Little Red Gem

by D L Richardson

  Miraculously, I managed to put myself into the trance. When I next blinked I was standing halfway down the embankment. Audrey sat on a log in the hollow where I’d left her. Sensing me, she looked up. I had expected her face to bear the look of fury, and she didn’t disappoint.

  I slid down into the hollow.

  “I’m so sorry, Audrey. I didn’t mean to trap you here, but I had to be with Leo. I had to know he truly loved me. The past few weeks have been amazing—”

  Audrey stared at me with fierce dark eyes. My body. Her eyes. The effect pulled me up short.

  “Come to your senses I see,” Audrey growled.

  “I shouldn’t have trapped you here if that’s what you mean. It was a shitty thing to do. I’ll let you out of this and you can go home.”

  To let Audrey out of her bind I took her hands in mine and repeated the words, “I release thee” three times.

  No puff of smoke. No tinkle of a bell to herald the use of magic. Nothing. Kind of a let down, really. But at least there also wasn’t the gaping hole into hell I’d nervously anticipated would be awaiting me upon my return.

  Audrey stepped out of the binding circle and rubbed her wrist as though she was experiencing real pain in her broken wrist. And then she slapped me across the cheek.

  “How could you do this to me?” she hissed.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t expect you to understand.”

  Audrey’s eyes widened. “Oh, I understand all right. I helped you when you didn’t know you were dead and you thanked me by binding me to the underworld.”

  The sentiment was too late but I said it anyway. “If it’s any consolation, nothing worked out the way I planned.”

  “No, that is not any kind of consolation.”

  She glared at me as stepped out of the hollow. Through blurred vision I watched her apparition shimmer. Right before she disappeared she shouted, “I hope you rot in hell.”

  I didn’t have to tell her the horrible taste in my mouth indicated I probably already was.

  ***

  After Audrey’s damnation of me to a bleak and very hot future, I closed my eyes. When I reopened them I found I’d materialized inside the cabin. William rushed up to the open doorway, and Anne jumped up from the couch.

  I’d stopped in the middle of the room and they’d each stopped five feet away. Nobody moved. Nobody said a word. It was like we’d all agreed we were cursed and could take no joy in each other’s company.

  “I’m done interfering,” I told them.

  I flopped down onto the couch and Anne joined me. We two sat in silence while outside William paced noiselessly up and down on the veranda. After a while Anne got up and matched his pacing on the inside of the cabin. Night fell. A clock I’d never seen before ticked. Owls hooted. Mice scurried. And still I sat on the couch incapable of speech, consciousness, or crying.

  “We’re worried about you,” Anne said pausing by the window. “You look like a defeated woman.”

  “I am a defeated woman.”

  “You must not give up hope.” This from William.

  “Hope is all anyone has.” This from Anne.

  They continued pacing and when the subtle change of light hinted that dawn had crept upon us, I was no less disgusted with my behavior, so I got up and took myself off to the small bedroom. There, I crawled under the bed.

  Anne followed. “What are you doing?”

  “Go away,” I told her.

  “Ruby—”

  “Please, Anne, I want to be alone.”

  I detected the faintest of sighs, but at last she spun on her heels and floated out of the room.

  It was dark under the bed. Dark and lonely. Exactly what I deserved.

  Anne returned a while later and demanded, yet again, to know what I was doing.

  So I told her. “Monsters live under beds.”

  Suddenly her face appeared. “Oh, sweetie, you’re not a monster. What you did, you did for love.”

  “That’s no reason to deceive the boy you love and trap your half-sister in the after world.”

  Anne reached for my hands. Instinctively I tucked them up under my chin and curled my knees into my chest.

  “Please come out from there,” begged Anne.

  “No.”

  “Please.”

  “No.”

  Anne’s soft features shifted into an expression of determination. “Do you remember how I told you when you first arrived that we have all the time in the world to tell stories? Well, if you come out I shall tell you the story behind mine and William’s fate.”

