The Secrets of Ghosts (5 page)

She plastered on her work smile and swept past them into the warmth of the reception hall. Katie stamped on the feeling that she’d just been rescued and went outside into the sunshine. She took several deep breaths, banishing the pipe smoke with the scent of freshly cut grass.

*

Katie had been visiting her aunt Gwen at End House on a Tuesday night since she was fourteen. They’d missed sessions, of course, for birthdays and holidays and when one of them was sick, but for seven years it had been a constant in her life. Pushing open the gate and hearing its familiar squeak and the thick scent of lavender as she walked up the path soothed her nerves. Things might not be perfect, but they weren’t terrible, either. She’d decided that she wouldn’t tell Gwen about passing out. It was probably because of the heat and the shock of finding Mr Cole and she was fine now. It would only worry Gwen and that was something she never wanted to do. Not again.

She could tell Gwen about her bad dream, though, and the weird feelings would go away; a problem shared and all that. And if not, Gwen might be able to give her a spell to make sure she didn’t dream about Mr Cole again.

Cat jumped down from the garden wall and began winding around her feet. Katie bent to pet him and heard raised voices from inside the house. Gwen and Cam were in the kitchen and the back door was open, probably to let air through.

‘It’s not my fault,’ Cam was saying.

‘Are you saying it’s me?’

Katie straightened up quickly. She shouldn’t be listening; this was private. She wanted to announce her presence but couldn’t make herself call out. She felt weirdly guilty even though she hadn’t done anything wrong. Cat ran on ahead, squeezing through the gap in the door, making it swing open.

‘I want this just as much—’ Cam broke off as the door moved.

‘Hello!’ Katie called in a cheery voice. ‘I’ve brought ice cream.’

Gwen was standing with her back to the sink, her face drawn and unhappy. Cam was at the opposite end of the kitchen. He smiled at Katie but it didn’t quite reach his eyes. ‘Mint?’

‘Yep. And dulce de leche.’ Katie unloaded her bag onto the table, not looking at Gwen or Cam. After he’d filled a bowl with mint choc chip, Cam kissed Katie on top of her head. ‘I’ll leave you two with your cauldron.’

‘Funny,’ Katie said.

After Cam had gone upstairs and Katie and Gwen had bowls of ice cream and spoons, the odd atmosphere dispersed enough for Katie to relax.

‘What do you want to do this week?’ Gwen already had a notebook open on the table. ‘Have you been practising the heart’s ease?’

Katie wrinkled her nose. No matter how hard she tried, she didn’t seem able to make the remedies. She didn’t seem to be cut out to be a healer like Gwen, which wouldn’t be so bad if only she knew she was cut out for something.

‘You’ve got to practise,’ Gwen said. ‘You can’t do this stuff halfway. All or nothing.’

‘I know,’ Katie said. She sat down and tried to follow the preparation for Mr Byres’s foot cream. The finished product was the right colour but it was runny where it should be gloopy. Gwen peered at it. ‘I have literally no idea why that didn’t work.’

‘I’m useless,’ Katie said, throwing herself backwards in her chair.

‘No, you’re not.’ Gwen stretched. ‘Maybe your heart isn’t really in it. Do you want to try something else or call it a night?’

Katie sat forward. Incensed. ‘But my heart is in it. I promise. I’m trying really hard.’

‘I know you’re trying, honeybunch,’ Gwen said. She scooped the failed remedy into a plastic bag and tied the top. ‘But sometimes trying isn’t enough.’

‘That’s depressing.’

‘Sorry,’ Gwen said. She threw the plastic bag into the bin. ‘It needn’t be. If you want this badly enough then you won’t give up, anyway, and if you don’t want it badly enough then you’ll stop trying and find the thing you really want to be doing and that can only be a good thing.’

‘You don’t think I should be doing this?’ There it was, the thought she’d been avoiding. If she wasn’t going to come into a power, a gift, and she was useless at the herbal stuff, then she had no place. No purpose. Katie saw the future closing down like a thick forest growing over a path.

‘I have no idea what you should be doing,’ Gwen said, her face a perfect blank.

‘I don’t believe you,’ Katie said. Being around a wise woman was hard work. You had the feeling that they knew more than they were saying, and it was hard not to resent that. Sometimes, just sometimes, Katie could see why people were wary of her family.

