Waking the Witch, page 25
Her makeup bag was still on the passenger seat. Pulling up a good head of face powder on her brush, she focused on Miranda, spoke the finding spell and blew the powder over the map of England’s home counties. No puzzle-box or keyhole like the others, the finding spell created within her the shape of Miranda, giving Gosha the feeling she was somewhere close, just out of view, around a corner or in another room.
The powder billowed off the brush like a smoke ring from a fat cigar, but the cloud ignited as it drifted over the map and burned away without revealing a thing.
She tried it again, and again the powder burned to nothing.
What’s happening? The spell worked an hour ago.
She tried it again, on George this time, his presence looming over her as she cast the spell, and again the powder burned away.
Margrave must have done something. She remembered the chaos that followed Mrs. Dearing’s attempt at scrying on him. Whatever countermeasures he had about himself to prevent others from spying on him must also encompass George and Miranda. She had to understand the finding spell better if she was to track them. She needed expert help.
Her mother’s house was a half-hour drive in traffic, time that could be better spent. Canterbury Gardens was five minutes away from Miranda’s even at rush hour. Gosha dumped her handbag on the chair by the front door, leaned her weight against the wall and took a deep breath. The house was quiet, her children safe under her mother’s protection. George was on his way to a fate that she wasn’t sure he deserved, despite all he’d done. And Cressida.
Poor girl.
A week ago, Gosha’s mother would have been the last person she would have called for help. Tonight, she was the first.
“Are you okay?” Her mother’s voice crackled down the line. “Elsie, it’s Gosha,” she shouted away from the receiver. “Pick up the extension on the landing.”
“It’s me, I’m here,” came Mrs. Dearing’s indomitable, upbeat chirrup.
“Tell us what happened.”
Gosha blurted out everything, the words tumbling out in a jumbled accounting of everything that happened in the hours since they parted. After she finished, the other end of the line was silent.
Her mother cleared her throat.
“You did well, Goga, very well.”
“But what do I do now?”
“We need to know more about this saint of the Devil and his masking spell. I’m going to set up a party line. Do as I say. Exactly as I say. Not like when you were a girl, and you thought you knew everything.”
Oh my word. Gosha rolled her eyes. I’ll never hear the end of it.
“Yes, Mamusha. Tell me.”
“Find five mirrors. Doesn’t matter what size. Arrange them around the kitchen table facing you. Place a saucer in front of each and a candle in every saucer.”
“There’s a box of candles under the kitchen sink,” chimed in Mrs. Dearing.
“Pour milk and some form of spirit in equal measure in the saucers. Whiskey is good, rum is better.”
“There’s a bottle of Appleton Estate left over from the Christmas party in the drinks cabinet in the living room,” said Mrs. Dearing.
She knows my house better than I do.
“Leave me on the line while you do it all,” said Gosha’s mother. “And don’t light the candles until I tell you.”
“Yes, Mamusha.”
“Good girl.”
She put the receiver down and ran upstairs on a scavenger hunt to collect the mirrors, the rum, and the candles.
“Everything’s ready,” she said, picking up the receiver again. Around the kitchen table she had assembled mirrors of every size: two wall mirrors—one large, one small—propped up against stacks of books, a hand mirror, George’s shaving mirror from the bathroom, and the mirror from her makeup compact. Saucers of milk and rum with a single candle balanced in the middle stood in front of each.
“Turn off the lights,” said her mother. “All the lights in the house. Check every room.”
“Everything’s off.”
“Are you sure, Gosha? Check. Every electric light must be turned off.”
Gosha sighed. If her mother had said something, she could have been doing this all along as she scoured the house for the mirrors, but she held her tongue and did as she was told.
“Light the candles from right to left. Counter-clockwise. What’s that funny word you use, Elsie?”
“Widdershins.”
“Okay.” Gosha cradled the receiver under her chin as she lit the candles. A warm glow spilled across the table.
