The black mirror
(19,572 words)

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But he had already taken advantage of her moment of distraction and moved past her, elegantly in the manner which only the very well-brought-up can achieve without seeming either timid or egregious. She was left, undischarged, the heat burning inside her chest, the beat in her head beginning to roll like those silly, blacked-up African drums in the monochrome films where all the men wore baggy shorts and slicked-back hair and were burdened with the white, constipated reveries of Oxbridge.  In the midst of tropical rainstorms, on rope bridges swung maniacally by the bespectacled team at Elstree, they would take a long-haired native girl who always seemed to hail from some ill-defined Micronesian archipelago not that far from the skull markets and they would seed her with their Norman dreams. All her men had been suburban. Even the one who had turned out to be a prescription junkie. When he had not been able to get enough of what he wanted, he’d simply taken an overdose of whatever he’d had. There was no glamour in that, just shivering, poverty, betrayal. Emptied plastic containers with child-proof lids. Children had been the least of her worries. Little white tablets, spun down into darkness on magnetic, swirling foam. Nothing remotely romantic. The beat in her head. Definitely not Elstree. Judy Garland, maybe. Some of her partners had been into camera shops and industrial estates. Others, into football or snooker. One was a reader. A voracious consumer of books, especially the ones regarded as highbrow. Ruqa had thought this admirable and for a while she had even attempted to emulate it. Until the day they had begun to argue about the nature of love. It hadn’t helped that at the time, they were both middling drunk on juniper gin. Hair, farts and nail clippings. That was what most relationships boiled down to. The bathos of the flesh. So why bother with all the romance, the ritual, the cerebration, if in the end it was always the same? There were only certain ways one human being could interact with another and they were all too well known. Each one had been written around, sang about, danced to, had its deepest interiors analysed to and beyond the point of fabrication. Madness. Each one had been lived, breathed and spat out by billions. Ad infinitum. They had been exposed and then exposed again until all meaning, if ever there had been any, had been lost. His back was broad. He held himself erect. Perhaps he’d been an athlete. She wondered what he did for a living. Did he have to do anything to live? Perhaps his was inherited wealth. Unearned income. A silver spoon, to keep away spells. Fiddling with her necklace, she followed him down the corridor.

I am cladd from head-to-toe in rose and ivie and I treade the spiral dance across the forest floore. I dwelle in places manifolde, but on this midsummer’s morn, I breathe within the longe limbes of the willowe and beneath the foliate shade of this tree do I sense the wordes before they are wordes when they are snakes and billowing, golden clouds.  Pentacle, candle, chalice, the white handle, the black handle, the red cord;  all these be but stringes of the spinet ‘pon which I playe; ‘tis not the instrument, ‘tis the musick which matters!  Canst thou not hear, O mightie judge? Canst thou not hear, O man-martin of the anthill, kinge of the black downe? In thy nakedness, canst not thou make out the faintest tremble of fish-wing ‘pon the face of the deep? Canst not thou hear the turning of Solon’s Key? Canst thou not feel the deosil tread of bared feet ‘pon the soft leaves of the forest, the dance of the salt ‘pon the face of the dead, the cut of sword through ayre, the heaving cone of unwinding power? No! Not yet. But soon, soon, my sprig of nettle’s foot, thou shalt feel it, thou shalt be there, one amonge the manie, and perhaps thou might e’en be the one who standeth ‘neath the watching tower and open thy wide mouth in a scream without ayre as thou layest the longe blade ‘pon mie lefte breaste. I wish it were so. But for now, we are enemies moste vile. Thou, witch-hunter, hammer-man, thou dost laye waste to mie sisters and brothers and slice their spirits through with hard rope and burning flame. Thou hast ravaged across the lande – our lande – and have show’d no mercie to bairns and women-wi-bairns, alike. But now, on this midsummer morn, ‘tis thou who art hunted, thou who art naked in the forest which is my bodie. I have thee inside me! I feel thee rant and rave and pray and sweat. I feel thy fear, O martin-man. Where now is thy hammer? Turn’d, broke, melted in the cuppe. And soon, the cuppe will brim o’er with flowers and thou shalt yet be drown’d in roses, Martinus Formicarius of Blackdowne. Thy maple-and-nuts yet shall leap over mie cauldron. My love. My lover. My dancing hare.

