by Les Goodrich
“Kind of.”
“Okay. Now just imagine the image of someone walking to the store. Down the sidewalk. No one in particular. Just sort of expect what they might look like in that same light. That reflected light. Now if anyone is coming you will see a flash. Like as if someone flashed a mirror over by the crystal cabinet and you saw the reflection for a second. That’s how you see it at first.”
“So if no one’s coming to our store, it’s blank?”
“Well it’s black and maybe some other reflections. But yes, basically.”
“But it won’t show people just walking along?”
“Um, no. It’s not like a security camera.”
“How does it work then?”
“It works on energy. People coming here will have a thought about the store. Maybe about what they need here. The spell captures and reflects that thought energy and connects our view of it to the mirror. It kind of works like a protection charm that uses a mirror to repel a hex or curse, but this does the opposite and captures the energy. Reflects it into the visual spectrum.”
“So what do you do, stare at it all day?”
“No, you just remember about it and if you catch that flash out of the corner of your eye then you look for who it is. Oh wait, look. Here comes someone now. It’s Carmine. See?”
“No.”
“Stand here hon. Look from the side. Not with your eyes so much. It’s like you’re seeing the idea of him coming at first. Then you can focus. See him. Cloak and cane. What a character.”
Tanner shifted and looked at the black glass and saw only black glass.
“Jack shit,” he said, and Carol moved to the register and motioned with her head for Tanner to stop focusing on the mirror just before the door opened.
Carmine stepped through the door wearing a charcoal grey suit, white dress shirt, burgundy and royal-blue paisley ascot, and a black quilted silk cloak over his shoulders. His shoes were black Prada wingtips with white paten leather spats covering the laces. Around his neck hung a sterling chain on the outside of his shirt with a silver pentacle at his chest. The pentacle had a round ruby at the top point. His right hand was hidden in his pants pocket through the hip pocket opening in his cloak on that side, and his left hand hung down at his side outside the cloak where his gloved-black hand clasped the red crystal ball finial of a cordovan-colored polished cherry wood walking stick.
“Good afternoon Madam,” Carmine said in a calm aristocratic Northern Italian accent.
“Greetings Carmine,” Carol said.
“Have you received the Italian Cypress wands?” Carmine asked.
“No not yet,” Carol admitted and added, “we should get them by the end of the day on Monday.”
“As long as we get them before the full moon,” Carmine said and he paused to look Carol in the eyes. She met his gaze and held it. She raised one eyebrow and Carmine lifted one as well but with a brief flash of a smile; he had a fondness for Carol although he knew she did not quite trust his every intention. The two had a brief staring contest and Carmine refused to look away first.
“Okay,” Carol said when she yielded and she spun toward the back counter with a wave of her hand, as if to dismiss something bothersome.
Carmine was descended from what he claimed to be an unbroken line of Italian streghe who had practiced their form of La Vecchia Religione, or the old religion, uninterrupted since before the burning times. He believed Stregheria to be the purest form of witchcraft and Janus and Aradia were his God and Goddess. He looked down upon other traditions as juvenile imitators. Carmine was a quintessential Ashenguild witch and, as such, believed himself and his craft to be superior to both Light Tribe (or basically good and balanced witches) and Shadowclan (basically devious and dark witches). An Ashenguild witch such as Carmine would use either light or dark magic to serve his needs and therefore believed his ways to be the ways of true balance.
Cause and effect were his most revered energies and he wore his witchcraft faith on his sleeve. He had little time for staring contests but nor would he back down from one. Although he claimed long and sacred connection to a distant kinship of witches, he was rarely seen in the company of others. Most other witches in town regarded his bark as much worse than his bite among themselves, yet they were all quick with courtesy when he was around. He was highly educated and informed about the craft and no one ever pressed him about much, such was his outward strength, attitude, and appearance. Carmine moved with a sort of threatening composure and a thin sense of humor that came across as somewhat condescending to many pagans and utterly contemptuous to cowans, or non-witches.
