, there was no unpleasant tug at her innards.
On this side the door bore the legend “staff only” and when it clicked closed, she knew that if she opened it without the right keyword nothing more than a spider infested janitor’s closet would present itself.
She turned and walked down the short corridor to the “T” junction at its end, right would take her down the stairs to the foyer, so she turned left. On her right she passed the door to the ladies’ room and moments later the one to the gentleman’s passed her on her left; but it was the wide double doors ahead of her that were her target.
The balcony was a narrow thing that could comfortably seat a dozen people and it looked over an auditorium that was as dark and quiet as a tomb.
Anna selected her favorite seat and sat, taking a moment to glance over the three-hundred or so seats below. Less than a dozen people were scattered about them, no two together and this struck sadness into Anna for more reason than she could mention.
On the twenty-foot screen a little girl danced down a yellow brick road with a scarecrow in tow, sometimes barely visible through the scars and dust the print had gathered over the years.
The balcony was bad in nearly every way, in the summer it was too hot and, in the winter, too cold, visibility was poor because of the ninety-degree angle to the screen and almost no sound could be heard from any of the left-hand speakers. So consequently, it had fallen into disuse, then disrepair.
Then it became her haven.
On the screen the two characters cower in fear as a lion approaches.
She remembered watching Blackmail, the first British talkie to be shown here on the same screen. She remembered the silent version some time before, and before that she remembered watching Harold Lloyd climb clock towers and Charlie Chaplin befuddle shop owners.
Far below her one of the paying customers glanced up in her direction, at her but did not see her. The glamour she cast on this whole section hid her from casual glances the same way her door was hidden back in her unseen home.
Without looking she sensed that he was a young man, no more than a boy really, who had seen something shimmer out of the corner of his eye.
No doubt he would tall his friends of the encounter.
Perhaps he might even comment on it to the staff of the old cinema; one more sighting of the ghost.
She smiled to herself; she was a ghost.
When she looked in a mirror, she saw what most would see. She was short by today’s standards with the mass of fire red hair that would make people stop and stare if they caught sight of her. But inside she was just what she became when she came to this place.
Nothing more than a ghost.