Trans Witch: College of Secrets Read online

  Trans Witch

  College of Secrets

  E. Chris Garrison

  Copyright © 2021 by E. Chris Garrison

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be copied or transmitted in any form, electronic or otherwise, without express written consent of the publisher or author.

  Cover art: Anne Rosario

  Cover art in this book copyright © 2021 Anne Rosario & Silly Hat Books

  Editor: Linda Sullivan

  Copy Editor: Amy E. Garrison

  Published by Silly Hat Books

  ISBN: 978-1-953763-28-0

  www.sillyhatbooks.com

  Publisher’s Note:

  Trans Witch is a work of fiction. All names, characters, and places are the product of the author’s imagination, used in fictitious manner. Any resemblances to actual persons, places, locales, events, etc. are purely coincidental.

  First Edition

  Other books by E. Chris Garrison

  Reality Check: A Tale of Quantum Entanglements

  Alien Beer and Other Stories

  Trans-Continental: Girl in the Gears

  Trans-Continental: Mississippi Queen

  Blue Spirit: A Tipsy Fairy Tale

  Restless Spirit: A Tipsy Fairy Tale

  Mean Spirit: A Tipsy Fairy Tale

  The Road Ghosts Omnibus

  Contains:

  Book One: Four 'til Late

  Book Two: Sinking Down

  Book Three: Me and the Devil

  Short Story: Spectral Delivery

  Dedication and Acknowledgements

  Trans Witch is dedicated to my friends, who reacted with love and encouragement to my first mention of this idea. Your enthusiasm and support made this book possible, even during the trauma of a pandemic, personal loss, political upheaval, and a sewage disaster.

  Much love and heartfelt thanks to my wonderful beta readers:

  Amy, Leslea, Kat, Noel, Hawthorn, and Kelli.

  Chapter One

  Professor Lily Shelley, a pleasantly plump, middle-aged woman, kept up a brave face, even though her heart ached. This Halloween, she stood in front of her English Literature class wearing a costume of a beloved fictional teacher. Dinosaurs of all sorts marched all over her purple dress, making a chaotic pattern that she rather preferred to polka dots or paisley. She'd dyed her mousy brown hair a vibrant red-orange, arranged atop her head in a messy bun held in place by chopsticks. Chunky but tiny dinosaur skulls weighed down her earlobes with a satisfying weight. A beanbag iguana draped over one shoulder, grinning at her class. She was one of few faculty at Moraine University who would even think of wearing a costume on Halloween, but Lily was desperate to find something to be happy about, since Penny was missing.

  But Lily, despite her festive costume, could not manage a grin, nor even a faint smile. All she could manage right now was to not burst into tears in front of her students as she lectured them about how Frankenstein wasn't the monster's name, but the scientist of that name was the real monster of the book.

  She covered a sob by turning away from her class to take a sip of water. Today, marked two full weeks since she'd seen her wife, Penny, and it was killing Lily to go through day after day without her. Why had she left? What had happened to her? Am I the real monster? Am I why Penny left without a word?

  She guessed her class had heard all that about Frankenstein before; half of them poked at their phones, and most didn't even try to hide it. Try as she might, she couldn't make the material as exciting as Ms. Frizzle might have. She lacked the magic to conjure up a living corpse or travel with them back in time to interview the fictional Victor Frankenstein.

  Or could she? To fight back against the heavy emotions weighing her down, she needed to let some of them out. She spotted a student dozing off up front. She kept talking and paced back and forth, waving her leather-bound copy of The Modern Prometheus around, until she reached his desk.

  She dropped the heavy collector's edition flat on the desk in front of Andrew, who sat bolt upright as his eyes flew open. "Hnnng!" he cried as the class tittered at his embarrassment.

  "It's… it's alive!" she cried, forcing maniacal laughter. She forced down feelings of guilt for picking on poor Andrew, telling herself she needed an outlet, and what better day than Halloween for a harmless trick like this?

