Conjured (30 page)

Zach held my hand as we passed by the tent, close enough that I could hear the applause from the audience inside. The Magician was performing. I stepped softly, as if he could hear me, as if he had any way to know I was here. I clung to Zach’s hand as if it were a lifeline, as if he were a rope that could pull me out of a hole if I needed him to.

As I circled the tent, I saw the wagon.

Carved from wood, the wagon was as ornate and colorful as a gingerbread house. The walls were covered in swirls and curls, painted green with gold trim. The window shutters, all sealed closed, were blue. The wheels were gold with metal leaves and vines. Cherry-red steps led to the round door, and talismans of feathers and bones hung on it. A lantern was beside the door, lit with the broken wings of a will-o’-the-wisp.

It looked exactly like I remembered.

The Storyteller should be here. She used to sit on a woven blanket beside a table covered in a velvet cloth. Tarot cards would lie on the table, spread facedown, waiting for a customer. Silk pillows with tassels would be strewn on the grass around the table for listeners to sit on, and a tip jar would be on the corner of a blanket. But she wasn’t—and the Magician was performing. It was the perfect opportunity.

Slowly, I walked up the cherry-red steps. I reached forward to open the door. The handle rattled in my hands—or maybe my hands were shaking. The door didn’t open.

Leaning toward me, Zach breathed in more magic, refreshing his supply, which had most likely faded by now. “We could walk through …”

I shook my head. “I remember how to unlock it.” Rose, leaf, stem … I pushed on the carvings on the door, and they sank in, a hidden combination lock.
Click, click, click
—the door swung open. The smell of sage and cinnamon and copper rolled out and over me, and I swayed on the top step, surrounded by the taste of the air—the taste of home.

Breathing deeply, I stepped inside.

Inside was brightly painted with hundreds of tiny mirrors embedded in the walls. Feathers, talons, and bird skeletons hung from rafters, broad beams that curved like whale bones. Bottles lined the shelves on the wall—green, blue, and purple glittering glass bottles with labels written in swooping black ink. He sold those bottles, I remembered. Ointments and potions that he’d gathered from the worlds we’d traveled to. Some worked, and some didn’t. They were strapped to the
shelves with leather belts to keep them from falling as the wagon lurched down a road.

And then of course there were the boxes. They were strung on a colored ribbon that stretched across the wagon. Silk scarves hung between them. Gathering my courage, I stepped closer to the first one and peered into it. Empty. All of them were empty.

“Do you remember this?” Zach asked.

“Yes.” Except that sometimes the boxes weren’t empty. But I didn’t say that. Instead I pointed to the dolls that filled the cots and benches: life-size with porcelain faces and cotton arms. Some were unfinished, their faces unpainted or their limbs not yet attached. Others were dressed in lace and jewels. “Except them. I don’t remember so many of them.”

In one vision that I’d had, a doll had been strapped beside me on the Ferris wheel. The Storyteller had made her out of stray bits of fabric and a porcelain masquerade mask. Clearly, she’d made more after I’d gone.

“Listen,” Zach whispered.

I held still.

There was breathing, soft and steady. It was so faint that I thought I was imagining it. It sounded as if it was coming from all around us. I scanned the wagon, looking for the source of the breathing. There weren’t any places to hide—

“It’s the dolls,” Zach said. “They’re
breathing
.”

He was right. Motionless, the dolls were breathing in unison. Now that I focused on the sound, it was all I could hear. The dolls stared sightlessly at us.

“Are they … alive?” Zach asked.

One of the dolls held a box, a match to the ones that hung from the string. I crossed to it. Inside the box, through the slats, an eye blinked. It was a filmy white-red eye, edged in wrinkles. I knew that eye. “She’s inside.”

“Who?” Zach asked.

Carefully, I lifted the box out of the doll’s hands. The doll’s fingers were rigid, posed to hold it. The doll stared glassily through me and didn’t move. Her lips were painted red and parted slightly. Her cheeks had been painted white with three black drops on each side, like a sad clown. Her eyes had painted eyelashes that curled an inch below and above her eyes, over her eyebrows. Her hair was black yarn. This close, I could hear her breathing, distinct from the others.

