“I understand the commercial considerations, but I’m a little worried about the artistic integrity of using subliminal messages. I mean, ‘Coke adds life’ is one thing, but ‘In Royce we trust?’”
“Stars are made, not born, Demps. You’ll understand, once you reach the inner circle.”
“I don’t see why I’m wasting my time in Parson’s Ford when—”
“Today Parson’s Ford, tomorrow the world.” Irwin Goldmyer let out a devious cackle, as if his 10 percent of the world was practically in the bank.
“All right, Mr. Goldmyer—”
“Ir.”
“All right, Ir. I’ll keep pushing product here and building an audience.”
“The devil’s in the details, Demps, and you leave the details to me.”
“Yes, sir, Ir.”
“Who’s that?” Cindy said, startling him. She was holding a red blouse and bell-bottom jeans.
He secretly clicked the button to kill the connection and pretended like he was still talking to someone. “And you tell Mr. Spielberg I expect total artistic control,” Dempsey said into the cell phone, and then he made a big show of flipping it closed. “These Hollywood types,” he added casually.
“Wow. Have you ever met Robert Pattinson?”
“You remember Royce, the one I was telling you about?”
“The actor?”
“Once you see him in action, you’ll forget all the rest. Just watch the videos I gave you, okay?”
“As soon as I try these on,” she said, holding up the clothes.
“Fine. I’ve been talking to some very, very, very well-placed people, and they like the sound of you.”
“The sound of me?”
“As an idea. In the room.”
She nodded and glanced toward the dressing room.
He pointed at her as if he were sighting down the barrel of a pistol. “We’ll talk.”
He sauntered out of Old Navy like a star on the rise, a dude with dreams, a man with an agent. Even the dreary gray tiles of the Parson’s Ford Mall, and the algae-scummed fountain in the center court with its broken waterspout, and the “For Rent” signs in the empty storefronts couldn’t get him down.
He was walking past Gamestop when he saw his gang, gathered around a video screen where Snake was thumbing the controls.
Only a day until Halloween and these clowns are wasting time on interactive media?
Dempsey swept into the store and clapped his hands. “Okay, people, what have you done for me lately?”
They turned in unison, eyes glazed. “In Royce we trust,” they said.
“It’s the big push,” he said. “I just got off the phone with some very, very, very well-placed people—”
“When do we get to meet Royce?” Willard said.
“He’s a busy man. You have to get his publicist, and that means dealing with his publicist’s agent, and—”
“Royce,” Snake said.
Dempsey playfully slapped him on the shoulder. “I know, and he appreciates it, let me tell you. Come Halloween—”
“Halloween,” they said in unison.
“Yes. Come Halloween , you’ll get to find out for yourself. But first we need to get my movies into every house in town. That’s going to take some word of mouth.”
“Royce,” Lacey said.
“Good. You’re catching on. Come by my apartment and pick up some more tapes. Snake, you hit the library—”
“They took away my library card.”
“You’re checking in, not checking out. Sneak a few copies into the video section. Lacey?”
“Royce.”
“These well-placed people, they like the sound of you. See if you can get your drama teacher to show The Bloodening to the class. Tell him it’s an example of post-modern cinema verite.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Neither does he, but it sounds impressive. And Willard?”
“Royce,” he said.
“Did you take Cindy Summerhill to the prom last year?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you score?”
Willard blushed a little. “I spilled Dr. Pepper on her dress.”
Dempsey nodded. “I figured as much. But you know where she lives, right?”
“Highland Drive, where all the big houses are.”
“I got a job for you.”
After the group disbanded, mumbling “In Royce we trust,” Dempsey got in his Prius and drove home. The plan was going perfectly, but he wasn’t quite sure what to do about Crystal. The flirting had softened her up a little, but she was a little too loyal to that doofus Pettigrew. And when Dempsey had tried to bring Pettigrew over to the dark side with a chance at stardom, the guy seemed too worried about what would happen to his tow truck if he had to fly to Hollywood.
