An Ignorant Witch

by E M Graham

  “So what was this agreement, Nan?” I didn’t have much time. I could feel the Alt taking a hold of me, a chill growing at the base of my spine. Like I said, you don’t want to spend too much time there, it can cause changes.

  “The berrypatch,” she said. “They agreed I could have that and they would never harm one of mine.”

  “Okay, but what were they getting out of this deal?” Despite my cool demeanour, I was impressed. This tough old bird had the nerve to go up against the fairies, she must have had elf blood in her, after all, or at least some kind of supernatural element in her genes.

  “Never mind that.”

  “Come on, you expect me to believe this? The fae would never make an agreement with a mere human unless they thought they were getting a better bargain.”

  She was reluctant to tell me, but I eventually got it out of her.

  “I would send them the odd ne’er-do-well,” she admitted. “The ones no one would miss anyway. The drunks, and the murderers, and the ones who diddled with little kiddies. I was doing my bit in cleaning up the town.” She stuck out her chin and looked me in the eye, daring me to judge.

  Nan Hoskins had been a one-woman vigilante team and all for the sake of a few berries. No wonder her very name had struck terror in the hearts of the locals. Too many people must have disappeared after she ‘had a word’ with them.

  And possibly, just possibly, the fairies had been confused when they found Benjy on the hill wandering too close to their hall, with the smell of drugs in his body and the stink of sin on his soul. They might have thought Nan had sent him there, a present from beyond the grave.

  Still, he had to be rescued.

  “Can you go up there, Nan? Explain to them that it was a mistake, that he’s one of yours?”

  She looked at me, all the fire gone from her ghostly visage. “I’m dead, so you say. I can’t leave this house.”

  “Can you at least try?”

  “You think I haven’t?” she snapped at me. “You think I want to be stuck in this house with that god awful TV going all the time?”

  Nan Hoskins shook her head then continued in a broken voice. “It costs too much for me to leave the house. Won’t do it.”

  “What can I do, then? Tell me, because I really haven’t got a clue.”

  She sat all hunched over, her mouth screwed up. “You’d have to give them something in exchange. Someone. Or make another bargain with them. That’s the only way of it.”

  Great. I’d have to become a fairy pimp in order to save Alice’s asshole brother. Not happening.

  She sighed and looked about her. “I knew something was wrong, just knew it. But that idiot family of mine, they wouldn’t pay attention. Too stunned, every single one of them.”

  “Well, they think Sal brought a poltergeist into the house,” I said. “On account of her age and her angst. They were going to bring in a priest to exorcise you.”

  “A Catholic priest? In my house?”

  I nodded, but I was inwardly wincing. I may have said the wrong thing. Back in her time, there had been strife between the two denominations of the Christian church, the Catholics and Protestants, and sometimes violence too. These prejudices died hard.

  “By the Lord jumpin’ Jesus!” With this the storm began again, the wind rising and whirling the papers and books which had been tidied, and whipping the drawn curtains up and shaking loose the accumulated dust and cat fur. I slipped out of Alt, and then out of the house, leaving Alice and Sal to deal with the rage of Nan Hoskins themselves.

  I couldn’t do what Nan had done. There had to be another way.

  Could I go up there and reason with them? Use logic with the fairies, like that would ever work.

  Not that evening at any rate. I was so bushed I couldn’t pedal the short distance up Old Topsail Road, and ended up pushing the bike home. I just couldn’t see myself leading poor drunks and addicts up the path to the fairy hell, so the only advice I had been given wasn’t acceptable.

  OR WAS IT? Didn’t Nan Hoskins mention the possibility of making another bargain with the fae before she went off the deep end at the thought of a Roman Catholic priest in her house?

  But what could I offer that the fairies would ever want? I had to go back to the books and dig a little deeper into the folklore.

  The closest at hand was in the old library in the house. All these ancient leather-bound books had been kept safe behind the built-in glass-fronted book shelves for years and years, and the entire wall was covered by them. I remembered a particularly thick volume which was dedicated to Victorian thoughts on the little people which might help a bit.

