Spellbinders Collection

by Molly Cochran

  "Just picked it up, you know. Typical Maine house, guns tucked away everywhere."

  "Uh-uh. I sanitized the place when the kids moved in. Come up with another one."

  "Okay, so I picked the lock on the gun room. Sue me."

  "Where'd you learn that trick? Talking with your brother through that Dragon pendant?"

  "Nope. Roommate in college."

  Alice decided she didn't want to ask. "I always wondered why Lainie wanted another dose of Morgan genes in the family. Maybe she was right, after all."

  She checked the safety, pulled out a handkerchief and wiped the pistol for prints, and set it down on the bookshelf next to the fireplace. "This doesn't leave the parlor until we can dump it someplace safe."

  Caroline's eyes narrowed. "Curiouser and curioser. We get out of this alive, I want to hear that story. Meanwhile, what are you planning to carry? I assume you aren't relying on Satyagraha and ahimsa?"

  "Moral force only works against moral people. No, I'm going to kill a man. If he doesn't kill me first, that is. And I think the best weapons for the job are tucked away back here." She pressed a board at the end of the bookcase and one of the panels over the fireplace shifted to show a line of pale varnish. Hooking a fingernail into the edge, she swung the panel out, reached into the darkness behind the chimney, and pulled out a flat mahogany box. It was about as big as a newspaper folded in half and as deep as her palm, and she'd forgotten how heavy the bastard was. She set it on the mantel and shoved that felonious automatic and spare magazines back into the shadows before closing the panel. Let the dead past hide its own dead for a while.

  Caroline was dripping questions all over the floor, but they wouldn't stain the carpet. She could wait. Alice slung the satchel over her shoulder, hefted the box in both hands, and marched back out through the centuries to find a place that believed in technology more advanced than the Neolithic. The parlor still thought in terms of flint axes.

  She carried the box into the kitchen and set it on the table, then slid the catches aside and opened the box, revealing two antique pistols in a fitted green velvet case. A powder flask, box of caps, and other accessories filled in the space around the blued steel and walnut of the weapons. Percussion dueling pistols they were, made in London by one of the finest gunsmiths of any age, and they had been a gift from some ancestral Morgan for the defense of the House and the Woman of that day.

  Probably stolen, but what the hey, who asks? They'd been kept near the spring for so long they'd become ritual weapons like some king's jeweled mace, part of the Haskell regalia. Still, like that mace, they were quite capable of killing. In fact, especially capable, when you were dealing with certain enemies.

  She fitted a cap to the nipple of one pistol, cocked the hammer, and snapped it with a satisfactory bang. A second cap, with a light charge of powder, dried out the chamber and proved the action. Alice felt the house breathe that sharp sulfurous powder smoke deep into its wood and smile like a shark. It wanted blood. Caroline sat quietly, watching, as Alice selected a tarnished ball of silver and a second of carved apple wood from the House orchard, charged the pistol with a full load of powder and both balls, and rammed the top wad home.

  "Werewolves and vampires, sterling silver bullets and a stake through the heart," Alice explained. "Old family custom. They'll also kill a man quite nicely. The wood shatters on impact and spreads out, sort of like a grenade."

  She repeated the ritual with the other pistol, set both hammers at half cock, and then tucked them into their sleeves in the beaded satchel. Aunt Jean never had explained what the witches had carried in those places, before they knew of firearms. Maybe those flint hatchets. She checked the bottom of the satchel to make sure that both bundles were ready — the ancient one of herbs and strange stones and bear claws, and the modern one with her mini-EMT kit. Strangely, the house hadn't complained about that change.

  She stood up and waved Caroline out. "Let's get this show on the road. You've got everything set up with Gary?"

  "Yeah. The Dragon makes a really neat radio. She added some ideas of her own."

  "Okay. You go in the back door, I go in the front door. We meet in the middle. There's going to be shooting and probably cops. Ignore them. Disappear. You don't have to be seen if you don't want to be. Don't. Stop. For. Any. Thing!"

