Book

When the angry mob broke down his door, they discovered how a man could keep a book locked within bird-cages. 

Robert Watts was not supposed to have the spellbook, and the book had tried its hardest to make that felt. A witch’s grimoire has a will of its own, and if you want to use it freely then it must come to you freely. It had belonged to Anne-O-The-Blackthorn, a generous woman as witches went; she’d work her cures for the kindly asking, and it took a lot of provocation before she’d curse anyone, and there had been times in the past where another witch had wanted to learn something of her and she’d lent her grimoire. That was all right: the grimoire knew it was being passed safely from hand to hand, and lay in the embrace of its borrower like a stroked cat, its cover barely twitching. Anne-O-The-Blackthorn’s friend or pupil would study the page, take the lesson, and go home to practice the charm, and the charm would work the way it was intended.

Taking a book without leave is another matter, though. Anne-O-The-Blackthorn meant to leave the grimoire to her niece Eyebright-Jenny, who had borrowed it before and got along with it very comfortably. The night she died Anne-O-The-Blackthorn had gone to bed feeling so unwell she’d resolved that in the morning, when Eyebright-Jenny had promised to visit, she’d write her niece’s name on the front leaf to seal the gift and put it straight into Eyebright-Jenny’s hands. It would have gone over quite tame. 

Unfortunately that was the night Robert Watts waited in Anne-O-The-Blackthorn’s garden. He’d heard her coughing for days, and he was a wicked man. In her life she’d refused to work him several curses. So when the coughing finally went quiet, he was in her house and stealing the book before morning.

If he’d been less greedy he’d have thought about why Anne-O-The-Blackthorn never locked her door. It wasn’t only because she was a welcoming woman.

The grimoire shuddered in his hands, and when he tried to read the pages their edges cut his fingers – quite a feat for a book so old, but it knew it wasn’t where it should be. Robert Watts put on gloves, determined. He had neighbours he wanted to curse and properties he meant to obtain. 

A spell is a difficult animal to handle. If it’s in your hands out of trust then it’ll take your commands docile as a good dog, but it doesn’t like to be forced. You can drive them unwilling, but they’ll resist as much as they can.

The first person Robert Watts had his eye on was his neighbour Sue Jones, who he considered a scold since the time she shouted at him for hitting her children. There was a tongue-knot spell in the grimoire and he knew that, but the question was finding it. To get to the right page he had to read each leaf, and they weren’t willing to yield up their secrets.

He tried to read the first entry; it was a list of herbals. He hadn’t got further than ‘comfrey’ before the ink curled up off the page, twining into dark, leaf-shaped curlicues like a drawing on the air, and pinched his eyes shut. It wasn’t painful – comfrey is entirely a healing herb – but it was sticky enough that his eyes were gummed black for a whole day before he managed to wash them open again.

The book’s leaves bristled. It had given warning. But Robert Watts was a stubborn man.

He passed over the list of herbals, looking for the next section. It was about working the bones; how to heal or harm, how to understand, and how to hear their echoes if you knock the right words against them. The pages contained some instructive drawings of the skeleton: the kind found in a man, the kind found in a child, the kind found in a dog, the kind found in a cow, horse, sheep and rat. 

Robert was reading from a careful distance now, not wanting bone hands to pinch his eyes, but before he could take in much information he found his own bones twitching. His muscles had nothing to do with it; they pulsed and spasmed in protest as his thighbones lifted themselves from the chair, the jumble in his feet crunched their way across the floor, and his skull knocked itself hard against the nearest wall.

Most men might have given up, but as well as a thief and a rogue Robert Watts unluckily was resourceful. He remembered the way the letters of the word ‘comfrey’ had shaped themselves into pinching leaves – but he also remembered that the entry said that comfrey was good for pain. When he was able to stagger to his feet he went out to his garden, picked some comfrey leaves and pounded together a rough poultice for his aching head, and lo and behold, he soon felt quite a bit better.

From this he collected one of the more regrettable truths about a stolen grimoire: you can still force use out of the spells. They just don’t want you to. A horse that hates you will bite as you try to slip a bit in its mouth, but if you get behind it and crack the whip it’ll still pull; it can’t hate away its own strength. 

So Robert Watts realised that the spells would work for him if he could only find a way of getting them to give up their knowledge without being ink-mauled first. 

The simplest solution would have been to make someone else read them for him, but that would have meant admitting he’d stolen the book. There were a few in the village that would have hanged him for a witch on the spot, and even those that had loved Anne-O-The-Blackthorn knew that her grimoire belonged to Eyebright-Jenny. If anyone knew he had it, the very best he could hope for was that the book would be taken from him and handed over to a young woman who had good cause to punish him.

Robert Watts had an idea, but it needed a little magic to push it along. He tried threatening the grimoire into obedience by holding it over the fire, but the thing almost leaped straight out of his hands into the flames: evidently it disliked him more than it disliked burning. Then he tried holding it over water, and the threat of that cruel fate – the warp of page and melt of ink until your words run together and you no longer say what you were meant to say – was too much for the grimoire. Trembling, its pages fell open at the very thing he wanted:

How to draw in a child.

This was a spell Anne-O-The-Blackthorn had used mostly for finding her neighbours’ sons and daughters when they got lost. There had been one occasion where Billy Thomas wouldn’t stop pulling the tails of cats and tearing the wings off butterflies, and she’d drawn him in and sat him on the spot for a day and a night to teach him a lesson about how it felt to be helpless – but that was as cruel as she’d used it, and Billy Thomas himself always said it had done him a kindness. He was a fine drover now who had the deftest touch with his herds and his dogs adored him, but back then he’d been drifting towards wicked habits and if she hadn’t pulled him up sharp when he was still young, he’d never have prospered. 

The spell fought back pretty hard: the letters unravelled every T-cross and G-tail to make a thread and stitched Robert Watts to his chair. But pain and all, he mastered the spell. Then he cut himself free, put comfrey on the bleeding wounds, and got to work.

In a small village it would be too conspicuous to draw in his neighbours’ children. But the road to market wasn’t far, and it was one along which beggars walked, hoping for charity.

Little Tommy Jones was seven years old and wanted his mother, but once Robert Watts had him in captivity he couldn’t flee. He couldn’t read either, but Robert only fed him when he studied his letters, and unluckily for Tommy he was clever and learned fast. 

