Phaedra Michaels is a small town
psychologist who is beginning to lose hope. Two of her patients at
the local hospital in Dismal, Alabama have just killed themselves,
she’s still reeling from her divorce and what turned out to be a
disastrous marriage, and her father has died, leaving her without any
notion of who her real mother is.
Just as Phaedra
decides to commit herself to a serious drinking problem and an eating
disorder, or two, a mysterious spell book arrives in the mail.
Feeling desperate, Phaedra uses it to cast spells to save her fading
patients. Suddenly, good things start happening. Phaedra’s
patients begin to get better and she even starts dating the sexy
doctor from the hospital.
Phaedra is so happy she doesn't
notice the small things that start to go wrong in Dismal, or the dark
creatures slithering out of the shadows near her house. When Phaedra
finally realizes her spells have attracted every card-carrying demon
from hell, she has no choice but to accept help from a slightly
nerdy, 500 year-old warlock with a penchant for wearing super hero
T-shirts and a knack for getting under Phaedra’s skin. Now, if only
she could get the hang of this witch thing, she might be able to save
her town.
Chapter 1
A White Candle Love Spell
It is amazing how
the most world-changing days can seem entirely mundane to begin with.
Friday the 13th seemed no different than any other day to me. I woke
up late, as always, and rushed to get dressed and make it to the car
with my usual box of animal crackers and diet cola. I pulled my shoes
on as I backed out of the driveway and ate while I drove to work.
I was late to work, but just early
enough to not be noticed as late. The small hospital where I worked
was a blip in a vast nowhere and the small psychiatric floor I worked
on was a blip in a blip. I was a blip within a blip within a blip,
making me practically nothing. I could’ve died in my sleep and the
world would barely belch. I liked to think that I was good at what I
did. I liked to think that even though I was a nothing, I made a
difference in the patients’ lives. I was one of those deluded
people that believed in saving the world one person at a time. I
guess I still am. Certainly, I was one of the few people that
actually cared about the patients. The management didn’t care that
I cared. Management was too busy trying to balance the books and keep
the floor profitable to care what the staff did with the patients. I
could take all the patients outside and have them moo like cows and
management wouldn’t care as long as I billed it as a recreational
therapy group and got the proper reimbursement.
“Hey, Phaedra,” Millie said as I
walked onto the locked portion of the floor. My keys jingled against
my chest as I walked towards the nursing station. I was one of five
therapists that covered the psychiatric floor. I never really saw the
other five therapists because the hospital was too cheap to ever have
more than one therapist working at a time, but I knew the other
therapists existed somewhere out there in the same kind of way you
know an atom exists without ever seeing it.
I smiled as I approached Millie. I was
used to smiling when I didn’t mean it. That is what being a
therapist is. It is putting your own feelings aside so that other
people can find happiness. At least, that is what it is supposed to
be. That is what I wanted it to be.
“Hey, girl,” I said. “How’s it
lookin’ today?”
“All bullshit as always,” Millie
said in her thick southern drawl.
Millie was one of those people who
wasn’t happy unless she was complaining about something.
“Sorry about that,” I said with a
small smirk. “What’s going on?”
“We have Kara Watson again,” Millie
whined. “I swear if they admit that girl one more time, I’ll kill
her myself. She’s just doin’ this for attention and she ain’t
right for our floor.”
“What’s she doing for attention?”
I asked
“She’s in there bangin’ her head
on the wall and expecting me to care,” Millie said. “She
shouldn’t be here.”
I couldn’t figure out who Millie
thought would be right for the floor. It was like she didn’t really
realize that the psychiatric floor was where crazy people were
supposed to be. She thought that all the crazies that came and went
through our doors acted out just to annoy her. All their suicide
attempts and hallucinations were an elaborate ploy just to make her
day shitty or get something from her. Although, I couldn’t imagine
what anyone would want from Millie.
“I’ll go check on her,” I said
with a smile.
I walked down the hall to room 101A
where Kara Watson sat on her small white bed sobbing and slamming her
head against the wall. Large tears bubbled down her plump cheeks and
puddled on her bosom. Kara was more than plump. She was fat in that
way that made other fat people look thin. The fat kind of rolled off
her like dough.
“Hey, Ms. Kara,” I said as I pulled
up a chair. “What’s goin’ on?”
“I don’t want to be alive,” she
wept.
“But you were doing so well,” I
said.
“There’s no reason for me to be
alive. Why can’t you people just let me die?”
“You know we can’t do that,” I
said.
“I got nothing to live for,” she
said.
“You have yourself to live for,” I
said. And that was a lot. A whole lot.
“Well, that ain’t much,” she
snapped.
“Your little one wouldn’t want you
to give up like this,” I whispered.
“I know,” she said. “I just miss
them.”
“You still have a son and a husband
and they need you,” I said. “You can’t give up. You have to
keep fighting for them.”
“I’m so glad you’re here,” Kara
said. “Nurse Ratchet is on a rampage this morning.”
