A Bitter Magic

by Roderick Townley

  “You were going to get married?”

  “And live happily ever after. Now,” he says, “could we get back to business?” He lifts his hat and wipes his brow. “I don’t want to spend six months on this one.”

  He glances in the direction of his bungalow. “Who’s that?”

  I recognize the loping walk before I make out the face. I jump up. “Hey, Cole!”

  He waves and hurries. A basket sways over one shoulder.

  “My mom thought you’d be getting hungry,” he says, setting the wicker basket before us. He pulls out a blanket and starts unpacking sandwiches, apples, and a jar of sweet tea.

  I spread out the blanket and pat it. “You’ve got to help us eat this.”

  Cole plunks down beside me and bumps against me on purpose. We trade smiles. “Nice seeing you in regular clothes,” he says.

  “Don’t you like ball gowns?”

  He makes a face.

  Soon the three of us are jabbering away, trading sandwiches and quips. I pause and peer at the two of them over the crust of my chicken sandwich. So this is happiness: Cole, Father, and Cisley on a picnic by the Firth of Before.

  It’s been tugging at the back of my mind all morning, something Asa said to me. I don’t think I should bring it up now, but when else? I lower my sandwich and turn to Father. “Why did you and Mother…?”

  “Break up?”

  Cole and I wait.

  “You know, grown-ups don’t always stay together, even when they love each other.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “Well,” I say, “my uncle seems to think it’s simple. He says he paid you to leave.”

  Father stiffens. “It’s interesting,” he says slowly, “that he’s still saying that.”

  I’ve never seen Peter Underwood angry, his shoulders hunching. So little I know.

  “Did he say anything else?” he says.

  “Nothing, really.”

  “Tell me.”

  “He said you took the money and went away. ‘Like a good dog,’ he said.”

  “Like a…?” He stands up and walks about, his hands in fists.

  “Not that I believe him,” I add quickly. I don’t believe him, do I?

  Father comes back. “He really said that?”

  I nod.

  “Well.” He rubs his chin. “I suppose he’s half right.”

  “What! You took the money?”

  “No. I turned down the money. But I did leave.”

  “Why?”

  Father sighs. “I had to face the obvious. Can you imagine Marina Thummel moving in with a penniless painter? Your mother? She’d have been miserable. As miserable as I’d be moving into that glass monstrosity of hers.”

  “I know what you mean about the castle. I like your place.”

  “She’d have hated it. She’d have hated me.”

  “I thought she hated you anyway.”

  He throws me an appraising look. “You’re too smart for thirteen. Yes, she did hate me, because she believed Asa’s story. I couldn’t convince her otherwise.” He sits back down and balls up the paper from his sandwich. “Of course, I had no idea you were in the picture.”

  “But she agreed to meet you on the boat.”

  “That’s right. She sent me a letter saying she’d found out about Asa’s lie. She said he laughed about it, and she was going to make him suffer.”

  The three of us fall silent. I don’t feel hungry anymore. Our perfect little gathering—encircling an absence.

  “Wait!” I say, standing up. “Do you smell something?”

  Cole and Father look puzzled.

  “Seaweed?” says Father.

  “Chicken sandwich,” says Cole.

  I close my eyes. The scent is faint…a dark floral, with a trace of bitterness that makes my nostrils flare. It’s coming from the direction of the castle.

  “It’s happening!” I cry.

  “What?” Cole says. He, too, stands up.

  “No, you stay here. I need to do this by myself.”

  “Do what? What’s happening?”

  “The rose!” I start off at a run. “He’s made the rose!”

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Out of breath, I stumble through the atrium. The smell is stronger here, a cloying sweetness with an acrid undertone, but Strunk seems unaware of it.

  “Miss Thummel, are you quite all right?”

  “Don’t you smell it?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The smell, Mr. Strunk, the smell!”

  The little man looks around, as if smells might be visible. His feathery eyebrows twitch. “Nothing out of the ordinary.”

  These last words are spoken to my back, because I’m running now. I take the glass staircase two steps at a time, reach the landing, then rabbit past my rooms to the spiral stairs. As I reach the roof, the smell grows stronger and stranger by the second.

