A Witch in Love (12 page)

DEUTERONOMY 18

10 There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch.

11 Or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer.

12 For all that do these things are an abomination unto the LORD: and because of these abominations the LORD thy God doth drive them out from before thee.

I sat for a long time, staring at the screen, until the words shimmered in front of my eyes, burning into my retinas. Cold fear coiled in my stomach and trickled down the back of my neck. At last I erased my internet history, closed down the browser and shut down the machine.

It didn’t erase the words from my mind though.

Witch. Abomination. And, in dripping blood-red letters on the side of our barn, the letters MM. What did it mean?

‘I need to talk to you.’ I grabbed Emmaline during break and pulled her into a cloakroom. There were two first-years there and I tried not to show my impatience as they slowly washed their hands, chatting all the while. ‘Where were you? I tried to phone you all morning.’

‘Oh, sorry.’ Emmaline took the clip out of her hair and started rearranging it in the mirror. ‘My phone’s out of credit. Do you have a brush?’

‘No.’

‘Do you have a brush?’ she asked the littlest first-year. The girl blushed pink and nodded, holding out a sparkly brush with a
High School Musical
sticker on the handle. Emmaline started dragging it through her hair, her clip in her mouth. ‘What d’you want anyway?’ she asked indistinctly. I made a face and nodded at the two girls. ‘What?’ Em said unsubtly, frowning over her glasses. ‘Cat got your tongue?’

‘No,’ I said crossly. ‘It’s, you know. Private.’

‘Oh.’ She handed the brush back to the little girl. ‘Cheers for the brush. Now trot along, you two. Bell’s due in a sec.’ They fluttered out, full of excitement, and Emmaline turned to me with an air of long-suffering calm. ‘Come on then, spit it out. What’s the drama?’

‘Someone knows,’ I said through my teeth. ‘About me.’

‘Knows? What do you mean?’

‘What do you think I mean? They came in the middle of the night, while we were all asleep. They painted a Bible reference on the wall of the barn; Deuteronomy 18: 10–12.’

Emmaline didn’t need me to tell her the rest. Her expression remained impassive, but she stood stock-still for a moment. Then she kicked open the cubicle doors to check we were absolutely alone and wedged her Philosophy textbook under the door into the corridor, jamming it shut.

‘OK. First things first.’ Her face was pale but her voice was grimly calm. ‘Were there any other letters? Any signs?’

‘Yes, there was a kind of hammer and the letters MM. What do they mean?’

‘Nothing good.’

‘Really? I’d never have figured that out by myself. Cheers, Em.’ My fear was making me cross. ‘Would you like to be more specific?’

‘MM means Malleus Maleficorum. Do you know what that is?’

‘Malleus … what did you say?’ It sounded familiar. I racked my brains and a memory came. ‘It’s a book, isn’t it? About …’

‘About witch-hunting and witch trials. Yes.
Malleus Maleficarum
, Also known as
Der Hexenhammer
or
The
Hammer of the Witches
. It was written in the fifteenth century by two German nutters who saw witches hiding under every bale of hay and thought every woman who wasn’t a good German hausfrau was shagging the devil and hexing cattle. It’s full of crap and was responsible for the deaths of a lot of people, mostly women, and very few of them actually possessing any magical power. So far, so dumb, but unfortunately it’s also an organization. Spelt with an O. Also full of crap but rather more immediately worrying. If you thought the Ealdwitan was scary, think again.
They’ve
ultimately got our society’s best interests at heart, even if they have a funny way of showing it. The Malleus would like nothing better than to see us all dead.’

‘Nice.’

‘Quite.’

‘So—’ I began, but at that moment the bell rang, loud and shrill, and I jumped and bit my tongue. Emmaline looked at her watch and we stood, indecisive for a moment.

‘Want to ditch?’ Emmaline asked at last. I bit my thumbnail. There was nothing I would have liked more than to ditch Classics at that precise moment, but our coursework was due in. My absence would definitely be noted.

