Page 23 of Witchlore
“Dearest?” a voice calls behind me. I turn to see a man coming through the door, wearing a tuxedo and a proud look. I know he is my father and I feel warmth rising inside me. “Are you ready? We’re getting started downstairs.”
“Yes, I am ready.”
He holds out my tuxedo jacket for me and I pull it on. He brushes the shoulders and assesses me so fondly.
“There now. What a fine young gentleman.”
I try to smile back, wanting to make him proud as we walk down the stairs. The great tree is decorated with candles and dried oranges; my mother and our tenants are there, all raising their glasses to the new year.
Strangely, in the corner, by the beautiful Christmas tree, is a young girl. She has hair the color of spun silk and I feel as if I know her. She’s dressed queerly, wearing trousers like a man, and I think to myself:You don’t belong here.She turns her face toward me and blood mats oneside of her golden head. It’s Elizabeth, I realize, her face pale in death. I desperately reach out, trying to catch her, but she’s falling away and the world is darkening. The Christmas tree is gone, the candlelight disappeared, I am scrabbling over the rough surface of a cave floor to get to her.
“Don’t leave me, Orla,” she rasps out.
I jerk awake, gasping, staring at my dark ceiling that, for some reason, has had glow-in-the-dark stars stuck on it. They’re old, so they only have a faint greenish tinge around them. I try to breathe slowly, Elizabeth’s dead face in the light of the Christmas tree fading with every exhale. It is normal for me to dream of her; there hasn’t been a night since her death when I haven’t, except for those foggy first days sedated in the hospital. What’s strange is everything else that happened in the dream, the loving parents who aren’t mine, the grand house in the snow with servants in black-and-white uniforms and the guests in Victorian dresses. Perhaps I dreamed about the shapeshifter who wrote in the grimoire. It’s odd, to have imagined my way into their life.
I reach under my bed and pull out the grimoire. I set it down on the pillow beside me, wanting to keep it close and check it doesn’t glow or emit magic, but it simply sits there, with that leathery scent of pennies, near my face. The smell is calming, familiar, like a hint of a memory I can’t quite catch. I place my hand on it, its binding uncannily warm under my fingertips. In the dark, it almost feels like a live animal, as if it could be awake, too, and whispering a thousand unknown words into my dreams. I shiver, wondering as I drift back toward sleep if I should be more afraid.
CHAPTEREIGHT
I know I shouldn’t takeThe Witchlore of Bodieswith me on Friday night. But I do. I feel better when it’s close to me, when I can reach into my bag and touch its leather cover, which never seems to be cold, whatever the temperature. I sit on the tram, reading it as I ignore the group of fourteen-year-old lads farther down the train taking turns throwing empty cans of Coke past my head.
There’s something about the way the words on the page sound in my head that’s comfortingly familiar, like listening to my own voice:
I’m going to the protest today. I want to support the women. Father says that if I care so much about suffrage for women then I should settle into a female form, but why should only women care that women are underrepresented? So I shall go to the demonstration and I shall stand with the women in a female form beside them. I enjoy the female form and the male. Why should I choose a path when I am made of both?
I stare at those words for a long time. I’ve never considered that there must be nonbinary people so far back in history. It’skind of a surprise to see my own thoughts and feelings echoed in such an old book, and from a shapeshifter, too. It’s like a hand has sprung out of the past, dived into my chest, and squeezed my heart to keep it pumping. I take a couple of deep breaths and notice that a small tear has dripped down onto the page. I brush my thumb over it, worried that it’s going to ruin the ink, but it only blurs the date. Then I frown. It’s dated July 1906. I do some maths; I hope it doesn’t take me until I’m in my forties to feel as confident in my own difference. But I don’t have any time to consider how long the next thirty years or so could feel because the tram is stopping at Booth Hall Road and I need to walk to get to the woods. Where there might be a boggart. I try not to think too much about the potential danger and instead reassure myself by repeating the same calming platitudes over and over:It won’t be there, Bastian’s wrong, a boggart in the city is just ridiculous.
I tuck the book carefully deep down in my backpack and trudge along in the darkening evening, through the quiet suburban backstreets with red-brick houses and cars parked on the pavement. Bastian is standing under a streetlight near the edge of the woods reading his book, the green lawn of the Boggart Hole Clough Park spread out behind him. He’s wearing dark colors again. I wonder if it’s a calculated choice so he blends into the shaded woods or if he simply has a bit of a goth streak (which would frankly explain a lot). However, it feels weird to open a conversation with an interrogation of his fashion choices so instead, I say, “I brought cheese.”
A dog walker passing us stares at me with a ludicrous expression and I wince with embarrassment, my cheeks flaring with humiliation as I castigate myself:Normal people say hello, youplonker.I stare at Bastian, biting my tongue to stop more awkwardness spilling out, desperate for him to say something,anything.
“Good.” He’s putting his book away and, mercifully, seems like he wants this to be all business. The fire in my cheeks dies down. Bastian jerks his head toward the entrance to the woods. “Let’s go.”
“Why did I bring cheese?” I fall into step beside him. We stride along the tarmac path that cuts through the fields, the new trees in their plastic sleeves rustling their turning leaves on either side. The grass has been cut recently and the smell of it, combined with the rain we’ve had today, is pungently sweet in my nostrils.
“Because boggarts love cheese, obviously.” Bastian is easily clambering over the chained fence at the entrance to the woods, the last light of the day entirely lost in the thick press of the trees.
“I don’t think that’s obvious,” I say, struggling to follow him, the rip on my jeans catching on the wire.
“Do you not know where boggarts come from?” Bastian watches impassively as I tumble over the fence and fall into a mush of churned-up mud and leaves.
“I’d assumed it was, like, hell, or something.” I brush dirt off my hands. Since I am nearly 95 percent sure there absolutely won’t be a boggart hanging out in a Manchester park, I’ve not really looked into their provenance. “Am I wrong?”
“Yeah, you are, actually.” We start walking into the darkness of the woods, both of us holding up our phone lights. It’s nearly nine and there are no dog walkers in here, the distant sounds of kids circling their bikes around the football nets getting lost in the dense bushes and bark. “I guess you didn’t take any modules on magical creatures?”
I get one of those horrible pangs of grief that threatens to strangle me because I wasn’t thinking about her and that was stupid of me, really stupid, because the remembering pain is so much worse than the knowing-it-all-the-time pain. They were her favorite modules.
“Elizabeth liked all that kind of stuff, she wanted to teach witchlore at a college one day.”
“Ah.” There’s a long, awkward pause and I can think of nothing to say to make it better. “Do you want me to tell you about boggarts?”
“Yes, please.”
“Boggarts aren’t demons, not really,” Bastian says, guiding us down the wood-chipped path. I hear rustles on either side and hope to god it’s just squirrels. “They’re silkies, that’s what my mum calls them, but they have other names, like brownies in Scotland.”
I frown, trying to think of everything Elizabeth ever mentioned about silkies. There are so many different types of magical creatures—some that might have gone extinct and some that witches know still exist. I’ve never really been the kind of person to memorize them. Some parents buy their kids those cardboard baby books with flaps of cute boggarts and gnomes on them. My parents were not those kinds of parents.
“That little goblin that keeps fires lit and all of that?” I say, dragging that fact up from memory.
