Hill Magick

by Julia French

  Rachel decided she liked her new boss. “Tell me about Robert’s Ramblings.”

  “Interesting people and places, but with a homespun touch, like the lady down the street who collects antique kerosene lanterns or the retired fisherman who sells rowboats he builds with his own hands. That’s the local flavor our readership prefers. Our e-mail address is yrc@jetstream.com. Type ‘RR Sample’ in the subject line so I’ll know it isn’t spam.”

  Before she could express her thanks, Rachel found herself on the street again, clutching a blank W2 form in her right hand and balancing the stack of Regular Chronicles in the crook of her left arm. Dazed at the sudden way her good fortune had come to her, she looked around to see whether the world had ended.

  It hadn’t. The sun still shone above her and the sky was still dazzlingly blue. The late morning traffic was rushing along Washington Avenue as it always did. An elderly woman emerged from Ah-Lee’s Medicinal Massage and held the door open for another woman to enter. A street performer squatted behind a gaudy souvenir-size sombrero on the sidewalk in front of Paige’s Pages bookstore and puffed unskillfully but hopefully on a harmonica.

  Everything was normal, as normal as Yarwich could be, anyway, she reflected as she reached her car. As she got inside, a giant purple tumbleweed rolled past her window. Rolling down the pavement, it swept around a city bus and came to rest against another parked car. As the driver emerged from his car to shoo it away, the tumbleweed evaporated in a puff of yellow smoke.

  You can’t believe everything you see, Rachel told herself firmly. Some prankster spray-painted a tumbleweed and let it loose downtown. Very funny, ha ha.

  On the way home, second thoughts about the Yarwich Regular Chronicle began to crowd her brain. Rachel, what makes you think you can do this, she thought, glancing at the pile of newspapers on the seat beside her. You never finished college. This great opportunity has been handed to you and you’re going to blow it. Why are you wasting your time? When you get home, call Don and say you’ve changed your mind.

  “I will not blow it! Go to hell,” she said, not sure who she was addressing. Could she write a column? A good one? Every week? Don was right. The only way to find out was to try.

  On the kitchen table she spread out the issues of the Regular Chronicle and chose one at random. “Elevated Mercury Levels Found in Yarwich Harbor,” she read. “President Vetoes Aid Bill for Sumatra. Local Mortuary Denies Involvement With Madame Tussaud’s.” Where was Robert’s Ramblings? Finally she found the column on page 17. This week’s subject was a fourth-generation beekeeper raising bees from an old-country strain which had come across the Atlantic with his second cousin once removed. Somehow the writer had brought forth those bits of the beekeeper’s life which were fascinating and made those details which were dry as dust recede into the background. The friendly, informal tone would be easy enough for her to imitate, since she had read that style of writing enough times in the organic gardening magazines her uncle stacked in his attic. A piece of cake, she thought. If I work hard, I know I could do it. This is my big chance.

  In that moment her ambition leaped beyond mere escape. It was possible for her to do something besides waitressing, and do it well. Eagerly she read the other Robert articles, one after the other. A black woman who had spent her life working as a maid had discovered an unknown Renoir sketch at a local garage sale, and was finally able to retire and hire her own maid. A transient carnival worker, liking the area, had decided to stay and take up bell-ringing at Holy Redeemer Chapel in Fish Creek. A middle-aged accountant had spearheaded a movement to preserve the last covered bridge in Raleigh County and had found himself heading the newly-formed NSFPCBCW, the National Society For the Preservation of Covered Bridges and Cobblestone Walks. Not particularly earthshaking subjects, but unique ones uniquely treated, once she got the hang of it, if she could.

  Rachel got up and made a pot of coffee, all the time wondering where she could look for ideas. Yarwich was a seaport, and interesting things and people could always be found. There was the rest of Raleigh County to explore as well. She estimated she could cover a radius of up to a hundred miles from her home in a day and return in time to cook supper for Mark when he came home from work, but how would she explain the increased mileage on the car? Perhaps she could rent a car for a couple hours each week, using a bit of her grocery money, and she could take a taxi to and from the car rental office. Fortunately, Mark never came home for lunch, but she should work out a plausible excuse in case he ever decided to and found her gone.