‘Here,’ Robert Watts said one day, pushing the grimoire into Tommy’s shaking hands, ‘read to me. Find a page on . . .’ He considered for a moment, needing a safe test. ‘On bringing rain.’

‘If I do can I go back to Mama?’ Tommy pleaded, and Robert Watts threw a shoe at him and told him to get on with it. 

The grimoire’s leather binding cringed a little as Tommy did, and when the little boy opened its pages it didn’t attack him. It missed Anne-O-The-Blackthorn almost as much as Tommy missed his Mama, and it lay in his hands with fellow-feeling.

Unharmed, Tommy read out the spell to Robert Watts, and Robert gathered and worked, and his neighbours gardens were flooded almost to marshland. He was delighted, and ordered Tommy to read him another. 

Tommy read him a spell about making animals swarm; Robert had no one to keep house for him and was a lazy sweeper, and rats had been giving him trouble. Sure enough, he was able to send the writhing brown rioters out of his house in a flood, but they churned up his path so much that Robert decided a rainstorm might help flatten the earth down again.

He turned to his worktable and searched his memory. 

He could remember how to make animals swarm. But he couldn’t remember how to bring rain. And despite how many shoes he threw at the boy for forgetfulness, neither could Tommy.

The grimoire was willing to yield a spell at a time to Tommy; it could feel his hands trembling around it. But it didn’t belong to Tommy either, and one spell was as much as he could hold. 

Robert Watts sat angrily down at his worktable and considered.

Stealing away one little boy had answered: Tommy’s Mama was a woman without home or money and had no one to help her. But Robert Watts knew he couldn’t count on finding an index-worth of such waifs, and even if he did, he hadn’t the house-room to keep them all. 

The grimoire was resisting as hard as it could, and a better man would have recognised that he had now two beings unwilling under his roof and shown mercy. But Robert Watts instead thought it over, and thought it over, and then he kicked the door of the cage where he’d been keeping Tommy to wake him.

‘Boy,’ he said, ‘would you like to go back to your Mama?’

‘Y-Yes please, sir,’ Tommy quavered. He said it a little fearfully; asking usually got things thrown at him. 

Robert shoved the grimoire at him again. ‘Look for pages on birds,’ he said. 

Anyone who passed Robert Watt’s garden for the next few days saw that he was busy building cages. If he’d been a less hateful neighbour they might have asked him about it, for he’d never been a man who kept chickens or loved pets. 

No one was up at the dawn chorus, though. If they had, they would have seen strands of ink cast up in the sky like fishing-lines, each dangling a glimmering moth of thought. The birds sat on their twigs and shouted, but a few of them couldn’t resist the curious temptation, and flapped up to take a bite at this new kind of bait. 

Thrushes and tits weren’t much use for spells, and Robert wrung their necks and tossed them out of the door, but his plan had one solid core to it: the more clever a creature, the more curious. Most of what he caught over the next few dawns were crows and magpies – and those are birds that can, when limed with magic and shown just how quickly a little neck can break, quickly learn the tongues of men. Enough, at least, to remind a witch-man how to work a particular spell.

Tommy wept, but Robert had made sure to wring the thrushes’ necks where he could see it too, so he didn’t plead any more. He held the grimoire in trembling hands as he recited each spell to the ink-meshed bird whose cage had been set before his, and then when it had learned its lesson, Robert Watts hung it up beside him.

Soon enough his floor was a scabbed wasteland of bird-droppings and dander floated in the sunbeams thick as smoke, and from his rafters hung cage after cage, each holding a living page of spells cheeping in sorrow.

The next day Sue Jones found herself with a knot in her tongue. Even if she’d wanted to scold her neighbour Robert Watts for boxing the ears of her little daughter, she couldn’t any more: she couldn’t say a word. All she could do was flap her hands, spreading her fingers like wings.

Jenny Brown’s cow wouldn’t milk. Robert Watts didn’t like the price of her butter, so the cow went dry, and when Jenny tried to get a blessing cast over it, there was a muster of crows seen on her barn roof, and the cow laid down and died.

Mary Samson was only six, and her neighbours excused her by saying that many children of six are young for their age. Her mother was sure Mary would be ‘young for her age’ for ever, and in this she was right, but Mary was a good girl, and when she disobeyed it was only because one thought in her head drove out another. She had been told to keep out of Robert Watt’s garden; she’d been told to keep out of many gardens. But it was only after she wandered in to pick dandelions from Robert Watts’s that she fell so sick they thought she might die.

Eyebright-Jenny wasn’t blind to any of this. She had her own knacks, and she’d been building her own grimoire, but that was the trouble with grimoires: each had its own character and no spell from one was the same as another, and so she couldn’t just counter Robert Watts’s spell. It would have been like ordering your dog out of the sheepfield and expecting someone else’s dog to obey. She worked the best cure she could manage on Mary Sampson, but while it saved her life it didn’t make her well, and as to the others, there was nothing she could do. 

Except that she could watch the birds. 

Eyebright-Jenny wasn’t a bird-worker herself; all her magic in that direction was for helping chickens lay. She had her suspicions who’d taken the grimoire, but if she was right then he’d equipped himself well enough that it wouldn’t be safe to just go in and ask. So she watched the skies. She saw that birds roosted on the thatch to the right of Robert Watts, and the thatch to the left, but that they left his own house bald-pated empty of their company. 

So she did the only bird-thing she knew how to do: she encouraged laying. It was a benevolent spell, except that a lot of eggs cracked down on Robert Watts’s head. But that was enough to provoke him and turn his eyes towards Eyebright-Jenny. 

Robert opened the grimoire, ignoring its struggles. He was of the opinion that he had handled it much like a difficult horse in need of breaking, and that gave him another idea. After all, Eyebright-Jenny must have a grimoire of her own.

And there were plenty of spells in Alice-O-The-Blackthorn’s book that applied to livestock. They’d been written as cures, but Alice-O-The-Blackthorn was too diligent a caster not to have recorded that each could be worked as curses if you turned the ingredients upside-down. 

