The Conjure Book

by A. A. Attanasio

  Those wicked green eyes narrowed. “But now you come along, and you make it personal. You crack me on the snout and deny me that stinky old conjure book so that Wart Face and her cowardly furball can find eternal happiness in the Big Sunset! Do you even care that they’re traitors to Wicca? No. Your mammy is dead, and that makes you mad. So Hiccup Joan is a sick-in-the-head witch who helped Europe’s rejects rip up our forests and poison our lakes and rivers. What’s that to you? All you know is you want revenge. Let me tell you something, girlie. What I’m fighting for is a whole lot bigger than you and your dead mammy. And when I get done tearing your guts out, I’m paying a visit to your pappy. He wants to suck oil out of the Caribbean? Hell! I’m going to suck those mad scientist brains right out of his skull!”

  “Oh no, you’re not!” Jane gnashed her teeth with the effort to push herself upright, and Trick E snorted a laugh of green fire that sent her sprawling.

  “Oh no, sugar plum? Oh no?” The spirit fox splayed both front paws, each claw blue-white as a welder’s torch. “You’re done saying no to me, baby.”

  “No! No! No! No! No! No! No!” Jane yelled maniacally, and while Trick E reared up to strike, green eyes ablaze with murderous delight at her tantrum, she reached into the right pocket of her Army jacket. She clutched the handful of salt she had been carrying there since her visit to the field where Alfred had lost his soul. With one more furious “No!” that emptied her lungs, she flung the salt at the rampant fox.

  An agonized scream ripped from Trick E, and he billowed into a raucous fireball of burning red smoke.

  Jane rolled out of the way, and the blazing gust of twisting vapors and spurting flames toppled to the ground where she had lain. Wailing horrifically, the burning fox flopped in the dirt, kicking up a dust cloud cut with horizontal rays of blue radiation. The conflagration snuffed out, smothered beneath a hissing bang.

  All that remained of the spirit fox was a scorched puppet that staggered two steps toward Jane and collapsed under a puff of black fumes. As the last echoes of his screams dwindled, a husky groan shook the charred rags of his body. Stitches of electricity crackled across his roasted face. “I … will … get … you!”

  Jane staggered upright and spun away from the shuddering lump of ashes. She lurched through the dark, stumbling over loose rocks and colliding with larger outcroppings. Behind her, the spirit fox’s voice grew louder, provoking bigger avalanches of echoes: “Jane! Jane — Riggs! I’m — not — dead! You — are!”

  Wrinkles of light rippled down from the stony heights. The faerïe were coming for her. Their soft voices sifted closer, “Vile child! Hither thither she runs and does not see. Vile child! With a fistful of salt, she scalded Trick E. With a fistful of salt! With a fistful of salt, she left him lame and halt. That vile child attacked our Trick E. Now, he calls to us in misery. Kill the child, the vile child. She is evil and not wild. Not a wild child but a vile child. Attack and kill the vile child. The vile child we will kill. She will not leave our hollow hill.”

  Jane heaved a terrified look around, vainly searching for the white steps she had descended.

  The first gust of faerïe swept over her in an explosion of tiny impacts. A thousand small blows struck her from head to toe, pummeling her with a convulsive malice that knocked the breath out of her and shook her stiffly and violently as someone electrocuted.

  “You’ll never get out!” Trick E shouted hoarsely. “You’re in my house! You hear me, sugar? My house!”

  The faerïe veered off, and Jane dropped to her knees, pierced through every inch of her flesh with aching bruises. She swiped wildly at her hair where several of the flying gremlins had got tangled and, when her breath gagged back into her lungs, shrieked, “Get away from me!”

  Flecks of fire fine as pollen settled in the dark beside her and drifted into the shape of the faerïe girl with floating hair of polar lights. “Are you my wild child — or a vile child? Are you sad and lonely — or our mad enemy?”

  “Help me.” Jane peered through tears at the dazzling girl at her side. “Please, help me.”

  “You cannot stay with me. You have hurt our friend Trick E. You cannot come away. We cannot dance and play. Wild child or vile child? Lonely or enemy? You must say. But you cannot stay.”

