The Forgotten

Emily 

Emily tried to block out the thoughts of the mover's as they uprooted her from her home. 

She had a knack for knowing how other people felt, what they thought. It was described as anything between "unusually perceptive" and "fucking creepy" by those around her - although the latter was never said out loud. She saw it etched into the brain of her teachers, her doctor, even her mum sometimes. Usually, she could tune people out, think of other things. But today, everything was coming into her head unfiltered, screaming and endlessly reflecting on the walls of her mind until it became a cacophony of noise, attacking her like a poked hornet's nest.

A headache rose inside her brain and she fled to the garden. Even the pressing, choking heat would be preferable to the never ending noisenoisenoise inside.

Emily had only just settled under the ancient oak tree when she saw a figure approaching.

"Hello, Oliver", she murmured. "Good day, Emily", the ghost replied, moving to sit beside her in the shade. Oliver had lived in this house decades ago, and never left after dying of a serious injury at age fifteen. He became strange when she asked about it or his family, so she tried not to talk about it much. Oliver had been Emily's tutor and playmate for years now. Unfortunately, no one but Emily could hear or see him. He said he had an explanation, but was supposedly oath bound not to tell Emily until she was at least ten years old. The ghost was entirely unsympathetic to her begging, and merely restated his inability to speak of it. Now it was only three months until he would be able to tell his secrets. 

"Are you sure you can come with me?" Emily asked for the millionth time. She'd never known Oliver to leave the house. 

The reply came in a deliberately soothing tone, which rankled. "As I said before, your presence gives me energy. With you as an anchor, I will be able to relocate for good. I may have to stay at a nearby cemetery as soon as… you leave for longer time periods … but otherwise, it should be fine".

Emily knew the way Oliver's words became sluggish and distorted when talking about her leaving. It was oath-secret stuff again. 

'Just three more months', she told herself.

She began ripping out strands of grass around her in agitation when she felt thoughts approaching. "Can't they just think quietly for once", she groaned. 

Oliver's hands, cold as a Scottish winter, appeared on her forehead, reducing the strain the thoughts had one her, and lowering the pain they caused.

This was one of the things Emily loved most about Oliver: she couldn't read his mind. There was nothing but blissful silence coming from her.

Emily sighed in relief and felt the stress of the move fall away. Everything would be alright. 

Moving into the new home proved to be less awful than expected at first. As long as she stayed in the background and focused on the new environment, she was alright. And when the movers had finally finished placing all the boxes and left, the old house was blissfully quiet. By dinner time, the beds had been assembled, the Wi-Fi and computers set up, and the kitchen was halfway finished. They ate take-out at the sturdy kitchen table under a still naked light bulb. All three were too tired to say much, and so the silence was broken only by the chewing (or slurping, in Emily’s case) of the noodles, and the soft humming of the fridge. The peaceful quiet was interrupted suddenly by a loud rumble, followed almost immediately by a rapid drumming noise coming from the outside. Emily’s head whipped around, and she made out a barely-visible humanoid form disappearing through the wall. As the form retreated, she saw the tin-sheet statuette her mum was so proud of laying on the floor, broken. Her father smiled as he looked out the window. 

“Finally, a proper thunderstorm with some heavy rain. One hell of a first rumble to start us off. That should get rid of the nasty heat. Maybe we can take a nice walk tomorrow, and get to know the area. What do you say?”

It took Emily a while to realise he had been talking to her, and she hastily stammered out a “Sounds great, dad”. Neither of her parents thought much of the way she was staring into nothing - it had been a long day, after all. 

Emily met the ghost, an elderly woman by the name of Jane that night. Jane was raving madly about “filthy muggles” living in her house with their machines and magic-hating religion. She seemed endlessly satisfied by the fact that she had been able to at least keep the “halfblood abomination” ghost out and wouldn’t listen to a word of Emily’s complaints that Oliver was supposed to live here with them.

