THE SCARLET WELL Simon Bleaken

It wasn’t what he had expected. He’d assumed the building would be grim and foreboding, with a heavy funereal air, or with at least a brooding and malignant sense of diabolical menace lurking about it. But, the grand three-storey house that stood elegantly among the trees, surrounded by neatly manicured lawns bordered by sweet-smelling jasmine, rose, lavender and heather, was well tended and looked far too trim and welcoming to have been the sinister haunt of evil and chaos.

For a moment, he wondered if he had come to the wrong house, but a quick check of the scribbled address on the page torn from one of his notebooks confirmed that he had arrived at his intended destination.

He had come to Averton, Massachusetts, lured from his home in Boston by a most unusual invitation, and he couldn’t help but feel the unease that commingled with his growing sense of excitement. There were dark rumours about this place. Whispered tales of terrible rites and unhallowed and blasphemous practices, of malign witchcraft and devilry, and of shocking orgiastic revels beneath the full moon. Though, looking now at the well-maintained house, brightly surrounded by such beautiful lawns and tidy flower beds, he wished it had presented a more baleful aspect. It would have helped him sell his book.

The heavy wooden door opened as he neared it, revealing that his approach up the driveway had been observed. The middle-aged man who emerged, tall and thin, with an erudite and cultured air about him, also looked far too commonplace and mundane to be a member of some iniquitous coven. In fact, in his brown waistcoat and tweed jacket, he looked more like an old-fashioned librarian.

‘Can I help you?’ he asked, a note of suspicion in his voice.

‘I’m Edward Prior. I was invited here. Are you Mr Underwood?’

‘Ah, yes!’ The suspicion fell away, replaced by an amiable smile and a twinkle in his green eyes. He extended a hand which Edward shook. ‘Glad you could make it.’

‘How could I refuse an exclusive interview with the head of a coven as private as this one? I’d be a fool to turn that down.’

‘Indeed,’ the man opened the door wider and gestured at the hall beyond. ‘Please come in. And, call me Vincent.’

Edward looked around with marked curiosity as he stepped inside. His first impression, even from the long entrance hall, was that the house seemed a sprawling maze of passageways, dark furniture and heavy doors, and the sunlight coming through the windows had a curiously muted quality, as if the glass were somehow tinted.

‘This is quite a place,’ Edward noted, as he followed the man into a wide lounge where two expensive leather chairs rested close to an unlit fireplace.

‘Please sit,’ Vincent gestured at the first chair, as he settled into the second. ‘So, if I understand correctly, you’re writing about the history of the witch trials, and contrasting that with surviving and modern witchcraft practices and beliefs?’

‘Yes, that’s right,’ Edward nodded. ‘I’ve interviewed many Wiccans and Traditional Witches in the course of working on this book. There seem to be as many different approaches to it as there are people.’

‘While it’s certainly true that these days there are many types of witchcraft being practised, I promise you, you have yet to interview anyone quite like our coven.’

‘Yes, I’ve heard as much.’

Vincent arched an eyebrow. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Oh, just that—well, I stopped in Salem on my way here. I mentioned your coven to a woman working in one of the witchcraft shops there. Uh, “Hekate’s Flame”? It was something like that, anyway.’

‘You were asked to keep this meeting strictly secret,’ Vincent cautioned, frowning.

‘Oh, I never said anything about our meeting. I just mentioned that I wanted to get a quick look at the house in passing, you know, from the road.’

A thin smile crossed Vincent’s lips. ‘Let me guess, she told you to avoid us at all costs?’

‘Well, not in those exact words, though she did try to warn me away.’

‘Sadly, we have a tarnished reputation even amongst the current practitioners of the craft.’

‘She wasn’t too happy about me including you in the book, either. She said you were dangerous. But you see, it all just made me realise how much I needed to get your side of the story. I think she realised at that point I wasn’t going to back down, so she warned me to be careful. Oh, and she insisted on giving me a free one-card tarot reading before I left.’

The smile deepened. ‘How quaint.’

‘I got “the Tower”,’ Edward explained, ‘she said something about a dramatic change in circumstances, and the tearing down of past ideas, opinions and beliefs—or something like that. I didn’t really pay much attention to be honest, I was running late.’

Vincent steepled his fingers together, giving Edward an appraising look. ‘You don’t believe in magic, do you?’

‘Not really, no. I mean, obviously, you do, and I don’t want to be rude. I’ve just never seen anything that’s convinced me it exists.’

‘Well, the day is still young,’ Vincent laughed. ‘Which reminds me, how about a tour? We can talk while I show you around the house.’

‘That would be fantastic.’ Edward fished in his pocket for a small voice recorder. ‘Do you mind if I use this?’

‘Not at all. Though, we should start by laying down a few rules that I must insist upon. You will mention nobody by their actual name or ritual name, and you will change the names of any locations that might get mentioned. Our coven insists upon secrecy.’

