Hill Magick

by Julia French

  He stretched out on the bed, his forehead furrowed in thought. He had entered into this marriage for life. He had believed that he and Rachel were joined in body, heart, and soul forever. He had been too trusting, too loving, too unwilling to believe that his own wife was capable of two-timing him. Or would that be three-timing? How she must be laughing at his naivety, she and her two lovers. Hot tears of humiliation spilled over the fleshy shells of his ears onto the cheap yellow bedspread.

  Failure, the seven-letter word that defined his life. He remembered his mother looking dully up at him through the rain of blows from his father’s fists. He hadn’t been able to stop that, nor the accusation of cheating that had snatched the college scholarship from his grasp because he hadn’t been able to prove the winning essay was his. Gone, too, the promotion that would have taken him and Rachel to live in Italy, because his boss had changed his mind and selected another man for the job.

  “You’re a control freak, Jeffries,” he’d said, and two years later those false and unjust words still rang in Mark’s ears. Now, in spite of his struggle to take control of the situation, the woman who mattered most to him in the world had betrayed him.

  Overhead, one of the spidery cracks in the plaster ceiling was moving. At first Mark thought of high blood pressure, but after he had made himself breathe steadily and deeply the crack still moved. Then he thought of cobwebs and reached for his phone to call the maid, but unlike the crusty brown rug, the ceiling was clean. Even so, the movement could have been his imagination except for the fact that the crack had wiggled and wormed into an S shape—S for “shush!”

  Obediently Mark put down the phone and the lower tip of the crack twitched in response, like a cat’s tail. Amazed and awed, he lay back on the bed and watched the pantomime unfold. The tail of the crack twitched again, wagged, then draped itself over the middle of the crack to the left of it. The two cracks twined around each other, touching and probing and exploring in pornographic intimacy. A third crack to the right of the other two didn’t know where to go or what to do with itself. It writhed in a way that almost made sense to Mark, but he wasn’t getting the message.

  More, he thought at the third crack, I need more. Responding to his plea, the crack convulsed, the ends touching and repelling like the poles of a magnet. Flopping like a landed trout, it rolled across the plaster and came to rest at the foot of the X-rated cracks, forming a jagged shape like a lightning bolt. Mark blinked several times to clear his vision, but the drama was over. The three cracks remained motionless, but something had blossomed and burst in his brain.

  What the cracks had showed him was this: he had been blinded by his love for Rachel. In his naivety he had showered her with gifts, waited upon her hand and foot, and treated her like a queen. Since he had done everything right he’d had no reason to suspect that anything was wrong, but Rachel had taken advantage of his trust to make a fool of him in front of the entire world-the symbol of the lightning bolt taught him that. Some women responded to kindness and others to firmness, but Rachel didn’t seem to respond to either one. If he wanted to save their marriage it was time to change his approach. Instead of lying here wallowing in self-pity, he should be wracking his brains to address the most important questions of all: What was wrong with Rachel? What could he do to fix her?

  Clearly, his boss had been wrong. His problem wasn’t being a control freak. His problem was that he wasn’t enough of one.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  A hazy blue vapor hovered over the floor of the cellar. In the uncertain light of the propane lantern True’s barrier warbled and shimmered like sun upon hot asphalt. Joshua snorted. If this elementary locking spell was the best the hillbilly could muster, their battle wasn’t going to be much of a contest.

  It was time to get to work. Joshua made a sign with the forefinger and thumb of his left hand, and the force field quivered and collapsed. He spat on his thumb and forefinger, took up the hawthorn twig, and flung it behind him into the shadows. Then he put his lips close to the ground and blew. The lines of the sage and ginger configuration True had created grew blurry, but the pattern of a cross within a circle remained intact. He took a deep breath and blew again more forcefully, this time scattering the powdered herbs entirely and destroying the pattern. The energy of the locking spell was safely dissipated.

