Something Actually Magic

Clare Maple was born feet first and struggling, her tiny hand clenched fast about the cord as about a life line, seeming to fight to stay inside that warm closed dark. That was the first time her parents believed her lost, an experience which was to recur continually until finally it became an accustomed part of their daily being, as ordinary as eating or breathing, until at last she was gone, really and forever.

From that first day when she did not howl like other babies but simply fought not to come into the world until she found she had lost the battle and then gave up stoically to face the consequences, she was never quite right. 

**

They are quiet a few seconds, Paul’s explanation hanging between them as the loose chain ends of the porch swing hang beside. It looks like Paul isn’t going to say, so Liv asks, “three generations of your family died while they were reading the same book?”

He turns his hands up to show that he doesn’t know what to make of it either. 

“And no one can read it now because your dad actually thinks it will kill them?”

He shrugs. “It wasn’t just between starting and finishing it. They weren’t in the kitchen with the book beside their beds. Their bodies were found beside the open book.”

“All this is really true? Really?”

“I swear to God.”

“Amazing.” She curls her knees into her chest, and her shoulders shiver in a gesture of pure joy. “You have something actually magic in your house.”

Liv loves a mystery. Not a murder mystery book with a solution at the end. In fact the solution usually spoils the magic in her kind of mystery, like learning about prisms and lightwaves in physics class plunged rainbows from otherworldly to just pretty. She gets a sweeping sense of living beyond the material when things defy simple explanation, a rush of imagination that fills the gaps with delightful fancies.  

Paul’s house keeps tripping over her sense of wonder, drawing her even closer to him. It’s already happened twice today, the first time she’s been here, the first week they appear to be a couple but secretly aren’t. As they approached a closed room, she heard Mozart, but with a crackling like burning sticks. Liv had fully populated the room with an orchestra led by a madly waving black-coated conductor with his back to a roaring bonfire before the doors opened on the library and the antique record player within. The library itself was straight out of Beauty and the Beast, lined with books to its twelve-foot ceilings.

“What do you do when you get a new book?” she asked, indicating the packed shelves, imagination fired with uniformed servants shifting thousands of volumes to the right to make room for something that had to be filed under “B.”

“Well, I try not to get new ones,” Mr. Hollingshed answered, and that was even better. Books just insinuate themselves into his life. She pictured the books knocking at the door and being turned away, only the most desperate dragging themselves exhausted across the threshold and declaring asylum.

Most fascinating of all is the one volume set aside in its glass case, like an overgrown cake dome. Within is a closed volume, with uneven, hand-cut pages, the cover itself decorated in the same gray-greens of the spine, a whirling tangle of vegetation, tumbling over itself. There is not a printed word on it: no title, no author, no publisher. 

“This one must be special,” Liv guessed, drawn to it.

“You can read anything in my library, except that,” Mr. Hollingshed declared, ushering her away. And now the explanation for this strange dictate. Actual magic.

**

Clare had eyes the color of stormy skies, without a mark in them, as if they were cast of cold metal. Sometimes, her mother believed that if she could break her open she would find that her heart looked just the same. From time to time she made all of them want to break her open, but it was not true that Clare had a cold inhuman heart. It was just that her heart hungered after something else that her mother could not understand.

When Clare learned to walk the doors had to stay closed all the time. Everyone else suffered in the heat, but little Clare seemed not to mind. By the next year Clare could reach the knobs, and it was no use anymore.

**

  “You may not.” Mr. Hollingshed is not a stern man. The lightness of his tone does not match the finality of his words. Weeks have passed as her fascination with the mystical volume has grown.

“Can I just look at it?” Liv pleads.

“Sure,” Mr. Hollingshed responds, springing the hinges and lifting the glass dome.

“Did your mother keep it in this thing?” She asks, waiting for him to pick it up and place it in her hands so that she will know how to handle it.

“No. She kept it in her hope chest and only brought it out when my father was away. He couldn’t abide her telling ‘ghost stories.’” He holds the volume with little reverence, handing it to her as he would a magazine.

“Is that what it is? A ghost story?” She inspects the cover carefully. Green and gray vines and weeds twist and tangle over each other. 

He explains his theory. The first death is nothing: a man died reading a book. But since they don’t know why he died, some people claim they always knew that book was cursed. His grandmother, only a child, blames the book and holds it in her heart until her old age. She reads it in hopes it will kill her, saving her children the grief of an agonizing end like her mother’s: a death wish, a self-fulfilling prophecy. And finally his own mother, in failing health, takes her last chance to know what’s inside. 

“She had been warned from childhood that the book was cursed, and that it killed. She may have died of simple terror.”

“So the story is scary?”

“That I don’t know.” She looks up at him, perplexed. “Everyone who has read that book in living memory has died before the end. Who would tell me?” 