‘Of course,’ Edward assured him, but a nagging question forced itself onto his tongue. ‘I’ve been wondering though, for a group that’s remained secret for so long, and who wishes to stay in the shadows, why are you even talking to me at all?’

‘Let’s just say that we have taken an interest in your research, and in the book you are planning. Sadly, knowledge of our presence is impossible to conceal these days, and we have been hounded by false accusations for decades. The time has come to dispel some of those untruths.’

‘I’m glad you mentioned that, because there is a darker edge to your coven, isn’t there? That is, if the stories online are to be believed.’

‘Baseless gossip fuelled solely by ignorance, I assure you. People fear what they don’t know, and as we keep what we do away from the public eye, they naturally indulge their sordid imaginations and expect the worst from us. Yet, for all their claims of our supposed nefarious practices, no proof has ever been presented, and no charges have ever been levelled against us.’

‘Some have claimed that’s because several high-ranking judges and officials are among your coven members.’

Vincent held up his hands. ‘Again, our membership is a matter of utmost secrecy. Such claims are mere speculation, and entirely without any basis in fact.’

‘So, there’s no truth at all to the allegations of black magic?’

‘You mean,’ Vincent gave a wry smile, ‘do I braid the manes of horses in the night, or curdle milk by my very presence? Do I dance naked beneath the moon on Walpurgis-Night and suckle at the Devil’s teat? No. I also don’t burst into flames should I walk into a church, not that I often do. Let’s leave the folklore to the past, shall we?’

‘But your practices differ from many modern witches, as I understand it?’

‘They all have their own ways, and we have ours. To try and compare us would be to liken water to fire. Our ways are a little more recondite than most and have remained in the shadows to this day. We also claim a less broken lineage to certain magical practices.’

‘I’m intrigued. Please, tell me more.’

‘Then let’s start our tour, and I can answer any questions you have—within reason, of course.’

Vincent guided him from the lounge and down a series of short hallways. They emerged into a cavernous library with narrow windows and shelves on all the walls that stretched to the ceiling. The space was shadowy and tranquil, lit only by the thin shafts of light from the windows, and a few pools of illumination from green banker’s lamps on side tables next to comfortable chairs.

‘This is where the majority of our occult tomes are stored,’ Vincent said proudly. ‘It is one of the finest private collections in the country, with many rare and unique volumes. We also use the open section of this room,’ he gestured towards a space at the rear of the chamber, ‘for occasional indoor rituals and initiations during extreme inclement weather.’

‘Well, this isn’t at all what I expected,’ Edward admitted.

‘What were you expecting?’ Vincent asked with a touch of amusement. ‘A ruined church with a huge inverted cross? Or perhaps an old basement or sepulchre cloaked in miasmal vapours? Times have moved on, you know.’

‘That’s one of the things I will address in my book,’ Edward lied. He already planned to give as much credence as possible to all the wild stories and dark rumours of this place—the more depraved and shocking the better. That was, after all, what the public wanted, and it would practically sell his book for him.

When he had started researching, he had hoped to fill his book with countless lurid details of debased ritual, shocking revelations and sinister practices. But instead, he had found a great many modern witches to be disappointingly decent people with a reverence for life, far from the satanic fiends he needed to promote his book. There had been no juicy hexes to include, no brutal animal sacrifices, and no corruption of the young or vulnerable. It was infuriating, what was wrong with people these days? What he needed were the sort of dark revelations that would instil in his readers a hefty dose of outward outrage coupled with secret vicarious thrills, the sort that would get all the conservatives clutching their pearls in public while covertly rushing to buy copies of the book in droves.

He had started to fear he would never find a suitable candidate. But here—here he finally had something that he could actually work with, though Vincent would need a hefty bit of re-writing. Perhaps, Edward mused, he’d give him a few piercings and tattoos, dress him in black and provide him with a sharp, penetrating gaze. He’d aim for somewhere between Anton LaVey and Aleister Crowley. That would be far more suitable and would give his book the darkly sensational edge it needed. And, since this place was so secretive and any names would be changed in the finished text, it would make it harder for anyone to disprove any claims he made and should limit any comeback on him from the coven as well. Yes, this would be perfect.

He wandered to a nearby case and studied some of the volumes on display. Heavy old tomes with obscure Latin titles sat side by side with a few more modern works on witchcraft, and many more ancient-looking volumes that had no visible titles at all. He also noted several locked bookcases secured by heavy clasps.

‘So, just how old is your coven?’ Edward asked.

‘Our origins are quite ancient, and sadly lost even to us. We once had ties with numerous other New England covens, though associations were cut during the witch-hunts of the late seventeenth century, to ensure its safety and survival. Whilst the majority of the unfortunate victims of those barbaric times weren’t witches at all, quite a few covens were still discovered and entirely broken up, their members tried and hanged. History records that even our coven lost a few key members to the purge that swept through Averton, but our roots were deep, and what they failed to destroy has grown back all the stronger, and eventually, this coven-house was established in 1883.’

