Lilian's Spell Book Read online

  LILIAN’S SPELL BOOK

  TOBY LITT

  Copyright © 2017 by Toby Litt

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

  may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

  without the express written permission of the publisher

  except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Printed in the United Kingdom by Alphabetical

  First Publication as an Ebook, 2017

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  www.tobylitt.com

  ISBN 978-1-9998021-0-3

  About the Author

  Toby Litt was born in Bedford, England, and grew up in Ampthill, Bedfordshire. He is the author of numerous novels including Corpsing, deadkidsongs and Ghost Story. He is a Granta Best of Young British Novelist.

  Toby won the Manchester Fiction Prize and was shortlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award.

  His book, Free Country: The Children’s Crusade, co-written with Neil Gaiman, was a New York Times Bestselling Graphic Novel.

  Praise for Toby Litt:

  ‘Toby Litt is awfully good—he gives something new every time he writes.’ - Muriel Spark

  Adventures in Capitalism – ‘the most exciting young talent on the literary scene’ – Independent

  Beatniks – ‘A great book’ – Literary Review

  Corpsing – ‘a first-rate thriller’ – Muriel Spark

  deadkidsongs – ‘Should put Toby Litt firmly and deservedly in the big league’ – Daily Telegraph

  Exhibitionism – ‘Serious entertainment of the highest order’ – Guardian

  Finding Myself – ‘Entertaining, inventive and original – Literary Review

  Ghost Story – ‘Agonising, innovative and very moving’ – Esquire

  Hospital – ‘Litt has created an extraordinarily vivid comic nightmare, an apocalyptic vision for our own weird times’ – Guardian

  I play the drums in a band called okay – ‘It’s like he’s been hiding under the bed in hotel rooms, in the corner of rehearsal rooms, in the toilets in bars, in the darkest corners of our minds, listening all the time. Spooky!’ – Peter Hook, New Order

  Journey into Space – ‘One of the most inventive and original writers around’ – Sunday Mirror

  King Death – ‘Litt has honed a storytelling formula that laces plots with sinister tensions’ – Time Out

  Life-Like – ‘quite an important addition to the unimportant world of short stories’ – Guardian

  Mutants: Selected Essays – This is a collection you should read if you are interested in literature, in reading it or writing it’ – BRSBKBLOG

  About the Book

  Lilian’s Spell Book is a thrilling and intimate paranormal adventure novel about an ordinary English family – mother, father, pre-teen son, baby daughter – who inherit an extraordinary house. They move to this vast Elizabethan mansion in rural Sussex from their small South London maisonette. Very soon, they all find out their new home is haunted. But it is the mother of the family, Jeane Jonson, who begins to suspect that the secret to the house lies in the Elizabethan portrait that hangs in a gallery just off the vast entrance hall – a glittering, gorgeous oil painting showing the proud, red-haired Lilian holding in her hand a small leather-bound book. But the real wonders start when the narrator discovers the book itself, in the secret library of the mansion. Lilian’s father was an alchemist…

  Table of Contents

  In the very heart of the fire

  Chapter 1.

  Chapter 2.

  Chapter 3.

  Chapter 4.

  Chapter 5.

  Chapter 6.

  Chapter 7.

  Chapter 8.

  Chapter 9.

  Chapter 10.

  Chapter 11.

  Chapter 12.

  Chapter 13.

  Chapter 14.

  Chapter 15.

  Chapter 16.

  Chapter 17.

  Chapter 18.

  Chapter 19.

  Chapter 20.

  Chapter 21.

  Chapter 22.

  Chapter 23.

  Chapter 24.

  Chapter 25.

  Chapter 26.

  Chapter 27.

  Chapter 28.

  Chapter 29.

  Chapter 30.

  Chapter 31.

  Chapter 32.

  Chapter 33.

  Chapter 34.

  Chapter 35.

  Chapter 36.

  Chapter 37.

  Chapter 38.

  Chapter 39.

  Chapter 40.

  Chapter 41.

  Chapter 42.

  Chapter 43.

  Chapter 44.

  Chapter 45.

  Chapter 46.

  Chapter 47.

  Chapter 48.

  Chapter 49.

  Chapter 50.

  Chapter 51.

  Chapter 52.

  Chapter 53.

  Chapter 54.

  Chapter 55.

  Chapter 56.

  Chapter 57.

  Chapter 58.

  Chapter 59.

  Chapter 60.

  Chapter 61.

  Chapter 62.

  Chapter 63.

  Chapter 64.

  Afterword

  In the very heart of the fire

  I could see it clearly – there stood a figure. I thought for one mad moment that it must be my husband, and that he must be burning to death. But the figure stood there, quite calm, quite still, completely unaffected by the furnace-like blaze surrounding them. I could see them through the open doorway that, for some reason, wasn’t burning. The fire did not come that far.

  Perhaps I should be clearer. This was not a figure made of flames. This was the outline of a figure where the bright flames left a darker gap. And the gap went all the way to the bricks of the far wall. It was almost as if there were a person-shaped tunnel running through the whole infernal room, from front to back. And there was nothing there to burn, I was sure. This room of our house was totally empty. It was the air itself that seemed to be on fire.

