“Plans are in place,” Dicky said. “But now we need help from the other side.”
There was a murmur of agreement.
“Well, then, let’s begin,” a man with a deep, gravelly voice said.
More footsteps, the rustle of fabric. The sound of chairs being pulled back and rearranged. There were a few soft murmurs from the group gathered. Olive could make out Dicky and thought a couple of the other voices might be familiar, but she couldn’t place them.
These are people you’ve probably been seeing in town your whole life,she told herself.
The murmurs built to a hum. A hum that filled the room and sounded, to Olive, almost insect-like, as if she were suddenly in a hive of bees, a nest of some sort of strange winged creatures droning. Above the buzz, a single voice rose: Dicky’s voice, loud and sure, speaking with his fake Texas twang: a rodeo cowboy turned preacher.
“Spirits of the east, of the north, of the west and south; creatures of water, air, earth, and fire, we call upon you. We compel you to open the door.”
Then the hum changed, morphed into a chant:
As above, so below
The door is opened
Let the worlds unite
Let the spirits walk among us
Olive’s skin prickled.
“Hattie Breckenridge, come forward,” called a man.
“We give ourselves to you,” said another.
“We offer ourselves to you,” said a woman.
“We are your faithful servants.”
And then the voices rose up together—“Hattie, Hattie, Hattie, Hattie”—until a single voice called out, Dicky saying, “Come to us, Hattie. We ask you to join us, your faithful servants. Come and guide us. Show us the way.”
The room got brighter, the smoke more intense.
Olive pictured the chalk marks on the floor, imagined them opening up like a magic portal and Hattie Breckenridge crawling through.
This she had to see.
Slowly, as quietly as she could, Olive crawled out from her hiding spot behind the bar, peering around, keeping her body hidden.
The group was standing in a circle in front of the fireplace, around the chalk circle drawn on the floor. The symbol that matched her necklace.
The door to the spirit world.
Olive counted nine people. There were candles lit all around the room—on the mantel, the floor—and incense burned in little brass bowls (the things she’d taken to be ashtrays the other day), filling the air with thick, sweet smoke.
Above the mantel, the black cloth had been removed to reveal not a mirror at all, but a painting. It was a portrait of a woman with long dark hair and dark eyes. She wore a red dress and had a necklace on—and it wasn’t just any necklace: it was the very same one Olive herself was now wearing.
The necklace seemed to thrum beneath Olive’s shirt, buzzing like a tuning fork.
Even from Olive’s hiding place, the woman’s gaze was mesmerizing, enchanting. Olive felt the woman was looking right at her, seeing inside her, and that she was trying to tell Olive something, something important.
Maybe justGive me my necklace back, or else!
And she knew this was Hattie, though she’d never seen a picture, never heard what Hattie had looked like, never heard people say she’d been beautiful. The way people talked about her, Olive had imagined a cruel, twisted face, fangs, a few warts maybe.