I laughed. Kara always called Millie
“Nurse Ratchet”. The patients hated a few of the nurses, but they
hated Millie most of all. Many of the other nurses were curt and
blunt and assumed the patients were all lying losers, but they did
their job with professionalism. Millie, on the other hand, snarled at
patients when they asked for any kind of help. She sat behind her
desk typing notes and making the patients’ lives a living hell. I
had no power to do anything about Millie, so I made my peace.
Management didn’t care. They would have staffed the Devil himself
if he was good at billing and paperwork. I had once asked my
supervisor what to do when the patients complained about the nurses.
She had told me to nod and smile. That was our official policy—Don’t
complain, just nod and smile.
“Yeah,” I said. “Sorry about
that. I noticed she was in a bad mood.”
“Does she have good moods?”
“No,” I said. “Listen, Kara, do
me a favor, would you?”
Kara nodded and turned away from the
wall. She looked at me with eyes bluer than the ocean. When I looked
in her eyes, I could see through the fat and self-abuse to the woman
underneath. I could see her as she used to be. I had seen the
pictures. Before her twin daughters died, Kara had been lovely and
thin and athletic, but years of depression had eroded that as surely
as a river carves out a canyon.
“Make a list for me. Make a list of
all the good things in life. Make a list of everything that’s even
a little bit good.”
Kara nodded.
“I’ll see you in group? It starts
in ten minutes.”
Kara nodded again.
I walked back out to the nurses’
station and looked through the charts. I checked to see which
paperwork I needed to do and which patients needed individual
sessions. It was going to be a long day. Bob had worked the weekend
and he didn’t like to work with patients. He liked to sit behind
the desk with the nurses and shoot the shit. Bob was a licensed
counselor, but I couldn’t imagine why he’d gone into it. He
seemed about as concerned about the patients as Millie. I hated
working after him. It was like doing two days work in one day.
The floor was full. Every bed was
taken. They always were. There weren’t enough psychiatric hospitals
in Alabama, let alone rural Alabama. Mostly, unless your family was
willing to commit you, you would slip through the cracks. The people
on our floor, despite its flaws, were the lucky few. Suicide is the
eighth leading cause of death in Alabama. Those on our floor were the
few that someone cared enough about to save or who were just lucky
enough to attempt suicide on a day when we had beds open.
The morning support group was a crap
shoot. It was one of those things that can sometimes reach people in
such a profound way that it almost seems divine and can sometimes
piss people off in such a horrible way that you just have to dodge
the obscenities being flung in your general direction. The moment I
walked into the group room, I could tell it was going to be a
crap-dodging day. All our regulars were there. The regulars are the
ones with the good insurance that the psychiatrists will directly
admit because they have good insurance, or the ones that spend so
much time driving the ER doctors crazy that the ER doctors force the
psychiatrists to admit them under penalty of death. Ironically, these
lucky few, the regulars that get help more than they deserve when
others get no help, are usually the whiniest, most complaining,
miserable people that can climb up out of the crazy bin.
“Good morning,” I said cheerfully
to the group. I scanned the group quickly. Wayne Braselton was there.
He was one of the regulars. Everyone knew everything about him. His
wife had killed herself last year and his son had shot himself in the
head a few days later. It is a strange coincidence that oftentimes
the floor seems filled with the same types of people at the same
time. Looking over the room, at least five of the people there had
someone die on them in the last three years. Last week the group had
been all rape or incest survivors and the week before, they’d been
all Iraq war veterans. It came in waves and I never understood why,
but in my heart, I believed it was fate.
“What are you doing back here,
Wayne?” I asked directly.
Wayne just started sobbing. Big fat
tears rolled down his face. “I just want to die now,” he said.
“Why can’t I die?”
“Did you try to kill yourself again?”
I asked.
“I took all my clonazepam,” he
wailed. “I should be dead. Why aren’t I dead?”
Kara leaned over and put a hand on
Wayne’s shoulder. “It gets easier,” Kara whispered.
“Really?” Wayne sobbed.
“Yeah,” Kara said.
“Wayne,” I said. “It’s not your
time to die. I think you know that. You can’t change things, so you
have to accept them. You have to accept them and work to make today a
better day. So what goal can you set to make today a better day?”
“I don’t know,” Wayne said.
“What do you like doing, Wayne?” I
asked.
“I like to play cards,” Wayne said.
“What do you think, Kara? Can you
help Wayne accomplish his goal of playing cards today?”
Kara nodded enthusiastically.
“I just miss them,” Wayne said.
“Every day I miss them.”
“I know you do, sweetie, but you know
how you feel right now?” I said.
“Yeah,” He said.
“Do you want to make your daughter
feel like you feel now? Do you want to leave her all alone?”
“No, I can’t do that,” he said
firmly.
“Then you gotta get it together and
accept that they are gone. You gotta play cards with Kara here today
and keep your mind on the positive. Focus on everything good you got
left in your life.”
Wayne nodded and I wrote a few notes
before I looked at the person in the circle. It was Brenda Belhaven’s
turn to talk. Morning group is supposed to be a time for patients to
set daily goals and discuss their feelings, but as soon as Brenda
Belhaven launched off into an unfortunate tirade, I knew there was
gonna be no therapy for her.
