Page 13 of The Folklore of Forever (Moonville #2)
Thirteen
Simmer one orange peel, one star anise blossom, and three sticks of cinnamon in a saucepan from noon till midnight to chase all the good luck you haven’t used up from this year into the next one. If you do not funnel what’s left of your luck into the new year, it will be irretrievably left behind.
Spells, Charms, and Rituals, Tempest Family Grimoire
I make my way to the front curb of The Magick Happens, where I check my phone to see if I’ve got any texts from Dylan, now that I’m thinking about him.
Over the last few days, he and I have built up a fiery exchange of banter:
Dylan: Hey, it’s me
Zelda: Hi! Miss me already?
Dylan: It was nice to see you again.
Zelda: It was nice to see you too. So, do you like movies?
Dylan: Yes
It ends there.
I don’t communicate by text very much unless I have something important to say; every sentence I trial-run for Dylan ends up sounding stupid and is therefore deleted. Dylan seems to be similarly reserved, so we’re not giving each other much to work with. How can a professional writer be so bad at coming up with words?
I’ve forgotten this part somehow—how awkward it can be right after the initial sparks, when you have attraction but little else to go on yet. It’s hard out here in the wildlands of dating.
Wretched musical notes screech from Morgan’s apartment window, falling in eeeeeek s and errrrrrr s around my poor ears. I wince, plugging them with my fingers. “Please take some lessons.”
“You would never say that to Beethoven!”
“I—” I peer up at him, leaning out his window. “Beethoven was a pianist. How dare you compare yourself to Beethoven.”
“At the very least, I’m a Chopin.” He begins to play “In the Hall of the Mountain King.” I prop my hands on my hips.
“That’s not Chopin,” I shout up at him. A few market-goers stop to watch. “That’s Edvard Grieg.”
“How would you know?”
“It’s my…” I pause, scowling. I dislike talking about myself. “It’s my favorite song.”
He scoffs, then continues sawing away. “This isn’t a favorite song . There are no words! ‘All I Need Is a Miracle’—now that is a favorite song.”
“Yeah, like thirty years ago.”
He stops playing, disgruntled. “And how old do you think your mountain king song is?”
Fair point. I’m poised to argue, anyway, when I hear the delicate, pearly notes of a harp drift in from somewhere behind us. Morgan must hear it, too, because he lowers his violin. Somebody’s playing along with him.
When the harp stops, Morgan picks up where they left off. Then when he stops, “In the Hall of the Mountain King” resumes on harp.
“Who’s doing that?” he yells.
The unseen harpist ceases their duet and does not play again.
I’m trying to remember if any of our neighbors have a harp, when lightning brightens the sky. Oh no!
“Right on schedule,” Gilda remarks, packing up. All the vendors scurry about, collapsing their tents, rushing crates of goods to their vehicles before the rain begins. It’s not even ten yet, and usually the night market stays open until eleven.
“?‘Right on schedule’?” I can’t help saying to Gilda, exasperated. “This wasn’t in the forecast. We were supposed to have clear skies all night.”
“Saw it in this forecast,” Gilda replies, gesturing grandly to her crystal ball.
I help a lady pile her turquoise jewelry back into a box. “You’re all impossible.”
With my head tipped back, I only just manage to spot a scintillating winged creature up in the fairy lights that connect Wafting Crescent and The Magick Happens. It’s the color of liquid mercury, moving so quickly that it leaves streaks in the atmosphere like smoke trails after a firework.
“I think I’ve seen this before,” I say, and all the lights gutter out.
Whatever I saw appears to have gone with it.
—
Half an hour later, I’m in the streets with my umbrella and a flashlight, inspecting the fairy lights. Their power has returned, and I could be imagining it—however, I do not think I am—but I think their coloring has been affected. They gleam a bit bluer now.
“What are you looking for?” Morgan calls down. He’d left his window for a spell, but now he’s back.
“Shh!” I flap my arm through mist; the air is warm and heavy with water. “Keep it down, will you? It’s late. People are trying to sleep.”
“Yeah, with you shining a light into their windows. What’re you doing? You see something strange?”
“Yeah.” I aim my light at him. “Right there.”
He grins crookedly. “Set myself up for that one.”
I continue with my business, determined. A drone, maybe? A tiny drone. We’re under attack by foreign adversaries, or perhaps a mischievous thirteen-year-old.
