by A. L. Tyler
Moving to the side of the car, I pressed my nose into the passenger upholstery. The milk smell was still there, but lighter than before.
What was I going to say to Vince? Or should I just ignore it?
I stood back up, leaving my doors open to help things dry, and wound the garden hose that Gates had used back up into the reel by the privacy fence that separated the greenhouse land from the neighboring fast food place.
I went back inside, nowhere closer to a solution than I was before. I hoped Gates might offer to beat Jennifer up for me. At four foot eight, it wasn’t likely to go in Gates’ favor, but I would appreciate the offer none-the-less.
“You know, I think maybe I should just go and talk to the school counselor, or… What happened? Weren’t you going to do these?”
I stared down at the cacti at my feet; they hadn’t moved at all since I left them. It wasn’t that I minded that she hadn’t done them, because I was happy to do the work myself, but Gates usually liked doing things that involved a little pain or mishap. It gave her an excuse to let her colorful vocabulary fly.
“Gates?” I called, spinning in a circle to look for her. I stuck my head out into the front, but only saw Lyssa chatting up a man in his mid-forties over a hydrangea. Turning to check the office, a light scuffling from behind the workbench caught my attention. “Gates?”
“Here—Sorry!” She popped up from where she had been sitting on the floor. Her eyes were large and bewildered as she held up a book.
“What’s this?”
“What’s that?”
We both spoke at the same time. Gates’ eyes shifted, and then looked at the door to the front, and she gestured me over to the other side of the workbench.
“I was just looking for some gloves to do the cactuses, and I knocked over a stack of the empty plastic containers, and it fell by the wall back here, and there’s all this stuff…”
Gates stared at me in consternation as I shrugged. Kendra had been a flake and a slob, and Lyssa was only a little better. There were strange things all over the greenhouse grounds.
“Annie, I think your aunt was involved in the dark arts.”
I snorted a laugh, but Gates didn’t crack a smile. She flicked open the book and pointed to a passage inside.
…to summon a demon: a name, a purpose, and an offering. Three candles, recommended black, but blue also works. Don’t bother with red. Incense helps, both with relaxation and hiding the smell. Copy the sigil below and say the incantation…
My jaw fell open a little as I looked back at Gates.
She pointed to the place where she had found the book, in one of the few real walls inside the greenhouse, where she had moved an old piece of wood lattice to get at the pots that had fallen behind. Someone had cut into the wall, revealing a set of little shelves hidden behind the workbench. They were stocked with books, little vials, some candles, and small boxes.
And there, in the middle of all of it, was a human skull.
Chapter 2
I stood there, frozen, staring at the fleshless human face. And finally, Gates laughed.
“Your aunt was mental, wasn’t she?” She bent down and picked up the skull in one hand. “This is fake, Annie. It has to be. Breathe.”
“Holy crap…” I grabbed the book from her, thumbing through page after page of rough paper with handwritten notes and drawings, sewn-in plant cuttings and hair, and wax seals every so often. I fell to my knees and grabbed another book, and another, reading incantations and spells that Kendra had made up over the years. In shock, I turned back around to see Gates’ laughing eyes.
“Too bad she bit the dust. She could have cursed Jennifer for you.”
Horrified, I shook my head. But Gates only smiled and picked up another book.
“I’m still joking, Annie.” Her eyes scanned a page. “But I mean…good god…” She raised a hand to her mouth as she gave me a mocking nod. “Gods, right? I don’t want to insult your family’s religion or anything.”
I closed the book in my hands and swatted her on the arm with it. “This isn’t funny! I always knew she was eccentric, but if she was actually certified crazy, I feel bad for calling her crazy! I mean, someone should have gotten her some help, or something!”
Gates looked confused as she stared down at all of the books I had pulled out. “Were all of those in there before?”
“Yeah…” I looked down at the stack in my lap. They were behind the skull.”
“Annie?”
I smacked my head on the underside of the heavy wood workbench as I jumped, and then shot to my feet to face Lyssa.
“What are you doing?”
Gates stood up next to me, much more gracefully. “We’re picking up cow shit. By hand.”
I nodded, licking my lips and raising my eyebrows as I gave Gates a look. “Fertilizer. She knocked over a bag of fertilizer, and—”
“Whatever.” Lyssa shook her head, furrowing her brow. “Annie I need you to water N through Z tonight before you leave, but then you’re done, okay?”
“Yup,” I squeaked. The plants outside were divided by annuals and perennials, and then alphabetically. N through Z usually got a little dry in the afternoons, because A through M had the good side of the yard with just enough shade.
“Yup,” Lyssa echoed, giving me a sidelong glance as she slipped back out to the front. “Weirdos…”
As soon as the door clicked shut, Gates dove back under the bench, haphazardly grabbing for her book bag and then stuffing as many tomes as she could into it.
“Gates—wait! What are you doing?!”
“Okay…” She gave me a crooked smile as she replaced the wood lattice and re-scattered some dirt and dried plant bits to make everything look undisturbed. “You are going to go water the ass end of the alphabet, and I am going to plant the pricks. When we’re done, we’re going to my place to read all this crazy and forget the crappy things that happened today.”
