Petty Magic

by Camille DeAngelis

  But upon waking, caked in sand and cold to the bone, he would find quite a different Eve beside him. That very thought horrifies and sickens me. It’s over, very nearly over—and because Justin can never know it, much less why, our last moments together are deprived of their rightful tenderness.

  The sun is higher in the sky now, the air cool and sweet. Little birds flit in and out of the hedges as the cows plod back to the trough. It’s the loveliest morning I’ve ever seen. I squeeze his hand and he turns to look at me. “What if something happened to me, Justin? No, I mean it. I’m being perfectly serious here. Life would go on, of course—but do you suppose you would remember me?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” He pulls me to him and holds me tighter than ever, and I smile into the folds of his jacket. I suppose I’ll have to content myself with that.

  I’M QUIVERING with dread by the time we reach the alley that leads to the back of the pub. “Are you all right?” he asks, and what can I say? I give him a weak smile, a grimace more like. I undo the lock on the alley door with what little oomph I have left (just enough now to get us home and get me away before he can see what I am), and we go round the back. I gaze up into his bewildered face, lay my hand against his cheek, and when he opens his mouth to ask why the heck I’ve pulled him into the ladies’ toilet, I press a finger to his lips. As the fog drifts into his head this last time he yawns and smiles, his eyelids growing heavy.

  I say the words that will bring us back to Hartmann’s Classic Toys … and that’s when it all, figuratively speaking, goes to pot.

  String ’er Up

  27.

  SECOND VILLAGER: She turned me into a newt!

  BEDEVERE: A newt?

  SECOND VILLAGER (after looking at himself for some time): I got better.

  ALL: Burn her anyway!

  —Monty Python and the Holy Grail

  THE FIRST thing I notice is that I feel awfully stiff in the limbs. I can’t see very well either, though I can tell we’re not in the bathroom like we should be. Then I notice my feet aren’t on the ground; I feel myself flailing and realize in utter astonishment that I am actually hanging from something.

  “Eve? Eve, what’s going on?”

  I turn my head at the sound of Justin’s voice, and when I see what he’s wearing—a jester suit, bells and all—the appalling truth becomes all too clear. Lucretia!

  I tug and struggle, legs wheeling, but the crossbars are resting solidly on the flies and my hands feel as if they’re glued to this stupid mouse-sized lute. My jaw hinge squeaks as I call out, “Justin? Are you all right?”

  I watch Justin survey himself, shaking his arm so the bells jingle, and I see a flash of panic in his little glass eyes.

  “You were right,” I say. “We shouldn’t have used her bathroom.”

  “What the hell is going on, Eve? Tell me I’m dreaming!”

  “Oh, how I wish I could.” I’m getting better acquainted with our surroundings now. It’s a vantage never before seen by human eyes—that is, unless Lucretia makes a habit of turning people into marionettes, which wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest. There’s a row of kewpie dolls propped up against the bottom of the stage beneath us and beyond them the railroad track with its gleaming red locomotive. And beyond that is the window, where I spot a faint reflection of us in our new (and hopefully very temporary) bodies. I’m the Renaissance angel, of course: shimmering wings, dark flowing locks, my rosy cheeks dusted with glitter. Gosh, I do look lovely, don’t I?

  “Eve! What’s happened to us?”

  “Look.” I nod at our reflection in the window. “See? We’ve been turned into puppets. And no, you really aren’t dreaming.”

  He stares at his wooden hands. The bells on his cuffs give a pathetic jingle. “How the hell are you going to get us out of this?”

  I turn to him sharply. “What makes you think I can?”

  He can’t answer me that—not yet, anyway. The cat will be out of the bag soon enough now.

  I pause, taking in the eerie early-morning stillness. No shrieking kiddies, no Chatty Cathys, no jingling doorbell. It’s still night here, and the only light comes from the streetlamp; we left Tully Cross sometime past five o’clock, so I guess it’s a little after midnight. The loo flue may shoot us back and forth between continents in a twinkling, but it isn’t a time machine. Would that it were.

