Something Magic This Way Comes

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  “Well, I dunno if it is the same one, but yeah, it sure looks like it.”

  George shuddered.

  “What the heck is wrong with you?” Harry couldn’t bring himself to swear, Methodist upbringing and all.

  “That’s Raven.”

  “What do you mean, it’s a raven? How can you tell?”

  “I didn’t say it is a raven,” George said in a voice that was very small for a man of his bulk. “but you can tell. It isn’t a crow. Crows are smaller. I said it was Raven. The Raven. The supernatural totem Raven. We are either going to get very lucky or we are in deep kimchi, my friend. You know about the traditions we Indians have about trickster gods, yeah? Well just like the plains people have coyote, we have Raven. And anybody who even pretends to be a shaman like me can recognize the genuine article when we see it. That was Raven.”

  They drove up I-5 North in silence through the evening twilight. It was not quite full dark even now. The freeway was clearing out though, since it was almost ten. Days were very long now. The longest day of the year was coming up, Harry mused.

  They pulled up to the restaurant and piled out of the car. Beth was waiting inside the restaurant. She’d gone ahead and gotten a table. She was short, a little dumpy, and not much younger than Harry, but with bright red hair that didn’t look like it came out of a bottle. She was wearing black, with a huge silver pentacle on a heavy silver chain around her neck and nestled between her breasts. She looked up and smiled.

  “Harry, it is good to see you!” She looked at George. “Elder?”

  “George Mason, and how’d you know?” George demanded.

  “Certainly you know how,” Beth said flatly.

  George turned to Harry.

  “She’s the real thing, okay, Harry.”

  “I kinda thought she might be,” Harry said, pulling out a chair and sitting in it. “Sit down, George, we got some talking to do.”

  * * *

  “So that’s what we know, Beth,” George finished.

  “Can I see those rap sheets?”

  “Sure.” Harry handed them over. Beth opened the folder, and flinched as she saw the first picture.

  “What is it?” Harry asked.

  “Well, that’s my brother Darryl,” she began.

  “Beth, he’s a bad one. I’m sorry to tell you,” George said.

  “I know. He’s always been. When we were little, he always wanted it easy. You both may know that although we claim to be the Old Religion, the Wicca we practice is actually very new. Too many things were lost during the Burning Times . . .”

  “Yeah,” George interrupted. “That’s why I’m such a crappy shaman, too. Not enough tradition to be traditional. Got to make it up as I go along sometimes.”

  “Well, we were brought up Wiccan. Our parents were members of a coven in Portland, and when we moved up here, they joined another. I kept on with it. Darryl didn’t. Or I thought he didn’t. Now I am not so sure.”

  Harry thought, then asked, “What would make Darryl or Darryl and his friends want to make a hole between the worlds? That’s what George thinks is happening. And whether Darryl is doing it or is just part of it, he’s the one we know about.”

  “Well, this is the time to do it. Tomorrow night is Midsummer’s Eve, the Summer Solstice. The walls between the worlds are supposed to be very thin tomorrow night. Remember Shakespeare? A Midsummer Night’s Dream?”

  “Yeah, but that was just a play,” Harry said.

  “Based on some very old traditions, though,” Beth said.

  “And not just white man traditions,” George added.

  “That’s a spooky night for us Indians too.”

  “Well, if we are going to stop him, or them, what do we need to do?” Harry ran his hand through his hair, suddenly conscious of its thinness and very conscious of Beth as a woman. He really hadn’t felt that way for a long time, not since Sally died. Beth seemed to feel his regard, and she smiled at him.

  “I’m going to need to make some phone calls,” Beth said. “I’m going to have to make some preparations . . . spiritual ones, too. George needs to do that, too. And Harry, how good a Christian are you?”

  “Um, well, I go to the Methodist church . . .”

  “Not a very believing one, then.”

  “I believe. I just don’t advertise.”

  “Then you need to spend some time praying tonight. Saint Michael might be good to talk to. I’ll call you when I find out something.” Beth stood, hugged each man, and was gone before any of them could say more than good night.

