by Zoe Aarsen
The young female sales clerk behind the counter greeted us without a smile. She appeared to be the only staff member on duty. “Can I help you?” she asked. She had shoulder-length hair dyed bright red, and wore black cat-eye glasses with little rhinestones on them. Even though she was probably the same age as Henry, she seemed displeased to have a bunch of teenagers who didn’t appear to be typical Wiccans milling about her store.
“We were hoping to ask you some questions about curses,” Mischa announced, walking right up to the counter confidently as if she were a regular customer. “Like, say, for example, someone put a nasty spell on you, and you wanted to flip it around and put it back on them. How would someone go about putting a curse on another person that was strong enough to kill them?” Mischa asked, casually placing her elbows on the counter and resting her head on her hands.
The sales clerk rolled up the sleeves of her yellow cardigan to reveal colorful tattoos. She raised an eyebrow at Mischa and replied in a bored voice, “We only advise on spell casting for people who know what they’re doing. This is serious stuff, and we don’t just send amateurs home with powerful magic.”
I turned my back to my friends and stepped up to the display of rocks and crystals where the whispering woman had just been standing. On the drive down from Willow, I’d thought my scalp would start tingling as soon as we got close to the store. I had been expecting some kind of corporeal sensation that would confirm we’d find answers here, or that the voices would chime in to encourage me. But even though I felt comfortable in the store, I didn’t feel anything special or different at all now that we were here.
However, it felt as if there was something magnetic in one of the piles of rocks drawing me toward the table, so I reached for one of the rocks—a white one, selenite, as identified by a label on the dish. I held it between my fingers and took in its smooth, marbled surface, vaguely aware of the sales clerk asking Mischa to wait a moment while she rang up a customer’s purchase.
“What’s wrong?” Trey asked me, noticing that I’d stepped away from him and the others.
I shrugged. “Nothing’s wrong, it’s just… nothing’s right, either. I thought I’d feel something when we got here, you know? But this—”
“Hey. Step away from the crystals, please.” Trey and I both turned in surprise to find that the sales clerk was pointing at us even though her customer was still standing at the counter, fumbling with his wallet.
“I was just looking,” I said apologetically. Carefully, I set the piece of selenite in my hand back down on the pile of other white rocks. Almost instantly, I missed the sensation of holding it, as if simply by touching it I’d established a bond with it that now felt as if it was pulling my hand back toward it.
“Nope. No way.” The sales clerk, sounding inordinately cross about someone simply touching a rock, stepped out from around the counter and walked briskly toward us. Suddenly, I was terrified that Trey and I had unintentionally done something that was going to get us in even more trouble with the law. “You’re draining all of them! You guys are gonna have to leave.”
I looked to Mischa and Henry for assistance, and they both looked baffled. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand. I wasn’t trying to drain them. I wouldn’t even know how to drain them if I tried. I’ll buy the one I was touching if you want.” This was a bluff on my part, since I really didn’t want to spend a penny of what little money I had on a shiny, polished rock.
The sales clerk put her hands on her hips. “I don’t want you to buy anything, and I don’t want you to touch anything else. Didn’t you see the sign on the door when you came in? Arcanists not welcome.”
Trey laughed in surprised amusement. “We’re not arcanists!” He turned to me to explain with a wicked grin. “ ‘Arcanist’ is, like, a Dungeons and Dragons term, or an old-timey word for a magician who recklessly fools around with magic, causing chaos wherever he or she goes.”
I wondered what had given the sales clerk the impression that we had anything at all to do with magic. Her assumption was kind of flattering because I thought we just looked like a bunch of teenagers from the suburbs, sticking out on the stylish North Side of Chicago. Mischa wasn’t even wearing her fake septum ring.
Henry stepped forward, intending to play the role of peacemaker. He was, after all, supposed to be majoring in political science with a focus on conflict resolution at Northwestern instead of seeking answers to questions at occult bookstores with us. “I think there may be a misunderstanding here. We’d like to ask for your help with a problem we’re having, and you might be our only hope.”
The sales clerk narrowed her eyes at me as if trying to determine if I was a good witch or a bad witch. I bit my lower lip and tried to smile innocently at her, still not having any idea why she thought I was trying to manipulate the crystals. “It’s a matter of life and death,” I added, hoping that the urgency of our situation would hold some appeal. Without meaning to, I looked over at Mischa, who leaned against the counter with her arms crossed over her chest.
The sales clerk followed my gaze over to Mischa and then frowned at me. She bit her lower lip, which was coated in maroon matte lipstick, and studied me for a long moment as if I were an optical illusion and she was trying to see more than one shape in my design. “Stay here and don’t touch anything. I mean it.”
We all dutifully remained where we were, and Mischa joined us as the sales clerk finished processing her customer’s transaction. She then leaned forward over the counter and in a raised voice announced, “We’re closing in five minutes, everyone. Closing early because of the snow.”
After checking out the last two customers who wished to make purchases and shooing them out the door, the sales clerk flipped the OPEN sign hanging in the door to CLOSED and twisted the dead-bolt lock. She didn’t look the least bit pleased that we were still standing there when she turned to face us. “Tell me why you’re here and don’t lie. I’ll know if you’re lying.”
