The Final Days of Magic

by J. D. Horn

  Darnedest thing was, Nathalie’s reminiscences of hanging out with her cousins, of wrestling with them and swimming at the old white house with the above-ground pool, had always filled her with nostalgia. She’d often thought of going back, of looking some of her relatives up, but she’d never understood what had happened between her mother and the Boudreaus. She did remember hearing her mother scream into the phone after her father’s death, insisting he would be buried in New Orleans, refusing to let his body be sent back to them. If Nathalie had ever come close to guessing what the Boudreaus had planned for her first reunion with them, she would’ve changed her name, left the state. Hell, maybe even left the country. Beyond the odd shady comment or things left loudly unsaid, neither Lincoln nor Wiley had prepared her for these crazed militants.

  What if they were a part of this? The thought didn’t break her heart, but it sure did crack it some.

  Wham.

  The thin wall behind her back reverberated like the skin of a drum. Nathalie startled and spun sideways, her eyes fixing on the wall. Wham. The wall shook like its hidden side had been punched by an enormous fist.

  Her captors, her cousins, were keeping her awake, keeping her on edge.

  The sharp, dark tones of a fiddle filtered into the room. The tune was one she could have gone the rest of her life without hearing again. Memory piled on top of memory as the image of Frank Demagnan’s mangled form crawling across the floor of the mortuary slid beneath an earlier recollection of a man who’d once terrified her by dedicating a wild, frightening rendition of “The Axman’s Jazz” to “little Nat.”

  It struck her that she did know Emil. He was her father’s great-uncle, though he seemed to be aging in reverse. Nathalie suspected that might have more than a little to do with the ring he wore. Not so very long ago, she would’ve laughed the idea off as impossible, but there wasn’t much left these days that didn’t seem like it could happen. The music shrieked to a stop. Nathalie felt Emil had been angry with her, that it had hurt his vanity not to be recognized. Now that she remembered, he was satisfied.

  Once again, he was with her.

  A pendulum swung back and forth before Nathalie’s eyes, though Emil suggested it wasn’t just a pendulum, that she ought to look closer.

  Without taking a step, she did as he suggested, her vision zooming in on the blurry object until it shimmered into fine detail. Her mother’s corpse swayed before her. Accusatory, bloodshot, bulging eyes glared at Nathalie from a deep burgundy face. Ashen fingers clawed at the noose as her mother’s feet danced a desperate jig in air, trying to find solid purchase.

  This is on you.

  Her mother’s fingers loosened their grip on the noose and slipped up to her face. Nails pointed inward and clawed at skin until her face pulled away in strips to reveal another’s features.

  Alice’s face glistened beneath a sheen of blood. Her eyes glowed like fat rubies, like a lamprey’s, her mouth gaping open to reveal a spiraling circle of teeth.

  Nathalie came to, alone, sticky with sweat and sick from terror.

  The night wore on as Nathalie tried to force the image of the round, ruby-like stone from her mind. She kept her eyes trained on the door, her ears pricking up at every sound; there were a lot of sounds. Some came from the yard—car engines revving to life, wheels crunching over gravel, whispers that sounded more like the relaying of orders than conversation.

  She fell asleep. She must have. Rough, calloused hands jerked her awake.

  The guys from earlier had returned. They stood over her, the cup they’d used before filled with another dose of the same murky liquid. One of them, a kid who looked like he couldn’t be more than sixteen, knelt behind her, caught her neck in the bend of his right arm, and wove the fingers of his left hand through her hair, tugging her head back. Nathalie felt nauseated by the rough movement and the three-day funk of the boy’s musk wrestling with a too-liberal application of one of those canned sprays. Body heat, excitement, and exertion worked together to ensure neither scent would admit defeat.

  Another of the three, one who looked enough like the boy to be his father, pried open her mouth and began to spill the liquid into it. Nathalie refused to cooperate. She made them put in the effort of forcing the liquid down her throat, but there was no denying the fight had gone out of her.

  “Tu vois.” Emil stood before her, resting against a plastic folding chair that hadn’t been there a moment before. “C’est pas si grave.”

