The Witches of Willowmere

Chapter 13

"It wasn't a dream," Claire insisted.

She had gone straight to the sick room at Willowville High that morning, skipping homeroom to talk to the school nurse. The woman looked kindly and patient but a bit doubtful.

"You say you were in bed."

"I know, but it wasn't a dream. It was too real. It's not the first time this has happened either. The first one I had ... I know this sounds weird, but in it I felt as if I'd turned into an owl. There was a real owl in a tree at the front of our property. I could hear it hooting as I lay in bed, and then suddenly it was as if I was the owl. Flying through the air. And then last night, it was even longer, maybe half an hour or more. I thought I was this girl from a long time ago, someone I'd been thinking about moments before ..."

"What do you think is causing this?" the nurse asked.

Claire hesitated. "I think it's something I came in contact with at my friend's place," she explained. "It must be. Her house is full of bizarre plants. She's got some strange ones in a sort of greenhouse, and some dried herbs or something in a room upstairs. There were some in this jar that accidentally got knocked over. I scooped the stuff up and put it back, but I breathed some of it in. That same night, I had the first hallucination, when I thought I was flying. I read in a book about an ointment with a herb in it that makes people think they can fly—belladonna or something."

"Oh, you kids and your drugs," said the nurse, sighing.

"I don't do drugs," retorted Claire, indignant. "I'm not an idiot. And Myra doesn't do them either. Look." She pulled the jar of dried plants, wrapped in plastic, out of her backpack and held it out.

The nurse took it, opened the jar, and prodded the contents with her forefinger. "Looks like plain old potpourri to me."

"Like what?"

"Flowers, dried and preserved for their fragrance. Lots of people make potpourri."

Claire shook her head. "You don't understand. Myra's a nature writer. She travels to places like the Amazon, and sometimes she brings plants and things back with her. Some of them may have unknown properties, she says. She's away now, so I can't ask her what this stuff is made of, but I wondered if it could have affected me in some way."

"I don't see how, unless you did something crazy like ate it or smoked it. And probably not even then. It still just looks like ordinary flowers to me. I'm almost sure this one's a rosebud." The nurse put the lid back on the jar and handed it over. "Well, you'll just have to ask her about it when she gets back. In the meantime, see your doctor if it happens again. Are you getting enough sleep at night?"

"Well, not a lot," Claire confessed. "I didn't sleep at all last night—but that was after I had the hallucination."

"How about the night before? Insomnia can cause hallucinations if it goes on long enough. You kids are always burning the candle at both ends—no wonder you end up getting sick." 

Claire gave up. As she left the sick room, she passed Mrs. Robertson in the hall.

"Are you not feeling well, Claire?" the counsellor asked, stopping.

Claire was getting tired of talking about the "dream that wasn't." She was even beginning to wonder if it might not have been a dream, after all. "I'm fine," she said in her most off- putting voice and headed down the hall at a brisk pace.

In her spare period that afternoon, she went to the library and looked up all the books that contained information on old-time witchcraft. The flying ointment was described in a couple of books, but there was nothing about the herbs it might have contained. Nor was there anything about a potion or ointment that might cause vivid dreams of faraway times or places. She logged onto one of the school computers, but that provided nothing useful either: most of the sites the browser brought up were about witches on TV shows or in fantasy novels. Claire decided to follow the nurse's advice and make a doctor's appointment when she got back to Willowmere. She was on the point of reshelving the books when another thought occurred to her. She tried the internet again, but it was in vain: the keyword search alice ramsay witch did not bring up anything about a laird's daughter in seventeenth-century Scotland. She did manage to find a reference to the town of Lyndsay. But it seemed that the town no longer existed. The valley in which it had lain had been deliberately flooded back in the 1970s to form a reservoir. The tenants' cottages, the church, and the ruined shell of the old manor house (which according to the website had burned to the ground at the turn of the last century) were drowned now in fathoms of water. There would be no church registry to check, then—no records of any kind. So there was no way to determine if Alice had really married someone named Macfarlane.