Seven Pets for Seven Witches

by Annabel Chase

  What was less normal was who the visitor was: it was Horatio, our local Church in Wales vicar, and he didn’t often visit a house full of witches, even though his small and ill-attended church actually bordered part of our garden.

  “No,” said Dilys to him straight away. “She’s about to do me some bacon.”

  “I haven’t said anything yet,” Horatio complained. He filled the doorway; he was tall and he was also wide, fleshy and corpulent, and all in black just like Dilys.

  Yet he was poles apart from my witchy aunt.

  Dilys sighed. “I will wither away in my dotage, I will. Starved, I am. I’d be better fed in a funeral home. Go on, then.”

  “What?” I was confused.

  “Bronwen, my lamb, would you step outside with me?” Horatio said, shooting a dark and unreadable look at my aunt.

  I looked to Maddie but she put her hands in the air and evaded my offer of the frying pan. “Gotta run, see you!” she blurted, and followed us out of the house. She dashed off on her self-imposed torture, and I walked with Horatio up the cracked stone steps and onto our mossy lawn. I hoped Dilys wouldn’t try to fry up the bacon herself while I was gone. She’d set fire to a paving slab once (don’t ask).

  “Bronwen, I am sorry to intrude, but I wonder if you might come and look at something?” Horatio said. He led me to the stone wall at the back of my garden. To the right, the wall stood between the garden and the hills, but on this half, it bordered part of the churchyard. He pointed towards his church and vicarage. I couldn’t see anything unusual. Just weathered grey statues, gravestones, the odd tomb, and of course the huge and ancient yew trees which marked this as a site much, much older than Christianity.

  “What am I supposed to be looking at?” I leaned on the wall. I was always happy to help Horatio out. He had saved my life in the past.

  “Look at the smaller yew between the large one and the house,” he said. “Can you see what’s halfway up?”

  “It’s a cat!” The cat was unusually large, and seemed to be entirely black. It clung on to the tree trunk. “Is it injured?”

  “It seems not. It moves up a little, and then down a little, but does not jump down nor does it ascend to the branch where I am sure it would be more comfortable. What do you make of it?”

  “That is odd. It must be stuck. Surely you should call the fire brigade?”

  “For a cat that is not quite five feet up a tree? No, there is something odd about it. The fire brigade comes to fires; but you are the one who is called to strangeness.”

  That was an interesting way of phrasing it. I considered the cat, looking at it with my hedge witch’s awareness. It was true. I could detect no pulsing red spots of energy, no signs of injury or illness. There was no immediate danger to the cat, at least not here on the physical plane.

  But there was a distinct feeling of stuckness and I chewed my lip as an old myth came back to my memory.

  “Have there been any funerals lately?” I asked Horatio.

  “Actually, yes. There has been one: Edgar Wrigley. He was very old, and it was his time. He passed naturally in his sleep.”

  “The problem is not his death,” I said, remembering Harkin’s calling in the night. “It’s his soul. They say that you can tell where a person is heading, after their death, by watching cats. If a cat runs up a tree, that person is going to heaven. If it runs down …”

  “I see. A cunning person would see to it that there is something tempting at the top of the tree,” Horatio remarked.

  “Indeed. But in this case, I’d say that something is preventing Edgar Wrigley’s soul from going anywhere at all. Which means the cat is likewise stuck. And that fits. I had disturbed sleep last night.”

  We stood in silence for a moment. The cat was caught in a mystical place; if I went over the wall and physically removed it, I reckoned that I could potentially do all manner of unknown damages to the cat, or to Edgar Wrigley’s soul - if my guess was correct. First, then, I needed to find out a little more about Edgar Wrigley.

  Horatio spoke before I could. He, like Dilys, could be an unsettling mind-reader. “I am not exactly asking you to investigate,” he said. “But I thought that you might help.”

  “The cat, or Edgar Wrigley?”

  He looked at me with inscrutable eyes and a flat expression, raised one hand, and walked away.

