A Homemade GrimoireJames Van Pelt
3000 words Friday, Sept. 29 INTENTION: Stop Mom from making Brussels sprouts for dinner. INGREDIENTS: Dried flies ground up. Squished dandelions. A booger. PROCEDURE FOR SPELL: Draw pentagram on ground in the woods. Light ingredients at midnight in the pentagram. Chant three times: Oh, Mommy dear, you soon will fear, to touch those sprouts, just toss them out, toss them out RESULT: Dead leaves caught fire under an oak. Smothered fire with my coat. Threw away my coat that burned through in spots. Told Mom I lost it at school. Note from Saturday, Sept. 30: We had Brussels sprouts anyway. After dinner I found a box filled with little plastic bottles in the attic. Perfect to hold ingredients. Dad said they were film cannisters. He also said photography is a good hobby for a boy. I think he’s given up on the idea I’ll play football. Monday, Oct. 2 Looked for books of spells at the public library after school. Just one listed in the kids section. Someone checked it out months ago and hasn’t returned it. Mrs. Birgitta caught me in the adult section. Said I have to wait a year until I’m 12 for an adult library card. Mom put parental limits on our computer two months ago because my search history included “glamours,” “curses,” and “fetishes,” not that I found anything helpful. I don’t know what she thought I was looking for, but she didn’t say anything about magic when she reamed me about it. The school computers only let us access ThinkerSITE, but that’s just for reading, math and science. Boring videos and stupid quizzes. I think I’m the only kid in sixth grade without a cell phone. Dad said I won’t get one until I’m in junior high. Research is hard. Tuesday, Oct. 3 Gathered ingredients after school: pine bark, aspen bark, sage leaves, goldenrod leaves, juniper needles, unknown fern leaves, unknown leaves appeared in groups of three, hard berries from the same bush, two earthworms, dragonfly wings (the bug was already dead). Continue to look for newts. I don’t know how witches get the eye of a newt. Sounds gross. Way back in history somebody created the first spell. It probably was an accident, like discovering penicillin. They wrote down what they did. That was the first grimoire. I figure if they discovered magic by experimentation, I can rediscover it. Wednesday, Oct. 4 Stayed home from school. Calamine lotion all the way to my elbows. Thursday, Oct. 5 Disaster! Tina Lynch stole my grimoire and read it out loud to her coven of flunkies. I had to give her a dollar to get it back, but the playground monitor noticed the fuss. Principal Tapeworm called us both to the office. He made Tina return my dollar, and then he said, “You shouldn’t have taken his little notebook, young lady. Apologize.” She did, but she didn’t mean it. I know a hex face when I see one. Success! Found a paragraph in our American history text listing common items in a witch’s cabinet. It said, “Pioneer women learned herbs’ medicinal properties and gathered them in the woods. Superstitious neighbors sometimes accused them of being witches and persecuted them.” The herbs included mugwort, nettle, lambs cress and mayweed. I added them to my grimoire with toe of frog, wool of bat, tongue of dog and the rest I discovered at the beginning of a Shakespeare play last week. Friday, Oct. 6 Everything in my desk messed up. Good thing I keep my grimoire in my backpack now. Tina Lynch looked smug. Sunday, Oct. 8 INTENTION: Summon a snow storm heavy enough to cancel school. INGREDIENTS: An ounce of rain water from Halloween last year. A dried carrot from last year’s final snowman. Seven snowflakes cut from Christmas paper. A flannel square I trimmed from an old winter scarf Dad doesn’t wear anymore. PROCEDURE FOR SPELL: Drew pentagram on the ground in the woods. Placed ingredients in a snow shovel in the pentagram. Lit the paper while chanting three times: Oh, clouds divine we ask for snow. Not flakes but blizzard that blows and blows. Cover the roads so we can’t roam. Bury the school and keep us home. RESULT: The plastic shovel melted. When it snows, we won’t be able to clear the driveway! Note from Monday, Oct. 9: Dad noticed the hole in his scarf in the morning. It was sixty-five degrees when the school bus arrived, and