A Murder of Crones
1
One of my most vivid childhood memories is of the dark and the damp, accompanied by the scent of wet fur. Then my mother’s voice told us to hush, and the door above shut with a snick. Her footsteps receded, and the only sounds left were our breathing and the dub-dub-dub of my sister Sigrid’s heart as she held my head tight against her chest. Cold water trickled down the wall behind me and soaked into the back of my shirt.
On the other side, Harriet—the source of the wet fur—said, ‘Where’s the light switch?’
‘Ssh.’ Sigrid’s grip on me tightened.
‘Come now, girls. It’s not like there are any windows. No one can see in.’
‘Ssh!’
In the complete darkness, I couldn’t see the weasel-woman smile, but I could hear it in her voice when she said, ‘And no one can hear us. We’re completely underground.’
‘Those are the rules,’ I said, ‘until Mum says it’s safe.’
‘Come now, little hag. You can’t tell me you two just sit quietly in the dark every single time.’
Neither of us answered. We did just sit silently in the dark. It was what we had always done. I’d even grown to like it—the damp, earthy scent, the rare quiet, nothing but the sound of us breathing. I usually fell asleep.
‘Huh-uh, little hag. Look. This’—Harriet rapped on the wall; it made a hollow sound—‘was built so light couldn’t escape. All these old bomb shelters are sealed like that.’ Her clothing rustled as she stood. Her fingers whispered along the walls. ‘Your mother doesn’t understand. She is how old? A zillion? And she can’t die. Or, rather, she can come back if she does. She doesn’t know what it’s like to be truly afraid, or what it’s like to be a child and scared of the dark…bloody hell, where is the damned switch?’
There was more rustling, then a scraped click. A small flame flickered to life at the top of Harriet’s cigarette lighter, and I had my first opportunity to get a good look at her up close.
Harriet had been camping in the garden under the oak tree out back, where her dome tent was in the process of ruining Stanley’s lawn. She wasn’t usually allowed in the house—none of the weasels who camped out during the summer ever were. My mother included them in her delusions. When they were here, they had to go into the shelter too. Sure, Harriet had been around, and even argued with our mother a few times when we were close by, but we weren’t allowed to talk to them. We were hardly allowed to look at them.
Keep away from them, girls. They’re bad as rats… or worse. They’re dirty.
Harriet didn’t look dirty. She kept the short fur that covered her lanky figure clean and neat. I thought that if I were to stroke her cheek, it would feel as silky soft as a kitten’s. Only the soles of her feet and the palms of her hands were completely hairless, but they looked soft too—pink and smooth like those of the hamster someone had once brought to school. Her black eyes flashed in the flickering light, and frustration showed on her triangle-shaped weasel face.
She didn’t smell too good, though. Not unwashed, but musky—an almost-sulphuric scent that wasn’t completely pleasant.
Harriet’s mouth curled into a smile, displaying inhumanly sharp canines. Her black eyes flicked towards us, then up at the ceiling, and its lack of light bulbs. ‘No electrics, huh? Ow!’
The flame disappeared, the lighter clicked, and it reappeared.
Harriet stared around at the shelter with undisguised curiosity. It was one of the old Andersen ones left over from the war—not much more than some corrugated steel panels bent into a half tube, half-buried then covered with earth to make a space just big enough for six adults to huddle inside. Red stains made V shapes on the walls, and earth bulged through in pockets where the steel had rusted away. New tin sheets covered some of the rust at intervals around the shelter. Pine beams propped up a reinforced roof.
Shelves of dust-covered mystery jars—my stepfather’s attempts at pickling—stood against the far wall. Sprigs of lavender were nailed to the curved sides: an attempt by Stanley to make the place smell a little better. A thick layer of pine needles covered the floor, as did a generous sprinkling of rock salt. The rest of the space was bare.
‘How long do you normally have to stay down here?’ Harriet asked.
‘Depends,’ I whispered. ‘Maybe a few hours.’
‘Ssh,’ Sigrid said. Two years older, she was less intrigued by the weasel-woman than I was.
‘Maybe a few days,’ I said.
