Witches: Wicked, Wild & Wonderful (4 page)

I edged around them, passing two curtained doors and a bronze statue of Alice and the Red Queen. Puzzle fragments of conversation rose out of the general buzz:

“My pearls? Thank you, my dear, but you know they’re only stimulated.”

“And
then
it just went ‘poof’! A perfectly good frog, and it just went ‘poof’!”

“ . . . and then Tallulah says to the bishop, she says, ‘Love your drag, darling, but your purse is on fire.’ Don’t you love it? ‘Your purse is on fire’!”

The kitchen itself was blessedly empty except for a stout gentleman in a tuxedo, and a striking woman in a peach silk pantsuit, who was tending an array of champagne bottles and a cut-glass bowl full of bright blue punch. Curious, I picked up a cup of punch and sniffed at it. The woman smiled up at me through a caterpillary fringe of false lashes.

“Pure witch’s brew,” she said in one of those Lauren Bacall come-hither voices I’ve always envied. “But what can you do? It’s the
specialité de la maison.”

The tuxedoed man laughed. “Don’t mind Silver, Mrs. Gordon. He just likes to tease. Ophelia’s punch is wonderful.”

“Only if you like Ty-dee Bowl,” said Silver, tipping a sapphire stream into another cup. “You know, honey, you shouldn’t stand around with your mouth open like that. Think of the flies.”

Several guests entered in plenty of time to catch this exchange. Determined to preserve my cool, I took a gulp of the punch. It tasted fruity and made my mouth prickle, and then it hit my stomach like a firecracker. So much for cool. I choked and gasped.

“I tried to warn you,” Silver said. “You’d better switch to champagne.” Now I knew Silver was a man, I could see that his hands and wrists were big for the rest of her—him. I could feel my face burning with punch and mortification.

“No, thank you,” I said faintly. “Maybe some water?”

The stout man handed me a glass. I sipped gratefully. “You’re Ophelia and Rachel’s neighbor, aren’t you?” he said. “Lovely garden. You must be proud of that asparagus bed.”

“I was, until I saw Ophelia’s.”

“Ooh, listen to the green-eyed monster,” Silver cooed. “Don’t be jealous, honey. Ophelia’s the best. Nobody understands plants like Ophelia.”

“I’m not jealous,” I said with dignity. “I’m wistful. There’s a difference.”

Then, just when I thought it couldn’t possibly get any worse, Geoff appeared, looking stunningly unprofessorial, with one side of his shirt collar turned up and his dark hair flopped over his eyes.

“Hey, Evie. Who knew a couple of dykes would know how to throw a wedding?”

You’d think after sixteen years of living with Geoff, I’d know whether or not he was an alcoholic. But I don’t. He doesn’t go on binges, he doesn’t get drunk at every party we go to, and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t drink on the sly. What I do know is that drinking doesn’t make him more fun to be around.

I took his arm. “I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself,” I said brightly. “Too bad we have to leave.”

“Leave? Who said anything about leaving? We just got here.”

“Your papers,” I said. “Remember?”

“Screw my papers,” said Geoff and held out his empty cup to Silver. “This punch is dy-no-mite.”

“What about your students?”

“I’ll tell ’em I didn’t feel like reading their stupid essays. That’ll fix their little red wagons. Boring as hell anyway. Fill ’er up, beautiful,” he told Silver.

Silver considered him gravely. “Geoff, darling,” he said. “A little bird tells me that there’s an absolutely delicious argument going on in the smoking room. They’ll never forgive you if you don’t come play.”

Geoff favored Silver with a leer that made me wish I were somewhere else. “Only if you play too,” he said. “What’s it about?”

Silver waved a pink-tipped hand. “Something about theoretical versus practical anarchy. Right, Rodney?”

“I believe so,” said the stout gentleman agreeably.

A martial gleam rose in Geoff’s eye. “Let me at ’em.”

Silver’s pale eyes turned to me, solemn and concerned. “You don’t mind, do you, honey?”

I shrugged. With luck, the smoking-room crowd would be drunk too, and nobody would remember who said what. I just hoped none of the anarchists had a violent temper.

“We’ll return him intact,” Silver said. “I promise.” And they were gone, Silver trailing fragrantly from Geoff’s arm.

While I was wondering whether I’d said that thing about the anarchists or only thought it, I felt a tap on my shoulder—the stout gentleman, Rodney.

“Mrs. Gordon, Rachel and Ophelia would like to see you and young Kimberly in the study. If you’ll please step this way?”

