MIXING TRACKS (RAILWAY MIX)

SCARLETT AND THE SPARK OF LIFE - IPHONE APP

2011-02-10T16:38:00.006Z

This iPhone + iPad app, by Launching Pad Games, is great. There are plenty of other reviews out there, so I'll keep this brief. I found it great fun and the only downside was that it was over too quickly. The graphics were stunning, the dialogue bitingly sarcastic. The irony of an - as yet unmade soon to be made out of rubbish - mechanical horse with delusions of grandeur is delightful to behold. Music was good too. I am panting for the sequel.

My favourite character was the LaoTse-esque Sweeper.

Here's a few tips if you're stuck:-

1. What do a key and a four-leafed clover have in common?
2. Watch out for the Zombie-Llamas on acid - what do they like to suck?
3. Besides being interesting, commentary mode can provide the odd clue.
4. The twins have lots to say about all kinds of things.

Scarlett SoL

BURNLEY

2009-05-05T00:49:00.004+01:00

It started small, a thing I never planned.
This house, which you expect - rather, demand -
I polish every minute, neat as a shell
has become my cell.

It's tough, not going outside, making no sound
as your schoolmaster cane inflects each wound,
accepts the count of every bright switch I take.
Afterwards, I ache.

So, I've begun acting out my dissatisfaction;
I don't deny I'm wanting your reaction.
I tilt this picture of your beloved Burnley.
You're bound to punish me.

And so, each day I say what I am feeling,
your Burnley's pants-down, shockingly revealing,
the doffing of its frame a shade more acute.
I'm following suit.

I wonder when you learned that swollen flesh
splits more when hit - anoints your cane afresh
when left to rise, like bread, for half an hour -
with my red offerings, my dying flower,
my dying red flower.

© Sara Willow 2009

Butterflies

2009-05-04T23:01:00.000+01:00

Butterfly kisses:
A thousand nightwings blooding
this revolution.

PRIMROSES

2009-05-04T18:43:00.003+01:00

In an urban room
in a pot beneath a bed:
yellow primroses.

A child of the dark
rests his cheek, plumply, on glass,
making connections -

His fingertips, eyes,
the world outside, primroses -
and a pledge is made.

© Sara Willow

FRIDGE POEM

2009-05-04T01:29:00.000+01:00

Candy kitty give me kisses
I like perfumed crazy flowers
You're god to my wild ghost

© Sara Willow

THE WORDS

2009-05-04T01:13:00.001+01:00

Your words deal castles crammed with noise under
stone sky, blood bridge, no water. It's as if
you set me in your painting, where you are.
I know this place: we're scanning the same page.

I always knew your words would ruin me,
and you, only one paragraph ahead,
both of us chasing tangled story-lines,
skimming at speed vast chunks of frantic rhyme.

The ceilings were too wide, beyond meanings,
flinging our last words back as noise; pure code.
I tried avoiding you, but had no choice;
knew I'd admit your ending equalled mine.

Cipher this slick only connects one way.
I knew this; still I followed it, running.
I blame the words. If you had spoken french,
this bridge would not have been here. Or this sky.

The castle would have seeped silence, not blood.
No blood, no rhyme, no turning of the page,
and I would not be spinning poetry,
not here, not now, weaving these last few words.

© Sara Willow

We are amused...

2009-04-30T16:26:00.003+01:00

First there was Tinyurl - but url-shortening is so last year, darlings. Big is the new small. For all your url-lengthening needs, why not try the dickensurl.com emporium? They even have a cut down version for Twitter, proving that one size really does fit all.

The dickensurl which leads back here is Mr_Chadband is a large yellow man with a fat smile and a general appearance of having a good deal of train oil in his system

ZITCHI - CHAPTER 24

2008-11-12T00:46:00.002Z

Taligás has procured a long black coat with many pockets. He smiles his crooked smile, tucks it tight around himself. It is not new; it has mildew at the hem, but he likes it all the better for this. It comes to him with a history and the satisfaction of a job well done. He remembers her face... and promptly trips over the hem. No matter, he thinks, as he digs himself out of the dust. He will get a needlewoman onto shortening it tomorrow. In the meantime, he will be careful.

On the battlements, Erzebet paces. She will not admit to being wrong, but still, she thinks, it is a pity the Zitchi girl is dead. None of the others were as juicy, nor screamed so sweetly, before or since. Since Zitchi, she feels seven years creeping up on her with ease on each single morrow. Only this morning she detected a dowager's back in the mirror. It was slight, but it was there. And smashing the mirror and using the glass to slash her latest maid's visage has done little to suppress her disenchantment.

Thurzó knows everything there is to know about lunar eclipses. Of course, he says to himself as he heads to the river again. It is today. It is written. A partial one only. He looks up. But this is not quite as foreseen; the moon is as a bloodshot eye. He shivers.

Aliz is thinking deeply, but not so deeply she misses his arrival. She has squatted in her skirts with a knife and a bowl on the edge of the camp. She sees him, solemnly watches his approach, the wineskins on his shoulder. Does he feel the extraordinary weight of her gaze on him?

She has hidden herself behind a good tree. He comes up to the tree, looks around the trunk and down at her sitting in the long grass. "Hello, Aliz," he says. She grins up at him like an idiot, seems unable to move. "Come," he says, helps her to her feet. Together they walk down to the river and into the camp.

The food has turned the night salty and running with juice and with herbs, down their throats, overspilling onto their chins. The wine flows like a river of rubies. Overhead, the lunar circle widens degree by bloody degree like a woman widens when a child must be born. The stars come out. And it seems to Thurzó that the only thing left waiting to happen must be the arrival of a comet or a shooting star, but he knows that cannot be; it has not been foretold. She is sitting on the other side of the campfire, there beside the cymbalom. He cannot stop looking in the direction of the cymbalom. And it seems to her that he cannot stop looking at her, and yet she is unable to meet his gaze.

When the last of the food has been consumed and the bones thrown to the dogs and the last of the grease licked from fingers, there is still the music. The ghost of Old Man Nagy strikes up the cymbalom, or is it Raoul of the red rage? Another man takes the fiddle, and there is a deerskin drum to honour the spirits of all the fallen deer, including the one they have just eaten. There is a drunken pipe, but it does not last beyond the first song.

Up at the tree where Aliz sat earlier with her knife and her bowl, a man is crouching in a coat as good as invisible against the sky. But why? Nobody tells Taligás No, is why, but that is not the whole story. Everybody underestimates Taligás, is why, but that is not the whole story either. There is a precious particle of story which Taligás keeps locked inside his head, cherishes, nurtures, feeds, and above all, nobody but Taligás knows it is there.

And songs. Songs of travelling, songs of love. Songs of fire and of water. The cymbalom never stops, thinks Thurzó, as he watches Raoul's hands from across the circle. He wonders how he can keep moving his hands hour upon hour, how he can layer the notes that way, have three harmonies - at least - going at once when he only has two hands. He cannot know the answer to this, which is that Raoul is dancing a duet with Old Man Nagy, and also that the cymbalom itself has spirit, as all things do.

She is in you - she is in all of us.
She wants your body, she wants your mind.
And when she finds you, and when you let her out
Then she will get you, get you - you can't escape this time.

Aíya, Aíya, Aíya, Aíya.

She is a cold heart, she is a shadow,
She will betray you from deep inside,
And when you hear her calling you quietly
Then you will let her, let her - and you can never hide.

Aíya, Aíya, Aíya, Aíya.

She will take you - she knows you want her to.
She wants to wake you, make you the same.
You know you want her, you know you want her to
When you start sleeping, dreaming, and calling out her name:-

Aíya, Aíya, Aíya, Aíya,
Aíya, Aíya, Aíya, Aíya,
Aíya, Aíya, Aíya, Aíya.

The truth is, Raoul is bewitched, thinks Thurzó. Each time he gets to the chorus, sings the Aíyas, he does this strange thing with his voice which sends shivers up Thurzó's spine. It is as if his voice exists on two or three planes at once, vibrates between them, builds energy, the kind of energy you need before a scream, and yet the scream never comes, it exists as a promise only. Not a promise - a prophecy whose fulfillment is inevitable.

Aíya!

And yet - after the second verse Thurzó is singing the Aíyas too, and the final time it comes around he feels almost like he has a new religion. It cannot be the Bull's Blood - he is a big man who finds it difficult to sink enough to get drunk. It cannot be the company - he has spent time with the gypsies before. Or can it?

The signs and portents in the heavens? The eclipse is done now; it fizzled like an anticlimax years ago in the penultimate song. Thurzó realises the other musicians have gone to bed, most of the gypsies have gone to their caravans in fact. He does not see Aliz there, slumping half-asleep against the legs of the cymbalom. There is some mumbled chatter from the stragglers by the fireside, but it is winding down with the embers. He really should be getting back to Piest'ány.

At that moment, the skies brighten and Thurzó cranes his head upwards: a meteor storm, ah, but it cannot be! The sky has turned from midnight to purple, stripy and swirly like a painting as yet unpainted in the mind of a man not yet born, with balls of light and stars like fireworks. The Carpathian mountains are black jags against the sky, the distant town's rooftops and spires are silhouetted too.

Aíya!

And he really should be getting back to Piest'ány, but finds he cannot take his eyes away from the stars, or his heart away from the sensation of someone's hand reaching into his chest between his ribs and squeezing, squeezing, massaging him back to life even though, until this moment, he had not realised he was dead. The sensation is not unpleasant, he thinks. And then he does stop looking at the stars; he lowers his head and discovers his eyes are pointing like a compass at the source of his rebirth, the cymbalom. And he has no idea why but he finds himself getting to his feet as hurriedly as he can, taking three strides across the circle - jumping the fading fire as he does so. He arrives at the cymbalom and stretches out his hand -

Aíya!

- and finds it clasped in return by that wizard Raoul, who has laid down his hammers and now grasps Thurzó's hand in both of his. Raoul locks eyes with Thurzó, lifts his hands to his mouth and places a warm, soft kiss atop Thurzó's thumb.

"What do you think of the fireworks?" says Raoul.

Thurzó opens his mouth to speak but finds he has no words.

"I laid them on just for you," says Raoul.

"I have no doubt of it," says Thurzó.

Thurzó leaves for Piest'ány just before dawn, unseen. Unseen, that is, except by Aliz, who has spent a cold night's vigil under the cymbalom, her heart in bits. And she was very cold, for it is early in the year, and the waters of the Váh, bloated with ice, give off a frozen white cloak as they rush past.

What a shame for Aliz, that she did not possess a long black pocketed coat to keep her warm.

ZITCHI - CHAPTER 23

2008-11-10T00:44:00.001Z

And here's a thing: the face of the girl is changing. From a certain angle and a certain light, she could be anyone. But it's not about her face, and it's especially not about a picture of her face made out of paint in another century. The force that made him paint the picture, ah, it might be about that. The voice of the woman standing beside him now, the epitome of truth and goodness, the deep honeyed throat of her voice - it might be about that too.

And he lifts his eyes from the painting, knowing where it is that they have to go now. And as he takes her hand she has a new peace about her. She follows him home, goes into the drawing room where together they put the lights on and shut the curtains against the cold, but she can't shut out that aching down in her bones. It's November, true. Yes, that must be all it is.

And he talks. And he talks and he talks. About Zitchi, about everything he knows about her, about everything there is to know or might even possibly be surmised, about the things he doesn't know, about his hopes and his fears and the ways in which he's let her down twice already, and about the terror he feels in his heart at the possibility of maybe fucking up for a third time. As he talks, he drinks a gallow-glass of blood-red wine, and then another.

Vanna doesn't drink because frankly, he's creeping her out. She knew he was obsessive, but this? What if he doesn't get his way? What if there is no Zitchi, or what if there is, but he can't bring her back? What then?

And what if there is, and what if he can? What will happen to Vanna?

Again, the overtiredness is seeping in, and it's almost like she hears the distant wail of the banshee the same way a bat would: under the skin. He's sounding maudlin now, she thinks, but she does as she's told and she refills his glass. The bottle is empty but he bids her go down in the cellar for another.

"There is no cellar; you live in a flat, Henry!" she says. But his face has clouded over and he waves his hand at her, dismissively.

"That's what you think," he says, but he's thinking of another house; he must be? "All right, in the bedroom then. There's a wine rack in the bedroom - you've seen it? And while you're in there, bring me my statue of Sekhmet."

This can not end well, thinks Vanna, not if he's going to invoke Sekhmet: Scarlet Lady, Avenger of Wrongs, Goddess of Blood. Apart from anything else, he can't possibly know what he's doing. But all right, I'll do what he says. Once more, and then I'll go to sleep. And off she trots, into the bedroom.

But: he must have been in here before her, when they got back from the library, maybe? There are candles burning on every surface; on the bedside tables, the bookcase, the tallboy, two candles either side of Sekhmet's statue on the dressing table. Candles gloating in finger-bowls. Someone's pulled the sheets back on the bed; it waits for an incumbent. The curtains are drawn back too; on either side of the Georgian sash windows dark red velvet pools, where they've been cut too long for the drop. And a moon wanes silently outside the window, casting its shaft of sepia light onto the brazen whiteness of the bed.

Vanna has seen this before. She's in the painting.

So, all I have to do here is wait, she thinks, but she's wrong. She'll have to do a whole lot more than wait before the night is done. For a psychic, she's pretty dense at times. In other words: this cannot end well.

Vanna sits on the edge of the bed, starts thinking about Zitchi. Wonders whether she's coming through by herself this time, or whether she has what it takes to deliberately channel her. And in the continued absence of Henry she wonders whether she should grab the nearest bottle of wine and get back into the drawing room before he realises she's dallying.

At the same time she's having these thoughts, she's got a sense of it all being unreal again, and of none of this mattering. In a moment, she thinks, destiny is going to get changed, dragged kicking and screaming in the blink of an eye into the tomb of all hope.

Yeah. But that's just melodramatic. Gothic hogwash. And she starts to chuckle softly to herself at her daftness. OK, you silly moo, just get him his wine and then we can all go to bed

kicking and screaming

we can all go to bed

And he's here, framed in the doorway. "What are you doing? You've been gone forever."

She giggles. "I was just getting you your wine. I've not been gone that long. Here it is - oh!" She looks down at her right hand but the bottle's not there because she's not actually picked it up from the wine rack. Thing is, thinking hard about doing something's not the same as actually doing it.

He glowers, leaning against the door jamb, his right hand in his pocket, almost casually. "I've come for you, Zitchi."

She looks up from her hands and into his face, and she realises he's not looking at her, but beyond. Or - he is looking at her face, at the space her face and her body occupies in this room, but it's as if his eyes are flickering like black flames, shifting back-and-fore between here and the abyss.

And then she looks at his hands, or tries to, but she can't see them, because they're in his pockets. And in that instant, she knows. She knows that inside his right pocket inside his right hand he has the pink pearlised gun.

face pockets face pockets

And she knows she has to get out of that room before he shoots her.

"What's the matter?" he says.

There's a quaver of delight in his voice. He knows she knows, is savouring the moment in its long, drawn-out glory. This is better than the especial pulling-out of fingernails.

And she looks into his eyes and she thinks, arbitrarily, that he's quite, quite mad. Not that that matters either way.

"What's the matter? Do tell..." he says.

And she knows - she doesn't know how she knows - but she knows that she absolutely MUST NOT mention the gun or allude to it in anyway, because if she does, it'll be like she's summoning it, and then he'll use it, or the Banshee will.

"Nothing," she squeaks.

"There clearly is! Come on, what can it be, I wonder? Are you afraid, perhaps, of some Little Thing?"

And she absolutely must not mention... or even think about... so in a tiny voice she says, "I need to go to the bathroom."

He grins. "Of course! Hurry up then, and come back soon, won't you?"

So she moves towards the doorway, but he makes no effort to move out of the way. This is an old building with big doorways, but Henry's a big chap. There's enough of a gap between him and the door frame for her to squeeze through without too much trouble, but then -

- but then, oh my god, she'll have to turn her back on him. Oh. Shit.

She has an idea. It's not even a half-bulb idea as ideas go, but it's all she has. "After you!" she says to him, her voice bright with hope.

He chuckles, like he'd anticipated her. "No, after you - I insist." And he still makes no move away from the doorway.

"No - you first."

"No, you; I insist."

What would Zitchi do? She has no idea.

Come to that, what would Bathory do?

Vanna doesn't really want to go to the bathroom, but by this stage she's almost pissing herself in terror. She knows - that word again - that he has the gun, that he's gonna shoot her as soon as she turns her back and quite possibly even if she doesn't, that he knows that she knows, and that above all, the bloody bastard is bloody enjoying every bloody minute of this.

And then - then he does something she wasn't anticipating. He takes his right hand out of his trouser pocket, unfurls it slowly and rests it flat against the top panel of the door. He looks at her looking at his hand, and he smiles like a lizard.

And she's barrelling out of the bedroom, elbowing him in the guts as she goes, rushing to the front door where bizarrely she has the foresight to grab her handbag, and down the two flights of stairs, round and down, out to the Jag and get in and start the engine up first time lovely well it's a Jag after all...

And as she leapfrogs backwards out of the drive she looks up at the big picture window at the front of Henry's drawing room. Henry is there, gazing out into the night, his face contorted into the staring eyes and open mouth of the Banshee's scream.

She knows the only place she can go this late at night is Pete's house. It's not until she pulls into his road with its derision of burnt out cars and detritus that she realises: Fuckfuckfuck but Henry is left-handed.

ZITCHI - CHAPTER 22

2008-11-10T00:43:00.001Z

Hungary, 1591

Gáspo Thurzó is nobody's cousin, although everyone claims he is theirs. One such cousin is Taligás the carter, the one with the ruined thumbs. How his thumbs got ruined is another tale, but after he sold the cart to Erzebet's henchwomen he made but one more, remember? He would never starve, for now he sells stories - the kind of stories people pay him not to tell.

Unlike Gáspo Thurzó, Taligás has many cousins who are quick to deny him. Brothers, too, and he would have a wife, but her name is better left unsaid. He said it himself once, into the wrong ear. Now she is dead.

Gáspo Thurzó hates no one, but if he did, Taligás would be top of his list. Instead, whenever he is forced to think of him he shakes his head.

Gáspo Thurzó has a profoundly rich, deep, singing voice, like rocks sliding away from lazarine tombs.

It's ironic, thinks Thurzó, as he looks down at the top of the greasy head of the snivelling creature before him. "No," he says, "I will not give you any money."

"Oh, but Master, you see the information I have will benefit you greatly!" and he rubs his thumbless hands together in anticipation of coinage.

"I am not your master, nor anyone's. What makes you think I have not seen this knowledge already?" He immediately regrets the question, for it prolongs the time he has to spend in the snotbag's company.

"Oh, but Mas - but, Your Worship, you cannot have, and see, I have proof!" He rummages around in his trousers, produces a piece of tallow candle with toothmarks in, assorted fluff (grey), and is searching for more but seemingly, in vain.

Thurzó banishes him. Since this has no effect and the denizen of the abyss is still there, Thurzó leaves his own chambers and heads for the marketplace. He chooses some food, enough to fill a massive sack. Considers having his beard trimmed, but discards the idea as purespun nonsense. He knows that Taligás will, at this moment, be riffling through his things, but this does not bother him needlessly. He hefts the sack over one shoulder and strides off in the direction of the river.

"Uncle Gáspo!"

"My, how you have grown, Yosjka! You were only this big - now you are just like your father."

"Ah, and with the same worries..." Yosjka looks over his shoulder, grins affably. "But - how long has it been?"

"Your mother was still alive, I remember. I was a young man myself then."

There is pain in Yosjka's eyes, but he says nothing of it. "Ha! You were never young, Uncle. Come and meet the tribe," and he slaps Thurzó on the arm, turns away quickly.

"Wait," says Thurzó, and hands him the sack, "No, it's not much. You may as well have it, it was going to waste."

In the centre of the group of caravans, the women are making gruel. They fall upon the sack like wolves upon white-tailed deer. There is even a haunch in there. One, a handsome woman with shiny hair, comes forward to clasp his hands. "Thank you," she says, looking up at him, then she drops her eyes.

"You're welcome, Aliz," he says.

"How did you know my name?"

"I remember you. You're about Yosjka's age, aren't you? Are you married yet?"

"No," she blushes, "And you flatter me. I'm older than him. I remember you too, but then, everyone remembers you, Uncle Thurzó." She seems embarrassed from such a long speech. She turns, continues helping the other women prepare the food. When she thinks he's not looking, she steals a glance at him, at his straight back, his tangled beard.

He sees her looking, but to spare her blushes, he pretends he doesn't.

Thurzó has to go back into town, he says, to sort out some business, but first, Yosjka says, he must meet his brother.

"This is Raoul".

At first, Raoul scowls, won't meet Thurzó's gaze. Instead, he carries on working on the cymbalom, says nothing. He seems to be repairing a tenon joint and tightening some strings, and for a time, Thurzó stands there in silence, watching. There is something in the younger man which the older recognises, understands. After a time, he goes over to the cymbalom, places a forefinger where a knot is being tied.

After another time, he leaves.

"Tonight," calls Yosjka behind him, and "A party - you will come?"

Once more to the market, this time for skins of Egri Bikaver - bull's blood wine. Then, various matters of the day, the lowest of which is Taligás and the mess he will likely have left at Thurzó's dwelling. Thurzó is rarely surprised, but this time he is; everything is tidy as a pin, just as he left it. All his papers in order. Not that there were any to interest the scumball, but... Hmm, he thinks, and now he is slightly suspicious. What is he planning? He looks closer, and realises that he was mistaken; there is something missing after all. But what?

He claps his hand to his forehead. Of course. But that was some while ago, last year anyway, and came to nothing. What on earth would the carter want with Fredek Agaroz Ecsed?

He sighs. It is too late in the day to set out for Lesethe, or to expect anyone else to. Tomorrow then. Though he is reluctant to line the pockets of a worm, he supposes he will have to get the letter back. It is a trifle though, and he quickly puts it out of his head.

It is rare for anyone to be a step ahead of Gáspo Thurzó.

ZITCHI - CHAPTER 21

2008-11-08T14:51:00.001Z

And now - now they've gone into the bedroom and come back out again, now they're going to the library. What did we miss? Nothing much; it was momentous for both of them but in different ways, for different reasons. Henry will never tire of hearing Zitchi's voice, even if he has to shag Vanna. Vanna will never tire of Henry making love to her. Except - she's not stupid. She knows he wasn't making love to her.

Guildford Library smells of paint. Of white Snowcem, to be precise. And the woodblock floors have that back-to-school stickiness of bonfire toffee.

At the Witt microfiche machine, Henry's leatherbound notebook flashes out of his top pocket. Except - he's written it down wrong, so he wastes almost an hour looking for the wrong name, sliding the viewer in all directions, ironing the records. Because it's not Zitchi he wants, it's Zichy. Mikhail Zichy. And even then they don't find him straight away, because it seems Ellie has misled them. Not Mikhail Zichy, but Mihály.

"So why did she tell us Mikhail?" asks Henry?

And straight away the answer comes to Vanna inside her head, without Ellie spelling it out, just as she said: "That was his other name when he travelled to Russia. He disappeared there. Why Olga is the first zina." She looks at him, startled at herself.

"But look - he's far too late for Zitchi, and too early for Olga. He was alive 1827 to 1906, it says here. Zitchi was alive in the late 1500's."

"He died, then reincarnated. Kept the same first name, took Zitchi's as his surname, more or less, so they were married in name at least. A kind of pledge. Then he painted pictures which were from visions he had of rescuing her. But he still failed to save her in that lifetime."

Henry looks at Vanna, and even though he doesn't have a perceptive bone in his body, hadn't until now at least, he says, "This is my last chance then, isn't it?"

"Yes," she says.

And, "Here, let me have a go," she says, taking charge of Henry for the second time that day. And of course she's better at it than he is because she has none of his faffage. Her new calmness can't prevent his pacing though, or his pulling at imaginary threads on his cuffs. She ignores him, concentrates on the rows and columns, the pages of photographed text, the paintings. Ah, those paintings; most of them deeply erotic. Does she feel a new respect for Henry, for the soul who created that unusual beauty at a time when such art must have been mostly forbidden?

Or does she wonder whether this is all too fantastical for words, something she should discard as poppycock, or turn her back on as evil?

Vanna thinks all of those things, certainly, and also a smidgen of something else, which is this: how am I going to turn this to my advantage? He doesn't see, but she blushes to herself there in the library, silent save for his pacing. Well, there again, she thinks, he's happy enough to use me for his own ends; why shouldn't I? And he carries on pacing up and down and she carries on sliding the stick, until she's seen enough.

"Right," she says, "Come and look at this now." They both bend their heads to the darkened screen-hood. "It's like being at the cinema, isn't it?" says Vanna, then when she notes his frown, she says, "Are you ready for hot-dogs? Or popcorn?"

And if Zitchi's brow is white as any lover's, Henry's brow is the opposite of that right now. He tries to take the stick away from Vanna, but she's enjoying this. "Don't snatch!" she says, and she keeps possession of it. But relaxes her throat, feels the shiver climb her spine, and drops into Zitchi's register.

"Mihály?" she says.

Henry's eyes glitter. "Yes! Oh, Zitchi, is that you?"

"Can you tell me what you were doing here, my love? What were you thinking when you painted me so? You know that never were we together in this way, for my papa and mama forbade it."

But now Henry merely looks confused. "I don't remember," he growls, then louder, "I don't remember! I - DON'T - REMEMBER!"

The librarian's disapproving shoes approach across the woodblock. Vanna knows what she's going to say:

"If you can't be quiet, I'm afraid I'll have to ask you to leave."

But there is another painting by Mihály Zichy, the one they came for, and Vanna shows it to him now. The Angel and Tamara. Except that it's called The Demon and Tamara. Why the girl in the painting is called Tamara, she doesn't know. Just because Vanna's a medium doesn't mean she knows everything in the whole world.

But both of them recognise the girl in the painting. And both of them recognise the face of the demon too.

The demon has Henry's face.

ZITCHI - CHAPTER 20

2008-11-06T14:57:00.002Z

Hungary, 1591

As near as can be spoken by Western tongues, his name is Raoul, which means wolf counsel. Five hundred miles or so may not seem far to have progressed in one lifetime, but his people have come from half a planet away; from the rice-fields of Burma and the foothills of the Himalayas, from Madras, where they danced under a turmeric sun, from the Hindu temples of the south where the Tamils turn their wheels, from all of those places and from more places besides, where they were mindful of each other and trod lightly on the earth.

Once upon a time, they gathered in Rishikesh in the north of India, at the source of the great turquoise River-Mother. (Names are important; Rishikesh is the sound she makes as she rushes from the mountains.) This was in the days before the bridge was built, all of them in their covered carts and their caravans, and while the planets turned like cogs above them, they set off on their journey.

They left behind the Hindu temples and the fat silver fish which swam in the Ganges, and if it seemed to them that the further they travelled, the leaner it was, well, they knew that it was their destiny as sure as they knew the words of the River-Mother, as sure as they felt the clunk and whirr of the giant rocks overhead. And so, like them, they moved. But being human, they hoped that before too long they would come upon another turquoise river.

Raoul's half-brother is Yosjka, which means God rescues, and whilst it could be said that the gypsies do not worship your god or mine, it is also true that Yosjka has experienced personal salvation in his own lifetime. To him, his dead mother Sarkosi is a goddess.

Much has happened in Raoul's seventeen years. Their father, Djordji, drank himself to death, or at least, almost to death, then took himself off one night into the Turkish Occupied Zone. Raoul's mother - and we do not even remember her name - did not survive his birth. Some say she did not want to stay to compete with Sarkosi's sainthood. Some say she could not stay where she was not loved. Yosjka, at thirteen, found himself largely responsible for the care of an angry baby. As Raoul grew into the shape of his red rage, Yosjka withdrew into his, and the colour of his was white.

Raoul has taken over from old man Nagy on the cymbalom. He has the knack for it, and the wolf which is in him swims downstream from his heart, down his arms and out through his fingers, hits the sinews of the cymbalom, runs away. Even old man Nagy was startled at his protegé, because he had thought that he'd heard - or at least imagined - every tune that ever there was. Then on his deathbed, Raoul serenaded him with a curtain made out of devils.

And that should have been the end of it, except that Raoul is convinced that the old man's spirit lives on, speaks to him through the cymbalom, tells him what he should do and where he should go. It's not his fault; Nagy was the nearest thing to a father to him - you cannot count Yosjka who is as wet as a blanket - and now that Nagy is gone, he falls asleep each night wrapped around the hard-soft form of his cymbalom.

For instance, Raoul has a memory. He has many memories, but this one he suspects is not his. He mentioned it to Yosjka once when he was very young, and knew in that instant he must never mention it again; a rich girl with a perfect face, laughing, standing on a chair in a market square. It can only be Nagy who told him - or was it Yosjka? The cymbalom, for once, is silent on the matter.

And now they have come, all of them, the Nagys and the Laszlos, to the might-be-turquoise River Váh. They have followed its course and wound up in Piest'ány, where its shores are made of rocky stones, none of them smooth, because each year's winter crunches them up with its teeth come springtime. It is that time of year now, and the river is loaded with houses of ice, rushing downstream like daughters of Rishikesh, overspilling Piest'ány's banks like tears through eyelashes.

The Crossed Thorns Inn has no rooms or food, or none for gypsies, but will they allow water for the horses, perhaps, in return for work? Yosjka knows better than to ask anyway, and shrugs at his brother's folly. He leads the horses to the river to drink. "You cannot rage at every man who refuses you," he says, turning his back. He does not need to see Raoul's eyes to know what lurks there.

Cymbalom skills, and songs, are things which get passed on from generation to generation like blood is, like a light passing from hand to hand. They settle on the banks of the tumultuous Váh, light a fire, and appease their hunger with songs learnt at the milk-floes of the River-Mother a hundred generations ago:

I asked if I may enter her
I asked if I may enter her
She said yes
I wondered whether it would make a difference

I asked if I may take away
I asked if I may take away
She said unless
I wondered whether it would make a difference

She said unless you give yourself
You may not take away
There must be no difference

She babbled stories of many years
She babbled stories of many years
She sipped my skin
I knew she'd never still her incantations

I gave my tears into her
I gave my tears unto her
She washed me away
I knew she'd never cease her incantations

I met the sand at the place she goes
The place she touches it
The place she washes it
With her incantations
With her incantations
With her incantations

And the way the cymbalom weaves its stairways, its halls and its corridors, it's like a kind of cloth is made, or a carpet, and Yosjka lets it seep into his mind and feels a kind of untidy peace, for tonight at least.

