Chapter 1: Chapter One - Teresa

Chapter One – Teresa

“Hey Tam? Come check if I’m seeing things.”

For a few long seconds, the echoes of my shout were the only thing I could hear, drowning out the distant drone of my sister’s speaker down on the second floor. Between the unfamiliar emptiness of the house and the thing in front of me, it was enough to start raising goosebumps. Until Tam called back even louder.

“I told you not to eat the brownies in the fridge! What’re you hallucinating?”

“Just come up here, ok? This is weird.”

While I waited for her to get here, I sat down the cleaning supplies I’d been carrying up. For a second, I could’ve sworn I saw something in the reflection of the water. Something grey on the mirror behind me. It was probably just a trick of the light – everything up here was dark wood and trellised red and gold wallpaper, except for the mirrors. Nothing grey – not even on the door-shaped chunk of wall sitting at an angle that I was completely sure hadn’t been there growing up.

“What is it?”

I pointed.

“Oh, cool! Secret room! I win the bet!”

She slung an arm around me even as I went to push her away. “Come on, this is seriously weird! This place hasn’t been the same since the funeral, Tammy. I don’t like it.”

She squeezed my shoulder and nodded, the grin falling off her face. “I know, Tere. It feels wrong to be here without him. We’ve just gotta take it one step at a time, remember? You don’t want to deal with this today – we don’t have to. I know you want to get the cleaning done this week, but we should take a rain check. The pizza’ll be here soon, let’s go down and take a break.”

I started to argue, but she had a point. I sighed, “Let’s go. I just don’t get why we’re finding it now.”

She looked back at the mirror-lined hallway and shrugged.

“Maybe he wanted us to?”

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“I wish we’d just closed the door and forgotten this existed.”

“You just don’t like books. This place is awesome.”

Tam pointedly looked around, then stomped her foot hard enough to send up a puff of dust to join the pall covering the room. Shafts of sunlight fell through the long, thin windows I’d never noticed from outside. They splayed across shelves full of books of every shape and size, not quite dropping down to the floor or the desk yet. It was, literally, my idea of paradise.

Well – if you ignored the bird skeletons on an end table, or the symbols scratched and burnt into the room, and the chandelier full of half-melted candles that had splattered across a big swathe of the floor. Those weren’t ideal. And I guess I’d have preferred readable things instead of…whatever these were.

“Teresa, you’re the one that called this place creepy when we found the door. It’s full of nonsense things that sound like a cultist’s college textbook list. Like, seriously.” She trailed a finger along the shelf and read off a few titles. “Principles of Summoning – 4th Edition. Encyclopedia Ephemeral – 2nd Edition. Iron and Salt; Defying the Fair Courts. On Roads, the Wood, and what lies Beyond. The Sixteen and the Three: Modern Elemental Theory.”

“In Grandad’s defense, at least two of those sound like something I’d pick up if I saw it in a bookstore. Sure it’s a bit weird, but this is the kind of secret I lived for as a kid. I wonder why he hid it.”

We’d gotten through about half of a bookcase so far, packing them down and separating out the ones in English and the ones that weren’t. A lot of those had weirdly textured covers and looked like some mix of handwritten and handbound. There was a third stack of boxes where I dropped the ones I wanted to keep for myself.

Tam’s response was to throw a wax-stained copy of Fifty Shades of Gray at me from the desk. I swatted it away and into the trashbag we’d brought in.

“I can’t believe that I have to be the reasonable one here, but maybe be glad that Gramps wasn’t the kind of guy who took little girls into a secret, soundproofed, room full of bones…”

“He wasn’t like that though! And it’s not like anything in here’s actually dangerous – we couldn’t even have gotten at those candles, and the shelves are bolted to the wall. Can you really say you didn’t fantasize about stuff like this as a kid? Secret rooms, finding something magical? Sure it’s just a bunch of dusty old books and…that…” I shuddered as I glanced at the heinous book in the trash. “…but I’d still have loved it here!”