  When I got back into the kitchen Dilys was polishing off a bacon butty and there was none left for me but a large amount of things to wash, including a potato masher, and I couldn’t imagine why she’d needed to use that. I ate some toast and got started on the day’s tasks, which involved making up some paste for Mrs Jenkins’s arthritic legs (both for her and her dog), distilling some lavender, and checking on the plant cuttings I’d been taking. I went out into town and visited one of my patients who had returned to its home recently - an anxious rat - and then headed back to our house in the early afternoon, looking forward to a cup of tea and a bit of a sit-down.

  Our kitchen table was invariably covered in all manner of stuff. If you thought the utility room sounded bad, you’d be appalled at the heaps of magazines, books, cacti, sewing kits, half-repaired cardigans, wicker baskets and malformed marrows that littered the wooden top.

  I still noticed the flat cap, though.

  Mostly because Harkin was sitting on it, with an air of propriety and some pride.

  He stood up when he saw me and arched his back. I petted him, and persuaded him to relinquish the tweed headgear. It was still a common thing to see older men in the area wearing, especially country folk. It was not, however, anything that any of us possessed. Harkin had brought it in.

  “Can’t you stick to bringing me mice, like normal cats do?” I asked him, flipping the flat cap over to see if there was a name in the lining.

  Luckily there was, and you can guess exactly what it said: Edgar Wrigley.

  I held it in my hands, lightly, and half-closed my eyes. I probed Harkin, trying to work out where he had got this from, and why it had been brought to me. Was the hat itself important, or did it represent something else? Working with the signs and symbols of the unconscious makes everything way more difficult.

  The hat felt neutral. It wasn’t cursed or anything. It was tinged only lightly with the man’s essence and that actually surprised me - most of the men who wore these, habitually wore them constantly. They were generally welded to their heads at all times, and probably while they were in the bath too. So I would have expected Edgar’s hat to feel a whole lot more … Edgar-y.

  I opened my eyes but it wasn’t a new hat. Decades old, if the faded price inside was anything to go by – it was marked up in shillings and pence. It was a puzzle, but a slight one. Maybe it just wasn’t his favourite hat, and he had another that he had worn a lot more often. Maybe he’d even been buried in his best hat.

  As I put it back on the table, a flash of light caught my eye. Then another, dancing in the air. At first I thought I was seeing the Fair Folk. My cousin Maddie was aligned to the power of the Faeries, and they would announce their glamourous presence by sparking lights and tinkling bells.

  I laughed. No, these were just normal, common dragonflies. The back door was standing open, and for some reason, a little cloud of dragonflies had floated into the kitchen.

  There were about half a dozen of them, and they darted around, making little lazy zig-zags around the table. Harkin shot up again, and began to hiss, all his fur standing on end.

  “It’s okay, daft cat; you’ve seen dragonflies before!” I told him.

  But he continued to make himself look as big as possible, and his hissing edged into a screeching sound. Maddie came in from outside, and saw Harkin.

  “What’s up with him?”

  “He doesn’t like the dragonflies,” I said, and as I pointed to them, they suddenly made a little bunch and shot out of the kitchen, past Maddie, making her jump back in alarm.

  “Whoa! I don’t blame him. I don’t think I like them when they
pull stunts like that,” she said. “Do people collect them here, like they do in Texas?”

  “I don’t think so,” I replied. “What do they do with them in Texas?”

  “I don’t know. Just … collect them. Into, um, collections. Like stamps or birds.”

  “Or Eddie Stobart trucks.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind,” I said, unwilling to try and explain one of Britain’s weirder hobbies. “Hey, here’s a fun fact for you, as you’re exploring your Welsh half. Guess what the Welsh word for dragonfly is?”

  “How on earth can I guess that? I suppose it has lots of unpronounceable bits though.”

  “Yeah, kind of. Gwas-y-neidr,” I told her.

  She shook her head blankly. “Nope. Not even going to try to say that. I don’t have enough spit.”

  “Well, the interesting thing is what it means,” I said. “It doesn’t translate to dragonfly. It means servant of snakes.”

