EIGHT
We needed a large space, one where we could work magic without attracting the prying eyes of the other witch families. To my surprise, Jilo volunteered the use of her haint-blue chamber, a magical hall that existed just outside our dimension but could still connect to any place within it. It stood as a testament to Jilo’s skill that she, a non-witch, could use borrowed power to build such a thing. For years, she had secretly connected it to a room in our own house, making her capable of coming and going as she pleased. Not that she’d snooped around too much on her own. She’d relied on the boo hag who had camouflaged himself first as Oliver’s imaginary friend, Wren, and then as Jackson. Wren had manifested himself in our home for decades, but my family had never caught on to his true nature, assuming he was a tulpa, or a thought-form, a thing so well imagined that it had separated itself from the one who’d originally envisioned it.
I hadn’t been inside Jilo’s haint-blue room since the night I’d found Wren there holding a knife to Jilo’s throat. Walls, floor, everything had been colored the same aquamarine that was prized for its efficacy in repelling unfriendly spirits. That being said, if you invited the spirits in, the way Jilo had done when she’d made her pact with the boo hag, the haint blue wouldn’t do you much good.
Today, Jilo’s cerulean throne was missing, and in its place Oliver had drawn a chalk sigil. The etching consisted of a crisscrossed combination of lines and circles that took up a good portion of the room. Walking around it, I counted ten circles, and I noticed that a pentagram had been inscribed in the centermost one.
“Jilo told him, he oughta use blood, not chalk, but that sweet uncle of yours would have none of it.” Jilo’s voice echoed around me, although my eyes couldn’t get a fix on her yet. To me, the room looked completely empty. Then the air in one corner rippled, like August heat coming up off the highway, and there she stood. “He,” she said, punching the word into the air, “say he know what he doin’, though, so Jilo need to stand back and let the expert handle things.”
“What is it supposed to be?”
“He say it the ‘Tree of Life,’ but it sure don’t look like no tree Jilo ever lay eyes on. We didn’t talk much. He just pranced in here, made his scribbles, and took off.”
Disdain for my uncle dripped from her every word. That Jilo would ever allow Oliver into her sanctuary, that she and Oliver would or even could work together, amazed me. “Thank you for helping us, Jilo. Thank you for letting us use your . . .” I struggled for a term. Room? No, it wasn’t a room. Rooms remained stationary, but this space could coexist with any other point on the earth. Right now it hovered over our own garden. The pentagram at the center of Oliver’s drawing overlaid the point where he’d placed the sundial. “Well, just thank you. And thank you for putting up with Oliver’s ego too.”
Jilo’s creased face smoothed as much as her advanced years would allow. “You welcome, girl. All the same, Jilo like to buy you uncle for what he worth and sell him for what he think he worth.”
A humming filled the air, and the lines on Oliver’s diagram began to glow. I was focusing so intently on them, I didn’t notice the shimmering air that signaled his arrival. I sensed his presence—a tingling that ran down my spine—and looked up. He stopped dead in his tracks and took a moment to absorb the haint-blue chamber. “I failed to say so last time, but this truly is impressive, Mother.”
I was grateful that he’d used the term of respect when addressing Jilo.
“I don’t think many of those born of the power could construct a chamber like this.”
He had meant it as a compliment, but to Jilo’s ears, it sounded like another reminder that she had no power of her own, only borrowed power. “Well that is mighty ‘witch’ of you,” Jilo said, her eyes narrowing.
“I meant no offense,” Oliver said, offering a courtly bow.
“No need to bend over for Jilo. You ain’t her type,” the old woman sniped and then chuckled at her own barb. “Let’s get on with this.”
“You have the jar?” I asked, meaning the Ball jar where we’d been storing the remaining flames.
“’Course,” she said, her voice laconic, cold. Her eyes looked in our direction without focusing on us. Her mouth was set in a straight line. I hadn’t seen this look on her in quite a while. I had grown unaccustomed to Jilo’s reptilian mask. She had allowed Oliver into her realm, but she would not display any sign of gentleness that he might mistake for weakness. She pulled her red cooler literally out of thin air, its color a vibrant contrast to this turquoise world.
