Don't Lose Your Head

“How much does an average human head weigh?”

What a thing to find myself Googling. All these years after the fact.

At twelve years old I took the brown wrapped package from her without hesitation, and delivered it where she asked me to. For most of my life i didn’t even question it, not even curious about what it contained. Because it honestly never occurred to me that the box might have been kind of … head shaped.

Not until a set of skeletal remains were dug up out of her orchard last month. With the skull missing.

Once upon a time I thought all the wild stories about Abigail Blake were too far-fetched to possibly be true. Now I just hoped they were.

I had been asking the internet foolish questions, too terrified to come out and ask Abigail if she made me an accessory to something unspeakable twenty years ago. When I did her a favour because she did me one.

When I first went to see her it was before she had rebuilt her house. She was still living in a caravan on wild, untended land, next to the burnt out ruins of her childhood home.

I went there with a purpose - to put a curse on Trevor Gilroy. Our insufferable little class “comedian” had gone too far with me that day. Graduating from just flicking my bra straps to cutting them. I’d sat through a double science lesson with my bra safety-pinned back together, and my arms clamped across my chest, and every boy in the class snickering away about it for most of the afternoon. My teacher did little about it, as usual. Just a few half hearted reproaches that the boys, especially Gilroy, could not have cared less about. So today I was taking the matter into my own hands.

“I want him dead.” I told Abigail, having barged into her caravan straight after school, only minutes before. At the time, I absolutely meant it, too, having marinated in a toxic mix of adolescent embarrassment, angst and revenge fantasies for a good two hours. The hatred I was feeling for Trevor Gilroy at that point was like lava coursing through my veins.

Abigail considered my request. Her wavy brown hair had no grey then, and her ivory skin had no lines, but the keen focus in her coal black eyes has never changed. It was common knowledge that if Abigail Blake wielded her evil sorcery against someone, they died. No question.

“We’ll put a curse on him.” she nodded. “How do you want him to die? Cancer? Deadly infection? Wild animal attack? Straight up murder?”

She let the question hang for a moment, eyebrows raised.

I laughed in spite of myself, and she grinned knowing she had lifted the curse of my own vengeful delirium.

We talked for the next hour, surrounded by arcane symbols decorating her caravan. Her warmth and empathy did not match her evil reputation in the slightest. Looking back I’m not sure I ever truly believed, even then, that she really put curses on people. I think I probably just needed to talk to another outcast.

“Look, he sounds like a horrible kid, but he is just a kid. Let’s hold off on the death penally for a few years.” Abigail reasoned about Trevor.

So I should just put up with it all, and do nothing then?” I frowned.

“Oh, I’m not saying that.” she said with a wicked smile.

Abigail gifted me my revenge on Trevor Gilroy. I never learnt what magic was in the sticky sweet substance she told me to paint onto the chewed end of Trevor’s pen before replacing it, but it had him farting for the whole afternoon.

At first he found it amusing - after all fart related content made up a sizeable portion of his comedy repertoire anyway - but the longer it went on, and the worse the smell became, the more Trevor himself became the punchline. When he finally asked to be excused from the room, he was addressed as “Trevor Trousers” by our bemused teacher. For some reason that name stuck to him like superglue.

Trevor Trousers was certainly not as resilient as he had expected his own perennial targets to be, leaving the school shortly afterwards because he “couldn’t handle the bullying”. I have to say I did not miss him.

Abigail and I often chuckled about this peculiar beginning to our friendship. Over the decades she had became my closest friend. I had told her pretty much everything about my life, and had thought, until recently, that she told me everything about hers, too.

I knew about the house fire she survived as a ten year old, that claimed the rest of her family and laid the groundwork for most of the insidious mythologies about her as some kind of paranormal murderer.How these myths grew legs when both of her seemingly heathy grandparents were dead within six months of taking her in. How she then went to live with her mother’s wealthy cousin when no other relatives would take her, and how she endured this woman’s psychological abuse until she was old enough to live on her own.

She told me how people crossed the street to avoid her when she came back home because of the dark power they believed she possessed. It always struck me that, after a life so steeped in tragedy, the superstitious paranoia surrounding Abigail must have felt particularly cruel for her.

This was why I, of all people, did not want to harbour any nonsensical suspicions, determined to eliminate every last disloyal doubt. My amateur research concerning the body found on her land was intended to quell my fears on the subject, but it was having the opposite effect, and leaving me with far more questions about the whole situation than answers.

