Spellbook of the Lost and Found

by Moïra Fowley-Doyle

  “Oh, Rose,” Olive whispers, and she takes her best friend in her arms and starts to cry.

  And just like that, I can tell, we’re all decided. Olive, even though she doesn’t really believe. Rowan, even though he thinks it’s dangerous. Ivy, even though she didn’t seem sure. Rose. Me.

  I take my granda’s old penknife out of my pocket and fold out the blade. Rose takes it.

  “We need to bleed,” she whispers.

  “What?” Olive says sharply. Either she didn’t read the spell all the way through or she didn’t think we’d really do the whole blood bit.

  Ivy looks up at her and says, “You can’t have blood magic without a bit of blood.”

  “Yeah, but—” Olive starts to say, but before she can do anything Rose has slashed the knife through the meaty part of her palm and is making a fist so that the blood drips down. Ivy holds out the jar of moss and Rose shakes her fist. The moss drinks the blood quickly.

  I take the knife from Rose and cut my own hand to bleed on the moss. The slash stings. Ivy takes the knife after me. Then Rowan, even though he doesn’t look happy about it. When he holds out the knife to Olive, she shakes her head.

  “No offense,” she says, “but that doesn’t seem safe.”

  “Oh, no,” says Ivy. “Nothing about this is safe.”

  But Olive looks at Rose, who’s bunching the end of her dress up in her hand to stop the bleeding, and she squares her shoulders.

  “Fine,” says Olive. “Give it to me.” She flicks the blade across the palm of her own hand and adds her blood to the reddening moss.

  Looking at it makes me woozy, even though I haven’t lost that much blood. But the poteen’s strong and the knife is sharp and the shadows are made in the branches of trees.

  I remember why I’m doing this. For Rose, but also for me. So, while Rowan crushes the berries into the moss with his fingers, and Olive unscrews the lid of the oil and pours it over the bloody mess in the jar, and Rose snaps the hazel branch in two and presses the sticky, reddened moss into the center, and Ivy wraps the ivy vine around it, I write my own words on the wall.

  I write them small, so no one will notice, but Rowan comes over and sees. I don’t know what to say to him. I don’t know how to explain. On the hazel branch in front of me I’ve written her name. Amy Aisling Kennedy. Our mom.

  “Not Dad?” Rowan asks. I don’t say anything. I pick up the bottle of poteen and take a long, hard drink.

  “What about you?” I say to my brother. I hold out the red marker for him to take. He goes over to the rowan tree and he looks right at me and he writes the same thing on his branches. He doesn’t write Dad’s name on the tunnel wall either.

  Amy Aisling Kennedy.

  He wants her back, too. Maybe he just wants the her we used to pretend existed sometimes. The real mom. The proper mom. The mom more like Ivy’s, who kept her close, who taught her at home, who baked and built tree houses and picked fruit in the rain. Not the mom ours really was. The one who was never there. The one who was a mess. The one I’m turning into, bit by goddamn bit.

  Maybe this was a bad idea.

  But the words are written now, and Ivy’s scratching things in red marker on her own tree branches. My friends. This adventure. And Olive is comforting Rose by making dry jokes about lost things, and Rose is giving her a marker and she’s writing things on the gnarly olive branches like she believes in all this. My charm bracelet. My hair clip. My best friend. And Rose looks like she’s about to say something, so Olive writes some words just to make her smile. That drawing of a skunk Eoin Kavanagh gave Rose when we were eight years old. Several really great ideas for English essays. My first Barbie.

  Rose laughs despite herself. She says, “Your mom probably just gave it to a thrift store.” And she takes another sip of poteen from the lemonade bottle.

  “Still,” Olive says, “it’s lost and I want it found, so this spell had better work.”

  But by the way she looks at Rose when she says it I know she’s not joking around.

  This spell had better work.

  We get kinda frantic then, like this is our last chance, like we have to drum up the magic so we all believe, so it all comes true. We write more words along the branches of the trees. Things we’ve lost. Things we’re afraid of losing. Trinkets, treasures, memories, beliefs. One of our phones goes out and we misspell words in the darkness. Spellings. Spells. The words become spells.

