Spellbook of the Lost and Found

by Moïra Fowley-Doyle

  That’s why I couldn’t stay with them. That’s why I left them with Mom and Dad. I knew you never understood, Laurel, but I have to keep him away from them. It’s my fault he came into our lives. If I hadn’t taken those diaries, we wouldn’t have needed the spellbook. If we hadn’t cast the spell, we wouldn’t have called up the lost things. The lost souls. The evil-hearted boy. I don’t regret the things I’ve done, but I regret the way I did them. Either way it’s too late to go back now, and the twins are better off with Mom and Dad.

  Do you remember that boy from school who went missing after the town bonfire party that year? I can’t remember his name, but I remember his face. Blond hair, pierced eyebrow. He was never found again. Do you think we did that? With our magic? There are so many things to be lost. One of those things is a life.

  Mom and Dad have put a payment on one of the houses for me and Jude. Can you imagine? Oak Road. Where our old oak tree used to be. Number 5. The one I knocked at. The one I saw well before it was built. Well before the forest was felled. Well before the oak tree was cut down. They stalled the building for almost twenty years—problems with planning permission, Mom says—and finally now they’re building again. They’ll be finished in a year.

  Sometimes I let myself believe that our children could play together on the grass in the front, that they could swim in the lake in summer, that they could run through the forest like wolves. I know that that can never happen, but I just want you both to know that I wish it.

  You were right, Laurel. He’s trouble.

  He’s trouble—but so am I.

  Love,

  Ash

  A scrap of paper with one sentence lightly scratched, slightly slanted. It says just this:

  How old is Mags Maguire and how long has she had that pub?

  Hazel

  Monday, May 15th

  Lost: Blood; nerve; belief

  Rowan holds out the last diary page and Rose and I read it, Ivy peering in over our shoulders.

  “My charm bracelet,” Olive says, and she sits down suddenly beside Rowan. “I lost it and I thought, when I read the bit in the diary when Laurel found it, that she’d just picked it up wherever I dropped it, but . . . It was my mom’s when she was my age. Her name is Laura.” Olive’s voice sounds kinda funny. “She was friends with your parents when they were at school,” she says to me.

  Rowan nods. “You know the picture—” he starts to say.

  “On the mantelpiece at home,” I finish. Mom with two of her school friends. Noelle, Ivy’s mom, and another that we didn’t know. Another who looks almost exactly like Olive. I don’t know how I missed it.

  Rose whistles through her teeth. “Your mom wrote this?” she says to Olive. She shakes her head in disbelief. “That’s . . . kind of mind-blowing.”

  “Kind of,” Olive says faintly. “I think I might be stunned. I think this is what being stunned feels like.”

  “But,” Rose says, “Ash came to the house the night before last. In the storm. She knocked on the door. We all saw her, right?”

  Olive lets out a breath. “A coincidence,” she says. “Some red-haired girl from town out in the storm. Or else it was Mags’s bloody poteen. Take your pick.”

  “Or a ghost,” I say softly at the exact same time as Rowan.

  Rose exhales. “You two are really spooky when you want to be.”

  I take the key out of my pocket and put it on the windowsill of the café. The handle is almost heart-shaped, the metal making twists and curls. Its teeth are sharp and shining. Rowan just looks at it.

  “It was in the spellbook,” I tell him. “The first time I found it. It was pressed between the pages like a butterfly’s wing.”

  Rowan stares down at the key.

  “It’s the same as your tattoo,” Rose says to me.

  “Where’s it from?” Olive asks. “What door does it open?”

  “More like what door does it shut,” Rowan says slowly.

  “After Rowan got burned, I went to get the key tattooed. I didn’t have it with me—the key to the bedroom door they locked him in—because we didn’t go back to the flat after the fire. There wasn’t anything left to go back for, and when Rowan got out of the hospital we went straight home to our grandparents’ house. But I remembered it well enough. So I drew it out from memory and went to get it tattooed. As a reminder. As a promise.”

  If they ever do anything like this again, I’m going to kill them. Set a fire and lock the door.

