Chapter 8 #2
A simple framed picture of a shriveled-orange of an old woman with a stony-eyed stare sits at the center.
She’s Mateo’s grandmother or great-grandmother—he never met anyone in his family and his mother wasn’t chatty.
But she called this old lady abuelita with a pronunciation that included a silent shitty at the start.
Two additional and exponentially worse frames flank the surly old woman.
The things inside of them are posed like a portrait from the shoulders up of something seated, but the shadowy forms are difficult to look at, the eye naturally sliding away.
Abuelita is surrounded by candles, incense, trinkets, figures, and a shallow bowl of water. All of which he upkeeps once a week, exactly as his mother had. He doesn’t know this old lady, but he likes to think that she’s just as disappointed with her lineage as he is.
“Come on,” Mateo says when it’s clear Topher’s stuck, coaxing him like he has a piece of cheese and Topher’s a little skittish dog he wants to urge close enough to pet.
It’s at this point that Topher sees Ophelia but also realizes he has shoes on. This short-circuits his brain. It’s a whole thing. Another wave of apologies spews out of him as he backs up into the door, frantic to remove his shoes.
Ophelia watches with dangerous amusement. She’s probably Looking at Topher, with a capital L, but her expression makes him think she’s coming up with a sick burn.
In an effort to hinder that, Mateo hustles Topher into the living room to sink onto the couch, taking the low stool on the other side of the coffee table for himself.
“Okay. So, we texted a bit about our progress. Research, mostly.” They’d looked into the accidents Topher had described.
But then learned Topher’s dad’s house was legit a mansion and spent a lot of time on an old Fillow listing admiring the pool.
“Every culture has curses. Meaning there’s a wealth of information out there, which is fantastic, but it also means we’ve gotta sift through that information in order to pinpoint the exact flavor of what’s happening to you so that we can figure out how to deal with it.
We can narrow it down in some obvious ways, though.
What’s afflicting you seems to be bad luck, but bad luck curses don’t usually cause bad luck to people around the hexed. ”
Topher nods, eyes googly and huge again, but Mateo doesn’t think it’s because of what he’s saying.
Ophelia is standing just inside the room, leaning against the wall closest to their bedrooms. Topher’s gaze keeps flicking to her in abject terror.
It could be a curse thing, afraid he’s going to hurt her.
It could be a Topher thing, other people too much for this flimsy, washed-out rich boy to deal with. But he suspects it’s just Ophelia.
Objectively speaking, she’s terrifying, even if she barely comes up to his chin.
Armored in little airy maxi dresses and flip-flops, she makes men and women alike cower.
Ophelia is cute in the same way a small, pink pocketknife is.
Her mass of hair is a cloud of soft browns and blondes in direct contrast to the coldness in her eyes and the hostility of her smile.
Since dying, her mystique has only gotten worse.
“This is Ophelia, the colleague I mentioned,” Mateo says a little louder, gesturing at her.
“Yo,” Ophelia says without moving, and Mateo realizes that he should have had a customer service conversation with her. She’s never held a job in her whole goddamned life, and she’s basically a nightmare gremlin given cute human girl form.
“Hello,” Topher whispers, and he’s doing that trembling thing again. Is this excitement? Fear? Deep desire? Difficult to decipher what a bug-eyed trust fund guy might be into. Whatever. Not his concern. Time to focus on the money in his digital pocket.
“First thing we’re going to do,” Mateo says, drawing Topher’s attention back to him. “Is a cleansing ritual. There’s a lot of different cleansing methods, but I want to start with something a little higher up the scale, since what’s happening to you is pretty hardcore.”
Ophelia, transformed into a rarely seen level of helpfulness by the concept of money, puts the gallon pitcher Mateo had brewed earlier on the center of the table, and Mateo places a white candle between the pitcher and Topher.
He lights the candle with a cheap blue mini torch, and they’re ready to go.
People want magic to be glitzy rituals, chanting, and lights flickering. With higher magic, those things can happen, but it either means you’ve done something super wrong and you’re about to die, or you’re tapping into something from another plane of reality.
The basics aren’t flashy.
They’re smoke, breath, and intention. A hand to chest or temple and the silence of trying to understand and communicate with things unseen.
Simple candles, common herbs, and light.
But people don’t pay for what feels like you walked into a Bed, Bath, and Beyond, grabbed a hundred-dollar candle, and then did Lamaze breathing with them. The performance is critical.
“This is a brew made from espanta muerto,” Mateo says, exaggerating the flavor of the words. “The ghost chaser plant. It’s a bitter herb that’s good at breaking curses.”
Topher’s hands slowly reach toward the pitcher and Mateo realizes he thinks he’s meant to drink a gallon of brown liquid. “No, it’s for a bath.”
Topher’s hand freezes an inch from the pitcher, eyes becoming glassy orbs. “I have to take a bath?” He looks around the living room like he expects a tub to be there.
Mateo tries to remember how his mother swung this sort of thing.
Ignacia Luisa Reyes Borrero was a lot of things.
Extremely powerful witch. Subpar mother.
Con artist. Cheat. Thief. Murderer. Middling cook.
Okay with a house plant. Terrible singing voice.
By twelve, Mateo had seen her stab a man in the face, rip a spirit from a little girl’s body with her bare hands, and lie to every single person she’d ever met like it came easier than breathing.
