by Luc Reid
“Yes, he will,” Chloe said. “Can I see the book?”
Another jab of pain hit Seth. He stumbled to the bed and fell down on it. “Help me,” he whispered.
“What?”
“Help me.”
“Can I see the book or not?”
“I’ll give you—” he gasped, looking around the room. “Is there anything you like in here? Anything you want?”
Chloe looked surprised at the question, but she glanced around. He saw her eyes linger on the bridges.
“I’ll give you the Golden Gate Bridge,” Seth said. “It’s the best one I’ve made.”
“I like the Brooklyn Bridge better.”
“The Brooklyn Bridge? No, no, that one’s screwed up—” if he didn’t make a good trade, she might not help him.
She walked to it, gazing at it to the exclusion of the other, much more accomplished bridges next to it. Each bridge had a little tag attached; this one said Brooklyn Bridge, 1883. “I want this one.”
“OK. Here’s the—aah!—here’s the deal. You work with me in looking through this book and try to get my stomach to feel better and you can have th—ouch— you can have the Brooklyn Bridge.”
“Really?” she said, turning to him, eyes bright. The look on her face was so unguarded, so pleased, that for a minute he couldn’t respond. She really was pretty, if you liked that kind of girl. Which apparently he did.
“It’s yours,” Seth said. “Now please help me.”
The pain came again, and he groaned, dropping the book. Chloe ran over and kneeled next to the bed. “What’s wrong? Are you sick? What’s the matter?”
“I don’t know,” Seth said, wincing. “I think it’s Grant. I think he cursed me. Look in the book. See what it says in the book.”
“Don’t you want—”
“Just look in the book!”
Chloe did look in the book. She flipped through the pages rapidly, scanning each one. “Here!” she said. “Here, curses! They … no, this is with stones. You build these little cairns of stones … well, they’re talking like that’s the only kind of curse there is. If you just stole it, Grant couldn’t’ve built one of these already. No, look at it. Everything has to be perfect.” She tried to show him the book, but he couldn’t concentrate with the pain.
“OK. It’s OK,” she said. “Don’t worry: I’ll find it. What else? Where does it hurt?”
“My stomach.”
“Stomach, stomach. God, this is too hard to read! It’s all faded! I hate this. But still, look at this stuff! A chant to call flame, a poultice to draw out a goiter, a tincture to strengthen weak blood. Come on! ‘Listening through a bug swallowed.’ What’s that?
“Seth! This is it: look, it’s a bug. Did you swallow a bug? Did he give you anything to eat?”
“Eat? No. Not … yes, he did. I mean, they did. Maybe he slipped something into the food when I ate dinner there. What is it? Is it poison?”
“No, it just listens. It … Seth, I think they can hear everything we’re saying. I’m not sure from this … they might even be able to see what’s going on.”
“I don’t think it’s ‘they.’ I think it’s just Grant. How do you get rid—Ow!”
“I don’t know! Here’s … here’s a compound to make wood rot, a means to be warned of trespassers, a curse to addle the brain, a chant to call locusts, a charm to hide the bearer from his enemies … here! This! A spell to cast out a watcher! Seth, do you think these work?”
“Some of them obviously work.”
“OK. Wait: this is the one Aunt Tessa was talking about. It says:
“A watcher hates the sand and ash
“It flees the mixture as the lash
“One part sand, of water none
“Two of ash when fire’s done.
“That’s it?” she said dubiously. “Just sand and some ashes? Do you have any ashes? Do you really want to try this?”
Seth nodded, weakly. “Fireplace in the living room.”
“Wait here!” Chloe said. As if he was going to run away. He lay there, breathing shallowly. If it was just supposed to be listening and watching him, why did it hurt so much? Or maybe that had been its original purpose and Grant had twisted it to something else. What was it doing in there? It was like it was trying to bore its way out—or deeper in.
