Spellbook of the Lost and Found

by Moïra Fowley-Doyle

  “So we won’t hide,” Ash said loudly, and she stood up on the bed, her school shoes scuffing the quilt. She stamped and said, “We won’t fucking hide. Who cares? We’ll go to the party like everybody else, Cinderella; we’ll be the belles of the fucking ball.”

  The town bonfire party is hardly a ball. It’s more of an embarrassment. But there is always precious little supervision and often unattended coolers filled with beer. The adults either turn a blind eye or they don’t even notice.

  Holly’s tears slowed to a trickle.

  “Think about it,” I said. Holly had until Saturday to decide. “We’ll be right there with you.”

  I didn’t say that the reason I wanted to go was very similar to Ash’s. I didn’t want to punch Trina; don’t get me wrong. But I did want to know how she got Holly’s diary. I wanted to know what she’d done with the pages she hadn’t torn out. And if she didn’t give them back, well, maybe I could do with a bruised knuckle or two.

  That night I tore my room apart. I called Ash around eleven. “My diary’s missing, too,” I said.

  She was silent for a moment. “I haven’t been able to find mine since the weekend,” she said.

  In our three separate houses, we confronted our parents, we yelled at our siblings, but nobody confessed. I still can’t quite imagine Trina McEown or any of her cronies somehow sneaking into our houses and taking our things, but I don’t see how there could be another explanation. We only know that our diaries have disappeared and pages of Holly’s turned up in hostile hands, that Trina and her friends, or somebody else, have read the missing pages, have torn out entire weeks of our lives to keep like butterflies pinned to a wall somewhere.

  I want to know where.

  Then we found the spellbook. It was like it’d been waiting for us. Like it knew we’d need it.

  I say we found it, but really it was Holly. We were on our way to the lake after school on Friday. Ash, still suspended, joined us outside town and we walked past her house, to where the forest gets thick and dark. It was warm—hot, even—but something in the air felt like rain. On either side of the road there were scraggly trees, tumbledown walls with gaps in the stone like missing teeth, green fields turning yellow under this unlikely heat.

  We swung our sweaters like skipping ropes, holding the ends of the sleeves and jumping over the body, singing mindless children’s songs. Ash rolled her T-shirt up to make a bikini top and Holly and I quickly followed suit, unbuttoning the bottom of our school shirts and tying the ends in a knot under our breasts. Our bellies white as the undersides of fish, blinding in the sunshine they hadn’t seen since last summer. We imagined what the teachers would say if they saw us now, bare-bellied and skipping with our ugly school sweaters, kneesocks peeled off and stuffed in our schoolbags.

  Holly was more cheerful that afternoon. With Ash at our side, we were a three-headed dog once again. We walked so close together, our hair started to tangle. Brown, blond, and red.

  Holly wanted to climb trees. She’s always seemed a little younger than me and Ash, even though we’re all the same age. Maybe the skipping made her think of childhood. Or maybe she was trying to become a kid again, to exorcise words spoken aloud about period cramps and fighting parents, about positioning the spray of the showerhead just so between her legs.

  We stopped at the giant oak tree in the fork in the road. We clambered from branch to branch, scratching our arms and legs and leaving sap stains on our bellies. Ash is arguably the bravest of us, but Holly climbed the highest. That’s where she found the spellbook: caught between two branches like it’d been left there by a bird.

  She called out, “Laurel! Ash!” and dropped it down to us: a small, slim notebook, red and leather-bound, secured by a rubber band. Holly came down and we sat beneath the branches to read it. The first page said only SPELLBOOK OF THE LOST AND FOUND, like a title.

  You can’t not read on with a title like that.

  We didn’t recognize the handwriting, but Holly said she thought it looked familiar. On every other page were prayers to Saint Anthony, suggestions of offerings to the goddess Mnemosyne, a map to the river Lethe: findings and forgettings. Stuck to the blank pages in between were things that made the spellbook creak at the seams. Prayer cards and candy wrappers with strange symbols on them. Foreign coins. Pressed leaves and strips of bark covered in straight cuts like ogham stones. Or scars.