‘Why doesn’t she just rough in an electric cable? Stanley’s pretty handy. He could do it in a couple of hours.’
Because she thinks electricity is the devil. I kept quiet. I’d said too much to the weasel already. I’d be in enough trouble if Desma found out about those. I didn’t even want to think about what would happen if I started jabbering. The weasels always wanted to talk.
What was out there? What was so dangerous that an ancient creature like my mother was scared of it? Why did it want weasels?
I was done speculating. The respective answers were: nothing, nothing and it didn’t, because there was nothing there but my mother’s contagious paranoia.
My sister shifted against me, and changed position. Her knees clicked as she stretched them out in front of her. She’d grown six inches in a year, and her bones creaked with the strain. I still hoped for my own huge growth spurt, even if I knew it wasn’t going to come. Sigrid was tall and slim and blonde and already starting to fill out. She hadn’t received our mother’s hag genes.
I had. I was going to be sharp-faced and bony. I’d only pass for human if someone weren’t paying attention. Sigrid would never have to worry about that.
‘I can’t stay down here for days,’ Harriet said. ‘I’ve got a job, which I’m already at risk of losing.’ She peered at her watch and grimaced. ‘You know what, girls? Treasure these days—the ones before you have to go out and work. Trust me on this.’
Sigrid and I both nodded as if we agreed. We didn’t. I’d spent hours with Sigrid in bed at night, huddled together under the covers while we made our plans. Sigrid was going to join the police and be a detective. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, but I thought it would involve animals. We were going to share a flat and we would each have our own TV in our bedrooms.
Harriet shifted from foot to foot then peered at her watch again. ‘Okay, I can’t do this. I have to go.’
‘Mum says you have to stay here.’ I said.
‘Yeah, well, she’s not my mother, and I have to get to work,’ and then she added, ‘If I see anything nasty, I promise to run for it.’
And with that, Harriet took two steps towards the door and shifted her weight into it. Light spilled in, followed by a gust of cool air that smelled like rain, and then she shut the door behind her, leaving us in darkness.
Sigrid stretched her legs again. Her knees clicked. She smelt like warm shampoo and the spoonful of mustard our mother made us eat every morning to stop our souls escaping. In our flat, there would never be any mustard. Not even for guests.
‘Did you hear that?’ Sigrid whispered.
‘What?’ I cocked my head to one side, listening, and heard nothing but the soft sounds of the rain. And then I caught it—a hiss, followed by a succession of sharp barks and shrieks. ‘Is that a fox?’
There were plenty around. They came into the house sometimes through the cat flap, after the cat’s food bowl. Once we’d had a pair of them come in, and they’d mated in the kitchen, screaming until Stanley chased them out with his cane.
The shrieking increased, became a long screech, and then stopped. ‘I’m sure it’s a fox.’ I said, but my voice wavered.
We sat in silence, our ears pricked, but we heard nothing further, beyond the gentle drumming of the rain against the door.
After a while, I fell asleep, and when the door finally opened, it was to a clear sky filled with brilliant, tiny stars.
I stretched and shivered as I followed Sigrid and Desma out into the
fresh air. The rain had stopped, but the downpour had turned the grass sodden, and our feet made slushing sounds as they met the mud below. The white light of the moon highlighted the garden, neat and tidy, except for the space where Harriet’s tent and camping equipment spilled untidily onto the grass.
‘Where’s Harriet?’ Sigrid asked.
Desma stopped. Black was in that year, and she had dressed head to toe in black silk. Along with the sharp boniness of her nose and chin, it made her look like a predatory bird. ‘Gone.’
‘Gone where?’ Sigrid asked.
Desma shook her head, her green eyes hard and a little too intense. ‘It got her, of course. Stupid creature. Should have stayed where it was safe.’
Sigrid and I exchanged glances. We were old enough that we weren’t quite sure if we believed her. Desma’s brow furrowed. She grabbed my shoulder with one hand and Sigrid’s with the other. Her grip tightened painfully, and her long fingernails dug into my skin. ‘Just you remember what happens when you don’t listen to me.’
