Authors: Sarah McCarry
Finally, one afternoon she walks to the witch store in the second level of the big open-air market downtown that's built into the side of a hill. The street level is a covered arcade of stalls: fruits and vegetables, street food, imports from Tibet and Mexico and China, paintings by artists from the tribes that live out on the peninsula. A stall of fish laid out on chunks of ice, handsome boys in rubber waders tossing salmon back and forth and hollering at each other. A little coffee shop with a painting of a naked mermaid in the window, encircled by her own tail. Cass knows the girls who work at the fruit stalls, some of them, pretty rocker girls with beat-up black motorcycle boots and tattoos from their knuckles to their shoulders. She waves to Valerie, the one she knows best, as she walks by.
“Hey, Cass,” Valerie says. She's older, lives in a house on the Hill with a bunch of musicians. Cass went to a Halloween party there once. Valerie and her boyfriend were dressed as sasquatches, and his band played, with Valerie on the drums. Cass can't see her now without remembering her in her fake-fur coat, her hair ratted out even bigger than it usually is, her eyes raccooned with black eyeliner. It had been an interpretive sort of sasquatch costume.
“What's up,” Cass says.
“You hungry?”
“Sure.” Valerie tosses her an apple and Cass bites in.
“What you been up to?”
“Things,” Cass says vaguely. She is not especially interested in discussing her dreams with anyone. But Valerie nods as if she's said something meaningful.
“Things,” she agrees. “Hey, you know Elizabeth who works in the health food store?”
“I think so.”
“We're starting a band but we need a singer. You know anyone?”
“I don't think so,” Cass says.
“What about you?”
“Me?” Cass laughs. “No way.”
“Too bad. You're missing your shot at stardom.” Cass makes a sorrowful face and Valerie laughs. “Here,” she says, “take another apple.”
“See you,” Cass says, waving, and Valerie waves back merrily as Cass heads for the stairs.
“Barbie's Dream Car!” Valerie yells. “You remember that name, 'cause you're gonna hear it everywhere!”
Beneath the street level of the market, wooden stairways lead to a maze of hallways and funny little shops. No matter how many times Cass goes to the witch store, it's always impossible to find. A window facing the bay lets in a smoky, salty light, and the shelves are full of witch books and herbs, tinctures and oils, incense, silver pendants, tarot decks, stones painted with runes. The girl who works there has long dyed-black dreadlocks that hang down her back and crescent moons tattooed at the corners of her eyes. Her arms are inky with more sigils and her fingers are tattooed with runes between each knuckle.
“I need something to keep away bad dreams,” Cass says. The witch-store girl is alone, sitting at the counter, leafing through a handwritten book bound in leather. She looks up.
“What kind of bad dreams?”
“People I don't want to see.”
The girl gets up and comes around the counter, looks Cass in the eyes. Cass tries not to flinch. She is not accustomed to being examined so closely. The girl touches her palm to Cass's forehead, whispers something, tilts her head as if listening, takes her hand away.
“It's not dreams you need protection from,” she says. “You are like me. Someone who lives in too many places. I can help you, but I can't change what you are.”
“Anything,” Cass says. “I'm scared to go to sleep.”
“You have a gift.”
“I don't think I want it.”
“You cannot choose to have it or not to have it. You can choose only how you will live with it.” The girl takes down jars of herbs, measures them into bags, piles the bags on the counter. She looks through some books, hums to herself, adds a tiny bottle of oil to the growing stack.
“I don't have much money,” Cass says. “Any money,” she amends.
“Then you will be in my debt,” the girl says. Cass scowls, not sure if she likes the sound of that. The girl laughs at her expression. “You can come back,” she says. “Tomorrow, same time?”
“Sure,” Cass says.
“Take this now, and come back tomorrow. I'll give you a way to earn your keep.” Cass stares at her, stricken, and the girl looks at her deadpan. “You can prepare the infants for sacrifice,” she says. “And after that, stock the shelves. I have a big shipment of books coming in tomorrow.”
“Okay,” Cass says.
