The sky had transformed into an image of charred meat by the time we got to the wood. The black of night, riddled with cracked bright red that was surrounded by the sickly grey of rain laden clouds. It looked – for the life of me – like a hastily burned corpse, the victim of a horrific crime ineptly disposed of by a disorganised serial killer. Beneath it the setting sun had pushed the wood into silhouette, creating jagged irregular spikes that thrust up into the wound of sky. I thought of knives as I walked behind the rest of the group, knives made from sharpened and burned bone.
The Golden Boy had taken the lead, as was his place in life I’d guess, his chosen arm-candy a step behind him. She had taken to the role well, I had noticed, barely needing the training he would certainly offer if she stepped out of line.
Behind him were his sisters – twins – I had been seeing one of them, but I couldn’t make out which one it was. When they were side by side, I could barely tell them apart, for all I knew I’d been seeing both, if they were both equally self-obsessed, I’d never tell. The twin on the left had smiled at me earlier, so I think it was that one, but I couldn’t be certain, so I decided to play it distant until the right one made the first move.
We had left Golden Boy’s Range Rover at the edge of the wood, where there was still a road – of sorts – to follow. It was a vehicle easily tough enough to take us further, but it was for show. There was no way Golden Boy would want it muddied or – God forbid – scratched, so he had decided we would walk the rest of the way.
The house on the edge of the wood could be seen from the road, but unless you wanted your location to be obvious it was wise not to park nearby. We had driven around and found a discreet spot and decided to cut through the wood rather than take the route closer to the road. Golden Boy had planned it all, right down to the way into the old building and the room we’d use, and there was little chance of anyone spotting us from the street.
The sun was fast descending over the horizon, and the foliage overhead sank the woodland floor into deep shadow. I could no longer see my feet clearly, and our pace had slowed as we evaluated the ground as we walked. The lightning strike ‘S’ embroidered on Golden Boys orange puffer jacket hovered in the darkness of its own accord in a zigzag of brilliant red.
His arm-candy drifted behind him, nothing more than a ghost image on a badly tuned TV. The twins clutched at each other, speaking their language of giggles and whispers. Their hair was almost white in the muted moonlight, their skin translucent. Some might consider them beautiful, but I knew better. Things squirmed behind their eyes; I had seen it when she – whichever one it was – had breathed into my mouth on those warm nights on the meadow that looked out over the city lights. The Golden Boy was no different. A toffee apple with a rotten core. A strawberry that tasted overly sweet moments before the putrefaction popped over your tongue in a sticky nauseous wave.
If I slowed my steps, would they wander ahead of me and lose me in the darkness?
Could I stop and listen to their giggles diminish as they stepped out of my world entirely?
My footsteps did not slow, I knew it was pointless, they would sense my absence and I would hear those sickly-sweet voices calling my name, and I would do anything to never hear my name on their lips again. What was once sweet was now terribly sour.
Amid the jagged lines of the wood could be seen the sharp angle of a rooftop.
The House on the Edge of the Wood.
The Witch House.
Our destination.
“I see you.” Golden Boy cooed.
Around us the night was impossibly still, as if the night creatures avoided this place, as if they found themselves repelled from it, drawn to night that was more wholesome elsewhere.
“We see you.” The twins cooed in perfect tandem.
I could not stifle a shudder. Icy fingers stroked the backs of my hands, caressed my forearms, and slid along my extremities until they reached my spine. A glint glared from a shattered tooth of windowpane and my mind screamed “witch” in response.
“Oh, this is a place of horrid beauty.” Golden Boy stage whispered. His arm-candy laughed but could no more stifle her fear than I could earlier. He pulled her close and stage whispered again. “They say she killed children here, that they found bodies impaled on the fence that surrounded the property. The boys had all the fat on their bodies removed, and search as they might, they never found it.”
“They say she ate it.” One twin added.
“Boiled it up into a witches brew.” The other offered.
It was theatre, I thought, and a particularly morbid theatre at that.
The twin who smiled earlier flashed another grin back at me.
Horrid beauty indeed.
The house revealed itself as order amid chaos, lines that had been hidden in the curves of the foliage reaching out to subdue, then dominate. It crept out from the surrounding darkness with the affected coyness of a fallen woman. It knew what we wanted, and it knew it had us, its affectations obscene in its crassness. The building was tall, slim, and undeniably feminine. Its bricks carried no weight, the narrowness of the building – what I could only think of as its slimness – lending the construction an illusion of lightness. The building seemed to dance ahead of us, peeking out from the woodland around it as a performer might around the curtain of a stage.