‘I can’t,’ I said at last. ‘I really can’t. Damn, damn, damn. Lunch, then?’

‘Won’t Seth want to reprise your eternal tryst?’ Em said sarcastically, referring to the fact that Seth and I usually ate lunch together, a fact that had not ceased to piss her off in the six months I’d been going out with him.

‘He’ll deal with it,’ I said shortly. The second bell rang and I shouldered my bag. ‘Meet you … where? South gate?’

‘South gate.’

We walked off in opposite directions to our lessons, and I spent the next period giving wrong answers to easy questions and fretting over the half-story I’d got from Emmaline. I couldn’t quite see what a bunch of superstitious dead Germans had to do with me, but just the fact that the name had stopped Emmaline in her tracks was enough to get me worried. And, undeniably, dead or not, someone had painted those words on my dad’s barn. On the other hand, from what Emmaline had said, it sounded like these were just ordinary people, outwith. That had to be good, right? My experience with the Ealdwitan had taught me that a nutter armed with magical power was a force to be reckoned with. Surely in comparison a nutter armed with nothing more deadly than a pitchfork had to be preferable?

At twelve forty I was standing at the South gate, shivering and looking at my watch. The snow had finally melted and the playing fields were a lake of icy mud, blasted by the salt sea wind. Just as I was about to get cross I saw Em flying across the quad, her long dark hair whipping behind her in the wind.

‘Sorry, sorry, got held up. Shall we walk into town and get a sandwich on the way?’

‘I’m not hungry,’ I said.

‘Well, I am. And getting into a size eight won’t impress the Malleus, you know.’

‘Em, this isn’t funny.’

‘Yes, thank you, Ms Winterson. I am aware of that. Probably even more than you.’ Her face was grim and I was reminded of her family’s constant obsession with secrecy, fitting in, camouflage. I’d violated every rule in their book – cast spells on the outwith, shared my secrets with Seth, let magic spill out at the most inopportune times and places. I’d brought the Ealdwitan’s wrath down on their heads and endangered the fragile peace they’d constructed in Winter. And yet here Emmaline still was, walking beside me, protecting me, giving me the information I needed to survive in this strange new world.

‘We’ve not got long,’ she said, ‘so I’ll talk quick. Stop me if you don’t understand something, otherwise I’ll just assume you know what I mean – I can never remember what I’ve explained to you before. OK, so where were we when the bell went off?’

‘The Malleus Maleficorum.’

‘OK. Well, you probably know the basics about the history of witch-burning, don’t you?’

‘The basics, I guess – as far as I understand it, everyone tolerated the village crone for centuries, and then it all goes a bit haywire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Lots of poor old women get tortured into mad confessions and burnt; the whole craziness dies down in the Age of Reason. Does that cover it?’

‘Pretty much. Wasn’t humanity’s finest hour, but to be honest the outwith suffered a lot more than we ever did. Our kind suffered too, though. The young and stupid, the old and senile. It’s pretty hard to perform strong magic when you’re sleep deprived, half drowned and being tortured. It was men like Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger who did the torturing.

‘They wrote a treatise, the
Malleus Maleficarum
, explaining how to get poor deluded people, usually women, to confess to lying with the devil, wishing ill on their neighbours and consorting with familiars. Since their favourite methods were pretty grim, not surprisingly huge numbers of women did confess. They were imprisoned, executed or burnt.’

I shivered and Emmaline cast me a sidelong look. We were walking into the wind and her long black hair was flapping behind her, giving her a particularly witchy appearance. I would not have been surprised to see her leap astride a broom and swoop, cackling, into the iron-grey winter sky. But I said nothing and, wrapping her scarf more securely around her throat against the biting wind, Emmaline continued.

