What The Cat Dragged In (The Celtic Witch Mysteries Book 1)

by Molly Milligan

  I didn’t feel the presence of the ghost. I was still edgy though, catching sight of myself in mirrors and using them to glance over my shoulder as if I might catch the ghost out that way. Eventually Maddie declared it was time for cardio in such a cheerful voice that I felt a very icy finger of doom on my spine, and it was exercise-induced, not supernatural. I explained I had a sudden need to visit the loos and dived away.

  How long could she spend on a running machine? I’d last three minutes, tops. I decided to lurk in the reception area for at least ten minutes. It would take that long to get my heart rate back to normal after I got tangled up in the cable weight pulling machine thingy, anyway.

  There was a group of senior citizens clustered around the reception desk, a riot of day-glow outfits and curling grey hair. Every time one of them turned around I got clobbered with the end of a rolled-up yoga mat. I retreated to a safe place behind the display boards about the sports centre development, and was happily minding my own business when Rachel Harris herself appeared with a bunch of leaflets in her hands.

  “Oh! You again,” she said, and smiled in a way that boded very ill for me.

  “Hello. Just, er, working out.”

  “Hiding out, more like,” she said. “Exercise isn’t your thing, is it?” There was a definite undercurrent of bitchiness in her words. I didn’t rise to it. My head was full of the knowledge that Reverend Horatio Lewis had imparted to me.

  Knowledge, but perhaps not wisdom.

  “I am here to support my cousin,” I said, trying to work out how to approach the subject. “It was a real surprise to have her turn up, you know. Isn’t long-lost family interesting?”

  “Was she long-lost? I thought you knew about her.”

  “Well, yes, I did, but I had never seen her. Everything assumes that all my family is local because we’ve been here for generations but Maddie is thoroughly American. You are very local, too, aren’t you?”

  She narrowed her eyes at me. “Yes, of course. What are you getting at?”

  “How is your dad, by the way? Well, Barry.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I heard he had a cold.” I was improvising desperately, hoping to get her to step into some major revelation accidentally.

  “No, he hasn’t. I saw him a few days ago. He was fine. What did you mean by saying ‘your dad, well, Barry?’” She glared at me suspiciously.

  “That is your dad … isn’t it?” Oh no, oh no, I thought. There is no way to do this subtly, is there?

  Rachel grew taller. Her eyes shimmered and there was a yellowish cast to them. I suddenly realised I didn’t know what colour they were normally, but they weren’t looking normal now. I felt energy – real magic – begin to gather around her.

  I stepped back, and tried to call up protection around me.

  She smiled.

  I could not.

  “This place is a special place,” she said, still smiling, almost wolfishly. Actually, not almost. Really wolfishly. Then her smile died. “And you have no place in it. Get out!”

  “I am so sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you,” I gabbled, and I meant it. “The recent events must have been traumatic…”

  “My dad is my dad, the man who raised me. Anything else is absolutely no business of yours, or of anyone else’s! And if you speak of this to anyone, I will come for you. Do you understand what I mean?”

  She moved forward, and for a moment I couldn’t tell you in all certainty whether she was walking on two legs or four.

  I ran out of there like the Hounds of Annwn were after me.

  Maddie found me half an hour later, pacing the car park, and my heart was still racing.

  “She’s not a witch, she’s not a werewolf, I have no idea what she is!” I gabbled. “Her eyes went funny. I can’t breathe!”

  She blinked at me. “Exercise really messed you up, didn’t it?”

  Fifteen

  I spent the rest of the day doing what I should have been doing – making up remedies, talking with people, helping the animals, and foraging in the fields. Maddie stayed behind, and helped Dilys with a few things around the house. I wondered how long it would be before she got bored of our little town.

  When I got home, there was a wonderful aroma filling the kitchen. Maddie had got to grips with the vagaries of Aga cookery and with Dilys’s guidance she had rustled up an amazing curry, slow-cooked in a crockpot like a casserole.