  Joshua wasn’t a large man or a strong one, but luckily the coming winter hadn’t frozen the ground solid yet. At first he pressed the blade of the shovel straight down with the muscles of his forearms and managed to scrape off a little bit of the topmost layer of soil. After a few more clumsy tries with the shovel, it occurred to him to put one foot on the shoulder of the blade to utilize his body weight and force the blade more deeply into the ground. In this way it took him only fifteen minutes more to break up the hard-packed earth over a very special spot—the spot where a private letter hidden in the archives of the Yarwich Historical Society had spoken of the plague victims aboard the Sea Queen being secretly interred. It took him longer to scoop away the intervening four feet of earth, and as he worked, under his breath he cursed the town fathers of Yarwich who had been more superstitious than intelligent with their precautions. Had she been bent upon mischief, a mere earth burial underneath a church would never have slowed Sevilla Johnston down.

  He had anticipated there might be difficulty with the disinterment and had come prepared for that. He felt less prepared, however, for the possibility of contagion. Would the plague germs still be active after three hundred and forty years in the ground? When he had communicated this question to Iskus, his familiar had shrugged and continued lapping its scaly testicles. So much for the Wisdom of the Ages! And there was nobody else, at least no one living or human, to whom he could address his question without arousing unwanted attention. Ultimately he had decided to rinse his body in a decoction of golden seal as a preventative measure before coming to the burial ground. He had left Iskus at home, not out of concern for his familiar’s safety, but because he didn’t want the bother of constructing another creature before he was through with this one if through disease, accident, or attack this one should happen to die permanently.

  Joshua had been expecting to hit the wood, or perhaps the lead, of a Colonial-style coffin, and was surprised when his shovel scraped upon bone. He stooped and felt around with his bare hands in the cold soil and discovered that he had struck one half of a pelvis. He pried the pelvic bone free of the dirt and placed it at the edge of the hole, in the lantern light. He stopped again, and the next item his fingers touched was a ragged piece of cloth.

  Working his freezing fingers blindly back and forth across the bits of rotted winding shroud, he discovered a handful of loose glass beads which had been a woman’s necklace. These remains, then, were female. In the semidarkness he continued to grope among the fragments of cloth. A piece of lace disintegrated into bits of knotted string under his fumbling touch, and a spongy piece of material that he thought was leather turned out to be fungus.

  Farther down in the chilly earth he came across three loose molars, and the claustrophobic cellar rang with his hiss of triumph. Below the teeth, he worked the skull out of the earth and placed it reverently on the rim of the pit by the pelvic bone so Sevilla could oversee the fruits of his labor. It wasn’t long before he was able to add an ulna, three vertebrae, and seven rib bones festooned with scraps of mummified flesh to the growing pile at the edge of the pit.

  A tentative scrape with the shovel made the blade ring hollow, and that thing which had been interred underneath this first body emerged from its uneasy resting place.

  “Motherfucking cocksucker!” Joshua hurled the second skull away from him, and it thudded against the wall of the cellar. The private letter hadn’t mentioned other tenants in the basement. Mass graves were an ancient and common mode of burial during times of disaster and mortality, particularly in the days before embalming. Letter or no letter, it had be
en absolutely criminal of him to have forgotten that fact.

  He had no doubt that Sevilla Johnston was buried here, and it was a logical conclusion that she would have been tossed into a pit with the rest of the Sea Queen’s dead. Which cadaver was hers? If every set of remains had been wrapped in a shroud, which wasn’t likely, they would be grouped more or less together and he might be able to sort them out in a day. If not, he would have to dig up every piece he could find and puzzle out which grouping of bones was most likely to be his quarry, which would take considerably longer.

  Joshua’s knowledge of anatomy was better than average, but not expert. Child versus adult would be easy simply by virtue of size, but that was the only easy clue he had. Dividing male from female would be harder, but items like belt buckles and jewelry would help. It would be even more challenging to determine the ages, but there was nothing else for it but to try.