“Ya’ll need to let us smoke,” she
began. Shit. Brenda had been on the floor fourteen times and she kept
coming back, so she obviously liked it. But all she ever did was yell
about the no smoking policy.
“And let me tell you that nighttime
nurse, Shaquella, is an evil bitch from Hell. I couldn’t sleep last
night and I told her I was going to lose it if she didn’t call the
doctor and get me something and she said she was gonna call the
police on me if I didn’t go back to bed, so I had to sit up all
night long in that damn bed. I haven’t slept in four days and that
bitch won’t do a damn thing to help me . . .”
I cut her off. That’s my job. “What
coping skills can you use to deal with this situation?” I asked.
“I can kick her ass,” Brenda said.
“And will that get you what you
want?” I asked.
“No. But it sure will feel good.”
The group laughed.
“Will it be worth it?”
“Hell no!” Brenda said.
“So what positive coping skills can
you use to make this work to your advantage?”
So group went on in this manner. Sorrow
and complaints lay at my feet like so many discarded socks. It was
going to be a long day. I snuck into my office after group and took
three ibuprofens. I put my head in my hands. There were three
patients waiting for me in the ER and we had no beds. That meant I
had to try to find someplace to stick them or try to sucker them into
signing a no harm agreement, so we wouldn’t be liable if they did
themselves off. I took a deep breath and sucked down a little more
diet cola. The animal crackers had mixed with diet cola in my stomach
to form a kind of cement. I felt sick, but that was an everyday
thing. I should probably eat better.
I grabbed my clipboard and made my way
down to the ER. I looked at the screen. Half the beds taken in the ER
were psychiatric beds. I often found myself wondering what was wrong
with the world. Why did everyone seem to want to die? People said it
was the economy or tough times, but it just seemed like it was deeper
than that. People in our little town were just getting sadder. Dismal
wasn’t much, but it was my home and always had been and it broke my
heart to see the people I’d grown up with giving up on life. Not
everyone there was from Dismal. Beds were scarce and when there are
no beds in their own towns, people came to where they thought there
might be beds, so oftentimes we had people from all over Alabama and
parts of Tennessee, but that was even more depressing, because that
meant the problem wasn’t just with Dismal.
Dismal sounds like a terrible place to
live. The name speaks of sorrow, but it wasn’t always like this.
Once upon a time, Dismal was a tourist destination. People came from
all around to see Dismal’s Gorge just a mile north of the town.
They came to see the largest canyon east of the Mississippi where the
Dismalites lived, wrapped in a kind of supernatural infamy. At night,
the canyon lights up with glowing creatures that line the canyon wall
like stars. The Indians thought the Dismalites were like fairies that
brought magic and good luck. In truth, they are the bioluminescent
larval stage of a rare bug that only lives in Dismal’s Gorge. Once,
they brought Dismal fame and travelers, but no one cares about
bioluminescent slugs anymore and Disneyland is much better than
Alabama, so Dismal, Alabama has slowly choked to death until it
looked like its name, dismal.
I sighed and leaned onto the nurses’
station’s desk.
“Hey, girl,” I said and I winked at
Diane.
“Hey. How you doing?” Diane, the
charge nurse, asked.
“The usual,” I answered.
“That bad?”
I laughed. I’d known Diane forever.
She and I had been friends in high school. She was a tall, thin woman
with high cheekbones and bright green eyes. Her skin was clear and
white and her straight, black hair was cut short. She always wore
bright red lipstick and scrubs with Halloween decorations on them.
She wore the Halloween scrubs all year round. Even at Easter she’d
be wearing cute little witch scrubs or black cat scrubs.
“Your boyfriend’s here,” Diane
whispered.
“Would you shut up,” I said in a
hiss.
“Oh, please, like everyone here
doesn’t know you would kill to go out with Dr. McHotty.”
“His name is Dr. Becket, thank you
very much, and everyone here does not know that.”
“Fine,” Diane said as she rolled
her eyes at me.
At that moment, Dr. Becket stepped out
of one of the ER rooms. Dr. Becket was perfect as far as I could
tell. He was very tall and lean. He ran marathons and did triathlons
and his build was sculpted into perfection by his religious physical
regime. He had sandy blond hair that fell over his blue eyes making
them seem even bluer. His skin was dark from the sun and when he
smiled, my heart skipped a beat. He wasn’t just beautiful. He was
perfect in every other way. He was nice when the other doctors were
snarky. He cared about the patients. He was the medical director of
the hospitalist group which meant he made more money than God. He
liked to read. He was born in Wales and moved to the States when he
was a boy. He had the subtlest hint of a Welsh accent that just
drove me crazy.
Of course, every single woman in Dismal
knew that Dr. Becket was perfect and a group of women swarmed him
whenever he was present. They fluttered around him like groupies.
They hung on his every word perpetually hoping that they would become
Mrs. Dr. McHotty. All the pretty blonde nurses lingered where he
walked, hoping he would look their way.
