Laurie focuses on the people, the sunlight, and the miraculous breeze as we walk. He can’t see the maze Stephen is forced to walk through. A labyrinth of bodies that no one has to navigate but him.
We pass the Museum of Natural History, moving into the busy residential streets of the Upper West Side. We stride past New Yorkers caught up in their own harried lives, ignorant of the questers in their midst.
“It’s just before Columbus,” Laurie says.
We get to Eighty-Fourth Street, passing small businesses and innocuous-looking apartment buildings.
Laurie hesitates, stopping just short of the intersection to look at a brownstone. “Huh.”
“What’s wrong?” I ask. Stephen remains silent. I notice how rarely he speaks when we’re in public. I understand that choice, but it only adds to my anger. The curse has even stolen his voice.
“This is the address.” Laurie points to the brownstone. It doesn’t look like any business exists here. There are no signs or advertisements. Passing it on the street, I would have assumed it was solely residential. My stomach drops a little, heavy with disappointment. But Laurie shrugs, heading for the steps that lead down to the garden entrance.
Stephen follows with me trailing. Laurie is staring at the door, which also looks nothing like a business entrance. No hours of operation listed. Not even a welcome mat.
“Do I knock?” Laurie asks.
“Just try the door,” Stephen says, making Laurie jump.
He apologizes immediately. “No offense. You still surprise me sometimes.”
“It’s okay, Laurie. I get that you can’t see me.”
Laurie nods and turns the doorknob. The door swings open and all I can see is darkness. Laurie pokes his head in and I hear him say, “Whoa.”
He disappears into the murky entrance. I see Stephen swallow hard before he goes after Laurie. My heart thuds against my ribs. I can’t explain the cool dread that’s gripping the back of my neck. I have to force myself to follow Stephen.
The first thing that hits me is the mixture of scents. One is familiar and among my favorites. I’m sure more than one person would call me crazy for claiming to love the smell of comics, but I do. They smell shiny and fresh. That scent would have calmed me if not for the others swirling in the shadowed space. Some I think I recognize: rosemary, melted wax. Others are exotic and so heavy I get a little dizzy.
It’s definitely a shop. I can’t wrap my head around the welcome sight of bins full of comics that I’d happily spend hours rifling through juxtaposed with the heavy velvet curtains covering the windows and the rows of burning candles on shelves that ring the room.
I lean in to Laurie. “So where’s the witch?”
“Sean said there’s a back room,” Laurie says, pointing to the far end of the store. Behind the service counter I can barely see the outline of a closed door. “But I don’t know if it’s available to anyone or if you need special access.”
“You’re just bringing this up now?” I ask.
“Don’t worry about it,” Stephen says under his breath. “If you two get stalled out here, I can check it out on my own.”
“Hey, silver lining,” Laurie says.
I shake my head, moving towards the back of the store. At first I think it’s empty, but then I notice a hunched figure sitting on a stool behind the counter. His head is bent and I think he’s sleeping. But when I get close, he looks up, peering at me through the gloom. I’m glad I stop myself from gasping. He’s missing an eye, and a wicked red scar runs from the empty socket down his face and neck until it disappears beneath his shirt collar.
“Help you?” he croaks.
“Uh . . .” I am frozen.
“We heard you have a witch,” Laurie says, as if he says such things every day.
The man laughs like gravel crunching under boots. “Did ya now?”
“Laurie.” I tug at his hand. If this guy thinks we’re a bunch of teen pranksters, we’ll get booted from the store with a life ban in hand.
“Why would you need a witch?” He’s not looking at Laurie, he’s looking at me. My heart thuds against my ribs.
“To help a friend,” I say, not sure why I answer.
“Mmmm.” The man slides from his stool. He walks past us all the way to the front of the store. When he locks the front door, Laurie grabs my hand.
“Millie!” the man shouts, and then begins hacking like he’s about to lose a lung. When the coughing fit passes, he calls again. “You got visitors!”
