The Price Guide to the Occult(27)
Nor glanced over at Reed. The rain slipping down his face. His hands white with cold.
It’s better that he didn’t kiss me, she decided, certain that if Reed Oliveira ever got close enough to learn all her terrible secrets, there would be no denying that pain might in fact be all Nor knew.
Nor wove her way through the piles of abandoned junk that made up the Society for the Protection of Discarded Things. A wintry rain pattered gently on the roof.
She picked up a book on aphids with one hand and a mystery novel about a murder on a train with the other. “Savvy, what section am I in?”
“Green,” Savvy answered from her perch on a director’s chair near the front counter. With a red scarf tied expertly around her plum-colored pin curls and an old jumpsuit from her dad’s mechanic shop hanging off her petite frame, Savvy looked a bit like a punk rock Rosie the Riveter.
The Society served as a glorified scrapyard, and it looked the part: piles of junk sat atop other piles of junk, some in towering configurations even Savvy had to marvel at from time to time. Almost anything could be found here — used appliances, water skis, a full set of silver cutlery. And if something was lost, it was always the first place to look. Savvy once claimed she had found a nun’s habit, a pair of red clogs, and an abandoned engagement ring (minus the diamond), all while digging through a day’s worth of deserted items.
“Green?” Nor put the two books — noting they both had green covers — off to the side and grabbed a dog-eared paperback from one of the other shelves. After glancing at the lustful couple on the cover, she tossed it to Savvy. “I found that book you didn’t know you were looking for.”
“Damn.” Savvy examined the lewd cover. “Well, you know what they say. The best time to find something is when you’re not looking for it. A couple of weeks ago, Heckel Abernathy wandered in and found some old matchbox car he had as a kid — the very same one — and he swore he’d lost that thing like seventy-five years ago.”
“He’s not that old.”
Savvy rolled her eyes. “Well, then, fifty years ago. Anyway, the point is that if shit gets lost on this island, it always ends up here. That’s science.”
“That’s — what?” Nor laughed. “No, that’s not science, Savvy. That has nothing to do with science.”
“Believe what you want. This book is a keeper, and you know it.” She wedged the book into her backpack. Sighing softly, Bijou shifted in his sleep, his body curled into an impossibly small circle of fluff at her feet.
Behind them, two girls sorted through a rack of vintage clothes. A man carrying a long hose of copper tubing over his shoulder searched a box of spare appliance parts.
To say the Society for the Protection of Discarded Things was a bit slow this morning would have been an understatement; all the shops along Meandering Lane seemed to be suffering from the same problem. Madge had even suspended the Witching Hour’s walking tours. Nor had first assumed it was just the time of year or that maybe one of the ferries was out, but as more time passed, the less likely either of those seemed. With each passing day, fewer and fewer people were on the island. She recalled what Savvy had said about how dogs could sense an earthquake even before the ground started to shake. To Nor, it felt eerily similar to the way the ocean receded before a tsunami hit. Or how the birds flew away before the forest burst into flames.
On her morning run that day, even the ground, covered in a typical early December frost, had set her teeth on edge. Nor had tried to focus on normalcy: her arms pumping at her sides, breath turning to clouds in the cold, heart beating, feet pounding down the trail around Celestial Lake, the rhythmic panting of Antiquity at her side. Still, she hadn’t been able to shake a feeling of doom. Her head had felt strangely empty without those squirrels and chipmunks twittering at her from the trees. Near Lilting Falls, she’d seen a cluster of oak trees with nettles wrapped around their trunks, covering them completely. It was as if they were prepared for battle, dressed in the armor of stinging leaves. A peculiar fog had settled over the ocean, just a couple of miles offshore. To Nor, it had looked as if those opaque clouds had swallowed the rest of the archipelago whole.
Nor absentmindedly pulled the crow’s claw Reed had gotten her for her birthday out of her pocket. It wasn’t particularly pretty — it was certainly a bit macabre. She thought the opaque gemstone could have been an opal; it was hard to tell. It was cloudy and dull and most of it blackened, almost as if from flames. Only when she held it up to the light could she see the tiniest bit of purple peeking through. Still, if it was an opal, then Nor could see why opals had once been called “eye stones”: it made her feel as though there were something staring back at her.
“Oh, that reminds me. I’ve got something for you,” Savvy said, hopping off the chair. It fell to the ground with a clatter, and Bijou scurried away. Savvy marched past Nor in her leopard-print platform shoes, calling “We’re closed now!” over her shoulder.
“I like to keep obscure hours,” she explained to Nor after the few customers had left. “It adds to the mystique of the place. Ambience is everything, you know.”
Nor followed Savvy down the narrow aisles, past toppling piles of timeworn quilts and yellow-stained lace curtains.
“Hey! Be mindful of my crap!” Savvy scolded when Nor knocked over a pair of hedge trimmers.