Shadow Witch

by Tess Lake

  “I’ll tell you all about it later on. And then—”

  I suddenly realized that I hadn’t said a word to him about Preston Jacobs either. I hadn’t explained about the Morchint or the fact that Preston Jacobs wasn’t actually just a missing person, but had been literally consumed by a supernatural entity. I stopped midsentence and looked at Jack, fighting the urge to tone it down, to not tell him all of the truth. But then where could it lead if I held back? He’d figure out sooner or later that I’d left things out, and surely that wouldn’t be good.

  “I’ll tell you about a supernatural entity called a Morchint and what really happened to Preston Jacobs.”

  “Deal,” Jack said, although some of his smile had slipped away from his face and he appeared much more solemn.

  There were about ten seconds of quiet awkwardness before a shiny black car drove into the parking lot and we saw Eve get out. I’d called her early in the morning asking if we could visit her grandmother Hilda, and Eve had agreed, saying she would come along to introduce us. We’d decided to tell Hilda that Jack was a former police detective and that I was a journalist, and we were hoping to discover what had been happening to her.

  We got out of Jack’s car and stepped out into the freezing cold day, the chill making my bones ache. I waved to Eve and we hurried up to the entrance of Sunny Days Manor and inside.

  The manor itself was aptly named. It had actually been a manor at some point in its history. It was about the same size as the Torrent Mansion, but it had been kept in good repair over the years and then at some point had been converted into a nursing home. The main manor building was large and spacious. This was the section where residents often had a single room to themselves. Around the back on the open land, it was as though the builders had constructed themselves their own little suburb, and there were single units, almost like small houses, where residents could live independently.

  Inside the Sunny Days Manor, it was much warmer and I breathed a sigh of relief. We approached the counter, where Eve signed us in, and then we followed her down and out through the manor and out into the grounds until we came to a charming little cottage. It even had a small garden and a white picket fence. There were a few small budding flowers that had been growing with the weather turning, warmer and I could see that in a few weeks the garden would look simply spectacular. You could tell immediately that it was cared for by someone with a great attention to detail. While the plants were arranged in neat rows, there were also smaller ones growing between them in a lovely companionship. I’m not a nature witch, but even I could feel the harmony and warmth and love of that garden bed. An elderly woman with white curly hair and vivid blue eyes met us at the front door. She kissed Eve on the cheek and then waved us in.

  “Come on, come on. You’ll catch your death of cold,” she commanded in a clear voice.

  As soon as we were inside, she looked Jack and me up and down. “Well, aren’t you just a solid streak of a man?” she said.

  “You two are obviously in love, are you going to get married soon?” she said to me.

  “Grandma!” Eve said as Jack laughed beside me.

  “My name is Hilda,” she said and shook our hands even as she gave me a devilish wink. I was a little taken aback. When you think nursing home, you think someone who is old and can no longer take care of themselves, but Hilda, who according to Eve was in her eighties, was still young and vibrant.

  “Come this way. Let’s have a talk about these fugue states,” she said and walked off ahead. We followed her through the small house and out into a large open kitchen. All over the walls were illustrations and paintings of flowers and their anatomical parts. On the kitchen wall there was a large poster that showed a plant, but when I looked closely, I saw the image was made up of repeating lines of A, T, G and C in microscopic script.

  “I was a biochemist specializing in botany. That there is the entire genetic code of Monstera deliciosa.”

  “What did you work on?” I asked.

  “Sit down, sit down, all of you,” Hilda said, waving us towards the kitchen table. She began pulling cups out of the cupboard after turning the coffeemaker on.

  “I started out in pure plant sciences, working on how to improve crop yields. Then I moved on to the interactions between bees and pollination and climate and spent quite a lot of years working on those problems. Towards the end of my career, when DNA sequencing became available, I took a sideways turn into biochemistry, working on plant compounds and seeing if we could replicate them or derive any useful purpose from them,” she said. “Now you’re here to ask me about the fugue states, correct?” she added. She looked over Jack and me as though assessing if we could be trusted. I did my best to look trustworthy, although I’m not really quite sure how I did that.

