by Jade Alters
“I don’t want it,” I say sharply. I spin on my heel and head straight to the breakroom. Even that doesn’t feel particularly safe. If he’s been following me enough to know where I stop for coffee and what I order, that means he doesn’t even understand the very idea of a boundary. The guy is potentially dangerous, and I just don’t want to talk to him anymore.
I decide I’ll barricade myself in here if I have to anyway. Assuming he doesn’t barge back here too. I’m shaky and freaked out. I don’t feel safe, and it’s not fair.
My phone buzzes in my pocket and it’s Becca who’s probably been alerted to something happening though she’s likely upstairs in her office.
Vic, what’s happening? Why don’t you come up here?
I head upstairs. I’m not afraid of being talked to because I escaped to the breakroom again or anything like that, at least. The management here is usually fair, and most people who spend any time on the floor have come across Creeper and also think he’s sketchy as hell.
“Okay, what’s going on?” Becca is the manager. She spends about half her time on the floor and the other half in the office consulting with our buyer or organizing author events. She’s usually straight with me. She’s a no-nonsense sort of person, but a good boss. “Creeper come by again?”
“He followed me home yesterday,” I say calmly. Her office is messy. Her desk is always piled high with papers and catalogs. The walls are plastered with posters for book releases and calendars. She’s always fidgeting with something squishy too. I think she has a lot of nervous energy. “And this morning he bought me a coffee from Kitty because he said I didn’t get a chance to stop there which means he knows I go there, and he saw that I didn’t stop there this morning-”
“Okay,” Becca says quickly, grabbing her phone. “We’re calling the police now.”
“Really?” I say, sighing in relief.
“Yeah, did you call for a patrol car or anything last night?”
“No…”
“You should have,” Becca says. “And you should have told me this morning that he followed you home. That’s way, way over the line for a fucking customer. You shouldn’t feel unsafe here, you know.”
“Yeah,” I say nodding. “Sorry.”
“Hey, it’s okay,” Becca says, rubbing my shoulder for a second. “This must be very frightening.”
“It’s totally freaking me out,” I mutter.
“We’re gonna ban him from the store,” Becca says, and then starts talking into the phone. She hands me a soda from her little office fridge and directs me to sit down while she talks to the cops, and I feel a little better. At least, I feel like something is being done about this. Although, now I’m annoyed with myself for not requesting a drive-by from the cops last night. Just in case.
The cops come down and take my statement, and it’s all so anticlimactic, I want to cry. Apparently, Creeper hasn’t done enough to merit much action on the cops’ part. They advise me to record and take note of any further harassing behavior in case I need a restraining order and tell me to call them again if he makes any threats or worse. They inform me that I can request a black and white to drive by if I feel unsafe at home. But that’s about it. I don’t know what I expected, but I feel frustrated when they leave.
Becca tells me I can go home if I need to, but I know if I do that, I’ll just be crazy by myself for the rest of the night. I’m more tempted to ask for a few extra hours. Even if Creeper comes back and Becca has to kick him out, I’d rather be around people than alone at home. Becca holds a quick meeting to advise everyone that Creeper is now banned and if he shows up, they should call her to come down and deal with it. She pulls his photo from a surveillance camera, prints it out, and puts the banned sign behind the registers. I hate that his picture is back there but it’s necessary. I just try not to look at it.
Then, Becca tries to cheer us all up. She puts 80’s pop on the speakers that usually play classical music or jazz, and we bop around the store to Tears for Fears playing just softly enough not to annoy people who are trying to browse books.
The kicker is when shy old Dale, a grizzled old-timer of the bookstore circuit who has long gray hair tied in a ponytail and little Harry Potter glasses, beckons me into the back room. Dale doesn’t say a word (he really is quite shy) but he pulls a little airplane bottle of whiskey out of his pocket and hands it to me and pats me on the shoulder.
I think that’s it, but then he clears his throat and softly says, “To take the edge off.”
