The Book of Magic, page 18
There was something called the Glasgow Coma Scale and Gideon had scored well, suggesting there was no permanent damage to his brain. When his hand was squeezed, he exerted pressure in return. He was in there, Antonia was sure of it. Today she came to the hospital directly from the retirement home up in Essex, still smelling of chocolate. She knew that Mrs. Barnes needed some respite from standing guard, and Antonia preferred to spend time with Gideon alone, when she didn’t have to keep a pleasant expression on her face to ensure that her fears about his condition wouldn’t be evident and upset his mother any further. Mrs. Barnes was already wrapped up in fear, and who could blame her?
“Go out for coffee,” Antonia told her. “Take a walk. Make sure you have some time for yourself.” But all Gideon’s mother could do was go back to her rented apartment and cry.
What filled the mind of a person in a coma was a mystery. The networks of the brain shut down, but some of these patterns might be rerouted to places most minds didn’t use. It was not sleep that befell such a patient, but a state much like being anesthetized. Parts of the brain went dark, but people in comas had dreams, memories, visions, and some had vivid nightmares. Recordings of sounds at all pitches had been played in an attempt to stimulate Gideon’s brain and his responses had been charted. He was reacting to certain noise, according to his EEG, especially when music was played, with Yo-Yo Ma’s recordings affecting him more than any other. Gideon was in there. He was. His mother thought she’d seen her boy’s eyes brim with tears as he listened to Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major, but when she spoke to the doctors they were evasive. Wait and see, was all they said.
During Antonia’s visit, she noticed that Gideon was moving his hand without any stimulus. She went to see the doctor in charge and was told it was an uncontrolled tremor, nothing more, but she didn’t think so. Gideon’s movements were specific, and actually quite odd. He appeared to be trying to fit a key into a lock.
Antonia lightly ran a finger over his wrist. “Tell me where you are.”
He couldn’t answer, though he tried. He was in a labyrinth. The walls were constructed of hedges with black leaves. He had a key in his hand. It had once been silver, but now was black. There was the door, but he couldn’t quite reach it. He was used to being in charge of his body, he was so tall and strong, a runner who could go for miles, who had run the last Boston Marathon, cheered on by Kylie at Heartbreak Hill. But now he was in a different place where none of those attributes mattered. It was like walking through water, every step took supreme effort and led nowhere. He simply could not reach the door. He was so frustrated he shook his head, but in his hospital bed he merely winced.
“Talk to me,” Antonia said, leaning in. If only Kylie could speak to him, perhaps she could reach him. Antonia dialed her sister’s number but all she got was a fast beeping and no answer. “Oh, Gideon,” Antonia said. “If you could only hear me.”
In his in-between world, Gideon recognized the voice as belonging to Kylie’s sister and he wished he could tell her where he was. He wished there was a way to get back. He couldn’t get to the door and he couldn’t use the damn key. He groaned and Antonia took his hand. She could feel that he was captured, as surely as if he’d been bound with rope. Gideon grasped her hand for a moment; it was no tremor, she was sure of it, then he let go. He had no choice but to return to the darkness and search for the door that would open the world to him once more.
* * *
Antonia had agreed to meet Ariel for a late lunch, to discuss the papers in the Owens family trust. When she arrived, forty minutes late, Ariel was waiting for her outside the restaurant on Beacon Hill, her back fitted against a brick wall, reading a mystery that had an Emily Dickinson line as its title, Started Early, Took My Dog. The hour technically made it a dinner date.
“Sorry. Time got away from me.” Antonia was exhausted as usual, but for some reason she felt utterly awake in Ariel Hardy’s presence.
“How’s the boy?” Ariel asked.
“Not good.”
Antonia was still puzzling out her drowning dream. There had been crows in the trees and the water in the pond was tinged green. She had taken note of a glass jar deposited on the ground; inside was a thin slip of paper, twisted around like a snake, printed with pale red ink. The weeds were tall and she didn’t realize they were stinging nettle until it was too late; she’d already reached for the jar. As she read the note, the palms of her hands were on fire. She fumbled with the note and let it fall; in a wild attempt to escape the ill effects of the nettle, she ran into the water in the hopes of soothing the flame she now felt. After she woke she couldn’t remember the message she’d read in her dream.