  George sat there folded into himself for a few seconds, then he shook his head as if to clear his eyesight.

  “Wow. That’s some kinda woman, Harry.”

  “Yes, yes she is.”

  “Well, you better take me back to my place. I’ve got to sweat in the sweatlodge tonight.”

  * * *

  Harry paced his living room. It was near dawn now, and he hadn’t been able to sleep. He was still having trouble believing that he’d gotten mixed up in pagan rituals, demons, and who knows what all. He was also having a really hard time praying. He hadn’t prayed much in the last few months, since Sally died. He realized that he’d been really mad at God, and when you’re mad at someone, you really don’t like to talk to them.

  He let the corgis out. Dylan and Caleb had really been Sally’s, and, thankfully, the neighbor girl was willing to feed and exercise them when he was out on a job. Harry got their bowls and prepared to feed them. Suddenly it penetrated that the dogs were growling and snapping, as if they had something cornered in the yard. Harry flipped the floods on and saw the dogs at the fence, their hackles raised and their fur standing up so straight that they looked double their size. Between them and the house was a bundle—a large one— lying on the grass. As Harry pushed open the door, he heard something very large running off through the woods that his house backed up on.

  Dylan came away from the fence and nosed at the bundle on the ground. It moved. Harry was there now, bending over a blanket-wrapped young man. The young man was thin, dark complected, and had shiny black hair and black eyes.

  “Call George,” he croaked, then fainted.

  George arrived as soon as he could. Harry had carried the young man or boy into the house and laid him on the couch in the den. He’d covered him with a throw that Sally had made and had gone to make some coffee.

  When George arrived, they found the young man sitting up on the couch, wrapped in the throw.

  “Oh. My. God.” George breathed.

  “Yes, well,” the young man said, his black eyes flashing. “Don’t make a big deal of it, George.”

  “What’s your name,” Harry asked. George shot him a deadly look.

  “Raven, Johnny Raven,” the young man replied, smirking at George.

  Harry stared. “You’re not . . .”

  “Yeah, I guess I am.”

  “Why are you here?” George wanted to know.

  “Did you or did you not spend all night calling for help? Now you want to know what I’m doing here? What kind of shaman are you, George? Don’t you think you might have gotten it right?”

  “No, I didn’t think I had gotten it right.”

  “Well, you very nearly didn’t. That was some big hound that almost got me as I fell into the world, there in Harry’s back yard. Good thing you had those dogs, Harry. They are spirit warriors too.”

  “Why did you land in Harry’s back yard, instead of mine?”

  “Because Harry needed more help believing than you did, George.”

  Just then Beth arrived.

  “Did any of you idiots think to get him some clothes?” she demanded, as soon as she saw what was going on. “Harry is a lot bigger than you, but we’ll find you something. Come with me, young Raven.”

  She hustled him upstairs to the bedrooms with a nonchalance that belied her awareness of who, or what, the young man actually was. Harry and George stood gaping at her, then stared at each othe
r, and then broke into unstoppable laughter.

  Beth and Raven came downstairs. She’d found him some sweats and a pair of sandals that weren’t too huge on him.

  “What are you two snickering about? Don’t you know that my Goddess is a Mother?” Beth demanded, with her hands on her hips, as if she was daring them to make something of it.

  “Nothing, Beth,” Harry said. “It just was a remarkable sight.”

  The young man looked puzzled. “Everybody has a Mother,” he said. “I don’t know what the big deal is.”

  Beth said, “I think I know where they’re going to do what they think will be a summoning ritual. My phone calls worked. There’s a big meadow below Snoqualmie Falls. That’s what I hear.”

  “That’s what I hear, too,” Raven smirked.

  “Well, what can we do?” Harry asked.

  “Darryl’s going to be using some type of Wiccan or backward Christian ritual, and I can stick a spoke in that,” Beth said, “if I can get close enough.”

  “And I can keep anything else from happening,” Raven said.