It felt like a long time before he heard footsteps on the stairs, pounding toward him. Chloe burst through the door and slammed it behind her. In one hand she had a glass of sand, in the other a grimy teacup and another glass.
“Ash and sand, ash and sand,” she said. “This is stupid. Isn’t this bad for you?” But she glanced at Seth’s face and didn’t stop. “How much do you think we need?”
Seth shook his head. How should he know?
“OK. OK, we’ll just try a little bit. You choke it down and we see what happens.”
Seth nodded jerkily. Chloe pinched sand and ash into the empty glass until the bottom was coated, very thinly, with the two. She swirled the glass, looked at it in dissatisfaction, and handed it to Seth. Climbing on the bed next to him, she helped him into a sitting position and watched grimly.
Seth looked at the powder in the glass and tried to pretend it was brown sugar, unsuccessfully. Closing his eyes, he opened his mouth as wide as he could and poured the stuff directly down to his throat, then tried to swallow.
It was horrible, burning and scratching his throat. He tried to choke it down, but he gagged, and a moment later he was coughing, bent double, his eyes streaming. He’d throw up in a moment, he thought, and in doing that he’d tear something inside him and—pain! His stomach lurched and he felt something rise in his throat, something struggling and alive. He retched, coughing up something small and black onto his rug. Something that moved.
The feeling in his throat was just as bad, but the pain in his stomach was gone.
“The bug,” Chloe said in wonder and disgust. It was a wet, black beetle. Seth tried to imagine how he could have swallowed it, and how it could be alive. But then, he already knew it was magic. Chloe stomped on it with her boot heel, then wiped up the remains with a tissue and threw them away.
“Could I have—” Seth coughed “—water. Please?” But Chloe didn’t seem to hear him. The curse again. He got to his feet, surprised to find that he wasn’t weaker. It had been the pain, or Grant’s spell, or both. He went to the bathroom, barging in on Kurt using the toilet.
“Hey!” Kurt said.
Seth ignored him, going to the sink and drinking directly from the tap. When the grit and ash was mostly washed out of his throat, he stood up.
“Sorry,” he said. “I really needed some water.” Then he left the bathroom and closed the door behind him. The taste of ash was still in his mouth, but he ignored it.
Seth went directly to his room and locked the door. He knew that was asking for trouble, but he wasn’t going to have someone interrupt him and Chloe with the book. He’d rather they thought he was making out with her, embarrassing a thing as that was for his family to be thinking, than have them realize he had stolen the Larshes’ spell book. Stealing was a bad enough crime in the Quitman house; Seth hated to think what the punishment was for making the Larshes mad. That is, what the punishment was in addition to having the Larshes after you. Grant Larsh, he corrected himself. Just Grant.
“So your parents aren’t going to take it very well when they find out you were here.”
Chloe looked away from the book, but not at Seth. “No. They’ll be furious. My father would …”
Seth waited for the end of the sentence. “What, beat you up?”
Now Chloe looked at him. “He doesn’t hit me, but he’d probably ground me for life.”
“Why’d you come over here, if you’re going to get in so much trouble?”
“I think we’d better start reading,” said Chloe sternly, and she turned her attention back to the book. Seth was about to ask a new question, but she spoke first.
“Some of this is in F
rench,” Chloe said. “Do you speak French?”
“No.”
“OK. Then let’s hope we find what we need in the English part.”
They got started, looking through each bit of lore carefully before going on to the next. Chloe found a notebook on Seth’s desk and took it and a pencil—without asking—to make notes.
Seth wondered if they would even be able to do anything with the knowledge they found: he had a suspicion that there was more to doing magic than a chant or a poultice: otherwise a lot more people would be doing it. But it wouldn’t help to worry about that yet. For now, the biggest worry was that they wouldn’t find anything at all.