            Okay, listen, he said as they reached the bottom of the staircase. I like the place. I’ll take it.
Panic crept up the back of her neck.
            But you haven’t had it surveyed yet.
He shrugged.
            I don’t need to. I’m an architect. I know the geometries of things, the deficiencies, the cracks. I can feel the shape of space.
She looked down at the schedule. The sun was so bright, she had to squint to be able to read anything from the paper. The sun was burning away the ground from beneath her feet, melting the soles of her flat, black shoes.
But you haven’t named a price, Martin. It’s up for bids.
            I can pay whatever the owners want.
He gestured towards the table.
            I brought some wine. I thought we might share.
And there, on the oak table, sat a bottle of red wine.
            When did you bring that in? she asked.
But he just smiled.
From where she was standing, Ruqa could see only up to the half-landing, above which the staircase angled abruptly to the left, from where they had just come.
It’s been empty for a long while, she ventured, and she rested her palm on the smooth wood of the banister. Shifted her body weight from one foot to the other.
            For centuries.
            Pardon?
            Nothing.
Ruqa glanced at her papers. The sun was burning on the back of her neck.
            It’s lain for eleven years without a sale. No-one’s even got as far as a survey.
            That’s incredible! Not even one survey.
            I know. As I said before, it’s rather out-of-the-way. People want speed. They’re not interested in big places that need a lot of upkeep. Besides, they can’t fill the rooms. Space for plasma screens is all they need. Nobody reads books any more. Not at home. On the Tube, maybe, and then only to avoid gazing into one another’s eyes. To avoid looking into the seat of their own terror. And even as they read, they’re having to imagine it in a film in which they play both roles. The words are good only in so far as they promote a shimmering surface like that of a shallow pool. Beneath the rippling skin, there is nothing. Just emptiness.

But he wasn’t listening. Or at least, he wasn’t paying attention. He was scanning the joins, the links, the places where walls and ceiling and windows met. The sun shone on both sides of his face and she wondered how that might be possible and then, to her left, she noticed the mirror. She hadn’t seen it on the way up, but then, she’d been too busy blabbing about this feature or that prominence. Sales-talk for the sleeping majority. It was round and concave and its diameter was about the length of a woman’s hand. The glass was black, or at least the backing must’ve been painted black so that although sunlight was now pouring through the windows into the room, none of it was being reflected by this mirror. The entire room had been telescoped into its dark concavity. The oak table, culled from the forest of William Rufus, burning god-king of the hidden clearing, the red footstool said to have reposed the aching feet of Joseph of Arimathea, the armchair where Ruqa had woken from her three hundred-and-twenty year long bilberry dream and gazed into the magenta emptiness beneath the frame of the mantelpiece. On the far windowsill, a Cuban cigar, from whose end smoke was slowly rising, and a dish of stale porridge. She saw that already, he had slipped off his green jacket and draped it over the wooden back of one of the chairs. His shirt-sleeves came down halfway to the elbows and all the skin up to the cotton-line had been tanned by the long days of sunshine and she could see that beneath the skin, his muscles moved with a sleekness she had thought only cats could attain.

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On the table were two empty glasses, a bottle of 1995 Night Coast Burgundy, a loaf of fancy French bread and a fruitcake which already had been sliced into nine segments. A sharp, white-handled knife. She counted them in the carbon computer of her mind. And the plates were real; clean, white porcelain, they shone in the sunlight, not like those silly paper ones which came decorated with partying balloon images and which were destined to be disposed of at the end of an evening’s revelry. Except that a few of those would always be left over and would fester in cupboards, sometimes for years, until eventually, they ended up being tossed out anyway during one of the occasional but intensely manic periods of spring-cleaning when she would completely gut the house. Once, she had even thrown out a perfectly-usable fridge. Hadn’t even considered advertising and selling it through one of the freebie ‘papers. Actually, she’d been a little apprehensive about allowing total strangers to wander with their great clumpy shoes across her rugs and to visually rape the interiors of her world. She almost laughed. That was ironic! Ruqa Farrell, the Estate Agent Extraordinaire who’d sold more houses than hot dinners (actually that was true), had awkward hang-ups about people – the very same people whom, day-in, day-out, she showed around the interior worlds of others – seeing into her past. Because that was what so many houses were, repositories of what had gone before: old photos of bleary-eyed toddlers who now might working in the stock exchange or else begging down some rat-ridden alleyway, stiffly-composed black-and-white portraits of dead husbands dressed up in the musty uniforms of non-commissioned officers, their eyes gazing at the smoke rising from some unattainable gattling-gun ridge, and then there were the brass hunting-plates, the porcelain mementos of Scarborough, the Spanish donkeys, the Österreichisch weather-clocks. When the man appeared, it meant rain. With the exception of the ones who’d been brought up Calvinists or Plymouth Brethren, the men who had appeared in her life generally had been inordinately nosey, poking around her things as early as their second visit. Even now, in that strange house which yet seemed oddly familiar, Ruqa felt the rising bile of irritation. Even now, she felt violated by their curiosity. She knew her reaction was over-the-top, but one had to draw the line somewhere. If they felt they could probe around her shelves or her mantelpiece while she’d nipped to the kitchenette or the bathroom, then they might assume, subconsciously, of course, that they might also hold the deeds to her life. To her body.

