She shook her head. “Non. I will fix this.” In one swift motion, her mother pulled back the rug in the kitchen to reveal a trapdoor that Juliet had never noticed before. “Help me.” She motioned to Juliet, who held open the heavy wooden door while her mother lowered herself into the space beneath the floor, returning with three black candles and what looked like jars of blood and meat and a giant leather book.
What Juliet saw hidden under the floor was different from the love potions and herbs above the ground. Below the secret door was a different kind of magic.
“What are you going to do?” Juliet held the jars and candle while her mother lifted herself out from the space.
“I need someone’s help.” Her mother carried in her hand the book with a battered leather cover—one the girl hadn’t seen before. As she peered over her mother’s shoulder, Juliet could see drawings of the moon and strange names she didn’t recognize. Her mother’s finger lingered on one name—exotic—Althacazur. She nodded, satisfied. Working furiously, using the mortar and pestle to grind herbs, she moved around the room, finally pouring the fine mixture into a crystal bowl with water. Chanting lightly, her mother moved the bowl in circles over her head. As the bowl moved, Juliet caught the smell of saffron, cloves, and cinnamon.
Next, her mother placed the black candles each in a small, crystal cup and poured the bloody contents of the jar over the candles. “Give me your hand.” Juliet held out her hand for her mother, who took a knife and before Juliet could protest sliced the girl’s finger, pouring the blood over each candle. Juliet winced.
“Do you have anything that belongs to him? Anything he’s touched?” When Juliet didn’t respond, her mother sighed impatiently. “Well, do you?” The older woman’s hair had fallen out of its usual neat chignon. Long pieces hung down her back and across her forehead, matted with sweat.
Juliet nodded and went upstairs and brought back Marchant’s birthday present, his painting of Paris.
Her mother grabbed the small painting from her and turned it over and over in her hand. “Did he give you this?”
Juliet nodded. “He painted it for my birthday.”
Her mother looked at her daughter with an expression of pity. She took a decorative knife out of her pocket, slit the canvas starting where Marchant had signed his name, pulled the paper off, and held it over the candle.
The oils on the paint took to the flame quickly. As the canvas burned, Juliet stared at the ruined depiction of Paris, the landscape buckling and bending as the flame twisted it. It was Marchant’s Paris, yet her mother had said he had no intention of ever taking her there. But Juliet felt her mother was wrong. Marchant had loved her. He would come for her.
After night fell and Juliet’s father and siblings fell asleep, her mother woke her from a fitful dream and took her by the hand down the stairs to the kitchen. Without the fire, the room was deathly quiet, cold, and damp. To Juliet’s surprise, the kitchen had been transformed. The table had been moved aside to the wall and on the floor, in its place, a giant circle had been drawn with chalk. Inside the circle was a star—the lines perfect as though Juliet’s mother had traced them with a straightedge—and at the top of the star, the three black candles sat blazing inside the circle, next to the crystal bowl.
In the light, Juliet was startled to see her mother moving around the space dressed in a strange oversize purple robe, her face painted white, like a carnival clown. But this look was not a jovial costume. There was something sinister about the cloak. She wanted to run, tried to turn, but her mother grabbed her arm and held her with a strength Juliet didn’t know she had. “You need to witness. He is asking for it.”
Juliet did not know who “he” was, but she felt she could not argue. She hoped her father or Delphine would come down the stairs and rescue her from this macabre scene, but her family slept soundly—too soundly—and Juliet wondered if her mother had put something in the tea she’d served at dinner.
“Sit.” Her mother pointed inside the chalk circle. Once she stepped over the crude chalk outlines, the circle felt distinctively warmer than the rest of the drafty room. The cool breeze that flowed from under the door seemed to stop at the edge of the circle drawing. To test it, Juliet ran her hand back and forth across the line, feeling the temperature inside the circle change. Her mother tugged at Juliet’s nightdress, pulling it down past her shoulders and letting it bunch in a heap beneath her. Then her mother began applying a stinking brown paste to Juliet’s face and then her chest, breasts, stomach, and legs, slapping the girl’s arms away as she tried to wipe it from her. Juliet gagged as the smell of cloves and earth hit her. Juliet pulled her arms around her in the circle, sitting on her nightdress, wearing nothing but the brown, pungent paste.
“I’m cold,” said Juliet.
Ignoring her, Juliet’s mother then knelt at the line of the circle, her robe collecting chalk dust as she slid forward on the floor until she was lying facedown on the floorboards, her forehead resting on the wood plank. As her mother chanted softly, Juliet felt a tug at her stomach followed by a stabbing pain, pulsing at first like a heartbeat but then growing harder and stronger. Gasping, she grabbed her stomach; it felt hard and hot. As her mother’s chants grew faster, she felt a warm liquid begin to flow down between her legs onto the nightdress bunched beneath her. Blood. She knelt to touch it but pulled her hand back as her mother began to sing in a strange high-pitched voice, almost like a child’s. Within minutes, her voice now lurid, the candles began to flicker faster in time with her song, wax melting rapidly down the sides like lava.
Juliet was frightened. This was a macabre scene, and the woman lying on the floor seemed not to be her mother at all. The figure in purple, now facedown like a wooden doll, began jerking violently. Juliet attempted to stand but found her legs wouldn’t work and she was unable to move. As if sensing her desire to flee, the older woman’s hand reached out to grip Juliet’s bare ankle; as it did, the girl’s body shook with convulsions. She fell to the floor in a ball beside her mother, rolling out of the circle where the cold air hit her, her body writhing. The pain in her stomach was searing.
Her mother rose from the floor like she was waking from a deep sleep. With a look of disgust, she glanced at the pool of garnet-colored blood around Juliet. “You were with child, his child, but it is gone now.”
Juliet cried out and touched her stomach, the thick brown mud paste crumbling as it dried. The pulsing and pain had now stopped, replaced by a dull ache. She sat up, looking down at her ruined nightdress. It looked like she’d been butchered in it.
“We’ll burn it,” her mother said as if she’d read her thoughts. “Get back in the circle.”
Juliet slid her body carefully inside the circle, her legs shaking, and for a moment she felt the pain leave her as she crossed the chalk line. Her mother looked at her with a hollow expression, a look of contempt.
The woman’s high singing resumed. Through the kitchen window, Juliet could see the full moon shining, casting light inside the circle. The candles sat burning in bowls filled with blood. When they reached the point where they’d burned to the liquid line, the blood puckered then bubbled and ran onto the wood floor, stopping at the chalk circle line. Juliet’s mother cried out just as the door blew open. A dense, wet fog seeped in, but as the haze swirled, it materialized into a form. What Juliet saw next caused her to yelp. It was a jerking skeleton of a horned goat attempting to walk upright on two legs. The grotesque creature materialized and faded as it struggled to find its footing before settling upon Juliet’s mother. It planted itself in front of her mother. There seemed to be some conversation going on between her mother and the creature, then some acknowledgment from the woman. There was a snapping sound as her mother’s jawbones broke and her mouth opened to an inhumanly large size, allowing the goat skeleton, which now seemed to have become a solid mass, to step into her mother’s throat like it was putting on a pair of pants. Juliet felt bile rise in her mouth. Despite the circle, she felt the cold for the first time as a chill seemed to wrap around her like blanket.