Petty Magic Read online

  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.

  HELENA 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.

  THE HARBI
NGERS, 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.

  Most of the people they tortured and executed in those days weren’t even witches—and in those dark times you might accuse any woman of witchcraft. The charges were generally preposterous: if a destitute old woman was really a witch, wouldn’t she have made herself rich and beautiful—or at least rich? (Or in the case of one-legged Elizabeth Clark, first victim of the Chelmsford hysteria of 1645, she’d have grown herself a new limb.) Ergo: not a witch.

  But back then it was only men with monstrous egos and no capacity for logic who banged the gavels and built the scaffolds. They accused you, imprisoned you and seized your assets, starved and tortured you until they extracted a false confession—but that’s not the worst of it, oh no! Once you were dead and buried in an unmarked grave, they sent your family a bill for the coal and wood they’d used to burn you—or, in the case of Goody Harbinger, the rope with which they’d strung her up.

  It’s the flying on broomsticks that really amuses me. The reality isn’t quite so dramatic: I go by bus most days. Of course, we don’t generally travel along with the unwashed masses, but I must conserve my oomph for my seductions. (For this same reason I don’t, shall we say, persuade an ill-mannered man to give up his seat.) Our preferred means of transport is the “loo flue.” Why do we travel by toilet? First, it is the only public place in which one may find a few moments’ privacy. Second, your mind wanders while you’re on the throne, does it not? While you’re doing your business you are always thinking about being someplace else. The third reason is that toilets are fixed points: they are generally in frequent use even when their maintenance has ceased, so that it is easy to travel between them. We are never inside the sewer system, mind you; it is merely a navigational aid. Travel by privy is possible as well, though it’s best to use them only to go to the places you know by heart, and using a loo on a train or plane is like telling a ticket agent to surprise you.

  Flying on broomsticks—“transvection,” those self-appointed witch-hunters called it—is only a small part of the hysterical mythology imposed upon us. They used to say we traveled in our dreams to a witches’ Sabbath, where we would feast on babies and take turns kissing the devil’s arse.

  We have our own mythology, of course. I always found it rather poignant to read of the “Sons of Adam” and “Daughters of Eve” in the works of C. S. Lewis, but I roll my eyes whenever I hear those silly dabblers refer to themselves as the “Daughters of Lilith.” We are the daughters of Lilith. They say she was with child when Adam cast her out of the Garden and asked for a more obedient replacement, and that Lilith, exempt from the punishment imposed after the Affair of the Apple, walks the earth to this very day. This is why we, her descendants, live so much longer than ordinary women; it is only because of our fathers and grandfathers that we are not immortal.

  Now, you might be wondering how we can go on living so long without anybody getting suspicious. It’s quite simple: we become our own daughters and granddaughters in the official census, and when anybody starts getting a little too nosy we distract him with a nice thick slab of ambrosia cake. We don’t worry about the neighbors anymore because our families are simply too big for them to keep track of.

  Otherwise, our great-grandmothers were protofeminists who engaged in frequent and often underhanded acts of social subterfuge, dropping full-strength sleeping tonics in the pint glasses of all the local wife beaters and replacing the text in the Sunday missals with demands for universal suffrage. Others weren’t so subtle. Marion Peacock and Philomena Jester used to stand on dairy crates outside a millinery on Alabaster Street handing out leaflets explaining how corsetry was indirectly responsible for puerperal exhaustion and shouting things like “It is the men who dictate the fashion, for that is the means by which they enslave us.” Their shrill proclamations distracted their neighbors from ever suspecting they turned themselves into great golden Labradors to frolic in the town park on Saturday afternoons.

  When I said Goody Harbinger arranged her daughter’s disappearance, it is the oomph to which I refer. A beldame may willingly hand her power to another, for an hour or a week, and when this is done she falls into a dead sleep that lasts until her sister’s return. And in rare instances, as in the story of my ancestor, she may also hand it over for keeps.

  Morven has done this for me on occasion. Well, all right: in truth, she does it all the time. I have long since ceased to ask when I might reciprocate, and whenever I make even the slightest hint she responds with a knowing but good-natured sigh. I kiss her cheek and make other expressions of blithe gratitude as she eases herself into bed. She simply hasn’t a taste for boys or travel, which are really the only reasons one would need more oomph anyway.

  But she’s a great one for the needles. When a person knits, she frequently and inadvertently weaves stray strands of her own hair into her work. So Morven might knit a pair of pullovers for two old chums whose friendship is floundering, pick the strands from their brushes and weave them into one another’s sweaters, and their problems will prove surmountable. This sympathetic magic works on ordinary people, too. My sister and her friends spend much of their time knitting receiving blankets for preemies and pompom caps for cancer patients. Each stitch has its own therapeutic value: diamond stitch for immune deficiencies, brioche stitch for clinical depression, seed stitch for rheumatism, and so forth. They generally do prefer to knit for strangers, as the consequences of an imperfect garment can spark a feud that wears on for decades. Back around the time the Harveysville Inn started boasting of Washington’s apocryphal visit, young Lilith Peacock knit a pair of baby booties for one of the Jester girls. Poor Lilith dropped a stitch but never noticed her mistake, and when the baby died she was ostracized by most of the coven for well on forty years afterward. Grudges can form all too easily when you live as long as we do.

  But don’t go thinking we’re as heartless as all that. Honestly, most of the time we’re more Christian than the Christians. We believe in an omnipotent power, and the law of karma, and the innate goodness of humankind despite all the piles of evidence to the contrary. We believe in the immortality of the soul and in its frequent recycling. We go on, of this I am certain; but before we die we leave a little piece of ourselves in a certain object kept in the family home, so that the wisdom accrued over a long, long lifetime will never be lost.

  Well, perhaps not never. Hard-earned wisdom is like an old leather shoe—no matter how serviceable, it outlasts its usefulness eventually. After a hundred years or two—once her children and grandchildren are old enough to follow her—an ancestor generally decides she’s ready for a do-over. So she comes back, usually within the same family, though she’ll have no recollection of who she was before—just like an ordinary human.

  The Warrens of New York City

  7.

  I LIVE IN an old tenement building on Cross Street, though you may not have heard of it since my block was torn down in 1898. On the Lower East Side there used to be t
hree streets, Anthony, Cross, and Orange, that converged into the Five Points, and the folks who lived there called it Cat’s Hollow. Most of the old flophouses are gone now, in the ordinary world I mean, but our neighborhood is still called Cat’s Hollow—and we, unlike its original inhabitants, will never live in the shadow of eviction.

  This is precisely why we reside off the map. Rent control doesn’t exceed the century mark, see, so if you want to live on an ordinary street you’ll have to contend with your landlord asking pointedly after your health (and you will have to move in the end, lest the buzzard report you to the Feds). My bathtub’s in the kitchen, the floor slopes, and I often hear spectral children whimpering in the middle of the night, but I’ve been here more than sixty years now and I won’t be moving again. It’s so much simpler to live in a reclaimed building, though it does make entertaining outside the covens rather impossible. Urban witchcraft is fraught with such mundane considerations.

  There are twenty-seven under-neighborhoods on the island of Manhattan, warrens we call them, and as you’d expect they are mostly concentrated in the island’s southernmost districts. We have our own shops, libraries, night schools, banks, cafés, and theaters, and all within buildings long since demolished in ordinary Manhattan.