  "Hey, man," said Andrew, wiping a bit of drool from the corner of his mouth. "That's not cool. If you want us to use your 'preferred pronouns', you shouldn't go around calling people 'it', okay?"

  Lily's stomach dropped, and her face flushed with embarrassment. She hated being called out as trans in front of her class. Her gender shouldn't matter in the classroom, and it shouldn't be used against her by students. But she couldn't allow the jab to get to her. So, she drew breath and exhaled before replying. She nodded to the young man and said, "Thank you for that reminder, Andrew! I'm sorry. Which pronouns did you 'prefer', then?"

  Andrew sat up straight and made a face. "I'm a guy. My pronouns are he/him. I don't prefer anything. Those are just my pronouns."

  Lily nodded and allowed herself a smile. "Very good. Thank you for that clarification."

  Noting the time, she picked up her book and wrote the next reading assignment on the whiteboard at the front of the class. "This is in the syllabus, but I know some of you appreciate the reminder!"

  As she spoke, most of the class gathered their things and filed out.

  Except for her favorites, the "Queer Quartet". Cameron, Hannah, Aiden, and Jesse often stayed after to hold an impromptu book club, something she'd encouraged since she had a free period after the Literature 101 class.

  "Hey Professor S! Any word about your wife?" asked Aiden. A short but buff guy, Aiden had taken a shine to her on the first day. They'd recognized each other as 'trans fam' right away, and his love of Jane Austen had further endeared him to her as the first few weeks of the term had gone by.

  Hannah blurted out, "Jeez, Aiden! Tactful much? Maybe I have some salt packets left over from lunch you could empty into her wounds! I'm sure she doesn’t—" Hannah wore her hair buzzed short to her scalp, currently dyed hot pink. Hannah's septum piercing always struck Lily as jarring, but she'd begun to get used to it.

  Lily held up a hand. "It's okay. I'm sure it's obvious. I've gone from worry to despair. I don't know why she left, but I don't think she's coming back. It's been weeks now. Maybe it was too much for her to go from one kind of life to another?"

  Cameron looked up from their sketchbook for a moment and squinted at the teacher. "D'you really think she'd leave over your transition? I've seen those pictures on your desk. I've heard your stories about her. Didn't sound like anything could make her want to leave you." Cameron's tight cornrows held a constellation of crystalline beads spanning the colors of the rainbow. Lily often envied them their collection of silk shirts and cat-eye glasses.

  "How would you know, Cameron?" said Jesse. "Did you talk to the police? Pretty sure Professor Shelley knows what she's talking about." Jesse's short, sleek, black bob swung back and forth as she looked back and forth between Cameron and Lily, a scowl upon her lips.

  Lily held up her hands to stop her students from arguing further. "Look. I don't know anything. The police don't know anything. They keep forgetting to follow up, and honestly, it's getting spooky. None of her friends or family even called me after the first week. You'd think her mom wouldn't give up on her that easily. Though I'm not exactly her mom's favorite person, especially after Penny disappeared. She never approved of her daughter being in a same-sex marriage. Or didn't really think of me as a woman, more like."

  Cameron
piped up. "See! It's spooky! It's not because you're—I mean, you know. Something else has to be going on. Maybe something—"

  They trailed off, and Lily pounced on what they didn't say. "Something what? What do you know?"

  The Queer Quartet all exchanged serious glances and shrugged in unison.

  Lily narrowed her eyes at them. "What do you know?"

  Hannah stood, slinging her backpack over one shoulder. "Nothing. That is, we have to go now. It's time for gaming club. Got your dice, Cameron?"

  Cameron nodded and stood, their face as confused as Andrew's had been after Lily startled him awake. "Uh, yeah, sure. Jesse's turn to GM, right?"

  Jesse protested. "My turn? Oh, come on. I haven't got anything ready—"

  "Just make something up, okay Jesse?" said Hannah, dragging her friend to her feet.

  Aiden sighed and gave Lily a sad look. "I'm real sorry about your wife, Professor Shelley. I can't even imagine. Do you have anyone you can talk to?"

