by Casey Lane
It must be someone else’s dog, I’d thought.
It seemed logical that since my grandmother had gotten the terrier here in Lost Cliff as a puppy, that puppy had come from a litter, and some of Coco’s siblings had also grown up in the area. Why hadn’t I stopped and tried calling her name, just to be sure? Why had I zoomed along, not even slowing? I blamed myself.
Of course, other questions needed answers. Why couldn’t my grandmother be bothered to keep track of her dog? She’d often let Coco out and forget about her for hours at a time. True, the terrier had never wandered far before now, content to lay on the porch while being neglected by her owner, but still, grandma should have known Coco getting lost was a real possibility. When the dog hadn’t come in the night before, why hadn’t my grandmother asked me for help? I would have hopped in the car immediately and whipped around the neighborhood searching. Had Lida not noticed her pet was missing?
The bigger, more terrifying question was what had hurt Coco like that? What did it look like? Sound like? Move like? Nothing natural, that much I knew. Plus, it had killed but not eaten. Why? I hoped it wasn’t because the thing enjoyed doing it. Worse, I couldn’t begin to predict what it would do next.
I’d known something was wrong in Lost Cliff for months. I could feel the darkness seeping up from the beach and out of the storm drains, its clammy tentacles snaking through the redwoods that ringed our North Coast town, a poisonous fog that could burn lips and scar souls. In December, at least twenty seagulls took up residence in the rafters of the town bandstand for three days, only they weren’t normal seagulls. Each bird sported a tiny cluster of bright red feathers that I swear looked like someone had used it for a voodoo doll, sticking a long needle in the center of its breast and drawing blood. Seagulls with red feathers? No one had ever heard of it.
In January, a child playing in the tide pools discovered a human toe tangled in a sea anemone. The little boy had been attracted to the gold ring on the toe that flashed in the water. It turned out the body part came from a woman who had drowned with six others when their boat overturned 30 miles north of us. Nothing else about her was missing. Marine scientists gave the odds of this tiny piece of her being discovered at all, let alone where it was found, as astronomical. Both the birds and the body part were bad omens, I could tell you that, but portending what?
Now, here we were in February, and I could feel that thing out there, lurking, stalking us, ready to make a hellacious mess of our lives. I had to do something.
For now, though, I had my grandmother to comfort.
Pluto turned off the highway and pulled the sleek SUV into my driveway. He turned off the engine, got out, and quietly went to retrieve Coco from the back.
My grandmother and I lived on the poor side of town, really several miles beyond that, deep in the gloom of the redwoods. It was a beautiful gloom, but still gloom, especially depressing in the winter. The closer you were to the beach, the richer you tended to be. The poorer you were, the farther inland you got stuck, living in continual shadow.
Our family home was a dilapidated version of the Greely Mansion, or a house close enough to be its ready-for-the-wrecking ball twin. Where the gray paint at Pluto's house was ever-fresh, thanks to regular maintenance, ours peeled and flaked with multi-colored layers stretching back to the 1800s. Mostly it was yellow, sort of a dull sunflower, a color my mother once insisted showed the sun was doing its best to shine on our lives, even though we got less than an hour of the stuff per day.
Grandma Lida came out onto the wraparound porch as we walked up to the base of the front steps with Coco. She’d left her walker inside and her shimmering white hair cascaded around her shoulders. Lida appeared decades younger than her years, not in the scary, plastic surgery way that actresses in their 80s employ to horrifying effect, but not in the natural sense either. This was magic, trumped up and applied with a heavy hand, makeup troweled on before a performance. I surmised the heavy hand was in Pluto’s honor.
For a split second it was as if I didn’t really live there. I felt like a stranger, or perhaps a distant neighbor coming to deliver grim news. That’s the way Lida looked at me, too. Like I didn’t belong and had never grown up in this house with her, or with my mom before her death. It was surreal and I wanted to cry.
“Mrs. Fairwell,” Pluto greeted her. He cradled the bundle reverently in his arms.
