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…What have I conjured?
…Father and Teddy are gone. Dead from the fever. This is my doing. I cannot meet Mother’s or Lillian’s eyes. I have brought about an abomination. Or perhaps it is I who is the abomination. He will never let me be. “Till death do us part.” That was the bargain I made, and the man in the hat means to keep me to it until I am driven mad by my sins or taken by my dead lover, to what terrible fate, I cannot say, I dare not imagine.…
…Tonight, I shall go to Elijah’s grave to perform the binding spell. To the devil with the man in the hat.
An entry later that same night said simply, It is finished.
And then Addie’s entries stopped altogether, as if she wanted no further record. No proof of what she’d done.
“How do you bind somebody?” Theta wondered aloud. If the spell had been done before, then it could be performed again.
Theta returned to the spell book. There were spells reaching back generations, but the language was stiff and formal and very hard to understand. Was shew the same thing as show? But at last, she found the spell she wanted. From what she could gather, you had to set your intention. You had to weave yourself into the spell you cast so that you could not escape your part in it.
“What does that mean?” Theta whispered. She wished Addie had written out exactly what she’d done—and in plain English. Theta shut the book. “This is crackers,” she said to no one. “I don’t know the first thing about being a witch.”
But she was tired of doing nothing while Miss Addie wasted away. Binding Elijah’s angry, possessive ghost from doing any harm to Addie was the best she could do. She read through the spell and gathered what she needed. Then she left the compartment.
In the pale moonlight, the darkened wagons were ghosts of the day that had been. A gentle breeze ruffled the Big Top as it lay on the railroad car.
For her spell, Miss Addie had taken a lock of Elijah’s hair and cut off a finger bone. Theta’s stomach turned at that. Theta had nothing of Elijah’s to use. The spell book said you could write the name of the person you wanted to bind from doing harm on a piece of paper, tie it up with string, and burn it.
“‘What you do shall return threefold,’” Theta read aloud. “Gee, thanks, creepy book. What does that mean?” She was really flying blind here.
She wrote Elijah’s name on a piece of paper. She had no string with which to tie it up. Miss Addie had used Elijah’s hair, so Theta yanked out a strand of her own hair and wrapped it tightly around the folded-up paper. “I bind you from doing harm, Elijah. Go back to your grave and harm no more.” She felt silly saying it, but she had to do it for Miss Addie’s sake—for all of their sakes. She couldn’t bind every single one of the Army of the Dead, but she could take out this one lousy bum.
Theta lit a candle and cupped the flame with her other hand. She dripped the wax down onto the offering. “I bind you from doing harm, Elijah. I bind you from doing harm. I bind you from doing harm.” She touched the flame to the paper. The flame mesmerized Theta, as if she could feel it within her. As if she could feel a generation of women who’d been cast out, hung, stoned to death, and burned alive taking root now. She could swear she saw Miss Addie’s face in the flame. The fire and its vision exploded in a bright flare. With a yelp, Theta dropped it. Out in the night, a hawk called three times. Theta let the hair-and-paper bundle burn until it was a charred mess. Then she buried it in the earth and tamped it down with her foot. Was she supposed to feel different now? Well, she didn’t. How did you know when a spell had worked?
“Buncha bushwa,” Theta said on a sigh. She gathered everything into her pockets, thinking of all the times she’d seen Miss Addie wandering the halls of the Bennington, sprinkling salt from her own pockets, intoning some spell of protection while the residents shook their heads and called her crazy. “Now I’m the crazy lady,” Theta said.
On her way back to her compartment, the breeze shifted. In it, Theta thought she heard a faint shuffling. The crack of a branch. She surveyed the deserted fairgrounds. It was pretty quiet except for Billy, the world’s loudest goat. Theta went to his stall to check on him. She found him standing in the corner, bleating.
“You’re gonna wake everybody up,” Theta said. She tossed him a little bit of feed. He stopped making noise long enough to eat it. “Get some sleep, pal. Big day tomorrow.”
As a bone-tired Theta nestled her head against the pillow, she thought she heard that same shuffling sound. She held her breath, listening.
“Just the wind,” she whispered and shut her eyes.
Isaiah spoke into the dark, careful not to wake Sam. “Sarah Beth? You out there?” He closed his eyes, willing her to appear, and in a moment his arms tickled. His body trembled. And he was in the dark space.
She was standing with the storm at her back. “Isaiah! How long before you’re in Bountiful?”
“Dunno. Still with the circus. Sure does take a long time to cross this country.”
“The King of Crows is up to something bad. I can feel it. Can you?”
Isaiah couldn’t feel it, and that upset him. He’d always been able to sense danger. Why not now? “Mm-hmm,” he said. He didn’t want to admit this to Sarah Beth. What if she didn’t think he was special? What if she didn’t want to be a team? “What do you see?” Isaiah asked, fishing.
“There’s something in the towns. Places nobody else sees,” she said. “I don’t know what, precisely, but I’ve got a pain in my belly over it. Oh, you’ve got to hurry, Isaiah! I don’t know how much longer we’ve got.”
“I promise we’re coming, Sarah Beth,” Isaiah said.
“I can’t wait to meet proper,” she said.
“Likewise.”
The moon kept watch over the sleeping circus. Over the painted wagons. Over the long snake of railroad cars waiting for morning. Over the empty food stalls and the muddy fields trampled by thousands of footprints. The moon kept watch over the sleeping circus and the deep, dark shadow passing over it.
The next morning, as Sam was getting dressed, he saw Zarilda marching toward the animal cages in a determined way with her hair still in rollers and her robe on. Johnny the Wolf Boy trailed her, crying inconsolably. Sam hurried out after them barefoot, his suspenders loose and thwapping against his trouser legs.
