Page 25 of The Folklore of Forever (Moonville #2)
Twenty-Five
While the leaves of peppermint are beneficial in healing work and amplifying psychic powers, beware this herb’s jealous tendencies. When not employed as the primary ingredient, it will sour the whole spell out of spite. DO NOT COMBINE WITH CATNIP.
Spells, Charms, and Rituals, Tempest Family Grimoire
The animal slinks out of the brush where it’s built a den, and—not even putting down my binoculars lest I lose sight of it—I begin scribbling details in my notebook. I’m crouched about forty-five yards away, and this is the closest I’ve managed to get to the paranimal in two weeks. It’s been a stimulating study.
Tinnitan Fox
Solitary, keen hearing. Mundane disguise: presumably the red fox, as they share several features, and red foxes are common local animals.
Like a Tibetan fox, but its eyes are farther apart, close to its ears. Lots of long fur around the throat like a Shakespearean ruff. Will induce tinnitus in humans who spot them. Maybe to aid in faster getaway, as human will become distracted. Prey: unknown.
Sunlight glitters over its muzzle, and I nearly gasp but thankfully catch myself. It would surely hear me and dart away. Whitish iridescent scales cover its muzzle , I write. Some scales fleck the eyes and mouth. They blend into fur. Hopefully this is legible—I’m not looking at the paper. These days I’ve got perpetual circles imprinted around my eyes from cramming binoculars up to them all the time.
The fox goes still, ears flattening. He lowers himself to the ground and moves quickly toward a hollow log. I adjust the aim of my binoculars, and almost gasp again when I get a good look at what the fox is stalking.
It’s a mouse with leaves growing out of its body. Six total, sprouting from the spine like a stegosaurus’s ridges.
Stupendous! Baffling!
What on earth is the purpose? Who does this witch think she is, putting leaves on a mouse and casting spells on foxes to make them induce tinnitus in people? What a lunatic. Maybe it’s for the best if I never meet her. However, I have so many burning questions, and a brain that won’t let me rest until I’ve received satisfying answers.
I want to protect the mouse, as it’s a paranimal and I feel a kinship with all these hiding-in-plain-sight creatures, but protecting the mouse would mean starving the fox. Which is also a paranimal.
A quandary!
I am right at the edge of the woods, and if I advance only a few inches, a voice drifts out from the trees. It’s the same voice that kept mentioning a clock, but it’s been speaking about something else today.
I slide forward.
“I’ll give you a cat’s-eye marble or a charm that fell off a dog collar. It’s the smoothest charm you’ll ever run your fingers over.”
I lean back, the voice disappears.
Forward again: “I’ll give you a cat’s-eye marble or a charm that fell off a dog collar. It’s the smoothest charm you’ll ever run your fingers over. And I can find any…”
Back, and gone.
The fox pounces on the mouse. But it’s thwarted when the mouse leaps over it and disappears into a hole in the ground. Not for the first time, my thoughts divert to Morgan. I want to tell him what I’ve found, because he’s the only one who would believe me, and the only one who’d be equally interested.
But I don’t, of course. We haven’t spoken for a month.
My phone vibrates in my pocket. 5:30 Date , the screen reads.
“Damnation.” Luna set me up on a date with some guy named Brant or Brent, and if I didn’t agree to it, I would’ve had to hear her complaints that I don’t get out of my shell enough (which is preposterous. Would she say this to a turtle? Shells have a valuable function). But this is terrible timing. I’ve got so much to research now, and there’s a stack of books in my car that I need to return to the library. I’ll just drop them off, and then be on my way to Brenton.
—
Ahh, the library. Society’s best invention. If there is a heaven, it is undoubtedly filled to a mile-high brim with dusty old tomes on magical theory.
Moonville’s library has milk glass sconces shaped like owls flanking the front door, and a plaque in the antechamber (a word that is close enough to anterior chamber that I uncontrollably link foyers with eyeball anatomy) that reads Fall Into a Story . It was donated by V. M. Macy, a Moonvillian author who does not know he is my professional rival because he died in the 1960s. Our town reveres him, and whenever there’s talk of local celebrities, V. M. Macy’s name is always trotted out.
Not that it is a competition, but someday I hope to have a plaque hanging here as well. It will be bigger than Macy’s and will say something more impressive than his (to be determined).
“Now,” I instruct myself sternly. “You will return your books, you will limit yourself to three new checkouts on common mice, and then you will leave in a timely manner so that you are not late for the date with Brandon.” I squint. “Anyway. Ten minutes, tops.”
Less than nine minutes later (well done, self!), I’m ambling toward checkout with five books on mice when I am waylaid by a powerful diversion.
There’s a new table!
Moonville Magic , a sign reads, overlooking a glossy wealth of books on local lore. I beeline.
I must broaden my knowledge on all magical fronts. Sly questioning of my sisters has revealed that even among witches, nobody quite agrees on everything, as every witch’s experience with the craft is unique.
I’m intrigued by Luna’s belief that magic is a renewable resource: Just like solar energy, wind energy, hydro energy, tidal energy, and geothermal energy. But it must be practiced often by those who use it, or magic will abandon them and cleave to a more powerful source. It feeds your energy, and vice versa. Why do you ask?
I am fully settled in my natural habitat, picking the bones of this establishment clean. Every book related to magic is plucked away to a table I’ve claimed with my jacket and purse. Dream magic. Salt magic. Blood magic. Root magic. From across the room, I spy a copy of Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker and have to filch that, too, as it’s been a whole year since I read it last. Is there anything quite like the library? No, there is not. You’re allowed to walk right in, open a book, any book. You can read whatever you like until closing time, and nobody will bother you. Interrupting the immersed reader with small talk is distasteful here. I thrive like a cockroach in this social system.
