Abby the Witch Read Online Free PDF Page A

breaking attic
windows that belonged to witches….
    'I'm worried,'
she mumbled to herself as she crossed the room to stand before the
lantern burning on the table, the only source of light in the
room.
    'I'm terrified.' Charlie's muffled voice came from under the
covers.
    'No…' Abby
stared at the flame, watching it pitch back and forth in its case
as if a draft had somehow squeezed between the glass. 'Not about
the storm.…'
    They'd managed
to make it back from Mrs Hunters with time to spare before the
storm hit. Charlie had been very productive and had at once set
about grabbing his favourite blanket in his mouth and pulling it to
a space on Abby's bed that was furthest out of the draught. Abby
had just sat down heavily at the table and stared at her hands,
lost in thought.
    The lines of
destiny on her hands were very different from what she
remembered….
    Thoughts kept
on flitting past her mind, not tangible and formed, but loose like
wisps of smoke. Her feelings of unease had grown. She felt that
simply by getting out of bed this morning she'd set in motion a
terrible set of events that she could never hope to mend. And the
feeling ground her to the spot like a sack full of potatoes.
    As darkness
had encroached from outside, the dark clouds finally claiming the
remaining light of dusk, Abby had lit her candles and waited.
    There was an
important lesson she'd once learnt from Ms Crowthy, and it was
about reading the future. For some reason Abby wanted to know what
lay in her future, now more than ever. She wanted to look ahead and
see that, regardless of the storm, regardless of the cards,
everything would turn out right. The storm would blow over and
the cards would turn out to mean nothing – she wanted to see her
future safe and steady.
    According to
Ms Crowthy, telling the future wasn't that hard really; all you had
to do was watch to see how things moved. If you watched closely, if
you concentrated really hard on the path an object took through
space, you could predict what would happen next. But it was not
just that you can say the floating parchment will fall to the
ground, or that the babbling brook will drain into the river –
because that's just remembering things. No, the movement of the
slightest thing, to the trained eye of a witch, could be used to
predict anything in her environment.
    The sad fact
was, witch or no, people get distracted, there is too much stuff
going on in people's heads to really pay attention to the
world. Plus, the more you watched – as Ms Crowthy had put it while
she was stoking her huge cast iron stove for a pie – the less you
can do. So you had to strike a balance, find a way to let your
second sight run along in the background of your mind so you could
still bake a loaf of bread or see to the hens before nightfall.
Second sight was a gift, but there was a reason it was
called second. If you allowed it to run all the time, if you
paid absolute attention to the fall of an autumn leaf while on a
walk in the forest, you wouldn't see the cliff till you were very
dead at the bottom of it.
    Plus, you
always missed out on the details. There are many versions or
perspectives of reality running along at the one moment, as
numerous as the many souls in the universe, in fact. And second
sight only ever gave you one version. So it never really made full
sense. It was like seeing events shot by an amateur film maker:
there were a lot of close ups of the fly on the wall and an
interesting pattern in the sand – but very little plot.
    It is, after
all, said that it is only with the benefit of hindsight that events
become clear. So it is only logical that if you can't understand
things in the present, you can't possibly hope to
understand things in the future. So, yes, second sight was a gift –
true, but it was also a right bother.
    Taking all
this into account, it was unsurprising Abby could make something
out in the dance of the flame then. Even less surprising that it
was