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“A ten-foot-tall Jesus Christ in the garden, Dave, picture it.”
“You’re getting thin back here, Edmund.” Breck examined the layers of hair with his comb. “How about we try something new? Maybe take a few chances, bring the golden locks up to the twenty-first century?”
But Edmund wasn’t listening, he was off on a paranoid tear that he wouldn’t come back from in a hurry. “I’m telling you, Dave, it’s them Winnebagos. They’re after my invention.”
As much as I love you, my old friend, I have no clue what you are going on about?” Breck said.
The other man sighed. “Breck, you are such a heathen. I’m quoting Rare Birds. It’s such a good move. You really should watch it one day.”
“Ah, so the hair? What do you want to do about it, Eddie? Not to be too indelicate, but there’s a decent sized bald patch going on back here. We could do a Trump combover?”
“Oh, heavens no, could you imagine what Dermot would say to that?”
That raised a smile.
“Maybe we could be more creative. Maybe a piece?”
Breck brought out a cardboard with sample swatches from his drawer. “I think we can match up your color really well, we just need to get a little creative, and with luck dear old Dermot won’t even notice.”
Edmund glanced at the clumps of hair pasted to the cardboard. “Got to admit, I’m not exactly enthused by any of them,” he said. The truth was, he wasn’t ready for baldness. Sure, he’d watched his father and grandfather grow bald, his father very young, but he’d never imagined it would happen to him. And certainly not after he went to the Other Side. That just seemed like a particularly cruel jape on the part of their maker. Male pattern baldness afflicting the dead? Who would ever have imagined such a cruel and hairless fate?
Maybe Breck was right. It wasn’t that he was vain, just that an eternity with a shiny pate didn’t set his heart all aflutter.
“Okay, fine,” he said, looking into the backwards land of the mirror at Breck. “You’ve got me, let’s give it a shot. Can’t look worse than a Trump, after all.”
“Well it could,” Breck promised. “But I wouldn’t do that to you.”
He flipped the board onto the counter in front of him.
Breck fussed with his hair.
The bell over the door chimed as another one of Mallam Cross’s ghostly residents came in looking for a short back and sides.
Griffin stood in the doorway, the sunlight glimmering through the stripes of his prison uniform.
“Lookin’ for trim or cut, Griffin?” Breck asked, looking at the murderer through the mirror.
The exinmate grinned and smoothed his errant hair as he looked back through the mirror at the barber. He pulled at the collar of his uniform to straighten the stripes. He laughed at his number on the right side of his chest. It was the only thing Griffin could read because he’d been taught his numbers.
Not many people called the old con by his name; he’d lost the right to it before his execution, where the State assigned a string of numbers in its place. That was his reward for butchering the Madaferro family. Back in the day, the Madaferros were a dirt-poor Italian immigrant family trying to scratch a living from the soil. They had nothing to speak of, and most certainly nothing worth stealing. Griffin broke into their tiny hovel while the family were gathered around the kitchen table eating a Sunday dinner of baked woodchuck, boiled potatoes and dandelion greens. This was washed down by a glug of putrid homemade wine. There were nine of them squeezed in around the small crooked table. The three smallest sat on the laps of the older children, since there weren’t enough chairs or plates for the whole family to eat together, despite the ritual. They crammed greasy wood-chuck into their greedy mouths with their fingers. The sucking and smacking sounds of licked fingers were the best sounds Father Madaferro knew, but they disgusted Griffin.
He howled at the man at the head of the table, but Father Madaferro’s English was still hopelessly poor, and the man didn’t understand.
He shrugged and answered in Italian.
This angered Griffin deep in his xenophobic soul. He hated the way they all came over here, taking good honest American money and jobs, polluting the blood. If it wasn’t the wops it was the spicks or the micks.
“Speak fucking English, you useless stinking piece of shit. Come here, take our money and jobs, piss all over our land, and breed like stinkin’ rats! You’re barely fucking human. Look at me when I’m talking to you,” Griffin raged, all control lost, as he gave the wizened man the back of his hand. Father Madaferro sprawled onto the floor, spittle and blood dripping from his torn lower lip.
Mother Madaferro ran at Griffin and threw herself at his feet, begging him in Italian to stop, which riled him up all the more. Griffin took his fist and slammed it into the side of her face, knuckles to temple. She slumped on the floor beside her husband.
