Marion waded into one of the beds. From between the wall and the rhubarb she lifted a gridded metal box. A cage, one of those rat traps you see in alleyways. Inside it blinked a rabbit, a domesticated creature the colors of valentines on snow.
“Oh, come on,” Fee said plaintively.
Handing the cage to Sharon, Marion dropped to her elbows and knees before an arched wooden door in the old stone wall. From her bag she pulled out a flashlight and a bent wire hanger, a magnet banded to its end. There was a gap beneath the door where the wood had warped. She set her flashlight in front of it, shoved her magnet stick through, and went fishing.
“Yes,” she breathed, slowly extracting a key.
Sharon whistled. “Nice work, MacGyver.”
Marion had been planning this for a long time. Longer than she’d let on. I bit my thumbnail as I watched her unlock the door, bumping it with her hip to dislodge the swollen wood from the frame. She’d done that before, too. Pleased with herself, she beckoned us in.
Just a step over the threshold and the temperature dropped. The sweet bakery funk of deteriorating paper and old ink blotted out the green clamor of the garden. Even with your eyes closed you’d know were inside a library. When the door had shut behind us we stood in the silence, an unwieldy circle of four. Five. The rabbit’s eye shone like a dime in the dark.
“Join hands,” Marion said in a slumber-party whisper. “I’ll lead us. We can’t risk the flashlight.” She reached a hand to Sharon, who reached back for Fee. I took Fee’s hand and became the tail of the comet streaking through the quiet library.
It was beautiful. There had to be fifty kinds of magic waiting to be woken in a place this stuffed with old books and history. We shuffled past a carved wooden screen that tossed geometric cutouts onto our skin and up a sweeping staircase. At its top a stained-glass window depicted a picnic party of well-dressed foxes, casting the landing in light the colors of fallen fruit. A recollection hit me with an ice-water charge: Marion had once found a body in this place.
We cut right, through an unlit passageway and up another stair, Marion cursing as the rabbit’s cage banged against her knees. On the third floor the ceilings were lower, the windows fewer. For rubbery stretches of time we had to rely on Marion’s memory and our daisy chain of interlocked hands to pull us through the dark. Midway between two pools of moonlight, she stopped and set down the cage.
“Gimme a boost.”
Sharon dropped, weaving her hands into a step. I could just see their outlines, one kneeling like a cavalier and the other straining upward, arms over her head to fiddle with something on the ceiling. Whatever it was came undone, and she caught it as it fell.
“Ouch,” she said, full volume, guiding the wooden ladder toward the floor. It came from an open hatch through which more moonlight fell. The same light from the same moon but up there it had an astringency to it, a thinness like lemon juice.
Marion climbed up first, disappearing in neat pieces before reaching back for the rabbit. Then Sharon, then Fee. As soon as I was alone the dark grew teeth and bad intentions, sending me scurrying up after them. Once I’d pulled my legs in and the ladder up, Marion pulled the trapdoor shut, locking us inside a tart bubble of light.
The room was circular, a snow globe filled with moon. We were above the tree line and the windows were placed in some tricky way that rendered the whole place shadowless. There was a stain in the center of the floor the size of a curled-up mastiff.
Marion dropped her bag beside it and pulled out a compass. Consulting it, she placed us in a fan along the room’s southern curve.
“Take off your shoes.” Her spine was a reptilian ridge as she bent over the laces of her boots. “We don’t need northeast for this, throw them there.”
The floor was the same neutral temperature as the air. If it wasn’t for the dust I’d have barely felt it. I was southwest, Sharon was south, standing taut with her hands folded behind her. Fee stood motionless at southeast, just the tip of her nose showing behind her fall of hair. I willed her to look back at me but for once she didn’t feel it.
Marion took out a wooden box the size of a matchbook, sliding it open and dusting her hands with white powder. When she blew the excess away it swirled up into a cloud, settling slowly on her shoulders and hair as she unwrapped the mirror, laying it on the stain before arranging a candle and the caged rabbit to her right. To her left she placed a cereal bowl full of salt poured from a Ziploc and the occultist’s book.
Usually spellwork made Marion stiffen up, like she was bracing for a blow. But tonight she moved nimbly on bare feet, chalking lines over the floor and adjusting our placement with impersonal hands before giving each of us a needle. I pinched mine tight.