The Witching Hour (The Witches Pendragon Mystery Series Book 1)

by Sarff, Julie

  For a moment everything is silent. I stand rooted behind the oak tree, bewildered by this girl’s act of bravery.

  “I think you killed Hugo!” the girl accuses the broad-shouldered figure. The others gasp, which surprises me. You would think among a group of Satan-worshippers who are about to sacrifice a goat, the idea of killing a young man would not be so startling.

  “Is this true?” another voice cuts in.

  Again, absolute silence –no rustle of the wind, no hoot of the owl, nothing. Even the fire which has been crackling and roaring with intensity makes no noise. All eyes seem riveted on the figure with the goat.

  “Satan commanded it, and so it was done,” the hooded figure says in a carrying whisper.

  More gasps from the crowd.

  “In that case, if our master commanded it, what you have done is right,” says a shorter figure, who steps forward. There is murmuring and a nodding of heads. To my horror, yet a third figure says, “Let us proceed. Let us make this sacrifice to the Lord.”

  “No,” Elise cries and lunges for the man with the knife. Two other Satan- worshippers are quick to restrain her. A moment later, I watch in horror as the man holds the knife up above the goat’s head.

  “YOU WILL NOT HARM WODEN’S CREATURES!” I bellow, stepping out of my place in the shadows.

  I do not have my black gown, I do not have my black hat, but I am sure I look fierce all the same.

  I walk towards them unarmed, chanting in my native Anglian, “I am a witch of Forest Fosse…”

  The hooded figures appear stunned by someone emerging out of the woods and speaking in an ancient language, even though they have spent half the night crying out in made-up tongues. For a moment nobody moves. I stride right into the middle of the circle and wrap my arms protectively around the goat’s neck.

  “You,” I spit at the monster of a human that has just confessed to killing Hugo. “You will not touch this animal!”

  There’s a low, unnatural sounding chuckle. Underneath the cloak, I see a gleam in the man’s eye as he raises his knife high.

  “Move away from the goat,” he shouts so furiously that I think he is a second or two from bringing down his knife straight at my face. And I wonder: will tonight be my last on Earth? Will I never return to the Forest Fosse, with its sweet smelling heather? Will I never again here the babble of the crystal clear Ouse?

  Just when I am thinking all is lost, I hear more chanting coming from the woods. All eyes turn as Manon, Beatrice and Sheila stride into the clearing.

  “I am a witch of the Forest Fosse,” they murmur in Anglian walking hand in hand towards us. Behind them I see they have brought Pierre along with two other policemen, who hold their guns at the ready. I watch as my sisters in witchdom stride into the middle of the clearing to form a protective circle around the goat and I look from the witches to Pierre. He has this insane look on his face, a mixture of fear and excitement. Crazed with power, he cries, “Everybody down on the ground, spread eagle.”

  Nobody listens to his words, instead chaos ensues. Several of the hooded figures race off. In their haste to get away, a few of them shove Elise to the ground. Quickly she scrambles to her feet and races away like the rest of them. The police, watching the scene, appear torn, trying to decide whether or not to use deadly force.

  Cornered, the would-be-goat-murderer throws off his hood, still holding his knife high.

  “Etienne?” I cry, shocked to the core. That’s when the electrician does something truly horrible. With a swish, he brings the knife slicing downwards right into tiny Manon’s shoulder.

  Chapter 15 (Elfie)

  We’ve been sitting in a circle in the basement of Chateau Trisse for the last thirty minutes, burning more incense, but our ghost appears to have left for the night. We begin another chant, a Celtic one, based on runes that I cannot read. On the day we were flung through the portal, Hendra was in our largest hut which serves as a library. We call it the library of Fredanandria, after the snaggletooth witch who started it three hundred years prior, and also because we think it is a clever twist on the name of the much more famous library in Alexandria. Anyway, when the pulling and tugging began as we were about to be whisked through space, Hendra reached out to anchor herself in any way she could to the year 546 A.D. As a consequence, she brought a large table with her through the portal; a table that held over four hundred scrolls. She has one of the scrolls now stretched out before her, the runes glaring up at us are just a bunch of straight lines, like hen scratches.

