The Witching Hour (The Witches Pendragon Mystery Series Book 1)

by Sarff, Julie

  “I don’t think that you have,” I reply matter-of-factly.

  “What?” His voice rises a little as he grips the bars looking like Jack Nicholson in that frightful horror movie we watched a couple of weeks ago, the red light still streaming from around his body.

  “If you murdered Hugo, tell me how you did it?”

  “What do you mean ‘if?’ Of course I did it. I did it as a sacrifice to…”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah, to Satan,” I say and fake a yawn.

  “Prove it, tell me the details,” I continue.

  Etienne looks confused. “You want details? What are you some kind of Satan-worshipper wannabe?”

  “No, that’s what you are. You didn’t kill, Hugo, did you? Now you’re going to go to prison for something you didn’t do. All so you can impress a bunch of bored kids. Pierre told me he talked to some of your teachers from high school on the phone this morning. Found out you were always trying to grab attention when you were younger.”

  “You witch!” he bellows.

  “Ooh, if only you knew what a compliment that was.”

  “You stupid cow, you’re crazy.”

  As he’s saying this, I pull my pointy hat out of the large bag I’ve brought and place it proudly on my head.

  “You guessed it, I am a full-fledged witch –pledged to Eostre herself. And now I will channel her powers and turn you into a mushroom, a nice, clear Shreem Shroom, unless you tell me what I came to learn.” I stare at my cuticles, as if very bored.

  Etienne lunges at me through the bars. For a moment his aura is even stronger, glowing bright red, and I wonder if this is the right course of action.

  I sputter the only incantation I know in Latin. It’s supposed to make the victim feel heavy and start to lose control of their limbs. They are supposed to feel like they are turning to stone. Unfortunately, I really have no idea how to turn anyone into a mushroom or any other type of fungus. I wish I did. Yet sadly for me, I’ve only practiced this stone-limb hex exactly once and that was on a fellow witch from the Forest Fosse. Her limbs didn’t get heavy at all, but she went quite cross-eyed. Hatha said my Latin pronunciation was poor and that’s why I couldn’t get the hex right. I was so distressed at making a fellow witch go permanently cross-eyed, I refused to ever repeat the words to the hex, until now.

  Behind the bars Etienne glares at me. “Is your Latin mumbling supposed to scare me?”

  “Nooo…but I might….” wails a disembodied voice, as Hugo comes gliding through the cell-block wall right on cue.

  My ghost, my hero! I throw Hugo a grateful smile and cheekily he materializes just enough to wink at me from behind Etienne’s back.

  “Mon dieu!” Etienne cries as Hugo glides right through him. By the look on his face, I do believe the would be goat killer is going to wet himself.

  “Gh-gh…” Etienne stammers, trying to get the words out.

  “I do believe the word you are looking for is ghost. Yes, this is the ghost of the man you murdered. He has returned to pay you the same favor.”

  “Muur-duur,” Hugo wails. Sing it loud and proud, o’ brother of mine, I think to myself and throw him an encouraging grin.

  Etienne falls to his knees. “I-I didn’t do it. It wasn’t me. I swear, I made it up. My followers needed to believe in me. They were beginning to defect. When I heard about Hugo, I knew that claiming to kill him would bring them back to me.”

  “So…you did all this to become some kind of cult leader? That’s really sick…You were going to murder an innocent goat for no reason other than to make yourself look like some kind of Grand Poobah of Satanism?

  “Muur-durr goooaaaattt,” Hugo wails, laying it on a bit thick.

  “Shut up in there, I’m trying to sleep,” the wino in the other cell block shouts.

  “I wasn’t going to really kill it. I knew they would all flee at that point. They’re a bunch of spoiled, university brats who were just seeking a thrill. I saved that goat, stole him from the slaughter yard.”

  “The slaughter yard? That’s ridiculous, who would eat a goat? Now, are you telling me that you did not kill Hugo?”

  The ghost hovers over Etienne, who is still on his knees, his eyes tightly shut. He’s terrified. And this is the man who just last night was trying to summon Satan himself? My goodness, what if he had actually conjured the dark forces? He would have fallen over dead from shock.