  The scent must have travelled for miles, because as we sat down to eat, someone knocked at the door.

  “Dean?” Maddie said. “You said that he’s the only one who knocks.”

  I thought for a moment it could be the ghost. He had been strangely quiet all day, and I was finding the lack of him as unsettling as his presence. But maybe it was just a natural fading away? Now he’d been unearthed, and named, perhaps his time walking our realm was done.

  I hoped so.

  Yet I didn’t believe so.

  My speculations had to be pushed aside. It was, indeed, Dean at the door. His thin frame sparked a natural tendency in everyone to want to feed him, so I ushered him into the kitchen and shoved him into a chair. He briefly nodded at me and at Dilys.

  Then he went straight on to the purpose of his visit: making moon eyes at my cousin.

  I sighed and fetched him a bowl and some cutlery.

  After we were done, after an excruciating fifteen minutes of polite small talk (due to the presence of my aunt) Dean got up to stack the crockery by the sink. Dilys went up to her room, citing a pressing need to learn the mediaeval system of musical notation (spoiler alert: it’s baffling and seems to use a lot of diamond shapes). Maddie helped Dean to wipe the dishes and neither of them knew where to put anything away again, so that was my job.

  I stayed quiet. It was blindingly obvious that my sweet, kind friend Dean was head over heels in lust-at-first-sight with my sweet, kind cousin Maddie.

  And I felt awful for the pair of them, as Maddie had not seemed to notice. Either that, or she was an awfully cool customer indeed. I wasn’t sure yet. Dean asked her questions and listened like a perfect gentleman to her answers. He made jokes which she laughed at, dutifully.

  But she kept re-including me in the conversation whenever Dean tried to turn it into a “just the two of them” kind of thing, and she didn’t let me leave when I said I was going to feed the animals.

  Then when she made eye contact with me, I realised that she did know that Dean was hitting on her – and she was very definitely not interested.

  “No, Bron is right,” Dean was saying, awkwardly. “She does need to see to the animals.” He fixed me with a stare, his eyes large behind his glasses. I didn’t even think he needed to wear glasses, really, but he embraced his nerdy stereotype.

  “I’ll help,” Maddie said. “I’m trying to learn everything I can.”

  Take the hint, I thought, trying to fire my mental chatter right into Dean’s brain. Don’t make a fool of yourself!

  But no. All three of us ended up in the utility room. That was supremely uncomfortable – only I had a task to do. The other two watched me. It was a small room and they were watching me rather too closely.

  “So, er, what about this body, then?” Maddie said brightly.

  “They’ve named him, haven’t they?” Dean said, keen to talk about anything that Maddie wanted to talk about.

  “They have.” I looked around in case the ghost began to make himself known. A leaf rattled its way past the window. Was that a supernatural force? It was hard not to end up jumping at shadows when you were in my business. Many an occult practitioner had sent themselves mad, in the end.

  “That’s that, then?” Dean said.

  “Well, not quite.” We hadn’t mentioned the haunting to him before. I finished changing the sawdust in the cages, and led everyone back into the kitchen so that we could at least breathe without elbowing into each other. “Sit down.” I told him about the ghostly presence that we’d begun to feel, and how it didn
’t seem totally friendly.

  “What you describe doesn’t sound malevolent either, though,” Dean pointed out. “I mean, you’re not experiencing the smell of faeces or anything like that.”

  “Eww. I’ve read the Amityville Horror. Don’t tell me that’s actually real,” Maddie said.

  He went into full-on I AM MAN I WILL PROTECT YOU mode, assuming a serious sort of expression. “In very rare cases and you would have known about it by now. And there are plenty of things we can do to counteract it. You needn’t worry about anything.”

  I wanted to click my fingers under his nose to remind him that I was there, too. And I was the one who found the body and I was the one who was getting most of the haunting. Wasn’t I the one who needed the protection?

  But then he just knew that I can handle myself. Just like Adam knew.

