Petty Magic (25 page)

“Spirit of Henry Dryden,” Clovis says. “We humbly ask that you tell us if you died by the hand of another and, if so, that you name your killer.”

Without taking his see-through eyes off Helena, Henry opens his mouth and begins to speak … 
but we can’t hear a word!

We just stare at him in bafflement for a few moments. Then somebody says nervously, “There’s no audio!”

Dymphna turns to the hysterix. “Is there any way to fix it?”

“I seem to have misplaced the remote control,” Clovis replies tartly.

Then we hear a second popping noise, this time right above our heads. A wheel takes shape out of a ball of unearthly light, then another, then a chair, then a person inside the chair. And she, like my unfortunate brother-in-law, doesn’t take notice of anyone else in the room. “Henry! Oh, Henry, how I’ve missed you!”

The girls turn away from the image of their father and eye the newcomer in consternation. “Who is
that?”

Helena regards the apparition with distaste. “Belva Mettle.”

“How did
she
get in here?”

Good grief—the hag knot! I’ve got to get rid of it. But she might not go away if I only make it vanish out of my pocketbook into the nearest trash can; I’ve got to undo the knot, separate the stone from the cord. Nothing good can come of an interview with Henry’s dead mistress.

Aside from the glowing blue permanent and a rather impressive wattle, Belva doesn’t look much altered from the scene inside the View-Master. “Oh, my dear, dear Henry!”

Henry, meanwhile, doesn’t even notice Belva in her spectral wheelchair hovering above the dining table. It’s like the spirits in the room are on two different channels. He holds his hand out to Helena, lips still moving, looking at her mournfully all the while.

Belva holds out her skinny bird-claw hands, waving frantically. “Henry! Henry! Can’t you hear me?”

“
We
can hear you,” Vega mutters. “And we wish you’d go back to whatever circle of hell you’ve just sprung from.”

The ghost of Belva slowly swivels to look at my niece sitting at the table next to me. “How like a Harbinger,” she says slowly, “to invite a gal to a party and once she’s there make her feel like she’s crashed it.”

“Nobody asked you here,” Vega retorts. I’m fumbling in my pocketbook for the hag knot while maintaining the picture of innocence above the table. Clovis shoots me a look but says nothing.

“Somebody asked me here, or else I wouldn’t
be
here. Why are you all so heartless? Isn’t it enough that I’ve had to live and die without my Henry? Why show him to me now, why make him blind and deaf to me?”

“He’s not
your
Henry,” Helena replies. “And he never was.”

I slide my fingernail under the knot, loosening it little by little. Belva glowers down at my sister, her wattle quivering with animosity. “You’ll be sorry, Helena Harbinger.”

I’ve almost got it now, but I can’t help laughing out loud. “What are
you
going to do to her?”

Belva ignores me, wagging her finger at my sister like she’s reprimanding a small child. “You may be a beldame, but you’ll pay for your sins just like anybody else.”

“Like you’re paying for yours?” my sister replies as I finally manage to get my forefinger through the slackened hag knot and pull it out of the stone.

Belva’s eyes widen, and as she holds out her hands to the specter of Henry it’s like some cosmic vacuum is pulling her back to wherever she’s come from. She gives a small shriek as her wheelchair hurtles backward, vanishing into the picture window. Lucretia jumps up from her perch in the corner and peers out into the night.

We turn back to the apparition in the living room doorway. Henry is still talking, still holding out his hand to his wife. Helena sits frozen in her chair, her eyes locked to his. “Read his lips!” somebody cries, but the apparition fades before we can even try.

Lucretia turns away from the window with a frown. “I find it very perplexing,” she says, “that we inadvertently called the spirit of Belva Mettle. How could this possibly happen?”

Dymphna turns to my sister. “Perhaps Belva gave your husband one of the objects you brought tonight?”

Helena shakes her head. “I gave him all those things.”

It’s a mystery to everyone but me, though naturally Lucretia is the only one unwilling to let it go. As we rise to leave she gives my sister a look almost as mean as Belva’s. Cut from the same cloth, those two.

Tonight didn’t turn out at all the way Lucretia hoped it would. Helena got the last word, and that’s got to count for something.

I go with the party taking the long route home and bring up the rear. This way I can throw what’s left of that stupid hag knot into an overgrown azalea bush without anybody seeing.

* * *

L
ATER THAT
night Morven and I go back to Cat’s Hollow and walk the old streets in the moonlight, chuckle at the bawdy jokes traded among the revelers outside the Dutch tavern, and buy a carton of milk to feed the strays. I’m restless when we get back to the apartment, picking up novels and puzzle books and casting them aside again with heavy sighs. Morven is working on yet another charity blanket with her supersonic crochet hook, seemingly unperturbed by the events of the evening.