  The others were gone.

  “No more,” Nathalie said, gagging as the liquid started to work its way back up.

  She heard it before she felt it. A sudden, hard backhand across her left cheek. She reached up and placed her palm over the sting. The shock settled her stomach.

  Emil smiled. “Tonton gonna make you strong.” He unfolded the chair and turned it so the back faced Nathalie. He sat, resting his arms on the chair’s backrest. “Gonna make you see the truth.”

  He pulled the ring from his finger, and as he moved it back and forth before her eyes, Nathalie noticed a dim light radiating from within the stone. Even as she looked at it, she sensed something inside it was watching her. “Yeah, you right, girl. She’s still in there. A bit of her. The whole may be in pieces, but there’s a memory of the whole in every piece.” He lifted the stone to his lips and kissed it. “Ain’t that right, ma minette?” he said to the gem, though his eyes never released Nathalie’s as he spoke.

  A single glint of the stone showed Nathalie a whole history. This Emil, red-faced, eyes bulging, had flung the now lost woman against the wall to make the point that he could. He’d made every decision for her. He’d changed his mind. He’d lied about changing his mind. He’d cut her off from the world, controlling her every contact. She’d never been a strong witch, but as talk of the Dreaming Road reached her ears, she decided to use what little power she had in her to escape. She should have known such talk would never have reached her if he hadn’t wanted her to learn of it. She’d been a game to him. An experiment. There was nothing left of the woman, only the rage. And the rage would bide its time, if it took until the end of the world, to tear this man to shreds.

  “Wasn’t easy to find her. To pick her out from the other shades slithering back and forth between here and the Dreaming Road. Took me fifteen goddamned years.” He said it with a wide, wild smile, like he expected Nathalie to admire him for his stick-to-itiveness. His real goal was more artful. Nathalie sensed he was trying to break her down with his wife’s story, trying to make what he wanted her to do seem normal. “But I did what I had to. What she was wasn’t right. She might’ve been my woman at one time, but she’d become an abomination. I considered it my duty to end her.”

  “Why?” Nathalie said the word, though it seemed to take several minutes to form. “Are you doing”—she noticed he was now across the room, peeking out from behind the blind—“this?” He was gone by the time she finished the words.

  And then, just as suddenly, he was back. The boy from earlier stood beside him. “You think the bitch is ready?” the boy said. Nathalie saw the boy’s words. They were neon orange, and they turned everything they touched the same sickening, unwholesome color. When she was little, she used to open every new box of crayons and throw out anything resembling the shade. Nathalie realized she was perceiving his threatening, repulsive words in the color she hated most in the world.

  Nathalie felt something on her tongue, and she stuck her finger in her mouth to peel it off. She pulled out a small square of paper with a smiley face printed on it.

  Emil laughed. “Don’t she look ready to you?” He waved his hand before her face. The red stone of his ring became a dragon, breathing fire, and then the image faded. He looked away, addressing the boy. “You make sure you ready, too.” The boy risked one last look at Nathalie before hauling out of the room.

  Emil crossed to the fan, switching it off with a loud click. Nathalie hadn’t thought the fan was doing much, but within seconds the air in the
room felt thick enough to swim through and heavy enough to bury her. Emil went to the wall switch and killed the light. They were alone together in what should have been blackness, though Nathalie perceived it as an emptiness, like they’d been swallowed by a blank page.

  She heard a scratching sound, then realized from the sulfur smell that Emil had struck a match. The world rebuilt itself around them, first two-dimensional and in black and white like an intricately detailed sketch. The color returned, and then the depth, and then the uncomfortable nearness of Emil’s face as he leaned in, holding the candle under his chin. A ghoulish, campfire-ghost-story grin carved into his face.

  “I brought you here to help you help your girl, your chère Alice.” He whistled a few bars of the old song, then let the tune trail off. “To really help her, in the only way you got left.” He set the candle on the floor between them before easing back down into his plastic chair. “Old Nick, he’s got plans for her, big plans.”

