The Raven’s Knot

With her gown billowing around her, Miss Ursula strode swiftly from The Separate Collection and Edie Dorkins, her eyes dancing with an excited light, ran after her.

‘Where is Ursula taking our new sister?’ Miss Veronica asked in bewilderment. ‘There’s jam and pancakes upstairs, I prepared them myself. You don’t think they’ll eat them all do you, Celandine? Do you suppose they’ll leave some for me? I love them so dearly.’

Miss Celandine’s nut-brown face crinkled with impatience as she stared after the figures of Miss Ursula and the girl as they disappeared into the darkness of the rooms beyond.

‘You and your pancakes!’ she snorted petulantly. ‘I’m certain little Edith can eat as many as she likes of them – and most welcome she is too...’ Her chirruping voice faded as her rambling mind suddenly realised where the others were going and she threw her hands in the air in an exclamation of joy and wonder.

‘Of course!’ she sang, hopping up and down, her plaits swinging wildly about her head. ‘Ursula will take her there! She will! She will – I know it – I do, I do! Oh, you must hurry, Veronica, or we may be too late.’

And so, bouncing in front of her infirm sister like an absurd rabbit, Miss Celandine scampered from the room and Miss Veronica hobbled after.

Alone with his sons, the dumbfounded Mr Chapman pinched the bridge of his nose and gazed around forlornly.

‘I... I don’t understand,’ he murmured, staring up at the spreading branches overhead. ‘I want to, but I don’t. Neil – what happened here?’

The boy pulled away from him, but he was too exhausted to explain. ‘It’s over now, Dad,’ he mumbled wearily. ‘That’s all that matters. Josh and me are safe. We’re back.’

‘Back from where? Who was that scruffy kid? She looked like some kind of refugee.’

But if Brian Chapman was expecting any answers to his questions he quickly saw that none were forthcoming. Neil’s face was haggard and his eyelids were drooping. Remembering that it was past three in the morning, the caretaker of The Wyrd Museum grunted in resignation and lifted Josh into his arms.

‘I’d best get the pair of you to bed,’ he said. ‘You can tell me in the morning.’

Neil shambled to the doorway but paused before leaving. Casting his drowse-filled eyes over the scattered debris of The Separate Collection, he whispered faintly ‘Goodbye Ted, I’ll miss you.’

Down the stairs Miss Ursula led Edie, down past a great square window through which a shaft of silver moonlight came slanting into the building, illuminating the two rushing figures.

‘Are you ready Edith, my dear?’ the elderly woman asked, her voice trembling with anticipation when they reached the claustrophobic hallway at the foot of the staircase. ‘Are you prepared for what you are about to see?’

The girl nodded briskly and whisked her head from left to right as she looked about her in the dim gloom.

The panelling of the hall was crowded with dingy watercolours. A spindly weeping fig dominated one corner, whilst in another an incomplete suit of armour leaned precariously upon a rusted spear.

‘Here... here we are,’ Miss Ursula murmured, a little out of breath. ‘At the beginning of your new life. The way lies before you, let us unlock the barrier and step down into the distant ages – to a time beyond memory or record.’

Solemnly, she stepped over to one of the panels and rapped her knuckles upon it three times.

‘I used to have to recite a string of ludicrous words in the old days,’ she explained. ‘But eventually a trio of knocks seemed to suffice. This place and I know one another too well to tolerate that variety of nursery rhyme nonsense.’

Striding back to Edie, she turned her to face the far wall then placed her hands upon the young girl’s shoulders and whispered sombrely in her ear. ‘Watch.’

Edie stared at the moonlit panels and waited expectantly as, gradually, she became aware of a faint clicking noise which steadily grew louder behind the wainscoting. Out into the hallway the staccato sound reverberated until it abruptly changed into a grinding whirr and, with an awkward juddering motion, a section of the wall began to shift and slide into a hidden recess.

‘The mechanism is worn and ancient,’ Miss Ursula confessed, eyeing the painfully slow, jarring movements. ‘In the last hundred years I have used it only seldom. Come, you must see what it has revealed.’

Edie darted forward and gazed into the shadowy space that had been concealed behind the panel.

The dusty tatters of old, abandoned cobwebs were strung across it but in a moment she had cleared them away and, with filaments of grimy gossamer still clinging to her fingers, she found herself looking at a low archway set into an ancient wall.

Tilting her head to one side and half closing her eyes, Edie thought it resembled the entrance to an enchanted castle and tenderly ran her hands over the surface of the roughly hewn stone.

