The Magpie Effect - The Magpie Chronicles Book 1 (#Wattys2015)

Chapter 18.1

When I got up early on Saturday morning - voluntarily, I feel obliged to add - my father was sitting on the sofa with his feet perched on the coffee table, gawping gormlessly at the TV. Vivian was nowhere to be seen.

"Where's mum?" I sniffed the air; the plastic lemon-scent of kitchen detergent. She'd been here recently.

Martin was preoccupied. "Gone to visit your Aunt Vera," he grunted, not bothering to peel his eyes away from the morning news.

"Without me?"

My dad batted at me with his hand.

My veins seemed to contract, bursting with red-hot blood. In my growing fury, I snapped, "Is that why you have your feet up on the coffee table?" and then turned to storm up the stairs. 

"Don't tell your mother!" Martin called after me, and then the rest of the house was cut off by my slamming the bedroom door behind me. I leaned back against it, pressed my head into the feathery embrace of the dressing gown that hung from the back of it by a hook, and closed my eyes.

I was trying so hard to build bridges with Vivian, but ever since the 'break-in' and the subsequent involvement of the law, she'd done all she could to avoid me even within the three-bedroom confines of our little house. She spoke to me when she had to, and she still put the same amount of food on my plate as she did for herself and my dad, but there was definitely a rift there; a tiny fissure in our relationship that she seemed to be trying her hardest to prise open further with a wrench.

I just didn't understand it. I was losing my best friend and my mother to the jaws of something that I couldn't even begin to explain.

"What's going on inside that overstuffed brain of yours?"

I jumped at the sound of Mona's voice emanating from barely a metre in front of me, and surely enough, when I opened my eyes, there she was: standing just in front of me with her hands perched on her hips and an amused glint to her eye as though she'd been watching me the whole time.

"Mona, you scared me," I breathed.

"Well, I should think so," she beamed. "That's what I'm good at. Now if you said I didn't scare you, then I'd be concerned."

It was too early for her riddles, my head too leaky to make sense of anything at all. I felt like my brain was sinking under the weight of everything, and as I desperately tried to empty buckets of thoughts over the side to keep afloat, Mona was just pouring stuff back in. 

With a sigh, I walked through Mona and sat myself down on the edge of the bed. "What do you want, Mona?"

Mona snorted. "Well, good morning to you, too."

A low grumble ambled up my throat. "Ok, I'm sorry. Good morning, Mona. How fairest thou on this most beautiful morning of autumn?"

"Ok, there's sarcasm, and then there's just unnecessary smarminess," Mona said, and then she gestured at the window. "Anyway, have you even looked outside this morning? Hardly a beautiful morning where living people are concerned."

She swiped at the air with her hands, and the curtains breezed neatly open.  For a second, I didn't understand what it was that I was looking at except a wall of undecipherable white: the glare of the morning sun, I thought, raking at my eyes. But then, as the whiteness failed to recede, I realized that it owed itself to a thick, motionless fog that came down from the sky like a collapsed ceiling of cloud.

"I myself think it's quite lovely," Mona said, fondly. "Such good weather for a haunting."

I frowned at her. It fascinated me when she spoke of haunting as a pastime, as though it were some Olympic sport that all spirits partook in during their spare time - which, I mused, they had quite a lot of.