The Mystery of the Marsh Malaise: Wonky Inn Book 5 Read online

  Gwyn nodded. “If my name was Horace I’d want to be called something else too. What does the T stand for?”

  “I have no idea. I didn’t ask him.”

  “So you went to London to meet him? Is he your new love interest?”

  “Grandmama!” I couldn’t believe her sometimes.

  “It’s been a few weeks.”

  I goggled at her in exasperation. “I haven’t given up on George yet! I never will. I’m going to find him.”

  A dubious expression crossed Gwyn’s face. “Hmm.”

  “Don’t you think I can?” I asked, and Gwyn shrugged. It concerned me that no-one else felt the passing of time the way I did. It was imperative to move quickly but only I seemed to want to do that. But then I suppose everyone else, like Wizard Shadowmender, was biding their time and waiting for a clue that would lead us to George.

  They seemed to think we’d find George and rescue him, and everything would be fine. In my mind, I figured I’d have to fight a battle with The Mori first.

  Hence the meeting with Silvan.

  “I’ve invited Silvan here.”

  “To do what?” Gwyn asked, eyeing me with suspicion.

  “To help me find George.”

  “Is he a detective?”

  “No, nothing like that.”

  “What then?”

  I shook my head, declining to answer, and headed for the open door, and my study on the other side. “You’ll find out if he comes.”

  “Well that doesn’t sound very promising.” Gwyn followed me, and I tried to wave her away. “Is he coming or not?”

  I frowned. I didn’t know for sure. “He wouldn’t give me a straight answer.”

  “Pfft!” The look on Gwyn’s face was a picture. An odd mix of triumph and despair. “What are you getting yourself into now, Alfhild?”

  I threw myself into the seat behind my laptop and started hitting the keys with ferocity, entering and re-entering my password incorrectly.

  I don’t know, I wanted to cry. I don’t know, and no-one seems to want to help me. So I’ve taken the law into my own hands and I’m going to find George. Whatever it takes.

  But I didn’t say that. I calmed my fingers and entered my password correctly, then looked up and smiled as benignly as I could manage. “I have to work, darling grandmama. I’m sure you understand.”

  We stared at each other for a long moment, until finally she nodded. “Very well,” she said quietly, before slowly beginning to apparate.

  As she disappeared, she couldn’t resist a parting shot. “By the way, Alfhild, I went through your entire wardrobe and you do desperately need new robes. Perhaps you should go back up to London, and after you’ve finished shopping, find Wizard Shadowmender and tell him all about Hortense.”

  “Not going to happen,” I muttered under my breath, but she’d gone.

  “Again,” Silvan instructed.

  Exhausted and dripping with sweat I directed a ball of energy at an empty whisky bottle. It skittered sideways. Silvan twitched his long thin black wand at it and it resumed its place with a shudder. We had taken refuge in the attic, practicing spells of force. We’d been at it for hours.

  My spellcasting ability was weak. I’d vastly improved over the past twelve months, for sure, but even so, the years I’d spent hiding from my vocation had taken a toll. And that was why I’d visited the dark web, looking for someone to teach me all I needed to know. Or all I thought I needed to know. Through my enquiries I’d made some dubious contacts. Silvan was the result of my research.

  Horace T Silvanus was a dark witch. A man who knew how to cast spells that hurt others. A being who could be totally devoid of compassion. A witch who could kill using his magick—without thinking twice. He was a necromancer—meaning he could call on the dead and speak to them and enlist their help if he needed to.

  But most of all he was a mercenary. A witch for hire. If I paid him enough, he’d do as I asked.

  He encapsulated everything I understood a war witch to be. Shady, manipulative, merciless, deadly. And as far as I was concerned, we were at war.

  With The Mori.

  I’d realised after George’s disappearance and the run-in we’d had with The Mori at the Fayre that I needed to upgrade my skills. Being ‘nice Alf’ simply wasn’t going to cut it anymore.

  Nice Alf wasn’t going to bring George back.

  Nasty Alf stood a chance.