  “I swear I didn’t kill him. I swear. I was nowhere near the Parc Leonardo on the night Hugo was murdered.”

  “Muur durr,” Hugo starts in again, and both I and the man from the other cell snap at the ghost to shut up.

  “You are one very sick man. You were willing to take a murder wrap in order to look like a big wig. You need to be locked up in a mental institution.”

  With that I put my hat back in my bag, stand up and pick up both my bag and the chair.

  “Good bye, Etienne. Hugo, I’m sure I’ll meet up with you later. For now, I’ve got some work to do. It looks like I am starting over on this murder case, but not to worry, I shall find justice in this violent world.”

  “Here-here!” the drunk in the next cell claps. Hugo disappears quickly as I walk back down the hallway, leaving the quivering mass that is Etienne alone in his cell to reflect on his evil ways.

  Chapter 19 (Elfie)

  One can only play so many rounds of lawn tennis before one grows quite bored. We aren’t on holiday, we’re supposed to be catching a ghost, but things never go our way. It’s been five days, and Camille and I have yet to see or hear the appearance of anything paranormal.

  During the days, we while away the time with Claire-Elaine. Camille was smart enough to bring her embroidery and she has gloriously reproduced Chateau Trisse on tapestry with a thousand tiny French knots. She also embroidered portraits of all its inhabitants, including the ten hunting hounds. Camille is every bit as bored as me. We witches were not meant for the idle life.

  “Shall we play another round, Elfie?” Claire-Elaine asks. I wave her off. I didn’t bring many clothes, and trying to play tennis in my long black robe is exhausting.

  “I’ll give it a go,” Camille flutters, staring up from her embroidery. “Why not? The sun has returned and it’s warmed up considerably. This is probably the last decent day for tennis until next spring.”

  I really don’t think Camille should play. The woman is so tall that with a racket in hand, she could accidentally swat birds out of the sky.

  “Tally-ho,” she calls, for no reason whatsoever. Claire-Elaine looks confused by her words, but performs a mean serve, sending the tennis ball whizzing over the net. Camille, awkward in her black robe, swings but misses the ball entirely.

  “Just a warm up, just a warm up,” she cries. I can see the uncertainty on Claire-Elaine’s face as she stands on the other side of the court in a starched white short skirt and polo shirt. Nonetheless, the petite woman serves again. This time Camille makes contact with the ball, smashing it so hard that it sails over Claire-Elaine out of the court and into the woods.

  “Goodness!” our hostess exclaims, startled by Camille’s strength.

  “I’ll get it.” I bound out of my seat, leaving behind a smattering of magazines that I have been reading while sitting at a small bistro table sipping my morning tea. Feeling happy to have something to do, I scour the ground with my eyes as I enter the woods and search for the ball.

  “No, no leave it, Elfie. I have others,” Claire-Elaine protests, but I just turn around and give her a carefree shrug before heading deeper into a stand of alder trees.

  With my bad sense of direction and the heavily overgrown forest, I never find the ball. Worse yet, it only takes me twenty minutes before I realize I’m quite lost. With all the poplars, pines, sycamores, oaks, and alders, everything in the forest behind Chateau Trisse begins to look the same. I become genuinely concerned when I realize I have passed the same outcropping of rocks three times.

  “I’m going in circles.” I splutter, feeling
freaked that this is not the first time such a thing has happened. Once, when I was only nineteen, I got lost in the Feral Forest. I was on milking duty when a lively black and white calf escaped the pen. Of course I chased after it into the forest. Where the trees haven’t been thinned by us witches, the Feral Forest harbors horrible creatures. As already mentioned, it is full of fassals, peffer-footers, and other things that’d sooner swallow you as look you in the eye. I was lost in the blackness of those trees for three days, sure that I would either die from exposure or be eaten by some hideous, man-eating azalea.

  One night, after going in circles for hours, I fell asleep, dehydrated and exhausted. My mind floated out of my body and up into the universe. Figuratively, that is. Anyway I’m not quite sure how long I lay there at one with the stars. Then, from betwixt two trees, a flash of something brought me out of my reverie; I saw a faint light and I was sure I was dead. The light grew closer and closer.

