The Broken Spell (11 page)

There was a sudden ‘whoosh’ from above; Ms Gold had landed gracefully beside Grace with a beaming smile.

‘Well done, Grace,’ she said. ‘I think I underestimated–’

But as she laid eyes on the Mirrorman, Ms Gold’s mouth dropped open in horrified shock. She looked like she had been punched in the chest.

‘No! No!’ she gasped, backing away. ‘It’s not possible!’

‘Don’t leave me, Miss!’ Grace scrambled to her feet and reached for the teacher.

She heard the old man growl behind her and felt a
massive
impact as Ms Gold raised her hands. A shock wave pulsed from the woman’s body, distorting the air and making Grace’s ears ring. She spun against the blow, using all her energy to fall in Ms Gold’s direction. Blinking against the pain in her head, and keeping her hands clamped over her ears, Grace felt the teacher’s arm circle her waist and then they were soaring, soaring out of the gloom and into the night sky above.

11

THE CURSING OF BLACKWOOD MANOR

Grace dropped, from a height, onto her back on the wet football pitch. Ms Gold’s amber eyes were panicked. The woman was shouting something at her, but Grace’s ears were filled with the sound of ringing and, beneath that, a noise like an untuned radio. She shook her head, trying to
communicate
that she couldn’t hear, but Ms Gold gripped her shoulders and shook her.

Grace watched as Adie, Rachel and Una tried and failed to coax the woman off her, then drag Grace away from the teacher and help her up. The ringing began to dissipate and Grace started to make out the commotion around her.

‘Enough! Enough!’ cried Ms Gold, putting up her hands
and signalling for the others to calm down. ‘I understand your concern but this is
vitally
important!’

She approached Grace again, calmly this time, but gripped her bruised shoulders, making Grace flinch.

‘Where did he come from?’ Ms Gold’s voice was low, but trembled as if she was forcing herself to keep from shouting. ‘He shouldn’t be here. Do you know where he came from?’

The woman’s face was too close and her golden eyes so intense that Grace was afraid to answer. Her head ached, and her shoulders pulsed beneath the woman’s fingers. Her eyes began to water. She held her breath and shook her head. The teacher searched her face for a few seconds, then let her go.

‘He’s dangerous,’ she whispered. ‘And he shouldn’t be here.’

‘Who is he?’ Grace breathed.

‘A twisted soul,’ the woman replied. ‘He was born of malevolence and evil – he’s soaked in it. If you see him again, you run. Don’t speak to him, don’t listen to him. You run and you don’t look back. Understand?’

Ms Gold stepped back, raising her eyes to the night-sky and taking deep breaths that gradually slowed. When she lowered her face, the familiar luminosity had returned to her skin and she seemed perfectly tranquil once more.

‘Go home, all of you,’ she said. ‘Stay together and stay safe. I have work to do.’

The girls stood in the damp grass, watching the teacher walk briskly towards the back of the school.

‘Grace?’ Adie said gently, but Grace was already running at Jenny. She raised one elbow, catching Jenny in the chest and knocking her to the ground. Grace fell to her knees,
grabbing
handfuls of Jenny’s hair and meeting her nose to nose.

‘What the
hell
were you doing?’ she screamed. ‘You tried to kill me!’

Jenny swung a fist at Grace’s temple that knocked her to one side, but Grace didn’t loosen her grip on Jenny’s hair. They rolled and grappled on the pitch, screaming at each other, until Adie and Una grabbed Grace and hauled her off, while Rachel wrapped a restraining arm around Jenny’s waist.

‘It was part of the lesson, you moron!’ Jenny shouted, her red face framed with tangled strands of hair.

‘Why didn’t you dismiss it?’ Grace cried in reply. ‘You set your monster on me on purpose!’

‘I was trying to control it, like Ms Gold said. That’s what we were
supposed
to do. It was
part of the lesson
.’

‘And part of the lesson was ripping me apart?’ said Grace, still struggling against Adie and Una’s grip.