“Mr. Danielsen,” Lida said. My grandmother had known Pluto as long as I had but started calling him by his last name when he'd turned eighteen two years ago.
“It’s Coco,” I told her.
“Yes,” Lida said. “I can see.”
Since the dog’s body was totally concealed by the blanket, I didn’t know how she could, but she was a witch like my mother and me.
“Hit by a car?” Lida asked. You could tell in her voice, however, that she didn’t believe this. She knew something else had happened.
“No,” Pluto said.
“I’m sorry, grandma,” I said. It was then, when my gaze strayed to the carefully wrapped burden in Pluto's arms, that I started to lose it. She might not have been my dog, but she'd been there since I was eight, a sweet girl, just as much a part of my life as my grandmother's.
Lida glared down at me from the top of the steps, snapping me out of any possible hysterics. Our relationship had been problematic for some time. Still, from her expression, you'd think she blamed me personally. Did she know I’d seen Coco on the highway and not stopped?
“Thank you for bringing her home, Mr. Danielsen.”
“You’re welcome, ma’am,” Pluto said.
And like that, my grandmother turned and walked back into the house, the screen door with its elaborate wood scrollwork banging closed after her. It was the second time in the space of an hour someone had metaphorically slammed a door in my face.
Pluto heaved an uncharacteristically heavy sigh.
“I think we should bury her,” I said.
“Of course,” he said.
I picked the prettiest spot I could find in the yard, beneath the largest of the redwoods. It was an old-growth tree having miraculously escaped being cut down in the 19th century with so much of the forest around here. Because redwoods grow slowly, I wasn’t worried about the dog’s bones being pushed up out of the earth by one of the tree’s roots anytime soon.
I wanted to say a spell of protection over her grave so the thing that had slaughtered her couldn’t come back for a second bite, but with Pluto there, I couldn’t chance it. He didn’t know about me. No one in town did, to my everlasting relief. High school had been hell enough without that little tidbit as ammo for our school’s resident bullies. Looks-wise, I’m ready-made Goth, not that I make any attempt at it. My body is slight and more than a little gangly, my complexion the pale white of a calla lily, my hair black, straight, and too fine. I don’t wear a lot of makeup, but my green eyes and lashes are so dark sometimes people assume I do. When I first went to work for Andrea, she asked me to stop “caking on the eyeliner and take out those colored contacts, for Christ’s sake.” I had to tell her that’s the way I came. “Uh-huh,” she’d said, “well just make sure you keep your tattoos covered and no piercings visible while you’re on the clock.”
I don’t have tats and nothing’s pierced, not even my ears, my body automatically rejects both—tattoos slough off, holes close up—but trust Andrea not to notice before opening her mouth.
I’d hidden who I was while at Lost Cliff High, letting people think what they wanted about my appearance. Now that I was an adult townie, the last thing I needed were whispers behind my back chanting witch, witch, witch. Or even kill the witch, whenever the rowdiest of our fine citizens got riled up after being tossed out of The Happy Alchy at 2 am on a Saturday night.
Did I worry Pluto might throw a can of gas and a lit match on the rumor mill if he saw me spelling poor Coco’s grave? Honestly, I didn’t know him that well. I may have traded verbal jabs at him during junior and senior years, but
after graduation, I hadn't seen that much of him. Until today, we hadn’t crossed paths in months. Yet, even with his wealth and social prominence, he didn’t strike me as the weasel type.
Always best to play it safe, though. I made do by gathering some spearmint from under the garden spout for protection during sleep, and hyacinth leaves for love and, again, peaceful sleep, those swiped from the bush beneath my bedroom window. Since nothing was blooming, a bouquet of greenery didn’t appear too strange. Laying these on the grave and bowing my head, I recited the spell I wanted in my head, one of safe journey and the attraction of good friends for Coco in her doggie afterlife. I don’t think magic works without being acknowledged out loud, but that was the best I could come up with. Hopefully Pluto thought I was praying. It pissed me off that Lida didn’t bother coming out to bid her pet of twelve years farewell with love.
