by Skylar Finn
“It’s…that place,” she said with a shudder. “No one has lived there for a very long time.”
“Why not?” I was instantly on alert. I knew that place was creepy. I knew it.
“It used to be the old Dark Horse Inn,” said my grandmother. “Of course, that was several lifetimes ago. Lifetimes before you came along.”
“What happened there?” I asked.
“Black magic,” she said. “The worst kind.”
“There are different kinds?” I asked uncertainly.
“Oh, goodness.” My mother sighed. “There’s so much I have to tell you. Listen, Samantha, please come back for dinner. And if you’d like—don’t feel obligated, I know we have, for all intents and purposes, just met—but please, feel welcome to stay. It’s not as if we don’t have the room.”
“Better here than at the Dark Horse Inn,” my grandmother said.
I bit my lip. They seemed eager to get rid of me all of a sudden. My grandmother shot me a look.
“Not that we want you to leave, dear,” she said. “Just that I’m sure they’ll be looking for you.”
“Looking for me?” I said, startled. “Who?”
“The other people,” she said, getting up and leaving the kitchen. Her voice drifted back to us as if carried by an invisible current. “The ordinary ones.”
Sure enough, I had several missed calls from Cameron, which I saw only after I left the house. I was unsurprised to discover that I got no service there. I didn’t know whether to attribute it to the spotty coverage of Mount Hazel, or whatever strange currents the house was emitting.
“Samantha! Oh my god, I have been calling and calling! Where are the newt eyes? Margo’s having kittens.” Cameron sounded breathless.
“I got a flat tire,” I lied effortlessly.
“In the forest? Heavens, no! Did the bearded men of the wood come for you?”
“The what?” I asked, befuddled.
“The bearded men of the wood. It’s who I imagine lives back there. I imagine that when you’re stranded, like with a flat or you run out of gas, the men of the wood emerge, with their long and matted beards, and they pull you from your car, and then they steal it! They leave you on the side of the road while they go for a joyride, and then they take your car and live in it forever, in the woods. And maybe you find it, years later, but by then, it’s just a mangled, rusted heap. It’s why I always fill the tank of the Sprinter before I go anywhere.”
I stared at my phone, momentarily stunned into silence.
“Cameron,” I said, finally. “Is this a real thing that you’ve heard of? Or something you invented in your mind?”
“It’s something I imagine, darling. I told you, I don’t do well with small towns. Are you on your way back now?”
“Yes,” I said. I glanced in the backseat, where I’d thrown the canvas bag upon leaving the store. I was lucky, in the midst of my familial drama, that I hadn’t left it on the counter. I thought of Margo and shuddered. I’d never hear the end of it.
“Fabulous! I temporarily distracted her with a jigsaw puzzle of a basket of kittens, but who knows how long that will last. Ciao, darling.”
He hung up the phone. I made my way up Spindle Lane and found Main Street with little difficulty. It was hard to get lost in a town with three streets.
When I got back to Margo’s manor, the house formerly known as the Dark Horse Inn, I sat in the car for a moment, gathering my thoughts. I opened the glove box. I pulled out a small bottle of tequila and a pack of Marlboro Reds. I knew Les well. I lit a cigarette while I sipped the airplane bottle of liquor and tried to put my thoughts in order.
First, I thought of Les. That was just unavoidable. I was smoking his cigarettes and drinking his tequila in his car, and his face appeared, unbidden, in my mind’s eye: “Tequila is the only alcohol that acts as a stimulant!” he said. I banished him with a long exhale of smoke and thought of what I had learned in the cuckoo clock house.
I would be lying if I said that there wasn’t a part of me that never wanted to go back again. But a much larger part of me felt both warm and relieved at the prospect of having family—my mother, another (kinder) grandmother, an aunt and cousin, all these women I’d never known. The witch thing was pretty freaky, granted, but if I actually had a full set of magical powers—which, let’s face it, I had already long suspected that I did—what could I do with them? Could I use them to protect myself? Could I forever stop the Les Rodneys of the world from ever hurting me again?