  This afternoon Silvan had me attempting to push back against the magick he used. To say I found myself struggling was an understatement. Moving objects is pretty much Spellcasting 101. So is blocking, or using a defence spell, when someone else throws or directs an object at you. Moving objects that someone else has control of, well that’s a whole different ball game.

  I’d tired rapidly. Working with Silvan took so much out of me physically. I had muscles aching, especially in my shoulders, upper back and thighs, that I’d forgotten I had.

  Silvan flicked his wand at the bottle again and it hurtled towards me. Instinctively I ducked rather than repel the bottle with my magick, and Silvan had to fling out a hand to catch it by its neck before it smashed into the wall behind me.

  “Ugh,” I cringed. After hours of practice, I just wasn’t getting it. I slumped down over my knees, panting.

  Silvan laughed. “Are you sure you want to go ahead with this? Perhaps you aren’t fit enough.”

  Too much cake and not enough exercise. I stood, breathing hard, trying to bring my gasping under control. “I’m fine. Perfectly fine.”

  Silvan’s eyes twinkled. “You have a very attractive flush.” He indicated his own face. Not a bead of sweat to be seen. I knew I must look a state, all wild hair and red face.

  “Let’s try again,” I said, struggling to catch my breath.

  Florence picked that moment to glide into the room followed by a tray of sandwiches, cakes, fruit and a jug of water with two glasses. She looked at Silvan with wide eyes and he offered her a leering grin in return. If it’s possible for a ghost to blush, I swore Florence did just that.

  “Hi Florence,” I said, attempting to distract her.

  “Oh, Miss Alf,” she smiled. “Sorry to interrupt you but we missed you at lunch and Charity thought you might be hungry.”

  Silvan examined the tray. “Leave the fruit and water and take the rest back,” he said.

  “But—” Florence glanced at me for confirmation.

  “Go, go, go.” He said, indicating the door with his wand.

  Florence decanted the water, glasses and plate of fruit onto a side table and reluctantly took her leave, as I nodded my thanks.

  Silvan tossed the empty whisky bottle he’d been clutching into the air, then guided it gently down to the floor. “We should try something else.” He plucked a couple of bananas from the plate and threw one at me. I caught it.

  “I was hungry enough for a sandwich,” I said.

  He moved over to stand next to me and tapped his wand against my stomach. “You’ve seen too many lunches. We need you to be fit and wiry. Fast-moving. Strong.”

  “Do we really?” I growled. I’d been thinking the same, but I didn’t feel it was his place to articulate that thought. “I’m plenty fit enough.” The goddess knew I should be, with the amount of running around after my guests and ghosts I did.

  “You should channel that anger of yours into your magick,” Silvan observed with a wry half-smile. He tapped his wand against my chin and I pushed him away, irritated by his over-familiarity.

  “I was always taught to control my emotions at school. The teachers there told us it was a sure-fire way of sending your magick askew. We practised endlessly.” I remembered the drills. Rather like learning our multiplication tables but with spells instead. We did all the basic skills repeatedly until we could do them in our sleep - do them without thinking.

  Silvan chuckled. “But how old were you then? Seven, eight? No older, I’ll warrant. The problem with school is that our young ones are sent there
to be controlled. To be manipulated. You’re coerced to behave in certain ways.” He circled me, tapping his wand against my scalp. I flicked it away with my fingers. “They keep you in line. Insist on your obedience. Teach you to tame the wildness within your soul. And they tell you that when you control your emotions, you perform clean magick.”

  He faced me, “And that’s what you’re doing, Alfhild.” He directed the tip of his wand at the banana I held in my hand. “You practise clean magick. It’s neat. It’s tidy. And it is largely ineffective.” The banana slipped away from my hands and bobbed in the air in front of me. With another wiggle of Silvan’s wand it spun in the air, dancing for my entertainment. “It’s only when you properly let go, when you give free rein to your passion that magick becomes stronger.”

