Ch. 8 / Pt. 3 : When They Wear the Mask
It took Deirdre longer than anticipated to stabilize the magic helping her diverse and esoteric crops to grow. She’d performed the ritual almost-weekly for almost-seventeen years and had learned that magic occasionally liked to remind its users that it wasn’t science. A practitioner could successfully trigger a spell three hundred times only to get a completely unexpected result on the three-hundred-and-first. Intellectually, Deirdre preferred the ill luck to interrupt a repeatable task, something that took hours to execute and hours to fix, as opposed to a cantrip thrown up in a desperate moment. Emotionally, it was still frustrating as hell.
The first hour-long ritual fizzled and died. After a muttered string of curses, Deirdre dusted herself off, fixed all the protections the ritual’s collapsed had tripped, and tried again. The second hour-long attempt unraveled unexpectedly; she lost control of the mystic energy, itself, and it spilled and rippled through her basement. The wards she’d had Shoshanna install stopped anything terrible from happening, but Deirdre felt them wane and flicker in the aftermath. Sweating and hungry, Deirdre rose from her second attempt with a groan and did what she could to reinforce the weakened wards. But a ward witch, she was not. To fully repair her defenses, she’d need Shoshanna’s help.
And for that, they didn’t have time.
Luckily, the third hour-long casting took. Craned with effort, dripping splats of exhaustion to the floor, she pressed her palms to the carved cement floor and muttered the words <> in twenty-seven different languages. Eyes closed, she focused the gathered energy into images of a fellow gardener, a farmer, a distant ancestor, a thriving biome, a world blossoming and fruiting and growing wildly verdant. <> she said in Quechuan, in Mvuban, in English, in Lao, in Urdu, in Latin, in Cantonese.
The spell pulsed through her, crackling up her bones and vibrating along her skin. The dozens of sigils, glyphs, runes, and vèvès carved in the basement floor sparked, glowing bright and briefly before fading back to dim carven concrete. All the plants misted by the hydroponics shivered at once; some sprouted new leaves or tendrils or shoots. Some bulbed, blossomed, and fruited. The heat lamps flickered once and steadied.
She stood and brushed herself off.
Paul had taken a couple anti-histamines and one of her home-brewed allergy cures by then. He’d also smoked a third of a joint of cannabis mixed with psychic downers. The vague grogginess that followed left him less eager to make the thirteen mile trek to the Blackwood Estate than earlier. Besides, the sun had sagged westward, four o’clock had arrived, and the chances of their finishing the walk before dark had bottomed out entirely.
She showered, extra-careful with the bonnet, and fixed her hair in the bathroom mirror. She changed clothes—her earlier outfit sticky with sweat and hours of demanding mysticism—and fixed a late lunch. Paul checked his bank account before ordering a car to the nearest serviced location. The pick-up point blinked on his screen, just over an hour’s walk away. He rescheduled the ride.
Deirdre gave him an extra week’s supply of psychic depressants as a way of thanks.
###############
The car picked them up a mile south of Squatter City and drove them westward, skirting the northernmost reaches of Denton. Not far from the western coast, the driver turned northwest, where the peninsula broadened as it joined the rest of the state. A couple minutes after that, he turned north.
Bright white Castine elms flanked the tight curve of Blackwood Drive, the private road leading up to the Blackwood Mansion, itself situated centrally to the capacious Blackwood Estate. The Blackwood family had owned twenty-six acres of land at the end of their lineage, though they’d only developed the center nine. The rest served as a private forest, blurring the edges of the Estate into the broader wilderness around it.
The late Ambrose Blackwood, last of his name, had willed half of his fortune and properties to a once-homeless teenager he’d adopted, Nora. The other half he’d willed to his longtime romantic partner, Victor Monroe. Though the two had shared a life for over thirty years at the time of Ambrose’s death, they’d only gotten officially married in 2015, in Massachusetts. Not long after, in summer 2017, Ambrose Blackwood had boarded a plane bound for Cairo, where he went missing for several weeks before dying suddenly in a hotel restaurant.
Deirdre had known none of this thirteen months earlier.
Paul still didn’t know all of it.
The private drive banked sharply east near the mansion proper and, following it, they passed under an archway of vines grown over a gateless iron frame, framed itself by six foot hedges, and into a broad driving loop circling an ancient stone fountain. An angel stood at the fountain’s center, pouring an empty urn into a pool of stagnant water. Decades of snow and Maine damp had shaded its in mold and algae.
The driver parked in front of the double-doored, three-winged mansion and let them out. He hesitated, expression unreadable beneath his facemask, but decided not to say whatever he’d wanted to say as Deirdre and Paul exited his vehicle. He pulled around the asphalt loop, under the vined arch, and away.
Deirdre and Paul stood there for a moment, unsure what to do next. Overhead, evening sunset sky purpled toward twilight.
The double-doors cracked open and inched apart. Victor Monroe stepped out of the mansion and onto the worn porch fronting it. He wore a black, medical-grade facemask; above it, sharp brown eyes squinted at them, crow’s feet gathering at their edges. A pump-action shotgun leaned against his shoulder, gunmetal grim against the bright colors of his nineties-era dad-sweater. A snapback cap crowned his head, one of almost fifty in a collection of lame tourist hats he’d bought with an irony that time and warmth and loss had turned into authenticity.
“Not your usual ride,” he said, lowering the shotgun into hands the shade of burnt umber and the strength of proofed iron. Taking another step forward, he leaned the weapon against a column running from the porch floor to the porch roof.
“Rehani’s busy,” Deirdre replied. “And Paul’s…”
“Mine’s still in storage,” Paul finished. “With a busted axle. And probably a dead battery.”
“I don’t like strange black sedans driving up here unexpectedly.” Victor had a rich tenor voice, a depth and resonance that suggested authority.
“We’re sorry,” Deirdre said. “I tried to call but it went to voicemail.”
“But you didn’t leave a voicemail.”
“I, uh…no, I didn’t.”
“I guess people don’t leave voicemails much, anymore,” Victor said. “Nora and Olly barely even make phone calls.”
Deirdre stepped toward the porch. “Vic…we could really use some help.”
Victor stared at them for a couple seconds, appraising. Finally, he picked up the shotgun, leaned it against his shoulder again, and sighed. “I’m not gonna send you back across the peninsula this close to dark. Come on in and tell us what’s going on. But first, I need to give you the rapid test.”
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