You could, said a voice agreeably. But maybe you have a higher purpose than that.
I screamed and jumped out of the car. Was it the devil? Wasn’t that a thing with witches? Could I hear the devil now? I didn’t think I wanted that.
Grandma? I thought uncertainly.
I heard a sound like laughter that slowly faded away. Well. That was obviously going to be a problem.
I put Les’s cigarette out in the gravel driveway and finished the bottle of tequila, tossing it in the open trashcan as I walked by. I made a mental note to find the lid and buy some bungee cords when I got a chance. Clearly, Cameron and Margo had never dealt with raccoons.
I opened the front door, which they’d left unlocked. For someone so concerned with the imaginary men of the wood, Cameron certainly was trusting when it came to leaving the door unlocked for any freak to waltz on in.
“Hello?” I called. “I have your newt eyes! Cameron? Margo?”
Down the cavernous hallway, I heard murmured voices. I followed them, past the ballroom and the room with the fireplace where I’d first met Margo. At the end of the hallway was a well-lit room that seemed totally out of place compared to the rest of the house. I was surprised to see them huddled on a modern-looking couch with normal Berber carpeting and a massive flat screen TV suspended on the far wall. I thought Margo shunned any advent after the Victorian Age.
“There you are!” said Cameron, turning to regard me with his twinkling smile. Crest White Strips, for sure. “We were just about to give you up for dead.”
“It’s about time,” muttered Margo. The bulk of her attention was directed at the array of brightly colored jigsaw pieces scattered across the glass coffee table. In front of her, a blue eye and a red ball of yarn took shape in a partially-formed wicker basket. “I wanted to have my bath ages ago.”
I noticed then that she had what theoretically could have been an English accent, although I was pretty sure she was from Nebraska.
“Oh, Margo,” sighed Cameron. “Just be glad the men of the wood didn’t get her.”
Above them, the TV glowed noisily with the sound of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, the news ticker gliding endlessly across the bottom of the screen. The booming voice of the newscaster from the TV’s surround sound seemed out of place from the silent gloom throughout the rest of the manor.
“Local authorities are investigating the disappearance of a local girl, Martha Hope, who vanished sometime after dusk on Friday evening,” said the news anchor. “Police ask that anyone with any information contact the help line listed on the screen. Her parents have released a statement that there will be a substantial award for anyone who assists in ensuring the safe return of Martha Hope.”
“That’s smart,” said Cameron, flipping over a puzzle piece. “Try to get the child murderer to return her whole in exchange for a nice lump sum.”
“Shut up about murderers, you git,” hissed Margo. “You’re interfering with the Zen flow bestowed to me by this kitten in a basket.”
As I watched the screen, the image of the newscaster cut to a school photo of the missing girl, Martha Hope. I stared up at the picture, stunned. The canvas bag slipped from my arm, scattering newt eyes, witch hazel, and essence of wormwood across the immaculate rug.
She was the girl from my vision in the fire.
7
A Lesson in Magic
I was still standing behind the couch, so neither Margo nor Cameron noticed my reaction to the picture of Martha Hope. I dropped t
o my knees and started grabbing newt eyes and stray witch hazel scattered across the rug, stuffing them back into the bag before they noticed anything was awry.
Why hadn’t I asked my mother or grandmother the most important questions I could have asked? What were my visions? What did they mean? Were they premonitions, or things that had already happened?
As eccentric as Margo and Cameron were, I didn’t want them to know what I had seen. I didn’t think their eclectic style of dressing or strange bathing rituals warranted confessing my visual hallucinations. I quickly shoved the contents of their odd grocery list back into the sack and got to my feet.
“Um, where do you want this stuff for your bath? Margo?” I tried to sound neutral.
“On the side of the clawfoot tub upstairs, first door to your left,” she said without turning around.
“And then we really need to talk about your brand,” I said, trying to sound brisk. Really I was just trying to keep what I’d seen on the screen out of my mind by pretending to act professional. Fake it till you make it.
