AN IGNORANT WITCH
Witch Kin Chronicles 1
E M GRAHAM
OneEar Press
An Ignorant Witch
Copyright © 2019 by E M Graham
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
ISBN: 978-1-9993908-4-6
Cover design by James at Go-On Write
First Edition: July 2019
1
MY REPUTATION AS a ghost whisperer started with Alice and her family. They didn’t know what was haunting their house when all that craziness started and although I didn’t manage to clear the house of their personal ghost who was the spirit of their great-grandmother, I did get her to calm down a bit and make their house livable again. That’s when Alice Hoskins’s family started to call me the ghost whisperer, claiming I was psychic and all that.
If they only knew the half of it.
So let me tell you up front, my name is Dara Martin and I’m a half-blood witch, the illegitimate product of a long-lasting liaison between my mother Marian and the head of the Witch Kin, Jonathon de Teilhard. This means I don’t fit into either world.
I’m nineteen years old with blue eyes and too much hair. It’s so thick that my Aunt Edna once got fed up with it being in my eyes all the time, so she took the kitchen shears and chopped it off. She cut it too short in front because she’s not good with straight lines, but I actually liked that punky look. The rest of it I color and bleach at whim. It gives me an edgy and mysterious look, I like to think, which makes up for the pudge I keep covered up with baggy tees and hoodies. I always wanted to be as willow thin as Alice, but it didn’t happen.
Aunt Edna brought me up ever since I was ten years old, after Mom disappeared. She acted as my parent as Dad refused to have anything to do with me, and I had a lot of freedom growing up with her. She’s a writer of fiction and most days can’t even keep track of what world she’s in, let alone what her niece is up to, so as long I kept to the agreement and didn’t mess with the supernatural, and cleaned up my own dishes and did my own laundry, she was happy.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t really help what happened here, and after I tell you, you’ll see my side of it. I just wish she and my father could, too.
She knows I’m a half-blood witch, and while she never really understood all this supernatural stuff, Dad warned her of the dangers so I learned early on to clamp down on that side of me. For many years, we all did our best to pretend I was Normal.
To get back to Alice and her family. Being what I am, I don’t have a lot of friends, so I have to look after the ones that are there. When she first started to look a bit peaky and even paler than normal, I assumed she was just having, you know, heavy periods or something. There’s not much to her at the best of times, skinny string bean washed out blonde that she is. I think they didn’t feed her enough when she was little.
But when I came upon my friend crying her heart out that day in the bathroom of the topmost floor of the old Science Building, that huge washroom that hardly ever gets used because it’s tucked away up there amongst the labs, that’s when I made her sit down on the deep window ledge and tell me everything.
“It’s the doll,” she said. “Nan Hoskins’s doll. It keeps moving around and no one is touching it.”
Nan Hoskins had been her great-grandmother, dead before either of us were born. She sniffed back her tears and wiped her nose on her sleeve, then looked at me with those huge gray eyes of hers. “Do you think my house could be haunted?”
“Is it that bad?” I had my doubts about what she was saying, for I’d never sensed any sign of a ghost in her family home, and even if I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone I could still secretly pride myself on my abilities.
She shook her head and sighed. “Not really, it’s just sort of creepy. And... Benjy has disappeared too, on top of it. No one’s heard from him in two weeks. Mom said he’s probably gone back to the mainland without telling anyone, but he would have told me.”
Benjy was her older brother, and he was a skeet. Heavily into drugs and booze, not too particular about how he got the money to buy these amusements, he’d been bad news ever since I’d known him. But he was her older brother. They were close and she loved him.
“You know what he’s like,” I said, trying to reassure her. “If one of his buddies was driving up to Nova Scotia and it sounded like a good party, he’d hitch a ride with them and wouldn’t think to tell anyone in the spur of the moment.”
“But he should have sobered up by now, sent me a text or something at least.”
True enough. “You think something bad happened to him?”
“Yeah, Dara, I do.” She was silent for a moment. “I think he’s gotten himself into a pile of trouble finally, and he can’t get out of it.”
“You don’t think...” I could hardly bring myself to say it, but I had to. “Could he be the one haunting your house?”
“He’s not dead! No way, he can’t be....” Again looking at me with those big eyes. “You really think so?”
