Hocus Pocus and the All-New Sequel

by A. W. Jantha

  I shine my phone’s flashlight around at the various tables, chairs, and cabinets. “I think the Sandersons were hoarders,” I whisper.

  “Light switch over here,” Isabella says, flicking it up and down a couple of times. Nothing happens. “Buuut it doesn’t work.”

  Together, our three phones’ sweeping flashlights give the house’s only room an eerie glow. The postcards and gift-shop items have been dumped into boxes behind the counter—silver lighters and small stuffed black cats with witches’ hats. There’s another big cardboard box by a curio cabinet that’s taller than Travis. I peer in and see a mess of broken glass and weird objects—feathers and desiccated herbs and spindly bones and a handful of things that I hope aren’t body parts. Everything is covered in dust.

  I hold my phone overhead. In the narrow loft over the living space, I can just make out a few straw pallets wrapped in rough sheets. I point to it. “My mom said the Sanderson sisters used to sleep up there,” I say.

  Isabella stares up at the loft. “I can’t believe I’m here,” she breathes. She wanders over to a wrought-iron candleholder as tall as her chest. She touches the curved top of it. “This is where the Black Flame Candle was,” she says. She looks around again. “The Sandersons lived here,” she adds, as if she truly can’t believe it. And I can’t blame her; I can’t quite believe it all, either.

  “Being here definitely makes my family’s story feel a little more...plausible,” I say.

  I see the cabinet that Aunt Dani probably crouched behind before the witches first discovered her. There’s also an overturned wooden chair that looks like the one Mom described: Emily Binx was killed here, and Aunt Dani was tied up and almost force-fed the witches’ evil life force potion. Wow, it feels ridiculous to even think it. I lean over and run my palm down the chair’s smooth wooden side. Oddly, the whole house gives me a profound sense of déjà vu.

  Nearby, there’s a big display case with cracked glass and caution tape to prevent anyone from getting cut. I sense my mom’s involvement here. The placard beside the case reads this is the spell book of winifred sanderson, but the slanted platform inside the case is empty.

  “You know, my parents are still upset about that spell book going missing,” I say.

  “Oh, about that—” starts Isabella.

  Travis cuts in. “Maybe Principal Taylor found it and can’t figure out how to make it work. I hear there’s a good spell in there for making people less grumpy. Poor Principal Taylor.”

  I laugh. “Or Katie’s got it locked away, ready for the day she finally decides to bewitch everyone into retweeting her clapbacks.” I pass the big cast-iron cauldron in the center of the room and a pair of skeleton cages dangling from the ceiling, large enough to hold two people each, and wander over to the stand where the Black Flame Candle used to be, but of course the candle itself is locked in a safe in our attic. My mom checks on it twice a year, just to make sure no one has gotten their hands on it. I’ve heard plenty about this particular house of horrors, but confronting it IRL is bone-chilling.

  “You guys,” says Isabella. She pulls an enormous book out of her messenger bag. “I know I should have told you sooner, but...I have Winifred’s spell book.”

  I freeze. “What? How?”

  “I don’t know. It showed up in my room on my bed earlier today. I don’t know what to do about it. It’s legit the spell book. Creepy closed eyeball and all.”

  Travis takes it from her hand. “Whoa! It weighs a ton!”

  How does Isabella have the spell book? This thing’s been missing for twenty-five years.

  “Let me see that,” I breathe.

  Travis hands it to me, and I hand him the spirit board box in return.

  I inspect the leather cover, with its clumsy stitches that look like scars and silver serpent embellishments. I open it and flip through dusty pages with black and red ink in archaic font, showing spells for all sorts of dark, creepy things. I slam the book shut. It’s much easier to doubt my family’s story when I’m not staring right at the closed, wrinkled eyelid of the accursed artifact. “Well, this changes things,” I say.

  “So, who wants to cast a spell?” says Isabella jokingly. “Tonight’s the night. It’s a blood moon. And someone wanted me to have this spell book. So which spell do we choose?”

  “Hey, let’s ask the witches!” Travis shouts, opening the spirit board box.