Tomorrow, they will go to see cousin Thurzó.

ZITCHI - CHAPTER 19

2008-11-05T19:50:00.002Z

Sleep, sleep... and then the yellowness of sunlight on her eyelids. She opens them, sees dust particles floating between here and the window, and the first thought she thinks is: Henry. The heavy drapes are still mostly closed on the safe dark of the room. It's just me in this big bed, she thinks, and stretches her arms and legs, a synchronised star, swimming. The outer reaches are cool, so he must have risen a while ago. What time is it?

Vanna can't wear a watch, or she can, but they always stop on her. (Sophie said that's her psychic nature stopping time, or the measuring of it anyway, because they don't allow time in the spirit world. But if they don't have time, why Zitchi's urgency?) She puts a foot out of the bed - gosh but it's a long way down like papa bear's bed - and scrunches her toes in the carpet.

At the window, the sun says crikey but it must be nearly eleven. The garden is crisp as a cake. Vanna's never been in Henry's garden, in fact she's not even glanced at it before. Should she go outside? How she knows she doesn't know, but he'll be back at lunchtime. She gets dressed and goes out, waits on the love seat.

The sun is directly overhead when he returns, all gruff in his Paddington Bear duffle, huffing and stamping his feet and rubbing his hands. He takes hers, pulls her to standing, puts his big arms round her and hugs her close. Vanna feels that warmth in her tummy, knows a rightness, feels a spark come alive.

"You'll do, as a radiator," he says.

He doesn't kiss her, though he did last night.

The lunch is in a Marks and Sparks bag on the kitchen surface. He doesn't ask, but she gets it ready anyway. He's too taken with what he's telling her to notice whether she does or whether she doesn't. Pacing, pacing, and flinging his hands around, his face beautific.

"You know my friend Piers? No, of course you don't; how could you? Old school friend as a matter of fact, still see him occasionally, well his wife, name of Susan, she works at the University, linguistics you know. Actually her name's not Susan.

"See, thing is, Piers got himself a Czech wife, don't ask me how, and whatever her name is, it's got lots of Z's and J's in it, so it's a lot easier for us chaps if we call her Susan. Even Piers calls her Susan."

"How does - 'Susan' - feel about that?" asks Vanna.

"I don't know! Intelligent woman, actually, speaks four or five languages: Czech, obviously. English is her second, couple of others, and then she speaks Hungarian." He says the word 'Hungarian' like you might say the word 'astonishing'.

"OK, I see where this is going..." says Vanna.

"Don't interrupt!" he says, mock-stern, but he can't be annoyed with her for the interruption; he's too excited. "Anyway, I don't think you do. Where was I? Oh yes, Susan. Speaks Hungarian; unfortunately it's her fifth language, but still. I played her the tape."

Vanna raises her eyebrows. She remembers the tape recorder, but she's not heard the tape herself yet. Not sure how she feels about a stranger listening to it, wonders how clever the microphone was at picking up... um.

Henry's either unaware of her discomfiture, or ignores it. "Well, you're not going to believe this; it's incredible. Although, given the nature of Zitchi - " he pauses, gazes into the middle distance. "Ah, um - where was I?" And now he seems to have lost his thread completely.

"Nature of Zitchi? You were telling me about Susan? The tape?"

"Oh, right. Well, Susan says the whole spiel is in Hungarian. Except for the French bits, of course. The rest is Hungarian, definitely, no doubt about it. And get this - it's not modern Hungarian; it's archaic. She thinks it's the Hungarian of around four hundred years ago. Example in English would be listening to Chaucer; all right, maybe not that far back; Shakespeare, say."

Vanna bends to put a dish in the oven, takes her time, considering. Closes the door properly then turns around to look at him.

"I don't speak Hungarian. I only know English, unless you count cerveza, cinicero, vino bianco in Spanish."

"Of course you don't, old bean. I didn't think you did for one moment. If you did, you'd speak the modern anyway. But you were out of it last night, truly. You should have seen your face."

I did see my face, thinks Vanna. And this is all the way through freaky and out the other side. "Oh!" she says, "I just remembered. I can say Yuroshka onegaishemasu - that means 'I'm so pleased to meet you,' in Japanese." She's babbling, natch.

"Bugger Japanese!" he says, then acts taken aback when she looks hurt. "All right, Vanna, I'm sorry. Let's keep our hair on. Thing is, this is pretty fantastic for both of us, I see that. Don't you want to know what you said?"

Not really, she thinks. Trouble with knowing something is that then you know, and all that. But he's clearly about to tell me.

"All right; Susan could only give me a rough translation due to it being sixteenth century Hungarian, but - hold on - " he rummages in his pockets and produces a leather-bound notebook. Starts reading.

The root of passion is this: the willingness and the capacity to suffer. For love of another or perhaps of oneself in another. I fight with my body for your body. I love life, suffer for life, for love. My search is for you, through whom I can live. Without you I can neither live nor love.

"Read it again," says Vanna.

"Sure - you said it a total of three times last night, on the tape." He reads it again.

Vanna doesn't know why, but her eyes are watering, and she feels cold. And then he reads it a third time, because he has to.

"She's talking about metempsychosis again, isn't she?" says Vanna.

"Yes, partly. And you were crying last night, too, by the third time. But you know, your voice - her voice - even though you were crying, you sounded so - what's the word - serene." Again, he gazes into the distance, remembering.

Vanna starts. "What do you mean - her voice?"

"Listen to the tape," he says.

And of course, it isn't her voice; it's Zitchi's, faint but clear, lower in pitch than Vanna's. Speaking musical words which have a rise and fall the same way a cymbalom does, a syntax, a shape and an urgency. There are other sounds which are unclear, and there is a white noise in the background which sounds like the whooshing of a November wind. A November wind in south-east England? Vanna wonders, then discards her cynicism: the tape is utterly convincing. Anyway, she was there, kind of; she remembers saying the words.

"It's done, then," she says, then wonders whether that was her speaking, or Zitchi.

And, "Let's eat," and wonders about that, too.

Afterwards, he insists upon an immediate board session, and she doesn't bother to disagree; she's wanting to get to the bottom of this herself. And she has a sense of being on a train now, a train without brakes, on a track whose parallel lines never meet because it goes on forever. He's told her about the French, too, and that at least sounded familiar to her, but perhaps that's because she's starting to feel like that about Henry. Does he feel that way about her? The answer comes immediately: Of course not. He loves Zitchi. He sees Vanna in much the same way he sees Olga - as a means to an end. He wouldn't even use the word 'feel' about either of them.

"All right, Ellie, are you there?" says Henry.

YES

"Do you have Zitchi there? Can I speak to her?"

WAIT

"Why do I have to wait? I need to speak to her, Ellie, I need to!"

SHE IS IN A BAD PLACE OPPRESSED BY BATHORY CANNOT COME NOW

"Oh, Ellie! Is she all right?"

NOT REALLY WOULD YOU BE?

"What can I do? I'll do anything! Can you tell her I love her? Can you speak to her, reassure her I'm coming to get her, maybe? Help me, Ellie!"

I CANNOT GET TO HER BUT CAN HELP WITH ZINA

As usual, Vanna's silent while Henry asks the questions. But now she finds her voice, has a need to speak.

"Why, Ellie? Tell me, why is all of this happening?"

MIKHAIL OWES DEBT TO ZITCHI
HENRY IS MIKHAIL ZICHY
THIS GOES BACK
SEE THE PAINTINGS
YOU DO NOT NEED THE BOARD NOW

"What paintings? What do you mean, I don't need the board?"

TWO PAINTINGS
FROM ANGELS TO LOVERS
THE ANGEL AND TAMARA
YOU CAN SEE WITHOUT ME SPELLING IT OUT

And sure enough, Vanna gets an impression of the paintings, of one of them, anyway. Oils faded with age; a dark man with white wings lifting a woman from her bed to kiss her. Her bed, her whole bedchamber, is cobwebbed. She is wearing a garment which looks like a shroud, but then again, it looks like a bridal gown.

She gets up, starts collecting the letters, ignores him when he blusters, "Hey!" and "What?"

She stacks the letter-cards into a neat pile in the middle of the shiny table, takes him by the hand.

"Are we going to the library?" he says, "You know, look up the paintings or something?"

"No," she says. And leads him into the bedroom.

Zitchi - CHAPTER 18

2008-11-04T21:50:00.002Z

Hungary, 1590

Lesethe is a millage - a village built out of two sticks. In that millage is a carter, but he does not make carts any more; his hands siezed up last winter. The penultimate cart he made is the one which Dorko and Illona have just pushed back to Castle Cjesthe, empty. Carts last twenty years or more, if treated well. This one is rotting at the joists.

Míhaly stands in the snow, his bride at his feet, gazing into the distance at the two crones until he can no longer see them. The wind has dropped, and sound carries on the mountainside, so he can hear their talk as clearly as if they were whispering in his ear.

I didn't think the mistress was going to let this one go, did you?

No, never. She was a dainty one. But I think she got to like it.

What about the screaming though?

Ah, the screaming. They say no, but they mean yes.

We've got a new one tomorrow, and another the day after.

He looks down at his feet, at Zitchi's broken body which somehow is still perfect in its brokenness against the packed snow, and he thinks of those words, the words they wrote together long ago and in another country. What were they now? Not that he has to think; they are imprinted on his soul.

... ma dernière à l'heure du coucher...

My last at bedtime; my last thought at the hour of my sleeping.

Was he her last thought then? He knows she is destined be his.

And her answer is in his right ear like the milky breath of babes at the edge of his hearing: Yes, my love.

You're my first thought each morning
my last at bedtime

You overflow my dreams
waking or sleeping

And I don't know whether
I can stop loving you

And I don't know if
I even want to

Mihaly turns his head, cranes round to look at the western face of Castle Cjesthe. High up, he senses a movement as a drape, perhaps, is pulled back from a window. There is a suggestion of an outline here, a sketch of pure high brow as white as any lover's, but he feels rather than sees her eyes on him. Feels her triumph burrowing into his flesh like a red-hot poker. Her. He knows it is Bathory watching.

There are vultures overhead, but they shall not have your body, my love. With his bare hands he begins to scrape at the snow, till they are bleeding and fiery from the hell of it. He cannot manage much of a grave up here at the end of all hope. The mountains are laughing at him, yes they are, and those eyes. He buries her maybe twice as deep as the drop of her. Not deep.

Three steps he takes before his blood curdles in his veins, and knows he cannot leave her. Instead, her father's gun, this gun, is sweet to the taste.

Is this whooshing noise the sound of the wind, or the bullet, rushing like a lover would towards the altar of its pleasure?

ZITCHI - CHAPTER 17

2008-11-02T21:29:00.001Z

Later, much later, Vanna wondered however they got onto the guns. How could guns ever be contextual? But first, there was something else; there was the banshee. Remember the banshee? Vanna does.

They get the dictionary out - that book is earning its keep, she thinks - to discover that bean-sidhe, or banshee, to give it its English spelling, is a female spirit whose scream portends death in a house. Nice, thinks Vanna. Just what we need. From the Irish, apparently. As Ellie's parting shot, no less.

And then later that afternoon he's in his dressing room, and she's decidedly vague about this bit. She's standing in the hallway and he beckons her, "Come in! Come and have a look at these; you'll like these."

And what he's got there, a boy with his toy, is a drawer of guns. Revolvers or pistols or both, she doesn't know the difference, handguns anyway. Big ones and small ones and shiny ones and old ones. Guns.

And she feels like she has to keep her eyes on the guns, like if she looks away the room will move or the moon will change phase. The air is thick with it. But she makes her eyes move up a few inches and points them at Henry. He's grinning.

"Fantastic, aren't they?" he says, "I knew you'd like them".

"How many are there?" she says. Not that she wants to know, but it's something to say.

"Thirteen."

Unlucky for someone, she thinks. And then she thinks back to last summer, to Jane and Sophie in a field. What was it Jane said? Vanna shivers.

And boxes, and boxes, of ammunition, all different gauges. She wants to take her eyes off the bullets. Eyes not under Vanna's control, today.

"Hey, look!" he says, and he opens up his big hand and there's this pearlised pink pistol. "I'd let you have it," he says, "But it's extraordinarily rare, and worth a lot of money. Sorry!"

"No, you're all right, " she says, "I don't mind. Really."

He'd let her have it.

That night, she's in bed in the spare room, overtired but unable to sleep. She can hear him gently snoring in the next room, so she tiptoes to his doorway, peeps in. He looks smaller, somehow, in his big bed. Even from the doorway, she can sense his warmth, the darling toastiness of him. She wants to get in beside him but she hasn't the front for it. So she pads back, barefootedly, to her room. Sighs a few times. Turns over. Turns over again. Again.

Nobody stays awake forever and Vanna's not Nobody, so she falls asleep eventually. Sleeps fitfully, then deeply, but it's cold, very cold, icy even, and dark, with snow swirling. There's stone, and vultures, an unending sense of nothing, or nothing except terror. And then - from a long way away at first, but getting closer, closer - there's a scream, a scream like nothing she's ever heard before, deep and yet high at the same time, a double note almost, vibrating, oscillating, everlasting, a scream that curdles the blood, a scream that ends all hope, a scream that as it gets closer and then this close and then right here you realise is coming out of your own mouth and you can't get away from it and it's the Banshee and the Banshee is you and you are the Banshee and you are screaming and after this scream which never ends because it can never end and which you can't stop screaming comes death in this house and -

Vanna!

And you hear that name and you know it has something to do with you but even as you hear it you know you can't claim it and the scream remember the scream is wailing in your ears and in your throat and to your fingertips which are clutching at the night and the night is a curtain made of sorrow and -

Vanna!

And your fingertips your fingertips are clutching at your body, scraping your skin, tearing your flesh and you realise they're not your own fingertips they're the Banshee's but you are the Banshee and the scream, the scream -

Vanna! For Pity's sake! Come on darling, wake up! Wake up! Thank God! It's all right, it's all right...

And of course it's Henry, darling Henry, and he's got her, and she's safe. Isn't she?

She's wrapped up in him, she can't remember how he came to be here, but she's never been so relieved to see his face, and to feel his warmth, smell the clean biscuity boy-sweat smell of him in his 'jamies, but against that she can still feel the vibration of that scream at the back of her throat.

"The Banshee..." she says.

"I know," he says, "I heard her too."

"But it was me."

"Well - yes. But - no. It was just a dream, and then Bobby came out of the shower."

She laughs. He laughs. They laugh together. She still feels a tiny part of the terror. "Death in the house. It portends."

"Do you think so?" he says, stroking her hair. "I really wouldn't worry about that if I were you. You were just overtired." She looks up at him, into his black eyes. That's the nearest he's ever come to an apology, she thinks.

And he makes her a hot milk and she drinks it sitting up at the table, which still has the letters all round it from earlier. The X is on the floor though. Then they go back to bed, him in his room and her in hers. It doesn't take her long to fall asleep this time, but as soon as she does the Banshee comes back for an encore; the scream starts like a tickle at first and then a scratch and by the time it's audible Henry's shaking her awake.

"Come on, you daft banana," he says softly, and - like she can't possibly walk all by herself - picks her up and carries her into his bed.

And OK, so for a long time they cuddle and stuff. She's still freaked out from earlier, and he seems to realise that. He can be sensitive when he wants to be, our Henry. The tenderness builds, and by the time he makes love to her she is on the ceiling with - what? Some thing she doesn't quite have a name for. But that doesn't matter; it's - whatever it is.

And then another strange thing happens.

Well, firstly, the way he makes love to her: it's - it's not like anything she's known before. It's - kind of - strange. He keeps stopping, as if he's afraid of conclusion. But it's more than that. Oh, never mind, she thinks; go with it, it's nice anyway, he's nice, I'm falling for him... and then she stops thinking about it and all of a sudden she's looking down on herself from up there, up here... and she sees Henry's back moving, covering her, herself underneath and her face with her eyes wide open and her mouth open, moving, and she hears words, knows the words are coming out of her own mouth, but it's all right because the words are beautiful words, gentle words, Hungarian words and French words which she understands and yet doesn't understand at the same time, words she knows she's said before.

And he doesn't jump up suddenly, he stops slowly. He gets up and goes into the drawing room and comes back with a tape recorder. This time when they make love and she starts speaking the words, he says, "Zitchi, my love..."

And the Hungarian words, well, Henry doesn't speak Hungarian. He learnt French though, at his posh school. And the French words were

Tu es ma première pensée chaque matin
ma dernière à l'heure du coucher

Tu apparais dans mes rêves
de jour ou de nuit

Je ne sais pas
si je peux arrêter de t'aimer

Je ne sais même pas
si j'en ai envie

ZITCHI - CHAPTER 16

2008-11-02T17:33:00.003Z

Hungary, 1590

Gáspo Thurzó looks at the oak tree and the letters A and E and sighs deeply within himself. He is an old man, too old perhaps; one who has seen too many things to be surprised by any thing any more, one who has learned the ways of the wise, but sadly too the ways of the terminally stupid. He suspects that what he will find, when he breaks the seal on the letter he now holds in his hands, will have more in common with the latter.

He is unprepared for the begging note in the words he reads.

He sighs. On the pretext of re-reading what he has already committed to memory, he takes a little more time to study, out of the corner of his soul, the young man who stands before him.

Aside from the mundane, such as the fact that he has the demeanor of a servant, it is blatantly obvious that this Míhaly is wedded, in spirit at any rate, to the Zitchi of this letter. Not in body though, thinks Gáspo. Interesting. History there; there must be. Planetary influences not quite right, stars not in line. And the future? Massive intervention by the malign. Inside his mind, he shakes his head to himself, sadly. Nothing he can do, nor should he.

Gáspo knows he will have to act, but the time is not yet. Any efforts he could make at this stage will cause no ripples in Cjesthe's pond. It must already be too late for Zitchi; this he knows. But what to say to the boy? Fredek Agaroz Ecsed is not a name to ignore out of hand. But it is a pebble next to the edifice of the house of Bathory.

Yes, yes, he hears himself saying. Don't worry. Nightfall, you say? Come come - why the drama? Tomorrow will be soon enough. I can get you a bed at the inn, you must be weary.

Míhaly is not a sharp chap, yet he knows he is being brushed off. The bluff note in Thurzó's voice gives him away. But what can he say? He is cold, and tired, and he is a servant, and there is only one of him.

He wishes someone would tell him what to do.

In response to the only guidance he's had for a week, he finds himself stopping at the Crossed Thorns Inn, a room over the courtyard gate. Out of one window he can watch the horses being brought in, brushed down, fed, stabled. Cross the room, look out the other window, see the road, see the river, see the watery sun setting behind the Carpathians.

Míhaly has a sense of time not really meaning anything any more. As he takes out his knife and watches himself cut some bread, it seems there is no roughness of crust or smoothness of metal under his fingers. Even the table - which has seen so many suppers with so many travellers - is not really there. There is nothing, already, nothing, and Thurzó knew that. He jumps up, and the table, for all of its not being there, clatters over against the wall.

He has not reckoned on the wind, nor the fact that he cannot find his way in the dark, yet he does find his way, eventually. Blind with cold, he approaches Castle Cjesthe as dawn breaks. Through the snow, there are shapes. A large shape, a cart maybe. Two people. He tries to run towards them, but the ice is in his lungs and he cannot take enough air to run. His breath feels like a knife.

Now he is closer he can hear their peasant chatter, and their laughter. They have a cart. There are shapes on the cart and they are hauling the shapes out onto the snow. There is more laughter, and one of the women breaks wind like a ratchet, and there is more laughter. The acrid stench of it comes to him on the wind and hits him, and he is shocked that now, now he is feeling everything again, and everything is real. Is that castle - that hulk of stone there, glowering through the sleet, is that where she is? Is Zitchi there, looking after her mistress, caring for her countess, helping her with her toilet and her clothing? He gets a sudden flash of Zitchi's pale beautiful hands, and now he does run, he runs the last few feet towards the cart, towards the old women.

Towards Dorko, and Illona.

But he doesn't look at Dorko and Illona, because he cannot, because he has seen their precious cargo. At his feet, his pearl without price. Zitchi my love. What are you doing? Wake up, wake up? Give me your hands, come on, come on, it's time to go. It's me, my darling. Wake up!

And why will she not? She is cold, she is curled, she is furled tightly like a bud, but look at me, her eyes are open. Staring. What's over there? Where are you gone?

Míhaly looks over his shoulder to see where she is looking but there is no one and nothing there. He looks at her beautiful hands and sees they are ruined, black with bruises, wet with pus, crabbed with scabs. He looks into her eyes and sees that she is not there. Her lips, swollen and split, are parted a little. Still, he tries kissing them. Then he puts his ear to her mouth and listens.

He cannot know that the last thing she said was "Míhaly".

HOUSE BY THE RAILWAY

2008-08-27T12:29:00.002+01:00

A writer friend of mine, writerwench, said (of herself):-
"As a writer, am I constantly trying to get 'home' - real or ideal - through my writings? "

Here's an old poem of mine - railway theme again - in which I think I'm saying (of myself):-
"Yes, I am".

HOUSE BY THE RAILWAY

When I was four we left the house with the faery track
on the bank at the bottom of the garden.
Silver rails through woodland trails
but we never went back.

At twelve a change, a switch which ran
down the road by the station scene;
matchstick men sketched in black
under a sooty sky.

My father, an artist, almost bought
a big square house which lived by the track
and was painted blue; the only dab
of colour in parallel monotone.

Eighteen, a proud house of my own
built on a hill with a tunnel for an eye;
all night in the cellar the rumble and Who?
- the house kept letting the trains run through.

A hum, a rattle. A poem swings around the track,
and I’m a shaking bridge thinking of home,
another house on a network of track
which pulls the past back;

often late, sometimes missing connections
and sometimes running bang on time.

NEW ROAD

2008-07-16T20:35:00.000+01:00

NEW ROAD

Day of the week: a road is being made
outside my window. Hot black desire is laid
in sheets, where once the farmer rubbed the soil
between fat fingers. That's covered now. Crops spoil,
left out to dry too long in the acid sun.
You can see - just there - his last words, left undone.

A magpie shrugs, heads for the lightning tree,
and mutters to himself of treachery.

© Sara Willow

UNTITLED POEM

2008-01-08T13:43:00.000Z

The moon is on the silver tree.
Orion's dagger glitters.
I sit on the entrance-stone and wait
for you, whose dreams are coins
in another place. Climb out of your window,
gallop here on a beam of light.
Carry nothing.

ZITCHI - CHAPTER 15

2007-11-18T19:58:00.000Z

Henry leads Vanna up the narrow stairs at Athena. He holds aside a sequin-encrusted black curtain to let her go first into the attic room.

As they enter, Pete springs up, looking flustered, but seems to recover immediately. He’s pleased to see Vanna, in more ways than one. He shakes Henry’s hand, then gives Vanna a bear-hug.

She jumps back, embarrassed. Is that his -? She flicks her eyes downwards to his jeans. And Henry, either unaware or doesn’t care, has just shaken hands with him. Yuck!

“Me next punter’ll be here in five,” says Pete, winking at her, “but sit down, sit down. You want me to have a look in me big ball for yer, Vee?”

“Yes, she does,” says Henry, “And so do I, if it’s not too much trouble. You know why we’ve come, of course?”

“Vanna can’t keep ‘erself away from me!” says Pete.

Vanna doesn’t know which of them is worse: Henry, who sees everything and everyone as part of his own agenda, or Pete, who’s - what? Irrepressible, that’s what he is, at least where women are concerned. I’d be better off not trusting either of them, she thinks. But she does her best when he passes her the big ball to hold, tries to clear her mind and put her energy into it.

“That’s strange,” says Pete, “I can’t see too far ahead at all. There’s nothing in here.” He gives the ball a shake. “Still nothing. Wait though - I can hear something.” He lifts it to his ear. “Now that is what I call weird. It’s not often I get sound effects through me big ball.”

“What is it?” says Vanna. Henry, meanwhile, is tapping his foot.

“I dunno exactly,” says Pete, “But it’s like a - a whooshing noise. Like the wind, maybe. Can you hear it, Gel?”

She shakes her head. “What does it mean?”

He peers into the ball again. “I dunno that, Gel, neither. But what I do say is this: When you hear it - sometime soon it’ll be - then you’ll know.”

A buzzer sounds. “That’s me next punter,” says Pete, “so I’m afraid I’ll have to love yer and leave yer, ladies and gents.”

Henry’s glowering at him, his mouth in a sulk.

“Sorry,” Pete shrugs, “Nothin’ I can do. Come round one evening, if yer like.”

Vanna realises she’d wanted to ask Pete about Henry, but there wasn’t time, and anyway, could she have asked anything with Henry in the room? Probably not. But back at the house she can see he’s still upset, though whether because he didn’t get his reading, or whether because of all that stuff in the Sun Cafe about Zitchi, she’s not sure. Both, probably.

And ‘upset’ is an understatement, she thinks. Henry’s almost beside himself with urgency. He presses her to go back on the board again before she’s even got her coat off. He badly needs to know, she thinks. She wonders how Pam managed to stand up to him.

“I’m tired though, Henry! Just let me have an hour’s kip, then I’ll go back on, I promise.”

“You need coffee, young lady,” says Henry.

She tries to be firm, she does. But it’s almost as if he thinks she won’t do it if he lets her sleep. Ot that it’ll be too late, or something. Zitchi’s been gone four hundred years, she thinks. Another hour shouldn’t make much difference. But wisely, she doesn’t speak these thoughts out loud.

“Coffee,” he says, “and then we’ll talk to Ellie. All right, all right, if the coffee doesn’t wake you up, I’ll let you lie down. I promise. Now come on.”

So that’s me, putting my foot down against Henry, thinks Vanna. She still takes her time with the coffee though, while he wears a highway in the drawing room carpet, adjusts each letter by a micron, does his Big Bad Wolf huffing and puffing thing. She stifles a giggle. He’s a sweetie, really, she thinks, and he can’t help it if he’s totally bonkers. Half-way down her coffee, she gives up and sits at the table.

Henry wastes no time. “Ellie, do you have Zitchi there? Can I speak with her?”

And, incredibly, she’s here. But the glass moves very slowly.

MY NAME IS ZITCHI AGAROZ ECSED

“Is it really you, Zitchi?” says Henry.

YES I COME FROM ECSED IN HUNGARY
MY NAME MEANS A CIRCLE OF OAK TREES IN A WOOD

Vanna has no idea at all what to make of this. Is it real? No idea. If not real, then what? No idea.

“Are you here, in this room, Zitchi my love?” says Henry.

NO
I AM IN FEAR AND IN PAIN AND I CANNOT LEAVE HERE

“My love! Where is ‘here’?”

HERE IS CJESTHE CASTLE
IT IS COLD AND DARK HERE
BATHORY IS HERE

Henry is crying. For a moment he seems unable to speak.

I HAVE WAITED FOUR HUNDRED YEARS FOR YOU

“I know, my darling. Hush now. We’ll ask Ellie what to do; she’ll know how to get you out of there.”

BYE

“Do you think she’s tired?” says Vanna.

“I think so,” he says, and his voice is softer than she’s ever heard it. “She’s probably weak, and oppressed by Bathory.”

“And it’s the first time she’s appeared on the board, isn’t it? I mean, she never came through in your sessions with Pam?”

“That’s true,” he says.

The glass moves.

YOU SHALL NOT HAVE HER SHE IS MINE

“Bathory!” says Henry, shocked, though it had to happen sooner or later.

YES

“Bathory, you are not wanted here. I command you to leave at once, and do not return!” says Vanna.

The glass is still, and the room feels empty.

“Has she gone?”

“Yes,” says Vanna, “I’m pretty sure of it. Don’t mention her name again though, not while we’re on the board; she might think we’re summoning her.”

“Let’s get Ellie back on here, quick!” says Henry, “Get some semblance of normality.”

Vanna laughs, “Normality?”

“Ellie, are you there?” he says.

ELLIE

“Thank heavens for that. Am I glad to see you, Ells old thing. Now, what’s the plan? How am I going to get Zitchi back?”

YOU NEED A ZINA

“Azina? is that a name?”

NO
A - the glass pauses - ZINA

“What’s a ‘zina’ then, when it’s at home? No doubt you’re going to tell me.”

ZINA IS A HUNGARIAN WORD
IT MEANS MANY THINGS

“Such as?” says Henry.

SHINING VESSEL
GOING BACK
GUEST
STRANGER
HELPER
HOSPITAL
GOOD HOST
SECRET SPIRIT

“She’s talking about metempsychosis, isn’t she?” says Vanna.

YES
NEED A WOMAN IN THIS TIME AND PLACE TO BECOME THE ZINA
HENRY YOU MARRY ZINA
ZITCHI WILL ENTER ZINA

“Right,” says Henry, “I’d already worked some of that out with Pam. Hence Olga. She’ll do, won’t she?”

PROBLEMS WITH OLGA

“I know there are. Like her visa application.”

YOU CAN GO TO SEE THE MEP

“Yes, yes, I know. Let’s not go down that road again, not for the moment anyway. Let’s just say, Ellie - imagine, if you will - that we can fast-forward, and I’m holding Olga’s visa in my hand. Will she come? Because there seems to be some doubt in the matter.”

SHE MIGHT NOT

“Go on.”

SHE WILL NOT WANT TO BE THE ZINA

“That’s easy then. I won’t tell her.”

“You can’t do that!” says Vanna, “You have to tell her what she’s letting herself in for.”

“I don’t see why,” says Henry, “I mean, she’s the one who wants to marry me to get herself out of Russia, get herself a British passport, get herself a better life as a British doctor. She doesn’t love me, she’s using me; I’ve always been fully aware of that. She uses me, I use her. Perfectly acceptable transaction.”

“What do you think about all of that, Ellie?” says Vanna.

ETYMOLOGY OF WORD ZINA ENCOMPASSES CONCEPT OF WILLINGNESS
RESCUE OF ZITCHI MAY NOT WORK IF ZINA IS UNWILLING

“A-hah!” says Henry, “May not, or will not?”

MAY NOT

“Well, that’s our answer then. Don’t breathe a word to Olga and cross our fingers that it works. Worth a try.”

ONE CHANCE ONLY IN YOUR LIFETIME

“Now, how did I guess you were going to say that, Ellie?” says Henry, “All right, so what if I do tell Olga what she’s letting herself in for? I could choose my words carefully, play it down a bit, that sort of thing.”

