by Tess Lake
“Luce!” Molly called out, but she was too far away to do anything.
“It’s okay, we need to get out of here,” Luce said, gritting her teeth.
The old age crept up from the floor and was now rising up the desk. I decided to chance it and picked up the map, expecting it to turn to dust in my hands. But it didn’t. It stayed fresh and new. I quickly shoved it in my pocket, put my phone away, and turned carefully back toward the door.
“Luce, can you get your foot out?” I asked.
Luce tried very carefully to extricate herself but it seemed she was stuck.
“Okay, I’m going to go to the door, and then Harlow, and we’ll try and pull you out,” Molly said.
“Don’t get too close or, well, Aunt Cass is going to be right and we’re all going to fall through the floor,” Luce warned.
Molly was the first to go, carefully edging her way around the outside of the room. The old age was now creeping up the walls and ruining everything as it went. The floor was starting to creak alarmingly. She managed to make it out the door without falling through the floor, and then it was my turn. I held my breath, feeling for some irrational reason that this made me lighter, and made my way around the outside of the room, wincing with every step. I was just about at the door when there was an enormous crack and I felt the floor giving way beneath me. I flailed my arm out and Molly grabbed it, pulling me toward her. I felt wood scratching my ankles as I sort of stumbled and half-fell out into the corridor. Molly and I both went down on the ground and we heard a loud crashing noise as something fell into the floor below.
“Luce, are you okay?” Molly called out. We scrambled to our feet and turned around to see Luce hanging on with two hands, dangling above a hole that went down two stories.
“Help me up,” Luce said in a strained voice. We rushed forward together and grabbed Luce’s wrists, pulling her toward us. In movies, it always seems so easy: hold out one hand and you can pull an entire person up from that cliff edge when they’re about to fall. In reality it was insanely difficult. Luce didn’t have anything to put her feet on, so we had to haul her entire body up until she could get halfway out the hole and sort of pull herself forward onto us. It took a few minutes of grunting and pulling to haul her up out of the hole and drag her into the corridor. We all collapsed there, gasping and looking up at the three balls of light floating above our heads.
“Let’s get out of here. I don’t want to find Aunt Cass’s secret lair now,” Luce said. We managed to pull ourselves up from the floor and then trekked our way back to the basement, where Grandma April was standing watch. The trip back was all of thirty seconds flat, another strange quirk of the magical corridors underneath the mansion, and I knew as we walked out into the basement that the chances of ever finding that room again were slim to none.
We went back to our end of the mansion and assessed the damage. Luce had sustained a few scratches around her ankles where she’d put them through the floor and was bleeding a little, and so was I. We were all covered in dust and grime from lying on the floor and generally looked like we’d been doing exactly what we’d been doing: exploring an underground ruined mansion.
Molly and Luce went off to have showers and get ready for another day of working with Aunt Cass while I sat on the sofa trying to recover my equilibrium. I’d promised Mom no more dangerous adventures, no more exploring things I shouldn’t be, and then what had happened? Luce had nearly fallen through a floor, and me along with her.
I pulled the map out of my pocket and spread it on the coffee table. There were a few paths drawn on it that led to near the center of the map where the X was, but at a certain point they stopped and the strange clues began. “Find the tree of love,” “Follow the birds.” Who knew what that meant?
Soon Molly and Luce were ready to go to work and came back to the living room. They sat beside me to have a quick look at the map.
“I think we have our next expedition planned,” Molly commented.
“Definitely, let’s find out what’s there,” Luce added.
It seemed that the showers had completely revived my cousins.
“Aren’t you worried it might be dangerous? I did make that promise to Mom,” I said.
Luce waved a hand at me dismissively.
“Yeah, so did both of us, but I think that diary was Grandma April’s and this map is definitely a clue to something. We have no idea why she woke up, but now we’ve got something we can investigate, so I say we do it,” Luce said.
“We promised we wouldn’t do anything dangerous, but I figure with the three of us together, we’re not really in any danger,” Molly said, displaying exactly the type of witch logic we’d used when we were teenagers so we could do what we wanted.
It was getting to be midmorning, so Molly and Luce hurried off to work before Aunt Cass could start messaging them. I studied the map for a while more, thinking about how Grandma April had looked at me and said, “Not yet,” before freezing again. Had that room under the house been hers? It appeared it had been preserved against time, until the three of us had gone in and then time had caught up with it, except for the map. I briefly pondered telling Aunt Cass about the map but then decided against it. As she had said to me many times, it was important for a witch to have secrets, so we were going to keep this one to ourselves.
I went off for shower number two of the day, warming myself up again, and by the time I returned to the living room, Adams was back, curled up asleep. I also saw that Jack had messaged me asking if I could come and meet him at an address in town. I quickly wrote back that I’d see him there within twenty minutes, and then got myself ready for the day. It had started fairly terribly, running up and down on the beach in the freezing weather, progressed to being insulted by Aunt Cass up on the roof, and culminated in nearly falling through the floor after that, but now, now the day was looking up.
Chapter 4
On the way to Jack’s, I got a call from Aunt Cass. I’d stopped at some slow lights, so I answered.
