Nancy Werlock’s Diary: Season 1
By Julie Ann Dawson
©2014 Julie Ann Dawson
Bards and Sages Publishing
Bellmawr, NJ
www.bardsandsages.com
These stories are works of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living, dead, or undead is coincidental and vaguely disturbing.
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Nancy’s Diary Entries
Dear Diary,
Homecoming
The Apprentice
The Inquest
Mother Knows Worst
The Show Must Go On
Karma’s a Witch
Tag…You’re It
Family Affairs
The Gremlin
Rank and File
The Lemure
‘Til Death Do Us Part
Possession is 9/10th of the Law
The New Normal
Behind the Curtain
A Bloody Mess
Being Human
In the Cards
A Clean Sweep
Devil in a Blue(ish) Dress
Publisher’s Note
Dr. Nancy Werlock is one of the most successful marriage counselors in the Delaware Valley. Some credit her uncanny empathy. Some credit her quick wit and quirky sense of humor. But Nancy also has a unique set of skills she didn’t learn from any psychology training. Nancy is a sixth generation demonologist, and though she upset her mother when she decided to pursue a mundane professional instead of taking up the family business, she’s kept her magical skills sharp by integrating a few choice spells into her counseling practice.
Nancy Werlock’s Diary follows Nancy’s daily trials and troubles as she struggles to juggle her professional obligations with her familial ones. Each set of stories is a standalone collection that provides a window into the life of a modern day warlock. And while Nancy may have a few arcane tricks at her disposal, her problems are surprisingly relatable (even when her mother is giving her a guilt trip from beyond the grave).
Nancy Werlock’s Diary is a serialized story told in diary format. This collection features episodes one through seven of the series. This compilation is released in both trade paperback and digital format. New episodes are published regularly in digital format only. This collection was compiled for the benefit of readers who prefer print or those that want to catch up with the series before jumping in to Season Two.
Dear Diary,
Dear Diary,
Dear Journal,
Oh, screw it.
Now I know why my clients look at me stupid when I suggest that they keep a journal of their thoughts. It’s therapeutic! It will help you resolve inner conflicts and conflicts with others without negative confrontation! It will help you reduce stress!
It’s ridiculous. I feel like I’m twelve.
Stop it, Nancy. You know better.
Mom gave me this journal two years ago as a Winter Solstice gift. One of her not-so-subtle hints regarding her disapproval about my career choice. It has this beautiful forest green goat leather cover with hand-sewn binding and a gold foil pentagram on the cover. It’s a bit over-the-top for your average diary, but it would have made a gorgeous grimoire.
Which was, of course, Mom’s point.
This thing has been sitting on my bookshelf since she gave it to me, right between my old Apprentice grimoire and Introduction to Behavior Sciences. That monster is almost five inches thick and cost me $60, used! The damn school bookstore was only going to give me a $10 trade-in for the thing when the semester was over. College textbooks are such a rip-off.
See, this is why I will suck at keeping a journal. I get off on tangents about unrelated stuff.
Not like anyone is ever going to read this thing, right?
Mom’s dead. My mother is dead and I’m complaining about an overpriced college textbook from ten years ago.
What am I doing? I just ruined this grimoire journal. Just burned a page on nonsense and now it’s ruined. I guess now I have no excuse not to keep a journal, right? It’s keep a journal or admit I destroyed one of my mother’s gifts to me for no good reason.
I’ll come back to this later. I have to call my brother and make funeral arrangements.
Homecoming
April 16th
“Ms. Warlock?”
“It’s Werlock,” I correct without looking up from the pile of paperwork on the counter. I thought I had locked the front door behind me when I came in. And even if it wasn’t locked, the bright red CLOSED sign in the window should have been a dead giveaway that the shop was, in fact, closed.
“I’m sorry. I’m looking for Wanda War…Werlock.”
I stop sorting mom’s papers and turned to the woman. She is in her late-forties. Maybe fifty at the most. She isn’t wearing any make-up but she has a tanning booth tan. You know, that unnaturally uniform color that you can only get from lying perfectly still in ten minute intervals three times a week. She’s wearing an oversized, faded Cherry Hill Cougars sweatshirt and a pair of loose fitting blue jeans. For some reason the thought of a middle age woman wearing a shirt with a picture of a cougar on it, even if it was the actual mascot for the little league team, makes me chuckle.
The woman just stares at me with that weird deer-in-headlights look some people get when they are confused. I take a deep breath and lean on the counter.
“You’re looking for my mother. She died last week.” My head drops as soon as the words leave my mouth. Gods, that sounded final, I think. She had only been fifty-five. Werlock women don’t die that young, not unless an exorcism goes wrong or something like that. But there had been nothing supernatural about mom’s death. Just a drunk driver and her being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I shuffle some papers around to make myself look busy. I am busy. I have to do a full inventory of the store yet and get all of mom’s files in order before the meeting next Thursday with Mr. Harvey about the estate. And her files are a mess. The woman could prepare a Sigil of Greater Binding with laser precision, but ask her to file her receipts in some sort of rational order and you would have thought you asked her to give up a lung.
