by Tess Lake
There were other bits of paper and things stuck to the wall, including a map of Harlot Bay where I had started making notations indicating where strange things had occurred or murders had taken place. If anyone were to see this, I'm sure they would think I was crazy which is why I thought of it as my crazy wall. I had marked on it where Preston Jacobs, working with or under the control of a supernatural entity, had killed a competitor for the Butter Festival. I had the locations where a little girl Holly and her dad were murdered; places where fires had taken place; sabotage on a movie set; thefts under the control of an entity named Slink that my mother had locked away; and finally the Shadow Witch, the evil witch from the deep past who had attempted to steal Kira Stern's body using most of my life force to do it.
I'd even been back through some of the histories of Harlot Bay and marked up other things on the map. The one location that was missing was the creepy mansion that was out on Truer Island.
Molly, Luce and I had found a map in a hidden room under the Torrent mansion. The room had had a spell upon it - when we had walked in, it appeared new, but the moment we had touched anything, it had transformed to old as though centuries of aging had caught up with it in an instant. There had been a diary in the room which had turned to dust, but there had also been a map which had survived. It had led us out to an empty field on Truer Island where hidden behind an enormously powerful concealment spell, there was a mansion that looked very similar to our Torrent mansion. We'd gone inside to discover a backpack full of food and wine sitting by a dinner table set out for three. We'd been shuffling our way deeper into the mansion, heading for some stairs that led downwards, when I had glanced at my cousins and saw red crowns of light around their heads, indicating that they, and me, were under the influence of a spell. I pulled us out of there, and we had only barely escaped. The moment we were away from the creepy mansion we were free of the spell, and so we had bolted. We quickly discovered after that that we could not find our way back to the mansion, that it had become hidden from us once more.
All I had up on the wall was a note: there is a creepy magical house on Truer Island.
Looking at the crazy wall was certainly an exercise in trying not to go mad. I had bought color-coded wool and tried to set up a categorization system. Things marked in red meant it was supernatural; things in black meant someone had died; things in yellow meant the Stern witches were involved, yellow being the color of lemons they grew out on their farm. But my system was struggling under the weight of everything that I'd put up on the wall. There had been murders, arson, thefts, and these were just the things that the Torrent witches had been directly involved in. Aunt Cass had fought some strange monster out on Truer Island, and when she defeated it, there had been an explosion so large it had detonated a gigantically deep hole about half a mile across which the authorities, unaware that magic had been involved, had blamed on a hidden gas pocket exploding.
I had even marked up on the wall where and when I'd slipped and then what had happened to me, as far as I could remember.
When I had decided a while ago that I would need a lair just like Aunt Cass so I could sit and investigate, I hadn't imagined that I would find one so easily and then that it would become a place I was both strangely attracted to and oddly repelled from. Up behind the Torrent mansion generations of Torrents had built things and then abandoned them. There were countless wells around the place, some of them full to the brim and croaking with frogs, and others bone dry. Some of them Aunt Cass and I used to help reduce the chance that we might slip, going out to boil water (after getting all the frogs out of course) and trying to float rocks around and things like that. There were numerous cottages built around the place, some of them little more than a square of stones, an outline of a building that once stood, others in ruinous states of decay with collapsed walls, and some still standing and whole.
It was in one of these that I had set up my lair, finding a cottage that was still in somewhat good condition. It was built of stones bonded together with a thick mortar and inside had a wood fire stove, a long wooden bench, and a small window on each side of the cottage. It was surprisingly well insulated but if I wanted to be in there when it was cold all I had to do was throw a chunk of wood into the stove and start it burning and the cottage would heat up quickly. Because it was largely empty I was able to fill the entire wall with the great mess of crazy. I had expanded onto the other wall with notes about John Smith, Talica Moore, his acapella costume, and anything else I could remember, such as the fact I'd seen John wearing a red crown of light as well that had streaked down to a wound on his chest.
I took my gaze off the wall and walked over to the small desk and chair that I had hauled out there and sat down. I tried to make myself focus on the research that Ollie had provided me, but I was failing badly. Part of me knew it was simply the dry nature of the research, the list of names of people from the past, but there was another part of me deeper down that suspected it was the spell pushing against me.
A while ago I'd gone to see Hattie Stern, who I'd discovered had been carrying a note around in her pocket that had written on it: Harlow Torrent has a spell cast upon her. Help her. Hattie had made me promise that I would visit her so we could work on this problem and I had indeed promised her but then… I had broken that promise. It's not that I hadn't tried. The first time I attempted to go out there, although I felt embarrassed and stupid as though she didn't want me there, I had managed to get halfway to her house before my car broke down. That little ordeal had cost me a chunk of money out of my bank account that I couldn't afford and by the time it was resolved, I'd forgotten that I'd even been going to Hattie's in the first place. The next time I had remembered that I was going to go out there the front door to the mansion had become inexplicably stuck and when I heaved on it I ripped the doorknob out of the door. That had necessitated more spending of money to buy a new door, but thankfully it hadn't been so bad because Jack, my handyman boyfriend, had come round to install it for us. Since then it had crossed my mind a few times that I should visit Hattie but it was only ever a fleeting thought.