I had no hopes and I hated swarms, so I
had no part in the other women’s behavior. I was realistic about
myself. There was a time, in my early twenties, when I had been slim
enough to be moderately attractive. I certainly had managed to
attract the biggest losers around and managed to marry one of them. I
had never been beautiful and after a horrible marriage and a terrible
divorce, I had let my butt sag and had given up my exercise routine
for a comfortable TV and Cheetos routine that seemed much less
complicated. I also had no intentions of getting involved with any
more men. I had dated enough to know that I had no sense when it came
to men and if I started dating again, I would surely end up with a
serial killer or child rapist.
Diane threw a chart at me, pulling away
from my gawking. “You can wipe the drool from your face now,” she
said.
“Ha ha,” I said.
“Bed three is hearing voices telling
him to kill his mother,” Diane said. “Bed four will kill himself
if we don’t give him hydrocodone and he is allergic to tramadol and
buprenorphine. Bed six is a homeless fellow who wants to hang himself
or find a warm bed.”
“Wonderful,” I said.
“I swear the crazy is contagious
lately,” Diane said.
“We prefer the term mentally ill,”
I answered.
“When’s your shift over?” she
asked.
“Six,” I said. “Bob’s working
the night shift.”
“You wanna get drinks when you’re
off? “
“I think I’m going to need a beer
or seven,” I said.
“Finnegan’s?” Diane said.
“Is there any place else?” I
answered.
“Not that I would be caught dead in,”
Diane responded.
I smiled at Diane and took the first
chart from the pile. I drew a deep breath and walked in to room 8.
* * *
It was seven before I finally sat down
at Finnegan’s. The greasy bar looked like it always looked. There
was an assortment of college kids from the university campus and a
few old bikers played pool in the corner. There were the locals
sitting at one side of the bar looking like they would catch on fire
if they mingled with any of the others.
I had a large Belgian ale in front of
me. I went almost entirely unnoticed in my smoky corner of the bar
until Diane walked in. She sauntered through the bar. Diane was
gorgeous and not a single man in the bar missed her appeal. She was
wearing a skin-tight tank top and skinny jeans that fit her so
closely, she might have been naked. She had big breasts and a tiny
waist. She looked like a gothic porn star. She smiled and sat down
next to me and ordered a beer. She had her nose ring back in and in
the tiny tank top, you could see all of her tattoos.
“You look like you’re in a funk,”
Diane said as she lit a cigarette.
“How can you smoke those things?
You’re a nurse. You should know better,” I said.
“How can you live on Cheetos and
animal crackers?”
I shrugged.
“So, how’s the house warming
going?” Diane asked as she exhaled smoke.
“Okay,” I said. I had recently
bought a house. It had been the largest commitment I had ever made in
my life and I had chosen the house with the same wisdom I had used to
choose my ex-husband. The saddest thing about it was that I knew it
was a bad decision even as I’d made it. It was like I just couldn’t
help myself. The house was old. It was so old, it had a name. It was
called The Black Magnolia and ghost stories and legends hung off of
it like the Spanish moss in the trees around it. The ghost stories
and the disrepair hadn’t mattered, however. As soon as I had
stepped into The Black Magnolia, I knew the house had to be mine. It
wanted me and I wanted it and as there really wasn’t much else
permanent in my life and as I had self-destructed in every other
semi-reasonable way, I couldn’t think of a reason not to drive
another nail into the coffin that was my life.
“Is it haunted?” Diane asked in a
casual way.
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” I
replied.
Diane cackled. She threw her head back
and laughed like a witch. I had no idea what she was laughing about.
“What’s new with you?” I asked.
Diane stopped laughing and took a drink
of her beer. “Same old, same old. I got a date with that
radiologist.”
No surprises there. “Really?” I
asked.
“Yeah. He asked me out for Friday
night. He’s gonna drive me to Huntsville and take me to a real
restaurant.”
“Isn’t he married?”
“If she were taking care of him
right, he wouldn’t be leaving town with me, would he?” Diane
said.
“Diane, if I didn’t love you so
much, I would call you the biggest bitch I’d ever met.”
“I am the biggest bitch you ever
met,” Diane said.
I laughed. I couldn’t help myself.
Diane laughed with me. She put her hand on my hand and her laughter
faded to a smile.
“You know,” she whispered, “someday
you are going to have to start loving yourself as much as you love
your patients. You are going to have to take some of that good advice
you give them.”
“Where did that come from?” I
asked.
“You can’t stay out there in that
old house by yourself forever. You have to forgive yourself and move
on. There are other men.”
I laughed again. “I’m too old for
that and I’m not pretty enough to keep up.”
“First of all, you are 33 not 63 and
second of all, you are just as pretty as any other woman in this
town. You just hide it under shaggy hair and baggy clothes.”
I shook my head. “You don’t
understand,” I said.
“Listen, honey, if you had been as
happy with old Johnny Boy as you think you were, you never would have
cheated on him in the first place.”
“That’s not fair,” I said.