It took me a moment to realise we had all stopped to admire the building. My mouth was slightly agape, I could feel the cool night air, it gushed over my tongue as I breathed in heavy breaths.
Did the building move?
Did I see it shift as if settling down for a more comfortable position?
I couldn’t have.
But why then did I hear the twins gasp in amazement?
“Welcome to The Witch House.” Golden Boy said, this time not in a stage whisper but a real one.
The twins stepped forward, and the arm-candy dropped her gaze to the smaller girls, her head darting from one creature to the other, stepping away until The Golden Boy stepped between the horrid beauty of his younger siblings. The arm-candy glanced at me, but I did not meet her gaze with my own, instead I looked up at the dancing building.
“Welcome.” The twins replied, in unison.
The picket fence that surrounded the property was once even, and probably painted white. Now it was no more than a suggestion of a boundary, in places the elements had torn it into rotten fragments, in others crooked remains jutted from the ground like forgotten tombstones. Behind it the earth was as uneven and overgrown as the wilderness in which we stood. If there had been a pathway leading to the buildings foreboding door, it was no longer there. A low weave of brambles buried where feet had once trod, bramble through which parts of the old fence poked reminding me of sailors gasping for air through untamed surf.
The brambles broke underfoot as Golden Boy stepped forward. The brittle stems offering no resistance to him as he waded through them to the front door of the Witch House. Close behind the twins followed, one of them glancing back briefly.
There was no question that we would follow. I knew without doubt that Golden Boy knew that turning back was no option for his followers. His arm-candy stepped up to the shattered boundary marker, her heels primly together and her sparkly shoes smeared with the mud of the journey. I could see her shudder in the moonlight, her shoulders slight, her stature bowed. I stepped closer and raised my hand, intending to rest in on one sloping shoulder. But as my hand lowered, she was no longer there to receive it. The heels of her party shoes crunched through the dead brambles as she followed.
Turn and run, I was going to whisper, hide yourself in the darkness beside the night creatures. Watch the house with the same wide eyes that they surveyed it. The wolves of the night will sense your fear and share of it, they will not harm you, because their understanding will be too great.
Instead, I was alone in the darkness. The dancing house watched me as I watched the fools who led me as they huddled around its door. The sound of breaking wood assaulted the silence, and I thought I saw the building shudder at its violation. The Golden Boy slipped into the darkness produced by the open door, followed by his sisters. The arm-candy hovered around the buildings entrance, stepping toward it, and then retreating, only to step forward once again. Her fear pushed, and her curiosity tugged, but eventually her curiosity won, and she stepped into the rectangle of shadow.
I had still not stepped onto the property surrounding the Witch House, but it was not such a conflict that held me at bay. I knew my purpose here. As I stepped into the trampled brambles, I immediately felt the allure of the house. It started in my belly, a warmth that I could not categorize as wholesome grew from an ember and inch behind my belly button and crept with tingling tendrils through to my spine.
With each step the warmth grew, and as the heat inside me raged my steps quickened.
The wooden steps to the door bowed under my weight, spongy as if alive, they creaked as I climbed them, but the creaking was the sound of old bones in overused sockets. I was close to the open door now, but the darkness inside was so complete that I could see nothing inside the building. I wondered if the doorway was not just a barrier between the inside and the outside of the building, but a doorway between my world and another.
I stepped inside, and my heels clattered on a floor that seemed far too solid.
My ears popped as if I had rapidly risen in the world’s fastest elevator, and the world turned momentarily black. Noise assaulted me, whispers and murmurs, footsteps, and shuffling, until finally a word made its way to the surface of the sea of sound.
“Witch.”
It was a woman’s voice, and it took me a moment to place it, fear pricked the edge of each word.
“Yes.” A man said, if such a description described the person who owned the voice, the ‘S’ drawn out into a sinister whisper.
The Golden Boy and his arm-candy.
Then I heard a tandem of giggles.
Everyone accounted for.
But I could still not see them.
I moved towards the sounds, raising my hands in the darkness. There was a flicker, in the darkness it was an explosion but as I neared it, I saw it was merely a match. The match met a wick and the first of ten candles burst into life. I took it and in its meagre light I saw one of the twins smile an eerie smile. Slowly my eyes adjusted, aided by the candle flames; one held by me, four others held by each of the fools.
I knew where the other five would be even before the twins had lit them.
Few shapes can be created with five black candles, and only one would be suitable for a building known as The Witch House.
