4. The Package
4
THE PACKAGE
Gone is all the glory of the race of Lir,
Gone and long forgotten like a dream of fever:
But the swans remember the sweet days that were.
— KATHARINE TYNAN HINKSON, “THE CHILDREN OF LIR”
T he sidewalk outside my building remained just as shockingly quiet as the car as I made my way into my building. Maybe it was the effects of the cold plunge, I rationalized as I unlocked the door with still-shaking hands. I’d always “touched the water” with a finger bowl at worst, a warm bath at best. I hadn’t done a cold plunge that way since I’d lived on the coast.
It had nothing to do with the stranger’s ability to See my own thoughts as well, I decided as I trudged up the stairs to my apartment on the top floor. Nothing to do with that oddly grounding, annoyingly direct gaze.
Even the door didn’t squeak when I opened it. I slammed it shut with a bang if just to prove a point.
Inside, the apartment was just as strangely silent. Aja’s open bedroom door informed me she was out, thank the goddess, but minor visions of her moving about the apartment should have flared up the moment I stepped inside.
Still, there was nothing.
My mind was blissfully blank.
“Well, that won’t last,” I announced as I kicked off my sodden boots and brought them over to one of the radiator heaters under the bay window of our small common area that looked out toward Cleveland Circle. I stripped off the rest of my wet clothes and set them up around it, then wrapped myself with a blanket and made for my bedroom.
A box sitting on the kitchen table stopped me. One marked with my name and address and little else.
It looked like a normal package. Roughly the size of a shoebox, the sturdy cardboard was slightly dented on one side, smothered with crinkled packing tape, and my name in large typed letters. I didn’t need to look to know who it was from. No one sent me packages like this except Gran.
Its arrival wasn’t necessarily all that out of the ordinary. But its coincidence with one of the strangest days I’d experienced in six years of living in Boston was.
“What’s in the mystery box this time, Gran?” I murmured as I eyed the package warily.
Penelope Monroe, whose attention to privacy was so great she easily fell into the realm of conspiracy theorists, never left a return address. On top of the lack of, she always cleansed her mail so it held no obvious marks of her handling. I tried to tell her that indicated more than anything who it was from, but she always shook off my chiding and said it wasn’t me she was worried about. She just wouldn’t tell me who, then, was worth her concern.
She liked a good test too, which was why I knew that as soon as I laid my hand on the things, I’d have to work to get to whatever was inside.
I drummed my fingers lightly on the table, trying to decide whether I should open the package or have my bath and ignore it. Anything Gran had actually taken the time to send me would occupy my attention completely. Her gifts made me listen whether I wanted to or not.
The first care package she ever sent me, when I was a freshman at Reed, supposedly contained a few saining bundles of juniper and cedar. But when I reached in to take one, I was overcome with such intense sadness and longing— Gran’s longing for me, as it were—that I had immediately burst into inconsolable tears and missed my first class of the morning.
Gran had never made any bones about the fact that she hadn’t wanted me to leave for school in the first place. “Well, at least it will be useful,” she had said unironically when I told her of my plans to continue studying Old Irish and Celtic Studies at Boston College, some years later. She hadn’t wanted me to leave then either, and it was only with the promise that I would come back that she relented.
I was still wary about the packages, though.
Tentatively, I laid my bare hand atop the box with my eyes closed. I was good at probing—better than most, despite my lack of discipline. Untrainable , Gran had said with some longing, the way any kind of expert approaches a challenge.
My mind was black for a moment, and for a moment, I wondered if something had happened in that pond. Or maybe when the sorcerer touched you , I couldn’t help but think. Maybe the unthinkable had happened, something I’d wished for as a teenager with no little shame.
Maybe my powers were gone.
But then, like water just starting to boil, something simmered to the surface. My palm tingled, and then the barrier I’d been expecting made itself clear.
She had used a kelp charm this time—easy enough, considering how abundant it was at the beach. Taut, but still giving. Room to stretch. I pressed with my mind’s finger, then a full hand, pushing and prodding, looking for weaknesses in the screen. Sometimes it broke when I did this. Sometimes it didn’t. I never knew when or how it might, only if it did, I’d instantly be?—
Overwhelmed.
I snatched back my hand, cradling it as though it had been burned.
Suddenly, my mind felt exhausted. My entire both wilted in nothing but a blanket.
