Carrie-Anne stood, her upper body bathed in the rich sunlight so that she was forced to squint against its brilliance. She tried to speak. Her throat clamped around her vocal cords.
“I am in no way a scientist, Mr and Mrs Goodwin, Dixon.” She nodded at each. “But it is my understanding that my aunt and her assistant, Mister Virgil Roberts, have been excavating below ground in a bid to find water and to understand what it is about the land beneath our feet which has left us in such dire straits.”
“Except, you ain’t in dire straights, are you, Miss Valentine? Not only have you water to feed the soil where you wanna, but a sorceress to raise them crops up with spilt rooster blood, devil’s weeds and every other kinda wickedness. ‘Use at midnight.’ That’s what I read, Miss Valentine. Written stark clear on a label it was. Use at the devil’s hour!”
Dixon’s expression was seven ways of wrong. And he wasn’t alone. More voices were cutting in.
“What a slave doin’ with her own store while we’re left to scrape around for seed and other provisions?”
“Always said Jos Splitz was lead-lined.”
“Heart of stone, that one.”
“Except when it comes to coloureds. Then she’s soft as marshmallow.”
“Coloureds with the know-how to mix magic? That’s a straight up sin. Ain’t no defending that.”
The eyes moved from Carrie-Anne to Julie. There was fragility in the air. One audible breath and the line between peace and pandemonium would be muddied.
“Exodus 22:18. Thou shall not suffer a witch to live,” said Lisa Goodwin, soft as the wind.
Carrie-Anne felt as if she was suffocating. So much white flesh crushed in around her like pulped pages from a bible.
“Enough with your accusations!” she spat. Her heart pulsed violently. Forcing her way past old Mrs Johnson, who shrunk into her desiccated bones, Carrie-Anne strode to the back of the chapel. Twice, a figure stepped into her way. Twice a voice told them to let her be. Through the smear of angry human shapes, she made out Samuel O’Ryan and George West. Good, honest men in a town awash with hokum.
She found Julie, fear and unshakeable knowledge etched into the lines of her face. Wesley was a phantom limb at his mother’s hip, arms encircling her.
Carrie-Anne reached out. The air inside the chapel turned shroud grey; she parted it with her hands like scissors slipping through silk. When her fingertips made contact with Julie’s wrist, she felt the housemaid shiver in spite of the tumbling waves of heat.
“Let’s go home, Julie.”
Out the corner of an eye, she saw a figure lurch from the back pew in a jilting motion. Cold dread poured down the inside of her ribs. She would not meet that vile stare. She would gather up Julie and Wesley to her side and she would walk with them out of chapel that day and deliver them safely home.
“Know what else I saw?” continued Dixon, a serpent at her back. “Last night, I was checking the grounds as is my employment when I find the workshop unlocked. Lotta fancy engine gear in that shack. This day and age, lotta folk in need of stealing such. So I slip inside. And I hear this ruckus. Any idea what I’m talking about, Miss Valentine?”
Eyes swirled towards her from every angle. The sun went in.
As Dixon went on with his sordid description, Carrie-Anne sensed the young men of Bromide wipe her from their palms like chaff. In a barren town, she had been the one sweet-smelling flower they could admire and dream of owning. Except now she was gone over. Another clean thing corrupted.
Their agitation was immediate. No insult was spared inside those hallowed walls. She was Jezebel, Salome, the Babylonian whore, and every other breed of temptress. But their anger was good. Anything to deflect attention from Julie.
Carrie-Anne made her way to the chapel door, Julie’s blistering handhold in hers, Wesley bundled into Julie’s folds... Only to find the exit was guarded by its own gargoyle of hunched flesh and mangled bone.
“About time the witches of Boar House paid their dues,” said Reg Wilhoit. His voice was a tar scrape, thickened over time. Hands that used to twist up inside her blouse and maul at her unformed breasts were pressing into and over one another, moulding the situation into his preferred shape.
“Move aside, Reg.” She concentrated her revulsion, taking strength from it.
“Time to pay, little lady.” A foul whisper. A forward shuffle on crumpled limbs.
“Stand away from the door.” Her eyesight blurred as a great hollow wind seemed to drag itself up beneath the underside of the chapel door and shriek past her ears.
Reg teetered. He kept his sneer stitched in place.
Beneath her fingertips, in the creases of her palms, at the tender flesh of her lips, the baking air reverberated. Dust drifted out the corners and alcoves where it slept, leaving a soft grey charge in the atmosphere. Heat surged in at every chink in the chapel walls, gushing and churning and soaring all around her. Sweat bled from Carrie-Anne’s temples, and the dust, so much dust, roared like the battle cry of an archangel.
The latch snapped up on the chapel door suddenly. Someone pushed it open and Reg was elbowed aside in a rush of zigzagging steps.
A young man’s face appeared, cherry-toned by the midday heat.
“Preacher Richards!”
Carrie-Anne heard the preacher’s sombre acknowledgement, and through her black rage, the man’s hesitant explanation.
“Preacher, I hate to interrupt service but my daddy says I gotta tell ya there’s a dust cloud growing out to north and it’s a fierce un. Bigger than anything my daddy ever seen. Folk might need to get off home now, tie down what they need, forget what they don’t. There’s a helluva storm coming.”
“Drag on that soot mixer, Virgil Roberts!” came the shout from up front of the Burrower. “You feel it, you Mary-Anne? We’ve gone and hit wet sand.”
Scooping his fingers around a small leather loop that hung alongside the larger one linked to the air duct, Virgil hauled down on it. As he did so, he tucked his head into his right shoulder and tried to peer past Jos’s front seat. The view was limited, but he got an idea that the soot mix was piping through the gills either side of the main hub thanks to the black spray coating the viewing pane.
“Lights... Hit the lights! Christ, man, if you ain’t gonna cease daydreaming over Carrie-Anne, I’m gonna pack her off to Michigan. She’s got a bitch of an Aunt Rita out there. Nibbling little ferret who’d have Carrie-Anne married off to some rich bilious bastard quick smart, I can tell ya.”
Virgil paid Jos no mind. He felt to the left of his chair for a triangular brass panel containing one squat flip- switch. It was an awkward location for a seemingly essential mechanism, except, as Jos has instilled in him a thousand times over when he had first started working for her, what real need was there for light when the bore that went before them was as blind as a mole. Best to feel their way through the earth’s materials, acclimatise themselves to the rat-tat-tat of sand, the plug and crack of rock, the lumber through shale-sounding gravel. But, on occasion, even Jos’s curiosity could not be contained, and that’s when she called for him to fumble for the switch and flood their murky world with light.
A blaze of illumination accompanied his tug on the switch. Virgil blinked wildly against its burn.
Jos, on the other hand, seemed insusceptible to alterations in light and dark. Yet clearly she benefitted from the refreshed view.
“There. Sand, And wet sand too. How’s the tunnel bearing up?”
Virgil revolved a polished wooden handle to crank the drive shaft that ran up the back of Jos’s seat. The whir of clockwork was just audible over the grind and sluice of the Burrower in motion. Lanterns affixed to the roof of the cabin as well as a number of spots integrated into the corrugated iron floor flickered then strengthened. Virgil stared at a rack of dials above his head. Indigo and ruby glass shields protected fine spindles which twitched or held firm.
“Whiskers say we’re okay for now,” he stated in the loud clear voice Jos had beaten out of him. “A little fallout to the right of that rock gorge few moments back.”
