The Power of Dark. Robin Jarvis

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      Lil raised her phone and started filming that eerie waltz. This was better than Verne’s zombie apocalypse. But it was too dark for the figures to show up on the screen. Lil scowled and moved a little closer to the shattered window. She changed the camera settings and the shapes began to emerge. Zooming in, it showed billowing, ragged shrouds and rotted scraps of Sunday suits streaming like ribbons. The unearthly gale made marionettes of the skeletons. They pirouetted in a maniacal ballet, swooping low over the garden, then plucked up once more to spin above the roofs.

      ‘Now that is mirificus,’ the girl murmured.

      The funnelling wind tore round and round and the collisions became more violent. The bodies began to disintegrate as the brittle, mummified flesh and sinew that bound them snapped in the storm. Arms fell out of sleeves and heads spun away from necks.

      Anxious not to miss a moment, Lil continued to record. The one body that remained intact seemed to be looking straight at the lens. There was something foul and wicked about that dead face with its long, lank hair and Lil didn’t like it. There was malice in the blank eye sockets and the jaw was waggling as if with laughter. Lil tried to keep from shivering with revulsion to maintain a steady picture. Verne would never believe it. She didn’t believe it herself.

      The phone began to zoom in on that hideous skull and Lil frowned in irritation and tried to correct it. Too late the girl realised it wasn’t the phone at all – the skeleton was racing towards her.

      The fearful corpse came crashing through the broken window, bony hands reaching out. Lil didn’t have time to scream. That terrible face smacked into hers. The skull struck her forehead so violently she was thrown to the floor. A blast of decay blew from the open mouth into her own and the mane of dirty hair wrapped about her head. The phone slid from Lil’s fingers and she lay unconscious, insensible to the storm and Sally’s frantic barking – and yet she was aware of a creeping, unnatural cold that entered her mind, and with it a hissing voice.

      ‘Know me,’ it said. ‘In life, I was Scaur Annie. See that what my eyes saw; make my ears yours. Drink full my spite and hate. We two shall be one. Melchior Pyke’s power is waking. We must stop him. He shall not win, not this time. Scaur Annie will thwart him again.’

      ‘Scaur Annie . . .’ Lil murmured.

      ‘Live them days long buried, long dead,’ the voice inside her head commanded. ‘You be Scaur Annie. See what I saw. Hear what I heard.’

      ‘I . . .’ Lil breathed. ‘We . . . us . . . be Scaur Annie.’

      Outside, the squalling gale began to die down. Lil’s head lolled to one side and she remained motionless as her mind went journeying back, to relive the events of a summer night that was filled with anger and fear four hundred years ago.

      She opened her eyes to savage, angry yells, and scrambled backwards on all fours. But she wasn’t Lil any more and she wasn’t in her bedroom. Hundreds of years had peeled away. She was Scaur Annie, a seventeen-year-old barefoot girl in a coarse woollen kirtle and a tattered smock.

      A guttering rushlight illuminated the interior of a humble wooden shack, built on the grassy slope of the cliff, with ragged hangings to keep out the biting gales. Bunches of drying herbs and seaweed were suspended from the sloping roof; beautiful shells and the skeleton of a two-headed lamb dangled among them. Clay pots and jars were ranged against one of the walls, and a rough straw mattress covered in sacking lay by another. It was dark outside, but harsh voices filled the night.

      ‘Come out, you filthy-faced hag!’

      ‘Best you do, or we must come in and fetch.’

      ‘Shall we drag you out by your hair an’ beat you with sticks?’

      ‘Step out and make answer!’

      ‘Witch!’

      Scaur Annie scrambled into a corner of the hut, pulling her knees under her chin.

      ‘Get gone from my door!’ she cried. ‘Get gone, masters – else I’ll have at you. I’ll pray long an’ loud at Them what rule under the waves. Them’ll send shadows to pull you under. Your boats’ll be upended and you’ll drown in the cruel salt deep. Nowt but widows and bairns’ll be left. Think on it!’

      The hostile shouts and threats outside turned to anxious murmurs.

      ‘She’s workin’ up to ill-wish an’ grief-charm us,’ one of them said fearfully.

      ‘We must stop her ’fore she spells it!’

      ‘Aye. Burn the witch in her den. Fire will staunch her evil. Lob your lanterns at it.’

      Annie heard a lantern crash against her door. The oil splashed across the timbers and at once greedy flames leaped between them. Another lantern struck the roof and rolled all the way across, dropping down behind the back wall, leaving a burning trail in its wake.

      The girl shrieked and clutched at the talisman of three ammonites around her neck.

      ‘Save us!’ she implored. ‘O Ye mighty powers of the deep, Ye Three Lords under foam and wave – save this Your servant, Scaur Annie. Deliver her from fires. Send a knight to shield and guard her. Hear me, an’ ever more I’ll do Your bidding, by sky, sand and sea – I swears it.’