I love my shop and its contents. No matter how alienated I have felt my whole life, when I’m in the company of old things I sense the human connections through the ages. They have always helped ease the loneliness of my solitary existence.
A narrow staircase led off the rear storage room to a cozy one-bedroom apartment on the second floor. As in the store below, I had filled my personal space with much-loved used furniture, appliances, and artwork. The lace curtains in my bedroom window had been tatted by a British war bride who made her new home in the Outer Sunset; the soft white sheets on my canopy bed were purchased at a Parisian flea market; even my stove was an old Wedgwood that had nourished three generations of a family in nearby Hayes Valley.
Unfortunately, like so much in the magical world, my sensitivity to vibrations was a two-way street. I hated the soulless feel of newly minted products that were factory-produced by poorly paid workers, and felt their despair every time I touched them. Even finding toothpaste whose vibrations didn’t rattle my fillings could be a trial.
I crossed through the bedroom to the bath and took a quick cleansing shower with lemon verbena soap. Afterward, brushing my long chestnut brown hair twenty strokes, I was sure to capture any loose strands before tying it into a ponytail with a black ribbon. I then cleaned the brush carefully and brought the loose hair into the kitchen to burn.
My grandmother Graciela had hammered this habit into me: Let not a single strand of your own hair fall into a brew, m’hija, for you will change the spell in ways you did not intend. Intention must always reign supreme while brewing. And never forget that hair and nails must always be burned lest they be captured for use in a spell against you.
I often wondered how much of what I did was witchcraft, and how much superstition. To this day I couldn’t shake the childish image of evildoers lurking behind every corner at hairdressers’ and manicure salons, brooms in hand, just waiting to sweep up all that personal mojo lying around on the floor and manipulate it for their own evil ends. Last week my neighbor Sandra suggested we go for mani-pedis and I nearly hyper-ventilated.
No wonder I had a hard time making friends.
My favorite part of the apartment was its huge kitchen, which was at least as big as my small living room. The floor was tiled with 1950s-style black-and-white-checked linoleum, the cupboards were simple wood hutches painted a chalky blue-green, and unpainted wooden beams ran across the ceiling. From the beams dangled bunches of dried herbs, flowers, and braids of garlic; open shelves were crammed with jars filled with ingredients in a rainbow of colors; and a pot of fresh basil sat on the butcher-block counter to keep negative spirits at bay. The all-important lunar calendar hung by the sink.
Ready to begin spell casting, I filled my old cast-iron cauldron one-quarter full with fresh springwater and hoisted the heavy pot onto the gas stove to boil. A village “cunning woman” in the Scottish highlands told me that using an iron pot is an insult to the Fae, or the fairy folk, but I’ve never known any Fae well enough to ask.
“Whatcha doin’?”
I jumped and whirled around at the croaky voice of my wannabe familiar, perched on top of the refrigerator. My own personal outsize gargoyle.
“You makin’ a spell?” he asked.
“You scared me . . .” I said, slapping my hand over my pounding heart. “What’s your real name, anyway?”
“Oscar.”
“No, it isn’t. I just called you that on the spur of the moment.”
“Then that’s my name, mistress.”
I realized I was arguing with a gargoyle, and tried to ignore him.
“I like it the way that lady says it. Oscaroo,” he crooned.
“ ‘ Oscaroo’ sounds like some strange Australian creature that evolution left behind.”
He snickered. It was a disturbing sound.
I pulled a huge red leather-bound volume off a high shelf in the pantry. Every practicing witch has her own unique Book of Shadows, full of spells, recipes, and remembrances. Mine creaked when I opened it and smelled slightly of must, reminding me, not unpleasantly, of a used bookstore. Graciela had given me the book, already half-full of her own family recipes, when I was eight, and I had gone on to crowd it with notes and newspaper clippings for as long as I could remember. Besides spells, it contained mementos and quotations that I read to myself in moments of doubt and despair, as well as a few newspaper articles about events I would rather not remember, but that I must. The tome quite literally hummed with memories, knowledge, and awareness.