  “Eve told us how you’ve been traveling out of Sunny Days and how you took a car, and she is very worried about that, so she thought we might be able to help,” I said.

  Hilda gave us coffees and then went over to a folder on the counter, which she opened up and pulled out some papers. She gave them to me.

  “These are my observations of myself and other residents. You can see I’m testing various hypotheses at the moment, including that there might be some psychoactive compound being administered to us,” she said. I saw Jack give me a look out of the corner of my eye, and I knew what he was thinking: holy moly.

  Hilda had given me four photocopied pages that were filled with her neat handwriting. On the first one, she’d detailed all of the trips she’d taken out of Sunny Days, where she’d ended up, what she been doing beforehand, and how she’d felt afterward. The next three pages were filled with observations of other residents, as well as a list of hypotheses that Hilda was testing. They read:

  1. A psychoactive substance being administered via food or water.

  2. CO2 leak or other gas being administered.

  3. Something Harlot Bay odd?

  She must’ve seen me looking at this one.

  “Yes, I know that one is not very scientific at all, but this is Harlot Bay, and I am fully aware that many strange things go on in this town, and as they say, once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”

  Hilda sat down and talked her way through the papers. Her first recorded fugue state, as she put it, had actually been two years ago, but she hadn’t realized it at the time.

  “Initially I thought I’d just been daydreaming. I’d go into town and then suddenly find myself in the supermarket or down the street, not really remembering how I got there. I used to do this a lot, though, when I was working, go into daydreaming about things, and so at first I thought it was completely normal,” she said.

  “What can you tell me about Wolfram Dole?” I asked, pointing to one of the pages.

  “I’d observed him leaving the manor at odd hours, traveling far away and doing strange things like digging in someone’s garden or watching a house. He died only a week ago, and after I spoke to Eve, she told me that apparently, he’d jumped over a six-foot-high fence, which was very strange indeed, considering he was ninety-one and had double hip replacements.”

  “What about these other people here? Arlan Raymonds and…” I stopped when I read the next name. It was Constance Osterman.

  “Is this Mrs. Osterman who walks around with her dog Rumtum?”

  “That’s her. She’s currently transitioning from living with her family to living here, so she only comes every now and again, but I’ve been observing her and she has definitely not been acting like an eighty-five-year-old woman. As for Arlan, well, I…” Hilda sighed as she crossed her arms over her body. She seemed to sag a little, and it was the first time that she’d actually appeared to be her age.

  “I’m not sure what’s happening with Arlan. He’s changed in the last few weeks, definitely hasn’t been acting like himself,” she said. I saw Eve look down at the table and in an instant knew that Hilda was holding something back. Was it s
omething romantic? Were Hilda and Arlan having a relationship of some sort? Had it come to an end?

  “You were in a relationship and now you’re not?” Jack said gently.

  Hilda nodded and then wiped away a tear. Then she cleared her throat and took a sip of coffee.

  “I was with my husband Murray from when I was twenty until he died eight years ago, and then I was with no one, and eventually I met Arlan and I was very surprised to find that there was still more love to be had. It’s just in the last few weeks, he certainly hasn’t been himself and he has said some terribly cruel things.”

  I looked away and out the back window of the kitchen, feeling a bit awkward, and over the low rear fence I saw an officious little chubby man in a suit scurrying along one of the small paths. There was a gardener working across the road, and the man hurried up to him and began saying something, actually waving a pointed finger. The gardener, a weary-looking man in his fifties, didn’t say much but kept nodding.

  “That’s Mr. Sharp. He runs Sunny Days Manor, and I think he would rather be a king,” Hilda said.

  I wrote down his name in my notepad and was about to ask a question when music burst out of a shiny-looking phone sitting on the counter.

  “That’s Arlan,” Hilda said and leaped up to grab the phone. As she answered Eve spoke to us in an undertone. “They were more than just dating. They were deeply in love and I don’t know what happened,” she said quietly.