  “A promise of what?” Olive starts to ask, but the sound of her phone ringing cuts her off.

  “Is Emily back?” Rose asks Olive when she disconnects the call.

  Olive shakes her head, her mouth a thin line. “Mom’s been with Patty and Dave Murdock all morning,” she says. “Chloe’s missing, too.”

  “Murdock?” I ask. “Isn’t that the name of—”

  “Chloe is his sister,” Rose says, eyes tight. “She’s Emily’s best friend.”

  “They had a fight . . .” Olive mutters to herself. “Where are they?”

  “Well,” I say, “we know exactly how to get her back. I dunno why no one else is suggesting it, but we still have everything we need for the spell.”

  “Again?” says Rowan. “I really don’t think that’s a—”

  “The way I figure it,” I tell him, not even bothering to keep my voice down, “this is all our fault. Mine and yours and Ivy’s. We took Olive and Rose into that tunnel, we gave them the poteen, we cast the spell with them. We’ve got to help them fix it.”

  “That’s not—” says Rose.

  But Ivy takes the spellbook out of her bag and says, “Third time’s a charm?”

  Rowan frowns at her.

  Third time’s a charm? A memory pops into my brain. Shaky and blurred, from the bonfire party last Saturday. Ivy disappearing halfway through the night. A little red notebook sticking out of her bag.

  That doesn’t make sense. I shake my head. I try to focus on what’s happening right now. “Maybe . . .” I say. “Maybe we need a bigger sacrifice. Something found for someone lost?”

  “We never got to decide what we lost last time,” Rose argues.

  “We didn’t really believe we were going to lose anything,” Olive says.

  Ivy nods slowly. “So much of magic is about belief,” she says. “Maybe making an offering—a sacrifice we decide—maybe that will work.”

  “How do we know, though?” Rose insists.

  “Instinct?” Ivy suggests.

  “Either way,” I say, “isn’t it worth a try?”

  Rowan’s still chewing on his lip. “I think,” he says slowly, “that’s not the best idea. Maybe this hasn’t been the best idea all along. We don’t know who wrote those spells. We don’t understand them. Maybe we’re just messing with things that shouldn’t be messed with.”

  “All the more reason to make it right,” I say.

  Olive rolls her eyes and sighs. “I hate to say this, but I’m with Hazel. If there’s even a chance all this spell stuff is even remotely real, it is worth a try.”

  We go back to Oak Road. We grab the lemonade bottle with the last dregs of poteen from the house. Out in the development it’s a bright afternoon, but inside the tunnel it’s night. Our words are on the walls. The silver string. The branches and berries, the markers and penknife, the bloody moss. Nobody talks; nobody laughs. Everybody’s face is serious. We wet our lips with the last of the poteen and Olive takes the knife.

  She slices the side of her other hand, hard. Blood comes pouring out. It soaks the moss in seconds. Instead of putting it in her mouth to stop the flow, she reaches out to the tunnel wall and writes her sister’s name on it in blood. I shudder and my skin feels cold.

  “You said it was all about reciprocity,” she says to Ivy. “Give and take. Balance. Payment.”

  “
That’s right,” Ivy whispers. “That’s what it says in the spellbook.”

  Olive grabs one of our red markers and slashes lines through every single word she wrote. It didn’t say that in the spellbook, but she acts like her hands know exactly what they’re doing. She takes the silver string tied to the jar of bloody moss and makes a circle around her sister’s name. The Saint Anthony medal swings from the other end.

  “Okay,” Olive says, her breath short and her hair all a mess. “Okay.”

  Rose takes the knife from where Olive left it and, even though Olive protests, she adds her blood to the moss. She writes Emily’s name on the wall in marker. She bites her lip and runs a line through her words. My virginity. My memory. My mind. My confidence. My happiness. Myself.

  “Rose, no,” Olive whispers.

  In the distance, we hear a howl. It doesn’t sound like a dog. I don’t know why we ever thought it sounded like a dog.

  When we come out of the tunnel, Rose holds me back. The others fetch their bikes from behind the wall to go back into town. Rose and I watch them.