Oh, how I love my space. I never had much of it growing up—a lack of bedrooms in the house meant I had to volley between sharing with Romina or sharing with Luna. This probably impacted my decision to run across the country once I was legally free to do so. Being alone is, in my experience, as energizing for the soul as plugging oneself into the sun. 10/10, would recommend.
“Maybe it’s under ‘cryptids’?” I hear Morgan ask a librarian. “I’d be shocked if you don’t have it. V. M. Macy is Moonville’s most famous author.”
Bats and rats and frogs! The library is beset with evils today.
He feels the scorch of my attention and turns. Morgan does not seem remotely surprised to find me watching. He’s wearing those damned nonprescription glasses again, and my pulse spikes dangerously.
Total avoidance has proved difficult to accomplish, as Moonville appears to have crushed itself down to the size of a boiler room and we have no choice but to bump up against each other constantly. The market. The post office. The shop. I’ve been haunting the Cavern of Paperback Gems even more than usual, or the night market, where I can hide under the wing of darkness. I most certainly have not been listening to his podcast. I do not read “Marvin Agassi’s” tastemaker column in the Moonville Tribune , which declares items to be “the moment,” such as sherpa ponchos and apple butter.
And I am not one bit affected that Morgan is walking this way.
“Zelda,” he greets me. I don’t know how he manages to make my name sound exactly like cleaning a knife with a silk cloth.
“Oh, are we speaking now?” I reply, not deigning to look at him. I grab several books without examining their covers, as my hands demand occupation.
Morgan glances. “ What Happened in US History in 1957 ,” he reads. “Interesting choice.”
“Nineteen fifty-seven was an interesting year.”
“Name one thing that happened in 1957.”
“Sputnik.” I whirl away in a flourish of black tulle skirts and dedicate myself to the performance of looking engrossed in one of the other books I’ve just grabbed, a history of Vinton County coal mining.
Morgan is instantly vibrating with curiosity. I can see questions filling him like kernels exploding in a bag of popcorn. “Why’re you reading that? Is there a paranimal that lives in coal mines? Or eats coal? A paranimal that burns fuel and can turn itself into a vehicle? Please say it’s avian. We’ll call it a Hummer-bird. Tell me about everything that’s led you to this moment.”
“Is that an apology? I’m still angry with you for being angry with me for not being angry with you. It is exasperating. Now please exit my beloved eyeball, so that peace may be restored.”
Morgan considers the request. “I don’t know what that means, but my gut instinct is to say no. I will stay in your eyeball as long as I please.” He points at my right eye. “Right there. Swimming in all that pretty blue maelstrom.”
“You aren’t in my eye, you are in an eye,” I correct archly. “The first set of doors to the library are the cornea. The second set are the pupil. The foyer between is the anterior chamber, the desk is the lens. You and I are floaters in the vitreous humor.”
He regards me as though I am bedecked with a blue ribbon at a livestock exposition. “Extraordinary. I’ve always wanted to be a floater in vitro.”
“Vitreous.” I examine my coal mining book, which contains sepia photos of men and women with thousand-yard stares. Old photos are crown jewels. I’ve been amassing a sizable collection of daguerreotypes, tintypes, and ambrotypes that I’d like to compile into a book one day. One of my most prized possessions is my tintype of John Milne, who was one of the three inventors of the horizontal pendulum seismograph.
“What are you hunting for?” he wheedles. “Paranimals? Black Bear Witch information?”
“Not everybody is as obsessed with the Black Bear Witch as you are.” And this is true. Not everybody is. But technically, I’m inching into that realm: I’ve depleted a highlighter and attained three paper cuts in my pursuit of knowledge. Much of it is contradictory: The History of Vinton County by Gilbert Fauxhall declares that The Black Bear Witch steals children from their beds and leaves changelings in their place , but The History of Vinton County, Part II by the same author states, The Witch has been maligned by many, but she is a gentle soul who attacks only when provoked .
Morgan sidles closer, circling a picture I’ve been evaluating. “Thoughts?” he encourages.
I respond with the first sincere thought that pops into my head. “Everyone in this picture is dead now.” I ruminate over another photograph, showing it to him. “What level of decomp would you suppose this man’s at?”
“He’s bones. Why’ve you got so many books on mice?” He’s browsing through them.
I’m reviewing the coal mining book with gaining intensity. It cannot be helped. There are pictures. Maps. How can I overlook a map? “That’s not your business. It could have been your business, but…”
When Moonville’s coal mines started closing, the area very nearly became a ghost town , I read.
“But what?”
I don’t look up. “Hm?”
Indeed, Moonville as we know it today wouldn’t exist were it not for the resurgence of interest in love magic in 1915. Folklore replaced coal as a profitable natural resource, and…
Morgan taps the page. Asks a question, but my head is too busy to process it, so his words have to wait at a stoplight to cross.
…love tourism took off. The legend of love magic, in combination with ghost stories, made Moonville an attraction, and the dwindling town rapidly jumped from strength to strength.
Morgan vaporizes into the mists of time. Whispering pages, shuffling feet, distant voices garble, becoming restful white noise. I turn page after page.
“Sorry,” I murmur eventually. “What were you saying?”
But when I look up, Morgan is no longer hovering at my side. He’s strolling out of the library with all my books on mice tucked beneath his arm.