  Lily offered him a weak smile. "My sister, Ellen. She's an administrative assistant in the Bursar's office. She's been coming by my house with casseroles and pizzas, checking on me. I don't know what I'd do without her."

  Cameron gave a mock salute to the teacher as they exited the room behind the others. "She sounds like she could fix anything, Professor S.!"

  She watched the students slip out into the hallway, flashing her awkward smiles and Jesse gave her a thumbs-up of encouragement. Their voices receded down the hall.

  Alone in the room, Lily choked back a sob, thinking of Penny. The kids are right. It's not my fault. Penny never said anything negative about my transition, she's been calling me her wife proudly for months now! She stood up to her family for me. She was there when my parents disowned me. So what if Penny had been a little secretive in the weeks before her disappearance. None of it pointed to her planning on leaving her!

  Lily pulled her phone out of her pocket and checked for texts. One from Ellen read, "Pepperoni's for dinner tonight, sis? Beer's on me!"

  Knowing her older sister had been thinking of her warmed Lily inside. Maybe Ellen really could fix anything. She wrote back, "Sounds good. I'll be there in full Ms. Frizzle garb! See you around 7?"

  And then, Lily could swear the air around her stirred, and for a strange moment, it was as though she wasn't alone in the room. Was that a whisper she heard? What did it say? She glanced at the open classroom door. Something occurred to her; as close as she'd gotten with her favorite group of students, she couldn't recall ever telling them any stories about herself and Penny. Was her memory failing her? Or—something seemed odd about the whole conversation with the kids. She decided she needed to catch up with them and ask them a few more questions.

  She grabbed up her shawl and purse and dashed out the door and down the hallway. The walls of Moraine University's English building were covered with large paper spiders, leering pumpkins, confused-looking ghosts, and a scattering of bats. The bulletin boards held orange copier paper printed with similar images and announcements for parties on campus. At the end of the hallway, she watched as the Queer Quartet rounded a corner. Just in time, I can catch up with them!

  Her heels clattered on the tile flooring as she hurried after the students and struggled to put on her shawl and tried not to drop her purse in the process. She called after the kids, "Cameron! Hannah! Hold on a moment! Aiden! Jesse!"

  Either the friends didn't hear her, or they chose to ignore her, because none of them reappeared at the end of the hall. She could hear their voices, talking, laughing, just ahead of her, so she rushed to follow.

  When she reached the bend in the hallway, Lily rounded the corner at a jog. Expecting to find the students not far ahead, she called out, "I need to ask you about Penny—"

  Except instead of the Queer Quartet, Lily faced another empty hallway.

  "I don't get it! Where are you all?" Lily dashed down the second hallway but knew in her gut that there was no possible way the kids could have covered that distance in the time they'd been out of her sight. They'd simply vanished into thin air!

  Chapter Two

  Lily stood in the center of the hallway where her favorite students had gone—but were nowhere to be seen. She strained her ears, and could almost hear Aiden's high, boisterous voice still echoing off the walls. She thought she caught a whiff of Hannah's musky perfume. If she closed her eyes, she could feel their presence, though they still receded from her.

  She opened her eyes and felt a sudden jarring difference. Something changed. What was it? She closed her eyes and searched her gut feelings about the air space around her. The slight breeze from the bend in the hallway swirled gently around her. The open space in front of her held no echoes or sensation of closeness.

  But neither did the space to her right.

  When she opened her eyes, the wall to her right disagreed with her assessment, looking stubbornly solid. She closed her eyes once more, and reached a hand toward the wall, expecting to encounter painted cement, and maybe some paper bats—

  —Instead, her hand passed through, unobstructed.

  Lily opened her eyes to look at her hand and found it buried in the wall up to her wrist. For a long moment, she just stood there, not knowing whether to believe her eyes or her hand's lack of sensation. She pulled at her hand, in case it was indeed stuck in concrete, but it pulled away with no resistance at all.

