by Tess Lake
The thought crossed my mind that she’d gone crazy. Closely following that one was an even more horrendous idea: what if she’d been the one to cast the spell on me? And now she was lying, being sneaky, trying to lure me into something else?
Hattie suddenly reached out and grabbed my wrist, and for a moment I caught a taste of her power, that roaring hurricane locked up behind six-foot-thick walls of glass.
“You must find a place of your own, a room somewhere where you can explore it. You must write down your thoughts, find the holes and examine them, find the gaps where you stray away. Every time you force yourself to concentrate on them, the spell will use more energy, and then perhaps one day you can break through. If you come here every week, we can work on it. You must come here even if I tell you not to, even if you feel bored or if you’ve changed your mind. Can you promise me?” she said.
I very nearly bolted out of there, the fear inside me growing that she was somehow connected to the spell. Then I saw the card in her hand again and read it upside down.
“There is a spell on Harlow Torrent. Help her.”
Why would she write such a thing if she was trying to harm me? Could she be right?
I felt the desire to get out of there grow stronger, to run, to find any reason to get away. I had other things to do, a boyfriend to spend time with, a manor to break into. But if what she’d said was true, perhaps this was the spell trying to force me not to look too closely at it.
“I promise,” I said. Hattie reached into her pocket and pulled out another blank card and a thick marker which she handed to me.
“Write it down,” she said. “Quickly.”
I wrote on the card, “You will visit Hattie Stern every week to discover why there is a spell cast upon you. You cannot avoid this, no matter what you think or feel.” Even as I was writing it, I was feeling the urge to add some more vague statements such as, “if you have the time” or “you’ll try really hard to do this.” I managed not to add them, and by the time I handed the marker back, I was feeling a touch of that exhaustion again.
“Did you read Juliet’s journal? I asked Oliver the librarian to give it to you,” Hattie said, changing the topic.
“I did, but it’s mostly mundane. Ordering eggs and ingredients for beer. It reads more like a business ledger. There’s certainly nothing in there to suggest that she was smeared by anybody,” I said.
“Perhaps you need to continue reading,” Hattie said. I was getting the sensation that our time here was quickly drawing to a close, but Aunt Cass was still frozen, and although the moms were somewhat powerful witches, I didn’t think they had anything on Hattie.
“Did you hear about that man Arlan who leaped off the lighthouse? I saved him from dying with a spell, and then when I was near him I caught the scent of magic. It smelled like meat that was about to turn bad. There have been other old people leaving the Sunny Days Manor and being found around town. One of them even died, and someone said she saw him, this ninety-one-year-old, leaping over a six-foot-high fence.”
Hattie bit her lip, and the piercing sharpness of her eyes returned. She certainly wasn’t going to lose her train of thought on this, and somewhere in the back of my mind, I heard a small voice whisper to me that this was the power of the spell, that it tried to hide and made other topics seem so much more interesting.
“Magic leaves a mark, Harlow. If possible, you need to check this man, Arlan. I will also suggest you view the body if it has not yet been buried or cremated.”
“But what am I looking for?” I said, feeling another little spike of dread at the thought I might have to go to the hospital. A hospital is a place of a lot of strong emotions, both happy and sad, but some of the areas there are so desperately sad they could almost make a witch cry just by walking in there. I really didn’t want to go, and as for the idea of sneaking into a morgue to look at a dead body? If that’s what it took to be “magical detective,” then I thought I’d go and find another imaginary profession.
“It can be different every time. Perhaps it will be streaks on the body, or it may be something only you, a witch, can see. It has been a number of days, so you may not be able to detect anything on Arlan, but if a witch caused the death of that other man, there may still be a sign that you can find. Once you find it, then you should check others and see if they are being influenced,” she said.
Then she stood up and began clearing away the cups and cookies, and I understood that our time was over.
“Well, thank you for your time,” I said, heading for the door.
“Harlow, wait,” Hattie said. She reached into her apron pocket, pulling out a jam jar that was half-full of what appeared to be liquid mercury. She gave it to me, and I felt the warmth radiating out through the jar. As I looked closer at it, I saw that the liquid was attempting to climb the walls of the jar and then sliding back.
“Give this to your mother. You’re going to need it to unfreeze Cassandra, if that works,” she said.
“Um, thank you,” I managed to say. I knew that I was standing in a kitchen on a lemon farm not far from Harlot Bay, but honestly it felt as though I could suddenly sense the spinning of the earth underneath me. The fact that we were hurtling through space at a tremendous speed. Who was this person? The one who crossed the street just to avoid Aunt Cass? The one who was all sour and mean and abrupt? Now she was a kindly grandmother with cookies and tea, and also handing over some concoction for the spell the moms were going to cast?
Hattie merely nodded, and then I went on my way, heading out to my car. It was only when I’d gotten in and was preparing to leave that she came rushing out with a white card in her hand. I lowered the window and she handed it to me. It was the card I’d written to myself, the promise that I would return to visit her. In her other hand she held her own card, the one saying that I had a spell cast on me.
“Same time next week, no excuses,” Hattie said. I caught a touch of that Stern power, the one that had whacked me over the knuckles when I’d trained with her.