  Lying on my bed that evening I had the music from Aunt Edna’s old ghetto blaster on bust. Yeah, really retro, right? But that old AudioLogic was a bomb, the best sound ever for all those eighties and nineties CDs in the family collection. David Bowie might be my favorite, followed closely by Freddie Mercury. Well, but that all depended on the day, didn’t it?

  Edna was gone out with Mark so I figured I could play the music as loud as I liked.

  Anyway, I got totally lost in that old book, full of secondhand tales of visits with the fairy folk. They were really high maintenance neighbors apparently, if you had the bad luck to live near a den of them. They were always spying so you couldn’t badmouth them or even speak the truth about them behind their backs or they’d do something dreadful to your children and your cow. And you always had to refer to them as Ladies and Gentlemen, or the Fair Folk, even though they were nothing of the kind. A shiver ran down my spine as I remembered the wording of Benjy’s text.

  I was so engrossed in this, it must have taken a while for Maundy’s pounding on the walls to make its way through my consciousness. Talk about high maintenance neighbors.

  “Stop that racket!”

  Jesus, she was a ghost, she could tune it out if was bothering her so much, and I told her so.

  “The vibrations are killing me!”

  “So come in here and turn it off,” I yelled back at her. At which point she began her heavy sobbing routine for she never, never left that room and nobody understood her.

  We eventually agreed on some cheerful Buddy Holly and rockabilly. At least she didn’t subject me to the hits of the 1890’s or whenever it was she lived. She was a weird ghost.

  It didn’t take me long to dive back into it, but the next time I heard knocking I got really pissed off.

  “What is it now?” I yelled out, but almost jumped off the bed when the door opened.

  It was Hugh. How the hell did he get in?

  8

  THE BACK DOOR WAS unlocked,” he said. “I did knock and ring the bell. Hope you don’t mind.”

  Mind? I was floored. The sight of him all tall and exotic, still in his faded blue jeans and scuffed leather jacket, his dark hair tousled. He had a motorcycle helmet under his arm to complete the drop dead gorgeous pose.

  But like the Fair Folk, he was completely false. A witch in half-blood’s clothing, so to speak because anyone who hung out at Dad’s house was no friend of mine. I turned my back on him and stared at the headboard.

  “Why are you here?”

  “Just wanted to have a chat.”

  A chat. Right. He must have told Dad, who sent him here to tell me I had to leave town. He wasn’t fooling me. I kept my back to him.

  “Yes, that is correct, but only partly. It’s a good idea for you to go away. You need to.” He winced as a new song began to racket through the room, and reached over to turn the music down.

  I needed to help free Benjy, but mostly I needed to learn to clamp down my mind away from this witch. I hadn’t spoken those words aloud, he had bloody well been inside my head and... and seen, or heard my thoughts, or something like that. How dare he? Why did he think he had the right to be so invasive? This guy was good – too good surely for the half-blood he claimed to be. Only a full witch could read minds so easily. Frigging witches, they were all so arrogant.

  And I tried to
block my thoughts from him, I pushed around in my mind, looking to see where the breach was and how to close it off. I don’t know how I did it, it was like drawing a thick iron curtain all around to shield my head, I guess it was more instinctive than anything.

  “Sorry, I didn’t catch what you think you really need to do. And I must say, you’re a really fast learner,” he said, pretending to admire my skill, but I knew he was just trying to butter me up for reasons of his own. The Kin are like that, so false in every way. “Good defensive blocking. This your first time you’ve ever done that? A little rough in the delivery, but you show great promise.”

  I whipped my head around and glared at him. He didn’t need to patronize me on top of it all.

  “So your father and I, we were talking about you, hope you don’t mind.”

  “You told Dad about the other day?”

  “No, he brought up the question of you, actually. And I agree with him, I think it would be good for you to go away, perhaps to my island for the winter? That would be a great start. A fantastic opportunity for you, really, but I didn’t tell him that.”