Luckily, Minerva Aldridge would be in no position to stop them. Royce had seen to that, sneaking into her trailer and swapping out her silky swallowwort elixir with terrier pee. When she tried to concoct a formula to close all the Orifices on Halloween night, she’d actually be making them wider. His agent said “Royce and the entire entourage” would be coming through, and then the cast party would begin.
Dempsey wasn’t sure what “the entire entourage” included, picturing hairdressers, personal trainers, and a voice coach, but he figured there was plenty of room on the Royce train.
And the director would be engineer. And the Oscar for Best Picture goes to…Dempsey Van Heusen!
The grin was still frozen on his face when someone behind him blew a car horn. He found himself in the parking lot of his apartment complex, idling with the car in “Park.” He waved at the person behind him—Pushy jerk, just wait until the entourage gets here—and eased into a spot.
He went into his apartment and opened the closet that held his personal inventory of videotapes. He took out a copy of The Cheesening, found an adhesive address label, and stuck it over the title on the side of the tape.
With a black Sharpie, he wrote, “The Best of Julie Andrews.”
Then he went upstairs and leaned the videotape against the door to Mrs. Vickers’ apartment. He would have hit the doorbell in a classic “Ding dong ditch,” but he was soon to be world famous. She’d be telling the local papers about the polite boy downstairs who worked so hard on his picture-making.
She might even do it without inadvertently saying “Royce.”
He was still smiling long after he’d returned to his apartment.
Chapter 21
The bathroom smelled of Comet and that mildewed, under-the-sink funk. The previous night’s smoke still lingered in the background like a ghost’s body odor.
“You got boy trouble?” Momma asked Crystal, arranging the rows of green glass bottles.
Crystal groaned inwardly. Here came The Talk, as if Momma knew the first thing about either boys or men. “Not any that I can’t handle.”
“Good, because you got other trouble.”
Does she know about Bone? Crystal had kept the secret because necromancy was against the family code. Plus it was plain bad business.
Momma had once tracked down an old lover, and even after finding out he was dead, she couldn’t resist. Three potions, a séance, and a literal blind date later, she’d had a visit from a filthy, long-bearded wino in an Elmer Fudd cap. Crystal never knew what the visitor said, but shortly after, Momma had given a lecture on never raising the dead.
“I know, I know,” Crystal said, feeling the shield slide up a little. “I have to help stand guard on Halloween. At the same time I have to go to the lame Summerhill party. And probably write a research paper, too. Want me to add ‘Clean the bathtub’ to the list?”
“You’re of age, Crystal.”
“That’s what you said when I had my first period.”
“That made you a lady. Now you’re a woman.”
“You don’t get to be a lady in a trailer park.”
Momma’s face drew in on itself and tiny bats fluttered
in Crystal’s stomach. Low blow. It’s not her fault we’re poor.
Momma thumbed the stopper on the Salamander Squirt, which Crystal had helped harvest during a Rocky Knob snow-melt spring. Momma gave a slight nod and rueful grin. “There’s an old story.”
Here we go…
“A toothless wizard was walking through the enchanted forest where men were hard at work, sawing and cutting trees for the king. His apprentice was at his side, taking in the destruction.”
Let me guess—he looked a lot like James Dean.
“Trees had been taken to stumps, as far as the eye could see. But one ugly, gnarly old tree still stood among them. And the old wizard asked one of the woodcutters, ‘Why did you leave that one?’ And the woodcutter answered back, ‘Too ugly and knotty. Ain’t worth dulling a blade over.’”
Crystal would have preferred something poignant, like they’d teach in school on Earth Day. Maybe that the woodcutters had seen the environmental consequences of their actions and decided to embrace a more sustainable world and take a conservation tax credit.
“The wizard took his apprentice over to the tree,” Momma continued. “Up close, they could see the tree had survived fire, lightning, blight, and a million chewy little chipmunks. The wizard rapped on the trunk with his staff and said to the apprentice, ‘Be more like this tree. The tall, proud ones got took. This one is lowly and worthless. If you don’t get noticed, you can work your magic in peace.’”