  I wait for something to break the silence, but all I can hear is the distant rumbling of a delivery truck. Where is the auld hatchet-face, anyway?

  Then I start to panic. With Morven conked out, who’s to notice I’ve been gone too long?

  “Enough of this.” I pull and pull and finally the lute comes loose out of my hands, and I cast it down with a discordant twang. Let’s see how well these little wooden lungs work. “LUCRETIA! Show your face, you miserable shrew!”

  “Lucretia? Lucretia Hartmann did this to us?”

  “I told you you’d be sorry for taking that apartment.”

  The light goes on in the room behind the counter. So she’s been in her office all along! We hear footsteps approaching and I can see her face in the window glass. “Ah,” she says brightly. “You’re back. I trust you had a pleasant trip?”

  “Go to hell,” I squeak as she reaches into the window, picks us up by the crossbars, and hangs us up again on a couple of hooks screwed into the wall above the display case. We’re much higher up now, making our chance of escape even slimmer—not that I could make a run for it on these wonky wooden legs.

  “Well,” she says. “You’ve come to a pretty pass, now, haven’t you?”

  “You’ve got to know you’ll be expelled, Lucretia.”

  She makes a show of considering this. “Perhaps I will,” she says, tapping her forefinger to her lip. Then she points at me, and I feel awfully queer. “But it’s a lot less likely now your sister’s not running things.”

  I glance at Justin: his little wooden brow is warped with horror. “Oh, Eve! What has she done to your face?”

  I struggle against the strings to turn myself so I’m facing the window again, but I can only catch a glimpse of my reflection. I gasp. The glitter slides down new runnels in my cheeks. She’s turned me into a prune-head! “Now, really, Lucretia. I may not be a spring chicken, but don’t you think this is rather overdoing it?”

  “It’s closer to the truth than the face you put on for this boy.”

  “It’s my own face!”

  “Was your face,” she sneers. “It’s been quite a while since you woke up looking like that, eh, hmmm?”

  “What is she talking about, Eve?” The fright in Justin’s voice is unmistakable, and I can’t bring myself to look at him.

  “It’s not your place to judge me.”

  “Not my place!” Lucretia laughs. “Oh, but you do have me there, Evelyn. Our coven leader turns a blind eye because she’s your sister, and not a peep out of anybody. Just imagine if I were to do the same as you, smoothing out all my wrinkles, cinching my waist, and making my hair grow nice and thick again just so I could have all the men drooling after me.” (It’s all I can do to keep from bursting out laughing; surely Lucretia was as homely in girlhood as she is in middle age.) “What would your dear sister have to say then?”

  “I haven’t broken any—”

  “But you see, it doesn’t matter that you haven’t used any charms or philters. You refuse to abide by the spirit of the law, and it’s time you were duly punished for it.”

  “Right,” Justin cuts in nervously. “Lesson learned. Can you turn us back now, please?”

  Lucretia looks him up and down. “I suppose you’ll be wanting your deposit back.”

  I hear Justin’s limbs clunking gently as he fidgets. “I think that goes without saying, ma’am.”

  “Lucretia, this is between you and me. I don’t see why you should punish the boy.”

  “ ‘The boy’?” Justin hisses. “Eve, who—what are you?”

  “I’ll explain everything,” I whisper, as
if she can’t hear me.

  “I suppose she was afraid you wouldn’t want her anymore if you knew she was a hundred and fifty years old,” Lucretia sneers.

  He stares at me. “You … you told me you were a hundred and forty-nine. I thought you were joking because you didn’t want to admit you’d turned thirty.” He shoots Lucretia a look of defiance. “No. It can’t be.”

  “See?” she says to me. “They always side with you no matter what rubbish you feed them. Evelyn this and Evelyn that. Evelyn, the pride of the coven. What a sorry lot we are, if you’re the best of us! You and all your stupid war stories—”

  “I never said I was a heroine,” I cut in. “I did good work, and I don’t see any harm in recollecting it.”

