The Curse of the Mystic Cats

by R. E. Rose

  Devils and lovers. I touched Cassie with the Lovers card. Easy enough, she lay unconscious on the floor. “Sorry, Cassie,” I had to apologize. “It’s too bad you must go back with this dude.” Then I slapped Drake with the same card. Bam! They were gone in two blinks of an eye. And their lockets fell to the floor. Not the new ones that Maisie had given them, but the original ones that they both claimed to have lost, or pawned. I tried to grab the lockets, but Devon’s card slipped out and jumped around like a Mexican bean, in my hand. I caught the card but accidentally released it three times.

  And that freed him! Damn it!

  Devon acted like he’d never left. He kicked the lockets beyond my reach. I found myself crawling on hands and knee after them, but they’d gone too far under a shelving unit, and I’d need a broom handle or something like that to fish them out. I decided it was more important to get the lid on the deck of cards and get the whole thing, cards and box, to the back room.

  No point in touching Devon with his card. He had to be in full demon mode to be put him back into the deck, and I didn’t know if I’d ever again get near enough to him while he was in that state. Somehow, he’d managed to return to his “normal” self and get out.

  At any rate, he managed to dig the lockets out from under the shelf and pocketed the two halves. He grinned at me, licking his little pointy teeth as he ran from the shop.

  Fine by me. I’d had enough; I picked up the worst mess and organized a little but as soon as I felt the magic burgeoning inside me like a helium balloon filling, I stopped organizing. I didn’t feel like expressing any more magic tonight. I quickly locked the shop and headed home.

  Just as I got there, a call came from my boss, Mr. Whitman; he wanted me to work the next day, which wasn’t fine by me. But I was saddened that I hadn’t actually heard from William. I told Whitman I wasn’t feeling well and couldn’t come in the next week, or even the next week. I said I had the flu.

  After hanging up on Christian Whitman, I thought about William. As much as I enjoyed Shane Apollo, the fact that he wasn’t a free man and remained a permanent fixture of the tarot deck got in the way of a relationship and always would. He’d return to the deck, until he’d worked off his debt with Maisie. And who knew how long that might take?

  I really needed to find my boyfriend. I think I’d fallen a little in love with William. And I was missing him.

  10.

  Magical Mundanes, Oh My

  I’d just hung up on William, once again not answeringhis cell. He and Sia seemed to have fallen off the planet. I dropped my Fontanelli bag on the coffee table and went to the fridge to get a beer. I took several gulps and stared into the yard.

  Everything, it seemed, was a mess. My life needed more work. The yard needed work. It was a jungle out there. The rhodos needed dead heading, but I couldn’t get Sia and William out of my mind.

  While I stood there thinking about the date, the deck, and the dudes in my life, I made a promise to myself to focus only on William and Sia.

  Then Gordon’s ghostly dead body appeared in my living room, but he wasn’t so dead, more ghostly.

  “Save me, Jane,” he said.

  “From what?” I asked.

  “Oooooh, boooohoooo,” he howled. He terrified me. He reminded me of Jacob Marley in the movie, A Christmas Carol, and I knew just how Scrooge must have felt on that fateful Christmas Eve. “Save me from what’s going to happen,” he said.

  “But how? How can I save you from the future when you’re still alive in the present? What’s going to harm you?” I asked seriously concerned.

  “Youuuuuuu,” he said, “You’re going to kill me.”

  “Me? Not bloody likely. How can I save you if I’m the one that’s going to kill you? That makes no –” and he was gone. Just like that.

  Oh boy. Now what? He was becoming a real nuisance. I thought about it for thirty seconds. Maybe I was going to accidentally run him over with my car. I’d be more aware of my surroundings, but other than that I couldn’t think of what I might do differently to save Gordon’s life.