“I’m sorry,” the woman says. “I didn’t know. My neighbor said she could help me. I guess she didn’t know, either.”
I know where the conversation is going to go, and I don’t want to go there. I open a drawer in the counter while trying to pretend I’m not paying attention. I guess I hope that if I look busy enough, she will just leave. Yeah, I know. My entire career involves getting people to communicate effectively with each other, and here I am engaging in confluent deflection behavior to avoid a confrontation.
I’ve opened the proverbial “junk drawer.” That drawer everyone has where you just throw stuff that you know you should keep but don’t know why you need to keep it. Sitting on top of plastic coin holder full of pennies is an old metal keychain that says Wildwood on it in chipped blue and gold paint. You did this on purpose, I think.
I performed my first exorcism at thirteen. Granted, it was only a class five imp in Mrs. McGulligan’s cat. And the cat was mean and spiteful already so nobody really noticed a difference when the imp took over. If it had played its cards right, it
might have enjoyed possessing its host for years. But the damn thing knocked over the hummingbird feeder in our herb garden and then it went after my dog Merlin. It just crossed a line it shouldn’t have crossed and needed to be stopped. You would have thought the cat would be grateful to me for getting the imp out of him without killing him. No, the damn thing scratched me when it was over.
Mom had been so proud that I identified the demon type correctly and was able to bind and exorcise it without help. Though I think she was more proud I actually bothered with the exorcism instead of just choking the damn cat. We went down to Wildwood that weekend to celebrate. We spent a whole day at Morey’s Pier, even though mom hated water parks. Mom hated large bodies of water in general. Something about an incident with a marid when she was at summer camp as a teenager. I never got the full story. She tried to tell me once, but when she started by saying it happened at a placed called Crystal Lake, I just started laughing and she got mad and refused to say anything after that. Long story short, it was a pretty big deal that she agreed to go down to Morey’s Pier for my First Exorcism celebration.
We didn’t celebrate when I decided to go to college and study behavioral science instead of continuing with the Craft. We fought. She said I was abandoning my responsibilities as both her daughter and her apprentice. She was so furious that she threatened to conjure Nana Morri’s spirit just so I could tell my grandmother why I hated my family. Can you imagine? Summoning the spirit of my grandmother to guilt me into continuing the family business? It wasn’t like I was going to stop practicing the Craft altogether. I just wanted to explore other career options.
“Maybe you—”
“No,” I say as I slam the drawer shut. “I’m sorry. I can’t help you. I need to sort my mother’s things.”
“But I don’t know where else to go,” says the woman.
“You know, the Catholic Church still has exorcists on staff. They even provide services for non-Catholics. And they do free in-home consultations. Their rates aren’t bad, either. I think they even have payment plans. It might even be tax-deductible.”
“I already spoke with Father Bryant,” she says. She shuffles in place. “He came out to the house and said there was nothing. My husband thinks I’m just being difficult.”
For the last three years, I’ve had a private practice in Philadelphia as a marriage counselor. I know the sound of a lonely housewife when I hear one.
“Husband travels a lot?” I ask. She nods. “Let me guess. He thinks you’re seeing things on purpose to make him stay home.” She nods again.
“Sometimes he’s gone for days at a time,” she says. “Or when he has to go to California, he can be gone for a week or more. That’s when it starts…doing things.”
“What kind of things?”
“At night, when I’m trying to sleep, I hear the sound of footsteps in the hallway. I’ll put something down in one room, and when I come back later it is somewhere else. One minute the room will be cold and the next hot.”
I walk around the counter and mutter the Third Eye incantation under my breath. It’s one of the first incantations you learn in Demonology. It allows you to both read auras and detect paranormal residue. All living things radiate an energy field, called an aura. It fluctuates and changes colors based on a person’s psychological state. More importantly for a demonologist, it allows you to immediately identify if the subject is the victim of a possession or disguised by a glamour. I confess, I’ve also used it on more than one occasion in my counseling work. It really gives me an edge when dealing with couples that don’t want to tell me everything but expect me to fix their relationships.
Some otherworldly creatures like specters and demons have their own auras as well, but when they enter the material realm, it becomes charged and takes a tangible form. Kind of like Fairy Dust, only not visible to the naked eye and non-allergenic. The woman didn’t have any poltergeist or demon residue on her, which meant that Father Bryant was probably correct. Her house wasn’t haunted or possessed. But her aura indicated that she wasn’t lying, either. Whether or not the haunting was real was irrelevant. She thought it was real.
