The Fascinators

by Andrew Eliopulos

  In the exact, heart-stopping moment when one of the faceless ones reached Sam and wrapped itself around him, Sam threw open the door, and there were James, Denver, and Delia.

  “He’s awake,” Denver said.

  “What the hell, Sam.” Delia’s voice was gruff with panic.

  James couldn’t speak. His face was ashen and slow to register relief.

  “I saw them,” Sam said. “I didn’t see the book, but I saw them, and they saw me.”

  “Who’s ‘them?’” Denver said.

  “You’re sure the book wasn’t there?” Delia said.

  “I’m sure. It was like my brain had been hijacked—like I wasn’t controlling where my mind went. They were. Is that what a dream is like? Lord, how terrible. It felt like they knew I was trying to find the book, and they wanted to know what I knew. It was like, if I’d ended up finding it, they wanted to be the first to know.”

  “They who?” Denver repeated, as if they hadn’t heard him.

  “This is exactly what I’ve been dealing with,” James said, his voice quiet with fear and guilt. “This is exactly what I was afraid of, telling you two.”

  “Maybe this is because of a spell they’ve put on the book,” Delia said, her mind practically whirring behind her eyes. “You said they came back into the room as soon as you touched it, right, James? Maybe they have some kind of tracer or tracker or something, and a finding spell triggers it just like touching the book in the physical plane would.”

  “Hello,” Denver said. “Metaphysical plane to you three. Could someone please tell me what the hell is going on here, now that I’ve basically risked my life for a spell without any prior warning as to what I was actually getting into?”

  “What’s going on down here?”

  Sam’s mom. In all the excitement, they hadn’t noticed her coming down the stairs, and now she stood across the basement. Who knew how much she’d heard.

  She walked right up to them and gave Sam a puzzled look. To be fair, he was lying faceup on the ground. The other three stood over him.

  Whatever her assessment of the situation, she must have realized that any immediate danger had passed; she turned in her comforting, measured way to Denver and said, “I don’t think we’ve met.” She stuck out her hand and smiled.

  “I’m Denver,” he said. “From Nashville.”

  “Nice to meet you, Denver from Nashville. James, Delia, good to see you both.”

  “Mrs. Fisher,” Delia said with a nod, while James mumbled a hello.

  She turned back to look at Sam, who’d managed now to perch on his elbows and look a little less dazed.

  “This wouldn’t be the result of some high-level, dangerous spell, I hope?”

  Denver, shocked, barked out a laugh. James and Delia gave away nothing with their silence.

  “Just based on the way you put that, I’m gathering that the correct answer to that question is ‘no,’” Sam said.

  “You are gathering correctly,” his mom said, with a look that added, Smartass. “Now if I go make pizza bagels, will you all still be alive when they’re finished?”

  They nodded—Denver picking up fast from the others that Mrs. Fisher could read into every word, tone, or gesture, so it was best to leave most of the communication to Sam.

  Sam half wanted to tell her the truth—to blurt out that James had gotten mixed up with some sort of cult, and to get her advice for how to handle the situation.

  But the memory of the faceless ones stopped him cold. The last thing he wanted to do was plant that vision in her mind, too. She was a powerful empath. If he told her what he’d seen, she’d probably end up on the floor right beside him.

  They took their time finishing off the pizza bagels, none of them too eager to try any more new magic after Sam’s close call. During a lull in the conversation—and attempting to pass it off as if it hardly mattered—Denver asked again who it was that Sam had seen in his vision.

  Slowly and carefully—and also truthfully—Sam replied, “These people who were there the night James lost the book. He told us about them.”

  “You mean, these people stole the book?” he asked.

  “No, we wouldn’t go that far,” Sam said, while James watched him with wide eyes. “But they were there, so I just think it’s funny they helped with my associations.”

  And by funny, of course, he meant the opposite of funny. There was an unspoken but deeply felt thrum of fear in the room, and when the eighth finding spell yielded no immediate results in their first attempt, they were quick to give it up and move on to showing one another spells they could do without trying.