‘I’m
sorry
,’ Jenny gasped as she fought to catch her breath. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t control him. I was sure I could do it. I just needed more time.’

‘How long were you willing to wait?’ said Grace. ‘Until he’d killed me? And why only
me
? Why did he go after me?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Jenny. ‘Maybe it was the lizard… and
then… I don’t know. Look, it was all part of the lesson.’

‘Stop saying that! That’s not an excuse. When your
monster
gets out of control and tries to
eat
one of your friends, the lesson is over!’

‘But it’s not!’ Jenny said, finally getting to her feet and pushing Rachel away. ‘You still don’t get it. We’re not kids anymore. We’re witches. And witchcraft is dangerous. Our lessons will be dangerous, but we have to embrace that. What can we possibly learn if we’re just doing harmless spells that achieve
nothing
? We might as well be in the lab at school. If we’re going to be powerful witches, we have to learn to cope with whatever is thrown at us. We have to be able to
fight
!’

‘Fight who, Jenny?’ said Grace. ‘Don’t you realise how crazy you sound?’

Jenny grasped the bronze charm around her neck – the one Ms Gold had given her – and shook her head.

‘I want to be a part of this,’ she said. ‘Body and soul. I don’t want to end up a useless old woman with too many cats. I don’t want to end up a boring old French teacher who makes no difference. Rhyming off the Latin names of weeds doesn’t change your life. I don’t want to dabble. I want to be powerful. I want to be a true witch.’

‘You sound just like
her
,’ said Grace. ‘Just like Ms Gold.’

Jenny rolled the charm between her finger and thumb.

‘Maybe that’s no bad thing.’

Grace’s breath came out in bursts of mist in the cold and
her eyes bored into Jenny’s.

‘You’ve changed,’ she whispered.

‘I’m growing up,’ said Jenny. ‘And if you’re all too afraid, then I guess I’m doing it alone.’

She dropped the charm and turned, slowly making her way off the field.

Hot tears streaked Grace’s face as the others stood still, not knowing what to do.

‘She set him on me!’ Grace’s voice was barely audible.

Adie shook her head and wrapped her arm around her friend’s shoulders.

‘No way,’ she said. ‘I don’t know about this “embracing witchcraft” thing, but she’s still our friend. She’s still Jenny.’

Grace shook her head. ‘She’s not,’ she mouthed, but her friends didn’t notice.

The red-brick building that housed the town library was comfortable and old. Inside, the single large room held lots of modern facilities, but many beautiful period features had been kept. The oak-beamed ceiling was supported by a number of black-painted pillars arranged down two sides. In the centre of the room was a large octagon-shaped desk, home to the librarians and their computers. At the back of the room were four rows of partitioned desks, each holding a PC. In the corner, sat Grace and Delilah, huddled in front
of a flickering computer screen.

Grace had told her friends of the encounter with the
Mirrorman
in the woods. After all, they needed to know he was there and how dangerous he was. But what she left out of the story was her certainty that
she
had somehow brought him with her from the past. Her last flashback to the 1970s, when she was running away from him through the school, had ended with the Mirrorman actually grabbing hold of her. Grace felt she must have dragged him with her as she bounced back to her own time. This, she decided, the others didn’t need to know – for now anyway. As far as Adie, Una and Rachel were concerned, their time spell had nothing to do with the sudden appearance of the Mirrorman, so it wasn’t necessary to tell Ms Gold what they’d been up to.

‘Was it a very big fight?’ asked Delilah, as Grace remained focused on the screen.

‘Yeah,’ replied Grace. ‘Pretty big.’

‘And you won’t be friends again?’

Grace sighed and entered another phrase into the search engine.

‘I don’t know. The others don’t want to break up the group, I’m sure of that. Jenny did something awful, but they don’t seem to believe she did it on purpose. They’ll talk to her, try to sort things out between us.’

‘And do you think–’

‘There!’ Grace said suddenly. ‘That’s it. That’s the big house
the old witch burned down.’

She double-clicked on the image to make it full-size, and an ink sketch of the house filled the screen.

