Spellbook of the Lost and Found

by Moïra Fowley-Doyle

  “Hang on,” Rose says. “The medal.” She looks at me excitedly. “It’s the talisman. A Saint Anthony medal. It’s the only thing we didn’t have yet for the spell.”

  “We have everything.” I breathe. “We can do it.”

  Rowan’s face darkens. Olive looks unsure. She takes the medal and flips it like a coin. It spins through the air, singing. “Heads or tails?”

  It stays in the air longer than is possible. “Heads, we cast the spell,” Rowan says slowly, nervously. “Tails, we forget about it. We just drink our beer and swim in the lake and don’t mess around with things we don’t understand. Things that could be dangerous.”

  The water’s clear and twinkling before us, reflecting the clouds that are starting to blow in overhead. We watch the medal spin. It’s weird that it just keeps doing that. Heads to tails, tails, heads. Finally, Rose reaches up and catches it, slaps it on the back of her hand.

  “Heads,” she says.

  Heads, we cast the spell. The medal glints on Rose’s hand, and all of a sudden the clouds are coming in fast and the wind’s picking up and the rain’s starting to fall.

  “No!” Rose says. “It was gorgeous a minute ago!”

  “It’s still gorgeous from where I’m standing,” I say under my breath. I know Rose’s heard me, ’cause she gives a little grin.

  By the time we’ve climbed over the rocks to the forest, the rain’s become a full-on storm.

  “We can’t stay outside in this weather,” Olive shouts.

  “We should go inside,” Rowan agrees. The rainstorm makes his voice sound small. “We can do this again another time.”

  “No way,” I say, and Rose takes my hand.

  “It’s okay,” Ivy says suddenly. “I know where we can go. And it’ll be out of the rain.”

  Laurel

  Saturday, May 13th

  Found: Tin medal (Saint Anthony); fingernails (rainbow-colored, acrylic); human hair; puddles of blood

  Something was building and it wasn’t the storm.

  The morning started cloudy. I went to Holly’s before school. We had a two-hour optional prep class on Saturday afternoon and although we were all behind on our study she didn’t ride down with me.

  “I’ll meet you there,” she said.

  I wanted to tell her what happened last night with Jude, to confess. Maybe I wanted to warn her about him. But I lost my nerve.

  She was sitting in the middle of her bed, surrounded by some of the things we’d found in the forest. Christmas lights, reading glasses, odd socks. Hairpins lined up like picket fences. And bottles of red nail polish, half-empty cans of hairspray, photographs of the three of us. There were no photographs of Jude.

  “He talks about Icarus,” she whispered through the ever-present scarf around her neck. “But he’s more like Orpheus. I think his voice could bring me back from the dead.”

  I wanted to shake her. “You’re not dead,” I said. “You’re just infatuated. He’s only a boy, for God’s sake.”

  “Oh, no.” She clutched her scarf tighter to her throat. “He’s so much more than that.”

  If I were the kind of girl who believed in vampires, I would have torn the scarf off her, but Holly has always been that pale and, no matter what either of them says, Jude is just a boy like any of the other boys in school, in town, in our families. He’s no different from the three of us.

  The very first time I asked Holly what she thought of him, before he’d kissed her, or Ash, or me, before he tore our friendship apart like the pages of a diary, she said, “I think I love him.”

  I wanted to be mean, wanted to say, You thought you loved John Calhoun last summer, you thought you loved Seamus from Salthill, you thought you loved your aunt’s new boyfriend. You’re always falling in love with somebody.

  I wanted to be cruelly truthful, wanted to say, I think I do, too. And so does Ash. We just don’t have the guts to tell you.

  I wanted to tell her what I’ve been thinking all along: And he knows it, our beautiful Jude—he knows very well how we feel about him. Can’t you tell? Don’t you see the way he looks at each of us in turn, how he eats up our affection and leaves only the seeds spat out onto the forest floor?

  Instead, I left her to her bed full of found things, and I rode to school.

