Uncommon Charm by Emily Bergslien & Kat Weaver

Author:Emily Bergslien & Kat Weaver [Bergslien, Emily]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781952086397
Publisher: Neon Hemlock Press

CHAPTER SEVEN

Over the next week, Muv avoided answering our real question by plying Simon with dozens of her own. Had the summoning of the ghost been intentional? Yes? What had intent felt like, in both a physiological and psychological sense? Was the speech element for my benefit as an observer? How did an audience change his practice?

“If you don’t know, then say so,” Muv would remind him. “Don’t make up an answer because you think there ought to be one.”

What had he said to the ghost? The Hebrew phrases, I learned, were part of Psalm 91. Neither Muv nor I could immediately place it. She’d spent too many years resenting Grandad and her Anglo-Catholic upbringing; as for me, to say I’d paid scant attention in my religion courses was a vast understatement. I had to dig out a great-aunt’s old Bible so Muv could look up the translation.

“Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day,” she quoted. “Will explaining the significance clarify why you were drawn to it?”

“It’s said at burials and other times. Morning prayers. On certain days.”

“Have you consulted a rabbi about your magic?”

“A few,” Simon said. “Their opinions differed.”

“Understandable. You might experiment further with magic and performance.”

At dinner several days later, she asked Simon what he thought about having stopped all of the clocks in the Koldunov house. Their housekeeper had consulted three craftsmen on the matter, and each time had received the same reply: though every clock ought to be in working order, not one of them could be made to budge from precisely 12 o’clock. Aunt Dahlia was terribly put out.

“I am not scolding you,” Muv added. “I am curious.”

I tented my fingers and batted my eyelashes at him.

He ate a piece of cherry tart at me, and when I replied with a discreet tap of my upper lip, he licked off the smear of cream there before saying, “I’m not sure. I tried to cause something to happen, to make a ghost manifest, and it did. I can take credit, I suppose, but all this time things have happened to me without my doing the work.”

Muv smiled as she watched Simon swirl sherry around his glass.

“I experience magic without deliberately causing magic,” he said. “But I also pray without expectation that the prayer gets answered. It’s all without a point, but it’s never pointless. It’s like Job, right—I don’t decide what happens to me. The kind suffer, the wicked thrive, and God doesn’t dispense justice. But you do good because you have the freedom not to. You do it because you can’t expect reward. So I shouldn’t ask why does this happen?,the question is what do I do?’”

They were getting to me, these dreadful magicians; I actually understood what Simon meant. Still, I wondered, “How do the ghosts fit in?”

He hummed. “If I try to explain their presence—you know, if I’ve got some sixth sense or I can see ley lines or magnetisms—it makes them less real.

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