“And I need to know when your new PA is getting here, because PR is a very different thing than a PA and I’m not here to get your coffee,” I continued. “Incidentally.”
Cameron glanced up at my tone. A look of glee stole across his face, and he winked at me. I like it, he mouthed. Margo, absorbed in her jigsaw puzzle, didn’t notice.
“That A&R bloke from the label is dealing with it,” she said listlessly. I looked at her more closely. She looked drawn and pale, as if she had no energy. Espresso withdrawal?
“I’ll draw your bath,” said Cameron reassuringly. He sprang lithely from the couch, cat-like, and turned to me. “C’mon, I’ll show you where it is.”
He led me up the sweeping staircase in the foyer. It was all very Gone With the Wind, but after the fire: the staircase was black, too. The upstairs carpet was red, and so was the entire bathroom: floors, walls, curtains, sink, tub. It was extremely bizarre, to say the least.
Cameron reached for the bag of ingredients and I handed it to him.
“Technically, it’s not really my job to run her baths for her, either,” he admitted. “I mean, I’m her stylist. How hard is it to turn a tap on? But I would do anything for Margo, and we go through assistants like gravy at Thanksgiving dinner.”
“Why do they all leave?” I ask, sitting on the closed toilet lid. Cameron was perched on the edge of the tub, scattering newt eyes and witch hazel into the steaming hot water. Ew, I thought, watching the lizard eyes float to the top. Her skin was amazing, though. Maybe it was worth it.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “Margo is actually really not that bad. They’re all just young girls who want to be in the industry, and they get scared away easily.”
“Scared away?” I asked. “By what?”
“The house freaks them out. Margo’s not mean, exactly, but she can be…intimidating.”
Terrifying, I mentally translated for him. “Go on.”
“She’s demanding. But, like any artistic, creative type, she has the right to be. She does things the rest of us don’t, so she needs things the rest of us wouldn’t. She needs us.” He looked at me dramatically.
“Where’s everybody else?” I said. “Besides just her PA. I mean, Les made it sound like she had a full entourage out here.”
“Well, she does. They just refuse to come to the house. I’m not entirely sure why. Nobody likes it here but us. Everybody else—her security detail, her producer, her manager, the PA, when we have one—stays at a bed and breakfast two towns over. Even her driver is there! He’ll only show up if she has to go back to the city. Which is why I end up driving that giant stupid van everywhere around town. Admittedly, it does take about five minutes, given the size of this place.”
“None of them will come to the house?” I asked, perplexed. “And no one will say why they won’t?”
“Something about it being creepy; I don’t know. The next PA had better be willing to live here. I’m overworked as it is. Lucky thing you’re here,” he said.
“Funny you should mention that,” I said. His back was to me while he tested the bath water, and I saw his shoulders instantly sag with disappointment.
“I’ll be back,” I added hastily in what I hoped was a reassuring tone of voice. “But I need to leave and get food. Want me to bring you anything?”
“Is there fried chicken anywhere?” he asked.
“Probably not,” I said.
“I’ll Yelp it and text you,” he said.
The bath was full. The eyes swirled and there was an oily sheen on the surface of the water, scattered liberally with what now resembled soggy leaves. I wrinkled my nose.
“Heaven for the skin,” he said.
“Whatever floats your boat,” I said.
On the drive back to my mother’s house, the mist was thicker than ever before. Like before, it freaked me out for reasons I couldn’t fully articulate, not even to myself. I guess it was the weather or the climate here in general, but something about it didn’t feel right. It was like I was in a dream instead of reality.
Once again, the house appeared to materialize out of nowhere, and while I looked closely this time to see if it was a trick of the light or invisible to the human eye—unless you knew it was there—this time, it seemed concealed by the strange gray mist hovering everywhere. The house loomed out of the fog as I parked a short ways from the door. The less time I spent outside, the better.
Tamsin opened the door. While she seemed dazed at the sight of me back in the shop, she was now enthusiastic as a golden retriever.