  It can only be the rose!

  He’s done it!

  Sunlight bounces off the glass turrets as I fling open the door to the laboratory. The scent overwhelms me—not the sweetness of fresh blossoms, but the sweetness of decay, as if I’ve opened a long-sealed tomb. In the center of it stands my wild-eyed uncle.

  I run to him, no word spoken, and watch what he’s watching: an apparatus of glass-and-rubber tubing, in the center of which stands a blood-red rose (red with my blood, I realize). I start to say something, but Asa holds up a finger. Within a minute, the rose begins to darken. Cranberry deepens to maroon, dims to burgundy, then eggplant, then…

  Midnight!

  All the while, the scent grows stronger, dizzying. Asa laughs, a low rumble that erupts in a bark. I feel a little light-headed myself.

  As we stare, the rose, now completely black, continues to change. It’s not any less black. If possible, its blackness has reached an even darker depth—but the petals are thinning. In fact, they’ve grown practically transparent. I can see through to the bright leaves behind.

  “I did it!” Asa’s voice is hoarse.

  I’m transfixed. He was right after all. Weeks ago, he told me that black is not a color, but an absence—that a pure black rose would be invisible. The blossom before us is now a trace of itself. Step back, and you’d believe the plant was all leaves, with no flower at all.

  The smell, though, is powerful, the sweetness nauseating. I crook my arm over my nose and breathe as lightly as I can.

  Asa, though, bends over the invisible flower and breathes in deeply.

  The words from Mother’s letter come back to me: Inhale the scent of a pure black rose.

  His body flinches, but he leans in again and inhales more deeply than before. When he straightens, his face is flushed, his eyes bleary. “Aah!”

  His sigh turns into a giggle. He totters around the room, hilarity subsiding, then breaking out again. He’s drunk. Or is it just that I’ve never seen him happy before? Is it possible that, in his whole life, my uncle has never been happy?

  He faces me, his eyes challenging. “Well, Miss Cisley, what do you say? A bit of magic?”

  He squares himself in front of the fat Latin book, his brows lowered in concentration.

  “Rise!”

  The book does a little fidget on the table, then lies still.

  “Rise! I command you!”

  The book’s front cover lifts an inch or two and settles back.

  He frowns at me. “What am I doing wrong?”

  I want to stay out of this. He is not a person I want to encourage.

  “What should I do? Tell me!”

  “I don’t know, Uncle Asa. I feel things best through my hands.”

  “Your hands?”

  All right, I can say this much. “Maybe if you hold them out?”

  He extends his arms, his fingers stiff as prongs. “Rise, book!”

  Slowly, almost lazily, the heavy volume floats upward and wobbles several feet over the table.

  “Ha, ha!” he shouts.
At which point, the book slams down again. “I did it!” He stares at me as his witness. “By God, Cisley! You saw it!”

  I nod weakly. It’s about all I can do. A wave of dizziness sweeps over me, and I touch my fingers to my forehead. “Uncle Asa, I think we need to get out of here.”

  “Leave now?” His eyes are dilated, his nose running with mucus. “Just when I’m doing real magic? You saw, didn’t you? There were no mirrors, were there? No mirrors!” He breaks out in a peal of laughter.

  “Got to get some air!” Gagging, I stumble to the door and barely make it outside before I collapse on the glass tiles and throw up. I lie there, breathing hard, then throw up some more. I groan and struggle to my feet. The breeze is cool. I take deep gulps of air and lean against the wall, looking out over the firth to steady myself.

  A crash from inside! What now? I rush back in, covering my face with my sleeve. A spotted lizard floats past my head. The air is filled with strange things—a glass vial, calipers, books, a terrified mouse, several flowerpots—all dancing overhead. Several less fortunate objects lie broken on the floor.

  Asa howls with laughter, his arms outstretched as if conducting an orchestra.

  “Uncle Asa!”

  A measuring cup floats toward me, and I pluck it from the air. Asa turns in circles. A metal bowl falls and clangs at his feet.