The first spell he cast was for swine fever. Alice-O-The-Blackthorn’s book had a good fat spine, and that put him in mind of pigs; he drew down the magpie that knew the swine fever spell, shook its jewelled wings against the bars until it surrendered the information, and then cast towards Eyebright-Jenny’s house.

Eyebright-Jenny’s pig died. 

Eyebright-Jenny shed a tear and called in the butcher to salvage what he could of the meat, and shared out sausage and ribs with all her neighbours. These lasted weeks longer than you’d think; Eyebright-Jenny had a spell in her book to ward off the spoiling of foodstuffs. 

Robert Watts ground his teeth and kicked the bars of Tommy’s cage, and took down the cage containing another chapter. This was a spell for wasting in goats: with a bit of success, Eyebright-Jenny’s book would grow so thin it could hold no pages at all. 

Eyebright-Jenny kept no goat, and nor did her nearby neighbours. Since Robert Watts was going on words repeated by a poor crow that didn’t understand any of them, words were all the spell had to work with, and it fell on the closest excuse it could find. A goat-willow tree withered, its catkins blistering and its trunk paltering down to splinters, and then crashed through the roof of the smithy.

Matters were coming to a crisis, but Robert Watts had gone months now without speaking to anyone he couldn’t threaten, and he’d lost sight of the fact he might just be making mistakes. Eyebright-Jenny must be counter-spelling him; it was the only explanation he could think of, and for that, she would have to die. He would take her book once and for all, and then he would curse her right out of this world. 

He got the idea from little Tommy. Tommy, by this point, was thin as a twig-bundle and mute with fear at the sight of him, and without the birds above him he might have gone mad altogether, but because of his fellow-prisoners, he still had something to love. Tommy croaked up to the crows and magpies, and when he had food he tried to toss them up scraps, and in return, when he called to them, they’d turn their dagger-beaked heads and gleam their black eyes, hopping grey-footed and tender to the sound of his voice. 

Evidently animals could be called, so Robert went through his cages, shaking each and demanding to hear its contents, until a little snow-jacketed magpie chattered out a spell for charming dogs.

It was a useful spell, and one that could be done quickly, for it was one of those you needed to be able to work in a moment of crisis: cast right, and the wildest hound would stop its snarling and trot peaceful at your heels. Robert recited it, changing the word ‘dog’ for the word ‘book’, and he aimed all his malice at Eyebright-Jenny’s house. 

Eyebright-Jenny sat beside her fire. The blacksmith was with her; he could serve no one until they’d repaired his smithy. The butcher was with her; he’d had his share of good sausage when he butchered her pig, and he didn’t like to see a fine fat animal drop dead so early in the season when in the natural course of things it could have been finer and fatter still. Mary Samson’s father was with her; his little daughter was still sick, and Eyebright-Jenny’s tinctures kept her from pain even if they couldn’t give her the strength to get out of bed. 

So it was noticed by several pairs of eyes when a plain leather book sat up on Eyebright-Jenny’s table and shook itself. It stretched open its covers and waved its pages to and fro like an eager tail, then tipped on its end, trotting corner upon corner towards the door.

‘Shall I stamp on it?’ demanded the blacksmith, appalled at this latest turn of events.

‘No, no,’ said Eyebright-Jenny, standing and dusting off her skirt.

‘I could cut its backbone,’ the butcher suggested, feeling he should offer the skills of his trade.  

‘No, no,’ said Eyebright-Jenny, walking quietly after it.

‘Madam,’ said Mary Samson’s father, soft and respectful, ‘do you think yourself quite safe if you follow it?’

Eyebright-Jenny turned and looked at all of them rather hard. ‘Perhaps not,’ she said. ‘Perhaps I’d be the safer for some big strong men at my back.’

The book loped down the road. Once it was in the open air it developed a gait for itself, leaping from cover to cover with a doggy bound, and it would have been too fast to follow if it hadn’t been somewhat hindered by the puddles. At each damp spot it stopped, shuddered a little and then tiptoed round, one edged tip at a time. Then, with a shake of its dog-ears, it was off again.

So by the time it was halfway to Robert Watts’s house, it had quite a few more followers. Sue Jones’s tongue was too knotted to say anything about it, but she followed very determined, and Jenny Brown – well, since her cow had dropped dead, that was one less chore to take up her day. It was a muttering and angry crowd that arrived at Robert Watts’s door, and if the book was narrow enough to slip under it and they weren’t, they weren’t too weak to kick it down.

The room stunned them all for a moment. It was a tangled forest of bars. Cages hung thick as herb-bunches from every rafter, swaying and shivering with a bundle of black feathers screaming for help within. On the ground was a cage just big enough to hold a boy, who stood gripping the bars, screeching like a bird and staring at them all with eyes in the darkness that looked black as a crow’s. 

Everywhere, thick as snow, rained soft, dark feathers. And in the middle of the room was Alice-O-The-Blackthorn’s book. 

Everyone was too shocked for a moment to know what to do. In that moment, Robert Watts reached up and took from his rafters the cage of a huge black raven.

Truly, Robert Watts was a terrible man; it was later discovered that raven could recite a spell for the curing or casting of smallpox. But in that moment, Eyebright-Jenny’s book stood up on its back cover, wagging a happy page, and then leaped onto the table.

Alice-O-The-Blackthorn’s book lay there for a moment, too beaten and discouraged to turn a leaf. But Eyebright-Jenny’s grimoire nudge, nudge, nudged it with the tip of its binding, fluttering its pages to and fro with the sound of a jolly pant, and then Alice-O-The-Blackthorn’s grimoire sat up. 

It shook its binding, huffing at the weight of itself. And then, as one, the two books leaned back, and their stitching stood on ends like hackles.

Well, they’d had a moment of being someone’s dog. And what dog of any pride doesn’t like to chase birds?

The leap of those two grimoires up to the rafters was enough to smash the first few cages right away; crows and magpies flew free, swirling around the room and pecking at Robert Watts’s eyes. The books threw themselves from wall to wall making merry havoc, and while pages and feathers flew and everyone sensible shrieked, Eyebright-Jenny took a hasty path to the cage holding the little boy and broke the latch.

‘There’s a brave lad,’ she said, putting her arms around him. ‘Don’t you fret, dear. I can find your Mama as soon as my book remembers itself. But I think we’ll let it play a little first, don’t you?’