  “And us?” George asked.

  “Strong backs and weak minds,” Raven said. “You get us there, and keep us safe while we do what we do.”

  * * *

  They all slept for a while, during the day, and started preparing for whatever was going to happen in the late afternoon.

  “It isn’t going to happen until the stroke of midnight,” Beth said. “They will be waiting in the meadow. We’ll need to get there early and make sure they can’t find us.”

  Harry opened his bottom desk drawer and took out his gun. He checked it, and loaded it, and put the holster under his jacket.

  George went out to his car and came back carrying a carved and painted staff that looked like a miniature totem pole. At the top of the staff was a carving of Raven.

  “Hey, that’s nice,” Johnny Raven said, preening as he looked at it. “It’s a good likeness!”

  Beth snorted. She had made her preparations before she arrived. They all piled into Harry’s green Volvo and headed up over Tiger Mountain.

  They parked well away from the falls and took their time walking down toward the meadow. They found a small copse of aspen trees and settled in to wait. No one said much. The moon rose, full and bright. Harry’s watch showed very close to midnight when Darryl and his cohorts arrived. Darryl was wearing a cassock, like a priest. There were an even dozen of them, and one that seemed to be a prisoner. In the moonlight, as they came closer, Harry could see it was a young girl, twelve or thirteen. A virgin, most likely, he thought to himself. Great.

  Darryl’s group arranged themselves in a rough circle around him, and two of them held the girl in the center of the circle, in front of their priest. Darryl’s voice rose and fell as he began to chant something.

  Suddenly, Beth stood up and moved out of the trees. Darryl stopped speaking and stared at her.

  “Darryl, stop this now,” Beth said, “before someone gets hurt. You don’t know what you are doing.”

  “And you do, big sister?” Darryl had a large dagger and he was holding it loosely in one hand.

  “Yes, I do. What you are doing is evil and dangerous, and you are going to get yourself, all your friends here, and lots of innocent bystanders killed. You cannot release the Wild Hunt on this world.”

  “Yes, I can.” Darryl grabbed the girl by the hair, and cut her throat from ear to ear before anyone could move. He held up the bloody dagger and made a cutting motion in front of himself. “By this sacrifice, I cut the veil between the worlds!” he screamed.

  “Come to me! Dark ones, come!”

  Lightning strobed again and again. Snoqualmie Falls could be seen in all its magnificence, and off to the south, it looked as though Mt. Rainier were illuminated, as if it were full day. Thunder drummed.

  Suddenly the meadow was filled with horses and riders. Some of the riders looked human, others hideously eldritch.

  The column of riders was stopped in the center of the meadow, facing a young man. Somehow, Johnny had gotten from the aspen grove to the center of the meadow with no one noticing. The lead riders were what appeared to be a woman and a man.

  Harry looked a question at Beth. “They’re not my Lord and Lady,” she said quietly.

  “Oh, but if we are not, Bethany Jones,” the woman creature said staring straight at Beth, “then what are we?”

  “You are the dark ones, that have hated men from the time the Goddess created us. I know you for who and what you are, Lady.” Beth stood, defiant.

  “You will not be allowed to pass,” Johnny Raven said, into the stillness.

  “By you?”

  “By me.”

  The dark lord spoke for the first time. Harry wished he had never spent so much time reading Tolkien.

  “You and what army rides with you?” the voice rasped.

  “Me.” George stood next to Johnny, his carved totem staff raised. “The land here belongs to us, not to you. This is not your land. The land itself will resist your passage.”

  “You are a fat middle-aged fraud.”

  “Perhaps I am,” George nodded. “But you will still not pass while I live.”

  The dark lord raised his hand, and George’s staff burst into white hot flame. George was knocked flat on his back, and he didn’t move.

  “I defy you, too,” Beth said, with a little bit of a quaver in her voice. She took half a step forward. Half a step because the lady’s upraised hand halted her, frozen, in mid step.

  “You had better go home, little bird, and let your betters play,” the dark lord rumbled, with subsonics rolling off each word he said, and each word hit Harry like a punch.