“That’s real heart-warming, Momma,” Crystal said. “Now, if I were a dogwood, that might mean something.”
Momma yanked the cork stopper out with her teeth. After clearing her mouth, she said, “The point is you’re an Aldridge and I’m an Aldridge, and this is the way the Aldridges have been since we come to the Blue Ridge Mountains. Maybe even before then, on back to the King Henries, maybe even the Druid Priests. If I conjured up a million dollars, people would talk. And when they talk, they stick their noses where they don’t belong.”
Momma took a deep sniff of the Salamander Squirt. “Ah, fresh as February in the high granite.”
“I don’t want to be real rich,” Crystal said. “I’d settle for a new iPad and a car that runs, and maybe a winter wardrobe.”
Momma dolloped two drops into a glazed clay dish. “If wishes were horses, you’d need a bigger shovel. Now pay attention, this is important.”
Crystal glanced past the potion-making and into the mirror, where her own reflection pouted back at her. Am I pretty enough to be a movie star?
Not as pretty as Cindy Summerhill, but prettier than Bone. Yet Dempsey hadn’t asked her about starring in a picture. He’d gone to Pettigrew first. And Pettigrew was hunky, or at least tall, but not the kind that made most girls twist their necks on the sidewalk.
“Crystal,” Momma said. “Your turn.”
Crystal reached out for the tin of parched cloth, rumored to have come from a witch’s bonfire in Denmark. She didn’t know if any Celtic Aldridges had been burned at the stake, but she wouldn’t be surprised, given those glittering, ice-blue eyes that ran in the family. Momma called them “diamond eyes,” but that made them sound like somebody would want to pluck them out and sell them on the black market.
The parched cloth crumbled in her fingers. She rubbed her fingers together and the chaff floated into the dish and rested on top of the concoction. Salamander Squirt, parched cloth, oil of elderberry, and bloodroot were now mixed in the dish, and all that remained was the conjure spell.
Momma held out her hand and Crystal took it. In the olden days, when covens were more tolerated in the back country, a group of witches could hold hands and chant in a circle. But now it was only half a circle, and the bathroom was crowded, and Crystal didn’t trust the recipe.
Something about that cloth seemed a little off. Maybe the fibers were a little too coarse and pulpy.
But if she expressed any hesitation, Momma would start from scratch and another hour of her life would swirl down the drain. Pettigrew was due to come by and say he was sorry. She wasn’t sure if she’d accept his apology, or even sure that he’d done anything wrong, but an Aldridge had nothing if not stubborn pride.
Momma nodded and they chanted together:
“Mixy, mixy, in the dish,
Grant forsooth a favored wish.
When midnight spreads its starry wings
Bring to me the troubled things.”
“There,” Momma said in her normal, scratchy voice. She lit a candle and then caught a piece of flash paper afire. As she tossed the burning paper into the dish, Crystal realized why the parched cloth hadn’t felt like cloth at all. It had been coarse paper instead.
Too late.
The recipe sizzled and sputtered, then erupted in a beautiful green-and-blue blaze.
“Uh… Momma?”
Momma was gazing blankly into the fire and its flickering threw cerulean rainbows across her eyes. “Mmm?” she said absently.
“The parched cloth—”
“Come down the Appalachian Mountain chain in 1749, compliments of Daniel Utter and—”
“I think it was paper.”
Momma’s nose crinkled. “Nah, the only paper we have is a flyleaf from The Grand Grimoire that was smuggled out of Nazi Germany while Berlin was a-blazing.”
She rummaged in the medicine cabinet, raking through salves, ointments, and wads of clotted feathers that looked like dried owl vomit. “I could have sworn it was right here.”
“You locked the door, right?”
“I always lock the door.”
Of course she did. Crystal was the only teenager in Parson’s Ford who had to carry a key to her own bathroom. But she recalled the way Bone had turned into a spider and ascended through a hole in the ceiling. It was possible something had crawled up from the bathtub drain or—gross—swam up from the toilet. And there was that mysterious hitchhiker who had slipped in the night Royce Dean paid a visit.