I hear the sound of someone climbing stairs. The door behind the counter opens. A woman steps into the shop. Behind her I can see stairs leading down to who knows where. She’s wearing a modest flower-print dress that reminds me of a tablecloth. Her silver hair is neatly rolled in the way of ladies who have a once-weekly appointment at the beauty salon. After eyeing me critically for a moment, she shakes her head.
“I can’t help him,” Millie says.
“What?” I stare at her.
She wiggles her fingers and I realize that she’s wiggling them in Stephen’s direction. “He’s beyond my pay grade. Sorry.”
Stephen draws a sharp breath. “You can see me?”
She gives no sign of alarm at the sound of Stephen’s voice. The one-eyed man looks towards Stephen with curiosity but quickly returns to his usual slouch on the stool.
“No such luck,” she says to Stephen. “But I can see the curse.”
Then she turns to me. “It took long enough for you to find me.”
Millie pivots around, tottering towards the staircase. We stare after her until she throws a glance over her shoulder. “Come on.”
Chapter 13
“Who are you?” Elizabeth asks as we head into the darkest recesses of the moribund comic store.
“Who I am is immaterial,” Millie replies.
“But what you are is important,” I say.
Millie nods. “You understand perfectly.”
I can feel things shifting. My whole relationship to the world is shifting. I thought it was all pretty straightforward, all observable at one point or another. But now it seems that I was wrong. There is a world I didn’t know within the world I knew. And Millie, it appears, is its emissary.
The room she takes us to is lined with bookshelves on every wall. A private library . . . but something is off. At first I don’t realize what’s so disconcerting about it, and then I notice: none of the books have writing on their spines. It’s an anonymous library. Or maybe a library I can’t read.
“Please sit down,” Millie says, gesturing to a table in the middle of the room. Four chairs sit around it, as if she had been waiting for three people.
I find myself hoping for Laurie to interject some humor into the situation, but he’s as speechless as the rest of us.
“Why have you been waiting for me?” Elizabeth asks once we’ve all sat down.
“For the same reason you’ve come, no doubt.”
“I’ve come because he’s invisible.”
Millie shakes her head. “No, you’ve come because you can see him.”
“Are you a cursecaster?” I ask.
The old woman looks gravely offended.
“Well, I’ve never!” she exclaims. “What a horrible thing to say!”
“I’m sorry,” I quickly continue. “It’s just that—”
“I’ll have you know, I am a spellseeker! And”—she looks at Elizabeth—“I know another spellseeker when I sense one!”
“Excuse me?” Elizabeth says.
“A spellseeker. A hexologist. A spellvoyant. Surely someone’s told you? You don’t just see through invisibility curses with no training!”
“I genuinely have no idea what you’re talking about,” Elizabeth tells her.
“I’ll second that,” Laurie chimes in. “I know you’re speaking English, but none of it really makes sense.”
“Hmpf,” Millie says. Then, with a certain acidity, she adds, “So you’re a natural talent?”
> “I assure you, she’s had no formal training,” Laurie says. “Our town didn’t even have a magic club.”
“Look,” I say, “you clearly know much, much more about all this than we do. I know that my grandfather was a cursecaster, whatever that is. I know that he cursed my mother, so I’d be invisible. And that’s about it. That’s all I know. We need help. Lots of it.”
“Clearly,” Millie says, a little less hostile than before. “But you’ll have to appreciate that I can’t get involved in curses. Especially when it’s a family matter.”
Part of me wants to weep and part of me wants to grab her by her shoulders and shake hard. To be so close to some kind of answer and to not get it—I liked it so much more when I was oblivious. But there’s no going back now.
“You said you could see my curse?” I prompt.
Millie sighs. “Yes. But that’s boring, isn’t it?”
“I don’t think it’s boring at all,” Laurie volunteers. “Is it like an aura?”
“‘Is it like an aura?’” Millie mimics. Then she turns to Elizabeth. “Dear, do you want to tell him, or should I?”
