The Familiar Stranger

3 of 12 Spooky Stories for Halloween

Sorry this one is a little late. I had a fun treatment yesterday that made me so sick. I crashed early and am still currently in my pajamas. Ugh…but, the story for yesterday is a good one. I love black cats and witchy fun moments. Tonight’s story might be in a similar vein. TTYL

The cat, whom Meredith had named Ptolemy in a fit of librarian nostalgia twenty years ago, watched the vampire try to shoplift a selenite wand by tucking it into his coat. This was the third time this month. The vampire was not good at shoplifting.

“Excuse me, Dimitri,” Meredith called from behind the counter without looking up from her inventory ledger. “That’s forty-five dollars, or you can put it back.”

Dimitri froze. “How did you…”

“Ptolemy told me.”

This was not true. Meredith had installed mirrors at strategic angles in 2003 after the banshee incident. But she liked to give Ptolemy credit. The cat, for his part, was too busy watching a lesser demon trying to read a book on necromancy upside down to care about attribution.

Dimitri paid in exact change, as vampires do, and left.

October was always like this. The shop, Meredith’s Mystical Miscellany & Rare Books, though everyone just called it Meredith’s, became a revolving door of magical desperation as All Hallow’s Eve approached. Witches needed last-minute ingredients for their grand rituals. Warlocks panic-bought protection amulets they’d been meaning to replace since last Samhain. Even the occasional hapless human wandered in, thinking it was a quirky antique shop, and left with a “souvenir” that would absolutely curse their mother-in-law’s garden to grow only ragweed.

Ptolemy had seen it all.

He’d seen Margaret Holloway, head of the local coven, accidentally summon a minor deity of parking spaces in the back room when she’d meant to summon a deity of “sacred spaces.” The deity had been surprisingly helpful, actually, and now Margaret never had trouble finding parking at the grocery store.

He’d seen two necromancers have a passive-aggressive argument about proper bone sourcing ethics that lasted three hours. Only Ptolemy knew that one of them had finally won by replacing the other’s car keys with chicken bones. Very petty. Very funny.

He’d seen Meredith herself, late one night when she thought no one was watching, cry over a photograph of a man with kind eyes. Then she’d dried her tears, fed Ptolemy an extra tin of tuna, and alphabetized the entire divination section by author surname. Because that’s what retired librarians did with grief.

“Ptolemy,” Meredith said now, scratching behind his ears as a coven of young witches filed past into the back room, their arms full of candles and chalk. “Those girls are going to try something ambitious tonight. I can feel it.”

Ptolemy could smell it. They reeked of nervous energy and drugstore body spray. One of them had already dropped her car keys twice just walking through the shop.

“Keep an ear out, would you?” Meredith whispered. “Just in case.”

The cat flicked his tail in acknowledgment. This was not the first time Meredith had asked for his vigilance, nor would it be the last. She’d been asking for twenty years, and he’d been doing it for far longer than that.

How long, exactly? Even Ptolemy wasn’t entirely sure anymore. He remembered the shop before Meredith, when it belonged to a stern-faced warlock who’d smelled of pipe tobacco and regret. Before that, a hedge witch who’d kept bees and talked to ghosts. Before that… things got hazy. Gas lamps instead of electric lights. Cobblestones. The scent of horses and the sharp crack of a witch being dragged to trial she wouldn’t survive.

Some memories were better left fuzzy.

In the back room, one of the young witches began chanting in what she clearly believed was ancient Sumerian but was actually mostly just Latin with a few random syllables thrown in. Ptolemy’s ear twitched. He padded off the counter and through the beaded curtain that separated the shop from the back room.

The witches had drawn a circle in chalk (reasonably neat, he’d give them that) and were attempting what appeared to be a “spell for truth and justice in the modern world.” Noble, if vague. The ingredients were scattered around them: rosemary, salt, a concerning amount of glitter, and what looked like a manifesto printed from Canva.

Ptolemy settled in the doorway to observe.

The lead witch, a girl with purple hair and septum piercing, raised her arms dramatically. “We call upon the ancient powers…”

The candles flared. Normal enough.

“…to reveal all deception…”

The temperature dropped. Less normal.

“…and bring truth to light!”

The circle began to glow, and not in a metaphorical way. Actual, pulsing, oh-dear-what-have-you-done light.

Ptolemy stood up.

