Page 15 of A Ghost’s Guide to Haunting a Witch

“I will,” Augustine promised. She didn’t want this hanging over them any more than Maddy did.

“Good. And one more thing—” Maddy lit a candle — “he thinks you can speak to the dead? Well, you need to make sure he leaves this shop one hundred per cent believing he was wrong.”

Chapter Five

“Your sister is batshit crazy, you know that, right?”

Sitting in his chair by the fire, Roy sounded indignant.

“Which sister?” Augustine said absently, scrolling through her phone. It was a problem she’d had all her life. When you had three very different sisters, it was never clear which one people meant. Context mattered. Tone mattered. Occasionally, astrology mattered.

Celeste was the academic of their family, serious and passionate in equal measure, the sort who could derail a dinner conversation by casually mentioning orbital decay. Clem was earthy and earnest to the point of madness, capable of abandoning a perfectly good life to go argue with soil on another continent. Maddy, meanwhile, existed in a permanently kooky state of barely contained chaos, oscillating wildly between being a competent professional and a walking magical disaster.

Augustine didn’t even bother looking up at Roy as she scrolled. “You’re going to have to narrow it down.”

Roy frowned. “The one who called today. She left a voicemail. I overheard her as she was leaving it.”

At that, Augustine looked up. “On the landline?”

“No, on the carrier pigeon she sent. Of course on the landline.”

Augustine took a brief glance at the table in the hallway, where the landline sat on its little side table like a plastic time capsule, its cord wrapped twice around one of the table legs. No one had a landline any more. Well, no one aged under sixty-five at least. It had come with the flat though, and her landlord, Steven, had apologetically explained that it was tied to the Wi-Fi contract he’d set up years previous.

“You can unplug it, if you like,” Steven had told Augustine, hands in his pockets. “But please don’t cut it out. Sorry about that. I’m too old now to learn how to have it taken out and I have a sentimental attachment to the phone itself.”

Augustine had glanced at the transparent phone, wondering how on earth anyone could be attached to such a piece of plastic crap.

She’d never bothered to remove it, though. Oddly, she kind of liked having a landline number. It meant when people couldn’t reach her on her mobile, they’d try her at home, and leave her messages there. The landline however, being such a piece of plastic crap — albeit nostalgic plastic crap — invariably failed from time to time, and some of her messages fell through to the great phone network beyond. Which felt oddly appropriate, really. She was a fraud of a psychic who couldn’t speak to the dead, yet here she was, routinely ghosted by a phone.

Augustine shrugged. “That doesn’t help,” she said bluntly. “All three of my sisters call the landline. Not that it really matters. Half the messages on that thing are just static and people breathing. You know that.”

“No, it was definitely your sister.”

“Yes, but which one?”

“The batshit crazy one,” Roy said again, frustrated. “She called today, and left this garbled message about witch hunters and rose quartz and sage circles. I mean, what the fuck is a witch hunter?”

“Nothing you need to worry about,” Augustine answered swiftly. “Did she say anything else?”

Roy raised a disbelieving eyebrow at her, letting Augustine know he hadn’t quite let go of his curiosity about witch hunters, no matter what she said. “She also mentioned something about her anus,” he carried on, however, clearly still offended by it. “And cleansing it with white sage. Now, I am not one to judge, and I’ve heard of some interesting colon cleanses in my life, Augustine, but that is a whole new level of wow.”

“Her anus?” she repeated flatly. “Wait. Do you mean Uranus?”

Roy blinked. “Oh,” he said, after a beat. “Probably. Yes. That would make a lot more sense.”

She glanced back at the landline, the little red light blinking patiently, smugly, like it knew something she didn’t. “It’s Celestine,” she said, certainty settling in her chest.

Roy raised an eyebrow. “Your astrophysicist sister? The one in Scotland?”

“Yes.”

“The one who thinks planetary movements are a valid reason to reorganize your finances?”

“That’s the one.”

Roy leaned back in his chair. “You should probably call her back.”

Augustine nodded slowly. She already knew why Celestine was calling. She’d clearly heard from Maddy, and as her oldest and most sensible sister, wanted to know what she was going to do about her mysterious, speak-to-the-dead-for-me customer of the day before.