I held the box up to one of the lanterns. Inside, shrunken, the Storyteller was knitting a gray scarf. Her knees were jammed into her chest, and her feet were curled awkwardly under her, but she held her gnarled hands with her needles up by her face. I couldn’t hear the
click-click
of the needles, but I could imagine the sound. Kneeling, I placed the box on the floor and pulled at the clasp. It was rusted shut, as if it had been out in the rain. The Storyteller must have been inside for a long time. I chipped at the rust with my fingernails. “Help me,” I ordered. Zach’s hand closed over mine, and together we pulled at the clasp. It creaked and screamed as the metal bent and scraped against itself. “He’s punishing her. Maybe because of me. Maybe because she set me free.”

Zach helped me pull at the clasp. Suddenly it snapped,
and the box fell open. Sitting on the floor of the wagon in the shards of the box, the Storyteller looked tiny, as if she were distant, and then suddenly huge, as if she were instantly close.

She matched my memory perfectly. The eyes, the wrinkles, the plump lips, the limp hair, the corseted dress, the gnarled hands, the pointed shoes, and the ever-present knitting on her lap. Deftly, the Storyteller lifted the box with one hand and closed the sides, the top, and then the clasp. She tossed the box from hand to hand as she smiled at us. She had few teeth left, and her gums were red and raw. “I thank you for freeing me.”

Her voice washed over me, and I shivered like a puppy quivering in anticipation of either praise or punishment. The Storyteller didn’t seem to recognize me. “Do you … do you know me?” I asked. I wanted to reach out and touch the wrinkles on her cheek. I wanted to curl against her and breathe in the smell of her, the smell of my childhood, the smell of my memory.

“You are the young adventurers who saved the wise old woman. I owe you a boon. Or advice. But I have nothing like that to give you.”

“I think you are my mother,” I burst out. After the words were out, I couldn’t breathe in more air. It was as if those words had taken all the oxygen out with them. I didn’t know where the idea had come from. My mother? Yes, of course, she had to be! Who else? I waited, breathless, for her response.

The Storyteller squinted at me. “I have no child.”

“I have pretty eyes.” I reached out to touch her—and then I stopped, not quite daring.

The Storyteller peered into my eyes, leaning closer and closer until I could smell her breath, rancid and sweet at the same time, and then she reeled back and laughed wildly, a dozen notes clashing together one after another, a cacophony of a hoot and caw and howl and giggle.

Zach gripped my arm to pull me backward. I stood firm. She didn’t frighten me. She’d cared for me, comforted me, freed me. She’d mothered me. “You cut the ropes,” I said. “You set me free.”

The Storyteller giggled. “And you blossomed into the princess that I always knew you could be.” She touched my face, tapped my shoulder, and tugged on my hair. “They did a finer job than I ever could.”

“Mother.” I tried out the word, letting it roll around my tongue. “I need to know—”

“I’m not your mother.” The Storyteller wasn’t laughing anymore, and there was sadness in her milky eyes. “You shouldn’t be here.”

The words felt like a blow to my stomach, and again I couldn’t breathe. “But I …”

“You never had a mother,” the Storyteller said.

I shook my head. “I don’t understand. I was … adopted. Abandoned? I remember you…. You told me stories … lullabies…. You were always there. You cared for me….” But I also remembered needles in my skin, ropes around my limbs. She hadn’t always been kind. “Did you steal me from someone? Where do I come from? Who am I?”

“You shouldn’t ask. And you shouldn’t have come back.” She bustled toward us, shooing us as if we were chickens.
“You must leave. Leave before he sees you and never come back!” She herded us toward the door, but I dug my feet into the wood floor.

“Please! I need your help! I’ve lost my memories—”

The door clicked.