  “Old Nick?” Nathalie repeated the words. For the briefest of moments, she was standing in her mother’s house, looking through the door at the neighbor boy in his Halloween costume, his excited eyes staring out through a red-horned half mask on his face, his hand gripping a plastic pitchfork.

  “Nicholas Marin,” Emil said with a snicker, like he could see the image floating through her mind. “Her papa, or least the one who was supposed to be. He may not have sent the girl to the Dreaming Road himself, but the couillon being who he is, he figured out right quick how to profit from her coming back.”

  “We brought her back.”

  “You brung back a demon. You ain’t seen it in her yet, but you will.” He shifted in the seat, the squeaks made by the cheap chair twining up around his legs like vines. “Tomorrow night. You’ll see it then.

  “Nicholas, he’s been goin’ around bending some ears, putting little bugs in others.” He held up his hand and moved it around in a zigzag. “Zzzt, zzzt, zzzt.” He lowered his hand and rested it on his knee. “Damn Chanticleer, promising he’s gonna put a chicken in every pot. Telling them fool witches he’s found a way to put the magic back in them. He’s gonna put something in them all right. Those demons. The ones that started out as witches before they went to the Dreaming Road. Gonna make himself king, he is. Plans to start by building himself an army, and finish by picking magic from the bones of everyone who’s left. Only thing standing in his way is that he can’t control those demons. But your Alice can. She was born and bred to lead those demons. Nicholas Marin can’t control them, but he can control your girl.

  “He knows we been watching. We’ve let him think we’re coming for his sister, Fleur. That one, she killed another witch to work a resurrection spell. She had to to make it work. Sure, back in the day it might register as a capital offense, might’ve even got her burned, but these days, what with witches carving each other up, a resurrection spell counts as misdemeanor.”

  Nathalie focused on the candle’s flame. Soon, she wasn’t seeing the burning wick; she was seeing its negative afterimage, which seemed to have burned itself into her corneas.

  “Alice, you think she the light, but she ain’t the light.”

  The dark images left on her eyes by the candlelight grew animated. Slithering like the tiniest of snakes, they joined together into one of the shadow figures like the one that had followed Alice back into the common world, like the demons who’d invaded the Perraults’ landscaping business. It slipped somehow out of her inner vision into the physical world of the sweltering, musty room.

  “This is what she is now, ma fille.” He bent over and pulled a small, ancient-looking dagger from his boot. He lifted the candle in his other hand, ignoring the slithering beast pushing itself along only feet behind him. He pressed the dagger into her hand. “You gonna have to learn to kill it, or have it kill you.” With that, he blew out the candle and was gone.

  Now Nathalie was in true darkness, an inky blackness that washed around her. She could only tell where the beast was by the flashes of its glowing ruby-red eyes, the snapping of its ephemeral teeth. She forced herself up, began spinning and slashing around in every direction, aiming the point of the blade at indiscriminate angles.

  A gray light began to slip in between the slats of the blinds, and Nathalie stood in the center of the room, bathed in cold sweat and gasping. A man’s scream from behind her nearly stopped her heart. She spun around to find Lincoln in the corner, his face toward the wall. He knelt, hunched over something. Protecting it. Nathalie felt the slick dagger fall from her sticky hand. So sticky. She looked down at her hands. They were covered with a sheen of blood.

  She stumbled over to Lincoln’s side. He was lying over a smaller man. Wiley. It was Wiley. She turned toward the wider room, seeing every square inch of it, floor to ceiling, had been splattered with blood and gore. She began screaming now herself.

  Suddenly Lincoln was standing behind her, bending back her arms. Forcing her to look at Wiley’s butchered body. Wiley’s eyes popped open—they were dead, empty. He sat up, then lifted to his feet as if he’d been pulled by a puppeteer’s string. He staggered toward her, coming closer and closer, forcing his fingers into her mouth, open now in a wild howl. He placed another tab of paper on her tongue, and Lincoln nearly broke her jaw forcing her mouth closed.

