Melissa was a celebrity long before Wanda started working at Witchwood. Her name had graced the front pages of national newspapers. She’d been constantly photographed – that pretty, innocent-looking, diminutive blonde – when the news first broke. They ran the same story twice every year on the anniversaries of her arrest and conviction. Melissa Powell, mass murderer and leader of the infamous Highgate cult.
Friends had asked Wanda to get an autograph. Her wife teased her not to fall in love with the femme fatale. Even after Wanda explained that with over six-hundred inmates, her chances of being assigned to its most famous resident were small, they wouldn’t leave the subject alone. Wanda didn’t know whether to be pleased by the excitement her new job had provoked or frustrated. She settled on her normal response of mild discomfort.
In spite of her publicly displayed reticence, Wanda had done her research. The moment she got the job she scoured the internet for information, reminding herself both of the official story and the surrounding rumours. The combined stories could be distilled and summed up in less than five hundred words.
Melissa had been young once. She must have been. After all everyone was born of a mother, nursed and bathed, protected while their brain and body grew. Although there were no photos of her as a tiny infant with aquamarine eyes to prove it, Wanda was sure Melissa had to have started out like everyone else, ripped from the dark blanket of a human womb.
The strange teen, to be henceforth known as inmate or Powell, was told she was special by those followers, since deceased, who had adopted and raised her. The seventh child of a seventh child and yet there was no word from her siblings, aunts or uncles, anywhere that Wanda searched, so as far as she was concerned even that was rumour and speculation, inadmissible heresay. However, Wanda did uncover photographs of the four sharp-faced women and two untidy, dark-eyed men who stayed with Powell, protected her in her mother’s absence, educated her, isolated her from the contamination of other children. They’d tucked her into her bed each night and promised her great power, but they’d never kissed her. They never embraced her except to hold her still as they brushed tangles out of her wild blonde curls. She never heard the word love escape their lips.
That was something the prisoner and Wanda had in common.
Was that why Powell didn’t shed a tear when she was on the stand? During police interviews Powell could only shake her head when asked what she’d seen. She’d been found – the sole survivor, covered in the blood of her guardians and the others who had arrived that night to join them. When Powell failed to provide answers the police drew their own conclusions, repeated in the newspapers and later in court. They claimed she’d murdered a dozen people, some old and others mere children. She pleaded innocence. The problem was that just as she couldn’t remember her early years neither could she recollect what happened after the chanting started. She sat at the centre of the dank ecclesiastical vault, surrounded by voices, and left her body behind. By the time she returned it was already over. She claimed that chanting, screaming, silence and later the soft buzz of flies feeding off her bare skin were her only memories of those hours.
One doctor argued that the accused was in shock, but that doctor was ignored in favour of the preferred narrative that Melissa Powell, The Priestess of Highgate, was a mass murderer.
Walking into the prison on that first day, all Wanda could think about was Melissa Powell’s face – her elfin features and haunted blue-green eyes.