A teaser from ‘To Otherwhere’
Ch 1 Escape to Bilgewood
In Mowbray, there were many types of magic, real and benign. It was a sleepy town with many sycamores and fat, homeless cats who snuck along the gutter picking up bits of jelly sandwich. There was magic owned by Ms. Umble down the street, who burned everything she put on the table. Except her peach pies, set absently on the windowsill to the envious eyes (and noses) of all passing children. Magic lay in the eaves of the church, and peered into the service from the rafters to whisper things infinitely more interesting than the homily, if only Sicilo could speak their language. Finally, there was magic that lay in Mowbray itself, running like veins of quartz under the dirt. That town grew flowers more spectacular and pigmented than Sir Trembley who lived less than ten miles off and had won the national prize for gardening twice. Its magic attracted all sorts of people, many strange and some troubled. A medicine man had come last month to peddle a tincture advertised as both a wart-remover and furniture polish, wanting in return only that people recount to him their dreams. If Sicilo Abbott narrowed it down with a sextant and compass and all manner of complicated mathematics, she could not have gotten closer to the center of magic than Abbott house.
Arcturus, her father, had inherited the estate from his father, who had inherited it from his aunt, who was allegedly a witch and had been burned at the stake. It was cold in the winters because it was drafty, but perfect in the summers because of its proximity to the lake. Sicilo liked that it had gardens, multiple of them and sprawling for acres around the house. Her father was a museum curator and ill-suited to care for living things. He preferred fossilized lemurs, dinosaur bones, and wrinkly parchment written with languages Sicilo understood but found uninteresting. The business of groundskeeping had been handed off to Clover. She was a genius with primroses and could coax ivy into an archway without a trellis. Her magic was the real kind; she said she was a witch and Sicilo half believed it. A watercolor of brown pigments created her skin: amber, dirt, melanin. She could have grown flowers out of her pores if she had tried. Arcturus worshipped her for it. Besides that, he needed her. In Abbott house, the dishes did not get washed; the food did not get cooked; the stars did not turn without her. Chewing bits of grass and the eponymous clovers of the garden, Clover was the caretaker of all growing things, including Sicilo.
The world was nearing up on the end of April when the flowers started to die. First, the lichen on the signposts and trees turned black, hardening into a tough coat of scales that defied the prying hope of trowels and even axes. In the height of spring, the grass was pale and wizened; Clover was holding out hope. Then, the primroses died. Sicilo watched from the window seat of the attic as Clover waged war on the topsoil, weeding and hosing the world as though it were a naughty child just pulled from an illicit mud puddle. That was April twenty-first.
On April twenty-second, the general store in town, marked by a false top in the shape of a crescent moon, put up a banner. It read thus: “Mowbray Millennium Celebration,” with a curlicue underline and a number that read ‘one’ and a month that read ‘May.’ Soon after, there were many houses with signs of the same sort. The church had hung a banner from one post of the entryway to the other, hung irreverently from the mouths of two gargoyles and painted by the members of the Ladies’ Society. Underneath it, a missing child poster tacked to the bulletin board had turned beige and eventually flew free of its tacks and off on a gust of wind.
In Abbott house, Arcturus had frittered himself away into the eaves of the house, where he could be heard scratching away at paperwork like a literarily inclined rat. Her father’s solitude freed Sicilo from the obligation to sit in companionate silence on the leather armchair in his office. The chair was much too large for her, upholstered in the sticky leather used in doctor’s offices.
Sicilo prized this unusual freedom. Her life had been blocked out by a chart which segmented her life hour by hour, dictating when she would take her tea and learn her French. These were the designs of her adopted mother, who cared above all that Sicilo would learn to socialize with other children. For this, Clover had designated an hour every other day. Sicilo drank lemonade in the spring and summer months, and tea in the winter, sitting by Clover’s side as she weeded or watered. Clover would tell her the secrets of other children’s hearts, which seemed like the bejewelled pomegranate seeds unseen beneath its skin. These children were impenetrable to Sicilo’s discerning gaze, and, despite Clover’s best efforts, she did not care much for other children.
Knowing that one of these chats was oncoming, Sicilo willingly forgot the chart and escaped through the Northeast corner of the estate into Bilgewood. She had not intended to go farther than the edge of the gardens. Luckily, she had possessed the forethought to wear her sturdier shoes. Through oceans of mud, ooze, and viscera, her wellingtons would emerge unscathed. Bilgewood was muddy and Sicilo did not want to track mud through the house, not that her father particularly cared.
