Here Be Witches Read online

  We cling together. There by the pinnacle of rock, the clouds at our feet, the icy mist swirling up until I can hardly even see the cafe.

  And we’re flying out over a sea of whiteness way above the world. It’s almost déjà vu. A memory. It’s like the time we first kissed, so long ago on the Devil’s Bridge.

  ‘Look,’ Henry points at something in the distance.

  As far as the eye can see continents of clouds are swirling, seething in smoky plumes, twisting towards us.

  ‘It’s coming,’ he says. ‘You must be prepared.’

  A column of white sweeps up at us. I sway, scarcely balancing. He slips his arms around my waist and pulls me close against him. He says, his voice tight and hard, ‘Be brave, beautiful Ellie. I should never have involved you in the way of dragons … May the stars forgive me.’ He holds me even tighter.

  He presses my head into his chest. I can hear the hammering of his heart. I cry out suddenly afraid.

  ‘Draco, forgive me,’ he says. Then he bends his head and kisses me.

  I sink into the darkness. Nothing but weaving shapes around us. Then I see he is pointing at something.

  Figures in the mist.

  Dark ragged shapes, cloaks tight around them.

  A flash of lightning, the screech of a landslide, rocks cracking open, sheer drops.

  Henry’s grip around me tightens. He looks into my eyes.

  ‘Be brave, Ellie.’

  —

  It’s a warning. I stop pedalling. Pull over. Try to figure out exactly what I’ve got to be brave about, apart from cycling over Snowdon in the dead of night, obvs.

  I try to remember the sweetness of Henry’s kiss …

  Ahhhhh … sooooo … niiiiice …

  Suddenly there’s a blasting and a shrieking; a roar, like a plane crashing. The ground seems to shake. For a second the road actually buckles under my bike.

  It’s like Glyder Fawr has reached out and, furious at being labelled a half-formed-monster-mutant, is shaking the pass all around me.

  THE PASS IS SHAKING!

  Thank God I stopped.

  My ears!!

  The whole north side of the gorge seems to shift. Holy crap! I can feel it in my teeth! Landslide! Earthquake! With a crashing loud enough to wake all of Nant Peris, rocks start tumbling. Bouncing.

  Rocks!

  Avalanche!

  How close? Darkness. Mist. I can’t see a thing. Unsure whether to turn and belt back downhill, or crouch, or scream, I freeze.

  The mountains close in. The sound thunders in my ears. I bend my head, clasp my hands over my ears. Don’t move. Don’t go on. The Brenin Llwyd: this is what he does!

  He sends his riders to hurry you over a cliff.

  To hound you into a lake.

  To force you into the path of an avalanche.

  This is it.

  This really is it.

  FOUR

  Long after the rumbling stops, I stay there crouched down by my bike, hands over ears, trembling. When at last I dare to move, I unclip my bike light and walk a little way up the road, shining the light from left to right.

  Woah!

  Massive rockfall.

  Shedloads of it. Nearly blocking all of one side of the road. If I hadn’t deliberately gone slower, if I’d hurried in the slightest … I shudder. I’d be there, right under all that tonnage.

  I am not allowed to swear at home. My mum doesn’t even like it if I say ‘hell’ and ‘cripes’ and ‘crap’ and all those other pseudo swear words either. (She hates things like ‘Oh sugar’ too.) But right then I swear. (I was not at home, obvs, but still, gotta respect my mum, so I swear in code.)

  ‘Oh coded words!’ I say.

  Coded fog and coded pitch dark.

  If anything comes up here and runs into that rockfall, it’ll be fatal. I should call the police or somebody.

  I pull out my phone. Thank goodness I charged it. I wipe it against the front of my jacket and swipe it open. But it’s no good. No flipping signal.

  Unsteadily, I attach one of my bike blinkers to the rocks as a kind of warning. Hope it works. Then I push my bike round the rockfall, and head on up the pass. Maybe up there I’ll get coverage. Shaking, I get back on my bike.