  “Uncle Asa! Stop!”

  This isn’t happiness. It’s delirium. I breathe through my sleeve as lightly as I can, but my stomach is rising again.

  “Uncle Asa! The air is poisonous!”

  He’s not listening. I take the measuring cup and throw it at him, hitting his shoulder. He looks over at me and breaks into a loopy grin. “I did it, Cisley, old girl. I don’t need her. I don’t need anyone!”

  With that, he twirls around again, then stops, looks off to the right as if struck by an odd thought. A moment later, his knees buckle and he collapses on the floor.

  There are thuds and crashes on all sides. A small hammer bounces off my shoulder. A spoon, then a mouse, land on my back. All his magic tricks are raining down.

  I run to him, brush aside broken glass, and hold his head. His eyes! He’s bleeding from his eyes!

  “Uncle Asa!”

  More crashes. Got to get him outside!

  I attempt to lift him, but he’s heavy.

  A dead weight.

  Dead.

  Desperate, I grab his ankles and try to drag him. I back into the worktable and have to pull him the other way.

  “Don’t worry, Uncle Asa. I’ll get you out of here!”

  “Nice of you.”

  My head snaps up. A woman’s voice?

  I scan the laboratory. No one. Wait: there, across the room, a shimmer. I watch, terrified, as it narrows into the shape of a woman…tall, in a pale blue gown….

  “Mother?”

  The woman looks at me for long seconds, her body moving in and out of focus. “Hello, dear.”

  I’m too stunned to move, fear mixing with disbelief, disbelief with tears. I take a step toward her. She holds up a hand. “Wait! I’m not here yet.”

  Not here? Everything’s a blur to my streaming eyes. I can hardly tell what’s here and what isn’t. It’s especially hard with my head banging with pain and my stomach lurching.

  “Soon,” she coos, “soon.” Then she adds: “Thanks to you.”

  “To me?”

  She nods slowly, as if testing out what she can do in this not-quite body. “Without you,” she says, “there would be no rose. I used to have the mirror to get back and forth, but after it broke, the rose was the only way.”

  “I don’t understand.” My glass thumb has started clicking. I concentrate to make it stop. Now if I could stop the dizziness.

  “The rose made an opening. It’s half in this world, half in the other.” Her smile is a sliver of light. “You didn’t want to help him,” she says. “I had to keep after you.”

  “You did?” I hold on to the worktable for support.

  “I was talking to you all the time. You didn’t know that?”

  I ransack my memory. When did she talk to me?

  “It wasn’t easy,” she goes on. “That creature had a mind of his own. Take my advice, dear. Never try to talk through a lobster. Always interjecting his own thoughts. The shell was so much easier.”

  “Wait.” I grope to understand.

  “My dear,” says Mother with a pretty frown, “here I am going on about myself. Shouldn’t we get you some air?”

  “Shouldn’t we?” I can’t keep track of who shouldn’t or what shouldn’t. It hardly matters, because I lose my hold on the table and slide to the floor. The cement is cool against my cheek.

  “Oh,” I hear above me, “that wasn’t supposed to happen.”

  A gust of wind blows in, a door slams, and then another voice, harsh: “What wasn’t supposed to happen, Marina? What’s that horrible smell?”

  “Don’t you like roses?”

  Someone’s bending over me. I smell the body powder of Miss Porlock.

  “Marina,” I hear her say, “what have you done? Come, Cisley, I’m getting you out of here.”

  “Yes, take her out, Edna. I’d help, but as you see, I’m not myself.”

  Sounds of voices, back and forth. Someone is angry. At least I can breathe better, this close to the floor. An arm slides under my shoulder, but Miss Porlock isn’t strong enough to lift me. She takes me by the legs and starts dragging me.

  Then stops. “Dear God!” she cries. “What have you done to Asa?”

  Mother’s voice, just as sharp: “Nothing you wouldn’t have done, given the chance. You hate him more than I do.”

  “Hate Asa? He’s our brother!”

  “Yes, and I’m your sister. Look what you did to me!”

  “Marina! How can you think—?”