  Back to William and Sia. What if they were in trouble? I had no idea how to find them. I had to be more proactive when it came to William, and stop relying on him to contact me. I had to make more of an effort to locate him, even if he was a shadow man. I still kept a landline at my house and noticed the light flashing on the answering machine. But this time, instead of ignoring my messages, I thought I better retrieve them.

  It was Glendie. I’d forgotten about her. She babysat Sia for me and had my back whenever I needed her. Lately, my treatment of her lacked best-friend behaviour. She wanted to know if I still wanted to go bowling on Friday night.

  I didn’t call her back.

  I went to the living room to watch TV. I noticed my black candle and feather sitting like small black islands in the sea of pink tissue paper. That reminded me that somewhere inside my Dior shoulder bag was my black box of nothing. I put down the beer and hunted in my bedroom for that purse. When I found it, I hunted through my purse.

  When I found the black box, the lid was still on. I was really glad about that because even though I didn’t believe Maisie when she said there was something inside, I wanted to be careful. I shook it a little. It rattled. Without hesitating, I flipped the lid off and looked in.

  Still nothing! I was thankful for that. I didn’t want to see that blackened leathery paw again, so I carefully replaced the lid and put the box on the fireplace mantel. Clearly, my magic wasn’t yet mature enough to handle seeing that thing.

  I reached for the black pillar candle, fat and long and plain, but smelling delicious, like Turkish delight. I brushed the tissue paper to the floor and pushed the feather around. As I pushed, I began to get that itchy feeling in my sinuses. My sneeze was thankfully interrupted by the door bell ringing.

  I looked through the peek hole. A sooty-faced Shane Apollo smiled back at me.

  I couldn’t get the door opened fast enough!

  I invited him in and got him a beer. I was as nervous as a girl at her first spelling bee. I asked him a million questions about the fire.

  “It was pretty bad,” he said, looking serious and absent-mindedly fondling the charm he wore around his neck. “The building is toast. A bunch of people are dead –"

  “Dead?”

  “Oh, yeah. They’re still investigating, but it looks like the Silver Bullet’s gang may have had something to do with it. They were having a nice dinner, paid for by the proceeds of their victims.”

  “Tell me more.” I was enthralled; he looked beat, but gorgeous and I really did want to know all the details of his day. He went on for a bit, but then he noticed the candle on my table.

  “That smells great,” he said, pulling it a little closer.

  I couldn’t believe my eyes; the candle lit up all on its own. Shane absent-mindedly picked up the feather and ran it between his fingers. I held my breath. I had no idea what might happen, but nothing did. He didn’t seem to notice the candle flickering.

  “The Silver Bullets? You were telling me about them.” I said, trying to bring him back round to the topic while keeping a very sharp eye on the feather he held. The flame started to chatter, flicker and then crackled. Shane absent-mindedly twirled the feather between his fingers and fanned at the flame. A long string of purple smoke spiraled up and around the quill.

  “That’s a cool effect,” he said. I gently took the feather from his hand and WHAM! A hot current ran through me like someone had turned on a hot water hose and plugged it into my circulatory system. When I looked at Shane, he seemed to be far away, at the end of a long tunnel while I spiraled backward and away from him. I was no longer in my living room sitting with the beautiful Shane Apollo. I heard a voice call to me –

  “Jane, help me, I’m here.”

  Inside my well of darkness, I found William’s face floating by me as if it were projected onto the skin of a helium balloon and I, seemingly disembodied, chased the floating imag
e like a kid.

  I remembered everything I’d just done: sitting on the couch with Shane, watching him play with the feather and candle, then BAM, I am in a land of shadow, where light existed in varying degrees of greyness. A nightmarish scenario, shadows on shadow – silhouettes, a cityscape, garbage cans in an alley, lanes, dark windows, even the outlines of cars, no colour, and the real world remained absent.

  At the far end of the sidewalk, I saw the tall form of a man. I focused on it and walked quickly toward him, but the closer I got, the less like William the form looked. It changed, became darker, less human and more animal like, until it took on the shape of the huge, dark, cat I’d seen at the White Swan.