“Do you know the game Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board?” I asked, cutting to the chase. “Where a storyteller predicts your death, and everyone chants—”
“And a demon lifts the body of whoever’s death was just predicted? Yeah, I am familiar with that game. It’s really old, dating back to the plague epidemic in seventeenth-century Europe, and probably all the way back to the original plague infestation that killed almost half the population on the continent. Were you stupid enough to play that game?” the sales clerk asked me in a condescending tone.
A demon. I hadn’t thought about demons as a possibility for what we were dealing with.
“Yeah,” Mischa snapped back at her. “We were.”
The sales clerk cast an accusatory glance at Henry, who smiled crookedly to exonerate himself.
“Not him,” Mischa clarified.
“Not the boys,” I added. “A bunch of girls, including myself and my friend here. In the last four months, two of our friends have actually died exactly as someone predicted they would in that game. So we’re hoping you might be able to tell us how the girl who told the stories when we played the game was able to make our friends die just like she said they would, and how to stop it from happening again.”
The sales clerk look at me dubiously. “You played the game, and people actually died?”
“The first one to die was my sister,” Henry said. His admission surprised the sales clerk, and her eyes revealed a new appreciation for us.
“Geez,” she said finally. “That really sucks.” She turned back to Mischa. “You said two of your friends died after playing the game.”
“Yeah, our friend Candace drowned in Hawaii about a month after Olivia, and the way she died also matched her prediction, like, exactly,” Mischa said.
“We thought we’d ended the game because the girl who was the storyteller always wore this locket, and we had this theory that somehow the locket connected her to her dead grandmother as, like, a channel for communication between the real world and the spi
rit world. We thought maybe the dead grandmother was the spirit who had given this girl, Violet, the ideas for the death stories that she told during the game,” I continued. “But now we’re pretty sure we were wrong. Violet’s still trying to get people at school to play similar games.”
The sales clerk sighed. “I’m not the best person to help you. My boss is in London for the holiday, and she’s the real expert around here.”
This made me a little disappointed; we needed an expert, not an apprentice. But we didn’t have time to be choosy. “Anything you could tell us would help,” I begged.
She continued, “Look. At least eighty percent of the people who come in here are just poseurs buying stuff to take home to try to get someone in their office to fall in love with them. It’s sad, really. But you guys have a legit paranormal problem on your hands. I’ll do what I can to help you. Let’s go in the back.”
She led us toward the rear of the store, which was lined with shelves of herbs. There were chairs arranged around one of the tables displaying books, and she sat down in one before motioning at us to also take seats.
“I’m Kirsten, by the way,” she said, introducing herself. We provided her with our names.
“Henry,” she repeated after Henry introduced himself. I was kind of getting the sense that Kirsten was flirting with him. I had also noticed that she kept looking at Mischa, or rather, around her, as if Mischa had a spare head growing out of her shoulders.
Kirsten took a deep breath before speaking. “So, you probably already know this, but the original way that kids used to play Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board was not so different from today. There’s historical evidence of the game being played all across Europe in a variety of languages. One kid would lie on the floor, everyone else would place a finger under the body, the story about how that kid would die was told, and everyone would chant.”
Mischa interjected, “Yeah, except when we played the game, the person telling the death stories actually saw fire when it was McKenna’s turn, which is freaky because—”
I tried to silence her with a frown, but she rolled her eyes at me. Ever coming to my defense, Trey was the one who said sharply, “Don’t.”
“Come on!” Mischa insisted. “If she’s going to help us, she needs to know everything!” I felt my cheeks get hot and looked at my feet, not really wanting to be present while Henry heard the full nerdish details of what we’d done in his family’s basement the night of Olivia’s birthday party. “It’s freaky because McKenna’s sister died in a house fire when we were in second grade. It was like Violet saw Jennie’s death when she was trying to predict McKenna’s. That should have been our first clue that something about Violet was majorly effed up. She’d just moved to our town, and there was no way she could have known that McKenna’s house had burned down.”
Kirsten’s eyes brightened and fixed on me. “Wait a second. Your sister who died—was she a twin?” I nodded. “Identical?” she asked. I nodded again.
“They were super close,” Trey added. “They were the kind of twins who made up secret languages and stuff.”
She clapped her hands together in glee. “This is amazing. Stay here for a second.” She got up from the table and returned to the counter. With a key she wore on a chain around her neck, she unlocked the glass display case of jewelry and withdrew something from it. From underneath the counter, she dug into her handbag and removed what looked like a cigarette lighter. With a small adjustment on the light dimmer, she lowered the lights in the store to create a cozier atmosphere. She then took a small bunch of sage off of the herb shelf at the very back of the store. Returning to the table, she looked directly at me. “Do me a favor and just hold this in your hand.”
Into my palm she dropped a cold brass necklace with an oblong rose-colored stone pendant on it. It was heavier than it looked like it would be. “What should I do with it?” I asked.
