The Eighth Witch (2 page)

The road was bordered by moorland with rocky outcrops, moss-covered and imposing. In places there were sheer drops at the side of the road where the land fell away. There were lines of small boulders, strategically placed along the edge of the road to indicate the drop, but they were a token barrier, nothing more. For a car travelling at even moderate speed, they would do nothing to prevent a serious plunge over the edge should the driver lose control. So you had to keep your wits about you driving over the Tops. Avoiding the sheep that wandered from the grazing fields and onto the road was one of the driver’s tests up here.

He felt comfortable behind the wheel of his new Range Rover. His previous car, a BMW coupe, was faster and flashier but didn’t give him the sense of security the Range Rover afforded him. The Beamer was a great status symbol, a reflection of how successful his business was, but he was higher in the seat of the Range Rover and could see oncoming hazards—like wandering sheep—much earlier, and the black powder-coated bull bars offered more protection. He’d worked hard to achieve his current status and he didn’t want it cut short by a stupid road accident.

As he drove he drummed his fingers on the steering wheel in time to an old rock classic blasting from the Range Rover’s speakers. Blue Oyster Cult. One of his favorites.
 

Heading down into the valley, he could see the lights of Ravensbridge in the distance and he felt the usual surge of contentment. As a young man he’d aspired to live here and now he had achieved his ambition. It was one of the many ambitions achieved over the last few years, and probably the sweetest.
 

He had a beautiful house, a beautiful wife and enough money in the bank to ensure that should his business suddenly founder, he would survive. It was an enviable position to be in, but by Christ, he’d worked hard enough for it. All those eighteen-hour working days, lost weekends and meager holidays had propelled him into the lifestyle he now enjoyed. So he was smiling with self-satisfaction as he swung through the gates of his house and glided up the York-stone driveway.

The smile slipped from his face as he entered the house. He felt immediately there was something wrong. The lights were on in all the downstairs rooms and the house was clean and tidy, with everything in its place, exactly as it should be, but of Sophie there was no sign. More tellingly there were no cooking smells coming from the kitchen and that was just wrong. Sophie was a cordon bleu cook and prided herself on having a superb meal ready for him when he got home from the office in the evening.
 

He took off his overcoat, hung it on the antique coat rack by the door and walked through to the kitchen. The granite work surfaces were clear and sparkling clean, the range-style cooker stone cold. This wasn’t right.

He wondered for a moment if his wife had been called out on some emergency or other. Perhaps her mother, who was in a nursing home in Leeds, had suddenly taken a turn for the worse. He opened the door from the kitchen to the garage. Sophie’s VW Golf was still sitting there, engine cold.

Wandering back into the house, he called her name and listened but was met by total silence. He stood for a moment in the center of the large kitchen, undecided. If she’d been called away she would have telephoned him. They kept in contact during the day. Unlike a lot of couples they knew who barely spoke to each other during office hours, he and Sophie prided themselves on the frequency of communication. In their opinion it kept their marriage alive, vital.
 

He thought back to their last conversation at lunchtime. Sophie was her usual bright and chatty self, telling him about a new shirt she had bought him from her favorite boutique in town and about how he was going to love it. Usual, normal Sophie, so pleased with herself that she had found something for him. He was always buying her gifts—jewelry, perfume, whatever caught his eye. But she rarely bought him anything. It wasn’t a lack of thought on her part, simply the case that there was very little he wanted—certainly very little he needed.

It occurred to him that maybe she’d been taken ill and was lying down.
 

He took the stairs two at a time, but slowly, carefully. If she was asleep then he didn’t want to wake her. At the door to the bedroom he paused. It was closed. He put his ear to it, listening, hoping to hear the rise and fall of her breathing. For some reason he couldn’t explain he was nervous about entering the room. The hairs on the back of his neck were prickling and his hands had suddenly become icy cold. He recognized the sensations. Trepidation. Fear.
 

In the past he’d experienced similar feelings, usually before crucial business meetings, and in general he welcomed them. They put him on his mettle, got his adrenaline pumping and psyched him up. But this was different. This felt more like a sick dread, as if he were going to open the door and find behind it something hideous beyond belief.

He gripped the handle and turned it slowly, opened the door a crack and peered through. He could see the bed and saw that the duvet was humped with Sophie’s form underneath it. The room was in darkness, the only illumination coming from a quarter moon that spilled its milky glow through the window. The moonlight shone on her hair, spread out on the pillow like a golden fan. She was lying on her back, the duvet tucked up to her neck.

“Sophie,” he whispered, fearful of waking her, but needing to hear her voice to reassure him that everything was all right. He tiptoed across to the bed. The moon was making her face pale, curiously characterless.

“Sophie,” he whispered again, stretching out his hand to stroke her cheek. He touched her skin and recoiled. It was icy cold. He took a breath and reached out again, touching her forehead with his fingertips.

As he touched it Sophie’s face slid beneath his fingers, skin slipping away, falling in a soft fold onto the pillow, leaving him staring at nothing but a bloodied skull covered in strips of muscle and sinew. Her lipless mouth grinned at him whilst her lidless eyes stared at him accusingly.
Why weren’t you here? Why did you let this happen to me?
He pulled his hand away, made a fist and rammed it into his mouth to stifle the scream that was forming in his throat.

“I think she’s prettier that way.”

Mark spun round at the sound of the voice. A young woman was standing in the corner of the room. She was smiling at him coyly, her golden curls glinting in the moonlight. She was naked. Full breasts, a neat triangle of fair pubic hair. A familiar nakedness.
 

