Spellbound

By Maryk Lewis

When Claudine’s straying fiancé caught AIDS she unwisely chose to stay with him. When modern medicine offered no cure she unwisely chose to look elsewhere, which is why she came to be crouched on a dark hilltop spying on a witch’s coven far below. She was not alone.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Maryk Lewis
• Release date: Sep 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370518036

Maryk Lewis

Maryk Lewis is a retired secondary school teacher. His main subjects were Geography, English and Social Studies. Bushcraft was an optional extra for senior students. He sold his first published item to a children's magazine in 1954. For military service he served as a radio operator in an armoured car, but was never called to active duty. There are two tartans he is entitled to wear as of right.

Book preview

SPELLBOUND

by Maryk Lewis

Dedication

For Shirley

When Claudine’s straying fiancé caught AIDS she unwisely chose to stay with him. When modern medicine offered no cure she unwisely chose to look elsewhere, which is why she came to be crouched on a dark hilltop spying on a witch’s coven far below. She was not alone.

Other than the obviously historical characters, doing what history records them as doing, all characters in this book are fictitious, and no reference is intended to any person living or dead. The right of Maryk Lewis to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988. Copyright © 2001, Maryk Lewis, All Rights Reserved.

ISBN9781370518036

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CHAPTER I

Feeling her way across the hillside in the dark, Claudine found the place, and thankfully lowered her heavy burden. Then she crouched, a tiny slip of a woman, trying to make herself smaller still. With trembling hands, she touched her equipment item by item to check that all was there. It had been quite a scramble through the fences on the way up. Everything had to be done in the dark, for torchlight would reveal her presence, and hers were dangerous prey. They’d be of no use to her otherwise.

That chalk ridge at night was cold and bleak, though it was not the chill which caused her hands to shake, as she set up the tripod for her camera. Angry with herself for showing such weakness, she willed the trembling to stop. For Harry’s sake, worthless though he was, she had to complete this task.

Darkness was simply darkness. There was nothing lurking in the shadows of the cairn behind her. The gloomy clumps scattered over the hillside were just bushes, trees, patches of hedging. The only really frightening things were the people in the dale far below. They’d frighten anybody.

Annoyingly, after she tightened the knurled knob to fix the tripod at its lowest, the telephoto lens chattered against the camera body when she felt for the thread alignment.

Nerves.

It was as well the focus length was pre-set, calculated from a map. Final sighting must wait for light to show away down there, because nothing could yet be seen through her viewfinder.

She was prepared for that. As she unfastened the last of the four carrying cases she’d lumped up the hill, she cast another nervous look over her shoulders. There was nobody to be seen. Knockstead Ridge in darkness was a dreadful place. Anybody with any sense stayed well away from it.

The night glasses Harry had given her worked surprisingly well. When Mistletoe Glade, the distant clearing, came into focus, the faces of the witches and warlocks showed clearly even in the faint light of the stars. She could name several of them. They were standing in a loose group, naked, all staring up at Knockstead cairn, waiting for the moon to appear behind it. She wondered how they withstood the cold. Their first incantation couldn’t be started until the moon’s upper rim showed, and had to be finished before the bottom edge cleared the tops of the trees.

Claudine had a good view of all they would do. As she had worked out when she first reconnoitred the area, the cairn and its close vicinity provided the sole vantage point from which the activities of the coven could be observed. The Satanists needed to see the cairn, so conversely anybody at the cairn could also see into their charmed circle. Of course the members of the coven were quite aware of that, but they were relying on two things to preserve their anonymity.

The first was distance. When the site had been selected long ages ago, no mere human, not even a sharp-eyed huntsman, would have been able to distinguish any detail in the far-off glade; not though the flames of the bonfire were at their very highest would identities be revealed. In those days none of the wizards or witches predicted the invention of night glasses, infra-red cameras, and telephoto lenses. Their counterparts of the year 2000 hadn’t given the matter a thought. Why should they?