“Just hold it. Don’t worry, it’s only a pendulum. Wiccans often use pendulums to pose questions to the spirit world, or the earth goddess, or whatever you believe in. I just want it to pick up some of your energy,” Kirsten said as she lit one end of the sage smudge stick on fire and shook it to calm the flame. All of this was making me uncomfortable, as if she was about to ask me if I ever heard voices, as if she knew that I had shown up at Sticks & Stones on a different mission from the others.
I held the chain between two fingers and let the pendant dangle. Smoke curled up from the sage, filling the store with a powerful odor that smelled like fancy pizza with a lot of basil on it. Henry pointed upward at a smoke detector on the ceiling, and asked, “Is that going to be a problem?”
“Oh, that? No, we don’t keep batteries in it… for this reason,” Kirsten said. She stood up and moved the sage in a circular motion in my general direction while quickly whispering unintelligible words under her breath. I was officially starting to get very creeped out.
“If you don’t mind my asking, what are you doing?” Mischa asked on my behalf.
Kirsten finished the prayer before replying to her. “Whenever I use a pendulum or perform even the most minor Wiccan task, I just like to cleanse the room and put up a little spiritual safety screen. Nothing too crazy, but, you know. Safety first.” Funny she should mention safety, I thought, since she’d just admitted that the store’s smoke detector was a decoy.
“When should I stop?” I asked, feeling self-conscious about sitting there holding the pendulum.
“Just let it hang,” Kirsten instructed me. “Sometimes—not always, but sometimes—there’s a psychic bond between twins that transcends the line between the material and spiritual worlds.”
Trey, next to me on the left, rested his hand on my knee and gave it a little squeeze, knowing that I didn’t like discussing Jennie with other people.
“She wouldn’t want me to say this, but the ghost of our friend has been haunting her bedroom,” Mischa told Kirsten. I narrowed my eyes at Mischa and shook my head. I didn’t mind so much that she’d told Kirsten, but really wished she had given some thought to the fact that Henry was sitting right there beside her. I didn’t know if she’d told Henry about the bedroom hauntings before they picked me up that afternoon, but if my dead sister were haunting one of my friends and they didn’t tell me about it, I would probably be pretty angry about that. “They weren’t even really that close before Olivia died, but for whatever reason—”
Henry sat up straighter in his chair. “Wait a minute. Olivia’s been haunting your bedroom?” he asked, confirming that Mischa must have left that part of the story out earlier that afternoon. He sounded hurt, which was understandable. I even felt a little guilty for not having told him about it in the fall, but it would have been extremely weird to have reached out to him with that news under the circumstances of everything that had happened.
“I thought you said you told Henry everything before you picked me up!” I snapped at Mischa.
Henry blinked twice without moving any other muscles in his body before saying, “My dead sister has been haunting your house?”
Kirsten’s eyes danced as if she kind of wished she’d made popcorn for this. “What sorts of things does this Olivia do when she visits you?”
The pendulum in my hand was starting to swing ever so slightly, but I attributed that to the fact that I was moving around a little, anxious about with the direction this adventure had taken. I’d thought we were coming here for answers about Violet, and now I felt as if I was the one being investigated. “Little things, really,” I insisted so as to try to downplay the haunting for Henry’s benefit. “Like knocking stuff off shelves, turning my music boxes on at night.” I didn’t want Henry to get the idea that Olivia was roaming around the afterlife in agony, even though my impression was that until I’d left for Sheridan, she’d been plenty pissed off about what Violet had done to her.
“Then how do you know it’s Olivia?” Henry asked. “And not just a draft?”
“Oh, she does bigger things, too,�
�� Trey said, sounding for a second kind of like he was bragging. “She writes messages on mirrors with lipstick, tries to flip the bed over.”
Again trying to downplay Olivia’s hostility, I said, “I think mostly she was trying to give me clues about what was going to happen to Candace. Only, it took me too long to figure it out, and I couldn’t save her.”
Henry looked as if I’d stabbed him right in the gut. “Why your house and not mine? If her spirit isn’t at peace, then why didn’t she come home?”
I looked to Trey for help, and he shrugged, encouraging me to just tell Henry everything. “She probably wouldn’t want you involved in this,” I speculated. “That’s why I didn’t tell you about it sooner. I mean, it sounds crazy, right? And I don’t think Olivia would want you getting anywhere near Violet.”
“I have a different theory,” Kirsten announced. She sat down on her chair again and smiled at me, clasping her hands excitedly. “But first you have to establish rules with the pendulum. Ask it to show you what yes looks like.”
I looked dubiously at all of my friends, suddenly afraid of what might happen once I started interacting with the object in my hand. “It’s all right,” Kirsten assured me. “This is a safe store. If we get weird vibes from anyone coming in here, we don’t sell to them. My boss is a good witch. We spiritually cleanse this space every day before we open and every night when we close. You’re much safer here right now than you were when you played Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board. Trust me.”
I took a deep breath, reaching out to Jennie in my thoughts for protection just in case I was about to get myself into even more seriously deep trouble with the spirit world. “What does yes look like?” I asked aloud, feeling like a total weirdo.