“You know it is. If you stop and
think about it, you know it is. He was an ass and you deserved better
and still do. He was just another surgeon with a god complex and you
are just another woman with a doctor fetish.”
“I don’t have a fetish,” I said.
“Yes, you do, sugar, and it is time
to get over that, too,” Diane said.
I smiled and put my hand on Diane’s.
She didn’t understand. How could she? She still looked like a
twenty-year-old goddess. Time had been kind to her. I didn’t blame
myself for anything. I wasn’t wallowing in my guilt. I sure as hell
wasn’t punishing myself. Being married to that cheating bastard,
John, for ten years had been punishment enough. He hadn’t waited
for the ink to dry on the marriage certificate to find another woman
to spend his evenings with. As far as my Dr. Fetish, well hell, I had
always worked in hospitals. Of course I wanted doctors. They’re
what I saw every damn day and if I ever met a nice engineer, I
certainly would give up doctors forever. But that was about as likely
as my head spontaneously combusting seeing as there were no nice
engineers in Dismal.
Sure, my hair was shaggy, but that was
just my hair. I could spend two hours on it in the morning. I could
wail on it with the straightener, but it would still look like a
frizzy wedge of brown fluff and tying it back just seemed to
encourage it to frizz even more. I wore baggy clothes because I’d
put on 15 pounds since the divorce. I put on fifteen pounds because I
ate bricks of raw cookie dough when I was depressed and drank at
least two beers every night. We all have our negative coping skills.
Still, I smiled at Diane. I smiled at
her because she meant well and I loved her. I loved her friendship
and the fact that she thought her little intervention might change
everything for me. It might make me decide to get my hair done and
buy new clothes and date an electrician. She wanted to help me see
the light. The problem was there just wasn’t any light to be seen
and I was really looking.
“Shit,” Diane said looking at her
watch. “I gotta go. I got a date.”
“Of course,” I said.
I stood up and paid the bill. I always
paid the bill. I got in my BMW and headed home. The car was the one
good thing John had given me. It was given to me in the settlement
and I wasn’t going to pretend like I didn’t love it. I also got
some money and I got to keep the engagement ring, which I hocked to
pay the down payment on my house.
The house was outside of the city
limits, down a lonely stretch of country road that meandered through
the woods and into the mountains. Dismal was located in the foothills
of the Appalachians. The mountains were small and old, and fog hung
on them like tinsel in the mornings. Old trees grew tall,
overshadowing the gravel road. I turned left into my long driveway. I
owned all the land, too. The Black Magnolia, my house, sat on more
than one hundred acres of land that had once been farmland. I pulled
up to the front of my house and stepped out into the moonlight. Home
crap home. It was a blessing that the lawn was overgrown and
strangled with vines and kudzu. The overgrowth hid the ruined mansion
that hid in the shadows of a forest of magnolia trees. There was no
such thing as a black magnolia, but the shadows that hung over the
ocean of magnolias wrapped them in darkness and made them appear
black.
The house was enormous. It was an old
Italianate style plantation house in red brick. It had five
fireplaces and twenty rooms. There was an old barn in the back and
several small cabins lined the property. They were in significant
disrepair and had been the slave quarters of the old house. I stepped
onto the white porch of my home and the wood groaned in angry
protest. It was still light outside. The days were long in the
summer. It was hot, and sweat had beaded on my chest just walking
between my car and the house.
I opened the door and jumped when I saw
that Lawson was still standing on a ladder in the huge foyer. He was
the contractor I had hired to renovate the old house. He was
installing a new light fixture in the foyer.
“Good Lord, Lawson,” I said. “What
are you still doing here at this hour? You scared the crap out of
me.”
“Sorry about that, ma’am. I didn’t
mean to scare you. Just trying to get caught up. It took me longer
than I thought it would to rewire the parlor and den. This place is a
real mess,” he said.
I looked around at the peeling
wallpaper and chipped banister. The house had once been a work of
art. I could see that. It had looked like Tara from Gone with the
Wind. Those days had passed years ago, and several fires and shitty
patch jobs hadn’t helped any. The once classic façade had been
mixed with gingerbread flourishes and modern windows. All of that had
gone completely down the toilet when the last owners had abandoned it
twenty years ago.
“I know,” I said. “Why are you
here by yourself? Your crew didn’t stay to help you?”
“Nah,” he said with a wink. Lawson
had once been a very handsome man, but years of hard drinking and
smoking had completely eroded that. He didn’t seem aware of this,
however, and he still acted like every woman on earth was just
waiting to lie down and spread her legs for him.
“You know I ain’t superstitious,”
he said. “But the other fellows don’t like being here at night.”
“It’s still daylight,” I said.
“That don’t matter,” he said.
“They heard all the stories, you know?”
“I know,” I said.
I walked through the foyer to the large
parlor and turned on the light. I practically giggled when the light
flickered on. I looked up. I had gone to seventeen different antique
stores to find all the fixtures for the house. They were all
Victorian or older. The light that hung in the middle of the parlor
was a red glass converted gas light and it was stunning. Pieces of
crystal dangled from the ends of it. The parlor was perfect.