I hadn’t studied for the math test. Maybe the spells need to be in Latin or Old French. Monday, Oct. 9 Everyone giggled when I sat at my desk this morning. I didn’t know why until I saw a note written in the corner of the whiteboard. It said, “Morgan Mitchell wants to be a witch.” Miss Price didn’t notice it until after we said the pledge of allegiance. She erased it, but I could still see the letters like spirit writing. I don’t like Tina Lynch. Her black hair is long and hangs down her back. She brushes it after lunch, recess and PE, as if anyone cares. Wears makeup. She’s got a fake smile and bosses her friends around. In kindergarten the teacher always let her lead the class to the cafeteria for lunch. She’s a sneak and a liar, and pretty dumb if she thinks I can’t recognize her handwriting. But I tried to make peace in the hallway when the class went for music. I said I was sorry I got her in trouble for taking my grimoire even though I wasn’t. She said, “There’s no such thing as magic, and a boy can’t be a witch, bitch.” What does she know? Anybody can be anything they want. Witches are cool. So after school ended and everyone left the class, I found her brush in her desk and collected five strands of hair. I’ve been trying to fall asleep for an hour. Mom and Dad turned off the lights and went to bed. I’m writing by flashlight. Does magic happen because of the words and ingredients? If I find the right combination, will my spells succeed? Would the ceremony work for anyone? Or is magic in the person? Maybe some people have magic in them, and the incantations and candles and pentagrams let the magic loose. I don’t know, but when I put my hand on the envelope with Tina Lynch’s hair in it, my fingertips tingled. Tuesday, Oct. 10 Somehow Tina Lynch gets to the room before anyone else, but on the whiteboard she’d drawn a boy wearing a pointy hat, riding a broom. The picture didn’t look like me or anyone else. I’m the only boy with glasses in our class, though. Miss Price didn’t even bother to erase it. During lunch, the school librarian told me about their encyclopedia. I don’t know how I missed it! It’s twenty-four books long and shelved in the reference section. She said this is what people used before the Internet. So much information! Nothing helpful for a spell to make someone sick, but I learned a lot about “sympathetic magic,” which says once something is in contact with something else, it’s always in contact, so taking Tina’s hair was a good move. The article on magic talked about the “law of similarity” and the “law of contagion.” Just her hair might not do it, so I stole a glove from her coat on the coat rack and a lipstick from her desk. I ought to be able to whip up a spell from that combination. INTENTION: Punish Tina Lynch for being a bully. INGREDIENTS: Tina’s glove, lipstick and hair. A kettle. An old ipecac bottle I found in the medicine cabinet. PROCEDURE FOR SPELL: Midnight in the forest, naturally. Full moon tonight! Good thing the back door is next to my room. Mom and Dad sleep hard. I slip outside and they’re not the wiser. I lit Dad’s camp stove in the pentagram, and filled the kettle with water, waited for it to boil. Dead quiet in the woods. No wind. No animal sounds. Finally the water bubbled, and I heard the tiny gurgle. The stove’s blue flame lit the nearby trees and my hands. I felt ghostly, a little scared. My knees ached from squatting for so long. Then I added a teaspoon of ipecac. The glove was heavy for a second as if her hand were in it. I chanted: Boiling, roiling, toiling for fever. Dripping bitters for a tummy ache. Let illness visit the disbeliever. Teach her magic is not fake. The water reflected the moon, shifting as it boiled, and it swallowed the glove. I chanted again when I dropped in the lipstick. My stomach clenched. I groaned. A spark snapped between my fingers and the envelope with Tina’s hairs in it. My chest tightened, but I spoke the spell a third time, released the envelope into the kettle. The forest grew dark. The stove’s blue flame flicked out. I fell back. A single cloud, hardly big enough to do the job, covered the moon, leaking a gross, milky halo around a churning, bruised pupil. For only a few seconds the horrible eye stared down, then the