Spellbent

by Lucy A. Snyder

  “Charming young man,” Pal whispered.

  I stepped into the living room. There was the usual array of College Guy Furnishings: a sagging old brown couch, stained maroon velvet recliner, thrift store end tables, and CD/DVD racks made of bricks and boards beside a shiny new wide-screen television and Sony gaming system. Rock posters adorned the walls. A half-empty bottle of tequila sat in the middle of the cluttered coffee table. The wooden floor was so old and worn that I got a pretty good view of the basement through the gaps in the boards; I saw the glow of fluorescent plant lights gleaming off the white enamel surface of a washer and dryer.

  “Yo, Kai!” bellowed Buckeye Shirt. “That chick’s here to see the room.”

  “Be up in a minute!” Kai yelled back from somewhere in the basement.

  Two other young men stuck their heads into the living room from the kitchen. One was a slightly built guy with black hair and glasses, and the other was a tall, handsome boy with a mop of curly red hair. They gave each other a glance that said This should be entertaining and came into the living room, grinning like schoolkids about to play the best practical joke ever.

  Nice, I thought. I know that look. It’s the look that says, “Ha ha! We’re going to take this stupid deluded witchy girl apart at the seams and laugh her right out of the house.”

  “You did express a disinterest in involving nice people in our current difficulties,” Pal reminded me.

  True enough, I thought back. Hallelujah, it’s raining jerks.

  “So how exactly are you going to handle these young gentlemen?” Pal asked.

  I know a few party tricks, I replied. Any Talent who ever went to OSU knows how to make faery liquor. It’ll seem just like the real thing going down, but it’ll turn to water a few minutes after they’ve drunk it. It’ll be better for their livers, anyhow. And plant growth is pretty basic stuff.

  The dark-haired fellow in the glasses stepped forward and waved at me. “Hi, I’m Scott, and this is Patrick, and you already met Mikey.” He pointed at Buckeye Shirt.

  “Hi guys. I’m Jessie.” I nodded at them and set my soda cup down on a clear spot on the end table beside the recliner. Keep an eye on that, would you? I thought to Pal.

  “Certainly.” He hopped off my shoulder onto the back of the recliner and took up a watchful position on the chair’s arm near the cup.

  “Nice ferret,” said Scott.

  “Thanks,” I replied. “You’re practically the first person I’ve met today who didn’t think he was some kind of rodent.”

  “So is he supposed to be your familiar or something?” Patrick asked, looking like he was desperately trying to keep a straight face.

  “Why, yes. Yes he is,” I replied.

  “So, urn, where’s your broomstick?” he countered, his face turning pink from his effort at not laughing.

  “Broomsticks are sooo 1695,” I replied, rolling my eye. “Modern witches use vibrators and drop acid just like everyone else.”

  “What?” He frowned, looking confused. “Yeah, flying on broomsticks equals a big-ass euphemism for pagan women getting their freak on with broom handles greased up with morning glory butter,” I said. “Sometimes strychnine. Not a good idea, but hey, back in the day they used to think a wolf’s testicle wrapped in a greasy rag was a good barrier contraceptive. So, yeah, no broomsticks for me. But thanks ever so much for asking about my sex life when we’ve only just met.”

  Just then, Kai came thumping up the basement stairs with a couple of small, spindly marijuana plants growing in a rectangular clay pot. He set the pot reverently on the floor.

  “Okay, so… make this grow,” Kai said.

  “Wait, don’t I get to see the attic first?” I asked.

  “Show us your stuff first, or show us some cash,” Mikey said. “Ain’t no way I’m giving up dibs on the attic unless you got proof of some real serious voodoo.”

  “Okay, fine. I’ll do my thing on your lovely little pot plant here, but you don’t get anything else until after I see the attic,” I said, then thought to Pal, You don’t have diarrhea, do you?

  “What? No,” he replied. “Why the sudden interest in the condition of my gastrointestinal tract?”

  Because I just realized I need a fertilizer starter for this charm, and I won’t gain the best credibility with these guys if I have to ask Kai for some MiracleGro. So I need you to poop in my hand, but not if it’s going to be all runny and disgusting, I thought back.

