Page 115 of The Book of Magic

Tom had read the last page, and now understood how a curse could be broken. A life for a life. “Are you willing to die?” he said mockingly. Kylie lifted her chin, defiant, and he saw that she was. He lost his temper then. He’d never had patience for fools.

“When my curse is set, yours will be unbroken, and you won’t have to die, you fool. The people in the town fulfill the curse’s bargain. Let them take your place.”

He had revealed himself to her. There was nothing but darkness looming inside him.

“I’m not willing to have them take my place,” Kylie told him.

“But I am. That’s what matters.”

He’d guessed she might resist him, that was why he’d stowed a pair of handcuffs in his bag. He seized them now, shoving one of the bracelets over Kylie’s wrist, and clasping the second cuff around his own. Iron stole a witch’s powers, but these cuffs were made of brass, unbreakable even with the use of magic.

“Take them off,” Kylie demanded, as if she would be the one to command him.

If she kept her power from him, he had little choice but to take it from her. The ritual would last all night, into the next day. But as far as Tom was concerned, he had all the time in the world.

They sat there through the night, with Kylie thinking of every way in which she might flee.

“It won’t work,” Tom told her. The hours had passed in the gloomy dark. It was already morning, though no birds sang. “The time is here.”

The fire flamed higher as sparks rose into the air, red glowworms of light. The cuff was digging into Kylie’s wrist as Tom dragged her closer to the fire. He chanted the invocation to call forth the plague, and as he spoke the smoke turned from gray to red and rose up through the chimney to become clouds dispatched by the wind. The Red Death spun through the air, carried toward the village. Already, there was a net of mist that was turning to rain. Tom was intent on stoking the fire, and he took no notice of the shade on the staircase. The dark girl with pitch-black hair and gray eyes. People say a ghost cannot look at you, for if it does it will reexperience the pains of being mortal, but this one did, it looked directly at Kylie and held her gaze as it began to disappear. Kylie understood the shade’s meaning even though it wasn’t spoken aloud. It was then Kylie thrust her wrist forward, and Tom’s was pulled along, for their arms were now locked together as one. In an instant, their flesh was in the flames, the handcuffs burning red hot.

“You idiot,” Tom shouted. He wrenched away from the fire, nearly breaking Kylie’s arm in the process. By then the handcuffs were searing into their flesh, and sparks flew. They both had burned their flesh above their left hands. Tom fumbled with the key in his pocket and unlocked the cuffs as quickly as he could, cursing as he did. As soon as he did, Kylie grabbed the book and ran. She stayed clear of the poison he had set out for any intruders; she all but flew. She didn’t care about the burning circle coiled around her wrist. She didn’t care that she was far away from home. All she had to do was follow the rules of magic.

She heard Tom Lockland call for her to stop, but she was a runner and she always had been. She was barefoot, but that didn’t matter. She’d run barefoot in the summers all around Leech Lake and now she was glad she had. The farther she ran, the clearer her head was. She had the one thing she needed, the book that would end the Owenses’ curse. The sky was blooming with red clouds; the air was on fire and the red rain fell on her as she left the forest and found her way to the road. She went past the old trees as their leaves dropped into red, muddy puddles. She breathed in the red droplets, knowing what the bargain was. A life for a life, that was the cost. She’d lost her way, but now she was herself again, and for this she thanked the ghost of the girl in the manor who had told her with a single look, Run.

III.

Jesse was the first to see the rain. She hadn’t expected anything unusual; she’d taken for granted it would be another ordinary day and had dressed accordingly, in jeans and a blouse she especially liked, gray with a frilly white collar, to be worn under her apron in the pub. They were serving meat pies and macaroni and spinach salad for those who wanted lighter fare for an early lunch. She’d been busy all morning because Rose, the woman who usually came to help clean up, had called in sick. Really, she’d had a fight with her husband, she’d admitted to Jesse, and had been up all night and now there was horrid weather moving in from the west.

“Don’t come in,” Jesse had told her. “Catch up on your sleep.”