Over the next weeks, Jane used her increasing strength to try to scare the family away with increasingly disturbing methods. She shattered light bulbs, threw down knick knacks, broke whatever machines she could, and destroyed religious symbols. Emily only managed to speak to Oliver once, when she went to the cemetery in hopes of seeing him there.

She found him sitting before a grave stone, staring at the inscribed name as if transfixed. 

"Oliver?", she called softly. She didn't worry about anybody seeing her talk to the air - surely nobody would think twice about that at a graveyard - but she didn't want to spook Oliver.

The ghost turned to her.

"Emily. I was hoping you would seek me out". Oliver smiled, but his eyes were sad.

Emily sat down opposite of him. "What is happening, why aren't you with me anymore? Why can that stupid ghost lady keep you away?"

Oliver sighed. "It was her house. She has the right to determine which ghosts can enter and which can't. And since she has decided that she doesn't want me there, I can't enter. At least not now. You may be able to override her when you are older and stronger, when the house has accepted you as its owner. But for now, I cannot enter the grounds."

Thoughts were racing through Emily's mind, mostly about how unfair this all was, but Oliver never reacted well to her saying things weren't fair and so she swallowed her protests.

"Jane keeps using these weird words", she said instead. "Calls you a halfblood, and me a mudblood, and my parents muggles. What does that mean?".

The ghost looked uncomfortable, the same way he always did when she asked him about his family.

"That is all part of the thing I was going to talk to you about after your birthday. But I doubt she will be silent on the matter this long, so I may as well tell you now. You, Emily, are magic. You're a witch. And because your parents aren't, they're called muggles."

He pursed his lips. "You would be called a muggleborn. The term mudblood is considered to be very rude. I am a halfblood because my parents were magical, but their parents weren't. If your family is magical for more than four generations, you would be considered a pureblood. Jane is one of those people who thinks purebloods are superior, that is why she's acting the way she is. She doesn't want dirty muggles in her home".

Oliver's voice was taking on an impassioned tone.

"And are you one of those people as well?", Emily asked, suspicious.

If ghosts could blush, she was sure he would have done so.

"I used to be. My family was very anti-muggle and taught me to be as well. I looked down on them. Since my death, though, I have learned better. Muggleborns are just as strong and worthy as halfbloods and purebloods. Muggles have an unfortunate disadvantage, but that doesn't mean we should treat them badly. We should have pity for them".

Emily flinched back as if struck. "Pity? Why would you pity them?"

He had the gall to look surprised. "They lack the magnificent gift of magic, of course that is a sad thing".

She jumped up, enraged. "And just because of that, they are worth less to you? Really?".

"I just said we shouldn't treat them as if they were less than", he defended himself.

"But you still think they are", she spat and turned away from him.

"Emily, please, you don't understand!".

She walked away briskly, ignoring the ghost's calls after her and furiously wiping at her face, where tears streamed down her cheeks. She didn't return to the cemetery.

Emily felt-heard her parents first be concerned at what they believed to be her acting out ("the move must have been harder on her than we thought", "I wish she would just talk to us"), then annoyed ("if she won't stop this nonsense soon, I will make her stop"), and at the end, terrified ("the cross was high up the wall, how could she even reach there?"). 

When Emily came home from school one Friday afternoon to find a stranger in black clothing sitting in the living room with her parents, she didn't even need to listen for their thoughts to know exactly why this man was here. She wasn’t sure what to think of him. At least he didn’t seem to believe she was crazy or evil.

"You must be young Emily. I heard so much about you. I’m Father Jonas, your parents called me to help you", he said, shaking her hand. 

Jane became enraged ("How dare you lay a hand on the girl you filthy muggle"), resulting in several broken vases and an upturned cross. Father Jonas suggested Emily be sent to a boarding school where she would be surrounded by the holy spirit, and where no demons could dwell for long. Her parents acquiesced and prepared everything to allow her to go within the week. 

Emily noticed the change to herself the moment she stepped onto the grounds of the disturbingly victorian-looking school. The foreign thoughts she had heard all her life drifted away into nothingness. For the first time, she was utterly alone in her head. It was jarring.

