Witch Doctors Inc: SEASON ONE (Completed!)

Part 4.16

PRESENT TIME
LILY

I knew no good would come of this.

Onyx peers down at me with eyes like black marbles.

"Is that why you pretended to meet some made-up friend in the Sactaphranian desert?" I murmur, sitting up slowly.

Onyx huffs. I was not pretending anything. I have friends all over the First Continent.

Addy puts a hand on my shoulder nervously. The pink glitter on her fingernails jumps up and down with streaks of magic. "Maybe you should stay lying down." Her voice is saturated with worry.

I shake my head. I've spent two whole days lying down, one of them in hospital. I'm fine. Amanda Hannigan, however, is paralysed from the waist down.

"I met the Dark Witch," I say. "Or the part of my mind that is the Dark Witch. She did cast the spell on the Tyfyr family. She killed the other villagers, but trapped the Tyfyrs in the bodies of dolls. Why?"

"And why did the curse pass on to Amanda only, and skip Ara?" Addy presses. "Plus, think about all the people who have had physical contact with Amanda. And I'm sure Ara wasn't the first little girl to slip past the railing and touch the dolls. They've been sitting there for six hundred years. Yet there are no other reports of this doll curse."

Onyx licks the milk moustache off his face. The Dark Witch was very powerful. Modern antidotes are unlikely to work. There is no use involving yourself in this.

"Aw Onyx," Addy protests. "We can't just leave Amanda to turn into a doll!"

I lean back onto my pillow. The light from the city's walls casts a wavering fractal over my bedsheets. "You know what, Onyx?" I fix shrewd eyes on the cat. "I remembered a few things while I was lying in hospital. Things from my past life as the Dark Witch."

A surprised meow slips from Onyx's lips. He turns those marble eyes up to me and blinks.

"It's funny, you know. I have memories of being inside Tyfyr House. Not as the Dark Witch cursing the Tyfyr family, but as Bethany. You were there."

Are you sure it was not another black cat?

I cast an incredulous glare in his direction. "It was a very annoying, secretive, lying black cat from outer space."

Addy turns to face Onyx. Her nail glitter bubbles excitedly. "Do you know something,
Onyx? Please tell us?"

The light from the window imbues Onyx's eyes with an entire galaxy of glitter. Very well, Adamantine. He hops onto the windowsill and turns his face towards the city. Bethany worked at Tyfyr House before she...turned. She was the duchess's maid, then later Lady Alicia's. She knew their secret.

"What secret?" If the cat lies this time, I won't hold myself responsible for what happens to him. We will be making cat soup out of his lying lump of a body.

There were four Tyfyr children, not three.

I scrunch up my nose. "There were only five dolls. Two parents and three children."

Onyx shakes his head. There were four children, but one was kept hidden. A small boy who was disfigured from birth. He was the true heir to the dukedom. The Tyfyrs were ashamed of him. They put out that he had died in infancy, and kept him hidden in the attic.

I stare at Onyx, wide-eyed. "The attic?"

Yes.

"The dolls were all disfigured," Addy reminds us. "That must be why she cursed them. Because of what they did to their son."

"Why would the Dark Witch care about a little boy? She had no heart, remember? She didn't care about anyone." My mind races furiously. They kept the boy locked up, so the Dark Witch locked them up in their own bodies. And she made sure to give them bodies that wouldn't work. "I didn't sense any life energy in those dolls though."

That is expected. It has been several hundred years. Even if the body cannot decay, the spirit eventually will. The Tyfyr family are no longer trapped in that attic.

Addy breathes a sigh of relief. "I'm glad, despite what they did to their son. No one deserved to be trapped forever."

"What happened to the boy?" I ask Onyx.

He died.

"In the fire? Did the Dark Witch kill him?"

No, no. He was an ill child. He died one night, and they held a secret funeral for him. Bethany cried for days. She did love him.

Is that why the Dark Witch punished the family? Because she remembered her own heartache and blamed them? Or was there a tiny part of the Dark Witch that was still the timid auburn-haired girl I met in the Forest of Sorrows?

Addy lets loose a small gasp. "He could be the boy you saw, Lily." She turns to me with wide eyes. "The one who drowned in Wyvern's Lake."

I turn to Onyx sharply. "The boy...did he have turquoise hair?"

Onyx blinks at me, then shakes his head. No. His hair was black as a raven's, like his mother. And he did not drown.

My shoulders sag. I suppose Onyx can't have the answers to everything. It was enough to know that Amanda was affected by the Dark Witch's curse. It must've spread to Ara when she touched the dolls, then to her mother. "I am you, and you are me," the Dark Witch had said. Well, if I cast the curse then I could reverse it, surely.

"I couldn't get rid of the curse," I admit. "The magic looked like a black weaving, so I tried to pick apart the threads. They were not soft."

Onyx snorts. You think that picking at it will work?

"Then tell me what will," I retort, annoyed.

Nothing.

He leaps from the windowsill and trots out the door.

"Where do you think you're going?!" I yell.

"Oh let him go," Addy says.

"You don't believe him, do you? That nothing can reverse the curse?"

Addy puts her chin in her hands. The nail polish charm licks at her lip. "No. I think he does know of a way. He's upset right now though. He and Bethany must've been close. Imagine how hurt he must be about what she turned into. Poor Onyx."

I'm feeling a distinct lack of empathy for the cat. Maybe if he'd told me all he knew before I went all the way to Tyfyr House and tried to break the curse myself, I wouldn't have ended up in hospital.

"You shouldn't think about it now, Lil. You still need rest. Onyx'll talk when he's ready. We just have to trust him."

"Amanda could be dead by then."

"Onyx won't let that happen."

I purse my lips into a thin line. Onyx's black marble eyes linger in my vision. "Are you so sure about that, Addy?"