Higher Learning

by Clare Kauter

  Noodles had also noticed the lady moving and started growling loudly, teeth bared. Eventually he inched towards her.

  “What’s he saying?” she asked.

  “Um... Difficult to know right now,” I said.

  Noodles had advanced right up to her, no longer growling but doing the dog equivalent of shooting her dirty looks. He lifted his leg and began to wee on her shoe, still glaring at her face.

  “How about now?”

  Noodles ran back over to me, tail wagging. I leant down and patted him when suddenly he disappeared in a puff. His business in this world had concluded.

  “He’s much happier now he’s seen you,” I said, trying not to stare at the ghostly urine dripping from the lady’s foot.

  * * *

  A breeze rustled the leaves of the fruit trees as the pinkish light of dusk settled over the cemetery across from my house. Some people found it odd that I lived across from a cemetery. I found it calming. If there was one place ghosts didn’t like to hang out, it was here. You’d only get the occasional newbie passing through, and they tended not to bother me. They had bigger concerns. Like being dead. Besides, it was good for business. When you deal in death, living near a cemetery gives you some street cred.

  It had always seemed like a bit of a sick joke to me that Watergrove cemetery was dotted over with a variety of fruit trees. How cruel could you be? The first thing the dead guys would see as they floated up out of the grave would be these very alive trees bearing very edible fruits which they could never again touch. Most of the deadies who ended up at my house whined for several minutes about something to that effect, before moving on to whine about something else. Usually to do with being dead. They had very one-track minds, these ghosts. As though death had taken something away from them. I mean sure, they couldn’t touch anything, but they could be invisible and fly and walk through stuff. Surely it wasn’t that bad.

  I wandered out to the herb garden in front of my house and picked some coriander. I was having tacos for dinner, but the coriander also had the added benefit of keeping away any stray ghosts who thought about haunting me. Like most people, ghosts can’t stand the smell of coriander. It’s like garlic and vampires. Taco Tuesday was a good night to keep away all the supernaturals.

  Well, almost all of them.

  Halfway through mashing up the avocado for my Holy Moly Guocamole (to go with my Salsa-tional Tomato Salsa and Cream-azing Cashew Cream), I heard a weird noise behind me. A squishy noise, like play-dough footsteps. (I don’t quite know what that means either. Just roll with it; it’s poetic.)

  I didn’t bother turning around. I knew who it was already. It would be some representative from the Green Wattle Coven, coming to hassle me again to join them. They’d become convinced that I had magical powers ever since three of them turned up when I’d first moved in, promising to rid my house of rodents. Apparently around the cemetery there were big problems with pest animals. When they found out I’d already taken care of the mice and the cockroaches, they were in absolute awe.

  “But how?” they’d asked. “Dost thou know the ways of Wicca?” (Yes, they actually spoke like this.)

  “No, I just googled it. Peppermint oil repels rats and cockroaches hate garlic.”

  At this moment, they all turned to each other and whispered, wide-eyed, “She knows of the Sacred Herbs!”

  “No, you don’t understand. I didn’t perform any rituals, I just used the herbs to keep them away and then blocked up the holes where they were getting in. I didn’t use any magic.”

  “Thou hast brought no harm to the living creatures! Thou art at peace with the Mother Earth!” the oldest, crone-iest one said.

  “Well, no, I’m a vegan so –”

  “Veegan? I do not know that sect.”

  “Oh, it’s not a branch of magic or anything, it just means –”

  “She has no coven,” one whispered.

  “She is unclaimed,” said another.

  “Join us!” said the third. Then they all began singing “join us” in unison. They wouldn’t leave and I ended up chasing them out by brandishing a frypan. Various representatives had been turning up a couple of times a week ever since. It got to a point where they’d started breaking into my house and I’d find them in the bathtub or hiding in cupboards waiting for me. One of them let slip that wormwood would keep them out, and after much searching I managed to find a bush in a corner of the cemetery and hung a wreath of it on my front door. I wondered how they’d finally managed to get past it. The squelchy footsteps stopped and it suddenly occurred to me that witches don’t really sound squelchy. Insane, yes. Squelchy, not so much.

  So what was that noise behind me?

  I turned around, confused.

  And screamed.

  Well, it was kind of a scream. You know when you’re not expecting something, so you start to scream, only to realize that it’s not actually that scary, and you stop committing to the scream so it sort of becomes a honk?

  Yeah. That.

  So anyway, I honked.

  Sitting in the middle of my (quite dirty, now I was looking at it – when did I last sweep it? Wait, when did I ever sweep it? Did I even own a broom?) kitchen floor, was a squishy little play-dough-footed axolotl.

  He squinted up at me. I crouched down to get a better look at him and realized he was wearing glasses. That was weird. What kind of animal has glasses? And wasn’t the coriander bothering him? He was even treading on a piece of it I must have dropped.

  “Are you lost, little guy?”

  “Unfortunately not.”

  This time I screamed properly. I did that whole scramble-back-from-the-unexpectedly-scary-thing that you see in horror movies and Vines where the person tries to run backwards while they’re still on their bum. I slammed into the kitchen bench and banged my head. Even after that, the axolotl was still there, so I kept banging it like an old person with a piece of technology that wasn’t working properly.

  “You’re mental,” said the axolotl.

  “YOU THINK I DON’T KNOW THAT?” I screamed. “YOU’RE TALKING TO ME.”

  “You talked to me first.”

  “But – but – wormwood – and the coriander!”

  He gave me what seemed to be a look of deep concern. “That’s not how you do sentences.”