  “There’s more.” I told Dean about what I’d learned from Horatio and my unfortunate conversation with Rachel Harris. I ended by asking, “Is she magical, do you know?”

  “I don’t have a clue.” Dean shivered suddenly. “Did I leave the door open?”

  “No. We were just in the utility room. Everything’s closed; we would have noticed. Are you okay?”

  He rubbed at his face, dislodging his glasses. “I don’t know if it was the talk of Robert Cameron, or the talk of Rachel Harris, but I felt something.”

  I stilled, and closed my eyes. Something passed by me. It was familiar in its chilliness. “Robert?” I said.

  It hissed in my ear and lifted a small curl of my hair, before passing on.

  “Yes,” I said to Dean and Maddie, as I opened my eyes. “That’s the ghost of Robert Cameron. He’s here, right now.”

  “Did Horatio give you any hints as to how to lay him to rest? This is kind of the church’s realm, isn’t it?” Dean said.

  “He didn’t. Maybe I should go back to him. But he didn’t know enough about the man, really. I wonder who the vicar was before Horatio came here?” I mused.

  Dean straightened his glasses. He was still looking ill at ease. “It’s a long time ago. But I reckon you might have some luck in talking to the druid who was here before I came here. He was an old man when I arrived, and if he had said he’d been here for a century I would have believed him. I studied under him for a good few years. It was hard.”

  “And he’s still alive?”

  “He is, and he’s in a rather exclusive retirement home up in the woods by the lake. Perfect for him, but I feel sorry for the staff.”

  “What is his name, and where is he?”

  “He’s called Iolo and he’s about ten miles away at a place called Happy Rest.” Dean looked uncomfortable.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked him. “You’re not being bothered by the ghost, are you?”

  “Not really,” he said. “I’m used to things passing through. But there is something else here, too. Something very powerful, as well as the ghost. When the ghost is here, this force is also stronger, but it’s separate.” He looked at me and at Maddie in turn. “What is it?”

  “I have no idea,” she shrugged, getting to her feet. “So, let’s have a cup of tea. Hey, do I sound British yet, talking about tea?”

  “Nope, sorry.” I turned back to Dean. “There is a lot happening and it’s tied up with this ghost,” I told him. “I need to go and see this druid of yours. I’ll go tomorrow, if I can.”

  “Tomorrow is Sunday; no buses.”

  “I’ll go Monday. Will you stay for a brew?”

  Dean glanced at Maddie. She had her back to us. She could give no clearer signal than that, and even Dean could interpret it. “No, thanks,” he said. “I’ll let you get on.”

  He left, after a protracted session of thanking us for the food, and finally I was alone with Maddie.

  ***

  “He can tell it’s me,” Maddie said as soon as I came back into the kitchen after seeing Dean off.

  “I’m sorry, what?”

  She remained standing at the Aga, her hands behind her on the rail where we hung tea towels and cloths. “He said that he felt another presence here, a strong one. That’s me, or something that I’m attracting. What am I supposed to do? Things are getting worse, Bron.”

  Her eyes were large with fear. I went over to her. I wanted to take her hands in mine but they stayed behind her back. “I don’t know,” I said to her. “We need to make a safe space for you here, a ritual space that will work for you. And maybe you could then do some guided journeying from that space to find your allies in the otherworld. We just don’t know what path you ought to be walking.”

  “I don’t know if I want to go back there,” she said. “It’s scary and I am not strong.”

  “Your strength is there, if you want to access it,” I said.

  “But what if I can’t?”

  “Perhaps we need to speak to Dilys about this,” I said. “She is experienced.”

  “I don’t know. She is old and she knows stuff, but her magic is different than mine.”

  “She might know someone who can help you,” I said. “I won’t tell her anything that you don’t want me to, but I strongly suggest you consider speaking with her.”

  Maddie let her shoulders sag. She pulled a hand free of the rail and scratched at her head. “I just want to escape from everything for a while,” she said in a low voice. “And I came here, and found it was all a thousand times worse.”