“I’ll take you back so you can get to work,” he said, once we were done.
Hells flippin’ bells, I’d forgotten about Scented Miracles.
“Thanks,” I told him. “I appreciate it. Everything.”
“That’s what I’m here for.”
It seemed a weird thing to say given our almost non-relationship, but I let it pass. Maybe for all his Nordic manliness, he was unnerved as I was by what happened. He just refused to let it show.
“It’s about time,” Andrea said once I walked into the store at 11:20. I’d been due in at ten, so given what I’d had to do, I thought I’d gotten back faster than most people who actually possessed hearts could expect. I swore if she made some snarky comment, asking me if it was a nice memorial, I was going to turn around and walk out of there right then, never to return. Thankfully, since her rush of the hour before had evaporated, she loaded me down with all the shit work she could find and departed for the back room.
Andrea didn’t really like running a shop; she only liked the idea of running one. No surprise, she wasn’t good with people and didn’t enjoy serving them. Instead, she preferred to pour melted goop into fancy containers in the back, and fiddle with tags she bought from Etsy, tying bows on everything not nailed down. Not that she had the first clue what essences to use in her candles for which maladies or desires, but it made her as happy as she was likely to be in this life, and gave her plenty of time to bitch about business with friends on her cell, thus keeping her out of my hair.
Tourist traffic was slow in Lost Cliff this time of year. We could go hours at a time without a customer, not even a looky loo. I busied myself with chores, dusting unsold candles languishing on the shelves; washing windows; scrubbing the tile floor on hands and knees just the way Andrea liked her employees to do; inventorying stock to determine what shrinkage, otherwise known as shoplifting, might have occurred over the past month; organizing storage closets; and the list went on. Any other day, the resentment might have built up until it was ready to blow, but the longer and harder I worked, the more a restorative calm came over me. Cleaning and tidying required nothing but physical effort, leaving me, like Andrea, in my own little world where I could think without interruption.
So far, I’d failed to come up with a plausible explanation for what was going on, or even how to identify the thing threatening the area without actually crossing paths with it–which I most definitely wanted to avoid–but I was already tired of calling it thing. I wanted to give it a name. A name is knowledge and knowledge is power in its most basic form.
Demon, the primitive, fearful part of my brain said.
I don’t believe in demons, nor had I ever heard my grandmother mention their existence.
What about that bear or perhaps a big cat? I’d thought it a lame theory when I’d suggested it to Pluto, but was it possible? Perhaps it was an animal, one with a past injury or birth defect that distorted its bite. No. That would have to be one messed up head sitting atop the body that drove the rest of it, and something that peculiar would have been spotted long ago by local hunters.
Maybe a dislocated spirit run amok? But spirits didn’t typically have power over the corporeal world, at least not in the way this thing–and there I was, back to thing again–demonstrated.
Truth was, I wasn’t much of a witch. A true witch, like my mother, Felicia, would have known what this was, how to locate it and what to do with it. My mother had possessed real power. She could ask the ocean to find a lost ring, even one misplaced miles from the shore, and bring it to her nestled in a mussel shell washed up by the tide. She could call the light of the moon down to turn ordinary gnats into clouds of fireflies that illuminated our backyard on a July evening, swirling and sparkling amongst the ferns and azaleas. When a stranger angered her, maybe cutting her off in line or shooting her the finger in traffic, the sewer backed up at their house day after day until that person did something nice for another stranger they met. She could stop a flood and break a drought, drain the strength from an abusive husband’s fists, or mend a child’s ego with a touch to one tear-stained cheek and a piece of salt water taffy.
She also had a special gift. All witches are born with a special gift, she’d explained to me when I was seven. A witch will always have that one thing they can do better than any other. Hers was to render herself impervious to harm, both physical and psychic. For such an important gift, she’d had little cause to use it, but when the need arose, it could save her life.
She was the best of the three of us, her, my grandmother, and me. Without her, my grandmother was a bad-tempered old woman, and I could be a bad-tempered young one. I missed my mother every day.
