Modern Magick

Toil and Trouble: 17

A long-dead, tormented and frightened Waymaster proved not to be the best or safest of pilots. We departed Tut Hill with a sickening lurch, and a rumbling shudder which sent everyone in the room crashing to the floor. We came down some interminable time later with an unpromising crunch. For a little while I lay inert, my every muscle aching and my poor head spinning dizzily.

Then Jay was at my side. 'Hup,' he said, and mercilessly hauled me to my feet. 'Steady?'

I was, just about. Shaking knees aside.

Zareen was already vertical, and on her way to the door at a bouncing trot. Katalin and Mercer were on the far side of the bare little room, looking (to my secret relief) quite as shaken as I felt. And wary, too. Why? Had they not got what they wanted in bringing the cottage here?

Assuming we had arrived at the right place, of course. Zareen soon confirmed this, for having opened the front door a crack and peeped through, she proceeded to hurl it wide open and stomped out into the darkness beyond. 'Ashdown ahoy!' she called back.

That was when a third voice spoke. 'Ashdown,' it said, low and cracked. 'I remember that name, of my youth.' It was an old woman's voice, the tones worn and faded by the passage of many a long year.

Dio sighed. 'Go back to sleep, Maud.'

'I think I will not,' said Maud.

'Ah!' I cried. 'How nice to make your acquaintance, Maud Grey. Or is it Greyer?'

'Tis Greyer,' she allowed.

'Good. Excellent.' I looked around. 'And where might you be?'

'They buried me in the back bedchamber,' said Maud.

'Buried?' scoffed Wester. 'Walled thee up, like the devil thou art!'

'I am no devil,' said Maud, winter-dry. Then she laughed, wheezing. 'At least, no more than any Greyer.'

'Who is "they"?' I wondered aloud. 'Who walled you up?'

'My grandson,' she said, with chilling indifference. 'And granddaughter.'

Considering that Maud Greyer had herself interred the body of her own, freshly-hanged sister inside the cottage's walls, I decided I did not wish to know any more about the Greyer family.

Bill, though, had no scruples. 'Ves,' he hissed, still stuck to the wall. 'Have a care! There is nothing but evil in that one.'

'How do you know?'

'My mistress always greatly feared her sister.'

'That is not true!' shouted Dio.

But Maud chuckled. 'It hath the right of it, thy odd creation. Thou wert always easily cowed.'

I felt a chill of foreboding. Dio Greyer, necromancer and High Witch of a powerful coven, found reason to be terrified of Maud? That did not bode well.

Whatever Katalin and George Mercer might know about Maud Greyer, it wasn't reassuring them either. They had gone from wary to outright alarmed at the exchange, and I heard Katalin say in a fraught whisper: 'She was not supposed to be here!'

'Aye,' said Maud. 'They made fine work of me, did they not? Put it about that I had died of the Sweat, and into the wall I went with none the wiser.' She paused, chillingly, and added in a musing tone, 'I wonder what hath become of my descendants?'

I, for one, did not want to know.

'I would like to be rid of these confines,' continued Maud after a moment. 'These rude walls, how they chafe after five hundred years!'