She shook her head and hopped up onto the desk to sit. The skeletons wobbled but didn’t fall over.

“Nope, I was too busy chasing the dogs and following cats up trees. Didn’t read those Treehouse books you were always curled up in the window seats with.”

“I stayed inside because you dragged me into a tree and then dropped me! My elbow clicked for almost a year even once it healed!”

“We were fucking seven! I didn’t know it was a raccoon I was chasing, or that it would jump at us! Besides, it’s not my fault you let go instead of hugging the branch.”

That didn’t deserve a response, so I just turned away and went back to work. More books went down into their boxes – including the row that she’d read off. Each thud left one of the bird skeletons juddering. It was weird – I couldn’t even see the rods keeping it together. That taxidermist must’ve been really good at their job.

I didn’t get why Grandad had put claw marks under its little perch, though. That was a creepy touch. And its empty eyes – the inside of its skull was still in complete shadow.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

“I just – I can’t believe he’s really gone.”

“Me either, Tere.”

I tore my gaze away from those empty eyes to blink away a surge of tears. My eyes landed on one of the circles carved into the floor, one that I’d been about to step into the middle of.

I wiped my eyes on my least dusty sleeve and got back to work.

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One thing I’d learned growing up with Tammy was that she didn’t work on the same schedule as a normal person. Another: the worst thing about living with her was that she didn’t really have a sense of time or propriety. Which meant she thought it was perfectly fine to bang on my door at two in the morning on a Wednesday.

This wasn’t even the first time.

“I know you’re awake by now! I’ve been doing this for five minutes – either you’re dead or you’re being obstinate.”

“Just because you finally learned a big word or two doesn’t mean you can wake me up for another of your ‘adventures’. Go away or I swear I’m going to sneak orange dye in your shampoo right before a date.”

“Bitch, you know I’d rock that. Just come on – this is important. I promise, you’ll want to see it!”

“If you drop another dead snake down my shirt, I’m throwing you out the window and leaving you out there for a week. Not everyone can subsist entirely on caffeine and pizza pockets. So unless you’re bleeding out and can’t see to drive to the emergency room – Let. Me. Sleep.”

I threw one of my slippers at the door, missing by a mile, then pulled my pillow tighter over my ears.

The pounding stopped, but there weren’t any footsteps. I’d only just started to relax when she knocked again, softer.

“Fine. Those books we found? They’re real. Come see.”

“Uh huh. Of course they are Tam, we’ve both got the papercuts to prove it. I wish they’d been imaginary after the sore throat I got from that dust. I’m glad you finally came around to reading – we can start a cult bookclub tomorrow. Just go to bed.”

She smacked the wall.

“No! They’re Real! Like, real-real. My hand is literally on fire right now.”

“You’re high again? Where do you keep getting that stuff, is it even legal here yet?”

The handle on my door rattled. She didn’t have a key because of precisely this situation, but she just wouldn’t give up. When I finally threw my pillow off to the side, the room wasn’t dark.

There was a flickering orange glow seeping in under my door.

No way.

“If you set something on fire to trick me…”

A lot of grumbling and some shuffling later, I threw the door open and froze.

Tam was there. She was a mess. The cerulean strands of her hair were clustered into a frizzy puff on one side, the way it always ended up when she rubbed it into the couch. The other side hung low across her face, each lock picked out in stark relief by the dancing light in her palm.

Fire. Wavering and yellow, it coated her nails like a sheen of opalescent oil before curling up and away into the breeze from the AC.

“I – you – what!? What on Earth did you do? Is…are you ok?”

I went to grab her hand but jerked back when I felt the heat.

“The books. The fucking books!” She shook her hand and the fire went out, the only sign they’d been there at all the afterimage in my eyes and the faint smell of heat. “I was screwing around with one of them. And then – this! It worked, it actually fucking worked!