‘How many of you are there now?’

‘We have thirteen full members, and up to nine initiates at any given time. Come, I’ll show you more of the house.’

As Edward went to follow him out of the library, a glimpse of movement from the corner of his eye made him hesitate. He squinted into the darkness where something hazy and nebulous seemed to be silently drifting across the room, a deeper black against the shadows around it.

He blinked, and it was gone, if it had ever been there at all.

He caught up with Vincent in the passageway just outside, and for the next twenty minutes they worked their way deeper into that massive old house, from mundane spaces like the kitchens and living areas, to chambers where herbs and animal remains were dried and stored in countless brown glass jars and air-tight containers, and to spaces set aside for ritual purposes, divination and meditation. There was even a large ballroom with a long banqueting table at the far end where Edward could easily imagine depraved parties and hedonistic sexual orgies taking place, though he kept such lurid ideas to himself. He’d be sure to add them to the book though. He could almost smell the money he was going to make from it.

The further they went, the more the unsettling and oppressive feel of the house grew. Edward assumed it was just nerves. He was, after all, piercing the esoteric heart of an infamous witches’ lair, and that was hardly an everyday occurrence. It was bound to feel a bit unusual, he rationalised.

But then, there were the shadows, like the one he had first noticed in the library. He kept seeing more and more of them, all over the place. They moved silently and quickly, like dark spectres, unaffected by the sunlight streaming through the windows. What was more, he didn’t like the way they appeared to be following him from room to room.

He told himself it was merely a trick of the light, or a side effect of those oddly tinted windows. Perhaps it was just his eyes, tired from the journey from Boston the day before. He didn’t really believe any of those things, but he tried to push it from his mind before he could dwell too deeply on what it might mean. He didn’t believe in magic, and he certainly didn’t believe in ghosts. Such things were nothing more than delusions created by infrasound, electromagnetic fields or Helmholtz resonance inside buildings, or else just hypnogogic hallucinations, imperfections in memory, or the mind fooling itself in countless different ways.

But, as they emerged into a hallway at the back of the house, his crumbling composure was finally shattered when one of those nebulous shadows actually reached out for him, stretching out a faint, half-formed arm, as if imploring. A sudden shock washed over him as he realised he could see a vaguely human outline to the thing, including deeper points of darkness that were suggestive of eyes and a mouth, opened as if in an eternal scream.

He stumbled backwards, and it was gone instantly, leaving nothing but a strange and lingering coldness to betray where it had been.

‘Did-did you see—?’ he stammered, but could already tell from the bewildered look on Vincent’s face that he had not. ‘Sorry,’ he said after a moment spent desperately composing himself. ‘I think I’m more nervous than I realised.’

‘That’s quite all right,’ Vincent assured him. ‘You’re stepping into a brave new world here; it’s bound to seem more than a little unusual. And…’ he added, as an afterthought, ‘I should have warned you, this house is quite haunted. Witches and spirits have walked hand in hand for centuries.’

‘S-spirits?’ Edward nodded, pressing a hand against the wall to steady himself. ‘I’m sorry, but could we stop for a moment?’ He tried to keep the tremor from his voice. ‘I need some fresh air.’

‘Yes, of course,’ Vincent assured him. ‘I was planning a light lunch for us in the garden. Now would be the perfect time, I think. This way, please.’

Edward trailed after his host in silence, casting anxious glances back down the hall as they went. It appeared those curious living shadows were holding back. He could just make out their sombre forms lurking on the threshold of the last room they had exited, but they were no longer following.

The light and warmth of the garden were staggering when Edward stepped outside, having become accustomed to the oddly muted light within the house. The rear garden was expansive, with rows of neatly pruned trees and flower beds running down to a small wooden pagoda at the edge of a lake. Closer to the house, Edward saw a large earthen circle framed by a trio of oak trees, and an old well with curiously discoloured stones. Clustered around it, in the shade of the trees, the purple flowers of Atropa belladonna and Digitalis purpurea lurked with poisonous patience.

‘Beautiful out here, isn’t it?’ Vincent sighed, taking a deep breath. ‘But don’t be fooled by it. This is the last bastion of civilised land for quite some way. Beyond this garden is an expansive set of untamed wetlands and woodlands that run for miles. It’s an important reminder that no matter how much we try to civilise our outward natures, the wilderness is always there, under the surface, waiting to creep back in.’

Edward was too busy glancing at the house for fear that those shadowy figures might be spilling out after them to pay much attention to what Vincent was saying, but when it became clear that they were safely alone, he allowed himself to be guided like a nervous child over to a small metal table and two ornate garden chairs that waited under an elegant white parasol.