“Good,” said her mother. “Elsie, tell them we’re ready.”
One by one, the candles began to sputter and smoke. Loud snaps and cracks cut through the quiet of the house as the smoke began to cluster over the center of the table. The reflection in each mirror darkened as the glass rippled like water on the surface of a pond. When the mirrors stilled, each had become a window into a different room. Her mother’s face moved into the frame of the largest mirror to Gosha’s left.
“I have it,” she said, her voice emanating from both the receiver and the mirror. “It’s working.”
Mrs. Dearing appeared in the mirror next to her, one of her mother’s friends stepping into each of the rest.
“Are we all here?” said her mother.
Each of the witches acknowledged that they were.
“Hang up the phone, Gosha.”
“So, tell us,” said the gray-haired South Asian witch, Shreya, dressed in another beautiful sari, this one green and blue. “How did it go?”
“The Betrayal,” said her mother. “Tell them. You can be honest. We’re all sisters here.”
Gosha looked at the expectant faces as she considered her experience. So much had happened in the hours since rolling around on Esher Green, it seemed years ago.
“It was terrifying, overwhelming. I thought I was going to die.”
The witches all nodded in sympathy.
“When I did mine in China,” said the Chinese witch, Mei, “I had a seizure, broke my arm and bit off the tip of my tongue.”
She stuck her tongue out to show.
“And the Queen?” asked Eleanor, the young-looking English witch. “Did you go all the way to Penrith?”
“Oh, honestly, Eleanor,” said Mei. “Read a newspaper or something. That was the old Queen. She died more than a decade ago. The new one lives in Surrey.”
“Show us your talisman,” said Mrs. Dearing.
The others all chimed in, agreeing. As Gosha took it from her pocket and held it out before them, they all oohed and ahhed.
“A lipstick,” said Eleanor. “What a good idea.”
“It’s very sleek,” said Mei. “Seamless flow integration. It should be able to channel a lot of power. Very impressive.”
“She did well, your daughter,” said Shreya.
Gosha’s mother beamed with pride as the others all agreed.
“And now, ladies, she needs our help.”
“Show us,” said Shreya. “Show us the spell.”
Gosha retrieved her makeup kit and the road atlas from her handbag by the door and replicated the finding spell. The cloud of face powder once again burned away to nothing.
“He’s the saint of Desire?” said Shreya.
“Yes, that’s what he said. His name is Emerson Margrave.”
“Never heard of him.”
“He said he’s trying to fuse his sphere with my husband’s. Is that possible?”
Mei let out a yelp, and an almighty crash came from somewhere beyond her mirror. Her head disappeared.
“Mei, did you try to find him yourself?” said Mrs. Dearing.
Mei ran past the mirror with an electric iron in one hand and a large kitchen knife in the other.
“I suppose anything’s possible,” said Eleanor. “As much as the high and mighty would like to think their domains are carved in stone, the spheres emerge from us. Anything human is subject to change. An entire sphere was eradicated hundreds of years ago because it became too powerful and all the others organized against it. If that can happen, there’s no reason two spheres couldn’t be merged into one, although I don’t know how it would be done.”
“With the sacrifice of a host of innocents,” said Gosha.
“Just a minute,” shouted Mei from beyond the view of the mirror.
“Shouldn’t we help her?” asked Gosha.
“Who, Mei?” said Shreya, shaking her head. “She can take care of herself.”
“He’ll be difficult to find,” said Eleanor. “The slightest hint of his plan getting out would bring the other spheres down on him before you could curse your neighbor’s cow.”
The sound of a hundred pots and pans clattering to the ground from beyond Mei’s mirror filled the kitchen. As the din subsided, Mei slipped back into frame, running her fingers through her long, straight hair.
