Do not allow a sorceress to live.
Milly looked up from her sketchbook as if the Bible verse had come from without. The creaking of the settling farmhouse and the stench of mold were her only companions as she sketched. The LEDs of her hurricane lamp cast half the room in glaring blue light and left the other in darkness. Dust swirled in its beam, dancing around empty, gray bookshelves and the glint of a chandelier just beyond the living room. On top of the bookshelf, jar with the remains of a label cast a shimmering shadow much grander than the jar itself. Above that was a still life, a bowl of fruit. Its style was idiosyncratic, certainly not traditional but not any modern movement she recognized. She despised it. The colors refused to stay one hue and shifted as she changed perspective and the glass reflected the room with a curve.
How much she would rather be with Lydia, curled up watching cable in the motel in Kokomo than this broken-down house. Mother would never have approved of Lydia. Their relationship was a magical liability, the sacrifice of the power within the divine union of opposites. Who gave a damn what mother thought? For four years, she confiscated her glasses and force-fed her pills she didn’t need in a vain attempt to make Milly a prodigy of Hermetic Qabalah and Tarot and Brauche. If ever there was a witch not to suffer to live, someone so irredeemable before magic even entered the equation, it was her. If she ever saw that bitch again, she'd–
The pencil lead snapped. So much for keeping her mind clear. Milly unclenched her jaw and set the pencil beside her before leaning over to fish another from the bag. A clatter next to her broke the silence. Milly jumped up. The pencil rolled along the hardwood, rocking back and forth, meandering its way towards the unlit half of the room. Milly laughed, curling over and setting her hands on her knees. Perhaps she shouldn't be so quick to judge people being so skittish.
Milly sat down and extracted another pencil, intent to resume work on her sketch. The sketch was turning into something–a hand. What that hand was doing was still not clear, but the curvature of the outside of the thumb and the tendons across its back were unmistakable. She set to work at once, filling her mind with strawberry milkshakes, kittens, and Monet paintings. “My Favorite Things” looped through her head and she started to hum it without noticing. She didn't have to live in the past; it couldn't hurt her anymore. Lydia would be here soon, and she could put this duty behind her
Click. Click. Click.
The pencil fell from Milly's hand, the hair on her neck bristling. Her body was bitterly cold and flushing hot all at once. The broken pencil moved in bursts, flicked by an unseen hand as it homed in on the base of the bookcase, dispelling any notion of a tilt in the floor. The noise of the collision was miniscule, almost imperceptible, but to Milly it was deafening. Something was here. Something was here and she would have to deal with it.
Milly leaned over and tugged the chalk from her bag, falling to her knees and drawing sigils. Their shapes didn't matter. In chaos magic all that mattered was intent. It was the force of belief, the force of will, the inner strength that had kept her alive, blind and sedated all those years, that powered her magic. She chanted under her breath, making up the rhymes as she went, pouring her focus into her work. She visualized a sparkling curtain of energy, a forcefield intended to inflict excruciating pain on anything that approached. She swapped chalk colors without even thinking, using her own correspondences. She didn't need any banishing ritual or cross; power, like salvation, was bestowed from within. Never from above.
She ground the chalk into the floor, watching the tip pulverize into pebbles as she drew. It wicked the sweat from her hands, threatening to snap under her weight. The colors of the room saturated, the lantern light growing starker. Raw creation was flowing through her and suffusing all around her. She was a mage, a blessing and a curse, the burden of duty and the freedom of possibility. Nothing could defile her ward.
She sat down, working at her drawing with the same intensity as her spell, ripping her soul open to the energies of this place and inviting them to flow through her and onto the page. That hand was her only clue to what was in this room with her. She could hear the chandelier rattling and the bottom of her cardigan was swishing. The floor whined under unseen weight. Then a crash.
Milly started. The empty jar lay in pieces on the floor next to the pencil. The wood around it grew darker. No, she had picked that jar up when she arrived. There was nothing in it, nothing that could leak and stain the wood. Yet, an oily substance oozed from it. An antiseptic scent wafted through the air, transporting Milly back to that room, the one with no makeup or posters or jewelry. She was in the rough cotton sheets of her bed again, listening to music and wriggling her finger to the beat, the only sign she was conscious.
