He had no idea if she was twelve or twenty-two. Of course, Danny mostly wasn’t sure about himself. He knew what his ID card said, the stupid fake driver’s license they gave to people who couldn’t drive so those people who were completely undeserving of pity or scorn could get a bus pass or cash an SSI check. His ID card said he was twenty-two, but lots of times Danny felt twelve.
Almost never in a good way.
“This your stuff?” She turned the retainer over in her fingers as if she’d never seen one.
“Nah.” Danny stared at the broken branches sticking out from under his thighs. “They belonged to some other guy I met up on the roof.”
She laughed, her voice soft as Sister Moon’s light. “You should tell that other guy he’d get farther with a silver athame than with a stainless steel butter knife.”
“It’s the edge that counts,” Danny said through his pout.
The girl bent close. He could almost hear the smile in her voice, though he wouldn’t meet her eye. “You’d be surprised how many people don’t know that,” she said, so near to him that her breath was warm on his face. “A sharpened paper clip and grass cuttings will serve for most rituals, if the will is strong enough and the need is great.”
Now he looked up. She was smiling at him, and not in the let’s-smack-the-stupid-kid-around way he’d grown used to over the years. Then she reached into her sleeve and pulled out a short, slightly curved blade that gleamed dully under the gaze of Sister Moon. “Try this one,” she said, handing it to him, “and look on page 238 of the Booke of Dayes.”
Danny stared at the knife a moment, then glanced up again. She was gone. Not mysteriously, magically vanished—he could hear the girl singing in the street as she picked up a bicycle and pedaled away with the faint clatter of chain and spokes. But still gone.
The knife, though … Touching it, he drew blood from his fingertip. Wow, he thought, then raced inside to read page 238 by flashlight under the covers.
Reversal of Indifference
Betimes the Practitioner hath wrought some error of ritual, perhaps through inattention, or even a fault of the Web of the world in disturbance about zir sacred space, and so the Practitioner hath lost the full faith and credit of the kindlier spirits as well as the older, quieter Forces in the World.
Zie may in such moments of tribulation turn to the Reversal of Indifference, which shall remake the rent asundered in the fabric of the Practitioner’s practice, and so invite the beneficent forces once more within zir circle of influence. Thus order may be restored to the business of the World, and the Practitioner rest easier in zir just reward.
Zie should gather three mice, material with which to bind their Worldly selves, and all the tools of the Third Supplicative Form before attempting the exercise in the workbook for this section.
Danny didn’t have the workbook—he’d only found Mother Urban’s Booke of Dayes by accident in the first place. He’d checked, though; the workbook wasn’t available on Amazon or anywhere. So he’d done without. Most of the time he’d been able to sort out the needed ritual, trusting in his own good faith to bridge any gaps. This was not so different. He understood the Third Supplicative Form well enough. Still, he’d never noticed the Reversal of Indifference before.
It was such a big book, with so many pages.
Mice, and binding, though. There were mice in the basement, in the heater room and sometimes in the laundry closet. He went to set out peanut butter in the bottom of a tall trash bucket, built a sort of ramp up to the lip of the bucket out of a stack of dog-eared Piers Anthony novels, then considered how to bind the sacrificial animals once they were his.
* * *
The answer, as it so often seemed to be, was duct tape. Danny was excited enough to want to try the Reversal of Indifference that same night. He had his new athame, and the star had certainly sent him a detailed message in the mouth of that strange Asian girl. A practitioner could only be so lucky, and he aimed to use his luck for all it was worth.
Danny had harvested four mice within the hour, so he left one inside the trash bucket for a spare in case he made a mistake. One by one, he took the other three and wrapped them in duct tape. They were trembling, terrified little silver mummies, only their shifting black eyes and quivering noses protruding.
“Sorry, little guys,” he whispered, feeling a bit sick. But magic was serious business, the lifeblood of the world, and he had failed to call down the rain.
No one would miss a few mice.