The second of their protective devices had so far served well enough to keep folk away from the cairn during the cold night hours. That lonely heap was haunted. When darkness fell the bogles, the bogeymen, the night wanderers, were reputed to walk the chalk ridges. Many simple country people claimed to have seen them, the ghosts of an ancient race, the little folk, arisen by night from the marshlands, where the Druids had driven them in times long past. They wreaked their bitterness, so the stories said, on any who trespassed on the only freedom left to them... the bleak ridges and downlands after nightfall.

Claudine was unsure whether to believe in them or not.

She’d grown up with the ancient stories. Fond nursemaids had whispered them to her when they were supposed to be reading her to sleep. The grooms related them, when as a sylphan wisp of a child, she’d hung around the stables watching the lads at their work. All from old Sussex yeomanry stock, the workers on the estate had been well-versed in the traditional folklore, and loved to make their adored little mistress’s brown eyes grow huge and round with delighted horror.

On this night, though, there was no delight in her awed apprehension. She was driven by a compelling reason to risk the wrath of the bogles. Much against her will and better judgement, she had to find a witch, a true old-fashioned practitioner of the black arts. Spying on the coven, which was about to meet in the clearing below, was the only likely method she’d been able to find.

Answering the advertisements in newspapers and magazines wasn’t much help. Mostly she had met only people versed in palmistry, or reading Tarot cards, and that wasn’t the kind of help she needed. The one genuine witch she was sure she’d met in that way would only grant her request if Claudine would join a coven. Pressing though her need was, joining a coven was not something Claudine was willing to do.

The approach she adopted was therefore of necessity based on coercion... blackmail in fact. Harry in his anguish had forced her into it. Reluctant as she was to use such methods, for his sake she had to provide herself with a lever to force a witch to co-operate. The threat of publicity was that lever. Exposure was one of a witch’s chief dreads.

Using the information she’d gleaned from the tales of her childhood, from things told her by the farm workers, and from old books and journals in her parents’ library, Claudine deduced that a coven would meet in Mistletoe Glade at this time.

The relief of finding that she’d been right helped to temper her fear. It gave her some control over the shaking of her limbs. Giving way to panic would ruin her best hope of obtaining for Harry the cure he so desperately needed.

To give herself courage, and perhaps to protect herself from the bogles, she had brought with her three golden crucifixes. Three, she was assured, the number of itself, was a powerful protection. One, the largest, hung between her shapely breasts. Another was centred on her forehead, and held in place by a golden chain threaded through her dark brown hair. The third dangled from her right wrist.

Besides those, she had brought water drawn from the baptistery of the village church, and had sprinkled it on the ground around where she was kneeling.

Even so, she was trembling, and the glasses shook as she peered down on the activities of the distant coven.

Behind her the moon was coming closer and closer to the crest of the ridge. A faint suggestion of light was beginning to spill down into the dale.

The faces there were all turned up to her, every detail sharp when seen through the night glasses. In the viewfinder of the infra-red camera they still appeared only as blurs, but the super-sensitive and fine-grained film she was using would deal with that. She checked the focus again, corrected the sighting, and took the first photograph. The moon was lifting behind the cairn. Its light reached to the nearest trees.

A match flared in the clearing. A lick of flame appeared among the stacked faggots. In moments the bonfire was burning up and lighting the gyrating bodies starting to dance in a ring widdershins... anticlockwise, bizarre, obscene.

Claudine adjusted the exposure of her camera. The brightness of the fire was blotting out the details of the naked bodies she wished to capture on the film. She refocussed on the part of the ring where the witches and warlocks were most often facing towards her. Sometimes she caught an individual who had stopped to drink from one of the several demijohns set at intervals around the edge of the firelit circle. By aiming wide she hoped to photograph the people without having the images drowned out by the direct radiation from the fire.

The technicalities of her task largely kept Claudine from thinking about what she was looking at. The foul rites, the lascivious posturing, she viewed impersonally. Jouncing breasts on the women, and jiggling erections on the men were matters of lighting and timing. Each groping hand had to be associated with a particular individual. An unseen face buried in an anonymous groin was of no use to her. The writhing bodies, teasing, tantalising, haphazardly conjoined, had to be identifiable. Her shutter clicked again and again. Frame by frame the film wound through her camera. Time passed unnoticed.

