Page 48 of The Witching Hours

They made faces at everything he said and laughed at everything I said.

I’m not a violent person by nature, but I desperately wished that I could take a baseball bat to both of them and beat out the frustrations of every year I’d lived with consummate crazy.

Other than landing day, that’s what I called the day they followed me up from hell, the only time I saw the queen was shortly after I began high school. I glanced into the band hall as I passed by and stopped dead in my tracks. Fellow students with a musical bent were warming up while the queen stood at the head of class with a baton pretending to direct a philharmonic. Four of the guard cards stood watch though I didn’t know why. It was hard to imagine that there’d be a danger to her in my reality.

Her style had changed. The day I saw her she was wearing a short red plaid skirt, combat boots, and a black tee with one enormous red heart applique on the front. Her hair was long, loose, and balayaged with black at the ends. The guards had changed their style as well. Their fire-engine red hair was still curly and long enough to brush their ear lobes, but the sides of their heads were shaved.

Huh.

When the queen saw that I was frozen in the doorway, unable to move, she flashed her typically nasty smile, blew me a kiss then disappeared.

Occasionally I’d happen to accidentally be near someone with extra sensory perception. These poor souls, who were almost always strangers, could see what I saw. The good news for me was that shared sightings were proof that I wasn’t insane. The good news for them was that they could get up and leave the nutty behind.

Whereas the characters generally behaved like they were part of the scenery, they were more aggressive toward others. The antics ranged from dumping someone’s purse onto a public floor (ew) to attacks by the contents of a can of carbonated beverage.

I’ll forever be grateful to my tenth-grade English literature teacher. In the early fall he’d broughtMacbethto life for me and made me appreciate Shakespeare and drama while most of my peers were either complaining or falling asleep. But Mr. Caras was far more than a first-rate teacher. He saved me. At least for a decade or so. One day he asked me to hang back after class for a minute.

I waited by his desk until the last person had left and the door, on automatic spring mechanism, closed behind her.

“Miss Campbell,” he said, “are you beset with any sort of unusual difficulty?”

Without any notion of where this line of questioning might be headed, I struggled with what to say next.

Difficulty? Yes.

Unusual? Yes.

My normally patient English teacher grew tired of waiting. “Your hesitation is an answer of sorts. Very well. I’ll gofirst. An odd fellow with fire-engine red hair and too-colorful clothing from an indistinguishable period was standing in the corner staring at you during class. When the bell rang, he disappeared.”

He had my attention. “Disappeared?”

“Yes. Disappeared. I’m an English Literature teacher. I know how to use words. I don’t mean that he walked away. I mean he vanished into thin air. One second he was there. The next he was not. Does that mean anything to you?”

Lying was the comfortable, familiar option, but the opportunity to talk about my ‘problem’ for the first time was too good to pass up. I was standing next to a person who’d seen something that most would say was a figment of my insanity.

“Yes,” I said quietly. “I can’t believe you saw one of them.”

Both his eyebrows shot up. “One of them? So, there are more?”

“Yes.”

“Catherine. If you saw him, why is it hard to believe I saw him?”

“Because not many people have and those were strangers who didn’t talk about it.”

“I see. How long has this been going on?”

“Since I was eight.”

I glanced up and saw on Mr. Caras’s face the understanding and compassion I’d been craving most of my life.

“That’s a long time,” he said quietly.

Yes. It had been.It was hard to remember the timebefore.

That simple acknowledgment of my plight caused a burning at the back of my eyes. It wasn’t welcome. Coming out of a high school teacher’s class crying was not an option. I would never live that down. Certain students in the Neanderthal Clubwould probably come up with a nasty nickname that would stick forever. But at the same time I was fighting tears, I felt whole groups of muscles in my body release some tension that had been tight for as long as I could remember. It almost felt like letting up on a rope pulled tight.

“Would you like to come see me after school and tell me the whole story?”

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