This ring I wear, right here – is wrought from the nickel bones of Amamihe nke Asaa Ifuru Akwukwo. She was once a sort of lesser tree of knowledge, famed since her pomes were full of the heretic Arcana of the Seven of Swords. Don’t worry your head one bit over remembering that. She’s long dead, her cult’s since failed, and we’ll do naught but confuse you if we steer into the heresies just yet. Plus, and I hope you’ll forgive me for being indecorous, but the Seven-Page-Flower – that silver-timbered Amamihe’s mostly recollected as a right infamous malice with a capital C.
Anyway, the stone’s just plain azurite, but I maintain the notion it’s fit’nuff to glitz a fellow. Not everything’t’s worth a spit’s got to be plucked out from the ten-aeon corpse of a thaumaturge’s fossil. Point is, this signet represents what some society might call the gnosis. And that’s just baroque for saying: the wisdom of hidden things.
Do you apprehend the words I have not said? Have you got the sense of whom I represent, and the purpose of what I’ve chose you for? Well alright, then.
Here’n at that, I’ll intermit, and roll back the orbit of Earth a bit. For I’ve since to now, in the passing of our correspondence, reached and made mention of all the necessary pieces that we might induct you into the lesser mysteries. Secret names from amongst the Twelve-that-were, the small manifestations of Grace, the edge and boundary words at the surface of the Argument; understand these are no mean data which I’ve trusted you with.
You secern and recall, I once promised you that we’d return to the subject of Ashli Hektor. After you’d been framed a context ample to hang the content over, we would revisit the place of the library mezzanine, and the time of our consult. So, there by scant moon (enough only for shapes and not for color), and then at the aft-end of my petite incarceration, I and she huddled cross-legged and whispered at conference.
Since I would later discover that Ursula was laid awake as our third; in all technical senses, I count that night as the first and only coven which was convoked on the grounds of Ghost Perch and in the name of the Witch.
---
“I know she wasn’t the first,” my cousin explained. She gathered up her irregular-quilted denim blanket about her knees and dug a pinky into her ear for a twist. “She was young, even if her name was old.”
I watched her flick something out between the balustrade to arc below. Then, I gave her a proper squint of disapproval.
“Young being?” I asked.
Ashli waved off the question. “Relative to the age of fuck’n sedimentary stone, probably. I don’t know. It’s not like she’s like, talking to me. It’s more like vibes, you know? The Lady never exactly swung by for like, a chit-chat. Neither does Craft.”
I felt a chill of something true. “That’s her name, then? I can scarce remember her voice, but that there sounds a genuine nomenclature.”
“Todd,” Ashli pressed her thumbs to either side of her brow, and her tresses shook from vexation. “You were like, six months old when she died. You never freakin’ heard her.”
Even from my kin, I didn’t take well to being called a liar. “Now, that’s not the least bit fair for you to abnegate my lived experience,” I protested, clenching my fists and shutting my eyes. “Even in due consideration of my past and erstwhile infancy, the Witch’s mortal vociferations’d done plumbed such spiritual enormity, it can’t be helped but to’ve knit since into my marrow as a formative -”
I was seized abruptly then at the shoulders and shook. “Oh my God, Todd, talk normal.”
Alarmed, and forced to meet my cousin’s gaze, I grabbed her back and gave her a retaliatory jostle. “Shh!” I hushed her.
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“Fine. Sorry. It’s just, fuck, I wanna scream. This old timey, huckleberry, wagon-trail bullshit is pure insanity. My mom’s from Chicago. Fuckin’ Seung-Hee’s from like, Baltimore or something. And I know for a fact that Rahit either grew up in Los Angeles, or moved to it young – ‘cause he was there for a solid chunk of the 1980s. There are photographs.”
My mouth pressed firm shut. I’d come to learn it was best not to tangle with Ashli when she’d pitched a conniption like this.
“For shit’s sake, the royal Walton himself is from like, Evansville, Indiana. Playing like he’s about to ‘hey howdy, lemme just hitch a stagecoach and drop off a vote for James Buchanan’. But he’s a goddamn hoosier.”
