Chapter 24
As she finishes recounting this, Sasha steals a glance round the courtroom.
No one is looking impressed. She knows she’s done a poor job in telling the story – now, in this over-lit room, it’s impossible to conjure up the way she’d felt then.
Too many doubters. But she’d believed. And so had the others.
‘That’s right.’
She’s doing her best to avoid looking at the girls in the dock.
But every now and then she steals a glance.
It’s funny, they’re not looking the way she thought they would.
It’s as if their powers have reversed. Eliza’s the strong one now, staring intently at Sasha, barely blinking as she takes in every word that Sasha says.
But Isobel is diminished. It looks as if her hair has thinned, less lustrous than it used to be.
Sasha almost laughs, the sound catching into a sob.
Life imitating art indeed, the curse from The Craft that landed on the racist palely replicated now.
That scene as the blonde cheerleader cried in the shower as her hair came out in handfuls is one that has stayed with Sasha ever since she first watched the film.
‘What happened next?’ The advocate depute is asking her a question. Sasha needs to pay attention. She swallows, gets back to it.
What she’s struggling to convey is how real it felt.
She went from being an outcast, homesick, missing her mum, to fitting into the coolest group in school.
OK, they weren’t the coolest in the most traditional sense.
They didn’t play hockey, excel in any sporting achievements.
But they were smart, they were funny, and they knew things that no one else knew.
They knew why Charlotte Nussey kept missing goal whenever she tried to hit the ball, why her maths had suddenly escaped her and every attempt she made to hiss racist invectives at Sasha failed.
They knew why Carol-Ann Napier couldn’t bully the smaller girls any more, but had instead grown terrified of the dark, insisting on sleeping with her light on, moaning whenever she dozed off because of the ferocity of her nightmares.
Those were deserved victims, though. They were mean to other girls, strutted round with superiority as if they thought no one was better than them.
Sasha didn’t mind that – their hexes wouldn’t recoil on them, the Rule of Three would be respected.
No harm done. It was when Isobel decided that she wanted to get Noah to dump Freya so Eliza could go out with him that the problems arose.
Sasha told her that she couldn’t hex someone just to get what she wanted. It wasn’t the right way to go about it. But Isobel didn’t care. She was doing it for Eliza, so it was fine.
‘The easiest way is to take Freya off the scene,’ Isobel said.
‘How are you going to do that?’ Sasha asked her, not really wanting the answer.
‘I’m going to curse Freya so she becomes ill. I know exactly what we need to do – all of us will have to be a part of it though so the magic is stronger.’
‘Won’t that rebound on Eliza? Given this is for her benefit?’
‘I think the risk is worth taking.’
Eliza had looked really pissed off at that. But she had such a thing for Noah, she couldn’t resist.
As she recounts it all now, Sasha can hear the scepticism in the advocate depute’s voice.
She knows he doesn’t believe in the truth of what she’s saying.
Not that he thinks she’s lying, but he thinks the magic stuff is bullshit.
She gets it, she really does. All she can do is speak her truth, though.
Even if they all think she’s crazy, at least they’ll see the kind of power that Isobel wanted to wield, even if they don’t believe that she did.
This was the first time they’d gone to the shed.
Isobel found it one day when she was foraging for herbs in the park, the gap in the railings, the unattended structure, the key hidden under a rock.
She had a sixth sense for getting what they needed, this space perfect for more complicated rituals.
There were only so many times they could kick the younger kids out of the common room before it blew up in their faces, and the prefect in charge of the dormitory was way too fond of telling them to shut up.
She didn’t care if they went out after lights out; she just didn’t want to be disturbed while she chatted on her secret phone to her even more secret boyfriend.
They’d wait until lights out, then they’d sneak out of the school grounds. It was easy to squeeze through the small gap in the fence round the school perimeter, the smaller gap in the fence that ran down the side of the allotments. It really wasn’t very big. But neither were the girls.
‘How do you know it’s disused?’ said Christian, panicking as usual. Isobel had the answer to that.
‘I’ve walked past multiple times to be sure; no one ever does anything there. Also, look at the place. Everyone else looks after their allotments – this one is overgrown and tired.’
A moment’s hesitation, then they were in.
It was dark in the shed, cold. Its décor was cheerful, but this only made its air of abandonment more sinister.
Spiders lurked in the corners, the webs catching at Sasha’s face as they crept in.
Isobel wouldn’t let them put any lights on so candles had to suffice, the shadows on the ceiling seeming to lean in around the girls, threatening to suffocate them.
Isobel was carrying a black tote bag from the occult shop in Candlemaker Row, the place they’d bought the Ouija board. She emptied the contents out on the floor. Sasha stared at them, transfixed. Something cold lodged itself at the bottom of her stomach.
‘What frightened you?’ Mr Alexander says, pulling Sasha back into the courtroom.
‘She’d brought all the components for the curse. The candle, the death oil—’
‘Sorry to interrupt, but what is death oil?’