The children clung to each other, whimpering and sobbing.
Griffin lost his shit, totally, bellowing at them to shut the fuck up, but that only turned their whimpers into screams and those cries tore at the inside of his skull.
The red haze descended then, sparing him the details of the murders.
The next thing Griffin recalled was the sight of himself in a silvered mirror. The evening twilight made him an imposing shadow in the kitchen doorway. The blood turned it into an horrific one.
Moonlight cast a dismal light over the lifeless bodies on the table and lying broken and scattered about the floor. He stood breathing heavily with clenched bloodied fists banging off his thighs.
He left the new dead he had made with his very own hands and walked down the dusty lane to the main road.
A farmer hauling vegetables and fruit to market saw him and noticed the bloodstained clothes. Combined with the fact that Griffin seemed to be locked in an argument with himself, full-on ranting as he walked along the road, there was no way that farmer wasn’t calling the sheriff just as soon as he could.
They found the Madaferros at last supper.
Three months later Prisoner 51021301 sat in Old Sparky and was juiced until pronounced dead at the prison on the hill overlooking Mallam Cross.
“Number two,” Griffin said, miming the razor across his scalp. He touched his temples which still showed the burn marks from where the electrodes had been secured. “Got to look good for the cameras when them ghost hunters come back, right? Wanna look as sharp as my axe.”
––––––––
“How much are the Silver Queen peas again, Bill?” Deirdre shouted through to the backroom.
Bill stuck his head around the doorway and held up the can. He only reached halfway up the frame. “Weekly special, remember? 99c.” Bill owned the store. It had been his folks’ before that. A proper Mom and Pop grocery store. Being a little person could work for you or against you, though now thanks to that Peter Dinklage it was more Game of Thrones than Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Bill made it work for him.
There were large antique glass jars throughout the store filled with an assortment of candies with a small printed sign: “Help Yourself. Enjoy.”
In the ledger corner there was a fresh pot of coffee and a plate of even fresher pastries. In the winter cocoa made with cream and dark chocolate would be kept warm on the potbelly stove and served with hard little sugar cakes sweetened with rose water, just like his mom had made.
Anything they sold was wrapped in tissue and then in quality brown wrapping paper, which was tied off with traditional hemp twine. A large green embossed seal with Bill and Deirdre’s name in gold was placed over the knot. The seal would be different depending upon the season and major holidays.
“When is that woman bringing her ghost hunter team back?” Esmeralda asked, leaning on the counter conspiratorially. The two women met over a bag of defrosting chicken thighs.
“Not sure anyone one knows. Sure, she threatened she’d come back, and kicked up one hell of a stink that’s got Jasmine all hot and bothered, but maybe she’s just all wind, you know?” Deirdre keyed in the price of the chicken thighs, another one of Bill’s weekly specials. Of course, anyone paying attention would have noticed that this week they were 49c more than last week, despite the big handwritten sign promising four bucks off. She stood on a small crate so she could look customers in the eye.
“Esmeralda, so lovely to see you again,” Bill said, poking his head around the door again. He offered Deirdre and Esmerelda a nod and a smile.
“Got a delivery coming in,” Bill promised. “Should be some really good fresh stuff from an organic farm co-op we just sourced. Really looking forward to people getting a taste of the good stuff.” One thing that never failed to amaze Deirdre was that the dead still had their appetites—all of their appetites. It kept Bill in business.
He was slow to adapt to the modern age, preferring everything written by hand in accounts ledgers. There was no place in Bill’s store for pesky things like computers or printers. They didn’t even have an intercom to communicate between the store and the stockroom, just their willingness to shout. And for a little person, Bill had got one hell of a big voice.
Bill wasn’t a fan of the whole little person label, and he wasn’t a huge fan of his new life here in Mallam Cross, either, given once upon a time the dwarf was Bilis, King of the Antipodes. He stumped back through to his little backroom study and let the ladies gossip over the chicken thighs.
The stockroom still had the iron and wooden pegs that used to hang work horse harnesses and farm implements, and some of the oak barrels he used for storage bins dated back to the 1800s.
This was his home now.
One good thing left in his life was the ornate leather chair, which in his other life had been his throne, and where he practiced metallurgy and conjuring. Only his wife, Deirdre, knew him as the lord of the dwarves. Her true name was Deldrid, and when they’d first met she had been the sister to Gribalo, a fellow dwarf king. He didn’t understand how, when they had both crossed over, they had somehow ended up here in Mallam Cross, selling organic fruit and veg.
