Every Witch Way

by Kirsty Ferry

  I spin around again and see a woman standing there. And the oddest thing is that Schubert is in her arms purring like a machine and looking up at her adoringly. He has his paws around her neck and yes, he is actually wagging his tail, just like a dog. The woman is small and slim, yet delightfully curvy where she should be curvy and she has cherry-wood coloured hair and the reason I know all this is because, despite the darkness, she is surrounded by a weird, milky-coloured glow which makes her look as if she’s been washed by moonlight and polished in starlight.

  I wonder briefly if I should be an author too, the same as Ewan, because I think that is rather a nice description of her.

  ‘Are you the woman from the coffee shop?’ I blurt out. It’s not the most inspired thing to say to a random stranger in a darkened wood.

  Maybe I shouldn’t be an author after all.

  ‘You got the book then?’ she replies and grins at me. ‘Good, I am glad.’

  Then I have one of those daft lightbulb moments.

  ‘You’re not … Maggie Wall? Are you?’

  The woman laughs and she has what I can only describe as an utterly filthy laugh.

  ‘Maggie Wall? Good Lord. No, of course I’m not. She’s a total fake, that lassie. No. It’s all made up. Fancy that, Schubert. She thought I was Maggie Wall!’ Schubert utters an equally filthy type of cat-laugh and looks at me as if I am stupid. ‘He’s such a lovely cat, isn’t he?’ says the woman, gazing adoringly at Schubert. ‘Still as opinionated as ever, though, aren’t you my sweet?’

  ‘Mow wow,’ says Schubert, comfortably.

  I am slightly dumbfounded at this.

  ‘Why don’t you take a good look at me?’ says the woman. ‘Go on. A very good look. What do you see?’ She steps forward and smiles at me encouragingly.

  I blink and look at her. I don’t even need to squint my eyes because she’s still glowing.

  Now my heart rate has calmed down a little and I can concentrate better, I take in the dark, curly hair and the mischievous eyes and the total devotion to Schubert. The nose is ever-so-slightly different and her mouth is a little thinner than mine, but there’s no mistaking her, now I’ve seen her properly.

  ‘Agnes?’ I whisper.

  ‘The very same,’ she says. ‘Nice to meet you properly at last.’ She holds her hand out to me quite formally, even impeded as she is by Schubert, and I reach out without thinking and take it. It’s a rather cold hand, and really quite substantial for what I assume is a ghost-hand, but she has a firm handshake, which is always good.

  ‘Now, I don’t have very long as I have to be somewhere.’ She blushes an icy pink, the colour of a crystallised rose petal, and lowers her eyelashes. ‘A rendezvous that I cannot rearrange, if you understand. I don’t want him to go off the boil, so to speak.’

  I know I am gawping at her. Good Lord, death has not changed this woman at all, has it?

  ‘But you need to know a couple of things,’ she continues serenely, raising her eyes to mine. She’s a bit shorter than me too. ‘Firstly, the witches they condemned to die here? Don’t worry about them—’

  ‘I don’t want to see them!’ I burst out. I do not, I absolutely do not want to see those women swinging from the trees or witness some ghostly effigy of their funeral pyres. Hearing those soldiers and chatting to Aggie is more than enough for one night, thank you very much.

  ‘Oh, you will not see them!’ says Aggie. ‘They’re long gone. They’ve gone to a better place, as they say. I mean – would you want to come back to this place after what they did to them?’ A frown crosses her beautifully smooth face. ‘Because I’m damn sure I wouldn’t.’

  ‘I bet they weren’t even witches, were they?’ I ask.

  ‘Not in the sense of the Dark Arts, they weren’t,’ says Aggie. She shrugs – no mean feat with Schubert clinging onto her – and shakes her head sadly. ‘They were like you and me. A little bit different, a little bit individual. They had a deeper understanding of certain things. And of course,’ that wicked grin again, ‘they were exceptionally beautiful. Well. Most of them were exceptionally beautiful; some were ugly old hags, but it is too impolite to name names.’

  ‘Aggie!’ I say, quite shocked.

