by Amy Casey
I looked at Mary and I rolled my eyes.
The joys of being a witch in a small town.
Chapter 3
Oh yeah. Small fact. I have a talking dog.
Probably should’ve mentioned that earlier. My bad.
It’s kind of just become normal for me, though. I mean, I don’t have to worry when I’m taking him out for walks or anything because nobody else can hear what he’s saying, only me. But that can bring with it some real perils, too. Namely being known as the “weird dog lady” who has in-depth conversations with her chocolate Labrador. I just go by the argument that everybody speaks to their dogs. Just some people speak a little more in-depth to them than others.
I looked over at the sofa where Rocky was perched and saw the way he was glaring at me.
“You’re late,” he said.
I sighed as I took off my coat, walking over to Rocky’s side in my small apartment a few streets away from the coffee shop. “Sorry, boy. Annabelle had a date and I let her finish early.”
“Food?”
“Yeah, I’ll get you food in a sec.”
He started bouncing up and down, licking my face.
“Food!”
“Yes, okay, food. Food.”
“Food!”
I sighed and rubbed Rocky’s head. I looked over at the window where Beatrice, my tabby cat, sat. She stared on, eyes narrowed, like she was judging both me and this “stupid dog.”
How different things could’ve been.
I walked across my lounge towards the kitchen, where I filled Rocky’s food bowl.
“Food!” he shouted, bounding up and down. “Food’s amazing!”
“I know you love your food.”
“Food!”
I put the food down and Rocky gulped it down. I heard him muttering with every bite.
“Oh man, this is great. This is so great. I love food. I could eat food forever. Mmm. I love food. I want to marry food. I adore food. I…”
I zoned out from Rocky’s words and looked back over at Beatrice, who sat there with that smart look on her face. Funny story how Rocky had come to speak, actually. I’d been sitting there bored one day looking through my extensive book of spells. I found that there was a spell that made animals speak. It was risky, dangerous, and could result in serious side effects. Which I felt guilty about even risking, to this day.
But I’d tried it. I’d tried it.
And the results were… well, they’d been interesting, that was for sure.
The spell seemed more straightforward than it had any right to be. I cast a circle with candles, first things first. Then I lit a flame in a jar—any would do—“jam jar fine”, the archaic-looking spell-book said—which I found kind of amusing.
Into the jar, I dropped a combination of things—a hair from Beatrice’s back, a swab of my own saliva, the leaf of a passion flower, and bizarrely some smoked bacon (part of me wondered whether this was just the writer of the book having a laugh). Then I focused, said the “magic” words and I waited.
Something strange happened right away. I saw Beatrice hissing. But she wasn’t speaking. I wondered whether the spell had gone wrong, and whether I’d hurt her.
Then I looked around and saw what she was hissing at.
Or who she was hissing at.
Rocky, a little pup at the time, tilted his head and looked at me.
“Walkies?” he said.
Six years later and honestly, Rocky’s vocabulary had grown a lot since then, but he still limited himself. His key desires in life were “walk” and “food,” but he did sometimes say some rather adventurous stuff, some of which he could only have picked up from the TV, and made me realise that perhaps dogs were even more intelligent than we gave them credit for.
Oh, and he liked musing about rather deep humanesque concepts sometimes, which was rather existential.
But mostly he wanted food. And walks.
And Beatrice was a mute cat.
A witch with a talking dog and a mute cat.
What is it they say about stereotypes? They’re there to be broken.
I reheated a slice of pepperoni pizza in the microwave, seeing as I was the world’s most lapsing vegetarian. I ate it, didn’t really enjoy it, forced it down anyway, and put my feet up to watch some Netflix. There was a movie out called The Witch that I was meaning to check out. Not because I was a witch. There wasn’t some kind of unspoken pact where every witch had to throw themselves into Western representations of witch culture.
I just fancied watching the movie because it looked pretty cool.
I curled up, the cold wind howling outside, a frost on its way as winter progressed. Beatrice meowed then trotted off outside. Rocky ran into the room, still chewing his dinner, then looked up at me.
“Cuddle?”
I smiled. Patted the space on the sofa beside me. “Come on then. Just this once.”
“Just this once,” he said. “Always say that. Silly human.”
I looked at him, surprised to have heard those words from him.
But he was cuddling up to me, looking comfortable and making me feel comfortable, so I couldn’t exactly kick him off.
I put the film on. It was pretty good in truth. Bit dark for my tastes, but a nice atmosphere and sense of dread to it.
I was entering the final twenty minutes of the movie when my phone rang.
I looked over at it. Thought about making the call end from across the room.
But hell. I could do with someone to talk to. It’d probably only be Mary anyway.
I walked over to the phone, lifted it off the hook.
“Hello?”
“Oh, Stella, yes. Is that you?”
I paused. “Yeah. It’s… it’s me. Who is this?”
“Oh, good. Good. It’s Janice. Janice from across the road.”
My stomach sank. Janice. Demanding old Janice. “Oh. Hi Janice. You okay?”