  Sixteen

  “Nothing much happens here on a Sunday,” I said to Maddie, the next morning. Dilys was still in bed. She claimed it was because she was old and needed to rest. Hungover, more like. Still, when you get to your eighties, you can do what you like. “We could work on your ritual space,” I offered.

  She shook her head. “I want to be normal for a few hours.”

  “Right. Um, well, there are lots of books in the living room.” Our main sitting room was woefully underused. I knew that most people would sit in theirs to watch television. With my issues, we didn’t have that option. So we always congregated in the kitchen, especially in winter.

  “I don’t want to read. I’m sorry, Bron, I just don’t want to be in this house right now. I can feel everything. Things are getting hard for me. It’s not just the ghost, although did you know he spent the whole night on the landing outside your bedroom door?”

  “Yeah, I thought as much,” I said. “I needed the loo at three in the morning but there was no way I was going out there. I’ve been awake since then.”

  “So, right, he’s bugging me. And it’s this whole place. You have so many layers of protection around it, and in it, and so much history, it’s like it’s clogging me up. I feel like I’m drowning in a pit of fluffy pillows and cotton wool. I know that might sound kinda nice, but I can tell you, it is not.”

  “Then we need to get out of here,” I said. “Thing is, we can’t go anywhere. I could call Adam and see if he’s working? He’d drive us somewhere to see some local sights. How about the coast? It will be wild and rugged.”

  “No, don’t bother him,” she said. “I’d be happy to just walk someplace. We don’t do a lot of that back home, you know?”

  “Tell me what you do do.”

  We got togged up in cold weather gear – thick coats, hats, gloves, scarves, the lot – and headed out into the chilly air. I shoved some loose change into my pocket, said goodbye to Dilys by sending Harkin up to her with a note tied to his collar, and we were fit to go.

  At first we just wandered. Maddie told me about her life as an American girl, growing up in one of the most racially diverse places in the US. It was hard for me to get my head around. I had this nice, rosy picture in my mind of the UK being wonderfully tolerant and inclusive but how would I know? It was the first time I’d encountered the concept of “privileged” and I found it a challenging one. “I’m Welsh,” I reminded her. “We’re the butt of the jokes by the English. Well, maybe not as much as the Irish, but still. We’ve always been oppressed.”

  “But no one can
just look at you and make assumptions that you’re about to mug them or something,” she pointed out.

  “No one would look at you and think that you were going to rob them!”

  “No,” she agreed. “We black women have a whole different set of expectations to fight.”

  “It must make you angry,” I said.

  Suddenly she started to laugh. “Angry? Oh, you’re cute.”

  “What?” I asked. “What did I say?”

  She shook her head. “Oh, I am sorry. Honestly, because you don’t have any access to modern media, you’re totally in the dark ages, you know? You don’t have any of the same, uh, terms of reference that I do, that the rest of us do. The stereotypes, the tropes. You’d fit really well into society about a hundred years ago, but you’re kinda separate to everything contemporary. You don’t know about the Angry Black Woman thing, do you?”

  “Er … no. Come on, tell me. Tell me everything. What am I missing out on with this internet business?”

  “You want me to tell you the whole internet?”

  “Yeah. We’ve got all day,” I said.

  She was laughing again. She linked her arm through mine, and we nestled together for warmth. “I’m gonna need a coffee for this,” she said. “Is that café open? The one with the grumpy guy?”

  “He might be. He’s hit and miss on a Sunday.”

  “Let’s go.”

  ***

  Caffi Cwtch was an oasis of warmth in the grey and miserable day. I was so looking forward to the start of spring. I always found the six weeks between Imbolc at the start of February, and Ostara around the spring equinox, a bit of a slog. I knew that Imbolc was Brigid’s day and marked the start of spring but aside from the emerging snowdrops and early flowers, I really didn’t feel the earth warming up until late March.

  But Alston had decided to open up that morning and I was very grateful. There was the family of holidaymakers in one corner, poring over maps and guidebooks. And Billy waved at me from his table, and I waved back.