  Feeling faintly ill at the thought of more manual labor, Joshua raised the spade and thrust it savagely down. As the blade bit into the earth a sudden pain shot up his calf. A wasp! Fiercely he shook his leg to dislodge it, and the bony hand that had delivered him the bruising pinch rattled out of his pants leg onto the ground.

  “Son of a bitch!”

  He bent down to get a better look at the hand and spied the dull gleam of gold encircling one of the carpals. It was a signet ring, crusted with corruption, and it bore the raised letters SJ. There were five passengers aboard the Sea Queen with those initials. Four of them men.

  He raised his arm and made a Sign. “By the Secret Name of the Prince of the Dark Dominion, by the Shades of Hades, I command you to reveal the name by which you were known in your coven!” The hand waggled its index finger bone, mocking him, and he fought the urge to deliver it a smashing blow.

  “Metraton, Domzarius, Bekuli, I order and beseech you to reveal your coven name to me!”

  The finger bones scrabbled in the dirt and he shifted the light to shine on them. Hard at work, the finger bones had scratched a jagged line, two legs of a triangle joined by a short crosspiece, a straight line with a shorter line going to the right…

  “Malbeata!” he cried. “Sevilla Johnston!”

  Immediately the finger bones ceased their movement, and he felt an unspeakable surge of joy. This part of his quest was at an end.

  The plan had been to resurrect Sevilla’s ghost in his basement laboratory, not here. Since her spirit was already awakened he would have to persuade it to follow him home voluntarily, and to persuade her he would have to woo her with promises, like any lover.

  “Sevilla Johnston, once you were young and beautiful. Now you are nothing but bones. I can give you your body again as it was before you died, young and beautiful once more. Are you willing to come with me so that I may bestow this gift unto you?”

  He said it looking at his feet, expecting the hand to respond, but a harsh grating sounded in his ear. The skull he had set at the edge of the pit was gnashing its teeth, he presumed in assent.

  “In order to give you back your youth and beauty, I must take the remains of your earthly body with me to my home. Do you give your consent?” Not that her consent mattered, but it would make her more kindly disposed toward him and less likely to rebel.

  The teeth gnashed again.

  He continued reciting the words of the standard pact, asking the ritual questions. “Do you agree to abide by my sole guidance in the matter of your corporeal materialization? Once resurrected in your body, do you agree to take no independent decision upon yourself without my advice and counsel, always referring any doubts to me?”

  The teeth chattered once more and the jaws shut with a defiant snap. So the answer was yes.

  Joshua fell to work, unearthing whatever he could find until he had one complete skeleton. Climbing out of the pit, he unfolded the blue tarp he had brought for the purpose, spread it on the ground and gathered the stained bones into it carefully. He saved Sevilla’s the skull for last, placing it onto the top of the pile with care. For once, his uncharacteristic gentleness was no act—he didn’t want to drop a single shred of corpse.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  It felt as though she had never lived there. Her new life had already started and she was anxious to leave the past behind. She had only come back one last time to their house—to Mark’s house—to make sure she had taken everything that was hers. She’d taken none of the furniture or other joint property, not a dish or a towel or a handful of silverware, for anything from this house would have served as a reminder of bad times. The living room, dining room, kitchen, den, and bedroom looked exactly the same as yesterday. Nothing seemed out of place except herself.

  Rachel walked through the living room, paused a moment by the entrance to the den, then went into the kitchen. There wasn’t any food in her apartment. She would take one carton of eggs from the refrigerator to tide her over. That was all. Cradling the carton in the crook of her arm, she allowed herself a last look around.

  The blue and white curtains over the sink were ones Mark had chosen when they moved in. “Dutchy,” he called them because he couldn’t remember “Delft.” She had wanted the bathroom to be blue and white too, but Mark said he was blue enough in the mornings and didn’t need to stare at more blue while he shaved. After a playful mock-argument they had decided on leaf green, and Mark had driven into downtown Yarwich at eleven o’clock on a Sunday evening to find a shower curtain in exactly that color.

