Raw an unedited, just for you!
The Mystery of Mattie
My roommate was a man-dog.
A dog who’d only days previous been a person. A cantankerous loner of a man formerly known as Mr. Matthews.
The good news was that I hadn’t turned him into a dog.
The bad was that someone had.
He showed every sign of being much happier in his current state. Prior to his canine transformation, he glowered in response to cheerful smiles and waves. He put a trespassers will be prosecuted sign up on Halloween (and meant it). He slammed the door on little girls selling cookies for nonprofits. He blew leaves into neighbors’ yards. And five years running—that was counting the years since I’d moved into my mother’s house, but it could have been happening before—he’d called the cops with a noise complaint when we had our fall block party.
His attendance at this year’s block party had been my goal when I’d dosed him with a mood-altering potion. I’d hypothesized that in an altered (more amenable) state, he would see the draw of a block party. (Which turned out to be true, Mattie loved people and would enjoy the opportunity to socialize if he was still a dog this coming Saturday.)
In contrast to the irascible Mr. Matthews, Mattie wagged his tail frequently, lazed about my small cottage with intent (not melancholy), chased as many tennis balls as I’d throw, and generally exhibited every sign of enjoying his newly acquired canine life.
But he made a problematic roommate.
I’d encountered a great number of inconvenient and embarrassing situations in my life. Christmas dinners as a kid with my nonmagical father’s second family (he hadn’t a clue I was a witch and didn’t celebrate Christmas), my first date with a boy named Jimmy Sellers (nonexistent conversation, sweaty blushes, and sloppy kisses all included), and magical mishaps numbering in the dozens that I’d sooner forget.
The pinnacle of awkward, however, was living with a dog who’d recently been a man and would (hopefully) be one again.
We ate meals together, his plate on the floor, mine on the table. I’d done research to ensure that everything I served Mattie was edible by both dog and human. I didn’t put an entrée or side on his plate that I wouldn’t be happy to eat myself, though his meals were a little protein heavy for me.
He had his own room for privacy purposes. Mostly mine, but since I wasn’t familiar with the psychological needs of a man-turned-dog, perhaps his as well. I found him sprawled on the twin bed or the hardwood floor when I returned from brief errands. I’d removed the large area rug after determining he preferred the cool touch of bare wood. My kitchen was his favorite place to lounge, and after doing some research I’d concluded it was the chilled feel of the tile that he liked. Google and the ebook I’d ordered on Labrador Retrievers had informed me that labs were built to tolerate extreme cold and even to swim in icy water, so that made sense.
And then there was the bathroom situation. My new roommate and I had quickly come to an understanding. I was not to be disturbed in the bathroom (I was adamant), and he wouldn’t be observed during his potty breaks in my yard (he didn’t seem to care, but I did). I also made sure that he was indoors when I tidied the yard. Who wanted to watch someone clean up after them?
And that was the nature of our first weekend together. Me pretending that Mattie was simultaneously both a man and a dog, and Mattie behaving with the happy-go-lucky acceptance I’d expect of a well-adjusted Labrador Retriever. Per Google. I’d never actually spent much time with dogs of any breed, certainly not a lab.
Then Monday morning rolled around, and the reality of our situation settled firmly on my tense shoulders. I had to go to work; he couldn’t come.
Hattie, with her more flexible writer’s schedule, had agreed to stop by the house midday to give Mattie his lunch and a chance to stretch his legs in the yard.
“I have to leave now.” I clutched my keys in my hand.
Big brown eyes stared back at me. A chunky Labrador body stood between me and the door.
“You’ll be fine.”
He tipped his head and arched his canine eyebrows. This was followed by a slow wag of his tail.
“You’ll just sleep all day. Right?”
Those huge canine eyes of his gave rise to more guilt than any man-dog, especially one who was crashing in my guest room uninvited, should be capable of causing.
I hurried past him and out of the house, barely avoiding being sucked into the vortex of his soulful, guilt-inducing gaze again.
Then I had a terrible day at work.
Nine calls. I made nine phone calls to Hattie.
