The Fascinators

by Andrew Eliopulos

  “Oh no,” he said. “No, no, no.”

  “What was that?” Sam said.

  “Who was that?” Delia added.

  In the twelve years that Sam had known him, James had never been one of those guys who hid his emotions. He couldn’t if he wanted to—his emotions were too big. (The words to go with them were a different story; James always said he didn’t like to share his problems, because it only made the problems bigger.) On three different occasions, Sam had seen James cry, and he’d lost count of how many times he’d seen James clenched-fist angry, usually about something his complete monster of a father had done.

  But never—not once in twelve years—had Sam seen his friend look scared. Not when they’d broken Mr. McDougal’s window playing catch with James’s little brother, Benji—not even when James had had to go to the ER with an arm so broken it jutted out at a weird angle.

  Right now, in the back seat of Sam’s car, James looked absolutely terrified.

  “James, does this have something to do with what happened at Mike’s party?” Sam said.

  “Maybe,” James admitted.

  Sam raised his eyebrows.

  “Okay, yes.”

  “You have to tell us what’s going on,” Sam said.

  “Agreed,” Delia said. “I’m no dark magic expert, but that felt like one powerful curse.”

  James wrung his hands and stared into his lap. Sam knew what was happening; James was afraid to make the problem bigger. Finally, he looked up at them. “Do you have time right now? It might be better if I show you.”

  Chapter 3

  IN FRIEDMAN, GEORGIA, THERE IS ONE MAIN ROAD, right off the interstate exit, that gives the appearance of a town that’s developed but generic. A pit-stop exit and not much more. In short succession, there’s a movie theater, a Chick-fil-A, a Waffle House, etc.—oh, and the Chili’s, the one where Delia works—and if you were just driving through on your road trip from Tennessee to Florida, you might think that Friedman was a cookie-cutter, forgettable town. No deep wells of magic here.

  If you took the time to head farther in, though, you’d start to notice the tiny box homes sitting right off the road, often dilapidated, yes, but many of them unchanged for a hundred years. You might catch glimpses of the sprawling farmhouses and colonnaded mansions at the end of long driveways, mostly hidden through the trees. (The houses Sam’s mom sold were somewhere between these two extremes, and she always said that this was by design; she hated that the super-rich people who made their money outside of Friedman didn’t want you to know they lived here, while the lower-income families couldn’t afford any privacy.)

  You’d see that, beyond that main road, hardly any of the town’s restaurants belonged to chain franchises—instead they had singular possessive names like Mo’s or Mary Ellen’s.

  You’d see at least ten churches, if you made the full tour, some of them one rectangular room plus a steeple, but some of them sprawling, the size of a big-city block.

  To Sam, who’d grown up here, everything in Friedman had a hard-to-pin-down quality that did have a kind of magic in it. A uniquely Friedman-like, beautiful magic. Even that main drag. It was something in the town’s bones—a jigsaw puzzle that needed every single piece to make sense.

  And even if Sam often felt like an extra piece in that puzzle—like the town didn’t want him; like he didn’t fit—still, it was hard not to feel as if the town’s magic coursed through his own veins, a part of his DNA.

  Perhaps that was why, when the end of James’s circuitous directions at last found them driving by a long stretch of land that Sam had never seen before, containing what appeared to be a repurposed warehouse a ways off the street, Sam knew they were outside the Friedman city limits without even having to check his phone. This place was silent and strange.

  “I don’t understand. Does Mike live around here somewhere?” Sam asked, leaning over Delia to try to get a look at the building.

  So far, on the drive here, James had been trying to set the scene with a story that kept circling around three facts: (1) He had been to Mike’s party last week, where (2) He had drunk way more than he should have, and okay, he’d even gotten high, when he really should not have, because (3)—and this was in answer to Sam’s question—yes, Amber was at this party as she’d hinted at lunch, but no, she hadn’t gotten drunk or high with him, because, in fact, she didn’t approve of anyone getting high, so James’s being stoned had caused a bit of an issue between them. Number three didn’t seem to be a main point of the story James was trying to tell, however—he didn’t get why Sam kept asking about Amber at all—so there was that, at least. Whatever dangerous things James had gotten mixed up in last week, Amber wasn’t mixed up in them, too. That was some consolation.

  “Don’t slow down,” James now urged from the back seat, startling Sam and causing him to jam his foot on the accelerator, earning a complaint from his transmission. “No, Mike lives back by Stillwater Creek.”

  “Then what are we doing all the way out here?” Delia said, craning her neck to keep an eye on the warehouse.

  There were tall windows on the first floor, but they appeared to be covered from the inside. There was a parking lot around back that Sam could see in his rearview mirror, now that they had driven past. It had three, maybe four cars in it, none of them very new or very nice.

  “Keep going and I’ll tell you,” James said, also watching the building. “There’s a little turnoff up here on the right, coming in . . . right there, see it? Pull in there.”

  Sam turned right onto a narrow dirt road, one he would have certainly missed if James hadn’t been here to guide him, since two arching trees by the street covered it almost completely, a hidden doorway in the wood.

