by Geof Johnson
She opened it and frowned. Huh? They’re not ground. Are they supposed to be? When she heard the front door open, she snatched a few leaves out and dropped then in the boiling pot. That’ll have to do. She grabbed the spell recipe that she’d printed from a website called “Magic Spells from Ordinary Kitchen Ingredients” and held it behind her back as her mother entered the kitchen.
Her mother pinched her nose. “Peeyou, what stinks?”
“I’m just doing a little cooking.”
“Cooking what, turpentine sauce?”
“No. Just…something.” It’s now or never. “Mom, I want a car.”
“Save your money if you want one. We can’t afford to buy one right now.”
I need to be more assertive. “You will buy me a car.”
“What?” She cocked her head and scrunched one eye tight.
It’s not working. “Oh…um…please buy me a car.”
“I told you….” She noticed Fred’s hands behind her back. “What are you hiding?”
“Nothing.” Fred backed away, but her mother caught her.
“Show me.” She grabbed Fred’s arm but Fred held the paper away from her mother as she struggled to grab it. “Give it to me, Fred. I mean it.”
Fred handed her the paper and her mother read, “A modern persuasion spell from ordinary ingredients.” She looked at Fred.” You’re…you’re trying magic! Aren’t you?”
“No…yes.” She squeezed hers eyes shut and said, “I’m sorry. I really wanted to try a spell to see if I could do it, and I thought that getting you to buy me a car was a good way to start.”
Her mother looked at her with her eyes hard, her jaw tight, but then her expression changed and she laughed out loud.
“You’re not mad?”
“Yes, I am, because you’re trying to manipulate me.” She gestured at the pot on the stove. “But it’s just so ridiculous.” She read the list of ingredients. “No wonder it stinks. You could probably peel paint with this recipe.”
“I’m sorry, Mom.”
“Fred, Honey….” She put her hand on Fred’s shoulder. “Please don’t do that again. I don’t like being manipulated.” She shook one finger at Fred. “And don’t be trying to make magic potions in this house!”
She didn’t say anything about powders.
“I mean any kind of magic.”
“Mom! That’s not fair. That’s like telling a bird she can’t fly.”
Her mother gave her head a quick shake. “What?”
“It’s like…well, it’s not fair, that’s what.”
“You said that. And I’m your mother. I don’t have to be fair. And you’re not a bird.”
“But aren’t you just a little bit curious about what I can do? You know, like persuasion spells and protection spells or whatever?”
“Not really. If I need any magic done, I’ll get Jamie to do it.”
“That’s…that’s sexist!”
“Fred….” She shook both hands in front of her. “You are so stubborn.”
“But all I want to do is —”
“Fred, no magic in this house. None! Do I make myself clear?”
Fred looked at her defiantly for a moment before answering. “Yes ma’am.”
* * *
Rachel tightened her robe and leaned closer to the bathroom mirror. There’s another gray hair! She pinched it tightly, curling it around her index finger. Then she gritted her teeth and yanked. “Ow! Ow! Ow!”
“Honey, you okay?” Carl called from the other room, where he was already in bed.
“No.” She looked at herself in the mirror and frowned. I look like a hag, she thought miserably. “Carl, do I look old to you?”
“No. You look as pretty as the day we met.”
“No I don’t.”
“Sure you do. You’re the prettiest mom in Hendersonville.”
“Nice try.” She leaned over the sink again and searched for more gray intruders.
“What brought that on?”
“Jamie said I looked old. Well, actually, he said I sounded like my mother.”
“Big difference between sounding and looking. Besides, there’s nothing wrong with sounding like your mom. She can be a little stern sometimes, but she means well.”
“But she’s a grandmother, Carl. I’m not ready to be a grandmother yet.”
“Unless you know something I don’t know, I don’t think you’re in danger of being one anytime soon.”
She walked out of the bathroom and leaned against the bedroom doorway. “What do you mean?…Oh! No, Fred’s not pregnant yet, I’m sure.”
“Do you think they’re, um, experimenting?”