And now this man was offering her booze ‘n’ sugar. Well, she’d accept his offering, what did it matter? But it troubled her that she hadn’t seen it coming. She was uneasy that she had not been able to gauge this man, that mentally she hadn’t seemed able somehow to get a hold of him. Even the idea of him. That wasn’t good, to be alone in a house, far from anywhere, with a strange man whom she couldn’t compartmentalise. It was also intensely exciting. Her skin was hyper-electric, she’d felt the static come off the banister as she’d released her hand. It didn’t often come off dead wood. But why hadn’t she noticed all the stuff laid out, before? How could he have got it all in – and so quietly, too? For a moment, Ruqa thought that perhaps the house had been broken into and occupied by vagrants, or squatters, or bizarre cosmonauts, or pop-stars, conjoined, in their unattainable villainy, in a long, dumb supper of sorts. Perhaps she should whip out her mobile and call the police. But then, Martin had conjured all this stuff out of nothing, hadn’t he? And for what purpose? she wondered. To win her over, or to close the deal. Or both. She disliked the vague notion that she might be in the process of being hoodwinked into a signature or else into bed. She didn’t want to be used. Not that the house was her’s to sell, of course. Still, it was good to be treated well. Different, nowadays when most men seemed either too scared, too brutish or too arrogant to know how to behave in the presence of a woman of childbearing age. A poignant touch. A trip of the sunlight upon a moving hand, seeming to draw it to a point of stillness. Just right. The way she’d felt today.

So they sat at the high table and partook of the wine and food.
            Marie Antoinette would’ve been proud of us, Ruqa joked.
            How so?
            Cakes. Wine. If they don’t have bread, tell them to eat cakes!
            But we have bread as well.
He paused.
            I’ve covered all the angles, he said.
            You certainly have.
In the light which filtered through the glazed windows, her gaze lingered like a loose amber necklace around his face, his neck which was half-lit. As he chewed, the tiny muscles in his face and around his temples shifted like the workings of some mechanical toy. She tried to imagine what he was like, inside. But he caught her eye and it was he who spoke first, while still chewing.
            Do you enjoy what you do, Ruqa Farrell?
She glanced down and focussed on a particular whorl in the wood. Teased a crumb across the plate. Tried to join it with another.
            Some days. It’s like anything, I suppose.
            Do you ever think about the moment of your death?
Her head shot up. He was still chewing, his expression nonchalant. Yet his eyes were intense, focussed, the pupils contracted to pinpoints.
            Not especially. Do you?
            All the time.
            How dreadful for you.
The conversation was becoming surreal.
            Look, this is very kind of you, I must say, but you know, I really oughtn’t to be driving after this.
She gestured at the half-empty bottle.
And nor should you.
            If we sit here long enough, Ruqa, our levels will drop.
            We’d have to sit here, all day and all night!
A hint of a smile.
She shook her head.
            Oh no, I have to get back.
            Why?
            I… I have other houses to show.
He shook his head, slowly.
            No, you don’t.
            Pardon?
            No, you don’t. I checked with your office. I said I needed you to be totally focussed on this purchase. It’s by far the most expensive property on their books and it’s been empty for so long. A millstone, they said. A milestone, I said. They agreed.
            No-one spoke to me about this.
            Why should they?
She felt suddenly cramped. The leather tightened across her insteps, the skirt contracted like a black python around her waist. She needed to visit the gym more often. She envied those taut twenty-two year-olds. But they weren’t sitting here in this magnificent hall, yes, that was that it was, coarse wood beams and all, Aradia Hall, being wined and dined and chatted-up by an attractive and rich scion of the British aristocracy or at least, of the English gentry. Yes, don’t forget that, he was rich enough to buy all her days and nights. She prised off her shoes. Pulled in her feet beneath her chair. Flexed, and then extended, the toes, which tingled painfully, needles pricking across the joints, prompting the flow of blood all the way up her legs and into her belly. She almost crumpled with the punch between her breasts. Her head felt light. Sun light.
            The moment of death.
            Umn?
            You were saying…
            Oh yes. It is with me, wherever I go. I carry it inside me like a disease, or a lover.
            The two being the same.
He laughed, cynically.
            Listen, this table’s awfully stiff, don’t you think? Awfully formal.
She didn’t reply. The sun was in her eyes again. Must’ve moved around the sky a little more. A tiny angle would be enough and everything would change.
            Let’s take this stuff onto the hearth-rug.
            It’s a bit old, threadbare. It might have fleas, or bugs, or something.
            Old’s good. Anyway, I like the idea of squatting on the Tree of Life. 

