Jim keeps coming in, looking at me, saying a few words, and leaving. He did so twice before I started typing, and once since I set down the paragraph engraved above. I have the impression he is worried about me. It is a good feeling to know that someone worries about you. I worry about Susan, but, as I type, she is safe in another room behind thick walls.
Let us put everything in order, as if the cold, evenly spaced letters were reflections of a calm, well-ordered mind, unmoved by turmoil within or distractions without, and I will note in passing that, were the walls of this house less thick, I might not be able to write at all. And from this, I am given to wonder if it matters, but leave that.
Let me return my thoughts to midnight, an eternity and a few short hours ago, when Jim and I came down to the parlor. Dust had gathered on the oak coat tree, but the maple floor still shone like new. There were a couple of sheets stuck into a corner, as if someone had used them to cover furniture and then abandoned them when the furniture was moved. The ceiling fixture hung in the center, impotent from lack of gas or bulbs.
I stood in the middle of the room and picked up the blue yarn. I held it for a moment, caressing it and wondering and thinking about what was to come. If what I was about to do was anything other than nonsense, than it was a skill, and it is the nature of skills that they improve with practice; I was trying something very difficult, and very important, as my first effort in ritual magic.
Yet, and it makes me smile ironically to consider it, that was not what nearly prevented me from beginning; nor was it the fear of the consequences from Kellem if I failed; rather it was the thought, as I contemplated the ritual whose steps I had so carefully memorized, that it was an absurd series of things to be doing and saying.
My conversation with the old woman kept coming back. “The state of your mind will be most important as you perform the ritual,” she had said.
“But how can I control the state of my mind?”
“That’s what the ritual is for.”
“Circular reasoning,” I said.
“It is not,” she had said, “a reasonable matter.”
I slowly laid the yarn out in a circle around myself and my tools, walking clockwise and saying, “May flames consume the evil around me, may Mother Earth shield me from evil, may the winds blow evil from me, and the oceans wash the evil away.” I laid three rows of the yarn, repeating this as I went.
To be perfectly honest, it felt ridiculous, especially with Jim watching, and I kept wondering if the old woman had lied to me; at the same time, I tried to put meaning into the hollow-sounding phrases. But what is “evil”? If there is such a thing, then could it not describe me? Or is it relative and practical-with evil defined as anything the practitioner doesn’t like? I didn’t know and I still don’t; only now I no longer care; then I must have, for such were my thoughts as I walked the fairy ring.
When it was done, I set the candle in the center, and lit it; the sound of the kitchen match igniting seemed unnaturally loud, as did the sputtering of the wax when the wick caught. The fire danced and flickered, making shadows on the walls-shadows of the coat tree and of the ceiling fixture, from which false crystals hung, throwing shades like a thousand little knives. For just a moment, I thought I saw Jim’s shadow, wavering in and out of existence in time to the dance of the flame, but perhaps not. I sat down on the floor, facing south.
I picked up needle, thread, and cloth, and began work on the poppet; I found it rather easier to make than I’d expected. I discovered that I ought to have purchased a thimble, but its lack was only an annoyance. And, as I sewed, I thought about Laura Kellem-everything she had done to me and for me, the things we had shared, the hatreds I had accrued. I had no hairs from her head, nor parings of her fingernails, as the recipe called for, but I had a piece of the mountain ash, and shavings of wild rose, and a crude drawing of her that I had made on a small piece of cardboard, and I had memories, and these things went into the poppet of black silk, sewn with black thread.
It was strange work. I would think of Kellem, perhaps remembering nights spent riding through the London Underground, doing nothing but laughing and joking and watching people, and then I would be distracted by the back of the needle poking into my thumb, and then I would think of Susan, sleeping on the chair in the next room, and then I would remember the hospital room, and I would hate.
And as I worked, I began to say her name, over and over, until it became a chant; an image of her began to grow in my mind. I held it there, still chanting. My hands went through the sewing motions on their own, and I had no need to concentrate on the chant, either; my only thoughts were of Laura Kellem and the image of her that grew until it seemed almost three-dimensional, hanging in the air before my mind’s eye.
After a time, the poppet was finished.
Then I stopped chanting, held it before me, looked at it, and said, “You are Laura Kellem.” And I meant it. There was no longer any feeling of absurdity to my actions; the rite had taken me, and was working me as I worked it. As the cigany had said, that must be the purpose of ritual; it guided me into what I must feel, the way an irrigation ditch will guide water; it doesn’t matter if the water doesn’t take the ditch seriously, it still goes where it must.
I felt as if my actions were those of a weaver and what I was weaving was myself, all my actions, all of my being, all of my desires into a tapestry of hope and will. Yet, at the same time, there was the curious sense of being outside of it all, of standing next to myself watching as I went through these strange motions, said these strange things, and hoped for this impossible and inevitable outcome.
I set the poppet aside and picked up a piece of white thread, and three knots I made in it, and as I made the knots I said, “So I am bound. So I am bound. So I am bound.” The words echoed in my head as they reverberated through the room, and who knows how much was real, and who cares?
And in black thread I wrapped the poppet, very tight, covering it all, and saying, “You cannot touch me. You cannot see me. You cannot harm me. You cannot touch me. You cannot see me. You cannot harm me. You cannot touch me. You cannot see me. You cannot harm me.”
And when she was bound so that no trace of her remained uncovered I held her before me and pronounced, with terrible clarity, “You have no power over me.” I wanted to believe that, and I almost did, too; I had a feeling like the twang of a plucked cello string, somewhere below the level of my awareness. But I didn’t know if I heard it inside my head, in the room, or somewhere else entirely, and by this time I couldn’t slow down to consider.
I cut off the end of the black thread and I tied it into three knots, and I think I said something then, too, but I can no longer remember what it was; I think a verse or two of a poem by Byron.
I set the poppet down, and I suddenly knew that Kellem was in the room, in the flesh, and she was speaking, powerfully, urgently; I felt her more than heard her, but it seemed to come from a great distance. For an instant the ritual wavered, but my hands knew what to do, even as my nerve faltered. I stuck the white thread into the candle’s flame, and as the three knots burned, I felt my lips move, and I heard myself saying, “So I am free.”
It was unmistakable now; the rumble of bass strings, a shiver up my spine; the feeling of a weight being suddenly lifted from my shoulders, a weight I had not, until then, known I bore. But now that I felt it, I knew, too, that it had been lightened, not removed entirely, and my determination rose with my hopes.