19. Sunday, October 29, 2023 #2
Images flash through her mind—the decapitated bird, the bodies in the ferns, the dirt between her mother’s teeth, the black ink spilling over Geoff’s eyes, the sniffling snout of Ruth Crowley’s blind fox.
Is she losing her mind? Then she remembers in the middle of the night, Polly asking if she thought something was not right about the house and the woods.
Polly feels it, and Quinn does too. She rips up the pamphlet and shoves it in her bedside drawer.
She offers to clean up the breakfast dishes and tells Geoff he should go get some writing in.
After Polly leaves for work and Quinn retires to his room to play videogames, she’s in the clear.
She puts the last plate in the dishwasher and then heads out to her car.
Glancing around to make sure no one is out there, she opens the back hatch to retrieve the cardboard box that Ruth Crowley gave her on Friday.
This is the first chance she’s had to go through it.
The garage is probably the best place to get some uninterrupted time to herself.
No one goes in there unless they absolutely have to, because it’s still a mess from when they moved in.
A mountain of empty cardboard boxes waiting to be broken down and recycled takes up half the space.
The rest is full of pieces of furniture that used to be in their old house but just don’t work in the new one.
Alice clears off an armchair that has already started to smell musty from being outside for two months and drags over a low bench to use as a table.
She sits down, pulls out the leather-bound book, and starts flipping through it from the beginning.
Everything is in Latin, which means she can’t understand it, but she pulls out her phone and finds the photo Geoff sent her that day of Polly’s floor.
It takes her no time to match symbols from the book with ones in the photo.
They’re all labeled in Latin as well, so she opens the Google Translate app.
She types in the words under one of the symbols, a triangle with another smaller triangle inside of it—protection of one child.
She remembers Ruth mentioning that her sister’s husband had convinced their only daughter to stay away from her mother.
Alice wonders if this symbol was for her, and she’s suddenly filled not with fear but sadness.
She continues typing in the words under each symbol and finds that one means familial, another means to return, and another means earth.
Alice has to flip through several pages of the book before she finds the biggest symbol on the floor. The translation comes back as conjuration.
She notices that a line is carved from the conjuration symbol to a smaller one just above it.
She flips through the book until she finds the smaller symbol and types the Latin words under it into her phone.
The words that come back flood her with unease—sign of the witch.
Could Ruth’s sister have conjured a witch in the woods?
The question swims through Alice’s mind like a slippery eel.
Before she has a chance to convince herself otherwise, the side door to the garage bangs open, sending shudders through the whole building.
Alice screams and jumps up from the chair, knocking the book to the floor and almost tipping over the cardboard box.
“For heaven’s sake, Alice,” her mother scolds. “What’s with the dramatics?”
“You scared me,” Alice shouts, relieved to see that it’s only her mother. For a split second she’d honestly thought the witch had come for her. Now, staring into her mother’s sharp blue eyes as she stands at the garage door, a paintbrush in her hand, she feels ridiculous.
“What on earth are you doing in here?”
“I could ask you the same thing,” Alice responds, flinching at how defensive she sounds.
“I’m looking for some turpentine for my brushes,” her mother explains without a beat. Then looks at Alice expectantly.
“I was just looking at some boxes we forgot to unpack.” She gestures to the box sitting on the bench. “Making sure there was nothing important in them.”
Her mother inches forward. “Anything of interest in there?”
Alice grabs the box off the bench, drops it to the floor, and then kicks it behind the armchair. “No. That one is just full of junk.”
“Are you all right, dear?” her mother asks, narrowing her eyes. “You seem jumpier than usual.”
Alice shakes her head. “I’m fine. Nothing to worry about at all. Do you want me to help you find the turpentine?”
Her mother says something, but Alice doesn’t hear her because at the very same moment an inky black shadow floods her mother’s eyes and then disappears. “Mom, your eyes. Did you feel that?”
Her mother smiles warily and shakes her head. “Feel what, dear?”
“A black shadow just went right across both your eyes and then disappeared. The same thing happened to Geoff’s eyes this morning, but he said he didn’t feel it.” Alice’s face is only inches from her mother’s, but she can’t see anything out of the ordinary.
Her mother takes a step away from Alice.
“You’re the only one who’s seen this black-shadow-in-the-eyes thing?
” Alice nods, her stare fixed in case it happens again.
“Well then, it sounds like maybe it’s a ‘you’ problem.
I mean, since neither Geoff nor I have experienced anything out of the ordinary. ”
“But why would I see it in your eyes if my eyes were the problem?”
“Migraines can cause people to see some very strange things,” her mother explains.
“Maybe you should go lie down for a little while in case something is coming on.” She takes Alice’s hand and leads her out of the garage.
“You know, my mother suffered terribly from migraines when she stopped menstruating. And those kinds of things run in the family.”
Alice allows herself to be led from the garage by her mother and even to be convinced to lie down on the couch with a cold cloth across her forehead.
After an hour of waiting for this hereditary, menopausal, hallucination-inducing migraine to arrive, she tosses the cloth aside and gets up.
Feeling like she may be on the brink of finally figuring some things out, she goes back out to the garage to resume her inspection of the box that Ruth Crowley gave her.
The box is gone.