‘Please, relax,’ Vincent said, settling in the seat across from him. ‘You look tense. Was it the shades? They can be curious about new people. You should see how they follow the initiates around like lost puppies. They truly are harmless.’

‘I—I’ve never seen anything like that before,’ Edward whispered, shivering despite the warmth of the day. ‘But it can’t have been real, can it?’

‘A little food and drink will fortify those shaken nerves.’ Vincent waved at the house, and two people hurried out carrying trays; an older woman and a young girl in her late teens. They set down two large plates containing a selection of sandwiches, a pitcher of iced lemonade and glasses, and then retreated inside without saying a word.

‘Are they part of your coven?’ Edward asked.

‘Oh no, that’s our cook and her daughter,’ Vincent laughed, reaching for the pitcher. ‘Would you like some lemonade?’

‘But where is everybody else?’ Edward shifted uneasily in his chair.

‘Don’t take it personally, but we thought it wiser if the others weren’t here while I showed you around. It’s hard enough to maintain the privacy of our members at the best of times, you understand.’

‘I do,’ Edward allowed a faint smile to cross his lips. ‘You know, I think that big old house, all those empty rooms and hallways, well it got to me. No wonder I thought I saw a ghost back there. My mind must have been playing tricks on me. I’m not normally so jumpy.’

‘And we’re back to scepticism, I see,’ Vincent sighed as he poured some lemonade for his guest. ‘Perhaps you should stay tonight. It’s a full moon and we are performing an ancestral offering ritual. Our members will all be masked, and it will give you a chance to see our coven working a little spirit magic.’

‘That would be interesting,’ Edward sat forward, his mind suddenly racing with the thought of getting some more material to twist to make the book even more scandalous and debauched. ‘Are you sure I wouldn’t be in the way?’

‘You would be an honoured guest, I assure you.’

‘Then, yes—I’d love to. Thank you.’

Edward sat back, allowing himself a moment to enjoy the bright serenity of the gardens as he sipped the deliciously cool lemonade, the perfect mix of sour and sweet, and nibbled at the sandwiches. He watched the softly swaying trees, the bobbing heads of the bright flowers as bees flitted to and fro among them, and listened to the gentle lapping of the lake far off down the garden.

‘We have quite an impressive herb garden too, as you might expect,’ Vincent explained. ‘Would you like to see it? I can run you through some of the uses of what we grow here.’

‘Hmm, that would be nice,’ Edward agreed, dreamily. He was watching a cluster of tall swaying plants with hooded, navy-blue flowers. ‘What are those ones?’

‘That’s monkshood. It’s popular with the bees, but quite poisonous.’

‘They’re… lovely,’ Edward murmured, staring at them. It took a few moments before he realised his eyes were growing heavy and his vision was blurring, and another second more to make the hazy connection that his host hadn’t consumed anything from the table.

‘How are you feeling?’ Vincent smiled.

‘Wh—?’ Edward blinked, trying to sit up, but his limbs were heavy and unresponsive. Vincent was watching him from across the table. His face, shifting in and out of focus, wore a smile of triumph.

‘Please, don’t try to move,’ he said softly. ‘Just close your eyes. We have a lot to prepare, and you’ll want to be well-rested for tonight’s event.’

With a monumental effort, Edward forced himself to stand, reeling and lurching as he staggered to his feet. The world spun drunkenly about him, the scents of the flowers had turned sickening, and his feet refused to go where he wanted them to. He collided with the table, sending the pitcher toppling and scattering sandwiches to the ground.

‘How far do you think you will get?’ Vincent mused, watching him.

Edward didn’t answer. It was taking all of his ebbing focus and concentration to coax any organised movement from his body. The sun was too bright, turning the world into a washed-out haze. He squeezed his eyes tight, feeling the pitch and turn of the ground beneath his feet get faster, his stomach churning, almost as if he were staggering blindly across a frantically whirling carousel.

He took three ungainly steps before toppling forward into one of the flower beds as the darkness of unconsciousness claimed him.
 


Awareness crept back into Edward’s body gradually, from the nagging discomfort in his arms and legs, to the dull pulsing throb behind his eyes, and the sharp, acrid burn at the back of his throat. Every part of his body ached. Slowly, his eyes opened and his brow furrowed in confusion, moments before his realigning mind remembered what had happened.

Wincing as he turned his neck, he realised with a burst of alarm that hours had passed, and the gloaming was spreading its crepuscular cloak over the world once more. He was sitting on the rough earth of the circle with his back against one of the oak trees, his wrists and ankles tightly bound. A roaring brazier blazed at the circle’s heart, and the garden was illuminated in the lambent glow of torches and lanterns. Close by, a small incense burner crackled as a plume of noxiously scented grey smoke lifted towards a sickle moon.

Turning his head the other way, he saw two horned stangs had been driven into the ground to form an entrance to the space. The old well lay at the westernmost edge of the circle, and many tall candles had been lit around it, illuminating those curiously stained stones.

