Lost Souls

A WITCH'S LAIR

I arrived at around five in the afternoon at the house that seemed to be the home to that...whatever it was. The house looked inviting. It had a white fence in the front yard of the otherwise well-groomed garden which had flowers of all sorts and colours.
A big apple tree with blooming blossoms hanging from its branches was seated right in the middle of the little yard. It didn't look one bit as I had imagined. The odours were pleasant, flowery scents filled my senses as I walked the little path to the door. I felt a bit dizzy and warned myself to not inhale too much. Otherwise I'd regret it later. "Turn around." I heard the words in my head, "For your sake, girl, turn around." My inner voice called out to me in warning.
No, I would do this now, I knew that I could do it, just a bit more braveness was all it took. Knocking on the graciously forged door knocker, I held my breath in anticipation.
A minute passed but there was nobody to open up to me. Three minutes - five minutes - seven minutes. The time continued running.
Then, after ten minutes of waiting, I noticed a sound near the door. But I was done waiting. I didn't intend to spend my whole twenties waiting for that cursed door to crack open. Just as I was about to leave, the entrance opened up and a voice greeted me.
"My, my. Sorry for the long wait. I'm not the youngest mare in the stable anymore, ye ken?" A grey-haired woman, at least around seventy of age came into view. "Emma, isn't it? What a lovely name for such a pretty young lady."
"How...?" I wondered openly, my mistrust growing with every passing minute.
- Did everybody here know my name and family history, for god's sake? -
"Ah, long story." The woman said, waving her hand dismissively. "Come on in, child. I'm sure you must be famished by now." And yes, I was, actually. I hadn't eaten since yesterday evening and I surely could have used some food finally.
Taking the woman's kind offer after careful consideration, I went back inside with her. She sat me down onto a chair in her dining room I guessed, surrounded by questionable antiquities. From tokens to glasses and plates, further yet to gross stuffed animals like foxes and cats, and no, not the cute kind of stuffed animals we all love to look at.
Feeling lost and overwhelmed by all these curiosities, I hardly noticed the woman - whose name I still did not know - shuffling back to the room where she planted me, a filled plate and a glass in her hands. Seating it in front of my face, the smell of it crawled immediately into my nose.
A delighted squeal escaped my throat and I blushed.
"Nah. No need to blush, love. It's always good to have a healthy appetite. Especially nowadays. All those young things are always so worried about their weight. Back in my time, we loved eating and the lads loved women who could eat." She chuckled. A pleasant, very feminine noise, compared to my laughter which sounded more like a snort than a laugh.
"I'm sorry, I seem to have forgotten your name, ma'am." I said in between bites and chewing. "Oh. Pardon me. I'm Agnes Barclay. But please, just call me Aggie."
"Aggie, then. Well, I mean you already know my name, so there's not much I could tell you about me. I'm curious though; How did you know it?" The question shot unintended out of me.
But now that it was out in the world, she might as well give me a damn good reason for her knowledge about me. "Oh, you know. I have a lot of rare talents, dear. This is probably just one of the minor ones..." She actually believed that knowing someone's name before they introduced themselves was 'minor' ?
"Well I wouldn't say that this is a minor talent, Aggie. It rather seems to me as if you spied on me...?" I guessed, sipping on my glass of water, a questioning frown presumably visible on my face.
"Ah. You're a smart one, my dear. Smartness. A wonderful thing for a young person to have." Ending this cat and mouse game once and for all, I came straight to the reason for my visit. "So, your henchman told me yesterday, that you could help me with a little problem I have at hand at the moment."
"Henchman, you say? Oh no, no, no. He's not a henchman at all. ...Willy? Could you come out for a second?" The old man from yesterday came out of the shadows of the living room, dressed in the same style he already wore then.
"This is my husband, William."
"Oh dear, I'm Willy. I enjoyed our little conversation very much. You are quite the witty one." He laughed. Unfortunately just as pleasant a sound as that of his wife. "Whoa, wait. Husband?" Both nodded.
I couldn't believe it, she actually sent her husband - her husband - to scare the wits out of me. "Okay, this is getting seriously ridiculous! Why are you doing this to me? I don't even know you - either of you - for fuck's sake!"
My anger over all this made my face go red with furious heat.
"Just calm down, Emma dear. We are not trying to hurt you or anything, please believe me. But I had a feeling - a strange dream of you - and needed to see you. So I sent my husband to find you, which he ultimately did. And brought you here. To me." She pleaded with me to understand, hands open to somehow make me believe her. And to probably calm me down, as well.
"Oh, I see. Because you had a feeling you had to make your husband stalk me, and tell me frightening stories about ghosts, and, and invisible dogs that bark in the middle of the night and all that. Oh yes right! And of course let's not forget about the great story that I'm not the first one to see strange things happening here!"
All dams broke and my fear and fury released onto Aggie and her husband Willy. I was in such a frenzy that I didn't realise that she brought some things to the dining table and laid them out in front of me.
"Oh, what the hell...?" I moaned, being at my wits' end.
"No, no hell at all, dear. We're going to perform a little magic..."