I held out my hands and shook my head, but Gates looked so excited, I didn’t want to put a damper on her fun. “…fine.”
I went and watered the plants. By the time I was done, Gates had loaded the car, and she sat waiting in the passenger seat, dutifully pouring over one of the spell diaries. Still shaking my head, I pulled off my green uniform apron and tossed it in the back seat, and we drove to her house.
~~~~~~~~~
Gates lived in a comfortable little house with her mother and two brothers on a street where all the houses were single-story and had car-ports instead of garages. They were all well-kept, because Bellmoral was solidly middle class, but Gates lived on the side of town with the older, more historical dwellings that had mature trees and plumbing problems. My parents’ house was in the newer development on the opposite side of town, where the trees were a little shorter and the plumbing worked great, but houses were likely to have bad foundations due to shoddy work by the homebuilding company. The company had declared bankruptcy and gone out of business during the recession, so the problems with tilting walls and flooding basements were a common gripe whenever someone went to buy or sell.
Sitting in her cramped bedroom, which made me feel as if we had crawled inside her locker, we each took to pouring over my aunt Kendra’s crazy scribbles. Gates was sitting on her bed, and I was on the beanbag chair. Separated by a large pile of dirty laundry and old comic books, we each read a spell book as classic rock played a little too loudly over the radio, drowning out the sound of her two younger brothers’ techno music pounding through the adjoining wall.
But even as interesting as the ranting of a mad woman was, I found my mind wandering, because I did like Vince. I wasn’t head over heels or anything, but I had always envisioned us going on a date or two when we got to college, even if it was only because I was the only person he knew in town and he missed home. Maybe we would get closer, and get an apartment together, and…
I shook my head. It was like she had put a crush in my mind where none had existed before.
I looked over at Gates. She peered over the edge of the leather-bound book she was reading. It had a tooled cover that was fancier than the others, and didn’t look nearly as beat up.
“It’s…nothing.” I sighed.
“It’s Jennifer,” Gates said, grabbing a sticky note from under her pillow—or maybe any of the nearby piles of stuff—and using it as a bookmark. “Don’t worry. I have a plan.”
The neon orange of the sticky note caught my eye, and I looked down at the small stack of books sitting by her thigh. At least five more spots were bookmarked.
“A plan?” I asked, not feeling any better. Any plan that didn’t include a complete life-ectomy wasn’t going to fix anything. Jennifer had it out for me now, and she would find something to make fun of. If I was the coolest person on the planet, she would still mock me for it. “What are you marking? The extra crazy?”
“The curses.”
“The…” I faltered. Whatever I had expected Gates to say, that wasn’t it. “Curses? God, Gates—”
Gates waved a hand and shook her head to cut me off as she brought the book over. “Look—your aunt was a nutter. I’m not saying we actually curse her, but this stuff did something for her, obviously, or she wouldn’t have written it. It was probably, like, therapeutic for her. I’m just saying, let it be therapeutic for you, Annie.” She opened the book in front of my face, and I tried not to be turned off by the words Boils and Warts scrawled extra large and underlined at the top of the page. “All of the stuff for these curses is in the greenhouse, or else it’s on those shelves. I’m sure of it. Lyssa has that thing with her kid tomorrow night, right?”
I rolled my eyes before looking her in the eye. I was going to lose this one, and I already knew it.
“We’re out of there before eight,” I conceded.
Gates’ wide grin reminded me of the skull hiding in the greenhouse wall as she gave me a shove. “That’s what I’m talking about!”
~~~~~~~~~
The next day, I hoped for rain, both to negate the need for watering and to cancel Gates’ crazy plan, but the night couldn’t have been clearer or nicer.
I felt a little ridiculous standing over the giant pentagram that we had drawn in the middle of the garden, trying to read my dead aunt’s old journals. Per instructions somewhere in one of the books, I had bathed myself fresh before coming, and dressed in clean clothes. I had even stripped in the office and donned a clean bath robe to adhere to some sort of standard regarding the freedom of airflow and communion with the natural world.
I still wasn’t sure she had read any of it correctly.
“She wasn’t exactly procedural, was she?” I asked, flicking back and forth over the same four pages and trying to figure out what I was doing with the orange buds called for in the curse I was working.
“No.” Gates said, pulling the belt on her own hot pink fluffy bathrobe tighter again. “It’s weird, you know? I found places where a sentence ends in one book, and it picks up in another, but it’s like she left stuff out on purpose. You’ve got to really know these books to make any sense of it.”
“How many did you read?”
“I had Hendal for a block period today,” she said. “You know, the giving up, and the movie…”
“Right.” I turned and paced away, still toying with the sprig of blossoms in my hand.
The things called for in the spells weren’t that strange, for the most part, and neither were the things we were doing with them. Passing an oak branch through the smoke of blue candles. Painting river stones with rose petals dipped in stagnant water. Collecting dogwood thorns in a satchel and burning it. Some called for stranger things, like marigolds planted during the waning moon, cat’s tears, or quartz gathered during war time…and we either didn’t have them or couldn’t get them.