So they carried the food and drink onto the large, rectangular carpet which lay before the fire-hearth. Ruqa left her shoes by the table. The sweat had discoloured the armpits of her white blouse with large, irregular dark stains. The day was almost unbearably warm and in this house, the heat seemed to concentrate itself, as though the tiny, convex pieces of window-glass were drawing the entire heat of the summer into this room, into the gaping, black hole of the fireplace. She noticed that Martin had copied her action, but that already he had gone further and also removed his socks, so that now he walked, on bare feet, over to the fireplace. She watched the way his feet moved across the hard, wooden floor. Every movement was smooth and was contiguous with every other movement, as though his body was unconscious of itself, as though like the house, his flesh simply existed on that summer’s morning on the edge of the forest, as though that was where it had always been meant to be.

She felt the need to say something, to regain some kind of control.
            Yes, I know this house pretty well, I think: the pedimented gables, the casement windows glazed with leaded lights, the recessed ceilings. Have you noticed, she expostulated, slipping back into estate agent mode, that this, the main room, was constructed in the shape of a cube?
He swung round.
            No, actually. I hadn’t noticed that.
She watched his expression carefully. He was not mocking her.
            Yet there is no basement; the lower orders had not yet been banished from sight.
            And breath.
            What?
            They breathed different air, in those times.
            How strange.
She paused, then went on.
            What an odd thing to say. To think, even.
But he was looking up at the ceiling.
            I know this type. It doesn’t surprise me. The clothes were old-fashioned, heavy, dark. They still hauled their wing’d bulk around as they had done from the time of Good Queen Bess, yet the houses, they were far ahead of the people. Clean, perfect cubes and rectangles. This Puritan of yours knew what he was doing. Beneath the iconoclasm, was a Renaissance man, struggling to escape.
She was lost. He went on.
            But perhaps some of this…
He went up close to the wall.
            … this was added at a later date.
He tapped the middle finger of his right hand against one of the dark, wooden panels. It made a hollow sound. He turned round again.
            It always seems as though there is something behind these. There isn’t, of course.
Then he went over to the fireplace, and lay down on the marble.
            Don’t! It’ll be dirty. Your clothes…
But he ignored her. His head was already virtually out of sight beneath the opening of the chimney. He was still poking about with his fingers. His shirt was all askew. One knee was flexed.
            It’s been blocked, higher up.
His voice seemed to come from far away.
He peeked out from under the chimney.
            The original furniture’s long gone.
She nodded. It didn’t take a genius to figure that one out.
            No damask and velvet, no Indian pintado on the walls.
            This was a Puritan house.
            Yes, but they were all merchants of one kind or another. Maybe they traded overseas. It was they who prepared the way for the Empire and for the growth of capital.
He got up and fingered the wall, just above the mantelpiece. The plaster was beginning to crumble, but he was burrowing into it, scraping out the fine, white dust. She supposed that she ought to have stopped him; after all, the property was not yet his; yet she let him continue, for she knew that he had a feel for this place and after all, he had found the puritan-hole, upstairs. The schedule would have to be re-written and she would have to do it. She would volunteer to do it. Oh no, she remembered, with a slump of disappointment, there won’t be another schedule, not if he buys the Hall. When he had finished tunnelling away on one side of the fireplace, he moved to the other side and did the same. Then he spun round, a look of triumph on his face.
            There! I thought so.
All she could see were two rough holes in the plaster.
            Bolt-holes. Something heavy used to hang here. A painting, perhaps. Or a looking-glass.
            What?
            A mirror.
            Oh.
Her heart pumped hard against her ribs. He went on.
            If it were a looking-glass then it would’ve been made of two sections, joined together, each one, a half-moon.
Mirror, sunshine, stone sill, the touch of leaf on skin.
            And those out-buildings I noticed as I drove in, they probably would’ve been bath-houses and the like. Perhaps, somewhere in the woods, there was a water-wheel. Turning, beneath the foliate canopy.
            There is a lake.
            There you go then.
He smiled, and shrugged his shoulders. There were no sweat stains on his shirt.

