Gypsy Magic - J.R. Rain Page 0,1

thing that didn’t look like it needed to be immediately torn down was the immense apple tree right beside the front porch. The thing was almost as tall as the house and covered in bright red and orange leaves and huge, round green and red apples. If we were lucky, they’d be Honeycrisp apples.

“Look, Finn, an apple tree! That means plenty of pies!”

He just looked at me and frowned, as if to let me know he was still unimpressed. So, I took a deep breath and faced the house again.

Ah, yes, the house.

Le Sigh.

Face it with a smile, that’s what my mother would say. I’d always taken that mantra to heart. Of course, my father always said smiling at a turd didn’t make it magically transform into a triple fudge brownie.

This house definitely wasn’t a triple fudge brownie.

“Let’s unlock the front door and look inside,” I said brightly.

“Let’s hope we don’t fall through the stairs on our way up,” Finn grumbled.

I walked just in front of him, not only to unlock the door, but to be the unlucky canary in case the coal mine collapsed. The door opened with a creaking sound, not unlike the cackling of a witch. A rancid odor wafted out, surrounding us in its putrid embrace. I made some sort of inarticulate sound just before gagging.

Finn waltzed into the wide foyer ahead of me, unperturbed by the smell. As a boy prone to an array of them himself, he’d probably been inoculated to the worst nature could throw at him. He craned his neck as he took in the massively high ceiling.

“What the hell died in here?” he then asked as he turned to face me and hid his nose and mouth inside his shirt.

“Language,” I coughed, eyebrows drawn together in disapproval. I couldn’t manage to wrestle the smell from the back of my throat.

I could taste it. God, what was that?

“Hell isn’t a bad word, Mom.”

“It’s not a nice word either.”

“Ah, whatever,” he said and then did a three-sixty as he started laughing. “Wow, you really did it this time.”

“What?” I asked, taking in the expanse of ancient brick walls, and even older planked wood flooring that appeared to be rotting in some places and sagging in others. “It’s… charming.”

“That’s not the word I’d use for it. Maybe ‘old’, ‘crappy’ or… seriously, Mom, what’s that smell?”

“That’s the smell of my soon to be empty bank account.”

All joking aside, the smell was probably an animal or several that had died during the many years this place sat empty. Lord knew how hard it was going to be to remove it.

“This place is totally haunted,” Finn said, shaking his head as he took a deep breath and then released it.

“Oh, come on. Not every old house is haunted!” Although, I wasn’t convinced he was wrong. Finn had the same Gypsy Traveller blood I did, but he didn’t possess the same affinity towards magic. No one knew why, but Y chromosomes just seemed to dampen magic. Witches, gypsy women, mediums, fae… all of us were almost always female.

There was something here though... I could feel it. Cold brushed across the fine bones of my face, sank into every joint and made them throb painfully. Or maybe that was just the reality of being in your early forties in an Oregon autumn. Yeah, I’d go with that for now. I really didn’t have the patience to deal with more ghosts.

Besides, there was no going back now. So, we might as well make the best of it.

“Do you want to check out the rest of the house and pick out your bedroom?” I asked, trying to maintain some level of enthusiasm.

Finn looked up the staircase and swallowed hard. “Will you come with me?”

“Sure.”

As we ascended, I could spy water damage on the walls. At the far end of the hall, the bare bones of the house showed pale in the fading light. The drywall was gone and whatever pipes had once resided within had been gutted.

Great...

My only consolation was that between the sale of the house in Los Angeles and the passing of Great Aunt Margaret, I had enough money to remodel this place and open my shop, if I approached both carefully.

Luckily, I’d bought this house for next to nothing, owing to the fact that the bank wanted it off their books. And I’d walked away with a hefty amount of cash from my inheritance. I could break even if did this right. Heck, if my new ‘holistic medicine’