  The spell was on the very first page: a calling for the lost to be found.

  We wanted our diaries found. So Holly suggested we try it.

  At first it was like a recipe: gathering moss and branches, raiding our cupboards for olive oil, slipping saints medals out of our nanas’ wallets, rooting through the Christmas boxes in the attic, looking for silver string. It was silly and secret and made us feel like kids making mud pies. None of us took it seriously, not even Holly.

  By Saturday we had all the ingredients except for the waters of Lethe.

  Ash was frustrated. “What does that even mean?”

  “We learned about it in Classics,” Holly told her. “Remember? The Lethe is one of the five rivers in the Greek underworld.”

  “So we’re unlikely to find any of its waters in Balmallen, County Mayo,” I said.

  But then we found some of Mags’s poteen, a can accidentally left at the back door of Maguire’s pub (although Ash, reading this now over my shoulder, would like me to note that Mags rarely does things by accident; Ash sees conspiracies between the trees).

  “We can use this instead,” Holly breathed, showing us the spell again. “See? It says poteen can be used as a substitute. It’s got to be hand-distilled—which Mags’s stuff is—and, if anyone infuses her poteen with ancient magic, it’s Mags.”

  So we took some of Mags’s poteen to the town bonfire party. We sneaked away from the crowds and slipped into the woods. We cut our fingers and drank the burning alcohol and wrote out our losses on the branches of trees.

  And that’s when the weirdness started.

  Moss became fur became dead animals on the floor of the forest. The trees became the spaces between the trees. We three held hands and made noises that weren’t words, but that Holly said later were a calling. A calling for the lost to be found.

  We came to in the morning, beside the giant oak at the fork in the road, each of us with scraped knees and bloody noses, tied together with silver string.

  And, all around us, our missing diary pages covered the ground like a blanket of snow. In the field in the distance, the bonfire was still burning.

  Calling for the Lost to Be Found

  You Will Need:

  A charm or talisman. (A medal or Mass card of Saint Anthony or Saint Jude, a dowsing rod, a crystal pendulum or an arrow-shaped hagstone will work best.)

  A glass bottle filled with the waters of Lethe, the underground river in Hades that makes the drinker forget. (Poteen is an acceptable substitute. Must be hand-distilled in a pot still and infused with ancient magic.)

  A length of silver string.

  Red ink.

  Olive oil.

  A handful of rowan berries.

  A hazel branch.

  A vine of ivy.

  As many rose thorns as you have losses.

  Moss gathered from under an oak tree.

  Human blood.

  To Cast the Calling:

  Gather fresh moss from under an oak tree.

  Soak it in olive oil and crushed rowan berries.

  Anoint it with human blood.

  Snap a hazel branch in two and form an equal cross.

  Bind the bloodmoss to the center X with an ivy vine.

  Tie one end of a length of silver string tight around it.

  Fix the cross to the branch of a tree.

  Write your losses in red ink on the branches around it.

  Pin each word in place with a rose tho
rn.

  Wind the string around each thorn.

  At the opposite end of the string, attach your talisman.

  Let neither the cross nor the talisman touch the ground.

  Wait for a sign.

  If the lights go out, you will know the lost are listening.

  If you hear dogs barking, you will know the lost have heard your call.

  If you hear the howling, you will know the lost have answered.

  Be careful what you bargain with;

  Every lost thing requires a sacrifice—

  A new loss for every called thing found.

  What will you let go of?

  What can you not afford to lose?

  Consider carefully before you cast the calling:

  It may not be for you to choose.

  Be careful what you wish for;

  Not all lost things should be found.

  Olive

  Sunday, May 7th

  Lost: Parents’ trust (not for the first time)

  My parents are early risers. Every morning the smell of fresh coffee sneaks into my dreams before my dad’s voice booms through the house. He throws open the doors to our bedrooms and stands on the landing, loudly reciting whatever his favorite poem is that week.