  “Ah. Indeed.” He hopped off the couch and climbed up to my shoulder. I moved my hand under him so he could discreetly deposit a small, warm black pellet into my palm.

  “I feel so close to you right now,” Pal said.

  Shut up and go back to the comfy chair, smart-ass, I replied, holding my cupped hand out toward the pot plants. I haven’t tried this trick in a while.. . I need to concentrate to do this right.

  Pal hopped back onto the chair.

  “Okay,” I said, “first I need you all to swear that what happens in this house stays in this house. You’re not to discuss anything you’re about to see with anyone else.”

  They looked at one another and shrugged doubtfully.

  “Yeah, whatever,” said Mikey.

  “I need a promise that’s just a teensy bit more formal,” I replied. “I need you all to raise your right hands and say ‘I will not speak of the magic I see.’ Can you do that? Okay, on a count of three…“

  After I counted down, they grudgingly raised their hands and repeated the words. As the boys said the final part of the promise, I spoke an ancient word for “bind,” and the room briefly went cold as the spell took hold. They wouldn’t be able to talk about my magic with outsiders no matter how hard they tried.

  “Thanks, guys.”

  I closed my eye and focused on the stronger of the two plants. It had suffered greatly from lack of nutrients and proper water; a lesser plant would have died weeks before. Kai, despite his abiding love of the resinous bud, had a thumb browner than a politician’s nose.

  I began the chant, calling on the power of the trees and bushes nearby to help their herbaceous cousin grow tall and strong. Old, alien words for “growth” and “bounty” flowed off my tongue.

  I felt Pal’s pellet grow hot in my hand, and it burst with a small firecracker pop. A heartbeat later, I heard the college guys shout in surprise as the clay pot shattered. Pain stabbed through my skull. I stopped the chant and opened my eye.

  The puny little plant had exploded into a seven-foot-tall bush. Shards of the broken clay pot lay around its tangled root-ball.

  “Ho-ly shit,” Patrick said, his skepticism drained clean away along with the blood from his face. “You’re not a witch; you’re some kind of ganja goddess.”

  “Ganja goddess, will you marry me?” asked Kai, tears of joy welling in his bloodshot eyes.

  “I’m touched, Kai… but no. I’m already spoken for. May I see the room now?” I asked.

  I collected Pal and my cup, and Kai took me upstairs to the sweltering attic room. It smelled of mildew and dirty feet. The room was about twenty feet long and maybe nine feet wide. The carpet was 1970s green shag and bore stains of unknown origin, and the floor was still littered with trash and milk crates left behind by the previous occupant. The walls had originally been white, I supposed, but it was hard to tell from the scuffs and stains. A noticeable nicotine line from cigarette smoke circled the room a few inches from the water-stained ceiling. Six-foot- square dormers were built into both faces of the roof; the left-hand one had been converted into a cramped bathroom with narrow closets on either side. There were windows in the dormers and in the wall at the far end; if I opened them all and set the stove in the dormer I wouldn’t have to worry about choking on carbon monoxide.

  A bare fluorescent light fixture—the sort of thing people usually installed in their garages—hung crookedly from the ceiling. There was a light switch to the right of the door. I flipped it experimentally; the fluorescent lights flickered on harsh
ly. I flipped the switch down again.

  “This’ll do,” I said. “Okay, here are the ground rules: You let me know before you come in, and you don’t come in here when I’m not around unless it’s a life-or-death emergency. I grew you enough pot to stone a small army, so we should be good there for a while. I’ll make you liquor, but don’t expect me to create it out of thin air. I’ll need a finger of whatever you want me to make still in the bottle. I don’t care when you have parties, but don’t wake me up at four AM when you want more tequila. Sound fair?”

  “Sounds fair,” agreed Kai.

  “Great,” I said. “Now I really need a nap, so I’ll see you in a while.”

  “Wait… aren’t you gonna bring in any of your stuff?” Kai asked.

  “I’ve already got it right here.” I held up the soda cup, then set it down so I could close the door. “Bye now. Buh-bye, Kai.”

  I latched the door after Kai left; the slide-bolt seemed pretty ffimsy, but anyone forcing it was bound to make more than enough noise to wake me from a sound sleep.