I needed to sain. I needed a bath. This package could wait until tomorrow.
I took the half-burned bundle of dried juniper and a lighter from the box on the windowsill and brought them into my bedroom. There, I lit the end of the juniper, allowed it to burn for a moment, then blew out the flame so the end was a glowing, smoking ember as I walked sunwise around the room.
This was one of the first things Gran had taught me when I started the change, just one year after she’d taken me in. Saining, an ancient purifying technique that had been passed down through generations, was an indispensable tool for any seer. At home in Oregon, Gran tended a grove of juniper and rowan for the purpose, and we kept a driftwood fire roaring at the huge copper hearth, always starting with tinder from Gran’s trees to quiet the house. It didn’t last forever, but it provided relief. And protected us, she said, though I never really understood how.
I carried the smoking bundle with me back into the hallway and into the pink-tiled bathroom, where I ran a steaming hot bath. As the water ran, I waved the smoke around the small room, forcing myself to breathe it in while I chanted the words I knew so well.
A Bhríd, beannaigh an teach. Cosain sinn. Dall orainn. Coinnigh slán muid ó fhuaim.
Brigid, bless this house. Protect us. Blind us. Keep us safe from sound.
“Light the fire,” I hummed as my breath caused the embers I held to burn, then turn to smoke and ash. “Touch the water.” I reached down to let the running water flow through my fingers. Its porous essence instantly calmed me. “Breathe the air.” I followed suit. “Feel the earth.” The tile would have to do as I flexed my toes on the ground. “Hear the silence.”
I extinguished the juniper in the sink, then removed my blanket and folded it on the stool in the corner. The smoke glided over and around me until I felt the urge to cough. Only then did I open the window to release the smoke and the remaining noisy prisoners into the afternoon.
When the air was clear again and the scent of crackling juniper infused the whole of the space, I closed the window. Then I slid into the tub and allowed the water to wash away the day and heat my bones through. Closed my eyes. And enjoyed some peace at last.
I awoke some hours later after moving from the tub to my bed and promptly falling asleep. I shoved my hands over my forehead, feeling more tired than normal. It was the smoke, maybe. But I checked my watch to find that it was nearly seven o’clock at night. I had slept for more than five hours, lost in my own spell.
“There has got to be a better way to do this,” I muttered as I pushed myself up.
A pair of piercing green eyes appeared in my mind’s eye.
I shook my head at my thoughts. “No, not that. Now get up. You’ve got work to do.”
And I did. Starting with a dissertation to finish. I couldn’t be lolling around on a Saturday evening like I had all the time in the world.
The effects of the smoke were wearing off, but the apartment was still mostly quiet as I padded back out to the kitchen in search of a snack and a cup of lavender tea.
I put on the hot water and sat down at the table to examine my package again. Aja was still out, either at her boyfriend’s or in a study session. More than likely she’d be back for a bit before leaving for another event this evening. If there was going to be a disruption, now was a good time to deal with it.
I set my palm on the box, and this time, I kept it there.
The barrier appeared in my mind again, and this time it stretched against my hand until, with another hard mental poke, it disintegrated completely. A space in the front of my conscious mind opened, like a picture-in-picture where the light had just been turned on.
I had no idea what I had done. I never did, in spite of Gran’s claims that I’d figure it out one day. But now I could truly See the clear yet random overlapping images, sounds, smells, noises, all attached to the journey this package had taken to reach me.
All at once, the memories coalesced. They lost that feathery, cacophonous quality of my own impressions and settled into a scene with perfect clarity. These weren’t my visions—they were Gran’s, bound to the package in a way that I (and likely only I) could See them.
There were her hands, long-fingered and capable, holding the box while she trotted down Laneda Avenue in one of her signature red skirts. I listened to her haggle about postage with Jerry, the scruffy postmaster with the gray handlebar mustache, while she asked if Connie Chapman had gone to the pictures with him. And he had better be careful with that box, else she’d make him think he was a toad. I smiled. No one ever suspected that she could be as good as her word on that one.
“’Tis for Cassie,” Penny confirmed. “A wee care package until she makes her way back home this spring. A present for her graduation, and something else. For the real work to do on her education.”
“Isn’t Cassie starting a job as a professor?” Jerry wondered as he tapped the address into his computer. “I’d think she’d have enough school, huh?”