Though I knew almost all of my spells by heart, I always opened my Book of Shadows and double-checked before conjuring. It was part of my ritual.
Covering the counter with a clean white cloth, I started setting out the things I needed. Of primary importance was my athame, or spirit blade, which is a black-handled, supersharp, double-edged knife. Beside it I placed a length of blessed rope; a special kind of vinca known as Sorcerer’s Violet; and dried stalks of Verbascum dipped in tallow.
“I like that lady that held me,” Oscar said, a dreamy note in his voice.
“I’ll just bet you do.” I had never met a demon, male or female, who didn’t possess a healthy libido. “Listen, I want to ask you about something. What do you know about La Llorona?”
He gave a little shudder. “She scares me. I hear she has empty sockets where there should be eyes, and her mouth is an open, voracious void, and—”
“Enough, thanks. I don’t need a description.”
“Then why did you ask?”
“I thought I heard her tonight. She’s supposed to hang around riverbeds,” I pointed out as I hung a basket on my arm and grabbed my white-handled boline, a special sickle-shaped knife used to cut magical herbs. “But there aren’t any rivers in San Francisco, are there?”
“Nope.” Oscar trailed me through a pair of French doors onto my terrace.
This was my essential rooftop herb garden: crowded with pots holding coriander, vervain, and even poisonous wolfsbane; and planters full of gingerroot, hore- hound, and damiana. Since it was only six weeks old my garden was still immature, but I had worked a fertility spell to speed the growing season up a little bit. I snipped off small sprigs of henbane and badger’s foot and placed them in my basket.
“But water spirits are practical folk,” Oscar continued. “They can’t find a creek or a river, they use the bay, a backed-up storm drain, a swimming pool. Easy enough for drowning people, either way.”
“Great. I finally find a place to settle down, and now La Llorona’s haunting the bay?”
He shrugged. “Everyone wants to live in the Bay Area. It’s an active area, spirit-wise. New Orleans is getting crowded, and the climate’s better here.”
“Hey, what’s the deal with your master, Aidan Rhodes? Does he want you to spy on me?”
“You’re my master now, mistress,” he repeated his earlier incantation.
“I don’t need a familiar, Oscar. I’m not . . . not a normal witch.”
“Well, you sure as heck aren’t a normal human.”
I glared at him.
“What’d I say?”
“Why don’t you go be Bronwyn’s familiar? She could use the help.”
“Who’s Bronwyn?”
“The woman you’re so enamored with.”
“Ooh, the lady,” he repeated dreamily. Then he shrugged. “Can’t. I’m yours. And she’s not a witch like you. She one of those, whaddayacall? Wiccans.”
“At least she belongs to a coven. I don’t belong . . . anywhere.”
In the old days—the burning times—there was a distinction made between sorcerers and witches. It was said that a sorcerer learned magic through training, while a witch was born with innate talents and connections to the spirit world. The latter was true in my case, to an extreme degree. I hadn’t chosen this path; it had chosen me. One of the many curses my status bestowed was a near-perfect memory, and I could recall every alienating episode, every isolating incident, of my thirty-one
years.
Oscar was following so closely on my heels that when I stopped to pick some cinquefoil grass he plowed right into the backs of my legs. He watched me for another minute while I gathered nine berries of deadly nightshade ; then we both headed back into the kitchen where the cauldron was boiling.
“Whatcha cookin’?”
“A woman I met earlier may have heard La Llorona ’s cry. I’m brewing a spell to protect her.” I started crushing sempervivum leaves in the ancient stone mortar Graciela had given me when I left home.
“Ooh! How much is she paying you?” Oscar hopped around the kitchen in his excitement. “Firstborn? Life of duty? Web site?”
That last option threw me. “Web site?”
“Master Rhodes had a supplicant make him an interactive Web site. You should see it. It’s awesome.”
Times do change.
“She’s not paying me anything,” I answered as I dropped the black shiny berries, one by one, into the boiling cauldron. “She doesn’t even know I’m doing it.”