  She caught the scent of the teenage boy’s body spray, and Wiley’s dead face melted, then rebuilt itself into that of the boy. Nathalie bent her head back far enough to see the head of the man holding her. It wasn’t Lincoln. It was the boy’s father. She tilted forward to discover the blood and gore had all disappeared. She swallowed, the paper slipping down her throat.

  Her body went slack, and the man let her drop. Nathalie fell with a heavy thump to the room’s rotting floor, her pulse slowing.

  Two glowing ruby stones lay before her.

  DECEMBER 21

  TWENTY-ONE

  The section of Chartres that ran between the cathedral and Jackson Square had long ago been turned over to pedestrians, and Alice found herself weaving her way through tourists who zigzagged back and forth, seemingly tantalized by the fortune-tellers who’d lined up their folding tables one after the other along the stone walk but also chastened by the nearness of the church.

  Alice, too, could use a bit of insight. The thought of a thirty-thousand-foot vantage point on her street-level drama tempted her. She considered stopping at one of the tables, if only to see if any of these purported psychics had a real gift. As she drew near, one of the card readers, a Rubenesque woman in her late twenties, maybe early thirties, pushed herself up out of her chair. The woman wore a scarlet Lolita dress, its brilliant red muted by a black-lace outer layer. Full-figured, yet of diminutive stature, she gained a few inches in height with the help of her patent leather platform combat boots. She’d curled her jet dyed hair into two large victory waves, streaked with a crimson nearly as bright as that of her colored contacts—at least Alice hoped she was wearing contacts. The reader’s crimson eyes widened as they regarded Alice, and she snatched up her cards. She bound them with a thick rubber band, then marched off in the direction of the Presbytère, leaving behind her table, folding chair, and a plastic placard that read “Cartomancer, Clairvoyant, Haruspex.”

  The other readers looked up, surprised by their colleague’s sudden flight, but none of them set eyes on the cause of it, Alice herself. If Alice ever did decide to consult a psychic, this woman in red, she decided, would be the one to receive her patronage. Provided, that was, she could convince the cartomancer not to flee at the very sight of her.

  Alice turned aside and mounted the three short steps leading to the plaza. She paused for a moment to rest her hand against the base of one of the quartet of cast-iron lampposts guarding its entrance. Dressed for the holidays, the lampposts all wore red velveteen ribbons around their necks. The bright ribbons were meant to be festive, but Alice had the distinct impression that, like in the story of the mysterious bride, if she were to undo a ribbon, the head of the
lamppost would slip off its ladder rail and tumble to the ground.

  “Is she alive or not? It’s just a mess.” The complaint of one of the duller children from the library reading circle where Alice had first encountered the story resurrected itself in her memory. Some souls, Alice reflected, weren’t built to cope with ambiguity, which was a shame, as those who are the most certain are, almost without fail, the most wrong.

  Alice remembered the dread the story had inspired in her but couldn’t remember the fate of the bride. Did a new knot in the kerchief make her as good as new, or had her groom’s selfish disregard killed her?

  “Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.”

  The words came to her in Daniel’s voice, a hangover from last night. A different story, but still apropos. Luc, too, was dead. There could be no doubt about that one either.

  Only now it seemed there might be. That solid fact had been jarred loose by Evangeline Caissy, who’d called her this morning to summon her here to Jackson Square. Evangeline had told her a centuries-old witch known as Marceline had passed “through the heart of madness itself” and returned to the common world with news of Alice’s older brother, the brother who now only counted as a half-brother, but who made up for the demotion by being her nephew as well.

  Alice had stashed away a handful of pleasant recollections of Luc, protecting them from the warping therapies of the psychiatrists and psychologists and, quite literally, witch doctors of the hospital on Sinclair Isle. She’d even managed to keep them separate, inviolate, from the false memories of years spent on the Dreaming Road.

  Most of these memories of Luc—the good ones—centered on ruby-red, cherry-flavored sno-balls and bike rides to Storyland, melting ice cream in Jackson Square, and pocket-change treasures from the French Market. Some, the later, sharper ones, included Evangeline. Those were the happiest of Alice’s memories of Luc, as Luc had only ever seemed truly happy when with Evangeline.