Witch Clan: Matriarchs by John Stormm (best beach reads of all time TXT) 📖

out of their reverie. “He’s not in his day bed. Search the house. He could be getting into mischief somewhere.”

“I suspected as much,” She said. “Maybe not to this extent, but the baby is all right. He’s with his brother George.”

“He’s off somewhere, playing with his imaginary, brother George?” Mary queried incredulously.

“You mean he’s with ‘St. George’ the dragon slayer in the Otherworld?” Margaret wondered aloud, staring fixedly into the bowl.

“I met him in a dream once,” she recounted. “He said he was here to protect the boy from a smoky, black dragon. I didn’t think a great deal about it at the time, but that was the first time I heard Johnny call George’s name. I had trouble separating the dream from the real. The boy exists as a ‘reality’ in both realms. We 'visit' but he 'lives' there, as well as here. My guess is that part of him is still in his day bed. He is so engrossed with brother George at this point, he’s not quite all there, or here. It’s confusing.”

The sisters actively sought to open the vision of the Otherworld in the gazing bowl. As before, it came easily. The angel was demonstrating a backhand stroke, making fierce faces while Johnny mimicked, standing on a large rectangular stone, with his switch.

"I haven't noticed any toadstool rings in the yard lately," Evelyn remarked. “Do you suppose he could have wandered into a faery rath? You know children like that become unreachable when they get caught up into the Otherworld for any length of time."

"Not him," Emma countered. "He's part Sidhe and can travel back and forth with no ill effects. I've suspected it for some time, but now I see it. I'll prove it to you."

“Grandma wants her boy,” she called out to the vision of Johnny in the gazing bowl. “We should have some milk and cookies, and it’s almost time for the Mickey Mouse Club on television.”

Johnny’s image promptly vanished from view, leaving the angel glancing over his shoulder at the gazers, cocking an eyebrow at them. Moments later, a sleepy looking Johnny walked out of his room towards the kitchen, rubbing at his eyes, expecting cookies and milk. The sisters gaped as Emma got up to tend her grandson.

“How do you deal with it, Mom?” Margaret demanded. “There’s nothing ‘natural’ about this.”

“First thing, daughter mine,” she snarled. “Not ‘it,’ him. I’ll never break him of that habit of referring to himself as ‘it,’ as long as human monsters insist on stealing his humanity. You just can’t make yourselves see a very natural boy. Can you? I see him all the time. He wants to do good. He wants to be loved. When he makes his mom and his grandmother smile, he’s ten feet tall inside.”

“But what will he be when he grows up?” Evelyn asked. “Will he be his father’s son? Will he be like Lee?”

“He will be the man of some woman’s dreams,” she murmured. “He can share a world that you or I can only peek at. I have to make sure he knows the right kind of woman, or the wrong one will make him everyone’s nightmare.”

“He’s not human,” Mary stated flatly.

“He’s at least half human, our half,” she said. “You’ve seen him in his dreams. He’s no monster. This is a boy who wants more than anything to be the hero of Irish myth and legend. What’s more, look who is teaching him to be just that. What human boy has half of his prospects?”

“I’m sorry, Momma,” Mary said contritely. “I didn’t see…”

“But you did see.“ Emma explained, “Had we left him to others to raise, they would have no claim at all on his human side. He might well have been a monster. If not for someone wise and brave enough to do what’s right, you’d have every good reason to fear him. He will fight, because it’s his nature to do so. His very existence is threatened. He must fight.”

“We don’t really mean to threaten him,” Evelyn objected.

“I don’t mean you or I,” she said, “though everything we do will either help or hinder him. He has a brother George to help him fight his dragons. That means his problems are bigger than a circle of bigoted, gossipy old women. Who’s to say that his dragons aren’t our problems too. We may need him as much as he needs us. This is the very nature of family love. Very natural. He needs a witch clan more than any living man on earth. And all of you need to be bigger than you are. Our matriarch had her dream for our future. We planned on a girl to replace our matriarch with a better one. I’m saying maybe this young wizard will be the one to help change the world’s attitude about us. Let him see us at our best. We guide our men hither and thither, this one can actually do something. Shouldn’t we guide him?”

“Since you put it that way,” Margaret huffed. “I think we should all join our nephew in the kitchen for milk and cookies. Fig Newtons anyone?”

"That dragon is going to have a real fight on it’s scaly talons," Emma murmured.

What Johnny Sees; Johnny Gets.

The scream awoke her with a jolt, shook her down to her very soul and made every hair stand on end as if they would never relax again. Emma threw on her robe and ran to her grandson’s room. Johnny was sitting bolt upright in bed staring wildly about, but somehow didn’t seem to be aware of her as she came in. The street lights shining through the window cast strange reflections on his eyes as though they were lit from within. She resisted the urge to grab him and hold him close and watched him a moment longer to see if she might discern what had upset him so.

Johnny looked about the room as if he were looking for somebody or something and couldn’t find it. The look on his face was not so much terror as a dreadful loneliness that seemed to pervade the room. Great shuddering sobs wracked his diminutive frame. Her heart threatened to burst for him. His gaze passed right over her and he showed no sign of recognizing her as even being in the room with him. It was dark but the lace curtains allowed plenty of light in from the street, and Johnny had never shown any sign of fear of the dark. In fact, he seemed to have no trouble at all negotiating her dark basement when he wanted to play hide and seek. He could see like a cat. He was either still dreaming or blind. He had contracted scarlet fever some months before and they feared they might lose him then as his heart rate soared and he became prone to nosebleeds when he got excited. But he got over it and snapped back to his old self like a charm. Was this a relapse?

“Johnny, Grandma’s here,” she murmured close to his ear.
He looked like he might jump out of his own skin, but his eyes went from that terrible sadness to bright hope in the same heartbeat as he recognized her next to him.

“You still love it, Grandma?” he asked as she sat on the bedside and pulled him close to her.

“How could you think your grandma doesn’t love you anymore?” she chided her grandson gently.

“Everybody went away and left me, “ he sobbed and hugged her in a death grip.

“It was only a bad dream, sweetie,” she consoled her heartbroken boy. “In the morning you’ll see us all at the breakfast table and we’ll all talk about your dream and you’ll feel much better and see we all love you very much.”

She laid him back on his pillow and stretched out beside him for a while until his breathing calmed and he was sound asleep again. With his mother’s recent marriage to David and Willard’s proposal of marriage to herself, perhaps the boy was feeling a bit left out in their affections. Gods knew that only four years ago he had been evicted from his mother’s womb and put up for adoption as an unwanted child. He seemed not to take anyone’s love for granted as though he expected to be sent away again at any time. His aunts would have highly approved such a move at one time, but were beginning to warm up to him a little. He could be such a charmer when he wanted to.

* * *

Emma contemplated the morning sun shining over the grape arbor outside her kitchen window as she finished up the morning's dishes. Dave and Lorry had bustled off to their respective jobs and Willard had a remodeling job he had taken on from his landlord. Willard lived a block away and Dave was renting one of the unused upstairs rooms, the beginnings of a new family were meeting around the dinner table once again.

Little Johnny was playing quietly in her garden where he loved to be in the morning. His appetite was voracious for such a little guy. At breakfast he wolfed down