He narrowed his eyes, fixed me with an odd look. “Don’t tell me you have a fetish for normal humans. They would have burned you not so long ago.”
“Good thing we live in modern times, then, right?”
“I don’t really like cowans,” he mused, using the archaic derogatory word for a nonwitchy human. “They’re fun to play with, but they’re narrow-minded, quick to blame, can’t see past their own—”
“Don’t call them cowans. Besides, I’m just as human as the next person.”
“Normal humans don’t cast spells . . . at least, not well.”
I threw my stone pestle down on the butcher block with a loud thud.
“For your information, familiars don’t argue with their masters. And if you don’t like humans, then you shouldn’t hang around me. I like being around normal people. I’m a normal-people person. They just haven’t especially liked me up till now. But all that’s about to change.”
“How will it change, mistress?”
“Because I’m not moving around anymore. I’m staying put, and I’m going to make friends, and sell great old clothes, and I’m going to use my powers to help people. But no one is ever going to know that I’m—”
“A superpowerful witch?”
“—a freak. I don’t want to be seen as a scary freak anymore.”
And with that I dropped a freeze-dried bat into the bubbling brew.
The matching of a witch with a familiar is supposed to be an intimate affair. A witch bonds to a special animal with which she feels an overwhelming sense of kinship and trust. Familiars are popular with witches because animals are often more in touch with the undercurrents of the spirit world than are humans, allowing them to be not only companions but magical intermediaries and helpers. But I had more than enough power all by myself, which was one reason I had never joined other witches in a coven. If I added my power to theirs, there was no telling what forces might be unleashed.
I glanced up at Oscar, who was back on top of the refrigerator, inspecting his scaly, clawlike toes. I couldn’t say I felt much kinship. But as I brewed my concoction, I had to admit that I did sense a subtle shift in my power. It wasn’t stronger, exactly, but it was smoother. Slippery, almost. As though finding the portals more easily.
I prepared the herbs carefully, mumbling incantations as I did so. I recited my spells precisely as I had learned them: in Spanglish, with a smattering of Latin and Na huatl, Graciela’s native language. After dropping in all the herbs, one by one, I brought out the tissue and added the strands of Frances’s hair while intoning her name ten times.
My left eye started to itch, an omen that sorrow would soon find its way into my life. This wasn’t unusual for me, and didn’t necessarily have anything to do with the spell at hand. Still, I made doubly sure to do everything I could to repel negative influences. I stirred the brew only deosil, or in a clockwise direction. I cast the few leftover herbs into the fire under the pot. I chanted an extra ten minutes, just in case.
It took a full hour of boiling for the brew to come to readiness. I spent the wait time cleaning my implements carefully and thoroughly. Inspired, I used the rest of the time to straighten my sitting room. I was vacuuming the faded Turkish rug when a distinctive, rank smell began to permeate the air, signaling the brew’s readiness for the next step: blood sacrifice.
I hated this part. Not because of the pain, but because it highlighted how different I was, even from other witches. The next step was beyond the abilities of any witch I’d ever known.
Gripping the black-handled knife in my right hand, I cut a small X in the palm of my left. Holding the injured hand palm-down over the cauldron, I allowed four drops of my blood to drip into the brew, which was now swirling deosil on its own.
I braced myself. A great cloud of vapor burst from the vessel and streamed up to the ceiling, taking on the amorphous form of a face lingering above us, looking down. Graciela said one day I would learn who my helping spirit was, but I wasn’t sure I even wanted to know. He or she . . . it . . . scared me, every time. Almost as fast as the face appeared, it melted back into the ether.
“Wow! Didja see that?” asked Oscar, who had fallen back onto his butt and was huddled against the cupboards in the far corner of the kitchen. I had that same reaction for the first year or so of learning how to brew. “Mistress is a truly great witch!”
I blew out a deep breath and wiped my sweaty brow.
Witchcraft isn’t for the faint of heart.