Elizabeth looks at her blankly. Millie sighs again.
“It’s not like it’s a color. Or an aura. I don’t literally see it. It’s like an extra sense.”
“A sixth sense,” Laurie volunteers.
Millie snorts. “I don’t rank them. And if I did, it wouldn’t come sixth.”
“But I don’t sense anything . . .” Elizabeth says.
“Of course you do, dear! That’s the only reason I could sense you working at it. I always know when another spellseeker is around. It doesn’t happen often enough, but when it does, I know it.”
“I haven’t sensed anything but Stephen.”
“Well, that can’t be. This is New York. There are curses and spells everywhere. I understand if you’re being shy—it’s not easy talking about your gift. I was once a girl like you. Although, obviously, I never honed my powers enough to see through an invisibility curse. I promise you, I am not your rival. We are all in this together. So if you would just throw off your, shall we say, reticence, it would be much appreciated.”
I can’t vouch for her sixth sense, but it appears that at least two of Millie’s other senses (sight, hearing) need some work. Because it should be more than obvious that Elizabeth is not being coy here; she’s not withholding anything. She genuinely has no idea what Millie is talking about.
Millie goes on. “Your cursecaster was very good at his work. It’s impenetrable. Sometimes there are cracks you can see through—that’s why people come to me, you see. But there are no cracks in yours. I haven’t seen this kind of worksmanship in years.”
“His name was Maxwell Arbus,” I say.
Millie blinks, then shakes her head. “I don’t know him. I take it he wasn’t local?”
“No. But are you saying there are other, local cursecasters?”
Now Millie laughs. “That’s for me to know and you never to find out! Trade secrets, my dear. And I am nothing if not discreet.”
Laurie and I shift in our seats. I look over to Elizabeth and find she’s staring at Millie. Staring hard. Millie notices this too and stops laughing.
“What?” she asks, a quiver in her voice.
I have never seen Elizabeth like this. And, judging from his expression, neither has Laurie.
She isn’t startled. She isn’t in shock. She’s concentrating.
“Your mother thought both of you would die,” she whispers.
Millie gasps.
Elizabeth continues. “She didn’t think both babies would live. So she cast a spell. You lived. Your sister died. And ever since, you’ve been fascinated by the spells. Because they are both lifegiver and murderer.”
“How . . . it’s not possible . . . you . . .”
“Elizabeth?” Laurie asks gently.
She turns to him. Blinks. Is back with us.
“Wow,” she says. “That was intense.”
“What did you do?” I ask.
“I saw the spell. It was right there. I don’t know how. But it was—”
Millie stands. “You must leave at once. I will not be attacked in my own hexatorium!”
“What?” Laurie says, grabbing a book off the shelf. “Are these, like, hex books?”
He opens it up, and the minute he looks at the page, he screams out in pain. The book falls from his hands. His eyes burn with tears.
“It’s not something you can read,” Millie says, picking the book up from the ground. “Clearly, you don’t have your girlfriend’s talent.”
“Girlfriend? That’s wrong on so many levels.”
“Again, I must ask you to leave.”
Laurie and I stand up, but Elizabeth stays put.
She looks directly at Millie. Not staring this time. Beseeching.
“You have to tell me what this means,” she says. “I have no idea what I’m doing. None of us does.”
Finally, Millie gets it. She looks almost as shocked as she did when Elizabeth saw her spell.
“You really don’t, do you?” she says, going over and standing next to Elizabeth’s chair. Studying her.
“I swear, before now, I’ve never done anything like this. I saw Stephen. That’s all.”
“Well, as far as you know, anyway.” Millie sits back down in her chair. Laurie and I remain standing, almost as if we know this is really between the two of them now, and if we interfere, we may lose Millie’s help forever. “When I was a girl, I saw things all the time—I just didn’t know I was seeing them. That’s the talent, really. To know what you’re seeing.”
“It’s just that I have no experience with . . . well, magic, I guess.”