  The cat eyes glowed and tracked my approach.

  I got lost in the green eyes of the panther, the only colour in this land of black and grey. The cat spoke to me. When I heard William’s voice in my head, it was like a cool drink of water on a hot day.

  I wasn’t afraid. I did want to continue toward the creature, but I’d lost control of my feet. They seemed to have minds of their own and continued on without direction from me.

  “I’ve been initiated, Jane.” I heard the large cat say as clearly as if he walked beside me.

  “I know. That seems frightening,” I said.

  “It is, a little.”

  “Is this what you want? Or did someone do this to you?”

  “It’s what must be,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said lamely, I didn’t know what else to say.

  “Darkness wants Meadowvale.”

  “Do you mean Emilia?”

  “No. She’s Death, not Darkness. It’s an evil darkness. To help keep the town safe, I must attain all my powers and my abilities, all that I possess, I need at once,” he said.

  While he spoke, he walked toward me, and my feet walked with him. We must have been a strange sight, the two of us, a tiny woman and a giant black panther in a land filled with many shades of grey.

  He had a destiny awaiting him. I could feel the import of it. When I asked him if that was the case, he said, “I’m searching.” And I wasn’t certain what he meant. He wanted to show me something. In my heart, I didn’t want to go, but I didn’t protest. I followed him down the road, around a corner, getting lost in his world.

  If he’d left me there, alone, I didn’t think I’d find my way back home.

  We entered an old building together. Then William, the black panther, changed form and became the man. He took my hand and somehow that made it a little easier for me to make out the details in his world. Everything became a bit brighter. And the place we stood in looked eerily familiar.

  It took a moment to understand that I was in an antique shop on the outskirts of Meadowvale. I’d never actually been inside the shop, but I remembered it now, as if I had been in the shop sometime before.

  I was in Temmie Skylark’s antique shop.

  I knew I hadn’t met her yet, and still, I knew who she was and that this was a greyed-out version of the packed antique store that she owned and ran. Even though I didn’t actually know Temmie, I had a clear memory of her.

  I’d never seen any of these shop things, nor had I met any of the people I was remembering, namely Temmie and Silvio, yet, they all seemed very familiar. William and I seemed to be the only people inside the shop, for the moment. He took me behind the counter and into the back room of the place.

  This was where I’d heard a man named Silvio Garcia worked as a tinker. I had a memory of him conversing, even laughing with Temmie.

  When William pulled me into the back room, nothing was discernible.

  “You can’t see anything because you’ve not been in this room before, so you don’t have a memory of it in this dimension. It’s virtually empty to you,” William said.

  “I’ve never been in this shop before,” I said.

  “You have,” he said, insistent. “Or you wouldn’t have recalled some of the detail you were able to bring forward in the outer part of the shop.”

  “What good am I then, if I can’t see any details in this room?” We still held hands and William looked back at me. In the twilight of this darkness, his eyes were still brilliant green.

  “Use your magic!” He said, sounding very annoyed.

  “What? How? I don’t know what to do here.”

  “What would you do ‘back home,’ if you found yourself in a dark room?” He said.

  “I would probably look for a light switch and turn it on, or find a flashlight, or light a candle –”

  “Aha! Light a candle,” he said, sounding excited.

  “But I don’t have one,” I protested.

  “But you do,” he insisted.

  “Tell me.”

  “In Cheshire, you have access to everything in your dimension. You need only visualize it. Close your eyes and picture a candle you’re familiar with.”

  I did that. I didn’t wait even a second to see the black pillar candle. It appeared and floated in the middle of the room, lit, and it cast a great light. Everything became visible at that point. I saw William in colour, the room, all of the junk in it; old TVs’, radios, a workbench, a small window on the back wall. Everything! The place seemed tinier than I’d imagined.

  “Can you see it, William?” I asked and heard the wonder in my own voice.