  “Neither’s that!”

  “I was trying to speak to you in your own language,” he said. Fair call.

  I took a few deep breaths and tried again. “The coriander didn’t scare you off?”

  He shrugged – I think it was a shrug – and said, “I’m Mexican.”

  “Right.” I was pretty sure it was a bad axolotl joke, though, because his accent sounded more like that of an Oxbridge graduate.

  “So, you are Nessa I presume?”

  “Yes. Who on earth are you? And why are you here? And how can you talk? And where did you get your tiny glasses? And why do you know my name?”

  “I’m your new familiar.”

  “I’m not a witch!”

  “Hey, I didn’t exactly ask for this either.”

  “What – do you mean someone sent you?”

  “Well, kind of.”

  “Kind of?”

  “I lost a bet.”

  “You lost a bet?”

  “Yep.”

  “And I was the punishment?”

  “Yep.”

  “And what did the winner get?”

  “Nothing.”

  “How is that winning then?”

  “They didn’t get stuck with you. I’m Henry, by the way. Since you didn’t think to ask.”

  “Henry?” I couldn’t take all this in. There was an axolotl talking to me and introducing himself – lecturing me on manners and grammar in amongst it – and he was here because he lost a bet?

  “Yes, Henry,” he said. “Now I hope you’re fixing me a taco.”

  I made Henry and myself a tempeh taco each and we sat out on the verandah overlooking the cemetery as we ate.
Henry began explain (between mouthfuls – if nothing else his table etiquette was second-to-none) what exactly he’d been sent to my house to do.

  “I’m here to audit you.”

  “What?! What for?” I mean, sure, I wasn’t exactly paying tax on my cash-in-hand psychic business, but was the ATO really in the habit of sending a talking fish-lizard to scare business owners into following the law? Come to think of it, that would probably be quite effective. They’d either shape right up or end up in a psychiatric ward.

  “Unauthorised use of magic.”

  Oh, man. He had to be kidding.

  “You have to be kidding! I’ve never used magic in my life!” Not strictly true, of course, but...

  “I just saw you talk to a dead dog.”

  “That’s not magic! I just talk to dead things.”

  “Are you hearing yourself?”

  Yeah, OK, he had a point.

  “So why are you here? To fine me? Arrest me? I can see why they chose you, what with your imposing physique and all.” He narrowed his eyes at me. I narrowed mine back.

  “I could take you in a fight.”

  “I’d like to see you try.”

  He sighed. “Fine.” Henry stood and clicked the fingers of his right hand. Suddenly there was a huge bang and we were encompassed in a cloud of sparkly smoke, the international symbol for “some magic is happening here”. The smoke began to clear and I realized I might have underestimated Henry’s ability to drag me away. Before me now stood a huge silverback. As in, a massive gorilla.

  “Ah,” I said. “So what were you saying about this audit?”

  He sat back down, now causing a lot more strain on my second-hand wicker chair. I noticed that his tiny glasses had grown to accommodate his now much larger head. It was like magic. “Basically, it’s my job to see how you conduct yourself and whether you’re qualified for a licence. I’ll be staying with you until I’m able to complete my observations.”

  “Right. And how long is that likely to take?”

  “Well, really, it depends on the quest.”

  Oh, great. Of course, there had to be a ridiculous step in the licensing process. “The what?”

  “I haven’t been given the instructions for your quest yet, but generally it’s a way for me to see how you conduct yourself in a pressure situation, and how well you’re able to control your magical abilities.”

  “What magical abilities? I talk to ghosts! What possible use is that for a quest? It’s not like I can do actual witchcraft or shamanry or alchemy or see the future or something useful.”

  Henry looked at me over the top of his glasses. “That’s not what I’ve heard.”

  What? How could he possibly know about... He couldn’t! No one knew. (Well, almost no one, but I doubted the devil was going to talk to this guy.) But then how did he know about me at all?

  “Who’s been telling you stories about me?”

  He shifted in his chair and looked like he might fall straight through it. “We had a tip off from that coven that meets nearby.”

  Of course. Who else? If they couldn’t get me to join them, they were going to... What, exactly? Have me arrested? Get me sent on a quest? What exactly was their agenda?

  “Right. So what happens now? Am I in trouble?”

  “No, no. We’re just waiting for someone to turn up with our orders for the quest. They’ll usually try to pick something that plays to your strength. Someone will be here soon and give us our directions, then we just go from there.” He relaxed back in his seat. I wondered what this would look like to a passerby – a girl and a gorilla eating tacos by the cemetery. Not that there were too many passersby around here. Except, you know, for gho–

  “YOU NEED TO FIND MY KILLER.”

  I screamed – again. This really wasn’t my night. A ghost (a poltergeist, to be specific – I could tell from his slightly green aura) had just appeared less than a metre in front of me. Just – POP. Out of nowhere.

  Henry yawned and stretched, completely unfazed. “I guess this is it,” he said. “That was surprisingly fast. It usually takes them weeks to send out a quest.”

  The ghost looked at Henry and frowned as if trying to figure something out. Probably why the hell there was a talking gorilla sitting across the cemetery eating tacos.

  “This is a, uh, special case,” said the ghost. “They said you’re to get started right away.”

  “They always say that,” said Henry. He turned to me. “They’ve done a pretty good job here. I mean, this is going to involve a whole lot of talking to ghosts. You should have your licence in no time. What’s your name, ghosty?”

  “Ed,” Ed said. “I, uh, I’m dead.”

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