The Witching Hours by Liam Smith

Author:Liam Smith
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2015-05-01T23:00:00+00:00

* * *

The room was dark. Pitch dark. Richard blinked hard, checking that his eyes were indeed open.

‘Daniel.’ Richard groped around him, scared suddenly of the most simple of terrors. ‘I can’t see.’ His hands felt the solid wall behind him, the solid wall he’d just passed through, and the contact with unmoving board and plaster cued a thrill of fear to rattle through him. He kept his voice from pleading, but begged his guide for aid. ‘Daniel. Help, please...’

When he looked back around there was a faint green glow. It grew stronger and Richard realised it was a small emerald fire, held in the ghost’s right hand. Daniel nodded at him.

‘My apologies Richard. Some things do not travel through the gulf of time intact, and my kind do not notice the lack of light. I would not wish you to despair.’

Richard realised that he found the sight of a ghost grasping a handful of flames of more comfort to him than the dark. This revelation did not wholly reassure him. As he watched, the fire grew and flowed, filling the room with a dim verdigris ambience.

‘We are in the witch’s quarters now,’ murmured Daniel. A flicker of fire remained in his hand like a lantern. ‘Tread carefully. Echoes can live on through the years; we do not know what may dwell here.’

Richard glanced around him. The room was an entrance chamber of sorts; the door to a house within a house. It was small, sparsely furnished with a low dressing table. Three doors led off further into the deeper bowels of the place. Daniel glided to the first and took the handle with his fiery hand. After he’d turned it and opened the door, the handle remained green, as if rusted. Daniel beckoned Richard closer, letting the fire light the place. Richard stepped through the door.

‘The first of her chambers,’ whispered Daniel. ‘Behold the trappings of her craft.’

There were no windows in the tiny room; it was little more than a cupboard. The green fire cast a sickly pallor in the space, picking out objects arranged neatly on shelves and dressing tables. An iron cauldron rested ahead of them, a sheaf of twigs and herbs propped up inside it. Around it myriad items rested – dull bells of various sizes, scissors, goblets. Wicker dolls lay like tiny stiff corpses, their limbs stuck out like stars. Richard could smell something too, a musky fragrance that had seeped through centuries. It reminded him of incense and old stale houses.

‘She performed magic here?’ asked Richard. He realised he been envisioning something more akin to a Halloween crone in a pointed hat than a real witch; what he supposed a Wiccan must be.

‘Some,’ affirmed the ghost. ‘But not the darkest of what she was capable. I chanced more than once to find this door unlocked, just as the servants must have whilst about their household duties. There was always something of the other world about Elizabeth; she could be found even in plain sight twisting lengths of corn into effigies and burning curious candles.

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