Things are tense in the house, what with Mr. Carhart mooning and moaning down in the cellar over his horrible songs, and Bennett moaning and mooning in his room over his wretched verse, and Mrs. Carhart fretting and fussing about both of them. However, things have been getting friendlier between Alex and myself.
Alas, I fear I made a grave mistake this night and that friendliness may come to an end.
The evening started off well enough, with Alex bringing me some milk and biscuits. Only when I called them biscuits, she laughed and said they were cookies.
Despite the silly name, I quite liked the “cookies,” which were chocolate with white cream inside. Perhaps not everything in this country is barbaric after all. About half of one is all I could manage, though. Even at that I felt stuffed. The things are bigger than my head!
Alex ate the other half of mine, along with four or five more.
While I was working on my half cookie, she said to me, “Angus, how did you get here from Scotland? Did you fly?”
“Do I look like I have wings?”
“No need to be snippy!”
“Sorry. It was a hard trip. I came through the Enchanted Realm.”
That was the first slip, as I’m nae supposed to speak of the Realm to humans. But once it was out of my mouth, I had to explain. Between letting myself be seen by Ms. Kincaid and now this, I fear I’ve become a right renegade.
Well, anyway, I began to tell about my journey through the Enchanted Realm. Alex listened with wide eyes. When I got to the part about needing to cross the Shadow Sea and started to tell her about the selkie, she burst out with, “Wait! Are you telling me selkies are real?”
“I’m real, aren’t I? Why should a selkie be any more surprising than a brownie?”
She closed her eyes and shook her head, as if trying to take this in. “Is everything real? I mean, all the things in the old stories? Like, oh, mermaids and goblins and trolls and…well, everything?”
“Oh, aye.”
“Can I ever meet some?”
“Well, I don’t know what sorts you have in the Enchanted Realm about here.”
“You mean there’s part of the Enchanted Realm here in America?” she asked, all excited.
“Oh, aye. Why should there be magic in one part of the world and not others? Sure, and it’s stronger in some places, like my dear old Scotland. But there’s no place totally void of it.”
She looked delighted at this idea.
Then she asked the question that led me to say what I should not have.
“How did you end up bound to my family?”
“It’s a long story,” I replied without thinking. “And it starts long ago, with a lad named Ewan McGonagall. Why don’t you go onto that intermagoogle thing you’ve told me about and see if you can find the tale of what happened to him?”
The moment the words left my flapping yap, I knew I had made a dreadful mistake.
Once Alex knows the story, she will also know about the curse.
She will know, too, that I have brought it with me into this house.