Penny shook her head, then pointed her finger at the mailman while she murmured something else under her breath. The motion cast a brief scent of sage through the air, and I recognized the signs of an erasure spell. Once she was out the door, Jerry would have no recollection she was ever there.
“There’s school, and then there’s learning, Jerry. Cassie’s got a lot of the one, but now she’ll get the other. I’ll be making sure of it.”
The kettle on the stove whistled, interrupting me from Gran’s wagging finger. I pulled my hand from the box, and the visions disappeared. I doubted there was much more to See anyway. Gran’s message was clear, the same she’d imparted at Christmas, when I’d last seen her. I was coming home, and there was no getting around it. It was time to finish my education. A seer’s education.
The problem was, I was a terrible pupil. In fact, I was an outright dud.
I preferred my books. My gloves. My quiet apartment.
After making my tea, I tugged the sleeve of my shirt over my hand, then tucked the package under a protected arm and took everything back to my room, still partially protected by the saining. There I took a sip of tea, set the mug on my nightstand, and sat on the bed to sink the blade of a letter opener into the creased tape.
Inside, I found carefully made bundles of juniper and rowan twigs. Enough to last me at least another month or more. I took them out and set them on my desk, relishing the love and care thrilling through each one.
Under those was a soft package wrapped in old newsprint, out of which I drew a brilliant red dress. It wasn’t the first time Gran had sent me something out of her wardrobe. I had a number of sweaters from her childhood home in Ireland. Three vintage mod minidresses from the sixties, a few hats and gloves, and random accessories she thought I might like that would remind me of her with memories attached to each. Because of my abilities, it was a mode of storytelling like no other. A way of keeping in touch from miles away, every time I slipped a sweater over my head.
This, however, was different. It was special.
The dress was the color of holly berries—similar to Gran’s skirts, but silk instead of thick wool. As I held it up, silk billowed out of the box and down to the floor, a lush spill of color that seemed to illuminate the entire room. Hardly a day dress for a rural beach town, it was more fitting for a royal court.
Several blurry visions immediately sprang to mind through my fingertips. Gran as a young woman, being twirled around to a waltz under twinkling lights of what looked like an actual ballroom. A torrid kiss that made my lips ache and my heart pick up a beat. The calloused grip of a stranger’s fingers on her waist, the smell of salty sea air as he pulled her against him.
And heartbreak, immediate and debilitating, like a winter wave toppling you over on the surf.
“Dang, Gran,” I murmured as I hung the dress in my closet. “You had some times in this one, didn’t you?”
The visions disappeared, though the music lingered as I turned back to the package. To my surprise, there was one more item at the bottom. Another smaller cardboard box smelling heavily of sage and juniper and other herbs I couldn’t name that told me if I touched it, I’d encounter another protection spell.
I frowned at it. Gran didn’t usually enchant her packages this intensely. Whatever was in here was important.
Hairs on the back of my neck rose. My Sight prickled in the center of my forehead. The juniper and dresses I’d take, with their frothy memories and practical magic, but suddenly I wanted to repack what was left and send it right back to Oregon.
Trust your intuition , Gran always told me. It’s a seer’s greatest gift of all .
“Stop being a baby,” I told myself, then reached in and took out the last box.
Immediately, everything felt…wrong. And looked very wrong.
In my hands, the cardboard shook, then sighed. I could See it starting to move as if the items on top of it had forced it to hold its breath for several days and it was finally allowed to exhale, inhale, and exhale again.
“What the hell,” I murmured as I watched. I was given to visions, but not full-on hallucinations. In all the time I’d been away, I’d never been sent a fully animated box. That was simply not something we did.
Was it?
Gingerly, I opened the flaps. At least fifty pellets of Styrofoam popped loudly out of the box and directly into my face.
“What the f?—”
I batted the pellets away as they continued to pop. What was this? As a seer, Gran was decent at charming live beings, but I’d never seen her enchant an inanimate object before. Seers required conscious thought to work their magic. This wasn’t right.
“Cass?”
The apartment door slammed shut, followed by the sounds of Aja’s boots flopping on the ground and the jingle of keys on the table.
“Shit,” I muttered, frantically trying to beat the pellets back into the box. “Oh my gods, will you stop !”
“Cass! Everything all right?”