The first was to ask if she’d stop by earlier than the planned eleven o’clock, because I was worried about Mattie being at the house alone for so long. What if he hurt himself? Or got into something he shouldn’t have? It’s not like he had a lot of experience being a dog.
The second was to remind her to check the temperature of his food when she reheated it, since he ate like a hungry lab and not a grumpy old man. In other words, he inhaled his food, licked his plate, and then looked for more. Actually, maybe he ate that way as a human and that was why he’d lived alone? Hattie refused to reply to that bit of fanciful speculation and hung up on me.
My third and fourth calls she ignored, which made me frantic and snappy with the owner of the business. Good thing I was amazing at my job and normally very easy to get along with.
I found out on my fifth call that she’d been inside my house, her phone still in her car, when I’d called earlier. Also, Mattie had been “dead to the world” when she’d arrived. Upon hearing this, I had a mini-panic attack. The tightness in my chest only abated when she made it clear with further details that he’d been asleep. On my sofa. She recommended I invest in a couch cover pronto.
Not sure what happened to him seeking out the coolest areas to lie down, but I added slipcover to the ever-growing list of supplies that living with a hairy, drooling, odiferous canine beast required.
Around three, I tried to get away from work, but I’d been so thoroughly unproductive throughout the day that it would have been irresponsible to leave early. My sixth call was to beg Hattie to swing by one more time for another round of fetch since I’d be home later than planned. I promised cheese in return, since I was already in a bottle of wine for the lunch trip.
After the seventh call, in which I’d begged for an update on fetch (many balls were retrieved) and whether or not Mattie seemed to be in good spirits (definitely yes), she stopped answering.
And when she refused to take my eighth and ninth calls, I had to admit that I had a problem. And if I hadn’t already figured it out for myself, Clara’s text telling me to stop calling Hattie or I’d wake up tomorrow with warts and prematurely gray hair would have clued me in.
I had to take some vacation time. I couldn’t leave Mattie at home alone. The stress was killing my productivity at work, driving my friends insane, and generally making me a basket case. I hadn’t had a panic attack since those first few months after my mom died.
I had an ah-ha moment on the drive home, in which I realized my level of concern was in part attributable to never having had a dog before. But it had even more to do with the fact that Mattie wasn’t a dog.
In the jam-packed few days since Mr. Matthews had been turned into a lovable canine, I’d delved into dog dietary research, reorganizing my guest bedroom, shopping for supplies, learning about labs, and creating a new schedule to accommodate all of the sudden changes in my life. Like cooking healthy meals for two, long walks, bouts of fetch, and poop-scooping.
All of those tasks and changes had consumed me, not leaving much time for the reality of the situation to settle in.
The reality being Mr. Matthews was a dog.
I’d been side-tracked by details while ignoring the much greater problem that a man who existed outside and ignorant of the magical world had been magically transformed. An act that was strictly taboo and most definitely illegal, not to mention fraught with logistical difficulties, only some of which I’d attempted to handle. Yes, Mattie had a safe place to live, but what about Mr. Matthews mortgage? Any family he spoke with semi-regularly? Maintenance of his home? And even more importantly, his lawn, because the neighbors would begin to comment when it grew unchecked. And speaking of the neighbors, they’d certainly notice when the police didn’t swing by our block party, and then I’d have to lie and say I handled it.
I hadn’t handled it. I wasn’t handling it—not well, anyway.
Mr. Matthews had been transformed on Saturday, and today was Monday. Saturday, Hattie, Clara, and I had been in shock. It wasn’t every day that one of our neighbor’s was zapped into animal form.
But two days had passed with no indications the magic of the transformation was fading. My potion still had the potential to be effective for the next day, two at most.
What would happen when it wore off?
Would Mattie become an ill-tempered Labrador?
Or would be become a cranky chihuahua?
One result Hattie, Clara, and I had ruled out was that he’d return to his human form. Whatever had caused his transformation had been in place before I’d dosed him with a liberal topical application of mood-altering potion. Our best guess was that the original transformation magic had been slow acting. Probably set to trigger with a specific event or intended to trigger a certain amount of time after he’d been magicked.