His manner had shifted from wedding guest to old-fashioned butler. Properly intimidated, I trailed him to the front hall. It was empty now, except for Lucille and the young person in chartreuse lace, who were huddled together on the bench by the fireplace. The young person was talking earnestly and Lucille was listening and nodding and sipping punch. Neither of them paid any attention to us or to the music coming from behind one of the curtained doors. I saw Kim at the foot of the stairs, examining the newel post.

It was well worth examining: a screaming griffin with every feather and every curl beautifully articulated and its head polished smooth and black as ebony. Rodney gave it a brief, seemingly unconscious caress as he started up the steps. When Kim followed suit, I thought I saw the carved eye blink.

I must have made a noise, because Rodney halted his slow ascent and gazed down at me, standing open-mouthed below. “Lovely piece of work, isn’t it? We call it the house guardian. A joke, of course.”

“Of course,” I echoed. “Cute.”

It seemed to me that the house had more rooms than it ought to. Through open doors, I glimpsed libraries, salons, parlors, bedrooms. We passed through a stone cloister where discouraged-looking ficuses in tubs shed their leaves on the cracked pavement and into a green-scummed pool. I don’t know what shocked me more: the cloister or the state of its plants. Maybe Ophelia’s green thumb didn’t extend to houseplants.

As far as I could tell, Kim took all this completely in stride. She bounded along like a dog in the woods, peeking in an open door here, pausing to look at a picture there, and pelting Rodney with questions I wouldn’t have dreamed of asking, like “Are there kids here?” “What about pets?” “How many people live here, anyway?”

“It depends,” was Rodney’s unvarying answer. “Step this way, please.”

Our trek ended in a wall covered by a huge South American tapestry of three women making pots. Rodney pulled the tapestry aside, revealing an iron-banded oak door that would have done a medieval castle proud. “The study,” he said, and opened the door on a flight of ladder-like steps rising steeply into the shadows.

His voice and gesture reminded me irresistibly of one of those horror movies in which a laconic butler leads the hapless heroine to a forbidding door and invites her to step inside. I didn’t know which of three impulses was stronger: to laugh, to run, or, like the heroine, to forge on and see what happened next.

It’s some indication of the state I was in that Kim got by me and through the door before I could stop her.

I don’t like feeling helpless and I don’t like feeling pressured. I really don’t like being tricked, manipulated, and herded. Left to myself, I’d have turned around and taken my chances on finding my way out of the maze of corridors. But I wasn’t going to leave without my daughter, so I hitched up my wedding-appropriate long skirt and started up the steps.

The stairs were every bit as steep as they looked. I floundered up gracelessly, emerging into a huge space sparsely furnished with a beat-up rolltop desk, a wingback chair and a swan-neck rocker on a threadbare Oriental rug at one end, and some cluttered door-on-sawhorse tables on the other. Ophelia and Rachel, still dressed in their bridal finery, were sitting in the chair and the rocker respectively, holding steaming mugs and talking to Kim, who was incandescent with excitement.

“Oh, there you are,” said Ophelia as I stumbled up the last step. “Would you like some tea?”

“No, thank you,” I said stiffly. “Kim, I think it’s time to go home now.”

Kim protested, vigorously. Rachel cast Ophelia an unreadable look.

“It’ll be fine, love,” Ophelia said soothingly. “Mrs. Gordon’s upset, and who could blame her? Evie, I don’t believe you’ve actually met Rachel.”

Where I come from, social niceties trump everything. Without actually meaning to, I found I was shaking Rachel’s hand and congratulating her on her marriage. Close up, she was a handsome woman, with a decided nose, deep lines around her mouth, and the measuring gaze of a gardener examining an unfamiliar insect on her tomato leaves. I didn’t ask her to call me Evie.

Ophelia touched my hand. “Never mind,” she said soothingly. “Have some tea. You’ll feel better.”

Next thing I knew, I was sitting on a chair that hadn’t been there a moment before, eating a lemon cookie from a plate I didn’t see arrive, and drinking Lapsang Souchong from a cup that appeared when Ophelia reached for it. Just for the record, I didn’t feel better at all. I felt as if I’d taken a step that wasn’t there, or perhaps failed to take one that was: out of balance, out of place, out of control.

Kim, restless as a cat, was snooping around among the long tables.

“What’s with the flying fish?” she asked.

“They’re for Rachel’s new experiment,” said Ophelia. “She thinks she can bring the dead to life again.”

“You better let me tell it, Ophie,” Rachel said. “I don’t want Mrs. Gordon thinking I’m some kind of mad scientist.”