  “Hah! You ‘never said.’ What have you done that you haven’t expected full credit for afterward?”

  Quite honestly, I’m so taken aback at this that I can’t even speak.

  “Coven,” Justin is muttering to himself. “What the hell, Eve? When you said she was a witch I never thought you meant it literally.”

  “Justin, dear,” Lucretia cuts in. “If I’m a witch, then what is she?”

  I refuse to panic. After all, he understood once—I can make him understand again. He won’t be angry for long. “I’ll explain everything once we get out of here,” I say. “I promise.”

  Justin shakes his head with childlike vigor. “She can’t be a witch. She can’t be.”

  “See!” Lucretia cries. “Everyone loves you. Everyone believes you, no matter what lies you throw at them.” Now she seems to be gearing for a meltdown. “You think I don’t notice how you all laugh at me? You and your snide laughter, always calling me a priss behind your hands—”

  “Actually, we called you ‘Little Miss Prissyknickers,’ but I suppose that’s close enough.”

  She leans in, and I get an unfortunately close view of her nose. For heaven’s sake, what’s the point of being a beldame if you can’t dispense with your own rosacea? “Helena is guilty,” she says fiercely. “You refuse to see it, but you will. She’s damned by the evidence.”

  “Pah! The ravings of a lovesick schoolgirl hardly qualify as evidence.”

  “It didn’t occur to you even when she closed the B and B? She might as well have painted the word ‘murderer’ on her own forehead! Use your brain, for heaven’s sake. Did you honestly think I would make that kind of accusation so lightly?”

  I screw my little wooden prune-head into the fiercest grimace I can muster. What a stupid question! “I’ve had quite enough of this.”

  “But I don’t see what the problem is, Evelyn. Go on and free yourself, why don’t you?” She pauses. “Oh, but I suppose you’ve run out of oomph. Well. That is a pickle.” She lifts me off the hook and carries me back to the puppet stage in the display case. I try to kick her but she’s holding me at arm’s length. “You can dangle here fifty years for all I care. Somebody will come along and buy you soon enough. Oops!” She attempts a girlish laugh but it comes out like a harpy’s honk. “I’ll have to change your face back first.”

  She walks away from the window case. “Not you, of course, Justin,” I hear her say. “You’re a nice boy, and I’m sorry to have put you through this. The baby sometimes goes out with the bathwater when you put a monitor on a loo flue. Not to worry, you’ll wake up in your own bed.” I hear her footsteps retreating back toward her office, but I can still hear her saying, “Honestly, though, I’d be a little more careful choosing my next girlfriend, if I were you.”

  Despair swallows me whole. The knowledge that I’ve just seen the last of him, and that it ended this way—I can’t bear it.

  Mind you, I don’t care a fig what Lucretia says on that account. It’s her talk of Helena that’s needling at me underneath it all. Evelyn Harbinger, you foolish, foolish girl! Hah, girl. Silly old hag, more like.

  I’ve never cared for the word “epiphany.” Feels like a shard of glass in my mouth.

  The jester puppet suddenly reappears at my side, inert. I hear Lucretia’s footsteps coming back down the stairs. Then I see a sudden movement outside. There are faces at the window peering in at me, and my little wooden heart jumps for joy and relief. Mira and Vega! Then I hear the doorbell jingling, and Vega’s hand looms above me. In another moment I’m freed of these stupid strings. Helena’s here too, and Dymphna, and there are very harsh words spoken without the raising of voices. I feel jubilant in the knowledge that in the end it isn’t me who’s getting the comeuppance. Vega grasps me gently by the waist, the glitter from my dress spilling down her forearm. She taps me gently between the eyes and, mercifully, that’s the last thing I remember.

  Night and Fog

  28.

  1945–1946

  She showed me mine, in crystal clear,

  With several wild young blades, a soldier-lover:

  I seek him everywhere, I pry and peer,

  And yet, somehow, his face I can’t discover.

  —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust

  CARRY ON and carry out, they tell you. But you feel quite sure the sun won’t rise the next morning, and when it does you resent it for shining.

