The Best Paranormal Crime Stories Ever Told

by Martin H. Greenberg

  “With those stupid spells you sell? I don’t know much, but I can tell they don’t work very well.”

  “They don’t have to work well to sell well. I don’t want to upset the social balance by giving anyone giant advantages in any of the areas I service. That might lead to scrutiny I don’t want. I can teach you how to be a much better witch, but you have to agree to help me. If I train you in the business, you can make enough money to get your own place. What do you say?”

  He stared at his coffee cup so long I thought he wasn’t going to answer, but at last he said, “Okay.”

  First I took Gareth home with me. I figured he should know what a mom was supposed to be like.

  “It’s mac and cheese again, Terry,” Mom called from the kitchen at the back of the house as I ushered Gareth in through the front door, “unless you have other ideas.”

  “I have a guest, Mom.” We passed through the living room and the hall into the kitchen, the heart of the house, where Mom and I spent all our together time after she got off work. The patina of a million cooked meals covered the kitchen ceiling in a yellow haze. The center of the room was a round table, often stacked with newspapers and mail, with just enough room for us to set our plates and silverware down. Sometimes we cleared the debris off, but it didn’t take long to build up again. The kitchen colors weren’t very inspiring, beige and brown, with a yellow fridge, all geared toward comfort and convenience. A cheese-and-boiling-pasta scent greeted us.

  Mom stirred a pot on the stovetop, her silvering brown hair coming down from its neat coils around her head drift in long, limp tendrils around her face. She was flushed from the stove’s heat and still wearing the white shirt and black suspenders she wore at the florist shop. It was a weird uniform that made her look more like a waiter than a flowership girl, but they liked that at Flowers While You Wait. “Gareth, this is my mom, Rebecca Dane. Mom, this is Gareth Mathis.”

  “Hi, Gareth! I hope you like mac and cheese. Terry, could you throw together a salad?”

  “Sure.” I checked the fridge and remembered why I’d gone to the supermarket in the first place. Produce! We were out. I sighed. “Well, I guess not, Mom. I forgot to shop.”

  “Frozen broccoli, then.” She nodded toward the microwave. I got out the broccoli.

  “Gareth, would you like something to drink?” Mom asked.

  “That’d be great.” He looked lost, standing in our kitchen, his hands clasped in front of his chest as though he were begging or praying, his brown-blond hair squiffed by the wind.

  “Help yourself to whatever’s in the fridge. Cups are in the cupboard over there.”

  Gareth poured himself some orange juice.

  Mom asked, “Where’d you two meet?”

  “At the supermarket,” I said. “Gareth’s a witch, but he hasn’t had any training. I thought I’d get him started.” I filled a glass with water and took a seat at the table.

  “Really?” Mom put the lid on the mac and cheese and came to the table.

  Gareth had gone red again. “Terry,” he said, his voice squeaking in a surprising way.

  “What?”

  “Maybe he didn’t want me to know he’s a witch,” Mom said. “It’s okay, Gareth. I don’t tell anybody these kinds of things. I appreciate Terry being up front about it, too. It’s when she’s keeping secrets that I get upset. Have a seat.”

  “Are you a witch, too?” he asked as he settled in a chair beside me.

  “No, not at all,” said Mom.

  He turned to me. “So where’d you learn?”

  “I had a teacher for about six years after I turned into a witch.” I could take him to meet my mentor, but then I’d lose my chance to train him up to be my new twin and business partner. Besides, my mentor no longer let me cross her threshold. She was pretty strict about not dabbling in the dark arts.

  “But you still live at home,” he said. “And you think I should move out?”

  “His mom makes him feel bad about what he is,” I told my mom. “She’s scared of him.”

  “Oh, honey,” said my mom. She put her hands on Gareth’s, squeezed. “So sorry you have to deal with that.”

  “Did Terry put a spell on you to make you say that?”

  “Nope. No magic in the house,” said Mom.

  “He doesn’t even know how to check for spells,” I said. “I’ve got my work cut out for me.”

  “For once, I might actually approve of what you’re doing,” said my mother.

