by Ava Day
“Fine. Go take a break.”
When I get down to the lobby, I see a pair of hands and a little wrinkled face pressed against the window. “Edna?”
I start out the door and the old woman turns on her heels. Calling out her name, I watch as she scurries down the street and back into her own business, which should be closed by now. She’s probably just afraid of competition, but maybe she knew Laverne and Beth better than she let on.
The lobby is painted perfectly. It doesn’t need another coat, I just need a distraction. I fiddle with my phone and decide to text Brent.
What are you doing?
Some research at the library
About what?
Witchcraft
Seriously?
Yeah, seriously. I just watched my girlfriend move a paintbrush with her mind today.
Girlfriend? I never said I was his girlfriend and he never asked. Do I even want to be his girlfriend? Butterflies swarm in my stomach, answering my question.
Sorry I lied to you, Brent. I just didn’t want you to think I was insane.
Want me to stop by later?
No. We're working on a special project tonight
Sounds fun
Not really. Scary is a better term
Hocus Pocus?
Yes
Please be careful
I will. See you tomorrow?
Definitely
It's a date then
Joy startles me as she leans across the concession counter.
“You supposed to be watching out for the end of the world.”
“It’s boring.” She puts two glasses of water down and she eyes me with a smirk as she takes a long sip.
“What are you smirking at?” I ask.
“You. You've got that dreamy look in your eye. Whenever you're around Brent or even thinking about him it's there,” she explains matter-o-factly as she mimics my expression. “Is he mad at you?”
Avoiding her question, I shoot her a glare. “No wine tonight?” I swiftly move the conversation to something less embarrassing than me falling in love with Brent.
“Of course not. We have an important project to finish or did you forget about that whole Underworld thing?”
“I didn't forget. I still can't believe you got me into this whole magic business,” I grumble.
“I didn't do anything. This fell in my lap as much as it did yours. Did you know we were buying a place that used to be owned by witches?” Joy cocks her head waiting for my response. “Because I sure didn't.”
“Ok, that wasn't your fault but casting that initial spell to unlock our magic was your idea. Finding the spell to summon a spirit was your idea. Do you see a pattern here?” I explain accusingly.
“You know you are enjoying this as much as I am,” Joy laughs.
“Sure, what's not to love about powdered faerie or giant spider eyes? Did you happen to make any food while you were bored upstairs?”
“There’s a leftover chicken parmesan sandwich in the fridge.”
“Will it turn me into a frog?” I joke.
“See! Your sense of humor is already coming back.”
We laugh together as we trod up the stairs into the apartment. Joy rushes over to the kitchen and uncovers the bowl. I step up behind her to look over her shoulder. The entire mixture is now just a small disk. It's dark green with small veins of silver running through it.
“Can we pick it up?” I ask.
“Let me check the directions,” Joy replies as she flips the pages of the book. “It says here we need to shatter it before moving onto the next part.”
“Shatter it?” I gently poke my finger into the center and it feels like a piece of pottery that's been fired in a kiln. With more confidence, I decide to pick it up and am surprised by how heavy it feels. The individual ingredients didn't weigh this much on their own.
“Here hold this,” I say, dropping it carefully into Joy's outstretched hand. She flips it over before smashing it down into the bowl. The disk shatters into a hundred tiny pieces. I watch in awe as the strangest thing happens. Solid fragments start to melt like pieces of chocolate on a hot day. “That was unexpected.”
“It said to smash it, so I did,” Joy says as she brings the bowl and spell book over to the kitchen table. “Let's finish this.”
“Ok, what's next on the list of terrifying ingredients?” I roll my eyes.
“Well this looks easy.” Joy pushes six vials towards me. “Just don't read the labels and put five drops from each bottle into the bowl.”
I make the mistake of reading the first label and stop myself as soon as I see the word vampire. “Stir?” I ask.
“Yes but only 7 times. No more and no less,” Joy replies. I pick up the small willow branch and carefully stir the mixture. With each swirl the color changes from orange, blue, yellow, red, and finally settling on a decidedly brown goop.
“This is getting tedious,” I remark.
“We're almost done. All we need to do now is cast the spell.”
“Oh, that's all huh?”
“Yes, so keep quiet while I read the incantation,” Joy shushes me as she begins to recite the spell. “Spirits unseen come forth from the darkness.” I watch as Joy picks up the small willow branch and waves it over the bowl. “The offer has been made. I command you come hither and show yourself.”
The mixture in the bowl starts to turn wildly as if some hidden force is propelling it. I make eye contact with Joy and she is as lost as I am.
“What do we do next?” I ask.