‘Here is the oldest part of the museum,’ Miss Ursula’s hushed voice informed her. ‘About this doorway, whilst my sisters and I withered with age – enduring the creeping passage of time, the rest of the building burgeoned and grew. This was the earliest shrine to house the wondrous treasure of the three Fates. We are very near now, very near indeed. What can you sense, Edith? Tell me, does it call to you?’

The girl stood back and studied the wooden door that was framed by the arch. Its stout timbers were black with age and although they were pitted and scarred by generations of long dead woodworm, they were as solid as the stone which surrounded them. Into the now steel-hard grain, iron studs had once been embedded, but most of them had flaked away with the centuries, leaving only sunken craters behind. The hinges, however, were still in place and Edie’s exploring fingertips began to trace the curling fronds of their intricate design, until her hands finally came to rest upon a large, round bronze handle.

At the bottom of the door there was a wide crack where the timbers had shrunk away from the floor and a draught of cold, musty air blew about the child’s stockinged legs – stirring the shreds of web that were still attached to her.

Edie wrinkled her nose when the stale air wafted up to her nostrils, but the sour expression gradually faded from her puckish face and she took a step backwards as the faint, mouldering scent entwined around her.

The smell was not entirely unpleasant, there was a compelling sweetness and poignancy to it, and she was reminded of the roses that had been left to grow tall and wild in the gardens of bombed-out houses – their blooms rotting on the stem.

She had adored the wilderness of the bombsites. In the time of the Blitz, the shattered wasteland had been her realm and of all the fragrances which threaded their way over the rubble, the spectral perfume of spoiling roses had been her favourite.

The tinsel threads woven into her pixie-hood glittered for a moment as the haunting odour captivated her and, watching her reactions, Miss Ursula smiled with approval.

‘Yes,’ she murmured. ‘I see that you do sense it. Nirinel is aware of you, Edith, and is calling. If I needed any further proof that you were indeed one of us, then it has been provided.’

Crossing to the corner where the armour leaned against the panels, she lit an oil lamp which stood upon a small table and returned with it to Edie. Within the fluted glass of the lamp’s shade, the wick burned merrily and its soft radiance shone out over the elderly woman’s gaunt features, divulging the fact that she was just as excited as the child.

Then, with her free hand, Miss Ursula took from a fine chain about her neck a delicate silver key but, before turning it in the lock, she hesitated.

‘Now,’ she uttered gravely, ‘you will learn the secret which my sisters and I have kept and guarded these countless years, the same burdensome years that robbed us of our youth and which harvested their wits.

‘No one except we three have ever set foot beyond this entrance. Prepare yourself, Edith, once you have beheld this wonder there can be no returning. No mortal may gaze upon the secret of the Fates. Your destiny will be bound unto it forever.’

Without taking her silvery blue eyes from the doorway, the girl said simply, ‘Open it.’ Then she held her breath as Miss Ursula grasped the handle and pushed.

There came a rasping crunch of rusted iron as slowly, inch by inch, the ancient door swung inwards.

At once the stale air grew more pungent, yet Edie revelled in it. Holding the lamp aloft, Miss Ursula ducked beneath the low archway.

The darkness beyond dispersed before the gentle flame, revealing a narrow stone passageway which was just tall enough to allow the elderly woman to stand.

‘Have a care, Edith,’ Miss Ursula warned. She lowered her hand so that the light illuminated the ground and showed it to be the topmost step of a steep flight which plunged down into a consumate blackness.

‘This stair is treacherous,’ she continued, her voice echoing faintly as she began to descend. ‘The unnumbered footfalls of my sisters and I have rendered each step murderously smooth. In places they are worn completely and have become a slippery, polished slope.’

Down the plummeting tunnel Miss Ursula went, the cheering flame of the lamp bobbing before her and, keeping her cautious eyes trained upon the floor, Edie Dorkins followed closely behind.

Deep into the earth the stairway delved, twisting a spiralling path beneath the foundations of The Wyrd Museum. Occasionally, the stonework was punctuated by large slabs of granite.

At one point a length of copper pipe, encrusted with verdigris, projected across the tunnel and Miss Ursula was compelled to stoop beneath it.

‘So do the roots of the modern world reach down to the past,’ she remarked. ‘Yet, since the well was drained, no water flows from the drinking-fountain above.’

Pressing ever downwards, she did not utter another sound until she paused unexpectedly – causing Edie to bump into her.

‘At this place the outside presses its very closest to that which we keep hidden,’ she said, bringing the lamp close to the wall until the young girl could see that large cracks had appeared in the stones.