  “You were rich and he was poor. You eloped. Obviously you died but somehow you were cursed never to spend eternity in the same room.”

  “If you come out from under the bed, I will tell you the true story behind our curse.”

  I’d thought before that only selfish and disgraced people were rewarded with cursed afterlives, and that if Anne and William were cursed then they must have done something to justify it. I wanted to know what they had done so I crawled out from under the bed and sat on the couch.

  Anne stood by the window and William stood on the steps.

  “I lived in a large estate on the banks of a great lake,” said Anne. “Not far from here but worlds away at the same time. Daily I rode horses and practiced the piano. I wore gowns and attended balls. Many hours were spent by the window stitching embroidery or reading poetry.

  “As I told you on the day we first met, my father was only ever interested in my happiness yet my step-mother forbade any union of my choosing because she had betrothed me to a wealthy man in a neighboring shire. I might have fallen to her whimsies had I not met William one afternoon. It was the first day of summer and I was out riding. The spring rains must have forgotten that their time on the land was passed; they came anyway and caught me by surprise. A grove of nearby trees offered shelter and I took it. There, high in the branches was a dashing man. His swinging through the branches had startled the horse so I ordered him to come down. And he did.”

  Anne stopped pacing. She rested her head against the window.

  “And then what happened?” I asked.

  “I fell in love with him.”

  “And I with you,” a voice said from outside.

  The pain in their voice was noticeable. Was that how I sounded?

  “William and I spent every day that summer, talking of nothing else other than our future together. Summer ended, and my step-mother invited the man she had betrothed me to and his family to an extended stay at our estate. Her plans were that we would marry in the autumn. This news sent icicles into my heart.”

  I couldn’t stop myself from blabbing the obvious. “Didn’t you tell her you were in love with someone else?”

  Anne shrugged. “Children, she called us. And as children we were not in custody of our futures. I argued that if I was old enough to marry then I was old enough to make my own decisions. She decided to give me a decision to ponder. Marry the wealthy man and allow lands as far as the eye could see to prosper through the union. Or marry William and be banished forever.”

  Ouch. That must have hurt. “What about your father? Didn’t he have something to say about all this?”

  Anne squeezed her eyes shut. “Father passed away during that winter. I could not have gotten through that terrible time if it were not for William.”

  I didn’t want to be sad, but I was swept up in the fairy tale saga of a girl who forced to marry someone she didn’t love. “That must have been awful. Marry someone you don’t love but it brings peace. Marry someone you do love and live a life of poverty. What did you do?” Anne burst out laughing. I shook my head and groaned. “Okay, dumb question. Forget I asked it. Of course you didn’t marry the loser. You chose William.”

  “We decided to run away, get married, and live happily ever after.”

  A head appeared in the window. “And that is where this story goes south,” William said. “I had no money for a ring. Anne said she didn’t need a rin
g to seal our love but I was determined she have one anyway. So, on the night of our elopement I stole a wristwatch from a drunkard at the tavern. I fled into the darkness and thought I had gotten away with the theft, when out of the darkness came this…this shadow. When moonlight struck, the shadow transformed into a man. Standing before me was the drunkard whose watch I had stolen. He was angry at the theft and when I told him I had taken it to sell so I could buy my betrothed a wedding ring, he grew even angrier and said that love was for fools. Then he laughed and said he was a witch and my punishment for stealing his pocket watch was that I was to be cursed. I was to be trapped in time with my beloved, but we would never be together. Like two sides of the same coin.”

  “Oh.” I didn’t know what else to say, yet I felt like I should have said something positive. “So that’s why you cling to the watch.” After a pause, I added, “But if magic bound you, then magic should be able to un-bind you.”

  Anne returned to the couch and sat down heavily. “It was a lovely gesture when you brought that witch here. For a moment I thought she might be able to help us. In a way I suppose I am glad that she refused. Magic only leads to trouble.”

