The Fascinators

by Andrew Eliopulos

  “It wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t left me alone in there,” Sam said.

  “For five minutes.”

  “Still.”

  Accepting that James wasn’t getting back up any time soon, Sam sat down cross-legged on the ground beside him. It smelled earthy down here. Sam would know it was night even if his eyes were closed. His breath and his heartbeat were returning to normal.

  “You could try to get along with them, you know,” James said quietly.

  “I really couldn’t,” Sam said. “Or at least, I couldn’t try any harder than I already do.”

  “You were the only sober person there.”

  “I’m a designated driver. No idea how the rest of them are getting home. Anyway, who wants to be friends with a bunch of people who are only fun if you’re drunk.”

  James peeled one eye open to peer at Sam, as if he was trying to gauge his own feelings, no doubt both heightened and hindered by inebriation.

  “You really think it’s going to be so different outside of Friedman?”

  “I know so,” Sam said. “Once you get out of Friedman, there are way more people like you, me, and Delia.”

  “Magickers?”

  “For one thing. But more than that.”

  “Well that’s good,” James said. “That it’s more than that. Because I can’t say I’ve ever met someone at convention that I was dying to become friends with. They don’t seem to me any better or worse than the people around here. They just cast cooler spells.”

  Sam started to argue that convention was the worst place to try to make new friends, not only because everyone was in competition, but also because everyone came with their own high school groups, and remained caught up in their separate dramas. He started to say that James should come with him and his mom sometime to a Q-Atl meeting—to hear queer people from all over the state, who sounded so cool in spite of the shit they were going through. But Sam was stopped short by the feeling that James had talked him down a maze, and they’d taken a wrong turn somewhere. The point for Sam wasn’t that they needed to make better friends. The point for Sam was that James shouldn’t leave him alone at a party—that the three of them needed to go somewhere where they would be their truest selves alone, and once they got there, the three of them would be enough.

  “See, you know I’m right.”

  “Whatever you say, James.”

  Sam lay down on the ground beside him. He looked up at the sky, where he could see only a few stars through the clouds, though the stars he saw burned brightly enough for the rest of them.

  Just as Sam felt himself lulled by the comfortable silence—felt himself almost persuaded by James’s argument that they already had everything they needed right here—James suddenly leaned up on his elbow, his eyes open wide and mere inches from Sam’s eyes. The space between them was so small, so charged with electricity, that Sam felt it ignite all the air in his lungs. His chest went rigid. His heartbeat stopped.

  It was impossible to mistake the look on James’s face. Sam had a never seen a look like that up close, a searching look, a look of unmasked desire. It was like the moment when Marshall had been frozen in air, his intent plain even in still life. James seemed to have been frozen, too, and for a moment, Sam wondered if he was supposed to lean forward and break the spell with a kiss, or if that would break the spell in the wrong direction.

  Then James blinked, and he kept his eyes closed for a breath too long.

  “Your car,” he said, leaning back to a safe distance.

  “What?” Sam’s voice was squeaky and raspy at once.

  “Your car. We need to get it before they do anything to it.”

  “Okay,” Sam said, reorienting himself. “You think they would do something to my car?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe?”

  “Okay.”

  They’d stood up in hurried unison, shaking the leaves from their clothes. Without having to discuss it, they’d both started walking in the direction of the soccer field; it hadn’t felt right to go back the way they had come, through the woods. They’d followed the little road the long way around, past the old rec center that was still open but barely used, now that the new sports complex had gone up across town. In silence, they’d come back to the front of Bridget’s house, where all the other cars were still parked outside; from what Sam could see through the living room windows, it looked like the party had gone back to normal.

  Had they been gone even twenty minutes? It was hard to say.

  Sam’s car had been fine. Sam and James had been fine. Though he’d worry about it in the hallways for the last two months of the year, Sam would remain fine; after spring break, the people from the party would pretend he didn’t even exist.

