Free Wylding Hall by Elizabeth Hand

together.”
“Which is just the case with mine ,” said the Hatter.
Alice felt dreadfully puzzled. The Hatter’s remark seemed to have no sort of meaning in it, and yet it was certainly English. “I don’t quite understand you,” she said, as politely as she could.
“The Dormouse is asleep again,” said the Hatter, and he poured a little hot tea upon its nose.
    Tucked in among the blankets were several more books, not much bigger than a Moleskine notebook, which is what I thought they were at first. I looked around to make sure the others were gone, then knelt and looked through them.
    They weren’t notebooks at all, but very old books in leather covers. One was done up in vellum and written in very archaic English. Another was in Latin.
    I felt excited, but also uneasy. I’d done classics at uni and I knew what these were—books of magic. The one in Old English was a grimoire. A scrap of notebook paper fell out of it, covered with writing in Biro. Julian’s writing, I knew that without being told. A spidery hand to suit those spidery fingers.
    I thought he’d copied out a spell. Later, when I heard the Wylding Hall album, I realized it was an old ballad by Thomas Campion—a song in the form of a spell, dating to the fifteenth century.
Thrice tosse these Oaken ashes in the ayre,
Thrice sit thou mute in this inchanted chayre;
Then thrice three times tye up this true loves knot,
And murmur soft, shee will, or shee will not.
Goe burn these poys’nous weedes in yon blew fire,
These Screech-owles fethers, and this prickling bryer,
This Cypresse gathered at a dead mans grave:
That all thy feares and cares an end may have.
    I thought I heard voices, so I dropped everything and scrambled back to my feet. But no one came, and when I listened, I could tell they were in the kitchen with Tom. I knew he wanted to go over some of the details about studio time.
    I figured they might be a while, and this might be a good time to do a bit of exploring on my own, without someone at my shoulder steering me past whatever it was I wasn’t supposed to be looking at. This is why you have to be very careful when you invite a journalist into your midst.
    The big room where they rehearsed was in one of the newer sections of the farmhouse, eighteenth century, tacked onto the Victorian addition. Tom had told me that the original manor was Tudor, and parts of it were older than that, fourteenth century.
    So, I did a bit of exploring. Their bedrooms were all in the newer wing, and I knew these would be off-limits to me. But one of the doors from the rehearsal room opened onto a hallway, and I followed that.
    The place was immense. From outside, you just had no idea of the scale. It was originally a manor house, where a knight would have lived—you could see where the old part began, because the walls changed from wood and plaster to herringbone brick, with massive oaken joists and beams.
    The hall grew narrower as I wandered along. Diamond-paned windows, that beautiful leaded glass that catches the light and throws it back in rainbows, like a prism. There were crooked wooden doors, oak planks banded with iron, so heavy and warped I couldn’t open most of them.
    And of course I tried—who wouldn’t? The ones I could open seemed to be have been used as storerooms for the last few hundred years, dank and musty and dark. I wasn’t going to start poking around in them.
    So, I kept going, until I found a stone stairway and climbed to the next floor. It was so dark, I kept my hand on the wall the whole time to make sure I didn’t lose my footing. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face, and the passage was so narrow that my shoulders brushed the walls. It was like climbing into my own tomb.
    I’d forgotten my watch, and so I lost all track of time. But finally I reached the top of the stairs and stepped out onto a landing. There, to one side, was an open door. Light poured into the hall, and it took a moment for my eyes to adjust