‘Hey!’ Edward called, feigning bravery as panic lanced through his body. ‘Hey, this isn’t funny! You can’t do this!’

‘Ah, I see you’ve rejoined us,’ Vincent answered, stepping into the circle from out of the indigo-dark night. He was naked save for an open-fronted robe of deep crimson. In one hand he clutched a thin wand of sharpened bone, its surface decorated in strange runes and sigils, the tip lethally sharp. In the other, he held a long blade with a black handle. ‘And just in time, too. You won’t want to miss this ritual. Those pathetic spirits that so terrified you within the house are mere shades, former enemies, summoned and bound to us in eternal servitude. But, the honoured dead are waiting—our kin, our kind—and tonight we call them back.’

‘Please!’ Edward begged, tears coursing down his face. ‘Just let me go. I won’t press charges—in fact... I won’t say anything to anybody! I won’t even mention you in the book, just please—please—let me go!’

‘Far too late for any of that, I’m afraid,’ Vincent smiled. ‘You will answer for your crimes, before our master and before the spirits of our ancestral dead.’

‘My crimes?’ Edward blinked in confusion.

‘You came here to make money from the legacy of your ancestor, Isaac Prior, the deluded fanatic and witch-hunter who butchered his way through Averton in the seventeenth century. Don’t deny it. We know the truth. That’s why we invited you here, so the descendant of the hunter could become the prey.’

‘You won’t get away with this!’ Edward insisted, but his words were betrayed by a tremor in his voice and carried no strength.

‘My dear fellow, nobody knows you’re here, remember?’

A sistrum rattled, and the coven entered in a silent procession, passing between the stangs and walking solemnly around the edge of the circle several times before turning inwards to form a ring around the terrified man. They were robed in crimson and most wore featureless masks over their faces. Resting atop their heads were crowns of bone, adorned with antlers formed from assemblages of human fingers and toes, and snapped fragments of rib.

As shocking as this sight was, it was the movement in the undergrowth behind the coven members that drew Edward’s attention. Strange creatures were peering from the foliage beyond the circle, caught for a moment in a flicker of firelight. There were lean and wiry cats of abnormal size with fierce red eyes burning with preternatural intelligence, monstrous and hunched gargoyle-like imps with corpse-grey leathery skin, and horrible rat-like things with alarmingly human faces. Edward squeezed his eyes shut, his stomach churning and a greasy nauseating terror inching up his gullet, burning like bile as he willed the horrible familiars away, desperately hoping they were mere illusions caused by the drugs in his system. But when he opened his eyes again, the creatures were still there, watching from the darkness.

Tears ran down his face as Edward fought against his restraints. He thought the ones on his legs might be working loose but couldn’t be sure. The residual drugs that still coursed through his body cast the whole scene in livid, unreal hues and exacerbated the dreamlike, hallucinatory bizarreness of the situation. He no longer knew what was real. He only knew that if he didn’t get away, he was sure to die here.

‘Present the offering!’ Vincent called, striding into the heart of the circle beside the brazier. He lifted his arms high, directing the wand towards the sky and levelling the blade at the well. ‘It is time to summon the spirits.’

There came the sounds of a scuffle and muffled cries broke the night as two more coven members entered the circle, dragging between them a young man in his early twenties. His head was painfully caged in an iron scold’s bridle with a metal spike piercing his tongue, keeping him from screaming. His face was bloody and bruised and his naked body was covered in painted sigils. Raw rope burns had cut into the flesh on his wrists and ankles, and a wild terror blazed in his eyes.

Edward stared in growing shock as the young man was dragged across to the well and bent backwards over the edge of it by his captors.

‘A scold’s bridle to silence the sacrifice, employing the very tools they once used against us,’ Vincent explained, as though this were merely a continuation of the earlier tour. ‘This is our place of ritual now. Through decades of devoted sacrifice, we have made a portal of this well. It is a bridge to worlds beyond and, it is unlocked by the simplest of keys: blood.’

Then, in a single fluid motion, he stepped forward and drew the blade across the young man’s throat sending a scarlet torrent spilling down the victim’s body and across the stones of the well.

‘With this offering, we summon you,’ Vincent called. He rubbed his hands in the gory fluid and smeared it over his face, chest and genitals. ‘This is the life force. Blood opens the gate between the living and the dead. I bid you, come forth once more to feast on its essence.’

The young victim bucked and thrashed, a garbled wail of anguish forcing itself from his throat. Finally, his head sagging and the life haemorrhaging from his body, the bridle was removed, and he was thrown over the edge of the well. The dull splash from below, a moment later, was the last sound his body would make.

That was when the scream that had been building inside Edward tore free into the night.
At a gesture from Vincent, a woman stepped forward from the edge of the circle, her long hair braided with raven’s feathers. She crouched before Edward, her hazel eyes locking onto his, and drew a small poppet and a silver pin from some hidden place within her robes. ‘Shh!’ she whispered.