  “I’m not your enemy. I don’t hate the faerïe.” Jane sobbed a breath, ribs aching, stunned flesh throbbing. “I am a wild child. I love earth — the woods — the desert. It’s Trick E I hate! He killed my mother! He killed her!”

  “Trick E comes. This way, he comes. And the faerïe gather again to swoop and kill. They will not let you leave our hollow hill.” The faerïe girl placed against Jane’s cheek a shining hand. “Wild child. Shadows of cats color your hair. The breath on your lips…” The radiant face pressed close and sniffed Jane. “Yes, the breath on your lips is the very breeze trees hide between their leaves. You are my wild child. But the others do not believe. So, you dare not stay. You must leave.”

  A blazing horde of faerïe daggered out of the dark and struck Jane between the shoulder blades. Over she fell, slapped to the ground, gouged, jabbed and rammed with pain that knocked her senseless.

  For a moment, she drifted in numb darkness. Then, stabbing hurt shook her awake. She thrashed onto her back and flailed her arms, futilely trying to drive off the machine gun rush of faerïe blows.

  The punishing swarm swung into the dark, a few stragglers lingering to yank fiercely at her hair. Jane lay gasping. “Get me out — get me out of here!”

  “You will not forget your hazelnut debt?” the faerïe girl inquired, bending over Jane with her sunset hair and star-core eyes. “You must douse the electric light and darken our Samhain night. Do not forget your hazelnut debt. If you forget, I will not care that shadows of cats darken your hair. I will not care that your breath is the breeze trees hide between their leaves. I will not care. So, you must beware.”

  Jane pushed herself to her feet and stood reeling, body embroidered with bruises. “Just get me out of here.”

  “Then, run!” With an arm shimmering like star-mist, like comet smoke, the faerïe girl pointed into the blackest depth of the cavern. “Run! You must run and must not stop until you see the sun. Run! Wild child! Trick E is here, and he smells your fear. The faerïe attack. They are at your back! Run!”

  Hesitantly, Jane advanced into the blackness. From behind her, a growl vibrated, low and mean, and wove itself into a raspy voice, “What a trip, honey pie. First you’re born — and then you die!”

  She flung a look behind and saw Trick E separate from the shadows, a piece of the darkness itself, a greasy black rumor of his former shape.

  He dragged his burned husk toward her, dripping sticky green flames. “You can’t escape, muffin. You’re inside my trip. You took the drug, girlie. You got high on your hate. And now you’re in my trip. You hear me, darling? Nobody does hate better than me.”

  Jane ran. Blindly, she ran hard as her hurting legs would carry her. Screams of fire flashed past on all sides, and the faerïe swirled around her, slashing her with their glittering thorns, pounding her with all the bone-bruising force of their wrathful bodies and ripping tufts of hair from her scalp.

  The small, whirling suns lit cameo glimpses of hell: sulfur flowers on the brink of brimstone fissures, black glass trees with leaves like knives, and underfoot a cracked lakebed veined with molten lava. Had she drifted a few paces to either side of where the faerïe girl had pointed, she would have fallen to her death.

  Terror whipped her run faster. Her hands beat at her hair and face, trying to drive off the stabbing imps. But they only cut at her deeper and faster, spinning around her like blender blades slicing her cries to short, sharp squeals and squeaks of simpering pain.

  The ground abruptly fell away, and horror hollowed her to a hopeless moan. She plummeted into a sinister abyss and splashed feet-first into the chill bed of a creek. Dead leaves fluttered around her. When she sat up dizzily on the mud bank, she viewed, high on th
e hillside, the cave ragged with ivy and tree roots that had been her chute out of the hollow hills.

  Quickly, she hitched herself upright, swiping convulsively at her hair, haunted by phantom blurs of the venomous faerïe. Chattering with terrified rage, legs wobbling, she collected helmet, rope and backpack from where they lay nearby. Then, she crossed the creek hunched as an old woman and climbed the steep embankment to her waiting bicycle.

  Gold rays of sunlight spread like a fan in the eastern sky. Only a few moments had elapsed since she had first crawled into the faerïe’s dark kingdom.

