Chapter 23
Chapter 23
That same Tuesday night, Fern waited until the house settled around them, then sat up in bed.
“Come on, Holly,” she whispered, swinging around and putting her feet on the floor.
“You’re going out there again,” Zinnia said.
Fern knelt on the floor and pulled out the pillowcase containing everything they’d need. She’d spent all day collecting it.
“It’s the last time,” she said.
“It’s never the last time,” Zinnia said, and rolled over and gave Fern and Holly her back.
They carried their shoes as they slipped downstairs and crept out of the side door of the house to conjure up a storm.
Daisy and Flora were staying in the Barn, but Fern didn’t see any reason why they had to go all the way to the river. The book said they just had to be skyclad and able to see the moon. Besides, she felt full of Charlie Brown. Every unsteady step she took, she took for two. Before they even made it across the backyard her breath was coming short and high in her chest. She heard Holly clumping along behind her, breathing just as hard.
By the time they entered the trees, her breath felt like a blowtorch in her throat. She needed to sit down, but it’d be too hard to get back up. She saw a patch of moonlight between some pines up ahead. That’d be good enough.
“Let’s do it…over there…” she gasped to Holly, and they plodded toward it.
They’d be done with this in an hour and back in bed. And then it would rain and finally break the heat, and she’d make Miss Parcae honor her promise to take Holly with them, and this would be over, and Holly would be safe.
Then they walked into the blackflies.
At first, Fern thought she was bumping into some branches with her face, then all at once they were on her. Swarming her face, pecking her cheeks, tapping her forehead and the sweaty back of her neck, crawling over her lips.
She pressed her mouth tight and walked faster, waving her free arm wildly, trying to brush them away, but they were crawling over every inch of her sweaty, exposed skin. They clotted in the corners of her eyes; she slapped her ears and heard them crunch and their juice ran down her earlobes. They flew up her nose, and she had to open her mouth to breathe and immediately they crawled in there, too.
She spat, trying to get them out, but when she inhaled, hard lumps of blackfly stuck to the sides of her throat. They were all over her, crawling, tickling, scratching. They squirmed down the collar of her duster and landed on her pregnant belly in clumped masses. They covered her eyeballs like crust.
Fern ran. She blundered forward, not caring if she went face-first into a tree, because anything would be better than this itching, prickling swarm. She heard something crashing through the branches beside her and hoped it was Holly but her ears were so filled with blackflies everything sounded far away. In a panic she slapped at herself, crushing their bodies between her clothes and her skin.
The ground got soft beneath her feet and she smelled the iron stink of tea left out too long, and the smell seemed to scrape the blackflies away and Fern sobbed in relief as a cool breeze lifted them from her skin and she stumbled out of the woods.
She held one nostril closed and blew through the other, expelling a clot of crushed blackflies, and then she did the same to her other nostril. Her skin prickled with their bites, and she scooped dead blackflies out of the collar of her duster, but at least they weren’t on her anymore. She spat crushed blackflies out of her mouth and Holly stood beside her, scooping bits of blackflies out of her ears. Fern got her breath back and saw the river up ahead.
“Well,” she said when she could finally breathe again. “I guess we’re supposed to go to the same old place.”
Scraps of the circle they’d scratched into the dirt were still there. They gathered firewood and found two fallen pine branches and stripped all their needles except for a cluster at one end. These would be their brooms. By the time they’d stacked the firewood and redrawn the circle they were beat.
They stripped off their clothes and waded into the river and it was a soft kiss on their skin. The river sucked their sweat away and sent it swirling toward the ocean, and Holly and Fern emerged dripping and reborn. The dark line of woods was still, and Fern stopped, listening, letting herself drip dry. It felt like something was waiting for them in there, then she put her finger on it: somewhere between leaving the backyard and getting here, all the crickets had stopped.
Fern lit the fire with a book of matches she’d found hidden in a drawer in Rose’s attic room. The dry summer branches caught and flames gobbled them up, twigs crackling in their mouth.