  Homemade spirits slosh over the neck of the bottle, over our lips and our tongues. I drunkenly stumble against the side of the tunnel and graze my palm. The blood is red like the marker. Like our words on the walls. We’ve all lost blood tonight. Ivy unwinds the silver string that dangles from the hazel cross and makes spider’s webs from each of the painted branches. She loops the string around the rose thorns she has stuck into the center of each lost thing like a pin through paper, not a thorn on a concrete tunnel wall. I don’t know how they even stay up.

  Outside, another dog howls.

  If the lights go out, you will know the lost are listening.

  If you hear dogs barking, you will know the lost have heard your call.

  If you hear the howling, you will know the lost have answered.

  And, just like that, the storm is eerie. Blue metallic light on concrete walls covered in shadowy trees. The howl of the wind and the dogs. Silver threads like the webs of fat spiders. Rose petals—where did we get rose petals?—by the entrance to the tunnel. Our blood on a clump of moss. We’ve all stopped writing on the walls. We breathe deep. None of us say anything for a long time. The rain falls on the roof of the tunnel outside; the wind stirs the dead leaves and the potato chip bags. Our phones go dark and we don’t turn them on again.

  Then we hear a noise. The unmistakable sound of footsteps on the tunnel roof. Our eyes are wide in the darkness. The footsteps cross the roof above us and stop just at the edge where the entrance is. Our five heads swivel around together. We stare at the opening, but no one appears.

  Before I know what I’m doing, I grab the glass lemonade bottle by the neck and dive for the tunnel mouth in a half-crouched run. I hear Ivy shout out behind me.

  Outside, there’s the gray and the rain. My glasses blur with water, and I give them a swipe with my free hand. I look around slowly. There’s nothing. No one. I crouch back down in the entrance to the tunnel and shake my head.

  “There’s no one there.”

  Olive

  Saturday, May 13th

  Lost: Shoe (white canvas, muddy and torn); sight of someone through the trees

  Without deciding anything out loud, we walk quickly back to the house. We close the boarded-up door and drip in the dark hall.

  “Well, that was creepy,” I say, because I feel like someone has to.

  Rowan goes upstairs and comes back with a couple of threadbare towels that we pass around until they’re half soaked and we’re merely damp. Then Hazel gets me and Rose a pair of her pajamas, and we all sit around the rickety old camping table in the only habitable room of the house. Ivy gives us Band-Aids that we press over the cuts on our hands.

  Rowan pulls the heavy wooden boards back over the sliding doors so we can’t see out. The wood mutes the sound of the storm. Inside, the generator hums, charging our phones, making the fridge cold, lighting the three ugly desk lamps on the kitchen counters. The light flickers. Our eyes are wild. It’s like the storm’s in our bones.

  “Who is she?” I ask to break the silence. “Amy Aisling Kennedy.”

  I’m fairly sure I know the answer, but Rowan tells me anyway.

  “She’s our mom.”

  It’s at exactly that moment that we all hear a knock on the door.

  Hazel’s face pales.

  The knocking grows louder. Nobody has moved to answer.

  “Aren’t any of you going to get that?” I ask.

&
nbsp; Ivy fidgets with the sleeves of her top. “Bad luck to open the door in a storm,” she says. Her voice is slurred. I imagine that drinking straight spirits will affect you more if you weigh approximately the same as a small teapot. I, on the other hand, have a more robust constitution. I stand—swaying only ever so slightly—and open the kitchen door.

  In the hall, the knocking’s louder. I can almost make out a little “Wait” from behind me, but I open the front door and pull the boards away from in front of it anyway.

  At the beginning of The Princess and the Pea, a mysterious girl shows up at the prince’s palace one night during a storm. She is half drowned and soaked to the skin and says she is a princess, but her hair is tangled and her dress is worn and her coat is several sizes too big. If I were Cinderella, hopping on one silver shoe after the bonfire party, the girl on the doorstep is the princess and the pea.

  Behind me, the others step out of the doorway to the kitchen. The light from inside spills into the hall, and although it’s still murky I can see her.