Now, I have to say, that wasn’t entirely a contemporaneous reference. “Consensus,” I was compelled to reply, “as I’ve read it, broadly marks the extremes of the frontier period from the close of the American Civil War up to the national census of 1890. President Buchanan would have preceded -”
“I, a hundred percent, don’t care. I only know like, three presidents. And I only know that because our moms were in denial for ten years, or whatever.” Ashli huffed from flared nostrils. “If you woke me up to teach me history, I’m going back to sleep.” She raised up the corner of her blanket like a threat.
As that was not my want, I flustered. “Wait,” I implored, “how did you come into her – how’d you come to reconstitute the…”
She stared at me and I deflated further.
“How? I guess, just how?”
Just for the sake of plucking the thistle, Ashli rolled her eyes as loud as can be done (less than popping a socket, that is). Turning to lean back over her section of bookshelf, she slid a beaten periodical from between an atlas of France and the semiotician Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics.
Her sole and dog-eared copy of Knit Bitch landed tossed into my lap. Carefully, I raised and tilted it towards what small angle of light I could make out. The cover displayed a young woman striped in garish white and red face paint, one side of her head shaved bizarrely flat to her skull, and with a rectangular-fit blazer that was open to bare her middle. Only a roping band of tacky beads preserved her modesty, and she held up a cross-stitch of the letter ‘A’, configured such to match a drunkard’s scrawl. I thought the woman’s face was notably and oddly plain.
“You conjured the revenant pow’r -”
“Yep.”
Tenderly, I thumbed a corner and turnt back the cover. “- and opine of a bonified peer to our Lady -”
“Yep.”
Paging past the introduction, I spread open a diagram of knitting loops and needle gymnastics. “- through the means and practice of crochet?” I gaped.
Squatting off by some other of her caches of contraband, Ashli rummaged gingerly for some oddment. “Just give me a second, I’ll show you. Obviously,” she gestured, “you’ve got to pick up some flavor first. Oh, but in the covens, they call it Aura.”
My bare toes scraped idly over smooth-worn wood-panel. My fingers relished the touch of rag paper, both rough and glossed with treated starch and gum arabic. “How’d they contrive to print a picture like this? They can’t have cameras working still,” I murmured. Pressing the next page near up to my nose, I discerned a lush scarf rolling off some toff with a pierced septum and a limber strut. “Is this a lithograph? Who’d strip their elbow to the grease to make this, and for whom’s it meant?”
Ashli snatched her magazine out from my keeping with a scowl. Then she revealed a columnar porcelain from her secrets and set it down between us. The device was a thumb wide, and some inches short a foot. Its lid was sealed by means of charcoal wax, and it had no aperture but for the protrusion of two metal pins.
“Don’t tell anyone I’ve got this,” she demanded of me on the matter of the battery. She pinched hog’s bristles from a small clasped tin and twisted them ferociously until they made a filament about a barleycorn long. Then, she assembled an upturned glass jar, a pewter hood, and strung her wire across a glass-braked yoke of brass bands. The whole mess aligned and alit such that the pins and bands matched, and then -
We were aglow.
Frankly, the sickly yellow candescence was out-of-bounds of the clandestine, so we hurled a blanket urgently over our heads and leant in: just as if we were planning a rendezvous with Archduke Ferdinand.
“These are crazy expensive, so let’s be quick,” she winced. The burnt smell of electrified hair curled out slow over minutes to occupy our air. “So like, this issue is the only one printed. The girl who did it, Trina Krayz – obvi, not her real name – basically vanished.”
She set the back leaf open and tapped on a narrow column labeled: about the editor. I nodded intently.
“I kinda like, love her and hate her at the same time?” Ashli flipped pages and indicated sections of printed articles. The whole of it was slim, there’d’ve been no more seven folded leafs in sum.
“Look at this sweater, the shoulders have corners,” she faked a gag. “She’s so funny, but like, she’s also bought-in, and I mean, full Stadt bootlicker.”
I took my turn to mug a yuck.
“Fashion, romance – shield your eyes, lil’ dweeb, absorb no words,” she mashed her flat palm across my face and I pushed her arm away peevishly. “But here’s the bomb drop -”
Her bony finger pointed me towards a stubby box amid the diagrams. It was captioned with the name Theodosia Proskauer, and a snidely cryptic goad that its illustratory knot was inadvised fare for beginners.
My pate was a tent-pole of our drooping privacy. “You have shaken me,” I drawled, “to the squishiest of my core.”