‘It’s an oil which has been treated to have magical powers. Dead insects, soil from a graveyard. We said incantations over it. It gives force to any spell you cast.’
‘Thank you,’ Mr Alexander says. Sasha is impressed that he’s treating what she’s saying seriously. She knows it’s a lot. ‘Please continue.’
There was all the normal stuff that they’d used to hex people.
But this time Isobel had brought something else with her.
A poppet of Freya. Sasha looked at the cloth doll with growing horror.
Christian and Isobel had made it together, giving it Freya’s features.
Isobel had stolen a shirt of hers which she’d made into the top part of the doll, and she’d sprayed it with some of her perfume.
Worst of all, she’d filled it with Freya’s hair.
With a grin, Isobel pulled open the seams and showed Sasha, chilling her to the bone to see wispy auburn curls of Freya’s hair peeking out from the gap in the top of the doll.
She’d taken it from Freya’s hairbrush that morning, she told Sasha with glee.
Then Isobel had picked up a plastic bag, opened it. A stench of fish had filled the shed.
‘What the fuck is that?’ Sasha said.
‘Rotten sardines. That’ll put Noah off for sure.’ Isobel stuffed the fish into the poppet before sewing the hole up roughly with a needle and thread. Then she pulled out a packet of pins, gave a handful to each of the girls who had been watching on silently as Isobel made her preparations.
‘Now we stick them in,’ she said. ‘It’ll make Freya so ill she’ll have to leave school. Then Noah will dump her and the way will be clear for you, Eliza.’ It was terrifying how matter-of-fact Isobel sounded.
‘We can’t do this,’ Sasha said. ‘It’s going to go badly wrong, I’m sure of it.’
‘Don’t be such a coward,’ Christian said. One of the few interventions she ever made, but backing Isobel up. At that stage, Christian always did exactly what Isobel said. It’s like they were one person. No room between them for anyone else.
‘Something terrible is going to happen, I swear it. We can’t do this,’ Sasha said again.
‘You can go if you don’t like it.’
After a moment’s hesitation, Sasha left, sneaking back in through the dark, getting into bed without anyone seeing her.
It was one of the hardest decisions she’d ever made, to walk away from her friends like that.
She had no choice, though. What they were doing was too dangerous.
When she got into bed she thought she’d be awake for hours, staring wordlessly at the ceiling, but she was asleep before the others came back to the dorm, the stress of it all too much to bear.
‘Did anything happen to Freya, as far as you know?’ Mr Alexander says.
‘She did become ill, though I don’t know what was wrong with her. She had to go home for a couple of weeks.’
‘Do you know what happened to Noah?’
‘He didn’t dump her. He was far too devoted.
Eliza wanted Isobel to cast a love spell on him but she refused.
She said that could only end badly. Eliza would have to seduce him herself.
I watched at the half-term disco and all I can say is that she tried, but it went nowhere.
Eliza was really upset. She ended up passed out in the toilets, so drunk that she had to have her stomach pumped. ’
‘Did anything happen to you after you walked away from the shed?’ Mr Alexander says.
Sasha doesn’t answer him for a moment. Words have temporarily failed her.
How can she describe the nightmares she had to this man in his wig and gown, his friendly yet sceptical smile as he humours her, letting her spout her nonsense in return for her telling them what Isobel and Eliza are really like. But she has to say something.
It was like hell. They never told her exactly what they did in the shed after she walked away. But Sasha’s guess is that they hexed her for breaking the sisterhood. She may have slept that night when she got back early, but that was the last time that she slept for days.
It would start with a crawling sensation.
As soon as she closed her eyes, it began.
Something moving under her skin, multiplying, woodlice when you lift a stone but they were crawling out of her ears, up her nose, round the edge of her pants while she flailed her hands at them, desperately trying to brush them off. That was the first night.
The second night it was grasshoppers. She knew why; she’d told Isobel once how scary she found them, the way they jumped. Hundreds of them, thousands, crawling all over her, tangled up in her hair.
The third, midges. An incessant scratching, every part of her bitten. But when the morning light came, not a trace of the intolerable itching, other than the long scratches she’d inflicted on herself in a vain attempt to make it all stop.
The fourth night, she was so tired, she’d fallen asleep despite herself.
However bright the bedside light in her eyes, the music she kept blaring through her headphones, she was unable to keep awake any longer.
Up and up she flew in her dream, soaring above the streets and houses of Edinburgh, Arthur’s Seat a tiny lion crouching beneath her, till suddenly she lost the wind beneath her wings, falling falling falling until she woke with a scream to see Isobel perched at the end of her bed, a manic grin on her face.
That was nearly the last straw. But it was what happened to her mum that flipped it.
‘What happened to your mum?’ Mr Alexander says.
‘She found a lump in her breast. They had to do loads of tests to see if it was cancer. I knew they’d done it to her. That’s when I knew I had no choice. I had to join back in.’ She takes a deep breath. ‘And that’s when it all went terribly wrong.’