Chapter 19, Witchcraft for Wayward Girls

Chapter 19

Mark a circle nine feet across. Power may be drawn out of a witch’s body to work a spell, but unless it is confined in a circle it will trickle away before it can be used. For best results, take a string four and a half feet long, anchor it in the center of what will become your ritual circle, tie it to a stick, and move it around the central axis.

The next night they used Holly’s key and went to the river. They found the fallen tree. They carried what they needed in Fern’s pillowcase. They had to move fast. Rose’s parents picked her up the day after tomorrow. She needed to unleash her anger while she was still at the Home.

Clouds covered the stars. The moon shone through them, a crescent the color of old bone. The river slid by like a great silent snake. It was a night for curses.

Fern grunted as she squatted and held one end of the string while Holly walked around her in a circle, using a stick tied to the other end to scratch their circle into the dirt. It was lumpier than the one they’d drawn with Miss Parcae.

“That’s nine feet, more or less,” Fern said.

Rose walked the edges, looking for breaks. She squatted to inspect a section. She didn’t grunt.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s do the altar.”

Holly and Rose piled up mud to make a rough altar in the middle of their circle. It was only a few inches higher than the ground, but it would do. Like Rose’s anger, it was theirs.

On the altar place a sword, a cord, a clay bowl of fresh water, and another of salt.

They opened the pillowcase and laid the rusty, wooden-handled steak knife they’d stolen from the kitchen, the string they’d used to draw the circle, and two decorative candy bowls taken from the music room on the altar. Holly filled one bowl with water from the river. In the other she dumped a paper packet of salt from McDonald’s they’d gotten from Tansy. It had cost them the rest of Rose’s bippies. Then Fern laid out the pliers she’d stolen from the downstairs hall closet. The knife should be enough, but they’d brought the pliers just in case.

Crown the altar with an animal heart, pierced by nine daggers.

Tomorrow night’s dinner was chicken hearts in gravy. Fern unfolded a square of wax. Inside was a tough, dark muscle the size of her thumb. She couldn’t believe something so tiny could keep a chicken alive. It was too small for even one dagger, let alone nine, so they’d settled for sewing needles. Rose worked them through, one at a time, each one bending as it pierced the tough muscle.

Cleanse yourself and go skyclad. Put nothing between yourself and the moon.

They washed in the river. Fern saw that Rose still carried her belly, but it hung slack and empty. Fern ducked her head beneath the surface of the water and shut out the sight. Underwater, the baby pulled her hands toward it like a magnet.

Zinnia should be there, but she wouldn’t come. She said they were wasting their time. She said the only thing that mattered was finding a way to save Holly and that playing witchcraft was a fool’s game. But Rose had asked them to avenge her daughter, and Fern and Holly had to help. They were her coven.

Fern’s hands settled on her stomach. She and the baby shared the same body, shared the same skin, sometimes even shared the same dreams. Fern thought about Blossom surrounded by strangers, kept away from her mother. Maybe it was for the best. Maybe it was for Rose’s own good. But they’d drugged her, and dragged her to the hospital, and she hadn’t given her baby up, they’d stolen Blossom, as surely as if they’d snatched her off the street. A dark fist closed around Fern’s skull. She emerged from the river, simmering with Rose’s rage.

Arrange yourselves around the circle, standing at the points of the compass as your coven leader lights the fire before the altar and invokes the Triple-Faced Goddess.

They stepped onto the rim of their circle and Fern felt a circuit close. They stood in their places—north, east, south. Zinnia would have been west. They stood naked, dripping, and Fern felt like a key in a lock, waiting to be turned. Rose squatted in the center and lit a fire before the altar with a pack of matches, then she dipped the rusty steak knife into the bowl of water and pointed it north.

“I exorcise thee of all impurities,” she said. “In the name of Aradia and Cernunnos.”

She scraped the wet knife through the salt. The firelight flickering over her folded belly made her look young one moment, old the next.

“Blessings upon this salt,” she said. “May it purify us, in the name of Aradia and Cernunnos.”

She picked up the pierced chicken heart and dropped it into the flames. It made a single loud pop and spat sparks. Rose dumped the salt into the bowl of water, then she walked around the inside of the circle clockwise, sprinkling the water as she went, some of it onto the ground, some of it onto their bellies, their chests, their thighs.

Rose reached into the pillowcase and took out a metal World War I helmet they’d found in the attic. She placed it on the fire, upside down. Then she took out the poppet.

Holly had sewn it, just a small, rough figure stuffed with cotton balls and one of Miss Wellwood’s kerchiefs that Fern had lifted from her office. Rose had wrapped the poppet tight in a string they’d soaked in a half-drunk cup of Miss Wellwood’s coffee. Rose placed the poppet in the helmet.

“I give it the name of Wellwood. Let the pain she visits on me be returned threefold.”

She held the knife in front of her like a sword.

Steel, earth, water, fire, darkness—the scene felt primitive and powerful to Fern.

“I summon thee, Ancient Ones, to guard this circle and witness our rites,” Rose said, then she addressed Fern and Holly.

“Hold the space,” she told them.