What a sweetheart. It’s not exactly professional, I guess, but given the circumstances, I don’t feel too bad when I drain that little airplane bottle. It burns going down and even makes me shiver for a minute. I wash it down with a long swallow of coffee, and thanks to Dale, I go back about my day feeling a little better.
Victoria
When I get off work, I feel a little better but just as paranoid. It’s still light out, but Becca sends Dale to escort me to my car anyway just to be on the safe side. When I thank Dale again for the whiskey, he just nods without a word. I can’t imagine Dale ever hurting a fly, but he is quite tall and broad enough to look like a potential threat. He’s an older guy, but he’s very fit. He runs marathons. He looks like he could do a little damage anyway, and that’s good enough for me.
I don’t drive directly home this time. I drive a weird route to nowhere before taking an equally strange route home. Finally, I call Shea and talk to her on speaker almost the whole time. Shea is almost as freaked out by what happened as I am. She’s also pissed that the cops didn’t do more. I’m just happy to have her voice in my ear while I’m so nervous. She offers to let me stay at her place but I’m actually planning on doing some serious research into spells tonight. I don’t want to have to feel helpless. I’d like to at least make an effort at protecting myself.
I like to think of myself as fairly independent. But I have to admit, when I’m dealing with real shit like this, I wish I had someone around to do some of the protecting for me.
I pick up some take-out on the way home. I grab myself some Pad Thai from my favorite Thai place and some shrimp cakes just because. I figure if I’m going to be freaked out and stalked and feeling totally paranoid, I might as well have some shrimp cakes to soften the blow.
That evening, I eat and watch some of The Good Place before diving into research mode. I dig out all my old spell books, even the ones that I’m assuming won’t be useful, because you never know. I try listening to a true crime podcast while I page through the books, and it makes the process a little more fun and entertaining, though I make sure I’m not listening to any stories about stalkers.
I need something that will ward off suspicious men and definitely something else just for protection in general. I haven’t done a spell this intense in a good while. I usually do little things. The last time I had my performance review, I performed a spell for good luck. I ended up getting double the raise I thought I was going to get. When I did my taxes this year, I did a spell for financial ingenuity and ended up getting a good refund I wasn’t expecting. But those were more general, mild spells. You can buy those for yourself pretty cheap at any magic shop. And I only did them on a whim. I thought they couldn’t hurt and they were worth a shot. But this is serious. I want a hardcore, high-octane spell...so to speak. And that will take a little more skill. I’ll just have to be careful not to screw it up. God knows the potential consequences of seriously fucking up a magic spell.
I finally stumble upon exactly what I’m looking for in an old spell book of my mother’s while munching on my shrimp cakes. It’s A Spell to Repel Lascivious Men. The name seems a little goofy to me but in my experience, spells often have goofy names. But the description makes much more sense. The spell was often used by maidens to rid themselves of men who pestered them night and day when they had no interest. It’s for suspicious men. It’s for creepy men.
It’s perfect!
It’s also...massively complicated. I have all the
ingredients at least. But some of them needed to be added in at very exact measurements while reciting an incantation in Latin at exactly the right time. And it needs to sit for a precise amount of time before other ingredients can be added.
Worse than all that though, is that once it’s all mixed, it’s done. For most spells I’ve done before, there are a few incantations at the end. Meaning that if you do the bulk of the spell and then figure out that you’ve messed up the ingredients, the spell won’t “take” until the last incantations. But this spell has a lot of the incantations front-loaded. So if I screw up the ingredients at the end, I’m...screwed.
I’ll just have to be very careful then.
I eat a late snack before I brew my spell. It’s around midnight and I usually go to bed earlier, but I guess I’ll just be a little groggy at work. I’m definitely stopping at Kitty this time. I’ll just have to get something large and with an extra shot of espresso. It’s worth it if this spell turns out to be at all effective. I measure out all my herbs as carefully as possible as I nibble on some trail mix. I read the spell about ten times and practice the Latin recitations over and over out loud. Gus thinks I’m talking to him as he paces on top of my books and whips his big, fluffy tail in my face.