“Nah,” I said quickly, although with his life style, it could be a distinct possibility that he would meet with an early demise. “Course not. He’s just being more Benjy than normal. He’s probably living it up somewhere, having the time of his life. When the booze runs out, your brother’ll come back.”
What I didn’t say was, if Benjy was dead, then yes he could be haunting their house. He was always the worst kind of trouble maker during his life, and there’s no way he would go gently into the light just because he’d stopped breathing. I thought a moment. “You say the doll thing started happening when he disappeared?”
She nodded. “Yeah, not too long after I last saw him. He was headed up to the Southside Hills for berry picking, to the family patch. No one has seen him since.”
I know what you’re thinking – big tough guy hoodlum like Benjy Hoskins doing a pansy thing like picking berries? Well, this is Newfoundland, and everybody does that. You want blueberry jam for your morning toast? Then you provide the berries, they’re free for the taking in the scrublands and the barrens. Besides, her family had a spot up on the mountain behind the Southside Road house, they’d been going there for generations ever since old Nan Hoskins stuck her flag in the dirt and declared it her own. No one would dare steal the berries from under that old harridan’s nose even now she’s been dead for twenty-five years. Reputations die hard in this land.
About the Southside Hills. I don’t know why the name is plural, for there seems to be just one solid mass of stone when you look at the geography from across the harbor. It thrusts straight out of the water and up, up, up, and there are no separate points that you could look at and say, yes, that’s a different hill. There’s only one very long range of rock that stretches out west and meets the land as it rises slowly out in the Goulds.
But the Southside Hills, those looming cliffs over the city of St. John’s – they were a dangerous place if you didn’t know them, and maybe even if you did. Full of bogs and gullies and beaver dams, rabbit trails leading nowhere. A person could get lost pretty easily up there. Personally, I avoided the area, it had always felt wrong to me.
The physical dangers were bad enough, Benjy could be lying up there with a broken leg unable to move, or even have fallen over the cliffs into Freshwater Bay on the other side of the hills where the sucking surf would take his body deep into the currents never to be seen again till he was thrown up by the ocean at Cape Spear or washed up on the shores of Ireland.
“No one’s gone up to look for him?”
“Mom and Aunt Trish went up for the berries when he never came back, and they didn’t see any sign of him. They were complaining because he took the good bucket, the red one, and didn’t bring it back.”
Just as Newfoundlanders carefully keep the best berry patch locations secret, so they treasure their berry pails. The best are old salt-beef buckets, the one-gallon ones, although others will do at a pinch. The trick is the pail has to be big enough to hold the most amount of berries you can get, but not hold so many it’s too heavy to carry back. It’s got to have a comfortable handle and preferably a lid that doesn’t get lost, one you can snap into place so the berries don’t spill when you bring the harvest home over the hills and rocks. Yeah, we’re a strange breed, but we know our buckets.
“I wouldn’t be worrying about him so much if it wasn’t for the doll,” Alice continued. “It’s all too strange.”
“I might be able to help with that,” I told her, albeit reluctantly.
I couldn’t help her on the Benjy front – God alone knew what that guy was up to – but a haunting, now that was more my style.
I did mention I don’t have many friends. Normal people can sense that I’m a half-blood witch with one foot in the supernatural, and don’t want anything to do with me because they think I’m weird. On the other hand, those who have full witch blood in their veins hate me too because they think I’m lesser and unnatural. Just like in Harry Potter, yes, only this is real, not fiction.
Also going against me on the friend front is the fact that I live in an old mansion on a hill. Richmond Cottage, it’s called, and all the local history buffs go into orgasms when they talk about it. One of the last surviving Classical Vernacular style buildings in the city, it’s falling down around our ears but we’re not allowed to tear it down and we don’t have the money for the upkeep. If Aunt Edna could afford it, she’d get us a nice little two-story townhouse on a terrace, but she’s a writer and well, there isn’t much spare cash around. Richmond Cottage is the family home where she and Mom grew up, and it’s mortgage free. We’re sort of stuck with it.
The poor kids don’t like me cause they think I must be rich, living up there, and the rich kids know I’m poor, despite my address. Their parents have told them to stay away from me because my father has shunned me and if they became my friends it might rub off on their families too. St. John’s may be called a city, but it’s still a small town in a lot of ways.