  “So can I start his training here?”

  Mom frowned, tapped her index finger on her mouth a couple times, and then nodded. “As long as it’s just matter stuff, not spellcasting on people. For the dark stuff you have to take him somewhere else. Okay?”

  “All right.”

  We had dinner, and afterward, Mom sat at the table with coffee and a crossword puzzle while I explained basic principles of magic to Gareth. Mom loves hearing this kind of stuff. It gives her insight not only into me but into my traveling twin, who blows home every once in a while. (I mean it about blowing, too. She brings the wind with her before she remembers to tell it to go outside and play.)

  I said, “You have to perceive things to be able to affect them—or, at least, it helps. Do you ever sense things other people don’t?”

  “I don’t know. How could I tell?”

  “I knew you were a witch, and that your mom was, too. I learned it through my witch senses. Do you ever get strong feelings about people or things?”

  His eyes narrowed, and he glanced past me, as though looking at something out a window, though he stared toward a wall. “I used to when I was little, but not for a long time. My mom’s dresser set. Her brush. It’s old. It felt like it might be able to—but she wouldn’t let me touch it, after that time she found me waving it around.”

  “Hmm,” I said. “Good news, probably. You have the senses. They’re just asleep. Once we wake them up, you’ll be able to do things. I’ll try a spell to open your witch eyes. Wait here a sec. I have to get my kit.” I ran upstairs, grabbed my traveling witch kit, and dashed back to the kitchen. I cleared newspapers off the table. “Mom, is this okay?”

  “Does it hurt anybody?”

  “Not physically. I don’t know about the psychic consequences. It should show Gareth what he does and doesn’t see.”

  “Gareth, are you ready for this?” Mom asked.

  He laughed, with scorn in it. “Hey, I’ve seen her work before. I don’t expect anything to happen.”

  Mom slanted a look at me. I smiled back at her. “Go ahead,” she said.

  I assembled dust of ages, scent of spring gone, sound of three high notes on a piano, and a trace of vanished sunrise. Power pooled in my palms as I bracketed my ingredients with my outstretched fingers. “Show us what he could see, and why he doesn’t,” I whispered, not a spell I’d ever said before. I wasn’t sure if it would work. It didn’t even rhyme.

  The ingredients flared, mixed, and vanished, leaving a twist of smoke behind. The world shifted around us. Everything in the kitchen glowed with colored light, and streams or strings stretched between people and furniture, appliances, floor, ceiling, walls. Some pulsed, beads of light sliding along the strings between things intimately connected; some shimmered in time to the hum from the refrigerator.

  In the midst of all this weaving, an overlay that didn’t obscure the physical forms of things—translucent as it was pervasive—something hovered above Gareth’s head. A miniature thicket of rose bushes, and trapped inside, a pair of eyes, their irises deep, shifting gray/golden/dark and shadow. The bushes had cleared from in front of them, so that they peered out, as if from a cage. They looked this way and that. Whatever they looked at deepened and intensified. They looked at me, and I felt warmth against my face as though I leaned toward a fire.

  “What is this?” Gareth cried, and his extra eyes looked at Mom. She had been turning and gaping at the room, trying to take in everything at once, but now the power of the eyes�
�� gaze focused her into concentrated Mom. She was taller, with a crescent moon in her hair—wrong symbol, I thought; Mom was hardly a virgin goddess—and a veil of golden haze surrounded her.

  “What did you do?” Gareth asked, turning on me, and again I felt the warmth of his regard. I held out my hands, studied what the eyes made of me. I was cloaked in shadow so dark it made me look like a silhouette, but flashes of color rippled through my new outer skin.

  “Why are you closed most of the time?” I asked.

  “What are you talking about?” Gareth demanded. “What’s with all these visions? Did you spike my orange juice?”

  The eyes blinked, a shuttering of images—all the color left the world, then returned as the lids rose. The eyes rolled up until mostly white showed.

  “Someone put a spell on you to blind you.” I reached out, my hand a black spider against the green and red and dark glow of vines and flowers. “Do you want to be free?”

  “Make it stop,” Gareth said.

