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

Chapter 2.1

It had been years since I'd last seen a spirit.  Sometimes I'd even forget that I could do it. Those periods of in-between, the stretches of absolute normalcy and dullness, were when I was happiest.

In fact, it had been so long since it had last happened that I'd almost tricked myself into believing that it would never happen again, that whatever twisted second vision I possessed had worn off with age. Like when Peter Pan told Wendy that all kids see fairies but, as they grow up, they forget. Maybe I was forgetting how to see dead people.

More fool me, I thought to myself as I climbed into bed that night. My grandmother would have turned in her grave had she heard me speak such blasphemy against her craft. It was something to be proud of, she'd told me, a gift that required my utmost reverence and care.

Even now, all these years later, I could recall my first sighting. It was sort of like the first time you truly learnt to ride a bike, or the first time you went to a sleepover. It was a lifelong memory, retrievable at the simple flicker of a synapse. 

I'd been on the bus with my grandmother. I must have been about four or five, cute as a cherub if I may say so myself. Where we were going was all but lost, but I could distinctly remember that she smelt like rose water, like she woke up each morning and rolled in the flowerbeds outside her house. We were sitting near the back of the bus, away from where all the other old people liked to sit.

She was a glamorous woman, my grandmother. She didn't exactly look like a necromancer, whatever that was. I suppose ignorance demanded that she be some sort of nomadic hippie, her arms laden with bangles and thick, colourful fabrics, but truth was she liked to have her hair permed every Wednesday at the salon and she took her baths with peach-scented bath-bombs.

There was a man sitting opposite us, and I was staring at him as we hummed through Magpie's Nest. I was staring at him because he had a hole in the middle of his forehead.  A neat, tidy hole, tinged at the edges with crimson, but a hole nonetheless.

It didn't seem to bother him; he just gazed off stupidly into the distance.

"Staring makes people uncomfortable, Saffy," my grandmother whispered in my ear, "even the dead."

I stared up at her. I was four; death wasn't one of the big topics I'd tackled yet.  Hell, I'd only just mastered the days of the week. "What happened to him, grandma?"

"Oh, he looks like he had a bit of an accident, but he's alright. I don't think he's in any pain.  But he does look like he wants to be left alone," she added, sternly. "So don't go gawping and staring at him with your chin scraping the floor. And what have I told you about calling me that word?"

I ignored her reproach; I wasn't allowed to call her by the G word. "Hasn't anybody else noticed him?"

"Nobody, just you and me."

"How?"

"Because you and I share a special gift," she said. "It means that we have this special eyesight that sometimes lets us see things that other people can't see. But that doesn't mean that they're not there, Saffy, always remember that. It just means that they're not part of our world anymore."

She could see that she was dishing out metaphysical information that was far too complicated for my little four-year-old brain to handle, so she reached into her bag and presented me with a lollipop. My mother would have killed her had she known; Winnie was always feeding me stuff that she shouldn't have been.

"Our little secret," she winked at me, and then nodded her head at the man with the hole in his face. "And let's keep this our little secret too, yes?  Just for a little while."

I nodded absently and popped the lollipop into my mouth.  "Does anybody else know, Winnie?"

"Your Auntie Vera knows," she said, "but she doesn't much like to talk about it."

"Why not?"

Winnie paused and considered, her blond hair bunched around her face like a mane. She kept colouring it right up until the day she died. "Well, it's not really everybody's cup of tea," she finally said. "So, our little secret.  What do you say?"

I nodded again and extended my pinky, a most serious and binding of childhood contracts.  Winnie stared down at my finger as though she couldn't quite figure out what it was.

"What's this?"

"A pinky promise," I explained.  "We both wrap our pinkies together and that means you can't break the promise. Ever."

"And what happens if you do?" Winnie asked me.

My eyes widened. I'd never really given much thought to it before. I searched around in my brain for an answer. "You die, I guess." And then I reached up with my finger and pointed it at the holey man. "Like that guy."

"Saffy!" Winnie scolded me, and she hooked her perfectly manicured pinky through my own. "Here, pinky promise.  Now keep quiet, the secret starts from now on."

I clamped my lips shut, certain that the words would tumble out of my mouth if I dared open it. There was a woman sitting in front of us who kept turning to stare at us, and she shook her head at me after that last little outburst.

The holey man didn't seem to mind. He didn't seem to mind much of anything, in fact.  He looked sort of zombie-like, like he didn't really do much thinking or minding. He just sat there and stared into space.  He was still gazing into nothingness when we got off at our stop.

After that it was like Winnie had opened my eyes to a whole new world. I saw the dead everywhere and anywhere.  You could always pick them out in a crowd because of their slight transparency, the way they would just stand there and let people stride through them like they were made of air.

Which, I guess, they sort of are.

Plus there was the indispensable marker of their death. It was usually there in some shape or form, only sometimes you had to look harder for it. A bullet hole, a bruised face, a slashed throat. The ones who stayed behind never drifted off in their sleep. Maybe that was why some people stayed behind and others didn't: maybe they'd died before they were actually supposed to.

Luckily, Winnie had opened my eyes to it pretty early on so by the time I saw my first burn victim, I was relatively well-conditioned. Not even the water-logged eye-sockets of a drowned spirit could phase me, cheeks nibbled to swollen flaps by endless schools of fish.

But then, when I was eleven, Winnie died. Sudden cardiac arrest, the doctors had told my mum and dad. Nothing had been wrong, but it wasn't entirely out of the ordinary, either.  It was just one of those things. Tragic, but irreversible.

Except to me it had been so much more than that, because I'd lost the one person with whom I shared a secret that I was sure would break my shoulders if I dared to try and carry it alone. For a while I'd even clung to the possibility that I'd bump into her somewhere, like on the bus or at the duck ponds, but as the years went on I knew I was only kidding myself.  Whenever I called out Winnie's name, only silence answered.

Now I was lying in bed, staring up at the plaster whorls of my ceiling, and my shoulders were doing ok. A bit too broad and porky for my liking, but they were doing just fine.  Spirits didn't bother me that much anymore.

The living, however, were a different story. And tomorrow I was going to enter a whole building full of them.

Thanks for reading, guys! I hope you enjoyed... if you did, don't forget to comment and vote! Part 2.2 will be uploaded in the next few days!