Petty Magic (4 page)

Welcome to Harbinger House

6.

But at evening she came all at once to the green lawn where the wretched little hut stood on its hens’ legs. The wall around the hut was made of human bones and on its top were skulls. There was a gate in the wall, whose hinges were the bones of human feet and whose locks were jaw-bones set with sharp teeth. The sight filled Vasilissa with horror …

—From “Vasilissa the Beautiful,”
Russian Wonder Tales

B
ECAUSE THE
house is haunted, Helena makes all her guests sign a waiver at check-in. The ghost is even older than we are; it seems he’s fascinated, still, with the concept of indoor plumbing. The toilets flush by themselves in the middle of the night, and when a guest gets out of bed to investigate, she spots no cat slipping through the open window, no other explanation for the water gurgling in the cistern. The ghost never shows himself, but before Helena instituted the waiver, the occasional guest would try to weasel out of paying for the night because of the phantom toilet-flushing.

Of course, there are others who come here
because
of the so-called “toilet ghost.” Excited middle-aged men bring EVP recorders, infrared cameras, and other devices that beep frantically just before the flush, and Helena has been interviewed on cable television more times than I can recall. People find her delightfully peculiar for the way she speaks of our ghost with fondness, for her taste in art (on the foyer walls one finds medieval woodcuts of tubby monks making merry and bare-bottomed fiends discharging Satan’s deadliest weapon), and for her collection of marionette puppets scattered throughout the house.

There is at least one marionette in every room apart from the baths. Each of the five lady puppets strung above the kitchen sink is dressed in a calico frock and sensible shoes, her hair—unnervingly lifelike—worn in a bob of brown frizz, her face kind in aspect. In the parlor four marionettes hang from the fireplace mantel; three are women and one is not. The lady puppets look like Gibson girls with their bouffants, swan-bill corsets, and pensive gazes, but their broad crimson mouths and spindly fingers lend them a more sinister air than their creator had perhaps intended. The man puppet, as if for comic relief, wears wire-rimmed spectacles and a pink cravat. Come December Helena tucks each of them into a red-striped stocking, and they goggle at you like curious marsupials as you pour your whisky.

Even at a distance one discerns the careful, even obsessive craftsmanship that went into each of these puppets. They wear hand-knit Aran jumpers in soft flecked wool, herringbone trousers and tiny leather wingtips, frothy lawn dresses and off-the-shoulder evening gowns. In their little wooden hands they carry golf clubs and croquet mallets, paintbrushes and knitting needles. Draw nearer and you’ll see the freckles on their noses and forearms, crow’s-feet, cleft chins, and liver spots. Their eyes are full of expression: some are wistful, others mischievous. The older puppets wear hats trimmed with dusty silk flowers, bustle skirts or crinolines, wimples and rough homespun; the men wear waistcoats, bow ties, spats, and what have you. One puppet in the dining room has a dime-sized pocket watch, and if you’re the first one up in the morning you can hear it ticking while you’re having your breakfast.

The parrot is another subject of curiosity. Hieronymus is an African grey, a species known for its skill in mimicry. He resides mostly in the sitting room, on a perch of eucalyptus wood beside an antique lectern. Not only is our parrot literate, but his IQ is probably higher than yours (and you shouldn’t feel bad about that, really, because the bird is smarter than anyone in the Harbinger clan). But he doesn’t say much, since he’s too busy working his way through the metaphysical poets. After that he’ll be on to the Scottish romantics, and yes, he turns his own pages with a flick of his claw. The parrot takes most of his meals at the lectern—Helena spends a small fortune each month on organic flaxseed and sardines
millésimées
—and a couple of times a day he flies up two flights of stairs and through an attic window (always kept open for this purpose) for a bit of fresh air. He roosts up there, too, in a cage without a door.

You should know that the bird is entirely too proud to provide any intentional amusement. The Manhattanites who are regular guests are used to this, and so they pay him little attention even while they are having themselves a dram at the sideboard.