Edward blinked, dimly aware that the head of the effigy she held bore a tuft of human hair that looked alarmingly like his own, perhaps taken while he had been unconscious.

She plunged the pin into the poppet’s mouth and out again, and there was an initial sharp sting as a corresponding bead of blood formed on his lip, and then the pain kicked in—a piercing, stabbing sensation all around his lips and mouth—as though the pin sinking into that effigy were plunging into and through his own flesh instead.

The raven-feather woman kept her gaze fixed on him as she worked, her mouth whispering a soundless incantation as the needle glinted in her fingers, in through the poppet’s top lip and out through the bottom, repeating the process over and over, as if drawing an invisible line of thread behind it.

Edward felt every piercing kiss of that needle, the pain of it passing through his flesh, and the pull of his skin as if his lips were being bound together. His mouth filled with the coppery taste of blood, and four thick streams of it oozed down his chin from his punctured lips and dripped onto his shirt. But the woman’s gaze was hypnotic and held him fast; he couldn’t blink or avert his eyes. He tried to cry out, but only an unintelligible muffle reached the air.

He could no longer open his mouth.

His fingers scrabbled at his ravaged lips, trying to find some way of freeing them; but he could locate nothing that physically held them together.

Smiling to herself, the woman slipped the poppet and the pin back into her robes. ‘He’ll stay quiet,’ she announced, before returning to the edge of the circle.

‘The dead are coming,’ Vincent declared eagerly, turning to the well. A soft white mist had risen within it, flowing gently over the bloodstained stones in strange long tendrils of curling fog that writhed and flexed. A faint sound accompanied it, as of dozens of voices, male and female, all whispering at once. ‘And with them comes our master. I am ever His willing vessel.’

The raven-feathered woman stepped back into the heart of the circle. In her arms she now bore the head of a goat, and as Vincent knelt, she placed it gently over his head.

Edward stifled an incoherent scream as Vincent stood and turned to face him. In his drug-addled state, the goat’s head seemed to merge with Vincent’s own skin, becoming a living thing. The mouth flexed then breathed, and the eyes—once glassy and dead—took on a horribly conscious gleam. Fine hair was sprouting down Vincent’s arms, and his hands appeared to be fusing into cloven hooves.

‘Look upon me,’ it commanded, and the voice issuing from the mouth of that hideously animated goat was not that of Vincent Underwood. It was deeper, rougher, and possessed of an ineffably inhuman quality. The yellow eyes sparkled with diabolical menace and mocking intelligence. ‘I have worn many faces and forms, and I have held many names. I am the chaos that crawls behind the surface of reality, coeval with temptation and corruption, the source and font of what your limited understanding would deem “evil”. How blind you truly are to what stands before you. But, I am not here to illuminate you from the darkness of ignorance. You are here to answer for the crimes of your bloodline against my followers.’

But Edward could only stare. The shock and horror of what stood before him, rendered even more surreal by the residual influence of the drugs pulsing through his veins, was too great. He felt insanity’s touch brush his mind. But while his awareness was snared, his body continued to fight against his restraints, driven by unthinking instinct. The bonds around his ankles were working loose.

Drawn by the blood, the mist from the well reached the floor, spreading out slowly, thick and roiling. The disembodied whispering echoed around them, as though carried from some remote place. As the mist flooded into the heart of the circle, shapes began to rise from it. At first, they were little more than indistinct humps, but they quickly began to take on humanoid form, even to develop discernible features.

‘We call our fallen kin back into the circle!’ the goat-being declared, spreading its arms wide as it welcomed them.

The ropes around Edward’s ankles finally slipped, and he kicked them away, scrambling to his feet while the coven was distracted, in a desperate adrenalin-fuelled bid for freedom. His hands were still bound, his voice locked behind bleeding and torn lips, and his mind was reeling in a hallucinogenic nightmare of distorted sound and vision, but, at least his legs worked.

He ran into the night, heading for the trees at the edge of the garden. He remembered what Vincent had told him earlier, that miles of forested wilderness lay beyond, and he knew his only hope of survival lay in evading the coven amongst it.

He expected a loud commotion to follow his terrified escape, or at least the outraged sounds of pursuit from the assembled witches, but there was nothing. Silence followed him as he raced across the neatly trimmed lawn, trampled a flower bed and plunged into the thicker shadows between the trees where the garden ended and the wild world began.

He saw the wall seconds later, and his heart plummeted. It was too high to climb and topped with ornate metal spikes. Of course, they would have a wall, his confused mind grasped dimly; a coven so secretive wouldn’t leave any part of their property open to potential intruders. Anxiously he hurried along it, praying it would at least bring him around to the front of the house. Perhaps then he could get onto the driveway, even to his car, or out onto the road.

