The Conjure Book

by A. A. Attanasio

  Enchanted Middle School

  The tenderness of her battered bones provoked a groan, and she slouched mournfully down the hall to the bathroom. Among billows of steam and suds in a hot shower, she tried out a chant called Slake the Ache, but it was useless against faerïe pain. Neither could she remove the faerïe knots in her hair.

  At the breakfast table, Mrs. Babcock took one look at the teen’s damaged face and twisted hair and sat down heavily, clutching her chest. “My word, child! Who laid hands on you?”

  Jane waved two fingers at the landlady and chanted her sing-song spell. The old woman blew a sigh of relief and returned to the stove, where she merrily griddled another gooseberry pancake for Jane.

  At school, Jane headed straight for the office, shouldering her way through a corridor of kids astonished at her crazed physical appearance. “Sharp hair!” one admirer greeted. “You are definitely tricked out for treats!” Another shot an appreciative smile at her, “Witchy bitchy make-up, Jane! Outrageous!”

  In the office, the secretaries smiled and winked, believing, like everyone else, that her faerïe wounds were part of her costume. Even the vice-principal, who always before strictly enforced the school dress code no matter the occasion, nodded with approval after she wiggled her fingers in his face. He even paused in his deskwork to laud her for “getting into the Halloween spirit.”

  She thanked him and said that she wanted to read to the entire school a short poem for Halloween. She informed him that it was about finding true happiness, and he got up from his desk enthusiastically and patted her on the back, making her wince in pain. He commended her for thinking of others and led her to the office’s public address microphone.

  From the grimoire, shrouded in invisibility, Jane chanted an ecstasy spell: “‘Now you hear the music in your own hearts — Now you hear the music where all hope starts — Where sickness ends and misery departs — Here we find the magic that love imparts — All of us one, one soul of many parts.’”

  Jane shut the conjure book quickly and loudly, triggering the spell she had cast. In a gentle voice, she added, “That’s for our classmate, Alfred Contini, who right now is lying in a coma in a hospital bed. We have not forgotten him.”

  “Certainly not!” the vice-principal erupted and budged her aside. He stared past her and through the office wall into a possibility that had not occurred to him until now. His eyes witnessed the future, and it shone with everything good and fun that he had hoped for as a child — and that future was today! It was Halloween!

  He spoke into the mike through a dazzling grin. “Today is Halloween everybody! And — if our principal agrees, and I believe she will — then I propose that we at Wessex Middle School dedicate the entire day to making creative and festive costumes for a parade through town to collect money for Alfred Contini’s medical fund! What do you say, people?”

  A unanimous cheer pealed from every classroom. Jane mumbled a Thee Agree with Me spell, and the principal emerged from her office smiling vigorously and flashed a thumbs-up at Jane and the vice-principal. Amidst the ensuing hubbub of zealous teachers and secretaries scrambling to gather together office supplies and classroom materials useful for making costumes and parade banners, Jane slipped away.

  She edged slowly along corridors jammed with excited kids and inspired teachers, each of whom wanted personally to congratulate her for her school spirit. When she got to the computer lab, nobody was there. Everyone had gone to the vocational shops, to the auditorium storage room, to the art and home economics studios for materials and then to the gymnasium and the cafeteria to begin creating their masquerades and parade frippery.

  Across the hall, in science class, Jane found a stuffed pheasant atop a specimen cabinet. She carried the dead bird back to the computer lab, where she got online and found her way to the local electric utility’s website. The spell for conjuring knowledge didn’t take long. As usual, she didn’t feel any smarter when it was over, and she anxiously walked around trying to summon insights into the city’s power system.

  She circled the room with thoughts of high-tension wires and electrical transformers flitting through her mind, and behind her back Trick E’s visage flashed on the monitor.

  The computer blinked out, and the spirit fox retreated invisibly through the machine’s power cord. He took with him the deceptive force he had used to distort Jane’s conjure knowledge. For a moment, his gloating grin flittered on the screen before exploding into hot pixels that streaked away like tracer bullets.

  Jane returned the glass-eyed pheasant to its proper place with doubts about whether the magic had worked. The so-called bird, after all, was just feathers stuffed with something like sawdust.

