Chapter 9
Alice scooped Rififi off the table and onto her lap. She scratched his chin and tried to smooth his fur. The cat refused to calm down and added his meows to the racket.
"Do you think that's a train?" Elizabeth asked, thinking of the trestle that ran along the river at the bottom of the hill. More than once in the past week, she had lain awake at night listening to the rumble of metal wheels on metal track and the whistle's hollow wail blowing up from the valley.
The others fell silent for a moment and listened to the low musical sound of the wind resonating around the house. One could almost make out words if one listened carefully.
Really familiar words. Elizabeth had to force herself to not go check up on the Velvis.
"What else could it be?" Bob focused his attention on the contents of the tea bag floating in his mug.
Dirk and Alice exchanged a glance. Dirk said, "Yes, I think I can hear the sound of the hitches rattling."
The lights flickered again and a vibration passed through the house. The foundations twitched and a crack in the plaster of the kitchen wall snapped and grew by an inch. The light fixture above them danced on its wire and crazy shadows ran from the web of extension cords into the corners of the ceiling.
Penrose materialized with a look of alarm that transformed to relief when he saw them all together. Rififi hissed and leaped from Alice's lap so suddenly that he left skid marks.
She cried, "Hey! What was that for?"
Penrose looked up at the swinging light and then at Elizabeth. "Maybe I was wrong about the house falling down."
Alice rubbed dolefully at a long scratch on her arm. "That's it, I've had it. We need an exorcism for this place."
"You think the house is possessed?" Dirk asked.
"Well, something is definitely not right," Alice said.
Dirk unwrapped a piece of candy and popped it in his mouth. "Something is not right, but that doesn't mean Satan. Besides, we're pagans, not Catholic."
"So what? We'll do a pagan version. We can do a purification ritual to cast out evil spirits and negative energy." Alice's eyes gleamed. "It'll be fun. I'll e-mail the coven."
Penrose's eyes gleamed more brightly. He said, "This could be interesting. I can arrange to give them quite a show."
Dirk chewed his candy slowly. "I read about that ritual. We have to clean the house first, you know. That'll be some job."
Bob slammed his mug down on the table. The tea sloshed straight up and dropped back into the mouth of the mug with a splash. He shoved his chair back and glared at them all. "This is such crap. I can't believe you people believe all this. There is a perfectly rational explanation for everything that's happened. This house is built over a sinkhole. That could account for the shaking. The windows are loose and the locks haven't been changed in years. Anybody with an old key could have been coming in here and taking the food. Did you notice we haven't had anything go missing since I changed the locks? No idiotic magic ritual is going to stop the house from sinking. Besides, there is no such thing as magic."
Dirk said, "Just because you don't believe in something doesn't mean it doesn't exist."
"Oh, please." Bob jumped to his feet and his chair fell over backwards and banged to the floor behind him, clattering loudly in the sudden silence. Even the wind stopped howling. He said, "You have no idea what you're messing with. You don't know what damage people can do to themselves by believing in magic."
He paced back and forth in the kitchen and absentmindedly set his chair upright again. "Perfectly healthy people have come into the emergency room dead on arrival. There's a woman in one of the immigrant communities who has all her family convinced she's a witch and they're scared to death of her, literally. She's killed off two husbands just by telling them that she burned some cat shit with their hair and put a hex on them. Her sisters-in-law brought their dead brothers in, and they were so scared they wouldn't tell me any more than that. So this woman is killing people with magic, or the idea of it, just like shooting them, because they're frightening themselves to death. And they are complicit in their own deaths. It's insane!
"And the families have no recourse. They won't go to the police because they're scared that this woman will curse them to death. Even if they could go to the police, the police would just laugh at them. So you can joke about magic, you can play around with it, but it's no joke."
The others fell silent during his tirade. Even Penrose couldn't come up with any smarmy remarks to share with Elizabeth. He sat on the counter and looked at Bob with new speculation.
"We aren't doing voodoo," Dirk said defensively. "The first rule of our practice is to do no harm, like your Hippocratic Oath. Our practice of magic is all about focusing our energies and trying to be better people."
"Oh really? and how does playing tricks with that ring fit into being better people?" Bob demanded.
Dirk blinked. "What ring?"
"Elizabeth's ring of invisibility," said Alice. "I guess we've been so busy, I've hardly seen you to tell you about it. That was how Elizabeth didn't get caught by the police on Halloween. Show him, Elizabeth."
Reluctantly, Elizabeth withdrew the ring from her pocket. Rather than putting it on and giving Dirk the demonstration herself, she handed it over to Alice. After all that Bob said about the evil of magic, her thumb itched where the ring sat each time she put it on. She didn't think it would stop until she scrubbed the skin raw with a nailbrush.
Alice slipped the ring on and off her finger and winked in and out of sight. "Isn't this cool?"
Dirk choked on his candy. "Yes," he said once he recovered the power of speech. Suspicion dawned across his face and Elizabeth figured he was connecting the powers of the ring with the wayward movement of his Velvis earlier in the evening.
Scratching her thumb, Elizabeth hastily excused herself from the room. As she put her foot on the first step of the back stairs, Bob shoved brusquely past her and headed up to the third floor. Shortly thereafter, Penrose joined Elizabeth in her room where she sat cross-legged on the bed, her chin resting on her hands.
"You might as well simply deny all involvement with the Elvis," he said.
"You think so? You don't think I should blame that on my imaginary friend?"
"You could, but they will think you are mad." Penrose sat on the chaise lounge and put his feet up.