Carmine made his way through the various vignettes of the store and he stopped to read the back covers of a few books. He replaced each book in turn, spun to look over the remainder of the store, and moved to peer into the polished oak rune cabinet.
Tanner moved to the cabinet as well.
“Would you like to see anything from inside?” Tanner asked.
“Are you familiar with the runes?” Carmine asked.
“I study them, yes.”
“And what have you learned?” Carmine asked without looking up from the cabinet as he gazed inside through the wavy leaded glass panes and viewed the four sets of runes on one of the shelves.
“I have learned that you could study them for your lifetime and never come to the end of their—information.”
“Their potency,” Carmine said.
“Yes.”
“Anything else?” Carmine asked still staring into the cabinet.
“Yes,” Tanner said but he stubbornly stopped at that, until Carmine looked up at him. Tanner did this instinctively out of what he realized was respect for the runes themselves.
“And?” Carmine asked looking up to meet Tanner’s stare.
“The runes are never wrong,” Tanner said.
Carmine looked toward the front to see if Carol was listening or to defer his moment to her, the person he knew to be the highest rank among those who worked in the store. Such things he did respect, regardless of tradition. When he saw Carol busying herself with some paperwork or other retail store details he returned his eyes to Tanner.
“This is very wise,” Carmine said and Tanner nodded. “Keep studying. Knowledge is understanding the hidden, knowing what you can know, and knowing what you can never know fully. It is not seeing your own imagination in black mirrors. Don’t let these witches get you down.”
He winked at Tanner then breezed toward the front with a, “Ciao Bella!” to Carol on his way out the door all purposeful stride and flowing cloak and raised walking stick.
Tanner continued to dust and he never mentioned that Carmine had sensed the visitor spell to Carol.
Chapter 3
Darkspell
The following Monday afternoon was slow at Avalon Spellshop so Carol left the store in the hands of Brit and Jordan around three p.m. and she walked out from the west end of Artillery Lane and swung right onto Aviles. She made the jaunt up King Street to the pedestrian-only Saint George Street where she headed north. She paused at the wine shop and stood to the west of the street to allow a group of school children to pass herded by chaperones on either end. She smiled to the kids then looked toward the old wine shop. A tiny entrance courtyard framed by a waist-high wall preceded the tan stuccoed two story building that stood above it. Four small tables with two chairs each stood empty in the low-walled court and between them a brick walkway led to the wine shop door. The door was opened and the owner, Frank, appeared and said, “Good afternoon Carol. Care for a sample of the new Pinot Noir? I just opened it.”
Frank grinned and raised his own already empty glass and Carol smiled and she knew that Frank drank as much wine as he sold but he was always kind and wine only made him more so.
“Sure,” Carol said, hefted her bag, and walked into the wine shop behind the owner and the two disappeared into the dark.
Frank installed himself behind the curved bar that doubled as the r
egister counter. Carol hung her bag on a hook under the bar, sat on a barstool, and looked over the store. Every shelf and table was stacked with bottles of wine and cases of wine and even some wooden barrels of wine. A curved staircase led up to the loft above, where Frank lived, and the steps were filled with wine bottles on both sides and the bottles and cases left only a narrow winding path to ascend the worn wood stairs. The windows of the store would have looked out onto the tiny courtyard had they not been filled with wine bottles on open shelves built across those windows on the inside, and the sunlight filtered through the various bottles and tinted the room in shades of white, red, and merlot. White Christmas lights draped the shelves and woodwork of the interior here and there and the entire store was dark but faintly effervescent.
Frank pulled a dark red bottle with a cream label from below the bar and displayed it for Carol with a dramatic gesture. She leant and studied the bottle and said, “Very nice,” but she knew little of wine beyond the few types of red she had come to like. Pinot Noir was one.
Frank remarked on the vineyard and he explained, as he positioned the glasses on the bar top, that Dane, the twenty-two year old son of the vineyard owner, had discovered a section of Pinot grapes that had been allowed to grow wild for decades on a hard to reach section at the far edge of the California canyon below the family’s hillside winery.