  Caroline nodded. She hugged her aunt, a fierce squeeze that admitted she was afraid they'd never meet again. About time to introduce that kid to spirit talking, Alice thought. Old Aunt Molly could calm her down. Blowing up that British sloop wasn't any picnic.

  Meanwhile, "that kid" had opened the side door. But she wasn't leaving. A chill seized Alice's heart. Had the brujo brought the battle to her? No. Caroline was staring down at her feet, with a bemused expression on her face. Alice followed her gaze down to the granite steps. A tiny bundle of fur stared back at her.

  "Me!"

  Alice squatted, shaking her head. She measured the calico kitten with her eyes. The little beast must have been weaned yesterday. If she had been weaned at all, that is.

  "No. Uh-uh. You're too young. You just trot back to the union hall and tell them to send out a girl who's ready to work."

  "Miaowr!" The kitten switched her stub of a tail in an imitation of feline rage.

  "Look, you little devil, this job killed the last queen who held it. All nine lives. Didn't they tell you that there's a war on?"

  "Me!"

  Then the kitten hopped to Alice's knee and climbed the vest's beadwork to her shoulder. A tiny nose shoved into her ear, and Alice nabbed the beast by the scruff of its neck.

  "That tickles!" She hung the kitten in front of her nose and studied it. The kitten studied back. "This place has some special rules. You don't eat the other residents, understand? You can play with the mice and the crickets, but you can't eat them. You can't even play with the bats. They break too easily."

  The kitten gazed back at her, all innocence. Well, the House had plenty of experience in training cats. Tears blurred Alice's eyes as relief flooded into her. Apparently, she didn't have to solve every problem by herself. The House had forgiven her. The spirits had forgiven her. She took a deep breath and swallowed the inevitable.

  "Are you old enough to have figured out your name?"

  She blinked at the answer in her head. "Oh, ye gods and goddesses. Little imp, you're trying to fit a size ten ego into a size one body." She looked up at her niece. "Caroline, meet Atropos. Atropos, meet Caroline."

  "Mer!" "Pleased to meet you."

  Caroline seemed vastly amused by the whole scene. Well, that might help her to face what was coming. Alice stood up and tucked the kitten into the palm of her left hand. It weighed next to nothing. The third Fate, Atropos, she who cuts the thread of life, she who could not be turned. Oh, ye gods and goddesses!

  She stepped back into the kitchen, refilled Dixie's water dish, and shook out an estimated week's supply of dried cat-food into the pan. The cat nibbled daintily at the one and lapped at the other before looking around. Alice puzzled over that for a moment, then pulled out Dixie's despised litter box from the closet and refilled it with fresh litter. The kitten jumped in and scratched around, after making it smell right.

  So now the House had a defender again. A weight lifted from Alice's shoulders. She hadn't realized how much she'd feared leaving the place alone. Now she could go into battle with a clear conscience.

  She did not lock the door behind her. There was too much chance that one of Caroline's sisters or even a cousin would have to be the next woman to open it.

  At least Kate was safely out of things, across cold salt water that shorted out most spells. The spring gave some very nasty pictures of what could happen if the big ox got caught in the crossfire.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Kate thought she was going mad. Alice's voice kept forcing itself into her brain and she hummed along or sang with it under her breath as she worked. That wasn't the problem. She usually had some tune stuck in her head afte
r visiting Alice, because Alice ran that megawatt stereo like some junkies mainlined heroin.

  But mirrors should stay mirrors, reflecting the rooms around them and the people looking into them. Kate had been working in one bathroom of Keith Bauer's island hideaway, replacing a faucet washer on a Victorian sink, when she looked up straight into Alice's face in the mirror. Except it wasn't Alice. It was some ancestral Haskell in ceremonial beads holding a muzzle-loading pistol across her chest like an antique photo of Sitting Bull. Her face was set in that grim rigidity you saw in early photos, where the subject had to hold a pose for fifteen minutes in a head-brace.

  Then the hallucination had faded and Kate stared into her own face. It couldn't have been an old photo remembered, because the scene was in color instead of the coppery silver of an antique Daguerreotype. Her eyes were playing tricks on her.

