Sticky Witch II
Meet the team and their maps
I dashed this out as a microstory for my Wednesday newsletter.…and it grew.
If you missed Part 1, you can read it here (no paywall).
I asked Colin to drop me off on the outskirts of Bristol, just outside my local supermarket. It was lunchtime, and a long, hard morning of magical work had left me starving. A sandwich would not cut it; I needed noodles, protein, and vegetables. Fortunately, my office had a decent microwave—I’d bought it on my second day here.
Latika grimaced when she saw my shopping bag in the work kitchen. “You’re going to stink out the office,” she objected. I gave her my widest grin. “Just like you did with that aloo gobi last week?”
“You ate half of it!”
“Your mother doesn’t just cook food; she creates masterpieces. I couldn’t resist. Are you sure she’s not an unregistered Herbalist?”
Latika wandered beside me and poked at my sad Thai meal in its microwave box. “I’m not convinced that’s food.”
“Eh, it just needs pepping up.” I dumped the noodles with its coriander and sad bits of chicken into a bigger bowl before adding prawns, peanuts and chilli sauce. I heated it in the microwave while dumping the salad bag on a plate. Doing physical magic with brickwork was the equivalent of running a marathon. I burned a similar number of calories and endured the same strain on my heart and muscles. As a result, I had a compulsory fitness regime and physio check-ins as part of my insurance. It also meant I could eat what I liked, within reason. Too much junk food, you got junk magic.
Thank goodness Latika likes nuts.
She was staring at me now with the same slightly spaced-out look you saw on game addicts after an all-night session. In Latika’s case, it meant she was reading my aura.
“You’re worried. And angry. Did something go wrong with your broken house?”
The microwave pinged. I pulled out the bowl and poked around for a clean fork. “No. I may have upset one of the local covens.”
“Oh.”
I explained about my research on housing subsidence and my bashed-in car. Latika looked shocked. “I can’t believe they would do that!”
I rolled my eyes. “I keep forgetting you’re not from around here,” I teased her. Latika was a university graduate who had taken on the admin in our magical firm as a summer job and discovered she had mild magical abilities. She was also from London, a city that still had its head stuck up its tech-bro arse.
“So what will you do about it?” she asked. A small divot formed between her perfectly spaced black brows. I’m sure her classmates wrote poetry about Latika’s face, and I’m used to the hush whenever I accompany her to a building site. How she remains so innocent is a mystery, up there with Bigfoot’s pedicure.
“Right now? Not much. I’ll tell Mike and keep an eye out,” I said.
“He’s with John over at the Marina. He won’t be in until five this afternoon.”
I frowned. “I thought that job was done?”
Latika shrugged. “Something about lost cables,” she said vaguely. “You should call him.”
“Maybe. I want to have some proof before I do.”
Latika chewed her lip. “If you think it’s Glenda, there will be a paper trail. Subsistence reports, tax records, that sort of thing. Do you want me to check the land registry?”
I shook my head. “I’ve already looked,” I said honestly. “The problem is that many people won’t report their property has subsidence until they have to sell, and it will be at least six months before the coven has to release this year’s tax records. Everything I’ve got is based on hearsay and rumour.”
“Well, where are all the claims coming from?” Latika asked, walking out of the kitchen and back into our shared office. We had four desks pushed together in the centre of the room, with neon-blue dividers between each one. John’s was decorated with his kid’s Pokemon stickers whilst I pinned tacky keyrings to mine. Mike’s desk was lost in a sea of flapjack wrappers and sticky notes whilst Latika was still in her crystal phase. I glared at the rose quartz skull before focusing on her question.
“Somerset, mostly. Around the Mendip Hills. The firms shared the villages but not the exact location. I’d expect them to have something in common, like clay soil or a valley line that could indicate an old mine.”
Latika marched to the filing cabinet and pulled out our much-abused ordnance survey maps. She found a spot on the office wall and started to tack the first map to it. “How far out are we going?”
“Um…as far down as Glastonbury. I didn’t have time to look further. Are you sure you want to do this? Old-school paper isn’t your thing.”
Latika shrugged. “It’s a quiet afternoon, and Mike keeps telling me there’s more to life than Snapchat. Let’s see if there’s a pattern.”
