Page 23 of Disenchanted

Casimir opened one eye. “Not like you, Specs. Feeling okay?”

Sage only replied with a sort of “hmm.” She gathered up her satchel from the foot of the stairs and reached for a few dusty volumes that were stacked on the telephone table. Meridian’s Principia Arcanica: Certainty of the Hidden Arts would be a good start to refresh the basics. Essays on the Lore of Incantation, certainly. A Believer’s Guide to Impossible Things…All potentially useful in understanding what exactly had happened last night.

Maggie floated through from the kitchen with two neat bundles of toast wrapped in embroidered handkerchiefs. “Butter for you, Sage. Marmalade for you, Mr. Everald. Eat it before it goes cold. I do believe that hot toast can cure all ailments.”

“Are you saying I look worse for wear, Maggs?” Casimir winked at her.

Maggie, despite being a translucent shade of desaturated grey, blushed furiously. “Never, Mr. Everald.”

“Whatever you’re baking back there smells fantastic, Maggs. What is that? Sticky toffee? Count me in for later?” Casimir asked, rising to his feet and taking an immediate chomp of toast.

“Yes, that smells extraordinary,” Sage said as she slipped on a brown velvet blazer, tugging wisps of hair out from underneath the collar. “New recipe?”

“I cannot take credit, madam,” Maggie said, offering out Sage’s boots and Casimir’s pea coat. “I’d planned a rhubarb crumble for this evening, but I could easily switch if you’d prefer. Although I’ll need you to fetch a few things from the vendor on your journey home.”

“No, no, a crumble sounds wonderful,” Sage said distractedly, her attention caught, “but if it’s not coming from your oven, what exactly is that lovely smell?”

“I assumed that one of the neighbours was enjoying a spot of baking,” Maggie said.

Sage and Casimir exchanged a look. “First thing in the morning?”

Mal was intrigued too, perched on the arm of the couch where Casimir had rudely interrupted his sleep by standing up. His whiskers twitched at the sweet, spiced scent that filled the air, following its trail from the direction of the window. Butter and treacle and caramel now clung to every breath that each of them took, undeniably delicious but a little overwhelming, to say the least. Sage and Casimir bolted out of the front door in unison.

Sage tripped over her own boots as she jolted down the front steps. “What in all the blue blazes…?”

She spun back around to face the house and stumbled backwards over the kerb. Her home looked…different.

The end-of-terrace cottage was normally a rich red brick, with a criss-cross pattern of darker bricks beneath the top windows. There was a steeply pitched roof and navy-blue gables, the front door a bright cornflower blue. There was even a small heart-shaped windowpane above it. She had fallen in love with it immediately all those years ago—even before she had found an unexpected friend and confidante in its permanent ghostly resident.

“Specs? What have you done to the place?” Casimir asked, hands on his hips.

“Me? I haven’t done anything!”

He stepped towards the front of the house and stretched up to chip off a little corner of the porch’s slate roof into his hand. He held it up to the morning sun and then promptly tossed it into his mouth.

Sage gawped. “Is that…?”

“Gingerbread.” He finished the sentence for her, scratching at the back of his neck in confusion. The walls of the house were covered in a perfectly baked, richly scented gingerbread, the aroma of cinnamon and brown sugar making Sage’s mouth water despite her turmoil. The patterned tiles had changed to thick loops of what appeared to be icing, although surely couldn’t be. Her blue drainpipes looked alarmingly like some kind of sticky liquorice, and each of the paned windows glinted in the morning sunlight with a tint of stained glass, as though made of boiled sweets.

“Why the bloody hell is my house covered in gingerbread?” Sage said, truly the most obscure question that she ever remembered asking. She threw her hands up, incredulous. “Who did this?”

“Don’t panic, Specs. It’s good stuff, really high quality.” Casimir snapped off another fragment, this time from the flower box in front of the living-room window. “Chewy yet firm.”

“Stop chomping on my house, you arse. What is going on?”

“I wouldn’t worry. It’s just the latest ludicrous idea for the Halloween celebrations, isn’t it? You know what this town is like with its endless fêtes and decorations and spectacularly overdone seasonal theatrics. Doubtless another stroke of genius from the Celebration Committee.”

Sage crossed her arms with a huff. He was absolutely right; the whole ridiculous sight smacked of the Celebration Committee of Port Sylvan. They took their seasonal décor very seriously. Thanks to her role at the museum, Sage had been forced to get involved with one too many jolly harvest festivals over the years and more unnecessary town meetings at the Lyceum than she could possibly remember. “Would have been nice of them to ask, although they never do.”

Casimir shrugged. “Shirley could have whipped this up in an afternoon, no problem, and the committee are forever taking matters into their own hands without asking.” Shirley, who worked at the local bakery, Wheat and Walnut, was frankly a force to be reckoned with when it came to any kind of sugary construction. “You have to hand it to her: It’s impressive.”

“Why haven’t they bothered with anyone else’s place?” Sage scowled.

“They’re probably planning to cover the whole town eventually. I suppose they thought it was a nice surprise, to celebrate all of our work on the new exhibition. The tourists will go wild for it; that’ll work in our favour. You’ll be thrilled to see them all crowding around your place each day, won’t you?”

Sage gave a disgruntled “hmm.” After all their years of living there, both of them had come to accept that general frivolity and organized fun was part of the deal in Port Sylvan.

Casimir faltered, a new thought occurring to him. “Unless, of course, you think it might be—”