  Trip Operator

  Jane dropped her bicycle among the spruce trees in the front yard and limped into Bosky Glen. She staggered upstairs without her father or Mrs. Babcock realizing she had ever left the house. In her room, she closed the door and sagged to the floor. For the next ten minutes, her shoulders heaved as she wept with pain and fury. Then, she heard scratching at the door.

  Jeoffry slipped in and, seeing her bruised face and crazed hair, his fur electrified. “Egads, Jane! What happened?”

  Jane told him, and he listened with ears laid flat and blue eyes wide with alarm.

  “You do realize how very lucky you are to be alive?” he asked in a quiet voice when she was done. “Truth be told, I wasn’t convinced I’d ever see you again when you lit out of here with that adolescent expression of ‘Nuts to you, Jeoffry.’ You’ve squandered one of my nine with worry! And to look at you now, all tattered about the edges and mottled with contusions, induces a limpness of the limbs. We must speed you to a physician forthwith.”

  “No.” Jane rose from where she had slumped to the floor and sat at her desk. “I’m fine.” She removed the conjure book from the drawer and began to study it earnestly. “This book is the only doctor I need.”

  “Tush! You’ve been thrashed by the faerïe!” Jeoffry propelled himself onto the desk and laid an urgent paw upon Jane’s hand. “Those are no ordinary blows, young witch. They are meant to kill. And you may well be hemorrhaging internally. You must be examined by a competent physician at once.”

  “Stuff it, Jeoffry!” Jane flashed him an irate look. “Didn’t you hear what I told you? Trick E wants to kill my father! That monster could be on his way right now. Well, I’m going to be here when he shows up — and I’m going to be ready.”

  A static ripple coursed through Jeoffry, standing his fur on end. “Let us not confuse recklessness for valor, Jane. The epidermis crawls to consider what you’re up against now that Trick E is nurturing a personal rage. Much as I am grieved to admit this, I say the time is nigh to relinquish the grimoire. Let him have it. The doddering Hyssop and her redoubtable Jeoffry will find our way to the Twilight by some other avenue, in some other age — because, you realize, there can be no way into heaven for us over your dead body.”

  Through clenched teeth, Jane replied, “That crazy fox is not going to kill me. I’m going to kill him.”

  Jeoffry hung his head timidly and stared up at her with frightened eyes. “You do appreciate the abominable vehemence of your adversary, young witch — and by young I do mean to emphasize ‘inexperienced?’ Trick E is centuries old and the very embodiment of deception and violence. And now that you’ve gotten him mad...”

  “Mad?” Jane shoved her chair back from her desk and grimaced with anger and the pain of her bruised bones. “What’s he got to be mad about? I didn’t kill his mother! I didn’t threaten his father!”

  “Calm yourself, child.”

  “Do you know what that monster said to me?” Her eyes tightened. “He said hate was a drug I had taken. He said I was on a hate trip — his trip. Yeah, well he’s wrong. Dead wrong. He took my mother’s life, and now he wants to take my life and my father’s life.” Her eyes tightened even deadlier. “Let him take his hate trip. But he’s going to find out that when it comes to my life I’m the trip operator. And I’m going to disconnect him. Big time.”

  “I admire your bravura — but Trick E fights dirty. He won’t be vulnerable to the old salt attack a second time. How will you fight him? He has teeth and claws. And you have — well, a book.” Jeoffry pitched a worried look at the grimoire. “That’s not exactly a martial arts manual for witches, you know.”

  “Look, are you with me or not? Because I don’t have time to argue.” Jane pulled her chair back to the desk and returned her attention to the grimoire. “I’ve got to figure a way to black out Wessex tonight without hurting anybody. If I fail, Trick E wins.” She cast a sidelong look at the cat. “So, are you going to help me — or not?”

  “The vile intensity of your will to destroy our nemesis very much troubles me.” Jeoffry’s left ear twitched nervously. “You seem to be willing to visit doom upon Trick E at all costs.”

  “You got that right. If I don’t kill him…”

  “I grasp the mortal necessity of your motivation,” Jeoffry interrupted. “But, young witch, I am obliged to remind you that the ends do not always justify the means. If in the process of eliminating our enemy you become as wicked as he, then you shall have lost something far more precious than your life.”

