The end of the evening doesn’t arrive with a fanfare. It arrives with Clara yawning so hard her jaw clicks, and then the weight lifts off my shins.
One by one, the feet go.
Clara’s cream knits pull back as she stretches. Tessa’s nylon ankles uncross and slide off my thighs, taking the rustle of tulle with them. Jules groans and digs her heels into my stomach for leverage before she pushes her chair back.
Cold air rushes in under the table to replace them.
I’m still lying with my chin tilted up and my neck curved around Anna’s heel when she finally shifts and draws her foot away. The damp cotton peels off my throat. A second later, Morgan’s sock lifts from the bridge of my nose.
I blink up at the pine. The skin along my jaw feels hot and ridged where their seams have been pressed into it. I have no idea for how long. Time doesn’t really happen under here.
Chairs scrape back. Above me, people stand, stretch, collect glasses.
“Vic?” Lea’s voice comes from my right. Her gold hem disappears as she crouches beside the table and peers into the gloom. One wing knocks against a table leg. “You still awake in there?”
“Think so.” My voice is thick, as if I’ve been asleep, though I haven’t missed a word all night.
I roll onto my side. My lower back protests, and my left leg has gone numb below the knee. When I feel beside the cushion for my cat ears, my fingers find snapped plastic. Someone has trodden on them in the dark. I hook the two halves with one finger and crawl out backwards onto the rug.
After the dark under the table, even the candles make me squint. The clock on the bookshelf says nearly half past midnight. I’ve been down there for well over an hour.
I get to my feet slowly while the blood prickles back into my calf. My top is creased across my ribs where Jules crossed her ankles. When I breathe in, all I can smell is them: wool, damp cotton, leather insoles, and Lea’s vanilla in my hair.
Two minutes ago, my nose was wedged against Morgan’s big toe while Anna used my collarbone as a footrest. Now we’re all upright in a normal flat again, and I’m at eye level, holding a broken headband.
I don’t know where to look. Nobody gives me time to find out.
“Oh, look at you, you’re creased,” Anna says. She puts down a stack of side plates and presses a Tupperware tub into my hands, full of the pastry fingers that still have their nails. “Take those for tomorrow. If you leave them here, Jules will eat them cold out of the fridge at two in the morning.”
“Slander,” Jules says, finishing the cheddar straight off the board. She catches my eye and grins, crooked and without a trace of pity. “Seriously, though, Vic. My back hasn’t felt this loose since I was nineteen. You’re a miracle.”
“Glad my torso could be of service.” I hold the Tupperware against my chest like a shield and slip the broken headband into my pocket.
Morgan comes round the end of the table. She looks rested, almost luminous in the low light, as if someone has turned her up a notch. She doesn’t crowd me, just touches my elbow. Her fingers are cool.
“Thank you, Vicky. Truly. Go home and sleep.” A pause. “We’ll see you on Sunday.”
It isn’t quite a question. She says it gently enough that it passes for one.
By the time I’ve rescued my coat and forced my damp, forest-stained socks back into my boots, the others are still drifting between the kitchen and the living room. Lea follows me to the front door. Her wings shed one last feather onto the mat.
“Have you got your keys?” She leans against the doorframe, just out of reach of the skeleton and its middle finger.
“Yes, Mum.”
She laughs and looks down at her star socks, then back up at me. Without the table between us, she’s standing very close. Her eyes drop to the side of my neck, where Anna’s arch was resting ten minutes ago and where my skin is probably still red. Then they come back to mine.
“I’m really glad you came tonight, Vic.” Her voice drops below the noise from the kitchen. “I know it was… a lot.”
“You’re a witch and I spent the last hour smelling your friends’ socks,” I say. “I’ve had quieter Fridays.”
Something small and almost shy pulls at the corner of her mouth. She steps in and wraps her arms around my shoulders.
It’s longer than the hug at the door, and that one was already long. Her cheek brushes my hair. One hand rests against the back of my coat. All evening, I’ve been touched by feet that weren’t paying attention to me. Having her arms around me at shoulder height makes something catch behind my ribs.
“Text me when you’re in,” she says against my temple, and lets me go.
At 3:14 a.m., I sit bolt upright in the dark.
My bedroom is freezing. Outside, a night bus rumbles along the main road, and its headlights sweep a pale bar across the ceiling.
I stay completely still under the duvet, waiting to hear what woke me.
At first there’s only the tick of the radiator cooling.
Then it comes again.
Not from the street. Not from upstairs. From the corner of the room, or from somewhere just behind my eardrums.
Three notes. Low, hollow and impossibly deep, like stones dropping one after another into black water at the bottom of a shaft.