  “Travis, that was a joke,” I say. “Right?” I’m starting to feel uneasy.

  Travis takes the book from me and kneels by the cauldron, laying the mass-market spirit board out in front of him with the book open to a random page next to it. The board itself is matte black, with delicate lines curling from the sides in shining gold and silver. Letters and numbers in bold white type dominate the center of the board. Isabella plops down beside him.

  “Pops, do you believe your family’s story, or don’t you?” Travis sticks out his tongue.

  “You know I don’t,” I say.

  “Good. Me neither. Now lighten up. Let’s have some fun,” says Travis.

  I force my eyes down to the spirit board and take a closer look at it, not quite sure how it works. In the middle of the board, the alphabet is printed in two arching lines. The numbers zero through nine are printed in a row below that, and along the bottom of the board are the words ghoul, bye. Similarly, hell yeah occupies the top left corner of the board and hell no takes up the top right corner. Centered between them is hey, ghoul, hey. Not exactly traditional.

  “But I still have kind of a bad feeling about—” I start.

  Travis clears his throat and places his hands on the planchette. “Hello? Calling all spirits?”

  The three of us sit in silence. Isabella glances at me and mouths, Are you okay?

  I smile and nod. Totally, I mouth back.

  “Hey,” Travis whispers to us. “How are spirits with college applications? Think they can help me get into Stanford?” He looks around the room, as if expecting a spirit to volunteer.

  Grinning, Isabella jabs his arm with her elbow. “Knock it off.”

  “If they can, I call dibs,” I say.

  Isabella jabs me, too, but I just laugh, and suddenly I’m not so nervous anymore.

  “That’s genies for long shots and wish fulfillment, and we’re short a lamp,” says Isabella, also placing her hands on the planchette.

  “Seriously, though,” I add, resting my own hand there, too. But as the words leave my mouth, the book’s pages flutter in a sudden inexplicable breeze, and the planchette slides to the top of the board and comes to a stop.

  HEY, GHOUL, HEY.

  No way is a ghost actually here in the Sanderson house communicating with us through this five-dollar toy store spirit board.

  I snatch my hand away from the cheap plastic planchette, jump up, and pace around the Sanderson house, crossing from the cracked, dusty cauldron to the wrought-iron stand where the Black Flame Candle used to sit before my parents locked away the remaining stub. I don’t believe in ghosts and witches like my parents do, but if I did, I’d know that this is exactly how one could get free. I take a deep breath.

  Stop freaking out.

  “Poppy, you okay?” Isabella sounds genuinely worried for me.

  “You’re moving it,” I say to Travis. “Good one.” I take off my basic witch hat and run a hand through my long dirty-blond hair before putting it back on.

  “I’m not,” Travis says where he sits. “Cross my heart and hope to...” He isn’t even looking at the board when the planchette slides on its own down to ghoul, bye.

  Isabella and Travis glance down to where it settled. Isabella inhales sharply and takes her hand slowly off the board. Travis’s eyes go wide, and he yanks his hand away from the board, too, and peers around the empty house.

  “It’s not us,” Isabella says to me.

  “So, what do we do now?” I ask, my gaze flitting between Travis and Isabella.

  Isabella bolts up. “Leave. Obviously. What else w
ould we do?”

  I bite my lip and wonder, fleetingly, what it would mean if there were a spirit here. What if my parents and Aunt Dani have been telling the truth this whole time? I’ve spent so many nights staring up at my ceiling, wondering whether my relationship with my family would be less complicated if I knew what actually happened. It’s All Hallows’ Eve with a blood moon, so if my mom is right—if the blood moon actually is amplifying magic tonight—this might be my only chance to find out for sure. What if all my denying and Halloween-hating has not only kept my parents’ story under wraps but also kept me from the truth?

  “No,” I hear myself say.

  Isabella meets my gaze. Her eyes are mesmerizing—wide dark pools with long lashes.

  “It’s just a cheap board game,” I say with more confidence than I feel.

  Isabella hesitates, trying to read me. “I’m high-key over this ghost stuff,” she says, “but if you want to stay, I’ll stay.”

