THE SUBWAY COLLECTION-A Box Set of 8 Dark Stories to Read on the Go (17 page)

             
Guida tried not to get pregnant after Jersey, her second son.

             
Mistakes happen. That's what the doctor said, checking her inter-uterine device. "Maybe we should try another method."

             
The birth control pill failed and she found herself pregnant with Nadine, her third child, and within months of bringing her into the world, she was pregnant with her fourth child, Martha.

             
And now she was pregnant with her fifth baby. Her powers were almost gone as it was. Once the child she carried was born, she expected she would be stripped of all powers, forever.

             
She lit the candle and set it back on the sill away from the hay bales. She opened the book of spells and studied it for some time. She had used most of them at one time or another: the spell to heal (Brady came down with measles and almost went blind.), the spell to keep a man at home (Jim had wandered from her bed during her fourth pregnancy, taking up with a barroom girl in town), the spell of fertility (this one was used on the plowed lands where Jim grew his own corn for the cattle.) There appeared to be no spell for insolvency. There was one to bring money, but she had been casting it for six months and it wasn't working. Oh, it wasn't working at all.

             
Her gaze paused on a page and she read the spell there slowly, carefully.
Spell of Deceit.

             
Guida sat back, letting the book lie open in her lap. Maybe this one would work. The county tax assessor was coming in the morning with a writ stating they were taking over the ranch for back taxes owed. Could she deceive him into believing they had been paid? By the time the spell wore off, she and Jim could make enough to really pay them and the assessor would never know the difference.

             
She turned back to the book and studied the spell until she had it memorized. Then she put it aside on the sill, bowed her head, and began to pray for intercession. For the power of deceptiveness.

             
Something must save them. Or else where and how would her children be able to live?

             
#

             
Jim stood alongside Guida, reading the formal papers from the tax assessor. As they stared the first paragraph of black typed letters on the page began to wriggle and move around, dancing like electrons around a nucleus. Jim looked incredulous.

             
Guida smiled mysteriously and heard the official say, "What a lovely smile you have, Mrs.

             
Fredrickson. I'm so glad I brought this out for you and your husband to see today. I know it takes a load of worry off you both to know everything has been filed and the ranch is all paid up." He looked confused, however, even as he said the words. He blinked rapidly and shivered a little.

             
Guida handed back the changed document and said, "Thanks so much. It was good of you to come all this way to let us know."

             
As he drove away Guida said to her husband, "Well, that's the first spell that's worked for me in months."

             
"What spell?" he asked. "Sometimes I think you speak in riddles just to make me look stupid, Guida."

             
He had already forgotten he saw the magic work on the words of the papers from the tax assessor.

             
That was the first inkling Guida had that something had gone wrong.

             
The next instance happened less than an hour later when Brady came to her with another complaint about his little sister. "Martha won't play house right. She keeps making me sweep the floor. Will you make her behave, Mama?"

             
"Tell Martha to come here and I'll speak to her."

             
Brady stood there, puzzled.

             
"Well? What are you waiting for?"

             
"I don't know, Mama. Didn't you call me?"

             
"I thought you wanted me to talk to your sister about the rules of playing house."

             
"Martha's fine. I love Martha. She knows how to play. Can I go now? She's waiting for me to sweep the floors."

             
After she'd dismissed him, she wondered what in the world was happening. Had she deceived Brady into believing his sister was a paragon of virtue? And Jim. Had the spell in some way spread out from the papers to his mind, deceiving him into thinking there had been no spell cast to save them from paying the taxes and losing the ranch?

             
She had never seen a spell travel so rapidly from one event to another, from one person to another.

             
It could turn against her and finally wreck everything if she didn't control it. It was like a spirit let loose, blowing reality into shreds.

             
She hurried to the barn, climbed to the loft, and took up the book. She reread the spell, her lips moving as she went over the words. Had she left one out, mispronounced a word, added in something she shouldn't have?

             
That night in bed Jim turned to her and whispered, "I never thought I'd be married to a movie star."

             
Shocked, Guida said, "What?"

             
"Honey, my world is perfect because of you. There's a thousand men in Hollywood who would have wanted you for their own, but I was the lucky one. I just wanted to tell you how much I love you."

             
He thought she was someone else! Now the spell was mutating so that the people it controlled grew to deceive themselves without her having anything to do with it. Had Jim always fantasized being married to some movie queen? And now he believed he was?

             
In the morning she'd have to find the priestess and ask for help. This was turning into a disaster.

             
#

             
"Weren't you in class the day I told the apprentices not to use that spell without supervision with higher ups? It's the most dangerous and unpredictable spell of all."

             
Guida's eyes opened wide. "I must have been absent. I don't remember anything of the sort."

             
"Well, you've caused yourself a great headache, Guida Fredrickson. You're going to have to reverse this spell. If you let it go on, eventually no one will know who you are. Everyone you meet will deceive himself into thinking you're someone else, someone they've admired or had a craving to know--replacing the real you in their memories."