  It was unthinkable to her to deceive her husband like this, and yet it was the only way. Mark would never agree to her working, and if he found out she was planning to leave him, there was no way to predict what he might do. In spite of that fact, she felt a surge of guilt as she thought about Robert’s Ramblings. She hated lies, and her life was turning into one big lie. If only there was the slightest chance that Mark would understand! But she knew there wasn’t. She imagined the words she might say, and in her mind’s eye arose the seagull at the dumpster, the one she had dreamed about. In her vision, as in her dream, that dangerous hooked beak drove straight for her face, but at the last second it changed into Mark’s clenched fist. She came out of the vision to find herself backed against the refrigerator, fending off the empty air.

  Chapter Two

  “It’s dry,” Mark told her, helping himself to another serving of chicken. “Didn’t you baste it with olive oil like I told you?”

  “I did, Mark. I’m sorry. It just turned out that way.” Rachel’s stomach tightened. According to Mark, there were mistakes in every meal she made-if she made omelets, the eggs were rubbery. If she cooked a sirloin, the meat was overdone and tasteless. The pie crust was always too heavy and the biscuits oily, not that it seemed to matter, because Mark always ate heartily of whatever she made. Did he really think she cooked so badly, or was this another way of keeping her emotionally off balance?

  “Make sure you baste it more often next time,” he told her, adding another serving of jasmine rice to his plate. “Did you drop off the dry cleaning?”

  “I did this morning. It’ll be done by Saturday.”

  “That Italian bastard better not put a hole in my best suit like he did with the sport coat.”

  “It wasn’t Ernesto who did it, it was his trainee, and Ernesto replaced the suit, remember?”

  “Damn Wop asshole.” Mark downed a forkful of rice.

  The rice is also dry, Rachel whispered to herself in anticipation, and it came.

  “The rice is dry too, Rachel. Did you let it boil down again? You’re supposed to simmer it gently like I showed you.”

  “I did, Mark, and I put a pat of butter in it to keep it moist.”

  “Damn it, Rachel, when I gave you that cookbook for Christmas I expected you to use it, not park it on a shelf!”

  She stared hard at her plate, willing herself not to hurt. In spite of her efforts to put a hard shell around her heart, Mark’s criticisms still managed to find their target. She wished she were as insensitive as he was.

  “I don’t suppose you made any dessert tonight.” He stabbed the last forkful of chicken as though it were trying to escape from his plate.

  “There’s a caramel cheesecake in the fridge,” Rachel replied, trying to keep her voice normal. Expressing her hurt feelings openly merely egged him on.

  “We’ve had cheesecake three times this month.” Belying his complaint, Mark got up, went to the refrigerator, lifted two large slices from the pan, and balanced them in his hand. “A little help, Rachel!”

  She retrieved a clean dessert plate from the cabinet and he slid the slices of cheesecake onto it. “I’ll be in the den,” he told her. “Don’t forget to use that new detergent. It’ll get the dishes a lot cleaner than that yellow crap you like to get.”

  As Rachel cleaned the kitchen she fought her te
ars and thought of Robert’s Ramblings. When the dishes were finished and put away she escaped to the bedroom where she paused to admire the bedspread, a dark green quilt with intertwined lilies-of-the-valley. She loved to imagine that her touch released the strong, waxy perfume of the white flowers. Fantasy aromatherapy, she thought, smiling to herself. Mark had gotten the bedspread for her in one of his increasingly rare affectionate moods. Once she had believed that affectionate mood to be his real self, but since those early days, she had learned differently.

  It was time to go to work. Rachel’s cherry wood desk was positioned in front of the bedroom window. She slid into the chair and pulled out a notebook and pen from the center drawer. A small squirrel was perched outside her window upon the branch of the elm tree in the yard. She watched the squirrel leap from branch to branch, its bead-black eyes shifting and darting. Soon the animal scurried down the trunk of the tree and bounded across the back lawn out of sight, and Rachel realized she’d wasted fifteen minutes of precious time.

