Light as a Feather, Cold as Marble

Chapter 19

"Let's go in," Henry said.

"Freaky," Mischa said, shaking her head.

I saw the woman standing behind the counter inside the store watching us, and felt a little pressured to actually enter and buy something since we'd been standing there like geeks for a minute. "Come on, Mischa. Maybe they'll have something we could use to break a spell. You never know."

As soon as I spoke those words, a shopping adventure in The Occult Bookshop seemed very much like the right thing for us to do. How had we not thought about going to a witchcraft store to research spell-breaking items sooner? A chime sounded as we opened the creaky front door of the store, and I felt a little more at ease about entering into a store specializing in weird horror items as soon as I heard "The Forest," by the Cure playing on the store's sound system. There were two shoppers poking around in the herbs and spice section at the back, and the young woman behind the counter greeted us without a smile.

"Can I help you?" she asked. Even though she appeared to be not much older than Henry, she was very obviously unenthusiastic about having three teenagers who quite obviously knew nothing about witchcraft milling about her store. She had shoulder-length hair dyed bright, Bozo the clown red, and wore black cats' eye glasses frames with little rhinestones on them.

"I hope so," Mischa said firmly, walking right up to the counter on which an old-fashioned register had been set. Beneath the glass counter was an array of strange rings and necklaces. I reviewed the merchandise quickly and noticed with both amusement and shame that many of the jewelry items were replicas of jewels worn by characters in blockbuster fantasy movies, with little display cards next to them featuring images of the actors and actresses from the films wearing them. Arwen's necklace, Lord of the Rings was one such high-priced item in the display.

The other items on the display shelves were exactly what you'd expect to find in an occult shop—rings with dragon heads featuring rubies for eyes, and cast iron skull rings with daggers jammed in the eye sockets. Unable to control himself, Henry nudged me in the ribs with his elbow and pointed discreetly at a ring on the lower shelf of a skull that had fangs.

"We were wondering if you have anything here specifically intended to break evil spells. Like, say, for example, someone put a nasty spell on you, and you wanted to flip it around and put it back on them," Mischa requested, casually placing her elbows on the counter and resting her head on her hands.

The girl behind the counter rolled up the sleeves of her yellow cardigan to reveal colorful tattoos. She raised an eyebrow at Mischa and asked in a deadpan voice, "Well, yeah. But we only sell materials for the practice of witchcraft to people who know what they're doing. If you were serious about lifting a spell, I'd need to know exactly what kind of spell it was, who cast it, and why. This is serious stuff and we don't just send amateurs home with powerful magic."

"Do you know the game, Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board?" I asked, cutting to the chase. Obviously this store clerk thought we were just dumb kids, when in reality we probably had a heck of a lot more firsthand experience with occult evil than she did. "Where a storyteller predicts your death, and everyone chants—"

"And a demon lifts the body of whoever's death was just predicted? Yeah, I am familiar with that game. It's quite old, dating back to the plague epidemic in seventeenth century Europe, and probably all the way back to the original plague infestation that killed almost half the population on the continent. Were you kids stupid enough to play that game?" the girl asked us in a condescending tone.

"Yeah," Mischa snapped back at her, "we were, and in the last four months, two of our friends have actually died exactly as someone predicted in that game. So, surely you can understand how we might be interested in finding a spell that reverses the effect of whatever occurs during that game, or something that might protect dumb kids like ourselves."