“Yes. Yes. Well, not really, actually.”
Oh great.
“It’s Piers. He’s gone missing again. And I think he might be stuck in the bins at the back of the house. I heard him rustling about in there. It’s just I’m an old woman, you know? I can’t go rummaging around in there.”
I wanted to tell Janice to ask one of her other neighbours for help. I wanted to tell her to get in touch with her family. But that’d be harsh. It seemed always to be me she turned to for help. I guess I had to take that as a compliment, even if it was a bit of a faff.
I looked at The Witch. I looked at Rocky sitting on the sofa. A perfect, cosy night. Ruined.
“Okay, Janice. I’ll… I’ll be right over.”
“Good,” she said. “Good. And if you could just sweep a few leaves up for me while you’re here, that’d be—”
I put the phone down before Janice could finish, biting my tongue at her cheekiness.
But I took a few breaths. Found my composure.
I patted Rocky on his head. “Won’t be long.”
“Food?”
“No. Not again.”
“Walk?”
“No. No walk.”
“Wait. She said walk. Human said walk. That means—”
“Bye, Rocky.”
I stepped outside of my apartment.
The wind howled against me.
In the lounge, a face of fear filled the television screen where The Witch was paused…
Chapter 4
I hadn’t been outside the house for five minutes and already I was longing for the warmth of my flat.
I knocked on Janice’s front door and waited as I stood there in the cold, my breath frosting in the air. I couldn’t see any lights on in her house. I couldn’t hear anybody about. Which annoyed me, in truth. She’d called me up, uprooted me from my precious Netflix time, and she couldn’t even be bothered to get up and answer the damned door? If I had a malignant bone in my body, I might’ve just turned around and gone right back home. Or cast a spell on Janice.
But I wasn�
��t nasty like that. Sure. I had nasty thoughts from time to time. But who didn’t?
I had to be careful, anyway. I was a witch. Couldn’t go living up to negative stereotypes.
A light flicked on in Janice’s hallway and finally I saw her making her way towards the front door.
“Just a sec, dear!” she called.
“Dear,” I muttered under my voice. “If I was such a dear you might’ve actually opened the door for me already.”
Janice’s door opened and the little old lady smiled at me.
“Oh, thank heavens you’re here,” she said. “I’ve been worried sick about Piers. You’re such a sweetheart, you know that?”
I forced a smile and nodded as I walked into Janice’s home. It was a small, quaint terraced house that had that classic old person smell to it, as well as a weird herby smell, like there were some kinds of plants growing deep within its confines. There were photo frames sitting on the side, most of her cat, but one interestingly of Piers Morgan, which must’ve explained why she’d called her cat Piers after all.
I kind of wanted to know why she had a photograph of Piers Morgan in her house like he was one of her children or something.
On the other hand, I wasn’t sure I really wanted to know just how deep her obsession went.
Janice was small, bony and frail, with knees that I was surprised she could still balance on. She had grey hair, weathered old skin, and thick-rimmed glasses. The stereotypical old lady, really. I wondered how old she actually was. But I didn’t want to ask her. I figured she might never stop talking if she got going, and I wanted nothing more than to get back to the comfort of my home right now.
“It’s just through here,” she said, leading the way through her narrow hallway and towards the kitchen door. The floral smell grew stronger the more I walked. There were a lot of daisies in this kitchen. It frustrated me in a way, mostly because I knew exactly where I was going, and for some reason Janice was still insisting on trailing ahead of me at a snail’s pace. “I heard him rustling back there a while ago. But he’s stopped now. He’s stopped and I—I’m so worried about him.”
I managed to bring myself to smile. “Don’t worry about Piers. I’m sure he’s probably just chasing a mouse or something.”
Janice turned around, a look of disgust on her face. “Oh, not my Piers. My Piers wouldn’t harm anything. Anything.” She repeated that last word for effect.
All I could do was nod.
All I could do was smile.
Eventually, after making our way through the kitchen—where something was bubbling in the pan, something awful smelling like a boiled egg gone wrong—we reached the back door. Janice unlocked it with her shaking hands, then stood by it for a second.
“Now if you just do me a favour and when you come back in, you take your shoes off, okay?”
The cheek of this woman. But still, I bit my lip, resisted the urge to just turn around and walk the hell away from this situation. “I’ll do that, Janice.”
She reached up, stroked my hair. It was only then that I truly realised how short Janice actually was. “You’re a good’un, Stella. So… so tuned in. So understanding. You’ll make a man very happy one day.”
“Righto,” I said, stepping past Janice and heading outside before someone else could decide to marry me off against my will like these were still prehistoric times. “I’ll get looking for Piers.”
“Please find him,” Janice said. “I’m so worried.”
“Yeah I’ll get to that,” I muttered under my breath. “As soon as you get off my case.”
“What was that, Stella?”
“Nothing, Janice!” I called.
When I was sure Janice was back inside, I stood and looked at the mass of bins at the back of Janice’s garden. It was a literal tip. Apparently she was a hoarder, and she used to have all this rubbish in the house, but she’d finally been cured of her hoarding ways so got rid of the lot of it.
