VenCo(10)

She turned around and sat on her butt, sweeping her small light over the space, looking back at the rabbit hole she’d come down. She could hear the washer thumping through its last spin like a beating heart.

She realized this probably wasn’t the safest place to sit. If the tunnel had collapsed once, what would stop it from collapsing again? Sticking her phone in her teeth, she crawled back towards the opening. Halfway there her hand hit something hard poking out of the soil. Sitting back on her heels, she grabbed her phone and directed the flashlight down. It was a piece of tarnished metal, embedded in the ground. She used her fingernails to pry it up. After she brushed off the clotted dirt, she realized it was a small spoon. Maybe from the hospital cafeteria? Maybe this was what he’d used to dig, like an old movie cliché. She slid it into her pocket and kept going.

Once she’d carefully extracted herself, she closed the cabinet back up and locked it. Looking down at her mud-caked knees, she said, “Great. More laundry.”

After tossing the first load into the dryer, she pulled off her pants and threw them in with the rest of the darks. Before she closed the lid, she fished them back out and checked the pockets—two quarters and the spoon from the tunnel. She set them on the dryer, threw her pants back in, and started the machine.

In her underwear, she climbed up to sit on the washer. It took a moment before she realized she was smiling, that she’d been smiling since she discovered that the tunnel was real. She picked up the spoon and rubbed more dirt out of the bowl and from the handle, revealing markings. No—letters, which spelled . . . S . . . A . . . L . . . E . . . M?

Salem. And there was more: the engraving of a figure of some kind, and a pointed line that could have been an arrow?

“You’re coming with me,” she whispered to the spoon, tucking it into the laundry basket so it didn’t get left behind.



The Crone dropped her fork. It clattered against her plate, a startling sound in the quiet of the dining room. She clutched at the lace by her throat, eyes wide.

“Anything the matter, dear?” Her husband looked up from his paperback on the other side of a very long table. “Shall I have Israel reheat your food?”

Israel stepped from the corner. Without his cap and shucked of his pinstriped blazer, every contour of muscle and hair pressed against his white dress shirt. There was a small white apron tied at his waist.

“No, no, my food is fine. Israel, could you bring me my phone instead, please?” He left without sound.

Her husband placed the book beside his plate, picking up a crystal wine goblet. “Is something troubling you?”

The Crone placed both hands flat on the table, straightening her already impeccable posture. The room contained floor-to-ceiling shelves stuffed full of books. She may have been dining in a library, except that her entire house was this way—books, scrolls, old pages held aloft in glass frames. Her eyes jumped around the walls, searching for something, though she wasn’t sure what.

“No. Everything is fine.” She took a sip of her own wine. She checked her gold wristwatch, holding it up to her ear to listen for the old-fashioned tick. “What time do you have, Maury?”

“Um.” He checked his own wrist. “Five oh six. No, five oh seven. Plans this evening?”

The Crone sighed. “No. Just suddenly feeling a bit pressed for time.”





3

Meena Good Gets Lucky




In the dream, Meena walked through a forest of branchless trees with peeled trunks. If she leaned even slightly one way or the other, a hard buzzing erupted like a mason jar of bees. She moved slowly—at the cadence the dream demanded, like she was moving underwater, using her hands like oars to paddle ahead. She couldn’t push the pace, or panic would jolt her awake or into a darker dreamscape.

Still, she asked the dream, Where are we going?

Home.

Home? She pictured her father standing on their porch, his collar starched and yellowed with sweat.

To the coven, the dream clarified.

The coven? She didn’t have a coven, not yet.

She wanted a coven. More than wanted—she needed a coven. All she had were five—herself, Wendy, Morticia, Lettie, and Freya. The Oracle had said there would be seven. Seven to close the circle and begin the next epoch.

She could see bright light ahead, and, forgetting herself, she tried to speed up. She stumbled and reached out to grab a tree. The buzzing sound dialed itself up to more of a crackle, as if the bees were now throwing themselves against the glass jar, and the wood under her hand grew hot. She turned her head just as the trunk burst into fire. Then, one by one, all the trees in the forest started to burn. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. She threw herself back on the path, but it was too late—the fires kept burning. They looked like stakes. She held her breath and walked slowly now, between the burning columns, towards that bright light ahead.

Pushing past the last of the flames, she found herself in a circle of tall trees, none of them burning. There were seven of them, unrolling slim branches and lush leaves like fists unclenching, fingers reaching, growing as she watched. There was no buzzing here. The light here wasn’t coming from the sky, but from the ground. She looked down and saw a postcard at the centre of the circle. She picked it up. In orange bubble letters, over a faded image of a tall grey tower with a ridiculous glass hub near its top, was written “Greetings from Toronto!” She turned the postcard over, and on the back was a single handwritten line. Luck has entered the game. That was all. Not even a return address.