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CELESTE

“Natalie, please—I’m tired. I just want to go home—we have to work tomorrow, you know,” I told my coworker.

“None of that matters right now, Celeste. There is a presence in the room with us—can’t you feel it?” Natalie flipped her long, artificially red hair over one shoulder dramatically, and looked up at me with wide eyes.

I sighed, my shoulders slumping. Why did I let her talk me into this in the first place? Maybe because I wanted to believe I wasn’t too old to be cool. Once you get past forty, you stop being interested in anything that happens after eight o’clock. Or at least, that’s my personal experience. Right now, all I wanted was to be home in bed curled up with a good book—preferably a romance about a hot, emotionally intelligent guy who would never exist in real life.

Instead, I had foolishly agreed to come to my younger coworker’s house for a séance to contact the spirit of her dead grandmother, so she could ask for advice on whether she ought to marry her fiance, Brad, or not.

Natalie was a self-described witch—she claimed she had inherited her powers from her grandmother, who had also been a witch. Practical Magic was her favorite movie, and she was always having “premonitions” that she claimed came true. Though honestly, I didn’t think it was much of a premonition to predict that it was going to rain when the sky had gone all overcast and cloudy. Or to say that she had a “feeling” that her favorite restaurant, Forenza, was going to have linguini with clams—her favorite entrée—on the menu when they kept it in regular rotation.

But nothing could shake Natalie’s faith in her own witchy powers. She did spells by moonlight and dressed in all black. She even had a black cat named Bartleby who she claimed was her “familiar.”

Bartleby was watching us now with a bored expression on his face as we sat around the small round table in Natalie’s guest bedroom, which she had turned into a kind of shrine to “The Craft” as she called it.

The room was decorated to the nines—I mean, you would have thought that a Spirit Halloween store threw up in there. There were rubber bats hanging from the ceiling and bedazzled skulls hung on the walls. The curtains on the windows were black-out shades—the kind that don’t let in any sunlight at all. It was definitely a must-have accessory for the room, since we lived in Tampa where the sun was almost always shining. It’s hard to build a spooky, witchy atmosphere in the sunlight.

But now, it was dark outside and I was tired. Natalie had lured me, Phyllis, and Tamara over to her house for a “pre-Halloween party” even though it was only the middle of October and I was ready to go home.

The first part had been fun. We had watched Practical Magic—which I admit, I love too—and had all kinds of Halloweenish treats. Natalie had prepared “ghoul soup” which was really just creamy spinach-cheese soup which she served in little carved out pumpkins. She also made us caldron cakes, brownies decorated like tomb stones, garlic bread sticks wrapped to look like mummies, and so many other little snacks I couldn’t count them.

It was an impressive spread, and I could tell it had taken her a long time to make everything, so we all “ooed” and “ahhed” over her creativity and complimented her house—a cute little bungalow which her grandmother had left Natalie in her will.

It really wasn’t a perfect house for a self-described witch—there were no high ceilings or creaking wooden floors or hidden passageways. But Natalie had gone out of her way to decorate it in an old-fashioned style that made you feel like you were stepping back in time the minute you walked through the front door.

So I admit, I liked the first part of her party. But now that she had moved us to the guest room—the “séance room” as she called it—I was ready to leave. And it wasn’t just that I was tired—although that was definitely part of it. I also had a strange feeling—an itching between my shoulder blades and weird pricking sensation in both my thumbs.

I know those are weird symptoms, but they were the same things I always felt when I attended a funeral or walked through a graveyard. I just don’t like anything to do with dead people, I guess. So trying to call up Natalie’s grandmother—who had been dead for five years—to ask if she really should marry her fiancé, Brad, was giving me that creepy-crawling feeling I hated so much.

“We can’t leave until I speak to her,” Natalie murmured in a hushed voice. “I must know if I ought to accept Bradley’s proposal or not. He got down on his knee and begged me—begged me—to be his wife. But I have a feeling I should consult my Nana first.”

I could tell by my other coworker’s faces that they were totally into this. Phyllis was our front desk receptionist who never had any fun and Tamara was always up for anything. They were leaning forward, watching as Natalie caressed the crystal ball in the middle of the small round table. The only light in the room came from the red-shaded lamp in the corner which painted everyone’s faces in an eerie crimson glow.

“Come, Celeste,” Natalie urged me. “Place your fingertips against the crystal ball—we must all be touching it to summon the dead.”

“Yeah—come on, Celeste, we all have to touch it,” Tamara urged.

“Touch the ball,” Phyllis chimed in.

I rolled my eyes. Who knew I would still be dealing with peer pressure even in my late forties? I wondered what was going to happen when everyone touched the crystal ball and nothing appeared in its shimmering depths. Probably Natalie would say that she “heard” the spirit of her dead grandmother speaking to her and the dearly departed would tell her to go ahead and marry Brad. Then we could all leave and I could get a good night’s sleep.

So, despite the itchy feeling between my shoulder blades and the pricking in my thumbs, I reached out and touched the round crystal surface of the ball with two fingers.

I was surprised to find the ball was warm instead of cold—was there some kind of heating element under it? But no—it appeared to be sitting on a plain wooden stand. Strange.

Then Natalie began to speak.

“Grandmother Cordelia,” she intoned in a low, mysterious voice. “Grandmother, I summon you from beyond the grave. It is I, your granddaughter, who needs your wisdom now.”

If she needed wisdom, I could have advised her myself. Don’t get married—that would be my advice. I’d met Brad once and he seemed a little too slick—like my own ex-husband who I had been glad to get rid of after twenty-three years of marriage when it turned out he was cheating.

But of course, I didn’t want to ruin the dreams of young love. Just because I was happily single and determined never to date or marry again, didn’t mean marriage wouldn’t work out for Natalie. And just because⁠—

But my silent musings were interrupted when, suddenly, the ball lit up from within, glowing with an eerie pinkish light. I gasped and so did everyone else in our little circle.

I hadn’t really expected anything to happen—I was certain this was going to be just another theatrical presentation by Natalie. Like the time she’d gone into a trance at the office Christmas party and started doing a “mystic dance” while taking off her clothes, which resulted in Chuck, our office manager, cutting off the alcohol and sending people home early. But this didn’t feel like that—not at all.