She fished out a fresh container from the refrigerated box and changed the film, crouching low, and mindful that moonlight might reflect off exposed glass or metal. Had she caught them all, every one, 13 of them?

She would take them all again. She had plenty of film.

The central one presiding over the fire was a difficult subject; she was hidden by the light itself. However, Claudine was careful to take several shots of that one, when the view of the fire was blocked by intervening bodies. She’d known the woman for years, and not for a moment had she suspected the mousy little nonentity was playing this secret role.

The three who seemed to have wrapped their lower limbs in goatskins, a berserk trio cavorting lewdly in an inner circle, were also difficult to capture. When they weren’t too close to the fire, they were hidden by other prancing bodies.

The nine in the outer circle were much easier, especially when they paused to fumble and paw at each other. She took them one by one, facing toward her, whenever she got a clear view, nine of them... and still had three to photograph.

Had she taken some twice by mistake?

Her count was wrong. No, that was wrong. Had she missed taking some at all?

She picked up the night glasses again.

The woman in the middle, the one she’d thought she knew so well, the one who usually stamped the date due in Claudine’s library books; there were several shots of her. If the setting of the camera was correct there’d be views of her chanting to the moon, a high-breasted pose produced by her raised arms. There’d be one of her poised over the altar stone... the Samhain Stone so the locals called it... driving a knife into a bantam rooster, and another of her pouring the bird’s blood into the flames. The prints would show her again sacrificing a piglet... surely a piglet? But looking for all the world like a human baby as she gutted it, and held it aloft while the loops of intestine tumbled into the fire.

Still further pictures would show her arched backwards, supported by her hands held over her head, presenting the darkly smudged cleft of her middle section to the warlocks, who took turns to come forward and briefly mount her.

Claudine had a mad mental flash of a series of photographic enlargements thumb-tacked to the display boards in the library… staff recruitment perhaps? See what our own Miss Scully does in her spare time.

She turned the glasses on the three in the inner circle, two grossly fat men and a woman to match. They were the awkward ones, the only ones to have dressed themselves in anything, even if the clothing did nothing to hide their genitalia. The garments seemed to emphasise them even, to make their owners appear amazingly deformed. Claudine wondered how the two men, so generously equipped, could dress themselves to hide those particular bulges in normal everyday company.

Try as she might, she couldn’t put a name to any of the three. Their features were too grotesque to be real. They had to be covered with rubber masks such as are sold in novelty shops, the little establishments where party conjurers obtain their illusions. As for their leg-coverings and footwear, staying on tiptoe to force their feet into the imitation goats’ trotters must have become rather painful by the end of the first hour. It was surprising that they still had the energy to carry on with their crazy strutting and posturing.

The outer circle was the easiest to photograph by far. The lighting was better. There was also more time to prepare to release the shutter, when the target reached the most favourable position. Claudine could put a name to half of them, knew where to find most of the others, and at least recalled having laid eyes on the rest at some time or other. The only problem was that there were 12 of them.

She had distinctly counted a total of 13 in the whole coven before the moon rose. Now there were 16.

Those three in the inner circle had to have joined the group unnoticed after the fire had been lit.

Again and again she snapped the shutter on one or other of the elusive trio, but always the view of the target was either blocked by another body getting in the way, or lost in the direct glare of the dancing flames. Doggedly she persisted, firing off film after film, until she was down to her last half-dozen frames. Just one revealing photograph of each of them was all she wanted. After Faith Scully, the officiating witch, Claudine was convinced that those three were the people who possessed the dark power she sought to tap. The other dozen were mere hangers-on, the unimportant hoi polloi needed only to make up the number.

When the climax of the ceremony came, and the participants fell about coupling on the trampled grass, Claudine’s only thoughts were about changing the aperture setting to cope with the fading radiation. Everything else was thrust firmly into the back of her mind, along with all the other matters which she wouldn’t allow herself to think about.

She ran off the last shots on the film with views of Faith Scully rising to deliver a concluding incantation. The woman faced the moon with her arms raised again, the dying fire lighting her body from below, and making her revealed contours a study of contrasts in gold and black. The picture, coming at the end of