  When I walk in the kitchen door, grass-stained and hungover, he is three stanzas into “The Stolen Child” by W. B. Yeats. My mom is sitting at the table, reading the paper. She raises her eyebrows as I come in. The clock above the kitchen door tells me it’s ten past seven. And yet I’d dared to hope that this one morning they’d sleep in.

  “In pools among the rushes / That scare could bathe a star. / We seek for slumbering trout / And whispering in their ears / Give them unquiet dreams,” intones my dad’s voice.

  “I always thought this one was kind of depressing,” I say.

  My mom sips her coffee. “Aren’t they all?”

  I pull my borrowed jacket tight around me to hide the state of my dress. I hope I smell of the strawberry bubble gum I found in one of its pockets, but in reality I probably just stink of vodka.

  “So, on a scale of one to that time Rose threw up in your car after a party, how in trouble am I?”

  My mom folds over the paper to the next page. “We’re rapidly approaching Rose-vomit territory,” she tells me.

  “Right.”

  My dad appears in the doorway from the hall. His voice gets progressively more ominous as he approaches. “For he comes, the human child, / To the waters and the wild / With a faery, hand in hand, / For the world’s more full of weeping than he can understand. So. I see that you’re home in one piece, albeit a relatively ragged piece,” he says. “And by ragged I mean tired, dirty, drunk, and grounded.”

  I abandon any pretense and slump into a chair. “Not drunk,” I mumble. “Hungover.”

  “Oh, well, in that case forget I said anything; please go about your day.”

  I drop my head between my folded arms on the kitchen table. I turned my hearing aid off sometime during the party because the speakers kept making it scream tinnily in my deaf ear. With my good ear against the table and silence in the other, every sound is strangely magnified: my dad’s heavy footsteps across to the stove; my siblings clattering down the stairs; my mom’s coffee cup clinking quietly against her plate as she raises it to her lips; my own breath rasping between my teeth.

  There’s a thud on the table in front of me. “This’ll help,” comes my dad’s loud voice. I raise my head and see a giant mug of black coffee. “Freshly grounded, get it?” says Dad. He chuckles to himself.

  My sister, Emily, bursts through the door as I take the first tentative sip. She stares at me.

  “Whoa,” she says. “You look like shit.”

  “Emily!” Mom says sharply.

  “Sorry, Mom. Olive, you look like defecation.”

  Dad hides a laugh behind his beard. Mom’s mouth twitches. “Slightly better,” she says. Then she trains her eyes on me, and there’s something to the slant of the lines around them that makes me wonder if I’m in even more trouble than I thought.

  My brother, Max, materializes bleary-eyed in the doorway as I plug my phone into the tangle of chargers on the counter beside the fridge. He has pillow creases on his cheek and is dragging Bunny, his tattered teddy, by one ear.

  “Can I have a cookie?” Max asks Mom. He’s five. He always wants a cookie. Cornflakes (a dog) sticks out his tongue beside him. He also always wants a cookie. Is there much difference between a dog and a five-year-old boy?

  “You can’t have cookies for breakfast,” says Emily, who slowly backs away from the cupboard she was about to open, obviously also looking for cookies herself. Emily is thirteen, skinny as a snake and twice as mean. She probably shares half her DNA with some form of reptile.

  Coco Pops (a dog) watches her with adoration. Weetabix (also a dog) snuffles around under the table for crumbs. The cat, Bacon, scratches at the back door.

  With my battery five percent recharged, I call Rose. There’s no answer. I suppose there must be an equation to calculate the probability of Rose’s hangover being mine to the power of N, given that she seemed so much drunker than me last night, but I doubt these things can be measured. Either way I’m sure she’s sleeping it off somewhere. This isn’t the first time I’ve had to ride home alone. Still, I’d feel a lot better if she’d replied. I don’t leave a voice mail because Rose never listens to them. I message her to call me instead.