“Make this into a tea, and drink it at night before you go to sleep.” The girl pats the pile of herbs. “I'm giving you a book to start, and a tarot deck. And if you don't come back tomorrow, I'll hex you.”
That night, the tea does not take away the dreams but it lessens the terror of them, weaves a barrier between Cass and the dead. When they reach for her they cannot touch her, and it is harder for her to hear the ghastly, jabbering chorus of their voices. In the morning she feels, if not well-rested, at least as though she's slept, and she walks back downtown to the witch store with a lighter heart.
The witch-store girl is named RavenâCass doesn't ask whether it's a given name or a chosen one, though privately she finds it a little cheesyâand she knows more about what she knows best than any knowing person Cass has ever met. Every possible permutation of tarot deck. The nature and purpose of an encyclopedia's worth of herbs, how to grow them and where to find them in the wild, how to decoct and decant and tincture and salve them, how to make spells with them and how to make them into tea. Runes in dead languages and living ones, the movements of the stars, the messages behind every pattern of wind and wave, the meanings of numbers and days and saints, the history of witches. It's weeks before Cass can tell when Raven is cracking a joke, and even then she's never really sure. A mean-mouthed tourist comes into the shop one afternoon, disorders the divination books and strews about the sage, asks a thousand pesky questions about all the essential oils, who grew them, where they are from, whether they were of a suitable quality or composed of inferior ingredients, which incenses were most likely to be non-allergenic. Raven responds with a stoic patience Cass finds astounding. When the woman leaves without buying a thing, Raven looks at Cass with a perfectly straight face. “Bring me the wormwood,” she says. “I'm going to give that bitch warts so far up her ass she'll wish she could shit out her mouth,” and it's long, long minutes before she laughs and Cass realizes she's not serious.
“Could you really do that?” Cass breathes.
“Oh, sure,” Raven says, and this time she doesn't laugh.
Cass's days in the witch store blur together, long pleasant winter afternoons that shade into twilight at four and full dark by five-thirty. Outside the shop's windows the wind howls and flings spatters of rain at the glass in torrential gusts, but inside they are warm and cozy. Raven makes them tea and sets Cass to dusting, or sorting her Dead Can Dance records out from her Clan of Xymox, or tidying the tarot decks in their glass case, or filling little glassine bags of herbs and handing them over to Raven to be labeled in her painstaking, beautiful script. Cass watches as Raven makes up tinctures for people who come in with aches and pains or broken hearts or longings for other people's loversâ“Be careful with those,” Raven says to Cass, when they can't hear her, “no matter what you give them, it will end badly for someone”âor sorrows large and small, wishes for joys, hopes and dreams and fevers. Raven picks out tarot decks, finds the right sorts of oils to make the right sorts of smells, matches eager customers with the futures they hope for, the small magics that puzzle out into a larger pattern of light and care. For all her smart mouth and wicked tongue, Raven is a good witch, and good at being a witch; she knows without being told who wants to be told they are psychic or special or waiting to blossom into beauty or love, and who wants to be told nothing at all, handed discreetly a little bag of herbs or a spell written on a folded piece of paper. When there is nothing to do in the shop, which is not often, Raven teaches Cass how to make magic of her own. Cass works at the shop every day, except for one day of the week she waits with her friends on the Ave and pretends nonchalance until Maia walks past, improbable Maia, with her sylph's face and yuppie's clothes, Maia who's bewitched Cass as surely as if she's cast a spell herself. Maia stops and says hello, shyly at first and then with more confidence as the weeks progress, until she's squatting on the sidewalk next to Cass, her brown eyes alight as she talks about Chopin or Bach or whatever she happens to be reading. They both love Shakespeare, Rimbaud, and Edith Hamilton, but from there their tastes diverge wildly. Cass insists Maia must read Delany; Maia says she will if Cass tries Proust. Cass counters with Angela Carter. Maia insists on Hugo. In bantering about books, they piece together a friendship. If Raven guesses why Cass doesn't show once a week, regular as a metronome, she doesn't say.
