Beneath the base of every flame there is a still, clear absence; a mysterious gap between the death of substance and the birth of light, with time itself suspended in this void of transformation, this pause between two elements. I understand it now, that there has only ever been one fire, that blazed before the world began and shall not be put out until the world is done. I see my fellows in the flame, the unborn and the dead. I see the gash-necked little boy. I see the ragged man that sits within a skull of blazing iron. I almost know them, almost have a sense of what they mean, like letters in a barbarous alphabet.
It was all for a joke at first, the picture drawn with pig-blood and the candle. We did not suppose that it would come to anything, nor be accomplished with such fearful ease. Some names were said aloud, and in the finish there were answers come as from an obscure place; from out a lively fog descended in our thoughts. This was in February of last year, when all the ponds were cauled and frozen.
Shivering bare, we squatted in my pinched up room and listened to the novel words we heard inside ourselves, this hearing being of a kind that cannot be accomplished with the ears, that is sometimes more like a drift of mood or vision than it is like speech. It told us many things.
We are all, each of us, the stinging, bloody fragments of a God that was torn into pieces by the birth-wail of Eternity. When all the days are done, She who is Bride and Mother unto all of us shall gather every scrap of scattered being up into one place, where we shall know again what we knew at the start of things, before that dreadful sundering. All being is divided between that which is, or else that which is not. Of these the last is greater, and has more importance. To know thought is to be in another country. Everything is actual. Everything.
At first naught but a voice within, the Black-Faced Man became apparent in small measures. First we had a sense of someone sitting in the empty chair that stood up in one corner of my room, but when we looked there would be no one there. At length we could both make him out by looking from the corners of our eyes, though if we gazed on him directly he’d be gone.
He was both tall and terrible, with hair and whiskers like a beast, his eyes a bright and pale goat-yellow in the painted lamp-black of his face. A dark and purple light hung all about him, and it seemed as if his flesh was everywhere embroidered with tattoo, in coiling lines like serpents or a new calligraphy. Things that were either branch or antler sprouted from his head upon each side, and when he spoke inside our thoughts his voice was deep enough to make the air grow cold. He told us that we must stretch out our hands, but only I dare do it, Mary being too afraid.
I stood there for some moments with my hand thrust out, and at the start felt nothing save for foolish. Presently, however, I could feel the faintest touch of something much like fingers wrapped about my own, and very cold into the bargain. When he spoke, it was to me alone, for when Mary and I discussed things later she confessed to hearing nothing at this point.
He said, ‘Elinor Shaw, be not afraid of me, for I am one of the Creation, as are you yourselves.’
He next said something that I did not understand, and asked that he might borrow something from us for a year and two months. It was not a solid thing that he desired, but rather something immaterial, so that at first I grew afraid, believing that he asked me for my Soul. He reassured me, telling me he asked for nothing save the mere Idea of me, for which he had some use I could not fathom, and this only for a little time. Even on this, my death day, I am yet unable to make out how the Idea of me might be of value, or to whom.
He promised in return that he would tell us how to call up Imps and have their conversation and obedience. Further to this, he promised that we should not feel the flames of Hell or punishment.
I am not certain how the piece of parchment was obtained whereon we made our marks in blood to seal the bargain. For a time I thought our visitor himself produced it, though from where I cannot think since he was naked. Now it seems to me as if it may have been there in my room a while before he came, forgotten until on that night we chanced upon it. He insisted that we sign in blood, saying that every human function and its fluid are possessed of awesome power, attractive to those spirits who do not themselves possess a body and thus find such substance novel. Going on from this, he said that we might let such Imps as we should summon suckle on the juices of our sex, which would placate them, causing them to favour us. He said this without any wickedness, as if to him there was no shame in such an act, although I blushed, as did my Mary when I told it to her.
What it was that happened next I cannot say. In my confession I have said the Black-Faced Man came with us both to bed, and had his way with us, and this is very like what did occur, but in another sense of things from that we are accustomed to. I am not sure that he was ever there in bed with us as we ourselves were there, in flesh, or that the things we thought he did with us we did not, after all, do to each other. Yet both of us felt him there with us in that delirious shift and tangle, that intensity of presence nothing like a man which pushed inside us, ice-cold yet exciting.
We were outside of time with him. Our bed was every bed where man or woman ever birthed or fucked or died. When Mary licked my bottom she could see a curious flower of light spread out from it so that we laughed, but in our thoughts his voice said to us, ‘See this Rose of Power. There is one set beside each of the body’s gates,’ whereupon we became more sober.
When we reached our Joy there was a moment unlike anything where all the world was gone, nor ever had been there, but instead only the most perfect whiteness, and we were the whiteness, and we were each other made sublime, and we were nothing. Afterwards, if there could truly be an afterwards of such a thing, we slept until the morning when we woke to find ourselves alone with a dead candle and a bloodied parchment.
Now my arms and shoulders are aflame. Beside me, under Mary’s skirts, I hear the hiss and sizzle of her scorching love-hair; secret, holy animal badge of our kind. How glorious it must look now, feathered with splendid fires and like a vision. I would rub my face upon it, drench my chin with sparks instead of spittle. I would worship it. I would adore it. Still there is no pain.