“Laugh now, Gus,” I say, sighing. “But I don’t have any better ideas.” I glare at my cat who stares blankly back at me. “Do you?”
“Meow,” Gus says.
“Yeah, I thought so.”
When I finally feel ready, I drag all my stuff downstairs. I used to brew in my apartment but then I had a couple...mishaps. One of these so-called mishaps involved a giant scorch mark on my kitchen wall that was expensive to repaint. Instead, I’ve found a nice and hidden little corner of the basement of the building far enough away from the boiler where nobody ever goes. That’s where I keep my hot plate and my cauldron. I also like brewing while sitting on a floor over standing up somehow. I don’t know why. I just feel more comfortable.
I don’t listen to anything as I work now, wanting to fully concentrate. It’s a little bit eerie in that dark basement, but I focus on each ingredient and incantation. I use a timer to make sure I’m timing the rest periods between ingredients correctly. When I’m near the end, my heart starts to race. All my incantations have been perfect. I just need to add the last few herbs and I’m home free. I grab for the pre-measured St. John’s Wort and pour it in. I’m already watching the herb swirl in the bubbling brew when I realize...it’s not St. John’s Wort.
I have no idea where this bottle even came from. I must have grabbed it along with everything else when I put all my ingredients in the box to bring down to the basement. The cauldron is bubbling and the brew is turning green...which it is not supposed to do. It’s supposed to be lavender. When I look at the label, I see it’s an old herb I picked up over a decade ago. It’s sorrel with some kind of powdered crystal in it. I can’t even see what type of crystal I wrote on the label because the ink has blurred and I certainly don’t remember now.
Shit.
I try not to panic too much, but it’s not easy. The brew is done. Whatever this particular combination does, it’s going to do it. If I can figure out what exactly I did, maybe I can find some kind of counteracting brew. But since I don’t even know what crystal I threw in, it’s not going to be easy.
It’s a good thing my best friend is also a witch.
First, I take the cauldron out to the drain in the driveway outside and pour it out. Once the brew is finished, it’s useless. I take the empty cauldron in the kitchen to be scoured, and then I go back downstairs and gather up all my things. I’m trying to remain calm. Maybe...this isn’t so bad. Maybe I’ve accidentally brewed up something totally harmless. Who knows?
But Shea doesn’t seem to think so.
“Holy shit,” Shea says on the phone. “Holy shit. I remember what crystal was in the sorrel. It was lodalite. That’s not good.”
“Why isn’t that good?” I say darkly, as I scrub at the cauldron with clean steel wool.
Proper cauldron scouring is very important.
“It’s very potent,” Shea says. “Whatever you did accidentally with the sorrel, the lodalite will kick it up several notches. I just...don’t know what the sorrel will do. I’d have to research it. How do you not remember that lodalite? We used that and the sorrel for a potion to give us good grades on midterms once.”
“Oh yeah,” I mutter, as it all comes back to me. We’d been worried about our Philosophy in Literary Fiction Class. “I got a C on that midterm. I don’t think it worked that time.”
“It didn’t,” Shea says. “But that doesn’t mean the lodalite is bad. You better hope that combination doesn’t do anything freaky.”
“Great,” I say, sighing heavily. “This is just what I need.”
Victoria
That night, I have a nightmare that monsters are chasing me. It feels like a kid’s kind of nightmare. I dream of faceless, growling, slimy monsters who all want to catch and eat me, and I’m just running, running, running in the darkness. It’s a silly type of dream except that it feels all too real. I wake up sweaty in my bed and then the memory of everything from last night and everything I have to fear from Creeper comes rushing back. I have a terrible feeling about that spell. I just hope I’m wrong.