  As James, Delia, and Denver gathered up their things to go, Sam noticed that Denver was making an effort to be the last one out. He literally bent over to tie his shoelace, even though Sam could have sworn that the shoelace had already been tied.

  Unfortunately for Denver, James appeared to be waiting around as well.

  “What’s up, Denver?” Sam finally said. “Something you wanted to say?”

  Denver glanced James’s way, considered him for a second, and then spoke quickly. “Oh, well, I was only going to ask if we know when the next practice will be, or if it will be decided on the group text again.”

  Delia paused on the staircase, nearly at the top. “The group text, for sure,” she said.

  “Yeah, I can’t meet again until Monday myself,” James said. “Let’s just see how we’re feeling this weekend.”

  “Okay, okay,” Denver said, re-entering the game of chicken with James, before finally seeming to come to some resolution in his mind.

  He turned to Sam.

  “Do you want to come to a concert with me this Friday? This girl Ellie from some of my classes—she lives in my apartment building, actually. I saw her a couple times this summer. Anyway, she plays drums in this band, and they’re playing at the fall festival downtown. On Friday night.”

  “Oh, man, the fall festival,” Sam said. “We haven’t been to that since freshman year. But yeah, that could be fun.”

  “Awesome,” Denver said.

  Sam felt suddenly and painfully aware of the fact that James was watching them with a funny look on his face, and Delia hadn’t moved from her place on the stairs. Denver seemed to recognize this at the same moment, too.

  “Delia? James? Do you want to come, too?” he said.

  “I can get behind it,” Delia said. “A last hurrah for senior year and all that.”

  “Excellent,” Denver said.

  “Yeah, excellent,” Sam echoed, though if he was being honest, there’d been an undeniable moment there when he’d been excited at the prospect of a night with Denver, one-on-one. Not as a date, mind you. Not when he and James still needed to figure out what that night at the bowling alley meant for their friendship—something they would do as soon as all this business with the spell book was behind them.

  “James?” Denver said. “What about you?”

  “I, uh—I actually was planning to be there already.”

  “You were?” Sam said.

  “Yeah, I . . . Amber is the lead singer of Ellie’s band.”

  “Oh, you know Amber?” Denver said. “She also lives in my building.”

  “Oh, yeah?” James said. “You live in Maplewood?”

  Denver nodded.

  “Well, sounds like we’ll all be there, then,” Delia said. “Sam, can you pick me up? From what I remember, parking there is a nightmare.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Sam said, his head swimming. He felt like they were playing a four-way game of chess, and each of them kept outmaneuvering the others, whether on purpose or by accident. Maybe it was more like Connect 4. Whatever it was, he was losing.

  “All right, then,” Denver conceded. “I’ll meet y’all there on Friday.” He headed to the stairs behind Delia, pausing just for a moment to observe that James still wasn’t moving, and then he was gone.

  Sam turned to James, taking in his bashful posture and crooked grin. If this wa
s a play for forgiveness, (a) it was working, and (b) Sam didn’t want it to. “Did you want to talk about something?” he said.

  “What? Oh, yeah.” James ran a hand through his hair and looked everywhere but directly at Sam. “It’s funny. I actually was going to ask if you could give me a ride on Friday, too. My mom has to use the car to go visit her sister, so I thought, I mean, if you didn’t mind joining me to hear Amber’s band . . .”

  “Not at all,” Sam said, a little ashamed of how relieved he felt. There had been infinite question marks between them over the years that they’d been friends, because the line between boys being boys and boys being attracted to boys was never easy to walk, but until this week, Sam had never doubted his place of prominence in James’s life; never doubted that he was James’s go-to for all the things that really mattered. This week, hearing about “snack time” and Mike’s party and all the other parties before that, he had started to feel like a thing on the side.

  But James had wanted him there on Friday all along.