Beneath the burning candles was a wooden floor that, though not new, belonged in a house not sodden with rot. Again, I had the feeling that the doorway through which I stepped did not take me into the house to which logic would suggest, but rather to another place, a place that was still inhabited.
My heart quickened at the thought.
I reached into the pocket of my jeans and grasped my protection. Drawing the weapon out without revealing its existence. It was too early to play may hand, though the intentions in the room were clear, I had to wait. The golden Boy indicated for us to gather around the pentagon. He stood between the horns, at the head of the painted beast, a sister each side of him. His arm-candy took her place, and I did mine, and before much time had passed the Golden Boy began his ceremony.
It was theatre, his words gleamed from too many movies. There were books he could have plagiarised, but his attention would not reach as far as the written word. In any other place such shallow theatrics would gain nothing, but in this place, a place where the moments between heartbeats was longer than in other places, such words had power even if the person uttering them did not.
The faintest suggestion of a room slowly appeared around us. I was not certain whether it was my eyes adjusting or whether it was another symptom of the otherness of the Witch house. A fireplace, a square of darker black stood beneath a thick mantle, on this I thought I saw what might have been candlesticks. But they were large, as tall as an eight-year-old child and I had the sudden impression that they were watching.
Again, I caught movement, a suggestion of dancing, as a shadow – or a figure – moved just outside the candles glow. The Golden Boys words were a childlike rhyme with sinister intent, and despite myself I shuddered.
Then I thought I heard a sound, a groan of a heartbeat. As a heart long dead might sound if it was drawn back to life by some black art. But the sound was too large for a man, too large for a beast, and I suddenly had the awful impression that it was the heartbeat of the house itself.
I looked around the others, and their eyes were on the Golden Boy, entranced by his theatre.
They could not hear it.
The ragged heartbeat grew stronger, louder. The thud of a bass drum that threatened to crush my skull as it intensified. I resisted the urge to raise my hands to cover my ears. I would not give the dark spirits of this place the satisfaction, and I could not reveal the weapon that I clutched in my hand.
Another shadow pranced across the edge of my vision. I caught an impression of flailing arms and sweeping legs, something black as midnight released to frolic in the darkness.
I thought I heard laughter. Deep male laughter. Laughter of a man ready to do terrible things. Beside me the arm-candy shifted, and I looked over. Her eyes were looking at my hands and I realised my candle shook violently enough to snuff its flame out.
Then suddenly, silence.
The Golden Boys eyes widened in confusion, and he looked around himself as if suddenly aware of the sounds that had plagued me since I entered the dilapidated building. Either side of him his sisters watched him, one wore fear in her eyes while the other still retained an evil smirk.
The arm-candy screamed, and her shoulder collided with my own as she backed away from something I could not see. The Golden Boys eyes grew wide, and his mouth opened in a wide ‘O’ of astonishment, as a wedge of darkness, something darker than its surroundings, reached out and punched him like a huge fist.
He was thrown across the room, his six-foot line-backer body raised into the air as if he were the frailest boy in school. When he landed, he hit hard, again the building was not the rotten one we had entered. Around me became sudden pandemonium as the twins dove for their fallen brother and his arm-candy backed away, her hands raised to her face like a thirty’s starlet.
Instinctively I dropped my useless candle and grabbed her by the arm.
I pulled her from the shadows, and I saw dark spots dance across my vision in varying sizes that resembled film damage on an old film. The light flickered as the remaining candle flames danced.
It was an old film, as if projected into the uneven darkness, a black and white film from the very birth of film. Its image unstable, choppy, and barely visible. I saw one black shadow pursued by many others, its hair streamed from it in impossibly long locks, flowing in stormy waves. I thought I saw fear on the figures face, though I could not understand how. The image was blackness against darkness, but my eyes picked it out regardless of the lack of light.
The pursuing shadows raised fists, or it may have been weapons and I again heard the cry of “witch!”
My hand still clutched at my weapon, my protection, and I raised it, again trusting to instinct.
The silver glinted, the light shining from it far more than mere reflection from the feeble candles.
I held the silver crucifix at arm’s length, to its right I could see the shadow of the fleeing woman, on the left the pursuing mass of fists and anger. I swung it to my left and stepped forward.
I opened my mouth and bellowed, the room reflecting my single word back to me. So loud that it eclipsed the pounding heartbeat of the building itself.
“Back!”
The figures cowered, and the fleeing woman’s lead grew. I swung the crucifix further to the left and drove the shadow figures deeper into the darkness from where they came.