And then I’d squirted Mr. Matthews with my mood-altering potion.
Magic being the unpredictable beast that she was, my potion could easily have triggered the dormant magic behind Mr. Matthews’ transformation.
Slow acting transformation magic like that could last…a while. Years even. Mr. Matthews could live in the form of a dog longer even than that dog’s expected life span.
I hadn’t turned my neighbor into a dog, but…maybe (most likely) I’d helped someone else’s magic along. My magic might have been (probably was) the precipitating event that had jump-started the transformation.
I wasn’t responsible for Mattie’s well-being…but who else could be relied upon to care for a man-dog properly?
So here I’d landed, responsible for a being who was neither man nor beast, but somehow both. And it was stressing me out.
As I turned down my street, I saw both Hattie’s car and Clara’s moped parked at my house. It seemed that we’d all three come to the same conclusion: present circumstances could not be allowed to continue. I was pretty certain that was why they’d shown up on my doorstep: for an intervention.
With any luck, they’d brought tequila, since Clara had used the last of mine for our prematurely celebratory drinks on Saturday. I wasn’t planning to practice magic in the next few hours, just talk about it. Booze were a definite yes, and tequila lifted my spirits, especially when delivered in a shaker along with the contents of a Mexican martini.
As I pulled into my drive, Clara lifted a bottle of tequila in greeting while sitting on my porch steps. Hattie, sitting next to her, lifted a jar of olives.
Definitely an intervention, but I’d convince my best friends that I didn’t need an intervention. I needed a plan.
***
Two hours later, I was tipsy, but feeling a little less overwhelmed. My friends had talked me off the proverbial ledge, convincing me that Mattie would be fine at home alone while I worked. And I’d convinced them that I needed a plan. They’d agreed that the three of us would tackle Mattie’s problem together.
Mattie’s thick tail swished reassuringly across the tile. He was sitting next to the kitchen table, staring longingly at either the drinks or the chips and salsa. Probably both, because I wasn’t sharing either one. Salt, peppers, and booze were not good for dogs, or so my internet sources had claimed. I apologized quietly to Mattie for my rudeness.
Clara, who’d had the most to drink by far and would be sleeping on my dog-hair-covered sofa tonight, tapped the kitchen table with the flat of her hand. “Almost forgot. No worries about that familiar thing.”
Familiar thing? Then I recalled that we’d had some concerns I’d unwittingly acquired a familiar since Mattie was a dog and everyone knew that a witch’s pet could be her familiar. Except none of us had known how a pet became a familiar.
“That’s right. You’re in the clear. Mattie is still a human, even if he looks and acts like a dog, so he can’t be a familiar.” Hattie scratched Mattie behind the ear and under the new collar I’d bought him. “I’d have told you on one of the many calls we had today, but I was sidetracked calming your irrational fears and forgot.”
I wasn’t working any sort of magic. I’d been busy with my new man-dog roommate and also, my last potion hadn’t gone to plan, so practice was on pause briefly. But as a result, I hadn’t had a chance to evaluate whether Mattie’s presence helped, hindered, or did nothing at all. Generally, the idea was that familiars helped witches work their magic.
Supposedly.
I didn’t know anyone with a familiar. I knew a few witches with barn cats, and one witch with a parrot she didn’t get along with (inherited from her cousin), but that was all. None of the witches of Westerville had familiars. Actually, that was odd. It seemed mathematically unlikely.
“What’s the current witch population of Westerville?” I asked Clara. “Somewhere around seventy-five, right?”
Hattie could remember a story she read in the fourth grade, but could barely remember her phone number, so I was surprised when, instead of Clara, she replied, “Seventy-eight.” She shrugged. “Kitty had a history lesson last week.”
Kitty was Hattie’s twelve-year-old, chocolate-loving cousin. Maybe if someone had bribed me with chocolate to regurgitate my witch lessons, I’d have remembered more of them. Probably not…but chocolate.
“I don’t remember having witch history or Westerville history.” Since I’d forgotten more than I’d remembered from my weekly witch classes, that wasn’t a surprise to anyone in the room. Even Mattie looked on with nonjudgmental sympathy in his sweet brown eyes.