  Realizing our words aren’t doing any good, Hendra raises her voice and holds the scroll straight out rattling off more Celtic gibberish.

  I do my best to repeat what she says, but Celtic is strange on the tongue. I have a feeling if either Beatrice or Sheila were here, our two resident Celtic witches would be giggling at our horrible pronunciation. I shoot Hatha a worried look but she doesn’t notice; her eyes are screwed up tight as she repeats Hendra’s words. Given the determined look on her face, I’m sure we’ll be here all night if we have to, speaking whatever language possible to rid this chateau of the ghost of Charlotte du Mont.

  Another thirty minutes of rune reading later and I grow drowsy. I’ve lost track of time, but I’m sure it’s way past the Witching Hour. My eye lids flutter and I believe I nod off for a fraction of a second. I awaken as the air around me, which was already cold, now turns positively glacial. On the wall behind us, the faint light from the sconces begins to flicker on and off.

  “You are still here….” The ghost of Charlotte du Mont charges out of the darkness. “What must I do to convince you to LEAVE!”

  I am convinced. I jump to my feet ready to race up the stairs. Hatha is on her feet too, but she has no intention of going anywhere.

  “We will not leave,” she replies feistily, holding up the cross, “Until you do. It is time for you to go Charlotte du Mont. Your cheating husband no longer resides here. He died years ago. Two years after your death, as it was.”

  “What?” Charlotte questions, and her voice changes, sounding like a little girl. “You know of my lord husband.”

  “Is it not enough, Charlotte,” Hatha continues calmly, a kindly smile on her lips, “that you haunted him for the rest of his days after he poisoned you?”

  “He…he…was a vile man.”

  “Yes, he was. Yet he has died and gone on. And yet you, Charlotte are still here, harming little girls.”

  “I have harmed no one…” Charlotte wails. “No one.”

  “And the fingernail marks on the child? What of those?”

  “What child?” Charlotte asks.

  “Do not play dumb with us,” Hendra’s voice rises as she pulls herself to her feet. She grunts and groans under her own weight and has to lean into the castle wall to steady herself. When she finally stands upright she adds, “We’ve seen what you did to the child.”

  “I’ve harmed no one,” Charlotte hiccups as if most fiercely wronged.

  “If it is true what you say–” Hatha begins.

  “It is true.” Charlotte bobs up and down before us, a ghostly blue light coming from the area of her body.

  “Then go now to your eternal reward…”

  “There is no reward, I have sinned. I tormented Roger, my husband, so, I cannot be received in heaven.”

  “Charlotte,” Hatha says firmly, her brow creasing thoughtfully. “Do you see the light?”

  “I-I don’t know.”

  “You must see it. It appears for all who die.”

  “There’s a glimmer way off in the distance, but I don’t know.”

  “Go Charlotte, your eternal reward awaits you, all is forgiven,” Hatha says and then she repeats a Christian prayer, “Say it with me, Charlotte, my Lord is my Shepherd…”

  “I shall not want,” Charlotte sniffs, repeating the words in unison with Hatha. I watch mystified as huge tears fall from her ghost cheeks. Curiously, the tears hit the floor but leave no wet marks. After the ghost and Hatha
say the entire prayer together all four of us witches repeat, “Go into the light,” in Latin.

  “I see it now,” Charlotte murmurs. “It burns bright. Ever brighter–”

  And just like that the ghost of Charlotte du Mont disappears. As soon as she’s gone, the lights on the wall return to full strength and the room begins to warm. I meet the eyes of my fellow witches and we begin to smile tentatively. Giant Camille congratulates us all with a hearty slap on the back and Hendra surmises, “Now the family can have some peace. Now the children can live in this big old house without fear.”

  I let out a huge exhale of air, feeling most relieved. Beside me, Camille gives out a small laugh, and even Hendra and Hatha smile at a job well done.

  But perhaps we are too early in our celebration because just then we hear it –a piercing scream of a small child from four floors away.

  I am by far the youngest witch among us four, yet I cannot keep up with Hatha as she holds up the skirt of her robes and races up all the flights of stairs.