While her nighttime business had been of the deals-with-dark-creatures sort, she paid the bills—when she felt like it—the same way any witch for hire does.
Husband cheating on you? She could hex him. Or her. Or other him. Client’s choice, as his mother was without opinion on any and all morality issues. Been cursed? Not a problem. She could cleanse it, offer a variety of protection spells you definitely needed to see her every two weeks to re-up.
Absolutely worst role model possible, except perfect for this, which is making him feel all sorts of ways he refuses to feel.
“It’s like in movies when the sports guy wins the big game and someone pours Gatorade all over him for some god-awful reason.
Not a bath-bath. We’ll do it in the bathroom tub and you’ll get privacy and a towel.
We have to do this first, though.” He indicates the candle.
“Look at this flame for ten seconds. Great. Now close your eyes and keep picturing that flame; try to empty your mind of everything else, and think about asking for aid in purifying this pitcher of water.”
Topher had closed his eyes, but they open, brow furrowed. “Ask you?”
“Not me,” Mateo says. “Are you religious?” Topher’s head shakes a no.
“That’s okay. Anyone who pretends to know exactly what they believe is lying.
” Mateo startles himself by saying something his mother loved to say verbatim.
That fount of bad feelings wells up again, but he shoves it away and searches for his own thoughts.
As someone with a demon inside of him, his relationship with the concept of a higher being is a little weird.
“Whatever actually powers life, sentience, souls, be it magic or a fluke of science, there’s an energy there.
In you and me and everything that lives or dies.
You’re reaching out to that energy. You’re asking the things that create, to help. Think about it like that.”
Topher vibrates a moment more but then murmurs okay and closes his eyes, lashes long and startlingly stark in their paleness.
“Intentions are important here,” Mateo continues in a soft tone, gaze shifting to Topher’s pale lips as they move in silent beseeching. “Seek help. Humbly. Earnestly.” Sprinkling more cascarilla into the liquid, he lets Topher beseech for a moment more and then drops him off in the bathroom.
Ophelia, a vulture perched on the arm of the couch who’s been watching something slow-moving and desperate, doesn’t wait for Mateo to ask what she thinks. “He’s magnificent. I thought he was going to hurl when you got all smooth-talking new age at him. He fully stopped breathing for that.”
“Gawd, you have no idea,” Mateo delights, crossing to her so they can talk mad shit in whispered tones.
“Legit, I think he’s never seen a computer or talked to a person before.
Everything I asked him to do was followed by—” He indicates his own face, trying to make his eyes wide.
“I can’t even do it. My eyelids lack the power.
Like a pug. I was afraid his eyes were going to pop out.
I mean, some of it was trying to avoid killing people probably, which—okay, very nice of him.
But also, I wish I’d filmed him trying to use the register.
Watching that was the most painful thing I’ve ever experienced and I’m weighing it against the stabbing and that time I fell off the roof. ”
He expects her to laugh and add on, but she’s looking at him, brow furrowed and shitty smile tilting the edges of her lips.
“What?” he asks defensively.
“Nothing,” she says like it’s absolutely something, teeth flashing in one of her more ambiguous, yet still shitty, smiles and he’s not clear on the meaning.
Oh. Maybe she’d really thought Topher was magnificent. Mateo had yet to ever guess her tastes correctly, but maybe something in Topher’s chihuahua mystique had piqued her interest.
Before he can decide what to do with this startling revelation—and make fun of her for it—she tilts her chin toward the hallway. “He’s taking a while.”
Outside the bathroom door, Mateo strains to hear the splashing of water he expects at this point in a cleansing.
Can’t even hear the rustling of fabric which might make sense if Topher’s going slowly because he’s trying not to touch anything he doesn’t have to.
It’s probably the worst room Topher’s ever graced with his million-dollar presence.
There was only so much Mateo could do to make a bathroom older than the incorporation of Seattle look nice.
Broken tiles, a missing cold dial on the sink—maybe he could have replaced that—and a window that’s been painted over since before he was born.
It has a very Motel 6 putting on a brave face spirit from all the little towels he’d rolled up and placed on the counter.
Not wanting to rush the guy, Mateo starts scrolling on his phone, skimming tarot articles for choice verbiage.
But Topher keeps not emerging and it’s been silent in there for at least ten minutes.
It doesn’t take that long to strip, hose down in the tub, dump the cleanse on yourself, dry off, and pull your clothes back on—the baby-simple instructions he’d given Topher.
Maybe the shock of poverty gave Topher a heart attack.
Except, maybe something really did happen in there. There is a possible curse. What if it finally finished him off? That would be such ass.
Mateo has no idea how to get rid of a body, and it’ll look so suspicious if he reports it.
The house is full hello Satan right now and Topher looks like he shouldn’t have even entered the zip code.
Also, there’s the matter of Mateo not existing, legally speaking.
Weirdly, his mom hadn’t registered her demon-spawn child, so he doesn’t even have a birth certificate to prove citizenship.
Pressing his ear to the door, Mateo listens with breath held. Nothing. No signs of life at all. It would be exactly his luck that the rich guy who’d promised a payday dies in his fucking bathroom.
The combination of dread and certainty reaches critical mass, and he knocks.
And gets silence in return.