  The light from the burning room scorched into the backs of my eyes. How long before the fire spread? How long before our beautiful old wooden dreamhouse was razed to the ground? But still I didn’t turn and run. Still I stared into the light.

  I knew this figure. With every passing second, I was surer of that.

  I knew her, and I knew she had a message for me.

  As I watched, she put her left hand out and beckoned me towards her. Of course she was left-handed! – I’d known that all along.

  It was madness but I felt certain that she wouldn’t let me come to harm. It was a while since I had started to trust her. But did I trust her enough to trust her with my life?

  Of course I hesitated. Nobody wants want to die like this. Nobody wants to be burnt alive. What I was about to do was against all reason.

  Reason, though, was something I had given up on or which had given up on me quite some time before.

  I nodded to her.

  The figure beckoned me again.

  I moved forwards, to the edge of the flames.

  I could see her better now. My eyes seemed to be getting used to the bright light. Was that a smile I could make out among the flames?

  With a final thought for my husband, my children, I stepped over the threshold – into the heart of the burning room.

  PART ONE

  Chapter 1.

  It’s the sort of thing that only happens in books – a relative you haven’t thought about for years dies, their solicitors track you down, you’re called to
a small, incredibly old-fashioned office and told you own a house you never even knew existed.

  If it hadn’t happened to us, I really wouldn’t have believed it. But the solicitors were called Gibbons & Jump, and their old-fashioned office was at 17 Winchester Road, Worthing, and Peter and I went there for ten thirty on a Tuesday morning in May – taking baby Mary with us and leaving my parents to entertain six year-old Jack.

  I breastfed Mary in the car before we went upstairs. She slept in my arms for most of the meeting, which lasted just under an hour. That was how long it took to change our lives completely.

  The dead relative, Michael Francis Jonson, was a great uncle of Peter’s on his father’s side. That part of Peter’s family seemed to enjoy falling out over things, especially religious things. Michael Francis had been Catholic, and had taken it all extremely seriously. So much so that he refused to leave his house to anyone who wasn’t of the old faith. But most of his family was either wishy-washy Protestants or nothing much at all. (Michael Francis never got round to having children himself.) Even though Peter hadn’t been a practicing Catholic for years, he had gone through the rigmarole of conversion while at university. He said it was because he found the whole thing very glamorous, silly idiot. So, when Michael Francis Jonson decided he needed an heir, he had ordered his solicitors to search out one who was a proper Catholic, and Peter, I suppose, was the best they could come up with.

  ‘You don’t have a photograph?’ asked Peter, after Mr. Gibbon broke the news. Mr. Gibbon didn’t look like a gibbon. He looked like a grizzled chimpanzee.

  ‘I think you should go and see it for yourself,’ said Mr. Gibbon. ‘Then you can make up your mind about taking on the responsibilities, etcetera. It’s about half an hour from here. You could be back by teatime.’

  I could tell this was the kind of office where teatime was still held sacred. Four o’clock, and not a minute after.

  There was a silence.

  ‘Who gets it if we don’t take it?’ I asked.

  ‘The taxman,’ replied Mr. Gibbon, as if Peter and not me had asked the question. ‘Mr. Jonson would die intestate.’

  If we took the house, he said, we would have to sign some papers, and agree to bring up any children of our own as Catholics – otherwise they’d be disinherited and lose the house, or any money from the sale of it. Also, we couldn’t just auction off the whole kit and caboodle.

  The solicitor explained, very carefully, that this last bit was binding. ‘You will not be able take anything out of the house for the purpose of selling it – the furniture, paintings, even the crockery. It is all part of the estate, and must be maintained by you. Paintings can be loaned for exhibition, if they are properly insured. The building itself, of course, cannot be sold. Nor the land it is build upon. Nor any of the surrounding acreage. Either you own it, as the heirs of Mr. Jonson, or it passes to the state. The same conditions will apply to your children. However, there are outbuildings, some garages, a garden shed, and the same strictures do not apply to these properties and their contents as to the main house.’

  ‘Oh good,’ said Peter, ‘so we can sell the lawnmower.’

  ‘I am merely relating the terms of the will,’ said Mr. Gibbon.

  ‘I am merely saying that we can sell the lawnmower,’ said Peter. He was never able to take official people all that seriously. That was one of the reasons I loved him like I did.

  ‘I believe there is a lawnmower,’ said Mr. Gibbon. ‘And it would of course be yours to sell – though that might leave the gardener in some difficulties.’

  ‘Could we rent the house out, and live somewhere else?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ said Mr. Gibbon. ‘That is explicitly forbidden.’

  Then he handed Peter the keys and a piece of paper with the address.

  ‘You’ll find an inventory of the contents in the middle drawer of the desk in Mr. Jonson’s study, rear room, left hand side.’

  ‘There’s no alarm?’ Peter asked.

  ‘No,’ said Mr. Gibbon. ‘It’s all rather old-fashioned.’ Which was rich, coming from him.