“Okay, Holly,” Fern said. “You’ve got to lead this time.”
Holly had been studying the book all day. Fern had explained to her that the witches would take her with them if she could do the spell, and Holly hadn’t hesitated. She’d spent hours reading this part of the book over and over again.
“Let’s greet the elements,” Holly said, walking to north, the position of Earth.
“We have to Rend the Veil first,” Fern reminded her.
“Oh, right.”
Together they Rent the Veil and greeted the elements in each direction of the compass (or as best as they could figure without Rose or Miss Parcae). Fern scraped a hollow into the ground across from the fire and laid Iris’s hand mirror (stolen from the bathroom) on the bottom so it reflected the sky. They waded into the river, cupped their hands, and carried thirty-three handfuls of water back and dumped them in the hole until the mirror glimmered darkly at the bottom of a small subterranean pool.
They’d brought a thumbtack from the Cong and each of them pricked her pointer finger, making little hisses through their teeth at the pain, then dabbed their blood on the ends of two long sticks.
They held their sticks over the flames and Holly said to the night, “With my pain, I call Hecate. See us standing in pain and flame, asking for your ear.”
Then they both struggled down onto their knees and put their sticks in the water and began to stir, going clockwise, their sticks knocking into each other.
“Pale Hecate,” Holly said. “Find us by the smell of our blood. Add your will to ours. Help us stir the sky.”
They had to stir the water exactly three hundred and thirty-three times and repeat the same sentence. By the time they got to one hundred, Fern’s right shoulder burned. They kept stirring. By two hundred she wanted to cry. They kept stirring. By the time they reached three hundred and thirty-three Fern’s arms felt like they were going to fall off.
The two of them peered down into the hole. This was when the real work began: they had to call all the names of the Queen of the Night.
It took Holly two false starts before she had them right.
“Aidonaia, Apotropaia, Chthonia, Dadophoros,” they chanted. “Enodia, Kleidouchos, Kourotrophos, Melino?, Nyktipolos, Perseis, Phosphoros, Propolos, Propylaia, Skylakagetis, Hecate, Great Goddess, stir the skies.”
They repeated this over and over until the words didn’t make sense anymore. They were supposed to repeat it sixty-six times, and they tried to concentrate on the surface of the mirror while keeping count, but her throbbing shoulders, and squirming Charlie Brown, and the complicated syllables that didn’t mean anything filled Fern’s skull with sand, and the names ran together, and she stared into the black mirror reflecting her dark silhouette against the starless sky, the rippling water occasionally catching a flash of firelight, and the sounds stopped making sense, what they were doing stopped making sense, and the fire burned down to embers, to shifting shadows, but they kept up their chant.
Finally, they were finished. Fern’s shoulders ached and her knees hurt and she wanted to scratch the bug bites all over her legs. Instead, she pushed herself to her feet and she and Holly marched around the circle with their brooms, evergreen needles pointed up, waving them back and forth, sweeping the sky.
“My will with yours, Hecate,” they said in unison. “Stir the sky.”
Every stroke made her shoulders groan and the bottoms of her feet feel bruised. She wanted to sit down, but they had to make thirty-three circuits of the circle before they could stop. She told herself this brief agony, this little period of pain, would save Holly. She told herself it was worth it.
“My will with yours, Hecate. Stir the sky.”
Their voices felt like one voice, their footsteps matched, their hips swayed together.
“My will with yours, Hecate. Stir the sky.”
Sweep, step, sweep, step.
Fern imagined the sky unleashing cool rain, felt its chill coming through the screens, heard raindrops on the roof.
“My will with yours, Hecate. Stir the sky.”
She could almost feel the rain on her face, she could almost smell wet bark and pine sap. They kept marching, they kept stirring the sky. Holly could do this.
On circuit twenty-six, Fern felt the gentlest brush of moisture against her lips, a light mist, congealing in the air around them. It was working. Holly was making it rain.