The shadow woman gained more ground, but as she was escaping, she stumbled. I reached out to her with my free hand, but she was just a shadow, so my hand faltered. I withdrew it but was caught, as a hand reached from her shadow and took my own.
I had forgotten the others in the room, but in shock I peered around with eyes so wide they hurt. The arm-candy had half hidden behind me, true to the thirty’s starlet she so resembled, while the sisters still crouched beside their fallen brother. Their eyes were on the shadow play, on me, and they were as still as the statues of church saints.
I felt pressure at my shoulder as the hand pulled me towards it, and as I returned my gaze another hand emerged from the darkness to take me by the wrist. My other hand still held the crucifix out to the cowering mass of figures, they writhed as sailors might in a sudden squall. Hands reached out of the mass as if seeking land on which to crawl. I knew if I swung the crucifix from them, they would be free, and the pursuit would continue.
The grip on my other hand was firm, the flesh that met mine cool but not cold. The fingers were as slim and long as a pianist, the nails clipped neatly and devoid of any colour. Its skin was fair to the point of white.
The hands begun to climb up my arm.
Hand over hand, as though it were climbing from a precipice.
I felt myself wrenched towards the darkness to my right, my feet slipping.
Arms wrapped around me, hands pressed to my rib-cage, and I realised that Golden Boy’s arm-candy and leaned her strength to my own.
She pulled me back as the hands dragged me forward. I could see arms now, and the impression of long ringlets of the darkest hair dancing in the shadows. The hands were to my shoulder how, one hooking around my neck.
I heard the twins scream behind me, but I could not turn. To my left, out of my view, I heard the splintering of wood and feet clattered across the wooden floor. But the arm-candy remained, her grip firm around my torso. The hands emerging from the shadows gripping me as tightly.
And then I saw the face.
They say the Devil can appear as the most beautiful Angel. They say that his beauty is unsurpassed, and I say to them that they are wrong. The beauty of the woman who reached out for me would tempt the Devil to hide his face in shame. She presented as perfect symmetry, gracing every golden ratio that any artist had ever imagined. She was a Fibonacci sequence made flesh, with skin that shone and eyes that pulled at your soul.
The arm-candy gripped tighter, and I blinked my eyes.
The shadow woman was half from her prison now, her legs slowly sliding free from the darkness that bound her. I thought I heard the shrieks of the sea of battling shadows to my left, howls of rage that their prey was somehow escaping them.
Again, I heard somewhere the scream of “witch!”
But it was too late, as the witch was free.
She released me and I toppled backwards, falling onto the Golden Boy’s arm-candy. The world rushed back to me, I felt the cold from the door that led back to our own world, I felt the heat of the woman who held me, her name still unknown to me. She clutched me tighter, and I looked up.
The witch climbed to her feet, her legs threatening to buckle under her meagre weight. The dress she half wore was savagely torn; one shoulder ripped completely free. The skirts split their entire length, flashing white thigh as she moved. Her feet were bare, slashed bloody by thorns, and across her arms were bruises.
A hand-print, etched in purple, marred on her pale flesh.
She shuddered, and my instinct told me to reach for her, but the restraining arms of the woman who held me made me keep my distance.
The shadow woman glanced upwards, around. Her eyes were wide with fright. Her mouth twitched, the corners daring the smallest smile. Beneath her, her legs shuddered and failed. She collapsed, her arms wrapping around her torso.
Her eyes met mine.
“Thank you, my sister.”
Her voice was small, but the house was silent. Around us the shadows had gone, wisps of smoke drifted from the extinguished candles. She looked at her hands and then cupped them together as if in prayer.
I thought I heard her thank us once more, as she seemed to erupt into tiny shards of light, specks of brilliance that seemed to drift towards the heavens as they faded from sight.
And then she was gone.
For a moment we did not move. I felt the heat from the woman behind me and I suddenly realised how cold the night had become. I shifted to my feet, and I heard as the woman did too.
“Are you okay?”
It was the first time I had heard her speak, and I found her voice melodious.
I nodded.
“Are you?” I replied.
She nodded, then offered a tentative smile.
I sighed and turned towards the still open door.
Outside a shard of red slashed across the horizon and the Golden Boy and his sisters were nowhere to be seen. We could see the trail we had followed and could hear traffic on the road that followed the edge of the wood. The Witch House stood on the edge of the small clearing. Its windows no longer seemed quite so menacing, and I no longer expected the building to move of its own volition.
For a moment I felt sad, and I had no idea why. The woman stood beside me and looked up into the windows.
Then I asked for her name.