  She shivered.

  And so, then, did I.

  The dry scaly slithering that had hissed through my dreams came back to me.

  Chapter 3

  It was clear to me that Edgar Wrigley’s soul needed release, but from what? I planned to find out that night. I decided that I would hedge-ride, a kind of journeying between the worlds, where I would be able to find Edgar’s soul and help to lead him on his final path.

  There were many hours of daylight left between now and then, though, and the chances of success when hedge-riding are vastly improved by being properly prepared. I had to find out as much as I could about Edgar Wrigley before I met his shade.

  It was odd. I thought that I knew most people in our little town. Even if I didn’t know them well, I would know their name or reputation. Yet Edgar Wrigley was a mystery to me.

  And, I soon discovered, he was a mystery to most people, too.

  I started by visiting the local café. I waved at Alston, the owner, who glared back in his unfriendly way. That was the best anyone could get from Alston. We were all perpetually grateful he didn’t throw chairs at us. The local college probably brought its hospitality students here as a case study in how not to run a café. I slid onto a table opposite Billy, who was a local down-and-out with a troubled background and a vast knowledge of everything that happened in Llanfair.

  “What do you know about Edgar Wrigley?” I asked Billy.

  He grinned, showing cracked yellow teeth that crowded along his gums like gravestones in a Victorian churchyard. “He’s dead, like.”

  “I know that. But did he live in Llanfair all his life?”

  Billy lost his smile. “You know, as to that,” he said, “I’m not rightly sure. Folks say as he did, like, but he was hardly ever seen. He had that little house up Narrow Row but you’d go for months on end not seeing him about the place.”

  “What did he do? Did he work? Was he ill?”

  Billy shook his head. “I don’t know. Maybe he worked away, like? That would account for it, wouldn’t it? Long distance driver, maybe. Thing is, he always knew what was going on, as if he’d been here. Like … things he didn’t ought to have been able to know.”

  “Excuse me? How so?”

  “He knew stuff that he shouldn’t have known.” Billy looked down and picked at a dry spot of tomato ketchup that was congealing on the tablecloth. “I’m only telling you because I know you and trust you, so …”

  “Of course. Go on.”

  “There was a time a few years ago, see, when I didn’t have anywhere to sleep, and it was the summer holidays, so I found a way into the school on Chapel Lane, but it wasn’t breaking and entering or nothing and anyway I didn’t do any harm, I just wanted to sleep out of the rain.”

  “Okay, sure.”

  “And no one knew. No one ever knew. I was only there for two weeks. Then that charity got me the room over the hairdresser’s place and I left the school and I never did any damage…”

  “I believe you. But Edgar knew?”

  “He did. He came up to me, he did, and he brought me a small bag that I had left behind in the school and I’d forgot about, see. It only had playing cards and a book in it, but the thing is, I’d hid that behind a cupboard, out of the way. So how did he find it, and how did he know it was mine?”

  “And another thing,” I said. “Why was he even in the school at all?”

  Billy nodded. “Strange, right enough. That’s been my only dealing with the man in the all the years we both lived in Llanfair.”

  “Thank you, Billy.” I went up to the counter and paid for a hot meal to be taken to his table, and left the café, filled with more questions than answers.

  I spoke to as many people as I could, and those who knew of Edgar told me the same tales that Billy had: Edgar Wrigley had always lived here, but he was rarely seen. No one knew what he did for a living.

  And he knew things. He knew people’s secrets, and it made everyone very uncomfortable.

  Finally I tracked down the one person who had been at his funeral. I guess that if you know people’s darkest hidden actions, you probably don’t make a great deal of friends; no one mourned him. Even the woman who had been at his funeral hadn’t been there on his account.

  No, Angharad Jones was an old lady and a habitual funeral-goer and turned up at every solemn occasion, both chapel and church, just for the chance of sandwiches.

  I found her sitting on a bench in the sun in a small park, throwing dry bread out in an arc for the pigeons. I took a seat next to her and greeted her.