Only “getting rid” of it seemed to go over her head in all truth, considering it was all sitting in bin bags at the bottom of the garden, just waiting for something to happen to it.
“Right, Piers Morgan Cat,” I said. “Where the bloody hell are you at?”
I started by looking manually, mostly because I didn’t want to waste my witchy energy on a case of a missing cat. But the more I looked, the more it felt like I was hitting a dead end. Which meant I was left with no choice but to try something different.
I steadied myself and prepared to draw true sight. I had a limit to my spells like this. One per day, sometimes two if the magicy gods were feeling generous. So I had to make sure I used them wisely.
Then again, it wasn’t exactly like I was going to need this spell again in the next twenty-four hours.
I held my breath. Went to trigger the spell.
Then I saw something.
Movement.
Movement between the rubbish bags.
It made me jump, initially. Made me jump out of my skin.
Then I heard the meow of a cat.
“Hey, Piers,” I said.
The fat ginger cat wandered out of the trash. He rubbed his head up against my thigh, purred.
I spent a few moments with Piers, mostly so it didn’t look like my search had been too easy to Janice.
“Come on, you,” I said. “Let’s get you back.”
I turned around.
And that’s when I saw them.
It was a girl. A young girl. Long hair. Bright blue eyes that stood out even in the night.
And as I looked at her, a part of me felt like I recognised her.
But what was she doing here?
What was she…
That’s when it dawned on me.
The glow.
The glow emanating from this girl.
It wasn’t just any ordinary girl.
She was a ghost.
Seeing a ghost meant several things. Firstly, the obvious—someone was dead. But not only that, they were recently dead.
And even though they could travel far away from their source of death, their energy was generally strongest when they were near their bodies…
Which meant there was a body nearby…
I froze cold.
I turned around. Looked at the rubbish bins where Piers had been walking around.
I looked at the gap between them, stepped towards it.
Then I looked back over my shoulder, over towards the ghost.
The ghost was gone.
Which meant I had no choice.
There was something else about ghosts. You only got a few minutes with them, usually. Sure, some stuck around for a lot longer, but they always gave off this glow, and when the glow surrounding their bodies faded they disappeared into… well, whatever was beyond the plane we lived on right now.
Sometimes they came back. Sometimes they had unfinished business. But that was rare.
And I’d seen this girl—familiar, somewhat—disappear.
Which could only mean one thing.
I stepped forward, heart racing. Behind, I heard Janice opening the door.
“Piers? Oh you found him, Stella. You found him… Stella?”
But I wasn’t listening to Janice.
I couldn’t listen to Janice.
Not when I saw it, lying between the rubbish bags.
There was a girl.
The same girl I’d seen the ghost of.
Only she was dead.
And by the condition her body was in, a bitter taste filled my mouth.
Because this girl looked like she’d been murdered.
Chapter 5
I looked at the body and I knew one thing for certain.
Well. Two, actually.
One was that I wasn’t going to be finishing watching my movie tonight.
Two… this was a murder. And the causes of the murder looked supernatural.
I didn’t want to examine the body too closely. I didn’t want to dwell on the gory details. I h
ated it when writers did that in fiction or when shows dwelled on it, almost like they were getting a weird kick from the violence.
But there were some things of note that I couldn’t ignore.
The body of the girl—the same girl I’d seen in a ghostly form just moments earlier—had a series of what appeared to be stab wounds all over. Every single inch of the body was covered with an identical looking slit. It took precision, that was for sure. Awful precision.
And as much as I knew the police were going to show up and try to dismiss this as nothing more than a sick sadistic murder, I’d seen enough to suspect that something else was at play here.
Something other.
I stepped closer. Behind, I could hear Janice on the phone to the police, trying to explain the situation to them. She didn’t seem to be having much success. I had to take that as a victory. After all, it gave me more chance with the girl, more chance to study the body.
There were a few more things I noticed about this girl. The first was her identity. Her name was Krissy. Krissy Palmer. She was seventeen, supposed to be going off to university next year. She was a good kid. Never got into any trouble or anything like that. Came from a good family. Why anyone would want to kill her, I didn’t know.
My stomach turned and my mouth filled with the taste of acid as I remembered the last time she’d visited Witchy Delights. She’d seemed… distant, somewhat. More distracted. Which was strange for Krissy because she was usually such a jovial, upbeat, optimistic character.
Of course, I hadn’t pried. I hadn’t really even been tempted to. Kids were kids. They had their own shit going on, their own problems. Besides, the gossip of teenagers wasn’t really something I was all that enthralled about throwing myself into. I preferred the juicier stuff.
But as I looked at Krissy’s body now, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d let her down somehow. I was supposed to run like, this hub of the community. I was supposed to be someone everybody could go to if they had issues or problems.
And even though I knew it was irrational, I felt like I’d failed Krissy, somehow.
That’s when I heard the rustling behind me.
