Page 2 of Spellbound

"If you hear something, no, you didn't....sit your ass down and leave it alone. It’s not your business, and you can't do anything about it anyway.”

~ Appalachian Folklore

Asher MacGregor

I woke up on the morning of our journey to western North Carolina, feeling anxious and uneasy. That wasn’t anything new for me, actually—my ex-boyfriend had once told me I was only one raw nerve away from a total nervous collapse, and I was afraid that was probably true.

But in my defense, I hated road trips, even if this was only a fairly short one.

Actually, I hated travel in general. And what was worse than all that was being rushed, which I now was because I’d overslept, and my grandma, who was driving us, would me there any minute to pick me up.

We were taking her big 2023 Chevy Suburban on the trip up to Brevard, N.C.

, a town only about thirty-five miles or so from Asheville.

I hadn’t been to that area since I was a teenager, but that’s where we were fucking going.

I had agreed to do this, damn it, and I just needed to get over myself and get on with it.

Arrangements had been made, my small amount of household goods had already been shipped, and money had changed hands for a lease on a little guest cottage I was going to occupy up there for the next six months to a year.

I told myself again that it would be fine.

I told myself it would all work out and I’d be glad that I agreed to do this— for the next six months to a year.

I told myself a lot of crap that I never truly believed.

I got weak for a few seconds at the thought of it, holding onto the kitchen counter to steady myself.

Six months to a fucking year was how long my doctor said it could take for me to recover fully from my accident and get back to full strength.

It was far too late to back out of this deal now—though I would have liked nothing better.

If I kept telling myself getting out of it was not an option, then maybe I could convince myself to just get on with it and fuck the premonitions of disaster I had and the idea that something major was waiting for me in North Carolina.

Something was either going to go badly wrong there or maybe even change my life.

Whether or not that was a good thing remained to be seen.

But fuck all that shit. I could do this.

After all, it wasn’t unusual to be apprehensive about an imminent journey that had such an uncertain outcome. That’s what my therapist told me anyway the last time we’d had a session, and I believed her. Well, you know, more or less…

But I still needed one of my pills to take the edge off.

Maybe two. I limped into the kitchen to get a glass of water to take them with and then decided maybe I should go ahead and take three while I was at it.

It couldn’t hurt. They were mild, and it was going to be a long day after all and a long ride to North Carolina.

I was rinsing the glass and putting it in the rack when I heard my grandma’s big ole SUV pull up in the driveway.

She and I were leaving for an extended stay at the home of her younger sister, Rosalyn. Or rather, I’d be in the cottage, and my grandma would be staying in the house with her sister, as the guest cottage was really too small for both of us.

They’d always been close, but when Rosalyn’s husband had died a few years ago after a long, lingering illness, it had brought them even closer together.

We had arranged for me to lease the cottage on Rosalyn’s property for the next however long—I refused to repeat what my grandma and the doctor kept saying— at a greatly reduced rate while I concentrated on recovering from an accident that had given me a serious concussion and required me to have surgery for fractures of both my tibia and fibula in my left leg.

It was every bit as painful as it sounded.

And gruesome, because after my fall, my tibia bone snapped clean in two and half of it came poking right out of my leg.

It looked like half anyway, though I admit I didn’t take a good long look at it.

I’d passed out right away, in fact, as soon as I saw all the blood and the white bone that should never have seen the light of day.

It was just wrong . They’d had to put in pins and screws, as well as putting me in a cast, and it had been a really long and painful three and a half months since the fall.

Rosalyn had insisted she didn’t want any rent for the cottage, but I didn’t like the sound of that and had insisted she take some money anyway.

I had a little in savings and my grandma had told me she would chip in and help too.

Like I said, she’d planned to stay at her sister’s house and give me the privacy and quiet I’d need to hopefully work on my master’s thesis while I was there.

Let’s just say, the project hadn’t been going well so far.

I was mostly recovered from my accident, but I’d got an infection after surgery, as the icing on the cake, which set me back even more.

The infection had cleared up, but the pain remained, along with a troubling, lingering weakness in my leg.

I also had migraines now too, which was just another little gift that just kept on giving, because I’d sustained a concussion that day, and though I’d never had migraine headaches before, I had them now.

In fucking spades. And I can’t say I’d recommend them even for my worst enemy.

I was walking with a cane now too, like a ninety-year-old man.

My frequent absences from my job as a Teaching Assistant at my college had been mainly due to the migraines and were the main reason I’d had to give it up.

Actually, the decision was taken out of my hands when they decided they couldn’t hold the position open for me any longer.

So, I planned to use the next six months (or so) that stretched out ahead of me to work hard on my recovery and hopefully complete my master’s thesis at the same time.

Said thesis was far from being done, because I was behind on that too.

I figured I could confer with my advisor by video calls if and when I needed to, and she had agreed to that plan.

It would also give my grandma a chance to spend time with her sister.

Rosalyn had recently undergone treatment for an aggressive form of breast cancer, and she had only just finished her treatments the previous month.

Thankfully, the cancer had been discovered extremely early, due to an incredibly luckily-timed mammogram, and she’d come successfully through a round of chemo and radiation and was doing pretty well now.

The thing was, she’d had cancer once before—five years earlier.

Back then the cancer had been in her lungs, but again, it was caught really early.

After intense chemo and radiation therapy, it had finally gone into remission, but there was some concern that this latest cancer might be related or meant that she was no longer really in remission after all.

I’m probably messing up the details, and I’m sure there was more to it than that, but that was the general gist. My grandma had told me all about it—at some length—but she tended to ramble a little, and sometimes I tuned her out.

My great aunt Rosalyn was the youngest of my grandma’s siblings and more than twelve years younger than my grandmother, who was the eldest sibling at age seventy-seven.

But Gran, who was blessed with good health so far, felt the need to go and spend time with her, “because you never know when the cancer will come back, and she may not be as lucky next time,” she had ominously informed me.

“When you get older, all kinds of things go wrong.” I guess she was right, though having cancer twice in five years didn’t seem particularly lucky to me.

When Gran had first brought up this idea of me “convalescing” in North Carolina, she’d made it plain she was going to visit her sister Rosalyn, regardless of whether I decided to come along or not, but she wanted me to go with her so she could keep an eye on me too.

And she’d layered on that extra guilt about “when you get older,” to convince me to go, even though the extra persuasion hadn’t been necessary.

As much as I liked to bitch about going, the area nearby was mountainous and beautiful—and quiet, so it was perfect for my writing.

Besides there wasn’t much I wouldn’t do for my grandma, whom I loved dearly and who had taken me in and raised me since I was fifteen.

So, I would have gone anyway, because I was already finding myself at some loose and very frayed ends because of yet another personal drama with my now ex-boyfriend.

It all started after my accident, when I’d had to cancel a long-anticipated spring break trip to Paris.

That helped to precipitate the final, bitter breakup fight with my boyfriend, though I think we were on the verge of breaking up anyway.

I had saved up to take Brent with me on the trip, but then I’d had to cancel, and he’d been terribly disappointed.

We had broken up only days later, which made me wonder if he’d only been hanging on long enough to go on the damn trip.