Dorothy sat quietly at her great-aunt’s head. She noticed that Winifred was clutching her knitting bag against the yellowed lace bed coverlet.
“Pagan I am, pagan I die. It’s what you’ve all been accusing me of for decades anyway. Oh, the hypocrisy! It’s enough to hasten my end, and I’m not due to die until four o’clock.”
She turned her face blindly toward her great-niece. “Dorothy, is that you?”
“It is.” Dorothy tentatively reached across and took Winifred’s hand into her own. The flesh was so withered it felt like the claw of death itself.
“Tell this self-appointed social worker to piss off so I can get on with the delicate act of passing over,” the old woman hissed.
Dorothy ushered the priest into the hallway. “Father, it might be better…”
“I should have known she’d react that way. They’re a stubborn bunch of heathens, the Owens. I’ll be praying you don’t go the same way.”
Propelled by a rush of familial loyalty, Dorothy pushed the tenacious cleric out into the rain
.
Back in the bedroom her great-aunt was humming the “Internationale” under her breath. For a moment Dorothy thought she might have fallen into total dementia. But then Winifred’s eyes fluttered open.
“Come here, child, it’s almost time. The goddess will come for me on the hour.” She clutched at Dorothy’s skirt.
“Auntie, don’t say that.”
“Enough with the bullshit.” With a supreme effort Winifred held up her knitting bag. It jiggled slightly in the candlelight.
“This is what I’ll be leaving you.”
Dorothy’s eyes widened with apprehension as she braced herself for a hedgehog or, worse still, some endangered rodent, like a pygmy shrew, when Winifred reached dramatically into the bag and pulled out a withered root. Dorothy tried hard to conceal her bewilderment.
“It’s lovely,” she muttered in an unconvincing manner.
Ignoring her niece’s lack of enthusiasm, the old woman dangled the vegetation proudly. It hung like a limp turnip. Dorothy peered closer. It looked like a large twisted stem of ginger and was covered in strange reddish hairlike roots.
Winifred pressed it into Dorothy’s hand. “Never betray the mandrake,” she gasped. Then, as the grandfather clock chimed four, she died, her bony hand still fastened around her niece’s wrist.
They buried Winifred’s ashes at her favorite spot on the riverbank, according to the complicated instructions she had left in her will.
“Unconsecrated land,” the mourners whispered knowingly to each other as Dorothy got down on her hands and knees to place the strange pewter casket into the damp black earth.
The local men’s choir broke into a Welsh folk song—Winifred had specified no religious music—the tenor voices swelling and floating up with the evening mist. Above the funeral proceedings hovered a single black raven. Dorothy looked up at the bird, then down at the rushing water. A wave of loneliness swept over her. Now she was the only one left, the last of the clan.
A middle-aged woman dressed flamboyantly in a long silk dress approached her. A ravaged face that must once have boasted a handsome beauty peered out from under an enormous hat. She took Dorothy’s hand and drew it toward her bosom.
“I knew your great-aunt. She was one of the circle. One of the ancient ones. She’s up there now,” she whispered dramatically, pointing to the contoured disk of the rising moon already visible in the steely sky. “Up there, riding with Arianrhod on a great white mare toward Caer Arianrhod to join her sisters. One day you too shall inherit the mantle.”
The woman released Dorothy’s hand and, with a studied swish of her skirts, turned and walked across the muddy embankment toward a waiting BMW. Dorothy noticed several of the parishioners crossing themselves as the stranger cut across their path.
Later that night Dorothy sat on her narrow single bed and watched the shadows cast by the fire dancing across the wooden roof beams. The silence was profound. She reached across and picked up the mandrake root from the cherrywood table beside the bed. She slowly turned it in her hands. What does one do with a mandrake root? Cook it? Eat it? Plant it?
She held it up to her face. A strong musk radiated from it, strangely animal, even familiar. She tried to think where she knew the scent from, but the memory kept escaping her. She turned it upside down. The root had feathery offshoots that looked as if they belonged in soil.
She went downstairs and searched around for a flower pot and some potting mix, then planted the root carefully, treating it like a bulb, making sure that the tip showed just above the soil. She left the pot on the kitchen table, went back upstairs, and fell asleep after listening to a debate on the radio on the pros and cons of fox hunting. She dreamed of nothing.
The next morning she was woken by a tickling under her nose. She sneezed and opened her eyes. An invisible hair kept stroking her cheek. She sat up, glanced at the pillow, and screamed out loud.
Curled up comfortably in a little indentation in the pillow lay a penis—in repose, one might say. Dorothy was transfixed. Her brain whirled madly, trying to absorb the illogical and surreal sight of an unattached male organ asleep.
She took a few deep breaths, trying to regain control, and looked away, but her eyes inevitably crept back to the sight. The penis still lay there, curled with an air of conceit. In fact it seemed to be waking up; disbelievingly, Dorothy watched it grow tumescent before her very eyes.