I forced myself to look back at the wall. I had a single note card up there that said Juliet Stern's journal. Hattie had given it to me and at first glance, it appeared to be a mundane journal of the workings of the Merchant Arms. Most of the entries were about the number of eggs she bought and pounds of flour and ingredients for making beer but hidden amongst them, and sometimes appearing and disappearing, were notes Juliet made about working with an unnamed Torrent witch, going on the hunt.
I had discovered that Juliet and this unnamed Torrent witch had been hunting the Shadow Witch, an evil witch who had found a type of immortality. She would use her power to push a witch out of her body and then steal it for her own, living for hundreds of years, repeating the process over the centuries. It appeared that Juliet had imbued her journal with magic, and when I'd been reading an entry I’d been pulled into a vision of the past, riding along inside my ancestor's head and experiencing her memory. I had seen the horrific past. The Torrent witch's daughter, Rosetta and Juliet’s daughter, Zelda, had been trapped by the Shadow Witch.
The Shadow Witch had almost killed Rosetta, pulling her life force out and using it to propel Zelda’s spirit out of her body before stealing it and escaping. Rosetta had survived and when my ancestor had been looking at Juliet, she had seen her aura, which had been golden, begin to streak with black as Juliet grieved for her dead daughter.
It had only been a vision of the past but when I'd returned to the present the journal held a weapon - a locket imbued with power that Juliet and the Torrent witch had left to be found to fight the Shadow Witch when she reappeared. It had been the only thing that had saved me, Kira and Jack and had helped destroy the Shadow Witch.
Since then I'd spent time reading the diary hoping that more could be found in it, but it had seemingly returned to its mundane state, being lists of eggs and pounds of flour. I'd given Aunt Cass and the mom
s a description of what had happened to me, what I'd seen in the past, and although on the day when I had told them it felt like the most important thing that had ever happened to us and that we must immediately look into it and discover everything we could, very quickly afterwards we returned to normality, the moms focused on their bakery, Aunt Cass on the Chili Challenge, my cousins on their business, and me back on my life. Again, in some moments I realized that this was normal, that you could not be in such a heightened state always, but in others, I realized it was the spell again seeking to hide by making us forget.
“Come on Harlow, pay attention now,” I said to myself, standing up and pacing around. But it was no use. I looked at the great mess on the wall, following strings and strands, not seeming to be able to unravel it. I saw my notes about John Smith's wound, his comments about the past, but I could still not see any gaps and holes I could focus on to solve this.
Eventually I sat down at the desk, opened my laptop and read through a story I'd been writing. I don't quite know how I'd slipped into it… it felt like another kind of spell honestly. Being I was a journalist I enjoyed writing but now my journalism business was shut down and I was trying to work out what I could do with my life. At some point in between not looking at the wall and not figuring out the past, I had opened up a new file on my computer and started telling the story of a girl who was a ghost trapped in a town with very little memory of the past, and who was stuck that way until one day a man came near her and she turned solid and real, able to reconnect with the world but only when he was close.
I read over my story for a little while then switched off that and started thinking about Hans again. I hit the internet to look up all of his past misdeeds. It was quite surprising with the spotty telecommunications over Harlot Bay and how far I was from the house but the internet still worked. I'd done some vague research on Hans before I'd gone to work for him, finding that he had been stabbed in the past and been involved in plenty of other terrible events mostly caused by him. This time I came across his autobiography. It was called 'I am Shakespeare's Son - The Madness of Shakespearean Life'. I looked through the reviews online and saw there were many praising the raw and gritty open nature of the book but just as many calling Hans an arrogant stuck up buffoon who believed he was the second coming of Shakespeare himself, and various things like that. I was just wondering whether I should order it online or whether the Book Bank in town would have it, when I saw movement out of the corner of my eye.
It was Aunt Cass and, well, she was sneaking. There was no other word for it. She was sneaking up to one of the other cottages. She opened the door and went inside while I sat at my desk as still as could be, carefully watching. Unlike Aunt Cass's underground lair I hadn't cast a spell on mine to keep people away from it. I had tried for a little while but the way spells work is that if you keep them going, every day at the time you cast it, it will drain your energy again. It was incredibly dangerous to keep spells going for a long time if you weren't strong enough. So I'd cast my spell at three in the afternoon and then the next day had yawned when a wave of tiredness came over me again. The next day, I'd almost fallen asleep and on the fourth day I let the spell go lest it knock me out entirely. Witches have died trying to keep too many spells going. It was yet again another reminder of how powerful Aunt Cass was given that she permanently seemed to have a spell set up to keep us away from her underground lair, and seemed quite spritely for someone who was in her eighties.
