FOUR
…
Intery, mintery, cuttery, corn
Apple bough and apple thorn
Bramble, briar, limber lock
Three geese fly in a flock
Cranny key is held in hand forged in blood
Open the door to fairyland. the sticklegrass wood
Someone has annotated the rhyme in faded ink, crossing words out and scribbling in new ones.
I know that writing. I’d know it anywhere.
This is Mam’s.
As I read the rhyme, a memory surfaces. Not of Mam, but of Odette, and the day I took her to Sicklehurst.
I brought her here, to the secret door. I made a wreath to open it and chanted the nursery rhyme. She begged me to teach it to her, so I did.
I look down at the crumbling sheet of paper in front of me. There’s mettle in nursery rhymes, power that grows stronger each time the charm is repeated, over and over, through the ages. Folk songs too, even pop songs, accumulate mettle if they get played and sung enough.
The memory is already fading, but I’ve got instructions now. I read through the rhyme a few times until I’m sure of what I need.
I can use the locket and feathers from Odette’s wreath, but other than that I’ll have to start again.
A yellow rosebush grows by the little door, and I snap off a cane, careful to avoid getting pricked. I can’t find any mint, but there’s a clump of costmary nearby that will have to do. There’s a stunted apple tree in the thicket, its branches gnarled and low. I realise that, along with no bees nor flying things of any kind, there are no flowers here, by the wall of Sicklehurst. I snap off a flexible whip of new growth from the apple tree, then bend to collect a few stalks of devil’s snare.
I take my ingredients back to the door and sit cross-legged on the grass.
I have no magic left. But Odette had no magic either, and she did it. After all, the spell to open the little door has already been cast. The wreath is more like . . . a password, or a key. Odette saw me make the wreath, back when we were little. And she remembered. But how had I known? Had I watched someone make it as well?
Mam. It must have been Mam. Had she left the paper moth for me to find? Did she want me to return to Sicklehurst?
Go home, says sensible Maude. You’re being ridiculous.
But this is where the paper moth led me. I’ve spun enough stories to know when the hero must heed the call.
I can’t go home yet.
I take the costmary, rose cane, apple and devil’s snare, and braid them together, then bend the braid into a circular wreath. I wrap Odette’s necklace around the bottom, and tuck the three feathers in.
Blood. The scrap of linen in the locket has some, but it’s old. I slide the bone-pin brooch from my cardigan, and prick my thumb, squeezing a single drop to splash on the locket, vivid red against the dull silver.
Then I replace the pin and Nan’s rose, stand up, and hang my fresh wreath on the horseshoe nail, over Odette’s withered one. I take a deep breath, feeling more than a little foolish.
‘Intery, mintery, cuttery, corn
Apple bough and apple thorn
Bramble, briar, limber lock
Three geese fly in a flock
Cranny key is forged in blood
Open the door to the sticklegrass wood.’
I repeat the charm three times, then turn around once and spit into a turkey rhubarb bush growing up against the wall.
Nothing happens, but maybe the air feels a little cooler than before. The shadows are growing long as the sun begins to sink towards the horizon.
I should go home.
I don’t belong here.
But I wait.
The shrill song of a cicada explodes from a nearby stand of whisky grass, so loud that it makes my ears ache.
I am hit with the overpowering scent of rose petals. It doesn’t smell soft and sweet, like Nan’s roses at home. This scent is rich and bloody, like roses strewn on a battlefield. It’s voluptuous, intoxicating, primal, like I’m being suffocated with petals. The sensual, earthy decay of them seeps into my skin, is sucked down my throat into my lungs, and infuses my blood. My whole body pulses with it.
It feels like a warning.
I stand up and reach out a hand to the dark wood of the door. It’s ice-cold and seems to throb under my touch, like it recognises me. Like it’s been waiting. My heart judders in response, the blood in my veins running suddenly cold, then hot, then cold again.
I feel a heavy pull in my abdomen, as if I’m getting my period.
The pinprick on my thumb pulses, and blood starts to weep from it. I press it to the door.
I can feel the overlapping layers of the triple spell – the loose, floaty forgetting spell over Inglenook, and the heavy blanket over the walls. I can even sense the third layer, deep within Sicklehurst, as thick and impenetrable as lead.
I should walk away. This isn’t me. This isn’t what I do. I like my adventures to be imaginary, where I’m able to step out at any moment and return to the comfort of home.
Nan and Halmoni will be worried about me.
But Odette could be in there.
She needs me.
Sicklehurst calls to me, to the wild girl I once was, the fierce creature that roamed Cygnet Creek with a pocketful of pebbles and dreams.
‘Open,’ I whisper.
I take a deep breath and focus my energy on the door, reaching with my witch-hands for the strands of mettle. But as always now, they slip away from me, like I’m a ghost. When it first happened, I thought it was just temporary. That I’d wake up one morning and be able to weave the mettle once more. Every morning, I’d reach out for it. And every morning, the mettle would slip through the fingers of my mind. Eventually, I stopped trying, because it hurt too much to fail.
But Odette got in. I’m sure of it – her necklace is here.
Which means I can get in too.
‘Let. Me. In,’ I command.