“I doubt it. Fred’s the friskier one of the two, but Jamie’s a little bit of a prude, in case you haven’t noticed.”
“He gets that from your mom.”
“Hey, she had a baby when she was still in high school, remember? My half-sister, Sophie?”
“I keep forgetting about that. So you think they’re just making out?”
“Every chance they get.”
“Bet that’s driving Larry crazy.”
“Fred takes Jamie down to their basement to ‘watch TV’, or so she says, but Larry can’t stand it and makes excuses to go down there all the time.”
“They can come over here.”
“That’s what I think, too. I’d rather have them home making out on the couch than parking on a dirt road somewhere. That’s asking for trouble. Too many psychos out there looking to hurt young people.”
“Rachel, think about it. If anybody’s safe on a dark road, it’s Jamie and Fred.” She shook her head and he continued, “If somebody were to mess with them, Jamie could blast them into chunk of charcoal.”
“Or Fred could turn them into a toad.”
“Can she do that?”
“I don’t know, and I hope we never find out.”
Chapter 18
“Fred, you been practicing for the show?” Rollie said as Jamie backed the car out of the driveway on the way to school.
“Lots,” she said, flipping the visor down and inspecting her makeup in the mirror. “About four or five times a week. It’s harder for me ’cause I gotta go to the dance studio. Can’t do like you and practice at home in front of a mirror.”
“The mirror doesn’t get my jokes.”
“Neither do we, sometimes,” Jamie said, grinning in the rearview mirror at his friend.
Rollie ignored him and looked at Fred. “How’s the witchin’ comin’?”
“Yesterday I tried to make a persuasion potion I got off the Internet. Big failure. Made my mom mad, too.”
“Probably just a bad spell,” Jamie said. “I imagine there are a lot of would-be witches putting stupid useless stuff up on web sites.”
“Well, this one was stupid and useless. I tried to get my mom to buy me a car, but she just laughed at me.”
“Soon as you get one that works,” Rollie said, “bring it over to my house and use it on my parents. Every time I ask them for a car, I get the same reaction.”
Fred flipped the visor back up. “I need a real spell book. Jamie, can you get me one?”
He steered the car onto the main road that led to school. “I don’t know how to tell a good one from a bad one. You’d probably have to get a real witch to tell you what a good one is.”
“There aren’t a lot of those around for me to ask, in case you haven’t noticed.” She tapped her lower lip with one finger. “How about back on Eddan’s world?”
“Probably plenty back there, but I’m not going there to get one.”
“Why not?”
“The last time I made a doorway there, a crazy wizard showed up a few weeks later in my family room and tried to kill me. A doorway is like a beacon to another sorcerer.”
“I thought you said that making doorways was a lost art.”
“Renn seemed to figure it out somehow. Probably found it in some rare book. But I’d rather not chance it.”
“But how am I ever going to find out what I can do if I don’t have a real spell book?”
“Fake it?”
Fred smacked him on the shoulder and crossed her arms, scowling.
“Fred,” Rollie said, “I don’t get it. Few weeks ago, you were griping about how you didn’t want to be a witch and witches were bad and stuff, and now you’re trying to do magic.”
“I can’t help it,” Fred said. “Now that I know I have some power, or whatever, I want to try it! I mean, really wanna see what I can do. I think about it a lot.”
“That’s the way I was,” Jamie said, waiting for a school bus in front of them to move. “Still am, really. I wanted to scream through the sky and blast the tops off of mountains and stuff. I had all this magic energy, I guess you’d call it, built up inside me, just pushing to come out.”
“That’s it!” Fred said. “That’s how I feel. Some of it’s just curiosity, I’m sure, but it’s more than that.”
Jamie looked at her and raised his eyebrows. “Like a colt that’s cooped up in the barn, wanting to race across the pasture?”
“Exactly.”
Rollie caught Jamie’s gaze in the rearview mirror and said, “I think it’s time for Fred to say the oath.”
“What oath?” Fred said.
“The one we made Jamie say way back when.”
“That was silly. We were eight years old then.”