The aftermath of Robert Watts’s bird-books took a fair amount of time and trouble. Eyebright-Jenny had no difficulty calling Alice-O-The-Blackthorn’s grimoire to heel once it had some time to express itself, and it was already firm friends with her own collection. It was a period of patient study before she was fully mistress of all the spells Robert Watts had wrought, but having learned them it was simple enough to undo them; they hadn’t wanted to be tied around their victims in the first place. 

What was left of Robert Watts after his bird-pages had finished with him was, in the butcher’s professional opinion, ‘Not good for much but pig-fodder,’ but that was only his way of speaking; they buried Robert Watts according to their own ideas of dignity rather than his. He got a grave, and if it was on the north side of the church with the sinners and suicides, well, nobody had any objections to that. 

Little Tommy stayed with Eyebright-Jenny while she summoned his mother. It took a bit of time, as his mother had ranged far and wide looking for him and living on what alms she could gather, but Eyebright-Jenny got her feet pointed in the right direction, and by the time the good woman arrived Eyebright-Jenny and Tommy had become friends. His Mama knocked on a door with no hope of anything beyond a strong sense that this was the place to beg from, only to find herself leaped upon by an overjoyed little boy and then welcomed in by a practical woman who sat her down to a supper ready-prepared and suggested that, since her son turned out to be a clever fellow who had learned to read in the time he’d been away, perhaps his Mama might live alongside him with Eyebright-Jenny so he could be trained up to be, one day, a man who knew his own book? 

So much was festivity, and it should have been a place of absolute thanksgiving. But nothing is perfect in this life, and the community had to resign themselves to the fact that they now lived with educated birds. There are places that leave out cream for the fairies and places that leave out salt for the spirits, but a place that doesn’t want its goats cursed or its women tongue-tied learns very fast to leave out nuts for the birds. 

Still, there are worse things. On Eyebright-Jenny’s shelf, two volumes, one old and thick and one young and slim, nestled side by side, quiet as two sleeping pups. 

posted by Kit Whitfield  # 8:36 am 0 comments

Lonely 

The oak wasn’t always lonely, but after the goblins moved in the other trees picked up their roots and walked away. 

They didn’t go far, of course; a tree is weighed down by its hundreds of years, and after more than a couple of yards they had to stop and rest. Their roots settled back into the soil with a sigh, and the oak stood alone, its branches zigging and zagging across the empty air just far enough from the beeches and elms around it that no goblin could jump the space. Trees will let themselves be infested with many things, but at the thought of goblins they flee.

The goblins themselves wrought their festive mischief. When they’d swarmed the tree they’d been riding on the back of a traveller, and had assumed the shape of more-or-less-men in imitation. Their jaws had been undershot like open drawers and their fingers long and broad in their reach as bat-wings, but they’d only had two arms and two legs apiece and they’d worn their hair on their heads. Once they settled in the oak, though, they shifted the hair to their feet, worming bunches of toes gripping the bark like roots, and they’d scabbed over their heads so that if anyone walked past they could squat down still and pass for galls. They settled, and they feasted.

Trees weather many insults, but to have your every acorn gobbled down by creatures clad in a mocking imitation of your skin is too much. The oak was lonely for other trees, and the company it had, it hated. 

Goblins will gorge themselves on whatever they can. The acorns were stripped the second they were ripe and the tree scattered no new generation, but that wasn’t all. Any squirrel that scuttled up its bark was mobbed from a dozen directions, branch-tipped fingers digging in and uncoating the poor squealing thing to reveal the pink meat beneath. The aphids they sucked down like grains of sugar-candy, and the sticky fungus they ripped apart bare-handed and stuffed into their greedy mouths, cackling and gulping all the while. An unlucky nightingale made the mistake of stopping to rest there for a moment, and for a full week the goblins wore feathers on their bums and croaked out tunes that made the other nightingales of the forest flee in sheer shame that anything, even a goblin, could make their sweet song sound so dreadful. 

A tree is a city; that is its natural state. But the goblins were nobody’s neighbour.

Some trees die of old age, and some of disease; winds can fell them and fires swallow them down. But this tree was on its way to dying of grief when the bats came. 

Every bat needs a roost, and they like to roost together; they’re kindly little creatures with a fondness for their friends, and besides that, if you’re just the size of a fox’s bite you know better than to go it alone. These ones, crumple-faced and big-eared, were in search of a safe place to land, and for them a tree that stood a little apart from the others looked like a good prospect: some extra yards to spread their wings before they bubbled up into the sky for their night-time hunt might be just the thing. 

The goblins, seeing the dark-winged moppets land, pointed their teeth to fangs and grinned. There was much to copy in the sharp bite of their new prey, and it had been some time since they’d tasted that squirrel-meat.

Their first attempts left them annoyed. It’s one thing to set upon a squirrel when the tree’s too far from its neighbours for the screaming rodent to jump safe to another branch, but the bats could fly. As soon as the goblins bore down on them they were in the air. The nightingale hadn’t heard them coming, but the bats’ ears could hear a moth’s chirrup and they weren’t about to wait for the hunters.

So for an evening, the bats tried to roost. The goblins tried to catch and eat them, and the bats leaped into the air and circled round in jagged escapes, and the goblins chased them to the tips of the branches and got nowhere.

The bats filled their bellies with insects that night, and nested on other trees during the day, but they hadn’t lost their liking for the oak. Its bark, by now, was scored with goblin-claws; given time and freedom, so many delicious grubs might come to doze in those scars. 

So the next evening they tried again. They could shriek so high a man couldn’t hear them, but the goblins had been copying their ears. With battle cries loud enough to stun a beetle, they raced around the tree. The goblins flinched and covered their heads, and quickly shrank their ears down to a less vulnerable size, but they kept the faces they’d been imitating from the bats and bared needle-fine teeth and chattered, ready to bite any who landed.

Sensible creatures might have recognised that the tree wasn’t a good place to roost, but the bats weren’t entirely sensible. They lived in camps; they understood the idea of friendship – and the way the goblins copied their ornate little faces had really and truly offended them. 

Chittering together on other branches, the bats consulted. They didn’t have the force to lift the goblins off: they weren’t made to carry anything bigger than an insect in their jaws, and the goblins were heavier than they were. 