  By the start of the Pyg Track, at the top car park, I’m puffed out and I stop. I get off the bike again and crouch down by the side of the road, squinting through the darkness, until I swipe my phone.

  Still no signal.

  I try holding it out at all sorts of odd angles. I cross the road and climb up on a low wall. A single bar shows. The phone buzzes. Two new pings.

  George.

  George

  Can’t sleep. Lying in my bed and thinking about you on this auspicious night. Please imagine all my thoughts and add some.

  The second is from some random number.

  +44 7654 111156

  So where is your BF then? I told you Hands Off or it was WAR. Well, eat your heart out GF cos his <3 belongs to me now.

  Whaaat?

  Who sent that?

  My first thought is Sheila, but it isn’t her number. And it’s been sent earlier than George’s, in fact at exactly 00.10.

  Why would Sheila send me a text like that in middle of the night? Because Sheila is a cow has been after Henry from the very first. That’s why.

  Why would Sheila not send me a text like that in middle of the night, though? Because she is lazy, and wouldn’t bother waking up to text anyone.

  Sigh. Sheila is my friend who sometimes doesn’t act like one.

  And anyway, why has it only just come through now?

  But what a nerve!

  I pull off my glove and message right back.

  Ellie

  Go suck bananas.

  And one to Sheila – just to double check.

  Ellie

  Did you just text me?

  Then I ping Rhiannon as well.

  Ellie

  You OK Rhi? I’m on my way – already up at Pen-y-Pass. Miracle I got a signal up here. Just letting you know. Did you want me to call anyone? XXX

  I press send.

  I wait for a reply, but none comes. I call the police about the landslide, but only just manage to shout out: ‘ROCKFALL ON LLANBERIS PASS!’ before the signal goes down again. I really should tell them about Dinas Emrys, despite what Rhi says. Perhaps they already know. I wave the phone in the air, turn it off, turn it on again, climb down from the wall and try the other side of the road.

  Zilch.

  It’s like that on Snowdon. Coverage comes. Coverage goes. It’s almost as if Snowdon itself decides which messages it will carry and which it won’t. I know from experience, I could muck about up here until tomorrow, hoping for a signal and might never get one. So, praying the police have got the message, I stuff my phone down the top of my parka, underneath my hoodie, close against my skin, so if coverage does come back on, I will feel it vibrate.

  As I turn to go, the clouds clear for an instant. The moon shines through. I look back down the road. I see the mountains unfolding below me. It’s a crazy sight. Like I’m standing on the top of the world as it ripples and falls away in huge chunks. A haze of low-lying mist seamlessly merges dark land into dark sky until the mountains look like waves rising and falling on a mysterious midnight sea.

  Then it blinks out.

  That text really was foul not very nice, was it? ‘Eat your heart out GF … ’ I bite my lip. Not that many people know about Henry and me – even fewer know the curse about giving his heart. Which makes the bit, ‘his <3 belongs to me now … ’ so much more than just five words. (I bet it was Sheila, the cowbag.)

  I really need to get to Dinas Emrys. Nobody can have his heart, can they? It’s mine. He’s My Henry. I try to reassure myself but an imaginary text thread burrows its way into my mind:

  ME: His heart is encased in crystal in a cavern. It’d take an earthquake off the Richter scale to shatter the cavern, and the Hadron Collider to break through the crystal.
You’re worrying for nothing.

  RANDOM TEXTER: You are thinking in terms of pure physics.

  ME: Huh?

  RANDOM TEXTER: It was the magick of Merlin that encased his heart and the power of Draco that holds the key. I am more powerful than Draco and possess older magick than Merlin.

  ME: Who are you?

  RANDOM TEXTER: Your worst nightmare.

  I jump on my bike and take the last little bit of rise. I pound the pedals like I’m in the Tour de France. I hit the downhill slope.

  Going downhill on Snowdon is scary. The road falls away in front of you; it curves out into a bed of mist. You know that a huge cliff lies on one side and at any minute there might be a hairpin bend. Then you hit cloud. It clings on around you. You can hardly see the road as it drops and drops away. You get a wave of vertigo, as if you’re flying off into nothingness. And you hold your breath, as you tear through cold air.