  After he hid me in the milking shed, tucked the dagger in its sheath inside the curve of my sleeping form and his father’s pocket watch in my hand, I like to think he kissed my lips and forehead and murmured a farewell in my ear.

  He might have heard engines in the distance as he sprinted back to the stable and set fire to his notes. As the flames spread across the worktable, he would have drawn out the L-pill from a smaller bag inside his tobacco pouch and tucked it in his jaw before loading his pistol, all the while hearing the lorry grind to a halt outside, doors slamming, heavy footsteps but no orders shouted, not a word spoken. From one of the loft windows he’d have taken out four or five men before the rest could reach the door, but once they were inside the building … well.

  I told you they killed him, and that wasn’t strictly true. He didn’t give them the chance.

  I DROPPED THROUGH the trapdoor and came out of the milking shed to find both stable and farmhouse in cinders, the ruins still smoking in the wintry sunshine.

  My first thought was that Albrecht Hoppe had betrayed us. It makes little sense in retrospect, of course; why would he cooperate with the men who were responsible for the death of one brother and would have taken any opportunity to do away with the other? But then again nothing made sense when it came to the German psyche in the grip of National Socialism, and I’m sorry to admit that in that first hour I put my whole heart into blaming Hoppe for Jonah’s death and the collapse of the mission. His mother’s behavior only added to my suspicion.

  I hurried across the snowy fields between the abandoned farmstead and the Hoppes’ place and tapped at the kitchen door. Frau Hoppe was genuinely surprised to see me—shocked, even. I caught a faint whiff of pine from the garland still tacked to the wooden mantelpiece and thought, The holiday is finished, everything is finished. She stood solidly in the door frame, as if to say I was no longer welcome inside. “We thought for sure they had captured you,” she said. “Where did you come from?”

  “I was hiding in the milking shed. Where … where is Herr Robbins?”

  “Oh, but Herr Robbins is dead,” she said. Dead?

  “Tot,” she said again, with an air much less sympathetic than I would have expected of her. “We heard gunshots. He killed some of their men before they got him. Albrecht could tell, because he saw more blood on the ground. But by the time my son got there they were all gone.”

  I didn’t want to ask the next question, because in these paltry seconds I still had hope. I could bring him back. If it had happened less than three hours ago, I could bring him back.

  “When was this?”

  My heart sank when she answered me. Two days ago. Too late.

  It took all I had left to hold myself together. “And … did they leave the body?”

  She averted her eyes. “It is in the ice shed. But you cannot
leave it there for much longer. Verstehst du?”

  Frau Hoppe’s manner had changed in a twinkling. With all the muttering and hand-wringing, her eyes darting this way and that as she spoke, I didn’t need to read her mind to know she was eager to see the back of me. The aura of warmth and childlike mischief I had so admired in her was gone.

  You see what fear does to people? Makes them small.

  I swallowed my disgust as I said my last good-bye. I told her Jonah would be buried and I’d be gone before next morning. Albrecht and Addie were nowhere to be seen.

  I WENT TO the ice shed and found his body under a tarpaulin in the corner. The Nazis had left him facedown in the snow, and my tears fell on his face as I brushed the grit from his nose and cheek. He looked almost as if he’d frozen to death. It’s the cyanide—turns your lips blue. I kissed him again and again, wishing the poison on his lips could have some effect on me.

  For a good long while I sat on the floor beside his body, mulling over the prospect of life without him. And there’s no sense denying I thought of bringing him back just as the foolish young beldame had done at La Corbière.

  But if I restored him—what then? He wouldn’t have been the man I remembered, for one thing, and he might have resented me for the strange, numb half life I would have imposed upon him. He might very well have hated me for not letting him rest in peace. Nor could I argue that we couldn’t complete our mission without him; Jonah would have been the first to tell me that a war can’t be lost by a solitary failure.

  And then I thought of Cordelia Wynne and her cold black heart. He was gone, and I had to accept that. I’d wait until nightfall, and then I would bury him.