‘Adeline. Adeline!’

His voice was lost in the murky air, in the slanting lines of rain.

And then he saw a movement, a blurred shape emerging from the darkness, and he ran towards her as best he could, almost slipping.

‘Adeline! Wait. Don’t—’

But now she had vanished once more. She cried out in alarm. And so he stood where he was, then took a few tentative steps towards the sound. He found her lying on the ground, near a patch of lawn, tripped by a large branch lying next to her feet. Her face was pelted by the rain, wet and glistening, and her short hair was matted close to her skull. But her face was the worst to look at, for the skin was pitted, and some of it had come away in shreds of flesh. She was sobbing. Drops of rain ran into her mouth. Her features slipped from one expression to another. One mask, another mask. One woman, another woman. Hobbes could hardly make it out. Was it an effect of the rain, the mud and the dim light? Or something real, something drawn from her mind, and manifested on the body? There was no way of knowing, not clearly.

The dress was still clutched in her hands.

She clung to it dearly, the only thing she had left.

Spells Against Darkness

From statements made by Adeline Graves during her interrogation, from the words of her grandmother, Mary Estelle, in her moments of clarity, from the confessions of Camilla and Rosamund, now they knew it was all over, from testimonies given by all parties at the murder trial, and from journals found in Adeline’s home in Hackney Wick, from all these sources, and from his own thoughts on the matter, Hobbes put together a version of the twenty-eight rituals, as undertaken over the years. Above all, he needed to know the story, or at least a variant of it, to picture the events in his own mind, this shared obsession of a family – and an idea, a spell, that drew people like a pull of nature, bringing with it both death, and life.

It goes like this:

Year zero. 1954. The corpse of Jeannie Watts is wrapped in Adeline’s favourite dress. She’s interred in the chimney breast. A prayer is said, improvised by Camilla. A prayer for her niece’s continued life.

1955. For the first six months, all is well. But the spell lasts for only so long. Adeline struggles to accept this new identity. She is wasting away, as her condition reasserts itself. Negation. The family prepare a special ceremony, to take place on the first anniversary of the death. Jeannie Watts will die again, in a symbolic manner, and her ‘body’ will be reburied in the cellar, dressed in blue and yellow, accompanied by five magic charms. A pigeon, found dead in the attic, is added to the pile of grave goods. A set of wings for the journey. Prayers are chanted. Leonard writes a script for this act of magic, and Adeline takes a full measure of life from it. The family see how she is now, how alive she appears, how vibrant. Decay is kept at bay. And they promise always to come back to this moment – to meet on this day, to perform the same ritual every year. And so Adeline will live on, in this new guise.