Chapter 5.03 – A Few Taboo Spells

Seth slumped into his chair and once again took his photo of Faith from his pocket. It was a greyscale image cut from a newspaper, fading and crumpled from the amount he’d thumbed it over the past three months; the creases stark white in the folds that ran across her features. Even just holding the grainy image, he could see the colour of her eyes, feel the softness of her skin, taste the sweetness of her sex…

This tattered clipping was all he had left of her. He had taken all her other things back to her house, left them on the porch, rung the bell and disappeared. Like a coward. He could’ve kept a memento, a souvenir of his feelings and proof that someone had loved him.

But he didn’t deserve that.

There was soft knocking at the door that he didn’t want to acknowledge. He knew who it was. He knew what she wanted. He was still seething from Kitty’s first attempt to get him to talk to that brainless bastard, the last thing he wanted was for her to crash into his quarters with the clueless cad.

“Go away, Kathryn,” he snarled.

The knocking stopped and, to his disdain, the door knob turned.

In a flash he was beside it, bearing his weight against the heavy wooden door as he snapped it shut, but not before he noticed the flash of white at his ankles. Growling, he turned to look at the cat as it shifted back into the sultry form of his mistress.

“Get out,” he hissed.

“Seth, baby,” she cooed. “Forgive my intrusion, but you left on such awful terms, I could not help but to seek you.”

“I’m not talking to that boy, Kitty.”

“I am not asking you to, not right now. I purely wished to check on you and -oh!” She moved over towards him in her fluid way, picking something up off the floor. A faded, tattered piece of paper. It took him a second to realise what it was.

“Give that back,” he snarled, reaching for the picture that she was already unfolding. She looked at it longingly, her features growing heavy with her sorrow. Seth reached again for the picture, but his arm fell limp by his side as tears threatened to choke him. “Give it back,” he whispered. “It’s all I have.”

Kitty folded the picture carefully and handed it back. Seth pocketed it hurriedly and turned his back to his mistress. “Please, leave.”

“Seth,” she whispered into the quiet, dusty room, shifting towards him elegantly in her silk dress. “You cannot survive this way forever.”

He didn’t reply, merely stayed turned away from her, willing her to leave. She had topped up her perfume, removed her shoes and no doubt had an alcoholic drink or three before she had joined him, if her soft syllables and wavering posture was anything to go by. She was tailored for conquest and Devil help him if he wasn’t conditioned to respond.

“Go ask Caleb,” he muttered, spitting the name as if it was shit on his tongue.

Kitty shook her head, her slowly-growing, increasingly frizzy cloud of hair falling into her eyes. “I do not need to drink,” she said softly. “I only need to soothe you.”

“’Soothe me’,” Seth almost laughed. “I don’t need soothing, Kitty, I need to be left alone.”

“To do what? To brood? To drive yourself into a deeper depression?” she huffed and folded her arms, a smile starting to creep across her features. “Perhaps…” she whispered. “If I cannot offer you solace this night, I can offer you a distraction?”

Seth was momentarily struck dumb. “You think that I want to sleep with you, Kitty? Now?”

“Who said a thing about sleeping?” she purred suggestively, running her fingernails down his baldric. She rose to her tippy-toes, steadying herself against his chest as she lavished his mind with memories.

Ah, the pain, the torture, the sheer bloody pleasure she could dole out with her talons, with her toys, with her twisted mind games. He could recall the pierce of her teeth, the sting of her cane, the crying shame and humiliation, intermingled with the sweet taste of blood, the prolonged precipices, the velvet smoothness of the parts of her she’d make him beg to be inside of.

It had never been love, never anything close – more akin to a cat toying with a masochistic mouse. But trapped together in the violent darkness of the Galloway Manor – once again – it had been, and once more could be, a perfect pastime. A dastardly distraction.

An inappropriate invitation.

Mind made up, he grabbed her wandering wrist, shocking her into sobriety.

“Get out,” he hissed again, and shoved her out of the room.

The graveyard was very small. That was Melinda’s first thought. Her second was wondering why a tiny graveyard in Brindleton Bay had been chosen for the gaudy, searchlight-lit monument to Sandy Moss.

