by Stevie Day
Was she just being lazy? There were more people to interview, follow-ups with Able Johnstone and especially Dr. Dalton still needed. She’d already done some basic Internet searches on poisons, but much more in-depth research was still to come.
But was all that really necessary when she could end this case conclusively in just a few minutes? Janet would know what happened to her and Alice believed she would want to help her husband let go. All it would take was a single magic spell, one Alice was equipped and capable of casting. And the Witching Hour was the perfect time, when magic was at its strongest, to cast such a spell.
But the Witching Hour was over. She again focused on the clock on her phone. 11:17.
She’d been so lost in her thoughts she didn’t notice the time moving forward, which wasn’t so rare for Alice. She got lost in thoughts all the time.
Still. 11:11 had passed. But midnight was just a little bit away. And maybe more realistically, so was 3am.
Or tomorrow night. Or the night after. Or never.
She put the phone down and wrung her hands together hard. Where had this come from, so suddenly? Why these morbid thoughts, these thoughts of death, these thoughts of dark magic? It was so far removed from Alice’s version of normal.
But she knew. There was no sense in playing games with her own psyche, leaving the unfinished thought buried just below the surface, dancing around it. Be honest, Alice, she thought.
If she could pull off the spell… if she could talk to Janet Lombardi… then maybe she could talk to her mom.
No “maybe.” Definitely.
Within moments she was in her basement, the book open in her lap as she prepared the spell.
11
Alice dove into her spell books and didn’t look back. Every time the little voice, the white angel on her shoulder, tried to speak up, Alice shushed it. Not only did she shush it, but shushed it with a force that was unlike her.
There were only two components to the spell: the incantation from the old spell book and something personal and cherished of Janet Lombardi’s. That personal object would have to be destroyed by the spell.
I could wait, Alice thought. Get something small from Barry. Maybe stop by for a visit and make up a reason to be left alone long enough to grab something. A piece of jewelry, an old photo?
But she already had Janet’s laptop and phone. Maybe these technological wonders weren’t the most romantic idea of a “cherished personal item.” Alice doubted Janet had ever snuggled up to her phone when she was sad. But what was more personal these days? What other physical items carried with them so much intimate knowledge of their owners?
She couldn’t just destroy either of those. But a piece of one? A small piece? That could work.
And she knew exactly the piece. Grabbing a knife from one of the shelves of tools and ingredients that lined her basement workspace, Alice pried the J key from Janet’s keyboard. Her excitement was building. She barely noticed the damage she’d done to the K on the keyboard, scuffing it up significantly. If she was going to have to replace the J, why not the K too?
She tossed the J in a metal mixing bowl and flipped open the book. The book was one of several she had on dark magic that, until now, she’d thought of as merely academic. A book to study, never to actually cast from. But as she thumbed through it now, a palpable sense of dread threatened to overwhelm her. This was real. This could work. She could make it work.
But should she?
“Shush,” she said out loud, as if the shoulder angel was as real as the spell in the book.
It didn’t occur to her during all this shushing that if there was an angel on one shoulder, there was probably a devil on the other.
She closed the book and made her way back to the magic room. Once there, she sat down on her cushion, snapped the candles awake, and put the bowl and book on the floor in front of her.
It was only 11:45. Still fifteen minutes to go until the witching hour, when the magic was strongest, and the spell was most likely to succeed. Still time to think about what she was doing, still time to change her mind.
Instead, she read and reread the spell. While the text in the book was largely in English, the language of this particular spell was completely foreign to her. But as she went over it, she felt that she’d be able to get by with pronouncing the words phonetically.
The fifteen minutes dragged on endlessly. Her heart was pounding, adrenaline pumping. The angel kept trying to talk to her; she could actually visualize it on her shoulder, pleading with Alice to stop and think. Hadn’t she watched a cartoon when she was little where the angel gets brutally beaten and thrown away by a cartoon animal? It’d been a funny cartoon, right? Why did it seem so horrible now?
Alice glanced at her phone. 11:59. Time to start. She shut the phone off and slid it dismissively behind her. Best not to risk interruption.
She sat crossed legged, as she always did. The candles flickered. The J from Janet’s keyboard laid unmoving in the metal bowl. She began the incantation.
There was a harshness to the words as she said them. An edge, as if the words themselves could cut. Said together and out loud, she could sense a pattern and rhythm to them. It took her a minute to say the entire spell, and in that minute Alice had felt… nothing. As she finished, she felt that same nothing. Had her pronunciation been that bad? Had she missed something crucial?
She said it again, this time slower. She put more focus and emphasis on each word, taking her time.
And again… nothing.
“Dammit!” she swore. And she seldom swore. Even a small swear like that usually made her blush. But she was deep in it now, with the combination of adrenaline and her pounding heart driving her forward. Her determination was building and transforming into anger.
She said the words one more time, this time using that anger, using all the bite, bile, and pain that was suddenly building and rising from somewhere deep within her.
If she couldn’t talk to Janet, how would she ever be able to talk to her mother?
She finished and waited. When nothing happened, she pounded the floor with her fist. She raised her head and screamed in frustration.