  Robert’s Ramblings. Travels across the eastern seaboard. Where should she go first? In her efforts to concentrate, Rachel put the tip of her pen to the blank page and found herself coloring in a little black dot, which grew in diameter until it was fully an inch across. Playtime is over, she told herself sternly-but if only that black dot had a stem it could become a balloon. As if it had a life of its own, her pen obliged her, and soon the large black dot had become a single balloon and then a cluster of them.

  The strings of the balloons were dangling in thin air, which made her uncomfortable. If only they had something to attach to! A few sweeps with the pen and a big top circus tent was born, complete with a supporting post to tether the cluster of balloons. The anchored balloons pleased her, but the tent itself looked unadorned and sad. A circus tent wasn’t supposed to be sad-looking, and she searched for a way to fix it. Another twenty minutes passed, and inside the opening of the tent a swaybacked camel teetered under the weight of a heavy-set young boy. The maniacally grinning boy clutched an oversized stick of cotton candy. To the right of the overburdened camel was a striped railroad flatcar bearing a lumpy-looking elephant, and a clown with drooping red lips stood holding a hoop out for a trained poodle frozen in mid-jump. Rachel surveyed the drawing and was almost content. There was still something missing, though. Perhaps another clown…

  “Rachel!” Mark’s voice bellowed from the den. “I need this month’s issue of Electronic Beat. I think it’s in the living room. Get it for me, will you?”

  You get it, I’m working. Rachel bit back the rebellious reply and moved to get up, but Mark’s voice came again. “I found it. Never mind.” Halfway out of her chair, she sank back into the seat, relieved that she hadn’t had to break off working.

  Working on what, though? For the last twenty minutes she had been playing. Her inked circus confronted her accusingly. She was supposed to be brainstorming ideas. Could she write a piece on balloons? Circuses? Elephants? Mischievous little boys? Cotton candy? She turned to a fresh page and made a note at the top: The circus comes to Raleigh County?

  What a stupid idea. Sick at heart, she flipped the notebook shut. Friday was two days away. Don Waverly would wait for her email, which would never arrive. Her one big chance would be gone, for it was too much to expect another lucky break like this one. She would have to settle for a job in child care, food service, or a telemarketing job because she hadn’t finished college or gone to a trade school. Working the few hours a week that she could manage to squeeze out of her free time without letting Mark know, her low earnings would never be enough for a down payment on an apartment, furniture, or a car. She would never get away, and Mark would order her about, criticize and judge her every thought, word, and action, until she was too old and decrepit to care.

  That circus she’d drawn was better than any article she could have written. She had been drawn into the picture and had felt compelled to finish it. Why, when the threat of being fired before she was even hired hung over her head? The answer came to her—because her hand-drawn circus had fascinated her. She was going about this writing business all wrong. She had been wracking her brains about what she thought she was supposed to write when she should have been thinking of what she’d like to read. Energized, Rachel got up and went over to the bookcase by her side of the bed. Mark allowed her only three shelves so the contents wasn’t truly representative of her interests, but it was a good place to start. It was the work of five minutes to make a list of nineteen subjects she would like to read about in the Yarwich Regular Chronicle. Tomorrow she would begin again to write her debut article, properly this time, and no more circuses.

  Chapter Three

  Fucking cheap scalpel. The man fished out the broken tip of the blade and dropped it into the wastebasket at his feet, where it winked redly at him. He selected a fresh scalpel from the tray and continued. The naked woman was bound too tightly to the stainless steel table to do more than roll her eyes upward in a desperate attempt to follow the motion of the scalpel. There were blackened bruises on her arms and legs where she had fought against the heavy-duty restraints. She was naked because the man liked naked women, although he considered the actual act of sex distasteful and messy. The woman was not anesthetized because it wasn’t necessary for his task. He didn’t like noise, however, so he had used a ball gag.