Then Danny made himself sicker wondering if one of the mice was a mother, and would little mouse babies starve in some nest behind the walls.
He shifted his thoughts away with the heft of the athame in his hand. The knife was tiny, but nothing felt like silver. The Third Supplicative Form—as best as Danny understood without the workbook available—was a long chant followed by the delivery of the sacrifice. Usually he sacrificed a candy bar, or maybe a dollar bill. In tonight’s case, the sacrifice was obvious.
This time Danny remembered to take the battery out of the smoke alarm. Then he lit his candles, purified his hands in the bowl of Costco olive oil, and began the chant. The mice shivered on the altar, one little mummy actually managing to roll over and almost fall off onto the green shag. He nudged it back into place and tried to concentrate on magical thoughts instead of what he was about to do.
When the moment came, the mice bled more than he thought they could. One managed to bite his finger before dying. Still, he laid them in the hibachi, squirted Ronson lighter fluid on them, and flicked them with the Bic. The duct tape burned with a weird, sticky kind of smell, while the mice were like tiny roasts.
Guilt-ridden, Danny grabbed the trash bucket to go free the last mouse into the yard, but halfway up the basement stairs he had to throw up. By the time he got outside, the last mouse had drowned in the pool of vomit, floating inert with the potato chunks and parsley flecks from dinner.
He washed his mouth and hands for a long time, but still went to bed feeling grubby and ill.
* * *
Morning brought rain.
Danny lay in his little bed—he had to curl up to even lie in the blue race car, but Mom kept insisting how much he’d loved the thing when he was seven—and listened to water patter on the roof. Portland rain, like taking a shower with the tap on low. It didn’t rain so much in August, but it was never this dry either.
He’d done it.
Sky had heard him, and returned blessings to the land.
Danny didn’t know if it was the girl’s athame, or the mice, or just more careful attention to the Booke of Dayes. He wanted to bounce out of bed and write Mother Urban another letter to her post office box in New Jersey, but he wanted more to run outside and play in the rain.
Then he thought some more about the mice, and looked at the red spot on his finger where one of them had bitten him, and wept a while into his pillow.
* * *
It rained for days, as if this were February and the Pacific storms were pouring over the Coastal Mountains one after another. Danny performed the Daily Observances and leafed through the Booke of Dayes in his quiet moments to see what else he’d missed besides the Reversal of Indifference. Mostly he let Sky take care of the land and wondered when he’d see Father Sun again.
Mom seemed distracted, too. Danny knew she loved him, but she was so busy with her work and taking care of the house, she didn’t always remember to hug him like their therapist said to, or feed him like their doctor said to.
That was okay. He could hug himself when he needed, and there was always something to eat in the kitchen.
So mostly Danny mooned around the house, watched the rain fall, and wished he could take the bus to Lowe’s to look for new magical herbs in the garden center. He wasn’t allowed TV, and there wasn’t much else to do except read Mother Urban or one of his fantasy novels.
Except as the days went by, the rain did not let up. First Mom became angry about her tomatoes. Then he saw a dea
d puppy bumping down the gutter out front, drowned and washing away in a Viking funeral without the burning boat. The news kept talking about the water, and how the East Side Sewer Project wasn’t ready for the overflow, and whether the Willamette River would reach flood stage, and which parks had been closed because the creeks were too swollen to be safe.
Danny watched outside to see if the Asian girl came by again on her bike. He wanted to ask her what to do now, what to do next. There was no point in climbing the roof to ask Sky—the only answer he would get there was a faceful of water and Oregon’s endless, featureless dirty cotton flannel rainclouds.
If anything, Sky was even less informative in such a rain than when Father Sun shouted the heat of his love for the world.
So Danny sat by the dining room window looking out on the street and leafed through Mother Urban’s Booke of Dayes for anything he could find about rain, about water, about asking the sun to return once more.