  “You realize of course that the flowers from the plant you just magicked for them aren’t going to be particularly rich in THC,” Pal said.

  Yes, I know, I thought back, just in case Kai was still in earshot. They’ll have to hang the plant up in the basement to cure for a while if they want a good smoke, anyway, and I hope to be gone from here well before then.

  “God, I’m so tired,” I continued aloud, suddenly feeling the weight of the day pressing down on my very bones. I knelt, popped the lid off the soda cup, and pulled the plastic bag out. It looked like all the miniaturized goods floating inside had stayed dry. I desperately needed a nap on the cot.

  “How do I unshrink and unfloat everything?” I asked Pal.

  “Well, the counter-charm is essentially the reverse of the packing charm—”

  “Jeez, more dancing? My feet are getting sore.”

  “—but it’s usually much quicker, especially you’re not particular about where things go.”

  “All right; let’s give this a try.”

  Pal coached me through the unpacking charm; soon everything was re-expanded and arrayed around me. My head hurt worse than ever. I unpacked the cot and set it up in the dormer; then unpacked the little fridge and plugged it in.

  “I really do have to take a nap,” I said as I unrolled the sleeping bag atop the inflated mattress and tossed the pillow onto the cot. “Everything aches.”

  I took two ibuprofen tablets with a swig of warm Gatorade, then stuck the bottle in the fridge. I plugged in the little electric alarm clock.

  “You have any idea what time it is?” I asked.

  “I’m afraid not,” he replied.

  “Oh well. I’ll take a wild guess and set the time to eight PM, and set the alarm to go off around midnight. And then, potions, with a quick break to go dump my anathema again! And then, we’re off to see the Warlock, and hopefully Lion will get his courage and Tin Man will get his heart and I will get my Cooper.”

  I went into the bathroom to avail myself of the toilet. The shower stall was caked with soap scum and mildew, and the sink was furry with shaving leavings and something that was possibly chewing tobacco. The floor was covered in dust and curly black hairs, and the toilet looked like it hadn’t been cleaned since the Truman administration. Fortunately, Boomer had left behind a roll of clean toilet paper in the cabinet under the sink, and having had to contend with Greyhound station restrooms at a tender age, I was well practiced in squat-and-hover.

  “I realize it’s probably karmic payback for not bothering to clean the apartment before I left it today, but damn that’s a nasty bathroom,” I said to Pal as I emerged. “You said you know a good cleaning spell . . ?“

  “I never said that, actually, but in fact I do know a very good cleaning spell.”

  “Does it take long?”

  “Probably half an hour to learn, a quarter hour to perform.”

  “Naptime first, then cleaning. Then potion.” I shucked off my sneakers, crawled into the sleeping bag, and was soon fast asleep.

  chapter thirteen

  In the Wake of the Dream

  I Walked barefoot across cool green moss growing along a forested stream bank. I had both my eyes and both my arms, and the spring sun felt wonderful on my skin. A few yards away, Cooper knelt bare-chested on a flat shale rock, washing a white T-shirt in the clear water of the stream. The morning sunlight shone on the wiry muscles of his back and shoulders.

  Smiling, I walked up beside him. “Whatcha doing?”

  “I can’t remember where this came from, but it won’t come out,” he said, lifting the shirt from the water. Dark red blood stained the white cotton. “I’ve been scrubbing this for hours, but it won’t come out.”

  The breeze shifted, strengthened. I thought I heard the tinkling of bells or a music box in the distance. It took me a moment to recognize the tune as “The Twelve Days of Christmas.”

  Somewhere in the distance, a baby began to scream.

  The sun fled the sky, and the wind blew cold. Sleet stung my face. I looked down at Cooper; he was shivering on the rock, the stream completely frozen over, his hands covered in fresh blood steaming in the icy air.

  “I didn’t want to do it,” Cooper whispered. “God help me, I didn’t want to do it.”

  He cried out, convulsing in pain. His body stiffened and turned gray, a statue of ash that began to flake apart in the wind.