Chapter 15
By 4:30 they knew how to break the curse in theory, and Seth even thought he knew where they’d have to go to do it. But that didn’t help the much more immediate problem of fending off whatever Grant might be planning to do next. Seth could only hope that Grant was preoccupied in arguments with Jerry and Tessa and wouldn’t have a chance to do anything before Seth figured out how to protect himself and his family.
It was funny about Grant: at first he had seemed genuinely nice, and in the end he just spilled the beans, as though he had no plan at all. Maybe it hadn’t been a plot: maybe Seth really had earned some gratitude from Grant when he saved Junie. That kind of made sense.
But whatever gratitude he had earned obviously didn’t go far enough to make Grant want to lift the Wall family curse. And Seth seriously doubted if Grant felt much gratitude any more.
Seth’s mom knocked on the door at about 5:00. “Seth? Chloe?” she said, much more timidly than usual. Seth tossed Chloe a textbook, strode to the door, unlocked it, and flung it open.
“What?” he said. “We’re trying to study.” Chloe sat on the floor with a notebook, surrounded by the notes they’d already taken and with the textbook open in her lap, covering Grant’s book.
“Sorry,” said his mom in an offended voice. “Is Chloe staying for dinner?”
“We won’t have time for dinner,” Chloe called without looking up. Seth’s mom seemed even more offended by this: apparently she had expected that at least the guest would be considerate. “Can I sleep on the couch in your living room tonight?”
“What?” said Seth’s mom and Seth together.
“Can I?”
“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” Seth’s mom said. “Do your parents know where you are?”
“I left them a note. Look, if we don’t get this stuff figured out, we’re both going to fail our history test tomorrow. I’m not kidding.”
“Can’t you—”
“Mom, please? This is really important,” Seth said. His mom looked at Chloe, then at Seth, accusingly.
“The living room,” she said shortly. “And please call your parents.”
“Will do,” Chloe said. “Thanks, Mrs. Quitman.”
“I’ll heat up some pizza rolls from the freezer,” Seth said, walking past his mom and closing the door.
“Uh-huh,” he heard Chloe say distractedly from behind the door.
They kept working as evening came on. From time to time, studying the book or their notes, one of them would call something out.
“You could probably break open one of these cairns with a sledgehammer.”
“I think these lines are supposed to be magnetic or something.”
“It has a whole list of things here that don’t really work. I guess it was kind of touch and go.”
“I think this one is supposed to bring a stillborn calf to life. Yuck!”
By quarter past ten they had been through the entire book—parts of it twice—and had gone over their notes in great detail. Besides the French section, some parts seemed to be nothing more than observations of the weather, or cryptic lists of livestock in one case, and people in two others. One part was long and hastily-scribbled in worse handwriting than they had seen anywhere else in the book. It seemed to be about finding corpses in the snow.
“So the skulls are all we have,” said Seth.
Chloe looked angry, something Seth had begun to suspect meant she was upset that she wasn’t doing a better job at whatever she was working on at the moment. In any case, he was too tired to take it personally.
“Unless we want to try cursing him,” she said.
“There’s no point in that unless we’re cursing to kill,” Seth said, “and if we want to kill him we’d probably have better luck stealing a hunting rifle and going after him that way.”
“My dad has a hunting rifle.”
“We’re not killing anyone.”
Chloe blew air through her lips in an expression of disgust. “I know.”
The skulls really did seem like their only lead. Putting together what Grant had said with what they’d read in the book, the skulls were obviously important. They belonged to each and every male Larsh forbear who had carried on the tradition of working charms and cures and curses. If Seth and Chloe were understanding the book properly, each of the skulls represented a lot of power. Even an untalented Larsh male could use the power those skulls represented to work a lot of the magic the skulls’ owners had been able to work. Seth didn’t know how talented or untalented Grant was, but it seemed likely that he’d lose a lot of his power if they managed to destroy the skulls.
But there were a few problems with that. The first one was that it was obvious that the magic-working Larsh men had a special connection to those skulls. Grant would probably know what was happening the minute Seth damaged the first skull, and it wouldn’t help to crack just a couple of them: he needed to destroy all of them at the same time.