‘Look,’ Gwen put the kettle on, then turned to face Katie. ‘I had the weight of expectation from my mother. She trained me, she told me every day that my destiny was to be just like her and I ran away from that. I’m not going to make the same mistake and tell you what you should be doing with your life. You can’t fix things for other people. It doesn’t work that way.’

‘You fix things for people all the time,’ Katie said. ‘That’s why they come to you.’

‘That’s different. You can’t tell people what to do with their lives.’

‘But Gran was right, wasn’t she? You stopped running and came back and everything got better. You and Cam got together and you have a home and a life and you’re happy. I don’t want to run away.’

Gwen smiled but she looked sad. ‘It’s not a map. You can’t follow my footsteps, you have to make your own path, make your own decisions. Maybe you should leave town, travel a bit, see the world.’

Katie felt as if she was going to cry. ‘Why are you pushing me away?’

‘I’m not. I swear I’m not. I just want you to be happy.’

‘You don’t think I can do it.’ Katie knew that she sounded like a child and her voice wasn’t helping any, cracking like that and making her sound pitiful and teary, but she couldn’t help it.

‘It’s not that. I just think that you’ve been pushing on this particular door for a long time and that maybe it’s time to try another one.’

‘Fine, point taken,’ Katie said. She stood up and grabbed her bag.

‘Don’t go,’ Gwen said. ‘We can watch a film or something.’

‘No, I’m tired. I’ll see you later.’

‘Katie,’ Gwen said, crossing the room and standing in front of the back door. ‘Please don’t be angry. I’m only trying to help.’

‘I know.’ And that made it so much worse. She wasn’t a Harper woman; she was a client to be fixed.

‘Stay,’ Gwen said. ‘I’ll even let you choose the film.’

‘I’m not in the mood,’ Katie said. She gave Gwen a quick hug and stepped neatly around her to the door.

Gwen said her name again but Katie was halfway out of the door and she didn’t stop.

Once outside, Katie let the hurt propel her forwards. She walked at double-speed, not caring that the warm evening air was making her hot and sweaty, that every breath felt like a gulp of soup. Soon, she’d turned off the main road into town and was inside the maze of cobbled streets that made up the tiny town centre. She saw familiar faces of people whose names she didn’t know and several she did. Pendleford was that kind of place. Close-knit. Tiny.

She was a Harper. One day, she’d be living in a big house like Gwen’s, dispensing wisdom and spells. A man with a dog on a lead nodded to her and she nodded back. Of course, she was going to have to get better at the spells and remedies, first. A lot better. The thing was, she knew she was going to do something brilliant. She knew she was going to rule the world or something equally amazing, but she’d always assumed the route to her something amazing lay in witchcraft. Suddenly, that didn’t seem so likely.

At her front door, she paused to pet the cat that lived on the ground floor. It hissed and jumped onto a nearby wall. That wasn’t usual. Katie might not have been a brilliant witch, but she knew animals. Katie knocked on the door of the cat’s owner, Mr Davies, but there was no answer. She scribbled a note saying that she was worried the cat wasn’t itself and had it been wormed, de-fleaed and checked by the vet recently, and shoved it under the door.

Upstairs, it took Katie several attempts to unlock the door as her hand was shaking. She was shivering, too, so violently that her teeth bashed together almost painfully. By the time she’d cooked a pizza from the freezer, Katie no longer felt hungry. Katie had always liked living alone, but now the flat seemed too quiet. She found herself wishing there were someone else around. If Anna were here, she’d make Katie a cup of Lemsip and crack bad jokes to check if she was delirious or not.

Katie bundled herself in a blanket and lay on the sofa to watch
The Lady Eve
. There was one plus side to probably having flu. It would explain why she’d screwed up Fred Byres’s foot cream so badly. And why she’d fainted last night and was smelling pipe smoke that wasn’t there. It had been an olfactory hallucination caused by a fever. She’d Google it in the morning. Relieved, Katie fell asleep.

*

Gwen put away the glass jars and re-hung the bundle of comfrey and meadowsweet from the wooden drying rack Cam had rigged up in the kitchen. She hesitated over the bowl of foot cream, still unsure how Katie had managed to mess it up so badly. The cream had separated completely, the oil emulsion sitting on top of the other ingredients, as if repulsed by each other. It had never done that for her.