  That made sense. I thought of my friend Mara, a witch who lived deep in the forest with her faery changeling. Only last Christmas I’d witnessed the way that her emotions could cause adverse weather conditions. She could wreak storms over East Devon by virtue of feeling a tad fed-up. When she suffered a bereavement, we’d nearly had to cancel all the Inn’s festivities. She’d wrought a snowmageddon that had brought the countryside to its knees.

  “It goes against everything I’ve been taught to just let go and… throw magick around willy-nilly.”

  Silvan directed the banana back into my hands. “When I first met you in The Web and Flame, you were angry and desperate.”

  I nodded, mute. What could I say?

  “Presumably you still are? You wouldn’t have invited me here and offered to pay me a ridiculous sum of money if everything was alright in your world.”

  Thoughts of George were never far away, along with the horror of finding Derek Pearce dead in his cottage. And what of Mr Bramble, felled by a heart attack at the Psychic and Holistic Fayre held in Whittlecombe at Easter? And Rob Parker, sausage seller extraordinaire, who had lost his impressively-liveried van, but had fortunately been saved before he met a similar sizzling fate to his famous bangers.

  George had been a hero that day. I would never give up looking for him.

  Plus it wouldn’t surprise me that there were countless other victims of The Mori.

  So yes, it’s fair to say I was angry.

  Silvan tapped my chin with his wand again. My irritation flared and overflowed. I cast it out of his hand, with a spark of annoyance, and watched as it spun, end over end, hitting a beam and breaking neatly in two, both parts rolling into the narrow eaves of the attic. It would be a bit of stretch to reach in and pull them out, but of course Silvan didn’t need to reach down. He simply beckoned and they came soaring through the air towards him.

  “I’m so sorry.” I watched him examine the broken ends.

  “Don’t be!” He waved them at me. “Nothing a little Sellotape won’t fix. I’ll send to Celestial Street for a replacement.”

  “I’ll pay for it.”

  Silvan sniggered. “I’ll add it to your bill.” He wagged one half of the wand at me. “But do you see, Alfhild? How that little bit of negative energy gave your magick an edge? If you put a lid on your feelings and only perform clean magick, you will never know the real power of the forces you are engaging with.”

  He pointed at the banana in my hand. “Imagine that is The Mori. The man responsible for the disappearance of your detective friend.” He moved to my side, standing just behind my shoulder. “Channel your feelings. Funnel them. Harness that energy inside you. Let it build.” From behind me, I heard the sound of him taking a deep breath. “Oh that’s good, I can feel it.”

  I did as he said, allowing the bleak feelings and despair I stored inside me to bubble and roil like hot sticky tar. I directed my frustration and grief at the banana, and as I did so, the yellow skin began to bruise and turn to brown, and then blacken. The banana aged in seconds, became droopy in my hand before collapsing on itself and falling to the floor with a dull splat.

  “Nicely done,” Silvan praised me. He moved to stand in front of me once more and tossed his own banana my way.

  I caught it and examined its pristine flesh. “You’re expecting me to do that to people though?”

  Silvan raised an eyebrow. “Problem?”

  “I’m not sure I have it in me.”

  “If you always do, what you’ve always done, you will always achieve the same results.” He flicked the banana from my hand using a broken half of his wand. It hovered in the air between us. “Now, again. Try and take the banana away from me.”

  No more ‘nice Alf’. Wasn’t that what I’d said?

  With a new sense of ferocity I beckoned the banana my way. It was almost in my hand before Silvan whipped it away.

  “Excellent! We’ll make a dark witch of you yet!”

  I’d taken to spending a lot of my free time—and to be fair when you’re running an inn, there isn’t a great deal of that—walking around Whittlecombe and the surrounding area. My reason for doing this, ostensibly, was simply to make sure I was getting enough exercise. However, I think deep down, I continued to search for signs of George, or clues as to his whereabouts. I’d scrutinize every stranger I met, engage them in conversation, digging for information about who they were and their motives for visiting the little village.

  I’d lived in Whittlecombe for a little over a year, and I’d noticed how I’d become increasingly alive to its innate energy. The more I trundled down the lanes or circumnavigated the village green and the large village pond, the more deeply acquainted I became with the profound magick at the centre of the village. I haunted Whittle Folly and the woods and marshes behind it, and grew increasingly familiar with the community and the rhythms of daily life.