Aja’s voice called through my door. Perfect. Just perfect.
There was a knock as the box continued to spew styrofoam. “You okay? You don’t light the apartment on fire unless you’ve had a really bad day. Was it James again? What’s that noise?”
I scowled. Aja was nice enough about my occasional pyrotechnics, but an animated box wasn’t something I’d be able to explain away.
“Just dropped a few things,” I called back, trying desperately to calm the popcorn. “I’m fine. Just, um, getting ready for bed.”
I turned on some music, hoping The Clash would mask the machine-gun rhythms of the packing materials. After the last piece smacked me in the center of the forehead with a final, resounding pop , the entire mess completely disappeared. It had been an apparition—nothing more.
“Ha, ha, Gran,” I said aloud as if she could hear me, though I was a bit unnerved.
I had felt the texture of that stuff on my fingers. Heard it banging in my ears. Was there truly nothing to it? Goddess, it was so… real .
Gran would immediately seek out the memory as soon as I returned home—along with my reaction to it, which would make her cackle like a crow. Right now she was probably enjoying a nice glass of whiskey, imagining my reaction while she watched the late winter storms blowing across the dunes in front of her house.
“All right,” Aja said. “Just, um, let me know if you need anything.”
“Thanks.”
I peered inside the box, eager to find what treasure my grandmother had sent this time now that she’d gotten her jokes out of the way. There lay yet another box, a homely wooden thing that had once been black but was now scratched on almost every visible surface. It was about the size of a recipe container that would fit a thick stack of three-by-five cards.
“Gran, this had better not be another attempt to teach me your potato bread,” I muttered as I reached in to pick it up. “The machine gun popcorn was so not worth this recipe.”
The moment my fingers touched the wood, a tide of dark, suffocating energy spooled around my body, and the room went black. Joe Strummer’s voice muted; it was as if I now existed in a vacuum. My body felt weightless, yet bound, drifting in groundless oblivion. It was the opposite of my crowded nightmares—isolation in the purest sense—and yet I began to panic, push back against the blackness with my mind. But nothing would budge.
I felt with my fingers, trying to grip something, anything…and realized I was still holding the box. Holding on to it. Like it was moving, pulling at me, as my arms followed it up and out. Positive it would fly away into the blackness, maybe even take me along with it, I pried my fingertips off and let the weight fall into the oblivion.
The familiar shapes of my room returned—the large Art Deco print hanging over my bureau, the shuffle of papers and books across my desk, the muted grays of my bedspread, where the box lay, seemingly unharmed.
The taunting chords of “Jimmy Jazz” gradually came back into earshot as I fell onto the bed, dizzy and nauseous, unable to suck enough oxygen into my lungs. With my last shred of self-awareness, I threw my head between my legs, focusing on breathing. What did they always do in movies? In-two-three, out-two-three, in-two-three, out-two-three…
Once the dizziness began to recede, I slowly raised my head and glared at the box. What was that? Some piece of terribly black magic, that was for sure, and I couldn’t imagine for the life of me why Gran would send me something so foul.
A prank? Surely not. Gran thought a bit of disturbance was funny, but she’d never sent me something that was truly horrifying. Was it someone else’s awful memory attached to it that I’d sensed instead? Or was Gran trying to tell me something by enchanting the contents in this horrible manner? Or trying to dissuade someone else from discovering it?
I wrapped a hand around my stomach, feeling like I was going to be sick. I would have to call home for further instruction before attempting another look.
The gleaming red numbers on my phone informed me it was now close to three a.m. Which meant I’d been caught in that terrible vortex for several hours. And it had only felt like seconds. Aja was probably asleep, and Gran too.
With the edge of my sleeves serving as a barrier once more between my hand and the box, I carefully set it back into its cardboard packaging. A thin sweat still broke out over my brow from the effort of keeping that horrible void at bay. My vision still went hazy but didn’t disappear completely, and I was able to fight off the looming sense of dread long enough to get the box safely into the back of my closet.
I stepped away, completely out of breath.
There, it looked innocuous—about as dangerous as the rain boots sitting next to it. But my heart was pounding, and the night seemed to press at my windowpanes just as that swirling blackness had threatened to engulf me.
“Good goddess, Gran,” I murmured as I lay back on my bed, as fatigued as though I’d run a marathon. “What on earth did you send me?”