She herded us into the kitchen then turned her back. As she walked out, she said, ‘Eat something, then straight to bed. I don’t want to see you anywhere other than the kitchen or your bedroom. The rest of the house is off-limits until I tell you otherwise.’
Sigrid grimaced. ‘Do you think she meant the bathroom too? I really need to wee.’
‘No. That would be silly,’ I said, but Desma didn’t trust the toilet. It’s not natural to crap where you live, girls. Go outside. She always used the ancient outhouse at the end of the garden. ‘It’s just a wee. Go outside on the grass. Just in case.’
‘Ugh, that’s so gross.’
‘Then go to the bathroom.’
Sigrid looked from me to the door to the rest of the house, then evidently decided not to risk it because she disappeared out into the garden and came back looking miserable. ‘When we have our own place, we’re not even going to have grass.’
‘Yes, we will, and we’ll grow it extra long so that if Stanley ever comes past, he’ll automatically go into a rage,’ I opened the kitchen cabinet. ‘What do you want to eat?’
We settled on tinned spaghetti with toast. Stanley came in while we were eating, and went straight out back. We watched him dismantle Harriet’s tent while we ate. All her belongings went into paper bags, which he carried around to the front for the bin men to take away.
In the morning, if it weren’t for the yellowed circle of grass under the old oak, there would have been nothing to indicate she had ever been. Stanley watered and fed the grass, and after a few weeks even that was gone. I asked Desma about her again, but all my mother would say on the subject was a repeated, ‘Just you remember what happens when you don’t listen to me.’
2
In the underworld, the night sky churned with yellow smoke. It had been perfectly black under a thick layer of cloud: moonless and starless, on a street with every window blacked out and every street lamp dead and still.
Then the wail of air raid sirens filled the air, punctuated with the thump thump of incendiary bombs. Golden light from dozens of fires brightened the night. The smoke stank of burning fabric, wood, and a horrible meaty smell my mind shied away from.
In the living world, the scars of the Blitz were mostly gone, with just a scrape on a building or a neat plaque remaining to remind the world of what had been. In the underworld, it was different. No matter how much Londoners might have put on a jolly face against death and destruction during the Blitz, their souls still knew and hadn’t forgotten.
Scenes like this were familiar. I’d spent much of my childhood and most of my adolescence exploring the underworld, and everywhere a bomb hit, everywhere someone died, a scar was left on the world of the dead. The underworld was shaped by the psyche of the dead, and the Blitz had left a scar on the underworld’s version of London as thick and permanent as any of the battles and wars that had come before it.
Harpies cluttered the pavement and the tops of the houses, their tongues extended from disturbingly humanlike faces as they sucked in the pain and anguish from the air. Water lapped at the end of the street as the tarmac became the Styx.
This part of the underworld had been Eighteen Cooper Street, when a bomb had seared a snapshot of time onto the underworld. In the living world, the entire row of houses was now gone, demolished and replaced by an anonymous office block. The houses still stood here in the world of the dead, leaning morbidly against each other.
I tried to summon the courage to step off of the pavement and up the stone steps. The last time I had stood in this same spot I’d been a child. I’d never expected to go back.
But then I’d never expected to be bitten by a zombie, either. I couldn’t go back to the land of the living. My body had turned, and the moment I returned I would no longer be myself. I’d be just another rotting and ravenous automaton.
Time flowed differently in the underworld, and I had no idea how long had passed in the world of the living, but it had been too long. I wanted back. Being dead wasn’t new. I’d been doing it all my life. Staying dead, however, was a complete pain in the rear.
The answer was in front of me. In 1942, five hags died in this house when it was hit by a German bomb, slicing a population already teetering on the brink of extinction down to two—my mother Desma, and her daughter Ana.
The hags who died were all refugees from the Continent who had fled to the relative safety of England only to die while they slept. Hags may have been creatures capable of dying at will and returning to life, but they hadn't. The damage to their bodies was too much. They were dead dead. For women who were technically immortal, we died easily enough.
By the time I was born, the house had become a magnet for long-dead hags. They had flocked to it from all over the underworld to join their sisters, where they spent their time drinking tea, gossiping, and peeping out of the net curtains to spy on the unaware dead.