  Chapter 16 (Noelle)

  Chateau Morcelle seems empty when I wake the next morning. I stare over at Elfie’s untouched bed. She’s such a slight gal that when the nights began to cool, she immediately swapped out her cotton cover for a heavy quilt, one that Hendra made from scraps of clothing she patched together and sewed to the back of a heavy wool blanket. Next to Elfie’s pillow is a small bear, a product of Monique’s craftiness.

  I sit up and sigh. This old room that we share with its peeling, cream-colored paint seems so empty without her. Elfie’s usually here talking my head off in the mornings about her various upcoming renovations. She’s very excited about the downstairs bathroom. She spent an inordinate amount of time returning the claw-footed bathtub to its pristine condition, using nothing but a rag, lemon-juice and Hatha’s super cleaning potion. It took her weeks but she finally wiped away a hundred years of grime.

  At any rate, I hope Elfie’s had a better night than I did, and rid Chateau Trisse of its ghost. With a yawn, I stretch, and throw back my covers. Then I get dressed in my thick chenille robe and matching slippers and hurry downstairs to put a kettle on. I swing open the kitchen door to find that Beatrice and Sheila have beat me to it. They sit picking at their toast when I arrive.

  “Poor Manon, any news?” I ask.

  “Nothing new, Noelle,” Sheila says. “She’s in stable condition. That disgusting excuse of a man stabbed her good, but she’ll be okay. I daresay with the remedies Beatrice applied on the scene, the doctors are probably scratching their heads wondering how Manon stopped bleeding so quickly. It was good thinking to bring Hatha’s clotting potion.”

  “Well, it’s a part of our first aid kit, isn’t it?” Beatrice replies. “I grabbed it from the pantry right before we took off in search of you.”

  “And I’m thankful that you did,” I reply, eyeing them up and down, these two Celtic witches, one from Erin, one from the land of the Picts, and I can tell neither of them slept last night. They both have dark circles under their eyes. And who can blame them? It was only the sheer exhaustion of sitting under an oak tree for several hours that allowed me to get some rest.

  “P-poor Manon, b-but she’ll be alright,” blubbers Francine gliding through the wall and ending up with her torso right in the middle of the kitchen table where we’re having breakfast.

  “She’ll be fine, Francine. Not to worry.”

  Lizelle glides through the wall and now there are two ghosts with their torsos entangled in the tiny table.

  “What has Hatha told you about gliding into the middle of tables where people are eating?” I scold.

  “Oh, right, sorry,” Francine moves away to take a seat at the small table and Lizelle does the same. Given the horribleness of everything that happened last night, our resident ghosts have decided to talk to us again –mostly to pump us for information.

  “I expect they may even let Manon come home today. When she fell, I quickly applied a tourniquet to her shoulder right after I poured the clotting potion on the wound,” Beatrice says, a proud gleam in her eye.

  “That was smart thinking,” murmurs Lizelle.

  Indeed, it was, Beatrice and Sheila were full of smart thinking last night.

  “I’m so glad you found me,” I whisper in a barely audible voice sinking down onto a fifth chair that I drag over from its resting spot besides the milk-white 1950’s Frigidaire.

  “It wasn’t that hard. We went looking for Manon, and found her at home, knitting in the library. She was wondering where everyone had disappeared to. She tried your cell, Noelle, but of course there was no answer because you had left Le Denouement in such a hurry, you’d forgotten your coat and your phone. Anyway, we all decided to head back to town for a bite to eat. We had dinner at Café Liberte, hoping we would see you pass by. When you never came, we headed back to the house one more time to see if you had turned up. That’s when Sheila had a vision.”

  “What?” Francine, Lizelle and I say together.

  “She had a vision of you, in trouble, crouching under a tree. I grabbed the first aid bag full of potions and some flashlights and off we went. It wasn’t too hard to find you. We knew you were heading to the river and we simply followed all the muddy footprints until we reached the site where those horrible satin-worshippers were standing around in cloaks.”

  “Not satin, Satan. They call their anti-god Satan. Satin is a type of material,” I correct.