She wandered across the sparse grass and yarrow, with Broof by her side, to gaze in awe/horror at the marble statue resplendent with a replica Starlight Accolade.

“She doesn’t deserve this,” Melinda whispered to the wind. “After what she did to April…”

“I know,” Broof sighed. Melinda could sense his unease. “I could have done more,” he muttered.

“You could have,” she agreed. “But so could I, or Travis, or Doctor Goth or anyone really. It’s a cumulative failure.” She looked up at the statue. “This thing is just awful. I want to.. to… burn it down!”

Broof smiled a little, nodded and placed a gentle hand on Melinda’s back. “Cabbage’s grave is over here.”

As he guided her through the darkness, over a patch of disturbed earth and a discarded shovel, she became aware of the presence of an elderly man.

“Thought I’d be seeing you again. Sent you to do her dirty work, didn’t she?” the mystery man said to Broof. He nodded to Melinda. “This one really didn’t have no pennies to his name. Good luck there.” He handed Broof the shovel.

“What?” Melinda asked, looking between the men, and the shovel, with interest.

“Oh, sometimes I help out here, tending the graves of the forgotten, when I visit my daughter! Right, uh, John…”

‘John’ looked at Broof for a long while before his brain seemed to click into gear. “Oh right, right, yeah he does. When he comes to visit little Celery.”

“Cabbage.”

“Yeah, her. Well, g‘bye.” The man grabbed the shovel back and walked off across the graveyard.

Melinda wasn’t convinced, but it wasn’t her place to pry into the secret life of her grandfather and the creepy cemetery man. She walked over to where he’d gestured, to a neat little grave adorned with roses and a small teddy bear.

“’Here sleeps Cabbage Hogwash’, she read, continuing to read the date and the age with a little choke. She knelt down beside the stone, brushing away a small cobweb, tracing the letters. “I… I’ve wanted to connect with my Mum for my whole life but this… sorry I don’t want to be disrespectful…”

“I don’t think you could be disrespectful if you tried, Melinda.”

“Hm. Well… this is a clearly a child’s grave. I know you’ve added the roses but,” she whispered, “It doesn’t feel like a resting place for Rose.”

“We have to be careful how obvious we make that…”

“I guess… I understand that. I just feel like perhaps her additional life is being forgotten, somehow. I want to honour it, somehow. But I don’t even know what to say.”

“You don’t need to say anything,” he assured her. “We can just sit here, with our thoughts. I often do.”

Melinda nodded and shrank away. He had taken a good dose of the apple potion so she didn’t want to get too close, but he was doing an awkward jerking movement, like he was trying to decide if it was a good idea to place his arm on her shoulders.

Somewhere in the distance a crow cawed. The wind began to whip around them. The pair sat in silence, each staring at Cabbage / Rose’s grave. Broof wiped a shed tear but Melinda couldn’t say she shared the grief. Yes, it was horribly sad that Broof had lost his daughter, that he’d brought her back and then they had both lost her. She should feel something more, right?

“How did you do it?” she asked quietly. “How did you resurrect her?”

Broof took a deep breath and wiped his hair back. “I had an inkling what I needed to do. You don’t hang around the house of great, yet utterly bonkers, head witch without picking up a few taboo spells. Then, shortly after Cabbage passed, I found a pressed death flower in the pages of an old grimoire. I researched rituals, bought a few candles and thought I’d give it a go…”

“What happened then?” Melinda pressed gently.

“I came here, conducted the spell. I got the world’s worst headache and began bleeding from my ears. I felt like all the life had gone out of me and into the ground at my feet. I felt for sure that I’d done it and then…” Broof sighed heavily. “Nothing. Nothing happened. I waited all night, feeling the ground warm beneath me. But there was no sign of my daughter. The ground began to cool. The sun began to rise. I tried to transportalate home, but I couldn’t. I’d lost my daughter and my magic. So, I got the bus home. I tried to get on with my life.”

Melinda shook her head. “I don’t understand. How could she rise up? She must be six feet under, in a coffin, yes?”

“Yes.” He rubbed his beard. “Bodies are disposable, Melinda. What the resurrection spell did, what it’s supposed to do, is raise the soul and manifest into a new body, a replica of the old.”