  “I can believe that,” I said, remembering how the guilt over messing people’s lives up had eaten at me so much that I’d dragged Teri up to Caper’s Cabin in the hope she could lift Anne and William’s curse. Teri had refused to help, saying curses were dark magic and she wouldn’t get involved with dark magic. Would she attempt it for me, I wondered?

  Somewhere midway through their story, the day had fully woken. Now, sun streamed through every window and crack in the cabin, bringing with it a gush of renewed vigor over how I could once again attempt to help Anne and William.

  If only I could have spent this much effort on learning how to stop interfering.

  “I’ll be back in a little while,” I told them.

  I vanished and materialized in front of Teri’s store. It was Monday, so Audrey would be in school in her physical form and not wandering the plane where she could see me. But Teri could, so I was careful when I slipped into her store and into the small back room where I remembered she’d stored the magic books she’d used to create the love spell. The other spirit-detecting radar, Oleander, was thankfully busy cleaning his nether regions.

  As I touched the spell book, the memory of my first visit to Teri’s shop rushed me. Showing up to have my fortune read…it was like that day had happened so long ago and to someone else. The memory of my second visit to Teri’s shop came next to mind. As well as explaining the process of trading places with Audrey and binding her to the afterlife, William had also said that ghosts made great thieves because whatever they hid inside their clothing became as invisible as them. I’d walked out of Teri’s store with a tiny antique mirror to test his claim.

  I grabbed the biggest of the spell books, closed my eyes, and wished myself back to the cabin. At least my teleportation skills had improved.

  “Got it,” I sang out, waving the book in the air.

  William’s face appeared in the window. “Got what, my dear?”

  “Teri’s spell book. I’ll bet there’s something in here that can help you.”

  “No. I forbid it.” Anne said.

  Slamming the book onto the dining table, I opened it to the first page. “It’s the only way. And William made a point before when he said magic works if you want it to. Trust me, Anne. This will work. You’ve got to believe in it.”

  “What if the spell backfires?”

  “Relax. You can’t be any more cursed, can you? Now, let me see…alters, astral projection, changelings, charms, cleansing spells, divination, dreams, love spells, psychic protection, tarot, visions, upperworld, underworld. There has to be something in here about undoing a witch’s curse.”

  I spent the rest of that day repeating chants and casting spells and pretty much impressing the heck out of myself with how easily I could read an ancient language, but my language skills weren’t enough to get any of the spells to work. It was as if I didn’t possess any magical genes and the spell book knew this. Still, because ghosts didn’t sleep I worked into the night, conjuring and chanting and pointing – there was way too much pointing for my liking – and even after every attempt at William entering the cabin failed, I continued. On the brink of the second afternoon, Anne begged me to stop.

  “We have all the time in the world,” I explained. “I’m sure I felt something that last spell.”

  I hadn’t, but Ruby Parker wasn’t a quitter.

  I jumped when someone behind us cleared their throat.

  Audrey stood a few feet inside the front door of the cabin. The slight opaqueness to her body indicated she was visiting us in her apparition state, which explained why we hadn’t heard her unlock the door. The last time I’d seen Audrey, it had not ended well. She’d slapped me and cursed me to hell.

  “Hi,” I said tentatively.

  Audrey nodded curtly in my direction and took a few steps into the room. Her eyes traveled all over the room until they landed on the dining table.

  “Mom went to use her spell book and found it missing,” she said. “She thinks I’ve taken it so I can make another love potion. I said ‘another’ and she said ‘you must be under a lot of stress at school because you’re acting weird again’. I said ‘again?’ and she said ‘maybe it is a good idea if you go to Texas with your father for a break’. As you can imagine, I’m confused.”

  I moved to step closer but stopped when I saw the tight set of her jaw. “I’m so sorry, Audrey. I didn’t mean to mess things up for you.

  “I warned you about the astral plane. You can only observe, otherwise bad stuff happens.”