No. Not water. A voice, humming three descending notes with its mouth closed. I feel them through the floorboards, through the bed frame, in my back teeth.
I’ve heard them before. Standing in wet leaves with mud between my toes, while Morgan waited in a lit doorway behind me.
At the same moment, my throat fills with the taste of wet moss and cold iron, right over the ghost of Morgan’s sock.
I fumble for the lamp.
My bedroom blinks into existence: laundry chair, wardrobe, the two halves of my cat ears beside Anna’s Tupperware on the chest of drawers.
Silence.
I sit there for ten minutes with the light on, pressing my palm against my ear until my pulse thuds in my head. Nothing else happens.
When my alarm goes off at nine, weak sun is coming through the blinds and the flat smells of somebody’s coffee downstairs. In daylight, the noise feels thin enough to blame on cheap wine and a strained neck.
Almost.
Then I see my socks from last night, lying by the laundry basket.
There is forest mud dried into the grey cotton.
I stand there in my pyjamas and look at it for a long time.
On my way to the shower, I stop with my hand on the bathroom door. It’s my bathroom. Mould in the corner above the bath, a window my landlord won’t fix. It has always been my bathroom.
I still wait five full seconds before I open it.
It’s my bathroom.
While I’ve been worrying about council tax and winter coats, Lea, who used to steal my stapler and complain about the canteen lasagne, has been walking through bedroom doors into forests. Every closed door on the high street is going to look different now.
By Saturday afternoon, I notice I can’t get warm.
I wear a jumper over a thermal top to do my weekly shop, and my fingers are still stiff on the trolley handle. I stand in front of the tinned tomatoes wondering how anyone is supposed to care about meal prep when the laws of physics are optional. Apparently I’m still supposed to give a shit about fibre.
At home, the flat feels too quiet. Every time I sit down to watch something, I’m restless within twenty minutes. I shift, pull my knees up, check whether Lea or Jules has messaged. It’s a hollow itch under my skin, like the feeling you’ve left your passport at home on the way to the airport.
Late on Saturday evening, I catch myself lying on my living room floor. On my back, between the sofa and the coffee table, staring at the ceiling. I don’t remember deciding to do it.
It doesn’t help. Without anyone on top of it, a floor is just a floor.
So on Sunday, I’m at Morgan’s door five minutes early.
The skeleton is gone, replaced by a plain brass knocker. Before I can reach for it, the door swings open.
“She’s here!” Jules calls over her shoulder, and pulls me in by the sleeve. “Thank God. Tell Anna that putting fennel in a potato bake is a hate crime.”
“It gives it depth!” Anna shouts from the kitchen.
In daylight, the flat is almost unrecognisable. The bats and the orange lights have gone, and grey November rain taps against the tall sash windows. What hasn’t changed is the heat, and the wave of welcome that reaches me before I’ve got my scarf off.
Lea appears from the living room in an oversized cream jumper, her hair in a messy bun, and hugs me so hard my ribs click.
“You came,” she says into my shoulder. She sounds relieved. “How are you? Did you sleep okay on Friday?”
I’ve barely got through the door. I’m not making myself a fucking problem before I’ve taken my coat off.
“Like the dead,” I lie, and let her take my umbrella. “Except for the bit where I woke up and remembered magic is real.”
Jules snorts and leans against the radiator while I unlace my boots. On the newspaper beside the bench stand six pairs of walking boots and wellies, caked to the ankles in drying mud.
“How was Finchley?” I nod at the carnage.
“Bleak,” Tessa says, appearing in the kitchen doorway with a mug in each hand. Without the bloodstained veil, she looks like an exhausted junior doctor in leggings and a fleece. She hands me one of the mugs. It’s made exactly the way I took my tea at work, which means Lea told her. “Three hours in a bog trying to coax a boundary stone out of the silt. My toes thawed out twenty minutes ago.”
For the next forty minutes, nobody mentions the floor. Nobody mentions feet, or books, or living grounds.
Instead, they fuss over me until my chest aches with it. We crowd around the kitchen island and the sofa with bowls of Anna’s potato bake, which is incredible, fennel and all, and bread Lea brought from the bakery near her flat. Anna has printed out the letter for my landlord and already filled in his name. Clara asks about my week at the office and actually listens to the answer. Lea sits on the arm of the sofa beside me, and every time she laughs, her knee bumps against my shoulder.
I’m sitting upright with a bowl in my hands while Jules mocks my taste in podcasts. It’s exactly the Sunday I was envying when I looked at that beach photograph.
Only, as they finish eating, I start noticing the cracks.