  She’s as pale as the lightning—ashen and freckled—with thick, curly red hair twisted around her head by the storm. She’s wearing a man’s shirt over a red sundress. Her feet are bare and muddy. Her eyes are wild and wide.

  We stare at each other for several long seconds before my mouth can move. I’ve never seen her before, but I feel like I know her. Red hair, bare legs.

  I whisper, “Ash?”

  “You’re not Laurel,” she says—I think she says it; everything’s howling in my head and the doorway is spinning. Maybe my constitution’s not so robust after all. I flail an arm out to steady myself and she jolts away from me. Before I can say anything to reassure her, she turns and runs into the forest, scurrying over the rubble like a rat.

  “Hey, wait!” Hazel pushes me aside and runs into the rain, her feet as bare as Ash’s. Her pajamas are soaked in seconds.

  “What’s she doing?” Rowan asks from behind me. I don’t know if he means Hazel or Ash.

  Ash turns around to us once she’s over the wall, her face all in shadows, and thunder shakes the world. Then she takes off again and is swallowed by the forest.

  “Stop!” Hazel calls, scrambling over the rubble to the wall.

  “Hazel, come back!”

  But all we can see is the rain and the trees. Beside me, Rowan pulls on his soaking wet shoes. I grab mine from beside his and Rose and Ivy follow suit. Laces lolling, Rowan runs out into the storm. Rose and I follow, unsteady on our feet, the backs of my shoes bent down under my heels and the soles slapping in the puddles. We put our phones in flashlight mode, train the beams on the rubble beneath us. We scramble over the wall, palms slick on brick. A mush of leaves and mud underfoot.

  Lightning. More thunder. I’ve never seen a storm like this. I’ve never been out in such rain. Showers of it. Rivers. Lakes and seas of it.

  In the next flash of lightning, I see two girls running. In the next flash of dark, I can see faces between the trees. I skid to a stop and hold on to the trunk of a silver birch for balance. Farther ahead, Hazel shouts, “She’s gone down the slope to the deeper forest.”

  Behind me, Rose yells, “Where the fuck does she think she’s going?”

  Rowan calls, “We’ll break our necks going down the slope in this,” and he’s right.

  “She could be anywhere.” Ivy’s quiet voice is right behind my good ear.

  “Fuck.” I crane my neck to stare down the slope, but everything is darkness.

  Hazel reappears. “I lost her,” she says, then she realizes her wording and looks grim.

  “She knows where we are,” says Rose, and Hazel nods.

  Hazel leads us back to the house and we all trek muddy footprints through the dirty hall.

  Hazel

  Saturday, May 13th

  Lost: Some skin off the soles of my feet

  I don’t remember falling asleep.

  The rain’s bashing at my bedroom window. That’s probably what woke me up. The wind sounds like howling.

  I don’t remember going to bed. Last thing I can picture is Rose putting plasters on my feet. It takes me a minute to remember how I cut them. Running through the woods after Ash. I sit up and the world sloshes. The wind howls inside my skull.

  I reach out blindly to find my phone to give me some light, but I left it charging downstairs. I’ve no idea what time it is. I light a couple of candles and an answering light appears under the crack of my bedroom door.

  “Who is it?” My voice is a croak.

  The door creaks open and Rose steps in. I put my glasses on and watch her walk over, watch her fold her long legs underneath her and sit on the end of my mattress in one fluid movement. The shadows under her eyes are black in the candlelight.

  “Did I pass out downstairs?” she asks me. “I don’t remember coming up.”

  I shake my head. “I don’t remember either.”

  Rose’s hands twist together in her lap. “It’s what happened to Laurel and the others. Ash and Holly. In the diary, when they cast the spell. She said they were beside the oak tree and must’ve passed out, and when they woke up their diary pages were all around them.”

  I nod my head slowly. It’s heavy. “You think the same thing happened to us,” I say. “You think this means the spell has worked.” Because it’s not a question, she doesn’t answer.

  “Do you feel different?” she asks.