Liv smiles. She has a feeling like treading water in the ocean; an unseen wave sweeps her upward, smoothly and thrillingly. Somehow this is the most magical part of all—even Mr. Hollingshed does not know what lies within. As they stand in silence, Paul returns with three glasses of lemonade.

Liv asks, “Why don’t you just read it and dispel the myth once and for all?”

He grins and shakes his head. “I’m not a betting man.”

Paul states it even more bluntly. “I’m too scared,” he says with no hint of shame.

While Mr. Hollingshed asks how his son’s day at high school went, Liv opens the gray-green cover and reads aloud, “Clare Maple was born feet first and…” but Mr. Hollingshed’s hands have closed around hers, gently folding the book shut and taking it from her grasp, smiling reassuringly all the while. He replaces it on its stand and clasps the dome closed. 

When his father has left the room, Paul remains standing by the dome, lemonade in one hand, the tray dangling by his side from the other. 

He looks up to catch her eyes. “Well, you hit the nerve didn’t you?”

“You mean—about his mother? Should I go and apologize?”

“No.” He puts the tray in a nearby chair and takes her hand. “His nerves, our nerves. We’re not supposed to believe all this nonsense, but in five seconds you spoiled all his reasonable arguments, and you know how he loves his arguments.”

“But I didn’t spoil them. I believed them.”

“Yes, but you proved that he doesn’t.” He sees her look guilty, and continues, “You didn’t do anything wrong. He just feels foolish for believing in ghost stories and not being as brave as a sixteen-year-old girl,” she looks up abruptly and slants her eyes skeptically. “Yeah, you think he’s not the type, but men…men are fragile.” 

**

I was born feet first. “Again?” I thought, oddly. Then the slave driver, whatever God made me start this again, took their finger from my neck, allowing me a second to think. But newborn babies don’t think about their births, I thought before a cool nothingness folded over me, relieving me of action and of dread.

**

“Well, it’s about this girl who’s always been strange from birth,” Liv explains. Paul sat beside her the whole time she read, baseball bat across his lap, ready to protect her from whatever demons the book called forth. In reality, she was protecting him, of course, with her bravery, with her belief that whatever mystery lies inside is the animating force of life, something so gratuitously beautiful it is not capable of harm. 

Since she read the first line, the book has been tugging at her hems like a nagging toddler, and she’s been working on Paul. “I can help your family get past this. I wasn’t raised on a steady diet of terror of the thing. It won't scare me to death.” And this is true, too. Maybe being brave for him will be the thing that makes him fall for her for real. Besides, she tells herself, Mr. Hollingshed’s always known she would take it. He wants her to read it. Why else would it stand there in its place of honor?

 Paul shifts around uncomfortably. Maybe even knowing the plot could trigger night terrors and stop his heart. But she proceeds, “Her behavior is weird and she can’t talk normally, but she’s got this affinity with nature. Things grow just because they love her. Here, listen: 

“‘Although Henry (that’s her brother) liked to believe that he was a man of science, it was he who first figured out that it was Clare making the soybeans grow. He made charts marking the changes he had made from row to row…The only thing that seemed to make any difference was whether Clare had come to visit that row.’”

“‘It was not that they would not believe, for everyone in Hampton had long ago accepted that some of the rules of nature did not apply to Clare. The trouble was that Henry was the only one truly convinced that nature had rules that did not make exceptions. The fact that his was the only mind around scientific enough to prove that Clare was making the beans grow also made Henry the only one unwilling to admit that he believed it.’” 

“It’s like my dad,” Paul says, coming closer to look over her shoulder despite himself.

“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. So this girl, Clare, keeps wandering off into the forest, like it calls her. And she tries to be a good girl and stay home, but she’s just…wild.”

“Can’t be told what to do,” Paul says, now looking in her eyes. He’s admiring her and admonishing her at once.

“Exactly!” Liv defies the accusation. “I love her.” She thinks a moment about how that love touches her. “But something terrible happens to her.”

**

I try to turn my feet around. I know what waits for me. Not in the woods. They would never betray me. In myself, my choices will do it to me. But if the choices are mine, why will my feet not turn? This voice in my head seems so clear now, nothing like the muddled mess that comes out when I use words. In the woods, I speak the language of sense, of breeze and odor, of color and scratch, of hard lump beneath my back, but words have never been my mode. What is happening? Something so strange drives me forward in fits and starts. Whole years are jumped and then I come to consciousness here, on my way to the woods, and… Oh God, why will my feet not turn? But then blessed relief, the world closes and there are no words or senses, only time.