  I hold tight on to the handlebars, hardly touching the brakes. I freewheel, all the way down to the junction on to the Beddgelert road. I race through the misty darkness like the wind. The bike flies beneath me. To distract myself from what I’ll find at Dinas Emrys, I wonder why Rhi didn’t want George to know.

  Rhiannon and George have got this thing going, you see. Or rather not going. In fact it has been not going for so long, it feels like it is going. Everybody knows about it. Rhiannon is totally nuts about George. George is not totally nuts about Rhiannon. George is totally nuts about me (though I am not nuts about him). Anyway, I have to pretend I don’t know anything about all the totally nuts stuff that is not going on between them.

  It’s sort of like A Midsummer’s Night Dream without Shakespeare.

  Anyway, it was weird of Rhi to say, ‘Don’t tell George’, because Rhiannon likes to see George under any circumstances. Even when she might not have done her hair/ fake eyelashes/eyebrows/lip gloss – you know – to look her prettiest best. Not that George notices that kind of thing. But anyway, under ordinary circumstances, she’d totally like to see him in the dead of night, when he could rescue her from some lonely location, and the darkness would hide any lack of blusher.

  So why text me?

  I’ve never quite got that – I mean the girly rescue thing. I’m pretty much a mountain boots, mountain girl. I’m best off in a waterproof jacket and a pair of jeans with a daysack on my back, rescuing myself.

  Not true.

  I can do pretty, really well in fact – especially if there was any hope Henry might be around . And actually, I would like a free voucher for Make-up Unlimited just as much as Rhi. If I had the offer of one.

  But Henry isn’t going to be around, is he? He’s entombed under Dinas Emrys.

  With his heart sealed in crystal.

  Imprisoned.

  With the White Dragon.

  His mortal enemy

  And without me.

  Or at least that’s where he should be …

  FIVE

  ELLIE’S PHONE

  No coverage. No coverage. No coverage.

  I hit the Beddgelert Road at speed. Freezing air whips my hair back, stings my eyes. The clouds lift a little. The mist rolls back. Moonshine glimmers through. This side of the mountain lies covered in a fine, icy frost. It glitters, ghostly.

  I twist my head to see if the shapes are still chasing me, but they’re gone. I crouch back over the bike and make as much headway as I can.

  Head down, pulverising the pedals, my hands literally frozen in place, I race downhill all the way to Llyn Gwynant.

  And I wonder what the heck I’m doing.

  The water on the lake stretches out smooth and black. Spectral slopes rise from its shores. The road lies totally deserted; the mountain is all mine. Sometimes I like it best that way. Just Snowdon and me. Pals. Sort of.

  I race past Llyn Gwynant scrooched down low. No sign of human life. No telephone pole. No cottage. Just the grey road winding on down alongside the Afon Glaslyn, down to Llyn Dinas.

  I sit back on the bike seat and squint into the distance. My heartbeat jumps about. The fortress of Dinas Emrys lies smack ahead. What will I find there? Rhiannon’s words send shivers through me. What did she mean: ‘Someone died’?

  The moon goes behind a cloud. Darkness closes in. Rhiannon must be mental coming out here at midnight. What the flip was she doing? I bet it was something to do with her new obsession with witches. Only last week I sat through a whole evening of tarot readings with her, trying to figure out meanings (it was actually quite a lot of fun). What had my cards said? Something about the Lightning-Struck Tower and the Ace of Swords?

  I think of Henry lying curled tight in the cavern, so near. He’ll still be there, won’t he? A bad, bad, bad feeling ripples through me, like something has crawled over my grave. What about the White Dragon? Everything about tonight is really bad, bad, bad.

  Tonight? Suddenly, I have a light-bulb moment!

  What did George write?

  ‘Auspicious.’ That’s it! It’s a leap year! That’s why Rhi went out. She’ll be doing all that witchy stuff with her ‘coven’, and trying to come up with the ultimate love potion; the Make-Me-Irresistible-To-George Charm. You know: look into the mirror and see your intended (George) appear over your left shoulder. Yeah. Right.

