Page 116 of The Book of Magic

Ian picked up the keys to Matt’s van. No matter how defiant he’d been as a boy, he’d been well aware that his mother put others first. He’d been cross about her generosity to strangers and neighbors alike back then, for she seemed to ignore his most basic desires and concentrated on those who came to her for help. All he’d wanted was a room of his own and a normal house like everyone else. Now he felt a good deal of pride as his mother packed up her bag of elixirs. “Ready,” she said. She turned to Matt and told him to remain in the cottage and stay out of the rain. He’d had asthma as a boy, and she’d been called in many times when his mother feared he wouldn’t be able to draw another breath.

“The van’s stuck,” Matt informed them.

“I’ve got wooden slats to put under the tires,” Margaret told him. “When you live here you assume there will be mud.”

“I could drive you,” Matt said, though he was utterly shaken.

“Don’t worry,” Ian assured him. “I know how to drive.”

When they reached the Three Hedges, Ian pulled over to let his mother out. Margaret was wearing a plastic raincoat and boots and had a mask over her mouth and nose. She went around to his window. “You’re not coming with me,” she guessed.

“I’ll be back as soon as I can. I have to do this for Sally.”

“They told you this was for family members to see to. And besides, the girl has to return on her own accord. She has to want to leave the left side.”

Ian nodded, his face grim. “I think I know the cause of the plague,” he said, meaning Lockland.

Margaret knew that her son was still called to trouble, no matter the cost to himself.

“Be careful,” she told him as they said their good-byes.

After he’d let off his mother, Ian drove west on the High Street, which by now was deserted. No birds, no cats, and not a soul. Everyone had locked themselves in their houses, windows shuttered as they hunkered down behind bureaus and in bathtubs. The rain fell harder as he turned in to the road that led through the forest. He didn’t park in the lot, but instead drove as close to the manor as possible, leaving the van in a thicket, hidden by currant bushes and saplings. Not far from this spot there was a glassy blue pond where children skated in winter. Ian had gone skinny-dipping there when he was a teenager, so high on psychedelics he was fairly certain he should have drowned. A groundskeeper had come upon him, an old friend of his mother’s who’d shouted for him to get the hell off the property, which, after some banter—Make me. I will if I have to—Ian wound up doing as he was told, for he was chilled and the area was spooky. It had taken him hours, and a curative tea his mother insisted he drink, before he regained his senses.

The red rain hadn’t fallen on these grounds, Lockland had made sure of that. While the village suffered, the parkland remained intact. Ian made his way to the house so distracted with his thoughts of Sally that he walked through a trail of red powder scattered in the front hallway before he noticed it had been set out for anyone who dared to enter the manor. The house had been burned from the inside out, but the black and white marble tile floor was still there and Ian staggered over the patchwork tiles. He managed to get to the huge parlor but at that point the world was a haze to him as it had been when he ingested mushrooms at the pond. He should have beaten Bad Tom senseless years ago when he caught him throwing stones at his mum’s Labrador retriever, Jinx, but he’d thought he understood Tom, another boy without a father who had never been taught how to be a man. Ian was usually so cautious, but he’d stepped into the poison that had brought him down before. There was no one as easy to fool as an expert, and Ian collapsed in a room where all he could see was the woodwork that had been stripped by the rain and a fire burning red.

On all of the High Street there wasn’t a living creature, not a dog or a cat, not a bird or a bee, but for anyone who squinted and looked carefully, it was possible to see a young woman making her way unsteadily, through gusts of wind and rain. She was barefoot and her clothes were scarlet, her black hair streaked red by the rain. Gillian noticed her when she happened to pass a window, and she quickly called for Sally. Both wondered if the figure might be a shade from long ago, trapped in a bubble of time, for the figure was ghastly pale, with freckles scattered across her parchment white skin, her black hair in knots. When at last the stranger stopped at the inn and gazed in at them, they were stunned to see who she was.

Sally gasped and went to fling open the door, but was stopped when Hal, the bartender, stood in her way, his arms crossed over his chest.

“No one in or out,” he admonished her. That’s what Margaret Wright had told him, for safety’s sake. More than half the people in the pub had been afflicted. Young men who usually wolfed down their food at the bar were now resigned to sprawling out on the floor, as weak as babies from the effects of the red rain. “This door doesn’t open,” Hal said crossly.

Rather than argue, Sally raced through the kitchen, hoping to find another exit. She made her way into an attached shed used for storage and found what had once been the milkmaid’s door for the daily delivery of butter and cream. When the door swung open, she called out to her daughter, who staggered toward the building. Kylie’s eyes were rimmed with black tears, and she likely would have been unrecognizable to most who knew her, but she was Sally’s darling girl, who Sally pulled out of the gusts of wind so they could take refuge in the shed. There was hay on the floor and the old metal pails hung on rungs, unused and rusty. Sally embraced Kylie, her life, her heart, her girl returned.

“He’s cursed everyone,” Kylie managed to say. Including her, for by now her fever was so high she couldn’t think straight, and by the time Sally and Gillian managed to bring her upstairs to bed, she was burning up.

Outside, the roads were flooding with blood-colored puddles. Franny had been tending to the ill, using the black soap that had first been made with antibacterial ingredients by Hannah Owens during the Black Death. Franny now brought the soap and a basin up to the small room under the eaves where the children of the innkeeper had slept in the seventeenth century.

“You can cure her,” Sally said to her aunt, for what was done could be undone, and Franny was the person most able to fight this cursed disease.

The girl had all the symptoms. A pox was rising on her fair skin with patches of angry red-stained marks, and her every breath rattled in her chest. She seemed delirious, and recognized no one.

Gillian drew the curtains. She didn’t like the expression on their aunt’s face.

“Let’s get her comfortable,” Franny said. As Gillian and Sally eased off the raincoat, The Book of the Raven fell to the floor.

“That damn book,” Sally said. She intended to go after it and toss it away, but Franny was quicker.

“I’ll see to it,” Franny assured her.

Gillian and Sally removed Kylie’s muddy, sopping wet clothes and washed her body with warm water and black soap, the washcloths turning red. Her teeth were chattering as if she were still in the stream behind Lockland Manor. Franny opened the desk drawer, withdrawing the sewing kit. Fortunately, there was blue thread, which she strung around Kylie’s ankles and wrists, taking note of the burn on her wrist. In the palm of the right hand is the future you are born with, but the left hand holds the future you have made yourself, and the lines on Kylie’s left palm had stopped. Franny felt a chill up her spine. Soap and thread would not help. She slipped off the amulet Agnes Durant had given to her to wear for protection. “Make certain she wears this at all times,” she told Sally as she looped the cord over Kylie’s head. “I’ll do my best to stop the rain.”

The Grimoire was in Franny’s suitcase, but instead she turned to The Book of the Raven, which had been used to call down the red rain. She turned to the page Tom Lockland had studied so intently he’d left blotchy fingerprints on the page.

“Don’t use that book,” Sally warned.

“What started it will end it,” Franny said.

Franny lit a fire in a brass dish. She used red magic, cutting her palm with a letter opener and adding her blood to the mixture, then she tore off a piece of the curtain at the window and wrapped a figure formed of melted soap in a bit of the blue fabric for protection and good health. She paged through The Book of the Raven until she came upon an ancient Aramaic incantation Amelia Bassano had discovered long ago. Franny began to recite the verse that would cause the red rain to cease.