I clear my throat and Morven pauses. “I’ve come to a decision,” I say.

“Regarding?”

“Justin.”

“Oh.” Morven puts down her hook and folds her hands over the mound of wool in her lap. “Well? What is it?”

“I’ve got to end it.”

Another pause. “I think that’s wise.”

“And well overdue, I’m sure you’d like to say.”

My sister shrugs. “How will you do it? And when?”

“Soon. Next week.” I pause. “There’s just one thing.”

Morven sighs. “You want your last hurrah, is that it?”

I nod a trifle sheepishly. “I keep telling him we’ll go to Europe for a long weekend,” I venture, and Morven rolls her eyes. “I’m not even asking for a weekend though—just a night. Only one night.”

“And what happens once you’ve had your one big night?”

“I won’t see him again. Cross my heart.”

“How will you explain your reasons?” Morven gives me a sharp sidewise glance as she resumes her crocheting. “You will break up with him properly, won’t you?”

With a forefinger I draw an X across my bosom. “And after that,” I say sadly, “it will be easy enough for me to disappear.”

Morven picks up the View-Master off a stack of old
Life
magazines on the end table, puts it to her face, and clicks once, twice. She puts it down again and gives me a long, sad, pitying look. “All right. I’ll help you. But if you don’t keep your word, I’ll kick your took.”

A
T TEN
past seven the following evening I knock on the front window at Fawkes and Ibis. Justin looks up from his neat piles of personal checks and fifty-dollar bills on the counter, grins like a schoolboy, whisks the money into the safe, and comes to the door to unlock it for me. When he kisses me I don’t want to think that the times our lips will meet in the future are numbered.

No sooner am I through the door than I catch sight of a new item on the casket table by the window and gasp. “Where did you find that lamp?” It’s a strange piece: a gnome crouching under a toadstool in cast iron with a faded green lampshade, the cord—with a clunky British plug—dangling off the edge of the table.

“Which lamp? Oh, the one with the dwarf? Estate sale. Why?”

“Where? Where was it?”

He gives me a funny look. “Upper East Side. Why?”

“How much is it?” I murmur as I lift the price tag. “I want it. I’ll buy it right now, in fact.”

Justin laughs, though I can see he’s a little disconcerted. “You can buy it in the morning, if you like it that much.”

He stares at me curiously for a long moment, until finally I feel compelled to say, “It has sentimental value.”

He laughs again. “How can it have sentimental value when it’s never belonged to you?”

“I only mean that it reminds me of someone—something.”
Tell me you remember it. Tell me you remember your mother switching it off every night when you were small
.

“It’s a little creepy, don’t you think?”

I turn away from the lamp and throw my arms round his neck. “If I thought it was creepy, do you think I’d want so badly to buy it?”

He kisses me once, twice. That’s two kisses less. “I don’t know,” he murmurs. “I stopped trying to figure you out a long time ago.”

Now seems like a good time for it: “Let’s go away this weekend.”

“Yes!
Where to?” He leads me into the ersatz parlor and flicks on the opera lamps, then approaches the old globe in the corner. “Should I spin it?”

“If you like,” I say. “But the world has changed quite a bit since that was made.”

“Some lines have been redrawn, but the continents are all in the same places.” He spins the globe half a dozen times but every time it stops his finger is pointed someplace entirely unsuitable, like Siberia or the Indian Ocean.

I drop onto the chaise lounge and catch sight of a woven basket on the end table crammed with old postcards. “Oh. Are these new?”

“Uncle Harry’s been collecting them for years. There are some really old ones in there.” I pluck a card, a hand-colored etching of Notre Dame circa 1900, and when I turn it over I find the postmark is still crisp enough to read.

When I pick up the basket to flip through it on my lap I notice the tag marked
$5/each
. “Five dollars! Hah! Have you found anyone foolish enough to pay five dollars for a used postcard?”

“People like to frame them,” he replies with a shrug. “They’re worth more because they’re used.”

I sit up straight on the lounge and pat the cushion beside me. “Let’s read through them together.” I pass him a handful of cards. “Whatever postcard strikes our fancy, that’s where we’ll go.” Justin thinks it’s a great idea.