The hags inside had died multiple times over their long lifetimes. One of them had to know how I could get back.
I shifted from foot to foot. Somehow just willing myself up the steps wasn’t enough to make my overly heavy feet take that single step forward. Stop being such a wuss, Vivia. They’re only hags. They’ll know how to do it. Just ask nicely.
Whether I would have chickened out again I’ll never know, because the decision was made for me. The front door flung open, and a small figure scuttled out. ‘Vivia! It’s Vivia, ladies.’
And just like that, I was surrounded by crones pinching at my skin and clothing. Mouths that had never known a toothbrush kissed my mouth, my cheeks. I kept my mouth closed, but put a smile on it.
A posse of old ladies swept me inside and into a Victorian-style parlour the size of a small ballroom. The edges of my vision shimmered as the underworld shifted to accommodate its inhabitants. My behind hit a hard chair with a painful thump.
‘Tea?’
I couldn’t see who had asked. Yeeargh. No, thanks. ‘Yes, please.’
I had been deposited in the central chair—guest of honour, so to speak—with the hags spread out in front of me in a half-moon shape. There were around fifty: all olive skinned with beak-like noses. Hags weren’t identical, but we were all very similar. Only just past thirty, I didn’t have as many warts or as much facial hair, but it was only a matter of time. I did have the hag nose.
I scanned their faces, but the one I was looking for wasn’t there. Wherever my mother had disappeared to, she wasn’t there. I allowed myself a sliver of hope that maybe she had passed over to whatever came next.
The squeak of the tea trolley announced its arrival, pushed by a sallow-skinned hag I knew as Auntie Tilde.
Tilde had been one of those who had died in the house when the bomb hit. Her name was seared into my brain, along with the four others who had died, because sometime after their deaths—and after Desma had moved to the house I’d grown up in—Ana had carved their names onto the doorframe of what was to be my bedroom door
. I’d traced their names with my fingers a thousand times over the course of my childhood.
Tilde had been more than six hundred years old when she’d died, and had worked for most of her long life as a midwife. While she’d always been pleased to see me and took an interest whenever Desma and I visited, it was a morbid interest that gave me nightmares.
‘Still alive?’ she’d say. ‘Oh, I am so pleased. You’re…what…five now? That’s good. Five’s a good age to get to. What about your sister? She still alive? Good, good. The humans die so fast, especially the littles. Now, you just need to make it to ten. You’ll have a good chance once you get there. All the nasty stuff—consumption, the scarlet fever, the poxes—they carry off the little ones like you quick-quick. You grow up. Make it to ten, you hear? Tell your sister, too. Ten’s the magic number.’
I half expected her to say it again now. ‘You made it to how old before you got zombie-bit? Good, good. You made it past ten. And your sister? Really? All the way to fourteen? Well done.’
But Tilde didn’t. Instead, she lifted the teapot with a saggy arm and trickled hot liquid into doll-sized china cups. The discoloured copper teapot gave off a sour aroma. I swallowed back the urge to gag and took the proffered cup with a smile.
When every hag had her cup, drinking was allowed. Despite their near identical looks, each drank differently. Auntie Tilde threw hers back like a shot of hot tequila. I touched the rim of the teacup to my lips, careful not to let the liquid touch my skin, then set the cup, still full, back on the tea trolley. Auntie Tilde glanced at it, and then at me.
The tea ritual was important, but I knew the story of Persephone and the pomegranate seeds. I wasn’t going to get stuck in the underworld for the price of a rank cup of tea.
‘You think we’d trick you like that, girl?’ The corners of Auntie Tilde’s mouth turned up in a smirk.
I shrugged. The room had turned quiet, all eyes on me. ‘Perhaps.’ I don’t trust a single one of you.
Auntie Tilde’s eyes narrowed. ‘Drink the tea.’
‘No.’
‘You are the youngest. Do as you are told.’
‘Times have moved on, Auntie,’ I said. The rest of the hags might have come from a time when junior members of the family were expected to show absolute obedience. I hadn’t.
‘Desma was too soft with you.’
I let out an involuntary bark of laughter. ‘Not quite.’
‘You won’t drink the tea. You sit there like Little Miss Priss looking as though the sight of us makes you sick. What do you want?’
