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Mystic Hollow Community Page
New post from Anonymous: Is it me or are the tourists getting weirder? What’s with the three women wandering around town asking about the grave site of the Headless Horseman?
When I get home, I hear Harry screaming.
As mad as I am at her, my sisterly reflex kicks in. “Harry!” I run toward the sound of her voice and find her in the dining room standing in front of a wall with a huge fissure. Harry’s got a broken bottle of glue in her hand and is watching wallpaper all around the room peel off the walls.
“What did you do?” I cry, rushing over to a wall and trying to stop the damage. My mom loves this wallpaper. The burgundy floral design is over a hundred years old, and now it’s disintegrating in front of our eyes, peeling like an apple.
“I did a mending spell,” Harry says, dropping to the floor to try to gather all the wallpaper slivers.
“I do them all the time! It’s what I use on my hair, but something is wrong.
Instead of fixing the walls, it’s destroying them even more.
What are we going to do? This spell always works!
” She sounds really upset, and I’m about to make her more so.
“You use it on your hair, and it always works?” I ask, biting back a laugh. Her normally sleek hair is a big ball of frizz, the edges fried. She has split ends aplenty.
Harry grabs her head and starts patting it. “What? No! Is it a mess?” She jumps up, dropping the wallpaper pieces and rushing to the dining room mirror. She screams even louder. “What’s wrong with my hair?”
“I don’t know,” I ask, fascinated by this turn of events.
The perfect Harriet Hadley has bad hair!
My heart practically sings for a moment, and I can hear my father tsking me from hundreds of miles away (“You’re sisters!
You should support each other.”) “Did you do a spell?” I ask innocently.
Of course she did. She’s done spells on her hair for years and never revealed what they were.
Harry ignores me and shrieks again in frustration. “Why is the enchantment failing?”
“Do you want me to try your enchantment to try to fix your hair?” I offer, tucking a strand of my healthy red hair behind my ear.
Harry’s head whips around so fast, I think it’s spinning. “You can’t fix this. You can barely handle your own spells.” Her expression falters. “No. Kat. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“Maybe,” I cut her off, my anger returning, “you’re the one who can’t handle your spells.
Look what’s happened to the dining room!
” I say, looking around at the fallen wallpaper.
“And the cracks in the walls! You did something to cause this!” The house, if I’m not imagining it, seems to settle with a heavy creak.
“Me?” Her eyes narrow. “How do you know this isn’t because you did a spell wrong! Did you try to resend your party evite? Maybe that’s what caused the house to go haywire.”
She marches out of the dining room into the hall. I follow her. Then I hear a sniff and look up. Great-Aunt Aida’s portrait expression has changed again. Now it looks like she’s crying.
“Well, thanks to you, Colton is now the one having a party!”
“Good!” Harry yells. “We don’t need people coming over here. We’ve got enough problems right now.”
“Problems caused by you,” I say.
Harry glares at me under her frizzy, wild hair. “I canceled a party. Why would that break the house?” she asks, but she sounds nervous as she walks into the kitchen.
“The nexus,” comes a voice, and we both jump.
There’s a girl in a bonnet and floral dress our own age sitting at the kitchen island. Her skin is translucent, and I can see through her chest to the stove clock, which is flashing 12:00. Funny because my alarm clock was flashing that this morning too. Did the power go out?
“Kat, go get the family spell book,” Harry whispers. “Because I’m seeing a ghost in our kitchen.”
“Psshh,” I reply, unfazed. “This is like the sixth ghost I’ve seen today.”
Harry looks at me incredulously.
“What are you going to do, exorcise her?”
“Maybe,” Harry snaps.
“Excuse me,” the girl says. “Please don’t exorcise me. This is my house too.”
Harry pinches her nose, holding back a sneeze. “You’re a Hadley.”
She nods. “Eleanor Hadley. Pleased to make your acquaintance.”
“I think I’m named after you,” I say excitedly. “My name is Katherine Eleanor Hadley.”
“To be remembered in such a fashion is a compliment,” Eleanor says, then looks up at the ceiling with a frown. “I died in this house the first winter it was built. It was a bad winter. Although it seems you’re in for a worse one.”
“Sorry to hear that,” Harry says.
“I’ve made my peace with my passing,” Eleanor says matter-of-factly.
“Though I do like returning at Samhain to watch Hadley magic at its finest. People believe Harold Croft is the founder of Mystic Hollow, but it’s my grandmother, Beatrice Shannon Hadley.
” She smiled wickedly. “That’s why we placed Beatrice’s spell book and some of her crystals inside the base of the monument after her passing.
That monument belongs as much to the Hadleys as it does the Crofts,” she insists, and points a finger at me.
“Please tell me you two are not this year’s casters. ” She frowns.
“You think the house falling apart is our fault?” Harry says, taking it personally.
Eleanor’s smile is thin. “The location of this house is no accident. Our foremothers built it atop the nexus of magic in Mystic Hollow. If the house is falling apart, magic itself could be failing.”
“We didn’t break the house,” Harry says stiffly, crossing her arms.
“We sort of did,” I mutter under my breath.
Harry gives us a look. “I know what my intention was. And it wasn’t to do anything to the house.”
Okay, so that’s the Harry Hadley glare.
“A house is not just four walls and a roof,” Eleanor says carefully.
“She doesn’t even live here,” I say, but my hands tingle with my magic, like it knows better.
Harry won’t look at me. “Kat’s right. This isn’t my home. Because she’s not my family.”
The floor starts to shake again and the next thing I know, a crack has split the kitchen island in half. A whoosh of cold air and snow rises from inside the fissure. Harry and I look at each other and bolt from the room.
“What just happened?” I cry. “Did you do magic?”
“No, did you?” Harry argues. I shake my head.
And then both of our phones start to ring.
“It’s Aunt Diane,” I whisper, my heart pounding.
Harry looks at her phone too. “It’s Aunt Viv trying to FaceTime.”
Neither of us are brave enough to pick up. We let the calls go to voicemail.
“A crack in the foundation can send every wall tumbling down,” Eleanor says wisely, drifting through the wall.
Harry and I look at one another, and then she snatches up the family spell book, darting down into the basement. I reach up for my crystal and remember it’s destroyed and rush upstairs just to be away from her, leaving Eleanor alone to haunt the foyer.