Enter Three Witches (4 page)

“I’ll touch if I like, and I’ll pinch you too, if you don’t get some ripe fruit,” Rose said.

The Korean made a hasty sign with his hand, a sign that in his country was believed to avert the evil eye.

Shaking her head, Rose turned the corner. There were plenty of these stores to choose from—all beautiful, all useless. “Plastic,” she muttered. “Plastic fruit, plastic vegetables.” They should sell that monster of a house and go live in the country, where, Rose thought, the food would be scruffy but real. She sighed. Miranda would never move. She was as happy as a flower drifting around the big rooms, dreaming and concocting spells in her lofty studio. And Bren had another year of school. Make the best of it, she thought, and stopped in front of another Korean greengrocer.

Miranda, however, was not particularly happy. She wandered about her room in the twilight and gazed out discontentedly at the rain. Her studio was in the tower which bulged from one corner of the stone mansion. When she and Bob had first moved in, she had chosen this third-floor tower room. It had seemed a snug and, important for a witch, a very private space. Gradually, however, she had come to feel that something was missing—a sense of mystery, a touch of grandeur. It had then occurred to her that perhaps a twelve-foot ceiling was not enough. Finally a pair of baffled workmen had been hired to cut through to the floor above, and now the studio rose twenty feet to the very top of the house. Since the fourth-floor room had been provided with stained glass windows, this renovation produced a curious and gratifying effect. On sunny days the high spaces were washed with multicolored light, but on a dismal evening such as this, they were filled with purple shadows. One could imagine bats and other, less material things.

On an impulse, Miranda went to a cupboard and selected a handful of greenish incense pellets from a tall glass jar. These she placed in the brass thurible that stood on a black table in the center of the room. Then she looked at it long and hard. A thin column of smoke began to rise straight up, then to waver and curl among the shadows above her head. There was a faint, woodland smell of wild strawberries, perhaps, and of something not quite so nice, like toadstools or the undersides of rotting logs.

Returning to the cupboard, Miranda took out a long, thin object wrapped in silk. Carefully she withdrew a black-handled knife inlaid with runes, her athamé or witch’s knife. She sprinkled it with salt water from the chalice that stood beside the thurible and then passed it through the low flame. Now with the purified athamé she traced a triangle around the table and made the sign of the cross three times in the air. After lighting two more candles with a match, she sat down with her back to the window and stared into the gilt mirror that stood behind the thurible. She saw her pale face and halo of fair hair reflected against the streaming window glass, and beyond, the vague forms of wind-tossed branches. The candles flickered, and the vision swam in the growing veil of smoke.

“Better,” Miranda murmured. “O spirits of the air, I grow bored; I grow stale. Show me there’s more to life than dull housewifery!” She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them again to stare into the mirror. A faint line of blue fire began to play around its frame, and the surface clouded over. Miranda felt her head throb. Then suddenly the mirror grew clear again. As she stared, she lost all awareness of the surrounding room. Slowly, through smoke and wavering flame, through water and leafy branches, a towering figure formed and hovered over the brownstones of West Eighty-fourth Street. Menacing, beautiful—as real as fear, as insubstantial as a dream—it loomed outside Miranda’s window, an answer to her longings and also a very considerable fright.

But she would never know what the spirit she had summoned might portend; the spell was broken by the arrival of her only son—the banging door, the joyful barking of the dog. Suddenly she was only a rather beautiful woman gazing into a mirror in an absurdly smoke-filled room on a rainy afternoon.

“O great and holy spirit, I license thee to depart into thy proper place, and be there peace between us evermore by Satandar and Asentacer. So mote it be!” Miranda muttered all in one breath, for she knew the risk of failing to give a spirit permission to leave, even when it might seem to have already done so. She turned and stared out the window at gray rain clouds now darkening ominously into night. Ominous they might be, she thought, but still just clouds. “I’ll try that one again,” she said, as Bren knocked and entered without waiting for a reply. Shadow was at his heels, bouncing and nudging with his shaggy head.

“Hi, Mom. What will you try again?” Bren said. “Ugh, what a smell. Sit, Shadow. You have to be good in here.”

“Hi, sweet,” Miranda said, blowing him a kiss. “You’re right, it’s a horrid smell. I won’t use that one again.” She opened the window a few inches, and the heavy, green smoke began to creep out into the rainy dusk.