The next seven circuits felt like dancing as the storm thickened around them, as the air got heavy, as moisture dewed on her skin. Finally, she and Holly stopped and stood on the rim of their circle, panting, hands on their knees. Fern looked at Holly, and Holly looked back at Fern through her bangs, the birthmark on her face resembling war paint, and she stuck out her tongue and tasted the storm. They grinned.
Out over the river, Fern thought she could see the air getting darker, like rain might start coming down any minute, but she held her hand out, palm up, and nothing landed in it. The dirt at their feet stayed dry.
The book had said to bring an umbrella. The book had said it would pour down for days. The book had said it was going to be biblical. Fern felt the storm straining to be born, she felt it on her fingertips, but it wouldn’t come through.
“We did everything,” Holly said. “We did it exactly right; I put in thirty-three handfuls of water and said Hecate’s name sixty-six times, and walked around the circle forever, and did the blood and everything and it’s not working.”
Fern could feel it, just out of reach.
“We cut ourselves for nothing!” Holly said, frustrated at how close they were. “We have to make it work!”
Something moved in the darkness outside the firelight, and a bit of shadow separated itself and approached the circle: Decima. She trotted along the riverbank, then stopped and sat on the edge of the grass. She watched the two of them and Fern felt like Miss Parcae was there, watching Holly fail.
Then she remembered the book.
Blood and pain are the midwives to every spell. When a working struggles to be born you must lubricate it with pain—the greater the working the greater the pain required.
Then she remembered her dad.
“I have an idea,” she said.
She pulled out a pair of scissors from the pillowcase. She’d brought them along, just in case. She handed them to Holly.
“Holly,” Fern said. “You need to pay a bigger Sixpence.”
The girl stared at her as Fern explained what she had to do. After a moment, Holly nodded.
“Okay,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” Fern told her.
In the guttering firelight Decima watched with glittering eyes as Holly raised the silver scissors to her face.
“Close your eyes,” Fern said. “Don’t look.”
Holly closed her eyes. She opened her mouth, put out her tongue, and fitted it into the beak of the scissors. A small whine escaped her throat.
If Zinnia had been there she would have told them this was a trick. That this was what happened in all the books and stories about making deals with the devil: the devil tricked you. All they’d wanted to do was stop Zinnia from being sick all the time, and somehow here they were, Holly about to cut off the tip of her tongue.
The most painful thing Fern could imagine.
Holly took a deep breath.
Zinnia would tell them to stop, to come home, to find another way, but the storm was so close. Fern could feel its coolness on her fingertips, just out of reach, and this storm would save Holly. They had to do this. They’d come so far. They were so close.
Decima licked her chops with a hollow slobbering sound.
The tendons on the back of Holly’s hand flexed as she slowly closed the scissors, the hard line of the blade pressing slowly into her pink tongue. She needed to speed up. She needed to do this fast before she thought too much about it.
Holly bore down from her shoulder and Fern saw the sharp steel bite into her exposed muscle and then Holly splayed her fingers open and threw the scissors in the dirt.
Her eyes streamed with frustrated tears.
“I can’t!” Holly wailed. “I can’t do it!”
Something solid hit flesh and fur and Fern heard an alarmed yelp and Decima scrabbled to her feet and charged a few feet away, spun around, and froze.
“Go on!” a woman shouted. “Get out of here! Get!”
Hagar strode after Decima, a shovel in one hand, and swung it at her again. The dog dodged out of the way, then turned tail and ran toward the woods, disappearing into the long grass. Hagar turned on the girls.
The firelight picked out the lines of exhaustion carved into either side of her mouth, the sweat staining the front of her housedress. Hagar looked at the two naked, pregnant teenagers standing by the fire, a pair of scissors lying on the ground between them. She threw the shovel at them. It landed in the dirt.
“Put out that fire,” Hagar said. “Clean yourselves up. Then get your clothes on and meet me in the kitchen. You’ve got some explaining to do.”