Over time, she became used to the silence that she was surrounded by at Saint Mary’s Academy for Young Ladies, although it increased her distaste for crowds outside the school. The school was annoyingly strict - she was only allowed to use her smartphone on weekends, and only for an hour, it was ridiculous - but at least she was no longer a weirdo. 

In her absence, Jane grew dormant once more and the weird happenings in the house stopped. Oliver, now without an active source of magic to fuel him as well, was bound to the cemetery as its protector.

When, a year later, a Hogwarts letter was sent to her, it was turned away at the heavy magic-suppressing wards. Emily would never know she was a witch, and by the time she left school for good, she had matured beyond accidental magic. Her core had withered away from disuse and year-long suppression, taking with it her gift for legilimency, and she continued on living a perfectly mundane life.

Anne 

Anne really didn’t care for magic. It was a secret distaste that she didn’t dare to share with anyone in her family. Despite her parents being muggleborns, they had internalised the feelings of superiority that purebloods tended to have towards everyone of “lower blood status”. The main reason Anne and Oliver were even allowed to go to muggle school was the fact that their parents couldn’t afford personal tutors and had no time to teach their kids themselves. The other reason was to make sure the kids understood their “place in the world”. They may not be at the top of the food chain alongside the purebloods, but they were better than muggles, and they deserved to gain confidence from that simple, obvious fact. Anne could see Oliver buy into the rhetoric, sneering at muggles, and her resentment grew. 

“You don’t understand because you aren’t at Hogwarts yet”, he’d say. “You will once you’re there. I’m almost certain you’ll sort into Slytherin or Ravenclaw, and I’ll make sure that the other girls help you see the truth. We are simply superior to muggles. It should be us who rule the world, and them who are kept to small territories. They are barely better than wild animals”. 

It was the same refrain she had heard all her life and it made her angry like little else could. 

Her friends at muggle school were wonderful, especially her best friend Eliza, and muggle England was making real progress towards equality, while Wixen England was actually going backwards. With how easy magic made many things, there were far fewer workers required to keep society running, and women were encouraged to keep to housework, at least according to Oliver. He tried to make it sound like a great privilege, but Anne, who wanted nothing more than to become a lawyer and further the cause for equality of the sexes, was repulsed by the idea. 

Wixen society appeared to be incredibly lazy, inventing nothing but stealing every muggle innovation they could get their grubby hands on. “Wizard Wireless” indeed. 

And so, from a young age, Anne suppressed her magic, hoping against hope that she may be “just” a squib. She would be disowned, certainly, but she would be free to follow her dreams. Of course, nothing ever went how it was supposed to and her Hogwarts letter arrived as expected. 

There was great excitement from everyone as the owl disrupted their breakfast to drop the stupid letter right in Anne’s stupid eggs. She fished it out and opened it, still hoping that maybe, just maybe, Hogwarts had started sending rejection letters to magical families. Or that the letter was supposed to be delivered to someone else in her family. But no. 

“Dear Ms. Woolthorpe, we are pleased to inform you…”, it read, just as she had known it would. 

She went through the motions of feigning dignified happiness as her family piled congratulations, praise, and advice on her. Anne had been hoping to escape after the horrid news, to sulk and be upset on her own, but of course Oliver insisted on taking her to Diagon Alley for celebration and some early school shopping. When breakfast was finished, she went to her room in a daze. There was no hiding from it now. She was a witch. Doomed to spend at least five years in a regressive, prejudiced society, away from all useful knowledge and skills - what kind of school offers neither maths nor spoken languages? Surely even wizards intend to cross borders at some point. While her friends would prepare for careers, she would prepare to do… what? Cook and clean? Raise children? Take a backseat in her own life? No way. She wouldn’t allow that. She couldn’t.

The door was opened noisily behind her. Oliver. He always announced his presence with loudness. He had the audacity to look annoyed with her. 

“You are acting weird. As if you weren’t happy. Surely you can’t wait to escape the dreadful muggles you are always surrounded by”.

