A Maze of Glass, Chapter Ten, Pt. 2
Time dilated in the ritual’s second phase. On a vegetarian diet without any booze or nicotine and limited to only two cups of coffee per day, Zoe felt the hours expand like some Big Bang fallout. The minutes unraveled at the fringes of the observable, every second somehow several seconds long. Itchy and prickly and nauseous, nauseous especially during those first few nic-fit shouting-match days, Zoe felt suspended, adrift on some temporal derivative as x approached infinity.
She’d only thrown up twice. That put her ahead of Jill on the scoreboard, at least.
The ritual work expanded, too. Zoe’s five hour days extended to seven hour days. The labor increased. The combination of more effort burned across longer hours left her queasy and frail. She needed a cigarette. If she had a cigarette, she introduced chaos into the spell. So far, she’d only thrown up twice. So far, she’d had zero cigarettes.
The ritual’s second phase also required more teamwork. The practitioners—Jill and Zoe—performed their morning meditations together, facing the dawn, and ate both breakfast and dinner as a group. In this case, a pair. A week into the second phase, their commingling withdrawals and frustrations had already revealed themselves in armor and claw, fights snarled over issues as stupid as undercooked pasta. Why?
Because Jill needed a fix and Zoe needed a cigarette and the dark, gravelly-voiced thing whispering in the walls needed them to need those things.
“You will never be free of this.”
(never)
(never never never)
During the Gateway between the First Confessional and the second phase, Zoe had taken the car into town for supplies. On the drive back, she’d stopped at a gas station to refill the tank. She’d walked inside almost without thinking and ordered a pack of Djarum almost without thinking. She’d paid for the gas and started driving back. Window open, filter between her lips, she’d barely stopped the lighter before she puffed. She’d snapped the Zippo shut and tossed the smoke. The rest of the pack had followed. And she’d only thrown up twice.
(never)
On the ninth day of the second phase, the ritual heading slowly-but-surely toward the second Gateway, called The Proclamation, Zoe stalked smoke-less upstairs to fetch Jill for lunch. Approaching Jill’s door, she felt an increase in the magic crackling in the air—a sixth sense sensation bristling against the skin of her ear-drums—and hesitated. “Jill?”
“Hold on!”
Zoe frowned, no longer nauseous from not smoking but plagued by the dual diseases of post-quitting lethargy and the withering leprosy of her patience. She grabbed Jill’s doorknob, twisted, and pulled. A mystic force held it fast. “Are you kidding me?”
“One sec!”
Zoe yanked on the door again. The spell fastening it to the threshold weakened, magic not an especially strong force. It opened on the third tug, flinging Zoe back with sheer inertia. Zoe caught herself and stomped into Jill’s room. “What are you thinking?”
Jill froze mid-movement. Several illusions glowed in the air, illustrations glimmering and hovering like sci-fi holograms. Five books also floated, untethered from gravity by more magic. Another dozen books and grimoires strew the floor, half-circling a lap-table overpiled with notebooks. Jill shoved a pile of dusty, thick-spined tomes under her bed. “I was…researching.”
“How many spells are you flinging around here?”
“They’re tiny. Nobody’s here who can fuck them up just by seeing them.”
“This spell is already infested with what sounds like every dark and self-loathing impulse you’ve ever had—why would you take even the smallest risk of destabilizing what little stability we have?” Zoe barreled over every interruption Jill made, giving no quarter for more than a single syllable. “What if that thing wins?”
“I’m sorry. I was just…I found something in Sung-ho’s collection and I think I’m onto a proof, a new way to reinforce—”
“You’re risking this entire ritual for some fucking academia?”
The illuso-grams fritzed and died. The books fell broken-backed to the floor. “I’m sorry,” Jill said, “I’m sorry, I just…”
“You ‘want to know,’ right?” Zoe didn’t bother to fight the sarcasm thickening her tone.
“There’s nothing else to do here!” Jill shouted.
“And how do you think I feel!?” Zoe shouted back.
“Fuck!” Jill kicked her bedframe to little effect.
Zoe wrangled control over her volume. “Shit. Goddammit. Why were you doing this?”
“It…” Jill stopped shouting, turned away, and took a deep breath. “It helps me organize things.”
“Could you try just pinning things to the walls? Draw it out by hand, tape it up?”
“I’m not the best artist.”
“And I’m not a substance use counselor,” Zoe threw up her hands, “but here we are.”
Jill opened her mouth to yell. Her nostrils flared, her eyes widened. She paused. Backed down. “I’m…okay. I’ll try pinning things up.”
“Like band posters.” Jill shook her head, arms folding.
“Sure.”
“Look, I’m sorry I barged in and I’m sorry for…I don’t know, for yelling, I guess. But we have to be really careful with how and when we use magic in this house. We can’t risk anything. I mean anything. Okay?”
“I said yeah.”
“You said ‘sure.’ With attitude.”
“Jesus. I’m trying to find something to do.”
Zoe pinched the bridge of her nose. “I know. Me, too.”
Jill sat sharply on the edge of the mattress. “How are we going to make it through this? It’s, what, two more weeks until the Proclamation? And then—”
“We’ll make it because we have to. We just have to be careful.”
Jill pressed the heels of her hands into her eye sockets. Her elbows met her thighs.
“Look, whatever,” Zoe said. “We’re too deep to turn back now. You said so yourself. So…so let’s have lunch, okay?”
“Yeah. Lunch. Sounds good.”
“I’ll go set the table or…something.” Zoe stepped backward out of the room. She hesitated, wanting to say something else but not sure what it was. Turning away, she followed the long hallway past another bedroom (two bunkbeds), the lounge with attached bathroom, and downstairs. At the first floor landing, before heading into the kitchen, a shot of pure cold rolled over her. She braced herself, waiting. Nothing else happened. She shivered, the temperature nosedived to the dirt.
“Hey, you,” a friendly voice called out from the kitchen. “Take a load off.”
Zoe crossed the threshold. Afternoon sunlight shafted in from the windows. The eat-in kitchen was exactly the way she’d left it.
Except.
Except for a pack of cloves on the eat-in table.
The temperature returned to normal, the sensation more sixth-sense than purely material anyway.
Zoe picked up the pack and crushed it in her hand. She turned on the garbage disposal and fed the pack to the shrieking teeth of it. The blades jammed and jittered through the box and she pulled it back out again. The disposal roared, an angry ocean in her ear. Breathless for a reason she couldn’t name, she yanked out the bent and busted cigarettes and began throwing them into the disposal’s whirring maw. Tobacco and spice flew everywhere. Zoe threw the half-tattered pack in the trash. She stood in front of the trash can, panting, for several seconds.
This was a bad sign.
the story might read differently if
The garbage disposal clicked off.
“Zo’?” Jill asked.
“Sorry. I, uh. I found some rotten food.”
“Already?” Jill watched her like an inspector.
“Yeah,” Zoe cleared her throat, turning to face her sister. “Yeah. Anyway. Lunch. What do you feel like?”
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