But that was a thought. And now, after all, the goblins couldn’t hear them planning.

So on the third night, the bats gathered around the tree. It was always their way to catch insects with their feet, flicking the things up towards their mouths with a limber bend of the back, but the goblins had begun by copying a man and were used to hunting with their hands. And they were, by their insolent nature, mimics. 

The bats spread out their wings, pointing and squealing. They dived as if to snatch the goblins up in a smothering embrace.

The goblins did what goblins do: they reshaped themselves. It wasn’t difficult to grow skin between their fingers, to dive into the air and fly towards their prey. When they launched themselves, they couldn’t imagine why they hadn’t thought of it before. 

A bat is just light enough to fly. But a goblin of the same size is just heavy enough to fall. 

If the ground beneath the tree had been soft, they might have survived the smashes. But the other trees had stepped back from the ridden oak, and there was no leaf litter to act as a cushion. The goblins cracked hard on the oak’s bare roots, and since a great deal of them was still twigs in imitation of the tree, they were brittle. Soon enough the oak’s feet were buried in broken pieces of goblin, and the last few – the ones that had realised how stupid it was to copy a bat – were left in a state of confusion as to what they should try to look like. All they could think to do was crouch down like oak-galls again, and that meant their claws were sheathed. The bats had no trouble pulling them free and letting them drop to their doom.

Thus the tree was cleansed of its goblin infestation. It would be some years before its branches grew long enough to close the gap between it and its neighbours, but the bats were delighted at so quiet a roost, and with winter nearly upon them, they very much wanted somewhere to hibernate. Little huddles of fur clustered around its trunk, and as the cold set in, the tree was not lonely. 

posted by Kit Whitfield  # 8:00 am 0 comments

Phone

There’s a number you can dial if you have a secret. Of course nobody answers; that’s the game. In this area code you have to dial at least eight digits, and this number has only seven. You stop while the line is still silent, and you whisper into the listening aether. 

I kissed my best friend’s boyfriend.

I stole the petty cash at work.

When I said I loved him, I lied.

The reason I set it up is because my familiar creature eats secrets and there was only so many of them I could create for myself. When I summoned it I thought it’d be simple: I was living a life of sin and telling nobody about it, and when I called up my creature it was glad, at first, to feast. 

It’s a little moon-faced thing, frog-bodied with a great round circle of eyes gazing at me in hunger. A sucking mouth in the middle of them something like a lamprey’s gullet: rings and rings of razor teeth, dragging secrets down into an infinite maw. The eyes are ranged round the mouth, looking something like the holes on an old dial phone. That’s what gave me the idea. 

The first time I told it a secret, it sucked it down with a sound like tearing cloth.

I’m tired of my mistress in the arts. She makes me sweep her house and carry her bags, and she drinks so much of my blood in payment that I’m near anaemia. I want her dead.

I’d never told anyone, and my familiar swallowed the words down. Then it digested. It coughed, it grappled, and into my waiting hands it pissed out a warm fulfilment of the secret: I’d wished her dead, and next day, there she was, lying stiff in her bed with a look of true astonishment in her drying eyes.

That’s how it digests. If you just tell it the secret it’ll eat it happily, and all it excretes is a relief from the burden. You wanted someone to know something; you didn’t want to carry the burden alone. My creature eats the secret, and behold, your wish is granted. 

But then it gets hungry again.

I told it I felt some guilt for killing my mistress in the arts, and it pissed out relief: no more conscience pains for me. I told it I wished for great wealth, and that secret gave it indigestion, wailing cramps and sad little farts of metaphysics until I came up with a more practical way to put it: I said I wished that seven million pounds from the account of the worst tech billionaire I could think of would be transferred into my account by a banking error, and it pissed happily. 

Of course, then I had to wish some brain damage onto the tax inspectors and auditors, but on the whole we were getting along great.

The trouble was that once its tummy was empty, the thing started growing needy. I’d wake to find it suckling on my veins, its hooked teeth clamped deep in my skin drawing out the deepest blood it could drink. Secret liquids inside me that had never seen the light of day. 

I couldn’t blame it. You get a pet, you have to feed it. But I couldn’t survive the endless nursing.

So for a while I took to creating new secrets. I’d ride the bus just to pick pockets. I’d ride crowded lifts so I could pinch unsuspecting bottoms. I scrawled confusing graffiti on posters: ‘If you’re reading this I know what you did on Sunday the twelfth, Delilah,’ – anything that people would think about enough that it would be a secret big enough to keep its pulsing belly filled.

Too many nights of nibbling, though, and I realised that a secret deliberately created was like skim milk: it’d slake my creature for a while, but it wouldn’t keep it full.

So I started the rumour. I dropped it on a few Internet sites, printed some fliers and left them on trains, slipped little pamphlets between books in the teen sections of libraries. Creating the connection between the number and my familiar creature itself was simple summoning, and my mistress in the arts had taught me that before she became one of my secrets. 

I built the line and watched the food coming in.

I only said I forgive my sister because our mother is dying. I don’t forgive a thing.

As soon as he leaves his wife, I’ll leave my husband.

When I went for a piss in your house, I stole your girlfriend’s panties.

My familiar creature was fat and happy. The relief it pissed out when the messages came in was mostly just the weight of a burden lifted: people wanted to say something, and once they’d said it, it evaporated from the table or the floor and I only needed to give it a quick wipe.

Every now and again, though, there would be something in that secret it couldn’t digest without doing more.

I wish he’d hurry up and die so I could inherit, for instance. Oh dear. I mean, not my problem, but the size of my familiar creature’s belly after it feasted on that little titbit – well, I think somebody’s richer than they used to be.

Or, When he does that stupid baby voice in bed, I wish I could kill him. I think I saw something about that on the news.

It was easy to solve at first. It meant I had another secret for my creature.

Sometimes, I whispered into its serried teeth, I feel guilty for what happens to the people who wish on you.

Then it pissed, and I didn’t. After all, I didn’t make them wish for those things. They wouldn’t have said it if it wasn’t in their hearts to begin with. And if you tamper with magic, well, that’s your choice.

But after another call – things got awkward.