  “James—” Sam started, as they prepared to drive away. But the word sounded strange as it left his lips, echoing and growing louder until it was no longer a word at all, but the sound of a bell. A reverberation.

  Jamesjamesjamesjamesjamesjamesjamesjames

  “Sam.”

  Sam opened his eyes.

  He was back in Delia’s bedroom. Their knees were still touching, and Sam’s hand rotated automatically around the singing bowl. His arm muscles ached. It was dark outside.

  “Oh, good,” Delia said. “I was worried for a second it was happening like last time.”

  “It was nothing like last time, for better and for worse,” Sam said. “It didn’t even work this time.”

  “What do you mean?” Delia said.

  “I mean I didn’t go to wherever the book is. I went . . . into a memory. Or an almost-memory. I think I might have had a dream that I actually remember? I’m not totally sure.”

  “Weird,” Delia said. “I think it worked for me. Do you know the old rec center? The one that looks haunted, out on Old Sycamore Road?”

  “Oh my God,” Sam said. “With the soccer field?”

  “Yes, exactly. That soccer field. I have no idea how or why, but I think that must be where the book is. The spell kept taking me to this one spot right at the edge by the trees, clear as day. I haven’t been to that rec center since I was six years old, so no way it was a memory.”

  “Well, then,” Sam said.

  “Why? What did you see?”

  “I’ll tell you on the way. Come on, before it gets too dark.”

  “So this is your spot?” Delia said, when Sam paused just inside the trees. She raised her eyebrows suggestively.

  “More or less.”

  “I think we need to be more exact than that.”

  “I don’t know. It was dark then, and I wasn’t exactly looking for landmarks.”

  Delia snorted. Sam could tell she was resisting the urge to say something else.

  “I just don’t believe it’s going to be here,” Sam said, even as he poked around the underbrush. There was no need for a magic light tonight. The moon was full and bathed the woods in a lustrous blue glow, more eerie than beautiful. “It feels too easy. Like if the book was here, the others could have done this spell and found it for themselves already.”

  “I thought about that, too, but I have a theory.” Delia was looking on the ground but also up into the branches of the trees, all the way to the tops. “I think the reason they haven’t been able to find it with their own magic—and the reason they tried to hijack our spell this week—is that you can’t find the book without the key from James. James created the spell he used to teleport the book. His associations were personal—his personal safe place. And even though he didn’t know it, the spell sent the book here. There’s a reason for that. He felt safe with you.”

  “Okay, okay,” Sam said. There was also a reason he hadn’t told Delia or anyone else about that night before. He’d felt safe then, too. Now he felt exposed.

  “Sorry, but it’s important. I think the key to finding the book is in what happened here that night. You said you were both on the ground, looking up?”

  “I was looking up. James had his eyes closed, until .
. . until he didn’t.”

  “Hmm . . .”

  They were running out of places on the ground to check. Sam couldn’t imagine how the book could be up in a tree.

  “You don’t think it’s possible he sent it to that exact night, do you?” Delia said. “Like, back in time?”

  “What? No way. That’s impossible, surely?”

  Delia shrugged.

  “It’s improbable. Especially for a spell James made up as a kid. But he’s pretty powerful, Sam. I don’t think he even realizes how powerful, half the time. He’s not in control of it. He doesn’t care about learning ‘the proper way.’ But it’s like, for him, magic comes out of this primordial place. His associations work even when they make no sense—even when he can’t explain them. And magickers used to be able to do a kind of time travel. Just think of Merlin.”

  “Merlin is fictional.”

  “As a single, literal person, sure. But as a composite of many actual Keeper-level magickers from the Middle Ages, studies suggest he is very real. At least the magic attributed to him is.”

  “Well, I don’t see any of Merlin’s Keeper-level descendants here to help us, so I think we should limit our search to what’s probable. And I think what probably happened is that the book was here at some point and then—holy shit.”

