Chapter 8 Danni
DANNI
To say I was terrified would be an understatement. I nearly wet myself I was so scared!
For a moment I just froze there, my eyes locked with the golden ones under the bed, unable to move—unable to blink or even breathe. And then I saw the shadows under the bed roiling—the eyes were coming towards me! At last, my paralysis broke.
With a breathless scream, I threw down the broom and scrambled to my feet. I rushed out of the bedroom and down the hall, through the living room, and out the front door in five seconds flat.
I ran all the way to the end of the walk and banged the gate of the picket fence shut behind me before turning to look at the cottage.
The round, green front door hung open and all I could see inside were shadows. It hadn’t been that dark a moment ago, had it? I didn’t know and I wasn’t going to try and find out.
Wrapping my robe tightly around me, I hurried down Main Street. I was practically running and glancing over my shoulder instead of looking where I was going. So it’s probably not surprising that I ran right into a woman who was heading in the other direction.
“Ooof!” she gasped as I barreled into her.
“Oh!” I cried and threw out a hand to steady her—to steady us both, really. “I’m so sorry!” I exclaimed, letting go of her shoulder the next moment. “I didn’t see you. I should have been looking where I was going but I just—”
“It’s all right—please don’t worry about it,” she reassured me quickly. “You just scared me, is all.” She frowned as she took a closer look at me. “Say, would you happen to be Danni Hawkins?”
I started to correct her and say my name was “Forester” but then I remembered that Goody Albright had said I should go by my Grandma’s last name.
“Er, yes—that’s me,” I said nodding. “And you are…?”
“Oh, I’m Harmony.” She held out a hand to me, smiling. She was a pretty, plump young woman with light brown hair and kind eyes.
“Nice to meet you, Harmony,” I said, trying to smile despite the way my heart was still pounding. “Um, do you mind telling me how you knew who I am?”
“Oh, because Goody Albright sent me to check on you,” she said quickly.
“She said she felt bad she couldn’t spend more time with you—since you’re a new transplant from the Human World.
I was attending one of the seminars at the Women in Magic Con and she asked if I could come look in on you.
” She spread her hands. “So here I am to see if you’re settling in okay. ”
“Actually, I’m not,” I said tightly. “I just walked through a magic doorway and found myself here a few hours ago and everything has been crazy ever since.”
Harmony got a sympathetic look on her pretty face.
“Oh, I completely understand! I was new here not that long ago and I know how disorienting it can be.”
“Did you come through a magic doorway too?” I asked her.
She nodded.
“Only I thought I was going to the ladies room at work. Imagine my surprise when I ran through the door and ended up here in Hidden Hollow instead! And I ran directly into an Orc and knocked myself out on the breastplate of his armor. Talk about embarrassing.”
“Wow—so what happened?” I was interested in spite of myself.
“Oh, he turned out to be my Heartmate, so it all worked out.” She shrugged. “Enough about me—you looked like you were in an awful hurry just a minute ago. Were you running from something?”
I explained briefly about how I had supposedly inherited my Grandma’s cottage, and how it seemed to be haunted in some way.
“Because there was a fire in the fireplace and fresh bread baking in the oven when I came in. Also, someone had drawn a bubble bath in the bathroom,” I told her. “But the worst thing was the…the thing under the bed.”
“The thing under the bed?” Her forehead creased. “That sounds terrifying! What was it?”
“I don’t know but it had glowing eyes and it called me ‘little witch.’” I shivered and crossed my arms over my chest. “And it said it couldn’t wait to hold me again.”
“Again?” Harmony frowned. “Have you ever seen it before?”
“Well of course not!” I began. “I mean, I never…”
I trailed off. Was it true that I had never seen the thing under the bed before? From the back of my brain, I felt something nudging—like a memory that had been hidden for years trying to come forward.
He looks scary but he’s nice, whispered that same little voice in my head. The shadow boy—you called him the shadow boy. He saved you.
I shook my head, trying to make sense of it all.
“Er…I’m not sure to be honest,” I said, still trying to answer Harmony’s question. “Since I came here—to Hidden Hollow, I mean—a lot of things I had forgotten have been coming back to me.”
“Actually, that’s not unusual,” she said, surprising me.
“Sometimes magical memories can be hidden in the Human World—I work with Madam Healer, who’s basically the doctor for all of Hidden Hollow—and she says it isn’t uncommon at all to forget things and only remember them when you get back to the Magical Realm. ”
Well, that certainly seemed to be what was happening to me, but I still didn’t feel comfortable going back into the cottage. When I told Harmony that, she nodded sympathetically.
“I totally understand. Something under the bed waiting for you is scary, whether you’re in the Human World or the Magic World.” Then she brightened. “I know—why don’t we test to see if the thing under your bed has harmful intentions or not.”
“How in the world do we do that?” I asked skeptically. “Just ask it? It might just lie to me. Maybe it’s planning to eat me up later!”
“We don’t have to ask it if you don’t want to—though it can’t hurt. But I have something here that will tell us everything we need to know.”
She reached in the pocket of her blue woolen dress—which was really pretty, by the way—and pulled out what looked like a smooth, flat pebble.
“What’s that?” I asked, looking at it.
“It’s a Harm-or-No-Harm Charm,” she said.
“We use it all the time when working with magical ingredients but I think it ought to work in this case too. All you do is put it near the thing you need to test—if it’s harmful, the charm turns red.
If it’s neutral and won’t hurt or help, it turns yellow.
And if it’s helpful or beneficial, the charm turns green.
” She flipped it in the air like a coin and caught it. “What do you think? Want to try it?”
“How come it’s not any color right now?” I asked, looking at the flat stone as it lay in her palm. “I mean, it looks like any pebble you could pick up on the beach.”
“Oh, because I haven’t said the cantrip that activates it,” she explained. “You can’t activate it until it’s tuned to a specific area or ingredient or person. You have to direct it to make it work.”
“Oh…okay.” I shrugged. “I guess it can’t hurt to try. Er…are you sure you want to come back into the possibly haunted cottage with me?”
“Sure—I’m not afraid.” She lifted her chin.
“One thing you need to know about Hidden Hollow is that bad magic has a very hard time crossing into the town borders. That’s why you don’t see Ogres or Giants or Trolls wandering around Main Street—the magical bubble around the town wouldn’t let them through.
And even if it somehow did, the Town Council would kick them out right away.
So I doubt the thing under your bed is truly bad or they would have been alerted. ”
Her explanation made me feel somewhat better.
“Well, all right then—let’s go test it out,” I said. “Because if I could live in the cottage, it would be nice. I think I’m about to lose my house back home. Er…in the Human World, I mean.”
“You are?” She gave me a worried look. “Why? What happened?”
I didn’t really want to tell her all my troubles—she was a stranger, after all. A really nice stranger, but still, I didn’t want to dump all my trauma on her. So I just said,
“I don’t have the money to pay the mortgage and I’m not working right now.”
“Well then maybe Hidden Hollow is the place for you,” she remarked.
“Let’s check on the cottage first, before we decide about that,” I said.
“All right.” She nodded. “Let’s go.”
And that was how I decided to go back into my Grandma’s cottage, even though I was pretty sure it was haunted.