  “I guess I’m it,” Harry said.

  “You don’t even believe,” the dark lady said. “How can you expect to defeat me?”

  “I have always had trouble believing. Now all I can do is ask.” Harry said simply. “Lord help my unbelief, Lord, I am not worthy! Help me now, a sinner, I pray you!”

  Johnny Raven’s body began to shimmer, and change. Instead of a slim dark youth, in his place stood a shining figure in some sort of armor, holding a spear.

  “You should call more often, Harry!” the figure said. “Now, I think, we have to end this. You,” he pointed at the dark lord and lady and all their host, “shall not pass. You don’t think to argue about it with me, do you?”

  “No, we will not argue the point with you, Michael. We will go.” The lady turned her mount in the direction of the rent in the sky. She turned back.

  “Darryl. Come.” She motioned and he literally flew to the back of her mount and grabbed on behind. The rest of his coven were trying to run through the meadow, but riders ran them down and grabbed each of them in turn.

  “And as for the rest of you,” she said, somehow staring at George, and Beth, and Harry directly simultaneously, “this will not be forgotten. And I have a very long memory.”

  With that, the Hunt turned and rode away slowly across the meadow, picking up speed and then riding up some sort of invisible bridge into the sky; and as they passed through, Michael made a motion with his spear, and the rent Darryl had caused was sealed.

  Michael turned and, like really good computer animation, morphed back into the slender young man they’d known as Johnny Raven.

  “I thought you were Raven,” George said.

  “Who told you that all those traditions were mutually exclusive, George? I can be whoever I need to be.” The young man walked over to where the dead girl lay.

  “No matter what, she didn’t deserve this.” He drew his finger across her throat, sealing the cut. “Here, you come back now,” he said, with his hand on her chest. He pushed. She shuddered and gasped.

  Beth ran to her and enfolded her. “It’s okay,” she repeated over and over.

  Harry looked at Raven or Michael, or whoever he was.

  “So now what?”

  “We seem to be done here,” the youth replied.

&n
bsp; “Will I ever see you again?” George asked.

  “Hard to say. Maybe. Then again, maybe not.” The young man cocked his head and his black eyes flashed in the moonlight.

  “So what will you do now?” Harry asked.

  “Oh, I’ll be around, Harry, I’ll be around.”

  The young man turned and walked away. As he walked, he became smaller, and his walk became jerkier and more and more birdlike until he was a very large black bird, walking away through the meadow.

  He croaked, flapped his sudden wings, and was gone.

  WINDS OF CHANGE

  Linda A. B. Davis

  MARTHA Jane stood in the cornfield with her face to the sky and her blue eyes closed. Surrounded by the half-grown, green stalks and hearing the insects buzz, she concentrated on the warm wind around her. She called it to her with whispers of promise.

  Come to me, be part of me, live through me, as I will live through you. I will grant you my breath as you grant me your strength. Come to me, be part of me . . .”

  Martha Jane repeated the chant several more times even as she felt the light breeze stiffen. She reached her hands above her head and beckoned to unseen forces.

  The magic rushed to encircle her slight, misshapen body with an invisible yet undeniable power. The dirt devil danced around Martha Jane, straining against her bonds so it could run amok through the vulnerable fields. She silently compelled the power to stay with her and to bring the mini-twister in tighter.

  Her sun-bleached hair whipped around her head, and Martha Jane laughed. She reveled in this power for a few seconds. So much of her life was beyond her will, especially her humped shoulder and her mother’s recent death. These tragedies seemed so often to define her life that she sometimes needed to be the one who birthed creation or destruction.

  But now it was time to go. Martha Jane needed to finish supper before Daddy and Jediah came in from the fields. She took a breath and pulled the dirt devil even closer. Now was the most critical point of control.

  “Magic is a living, breathing thing,” Mama had counseled during Martha Jane’s first lesson. “It always wants to be free, and you can’t ever whip it up so big that you lose it.”