In mine hande, do I wield the hammer of witches, the great Malleus Maleficarum which covereth moste, if not all, matters concerning this foule creed and in mie head, do I porte other tomes of manifold wisdom: the Daemonologie of James Rex; The Laws against Witches and Conjurations; the Pneumalogie of Brother Sebastian Michaelis; Guazzo’s Guide to Jurymen on the finding of insensible marks; Bishop Hutchinson’s Historical Essay on the Witches of Ipswich; the Formicarius of Prior Johannes Nider, a treatise on Visions and Revelations, which is moste especiallie goode on the machinations of succubi; Boorde’s Breviarie of Health; the Reverende Robert Kirke of Aberfoyle’s Secret Commonwealth; the Tales of Ursla, the Pig-Woman who did stride starke nak’d between mass’d ranks of succubi in Bartholomew Fayre long past; L’Histoire Generale du Monde, by that esteem’d author, Pedro Valderama and translated from the Spanish by the goode Richardiere, which, among manie other omphalotic transmutations, dwelleth on the inspissation of air by spirits which doth render to them the power to appear as human beings. Thou wilt see from this laste, that no man or woman may be trusted in manner whole, not e’en thine owne selfe. For who knoweth which of us, appearing goode and true, may yet be an agent of the Devil? Such evil may seep into the coils and spirals of thine owne brain, moste likelie whilst thou art sleeping or employing nature’s needes. E’en I, verilie a judge and magister in these matters, cannot be certain of mine owne puritie. Every morn’, therefore, with an iron pricking-pin do I inspect mine owne bodie for insensible markes. Mie pack-donkey is loaded unto cracking wi’ sacks of salt, with which I do seal up the woundes inflicted thereof. For I have read in manie learn’d works, bothe of the goode and of the other, that th’angelic hoste who fell with Lucifer have retain’d the powers of alchemical transmutation which they possess’d as spirits of light. Such forms do pass moste readily through the open’d orifices of the bodie. This is why the vessel of woman hath indeede more possibilities for the reception of evil. Everie man muste needes poste guardes moste holie and infallible ‘pon his mother, his wife, his maides and his daughters (moste especiallie ‘pon nightes of the fulle moon when the witches engage in transvection moste foule) and e’en thereof, himself! And if thou muste needes taketh a woman in the darkness, be sure and spell out the Lord’s Prayer at the moment of greatest loss. I have learn’d all this and much more from the pages of these bookes and I shall carry them ‘pon mie person till the daye of mie deathe and beyonde. With these tomes goode and true, sharpe quill’d by the handes of those who ride along the bridal path of the holie, with these pages moste heavie shall I leaven and crush thee!
            Verilie, my lorde, thy spirit is weigh’d downe by books. I carrie onlie the shadow pages of the forest, the great workes of hawthorne and elder, the dreams of the river fish, the folding clouds of the sky. Oak, hollie, bilberrie and willow – these be to me, both longe bone and marrow. Thy books, mie Lorde Martin, speaketh through wordes quill’d on the pointes of pheasant feathers. Yet still, the pheasant cannot singe!

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Up till now, she hadn’t noticed the pattern of the ancient Persian rug. It had been faded red, that was all. But now she saw that there were birds of many different kinds, perched on each of the boughs and that each of the birds had its beak half-opened as though it were singing. He filled both their glasses and raised his so that through the wine, the sunlight turned the walls red.
To you, he said, and to me and to Aradia Hall. All three hundred-and-thirty-odd years of it!
She touched the side of her glass against his.
            To us, and the house and the carpet.
He smiled, and the points of his teeth were just visible. A light sweat adorned his upper lip and in patches on either side of his chin, the stubble was turning grey.
She emptied her glass in one long swallow. 
            Now that I shall be living here, now that this house shall be mine…
He had stretched out his arms, full-length, as though by doing so, somehow he would possess the space itself. She remembered that the wing-span of a man was always greater than his height. So they said.
            You simply must visit. Often. I insist, he went on, as though she had demurred from his suggestion. It has been yours for so long. I absolutely insist.
            I know this house like the back of my hand.
And she held up her left hand and extended the fingers. Followed the tendons as they ran in thin lines beneath the barley skin to the wrist, to the filigreed gold of her watch. It was nearly noon. Damn it! She had set up two viewings in the afternoon. But they would be cancelled easily enough. One call on her mobile would be sufficient. She laughed. That would normally be the kind of thing she would shrink from doing; she was not known to be a good liar. But today was different. She felt different, her mind more supple, her body…
What? he asked.
            Nothing. Everything.
And then they both burst out laughing and he brought round his hand and lightly touched her’s, just above the wrist. Even before the tips of his fingers made contact with her skin, Ruqa felt the tendons rise and tauten. Then she remembered that Martin had already arranged it so that the rest of her day would be free.
He turned away from her for a moment and she saw that there was a dark stain running down the back of his shirt. Soot from the chimney, she thought. The residues of old fires.

The wine was strong and she felt her body sink like a tired skin into the rug. Her arms and legs became branches, her fingers and toes, twigs and leaves. She undid her hair so that it flowed down over her shoulders and her face, so that even tiny movements of her head would tease and tickle the skin. Through the strands of her hair, she watched a long shadow sleek across the window. The room darkened slightly and grew cooler. The shadow paused for a moment, and then was gone. The sunlight streamed back in. Then she noticed that a stream of wine had trickled between her lips and the glass as she had drunk and had drawn a fine, red line down her chest and between her breasts. It felt warm and it drew her attention now only because it had begun slowly to evaporate into the still air. She glanced up and saw that he, too was watching the stream disappear.
            How clumsy of me! she joked.
He looked away, towards the window.
She was running through the sequence of events, playing it backwards, juggling the concatenation of circumstance which had led to them both being here, in this house, on this day. But she could hold the thread for no more than a few seconds before it slipped again from her mind. Then she gave up and allowed her gaze to flit with the reddish spots of light across the patterned, bilberry-blue wallpaper. Amanita muscaria.