moon slipped into view, blinding in brightness. RESULT: Wait and see. Now that I’m home, the forest creepiness, and the weird thing about the moon scaring me seem like a nightmare. Spooky when it happened, but as soon as I woke up, kind of silly. Wednesday, Oct. 11 Woke with a headache. It throbbed through breakfast, but I felt okay when the bus showed up. Tina didn’t come to school today. Wouldn’t it be funny if my spell worked? I like the pullup bars on the playground. One’s at four feet, the next is five, and the third is six. We can grab the bar like we’re going to do a pullup but not sit on it. If the teacher isn’t looking, though, you flip upside down and tuck your knees over the bar so you hang like a bat, swing back and forth to get momentum, then do a baby drop to land on your feet. If you swing hard enough, and don’t do something stupid like stall out just before you reach the top (and fall on your face), you can end up sitting on the bar. It’s tricky and not stable. I can do it, but I imagine riding a broom far above the ground. I don’t know how you can perch on a broom that high and not fall off. It must take a ton of practice. Thursday, Oct. 12 Tina didn’t come to school today again. I’m worried. I kept looking at her empty desk. When I closed my eyes, I saw the cloud-covered moon above me, a sickly white circle writhing around it. Where is she? What have I done? Friday, Oct. 13 (written on Saturday evening, the 14th) It’s been a terrible day. I overheard Vickie Shnabel and Addison Marquez during lunch. They’re in Tina’s Girl Scout troop. Tina’s in the hospital! She got sick Wednesday morning with a fever. Her parents took her to Community Hospital Wednesday night when she fell asleep and wouldn’t wake up. She’s in the ICU now and her parents are sitting with her. I walked to the public library as soon as class ended and went straight to the encyclopedias. Nothing on reversing spells. The closest the article came about magically curing illness talked about folk medicine, herbal teas and homeopathy. “Pioneer women were America’s first pharmacists,” it said. Community Hospital is only a half mile from the school. The wind cut through my sweatshirt. I kept my chin tucked and jammed my hands into my pockets, but it was still cold. The gift shop had get-well cards. I wanted flowers too, but they only had expensive roses. I couldn’t get into the ICU anyways. An orderly at the nurses’ station took my card. He promised to deliver it, but he couldn’t tell me how she was. “Family members only,” he said. The walk home was miserable. Three more miles. Wind in my face. I kept thinking I deserved to be cold. I deserved punishment. INTENTION: Save Tina Lynch INGREDIENTS: Tina’s boiled glove, hair and lipstick. The lipstick melted and squeezed out around the lid, but I think there’s still plenty inside. Ipecac. Kindling. Mom’s dresser mirror. PROCEDURE: Cloudy tonight, so the moon was covered. Windier and colder than this afternoon. The trees absolutely tossed about. I needed a flashlight on the trail to my little clearing in the woods. I’ve never tried to reverse a spell. Does the moon have to be the same? Do I say the spell backwards? I don’t know how to pronounce ekaf ton si cigam reh hcaet! Can a spell be erased? Can it be redirected? If I had a time machine, I’d go back to talk to some of those “American pharmacists.” I bet they’d know what to do. I redrew the pentagram, then built a fire in the middle. Wind picked up sparks and swirled them higher than my head. Flame whipped around so I thought the fire might go out, but it burned strong, the coals glowing like a furnace. To reverse the spell, I put mom’s mirror on the other side of the fire so I could see the flame in it and my firelit face. A spell has to go somewhere, I thought. Maybe the mirror would reflect it on me so no one else would be cursed. I dropped the glove into the fire, then chanted, Bring back my ill-considered charm. Give me the sickness I have cast. Let magic heal what I have harmed. May night and fire grant what this witch has asked. The glove was still wet inside. It steamed and popped, and moved like a black spider, curling its legs in the flame. Lipstick went in next as I chanted again. The red seeped out, melted and dripped into