  ‘Now don’t pretend you weren’t wondering the same thing,’ she says.

  I can’t actually pretend I wasn’t, because I was.

  ‘So that’s the first bit out of the way,’ continues Aggie, ‘and now I can move onto the more exciting things.’ She beckons me closer, again impeded slightly by Schubert, and as if I’m in a dream I take a couple of steps towards her. There’s an awfully cold chill around her, but otherwise she looks rather good for someone who’s been dead and buried for the best part of a century.

  ‘I saw your young man earlier,’ she says, ‘when he was poking around the farmer’s field and you were in that contraption with the bed in. Have you put him through his paces yet? You know? With the bed?’ She winks at me and there’s that filthy laugh again.

  ‘Aggie!’

  ‘Hmmm. I did wonder.’ She tilts her head and looks at me critically, leaning her cheek on Schubert’s head. He lets out an enormous purr. ‘Well, let’s not worry about that right now, it’ll come. And he’s got a very nice rear end, I noticed. I’ll talk to you about that too. First of all, though, let’s think about the matter in hand. That car by the side of the woods.’

  ‘The car? What about it? And what do you mean by “it will come” and by talking about Ewan’s rear end? You awful, awful great-great-granny! It’s just wrong to hear an old person talk like that!’ I squeak, suddenly coming over all prim and proper.

  Aggie mutters something that should never really be said by someone of her standing and great antiquity, then she trundles on. ‘I might have been old when I died,’ she says, ‘but inside I was always like this. That is the fabulous thing about being dead. I can go anywhere, do anything and still look gorgeous. I do like the fashions nowadays though, I must say.’ She grins at me over the top of my cat and shakes her glorious cherry-wood mane out. The moonlight catches it and it shimmers like dark molten lava.

  ‘You have fabulous hair,’ I tell her. ‘But we all thought it was black, like mine.’

  ‘Sweetie, have you never heard of henna? Wonderful stuff. You should try it. Anyway – the car. This is what we need to do, all right?’

  And she takes a step closer to me and whispers in my ear. ‘It’s all fine, you know. It’s all been planned out – up there—’ she points skywards ‘—but we can’t do everything for you. A lot of it is to do with positive thinking. But the results will be worth it and he’ll really really like it. I promise.’ She giggles in a lewd fashion.

  ‘Positive thinking?’

  ‘Positive thinking. And a wee bit of magic. Look. Sit here, and I’ll go through a few things with you.’

  ‘I do appreciate your time,’ I say stiffly, one eye on Schubert who is looking smug, ‘but Ewan will be waiting for me and I don’t know if it’s quite right that he should come across us discussing magic when he thinks I’m saving Schubert’s life.’

  ‘My dear girl, I can make time stand still. I can make this little clearing suck itself out of the world and show you everything you need to know. However. As I say, I have an appointment I’m reluctant to delay so we’ll make it quick.’

  I cast a glance at Schubert who frowns and nods at the ground. ‘Mow wow,’ he states and I shuffle uncomfortably. I fear I am outnumbered.

  ‘Sit down,’ commands Aggie and points behind me. I see a comfortable-looking cushion which I’m pretty sure wasn’t there before and I lower my posterior into it. It is indeed a very comfortable cushion, but even as my bum is registering this, a little fire erupts between us, illuminating golden flecks in Aggie’s eyes and rippling highlights through her cherry-wood hair.

  ‘Fire. We’ve got the earth as we’re standing on it, and we’ve got the air because we – or you – are breathing it. So now all I want is some water; and you don’t need that silly
altar you created and you certainly don’t need a knobbly stick. You’re using it like a crutch, my dear and you don’t need it – just like how it was with brandy, for my dear Lord— ’ Then she bites her lip and her cheeks turn the silvery-pink colour of mother-of pearl. ‘Oh, I shouldn’t divulge details.’ And she smirks, knowingly, and I wonder if that’s another man she slept with.

  ‘Aggie, who is my great-great grandfather?’ I ask sharply.

