The Hotel Witch by Jessica Miller

Author:Jessica Miller [Jessica Miller]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2023-01-18T00:00:00+00:00

Hours passed after Grandma’s disappearance. And then hours piled on top of hours until Grandma had been missing one whole day.

Then two days, then three. After that, Sibyl stopped counting.

It wasn’t that she didn’t miss Grandma. Sibyl missed Grandma very much.

She stopped counting the days since Grandma disappeared because she was too busy to keep track. It was high summer, after all, and Sibyl was occupied with spell-patterns from morning to night.

She did all the usual summer spells: she cast cooling patterns over all Madame Pascalline’s sorbets and jellies so they didn’t melt and droop in the heat. She cast un-wilting patterns on the roses in the garden beds when they languished in the sun. Every few hours, she went out to the Mirror Lake and un-toppled all the umbrellas and deckchairs that had toppled over in the way that umbrellas and deckchairs often do on sunny, breezy days. Sometimes she stopped to watch the guests as they swam in the cool waters of the lake. Sometimes she let out an envious sigh, as she watched them splashing and laughing.

It was only ever a very short sigh, though. She was much too busy for a long sigh.

Of course, the pattern she cast the most often was the returning-lost-things-to-their-right-place pattern. She used it to find lost beachballs and lost crystal balls, lost sunglasses and lost enchanted violins, lost ancient scrolls and lost Agatha Christie novels, and once an entire lost flea circus.

Admittedly, without Grandma there to tell her to concentrate, she did make a few mistakes. Sibyl returned a visiting Baroness’s sunglasses to the bridge of her elegant nose, for example, but she also returned every other pair of sunglasses in the Grand Mirror Hotel there, too. And while she meant to return the flea circus to its ringmaster, specifically to the ringmaster’s cardboard suitcase labelled ‘Flea Circus’, the fleas whizzed right past their intended destination and disappeared. Luckily, Madame Pascalline’s bellow—Zut alors!—quickly led her to find them performing tiny flea somersaults and balancing tricks among the hams in the kitchen pantry.

Then one day—it must have been Tuesday, because there were marmalade pancakes for breakfast, marking five days since Grandma vanished—Sibyl was asked for a spell that she hadn’t cast before.

It was almost lunchtime and the lobby was crowded with guests drinking lemonade and violet cordial. There weren’t enough waiters to clear their empty glasses, so Sibyl was casting travelling spell-pattern after travelling spell-pattern, sailing the dirty glasses up over the guests’ heads and into the kitchen for washing. She was concentrating on steering an empty crystal lemonade pitcher under a chandelier when she felt a tap on her shoulder.

She turned around and saw Helga, the harpist, standing with her hands on her hips.

‘I have a rather large problem,’ Helga said.

Every lunchtime, Helga strummed her harp in the centre of the lobby. But today the instrument stood covered in a dust sheet. Helga lifted off the sheet. ‘It’s my harp.’

Helga strummed her hand across the strings. Some of them sounded just as bright and golden and quivery as they ever did.

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