  “Arlan, where are you? What are you saying?” Hilda cried out.

  She pressed a finger to her ear to block out any other sound.

  “No, don’t do that, don’t do that, my darling!” Hilda yelled before pulling the phone away from her ear and looking at it in horror. Jack had jumped up from the table and I had too, a sudden roar of anxiety flooding through me.

  “He said he’s at the lighthouse and he’s going to jump!” Hilda said, her eyes wide in shock.

  “Go with your granddaughter and meet us out there. I’ll call the sheriff,” Jack said. We rushed out of her house. For a moment I caught a glimpse of Mr. Sharp staring at us with an expression on his face that said people shouldn’t be running at the Sunny Days Manor.

  Soon we were in Jack’s car, and I saw Eve’s car squeal out of there with a roar of the engine. Jack drove while simultaneously talking on the phone with the sheriff.

  “You need to get to the lighthouse right away. A possible suicide attempt. A man named Arlan Raymonds. He’s in his eighties, and he’s there right now,” Jack said. I didn’t hear what the sheriff said in return, but soon Jack hung up and clenched his hands on the wheel, concentrating on getting us out to the lighthouse as fast as possible.

  That anxiety that had burst upon me as soon as the phone had rung had almost overtaken me entirely. I felt like I hadn’t eaten enough food and that I was getting shaky. My heart was pounding and my mouth was dry. Something terrible was going to happen. I had the wild idea to tell Jack to stop, to turn us around and just take us to his house so we could hide in the warmth of the kitchen and never have to face what was outside ever again. I didn’t speak these thoughts, though. I just sat numbly as streets whipped by, and soon we were leaving Harlot Bay and racing out to the lighthouse. Distantly, I heard the sound of sirens, and when we pulled up at the lighthouse I realized they were in front of us, the sheriff and his men.

  Out at the lighthouse it was even colder than in town, a chill breeze blowing in off the beach and up the cliffs. The day seemed grayer too, as though the weather was matching our moods. I saw Sheriff Hardy yelling to his men as they leaped out of their cars and ran up to the lighthouse. We bolted out of our cars and I looked up, dreading what I would see but unable to stop myself. There, right at the top, out on the observation deck, was an old man. He’d climbed over the fence that was constructed up there and was holding on with one arm. The other was up in the air.

  Hilda shouted, “Arlan!” and in a sickening moment, I saw the distant figure wave and then step off the edge.

  I lunged, pulling on the magic around me. But it was weak, not enough for me to stop the full weight of a man leaping off a lighthouse. Just another moment more and I might have been able to hit him with some kind of spell to pull him back over the fence and onto the safety of the upper deck, but it was too late. I gave it everything I had, stretching out my hand and fighting against gravity. I felt Arlan slow but it wasn’t nearly enough, and then the roaring black came crashing on me.

  “Harlow! Harlow, wake up,” Jack said.

  I was in the parking lot, lying on my back on the ground. Jack was holding my legs up in the air by the ankles, and even in my befuddled state I realized that’s what you do when someone faints, to try to get the blood to come back to their head. I groaned and felt the side of my face, where tiny stones had embedded themselves, obviously when I’d collapsed on the ground. Jack let go of my legs and carefully helped me up. I wasn’t dizzy, but I was exhausted. I felt like I’d run a marathon after a night of no sleep at all.

  I looked blearily up towards the lighthouse and saw some paramedics carrying Arlan down on a stretcher. He was wearing a temporary foam neck brace. They had also strapped one of his legs, which appeared clearly broken. But he was alive, groaning and trying to wave his arms around. Hilda was walking along beside him, the expression on her face alternating between fear and anger, and behind her, Eve was scurrying along.

  “He’s okay?” I asked.

  Jack didn’t answer, but rather wrapped his arms around me and gave me a hug pulling me against him. When he pulled away I saw him blink away tears. “Broken leg, but he’s alive,” Jack said.

