by Scott, D. D.
“Or a wedding ring,” I added, suddenly feeling my own throat constrict.
“That’s right. Speaking of which, I think I know what might have gone wrong with Hank’s spell. I put the ring around the doll’s neck, and I can only assume that has something to do with why he ended up choking.”
That was not exactly the breakthrough I’d hoped for. Even I could figure out that’s why Hank damn near choked to death.
“You didn’t think something like that could happen?”
“To be honest, I thought he might get a sore throat or something.”
“Well, he certainly has a sore throat now.”
I’d said it in a rather snotty way, and probably shouldn’t have if I wanted to keep her on my good side. But sometimes, I couldn’t contain my New York City snark, especially when I was being pushed to the end of my patience.
Not that it mattered that I’d been rather catty, because it appeared she’d missed my zinger altogether. She had her head cocked to one side, listening intently to something. And whatever it was, it sure as hell wasn’t me. After a few moments, she nodded her head ever so slightly and then refocused her attention on me.
“I’m sorry, Sam. She doesn’t mean to interrupt. Now, what were you saying?”
“I said...” But now I couldn’t remember what I’d said. “It was nothing. So, who were you listening to instead of me?”
“Oh, it was just my rhododendron reminding me that it’s time for her monthly watering. The old gal’s gettin’ thirsty, and we can’t have her shrivelling all up and wasting away. I mean, I’d feel just terrible if anything ever happened to her. We go way back.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
“Your rhododendron?”
Here I am trying to get to the bottom of the fact that she damn near offed our exes, and she’d rather talk to her plant?!
“Yeah. Right over there,” Liza said, pointing to a bushy plant with purple flowers in the corner of the room. “Actually, I’m surprised you didn’t hear her too. After our talk at the lake house, I just assumed you also communicated on a horticultural level.”
Ah, yes. That. With all of the confusion of the past few days, I’d all but forgotten about Liza’s plant whispering.
We still hadn’t spoken about the talking bushes at the lake house, but now was not the time.
“I’ll tell you what...how ‘bout we get your Voodoo spell issues resolved first, then we’ll talk to, I mean about, your plants,” I offered, really worried that none of this mess seemed to be affecting Liza in the horrid way it was me.
And just wait till I tried to explain this to Nicky and all of our guests. That thought gave me a splitting headache along with my queasy stomach.
My cell phone rang, so I excused myself for a moment to check the screen, hoping like hell it wasn’t the hospital telling me that Hank had bit the big one. I’d promised myself I’d someday be the cause of that, and I’d be damned if I was gonna let Liza steal my moment. Just joking...sort of.
Speaking of the devil, and no, not Hank, this time. It was Nicky calling.
“What the hell is going on over there?!”
Nicky shouting in my ears was not helping matters at all.
Before my head spun out of control, I motioned to Liza that I’d be stepping outside a moment. I needed to get some fresh air as well as be out of her earshot so I could clue in Nicky. She seemed as relieved as I was to take a break from our conversation and left me to my call as she disappeared into the kitchen with our tea cups and saucers.
“We’ve got some big-time Voodoo doll hell. That’s what’s going on! And do you have to scream at me?” I asked, holding my head in my hands, while my teeth started to chatter.
“Sorry. But, you mean to tell me that’s all the further you’ve gotten? We already know we’ve got doll hell. I’m sitting here looking at their charred remains.”
“Put those things down,” I said, totally unsure whether or not he should be touching them.
“Whatever you say. There. Just tossed ‘em in the trash can.”
Shit. I hope that didn’t mean Darryl or Hank had just taken a nasty tumble too. Thinking about the possibilities that they’d each just sustained new contusions, I shook in my snow-covered rocking chair. Brrr. Also, I’d forgotten to put on my coat before coming out onto Liza’s porch. But maybe the ice cold chill is what I needed to make sense of all this.
“Those dolls were supposed to be Liza’s ex...and my ex.”
“Whoa! No way! She roped you into her crazy ass spell casting too? I thought you were smarter than that, Sam.”