He sat back and let himself dream a little dream of his other life.
Time got away from him.
Before he knew it, it was time to shut up shop for the day.
They had their little rituals.
Bill went through to the shop where Deirdre was saying goodbye to the last of their customers and slotting the bolts in place on the top and bottom of the door. There was no real point to that, of course, given the majority of their business could simply walk through the glass door as though it wasn’t there, but routines were good, they kept you grounded.
He made his way to the stockroom, shutting off the floor lights.
He didn’t need an alarm, he’d got a hellhound which would patrol the stockroom at night, and that mutt was far more effective than any siren.
Bill noticed two figures lurking by one of the freezers. It was Lumas, a former prison guard—the man who had pulled the switch on Griffin and tied the knot on more than one hangman’s noose—and his dog, a pug called Galway, trying to steal steaks for a slap-up evening meal.
Bill opened the freezer for Lumas and grinned as the ghostly guard reached for the meat with his hands going through the package. Galway sat attentively at his side, licking every now and then at his trouser leg and jumping up each time she thought he was going to toss a piece of meat his way. “You’re chuckle heads. Both of you.” Lumas gave Bill a toothless grin. Lop-eared Galway bounded through Bill, barking happily. “See you tomorrow.”
“Wouldn’t wanna be you,” Lumas said, grinning some more.
Rituals.
It was just something they did every night.
Bill went through to the back of the stockroom to bolt the doors.
Through the small window he got a decent view of the birch trees at the far end of the parking lot. He saw something moving quickly through them, just a whisper of movement, too fast to focus on. He watched, and as it moved the blur settled down, solidifying as it took human form. For a few lingering seconds the figure walked through the birch trees, suffused with a sapphire aura.
Once the figure stopped walking the aura faded to nothing. No, that wasn’t true, Bill noticed, it didn’t become nothing ... it slipped, thickening and darkening until it formed a low black mist that wreathed around the figure’s ankles, always in motion, constant eddies and ripples.
Bill noticed a sulphur dioxide smell.
Bill shivered. His old mom had always said those shivers meant someone had walked over your grave.
In Mallam Cross that was more than possible.
He felt rather than heard his wife coming up behind him.
“Dee ... ”
“I sense something evil is coming this way, Bilis.”
“I sense it too,” the once and maybe future dwarf king said, unable to take his eyes from the figure in the rising mist.
“I think it’s time.”
He knew what she meant, but couldn’t believe it had come to this, so soon.
“Are you sure?”
Her reflection nodded at him in the glass. “I have to.”
“If you’re sure,” he said.
She was going to the garden basin to scry.
“Travel safely and wisely,” he told her, still watching the vaguely human form out amongst the trees. His view was obscured by a V-shape nook within the birch, but it seemed that he had been wrong and there was not one but two figures there, as a second blue aura began to glow steadily, intensifying in brightness and hue until it ignited into a large blue flame.
“You’re a couple of twisted little motherfuckers, aren’t you? All dressed up in stench and gloom. Well, I see you. I see you.”
––––––––
“You touch that book one more time, Amaryllis, and I’ll slap that grin right off the side of your face!” Esmerelda said. The girl could tell she was serious because she wasn’t shouting. Of course she didn’t know that Esmerelda would never slap her, but the threat was enough. Give it a year or so and she’d no doubt wise up to the bluff, but for now it worked, and that put a smile on the old librarian’s face. “And don’t you be giving me that puritanical stare of yours, either. I’ve told you a hundred times if I’ve told you once, we don’t censor our books, and we won’t burn them, either. So why don’t you take your tight-ass bun and spit curls to another part of the library and let me do my job.”
Esmerelda took the book away from the dowdy woman before she could object. She fully expected the old hag to call her a witch and cry that they should burn her.
“Now you know full well the Comstock Law states there is to be no lewd, indecent, filthy or obscene materials, Esmerelda. And don’t pretend you don’t. If we won’t protect our children from this filth, who will?”
Esmerelda didn’t point out the irony that neither of them had children to protect, nor that the minds of any modern children would never be perverted by something as mundane as—she checked the spine on the book—The Grapes of Wrath.
Amaryllis’s voice became shriller with each word and inflection.