  Being a witch is actually quite cool. Although those bunch of loonies from Betws-y-Coed are well known to be evil ones who turn into cats, which is not so good.

  And why up here on Dinas Emrys? I bite my lip.

  An image of Sir Oswald flashes across my mind. He’ll be under the mountain too. Nobody would want to see his face in the mirror. I shiver at the thought.

  A light flashes. Away down the road, somewhere near the National Trust car park, more lights. As I draw nearer, a glow of flickering orange. A siren wails, screeching into the night. It’s serious then. Has to be. Emergency services don’t come out for nothing. Yikes. Someone must have died. How the hell did that happen?

  Instinctively I slow down. Lights and sirens mean police everywhere. And that means a police cordon. How will I be able to get to Rhi or check the cavern for Henry, if I can’t get access? And then I think – what if Henry is still there and the police find him? I mean, he’s in his dragon form and has to stay that way for the next seventy-two years under the Merlin curse rules.

  I imagine the Snowdonia Chronicle headline:

  Mabinogion Legends True After All:

  Landslide Reveals Sleeping Dragons

  I mean, it could happen – think of the Titanosaurus find …

  Best to avoid the police.

  I swing off the road and cycle up towards a farm, avoiding the car park and the lights and all that police stuff.

  I take a shortcut I discovered on one of my treks to Henry’s cavern. I do that sometimes, you know, visit the place where he lies, pray to Merlin, beseech the Constellation of Draco, beg Snowdon to show me the way to find him again. Sit there with my heart breaking. Sometimes I think I hear him – just a rumble from the depths of the mountain – as if he knows I’m there. (Don’t say anything. Keeping lonely vigils over your buried beloved is too depressing to think about.)

  Anyway, there’s this turning to a farm, and from there, to a lane and a row of mobile holiday homes. Behind them you can scramble up a steep slope between trees, all covered in moss and get to the fortress from the back. The bracken is tight and scratchy, but it’s really not too far and saves a good three-mile trek.

  Anyway, I pedal very carefully once I’ve got up through the gates to the farm, as it’s private property. Once through them, I take a sharp left along a dirt track towards the mobile homes. Frozen grass pokes white through the middle of the road. It really is bitter. My fingers are totally numb. I dodge the potholes. As I near the chalets, I get down and tiptoe.

  I am very wary creeping through the holiday homes. They’re supposed to be empty at this time of year, but actually everyone knows they’re pretty much lived in for the entire winter. They’re rented out in the high
season for silly prices to silly tourists who have more money than us locals, but at the first sign of frost, the owners come sneaking back in, after they’ve probably been sofa surfing at their auntie’s all summer. Then they live in the chalets for the rest of the year.

  It drives the local council nuts, trying to get them to stick to the rules of holiday home ownership. And that makes me even more super-quiet. These guys are really jumpy and ready to shout at anyone. They’ll think I’m here to spy on them.

  So, very carefully, I hide the bike behind the first chalet, where I see a pair of muddy wellies shoved against an upturned bucket (what did I tell you), then I sidle round it and head for the first row of homes. I slip down between them. I don’t want some bloke with his stripy pyjamas and a big attitude to come busting out of a caravan and start yelling at me. I don’t want to have to cycle down to the National Trust car park either and get stopped by the police, or walk three miles back across country. I’d get to Rhi by the end of next week.

  It kind of goes OK, ’til I see a light go on in the first chalet. I swear I never made any noise. These guys must have trip wires or something. Then the light snaps off and I hear the caravan door open. I freeze.

  A definite pyjama-shaped shadow falls across the gravel.

  Oh no.

  I don’t move. The shadow goes the opposite way, checks the front. I slip into the woodland at the back. Phew.

  In front of me rises a steep bank, covered with spindly trees. Thick green moss coats every patch of bark, and the roots are tangled knots of black. In parts, the rocky hillside is almost sheer. Still need to be totally quiet.