‘I don’t want to be dead anymore.’ The words came out sounding more plaintive than I’d intended. ‘I’m not properly dead. It was a zombie bite. I want to go back.’
To my surprise, she roared with laughter. ‘Who doesn’t? Being dead not good enough for you?’
‘No.’
‘You have tried going back to the living world? That should rewind your clock. Or did you just get bit and come crying to us?’
‘I died and went back. I was still a zombie. It didn’t work. ’ I had. The irony was that I’d died so many times while I’d been alive. The hag part of me made returning to life easy. Somehow it had never occurred to me to worry about the day when death would be permanent.
She gave me an up-down look. ‘Must be because you’re too young. Power comes with age. You’re still a tadpole.’
‘I’m not going to get any older if I stay dead.’
She grinned, displaying a mouth of rotten teeth. ‘All right, then. I may be able to help, but first, come with me. I want to show you something.’
The other hags melted away.
We were back on the street in front of the house. The air raid siren still wailed in that peculiar up-and-down manner that meant no matter where I was in the underworld, I could never mistake it for anything else.
A dead man, his face blackened with smoke, scuttled past me. A dead woman—some kind of shifter, to judge by the way the fire flashed yellow in her eyes—ran past him towards the public bomb shelter at the end of the street, a not-real child in her arms. Another small not-real child trotted behind her, holding the edge of the dead woman’s nightgown with one hand, thumb of the other firmly stuck in its mouth. My eyes followed the woman. Over the half century that had passed since she’d died, how many times had her spirit run down this road to safety, playing the same old scene over and over again? I deliberately put her out of my mind. There was nothing I could do to help her. She had to work through it on her own.
The whump whump of the landing bombs couldn’t be heard over the siren, but the ground jolted with each impact.
Tilde took my hand in her gnarled one, and mouthed something at me. ‘Come.’
The unlocked front door opened onto an unfamiliar hallway, and the sound of the siren diminished. The house stank—the death stink of the hag I’d been so sensitive about while alive, but multiplied by seven, along with the distinctive odour of a group of people who’d been born in a time when bathing was considered optional. I held my nose.
Tilde led me up stairs littered with the detritus of the living—shoes, bags, coats.
She turned left at the landing and pushed open a door. The room was filled with not-real hags, but only one dead one. Hags came in two shapes—tall, skinny, and ugly (my mother and I), or short, squat, and ugly (Ana and Tilde). The hag lying on her back on the bed was one of the latter. Hair sprouted from the warts on her chin and quivered as she snored. I didn’t recognise her.
I gave Tilde a quizzical look.
‘Her name’s Ingeborg.’
Ingeborg. The fourth name on the list carved onto my bedroom door.
‘What is she doing here?’ There were plenty of negatives to being a hag: the warts, the excess hair, the anti-hag prejudice that seemed to infect so many humans; but death wasn’t one of them. Hags knew when they were dead. They weren’t supposed to spend a half century living out their deaths like the humans did.
Tilde’s mouth turned down at the corners. ‘Silly cow hasn’t realised she’s dead yet. Me and the others, we knew we were dead straight away. Daft creature’s been asleep ever since. At least we don’t have to relive being blown to bits. Four against one, our reality overrules hers, but it means we all have to stay here until she wakes up. I’m not leaving her to die over and over, but we just can’t seem to snap her out of it.’
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t know. She always was a little simple. Could be that.’
There was an unspoken or. I voiced it. ‘Or?’
‘Or she’s boiling mad about the same thing I’m boiling about. She just doesn’t want to move on yet. She has to come to terms with her death.’
‘It’s been more than seventy years,’ I said. ‘She’s a hag. She should have come to terms with it in minutes.’
‘Unless there is something unresolved.’
‘What’s to resolve? The house got hit by a bomb. Sure, it’s bad luck, but it’s not complicated.’ I said. The hag in the bed hitched her breath, snorted twice then turned over.
Tilde glanced at her then gave a snort of her own.
‘You’re a hag. You tell me.’