At first, there wasn’t. We used small blobs of blu-tack to mark the places and watched them blossom outwards like a bruise across the Mendips. Three here, four there. Different soils, locations and building types. A few were old enough to have a preservation order slapped on them; others still had the builder’s guarantee. They didn’t follow any road or river. The only thing they had in common was that the subsidence had appeared this year.
“Anything?” Latika asked. I winced and relaxed my jaw. I had not realised I had clenched it.
“No,” I admitted. “It’s just the increase is so high. I’d expect a new underground cave system or something, but there are no straight lines or clusters at all.”
Latika nodded. “It’s a pretty rainbow, though,” she said, sweeping her finger in an arc from Burham-on-Sea to Midsomer.
I stared at her open-mouthed, then shuffled through the remaining survey maps.
“What?”
I added the bottom half of Somerset to the wall. “What if it’s a radius?”
“Um….”
“Check subsidence for the entire county in the past year. It won’t give us the complete picture, but it will be enough for Mike.”
It took another 40 minutes, but we ended up with two concentric circles around Glastonbury.
“Holy crap,” Latika said, a little awe-struck. “How did you guess that?”
I shrugged. “It’s the Tor. Everything points to that hill around here..”
“Oh.”
We stared at the map for a moment longer. “Tea?” Latika asked
“No. It’s serious enough for coffee”
*
Mike agreed.
After my terse text, he returned early, stopping only to roar at John to kick his wet gear off in the hall. Mike was a bear of a man who seemed more at home in a beer tent than in a chalk circle. This threw off many clients who expected a wizard and got a biker instead. He accepted a mug from Latika with a nod and stabbed his finger at the map.
“Please tell me this is a case for a rich conspiracy crank, and I’ll be able to retire once it’s done?”
“Nope. Someone totalled my car for this.”
Mike listened as I recounted my story, his face getting darker with each sentence.
“I don’t want you at home alone until this is sorted,” he said. “Did you tell the police?”
“Yeah, but they wrote it off as a vandalism. I’ve got wards up for anyone who tries to break in. And a video doorbell.”
Mike glanced back at the map. “This looks too big for one coven. If - a big ‘if’ - it’s Glenda, she’ll have a lot of help.”
John slipped in through the door, clutching a mug and suppressing a yawn. He wore old, nondescript clothing and had at least a day’s worth of peppered stubble on his face. “Long day?” I asked teasingly. John was usually the snappiest dresser in the office.
“Try dowsing in four inches of mud,” he shot back. “And your map’s too small.”
“It covers the entire county.”
John picked up a ruler and ran it straight from Glastonbury to Stonehenge. “I know - I overheard. Your greatest clusters are on the main leylines. If you expanded it again, you’d see a new pattern stretching east.”
“Coincidence,” I argued. “You know leylines are nineteenth-century bollocks.”
John shook his head. “It doesn’t matter if they are made-up bollocks. If enough people agree, the belief forms around it.”
“What are you not saying?” Mike asked. The two had been friends for longer than I’d been alive, and John was one of the most respected trackers in the South West. He was your man if you wanted to find underground water, minerals or electricity lines.
“English Heritage contacted me on Saturday. They’ve had five separate reports of loose stones for Avebury and Stonehenge. They wanted me to check the ground for any changes.”
“You’re telling me the henges have got subsidence?” I said, shocked. “They’ve been in place for thousands of years.”
“Apparently. They’re keeping it quiet until they know more and keeping the public away.”
“Are they sure it’s not vandalism?” Mike enquired. “We’re talking about twenty-ton stones here.”
“No. I spent most of Sunday plodding around, watching the tractors haul them back up. You’d need a lot of machinery or magic to knock them down, and most of the covens would consider it blasphemy.”
“Which is why they’re keeping it quiet,” Latika added.
“Yeah. Consider this a privileged conversation between colleagues, and don’t blab it around town,” John said wryly. “But I’m sure it’s all connected, and I don’t think Glenda’s involved. She wouldn’t touch the stones.”
My phone buzzed twice in my pocket, followed by a high-pitched alert. I pulled it out before flashing its display at John. “If that’s true, why is she at my door?” I asked.
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