  There was a storm coming. The radio in the staff room next door was staticky; the forecast crackled. West by south-west, twelve knots, falling slowly. The newspaper my sisters read that morning was less poetic: Highs of sixty-eight to seventy-three. Winds will reach gale force on all Irish coastal waters and on the Irish Sea. Halfway through the revision class the wind began to blow and Holly still hadn’t come.

  “She’ll show up,” Ash said, but I didn’t think so.

  “I’d say she’s running through the forest with Jude.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t come back either.”

  My clothes felt itchy, sticky around the collar of my shirt where my sweat had seeped. The wind outside the school sounded funny.

  “Did you hear that?” I whispered to Ash. Mr. Murphy kept talking up at the blackboard, writing out equations in staccato bursts of clicking chalk.

  “Hear what?”

  “Like a dog?” But I wasn’t sure.

  Lorraine Donnoghue behind us was eavesdropping. “Bet it’s just your little friend panting,” she said nastily. “What was it she wrote in that diary? After those kinds of dreams, I stroke with two fingers down between my legs and it’s all I can do not to bite the pillow. That’s just disgusting.”

  “Well, I can hardly hear anything over that cow crapping on behind us,” Ash said to me as loudly as she dared. Lorraine went to say something else, but every time she opened her mouth Ash mooed.

  I laughed, but I could have sworn I heard howling. And something else, like a child’s spinning top.

  Ash smacked her hand onto something on the desk in front of her and the noise stopped.

  “What’s that?”

  She lifted her palm to show me: a holy medal. My mom has dozens.

  “I found it on the side of the road this morning,” Ash said. She set it spinning again. “Must be something about being so close to the pilgrimage site in Knock. People losing Miraculous Medals left, right, and center.”

  “It’s not a Miraculous Medal,” I told her. “Those’ve got Marys on them. This one’s Saint Anthony.” There was a stain on the medal, crusted across the rose on the back. I flicked a bit of it off with my thumbnail. It was the exact rusty-brown color of dried blood.

  “Can I have it?” I asked Ash. I didn’t tell her I was sure this was the medal we used for the spell. I recognized the stain. There was no reason for it to be there; we’d left the spellbook in the hollow of the oak tree where we found it, in part so that if whoever wrote it came back for it they wouldn’t find it gone, and in part because none of us wanted to be the one to keep it.

  “If you want.”

  I attached it to the gold charm bracelet, right next to the little gold olive tree.

  Something was about to fall and it wasn’t the trees.

  I didn’t want to go near the forest after what had happened the night before with Jude—as if the trees would somehow spill our secrets, tell Holly I’d been with him—but Ash insisted, and I knew that’s where we’d find Holly. The clouds blew in quickly, threatening rain. The sound of the wind was so much like howling.

  Holly and Jude were in the oak tree, kissing. Long hair and wooden beads that, in the right light, almost looked like teeth; Holly’s clothes covered in leaves. They were like something in a children’s book and Ash and I stared up from our bicycles hungrily. A few tentative drops of rain came through the branches onto the ground and in several puddles small change glistened. I stood beside a sprinkling of acrylic fingernails painted in every color of the rainbow.

  Ash shivered in her littl
e red sundress and Jude threw down his shirt for her to wear. When they climbed down, I pulled myself up into the oak to find the spellbook. I wanted to make sure the Saint Anthony medal was still there, stuck into it with the prayer for lost objects. I wanted to make sure the one I had on my wrist wasn’t the one we used for the spell, stained with our blood, following us. But when I reached into the hollow of the oak tree the notebook wasn’t there. Just the last two beers we didn’t drink the other night.

  Holly paled. “Do you think someone took it?” she asked. She said it just to me, softly, while Ash opened one of the beers and told what Lorraine had said earlier.

  “What a cow,” Jude agreed. “Maybe there’s a spell somewhere to turn her into one.”

  “Who else would know to look for it there?” I whispered back.

  “I don’t know,” said Holly. “What if it just disappeared?”