“I agree with Rollie. I think you should say it,” Jamie said.
She smiled. “Only if I get to wear my tiara again.”
Rollie laughed. “And I can wear the crown and cape, if you still got ’em.”
“I have all my dress-up stuff in a trunk somewhere.” She twisted her mouth into a whimsical half-smile. “Do I have to swear not to do ee-ville and stuff?”
“I remember that.” Jamie chuckled. “Ee-ville. That what they called it on the Commander Hawk Show.”
Rollie grinned. “We’ll do the whole nine yards, just like before. Hands on the Bible and everything.”
“Jamie,” Fred said. “I was wondering: does it have to be a Bible? What if you’re Jewish or Muslim or something?”
“I think you could use a Torah or a Koran, too. The Bible acts as an amplifier, sort of…a focuser. Anything you strongly believe in will do the trick, I believe.”
“All right then,” Rollie said firmly. “The three of us, back in the club house, soon as we get home from school.”
* * *
The shadows from the setting sun were stretching across the yard when Jamie, Fred, and Rollie climbed up the ladder to the clubhouse. The structure consisted of two small cube-shaped wooden buildings stacked on top of each other. The bottom floor was partially open, with half walls running all the way around and a ladder that led to a trap door in the top floor. Another ladder, which the kids were on, ran up the left side and was attached to the frame that held the bench swing.
Rollie paused at the top step. “Been awhile since we’ve done this.” He opened the door, brushed a cobweb aside and they crawled into their former playhouse. It was completely walled in and roofed, with windows on three sides. A kid-sized table and chairs served as the furnishings.
“Seems smaller than I remember.” Fred set her bag on the floor and took a seat in a red plastic chair. “It used to seem huge to me.”
Jamie sat in a blue chair and put the Bible on the table. “We were little kids then. Everything seemed huge.”
Rollie looked around with a nostalgic smile. “We had a lot of fun in here, didn’t we? Campin’ out and watchin’ movies on Fred’s little DVD player. Eatin’ your Gramma’s brownies. I miss that.”
Jamie leaned back in his chair. “Life sure was simpler then.”
“It was, until you started bein’ a sorcerer.”
“Well…yeah. Until then.”
Fred tapped the Bible. “So what am I gonna say in this oath?”
Jamie looked at Rollie. “I think you ought to say it, too, Rollie.”
“What for? I don’t have any powers or anything.”
“We didn’t think Fred did either, but she does.”
“My momma didn’t touch bellies with your momma when she was pregnant. Didn’t even know your momma then.”
“We’re not sure that’s how Fred got her power. Could be some magic soaked into her from playing in my yard so much.”
“Yeah, Rollie,” Fred said. “You played over that dead wizard in the yard as much as I did.”
Jamie thought about how Eddan the sorcerer had died in the yard and let his magic and memories soak into the ground for Jamie to absorb later.
Rollie set his jaw for a moment, but said, “Okay, sure. Won’t hurt, right?”
Jamie pulled a sheet of paper from his back pocket and unfolded it. “I wrote this down. This is sorta what I said back then, and I think it’s pretty applicable.” He spread it on the table so that Fred and Rollie could both see it. “You should read it together.”
Fred and Rollie exchanged glances, and Fred said, “You ready?”
They all placed their hands, one atop the other, on the Bible. Rollie nodded and he and Fred read aloud, “I solemnly swear in the eyes of God and my best friends to never use my power for evil or to enrich myself, and to always do my best to help others.”
The familiar tingle surged through Jamie’s arm. Their hands began to glow, a dull amber at first, then blossoming to a brilliant white that flared and went out.
Rollie blinked at his hand. “Wow! That was stronger than the last time.” He looked at Fred and Jamie. “Didn’t it seem like it?”
“It sure did,” Fred said, rubbing her palms together. “The tingle, especially.”
“Maybe it’s because of your power, Fred,” Jamie said.
Rollie pushed his chair back and stood. “Well, now that we got that out of the way, it’s time for a snack.”
“It’s almost dinnertime, Buddy.”