OLGA HORRIFIED
WILL NOT COME

“Khhff!” says Henry, throwing his hands up in the air, “What’s the point? Why am I even putting myself through this? It was you who suggested Olga in the first place, Ellie, and you know it, back on Pam’s board.”

NOT ME ANOTHER SPIRIT
YOU ASK QS WE DO OUR BEST

“You’re right, it was Pam’s guide. Whatever. And I am grateful, truly I am. But where is Zitchi in all of this? What am I going to do to save her, if Olga’s no use to me?”

“Henry, I’m getting really tired,” says Vanna.

“Yes, yes, just a little longer. I can’t stop now.”

THERE ARE OTHER ZINAS

“There are? For Christ’s sake, tell me who!”

THERE MAY BE TWO OTHERS
ONE IS VANNA

Vanna skips a beat. “Maybe -” she says.

“And the other?” says Henry, ignoring her.

NEW WOMAN AT WORK SOON
YOU DON’T KNOW HER YET

“I need a wee,” says Vanna.

Henry sighs. “All right, Ellie, thank you. We’ll leave it there for now. Any final words of wisdom, before we break?”

BEANSIDHE
BYE

“Bean sid he?” says Vanna, “What’s that?”

But Ellie’s gone, and the glass is still.

ZITCHI - CHAPTER 14

2007-11-18T19:57:00.000Z

Hungary, 1590

Almost twelve months have passed since their daughter left Ecsed, and Fredek is worried. His wife has taken to her bed-chamber and is refusing all sustenance, even a thin gruel, so distressed is she by the rumours. Fredek thinks the stories may well be of no consequence; they are probably spun from peasant unrest at the recent raising of taxes. The Turks have much to answer for, with their bloody - and expensive - wars. And there is always peasant unrest over something.

And is it not true that the Countess Erzebet’s Uncle is the King of Poland, or was, until a handful of years ago? Two more of her Uncles are Voivods of Transylvania. She must be beyond suspicion. No, the rumours cannot be true, he thinks; it is not possible for blood as blue as hers to turn bad. He will not countenance it.

There are other stories too, and in these, he does believe. The time Erzebet re-homed a destitute family in one of her villages, when their house burned. Another time, when she supported a young woman who had been raped and beaten, personally nursed her until her strength returned, tracked down the villain and ensured he was hung. She must be beyond suspicion.

And yet, truth or lies aside, he fears his beloved Margareta will starve herself to death if she does not receive news of Zitchi soon. Perhaps it would have been better, even, if he had allowed her to marry the servant. The boy is honorable enough. They would at least have known where she was, and Margareta would still be well. Fredek sits in the library by candlelight, considering. Finally, he takes out his quill and writes. He presses the letter with the family seal - an oak and the letters A and E - then sends to the Lodge for Mihaly.

Even if the news is good, he thinks, it may be too late for Margareta.

Mihaly has heard the rumours too, with mounting concern for his beloved. He remembers that day in the woods not long after her departure, and the feeling he had then that some thing was not well. But that was all it was; a feeling, not a certainty. Even so, how he wishes he had acted upon it then.

Two things stopped him. Firstly, he had neither money nor a horse of his own for the journey. The other reason was that, although he is an honorable man, Mihaly is a servant. As such, he is unused to making his own direction. Rather, he waits to be shown or told what to do. Where Zitchi led, he would follow, but once she had gone he was lost. Even so, he curses himself for a fool.

It is late at night when her father calls him to the library. The room - so full of memories for Mihaly - looks different in the candlelight; more sombre. He accepts the letter, and the mission, with a lightness in his heart that he has not felt since she left. But his mood soon changes when Fredek explains to him for a second time just what he expects him to do.

He will leave at dawn. Besides the letter, there is a map, with towns and villages marked where he may rest his horse overnight, or change the horse, if needed. There is more money than Mihaly has seen before. There are miles, and more miles for him to ride, and this is the cold time of year, so there are furs. Fredek would go himself if he could, but he cannot leave Margareta, you understand?

Mihaly understands. It is up to him now.

The document is signed with her name and a drop of her blood. Although her limbs ache and her wounds weep, Zitchi is joyous in the certain knowledge that soon, she will leave this place and return home. She pictures their faces; Mama, Papa, Mihaly. She weeps hot tears of relief.

Erzebet smiles. Does Zitchi think, then, that she will part with her darling so lightly? “Tomorrow,” she promises, but tonight, for the last time, Zitchi must share her bed.

I am tired, so tired of this, thinks Zitchi. She is tired of everything she has seen, of all those other girls who came, fresh-faced and clean, only to be broken into smaller and smaller pieces until they turned grey. Once they were nothing, actual death had no meaning. She is tired of the stenches and of the screams, of hearing herself scream and not knowing how to stop. And the pain. She is tired of all the pain and cannot bear, any more, to look at it, cannot bear to look at the ways, all of the ways in which it is possible to die. “No more,” she says.

“Yes more,” says Erzebet, as she bites Zitchi’s fading face in the big bed. “And no, you cannot go home. Did you really think for a moment that I would let you go? You are mine.”

Zitchi is far, far beyond being able to feel shock at this. And no, she didn’t really think. The only hope worth holding now is that Erzebet will allow her to die soon.

As the sun begins to rise Erzebet leaves Zitchi on her own to regain her strength, or some of it. This is the way she plays her game of blood. Play, rest. Eat, sleep. Drink, re-fill. But even though Zitchi’s blood has been the sweetest so far, everything must end. Erzebet will allow her a day or two to herself - alone with just the thoughts in her head - and then she will play the end-game. The end of all hope, for most of these maidens. The cage.

“Dorko! Ilona!”

It is almost three hundred miles by road from Ecsed to Castle Cjesthe, avoiding, as one must, the zone to the south which is full of Turks. In places, the roads are frozen, rocky and wanting repair.

It is almost a week before Mihaly crosses the River Váh and reaches Lesethe, the nearest village to Cjesthe. Lesethe is set at the foot of the White Carpathians, and from the village centre he gazes upwards, sees the castle above him like a giant’s tooth on a rocky outcrop, glowering. He stables his horse at the inn, buys food and attempts to strike up conversations with the Innkeeper, stall-holders, anyone. No one will say anything about the castle or the Countess. Would any of you, if she owned your homes, your land, your lives? Time then, to deliver Fredek’s letter.

Mihaly hires another horse and rides south six miles to Piest’ány, a large town on the same side of the river. There, he finds a distant cousin of the Thurzó family, Gáspo, and hands him the letter.

ZITCHI - CHAPTER 13

2007-11-15T21:16:00.000Z

Thursday, crack of sparrow, and Henry’s on the phone to the OPCS woman. “Did you have a good holiday?” he asks her.

“Yes, thank you,” she says, a little stiffly.

After some preamble he asks her Ellie’s question: How many British visas have been granted to Russians in the last twelve months?

She’s not keen on answering him, he can tell. First she says that such a request should be applied for in writing, and he should expect it to take at least fourteen days, because they have a backlog. And anyway, she’s not sure if she has the correct information to hand at the moment, and she’s just returned from Spain, and her colleagues have been using her desk while she was away, and and and...

In other words, she doesn’t want to tell him. (Sensitive material, or jobs-worth?) But Henry has had a lifetime of getting his own way, so he’s a persuasive chap, and he’s used to arguing the legal toss - it’s his job. Item by item he deconstructs her excuses. He clinches it when he reaches into his armoury - remember Henry’s armoury? - and uses Sympathy with a capital S. Oh, and Flattery, big time.

Vanna hears the conversation. She’s eavesdropping whilst trying and or pretending not to - come on, we all do it - and she thinks he’s overdoing it, laying it on with a trowel; the woman will never fall for it. But she does.

And the answer to the question is: None. Zero. Zilch.

Henry’s taken aback, obviously, and he asks the woman if she’s sure, and she is, and he asks her Why, for heaven’s sake? And she says she doesn’t know why, they just collect and store the data.

Henry sits with his elbows on the Ouija table and his head in both hands. “No wonder Ellie said there was no point,” he says. “But why none at all? The Cold War ended. The legislation’s in place. You’re entitled to have your wife living with you in Britain.”

“I wonder whether it’s the same for people in other countries,” says Vanna, “or just Russia?”

“I should have asked her for the stats for France,” he says, “or Italy, or Poland, or Outer-Fucking-Mongolia. I’ll bet the bureaucrats give visas to eye-tyes.”

“But it’s kind of irrelevant, though,” says Vanna. “Though - you don’t think it would be worth going ahead with your application anyway? I mean, just because there were no Russians allowed in last year... Maybe this year they’ll start issuing them?”

“I doubt it,” he says. “It’s as Ellie says. No point. But what am I going to do? Olga’s essential. I need her; without her as my wife, it won’t work.”

“What won’t work?” asks Vanna, but he doesn’t seem to hear her, caught up as he is in his own misery.

Vanna feels sorry for him, she does. But she’s just realised that, actually, she feels somewhat relieved at the prospect of no Olga. She’s starting to wonder whether Henry’s the one Pete saw in his crystal ball. There’s something about him; his vulnerability, perhaps. Yes, I could fall for you, Henry, she thinks.

He’s clearly doing his own head in, so she decides to try to cheer him up. She makes two coffees and brings them through. He’s sitting where she left him, absently tugging his fingers through his hair. She sets up the Ouija, deals the letter-cards around the table edge. “Move your elbows for L, M, and N,” she says, “We’re going to talk to Ellie.”

“What possible good will that do?” he says.

“Who knows? She might have a way. Come on.”

“Ellie, I’ve just been speaking to the OPCS, and it’s not looking good for Olga,” says Henry.

I KNOW (says Ellie) NO VISAS ISSUED LAST YEAR TO RUSSIANS

“That’s what they said. But how could you know?”

I KNOW MANY SECRETS

“I’m beginning to understand that, Ellie. But why none at all? Is it coincidence? An anomaly, perhaps? Or policy?

POLICY

“And is the situation going to improve, do you think?”

NOT IN THE NEAR FUTURE

“Then what am I going to do? How am I to get the visa?”

THERE IS ANOTHER WAY

For the first time since the phone call, Henry sits up straight. “Really?” he says. “What’s that? If you think you’ve got a plan, Ellie, I’m all ears.”

MEP

“What’s ‘mep’?” says Vanna.

MEMBER OF EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT
GO SEE MEP FOR SOUTH EAST
ASK HER TO SORT VISA

“Ellie, I don’t mean to be difficult,” says Henry, “But that simply won’t work. Firstly, MEP’s are busy and important people, so they’re unlikely to be able to spare the time for a hack lawyer like me. Secondly, it’s not their job to process visa applications. Thirdly - is there a thirdly? - oh yes, thirdly, what makes you think an MEP would succeed when normal channels are bound to fail?”

GO SEE MEP FOR SOUTH EAST
HER NAME IS CAROLYN DOVER
IT WILL WORK AND YOU WILL GET THE VISA

“Carolyn Dover, hmm? I can check that out easily enough, see whether the name fits the seat. Why would she agree to see me though?”

SHES ALREADY MET YOU

“Really? I don’t remember meeting her. When was this?”

DINNER PARTY AT THE LINKS LAST YEAR WITH YOUR WIFE

“Ex-wife, Ellie. Christ!” he says, clapping his hand to his forehead, “That wasn’t the night she told everyone about the brains, was it?”

NO
DIFFERENT NIGHT

“That’s a relief,” says Henry, laughing. “I can’t place Carolyn Dover though.”

This time, the glass shoots off before he’s finished speaking. Vanna’s noticed that today the words are coming much faster than before.

SHE WILL REMEMBER YOU WHEN YOU RING HER FOR AN APPOINTMENT

“And she’ll give me one?”

NO BUT SHE’LL GIVE YOU AN APPOINTMENT AS SOON AS YOU LIKE

Vanna smirks, but the joke goes over Henry’s head. He purses his lips, considering. “It’s worth a try, I suppose,” he says. “Wait though. Getting an appointment is well and good, but what am I going to say to the woman? I don’t know her. She’s not a personal friend or anything. I might recognise her when I see her but that’s not going to be enough. Why should she want to help me? Assuming she’s in a position to, which I doubt.”

I KNOW MANY SECRETS

“Yes, old bean, you said. Do try not to repeat yourself. Are you going to tell me one of them?”

TELL HER YOU KNOW ABOUT GILES CLINTON BROWNE

“Who’s he?” says Vanna.

HOME SECRETARY

“Ah, right,” says Henry, “Of course he is. What about him?”

HES GIVING HER ONE

Both of them laugh. “Nice turn of phrase, Ellie. Very lady-like. But so what if he is? This day and age, that sort of thing goes on all the time. Nobody bothers about it. Are you honestly suggesting -” The glass speeds across the table.

BOTH OF THEM ARE MARRIED WITH CHILDREN
THERE ARE OTHER ISSUES TOO
IT WOULD BE VERY DISTRESSING IF IT GOT IN THE PAPERS

“Ellie, I’m shocked,” says Vanna, reproachfully.

“”Right,” says Henry, “So let me get this staight, Ellie. What you’re suggesting is that I go and see this Carolyn Dover, and ask her to wangle an under-the-counter visa for Olga, no questions asked. If she won’t help me, I slip it into the conversation that I know about her and the Home Secretary. A nod’s as good as a wink to a blind bat, and all that malarkey. If that doesn’t have the desired effect, I then insinuate that the pair of them could soon be looking at themselves in the tabloids. What makes you think a newspaper editor would even believe me? I’ve not got a shred of evidence; I don’t think the word of a disembodied spirit on a Ouija board would quite cut it, do you? The whole fiasco is preposterous in the extreme. You’re bonkers, Ellie, you really are: totally fucking bonkers.”

YOU WOULDNT HAVE TO ACTUALLY GO TO THE PAPERS
MOST LIKELY SHE WILL WANT TO HELP AS SOON AS
YOU SAY ABOUT HER AND THE HOME SEC

“And what if she calls my bluff? I don’t think I can bring myself to do it, I really don’t.”

SHE WONT CALL YOUR BLUFF

“And how is she going to swing the visa, even? That sort of thing isn’t within her remit.”

SHE CANT BUT THE HOME SEC CAN

“Ellie, I simply don’t believe this,” says Henry, leaning back in his chair. “I don’t even believe I’m having this conversation with you. It’s cellars and ‘X marks the spot’ all over again”.

THE COINS ARE THERE I CAN SEE THEM
YOU ASKED ME FOR ANOTHER WAY TO GET THE VISA

Henry sighs. It’s been a long day, and it’s not yet ten in the morning. It’s true, he did ask her - for which I can only blame myself, he thinks - and she’s given him the answer. An answer, at least. But his head aches. “I need some time to think about this,” he says.

Good, thinks Vanna; he’s going to finish now. She feels tired. Not physically, but her mind’s all tangled up in tentacles. “I could do with a break,” she says, putting her hands in her lap.

“All right,” says Henry, “but just one more question before we knock it on the head. Are you still there, Ellie?”

YES

“Good. Look, assuming I manage to get Olga’s visa - by whatever means - will she come? Will she marry me? Because as you probably know, Ellie, according to Vanna the tarot said that maybe she won’t make that final journey.”

PROBABLY NOT

“What? So now you’re saying she won’t come anyway? Then why go through all this blasted hoo-hah of getting her a visa?”

THERE IS A CHANCE BUT ONLY TINY
YOU HAVE TO TRY
YOU MUST KEEP TRYING

The glass stops, then starts again.

YOU OWE IT TO ZITCHI

“Who’s Zitchi?” says Vanna.

“I’m taking you to lunch,” he says, “and we can talk then. You can call in to see Peter at his shop afterwards if you like.”

At the Sun Cafe, Henry begins his story.

“Zitchi is, or was, a young Hungarian noblewoman who lived in the late sixteenth century. She was probably only fourteen or fifteen when she was invited to the court of the Countess Erzebet Bathory, to be her Lady-in-Waiting.”

“Erzebet Bathory - but that’s the woman in that book of yours.”

“Yes. Bathory later became known as ‘The Bloody Lady of Cjesthe’, ‘The Blood Countess’, and ‘Countess Dracula’; this last name because she spent her childhood at her parents’ castle at Ecsed, and Ecsed is relatively near to Transylvania, home of the Dracula legend, of course. In her lifetime she tortured and murdered hundreds of young women, many of whom were from noble families. Some historians say there may have been as many as six hundred killed, but nobody knows the true number, nor most of the names. Zitchi was one of them.”

“If nobody knows the names, or most of them, anyway, how do you know?” says Vanna.

“Two reasons. Firstly, her name is mentioned - very briefly and in passing, admittedly - in the book, which is based on the records of Bathory’s trial, many letters, and other papers. In the book, the way it’s worded is that she probably wasn’t killed but might have been, and since her family were silent on the matter, no one is sure either way. The point is made that if their daughter had been one of Bathory’s victims then surely they would have spoken up, but they didn’t. Personally I think that there might have been something else at work, such as politics, or more probably, fear. My belief is that they said nothing because they were afraid.”

“So you don’t really know if this Zitchi was a victim or not, then?” says Vanna.

“On the contrary. I have proof that she was.”

Vanna raises her eyebrows, makes a silent question with her eyes. He sips his wine.

“I acquired the book when I was at Cambridge, I don’t remember how. I didn’t get round to reading it until early this year, but when I did, Zitchi’s name leapt out at me. I had a strange feeling that I’d heard her name before, and that it held great significance for me. But I had no idea why. It’s not a common name, certainly not in this country, and I’m sure I hadn’t come across it in the everyday sense. I carried on with my work and put Zitchi out of my mind. But sometimes at night, just as I was falling asleep, her name would come into my head. Then after two or three months of this her face would appear as well, and it was a face I recognised.”

“You actually saw her face in your bedroom? Who was it?”

“No, her face was in my mind. And I don’t mean I recognised her from somewhere else, I mean I knew that I knew her. It’s difficult to explain. I realised that she was trying to speak to me, so I began studying the occult every spare moment I had. I thought it might help, but as you know, I do not have the gift. Then one day I went into Artemis - that’s the New Age shop in the High Street - and met Peter. He was giving Tarot readings, and he was able to give me some information about her. Not much though, I have to say; his readings are usually a hotch-potch of business advice, family, money, what-have-you. All good stuff and useful in its own way, but not what I needed the most. Some Thursdays he made no mention of Zitchi at all, even though I stressed how important she was. At other times there would be a brief mention, some snippet of little consequence.

“But, through Peter, I met Pam, and Pam is a Medium Extraordinaire. I had weekly sessions with her on the Ouija Board for several weeks, and I learnt so much about Zitchi -”

Henry’s voice fades; he is lost for words at once. Vanna watches him gaze at the space above her head. Like there’s something there a long way off, and yet he can see it clearly. Something beautiful. Or someone.

He returns to their table in the Sun Cafe, discovers his wine-glass with surprise, held in his hand halfway between the table and his face. The waiter arrives with their food, and they begin eating.

“Well, anyway,” he says, clearing his throat, “I now know that she’s real. I know it. And I know that I’m in love with her. But she is in a terrible place, and in such pain.”

My God, thinks Vanna. This is something she’s never come across before. “What I don’t understand,” she says, “is how she’s able to contact you, how you can know her and be in love with her, when she died - what was it - four hundred years ago?”

“Yes, about that,” says Henry, “Pam says it was around 1590. But her spirit can’t rest, you see, so that’s why she’s here.”

“ But if there were - hundreds you said - of women murdered by Bathory, why aren’t more of them here, in spirit? Why just Zitchi? And why you; why does she want you?”

“I don’t fully understand it myself,” he admits, spreading his hands. “But Zitchi is special in countless ways. And the main difference between her and all those other poor girls was that something additional happened to her before she died. Something worse, much worse even, than the torture.”

“What was that?” says Vanna.

“Pam discovered, through the board, that Zitchi was special to Bathory. She was the first noblewoman to be captured and tortured. Before her, Bathory had cut her teeth on peasants, quite literally, I understand.”

Vanna shudders.

“Because she was Bathory’s first victim of noble blood, Bathory kept the torture going for longer, kept her alive in an ever-weakening state, and Zitchi watched some of the later girls die. Pam thinks that Bathory was in love with her, in her own depraved way. She may have made Zitchi share her bed, although Zitchi remained a vigin in the strictest sense of the word. That was important, because Bathory believed the blood of virgins, and especially high-born virgins, had magical properties, and so she would bathe in it.”

Vanna has stopped eating. She doesn’t think she can finish her lunch. “It’s hard to understand how a human being could be so evil,” she says, “especially a woman.”

“I agree with you,” says Henry, although he seems to be managing his own lunch just fine. “Anyway, where was I? Oh, yes. Well, by the time poor Zitchi was near to death, she had suffered at Bathory’s hand for months, much longer than many of the others ever did. And still Bathory carried on. Apparently, Zitchi begged her to spare her, but not only that, she begged to be allowed to go home to her family. And Bathory replied that because she loved Zitchi she would indeed spare her, on one condition.”

Henry’s finished his food now, and is searching for the waiter. Does Vanna want pudding? No? Or coffee perhaps? He orders two coffees.

“What was the condition?” prompts Vanna.

“The condition was,” says Henry, “that Bathory would spare Zitchi’s life and let her go home, in return for Zitchi’s soul. So that when, eventually, Zitchi did die, Bathory could be with her for eternity.”

“But that’s appalling! I wouldn’t do it!”

“Maybe so, but you don’t know how you’d react in that situation. Imagine extreme pain for months and months, and the terror. You’d probably sign anything.”

Vanna’s silent.

“Now,” says Henry, “I don’t know the process by which Bathory got hold of Zitchi’s soul; all I know is that she did. There may have been a ritual of some kind, or a document. I don’t know. What I do know is that once she had it - Zitchi’s soul, that is - Bathory went back on her word and killed her anyway.”

“Never trust a psychopath, that’s what I always say,” says Vanna, in an attempt to lighten the mood.

The attempt backfires. “It’s no joking matter,” says Henry, huffily. “Because of Bathory, Zitchi is still captive, and in torment.”

“Sorry,” she says. “Did you find out anything else, on the board? Did you manage to speak with Zitchi herself?”

“No, sadly not. After a few weekly sessions, Pam had to go into hospital for a woman’s operation. She was quite ill for some time. Then, just as she was beginning to get better, Peter found himself another woman, and now they’re going through a divorce. It’s a damned nuisance from my point of view, because I still have lots of questions. About Zitchi’s early life, for example. About why she’s relying on me, of all people, and not another man. What’s special about me? Also, I’d like to find out more detail about how I’m going to save her.”

“Save her?”

“Yes. I’m determined to do it this time.”

“What do you mean, ‘this time’?”

“I don’t know what I mean. Sometimes I get a sense of deja vu.”

“Everyone gets that though,” says Vanna.

“You’re probably right,” he says.

“So then, how are you going to save her?”

“It’s complex. Very complex. Do you remember me mentioning metempsychosis?”

“Ye-es,” says Vanna.

“Well, I need someone to take Zitchi’s place, only not exactly. As I said, it’s complicated. But anyway, that’s where Olga comes in.”

“Olga? What’s she got to do with it?”

“The metempsychosis. Come on, you know what the word means; I saw you looking it up in the dictionary,” says Henry.

Vanna hadn’t known he had been watching her.

ZITCHI - CHAPTER 12

2007-11-15T15:40:00.000Z

Hungary, 1589

There are many other girls, but none so entrancing as the raven-haired Zitchi, thinks Mihaly, as he steers his bay through the narrowing wooded paths. Rings of sunlight pierce the dusk between the leaves. The mare jumps ice-chunked streams with ease, the muscles beneath its skin rippling in the yellow gloom.

He remembers her as a baby, swaddled against the cold as his mother carried her from the big house to their lodge at the gate. How his mother nursed her in their only chair by the wood stove, while he clung to her skirts. How he wondered at the infant’s shock of fair hair, which later fell out in wisps and grew back dark.

He remembers the kindness and gentility of her parents, who never spoke harshly to her, nor to him. How, one exciting day, they said he could come to the library in the big house, sometimes, so their daughter might practise her French and German conversation. How he hated Zitchi’s governess, her narrow back like a rod, the whap of her stick if he got his lessons wrong. But fear was a good teacher, and in the end he learnt well, though his mind was never as nimble as Zitchi’s.

Zitchi: the shape of her name in his mouth. When was it, that moment when he knew beyond doubt that he loved her? And did she love him then? (No, that came later.) They were in the library conjugating French verbs, and the revelation hit him all in a rush, so he scribbled the words on her slate: Je t’aime. She scrubbed it out quickly with her cuff, looked up guiltily at the lurking governess. Said nothing.

Mihaly urges his horse on, even though there is barely a path now. The darkening wood suits his mood. Ah me, he thinks. But he knows there is no point moping at her father’s refusal; it is not seemly for a Lady to marry her servant. The world turns. But the miles, the miles, and the forests between them, keep him from sleeping.

But. He cannot conceive of a lifetime without her. She gave him comfort when his mother died, held his arm at the graveside. Does she think of him when she wakes? Does she dream? Suddenly he has a sense of her frailty, her transience. Is there anyone who will care for her? Is she cold where she is, in that hulking stone castle, way, way away in the cruel mountains? Dare he follow her?

Mihaly turns his horse around, and presently, he reaches the edge of the wood. He looks up: a crescent moon has risen. Do you watch the moon, where you are? he thinks. Do you know that the same moon you see, so do I? Does that thought stir your blood?

There are many other girls, and Erzebet has ways. She has her own connections, those of her husband, those of her mother and father and of her sisters and brother. When you think of it, the whole of the Magyar nobility is an extended family, criss-crossing the kingdom like a net from Csaktornya to Ecsed.

There are many other girls, also, in the Viennese court. Most of them have been properly educated in the manner of the day, so that even if they cannot speak Hungarian, they are bound to be fluent in French. Erzebet has spoken French since childhood.

Erzebet’s ways include Dorko and Ilona, and other servants who know far better than to defy her bidding. Until now, the crones have only obtained peasants and needlewomen for her, it is true. But with a little elocution she is sure they may also approach the nobility. They have her absolute authority, after all, for every family in Hungary knows the name of the Countess Erzebet. The word of a wizened old crone is a rune, when that word is Bathory.

Zitchi, the first of many other girls, looks up at the crescent moon over Cjesthe. The moon is in her inscrutable phase, and says nothing.

Zitchi reaches with three fingers to trace the furrows on her face. She touches the newly-formed crusts; the surrounding skin feels puffy and hot. She cannot comprehend why Erzebet struck out at her; one minute she was attending in her bed-chamber and the next... But afterwards, that terrible smile on Erzebet’s face - what was it? A bubble of bliss, but before that, what? Discovery? Enlightenment? She does not know, but it chills her like the creeping dark.

There are dungeons cut into the rock beneath Castle Cjesthe. From somewhere under the mountain, you can hear water trickling. It freezes into ice-seams, then melts in the warmth of the jasmine oil lamps. When the lamps are taken away, it freezes again in the deep dark. Ice, water. Freeze, seep, flow.

Tonight, the lamps are alight and flickering along the wet grey walls. Jasmine is a sickly-sweet smell, pervasive and strong, cloying. Even so, it cannot cover that other stench. If you have not smelt the collapse of flesh as it drops from the bone - and Sarika hasn’t - you cannot imagine it, and believe me, you don’t want to. But the hot stink of it gets behind your eyes, in your nose and your throat, makes you retch. It shrieks of ruin, of defilement, of spoiling and sinking, and of the end of all hope.

In one dungeon, suspended from the ceiling, there is an iron cage. It is lined with blades which are sharpened daily. The cage - from knife-tip to knife-tip - is the measure of a girl, standing.

Sarika has bruises on bruises, and is clearly weakened by all that has happened to her in the few short weeks since she came to Cjesthe. Dorko leads her, naked and shackled, to the door of the cage. There is a brazier, and there is a red hot poker.

Then there is a girl in a cage.

The Lady of These Ruins is not revolted by the all-pervasive stink of putrefaction, rather, she embraces it. She enters the room, an apparition in a pale robe. Ilona winds the pulley and raises the girl, in ceremonial fashion, to the ceiling. Slowly, silently, Erzebet sits on a footstool under the cage.

Ilona and Dorko dance around the bars. Each brandishes a poker, and there are others cooking in the brazier. They taunt the cowering girl, jabbing at her with fiery iron. When she recoils, her skin splits open on the blades. Her blood drips. Then it splashes. Then it spurts onto Erzebet, who receives the supplication in silence, her eyes glazed.

When at last Erzebet recovers from her trance, a transmutation has taken place; her white robe has become a red robe. And the cage contains a corpse, slumped, impaled.

There are names, and then there are no names. In between, the names get lost, remain unspoken. Except, for a while, by families who wonder and wait, but then less, and then less, and then never.

And then there are no names.

ZITCHI - CHAPTER 11

2007-11-13T04:52:00.000Z

Henry wants them to go on the board again later, predictably, but Vanna’s not having any. She refuses point blank, quotes Pam’s rules. He sulks like a petulant child. She offers to cook him dinner. He refuses. It gets later and later, and in the end he orders a Chinese takeaway, and produces a couple of bottles of wine from the cellar. Vanna’s no idea what kind they are - when he announces their heritage it’s all dutch to her - but they look old. Dusty, anyway. “Delicious,” she says.

Henry grins, and rattles off a bunch of wine history, geography too, probably. He’s warming up again bit by bit, with the wine. He starts telling her funny stories about his ex-wife and her constant obsession with swanky dinner parties. Vanna giggles; the wine’s getting to her too.

“I once told my wife that it had been scientifically proven that men and women had different-sized brains,” he says, “but she didn’t believe me. I told her, no, it’s true, seriously, scientists have found out that the male brain is significantly larger than - and therefore superior to - the female brain, no really, it was in The Lancet only the other week. That’s why most scientists are male, obviously. Q.E.D. But she wouldn’t have it. Reckoned it was just down to larger body size, if it was true at all.”

“So what did you say then? Did you manage to convince her?”

“I said that some human biologist or other proved - with a gigantic statistical sample - that even given the larger male frame, the male brain was still bigger than the female brain, proportionally. But I think the clincher was when I told her that they’d also found out that the negroid brain was smallest of all, even smaller than a white woman’s brain. She believed me then.”

“No! That’s terrible, Henry! And completely untrue.” Vanna’s horrified.

