The Dreadful Tale of Prosper Redding

by Alexandra Bracken

  NAMES OF EVIL CREATURES. The same blocked page came up. And then again when I tried to search for FIEND CURSE, REDDING FAMILY CURSE MAGIC, and HOW TO KILL THE DEMON INSIDE OF YOU.

  I let out an annoyed groan and slumped back in my seat.

  “Something I can help you with…Mr. White, was it?” The librarian was standing right behind me, staring at my screen with an unreadable expression on her face. My hands slapped against the mouse, exiting the page and logging out entirely. I stood, grabbing my bag and almost tripping over the chair.

  She held out a stack of papers, still warm from the printer. “Here you are.”

  “Oh, um, thanks, sorry, just, gotta—do my work. Yup, ooookay, bye—”

  I all but ran back to the worktable, nearly dropping the papers in the process. One kid looked up and shushed me as I let out a small noise of frustration.

  I tucked those printouts back into my notebook and flipped it open to a blank page. I was halfway through my list of ideas for the Greek mythology project when two guys—friends of Parker’s I recognized from PE—sat down behind me.

  “It sounds like it’s broken,” one of them whispered, trying to hide his phone beneath his desk. “He doesn’t need surgery, though. That’s good, I guess. Maybe he’ll be healed in time for track season?”

  “He’s definitely not going to be able to do the play. I don’t think the drama teacher is going to let him onstage with crutches. And didn’t the understudy get mono? What are they going to do?”

  “Maybe the girl with the glitter glasses will try to audition for the part again.”

  Glitter glasses? As in…Nell?

  I turned around in my seat to ask them about it, but as I did, I saw the aforementioned glitter glasses and the girl wearing them slip past the library’s window, glance back and forth, and then bolt for the side entrance of the school.

  I was on my feet before I remembered standing, scooping all of my things into my backpack.

  “Hey, isn’t that the kid…?” one of the guys started to say, but I was already leaving, keeping my head down. The librarian had her back to me as she reached up to replace one of the books on the shelf, and I took my chance to duck outside without her noticing.

  “Where did she go?” I muttered, looking around. Nell wouldn’t leave class without a good reason, not unless something was happening.

  As soon as the thought floated through my mind, I spotted her, running through the trees on the east side of campus, heading for the side street that ran alongside it.

  What is the meaning of this, Maggot? Al demanded as I ran after her. Were you not told to remain here, in this place?

  I wove through the trees, my backpack and hair catching the golden leaves as they fluttered down. The faint green magic of the boundary came into view. It stretched like a ribbon as I struggled to push through it. With a pop! it spat me out and I was running again, following the purple of Nell’s sweater like a star as she disappeared between two houses.

  On the other side of them, just past the fencing of their backyards, was another small house, this one sitting between two empty maple-tree-filled lots. It looked Victorian, in contrast to the other homes’ sturdy colonial style, with stained glass in the two bay windows on the main floor. A sign hung from the porch: ESSEX BOOKSTORE & OTHER ESSENTIALS.

  I was close enough to hear the bell ring as Nell pushed the screen door open and let it slam shut behind her.

  Here there be magic, Alastor warned, sounding uneasy.

  I crossed the street, keeping behind the old trees weeping their leaves onto the front lawn. A lone swing swayed in the breeze. I cut around it, getting as close to the nearest bay window as I could.

  Inside, piles of teetering books filled every corner of the shop, some stacked as high as the ceiling. Shelves were neatly labeled with their contents, and through the green coating of the glass pane, I made out an old-fashioned cash register and a neat pile of bags waiting to be filled with purchases. Behind them was a wall with a wood carving of the shop’s logo, a few framed newspaper articles, and a photograph of Nell grinning between two women. One had dark skin like her, her warm, wide smile and the tilt of her eyes nearly identical—clearly, Nell’s mom. Her hair was braided into a crown around her head and woven with flowers.