  ‘A man who was very good to me,’ she says, ‘although his mother, the old crow, never approved. Said he was a playboy and sent him off all over Europe to keep him away from me.’ She sniffed in disgust. ‘But it didn’t stop us and the subterfuge worked marvellously. Now lassie, let’s get down to business.’ I know I’m never going to find the answer out to that question, which is frustrating.

  Aggie looks up to the sky again and holds her hand out. Somewhere, way above us, is a rumble of thunder and all of a sudden there’s a little fluffy raincloud drifting in from a cluster of trees. It floats about shoulder height and settles near my glamorous great-great-granny. A few drops of rain tumble out of the cloud and she catches them in her palm and flicks them into the flames, murmuring something under her breath. The flame pulses violet and orange and it looks like a Bunsen burner.

  ‘There you go, have a look. Tell me what you see. Now concentrate, mind,’ says Aggie.

  I stare into the flames and feel the warmth on my cheeks. I wonder vaguely if the combination of water and heat is going to make my hair frizz up even more, as it has apparently done with Schubert’s fur. He now looks to be twice the size he actually is and appears to be quite proud of that fact.

  ‘I can’t see anything,’ I say. ‘It’s just a pretty coloured fire.’

  ‘No pictures? No messages?’

  I squint. Sure enough, there are shapes appearing in the flames; shapes that are starting to look a little familiar. ‘Oh. Oh, oh, oh. I can see my house.’

  ‘That’s a start. What else do you see? What do you see if you look closely? What do you really want to see? Think positively now, that’s the real magic.’

  I lean forward and peer into the flames. The shapes are bending and wavering, but I can definitely see the shape of the building Ewan and I live in.

  ‘There are some shadows in the windows,’ I say thoughtfully, ‘like people, moving around.’

  ‘That’s good,’ says Aggie. ‘What else?’

  ‘Gosh!’ I say in delight. ‘If I look very closely, I can see through my window!’ In fact, I can definitely see a little me-shaped figure inside the building, and now I’m disappearing up the staircase to Ewan’s flat. I wave at the me-shaped person and— ‘Oh! I’m going up the stairs. I’m going to bump my head. I’m going to—oh!’

  I see the me-shaped person pop up in Ewan’s flat and then a Ewan-shaped person comes down some more stairs – from his DJ room, I assume – and meets the me-shape in Ewan’s flat.

  ‘I’m confused.’ I pull a face and look at Aggie. ‘How am I moving around the house like that? Why am I climbing through the ceiling?’ I look back into the flames and there’s a Schubert-shape prowling around the rooftop, winding itself around the chimney pots, strutting his stuff in, I have to say, a very confident manner. As I watch, he manages to slip through a window with only a very small amount of inelegance as he doesn’t quite make the leap the first time, and he disappears inside the house and pops up in the window where me and Ewan are, then begins to clean himself self-righteously.

  ‘It’s all your house,’ Aggie says cryptically, and grins. ‘You’re all going to live there for a very long time. Listen. I wouldn’t normally tell anyone this, but for you I’ll make an exception.’ She leans towards me and whispers some very odd stuff in my ear and eventually I sit back on my comfy cushion and stare at her. ‘But first—’ she says, as my mind reels and churns like it’s at an LSD induced ceilidh ‘—we need to make sure certain people are dealt with.’

  ‘Certain people,’ I repeat, still thinking of the things Aggie has said.

  ‘Yes. They’re in that car, you know, and we have to deal with them.’ She makes an elegant gesture with her hand and the fire goes poof and then disappears. ‘This is what I suggest you do.’

  And she leans in towards me again and I wonder, with, I must admit, a little shivery thrill, what she’s going to tell me now …

  ‘You have to get up off your backside first, Nessa darling. Nobody likes a lazy witch.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  EWAN

  ‘Nessa!’ I’m pushing through the forest in the general direction she went, and although I know she’ll complain and say she didn’t need rescuing I can’t let her just disappear into Kincladie Woods like that.

  Kincladie is only about half a mile long and logically speaking she will come out the other side of it in about ten minutes if she runs in a straight line; but what if she doesn’t? What if she stumbles and falls and hurts herself?