He read all about the Spelle for a Seizure of the Bladder, but realized after a while that wasn’t the right kind of water. Maidens’ Tears & the Love of Zir Hearte had seemed promising, but even from the first words, Danny knew better. Still, he’d studied the lists of rose hips and the blood of doves and binding cords braided from zir hair. Closer, in a way, was the Drain Cantrip, though that seemed more straightforward, being a spell of baking soda and vinegar and gravity.
Danny tried to imagine how much baking soda and vinegar it would take to open up the world to swallow all this rain.
The news talked about people packing sandbags along the waterfront downtown. All the floodgates were open in the dam at Oregon City. A girl drowned in the Clackamas River at Gladstone, trying to feed bedraggled ducks. A grain barge slipped its tow and hit a pillar of the Interstate Bridge, shutting down the Washington-bound traffic for days.
All his fault. All this water.
He prayed. He stood before his altar and begged. He even tried the roof one night, but only managed to sprain his ankle slipping—again—on the way down. And he read the Booke of Dayes. Studying it so closely, Danny realized that Mother Urban must have been a very strange author, because often he could not find the same spell twice, yet would locate spells he’d never seen before in all his flipping through the book.
Meanwhile, his own mother complained about the weather, set buckets in the living room and bathroom under the leaks, and sent Danny to the basement or his bedroom more often than not. Something had happened to her job—too wet to work outdoors at the Parks Department—and she stopped using the TiVo, just watching TV through the filter of gin all day and all night. He wasn’t sure she slept anymore.
Danny was miserable. This was all his fault. He never should have listened to the Asian girl, never should have killed those mice, not even for a ritual. If only he could bring them back to life, or set that stupid, fateful star back into the sky.
He couldn’t undo what was done, but maybe he could do something else. That was when he had his big idea. It couldn’t rain everywhere, right? If he worked the ritual again, somewhere else, the rain would leave Oregon behind to move on. Things would be better again, for Mom, for his neighbors, for the people fighting the flood. For everyone!
Excited but reluctant, Danny caught five more mice. He put them in a Little Oscar cooler with some newspaper, along with cheese and bread to eat, and pounded holes in the lid with a hammer and a screwdriver so they could breathe. He gathered the rest of his materials—the silver athame, duct tape, the brass bowl, the bottle of Costco olive oil, the Ronson lighter fluid—and stuffed all of it in his dorky Transformers knapsack.
All he needed was money for a bus ticket to Seattle. They wouldn’t even notice the extra rain there. Mom never really slept, but she was full of gin all the time now, and spent a lot of her day breathing through her mouth and staring at nothing. Danny waited for her noises to get small and regular, then crept into her room.
“Mom,” he said quietly.
She lay in her four-poster bed, the quilted coverlet spotted with gin and ketchup. Her housedress hung open, so Danny could see her boobs flopping, even the pink pointy nipples, which made him feel weird in a sick-but-warm way. Her head didn’t turn at the sound of his voice.
“Momma, I’m hungry.” That wasn’t a lie, though mostly he’d been eating the strange old canned food at the back of the pantry for days.
She snorted, then slumped.
“Momma, I’m taking some money from your purse to go buy food.” There was the lie, the one he’d get whipped for, and have to pray forgiveness at the altar later on. Mother Urban’s Booke of Dayes was very clear on the penalties for a Practitioner’s lying to the Spirit Worlde.
But without the money, he could not move the rain. Besides, surely he’d buy food on the way to Seattle. So it wasn’t really a lie.
He reached into her purse, pushed aside the pill bottles and lipsticks and doctor’s shots to find her little ladybug money purse. Too scared to count it out, Danny took the whole thing and fled without kissing his mother good-bye or tucking her boobs back in her dress or even locking the front door.
* * *
Danny’s pass got him on the number 33 bus downtown. Even in the floods, Tri-Met kept running. The bus’s enormous wheels seemed to be able to splash through deep puddles where cars were stuck. The rain had soaked him on the way to the bus stop, and at the bus shelter, and even now its clear fingers were clawing at the window to drag him out. Danny clutched his Little Oscar cooler and his Transformers knapsack and stared out, daring the rain to do its worst.