He grins. “I know,” he says, “Of course it’s bloody untrue. But I was sick of her banging on all the time about how clever she was and how much better than me she reckoned she was in every conceivable way, and how she could go on Mastermind for goodness sake. She was always going on about bloody Mastermind. Funny thing was -” he stops to light his cigar, takes a couple of puffs, “Funny thing was, she didn’t mention it for ages, but then a month or so later we were at a dinner party, massive house, big table, must have been twenty or thirty VIP’s there, including a judge and the local mayor, and she just came out with it.”

“What, you mean she -?”

“Yes. She was talking to the judge at the time, if I remember. She said, ‘Did you know, some famous scientists have recently proved that the negro brain is significantly smaller than the caucasian brain?’ and the room went utterly quiet. Everyone stopped eating, fork halfway to mouth, and looked at her. And someone said, ‘Mrs Tunstall, that is an appalling thing to say! Where on earth did you get such a piece of abject nonsense?’ And then she said, ‘Oh, my husband told me,’ and then everyone stopped looking at her and looked at me instead. And no one would talk to either of us for the rest of the evening. Except the judge, and he said, ‘Good for you, dear boy, I have long believed that to be true.’”

“Well, that just serves you right, Henry,” says Vanna. He can be quite nasty, she thinks.

Henry’s grinning like a schoolboy.

Later though, she senses his mood darkening again. She tries to think of something to say to cheer him up, or at least get him talking. She looks around the room, sees his bookshelves, and wanders over to have a look. “These are all leather,” she says.

“Yes. I got some chap to bind them all for me when I was at Cambridge, got him to take off the original covers and redo them with leather and gold blocking. Don’t worry, none of them are first editions. Wasn’t all that expensive, as a matter of fact, and they go well with the panelling in here, don’t you think? Have a proper look, if you like. Read anything you like while you’re here.”

She looks at the titles, takes the odd one or two down. They’re beautifully bound, though it’s a shame they all look the same, she thinks. Most of them are classics. “Have you read all of these, Henry?”

“Most of them, at some stage,” he says. “Those top two shelves are the Occult ones.”

“What’s this one?”

He narrows his eyes. “Can’t see from here,” he says, “What’s the title?”

“Necronomicon.” She hears his hissed intake of breath.

“I know I said you may read anything, and it’s up to you of course, but I shouldn’t read that one if I were you. Seriously. Very dangerous book. Very disturbing.”

“Disturbing in what way?”

“It’s demonic. Contains all the names of absolute power, and words which, if you say them out loud, will conjure up demons from the abyss.”

“You don’t take that seriously, do you?”

“I most certainly do, and so should you, if you’re sensible. Nietzsche said, ‘If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.’ The Necronomicon is the abyss in book form, or a window onto it, at least, and I should know. I keep meaning to get rid of the darned thing, get it out of the house. Evil book. No, don’t open it for Christ’s sake! Put it back on the shelf would you? Good girl.”

“What about this one next to it? The title’s ‘Erzebet Bathory’.”

“Ah, now that one’s pretty sinister as well. Not as bad as the other one, but there are some terrible things in there. Definitely not bedtime reading.”

I’m starting to see a pattern here, thinks Vanna.

She starts leafing through it. There are photos of paintings and engravings. One is entitled ‘The Cachtice portrait of Erzebet Bathory (unknown date)’. Incredible dress, she thinks, and how much must those pearls be worth, if they’re real? Another is a map of 17th Century Hungary, with hundreds of unreadable place names. She can make out ‘Moravia’ in the top left, and ‘Transilvani’ on the right, and that’s it. There is also a family tree. “Who was she?” she says.

Henry sighs. He’s on the brandy now, lying stretched out on the Chesterfield. “She was a Countess who lived in Hungary from 1560 to 1614. She was known as ‘the Blood Countess’. I’ll tell you about her, if you like, but tomorrow,” he says.

“Are you all right? You seem a bit - down.”

“It’s Olga,” he says. “I despair of ever bringing her over here. Especially if Ellie is right about there being no point in my applying for a visa. And having to wait until Thursday to find out more is killing me.”

“Do you love her very much?”

“No, I don’t, I don’t love her at all. I only met her the once, as I said, in a shabby restaurant in her home town. People like me don’t use dating agencies, least of all Russian ones, and as I said, I’m deeply ashamed to have done so. But it was a necessary evil in order to meet a woman who was suitable.”

“I don’t understand then. Isn’t she your fiancé? Why do you want to marry her if you don’t love her?”

“It’s a long story,” he says. “I will tell you about it, I promise, but not tonight, I feel too upset. Suffice to say I have an important mission for her, of which she knows nothing, and that’s the way it must stay. Actually, “important” isn’t right. It’s a vital mission, in every sense of the word. Absolutely vital.”

Vanna thinks, what is he talking about? It seems a bit unfair of him, to plan something for Olga and not tell her about it. But he’s not in a good mood, so she keeps that thought to herself. “I don’t understand,” she says, again.

He turns raises his head and turns to look at her, his black eyes gazing into hers. “Have you heard of metempsychosis?” he says.

“No,” she says, and she has to turn away from his face. She shivers. “Good night then, Henry. See you tomorrow.”

He says nothing, sweeps his hand at her dismissively.

Vanna wakes early on Wednesday, and is surprised to discover she’s slept well. She hasn’t dreamt either, or if she has, she can’t remember. She dresses quickly and goes into the drawing room, half-expecting to see Henry on the sofa where she left him. But the room is empty.

She goes over to the bookcase, and digs out a dictionary. Turns to M - mete, metempiric... metempsychosis: the transmigration of the soul, esp. the passage of the soul after death from a human or animal to some other human or animal body. From Gk. metempsychosis, from meta “change” + en “in” + psyche “soul”. Pythagorean word for trans-migration of souls at death.

What was it Henry said last night? Her mind’s still fuzzy from the glasses of red wine she had. Head-achey, even. She goes into the kitchen, finds some aspirin and knocks them back with a glass of water. She eyes the coffee machine warily, decides it’s completely unknowable, and puts the kettle on instead. Leans against the worktop, thinking. What did he say?

He was in a bad mood, she remembers. Upset about maybe not being able to bring Olga over. Needs her for his special mission. No, not special - vital, he said, and he said it twice. Doesn’t “vital” just mean “important”? Oh, and “life”, it means that too. Was he trying to say it was “life or death”? She tuts. He’s always so darned melodramatic, she thinks. And what - on this earth - has metempsychosis to do with Olga? She carries her cup of tea back into the drawing room, picks up the dictionary again, and looks up “vital”. There are several definitions, but the phrase which jumps out at her is essential to the existence.

When Vanna protests at going on the Ouija board again so soon and cites Pam’s second rule, Henry points out that after all, she’s only here for a week or thereabouts, and once she’s gone he’ll have to manage without her. And Pam has said she won’t do any more sessions with him for the time being; she’s too stressed emotionally with her ongoing divorce. And he really does need Vanna’s help to sort his life out, he can’t do it otherwise, and he’ll make it worth her while. And she’s amazing, no really, she’s got the gift and what would he do without her? In the end she agrees to go on the board once per day, but once only, and for no more than an hour each time.

First off, Ellie’s in a sassy mood this morning. She sidesteps Henry’s questions about Olga and tells him about some buried treasure instead. She reckons there are some very old coins, possibly Roman, hidden behind a wall in the cellar at Henry’s work. They’re valuable, though she won’t say how valuable, and they’re just sitting there, waiting to be discovered.

Henry’s not having any of it. “Yes, yes, this is all very amusing, Ellie,” he says, “but may I be frank with you for a moment? All of this is ludicrous in the extreme. Come on now, admit you’re having a joke with us, hmm? No hard feelings, I promise you.”

But Ellie says REAL NOT JOKE and, to be fair, she describes the cellar perfectly. She knows its shape, approximate dimensions, the number of steps down (which would need to be checked, Henry says, since he can’t recall how many there are), which file archives are kept where, and she reminds him about that old desk against the far wall and the terrible trouble they had getting down the cellar steps. You name it, she’s seen it. And she tells him to the nearest brick exactly which bit of wall he needs to excavate.

And on the one hand, Henry and the other two partners own the freehold to the building, and there are such things as metal detectors. On the other hand though, Roman coins would have to be declared as Treasure Trove and - for crying out loud - that’s irrelevant, since the whole thing is preposterous and he doesn’t believe a word of it. Very funny, Ellie.

Ellie still insists she’s not mucking about, and then Vanna comes up with the idea of Ellie giving them a piece of information which can be proved, to show good faith. Anything will do, but preferably something they know nothing about, which is nothing to do with anything they’ve already talked about, and which can be checked out at - oh, let’s say - the local library?

Henry shrugs. “I’m game,” he says, “but are you, Ellie?”

YES THEN YOU WILL BELIEVE ME ABOUT THE CELLAR, says Ellie.

“Sure.” says Henry, “Fire away”.

CASTANEDA

“What’s that?”

WRITER CARLOS

“Never heard of him, have you, Vanna?” She shakes her head.

WROTE DON JUAN

“Ah, well I have heard of Don Juan, of course,” says Henry, “but I’ve not read any books on him. Vanna? No? All right then, what about this Castaneda chap, Ells old thing?”

GO TO GUILDFORD LIBRARY GET CASTANEDA BOOK OPEN IT YOU WILL SEE TODAYS NEWS

“Fine. We’ll do that and get back to you. That all?” he says.

YES AND ALSO LOOK FOR MESCALITO

In the Jag, on their way to the library, Henry witters on. What if there is no Castaneda book? What if there are several? How will they know which is the right one? What if, what if. Vanna drives.

Naturally, the book is there, and it’s the only one, Journey to Ixtlan: The Lessons of Don Juan by Carlos Castaneda. Henry checks for the index so he can look up ‘Mescalito’, but there isn’t one. He shuffles through a couple of times, impatience written on his face like tomorrow’s tabloid news. “Big deal,” he says, “So there’s a Castaneda book in Guildford library, just as she said. Is that it?”

Vanna gently removes the book from his hands, and starts looking through it herself, but slowly. First she closes it then opens it again to see whether it wants to fall open on a particular page, but it doesn’t, not really. It seems fairly new, like it’s only been read once or twice at most, and whoever read it before knew how to be nice to books. She starts at the beginning and turns the pages, not reading it but allowing her eyes to settle where they will on the words as they go past. Henry, meanwhile, is tapping his feet, shooting glances left and right, and muttering about the time.

Around two-thirds of the way through, Vanna finds a cigarette paper, wedged between two pages, between the last page of one chapter and the header page of a new one. The header page is blank except for the words, “Tuesday, November 1st”. She turns over the page. The chapter begins, “The next day...”

In Guildford library, in this world, yesterday was Tuesday, the first of November.

Today is Wednesday the second.

Today’s news. Just as she said.

And further down the same page, Don Juan speaks of the drug mescaline, which is present in the buttons which grow on the peyote cactus. Does mescaline equal Mescalito? They check the reference section and discover that Mescalito is the peyote plant’s spirit, and is said to reveal himself - to people who eat the buttons - as a laughing green medicine man.

So yes, they’ve found Mescalito. Just as she said.

“Of course,” says Henry, “It doesn’t mean there any coins. But she knows that cellar inside out, backwards forwards sideways. What’s the point of this little tangent? Absolutely nothing, I’ll be bound. A complete and utter red herring.”

“Maybe so,” says Vanna, “But you’ve got to respect her, pay attention to what she says. Maybe that’s her point. And how did she manage it? Not just the correct date, which is a one-in-three-six-five chance, but the correct day of the week too. And in the book she said it’d be in. And how did that Rizla get in there, like a bookmark, in just the right place? Put it all together. What are the combined chances of all of that?

ZITCHI - CHAPTER 10

2007-11-13T04:50:00.000Z

Hungary, 1589

Breathtaking: how a single drop of still-warm blood has such majesty.
How many little deaths are sealed at the moment of its spilling?

Come, my red children; confess at the reptilian altar of my pleasure.
Cover me with your sacrament.

A spurt, a gush; each drop a burst of glory from the still-beating, royal heart.

Erzebet sits on the throne. Her bodice drips with the moon-milk of pearls, row upon row of them. At her breast she wears a lizard brooch of finest gold, with emerald eyes. She has been married to Ferenc Nadasty for fourteen years, but hardly sees him; he is away fighting bloody battles against the Turks. When she is not in Vienna or visiting her other castles, she lives in here in Castle Cjesthe, in the desolate Carpathian mountains.

Erzebet sits on the throne, her hair bleached in the Venetian style, her already-pale complexion whitened with powdered lead, her lips and cheeks reddened with the crushed exoskeletons of cochineal beetles. Sometimes her eyes glitter more than usual, and this is one of those times. Beneath the powder her cheeks flush, unseen, and a sheen glistens on her brow.

It is not religion which has caused her heightened state, although such ecstasy may be likened to it. No; it is pleasure and power in equal measure. Before the throne, her crone servants have procured many peasants and seamstresses for her delectation. To her right there is a brazier for heating spoons until they turn orange.

The crones Dorko and Ilona perform for their Countess, or rather, they are the mistresses of the concert. With their whips they keep the women close, prevent them skittering to the shadows in the corners of the room. Katalin and Anna wield iron tools with teeth. They snatch and grip and rip an arm, tear chunk of cheek. The floor is slick with flesh.

Imagine: Erzebet’s laughter, as her pleasure builds.

The young ones are the best, the girls. She grasps a narrow wrist and pulls one close, pinches the pretty one’s breasts. Anna helps to hold her, tilts her head back. The girl’s eyes are wide with terror, her mouth wider. Erzebet releases her lizard brooch, its pin still black from the last time. She stabs inside the girl’s open mouth, pushing the pin through her cheeks, her tongue. The blood runs gargling down her throat, makes her gag. Then Erzebet leans towards the brazier, selects a spoon.

Imagine: the screams.

Erzebet returns to her bed-chamber, instructs her new lady-in-waiting to help her remove her gown. The rows of still-wet pearls are no longer milky, but the red of a harvest moon. Soon, they will turn black. If the dress cannot be cleaned, no matter; the pearls will be removed and stitched to a new one. If the pearls cannot be cleaned, there are more pearls.

Her new lady, Zitchi, is fifteen at most. She is the only child of a noble Ecsedi family, and has come to Cjesthe at Erzebet’s request. You’d expect her to be married by now, but there is talk of an unsuitable man. In fact, there was nothing in it; they were hardly, if ever, left alone together. He asked for her hand but as he had no title her father turned him away. His name is Mihaly, and Zitchi thinks about him every day, wonders whether he has forgotten her yet.

Erzebet stands naked by the window and examines her own body. The shrunken old woman in the wood still haunts her. No doubt by now that woman is a husk in a grave. Erzebet knows her skin is not the same as it was when she was young. True, she is not yet thirty, but still. And her belly and breasts bear the marks of motherhood.

She turns to see Zitchi watching her. Zitchi who is, perhaps, the age Erzebet was then. In that moment she’s all rage; she strides across the room to gouge the girl’s impudent face, makes three stripes appear from eye to chin. Blood runs down Zitchi’s cheek, dripping. She lifts her fingers up to touch, and then it’s real. She cries.

But a miracle is about to happen, a transmutation. A single drop of Zitchi’s virginal blood has splashed Erzebet’s hand. She wipes it away, and it seems to her that where it was, her skin is paler. Smoother, even. She makes the link. A peasant’s blood is just a peasant’s blood. A noble virgin’s blood can save her, yes, it can, and now she knows. But she will need more, oh, so much more of it. Yes.

There are unmarked graves amongst the hungry Carpathian peaks, an unspoken number of them. The unlucky ones were still alive when they were brought here, though their bodies had already begun to rot. They stayed until their blood stopped moving in their veins, then a layer of ice smothered them, and they became part of the mountain.

There will be more of them tomorrow.

ZITCHI - CHAPTER 9

2007-11-12T05:49:00.000Z

“I beleive,” writes Pam, “that comunicasions recieved through the OuiJa Board are mesages from the Other Side, e.g. people who have Passed who are still waiting to be re-incarnated in a New Body. Most Mediums I know think the same. But Mrs Parrish thinks that realy we channel the mesages from our selfs, maybe our Sub Consious or maybe our Higher Self, or even the great Akashic Library which is a psychic reference of all time on the Etherael Plane. As I say, I reckon its dead people bringing mesages from the Waiting Place. But I dont rule out what Mrs Parrish says, and she says as how theres this famous bloke called Dr Young says the same as her too, and he wrote books on it. Maybe its a bit of both. RULE ONE is the Good Medium is open to all explanasions, she keeps an Open Mind at all times.”

Vanna sits up in bed, in the put-me-up in Henry’s spare room, reading. She’s drawn towards the astounding aroma of fresh coffee, and starts trying to get dressed while still in the bed, still holding Pam’s exercise book as she does so.

“RULE TWO,” says Pam, “is never work the OuiJa Board when your tired or unwell, always stop after an hour at the Absulute Most, or sooner if you tire. When you are new at the Board its best to start with fifteen or twenty minutes at first then build up as you get used to it. Best not to go on the Board more than once every two days, certanly nor more than dayly. Some say not more than one hour a week, even. Over Use can lead to Obsesion so BEWARE. Make sure you do lots of other things between sesions, ordinry things like shopping, seeing other people, seeing to the kids, even hobies ect. if you have the time. This will ground you and stop the Board taking over.”

Vanna’s up and dragging her tracky-bottoms on now.

“RULE THREE is know and remember that you are the Boss. It is your job to be in charge on the Board. Always get the Spirits to intraduce them selfs. Know who you are talking to. If you get a Evil Spirit (or unhelpfull one or mischiefous one) tell them to Leave in No Uncertain Terms. Use a firm voice and command them to GO. They have to do your biding and will go away no problem, but only if you make them.”

Interesting, thinks Vanna, as she comes out of the bedroom with her thumb stuck in Pam’s notebook, and makes for the bathroom. It’s all quite straightforward, she thinks, all you have to do is follow the rules. She sits on the loo (or “lavatory,” as Henry would say) and reads on.

“RULE FOUR should realy be before rule one, before you start with a new Board make sure you cleanse it in the proper manner. You dont have to cleanse it every time you use it, just say a short prayer of protecsion. After that, make sure your relaxed and feel posative before you go on the Board. If your not relaxed, dont go on.”

She wanders into the breakfast room where Henry is pouring coffee from the Bentley of All Coffee Machines. “Hullo, Vanna, did you sleep well? How do you take your coffee? I’ve made toast. Is that all right? Perhaps you’d prefer cereal? I’m not very good at cooking I’m afraid, otherwise I’d cook you a hot -”

Vanna smiles. “Don’t worry, Henry! Coffee’s fine, white, no sugar, thanks. I never bother with breakfast, normally.”

“Ah, that’s Pam’s notebook you’ve got there, I see,” he says, sitting down at the table with her. “Interesting? How far have you got? Let’s have a look.” As usual, he doesn’t wait for her to answer - and most probably wouldn’t listen if she did - but reaches for the book, snatching it from her, his fingers jolting her thumb where she’s holding it open.

He reads aloud from the top of the page. ‘“RULE FIVE is dont beleive everything the Spirits tell you, they were Human once just like you and you dont know everything do you? No you dont. They dont either. They will mostly do there best for you but some times they get things wrong thru no fault of there own. Test things out or check them later e.g. at the library. In the mean time you can ask the Spirits for Proof and some times they will be able to give you some.”’

“Apocalyptically bad spelling,” says Henry, “but that’s the proletariat for you. Still, a bloody good Medium is our Pam, so I suppose her grasp of the English language shouldn’t matter. You know the most amazing thing, Vanna? When she’s on the board the spelling comes out perfect. Obviously, the spirits must have had an education even if Pam hasn’t. Proves it’s for real though, doesn’t it? I mean, if she were making the whole thing up, we’d never see i before e except after c, that’s for certain.” He ignores - probably doesn’t even notice - Vanna’s frown, and ploughs on with reading.

‘“RULE SIX is never use the informasion you gain from the Spirits to harm anyone. Secrets can be upseting, even dangerous. Use with care and always for the good of others. The Price of Knowing is that then you Know. If you dont want the Knowlege, dont ask the Question in the first place. Remember at All Times that your Gift brings with it Responsability. If you misuse your Gift you will suffer later.”’ Henry puts the book down on the table, stands up and begins pacing. “What does she mean, ‘The Price of Knowing is that then you Know’?” he says, “I mean, give me knowledge every time. One can never get enough knowledge, surely? What price is she on about, the silly woman?”

“I think,” says Vanna, “that she means that once you know something you can’t un-know it.”

“Well, isn’t that ‘Statin’ the bleedin’ obvious’?” says Henry, in an impression of John Cleese.

“It’s a common theme within Paganism,” says Vanna, but it’s clear to her that it’s whooshed right over his head. And she’s not happy about his put-down; Pam’s lovely, she thinks.

He picks up the book and resumes reading.

‘“Acording to Dr Muhl, everyone can use the OuiJa Board or do Automattic Writing. But in my experiense I dont agree. Some people cant get anything off the Board. However non-psychics can still play there part, by placing there finger on the glass or planchet, and lending there Energy so to speak. Everyone has Energy even if they are not Psychic. But they will need a Medium there too or the glass will tell them nothing but rubish.”’

“She’s right there,” says Henry, laughing. “The number of times I’ve tried the Board on my own, and ‘rubbish’ is putting it mildly. Nothing at all for hours, and then complete gobbledegook. She goes on, ‘RULE SEVEN is always have two or more people there, one Medium and one or more who can be non psychics or other Mediums. Never go on the Board on your own. Make sure you can trust the people you are with to keep things to them selfs and not gossip later.’”

“Still,” says Vanna, “she’s saying that even people without the ability - non-mediums, if you like - have their part to play. When she reads for you, you still put your finger on the planchette, yes?”

“Oh, absolutely,” says Henry, “but one thing’s certain - either it’s Pam moving the glass, or the spirits, because I’m certainly not. And my vote is for the spirits, because with most of the things I ask, Pam has no possible way of knowing the answers. Look, Vanna, have you finished your coffee?” he says, leaning towards her mug.

“Yes, pretty much. I’ll wash up,” she says, taking both mugs and Henry’s empty plate towards the sink.

“Well, because I thought - no, leave those for Mrs Bird, she’ll be in tomorrow - I thought we could have a little try if you like, just as - seriously, Vanna, leave them, that’s what I pay her for - we could just try an experiment. You know that tarot tape you did for me, and we never did work out what you said at the end, did we? Well, I got my secretary to transcribe it yesterday. Hold on, I’ll go and get the paper copy, and then...”

Vanna watches his busy back retreat into the hallway -

“... thought I left it here on the sideboard... oh, got it!”

- then he’s back, licking his thumb and riffling the pages. There are quite a number of them; Vanna’s surprised she’d burbled on for that long.

“So if you could just read through, and then fill in the end bit for me, and then I’ll set up the Ouija and we could make a start. There are quite a few things I need to know, some of which have cropped up as a result of your reading in fact. But here, read these first anyway.” He sits down and pushes the sheaf of A4 across to her.

She starts reading from the top, but she’s aware that he’s fidgeting, so she skims instead, until she reaches the end. It’s coming back now, she thinks, but still not as clearly as I’d like, minus the so-called trance and plus several days-worth of excitement. The last bit reads “The tenth card, which is The Tower, is What Comes of It. This card can mean distruction, a warning, plans thwarted possibly. Combined with the previous Chariot card, which referred to an important journey, if you remember, I feel that -”

“Well?” he says, leaning forward, watching her intently.

She riffles back a page or two, looks at what she had to say about the Chariot. “I’m not sure what I said that day,” she says, “But I think there was only a little more. Two or three sentences at most.”

“Please, do try to remember!”

We’ve been here before, she thinks. He’s still pressing me. Just go for it. Say anything. It doesn’t matter. “OK. Here we go then,” she says, “I reckon I said that the journey, as indicated earlier in the reading by the Chariot card, would not actually be able to happen due to the Tower card at the end.”

“But that’s meant to be Olga’s journey! You said! It’s very important - no - it’s essential Olga makes the journey over here! Are you sure?” He’s grabs the pages from her and he’s on his feet now, shuffling through them, looking for - what? Something, anything?

She doesn’t know what makes her do it, whether it’s his transparent distress, or whether she feels guilt at provoking it, but suddenly she’s standing too. And she puts her arms around him, says, “Hey -”

And he puts his arms around her tightly, and bows his head onto her shoulder, rocks from side to side. Warm, she thinks, so warm.

And in a minute or two they pull apart and sit once more at the table. “Look,” she says, “If you want me to go on the Ouija board with you, I will. I don’t know if I’ll be any good at it, but I’ll try.”

“Oh, you will be good at it,” says Henry, smiling once more, “I know you will.” He jumps up and starts rummaging in a kitchen drawer.

“I’m glad of your confidence in me,” says Vanna, “But promise me you won’t be upset if I can’t do it? And we’ll have to cleanse the board first; Pam says so.”

“Sure, no problem,” he says, and produces a set of cards with letters on. “Come on through to the drawing room and I’ll set these up in there.”

Up until now, Henry’s been the one calling all the shots. But Vanna insists he reads Pam’s notebook all the way through, “Properly,” she says, and won’t let him set anything up until he has.

“RULE EIGHT is do not use the OuiJa Board if you are young or a teenager, under the influense of alcohol, drugs, or have a mentel illness. If you have a physicle illness you should wait till you are better. A succesfull Board sesion will allways draw a masive amount of energy from the user and this is as it should be. But if you are low on energy to begin with then it will be too much for you.”

She gets the lizard wand from her suitcase, and he takes it from her, smoothing the scales with his fingers, a look on his face like he recognises it from somewhere but can’t quite place it. She sees his expression and thinks, yeah, I feel that way about it too.

“RULE NINE is do not use the OuiJa Board if you are a Fundy christian, Satanist, or beleive in demons. Because due to your beleifs you will have a negetive experiense. Do not ask the Board such questions as “Is Satan There?” or “Do you beleive in Jesus Christ?” because such questions are Stupid and asking for Trouble. Also if you are confused, depresed or angry dont go on, as you may draw chaotick or evil Spirits. If you feel a negetive emotion while on the Board, then Stop. If you get tired, Stop. If the Board (or the Spirits) says to Stop, then Stop.”

He arranges the twenty-six cards around the edge of a small circular table, and when he produces two more cards marked “Yes” and “No”, she raises her eyebrows at him, tilts her head on one side.

“Yes, well,” he says, “I have tried this before, you know that. On my own, true, but nothing happened anyway.”

“RULE TEN is Never take the OuiJa Board or the Spirits or any Mesages recieved for granted.”

She gets some salt and water from the kitchen, and using the wand and a rite she read in a book once, she cleanses the table. Then they begin.

They each have a forefinger on the upturned glass, which is in the centre of the table. “Is there anybody there?” says Henry.

They wait.

“Is there anyone who wishes to speak to us?” he says.

And then, “Does anyone have a message for us?”

The glass moves an inch, then stops. Then all at once, it moves across the table to YES.

Vanna is shocked, a little, anyway. But Pam said she had to take charge. “Who is that?” she tries.

HELLO VANNA

“Hello,” she says. “Who are you?”

ELLIE

“Hello, Ellie,” says Henry, “We’re pleased to meet you. Can you tell us who you are? A bit about yourself, perhaps?”

I KNOW VANNA

“Do you?” he says, “That’s nice. How do you know Vanna?”

NOT IMPORTANT

“All right, never mind,” says Henry. Vanna, do you know anyone called Ellie?”

She shakes her head. She still can’t quite get over the fact that she’s here, talking to a table, and that the table is talking back. But what else did I expect? she thinks. Get over it. “Do you have a message for us, Ellie?”

YES FOR HENRY

“Oh good,” says Henry, “Fire away, Ellie.”

ABOUT OLGA

“What about her?” he says.

SHE MISSES YOU WANTS TO COME SOON

“Well, that’s nice. Though I doubt she’s missing me - she’s only met me once. Still, who knows the workings of a woman’s mind, eh? Apart from you, Ellie, obviously.”

OLGA WANTS TO COME SOON SAID IN LETTER

“Yes, you’re absolutely right, I got her letter last week. I am working on it, I promise. I’m going to send off her visa application very soon.”

Vanna takes her finger off the glass. “Just a sec,” she says, “What’s all this about Olga? Who is she? I feel like I’ve just come in halfway through the film or something.”

“Ah, right,” says Henry, “Well, it’s a bit of a long story. She’s a Russian woman, I’ve met her once, she wants to come over here. Look, I can tell you more about her later. Can you bear with me for the moment?”

“I guess so,” she says, “but I thought you said you were no good at the Ouija? You seem to be getting this stuff about Olga loud and clear. Are you making the glass move?”

“Of course not! What would be the point of even bothering if I was just going to push the glass around?” says Henry, hotly.

“OK, OK, sorry! I didn’t mean you’re doing it deliberately. Maybe you could be pushing it subconsciously or something. I don’t know.”

“Well, how about this then: for the next few questions I take my finger off the glass and you leave yours on? I can put my hands on the table-top and ask the questions, so I’ll still be contributing.”

“All right,” says Vanna, “It might not move at all though. But sure.” She returns her forefinger to the glass.

“Hello again Ellie,” says Henry, “Are you still there?”

OF COURSE

Now Vanna’s amazed. And chuffed. I can do it by myself, she thinks.

Henry says, “Ellie, forgive me for testing you with this one, but can you tell us something which Vanna doesn’t know? Something about Olga, maybe?” There is a pause, as if the Spirit is choosing what to say next. Then:

OLGA YOUR FIANCE

Vanna didn’t see that one coming. And she’s surprised to realise that firstly, she completely believes Ellie, and secondly, that she’s disappointed. Though why should that be? she wonders.

Henry forges right on. “True, Ellie. Well done. Anything else?”

YOU MET RUSSIAN DATING AGENCY

“True again. Though I must say I am very embarrassed about that - it’s just not the done thing, you know. Still. Can you tell me about her British visa? Will I be successful?”

NO

“Seriously? How can you be so sure, Ellie? You could be wrong; I’m going to send the application in soon anyway.”

NO POINT

Vanna stops again. “Henry,” she says, “Could you put your finger on again now, please? It’s much more tiring on my own. But carry on doing all the talking, if you like. Saves me thinking.”

Henry touches the glass. “Why no point, Ellie?”

VISA WILL BE REFUSED

“But that’s terrible! I need her over here. Besides, she’s not happy where she is. She has a good case, it’s a good application, I’ve taken advice. Why on earth would it be refused?”