“Harlow Torrent, journalist at large.”
“I went to the house where the old man died. There’s definitely something magical going on. Now is your chance to get in on the ground floor,” Aunt Cass said.
“Get in on the ground floor of what? Trying to track down some crazy magical entity? Possibly being shot at? Doing a whole bunch of illegal things? The only thing I want in on the ground floor of is seeing my boyfriend, starting my new job, and occasionally having a nice coffee.”
“So that’s why you were trying to find my so-called underground lair, then?”
Uh oh. Okay, so she knew, but that didn’t mean I had to confirm it. I slipped straight into lying mode.
“I think if I feel like going exploring under the mansion, I can do that. Why, do you have something to hide?”
There was a pause, as though Aunt Cass was thinking of all the things she had to hide.
“There are some rooms down there that are very dangerous, and you and your cousins should watch yourselves,” she said finally.
“Okay, thanks for the advice!” I said in my most chirpy and annoying voice.
“Fine, I’ll get someone else,” Aunt Cass muttered and then hung up on me.
Good luck with that, I thought as I continued driving through town. The moms probably wouldn’t help her, and neither would Molly and Luce. So who would she turn to? Hattie Stern? Yeah, right.
I drove out the other side of Harlot Bay, heading close to the beach, and turned down a small side street where I spied Jack’s truck parked in the distance. This area was a couple of streets back from the beach and sort of the middle of Harlot Bay in terms of wealth. There were some nice houses, but also some run-down old ones that definitely needed renovating. I pulled up behind Jack’s truck and got out to find him standing in front of a house that was definitely in the category of needing serious renovating. Actually, it probably could have used a bulldozer or maybe a fire. It was a two-story brick house that had a la
rge circular window up on the second story, like a church window. Jack grinned at me and waved me in. I opened the squeaky gate and had a look around the yard. There were a lot of weeds, and I was pretty sure most of the plants had died and been taken over by some kind of other toxic growth.
“Your next job?” I asked before Jack swept me into his arms and kissed me.
“Definitely,” he said and jingled the keys in his hands. “Come on, I can’t wait for you to see this,” he said.
He was so excited he was practically bouncing his way to the front door. It creaked like the door to a haunted mansion as he opened it. He turned on the lights, but only a few of them lit up. The rest of the bulbs were burned out. I followed him in, slightly puzzled as to why he’d be so excited. On the inside, the house wasn’t much better than the outside. It was aged and run-down. In front of us was a staircase leading up to the second floor. Rooms led off to the left and right, and straight ahead I could see what looked to be a very old kitchen peeking at me through from another doorway.
Jack spun around to face me, stretched his arms out and said, “Ta-da!”
“Why is this ‘ta-da’?” I asked.
“I bought it! I own it! I’m going to rebuild it!” he said. He grabbed me in his arms and spun me around again before hauling me off to the right through a doorway that was missing its door.
“This is the living room. I’m going to knock that wall down and expand it through to make an open living space so it connects with the kitchen. Out this way I’m going to strip most of the kitchen out, change it over to gas cooking appliances, and expand the window into the backyard,” Jack said. He led me from room to room, talking at a hundred miles an hour. I was pulled along in his wake. And yes, although every single room was wrecked and run-down, his enthusiasm was infectious.
We finally did a full lap of the bottom floor of the house and then Jack grabbed my hand and pulled me upstairs, which did creak alarmingly, but held.
“Up here there are some more bedrooms which will probably be used for guests, and check out this room here,” Jack said. He led me into a wide room which was lit up with sunlight from the circular window high above. It was the room that looked out over the street. It was completely bare, nothing there except for polished wood floorboards coated in a layer of dust. The walls were covered in some type of peeling wallpaper that was a pale mint green and looked like it had tiny tridents all over it.
“So I was thinking that maybe this could be a study or a writing studio,” Jack said, turning to face me.
“Do you write?”
The question slipped out of my mouth before my stupid brain had time to process what Jack had said. He rubbed the back of his neck and gave me a look that was one I hadn’t seen on his face before. It was part hopeful but also part scared.
“No… but you do… anyway, let’s check out the backyard,” he said and went to rush out of the room.
The man still gave me butterflies in my stomach on a regular basis, and now was no exception. They must have been wearing size twelve army boots, because they were thudding around in there and I became hyperaware of the magic surrounding me. It was moving like the gentle swell of the sea, pushing at me with a warm current.
I grabbed Jack’s arm and pulled him close to me before looking up into those eyes of his that hovered between blue and green.
I felt generations of ancestors silently cheering me on, calling at me to be brave, to leap.
“A writing studio here would be amazing,” I said and then kissed Jack again, running my fingers over his stubble.
Holding him close against me, I felt the tension leave his body. He’d been excited, but under that, he’d been wound up tighter than a spring.
“I’ll make it beautiful,” Jack murmured. Then he took me by the hand and led me out of the possible future writing studio down through the house and out into the yard. The backyard was an absolute wreck too, with a shed that was literally falling down and a garden that was full of weeds. I looked over the yard and then back at the house.