“You’ll love this place,” Ariel told her as they went inside a restaurant called Incanto. “I used to come here with my grandfather every Friday.” There was no sign on the door, but the courthouse was nearby and Incanto was a great favorite with attorneys and judges.
As she followed Ariel inside the tiny restaurant, the idea of being cursed in matters of love struck Antonia as something she should take seriously. They were immediately seated at a table by the window and it was clear that Ariel was a regular, as the maître d’ knew her by name. By now, Antonia’s head was pounding. As the bread was served, a plate of salted butter that was left for them began to melt. Antonia pushed it away. That old wives’ tale about butter melting when someone was in love was utter nonsense. It simply couldn’t be. Exhausted, Antonia closed her eyes while Ariel ordered white wine. “Just water for my date,” she heard Ariel say.
Antonia was remembering more of the dream she’d had the night before. There had been dragonflies darting through the air and the day was so brutally hot steam was rising from the surface of the water. Her hands had stopped smarting from the nettle as she went deeper, even though she knew it was dangerous. She thought she heard a voice calling her back to shore. She thought the sky was filling with clouds as a shadow was cast, but the shadow was formed by the crows winging above her, gathering in masses, as they did when trying to protect one of their own. She didn’t look back, she didn’t care anymore, she went deeper, and cursed or not, warned or not, she reached for Ariel right there in a restaurant on Charles Street and kissed her as if she had never kissed anyone before, because the truth was, she was already drowning.
III.
There was a train from the station on Liverpool Street that ran from London to Witham in Essex in under an hour. The view out the window was a blur, first urban and gray, and then the deep flickering green of the lush countryside splotched with sunlight that faded as the hour grew later. Once off the train, Kylie was directed down the street by a ticket taker, and there she found a local bus that made so many stops in a string of little towns that it took nearly another hour to reach Thornfield. It was a small village, with most houses dating to the seventeenth century, many with mossy slate or tiled roofs and gardens set behind stonewalls. The area was famous for its roses, many of which had already begun to bud in bursts of salmon and crimson along with a pitch-black variety that was known as the Thornfield Rose.
The village was considered picturesque and had been featured in many guidebooks about the region, most of them showcasing the forest on the edge of town, where some of the most ancient trees in the county could be found, huge oaks, hundreds of years old, which were said to sing on gusty days. Children in the village stood out on the street or in their gardens to listen for the trees when the wind came up. Magic had been here longer than the school or the library or the firehouse and had become part of everyday life. Elderly women were respected, and a little feared, for many had retained the old knowledge and held on to that bit of power; they could protect themselves, leaving salt outside their doors and planting lavender for luck. On All Soul’s night most everyone stayed home. People held house parties and insisted it was too chilly to venture out, but the truth was people frequently became lost in the fens on the occasion of that night. Now, on the verge of summer, with the unfolding roses incandescent in the fading light, people still kept the windows in their children’s bedrooms closed at night. Doing so protected against the damp, the children were told, but the mist doesn’t need double locks and drawn curtains. It was magic lurking out there, rising from the fens and shadowing the lanes. People walked with torches in the fluttering twilight, and usually avoided trekking alone in remote places. But when they needed a cure, when their children couldn’t sleep, when their lovers left them for another, they knew where to go.
* * *
Kylie stopped at a shop called Marian and Jason’s Teahouse. There was a Thornfield Rose bush outside the door of the shop, with one black flower already blooming. Bees were gathering, droning in the falling dusk, drawn to the scent of the blooms. Kylie had lost her appetite; each time she thought of Gideon in his hospital bed, she felt sick to her stomach, but once inside the shop she ordered a scone to keep up her energy, along with a cup of tea, to which she added three sugar cubes. The scone arrived with a curious dollop of heavy cream on the plate and a small pot of shimmering black jam. Marian Dodd, the owner and cook, looked at Kylie, unblinking, when asked if she might know a resident called Thomas Lockland.