From Raven Cass learns the cycles of the moon, the best days of the month for making people fall in love with you, asking goddesses for favors, sowing crops. The crops are just for reference, though someday she would like to have a house of her own, a garden, a ring of herbs and flowers, vegetables growing in neat lines. She reads about tinctures and teas, cooks salves in a dirty pot on the Coleman camp stove they use at the squat. She steals crystals from the new age store on the Ave, soft leather and thread from the fabric store. Raven does not ask where she has procured her materials, but teaches her without comment to make amulets to ward off bad dreams, bad luck, and bad spirits. When Cass herself is so festooned with talismans she clanks when she walks, she begins to hand them out to her friends. It is not long before she has something of a reputation. She's asked to interpret dreams, suggest prudent courses through difficult problems. She makes love spells and money spellsâthough even she will admit it'll take a lot more than some herbs and a green candle to bring prosperity to her own house and its ragtag gaggle of urchinsâand begins to specialize in astrological predictions. Cass has a lot of free time with which to apprehend her new craft, and she takes to it the same way she took to prescription pills washed down with cheap whisky.
Felony and Mayhem are mostly amused by her new hobby, but Felony will take the bus downtown with her to the island ferry, cross the mountain-ringed Sound, hitch rides with pickup truckâdriving loggers and back-to-the-landers out along the winding roads that crisscross the island like veins. Felony and Cass thrash through the wet woods, salal slapping at their knees, dripping branches smacking them in the face, while Cass digs for roots and stubborn winter-growing herbs. Felony is always pleased by adventure in any shape it chooses to take. Cass clambers over fallen trees, her muddy boots sinking through deep piles of moss and loamy soil, one eye out for the gold-brown flash of a startled deer leaping away through the trees, or the black dart of a crow winging between the branches. Cass is no woodswoman, but Felony spent a few years living in tree platforms and shackling herself to logging-road gates to stop timber sales. While her efforts did little to slow the increasing tide of clear-cutting that scars the peninsula, she came away from her brief stint as a forest defender with an unerring sense of direction and an uncanny ability to find the road again no matter how many circles they wander in or how far into the woods they stray. As they tramp about, Felony regales her with tales of running away from federal agents, fornicating in the treetops with her revolutionary compatriots of various genders, and defecating in plastic buckets that had to be lowered daily from their platform homes and emptied by ground teams who kept the platforms supplied with anticapitalist good cheer, Dumpstered vegetables, and soy protein snacks. The winter's too cold and wet for sleeping out, but Felony promises that when the weather changes they can come out to the woods with a tarp, set up a little camp under the trees.
Cass feels, for the first time in a long time, as though she is doing something useful. Learning a craft, thrashing around in the woods, sweating some of the whisky and pills out of her system. She even quits drinking for a while, which Raven guesses, though Cass hasn't told her. “It's good for you,” she says, “to let go of what dulls you and puts a veil between you and the world.”
I need that veil,
Cass thinks. There are reasons she and Felony and Mayhem drink like they do, reasons that have as much to do with forgetting as celebrating. She's never told Raven any of the secrets knitted into her skin, but Raven's sharp eyes miss nothing.
“The Hanged Man,” she says one slow afternoon, as Cass refills the herb jars. “Beyerl tells us that he has lessons for us about letting go, release. We have already learned through our suffering; the time comes to contemplate the wisdom we have gained. To move from action to inaction. We must learn to be a vessel in order to allow ourselves to be transformed.”
“I don't need a lecture,” Cass says.
“Sorrow can be a teacher,” Raven says, “but it can also be a trap. You're a walking wound, Cass. You've been bleeding all over my floor since the first time you came in here. I can't teach you any more until you learn to live with what you carry.”
Cass is still, only the twitch of her jaw betraying her. “I'm fine.”
“You're not fine. You're full of poison. You're strong, Cass, stronger than even you know, but it takes a new kind of strength to let yourself heal.”
“You think what happened to me is
my
problem? You think I just need to get over it?”
Raven raises one hand, her silver bracelets clinking. “Do not change my words into things they are not, Cassandra. I am not your monster. We all carry pain within us; it is how we bear it that makes us what we are.”