Mammoth Book of Best New Horror (37 page)

    "Why do you ask?" said his guardian, brushing the dust from his black suit with ivory fingers.

    Bod shrugged. "Just wondered."

    "It's unconsecrated ground," said Silas. "Do you know what that means?"

    "Not really," said Bod.

    Silas walked across the path without disturbing a fallen leaf, and sat down on the stone bench, beside Bod. "There are those," he said, in his silken voice, "who believe that all land is sacred. That it is sacred before we come to it, and sacred after. But here, in your land, they bless the churches and the ground they set aside to bury people in, to make it holy. But they leave land unconsecrated beside the sacred ground, Potters Fields to bury the criminals and the suicides or those who were not of the faith."

    "So the people buried in the ground on the other side of the fence are bad people?"

    Silas raised one perfect eyebrow. "Mm? Oh, not at all. Let's see, it's been a while since I've been down that way. But I don't remember anyone particularly evil. Remember, in days gone by you could be hanged for stealing a shilling. And there are always people who find their lives have become so unsupportable they believe the best thing they could do would be to hasten their transition to another plane of existence."

    "They kill themselves, you mean?" said Bod. He was about eight years old, wide-eyed and inquisitive, and he was not stupid.

    "Indeed."

    "Does it work? Are they happier dead?"

    Silas grinned so wide and sudden that he showed his fangs. "Sometimes. Mostly, no. It's like the people who believe they'll be happy if they go and live somewhere else, but who learn it doesn't work that way. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you. If you see what I mean."

    "Sort of," said Bod.

    Silas reached down and ruffled the boy's hair.

    Bod said, "What about the witch?"

    "Yes. Exactly," said Silas. "Suicides, criminals and witches. Those who died unshriven." He stood up, a midnight shadow in the twilight. "All this talking," he said, "and I have not even had my breakfast. While you will be late for lessons." In the twilight of the graveyard there was a silent implosion, a flutter of velvet darkness, and Silas was gone.

    The moon had begun to rise by the time Bod reached Mr Pennyworth's mausoleum, and Thomes Pennyworth (HERE HE LYES IN THE CERTAINTY OF THE MOFT GLORIOUS REFUR-RECTION) was already waiting, and was not in the best of moods.

    "You are late," he said.

    "Sorry, Mr Pennyworth."

    Pennyworth tutted. The previous week Mr Pennyworth had been teaching Bod about Elements and Humours, and Bod had kept forgetting which was which. He was expecting a test but instead Mr Pennyworth said, "I think it is time to spend a few days on practical matters. Time is passing, after all."

    "Is it?" asked Bod.

    "I am afraid so, young Master Owens. Now, how is your Fading?"

    Bod had hoped he would not be asked that question.

    "It's all right," he said. "I mean. You know."

    "No, Master Owens. I do not know. Why do you not demonstrate for me?"

    Bod's heart sank. He took a deep breath, and did his best, squinching up his eyes and trying to fade away.

    Mr Pennyworth was not impressed.

    "Pah. That' s not the kind of thing. Not the kind of thing at all. Slipping and fading, boy, the way of the dead. Slip through shadows. Fade from awareness. Try again."

    Bod tried harder.

    "You're as plain as the nose on your face," said Mr Pennyworth. "And your nose is remarkably obvious. As is the rest of your face, young man. As are you. For the sake of all that is holy, empty your mind. Now. You are an empty alleyway. You are a vacant doorway. You are nothing. Eyes will not see you. Minds will not hold you. Where you are is nothing and nobody."

    Bod tried again. He closed his eyes and imagined himself fading into the stained stonework of the mausoleum wall, becoming a shadow on the night and nothing more. He sneezed.

    "Dreadful," said Mr Pennyworth, with a sigh. "Quite dreadful. I believe I shall have a word with your guardian about this." He shook his head. "So. The humours. List them."

    "Um. Sanguine. Choleric. Phlegmatic. And the other one. Um, Melancholic, I think."