His eyes spotted an unexpected dark opening, and his heart quickened.

It was a small access gate, and, against all the odds, it was open.

Without hesitation he raced through, plunging into the tangled woodland beyond. The trees were old and gnarled, with ponderous low branches that seemed to block his path ahead, forcing him to weave and duck clumsily through them. With his hands still bound he had to take extra care not to trip or catch himself, especially when he encountered a curling mass of exposed tree roots lying like a swarm of fossilised serpents directly in his path.

His drug-crazed brain populated the lurid, psychedelic night with demonic faces that leered maniacally, distorted and twisted with elongated chins, hollow pits for eyes and teeth like glinting bristles of needles. They peered out of the swirling, multicoloured shadows or sprouted like fleshy fungal growths from the tree trunks, as if whispering ‘He’s here! He’s here! Come get him!’

He knew in his heart that the coven had to be coming for him. There was simply no way they would let him escape, not after what he had seen, and not after going to such lengths to lure him there.

As if in answer to that thought, he heard a sound on the night air: voices, raised in a chant. The sound was distant and yet he heard it clearly, even above the frantic pulse of his heart.

The trees swayed and creaked as he moved between them, branches twisting like fingers as they tried to snatch and claw at his arms and legs, or sent roots to block his path or trip his feet.

The night too seemed to turn against him, as tenebrous shadows clung to him like dark cobwebs, seeming to possess a curiously physical quality as if trying to bind or slow him up. He tore through them, struggling to free his limbs and face from their suffocating embrace.

The chanting grew louder until it filled the night air. No longer distant, it seemed as if the coven were all around him, invisible among the darkness.

He scrambled awkwardly up an earthen bank, nearly losing his footing. A snake slithered away with a fierce hiss that made him stagger sideways, and then he tripped and tumbled clumsily down the other side, skinning his elbows and knees and grazing his chin as he ended up face-down in the dirt on the edge of a wide clearing.

For a moment, he simply lay there, shaking, his whimpers subdued by bound lips as tears cut a trail through the dirt on his face. He knew he had to keep running, knew he couldn’t stay there, but suddenly the thought of going on, the thought of fleeing like some hunted animal seeking sanctuary, was just too much.

Maybe if I hide here, I’ll be all right, he thought. Maybe they won’t find me.

That was when he realised the chanting had stopped. The night lay silent and heavy once more.

A twig snapped in the darkness, like a gunshot in the stillness. He squinted into the dancing multicoloured night with eyes that slipped in and out of focus. He thought he could see vague shapes moving furtively behind the trees bordering the clearing, and the cold fingers of dread clamped his heart once more.

Pressing his body to the ground he started to crawl, hoping to find some concealing undergrowth. But the whole clearing was curiously free of anywhere to hide. In fact, the more he looked, the more he realised the space was oddly barren and trampled down, much like the earthen circle by the well back in the coven’s garden.

As if it had been deliberately cleared, and regularly used.

As his mind made that connection, and he understood with dawning horror that he had been drawn there intentionally, the coven members stepped out from behind the trees. They had shed their robes and stood naked around him in a circle, though all still wore their masks and crowns of bone.

He closed his eyes, knowing there was nowhere left to run.

It’s just a hallucination, he thought desperately. They aren’t here. This is just the effects of whatever they drugged you with.

That was when two cloven hooves pressed into the soft soil next to his head. Edward looked up to see the goat standing over him, its grotesque humanoid body lean and powerful in the moonlight. He could smell the blood and musk clinging to its hairy hide, and he knew it was all real and not some drug-fuelled delusion. Although he was a lifelong atheist, he made a clumsy sign of the cross with shaking hands, but this only elicited laughter from the assembled coven.

‘There is no Devil here,’ the goat explained. ‘You look upon the avatar of older and more primal powers, of things that come from out of the shadow-steeped aeons, and which bring whispers of forgotten truths back into the light of the present. How little you understand.’

Please! Edward wanted to scream, to beg, to say… but a weak moan was all that could escape his locked lips.

‘Stand!’

Edward did as the creature commanded, rising shakily to his feet.

‘Do you know where you are?’ the goat demanded, its menacing voice thundering in Edward’s ears. ‘You should. This was the site of a pond once. Long silted up, and since reclaimed by us. But, this was the spot where Isaac Prior sentenced several ancestors of our coven to death all those centuries ago. He deemed them impure when the water refused to drown them, and they were hanged and then burned just over there, on what had been the bank.’

A mist was seeping into the clearing, whispering softly as it coiled about the trees and flooded past the assembled witches. It was the same mist that had emerged from the scarlet well.

As one, the coven resumed their chant, focusing their spell out into the night and causing the mist to swell and move faster. They had drawn it from the well in the garden, from out of that blood-soaked portal and through the silent domain of the woods like some colossal, ethereal serpent, into that infernal space of baleful ritual and malign ceremony.