Elizabeth said, "I'm beginning to wonder about that. Alice and Dirk believe in magic, why not ghosts? Sorry, spirits." She corrected herself before he could. "They'd believe me if I told them about you. Why don't you want me to?"
"For your own sake. It's never been a safe world for people who see things that most everyone else cannot. I've seen." He stopped and chose his words carefully. "If this were the seventeenth or eighteenth century, you'd be burned or hanged. In the nineteenth century you'd be locked up in an asylum or an attic, where you'd doubtless go mad. And nowadays."
"I'd get an appearance on Oprah and a book deal," she said, drawing half a smile from him.
"So we should work this then? I still don't want you to take the risk." He shrugged and changed the subject. "Do you really think they're going to have their coven over for a ritual purification of the house?"
Elizabeth leaned back against her pillows. "Of course. Alice loves a party. Besides, if we're all believing in magic now, then we have to be open to the idea that it might work. Unless you're responsible for all that Sturm und Drang earlier."
"No, that was not I."
"Why should I believe you?"
"Because it's true." Penrose jumped up and went over to the fireplace where he fiddled with the china dogs on the mantle. "There's something in the house that is creating the disruptions, among you all and in the structure of the house itself. Hence the noise, the localized earthquakes. I am not in, or only partially in, your dimension, so I don't have as much," he hesitated, "power? information? to work with as you all. If I weren't caught halfway between worlds, then I might be able to put things right."
Slowly, Elizabeth asked, "Is this the part of the story where I offer to break the spell on you?"
"No, don't do that," he said, with a look of real fear. "I am more accustomed to this existence than to being alive. I can't imagine what I would do if I were released. Anyway, there is no need for such a drastic step. I have shelves full of books on dispelling evil spirits. I'm sure I can find something in the library which will suffice to solve our problem."
"Will the purification ritual help?" Elizabeth asked.
"It will have some effect. But can you imagine the comic possibilities? I'll wager they've never done a ritual with any visible results. I wonder how they'll react when they actually see their cone of power instead of having to visualize it. Just think of it." He grinned.
"I think you are too easily amused." Elizabeth felt mildly offended for the sake of her sister and Miss Price.
Penrose merely agreed and disappeared.
The voices of Alice and Dirk, arguing over the magic ring, floated up the back stairs. Elizabeth lay back against her pillows and listened to the fierce wind rise and drown out their voices.
Pie for breakfast! Who would have thought it was so wonderful? The cold creamy pie and hot coffee had started her off with a sugar rush which she sustained by consuming coffee throughout the morning. The boys had seemed to accept pie for breakfast as normal. Elizabeth wondered whether it really was and her parents had simply denied her and Alice morning pie out of puritanical malice.
The sugar had Elizabeth bouncing all morning long. She was enormously productive, processing a tall stack of orders and preparing another bundle of catalogs to take to the post office. While she worked her mind wandered, as usual, and she thought about the "thing" that she had going, or not, with her neighbor. She hadn't talked to Trip since Sunday night and she resolved that rather than waiting around for him to call, she would call him, or at least knock on his door. She didn't have his telephone number, she realized.
Around noon, the caffeine let her down and she saw the cash register through a haze while Miss Price showed her how to ring things up and process credit-card purchases. Elizabeth would have to cover for Alice while she was on a lunch date with her policeman.
Alice ducked out at noon precisely to meet him down the street. Elizabeth had not been able to determine whether Alice had won the argument with Dirk over the ring. Judging from her sister's barely concealed jubilation, Elizabeth suspected that she had and would be making a midday raid on Marla's computer.
During her hour at the register, Elizabeth rang up, among other things, a blank card and a blank book for a girl wearing a shirt, jacket and trousers plastered with logos from three different sports teams and no fewer than five sportswear manufacturers, and a copy of A Moron's Guide to Simulating Intelligent Conversation for a fellow who looked like he ought to read it, but whom Elizabeth suspected, based on his smirk and the ratlike shifting of his eyes, of getting it as an obnoxious joke for someone. No one who needed a book like that would know they did.
The last purchase she rang up was a copy of Shirley for a gentle-eyed woman who sighed as she slipped the book into her handbag and confided, "That's the last Charlotte Bronte that I haven't read. After this, I can only reread them."
They traded favorite authors until the customer had to go back to work, leaving Elizabeth staring dreamily at a shelf of Penguin Classics.
"Elizabeth, Elizabeth."
A hand waved before Elizabeth's eyes and she came back to reality.
Miss Price said, "We're out of coffee again. Would you mind running up and getting some more? I'll take the register for now." She withdrew money from the register and handed it to Elizabeth, who bundled up against the cold breeze and walked up the street in the sunshine.
Against the clear sky, the leaves of the pear trees glowed red until the wind pulled them down and whirled them into small dervishes along the sidewalks. The sunlight glittering off the pavement and the shop windows and the cheery rattling of the leaves cleared the cobwebs from her mind. She looked in the shop windows as she walked along. Christmas would be coming on soon and since she worked in a retail district, she would have no excuse for not getting her shopping done early, or at least on time, for once. She paused at a cafe and looked in at the early afternoon coffee drinkers lingering over their books and laptops. As she drew near the fancy restaurant, she saw a familiar form at a table by the window. She recognized Trip from behind, from the way his hair curled above the nape of his neck, exposing an endearing inch of golden skin that begged to be touched.
Her smile widened and she decided to go in and say hello. She put her hand on the glass door, but her smile faded when she saw his lunching partner.