Otherworldly Discipline: A Witch's Lesson (5 page)

“Fine, so you want an automaton,” she argued snidely, unable to keep her comments behind her teeth any longer.

Ashcroft sighed. “No. I want you to be civil and respectful, like you grew up among people and not among wolves or apes. You will not bite, pinch, kick, or do other awful things to me or anyone else. You will be obedient.”

“I’m not a slave!” she snapped.

“No, I just want you to stop acting like you’re a small child. It’s far more tiring than it is cute. Do you want me to find a book
on
manners, because I’ll happily—”

“No, Ashcroft,” she fumed. “This is ridiculous! I am who I am and if you don’t like it, then—”

“—get one for you. Especially because you can’t help but talk over me within two minutes of your spanking
!” His
voice was exasperated only for a moment before he gave her a few more very firm spanks.

Her eyes widened and she renewed her struggles immediately to full-force. She did not want him to start up again. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” He continued his volley for a few spanks, making it an even ten, before he stopped.

His hand felt like freaking wood.

“Rule three,” he said above her, and she felt a tear escape her
eye and drip down her face onto the floor below
. There was nothing to do but to comply with whatever ridiculous, pedantic nonsense he was about to throw out there.  “You will give some sort of noticeable effort
to
the tasks I assign you, including your studies.”

She narrowed her eyebrows, even though she had nothing to glare at but the ground. Ashcroft was stubborn, but so was she! If he assumed that she was just going to obey him like some sort of wayward schoolgirl, he had another thing coming! “Will you let me up now?” she said, the words coming out raggedy and soft.

He finally let go of her hands and gently helped her to her feet. She meant to glare at him—even slap him. Instead, she was too humiliated to do anything more than quickly pull down her skirt and look away from him. Her eyes skirted the farthest wall and then the floor; everywhere but in his direction.

“Do we have an understanding
,
then?” he asked as she busied herself by rubbing her forearm over her face, rubbing off the hot tears that had acquired there.

“Yes. You think because I was born with some freakish genetic ailment,” she seethed, “that you can force me here to work for you like a servant.” Her eyes bravely looked up at his face,
which
stared at her
every bit as darkly as she stared at it
. “But read my lips—ain’t gonna happen.”

“Did you like your spanking?” he answered lowly, standing to his full height. He seemed like a giant.

She ground her teeth together in response.

“Then you’re going to stay here and behave accordingly, do you understand that?” he asked her threateningly.

She grumbled, and then stepped back when she saw him even twitch a movement. “Yes.”

“Promise me?” he reached further.

“Sure.”

“Good. Then progress has finally been made,” he said lightly, and he gave her that look he used to give her—the one she used to like.

Now that look made her virulent. It was everything she could do not to snarl at him. It was certain; she was going to have to do a better job of staying away from him next time. Even sleeping with Jimmy, her band’s guitarist, would be better than being treated like a child.

Next time, she wouldn’t be caught.

*
*
*

She had only ever gone into the Otherworld in the light of day—when light shown through the trees and she could almost call the place peaceful. She might have even enjoyed journeying there so often if she didn’t know Ashcroft was waiting to squawk at her. 

But once the moonlight shown through the clouds, the Otherworld became horrifying. It was past midnight now, and the forest howled
with noise… Howled and screamed and
crunched..
.

Even though she had eaten something more than a can of soup for the first time in three days, and she was pleasantly full, the noises kept her more than wide awake.

Sheesh—and she thought the highway running adjacent to her apartment was annoying! This was annoying
and
scary as hell
! At least she knew what was making the noise on the highway. Here, she had no idea what sort of horrifying creatures were running around out there.

And yet, despite the nighttime noises and the too
soft and too large featherbed that Ashcroft gave her, or the fact that her room was larger than her whole damn apartment on Earthside, she couldn’t stop thinking about her spanking.

She
’d
realized he was serious when he first threatened her with a spanking six weeks ago; that’s why she didn’t return. Ashcroft had finally reached his breaking point with her, and he was not a ‘modern man’ in any sense of the word. He was well-read, but even so, he would be startled to see what Earthside was like now. He used to frequent it constantly back in the 1850s, he said, but then he hadn’t gone back until 1927. And then he said that it was ‘too fast
paced and startling to comprehend, let alone want to go back to’.

If he thought 1927 was something… He would probably crap a brick at the sight of the world over
eighty
years later. It had been quite the eighty years—internet, telephones, Xbox360... Ashcroft had never even watched TV before. Everything he needed or wanted from Earthside, he would simply send Moriarty out for.

In essence, somebody might not have told him that spankings simply no longer happened, that pain was no longer a given, and that feeling pain was no longer common
place. And if someone had told him that, it obviously hadn’t gotten through to him.

And he spanked too hard. Certainly she wasn’t still supposed to be feeling the sting enough to be sleeping on her side? The nerves on her bottom tingled and seemed to think even the soft cotton panties she wore were far too scratchy for comfort.

With a sigh, she realized the sun was coming up in the horizon. The crunching and screaming noises from outside had finally subsided into gentle morning chirping. She hadn’t slept a single wink. She got of her bed, pulled on her clothes from yesterday, and crept out of the doorway, her hands wringing her hair nervously as she looked back and forth down the hallway and the spiral staircase.