‘Eventually the Ealdwitan got their act together and got control of the situation; the Witchcraft Act of 1735 was passed and, without the law behind them, the witch-burners were out in the cold. Because this new act didn’t cover real magic at all, the only thing it made illegal was
claiming
to be able to invoke spirits and cast spells. Even if you were found guilty you were just treated as a con-artist. Eventually the burning stopped and we were back in the shadows, out of harm’s way.’

It was strange and uncomfortable to hear about this benign, protective side of the Ealdwitan but I shrugged that off and only asked, ‘So, what happened next?’

We’d reached the harbour and Emmaline sat on a bench facing the sea. I sat silently beside her, waiting for her to marshal her thoughts and continue. When she did, her face had a new grimness of expression.

‘So far, so good. But, like always when the law changes, there were some people who preferred things the way they were before. When America banned slavery, the Ku Klux Klan sprang up. When our government stopped burning witches, the Malleus Maleficorum was born. They see themselves as continuing Sprenger and Kramer’s legacy, only this time, outside the law.’

‘So, who are they?’ My fingers felt like blocks of ice in my gloves. Emmaline shrugged.

‘I have no idea; we steer very well clear of them. They seem to be organized on a cell basis, with local chapters of varying intelligence. Often they’re not much better than Boy Scout troops – one or two families of nutters who like patrolling around in black hoods and painting sinister slogans. If we’re lucky, this is just a pack of local loonies and they’re acting on suspicion rather than knowledge.’

‘Oh.’ I felt completely blank. Last year the witches wanted to kill me, now it was the outwith. I felt like I should make a joke:
Was it something I said?
But Emmaline’s expression told me that having a group of masked crazies on my trail wasn’t a joking matter.

‘But they’re only outwith, right?’ I said at last.

‘Yes,’ Em admitted, ‘they’re only outwith – and consequently pretty dim and pretty helpless if it comes down to direct combat with one of us.’

‘Exactly,’ I said. Em had put her finger on what was bothering me. ‘Direct combat with one of us;
I
can take care of myself, Em. But what about Dad? What about Seth?’

‘They won’t hurt their fellow outwith,’ Emmaline said confidently. ‘It’s you they’re after. They’ve got no beef with your dad.’

I hoped she was right. Her comparison to the Ku Klux Klan stuck in my head. As I recalled, the KKK weren’t too keen on their fellow whites aiding and abetting freed slaves. What if the Malleus saw Dad and Seth as traitors to their kind?

Damn, damn,
damn
. I felt a cold, fierce fury against these outwith nutjobs and most of all with myself, with my witchcraft, for putting Seth and Dad in danger all over again.

‘Anna …’ Emmaline said, breaking in on my thoughts. Then, more urgency, ‘Anna, Anna …’

I looked up. Ice was spreading out from the puddles under our feet, across the quay and down into the sea. The choppy waves were turning to frozen slush and coalescing into crystal shards around the quayside and along the ropes of tethered boats. Icicles hung from the anchor chains and frost crept over the floating buoys.

I swore and caught myself back, reining in the power that had seeped out with my bleak, icy anger. In a matter of seconds I’d drawn the cold back inside me and the harbour was free of ice once more, the puddles liquid and sloshing around our feet. Emmaline said nothing, but she shook her head.

It began to rain as we walked back to school and I realized as we got to the gate that we’d forgotten about lunch. Apparently neither of us was very hungry now.

CHAPTER NINE

I
t continued to rain all afternoon, the grey trickling windows matching my mood. I sat in English and my problems ran a rat’s maze around my head – the Malleus, Dad, the tendrils of my mother’s fierce purpose reaching out of the past to thwart me at every turn … Why had she run? Why had she hidden me?

The need to know the truth was so strong it burnt, like acid, in my gut. But without Dad’s memories, how could I find out the truth about my past, my powers, myself? If I didn’t know, I would always be running, always afraid – afraid of the Ealdwitan coming for me again, afraid of the monsters in the shadows, and afraid of the worst monster of all: the monster inside myself.