Witch

Witch - By Fiona Horne




Prelude





I stared into the eyes of the snake. I didn’t feel fear – I was drawn to her. Like a ribbon of black lava, she lay coiled on the rock in front of me. The leaves on the trees rustled as I stretched out to touch her sleek, glossy head. She felt cool and smooth. I let my hand rest there as, slowly, I felt our pulses become one. With every beat, more of the outside world – the trees, the wind, the rocks – disappeared. Until it was just me and the snake.

And then she spoke.

‘You are one of us.’





One





Thwack.

A piece of orange hit the back of my head, hard. Pulp and juice splattered over my shoulder and dripped down onto the book in my lap.

‘M-m-m-massive lips . . . Mrs Fish, Vania Thorn, Fish Lips,’ sang Cassidy Walters, then led a rousing chorus of, ‘Mrs Fish, Fish Lips,’ from the back of the Summerland High bus. All the cool kids sat in the back seat, taunting us losers spread out before them, ripe for the picking. I was third row from the front.

Although it was definitely annoying, I wasn’t angry about the orange or the song – I didn’t need idiots like this to like me. I was trying to ignore what they were saying, but their accents sounded harsh to me. Even though I’m American, I’d never lived in the US before, because my parents decided to move to the farthest-away place in the world – Australia – when I was born.

And now, fifteen years later, we were back here. My parents had said I would love it. Summerland was a small coastal town, just like Jervis Bay where I’d grown up, and my parents knew I loved the beach. But this beach was nothing like the beautiful white-sand cove of my Australian home. The water here on the coast of California was not blue, translucent and warm like Jervis – it was dark and green and freezing cold. The sand was not a fine white powder, smooth underfoot, like my cove – it was yellow and gritty and got stuck under my toenails. It was the same ocean, the Pacific, but here on the other side of the earth it was alien territory to me. I wasn’t loving it.

As for school, it wasn’t that I’d expected to fit in. I hadn’t exactly been popular back in Australia. I guess you could call me a loner. I find it comforting to be anonymous. So not fitting in to a new school in a new country didn’t surprise me, but the fact that my new classmates knew my name and cared enough to make up a horrible song about me did. Especially when I had only been at the school for two weeks.

‘Mrs Fish, Fish Lips, Mrs Fish!’ they kept screaming.

Thwack. Another piece of orange hit me. Still I did nothing.

Finally the bus driver, who was young and kind of cute, turned around. ‘You guys shut up or you’re all getting off this bus!’ He caught my eye briefly, concerned. I guess my stoic expression reassured him, though, because after that he went back to his driving.

I turned my attention back to The World of Chemistry in my lap, picking bits of orange off its pages and out of my hair. Suddenly more sticky juice coursed over my head. Cassidy was standing in the aisle squeezing another large piece of orange directly over my head.

‘You suck, Mrs Fish,’ she said as she grabbed the back of my head with one hand and roughly pushed the orange into my mouth with the other. Her fingernail cut into my lip and the acidic juice of the orange burned like fire. As the bus sped down a hill, Cassidy pushed me hard, laughing, then headed back down the aisle towards her back-row throne.

Fury suddenly coursed through my body like boiling lava. I didn’t deserve this. I wanted to run after Cassidy and punch her. Instead I glared out the window at a giant oak tree at the bottom of Ortega Hill. I stared and stared at the enormous tree . . . and realised it was falling across the road.

In reality it must have happened very fast, but it felt like slow motion. The bus driver braked hard to avoid it. Everyone screamed.

I was still staring at the tree as the bus screeched to a stop just before hitting it. Its huge roots were torn out of the ground, reaching to the sky like a giant claw. The driver, white-faced, walked up and down the aisle, checking to see if we were okay. Cassidy had been thrown to the floor. He helped her up; blood gushed from her lip. I looked around and saw that no one else except her was hurt.

I could feel someone looking at me. Bryce, our majorly gorgeous class president, was staring at me from the back row. I turned away, but his eyes were burning a hole into the back of my head.

‘Vania, are you all right?’ he asked about ten seconds later. He’d come to stand beside me.

I was so stunned I could barely move my mouth to reply. ‘Uh, yeah,’ I finally managed. I looked up at him through my hair.

‘Good,’ he said. He glanced at Cassidy, who was now sitting in the front row, and shook his head. ‘Cassidy can be such an idiot sometimes. I guess you get what you give.’

He started off towards her and then turned and smiled at me. ‘Your accent sounds cool.’

I suddenly couldn’t look at him a second longer. When I did dare to peer up again he was standing next to Cassidy, taking a handkerchief from his pocket. He held it gently to her mouth to help staunch the flow of blood. What an old-fashioned, gentlemanly gesture. It was kind of hot.