OPCS

“Opcs? What’s that?”

GOVERNMENT BODY OPCS

“What about it?”

RING OPCS THURSDAY

“So you’re saying I should ring this Opcs - whoever or whatever they are, some kind of government body apparently, on Thursday?”

YES

“Whatever for? And why not today? Why do I have to wait until Thursday?”

WOMAN AWAY TILL THURS

“Which woman is that?”

WOMAN IN CHARGE OF POPULATION AND MIGRATION DEPT

“All right, Ellie; this is all a bit unlikely but I’ll do as you advise. So, assuming I manage to speak to this woman, what do I say to her?”

ASK HER HOW MANY BRITISH VISAS HAVE BEEN GRANTED TO RUSSIANS LAST TWELVE MONTHS

“Good grief, Ellie? Why should I do that? I mean, what’s the point?”

The board is silent. “I think she’s gone,” says Vanna. And I’m knackered. Can we stop now? She can tell he doesn’t want to stop, not really.

He pauses, then nods to the board. “Fair enough. Thank you, Ellie! Oh, and thanks, Vanna,” he adds, as an afterthought. He pours them both a brandy - to hell with it being too early - and they move to the sofa. Then he stands up again, and goes to the phone. “Can you get me the number of OPCS? Yes... hold on... Thank you.” He dials the number. “Hello? Yes, could you put me through to the person in charge of the Population and Migration department please? Yes, I’ll wait... Oh, really, is she? When is she due back? Thursday, I see. Could I speak to someone else in that department please? Yes, I’ll wait... Oh! They’ve hung up!”

Of course, he wants to try again, but Vanna manages to persuade him to leave it for now. It turns out that OPCS stands for Office of Population Censuses and Surveys. Which would make sense, given the question Ellie says they need to ask. He doesn’t know if they’ll have that data, but it sounds like the kind of thing they might have. Vanna thinks it’s spooky that the woman is on holiday until Thursday, but then again, she’s starting to suss how this Ouija thing works. It all slots together neatly.

Too neatly, perhaps.

ZITCHI - CHAPTER 8

2007-11-09T03:52:00.000Z

HUNGARY, 1574

Erzebet, though only fourteen, is a young woman. Her extraordinary black hair falls almost to her waist. Her maid still braids it for her, but it is a different maid. Erzebet expends maids so fast that her mother Anna despairs. Or she would, if she noticed, but these days she is ill in her bedchamber all of the time. When dismissed, some of Erzebet’s previous maids left for other castles and mansions of Magyar nobility, but one or two of them ended up poor or in otherwise sorry circumstances. All of them were lucky, did they but know it. The current maid, Csilla, is not destined to fare so well as her predecessors, not by a long way.

Another thing Erzebet’s mother has failed to notice is that her daughter’s dresses have needed to be let out at the waist recently. She does not know that Erzebet has many lovers, some of whom are of noble blood but some, at least, who decidedly are not. The young Countess delights in the attentions of men, and women too, if truth be told; for what does it matter who or what the other is, when she is on the receiving end of pleasure, and the pleasure is all hers?

She has watched her older brother Istvan on many occasions from behind curtains - which is not an agreeable pastime if one’s constitution is weak - and has noted his cruel predilections. First with mounting astonishment, then the stirrings of understanding, then grudging admiration, and finally, with turgid excitement. Erzebet’s younger sisters, Zsofia and Klara, have not fared at all well in some of these encounters. One might assume that neither would Erzebet, but her mind is wired the other way around. Much like his is, in fact, a truth which both he and she have arrived at somehow, and so most of the time, he lets her alone.

On this particular day, Erzebet rides from Ecsed castle, out through the newly fruiting apple orchards. Her latest lover, Jozsua, a man of good family but without title, rides with her. They head for the distant woods. It is a hazy day, filled with yellow light.

Jozsua has not noticed Erzebet’s burgeoning waistline, but if he had, he’s conceited enough to believe the child must be his. She tells him nothing, and indeed, it is not his child. In his ignorance he thinks: her skin glows, her hair shines, and her eyes sparkle like crystal. If he had more imagination, and if he had been born at another time and in another place, he might yet have been a poet, or a musician, perhaps. As it is, more and more these days, she finds him dull in the extreme. (Not duller than death though, for death excites her). Though he is seven years older than her, she does not think he has anything to teach her. Though he is easy on the eye, and one cannot have too many lovers, she does not think she will have need of him for much longer. He is too decent a soul, and for that, she is beginning to despise him

Atop their horses, they reach the edge of the woods, and she feels - for the first time - the child move in her belly. Unmistakable flutterings; a bird captured within her. Her eyes widen in surprise. In that moment she knows she will never feel more alive than she does now.

As they enter the wood, they see, ahead of them, a shrunken old woman in peasant attire. She hefts a bundle of sticks wrapped in rough cloth, tied to her back. Her eyes are sunken stones in the folds of her face, and her skin is crabbed, weathered brown and blotchy. She sees them, stands to one side of the path, half-curtseys and waits quietly for them to pass.

Erzebet cannot conceive of how old the hag must be; she has never before seen anyone more advanced in years, more wizened, or more grotesque. She pulls on the mare’s reins to stop her, and Jozsua follows suit. She shudders.

Jozsua smiles at her, raises his eyebrows. “Why have you stopped, my loved one?” he says.

He can be dreadfully annoying sometimes, she thinks; why should I have to have a reason for stopping, much less explain it to him? Besides, he’s ceased to give me pleasure now; in fact, he bores me. I think today shall be the last day I bestow my company on him. With narrowed eyes she glances back over her shoulder at the old woman.

“How would you feel,” she asks him, “if I commanded you to kiss the old witch?”

He turns to look at the woman, and grimaces. “Yuck!” he exclaims.

A game then, she thinks.

“If you truly loved me, and I commanded it, you would kiss her this minute!”

But he just stares at his lover, shock written on his face, and shakes his head. “Tsk! You don’t mean it, my sweet one! You’re playing,” he says, then kicks his heels and canters off up the path between the trees.

Erzebet turns her horse around. She can still see the hag’s hunched back, growing smaller, smaller. She feels her stomach churn, and this time it is not the child within which afflicts her. As I am now, she thinks, that woman once was. As she is now, one day I will be.

She barely has time to dismount before she vomits, violently, onto the ground.

It is autumn now. In the orchard, the air is fecund. Strewn fruits nudge the grass like mushrooms; rot politely, too tired to hold on. Bees hum hexagon songs; the queen and her courtiers are about to swarm.

Erzebet lies in a bed in a high room, her maid Csilla in attendance. Her labours have begun with sharp and furious pains, and she wails, “Mother, mother! Oh, mother, please come... He-elp me, it hurts!”

Erzebet’s mother Anna lies in the next room. She is dying. Her husband is in Vienna, and is not expected home any time soon. He knows about his wife, although not just how close to death she is. He does not know about his eldest daughter, because no one has seen fit to tell him. Anna hears her daughter’s cries, but can do nothing; her breaths are laboured, and she can barely move. She’d cry if she could, but she has no tears.

When her mistress’s pain next eases, Csilla dashes down the tower stairs, through the corridors of the castle, and fetches two more maids. A third leaves for the village to call the Wise Woman. By the time the Wise Woman arrives, Erzebet’s contractions are much closer together, and more powerful. Csilla is standing in the doorway to the room, afraid to go near her.

The Wise Woman has her herbs and her amulets ready, and speaks of the baby’s journey across the wide river, from that world to this one. She soothes Erzebet with her words and her hands, but when the peaks come, Erzebet fights her own body. She arches her back, rolls violently from one side to the other like a doomed ship. At times she hangs over the edge of the bed as if fixed to a crag, and the maids rush to her side in fear that she’ll fall to the floor. But she pinches and slaps anyone who comes near her, and screams for her mother. She begs the Wise Woman, “Please, I’ll give you emeralds, or anything, but make it stop.”

She’s hardly more than a child herself, after all.

The Wise Woman offers her sips of mead, and of a secret but vile medicine which, she promises, will help ease the pains. She claps her hands, calls for the maids to bring more supplies, bring more sheets, more cloths, bring basins of water, bring twine for the cord, and a knife. And later she says, light some candles.

The Wise Woman tells them to find her a box, or a drawer, to be used as a crib. They bring her a case made of oak, but it’s destined not to be used, in the end. Erzebet writhes on the bed in a round pool of tallow light. She’s exhausted. She sweats beads of water and her forehead burns. She cannot sleep for the pain, yet she is not entirely here, either.

The Wise Woman quietly feels for the baby. “Erzebet,” she says, “It’s almost time. When you feel the next pain, push hard.” Erzebet curses her, tells her she’s lower than a cur, but the Wise Woman has heard it all before and pays no heed. She puts her hands up and around the child’s head and lifts it across the river, as Erzebet screams like a banshee then falls back on her cushions, her eyes clamped shut.

It is dawn; the room begins to lighten, and its corners exist once more.

The baby girl has been born still wrapped in her membranes. This is very unusual, says the Wise Woman, but good, because she will never die by drowning. She carefully removes the membranes, and places the baby on her mother’s belly. “No!” shouts Erzebet, “Take it away! Do what you want with it, I don’t care. Just get rid of it.”

Csilla swaddles the child and carries her into the next room, to show her to her grandmother. But she’s been born a few minutes too late. The Wise Woman comes in and begins laying out Anna’s body.

The baby is given the same day to a childless couple on the far side of Ecsed. When they unwrap her, they discover a tiny piece of the caul clutched in her hand.

In the days that follow, Erzebet’s fever - or perhaps it is mania - worsens. When Csilla tends her she has to cover her nose; the room smells bad. Perhaps some dirt got in, she thinks. Perhaps the rage and the ranting would have happened either way. But after two weeks, Csilla’s mistress begins to recover, demanding food at first, and then to be dressed. After a month she goes outside.

She has never been heard to speak of the child.

She has never forgiven her mother for not coming to her in her pain.

ZITCHI - CHAPTER 7

2007-11-08T05:30:00.000Z

Whoosh, bang, and we’re on the train down to Guildford. Tarot cards, at Henry’s request? Check. Henry’s address? Check. Pete’s phone number? Check, because he told her to carry it with her at all times. Lizard-wand? Check, though she has no idea why, but she caught it looking at her from the altar when she packed her suitcase.

Today is Monday. Yesterday Vanna gave Pete a ring, brought him up to date. In short, Pete’s reaction to everything in the whole wide world was “Didn’t I tell yer?” He was keen to meet her at the station, but then again he’d be working, so they agreed to get together when he was off, some time in the next week. Take in the local greasy spoon, maybe. “Or come into the shop, Gel, and I’ll do yer cards for yer,” he said. His summing-up of Henry was “Good bloke, no kidding; he’ll see yer right”.

She gets in at four thirty, follows Henry’s directions which are simple enough, and winds up at Jeffrey’s Passage. Big blue door with antique fittings. Takes a deep breath, goes inside and gets smiled at by a woman with extravagant dentistry. The receptionist? Henry’s secretary? She’s unsure; she doesn’t know how these things work. Vanna gives the woman her name, gets buzzed through a door into some kind of inner sanctum, and finds herself outside Henry’s office.

She smoothes her skirt and her hair, and remembers to breathe before knocking on the door. “Come!” says Henry. As she goes to try the handle he sweeps it open and stands there, filling the doorway. “Vanna! Ah, Vanna! Welcome!” he says, and after a beat too long, stands aside to let her enter.

“Did you have a good journey? Not too tiring? Good, good. You’ve made excellent time. I thought we would go out to dinner tonight; I’ve booked a table at a little restaurant I know. Very select; you’ll like it. And later on there’s someone I’d like you to meet, but I’ll tell you more about that later. Don’t want to spoil the surprise. But forgive me - I’ve forgotten my manners. Please do sit down. Would you like a drink? Tea? Coffee? Or something harder, perhaps?” He moves over to a sideboard, indicates several crystal decanters with the wave of a hand.

Vanna doesn’t know what she’d expected. But whatever it was, Henry is, somehow, more than that. She’s seen his photo, true; but it was too solemn, his face arranged to fit around his fear of the camera. And it isn’t just that Henry’s real-life face is different from his photograph. Maybe it’s that here, he’s larger than life. It’s - Oh, I don’t know, thinks Vanna. Stop thinking so hard; you barely know the guy. But despite his wide smile, she suspects he’s not happy within, nor at peace with himself.

Camera Obscura, she thinks.

“Or perhaps you don’t drink, or you do drink but it’s too early?” says Henry.

“Oh, sorry, coffee please, if it’s not too much trouble,” says Vanna.

“Not at all; Alison? Two coffees please,” he says, pressing the intercom button. “Now, where were we? Oh yes, you were telling me about your journey.”

“Um, was I?” says Vanna. “Mostly good I think; bit boring. That’s trains for you. It’s lovely to meet you though, Henry.”

They carry on like this for some considerable time, until the coffees have been served and drunk and for a little longer, as etiquette demands. Then they walk to his house which is nearby. On the drive stands a dark blue Jaguar Sovereign. This year’s, naturally. “Do you drive?” he says.

“Yes, actually. Though I don’t have a car at the moment”.

He passes her the keys. “You can drive this one while you’re here, if you like.”

“Wow! Really? Are you sure? What about the insurance?”

“Of course I’m sure,” says Henry, sounding ever so slightly ruffled, “I wouldn’t offer if I wasn’t sure. It’s only the firm’s car, anyway. Each of the partners has one - it all gets written off against tax. I’ll get another one next tax year. I never drive it myself; can’t drive, you see. But Alan and Tobias - that’s Lakeman and Bliss, the partners, you know - say I might as well have one anyway. Only person who’s driven it so far is my secretary. It’s insured for any driver. Press the key fob. Have a look inside.”

She sits in the driver’s seat, puts the keys in and starts the engine, which sounds like the big cat it is, predictably so. There are only two hundred miles on the clock, which is set in a dashboard made - no, crafted - from walnut. She breathes in: the car smells of its powder-blue leather seats. “I’ve always wanted -” Vanna stops herself. She thinks, I was going to say, I’ve always wanted one of these. But that would be rude, might make him think that I’m angling for this one. She tries again: “I’ve always thought that when I made my first million, I’d have one of these. It’s my favourite car.” Does that sound better? Keen, but not gold-digging? She hopes so.

Henry? He grins like he made the car himself. “I’m glad you like it. Hold on to those keys; put them in your handbag or something. If it makes you feel better about using it, you can drive me about if you want to. But use it whenever you want, while you’re here. Come and go as you like. Don’t let that scallywag Peter drive it though, will you?

“Of course not!” she says, horrified, then catches herself. Is she being snobbish at the idea of Pete driving Henry’s car? She’s always believed people are equal, regardless of class. Or is she possessive over a car she doesn’t own and has only just been told she can drive? No, she thinks; it’s just the suggestion I’d let someone else drive it without Henry’s permission. That must be it. Yes.

They stay at Henry’s house just long enough for each of them to shower and change, then he gets her to drive them to the promised restaurant for dinner. He gets Tommy the Proprietor to bring amaretti with the liqueur coffees, and to do a party-trick; Tommy lights an amaretti paper with a match and it floats up, up above their table, burning into nothingness. Vanna claps her hands, laughing. “Again, Tommy!” says Henry, and Tommy obliges twice more. Tommy is heartily fed-up with doing this trick every night of the week, but he knows that Henry is a flamboyant tipper. He waves them off from his doorstep with good cheer, shakes his head to himself, and returns to the restaurant.

Henry wants to surprise Vanna with their eventual destination, and still won’t reveal the identity of this V.I.P. they’re visiting. “Left here,” he instructs, and “Right, now left...” Vanna follows his commands. She’s never been to Guildford before, and is surprised to find they’re heading into a rough area. They wind up in a council estate - nothing wrong with that, per se, she thinks, but that burnt out car skeleton over there doesn’t look too clever, nor that one, up on bricks. She wonders about parking the Jag, the wisdom of leaving it to fend for itself.

“That’s the house there, yes, number forty two. You can park right outside,” says Henry. She blips the Jag shut, follows him up the path. The gate is off its hinges and the front garden overflows with rubbish. For the second time today a door is flung open.

“Cor, blow me down Gel!” says Pete, “Yer even better to look at than I remember. Well, come in the both of yer, an’ welcome to my humble abode. Our ‘En-er-y lookin’ after yer all right, is he?”

Vanna’s gobsmacked. She knew she was going to see Pete at some stage, but surely Henry hadn’t planned...? Well then, she thinks, is Pete the special person Henry wants me to meet tonight? It doesn’t make sense.

Pete, meanwhile, in between taking their coats and throwing them onto an overloaded bannister, is swatting any number of small and screechy tykes, ticking them off in a good-natured way, and attempting to propel Henry and Vanna towards a closed door at the end of the hall. “KEV-IN!” he yells, in the general direction of the stairs, but in the specific direction of Vanna’s lug-hole. Even above the general decibel level of the hallway, Vanna’s ear is fizzing, he’s that loud.

“Come down ‘ere, yer ‘orrible lout, I got a job for yer!” he yells. A spotty lad appears at the top of the stairs. “He’s me eldest,” explains Pete, proudly. He sends Kevin outside to mind Henry’s car “on pain of death if anything ‘appens to it, so ‘elp me Goddess”.

“What do I get?” whines Kevin, holding his hand out.

“You get to go to bed tonight without yer bum on fire,” says Pete, but turns a blind eye when Henry slips Kevin a couple of coins, saying something about there being a note in it for him later if the car’s still there, and untouched.

They leave the clattering of kids and make it to the door at the end of the hall. How many has he got, anyway? thinks Vanna, and as if he can read her mind - which he probably can - Pete says, “Ten of the little bleeders, all me own work,” with a note of pride in his voice. “One every year or thereabouts, barring the last ‘un, two year gap between her and the next.” He opens the door and leads them into the kitchen. “Vanna, meet me wife Pam. Pam, Vanna. Henry you’ve already met of course, many times.”

Pam half-rises from the kitchen table, half-shakes Vanna’s hand. Vanna wonders how much effort Pam’s put into the birthing and raising of ten kids, seeing as Pete reckons they were all his own work, but she says nothing, naturally. Pam looks frazzled. How old is she? Vanna knows Pete’s forty-five; Pam looks maybe as much as a decade older than him, but she can’t be, can she, if that toddler in the playpen is anything to go by?

Henry magicks a bottle of red wine from inside his coat - he must’ve got it from Tommy, thinks Vanna - and presents it to Pam. The four of them spend the next half-hour or so chatting. The kids are all still up - the racket proves it - and neither Pete nor Pam seems inclined to put them to bed. It takes all kinds, thinks Vanna; maybe if I had ten kids I’d let them stay up until they fell asleep of their own accord, too. She wonders though; didn’t Pete say, at the Rollrights, that he and Pam were getting divorced?

After a while, Henry starts getting a little agitated; runs his finger round the inside of his collar, clears his throat, that kind of thing. Tries to steer the conversation in a certain direction, but what direction that is, Vanna doesn’t know. At length, he stands up, starts pacing the kitchen.

“Thing is, Pam,” he says, “Vanna here is as truly gifted a psychic as you or I are likely to meet. I expect Pete must have told you the same.”

“Well, no,” says Pam, “Can’t say as he has. But he doesn’t talk much to me these days, anyway.”

Oh dear, thinks Vanna, I hope this isn’t going to end badly.

“Well, anyhow,” says Henry, still pacing, “She read my cards for me recently, by post, before she’d met me or even knew anything about me. And she really is quite remarkable. Quite astounding. The accuracy! And I was wondering whether she has abilities in other areas, and if so, whether you could teach her your, you know, speciality?”

Pam sighs. She thinks of the times, night after night sometimes, into the small hours sometimes, when Henry wants her to just ask, just ask one more question. And then one more. Just. Such a little word. She knows he pays well. She can use the money, but it wears her out.

It wears her out.

There is a crash and a scream from overhead, and Pam looks at Pete, and Pete looks at Pam, then he gets up in a resigned fashion and leaves the room to investigate. Vanna wonders if she should go and help him, since she gets the feeling that she’s being discussed in much the same way she’d be discussed if she wasn’t there. But it’s been a long day, which means she’s probably being over-sensitive, and anyway she hasn’t the energy to get up. Or to take an active part in the conversation. She tunes out for a bit, and when she tunes back in Henry’s returned to the table, and they’re talking about using the Ouija Board.

“No,” says Pam, “I am not going on the board tonight.” Henry reaches into the left side of his jacket. “No, keep your money, Henry. I mean it. It’s late. Never mind me; look at poor Vanna. What time did you set out today, er, yesterday, Hun?”

“Um, ten, eleven?” says Vanna.

“She’s travelled all this way, Henry, and look at her, the poor child, she needs to go to bed. You know my golden rule, Henry, never go on the board when you’re tuckered out. You can get all kinds of bad spirits taking advantage of you if you do that. You start forgetting things, and you can’t think straight. You can huff all you like, Henry, but I’m not doing it tonight. I’m not.” And with that, she folds her arms.

“But I want to see if she can -” he says, frowning, “ - if she can hear them, speak to them.”

“Well, maybe she can and maybe she can’t, but either way, she’s not doing it tonight. Let her get her head down, get a good night’s sleep, and she’ll be fresh tomorrow. Tell you what, I’ll lend her my notebook, the one I wrote my rules in. Hold on, let me find it now.”

Pam opens a drawer under the table, rummages around, and comes up with a child’s exercise book. She flicks the pages. “This is it,” she says, then - as Henry tries to grab it - “Don’t snatch, Henry! Anyway, there’s no point you having it. You can’t use the board; how many times have I listened to you moaning about the fact the spirits won’t talk to you?” She hands the book to Vanna.

“Thank you,” said Vanna, “I’ll look after it. Can I read it tomorrow?”

“Of course you can, darling. Don’t bother looking at it tonight. And give me a ring if there’s anything you want to ask. Now take her home, Henry, and let the poor girl sleep.”

ZITCHI - CHAPTER 6

2007-11-07T21:12:00.000Z

HUNGARY 1572

A circle of trees in a wood near Ecsed. Romani gypsies - the Nagys and the Laszlos - dance under the half-moon. Unworldly instruments; a violin, a hurdy-gurdy, and a beast which resembles the guts of a piano, its strings hit by hammers on the end of the arms of an old man, moving faster than you can see. The music, and the instruments, all handed down; the only things of value the families own. Except for themselves and their children.

Their dogs bark if strangers come. But not these dogs, not this time. Ecsed’s elders have supplied spiked steaks. The dogs can’t remember the last time they dined on an animal taller than a hedgehog or a hare. They slaver and snatch, grimace, foam, and finally lay down shivering, convulsing, to die. Their bellies grasp their last meal like a labouring woman’s womb contracts around her child, striving to expel it. By the time the men of Ecsed creep into the clearing, there are no dogs to warn their masters.

With fire-sticks and shouting they seize the dancers. The music carries on for a bar or two then melts note by note. First the violin stops, then the hurdy-gurdy, and lastly old man Nagy, whose grasp on events outside of the tune is precarious at best, stops hitting the cymbalom,.

“Where is the child known as Yosjka?” demands the leader. “Snot-faced boy, around six or seven years, wears a green cravat?”

Yosjka is nearer to twelve, but no one corrects the leader. No one says anything at all.

“I will ask you again, but only once,” says the leader. “That child was seen in the market today, stealing bread. But certainly you will know that already. I have no doubt he learnt his thieving ways from all of you.”

He brandishes his fire-stick and the other elders follow suit. “So once again, and once only, and then we will burn your caravans and flush him out. All of them, if needs be. Show me the boy.”

Again, silence.

The leader moves towards the nearest caravan, touches it with his fire-stick.

“Wait!” says Sarkozi Laszlo, Yosjka’s mother. She goes up the steps into the caravan and returns with her son, stumbling, still half-slumbering. The leader withdraws his fire-stick.

“Seize the child!” he shouts, and three of his men step forward, wresting Yosjka from his mother, gripping him by the arms. But as the men turn, the Romani form a tight circle around them.

“You must know, surely,” says the leader, his voice loaded with disdain, “that you are outnumbered three to one, at least. Even if you win a fight against us, there will be many more from Ecsed at first light, coming to see why we have not returned. Happen not at first light even - happen in only an hour’s time. And any Rom who harms even one of us will lose his head at the very least. I will have the boy. I will have him. His stealing will be dealt with, and the rest of you may go. Though I’d advise you to move on from here. You are no longer tolerated in Ecsed.”

There is a murmuring amongst the Romani. “But what will become of my little Yosjka?” cries Sarkozi, her face wet and gleaming in the moonlight. “Where are you taking him? When will I get him back?”

The leader laughs most cruelly, and his laugh is echoed by a dull chuckle from his men. “You won’t get him back,” he says. “Surely you must realise that? All theft is punishable by death. If you were an Ecsedian, and if you had someone noble to speak for you, then happen...”

Sarkozi stumbles forward, trips and falls at the leader’s feet. She wraps her arms around his shins. “Please! Sire! Spare him, I beg of you. He is a good boy, and my only son. My others died when they were born.”

The leader kicks the woman away. “You are dogs, all of you. Lower than dogs, even. No, indeed, I will not spare him. He will be taken in front of the assizes in the morning. They will not spare him either. Away now, men.”

It takes all three men to drag Yosjka, puny as he is. He kicks their shins and tries to bite their wrists. Then he screams, “Mama!” as they turn to leave the clearing.

The Romani men are reaching for their axes, but Sarkozi is swifter. She runs in front of the leader, falls at his feet again, and grasps his boots. “Take me! Spare my babba, and take me instead! It is my fault; he is a good boy, but I taught him how to steal. Take me instead, I beg of you.”

The leader pauses, rubbing his chin with his hand. Several seconds pass in silence. Then he leans towards the three men who hold Yosjka and they mutter together. Sarkozi hears a few of the words. “Both of them?” “Hardly... trouble.” “But...need two horses?”

Then the leader speaks out loud. “Release the boy and take the woman.” His men do as he says. Sarkozi is dragged to her feet. She is not even allowed a final embrace with her son before they are parted forever.

Yosjka and his father Djordji weep until daybreak, and cannot be consoled.

Erzebet, aged twelve, has been dressed in her fur coat, suede boots, and gloves made from the skin of an unborn calf. Her hair has been braided. It took the maid over two hours to dress her lady, and she took several slaps from her young mistress for her trouble, because Erzebet is very particular about just exactly how she wears her hair. In any case, a good maid needs to know her place, so even if the braiding had been perfect the first time, she would most likely have received the slaps anyway.

Erzebet’s father, György Bathory, is away in Austria, and her mother has taken to her bed again. Perhaps she is ill, perhaps not. Perhaps she will need a doctor. Perhaps she will die. Erzebet does not care. Today her maid is taking her to the square in the centre of Ecsed to watch a public execution. Erzebet has never seen an execution before, and although she has no idea what to expect, she is looking forward to it with some excitement. It is largely due to her not being able to keep still that the braiding has taken so long.

The air is biting, and Erzebet pulls her coat more tightly around herself. Her maid shivers in her thin dress and home-made jerkin. The sky is clear though, so it looks like it will be a good day for it. When they reach the square there is already a large crowd of locals gathered in front of the steps of the court building, where the prisoner will appear. “Get me to the front,” says Erzebet, “I will have a good view.”

The maid pushes through the crowd, calling, “Make way for the Lady Erzebet Bathory! Make way!” The crowd does as it is bid. Some peasants look annoyed by the intrusion, but they say nothing. Most keep their eyes averted. There are murmurs, “Look! ...Fine clothes...”

“A chair for her Ladyship!” calls the maid, and one is brought, swiftly.

Sarkozi is led in shackles from the court house, a large man either side of her. A third man reads the charge, his voice booming to the back of the crowd, “This woman, Sarkozi Laszlo, of the Romani, was charged with stealing a loaf of bread in the market of Ecsed yesterday. She has been found guilty and sentenced to death by dead horse. This punishment will begin henceforth, and will act as a warning to any other would-be thieves.

“What’s death by dead horse?” said Erzebet, in a piping voice. But her maid’s answer, if any, is lost in the roar of cheering and clapping from the crowd. She looks at the gypsy woman, who stands very still on the top step, her head bowed. To one side, there is movement, and Erzebet stands up to see; there are several men pulling a cover off a cart which is parked there. Something large and black is on the cart, but she still can’t see clearly, so she stands on her chair, watching intently.

The men, grunting, haul the dead horse off the cart, by means of the ropes which are tied around it, and by means of an old door which they use as a ramp. One takes a butcher’s knife and, in one deft motion, slits open the belly of the horse from under its ribs to just above its genitals. There is a wet, slapping sound as the horse’s bowels hit the stone flags. The butcher reaches inside the body cavity, does something more with the knife, until all the organs are outside the horse. Those who are near back off, holding their noses, some of them retching at the stench, and the crowd retracts in a wave. The wind is blowing away from Erzebet, but she screws up her nose at the sudden sight of the entrails.

Sarkozi’s gaolers start to walk her down the steps and across to the wagon. She resists, but they were expecting that, and other elders come to push her, drag her. One of them is the leader from last night’s capture, and he carries a fire-stick. To be fair to them, none of the men look like they enjoy their task; rather, their faces are set in the shape of men who have seen these events many times. The crowd jeers louder.

“What are they going to do with her?” says Erzebet, still standing on her chair. She digs her fingers into her maid’s neck. “I command you to tell me!”

The maid is used to the sharpness of her mistress’s fingers. “Watch, and you’ll see,” she says, pressing her lips together.

The butcher and his men now take three long wooden stakes from the wagon, haul up the top edge of the horse’s body cavity and wedge the stakes to hold it open, revealing a cave within. By now the gaolers and Sarkozi have reached the horse. The innards lie on the flags between Sarkozi and the horse. The leader gives her a small hollow bone from some other dead animal, and they all start pushing her from behind. Sarkozi pushes back, and they push her forwards. Her feet slip on the gore and she falls over, landing in the entrails.

The leader helps her up by the hand. He seems not to notice, or if he notices, he seems not to mind that her hands are covered in horse blood. “You have to get into the horse,” he says.

Sarkozi wails. She shakes so badly that her shaking can be seen by those far back in the crowd. She barely manages to stand, and has to be held up by her gaolers. “You have to get into the horse,” says another, and he tries to push her again.

Erzebet stands very still on her chair, watching quietly as the scene unfolds. Her forehead wrinkles into a frown. “Surely they can’t make her, can they?” she asks in a small voice.

