It distressed Cleo to see her sister doing this basic stuff. Siobhan was smart. She aced high school, and she’d probably ace college too. She could be a doctor with that brain, or a lawyer. Something clever. Siobhan had a neat way of speaking, words as pointed and sly as a knife between the ribs.
To Orlaith, any type of reading beyond a women’s magazine was taken as a personal insult. Higher education was an affront, an insult to the family’s good blue-collar name. According to Orlaith, college was too expensive (Cleo had to concede that point), Orlaith had beautiful girls (she said this like she hadn’t just called them ugly or fat), why trying to force themselves to be bookworms (ignoring the fact the girls read constantly). Cleo’s personal favorite was the ever-popular ‘I’m just trying to help you because you know you’d just fail anyway.”
Her mother took any type of individual advancement as a personal attack, as if Cleo was silently criticizing her mother. Hilarious, because criticism was Orlaith’s preferred sport, second only to passing judgment. She was a master at chipping away security and confidence.
Their older sister Aisling had been long gone by the time Cleo got into high school, but Cleo figured Aisling had heard it all too. Cleo had pieced together over the years that something had happened and their Nan had gotten Aisling out somehow. It was the one topic Orlaith refused to discuss, but Cleo suspected it was because Orlaith didn’t know anything either. Orlaith only seemed to care when she wanted to be a Tragic Mother figure.
“If you’re not here for any of those things, then what do you need?” Siobhan asked, her eyes flicking back down to her page. The sun streamed over her hair, pooling on the floor by her dainty feet. Siobhan looked like a painting like this. One of those paintings of ladies lazing about in long dresses in the sunshine, draped over weird chairs. In that picture, Siobhan looked like she was peaceful inside and out.
“Money? A pregnancy test? Unfortunately there isn’t currently a reliable broad-spectrum over-the-counter test for sexually transmitted infections.” Siobhan looked up, pulling out her smile like freshly unsheathed daggers.
Not so peaceful, then.
“I’m just here for a normal, boring book that nobody cares about. Besides, all of Nan’s books belong to me,” Cleo replied. She hadn’t even thrown anything at Siobhan after her dig, which was proof of personal growth. Cleo walked towards a squat built-in bookshelf towards the back of the attic, pushed the upper-left-hand corner hard, and the bookshelf swung open. Cleo bent down and crawled in.
Siobhan was quiet in the other room, but Cleo knew better than to assume acquiescence. Siobhan was hard to predict, but once she acted Cleo could usually figure out her thought process. Usually. Cleo kept an ear open for her sister’s next movements.
Nan’s witchy room wasn’t quite what Cleo had seen in the movies. It had taken Cleo an embarrassingly long time to correlate the moody rooms on TV with pentacles on the floor and candles everywhere to her Nan’s packed junk room where wyrd shit happened. But Nan’s junk room was a witchy room, one that smelled of dust and occasionally of mice that had died under a pile of suitcases or broken furniture. One wall had a perpetual display of crooked Christmas decorations that Cleo had put up in grade school in a sincere but misguided attempt to cheer up the space. The desks were covered with identifiable garbage and debris. Largely abandoned after Nan’s death three years ago, it had the distinctive smell of rot, courtesy of the mold streaking down the window frames and arching over the ceiling. At this point, Cleo mused, only fire would get this place clean.
Cleo heard Siobhan creeping down the attic ladder, back into the house. Siobhan had skipped the third rung, which implied stealth, but couldn’t avoid the creak of the wooden floors, which proved Siobhan’s ninja skills were for shit.
The book Cleo needed was neatly placed on the bookshelf, well-thumbed. Its cloth cover was dirty but not torn. Nan had been weirdly proud of that fact.
The Wicked Witches of Old and Their Spells and Their Tragedies was a low-brow print publication from 1912. Wicked Witches was mostly garbage. It was a mix of lurid “spells” and biographies of prideful women, and how the spells backfired on those wicked, sinful women. Cleo had read it once with great curiosity, and then once again just to make sure it was as bad as she remembered. It was worse the second time around, actually, given that 20-year-old Cleo picked up on the slut-shaming misogyny she had missed when she had read it at 12. Even at 12, though, she had seen its racism. It wasn’t a subtle book.
But, bizarrely, what the author had gotten correct were the rituals. The way the witches placed various objects, or when they used iron versus wood versus water. Candle placement, the phases of the moon, song versus speech. When blood needed to be shed. All detailed, effective, and real. And worth getting, now that Cleo’s coven was starting to advance in their skills.
Most of Nan’s books were like that: pulp novels and cheesy vintage horror stories that held a thread of truth in there somewhere. Nan had a huge grimoire that she’d kept a running list of all of the different things that were true, false, and a mix of both. Cleo hadn’t found it yet. Orlaith swore she hadn’t taken it, but Cleo knew what her mother’s oath was good for: stubbed toes and cries of irritation only.
Cleo had held off getting Wicked Witches and the bother books because the last time she saw Orlaith involved threats of restraining orders (by Cleo), and threats to call the police (by Orlaith). Worse yet had been Siobhan’s pale, drawn face at the upstairs window. She sat impassively above it all as Orlaith and Cleo screamed