In fact, I wasn’t thinking at all, except that I was in way over my head.

“I’m working on animating extinct species,” Rachel said. “I’m particularly interested in dodos and passenger pigeons, but eventually, I’d like to work up to bison and maybe woolly mammoths.”

“Won’t that create ecological problems?” Kim objected. “I mean, they’re way big, and we don’t know much about their habits or what they ate or anything.”

There was a silence while Rachel and Ophelia traded family-joke smiles.

“That’s why we need you,” Rachel said.

Kim looked as though she’d been given the pony she’d been agitating for since fourth grade. Her jaw dropped. Her eyes sparkled. And I lost it.

“Will somebody please tell me what the hell you’re talking about?” I said. “I’ve been patient. I followed your pal Rodney through more rooms than Versailles and I didn’t run screaming, and believe me when I tell you I wanted to. I’ve drunk your tea and listened to your so-called explanations, and I still don’t know what’s going on.”

Kim turned to me with a look of blank astonishment. “Come on, Mom. I can’t believe you don’t know that Ophelia and Rachel are witches. It’s perfectly obvious.”

“We prefer not to use the W-word,” Rachel said. “Like most labels, it’s misleading and inaccurate. We’re just people with natural scientific ability who have been trained to ask the right questions.”

Ophelia nodded. “We learn to ask the things themselves. They always know. Do you see?”

“No,” I said. “All I see is a roomful of junk and a garden that doesn’t care what season it is.”

“Very well,” said Rachel, and rose from her chair. “If you’ll just come over here, Mrs. Gordon, I’ll try to clear everything up.”

At the table of the flying fish, Ophelia arranged us in a semi-circle, with Rachel in a teacherly position beside the exhibits. These seemed to be A) the fish and B) one of those Japanese good-luck cats with one paw curled up by its ear and a bright enameled bib.

“As you know,” Rachel said, “my field is artificial intelligence. What that means, essentially, is that I can animate the inanimate. Observe.” She caressed the porcelain cat between its ears. For two breaths, nothing happened. Then the cat lowered its paw and stretched itself luxuriously. The light glinted off its bulging sides; its curly red mouth and wide painted eyes were expressionless.

“Sweet,” Kim breathed.

“It’s not really alive,” Rachel said, stroking the cat’s shiny back. “It’s still porcelain. If it jumps off the table, it’ll break.”

“Can I pet it?” Kim asked.

“No!” Rachel and I said in firm and perfect unison.

“Why not?”

“Because I’d like you to help me with an experiment.” Rachel looked me straight in the eye. “I’m not really comfortable with words,” she said. “I prefer demonstrations. What I’m going to do is hold Kim’s hand and touch the fish. That’s all.”

“And what happens then?” Kim asked eagerly.

Rachel smiled at her. “Well, we’ll see, won’t we? Are you okay with this, Mrs. Gordon?”

It sounded harmless enough, and Kim was already reaching for Rachel’s hand. “Go ahead,” I said.

Their hands met palm to palm. Rachel closed her eyes. She frowned in concentration and the atmosphere tightened around us. l yawned to unblock my ears.

Rachel laid her free hand on one of the fish.

It twitched, head jerking galvanically; its wings fanned open and shut.

Kim gave a little grunt, which snapped my attention away from the fish. She was pale and sweating a little—

I started to go to her, but I couldn’t. Someone was holding me back.

“It’s okay, Evie,” Ophelia said soothingly. “Kim’s fine, really. Rachel knows what she’s doing.”

“Kim’s pale,” I said, calm as the eye of a storm. “She looks like she’s going to throw up. She’s not fine. Let me go to my daughter, Ophelia, or I swear you’ll regret it.”

“Believe me, it’s not safe for you to touch them right now. You have to trust us.”

My Great-Aunt Fanny I’ll trust you, I thought, and willed myself to relax in her grip. “Okay,” I said shakily. “I believe you. It’s just, I wish you’d warned me.”

“We wanted to tell you,” Ophelia said. “But we were afraid you wouldn’t believe us. We were afraid you would think we were a couple of nuts. You see, Kim has the potential to be an important zoologist—if she has the proper training. Rachel’s a wonderful teacher, and you can see for yourself how complementary their disciplines are. Working together, they . . . ”

I don’t know what she thought Kim and Rachel could accomplish, because the second she was more interested in what she was saying than in holding onto me, I was out of her hands and pulling Kim away from the witch who, as far as I could tell, was draining her dry.