  “I’m not talking to you,” I muttered. With my shadowy hand, I touched the roses caging his vision, pressed this stem and that. A thorn bit my finger and I sucked in breath. Itching tingle spread from the puncture. The eyes stared at me. The shadow cloaking my outstretched hand faded as the itching tingle spread from my finger to my palm, and up my arm. My powers leached away as the shadow faded, revealing nothing but normal flesh, blood, and shirt.

  Damned spell! Could it kill my witchness? I never thought anything could. In trying to save Gareth, was I dooming myself to being normal?

  Before my darkness left me entirely, I murmured power words and picked more carefully through the roses, looking for help. The thorns sprouted and pricked my hands again. Weakness spread through me. Both my arms were bland.

  Near the base of one of the vines, I found an aphid like a small hard bump, then another. I rested fingertips on their backs. “Small things, strengthen; change the balance. Shift the spell, let loose the sight. Sip the sap and wreck the roses; give me back my stolen might,” I murmured, putting the remnants of my power into it. The aphids listened and grew strong, sucked the lifeblood out of the rose spell until it withered and fell away. They nestled in my palms, gleaming soft, fuzzy green, the size of kiwi fruits, full of the power they’d sucked from the spell.

  Gareth groaned. “Stop it, Terry! Whatever you did, make it stop!”

  I exchanged a glance with the eyes. They blinked again, then the lids closed, slowly, and all the extra color faded from the room.

  “All right,” Mom said, “what was that, Terry? Did you break a rule?”

  “I just did what I said. We saw what Gareth would see if he used his witch senses.”

  “What, all that?” he said. “That was crazy.”

  “You have to get used to it.” I sat in a chair at the table and rubbed one of the aphids against my cheek. So soft. It made a small, vibrating sound like a purr. I was exhausted, and a little worried: the rose had poisoned my power. My defenses were weak, now; if anything with power came at me, I could be badly hurt, though not destroyed, because of my secret protection. I needed to find a spell to restore me.

  Chances were the rose spell had also poisoned Gareth’s powers somehow, maybe paralyzed them. Now that it was gone, maybe he could get some joy out of his power. Maybe he’d be grateful. I hoped so. I wanted to use him in many different ways. “That’s where you begin with your powers,” I said. “See what you can see. Then decide how you want it to change, and work toward that.”

  “What does this have to do with those spells you sell?”

  “I decide what the spells will do. I infuse them with power and direction. Once I craft the spells, other people can use them.”

  “You hypnotized me,” Gareth said.

  I sighed and rested my hands on the table, palms up, with the aphids in them. I wasn’t sure what to do with my new friends. They solved the problem for me, sank into my palms. A flush of unfamiliar power flowed through my veins, mixed with the power the roses had sucked out of me, now come home.

  I leaned back and closed my eyes, felt this foreign power move through me. It was a slivery power, like bamboo under fingernails, a power with hate in it, and strength, edged with elegance and beauty. “Tell me who you belonged to,” I whispered, and learned about Gareth’s mother, forced by her mother and grandmother to use her power when all she had wanted was to be normal. They had put a geas on her to pass her power to her daughters, but none of her daughters had been born gifted. A boy with gifts was an abomination. When she discovered Gareth’s gifts, she locked them in a hedge of roses and put them to sleep. This was a power she had to renew constantly, as his witch eyes struggled to open.

  And in the meantime, with that geas on her, continually unsatisfied, she twisted up in some truly unpleasant directions.

  I accepted the foreign power as part of my arsenal. Strange to meet power darker than my own. Everyone I knew in the witch community thought I was the bad guy, the unnatural one who forced people into things against their will. I was as capable as Gareth’s mother of mistreating other people.

  I would take joy in foiling her.

  Gareth shook my shoulder. “Terry?” he said. “Terry—it’s happening again.”

  “What is?” I asked.

  “The world looks screwy!”

  I straightened and rubbed my palms together as a final thankyou to the aphids. I felt not only restored after the rose’s poison but augmented.

  I glanced around. The room seemed normal. I studied Gareth, and realized his aura had awareness in it now. He looked all around, panicked.