  “Course I can. Good job, Jane.” He kissed me on the forehead.

  “Why’re we here?” I asked and looked around. I tried to let go of William’s hand, but he wouldn’t let me.

  “Don’t let go. I’ll lose the vision if you do.” I nodded. I got it. “When you visited Temmie, did she say anything about her boyfriend?” William asked.

  I didn’t remember ever visiting Temmie or her boyfriend, and yet, somehow, I knew that I must have done so. As I thought about it and tried to recall a memory that I didn’t think existed, I suddenly had a very strong feeling.

  “Silvio, that’s his name. I remember that Temmie appeared a little afraid that he might overhear her and me chatting in the front part of the antique shop,” I said. “Oh, and she said that all the money they make selling pot goes south, to Mexico.”

  As I walked in a slow circle, talking, so did William, following in my footsteps. I wasn’t sure what he looked for, but the minutiae which Silvio found important and had stashed in his workshop baffled me. There were packages of shoestrings, and bottles of polishing liquids, shoe shining brushes and all sorts of things in the compact room. There didn’t seem to be a system of organization, and I don’t know how he found anything. I did notice candle making utensils tucked into one spot, and near to that, a bag of feathers. It occurred to me then that he’d made Temmie’s earrings and necklace, which meant her jewelry would be chock full of magic.

  “It’s not any old pot those two grow and dry out,” William said,

  “Oh?” I said, curious.

  “This is where they lace it with sorcery,” he said.

  I didn’t smoke a lot of the stuff, but I enjoyed my moments when I had some. I’d never found it dangerous, except maybe in the purchasing of it at times.

  “Laced with magic?” I said, now I was very curious. “My experience tells me that it stops the flow of magic when you imbibe.”

  “Not Silvio and Temmie’s. It gives and enhances magical ability. Mundanes suddenly become magical.”

  “Is that a bad thing?”

  “Trust me, in most cases, it’s a disaster.”

  “What are you looking for?” I asked. “His stash?”

  “Sort of.”

  We did another hand-holding circle around the workshop. Then William came to an abrupt stop.

  “Sort of?” What could he possibly be searching for if wasn’t a stash of weed?

  “Not his stash of weed, exactly, but his stash of magic. I’m trying to figure out how he’s doing it. How does he cut magic into the drug? And I think I’ve found it.”

  I tried to turn around to see what William had spotted, but while our hands were still clasped,
I kept getting tangled in our arms. He’d opened a small cupboard set in the top of a workbench. Deep inside, a number of long boxes formed a square; each small square had a knob on top. William pulled one box out, then the next two, and finally the last.

  “Candle making. Look.” He showed me the inside of the boxes. Wicks, bits of stone and salt, rose petals and other things I didn’t recognize. One box contained several black feathers, much like the one sent to me along with the candle. While we stared quietly, contemplating the items, we suddenly heard a banging sound; bang, bang, like something being hit, blow after careful blow. I looked to William for a clue as to what it might be.

  “He’s here.”

  “Silvio?”

  “He’s not in the Cheshire realm, but he is in his workshop back home.”

  I made an “O” shape with my mouth.

  “He’s in the shop working on something,” William said.

  “Maybe he’s doing it. You know the thing you’re wondering about.”

  William nodded. In that moment it occurred to me that Maisie and William might be in cahoots.

  Then he let go of my hand.

  11.

  See the twinkle

  Suddenly, I was back on the couch with Shane.

  “Wow, what just happened?” I asked Shane. He shrugged at me and looked confused.

  “You closed your eyes a minute. Are you feeling okay? Cause you look fantabulous.”

  Was I okay? Did I feel fine? I felt way, way confused.

  “Shane, do you know anything about a guy named William Tell?”

  “From the Cheshire Society?” he asked, looking puzzled. “The Shadow Man?”

  “That’s him. What – how do you know?”

  “He’s tight with Maisie. I know that.”