The things we were accused of, that we did, in scarce more than a year, kill fifteen children, eight men and six women with our diabolic art; that in like manner did we also rid the world of forty pigs, a hundred sheep and thirty cows, which by my reckoning suggests that we bewitched three beasts a week. Also, there were some eighteen horses that I had forgot. All about Oundle, and as far as Benefield and Southwick, not an ant was stepped upon without it being held that we were by some means responsible for the poor mite’s demise. When they had quite run out of murders to accuse us of, they took to listing our more minor sins, establishing that we were bedfellows and also ‘partners in knitting’, which gave us much cause for merriment.
What was it that we knitted with our wax and clay, our little pins? If I am honest, most of it was little else but selfish entertainment, though as we came to know more of the Superior Realm it touched us, that we were both made more reverent. Yet still we giggled, bent above our knitting, and we cast off curse and charm in endless rows, and purled word into wonder.
Would that we might tell the half of it, the Imps we called and many higher creatures of that kind beside. As I have said before, the ease of it is frightful, if one is but shown. We had four kinds of Imp bound to our call, all of a different usefulness and colour. Some of them were intricate and red, and these had knowledge of both Art and diverse other matters. Some were dun, and shaped like decorated eels, or else like torsos that had tails, and though they did not seem so clever as the others, in their swim and flicker we could hear each other’s thoughts, and on their ripples send our dreams across the world.
Some Imps were black, with shiny skin wherein was All of things reflected, as within a mirror. These were shaped like men, though smaller by a measure, and were used for prophecy, or seeing from afar. Gleaming upon their brow we saw the da
rk time gone before, and knew the days of falling fire to come writ on their ebon bellies.
The white Imps were like ferrets, or perhaps like slender cats with tiny hands like those of aged men, and something of an old man’s face about their features also. These had no purpose save for harm. We did not use them. Not that often, anyroad.
The thing with Imps is that they must be given work to do at all times, lest they should grow bored with mortal company and take their leave. It is moreover only right they be rewarded for each task, which bounty me and Mary would dispense flat on our backs there in the chalk ring with our frocks up and our knees apart. After we’d done it, we were always tired. We could not see them as they lapped between our thighs, but only sometimes feel them, sucking on our little buttons.
(On that miserable night when Billy Boss and Jacky Southwel, Constables the pair of them, were sent for us, we were examined. All the men there present looked upon those little buttons, where we said our Imps had suckled us, and seemed very amazed, as if they had not seen such things before. Describing them, they said they were like teats or pieces of red flesh there in our privy parts. I pity their poor wives, if wives they have.)
Apart from Imps, we called up creatures of a great peculiarity, that are like monstrous dogs, sometimes called Shagfoals. They have burning eyes, and some are very old. They live near crossroads, or at bridges, where things have a choice to them and where the veil between what is and what is not grows worn and threadbare, rending easily.
These have a kind of pup, much smaller and more hideous to behold, being both black and blind, with long and questing tongues. Their presence puts an air of fear about things, but this thickens into an exquisite, shocking pleasure if they should be touched. We sent a pair of them to Bessy Evans when she said she had no fun in life, and look at all the thanks we got.
I still remember it, that morning stood in her front yard with Mary, Bessy going on about her John and how he hadn’t touched her for a year, and slept off in a different room away from her. We said she was a fool to live so wretchedly, at which she asked us if we would send something to her that would do her good. We swore to do our best, and that next morning when we met with her she seemed a different woman, telling us how in the night she dreamed two things like moles had come into her bed and suckled at her lower parts, both front and back, which she informed us was both somewhat frightening, and yet at once agreeable. Later, when she gave evidence against us, she swore that these nightly visits made her so afraid she had to send for Mr Danks the Minister, who came up to her room on several evenings, where they prayed together that the creatures might be banished.
Four nights! By her own admission, that’s how long the thankless cow took pleasure with our subtle pups before she thought to call a Minister, and only then because we would not send them any more and she desired a man up in her room to take their place. Four nights!
I’ll tell you this, though mostly I like men the least, there’s times I care for women not at all. When I think of the things we did for them in sympathy because they shared our sex, and how they all rushed to accuse us once the chopper fell. When they had muffins in their ovens and were yet unwed, or if they thought their man was bedding with another, then it was a different story. Then it was all ‘Nell, get rid of it for me’, or ‘Mary, make her fatter than a pig and bring him back’. We cured their babies of the croup and charmed warts into being on the cocks of faithless men. We sent blue gems of light to ease their cramps when they were bad and gave them scripts to ward off those who rape and rob. We raved and prophesied and read the future in their turds.
But did we kill?
I think we did. Old Mother Wise at least and, yes, perhaps the Ireland boy. I cannot say we did not mean to, for we surely did when we called our enchantments down, but for my own part I regret it now. Anger, resentment, spite and all such common worldly moods are dangerous luxuries that one who works the Art cannot afford. They will return to you, like starving dogs. They will eat everything.