“Up until about twenty or thirty years ago, the witch population had always been around one percent of the nonmagical population, somewhere between a hundred and two hundred. That seemed high, so I looked at the witch rolls, and found that the numbers have been dropping since then. Our current number is seventy-eight, about .78 percent of the total population of Westerville, since Letitia left.”
I’d have run far away from Westerville, too, if I’d lived through Letitia’s last tortuous year here. A whole year of community service working at The Home for Genteel Ladies, where the least genteel witches went to live after they turned fifty-five.
“It’s weird, right?” I hadn’t had that much alcohol. I was pretty sure that at least one witch in Westerville should have a familiar.
“Oh yeah,” Hattie agreed. “Seems shady to me. The population of the town has grown in the last ten years, but not the witch population? Something’s off.”
“No, I was talking about how there’s no familiars. Seventy-eight witches and—”
“More than a third of Americans are pet owners,” Clara declared, reading straight from her phone, then hiccupped. “That’s too much math for me, but zero of seventy is way less than a third.”
“Seventy-eight,” Hattie repeated absently. “You’re right, though. That is odd. I love dogs. I should get a dog.”
Mattie thought that was a fantastic idea, because he wagged his tail so hard his butt wiggled. Actually, he was licking his lips. He might have gotten a stray chip.
Clara topped up my drink with the last of the martini in the shaker, then headed for the counter to mix another. As she poured, she reminded us that we were supposed to be solving the problem of Mattie.
“There’s only one thing to do,” I pronounced. I’d given this some thought on the drive home. Dripping Springs, the town I worked in, was a good twenty-minute drive from my house and that was when I drove ten miles over the speed limit…which I would never do, because that was illegal.
Hattie sighed. “Spit it out already. Except, wait, whatever we’re doing, it better not involve me trucking my rear over here three times a day to babysit Mattie. I adore him, but I have to actually get some work done during the day.”
“Entertaining Mattie won’t be a problem,” I replied, “if we change him back.”
Silence followed.
And not the variety that said, “awed-appreciation.”
It was the sort that said, “You’ve gone off your rocker.”
No one messed with another witch’s magic. Ever. That much even I remembered.
“Can’t be done,” Clara finally said. Then she shook the shaker of Mexican martini in her hand like she’d shake me if she could get away with it: with gleeful determination.
“Sure it can. We just won’t be doing the magic part. All we have to do is figure out who did it…then use that information.”
Hattie blinked.
Clara stopped shaking.
Mattie yawned with a cute little growly squeak.
I pointed at Mattie. “This time you don’t get a vote.” Then I petted his head, and he wagged his tail.
“What you’re saying is… Let me get this right.” Clara set her shaker down on the counter, leaned her hip against it, and crossed her arms. “We find out who magicked Mattie. We then confront that sneaky nasty witch with the evidence. We then leverage that evidence to get Mattie turned back into Mr. Matthews. All while avoiding being turned into…well, whatever Mattie was intended to be before your magic intervened in the process. Ha!” She smacked the counter. “I love it. I’m in!”
Clara might wear multi-hued (vibrant) clothes, drive a moped, and drink like a college freshman with her first fake ID—all traits that led many a confused soul to underestimate her—but she was no college kid. She ran her own virtual assistant business with more full-time employees than the company I worked for. She was a savvy businesswoman with a teeny, tiny (but thoroughly vicious) competitive streak, and she always played to win.
“You’re crazy,” Hattie, who was much more risk averse, replied.
I wasn’t sure who she was talking to. “Does that mean you’re out?”
Hattie leaned closer to mattie and scratched his chest. “No, it means I’m in, but you’re both crazy.”
Clara whooped. “Drinks for everyone! We’re finding us a wicked witch of Westerville.”
Which she found absolutely hilarious. Hopefully, that attitude survived the hangover she’d have tomorrow, because Hattie and I were relatively sober and definitely in.
We were, in fact, going to hunt the wicked witch of Westerville.
***Keep an eye out for the next installment of the serial! ~Cate