Sarkozi begs. “Kill me now, please, Sires, I beg of you. Please, take my life, but not this way. My neck, have my neck, here!” She lifts her head back and to one side, exposing her throat.

“We’re going to have to burn her,” says the leader to a gaoler, and brings his fire-stick close to Sarkozi’s head, scorching her face and her hair. She screams. He moves his torch away again, and says to her, “You have to get into the horse. Either you get into the horse as you are, or I’ll have to burn your clothes off.”

“I don’t care if they all see me naked!” she says, “Please, I’ll remove my clothes if you want, but just kill me now.”

“You don’t understand,” he says, and is that, perhaps, a kinder tone in his voice? “You have a choice. It is the only choice you have, it is true. You can get into the horse clothed, or naked. Your clothes against the inside, or your bare skin. We will make you get in, anyhow.”

She still fights, but now the strength has gone out of her. Small shoves, the sometimes-flash of flame, and she’s inside the belly of the horse, looking out at the world for the last time. Swiftly now, while the other men stand guard, the butcher takes a large leather needle, kneels down, and begins sewing up the horse’s belly.

The crowd goes quiet.

Sarkozi does not try to escape now; she no longer has the will. But when the butcher has nearly finished stitching and only her face is visible, she finds a tiny voice from somewhere and says, “Please - how will I breathe?”

“The bone,” he says. “Put the bone in your mouth now, and I’ll leave a hole.”

She hears his words but doesn’t react, at first. Then she remembers. The bone. She reaches up with her left hand, opens her fingers. The bone. Her elbow pressed close against her body, her fingers hardly shaking now, she holds the bone firmly, and the butcher finishes stitching around it. He stands up, straightens his back and scratches his head, unmindful of the scarlet slime he’s rubbing into his hair.

The crowd claps, but sedately now, and begin to disperse. Show’s over. Merchants start to sell food.

Erzebet frowns. Her nose is crinkled in distaste. But as the crowd moves away, she sees the bone poking out of the horse’s distended belly. The corners of her mouth turn up, and then she snorts. Soon she’s gulping and shrieking with laughter, clapping her foetal-gloved hands in delight. She almost falls off her chair.

“Again,” she says to her maid, “You must bring me again.”

All the Nagys and Laszlos leave the circle of trees in the wood that night. Shortly before dawn, Djordji and his brother take a detour with their caravan to the market square. There is only one guard, and they kill him quickly with a dagger.

By now, Sarkozi has been inside the horse for around sixteen hours. When they cut her out of the horse, she cannot stand, so they carry her to the caravan. She is barely conscious. They give her herbs to make her sleep for three days, and drive off to join the others.

When she awakes, Sarkozi wails and keens. She does not seem to know them. Her skin is hot, and she sweats. There are more herbs.

Two weeks later, they bury her.

ZITCHI - CHAPTER 5

2007-11-05T02:54:00.000Z

There again, Vanna has no way of knowing how accurate she’s been with that reading. Henry isn’t there to give her any feedback - cynically known as “clues” - at the moment. Even when, in due course - as he must - Henry gets back to her, well, it’s human nature to respond well to things which chime, to brush aside things which clang.

But she’s put her heart and mind into it, with the best possible intent. At the very least, she’s an honest reader, not a charlatan. And if it’s true that there is a psychic sixth sense - clairvoyance, mediumship, call it what you will, then it’s also possible that Vanna has it in spades. And Henry is a Real True Believer in the Occult, which helps.

Henry’s demigods are the ringmasters Crowley, La Vey, and Lovecraft; showmen all. Unlike most Tarot readers, Henry keeps his Crowley Thoth deck in desperate seclusion, won’t let anyone - not even Pete - handle them, for fear that people might “nice” his cards; then he’d have to start all over again with them. The fact that any Left Hand Path Magician worth his salt should be able to “nasty” a Tarot deck with his hands tied behind his back is beside the point. Henry holds the belief that “forbidden” equals “powerful” and, by the same token, that “most forbidden” equals “most powerful”. He’s read the tomes word by word, chanted the definitions of the seventy-eight cards ceaselessly. He’s “showed the thing what to do” by drawing out token cards, uttering the words, metaphorically scratching his Eton-schooled head and trying to fathom how, in even the most tangential way, they might apply to him.

But none of it means anything, anything at all, because Henry is crap at being a Magician, or a psychic, or sensitive in any way at all, for that matter.

Henry is the sort of man who will turn up at a garlanded, cornucopian May Day gathering with the gift of a black candle.

Sure, over time he’s able to discern the rules, retain them and apply them to his own situation. He sometimes gives people the impression that he cares about them, no, he really does, honestly my darling. He’s picked up the requisite social skills (or “ammo,” as he likes to think of all that touchy-feely stuff). Rather late in childhood, perhaps, but now he has them in his armoury. They are his advantages, his tools, for retrieval under appropriate circumstances.

We all view the world as some kind of universe which rotates around us, it’s true. Where is your consciousness, right now? Place your hand on it. Did you touch your hand to the middle of your chest, or to your forehead? To the region of your mouth and throat, even? These are the heart, third eye and throat Chakras, spinning centres of light energy, believed to be present in all of us - or almost all of us - since the beginning. In most cases - hallucinogenic drugs aside - you can only gaze out upon the world from within the realm of your own senses. But even small children develop empathy. A small child will go to cuddle his mother if he sees her crying.

Picture Henry in his flat; he’s spent his night being utterly, utterly incapable of sleep. Today is Saturday, so he doesn’t have to go in to work, which means that the Universe, clearly, is spinning in his favour. It’s eight-oh-one, and damn that dallying postman but Henry’s only just got his mail. See him jostle for the phone as he attempts to rip open the Jiffy envelope and extract Vanna’s tape using only his teeth.

Even though Henry is the poster child for Egomania, he’s not stupid. He realises he needs to put the damn tape in the damn machine, wrap his Ultrasones around his head and listen up. He does just that, hurls himself back onto the Chesterfield, and on second thoughts presses “stop” while he lights a cigar. Then he listens to the sound of her voice.

Sweet voice; state-educated, maybe, but still. She says the date and what she’s doing; the hair, the photo, the attentive selection of cards. As he waits to hear about his favourite subject, Henry doesn’t breathe, and his cigar goes out. He re-lights it without noticing.

“Yes,” he says. “Yes.” “Good Girl.” “You’re absolutely right.” “Clever.” “Amazing.” “Absolutely fucking amazing.” “But how could you possibly know-?”

Incredibly boring, if you’re a fly on the wall. Or anyone at all except Henry himself.

It goes on in much the same fashion until the end of the first side, by which time poor Henry’s almost come in his pants. Except that posh blokes don’t come in their pants; they have an emission in their trousers.

As he leaps up to turn over the tape, he knocks the ashtray with its pendulous turd of ash onto the carpet. No matter. Mrs Bird will sort that out tomorrow.

As far as Henry’s reaction to the other side goes, it’s rinse, repeat. That’s the other side of the tape, obviously, not The Other Side. He wouldn’t recognise The Other Side if it bit him in his well-bred trousers. But -

That’s exactly it: But -

Side two peters out, with Vanna in mid-sentence, maybe mid-paragraph. She’s on the tenth and last card, which in the Celtic Cross spread is “The Final Outcome” (or, some say, “What Comes Of It.”) She’s said a fair bit about the card, but it’s unclear to Henry just how much is missing; in other words, how long does Vanna keep on talking before she gets to the end of what she has to say, or realises the tape has run out? He rewinds the tape a little and replays the last bit. Infuriating! The stupid little girl. He picks up the tape recorder and lobs it across the room, where it hits a heavy glass table.

Again Henry wants to seize the phone and ring her, but again, he isn’t stupid. He knows she’s far, far better than that dummkopf Pete in his tawdry room over the New Age shop. Despite her blunder. And Pete, the precious bastard, won’t read for him more than once a week. The abject cheek of it. Doesn’t need the money, obviously.

No, he’ll be fine in a minute, collect his thoughts, stiff brandy, then ring the girl. Be Nice, Henry. You know how to behave. No need to bawl her out, not at this stage. He goes over to the sideboard, pours a healthy brandy from the decanter. Better. Play part of side one again, perhaps? Hear the beginning again, then phone her?

But the tape recorder is as dead as a very dead thing, and Henry knows he doesn’t possess another. The inclination to throw the brandy flickers across his mind for half a second, but already he’s cooling and can’t be bothered. “Bollocks to it,” he pronounces. Bound to be one at the office. In fact - and he’s pleased with this one - he’ll get his secretary to transcribe it first thing on Monday. Might she be persuaded to come in to the office later today to do it, even? He files the thought away under “pending”, feeling better. Lights up another cigar, visits his “armoury,” and finally phones Vanna.

Vanna is certain that Henry will phone her today, or she would be if she were awake yet. If she liked a flutter, she would put money on it, though nobody in their right mind would give her even halfway-decent odds. Not given the speed with which the deed was signed, sealed and delivered. Not given the fluster and bluster of Henry’s phone message yesterday.

Neither Vanna nor Henry knows how long the tape is. Vanna was far too much of a fluffy bunny to check at the time; she just stuck a blank tape in the machine and lost herself in her task. She read those ten cards until they were all done. She meanders a lot when she talks in any case, and she meanders a lot more when she’s got her psychic head on and she’s concentrating hard. Writing stuff down is even worse than conversation.

As for Henry, he was so frantic to get the bloody cassette spooling so it could begin telling him what he wanted to know, that the fly on the wall - remember the fly? - had it been versed in the causes of human affliction, that fly might well have thought that Henry was a junkie suffering appalling withdrawal symptoms. Which is ridiculous, of course, because this tape was Henry’s first hit, main-lining anyway. (The fly on the wall wouldn’t have paid any heed at all to the cheap dab-or-sniff of Pete’s offerings, and you shouldn’t either). Henry’s response to the new drug doesn’t bode well for the future, though, does it? It just - bodes.

The tape, in actuality, is a C60, half an hour on each side, which is generous for a professional Tarot reading, and therefore very good value for forty pounds of anyone’s money. Anything over forty minutes is an absolute steal; a pound a minute is just right. (Hags at Psychic Fairs charge a tenner for fifteen minutes, but they’re selling themselves short.) So Henry hasn’t got much room to complain about the sudden ending. Not that he is aware of the going exchange rate of Tarot to Pounds Sterling, nor, if you remember, how long he actually got for his dosh, but in any case, the guy’s loaded, Christ, so in real terms ...

So by the time Henry’s finished buggering about it’s around nine-fifteen, give or take. Vanna’s still away with Cobweb and Peaseblossom, because she stayed up late last night watching the re-runs of Casualty followed by Most Haunted. (She didn’t have nightmares, because on one level, she doesn’t believe a word of it. On another level, she’d love to get the chance to speak to some spirits, whoever they might be, and if that happened, she’d be too thrilled to be scared. Seriously.)

The phone’s by Vanna’s bed so she picks it up straight away, but she’s still pretty much asleep - about nine-tenths, I’d say.

“Hello Vanna, it’s Henry”.

“Wha?”

“It’s Henry here, Vanna. I’m phoning to talk to you about the splendid reading you did for me. That tape is the dog’s bollocks, it really is. My goodness, Pete was absolutely right about you. You got virtually everything right; to do with me, my background, what I already know. And so much insight, Vanna! How old are you, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Mmm?”

“No, that’s all right, impolite of me to ask, though I’m guessing you’re in your twenties from what Pete told me. No, don’t say anything, I won’t press you; I’m the archetypal gentleman. But incredible is not the word, young lady! So much insight in such a young mind. You really are quite the ingenue. You told me about Olga, you said she’s Russian, which she is, and that she’s a doctor, which she’s not, but she is a medical student which is so close to being the same as makes no odds, and you said I’ve only met her once, which is perfectly true.

“You mentioned that one of my partners is soon to leave, which he is; old Mr Bliss is retiring, oh, we’re not sure exactly when but it will be soon. You said I would take charge of the business, which broadly speaking is absolutely right, since I am set to become the senior partner. But Vanna, can I ask you something?”

“Mmm, ok-a-ay?” Vanna is still having trouble keeping up with all of this.

“Well,” says Henry, “I’m sure this isn’t a big problem, not really, but did you know that the tape ran out at the end before you’d finished reading the last card? You just stopped speaking mid-sentence, or rather the tape cut you off - did you realise, Vanna? You can’t have done, I guess, or you would have re-done it, wouldn’t you?”

She isn’t sure whether it’s his repeated use of her name, or whether there is something else, a kind of note in his voice, oh, but barely there. She’s more or less woken up now. “Really?” she says, “So - sorry - the tape ran out at the end, is that what you’re saying?”

“Yes, that’s right - obviously I’m not cross or anything, I mean, it’s such a - packed with so much advice and insight - but I’m just wondering, could you possibly remember what you said at the end, do you think? Please try if you can.”

“Um,” says Vanna, thinking. “I’m not sure I can. I mean, right from the beginning, I tuned in to you using your hair and your photo, and the letter itself of course; by the way, those things were great. I had no problem using them, or maybe it’s that you’re such a good subject.” Flattery, she thinks. Though why do I feel I need to flatter him?

“Thank you; most kind,” says Henry. “You were saying; at the beginning?”

God, he’s impatient, she thinks. Cut to the frickin’ chase, why don’t you? “OK, well when I’m reading someone’s cards - probably even more so when the person isn’t in front of me, because I have to concentrate even harder - I find that quite early on in the reading I go into a kind of trance. Probably even before I interpret the first card. Do you understand what I mean?” That’s bullshit and you know it, girl, thinks Vanna. You only read the cards once, very quickly, for Pete, and other than him it was just yourself. But that’s what he wants to hear, it’s what he expects, needs even, in order to believe it was the real deal.

“Of course,” says Henry. “Go on.”

“Well, so I switched the tape on and went into the trance and after that I don’t remember much of what I said. What about the end of the first side and the start of the second? Were they OK?”

“Yes, they were fine,” says Henry. “But -”

“Good, well, that’s good. I don’t remember turning the tape over but clearly I must have done. To be honest, I’m not used to using a tape recorder for readings, you see.” That at least is true, she thinks.

“Yes, but -” says Henry, like the proverbial mutt with a bone, “- it would be so good if only I knew what you’d said at the end. How about if I tell you what you said just before the tape ran out? Would that help?”

“By all means, try.”

“You said that there was a journey that was meant to be taken but couldn’t go ahead for some reason. Not my journey, but the tape finished before you said whose.”

“Ah, right; it’s coming back, hold on.” Vanna’s suddenly recalled the last card, and one or two of the others are piecing together, too. In the last three months when reading and practising, she’d often wondered how much she’d feel able to say to a client when faced with a combination of tricky cards, like the Tower, like Death, like the Ten of Swords. Whatever she’d said on the tape - and Henry doesn’t seem too phased about it being all that negative - well, it’s doubly difficult now, voice to voice. He’s put her on the spot. Any way of her buying some time?

“Right, no, I’m so sorry, I can’t remember,” she lies, and she hears him curse under his breath at the other end. This isn’t a big problem My Arse, she thinks. How many times in this conversation has he assured her, in so many words, that the tape running out event was not a problem? Methinks the lady doth protest too much. But how to salvage it?

“I’d like to make a suggestion which might help, if that’s all right?” she says.

“Surely!”

“Well, I remember that the last card was The Tower, which can mean destruction, but I’m loathe to say more than that without being able to remember the original context. I wouldn’t want to tell you a bunch of nonsense. Sheesh, these trances, eh? But how about this: why don’t you send me the tape back, just in the short term of course, and I’ll listen to it and I’m sure the ending will come back to me then.”

He sounds like a different guy suddenly, like his toys are all back in the pram again. “I can do better than that. I’ll keep the tape, but I’ll have my secretary send you a transcript as soon as possible. Oh! One of the things you said on side one was that I would learn much from a wise woman, a princess. You said I would receive help from her, but also that she would gain something from me too. Do you remember?”

“Vaguely. Sounds like the Princess of Wands, but I can’t be certain.”

“Well, don’t you see?” says Henry, “The wise woman is you! Listen, I’ve just had an excellent idea! Forget what I said about my secretary; why don’t you come down to visit me here in Guildford? At my expense, of course; I’d sort out your train tickets and you could stay here for, oh, let’s see, a week perhaps, and I could take you to the theatre - you do like the theatre, don’t you? I could take you wherever you like; you could choose. It’d be a chance for you to catch up on old times with that old reprobate Pete; I know he’s fond of you. And you could do one or two readings for me while you’re here. It’d be so much easier when we’re face to face, because if I didn’t understand something I could ask you. Much better than doing it blind. Wouldn’t that be good? I’ll take next week off work; let’s see ... I have a court case on Monday but from Tuesday I could arrange to be free.”

“Woah there! Hold on one cotton-pickin’ minute,” says Vanna, chuckling. Despite herself, she realises she’s flattered, and it isn’t like she has anything lined up around here. But the guy is clearly Off. His. Rocker. “I hardly know you,” she tries. “For all I know, you could be an axe-murderer or something!”

“Yes, I do see what you mean,” says Henry, solemn now. Hmmm. But you could come to my business say, late Monday afternoon, and meet my partners and my secretary, and Pete is just around the corner in the High Street. In fact, why don’t you speak to Pete on the phone before you come, see what he’s got to say about me? He can tell you I’m not crazy. Correction; maybe I am a bit crazy, but not in a bad way.”

“Aren’t we all,” says Vanna, “Aren’t we all?”

ZITCHI - CHAPTER 4

2007-11-04T16:55:00.000Z

It began the day the lizard turned up in the skyroom...

Ellie got out of bed and looked at Vanna, who put her head under the duvet, moaning quietly to - herself? Themselves? We’ll settle on herself for the sake of the story...

Are you still watching?

Roll forward five minutes; the girls are sitting up in bed slugging back the first coffee of the day. The phone rings. Vanna answers it. Hello?

“Good morning; I hope this isn’t too early for you. Please forgive me if it is. Is that Vanna?”

Is this guy for real? It’s frickin’ eight a.m. Vanna wants to hang up, but Ellie won’t let her. “Yes,” she says, and “Who?”

“Please allow me to intruduce myself. My name is Henry Tunstall and I believe we have a mutual friend, Peter Smith. He gave me your phone number and suggested I ring you.”

“Peter Smith?” Vanna doesn’t know who that is.

“Yes. He met you at a festival during the summer, I understand”.

Vanna is seriously annoyed now. She’s pissed off that Pete gave her number to a stranger. She’d hang up, but Ellie wants to hear more. “Yes?”

“Peter is my regular Tarot reader. He reads my cards every Thursday lunch-time in his shop in the Guildford High Street. I would prefer him to read for me more often, but he refuses. When I pressed him, he recommended you. He spoke very highly of you, of your ability. He said you might consider reading for me via the postal system, for remuneration, of course. Would forty pounds be an adequate sum?”

“Um - yes - no - I don’t know,” says Vanna. Then she gathers herself. If Pete thinks she can do it then maybe she can. Pete spoke very highly of her ability. It must be all right. “I don’t normally read by post,” she says. “How?”

“I have thought of that already, and propose the following: I will write a letter to you requesting the reading, in my own handwriting, naturally, and enclosing a piece of my hair and a photograph. You will use these three things to tune in to me. Peter assures me that that is how these things are normally done. I will also enclose my payment, naturally. You will select and read the cards on my behalf. Will you send me a typescript of the reading? Or perhaps you would prefer to use a tape?”

The next day, Vanna has to go all the way down three dusty sets of stairs to collect a letter from the postman, recorded delivery. She begins opening it on the bog, then feels uncomfortable, creepy somehow; thinks perhaps Henry wouldn’t approve. So she puts the envelope on the floor, but now she can’t even piss. She has to give up and go back to the skyroom. Then she feels annoyed with herself. Who the fuck is he, anyway? Some kind of control freak?

Dear Vanna, (writes Henry)

Thank you for agreeing to read the Tarot cards for me. As agreed, I enclose a recent photograph and a lock of my hair. I have also included forty pounds in postal orders. I trust all is in order.

Please be assured that our mutual friend Peter spoke of you in glowing terms, both as a kind and honest person and also as a highly skilled psychic reader. I therefore have every confidence in you.

No pressure there then, thinks Vanna.

I myself have dabbled with the occult, especially the Tarot, and I possess a copy of the excellent Thoth deck designed by the Master Crowley. I must confess, however, that I have approximately the same psychic abilities as a hard-boiled egg. Hence my frequent readings with Peter in his “boudoir”; however, he is unable to tell me everything I need to know.

Vanna sniggers. What do you want? she thinks. A frickin’ hourly planner in pictures? Despite herself, she’s starting to find the old fart endearing; that comment about the egg, maybe.

I should very much like you to do a full Celtic Cross spread, and for you to tell me as much as you can about (i) the woman known as Olga, (ii) money matters in my business, (iii) anything else the cards reveal. Please send it (written, typed or taped as you prefer) to my home address (as above) as soon as you are able.

Thank you for your kind attention,

Yours sincerely,

Henry Tunstall

Henry’s written on headed notepaper; Tunstall Lakeman & Bliss, Solicitors, 11 Jeffrey’s Passage, off High Street, Guildford. On the reverse, he’s taped some hair and a photo.

My God, thinks Vanna. He’s young. Thirty-five, maybe. Black hair. Not bad looking, or he would be if he didn’t look so solemn. She gets the cards out, and, not like she’s cheating or trying to get the low-down or anything, she rings Pete’s number. Be good to see what else that scoundrel’s been up to since the summer. Besides reading Henry’s cards, that is.

But no one answers.

She shrugs to herself, opens the sky-light as one might open a portal, to let the dust out anyway, sighs once or twice, and settles down on the floor. Switches on her tape-recorder. Letter in one hand, she looks into the eyes of our Mr Tunstall, chooses ten cards at random and begins to speak.

There is a theory that words have power. Are spoken words more dangerous than written ones? Perhaps.

Can words which say the past send the sayer back? Can stories, told over and over in a particular way, particular pieces edited out, particular pieces edited in, eventually change what has happened here?

Does a future event begin the moment it is named? Does naming lend a shape to it?

Perhaps, perhaps.

Vanna doesn’t pay too much attention to the words coming out of her mouth. She’s slept with the cards under her pillow since the summer, dabbled a bit, and considering this is only the third proper reading she’s done, it’s easy. It’s easy to look at each picture and make up a whorl of flimflam, tell a story, join the dots ...

She has no idea whether the stuff she’s getting is right or not. She knows she has no idea, but she has to trust that Pete was right about her natural talent, and that Henry will understand her gabblings. She’s getting the sense that Henry is maybe more - what? More vulnerable, perhaps, than he first appears. Like every other human being, he has dreams, plans, desires. Places he wants to go to, places he’d rather not see. And by the time she’s finished, the twist of his hair in her fingers, the outline of his face and of his handwriting, well, all those things have made their impression.

She doesn’t remember turning the tape over. She doesn’t even remember the tape coming to an end.

She packs it up and takes it to the Post Office; while she’s there she cashes the postal orders. Job done. A trip to Borders next, then a new hairstyle at Dotty Lines. Money’s for seeing off, burns a guilty hole in her hand.

As is the way of situations like this in stories everywhere, when Vanna gets back around six he’s already phoned and left a message for her on her answerphone. Is that Sod’s Law operating here, or Murphy’s, do you think?

“Vanna? Are you there? It’s Henry.” (Sounds of tapping). “Hello, Vanna? Pick up the phone if you’re there, would you?” (Yes, he’s definitely tapping a pen against the receiver or a table his end, or something). “Well, you must be out I suppose. Did you get my letter this morning? It’s Henry Tunstall from Guildford, did I say that already?”

He must think I have lots of - clients, that’d be the word for it, thinks Vanna. And how many of those are are in the set called Henry? She pictures a Venn diagram; a small circular set called “Vanna’s Clients”, and a smaller circle inside it called “Henries”. There is only one flimsy X inside the inner circle, the elite, a kiss, if you like: the whimsical Henry Tunstall.

“... should have done, I sent it first class recorded. But of course you must have. I wonder if you’ve had a chance to look at the Tarot cards yet. Of course I’ll understand if you haven’t, you must be very busy with your other clients...”

There’s my answer to that one, she thinks.

“... not that I have any kind of priority, I mean, you’ve only just received my letter, if you have. I do hope those Post Office bods haven’t mislaid it.”

Bods, thinks Vanna. There’s an old-fashioned word. Considering he’s only mid-thirties.

Ellie nudges her; It sounds like he’s quite, well, flustered, she says.

“ ... get in later perhaps you could give me a bell; my number’s on the letter. If you have time. If I don’t hear from you then I’ll look forward to receiving your letter, yes? Goodbye.”

And naturellement, the only phone number she has for him is at the office. She tries it, briefly. She didn’t really expect him to be there.

ZITCHI - CHAPTER 3

2007-11-04T01:15:00.000Z

More about the lizard. Not the Lizard, not the one that turned up in the skyroom. That came later. This one was more a kind of - foreshadowing.

The Sweat Lodge, so the women told her, came from the Native American tradition. Vanna helped build one with thirty or forty others who intended to take part. First you dig a hole, maybe half a metre square and half a metre deep, maybe more, depending on the size of your Lodge. Then you get some long wooden poles, hazel branches or saplings are good, stick them into the ground at intervals, bend them over and lash them together in a circle around the pit. That’s called a bender. Then you throw a tarpaulin over your bender and pin it down tight on the outside with some rocks.

At night some of the men build the fire up in a ritual way, with rocks in the middle. Limestone is good; flint isn’t because it explodes when it gets hot. This is your sacred fire. When the rocks are white hot, one of the fire-builders carries them to the Lodge on a shovel and places them in the pit. Everyone gets naked.

There is a gate-keeper who allows you to crawl in through one small section of the tarpaulin, who waves burning sage and sweet-grass over you to cleanse you before you go in. This is called Smudging. You all shuffle round clockwise on your bottoms to make room for everyone. Maybe fifteen or twenty of you go in at once. It is a very tight fit, and the Lodge is filled with dry heat. People pass bottles of water around, and sometimes water is poured onto the stones, which makes it more humid but also hotter. If you like it hotter still, you can kneel up or even stand, supporting yourself by lacing your hands and wrists through the roof poles. It is deepest black in there. Some people say it’s like going back into the womb.

What happens in the Lodge stays in the Lodge. There may be chanting, meditation, and the sounds of the didgeridoo or drums coming from outside. What happens in the Lodge stays in the Lodge.

After a time - although, in some sense, there is no time inside the Lodge - you go back to the gate-keeper and are born into the night air. Others shift up inside to seal up your space, and it’s like you were never there. Outside, there is a pool for dousing, to close your pores. What happens in the Lodge stays in the Lodge.

When Vanna came out, she was serene in the extreme. After she’d doused, she went back to the fireside, still naked. The next day, the Lodge was dismantled. That Sunday night, she found herself whittling a long stick into a wand. She burned off a length of it in the fire, stripped off the bark, began smoothing it with her knife. The knife is not good or evil, it just is.

The way the knife worked felt right. There were a couple of burrs on the stick, and she left them alone. In the firelight, she had a sense of scales forming under her fingers, a mouth, a tail.

The next day, the day she’d have to return home, she looked at the stick as it lay beside her in her tent, and the stick looked back at her. She took it outside, and when the sunlight hit it she realised that what she’d carved from part of the hazel bender, was a lizard.

She went to find Pete to show it to him. He was sitting in the front of his van, playing with Tarot cards. He nodded, unsurprised. “I told yer you’d get yer wand this festival, didn’t I?”

“But what does it mean?”

“Mean? It don’t have to mean anything. But it looks to me like yer might have got yerself a Power Animal, like what the Native Americans have”.

“Are you OK?” she said, “You seem a bit down.”

“Yeah, Gel, I am, I’m always like this at the end. But it’s OK, ‘cos I got to meet you me darlin’ didn’t I? And we’ll stay in touch won’t we, and I’ll see yer at the next one?”

It was like he needed her to reassure him, she thought. “Yes, of course,” she said, “You can come and visit me, if you like. I’ll give you my phone number too”.

“Ah, well,” he said, as he took the piece of paper with her number on, “I don’t have much money, usually. I’m very busy with me job, tarot reading and that, and then there’s the kids and -” he opened both hands and shrugged.

Vanna had an idea. “Tell you what - why don’t you ask the cards when we’ll meet up again?”

“Yer right, Gel! I’ll do that. Here -” he spread out three cards on the top of the dashboard, “You read ‘em for me. This one’s past, this one’s present and this one’s the future. Not room for a Celtic Cross spread on here, but these three’ll do.”

“Me?” she said, “I’ve never done it before”.

“Go on; just look at the pictures and say the first thing what comes in yer head”.

She gazed at the cards, tried to empty her mind of everything, which was hard given the weekend she’d just had. “Hmmm... the past. This one looks like it might be this festival. There’s people having fun, it’s like a party, like they’re celebrating. How am I doing?”

“Yer doing great, Gel. Go on.”

Well there’s lots of fruit, maybe that means plenty of - a time of plenty? That girl looks a bit like me. And those two trees look like those ones over there.” She pointed through the windscreen to the trees at the edge of the field.

“True enough. But that’s in the past. What about me present?”

“He’s at the bottom of a canyon, and there’s rocks making up the cliffs either side, and he’s stacking a pile of rocks in front of him - it looks like hard work. It looks like it’s a long way out of the canyon, but if he keeps piling those rocks up he’ll be able to climb out eventually. Is that right?”

“Righter than you know, Gel. What d’you reckon it stands for though, in terms of real life? The two sides, the two cliffs of rocks are a clue.”

Vanna thought for a moment. “Um - two sides to an argument, maybe? A really big argument which is hard work to sort out? I know, is it divorce? Are you going through a divorce right now?”

He grinned. “Spot on. That’s what’s on top of me right now; me and Pam are splitting up. I nearly didn’t come to this festival, it’s causing me so much bother. Glad I did though, ‘cos you’ve just told me I’m gonna climb out, sooner or later. Go on.”

“Well this third one, future you said? The guy’s looking fit -”

“He’s looking well fit! He looks just like me, body all toned and muscly.” Pete pretended to look offended when she laughed at him.

“Yeah, OK, and he’s lifting a weight which means he still has to work, but it looks easy for him now, and with his other hand he’s accepting money, lots of notes from several different people -”

Pete leaned back with his hands folded behind his head. “Well, that’s all’s well that ends well,” he said, “at least I’ll be flush in me future. Still have to work, but it’s all gonna come easy. Thanks, Babe!” He kissed her on the cheek.

