Brontide

Ottery St. Catchpole, a small village near the South West end of Britain, was where I’d grown up. There were hills as far as the eye could see and beyond them, well, I certainly didn’t know what was past them. I only knew what I saw on the map that hung in my school classroom. There was no “Ottery St. Catchpole” anywhere on it, and on the day I discovered this I went home to my mother and asked her a million and one questions.

“Mummy, how come we’re not on the map?” I asked as she brushed out my hair, preparing me for bed.

“What map, sweetie?” she asked in a gentle tone.

“The map in school, I looked everywhere and we’re not on it. Why is that, Mum? Did they make a mistake?”

She laughed quietly, running the brush slowly through my long golden locks, precisely the same shade as hers. “They didn’t make a mistake, sweetie. Ottery St. Catchpole is very small so it’s not big enough to appear on a map.”

To my almost ten-year-old brain this didn’t make any sense. “Does that mean we aren’t important?”

My mother turned me around to face her, cupping my face in her hands. “Of course not, we’re all very important. We each have roles that we play in society, jobs that we work hard to keep and lives that we lead. Just because we don’t show up on some silly map doesn’t mean we aren’t important. You’re important, Cassie, you’re very special, and one day you’ll grow up and find your place in the world.” She kissed me on the forehead and pulled me in for a hug.

I considered her words, listening as she quietly hummed while I was in her arms. Truth be told, I couldn't have felt any less special if I tried. It isn't right for someone so young to feel negative about themselves but at the time it was the unfortunate reality of my situation. That night I couldn't help but stare at the ceiling restlessly, her words turning over and over in my head like a broken record.

If only I'd known then how special I really was.

A few hours later, after I’d finally fallen asleep, I was woken up by my frantic mother. She was crying and muttering things about my grandmother and the hospital and how we had to leave immediately. Clothes were thrown in my direction and I put them on quickly, having absolutely no idea what was going on. My father drove us to the hospital because my mother was in no fit state to drive. Devon, my thirteen-year-old brother, sat next to me in the backseat and said nothing, still in his pajamas. It was all a big rush until we got to her hospital room, where she was hooked up to wires and breathing through a tube.

The nurse who’d been tending to her brought my mother outside to assess the situation, and it was obvious something was very wrong. A hospital doesn't call you in the middle of the night about one of its long-term patients unless they’re dying. With a jolt of my stomach, I realized that was precisely what was happening.

I gingerly approached her bedside and noticed her eyes were closed, but her heart monitor was beeping so I took that as a good sign. Devon stood next to me and placed the Delilahs my mother had picked from our garden on the night table next to her. Sounds of the muffled conversation between my mother and the nurse seeped into the room and I caught bits and pieces of it, an “I’m sorry” and “there’s nothing we can do now.” My mother returned shortly and went to the opposite side of the hospital bed, my father rubbing her back consolingly and overall trying to be good moral support.

Twenty minutes went by and no one said a word, the beeping of the heart monitor doing all the talking for us. I knew my grandmother had been in the hospital for a long time. She'd been battling some sort of cancer, and when she got sick it aged her a lot. She was only in her late fifties, but her eyes were sunken, her hair was sparse and her skin hung loose, tinged with grey. She was a kind woman with a sense of adventure, always traveling all over the place and coming back with endless stories to tell me. She was very interesting and I’d always felt connected to her in a way that I didn't feel with my own mother, though I had no idea what it was.

I didn't like that I was watching her die right in front of my eyes, no, I didn't like it at all.

I heard the beeping start to speed up and the grip on my hand tighten as my grandmother opened her eyes. She looked around at all of us, stopping on me and smiling for the first time in a long time. I felt tears well up in the back of my eyes, too young to understand anything and yet I knew too much. I didn’t realize at first that within seconds the flowers next to me had wilted completely when only moments earlier they were bright and purple.

My grandmother noticed this, however, her smile growing wider and her grip on my hand getting tighter. "I always knew," she faintly whispered, her eyes welling up happily with tears.

It was then that the beeping slowed down so much that the monitor flatlined, the only witch in my family leaving the rest of us behind.

Everyone else was too distraught to notice the flowers. Deep down, my mother was never the same and neither was I. Not only had I watched my grandmother die, I desperately wanted to know what those last words meant.

“I always knew.”

What had she always known? It obviously had something to do with the flowers dying, and it took me a little while to start considering that maybe I’d done it somehow, but how? I didn’t know at the time that my grandmother was a witch. My mother wasn’t one, and when she had me she probably thought I’d pop out perfectly normal as well. I'd begun to believe there was something weird about me and I quickly became a very withdrawn, reserved child, disturbed by what I’d seen and scared that something like that would happen to me again.

***

It was the summer of 1989, about a year after my grandmother had died. I was almost eleven years old, and more than anything I wanted to grow up. I wanted to be able to go places with Devon and his friends. I wanted to be able to see a film with a boy and go out on dates. I wanted to travel the world and see marvelous things.

The reality of it was I spent most of my time alone, wandering the village. My mother quit her job and became a stay at home mother, while my father worked full time as an electrical maintenance engineer. Devon couldn’t be bothered with me, as he was starting to develop a social life and I was just his annoying kid sister. I started creating places in my head, places that I could escape to when I was feeling lonely, which was frequently. I made imaginary friends instead of real ones, which my mother was beginning to worry about. She didn’t want me to become a recluse and shut everybody out, even though that’s exactly what she’d done. I pointed this out to her one particular day and she didn’t have much to say in response, only that I was “too smart for my own good”.