  “Satin, Satan, it all sounds the same to me. Anyway, we saw those horrible Satan-worshippers and–”

  “Satan-worshippers?” Francine shivers. “You didn’t tell us that part–”

  “Shh,” Beatrice holds up a finger to her mouth, cutting her off as we hear the sound of the laundry room door open with a loud bang. A gust of autumn wind blows straight through the kitchen and it is so chilly that even in my thick robe, I shiver. Indian summer is gone. A few leaves swirl into our tiny kitchen and land at the foot of the Frigidaire.

  “What in the name of Merllyd opened the back door?”

  “Please, Sister Noelle, do not curse,” Sheila reprimands, as we all sit frozen in our spots, wondering who or what opened the back door. In my mind I worry, did the police round up all the Satan-worshippers last night? It was dark, and some of them ran off. Have they come for us?

  Clop, clop, clop comes a strange noise. Whatever it is has entered the back hallway and is heading for the kitchen. Is it any wonder, after all I have been through, that a scream rises in my throat as the noise grows closer?

  “Oooooh,” a frightened Lizelle wails softly.

  Clop, clop, clop. It sounds like someone with a peg leg is about to come around the corner. Surprisingly, there is a tinkle of a bell, followed by a bleating noise right before the sacrificial goat from last night pokes his head into the kitchen.

  “Oh, clever boy,” Sheila yells, “Did you figure out how to open the door?”

  The goat replies by eating one of Monique’s finely embroidered dish towels, which he plucks off the countertop.

  “I thought you put him in the shed,” Beatrice sputters reproachfully.

  “I did, I did. He must have escaped. Probably was still awfully scared over everything that happened last night.”

  “I’m not sure what Hatha is going to say about this, ladies,” I say as the goat polishes off the another dish cloth that he hovers off a hook by the stove. As he starts for the heavily-starched napkin on my lap, I hold up a hand.

  “Ah, ah, ah!” I say forcefully and the goat stands down, eyeing me curiously with his big brown eyes. Even though Hatha may not like a goat in the kitchen, this animal turns out to be exactly what we need to bolster our spirits. As Sheila tries to wrestle a third linen dish towel from his mouth, we dissolve into a fit of laughter.

  “Of all the things I never thought I’d see, a goat standing right here in front of the stove is one of them.” Of course, two years ago, I never thought I’d see a stove, or a kitchen. In the forest, we cooked outside
until it was too cold to do so. But I like the kitchen at Chateau Morcelle. It is homage to the late 1950’s, or so I am told by Francine and Lizelle. Apparently, the last family to live here moved out in 1962, leaving behind this kitchen with its yellow and white checkered linoleum floor and a stainless steel diner set that seats five snuggly. The stove is a piece of work; its temperature controls have gone completely haywire and I know Elfie would love to replace it. But, other than that, we really love the kitchen with its open wooden shelves that house dozens of white porcelain dishes and the butter-cup colored curtains that flutter at the window.

  “Baah,” bleats the goat, and I stop staring around the room. Beatrice is now tugging the animal by the rope that serves as its lead and Sheila is pushing it from behind, trying to return it to the out-of-doors. Despite the tragedy of last night’s events, I smile.

  “What should we name it?” calls Sheila. This makes me laugh. We all know if she names it, she’s going to want to keep it.

  To my surprise, level-headed Beatrice, who looks hilarious with the heels of her boots dug into the floor as she tugs at the unwilling goat, replies with a “What about Harold?”

  “No, what about Offa?” Sheila cries.

  “You want to name the goat after the awful King of the Mercians?”

  They continue to banter names back and forth as they head back out through the laundry room.

  “Well, ladies, I’ve got things to do,” I sigh a few minutes later to Francine and Lizelle. I refill my cup of coffee from the French press on the table and wave goodbye as the two ghosts twitter madly about “dignified names for the goat such as Danton and Robespierre.” I pass an unconscious Monique, who is sleeping on the parlor couch as I climb the stairs to take a shower. Exactly two hours later, after visiting Manon in the hospital where she is looking remarkably well, I return to the chocolate shop to retrieve my coat and cell phone. It’s Sunday, and Le Denouement is closed on the Sabbath in the off-season. So today, my intent is to quickly dash in and dash back out, but as I collect my things from the back room, darn if Hugo doesn’t materialize again.