  “What, spend all winter in the Outer Hebrides? That’s so far north, the sun doesn’t shine for months. You have got to be kidding me.”

  “It’s not quite that bleak, but on the other hand, the Aurora Borealis is stunning.”

  I didn’t know how long I could keep this mind block up – I guess those muscles were weak from never having been used. I needed to get rid of him so I could think in private.

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “Really?” Hugh looked surprised, but in a pleased sort of way. “It is important, not just for your safety. You’ll find it a different world there.”

  Yeah, a cold world, ten times worse than this world right here in St. John’s. As if.

  “Alright,” I lied. “Now go, I have work to do.”

  He looked with interest at the old book lying open on the bed. “What’s that you’re reading then?”

  I tried to block his view with my arm. “Just some stuff for a folklore course I’m doing.”

  “Fairies?” His eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Please tell me this is theoretical work. Your father mentioned a run in you had... You’re not equipped to handle those folk.”

  This was so not his business. “You think I’m nuts? I’m not going near them.”

  He was quiet for a moment – I couldn’t feel him probing my mind but I wasn’t about to relax my defences. Then he nodded decisively. “All right. The sooner we get you out of here the better.”

  We? He was working with Dad, he was, which meant he wasn’t on my side, no matter how much he pretended.

  “See you later. Don’t slam the door on your way out.” And I turned my back on him again.

  After a moment I heard his footsteps on the stair, then from a distance the sound of the back door closing. I jumped up and ran to the bathroom at the back of the house to watch him depart on the motorcycle. Man he looked good on that Harley, good enough to eat.

  But then he ruined it by looking right up at me and waving good bye. Bloody witches.

  OF COURSE I’D BEEN lying about my plans to not visit the fairy hall, and I had a feeling he knew it too. But I had a full day of classes Monday and besides it was wet out, so there was no clambering around the Southside Hills for me that day.

  Nothing scheduled for Tuesday, though, at least nothing I couldn’t skip, so that day I rode my bike down to the lighthouse and climbed back up the hill. I suppose it would have been faster to cut up through Alice’s back yard and find my way from there, but I couldn’t chance having her with me again. I needed to do this alone, and I needed all my wits about me which I couldn’t do if I had to go hauling her out of the crevice again.

  It was a good thing she forgot to bring the berry pail back with her the other day, because that was my only marker to the fairy hall. Up here on the barrens, all the hillocks looked the same.

  I sat on the rocks outside and debated which was the best way to go about finding them. I sure didn’t want to have to go back down inside there, the smell was bad enough out here.

  All the folklore said that to avoid alerting the fairies to your presence, you should never say their name, instead refer to them as the ‘Good Folk’ or some other misleading misnomer. So it should be easy enough to grab someone’s attention.

  “Fairies! Hey, fairies, anyone around?”

  Not a peep. Were they all asleep? It was chilly up there on the hillside, and I wrapped Mom’s scarf around me tighter.

  How did fairies cope with our winters, anyway? I assumed they had come over from England and Wales, way back when, and those countries had much better weather than Newfoundland. Hey, the frigging moon had a better climate than this place. But really, in England, they didn’t have as much snow or ice or freezing winds, so how had the fairies adjusted? Did they hibernate like the bears did?

  If one of them ever showed their faces outside the crevice, I might get a chance to find out.

  “Hey! Anyone there? Yo, fairies, I need to speak with you.” Still nothing. Had I imagined the whole scene the other day? If they were waiting for me to go see them in their den, they were out of luck.

  “Stupid asshole fairies anyway,” I muttered. I was getting sick of this game.

  But at least that did the trick. When I looked up, a fine gent stood before me, dressed in velvets and silks with slippers that curled up at the ends. He stood not more than two feet high, but placed on the rock above where I sat, he still managed to look down his nose at me.