Which is what they’re doing now, judging by the laughter I can hear through the parlor door. If they stay too long the parrot will begin to mock them. There’s an old record playing on the turntable in the dining room—torch music, disgustingly sentimental—and I make my way toward the distant tinkling of ice cubes.

Each of the puppets above the kitchen sink holds a baking mitt or spatula in her little wooden hand. They sway in the faint breeze from the open window, their jointed legs clonking faintly, and seem to smile down at my niece as she chops up a spray of fresh mint and stirs it into a glass pitcher of lemonade. A lock of her lovely red-gold hair has fallen out of her ponytail, and there’s a dreamy smile on her face as she watches the neighbors’ children playing tag through the window above the sink. It’s her forty-fifth birthday tomorrow, but to ordinary men she doesn’t look a day past eighteen.

Harry’d given me a box on my way out so I could give Vega her present straightaway. I rest the shopping bag on one of the kitchen chairs, we seat ourselves at the table, and Vega pours us each a glass. But she wastes no time, that girl: “What’s that in the shopping bag, Auntie?”

Seems like we are forever celebrating birthdays. I pull out the box with the looking glass inside. “Happy birthday, dear,” I say as she exclaims in delight at her new treasure. “I thought it would be nice for you to have an extra hand mirror.” I pause. “Just one catch.”

Vega raises the mirror and regards her reflection for a moment, then tilts it so she can see over her shoulder. She frowns. “You’ve done it now, Auntie. Freaky bastard, isn’t he?”

I cluck my tongue. “Beat his wife, I’d say.”

“It belonged to her, of course.” With her forefinger she traces the intricate floral engraving down the handle. “The one I’ve got upstairs isn’t nearly as nice as this.”

“Doesn’t have a demon in it, either. Can you fix it?”

She casts a glance toward the foyer. Helena’s guests are leaving the parlor now, clearly disgruntled. Hieronymus has made short work of them.
“It’s tourist season!”
shrieks the parrot as they slam the door behind them.
“Now where did I put my gun?”

“We’ll go up to my room,” Vega says, and we spend the next quarter of an hour laying the spirit in the privacy of her attic bedroom.

She raises the mirror once more, tilts it so she can see his face, and makes eye contact (or would, if there were any balls in his sockets). She doesn’t open her mouth, but I can tell she’s speaking to him, and from the sudden heaviness of the air in Vega’s ordinarily cheerful room it seems he’s not especially grateful for it. The clouds part and a muted shaft of light spills onto the hardwood floor. I see a shadow pass along the wall out of the corner of my eye, and when I look down I see faint boot prints in the hooked rug by the bed. Vega’s eyes are glued to the looking glass, her mouth set in a grim line. The rest of this eldritch business passes quickly enough, though, and once the boot prints have faded she heaves a sigh, places the mirror on her vanity table, and declares we’ve earned ourselves another glass of the sweet stuff.

When we come back downstairs there are half a dozen gals—our friends, not the weekenders—in the kitchen helping themselves to the lemon squash, all of them looking rather glum. Our gathering ended yesterday, but the local ladies are reluctant to go back to their routines.

The covention, if you’ll forgive the pun, is a twice-annual event that brings all our hundred-plus members back to Blackabbey. These weeklong events straddle the summer and winter solstices, though the end-of-year covention is naturally the more festive of the two. The covention is not merely a social occasion. There are memorials for our recently departed and rituals of welcome for babies and other newcomers, and the oath-taking for those on the cusp of adolescence. And on the extremely rare occasions when one of our members is suspected of breaking that oath, we hear testimonies, confer among ourselves, and form a judgment by consensus. It’s a distasteful business, needless to say, though fortunately I’ve never had to witness any trials for sorcery in my century and a half of Blackabbey coventions.

Minor problems are dealt with, too, of course—we hash out our conflicts, offer up our transgressions. Mind you, we’ve all bent the rules at some stage, but when one of us is angling after love or money like the crassest of neo-pagan frooty-toots, with their plastic runes and two-bit spellbooks—well, then an intercession is necessary.