After a while I stop reading the messages, all of them tedious litanies of routes traveled and souvenirs purchased. Big Ben, Great Wall, Eiffel Tower. Athens, Knossos, Giza. A few naughty burlesques thrown in for variety’s sake. And—aha!—here are a few old-fashioned etchings of fairy-tale castles, medieval alleyways, Gothic cathedrals born of the sweat of a thousand men. But most of these quaint ones hail from Germany, which is the one place to which I’ve no interest in returning.

Then,
naturally:
“How do you feel about Germany? Found a very nice one from Bad Wimpfen.” He rattles off a list of places and I nix every one. Nuremberg? Can’t go back to Nuremberg without feeling like I’ve got to look over my shoulder at every turn. And then there was that time in Oberammergau when I came upon a public auction of porcelain and silverware; the self-appointed auctioneer had looted the house of a Jewish family who’d just been dragged off to the death camps. I made myself a vulture, roosted on a lamppost, and went on shrieking until there wasn’t a soul left in the
Marktplatz
.

I need to go someplace new, someplace untainted by morbid recollection. “I don’t want to go to Germany,” I say as I shuffle through another stack of cards. “If you don’t mind.”

Something in my tone gives him pause. Out of the corner of my eye I see him open his mouth to ask, then think better of it.

As I flip through the postcards I find myself thinking of that ride back to London on the Caledonian Express, Jonah’s melancholy and my wish for a honeymoon of our own. In a way, it isn’t too late.

But we can’t go to Scotland—too many memories there, though they aren’t unhappy ones. He had been to Connemara with Patricia, and yes, it would have made sense for us to go someplace else, someplace new to both of us. But that longing in his eyes hadn’t been for Patricia or the honeymoon itself; it was for the landscape, the stark and heathen beauty of it.

As I’m mulling this over, I come upon another Irish postcard in the stack—not another quaint thatched cottage or sheep-crowded road captioned
rush hour in Ireland
, but a simple shot of a bar-front with a shaggy dog dozing in the open doorway. M
URTY
C
OYNE’S
, says the sign above the window.

“You haven’t been to Ireland yet, have you?” I ask him.

“No. Always wanted to though. Have you?”

I shake my head. I flip the postcard and at the bottom left is printed
Coyne’s pub, Tully Cross, Connemara
. The postmark is smudged, but judging by the quality of the photo on the front I’d say it’s thirty-five, forty years old. It is addressed to a Miss Eugenie Pryce of 622 Greenwich Street, New York, and though the message is not signed, the scrawl is obviously a man’s.

This is the best pub in all the world
, it reads.
There’s only one thing missing
.

I hand the postcard to Justin and as he reads it a broad smile spreads over his face. “When can you leave?”

The Goblin Ball

25.

December 31, 1944

“I will tell you everything you have forgotten. We loved each other—ah! no, you have not forgotten that—and when you came back from the wars, we were to be married. Our pictures were painted before you went away. You know I was more learned than women of that day. Dear one, when you were gone, they said I was a witch. They tried me. They said I should be burned. Just because I had looked at the stars and gained more knowledge than other women, they must needs bind me to a stake and let me be eaten by the fire. And you far away!” …

“The night before,” she went on, “the devil did come to me. I was innocent before—you know it, don’t you? And even then my sin was for you—for you—because of the exceeding love I bore you. The devil came, and I sold my soul to eternal flame. But I got a good price.”

—E. Nesbit, “The Ebony Frame”

I
T’S WELL
past sixty years since I’ve seen it, but I often dream of that castle with its spires and crooked turrets on a mountain wreathed in evergreens, ominous clouds gathering overhead; it was just like a picture in a storybook. In the dream I’m riding through the forest in a posh car, an armored Mercedes, and when I meet the pale cold eyes of the driver in the rearview mirror the recognition sends a tingle of horror down my neck.

The road zigzags up the mountain. I look out the window and see figures, skeletal figures, coming out of the gloom of the forest, and they line up along the road and stare at me as the car passes. I press my palm to the glass, but what can I do for them?

The armored Mercedes pulls up to the archway and I glide noiselessly up the stairs in a black velvet gown. I pass through the chapel gallery on my way to the party and when I look down at the altar I see a corpse there in a mahogany coffin. It’s Jonah’s. Terrified at the sight, I run across the gallery and through the doorway into the banquet hall. The crowd of dancers parts so I can see him there at the far side of the room in his brown dress uniform, now striding toward me, smiling like he’s lived to see the end.

S
O WE
came out of the station waiting room at half past three on New Year’s Eve, having spent the last quarter of an hour checking that our visages and uniforms were all in order. We didn’t have to have every detail perfect; after all, no one in Wernigerode had met these two before, and I didn’t want to waste any oomph making sure Jonah’s new nose was just so. We only had to resemble the pictures on their identity cards.