Nobody sounded awake yet—in fact she could hear the distant sounds of some people snoring lightly—they might have been servants, maybe Ashcroft himself. But she was determined not to make any noise
that might awaken any of them
.

Torches actually lit her way through the darkness, as if she was in some seventeenth century castle. She could feel the cold coming from the stone underneath her feet around her ankles. She knew that it was going to be freezing outside—it was freezing last night when she was getting carried back. They were a few days into autumn, now, and she’d run out of the bar before she could grab her jacket.

Urgh! The spiral staircase took forever to go down. Ashcroft’s tower was more like a very round, very tall castle with tall ceilings. No wonder Ashcroft was in such great shape—just going up and down the stairs… Her eyes glanced into his office as she passed it; out of habit. And just like always, much to her astonishment, Ashcroft was in there, sitting in a chair by the burnt out fire with a book open but resting on his chest. His eyes were closed.

That man has got to get a life. For a moment she actually cocked her head to the left, looking at how exhausted he looked. He worked far too hard—she wondered why, and what for. He was always working, always writing, always reading.

That man could not be anymore her opposite.

The moment of pity was over, however. It was time to go.
She gave a fleeting idea that, m
aybe in a hundred years, when her age provided her with a little bit of respect and mayhap leniency, she would stop in and check on him…

The Otherworld was like England in the fact that it was foggy in the mornings
;
mostly she didn’t have much experience with
it
,
particularly this early in the morning. She would normally stroll in nearer to noon.

She shivered and, crossing her arms tightly to her chest, she walked back towards Earthside. It wasn’t a long walk
,
maybe a mile, though she realized, accompanied by a falling-feeling in the pit of her stomach, that she had never walked to the entrance by herself, and she had to think through the ritual of how to get home.

It was tricky coming
in and tricky going out of Other
world—designed that you can only get into another world by one of two ways: if you already know where it was or if you somehow stumble
d
onto it.

It wasn’t easy to stumble upon it.

Once she got to the river, she would cross a bridge and go into the woods. Thereby she would have to take fifteen steps to the front, twenty walking backwards, and then turn three times, and then she was already on Earthside—she would just continue walking. Getting
in
was even more complicated and nonsensical.

But as she walked through the fog and up towards the bridge to cross the river, she heard splashing noises
,
like someone was struggling.

An
old man’s voice, shaky, panicked and weak, called through the dense morning air. “Help me! Somebody!”

Her neck snapped towards the direction of the noise, but she could barely see a shadow. She didn’t hesitate to run back off the bridge and up the riverbank toward the sound, where she saw an old man struggling on the surface of the water, looking like he was drowning. “Help!” the old man cried.

She looked up and down the riverbank, but didn’t see a soul, so she took a deep breath and tugged her shoes off before running into the frigid water. “Hold on!” she called back. “I’m coming!”

Normally, she hesitated even getting too far into a backyard pool because of the temperature
of the water
. The cold felt like it was a shock to her whole system, but she still paddled out to the man with strong strokes that she learned when she had been subjected to swimming lessons as a child.

The man grabbed hold of her as soon as she paddled close to him and she felt him pulling her down beneath the surface.

It was a struggle just to get a breath of air. Finally, when she put her arm around the man’s waist, trying to calm him, he grabbed her arms with hands that felt like hooks. Her head breached the surface and she made eye contact. “Don’t struggle,” the old man said. “It’s been a long while since I had some fresh meat…” He smiled at her with sharp, pointed teeth, and then her body was pushed back down below the surface, her eyes wide, her heart racing.

Ashcroft was right
—that was the clearest thought rushing through her head.
I never listen. Now, I’m going to die
. 

*
*
*

Moriarty yawned and stretched his shoulders as he walked down the front steps early in the morning, looking through his coat for a cigarette. Charlotte’s
vanilla
-and-cinnamon scent was in the air. That’s right… She was here. Oy vey
!

He felt his bottom lip agai
n, although his immortality had already healed the swelling
, and then he grumbled and replaced his finger with a rolled cigarette before continuing a search for a match, which he lit by running it over the brick wall next to him and then waved his hand until it went out after the cigarette began to burn.
His eyes glanced towards the ground in front of his feet.

Footprints. Fresh footprints from ugly ballerina shoes.

He spit out his cigarette and ran in the direction of the prints that trailed out through the gardens. The heavy dew wetted the ground like mud, making them painstakingly obvious.

He couldn’t help but grumble in his head, blaming Ashcroft, who apparently didn’t lock her in her room the night before. Didn’t that man know that he had to chain her to the wall or something? She couldn’t be trusted to stay anywhere for a second when she
wasn’t
held somewhere against her wishes!

And now she was walking through the Otherworld… Alone and unprotected.

“Charlotte!” he called out at the edge of the garden, still following footsteps. “Charlotte!”

She must have been far ahead of him, because there was no answer. And indeed, he followed the footsteps to the bridge. He was about to go over and chase her to the entrance of Earthside, but then he saw a second trail of footprints—these looked longer like she had been running back off the bridge and up the riverbank.

He felt his heart jump up into his throat even before he listened closely enough to hear splashing coming from up the river. He sprinted through the lifting fog, and watched as a pale old-man
-
like creature pushed something with willowy arms into the water, trying to drown it.