  “Just tell me when you need me to be at your house. We can stop by Delia’s on the way in.”

  “Thanks, Sam. You’re the best. You know that?”

  James smiled. There was a moment in which Sam thought he was going in for a hug, but in fact he was simply scooting past Sam in very tight quarters.

  “James?” Sam said, right as his friend reached the bottom of the stairs. He turned back to Sam, and his eyes were so sunken and tired, they practically looked bruised.

  “Mm?”

  “We’re going to find that book, I promise. Then everything will get better.”

  James nodded, accepting this. “Thanks, buddy,” he said.

  If Sam thought he’d had trouble sleeping before, it was nothing compared to what he experienced that night, tossing and turning, the faceless ones always waiting behind his eyelids and in his peripheral vision. Was it memory or imagination? Imagination or a spell? It hardly mattered. Sam had shown them his face; they knew who he was. He was in this now. For better or worse.

  Chapter 5

  IT HAD BEEN ELEVEN DAYS SINCE MR. GRENDER’S BOOK GOT taken—and four since she would have gone back to school, if school were still in the cards—and Liv was starting to second-guess her decision to live at the compound. To be a part of True Light.

  “I don’t understand,” she said to Isaac. She was standing in his doorway as he circled his room, packing a messenger bag full of spell components, plus a flashlight, a crowbar, and a piece of rope. “Why do we have to drag his friends into this, too? Isn’t it enough that we’re going after him?”

  “I told you,” Isaac said, noticeably less patient than he’d been in their first weeks together, “we’re not the ones dragging his friends into this. He dragged them into this just fine on his own. All we’re trying to do is make sure they give us back Mr. Grender’s book.”

  He paused in his packing, glancing around his room like there was something he was forgetting, or else couldn’t find.

  “What’s in that book that’s so important, anyway?” Liv asked.

  “Spells,” Isaac said tersely.

  “Yeah, I figured that part,” Liv said, trying to keep it light. Trying to get back to the place where they’d been before that disastrous party, when the book had been stolen and the vibe in the compound had taken a serious nosedive. “But what spells? The way everyone around here has been acting, you’d think they were spells you couldn’t find anywhere else.”

  “That’s just it,” Isaac said. “You can’t. Mr. Grender has been collecting the spells in that book for decades, and half of them came from Grace herself—stuff she could never replicate.”

  This had been a recurring thread during her weeks at the compound, always deployed lightly, danced around: Mr. Grender was smart and imposing, their group’s de facto leader, but it was Grace who channeled the more powerful magic. Never mind the fact that she had yet to say a word out loud within Liv’s hearing, for all the times Isaac had come by her room to say that Grace was wondering if she was practicing her craft (and more, if she was “getting better”)—Grace had a power you could feel just by being around her, like a sad song you’d put on repeat so many times you forgot it was playing in your ears.

  “Why can’t she replicate them?” Liv pressed.

  “Because,” Isaac said, finally spotting what he’d been looking for—a spiral notebook, hidden under a small pile of clothes.

  What Liv was really trying to get him to admit was that Grace thought her magic came from an angel. She’d heard this from Carl, one of the five other full-time residents of the compound, besides Liv and Isaac. There was Carl, Grace, and Mr. Grender, plus the married couple, Alex and Alex, and there used to be a lot more extended guests in and out of the compound as well—guests who came to one of Mr. Grender’s big parties and stayed for a few days—but that was this summer, before three such guests had brought the thief to a party.

  It was at a similar party two weeks before that Carl had gotten drunk and told her about the angel.

  “Why do you think we call ourselves True Light?” he’d asked her through a hiccup, and it had caught her off guard, because the truth was, she didn’t know that they did. She’d never heard that name.

  “It’s ironic,” Isaac had explained to her later that night, when it was just the two of them again, and he could tell she was freaked out. “It’s the true light that’s opposed to the false light of organized religion. Don’t worry, babe. We’re nothing like your parents.” He hadn’t denied the part about the angel, though. That hadn’t escaped her attention.