I wish, someone said, that I could just take a knife and stab every last person at my doctor’s surgery. 

That kind of thing draws attention from the police, you see. And before I could wish anything about it, they’d looked up the last numbers dialled. 

It didn’t lead them to me - it’s not my phone number - but they did put out an enquiry. Some people started messaging them about this odd Internet rumour. I wouldn’t have thought the police were that quick at finding their way through to the dark arts, but I suppose I hadn’t reckoned on amateur sleuths these days. We’re a long way from the time of the dial phone.

I tried wishing I’d never started this whole business – that seemed the simplest – but the amount of upset tummy it created meant I spent an entire night on my hands and knees mopping stinking paradoxes out of the carpet. It didn’t work, and it was disgusting. 

It had seemed such a clever way of keeping my familiar creature fed. But I suppose when you let it swallow your pangs of guilt, you forget to worry about the future as much as you should. It didn’t occur to me until it was too late that some clever-clogs might call the number and whisper:

I wish I knew the secret behind this phone.

Shit.

I’m typing this under coercion, Simona Harris, I hope you know that. If I’d known you were going to do that I’d have wished something against you before you ever had the chance. And I can tell that my fingers aren’t going to be able to stop moving until I confess not just my name – it’s June Alice Marks – oh for fuck’s sake, but yes, that’s the truth, it’s June Alice Marks and I live in South Manchester and before I finish this I’ll have to type up my address too – 

But let me tell you this, Simona Harris. There’s one thing I can do. I can read aloud as I type, and my familiar creature is sitting next to me, and as I read aloud every secret word it gulps them down. 

And do you want to know how I know your name? Because my familiar creature has had all its eyes on me for a very long time, and it knows that along with my secret it’s going to get a wish. It swallows the secrets whole, and however long a secret I have to tell, it already knows what wish will go with it. 

My secret is that I’m the one behind the murder-phone mystery and I wish that I knew the name of the person who forced me to confess so that I could give her my familiar creature as a parting gift. 

Signed, June Alice Marks, 42a Russell Street, South Manchester, which the police will no doubt confirm when they read this. 

Enjoy feeding it blood or secrets, Simona Harris. We all think we’re clever till it’s gnawing on our veins. 

posted by Kit Whitfield  # 7:00 am 0 comments

Great Horned

The chickens were beautiful: copper feathers edged in snow, with mad blood-red eyes gazing at us in hopes of a treat. Jill and Toby jumped around me, and I said, ‘Go on, guys, you can throw the feed now. Give the chickens their lunch. It’ll be good luck – some people say chickens bring fortune.’

‘The chickens can give me my lunch,’ said Dad. ‘Let me rip a leg off right now. I don’t know why the hell you want to feed your kids this sentimental nonsense.’

‘Dad,’ I said, ‘city farms are educational.’ I didn’t say that they were also public. He’d called me a bitch for refusing to let him visit ‘his grandchildren’ in my own home, and I’d gone another year without speaking to him. 

He didn’t know this was his last chance. 

He hadn’t sworn yet, but I could see his foot starting to tap in irritation when Toby giggled, and my heart started to beat hard. 

Jill threw her feed in big handfuls and Toby scattered carefully. ‘That boy needs to stop tiptoeing,’ said Dad.

‘Dad,’ I said. ‘I need you to speak to the children kindly.’

‘Oh you need, do you?’ 

His face was growing red. Since Toby had finished, I said, ‘Guys, let’s go look at the pigs. Did you know that pigs are as clever as dogs? Some people even say they can think as well as young children.’

Dad snorted. ‘And you say I need to speak to them kindly.’

The pigs were Vietnamese pot-bellied, sooty black and puff-cheeked. Dad read the label on the pen and said, ‘Hey, we found your spirit animal.’

I didn’t say anything. My body was locked up.

‘I’m just saying what’s true,’ he said, giving me a poke in the stomach. ‘Never did get your figure back after those two. Maybe if you made more of an effort that husband of yours would have come along.’

‘If you want to see him, see him,’ Jack had said. ‘I’ll support whatever you decide. But I can’t be around him. It would take more powers than I’ve got. But I’ll cook dinner for when you get home, okay?’ 

‘Mummy?’ Jill tugged on my arm. ‘Mummy?’

I made myself move. I made myself smile at her. ‘Shall we go see the donkey?’ I said. ‘Christians say they’re the holy animal. Since they carried Jesus into Jerusalem, they have a cross on their backs.’ 

‘God, but you talk a lot of rubbish,’ Dad said. ‘They should have burned you as a witch by now.’

‘Mummy doesn’t talk rubbish!’ Jill turned on him, flushed, her angry little fists clenched. I tried to take her arm, pull her aside; she didn’t know you couldn’t do that with him.

Dad looked at her for a moment, his eyes going hard. ‘Let me tell you this,’ he said, ‘you fat little sow. You want to give me any back-talk, you can get in there with your friends the pigs, and if you want any help, I can throw you in this minute.’

Jill stared at him, her mouth falling open. Her eyes ran with tears, but the look on her face, more than anything else, was utter disbelief.

‘What’s the matter, Jilly?’ Toby said, running over to her. 

He put his arms around his sister, and Dad said, ‘You make a sissy of that boy, you’ll have two worthless brats on your hands.’ 

It was the disbelief in both of them that got me moving. I saw, in that moment, that they really hadn’t known anyone could talk to them like that.

‘Come on,’ I said, ‘let’s look over there.’

‘What’s over there?’ Dad said, irritated.

‘Sheep, I think.’ I walked faster, pulling at my children’s hands. When I was a little ahead of him, I said, ‘Did you know, guys, some people believe that goats can strike people dumb? It’s the slotted eyes, I think, and maybe the horns that made people think they were scary. They used to say that if the goat saw you before you saw the goat, you’d lose the power to speak.’

‘I – I don’t want that,’ Toby said. He sounded uncertain. Both of them were glancing towards their grandfather.

‘That’s all right,’ I said. ‘Look, you see the goat now. I bet you can still speak, though. Let’s all say it together. Say . . . say helicopter.’ 

‘Why?’ Toby said.

‘Because it’s a fun word to say. One, two, three: HELICOPTER!’