  “What?” Jane raised her eyebrows with incredulity. “My soul?”

  “Word.”

  She dismissed her familiar’s objection with a wag of her hand. “I intend to protect myself and my father. My soul is just going to have to take care of itself.”

  “That is a dangerous attitude, miss.”

  “Yeah! I am in danger! And so is my father. And so is Alfred. You better believe I’m dangerous.”

  Jeoffry slinked away and sat on the bed warily watching Jane pore over the conjure book. She got up occasionally during the next hour to leave the room and fulfill directives from the book, continuing to practice her magic around the house while her father got dressed for work and Mrs. Babcock slept.

  After a while, when the teen witch was back at her desk, the cat dared ask, “What, precisely, are you hoping to glean from those pages?”

  “Glean?” she asked without looking up from the grimoire. “I’m trying to glean everything I can. I own this book now. I own everything in it. And I’m going to use it all to make sure Trick E doesn’t hurt me or anybody ever again.”

  Jeoffry got to see just how serious Jane was a few minutes later when her father tapped at her door to say goodbye. Opening the door, she gazed at him levelly with her bruised face, and he drew a shocked breath.

  She flicked two fingers before his eyes and chanted a sing-song melody: “What you see, you do not see. I am the ‘me’ of your memory. See me now as you remember me, and go away happily.”

  Ethan smiled benignly, gave her a kiss on her injured cheek and walked away whistling a jaunty tune.

  Curled up on the bed’s quilt, the familiar said nothing. He watched her, ears lowered, as she closed the door and returned to her desk.

  “Don’t look at me like that.” Jane bent over the grimoire. “If I’m going to protect him, I can’t have him worrying about me.”

  “Naturally. And I suppose when you keel over dead from internal bleeding, your ghost can come back and chant a jolly spell to comfort him.”

  “I’m not going to keel over.”

  Jeoffry canted his head inquisitively. “And you know that — how?”

  Jane’s eyes continued to rove over the archaic brown pages. “I performed Conjure Leechcraft on myself. I’m okay. Just bruised. Nothing’s ruptured.”

  “Leechcraft?” Jeoffry perked up. “You know about leechcraft?”

  “Uh-huh,” Jane answered distractedly. “It’s the craft of the leech, which is an Old English word for physician...”

  “I know what a leech is. I was around when Old English was New English.” Jeoffry rose and stepped to the edge of the bed to see what Jane was reading so avidly. “But how do you know about leechcraft? That’s not a spell written in those pages.”

  “Right.” She paused to take some notes and spoke as she wrote in her scrapbook. “It’s one of the spells written between
the pages. You have to know how to read between the leaves of the book.”

  “You figured out how to do that?”

  Jane flipped an amused glance over her shoulder. “Don’t look so surprised. It’s not that hard. You just sort of cross your eyes and chant for what you want. I wanted to know if I was all right. I found the leechcraft spell, and now I know I am.”

  The white cat sat back with amazement. “I’m impressed.”

  “Yeah, well, I still haven’t figured out how to shut down the town’s lights. Blink Blink Make Dark is only good for one light at a time. It’s just not realistic to use it over the whole town. And there’s really nothing in here about electricity.”

  “This grimoire does somewhat predate electrical engineering.”

  “I think I’m going to have to conjure knowledge about that over the internet.” Jane sat back with a perplexed frown. “But I can’t do that now. I’ve spellcast a protective circle around Bosky Glen, to make sure Trick E doesn’t try to slip in here again.”

  “I couldn’t help but notice,” Jeoffry remarked proudly. “Your use of Smoke Be Bride to Wind to distribute guardian ash around the house is very clever.”

  “Yeah, but now I can’t send a spell beyond Bosky Glen for information. That would break the protective circle, and I don’t have anymore cayenne pepper to burn to make guardian ash and spellcast another circle.” She shrugged and returned to her studies. “I’ll just have to conjure knowledge today at school.”

  “At school?” the familiar asked at a higher octave. “How can you possibly hope to chant over a dead bird and still hold our secret close with teachers and students swarming everywhere like bees in a hive?”

  “No problem,” Jane responded casually, continuing her research. “I’ve figured out how to enchant the whole school.”