We did ride in an armored Mercedes (sent by the
Oberst
, the colonel in charge of SS headquarters in Wernigerode, to meet us at the train station), but the ascent wasn’t as smooth as I later dreamed it. Seated in front, the colonel’s secretary told us we would be staying at the castle, but only for the night.

The wind set the trees to whispering, and I began to feel rather anxious. Every time I glanced at Jonah he looked back at me through the face of Dr. Schafer, and I had to fight to reassure myself that he
was
my Jonah, same as ever. He gave my hand a furtive squeeze, and I realized he must have found my face just as disconcerting. It began to rain.

The road led through a gate and skirted the castle mount as it climbed. On the left we saw a stretch of half-timbered houses and provincial shops, several of which offered more of those heinous little witch figures. To our right the castle loomed.

Soon we passed through a second gate, and the Mercedes slowed to a stop on a wide stone terrace with a pepper-pot tower and a panoramic view over the mountains. Jonah and I weren’t even out of the car when a couple of porters disappeared with our suitcases. We looked up at the castle, the turrets and spires and tiny dormer windows poking out at odd places along the roof. Rough medieval masonry was set against towers of tidy brick and mullioned windows; this and other charming quirks indicated that the castle complex had undergone a spell of “improvement” every century or so.

We were ushered through a doorway and up a spiral staircase, and a knight glared at us from a niche halfway up. We reached a landing and passed through a door into an inner courtyard. Here all the architectural periods in the castle’s history converged—medieval, faux-medieval, and quaint half-timbering—so that if I hadn’t known better I’d have thought I’d stumbled into a warren unawares. Vines of ghost ivy snaked across the stone and wood façades, and griffin-headed gutter spouts high above our heads unleashed the rainwater in roaring cataracts onto the cobblestones. The whole place would have been very charming in summertime, but that night, the last night of the year, the narrow windows reflected nothing but the storm clouds.

I looked down at my thumb in my coat pocket and was greatly relieved when the crescent didn’t glow. I’d never before met a beldame in the service of the Führer, and I hoped I never would.

A small staircase flanked by stone grotesques led to a doorway in a round tower, and I counted nine steps as we followed the colonel’s secretary inside. Nine steps, that was a good sign; we’d carry it off tonight, I knew we would. I reached down to pet the dragon on the banister and felt it purr ever so slightly beneath my hand.

Our wet coats were whisked away and we were given a brief tour of the public rooms. There were gargoyles and demons everywhere we looked—on the banisters, the wainscoting, the mantelpieces. It was as if this castle had been custom-built for the men who’d taken it over.

Swastika banners were hung on either side of the heraldic stag rearing above a side doorway in the banquet hall. The walls were paneled with tableaux from local history, processional pomp and men in tights and bloomers, but these scenes were obscured by great oval mirrors taken from elsewhere in the castle, no doubt hung there to make the room seem larger than it already was. I met my reflection in each mirror I passed and felt a burst of confidence in the security of my disguise.

Beyond the banquet hall was a series of reception rooms paneled in faded red and green damask, furnished with chaise lounges, ottomans decorated with intricate needlepoint, and chess tables with pearl inlay. In the first reception room beyond the hall a great evergreen tree stood, glass icicles and silver bells glittering on every bough. The party wouldn’t begin for another three hours, and there was a hush as we passed through all these rooms, an air of expectancy.

We went through another maze of corridors before we reached the guest wing, and there the secretary left us to our rooms. I’d hardly opened my suitcase when a maid arrived with a light supper tray. This Schafer chap must’ve been quite the big fish.

I hung up my uniform and climbed into bed in the twilit gloom. There was a great horned chandelier poised directly above my head, and if I looked out the tall windows on the opposite wall I could see the evergreens vanishing into the fog on the horizon. The rain had given way to snow.

Within a few minutes Jonah had slipped in beside me. There wasn’t much need for caution; half the SS were sleeping with their secretaries anyway. There was no telling when we might be interrupted, though, so we had to keep to our disguises. Mindful of this, he buried his face in my neck.

Afterward he slept. I put my hand to the locket round my neck and whispered, “Happy New Year, sis.”

“Good news,” Morven replied. That disembodied whisper in the darkness never failed to spook me a little. “I just talked to Helena. The Gingerbread Man says there’ll be peace in the spring.”

“Spring is centuries away,” I sighed. I glanced over at Jonah and found him sleeping with his eyes open.