Otherwise, we pass the evenings with music and gossip, ribald jokes and epic card games, the tallies running year to year. We stuff ourselves with cakes and cookies, and we bawdy old broads indulge in our signature liqueurs while the children drink themselves giddy on nose-tingling ginger tonic. Those who travel tell of all the strange and marvelous things they’ve seen since the last covention, and among the armchair set there are recipe exchanges and reminiscences of coventions past.

Our coven has grown increasingly diverse through the generations, as hereditary members return with the progeny of their exotic unions, and as Blackabbey itself swells with those wandering beldames attracted by its reputation. Even the local coven members sleep over during the event, and the house grows another dozen or so rooms to accommodate everyone. My sister brings out the
NO VACANCIES
sign when there’s an excess of tourists, but there’s always room at covention time.

H
ELENA BUCKED
the trend by marrying twice. Her case was exceptional, too, in that neither of her husbands left her—Henry died young and Jack lived to a ripe old age, at least by ordinary standards. Henry had some nasty kind of food poisoning; I’m none too clear on the details, but I need hardly say that Helena was blameless. Indeed, she seized upon every morbid custom by which to mourn him: she festooned the door knocker with black crepe, wore that somber color head to foot every day for two years, and during that time left the house only to visit the florist and the graveyard. To this day—and in flagrant disregard of her second husband’s feelings on the matter, though his feelings matter even less now he’s dead—she wears a lock of Henry’s hair in a glass pendant round her neck.

Apart from that one reminder, however, she seldom gives any indication of Henry Dryden’s presence in her thoughts. Helena is a pillar of efficiency, judicious with praise and affectionate in moderation. The B and B is her lifeblood now, though she doesn’t do it for the income. Entertaining family and coven with tasty victuals in a spick-and-span home simply isn’t enough of a challenge for her. Helena Homebody delights in finding new ways to keep her guests happy; her latest scheme consists of a system of chutes under all the guest beds, whereby an item not yet discovered to be missing is deposited in a lost-and-found box in the laundry room and returned to the surprised and grateful guest upon checkout. Yes, she revels in all the trappings of domesticity, the quilt making and the gingham aprons, the teapots and the feather dusters, the stainless-steel cookie-cutter sets and the eco-friendly cleaning products. I must look positively feral in comparison.

And of course, Helena is the only one of us three who has experienced the miracle of procreation. As I say, we reach puberty as usual but age imperceptibly from then on, which means our biological clocks keep a different time. Beldames tend to wait until they’re fifty or sixty to have their kiddies. I suppose Morven had some vague wish to do so herself, but she never met the right man, in the madhouse or anywhere else. She did garner a slew of proposals at Ypres though, and she might have even accepted one had any of the men survived the hospital. The soldiers adored her—and why wouldn’t they, sweet as she is? Her pointy nose and expressive mouth made her the classic
jolie laide
. Perhaps she reminded them of their mothers.

As for me, well—I did have the occasional pang of maternal desire, but I knew better than to pretend I could ever be selfless enough to raise a kiddie.

T
HE HARBINGERS
, the Jesters, and the Peacocks are the oldest extraordinary families in Blackabbey, our ancestors having arrived among the first colonial settlers. Few were ever suspected of witchcraft, and fewer still were persecuted for it—our own Goody Harbinger, “the Harveysville Witch,” being the infamous exception. Hers was the only recorded witch trial in the history of our humble burgh, initially brought about by all the haggard young mothers in the neighborhood grumbling that Goody Harbinger never seemed to grow any older. It didn’t help that her hair was red and her little black terrier—her familiar, they said—would follow her anyplace she went. Subsequently she was blamed for an epidemic among the cattle, and that was that: Goody Harbinger was sentenced to die on the gallows. Though that sentence was carried out in due course, she arranged that her nine-year-old child should vanish in the crowd that bright and frosty morning, prescient as she was that her daughter would be next accused. Lily Harbinger stayed away for a long time, nearly a hundred years, so that by the time she returned there was no one left outside the coven who might have recognized her.