  But when she reached her fingers out once more, she touched cool, solid wall.

  A pair of boys, hand in hand, passed by her in the hallway, too lost in each other's eyes to notice her staring at a wall.

  She took a few deep breaths, and said, "This is crazy. This can't be happening. But here goes."

  Lily held her breath, closed her eyes, and stepped forward.

  She should have bumped into the wall. She risked smashing her nose.

  Instead, the muffled building sounds around her changed. Air currents reversed. The light filtering through her eyelids dimmed.

  Still holding her breath, Lily opened her eyes and found herself in a windowless circular atrium. Light filtered down from a frosted skylight and some glowing yellow globes around the circumference of the room. At intervals around the room's perimeter stood a half dozen doorways, each with a different color of luminescence defining its edges.

  Students passed by, going in and out of the doorways, seeming to pop in and out of existence as they did so. Gold, red, and blue triangles adorned the walls, each bearing dragon-like heraldry upon them.

  Seated in couches in the center of the room was the Queer Quartet, their feet propped up on a blocky table between them. As she entered, they stopped talking to one another and turned to stare at her as though they'd seen a ghost.

  "What… what is this place?" asked Lily, casting her gaze all around the room in confusion.

  Cameron cleared their throat. "I don't think you're supposed to be here, Professor S. At least, I didn't know you were—"

  "Shh! Maybe she doesn't know yet!" cried Jesse, springing to her feet. "You should probably go back, this is uh, a restricted area!"

  Lily shook her head. "Restricted? What, to students only? In my building? That's ridiculous. What am I not supposed to know? How did I go through that wall?"

  "Right. That's the question. If she's not like us, how did she do that?" asked Hannah, running a hand across the pink brush on her scalp.

  Aiden stood up now, and crossed towards Lily, taking her hand in his to shake it. "Congratulations, Professor Shelley! You're one of us! I just knew it, the first time I saw you!"

  Lily blinked at Aiden. "One of you? And just what does that mean? What are we?"

  Cameron crossed their arms and said nothing, but the others cried in unison, "You're a wizard, Professor Shelley!"

  Lily stood with her mouth hanging open.

  Cameron snorted. "Now you're in for it. If she's not, you'll all be expelled and stripped of your magic."

  Han
nah glared at Cameron. "But if she's not a wizard, how did she get in here in the first place? The glamours and wards keep all the mundanes out. And we wouldn't be able to even talk about this if she weren't one of us, right?"

  Cameron shrugged. "Maybe you're right. Or maybe we can talk freely because we're inside of SOAM?"

  "SOAM?" asked Lily, still turning the word 'wizard' over in her head, trying to make sense of it.

  Aiden grinned. "SOAM is the School of Applied Metaphysics at Moraine University!"

  "Wizard School!" cried Jesse. "Usually kids get discovered in junior high school and have special studies and limitations until they can finally be admitted to SOAM when they reach college age!"

  "Not me," said Aiden. "I was already going to Moraine when I did what you did, Professor. I stumbled into the old Recitation Hall, which is warded off like this place."

  Cameron sighed. "Yes, most of us bloom when we're teens."

  "What do you mean, 'bloom'?" said Lily, who crossed the room to sink into one of the couches, across from Cameron, and next to Hannah.

  Cameron said, "Well you really should go through orientation for all this. We all—that is, most of us—learned this years ago. But some people are lucky enough to be born magical. Like us. It's not something the Council of Elder Wizards wants to get out. For our safety, or something. Or maybe for the safety of mundanes? Anyway, there's usually this spark, an emotional event that causes something metaphysical to happen—"

  "They mean a 'holy shit, I just sneezed and turned dinner into a pile of frogs' moment," added Jesse.

  "Oopsie!" giggled Hannah.

  "If I may continue?" snapped Cameron. "When that metaphysical event happens, the Council picks up on it somehow. Magical radar, maybe? I don't know. But then they send someone out to talk to you and give you your geas spell."