Morrigan, Book 1: Emergence

Morrigan: Tale of a Teenage Witch

                                                                         Chapter One

Time had a funny way of slowing until it became a dull ache at a particular point on a Friday. Listening to Mr. Mullen droning on dispassionately, as tired of the subject matter as his students were, Mo couldn’t escape the feeling that something in her was dying. Though it was just a few weeks into term, the days had already become mundanely routine. Gazing out of the window at the school woodland, mainly green and leafy save for hints of orange burning the extremities of the great ash trees, Mo saw how Autumn was seeping in, trimming the edges off everything, even the days—the clocks would soon go back.

Twisting the thread of her pencil case around her fingers and cutting the blood supply until the skin was a yellowy white colour, she attempted to at least appear awake, if not attentive, for the remainder of the lesson. Unsure of the reasons why, she was aware that she had got onto the wrong side of Mad Dog Mullen and that was not a position she wished to get locked into. In this case a little self-harming was entirely justified.

She was pulled abruptly and violently out of her reverie by a large bluebottle that had come in through the open window and settled on her desk. Mo hated flies with an irrational passion; whenever she encountered one, she would become fixated on their heavy drone and challenging flight paths that usually crossed whatever food she was eating or book she was reading. Her mother didn’t understand her aggression toward these blow-flies and would watch openmouthed whenever Mo would approach one from behind using all the stealth she possessed and smash it with whatever book or magazine was at hand. This bluebottle appeared to be particularly disgusting and settled on her book rubbing the tips of his legs together, spreading whatever feces or filth he had collected onto the page, all the while eying her with his fixed red eyes. Mo’s fingers edged imperceptibly toward a ruler to the right of her history book. Her thoughts gathered like storm clouds and her focus sharpened to a pin point. Taking hold of the ruler, the voice in her head grew louder. Get out now or I will pulverise you. Find a window or a door and get out! Tentatively raising the ruler, she was oblivious to the queer look that Eva, who was sitting beside her, was giving her, just as she was unaware that she was gritting her teeth. But Eva noticed and so did the fly, who lifted into the air and made a beeline for the open window. Placing the ruler back on the table, Mo allowed her face and shoulders to relax again and she fell back into her former stupor.

“Did ye get ‘im?”

“Who?”

“The fly,” Eva nodded toward the ruler.

“Yeah, I did. I gave him his marching orders and he left. A little talent I have - communing with creatures.”

“Nice party trick.”

When the bell did finally ring nobody stirred until Mad Dog had finished the point he was making about the Boer war and then without dismissing the class directly, turned his attention to his papers which he shuffled into a pile before striding out of the classroom. Raising her eyes to the clock above the interactive white board Mo could see that it was a little after 3.30pm but that last class had drained any previous enthusiasm to escape the confines of the school and she found herself procrastinating until all her classmates had left. By the time she had paid a visit to the loos, dumped some books in her locker in a vain attempt to lessen the weight of her rucksack, and then somewhat perversely, collected others she might need that evening at home, the school grounds were all but deserted.

A certain malaise seemed to cling to her and, without knowing why, she had avoided seeing Rachel, Eva, or any of her other friends on the way home. She’d been feeling a little off of late but try as she might, she just couldn’t pinpoint the reason for it. Summer had been fun; she’d been to the south of France with her parents and spent a week sailing with friends in the west of Ireland. She was a lucky girl and she knew it, so this feeling of foreboding she found so hard to shake was either ridiculous self-indulgence—was there any other kind?—or a sixth sense of something brewing. She laughed at her own sense of melodrama and tried to brush the feeling away by concentrating on her surroundings.