  A cloud had swept over the moon, urged on by the chilly breeze Sam had felt right through his hoodie. In the exact moment that the woods had gone dark, something unnatural had appeared at his feet. But that wasn’t quite true. What had appeared was natural enough—it was, in fact, exactly as he’d pictured it, green leather with a lightning-bolt V inlay on the cover. It was the way that it had appeared that was unnatural. One moment not there, and then, as the moonlight left the space where it lay, it had appeared in a wave.

  Delia was the first to process and recalibrate. She bent down and snatched the book before the cloud had a chance to move again. Then she grabbed Sam by the shoulder and hurried them back toward her car, already muttering the words of another spell as if she were speaking them directly to the book. Sam wasn’t sure if she was trying to keep the book from disappearing, or if she was trying to keep it from being found, now that it had been removed from its hiding place.

  Sam couldn’t think too hard about that.

  “That night,” Sam said. “It was cloudy that night. There were only a few stars. He sent it back in time. I don’t know how, but he did.”

  Delia finished the words of her spell just as they reached her car.

  She turned her full attention to Sam, in the exact moment before he started tearing up.

  “Oh, Sam,” she said. “My sweet summer child. Let me get you a Starbucks and then take you home.”

  Chapter 9

  WHEN SAM GOT OUT OF BED ON SUNDAY MORNING TO find a text from Denver that read, How are you holding up?, his first reaction was to wonder—with much confusion and a bit of vague annoyance that bordered on hurt—just how much Delia had told him about their trip to recover the book. Did everyone know about that night in the woods now? But as he pushed through the fog of his ongoing sleeplessness and let reality catch up to him, he realized that of course Denver was asking about Friday night and the incident with his windshield.

  Had that really been this same weekend?

  Ha, I’m okay, he replied. Car still in the shop.

  Do we for sure have practice tomorrow? You need a ride after school?

  Sam was definitely alert now. He pictured Denver in his room, waking up early on the weekend to check on him. To be fair, it was ten o’clock, so not that early. Sam had just been beyond exhausted.

  Let’s check with the group, Sam said.

  Sam switched over to the group text.

  We still meeting tomorrow?

  Yes! Delia responded right away. Wait till y’all see this book. It’s insane.

  What book? Denver wrote. As far as he knew, the book they’d been looking for was their old spell book, well-known to them all.

  The placeholder image for an incoming text appeared, signaling that Delia was working on a response, no doubt remembering the same thing and wondering if there was any reason not to rip off the bandage and tell Denver the truth, now that the book was safely in their possession.

  Her message, when it finally came, was: You’ll see. It was the kind of message that really could have used a smiley-face emoji to soften the sinister.

  When James finally chimed in with the ever cryptic praying hands emoji (did they really mean praying, or thank you, or what?), Sam wrote, James, is this you or your dad? Please confirm your identity. To which James responded with a middle-finger emoji and a black-heart emoji.

  Identity confirmed.

  All right, then, Sam wrote. My house after school. His hands hovered over the phone for a second more. Denver is giving me a ride.

  It was kind of remarkable how easy it was to talk to Denver. Sam had this—in retrospect, irrational—fear that since they’d only known each other for a week, they were quickly going to run out of things to say when it was just the two of them. But it turned out that the years they hadn’t known each other gave them plenty of things to say, and Denver had this genuine curiosity and delight for details that made Sam want to answer his questions in the longest, most colorful ways he could think of. They talked in an uninterrupted flow from the school parking lot all the way to Sam’s basement.

  “So, you’re saying that little shack attached to the gas station, with a door that looks like it’s made out of plywood, is actually a quality food establishment?” Denver asked.

  “Mary Ellen’s has the best biscuits and gravy you have ever eaten or will ever eat. It’s like gravy soup with biscuit croutons. It’s like a gravy landslide over biscuit city.”

  “I’m not sure you’re convincing me by comparing the food to a natural disaster.”