It’s even affecting how I’m dressing. I wear a loose fitting plaid camp shirt and an old pair of ripped jeans to work because I don’t want to wear anything even in the ballpark of sexy. I put my hair up in a messy ponytail. I feed Gus, grab a Pop Tart for breakfast, and head off to Kitty for coffee, making sure I’ve got my pepper spray in my pocket just in case. I find myself even more paranoid on the drive over though, and the intensity of it almost makes the coffee not worth it. I wonder if I should even be drinking coffee in the state I’m in. But I get my Americano with the extra shot of espresso anyway.
A few blocks from work, I spot Creeper’s car and I take a long deep breath, but I’ve already started to shake. It’s not even outright fear so much as the jolt of adrenaline itself.
I can’t believe he’s getting away with scaring me like this. It’s seriously pissing me off. I don’t deserve this at all.
I park so quickly, I almost hit another car. Then I grab my coffee and my purse and all but run to the doors of Baker Books just as Becca is opening up. I can practically feel Creeper behind me. He’s got to be a block away and yet I feel as if he’s breathing down my damn neck.
“Creeper’s coming,” I say to Becca as she lets me in. I see her scowl out the glass doors in his direction.
“Goddamn asshole!” Becca says. “Okay, honey. Don’t worry. I’ll head him off. He’s not allowed in here. We’ll call the cops if he refuses to leave. It’s gonna be okay.”
I have a hard time finding her words convincing.
I’m supposed to be working the registers today which means I’m near the door and he can see me when he comes striding up like everything is just peachy. It also means I can hear their conversation.
“Sir, unfortunately, we can no longer allow you inside,” I hear Becca saying in low tones to Creeper. “Your behavior toward one of our booksellers has made her very uncomfortable and I have to agree that we cannot let you come in. If you don’t leave the premises, we’re going to have to call the cops.”
Creeper seems flabbergasted. “I don’t understand this at all,” he says, sounding so indignant. “I have an excellent rapport with everyone who works here-”
“I’m sorry, sir. This is not up for debate.” I glance in their direction. Becca is kind of blocking the door. I see Dale and Winny come over from the back, crossing their arms like they’re back-up. I find myself very grateful that they’re around too. “You need to leave our employees alone and you especially need to stop following them.” Becca isn’t a small woman. She’s a little shorter than Creeper, but she can be imposing. He’s not getting by her, I know that.
“Well, you can tell Victoria that she’s going to regret this!” Cre
eper says. My face feels hot. Creeper has never been truly threatening before and he could be all talk, but if he’s actually following me sometimes, I just don’t think so. There’s no telling what he might do.
“Get out!” Becca finally thunders at him.
Creeper stops trying to come in. But what he does do is just as bad. He goes to the sidewalk, right outside the line of what’s considered to be our property, and just stands there. His objectively handsome but narrow face now seems weirdly sharp. His nose is too long and pointy, and his chin seems like it’s been stretched out unnaturally. His hair is a messy mop on top of his head. It seems a bit affected like he’s brushed it to look that way; “artfully mussed.” He can’t be more than thirty-five. If you met him on the street, you might be taken in. He doesn’t look like a total weirdo right away. It’s only now after all his frightening behavior that I see him for what he really is. He’s ugly as sin. He stands there outside and just stares at me through the window.
But this time, I won’t be cowed. I don’t go hide in the back. I’m aware of him every second, but I keep working. I stand up straight, wearing a glower on my face, and keep myself busy straightening up all the items we sell by the registers and wiping down the counters with Lysol wipes. Becca hangs around on the floor for a while to make sure things are okay, and Creeper doesn’t try to come in. Eventually, customers start arriving. It turns out to be a fairly busy day, which is a huge relief. I need something to keep my mind occupied.
I recommend a bunch of books to some college students who have just read Murakami for the first time. I talk about my favorite new contemporary romances with a couple of women who giggle like they’re holding hardcore porn in their hands instead of the traditionally published and not very explicit novels. I sell three book lights to a group of teenagers going on a read-a-thon camping trip.