She reached into her bag, removing a thick amethyst crystal wrapped in lavender and rosemary and held together with black twine. The power to see the truth and to remember soberly and calmly, bound together by protection. She tossed it into the center of the room like a grenade. The wind and the clinical scent it carried, the unnatural perturbations of this restless entity, died down. What was unnatural would be brought to heel with what was.
Something was feeding on her fears, and letting terror consume her would only make it worse. Milly shook away the cloying misery and lifted her pencil. Whatever the hand was wrapped around was organic, made of curves with two larger pieces at the top and bottom. The hand was taut, flexing, the veins on the back bulging. The nails were clipped short like a man's or . . . Milly looked at her stubby fingernails.
Maybe she would propose to Lydia soon and they'd spend their honeymoon anywhere but Indiana. Or maybe she'd go to grad school and get a Masters. In what? That was a question for later. She was certain she'd go out for ice cream after this, although the McDonald’s ice cream machine was probably broken. Ice cream or no, she and Lydia could watch some dumb B-horror flick, Lydia joking about all that fat and sugar going straight to Milly's chest. Milly closed her eyes and daydreamed.
“Why can't we ever get lucky enough to get attacked by 50 foot women?” Lydia said, stroking Milly's hair.
Milly buried her face in Lydia’s chest, breathing in her scent. Lydia wrapped her arm around Milly and pulled her in.
“I think I give you enough trouble at five feet.” Milly smiled and craned her head up. “I love you.”
“I love you too.” Lydia twirled Milly's hair in her fingers and ran her teeth over her lower lip. “May I?”
Milly nodded and Lydia stroked her cheek before plucking Milly's glasses and setting them on the nightstand. Milly lurched forward, kissing Lydia. There was no dread; Lydia always made sure Milly had them when she needed them. It was passion and vulnerability between lovers and there was nothing more natural in the world.
The natural order would be to respect your mother. Mother knows best, Mildred Ann.
The wind picked up, dragging her back to the house as the intrusive thought slipped through her mind. She turned to the sketch once more, knowing to linger on the doubt would cut into her defenses. The image behind the hand was coalescing, the shading creating contours she recognized but couldn't place.
The still life flew off the wall, wire skittering as it slid across the wooden planks and came to rest at Milly's feet. Her mouth went dry. Her face, distorted and inverted, stared back at her. The bowl was cracked and the rotting, fermenting juices of the fruit seeped into a puddle around it. All four pieces of the frame were disparate stains. Milly picked it up and turned it over, the wire on the back shaking with her own hands. There was no signature, only rusty brown stains. The message was clear: “I can touch you.”
Milly leaned back and closed her eyes, siphoning energy from herself and imagining a sphere around her. Her emotions poured into it, tingeing its flowing walls red and pink. The meaning of the pink she understood. She had to deal with this here and now; Milly could defend herself against this thing, but if it followed her home and cornered Lydia? Lydia knew nothing of this. This wasn't her cross to bear. But the red? Milly didn’t want to think about it.
“I'm not afraid of you!” She shouted at the swinging chandelier and the broken jar.
If there was an answer, it was silent like the radio waves passing through her. The darkness played tricks on her, turning the drawn shadows of the furniture into figures but whatever was there remained unseen. The scent of the antiseptic was back, choking, cloying, filling her mouth with its acrid taste.
She grabbed the sketch and worked at it, her eyes wide and her strokes short and fast. This was her only clue to what she was working against. To destroy it, she needed to identify it. She drew a line and gasped. It was a lower lip, and it belonged to the neck the hand she had drawn was wringing. The supple skin around its grasp creased inwards as it crushed the trachea. The shape of the chin and the curve of the jaw. It wasn’t just any neck, it was–
The lenses of her glasses cracked, the frame twisting, pulling her hair. Milly pushed them off, but something ripped them from her grasp. There was a crack and tinkling as flecks of glass struck everything in the room. Milly reached into her bag, fumbling around. She could feel the shapes of her art supplies and her magical foci, but no glasses case. She must’ve left her spares at the motel. She was myopic and helpless.
The room was twin blurs, one cold blue and the other black. The sketch no longer meant a thing. Every creak of the floor and every pendulum swing of the chandelier echoed out, permeating her consciousness. The click of the rolling pencil came back, moving towards her.