  “It’s like a natural disaster that’s making way for a better civilization.”

  “Wow, Sam. Didn’t peg you for a kill-all-humans type, but I guess we all have our dark sides. Is it better than Waffle House?”

  “Depends on what you’re ordering. They both have their specialties.”

  “Let me guess—Waffle House specializes in man-made disasters?”

  “What’s so funny down here?”

  Sam hadn’t even heard James coming down the stairs, but now he stood there, his mouth quirked into his best attempt at a smile, while the now violently purple bags under his eyes gave away the fact that he was barely hanging on.

  “Sam was just telling me about the biscuits and gravy at Mary Ellen’s.”

  “Oh,” James said. He came to stand behind the couch where Sam sat, and his hands bounced in his jacket pockets, antsy, incessant. “Is Delia on her way?”

  “I assume so,” Sam said.

  “Cool, cool. And she’s bringing the book, right?”

  “So she said . . .”

  (And to be clear, she’d said it to both of them, but that was at lunch, and James had basically flipped out that she didn’t have it with her right there, right then. She said she’d felt it would be safer at home than in her car or her locker; James had disagreed.)

  Sam did his best not to take it personally now—this single-minded, sharp-edged focus James had on the book. Things would go back to normal once the book was returned. Once James and Sam both had a good night’s sleep.

  “So where did Delia end up finding the spell book?” Denver said.

  “Oh, it was at the old rec center,” Sam said, as he and James both tried to avoid each other’s eyes without being obvious about it. (James hadn’t been so successful at hiding his surprise and recognition when Delia first dropped the news at lunch—clearly, he’d remembered that night as well as Sam had.)

  “What was it doing there?” Denver said.

  “Long story,” Sam said.

  “You guys are not going to believe what I’ve found in this book,” Delia said, appearing at the bottom of the stairs.

  James visibly rel
axed at the sight of the book in her hands, while Sam tensed up, sensitive to Denver’s confusion.

  “Did someone leave us a surprise in our spell book?” Sam asked, hoping Delia would get the hint and keep up the act for Denver’s sake. Sam didn’t want to drag Denver into their true collective nightmare if he could help it—and, if he was being honest, he didn’t want to have to admit to Denver that they hadn’t been honest with him last week.

  Delia, it seemed, had no such moral quandaries.

  “Denver,” she said, “you probably already guessed this, because we’re all terrible liars, but this isn’t our spell book from last year. No offense.”

  “None taken?” Denver said, more confused than ever.

  “Oh, dear,” Sam said.

  “We had our reasons,” Delia said, half-directed at Sam, as if to suggest she had no patience for his holier-than-thou act. “But they’re not important anymore. What’s important is that the group that put this book together has been messing with some very serious shit. James, that spell they were doing when you were there? With the cutting and the tearing associations or whatever? I think I found it.”

  She and James came around to sit beside Sam on the couch, though she never took her eyes off the book, flipping quickly through the pages even as she placed it on the ottoman in front of them.

  “Listen to this. ‘Once the aides are in place on the points of the star, and the subjects are gathered in the inner vertices, the spell leader should direct everyone to associate rending a gap between the worlds as he’—or she, I don’t see why a spell leader can’t be a she, but anyway—‘as he reads the incantation below.’ I personally didn’t recognize the language of the incantation, so I figured y’all wouldn’t know it either, but I posted a picture of it on the Pinnacle Friendivist group yesterday, and somebody said that it looked like Enochian. Do y’all know it?”

  The three boys shook their heads.

  “Right. So, it turns out Enochian is this language that originated in the sixteenth century when these two magickers said that angels brought it to them. It’s not a full language, in the sense that there are only enough words to cover what was supposedly said by these angels in the original message. But there are enough Enochian words that this language is used in all kinds of spells related to the spirits of the dead. That’s what the spell was supposed to do that night, James. Open a gateway to the spirit world.”