I have a genuinely terrible singing voice, but I didn’t let that stop me from crooning along to a Dido CD at the top of my lungs as I sped my cherry red convertible through San Francisco’s quiet streets. Oscar had whined and pleaded and mewled until I caved in and let him come along. Now, ignoring my admonitions, he jumped back and forth over the seats like a talkative dog.
Sneezing be damned, a traditional black-cat familiar was sounding better all the time.
Bayview-Hunters Point, Maya had informed me, was one of the last affordable neighborhoods in San Francisco, in part because it was adjacent to 465 acres of prime waterfront property that had been declared a toxic waste zone after the military pulled out a few decades ago. While lots of San Francisco’s lower-income and “marginal” folks—hourly workers, free spirits, and artists alike—had been driven by economic necessity across the water to the East Bay, many people in Hunters Point had stayed on, developing a strong, innovative neighborhood association and even establishing a flourishing artists’ colony.
As I drove into Frances’s neighborhood, I noticed small groups of young men lingering on corners and loitering in front of the liquor store, using the pay phone. Farther down the street, where Jessica lived, all seemed quiet.
I pulled up in front of the darkened Potts house a little before one in the morning. Taking a special charm from the glove box, I held it in my right hand, closed my eyes, and recited an incantation several times. A few minutes later a bleary, disoriented Frances opened the front door. I ordered Oscar to stay in the car, grabbed my big canvas carryall, jumped out of the car, hurried up the path, and took the stairs two at a time.
I shut the front door behind us. The house was dark, but my night vision is better than average, and diffuse light from the streetlamps outside sifted through the windowpanes, lighting our way. Frances moaned softly as I gently propelled her up the stairs and down the hallway. If she remembered any of this, she would think of it as a vague dream. She moaned again and I searched her lined face, hoping I hadn’t given her a nightmare. People had unpredictable reactions to sleepwalking.
Strange . . . tonight the patterns of colored lights filtering through the stained-glass window seemed to have an ominous cast, and the ticking of the grandfather clock marked time too quickly, almost frenetically. The air held a stale mustiness that melded with the lingering aroma of pot roast and potatoes, the scent much stronger now than it had been earlier this afternoon. Ditto the general sensations of past
souls, though this wasn’t surprising. Old houses held all kinds of spirits. Like the vibrations I gleaned from clothing, these were primarily benevolent, but not entirely.
Still, all the sensations felt stronger. Had something shifted since this afternoon, or was it just the effects of being here, virtually alone, in the middle of the night?
Frances’s bedroom was small and cozy. I imagined that she and Ronald never moved into the master bedroom after his parents died. The chamber was minimally furnished: a double bed with a simple maple headboard and matching side tables; a vanity covered in doilies, old perfume bottles, and a fine mist of baby powder; and a faded, rose-colored upholstered easy chair decorated with embroidered heart-shaped pillows like the ones I had seen in the kitchen. I noted with approval that both tall windows, looking toward the north side of the yard, were covered with heavy brocade curtains. That was good; it was best for me to be able to control the light.
I pulled the headboard out from the wall a few inches, then led Frances back to bed and tucked her under her worn sage green cotton duvet. She wrapped her arms around her middle and curled up on her side into a fetal position, let out another soft moan, and went back to sleep.
From my satchel I extracted a dozen hand-dipped white beeswax candles, candleholders, a widemouthed thermos, and my black-handled spirit knife. I lit a few candles for light and set them on the bedside table. Then I unscrewed the thermos and invoked the powers of the moon as I poured a thin stream of liquid in a magical circle around the bed. That done, I took my athame and used the sharp tip to trace a five-pointed star within the circle—a pentagram—in the air. With each point I acknowledged the five elements of life: Earth, Air, Fire, Water, and finally, Spirit.
I placed the ritual candles in sets of three on the watchtowers of the circle: north, south, east, and west. Finally, kneeling within the circle, I invoked my powers, focused my intentions, and began to cast my spell of protection against La Llorona, against evil demons of all sorts.
As soon as I began, I heard a scratching sound overhead, a rustling that indicated restless spirits. The bedside lamp flickered on, then back off.
Secondhand Spirits Page 4