6. Last Christmas （I Gave You Amnesia）
Last Christmas (I Gave You Amnesia)
Jasper stared into his coffee mug, hoping it might contain a few answers along with the rum.
No such luck.
“Six times,” he said slowly. “You’re certain? I’ve been here six times?”
“No, we’ve met you six times. Who knows how many other times you’ve driven through town. But yeah,” said Nine, “we’re certain. As certain as we are that you’ll forget this conversation, same as all the others.”
“If it helps,” Ten offered, “you do mix it up a bit each time we see you. First time you visited, you got so angry about Oak Haven being off the map that you threatened to call the U.S. Department of Defense to report a glitch in the Global Positioning System.”
“The time after that, you were hopping mad at the National Registry of Historic Places,” added Eleven.
“You do have a tendency to get worked up, Mr. Hopkins,” Twelve said. “That’s why we started adding rum to your coffee.”
“But hang on...” Jasper’s mind was spinning from all the questions he wanted to ask. “When exactly does this forgetting happen? The second I leave town?”
“Like stepping from light into shadow,” Ten confirmed. “When you cross that town line, Oak Haven becomes nothing but a weird feeling you can’t quite place. Like déjà vu, but backwards.”
“Sure, the French call it jamais vu . The feeling that something familiar should be recognized but isn’t.”
“Look at the brain on this kid!” Twelve clapped his hands.
“Is it all at once? Or gradual?” Jasper pressed. “And is it complete? Do I forget everything?”
Nine stroked his beard thoughtfully. “Not everyone forgets the same way. Sometimes visitors retain tiny fragments: a smell, a tune they can’t place.
Nothing useful, mind you. Likely that’s why we get the occasional repeat visitor such as yourself.
Curious souls who keep wandering back, who can’t quite shake us. ”
“How does it work, though? What’s the mechanism?”
“The spell fills your noggin with trivia,” Twelve explained. “Crowds out the real memories with random facts. You’ll suddenly know which sea creature has three hearts, or which horse won the Grand National three times.”
“So... hang on.” Jasper blinked. “The spell doesn’t erase memories, it buries them?”
“More like it interferes with the recording and organization,” Nine corrected. “It fills up your head with useless stuff so there’s no room for what the witches don’t want anyone remembering. You know how it’s impossible to find anything useful in a junk drawer? Kinda like that.”
“This town is turning my mind into a junk drawer,” Jasper repeated unhappily. “That’s... not great to hear. Is anyone immune?”
“The witches, of course,” said Ten. “They designed the spell that way. And those of us born here build up a certain tolerance. We can leave for short trips—a few hours, maybe a day or so—before it kicks in.”
Twelve nodded. “I managed an entire long weekend one time. Of course, then I got overconfident, stayed away too long and forgot where I live, even forgot my own name. Nate had to come looking. Eventually he tracked me down in a Macaroni Grill at Atlanta International Airport. So... not really worth it, if I’m honest.”
“But if you’re somebody like me... if you don’t have magic, and you weren’t born here...” Jasper’s voice trailed off.
Nine raised his glass in something between a toast and a condolence. “Junk drawer.”
Jasper’s hand crept to his jacket pocket, where a crumpled piece of cardboard had been bothering him all week.
He hadn’t been able to bring himself to throw it away, even though he couldn’t read the water-damaged writing.
Now he pulled it out, smoothing the wrinkles.
It was a postcard, showing a quaint New England town square.
The message side was a mess of bleeding ink, but he could barely make out his own handwriting: “Dear Future Jasper...”
“That’s from visit four, I think,” Ten said. “You bought a whole rack of postcards over at Spellbound Books. Mailed them to yourself, your boss, the Library of Congress...”
“Oh! Well, maybe somebody got one! Maybe?—”
“Guaranteed that none of them arrived legible,” said Nine. “The forgetting spell’s thorough like that. It’s not just your brain, it’ll put a whammy on your writing, too.”
“And your camera,” added Ten.
“And your electronic devices,” Eleven chimed in.
“Ohh ho, remember that, boys, back in the Eighties? The witches had to revise the spell to cover emails and such?” The old men all chuckled.
“The whole zeroes-and-ones thing was new to our gals, and the spell kinda backfired at first. For three days, that ‘ You’ve got mail !’ voice got stuck in everybody’s head like a bad pop song.
You’ve got mail, you’ve got mail ... over and over. ”
“I have to go.” Jasper stood so abruptly his chair rocked backward. “I’m going to leave myself a voicemail.”
“What did I just say?” said Eleven. “Stubborn kid, ain’t he?”
“Hey, maybe hire yourself a singing telegram,” suggested Ten. “That’d at least be a new one.”