  “Well,” Liv said now, reminding herself that Isaac’s frustration was about the missing book far more than it was about her, “I guess I see why we need to get that book back, but is scaring these guys really the best way to do that? Couldn’t we try another finding spell?”

  “Maybe we could, if we were at the top of our game.”

  This was a dig at her; there was no mistaking it. Every time they’d attempted a finding spell so far, focusing on the book, it had ended in disappointment, with everyone else in the circle ultimately staring at her like she was the obvious weak link.

  “Why don’t you try again without me?” Liv had suggested after one such attempt.

  “We’re only as good as our seventh member,” Mr. Grender had replied, and while that might have sounded like positive reinforcement coming from another person, a nod to the importance of teamwork, Mr. Grender was brusque and impatient, like the smart kid in class who didn’t play well with others and didn’t want to show his work. Without his book he was miserable, and he wanted the rest of them to know it.

  The compound had even been on something of a lockdown since the book had been taken. No more parties for the out-of-city and even out-of-state guests who stayed for a while; now, the seven of them weren’t even going to work. Isaac fronted her the money she needed for rent, and he promised to get her another job like the one he’d gotten her bagging groceries, since three days missed in a row had led to a voicemail on his phone from her manager: “Tell Liv she’s fired.” (Her parents had finally cut off her cell phone, with no attempt to contact her first. She was planning on buying her own phone plan as soon as she had enough money saved, which was reason enough to either find Mr. Grender’s book soon, or else admit that this co-op situation was more cooperative than she’d signed on for, angel or no angel.)

  “Well, suit yourself,” Liv said now, as if suiting himself weren’t already exactly what Isaac was doing. “You and Carl go scare whoever you want. Get your vigilante justice. Get the book back by any means. But if I’m gone when you get back, know that it’s because I’m out looking for an apartment that doesn’t come with any cult strings attached.”

  Isaac moved faster than a fire on pine straw, getting up in her face until she had to take a step back into the wall.

  “Don’t you ever call True Light a cult,” he said. “Mr. Grender is a great man. He took me in when no one else wou
ld, and Grace has brought more magic into this world than everyone else in the state of Georgia combined.”

  That doesn’t prevent them from leading a cult, Liv might have said, if she weren’t so scared, her shoulder throbbing from where she’d banged it against the doorframe. She’d never seen anything close to this side of Isaac before, and why was it coming out tonight? Because he was on edge? Or because she was the weak link in their group?

  “I’m sorry,” she said, and it was like those were the magic words. Isaac’s face became Isaac’s face again. He looked like himself.

  “No, I’m sorry,” he said, taking a step back. “I don’t know what came over me. I just get so defensive of them, I guess.” He ran his hand over his head. “Do you forgive me?”

  “Yes,” Liv said, and she almost meant it.

  They needed to get Mr. Grender’s book back. The sooner they did, the sooner Mr. Grender would be in a good mood again, and the sooner Mr. Grender was in a good mood, the better it would be for all of them.

  She didn’t know what it would mean if she stuck around here and the book never came back. She couldn’t let her mind go there.

  Not until it had to.

  Chapter 6

  IT WAS STILL LIGHT OUTSIDE WHEN SAM PULLED INTO JAMES’S driveway on Friday, and Sam couldn’t help feeling a little infantilized by that fact. Couldn’t help picturing the hypothetical cool kids who wouldn’t be caught dead going out this early on a weekend. This pretty much summed up his memories of the fall festival—and explained why they hadn’t gone the past two years. It was a glorified back-to-school fundraiser for Friedman Elementary, with wholesome bake sales and plywood-based games run by the teachers, and with a few of the mainstay Friedman restaurants offering half their normal portions at double the price. Not long after dark, the kids would start to thin out, and the adults who remained would get progressively rowdier as they kept going back to the restaurant stands for more beer, at which point the whole thing became a real shitshow.