“So what were you up to?” Bren asked. He was wandering around the room, picking things up and putting them down, peering idly at the symbols and calculations on his mother’s desk.

“Oh, just a little conjuring and summoning,” Miranda said. “I was so bored with those spells for Mrs. Goodrich, and besides, I need a frog.”

“All out of frogs?” Bren asked. He looked into the terrarium next to the desk and saw that although there were a number of hopping and crawling things, it was innocent of frogs. “You’ll have to think of a substitute.”

“You know I can’t do that,” Miranda said. “It’s not like using honey instead of sugar. Frogs are basic, even if they’re not so popular as they used to be. Unfortunately, though, Mr. Chu has run out, and I don’t want to go to another dealer. What do you think?”

“What do I think? You’re asking
me
where to find frogs?” Bren gave the astrolabe a push and watched it rotate slowly on its long chain in the center of the room. “There might be some in Central Park,” he said, “but you’d never catch them, and the rangers wouldn’t approve. The only other place I can think of is…Oh, no. I must be crazy. What a dumb idea.”

“The biology lab!” Miranda cried.

“Stop that!” Bren said. “What are you doing, reading my mind?”

“Not at all. It’s perfectly logical.”

“It’s perfectly insane. Put it right out of your mind,” Bren said, with the doomed feeling he had whenever he saw that his mother had made up her mind to something he didn’t want to do. “I don’t take biology this year. The biology teacher’s new and I’ve heard
very
strict about her supplies, pathologically fussy, in fact.”

“I hear you, Bren,” Miranda said. “I’m not feeble-minded. You just don’t want to snitch even one little frog—one little frog that wouldn’t be missed. You want me to go all the way downtown and spend a ghastly day trying to get another suspicious Chinese to trust me enough to take my money.”

“I’ll get the name of the biology supply place,” Bren said. “I’ll even write the letter.”

“That shouldn’t take more than a month,” Miranda said. “Meanwhile Mrs. Goodrich will certainly find another witch.”

Bren laughed and clutched at his head. “You’re impossible,” he cried. “All right, I’ll look. Okay? Just look in the bio lab. No promises, understand?”

“Of course,” his mother said. “I wouldn’t want you to promise and then do something that might get you in trouble. Just scout around. ‘Case the joint,’ I think is the phrase.”

“That’s the phrase,” Bren said. “Burglars use it.”

“Well, it’s not like it’s anything valuable. Stop wandering around. Come sit by the window and tell me about your day. You’re late. Did you do something after school?” Miranda tucked her feet up on the window seat and beckoned to her son.

“Eli took me to look at the switchboard,” Bren explained. “I’m going to help him light
Macbeth
, which will be really cool; but the price I have to pay is doing a lot of electrical work—putting plugs on cables, stripping wires, that sort of thing. I suppose it will come in handy someday.”

“Almost certainly,” Miranda said. “And then?”

“What do you mean, ‘and then?’ That’s how I spent the time after school. Oh, all right. There was an interesting girl there. She was dancing, and we fooled around, turning her all different colors. She liked that. She’s going to play the first witch, and I’m going to take her to the dance program at the Delacorte on Saturday. There. Now you know it all.”

Miranda smiled happily. “Well, it’s a start,” she said. “What kind of dance does she do?”

“Some sort of ballet, I suppose,” Bren said. “Everything I know about dancing I learned at parties, and that’s not much.”

“You’d better go to the library and read up on it.”

“Would that help?” he asked. “I doubt it, and when do I have time to go to the library?”

“Books are better than nothing,” Miranda said. “Why don’t you ask Madame Lavatky? She has tons of books on the performing arts—mostly opera, I suppose, but surely ballet too. She’d be thrilled to lend you one.”

Bren groaned. “She’s always thrilled to see me, but the feeling is not mutual. Still, it’s worth a try. Come, Shadow. Come and defend me for just a minute, and then I’ll take you out. Please do something about supper, Mom. I could eat a horse. Or maybe a fat Siamese cat,” he added, as Luna slid from under Miranda’s desk and darted through the door ahead of him.

“I can’t till your grandmother gets back with the groceries,” she said. “Wet and cross. Oh dear. It bodes no good. I’ll go open a can for Luna, which is also a poor idea unless it’s foie gras.”