  Jude, unconcerned, took a silver hip flask from his back pocket. He uncapped it and put it to his lips. I watched his Adam’s apple as he swallowed. He passed the flask around.

  “What is this?” I said before tasting it.

  “Whatever you want it to be,” he replied.

  The waters of Lethe, I thought, watching Ash and Holly drink it down. Something to make us forget any of this ever happened. I turned the Saint Anthony medal over and over in my fingers. When nobody was looking, I slipped it into one of the empty beer bottles. So none of us would try the spell again.

  I followed the others down to the lake under a drizzle that would soon become heavy rain. Ash stepped over a rock covered in clumps of hair. Holly splashed through a puddle of blood. Out of the corner of my eye I thought I could make out shapes between the trees. Faces looking at me. That howling I was hearing couldn’t have been the storm. One of the faces opened a wide red mouth and screamed. I ran to catch up with the others, but the faces were gathering closer. The howling was louder. The lost souls followed us down to the water.

  Jude raised his arms and howled along with them.

  Dogs in the woods, I reminded myself. Deer that sound like screaming children. Foxes calling. That’s all this is.

  Holly opened her mouth and joined in. Ash whooped and crowed like all the trees in the world were being felled around us.

  Bang went the thunder. Whimper went the rain. Burn, burn, burn went the lightning. The sky was a rush of water with the lake rising to meet it, and in its choppy waves I saw more bodies, more red, open mouths, hands like claws wanting to pull us under. My heart was the backbeat to the thunder.

  “Marry me,” Jude said to Holly. “On this rock, this altar, under the rain.” She stepped up there with him, me and Ash on the shore below, shivering and soaked to the skin, but feeling nothing. He kissed her, he hit her, he snapped her skinny neck. She went back to the forest and climbed the tree one final time, only to throw herself down with a rope around her throat. She swung between the branches.

  How do you know if you’ve lost your mind? I blinked and she was back there, standing smiling on a rock with the boy she loves. The image I’d just seen was like a flash of the future. I felt a sudden lick of fear.

  Ash climbed onto the rock, too, her hand around Holly’s ankles, then around her proffered wrist, and the three of them howled and laughed.

  “Can you imagine?” Ash said manically, long, tangled red hair in her face and fire in her eyes. “If I’d never taken your diaries, we never would have met Jude. None of this would ever have happened.”

  I could hardly speak past the sudden jump in my throat.

  “What?” I croaked.

  “We’d still be sitting in one another’s bedrooms, you and Holly reading your big books and keeping your little secrets, and me running to catch up.”

  “Ash,” I whispered, my voice choking on that betrayal. “You didn’t.”

  The wind whipped our hair and our clothes. The rain lashed our skin.

  “We’d still be worrying about exams and schoolwork, about the boys who don’t care about anything but jerking off and the next soccer match. We’d still be wishing we were like Trina McEown, but she won’t ever be anything more than a stupid cow stuck inside this nothing town. She’ll never leave and her children will hate her for it.”

  Thunder. Lightning. I didn’t understand. When I looked at Holly, her face was blank. Jude held her to his chest. She turned her face away from Ash. She turned her face away from me.

  “Holly,” Ash said. “Laurel. Come on.” She had to shout to be heard over the storm. “They’re nothing. They’re insignificant and ordinary. We’ve become magic.”

  I was afraid if I left I’d get lost in these woods. I was afraid I would never find my way back.

  “All because of the diaries,” Ash shouted louder. I shook my head because I couldn’t do anything else. “All because of me.”

  “How could you do that?” I asked her. “Did you give the diaries to Trina? How could you do that to Holly, to me?”

  Ash laughed so hard, she coughed. “How could I?” she shrieked. “Tell your precious Holly what you did with Jude in the woods. Tell her all about it.”

  Holly’s face was still turned away, but I thought she was crying. Jude’s arms strong and safe around her. Her hair darkened by the rain.

  “That’s different,” I whispered. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know what I was doing. I just lost my head.”