  The other woman in the picture walked into the room, coming down the spiral staircase behind a grim-faced Nell. Unusually tall, she had long blond hair that poured down around her shoulders like moonlight. Her clothing was loose and silky, weighed down by the heavy silver necklace and earrings she wore.

  “Nellie, please—”

  Nell kept her back to the woman, stuffing her backpack with a white paper bag and a book.

  “At least tell me everything in that house is okay,” the woman continued. “Are you happy?”

  Nell, finally, looked at her and said coldly, “What do you think?”

  The woman tried to tuck Nell into a hug, but the girl pushed her back. “Thanks for the herbs.”

  “Come live with me here,” the woman said, following her again to the door. “I don’t care what your father says, what anyone says—”

  “Like the way you fought to keep me before?” Nell shoved the door open, but turned back at the last moment, facing her. “The way you fought to save Mom?”

  “You don’t mean that,” the woman said as they stepped out onto the porch. “Come back inside for a moment, we’ll—”

  I took one step toward them, meaning to make my presence known. But almost as soon as my sneaker sank into the wet earth and leaves, a nearby rosebush lashed out a thorny vine, snapping it around my ankle and violently jerking me back. I felt myself soar through the air, only to land with a cold, wet splat in the nearby little pond. A hurricane of tiny green frogs suddenly emerged from the muddy banks, their glossy eyes turned toward me.

  “No—no! Missy, that’s him! That’s Prosper!”

  Nell rushed up, dragging me away from the frogs and whatever else was in the water, slapping the thorny vines that were stroking the edges of the murky water, daring me to try to rush toward the house again. A short distance away, my book bag had split open, spewing everything—papers, notebooks, pencils—onto the ground.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked. My ears rang like I’d been clubbed on either side of the head. A lone frog clung to the back of my hand. I felt my good arm start to prickle again.

  Tiny, little, delicious, juicy frog legs—

  “No!” I said, slamming my left hand down on my right to keep it in place.

  “What are you doing here?” Nell demanded. “Why did you follow me? I told you to stay in the library!”

  “I wanted to make sure you were okay,” I said.

  “A fiend,” Missy said coldly from behind us. “Checking up on a witch?”

  Her unusual violet eyes flashed in warning as I looked up at her. They only softened when she saw that the hem of my jeans had been yanked up during the tussle and a crisscross of angry cuts ringed my ankle.

  “Come inside, I’ll clean those for you,” she said finally. “Come in, come in, and let our work begin.”

  The barrier, including the vines, shrank back. The line of airy green magic I’d missed yet again fell to my feet, allowing me to step over it.

  Nell said nothing as we entered the warm, cozy shop. She barely seemed to be breathing as Missy led me upstairs, to the second floor. There, behind the door at the top of the steps, was a room filled with light.

  It was the opposite of the attic in every way. Bookshelves lined every side of the room, each painted a pristine, welcoming cream. The window was large, catching the golden afternoon light through the thinning tree branches. While there were plenty of books up here for purchase, most of the shelves contained bottles in neat rows, or had sachets of sweet-smelling herbs. Here and there, there were copper cauldrons, but they were filled with some of the same black soap I’d used that morning at the House of Seven Terrors, or tiny vials of green liquid for “Aches & Pains o
f the Heart.”

  So. This was the “& other essentials” part of the store.

  Nell stood with her back to the door, keeping me locked in, or someone or something else out.

  “Have a seat, Mr. Redding,” Missy said, gesturing to a hand-carved stool.

  “You know who I am?” I asked, but did as I was told. Missy was gentle as she rolled my jeans up away from my shoes and began to apply a peppermint-scented ointment.

  “I know of you, yes,” Missy said, with a look back over her shoulder to Nell. “As a witch, I can see through the glamour Nell placed on you.”

  The girl crossed her arms. Said nothing.

  Though the cuts were already mending themselves back together, Missy still wrapped a loose white bandage around my ankle and tied it off—with maybe a bit too much force. The way she looked at me now, down the bridge of her nose, eyes never leaving my face, made me feel like I was a feral dog she’d pulled off the street and now had to watch nonstop to keep me from tearing her home apart.