It is the hour of the witch, the moment of knowledge. By the trunk of the blackthorn tree, the Witch Queen holds between her teeth the balls of the kiss’d, blinded king of oak and she feels the life slip from his body and his shadow rushes to the rough ground beneath her feet. She lays him down on the fire, anoints herself with the salt of his skin, then leaps over the cauldron eightfold, once for each garter, and then in the green smoke of his flesh, she begins to dance in a circle. She dances slowly at first like a molten stream, but with each deosil sweep of her white arm, her feet move faster and faster until she is wheel-kicking over the arc of her skull and then in a moment of perfect circularity, the balls fly from the clamp of her jaw and whirl through the air, and land on her feet, each ball rolling on the tip of a great toe. And now, she, the balls and the wind swirl into a blur and occupy all points at once.

Then she rises and flies as a wheel across the willow forest and the moors of red heather and the teeming city and she crosses the cold blue sea to the island of summer where words spiral in poetry up mountain-goat tracks.  The octagonal House of Aradia welcomes her within its magic walls of cedar, sandalwood and juniper. Still cradling the balls of the King in the epidermal forest of her foot-skins, the witch eats the food of the dumb supper, she drinks from barrels of mead, she hears music which has no sound, no notes and she bathes in wine which evaporates slowly from her skin into the air. She is scourg’d by the tail’d cat and bleeds vines into the earth and as joyous fireflies pour down in light upon her, still she dances between the peaks of song.

At sunrise, she is whirling widdershins and her fingers have grown and lengthened and they pluck wrens from the boughs of ancient oak trees and the blood of the wrens feeds her belly which has bladder’d across the hog valley so that as her spine writhes in the dance, she lies down upon a blossom couch and from her raised, opened thighs, leap eleven wild women. And the women sing in a chorus-line:
            Horse and hattock, horse and go!      
            Horse and pellatis, ho, ho, ho!
They sing this eleven times and their words raise a bone fire into the sky and the witch rocks on her rolling heels so that her feet become the long cone of a demon, head-to-claw, and the demon takes aim and kicks the balls of the King into the heart of the flames. The world stops. Breath ceases.

Then, from the heart of the fire, there leaps a giant, horn’d god. And the Witch Queen is unmoving as the beast lies down upon her and the two take up the chorea of electric blue moving stillness and their glowing transparency becomes a fiery line which cuts into the ground to form a spherical, glass altar. And through the glass, the Witch Queen sees the dark bone arch of the new moon, omphalos in the magenta sack of the sky. And in the black mirror of Idris, she calls and reads everything that has happ’d and everything that will come.

Then she saw that the pattern of the wallpaper, the tree of the rug and the jambs and beams of the house actually formed a large, octagonal web and that she and Martin were spiders who had spun the silver threads of a dance across time and death. Martin, the Judge and Ruqa, the Witch.

After they had eaten, he leaned across the rug and slid his arm around her waist. She felt a jolt of electricity fire from her solar plexus, outwards. He glanced down at her and brought his lips closer, closer until she could feel the stubble on his cheek, brush against the fine hairs of her face. His lips were half-opened, firm but not forcing. Just at the last moment, she felt them quiver, as though he was considering something. He drew away, glanced down, then looked back up at her and he said,
            Shall we retire upstairs, my love?
She felt the top half of body shift on the carpet, ever so slightly away.
            I’m not ready, Martin, not for this.
He moved towards her again. His eyelids drooped heavily across the shiny globes. His long skin, the musk of hot summer.
She flinched.
            No! Don’t ! I mean, you don’t know what you’re getting into. We can’t. Not here.