Gwen emptied the whole mess into the bin and washed up the bowl, trying to think of something else to try with Katie. Herbal remedies certainly weren’t her forte, but Gwen didn’t know how to teach any of the other stuff. Most of it was experience, instinct; the right words at the right time. A kind of magic that was part psychology, part common sense. How Katie expected to have it, Gwen couldn’t understand. At twenty-one, she’d hardly been able to find her own arse with both hands, let alone give sage advice. But there was no talking to Katie, no convincing her. She radiated need, thrummed with it. Gwen wanted Katie to relax, to enjoy her life, her youth, but she knew Katie didn’t want to hear that.

Gwen heard Cam open the door from the hallway and a moment later she felt his hands on her waist; he pulled her gently backwards, against his chest, and put his face to her neck, inhaling deeply. ‘What’s that smell?’

‘Foot cream,’ Gwen said. She watched Cam kiss her neck in the reflection in the window and urged her nerve endings to respond. The glass was still cracked in one corner, something else she hadn’t got around to fixing.

‘I don’t think so,’ Cam said, into her ear.

It tickled and Gwen twisted away, fired with the sudden need to move. She grabbed a tea towel and began drying up the bowl.

Cam stroked Cat, who was winding around his ankles. ‘Katie gone already?’

Gwen slumped against the counter, hugged the bowl to her stomach. ‘She was upset. She’s not getting better — she’s actually getting worse if anything.’

‘Why doesn’t she do something else? I wish she’d reconsider uni—’

Gwen interrupted him. ‘I know. Me too. Ruby and David would be over the moon, too, but there’s no budging her on it. She’s convinced she needs to train with me. She takes being a Harper really seriously and that’s good—’

‘It shouldn’t be everything, though,’ Cam said.

Gwen turned away, put the bowl on the side. Cam tried, but he couldn’t really understand what it felt like. Not really. He wasn’t a Harper. He’d never woken up and found his life changed by a power that was at once external and completely part of him. He’d never felt the spark of power ignite inside his skin and watch it burn. He accepted her magic, her ability to find lost things and to make herbal remedies that were uncannily effective; he accepted that the people in their town came to the back door of End House at all hours of the day and night and that Gwen couldn’t turn them away, had to help if she could with advice, a spell or some foot cream. He accepted, he supported, but it was never going to be a part of him. Gwen felt sick. No matter how close you were to another human being, you were never truly inside them. You were always alone.

Gwen realised that Cam had asked her something. ‘Sorry?’

‘Drink?’ Cam was holding up a bottle of red wine, already undoing the top. She heard the crack of the screw cap and did a calculation that had become a reflex. She’d only just had her period so there was no chance she was pregnant. She was safe to drink. Could drink herself into oblivion, if she wanted, in fact. ‘Make it a large one,’ she said and ignored Cam’s raised eyebrows, his filthy smile. She felt the press of a thousand worries pushing down on top of her head. She couldn’t even think about getting in the mood. She took the offered glass, thoroughly depressed. When had ‘getting in the mood’ become a chore?

*

Katie was still shivering the next morning, but she was certain it wasn’t flu. She just felt cold. As if there were an air blower right next to her at all times. That wasn’t right — it was more as if she were standing inside an air blower. If she could get used to the weird sensation, it might be quite nice. The man on the radio had already cheerfully assured her that today would be another ‘scorcher’ and she had an eight-hour shift at the hotel, starting with breakfast.

Katie avoided the main road out of Pendleford, which was choked with cars even at this God-awful hour of the morning. Commuters heading to Swindon or Bath or Bristol, sitting in their metal boxes and trying to pretend that the olde-world charm of Pendleford made their hellish drive every morning and night worth it. Katie took an old farm lane, instead, feeling more cheerful. Slinging cooked breakfasts at MOPs wasn’t scintillating work but at least she wasn’t stuck in an office cubicle.

The hedgerows were so lush and green that they were hanging over the narrow road. The cow parsley had been thick and white, making the rows look covered in snow, but now it was dying back, overtaken by red poppies.

After half a mile or so, Katie realised something. It was too quiet. The birds weren’t chattering. In fact, looking around, she noticed there didn’t seem to be any birds around. No wrens or blue tits, no swallows swooping. She looked up, expecting to see a buzzard hanging motionless in the sky, frightening the little birds away. Nothing.

Feeling spooked, Katie looked carefully around. That horrible feeling of vulnerability was back. She hated her lack of knowledge, her powerlessness. Gwen would know why the birds were silent. Maybe there was a natural reason and maybe there was a magical reason but Katie was lost no matter what. She was cast adrift, floating between the two worlds. Aware that the magical one existed, but not powerful enough or clever enough to be truly part of it. She knew enough to be frightened and not enough to feel safe.