She punctuated every three or four words by sharply pushing her round rimmed glasses up the bridge of her nose.
“I know I am right in this. Our government agrees with me.”
Her voice cracked, and her toe tapped madly on the floor.
“You know, if you really cared about perversion and filth you ought to go and see that Peter Logan, I hear they’ve got magazines with naked women in. Fancy that!”
“There’s a special place in hell for peddlers of such filth,” the other woman said, then stormed out of the library, ready to put the world to rights, or at least Mallam Cross if not the whole world. You had to pick your fights, after all.
––––––––
Seamus knocked gently on the door, then leaned close and called, “Hello, hello,” softly against the edge where it met the frame.
He listened at the door.
Nothing.
He waited fifteen seconds and knocked again.
Still no answer from within the room.
“I hope you’re not up to anything I wouldn’t do,” he said, smiling to himself, and turned the handle. “Fair warning, I am coming in.”
He knocked a third time, this time as he opened the door.
Seamus was greeted by the acrid tang of smoke.
He crossed the threshold, putting the tray down on the credenza, and went to the window to let some of the smoke out and some fresh air in.
He stood a moment in the breeze, then tried to find the source of the smoke. It wasn’t as difficult as it might have been. On the still-made bed lay a smoking bra, panties and boxers. He wanted to laugh at the ridiculousness of the situation, guests seemingly spontaneously combusting, all that remained a pile of smoking undies. But it wasn’t funny. Something both strange and decidedly nasty was afoot.
He shut the window and left the room, locking the door.
He walked down the hall reflecting upon what he’d seen. He didn’t want to think about what it meant, so of course that was all he could think about. Right up until he heard a scream and crashing dishes coming from the dining room.
Seamus hurried along the hall and descended only to be greeted by plumes of smoke gently rising from several of the chairs at now empty tables. There was a surreal aura of calm about the room.
His wife, Miranda, had been serving the evening meal as the guests began to go up in smoke. She stood with her back pressed up against the kitchen door with a tray of empty and half-empty dishes strewn across the floor.
Seamus walked through the tables, drawing each chair back to find smoking pairs of shoes arranged neatly on the carpet, all that remained of their diners.
He found himself laughing.
“This isn’t funny, Shame.”
“Ah, Miranda, love, it’s fucking hilarious. I mean, talk about dine and dash.” Seamus smiled at his freckled face wife.
“You’re nasty!” She grinned. “What should we do?”
“I suppose we should go check on the other guests?”
Together, they went door-to-door through the three floors of hallways and knocking on doors of the Silver Bough’s guest-house without raising a single soul. It was the same in every room: smoking shoes, underwear, trousers, and socks, and in one room, a single condom in the middle of tangled sheets that smoked with more than just friction burns.
In the kitchen they found their chef’s apron smoking on the floor in front of the stove where an omelette was in the process of burning the pan dry.
In the potting shed out back they found what was left of the gardener, a pair of smoking hiking boots and a rake.
Seamus picked up the errant boot. “Alas poor, what was his name again?”
––––––––
Bill walked into the lounge.
He tossed the keys into the wooden bowl on the table.
He looked into the mirror.
He was looking at the back of his head, neck and shoulders.
He turned to his right to see his left profile and to the left to see his right profile.
He faced the mirror and saw the back of his head.
Alice Through the Looking Glass or what? he thought, struggling to orientate himself.
He walked through the kitchen to the back gardens, where Deirdre hunched over her scrying bowl. She was surrounded by all manner of frogs and toads.
“Dee?” he asked, not venturing out.
In answer a frog chorus croaked up in a hundred ribbiting voices.
She looked over her shoulder at him.
“Have you talked with Old Man Feary?”
Old Man Feary was Seamus Feary’s father, Samson, who had founded the Silver Bough, and in a way created the town.
She shook her head. “Couldn’t reach him. Every time I tried to get through to the Waiting Room, one of the frogs splashed down, breaking the connection.”
He nodded, like it made perfect sense that frogs should rain from the sky. “Something is out there,” he said. “I saw it. I don’t know what it is, but I swear it came through from the other side.”
She kept scrying over her bowl. “The water creates ever so slight waves. It carries an electric blue aura. Have you seen this?”
Electric blue? Another word for sapphire?