  “Cooper!” I tried to grab him to shield him from the wind, but his body came apart in my embrace, blowing away on the freezing wind. A fist-sized lump of molten iron glowed where his heart had been, and the burning metal dripped out of his crumbling chest cavity, searing my left hand horribly, and suddenly I, too, was turning to ash and I couldn’t stop it— I came awake in the darkness, my clothes and the sleeping bag drenched in sweat. My eye socket and arm hurt worse than ever. I sat up, doubled over on the cot, cradled the stump of my arm, and vainly willed the pain away.

  It was absolutely no comfort to realize that finally I was starting to remember the nightmares after I’d awakened.

  Pal hopped up on the cot. “Are you all right?”

  “No,” I said, and began to sob from the pain in my body and in my soul and from the sheer injustice of everything that had happened oh God Cooper was gone and how would I ever get him back with the entire Universe wanting him gone and dead and what had he done and what was I going to do…

  “Jessie, shh, Jessie, please, it’ll be okay,” said Pal.

  “I can’t do this,” I wept. “I can’t. It h-hurts too much.”

  “I know you’ve been through a lot, too much for any one person to be expected to handle, but you’ve got to pull yourself together,” Pal said.

  “I can’t. I just want to sleep, and how can I sleep if I keep having nightmares… ?“

  Somebody knocked on the door.

  “G.G., you okay in there?” Kai asked.

  “Yeah,” I replied weakly. “Do you have any Vicodin or Percocets or anything like that?”

  “I got some Robaxacets we got up in Toronto. .

  “My arm is killing me.. . can I bum one?” I asked.

  “Uh, okay… I gotta find the foils, though.” I heard him head back down the stairs. I leaned against the door frame, wishing the Brick Fairy would descend and smite me across the head and make the pain go away.

  Finally, Kai returned and I unlatched the door. “I’ll pay you back for this,” I said, taking the thick white pill from his hand.

  “Hey, no worries… I hope you feel better,” he replied.

  I thanked him again, latched the door, downed the pill with a swig of Gatorade from the fridge, and collapsed back on the cot.

  I slept fitfully at best, and did not feel the least bit better when Pal poked me awake with his sharp snout. Sunlight streamed through the window.

  “Ugh, what time is it?” I asked, feeling queasy and feverish.

  “Nearly noon,” Pal
replied. “It’s only four hours until your anathema counter-spell starts to wear off.”

  “Four hours? Can’t I sleep a little bit longer? I’m so tired

  “No, you’ve got to get up. If you go back to sleep you might never wake up again,” Pal replied. “You’re burning up; unless my nose deceives me, you’ve got a nasty staph infection, and we need to take care of that before you get any worse.”

  “Infection?” I wriggled my throbbing arm out of the sling; my elbow was so swollen I could barely flex it. The bandages covering my stump were soaked with greenish yellow pus. “Aw, hell.”

  I threw off the sleeping bag and lurched up from the cot, my vision swimming, and stumbled to the bathroom to relieve my aching bladder. I switched the light on, and the sight of the forgotten filth suddenly made me absolutely furious.

  “Can’t any of the fraternity rejects around here learn to use a goddamn sponge?” I yelled into the tiny bathroom. “Damn this place to the nine hells, what kind of inbred dirt pig can live in this crap? Is it too much to ask for a clean fucking bathroom—”

  I gasped, the muscles in my feverish body seizing up, my spine going rigid, and instead of my profane rant, old, old words spilled from my lips and a whirlwind rose in the cramped, moldy bathroom and then a bang and sunburst of light that blinded me and sent me to my knees.

  “My goodness.” Pal hopped over to me and nudged my thigh. “Are you all right?”

  “Buh.” I blinked several times to clear the spots in my vision. The bathroom floor in front of me shone bright and white and clean. The tub and sink and toilet looked like they were brand new. “Holy cats, did I do that?”

  “Well, I certainly couldn’t,” Pal replied. “I suppose you don’t know how you managed that, do you?”

  “Uh-uh.” Shaking, I got to my feet and went into the bathroom to use the toilet.

  “You Babblers and your unreliable bursts of magical inspiration,” Pal sighed.

  I stared down at the white tiles as I peed. The grout lines seemed to be undulating back and forth. “I think I’m starting to hallucinate.”