  They brought Arlan down to the parking lot and began loading him into the ambulance. I was yawning still, trying to wake myself up, feeling myself slowly coming back to life, and then I caught a faint scent. It was magic from another witch. I breathed in deeply, closing my eyes and trying to place it. It was unpleasant, like the smell of raw meat that was about to turn bad. I walked closer to the ambulance and the scent of the magic became stronger. The paramedics slammed the door shut and then Sheriff Hardy cleared us all out of the way before the ambulance turned its siren on and went racing back into town, heading for the Harlot Bay Hospital. Hilda and Eve jumped into their car, Eve giving me a desperate look before they followed.

  Now that Arlan was gone, that scent, the raw meat about to spoil, began to fade.

  “What is it?” Jack asked, noticing me taking deep breaths.

  “Someone cast a spell on Arlan to make him jump off that roof,” I murmured.

  Chapter 6

  Sheriff Hardy closed the door to his office behind me and directed me to the seat on the far side of his desk. I slumped down into it, and then he did the same a moment later opposite me. He rubbed his face with his hands and then looked at me with a tired expression.

  “That poor man,” he murmured.

  It was about four in the afternoon at the end of a very long day. Eventually, we’d realized through the shock that there was nothing else we could do out at the lighthouse. Eve had taken Hilda away, presumably to go back to the Sunny Days Manor or the hospital, and Jack had driven me back to his place. We had eaten a lunch that I didn’t remember and talked, although I didn’t really remember that either. He’d offered to cancel the job he had scheduled for that afternoon, but I’d insisted he go, and so he’d kissed me goodbye and then I’d driven myself to my office. I’d told myself I’d be researching Sunny Days Manor and anything else I could discover about fugue states, and I definitely know I was in my office, but I barely remembered a thing. For all I know I might have sat there for three hours, blankly staring at my laptop screen until eventually the sheriff called me and asked me to come into the office.

  I sat up in the chair and took a quick look around Sheriff Hardy’s office. The march of progress was still occurring here—there was now a shiny new laptop sitting on the desk; most of the stacks of paper were gone; and apart from a giant box of old dusty files sitting on his de
sk, things were looking reasonably clean and neat.

  I looked at Sheriff Hardy and found him watching me. Since Aunt Ro had told him back at Christmas that she was a witch and surprise, surprise, so were the rest of us, we’d barely seen him up at the mansion. Aunt Ro insisted that everything was fine and that he was just busy and working, but before he’d known we were witches, he’d often been up for dinner, and then after, we had hardly seen him. Most of the time he didn’t even get out of the car when he came to pick up Aunt Ro. My assumption was that there was a big difference between suspecting something odd was going on and knowing that something odd was definitely happening.

  “I have something I need to show you,” Sheriff Hardy said. He reached into a drawer and pulled out what essentially looked like a black button.

  “This is a camera that I’ve been testing out. Motion-activated. Has about ten hours of recording time on it, no sound but it’s in color. I’ve had it up on the bookshelf over there, just testing it out to see if the quality is of any use to us in police work,” he explained.

  He passed me the small button camera. It was incredibly light. I flipped it over in my fingers before handing it back to him.

  He opened the shiny new laptop on his desk and turned it around to face me before clicking on a file. The image showed Sheriff Hardy’s office shown from the viewpoint of the bookcase. Sheriff Hardy was sitting behind his desk, tapping away on his laptop with two fingers, when he answered the phone, talked for a moment and then suddenly slammed it down before rushing out of view.

  “That’s when Jack called,” Sheriff Hardy said.

  The screen went dark before lighting up again a moment later. On the edge of the screen, an arm came into view and then a body shuffled across in front of the camera. I couldn’t see who it was, but they were definitely old, which was easy to tell just from the movement. Whoever it was shuffled around and then stepped over towards Sheriff Hardy’s desk. It was a woman, hunched over, probably about eighty years old, facing away from the camera. She grabbed a box of dusty old files sitting on Sheriff Hardy’s desk, flicked through them and then grabbed a bundle. She held them to her chest and then turned around. A cold supernova burst inside my chest and I gasped aloud.