The leaves and blossoms on the wreath curl and shrivel in front of me, then crumble into dust that gets whipped away on a gust of wind. What’s left of the wreath slips to the ground. Only the feathers are undamaged.
The musky scent of roses hits me again, thick and moist, like rotting vegetation.
Thunder rumbles overhead.
The door shifts under my hand, opening a crack, and my ears pop.
A thorned rose cane spills out of the door, like some sea creature’s tentacle. I glimpse velvet-red petals, more than I could have imagined. There is malice in them. They tremble, as though they’re being ruffled by a breeze I can’t feel. I glimpse a shape beyond them, insubstantial as mist, whirling and writhing in wisps of silver and white. I watch as the silvery threads coalesce into a human figure.
Despite his white hair, I don’t think he’s much older than me. He is stunningly beautiful – a long, graceful neck, sharp cheekbones and platinum eyes fringed with thick, silvered lashes. He stares at me, his lips parting in shock, and a crease appears between his brows. I have never seen anyone quite like him before, and yet he feels sharply familiar. He opens his mouth to speak, but no words come out, only a strange, inhuman cry. He reaches out a long, fine-boned hand, but the red roses close in, and he dissipates as if he were nothing more than a shadow.
I push the door fully open. There are no roses. No beautiful ghost boy. The abandoned power plant is gloomy, veiled in evening shadow. I see the rising bulk of the cooling tower again, past crumbling buildings, silhouetted against the darkening sky.
There’s a faint glow coming from the very top, as if a candle has been lit in a princess’s tower. Is that where Odette is?
I look over my shoulder at the holly thicket, drab and colourless under a cold rising slice of egg moon. I imagine walking back along the dark paths – the slimy creek, the garbage-strewn public housing, pushing blindly through grasping branches.
There’s no going back now. I step forward into Sicklehurst, through skin-crawling wrongness as I pass through the second layer of the triple spell, the door falling closed behind me with an ominous thunk.
I should have brought a torch. There’s barely any light left in the day, and I’m an idiot for coming in here at all. I turn to leave, but the door is gone, replaced by unbroken red brick.
Of course it is. Bloody magic doors.
Everything looks . . . fairly ordinary. Nettles scramble over cracked concrete paths. Garden beds are overgrown with hemlock and wood-parsley. The structures are weathered – windows broken and grimy, paint flaking. It looks exactly how a forty-years’-abandoned power plant should look.
But beneath my feet, I can sense something powerful, huge and spreading. It feels like . . . a kind of vast consciousness. It calls to me in whispers that I can’t understand, but I get the feeling that it recognises me, just as I recognise it.
The mettle of it feels somehow oily – dull and grey instead of the usual bright silver.
Something is wrong.
There’s a building before me, a squat brick thing lined with broken windows. To one side is a series of storage sheds. To the other is bare earth, raised and chalky, next to a muddy-looking pond. I can see the frames of rusting tanks in the distance and, beyond, a huge barnlike container building. Behind everything is the rising concrete mass of the cooling tower.
It’s hard to decide which way to go when you’re not really sure what you’re looking for. I had expected it to be made clear when I arrived. I’d thought Odette would be here, grimy and grateful to be found. Or I would be greeted by a wise old wizard or a talking animal, or perhaps have the path laid out before me in coloured brick.
Maybe the secrets of Sicklehurst aren’t available to me. I’m no lost girl, no tragic princess. I’m not the hero of anyone’s story. My gift is telling stories, not living them.
I feel a rising wave of shame, that familiar feeling of wrongness, like I don’t belong. Like I’m inappropriate. I clench my fists and swallow it down.
Not today.
My heart starts to beat faster as I realise there’s something moving around the corner of the squat brick building. I can see it, white like a ghost. Is it the boy again? I take a deep breath and head around the corner. I am surprised to discover that it is a clothesline, strung between two wooden poles, pegged out with white sheets. I walk right up to it, not quite believing that it’s real. Who is hanging laundry inside an abandoned power plant?
A sudden gust of wind billows the sheets out towards me, and I’m engulfed by waves of bed linen. It smells like sunshine and dittany. I try to step backwards but become tangled in the sheets and turned around, so I’m not sure which way is forward and which way is back. The sheets boom and snap in the wind, whipping at my face and shoulders. I push through them, but there seems to be another row, then another, an endless maelstrom of crisp white cotton.
And then I’m out, the sheets behind me. But when I look over my shoulder, there’s only a single clothesline, with two sheets hanging from it. I’m standing in front of a ramshackle wooden building, leaning visibly to one side, dittany bushes growing thick up against it. A faded sign over the door reads security office. Gauzy curtains float from the window.
Is someone living here?
I touch my fingers to the bone-pin brooch for luck. It feels warm.
A girl steps out of the building, carrying an empty laundry basket on her hip. She’s about my age, perhaps a little older, wearing a blue-and-white polka-dot dress that hugs appealingly plump curves, her beetle-black hair swept up into a vintage roll. She looks familiar, but I can’t quite figure out why. Her lips are painted red, and freckles are sprayed across the pale bridge of her nose. She turns bright-blue eyes onto me, eyes that widen in surprise.
‘This is unexpected,’ she says, her voice low and warm. ‘Are you lost?’
Winner of the Writing for Young Adults category in the 2024 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, Hunger of Thorns, can be found here.