  She dismissed her apprehensions and joined the cavorting students down the hall swaddling a life-size plastic skeleton in orange and black crepe. When they finished decorating this Halloween mummy, Jane went to the cafeteria and helped carve pumpkins into jack-o’-lantern helmets for the football team.

  Jane’s homeroom teacher, in feathered headgear and cheeks streaked with lipstick, gathered Jane into a huge hug. “I’m so proud of you,” she praised her student. “We’ve all been worried about Alfred, and you found a way for us to do something for him that makes everyone feel good!”

  Jane didn’t feel so good, because she knew why Alfred needed help in the first place. She tried to put those bad feelings aside for the time being. That wasn’t too hard, because the enchanted middle school had enchanted her as well. Even with her chest full of her secret and the shadow of fear for what lay ahead dark in the furrows of her brain, she had fun. Giggling with her teacher and the others as they carved goofy faces into the pumpkins, she forgot for a while that she was a witch.

  When it was time to remember, she visited the woodshop and fashioned a besom, which an English teacher in a Dracula cape told her was the old-fashioned name for broom. A storm-felled tree had been cut up and stacked in the lumber-room for the woodshop kids to use for raw material. She selected a gnarled bough as thick as her forearm, because it looked like the knobby handle of the besom that Hyssop Joan carried. She rounded one end with a rasp and sandpaper and at the other end used sturdy twine that the shop teacher called raffia to secure a bundle of twigs and straw grass.

  Authentic besom in hand, Jane pranced through the carnival crowd milling in the halls, showing off their costumes-in-progress, and dancing to the party music on the p-a system. She found black fabric and sewing machines in home economics and enough friendly kids who were talented tailors and enthusiastic about helping her create a witch’s frock and a pointy hat with a gauze veil.

  When Ethan drove into the parking lot at the end of the school day, he sat amazed before a costumed parade of fabled characters pouring from the exits. Bearing placards with Alfred Contini’s face and wielding drums and band instruments, the students promenaded like some kind of homecoming celebration from hell: vampires, zombies, devils, white-faced buffoons, hunchbacks, motley fools, ghosts, pumpkin heads, space aliens, mummies, werewolves, and a veiled witch from a macabre black-gown wedding shaking her besom at him.

  Part Four:

  Witchcraft Straight Up

  Nature of the Cat

  Dressed as a witch, Jane returned to her room in Bosky Glen to find Jeoffry sulking beneath her desk. At the sight of her, he dragged his belly into hiding under her bed.

  “Hey, it’s me, silly cat.” Jane knelt down and took off her veiled hat. “It’s just a costume.”

  “Well, I’ll be the son of a cur!” Jeoffry poked out his head. “For an awful moment there, my troubled brain mistook you for that degraded hag who popped us into this hot water in the first place.”

  “Hyssop Joan?” Jane asked in disbelief. “This costume doesn’t look anything like her.”

  “Like she.”

  “Whatever.” Jane stood and threw her hat and besom on the bed. “Are you mad at me, Jeoffry?”

  “Mad? Oh, indeed, young witch. I am mad with worry.” The fa
miliar emerged from hiding and climbed onto the cane chair, where he executed a slow turn before comfortably settling down. “Today is Samhain, and your behavior on this most dire day of your unripe life hardly warms my heart.”

  Jane sat on the edge of the bed, annoyed. “What are you talking about?”

  “Your behavior, miss. Without so much as a thoughtful furrow of the brow, you have tossed magic about like confetti at a New Year’s ball. To think how the Babcock and even dear old dad have succumbed to your enthralling powers of deception sets my cardiac muscle galumphing. But that was merely your warm-up act. From the window, I’ve seen your teachers and classmates outlandishly caparisoned and strutting up and down the streets like flamingos in a feeding frenzy. Great Goddess, Jane, you’ve enchanted your entire school! You’ve sent them parading through town mesmerized with bonhomie for your comatose friend who only requires bonhomie because your foolishness (against which I sternly warned you, you will recall) has left him inert as a yam. Have you any notion of the titanic consequences you’ve set in motion just so that you could conjure knowledge of the town’s wiring?”