See, the problem with truth spells was that they never worked the way you wanted. Truth was slippery. Truth was subjective. Truth was the kind of thing that, when summoned without proper constraints, would absolutely tell your boyfriend about the text messages and reveal that your roommate had been stealing your yogurt and announce to the entire apartment complex that the landlord was running an illegal subletting scheme.

Truth, unbound, was chaos.

The purple-haired witch’s eyes widened as the glow intensified. “Um…”

Ptolemy leaped into the circle.

The energy slammed into him like a freight train made of honesty, and for a moment (just a moment) everything in the shop hummed with unbearable clarity. Every secret, every lie, every hidden thing pressing against reality, demanding to be known.

Then Ptolemy, who had absorbed more magic than most grimoires and survived longer than some minor deities, simply… digested it.

The glow faded. The candles went out. The circle was just chalk again.

The witches stared at him.

Ptolemy licked his paw.

“Did your cat just… eat our spell?” one of them whispered.

“Good Ptolemy,” Meredith’s voice came from the doorway. She stood there with a broom, though whether she’d come to clean or to weaponize it was unclear. “Girls, what did I tell you about unbound summoning?”

“To… not?” Purple-hair ventured.

“To not.” Meredith surveyed the scene with the weary patience of someone who had once managed a public library during summer reading program. “Clean this up. The protection salt is on the house this time, but next time I’m charging you double.”

As the witches scrambled to clean, Ptolemy returned to Meredith’s side. She bent down, creaking a bit (twenty years was a long time for humans, too) and scratched his chin.

“You’re a very good boy,” she murmured. “Very, very old, and very, very good.”

Ptolemy purred. It was, in its way, an acknowledgment.

That night, after the shop closed and the last desperate warlock had been gently but firmly ushered out, Meredith locked the door and turned off most of the lights. She left one lamp on in the back room, where the coven met on new moons, and one candle lit by the register, because the shop cat preferred a night light.

Tradition, or perhaps something older than tradition.

“You know,” Meredith said, settling into her reading chair with a cup of tea and a well-worn paperback, “I’ve always wondered what you’d say if you could talk.”

Ptolemy, curled on the windowsill where he could watch both the street and his human, considered this.

If he could talk, he might tell her about the warlock before her, who’d died alone and unmourned. About the hedge witch before that, who’d died in her sleep with her bees humming lullabies. About all the others who’d kept the shop running, generation after generation, a lighthouse for the lost and magical in a world that kept forgetting it needed such places.

He might tell her that she wasn’t the first person to be kind to him, but she was the first in a very long time who’d seemed to see him (truly see him) as more than just a shop fixture.

He might tell her that twenty years was nothing, a heartbeat, a moment in his long strange existence, but that he’d remember her long after she was gone. Remember her stubborn insistence on proper alphabetization, her terrible puns about spell books, the way she always kept the good tuna on hand and never once begrudged him his oddities.

He might tell her that of all the witches and warlocks and magical beings he’d known, she (a retired librarian with no magic of her own beyond belief and kindness) was one of the most powerful.

But he was a cat.

So instead, Ptolemy jumped down from the windowsill, padded across the shop, and climbed into Meredith’s lap. She adjusted her book with one hand and petted him with the other, and together they sat in the warm circle of lamplight while outside, October darkness gathered and All Hallow’s Eve crept closer.

In two days, the shop would be chaos. There would be magical emergencies, last-minute panic buying, and at least one incident involving incorrectly labeled bat wings. Ptolemy would stop at least three catastrophes, witness several minor ones, and probably ingest another spell or two.

But for now, there was just this: the quiet shop, the turning pages, the steady rhythm of his purr, and the gentle hand of the woman who’d always believed he understood.

She was right, of course.

She’d always been right.

Outside, something with too many teeth and not enough good intentions slunk past the window. It peered in, hungry and hoping.

Ptolemy opened one eye.

The thing thought better of it and slunk away.

“Good boy,” Meredith murmured, not even looking up from her book.

Indeed.

After all, someone had to keep watch over the shop, the witches, the foolish young magic-users with their unbound truth spells, and the retired librarian who talked to her cat like he was people.

Someone had to be the familiar stranger, the secret keeper, the silent guardian of Meredith’s Mystical Miscellany & Rare Books.

And Ptolemy had always been very, very good at his job.