‘Come my children,’ the goat-creature laughed, as those thick, mephitic vapours curled about Edward’s legs, drawn as if to the blood of his grazed knees and elbows through the tears in his clothing. ‘The descendant of our enemy stands among us to await judgment.’

As if having gained confirmation of Edward’s identity, the mist withdrew, pulling back into the heart of the clearing where it rose upwards like a hazy white wall. From out of this, as though stepping through a doorway, emerged a dozen spectral figures, men and women, with hollow, cadaverous faces, wreathed in trailing mist and garbed in clothing from centuries earlier. They advanced on the terrified man, forming a loose circle around him. Their eyes were like dark hollow pits in their pallid faces and their bodies radiated an icy chill that froze the ground as they moved across it.

There’s no such thing as ghosts! Edward thought frantically, holding desperately onto the tattered edges of his crumbling mind. He squeezed his eyes shut and held his shaking hands up as though trying to ward them off. They don’t exist. They’re not real! Not real!

‘An interesting way to address the jury,’ the goat commented wryly, as if reading his thoughts. ‘I was expecting an appeal for clemency, or to see you beg for your life—as best you can under the circumstances. But this is an interesting approach. It won’t save you.’

Edward’s eyes snapped open at that, and he stared into the faces of the dead gathering around him as if finally seeing, finally believing, the truth of his situation.

‘The tower is collapsing,’ the goat smiled sardonically. ‘The world you thought you understood is an illusion, and it is burning.’

Edward took an unsteady step backwards. His vision was spinning again, coupled with a slick, greasy sickness that surged up his gullet from the pit of his stomach.

He made one final muffled sound; a frantic apology.

And then, the shrieking, hissing spectres swarmed him.

He fell beneath their fury and their assault as if they possessed physical bodies. Their dead fingers raked his torso like steel talons, the cold burned his flesh. The worst torment came when they took his eyes and tore thick clumps of bloody hair from his scalp.

He was too far gone to feel the rough scratching of the rope that closed around his throat. He never saw the goat looping one end over the thick branches of a nearby tree. But he did feel it when the goat hauled upon that rope with inhuman strength, hoisting the terrified man, kicking and writhing, up into the night. He flopped and thrashed like a fish caught on the end of a line, fingers clawing in futile desperation at the rope crushing his throat and biting into his flesh, his lungs burning like fire, while the summoned spirits watched from below, and the coven danced and chanted, turning merrily in the circle.

The merciful darkness that came to claim him was slow in arriving.

It was also a darkness that didn’t last.

 

At first, time lost all sense of meaning in the darkness of the void. He drifted for a while, weightless, directionless, with no concept of where he was, or of anything beyond the boundless gloom that surrounded him. The memory of his death had saturated his awareness like a permanent stain of blood, and the horror and the pain journeyed with him through the strange dark limbo, haunting him with echoes of that terrible moment among the foggy trees and under that sharply sickled moon.

Was this all that existed after death, he wondered, this lonely, interminable void? Was he doomed to drift through the darkness for eternity in such a state until he went truly insane from the isolation and boredom? His external senses were useless here—there was nothing to see, hear or touch. All he carried with him, all he could feel, was the brutal torment of those last few nightmarish moments of his life, the constricting rope and the burning, frantic need to fill his lungs with air.

And then, gradually, it changed.

He became conscious once more of sounds and of shapes, hazy and indistinct to begin with, but coming slowly into focus, the way eyes adjust to a darkened room when stepping in out of bright daylight.

He was in a horribly familiar library, full of dark shelves that reached from floor to ceiling, and surrounded by chairs in small pools of light cast by green banker’s lamps.

If he still had a heart, it would have lurched.

‘So glad you were able to join us,’ a voice laughed as Vincent Underwood rose from a nearby chair. He looked human again, dressed very much as he had been when Edward had first met him. ‘We’ve been drawing you back ever since your death, but it can take a while for the soul to manifest. Rest assured, your body has been disposed of, and all traces that you were ever here are gone.’

Edward tried to speak, but no sound came out.

‘Ah yes, I’m sure you remember the shades you saw on your tour of the house?’ Vincent explained. ‘They were people once, much like you were; people who foolishly crossed us, or wronged us, or who incurred our wrath—again, just as you have.’

In a burst of fear, Edward tried to look down at his body, to lift his hands up where he could see them. But, all he saw was a shadowy haze, just like those that had followed him from room to room during his visit.

‘We keep them bound here as servants, just as you now are,’ Vincent smiled as he crossed the room. ‘In time you’ll learn how to carry messages for us, spy for us, and there are lots of other ways you can be of value, too. And if not, we can always find ways for you to amuse us. But for now, I’ll just let you settle in.’

Vincent paused in the doorway and glanced back.

His smile had gone cold, matching his eyes.

‘Oh, and if you think being dead means you can no longer suffer, you are in for a surprise.’