“How about if you tattoo the details on your arm,” offered Twelve. “You could kinda Memento -yourself.”
“ Memento -himself?” Ten stared at his grandson. “The hell does that mean?”
“It’s a movie,” Twelve explained. “Fella has no short-term memory, so he starts tattooing information on himself. His body becomes his memory, if you will.”
“Huh.” Ten shook his head thoughtfully. “How come we’ve never tried that around here?”
“Come on,” said Eleven. “You know tattoos about Oak Haven would never stick.”
“True,” Twelve agreed. “Or they’d all transform into pictures of mermaids. Or infinity symbols—whatever the kids get nowadays. Anyway, Memento , good flick. It stars... um... ohhh, what’s his name. That Australian fella.”
“Hugh Jackman,” Eleven offered.
“Chris Hemsworth,” said Ten.
“Wrong,” Twelve demurred. “No, it’s um... the other one.”
“ Liam Hemsworth!” cried Nine.
“Russell Crowe.”
“Mel Gibson.”
“No, no, and definitely no. He’s um . . . Guy . . .”
“Yeah,” Ten said, “you made it clear he was a guy.”
“No, I didn’t say he’s a guy, I said he is Guy.”
“Twelve, what are you talking about?!”
Jasper sighed deeply. “Guy Pearce. The actor’s name is Guy Pearce.”
“That’s it!” Twelve clapped his hands, delighted. “Guy Pearce!”
Nine frowned, muttering to himself. “Who in the blazes is Guy Pearce...”
As if beyond his ability to control it, Jasper kept speaking.
“Guy Pearce got his big break in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert , soon followed by 1997’s L.A.
Confidential . As a young actor he appeared in more than four hundred episodes of the soap opera, Neighbours , only to return as the same character in 2022.
He was actually born in England but moved to Victoria in—” He stopped abruptly.
“What is happening? Why in the name of the National Archives do I know any of this?”
Twelve smiled. “Told ya. Junk drawer.”
“Oh!That must be why I knew random football trivia this morning. I can’t beat the spell, can I? It’s hopeless.”
Eleven gave Jasper a friendly slap on the back. “For you , maybe it’s hopeless. For us, it’s a privacy dream come true. Or at least, it used to be . Speaking of which, c’mon lads, it’s about time we got outside.”
Ten checked his watch. “Yeah. It’s almost time.”
“Time for what?” Jasper asked helplessly. “What is it now ?”
“The current show,” said Nine grimly. “Though you might want to brace yourself. May get ugly.”
The men arranged themselves along the store’s front porch and stared out into town. Jasper followed their upward gazes and felt his knees go weak.
Just beyond the tree line, a massive casino tower thrust up from the earth like the world’s largest middle finger, its mirrored surface reflecting the winter sun with smug superiority. It was the kind of Vegas brutalism that would make Frank Lloyd Wright wish he’d gone into accounting instead.
“That’s what all the paperwork’s been about,” Nine explained. “The environmental studies, the zoning variances, and um, what brings you here this time?”
“A liquor license.” Jasper squinted up at the monstrosity. “But how did this mess pass an environmental impact study? I mean, who are they kidding?”
Eleven shrugged. “These are some powerful people we’re talking about.”
“Look, I know powerful, okay? Powerful is, like, somebody’s son-in-law plays golf with a committee chairman. There’s powerful and then there’s... whatever the hell that is. Nobody is politically connected enough to sneak something like this by county government. I mean, what are they, wizards?”
“Funny you should say that?—”
“Also? I can’t get my head around the address... West 113th Street? Where are the other hundred and twelve?”
The Earls shared a dark look. “Just their idea of a joke,” said Ten. “West 113th Street was Harry Houdini’s address in New York.”
“Harry Houdini? Why would anybody even know his address, much less?—”
“Magicians,” all four Earls said in unison.
“Smug little shits,” Twelve added.
“This isn’t the first time they’ve tried to take Oak Haven for themselves.”
“Far from it,” said Nine. “They’ve had it in for this town for a very long time. Fight’s been going on so long, nobody even remembers how it started.”
“Okay, hang on.” Jasper put both hands to his head, which was starting to ache quite a lot. “First you tell me I’m supposed to believe in witches. Now you’re telling me that witches have some longstanding feud with magicians .”
“Oh sure,” Nine began, “it’s an old, old thing. Nobody even remembers how it started. My dad told me witches and magicians were on opposite sides of the Civil War, but I’m not even sure that’s the first?—”
But Jasper had stopped listening. Two women were coming down the street, and one of them...
Oh , Jasper thought. Oh dear.