Miranda followed the cat down the stairs while Bren and Shadow toiled another two flights up to the tiny attic apartment of the Bulgarian ex-opera star. She was practicing again, and this time her efforts were directed toward some goal in the upper register. Bren winced and Shadow whimpered as she began hopefully on a low note, climbed uncertainly through the middle range, and ended in an appalling, inhuman shriek.

On the top landing Bren knocked hastily before the singer could begin again. After a moment an eye appeared in the peephole in the door and then withdrew. This was followed by the sound of many bolts being shot and keys being turned. A dramatic pause then preceded the actual opening of the door, which was sudden and alarming. There was a cry of joy, and Bren found himself enveloped in the arms of the ancient soprano. Shadow, crouching on the threshold, began to bark.

“Bren! How joyful it is you have come! We will celebrate, but not, I think, your big friend,” said Madame, closing the door firmly in Shadow’s face.

“What are we celebrating, Madame Lavatky?” Bren asked. “I actually only came to see if I could borrow a book.”

The singer released him and whirled away toward her little alcove kitchen. She returned, flourishing a bottle of something that looked dark, viscous, and highly alcoholic.

“We celebrate the high C,” she cried. “Three years I am working to find again my high C after my breakdown. You know I have terrible breakdown of the nerves, Bren? After the prison and the torture and so many things you are too young to hear.”

Bren nodded, hoping he would not have to hear again any of the lurid and, so far as anyone could tell, totally imaginary incidents out of the opera singer’s past. He was relieved to see that Madame Lavatky had not yet produced any glasses. Perhaps merely holding the bottle of villainous-looking liquid would be sufficiently festive.

“So,” she went on triumphantly, “today I am achieving at last the very apex of my voice, the great high note which ends so many magnificent arias. You want to hear? The voice should rest, but for you, I sing it one more time.”

“No, no, please,” Bren protested. “I heard it perfectly coming up the stairs. It was beautiful, Madame Lavatky. Congratulations.”

“We will drink, then,” she said, swerving toward a cupboard full of glasses. “We will drink to my career—to my audition which I will have in only a few weeks at the Metropolitan Opera.”

She carried bottle and glasses to a coffee table in one corner of the room, and Bren followed, drawn by the sight of a long bookcase of oversized books.

The soprano settled her ample form on the couch. Somewhere between sixty and eighty years old, she was still imposing but far from lovely, with her hair dyed shoe-polish black and her sagging features vividly made up. Bren accepted his sticky libation politely and raised the mercifully small glass to his mad hostess. “To your career, Madame Lavatky!” he cried and took a cautious sip. It was worse than he could possibly have imagined.

“To music, to art, to love!” she replied and tossed hers down.

Bren put his glass on the table, hoping he had done his duty by it, and twisted to look at the books behind his back. They seemed to be mostly in foreign languages, but one said something about the Ballet Russe. “I was hoping you had some books about ballet,” he said. “Could I borrow one just for tonight? I have to write something for a class in school.”

“Certainly, my dear young man,” she said. “But why not study them here? So many are in French or Russian or Bulgarian. I could translate for you.” Her eyes had grown moist after the toast, and she leaned her great bosom alarmingly close to Bren.

“I can read French,” he said recklessly, “and I haven’t had supper or taken Shadow out, so if you wouldn’t mind. Just this one about the ballet russ would be fine.” He gazed pleadingly at the singer, and she made an expansive gesture.

“Take it, take it. I do not need. And when you return, we will drink another little glass and maybe I sing for you or give you a tiny lesson in the French pronunciation. Yes?”

“That would be great, Madame Lavatky. Thanks a million,” said Bren, and made hastily for the door, the heavy book clutched to his chest.

Bren got drenched walking Shadow, who dragged him from one dripping tree to another. He was tired and hungry, and the magical time he had spent with the slender girl in the theater seemed at least a hundred years ago.

Supper did nothing to lift his spirits. His grandmother, after wandering with increasing gloom from one sumptuous West Side food emporium to another, had finally come home empty-handed. What she thought she could afford, she didn’t like; what she liked, she thought she couldn’t afford. They dined on wet scrambled eggs and three-day-old corn muffins.