***

Her mother began, with those yearning looks, to glean that Clare needed freedom as much as she herself needed the constancy of her home and family. Despair was not a feeling with which Clare had much experience. She did not stay home when she was a child because she had not understood that she was meant to. Now that she understood, and had committed herself, she could endure despite what her nature told her. What made her flee was reading in one of Henry’s volumes what caused the moldering odor she had discovered coming from dead animals. She was awestruck.  

Clare’s disappearance came as no surprise to the women of the family, though Mr Maple smote his forehead in disappointment for having been convinced that this time she would mend her ways. Henry railed against his freakish sister in embarrassment over both her behavior and his own relief that she was back out there making the crops grow. 

Meanwhile, Clare went out to hunt, seeking carrion like a vulture and waiting, watching, trapped by the magnetism, luring and repelling, of that awful-lovely odor of death-life. She watched, trying to pinpoint the moment of change, the transubstantiation from lifeless mass into the teeming legion of living cells, and onward. She stood by envying the flesh so abused, torn and quaked by flies, worms, beetles, animalcules unseen only smelled, envied its passage through bizarre inconceivable gullets and down, wasted, down into the soil becoming the earth itself—envied it as though the flesh had yet life, as though the molecules themselves had memory and could cry out to themselves “I was flesh, but I have come back, returned home to the bosom of the land my mother, and I am earth.”

**

“She eats dirt. She’s jealous of dead things because they rot into the earth,” Liv explains. Paul’s face recoils in disgust. 

“No, it’s not like that,” Liv tries to explain, but she’s been reading for hours while he watched, thumbing the pages of a sports magazine. It’s hard to explain the character that has been unfolding over the last hundred pages. “She’s read her brother’s poetry books but hasn’t really understood. We read this stuff too. Remember ‘Thanatopsis’? ‘To mix for ever with the elements, To be a brother to the insensible rock.’ She wants to be the Earth, like she thinks she can have the rocks for brothers. And there’s something from Othello about being the mother of frogs and flies. It’s beautiful. It’s tragic. She thinks she can become Mother Earth.”

Paul’s imagination runs in six directions. Does she succeed? Is it a goddess in the pages? Why would she attack his grandmother? Does she resent the scale of the world inside there?

**

I did this. I caused the cave in, buried myself alive. Again. It was a mistake the first time. I know the agony of starving to death without hope of being found. I would not have done this to myself again. There is something out there, some dark God pushing me through this again. My arms are pinioned again. I have no more means to end this than I have to escape. 

Sometimes this God, this puppet master, grants reprieve and there is only darkness and incomparable relief of non-being. And sometimes It forgets me, follows some tug of attention to another victim perhaps, leaving me to the long slow process of wasting. It is then, when the God leaves me, forgetting to close the lid on my dollhouse, that I can feel-- miserable as I am--that my fate is not written. Not closed, not inscribed. I can think clearly for a moment.

** 

“She’s buried herself alive.” Liv explains. “They don’t even look for her. She’s run off so many times before.” It is night again. Mr. Hollingshed will be back in the morning and their theft revealed. But Liv is nearing the end and nothing has happened to her yet. But now, she hesitates. Clare, her now-friend, is suffering a horrible fate. Paul reads her hesitance on her face.

“You don’t want to read what happens to her?” He gets it. He has reread books in dread of the gut-punch ending.

“I don’t want it to happen to her again.”

“Again?”

Liv looks up sharply, only now aware that there was anything unusual about the thought. “Do you ever feel like that? Like the people in the book are reliving it when you read?” Quietly, she probes this feeling for a moment. “I don’t want to put her through it.”

“You don’t have to,” he says, not because Clare’s feelings are real, but because Liv’s are so very.

 And for the same reason she says, “No, I can do it. You guys have to lay these demons to rest.”

“It’s late,” Paul says, brushing her cheek, giving her an out. He wonders, then, if Liv is putting her through it again, whether she knows. Whether she wants revenge.

“We only have until morning.”

**

The God sleeps but the nothingness does not come. The lid to my world that It peers through is still open and my machinery grinds on like a wind-up dancer in a jewelry box. I will go through the motions until I grind to a stop with my death. But I’m free in my thoughts, no power looms overhead rereading my fate. I call out to the earth, my mother, my best beloved. The vines will grow up to that sleeping god and defend me. The plants love me. I can see them swelling upward.

**

Mr. Hollingshed finds Paul kissing Liv’s still-warm lips and crying on the library floor. The green-brown book on the floor lies in a confusion of ripped pages and leaf litter. Liv’s limp arms, falling below the body Paul rocks at his chest, tell the story. 

“We fell asleep,” he sobs.

His father drops the bag he’s forgotten he holds, picks up the book and throws it, open, on the embers of the fire. “What have I done?” he asks collapsing beside his son. But he knows, the God in his Eden, what he invited by separating out a forbidden fruit.