  The second blade didn’t break, and he was able to slice a neat flap in the woman’s shaved scalp. The lines of the flap welled red and he dabbed at them with a handful of cotton. When he could see the edges of the wound clearly he picked at one edge of the flap of scalp until he was able to get his fingernails underneath, then peeled it away to expose the bare bone. The man had never used a bone saw before. At first he bore down too hard, and the woman’s limbs twitched and convulsed against the straps as the saw tore through brain tissue. He quickly realized that using a bone saw was much like using a handheld hobby drill and, using a lighter touch, he soon had a neat circle of skull sawed away. The woman’s mouth mumbled around the ball gag, and she started to drool.

  The man set the bloody circle of bone upon the stainless steel tray and regarded it with satisfaction. It was a job well done, and the rough spots could be smoothed out with sandpaper. Now it was time to take out the garbage. The woman had fallen unconscious, rivulets of drying crimson striping her face.

  He untied the leather straps from the steel table and wound them around the woman’s torso, arms, and legs until she was wrapped like a mummy with only her head exposed. He considered taking some of her fingernails but decided against it, since he already had a good supply of fingernails. Fitting the woman into the lawn-and-leaf bag proved a challenge, as he had wrapped her so tightly he could barely bend her body to fit inside. He put his weight into it, however, and soon had the job done.

  The woman regained consciousness just as he was pulling the plastic drawstrings shut over her mutilated head. He stopped a moment to examine her eyes. One pupil was dilated enormously and the other had contracted almost to nothing, a natural consequence of his clumsy handling of the bone saw. There was still some kind of consciousness left, but he could see that the woman no longer understood what was happening to her. All he had to do was drop her off at the local landfill and let nature take its course.

  He tied the mouth of the bag firmly shut over her uncomprehending face, balanced the load upon the metal dolly, and began hauling it upstairs.

  Chapter Four

  Thursday dawned wet and cold. Mark had taken the car to work and Rachel was left alone with her thoughts. Sitting quietly, drinking her coffee and watching the rain come down, she thought of the Chinese game of Mahjongg. Mahjongg players sorted their groups of tiles into sets, like card players sorted their cards into suits. When a player needed only one more tile to complete their layout they called out “one-before-ready” to let the other players know of their imminent win. This morning Rachel sensed she was one-before-read
y, poised on the brink. Two days ago she’d had nothing. Then, like a gift from the heavens, a whole world of options had opened up for her. It was frightening but exhilarating. The time was coming for her to take risks, make decisions, and commit herself to one course of action. She might succeed or she might fail, and then other decisions would have to be made and fresh risks taken. She was taking back her life and her future, things she would never again give away to any man or woman. Right now, however, she was savoring the peace and calm of one-before-ready.

  She opened her notebook and studied the address she’d copied from the phone book. The magazine in her bookcase had merely given Jake Q. Jenson a passing mention, but she was planning a more ambitious project, one she hoped was worthy of Robert’s Ramblings. She would give the self-taught roof thatcher what would probably be his first in-depth interview about his craft. Don hadn’t mentioned pictures, but there had been photos accompanying some of the Robert’s articles. She would bring her camera and take a few, in case Don asked for one.

  The rain had stopped and her coffee had lost the rest of its warmth. One-before-ready had turned into ready. Leaving her half-empty cup on the table, Rachel went into the bedroom and put on a thick sweater. She sleeked her hair back, pinned it with a simple tortoiseshell barrette, and nodded in approval at her reflection in the mirror-nice and casual, but not sloppy. She extracted her camera from the bedside table, tucked her notebook and pen into her bag alongside the camera, and went to call a taxi.

  A small, brilliant ball of transparent white light followed her into the living room, and bobbled gently up and down just above the telephone. Annoyed, she batted it away. The ball scooted away and hovering just out of her reach, teasing her. Rachel had never seen ball lightning before, but she had no doubt that this was it-ball lightning was a rare occurrence anywhere else but in Yarwich. Here, wandering globes of ball lightning were as common as mosquitoes and just as irritating. Rachel picked up the telephone receiver, made a derisive gesture at the ball of light with her free hand, and it vanished without a sound.