“I’m sorry. I’m Nancy,” I say and extend my hand.
“Nadine,” she replies. “Nadine Porter.” She shakes my hand with a weak handshake. “Does this mean you’ll help me?”
I look over my shoulder at the counter. “Mom would be upset if I left you out to dry.” I shrug my shoulders and force a smile. “I can come by tomorrow.”
April 17th
Mom never actually advertised that she was a demonologist. She promoted the shop, Three Wishes, as a new age bookstore/alternative medicine/arts and crafts establishment. Her clientele consisted of wannabe teen witches, “whole health” people, and grade school art teachers. But somehow word would get around to those that needed it that she also provided exorcisms, séances, and an assortment of other occult services. When I was her apprentice, I would assist with the exorcisms. Most of the time, we were really just offering a placebo. Of the dozen or so exorcisms we would do each year, only one or two ever had a real entity involved. And even if there was something involved, it tended to be a brownie or house sprite or something equally harmless. In those cases, mom would just tell the fae to chill the Hell out and stop spooking the residents. No sense banishing the poor things back to the Aether over spilt milk or a broken light bulb.
It seemed odd at first performing exorcisms on houses that didn’t need them. It felt like stealing. But Mom said that in some cases, imaginary hauntings were more real to the victims than real ones. And the only way to help someone with an imaginary haunting was to validate their belief so they could confront whatever it was causing it.
It was a tactic I had learned to use in my counseling practice, too. I’ve learned that people often contrive problems to avoid dealing with real issues in a relationship. So the husband might complain about the fact that his wife owns fifty pair of shoes instead of dealing with the fact that he’s stressed about work and is afraid he might get laid off. Or a wife might complain that her husband leaves his dirty socks on the bathroom floor instead of the fact that she’s afraid that he no longer finds her attractive. So you have to work through the fake problems first as if they were real in order to get people to address the real ones.
I arrive at Nadine’s house carrying mom’s house cleansing kit. I thought about using the exorcism kit, but considering that there wasn’t actually a demon or ghost in the house that seemed a bit excessive. It wasn’t like Nadine would know the difference. At the very least, maybe removing some of the negative energies from the home would lighten Nadine’s mood enough for her to stop thinking that she was being haunted.
“You’re early,” says Nadine as she let me in through the kitchen door. A box of chocolate Chex cereal and a carton of Silk soy milk sat on the kitchenette next to a bowl.
“I have an appointment with a couple of clients at noon,” I say. “It was supposed to be later but the husband’s work schedule got changed at the last minute and the wife accused him of volunteering for the new shift in order to avoid dealing with their relationship so he’s trying to get her off his case and—.” Nadine wraps her arms around herself and looks around. “I can come back if this is a bad time.”
“Nay, where’s my burgundy briefcase?” asks a voice coming from upstairs. As it doesn’t sound disembodied, I assume it is her husband.
“It should be next to your desk where you left it,” she yells back.
“It’s not here.”
“I’ll be right back,” she says as she leaves me in the kitchen in order to help her husband find his briefcase.
I wander into the living room and end up standing in front of a wall full of framed photos. There’s Nadine and her husband’s wedding picture. They made a good-looking couple in their day. I mean, red carpet movie premier good-looking. I’m trying to reconcile the stylish fashionista in the wedding portrait with Mrs. Frumpy who came into the shop. Nearby are
photos of what I assume are their children. The most recent features the kids’ college graduation photos. Empty nesters, I think to myself.
“I’m sorry,” says Nadine as she comes back downstairs. “I swear sometimes men are blind on purpose.”
“Let me guess. Sitting next to his desk?”
Nadine laughs and nods. “Do you want a cup of coffee before you…I don’t even know what it is you exactly do.”
I sit my kit on the coffee table and open it up. “We’re going to chase the spirits away.” I pull a set of brass bells, a cymbal, and the incense burner from the kit. I reach for the dried sage. “You don’t have an infants or small children in the house, do you?”
“No.”
“You’re not pregnant, correct?”
The look on Nadine’s face makes me want to kick myself. It’s a standard question. Any first year apprentice knows you don’t use sage around infants or pregnant women. So you have to ask. With modern fertility treatments, you can’t just assume a woman her age wasn’t pregnant or trying to get pregnant. I think about apologizing to her but anything I say at this point will just drawn out the awkwardness and make things worse. I go about setting up the incense burner instead.
“Nay, I should be home…who’s this?”
I look up to see Jason Porter standing on the stair landing. My jaw drops. He’s aged well. We’re talking Johnny Depp aging well. The single gal in me thinks, “Jesus, Nadine, what are you so miserable about?” while the marriage counselor in me realizes “Well, now I know why you’re so miserable.”
nancy werlock's diary s01 - episodes 1-7 Page 1