  “Me too,” says Travis.

  “Cool. We stay,” I say. “Let’s see what the spirits want.” I kneel between my friends on the rough wood floorboards. I’m the first to reach for the planchette, and Travis and Isabella rest their fingers on it, too.

  “I’m sorry about that,” I say to the board, feeling a little silly talking to thin air. But at least the three of us are in this together. Well, the three of us plus the disembodied spirit.

  The planchette slides back to hey, ghoul, hey.

  I glance at Travis and then at Isabella.

  “Who are you?” I ask the board, my gaze locked with Isabella’s.

  The planchette skims along the board, and I tear my eyes from her to watch it. It points to the letter M and then to the letter E.

  I laugh. “Helpful,” I say.

  “Great,” says Travis. “The ghost is sassy.”

  Isabella shushes him. “Let Poppy do her thing. You go, Poppy.”

  “So, how long have you been dead?” I ask casually.

  Isabella leans into me and whispers, “Master of ghost small talk. I dig.”

  I chuckle, but then my fingers seem to chase the planchette, it’s moving so fast: three, two, five.

  “Three hundred and twenty-five years,” Isabella says, tone reverent—like she can’t believe this is actually happening.

  “Or Texas,” Travis adds.

  I raise an eyebrow at him in question.

  “Three-two-five. It’s a Texas area code.”

  Travis is my best friend, which means that I’m afforded the truly priceless gift of never having to laugh at his jokes. “You’re right. A Texas area code makes so much more sense.”

  “That means it’d be the year...” Isabella’s voice trails off.

  “Sixteen ninety-three.” Travis can do mental math faster than anyone I’ve ever known.

  I meet his eyes, then Isabella’s. She bites her lip and looks back at the board, studying it like it’s a textbook and finals are tomorrow.

  “Are you...a Sanderson?” I ask.

  The planchette speeds up to the right corner: hell no.

  “What’s your name?” I ask.

  The planchette zips toward the bottom of the board and back to the top, nudging at the corners. I glance at Isabella, who’s frowning at the board, eyebrows knit in concentration.

  I take a deep breath and repeat my question, louder: “What’s your name?”

  I read the letters out as they’re selected.

  T-E-L-L.

  Then the planchette dips out of the alphabet for a second before diving back in.

  Y-O-U.

  “‘Tell you’?” I repeat. “You want to...tell me something?”

  The planchette shoots to the top left corner: hell yeah.

  I swallow hard. “Okay. Go on. I’m listening.”

  The planchette skitters around the board, stopping on letters just long enough for me to catch which ones they are. My heart is racing. Without permission from my brain, my mouth starts reading the words aloud faster than I could ever hope to comprehend them.

  “‘Some inside and some without,’” I hear myself say. “‘One believes and one holds doubt. On All Hallows’ Eve ere twelve is struck, trade three souls—’”

  “Um, Pops,” says Isabella, “I think—”

  “—‘until sunup,’” I finish.

  “—we should quit while we’re ahead,” Isabella continues.

  There’s a pause, and the planchette makes its way to the bottom of the board.

  GHOUL, BYE.

  I pull my hands back, clasping them in my lap to hide the fact that I can feel them shaking.

  Travis and Isabella let go of the planchette, too.

  Isabella looks around the Sanderson house as if she’s afraid something is about to happen.

  “What the heck was that?” I ask.

  The spell book snaps shut of its own accord, and we all scream. Then the planchette shoots off the spirit board and skitters across the room and under a cabinet. Cobwebs run thick between the bottom of the cabinet and the floor, and the open shelving reveals ancient jars of pickled things—some of which look like children’s ears. We stare at the book for a long, tense moment.

  “Good thing nothing weird happened,” says Travis, a slight tremor in his voice undermining his deadpan tone.