  “Take me, I’m ready,” I said, and it was true. At the ripe old age of 19, I had made peace with my maker.

  “Death? No, not today,” a voice boomed, and the light extinguished itself. A face pressed down close to mine. It was chiseled and wizened with age, and the wrinkles on its face represented the wisdom of a life well-led.

  “Not today, Elithra, my dear. You shall die someday, but not today. You are far too young,” Merllyd said. He picked me up as if I weighed nothing, carrying me back to camp. Hatha attended to me immediately and when I came to, I realized the light I had seen had emanated from the crystal globe that sat at the end of the wizard’s walking stick.

  Darn if I couldn’t use that light now. Darn if I wouldn’t be ecstatic to be rescued once again by Master Merllyd.

  “And you call yourself a witch of the forest,” I chide myself and sit down on a large stump. When I glance down, I let out a chuckle. Right there at my feet is the tennis ball. It has collapsed in on itself, probably from the impact of Camille’s mean swing. I bend down to pick it up when suddenly I hear a voice.

  It sounds like the Count, but that couldn’t be, he went up to Paris today for work.

  “I told you to lay low,” the Count hisses.

  I hear a woman whisper something back. I can’t quite make it out. Her tone sounds pleading.

  “You could have ruined everything. You’re ridiculous and I want you to stop. As it is I can’t get those idiot nuns out of my house. Claire-Elaine seems to have claimed them as pets. She’s so desperate to have others in the house now that I’ll never get them to leave. If that old one comes back, spewing Latin, I swear I’ll hit her over the head with a shovel…”

  I gasp.

  “What was that?” the Count hisses.

  “Honestly, I don’t know,” a woman’s voice replies sharply. I’m so disoriented that I can’t tell from which direction her voice is coming.

  I jump up from my stump and head towards the great outcrop of rocks, searching for some place to hide. Finding a crack between two rocks, I wedge myself into it, hoping against hope that the Count and whomever he’s talking to won’t see me.

  That’s when a giant spider falls from the rock onto my head. I gasp again, and brush it off. At that moment the unthinkable happens, the Count emerges from a large hole in the ground, a hole that is between the rocks where I am standing. My goodness, is that where the figures were hiding? What are the chances of that?

  Obviously, he spots me and my heart stops. Then the chase is on. I spring from my ill-chosen hiding spot and run like the prey that I am.

  Chapter 20 (Noelle)

  Trying to interrogate a ghost is a futile affair. Hugo is so clueless about his murder that I wonder if he didn’t die of blunt force trauma rather than being slashed in the throat.

  Alright, that’s crude, but after trying to talk to him about the circumstances surrounding his death and getting nowhere for an entire hour, I give up and close up shop. I still don’t know how he knew that Etienne wasn’t the murderer given his vagueness about everything, but I guess a ghost instinctively knows when the right person has been caught.

  Exiting onto the street, I pull my warm woolen coat around me and open my lovely red-and-white polka dot umbrella. A heavy rain sets in and I watch the last leaf from the nearby oak tree swirl to the ground as I turn down the Quai de Marais.

  Tonight I stride up the street with purpose. If I don’t move fast enough, I won’t make it on time.

  The hospital on the outskirts of Amboise is in a dark and ugly structure that was thrown up in the 1960’s with little regard to classic architecture. Perfect squares of yellow light emit from its windows, somehow adding to its menacing look. Its door resembles a tiny mouth and the whole awful edifice strikes me as a garish face with over a hundred eyes.

  I enter the main lobby, with its deteriorating concrete floor, and hurry past the nurse on duty who shouts at me that visiting hours are over in half an hour. Climbing the steps two at a time, I then hasten down the hall. I am about to swing open the door to Manon’s room when I hear a voice –a man’s voice– coming from her room.

  Who on Eostre’s Great Green Earth is in there with her?

  I stop in my tracks and do something Hatha wouldn’t approve of –I stick my ear to the door. Wait a minute…the voice is not deep enough to be a man’s, rather it sounds like a teenager. Is this the young man with whom Manon has reportedly gone walking in the woods?

  From the other side of the door, it sounds as if the teenager is crying. “There, there, now, it will be alright…” Manon soothes.