A few of the spells, and especially the curses, called for things beyond anyone’s reach. Dragon’s blood. Heart strings. The soul of a tree.
The evening had begun with an air of excited anticipation, but as time went on and nothing happened, it kind of puttered into silliness. I hadn’t expected much, but anything would have been nice. There weren’t any lights or puffs of magical smoke. The plants stayed plants and the candles never so much as gave an ethereal flicker.
“Did it say anywhere what I’m supposed to be doing with this?” I finally asked.
Gates paused, holding her robe shut as she stood to look at the book with me. “Are you on the balding curse or the one that’s supposed to give her endless diarrhea?”
“The one to repel love,” I said. I had skipped the diarrhea curse; no one deserved that.
“Oh, no, we can’t do that one,” Gates sighed, resuming her seat on the nearby stump of an old evergreen. She looked wistfully up at the giant, glowing taco sign of our business neighbor. “It’s unfinished, unless it’s in another book somewhere. Do you want to split some nachos or something? The smell is driving me insane.”
“In a bathrobe?” I asked her, glancing over the fence.
“Seriously. It’s almost midnight, Annie, do you think they get any normal people asking for nachos at this hour? We’re going to fit right in. Don’t ask, don’t tell.”
I gasped. I knew that we were pushing it when it got dark, but I only thought it was ten. I grabbed my cell phone from my bag and it lit to life. “Crap, Gates, we’ve got to go…”
“No—wait!” She jumped back down and her robe almost flew open, but she caught it just in time. Pulling another book from the stack—the one with the leather cover—she opened to the sticky note. “I wanted to save this one for last!”
Suddenly feeling exhausted, I read the title and description.
Charlie
He’ll do anything for a lock of hair.
“Charlie?” I asked in confusion.
Gates’ eyes lit up as a car drove down the main road. Things slowly hummed back to silence as it passed us. “He’s a sort of demon butler, from what I gather. There’s all sorts of notes in her columns after a certain date about ‘Charlie corrected this’ or ‘C said to use this instead of that’ for an added effect.”
I scoffed. “A demon? Get real.”
“Your crazy aunt!” Gates threw her hands up. “Just saying, you could use someone to watch your back. Let your aunt’s imaginary friend watch your back, Annie.”
I looked back down at the description. It said he was smart and loyal, and very obedient. He sounded like a dog.
Even if he was imaginary, I could use the extra confidence. Gates was already fishing for the relevant spell in another book.
“A name, a purpose, and an offering,” she repeated. “Get the blue candles.”
Still rolling my eyes, I went to the box of candles with a little grin and pulled out the blue ones, the sigil, and the pencil and paper as she read them off her sheet of notes. We took a break and went to get some fast food tacos from the joint next door, and laughed at the way the clerk had looked at us. Then we set up the area to summon “Charlie,” my dead aunt’s imaginary best friend.
“Okay…” Gates laughed, sipping the extra large soda in her tiny right hand. “You need to open your mind to the universe and form a mental image, and call Charlie by name.”
“A mental image of what?” I asked with my own straw still in my mouth. I blew out the match I had used to light the candles.
“Uh…” Gates flicked a few pages, reading. “Something gold.”
“Seriously?” I walked over to read the note over her shoulder. “Something gold? That’s all she wrote… open your mind and think of something gold, and then call Charlie?”
Gates slurped her drink and nodded.
I went back into the pentagram, and kneeled next to the little boulder we had turned into an altar for the candles and the incense. If conjuring demons was really so easy, it was a wonder that half the world didn’t have a personal demon assistant.
Taking a deep, melodramatic breath, I shook out my shou
lders to relax and focused on the first gold object that came to my mind; it was my mother’s golden locket, which held a picture of her and her sister when they were little girls. She had been wearing it when she passed, and my dad had tried to give it to her sister—our other aunt, Mary—but Mary had said that my mom had intended to give it to me. Even years after the car accident that had taken my mother’s life, that locket was sitting untouched on her dresser at home. It felt like grave robbery to call it mine. When I had it firmly imagined in my mind’s eye, I tried to call Charlie to me.
“Charlie…?” I said, trying not to laugh. “Ring ring, please pick up…?”
The wind picked up right then, catching the hem of my robe. I saved my dignity just in time, but all the candles had blown out.
“Hand me the matches again, would you…?”
I looked up when Gates didn’t answer. Her jaw had fallen open, and the drink that had been threatening to escape her grasp finally fell to the ground. I straightened up, pulling my robe tighter.
“Gates?” I put a hand on my hip and smiled. “Ha ha, very funny.”
Her eyes grew even wider, and the terrified screech that escaped her throat told me she wasn’t joking. I spun around just in time to see the dark outline of a man reaching out toward me. I screamed as I ran to the edge of the circle.
I tripped on a rock, and the bulb in the nearby streetlamp exploded in a shower of sparks and glass. Gates caught me and we tumbled to the ground together in a pile of cold sweat and frayed nerves, both of us trying to scramble away and look back at the man at the same time.