Unlike Felicia, I could not perform complex magics. I could barely spell a match into lighting on its own, which, yeah, why would you need to do that when you could just strike it on the side of the box? I also sensed and foresaw things, but only in vague ways, never anything useful. However, whenever I became angry or frightened, an unpredictable ability infused me. Power lashed out of me in a sudden burst. I could make a bad situation go terribly right, and I mean that literally, terribly right. Or I could turn it into just plain disaster. I was a half-witch freak, and for that reason kept to myself when not at work. Though the town might not realize it, I was sure they’d be grateful for the favor.
Toward closing time, we got our second customer of the afternoon, a fortyish, silver-haired woman who made a beeline for the CALM section of the store. I immediately knew she required more help than she could get from an aromatherapy candle. Her fear-widened eyes and strained lips jittered in front of me as she stepped up to the counter. Not really, but that’s the way I saw her, nose and chin, and her hands as well, all smeary, vibrating with the intensity of a paint can shaker at the hardware store.
She set an anise and peppermint candle on the counter. Sure enough, Andrea had tagged it CALM. The last thing this woman needed was to vibrate right out of her skin, especially with the peppermint.
“Excuse me a moment,” I said and walked to the other side of the store, where I found what I wanted in the MONEY section, a candle with the combined essences of tea tree, thyme, and verbena. It would offer balance, harmony, and relief from fears. Where Andrea got the idea those three scents could bring wealth into anyone’s life I couldn’t begin to guess.
“The tags got switched on these by mistake,” I told her, setting the replacement candle on the counter.
“Are you sure?” the woman asked.
“I’m sure.”
She looked at me, eyes still wild. She was more than a little unhinged.
"I saw…" she said and pointed vaguely over her shoulder in the direction of the highway. "I saw…"
Gently, I prompted her, “You saw…?”
She shook her head back and forth, which only increased the smeariness. I got dizzy just watching her.
“It…” She said before speech failed her.
“It?”
Uh-Oh.
“It.” She nodded.
“What did it look like?” I asked. “What was it doing?”
She picked up the candle in fron
t of her and took a massive, fortifying whiff. Instantly the vibrations in her appearance slowed and lessened. She shook her head, coming back to herself.
“How much?” she asked.
She didn’t want to talk about it anymore.
I pulled into the drive just as dusk fell. Unlike my scared spitless customer, I hadn’t seen it on the way home. I didn’t even feel it anywhere along the road. Now, standing in our side yard, I turned 360 degrees, studying the garden, the national forest in back of us, and more redwoods across the highway. Nothing. It wasn't here. It hadn't been here, not recently. Good. I wanted to go back out to Coco's grave. First, though, I needed to duck into the house for a container of salt.
Glancing up, I saw the light in Lida’s bedroom was turned on, the rest of the house dark. She was upstairs. I was glad. It meant no confrontations, at least not right away. I headed for the kitchen door at the side of the house. Just as I reached for the knob, a branch snapped behind me in the trees.
I slowly turned around on the stoop, afraid of what might be out there.
“Hello?”
A distinct sound reached me, something small dropping into the carpet of Douglas fir and redwood needles, coming from several yards into the trees where night had already taken hold.
“Hello?” I said again.
No reply.
I crossed the yard in the direction of Coco’s grave, left the relative safety of open ground, and entered the forest. So help me, if something had disturbed her resting place, I would let loose that freakish power of mine on it, no problem.
But she was fine. Or else the grave was. The sad little mound of dirt remained smoothed as it had been by Pluto with the shovel. My bunch of spearmint and hyacinth leaves lay unmolested exactly where I’d left them.
I stood there for several moments and gradually noticed a difference. It teased at the back of my brain. What was that? I sensed something I hadn’t felt since before my mom’s death. Safety. Protection. Strong magic. It wrapped around me, hugged me, whispered everything would be alright. At once, my eyes grew hot and I blurted out an ugly sob.
