The Lighthouse Witches(46)

“There are witches still?” Luna says, wide-eyed.

“They aren’t witches, silly.” She holds her younger sister in a long stare. “Or at least, not all of them. Do you know what a grimoire is?”

Luna shakes her head.

“It’s a book of spells. Look.”

She shows Luna, who looks puzzled.

“What’s this one?” she says, pointing at a set of triangles. “It looks like the one Mummy painted in the Longing.”

“It is,” Saffy says. “?‘Rune to call a loved one home from afar.’ But it only works if you cast the spell.”

“What’s the spell?”

“Living bones,” it says. “Look.” She points at the archaic handwriting.

“Bones that live?” Luna says, screwing up her face.

“No, you dimwit. Bones taken from a living creature. As in, one that’s still alive.”

“Gross.”

“You’re gross.”

“Is there a spell for Mummy?”

Saffy gives her a puzzled look.

“What, to make her disappear?”

“To give her money and make her happy.”

“Money wouldn’t make Mummy happy,” Saffy says sourly. “Getting rid of me would, though.”

“Money would make her happy. And getting Daddy back.”

“There are spells here to bring people back. But they won’t work on Daddy.”

“Why not?”

She lifts her eyes to Luna’s and looks gut-punched. “Because he’s dead.”


II

Saffy takes one last look behind her before tugging the door of the Longing and stepping inside.

It is freezing cold, and already she’s starting to regret this. Why is she doing this again?

It’s about one in the morning. She can hear the sea exhaling against the rocks, and she’s pretty sure there’s a seal or a dolphin or something at the bottom of the cliffs, a low, guttural sound marking its presence within the tapestry of this wild place. She fingers the skeleton key that she’s tied around her neck with a leather shoelace, sitting low between her breasts so that her mother doesn’t spot it. It’s cold against her skin and she wants to take it off.

But first, she thinks. But first.

She has it planned. She borrowed her school friend Machara’s makeup and has spent a long time putting it on, coating her eyelashes with mascara, drawing in her pale brows, shading her eyes in dark brown and copper. Inside the Longing the darkness is thick as soup, but she clocked her mum’s work lamps the other days and figured the lighting would be perfect. The lamps come with a remote control that lets you dim the light, which is perfect as she doesn’t want anything too bright. She’d draw attention to herself if the light is too bright.

For one, she’s naked beneath her coat, and she can well imagine her mum’s face if she barged into the place and found her oldest child lolling against the staircase of the Longing in her birthday suit. Saffy hates her body. She thinks she’s too tall, her hips too big, and she hates that her left boob is slightly bigger than the right. She hates her arms, and her ankles, and her feet, and her knees. Her bum is long and square, not pert and round, as it should be. That said, she’s well aware that her body seems to exert a particular effect on men. And if Brodie wants sexy photos, he’ll get them.

She closes the door behind her and looks fearfully around. It smells of paint and dead fish, and a quick flick of her torch shows where her mum has already started the mural. The plasterwork helps it look a little less like a ruin and more like a work in progress. She finds the round light, plugs it in, dims it down low, then searches for her mum’s Polaroid camera. There it is, on top of the wallpaper table.

She removes her coat and wellies. She wears only the old heavy skeleton key that she found in the bothy, tied around her neck with a shoelace. It looks like something you’d find on a pirate ship, which she thinks is appropriate for the tone of the pics.

She sets the camera timer and poses, rolling her shoulders back, looking over her shoulder, pouting her red lips, opening her mouth and showing her tongue. She unties her hair and lets it hang long and loose, trying much more overt pictures in case the ones she’s taken are too tame for someone like Brodie. She opens her legs wider, lets her hands roam across her skin.

She tugs on her coat and looks over the prints that are coming into view on the small white squares. The prints are startling—she doesn’t look like herself.

She looks like a porn star.

Hopefully Brodie will like her now.

As she tugs the zip on her coat, the shoelace from which the skeleton key hangs comes loose, sending the key to the floor with a sharp clang. She tenses, worried in case someone outside will hear. The noise sends bats flittering above, and she’s about to grab the key and race outside when she notices something. On the floor by the stairs there’s an old lock peeking out from beneath a slab of wood.

Quickly she pulls the wood slab aside and fingers the lock. It has a similar insignia on the side of it to the one on the skeleton key; a snake eating its own tail, so it looks like a circle. An ouroboros.

She slips the key inside the lock and is amazed when it clicks open, smooth and unhesitant. She pushes the wood slab farther and finds that it was covering a strange metal grille that is now unlocked. She opens it to find nothing but a deep, dark hole. No treasure chest or room full of secrets. Just a weird old hole. A deep one, by the looks of it.