“No idea. The book doesn't say,” she replies.
“Let me see the spell.”
I take the book from her hands just as the liquid in the bowl begins to lift up and into the air. It grows in size, casting a dark eerie glow across the room. With a loud bang that causes us to cover our ears, the entire mass shrinks upon itself and disappears.
A wailing voice emanates from the amethyst around my neck, making me jump into the air. The drawers in the kitchen pop open and silverware begins to rattle. Pots and pans fly across the room as the light bulb above out heads explodes in a shower of sparks.
I look around for Laverne's ghost, but instead I am greeted by what I can only describe as a menacing spirit. A young woman with glowing red eyes races around the room, thrashing and screaming. Her hair is a mass of curls and sparks trailing behind her. The spirit doesn't notice us at first as she continues to manifest her rage by destroying our kitchen.
“Hey! I command you to stop!” Joy shouts.
That was a big mistake. The ghost locks eyes with Joy and flies in her direction. We dive under the kitchen table to no avail as the spirit smashes it to splinters.
“Where am I? Where is my body?” the voice booms through the amulet around my neck.
“We don't know! What's your name? Do you know Laverne?” I ask timidly.
“My name is...” the ghost stops for a second to think. “I don't know who I am!” She wails again and returns to destroying our apartment. I scramble over to the spell book just in time to snag it out of the air before it takes flight.
“What do we do now?” I say, frantically flipping through the pages for something that might help us.
“I have no idea!” Joy shouts.
“Maybe she'll wear herself out? Is that possible?”
“Who knows? We were supposed to get Laverne. How is she not here?” Joy wonders aloud.
“Gee I don't know Joy. You think there might be more to this magic stuff than we thought?” I reply, jumping for cover behind a chair as the angry spirit dive bombs me.
“Who am I? Where is my body?” she screams again.
Joy shrugs at me from the across the room. The situation is getting more out of hand by the second. A pane of glass shatters in one of the windows and the ghost zips out into the night. We rush over to the window and watch as she disappears high into the moonlit sky. I'm relieved that she is gone, but curious as to what we do now? This is so new to me. Will she eve
ntually just go back to wherever she came from or will she continue to rage until another witch puts her down?
“Penny, I think we made a big mistake when we decided to cast that spell,” Joy admits.
“I am going to strangle you with my bare hands. Why do I let you get me involved with crazy schemes?” I reply while surveying the damage that was done in the short amount of time that the spirit was loose in our apartment.
“We know one thing though?” Joy adds.
“What?” I ask.
“Well, that amulet works for hearing ghosts. Every word she said came out crystal clear from the amethyst pendant.”
“True, but what good does it do us if we can't talk to the one ghost that we need?”
“I don't know. Just trying to stay positive.” Joy stares out the broken window into the night as a shiver runs up her spine. “I hope she doesn’t hurt anybody.”
“Me too,” I reply as I step over and put my arm around Joy. “We'll figure it out somehow.”
I grab a broom and dust pan from the pantry to begin cleaning up all of the broken glass. Joy holds up the empty bowl inquisitively. The entire mixture disappeared without a trace. We spend the next hour putting everything back where it belongs. There are several utensils that are deeply embedded in the wall. The kitchen table is a lost cause. Together, we haul what’s left of it downstairs and into the alley. The kitchen looks bare without it. Before heading back up to the apartment, Joy and I take a minute to collect our thoughts in the lobby.
“What should our next move be?” she asks me.
“Maybe we should give up on finding Laverne. She'll either show up or she won't.”
“So that's it? We're going to stop trying to solver her murder?”
“For now. We have a business to get started, remember? We can't let this consume us while the rest of our life falls into the gutter.” I look at Joy and her silence tells me that she agrees. Both feeling defeated, we trudge upstairs to call it a night.
My dreams are haunted by the image of the ghost we released. She looked so young and lost. It makes me wonder how many tortured spirits are out there that we can't see. I finally wake myself up enough to stumble out of bed still bleary eyed from the night before. Joy is sitting in the kitchen sipping a cup of coffee that she puts down on the floor due to our lack of a table.
“Good morning!” she says cheerfully.
“Hey,” I mumble.
“I was just about to go wake you up. There’s some furniture in the basement and I thought we might find a replacement table in one of the storage rooms,” Joy explains.
“That's a good idea. Did you make any extra coffee?” I ask.
“Sure did!” she says, pointing to the pot of steaming goodness waiting for me on the counter.
“Has Brent stopped by yet?” I wonder.
“If he has, I haven't seen him.”
“Let me throw some real clothes on, then I'll help you explore the basement. I know it's your favorite thing to do.”
