The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills [100]
Had to be done with proper ritual, he said. They would wear robes and masks. I was to be masked too, dressed in white. Masks were important, to make us not entirely ourselves: we would become vessels for the forces we were calling on. I was to be the Goddess made flesh, and I would draw down her power into me.
What you will shall be
Between worlds.
The front door rattled with the key in the lock, the hall light went on downstairs, and I jumped up and threw off my coat because I wasn’t undressed yet like he’d told me.
‘Hello. You there?’ Mr Cromley’s voice floated up the stairwell. I didn’t answer. He muttered something, then I heard a foot on the stair.
‘I’m here,’ I called. ‘Getting myself ready’
‘Good.’ I could hear the relief in his voice. The floorboards creaked as I took off my coat and dress, my fingers fumbling with the buttons. I was in a panic. I wouldn’t be ready, they’d come up and find me in my vest and knickers…But they could hear me moving around, and they wouldn’t come straight up because they were getting ready too, in the front room downstairs.
Robes and masks. Masks make you free, Mr Cromley had said. You can do what you like wearing a mask. Mine was tucked under the white nightie. I’d imagined it would be a little black Burglar Bill mask, just covering the eyes, but it was a great sparkly thing with sequins and feathers, and it came down over my nose and cheeks, so there was only my mouth exposed. I’d put on red lipstick before catching the bus to Swindon, but it was all eaten off now. I looked for my bag that I’d kicked under the bed, but I heard their feet on the stairs.
There was only the two of them, like he’d said. They had hoods on their dark blue robes, and under them masks, like balaclavas made of leather, that covered the whole head. A smell came off them, a tannery smell overlaid with whisky fumes, a hot chemical stink of excitement. Eyes gleamed through the eyeholes, lips glistened in the wide oval cut in the masks for the mouth; they looked like blacked-up minstrels from an end-of-the-pier show. One was taller, one was younger; and anyway, I’d have known which Mr Cromley was because he spoke, he said the words, he told me what to do, and he was first.
The dagger, he’d told me, is called an athame, a ritual tool from earliest times. The dagger and the cup. You mix the fluids in the cup with the dagger. A little mead, a little blood and, afterwards, a little seed. We shall smear it on your forehead, Heartbreaker, and on your breasts, and call down the Goddess into you. In the space that hangs between worlds, you shall have infinite power. What you will shall be. Demand the universe gives you whatever you desire.
At the empty guesthouse I woke before the dawn, and washed my face in cold water from the jug I’d brought in from the pump the night before; the mains water had been turned off when Mam and Dad left. No power, either, and the range was long out, so I drank water from the jug for my breakfast and ate the bread and jam sandwiches, soggy now, I’d made at the widow’s house. The early sun was coming through the kitchen window, making patterns on the dusty flagstones where Mam had danced. There’d been a frost in the night–no wonder I’d been cold under the thin blankets–and the stalks of the runner beans had turned black.
I took out my rosewood watercolour set that Mr Keiller had given me in the summer, filled the little tray with water, and began to paint what I could see. Beyond the fence at the back of the garden, the trees on the main road hid where the workmen was still busy with the digging. At the end of the field was a single stone, trussed and bound and propped with planks. A cement mixer and a wheelbarrow stood a few yards away, ready for making the concrete base so it’d never fall down again. Mr Keiller had said he’d carry on till November if need be, so he could say he’d finished the first half of the circle by the end of 1938.
We all understood why he was in a rush.
Mr Cromley’s dagger was an old bronze thing. He’d stolen it from