“You would think that”, Anne huffed. “But not everyone is like you or our parents. I want more than what wizards deign to give me.” She must be mad to speak this candidly. Already, she saw his face twist in anger, and she just knew this was going to turn into a fight.

And sure enough, he began getting into a rant about their superiority over muggles and their duty to their gift that she tuned out as much as she could. Only when he closed the distance between them to grab her arms and shake her did she snap back to the presence. 

“Don’t you care at all about your potential? You keep talking about wanting to do great things, and yet you refuse the greatest gift anyone could ever have”.

“I don’t want to find greatness in hatred!” she screamed at him, and her world was plunged into darkness. When she came to, there was nothing but devastation to be seen. The walls in her room were covered in soot, and the space directly around her was scorched. To her feet lay the lifeless body of her brother. Her parents stood in the door, looking horrified. They seemed to be yelling something, but all Anne heard was a persistent ringing in her ears.

Anne was bedridden for the rest of her life. Oliver’s ghost kept her company until she died at the age of sixteen.

Mike

Mike was tired of hiding who he was. What he was. Everybody believed him to be the son of the local priest, who had been the son of the priest before him, whose father had been a priest himself, and so on for as long as anyone in Abbotsbury could remember. It was a useful and necessary method of keeping under the radar, but it was incredibly aggravating. 

In truth, Mike came from a long line of witch hunters, and he was educated in the family business from a young age. 

“Centuries ago, witches took our land and our property”, his father always said.

“Hectares of land, gone just like that. We were rich, and then, suddenly, we were nothing. The land just disappeared, and we were abandoned to live in squalor. They have no morals to stop them from hurting us indiscriminately. All they care about is to increase their influence”.

He knew they had infiltrated the government, that they were willing and able to kill anyone standing in their way, and that they survived things no human ever could. In essence, they were demons. And they needed to be destroyed. Mike took his duties very seriously, spending hours training every day. As long as he was a child, he was not allowed to actively fight witches and had to learn to protect others instead. 

His mother, who managed the families’ small business selling homemade protections against witches, was the one to teach him this. She had not been from a witch hunter family, and once he’d asked her what had brought her to wanting to fight witches. She had told him about a girl she’d known as a child. 

“Anne never wanted to come into our house. I had no idea why, back then. I thought it was just because her family was a bit weird. Your father later told me she would have been repelled by the cat that was bricked up in the wall. When she found out she was a witch, the first thing she did was kill her brother. Her poor parents had to sedate her to keep her from hurting other people. She died a few years later”. His mother’s eyes had turned more serious.

“You can never trust a witch. They can pretend to be nice, but they will turn on you as soon as they come into their powers”.

Mike had never forgotten her advice and thought about it frequently, mostly when he was a bit bored making crosses out of rowan wood, or amulets, or witch bottles. The mission stood above all. He felt reassured whenever he went out on a walk around the village, hoping to find protective items. It was clear that the Lord favoured him especially. He had found dozens of hag stones and even a handful of elf arrows, far more than any of his siblings ever did. It was almost as if they were attracted to him, just waiting for him to call for them.

The other boys in the village thought he was a bit weird with all the amulets and crosses he wore, but he didn’t worry about them much. They didn’t understand, didn’t know what he was called by God to do. His father always said that they were small people thinking in small dimensions. As long as his family was there with one of the men working as a priest, they were safe from witches. They were free to have their minds unburdened of the terrors waiting to devour them. 

Once the time came, Mike would take over for his father and protect the village for the next generation. Whichever other place the witches might take over, they wouldn’t take his home. He wouldn’t let them. Soon, very soon, his father would introduce him to the ways of trapping and killing witches. For now, however, he had to continue to learn protections. 

He rose from his bed and knelt before the large cross hanging atop it, praying to the Lord to thank him for His mercy and ask for His protection in the fight. Mike had just finished his prayer as he heard a commotion downstairs. There was scared yelling and angry shouting and… hooting? Cross in hand and still in his pyjamas, Mike ran down the stairs, his elf arrow pendant hitting him in the chest with every step, the wood cold under his naked feet.