Frank said that Dane had hiked alone to the location many times and had slowly pruned the ancient vines, some of which were as stout as telephone poles at the base. It took the young man two additional seasons to re-prune the vigorous suckers that shot forth from those old stumps. Those two years passed as the boy worked alone and he grew to love the canyon and the old vines. The deer in the morning fog. The hawks who watched him as silent as paper hawks from the highest pines and in whose lungs the blue sky breathed. In the third year the son convinced the father to allow him to build arbors for the vines and the following year came the first harvest.
Carol listened in earnest as Frank poured the glistening blood-red wine.
“Early and persistent rains that first arbored year caused the grapes to ripen too quickly and much of the crop split and there was scarcely enough fruit to bottle one case. But when the father and son tasted that first case they knew they had something special and the father admitted the son to be right and they both prayed for good wine weather the next year and they got it.”
Carol followed Frank’s lead and lifted her glass and smelled the aroma of the dark silky wine.
“That was five years ago and this is the first wine ever sold from those grapes the boy, Dane, discovered and there are only enough vines to produce twenty cases per harvest. I bought two cases and they just arrived this morning.”
Frank lifted his glass and he and Carol toasted.
“To Dane,” Carol said and Frank said, “To Dane,” and they drank.
As Frank sipped the wine he smiled because he had tasted it before and each sip tasted better than the last and he nodded and looked to Carol as she tasted it for her first time.
As she did she was struck by the smooth but sturdy flavor and as she swallowed that first sip she tasted the Sun and the wind in the canyon and she suddenly saw the view from the hawk’s eyes and the hawk opened its wide wings and fell forward from the pine branch and it dropped swiftly until the air current traversed the canyon floor then lifted with the rock faces and the bird of prey ascended and wheeled slightly then flew above the green floor and what he saw Carol saw. Her eyes closed. She watched the vines slip by far below where they hung draped over their trellises like thick damp green crocheted blankets and she saw the fog that held yet in the valley corners and she knew the fog had nourished the grape vines and along one end of the green stripped plot she saw a young man lift a bunch of maroon grapes and he turned to watch the hawk soar and Carol knew that to be Dane and he shaded his eyes from the Sun to follow the hawk and the bird twisted and rose to a staggering height and cast its eyes across a far verdant country where hills rolled under hissing tan grass and giant oaks stood tiny as puffs of moss in that bright distance.
“Amazing, huh,” Frank said and Carol was back in the wine shop and she said, “Amazing,” and she felt that deep connection with all things of the Earth that only a witch can feel in that way and she knew that all things were one and she smiled to think of the boy watching the hawk fly and she tasted the boy’s wine again and she tasted within it the love he had for the world. She finished the wine and thanked Frank and she walked out into the bright light of the Saint Augustine afternoon and she crossed over familiar cracks and along familiar walls and around always surprising corners as she moved smoothly toward her home.
Ancient oaks shaded Spanish Street and Carol walked under them to her house between Cuna and Orange. She turned west on the short, narrow, brick lane that led between the picket fences of other homes on each side and up to the front porch of her two-story house which was the only house at the end of that little road and was indeed the reason for any road there at all. The house stood tall and narrow at the back of the brick lane and the house itself was scarcely wider than the road and was in line with it so it looked as if the house had been backed in and parked there. Each of the two stories were fifteen feet high, so that the two-story house was three stories tall. White clapboard walls. White gingerbread fretwork around the white railed porches fronted the house top and bottom. White lace curtains behind leaded glass. Purple shutters on every window. A royal blue door.
Inside was warm and neat and the definition of cozy. An open-shelf, eat-in kitchen anchored the back of the first floor behind a comfy living room and its back door opened onto a brick paved patio, then a long narrow shade garden framed with tabby walls and hung with wind chimes and Spanish moss above a collection of rare plants.
Medicinal or magical herbs thrived in clay pots along the twisting garden path that snaked among them to a spot in the far back where two concrete benches edged a stone paved dais and faced a cobalt urn fountain overflowing into a river rock basin where the trickling water softly sung.