I started to say something, stopped, then walked back to grab my pillow. After a nice long scream into it – how was it fair that my twin discovered magic first? That was my dream! – I turned around and went back to her.

“Tell me everything.”

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This was absolutely, positively, one-hundred-percent unfair. We had magic. Actual, real life, magic. The stuff I’d dreamed of for as long as I could remember. It should’ve been amazing.

But it was just…useless.

I could barely pull off the fire trick that Tammy had found. She got candles, I got sparks. The other exercises in the book weren’t much better. They were like cantrips – it didn’t call them that, but for mostly-useless spells that even clueless people like us could pull off, that was all I could think of them as. Tam could make a pebble roll over like she’d just barely tapped it with her foot, but it didn’t work for me. I could make a bowl of water sit at a little bit of an angle though, and I could make wind blow a little faster than she could. It was fun for keeping a paper-airplane aloft, but the novelty of that got old fast.

I could honestly say I never expected to think that about magic.

The book phrased them as fundamentals for learning to work with what it called the Prime Quartet, and it was harder to read than some of the textbooks at our boarding school. I didn’t know how Tam had gotten far enough in it to start all this, but I was sort of wishing she hadn’t. If all we were getting was party tricks that nobody would believe, what was the point?

Maybe it was just the book though – it looked like some 1700s-version of a college textbook. Black embossed letter in a worn leather binding spelling out A Primer on the Prime Quartet. It wasn’t handwritten, except for the notes that Grandad had scribbled in the margins. The red ink he always liked using stood out, and the parts he’d written around were what we managed to figure things out from. Even his notes kept talking about what sounded like technical talk for ‘magic veins’ and how to set up exercises better than the book’s.

As best as I could tell, this book, the notes, and everything else we could get close to understanding assumed we should be able to see or feel or…something… like that the magic.

Which obviously, we couldn’t.

Digging through the boxes we’d already moved out of the office didn’t help much. Most of the books were more historical – they talked about magic in use, not about how to use magic. Stories of wars that google said hadn’t happened, alternate accounts of how major events that we could find on Wikipedia became motivations for wars, bestiaries that listed fantasy creatures the same way a reference book would describe flowers or different kinds of toads…

And that’s just the ones that were in English. There were a couple in Latin that we hadn’t been taught nearly enough to actually read, a few that looked like French and German, and huge piles that we just…couldn’t tell. Some looked more pictographic than anything written in an alphabetic language.

Some of those had ink that looked…disturbingly cracked and brown.

Most of what we found that was actually readable ended up being biographies. Surprisingly thick ones, and all of them from the same author. Johnathan Rames. A man who, also according to google, didn’t exist.

Publishers marks going all the way from 1830 to 1975 made me pretty sure that it was a pseudonym. Sure, magic was real, but immortality?

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“Tere! Breaks over, put down the smut!”

Tam’s shout sent blood rushing to my face as I dropped a rather…descriptive account of a coven of witches apparently dedicated to seducing monarchs. It wasn’t immediately clear if it was historical or fictional – just like half the books we’d found – but it was interesting, unlike nearly everything else I’d picked up in the last few days.

“Uh – I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

The book bounced off the pile in front of me, sending it over to the side and leaving a thin book bound in black leather sliding out onto my lap. I was about to set it aside when I saw the cover.

Its original title was crossed out, a replacement scrawled in grandad’s crimson script underneath it as if it had always been part of the leather.

“I uh, think I might have something here? It’s got his writing on the cover. He crossed out the old title, so this might be promising? It’s uh – Unsealing the Eyen of the Minde. There’s an extra ‘e’ on the mind part and I think that other thing means eyes? He just wrote Awakenings under it.”

Tam came over from her pile, and together we started skimming it. Between the notes in the margins and the passages that weren’t blocked out in red ink, we managed to piece together that it was talking about a ritual – about multiple versions with the same purpose. One that both it and the notes emphasized as being essential to becoming a mage.

One that was phrased as literally the first step in an apprentice’s education.