Our Crooked Hearts(35)
We cut right, through an unlit passageway and up another stair, Marion cursing as the rabbit’s cage banged against her knees. On the third floor the ceilings were lower, the windows fewer. For rubbery stretches of time we had to rely on Marion’s memory and our daisy chain of interlocked hands to pull us through the dark. Midway between two pools of moonlight, she stopped and set down the cage.
“Gimme a boost.”
Sharon dropped, weaving her hands into a step. I could just see their outlines, one kneeling like a cavalier and the other straining upward, arms over her head to fiddle with something on the ceiling. Whatever it was came undone, and she caught it as it fell.
“Ouch,” she said, full volume, guiding the wooden ladder toward the floor. It came from an open hatch through which more moonlight fell. The same light from the same moon but up there it had an astringency to it, a thinness like lemon juice.
Marion climbed up first, disappearing in neat pieces before reaching back for the rabbit. Then Sharon, then Fee. As soon as I was alone the dark grew teeth and bad intentions, sending me scurrying up after them. Once I’d pulled my legs in and the ladder up, Marion pulled the trapdoor shut, locking us inside a tart bubble of light.
The room was circular, a snow globe filled with moon. We were above the tree line and the windows were placed in some tricky way that rendered the whole place shadowless. There was a stain in the center of the floor the size of a curled-up mastiff.
Marion dropped her bag beside it and pulled out a compass. Consulting it, she placed us in a fan along the room’s southern curve.
“Take off your shoes.” Her spine was a reptilian ridge as she bent over the laces of her boots. “We don’t need northeast for this, throw them there.”
The floor was the same neutral temperature as the air. If it wasn’t for the dust I’d have barely felt it. I was southwest, Sharon was south, standing taut with her hands folded behind her. Fee stood motionless at southeast, just the tip of her nose showing behind her fall of hair. I willed her to look back at me but for once she didn’t feel it.
Marion took out a wooden box the size of a matchbook, sliding it open and dusting her hands with white powder. When she blew the excess away it swirled up into a cloud, settling slowly on her shoulders and hair as she unwrapped the mirror, laying it on the stain before arranging a candle and the caged rabbit to her right. To her left she placed a cereal bowl full of salt poured from a Ziploc and the occultist’s book.
Usually spellwork made Marion stiffen up, like she was bracing for a blow. But tonight she moved nimbly on bare feet, chalking lines over the floor and adjusting our placement with impersonal hands before giving each of us a needle. I pinched mine tight.
“I’ll do most of the work.” Her voice broke the hush, sudden as a slap. “Stay where I put you, and when I tell you, you’re gonna draw the needle over your left hand from here to here.” She pointed at the bend of her thumb, then the base of her life line. “Deep enough that the blood comes up. When I say so, you’ll press your palm to the floor.”
My bare toes rubbed half-moons in the dust. Blood magic equals big blowback. But I knew there’d be a cost. Maybe Marion would pay for a hotel room where we could dry out after. Cheesy TV and takeout and Fee’s vinegar brew. It could be fun.
There are scenes in your life you replay like a movie, sitting in some darkened room inside yourself yelling, Get out, you idiot, run! The person in the movie looks like you, sounds like you. Like you, she does the things she shouldn’t, failing every time to save herself. Over time you can almost convince yourself she’s some anarchic stranger, malevolent in her ignorance.
Here’s a scene that still plays in my head. Not daily like it used to, not weekly anymore, but often enough, stealing over me at random like a carbon monoxide cloud.
Four figures stand barefoot in a circular room. The light is such that their shapes appear hazy, insubstantial. They vary in age but all are young, their hair red or black or pale, their posture predatorial and prepared. Who knows what lies in their hearts.
The girl with pale hair crouches before a stain on the floor. Beside her is a bowl of coarse salt, a book, a red candle, and a panting rabbit. A circle of mirror lies over the stain, its glass reflecting not the ceiling but a dirty sheep’s-wool circle of sky, unrelated to the night outside the windows.
Some spells are finicky down to the last detail. Some have small gaps inside them, left open to interpretation. The pale-haired witch lights her candle with a Bic shellacked in cutout magazine mouths, because the spell doesn’t care how the fire starts, just that it does. It’s a steady orange tongue of ordinary candlelight until she holds a hand over it and speaks the first words of the incantation. The flame crackles, then expands into a mellow blue globe.
The spell is stronger than the witch working it. This first success makes her bite her cheek against a triumphant smile.
The blue flame eats through the wax in triple time, melting the candle into a thin-sided saucer. Carefully the girl pours the wax onto the mirror, spiraling from center to edges like she’s making a crepe. She speaks in a language no one knows, not in this room or any other. Moving rapidly now, she unlatches the catch of the cage and drags out the rabbit. Placid to this point, now it’s kicking frantically, born to be a house pet but the fight it puts up is worthy of a wild thing. You want it to win, anyone would, but with the flash of a blade and a scream as pagan as anything else in that room it gives up the fight, its life dropping in a red rush over the swirled wax.