Beyond the fountain at the far back of the yard was a tall but narrow garden shed that looked like a miniature Victorian house in white clapboard, royal blue shutters, fancy trim, porch rails, paned windows, benches at the front door, and flowers along its sides. Inside the shed was one high story with a sleeping loft, many bookshelves, and a sitting area, where a sofa and a table shared space with shovels, rakes, and clay pots. Inside Carol had many magickal treasures, special books, and valued artifacts collected over her lifetime and the shed was protected by the most powerful spells and charms. The little house looked toward the back brick patio and between them in the garden exotic vines climbed the walls and tree trunks.
In the garden lived a polite, well-read faerie named Thistle who had been Carol’s friend for ages. Thistle had lived in the garden of the narrow house since it was owned by Carol’s grandparents. She kept an eye on the little garden shed, patrolled the house grounds, and watched the neighborhood for any suspicious activity. She loved to drink champagne and she slept unseen in the trees for most of the summer. In the colder months Thistle would dust in the garden house and read all day. Carol visited her often and they had long and thrilling conversations of days gone by.
The main house living room looked over the front porch and brown leather sofas faced one another with a fireplace between them on the far south wall. Upstairs Carol’s bedroom stood at the back, and her library at the front, separated by the stair landing.
The library had its own small fireplace also on the south wall and there was a desk and a wooden swivel chair but Carol hardly sat there. She favored the plush red velvet chaise lounge between the fireplace and the French doors where they opened to the porch that looked back up the lane toward Spanish Street. The oaks that shaded the lane and the street hung like curtains on the south end of the porch and every few years Carol would have the branches trimmed to keep the view and she also sat often on the library porch a
nd read amid a never-ending carpet of oak leaves on the white porch floor boards despite their having been swept away and swept again. In the library on one shelf was a collection of vinyl records and there was an automatic console record player of a type that was old when Carol was a young girl and it doubled as a tea bar and it could hold then play one side of six records in a row. When the weather was cool she would sit on her balcony and listen to jazz with the doors opened and read, or write, or drink tea and watch the squirrels. The neighborhood birds in the trees. The sounds of children playing a block away.
The temperature had dropped steadily on Carol’s walk home and the wine had made her sleepy so she made a cup of chamomile tea in the kitchen, then took it to the living room where she lit a fire in the fireplace and sipped the tea on the couch that faced the front of the house and she curled her legs under the blanket and called, “Jasmine, are you in here?”
The grey and black margay-dappled cat appeared from somewhere in the house and walked across the sofa back where she stopped. Carol petted her and said, “Hello Jazz,” and the cat meowed, then walked across Carol’s blanketed legs as if to curl up there but did not stop and just hopped down to the floor and disappeared again.
“Oh go on then. I know you’re busy,” Carol said and she sipped her tea. The fire swung then righted itself and the logs popped somewhere along their crazed seams as the flames sought deeper and the room warmed. Carol was asleep in minutes.
***
Brit walked to get them coffee. Jordan helped a few customers, one of them a guy she knew, and she was glad when he finally left. Jordan moved to the center of the store and returned four books from the reading table to the bookshelf. She straightened a few round shiny brass incense burners back into neat rows on a shelf. Then she headed, the narrow feather duster in hand, to dust her favorite part of the shop. Near the back and above an arched doorway hung a sign in the shape of a zigzagging, crooked, four door cabinet. The sign read, The Crooked Cupboard. The doorway led through a short arched hallway and into a secluded back room of the shop and within it were all manner of spell books, grimoires, ancient books of shadows, manila files of photocopied spells, bottled magical potions, incense, and various boxes and objects of power. Yew stave runes from Norway arranged in order on a shelf. Silk hand-dyed altar cloths. An eagle skull. Carved staffs. Black tallow candles. Hand-carved wooden pentacles. Serious witchcraft gear old and new. Electric candle sconces lit the room with amber candelabra bulbs. The Crooked Cupboard section of Avalon Spellshop had its own music apart from the music that filled the rest of the store and in this room there was always a dark ambient soundtrack. Jordan stepped into the room, the music, and the moody electric candle light. A red liquid lava lamp with black wax flowed in a languid, endless chronicling.