Camdeboo Nights (9 page)

She did not expect to find Damon blinking back tears when she reached him. Wordlessly, she squeezed his arm.

“Okay, okay...well, Helen’s here. I’m sure she’d also like to talk to you.”

He tried to sound brave but then Damon thrust the receiver in her hands and pelted upstairs. His slammed bedroom door resounded with a heavy boom that reverberated through the house.

“Dad?” Helen asked. She did not want to have this conversation but couldn’t kill the call either.

“Hey, my girl. I’m sorry I haven’t called earlier but it’s been...well...you know how Joburg is.”

The welter of hot and cold roiling in her belly made her want to shout at him but, instead, Helen said, “Hey Dad, I miss you.”

She did miss him. He may have been absent for the past six months but she couldn’t deny that she did love her father, and her love for him was a hollow ache in her chest.

“I miss you too, Helen. How are things down in the middle of the Karoo? I spoke to your grandmother last week, but...”

They both laughed. “Anabel has this way with words, doesn’t she?” Helen asked, despite the tears clouding her vision.

“Oh God, just pray that you never find out.”

“Mother misses you,” Helen blurted. Damn him, he needed to know.

A pause hung between them then he inhaled sharply. “I know. Helen. It’s complicated. Please don’t discuss this. I want to talk to
you
, about what’s going on in
your
life.”

Fuck it. “This
is
what’s going on in my life, Father. I feel like you’ve just thrown us all away, that you’re more interested in this other woman than us.”

“I’m not throwing you away. Not you, not Damon. I just need some space so I can gain perspective and, anyway, things are not that great here in Joburg, either, in case you’re wondering. I’d rather you and your brother go to a good school out where you are now, in the country, and it is a good school, right?”

“Yes,” Helen mumbled, sullen.

“I love both of you very much.”

“But not Mom.”

“I love her too, but not in the same way like when we first met, if you can understand that. People fall in love and sometimes that love changes because the people change.”

“And you’ve met someone else.”

Another pause dragged between them, followed by another shuddering breath. “Yes.”

Helen had run out of things to say. Her anger deflated and all she could do was stare blankly at the Grecian postcard tacked onto the cork note-board above the phone. Too-blue sky. Too-blue water.

“Okay, Dad, I’ll take good care of us.” She could try. She couldn’t promise anything when she wasn’t even sure she could look after herself.

“I’m glad to know that. It’s crap when you’re suddenly lumped with...”

He couldn’t finish the sentence. A movement out of the corner of her eye told Helen her grandmother stood in the doorway leading from the dining room, listening. She was too wound up to get angry that the woman eavesdropped so obviously. Too much was going on right now.

Helen wanted to say, “Like your father ducked out when you were little,” but didn’t. A snippy comment like that may push him away from her. She wanted to hate him. No, she needed to hate him, but couldn’t. Helen swallowed her negativity instead and babbled, summoning anecdotal bits from her first week at the new school.

She neglected to mention Odette and the others, or Arwen’s family. Helen certainly did not tell her father about the mysterious boy who’d climbed onto the balcony. Hell, she didn’t even want Anabel to know about that.

Helen pretended she was an ordinary teenager and pitched a false smile in her voice as she babbled. Lying was easy. If only she could believe her own lies. If only her mother would pull out of the fog shrouding her mind. If only she could see a way forward out of this mess.

Chapter 11

The Cemetery

“Where’re you going, Arwen?” her mother asked after they finished drying and packing the dishes.

“I’m going to visit the new kids.” She couldn’t hide her smirk.

Her mother did not suspect a thing. “Well, be good dear, and don’t be too late.”

Szandor said nothing, but eyed Arwen from where he sat at the kitchen table, pretending to read his magazine.

He knew perfectly well she was up to something but wouldn’t do anything about it, not if he wanted to have her tell her mother about his visits to Aunt Sonja’s house whenever there was an Esbat or some sort of celebration.

What Mother didn’t know couldn’t hurt her. Arwen had packed her sling-bag with all her tools earlier and had hidden it in the bushes by the front gate. If her mother did suspect anything, she never let on and, since these things were never discussed in her presence, Arwen assumed they shouldn’t be.

“I’ll be good, I promise,” Arwen said. “We’re watching some National Geographics we took out at the school library.” There was no reason her mother would ever talk to Anabel.

Arwen wanted to laugh.

Szandor frowned at her, tugging absently at his goatee. “Don’t get into trouble.”

“Come now, Szandor, what could we possibly get up to here in this little village?”

“Enough.”

“Okay, well, I’ll be off then.”

Arwen often wondered why her father had settled on marrying the woman that she had the misfortune to call mother. Molly was short, brown-haired and hazel-eyed, and tended toward plumpness, which was always at odds with the rest of the extended Wareing clan who sometimes blew in and out of their lives. Her complexion screamed “outsider.”

Tonight was the perfect night for going out, though there was no pub in Nieu Bethesda she’d bother frequenting. Some folks would be hanging at Clive’s Bistro, where Clive and Bonny served up home-brew, but the patrons would mostly be strangers, from Cape Town or Jozi, or even as far afield as the UK. There weren’t many others her age, with her inclinations and, even then, they were so unutterably dull she preferred her own company. Helen would be an interesting diversion, if she could tap into the potential she suspected. To think her father hadn’t noticed the girl was special. Or if he had, he’d shut up about it.