  I knew this would be tricky, and I was prepared. In order to block any enchantment which might seep through my defenses, I had to keep one foot, or eye, in Alt, while the other remained fully in the physical. Sort of straddling two worlds, so to speak, but with nothing to anchor me. It was best done while wearing shades, so Mom’s round John Lennon retro sunglasses remained firmly on my nose.

  Yes, I admit it, I wore a lot of Mom’s old stuff, for a few reasons. The main one was to keep her close to me, to keep her alive. The other was that she had really cool, classic taste and I was now just about the same size she was when she disappeared.

  “What manner of half-breed is this who speaks so contemptuously of my race?”

  Frig this little shit and his pretensions. He was a nasty dirty fairy and had no reason for putting on airs. I cut to the chase.

  “I want Benjy back. Let him go.”

  He trilled a little silvery laugh, but the Alt side of me could hear the wet wheezes in his lungs. He was an old one, then, or at least not well. He stroked his unwhiskered chin as he thought.

  “Benjy, Benjy... Let me see. No, I don’t think we have a Benjy here.”

  “You do too, you liar, I saw him in your hall the other day.”

  The facade slipped a little, and the stink was tremendous. “That was you?”

  “Yep. I saw him, and I saw what you were doing to him.”

  “Oh, of course, Benjamin, I remember now. Such a delightful playmate.” He was all sickly sweetness and light again. He bent down to whisper at me. “I think he’s having too much fun to leave. Why don’t you come down and speak with him? Maybe you’d like to join in with the play? You’ve always liked Benjamin that way, haven’t you Dara?”

  How the hell he knew my name and my past crush, I’ll never know.

  “No, not happening,” I told him. “Look, I think you made a mistake taking him down your suck-hole. He’s one of Nan Hoskins’s crowd. She is really pissed at you guys.”

  “Why, how interesting! And why hasn’t dear Nan Hoskins come to speak to me directly, herself?”

  I opened my mouth to answer, but he did it for me.

  “Because she’s dead,” he hissed. “She’s dead so the contract is over. I owe her nothing.”

  “She’s still here though, at her house anyway,” I said. “People are still avoiding the berry patch and your hall just on the strength of ingrained fear of her, dead or not.”

>   “Did she tell you she was protecting us?” He laughed that horrible cut-glass trill again. “Too amusing for words, my dear.”

  This was my first inkling that I was fighting for a losing cause. Did that old bat Hoskins actually lie to me? Perhaps the terms of the agreement were not what she had specified.

  He saw my doubt and raised the stakes. “We’ve hardly had any new blood for a good twenty years,” he growled at me. “Our Benjamin is all the sweeter to us for that, and we’d be loath to see him go.”

  “Look, I don’t know what sort of bargain I can make with you in exchange for Benjy. I’m not going to supply you with more unsuspecting humans, no matter how degraded they are or deserving of the hell you can offer them.” Yes, I was as desperate as I sounded by this point.

  “So she didn’t tell you the real terms of the contract?”

  “Obviously not.” I hated being at this disadvantage. “But she did say I could strike some sort of other bargain with you. Who are you anyway?”

  “I am Oberon.” He drew himself up another half inch and his velvet robes sparkled with diamonds in the sunlight.

  Oberon. I vaguely remembered the name from high school English class, and then it came to me. Of course, our Shakespeare studies. I laughed in his face.

  “No you’re not! The king of all fairies wouldn’t be living in this shithole of a rock in Newfoundland in the middle of the Southside barrens and so close to the salt ocean. What’s your real name?”

  This let the air out of his tire.

  “You can call me Thursk,” he said.

  So he wasn’t going to tell me his real name – fair enough. There’s a lot of power in a name.

  “Well, Thursk,” I said, trying to get my tongue around the unfamiliar sound. “You know my position in the matter. I want Benjy back, and I’m prepared to do something in return for you, but only within reason.”

  “What could I possibly want from you that I couldn’t get myself?”

  “I don’t know, but you should think hard before I get the de Teilhard witches on your case.”