With Mrs Wise, it was because she would not sell us buttermilk, though there was more to it than that. For one thing, she kept company with all the rat-jawed village wives that called us whore, and shared in that opinion with them, this because Bob Wise, her husband, put his hand inside my bosom and was kissing me when he got drunk the Plough Day before last.
It is funny now I think of it: he was dressed up for Plough Day in the costume of the Witch Man, as somebody always does each year. His face was painted black, and he had twigs and branches tied about his head like horns, for such is the tradition. I asked him if he was wearing horns because his wife was in the hay with someone else, to which he answered that he did not care where she might be so long as he had me instead, and after kissed me on the mouth and grabbed my tit a little while. Though he was stout and coarse and nowhere near so tall, why did I not think of Bob Wise’s fancy dress when first we fetched the Black-Faced Man? What is the meaning of this similarity, and why have I not thought upon it until now?
No matter. When his wife refused to give us buttermilk she called me all the harlots underneath the sun into the bargain, so that I grew angry and remembered all the times I’d walked between the stalls at Oundle Market with their shrieks and jibes still ringing in my burning ears and me too scared and full of rage to answer back. I stormed home, coming into Mary’s room to wake her like hundred of bricks in high wind, and I was so cross that for a time she could not make out anything I said. When I was made a little calmer, I prepared an effigy of wax that was stuck full with pins, and Mary called a white Imp like a stoat with baby’s hands that answered to the name of Suck-My-Thumb, or sometimes, when it fancied, Jelerasta. This appeared, talking at times in English but more often in a tongue we thought was Greek. It supped the nectar from the Rose of Light at Mary’s loins and next was charged with the delivery of those hurts bound into my tallow mannequin, pierced like a martyr, almost lost from sight inside a hedge-pig ball of nail and bodkin. This was in the afternoon.
That evening, Widow Peak came by to visit. Though her husband’s name was Pearce she is called Widow Peak because her hair has gone back at the sides just as it does with men in later life, to make a point in front. She had come in to ask if we might give her luck with men in the New Year, this being New Year’s Eve, but though we wrote a charm for her she would not leave, and was still sitting with us when our door blew open as the church clock chimed for midnight. Suck-My-Thumb came in, returned from where he had been sent, and slid across the floor to leap in Mary’s lap, where he enjoyed the warmth and scent.
The widow gazed in fascinated terror at the Imp and then would look away as if she was not sure just what it was that she could see, or even if she could see anything at all. It made us smile to see her so discomfited, since she had long outstopped her welcome, and I think that Mary hoped to frighten her off altogether when she said, pointing to me, ‘See there, the witch that’s killed old Mother Wise by making first a doll of wax, then sticking it with pins!’ Widow Peak left soon after this, and we both laughed at it, and did not think that there were far more prudent things we might have said.
We learned next day that after taking leave of us the widow had gone straight across to Mother Wise’s house, first-footing, where she found the woman to be in great pain, so that she very shortly after midnight died of it, God rest her mean and disappointed soul. I do not feel so bad for her as I feel over little Charlie Ireland, who I think we killed the week before.
The two deaths were not unconnected. In the case of Mrs Wise, Mary made use of Suck-My-Thumb when my wax doll and pins would no doubt have made short work of the job alone. She did this, and indeed was glad to do it so that she might find work for the Imp and keep him happy, for it is a fact that Imps will stray or become snappish if they are not ever in employ, which exercise appears to make them stronger. Being stronger they demand more work, and so on. Once you’ve called them up, it is a difficulty knowing what to set them to, week after w
eek.
Mary had first called Suck-My-Thumb a little prior to Christmas, when like me with Mrs Wise she was caught in a fit of temper. This had been brought on by Charlie Ireland who, with other lads his age, would hang about in Southwick village, where we often walked. Mary had gone to Southwick looking for a ham that we might boil up for our dinner, and on coming out the butcher’s was surrounded by a gang of boys, with Charlie Ireland at the head of them. Urged by his fellows, he called her an old witch and a whore and asked if she would gobble on his winkle for a farthing.
I have never seen her in a mood so bloody as when she got home that night. She did not speak a word, but went into her room where first, after a silence, I could hear her making noises as if she were frigging off, and then could hear her talking in a low voice, though to what I did not know. Some time went by before she would open the door, at which she was revealed stood naked with the sleek white weasel creature whispering in French as it coiled there about her heels, before next darting from the room and thence the house, gone from our sight.
We did not see the Imp again that night, and Mary told me that she had instructed it to journey up the dark and empty lanes and find the Irelands’ house in Southwick, where it was to worry at the boy’s insides, afflicting them with gripes and pains. The thought of his discomfort took the edge from off her wrath, and both of us believed that was the last of it until the evening after, when the baby-fingered creature came once more to us.
It paced and chattered in a multitude of tongues before our hearth, and seemed at first to sulk and then become enraged when we did not set work for it to do. It glared at us with hateful eyes or tugged our skirts with hot, soft little hands and would not leave despite our pleas and our commands that it should do so. Next it started up to rail at us in English, when it told us that we must now call it Jelerasta, and that it would not permit us sleep until we found a task in keeping with its nature.