The Storyteller quit pushing me. “I’ve helped you more than I should have and less than I could have.” She retreated and sat heavily on a wooden bench between two unfinished dolls. “Once upon a time, a young witch fell in love with a boy who feared death … and it was beautiful. For a time.” She wrapped one arm around a doll. It fell limply against her shoulder. Its head sagged forward.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out the box, hiding it behind my back. All I had to do was flip open the lid and touch him with the clasp—a simple plan. Ready, Zach waited behind the door. The Magician wouldn’t see him. I stood in front of the door and waited.

Click. Click, click
.

The door swung open.

And I saw the Magician.

That is what the Magician’s hat is supposed to look like
, I thought. It was crushed velvet with a white ribbon around its base. It was tattered and worn near the rim from years of use. It shadowed his face so I couldn’t see his blacker-than-black eyes, only his snowy beard, which he had braided with multicolored beads. I had forgotten the beads. I stared at the beads swinging from the tip of each braid. Some were glass; some were wood; some were bone. The bone ones had been carved with symbols and leaves.

His eyes fixed on the Storyteller first. “You’re free.”

“It’s her,” the Storyteller said. “They changed her body, but it’s still her in all the ways that matter. She came back.”

Then the Magician stared at me.

“Father?” I said.

“You’re alive,” he said. And joy lit up his face.

And then Zach worked magic: a blanket flew off a cot and wrapped around the Magician as tight as a strait-jacket. But I couldn’t make myself open the box. My father! Maybe the agents were wrong about him. Maybe the visions lied. Maybe he—

The dolls moved.

From both sides of the wagon, they lurched onto their feet. They swarmed over Zach. From behind me, two grabbed my arms. Their knitted hands squeezed like wire garrotes. My left hand was still plunged into my pocket, but I couldn’t move to draw the box out, though now I realized my mistake.

Across the wagon, his supply of magic gone, Zach struggled as four dolls held him fast. He was forced against the wall. The bottles shook from the impact. “Zach!” I cried. Without thinking, I threw magic at the dolls around us.

The dolls burst into flame.

And I collapsed.

The Storyteller dances the marionettes with ease. They leap and twirl at the twist of her gnarled fingers. She shouldn’t have such dexterity in her old hands, but she does. Children on the grass hill laugh and clap their hands
.

“Once upon a time,” she says, “there was a boy and a girl lost in the woods …” She tells the story of Hansel and Gretel. A third marionette joins the others on the wooden stage. This one is dressed all in black, and her cloth face is pinched in false wrinkles. She looks like a cloth copy of the Storyteller. “Who is nibbling on my house?” The Storyteller tells of the witch pushed into the fire, and Hansel and Gretel locking the cast-iron door. She tells how they run out of the house into the forest, where they starve and die and their bodies are ravaged by wolves and then carrion birds and then crawled over and claimed by maggots and earthworms until they are nothing more than dirt and leaves on the forest floor
.

She then beckons, and I dance on the stage between the dolls
.

The click of needles was the only sound.

I opened my eyes and saw the Storyteller seated against the shuttered window. She was knitting an arm, a doll’s arm. The rest of the doll lay next to her, and a bag of scraps leaned against the shutters. The doll had black yarn hair and black button eyes. Its body was magenta, and it wore a crocheted white dress. The Storyteller had not yet given it a mouth.

The other dolls were missing.

Lifting my head, I looked for them—and I saw a pile of burned rags in the corner, a tangled mass of charred dolls. Arms and legs stuck out at awkward angles. Half a charred face stared sightlessly at me. I had burned them all.

“She’s awake,” the Magician said.

I jerked at the sound of his voice. After hearing him in my visions and memories for so long, his voice felt oddly disembodied outside my head. Bending over me, he peered at my face, only inches away. He raised my eyelids higher and examined my eyes. “Where’s Zach?” I asked.

He lifted my chin and turned it. With yarn pinning my arms to my sides, I couldn’t do anything but tilt my head back away from his hands. He pinched my cheeks, and I yelped. “Perfect teeth,” he said. “The details are magnificent.”