             
"This is terrible! My husband already thinks I'm a movie star. This morning my children thought I was Miss Rosback, their favorite teacher at school."

             
"Hurry back home and call for a reversal before it gets any worse."

             
Guida stood from the sofa and moved quickly to the door. She turned back to ask how long would she need to pray and the priestess astonished her by rising, coming to give her a hug before she stepped back to say, "I'm so glad you visited, Rita. I thought you'd never come on a trip all the way from Spain to see me."

             
Rita?
Now her mentor thought she was a long-lost sister. She had heard her mention the woman before and how she missed seeing her.

             
She must hurry home to the barn loft. No time to lose! It was all getting out of hand. If she didn't do something soon her whole world--even her own memory--would be destroyed by the Great Lie, by the spell of Deception.

             
#

             
The day wore on toward night and the light dimmed in the stable, casting shadows like black bars across the empty spaces.

             
Guida had been on her knees and studying for hours. Her mind had begun to fade like an old photograph left in the sun. She rubbed her temples wondering why she felt so...confused. So dizzy.

             
Suddenly she felt better, in fact, felt like a million dollars. She dropped the spell book from her hands and turned to move smoothly, gracefully to the ladder leading down to the stable floor.

             
On the way to the house she touched her hair and thought,
I should have my hair seen after. It
must be a fright.
She looked down at her faded dress and thought,
I need new vestments. This ragged
apparel will not do.

             
As she opened the front door, her children greeted her with cries of delight. They called her Miss Rosbach, but that was all right, the dears, she would straighten that out later. They could call her anything they liked as long as they were well-behaved and gave her no trouble. They couldn't very well address her as Diana, Goddess of Moon, Forest, Animals, and Childbirth, could they? At least not yet they couldn't.

             
Orpheus came from the kitchen, an apron tied around his waist. Even in a rancher's dusty clothes, old boots, and the apron, he made her heard accelerate. She had always known he would make a good mate. If he would follow Eurydice into the bowels of Hell, he would be true to his Diana. "Hi, sweetie," he said. "I thought I'd make dinner tonight."

             
She nodded at him and smiled regally. "I'll entertain the children," she said, sweeping her skirts aside as she sat down in the easy chair in the living room, feeling it just as elegant as a throne.

             
"Come now and sit at my feet," she ordered, reaching out to touch each child on the shoulder.

             
She then rested her hands on her growing stomach and began to tell the tale of olden times when there were theaters and coliseums and chariots full of adoring worshipers who came to give the gods and goddesses their due. She talked about the great hunts and how she ruled over all the forests and all the green woods, over all the animals.

             
She concluded, "Though the time has passed from that golden age to this new one, we are back once again to create the world anew. You do know your mama is a goddess, right? And your papa is a god? That we rule eternal? Yes, it's true, my little babies, it is as true as true can be. We had only been waiting for the right time and the right spell to set us free. Your old mama and papa? You won't miss them, I promise you, just wait and see."

             
The children at her feet all beamed in enchantment. She had done that to them with her tales, with her words, with just being in her presence.

             
Diana thought that tomorrow she would cast a new spell, adding more cattle to the ranch, building a forest glen where the children could pay in running brooks--something cool and beautiful to take the place of the empty pastureland--and maybe she would have the moon shine all throughout the day to signal a fresh beginning in the land. She controlled great powers, and her husband possessed a great many abilities of his own. If they wanted, together they could change everything now that gods had come to earth to make it a paradise once more.

             
She stood and clapped her hands in glee, her smile majestic. Her old farm dress changed instantly to a green satin gown studded with emeralds. The children cried out softly in awe, touching the hem of her skirt.

             
"Come," she said. "We will join your father for dinner. And tomorrow there will be surprises! Oh so many surprises!"

             
As the family sat together at the table, subtle changes made the kitchen more sleek, the appliances more modern. Changes made painted walls into flocked wallpaper and bare overhead bulbs into chandeliers. Changes transformed the entire house during the course of dinner into a small, but comfortable palace. The children wore finer clothes, as did Orpheus. He looked like a king in his gold shirt with the onyx buttons. Diana smiled and smiled.

             
It was a new world. It was a new age. And anything was possible.

             
THE END

Billie Sue Mosiman

Copyright Billie Sue Mosiman 2012

First published in MISKATONIC UNIVERSITY, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Robert Weinberg, DAW Books, 1996

             
I was dozing off that day during Professor Alan's lecture on the Norse legend of the ash tree when Carla Knight came into my life and changed it forever.

             
I'd just slipped down in my chair to a comfortable position and sat with my cheek resting on my fist. My eyelids kept falling shut. I began to drift, to dream. I dreamed I was in my apartment with slices of cucumber covering my weary eyes and a cup of ginseng tea in my hand. It was so soothing, restful, so very pleasant, and so far away from the prison of the classroom. Then Professor Alan's monotonous voice intruded, waking me. "The great ash held together the earth, heaven, and hell by its roots and branches."