The Price Guide to the Occult(14)
Savvy stopped smiling. “Nor,” she whispered seriously. “No one wants to die without ever having been in love.”
“I’ve seen you out running around the lake a couple of times,” Reed called cordially as he came back. It took Nor a moment to realize he was speaking to her. “You probably haven’t seen me. You’re a much faster runner than I am.” He set a small case on the front counter, pulling out vials of essential oils and handing them to Nor: bergamot, neroli, rosewood.
Nor kept her focus on the vials to avoid both Reed’s gaze and Savvy’s. “Oh?” she murmured.
“Would you —” He paused and ducked his head to meet her eyes. “Would you ever consider letting me join you sometime?”
Nor lost the ability to speak as soon as their eyes met. Please focus, Nor, she begged herself. What was he asking? To go running? With her? Why did he want to do that? And then, because she couldn’t think of anything else to say, she whispered, “Okay.”
He examined her for a moment, still holding one of the vials between them. “I’m glad you stuck around, Nor Blackburn,” he finally said.
“Where else would I go?” she blurted, incredulous.
He laughed, and it was like a warm beam of sunshine on a cool morning. At that moment, Nor wanted nothing more than to make Reed Oliveira laugh like that again.
And it terrified her.
In the spring of 1998, Madge Shimizu, an undergrad student working toward a degree in botany at a notable East Coast university, randomly received an anonymous and innocuous chain letter. The chain letter, like most in those days, promised that even the wildest of Madge’s dreams would come true, if only she were to send a copy of the letter out to ten people and one back to the letter’s original sender. Though bright, young Madge was also exceedingly superstitious, so she promptly copied the letter eleven times and popped them all into the mail. While she didn’t truly believe that a chain letter could affect the outcome of her life, her bright and promising future wasn’t something with which she was willing to take any risks.
Besides, what harm could sending out a few letters do?
Much to her surprise, Madge quickly received a note of gratitude from the chain letter’s original source, a lonely, pregnant seventeen-year-old girl living on an isolated island off the Washington coast. Through their ensuing correspondence, Madge learned the poor girl had few friends. And as she wasn’t very close to her mother, she said, she had very little support at home. The girl felt utterly and completely alone. The chain letter, Madge surmised, had been the girl’s attempt to connect with the outside world in search of someone to nurture her, which Madge was happy to do. It seemed particularly auspicious that the girl’s name was that of a plant.
A few months after the girl’s baby was born, Madge did something that baffled even herself. Instead of taking her semester final exams, Madge packed up her Volvo and moved to the island with every intention of saving the young mother and infant daughter from a life of isolation, neglect, and hopelessness.
It was during her long cross-country drive that Madge realized that the chain letter had worked: her wildest dreams were coming true. It was just that her dreams of a college degree and a career in botany were tame ones. If Madge’s future was to be bright and promising, she somehow knew that her life had to be built around only one thing: Fern Blackburn.
Upon arriving, Madge discovered that she wasn’t the only one from whom Fern had evoked a noble sense of sympathy. In fact, Fern had been corresponding with naive college students like Madge all over the country. And like Madge, they arrived in early spring — the group hovering somewhere between ten and thirty. They brought small camp stoves, heavy dark-green tarpaulins, and portable toilets that failed by mid-July. They filled nights with the sounds of drum circles and lovemaking. They brought dogs with coats ratty with mange that Judd managed to heal and an outbreak of gonorrhea she couldn’t. More importantly, they brought their devotion and their idolatry, and most of all a perverse desire to do whatever it took to make Fern happy.
Fern’s Followers, as they called themselves, stayed until the heavy October rains brought their tents down around them. After that, only the most devoted remained, which included Madge. She was no doubt already Fern’s lover by that point. Nor had never been sure whether Madge was in love with Fern of her own accord or because Fern had wanted her to be and so made it so.
This was Fern’s gift: the formidable ability to manipulate the minds of those around her.
At Fern’s “suggestion,” Madge took the money she’d been saving for a backpacking trip through Europe and rented out an empty storefront on Meandering Lane. A card table was set out front with a sign offering palm readings for five dollars apiece, and the back room was used as a living space. They transformed a small closet into a nursery after Fern, having seen the obvious affection Judd and Apothia were developing for baby Nor, left the Tower and took the baby with her. It didn’t matter that Fern had no genuine interest in motherhood. That was one of the things about Fern: once she knew someone wanted something, she had to have it simply so the other person could not.
Most of Nor’s childhood memories were of that small storefront, that closet nursery, and a parade of strange people. She had known some of them by the whimsical names they gave themselves: Summersong, Lake, Vega, Wintersweet. She remembered the clack of the wooden beads that had once hung from the doorway between the front and back rooms, the small hot plate and microwave oven that had made up their kitchen, and the pedestal sink where they’d brushed their teeth and washed their dishes. She remembered the ripped leather sofa against the wall and how the floor was always slippery with down sleeping bags. The little closet where she had slept was draped in brightly colored tapestries; a watermark stained the ceiling. Her bed, a twin-size mattress, had taken up the entire closet floor.