Fern imagined herself getting bigger, turning into a giant, the top of her head brushing the stars. Her feet rooted to the earth and her thighs grew like tree trunks. Her stomach became a mountain. Fern saw herself blotting out the sky.

It was time.

If anything was going to go wrong, this was when it would happen. Holly and Rose kept forgetting all the words but Fern was used to memorizing lines, so she’d lead. They looked to her. She knew this by heart.

Fern faced north, where Holly stood. She reached out her arms and moved them apart as if opening a curtain: Rending the Veil. Then she held her right arm up, pointing to the sky, and her left down, pointing to the ground, making the sign of the element Earth.

“Adni,” she said.

“Adni,” they repeated.

She turned east, facing the river. She Rent the Veil, then held out her arms by her shoulders, elbows bent, wrists splayed out, like she was holding up the sky, making the sign for Air. She looked up into darkness.

“Eh-ee-eh,” she said.

“Eh-ee-eh,” they repeated.

She turned south, facing Rose, and this time when she Rent the Veil, they all moved in unison. They held their hands to their foreheads, making the shape of a triangle, the sign for Fire.

“Al-him,” they said in unison.

They turned west, facing the emptiness where Zinnia should have been. Rending the Veil, forming their hands into downward-pointing triangles over their bellies. The sign of Water. They couldn’t see beyond the pale glow of the fire, but Fern sensed the massive river, flowing quietly and full of power nearby.

“Agla,” they said, with one voice.

Fern felt the world turn beneath her feet; she saw the river without seeing it, feeling its entirety. She felt its tail, all the way back in marshes two hundred miles south; she felt it flowing deeper into swamps, seeping down through cracks in pond beds, through cracks in the bedrock, down into caverns and tunnels honeycombing the state, pulling water from Georgia, South Carolina, Virginia, Alabama. There were no rivers, no lakes, no ponds; it was all one great sunless sea beneath the earth’s crust. She felt Huntsville, she felt Mississippi. She stood on the surface of this nocturnal ocean and felt its echo in the smaller sunless sea inside her womb.

They turned to face Rose, who raised the steak knife to her forehead.

“I pay the price,” Rose said. “I and no other.”

Blood is no more than the measure of the sacrifice,

the weighing out of its worth to the witch,

the sign of her sincerity.

Pain is the real price, not blood.

How much pain are you willing to endure

to achieve your heart’s desire?

Rose dropped to her knees in front of the fire and slotted the tip of the steak knife beneath the fingernail of her ring finger. She heard the sound of Blossom crying, growing fainter and fainter as they carried her away down the hall.

She pushed the blade under her nail.

Fire crackled up her arm, an electric bolt seared her skin from nail bed to shoulder. Her body went numb but she managed to hang on to the knife and worked its triangular tip back and forth, rocking it from side to side, pushing it toward her cuticle, hacking at its root. She twisted the blade hard and half her nail lifted off with a tearing sound somewhere between paper and meat.

Rose dropped the knife. Her nail stuck up in the air, half off, but she needed it all the way off. That was why they’d brought the pliers.

Rose groped blindly in the dirt for them, then clamped them around her protruding nail and yanked. The pain was enormous, then replaced by a hard throb like someone hitting the tip of her finger with a hammer in time with the beating of her heart.

One nail wasn’t enough.

Body short-circuiting with pain, she went for her middle finger next.

By the time she’d finished, Rose was grunting sounds that weren’t words, and blood pattered to the sand in heavy drops from her mutilated left hand. She stood and the pain made her knees buckle and she almost fell. Fern caught her around the waist, and Holly took her other side, and the two of them walked her to the fire, where Rose threw her fingernails into the pot with the poppet. Then Fern held Rose’s hand over the fire and let her blood drip into the flames, hissing where it landed, falling onto the poppet, marking it with Rose’s will.

“With my pain, I call Hecate,” Rose mumbled through numb lips. “See me standing in pain and flame, asking for your ear.”

The heat from the fire tightened the skin over her unprotected fingertips, and she felt her heartbeat in them. Fern took the knife from Rose’s limp right hand and threw it in the fire, where the flames sniffed the wooden handle, then began to gnaw.

“Pale Hecate, add your will to mine,” Rose said through gritted teeth. “By all the power of iron and fire, by all the might of moon and sun. What I do say, it shall be done.”

She turned to Holly. “Now we will be free. Evohe.”

Holly had forgotten her lines, but not Fern. She never forgot a line. She caught Holly’s eye and said, “Ieo veo veo veov.”

And Holly, prompted, said back, “Orov ov ovovo.”

Fern stepped right, pushing Rose in front of her, and Holly joined, saying, “Aeiou!” and they moved around the circle clockwise.

“Eheie!” Fern said.

“Eheie,” they repeated.

“Evohe!” Fern shouted, and as one they switched direction and began circling the other way, going widdershins, chanting, “Ieo veo veo veov orov ov ovovo!”

The alien syllables lifted their bodies, made their feet light on the ground. Fern saw her far-off shadow on the long grass as she went by; she saw all their shadows, and they looked like giants, they looked like monsters, they looked like goddesses. They looked like witches.

“Ho Ho Ho,” Fern chanted.

“Ise Ise Ise,” they replied.