“What’s your interest in him?” Mrs. Dodd asked. She wasn’t a woman who was easily fazed, but she had a peculiar, chilly expression when Lockland’s name came up. Mrs. Dodd’s daughter, Mary, had dated Tom for a while. He was handsome and charming and they’d all felt sorry for his rough upbringing. They thought the notion that he was a self-centered rogue was mere gossip, then he’d gone ahead and broken Mary Dodd’s heart, dumping her for no apparent reason, which caused her to move to London and never return, not even for a weekend. Mrs. Dodd hoped to never set eyes on Tom again.
“I think our families knew each other long ago,” Kylie explained.
“Oh, I see.” Mrs. Dodd seemed to flinch as she nodded out the window, saying she believed he was currently at number 23 on the far end of the High Street, the main thoroughfare in town. “He comes and goes,” Mrs. Dodd told Kylie.
When Kylie thanked Mrs. Dodd for her help, the proprietor responded by saying, “Good luck to you.” Kylie couldn’t tell if her comment was sincere, for as she went out she noticed that Mrs. Dodd held up her index and pinkie fingers, making the sign of the fox, traditionally used as a counter-charm against hexes to send left-handed magic back to its originator.
The High Street wasn’t especially long, a mile at most, and it was easy enough to locate number 23, a small one-bedroom cottage in need of repair. Once she’d arrived, Kylie hesitated, thinking of Gideon. She made her way into a grove of linden trees across the road and took out her phone to call the hospital. When she was put through to his room the phone rang and rang, then suddenly was picked up.
“Gideon?” Kylie was standing in clover in a damp, muddy dip beside the road. There were cows in a nearby field, all black and white, resting in the shadows. Kylie had to blink back tears. “Talk to me,” she said.
“Kylie, it’s me.”
Antonia, her dear sister, to whom she didn’t wish to speak.
“Put him on,” Kylie demanded.
“Kylie.” Antonia sighed.
“I want to talk to him,” Kylie insisted.
“There’s no point. He can’t speak. We’re all so worried about you. Just tell me where you are.”
Kylie laughed, but the sharp burst of laugher turned into a sob. “I’m not crying,” she said, embarrassed by her raw emotions.
“You should be here with Gideon,” Antonia urged. “Wherever you are we’ll come get you. You know I’ll do anything to help you.”
“Then hold the phone to his ear.”
“Kylie, he’s in a coma.”
“Are you trying to help me or not!”
The phone was held up and Kylie could hear Gideon’s breathing, a shallow, watery sound, as though he were drowning. “Come back,” she said to him. She wiped her black tears away with the back of her hand. “I’m getting you out of there,” she promised. “You just have to wait for me. Wait right there.”
When she hung up, she collapsed in the clover and wept, then wiped her face with the tail end of her shirt. She felt different, as if nothing could stop her. She had no choice in the matter if she intended to bring him back. She made her way out of the grove of trees. The Book of the Raven advised that only a person who has been cursed will understand the meaning of carrying the burden of being exiled from her own life. You cannot do as you please, only as the curse commands you to do. That would end, no matter the price. Kylie took in the last few breaths of the life she’d led before arriving at number 23. Out here in the country the air was perfumed with the scent of ferns and juniper. Kylie had wrapped The Book of the Raven in newspaper, then again in a scarf, which was carefully tucked into her backpack. There was a tremor in her hands as they rested on the iron gate. She recalled the librarian’s last words. Don’t trust anyone.
When she lifted her gaze and looked through the window, Kylie spied a handsome man in his twenties at his desk, his attention riveted on the book he was reading. The vine at the window scraped against the glass as Kylie leaned upon the sill, a slight sound, but one that caused Tom Lockland to turn from his studies. He was the seventh generation in his family to have that name and he carried the weight of those who’d come before him. He closed his book and turned off the light before rising from the desk.