Crystal pointed to the burning recipe, which was starting to sputter and throw off bright lime sparks. “So, what happens if that was paper instead of cloth?”
“You know that line about ‘troubled things’?”
“Yeah?”
“Make that ‘Underlings’ instead.”
“’Bring to me the Underlings?’ And I take it this isn’t good, right?”
The recipe sizzled and the concoction was now tarry. Momma put her finger to her nose, which Crystal thought was a harbinger of some warding spell, but instead she brushed away a flaky booger. “Hmmm. This hasn’t happened since….”
As Momma trailed off in memory, Crystal braced herself for a tale of Aunt Gertrude or the Utter twins. But Momma turned on the sink spigot instead.
“Never,” she said. “This has never happened.”
Crystal was horrified. “You’re just going to dump it down the drain?”
“Out of sight, out of mind.”
“What about the environment? What happens when seven-legged frogs turn up at Idlewild Pond?”
“We got more immediate worries. Like finding out who is getting in here and sabotaging the potions. And why.”
Crystal pretended to adjust her hair in the mirror and check an eyelash. The move wasn’t convincing.
“Crystal. There’s something you’re not telling me.”
Crystal shifted her gaze from the mirror to Momma. Mistake. She could never lie straight to Momma’s face. So she crossed her eyes a little. “I think it has to do with Royce.”
“That boy who showed up dead the other night and made a mess of the place?”
“That would be the one.”
“Is he sweet on you or something?”
“No, he’s all Bone’s—I mean, he’s just somebody Bonnie knew, back in grade school.”
“He looks familiar but I can’t quite place him. What’s his last name?”
Crystal didn’t have to lie this time. She changed the subject instead. “I don’t know, but he’s tied in with Dempsey. You know, that guy that makes
movies.”
“Wow, you’re really trying to make Pettigrew jealous, ain’t you?” Momma practically sparkled with a new-found respect. “That will rope him into tying the knot for sure.”
“I don’t want any knots, Momma. All I want is a GED and a good job and car that can get me to Oregon. A place where I never have to worry about spells or Orifices or Underlings, whatever they are.”
Momma dipped the oily concoction under the tap water and it immediately sent off a stinky hiss. Crystal wondered if the steam would turn her eyelashes into thorns, or maybe put a raspberry fever blister right in the middle of her bottom lip. Just what she needed for the big party. But the corrupt steam rose on up and dispersed, leaving drops of condensation on the mirror.
Momma knelt under the sink and searched for the cloth, bumping her head on the drain pipe. She muttered a curse that had no real mojo behind it, but probably some stray cat was just eaten by a trailer-park rat as a result.
“Now, where the heck is that cloth?” Momma said. “Somebody got no respect for family keepsakes.”
“Looks like this experiment is over, so I better go do my homework,” Crystal said. She hurried from the bathroom, leaving Momma crawling around and muttering, but at least her head was newt-free.
She closed her bedroom door. The Orifice was open on the wall, glistening with unwholesome dew. She went as close as she dared and whispered into it. “Bone!”
No answer, aside from some distant squirting rumbles. Crystal wondered how far she would get if she dove head-first into it. Was it a thin layer, like a donut, or would she have to crawl through miles of gooey darkness to reach Darkmeet?
It couldn’t be too deep, or those Lurken tentacles wouldn’t be able to reach out so far. She tried again, raising her voice as much as she dared. “Bone, get over here right now.”
Her cell bleeped and she picked it up, thinking Bone might have used an electronic voice, what the ghost-hunters called EVP’s, to communicate. Instead, it was Pettigrew.
“Whatcha doing?” he said, guarded.
“The usual.” Looking for dead folks, miscasting spells, waiting for the world to end. “You?”
“I was just thinking about you.”
“That’s sweet.”
October Girls: Crystal & Bone Page 16