“I’ll do that,” I said.
Hattie looked down at the card again and then back at me, her expression softening into sadness.
“I am so very sorry it is you, my love,” she whispered and then patted me on the back of the hand before turning away to walk back inside.
For a moment I thought I remembered someone else saying that to me, but then I couldn’t catch the memory. It was a word on the tip of my tongue. I let it go and then drove to the hospital.
Chapter 14
The hospital was worse than I’d thought it would be. By the time I reached the door to Arlan’s ward room, I was on the brink of tears. I’d walked through spots of intense elation, of joy so pure and strong that I felt like leaping up in the air and waving my arms around, feeling the happiest I’d ever been. These were the moments of babies delivered and good news, people who’d had operations and come through it, and all the wonderful miracles that occur every day in a hospital. Then I would take another step and be plunged into ice. The dark depression of a terminal diagnosis. The intense sharp pain of all the terrible things that happen every day in a hospital. Behind it all were the general emotions of the people who worked there: busy doctors and nurses; people tired and frazzled; and then unexpected moments of happiness and comedy.
If I could’ve navigated the path, I would have simply walked through all the happy spots and tried to avoid the sadness, but that’s not the way it works. I felt like I’d gone from a hot bath to a cascade of ice and back again, over and over. On the way to the hospital I’d called Eve and left her a message saying that I hadn’t found very much new yet, but I had some leads and I would be back in contact. Then I’d steeled myself to go up to see Arlan. Now I was outside his room.
I took a few deep breaths, wiped my eyes, and went in. There were only two beds in this room. The one nearest the door was empty, and then there was a divider, and over on the other side was Arlan with his leg in a cast being suspended by some
metal wires hooked to the ceiling above him. In this room it was much better. There was still the general undertone of anxiety, but this was a place they put people when only minor things had happened to them—people who weren’t in life-threatening situations—and so the sadness was weaker, but also the joy.
Arlan was resting back on his pillow with his eyes closed, and I suddenly realized I hadn’t come up with a plan for how exactly I was going to examine him to see if there were any signs of magic. Ask him to lift his shirt? Pull down his pants? I didn’t even know what I was looking for. Arlan opened his eyes, and when he saw me, he gave me a smile, so I walked over.
“Hi, I’m Harlow, I was there at the lighthouse,” I said, not really sure how I should introduce myself.
“Yes,” Arlan said and gave me another smile. For some reason I thought I had to try again.
“I mean, I was with Hilda at Sunny Days Manor? When you called and then you…” I stopped talking when I realized where that sentence would go, but Arlan finished it for me.
“When I jumped off the lighthouse, you mean,” he said.
“Uh, yes. Do you remember that at all?” I asked.
Arlan shook his head and then clasped his fingers in front of him. When he looked at me, I sensed a sharp intelligence behind his twinkling eyes. This was definitely not a man who had had a fugue state due to dementia or Alzheimer’s and gone wandering off.
“Sit down, sit down if you’re Hilda’s friend,” Arlan instructed.
I sat down and tried to relax, which was a little hard after the barrage of emotions I’d gone through just to get to his room.
“So are you a friend of Hilda’s?” Arlan asked.
“I’m a friend of her granddaughter, Eve. She’s worried because Hilda also left her home and was found in town without remembering how she got there. She asked me to investigate,” I said.
“Harlow did you say your name was? Ah yes, I read your paper on the thingy.”
Thingy? Arlan waved his hand to a shiny large-screened phone that was sitting on the cabinet beside his bed.
“Oh, so you’re one of my five or six readers,” I said.
“You’re doing a great job. I would never have cared about foreshore restoration without your articles,” he said.
I found myself smiling and almost laughed at the idea of meeting one of my readers. I mean, I knew they were out there and there had been a lot more in the past, but apart from Hattie talking to me in the street trying to back her cause to change the name of Harlot Bay, most people didn’t bother to say a thing to me about it. It was very surprising to meet a man who had been reading all of my articles, especially about foreshore restoration, and to learn that I’d apparently made him care about such a thing. I guess maybe I was good at that job, even though the Harlot Bay Reader was dying?
“Thank you so much,” I said.
“So are you going to do an article on me?” he asked.
I shook my head. “I’m just here because I’m helping Hilda, and I was at the lighthouse, so I wanted to check on you,” I said.
“Here I am, alive and well with a broken leg,” he said and gave me a smile.
It struck me then that Arlan was only in front of me, alive and well, because I’d saved his life. If I hadn’t been there, or if I’d just been a moment too slow, or if my magic had failed, he would be dead rather than lying here with a broken leg. The truth of our lives is that we often don’t know how we influence other people. That kind remark or that cutting one could land and change someone’s life and we will never know it. It is so rare to have an unequivocal moment where what you did changed everything. Arlan was here alive and breathing because I’d magic-spelled myself into unconsciousness in that parking lot and saved him from dying.
I had a sudden thought about how I could see if there were any magical marks on him.
“Do you have a lot of bruises?” I asked.
