You can find previous Ines’ Adventures instalments here. They can be read in any order, although might be most fun to read chronologically as I build the world.
As autumn fell over the Ines’ town, so did an enchantment. Ines didn’t notice at first, because she was rather busy with magic of her own. The only practising witch this side of the river, her days were spent brewing teas, concocting ointments and listening to the anxious and needy talk about their problems, then prescribing something herbal as a solution. Ines was good—not the best, not yet, but good—and the transition of summer into autumn was always busy for her. She specialised in communication, and something about shifts in temperature and changes to evening light made people think, even if only subconsciously, about the changes they wanted to see from their loved ones. Of course, they usually actually only wanted to see changes within themselves. For a lot of the middle-aged women who came to visit, a summer of children crowding the house and unhelpful husbands prompted soul searching, and a trip to Ines was cheaper than a fortnight in the Mediterranean flirting with waiters.
When magic engulfed the entire town one early November day, Ines was in the middle of a follow-up appointment with Mrs Imelda Parker, soon to be reverting to her maiden name. Mrs Parker first come to visit in mid-August for something to help her reconnect with her husband after she had wrangled their three young children into bed. The couple hit a snag—several snags, a rip—following day after day of Mrs Parker organising summer clubs and arbitrating arguments and trying to persuade the youngest not to flush her books down the toilet ‘because that’s what Mummy did with some of Daddy’s magazines.’ Mrs Parker also ran a successful marketing consultancy firm. Mr Parker, meanwhile, spent his time away from his day job as a sales advisor playing videogames in the spare room. Unfortunately for both Ines and Mrs Parker, Mr Parker had no intention of reconnecting anything except the family’s dodgy internet connection. Not even Ines’ famous aphrodisiac essential oils could help. So after three meditation sessions, a course of specialised herbal teas and a referral to a marriage counsellor, Mrs Parker gave Mr Parker his marching orders and visited Ines one last time for some charms to help with fresh starts. Ines sold her the entire stock.
Only after she’d seen Mrs Parker to her car, made herself a calming tea in a flask and set out for a walk did Ines realise that the light headache she’d noticed pressing at her temples all afternoon wasn’t down to Mrs Parker’s talking. It was because everything in sight was engulfed in cobwebs.
For the first five minutes of her walk, Ines put the cobwebs down to spidey season, and merrily carried on. Darkness was falling fast, and Ines knew her glasses needed a new prescription from all her late-night sessions editing her blog (Ines’ Adventures in Paganism was thriving; her eyesight was not). So when her feet got stuck in cobwebs as she wandered through the park, Ines’ first thought was that a teenager had dropped a large quantity of gum. Children, she thought crossly, followed by, I suppose their parents let them get away with murder, followed by, oh— I can tell I’m nearer to thirty than I am to twenty. She pulled herself free and inspected the soles of her boots, expecting a horrible gooey mess of chewed plastic.
But her shoes were covered with the remains of spider silk. Thin, sticky tendrils floated in the breeze and when Ines crouched down to the ground, she could see more clearly: she hadn’t trodden in a discarded wad of gum but a fine layer of webbing. Now she was paying attention, she could see it covered not just the pathway she stood on but the entire park: grass, trees, benches, fences.
For a moment, Ines thought it might be the work of a caterpillar. She’d read about the bird cherry ermine moth, whose caterpillars wove silk around trees for protection from predators. But that was a spring activity, not an autumn one. And these webs… well, they looked like cobwebs. Ines tried to be a friend to all creatures, but she had to admit that the thought of a spider capable of weaving a web big enough to cover an entire park gave her the heebie jeebies. She’d read enough fantasy books to know that spiders large enough to drive a car were bad news. Or maybe this was the work of thousands of little spiders.
Or was that worse?
Pulling her phone from her pocket, Ines balanced her drinks flask on a webby bench and found the town’s local social media feeds. If the webbing was covering more than just the park, someone would have—aha.
Has anyone noticed it’s really cobwebby out here today?
My dog got caught in a web when he went into the garden… and he’s a German Shepherd!
My son flew his drone out today and says it’s all over the town.
Alien invasion!!!
Don’t be silly it’s a conspiracy to get us all buying bug spray. Spiders are GREAT for the eco-system.
Ines had read enough. Striding back to her flat, she couldn’t believe she hadn’t noticed sooner: everything was covered in a fine layer of webbing. Houses, cars, windows, streetlamps, electrical boxes. And the evening was quiet. Autumn was always quieter for people wandering around in the evening, of course, and winter quieter still. It was harder to get your steps in when it was dark at three o’clock in the afternoon and you needed to apply five layers of clothing to your person to leave the house.
But the town shouldn’t have been silent.