“He’s a bastard, that one,” she said. “Ruined my best bowl. Well, now we know how he’s masking himself. It’s complex, many layers deep. A particularly vicious spell with limited autonomy. This saint must be an old one. Knows how to keep his business private. That basic finding charm you’re using won’t be powerful enough to break through it. We need something devious and serpentine. Any suggestions?”
An animated discussion ensued, the witches arguing among themselves about technicalities of Craft that were meaningless to Gosha. Most of these women were strangers to her, but their willingness to help when she was so woefully inexperienced, just a newborn to their world of ancient secrets, comforted her.
She thought back on the handful of times she’d used the finding spell. The experience had been different the times it worked compared to when it hadn’t. When she was successful in finding Miranda at her house in the mews, the impression of her created by the spell word drifted away into the powder. With the blocked spell, the impression had lingered, her presence powerful, but removed.
It reminded Gosha of the weeks after her father died. At first, though he was gone, his memory held on. She would go into the living room and be shocked that he wasn’t sitting in his chair watching the races on the telly. She would see his gardening gloves gone from their place in the greenhouse and look for him pruning his roses at the bottom of the garden. The more time passed, his lingering impression faded. The way he looked, the way he smelled, the sound of his heavy feet walking across the bedroom floor upstairs when she was down in the kitchen, all faded. And yet, she might see the evening paper delivery on the doorstep, or his shoes in the downstairs cupboard, and she would feel his presence so strongly it was if he were standing behind her, looking over her shoulder. This was the way she experienced Miranda’s presence when she cast the spell for her mother’s friends.
“Shreya, Shreya, you’re wrong,” said Mei, shouting over the South Asian witch and snapping Gosha out of her reverie.
“Mamusha,” she said, turning to her mother in her gilded frame. “Tell me exactly why the finding spell isn’t working.”
“Your devil-man has created an effigy of himself, like the one you made this morning, but out of Influence that he has twisted and shaped and given life. The saints call it a shade. It has no substance, no real shape, but it stands between him and any use of Influence to seek him out.”
“And Mei said we needed something more serpentine.”
Mei and Shreya continued to bicker, ignoring Gosha’s side-conversation with her mother.
“Yes,” said her mother. “We need to find your friend without asking for her directly, a spell to carry the request around the shade, but the bastard thing is clever. It knows we’re looking for its principal. There are only so many paths to find something. If we try another spell and it doesn’t work the first time, then it’s useless to us.”
Her mother turned her attention back to the discussion among her friends.
Something about what she said nagged at Gosha from the back of her mind, but whenever it drew close, it slipped away before she could catch it. She loved her kitchen, but it wasn’t the part of the house where she was most at home, where her mind was most free to wander. She got up from the table without drawing attention to herself and made her way upstairs to her workroom.
The portrait of Miranda stood out in its frame in the light of its overhead spot. This Miranda, captured at the beginning of her career before disappointment and addiction, was filled with hope. Morning light shone in through the picture window as she leaned against its frame and stared out over the rooftops of Cheyne Heath. Though Miranda’s pose was easy and casual, Gosha had spent weeks preparing for the shoot, doing study after study to compose the shot just the way she wanted. In the scene around her were representations of things Miranda held most dear: her favorite guitar resting against the wall near her feet; the records that inspired her the most spread out in piles by the portable record player they had huddled around in their first flat. Interspersed with the memorabilia of Miranda’s life were other suggestions of her, objects that Gosha thought of when she thought of her friend: a hand-knitted shawl draped across the back of the chair; a delicate china tea-set on a silver tray next to a steamer trunk cracked open to reveal a hint of exotic fabrics. Everything in the picture reflected Miranda Lovelock.
She stood back and raised a hand to block out the center of the image, leaving only the set dressing around her friend. The background was like a code. If someone had shown it to her, she would know that it signified Miranda.