  I can’t believe it. Is it true that our tiny, mouse-like Manon is…is having some sort of relations with this boy? Of all of the people to be swayed by masculine ways, I would have never thought it would be quiet, sensible Manon. And a relation with a teenager, no less. I’m pretty sure there’s a law against that.

  It’s all so very strange that it makes me shake my head. Dating is something we witches don’t do.

  Well, come to think of it, back in the Forest Fosse, Eleanor of Jarrow ran off with a snake oil salesman. Hatha was most disappointed about that. But Hendra gleefully reported that Eleanor got her comeuppance by having four children in five years, to which Hatha replied that children were a blessing and not a payback for bad behavior.

  And exactly why am I thinking about Eleanor of Jarrow at a time like this? I don’t know. I press my head tightly to the door, hoping to hear more.

  “Why don’t you just go in? That way you can hear the whole conversation,” someone says to me.

  Startled, I turn around to see the most handsome man I’ve ever met in my life. He has black hair that falls in curls, and his eyes are a deep emerald. He has the strongest, sharpest cheek bones that look as if they could be used to chisel a masterpiece out of marble. My stomach does a summersault.

  “I wasn’t eavesdropping,” I stammer. “I was just listening to see if they were done talking, I didn’t want to interrupt.”

  “Uh-huh,” the man muses. Only then do I notice he’s a doctor. I never really made it passed his angelic face to take him all in. He’s wearing a white lab coat, tan pants and has a flip chart in his hands.

  “Well, I need to visit my patient. Perhaps we should go in together,” he says and puts a hand on the doorknob.

  “N-no, I don’t think that would be a good idea,” I sputter, but it’s too late, the doctor turns the knob and strides right in.

  I stand in the hall, thinking about making a break for it.

  “Come on in, Madam,” the doctor motions to me, “I’m sure Manon is up for one more visitor.”

  I slink in sheepishly. This is one of the most awkward scenes I have ever witnessed. Manon doesn’t meet my eye. The young man she’s been talking to backs into a corner, as if he hopes nobody notices him. And the doctor? Well, the doctor seems to find everyone’s behavior quite amusing. A smirk appears on his face as if he has just caught the three of us behaving badly. He’s not wrong. He has caught the three of us behaving badly. He caught me eavesdropp
ing and who knows what he caught Manon and this…this…pimple-faced teenager doing when he opened the door.

  The doctor rocks back on his heels and unhooks his pen from his clipboard. Feeling self-conscious with so many visitors, Manon pulls her bedsheet tight around her body.

  “Good news, Manon, you’ve been here for five days and I think if all goes well, tomorrow you may go home,” he says and scribbles something on her charts.

  “That is good news,” Manon whispers quietly, staring down at her hands before looking up to meet me straight in the eyes.

  “What were you doing standing out in the hall, Noelle?” she asks.

  “I was just about to come in,” I begin.

  “She was eavesdropping,” states the doctor.

  My jaw drops, I can’t believe this man ratted me out.

  “I was not, I was just coming down the hall and was about to knock…”

  “She had her ear pressed to the door.”

  Hex him, vex him, turn him to pie, I chant in my head, suddenly so infuriated I feel a hotness in my cheeks.

  It’s not a very nice nursery rhyme. Hatha doesn’t approve of it, she says it helps feed unhealthy stereotypes about witches. Still every little girl growing up in the woods knows it. And, incidentally, I have learned some modern day nursery rhymes that are not so nice either. Like the one where the man puts his wife in a pumpkin shell and there he keeps her very well. What is that all about?

  “Is that true?” asks Manon, beads of sweat forming on her brow, her paper gown rustling as she fidgets. My goodness, why is she so nervous? What is going on between her and this young man?

  “Oh well, just briefly. I heard you talking to someone and didn’t want to interrupt,” I murmur and stare up at the ceiling as if this is a very boring line of conversation.

  “You had your head pressed to the door for the entire time I walked down the hall,” the doctor continues with a smirk.

  That’s it! I spew Latin.

  “Noelle, don’t!” Manon cries.

  Oops, I didn’t even really realize I was doing it, I was just so enraged that this man wouldn’t shut up.