  She’d had a smoking hot three-cheese pizza delivered and waiting for him when he returned, but they had eaten very little of it. They hadn’t waited until they got to the bedroom, but coupled right there on the kitchen floor, because they were so much in love that a minute wasted was a minute gone forever, never to return.

  Was she sure she wanted to do this thing? Once she left there would be no turning back. And why was she thinking of roses? The rich, heavy scent was so strong she could have been holding a bouquet of them in her arms, deep wine-red blossoms sparkling with dew. A spreading warmth centered itself between her breasts, and she put a hand inside the collar of her blouse to touch the warm chain of the amulet. The amulet itself was radiating heat like the inside of an oven. Danger.

  “I missed you, sweetheart.”

  Without turning around, she knew.

  “I couldn’t wait any longer. I had to see you.”

  Two separate impulses fought inside her, to fight or to run. Neither of them won. She stood unmoving, listening to the honeyed voice coming from the doorway.

  “These are for you.” She heard the rustling of tissue paper and knew they were roses-wine-red roses, her favorites.

  “Did you miss me, Rachel?”

  Her mouth worked but nothing came out.

  “I paid good money for these not because you deserve it, but because I’m a good husband.” The rustling intensified. Mark had flung the flowers to the floor. “At least look at me, damn you!”

  Rachel’s body was paralyzed, but her mind was working at lightning speed. The keys to the Behemoth were in her pocket, but her purse was in the bedroom. She would have fled without it, but inside were her bank book, cell phone, and the brand new driver’s license revealing the address of her apartment. She had to get the purse.

  Another sound came from behind her. “You don’t have the guts to face me, which isn’t surprising. Did you think I wouldn’t find out what you were up to?”

  Which one of her secrets had he discovered? Had he found out she was working, or had he realized the decrepit white van parked in the alley was hers?

  “You must think I’m terminally stupid, Rachel. Didn’t you think I’d realize something was up? Four months of not getting any, and then I hear you’ve been putting out for not one other guy, but two!”

  He didn’t know about the van or the job. What was he talking about? ‘Putting out?’ Oh, no…

>   “Mark,” her voice sounded rusty and dry. “Mark, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m not seeing anyone else, I promise!”

  The impact sent her flying across the kitchen. Her head struck the edge of the cabinet above the sink, and the skin on her forehead split open.

  Through a curtain of blood Rachel saw—the Alien—coming at her again, eyes sparking with fury through the masklike expressionless features. She dropped the eggs and tried to dive past him, but he caught her wrist and jerked her backward so violently that she rebounded like a rubber band. The back of her head struck the cabinet, cutting another gash into her scalp. Something in her shoulder moved, and she found that she couldn’t lift her left arm.

  His hands clenched into weapons, Mark came at her again, not swinging wildly this time, but striking out with cold precision and timing. With one arm hanging limp at her side, she couldn’t fend off his blows. The next one glanced off her breastbone, but the following one hit its mark. It punched and bruised her squarely upon her rib cage, and for a wild moment she thought he had stopped her heart. Then she blinked past the blood in her eyes and saw the broom handle protruding from the gap between the stove and the refrigerator.

  Another blow was already coming, but there was no time to get out of the way, so she twisted sideways to make herself a smaller target. He swung but missed, and the momentum moved him past her enough for her to slide out from between his body and the counter, and run for the broom. Almost it slid out of her good hand, but she gripped it with all her strength, bracing the bristle end against the stove, and then Mark was charging at her again across the red-spattered linoleum. Like a Viking spear, the wooden tip of the broom handle rammed into his solar plexus, and the air went out of his lungs with a whoosh.

  Rachel dropped the broom and dashed into the bedroom. The near-useless push button on the doorknob wouldn’t keep Mark out for long, but it would gain her a few minutes of grace. She had to get out of the house, but how?