I
WORE A
simple black gown, and Jonah was back in SS uniform. We had to pass through the chapel gallery to reach the banquet hall, and for a moment I paused at the handrail to look down on the altar, bereft of all sacred trimmings. Looted or hidden for safekeeping, who could say? There were voices and laughter coming through an open doorway on the chapel’s north wall, and a brief silence before the clicking of billiard balls and the thump of ball in pocket. Putting the
Billiardzimmer
right next door to the chapel seemed gauche even to me.

We passed into the banquet hall, where men in and out of uniform were milling about. The chandelier was blazing, and it was reflected in the long windows and all the mirrors hung about the room to marvelous effect.

The great mantelpiece in the corner was flanked by yet two more bronze dragons and festooned with fragrant boughs. Jonah presented himself, and then me, to the
Oberst
, and as the men took turns asking him about our trip from Berlin and grilling him for news, I wandered into the reception room. There were children kneeling at the foot of the great Christmas tree, picking up packages and shaking them for clues. Others were staring at the lavish spread of meats and sweets, held back out of politeness by their mothers, who were eyeing the food with just as much desire.

I stared at the plates piled high with frosted
Lebkuchen
, and my first thought was of the covention I was currently missing.
The Gingerbread Man says there’ll be peace in the spring
. I looked again, and the sight of so much food made me nauseous. The German people had little but last year’s potatoes, and the death camp inmates, slave laborers, and prisoners of war got nothing but soup made of the peelings. This party food was all part of the illusion that the Germans’ victory was close at hand.

The cook appeared, looking jolly in a clean apron, and for a second I fancied her the German counterpart of my dear Mrs. Dowel. Would that she were! She bid us all eat and started the children singing “O Tannenbaum.” I didn’t touch a morsel.

When I returned to Jonah’s side a light was shining in the musicians’ gallery up above, and three officers had struck up a rather desultory waltz. Someone took me by the elbow. “Why, Fraulein Gross,” said the colonel, “you are a very fortunate young lady.”

“Oh?”

“Aren’t you aware that had you taken the train yesterday as originally planned, you would most likely be dead now?”

I glanced from the face of the
Oberst
to Jonah and to the faces of the other men in their circle, as if I hadn’t the faintest notion what he was talking about.

“The train we were meant to take yesterday.” Jonah spoke as if to clarify some simple point to a small child. “It was bombed by the British.” He turned to the SS colonel, and for one terrifying moment I lost all sense of him behind that bland mask of self-satisfaction. “At first I thought it best not to tell her,” he said. “She rattles so easily—as you see.” Then he laughed. “No use fretting, my dear. Let’s have a dance.”

As we whirled about the room I kept catching glimpses of myself in the mirrors, and this time I was surprised despite myself to see the face of the dead secretary gazing back at me. As I say, mirrors are mere objects, easily deceived, and I was the only beldame in the room—yet I half expected these mirrors might betray me.

I looked up at Jonah and he pressed the small of my back. I cocked my head as if to say,
Now, which of these Nazis knows what we need to?

At that moment the colonel tapped Jonah on the shoulder, and Jonah gave me a wry look.
There’s your answer
. It was up to me now.

“May I cut in?” he was asking, and Jonah gave a gallant half bow as he retreated.

The next time I glanced in the mirror I was struck with horror at what I saw: every person in the room, save Jonah, was wearing my father’s face. I saw that same proud, remote visage on women in evening gowns as well as men in SS uniform. It was as if his image had been fractured by a kaleidoscope turned over and over again in the light. Even the children lingering in the doorway gazed up at me with his cold hard eyes. Up to now I had only ever seen his face on one snake at a time, and the effect of seeing it gazing back at me on all the hundred people in the room sent me almost to the brink of madness.

The waltz went on and on, though it now sounded as if the musicians were playing underwater. I turned back to the
Oberst
, who had my hand and waist in a viselike grip, and he glared at me as if to say my birth had been a mistake he was ready to correct.

Frantically I looked over the bobbing shoulders for Jonah and spotted him in the middle of the floor. He was gazing back at me behind the bland features of Doctor Schafer, heedless of the evil that surrounded him. When I glanced in the mirror I saw—or
thought
I saw—my own frightened face, and I turned back to the SS colonel with a stab of certainty that it was all over. They had found us out.

But my father was gone, and beyond his shoulder I perceived that the room had been restored, festive and ordinary. “Are you unwell?” he was asking me, and it occurred to me that his grip had tightened merely to keep me from falling. He led me out of the hall and into the chapel gallery, where he sat me in a pew and petted my hair as Jonah handed me a mug of Glühwein.