Because when the back cover faced up in the strong light of a summer’s afternoon, this innocuous collection of outdated essays revealed another persona. Underneath the commercially produced cover was a different cover, one with swirls of silver leaf and other embellishments. I could see all that under the veil of the paper cover, and I couldn’t tell if it was something I could reveal simply by peeling that layer back—which I could do—or if I would need to use a magical touch or incantation—which I would need help with.
I opted to try my athame. The blade, which I was supposed to use for witchy rituals, had a very dull edge and spent most of its time on my bureau.
Athame in hand, I paused at the threshold to my office. Sun streamed through my open window, giving the full weight of its attention to the section of the floor covered with books. The pesky dust motes that followed me down from the attic converted to sparkly bits of pink, orange, and yellow glitter in the light.
I giggled a bit at the presentation, squatted near the first victim, and sliced a thin line all around the edge of the rectangular cover. As I cut, the paper curled off the under-layer, and when the tip of my knife sliced the last bit of paper, the raggedy cover turned to translucent ash. Marveling at the true cover, I set my thumb pad to one corner and lifted.
Centered on a book plate affixed in the middle of the frontispiece, written in cursive by a steady hand, was Genevieve V. du Sang Volume III.
Mama. Memories of swimming in the ocean with my mother washed over me, turning my body liquid and forcing my eyes to water. A memory from my nap in the burial mound added itself to the eddy of emotions, and before I knew it I was awash in my mother’s presence.
I hadn’t asked for Christoph’s—and by extension, my father’s—last name. But now I had my mother’s.
I pressed an open hand to my heart. Acquiring yet another detail about my parentage was no small thing. I delved further, resting my fingertips on the cover’s ruby-colored leather, hoping to sense a shift or reaction.
Swirling lines of silver gilt depicted trees, leaves, flowers, birds, animals, and arcane symbols. I pivoted on my knee and dragged the flower press and sketchbook from under my desk. Opening to a page with side-by-side drawings of stalks of wild lupins, I compared what I knew were my mother’s illustrations with those on the book cover.
The hand was the same.
Then and there, I wanted to cut off every other back cover and peel away what was hiding an important piece of my history, my mother’s history. Before I did though, I lifted the cover again, shoved my reading glasses on my face, and rifled the pages. My athame buzzed in anticipation. I touched its tip to the top page.
Nothing.
I peered at the edges again. With the help of a magnifying glass, the paper looked thick enough to split, like layers of phyllo dough just beginning to dry out. I teased in the tip of my blade and coaxed it back and forth until I’d opened a six-inch section. I blew into the space.
Nothing.
Closing my eyes, I searched through the floor to the root cellar, to the soil directly under the house, all the way to the edges of the property. I pulled everything I could toward me, toward my desire to know my mother, my desire to know my history and enrich my future, my sons’ futures. I squeezed my eyelids shut, inhaled, and blew again, through pursed lips, softly exhaling multistranded threads of hope, desire, and curiosity into the small opening.
The top, bottom, and inner edges of the paper separated. The outer edge became a fold, and when I lifted the paper away from the spine, a map of my property appeared. Hand-drawn and not accurate to the current buildings, it looked like it had been rendered a century ago. Maybe more.
My A-frame house occupied the same footprint as an earlier one, but the outbuildings were gone and sections labeled for livestock had succumbed to stands of blackberries, salal, and a smattering of native trees. I pictured egg-laying chickens hiding from the eagles and hawks that would have known exactly where their roosts were located.
I refolded the map and eyed the next page. This one separated into two full pages that had numbered lists, much like a table of contents. One word and its accompanying icon leapt off the page.
Portal.
I took a closer look at the map, tried to keep my fingers from leaving prints on the page, and scanned for the word portal as well as its icon, a hand-drawn thin circle within a thick circle with the dot on one side, like a door handle.
The spot occupied by my garden had not changed purpose or location. And the nearby tree could be the old crabapple. A portal icon nestled in its spidery branches.
Figures.
I hunted for more and found another portal icon straddling my property line and the road and yet another in the stand of fir trees at the back of property. When I flipped to the table of contents again, I read a series of subheadings underneath the chapter titled Portals.
How to Create a Portal. How to Travel Between Portals. Safety Tips for Portal Travel. Packing Tips for Portal Travel. What to do when you are stuck in a portal…cannot find your way out of a portal…encounter enemies inside the portal…are followed into the portal.
How to Close a Portal. How to Destroy a Portal.
Destroying a portal. Sounded like one of those magical things with consequences I didn’t want to consider.
I took my athame to the third page then the fourth and the fifth, but I didn’t meet with the same success. No more pages opened to me, and rather than end up with ripped or otherwise destroyed or unreadable pages, I