“Sure, but you could’ve read those cards yourself, better than I did, probably”.

“Maybe so Gel, but I’ve had years of practise. And yer read ‘em beautifully, that’s the point; even though yer a beginner yer a crackin’ card reader. I know what, I’ll give you this deck, pressy from yer Uncle Pete, yeah?”

“I couldn’t possibly - they’re yours,” said Vanna.

“Nah, I’m not gonna - tell yer what, you do a reading with them now, on yerself, and if it’s any good you get to keep the deck. If yer no good, I’ll tell yer.”

“OK then, it’s a deal,” said Vanna, thinking that this was the second time this festival that she’d been tested. “I just realised though - your cards didn’t say when we’d meet up again.”

“They didn’t, did they? Maybe it’ll come up in yours. Here’s the deck. Give ‘em a shuffle, think about what you want to know, put yer vibes into ‘em like yer did with me big ball, that’s the way”.

Monday night she’s back in the skyroom; everything that goes has to come back sometime. She’s lying in bed thinking about - oh, everything, and for a moment there she thinks she’s being watched. She gets out of bed and it feels like she just did that, a second or two earlier. She looks at her new wand, there on the altar. Do Power Animals watch you? Things have gone weird on her tonight. Was it the time she spent in the Sweat Lodge? She doesn’t know.

Skip forward three months or so, to when we came in. It began...

ZITCHI - CHAPTER 2

2007-11-03T03:26:00.000Z

“All right Gel? I reckon I saved yer life last night, you was gonna choke if I didn’t stay up with yer,” said Pete, hugging her. Vanna started crying. “Nah, it’s all right,” he said, passing her a loo roll. “It was no trouble. That’s the kind of bloke I am. Cuppa coffee’ll have yer back on yer feet, Gel. No need to thank me. Tell yer what, I’ll show yer me big ball and me little ball later on, that’ll put a smile on yer face.”

Vanna, despite misgivings as to the nature of Pete’s balls, smiled weakly. “There yer go, see?” said Pete, delighted, “and yer dead pretty when yer smile, yer know that Gel?”

“I’m sorry about last night,” she said.

“Nah, it’s nothing, I like a chance to help a damsel in distress,” he said, “and that coffee’s doing you a power of all right - here, hold on, I’ll get me balls out for yer now seeing as yer here”.

Pete rummaged around in his rucksack and produced two objects wrapped in black silk. “Look,” he said, as he unwrapped them, “meet me big ball and me little ball.”

Vanna looked. He was holding two crystal balls, one about six centimetres across, one double that size. “Can’t be many blokes with four balls, eh Gel?” said Pete, laughing far too much for the magnitude of the joke. “Now, I’ll read yer future for yer - but which one do you want me to use, the big ball or the little ball?”

“Um - the big ball?” said Vanna.

“Good choice, good choice! I like your style. Size is everything, and don’t let anyone tell yer any different. Right then, first yer have to hold the ball in yer hands, sorta put yer energy into it, that’s the way, now give it back to me and I’ll tell yer what will be. Ah, now let me see...”

Pete sat there cross-legged, big ball in his hands, gazing silently into its depths. Vanna didn’t know what to expect, other than nothing, perhaps, or maybe some kind of make-believe, charlatanism even, although the part of her that was a Witch, wanted to Believe. In any case, Pete hadn’t asked her for payment, not yet at least, so why would he have a reason to lie or make things up? She’d yet to learn the lesson which teaches that there is always payment in one way or another.

“I knew it! I knew it!” said Pete, “Yer one of us, int yer? Yer a Witch! Says right here in the big ball. Tell me - that’s true, int it Gel?”

Vanna inclined her head. She wasn’t convinced; she’d come to a Pagan festival, after all, and probably half the people here were Witches.

Pete was delighted with himself. “Wait,” he said, “there’s more,” and then he seemed to go into a trance. Despite herself, it seemed to Vanna that the ball misted over; on the other hand, it was rather dull inside the First Aid tent, and after all, she told herself, the imagination is a powerful thing.

“Ah,” said Pete, “but yer not initiated. Leastways, not properly. Wait - oh, you done it yerself, didn’t yer? I can see you sitting on a check blanket in a field, trees all around - wait - the field was on the edge of a wood. And yer showin’ yer tools to the elements, yer knife - yeah, you got an athame Gel, good for you - and yer chalice - but you’ve not got a wand or pentacle yet, am I right?”

Vanna was astounded. “That’s right! I haven’t. And there was a wood right by that field, I walked down through it, you couldn’t get to the field by road”.

“I know you couldn’t - that’s what me big ball says as well. It says yer gonna get yer wand at this camp too, but you’ll have to wait to get yer pentacle. And yer self-initiation is just fine for now, but by the end of this year you’ll be gettin’ dibbed proper by a Witch you already know. And - hold on, there’s more comin’ through - nah, it’s difficult to see. Give me big ball a bit of a rub again will yer?”

Vanna leant over and rubbed the crystal with her fingers. As she did so, she caught a glimpse of a rainbow in there, deep between the layers of quartz. Pete continued gazing. Then he sat back.

“Well, Gel,” he said, “Yer gonna go on a journey before the year’s out.”

“What kind of journey? You mean like abroad or something?”

“Yeah, well the spiritual kind of journey’s a given, natch, smart little Witch like you, yer always gonna be on a spiritual journey. But me big ball reckons you’ll travel, ooh, two hundred and fifty miles near enough, on a train. Still in this country though.”

“Could it be talking about this festival?”

“Nah, shouldn’t think so. That’s in here as well, but that’s not nearly as far. Only about two-thirds the distance, am I right?”

“Yes!” said Vanna, surprised, “Can you tell where I come from then?”

“A-hah!” said Pete, wagging his forefinger from side to side, “Yer trying to test me big ball, int yer? Naughty Gel. But as it’s you -” he had another look, “It’s not all that clear, but it seems to be showing me a long hill with a bump and a sharp drop on one end, and a cairn of stones on top. That any use to yer?”

“That’s Pendle Hill!” said Vanna.

“And that’s near you?”

“Yes of course it is - have you been checking up on me?”

Pete spread his hands in the universal gesture of innocence. “Me? Course not! Straight up an’ down I am, trust me!”

And he did, indeed, despite his ducking-and-diving manner, look the picture of truth. And he had sat up with her all night, holding her ponytail while she threw up into a bucket, hell, maybe he had saved her life as he said. She was overcome with gratitude and fondness for the guy, ugly though he was, and she sat forward and threw her arms around him in a bear hug.

“Ay, steady on Gel! You’ll get me goin’, me and me plonker, mind you, me plonker’s worth a look, it’s massive! You wanna see?” he said, reaching for his flies.

The look of horror in Vanna’s eyes as she pulled away got through to him, fortunately. “Only jokin’ Gel,” he said, as he zipped himself back up, “though I’m telling yer no word of a lie, it is massive, and if yer want to check it out any time, you just let me know... so anyway...” He turned his attention once more to the ball. “Anything yer want to ask me?”

“Well, this journey; can you tell me more about that? And am I going to meet someone lovely?” She noticed his expression. “Apart from you, I mean! I mean, you’re lovely, you are, but, well, you know, am I going to meet my soul mate or anything?”

“Ok, hold on tight,” he said. “Right, the thing yer have to know is this ball is never wrong. But things don’t always happen how yer think they will. Now, this journey is south from you, and it’s showing me it’s gonna happen before the end of the year, on a train. Someone you’ve not met yet is gonna meet yer at the other end. Yer gonna be there one week, but - hold on -” he looked worried.

“What is it?”

“It’s a bit strange this, I dunno, I can’t make sense of it. It’s also showing somewhere far away, up in some mountains, very, very cold, brrr -” he shivered, and pulled his collar up. “I think yer going on another journey from the first one, and I get the feeling of old, very old, you know, ancient things. There’s a castle. And danger. And there’s words, writing, lots and lots of words. That’s enough.” He stopped very suddenly, and began wrapping the ball up in its silk. “Always wrap yer tools in black silk Gel, that’s my advice, stops the malign influences getting to them”.

Vanna shivered. “You think I shouldn’t go?”

“Got to go, Gel, got to. It’s yer destiny. Me big ball says so. But don’t worry. Uncle Pete’s on yer side, yer just have to ring me up and I’ll come running.” He rummaged around in his pocket for a scratty bit of paper, and wrote his phone number on it. “There yer go. Good job you met me, eh? Keep it safe, and just ring me. Now, another coffee, yeah?”

He busied himself with the ritual of making coffee while Vanna sat there, thinking. “What about my soul mate? Am I going to meet someone?” she said.

“Ah,” said Pete, “everyone wants to know that. Actually, there was someone in me big ball, tall, dark and handsome he was.”

Vanna rolled her eyes.

“You may well roll yer eyes, young madam,” he said, “but I’ve told yer, me balls don’t lie. And I’m yer ac-tu-al champion crystal ball reader. There ain’t no ball reader who can do it better than what I can. I can do the cards too, that’s what I do for me job, and I got plenty of customers who come back week after week for what I can tell ‘em. I -”

“The man?” Vanna prompted.

“Ah yes, the man. Not yer soul mate, I don’t reckon, though yer might want him to be. But he’ll love yer for a time, the ball says. How long a time I don’t know. One thing yer should know is, watch out for his hands.

“His hands?”

“His hands.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Yer will. Can’t tell yer any more. Just watch out for them, if yer value yer ... and ring me if yer get into any trouble. I won’t be far away. Make sure yer carry me phone number always”.

Vanna thanked him, and wandered outside carrying her coffee cup, heading for the toilets. A guy she vaguely recognised waved to her, calling,

“Hell-oo Vanna! You look a darned sight better than you’ve a right to, this time of the morning!”

She sat on the toilet, pissing the eternal piss of the recently-drunk, and tried to work out who he was. Then it came to her; he’d been on the gate yesterday. He was outside the loos waiting when she came out.

“Excuse me,” she said, “but who? What?”

He laughed. “I’m Stan,” he said, “Digger’s friend. You rang me and I told you about this festival”.

“Ah, it’s your festival then? How did you know who I was?”

“After your antics last night? The whole site knows who you are! Don’t worry,” he said, noting her crestfallen expression, “we’ve all been there. You’ve just guaranteed yourself a place in the folklore of this festival. I must say though, the Postman Pat sleeping bag was a nice touch.”

Vanna could feel herself going bright red. “I got it off a car boot...” she said, faintly. It was coming back to her now, a dim recollection of several big guys trying to shove her into her one-man tent which was resplendent with its Postman Pat sleeping bag and pillow, then giving it all up as a bad job and marching her back to another tent, all in pitch blackness, with much cursing at thistles and cow-shit. “I’m never going to live this down,” she said.

Stan waved at her as he walked off. “You will,” he said. “You’re one of us now”.

Vanna wandered around the site, beginning at the camp fire she’d no recollection of leaving last night. Its embers still glowed, and a couple of women sat there, tending a small iron cauldron and some baking potatoes wrapped in foil. She said Hi to them then stood there, feeling a bit out of sorts.

“It’s my first festival,” she said, feeling like she ought to say something to explain her presence.

“Ah,” said one, in the manner of one who feels that now everything makes sense.

“Want a brew?” said the other.

“Um - no thanks, I’ve just had one,” said Vanna, looking at the cauldron in a slightly worried fashion.

The second woman chuckled. “Better’n a kettle,” she said, “I can use it to boil up me eye of newt as well”.

Vanna laughed. “You’re Witches then? I’d never have guessed,” she said. “What’s your names? Mine’s Vanna.”

“I’m Jane and that’s Sophie,” said the second woman. “Don’t mind us. We’ve been going to these things for years. That your Witch name? Sounds witchy. Take a pew.”

“No, it’s my real name. Short for Vanessa,” said Vanna as she sat down. They sat in companionable silence for a while. Then she said, “There don’t seem to be many people here”.

“Ah,” said Jane, “It’s early yet. People don’t get up much before noon. Plenty of tents in the other field though. Just the marquee and the stall-holders in this one. And the First Aid tent,” she nodded at Vanna.

Vanna managed to avoid blushing this time, and grinned instead. “Yeah, well...”

“Don’t worry, Luvvie. Happens to the best of us. You’ve recovered, well in time for the main event, that’s what matters”.

“Yeah, what is the main event?” said Vanna.

“Well, after lunch there’ll be an opening circle at the stones. Most people go but it’s not compulsory. And there’s always workshops on, later. Have a look at the board by the marquee. Is the board up yet, Soph?”

“Nah,” said Sophie, “I ain’t done it yet. Half an hour, maybe”.

“What you have to remember,” said Jane, “Is we run on PMT here.”

“PMT?” said Vanna.

“Pagan Mean Time. So just because the board says Tarot at 1pm, doesn’t mean it will be. People leave their watches at home, go by the sun instead”. The three of them looked up. It was cloudy, but you could tell roughly where the sun was. “See? Eleven a.m. I make it.”

Vanna looked at her watch as Jane shook her head, tutting. It was, indeed, just past eleven - ten past, to be exact.

“And if the workshops run over, does it matter?” said Jane, “The next one starts a bit late, so what? We’re on our ‘olidays. There’ll be a Sweat Lodge tonight; that’s the other main event.”

“What’s a Sweat Lodge?” said Vanna. Jane tutted again.

“No, don’t tut ‘er,” said Sophie, “We was all new once. Not ‘er fault she don’t know nuffin’. Sorry about my friend’s manners, Vee.”

“Yeah, OK, didn’t mean to be rude,” said Jane, “It’s just that some newbies want to swan around in their black dresses and their silver jewellery, pretending to be Witches, talking about white magic versus black magic, and they give real Pagans a bad name. Other newbies want to learn, and that’s fair enough”.

Vanna silently thanked herself for leaving most of her jewellery at home; all she had on was a discreet pentacle ring. “I do want to learn,” she said, “and I keep reading and reading, mostly about Wicca. But this is the first time I’ve managed to find other Pagans to talk to. It’s why I’ve come here, I guess. I’ve never read about a - a Sweat Lodge, though”.

“Right then,” said Jane, “I’ll tell you, but first I want you to tell me something.”

“Sure, if I can.”

“I mentioned white magic and black magic; what’s the difference, in your opinion, between a Black Witch and a White Witch?”

Vanna smiled. She knew she was being tested, but she reckoned she knew the answer to this one, based on everything she’d read. In the absence of people, books were useful for something, it seemed. What Jane was asking her was - kind of - a trick question. “Magic just is,” she said.

“Explain.”

“If you have a sharp bread-knife in your drawer,” said Vanna, “you can use it to cut bread, or you can use it to murder someone. Or all kinds of other uses in between. The knife isn’t good or evil, it’s not white or black, it just is. It’s up to you to decide how you use it.

“Could the same be said for a gun, then?” said Jane.

Vanna hesitated. “I guess anyone’s answer to that depends on where they live. If I lived in the States I might say a gun was a good thing because I could use it for protection, or as a deterrent.” She wrinkled her brow. “It’s complicated though.”

Jane nodded her head on one side. “I’ve heard it said, though,” she said, “that once a gun appears in any story, sooner or later it has to be fired. Surely, if it’s inevitable that the gun must get fired, the gun must be inherently evil?”

Vanna shivered; the felt like the proverbial Someone had walked over her grave. “I don’t think so,” she said, “I think that possibly the hand that made the gun is evil, or the hand that chose to fire it, but the gun itself is neutral - it’s only a lump of metal, after all. And it’s always possible that the gun won’t get fired, despite your theory”.

Jane sniffed. “‘T ain’t my theory. But, fair enough, you’re saying magic’s like the knife, or the gun, not evil or good in and of itself; it depends on the will of the user, yes?”

“The Four Powers of the Magus,” said Vanna, “To Know, To Dare, To Will, and To Be Silent.”

Jane and Sophie exchanged glances. Sophie grinned, and took the cauldron off the boil. She rustled two - no, three mugs from out of her skirts. “Sure you won’t ‘ave a brew, darlin?”

Jane said, “OK, Clever Clogs, what about Black Witches and White Witches, hmmm? You must’ve heard of the terms?”

“Well, I’ve read about people claiming to be both in Prediction Magazine...”

Together, Sophie and Jane spat into the fire. “Huh!” Vanna raised her eyebrows, quizzically.

“Wash your mouth out with soap!” said Sophie, grinning.

“Don’t you be reading that nonsense!” said Jane.

“So you’re saying they’re not real Witches?”

“Well, sure,” said Jane, “You get people calling themselves both white and black, in and out of that magazine. People who call themselves White don’t understand what Wicca is, and they’ve probably never heard of the Four Powers of the Magus neither. Others make a living casting curses, and call themselves Black Witches, but they’re no better than they should be. Soph and me don’t have no truck with them, and you’ll do likewise, Girl, if you take my advice.”

“Fair enough,” said Vanna, evenly, “So are you going to tell me about tonight’s sweat lodge, then?”

NANOWRIMO 2007 - ZITCHI

2007-11-03T01:20:00.000Z

For the next month I will be attempting to write 50,000 words in 30 days, or in my case, in 22 days, because I have to have an op on 23rd Nov. For me, that's approx 2273 words per day. I intend to put completed chapters up here. Here's the first.

ZITCHI - CHAPTER 1

It began the day the lizard turned up in the skyroom. Vanna pressed stop on the alarm clock and go on the coffee machine. It felt like three hundred and sixty five days since she’d heard her own voice. Hello?

Ellie got out of bed and looked at Vanna, who put her head under the duvet, moaning quietly to - herself? Themselves? We’ll settle on herself for the sake of the story. Vanna groaned softly under the duvet until the coffee machine stopped wishing and plupping. Then Ellie flung the duvet off and, shivering, fumbling, began pouring coffee into yesterday’s stained mug.

For the sake of the narrative I, that is, we, cannot keep referring to the girls as separate entities. They are separate entities, true, but this is a new phenomenon, fiasco, what-have-you. Besides which, it’s confusing for the reader, and the girls are confused enough without the reader muscling in.

The point is that on one day everything was normal, whatever normal is, and the next day the lizard put in its appearance. Which was strange in and of itself, this being the North of England and lizards not being prevalent in these parts. Then Vanna went to bed, was insomniac for many hours as per, eventually went to sleep before dawn, dreamed some, then awoke when the clock began shouting at her which was where you, dear reader, came in. Hello?

Hello World? Imagine, if you will, one of those snow-globe thingies in your hand, a present from Torquay or some-such. A beach scene within, lots of water anyway, and you give it a shake to see what happens even though you know damn well what’ll happen; it’s imprinted on your genetic code going back generations.

A snow-fall. Dozens, nay, hundreds, of tiny snow-flakes fall in the ball in your hand, which is odd, because why would there be snow on a sun-lit beach? Though I guess even beaches get snow sometimes. You shake it three, four times and peer in. Look in there: there’s a bed, with books and slippers and inside-out clothes scattered around it, and on the bed, oblivious to the snow-fall, lies Vanna, asleep. Watch closely, see her stretch. See her tiny hand reach out, hit the top of the tiny alarm clock then the top of the tiny coffee machine. How would you like to be God, watching her? What do you want her to do today? Start small: think about her scratching her nose. Think hard, fingers reaching, she’s almost sneezing her noze iz zo itchy, and - Whoops! there she goes, scritchity-scratch. Fingers back underneath the duvet, and - relax.

So what’s real? Is she? Are you? Who are you, anyway? Is your name Vanna, or Ellie? And where did that damn lizard go?

For starters, it hops about a bit, that lizard, and if you want to catch a glimpse of it you need to pay attention. Do lizards hop? Slithers, then, if you want to be pedantic. Better? This lizard goes backwards, forwards and sideways, any which-way, or any witch-way, to use one of Vanna’s terrible puns. Vanna reckons she’s a Witch, which basically means she got tired of organised religion and decided to go in for some New Age hippy-shit, you know, you burn a white candle if you want to do spells on a Monday. Tuesday it’s a red candle, Wednesdays are yellow, and so on. Then there are crystals, lumps of rock which give you Powers with a capital P so long as you carry the right one at the right time. Mostly she can’t remember the meanings of all the different stones but she’s got the books, and Ellie helps her out now and then. Bloodstone’s good when you’ve got your period, and trust me, you don’t want to know where she puts the stone. She could almost swear it works though, leastways, she’s not consuming as many Nurofen Plus as she used to, and that has to be a good thing, right?

Use a pink Garnet to balance your energies, whatever that means.

We could go into the phases of the moon, the angelic hours, the incenses, the herbs, the names of power - but you’re bored rigid by even the threat of those, and if you’re not, you want to read another book, not this one. The book you want is 777 by Aleister Crowley, and you guessed it, Vanna has a copy which she reads religiously and pretends to understand. She reckons hers is a first edition she found at a car boot sale. Yeah, right.

An Aquamarine protects you on a journey. Vanna’s going to need one of those soon.

Use a green Garnet to draw out negativity and bitterness. It’s known as the Vomit Stone. For real. We don’t need that one just now, but we might do later on. We’d best pack it, just in case.

A Moonstone increases intuition, which is nice. Could be helpful, what d’you think? You’re God, after all; you should have an opinion if anyone does.

Sleep with an Amethyst under your pillow if you want to remember your dreams.

That ol’ lizard has a hankering to show you something which happened last summer. We know what you did last summer, but as yet, you don’t know what Vanna got up to. Listen up.

She went to a Pagan festival, is what. She was a New Baby Witch, and the problem was she didn’t know of any other Witches, or Pagans of any flavour, come to that. She’d read all the right textbooks on Wicca, searched their glossaries for places to write off to and got a big fat Nothing back. Everyone was just trying to sell her Witchcraft courses at five hundred pounds a pop, and even Vanna isn’t that gullible. Correction: she is that gullible, but she didn’t have the readies.

So she’s in Borders browsing the New Age section, and as is the way of bookshops everywhere, they’d decided to shuffle the books around since she was last in, just to keep the customer on her toes. Vanna can’t find the Wicca books.

She stares at the New Age section, which is a floor-to-ceiling, five metres wide lump of shelvery, and her eyes pass over the crystals, the Jonathan Livingston Seagulls, the Mediumistic hokery, the Druidic entrail-winding section, and she thinks: If Druids love trees so much, why do they even allow books to be made out of them? That, by the way, constitutes deep thinking for Vanna.

And she can’t see the Wicca books anywhere. She does see this ratty little guy in army surplus standing a metre or so away from her, and even though she’s not the kind of girl who talks to strange guys in bookshops, she says, “They’ve moved the Wicca books”.

Now that’s not any kind of startling conversation, but the guy boggles his eyes like it’s the strangest thing that anyone ever said to him, and he says, “You mean - Wicca? As in - Wicca?”

And - like they’re not both standing there looking at the Pagan books anyway - she says “Yes”.

And the long and short of it is they get talking and she tells him how she’s never met another Witch which is a shame ‘cos she’d like to join a - um - Coven, you know, and he tells her he knows these people and they’re fine people and they’re running a Pagan festival, like, next weekend and would she like to know all about it and here’s their phone number. And he’s going to be there and his name’s Digger.

Digger’s not important; you can forget about him. Vanna does. But she rings the phone number and the following weekend she goes to a little festival near the Rollright Stones in Oxfordshire. It could have been anywhere, but it was there. The only thing you need to know about those stones is that they can’t be counted, because some stones look like they might be one stone or two stones and you just don’t know. Oh yes, and if a woman sits astride one of the stones she’ll be bringing her new babby back to the stone circle within the year. Luckily someone told Vanna about that, and she left the sex-with-stones thing for another time. She thought about it though.

Sure enough, Digger was there, but he was off his face. Somebody said the only provisions he brought with him for the whole bank holiday weekend were a pound of cheese, a loaf of bread, and an ounce of rocky. And he never paid for his ticket, because some family smuggled him in under the bed of their camper van, once they’d convinced their toddler that Digger wasn’t really there. That set the tone for the festival, as far as Digger was concerned. He spent the next four days in various degrees of not being there.

As for Vanna, she’d never seen so many Witches in one place; so far her grand total was one Witch, that Witch being her. It hit her like a bottle of gin taken intravenously. Add to that the multifarious chalices passed around the campfire, and it wasn’t surprising her green Garnet - remember the green Garnet? - came into play; she was found honking her guts up half-way across the field at around midnight.

The person who found her was Pete. He found another four men and true, and they carted Vanna, a man at each corner, a man at her head, into the First Aid tent. Where they discovered that in true Pagan tradition, the inner tent had been erected the wrong way round, which meant you had to breathe in and shimmy down the inner sides of the outer tent and lever yourself in against the back wall. There was no chance the guys could post Vanna in there, star-shaped as she was, so they set her up on a camp bed in the outer tent. She spent her night in alternative reality, alternating between the dead sleep of the drunk and the vulcanous vomiting of the - um - drunk.

Pete sat up with her on his three-legged stool for the next eight hours like a goblin, holding the bucket and brushing her fringe away from her face.

NORMAL SERVICE WILL BE RESUMED AS SOON AS POSSIBLE

2007-08-22T03:15:00.000+01:00

Sorry for the lack of writing posts. I hope to post again here soon.

In the meantime, the winner of the last Word of the Week competition is Bill G. Bill, see the comment under the last post on how to get your prize.

MONDAY IS WORD OF THE WEEK DAY (NO. 3)

2007-07-17T10:55:00.000+01:00

The more astute among you will have noticed that today is Tuesday; sorry about that. I've been away. Last week's competition was won by Spicy. Well done to everyone who took part.

So, third week of the competition (rules below), and my Word of the Week is QUIXOTIC. There's a dictionary definition of it HERE. The word was chosen for me by my son Josh, who is quixotic himself.

RULES

I'm going to try to use the word QUIXOTIC as often as I can for the next seven days, in my writing and in my speech. Within reason though - not in every other sentence just for the sake of it (that would be silly).
You can run with it too, if you like.
Whoever posts the best comment (in my opinion) to this post containing the word QUIXOTIC wins a copy of my poetry book, Shape to Shape. You can use any definition of the word you like.
This competition is open worldwide.

Next Monday I'm off to a poetry masterclass in Wales - review later - and from there to a Pagan camp in North Yorkshire. For the rest of the month posting will be sporadic and I may allow the Word of the Week to run for two, or even three weeks; we'll see.

TRICKING YOURSELF INTO WRITING POETRY (No.2)

2007-07-10T15:11:00.000+01:00

Here's how to write a poem using the FIVE SENSES METHOD. The exercise was originally given to me by the poet Pauline Keith.

Choose an abstract noun, such as loneliness, doubt, hate, boredom, freedom, insomnia, joy, justice, love, fear etc.
Write without using the term at all, except, if you like, in the title.
What does it look like? What shape is it? What colour is it? Does it look like something else or does its appearance remind you of anything?
What sound does it make? What song does it sing? What words does it say?
What does it taste like/of?
What texture does it have? When you touch it, how does it make you feel inside?
What does it smell like/of?
Is there anything else you can say about it, e.g. how old is it? Where did you find it, or where can it be found? Does anyone else know about it? If it's lost, how and why? Have books been written about it? If it were a car, or a drink, or a book, or a person, what or who would it be?
Write down your answers to all the above, then cross out any you're not happy with. Some may need rewording.
Rearrange the order if necessary to form a pleasing poem.

I've pasted an example below of a poem I wrote using the above method. It's ended up not being quite what I wanted to say, but I offer it purely as an example of the kind of thing you can 'trick' yourself into writing; when I started the exercise I had extreme writer's block and had been unable to write anything at all. I think it's probably turned out an example of a Type 3 Love Poem.

LONELINESS

You know me - four centuries ago
I was a willow leaning on the far bank
of the oldest river, wanting the water.

Listen. Can you hear my low note trembling
a violin? For no one but you have I sung
to you. I am the first notes of our song.

My scent is the last drop of Casmir
out of the bottle and onto your wrist.
Reach out for me in the dark -

I am cold cotton sheets in your blank bed.
I'm shiny juice of half a strawberry
on your tongue, then the other half.

I wear a vermilion dress, so no one
notices me in a room pressed with people.
I am so-o - and my stone voice has no echo.

_{© Sara Willow}

MONDAY IS 'WORD OF THE WEEK' DAY (NO. 2)

2007-07-09T22:45:00.000+01:00

Second week of the competition (rules below) and my Word of the Week is SNARK. Lewis Carroll invented the word in 1876 in his poem The Hunting of the Snark. It's generally used in computing to mean a system failure, an unexplained or threatening event or security violation.

Personally, I use it to mean a system failure or threat in the personal sense; when I'm overtired and/or insomniac and my mind is playing tricks on me, or when my thinking becomes tangential to the point of disconnection. I'm bipolar, so sometimes this happens if my mood goes too high. I sometimes refer to this as 'Snark Attack' or 'being on Planet Sock'. Planet Sock is one of those planets in the Galaxy of Lost Things (others being Planet Biro, Planet Lighter... you get the idea). You know how inanimate objects teleport there sometimes. Maybe it's a conspiracy against us sentient beings.

Some of my best writing is done under the influence of Snark. Some of my worst writing is, too.

RULES

I'm going to try to use the word SNARK as often as I can for the next seven days, in my writing and in my speech. Within reason though - not in every other sentence just for the sake of it (that would be silly).
You can run with it too, if you like.
Whoever posts the best comment (in my opinion) to this post containing the word SNARK wins a copy of my poetry book, Shape to Shape. You can use any definition of the word you like.
This competition is open worldwide.

I won't be posting much to this blog before next Monday because I'm going away until then, but I'll check out your comments and reply when I get back.

BOOK REVIEW: 'THE ODE LESS TRAVELLED' BY STEPHEN FRY

2007-07-06T17:55:00.000+01:00

Stephen's poem entitled Example (a), which appears on the back of the dust jacket, goes as follows:-

Let's hear it for the Sapphic Ode
An oyster bed of gleaming pearls
A finely wrought poetic mode
Not just for girls.

The book contains many examples of poems in every form, not just odes (sapphic or otherwise). As an aspiring poet who has written many poems but is still learning, I looked forward to diving into it with relish, and not just because of my admiration for its author. A friend who has never written poetry also bought the book, loved it and found it helpful, though perhaps for different reasons to mine.

In other words, this book is ideal for beginners, intermediate and advanced poets alike.

Stephen's inimitable style made me chuckle occasionally as I read. He begins, "I have a dark and dreadful secret. I write poetry." He quotes J.V. Cunningham's definition of poetry: Poetry is metrical writing. If it isn't that I don't know what it is.

