What The Cat Dragged In (The Celtic Witch Mysteries Book 1)

by Molly Milligan

  I stopped walking and so did she. We faced one another on the narrow path. “You can detect that, and you say there isn’t a strong magic in you?”

  “I didn’t say there wasn’t.”

  “What are you not telling me? Why are you hiding something? Did you do something in America that meant you had to come here?”

  Her eyes widened in shock and for a moment I thought I’d nailed it. I continued. “Is that it? Your power caused something to happen … ooh, something dreadful … oh, are you on the run?”

  Maddie let out an explosive snort. “Oh my gosh, no. No, Bron! It’s … way less exciting than that. Look. Um, you were talking about my need for connection, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think I need help. I was wondering if there was some way for me to talk with my ancestors? My Welsh ones, the ones from here. That’s all I need, I’m sure of it.”

  Was it? She was avoiding mirrors. There were messages in the bird seed on the floor of the utility room. Harkin, I had noticed, had never approached her for a cuddle or a petting.

  That told me a lot.

  I wasn’t saying I thought there was anything bad in my cousin, because she was my cousin.

  But there was something strong.

  Did she really not know?

  And she didn’t have to be here in Wales to connect with her ancestors. They were already with her – people often forget that.

  “Yes, of course.” I made a quick decision. I’d help her in the way that she asked, more or less, anyway. “Let’s not go home. I want to take you somewhere important. It’s a well, up on the hill. Places where water and earth and sky all meet are powerful; you know that already. This place in particular has some spirits that might be helpful to you. Are you up for it? It could be muddy.”

  “Yes, please!” Her face lit up like I’d just offered a small child a trip around a sweet shop.

  We turned around and doubled back for a short distance. Then I led her away from the road and down a bridleway. It was partly hard-packed rubble, and quite wide, and skirted alongside a few fields of sheep as it wound its way up and past a farm.

  Then the bridleway ended abruptly, and we climbed a slippery wooden stile. Now the path split into three, and I took the left hand way. The land was open-access now it was high, and there were few walls, occasional broken fences, and no trees at all. We could roam at will as long as we did no damage. The scrubby grass was lank and patchy, and no new spring growth showed yet. Instead the land was grey – grey rock, grey stone, grey mud, below a grey sky.

  The wind was stronger up here, and my face was already going numb. I pulled my hat lower to cover my ears as much as possible. Maddie flailed her arms as she tried to keep her footing on the rocky, slippery path.

  She kept turning around.

  “It’s following us,” she whispered. “The ghost, or whatever it is.”

  “I know.” The prickling on the back of my neck had been growing stronger and stronger. Why would it get more intense as we got further away from home?

  Maybe it didn’t want us to leave.

  I didn’t like that idea. I stopped and faced the empty air where the energy of the ghost was fizzing at the edges of my sense. “We are not running off,” I told it. “We will be back. But what’s it to you, anyway? What do you want?”

  There was no reply and no change in the feeling.

  I sighed. “It might not understand our words,” I muttered to Maddie. “Let’s keep going.”

  “Do you have a lot of experience with ghosts? Surely if it’s the ghost of the dead man, it will understand you?”

  “Ah. No,” I explained as we continued up the path. It was narrower now, and much steeper, but we were close to our destination. “I take it that you’re not so familiar with ghosts? They’re not like people think they are. Often it’s not really the whole – um, soul – that remains behind. Sometimes it’s just a pattern of energy that gets stuck in a kind of earthly loop. Sometimes, a person had such a strength of emotion, for good or ill, that the emotion gets trapped in a particular place. Usually that’s because of some force in the place, too. That’s why you get lots of hauntings in one area. There is something that literally traps the ghostly remains, you see.”

  “So this is not the whole spirit of the dead man?”

  “It might be,” I said cautiously. “It might be, and it might just not be able to communicate with us, or it might be choosing not to. If, when I found the body, I disturbed it, then it’s likely it hasn’t worked out how to be a ghost yet.”