If he made the rain mad enough, and Sky, who was both mother and father of the rain, maybe it would follow him to Seattle even without the Reversal of Indifference.
* * *
The Greyhound station downtown had a sign on the door that said NO SERVICE TODAY DUE TO INCLEMENT WEATHER. Danny wasn’t sure exactly what “inclement” meant, but he understood the sign.
He sat out front and stared at the train station down the street, crying. It was in the rain, no one would notice him in tears. The Little Oscar emitted scratching noises as the mice did whatever it was mice did in the dark. He knew he should draw out Mother Urban’s Booke of Dayes and try to work out what to do next.
Then the girl on the bike showed up again. She came splashing through puddles with a big smile on her face, as though this flood were a sprinkler on a summer lawn. The bike skidded sideways in front of him, splashing Danny with grimy water. She leapt off like she was performing some great trick, and let her bicycle fall over into the flooded gutter.
“So how’s your edge, Danny?” she asked brightly.
He couldn’t remember that he’d ever told the girl his name. It wasn’t like he knew hers. “Th-this is all your fault!” he blurted.
Somewhere out in the rain a ship’s horn bellowed, long and slow. The bus station was near the waterfront, Danny knew.
The girl’s grin expanded. “Somebody’s going to hit the Broadway Bridge.”
“You s-set me up.”
“No, Danny.” She leaned close, her hands on her knees. “I just told you how to do what you wanted. You set you up. A Practitioner must know zir Practice.”
He was startled out of his growing pout. “You know everything about the Booke of Dayes, don’t you? Tell me, how do I fix this?”
Another laugh. “Think,” she said. “Smart kid like you doesn’t have to go to Seattle to stop the rain.”
“I been doing nothing but think for days!” The tears started up. “People been drowning, that p-puppy, Mom’s got no w-work, the tomatoes are rotting…” Danny screwed his eyes shut to shut the tears off, just like Mom always made him do.
When the girl’s voice spoke hot-breathed in his ear, he squeaked like a duct-taped mouse. “What’s the name of the ritual, Practitioner?”
“R-reversal of Indifference.”
“What does that mean?”
He wasn’t stupid! Danny concentrated, like they’d always tried to make him do in sch
ool. Reversal … reversal … The meaning hit him suddenly. “You can turn something around from either direction,” he said with a gasp.
She clapped her hands with glee. “And so…?”
“And so…” Danny let his thoughts catch up with his words. He could see this thread, like a silver trail in the sky, tying a star back into place. “And so I can make Sky stop thinking about rain on Portland, make Sky take the rain back.”
“Bravo!” Her eyes sparkled with pure delight.
“Wh-what’s your n-name?” he asked, completely taken in by the girl’s expression.
“Geneva,” she said, serious but still amused. “Geneva Fairweather.”
* * *
He squatted on the bench in front of the Greyhound station and opened the Little Oscar. Five sets of beady eyes looked from a reek of piss and damp animal. Danny already had his duct tape out, but when he reached for the first mouse, he remembered that it was the edge that counted. Geneva Fairweather had said you could work most rituals with a sharpened paper clip and grass cuttings.
So maybe he didn’t need to kill three mice. Or even tape them into tiny mummies to bind them. His fist would hold the mouse. The athame was sharp enough to prick three drops of blood from the mouse’s back. The poor animal squirmed and squealed, but it was not dead. He folded the blood into a corner of paper torn from Mother Urban’s Booke of Dayes, and followed the ritual from there.
Within moments, the rain slackened and Father Sun peeked down for the first time in three weeks. Danny turned to Geneva. “See? I could do it!”
A distant bicycle splashed through the puddles. She was gone.
Still, it didn’t matter. Danny knew he’d done something important. Real important. And Geneva Fairweather would be back, he was sure of it.
As for Danny, if he could do this, how much more could he do?