Millie groans. “Magic! Now, there’s an abused word. What we do is as much a part of a system as physics or chemistry or biology. It’s just much less . . . public. It has to be. If you don’t understand that now, you soon will.” She pauses, sighs again. “I see I will have to start at the most basic level.”
“Yes,” Elizabeth says. “Please.”
“Out in the world, there are spellcasters, cursecasters, and spellseekers. Spellcasters are practitioners who use hexology to influence events, for better or worse. Cursecasters can only do it for the worse. And spellseekers are the only ones who can see what’s happening, even if they themselves can’t create spells or curses. There aren’t many of us, philosophy knows, just as there aren’t many spellcasters or cursecasters. It’s a dying power, really. But still potent, when used in the right place at the right time.”
“And is it, like, hereditary?” Laurie asks.
“Some casters and seekers are made, some are born,” Millie replies. “It depends on the situation.”
“And can curses be broken?” Elizabeth asks.
“Ah, we’re back to that, are we? For your other boyfriend.”
“You’re much closer this time,” Laurie mumbles.
“When was the last time you met another spellseeker?” Elizabeth asks. I don’t know why she’s digressing from the main topic—namely, my curse—but I trust she knows what she’s doing.
Millie looks grumpy again. “I don’t see how that’s germane,” she huffs.
“Ten years? Twenty?”
“Twenty-seven, okay? It’s been twenty-seven years!”
“That’s quite a long time. You must be very lonely.”
“You have no idea!” Millie is near tears now. “A girl like you—so young! You have absolutely no idea.”
“Millie, I want to be able to trust you. I want us to be able to talk about things. But I can’t do that—I can’t come back here—unless you help me break Stephen’s curse. Because if I can’t do that, I don’t really want to be a spellseeker at all.”
“But you can’t!”
“I can’t what? Give it up?”
“No—his curse. You can’t break his curse!”
“Surely,” Elizabeth says calmly, “in some of the books in your hexatarium—”
“Hexatorium.”
“Hexatorium. Surely there must be things in these books that can help us. Or stories of curses that have been broken.”
Millie shakes her head. “Yes, but not one . . .” She trails off.
“Not one . . . ?”
“Not one by Maxwell Arbus, okay? Never! Not one!”
“So you do know who Stephen’s grandfather is.”
“You see, that’s why I can’t be involved. I knew from the moment I saw him. I said to myself, ‘That’s Maxwell Arbus’s work, and you shouldn’t get involved. Because if he finds out you tried to break one of his curses, you’re doomed.’ Those were my exact words.”
“But how would he know?” Elizabeth asks.
“Because he’s been here! Not in this room, but in the city. I’ve sensed him at work. But I’ve never seen him.”
“Has he left a body count?” Laurie asks.
Millie looks at him with utter disdain. “Only indirectly. You do know, don’t you, that curses can never directly kill someone? That’s why they’re curses—you have to live with them, in agony, for a very long time.”
I can certainly vouch for that. And, I think, my mother could have vouched for it even more.
But I have to block that out for a moment. I can’t think of her, or the agony. Millie’s other words are sinking in.
“He’s been here?” I ask. “You’re sure of it?”
“Yes,” Millie says. Then she catches herself. “But I said I wasn’t going to talk about it, didn’t I?”
Elizabeth makes to move out of her chair. “Well, then, I guess we’ll leave. And I’ll never see you again.”
“No!” Millie protests. Then she regains her composure. “Rather, that would be inadvisable. Why don’t we do this? Give me a little time to mull this over. Why don’t you come back the day after tomorrow at one? We can talk again then.”
“Okay,” Elizabeth says. But before she can get up, Millie leans over and takes her chin in her hand.
“Look at me,” she says. “I can teach you. There are many, many things I can teach you. You will never know what to see until you are taught how to see. Not fully. Don’t underestimate that.”
Elizabeth waits until Millie takes her hand away. Then she stands.
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