“You know me so well.”
With liquid energy warming my hand, I head back towards my room. I'm just happy that the destruction from last night was contained in the kitchen. Stifling a yawn, I rifle through my closet. When I emerge clothed in something that isn't pajamas, I find Joy showing Brent the silverware lodged into the kitchen wall.
“I'm just glad no one was hurt,” Brent says while turning to greet me. “Hey, Penny.” He gives me a timid smile.
“Hi,” I reply, stepping over to give him a hug. His embrace is tight and he holds me for a second longer than normal.
“What if this knife had gone through you instead of the wall?” he says, pulling a butcher’s blade free of the drywall.
“Things got out of hand. We’re new at this.”
Joy clears her throat awkwardly. If she’d just leave, we could have a proper fight. I try to tell her to get lost, but before I can get a word out or give her a wave of my hand, Brent shakes his head and storms out of the apartment. “I’ll be on the roof,” he calls out.
“He just doesn’t understand,” Joy says, trying to make me feel better.
“I don’t really understand it either. This was all your idea,” I say, pointing at Joy accusingly.
“Hey! You agreed. Don't throw me under the bus, Penny.” Joy replies defensively.
The last thing I need is to be in a fight with my kinda-sorta boyfriend and my bestfriend/business partner, so I take a deep breath and let it go. “Come on, let's go find a replacement table.”
Down in the bowels of the Beacon, Joy and I once again don dust masks to explore these storage rooms more thoroughly. There are cardboard boxes filled with old programs in the first one. We move some boxes out of the way and find a few old chairs, but nothing else that we can use. In the adjacent room, we discover the biggest rats nest ever. Shredded piles of paper and cloth from old costumes are scattered everywhere. If anything was in here that we could use, it was probably eaten by a rat long ago.
The third room we explore is a gold mine of old furniture. I assume it was used for set design when the Beacon was to be a playhouse. Joy pushes a stack of chairs out of the way so we can get to a table that looks like it might fit in our kitchen. There are a few options, but this old mahogany table speaks to me. We wrangle it out of the corner where it sits. I use my sleeve to wipe the mountain of dust that has collected on it since it was put in here. We're going to need to remove the legs of the table so it can be moved through doorways so I leave Joy in the basement while I run upstairs to borrow some tools from Brent’s truck.
As I'm walking through the lobby, I hear a phone ringing. Not a ringtone but an actual phone. It's been so long since I've heard one of those phones. Searching the lobby, I discover an old rotary handset under the concessions counter. Gingerly, I pick up the phone from its cradle.
“Uh, hello?” I say as more of a question than anything else.
“Penelope?” a familiar man’s voice asks from the other end.
“Yes, this is Penny. May I ask who is calling?”
“It's Harold Beaucatcher the third. I am calling in regards to your safety.”
“How did you get this number? I didn't even know we had a phone.”
“The how is not important. An evil is growing and you are at the heart of its epicenter. You need to be careful. Leaving town would be your safest course of action,” Harry continues.
“Evil? You're going to have to give me more information than that. We won't leave unless there is a real threat,” I explain.
“Just evil, darkness, or whatever you want to call it. The Beacon is positioned along several highly charged magical ley lines. It's why the sisters bought it so many years ago.”
“Okay… but you haven't explained the danger.”
“Time is short as it always is. I cannot reveal my methods, but I would hate to see two novice witches destroyed before they realize their full potential.”
“Would you really, now?” I shoot back. “Because for all I know, you just want us out of the way so you can…” I honestly don’t know what he would do. “How did you know Laverne and Beth? You never actually told us.”
“Whether you stay or go is up to you, but my conscience is now clear. Good day.” The line goes dead.
That was cryptic. Behind me, Joy peeks her head over my shoulder and sees what I'm holding.
“How did that old phone get there and who are you talking to?” she inquires.
“Harry, and I have no idea where this phone came from.”
“What did he say?”
“That evil was coming and that we needed to leave town to stay safe. Something about the theater being on some special ley lines. Whatever those are.”
“I read about those. Magical energy crisscrosses the planet and where it intersects it creates a powerful location where magic is more potent,” Joy says excitedly. “So, the Beacon is built on one of those crossings?”
“Several crossings if Harry is to be believed,”
I say.
“Wow! That's really cool. This place is probably valuable, magically speaking anyways. I'm surprised the Beacon has sat here for so long undisturbed.”
“Me too. It makes me wonder why?”
“Fate! No one else bought it because it was our destiny to be the new keepers of this place,” Joy speculates.
“I thought you didn't believe in fate? You're always talking about choosing your own path and grabbing life by the horns,” I reply.