Jilo opened it and passed the jar to me. Bright little sparks flitted about inside, bright little sparks that would hopefully lead me to my twin. I watched them interact for a moment, changing colors briefly as they bumped into one another and then flew apart. I offered the jar up to Oliver’s outstretched hands.
“So how will this all work?” I asked, as he placed a satchel that I had not previously noticed on the floor next to him.
He knelt and set the jar down next to the satchel, then opened the bag. “Earth,” he said as he pulled a brown paper sack out of it. He gave Jilo a taunting look. Dirt played such a great role in her form of magic, but she and I had completely overlooked its power up until now. Jilo grunted to show that he had not managed to impress her.
“That’s from beneath the sundial?” I asked.
“Yes,” he nodded. “It’s the earth where Maisie was standing when she disappeared.” He sat the bag down. “Air,” he continued, pulling out a perfume atomizer and giving it a quick spray. Maisie’s favorite scent rose up around us, summoning an image of her face as clearly as if she’d appeared before me.
“Fire,” he said lifting up the Ball jar. “And water.” He produced a bottle of scotch and three glasses. “Single malt, twenty-one years old. I’d intended it as Maisie’s birthday present.” He lined the three glasses up on the ground next to the satchel, filling them without spilling a drop. He held a glass up. “Mother?”
She hesitated, but only for a moment. She took the glass from Oliver’s hand. “Thank you,” she said, and then knocked it back in one gulp. “Amen,” she said, sucking in a deep breath. Oliver saluted her with his own drink and downed it in the same manner.
“I can’t,” I began. “Baby and all that.”
“Oh, this one isn’t for you, Gingersnap. We need this for the spell. You’ve had a chance to check out our workspace here?” he asked, pointing at his chalk sigils.
“Yeah, but I have no idea what it means.”
“It’s known as the Tree of Life, and much ink has been spilled in trying to describe what it means. Most of that ink died in vain.”
“All right, professor, why don’t you enlighten us?” Jilo said, but there was no real rancor in her words. It must have been very good scotch.
“No. I don’t want to color Mercy’s perceptions. I’m going to let her do all the enlightening today.” He made quite a show of moving his elemental markers over to the diagram, placing earth and fire at the lower part of the pentagram and air and water at its hands. “And now for ‘spirit,’ or perhaps, more correctly, ‘power.’?” He motioned for me to join him, and I went and stood at the head of the star.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do here. I don’t understand any of this.” I started to step away, but his hand shot out and held me in place.
“Don’t move. Don’t tell yourself what you don’t know. Now, Mother, would you stand next to Mercy, right outside the pentagram?” Jilo shuffled her way into the diagram, keeping a wary eye on Oliver the entire time. “Thank you,” he said as he stepped outside the chalk lines and pulled a metal bowl and a short stick from his satchel. I shook my head and started to speak, but his look stopped me dead. I acquiesced.
“What in the hell are you up to?” Jilo asked.
Oliver responded by hitting the side of the bowl with a part of the stick that was covered with felt. The bowl rang out as clear as a bell. “This,” he said, using his palm to stop the ringing, “is a singing bowl.”
“Mm-hmm,” Jilo hummed, “sho it is.”
Oliver sat down cross-legged on the floor, taking the bowl onto his flattened right palm. He closed his eyes and breathed in deeply, straightening his spine, and then he struck the padded portion of the mallet against the bowl a second time. This time, he contracted his hand and curved it, causing the sound to change. He started to rock the bowl gently between the heel of his palm and fingertips. The sound modulated, higher, lower, the ringing actually quite lovely and calming. I relaxed into the sound, which was exactly when Oliver smiled.
