by James Rhodes
Hettford Witch Hunt
Easter Special
James Rhodes
Copyright 2013 by James Rhodes
SmashWords Edition
SmashWords Edition, This book is licensed for personal use only. You may freely distribute it as it appears in this edition. However you may not alter the text. You may not republish the work if the text, title or author name have been altered. James Rhodes worked hard to bring this edition to you at no cost. Please respect the work of the author.
This book appears as a supplement to the Hettford Witch Hunt Series. It can be enjoyed as a stand-alone piece but is best appreciated as part of the Hettford Witch Hunt Series. Series One of Hettford Witch Hunt is available for free on the SmashWords website or, for a small charge, from Amazon.
Hettford Witch Hunt by James Rhodes
Easter Special: The Mystery of the Eggs
Copyright James Rhodes 2013
Feel free to share this copy of Hettford Witch Hunt in its original format but please do not alter the title or text of the book.
1.
The woman shook her head at Gary. She wore an ill-fitting floral dress, the cleavage of which was pulled together with what looked like a shoe lace. A shoe lace that had been used previously, and extensively, on a pair of shoes. Gary noticed that she only had one front tooth.
“I’ve got ‘em,” she said defiantly.
“But you can always use more, it’s Easter tomorrow” Gary lifted his eyebrows and tried to force a smile.
“I don’t want any more eggs.”
“They’re only one pound ten.”
“I don’t want no eggs.”
Gary considered leaping on the double negative but the wrinkled, ugly and haggard frown of the woman deterred him from the effort.
“They’re good soft eating,” he suggested.
The door to the house slammed in his face. Gary’s shoulders slumped, he let his head fall backwards. With a deep sigh, Gary took hold of the pensioner style shopping basket that he had borrowed from the farmer to carry the eggs in. He wheeled it up and out of the grumpy woman’s garden. Then he moved on to the next house.
“Who knew sales was so exciting?” Gary muttered to himself.
With a sense of growing trepidation, Gary approached the next door. He had visited half the village and only sold six boxes. When he agreed to the, ten pence a box, commission rate Gary had reasoned that if he sold fifty boxes he would have enough money to buy bread, beans, frozen sausages and UHT milk; that would last him for the week. He had hoped to buy orange squash too, the value brand. If all else failed, he at least needed enough to buy a loaf of bread. As it stood, he was burning more calories than he was earning food to buy. He knocked on the door.
“Oh hello, Gary.”
Mrs. Fuller’s voice was brimming with enthusiasm and welcome. Gary had not spoken to Mrs. Fuller since she phoned him to retract a job offer as a part-time English teacher. Gary did not want her to see him selling free-range eggs at bargain prices. His feet filled with the instinct to flee, squirming inside of his trainers as he attempted to stand and face Mrs Fuller with dignity.
“Mrs. Fuller, would you like any eggs for Easter?” Gary asked.
“I’ve already got a fridge full, I’m afraid.”
“No problems.”
Gary turned to walk away.
“Are you working at the farm now?”
“No, just offered to sell some eggs,” Gary deliberately hid any revealing inflection from his tone.
“How’s the garage?”
“It’s still there.”
“Are you still getting a lot of late nights?”
“I suppose that depends on your definition of late.”
“What I mean is…”
Mrs. Fuller paused as she failed to find a tactful way to pose the question.
“This isn’t your only job is it?”
“Well, I handed in my notice at the garage so I’d be able to work at the school and, what with Hettford’s thriving economy; they had the position filled before I left.”
“So, are you signing on?”
“No, I just can’t bring myself to.”
“You shouldn’t be proud about it, that’s what it’s there for.”
There was no way that Gary could explain that he was physically unable to leave the boundaries of the village. That he could not reach the job centre in Bridgeford to sign on and that he was actually going to starve to death if he didn’t get money from somewhere. Gary suspected his confinement to the borders of Hettford was largely due to a demonic death curse and he definitely wasn’t about to start discussing that with one of the two women he held responsible for ruining his life. Instead, he said:
“These eggs won’t sell themselves.”
Gary walked quickly down Mrs. Fuller’s path and into the path of her next door neighbour. Mrs. Fuller did not go into the house, she watched him walk up to the door and then she called across the fence:
“How’s Alison?”
Gary eyed her sideways:
“We broke up,” he told her.
“But how is she?”
“She’s better than me, Mrs Fuller, always has been.”
“Would you like to come in for a sandwich?”
“I need to sell these eggs.”
“Come on, I’ve got a party platter made up for my family, it’ll only take a minute.”
“Right. That’s just adding insult to injury.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Oh, I’m Mrs. Fuller I’ve got too much food.”
Mrs. Fuller gaped at Gary with a blank mixture of concern and bemusement.
“What are you going to do?” Gary asked, “Wait till I’m all sat down with my plate in front of me and then remember that you forgot to make enough for Aunt Merthyl, then take it away from me.”
Gary wasn’t sure that Merthyl was a real name but it was out there now, so he was going to run with it.
“Oh here you go Aunt Merthyl.”