He couldn’t speak. He just stared at the young woman uncomprehendingly. Who was she? Why was she here? Why did her naked body seem so familiar to him? The strawberry birthmark just to the left of her navel, just like the one Sophie had. The silver scar on her thigh. Sophie had injured herself in a fall the second day into their first skiing holiday together. A hidden rock had sliced her thigh open and left her with a scar just like the one he was staring at now.
 

The young woman took a step towards him. It looked wrong. As she moved her whole body rippled. He could see a livid red mark at her throat, almost as if the skin had been slit and was peeling…

Realization hit him with the force of a tsunami and he reeled across to the bed, grabbing the corner of the duvet and yanking it back. It came away with a wet, sticky, sucking sound and he stared down at Sophie’s flayed body. He jerked his head around to stare at the young woman with blond curls, the young woman who was wearing Sophie’s skin like an obscene designer cat suit.
 

Tears coursed down his cheeks. “Why?” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. “Why?”

The young woman smiled. “Your house!” she said condescendingly. “She said it was your house.”

He wanted to kill her, to smash the mocking face, to beat it to a pulp. He grabbed the stainless-steel lamp from the bedside table and hurled it across the room, but it never reached her. The cable was still plugged in and the lamp stopped in midair before it clattered to the floor, the bulb smashing with a loud pop. He retrieved it from the floor, twisting it in his hands to use it as a club, yanking at the cable, trying to pull the plug from its socket.

“Stop!” The young woman spoke sharply.

Mark stopped. His mouth was working but there was no sound coming from his lips. The woman held his gaze for a moment, and then she blinked. Just the once.

Mark stared down at the lamp that was twisting again in his hands, only this time he wasn’t consciously doing it. His hands were moving of their own accord, bringing the lamp to within inches of his face, turning it around so he had a clear view of the broken bulb, ragged and sharp, lethal.
 

He concentrated fiercely, trying to regain control of his hands, but they were beyond any conscious will. When the lamp was inches away he opened his mouth. Again he had no control. His bottom jaw just dropped and kept dropping, opening his mouth wider and wider. He could feel tendons and ligaments popping in his cheek, and the pain was excruciating. His arms positioned the head of the lamp and smashed it into his mouth, the broken bulb slicing through his tongue and gums, the stainless steel crunching through his teeth.

The young woman snapped her fingers and the switch flicked on, sending a pulse of electricity coursing through Mark Gillespie’s head. For a moment he stood, convulsing as his brain fried, and then he crumpled to his knees and pitched forwards, the lamp taking the full impact and burying itself deeper into his mouth, snapping his jaw. His eyes were open but losing focus. The last thing he saw was the cable of the table lamp curled like a thin, white snake on the floor. The plug was clear of the socket, lying on the floor, mocking him.
But if it wasn’t even plugged in,
he thought,
how did…?
 

And then he died.
 

The young woman clicked her fingers again and Mark stopped twitching. She stared dispassionately down at Mark Gillespie’s lifeless form, poked it once with her foot, then shucked Sophie’s skin from her body, draping it over him like a blanket.
 

She padded into the en suite bathroom and showered away the blood. As she toweled herself dry she studied her reflection in the mirror. A hundred different faces stared back. A hundred different identities, a hundred different lives.
 

They were all smiling at her.
 

Chapter Three

Robert Carter peeled off the motorway and took a right, heading towards Halifax. Ravensbridge was a few miles farther on from there. It was a long time since he’d seen Annie Ryder and was looking forward to the reunion.
 

Downtime was a premium at Department 18 and after the last few cases he’d tackled for them he felt he deserved some, and he couldn’t think of a better location for a holiday. Ravensbridge settled at the start of the Pennines, and it was easy to envisage a week or more spent hiking in the hills, taking in the dramatic and beautiful scenery and then coming back to Annie’s cottage in the evenings, tired but relaxed, and ready for her delicious home cooking and some convivial conversation with her over a glass or two of Merlot. It was an image he carried with him for a few more miles.

Carter first met Annie Ryder fifteen years ago when he was staying at the Institute of Psychic Research in Kansas. She was young, fresh from university, and he discovered that she’d been born in the north of England and come to America with her father at the age of seven when her parents divorced.
 

The two of them struck up an instant rapport. She was a technician and he was one of the test subjects, and her presence at the institute made the years he spent there more tolerable. At that time Annie Ryder was a lively twenty-one-year-old—pretty in a rather unconventional way, with a sharp wit and an even sharper tongue, but they found they got along fine. There was no hint of a romance between them, but then neither of them were looking for that kind of involvement. They’d spar with each other in a light-hearted way and be there for each other when things got tense.

When he finally left Kansas after three years and returned to England to start work with Department 18, they kept in touch, mostly by letter, occasionally by phone and later email. A few years back she wrote to him to say she was moving back to England, to Yorkshire. Her father had died suddenly from a heart attack and she found she was missing her homeland. Carter had not long moved into his cottage in the picturesque Lake District when he received an invitation to go down to Ravensbridge to stay with Annie for a few days. He’d spent a week there and found the chemistry between them hadn’t changed. She was still single and happy to be that way. She’d taken up a post as teacher at a local primary school and settled into the slower-paced northern lifestyle with ease. For her, coming back to England to live in a small town in the country was like coming home.

In the years that followed any contact became less and less, until the letters and emails dried up completely. He figured that maybe she had met someone, got married and maybe even started a family. It was all speculation of course, with nothing at all to back it up. The email that appeared in his inbox three weeks ago broke the silence of five years.

She was at the door to greet him as he pulled up outside the cottage. A thin drizzle was falling from an aluminum sky. He switched off the wipers and ignition and sketched a wave. As he got out of the car she flew at him, wrapping her arms around his neck and planting a kiss on his cheek.