Once, the big stewpot cracked loudly and fell into pieces: the dinner, which was cooking in it slopped and hissed onto the fire, blackening and stinking and smoking us out of the door. And birds would get in and flap crazily against the walls, never managing to escape. They always died of fright, and my mother, who was never one to waste anything, put them in pies.
I made myself into a weasel, slipped in every house, listened to secrets told in every bed, ran over my neighbors while they slept, lifted covers, saw their blemishes, bit their ears to give them bad dreams. If any had offended me, I blocked their mouth and nose with my body till they fought for breath, let go of them, to torment them again when they had fallen quiet, pissed in their cream to spoil the butter, and in their beer to turn it sour.
I used to turn myself into a hare. Those nights when the moon‘s full and the trees throw black shadows on the fields. I‘d feel hair growing on my skin, I was shrinking, but my legs grew powerful and swift, and I‘d run out to the other creatures of the night. I ran faster than the wind, there was nothing I couldn‘t have raced, I was drunk with the scent of elder blossom.
But the birch tree that haunts the other side of the churchyard wall, its fingers groping into sanctified ground moves in the wind, whispers: I have you, there is none of all that left, I have eaten and drunk your sap, you are dry now, sleep, it is no longer the time to want, sleep, your bones, your skull are empty, only the ashes of words lie round them, Sleep, sleep, whispers the birch tree in the wind. Sleep, it is a horror for you to be awake.
The days fell off that year like leaves from a tree. At first Alice told herself there would be no emptiness waiting at the other end.
I‘ve decayed, in my coffin, my face looks like any other skull. I should be asleep, no one should be able to make me know anything. But I‘m helpless to move or resist: the memory grows through me like a tree – root.
Your memories seem to turn sweet with age, like pears that only ripen when they come off the tree. You‘ve lived so long, hoping for more, now you understand you‘ll get no more, so you make the best of what you‘ve had. The sun is shining in at the window and even my eyes can see the brightness. It surrounds me, like a caress.
If you make a woman learned, in never so small a degree, if you tame a fox – you make them both cunning. Alice was vixen enough. I had to act.
There is no sin. Everything comes by nature, and nature is good. Sin is a word they have made out of their own fears. They fear life, as I did.
She could wrap herself in a trance, leaving him outside to beat himself silly on the glass wall of her silence.
Malefice | 