Back in her flat, Ines logged onto a message board that she usually reserved for working hours: a forum for occultist practitioners. Navigating to a thread dedicated to practitioners in her region, she soon found what she was looking for: nothing.
No one had reported anything. No spells gone wrong, no angry customers knocking over a glass vial of cobweb potion, no toddlers reading aloud from the wrong spell book and accidentally starting Spiderpocalypse. There were only half a dozen practitioners in the wider area, and Ines knew them all by reputation well enough to know that they would have posted if the cobwebs had been their fault or if the same thing was happening in their town. The only other witch who lived in Ines’ town wasn’t powerful enough to have caused the cobwebs. Juniper—Ines always wondered if that was her birth name or if she’d chosen it—was an occultist Ines’ age who Ines saw at events and craft fairs. They had different specialisms, and both ran online platforms about their work. Ines’ blog was had gone viral a couple of times; Juniper’s YouTube channel hadn’t. Juniper rarely posted to the online forum, because she preferred to connect with fellow occultists via Instagram. She also dyed her red hair black, wore too much eyeliner and, in Ines’ opinion, spent more time thinking up hashtags for her online followers than she did honing her craft.
Juniper wasn’t experienced enough to have caused this on purpose, but Ines thought she probably was ethical enough to share if she’d done it by accident.
Ines made a fresh cup of tea and took out a notepad and pen. Over the next twenty minutes, she made the following list:
REASONS FOR COBWEBS:
- Practitioner magic goes wrong
- Child/teen messing around
- Someone wants to get someone’s attention
When she rechecked the message boards and there was still nothing, she wrote:
- Someone wants to get my attention.
Ines drained her tea and got to work. First: protective candles lit, and protective charms left around the entrances and windows of her flat. Put your own oxygen mask on first before helping others with theirs. Second: scrying. Lighting a new candle, Ines gazed into the flame until her mind cleared, then focussed on visualising the source of the cobwebs. As minutes ticked by and her eyes watered from the effort of not blinking, an image formed in her mind’s eye: a house on the other side of the river, in a nice new development in a wealthy suburb. She knew it: most of her clients lived in the area.
Rubbing her eyes with her knuckles and taking some deep breaths to bring herself back to the present, Ines extinguished all the candles in the flat and gathered her first aid kits (one mundane, one magical). Then she put on her big coat, her hiking boots and a pair of gloves, ensuring no skin was showing between her neck and her fingers. She would have worn sunglasses, too, but it was too dark out for that.
Instead of trying to call a taxi, Ines walked the two miles to the house she’d visualised. By now it was gone seven o’clock in the evening and Ines would have expected traffic noises, bright lights from fireworks left over from Bonfire Night, smudges of orange on pavements from abandoned pumpkins, the scent of wood smoke as people started lighting fires.
But the town was strangely bright, like you get when it’s snowed and all the white reflects light. And it was still eerily quiet—so much so that she could hear the gentle movement of the river long before she saw it, and usually you couldn’t hear it at all. And everywhere, of course, were the cobwebs. They wafted down from tree branches and stuck to her clothes, they caught on her coat as she walked past hedges, and they clogged the grips on her hiking boots. By the time the housing development she was looking for came into view, she felt like she’d walked through a haunted house exhibit or been doused in silly string. Everything looked dusted with snow, or icing sugar. Ines wondered why she couldn’t hear sirens. Surely people would call the police when they noticed their houses and cars were suddenly extras in a Halloween film. Maybe all the police cars were caught in webs.
Ines had expected to search for the correct house: they all looked the same in this area, beige and glassy, and she hadn’t noticed any numbers on doors or distinctive decorations in the house she saw when she was scrying. But as it turned out, she knew the correct house as soon as she saw it, because it was the only one that still looked normal.
Taking a deep breath, Ines squared her shoulders and strode up to the house, hand outstretched to knock firmly on the door—
The door opened.
‘Ines! Welcome! Would you like a cup of tea?’
‘Excuse me?’ Whatever Ines had been anticipating—spider nest, Spiderman fan party, mad scientist—it wasn’t a jovial voice offering a hot beverage. The figure in the doorway was backlit by hall lighting, and Ines couldn’t make them out. Male? Tall? Two legs, not eight.
‘Tea?’ the voice was saying. ‘I have coffee. Or wine? If you’d like?’
‘I’m going nowhere with you and I won’t drink anything you give me,’ Ines said sharply. ‘What have you done to the town and why were you expecting me?’
‘Come in and we can talk!’ the figure stepped forward—Ines stepped backward—and away from the light glare she realised she was talking to a teenager.
‘Wait a second… I know you, don’t I? You’re Juniper’s brother.’
‘I’m Jason.’