  The trees only grew denser as the road continued. Though Sam had turned off the main street in broad daylight, it was as if he’d driven into a world where it was always night.

  Sam was more than a little relieved when James said, “You can stop here.” He figured the chances of another car coming in either direction and needing to get by them were low; the chances of going so far into the wood that they never came back out again seemed significantly higher.

  “Okay,” Delia said. “Now can you tell us what in the hell we’re doing here?”

  “Right. So, like I said, this all started at Mike’s party, where I got completely blasted—like, seeing double, walking backward, high. Backing up a little bit, though—there were these three guys there, guys I’d seen at a couple other parties this summer, always standing off to the side, keeping to themselves. One of them had offered me a light once, I think. They seemed fine. Maybe a little old to be at a sophomore party, but I was, too, so.”

  “Yeah, I won’t pretend I’m not judging you for that part,” Delia said. Sam was more hung up on the “couple other parties” that James had apparently attended without them this summer. At least he’d known about Mike’s. At least he’d been invited.

  “Judge if you want,” James said. “I needed to get out of my house. Anyway, so these guys were standing right by the cooler when I went to get another drink, which of course was also when Amber got there, saw the empty and the new beer, and gave me this look because she knows from church that I’m trying to cut back. Right away, the guys are like, ‘Oh, somebody’s in trouble,’ ‘somebody’s in the doghouse,’ that sort of shit. So Amber heads inside, and I end up starting a conversation with these dudes, partly to save face but also to tell them they were being complete assholes to my friend. But then we started talking, and they actually seemed pretty cool. They’re the ones who had the pipe.”

  “James, please tell me you did not take a hit of something a stranger gave you,” Sam said, exasperated.

  “Not until after I’d seen them take a few hits of it first,” James said. “I’m not a complete idiot. Anyway, somehow we got on the topic of magic; I think I mentioned something about the Fascinators, I don’t know. And it turns out these guys are magickers, too. And they say, hey, y
ou should come with us to this other party, at this place where all these magickers hang out and learn new spells.”

  “And let me guess, that creepy abandoned warehouse we just passed was that place?” Delia said.

  “Not abandoned, but yes.”

  “You went to a magicker party without us?” Sam said. For some reason, this was even worse than going to a regular party—magic was their thing: Sam, James, and Delia. It was what set them apart.

  “How many times do I have to say it? I was high out of my mind. Even if you had been at Mike’s, y’all hate being around me when I’m high.” Which, fair enough. Delia and Sam didn’t do drugs of any kind. Delia had stopped being around them altogether because of the potential impact on her college applications if she got caught. Sam didn’t have strong feelings about alcohol or drugs in the abstract so much as he had strong feelings about what everyone in Friedman became when they consumed them. Drunk people were way more likely to let their homophobic flags fly. James never got that way, of course, but he wasn’t pleasant to be around either—he became more avatar than person, ecstatic one moment and then hating the world and his life the next. Sam preferred the small, sober, and separate world the Fascinators inhabited when they practiced magic. That was why the news of this party, populated by other magickers, felt like such a betrayal.

  “Anyway, backing up again, that’s when Amber and I kind of had our thing. She didn’t want me leaving with these guys, because I was so stoned and because she didn’t trust the one guy who said he hadn’t been drinking to be the designated driver.”

  “At least someone was thinking straight,” Delia said.

  “Look, do you want to hear the rest of the story or not? I’d been watching him. He hadn’t had a drink since I’d gotten there.”

  “Go on,” Sam said, even if inwardly he was having the same horrified reaction as Delia.

  “So we get to that warehouse, and there are all these cars in the parking lot, which is weird, because I’m thinking there can’t be that many practicing magickers around here. Surely we’d know if there were. And then we walk in the back door, into this huge, open room, where I can see two floors above me, almost like the ground floor of a prison or a mall or something. Right away, I notice that of the thirty or so people there, only nine or ten look like they’re our age. Everybody else is a grown-ass adult. Then this guy comes up to us with a clipboard, asks for our names, and I think we’re about to get kicked out, but the three guys have their names on the list and say I’m with them. Say I’m really good at magic, which struck me as funny, because what are they basing that on? At this point, I was starting to come down, and my internal alarm bells were going off, just a little bit.”

  “‘Just a little bit?’ What the hell, James.” Delia looked like she was ready to smack some sense into him. Sam had to agree. Showing up and then staying at a sketchy adult party in the middle of nowhere sounded insane, even for James, and the fact that he could recount this story in such a calm voice—the fact that he’d been planning to not even tell them about it—made Sam worry that maybe it wasn’t that insane for him. Unlike Delia, though, Sam was trying to contain his surprise; if James saw how cool Sam was being with this news, maybe next time he’d let him in a few steps before things got so out of hand. (It hadn’t escaped him that James had confided in Amber about wanting to cut back on drinking—something he’d never told Sam.)

  Outside Sam’s car, it was growing ever darker. The sun must have been going down beyond the trees, though none of the pinks and oranges of sunset were able to penetrate the forest; in here, it only went from gray to grayer. The three of them all seemed to notice this at the same time, and James’s face creased in concern.