  As soon as we were out on the street, Peter said, ‘I don’t like the bit about Mary and Jack having to be Catholic.’ It was a sunny morning. People whose lives were still the same walked past us with shopping bags in their hands.

  The key was nothing special – just a dull brass Yale attached by a steel ring to a fob of new leather.

  Peter held it up next to his ear and shook it like a bell.

  ‘I’m trying to hear money,’ he said.

  I looked at him properly for the first time in a while. Blue eyes. Stubble. He was a bit of a scamp – could never get his dark hair to sit down properly. When we’d started going out I’d thought he was very attractive, but that I was the only person to see it. It wasn’t that Peter was the greatest looker; it was the energy he had inside him. Turns out, I wasn’t the only person to see it. At least one other did.

  ‘This is fun,’ I said, trying to clear those sad thoughts out of my head.

  Chapter 2.

  My name is Jeane Jonson.

  I’m an ordinary woman and I have an ordinary family, at least that’s what I thought. We lived ordinary, happy, suburban lives – in Tulse Hill, South London. Peter had his own business, creating and maintaining financial software for small companies. As for me, before I had the children, I’d been a schoolteacher at a primary school. I intended to go back part-time as soon as Mary was in nursery. We couldn’t afford for me not to work. We weren’t rich. We were as normal as normal gets. This inherited house was the first extraordinary thing that had even happened to us. Even Peter’s affair had been perfectly normal.

  With the traffic, the drive took more than twice the half hour Mr. Gibbon had promised. Almost as soon as we started, Peter had to pull over so I could get in the back. Mary had woken up, and wouldn’t stop crying. She calmed down when she felt me beside her, and we set off again. Luckily, Peter had recently put Sat Nav in our car, so finding the village was easy. We had the postcode, and the solicitor had told us to follow the road down past the church. This went on for about a mile, only wide enough for one car, and with tall beech trees on either side. Here was where Mary decided to fall asleep again. She’s a very good baby – typical second child. Or at least the kind of second child everyone hopes for.

  The road ended at a pair of tall black metal gates, beyond which was a gravel track curving round to the left. The gates were open.

  Peter stopped the car and turned off the engine.

  ‘What are you waiting for?’ I said.

  ‘I need a moment or two,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t be so melodramatic.’

  ‘I’m just preparing myself for the full horror. It probably doesn’t even have a roof.’

  ‘Then we’ll get a roof put on. Anyway, Mr. Gibbon said there were paintings – and they wouldn’t just leave paintings open to the rain.’

  Peter was silent for a moment. ‘I don’t want to force the children into anything that’s not good for them, Jeane. Not just for the sake of money.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘If we don’t like it, we don’t take it. Now, drive.’

  He started the engine.

  The track curved round to the left, then to the right, then left again. A thick wood surrounded us. Trees high over our heads made the inside of the car quite dark.

  And then, without warning, the house was on top of us. Peter had to do an emergency stop, and the tyres skidded on the gravel. He pulled up a few inches short of a green garage door.

  In front of the house there were only a couple of parking spaces, nothing more. No grand drive down an arcade of trees. The trees were growing very close, all around the tall two-storey building.

  The jolt had woken Mary, who started to do her worst kind of cry. I picked her out of her backwards-facing car seat and cuddled her. She was three months old but chubbing up nicely. I was pleased about that. Jack had been just the same. They took after me, that was
for certain.

  ‘Oh my God,’ I said.

  ‘Wow,’ said Peter.

  ‘Look at it,’ I said. ‘It’s a stately home.’

  ‘It is a bit over-the-top,’ said Peter. He was looking up at the black beams and white plaster of the building, and the diamond patterning in the glass of all the tall, narrow windows. This house definitely had a roof – with bells on. Three bells.

  ‘No decisions yet,’ I said. ‘Let’s go inside.’

  To the sound of Mary’s screams, Peter put the key in the lock and turned it.

  Even with a hard shove, the door wouldn’t open.

  ‘There’s another lock,’ said Peter.

  He pushed the door at top and bottom.

  ‘Down there,’ he said, pointing. ‘I can’t see anything on the outside.’ Peter stepped back. ‘There isn’t even a deadlock.’

  ‘Perhaps there’s another door,’ I said.

  ‘But this is the front door, and Mr. Gibbon said the front door. And this key was the right one.’

  ‘Well, maybe someone’s in there.’

  ‘Who?’ asked Peter.

  ‘Let’s find out,’ I said.

  If the house key wasn’t impressive, the doorknocker certainly was. It was shaped like the beak of a brass griffin, and when I let it slam home Mary – who had just quieted down a little – started screaming again.

  ‘Let me,’ said Peter, and banged on the door for a deafening minute.

  Then we spent another minute stepping back from the house and squinting towards the upper windows. They were all of them closed, and it was only in my imagination that I saw anything moving behind them.

  ‘I’ll have a look round,’ said Peter. ‘See if there is another way in.’

  He took the key from the door and started off round the right-hand side of the house.