  “Don’t come back to this place ever,” she told me.

  Dread-bolted flax-wench!

  “Missy!” Nell hissed.

  “This is sacred, protected ground,” Missy continued. “I can’t have any kind of fiend jeopardizing it, no matter who its host is, or how powerful his family might be. You have no business coming here and forcing Nell to care for you.” She turned to the girl. “And you, as a witch, should know better than to believe whatever lies that man has told you—”

  “All right,” Nell snapped, coming across the room to take my arm. “Come on, Prosper, let’s go.” Then, glancing back to Missy, she added, “Don’t worry. We won’t come back here again.”

  Missy’s face visibly fell, horror and sadness crashing over her features. “You know I wasn’t talking about you—Nell, please—please, just listen to me. This is still your home.”

  We were already outside, Nell dragging me after her down the street, when I finally heard her soft reply. “No, it’s not.”

  “What do we do now?” I asked, holding my torn schoolbag together. “Go back to school?”

  Nell was pacing around the corner at the end of the street, just out of eyeshot of the bookstore, fuming so hard I thought I saw smoke escaping her ears. Every now and then, a car would whisk by us, but just as quickly, we’d be left with the silence and the darkening sky once more.

  The houses in this part of town looked like they were burdened with centuries of memories. They were old, overrun with ivy and brambles, and despite being so close to the school and the center of life there, had faces that glowered at anyone who passed them by. I hadn’t minded the way Missy had treated me, or the odd feeling I’d had in her shop. But these houses seemed to whisper warnings in the clattering of their old shutters and the squeaking hinges of their gates.

  “The buses have already left,” Nell muttered.

  “What should we do, then?” I asked. “Should we call Uncle B? Call for a driver?”

  “We do what normal people do—we’re going to walk.”

  So we did. Through the same streets we had passed on the way to school, around the same gas station, and through a few pockets of trees (that might have been considered trespassing if it didn’t feel like everyone who lived in the town had such firm ownership over its empty places).

  “So…” I began, reaching down to pick up a single maple leaf that showed nature’s ombré in full effect: yellow at the tip, red at its heart, green at the stem. I let the wind snatch it from my fingers and carry it off toward the gray sky. “Who’s Missy, exactly?”

  Nell’s hands were jammed into her pockets, her forehead creased in thought. After a long while—long enough that I didn’t think she was going to answer—she said, “Missy was my mom’s girlfriend. Her fiancée. They were a few months shy of getting married when my mom got sick.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that, so I just nodded. Maybe there really was nothing I could say. Like the haunted house, it was another dream interrupted. And, sometimes, we just had to live with those disappointments and wait for their sharp edges to dull.

  “The commonwealth said I had to live with my father, even though I hadn’t seen him in years,” Nell told me. “They claimed that was what was right.”

  It clearly wasn’t.

  Despair, I thought. That terrible word. The terrible, consuming world of it.

  “Is that why you left school? To visit her?”

  “I had to pick up a few ingredients for your spell,” she explained. “And a few other things we’re going to try in case the fiend grows more powerful and starts to make his will known.”

  “Oh. Thanks.”

  She spun on me so suddenly I backed myself into a tree to avoid her. Nell took another challenging step forward. “If you tell Barnabas that I left school and stopped by Missy’s, I’ll curse you so fast you won’t even know what’s happening until your nose is suddenly on your butt and you’re forced to breathe in every. Single. Fart.”

  “Okay, okay,” I said. “I wasn’t going to tell. Jeez. You really are a good actress—I had no idea you were even planning on leaving until I saw you go.”

  Nell’s lips twitched, just for a second, into a small smile. Soon enough, her usual scowl was back. But it was a better opening than I could have hoped for.

  As we passed by a garbage can on the street, I glanced at the front page of the newsletter shoved into it, and the bright orange headline screaming across it: SALEM HAUNTED BY A PUMPKIN THIEF?