  Okay. She could live with that. So she got on with her work, getting the place ready for the few weeks a hard-nose corporate shyster could afford to relax away from phones and secretaries and instant access to his files. Then she'd been rewiring a floor lamp in the parlor because the mice had gotten at the cord over the winter and the bare wires had popped a fuse when she turned the power back on. The mantle-piece was one of those ornate Victorian things, white columns and carved rose garlands and an oval mirror with beveled edges crowned by a Grecian urn, and she'd glanced into it to see Alice striding through the fog and drizzle with a face like an avenging angel.

  Kate had grabbed the medicine bag hanging around her neck, comparing the beadwork on it with the outfit her friend was wearing. The vision had strengthened and zoomed like a movie shot until patterned flowers filled the mirror. They matched the poke in her hand. Then Kate blinked and the mirror was a mirror once again.

  Mirrors were uncanny things at the best of times. She'd taken the lamp into the kitchen and finished her chore at the counter, breathing deeply and calming her hands before she could handle a screwdriver without gouging bright scratches into the antique brass.

  Now she was working outside in the cold fog, breath condensing under her nose, swearing at the mud. She really should have started in on the dining room, replacing a pushbutton light switch that worked only half the time and maybe rewiring the chandelier before it shorted out and burned the old place flat. She'd looked into the room and then retreated, her shoulder blades twitching like somebody had dumped an ice cube down her shirt. The sideboard was another one of those Victorian monstrosities — age-darkened oak and a mirror behind the shelf to show off both sides of your crystal and silver.

  There weren't any mirrors out in the rustic gardens that led down to the bay.

  She hoisted another stone back into place, rebuilding a garden wall that the freeze and thaw of fifty winters had finally torn apart. Dry-stone work of quarried granite held a bed of blueberry bushes and ferns against the slope above a path, and it was really a landscaping job that she should sub out to another crew. But that would be a minimum of half a grand, straight out of her pocket. For that kind of money, she could put on her gardening gloves.

  Or just do without. The gloves slipped, muddy with the drizzle, and she tossed them to one side. She grabbed the next chunk of stone. It felt gritty, rough and cold and heavy, and images flooded out of it.

  Fear and musty smells and darkness. She was trapped, but she couldn't give in to panic because Mouse was depending on her. She hugged her sister close, and whispered in her ear. "Remember what Aunt Alice taught us. People see what they expect to see. Think like a window. Think of the rock behind you. If they see a pattern that looks like the wall, they see the wall. Those African lizards do it. So can we."

  Kate dropped the stone, narrowly missing her foot.

  "Aunt Alice." Everybody in town called Alice Haskell "Aunt Alice," even blue-haired old biddies twice her age. That was the Emily-Post-approved etiquette for addressing the Haskell Witch.

  "Mouse?" Kate had heard that nickname. Where? A small child, quick and inquisitive, you could almost see the bright eyes and twitching nose of a deer mouse poking through the leaves under a beech tree, looking for nuts. She'd been playing in front of a big house.

  Kate stepped backwards inside her memory, widening the view. She knew buildings better than she knew people, for all that she'd lived in Stonefort for forty years. When she thought of names, she thought of houses, like she thought of the House whenever Alice crossed her mind.

  There were the Doric columns of the Frederick place, sea-captains who brought a thirst for Boston culture to the ass-end of Maine as a back-haul load for fragrant pine lumber and Stonefort granite shipped upwind to Massachusetts. There was the fake Tudor half-timber of the Pratt mansion, with dry-rot in the beam ends and a hole she'd had to patch in the eaves where squirrels had decided to make their home. The elaborate scroll-saw fretwork of the Johnson's Gothic Revival bed-and-breakfast right off the village green, that had taken her three weeks to scrape and paint. What house stood behind "Mouse" in her memories?

  Not a house — a stone tower. "Mouse" was Peggy Morgan. She'd been playing tag with her brother and sister, dodging irreverently around the age-worn markers in the Morgan graveyard while Kate repointed the masonry on one of the crypts. Both Peggy and Ellen were staying with Alice. Had been staying with Alice, that is, a major reason why Kate couldn't go anywhere near the House.