Dad was looking up as he came over to what I’d told him was sheep. The goat, though? We made so much noise that it had to look straight at us: the mother holding her two children’s hands, and the old man looking crossly up in the air, not seeing the great horned creature in its pen.

He opened his mouth to say something. 

Not all folklore is sentimental nonsense. Not if you give it a little push. Jack was right he didn’t have my powers, but I was looking forward to our family dinner tonight, and Dad had used up his last chance. 

By the time the ambulance came to take away the silent, thrashing man, there was bit of a crowd gathered, but I didn’t make the children wait. I took them to feed the ducks. 

posted by Kit Whitfield  # 10:39 am 0 comments

Space

‘I have to go to space tonight,’ Bobby told me. 

‘Oh, are you? That’s exciting! Are you going in a rocket?’ He didn’t have any spaceship toys out, but it was good to see him have a flight of fancy. Usually he was such a sober boy, even literal-minded; I wanted to encourage his imagination.

Bobby chewed his lip. Maybe I’d made him feel pressured to perform; he looked worried at my response. ‘He didn’t say about a rocket,’ he said.  

‘Who said, darling?’

‘The spaceman.’

I set him on my lap and he leaned his head on my chest. ‘Well, I bet you’ll have a wonderful time.’

‘I don’t know,’ Bobby said. ‘I think it’ll be dark.’

‘You could bring your torch,’ I said. ‘Here, use this one.’

Bobby held the little torch very tight. ‘The spaceman didn’t say I could bring a torch.’

‘Well, you just keep it with you.’

After supper we sat on the sofa to watch a cartoon. He climbed on my lap again; I could feel him shaking.

‘Are you sick, sweetheart?’

‘No, but I don’t want to fall into space.’

‘What space?’ I looked around. The curtains were closed, no sky visible.

Bobby held his mouth tight closed. He pointed to the gap between the cushions.

‘You won’t fall in, sweetie.’

He looked at me, his eyes dark. Then he looked at the floorboards, pointed to them.

‘What’s that, love? Space is up.’

He pointed again, his finger stab, stab, stabbing at dark stripes between each slat. He whispered very quietly in my ear, ‘Between.’

‘Oh Bobby.’ I stroked his hair. ‘You’re fine, lovie.’

‘I don’t want to go to space,’ he said.

‘It’s all right. Come on, let’s get you to bed. I think maybe you’re too tired.’

But when we got to his bedroom, I found he’d stuffed his duvet under the bed. He’d taken his clothes out of the cupboard and crammed them into the gap under his wardrobe and dresser; his mattress was hard up against the wall, and he’d taken towels from the bathroom to cover his toybox.

‘Don’t tell me off!’ he said, and buried his face in my hip before I could say anything. ‘I don’t want to go to space!’

I didn’t know what to say. 

After a long moment, my heart broke a little. ‘All right, darling,’ I said. ‘I won’t tell you off. Would you feel safer if you slept with Mummy tonight?’

He nodded into my body, clinging tight. 

We curled up together, Bobby pressed against me so hard there was no space between us, and his torch was clutched hard in his hand. 

It was the cold that woke me. I’d never felt anything like it: a cold so fierce it was almost heavy, dragging at my skin until I felt I was falling into it. 

Bobby was curled in a tight ball. The torch was still in his hand, but loose with sleep now, and I drew it from his as gently as I could. The cold was tumbling above me, up at the top of the bed where there was just a little space between the headboard and the wall.

I turned quietly. It was a toy torch and it cast a weak beam. But when I switched it on, I saw the hands reaching – or the ten finger-places in the air where there was no colour, no heat, no light. Fingers of absolute void reaching towards us. And then I looked up and saw two gaps in the universe, two round black holes, watching, waiting, their cold sucking us in. 

I looked into the eyes of the Space Man. 

The pull was ferocious, but I managed to grab Bobby just in time and slam the bed towards the wall, closing the space. Then he wasn’t there any more – but I didn’t feel safe again until I’d carried Bobby through to his own room and crowded us into his narrow little bed. What a good boy, to cram all the spaces with mess. 

It was warm in Bobby’s room and he curled his little arms around me. When he woke in the morning, I knew I’d have to ask him if the Space Man would come again tomorrow night. 

posted by Kit Whitfield  # 7:05 am 0 comments

Fridge

You can buy pinkies in bulk online: little baby mice and rats, naked as eyes, pink as palms, nicely dead and vacuum-sealed. I kept them boxed in my freezer, and when it was time to feed, I put one in the fridge to thaw. After that I warmed it in water, ready to eat.

I mean, they don’t ask you if you have a snake before they sell you feeder mice. 

One of these days I was going to go to the hunter and beg him to cure me. They said it can be done, but what it involved . . . he’d drown you in running water before he took the silver knife to peel off your skin, they told me, and then you wouldn’t feel the worst of it. But only if you’d never, well, never eaten worse than pinkies, and by the time I realised what was wrong with me it was too late for that. 

That was doing it the easy way. He’d drown you first if you paid him five thousand instead of three; if all you had was three, he'd do you conscious. But I didn’t have five thousand.  

Night-shift work paid extra, so I was saving up. In the meantime, there were the pinkies.

I started with little mice. It held me for a while, but I’d wake up with the sunlight burning behind my curtains like acid and the veins of my wrists gnawed open, and a face caked and itching with my own blood. I wasn’t holding out. 

I moved up to feeder rats. A couple of weeks, I slept like a baby; I dreamed blood-warm dreams. But then it started to hurt again.

I had only two thousand saved. And I still had to pay my rent; if I ended on the street there was no way I could keep my teeth to myself. 

You can buy edible snails and eat them live. They squirm against your tongue like a cold kiss you don’t want, but they’ll hold you for a while. 

You can buy bigger animals to dissect, but that made me sick before I even got my teeth into the cat I ordered: the thing was cankered with formaldehyde. 

The other thing you can buy live is invertebrates. Crickets aren’t so bad once you’re used to the crunch, but the way they struggle between your teeth made my heart pound and I wanted it too much. 

There was a cat hoarder who lived down the street. She never missed it if I took some kittens from her garden, but every night I stood there under the moon, I could smell her veins fat with blood and rich as butter right through the walls of the house. I was only going to last so long before I went in and took her.