  “Did you hear about Parker?” I said, trying to keep my voice casual. “I guess he broke his ankle. Some kids were saying that he might not be able to perform his part in the school play.”

  She rolled her shoulders back, straightening. “I guess.”

  After a full half hour, we finally passed through tourist Salem, the part of the city with all the witch shops and ye olde buildings and the common. The salty smell of Salem Sound hit us first, even before we saw the old wharf.

  “You’re in theater class, right?” I asked. “Are you playing one of the other parts in The Crucible? That’s what I heard you rehearsing in the house, right? Lines from the play?”

  “I’m just on crew,” Nell said, her breath frosting the air. She pulled her jacket closer to her center. “I only wanted one part, and the teacher wouldn’t let me audition for it.”

  “Parker’s part?” I pressed.

  She nodded. “John Proctor.”

  Otherwise known as the male lead.

  My eyebrows rose at that, but the more I thought about it, the fewer reasons I could come up with about why Nell couldn’t play the part. The fact that the drama teacher didn’t even let her try out for it cranked up the temperature of my blood until it was near to boiling.

  “Things don’t tend to go my way,” Nell explained quietly as we started up the path to the House of Seven Terrors’ front door. “Even magic doesn’t really let you make your own luck. Not white magic, at least.”

  I nodded, but my attention was quickly dividing between her and the clean yard around us, which only a few hours ago had been littered with trash from visitors and dead overgrown grass. Nell seemed to notice it at the same moment I did, her feet dragging to a stop.

  “Wow, Uncle B must have gotten home early to clean things up for the tour-group audition tonight,” I said. Weird that he couldn’t keep a space as small as the attic clean, though.

  Nell’s chest was rising and falling in faster bursts. She dropped her bag on the path and ran toward the door, muttering something under her breath. It flew open without her touch, banging against the wall.

  “Nell?” I called, chasing after her. “Nell, what’s wrong—?”

  She stood frozen in the middle of the entry hall, her face turned toward the zombie operating room. Or what had been the zombie operating room.

  The wall that was once drenched with fake blood had been scrubbed clean, leaving only a faint pink stain behind. The gooey guts previously dribbling out of the fa
ke corpse’s body had been pulled up from the floor. They were now neatly coiled on the dummy’s stomach, wiped clean. Everything was. The metal gurney and fake silver knives and saws were sparkling. Not even I could have done a better job.

  “He didn’t,” she breathed out. “I can’t believe this—”

  Nell bolted up the rickety staircase. The whole house groaned under her pounding steps. She hit the second floor and flipped on the overhead lights.

  The giant spiders were stacked neatly in the far right corner. All the fake cobwebs had been yanked down from the trees, the leaves littering the ground had been swept up, and the stuffed werewolves had been shoved out of sight in the hallway closet.

  Every room was the same: the fake blood vanished, the creatures piled up, the guts and gore and mummies and axes and swords—all of them organized, dusted, brushed, polished. All the scrubbing I had done up in the attic was nothing compared to this. It was nothing compared to what the house looked like now. The floor and walls were practically three shades lighter.

  “Would someone steal all your garbage and decorations?” I asked, my mind suddenly spinning with the investigative crime shows I sometimes watched after school. “Do you think it was a rival haunted house? Someone with a grudge against shrieking children?”

  “No! No, that’s not what I—” Nell was shaking. “Don’t you get it? Whoever did this messed everything up. There’s no way we can get the rooms back in shape before the run-through tonight—and all of the spells my mom used to enchant everything, they’re—”

  Gone.

  Everything she and her mother had made was gone.

  “Why would he do this, tonight of all nights?” Nell said, her fingers clenched in her hair. The lights over us, all throughout the house, began to flicker dangerously, the electricity surging until the bulb just over my head burst with the force of it.

  “Uncle B?” I asked. “What does he have to do with this? Hasn’t he been at work all day?”

  Nell was fighting so hard—so hard—not to cry. I saw it in the tightness of her face and the way her hands clenched and unclenched at her side. The room began to take on a gray, silvery tint, as actual storm clouds formed over our heads.