  Jane glared morosely at the cat. “I’m doing whatever it takes.”

  “Precisely my objection, you wild thing.” Jeoffry upheld a cautionary paw. “You are a child, and you do not wear ruthlessness well.”

  “I don’t care.” She stood and went to her desk to continue her grimoire studies. “I almost got killed this morning. I’d rather be ruthless than dead.”

  “My, my. Aren’t we sounding not unlike the horrendous Hyssop herself.”

  Jane paused at her desk and stabbed Jeoffry with a scowl, “Why do you dislike her so much?”

  “You mean, apart from her being a degraded character and fiercely ugly to boot?”

  “Hey, that’s unkind.” Jane leaned forward, fists on her hips. “I thought familiars were supposed to help.”

  “Whom do you fancy provided that human carbuncle with succor and sage counsel all the days of her mortal existence? One forbearing and capable Jeoffry is the answer.” The cat sat up proudly. “I’m the one who introduced her to Wicca in the first place, you know. When I first met her, she was just a dirty-faced mixed breed in the everglades of Florida, an amateur healer collecting herbs and insects for the stinking medicines that she peddled to the natives, croc hunters, and feverish madmen searching for the fountain of youth, which was all that Florida was famous for in those days, by which I mean the slaphappy days of the 1560s. Ah, but you don’t have time for these reminiscences, what with your Napoleonic plans to enchant the whole planet.”

  “Then, how about keeping it short?” Jane crossed her arms, not bothering to hide her annoyance. “Today’s Halloween, and I have an important favor to do for the faerïe, remember? Why don’t you just finish telling me why Hyssop Joan became so cruel? She sounds like a very good witch so far, wanting to heal people.”

  “That was the problem. She was a good witch. She cared about people, and she used Wicca to help countless souls from childbirth to the deathbed. But in advanced age, she became so expert, so goody good at Wicca, she stopped taking my advice. I warned her not to settle in the West Woods. These were stomping grounds for fanatical Puritans — no friends of Wicca they. You do know about the Puritans?”

  Jane raised both hands. “Jeoffry, please. Forget about the Puritans. Just tell me what happened to Joan.”

  “Well, you already have the gist. The old girl insisted on spreading Wicca like some kind of delicious jam. They’d eaten it up all through our travels in the southern colonies and Appalachia. But when we arrived in the Massachusetts colony, the Puritans wanted none of it. Your mentor was aged of flesh and weary of spirit by then. We’d been on the road for over seventy years, and all she craved was a quiet cottage wherein to ply her craft through her sunset days. The Mayflower crowd took exception. ‘Bad for the neighborhood,’ they railed. I counseled Dame Know-It-All to go west, where the Iroquois Nation had offered her a teaching fellowship and a celebrity tour up the Hudson. She refused to budge.”

  “Okay, I understand now.” Jane sat back with a sad sigh. “Hyssop Joan got old and cranky — and in the wrong place.”

  “That’s the nutcup.”

  “But why do you talk so harshly about her, like she was some kind of fiend?”

  “The old girl had been doing stupendously,” Jeoffry answered, lounging on his back. “She had dedicated her life to performing wonders for humankind, healing the ill, comforting the dying, succoring the grieving, dispensing blessings and benisons everywhere she went — right up until the end. And then, she soured into a wicked witch. Just like that — ker-plooey!” He slashed a claw through the air. “She blew it. She dropped the ball. Flopped. Laid an egg. Fell on her face. Crapped out. And that was that. The bitter end for any hope we had of entering the Big T.”

  “That’s it?” Jane cocked an eyebrow knowingly. “You’re mad at her because you were counting on her getting you into the Twilight? That’s the only reason?”

  “Do you have any idea how tedious is the life of a familiar?” Upside-down, Jeoffry gave her a penetrating look. “One is constantly ingratiating oneself to those people attracted to magic: humanity’s outcasts — pariahs, curmudgeons, miscreants, devil worshippers, addicts, melancholics, felons, megalomaniacs, derelicts, malefactors and thieves. For centuries, I’d snuggled up to one exemplar after another of this miserable lot, hoping with eternal optimism that just one of these blighters would heed my advice, do the necessary good deeds and clear for us a path directly into Happy Land. Joan is the closest I’ve come. What a champion of kindness she was! What a benefactor to all things living! And then, just when I was smelling the catnip, she gets a bug in her ear about Puritans and out come the hexes and curses. Ker-plooey! Just like you’re behaving now, full of piss and vinegar and determined to defeat your foes with absolutely no kindness aforethought.”

