Enter Three Witches

ENTER THREE

WITCHES

Kate Gilmore

For Valerie and Eric

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

September is a month of mixed emotions—anticipation, hope, and a pang of sorrow for the summer that is suddenly, irrevocably lost. The weather intensifies this sense of a divided heart. One day it’s hot enough to swim—but school has just begun. Then a cold rain makes one think of being under the covers with a book. September is sunlight with a little edge, a time when promise and regret mingle, bringing that slight pain in the chest that is almost like fear. And the days run out so fast. To Bren, who would live in Central Park if he had a tent, the shortening afternoons imparted a sensation close to panic.

The small private school on West Eighty-ninth Street ran until four. In many ways Bren liked his shabby, friendly, and often stimulating school. Unfortunately, the last class of the day was economics, and it was held in a room that had a tantalizing view of the street. Through the long windows he could see the light changing on the leafy branches of the plane trees, an agonizing reminder of the passage of time. When the bell finally rang, he dashed for the door, only to stop with a groan as he saw that Eli was going up to Mr. Steiner’s desk to ask a question. Eli, his best friend since sandbox days, had funny ideas about how to spend the last hours of a beautiful day.

“Come
on
, Eli,” Bren called from the door when the endless question seemed to have been answered. “It’s getting dark, you creep.”

Eli glanced out at the still glowing afternoon. “So go,” he said. “It’s not as if I don’t know where to find you.” But Bren waited, and they walked together toward his house, where they would pick up a Frisbee and a large black dog.

Shadow was a Newfoundland of heroic proportions and a champion Frisbee player, which was fortunate because Eli had a tendency to duck when anything more menacing than a leaf passed through his private air space. Bren knew that Eli would rather be at home, gloating over the microprocessors, converters, and gently humming power supplies that occupied all but a small corner of his bedroom. Instead he went to the park and watched Bren play with his dog.

They reached the place Bren favored for his game. “Why do I do this?” Eli asked, as he tried to find a perch for his bony backside halfway up a small hill, where he hoped the Frisbee would not find him in its murderous horizontal course. “Every day I ask myself the same question, and every day I come up with the same answer: Eli Wilder, you must be crazy.”

“It’s my magnetic personality,” Bren said. “Here you go, Shadow, old boy. First an easy one. Get your reflexes tuned up.”

A practiced flick of the wrist, and the Frisbee sailed under the autumn trees, in and out of the golden shafts of light that fell on the worn grass of Central Park. A hundred yards away the great dog crouched, his muscles taut but still, no motion wasted until the last second, when a single economical leap and snap of massive jaws secured the prize.

The game had a theme with only two variations. Sometimes Shadow brought the Frisbee to Bren. Sometimes he pranced away with it, tail wagging, brown eyes shining with mischief.

“Here! Stop, thief! Give me that, you monster,” Bren shouted. “Come on, Eli. Don’t just sit there. Head him off.”

With a sigh, Eli closed his book, dived down the hill, and wrestled Shadow to the ground. “You could train this beast better,” he said, as Bren came panting to the fray. “Train him better or find a more athletic friend.”

“More athletic than you, or more athletic than Shadow?” Bren asked.

“Than me, you nit. When I think that I could be listening to the Ninth and finishing those circuits.”

“Eli,” Bren said, crouching with one arm over the dog’s dusty shoulders, “Eli, my friend, think. Winter is coming. You can wire circuits till your eyes drop out, but
this
can’t last.” Bren made an expansive gesture at the autumn glory of the park and fell over in the grass. Eli laughed. Shadow barked and jumped on top of Bren.

Back on his feet, Frisbee in hand, Bren paused and looked with disapproval at the fading light. “You see,” he said, “it’s almost gone. Every day a few minutes less, and now, oh blast! I think she’s calling me.”

Eli waited while the familiar look of concentration possessed Bren’s face. Shadow, too, appeared to listen to a voice that only they could hear.

After a moment Bren shook his head and gave an exasperated sigh. “Well, that’s it for today, I guess. I told her not to call, I’d come when the sun went down, but she can’t resist.”

“Mothers are like that,” Eli said. “I’m just glad mine is limited to the distance she can screech.”

“You don’t have a clue how lucky you are,” Bren said, as they turned toward home. “I’m getting too old for this.”

“Maybe you could have a serious talk with her,” Eli suggested, not very optimistically. “Ask her to save it for real emergencies or something like that.”

“I can try, but it’s a bit like reasoning with some force of nature, you know—like maybe a volcano?”

Eli grinned and nodded. He had known Bren and also Bren’s mother for a very long time, and he was aware that there was little more to be said on the subject of Miranda West. They walked in companionable silence toward the western edge of the park, where tall apartment towers were silhouetted against a pale sky streaked with apricot.

Miranda West gazed out the window of her tower room, letting her mind relax from the intense concentration of calling her son. Lights were coming on in the row of brownstones across the street, but half a block away the treetops at the edge of the park were still flooded with late afternoon sunlight. Bren would be on his way now. Miranda hadn’t the slightest doubt that she had reached him. This was how it had always been. But he’s growing up, she thought, a little uneasily. Will I always be able to call him? Will I want to?

A silvery Siamese cat was watching her from the other side of the window seat, stone still, only the dark tip of its tail twitching, betraying some feline anxiety having to do, perhaps, with dinner. “Come, Luna,” Miranda said. “Supper-time for you and then for the hungry horde. So much to do, and here I sit.” Suddenly animated, she crossed the room, her long skirt sweeping the intricate figures of the pentagram inlaid in the floor. Behind her the cat, hungry but cautious, circled the magic signs and padded after her down the stairs.