The forensic testing on the bones had suggested they belonged to a man who had died nearly two hundred years ago. Yet his clothing was from the early twenty first century, and had only been decomposing for a couple of decades. So the police were baffled by the case, too.

“It wasn’t a human head if that’s what you’re worried about.” Abigail said, to me out of the blue, when I came to her home for dinner as she asked me to do every Friday.

“What do you mean?” I asked, stunned. I had deliberately avoided any mention about the suspicious package from all those years ago, even though it weighed much on my mind.

“The box I asked you to deliver. Don’t even pretend you don’t remember.” she smiled. “I’ve been getting the feeling it’s a worry going through your head lately.”

I slowed my breathing and reminded myself not to read too much into the fact that she knew this. It could often seem like Abigail was able read my mind but, as she had told me many times, she simply had a heightened ability to read my face and my behavior, and predict my thought processes, having known me so well for so long. Surely that made far more sense than the idea she was some kind of telepath, didn’t it?

I was figuring out what to say by way of apology, feeling silly, but she spoke first.

“It was a warlock’s head.”

My blood ran cold.

She fixed her eyes one me with purpose. “Settle in. I’ve a got a lot to tell you.”

She said the head belonged to a sorcerer called Darius who used to control the territory that included our town. Abigail said she was chosen to be his apprentice at ten years old but her family refused to accept the decision. He burnt them alive in front of her to terrorise her into obedience, but she ran from him to her grandparents instead. Soon enough he killed them, too. At which point the High Priestess, Raina, intervened and decreed that she would personally undertake Abigail’s training, then send her back to be Darius’ deputy once it was completed.

For the next ten years Abigail lived with this High Priestess. Raina was no fan of Darius and she offered Abigail a secret deal: if Abigail could overthrow Darius and find an apprentice of her own, Darius’ territory would be hers to run.

Abigail revealed that, on the day I first came to see her, she chose me to be her apprentice. Soon afterwards she killed Darius and had me deliver his head to Raina as a sign that I was her choice.

Because Raina was usurped not long after that, and internecine politics erupted, nobody in “the Inner Circle” was paying attention to whether or not Abigail actually trained her new apprentice. Meanwhile nobody within her territory dared question her about it, probably just relieved their own offspring had been spared from the task.

Abigail said our territory was barely on the Inner Circle’s radar before the troubles started, but now a rival circle were trying to make a power play, so troops were being corralled to fight it. My head had been counted amongst them and refusing the draft was not an option. If anyone in the Inner Circle discovered that Abigail had neglected to train her apprentice, it would mean both our heads.

I tried to digest the incredible tale she had just told me.

“So, our town is one big coven in the middle of a witch war? Magic meets Mafia?”

“It’s not a joke.” she chastised me.

“If it was so important to train me, why didn’t you just do it? To have that up our sleeves, at least?”

There was a sorrow like I had never seen in her face before. “The training takes you into a lot of very dark places. I didn’t want that for you. Or for me anymore if I’m honest. “

“So what now?” I asked, feeling my heart sink.

“I have to train the hell the out of you. Starting this process at your age is unheard of, but I’m hoping that being a late bloomer might give you some advantages, as well. Your psychological maturity, for one thing, could be a huge help.”

She saw the anxiety twisted into my face and squeezed my hand.

“I know it’s a lot, but we’ll make this work. I don’t want you to worry.”

“I’m not worried.” I lied.

Just how long had I failed to notice the signs that my dearest friend was losing her mind? So many thoughts were fighting for space in my head now. How to go about sourcing help for her and getting her some kind of psychiatric assessment. How to reschedule my life in order to spend more time looking out for her. How guilty I felt about my obvious neglect of her. Because everything this poor woman suffered had clearly taken a much greater toll on her than I had ever realised …

And then I realised that every piece of cutlery in Abigail’s kitchen was now suspended in the air around my head. I let out a gasp and all of it dropped to the ground with a clattering din.

“Do I have your full attention now?” Abigail asked me with pitch black eyes.

I nodded, terrified.

“You have to keep it together. We can’t afford a wrong move at the moment. Do you understand me?”

I nodded. I was trying to, I really, really was.

“By the way, the answer to your question is around 5 kilograms,” she told me, irritated, “but if you want to keep your own head, you need to learn to keep questions like that to yourself.”

I … thought I had???