  “All right, let me get this straight.” Jane laughed coldly. “What you’re saying is, all you really care about is yourself.”

  “Well now, miss…” Jeoffry rolled onto his belly and lifted his whiskers in a suave smile. “That is the nature of the cat.”

  A Cupful of Beauty

  Jane rose decisively from her chair. “Enough talk!”

  She swept aside the lace curtains and inspected the late afternoon’s cloudless sky and the red autumn sun low among the trees across the street. “It’s going to get dark soon,” she said, “And unless we give the faerïe what they want before midnight, we’re dead.”

  “Were there not fur upon my face, you’d see how pale the thought of disappointing the faerïe leaves me.” Jeoffry leaped from chair to desk and sat alongside the conjure book. “If you would open the door for me, I shall carry my consternation to the garden.”

  “I wish I could walk away from my problems as easily as you,” Jane grumbled and opened the door.

  Jeoffry picked up the grimoire in his jaws and dashed out the door in a white blur.

  “Hey!” Jane hobbled after him down the stairs, her bones sore from her faerïe beating. “That’s my book!”

  “What’s that, dearie?” Mrs. Babcock inquired from the kitchen. “You want to take a look? Certainly! The dinner I’m preparing is ideal for Halloween.”

  “Where’s Jeoffry — I mean, Lester?” Jane asked in a huff. “Where did Lester go?”

  “He’s right here, dear.” Mrs. Babcock pointed a wooden spoon at the white Manx sliding in through the cat panel of the garden door. “Are you teasing him? He’s full of beans today.”

  Jane followed Jeoffry back upstairs, her jaw set. “What did you do with my grimoire?” she asked gruffly when her bedroom door closed behind them. “I want my book back — now!”

  “Gnashing of wisdom teeth and tearing of hair will not avail.” Jeoffry blithely hopped onto the bed. “I related to you in rough the illustrative biography of your mentor and the causes of her miserable fate, and yet you do not seem moved to change your wayward ways. Conse
quently, I have taken it upon myself to terminate your tenure as a witch. I shall see that the fearsome Trick E receives the grimoire in exchange for Alfred’s soul. Thus, you shall be acquitted of any harm to others and may carry on with your adolescence guilt free.”

  “You little coward!” Jane rushed at him with hands open to grab him by the throat. When she saw him cringe and puff up with fright, her hands dropped to her sides. “I could strangle you, you — you little twerp. What you’re doing is wrong. Trick E isn’t going to just walk away with the conjure book. He’s going to kill you. And then he’s going to come here and kill my father and me. And it’s all going to be your fault!”

  “I dare say. But I cannot bear witnessing your decline into moral turpitude. Ah, but that’s probably a word beyond the perimeter of your vocabulary.”

  “You and Hyssop Joan didn’t get me into all this trouble to teach me vocabulary,” Jane shot back. “You wanted my help, and I came through for you. Now, you’re pulling out because you’re scared. That’s stupid. You’re going to get us killed. And I’m not going to let that happen.”

  Jeoffry continued to cower. “I may be pusillanimous,” he said in a frightened voice, “but I will not succumb to torture. I took the grimoire away from you for your own good.”

  “Oh, shut up.” Jane began to walk a tight circle counterclockwise, muttering, “Not death but the flower of it — Not flesh but the living spirit — Come back, come back...” Jane paused, thumb to chin. “Damn! What’s the rest of that?”

  “You’re making the flesh creep, Jane.” Jeoffry slid off the counterpane and slipped under the bed. “What you’re doing is obscene for an apple-cheeked youngster. Desist, for this desperate measure cannot succeed.”

  “We’ll see about that.” Jane closed her eyes, striving to recall the chant she had read the night before. “If you won’t help me, maybe Hyssop Joan will.”