As he approached, the loud voices were replaced by muffled whispers, but there were still occasional hoots. When he reached the ground floor, he could finally properly locate the noises. Carefully, he made his way towards the kitchen, the Lord’s prayer falling silently off his lips. 

He was just about to grab the doorknob when the door was ripped open. Before him stood his father, a look of rage on his face. He pushed Mike past him into the kitchen and locked the door behind them. Standing in a corner was his mother, sobbing uncontrollably. Atop his chair sat an owl, seemingly unperturbed by what was happening around her. On the table itself lay a letter. Mike looked between his parents, unsure what he had walked in on.

“Father? What has happened?”, he asked carefully. His father’s anger seemed only to increase if that was even possible.

“It would appear that you, Michael, my SON, are a witch. You got a letter from other witches asking to go to their witch school”. His father spat Mike’s name out with as much venom as he only ever used when talking about witches, and Mike knew at once that they were being entirely serious. 

“What do you want to do, Father?”, Mike said, as calmly as he could while clinging onto his cross as if his life depended on it. He refused to let himself feel anything. He was 11, almost a man, he needed to show his family that he could still be trusted.

His father’s eyes caught on the cross and they seemed to soften ever so slightly.

“An exorcism will be necessary to ensure your mind is still there. Your mother will deal with the letter. There is reason to believe that you may be useful to us. You will show us where the witches hide so we can destroy them, once and for all. Then we will decide what to do with you”. 

Mike nodded. If this was to be the role the Lord had chosen for him, he would not complain. 

Despite their best efforts, Mike’s parents were not allowed to enter the shopping district. Apparently, the witches had had a war not too long ago and it wouldn’t be safe for “muggles”. In lieu of going himself, Mike’s father gave him orders to remember everything as well as he could for an attack in the future. 

When, a few months later, Mike tried to enter Hogwarts grounds, he was turned around by a force he couldn’t understand. While his classmates trudged towards the castle, he became increasingly lost in the Scottish Highlands, as the castle’s wards had rightfully refused to let someone with intent of destruction enter. Mike hadn’t spoken with any of the other students on the train and, as a muggleborn, was swiftly forgotten. 

Mike returned to his home a few days later, having finally found a train station to bring him back to Dorset. His parents saw his failing as the Lord protecting him from the witches and allowed him back into the family. He would never manage to find Hogwarts, and nor would his eldest, Jeremiah. His younger son wasn’t even interested, instead choosing to leave witch hunting and devote himself entirely to God and helping children fighting possession.

Liam

Liam couldn’t remember a time where strange things didn’t happen around him. His earliest memory was from when he was about three years old. He’d been put to bed for the night, tucked in under a giant blanket, and then there’d been something that scared him. He had felt petrified, unable to even scream for his parents as the darkness surrounding him began feeling distinctly active. Fear had been building up in his body and he had started sobbing. He had been near a total breakdown when the ceiling lamp turned on by itself, bathing the room in warm, yellow light, and expelling whatever evil force had been there. 

Most of the strange things weren’t as scary - toys would come to him, yucky vegetables would burn on the stove, mean people would trip or make a fool of themselves. It had taken him a while until he had understood that some of these things weren’t supposed to be possible. They would usually happen when he was alone with no one to comment on it, after all. When his parents had found out, they had been frightened and had taken him out of school immediately. Ever since then, they dragged him from priest to doctor to priest - or, alternatively called either to their home. He was only ever allowed to leave the house to go to church or to a hospital.

The doctors all clearly thought that his parents were imagining things, or that there was a natural explanation. They suspected epilepsy, disassociation, and a range of other diseases causing memory lapses. They reasoned that things apparently moving on their own could be explained by him moving them and then forgetting it. They prescribed a number of pills, none of which worked. In fact, they made Liam desperately sick, and he would vomit them up minutes or hours later.