Gary mimed handing a plate over to an imaginary Aunt Merthyl.
“Gary gave up his one chance at eating so I could get you this sandwich.”
“I think you’re being a little unfair Gary,” Mrs Fuller spoke with the guarded diplomacy with which she would approach one of her teenage students.
“I’m being unfair, you’re sitting in a house piled from floor to ceiling with sandwiches and I’m being unfair!”
Gary threw his hands at the sky in sheer frustration.
“Sandwiches everywhere, but you don’t need any eggs do you? Unbelievable!”
He didn’t look back to check on Mrs. Fuller’s reaction.
2.
Dan’s large bottom was gaping out of the top of his shorts as he kneeled over to dig with his trowel. They had not been working for long and sweat was already beaded on the brows of both Dan and Milton. Milton was sat cross legged and twisting his greying bob with the fingers of his left hand. Both Milton and Dan were trying to catch a look at Carrie’s boobs whilst she bent over to dig in the earth Dan was trying to be covert about it.
“Are you sure this will work?” Milton asked.
“I' m not.” Dan answered.
“I wasn't asking you.”
“No, I'm not” Carrie told them both, “but it will work a lot better than doing nothing.”
“Ah yes,” said Dan, “but doing nothing is so much less work than this.”
The three of them were digging a small trench around the border of Milton's back garden.
“We have to be very careful about depth,” Carrie told them “the wa
ter has to keep moving.”
“This is an awful lot of work to go in order to avoid getting free eggs.”
Dan wiped his brow; he had dug a hole that was about four inches wide and seven inches long. It had been more effort than he had anticipated.
“Didn't you used to dig ditches in the Army?”
Milton was attempting to diffuse the coming argument between Carrie and Dan before it erupted.
“I did,” Dan told him, “but that was different. Back then I wasn't suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder from previously having been in the Army and forced to dig ditches.”
“You said you enjoyed the Army,” Carrie said.
“It was great, up until I shot that bloody cat.”
“What?” Carrie's voice brimmed with intrigue.
Dan ignored the question and carried on poking at the soil with his trowel. Carrie’s idea was that, as witches cannot cross running water, they could arrange a small drainage ditch so that the water trickled downwards in a rectangle around Milton's back garden. When it reached the beginning it would be siphoned back up to the top to maintain the constant flow. This was Carrie’s solution to the mysterious appearance of hen’s eggs in the run of Milton’s pet rooster.
If Dan had thought of the idea, he would have described it as an accomplishment of simple engineering to rival that of Xerxes bridging the Hellespont: He would have attacked the project with the conquering enthusiasm of a Macedonia imperialist. However, as Carrie had thought of it Dan was sulking, which, he reasoned, is probably what Alexander the great would have done too. He sullenly broke a layer of soil with his trowel whilst he thought of ways to distract the other two from the effort. As luck would have it, the opportunity presented itself almost immediately.
“I found another egg,” he told them.
3.
“You want me to buy eggs?”
“Well, I was asking if you’d like to.”
The man stared Gary hard in the face; his gnarled face had the intense ruggedness of an aging bare-knuckle boxer. There were scars above his top lip, his nose had been broken and left crooked. Furthermore, the man’s knuckles were each about the size of a normal man’s knee cap. Gary considered stepping backwards out of arm’s reach.
“If I wanted eggs, I’d go to the fucking supermarket and buy eggs.”
“Alright, I was only asking.”
The big man thought about it.
“What kind of eggs?”
“Hen’s eggs.”
“Hen’s eggs? I could get bloody hen’s eggs anywhere. I get all mine from the Reginald’s farm and they’re ten pence cheaper. I could understand if it were quail or duck or bleeding condor eggs. I’d buy them off you… But hen’s eggs?”
The man shook his head as if the thought defied imagination.
“They are free range.”
“Well, I guess that justifies you interrupting my film then, because the hens have been humanely treated.”
Gary nodded and the door slammed hard in his face.
He trudged down the man’s path and on to the next house, his stomach gurgled at him as if to ask, “Where do you think these calories are coming from?”
Gary considered walking back to Mrs. Fuller’s house, apologising and asking for a sandwich but he only considered it for a moment before his pride told his stomach to go piss up a rope.
4.
“I wouldn’t tell you that it was important if it wasn’t important.”
Dan was becoming frustrated.
“Listen Dan, if you don’t want to help with the trench can you at least stop interrupting the digging.”
Dan inhaled and the air fanned the flame of his reddening cheeks.
“How dare you question my motives?”
The indignity in Dan’s voice bordered on tearful, “when I say I have an important egg to look at, I mean I have an important egg.”
Carrie had decided to keep digging and stay out of the conversation.
“What could be so important about an egg?” Milton asked him.
“Well, if you’d give me enough credit to come and look at it then, maybe, you’d find out.”
Milton put down his trowel and walked over to Dan.
“You see,” said Dan, “it’s a funny size and it has a letter g in the pigment.”
Milton stared at it.
“It is odd.”