“That’s right,” he said, striking the bowl again. “Listen. Try to detect where the sound begins and ends.” He struck the bowl again and again, a rhythm building itself from the repetition. The ringing washed in and out, and I both heard and felt the vibrations. They layered over each other, growing wider and deeper, forming a wave that carried me away. I could no longer sense a beginning. I could no longer perceive an end. Oliver’s body began to sway, and before I knew it, I felt my own body weaving in the air that moved to make space for me. My breath slid in and out in time with the reverberations.
I no longer heard anything except the bowl, but Oliver must have somehow communicated with Jilo, because she opened the Ball jar, and the flames floated out to land in my outstretched hand. Then nothing existed but the chiming and the light. They merged together and flowed as one, and the Tree of Life that Oliver had etched in chalk entered into the realm of my awareness again, glowing and singing to me. I realized this sigil was not merely a drawing, not merely a diagram. It represented a two-dimensional expression of something so very vibrant and large that it could not possibly fit into our world. I watched as the lines folded up on themselves, an autonomous origami bending into dimensions far beyond any I had ever imagined or experienced. The circles began to overlap one another, linking together into the most perfect sphere, tinted the same haint blue as Jilo’s chamber. I hovered in blackness next to it—becoming the blackness. “What is this place?” I said aloud to no one. The globe spun at a maddening pace as images leapt out to me. Epochs and moments and every single possibility that each contained.
The scent of Maisie’s perfume hit me again, and my thoughts turned to her. Something was in my left hand. I looked down and realized the burnt earth had somehow been placed there. Liquid flowed over the earth, causing it to filter through my fingers. Thoughts of Maisie consumed me, and the flame in my other hand grew into a sun, the earth into a mountain, the liquid into a sea, her scent blossoming like a flower where the two met beneath the star’s warm rays. The rotations of the blue sphere began to slow, and it came into greater focus as it condensed into a single door, painted with bright red panels and black stiles and rails. Something brushed up against my leg, and then wove between them, circling in a figure eight. I looked down, amazed to find Jilo’s three-legged cat there with me.
“Schr?dinger,” it said, and then wound back off into the darkness. I was puzzled at first by the one-word message, but then I understood. Like the cat in Schr?dinger’s famous thought experiment, Maisie was frozen in a place where the possibilities were limitless. The line had locked her in a state of flux, like some kind of sleeping beauty awaiting rescue. I felt my sister’s presence. The line had encased her in a sense of awe, a sense of wonder—she was lost in a sense of ecstasy very much like what I had felt when the power of the line first settled on me. The ringing lessened. The sphere began to dim, and then it unfolded, circle by circle, line by line. I stood again in Jilo’s chamber, the Tree of Life now nothing more than a chalk drawing beneath my feet. Oliver was knocking back scotch straight from the bottle.
“You did it,” he said, his face flushed. “You opened the Akashic records, kid. The universal knowledge of every event that ever has occurred and ever will occur in all of its squiggly and mutable glory. You got a peek into God’s very own diary.” Another swig. “I’d always heard the right witch could.”
“Wait,” I said, trying to clear my head. “You’ve never done anything like this before?”
“Of course not,” he said with a sad smile curling his lips. “The records won’t open for just anyone. I’ve never met a witch for whom they would. I knew it, though. I knew if anyone could access them, it would be you.” We had used the rest of Maisie’s flames in this experiment. What if it hadn’t paid off? I halfway wanted to throttle him, and I more than halfway expected Jilo to beat me to the punch, but when I turned to look at her, what I saw surprised me.
She was trembling, her eyes focused on something far away. I crossed over to her and took her hand. She jerked awake from her reverie, her eyes full of panic and sorrow. “I have seen it now,” she said, her voice soft. “I have done wrong. I have worked evil in this world,” her words called out to ears other than mine, begging for absolution. “You have to go. You both have to go,” she said, waving her arms, shooing us away like noisome children. Haint blue burst like a bubble around us, and in an instant Jilo and her world had gone, leaving Oliver and me standing in our own garden. Oliver was still clutching the bottle of scotch. As he took another swig, the empty Ball jar fell from nowhere and shattered at his feet.