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And she stood up and reached out and grabbed her briefcase by its irregular base and the contents spilled out over her bare forearms and she stood there, cradling the pile of schedules, the meaningless lists of figures, the contracts, the dissolutions, the digital organisers, the whole bloody register of shadows, and tears streamed down her cheeks and glistened on her skin like strings of pearls.
            It doesn’t matter. Here, there, anywhere. It’s all the same. Let’s seal the House of Aradia in the old way.
He moved closer to her, his whole body, next to her’s, the hairs of his forearm, barely-visible through her half-closed lids, brushing the air over her lips. He lifted his hand and with the tips of his fingers, he touched her forehead and set a lock of hair back in place. She felt the sweat push through the pores above her top lip. She drew the cone of her tongue across the skin, then tasted the salt. Swallowed. Slowly. Felt the muscles contract over her throat. His hands on her throat. Gauging her, sculpting her. Her sweat was on his palms. She could see it herself, shining like a trail, like the clear exudate which ran off skin, the moment before it ignited. The purity of the soul. Then she was in his mouth.
            What about the woman in the receiver? she asked. The blonde.
He inhaled. Drew his shoulders up around his neck.
            How did you know she was blonde?
She shrugged.
            You can tell, from their voices. Certain women.
He was avoiding her eyes.
            I live alone, but often call friends over, friends from work… or from love, he whispered.
Liar! she thought. I don’t believe you.
            And sometimes you go to bed with them.
You, who cannot love.
            I might, if I liked them.
And now it was her turn to look away.
But she doesn’t matter, he went on, the one you spoke to, she’s just another leap into the dialectic, but his voice seemed to come from far away, centuries away, the words reversing in time and splitting and turning and spinning on their axes, widdershins, widdershins, until they were just a blur of thought and form, until they had reverted to the spirits which really they had always been. Every word, a binding spell.

Get thee behind me, harlot of Azazel!
I was e’er before thee, mie lorde.
Harlot! Bath-woman!
Thy wordes are running from thee like water from a bladder. Do not forget, Lorde Martin, that ‘twas thee who made me thus.
            Thou hast acted as succuba to husbande and incubus to wife. For ‘tis affirm’d in manie learn’d tomes that a spirit hath no sex and therefore may assume either the forme of man or of woman or indeede, ‘tis moste likely that such may e’en act in a certain locus as both man and woman! Thou hast called down the Sons of God and thou hast lain wi’ them and hath spawn’d a race of giant Nephilim, said in the Book of Wisdom to be tall as cedars and strong as oak. These terrible beings walk the land invisible and do commit such awfulle acts of rape and crueltie that I cannot permit such to pass ‘twixt mie lips, lest they cause pollution thereof to mie hearte.
            Thou art insane, mie Lorde. ‘Tis thine owne desires which thou dost impute ‘pon others, the looking-glasse beings of thine owne braine which thou hast loos’d to tread the foul’d earth of humankind and nature!
            Thou liest, woman! I have seen thee, in mie dream, I did see thee dance nine times nak’d ‘pon the longe bodies of dead men laid down in the shape of an inverted pentagram ‘pon unhallow’d earth, and at the end of the circuit, I did see thee ascend, one foot ‘pon next, the Witches’ Ladder. And I saw thee, in flesh solide as mine owne, take in the forest clearinge of Aradia Vale, ten sol de roi from the hoof of thy familiar gros as reward for thy heinous acts.
            Thou were watching, mie lorde?
            Aye.
            Thou wast alone in the nighte wood?
            Aye. What of it?
            How didst thou spend the rest of the nighte?
            I… I cannot recall, down to exacte detail. What spiral trickerie is this?
            Didst thou not fall into reverie?
            Perhaps. I know not.
            Thou knowest fulle well that in the warmth of that summer forest thou didst slip into dream and that thou didst come forward and presente thself to the Sabbat.
            No! Thou art a lyinge bitch! Pig-woman Cattox! Do not thou shakest thy Medusa head at me! I will lop it off!
            Thou hast no sword, mie lorde of the nighte.
            I have a bread-knife. T’will be sufficient.
            In thy robe dost thou carrie one black-handled athame, halfe as longe again as thine hande.
            Damn thee!
            Search within thine owne robe, Lorde Martin.
            ‘Tis a blade with figures inscrib’d ‘pon the metal!
            Thou art a witch, mie lorde. Thou art the harlot of Semjaza.
            Damn speck! I shall put thee in the witch-hole!
            The witch-hole, mie lorde?
            The darke place of which no man knoweth, save me.
            Thou shalt not be saved, mie lorde.
            I shall be flung into the balm of eternal salvation! And thou, witch, thou shalt dwell, without ayre or water, within the darkness of the hole. What is this? Why dost thou stretch out thine arms in manner akin to those of our Saviour? What curs’d mimicry is this?
            I shall seep through stone and wood, through walls and blood mortar, till this thine Hall, this thine foreste, hath become no more than rivulets in the sea of mie beinge.
            With this gleaming blade, I shall flay thee, then hang up thy meat ‘pon oak branch, them, before thou hast fully expir’d, drag thee to the Hall and have thee cast, raw, into the endless hole.
            Then I shall take on thy skin, Master Blackdowne. Thou wilt remain the squire of an empty pool. 