  “And when it does?”

  “Who knows,” I said. “A lot will depend on the sort of person he was when he was alive. I’m hoping he was a nice man and once he’s buried again, the ghost will happily disappear.”

  “And if not? I’m not getting a very good feeling from him so far.”

  I shivered. “We will deal with that when we come to it,” I said. “Look, we’re here. The well.”

  Maddie came to my side and I could almost feel the disappointment roll off her. We were looking at just an ordinary lump of rock. A trickle of water came down above it and poured over it, splashing into a pool beneath it. That pool, I knew, was also fed from below. There was a larger stream that led off from the pool. A stunted hawthorn, less than four feet high, stood by the pool.

  “And this will help me contact my ancestors, will it?” she said. “Well, I mean connection, rather than contact…”

  “Yes, but not directly. You can’t just go roaming around in the other realms without protection,” I told her. “First you need your familiar, in the spirit world, to lead the way and to help you stay safe. Do you have a familiar?”

  She took a step back and started to shake her head. “No, no. That’s never been … I don’t need to go poking into things. I just want to connect with my forebears.”

  “How do you think you’ll do that without journeying?” I asked her.

  “I can probably do a guided mediation,” she said. “But not here, out in the open. And what about, um, wands and candles and things?”

  “You don’t need all that paraphernalia. And what do you mean, ‘probably’?”

  “I am sure that I do need it,” she said. “Don’t most people?”

  “It depends.”

  After a short silence, she said, brokenly, “Bron, I am really scared.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of this. Of the landscape here, of the ghost, of the idea of journeying without the usual protections and rituals that people have, of being in another realm, and most of all … of the power in me. Those dragons of the mind, Bron.”

  “And this is going to help you. Sit,” I ordered.

  She looked at me plaintively but she obeyed, at last. She pulled the bottom hem of her coat down to sit on that as much as possible, and drew her knees up to her chest.

  “Steady your breathing and relax,” I told her. “I’m going to look for the right things to cast a circle. My kind of circle.”

  She closed her eyes.

  It was not long before I had found what I needed: a feather, a reddened sprig of heather, and a small pile of earth. I had a small plastic bottle in my backpack – it’s always useful to carry many containers when you work with herbs – and I filled it with water.

  I placed the items at North, South, East and West, and then I joined Maddie in the centre of the circle.

  “You’re coming with me?”

  “Yes,” I said. “As far as I can, at any rate. We will go down some steps into a black cave beneath some twisted tree roots, and then you go on alone, to meet what you may meet. Speak respectfully but firmly. Ask questions, and listen to the answers. You won’t be far from home, and land, and me, and safety.” In truth, a flicker of unease gripped my stomach. I usually journeyed with my stang, and always alone. I suddenly didn’t like the responsibility I was taking upon myself, but it was too late to back out now, wasn’t it?

  And the ghost would be out there, too, watching
.

  I cast the mental circle.

  “Don’t you walk around?” Maddie asked.

  “Not usually.” But this time, because of the presence of the remnants of the dead man, I got to my feet and went widdershins, hailing the elemental at each quarter.

  Then I sat back down. The ghost was there, pressing up against the protection I’d just cast.

  I should call this off, I thought, and turned to look at Maddie. Her eyes were closed, and there was a grim determination on her face. She trusted me, against her own judgement.

  I wanted to live up to that trust.

  I began to speak, first intoning a short rede in Welsh and then switching to English to guide Maddie with me into the Underworld.

  I described the steps and the cave and the tree very loosely, letting her own imagination do the work for her. For me, things were nebulous and loose and grey but grew sharper with each step of the descent until I stood with the purple water lapping at my ankles.

  “Go forward,” I told her.

  I remained where I was, in two states at once. I was sitting on the hill, and I was also standing in the Underworld, waiting for Maddie to return.

  I felt a tug. Something back in our everyday world was calling me.