  “Look, I know, it’s not great. I wish I could say I left the second things got out of hand, but I didn’t. And I can keep talking about it all night, but before we lose the little light we have left, the real reason we’re here is to look for something. A giant leather book. It has this symbol on the cover.”

  With hardly any effort, because little prestidigitations like this came as naturally to James as breathing did, James guided his fingers through the air and left a trail of light in their wake—a trail of light in the shape of a jagged V, like two lightning bolts striking the same point from different angles. The shape stained the air for a moment and then was gone.

  “Oh, hell, no,” Delia said. “I am not going out into these woods and looking for anything until I know exactly what it is. What is in this giant leather book? Dessert recipes? Your grandmother’s journal?”

  “I can explain more as we’re looking,” James said. “But that thing that happened to me back in the parking lot? The curse or whatever? It’s going to keep happening—and it’s going to get worse—until I find this book.”

  Sam was already opening his door and stepping out into the woods.

  “Brown leather or . . . ?” he said.

  “Green, actually. Might not be real leather. Looks like something you’d buy at the renfest.”

  “Gotcha.”

  “James,” Delia said. “Is this a spell book we’re looking for?”

  “See, I knew you wouldn’t need more explanation.”

  “James!” she protested.

  They were all out of the car now, but Delia was standing her ground beside the passenger side door. Sam was scanning the foliage and trees right beside the road; it was hard to take even a step farther into the forest, because the underbrush got so thick so fast. Sam saw more than a few bramble bushes whose thorns looked sharp enough to pierce his jeans.

  “Okay, okay,” James said. “So, once everybody on the list got there, they started this group spell, right? And shit got weird really fast from there. Like, five people were supposed to stand in the points of a pentagram—”

  “What would Amber say about that, I wonder?” Sam asked before he could stop himself.

  “Sam, focus,” Delia said.

  James barreled ahead like he hadn’t heard Sam’s comment. “—and one stood in the center, while the guy who was in charge stood off to the side with this giant spell book. When his six people were in place, he started reading from it. I didn’t recognize the language. Meanwhile, his helpers told the rest of us to start making associations like ripping, cutting, tearing—scissors, knives, paper, whatever. Maybe if I’d still been high, I could have done all that touchy-feely stuff. But in that moment, hell no. And I could tell I wasn’t the only one there who hadn’t known what to expect and was getting a little freaked out. A few of us were looking at each other like, Um, sorry, no?

  “The good news is, the spell didn’t work, whatever it was supposed to be. The guy with the book was getting super frustrated, shooting these death-stares at those of us who weren’t into it. Finally, he called it off, and everybody started milling around, trying to get the party started, while the leader guy took his book and stormed off into another room, like he was having a temper tantrum.”

  As he spoke, James tromped around the woods, slicing through the air with his hands, clearing a path with his magic as if he really did have scissors, a knife, a machete. The weeds fell at his feet, though he didn’t venture too far off the road.

  There was no sign of the book, or of anything not belonging to the forest. Everything here looked like it had always been this way—untouched, unchanged, until now.

  Delia didn’t budge. “And how did we get from that point in the warehouse to the book ending up out here?”

  “Well, almost as soon as the spell failed, I went back to the guys I came with and asked to get the hell out of there.”

  “The first good decision you made that night,” Delia said.

  “It would have been, except the guys didn’t want to leave. I ended up wandering around the first floor, doing my own thing, until finally I went into that room where the guy had taken the book.”

  “So it was also the last good decision you made that night,” Delia said.

  James shrugged. “The door was u
nlocked, the guy was nowhere in sight, and the book was just lying there, so I figured they wouldn’t care too much if I read through it. But as soon as I put a hand on it, the leader guy and two of his buddies, like, appeared. The door didn’t even open, they were just there. And I swear on Mary Ellen’s biscuits and gravy, they were ready to kill me. Really and truly. I’ve never seen faces look like that, so full of hate, and y’all know my dad, so that’s saying something.”

  It was getting darker and harder to see by the moment. Sam closed his eyes and imagined that he was the moon, reflective, willing. When he opened his eyes, a soft, blue glow emanated from his palms, casting everything in a somber light.

  Bathed in blue, James stood stock-still, his face beyond haunted—the distance Sam had detected at lunch now clearly a reflection of sleepless nights since last week. Sam believed James about what those guys would have done to him. James didn’t exaggerate about stuff like that. Sam was suddenly overwhelmed with gratitude to have James here, alive.

  “I panicked like a bear in a trap. I wasn’t even thinking. I did this spell that I hadn’t done since I was a kid—hadn’t even thought of since I was a kid—when my dad almost walked in on me playing with my mom’s makeup, and I wanted to make it disappear. All these years later, the spell still worked. At least, I’m assuming it did, because the book disappeared. Either way, I told the guys that I was the only person who knew where it had gone, and if they ever wanted to see it again, they better let me leave the warehouse, unharmed. They were pissed. You could tell they didn’t trust me to give it back, but they didn’t really have a choice, and they didn’t want to make a scene in front of the other guests who weren’t part of the main group. I guess the book is a big fucking deal for them.”