The second problem was that he had no idea where the skulls were. Chloe had a suggestion for that one.
“We’ll dowse for it, like the Larshes dowse. You draw a house, and then we’ll swing a pendulum over it and find out where it is,” she said.
“Why would it work for us?” Seth said.
“Why wouldn’t it? Anyway, do you have a better idea?”
So they took a silver ring of Chloe’s and some twine and made a simple pendulum, which Chloe swung back and forth over two maps Seth had drawn, one of each floor of the house. Unfortunately he hadn’t seen the whole house, and he didn’t remember exactly how everything was laid out in the parts he had seen. Whether that was the problem or whether Chloe just didn’t have the knack, she swung the pendulum for about twenty minutes without getting anything.
“This isn’t working! Here, you try it,” she said, handing him the pendulum. Seth focused his attention on the maps and began to swing the pendulum. How was this supposed to work? Was it supposed to stop swinging when he was over the right spot? Was he supposed to ask it questions?
The pendulum stopped swinging in a circle and began instead to swing in a straight line, toward and away from him. He started swinging the pendulum in a circle again. Maybe the straight line was trying to tell him something.
A straight line again. A kind of yes?
Straight line.
“Is it on the first floor or the second floor?” Seth muttered, not looking up at Chloe. Talking to a ring was embarrassing.
“What are you doing?” Chloe said.
The pendulum swung around in a circle. Was that a no? But it didn’t seem that definite. It didn’t seem definite at all. Probably that was no answer at all.
The pendulum started swinging in the same straight line it had before: yes, swinging around was no answer at all. Maybe it needed yes or no questions.
“Is it on the first floor?”
Yes.
Chloe was watching Seth avidly, shifting her gaze from his hand to his face and back.
“The kitchen?”
Now the pendulum swung back and forth in front of him. Which meant … no?
Yes.
“The living room?”
No.
“The hall?”
No.
“The … storage room?”
Yes.
In the storage roo
m. “I think it worked,” Seth said quietly.
“Why could you do it if I couldn’t?”
“I don’t know.”
“Your grandmother said your great-great-grandparents or whatever were dowsers,” she said accusingly.
“Well, I’m not!” He wondered at his own vehemence until it occurred to him that the only dowsers he’d ever known about were the Larshes, and he didn’t have powerfully good feelings about them.
OK. Maybe he did have a little of that talent. Lucky for him.
Chloe yawned cavernously, making Seth yawn himself. He looked back at his maps and found that he had trouble focusing on them. He was exhausted, and Chloe probably was, too.
“I can’t think any more. I’m going to bed,” Chloe said. “In the morning we’ll figure the rest of it out.” She got up and opened the door, yawning.
“Does that mean I’ll have to give you another bridge?”
“Maybe,” Chloe said. She backtracked to Seth’s bed and took the spare blanket off the foot of it, then went out into the hallway and down the stairs. The darkness didn’t seem to bother her.
Seth sat on the bed, staring blearily into space. He had things he was supposed to do, didn’t he? Figure out what he was going to do, exactly, or get some sheets or towels or something for Chloe … was she really going to be all right on the couch? And what if her parents called the police? Maybe it would be better to act now instead of waiting for the next day. Especially if he had to smash all of those skulls … except that he had no idea how to do it, because it seemed likely that the minute anything happened to any of them, Grant would feel it. And if Grant were nearby, that gave him hardly any time to smash them. Breaking two or three wouldn’t be enough.
He was too tired to think about it: it would have to wait until tomorrow, and he’d have to skip school to take care of things. Maybe Grant would expect him to be at school and that would give him a little bit of an edge. Down the hall he heard water running in the bathroom, and he hoped Chloe had found the linen closet. He needed to brush his teeth, especially after the sand and ash, but first he’d lie down for a minute, just until Chloe was done …