I remembered how we had tormented her once, when she was at her maddest. We must have been ten or eleven. She had pushed me down the front steps because she had sent me to the shop for cigarettes and I had come back empty-handed because they wouldn’t sell them to me. I was bleeding, and Mor was picking me up and we saw a big black bird flap slowly across from the cemetery gates—it was probably a crow, but at that age we called them all ravens. It’s the same word in Welsh, anyway. “Once, upon a midnight dreary,” Mor began, and I joined in, and she, Liz, my mother, had retreated into the house, and then into her room, as we’d gone on reciting Poe’s Raven louder and louder.
I had seen the pattern of the world. I had sent Mor through to where people are supposed to go when they die. I had been flame. My mother was a pathetic patchwork witch who had used magic so much to meddle in her own life that she had no integrity left and was nothing but a coil of hatreds consuming themselves in futility. We had already hedged her power, with the help of the fairies.
“I have nothing to say to you,” I said, loudly, and took a step forward.
I took another step, which was making my leg hurt quite a bit, but I ignored that, ignored her. I could tell that she was doing something magical, something aimed at me, but my protections, the ones I had made at school, held, and it drained harmlessly away into the ground, the way the pain does in acupuncture.
I took another step and passed her. She reached out and physically grabbed me. Her hands were like claws.
I turned and looked at her. Her eyes were terrifying, just like always. I took a deep breath. “Leave me alone,” I said, and shrugged her off.
She reached up to hit me, and I realised she really was reaching upwards. I was taller than she was. I pushed her, using the momentum of her own movement and the turning of the world. She fell. I took another step on beyond her, up the hill. I couldn’t run, I could barely limp, but I kept on limping upwards.
“How dare you,” she said, from where she had fallen. She sounded really surprised. Then she was drawing on magic again and like the time when Mor died, she sent illusory monstrous shapes swirling around me as I walked. Then, we’d ignored them as best we could. Now I took hold of them and drew them around me. They were sad hollow things without fear to feed them.
I heard a ripping sound, and turned, and gasped with horror. She had taken out the one-volume edition of The Lord of the Rings, which was hers, but the first one I had ever read, and torn out a page. She threw it at me, and it became a burning spear in the air between us. It was dark enough now that it lit everything up with strange extra shadows. I dodged it. She tore another page. I could hardly bear it. I know books are only the words, and I have two copies of it of my own, but I wanted to go back and grab the book from her. The spears weren’t as bad as the violation, they wouldn’t have been even if they’d hit me. How could she use books against me? But I could see how it would seem the obvious thing.
I could do the same. I drew the illusion monsters towards me and gave them a push towards her. They changed and became dragons and huge alien turtles and people in spacesuits and a boy and girl in armour with drawn swords, making a barrier between us, protecting me, rushing down through the dusk towards her. I took another step uphill and away.
She could ignore an illusion as well as I could, of course.
The spears kept coming. They weren’t on fire now, and they were harder to see. She must have torn out handfuls at once and been flinging them wildly. I stopped and reached out to the pattern of the world. They were paper. Paper was wood, so easy to make into a spear, but what did wood really want to be? One came so close I could feel the wind of it passing, and I knew, and laughed. It was what Mor had said here, so long before. It wasn’t even difficult. The spear that was a page became a tree. So did the others, the ones she had already thrown and which were stuck in the ground. For a moment they stood there, roots in the earth, branches reaching, oak and ash and thorn, beech and rowan and fir, huge beautiful mature trees in full leaf. Then they began to move downhill, Burnham Wood coming to Dunsinane. “Huorns will help,” I said, and there were tears in my eyes.
If you love books enough, books will love you back.
They weren’t illusion. They were trees. Trees are what paper was, and wants to be. I could just about see her through them. She was raving and screaming something at me. The pages were turning to trees as soon as she tore them, and sooner. The book, which was in her hands, became a huge mass of ivy and bramble, spreading everywhere. The whole desolation where the Phurnacite had been was a forest, with the ruins of the factory at the heart of it. There were fairies in among the trees. Of course there were. An owl swooped down over the dark pool.
“Sometimes it takes a little longer than you think,” I said.
I kept walking on, up and away from the Phurnacite. She was still raving, down there in the trees. I just kept walking away, as fast as I could, which wasn’t very fast. I was out of her reach now. I took two more steps and I was out on the road.