“I sure do,” he said, and just as I’d hoped, he lifted his shirt. He was quite a skinny man, heading towards bony, and all over his torso were scrapes and some fading bruises from where he must have landed on the ground outside the lighthouse. He only had his shirt up for a moment, but I caught a silvery glimmer, as though on his flesh was a spot where he’d once been burned and then it had healed, leaving nothing but an afterimage of the wound. But then he pulled his shirt down too quickly for me to look properly.
“Oh my, what am I doing taking my clothes off in front of a young lady?” he quipped. He gave me a roguish smile and I suddenly caught a glimpse of the man he must have been when he was younger. I was betting that roguish smile had won him many kisses and perhaps a lot more.
“Well, I’m glad to see you’re feeling better, and I hope you get to go home soon,” I said. That meat-about-to-spoil scent was absent entirely. When I breathed in, all I could smell was disinfectant and clean sheets—that impersonal hygiene of a hospital.
“Goodbye,” Arlan said, giving me another smile and then settling back into his pillow. The wires holding his leg up creaked a little as he moved.
I left his hospital room and was tensing myself for the barrage of emotions, but they were oddly absent. Seeing him lying there in a hospital bed, only alive because I had saved his life, must have changed something. I was no longer plunging through good and bad, although I could feel they were still somewhere there at a distance. I didn’t know if I’d Slipped or I was about to, but this was a welcome change, and I decided I had to be brave and take advantage of the moment!
I headed for the morgue.
The hospital was moderately busy with people and patients going everywhere, and I had to linger around for a moment before stepping through a door that led downstairs. I could only hope that luck was going to smile upon me, because if there were a lot of people down there as well, I wouldn’t be able to cast a concealment spell to hide from them. At best I was going to have to blush and mutter that I’d gotten lost and then be sent back on my way.
I went down the stairs as fast as I could, listening for voices and footsteps. It wasn’t long before I heard a man and a woman coming back up the stairs towards me. I looked around, but there was no door for me to duck out of, so I flattened myself into the corner of the stairwell, cast a concealment spell, and prayed to the goddess that it would work. It was two doctors, a man and a woman, and as they came up the stairs and passed me, the spell pulled at my energy, draining it. It had pushed their attention away from me. Don’t look in the corner, ignore it, you didn’t see anything. I saw the man look past me, his eyes traveling over where I stood, seeing only the corner of the stairwell.
Then they were gone, and it was not a moment too soon. I let go of the spell and then had to hold myself up with my hands on my knees, taking deep breaths, feeling like I was about to pass out. I could only hope I wouldn’t come across anyone else, because I couldn’t do that again. Although I wanted to collapse in the corner of the stairwell for, say, eight or nine years until I got my energy back, I forced myself onward until I reached the basement door that had “Morgue” printed on it.
I opened the door and walked through boldly. If I was going to go with the lie of getting lost, I had to pretend that I was exactly where I thought I should be. Thankfully there was no one down there. I went down a short corridor and then through two swinging doors that led into a kind of administration area, and then behind that were two larger doors where they kept all the bodies. I continued on my way, only pausing for a moment outside the doors to listen for anyone inside.
When I didn’t hear anyone, I pushed through and stepped into the chill of the morgue. It was about as clichéd a morgue as every one you’ve ever seen on television. Two rows of burnished steel doors, and behind each one a tray that could roll out where they kept a body prior to autopsy or burial. You might expect that a place like a morgue would be one of deep sadness, but it really isn’t. That distant feeling I had of the emotions wasn’t triggering anything. All I caught was the vague professionalism of a place where p
eople worked. They were no more upset than anyone who would be at an office. To them it was a job, a methodical one, and as I moved around the morgue, I even caught slight hints, somewhat at a distance, of the jokes and fun people have with each other at work. Each of the steel doors had a small spot for a card to be placed. Most of the drawers must have been empty. Only three had cards, and on one of them was printed Wolfram Dole.
I didn’t have any time to waste, because whoever worked down here might be back at any moment and I honestly had no idea what I would do. Try to dive past them under the guise of another concealment spell, likely pass out and hit my head on the desk? I grabbed the big silver handle and pulled on it, opening the door. There in the dark lay Wolfram Dole, a thin paper sheet covering from his shoulders down to his feet. I’d gone too far to stop now, so I grabbed the drawer and pulled it out.
I’d seen dead bodies before, and some of people who’d been murdered. Wolfram looked like he was sleeping, but you could tell he wasn’t. It wasn’t just that he was still; you could tell that the essential spark of life that had animated him was gone and what was left was the shell that had long ago housed his spirit.
With trembling hands, I slowly pulled the paper sheet down. I didn’t have far to go until I saw the mark the magic had left. Over his heart, looking like a sunburst, were the same silvery lines I’d seen on Arlan upstairs. As though he’d been burned sometime long ago and then healed. I knew in that moment that only a witch would see such things and to everyone else it would be invisible. There was kind of a pattern to it, so it looked like a child’s drawing of a sun, but with some spiky edges as though it had been done with wet paint and then the canvas had been suddenly moved underneath it. I took out my phone and got as close as I could to take a quick photograph of it, not even knowing if I’d be able to capture it. I pulled the sheet down a little further, to his waist, but there were no more marks on him.