“Fuck.” This was bad, but it wasn't impossible. She had lived through much worse than this. Again, the shapes of the sigils didn’t matter. All that mattered was her belief. The smell made her stomach turn. Milly started to hum again, the notes staccato and sharp. She had to stay calm. She had to stay calm. She had to–
There was a new sound, heavy heel-toed footsteps accompanied by the jingling of a key ring and the rattle of a pill bottle. Anything but this. Milly fell back and out of the chair, pain erupting through her elbow. She emptied her bag and felt for the salt canister. The footfalls were closer. If she didn't have a barrier up–did the previous ones do anything?–she would be in deep shit.
“Mildred Ann, it's time for your medicine,” her mother's voice sang from the adjacent room.
Milly found the canister and ripped off the spout, whipping the contents in a circle around her. She leaned over, drawing more sigils, the footsteps speeding up, then stars filled her vision. She was flat on her ass. Her head rang and warmth gushed from her forehead. Something clattered in front of her. She reached out and found the painting, its glass cracked.
“I’m not scared of you!” she shouted again and threw the painting as hard as she could, satisfied to hear it shatter against something.
“Oh, Mildred Ann, you broke your glasses, what would you ever do without me?” The voice was in the doorway now, menacing ever closer. The footfalls slowed down, savoring every moment of her terror. It was mocking her, unconvinced by her proclamation, and intending to prove its point.
“Stay back!” Milly tossed a handful of salt in the direction of the voice. In her mind, it was a blade charged white with energy meant to slash this being to ribbons. The grains landed on the floor with a soft sound like sand.
“Look at yourself, Mildred Ann, you really are such a crybaby. Your grandma gave it to me so much worse than I treat you.”
A blast of wind rushed past Milly, and her cheeks and teeth ached. Her mouth tasted of metal and bile. She ran her tongue over her teeth, feeling braces. Her hands shot up to her face, swollen and uneven with zits. Her clothes, she didn't have to touch a thing to know her cardigan and leggings had been replaced with one of those frumpy dresses that made her look like a Victorian prude, the same dresses Mother made her wear every day of high school.
This was an illusion. It was all to cow her. She had to hold on. She searched her things for the chalk, smiling when she found a piece. Snap. It broke in half. Snap. Snap. Snap. The chalk broke and then rolled away towards the voice. Something pulled her fingers away and pried the last piece from her hand.
“I really want what's best for you, Mildred Ann.”
Milly closed her eyes and breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth. All she could do was layer and reinforce a small barrier around herself. Defeating it was no longer the priority. Surviving to fight it again was. If she perished, Lydia would come here and be alone with this thing, standing no chance.
The light behind her eyelids grew brighter. She opened her eyes to find the room lit not with the cool LEDs of her lantern but the warm white of the afternoon sun. Something pretending to be her mother stood before her. She'd recognize that shape anywhere even without the glasses. This room was her room. The dark shape of her sketchbook, useless to her now, sat at her desk. Lines of color–more awful dresses–filled her closet. The antiseptic stink became stronger, disrupting her breathing.
“Stop fighting and take your medicine. I’ve had enough of your silly little games.” Her mother leaned down and cupped her face with one hand, shaking an orange bottle in the other hand. “It's for your own good, you horrid, petulant child.”
“This isn't real. You’re not real. None of this is real.” Milly tried to push her hand away, but her forearm passed through empty space. “I’m not your little puppet anymore!”
But what if it was real? What if mother engineered this encounter? What if she projected herself here? What if she was on the chair, shaking her head in disappointment as Milly acted out the nightmare she was trapped in? What if she was asleep and she was still in that sterile room, lying in bed and having a dream that had gone on a decade? She would wake up back in high school, under her mother’s thumb, being lectured about Cornelius Agrippa and Rosicrucians and Neoplatonic world souls. Or worse, what if she needed the medicine all along and instead of a dream, Lydia was a hallucination?
The hand shifted from her cheek to her throat, caressing it for just a moment. Then it clamped down. Milly's hands shot up at once but grasped at nothing. The rim of her vision was going dark, and the sound of rushing blood filled her ears. She fought for each gulp of air, wheezing as the hand constricted. No, this wasn't mother. Mother needed her alive. This was something else, something that was in her head and tugged at the seams of her doubts until her magic was unraveled by her own faltering will.
And now it was going to kill her.