  Heads rolling in the water, tongues lolling, eyes staring blankly out at me. I could feel the bile rise in my throat. The wind pulled at our hair, our clothes, our frail limbs and fragile hearts.

  “Let’s go,” I pleaded. “Let’s just go. Let’s get out of this rain and back home.”

  But Ash said, “No.”

  Jude stepped down off the rock with Holly in his arms. He walked off through the forest with her head resting on his shoulder, and I turned to follow before I could lose them between the trees. I looked back at Ash.

  “You can’t hate me,” she said. “Just imagine where we’d be if we’d never met Jude. If we’d never called up the lost things.”

  I shrugged. Somewhere nearby another dog howled. Just a dog. “It’s only trash,” I told her. “Overturned bins that blew in on the storm. And Jude is just a boy.”

  “He loves me,” she said. “He tells me that when Holly’s not around.”

  “We loved you. We were your best friends.”

  Ash shook her head. I held out my hand—it was like touching the end of a waterfall—but Ash laughed me off. She turned around and ran away, up the slope and away from the lake, just a shadow moving between the trees.

  Hazel

  Saturday, May 13th

  Lost: Blood

  The second we step out of the forest the storm lashes our skin. Ivy says something, but none of us can hear her. Only the howling of the wind and the swish of the rain and the fat gray rolls of thunder in the distance.

  Ivy gestures and we follow her to the edge of the development. To the storm-drain tunnel.

  We slip down into the ditch; we lose our footing in the mud. We could be a bunch of hungry trolls waiting for a traveler. Inside, the tunnel is short and dark. It smells of wet cement and stagnant water, but it’s dry. We crouch on our heels and use our phones as flashlights.

  Rowan passes the lemonade bottle of poteen around, and I take a burning sip that makes me cough and splutter. Ivy’s eyes water. Rose utters a hoarse “Fuck.”

  Rowan wheezes and presses a fist to his chest. “That’ll curl your hair,” he says, and everybody laughs because his hair is all brown corkscrews, just like mine. With our hair, we might have drunk straight spirits since the age of twelve. Or else we’re turning out just like our mother.

  I push that thought away from my mind. I’m doing this to bring her back, even if she was a pretty shitty mom. I take a great gulp of the poteen and my throat’s aflame.

  Olive winces. “I do
n’t think I’ll be able to taste anything ever again.”

  Rowan laughs. It’s not just the taste that’s burning; the world’s already feeling kinda soft around the edges.

  Rose looks up from the spellbook she’s been bent over. “There’s just one problem with this tunnel,” she says. “No tree branches to write our words on.”

  But I know how to make a tree. I jump up and grab a marker and I start to draw.

  Big horse chestnuts, thin willows, silver birches. Wide hazels and tall rowans, prickled rosebushes and gnarled olive trunks and climbing ivy. They rise like a black forest on the pale gray tunnel walls. Silhouettes. Ghost trees on concrete. One time Granda told me that four hundred years ago Ireland was mostly forest. You could walk from coast to coast without leaving its shade. I wonder if the ghosts of lost trees stay on in towns and fields, in motorways and housing developments. Mags says this development used to be trees. Oak Road. They named it for the trees they felled to build it and now nobody lives here except rats.

  And us.

  When I’ve drawn a whole forest, I sit down and I’m breathless. My heart’s right up against my ribs.

  “What do we do next?” Rose whispers.

  “We write our losses on the branches,” I tell her. My eyes on her eyes. Dark and wide.

  I give her a red marker and she moves to the other side of the tunnel, to the big rosebush I drew. The rest of us sit in silence and watch her. Olive doesn’t say this is nonsense. Rowan doesn’t warn us it might be dangerous. We just sit all lit up from the inside with Mags’s poteen, and we watch Rose uncap the marker and turn her back to us and write her losses on the branches of the rosebush. Her shoulders move and I think she might be crying, but when she turns around again she looks furious.

  Behind her, scratched hard in red ink on the black branches of the gray concrete walls, are the words Rose wrote. My virginity. My memory. My mind. My confidence. My happiness. Myself.