The egg was a pale white, its shell felt unusually delicate and sure enough it had a blemish on it that very much resembled the shape of a lower case g.
“G for Geraldine,” Dan told him.
“Are you suggesting that a witch went to the trouble of casting a spell so that her initial would appear on an egg shell, but that she couldn’t be bothered to capitalise it?” Milton asked.
“Pretty much,” shrugged Dan.
“All the eggs we’ve ever found in the garden, have all been normal hen’s eggs: Despite the fact that they seemed to be being laid by a rooster; and, despite the fact that on your insistence Carrie adopted the rooster to stop the eggs appearing and they still keep appearing. We’ve tested how many now?”
“We haven’t tested this one,” Dan protested.
“Which has a lower case g shape on it, maybe it stands for Gandalf.”
“Or, g for Gary.” Carrie piped in.
Dan’s face turned stern again:
“Perhaps this is Gary’s doing. All of it.”
“For the last time Dan,” Milton said, “passing on a piece of paper to somebody does not make you a witch.”
“Passing on a curse is witchcraft, and performing witchcraft makes you what? Milton?”
“In Gary’s case, it just makes you a bit stupid and desperate; he was trying to save me remember.”
Milton raised his eyebrows at Dan but Dan wasn’t about to back down on the issue of their estranged club member Gary.
“Whilst passing it on to someone he hated, who just by co-incidence died that same day.”
“Co-incidence is right,” Carrie interjected, “if it had been the curse Saul would have died at midnight.”
“Except he didn’t live that long.”
“Look Dan, Gary’s our friend and we’ve already banned him from meetings, which considering how badly the rest of his life is going feels, like a massive betrayal to me. I’m not going to accuse him of nefarious egg dumping also,”
Milton wiped the sweat from his brow. Carrie nodded at Milton, with a gentle half smile.
“In fact,” said Milton, “we can give him this as an Easter present to show, that even though he can’t be in the hunt, we’re all still friends.”
“Good idea,” Carrie agreed.
Dan blew air through his lips to suggest that he did not share their enthusiasm.
5.
As the unsuccessful morning passed into the unsuccessful afternoon, Gary’s stomach passed from nagging at him to producing extra acid in the effort to eat itself. After a particularly disheartening sales rejection from a brutally honest girl in her early teens Gary was feeling particularly disheartened and, not just with egg sales.
“Is this it?” she had asked him:
“Is this what your life is? Door to door egg sales?”
What do you say to that? He had wondered, but then she said.
“I’m not buying off you; it would be like enabling a junkie. You need to sort your life out mate.”
“That’s very easy for you to say,” Gary mumbled at the door that she closed on him.
He rubbed his stomach to sooth the ache and then glancing about, he looked at the eggs. There was bound to be some breakages, he reasoned. Then, and not without a sense of shame, Gary reached into the box at the top of his basket and took out an egg. He cracked it on the wall of a nearby house and leaning his head backwards, opened his mouth wide and let the raw egg drip into his mouth. It slid down his throat with surprising ease. It didn’
t quite hit the spot and after throwing the eggshell into the road, Gary reached for another and repeated the procedure.
“You must be starving mate.”
A voice from behind him said.
Gary turned around to see his former nemesis Paul smiling at him. Since the death of his brother Saul, Paul had let his hair grow out a little. Paul had the easy smile of someone who was genuinely pleased to find company. Gary was always pleased to see Paul because he was about the only person that Gary knew in Hettford who seem to judge him for Saul’s death.
“You’re a braver man than me,” Paul told him.
“I’m in training, like Rocky.”
“Grim, so is this your job then?” Paul asked him.
“What? Eating raw eggs?”
“No, selling them.”
“It’s just something I’m doing for Easter.”
“Cool,” Paul said, “well, I’m off to my job at the shop.”
Paul walked away with a happy spring in his step.
6.
“It’s Easter tomorrow.”
“So what?”
The man was neurotically thin, even thinner than Gary felt.
“So you might want some eggs for that.”
“Have you ever heard of Richard Dawkins?”
Gary let out a deflating sigh, as the air escaped so did any hope he had for making enough money to buy a loaf of bread. The man he was talking to wore a t-shirt that clung to his waifish physique. The t-shirt had a logo that Gary recognised as the Christian fish symbol; however it had been altered so that the fish had feet (presumably as a tribute to evolution).
“Look, I’m not here to discuss the existence of God I’m here to sell eggs.”
“It’s the same thing,” said the man “Jesus rose from the dead so everybody has to paint eggs and eat chocolate, I wonder, I wonder if you’ve ever really thought it through. I mean what real significance does it have to Christ’s passion?”
The man snorted derisively.
“It comes from the Zoroastrian New Year’s celebration, with the eggs representing new life. There is a vague tie in with the resurrection but the Catholic Church probably integrated with the Zoroastrian tradition and other pagan fertility rituals in order to help with conversion. However, I suppose most people do it because it’s fun. Do you want any fucking eggs? Or do I have to stand here discussing cultural anthropology with you until I starve to death.”