‘Blackwood Manor,’ said Grace, reading the text beneath the image, ‘was built between 1738 and 1743 for Charles Hayton, one of the wealthiest commoners in Ireland at that time. The house was a striking example of the Palladian style and boasted… blah, blah, blah.’ She scrolled through the long description of the building’s features and history.

‘Following Hayton’s ruination and subsequent arrest, the family abandoned the house and fled the country… blah, blah, blah… In 1839 the estate was purchased by Lord Wilbury, Baron of Millmount. Wilbury lived at Blackwood, with his young family, for only eight years before tragedy struck. The cause of the fire is unknown but, in 1847, the Manor burned to the ground. Wilbury’s son, Robert, is believed to have perished in the fire. Husband and wife abandoned the house after their son’s death, and Blackwood was never rebuilt. Designated unsuitable for farming or
raising
livestock, due to the peculiarly inhospitable soil, the site remained virtually desolate until 1971, when it was donated to the local county council for the building of St John’s
Secondary
School… Woah!’

Grace leaned back and looked at Delilah.

‘We’ve been sitting on the site of his house every day. That explains why he worked at the school, I guess.’

‘But it says he died in the fire,’ said Delilah.

‘Well,
we
know what really happened,’ said Grace. ‘He was forced into being that old witch’s Metamorph familiar. There’s got to be more we can find.’

Grace started typing again, in earnest, while Delilah’s gaze drifted around the room. Finally, the small girl got to her feet and wandered between the tall bookshelves.

Nearly two hours later and Grace could feel her eyes going square. She rubbed at them and stretched her face in a yawn, tipping her chair back onto two legs and wriggling from side to side to ease the ache in her back. The library would be closing soon, and she hadn’t found anything more on Robert Wilbury.

‘I give up,’ she said as Delilah returned to her seat. ‘The internet’s useless.’

Delilah smiled and dropped a large book onto the desk, open on a chapter called ‘The Witch of Blackwood.’ Grace gasped and dropped forward, her chair landing noisily back on all fours.

‘Where did you get this?’

‘Local History,’ said Delilah, grinning. ‘It was in the
subsection
on Myths and Legends.’

‘Delilah! You’re so clever,’ said Grace, running her index finger down the fine text. Again, she began to read aloud.

‘Maureen Grogan, dubbed ‘The Witch of Blackwood’, lived in Dunbridge sometime between 1825 and 1920. The
earliest known reference to her describes Grogan as a talented healer, well-respected amongst the townspeople. However, later texts describe the woman definitively as a ‘witch’. She became an outcast that plagued the more powerful citizens of Dunbridge, which culminated in the cursing of
Blackwood
Manor during the Famine. Like many landlords of the time, Lord Wilbury threatened his poverty-stricken
tenants
with violent eviction. Maureen Grogan was one such tenant. The details of the Blackwood Curse are not known but Wilbury and his wife deserted their home after a fire in 1847. It is officially recorded that their young son died in the blaze, but rumours persisted that Grogan had captured the child and changed him into an animal; she was later seen with a large dog that answered to the boy’s name.

‘Following Grogan’s death in about 1920, there were apparent sightings of the boy, in human form, in and around the woods adjacent to the Blackwood Estate. A strange creature warped and deranged by decades of enslavement, Wilbury was said to terrorise unsuspecting hunters and
fishermen
that dared to enter the woods that had become his home. There were sporadic sightings of Wilbury as late as 1952, but the legend died in the latter half of the century.’

Grace skimmed through the next few pages, but there was no further mention of anyone named Robert Wilbury.

‘So that’s it,’ she said. ‘He was freed from the curse when the witch died, but never left Blackwood. So, what, he doesn’t
want people on his land? Bit late for that.’

‘Maybe he doesn’t want
witches
on his land,’ said Delilah.

‘Oh,’ said Grace, suddenly seeing the connection. ‘Grogan made him a slave and twisted his mind, but then she dies and he’s set free. Free to get his revenge. You should have seen Ms Gold’s face, she was terrified of him – he must have gone after their coven in the ’70s. And now…’