  The next thing I hear is Isabella shouting, and then everything around us flies into the air. Winifred’s spell book hovers, opening and glowing green around the edges. I take cover as a chaise longue and the Black Flame Candle holder rocket into the air. The display case for Winifred Sanderson’s spell book flies up, as well as a wooden dining table and boxes of crap from the ticket counter. A strong wind whips through the house, swirling the spirit board, witch-hatted black cat plushies and my own witch hat, Sanderson sister postcards, and other debris.

  Drawers and cabinets snap open and shut like loud, hungry mouths. An animal lunges at me, and I scream before realizing it’s a stuffed and mounted squirrel, jaws frozen open in an angry hiss. It bounces off my arm and flies away, back into the whirlwind. Travis and Isabella shout and raise their arms to protect their faces from flying taxidermy. It feels like the room is spinning. The wind tugs at my hair, winding it around and around, the air twisting it in a vortex. My camera flies off from around my neck. I grab the strap, preventing it from soaring away completely. The floorboards jump, making me shriek, and an unnatural lime-green light shines from beneath them, as if someone’s run neon bulbs under the house.

  “What did we do?” I yell over clattering and crashing.

  “I’m going to go with the obvious answer and say we angered the big dumb evil spirits, Pops!” shouts Travis.

  There’s a crack of thunder and bright burst of yellow lightning that seems to be coming from inside the house. A crash nearby—not from thunder, this time—makes me jump. I peek up to find that the dining table has landed miraculously on its feet beside me. I reach for Isabella and wince from the shock of electricity that passes between our hands. I drag her under the table with me.

  “Travis!” I call. “Get over here!”

  He scrambles over and joins us. “Don’t have to ask me twice!”

  Then the air goes perfectly still, and all is silent for a moment before the airborne debris showers down around us at once. It thumps and patters against the tabletop overhead, including the two skeleton cages, which roll onto the ground where they rock and teeter. The three of us cluster closer together, trying to avoid the falling fragments. The spell book slams shut and lands at our feet, and Isabella quickly snatches it up and hugs it as if to prevent it from opening again.

  And then the whole house goes silent once more.

  I can hear us all breathing heavily.

  “What was that?” whimpers Travis, his eyes darting around wildly. He looks at Isabella. “And where the hell did you get that spirit board? Grim Grinning Ghosts and Sons?”

  “Hello? Did you not see when the spell book was floating in the air and glowing?” she retorts, wav
ing the book.

  “What spell did we just read?” I ask.

  Isabella cautiously opens the book and riffles through its pages, then stops. “An exchange spell?” she says.

  “What’s that?” Travis asks.

  “So let me get this straight—we read a spell from the book? How did the spell from the book...?” I say. My heart is still pounding, partly from the adrenaline and partly because I know this is all my fault. The blood moon. The spell book. The stupid spirit board. I never should’ve offered to take my friends here and perform a spirit summoning. Ever since I can remember, even when I was just a little girl, I’ve done everything in my power to make sure no one else heard the story my family told me—the story they swore was true. And now...

  Isabella opens her mouth to speak. But she freezes when we hear the wooden slats of the front porch creaking under slow, deliberate footsteps. Isabella shuts the book and presses into my right side, and Travis clings to my left arm. We’re all shaking like leaves. I pray it doesn’t give us away to whoever, or whatever, is about to enter the house. I hear the doorknob rattle and give, and I realize we didn’t lock it behind us when we came in. The front door to the Sanderson house creaks open. I take a deep breath, bracing myself. The door continues to swing back on its hinges, eventually bumping into the wall. The figure in the doorframe is towering and backlit, with a bushy crown of fire-red curls haloed by the toasted moonlight. It can’t be. Can it?

  “Try to get into the loft and down the waterwheel,” I whisper to my friends.

  “I’m not about to die for you,” Travis whispers back.

  “Shhh!” Isabella hisses. She’s gone from terrified to observant.

  The figure steps into the house, floorboards thudding beneath heavy shoes. It pauses, looking slowly around as if trying to remember exactly where it left something precious.

  Two more sets of feet thunder up the steps, and I scrabble toward Travis, gesturing for him to move.

  But it’s too late.

  Lights spring on.

  Travis shrieks, Isabella winces, and I flip over the table to create a barricade.