“You’re here! Come in, come in.” She reached out to the stoop, pulling me into the house. “I told Mom you’d be back, oh her of little faith. Dinner’s not ready yet, do you want to see my room?”
“Yeah, sure,” I said, overwhelmed by her boisterousness. I don’t think I could have said no to her even if I wanted to.
She pulled me up the sweeping crooked staircase to the third floor, or the third box from the bottom of the house. She threw open the first door on the landing.
It was breathtaking. The carpet, walls, and ceiling were a deep indigo, navy, and turquoise. Tiny white lights, whose source I couldn’t discern, glimmered on the ceiling, which was painted to look like the night sky. Whoever had done it was so skilled a painter that the ceiling appeared domed like the atmosphere around the planet. Her walls were painted with tall birch trees, whose leaves seemed to ruffle in a nonexistent breeze.
“It’s enchanted,” she said excitedly. “Like my tattoo. See?” She proudly showed me the watercolor sleeve on her arm, and I saw now that it resembled moving water, strewn with flickering stars. Looking at it made me dizzy, and after a few seconds I had to stop.
“I designed it all myself,” she explained. “The room, the tattoo. I’m applying to art school, which Mom is super stressed out about, like somebody’s gonna burn me at the stake if I venture more than a mile from home. But too bad. You’ve been living in the world this whole time, and you’re fine, right?”
“Right,” I said. I hoped I wasn’t being put in the middle of an ongoing debate. I hadn’t had any issues, as Tamsin put it, “living in the world,” but I also didn’t have moving tattoos and a live forest in my bedroom.
Tamsin flopped onto her bed and studied me thoughtfully. Her bed looked like a large tree stump covered in moss, which I assumed was her comforter.
“So did you seriously just not even know you could do stuff?” she asked. “Like, have you gone this entire time without magic?”
“Well, no.” I sat in the middle of her rug, which was decorated with an extremely realistic field of daisies. It was soft and spongy, like I was sitting outside. “I definitely noticed stuff, but I didn’t know it was magic.”
“What did you think it was?” She looked intrigued, hugging her owl-shaped pillow to her chest. “Did you think you were crazy?”
“Sometimes. Other times, I just thought…I don’
t know, maybe it was my mom sending me a message. Or I’d imagined it, or it was a coincidence, or…something beyond my reckoning.”
Tamsin looked sad. Like she couldn’t imagine ever having to attribute her magic to her imagination or a coincidence. I looked around her room again and suddenly felt sad, too: remembering myself and the bedroom I grew up in. An ordinary girl in the normal world, surrounded by a canopy bed and white wicker furniture, lonely and having one-sided conversations with the dolls in my elaborate dollhouse. And no, the dolls never talked to me. Thankfully. I can only imagine how terrifying that would have been.
I decided to change the subject. “I saw something weird before I came here,” I said. It seemed easier to tell her, like I was confiding in an equal rather than someone who might react more strongly to the news. Like my mother or grandmother. They were so intense. Everything seemed so high stakes with them.
Tamsin looked concerned. “You saw something? What did you see?” She seemed to know right away without asking that I didn’t mean a new show on Netflix or a pair of shoes that I liked at the mall. Something meant something much larger than myself. I thought of what a relief it was, not to have to explain that part of it.
“I saw a girl in the woods, running away from something, and then I saw her on TV,” I said. “Martha Hope? That girl that disappeared?
Tamsin looked more than a little bit freaked out, which worried me even more in turn. If the information fazed a person with a magical bedroom, that seemed like a cause for concern.
She bit her lip, eyes wide. “You mean like a premonition?”
“I don’t know,” I said, shaking my head. “I mean, how do I know? If that’s what it was?”
“Witchcraft isn’t a concrete thing, like we go out to the woods and chant under a full moon and the devil appears and grants us wishes,” she says. “It’s really not like that at all.”
I lowered my voice, certain my grandmother could hear me, even though she was (presumably) floors below. “So you guys don’t, like…worship the devil?”