I swore I heard the son of a bitch laughing. If my teeth weren’t chattering so bad, I’d have let him have it.
“Listen, asshole. Darryl and Hank are now both in hospitals. Darryl was damn near decapitated, and Hank just about choked to death.”
“Oh. That’s not good.”
“Oh. You’re right. It’s not good. And aren’t I lucky that that’s about the limit of your intelligence.”
“Ouch! Don’t bite my head off. It’s not my fault both of your exes about lost theirs,” he said.
And damn it if he didn’t start laughing again.
“I’ll tell ya who’s gonna be next, smart ass. Did I happen to mention that she has a doll in her collection that looks an awful lot like you?”
That shut him up.
“I kinda figured she would,” he said in his best awe shucks, golly gee tone.
“Listen to me. You’ve got to find out everything you can about reversing her spells, while I stay here and try to figure out if she has even the slightest clue how to fix things.”
“How the hell am I supposed to do that?”
“Just Google it for cripe’s sake. Use your head.”
“Right. Before she does...”
“Would you stop it with the head jokes? Damn it! This is serious stuff.”
“No worries, Allwitch. I’m on it.”
If he wasn’t careful, I’d be the one taking his Voodoo doll likeness out of the case and using it.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The thought occurred to me that I could make a nice living writing about Aunt Liza’s stupid-ass stunts. I wouldn’t have to use any creativity. You can’t make this shit up.
For instance, I’m now taking a huge stock pot I normally use to concoct my famous chili - because, no, I don’t own a cauldron, and I’m not about to ask Liza to borrow hers - and using it instead to whip up some kind of spiritual bath soak I just read about on Google.
According to what I’d read, if the “enemy” is in your family, and constantly uses spells to hurt you, you can’t simply cleanse and do a basic protection spell. You’ve got to attempt a reversing maneuver. And what that boils down to, pun intended, is now bubbling in my stock pot.
And damn, is this costing me a small fortune.
The Captain and I had to make a quick trip to Chicago to pick up all of the ingredients. We certainly don’t stock this stuff in our local tractor supply store, and I didn’t have time for Amazon to deliver what I needed tomorrow. That said, I’d gone ahead and ordered all of this crap in bulk from The Zon, next day delivery. So, from now on, I’d always have plenty of reversing supplies on hand.
Listen to me, I sound as if I believe I can fix Liza’s latest disaster. Truth is, I have no clue if my concoctions will work, but we have to try something.
Hopefully, with the combination of the spiritual bathing, house cleansing and floor washing potions I’m beginning to mix up, we’ll be able to not only reverse Liza’s spells here on the farm, but maybe help poor Darryl and Hank too.
Come to think of it though, I wonder if I can bottle these witchy brews and ship ‘em to the up shit creek exes. Once it’s been bottled, does this stuff even work? Guess I’ll have to research that too. Otherwise, the schmucks might remain hexed.
I checked the list I’d made of what all I need to do. Shit! Good thing I’d gone back. Before I continued with my stock pot reversing stew, I needed to li
ght all the crazy candles we’d bought.
I was now the proud owner of one hundred specially made, free-standing jumbo candles, in a variety of colors, that I’m to burn on a mirror. Doing so is supposed to send bad luck and trouble back to the person who sent it.
With each candle now lit, placed on its mirror, and sitting in every window in my farmhouse that looked out toward Aunt Liza’s farm and property, I was set on that front. Let the bad juju bounce back.
“We should probably go ahead and mail a box of these candles and mirrors to both Darryl and Hank,” Captain Allen said, after finishing lighting the last one.
“I suppose you’re right. But can you imagine the cost to send the package to Switzerland? Fuck me,” I said, shaking my head and returning to my reversing stew.
“So what all you got cooking in there?” the Captain asked, sitting down at the table, evidently not wanting to get any closer to my pot.
I checked my recipe so I could recite the ingredients in this first potion.