I admit, I was reluctant to offer Alice my help with the haunting for the simple fact of my Dad’s stipulations. In exchange for supporting me and Edna in that huge old house, I was not allowed to let anyone know of my powers. In fact, I had to turn my back on the whole magic thing.
Being part witch, I’ve always been able to interact with the supernatural world. After all, my friend growing up was Maundy, the ghost who occupies the bedroom next to mine. She was like a bossy older sister to me in my younger years, and even though she remains forever thirteen years old as opposed to my nineteen, she still acts as though she knows better than me in everything. And she’s perfectly happy living in Richmond Cottage in her miserable half-life so she won’t move on to wherever dead people are supposed to go. But Maundy would be no help at all here, for she refuses to leave her room. Ever.
Despite the agreement with Dad, I knew I had to help Alice. Like I said, I didn’t have a lot of friends and I hated to see my bestie so distraught. Plus, I knew she wouldn’t tell anyone, so it was sort of cool to actually do something with my talents.
So me and Alice ended up going down to her home in the shadow of the Southside Hills after we’d both finished classes for the day. She’s studying science at university on all her scholarships – she’s really smart – and she wants to be a marine biologist and help save whales. Me, I think I’ll specialize in General Studies and be a student for the rest of my life, if only because Dad is obligated to support me while I’m still studying. Some months my allowance is the only thing putting food on our table.
Alice’s family, the Hoskins, have always lived in that little house whose front door opens right onto the road. Her back yard is really cool because it goes straight up the hill at a sixty degree incline. Not so great for having a garden or if they wanted to have a patio, but super in the winter for sledding. Old Nan Hoskins established a potato patch further up the hill years and years ago, and she made her husband put in stone steps leading right up to it. The family still looks after it, trudging up and down the stairs every second day in summer even though you can buy better vegetables at the grocery store.
It’s a three-story house, narrow and tall, and must have been pretty full back when there were thirteen youngsters in the family, when her father was growing up. Now, it was just Alice, her parents, her younger sister and Benjy when he bothered to be around.
Before we got there, I had suspicions that if it wasn’t Benjy’s ghost making all the trouble, the strange things happening there might be because of a poltergeist. Alice’s sister Sal was fifteen and going through a rough time with the hormones and with little support from her parents. Their mom worked long hours at the drug store across the river by the bridge, and her dad, well, let’s just say it’s no surprise Benjy turned out the way he did with Mr. Hoskins as a role model.
It was a dark little house, huddled into the side of the hill as it was, and the sun rarely hit it except on summer evenings. The carpets were threadbare and the floorboards creaked a lot, those that weren’t really soft and bendy and sort of rotten, that is.
We paused inside the hallway at the door to the parlor, and Alice pointed at the wooden rocking chair by the window. I could hardly make out anything in the room, so dark was it with the drapes closed tight. Despite the warmth of the September day, it was freezing cold in that dank house.
“Look – there it is.”
A rag doll sat in the shadows of the chair, looking innocent enough with its wispy brown wool hair and the embroidered mouth half undone with the years. It stared vacantly ahead with its mismatched button eyes, and an ancient stain covering the lower part of its face like birthmark.
“It’s not doing anything,” I said.
“Dara, of course it’s not – now. When I left this morning, it was in the upstairs hallway.”
“Maybe your sister...”
Alice shook her head. “No way. We left at the same time, I walked her to the bus stop, I know she didn’t touch it. In fact, she refuses to go near it since all this spooky shit started happening.”
I drew a deep breath, sending mental feelers out all around for some evidence of supernatural activity, and tried to switch into Alt-thought.
Ah, the Alt world, let me try to explain. Being a half-blood, I learned by accident that I have the ability to see both the regular everyday world, and the world of the supernatural. A few years ago, I found I could even jump right into the other which is sort of superimposed on our dimension, or perhaps lurking underneath it, more like. To switch back and forth, it’s as if you had a pair of those glasses which shade to sunglasses in bright light, only you do it in your mind. Sometimes I can see both at once. I try not to flip too much anymore, and that’s on purpose as Alt world is a scary place to be. You could get stuck in it.
And I especially hated to do it in Alice’s neighborhood, because there’s vampires and all sorts of other nasties living in these parts. I don’t like seeing them.
So instead of actually switching my sight, I try to just sense the Alt, allowing any supernatural presences to come to light, and I keep my eyes narrowed to slits to prevent the full onslaught of the Alt coming on me. I was doing this when Alice started to speak and I hushed her with my hand, for something was coming through and it was centered in the old rocking chair.