  “I don’t know if I did it,” Rose says softly. “With the spell. I don’t know if Emily’s with him. All I know is that I wanted him to go away. When we cast the spell, that’s what I was thinking. All that stuff Ivy said about intent. That’s what I was wishing. I wanted it all to go away so I wouldn’t have to think about it again. As if it’d never happened.”

  “Rose,” I say, “it’s not your fault Emily’s missing.”

  “I know that,” she says. “But if there’s a chance that this could help . . .” She shakes her head and we rejoin the others, moving slowly like we’re asleep. “And anyway,” she says, “maybe I didn’t lose my virginity that night. Maybe I lost it on Saturday, with you.”

  I take her hand. I don’t know what this all means, but I know I want to keep her, more than I’ve wanted anything else in a really long time.

  “I’m glad I met you, you know,” Rose says.

  “I’m glad I met you, too.”

  We get our bikes and set off again.

  “Maybe she’ll be there,” Olive turns her head and says. “Maybe we’ll come home and they’ll have found her. Like magic.”

  We melt into single file to let a car pass by, then spread out again when we hit the bigger road. We move fast in the direction of Olive’s house, like we’re racing to find out if the magic’s worked. We ride so quickly that when Olive’s bike flies over a pothole her bag gets thrown from the basket and lands by the wall alongside us.

  “Ah, shit,” Olive says loudly, and she veers suddenly to the side of the road. We all clutch our brakes and follow her. We pull up in front of a roadside shrine.

  Holy wells are a dime a dozen on Irish country roads, and this one’s nothing special. It has a statue of Mary, a plaque with a prayer, some browning flowers still in the plastic wrapper with a yellow price sticker.

  Suddenly Olive gives a mirthless kind of laugh. I understand why quickly: Inside the wrapper, among the roses, there’s an empty candy packet and a diary page.

  It’s close enough to Olive’s house for it to have blown out of her bin; after all, her mother did write it. Maybe that’s all this is: a woman leafing through her old diaries that were lost and found long ago, throwing them out with the junk mail and the carrot peels after she’s read them.

  Olive slips the page out of the bouquet and she reads as we walk on, pushing our bikes by our sides.

  It’s about the night after the storm. Ash—our mother—shows up at Laurel’s house, dripping wet, barefoot, just like she did at Oak Road. They talk about Jude—his power.

  He’s trouble, Laurel tells Ash. He’s lost a lot and so will you. Stay away from him, or you’ll lose everything.

  Laurel sees Ash lying on a couch with a lit cigarette. She sees the room go up in flames. It’s like she knows—knew, twenty-something years ago—what was going to happen. Visions of the future. Stay away from him, or you’ll lose everything. My mother didn’t stay away. And it looks like she did end up losing everything.

  Olive, already pale with worry, looks even weirder. “My mom,” she says. “She told me that. Those exact words. It was like she was in a trance or something, not seeing me at all. I thought I wasn’t hearing her right. I mean, my hearing aid acts up sometimes. I thought maybe I was losing it a little. I was worried she was talking about you.” Her eyes flick to Rowan. “But that wasn’t it at all. She was talking about Jude.”

  “He attacked them,” Rowan says, disgusted, but it was Ash who brought her friends to the woods. It was Ash who tied Jude to a tree and flicked open her silver lighter.

  As the smoke curled up into the body of the tree, he broke free. He tore the scarf from around his mouth. The flames licked the leaves, but he kicked them aside. He came toward us with his arms outstretched. He lunged at our throats.

  We three held hands and we turned and ran.

  It’s creepy, even with the birds singing and the cows mooing and the cars driving past on the sunlit road. It’s even creepier knowing what we know.

  “The book about trees we used to identify the leaves for the spell,” Ivy says softly. “It’s my mom’s. I thought that’s why she called me Ivy. She used to read it to me every night. That’s why I brought it with me. I know it almost by heart.”

  Ivy’s mom, small and blond, delicate like her daughter, obsessed with constellations and the names of trees. Holly.