“Sorry. Old habit.”
“Hold on.” Fred reached into her backpack and pulled out a resealable plastic bag.
“What’s that?” Rollie asked.
“Cookies.” She pulled one out for each of them. “For old time’s sake. Wait!”
She reached into the bag again and pulled out two plastic gold crowns and a rhinestone-covered child-sized tiara. She handed a crown to each of the boys and set the tiara on top of her red curls, grinning broadly, “Okay. Now I’m ready.”
* * *
“Cassandra, where do you think you’re going?” Rita asked.
“To the Screw,” she said, standing near the front door with her purse in one hand and the car keys in the other. She wore a black leather mini skirt and tall black patent-leather boots. A low-cut red blouse hung loosely on her freckled shoulders. “You’re not dressed yet. Aren’t you coming?”
“Did you forget what night it is?”
She squinted one eye. “Wednesday? No, Thursday. It’s Thursday, isn’t it? Or is it Friday?”
“Don’t be such a blonde, Cass! It’s full moon night.”
She blinked her stupendously fake eyelashes hard, twice. “Oh! The spell! The new witch. Why didn’t you say so?”
“I did, about twenty times. What do you think I cleared the table for?”
“I didn’t notice, if you want to know the truth.” She set the keys and her purse on a chair by the door and joined Rita at the big table, which was completely bare and wiped clean. “I always wondered what this table looked like without all the junk on it.” She rubbed one finger across the smooth surface. “So how does this work?”
“Were you payin’ attention to anything Momma Sue said?”
“Some. That old bag talks too much.” She put a hand to her mouth and said, “Ooh…you don’t think she’s spyin’ on us, do you?”
“I got wards all around the house and the yard. Her proxies can’t hear a thing, if she’s got any around here.”
“Why would she care, anyway?”
“She wants to make sure w
e don’t misuse the voodoo doll, remember? She guards her reputation pretty fierce.”
“She can guard this.” Cassandra made a rude gesture and Rita smiled and shook her head. “Cass, make sure you don’t do that in public, okay? I can’t put wards everywhere.”
“You’re scared of her, aren’t you?”
Rita pulled the bag containing the special powder out of a box on the nearest shelf and set it on the table. “Damn straight I am. Any witch in her right mind oughta be, but we got no choice. We gotta deal with her if we want to do the tricky spells, especially with Izzy gone.”
“You think she’s stronger than Isabelle was?”
“Not even close. Izzy was a powerful witch, but she wasn’t a voodoo queen.” Rita opened a fresh can of Sterno and placed it in the center of the table. “So if we’re gonna bitch about Momma Sue, let’s make sure we do it someplace safe.”
“We’re supposed to do this around midnight, aren’t we?” Cassandra glanced at the clock on the far shelf. “That’s about fifteen minutes from now.” She scratched under her chin with a long fake nail. “Should I light some candles and put on some music or something?”
“Suit yourself. Don’t think it matters to the spell, though.”
Cassandra went to the shelves next to the television and began flipping through a stack of CDs. “So, what do you think? Probably not party music, right?”
“No, that’s won’t seem right. Don’t we have a New Agey kinda disc in there somewhere? The one we got when we visited Salem a couple years ago?”
“Hah.” Cassandra paused and smiled. “That was a fun trip, wasn’t it? Never seen so many nutjobs in one place in my life. Everybody wore black and died their hair purple and stuff.”
“And everybody tried to sell us crystals. I still got a couple somewhere.”
“Too bad there aren’t any real witches there. That would make it easier to find us a new one, huh?” She resumed her search through the CDs. “You think there have ever been any real ones in Salem?”
“Long time ago. A few come through nowadays, I bet. Probably some younger ones…runaways, mostly. But I bet they take one look at that freak show and split.”
Cassandra pulled out a CD, regarded it for a moment, and put it back. “I heard it’s only bad there in late October, when we went, ’cause that’s when all the weirdos and tourists come for the festival. I heard it’s nice most of the rest of the year. Except winter. Too cold.”