  “Your witch eyes are open now, Gareth. You can close them if you don’t like it, but you can also open them whenever you want. What you see, you can change.”

  “Can I change you? You look like the Grim Reaper.”

  “Really? Skull and all?”

  He stared at my face. “Mostly it’s the dark cloak. I guess I can see your face. Are you smiling at me?”

  “I am, Gareth.”

  “How come your mom has a moon on her head?”

  “I don’t understand that myself. It’s not there when I look at her. Have you figured out how to close your eyes yet?”

  He glanced around, looking haunted again. Mom got to her feet, shaky, and went to the coffeemaker for a refill. She had some experience with weird witch effects—most of them from my sister, who was allowed to witch around the house, since she didn’t hurt anyone. Mom hadn’t had enough exposure to be relaxed about it, though.

  “I can’t—oh,” said Gareth. “Oh, it’s all gone again. Okay, good.”

  “Terry. Explanations?” asked Mom. She dumped extra sugar in her coffee and drank.

  “Gareth’s mom put a spell on him to close up his powers. Did you see the roses?”

  “I did. Thanks, by the way, for making me part of the equation.”

  I couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic, but, even though I hadn’t planned for her to see everything, I was glad she had. It meant she knew more about Gareth’s problem. “She planted those to keep his powers asleep. She tends them constantly to make sure he’s crippled. My spell messed hers up. Now his powers are awake, but he doesn’t know how to use them. Can Gareth live with us, Mom? If he goes home, his mother might shut him down again.”

  Mom’s frown was ferocious, but I knew she’d cave. She had the softest heart of anybody I knew.

  “I have rules,” Mom said, the start of her consent.

  Gareth moved into the guest room. We went back to his house the next morning, when his mother was at work and his sisters had gone to school, to retrieve his belongings.

  The house had no witch vibes. It looked like a TV sit-com house, not distinctive, not identical.

  His room was a sad excuse for a boy’s room. There were red roses winding in the wallpaper, and no pictures of cars, airplanes, metal bands, or things blowing up. His clothes were all neatly folded or hung on hangers—no dirty laundry on the floor or draped ove
r the desk chair. I was more of a boy than Gareth was.

  I’d brought a duffle bag for him. He put everything in it very neatly, then stuffed his backpack with a bunch of books.

  On our way to the front door, I said, “So where’s the room your mom uses for her rituals?”

  Gareth looked over his shoulder toward a doorway I hadn’t noticed before—and that disturbed me, because now that I know where to look, the witch vibes coming from it were incredibly strong. “We’re not allowed to even open the door,” he said, as I grabbed the doorknob. A stinging jolt shot through my hand, the same poison Gareth’s roses had carried. I jerked back, shaking my hand. Weight in my other hand made me look: I saw one of the aphids, shrunk to the size of a marble, rising from my palm. As soon as it separated from my skin, I held it near the doorknob; it leaped the gap, fastened to the protect spell, and fed.

  “What is that?” Gareth whispered.

  “This is what freed you yesterday.” I hadn’t realized they could manifest again, but I was thrilled. Spellsuckers! A staggering number of household applications occurred to me. “I found them feeding on your mother’s power-suppression spell, and helped them eat faster. They broke the spell for you. I wonder if they’re yours?” The aphid on the doorknob was as big as a cantaloupe. My right hand, still tingling from the spell jolt, unhosted the second aphid, and I set it to join the first.

  When they were both the size of fuzzy, pale-green watermelons, the tiny scritching sound of their feeding stopped and they dropped from the doorknob. I caught one, and Gareth caught the other. “Do you want the power?” I asked.

  “What?”

  I cradled my aphid in both hands, and it deflated, feeding me spell power again, exquisite hate and strength, a hot syrup both burning and sweet. “Put it down if you don’t want the power.” My voice was hoarse as my body adjusted to this influx. I was lucky to have had a taste the day before, otherwise I could see this killing me, as poisonous as it was—or it could have killed me if I hadn’t had my special protection. What if someone random touched the doorknob?