It was only natural for Tom to be wary as he opened the door to Kylie, for he was a man who’d been bred to be cautious. His shaven head only served to bring out his sharp, intelligent features. Although he had been studying the Dark Art since he was a boy, the magic he practiced was a thin, weak strain, and the best he could accomplish were parlor tricks, sleight of hand, small incantations that called up desire in the women he met, and impressed drunken patrons in pubs when he held fire in his hand. Any real witch would laugh at his attempts, but not at his expertise in poison. That was one art in which he excelled, bringing people to the brink of death, using the herbs in an old poison garden that grew wild in Devotion Field where he foraged for Amanita virosa, a local variety of mushroom known as the Destroying Angel.
His life’s work was revenge and he was more than willing to use left-handed magic to do so. Like called to like, and to destroy something you often had to become it yourself. Tom had claimed the Crooked Path and took to walking at Lockland Manor, once his family’s sprawling estate, now belonging to the National Trust, visited by scores of hikers and vacationers when there was fine weather. The house itself had been built in the 1300s, but it was mostly a shell, topped by a tall spire, for it had been consumed in flame, and for those who dared to venture inside it was possible to look through the damaged ceilings to the sky above. It should have all been his—the parkland, the manor house, the family wealth—but the Locklands’ circumstances had grown worse with each generation and people in the village had calmly watched them come to ruin. There was drink involved, and bad luck; marriages were wrecked, lives were cut short, poverty haunted them, jail terms led to disaster. It was a tradition for women married to the Locklands to disappear and leave their men, and there were few who could blame them. Tom’s own mother had vanished on his fifth birthday and his father had neglected him, leaving him to sit outside the pubs he frequented where Tom would wait till all hours, having been reminded not to call his father Dad in front of any of the ladies, beaten when he talked back, sleeping in a shed whenever one of these ladies was brought home for the night. Tom had learned that women were heartache from the moment you encountered them and that men were not to be trusted. The first Thomas Lockland swore he’d married a witch; he’d taken their son away from his wife to be raised by his sisters, but in the end his wife had ruined him. When she ran away, he tracked her to the house of a woman who practiced the Nameless Art and after his downfall at the hands of this woman, Hannah Owens, his wife had run off with another man and the child they’d had during her marriage to Lockland.
The family curse had been initiated when his seventh great-grandfather was poisoned only half an hour’s walk from the village, in a place called Devotion Field, where an apothecary garden had once grown, rife with dangerous plants including yarrow and black nightshade, wolfsbane and foxglove and lords and ladies with its toxic black berries. All this bad fortune had been conjured by a cunning woman who had long ago been burned. Festivals were held on what had once been her land on the old holidays of May Eve, All Hallows’ Eve, Candlemas, and Lammas, with women gathering as the wheel of the year moved forward. On these occasions, white paper bags lit by candles arose into the violet sky so that stars seemed to be both falling and rising.
People in the village were fools for the old folkways and they always had been, leaving out saucers of goat’s milk for witches on overcast nights, allowing crows to fly through their windows rather than chase them away, drinking herbal teas they thought would strengthen their constitutions. It was the village council that had voted to remove the Locklands from their property nearly three hundred years earlier and Tom intended to pay them back threefold. Let them sit in their houses and hide, let them lock their doors and leave the streets of the village empty. When he had the power to do so, he would make them understand what it was like to be in exile in your own home.
Tom fixed his gaze on Kylie upon encountering her, immediately interested. It wasn’t her beauty that drew him in, but the aura of magic around her. Even someone with as little talent as he could tell she had power. “Did you want something?” Tom asked, for in his experience people always did.
Kylie took a breath. The next step was about to begin. “Tom Lockland?”
“That would be me.” Tom took in the measure of the girl and decided that she was far more than a spoiled American.
Kylie introduced herself and said, “I thought you might help me. I’ve heard that you know something about curses.”