Of course, he had been the one, the Architect. Between the geometer of the snail’s cocked horns, had he built the Hall. Long ago, this had been his house in the heart of the forest - and now he didn’t even know it! But Ruqa had been drawn to the stone, which had been cut from ancient hillsides in the Welsh Marches, and to the windows, and the images, trapped within their substance, of the screaming moments of death of the women of the bath and of the forest. And to the horsehair plaster that breathed of clattering, spittle-flecked rides, wild white manes surging through the coarse, starry darkness of summer nights. She could see through his eyes, she could feel through his skin. There, the shelves where once rows of books had spoken to him in words beneath language, words which had hidden in the throats of dogs and fish and in the bellowing of black beasts careening, riderless, across the empty marches. And as she stood there in her business suit, clutching her wad of sales figures, ‘phone numbers, electronic and manual organisers and the whole crushing panoply of her life and those of the lives beneath her feet; her mother’s dying face, exhaling blood onto the pillow, the beats of her father’s orgasmic song pulsing always beneath her skin, the double altar of her naked niece riding, rodeo butch, upon the whitened girdle-bones of her bulbous lover, the guilt of her brother which through love had grown oceanic, the mirror dynasties of her men, the blasted eggs of her barren-ness; all of this compressed itself into an incredibly dense ball and came roaring and burning from the depths of the dark glass.

They had been lovers, Emm and Martin, yes, bizarre unto lunacy, and he, the witch-hunter, had hunted through the entire landscape of West Sussex in search of her. Blindly, unknowingly, he had sought her out. Over the bloated, burned, garrotted, rictus-tortured corpses of thousands, had his skin stretched towards her’s. On the nights of mischief, he had danced the Abbott’s Masque through the perfectly-clasped portals of the old village temple of Blackdowne, the Church of Saint Nicholas, and she had been the stone, her back, the roof, her neck, the tower, her voice, the bells and her door had led him into darkness. And yet still, he had not seen. And now she had found him. Even after all these years, and so many lives and deaths, he had not gained the wisdom to see. And she was aware that her mouth was opening, slowly like bud into flower, like the gaping hole of the cropped black sow, and that words had begun to tear off the leaves of her brain and to rip through her throat and out into the room, into him.
            I am the man in black. Do you know me? Say it, my love. Say it, and we shall be One again.
            You don’t know what you’re saying. You think you’re just seducing a modern woman who sells plots of ground and who drives a fast car. Please, Martin, let’s just leave here, let’s leave the House, intact.
We slip into the skins of our mothers, she thought. The burned, blistered, bleeding skins. Howling, in the bone fire.

Tear the skin from mie bodie. Flay me! And wear the bloodied cloak as thou dost dance with me, joyous, into the fire! Before the blue mirror, I became one wi thee, then, and after mie neck be crush’d by long jute snake, for manie a yeare after. I know who thou art, but thou art the Man in Black. Across longe centuries, have I sought thee. My dust bones seeped through the soil of the dead in search of thine. And now, here, beneath the death scrape spin of artic wheels, I have found thee, skybound in the eye of the white rider.

She barely heard the clip-board as it flew up into the air, sending a cascade of white papers all over them. Frantically, half in jest, he fought the paperfall, his arms revolving like the limbs of a windmill. Yet he seemed puzzled. His face, quizzical and smiling at the same time. Hilarious. Unknowing. But in the black mirror, he was swelling. Bearded, green, foliate robin. After the paper, came the cotton. Electric blue nakedness. She gazed into his eyes and she found there an inchoate fear. Even in his state of incipient drunkenness, he knew that something wasn’t right. Hitherto unused cells in his brain were firing-off and then tumbling into the darkness of the centuries. It was something which she knew he would be unable to define, something which had slumbered for too long inside him and which through meeting Ruqa, the Pure One, now at last was arising. He backed away from her, headed for the door. She saw her own beauty in the terror of his face. In his burning, oaken eyes. Hands-on-hips, she watched as he left. Watched, as he tripped on the strip of wood which lay across the entrance. Watched, as he dirtied his tailored summer trousers with earth, wood, mould. He scrambled into his green sports-car, which wouldn’t start at first. He was cursing, modern, meaningless. Trying to shut out his destiny. She laughed out loud at his panic as she came towards him. Behind her, from the round mirror, she felt his wet breath singe the skin of her thighs. Her whole body guffawed. Stretched on its toes towards the burning sky of the noon sun, and screamed. She felt the skin peel away from her flesh. In one movement, she stepped from the trembling cage of her chest. And in the cool, metal slipstream, Ruqa leapt and flew and rose until all that could be seen was a long, billowing cone of dust which thinned and broke apart as it ascended until it became a chaotic shadow which slipped in fragments across the land.

Behind the spiral of her back, his green face filled the glass and then, as the sun reached the peaked dome of the sky, the glass exploded, sending shards in all directions. The glass was inches thick and it split into thousands of tiny pieces which embedded themselves in plaster, table, chair, footstool, blackthorn tree and in Ruqa’s naked body. Yet no blood flowed from the already flayed skin.

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