Death Before Facebook
and fancy words—mostly at Neetsie’s insistence.
“Once we did this ritual to banish all our bad habits and Neetsie insisted we all go do it at the hospital where Kit works, in this spooky old room where she goes to smoke. Can you imagine what that was like? Getting all our robes and gear past the hospital staff? That Neetsie’s something else. By the way, it didn’t even work that well—Kit still smokes, I still eat chocolate, and Lenore… oh, well, that’s her business.”
“What about the skull?”
“Sorry. I just wanted to emphasize that there’s nothing like having an actor around to get a little drama in your life. So naturally, we’ve got white robes for the maiden, which we also wear at the full moon, and red for the mother, and black for the crone. Also, we use black candles for the crone.
“I know it sounds gross, but basically we’re talking death here—that’s what winter’s all about, right? Halloween is All Hallows’ Eve, when the veil between the worlds is thinnest—”
“What worlds?”
She shrugged. “Us and the other side. Death’s what Halloween’s all about—communing with your dead ancestors, all that sort of thing, and that ritual was barely afterward. Remember? Theoretically, the veil stays thin for a few weeks. And Geoff had just died.”
“Oh. You were trying to get in touch with him?” She felt awfully silly talking this way.
“No, although we might have if he’d died before Samhain—that’s what we call Halloween. Oh, God, I’m bogged down again. Look, the idea is that the goddess is everything—not just sweetness and light, but everything. Unlike the Christians, who see their god as simply good, and Satan, I guess, as evil, we try to recognize the dark side of life. Are you freaked out yet?”
Oddly, she wasn’t. “No, I can kind of see it. If you see it and call it what it is, it can’t sneak up on you.”
Suby beamed. “Exactly. So we had this ritual to kind of say good-bye to Geoff—to acknowledge that he was really dead and to try to assimilate what that means. Somebody’s parents had gotten that skull at some doctor’s estate sale—why, I have no idea—but she appropriated it for the occasion.” She laughed. “I can truthfully say we’ve never before had a skull on our altar. Creepy, wasn’t it?”
“The whole scene was kind of creepy.”
She laughed again. “Yeah, I guess it was. You should have seen the one we did last night. There’s this thing where you call a deity into a person….”
“Is that symbolic or… uh… real?”
“I’m not going anywhere near that one. For our purposes, let’s just say it’s symbolic. Kit wanted to call this real fierce Egyptian goddess that’s supposed to have a lion’s head. And one of the things that’s survived is a list of her epithets—the things her devotees called her. So we got them out of a book, and called her with her names. Man, you should hear them—stuff like Lady of the Bloodbath. Yikes. But then there’s also sweet stuff like Giver of Ecstasies. We tried to intersperse them—I sure hope nobody caught that little gem.” She looked at Skip suspiciously.
“It sounds colorful.”
“Oh, we’re nothing if not colorful. Kit says you really don’t have to do all the elaborate stuff we do, but we like it. Especially Neetsie. She kind of orchestrates us.”
“I get the feeling Kit’s the leader of the band.”
“Yeah, she was into it wherever she lived before—Kansas, I think—and she started a topic on the TOWN.”
“Do you ever… uh… sacrifice any animals?”
Suby’s young features contorted. She looked around frantically for the cat. “Midnight, you didn’t hear that.” She picked up the animal and stroked it. “The Santeros do; and maybe some of the voodoo people do, but if so, they’re sure quiet about it. We wouldn’t hurt a fly.” She spoke to Midnight again, “Now, a flea—that’s a different matter.”
Skip wondered if she’d been conned. It was a pretty story, and not that different from what Ramon had told her, but was this all there was to it?
Quite apart from that, there was a personal question: How could she not have known about a thing like this?
But then she remembered how frightened Suby had been at the thought of Skip’s telling her father.
I guess you don’t nose it around if you’re a witch.
Skip went through her friends and relatives, trying to figure out how they’d respond if she said she was one.
Oh, God.
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