There are sections entitled, 'Metre', 'Rhyme', 'Form', and 'Diction and Poetics Today'. I found the chapter on metre particularly useful. All are thorough, and besides copious definitions and examples, contain frequent exercises for the reader to try. I found these exercises enjoyable, and managed to write some half-decent poetry as 'homework'. Besides which, I have found that I carry Stephen's advice with me to this day; it's there in the background whenever I write now.

I've given a couple of examples below of short poems I wrote in response to the exercises.

You might think that Stephen's having - as Michael Parkinson said - 'a brain the size of Kent' might make this tome impenetrable. Nothing could be further from the truth. If you're clever enough to want to write poetry, you'll have no problem catching his drift.

In summary, 'The Ode Less Travelled' is itself 'An oyster bed of gleaming pearls', an excellent 'How-To' book, and an indispensable reference to dip into again and again.

_{'The Ode Less Travelled - Unlocking the Poet within' by Stephen Fry, pub. Hutchinson 2005, £10.99 hardback, to be published in paperback in August 2007.}

Finally, here's my homework inspired by Stephen Fry:

MY BODY

My arse is going south; I'm too afraid
to brave the knife, or drill, or fucking spade.
Fix this, fix that; cosmetic surgery
is not the craic that it's cranked up to be.

Sure, throw your money at it - let's pretend:
But gravity will get you in the end.
_________

OVERTIRED

Either she was drunk or else her
brain was simply saturated.
Surplus words seeped through her skin, they
positively suppurated.

Soon she swam in pools of letters
eddying around her bed,
rising, rising unintended -
Was it something that she said?

_{© Sara Willow}

GHOST STORY: THE TALE OF JOSHUA SCAMP

2007-07-05T21:11:00.000+01:00

Intro:

I wrote this story many years ago when I was a new baby writer. We were given the task of writing a ghost story for Creative Writing class. I offer it as-is.

The accent of the innkeeper is Wiltshire, which is in the south-west of England. He's a local yokel, if you like. I grew up in Salisbury.

Joshua Scamp was an actual gypsy, and there is a local legend about him and his clan occupying the lay-by at Odstock, him being (falsely?) accused of a crime and ending up hung for it, and the Odstock church being haunted afterwards. I don't know whether the legend is true, and the rest of the detail in my story is pure fabrication.

THE TALE OF JOSHUA SCAMP

You be new ‘round these parts, b’aint yer? Well, sit ‘ee down my dears, sit ‘ee down. Two cups of Odstock Mead’ll be sure to warm ‘ee on such a night as this. ‘Twas a fair old hollerin’ night that Christmas Eve all them years ago. To think of it, each Christmas Eve has been the same these long years since. They say ‘tis Joshua Scamp and his gypsy friends, dancing over the graves in yon’ churchyard.

You’ll have passed around the S-bend, afore the hill? You’ll have seen the lay-by on the bend, there where the woods are black on either side? There’s foxes in they woods… ‘Tis that same lay-by where the gypsies had their camp each year. It’s sheltered from the wind, it’s quiet, and the woods give plenty of fuel for the stoves. So they’d come in November, spend the winter. ‘Twas as good a place as any for miles around.

Well, they’d come close on twenty years; the lay-by was theirs by rights November to March. They kept theyselves to theyselves, didn’t bother no one. You’d not have known they was there till you rounded the bend. One or other of them was seen in Salisbury market, buying food, but there’s no harm in that. Or sometimes, if the wind was right, the smell of bacon cooking and the sound of Joshua’s accordion, from beneath the hill.

Then one day, a sheep was stolen from the market. The thief was never brought to light, but rumours told of mutton cooking on gypsy stoves. To most folks’ eyes, Joshua Scamp became a sinister figure who’d steal food from a child’s table. Tongues began a-waggin’, plots were plotted, for the village wanted rid of the gypsy caravans.

Lines were laid in they black woods, to trip gypsies and they chillern. ‘Twas a brave stall-holder who’d refuse to serve, but the worst was saved for ‘em. Names was called, but never to ‘ey faces, y’understand? Always behind they backs - they proud backs… Though Joshua escaped the worst, as folks feared the tangled man they thought lurked behind that black beard, and them glitterin’ eyes.

That dreadful year, all them years ago, they moved on a month early. Locals were satisfied; they nodded they heads and said, truth was, gypsies had gone for good this time. They might have added, “and we drove ‘em to ‘t,” but that was forgotten. Instead they said as how the ghost of the stolen sheep had driven ‘em out.

‘Twas with dismay the curlin’ smoke was sighted that same November, under Odstock hill. Prayers were said in church, that peace would live in the village, though what was really wanted was that they gypsies would up and leave as if ‘ey’d never been there. They never went near the church, and to folks, this meant they must surely worship the devil instead.

So when that Winter Solstice the Barton child disappeared from her bed, the search party sped to the S-bend. What terrible deeds must surely have been done? They carried high their sticks and axes, and they did not pause before beating and hacking at the caravan doors…

Suddenly a voice boomed out like the first thunder of a storm which has brewed for a long time; Joshua spoke. “Search our vans,” he commanded, and silenced now, they did. After lifting they lanterns to every inch, with one mind and fury they swept out of the caravans. The child was not to be found there, but neither were the gypsies. They had slipped into the woods either side of the road, leaving no sign other than that they could not have gone elsewhere.

The woods that night were full; two tribes, them and us. The one trying to trap and round up men like sheep to a pen. The other, always ahead, always silent, avoiding their fate. As dawn broke, Joshua was sighted entering the church on t’other side of the woods, by the side door. All locals made their swoop on the church, while unseen, the other gypsies stole back to the vans, harnessed they horses, and drove away. They never returned, but must they not have spoken since of a man who saved all they necks?

As the sun came up, folks were deciding what to do with the man they had cornered. The Priest would not allow bloodshed in the church, for Sanctuary was the law then. At length they got the key to the oaken doors and locked them fast, side and front. ‘Twas their intention to have no Christmas service that year, but on the Eve, they relented. This time the Priest stood by while they entered and dragged Joshua out.

He was starved and very weak; he’d survived by drinking water from the font. This incensed them more, that an unholy man should drink holy water. He was taken to the gallows that same day and finished off without trial.

Where the child had been them four long days nobody knows; she was found after, safe and well in a barn. Some say ‘twas a plot for ridding of they gypsies; some say she was kidnapped. But one thing was sure - she had come to no harm and remembered nothing. Some even say she was found before the hanging took place, but it went ahead anyways.

‘Twas that Christmas day, the day of the gallows, when the man who had turned the church key took ill in his bed and died. I know, for he was my grandfather, and my father told me of it. My grandfather screamed on his death bed of a visit from a tall man with black eyes. The following Yule the hauntings returned; some of they locals would not go to church for fear of a sighting of Joshua Scamp. Yearly the legend grew, and ‘twas said if any man locked the church door, he’d die that same night.

By and by the key was thrown into the Ebble, where it stayed nigh on thirty years. Joshua was seen less in church, but the village did not forget. One day last year the key was dredged up and the curate declared ‘twas time an end was put to these so-called hauntings. ‘Twas nothing but a tale, he declared, which would stop a man from coming to church at Christmas time. In defiance of they gypsies and their ancient curse, he turned the key in the oaken doors once more.

That night, he took to his bed, and died.

Well, ‘tis all I can tell ‘ee my dears; I see my mead has warmed ‘ee. I’ve a room upstairs for the taking; ‘tis a wild night to be going out again now. The church key? A safe place was needed for ‘t, and since ‘twas my grandfather who turned it first, I’d a hankerin’ for it. There ‘tis, on hook on yonder wall. ‘Tis a curious story, think ‘ee not, my dears? If ‘ee don’t believe me, take down the key, and go try it in the church door this night. I’ll not come with ‘ee mind - I’m not as young as I once was.

^{© Sara Willow}

AUDIO POETRY, ANYONE?

2007-07-04T15:36:00.000+01:00

I'm considering this:

Is poetry better spoken aloud? Does performed poetry lend itself to better understanding?

Would anyone be interested if I posted some free audio files of me reading my poetry, in addition to the typed versions? One poem per file, so they'd be small. I have no idea how to do this yet, but I'll look into it. It can't be too much of a KERFUFFLE.
How about a CD of lots of spoken poetry which people could send for? Likewise, I'd need to look into how to get a good-quality recording made. If I did this, I'd keep the price low, just enough to cover costs.
I might also give a short introduction to each poem saying why/how I wrote it, etc.
I already have a book of poems called SHAPE TO SHAPE which I'm offering as a prize in the Word of the Week and Site of the Month competitions, but would anyone be interested if I were to make this available to buy on this site? Again, the price would cover costs only.

WRITING BLOG/SITE LINK EXCHANGE - SITE OF THE MONTH COMPETITION

2007-07-04T13:28:00.000+01:00

People with writing weblogs or websites, this post is for YOU:

Would you like a link exchange? If you link to this blog on your page, I'll add your site to my links. You need to email me at professoryackle(AT)blueyonder(DOT)co.uk to let me know you've added me, or else comment on this post.

Sites to do with writing only please - creative writing, prose, poetry, novels, stories, how-to's on writing, you get the idea.

EDIT - Hell, I'll even consider non-writing sites too, so long as they're really cool. /edit

HERE'S THE COMPETITION PART

Every month, the link-exchanged site I like the best, I'll feature in a post called Writing Site of the Month. I'll also send you a free copy of my poetry book Shape to Shape through the post (I'll contact the winner at the end of each month for address details).

Happy linking!

REVIEW ON BLIXA BARGELD'S REDE/SPEECH

2007-07-03T21:01:00.000+01:00

This post is about music, or more specifically, the nature of improvisational sound. It's not really about writing, but the reason I'm cross-posting it here (it first appeared in my Livejournal on 23.10.06) is because I'm interested in the concept of conjuring art from the rawest of materials, of going back to the source. I like it when poetry works that way, too.

Last October I went with to see Blixa Bargeld (from the German band Einstürzende Neubauten) at the Charter theatre in Preston, UK.

This is going to be a long post in order to do justice to Blixa, though actually I'm completely incapable of conveying in mere words the enormity of the things I heard or their impact on me. If you are AT ALL interested in music of any kind, please read on, especially the section after the second heading, 'Blixa'. I'd be particularly interested in receiving comments from anyone who understands the science of sound.

SUPPORT ACT

We arrived in the theatre just after the start of the support act, theybreakinpieces. I'm always slightly suspicious of bands which don't capitalise their name and/or don't use spaces between the words - it smacks of pretentiousness, and in this case I was right to be suspicious. They were the musical equivalent of the Turner Prize but with less talent. It would have been best for all concerned if someone had dismantled them years ago.

There were three of them on stage - the first was a guy who had an instrument vaguely resembling a double bass, made out of what seemed to be a metal chimney hood/flue thing and strung with a single piece of string. He played it with a violin bow, hunching over it and striking ominous poses for dramatic effect. The best thing I can say about him was that he looked a bit like my boyfriend John would if John had crinkley hair.

The second guy had an upturned wok on a boingy spirally pole which he played with a double bass bow against its edge. Then there was a woman in a powder blue top and brown cargo pants who stood, completely unmoving, sideways on. She had black leather cuffs on and had various wires crocodile-clipped to her clothing. There was a camera at the front of the stage on a tripod, angled at the woman, and her image was projected on a large screen at the back of the stage. She didn't appear to add anything to the act, other than visual effect. The whole thing was very surreal without being interesting, and completely unmitigated.

The sound coming out of the speakers was earsplittingly awful, and went on for 25 long minutes. Three guys go into a pub... I say pub, but it was a theatre, and one of them was a woman. The first guy says to the others, "Let's go on stage, make the most nauseating noise we can, and call it art". So they did.

I kept wishing I'd brought my earplugs. It was painful. But clearly, we just weren't clever enough to appreciate what they were doing. Finally the two guys left the stage and the woman stood there for some minutes doing nothing. Then she started making infinitessimally small movements. At first I thought one of the guys was backstage with a mouse, woggling it over a computer screen connected to the projected image, because the image was shooting in and out and shaking and we could hear popping and crackling and general weirdness. As the girl moved more and slightly faster I realised that actually she was a kind of human theremin; her wires and cuffs were connected to the camera and generating the interference. I dunno how it worked exactly. This was vaguely intriguing for as long as it took me to wonder how she was doing it, but rapidly became yawningly dull.

The words 'Emperor,' 'new' and 'clothes' spring to mind.

Hey! If any of you guys want to get together with me sometime, play junk instruments on stage and create a fucking terrible trauma for the audience, I reckon we could make a few bob. What d'you reckon? Anyone up for it?

BLIXA

The act was entitled "Rede/Speech" and we'd expected Blixa to talk about Einstürzende Neubauten, his writing, influences etc. but what we got was two hours of auditory genius. The man is a god. He began by saying that he considers his act "industrial comedy", and explaining what he was going to attempt to do - imagine the auditorium as the bowl on a candy-floss machine; he was going to fling sound-bytes, like sugar, out to the far reaches of the bowl where they'd spin and return to him and keep spinning. He'd add more sugar and gradually, layer upon layer, the candy-floss would be formed. He commented that with candy-floss, watching it being made is infinitely more interesting than eating it, and hoped that that wouldn't be the case with his music.

In order to do this he had a number of pedals which he used in 32-second loops, bouncing them to Mephisto the sound-man in the centre of the auditorium, and he interspersed the music he was making with explanations, funny asides, his German brand of irony etc. all in his guttural accent.

For one piece, he re-created our solar system right there in the theatre, all from bits and pieces of sound which he made with his own voice. It got deeper and wider and more infinite and by the end you had the planets zooming around you, the crackle of the asteroids, the moons, stars, everything. It WAS a solar system, enormous, terrible, glorious. Actually, at the beginning of the piece, he involved the audience: he got the two sides to sing a long "Ah" note (he said, 'Don't worry what note to sing because it will always be D' - and it was) slightly displaced from each other time-wise. We were the gamma radiation or whatever it is, left over from the Big Bang. So we were part of that solar system too. I felt honoured.

He has an incredible range (understatement). The lowest notes he sung I can only describe as being so low that they made me want to take my clothes off. But he could also scream and screech so high you could only just hear the notes, even though he was doing it loudly. Once the layers began building up, the floor, seats, air, my body all vibrated with the sound. Some of the time I felt physically turned on by the pulses of it all. Is it possible to have an orgasm from sound alone? My guess is that it IS possible; if he'd gone on for much longer or not kept breaking to chat between the pieces, who knows what would have happened. He gave us two hours of ecstasy.

Another thing he did was to take the DNA of a human and remove a small piece and insert some raven DNA, to create an angel. He told us about certain experiments where scientists have done similar things and created monsters which, in some cases, have lived for quite some time, although they couldn't procreate. He said, in an ominous voice, "Isn't it interesting how ven I am talkink about zese experiments, my german accent gets stronger, nicht wahr?" By the end, I swear to you, we could not only hear that angel, we could see it, smell it, feel its presence in the room. Incredible. Beyond incredible, and really there are no adequate adjectives.

I would happily go and see him again and again and again. He is a genius. I wonder whether he is synæsthesic? To a certain extent, we all were, by the end; he gave us a taste of what it must be like to experience sound as form, colour, to touch it, smell it.

He rarely tours, but if ever you get the chance to see him I cannot recommend strongly enough that you go.

TRICKING YOURSELF INTO WRITING POETRY

2007-07-03T01:39:00.000+01:00

This is a game (technique, device) I use when I have writer's block, or sometimes just for the Hades of it. It's a method of generating a poem, or at least the innards of a poem, from - where? The æther? Your subconscious? How many combinations can be concocted from a mere twenty-six letter cypher? How many of them form words which taste good on the tongue?

The rules of the game are as follows:

Choose any word or phrase you like which has, say, 12 to 20 letters. Bear in mind that phrases which have lots of repeated letters don't work so well. Get yourself a sheet of A4 paper and write the phrase along the top. In this example, I'm using the phrase Miracles happen.

Find as many words as you can which are contained within the phrase. I like to arrange them in lists, all the words beginning with A in one column, C in another column, and so on, but that's just me being anally-retentive, I expect.

In the phrase Miracles happen there are two A's, so you're allowed words with zero, one, or two A's in, but not words with three A's. Likewise, there's only one N, so you can't have a word containing two or more N's.

Having said that, if I come across an especially juicy word which breaks rule no. 3, I can't resist adding it to my list anyway, but I tend to put brackets round it.

Any time you come across a word you really like, a word which leaps out at you as being excellent in some way, underline it.

Carry on until you can't find any more words, or stop when the time runs out, or something. You could use some kind of anagram search program from teh intarwebz, but I don't recommend that. Why? The hand-drawn method is more organic, and the time it takes is an essential ingredient. While you're stewing, images are brewing. The poetry is already cooking in your head before you're done.

OK, now the fun part. Copy your underlined words onto another piece of A4 in a random fashion, spaced out any-old-how. Keep your lists to refer to later.

those

If you're off and running with a poem at this stage, go for it. If not, the next step is to write an arbitrary story linking the words up. A kind of "Once upon a time" fable, or "Three men went into a pub". It can be a rubbish story (it probably will be). Just use your words as they crop up on the page; squish as much padding in between as you need to glue it together.

Now cross out anything you don't like. Be ruthless. Nothing is sacred - we're not even at first draft stage here, we're draft-minus-one. Chuck in a couple of spare words off your list - remember the list? - for good measure. Rearrange the order of sentences for any reason or none. Leave it as one block, or divide it up on a whim into stanzas of however many lines feels right on the night. Throw a die to decide how many lines go in a verse, if you like. You get the idea. Cut it and mix it. Be random.

When you're fed up with pushing groups of words around the page, write Draft 1 in the top right hand corner, put both pieces of paper somewhere safe, and go and do something else. Sleep on it, maybe.

When you come back to it, certain things will occur to you that you weren't aware of before, like this phrase sucks or I really like that bit or I need to swap this line with that line. If you get stuck for words, go back to your list, and find a few more you like. Basically, you're trying to write a poem with as many words as possible from the phrase you chose, plus the minimum number of extra words you need to make sense of it.

Once you've finished playing with it - temporarily - you'll find you've got something which is starting to resemble a poem. You can call it Draft 2, and maybe copy it out onto a fresh sheet of paper to celebrate, because now the first sheet is getting scruffy, maybe illegible.

I'm going to cover editing drafts is more detail in another post, but for now, this is just one of the ways you can trick yourself into writing poetry. It sounds long-winded, and I guess it is; but you can pick it up and put it down again, search for words while you're waiting in queues or watching a boring proggy on TV. In fact, the more you're distracted because of doing something else at the same time, the better it works, because you'll be using your right-brain to come up with things you didn't know you knew.

So, after all that kerfuffle, what happened to Miracles Happen? It turned into a poem about a good ol' boy from New York who went to Iraq (below). Code gets mentioned, funnily enough, and I even managed to get railways in there. An imran, by the way, is a journey, a kind of personal pilgrimage, sometimes involving a series of challenges. But I doubt if you'll find it in the dictionary.

_{Further reading: Constrained Writing}

SPECIAL FROM NEW YORK
“Miracles happen…”

These machines are never still: twenty-four
seven construct code from components,
sharpen truth on the front-end of symbol,
collocate cipher-charms for killers.

Crime is nice, but spies use miracles:
the space to erase, repaper the lines,
replace the map. This is not an apple.
The cream of the crap, whatever happens.

Mr Clean’s on his imran, chasin’
peace with ice in his ears: the plash
of rain on rails, the plan, the plan,
or was it war let him forget his name?

Perhaps the Clap. Or cash. Or sarcasm.
Same heist, same price here in his cell.
He came to Iraq happier, sane.
Can he recall the shape of an apple?

^{© Sara Willow}

WLTM (PERSONAL AD)

2007-07-02T18:40:00.000+01:00

To see if words can walk across blank space
I'll send you this, my poem, like a light
from one hill to another. Is it bright
enough to close the gap, to find your face?
And do you feel the code for rose conveys
my red S-O-S heartbeat through the night?
I can't yet read your name; how can I write
a thing which makes you want to count the ways?

Must try, within the confines of this rhyme
to cause you to apply. Show me a sign.

^{NOTES
This is an example of a Type 1 love poem, even though the object of my desire is undefined (I haven't met him yet). It's a search for a soul-mate, if you like.

I've alluded to Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poem How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count The Ways and to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. The poem started off as a sonnet - a form which takes love as its theme, traditionally - but I found I'd said all I needed to say after ten lines.

© Sara Willow}

4 KINDS OF LOVE POEMS

2007-07-02T15:45:00.000+01:00

The poet Ian Parks once said that there are three kinds of love poem:

You want her¹ but you can't have her (or not yet).
You've got her and everything is delightful.
She's gone, and you're bereft.

Ian said that in general, Type 2 love poems don't work, or they're difficult to bring off at least, because there's no conflict, no tension. "I'm in love, la la la, hello clouds hello sky..." Shut up! Nobody cares. In a sense, as with the newspapers, good news is no news.

Type 2 love poetry also conjures clichés, if you're not careful. How many pop songs contain lyrics like, "With every beat of my heart..."? Pass me the bucket; it's all been said before. (Of course, if you just want to write fluffykins a poem for her eyes only, go right ahead).

Type 1 and Type 3 love poems: different pot of lobsters entirely. Conflict makes for tight poetry which is intriguing to read. And why can't you have her? Why did she go? There's mystery there, possibly.

Finally, Type 4 love poems: Any kind of love poem which doesn't fit into the other three categories. Personally, I like this kind best; for me it's the most challenging to write. Examples could include:

You've got her, but you wish you hadn't.
She's gone, and good riddance to bad rubbish.
A love poem about a child, parent, friend, place etc., i.e. not romantic love.

^{1 - I've used 'her' on this occasion; by all means substitute 'him'. I'm not going to get into that 'him/her/he/she' KERFUFFLE here.}

MONDAY IS 'WORD OF THE WEEK' DAY

2007-07-02T13:12:00.000+01:00

Ok, so here's my first Word of the Week: KERFUFFLE. The dictionary definition is: disorder, commotion, a disorderly outburst or tumult.

I like it because it's somewhat onomatopoeic; it sounds like what it is. I also like it because it's a ridiculous word, as English words go. It's less mischievous than 'shenanigans', which is another favourite word of mine.

LET'S HAVE SOME FUN - WOTW COMPETITION

Unlike other WotW websites, you're not necessarily going to get unusual or little-used words here, or definitions intended to expand your vocabulary whilst insulting your intelligence. What I want to do is play a game.

Each Monday (if I remember) I'm going to nominate a Word of the Week.
I'm going to use that word as often as I can for the next seven days, in conversation, in my writing, or here in this blog; within reason though - not in every other sentence just for the sake of it (that would be silly).
You can run with my word too, if you like.
For a limited period only, each week I'll send a small prize to the best comment (to any of my posts) which uses my WotW. EDIT: The prize is a copy of my book of poetry, SHAPE TO SHAPE. /edit

What are you waiting for?

OBLIQUE STRATEGIES WIDGET

2007-07-02T03:47:00.000+01:00

If you use Mac OS X you might be interested in this dashboard widget - I use mine all the time when I'm writing and stuck for ideas.

The Apple download site says:- Are you a musician/producer having a blank in the studio? Are you a writer with a sudden writer’s block? Are you an artist staring at a blank canvas? Are you a creative looking at an empty screen?

In comes Oblique — a widget implementation of the famous “Oblique Strategies” card decks from Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt...

You can download it free HERE

Or you can buy a real-life deck of the cards, fifth edition, for £30 HERE. More info about the cards is HERE.

I don't get any commission by the way - I just love it as a writing tool.

BARN IN BOWLAND

2007-07-01T23:32:00.000+01:00

The barn was built four hundred years ago.
It stands aside, its shoulder to the north
wind, watching the wind turn tongues of brown grass.

Which is stronger: four centuries of stone,
or wind, carrying a sheep’s bleat on its back,
crumbling the barrow-side with callused hands?

You would not notice, but the wall gapes, “Oh” –
listen. Is that the wild cry of the wind
or slow, a stone lament for centuries lost?

No one goes there. Except, sometimes, the rain.

^{‘Barn in Bowland’ © Sara Willow, was published in 1995 in Poet’s England 18 – Lancashire, Ed. Gladys Mary Coles, pub. Headland Publications; and also in Pennine Platform 33, Sept 1993.}

SITE REVIEW: READ IT SWAP IT

2007-07-01T21:35:00.000+01:00

I met the author and poet Joolz Denby at a writing course last year at Ty Newydd in Wales. Joolz said the best tip she could give to aspiring writers is that if you want to write well, you must read, read, read.

Books are expensive - though worth every penny - if you read a lot of them. One solution is to trade the books you've finished with, and it was Joolz who first recommended Read It Swap It to me. I duly took myself along to the site, and discovered a cornucopia of books of every category imaginable; not just fiction of every genre, but non-fiction and poetry too.

Basically, how it works is like this: You sign up, and any spare books you might have, you list on your Read It Swap It 'bookshelf'. Although this takes a bit of time at first, obviously once your books are up there you only have to add the odd one or two now and then. It's easy to do, because the web form allows you to type in the ISBN number and in most cases it recognises the book and fills in the details for you. You can add books without an ISBN by filling in the title and author manually. You also say what condition the book is in.

Soon you will start getting requests from people who want your books, and you can then view their bookshelves to see whether they have any titles which interest you. If they haven't, no worries, you just decline the swap, simple as. If they have, you choose a book and the swap goes ahead. Each swapper stands their own postage costs, so it's worth bearing that in mind and not putting any enormous tomes on your bookshelf. The smallest amount I've paid for postage is 35p, the largest was about £2. On average I spend 75p-£1.20 or thereabouts.

You can also browse the library for specific books, by title, author, user or category, and instigate a swap request yourself.

So far I have got 100 free books this way, many of them in brand new condition, all for the cost of the postage plus a book of mine which I didn't want anyway. I read fast, but I can't keep up - I have a stack of books waiting to be read.

It's a friendly community too, with forums. It works on the honour system, and generally people are genuine. I only had one problem with a swap, and that was sorted out eventually. The other 99 were smooth as butter.

Not got any books you don't want? No problem. One of the things I do is I buy paperbacks in reasonable condition from my local Samaritans shop for 30p each. I read them, then put them up on my RiSi bookshelf. I've also got old books from friends and family, and returned the favour by giving books from RiSi to my friends (after I've read them first, of course!)

Authors like Read It Swap It because users get to read titles/authors they haven't tried before, and if they like them they'll perhaps want to read other books by the same author. If the other titles aren't currently available on RiSi the person will probably buy them. Also, many authors get pleasure from knowing that people are reading and enjoying their work - I know I do - and the odd few people swapping books is not going to affect their income much anyway.

IN CONCLUSION
This is the best site I know for getting free (or nearly free) books; its only disadvantage as far as I can see is that it's a UK site. However, if you type "swap books" into Google there are lots of other sites for other countries. If you do live in the UK I recommend you give Read It Swap It a try.

Reviews on Joolz Denby and Ty Newydd coming soon.

WHY THIS, HERE?

2007-06-30T23:06:00.001+01:00

Why call this blog MIXING TRACKS (RAILWAY MIX)?

I've always believed that the spoken word can, perhaps, be a kind of music. When I write poetry I like to shuffle words around, experiment, use onomatopoeia, explore the chime of rhyme, the riff and ripple of rhythm. Borrow cadences, repeat, repeat, cut it out here, shove it in there. Why this word, here, now? Does that word say all I want it to say? If not, delete, rewind, find a new shoe, make it fit a bit better, slow it or speed it, most of all read it to hear it say what it's trying to say - out loud.

Sense is not always necessary. My favourite visual artist is Dali.

Why write a poem
which leaves ab-so-lute-ly
no room what-so-ever
for mis-in-ter-pre-ta-tion?

What would be the point of that? It wouldn't be art, it would be an instruction manual. I like it when people uncover an idea in one of my poems which even I hadn't realised was there.

I like to try different ways of composing poetry. Sometimes I can trick myself into making it. (More on this later). As the superlative Pink Floyd said,

I know a room of musical tunes.
Some rhyme, some ching, most of them are clockwork.
Let's go into the other room and make them work.
_{(Pink Floyd, I've Got A Bike)}

I always go through at least six drafts per poem; Mixing Tracks took me thirty. The last ten of those involved moving whole lines around. People who refuse to move from their first draft, saying, "But that's how it came to me!" as if some archangel sent those exact words to them on a sunbeam, are short-changing themselves (and their readers): no matter how brilliantly your poem shines there is always some mote which might be better out. Don't be a luvvie. Be ruthless. As Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch said, Murder your darlings. If you really can't part with that sound byte, put it aside for another time. (More on this later, too).

Every house I've lived in has been by a railway. Consequently a fair few of my poems have railways in them in one form or another, often in a disturbing way. Make of that what you will.

So, if I have a 'signature' poem, this one is probably it. Which is why I chose it to kick off my new writing blog.

MIXING TRACKS (RAILWAY MIX)

2007-06-30T20:20:00.000+01:00

Blackbird-dawn; Mad Jane shuffles home
by the railway line, shove-ha'penny shoes
strung slack round her neck. Thinks she's seen
a one-eyed gecko. It blinks right back.

Two cats, three eyes: my Moonchildren.
Another chick will croak tonight
under the river, under the train.
The table-tilters decide who dies.

Zombie Train drives two hours late
balancing on silver bones.
Brother River's jiving past
my gate, or is that thunder, rain?

You lick like lipstick on a beach.
Cannot smoke it, cannot stick it.
Cannot stop it with your stick.
Under the river, under the train.

Mouthing X-words, munching numbers -
You in the In-Between Machine.
DJ Demon's toasting fractals,
Teaching his leeches cheap pixel-mix.

Karaoke generation
screech for free beer-fucks, off-key
beside the river, under the train -
they were here first. But so were we.

Dog take your toke? He took my cheque;
Now all I got is rocks and cake.
Hole in my stomach, truck through my skull.
Now I rattle like a tin can alley breeze.

All the sixes; my energy's a runaway
underneath the river, under the train -
flickering liquid, nicotine sighs.
Don't shake your killing lies at me.

Train carves the last curve around the track,
hooks Mad Jane off her cig-pack feet.
Today is Wednesday. You're still alive.
Sunrise is running smack on time.

_{© Sara Willow}