There was a creak above her. Not loud, but loud enough for her to think she wasn’t imagining it. From the ceiling. The roof?
Then she heard another creak from the other side of the room, and for a second, Alice imagined a cute family of raccoons wandering around on her roof. If she could have fully let go of the anger and negative energy she’d conjured, and instead focused only on something cute and fuzzy, she might’ve stopped what was about to happen from happening.
But then the candles went out.
The room went pitch black for a moment. But only a moment, as suddenly the J in the metal bowl erupted into flames. The flames grew fast, reaching as high as the ceiling. Alice’s heart pounded as she feared she was about to burn her house down in a magic flame.
But as quickly as the flames had exploded, they suddenly died down to a more reasonable level, flickering orange and blue just over the lip of the bowl. Alice stared into the flames, not quite in shock but still stunned and unsure of what to do next.
She sensed movement around her. She glanced to her left and was startled to see liquid streaming rapidly down the wall. She spun her head to the right and saw the same thing on that wall. It was all around her now, dark, viscous fluid oozing down her walls.
Thunder banged outside, loud enough to shake the house and make Alice cry out. The panic from seeing the fire a moment ago never had a chance to fully subside, and she was right on the edge of being consumed by it. “Oh no,” she said. “What’d I do?”
The thunder crashed, the house trembled, the flames burned, and the liquid oozed. Alice put her hands dumbly to her ears, trying with all her might not to scream. Because if she screamed, she would have lost the last shred of control she had just a few moments ago, and what would happen then?
There was a face in the fire. Alice gasped, her breath cau
ght in her throat. The features of the face were impossible to make out, but she had no doubt it was a face. For a brief moment, she thought she might actually be able to summon the courage to speak. But then the face swooped up, the fire with it, until an ethereal figure appeared over the fire, looking down at her.
The room got quiet. The thunder ceased, the liquid stopped oozing down the walls. The figure in front of her was female and, while Alice had only ever seen pictures of Janet Lombardi, she was sure that was who she was looking at.
Alice collected herself and summoned the courage she would need if she was going to talk to this spirit. Her mouth opened, the makings of a question about to come forth, when Janet’s own mouth slowly opened.
But no words came from the spirit. Instead its mouth grew impossibly large, its eyes equally wide as it raised and pointed its ghostly finger at Alice. It screamed, and it was the most horrible, terrifying sound Alice had ever heard. With the scream the thunder cracked again, the flames exploded to the ceiling again, the liquid oozed, and the house shook with such force Alice was convinced it was about to fly apart.
The sounds in the room were deafening and the face that might or might not have been Janet Lombardi twisted and screamed. Suddenly Alice was flung backwards against the door with such force that she saw stars from her impact with it.
Alice rubbed her eyes open. But that face, the face of an angry spirit, was now right in front of hers. It leaned in close to her ear as if to whisper something to her, and it did whisper something to her, but by now Alice was unable to process it. She’d been terrified, afraid like she had never been afraid before, and the force of the impact against the wall had been so hard that she finally passed out.
She didn’t know how much time had passed when she finally came to. But the spirit was gone. The room was quiet and still, the candles once again lit. There was no sign of the liquid that had oozed down her wall. She crawled over to the metal bowl and looked in. The J was still there, burnt and mangled and melted, never to be used again.
Alice laid down and looked at the ceiling. She’d done it, the thing she had set out to do. She had contacted the dead. And it’d been horrible. And she had been wrong; she hadn’t been able to handle it. She hadn’t been prepared.
What had Janet said to her? She was sure it was a word, a single word that was just out of reach. But she couldn’t remember it. Hopefully it would come back to her. She decided she would meditate in the morning, and perhaps she would find it then.
The experience had been horrible and Alice regretted doing it. She wished she’d listened to her father, that she’d even listened to her own voice telling her to slow down and consider what she was doing. Instead she had rushed forward blindly, arrogantly, and conjured a nightmare.
But one thing did come from the experience. It wasn’t the mystery word Janet Lombardi had spoken, but instead the feeling that now ran through every fiber of Alice’s being. She couldn’t put it into words, but somehow Janet had communicated something to her, maybe in a similar way that a millipede or tree might. And she had told Alice one crucial thing as clear as day.
Janet Lombardi had been murdered.
12
Alice had a restless night’s sleep. She rarely had nightmares, but they came in spades that night. Nothing concrete, no dream storyline to remember. Just images and sounds, dark and moving, grabbing and screaming. At some point she did finally achieve a deep sleep and that should have been refreshing. But instead, she woke up with a start, her long hair plastered by sweat to her face, shoulders, and back.
She looked anxiously around the bedroom, initially unsure of her surroundings. The room was bright. The sun wasn’t in the right place. What did that mean?
She grabbed her phone and looked at the clock. 11:11.
Alice was baffled. Had she dreamed everything? How could it still be 11:11? Why was the sun up at 11:11, and in a weird place?
Then the obvious explanation emerged in her mind, startling her. It was 11:11am! She never slept until 11:11am!