Bilis felt the cold stone of fear settle in his stomach as he leaned over Deirdre’s scrying bowl to watch the psychic water bubble and churn as murky irregular shapes came to view. Slowly but surely, they changed into the same vaguely human forms he had seen emerge between the birches.
“By the powers that be! Tell me those two aren’t who you saw, Bilis? Tell me the water is mistaken?”
Bill leaned over. He felt a chill throughout his body. “I could tell you that, my sweet, but that wouldn’t change the truth, that Gwydion and Gilfaethwy walk among us.”
Gwydion and Gilfaethwy, wicked tricksters both.
How could they have found a path through?
The last he remembered of Gwydion, from the ancient days, was when the fiend started a war purely to trick his uncle Mathonwy so that Gilfaethwy could rape Goewin. Mathonwy had exiled them both, their punishment to live that exile in the form of animals. Gwydion lived as a stag for a year, a sow for a year, and finally a wolf, while Gilfaethwy was cursed to live as a hind deer, a boar and a she-wolf, forcing them to mate and create off-spring.
He kept watching the bowl.
Two figures emerged fully from the darkness, unmistakeably the damned brothers.
“How can this be?” he asked, not really expecting an answer. It wasn’t as though Deirdre could know. The only one who might was Feary and no one had heard from him in a long, long time.
“What do they want?”
“I don’t know,” the old dwarf king said, shaking his head, “But whatever it is, it can’t be good. We need to talk to Seamus Feary.”
––––––––
“What in the blue hells is going on?” The line was still busy. It didn’t matter how many times he jiggled the receiver or reset the wire in the wall. Zip. Nada. No open line, just that dull beep, beep, beep to say the line was engaged, even though he couldn’t dial out.
Seamus kept scratching his unruly ginger hair.
He tried again.
And again.
And one more time before he gave up and went looking for Miranda. Not that she was his first port of call; first he hit the bar and grabbed a bottle of Jameson’s with two double shot glasses. She wasn’t hard to find. She was on the front stoop smoking a thick cigar. He came up behind her, clinking the glasses. “What do you think you’re doing? You quit smoking forever ago.”
“It just felt appropriate,” she said, meaning all of those smoking remains. She had a nasty sense of humor sometimes.
“Dare I ask where you got it?”
“One of the guest rooms. It’s not like they’re going to be needing them in a hurry, so I took the humidor as payment in lieu.”
“Ah, right. Waste not, want not,” he said as he poured out a double shot and gave it to his wife. She took another deep drag on the cigar and blew smoke up into his face.
Seamus held the glass until she took it and handed him the cigar.
He took several small puffs as he poured a shot for himself.
“Not so bad,” he said after a moment. It was strong but flavorful.
He slugged the whiskey back in a single swallow and took a longer drag. “Oh, now that hit the spot. Okay, I get what the fuss is all about, two is always better than one. Nice combo.” Seamus nodded and grinned.
Miranda flipped him off.
“That’s the love of my death,” Seamus grinned and lovingly ran his fingers along her cheek to gentle under Miranda’s chin.
He leaned his head back and tried to blow a smoke ring.
It could have gone better, it could have gone a lot worse. He gave a short chuckle.
“Mamma needs another hit.” Miranda started to laugh.
Neither one of them noticed the dwarf. It was as though, by magic, the shopkeeper had appeared.
“Well aren’t you two just having a grand old time,” Bilis smiled. “We’ve been trying to reach you, but the phone isn’t working and Dee couldn’t hold the scrying pool stable long enough to reach you.”
“Come and sit down, Bilis.” Miranda gestured toward him. “If you’re brave enough?”
“Brave enough?”
“We’re positively, absolutely, totally, not explosive. But you on the other hand? Maybe.”
“What on earth are you talking about?”
“Smoke,” she said, offering him the next hit on the cigar. “I figure we’re fairly safe at this point.” Miranda was beginning to experience the whiskey. She felt a tad mellow.
“We tried to call you. Same deal. Nothing in or out. All very last century,” Seamus said, pouring Bilis two fingers of whiskey and handing it to him.
He pulled a flower pot out in front of them.
The flower was dead, so he broke it off and sat down and took the shot, giving them a salute. Bilis took a drag on the cigar and handed it back.