He addressed the bus as she moaned: ‘She’ll be all right, it’s just a split lip.’

A volunteer emergency crew turned up. One man directed traffic, such as it existed for Summerland, to a detour. The rest of the brigade got to work clearing the tree from the road. Eventually everyone in the bus had calmed down enough that the driver decided we could get moving again and put the bus into reverse.

Just because Cassidy was so nasty didn’t mean I had to be. I decided I was glad she wasn’t hurt too badly. I was actually smiling as we continued on our way.

But as I walked home later my expression turned from a smile to a frown. I couldn’t help thinking about what had happened with the tree . . . and how angry I had been just before it happened. It almost felt like I had caused it to come crashing down like that. But that was just not possible. Was it?

Then again, freaky stuff was always happening around me. I wasn’t a loner for nothing: if you hung around me long enough something strange always happened. I didn’t know why. But this was the first time anyone had ever got hurt.



At dinner that night I decided I couldn’t tell my parents about the tree incident. It was just too weird, and dinner was turning into the usual drama anyway. The last thing I wanted was to cause even more problems.

My mother had gone to a lot of effort to roast an enormous piece of beef. It looked and smelled great . . . if you were a meat-eater. I wasn’t, so it stank and looked disgusting to me.

‘Mum, I can’t eat that, you know I can’t. I’m vegetarian.’

My mother rolled her eyes and turned to my father. ‘Keith?’

Dad glared at me. ‘Vania, you were brought up eating meat and you are perfectly healthy. God put animals on this planet to feed us, and you are going to eat that meat.’

All my life, there had been no getting around my father’s authoritarian attitude. He wasn’t a decorated senior police officer for nothing – he excelled at and relished keeping people in line. And being his only child, I was unfortunately always on his front line. I knew from previous experience that at this point, one more word from me would mean I would be grounded for a week, so I kept my mouth shut.

Mum dished meat and vegetables onto a plate for me. ‘Honey, I cooked some nice green beans for you.’

I smiled at her a little before picking up my fork and gingerly stabbing one of them. I put it in my mouth, but

I could taste the rank flavour of dead cow. I put my fork down again – the bean still attached.

My father clipped me over my ear with his hand. ‘EAT!’ he bellowed.

I watched my mother smother her food in salt and I elected to not put any on mine from that day forward. Somehow I would maintain my individuality in this house. I didn’t want to end up stuffy and repressed like my parents. I picked up the fork again and ate the bean.

Two hours later I was finally in bed, still trying to forget the bus accident. At dinner I’d managed to get away with not eating any meat by cutting it into small pieces and hiding it in my serviette. But I had eaten the beans. And then I’d washed up and taken out the garbage, and by the time I’d said goodnight my father had almost smiled at me. I generally kept up the ‘dutiful daughter’ act as much as I could stomach it.

Now I was alone. Well, as alone as you could be in a house with two other people and zero privacy. I couldn’t remember when this rule had started or why, but I was never allowed to shut my bedroom door. Not back in Australia, and not here. If I did shut my door for more than a few minutes, my mother would jerk it open as if she expected to catch me doing something heinous. I had already become very good at changing in the small space formed by the wall and my wardrobe door. At least in our old home in Australia I’d had a walk-in wardrobe, which gave me more room to change.

I knew this rule was peculiar, and I’d once asked my mother why she didn’t trust me. She’d said, ‘Honey, it’s not that we don’t trust you – we just don’t trust other people.’ Which just made me paranoid that some crazy guy was going to be waiting for me in my wardrobe one night. But then I would reassure myself that for all his strict, intolerant behaviour my dad was an excellent cop and nothing would happen to me on his night watch.

Eventually I heard my parents turn off the television and make their way up to their room. They shuffled around preparing for bed before turning off the light, their door open, too. I waited another five minutes before reaching under my mattress and retrieving my torch and a book: The Sixth Sense and Us.

I’d found the book under the floorboards in my new bedroom a few days ago. The house was old and I had noticed a loose board under the new rug my mother had bought to cheer up the room. When I prised it up I was expecting to find a whole lot of dust underneath, not a strange book with a mysterious blonde woman on the cover holding a candle up to a mirror. I found the image mesmerising. Flipping through the book’s pages, I discovered it was all about witchcraft and felt a tingle of excitement – I knew my parents would never approve. I hadn’t hesitated to start reading it – in secret.

I pulled my thick blanket over my head before switching on the torch and turning to Chapter Three, ‘Witchcraft and Magic’.