  I couldn’t leave Maddie. I tried to send a tendril of awareness up. Was it Harkin? But the answer did not feel like my cat.

  It wasn’t a tug. I realised that it was a push. Something was pushing at the circle.

  “Maddie,” I said, my words breaking in my suddenly dry mouth. “Maddie, come on back now.”

  It pushed harder.

  “Maddie!” I said. “Can you hear me? Speak!”

  “I’m here,” she said, in a low and breathy voice. I reached out with my hand and found hers, and I gripped her fingers tightly.

  “We’re going back,” I said. I fought to stay calm as I talked up back up the steps and out into the ordinary and everyday world once more. I opened my eyes and blinked to clear my vision.

  On the surface, everything looked the same.

  But I could detect something pushing hard at the circle. Instead of unravelling it, I strengthened it, and pulled it close in about us. Then I begged the spirits of the well for assistance.

  Maddie said, “”What’s happening? What’s there?”

  “The ghost, I think.” I got to my feet and faced it. It stopped pushing. Bit by bit, it drew away from us. “But it’s going.”

  “What does it want?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She stood up next to me. Together we waited as the ghost’s energy receded.

  “Now it’s gone,” I said and we breathed out.

  After a short silence, Maddie spoke. “Something happened down there.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. You called me back so quickly.”

  “Did you meet anything?”

  “No.”

  We cleared the circle, thanked the elementals, and began to walk back down. I let Maddie talk.

  “There was nothing but blackness at first, then twinkling lights,” she said. “I stopped going forward. I just couldn’t. I am so sorry, Bron. I’ve let you down. I shouldn’t be here, should I?”

  “Don’t say that,” I said. “We can try again.”

  “No. We shouldn’t. I shouldn’t. I haven’t been totally honest with you, Bron. I am so sorry.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  She sighed heavily. “I don’t know how to control it,” she said in a very quiet voice.

  My chill came back.

  “There’s such a force in me and I can’t deal with it,” she went on. “It terrifies me.”

  We should not have journeyed. I knew it now. “I can feel something in you, but surely you can control it with your rituals and so on?”

  “I have never done a ritual in my life.”

  “You said you were an eclectic witch!”

  “I did not. I said I was eclectic as a person … I didn’t say I was a witch. I am not. Wait a minute, is that an actual thing? ‘Eclectic’ witch?”

  “Yes. Like hedge witch and cyber witch and traditional witch. So you’re not a witch? But there is such power in you.” I stared at her in amazement. We’d been at cross purposes ever since she’d arrived. I’d assumed – and she hadn’t corrected me.

  “I know,” she said miserably. “I’m a pagan, I guess. I mean, I read a lot and I believe. But I have never ever dared to do anything like this, today. I just kinda hoped it would be okay because you were here. Something is in me, and there are things around me, too. Things that are trying to communicate with me. And it’s getting worse. That’s why I am here. Mom said that maybe coming here could be the key. But it takes over. When I look in a mirror, Bron, I see other faces there. I think they are my great-great-grandparents, but I am not sure. That’s why I wanted to talk with them. The more I ignore them, the more I feel a pressure building in me. I got called to come here.”

  “And what about the spilled seed?” I was still reeling from her revelation. Not a witch? All that power and energy … my mouth was dry.

  “That wasn’t me,” she said. “That was the ghost.”

  We had reached the path that led quickly to the road. “The ghost is behind us again.”

  “I know,” she said. “What if it’s all my fault?”

  I could not answer that. For, what if it was?

  Ten

  I felt like I was looking into a kind of mirror when I bumped into Maddie on the landing the next morning. She looked like she hadn’t slept. And I felt as if I hadn’t.

  “Bad dreams?” I asked.

  “Yeah. You?”

  “Yes. The ghost, I think. Hands, reaching out to me.”

  She shivered. “Same here.”

  I went down to breakfast and she wandered into the bathroom blearily.