“Let’s see, in this one, we’ve got sea water, salt, minerals, herbs including Damiana, raspberry leaves, rue, eucalyptus, agrimony and cinnamon chips, roots and various tree barks. Oh, and some chamomile flowers too.”
“I’ll have to admit, I don’t know what half of that stuff is but it smells damn good,” Captain Allen said, evidently not afraid to inhale.
No way was I telling Liza or Sam what I was cooking up for their exes. Since they’d damn near killed ‘em, I doubt they’d be into making their lives full of all kinds of positive stuff. And from what the recipe said, not only would bathing in this special juice put an end to the adverse conditions Liza had created, it would bring all of us more love, attractiveness, money and fewer bad habits and evil companions.
Hey, it was the best thing I could find on short notice.
Since I’d been appointed the new anti-witchcraft chef for this family, they’d just have to live with the awesome sauces I cooked up.
“Do we use the same crap on the floors too?” the Captain asked.
“Oh no. Are you kidding? We couldn’t be that lucky,” I said and laughed.
I searched through the gazillion recipes I’d printed out, looking for the floor wash formula.
“Here it is. For the floors, we’re mixing up salt with added saltpeter, washing soda, ammonia, turpentine, lye, some kind of herb called Devil’s Shoestring and diluted urine.”
“Whose urine? Or do I even want to know?” Captain Allen asked, picking up his tea cup, looking at the contents, then putting down the cup without taking a drink.
Guess he decided he wasn’t thirsty.
“I know I don’t want to know. Thank goodness that came in a bottle too,” I said.
And it was a damn good thing I also had several bottles of Templeton Rye Whiskey to get the Captain and I through this crazy ass chaos.
“Good point. How ‘bout I go ahead and get started with placing the protective charms?”
“Good idea. And I suppose we should prepare boxes of those to send to Darryl and Hank too,” I said.
Holy schmoly! The UPS driver was going to get a real workout this week.
“Got it. I’ll start by making those reversing mirror-box spells,” the Captain said finding the printout with the how to’s for making the protective boxes.
“Hell’s bells! Don’t we need a couple of those damn Voodoo dolls for those things?” I asked.
I grabbed the printout. Sure enough. There was the picture of the box filled with junk to ward off Liza’s spells.
“Oh yeah. We do. And I ain’t goin’...”
“I’ll tell ya what, we’ll flip for it,” I said, taking out a quarter from my pants pocket.
“Fine. Heads,” Captain Allen said, looking just as anxious as I must have while the quarter spun toward the hardwood floor of the kitchen.
“Tails it is, my friend. Looks like you’ll be going to Liza’s to get the dolls.”
“Fuck me.”
“Pretty much,” I said, so relieved it was him headed to the coven and not me.
CHAPTER NINE
I was always glad to see my Captain, but never more so than right now, I thought, rushing to Liza’s back door to let him in.
“Oh, I’m so glad you’re here,” I said, throwing my arms around his neck and planting a kiss on his snow-dusted cheeks.
His face and neck turned to a color more in line with his red scarf than his tanned skin. Shucks, if I hadn’t embarrassed him.
“I’m glad to see you too,” he said, stomping off the snow from his boots on the large rug in Liza’s mudroom, “but I’m not too thrilled to be here.”
“Understood,” I said, and boy did I.
“This old gal is totally nuts. I don’t like you being around her,” he said, hugging me close to his chest as if he were a wee bit leery of letting me go.
“She’s nuts, I’ll give ya that. But I don’t think she really means any true harm. Well, not to anyone except Darryl,” I said, not doubting for a minute that she’d one day finish off that jackass.
“Yeah. Right. Speaking of Darryl, and Hank too,” the Captain said, clearing his throat and looking around to make sure Liza wasn’t within earshot, “I’m going to need a few of the dolls that look like Darryl and any others that look like Hank too.”
I lowered my head and gave him the look as in if you want my help, you’d best be tellin’ me more than that.
“Don’t give me that look. I’m just trying to get you out of this mess, and I need those damn dolls.”
