Our Crooked Hearts(36)
The witch doesn’t just slice its throat but beheads it completely, with a blade pulled from her clothes. See the enameled horses on its handle and remember a day at the beach when she used it to slice mangoes, handing them around on the blade like a mother with a paring knife.
She sets the dead animal down and takes a needle to the bloodied wax, inscribing letters in it from right to left, bottom to top. How she can still hold it, how she can see anything around the blood, isn’t clear. The other figures in the room are so still you might think it part of the magic, but there: the flicker of eyes, the flick of a tongue catching sweat.
The room is hot now and getting hotter.
When her inscription is done the witch stands, bowl in her bloody hands. She pours the salt in a circle that seals her in with the candle and the mirror and the stain, leaving the other three without. She moves with careful speed. Still incanting, she cracks the candle’s sides away, so the blue firelight rides atop a thin wax circle. This she holds over the mirror, tilting until the globe of fire rolls like a shooter marble onto the coated glass. The inscribed wax lights up all at once, turning the mirror into a porthole to Hell.
At this moment the witch is sure she’s done it. Her voice is victorious, her throat ripe with iron and smoke. Outside the circle the heat is receding. Inside it the pale witch sweats, hair lifted by a sudden wind. She puts up a hand.
“Now,” she says.
The faces of the three outside the circle are sluggish, featureless, as if watching through a scrim of sleep. In perfect somnambulists’ tandem they lift their silver needles and paint beading red lines over their palms, pressing them to the floor.
Two of them do. The third, black-haired, purple lips trembling, hesitates with her hand upheld. She stares at the flaming mirror.
“Now!” the pale witch repeats, face prickling all over with sweat.
“Qué carajo,” whispers the black-haired witch.
“Do it,” hisses the woman beside her, whose black hair is the bottled kind. “Are you trying to get us killed?”
Then the other worker sees what her friend has seen.
I see it. I can’t stop myself now, I’m poured back into my body and I’m there. Seeing what’s inside the circle of mirror, its wax burned away and its glass hazed with blue fire.
A woman’s face. Her face and her hands, pressed to the glass from below, as if she’s standing under the floor looking up. Nails sharp and fingertips callused, her forehead high as a child’s. Her hands pushed against the glass’s underside. They pushed through.
The surface of the memory is eroded now, taffy soft and crimped with overuse. Sometimes I think I heard the occultist’s laughter. Sometimes I think I smelled her, Florida Water and a bilious tang. But always I remember this:
One reaching hand rising from the fiery circle, then the other, pressing into the stained wooden floor. Nails curved to grip, Astrid Washington dragged her body over the mirror’s edge.
First her head, crowned by a wet-looking cap of blonde hair. Then her face rose inch by merciless inch. The eyes that might’ve been brown once, tarnished by time to an unholy gold, the mouth too lush and red as a warning. She had her elbows up, she was out to the middle of her rib cage. Panting, determined, each gasp making ripples in the pooling blood. She hoisted herself higher.
That’s when Fee charged forward, shoes smudging the salt. As soon as she was over the line she pulled back, crying out. The moonlight was so bright I could see her reddened skin. Marion must’ve been roasting inside that circle.
I stood frozen as Fee stuck a hand into her pocket, digging out a black-paper bundle. She shook free from it her mother’s crucifix.
Marion had been watching Astrid’s rise with shining eyes. Now she looked up. “Don’t,” she shrieked, too late, as Fee tossed the gold cross underhand at the mirror.
The occultist might have been stronger than whatever was in that necklace. But it startled her enough to lose her grip.
She fell back. Below the flames, below the glass. Her body went down but something else went up, some grainy exhalation of spit or spirit. The cross hit the mirror just after her fingertips went through and the glass cracked, four perfect lines blooming into an asterisk.
A rushing sound rose as the flames went out. A burning wind plucked at our hair, the salt circle’s hellish heat spilling into the rest of the room. Something interrupted the moonlight, casting the walls in reaching, fast-flickering shadows, like we were moving at speed through a naked wood.
“We have to end it,” Sharon said tightly. “Forget the spell, the spell is broken, we need to end the magic. Clasp hands. Now.”
We did, flinching from each other’s scorching touch even as our fingers tightened. When we were a circle of four Sharon began to chant.
I dropped my pail into your well
From your well I drew
With blood for thanks and a strand for luck
My gratitude I’ll shew.
Until we meet on a blood-moon night
Or on a silver shore
I’ll thank the Devil once, twice, thrice
Before I ask for more.
She let go of us to rip a few hairs from her head, pressing them and her bleeding hand to the floorboards. My scalp freckled with heat as I yanked my own strands free.
Our hair and blood joined the mess on the ground and the wind snapped off. The writhing shadows withdrew, the temperature dropped to the middling warmth of an ordinary attic room. Our bare feet shifted over boards slicked with salt and chalk and blood and the remains of a rabbit. It was done.