The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills [99]
So it’s a house in Swindon, an anonymous terraced house in a row on the north side of the town. Respectable, characterless. Behind it is a park, with trees, which seems nice, only when I look closer it’s not a park after all: it’s a cemetery.
I let myself in with the key Mr Cromley gave me. A long, dark, spooky hallway that smells of furniture polish. Kitchen at the back, abandoned in the middle of a meal. There’s a plate on the oilcloth with half a piece of buttered toast, an eggcup of white powder covered with a saucer, a cup in the sink. But maybe I wasn’t supposed to go in here. Upstairs, Mr Cromley said. Front bedroom.
The curtains are already drawn across the bay windows, worn crimson damask. The satin eiderdown on the bed is a purply red that clashes. The carpet is dark blue with swirly gold leaves, not quite enough to cover the room so there’s a border of stained dark brown floorboards round the edges. It’s a large room for such a little house, hardly any furniture except a wardrobe with a mirrored door and an old-fashioned dark oak washstand in the corner, but still the bed seems to fill most of it. Someone’s left a long white nightie on the pillow, freshly washed and ironed. I slip off my shoes and sit down on the end of the bed to wait.
The village turned out to watch the wrecking crew bring down Mam and Dad’s guesthouse. The first people were already gathering on the road outside at half past seven when I came downstairs, and they looked surprised to see someone coming out of the empty house. Mam and Dad had moved out weeks ago, gone to Devizes with all their furniture and bits in a van, apart from what was thrown out for the rag-and-bone man. I’d found lodgings less than a mile down the road at Winterbourne Monkton, under the roof of a widowed lady who rattled around in a house she couldn’t afford to keep up. I had my own gas ring and she let me have the back sitting room all to myself, so I never saw her unless it was on the way to the bathroom. She didn’t seem to care about my comings and goings. The night before they was due to knock down the guesthouse, I’d gone home with a stub of candle and blankets and slept on the bare boards of my old room.
Mr Cromley had said it took time to arrange these things. He said it wouldn’t be the same as the ritual on the stone under the trees. That was a makeshift demonstration of what the energies could do; this had to be more formal, like, more special. It should take place near the autumn equinox, when light and dark were in balance, between summer and winter, to help us slip between worlds.
He’d never taken me into the circle again, but sometimes he caught me in the corridor in the Manor, and would press me against the panelled wall and kiss me, slipping his hand under my skirt. It excited him all the more if there were people not far away. Once, we heard Mrs Sorel-Taylour’s little feet clacking down the wooden staircase, and I tried to push him off but he kept sliding his fingers against me and only stepped away a moment before her shape blocked the light at the end of the passageway.
‘Mr Cromley!’ I said, a little breathless, the minute she’d gone. ‘That was–’
‘My lovers call me Donald,’ he whispered in my ear. ‘But you still can’t bring yourself to do that, can you, Heartbreaker?’ His fingers resumed their relentless circling. He never called me Frances or Fran, and he never finished what we were doing. That was for the equinox.
I’d had cold feet about it since September blew in and swept the stone circle with drifts of golden leaves. What was I letting myself in for? This wasn’t black magic: Mr Cromley was clear on that. I wasn’t putting my soul in danger, oh, no, there was a long tradition of Christian magicians, like John Dee, whose magic mirror Mr Keiller kept in his study. Occult didn’t mean bad: it meant secret, hidden. Knowledge that had to be hidden from ordinary people because it was powerful and, in the wrong hands, dangerous. Like electricity, from Mr Rawlins’s generator: it lit the house, but it could kill you too, if you