It was the third of June, a few weeks before my eleventh birthday, and it was right before supper. Mum was in the kitchen making her homemade shepherd’s pie, while dad’s shift was running late again. I was donning a pretty blue sundress that went nicely with my long blonde hair. When I went outside I usually preferred to walk around barefoot, as it made me feel rather free.

Situated in our backyard was a quaint little pond, inhabited by a number of small fish and tadpoles. When I was much younger, I absolutely loved feeding them. Their little mouths reminded me of vacuum cleaners, the way the food pellets would be there one second and gone in the next. Simple things such as this would keep me occupied for hours at a time.

I’d been sitting by the pond for ages that day, and by six in the evening, the fresh air had made me exhausted. Often times I’d take naps in the soft grass, but no matter how many times I tried that particular day I couldn’t do it. Subconsciously I kept getting this nagging feeling that something significant was going to happen. I couldn’t tell you what it was. Perhaps it was something in the air, or maybe I was feeling a bit paranoid, although I wasn’t sure what it’d be about. Either way that feeling easily consumed me and, being curious, I didn’t want to move in case I did miss something.

I got lucky and the waiting period was fairly short. All had been quiet, save for the occasional hoot of an owl, until I heard what sounded like a crunching noise coming from directly behind where I was sitting.

My heart had stopped. This was it. I knew this had to be what I’d been anticipating, something exciting, something riveting, something my childish mind would find spectacular, something-

Without a second glance back, I got up and ran like I was being chased, straight to my back door and yanked it open. Mum, who was right there in the kitchen, nearly cut her finger as she was chopping up carrots.

“Mum! Mum! Do you see it?!” I nearly yelled, out of breath and my eyes the size of saucers. I pulled open the curtains to the window right above the sink and pointed to the apple tree, only meters behind the pond.

Mum put down the carrot and the knife and squinted. “Do I see what, Cassie? I don’t see anything,” she replied, leaning further over the sink to try and get a better look.

“The horse!” I exclaimed, truly not understanding how she couldn’t see it. It was still light outside. “The winged, skeletal horse that’s eating from the tree! Mum, I’m telling you it’s there!”

“Cassiopeia Alice Bains, I have absolutely no idea what you’re rambling on about but I don’t think you should be in the sun so much. It isn’t good for you to be outside all the time, especially by yourself. I really wish you’d try to make friends at school. I worry about you, you know.” She went back to cutting the carrots, looking back at me after I didn’t respond, my focus most definitely elsewhere. “There’s nothing out there, sweetie,” she sighed, “now go get washed up for supper, will you?”

Curiosity got the better of me, and I wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to investigate something such as this. I turned my back on my mother, proceeding to open the back door again and stepping outside as silently as possible.

Needless to say, I’d never seen anything like it in my entire life. It was small, only about half my height, with the frame of a horse. It appeared almost malnourished with the way its black, leathery skin stretched over its boney body. It had large skeletal wings that were folded up against its sides. The face was as gaunt as the rest of its body and its eyes were white and vacant, reminding me of two foggy windows.

As I tip-toed closer I noticed it was injured, a rip going through its right wing, probably preventing it from flying. I stood less than fifty feet away and went completely unnoticed, watching in amazement as it munched on some apples hanging from a low branch. It was a rather ghoulish-looking creature but I, being an animal lover, easily concluded that it was cute in a way that I was sure other people wouldn’t understand. I’d always had an affinity for odd things.

As soon as the back door opened again I turned around with a finger pressed to my lips, signaling for my mother to keep quiet. She blatantly ignored me. "Cassie, stop fooling around and get inside already!"

I gasped when it looked right at us. The creature flapped its black wings nervously before taking off at a run, galloping off towards the hills far behind my house, a place I'd never been allowed to go, especially at night time.

I didn't hesitate to run right after it, my hair and dress flying behind me as I sprinted after the speedy creature. Ignoring my mother’s yells for me to get inside, I disappeared over a large hill, my eyes locked on the injured horse. It looked like it was trying to take off in flight, but every time it attempted it would stumble back onto its feet again, continuing to evade my company. I couldn’t understand why it wouldn’t just let me pet it. That was all I wanted to do with it if I somehow managed to catch it, to be completely honest. The alienness of it reminded me of some of the creatures I’d make up in my head or envision in my storybooks. The thought of coming into contact with something almost fairy tale-like in nature overwhelmed me with excitement.

I’d run over a few more hills before I became out of breath. The skeletal horse quickly began to outrun me, and before I knew it it’d galloped off into a thickly wooded area, its long tail flicking once more before disappearing into the trees.

There was a large part of me that was tempted to continue chasing it, if only I hadn’t stumbled across something that might’ve been considered more spectacular than the horse. Not far from the thicket of trees stood a house. This wasn’t just any old house, no, I knew this one was special, different than anything else I’d ever witnessed. It was several stories high and lopsided, appearing as though it could topple over at any moment.

This place, in all its humbleness, would change everything for me.