  I bit my lip but it quivered and trembled nonetheless. “You don’t wanna know how bad.”

  “Oh, I have an idea. Natalie and Shanessa want me to join their band. They say we may be going to Los Angeles for Reach For The Stars finals, though I didn’t realize I knew how to sing. My best friend has kindly informed me that Leo Culver and I are an item, though I don’t see how that’s possible when Leo glares at me like I’ve killed his dog. And, not only does Dad not want me to hang around with Leo Culver, he wants me to move to Texas with him. Permanently. I have to wonder how my life could get so completely turned upside down in such a short time. Most of your meddling is confusing, but not catastrophic.” She paused dramatically. “Most of the things. The one thing that is catastrophic is Dad wanting to take me to Texas with him. Care to explain that to me?”

  I realized I might not have a bottom lip by the time I finished confessing everything to Audrey. “He’s worried Leo is going to seduce you and get you pregnant.”

  Audrey gasped, and a little piece of me hardened in defensiveness. This simple gesture drove a knife into my steely resolve. It was as if that one gasp had acted as judge and jury and I’d been found guilty of a serious crime. So what? I’d made a mistake. I didn’t deserve to be cursed for eternity. I didn’t deserve a lot of things.

  “Wait,” Audrey said. “Did Leo get you pregnant or you as me pregnant?”

  “I was pregnant when I died—”

  She interrupted me with her dagger stare. “I suppose you think congratulations are in order.”

  “No.”

  “Good. Though it is kinda cool how I might have been an aunty.”

  Her shoulders slumped. “You want to know what hurts the most. That you hate me so much you’d trick me. I loved having you for a sister, even after our dad and my mom broke up I wished you and I could keep on being sisters. But you wanted nothing to do with me.”

  I had no energy left to deny it, but I owed her an explanation. “I thought dad loved you more. He was always buying you gifts and I got nothing.”

  She shot me an incredulous look. “He loved us equally.”

  “I know that. Now. But you gotta understand, I was a kid myself. It was easier to hate you than to hate dad.”

  She nodded. “I know what you mean. Still, I would have glad
ly traded places with you if you’d asked. I would have let you say goodbye to Leo. I’m a girl, aren’t I? I know about love.”

  An uncomfortable silence hung around us and was only interrupted when Anne politely coughed and said, “You came for the spell book.”

  I went over and picked it up. It was a powerful book, yet useless in the wrong hands. “You might as well take it back. We can’t get it to work.”

  “I can’t carry stuff around me like ghosts can,” Audrey said. “You’ll have to bring it back.”

  “Fine. Might as well do it now.”

  Audrey’s apparition could travel fast, but not as fast as me. Besides, it was as if we both felt that walking into town might make up for lost years.

  When we reached the edge of the dirt track, Audrey asked, “What did you want the book for anyway?”

  I told her about Anne and William’s curse. Then I told her about everything that had transpired while I’d been in possession of her body. When I finished, we were standing out the front of Mysteries.

  Audrey shook her head and chuckled. “I can’t believe you thought you could undo a curse. No offense, but although the dead often feature in magic, they can’t weave it. There has to be some laws.” She paused with her hand pressed against the solid wall. “It’s a sweet gesture though. Tell you what, I’ll come to the cabin tomorrow and undo their curse.”

  “You can do magic?” I asked. “I got the impression from your mom that you weren’t into this stuff.”

  Audrey stepped through the solid wall of the shop and I followed.

  “I am into magic,” she said. “I just don’t let her know.”

  “Why not? Your mom’s pretty cool. I’m sure she’d be pleased to know you share an interest.”

  “Look at this way. If you expressed an interest to work at the tourism office, don’t you think your mom would be so over the moon she’d want to spend every freaking minute of the day with you?”

  Her wisdom was flawless. “You’re right. I’d never get any privacy.”

  “I can do magic beyond my mother’s wildest dreams.”