My landlord lived downstairs. He said I was a quiet tenant, and I was. He never heard my feet on the ceiling; I was padding soft as a tiger now. But it was him who brought up my post because it came in the day while I hid from the sunlight. If I wasn’t too exhausted I could hear it land on the mat and race downstairs, my dressing-gown hood up and my steps never touching the carpet where the sunlight fell – but I wasn’t sleeping. My fridge was full of baby mice and my bathroom crammed with cricket tubs, but I lay in my bed and thrashed against the sheets and dreamed of hunger. 

So that evening he was at my door with a parcel in his hands, and he was looking at me sharp. I’d never seen my own eyes as I looked at the neighbours, the drunks on the street, the veins and veins and veins of what I couldn’t drink – but the way he met my eyes, I saw a gaze I recognised.

‘A lot of creatures,’ he said. His smile was so bland beneath those eyes as he handed me my parcel. ‘Anyone would think you were eating them yourself.’

I laughed. I didn’t show my teeth.

He leaned on the door frame. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I used to . . . order a lot of pinkies myself.’

I looked at him. His eyes were very dark. His teeth only a little pointed. His hair was short and grey, but his skin – every inch of it was clean and new. You’d think someone had taken a silver knife and peeled off the old layer.

He saw me looking. He nodded, gentle as a lamb. ‘It’s been a long time, though,’ he said. ‘You could say I’ve gone vegetarian. It’s amazing how much joy there is to come back to it, eating plain, normal food.’ 

‘I’d rather,’ I said very quietly, ‘you didn’t look at my mail.’

‘I’m sure you would.’ So calm, his smile. ‘It’s true, what they say of the hunter, you know. Even drowned, it hurts more than you’d believe.’

I said, ‘If I collected rent instead of paying it, maybe I could afford to do it drowned.’

‘Ah,’ he said. He didn’t blink. ‘Well, that’s unlucky for you. But unluckier still – my dear, I’m afraid I have some bad new for you. Your rent’s about to increase.’

‘What?’ I dropped the box. The pinkies rattled in their sealed tomb. ‘No. No, I can’t pay a higher rent.’

‘You may have to,’ he said. ‘After all, that poor woman down the road, with all her cats and all her problems. I’m sure she doesn’t deserve to have strangers in her garden at night. I’m sure it’s . . . cruelty to animals, we might say, to steal her kittens.’

I swallowed. I could feel my tongue cutting itself against the edges of my teeth. ‘The police don’t care about minor trespassing,’ I said. ‘Even if you could prove it.’

‘Ah, no,’ he said. ‘But the hunters. Our local man will flay you free if you pay him, but if you don't get to him in time . . . well, my dear. There's other hunters. I think, for both our sakes, another hundred a month won’t kill anyone.’

A hundred a month. I’d been setting aside a hundred and ten for the hunter, payday after payday after payday. Years till my freedom. Years of filling my fridge with dead rats and keeping my teeth to myself. Years, even if I paid for the cure without the drowning first, if I let him flay my waking skin from my screaming flesh. 

‘I know it’s hard on you, my dear,’ he said, ‘but after all, I have to eat.’ 

I couldn’t do it on ten a month. I just couldn’t.

‘Come in and we’ll talk about it,’ I said. 

He might have seen it coming. But I suppose he saw how hard I was trying to keep my teeth to myself.

The hunter must be good at his work. The man’s veins burst under my teeth like candy, and once I began to drink I thought I’d never be hungry again. Whatever the hunter had done to him – what he could do to me one day, once I’d saved enough – it had cured the man entirely. He was as mortal and delicious as my first kill. 

And that first kill – it was a stranger coming out of a pub drunk enough to ask me to go up an alley for sex, and nobody had caught me for that either – well, that first kill put me into the higher price bracket anyway. It wasn’t as if this second kill would make the cure any more expensive. 

I’d have to find somewhere else to live, but I wasn’t as sorry about it as I had been about the first. After all, they say landlords are bloodsuckers too. 

posted by Kit Whitfield  # 11:33 am 0 comments

Beach

The tide crept in on gnarled fingers. Scabs of foam clotted the shore, raking the sand and creeping up, up, up to whisper under the little girl’s window.

‘Come out and play, pretty child,’ the mermaids sang. ‘We’ll give you a necklace of pearls.’

‘No,’ said the little girl. ‘I must stay in bed like a good child.’

‘The pearls gleam like shark’s teeth,’ the mermaids chanted. ‘Worms crept between the oyster’s lips and anguished its flesh till it wept solid shimmer. We’ll hang its tears around your pretty neck.’

‘You will not,’ said the little girl. ‘After sunset, my mother says I mustn’t go on the beach.’

The tide crept up on sharp fingers. Slashes of spume struck the pebbles, dragging them to drown as the crept up, up, up to whisper under the little girl’s window.

‘Come out and play, pretty child,’ the selkies crooned. ‘We’ll give you a coat of fine gold fat.’

‘No,’ said the little girl. ‘I must stay in bed like a good child.’

‘Cold, cold, cold is the sea and the world,’ the selkies murmured. ‘The fat we mined from beneath a porpoise’s silver skin. Its blood bloomed dark anemones in the water. We’ll wrap its warmth across your pretty back.’

‘You will not,’ said the little girl. ‘After sunset, my father says I mustn’t go on the beach.’

The tide crept up on writhing fingers. Whips of water drove the land down, twining and reeling up, up, up to whisper under the little girl’s window.

‘Come out and play, pretty child,’ the serpents whispered. ‘We’ll hold you in the closet hug you ever knew.’

‘No,’ said the little girl. ‘I must stay in bed like a good child.’

‘Becalmed and alone you lie, precious darling,’ the serpents breathed. ‘Come and take a kiss for how good you have been.’

She knew she had been good yesterday. And she forgot that she must be good today. 

So the little girl opened her window and climbed out. The serpents held her skin to skin, and as their fangs kissed her neck, her blood forgot it had ever needed to be warm. 

The tide creeps up every night. Water swallows the land, and a little girl calls out: ‘Come out and play with me!’

When you hear her calling, my child, close your window and cover your ears. 

After sunset, you mustn’t go on the beach. 

posted by Kit Whitfield  # 6:00 am 0 comments