  ***

  “Robert Cameron,” Aunt Dilys announced without looking up. She was hunched over the newspapers spread out on the kitchen table, while I was at the range and frying half a dozen eggs. We’d all opted for egg on toast that morning. Maddie was tending the coffee pot, which was for herself, and the tea pot, which was for me and my great aunt. Maddie’s health kick obviously didn’t start until after our breakfast of grease and lard. I could get behind that – I could easily be healthy for just a few select hours of the day. I decided I’d start with just the hours of darkness. I could definitely avoid unhealthy food while I was asleep.

  I spent half of each day being healthy! I suddenly felt very proud of myself, and buttered the bread very thickly. Everything in balance, of course.

  “Who is Robert Cameron?” Maddie asked politely. I was used to my aunt’s random outbursts and tended not to ask. For all I knew, she was engaging in free form poetry.

  “The dead man. Our dead man,” she said. “The man they found in our garden. They’ve identified him as Robert Cameron.”

  The name hung in the air. At last, he was becoming more than a malevolent presence.

  “How did he die?” I asked as I used the spatula to flick hot oil across the top of the eggs. I tried to keep my voice light and I didn’t look at Maddie.

  “Natural causes, it says here.”

  “How old was he?”

  “He was in his fifties, and he died back in the 1960s, apparently.” Aunt Dilys sat back and gazed at the window. “Hmm. Robert Cameron, Rob Cameron. I should know that name. I did a lot of travelling in the sixties, though. There are some gaps in my memory.”

  I didn’t want to speculate on what the once-young Dilys would have been getting up to in the sixties. Gaps in her memory were probably a blessing.

  Maddie poured our drinks and I slapped the sizzling eggs onto thickly sliced, home-baked bread. We took our places at the table. Maddie had been slightly more quiet than usual that morning, and neither of us had mentioned the exploits of the previous day. I still felt guilty for exposing Maddie to potential danger.

  “How does someone die of natural causes
at the bottom of someone else’s garden?” I asked. “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Heart attack, maybe?”

  “But he would have been found. You’d notice if your father or husband or whatever didn’t come home,” I said. “Llanfair is not that large. They would have searched and found him.”

  “Maybe he was a visitor,” said Maddie. “And that’s why he’s roaming, and not at rest. Not only is he dead, in our garden, but perhaps he’s far from home. That must be horrible.”

  I nodded and Dilys agreed. “There’s been something lingering in the house,” she said. Of course: Dilys was more of a future-person than a past-person, telling fortunes not seeing ghosts, but she was still psychically attuned. “So he’s haunting us, is he? I thought for a while that it was Madison.”

  “Lingering?” Poor Maddie hadn’t yet been directly on the receiving end of Aunt Dilys’s random not-quite-attacks. “What, like a bad smell?”

  “You’re different, dear,” Dilys said, patting Maddie’s hand with her egg-flecked fingers. “You were bound to bring a new and different feeling to the place.”

  “Because I’m-”

  “So dreadfully American.”

  “Dreadfully?”

  “Oh, I am using the term in its wonderfully historical sense, my dear. Once, you know, it meant to ‘hold in respectful awe’. I’m reading an old dictionary to help me sleep.”

  Maddie narrowed her eyes and looked at me, unsure as to whether Aunt Dilys was playing with her or not. I shrugged. “Maddie has her own energies, Aunt, but the ghost of the dead man has also been lingering around the house. Now we know his name, though, we can hopefully help him move on. Or move away.”

  “Be careful with banishing,” Dilys said.

  “I’m not suggesting we banish him.” I was well aware of the dangers of any spell that purported to send something away. Often, you were in danger of banishing things that you actually needed, as well. My last attempt to banish fleas had accidentally also banished soft furnishings – the home of the fleas – not in any real sense, but my spell had made all our cushions and throws into rough, horrible, scratchy things for weeks. You don’t realise how much you enjoy snuggling on a sofa with a good book until you find yourself apparently sitting on a plywood board, nestling up to a bit of hessian.