It was this rejection of earthly medicine which cemented his parents’ certainty that his problem had a supernatural cause. Every priest he was made to see agreed he had been possessed by a demon, and they all decided on exorcisms as the only way to free them.

None of them seemed to do anything, and Liam knew his parents were getting increasingly desperate. He heard them talk in hushed voices about the demon he was surely carrying in his soul, and how they needed to do something about it to get their boy back. One time, his father had confessed that he worried Liam had never been a real boy at all. That, at least, seemed to be too much for his mother to accept. 

“I carried him inside me for nine months, Carl! I nursed him myself. I know he was a normal boy back then, don’t you dare say anything else! Something happened to him to make him this way, we need to help him”.

Liam’s father had seemed appropriately chastised and seemingly not brought his suspicions up again, but Liam could see him looking at him sometimes, and he’d feel a shiver run down his spine. His parents were truly, fundamentally scared of him. He tried his best to please them, but weird things kept happening, especially when he was angry or scared. 

They tried to sedate him with herbal teas and salves, which was the first thing to show any effect whatsoever. Liam would stumble around, dazed and confused, hearing, seeing, feeling, as if he’d been wrapped in a layer of cotton wool. Anything that would usually anger him seemed barely worth consideration, and so the weird things would stop happening. After a few weeks however, it became clear that Liam’s body was getting used to the plants and fighting against their properties. When his parents stopped medicating him on advice of the priest who had originally suggested the herbs, Liam was overcome by a hurricane of emotions. 

He woke up feeling completely like himself for the first time in weeks and after the immediate feeling of disorientation was sorted, he felt pissed. As he realised what had been done to him, the house began to shake, as if there was a very localised earthquake. It got worse and worse until every single window in the house shattered into a million pieces. Looking at it in retrospect, Liam was sure that this incident had been the reason his parents had taken this last, desperate measure.

The man before him looked nice, his brown eyes warm and understanding behind his glasses, his clothes practical and sedate. His voice was slow and measured and had a vaguely melodic tilt to it. His entire person exuded an air of trustmetalktometrustmebehonest to the outside observer. At least that's what his parents saw. 

"Hello, Liam. I am Father Jeremiah", the man said and held out his hand. Liam heard the steel in the man’s voice, felt his harshness as they shook hands and Liam’s was nearly crushed, shivered at the way he looked at him, unforgiving, searching, angry. Barely hidden rage simmering beneath the surface. 

“Hello Father”, Liam replied cautiously, his voice wavering. The man’s eyes sharpened.

“So, I heard you have had some trouble with a demon. Don’t worry, I am the best exorcist there is - none of hell’s creatures has yet managed to triumph over me. It has been a family specialty for generations. I have spoken with the other priests you contacted, and I am confident that I can help you with your problem.”

The first attempt at exorcism started like many of the ones Liam had had before, with Father Jeremiah laying his hand atop Liam’s head and trying to call forth the demon. As always, this action did nothing. The priest tssked. 

“Nasty little bugger. We’ll have to take more complex measures”. 

He shoved Liam onto a chair and began tying his hand and feet to it. The ropes burned like nothing Liam had ever felt and he started screaming. He barely heard the man's voice over his own.

“Yes, your occupant wouldn’t like that. The devil’s forces are repulsed by this twine. You will be free soon enough, child.”

The pain was so all-encompassing that Liam could barely keep track of what was happening around him. Suddenly, he felt a slow, slow drip of cold water on his head. There were voices calling from somewhere far away, words he vaguely understood to be part of a prayer to free him from possession. He lost all sense of time, only noticed that, at some point, he had screamed himself hoarse. A goblet was pressed to his lips, and he eagerly gulped down its contents, hoping it would calm his dry throat. For a moment, it seemed to work, but then his throat swelled up and he started convulsing. Distantly, he heard his mother scream. When she had managed to free him from the restraints, it was already too late. Liam's dead eyes stared accusingly at Father Jeremiah, who kept a tight hold on his expression to avoid showing his pleasure at another job well done.