  Okay, I’m probably being a bit melodramatic and the last thing I am is some sort of hero – but I care about her and I want her safe.

  I love her and I want her safe.

  The thought makes me stumble instead and I shake it out of my mind.

  ‘Nessa!’ I try again. ‘Nessa!’ My voice is deadened with this fog and the tree canopy, but it doesn’t stop me shouting.

  It’s ridiculously dark in here now and I’m forced to stop and fumble for my mobile phone. I manage to locate the torch app and turn it up to its full strength. I do a sweep around the area, and all I can see are bloody trees. There’s a well-trodden pathway beneath my feet, so at least I’ve managed to stay on that but it’s really cold now and I’m not seeing Nessa anywhere in the torch beam.

  Then I notice a break in the trees before me, and head towards what seems to be a clearing. For a moment I worry that I’ll walk into some scene of carnage there and I’ll see eight women swinging from the tree branches up above me, but I tell myself not to be so stupid and I keep going across the uneven ground.

  There’s the briefest flicker of light in the clearing, but it’s enough to make me start running again and calling her name. I hope to God she’s found that bloody cat and her torch app is working as well.

  ‘Nessa!’ I yell. ‘Is that you?’

  I jog into the clearing with my torch trained before me and thank God, I see her standing in the middle of the clearing holding that damn cat and blinking like an owl as the beam illuminates her fully.

  ‘Nessa! You’re okay! And you found Schubert? Thank God! Now I think we’ve seen enough of this place and we need to go back to Winnie. Deal?’

  ‘Sort of,’ she says. ‘But I didn’t need rescuing, you know. I’m fine.’ She blinks again and looks a little vague. In fact, she’s looking at me really strangely. ‘But thank you, Ewan, for coming for me.’

  There’s an odd little awkward pause where nothing happens, then she takes a step towards me. She looks up at me and takes another step. Then I find myself taking a couple of steps towards her …

  She feels so good in my arms and she fits so snugly, it makes me wonder why I didn’t do this earlier. Her head is just about level with my chest and my chin rests on her hair if I just drop my head down a little.

  Her voice is muffled, but not by the fog this time; it is muffled by cat and fleecy hooded jacket material and it sounds so lovely. ‘Ewan, I very much want to do this for a very long time with you,’ she says in that funny stilted way she has, ‘but I’m afraid I have pressing business with the car in the verge and you have to come with me.’

  ‘Okay,’ I say, slightly bemused. ‘I’m just glad I found you both before anything else did.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ she says.

  And I think it’s at that point where I realise that, with her arms full of beast, there is no way she could have been using the torch app on her mobile.

  I pull her closer for a second or so longer and look around us, my heart pounding just a little faster in my chest. A breeze whips past
my legs and vanishes into the forest with a rustle of foliage – apart from that, there’s nothing out of the ordinary here.

  But I will be damn glad to get back to Winnie.

  NESSA

  Ewan might think I’m totally crazy, but I have to do this and I have to see whether Aggie was right. There’s an awful lot at stake and I don’t want to make any mess ups.

  I haven’t really been trained fully yet, so a lot of this is going to be instinct.

  Ewan takes my hand ever so gently to lead me out of the clearing and back to the road. He’s even shining his torch app out the front for us, but I really don’t feel as if I need the light to show me the way out. I’m pretty certain I could lead him out of Kincladie and be none the worse for it.

  I heft Schubert into a more comfortable position because I’ve only got one arm free to hold him and he appears to have lost all desire to walk.

  Actually, I can’t trust him not to run off again if I do put him down.

  I wish I had brought his lead.

  But there’s something else that keeps bugging me, to be honest, apart from Schubert’s indolence that is.

  If Aggie is right about the car in the verge, then maybe I can allow myself to believe her when she says “it” will happen between Ewan and I. I already know she is right about his rear end. So I know I need to get to that car and check it out. Then I can go from there.

  But then I realise Ewan is talking. I think it’s an act of bravado to show me how manly he is, and to hide the fact that Kincladie Woods is a very, very quiet place indeed in the late evening near Halloween.