The parlor door was open, and Miranda glanced inside. Her mother’s crystal ball glowed softly in its alcove, but the room was empty. “That’s good,” she said to the cat. “With any sort of luck, she’s started dinner.”

The kitchen occupied the entire back of the house. Most people in space-hungry New York would have made four rooms of Miranda’s kitchen, but the West family loved and needed it just as it was. Huge, dark, inconvenient, it was also welcoming. Copper gleamed on the shadowy walls; rosy fruit and yellow cheese beckoned from the round oak table. In all but the hottest weather a fire burned on the hearth, and often there was something simmering in the kettle that swung on a chain over the flames. There were good smells, too—old-fashioned smells of home-cooked food from the cast-iron range and sometimes just a whiff of something strange floating from the cauldron over the fire.

Miranda’s mother, Rose, stood at the stove. She was a plump old lady whose pink cheeks and white hair disguised a snappish temper and a rather dark outlook on life. Many years of professional fortunetelling had not improved her opinion of the human race, and sometimes this view extended to her immediate family.

She glared suspiciously at her daughter’s flowing skirts. “Next time it’s royalty to dinner you might let me know,” she said. “I’ll have me hair done up and throw another turnip in the pot.”

“Just Bob,” Miranda said, leaning over to sniff the curls of steam that rose from the stove. “Mmmm, good, but we’ll have to think of something else. Men don’t like the soup-and-salad supper. They feel cheated, no matter how full they get. Even Bren, I think, wants something he can get his teeth into.”

“Bob, Bob,” the old woman muttered. “Let Bob eat quiche. Let Bob stop off for marinated mandarin mushrooms. There’s a chicken. Scrawny. You do something with it if you want to.”

“Bren needs to see his father,” Miranda said, peering into the refrigerator. It was a huge one, set into the wall—the kind that had been an icebox and was now uncertainly supplied with power by an antiquated gas motor.

“Bah! Malarky!” her mother said. “Bren can see his father anytime he wants to. It’s you wants to see Bob West, though what you ever saw in that pie-faced yuppie beats me.”

“Well, of course I want to see him,” Miranda said. She held the chicken up to dubious inspection in the dim light. “The separation wasn’t my idea, and I still think I’ll get him back, although it’s turning out to be harder than I thought it would be. Certainly not if we starve him to death, though. Isn’t this an awfully tiny chicken?”

“It’ll have to do,” Rose said. She snatched the chicken from her daughter and attacked it with a knife. “Maybe when your star roomer, God’s gift to the Bulgarian opera, pays her rent, we can have a proper meal.”

“Oh, Mama, stop it,” Miranda said, laughing. “We’re not dependent on poor Madame for our meals. Are we short of money? I’ll ask Bob for some more, but don’t nag Madame. You know what a hard time she has.”

“Let her sell some of the crown jewels we’re always hearing about. The ones people kept throwing onto the stage.”

“Don’t be mean,” Miranda said. “Here, let me have the neck for Luna. She’s been such a good girl.”

They heard the front door slam and a series of thumps, as of things being dropped progressively down the long central hall. “Bren’s here,” Miranda said. “There, Luna dear. Take it someplace safe.”

The cat snarled and retreated with its chicken neck under the skirts of the couch, which was one of the kitchen’s amenities. She was just in time, for Shadow was, as always, only inches behind Bren.

He seems to bring the park in with him, Miranda thought, smiling at her son. His hair was the color of oak leaves in the fall, and his eyes, above high cheekbones dusted with oak-brown freckles, were gray and green—changeable eyes like an autumn sky.

“Hi, Mom. Hi, Gram. Oh, that smells good. What is it?” Bren leaned over the simmering pot.

“Potato soup,” Rose said. “Your father’s coming, so I made something special. The strychnine goes in last.”

“Dad’s coming? Fabulous!” Bren said. “What’s the occasion, or is there one?”

“I just thought it would be nice,” Miranda said. “You haven’t seen him in a while, so I summoned him.”

“You
summoned
him?” Bren was incredulous. “You
summoned
Dad?”

“By telephone,” Miranda said.

“Whew!” Bren threw himself onto the couch, then hastily pulled up his feet as a furious growling hiss came from beneath. “I don’t know why,” he went on, “I just don’t like the idea that Dad can be summoned. It’s out of character.”

“It’s biologically impossible,” Rose said. “When mind calls to mind, there has to be a mind at both ends.”

“Mother,” Miranda said, drawing herself up to her considerable height and glaring down at the old woman, “I am really tired of this. Bren loves his father, and I am still fond of him. You might also remember who supports this menagerie. Not the mad diva in the attic, as you have pointed out, but not you and your tea leaves either. Not by a long shot. So just remember which side your bread is buttered on, or I’ll curdle your soup.”

Bren viewed this scene with admiration. His mother’s beauty was enhanced by rage, a fact of which she was happily unaware. Her mane of fair hair seemed to crackle with malevolent energy, and her blue eyes burned in the pale perfection of her face. Shadow left his bowl of dog food and came to lay his head on Bren’s knee. “It’s all right, old boy,” Bren said, stroking the sleek, black head. “She won’t look at us like that. Not so long as we’re good, so try to be a model dog. Don’t leave your toys on the stairs, don’t spill your water, don’t…”