the coals. Then the brass top slid off, bubbling red liquid. One more time I chanted, then fed the wrinkled envelope with Tina’s hair into the fire. For a moment, I stared at myself in the mirror. Still wind lashed through the trees, through the flame. Shadows leapt about my face, and I couldn’t see my eyes, like I didn’t have them. My spell had one more step. I uncapped the ipecac, then took a swallow. It was bitter. I almost coughed it out. Fifteen minutes later it worked. I threw up again and again until my stomach muscles ached with effort. In a moment, between spasms, I thought the word “expel” sounds like “ex-spell.” Maybe that’s what it means. Maybe this will work. Lying on the dirt forest floor inside the pentagram beside my fire, I giggled. Then my stomach clenched around what little I had left. RESULT: I slept most of Saturday. Told Mom my stomach hurt, and it did! She took my temperature. “I think you have a touch of something. It’s going around I hear.” She gave me ibuprofen. The wind rattled my bedroom windows when I was awake enough to hear. Every time I woke up I thought, “Not in a coma yet.” Sunday, Oct. 15 Grayest morning I’ve ever seen. Clouds almost touching the housetops. It’s like our street is being squeezed from above. Misty tendrils reaching down. Fog drifting in the streets. I asked mom to shut off parental controls on the computer so I could check on Tina. Turns out Mom and Tina’s mom are both in the PTA. “I’m sorry to hear about your friend,” Mom said. Vickie Schnable started posting online about Tina this morning. She’s calling it “Tina Watch.” There’s pictures with Tina and her buddies (most with Vickie in them too—I’m not in any. Big surprise). There’s a message from Tina’s parents saying Tina is “stable” but not able to receive visitors. Lots of comments from Tina’s crowd with emojis: clasped hands, hearts. I could try another spell, but I burned everything I had connected to Tina. Pretty dumb. I could have used just a finger from the glove, just the lid from the lipstick, just a single hair so I could do variations. Also, taking the ipecac myself might have been a mistake, but I’d do it again if I thought it would help. Responsibility is a terrible burden. Sunday evening: Tina woke up! The spell worked! Vickie posted fireworks emojis, and everyone is celebrating. There’s a short video of Tina in her hospital bed, waving at the camera. Tina’s parents posted a comment: “Her prognosis is good. The doctors feel there is no lasting effects. We expect a full recovery. Our beautiful girl is out of the woods,” which made me think about the pentagram and how the fire danced in the wind. She wouldn’t have been in the woods if I hadn’t been so careless. I’m going to make rules for myself in the grimoire, like “Don't hurt people.” Monday, Oct. 16 Two interesting items. When Mom and Dad were in the kitchen getting dinner ready yesterday, Mom screamed. It was a little scream, mostly of surprise. I ran into the kitchen. She pulled a plastic bag with moldy vegetables from the fridge. “These are disgusting,” she said. “I thought it was a something dead. Scared me.” She dropped the bag into the trash. “We need to throw this out. Gross! I’m never buying Brussels sprouts again.” The second item. It snowed and snowed and snowed last night. Cars are covered. They haven’t plowed the streets. The principal sent an e-mail. There’s announcements on the radio. School’s cancelled for the day. As long as I remember to erase my search history, I’ll find all sorts of stuff on the Internet. You can’t keep a good witch down. |
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James Van Pelt
James Van Pelt writes full-time in western Colorado. He has coached swim teams, taught high school and college English, and enjoys the hiking trails near his home. His work has appeared numerous times in Analog, Asimov’s, and other venues. He has been a finalist for the Nebula, the Theodore Sturgeon Award, the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer (now the Astounding Award), and been reprinted in several Year’s Best anthologies. He hangs out on Facebook and loves chatting with fans and writers. He can be found at jamesvanpelt.com and on FaceBook.
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