Everything was, period. I had even managed to hang the wallpaper. It
was red, too. This was my red room. An old Victorian sofa sat in one
corner with two wing back armchairs with tulle print on either side
of it. Everything was Eastlake style except the baby grand piano in
the corner. I smiled. The parlor was done. Three rooms were done. I
set my purse down on the sofa and collapsed into one of the arm
chairs.
“If you don’t mind me askin’,”
Lawson said. “Don’t you care about all those stories? Most ladies
would be afraid of stories like that and you’re out here all by
yourself.”
“There isn’t anything that died in
this house that is scarier than my ex-husband,” I said.
Lawson laughed and climbed down from
the ladder. He stood in the middle of the foyer and studied it. He
was doing a good job and I could tell by the look on his face that he
was proud of the job he was doing.
“We didn’t get to the upstairs
today,” he said.
“That’s okay. I’ve got plenty of
flashlights and that portable AC unit has a really long extension
cord,” I said.
I had six portable air conditioners
throughout the house. The southern heat was unbearable in the summer.
I could live without running water and electricity, but I would have
killed myself without the air conditioner. When I first moved in,
there had been no electricity, but I had bought a generator and the
air conditioners and just camped out.
“You got a package today,” Lawson
said as he handed me a small box.
“Thanks,” I said as I took it.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, Dr.
Michaels.”
I gave Lawson a hint of a smile and he
grabbed his ladder and walked back to his truck. I sighed deeply and
looked at the box in my hands. It was small and wrapped in brown
paper and twine. I didn’t know people still wrapped packages like
that. There was no return address. I couldn’t imagine anyone who
would send me a package. My father had died last year. My step-mother
hated me and my half sisters and brothers were just too lazy to go to
a post office. They wouldn’t even call me or text me, so they would
never send me anything. My real mom had run out on my dad and me when
I was a baby. Everyone else in the family was dead. All my friends in
Chicago had sided with my husband in the divorce, so I’d been left
alone. Diane was my only friend. I couldn’t imagine who would send
me anything.
I carefully pulled the twine and the
brown paper fell off. Beneath the paper was a large, leather bound
book. It looked like an old journal or recipe book. It was tied
together with a red ribbon and the ribbon held numerous pieces of
paper. I ran my hands over the smooth leather and read the title of
the book. The title was simple. It simply said “Spells”.
I laughed and pulled the red ribbon
that held the book together. The book fell open. Inside it was like a
recipe book a mother would pass on to a daughter. There were old
typed pages with handwritten notes in the margins. There were pages
added with handwritten spells on them and drawings.
“What the fuck?” I said as I leafed
through the old book. There were potions and summoning spells and
candle spells. In-between pages, there were pressed flowers and herbs
and some of the pages were stained with old candle wax.
I set the book down and went into the
kitchen and opened the fridge. At least the kitchen was done. It
looked like any other modern kitchen. It had granite counter tops and
marble floors. I had spared no expense making it look like something
that belonged in an old southern Mansion. I wanted the house to be
perfect and I had Johnny Boy’s money to help me achieve that dream.
The lights flickered when I entered. I would have to talk to Lawson
about that in the morning. I took a beer out of the fridge and opened
it. I had a sip of the beer and grabbed a roll of cookie dough. Armed
with the cookie dough and beer, I returned to the book. The book had
fallen on the ground and was opened to a page. I laughed again. The
page it had opened to was love spells. That was just what I needed.
I sat down and ate and drank and leafed
through the book. I stopped at a page with an interesting picture on
it. The spell was an awakening spell. It awakened you to the
supernatural world. I hesitated and looked at the script around it.
Something fell upstairs and the lights
went out. I fumbled around and found the nearest flashlight and
switched it on just as the lights flickered back on.
“Lawson, you asshole,” I said as I
turned the flashlight off. “The wiring is done in the parlor, my
ass.”
A sudden wave of fatigue washed over me
and I picked up my mess and carted my sorry butt upstairs. I climbed
into bed with my flashlight. I still had the book of spells. It had
been so long since someone had given me something that I had
forgotten what it felt like. I knew the book was more than weird. It
bordered on creepy. A normal woman would probably burn the damn
thing, but I wasn’t a normal woman. I was a lonely divorcee living
in a house known to be haunted, but I loved it the way most people
love their pets. I was the daughter of a man who had made it clear
that he loathed me, with a step-mother who’d bought me toilet paper
for Christmas. The creepy book was wonderful to me. It meant that
someone out there, even if they were a freak, cared about me, and
freak love was better than no love at all.
* * *
I knew something was wrong as soon as I
pulled into the parking lot. There were two police cars out front.
That was actually pretty standard for our unit. The police had to
carry folks to the regional hospital for commitment often enough, but
there was a quality about the air that morning told me that something
was really wrong. It was hot. Even at 8 a.m. It was so damn hot, my
shirt clung to my sweat-covered chest.