  Ivy quotes, her eyes closed: “Ash, the mighty, is the tallest common tree in the forest. Its branches sprout seeds that look like keys. There is no better firewood than a felled ash tree. It is a close relation to the rowan, or mountain ash, whose name comes from the Norse raun, which means charm or spell. It’s said that drinking the distilled spirit of the blood-red berries of the rowan tree can make you see the future. The ash, however, boasts no such properties. Although it does have the power of resurrection: After it has been felled, it can resprout. It can grow again.”

  It can resprout; it can grow again; it can persuade two gullible girls that a boy they love is some kind of monster.

  “But what if he was?” Ivy whispers like she read the words right out of my head. “What if he was a monster?”

  “The only monster in that story is my mother,” I tell her. “And maybe it’s always like monster like daughter.”

  There is no better firewood than a felled ash tree.

  “Your mother wasn’t a monster,” Olive says scornfully. “She stole her friends’ diaries because she was insecure. She tied up a boy with some silver string and flicked open a lighter to scare him. It’s worrying, sure, it’s kind of fucked up, but it’s hardly monstrous.”

  “And you’re not a monster either,” says Rose. “It wasn’t your fault. None of this was your fault.”

  “You weren’t there,” I say. “It pretty much was. I murdered my parents. Now who’s the monster?”

  “Wait,” says Olive. “You what?”

  We are standing by the side of the road, holding our bikes up by the handlebars. Cars drive past. I look my brother in the eye and I tell them all of it. He doesn’t break my gaze. He hardly blinks. He doesn’t say a thing.

  Olive whistles slowly into the silence. “Okay,” she says. “Okay. That’s . . . that’s—I’m sorry—but that’s, well . . .”

  “How do you know,” Rose says then, carefully. “That they . . . died?”

  Ivy looks up at her. I don’t really know how to answer. I’ve been carrying this around for so long. “I told you,” I said. “I saw a spark. I saw . . . I saw the fire start. But I still left. I still locked the door.”

  “I mean, they could have got out,” says Olive in a voice that’s trying to sound calm. “There was probably another key . . .”

  Her face falls when I shake my head. My voice is this skinny old ghost. “I didn’t mean to kill them. Not reall
y. I told you I swore I’d kill them if it happened again. But I just . . . I was just so mad. I wanted to teach them a lesson. Scare them a bit maybe. I didn’t care if they got scars like Rowan’s. I thought they would have deserved it. I wasn’t thinking straight. I swear I didn’t mean for them to die.”

  Everybody’s very quiet. When I blink, I can see flames behind my eyelids. The flames of the fire that burned Rowan. The flames of the fire Ash set under Jude. The flames in the flat lit by my silver lighter. The past repeating itself, over and over.

  “But,” Olive says, still trying to make sense of this, “didn’t Mags say your granda’d heard from Ash—I mean Amy? Ghosts don’t make phone calls.”

  “He’s not . . . right, our granda. He doesn’t know who we are anymore.”

  Rose reaches out and holds my hand. After everything I’ve told her, she holds my hand.

  Then Rowan finally speaks. “You didn’t kill her, Hazel.” Something about the way he says it stops me short. He looks at Ivy, who nods at him to go on. “At least, not anymore.”

  “Anymore?”

  “You didn’t need to call her back with the spell the other night,” says Ivy. “She wasn’t a lost thing to be found. She’d been found already.”

  “What?”

  Ivy and Rowan look at each other.

  “She’d been found already,” Ivy says again. “Because we’d already cast the spell.”

  “What?” I ask again.

  “Oh God,” Rose says suddenly. “It was you. It wasn’t Laurel and Ash and Holly who cast the first spell at the party, because they did that, like, twenty-five years ago. But someone had to have cast it this time around.”

  “You wanted to know what I was doing with Ivy at the party,” Rowan says to me. “That’s what we were doing. We wanted to get her back. Find her again. But then Mags’s crossword kept saying things about loss and I—we were afraid it didn’t work. We thought we’d done something wrong. But it must have worked. Granda heard from her, Hazel. It must have worked.”