I closed my eyes and concentrated. The room felt like death. The hag on the bed felt like death, as did Tilde beside me. It made me all too aware of the spark within me—the spark that said it wasn’t too late. There was still something inside me that was capable of crossing back. I reached out with the hag part of me and sent a tendril of hag magic towards the sleeping woman.
Information flooded into me. She was dead. Her mind was firmly stuck in the death dream. Her body had been buried and was now nothing more than dry bones. She—
The tendril jolted back.
‘She was murdered.’
‘Ten points for you, cleverclogs. And she wasn’t the only one. Son of a bitch got all of us. Damned humans. They’re always coming for us. Burning us alive. At the stake. In ovens. In our own homes.’
&nb
sp; ‘I think the oven one was just a fairy tale,’ I said.
‘Hah! There’s a lot more to fairy tales than meets the eye.’
I was only half-listening. My brain whirred furiously. The house had been hit by a bomb. It was technically possible some sneaky person could have wandered in, knifed everyone while they slept and then run away minutes before the bomb hit, but the likelihood of such a scenario felt astronomically small.
A more-obvious explanation presented itself. What was war, but murder on a grand scale? ‘It was a bomb, Auntie. Whoever the bomber was, he couldn’t have known who was in this particular house.’
‘You may have our blood, but you certainly don’t have the brains of a hag. You think I don’t know how I died? How any of us died? We know. We were murdered. That bomb was meant for us.’
‘Okay,’ I said. And just like that we moved from a mildly bonkers conspiracy theory to completely box-of-frogs crazy. German bombers had deliberately targeted a lot of things during the Blitz, but I doubted a single house full of crotchety old ladies was on their hit list.
From what I remembered from history class, the Luftwaffe’s general bombing strategy was to aim somewhere near the docks and factories and hope for the best. Even if they had wanted to kill the hags, the chances of a bomber deliberately targeting a particular house and then actually hitting it were minimal at best, if not close to impossible. I was sorry she was dead, but for hags, paranoia with a side order of dementia was practically mandatory.
‘A cowardly way to do it, too. None of us even woke up. One minute we’re alive, the next we’re dead. Didn’t even give us a chance to fight back.’
‘I’m sorry you’re dead, Auntie.’ I added, and I was.
She rolled her eyes. ‘You don’t have to believe me. You want a way back? This is it.’
The room began to fade around us, and slowly the parlour reappeared. The hags hadn’t moved. Tilde gave me a sly smile. ‘How about this? I’ll send you back. You find out who killed us, and you bring me their heads in a bag.’
The hags looked at each other. There was muttering. Crazy old baggage. I was the youngest, but I wasn’t the stupidest. Whose heads? Some mystery German pilots? Even if someone had murdered them, it had been seventy years ago. The bombers were likely long dead.
But it was the only option I had. ‘Deal.’
‘And you’re going to keep to your side, are you? Or are you going to go back and get on with your life, sniggering about how you pulled a fast one on an old woman?’
‘I’ll look into it,’ I said. ‘I can’t promise more than that.’
Tilde laughed suddenly, a death cackle that made me realise why wicked witches are such a stereotype. She reached out suddenly with a gnarled hand and pulled my hair. Hard. A bunch of strands came away in her fingers.
‘Ow! What was that for?’
‘Collateral, you uppity little whippet. This is a deal, not a gift. You act like you’re superior just because your skin’s still young and smooth as a baby.’ She twisted my stolen hair around her fingers, sniffed at it, then blew on it. The strands turned white. ‘You don’t trust me? I don’t trust you. You’re on the clock, chicken. You’ve got until every strand of your hair turns white.’
‘How long will that be?’
She shrugged and turned up her thin lips in another sly smile. ‘Until the moon begins to wane. A few weeks. If that.’ She grinned, showing her rotten teeth again. ‘There may be some side effects.’
Laughter erupted from the audience. Mad as March hares, the lot of them.
‘Just send me back.’ One thing at a time. I couldn’t do anything while I was dead.
She reached out her hand. Her long fingernails scratched my chest. ‘Then it is a bargain.’
My soul began to fade, but I could still feel her talons on my skin and the rest of her words echoed in my ear. ‘Until your hair goes white.’
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