    And so it went, until it was time for Grammar and Composition with Miss Letitia Borrows, Spinster of this Parish (WHO DID NO HARM TO NO MAN ALL THE DAIS OF HER LIFE. READER, CAN YOU SAY LYKEWISE?). Bod liked Miss Borrows, and the cosiness of her little crypt, and that she could all-too-easily be led off the subject.

    "They say there's a witch in uncons- unconsecrated ground," he said.

    "Yes, dear. But you don't want to go over there."

    "Why not?"

    Miss Borrows smiled the guileless smile of the dead. "They aren't our sort of people," she said.

    "But it is the graveyard, isn't it? I mean, I'm allowed to go there if I want to?"

    "That," said Miss Borrows, "would not be advisable."

    Bod was obedient, but curious, and so, when lessons were done for the night, he walked past Harrison Westwood, Baker, and family's memorial, a broken-headed angel, but did not climb down the hill to the Potters Field. Instead he walked up the side of the hill to where a picnic some thirty years before had left its mark in the shape of a large apple tree.

    There were some lessons that Bod had mastered. He had eaten a bellyful of unripe apples, sour and white-piped, from the tree some years before, and had regretted it for days, his guts cramping and painful while Mrs Owens lectured him on what not to eat. Now he waited until the apples were ripe before eating them, and never ate more than two or three a night. He had finished the last of the apples the week before, but he liked the apple tree as a place to think.

    He edged up the trunk, to his favourite place in the crook of two branches, and looked down at the Potters Field below him, a brambly patch of weeds and unmown grass in the moonlight. He wondered whether the witch would be old and iron-toothed and travel in a house on chicken legs, or whether she would be thin and sharp-nosed and carry a broomstick.

    And then he was hungry. He wished he had not devoured all the apples on the tree. That he had left just one…

    He glanced up, and thought he saw something. He looked once, looked twice to be certain. An apple, red and ripe

    Bod prided himself on his tree-climbing skills. He swung himself up, branch by branch, and imagined he was Silas, swarming smoothly up a sheer brick wall. The apple, the red of it almost black in the moonlight, hung just out of reach. Bod moved slowly forward along the branch, until he was just below the apple. Then he stretched up, and the tips of his fingers touched the perfect apple.

    He was never to taste it.

    A snap, loud as a hunter's gun, as the branch gave way beneath him.

    A flash of pain woke him, sharp as ice, the colour of slow thunder, down in the weeds that summer's night.

    The ground beneath him seemed relatively soft, and oddly warm. He pushed a hand down and felt something like warm fur beneath him. He had landed on the grass-pile, where the graveyard's gardener threw the cuttings from the mower, and it had broken his fall. Still, there was a pain in his chest, and his leg hurt as if he had landed on it first, and twisted it.

    Bod moaned.

    "Hush-a-you-hush-a-boy," said a voice from behind him. "Where did you come from? Dropping like a thunderstone. What way is that to carry on?"

    "I was in the apple tree," said Bod.

    "Ah. Let me see your leg. Broken like the tree's limb, I'll be bound." Cool fingers prodded his left leg. "Not broken. Twisted, yes, sprained perhaps. You have the Devil's own luck, boy, falling into the compost. Tain't the end of the world."

    "Oh, good," said Bod. "Hurts, though."

    He turned his head, looked up and behind him. She was older than him, but not a grown-up, and she looked neither friendly nor unfriendly. Wary, mostly. She had a face that was intelligent and not even a little bit beautiful.

    "I'm Bod," he said.

    "The live boy?" she asked.

    Bod nodded.

    "I thought you must be," she said. "We've heard of you, even over here, in the Potter's Field. What do they call you?"

    "Owens," he said. "Nobody Owens. Bod, for short."

    "How-de-do, young Master Bod."

    Bod looked her up and down. She wore a plain white shift. Her hair was mousy and long, and there was something of the goblin in her face - a sideways hint of a smile that seemed to linger, no matter what the rest of her face was doing.