I walked into the hospital. We had our
own little wing, so the six offices in the front were all the
therapists’ and doctors’ offices. I could see the police had one
of the night nurses, Shequella, in one of the empty offices. I moved
past the office and unlocked my office door. I set my stuff down and
turned to lock it again and returned to the psychiatric floor. The
CEO was on the floor and she was talking with Amy, the Clinical
Director.
“What happened?” I whispered.
“Kara and Wayne are dead,” Amy said
coldly. She was trying hard to hide her anger. “They hatched some
kind of scheme together and hung themselves from the bathroom door
using each other’s weight as a counter balance.”
The impact of this information was like
a punch in the face. I sat down.
“I just had sessions with them
yesterday,” I whispered.
“I know,” Amy said
Jenna was the nurse that day and she
was the polar opposite of Millie. She was so sweet, she made sugar
look bitter. She was the nurse all the patients loved. She went out
of her way to talk to everyone and make sure they were all right. She
was always ready with a cheerful smile and a word of encouragement.
Jenna was crying.
“I just can’t believe it,” Jenna
said. “Ms. Kara was doing so much better this time.”
I nodded. I couldn’t believe it,
either. I always had faith that Kara would get better. Time would
heal her wounds and she would move on. I had spent so many hours
sitting in my office with Kara that I couldn’t even count. I had
always believed I was helping her. I was healing her, but I hadn’t
done anything. I couldn’t save her. I couldn’t save Wayne and if
I couldn’t even do that, why was I even here?
“We are in a world of trouble,” Amy
said. “Wayne’s daughter is here and she is very angry. She’s
got a lawyer. Make no mistake, this in a sentinel event. We might all
lose our jobs for this.”
“To hell with our jobs,” I said
suddenly. “Two people died here and it was our fault. You knew that
Shequella played on the Internet all damn night. How many complaints
have we had about her? You know she doesn’t do fifteen-minute
checks. I’m not even sure she does any checks. She just signs the
paperwork, so it looks like she does. She won’t even talk to the
patients when they ask for help. You should have fired her years
ago.”
“Be quiet!” Amy said. “The
nurses’ jobs aren’t any of your business and you can’t say
anything like that to anyone again.”
“Or what?”
“If this floor stops making money,
Columbia Health Care will shut this wing down. If we get sued or have
to hire more expensive staff, that will cost us money. Don’t you
get it? We’ll all lose our jobs and the patients will lose the only
psychiatric floor in the area. If you really care about the patients,
you better realize that money is all that matters, because they’ll
close us down the moment they think we cost them a cent more than we
are worth.”
I opened my mouth to say something and
then shut it. I had lost control. I knew what I thought didn’t
matter. My opinion didn’t matter. I was powerless and unimportant
and two people had died and there was never anything I could do to
stop it. I couldn’t control the nurses or change the
administration. I couldn’t make anyone care.
“You’re right,” I said meekly.
“You’re right. I just really thought I had gotten through to
Kara.”
“Maybe you should take the day off,”
Amy said putting her hand on my shoulder. She was acting like she
cared, but she really just wanted me and my radical opinions as far
away from police and lawyers and administrators as she could get
them. I’m not stupid enough to believe she would care one stitch
about me if she didn’t see me as dangerous.
I nodded. I needed the day off.
“I’ll call Karen in to cover for
you,” Amy said. Karen was a good choice. Karen had no opinions.
Karen was all smiles and no brains.
I stepped into my office and grabbed my
bag and fled to the car. I cranked the engine up and let the air
conditioner blow the heat off me. I wanted to cry. I wanted to sob
for them, but it wasn’t in me. I had cried all the tears I had left
to cry a long time ago. I put the car into reverse and pulled out of
the parking lot. I drove straight home.
Lawson and his crew were hard at work
when I got back. He had ten men working with him. He was a general
contractor and he had to subcontract out the plumbing, painting, etc.
The house was filled with men. The old wallpaper in the foyer had
been scraped away and a few men were putting down fresh paint. I
turned around and walked away from the bedlam into the wilderness
around The Black Magnolia.
There were three cemeteries on my
property. The first cemetery was just past the old barn. I walked
through the tall grass down a path that used to be a road. An old
stone fence marked the remains of cotton fields and animal
enclosures. I stepped into the first cemetery. It was the nicest. A
stone angel guarded over the tombstones of all the plantation owners
and their families. The tombstones were gray and covered with moss.
They were large and lovely. They represented all the wealth and glory
that the owners of the house had possessed.
I passed by these large, beautiful
stones, and continued down a small trail, and over a wooden bridge.
The woods grew thicker as I walked. Nature had reclaimed what had
once been rich farmland. There were no signs of the old cotton
fields. They’d all faded away. I kept walking deeper into the woods
until I came to a ring of decaying wooden shacks. Just to the left of
the shacks was the old slave cemetery. There were no epic stones or
gothic angels in this tiny graveyard. In fact, the small hand-carved
stones were hardly visible above the kudzu. I walked into the
cemetery and cleared the kudzu away, exposing the stones. A cloud
passed over the sun and a bird sang out in the distance. I shivered.