She inhaled sharply and rushed to her archive, a phalanx of file cabinets against one wall. With a surge of excitement, she rummaged through them to find prints of the studies she had made to prepare for the shoot. She found the folder at the back of a drawer, stuffed with prints and negatives that spilled out as she opened it up on her work bench. The exact print she wanted, the last one she took on the night before the shoot, leaped out at her from the mess. She held it up and compared it to the final shot on the wall.
Exactly what I need.
Downstairs, the discussion between the witches had turned into a commotion, all of them talking over each other.
“Ladies!” She banged on the kitchen table to catch their attention. The mirrors jumped and the candle flames flickered.
“What’s the best spell you’ve come up with,” she asked her mother.
“It won’t work. It’s too subtle. We need something powerful to punch through the veil he’s dropped around himself.”
“Just give it to me.”
Her mother looked down and wrote, surprising Gosha that her abruptness hadn’t resulted in a reprimand. When her mother finished, she held up a pad with the word scrawled phonetically on it, each syllable separated by a dash, the emphasis marked with three sharp underlines. Gosha wrapped her fingers around her lipstick and mouthed the word, saying it in her mind, feeling its shape and resonance. Her mother was right. It was a more subtle and serpentine spell. Even the thought of it caused ripples in the flow of Influence within her.
“I think I can make it work,” she said out loud, but more to the photographic print on the table before her than to the women watching.
“Pelletethaneras.”
Her awareness of the kitchen shifted. The cabinets and counters disappeared in the dark, as if the room had doubled or tripled in size. The sound of her breathing became loud in her ears and an owl hooted somewhere in the distance. Panic shocked through her, her heart racing as she recalled the twisting of reality in the cellar in Poland, but she shut the thought down hard.
The spell had presence and intent like the curse her mother had given her, ready to take whatever she gave it and do her will, ready to race through the world to find whoever or whatever she wanted.
In the dark beyond the candlelight, something stirred. Two slits of glowing, sickly yellow appeared an unimaginable distance away. The stench of rotting flesh wafted toward her, and the hairs on the back of her neck stood on end.
In the test photograph, the set was lit and ready, the chair in which Miranda would sit the next day empty.
The figure in the dark paced like a wild animal.
Gosha ran her gaze across the photo. She had lived with the finished shot for years. Her mind tried to superimpose the image of Miranda upon it, but she blocked it out, only allowing the test shot to be real. When she was satisfied, when she captured the image in her mind’s eye exactly as she wanted it, she released the spell.
The presence of the spell flitted away from her and the kitchen re-established itself. The evil shape pacing in the darkness vanished. Candle smoke clustered over the photograph into a dense cloud of rolling smog over the tabletop.
The witches all began to talk at once, making Gosha jump, all of them saying the same thing:
“Light a candle!”
She snatched a candle from the box. The small, frayed wick took the flame from her match and burned brighter than any of the others on the table, blazing into a miniature torch in her hand. To her amazement, the flame detached itself from the wick, rising up to float in the air and drift away toward the front door.
“Go, go, go,” cried her mother. “Follow it.”
“Take the candle and the photograph with you,” said Mrs. Dearing as Gosha knocked her chair over jumping to her feet. “They tether the spell. Without them the sprite will dwindle and fade.”
38
The sprite built up speed to a steady pace of twenty-five miles per hour. London traffic made following it a challenge. If it drifted too far away, the sprite slowed and waited until she caught up, and the longer she took to get back in range, the dimmer it became. Once they got out of London, the sprite led her into Hertfordshire, where the back lanes made it easier to follow. Traveling the M1 at fifty miles per hour below the speed limit would guarantee she be stopped by the police and lose track of the delicate flame.
The drive lulled her into a dangerous reverie. Her mind drifted back to the image of the dead and deformed body of Margrave’s thug sprawled across Miranda’s kitchen floor. Whatever good her mother thought she had done by giving her a curse with its own mind, Gosha was still the one who cast the spells. The responsibility was hers. It hurt to think he was someone’s child or someone’s lover. She could blame Margrave for his death, but that would be a lie.
