E M Graham [Graham - An Ignorant Witch

Contents

AN IGNORANT WITCH

Witch Kin Chronicles 1

E M GRAHAM

OneEar Press

An Ignorant Witch

Copyright 2019 by E M Graham

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

ISBN: 978-1-9993908-4-6

Cover design by James at Go-On Write

First Edition: July 2019

For Carmel the last one standing.

MY REPUTATION AS a ghost whisperer started with Alice and her family. They didnt know what was haunting their house when all that craziness started and although I didnt manage to clear the house of their personal ghost who was the spirit of their great-grandmother, I did get her to calm down a bit and make their house livable again. Thats when Alice Hoskinss family started to call me the ghost whisperer, claiming I was psychic and all that.

If they only knew the half of it.

So let me tell you up front, my name is Dara Martin and Im a half-blood witch, the illegitimate product of a long-lasting liaison between my mother Marian and the head of the Witch Kin, Jonathon de Teilhard. This means I dont fit into either world.

Im nineteen years old with blue eyes and too much hair. Its so thick that my Aunt Edna once got fed up with it being in my eyes all the time, so she took the kitchen shears and chopped it off. She cut it too short in front because shes not good with straight lines, but I actually liked that punky look. The rest of it I color and bleach at whim. It gives me an edgy and mysterious look, I like to think, which makes up for the pudge I keep covered up with baggy tees and hoodies. I always wanted to be as willow thin as Alice, but it didnt happen.

Aunt Edna brought me up ever since I was ten years old, after Mom disappeared. She acted as my parent as Dad refused to have anything to do with me, and I had a lot of freedom growing up with her. Shes a writer of fiction and most days cant even keep track of what world shes in, let alone what her niece is up to, so as long I kept to the agreement and didnt mess with the supernatural, and cleaned up my own dishes and did my own laundry, she was happy.

Unfortunately, I couldnt really help what happened here, and after I tell you, youll see my side of it. I just wish she and my father could, too.

She knows Im a half-blood witch, and while she never really understood all this supernatural stuff, Dad warned her of the dangers so I learned early on to clamp down on that side of me. For many years, we all did our best to pretend I was Normal.

To get back to Alice and her family. Being what I am, I dont have a lot of friends, so I have to look after the ones that are there. When she first started to look a bit peaky and even paler than normal, I assumed she was just having, you know, heavy periods or something. Theres not much to her at the best of times, skinny string bean washed out blonde that she is. I think they didnt feed her enough when she was little.

But when I came upon my friend crying her heart out that day in the bathroom of the topmost floor of the old Science Building, that huge washroom that hardly ever gets used because its tucked away up there amongst the labs, thats when I made her sit down on the deep window ledge and tell me everything.

Its the doll, she said. Nan Hoskinss doll. It keeps moving around and no one is touching it.

Nan Hoskins had been her great-grandmother, dead before either of us were born. She sniffed back her tears and wiped her nose on her sleeve, then looked at me with those huge gray eyes of hers. Do you think my house could be haunted?

Is it that bad? I had my doubts about what she was saying, for Id never sensed any sign of a ghost in her family home, and even if I wasnt allowed to tell anyone I could still secretly pride myself on my abilities.

She shook her head and sighed. Not really, its just sort of creepy. And... Benjy has disappeared too, on top of it. No ones heard from him in two weeks. Mom said hes probably gone back to the mainland without telling anyone, but he would have told me .

Benjy was her older brother, and he was a skeet. Heavily into drugs and booze, not too particular about how he got the money to buy these amusements, hed been bad news ever since Id known him. But he was her older brother. They were close and she loved him.

You know what hes like, I said, trying to reassure her. If one of his buddies was driving up to Nova Scotia and it sounded like a good party, hed hitch a ride with them and wouldnt think to tell anyone in the spur of the moment.

But he should have sobered up by now, sent me a text or something at least.

True enough. You think something bad happened to him?

Yeah, Dara, I do. She was silent for a moment. I think hes gotten himself into a pile of trouble finally, and he cant get out of it.

You dont think... I could hardly bring myself to say it, but I had to. Could he be the one haunting your house?

Hes not dead! No way, he cant be.... Again looking at me with those big eyes. You really think so?

Nah, I said quickly, although with his life style, it could be a distinct possibility that he would meet with an early demise. Course not. Hes just being more Benjy than normal. Hes probably living it up somewhere, having the time of his life. When the booze runs out, your brotherll come back.

What I didnt say was, if Benjy was dead, then yes he could be haunting their house. He was always the worst kind of trouble maker during his life, and theres no way he would go gently into the light just because hed stopped breathing. I thought a moment. You say the doll thing started happening when he disappeared?

She nodded. Yeah, not too long after I last saw him. He was headed up to the Southside Hills for berry picking, to the family patch. No one has seen him since.

I know what youre thinking big tough guy hoodlum like Benjy Hoskins doing a pansy thing like picking berries? Well, this is Newfoundland, and everybody does that. You want blueberry jam for your morning toast? Then you provide the berries, theyre free for the taking in the scrublands and the barrens. Besides, her family had a spot up on the mountain behind the Southside Road house, theyd been going there for generations ever since old Nan Hoskins stuck her flag in the dirt and declared it her own. No one would dare steal the berries from under that old harridans nose even now shes been dead for twenty-five years. Reputations die hard in this land.

About the Southside Hills. I dont know why the name is plural, for there seems to be just one solid mass of stone when you look at the geography from across the harbor. It thrusts straight out of the water and up, up, up, and there are no separate points that you could look at and say, yes, thats a different hill. Theres only one very long range of rock that stretches out west and meets the land as it rises slowly out in the Goulds.

But the Southside Hills, those looming cliffs over the city of St. Johns they were a dangerous place if you didnt know them, and maybe even if you did. Full of bogs and gullies and beaver dams, rabbit trails leading nowhere. A person could get lost pretty easily up there. Personally, I avoided the area, it had always felt wrong to me.

The physical dangers were bad enough, Benjy could be lying up there with a broken leg unable to move, or even have fallen over the cliffs into Freshwater Bay on the other side of the hills where the sucking surf would take his body deep into the currents never to be seen again till he was thrown up by the ocean at Cape Spear or washed up on the shores of Ireland.