  I’m about to get up and take my coffee into my room when Mom looks at me.

  “Did you meet a boy?” she asks me suddenly, folding the paper over to another page with feigned nonchalance. Emily, sensing that I’m about to be told off, perks up and listens in.

  “In my life?” I say. An image of the curly-haired, freckled boy I saw this morning between the trees flashes into my mind. Old flat cap and guitar slung over his back. He must have been someone’s cousin, or a friend from out of town. I didn’t recognize him, and he was far too beautiful to be from around here.

  “Last night,” she clarifies.

  “Unsurprisingly, the town festivities were a mixed-sex event,” I say to the ceiling. “As you will recall. There were quite a few boys there.”

  Emily snorts.

  “I’m a boy,” Max pipes up from the other side of the table.

  “You’re an alien,” Emily retorts.

  “If I’m an alien, you have to be an alien, too,” says Max. “That’s how brothers and sisters work.”

  “So you didn’t meet a boy?” My mom’s repetition of the query brings her would-be casual tone into question.

  “Why?” Emily asks.

  “Mind your own business,” I hiss at her. “May I please be excused?” I take my mug of coffee and stand up on slightly wobbly legs.

  “You’re confined to the house and garden for the week, apart from school,” my dad reminds me. I nod and turn to go.

  “He’s trouble,” my mom says. She says it very softly, almost in a whisper, but I hear her clearly even over the noise of my family and the dogs. Nobody else seems to hear her at all. “He’s lost a lot and so will you.” Her eyes are far away. Her eyes are not her eyes. She looks at me and it’s like someone else is looking through her. “Stay away from him,” she says, “or you’ll lose everything.”

  Then she turns to make breakfast as if nothing has happened, as if she was never talking to me. The newspaper flutters to the floor.

  Hazel

  Sunday, May 7th

  Lost: Jacket (denim, missing third button); some pieces of broken teacup

  Mags comes into the pub at twelve. We open at half past. I’ve set the whole place out already: the stools off the tables; the counters wiped down; the glasses polished; the trap unlocked for Cian and the boys to roll next week’s kegs into the basement.

  The windows are open jus
t a crack, and I can still smell the bonfire smoke from last night’s party. It’s faded now, just this vague taste of ash on the air. Makes you wonder what it was they were burning.

  I left when the flames were almost as high as the random boy who placed a tiny square of paper on my tongue and tried to follow it with his own.

  “I don’t kiss boys,” I told him, and I walked home alone.

  It was a long night of dreams and visions, but this morning is clearer, tinny and thirsty.

  Ivy and Rowan still weren’t home when I left for work.

  “Well,” Mags says, and she flicks on the lights. They hardly brighten the dim room. “You’re here early.”

  An ancient brown Labrador wanders in after her and settles heavily in her usual spot in front of the fireplace. She’s the latest of Mags’s long line of dogs who run away or get knocked over or have to be put down every few years. When one goes, she gets another. They’re always big and they’re always brown and she always gives them the same name: Lucky. Mags likes irony.

  I shrug and blow on the paper in front of me. The latest Lucky yawns. Mags comes over to look at what I’ve drawn. She says she hates that I get charcoal all over the tables, complains that it gets in the air and sticks in her lungs, but she smokes two packs of cigarettes a day, so I don’t listen.

  Mags lugs a big tin can onto the bench beside me. The stuff inside sloshes. “Why do you never draw people?” she asks, flipping through my sketchbook. A silver shoe, scuffed at the toes. A metal hip flask. The clock on the pub mantelpiece. A big, rusty key. “People are more interesting than things.”

  “Says you.”

  “Yes, says me.” She flicks a line through the charcoal dust on the table. “You could draw me, regal beauty that I am.” I try not to snort. Mags is about five hundred years old and built like a wirehaired beer keg. She may be regal, but she’s no beauty. “You could draw Cian or Alicja,” she continues, ignoring my look.