  “A bit, yeah.” My head’s swimming and my throat is tight, but that fire I’ve been feeling in my veins is cooler, calmer. I don’t feel so much like I’m going to explode. “Do you?”

  “Definitely different.”

  A howl again. This time it sounds farther away.

  “It’s not a dog, is it?” Rose asks. I can feel pinpricks down the back of my neck. “I heard it at the party,” she says. “Like tonight. The spellbook says you’ll know the magic’s worked if you hear the howling, but it doesn’t say what howls. It sounds like a human, doesn’t it?”

  It sounds like a ghost. Lost lives, lost souls. For a second, I wonder if maybe Rowan’s right and we should’ve stayed away from the spell, but then I look at Rose and I’m glad we didn’t.

  “Are you okay?” I ask her.

  Her face is tight but she nods.

  “At the party last Saturday,” she says, “when I—when it happened. I didn’t remember it the day after, but since then pieces have come back. I remember I was, like, half asleep. I couldn’t move. I wanted to get up and run away, but he was too heavy. I was too tired. I couldn’t make myself get up. All I could focus on was, like, this hedge behind me. Right behind my head. And I remember thinking that . . . that if I turned into a rose I wouldn’t be there.”

  She’s staring straight into my eyes and I can’t look away.

  “I wished it so hard. I wished I could become a rosebush so he couldn’t hold me. Because my thorns would stick in his skin.”

  “Rose—”

  “I didn’t come here because I believe in magic, because I thought the spell could really work. I figured if magic was real I’d’ve turned into that rosebush. I wished it so hard.” Her voice breaks. “Your mind’s another thing you can lose,” she says. “You know? He came up to me in class the other day. He threw some money at me and said some stuff to make his friends laugh. I got so mad I just stuffed the note in my mouth. Maybe I wanted to scare him. Maybe I’m just losing it.”

  “You’re not losing it, Rose,” I whisper, and I put my hand on the back of one of hers.

  “D’you think it’s going to work?”

  “The spell? You believe in it now.” That’s not a question either.

  “If it is, do you think your mom’ll come find you? That’s why you wrote her name, isn’t it?”

  Our hands, close together, sharing warmth. “I dunno,” I say slowly. “My mom, she’s . . . She’s dead.
I think she’s dead.”

  “What?”

  I take a shaky breath. “There was a fire. I think I saw a fire. When we left. When we ran away. Rowan went on ahead with our bags to get a bus ticket, and when I left I saw a spark. A flame. Smoke under the door. I thought it was just her cigarette, you know, so I didn’t think too much of it. But then we didn’t hear from her for weeks.”

  Rose’s voice is low. “So you think . . . there was a fire?”

  Flames behind my closed lids. “I don’t know. At first I thought, Hey, I was right, we ran away and she still hasn’t contacted us and it’s not like she doesn’t have our numbers. She’s just gone off with Dad again, like always. Rowan was the one who let himself believe it could be different. I kept telling him that she’s been like this all our lives—why change now?”

  “Because you’re all alone now,” Rose whispers. “Because you’ve got no one else.”

  My throat closes. It didn’t use to matter so much. We had Granny, we had Granda. It didn’t matter.

  “I’m sorry,” Rose says softly. “I’m so sorry.”

  Two tears come out of my eyes, and I’ve no idea how they even got there. “At first I thought: So what? So what if they’re dead? It’s not like it’s that big a loss anyway.”

  “Oh, Hazel.”

  “But then the crossword—I dunno—it said that we were gonna have guests. And I thought, Maybe, just maybe. What if it was her? And if she was here. And if she actually cared.”

  Rose’s fingers make little circles on my palm.

  “But then it wasn’t. You know?”

  “I know,” she whispers. “I know.”

  The room’s spinning like a fast carousel and I haven’t eaten since morning and I haven’t been sober a full day since we got here. Not twelve hours. Not ten. I’m just as messed up as my mother.

  I need to not think about this. I need to believe I’m different. That I’m not a monster.

  “Maybe she had her reasons,” Rose says.

  I’ve never told anybody all this before, and here’s this beautiful, messed-up girl in my messed-up life like she’s meant to be here.