They’re exhausted. Much more than they were at the party. Clara keeps pinching the bridge of her nose between sentences. Anna’s shoulders are up by her ears. Morgan, sitting by the window with a black coffee, has a grey tightness around her mouth that wasn’t there on Friday night. Whatever they did in the woods this morning, it wasn’t just a walk in the rain.
“Right,” Morgan says, setting down her cup. “Shall we move to the table? Anna made crumble.”
Everyone gets up with a chorus of stiff groans, gathering spoons and napkins.
I stand too, reaching for my bowl, and look at the long table in the middle of the room.
It has already been set with dessert bowls and a big jug of custard.
I count the bowls. Six. I count them again, the way Morgan counted in her dream, and get the same answer.
Around the table stand five chairs and the low stool.
And underneath it, in the middle of the floorboards between the heavy pine legs, the green velvet cushion is already waiting.
Nobody says Vicky, do you mind? Nobody clears their throat or exchanges an awkward glance like they did on Friday.
Anna carries the crumble over. Jules takes the custard. Lea takes the empty bowl out of my hands on her way to the sink, squeezes my fingers as she passes, and goes to her seat at the side of the table.
The conversation about Clara’s neighbour’s cat doesn’t even pause.
I stand at the edge of the rug for three seconds. Half of me expects someone to turn round, laugh, and fetch a seventh chair from the hall.
Instead, Morgan pulls out the chair at the head of the table and looks at me. Her face isn’t cruel. It’s warm, almost gentle. She just holds the back of her chair and tilts her head a fraction towards the gap beneath the apron.
Go on, the look says. That’s your place.
And the worst part, the part that makes my face burn as I get down on my hands and knees, is the relief. It floods my stomach the moment I duck under the wood.
The chill that has been clinging to me since Saturday is gone before my back touches the floor.
I shuffle into the narrow space, lie flat and settle my head on the cushion. Chairs scrape in from all sides, louder and faster than on Friday.
There’s no pause this time. No polite fence of feet waiting on the floorboards for permission.
They land all at once.
Before I’ve settled my shoulders, Tessa’s feet drop across my thighs, Jules’s heels thud into my stomach, something heavy pins my shins, and a sock I can’t place drags across my hip on its way somewhere else. The weight comes from every direction together, so fast that for a second I can’t tell whose foot is whose. Only the feet at my ribs are soft and dry: Lea, in grey lounge socks warmed by the radiator rather than by boots.
“Oh, thank Christ,” Tessa says above me.
She’s not in nylon today. Her socks are thick wool hiking socks that have spent the morning inside rubber wellies: damp, clammy, sharp with rubber and trapped sweat. She doesn’t just rest them on me. She rubs her soles briskly back and forth along my jeans to warm them up, using my legs like a radiator.
Jules is in thick sports socks, hot and dense from her boots. She leans forward to scoop crumble into her bowl and drives her heels into my navel for balance. I let out a small oof. Nobody hears it.
Anna doesn’t wait for me to tilt my chin.
On Friday, I turned my head for her. Today, she nudges my jaw aside with the ball of her foot until I move, then sinks her heel into the hollow of my throat. Her navy sock is warm and damp. Her arch flattens over my pulse. Her toes curl against my collarbone.
Then Morgan’s black socks come down over my face.
She doesn’t stop at the bridge of my nose this time. As she settles back with her bowl, she lays her left arch across my mouth and nose and slides her right heel up to brace against my forehead, tilting my head back into the cushion.
For a second, I panic. My whole face is covered in hot, lived-in cotton. Every breath has to come through the weave of her sock, sour-warm from a morning in wet woods, with the humid smell of Anna’s heel underneath it.
Then the magic hits me.
It isn’t the clean, bright heat of the back room on Friday. It isn’t the near-nothing of the party.
They worked in the woods this morning. All six of them.
The moment their soles settle, something heavy and dark pours down through their feet and sinks into my chest, like black silt settling at the bottom of a pond. I gasp and get a mouthful of Morgan’s sock. Through my stomach, my ribs, my throat, I can feel the dregs of whatever they did in Finchley draining out of them and into me: wet earth, cold river water, and under it, faintly, the same three-note hum that woke me in the night.
It tastes of ash and sweat. It feels filthy, like standing under a gutter when the rain clears the roof, taking all the cold sludge so the house stays dry.
And my body drinks it in.
The itch that tortured me all through Saturday is gone in a heartbeat. A heavy, narcotic slowness spreads from Morgan’s sole across my face and down through my limbs. It pins me to the floor far better than Clara’s feet on my shins. My muscles go completely slack.
Above the table, spoons clink against bowls.