She flailed, limbs growing heavier as they starved for oxygen. Her body’s screaming panic for air shattered her concentration. Magic was impossible now. She was drifting further away, her vision growing darker like falling through a hole in ice. Lydia was going to find her body; she was going to find Milly and never forgive herself. Then it would kill her too. Everything she’d been through, the hell she survived and the life she’d built in spite of it, it was all meaningless.
Her hands brushed the rosemary and amethyst. Remembrance. Words roiled within her, ones that a kilo of Seroquel and a decade of running couldn’t erase. There was a way out, but it would prove mother right. It would prove that what mother did wasn’t entirely in vain. Yet, Lydia would be next if she didn’t debase herself. In her mind’s eye, light shot from her forehead, and she reached her right hand to it.
“Ateh.” The word wasn't even a whisper but the hand loosened. “Malkuth. Ve-Geburah. Ve-Gedulah. Le-Olam, Amen.” There was no thinking, only doing as she executed the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram. The motions poured out, burned into her mind by hours of practice, of standing there in the kitchen and doing it over and over until mother was tired. Sweet air rushed back in.
She snatched a handful of salt and began drawing at once. She had staved off strangulation a little longer but time was not on her side. This sigil was not chaos magic; it had to be precise and she had to do without her sight. Milly closed her eyes, blocking out her own gasping and the hand smashing her throat. She traced the salt around her into a star, invoking the earth, water, air, fire, and spirit. Those triangles all had to come next in the right order and the right position. Milly jerked, narrowly avoiding destroying her progress, as the hand reasserted itself.
She whipped out her hand to the east. At least she thought it was east. Please let it be east. Milly traced the pentagram in the air and pointed to the center.
“Yud. Heh. Vav. Heh.” She caught another breath. She had gotten it right! Milly continued to the south, the west, the north, and finally back to the east. The hand weakened with each invocation, letting more oxygen in. The darkness receded from her vision. The circle was complete now. She visualized an angel in yellow with purple and a great blade.
“Before me, Raphael.” Then it was the blue and orange angel with a cup. Milly turned to the south. No, this was wrong, she had to go to the west. “Behind me, Gabriel.” Now it was to the south. “To my right hand, Michael.” She gestured to the red and green angel with his staff of living wood. She was almost done, the hand was faltering. She could breathe! she could shout! “To my left hand, Auriel.” The archangels invoked, she screamed. “For about me flame the pentagram, and upon me shines the six-rayed star!”
The hand slipped through her, powerless. The red and blue star pulsed through her mind. All she had to do now was the final Qabalistic cross.
“Ateh. Malkuth. Ve-Geburah. Ve-Gedulah. Le-Olam, Amen.”
The illusion shattered like tempered glass. There was no draft. The only smell was of mold and mildew. No chalk or pencil rolled towards her. Not even the settling creaks of the house echoed out. She had done it, she had banished whatever was here. And all it cost her was taking one step closer to being what she reviled. Like grandmother, like mother. Like mother, like daughter. Did she exist? Was she anything other than a foil to her mother? Was her mother right? Was her magic inferior?
Milly brought her phone close to her face, tears dripping onto the screen. She managed to unlock it and speed dial Lydia.
“Hey, babe, you're calling early. Is everything ok?”
Milly opened her mouth but could only sob. She was here, blind and alone. Something had tried to kill her, and she had to keep it a secret. Worse, she was like her mother.
“Milly, babe, what’s wrong?!”
“I scared myself, tripped, and broke my glasses.” That was a sane explanation that didn't expose Lydia to anything supernatural. She’d need to find cover for the bruises around her neck.
“Oh my God.” She could hear Lydia getting up and grabbing her purse. “I'll grab your spares and get there as soon as I can. You're ok, babe, she’s not there. She can’t hurt you anymore.”
“Can we get ice cream?” Milly sniffled, needing Lydia more than anything in the world right now.
“Of course! We'll go straight from there. I love you. I’m here for you.”
“Thank you.”
“Do you have your headphones?” What would Milly ever do without this woman? “Put on your playlist and close your eyes and I'll come get you.”
Milly found the tangled cord stuck under her pencil case.
“Yeah, I’ve got them.”
“Okay. I'll be there soon. I love you.”
“See you soon. I love you too.” Milly hung up and plugged in her headphones. It was difficult to get the music started, but once she did, she put her head between her knees and wept. Magic was a curse, one that defined who she was just as much as what her mother had done to her, and yet, it was the only way to protect the woman she loved. Unlike glasses, mother couldn’t take love away.