“You know what? I think we can do better than share. We’re not exactly poor students pretending to read Simone de Beauvoir to get the pretty ones into bed. Let’s push the boat out.” Miranda pushed herself up to her feet and ran back inside the house. She returned a minute later with another couple of thick stogies, and another shot glass. “Party time,” she said, as she gave one to Bill and kept the other for herself. They lit their own off the other cigar, and sat silently smoking and thinking about what they weren’t saying, until Bilis said it.
“I take it you know Gilfaethwy and Gwydion are here?”
“Ah, they’re the ones. We wondered.” Seamus looked back over his shoulder. “Makes sense now you say it.”
“What happened here?” Bilis asked.
“We had guests, now we have some shoes, a few pairs of panties, and a couple of bras, oh yeah, and a lot of ash and smoke. Even dear old Goodlow the gardener’s gone. Only a pair of boots and his old rake left.”
Miranda nodded.
Bilis chewed on his finger nail. “Well,” he mused. “I saw two stinking murky presences out back of the store, went to investigate only for it to rain bloody frogs on Dee’s scrying bowl as she tried to divine who was out there. All I got was a rich blue aura, but she finally got them in her sights, and it’s definitely the brothers McNasty. What I don’t know is how they got here, or why, what they want, and how, suddenly they can have half your guests spontaneously combusting.”
“Not half,” Seamus said.
“I’ve got no answers.”
“We’d better check the ribbon.”
“I was really hoping it wouldn’t come to that,” Bilis said.
“When was the last time you went through?”
“A couple of years now. You know how it is, time slips away from you. Hmm, Halloween ... 2015? Something like that? I try not to think about it. It’s always given me the creeps.”
“It’s not so bad,” Seamus said. “You just gotta remember all we are when it comes down to it, is just the guardians. We keep the secret from generation to generation. That’s it. It’s not like we control the ribbon. We don’t and to even dare think we might is hubris on a shocking scale.”
This was true; the ribbon was wound into and through dimensions, consequently the different tensions at various points created vibrations everywhere.
“Personally, I think the vibrations are what brings objects and people here.” He looked to his wife. “We’ve been keeping journals about the things that stumble through for generations. If old Samson understood it right, the ribbon splits here, that’s why we get so much strange stuff going on. But you have to ask yourself, why here? What’s different about Mallam Cross? Why should it be a crossing place? Why is the boundary thin here?”
Bilis nodded. It was a question that had occurred to him, too. But then his old head was filled with so many whys. “Did you know Einstein came here? First time he came was with a writer, they swore us to secrecy, but as far as I could tell just made some notes and disappeared into the ribbon for days at a time. His last visit, he just sat, stared and smiled. Nothing more.”
“You have mentioned it before,” Seamus said, which meant they must have heard the story a dozen times or more over the years.
The dwarf smiled indulgently, “Ah, but did I ever tell you what he said to me?”
Seamus and Miranda both shook their heads.
Bilis’s smile widened. “He said, there will come a time for this, but mankind isn’t emotionally or mentally prepared for the truth that is the ribbon. He took the knowledge of this place to his grave. Some say he thought out of the box. But, I believe, he had no box.”
They stood silently.
“So, I’ve never asked this, but what is it like in your realm?” Seamus asked the dwarf king.
“Fire. Pestilence. Plagues. What I remember most? The smell of fresh blood and people screaming and begging for forgiveness.” Bilis drew circles in the pebbles with his foot. Then he looked up and stared at the sky and gave a sigh. “I remember village burnings. Torture. Murder. Maiming. Drunken brawls. But it wasn’t all so bad. I remember lots of nasty sex, too.” He grinned at Seamus. “But all things considered, I prefer it here.”
––––––––
Jasmine McIntyre rummaged through her cobalt ceramic jars.
The walls were lined with dusty wooden shelves holding dozens upon dozens of them. They ranged from largest on the bottom, which a child could have climbed inside, to smallest on the top, which were barely enough to hold a pinch of snuff. The bell jars and their sizes gave some dimension to her potion room. Jasmine knew what was in each, to the ounce, without the need for labels. Even so, more often than not she found herself standing before the wall of jars, muttering and cursing at the ceramic and threatening to actually put them in order one of these damn days.
She uncorked one of the mid-shelf jars and gave a tentative sniff to confirm she was right before she reached it down. There were so many smells trapped in these old jars, and each one took her back to a place and time in her life and death when she’d gathered them. Stories and adventures went with each spice and herb.
