Content note: contains brief mentions of violence against humans and animals.
When Summer wakes up she doesn't know where she is. The darkness remains when she opens her eyes, except for an orange light some distance away. There are sounds she doesn't recognise. She's standing up but she can't move and she doesn't know why. She only knows that everything hurts and that she's cold. So cold. She remembers being so close to the fire that she thought she would burn, but now she is so cold.
She tries to remember.
It was Zoe who'd found the ad online. A British woman - an academic at the University of Manchester - highlighting an opportunity to study abroad for a semester and to stay with her, in a place called the Top Lanes, 'with real witches'. They'd been excited. They'd never been out of California. They looked up the Top Lanes online - the cobbled streets, the green hills, the moors, the mist - and it couldn't have been more different. They'd booked their flights that week.
The journey took sixteen hours, with two stops; and though the drive, once Alison picked them up from the airport, was under an hour - much of it through the promised beautiful country lanes - Summer and Zoe were jetlagged and exhausted by the time they arrived at the sprawling house Alison shared with her daughter Lettie. But Alison wouldn't let them sleep; she insisted on taking them to a 'real English pub', and they didn't want to offend or hurt her feelings by refusing.
The beer was bitter and unfamiliar, but at least they didn't have to do much to hold up their end of the conversation: Alison talked and talked in her loud squawking voice. Lettie mostly stared, sullenly. Only some time after Alison had got up to talk to a friend at the bar - with Lettie joining her soon after - did the girls realise three things. One, they were very drunk. Two, it was dark outside. And three, their hosts were no longer in the pub.
After a plurally doomed attempt to call Alison - dead batteries, SIM cards that didn't work in this country, a phone number they hadn't even been given yet - they decided to walk back to the house. The walk, across an unlit, uneven field noisy with the unfamiliar shrieks and howls of unknown animals and birds, seemed endless and dark and frightening at the time; but in the warmth and light of the house, as Alison laughed at them and at her 'prank' with her peculiar, shouting laugh, it began to seem smaller and easier; and in the morning, after a long night's sleep in the twin beds of Alison's spare room, it was almost forgotten.
Harder to forget had been the spectacle they'd been forced to witness the next morning. Alison had woken them both just before dawn, and they'd dressed quickly and stumbled outside, hungover and homesick, where Alison and Lettie and their friend Feather, who Alison introduced as a member of their coven, led them onto the moor and made them watch as Alison retrieved a fox she'd caught in a trap and injected with tranquilisers. The stunned animal was roped into a noose and hanged from an oak tree, and then Lettie had slit its throat.
The blood had sprayed out onto the ground, onto the roots of the tree. They'd had to step back to keep clear of it. It had steamed in the cold morning air.
That had been more than enough for Summer, and she'd suggested quietly to Zoe that they either find a place to stay in Manchester or simply head straight back to the US; but Zoe, to Summer's growing horror, was not repulsed but fascinated.
"They're not witches," Summer had hissed. "They're not Wiccans or pagans or anything. They're just mad, horrible women doing mad, horrible things for no reason."
This wasn't quite true - as Feather had explained on the walk back to Alison's house, Alison did have a reason for taking against this particular fox, which she believed to have killed the cat she thought of as a familiar.
"Alison has her own style," said Feather, in her low, coaxing voice. "Would I have done that? No. But stick around, and I promise you, you'll see some real magic." She looked into Summer's face until Summer had no choice to look back.
"OK?" Feather had said, and without expecting to, Summer found herself saying "OK. I'll stay a little longer."
And then it had been Samhain, and Alison had been so strange - so highly strung as to make her usual mood seem easygoing and quiet. She'd fairly screamed at Zoe, who couldn't seem to stop doing things wrong - she'd accidentally blown out a candle that was supposed to remain lit; at dinner she'd sat in a chair that was kept empty 'for the dead' (when Zoe asked, Lettie had clarified that this referred specifically to her mother's fox-murdered cat). So fascinating did Zoe seem to find both Alison's rage and the rituals that provoked them, that Summer began to suspect the provocations were not accidental, but research.
After dinner - which had involved so much wine that, once again, Summer got up from her chair to realise that he was almost incapacitatingly drunk - they'd gone back to the moors, where Feather had started a bonfire; and the witches had alternately danced and insisted on a game - a sort of contest - that involved seeing who could get closest to the fire before jumping back in fright or pain; and you couldn't stand, you had to lie down, on the grass near the fire, inching closer; and Zoe had got closer than any of them, so close that Summer was frightened, but the wine was weighing down her tongue; and at some point Summer had simply lain down on the grass, face down, the cold of it soothing her fire-warmed face; and that was all she remembered.
And now she is awake again and it’s cold. This time when she opens her eyes it is a little lighter, and her head is a little clearer. In the dim light she realises she is still on the moors. There is something rough at her back and something tight around her waist and arms, and little by little she understands that she is tied to the oak tree; that the rotting body of the fox is hanging near her head and that the dark patch on the roots by her foot is its dried blood. And the fading glow a little way away is the bonfire from last night, almost out now; and the blackened thing resting in its embers is Zoe, or was once. And as the sun rises the crows shout overhead, and strange somethings rustle through the grass, and somewhere in the distance there comes the scream of another fox.