  “Don’t deny it. We all know about your gift. The one pathetic bit of magic you have. Breaking things! Mirrors, especially. It was you, wasn’t it?”

  “I don’t have to answer that.”

  “I knew it was you! It was a horrible thing you did, trapping me in there for months.”

  “No more than you deserved. Wait. There’s no pulse! You killed him!”

  “Did I? Oh. Maybe so.”

  “You killed our brother!”

  “I just wanted to torment him a little. Get back at him. Like when I pricked my finger before the magic show and dripped blood on the scarf. A bit of fun, that’s all.”

  “Fun! Come on, Cisley.”

  “Yes, take her outside,” calls Mother’s echoey voice. “Another minute is all I need. Then I’ll take over.”

  “You’ll have nothing to do with her!”

  Mother’s laughter is a silver waterfall. “Is that what this is about, Edna? You want her for yourself? Is that why you broke the mirror? To keep me from taking her away?”

  Silence.

  “That’s it, isn’t it?”

  Silence.

  “Oh, Edna, Edna. You think she loves you?” More silver laughter. “Look at yourself in the mirror sometime, you ridiculous woman!”

  “Quiet!”

  “You poor, deluded—”

  “Quiet, I said!”

  Mother’s laughter echoes through the building.

  A sudden, violent crash of glass, and then a howl such as I’ve never heard from any creature, animal or human. It’s Mother!

  I lift my head from the floor, just enough to see my mother, her face a contortion of horror as she’s sucked into the distance. Back into the invisible!

  “Mother!” I croak. “No!”

  A much louder crash now. Then others, close and far away.

  A moment later, something warm and heavy falls on top of me, knocking me windless.

  I can scarcely breathe under the heavy weight. The smell of body powder and perfume mingles with the stink of the rose. I blink my eyes hard and try to focus. In front of me on the glass-strewn floor lies a mangled rosebush amid spilled dirt and
rubber tubing.

  The sight of it fascinates me. I catch what breath I can and watch. The faint outline of a blossom takes form.

  The outline fills in. Darkens.

  Black petals! How beautiful!

  The changes continue. Black saddens to almost black. Brownish red now. Then dirty brown.

  As I watch, hypnotized, the petals curl inward and shrivel. From the broken stem, reddish fluid slowly drips.

  The rose is dying.

  It’s all right; I’m dying, too.

  Mother’s dying. Porlock. Asa.

  We’ll die together.

  Chapter Forty

  Leave me alone.

  Someone’s pulling at me. Interfering. And here I was sinking so nicely. The blackness of blackness, darkest velvet.

  Stop it!

  I feel lighter suddenly. A great weight off me. Oh, that’s better!

  Someone’s arm under my shoulder, then under my knees. I’m being lifted.

  “Cisley, wake up!”

  Nice voice.

  “Cis! Come on. I can’t lose you.”

  Lose me? I’m right here.

  “Cisley!”

  I force my eyes open a sliver. Cole! I try to say something, but my throat is clogged.

  “Stay with me, Cis!”

  Sure, I’ll stay with you. I love you, Cole Havens. Do you know that?

  Bang! I jump at the noise. A slice of glass sticks in the counter next to us and quivers like a thrown knife. Another shard hurtles down nearby, spattering bright splinters.

  “Gotta get out!” Cole shouts, heading toward the door, or where it used to be. Half the wall is missing.

  As he steps out, I glance behind me.

  “Don’t look!” he says, swiveling so I can’t see.

  But I do.

  Oh God, I see! A lump of a woman facedown on the floor, daggers of glass jutting from her flowered dress, her back oozing.

  “Is that…?” My voice sounds like gargling. I twist around as Cole carries me.

  “Never mind!” he says.

  “No! Stop!” I croak. The sight of my old tutor focuses my mind. “Let me down!”

  “There’s nothing you can do,” he says, but eases me onto my feet.

  A breeze coming through the broken panes carries away the fumes, and with a steadier head, I see Miss Porlock clearly. I work my way toward her, leaning for support on the worktable while glass continues shattering all around us.