I pulled on sweatpants and an old T-shirt, slapped a Mets cap onto my thinning, uncombed hair, and donned a well-worn pair of fur-lined leather slippers. Cane in hand, I headed back toward the stairs.
“Temple, get down here,” said Annette. “We have a problem.”
I was aware. I mentally flickered one of the basement bulbs to let her know I would be right there . . .afterI stopped in the kitchen to grab a strawberry turnover: my reward for making it through another night. I was licking crumbs and buttercream frosting from my fingers when I reached the basement.
It was partially finished, with an old concrete floor and walls covered with green-tinged wood paneling that had been cool and modern when I installed it. The ceiling was bare rafters with electrical wires and copper pipe running through them, along with naked bulbs with pull chains.
Jenny had converted the southern half into a makeshift gym shortly after she moved in, one of many changes I’d endured. I wondered if she or Annette had any clue how close I’d come to turning them into ravens or geese, or maybe seagulls—I didn’t remember exactly what. I’d been on a bird kick.
It had all started innocently enough. Jenny showed up on my doorstep saying she needed a place to stay while she sorted out her life. I knew who she was—I knew all the players back then—and I’d loved how she told those stuffed shirts at the Guardians Council to go piss into a hurricane.
I needed the rent money, thanks to the fallout from a nasty financial curse, so I grudgingly offered her a room upstairs. It was supposed to be a short-term thing to get us both back on our feet.
Annette came along a month later, saying Jenny had asked for her help cleaning up the aftermath of that curse. Jenny had been looking into it, and the money mess went deeper than I realized. Something about old liens and misfiled deeds and back property taxes and other mind-numbing mundanities. By the time Annette got all that sorted, she and Jenny were well underway with their conspiracy to turn my home into a damn bookstore.
Hummingbirds! That was what I’d been ready to transform them into the night Jenny showed me her plans for the storefront. I’d gone up to my study to fetch my spellbook, but the house had hidden it away, the traitor.
It wasn’t just Jenny and Annette conspiring to upend my life. The house had been in on it, too. I remembered grousing out loud as I searched for my book.“A bookstore? Really? You saw her drawings. You want to let Jenny and Annette give you a makeover like you’re some ugly duckling in a teen romantic comedy?”
The door had slammed and locked, trapping me in my own study. Mule-headed as I was, I had nothing on the Finn ancestral home, fueled by the power and stubbornness of generations of Finns.
I let them make their changes. Including Jenny’s home gym.
She’d kept her equipment in good shape, though she didn’t use it as much anymore. To one side were an old weight machine and racks of free weights. Various training weapons lined the opposite wall. A punching bag hung suspended between two ceiling beams.
Her bokken—a wooden Japanese-style sword—was on the floor, broken about an inch above the plastic guard. It looked like someone had been pummeling the punching bag with the sword when it snapped. The broken blade had flown across the room and struck the south wall, leaving a large gash in the paneling.
I smelled dampness and mold and rotting wood.
Annette was picking at the hole in the paneling. It tore as easily as paper. “There’s water and mold back here.”
I tried not to take offense. This place had protections that would bounce a meteorite back into space like Steffi Graf returning a serve on the tennis court. You could flood the entire East Coast and not a drop would get inside these walls.
But pride and hubris didn’t change the smell coming from the wall or the damage I felt in my bones.
“I’m sorry, Uncle Temple,” said Ava. She and Morgan stood off to the side, out of the way. They looked nervous.
“It was an accident,” I said. “Everything breaks eventually.” She’d done me a favor by exposing the damage before it got worse. But why hadn’t I felt it sooner? Mold took time to grow and spread. This had to have been going on for days or weeks.
“You’re still in trouble, Ava,” said Annette. She used the light on her phone like a flashlight to look behind the paneling.
“Stand back.” I waited for her to move, then raised my cane in my left hand. Decades past, I’d carried a proper wizard’s staff carved from a three-thousand-year-old baobab and imbued with elemental power that could split a mountain. But the cane was fine too, I supposed. It was made by a dryad colleague, it was more practical for everyday use, and it had a heavy-duty black rubber tip for traction.
When I lowered the cane, three sheets of paneling ripped free and crumbled to the floor. My clothes tried to do the same—another problem when the boundary between myself and my house got too thin. I grabbed my waistband just in time to keep hold of my dignity.
“Shit,” whispered Annette. Her grandkids didn’t seem to notice her profanity or my sweatpants trouble. They were too busy staring.
Behind the paneling, the basement walls were rough-cut limestone, quarried back at the beginning of the nineteenth century. They’d been painted from time to time over the years. The last time was a simple coat of white back in 1968, about ten years before I framed and finished the walls.
Now mildew had turned swathes of that paint the yellow of old parchment. Dark splotches of mold covered much of the lower wall. The wood framing was damaged as well, damp and softened by rot.
“How did you do that?” asked Ava. She was staring at me. So was Annette, and she didn’t look happy.
Probably because she hadn’t told Ava about magic. I’d forgotten. Even though Annette brought it up every Friday night.“And remember, no magic in front of my granddaughter.”
I gripped the hook of my cane with both hands and pressed the end firmly against the floor. “How did I do what?”
“You...you waved a hand and ripped the wall apart. Like a Jedi!”