“God, Anna, this crumble is obscene,” Jules says. She shifts in her seat and, without looking, wipes the side of her sock along my ribs, the way you’d wipe your feet on a mat on your way in. Then she drops both heels back onto my solar plexus with her full weight.
An hour ago, she was pulling me through the front door by my sleeve, glad to see me. Now she’s wiping her feet on me. Both of those are true at once, and I can’t make either of them feel wrong.
“Told you,” Anna says. Her toes dig into the soft skin under my jaw as she reaches for the custard. “Vic, you got enough room down there?”
I can’t answer. Morgan’s foot is still over my mouth. The best I can manage is a muffled hum into her arch.
Morgan doesn’t lift her foot to let me speak. As she takes a spoonful of crumble, she lets a little more weight sink into my face, pressing my head into the cushion.
“She’s fine,” Morgan tells the room.
I feel the words through her heel before I hear them.
Against my ribs, Lea’s foot presses once. Deliberately. Not the idle wriggle of someone getting comfortable. A small, firm push, the way you’d squeeze someone’s hand under a table.
Then it goes still again, and above me Lea laughs at something Clara says.
Down in the dark, pinned beneath twelve damp feet and swallowing the dregs of their magic with every breath through Morgan’s sock, I close my eyes and let myself sink into the floor.
When they finally let me up, the rain has stopped and the windows have turned the colour of a bruise.
I don’t crawl out straight away. Even after the chairs scrape back and the feet lift off, it takes me nearly a minute to convince my limbs that they’re mine. My head feels stuffed with dark wool and wet leaves, heavy and pleasantly slow, as if I’ve spent the afternoon drinking red wine in a windowless room.
Someone crouches beside the table and hooks a hand under my arm. Jules.
“Easy there, Dormouse,” she says, and hauls me upright onto the rug as if I weigh nothing. “Here. Anna saved you a bowl.”
Before I’ve got my bearings, I’m on the low stool by the radiator, the one Tessa used while her feet warmed themselves on my thighs, with a bowl of lukewarm crumble and custard balanced on my knees.
Around me, the coven has changed.
The grey exhaustion has vanished. Clara hums as she stacks plates. Tessa does a victorious stretch in the doorway that makes her spine pop. Anna and Lea stand at the sink, bumping hips as they wash and dry.
Now that I’m upright, nobody ignores me. Quite the opposite. Jules leans against the wall beside my stool, eating the last of the custard straight from the jug and telling me about a disastrous date in Camden, and every two minutes someone asks if I want more tea or another jumper.
But the velvet cushion stays where it is under the table. Nobody puts it back on the sofa.
It lives there now.
When I carry my bowl into the kitchen ten minutes later, Morgan is standing at the counter, writing in a small black diary with a silver pencil.
I know that sound. The scratch from the head of the table on Friday night, while I lay under it listening to them plan the weekend.
She looks up as I put the bowl in the sink. Her dark eyes are clear and sharp.
“Are you working late on Wednesday, Vicky?”
I blink at her. My brain is still wading through the fog her heel left behind. “Wednesday? No. I finish at five.”
“Good.” She writes something down without waiting for me to ask why. “Come straight here from the station. We’re going back to the boundary stone on Wednesday afternoon, and I don’t want the girls sleeping on that weight before Thursday. Anna’s making a Thai green curry. Bring an overnight bag if you don’t fancy the night bus.”
It’s the exact tone Colin, my manager, uses to schedule a team meeting, with a home-cooked meal instead of biscuits. Great. Apparently I’m on a fucking rota now.
By the drying rack, Lea pauses with a tea towel in her hands. For a fraction of a second, her eyes go to Morgan’s diary, and a small crease appears between her brows. Then she looks at me, and her face softens into a smile that’s warm and a little guilty.
“I’ll meet you at the tube,” she says. “We can walk up together.”
“Okay,” I hear myself say. “Wednesday.”
I leave twenty minutes later with another Tupperware tub in my bag, Lea’s scarf around my neck because she decided mine was too thin for November, and the seam of Morgan’s sock still printed faintly across the bridge of my nose.
Halfway down the street to the station, I stop.
My breath clouds in the cold.
At the back of my throat, under the apples and cinnamon, the taste of wet iron and black silt hasn’t faded at all. Out here, I can feel it sitting at the base of my skull: a quiet, foreign weight that wasn’t there when I arrived.
I look at my reflection in a dark shop window.
For a split second, the shadows in the doorway behind my reflection don’t line up with the street. They’re deeper. Like the spaces between tall, wet trees.
I blink, and it’s a dry cleaner’s doorway again.
I pull Lea’s scarf up over my chin, push my hands deep into my pockets and walk faster towards the underground, already counting the hours until Wednesday.