I had one of my landscapers lug a stone bench out to the cemetery. He
had looked at me like I was as crazy as a shit house rat. Maybe I
was, but this place called to me. I had even cleared out the old
slave cabins. I had swept the wooden floors and pulled the weeds out
of the spaces in-between the floorboards. I had raked the ground and
planted little yellow flowers in front of them.
I sat down on my little stone bench and
sighed deeply. I had to wonder if anything I did made any difference.
I had really believed I was reaching Kara. I had thought that she was
doing better and I was some small part of that, but it had all been a
lie. My entire life felt like a lie. It was one long, creeping lie.
My marriage had been a lie. My career was a lie. That left me with
nothing but an old house and three cemeteries.
The Black Magnolia had a story. It was
a story that was told so many times, no one knew where it came from
or if it was true. They said the old plantation owners had beaten
their slaves. They had tortured them and locked them in the basement
and let them die. After slavery was abolished, the remaining slaves
had crept up the stairs in the dark of night and murdered their
former masters in their sleep. They left them to choke on their own
blood. The Ku Klux Klan found out about this and rounded up the
slaves and hanged them from the old tree that loomed above me. The
story was probably as much of a lie as my career, but at least it was
a lie that lasted.
I stood up and began the long walk
home. The smell of magnolias lingered in the air as I walked through
the overgrown necropolises to find my way back home. By the time I
got back, most of the crew had packed up for the night. A lonely
painter was on the front porch painting the old columns. I smiled at
him and he winked at me.
“Hey, lady,” he called to me. “What
are you doing up here in this haunted house by yourself? Don’t you
get scared?”
I looked at the little painter. I
hadn’t seen him before. He was short and dark skinned. He spoke
with an accent.
“Why? Do you think it’s haunted?”
I asked.
“Everybody knows it is haunted,” he
said. “That’s why no one buys it. It’s killed all of its
owners.”
“You shouldn’t listen to gossip.
Everyone in this town loves to gossip, but no one knows what they’re
talking about. The last owner died of lung cancer.”
I straightened my hair and walked into
my empty house and closed the door behind me. I looked up. There was
light upstairs. They had finished the wiring. I looked down. The tile
was finished. The house was coming together and that was enough to
make me smile on the worst day. I walked into the kitchen and grabbed
a beer and sat down at the table. A book was open on the table. It
was the spell book. I finished my beer.
I would have to remember to remind the
crew not to touch my stuff. I grabbed the remnants of a bottle of
scotch I had beneath the sink and poured myself another drink and
then another and one more for good measure. I was out of beer and I
knew I had to have at least four drinks to make it through the night.
I sat down in front of the spell book. The spell book was opened to a
page that had been illuminated with gold hearts. The spell on the
page was handwritten and illustrated. There was a picture of a white
candle. The spell was labeled ‘A white candle love spell’. On any
other day, I would have put the book away, but a desperate sorrow
tugged at me and the four shots of scotch were beginning to soften my
brain. “What the hell?” I thought the ritual would be
therapeutic. I thought going through the motion would calm me down.
Conveniently, I had everything I needed
for the spell. I went outside and picked a red rose from the many
tangled bushes in the old garden. I gathered one of the small white
candles I had used for the bathroom when there had been no
electricity. I found a picture of Dr. Becket from one of the
hospital’s newsletters and a note he had written to me about one of
our shared patients. I put all of the items together in the middle of
the kitchen table. I put my picture by Dr. Becket’s and looked at
my little altar. I looked at Dr. Becket’s picture. I didn’t even
know his first name.
Finally, I took a thorn from one of the
roses and wrote “All my love come to me” three times on the small
candle. I lit the candle and watched it burn. Time passed, and as the
candle burned, I felt better. I felt my anxiety burn away with the
melted wax. I couldn’t control everyone. Kara and Wayne had endured
more than many people could. Death was a grim specter that offered no
solace. It wasn’t my fault. The candle flickered as the sun set.
The candle smelled like magnolias. I breathed in the wonderful smell
and let it fill me. The moon rose over the horizon and the moonlight
spilled in through the large kitchen window, bathing my altar in
white light.
I rested my head on the table and I
focused on the flickering light of the white candle. I looked at Dr.
Becket’s picture. The last thing I needed was another man, but it
would be nice just to be touched again. To feel skin against skin. To
taste a man’s flesh. Let’s face it, it would be nice to get laid
again. I hadn’t been with anyone since Blake. I had spent six
months with Blake while I was still married to John. The saddest
thing about the affair was that John never even noticed. Blake had
been everything John wasn’t. He was a carpenter. He smelled like
wood and sweat. He had never cared about appearances or money or
image. He hadn’t wanted me to be anything I wasn’t. He had wanted
solace. I guess I had wanted that, too. He just wanted my body and I
was more than happy to give it to him. I fell asleep dreaming of
being touched.
The sun was just rising when I woke up.
I looked at the candle. It flickered one last time and went out. I
scooped up all the wax and the altar and put it in a pillowcase and
placed it under my pillow. I felt better already.
Giveaway:
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