    "Were you a suicide?" he asked. "Did you steal a shilling?"

    "Never stole nuffink," she said, "Not even a handkerchief. Anyway," she said, pertly, "the suicides is all over there, on the other side of that hawthorn, and the gallows-birds are in the blackberry-patch, both of them. One was a coiner, t'other a highwayman, or so he says, although if you ask me I doubt he was more than a common footpad and nightwalker."

    "Ah," said Bod. Then, suspicion forming, tentatively, he said, "They say a witch is buried here."

    She nodded. "Drownded and burnded and buried here without as much as a stone to mark the spot."

    "You were drowned
and
burned?"

    She settled down on the hill of grass-cuttings beside him, and held his throbbing leg with her chilly hands. "They come to my little cottage at dawn, before I'm proper awake, and drags me out onto the Green. 'You're a witch!' they shouts, fat and fresh-scrubbed all pink in the morning, like so many pigwiggins scrubbed clean for market day. One by one they gets up beneath the sky and tells of milk gone sour and horses gone lame, and finally Mistress Jemima gets up, the fattest, pinkest, best-scrubbed of them all, and tells how as Solomon Porritt now cuts her dead and instead hangs around the washhouse like a wasp about a honey pot, and it's all my magic, says she, that made him so and the poor young man must be bespelled. So they strap me to the cucking stool and forces it under the water of the duck pond, saying if I'm a witch I'll neither drown nor care, but if I am not a witch I'll feel it. And Mistress Jemima's father gives them each a silver groat to hold the stool down under the foul green water for a long time, to see if I'd choke on it." "And did you?"

    "Oh yes. Got a lungful of water. It done for me." "Oh," said Bod. "Then you weren't a witch after all." The girl fixed him with her beady ghost-eyes and smiled a lopsided smile. She still looked like a goblin, but now she looked like a pretty goblin, and Bod didn't think she would have needed magic to attract Solomon Porritt, not with a smile like that. "What nonsense. Of course I was a witch. They learned that when they untied me from the cucking-stool and stretched me on the green, nine-parts dead and all covered with duckweed and stinking pond-muck. I rolled my eyes back in my head, and I cursed each and every one of them there on the village green that morning, that none of them would ever rest easily in a grave. I was surprised at how easily it came, the cursing. Like dancing it was, when your feet pick up the steps of a new measure your ears have never heard and your head don't know, and they dance it till dawn." She stood, and twirled, and kicked, and her bare feet flashed in the moonlight. "That was how I cursed them, with my last gurgling pond-watery breath. And then I expired. They burned my body on the green until I was nothing but blackened charcoal, and they popped me in a hole in the Potter's Field without so much as a headstone to mark my name," and it was only then that she paused, and seemed, for a moment, wistful.

    "Are any of them buried in the graveyard, then?" asked Bod. "Not a one," said the girl, with a twinkle. "The Saturday after they drownded and toasted me, a carpet was delivered to Master Porringer, all the way from London Town, and it was a fine carpet. But it turned out there was more in that carpet than strong wool and good weaving, for it carried the plague in its pattern, and by Monday five of them were coughing blood, and their skins were gone as black as mine when they hauled me from the fire. A week later and it had taken most of the village, and they threw the bodies all promiscuous in a plague pit they dug outside of the town, that they filled in after."

    "Was everyone in the village killed?"

    She shrugged. "Everyone who watched me get drownded and burned. How's your leg now?"

    "Better," he said. "Thanks."

    Bod stood up, slowly, and limped down from the grass-pile. He leaned against the iron railings. "So were you always a witch?" he asked. "I mean, before you cursed them all?"

    "As if it would take witchcraft," she said with a sniff, "to get Solomon Porritt mooning round my cottage."

    Which, Bod thought, but did not say, was not actually an answer to the question, not at all.

    "What's your name?" he asked.

    "Got no headstone," she said, turning down the corners of her mouth. "Might be anybody. Mightn't I?"

    "But you must have a name."