Luckily, Liza had gone to take a nap in her room. She’d claimed that with an afternoon of rest, she’d be able to get a fresh new perspective on what she’d done and perhaps gain clarity on how to undo it. We could only hope her beauty rest led in that direction.
“Well, fine. But let’s make it quick before Liza wakes up and catches us. C’mon in here. She keeps the dolls in a special display case.”
“How quaint.”
I shook my head and snickered at The Captain’s snark. He was totally my kinda guy with my kinda ‘tude too.
“Give me three of those Darryl look-a-likes. And oh shit, there’s a few more Hanks too,” he said, carefully taking out the dolls.
“For the love of Buddha! I only had one wedding band, so I didn’t even look for more Hanks,” I said, shocked at the three more Hanks.
Liza had made rings out of gold braid and made nooses for the three extra dolls in Hank’s image.
“Now what are you going to do with these?” I asked, nervous as all hell to hear the answer.
“Well, something very nice, I assure you. To prevent more harm from coming to them, we’ve got to do what we’ve got to do,” the Captain answered.
Can’t get much more vague than that, I thought. But I trusted him more than anyone else.
“Hey, there’s one that looks like Nicky. Should I take that too?” He asked.
I thought for a moment...about all of the deadlines Nicky had missed, about him calling me Allwitch, about his propensity for escort services and more.
“No. Just leave that one,” I said, thinking karma was bound to catch up with Nicky Blane sooner or later.
Captain Allen raised his eyebrow but didn’t say a word about my decision.
“Now then...I need plain, basic dolls that we can make symbolic of Liza.”
“Oh no. You’re not going to hex her!”
“Relax. We’ve got to have three in her likeness too for my reversing boxes. Here, these will do,” he said, taking three of the six dolls laying next to Liza’s sewing machine.
These dolls hadn’t been dressed up yet to resemble any others we saw in her case.
“Okay. What else?” He muttered, rummaging through the items on the sewing table. “I also need something that either belongs to or will symbolize her to put on the dolls.”
Not finding anything to his satisfaction in her sewing supplies or in the quantity he needed, he looked around the living room next. It didn’t take
long for him to focus on all of the boxes of shotgun shells.
I opened my mouth wide and started to speak, but before I could get anything out, he gently closed my mouth with his large cold hands, then reached into one of the boxes and removed three shells.
“I’m making what’s called reverse mirror protection boxes.”
“What’s that?” I asked, giving up on trying to stop him, figuring whatever he was up to Liza probably deserved it.
“If you know who jinxed you, they can always do it again, right? So, you’ve got to bind-up your enemy in a mirror-box spell. These little beauties will bind up your enemy and make sure that everything evil they do bounces back to them, hurting them each time they try to hurt someone else.”
“It’s negative reinforcement, so to speak.”
“Good way to look at it, Ace. I’ve got to smash a few mirrors, glue the pieces to the insides of a box, arrange the doll in Liza’s likeness in the box, sprinkle it with red pepper and sulfur powder and chant the spell.”
“You have a spell?”
This couldn’t be good. We already had spells we were trying to undo. We didn’t need to cast more!
“I do now. But I can’t say it till I prepare the box and right before I bury it in the cemetery and pay the spirits a dime to hold down our little Liza.”
“They only charge a dime for that?”
“Evidently.”
Damn, if I wasn’t going to go get a roll of dimes for future use.
“Okay. I gotta run. I’ll call you when the box is ready, and if you’d like, we can bury it together.”
“Perfect. I want to hear this spell.”
“I thought you might enjoy that.”
He turned to leave, but stopped right as he was about to exit the living room and go back into the kitchen.
“What? What’s the matter?”
“What the hell is that?!”
I followed his gaze, and there, crammed into the corner of Liza’s sewing area was a small table holding two, tilted black candles, that had at one time, when lit, dripped wax on two photos, one of Darryl and one of Hank. She’d printed out a photo of Hank from a feature the New York Times had done on him.