She sprang to her feet and threw on the clothes she hadn’t remembered removing the night before. She ran out into the hallway and nearly tripped over Mr. Ploppers, who was babbling some kind of nonsense she couldn’t quite take the time to decipher. She practically sprinted down the short hallway to the magic room and flung open the door, unsure of what she was expecting to find.
Everything was as she left it the night before. There was no sign of fire, ghosts, wrath, or ruin.
But the twisted and melted J was still in the metal bowl. Any slim “it was all just a bad dream” wish she may have had melted away with it.
Still, she felt disheveled and strange. Off. She kept her own office hours, and sometimes her job dictated she not go in at all for the day. But she always tried to at least stop by once every day, and her normal routine brought her in by 9:00am. And there was no reason to shift from that routine.
Maybe she was just being hard on herself. People overslept all the time. And it’d been a late, eventful night. In fact, she didn’t even remember going to bed. She had been exhausted and the last thing she remembered clearly was sitting down on her bed.
Mr. Ploppers continued to yammer away, and Alice continued to ignore him. It wasn’t mean-spirited; she was still just trying to collect herself.
Calm was what she needed, and calm was something she was good at. She closed the door to the magic room, almost bopping a slow-reacting Mr. Ploppers on the head, then sat down on the cushion. She placed her hands on her knees and breathed in deeply.
Eyes closed, Alice turned her attention to her belly and the breath that lived there. Slowly, she felt it expand as she inhaled. Slowly, she felt—
But Mr. Ploppers wouldn’t stop meowing.
That was okay. Cutting out distractions was something else she was good at.
She pulled her attention back to her belly, back to her breathing. Slowly she felt her belly expand as—
Still with the meowing! “Can you just give me ten dang minutes, dude?” she screamed. The meowing stopped and Alice felt instant regret. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d snapped at her pet and dear friend. Had she ever?
“Mr. Ploppers…” she started, voice raised so he could hear her through the door. “I’m sorry, buddy. I just need ten minutes, ‘kay? Then I’ll give you a treat or three. Okay? Are we good?”
She heard only a tiny meow in reply, but that would have to be good enough. She really needed to meditate.
Once again, focus on the belly. Feel it expand as—
Wait a minute. Why was Mr. Ploppers meowing? Mr. Ploppers didn’t meow. Mr. Ploppers talked.
Alice jumped to her feet and raced for the door, an unfamiliar anxiety racing through her blood, making her heart race. She flung open the door and called out.
“Ploppers? Hey, Ploppers? Where are you?”
The big cat came around the corner, looking up at her with huge eyes. He meowed and Alice let out an involuntary cry.
“Ploppers. Oh, no…” She collapsed to her knees. “I… I can’t hear you.”
If it was any consolation—not that it was—Mr. Ploppers seemed as distressed as Alice at the sudden loss of their ability to communicate with each other. He circled her feet with his big round eyes looking confused, all the while meowing incessantly.
Alice bent down to pick him up and tried to reassure him, but being held wasn’t really his thing, even in this trying moment. He scuttled away and sat down out of reach, still looking at her with those big cat eyes.
“What’s happening?” Alice asked, partly to Mr. Ploppers and partly to the universe. Magic was and always had been a part of her. Sure, there was study and practice in order to maintain and grow her knowledge and skill. But it was largely spiritual and innate, as natural to her as breathing.
And it was gone. Completely gone.
She ran back to her magic room and snapped her fingers at the candles, something she’d done thousands of times over the years, a
nd something that had never failed her. They should light. They should light easily. It was one of her simplest spells.
But they didn’t. She snapped her fingers until they hurt, and still they didn’t light.
Alice felt panic rising fast, and she seemed unable to stop it. She’d never had a panic attack but had seen one once; a friend in high school, the eventual valedictorian, had gotten a D on a history exam and suddenly started shaking, unable to catch her breath. It’d been terrifying for Alice—infinitely more so for her friend—and had given her already ingrained meditation practice even more importance. She never wanted to go through that.
Yet here she was, right on the verge. She felt helpless to stop it, all sense of control fading fast. She needed to sit, needed to breathe, needed to meditate.
She sat down and hurriedly assumed her standard position. Her breathing was fast, way too fast, and her mind was racing. But meditation… More than anything else, that was her “thing.” She could do this.
But she couldn’t. She knew how hard meditation was for a lot of people, how challenging it was to quiet their minds, and she never took it for granted that she was “good” at it. And suddenly not being able to quiet her mind, to be in touch with her breathing, to feel control completely slip away…
She thought of her dad and suddenly knew she had to talk to him. He would know what to do. He’d certainly be able to help her. But if she couldn’t mediate, and if she really had lost touch with her magic, how could she contact him? He was days away from a phone. There had never been a problem with reaching him before; their connection had always remained rock solid. Neither had ever anticipated something like this happening.
Her phone was ringing. It might have been ringing for some time before she noticed, she wasn’t sure. Grabbing it out of her back pocket—foolishly hoping it was somehow her father—she read the screen: Mr. Lewis, the director of the pet shelter she volunteered at.