Jude rejoined the conversation. “How did you ever get her to admit to something like that?”
“I have my ways. The land can provide more than just food, lambies, if you learn how to speak its language.”
“I’m not following,” said Jude.
“Me neither,” said Ashley. “Tell us exactly what you mean.”
Rita chuckled. Her tiny body rattled. “Suppose what I’m saying is that I’m a witch. My mother were too, and her mother before that. It’s not exactly as you’d think – there’s no eye of newt or silly love spells – but it’s as real as the wind and the rain. To be a witch means to sacrifice a part of yourself in exchange for certain favours. There must always be a balance to everything, which is why, in the case of Rose, I were able to ask for a great deal of power. She took three people I cared about from this world. That left a lot of room to rebalance the scales.”
Ashley smirked. “You’re a witch? Prove it.”
Rita rolled her eyes, more like a teenager than an elderly woman. She pointed a crooked finger at Ashley and said, “That bruise on your nose. Your dad done that, yes? Hit you this very afternoon, he did.”
Ashley gasped.
The old lady shrugged as though it was nothing. “Easy to read pain when it’s so fresh. Am I right, lamby?”
“Yes! But how did you… How the fuck did you know that?”
“Because she’s a witch,” said Jude.
Rita nodded. “That I am, and I’ll ask you not to soil the air in here, girl.”
“Sorry.”
“With all that’s happened,” said Jude. “You being a witch isn’t so strange. I’ve always wondered if such things were real.”
Rita smiled warmly at Jude. “You have an open heart. People might call that a weakness, but I don’t. In fact, one day you might find it’s your strength.”
“Wait!” said Ashley. “Everything you’re talking about happened when you were a young woman, right? We saw Rose in the farmhouse and she was in her thirties. It makes no sense.”
“Rose is as old as I am, lamby.”
“How can that be true?”
“Because it is. You see, once I got her confession, I dealt with her accordingly. My dear old ma helped me, although she were dead less than a year later from the grief.”
Jude leant forward, eyes locked onto the old woman. “What did you do?”
“We invited the bank manager over to our farmhouse for dinner, pretended we wanted to talk about a loan. He were arrogant enough that he came. My mother slit his throat in the kitchen and we used his bones to make Rose’s chains. We bound her to the very spot where she had murdered my brother. Then we forged a locket from copper and pig flesh and placed it around her neck with photographs of my niece and nephew so that she could never escape the truth of what she had done. Finally, after we pierced her flesh with the bones of her dead lover and cursed her with the image of her dead children, we trapped her inside the farmhouse using ancient spells passed down through our family for generations. A triangle, the strongest of all shapes, was painted on the ground with her paramour’s blood. Finally, my mother and I used the last of our power to invoke nature to fall upon the farmhouse and keep people out. Over time, that magic has probably faded, but as extra protection, I sold the farm to an organisation that deals with… unfit properties, you might say.”
Jude jolted. “You mean there’s a company that buys haunted houses?”
“They think of themselves as caretakers. It’s their job to make sure nobody goes inside places like my family’s old farmhouse. Given the two of you, it looks like they failed, but I’ll give them some credit, it’s been more than fifty years. I always knew Rose would be discovered one day, but I only cared about making her suffer. The locket around her neck is cursed. It gives her eternal life. Eternal suffering. If I had just killed her, her wickedness would have been at an end, but my darkness demanded more. I let it win out over my conscience. Perhaps it’s finally time for me to pay for my sins. Tell me, lambies, did you enter the triangle? Is Rose free?”
Ashley shook her head. “We didn’t enter the triangle.”
Rita exhaled. “Thank the Lord. The triangle is the only thing keeping her—”
“But someone else did.”
Rita went rigid. Her eyes stretched wide. “Rose is unbound?”
Ashley swallowed a lump in her throat. The fear in the old woman’s eyes was not comforting at all. “There was a girl named Lily Barnes. She went into the triangle. Rose killed her. She… she couldn’t see Rose.”
“Only the pure of flesh can see the wicked of heart. This girl, Lily, she was no longer a virgin?”
Ashley grimaced. “What? I don’t know. Gross.”
“She probably wasn’t,” said Jude. “She was kind of off the rails.”
Rita exhaled again. She seemed to be growing tired, like continuing the conversation was hard work. “Only virgins, or those who have only ever known the body of a spouse, can see the likes of Rose. The locket around her neck pins her to the in-between, keeps her soul thinly bound to existence, never able to be truly alive and never able to pass on to the next. I admit, my revenge upon her was grave, and yet…”
“And yet what?” asked Jude.
“And yet to this