  The notion that something special and ancient existed within the land here had first occurred to me in the days after my dunking in the village pond at the hands of The Mori. The sprites or ghosts—or spirit water witches as I liked to think of them—had saved my life that awful night. It now seemed obvious to me, that it was no coincidence that my wonky inn teemed with spirits. Whittlecombe was alive with its own magickal history, and like it or not, the villagers who made up the small community were part and parcel of that.

  And so my forays into the lanes, mapping the village in its entirety, helped keep me fit on one level, but added fuel to the fire of my drive to understand this particular part of the British Isles, and the lure it held for the Daemonne family. We’d lived here for hundreds and hundreds of years. Whittle Inn had been standing for five hundred years or so, and simply been added to in order to create its own inimitable wonky architecture.

  After all those years in London, I really couldn’t imagine living anywhere else now. I felt at home here.

  And I had no intention of being driven away from my ancestral home by a bunch of nasty wizards or warlocks.

  Whittle Folly was as far as I could walk from the inn and still remain in Whittlecombe. The road here carried on and headed for Durscombe on the coast. I liked to walk down to the Folly and see how they were getting on with rebuilding the scout hut—a community funding initiative had provided the money needed to underpin the ground here and shore up the surrounding area. The council intended to replace the hut and make improvements to the parking area.

  Behind the hut, the forest spread out in all directions. It radiated out beyond a small housing development and the village, around the back of Whittle Lane, all the way up to Whittle Inn and beyond, with only the narrow road cutting through it. There were several springs running through the wood that originated in Speckled Wood, and they fed some of the marshy areas. The marshes were, for the most part, well signposted to ensure unsuspecting hikers didn’t come to a dank, damp end by meandering into the water when they were unprepared to do so.

  Everyone’s favourite part of the Folly was the deep-water pool, however. During the summer, it provided a welcome respite on hot sunny days. Local kids loved diving into the clear water and cooling off. A local folk tale told that the pool was bottomless, but during the hot summer the
previous year, the water had declined to a low level never previously seen—well not in living memory anyway—and it transpired it was fifteen feet deep at its centre.

  My daily route habitually took me down as far as the Folly. On dry days I would circle the pool and then head back to the inn, with a stop at Whittle stores to say hello to Rhona and Stan. Then perhaps I’d call in briefly to see Millicent and her pooches, Sunny the Yorkshire Terrier and Jasper the lurcher.

  Today should have been no different. Beautifully blues skies and warm air on a Saturday meant that the popular local beauty spot was relatively busy. As I walked across the car park, picking my way through the vehicles left there, I could hear a woman shrieking from the direction of the pool. I picked up my pace, alert to any other danger around me.

  As I neared the pool itself, I could see where families had been sitting enjoying the day. Camping stools and collapsible chairs, picnic blankets, towels and hampers were spread around. People were clustering around the pool and I broke into a run and raced to join the small throng, willing to offer any assistance.

  As I arrived at the pool’s edge, I saw a child being pulled from the water and into his mother’s outstretched arms. The look of relief on her face was palpable.

  “What happened?” I asked the young man nearest me.

  “The little lad got into trouble. He was playing on his own and maybe he slipped or something. I’m not sure.”

  “He lost his footing,” his partner told me, her hand clamped over her heart. “He disappeared under the water and nobody noticed initially.”

  “Oh my goodness,” I exclaimed.

  The young woman whispered conspiratorially to me, “I think his mum was on her phone. She wasn’t watching him.”

  “It’s easily done.” Her partner gave her a withering look.

  “You need eyes in the back of your head, don’t you?” I offered, trying to soothe relations between the two and the chap nodded sagely.

  “Fortunately, Stan from the shop was here, and he leapt right in. Didn’t think twice.” The man indicated a fully-dressed Stan. He was wading out of the water to cheers and greetings from the gathered ensemble. We all broke into a round of spontaneous applause and Stan beamed and waved us away.