“So, Cabbage’s body is still buried under here?”

“Yes.”

“But Rose’s body is also out there somewhere?”

“Yes.”

“So, they’re not the same person?”

“They’re the same person, just not the same body.”

“…This hurts my head.”

Broof smiled at her. “You’ll get used to having a sore head. It’ll take a while to get used to the way of the witch. To be honest, I don’t think I fully understand everything.” He got to his feet and held his hand out towards her. She took it cautiously and dusted down her jeans.

“Thank you for bringing me here,” she said sincerely. “And for being so open with me. I gather from Wyatt’s reaction that telling your fellow witches that you resurrected your daughter is a no-no.”

Broof shrugged. “The only one I would tell would be Claudia, my ex-wife and Cabbage’s mother. But I don’t know how I would explain that she’d risen and then passed, yet again…”

“I have a grandmother?”

“You do. She’s… well. One day, when you’re cured and I’ve got the guts to declare my infringements, I’ll introduce you before I’m banished.”

“Would they really banish you for this?”

“Yes, they would.”

The pair had walked to the gate, passing ‘John’ who had dozed off on a bench, and towards the street where Broof had parked his car.

“Do you think we can visit Rose tomorrow?”

“That depends on Jessica. She’s quite heavily pregnant now so she might not be up for a trek into the forest.”

Melinda understood. They walked down the street, a good two foot apart, like strangers, not like grandfather and granddaughter. It felt uneasy, it felt weird and yet… Melinda could feel that it wouldn’t always be this way.

She thought about her Dad, about how he and her Mum would take all this news. They were also struggling to get their heads around this supernatural underworld that they had learned the existence of. She wasn’t sure how they’d take resurrection and Melinda having found new family.

And then there was the mystery of her father. Melinda wondered who he was, what he looked like, whether he was still alive, whether he knew that she existed. Was he a fellow teen patient? Had it been a Romeo and Juliet situation? Maybe they had run away from the Tower together and ended up in Forgotten Hollow. Maybe Seth had ended them both but Caleb had only attempted to save Rose.

Maybe her father had escaped and was living a new life, with a new family.

Maybe he wouldn’t be interested in knowing Melinda at all.

April, or ‘Amy’ as she was right then, couldn’t quite believe it. A musical! She was going to see a musical! She’d always wanted to see one, but her Mother had called them ‘common’ and none of April’s friends, public or secret, had ever been interested. So, instead, April had spent many a day twirling around her room, singing to herself and imagining that her pillows were her audience as she was a princess in a castle, a wench in a western tavern, an alien in a pink dress or anything else she could dream up that could be acted to music. 

She and Wyatt were waiting to get on a train, which was also exciting! It reminded her of when she and her friends first ran away all those months ago, except without the itchy acrylic sweater and the overbearing shame. It was one of the few times April had been on a train; she usually got driven everywhere by Broof in one of the fancy cars, isolated from the heaving masses.

Thankfully, the summer heat had passed as the autumn had rolled in and therefore most of her fellow passengers didn’t smell too offensive. Everyone was rather close to her though – she could feel someone lightly touching her bum, but was swept up in the crowd as everyone pushed to get on to the waiting train carriage.

The pair found a seat as the last passenger to get on, the conductor, closed the doors behind him and started making his rounds of the carriage.

“Do you have our tickets, Amy?” Wyatt asked, watching as she patted down her jeans pocket. Her completely empty jeans pocket.

It was an unusual sensation, like freefalling from a cliff, she imagined, to realise that she’d been subtly robbed. She looked around the train carriage but no one looked suspicious.

“Tickets and passes,” the conductor requested cheerfully as he walked up to them.

April looked at the floor. “I’m really sorry, we don’t have any tickets. Someone’s taken them.”

“Oh really.” The conductor sighed and pulled out his ticket book. “The old ‘pickpocket’ line, hey? Right, you have two choices – pay the penalty fare or get off at the next stop – Shitetown.”

“That… doesn’t sound like a great place. How much is the penalty fare?” Wyatt asked, reaching for his wallet.

“A hundred simoleons. Each.”

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