No eyes of newt or snake tongues, no desiccated animal, insect or reptile were killed for her needs. She wasn’t that kind of hedge witch. As far as she was concerned you couldn’t heal with the death of another creature, and she was fairly adamant about that.
“Ah ha! There you are. Now, I think I’ll just mix a dash of you in with the lemon and glycerine. That should be enough to take care of a chesty cough.”
Jasmine made the mixture and put it in a clear bottle and labeled it: “Cough Medicine.”
Done, she pulled the string to shut off the light and made her way back through into the pharmacy store room.
“Here you go. Take a tablespoon once every four to six hours, and that niggly little cough will clear up in no time, Esmerelda. Go home and get some rest.” Jasmine followed Esmerelda to the door and waved to her as she made her way down the sidewalk.
She closed the door and turned over the Open sign.
An old man in a wide-brimmed straw hat and cane and smoking a quite elaborate ivory pipe appeared in front of her door. He had a thick white beard and when he breathed out the smoke seemed to be haunted by ghosts of his own making. A wicked twinkle gleamed in his eye as he saw Jasmine.
A dog came up to him. A little happy pug. He bowed and reverently tipped his hat to the dog.
“I know you, old man ... ” She drew a deep breath. “I know both you and what you are, and I am not messing with you or your ways. Understood? Move on. Go back from whence you came.”
He merely stared at her as she closed the door on him.
Jasmine turned off the overhead lights and put the window lights on.
She had two large display windows, one of which contained a skeleton wearing a white lab coat standing behind a worn oak table, facing out to the street with its death grin. She had a pestle and a small black cauldron she was grinding in. There were large vials setting in a wooden rack and cracked glass jars with faded labels. If you looked closely they said, “rat testicles, boiled troll toe nails and crocodile goobers.” Which was just a little joke that tickled Jasmine. The other window had a mummy in a white lab coat sitting in a rocker with a glass Jasmine had wired onto his hand. He was toasting the skeleton in the other window. There was a sign in one window saying, “Before ... ” and one in the other saying, “After... . ”
The sign above the door said, “Apothecary” with a mortar and pestle at either end.
The strange old man continued to look at her through the glass, not saying or doing anything, just standing there with his pug at his side, watching her.
“Begone from my doorway,” she muttered, turning her back on the creepy old ghost.
She went through the side door hidden by the potions display, and up the stairs to her rooms.
Her past lives built the foundation she needed to manage all that was handed to her. And for those crossing her door.
“Hello, Sister Jasmine.” The woman’s voice was low and confident, those dulcet tones as cool and refreshing as an evening breeze. She sat in the rocker with her hands folded and resting in her lap, looking straight forward and rocking steadily back and forth.
“Papa is troubled, my sister.”
“He came to the door,” she told the old woman, Roxane.
“Did you talk with him?”
“No, my Queen.”
Roxane folded her arms across her chest.
She scowled up at Jasmine, then let out a deep sigh, as though a comment on the whole mess. “This is not good, Sister Jasmine, not good at all. Papa should not be troubled. He is too important to all that we have here.” She looked away, and then down to the floor. “Something evil has crossed over. I sense it. I do not know why they have come, unless it is to undo all that we have, but two brothers with nothing but black in their hearts are here. Can you sense their presence?”
“I have felt something all night,” Jasmine said, but in truth her mind had been flustered and focussed on how they were going to deal with the threat Maggie Carlisle posed, not on new ghosts coming to town.
“Something has happened to the boundaries. These wicked entities are disturbing the town’s ghosts. I fear they intend to bring down Papa’s house.”
“Do the Fearys know? They guard the boundaries.”
“They have been lax in their duties as guardians, Sister. Even now, with so much at stake, I came through without their knowledge.”
“Not good,” Jasmine said, annoyed that Seamus and Miranda could have become so complacent in their duties.
“We will meet with them. Prepare yourself.” Roxane rose elegantly from the rocker. In another life she had been a queen. She straightened her ornate headdress of feathers and beads woven into her dark, long coarse hair. She wore a loose fitting, finely woven, bright colored, sleeveless short top with a long apron made of woven material. Tonight, she had bija, a red dye, painted on her golden-brown body to protect her from the evil.
She was a fine woman.
And more than most, she knew of malevolence created by man.
She could smell and see danger before it came through the door.
Within minutes they were on their way to the Fearys.