Jesse tried to be supportive of her coworkers, although it was annoying to have the work of two laid upon her. She was taking out the trash when a black dog ran past. She thought it might be Matt Poole’s sister’s retriever, but then it disappeared like a shadow. When she looked up she saw that the sky had turned red. There was a mist in the air, and it seemed to be moving through town. And then all at once the rain came down in sheets, a rain as red as blood. Jesse tossed down the dustbin and fled back to the kitchen door, but the eerie fog that accompanied the rain followed and she rushed inside and locked the door behind her, and even still the red mist did its best to get under the door, which thankfully had been caulked only a few weeks earlier.

The bar was crowded as it always was at the lunch hour, and people were staring as Jesse came in, then doubled over coughing. The bartender, a fellow named Hal, went to look out the window. He saw the clouds, their red tendrils dipping into the treetops and a rain spattering down so hard it shook the leaves from the trees. He called for everyone to remain calm and stay inside; they should phone their loved ones and tell them to do the same. Perhaps there’d been an accident at the power plant three towns over. The windows were hastily closed, but the mist had stuck to the soles of Jesse’s shoes and had dusted the folds of her clothes; it was there in every cough and already spreading.

Two men in their eighties, who’d taken refuge in the bar, now collapsed and Gillian, who’d come down for some lunch, was ministering to them, demanding the kitchen staff bring her lemons and ginger and salt and hot water. She knew a curse when she saw one. She grabbed the bar of black soap she carried in her purse, then washed her hands and insisted everyone do the same. All through town people had succumbed to the illness and those who listened carefully could hear crying. Matt Poole had climbed into his van and locked all the doors when he saw people running into their houses, screaming for their children to leave their toys and hurry inside. He started driving at top speed, barely able to see through the mist, skidding as he went, hoping to outrace the haze. He could swear that he saw his sister’s dog, but it was only the shadow of a cloud. When he reached the town limits he noticed that the red sky went no farther, but rather hung above the fens where it thundered down. The curse was Thornfield’s alone.

Matt drove to the mud-splattered lane beyond the village limits where the Wrights had always lived and kept on until his van got stuck. He damned the road and the van and himself, then got out and ran the rest of the way, right through the brambles which stuck to his trousers and his jacket, ignoring the sodden earth that was flung up as he went, so that his face was smeared with mud. There was stinging nettle he did his best to avoid. Though he was breathing hard, he noticed that no birds were singing, not a one.

“What’s this now?” Ian narrowed his eyes as his gaze focused on the long view he could spy from the kitchen window. Something strange had happened to the sky. Ian had just embarrassed himself by questioning his mother about love, which was foreign territory to him. He had planned to be offhand and casual, but the minute he said Sally’s name his mother laughed, and then he understood she already knew and that she was amused to see him torn up the way he was.

“I never thought I’d see the day,” she told him.

“Fine,” he’d said. “I’m through discussing it.” As the figure outside grew closer Ian was surprised to see who it was. “Matt Poole’s arriving.”

“Ian,” Matt shouted from the front yard. “Something’s gone wrong.”

Ian cast a fleeting look at his mother, whose eyes were closed. She had picked up the scent of death. She often was called to deathbeds, to ease the transition of the dying, and she recognized the bittersweet tinge in the air. She threw open the door and Matt came racing in, shaking, his clothes soaked through with sweat.

“Somethings happened in the village,” he said. “A red cloud of illness has settled over the roofs.”

He didn’t need to say more. Ian had read about such things, diseases called down in Egypt and Persia, rains of death, of toads and frogs, of snakes and illness, a rain of revenge. Summon a red rain and you never knew who might be sacrificed. Margaret had heard of the Red Death as well, and was already paging through her Grimoire, that her mother and her grandmother and her great-gran had used. To purify, to end illness, to battle maledictions. Rosemary, lavender, basil, mint, and woodbine for purification. Garlic, ginger, golden seal, clove, all antibacterial elements, along with an elixir of honey and boiled nettle.

“We’ll go to town now,” she told Ian, who nodded, quickly going to the entryway for his coat on the peg and pulling on the old boots he wore to trek through the fens. “Get my bag,” Margaret called to him. He knew what she meant, the one she took around to houses when she was called upon to heal the sick; it, too, had belonged to her great-gran and had been handsewn by a bootmaker in Thornfield a hundred years earlier.

“Don’t let your mum go,” Matt told Ian. “It’s not safe out there.”

“She won’t let people sicken without helping,” Ian said. “You should know that.”