  Kate reached out towards the stone and then jerked her hand back. Why would Ellen Morgan's thoughts be trapped in cold pink granite? She was going mad.

  Lightning flashed in the fog, impossible on such a still day. Kate blinked dazzle out of her eyes and waited for the thunderclap, or maybe the Voice of God. It never came. Instead, she heard the slow wash of waves down by the shore, the drip of water off the leaves, gulls crying in the gray fog against the distant grunt of the foghorn on Egg Rock. The world seemed sharp and clear and clean, as if she could cut herself on the damp spruce smell and the earthy cinnamon of the blueberry bushes. The island gripped her senses. She was going mad.

  Or she was caught by magic. She wiped her hands on her jeans and clutched the beaded poke again, seeking the calm it offered. Twenty years, thirty years, she'd been like Lew Lewis. In Denial. "No, I'm not an alcoholic." "No, the world is scientific and rational. Magic doesn't exist."

  Kate squatted in the drizzle, her knees too weak to hold her. Something seemed to pull the soul out of her and reshape it before forcing it back into her body. Saul on the road to Damascus, falling on his face before the glory of the Lord: "Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?" At least she'd been spared the three days of blindness. Shivers ran down her spine and she squeezed the bag in her hands.

  "Magic doesn't exist. Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live."

  Two mutually exclusive ideas, now that she thought about them and brought them together. If magic didn't exist, the things Alice did were a harmless eccentricity. Another way the rich folks played with their money, like Tom Pratt and his antique cars.

  Okay, if the Bible said using magic justified the death penalty, somebody sure thought it was real. But then you got into translation problems. Kate remembered that one. "Witch" should have been read as "poisoner" in the original Hebrew. And as far as she knew, no Haskell Witch had ever poisoned anybody. They tended to be more direct than that. Shot a few, blew them up, burned them alive, yes. Quibble, quibble, quibble.

  Still, every case Kate knew about had been self-defense or the defense of someone else. If outside authorities had poked their noses into Stonefort business, the community always closed ranks around their Witch. "The bastard needed killing," was the common attitude.

  She held the medicine bag in one hand and reached out to the stone with the other. Her hands trembled and she found it hard to breathe. Magic exists. It can be good or evil, just like that chunk of granite can be part of a garden wall or a weapon crushing someone's skull. Magic is a tool. I could kill someone with almost any tool in my truck. That doesn't make the tools evil.

  It's just a chunk of stone,
nothing magic about it. Only a chunk of stone like any other. But her mason's brain wouldn't let that pass. It wasn't just a chunk of stone. It was a chunk of quarried pink granite, imported to this island of finer-grained gray stone. It was the same kind of stone that underlay Morgan Point and Pratt's Neck, Stonefort granite from those abandoned quarries the kids used for beer parties and back-seat make-out passion pits. It remembered. It still touched its home. Things that had once been in contact remained in contact. And Alice said that Kate could talk to wood and stone . . . .

  She ran her fingers over it nervously, expecting a spark to seize her muscles. It was cold and rough and slippery-wet with lichen under the day of fog and rain. Cold. Fear and musty smells and darkness. Back in Ellen Morgan's thoughts, Kate ran through the scene. She didn't drop the stone this time, and Mouse answered in the darkness. "Those men want to hurt us. You heard them talking, the things they said to that little man. The one who scares them so much."

  Kate saw the "little man" in Ellen's mind. Antonio. She broke loose from the grip of the stone, shivering with the images she'd just swallowed. She'd let Antonio into the Haskell house, and this was what happened. This was what was happening now, what she had caused.

  No. If the stone had shown her the scene twice, it couldn't be happening now. Now only happened once. What she saw had to be memory or foresight.

  If it was foresight, she could try to stop it.

  She stood up and fumbled for a cigarette. Damn good thing she was outside — client houses were all "No-Smoking" zones. You could smell cigarette smoke for months after the dirty deed. Funny, the trendy styles in vice. Smoking used to be perfectly acceptable but you couldn't cuss in public. Kate remembered Alice's Aunt Jean. The old woman would box your ears if you even said "darn," but she'd smoked like a chimney. She'd lived to be 93 or so. So much for established medical mythology.