The stars glinted across the blue-black sky, the Milky Way a dusty trail from one end of the sky to the other. If she stood to gaze for some time, Arwen would be bound to see a shooting star but she’d spent enough time doing that as a child.

Every two houses were dark–holiday homes. This time of the year, Nieu Bethesda would be a ghost town until Easter weekend. No moon yet, and no streetlights either, so it was very dark. Arwen knew her way and hugged her bag to her body, pleased at herself and breathing deep of the Karoo vegetation–a herbal tang that never failed to make her shudder with delight.

She checked her cell phone. Half-past eight. A dark figure detached itself from the hedge outside Anabel’s house. Arwen started, worrying for a minute that it might be...

There were no monsters in Nieu Bethesda.

“Hey,” Helen said.

“Hey,” Arwen scuffed her sneaker’s toe in the dusty road. Why was she feeling shy all of a sudden? “You ready?”

“Yup.”

“Damon?”

“He’s watching that Chuck Norris action movie Etienne was bitching about.”

“Pity.”

“So, what’re we actually gonna do tonight?”

“Shhh, you’ll see,” Arwen said. Helen didn’t need to know they were performing a witchy ritual until right at the last minute.

The two walked the few blocks to the edge of the hamlet, where a low, white wall separated the land of the living from the land of the dead. They entered through a high, round arch, by a gate made from black wrought iron, which did not close properly.

“Why the graveyard?” Helen asked as they walked down the rows of granite and marble pushing up like some macabre crop.

“’Cause it has more atmosphere. Plus, we won’t be disturbed. The people here, especially in the township, are very superstitious or, as they like to say it,
bygelowig
.”

Helen snorted softly, as if stifling a laugh.

Arwen sought one grave in particular. Actually, it wasn’t where the person was buried–so far as she’d heard, the body had been cremated and the ashes scattered–but people liked having some place they could visit, to remember, where they could leave flowers or burn candles.

The cement owl looked almost incongruous among the polished granite blocks.

“Oh, my. I didn’t know,” Helen said.

“Not many people have any idea this is here. Cement is flaking a bit. Not the most permanent afterthought for posterity but it was still made by Koos Malgas’s relative back in the day. He used to have to dress Miss Helen when her arthritis became too bad. There’s another marker like this, facing west in the Pienaarsig cemetery, on Koos’s grave. Very romantic, don’t you think? They’re always looking toward each other. A forbidden friendship acknowledged in death.”

Arwen traced the contour of the handmade marker’s shape. She’d come here many times, but never at night, alone. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught flickers of movement, people who had been and were no more. If she tried to listen, she could even hear their whispers, like dry leaves stirred by the wind. But it was better to tune out the dead. Once they knew a person could see them, they sometimes became pests.

When I die...I don’t...
She suppressed that train of thought. No ghosts tonight, thank you.

“You scared, Helen?”

“No!” her companion answered, a little too quickly. Helen turned, rubbing her arms.

“I guess your mother named you after her,” Arwen said.

“Who?”

“Helen Martins, you twit.”

“Oh. Yes.”

Helen hunkered down next to Arwen. The lettering on the cement marker was difficult to make out in the starlight, but they weren’t here to read gravestones. Arwen busied herself unpacking her tools.

She had the dagger that Aunt Sonja had given her for a yuletide gift the previous winter. It wasn’t very sharp but it was pretty. The handle had been molded out of a hard resin twisted to resemble an animal horn. The blade wasn’t straight, but wavy–a
kris
.

Next was a small flask of red wine and a silver goblet. The goblet she’d pilfered from Szandor’s workshop.

A small cloth drawstring bag contained salt. She had matches and five fat beeswax candles. She checked off the matches, incense sticks and an offering of dried herbs–mostly from her mother’s garden she’d tied together with black satin ribbon.

“What’s all the stuff for?” Helen asked.

“It’s what we’ll be needing. Now’s not the time or place for Witchcraft one-oh-one.”

“What are we actually going to do here?”

“I want to summon the
genius loci
of Nieu Bethesda.”

“Why?” To give Helen some credit, she didn’t ask what a
genius loci
was.

“To see if I can.”

“What if we get caught? Aren’t there laws against witchcraft and stuff?”

“What?” Arwen asked. “Are you scared of getting caught?”

“No.”

“Well, I’ve done this a million times before.” She wasn’t about to tell Helen she’d only practiced this in her bedroom.

“Why do you need me then?”

Because my Wyrd told me
, was not going to be a good answer. Arwen paused, thinking of how much she should say. Sometimes some of the truth was better than none.

“You’ve got the vibe, the sparkly bits about you that I need. Sure, I can see stuff, know stuff and do stuff but you’ve got potential to have the power. All the big dudes throughout history tended to work in pairs. One guy would conduct the summoning while the other would be the sensitive.”

“So, what you’re telling me is that I’m some sort of magical battery?”

Both of them paused then laughed. To be quite honest, Arwen wasn’t sure but something about Helen seemed somehow more than the average and tonight she was about to find out.

“Oh, shit, Helen, you’re funny.
Ja
, if you want to look at it like that. My aunt says that some people are born with the chance that they may be really powerful with magic and stuff. It takes a little nudging but if what I suspect is true then we’ll know when we see the results.”