Normally Ines didn’t think about Juniper unless they happened across each other; Ines stayed in touch with her colleagues through the message boards and they met up occasionally for a drink, but she preferred working on her own. She preferred her own company generally, which was why she’d moved to a cottage in woodland straight out of university, only moving to the town when she needed the money and realised she could help more people with their communication skills if she lived somewhere with people. So while she would recognise Juniper to say hello to, she wouldn’t have remembered Juniper’s little brother Jason had he not tagged along to craft fairs sometimes. Juniper concocted a lot of candles and scented lip balms; Jason helped by carrying boxes.
‘You did this?’ Ines demanded.
‘Yes. Well, mostly. Well, Juniper helped.’
‘Why?’ Now she wasn’t walking, Ines could feel the cold, and now she was talking to a literal child she could feel fury spreading through her like a too-strong drink. A small part of her wanted the heat to reach her numb toes as soon as possible.
‘I tried emailing you, but you never responded.’
‘Emailing—those creepy emails were from you?’
‘They were demonstrative.’ Jason’s face fell, as though he was just starting to realise that the evening wasn’t panning out as he’d anticipated. ‘I wanted to get your attention.’
‘Well, you’ve got it. Is this your house? Of course it isn’t, you’re twelve. Juniper. JUNIPER. Come out here!’
Footsteps echoed through the house and after a moment Juniper emerged. Although Juniper and Ines were a similar age, Juniper was far taller, far thinner and far more dedicated to actively looking like a witch. Today she was dressed like Morticia Addams at a funeral.
‘Hi, Ines. How are you?’
‘You helped your child brother curse our town? Because he wanted to ask me on a date?’
‘He’s nineteen.’
Ines squinted. She doubted it. Jason stood up taller, like he knew what she was thinking. It did not make him look older.
‘So do you want to get that drink—’
‘Oh my god, Jason, no, I do not. I wanted to finish my working day and go for a walk. I want you to reverse whatever jiggery pokery you did on my town and I want to never, ever, see you again.’
‘Will you be at the church hall craft fair next week?’ Jason started to ask, but Juniper laid a hand on his shoulder. The hand was encased in a black lace glove. She really committed to the look, huh.
‘Go inside, little brother. And maybe start on that counter spell. I’ll deal with Ines.’
‘Deal with—’ Ines spluttered, by now filled with rage so strong she was struggling to talk. ‘You’re going to deal with me—’
Juniper turned to watch the front door close and then said to Ines, ‘I’m really sorry about this. I told him it was a stupid idea.’
‘But you helped!’
‘Of course I did. He got hold of one of my books and if I didn’t supervise, he was going to zap us into another dimension or summon a demon or something. The cobwebs were the least intrusive thing I could think of. They’ll just disintegrate if he does the counter spell properly, and I’ve rehearsed it with him twice.’ Juniper paused. ‘You’re really angry, aren’t you?’
‘I—are there spiders? Massive human eating spiders I need to deal with?’
Juniper laughed. ‘No! Definitely not. Pinky promise, one witch to another.’ Ines almost said something extremely rude in response. She considered it an extreme act of heroism that she held her tongue. ‘I really am sorry if we scared you,’ Juniper was saying. ‘Jase has had a crush on you for ages and he wasn’t sure how to get your attention when you weren’t answering his emails. Which I’ve seen, and I apologise, he overdid it with the poetry and the comparing your eyes to the rich brown of an enchanted forest. He should have just waited until the next craft fair and asked for your number.’
Ines took several long, deep breaths as she absorbed this information. Jason must have gotten straight to the cobweb reversal, because all around houses were beginning to look like themselves again as the webbing fragmented and crumbled into nothing.
‘He really thought it would be a cute gesture?’
‘He really did. And I will make him apologise, in person, at the church hall craft fair. With no poetry or magic in sight.’
‘Okay,’ Ines said. ‘I’m not—I’m still angry I had to come all the way out here, but okay. If he apologises, and sounds like he means it, then I might, eventually, stop hating the pair of you.’
‘I appreciate that.’ Juniper blew on her hands and hopped from one foot to the other. Who knew that a few layers of polyester lace wouldn’t keep you warm in November? ‘I’d like to apologise for my part in this too, properly. Can I buy you a drink some time?’
Ines thought about it. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘but only if you promise it will be absolutely non-magical.’
‘Oh, I’m sure it will be,’ Juniper smiled, and Ines caught a glimpse of bright, keen grey eyes under her layers of eyeliner. ‘Absolutely not magical whatsoever.’
It wasn’t until Ines was almost back in her flat that she realised Juniper might have meant that last comment in a certain way.
‘Sneaky,’ she said to herself as she climbed the web-free stairs to her front door. ‘I might have to respect your long-term strategising and ruthless utilisation of your younger brother, Juniper Whatever Your Last Name Is.’
But first, Ines decided, she would run a bath. There’d better not be any spiders in it.
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