“Talk about your fixer-upper,” I said to Jack. He laughed and then grabbed me by the hand again and dragged me back inside, starting to talk about all the renovations he had planned. Most of what he said went straight over my head, so I sort of flowed along with him, basking in the glow of his excitement for the possible future.
Chapter 5
Jack and I went to lunch at Valhalla Viking and then both of us had to go off to work. Since the movie people had departed town, Jack had returned to renovating people’s houses and working with his brother Jonas. A while back, someone had burned down one of the homes that Jack had been working on and his business had taken a hit from it, but it seemed enough time had passed for people to forget that, or perhaps forgive it. I was on my last few days of what I guess you could call unemployment until I started work with Ollie for the library, sorting and scanning all of the papers and documents they had stored. I decided to head into the office to have, yet again, one more last look at whether the Harlot Bay Reader was worth reviving.
When I got there, I was half-expecting to find Aunt Cass with her feet up on the desk, conducting her possibly illegal chili sauce-selling business, but the office was empty. Not even John Smith was around. Not only that, but most of the boxes that Aunt Cass had been storing there had been removed and my office was back to looking very stark.
I sat down at my desk and turned on my laptop. While I waited for what was increasingly a slow piece of technology to start up, I looked out the front window at the tops of the buildings across from me and thought about the Harlot Bay Reader again. A long time ago, my website had taken a serious hit when I’d abandoned it for six weeks straight. It hadn’t been by choice. I’d been frozen in place trying to fight a magical entity. My website had never really recovered from that, despite the fact that I’d put in as much time and effort as I could. Most recently, I’d gone to work on the set of Bella Bing’s latest movie. I’d hoped that reporting on it would bring my website back to life as well. But after all the sabotage and, yes, murders that had happened on the set, the film studio had taken all of my recorded interviews, banned me from writing anything about it, and then paid me to go away.
My laptop finally started up, so I went to check out my website and found that the number of visitors was now down to a trickle, if that. The last article I’d written was once again about the foreshore restoration project, and it had had a whopping six people read it in the last week. Definitely not enough to run a newspaper, and definitely not enough to make any money.
I clicked away from my website and idly started browsing around until eventually I found Ollie’s historical blog. He’d been running a series of articles about the town since he’d moved to Harlot Bay and every single one of them was absolutely fascinating. Harlot Bay’s history was somewhat dark and dangerous. The pirates that used to sail up and down the Atlantic would frequently come to visit and sometimes rampage through the town. Many of the homes had secret corridors built into them, and extra floors hidden underground. They’d come in handy during the Prohibition era, when it seemed the entire town had returned to its formerly criminal ways.
Ollie had been writing the blog for quite a long time and it looked like he almost had enough that he could publish an entire book if he wanted to. As I looked through his website, reading a story about a pirate who’d married a local widow, a small thought began to form in the back of my mind: I shouldn’t be wasting my time writing articles for the Harlot Bay Reader. I should be writing something else.
What that something else was, I wasn’t quite sure. Should I write a book? Did I even have the skill to do so? And what would I write about anyway?
I felt these thoughts come and go, and in my mind a hazy image of the future flickered. Me sitting behind a desk, looking out a large round window in the writing studio of the house that Jack and I lived together in. I felt my heart thud and I wasn’t really sure whether it was from excitement or possibly fear.
Like every girl in existence, I had done that thing where you have a boyfriend and then you write your name over and over, but with his last name and put a thousand hearts around it. Yeah, I’d done that, and yes, I had done the thing where I imagined getting married, and yes, I’d done the thing where I imagined having babies. The problem with all those imaginings was that when they didn’t come true, they hurt more than you could bear.
I was idly thinking about the future and staring at Ollie’s website when a name on the screen leapt out at me. It was part of an entry titled “Juliet Stern: The Original Harlot of Harlot Bay?”
I read the article, which seemed to come from some land documents that Ollie had recently unearthed. It showed the owner of the Merchant Arms was a Juliet Stern, and although on paper, the Merchant Arms had been a drinking establishment, Ollie suggested that it was actually a house of pleasure.
I couldn’t help myself shaking my head in amazement as I read his article. A while ago I had slipped and gained the power to see the past overlaid on the present. It sounds kind of amazing to be able to see the past, but not when you’re trying to drive a car and trees fill the road in front of you, or your bedroom, or when the entire city disappears and you can’t see anything at all except a hundred and fifty years ago. In one of these moments when I’d slipped, I’d seen the Merchant Arms, and a young woman had come out the front who I swear had been wearing Hattie Stern’s face.
Hattie was a buttoned-up, iron corset kind of witch. Her last name pretty much described her, and she and Aunt Cass hated each other with a passion for some reason. In my vision of the past, I’d seen that the Merchant Arms had actually been, as Ollie said, a house of pleasure.
Suddenly, Hattie’s constant attempts to have the town renamed from Harlot Bay to Calm Water Bay made a lot more sense. Everyone else living here had pretty much accepted that we lived in a place called Harlot Bay. A lot of the tourist traps actually played on the name because it made us stand out in the list of dying seaside towns. Before Molly and Luce had transformed Traveler into a full coffee shop, they’d sold T-shirts with things like “Go All the Way in Harlot Bay” written on them.