A form was materializing for me, a skinny scrawny old woman glaring at me as she knit so furiously I could hardly make out her hands. She was rocking back and forth to keep time with the clicking of the needles, and she was agitated.
My heart sank. This wasn’t a poltergeist, a scary enough thing in itself, but a real ghost. A very angry one, judging by the hatred in her eyes. Still, I had experience with ghosts as Maundy was one of my oldest acquaintances. Perhaps all this spirit wanted was to tell her tale. Perhaps I could help her resolve whatever issues she was holding onto, and help her towards the light.
“The chair is moving!” Alice shrieked in my ear and broke my concentration.
I opened my eyes again and there it was like I had pictured it in my mind’s eye but without the terrible specter in it, just the rag doll going back and forth, staring at me with malevolence.
“What’s going on?” She was beside herself and clutching me hard. Still the chair rocked back and forth, seemingly of its own volition.
“Get behind me, Alice,” I said with a firm calmness I really wasn’t feeling.
“Is it Benjy?” She was almost sobbing as she scuttled around, placing me between her and the chair. “Is he dead?”
I shook my head. “No, whatever it is, it’s definitely not your brother.” I took a step forward, and nothing changed. Emboldened, I stepped again.
With that, the doll flew into the air and launched itself into my face, the black button of its right eye becoming tangled in my long hair. Alice screamed once more then ran out of the room like a shot as I tried to tear the doll from my head – it no longer felt like a limp ragdoll but a small animal, all hardness and muscle and teeth. We struggled, the creature determined to do its worst, clawing at my face and ears as if it was a rabid rat.
Finally, I won out and wrenched it off me through pure force of will, flinging it to the floor where it lay senseless and limp once again with a few strands of my hair in its fist like a trophy. I looked back up at the chair and in my fear and outrage forgot to put on my Alt blinders.
The malevolent old bat in the chair cackled with glee when she saw the scratches on my face. A wind was starting to whip around the room, taking papers and dust and the petals of silk flowers up in its maelstrom, even the heavy drapes were stirring. I could feel myself being pushed backwards.
“Who are you?” I was yelling at her, or it. “Go away, leave Alice in peace!”
Like that was going to work, ever. The thing just kept cackling and rocking away while she sent me a stream of psychic spite so powerful it felt like acid being thrown at me. My hair was whipping in front of my face, blinding me.
I tried something I’d seen in the old movies me and Edna used to watch sometimes. With one hand clutching my hair to keep it out of my face, I stepped forward and let her have it as I held up my other hand.
“In the name of God and all that is holy, leave this place!”
Did I mention that Edna was an atheist and refused to let me go to church as a kid? She wouldn’t even sign me up for Brownies and Guides, she hated organized religion so much. So God could be forgiven for not being on my side that day.
“You! You get out of my house!” The cackling had stopped now and the entity was no longer gleeful. A terrible rage overtook her ancient wrinkled face but the roar could have come from the depths of hell itself, and the wind rose to hurricane speed as the lamps and end tables went flying and careening around the room. I ducked as the cable box detached from the wall and flew past my head.
There’s only so much you can do to help a friend, so I was out of there in half a second flat, banging the front door behind me and not stopping till I found Alice underneath the highway overpass across the road, huddled into the shadows of the concrete. She was crying, yet even through her tears she could see how shaken I was.
“What is it in there?” She was whispering as she scuffed at the weeds and grass growing in the cracks at the pillar’s foot. “What’s in my house?”
I shook my head. I didn’t want to tell her my guesses, but she had to know.
“It’s an old woman, and she’s really angry. An old wizened woman, but she scared me. A lot.” I leaned against the pillar and stared at the bridge crossing the river. The smell of diesel and salt wafted up on the gentle fall breeze.
“Oh.”
This made me look back up at Alice, for that one sound held a lot.
“You know something about this, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Maybe. Did the old woman... did she look sort of like me, the way I’d look a hundred years from now?”
I nodded slowly. Yes, the specter did have that look of Alice about her, come to think of it.
“It’s Nan Hoskins, it’s got to be,” Alice said, her voice as mournful as the gulls crying over our heads. “Shit. Gran always warned us this would happen.”
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