It is likely that Sicilo would have stayed on the property if she had not seen it. But see it she did. A hovering blue light sped into the forest and disappeared in the trees.
Mnemosyne occupied many of her childhood fairytales, leading heroes equally through gaunt labyrinths, to safety, or over cliffs. They floated at nose height and glowed blue, about twice as bright as a firefly. Sicilo knew what they looked like because she had seen one before.
***
The roses were wilting heavily on their stems and convection currents lifted off the pavement. Sicilo was napping under the enclave of a rushbed. The leaves flopped over her like the protective arch of a wave. Breathing slowly-because she had a lot of time to fill and not many ideas of what to do with it–Sicilo had thought it was a sunspot. She blinked and, when it did not disappear, she leapt to her feet and raced after it, down the dirt lane, shoes abandoned. The mnemosyne flew steady so that Sicilo barely kept pace. It led her to the edge of Bilgewood, hovering like a mistinted ray of sunlight.
A snake coiled itself. It was taller than her and black scaled like an oil spill. It moved quickly and with criminal purpose. Sicilo stumbled back as the serpent reared its curious beady-eyed head, and, in that moment, the Mnemosyne had disappeared. In a half-remembered flicker, it left into the fractured shadows of the wood, and Sicilo had not seen it since.
That day, Sicilo was unprepared. The threshold of the forest stretched before her and its trees were winter corpses, chests hanging open and melting into the dirt with softness. Sicilo paused to examine a worm which had found interest in the toe of her boot. It was half the girth of her pinkie finger, mottled purple like a root. She laid it on the path side, even though the overgrown path presented little danger.
There is magic in Mowbray, Sicilo thought. Some of it on the windowsill of Ms Umble, and some of it in the nooks of Bilgewood, where the sun shines half as bright and the moon shines twice as loud.
***
Sicilo stepped over the smudged end of the path where there had once been mulch, now dissolved. Today, she would find the Mnemosyne again and let herself be led where it would take her.
Branches grew up from the spindly trees, and bore few leaves. The forest ceiling was about a lamp post height above her. Old branches tangled themselves into the inextricable mat of the forest ceiling; rare spots of light fought their way through its density to land on the carpet of emerald grass. Sicilo ran her hands along the graying bark of the tree trunks, dry with winter’s death.The trees were many limbed, with climbing holds for little girls and gnarled branches for hawks to perch. There was a hollow oak tree, which she fancied would be the stronghold of the squirrel kingdom in any forest war. The ground sunk underfoot, not quite wet, but filled with many dead things.
Sicilo snooped around this Oak, a species notorious in Mowbray for housing strange bugs. She even cooed up a little song of her own making to coax something out, but nothing came. Sicilo walked a while in the wood, a familiar stretch where she had hiked before with her older cousin, who was in college and liked things like impressionism and vintage film.
The wood was a series of overlaid photographs, revolving in an endless set, all similar, imperceptibly yet uncomfortably different. A tree looked the exact twin of one she had just seen, or a headless stump reappeared. Sicilo was unafraid. Bilgewood was four miles long exactly and to get oneself un-lost, you needed only to walk for a ways in a straight line to come out the other end.
The path thinned. Fewer feet had trodden there, where the sun was hidden a little ways more and the trees grew thicker like conspiring friends. Sicilo peeled a flake of bark from a nearby tree and brushed over it with her thumb. As she did, the black lichen covering it dissolved. She blew the dust away and admired the eyelets of the bark. It was the sort of thing one finds interesting when they have a perfectly tended garden and father with a penchant for old things and beautiful things - impressionism and probably vintage films too.
The blue light reappeared. It moved drunkenly now; having led Sicilo into the forest it seemed less concerned with speed. She walked right behind it, where she could see the individual filaments of light surrounding it. Glowing as unsightly as the sun, Sicilo could not view its body directly without hurting her eyes. They traveled for a few minutes in silence. A bird cawed in the distance; Sicilo turned her head; and the Mnemosyne was gone.
She stood on the blot of mulch where the path ended. Three wooden houses lay not far in front of her. This furrowed her eyebrows. She dug her hand into her pocket, and retrieved the fourteen items of her explorer’s kit: a set of binoculars from a cereal box, cherry candy, map of town, floss, two marbles, a dried rose-head. The rest of the fourteen were teabags, mostly earl gray and some oolong. The binoculars had a slight film of dust over the lens so that the scenes viewed in it contained a fog on the sunniest of days, but they were functional. Up the porch of the middle house, a lady with leathery black wings sat in an armchair,
Looking straight down the lens.