It wasn't long before Aunt Cass emerged from the cottage and my curiosity shot through the roof. She was now wearing coveralls looking like a plumber of some type and over her shoulder she had a bundle of ropes and what appeared to be rock climbing gear. She was wearing a belt that looked like you could connect ropes to it if you were going to scale a mountain. She closed the cottage behind her and then walked off down the hill. I sat there for all of a minute having an internal battle with myself about whether I should follow her. I finally decided I should because if I caught her wearing coveralls and carrying ropes, there's no way she would be able to deny that she wasn't up to something.
I quickly shut my laptop and crept out of the cottage, promising myself I'd come back later to retrieve it before I headed down the hill. When Aunt Cass disappeared around the front of the mansion I increased my speed, jogging after her, afraid she was going to pull an Adams on me. When I came around the corner, my heart sank when it appeared that she had. Aunt Cass was nowhere to be seen. My moment of disappointment didn't last long, though, because I heard the familiar sound of Jack's truck and then he was pulling up outside the mansion. He came bounding out of the truck and raced over to me before grabbing me in his arms and pulling me against him.
“Are you okay? I just talked to Jonas. He said that Hans guy got poisoned and you saw it?” he said.
“I'm not upset about it,” I said somewhat muffled from somewhere in the vicinity of his chest. Jack let me go and looked at me. As I said before, the combination of scruffiness and blue eyes is quite deadly.
Jack's eyes hovered on a point somewhere between blue and green and seemed to shift with the light. At the moment, in the shade of the Torrent mansion, they were a deeper blue as though if I peered into them I would be looking into the ocean and somewhere in the cool water I would find colorful coral. Jack pointed his finger at me.
“Do not tell the police that you weren't upset about the guy getting poisoned. Everyone knows who he is. Everyone knows he was hated, but police love nothing more than finding people who hated a victim and trying to pin it on them,” Jack said.
“I'll tell the police it was very distressing if they come to ask me,” I said.
Jack paused for a moment and then pointed back at his truck.
“I know I've never done this before, but I made you cookies,” he said. He grabbed me by the hand and pulled me back to his truck where he had, in fact, a container of choc chip cookies, still warm from the oven. He told me he'd finished work early and for some reason felt like making them, only discovering as they were coming out of the oven when he was talking to Jonas what had happened today. We went inside and started eating cookies which led us somewhat to ruining dinner, but it didn't matter at all.
Molly and Luce came home and brought their boyfriends Will and Ollie, and a whole bunch of takeaway Indian. The six of us ate delicious Indian, and then we opened a couple of bottles of wine and drank them and demolished the rest of Jack's choc chip cookies before the night drew to a close.
It wasn't long before Jack and I were in the warm dark of my bedroom. I leaned forward and kissed him and then whispered in his ear “Thank you for the cookies.”
Chapter 4
I was at rehearsals talking with Henry G, the chief costumer, and Peta when I Slipped. Sometimes in the past when I’d slipped I'd have no idea until something weird started happening like the ground turning soupy or flowers starting to grow spikes.
This was not one of those times. I was standing chatting to Henry G about the fabulous costume that he had constructed for Katherine, played by Kira, when I heard what sounded like a distant explosion. The magic surged and cold bubbles rushed up my legs as though I'd plunged into an icy swimming pool. They fizzed up my body and out the top of my head, leaving a trail of goosebumps behind them. I gasped, and flinched involuntarily.
“Are you okay darling?” Henry G said and raised one of his finally sculpted eyebrows.
“Yeah, just a random shiver,” I said, slipping back to the lie I'd used many times in the past to explain why I might suddenly jerk and then be looking around as though I was stunned.
“Oh no, you're not getting sick, are you?” Henry G said and touched me on the back of the hand. I heard a croak of a frog next to my ear, incredibly loud and then an echoing chorus of them fading away. Somewhere behind it I heard someone shouting:
“Notable coward, an infinite and endless liar, an hourly promise breaker, the owner of no one good quality!”
Behind that, which I re
cognized as an insult from one of Shakespeare's plays, there was the another voice shouting “Away you 3-inch fool, I am sick when I do look on thee.”
They echoed away, leaving me blinking at Henry G who was watching me with a half smile on his lips and Peta who wore a mask of concern. She knew exactly what was going on. She'd been my friend my entire life and had known that I was a Slip witch for just as long.
“Darling, you can't jump like that around a man who carries so many pins in his hands,” Henry G quipped and patted me on the hand again.
“Maybe you shivered because you remembered seeing Hans get poisoned yesterday,” Peta said, obviously ad-libbing to move the focus off me.
“Oh, I do not care at all that that horrible man got poisoned,” Henry G said.
Peta smiled and smacked him on the back of the hand.
“Don’t let the police hear you say that or you're going be going to jail,” she said.
“I don't mind an interview with the police, it could be quite fun. I hear there are some quite handsome policemen in this town,” Henry G said. I laughed, despite what I was feeling, terribly afraid that a costume would burst into flames or something else odd would happen. I quickly excused myself and went to the kitchen where I grabbed a glass of water and stood there at the sink while I drank it, feeling the cool liquid plume down into my stomach.