Morgan’s window creaks as he pushes it up higher. It judders back down a couple inches, right onto his head. He rubs his crown.
“You’re going to hurt yourself not minding your business,” I warn.
“Can’t mind my business. You’re acting weird, and if there’s one thing I’m gonna do, it’s pay attention to weird. Maybe you saw a ghost? I could help you look. I know lots about ghosts. Bet you don’t have any EMF readers, either.”
“You talk absolute fairydiddle, Morgan. And you’re distracting me. Go home.”
“I am home.” He brings a mug to his mouth, sipping slowly, shrewd eyes trained on me. “You know—”
I switch off my flashlight. The streetlights are dim, most of them shadowed by tree foliage, painting the puddles of Vallis Boulevard citrine. All I’d wanted to do was have a look around, but I can’t focus with all his commentary.
“You know,” he repeats, louder, as if I won’t be able to hear him as well in the dark. “I can help you, if you just tell me what you’re looking for.”
“I don’t even know what I’m looking for.”
“A phantom. Specter. Apparition.”
“Stop pushing your ghosts onto me. I don’t believe in ghosts.”
“I’m bored for you,” he returns. “Where’s your sense of adventure? Where’s your curiosity? Have a little faith.”
“Faith? Ha! Says the man who pretended to like me because he thought I could give him special powers.”
He makes a face. “When you say it like that , it doesn’t sound nice. Say it a different way.”
I turn around, pretending he isn’t there. Accidentally step in a puddle. “Curses,” I mutter. Deeply irritated now, I shout at him, “If ghosts were real, there would be ghost actors! Ghost politicians! Imagine never being able to get rid of eternally eighty-year-old Senator Barry, who keeps vetoing all the bills to fight climate change because he doesn’t have any skin and can’t feel how hot the earth is getting.”
He crosses his arms on the windowsill and rests his chin atop them, smiling. “You’ve been thinking about this.”
“It is any curious mind’s responsibility to fully examine all sides of a theory before you are qualified to dismantle it.” I square my shoulders, boots filling with water. “There would be ghost shops and ghost holidays and clear recordings of them, real ones, and ghost legislation, ghost rights movements, ghost prisoners, and living people trying to marry dead people—”
“Actually,” he interrupts. “There’s a woman from Oxfordshire—”
“If it were real,” I continue firmly, “it could be proven.” Voicing the words is cathartic. I can’t say any of this to my sisters, or they’ll get mad at me. Morgan is a convenient pair of ears.
He sighs, probably loud enough for the night shift to hear him from all the way down the corner at our new twenty-four-hour diner, Dark Side of the Spoon. His smooth face is white as the moon in contrast to the shadowed building he occupies, hair a tousled mess from combing it back with his fingers. From my perspective, light and darkness trace him in an uncanny way, making the bony sockets that his eyes are set in appear bigger, and the eyes themselves like black tourmaline. “You’re so above it all. You don’t believe in ghosts, you don’t believe in witches, you think your niece is a pathological liar and that I’m annoying.”
My hair is damp with a light drizzle, strands sticking to my neck and shoulders. “Not just annoying. I think you’re dishonest, too.”
He draws the bow from his violin downward in one quick motion, extending it toward me like an accusing finger. Its tip is haloed in the streetlight, the softly falling rain that encircles Morgan like a faint, shimmering aura. From somewhere behind us, lifting like a fog from the earth, I hear a dreamy song twirling along the strings of a harp. “That’s mean,” he tells me.
The sound amplifies, but I cannot detect its source. Music seems to be falling from the sky, hidden behind each drop of rain. Then, abruptly, the song collapses and we’re left in silence.
“It’s what you deserve.” I return to my search, walking until he’s out of earshot.
“There would be ghost restaurants, with living volunteers who let their energy be fed on because they get off on the experience sexually,” I mutter, dragging a wet snake of hair out of my eyes. It slaps right back into place. “There would be ghost federal agents. Musicians. Beauty parlors. Are you trying to tell me our government would pass up the opportunity to keep taxing people after rigor mortis sets in, if they could get away with it?” I gesture my hands as if swatting flies, flashlight jerking. It’s maddening that I can’t prove ghosts don’t exist, either. All things should be either provable or disprovable, yes or no. “Unlikely!”
On and on I mutter.