  “Vermin, they say,” she told me, indicating the pigeons. “Flying rats. But I’d rather see these birds than no birds at all, hey?”

  “That’s true. Mrs Jones, you went to Edgar Wrigley’s funeral, didn’t you?”

  “Oh yes, just the other day. That Horatio Lewis, he does a lovely ceremony. I’m chapel myself, of course, but I don’t mind a bit of the churchy stuff from time to time. Much nicer interior design. Better eye for colour, don’t you think, than the non-conformists?”

  “I’m not really into either,” I said. “And were you the only person there?”

  “No,” she said. “There was another person. Well, I was the only one at the graveside, and I wouldn’t have been there at all but it felt wrong to let him be buried all alone. So I did see the deed done, and then the reverend said that there wasn’t going to be any kind of afters, because no one had organised anything, and I suppose I looked sad about that, because he invited me into the vicarage for a nice bit of tea and cake. I told him I wasn’t going to be converted even if they did have better paintings, and he said that was all right.”

  “Wait, hang on,” I said, trying to stay afloat in her stream of words. “You said you weren’t the only person there?”

  “That’s right. I went into the vicarage and someone else appeared. I was in the downstairs sitting room, oh, it’s a nice room that one. So many cushions. The reverend, he went off to find his housekeeper. Then another man appeared. He asked if it had been Edgar Wrigley’s funeral and I said yes, he’d just missed it, but if he stayed he might get a sandwich.”

  “What was he like?” I asked. “Did he say who he was? Was he a relative?”

  “He looked nothing like Edgar. Edgar was a dark-haired, bristly sort of man. But this other fellow, he was thin and pale and he had the most terrible lisp. And I think he was called Tom, or Tim, or Twm. Then he came out with some gibberish, and left, and that was that. Didn’t even take a sandwich. And they were cheese and everything.”

  “So Horatio never saw him?”

  “No.”

  “What gibberish did he say?”

  Angharad Jones had to purse her lips and concentrate. She muttered to herself a few times, rehearsing what she was going to say, so that she got it right. Eventually she declared, very slowly, a riddle.

  “What falls but does not break? And what breaks but does not fall?”

  I waited for the answer or the punchline.

  She shook her head and smiled at
me. “And that was that,” she said. “He left.”

  It was now mid-afternoon. I spent a frantic hour going back around town, back to Billy in the cafe, over to see ex-journalist Jemima, and stopping to speak to every person I recognised on the street: but no one, absolutely no one, had seen this mysterious pale thin stranger from after Edgar’s funeral.

  I stamped home in a despondent mood. I didn’t feel as if I knew anything more about Edgar. In fact I had merely opened up more mysteries.

  Who was the strange man?

  And who had Edgar Wrigley actually been? How did he know people’s secrets when he was apparently so reclusive?

  I wanted to pummel my own face in frustration.

  The kitchen was empty except for Harkin lolling in a padded basket in front of the ever-burning range which stood along one wall. I filled the kettle and put it on the top to make a fresh brew, and paced around, turning it all over in my mind.

  “What do you think, Harkin?” I said, stopping at the far end and addressing the cat.

  He got up, stretched, yawned, and began to make his way over for a fuss. He wandered slowly, weaving between the table legs and chair legs.

  “What falls but does not break? What breaks but does not fall?” I said aloud.

  Harkin stopped dead.

  The kettle began to boil and I went over to see to my tea. I passed Harkin but he did not move.

  I poured the hot water into a mug and turned around.

  Still Harkin had not moved. I began to feel uneasy. I set the cup down and crouched to call my cat over to me.

  Usually he came running when he heard his name.

  But he was still facing away from me, and all he managed to do was an unhappy little mew.

  I threw myself across the floor and put my hands out to him. He was soft, and warm, and unharmed - and utterly immobile.

  I recoiled. The words were surely a curse. I couldn’t risk picking him up and wrenching something out of alignment. I needed to get Dilys and Maddie here, and I needed them now.