The candle guttered out and left Aaron in the darkness, praying that this time the magic would not fail him.
When he'd first gone to college upstate, Aaron hadn't believed in anything supernatural. He was in the computer science program. He believed in science, logic, things you could prove. All that had changed. Now he was keeping his fingers crossed, just for luck, and praying that, when he woke up, he could go back to that saner, more rational world.
Aaron's parents had bought a condo near campus when Aaron had been accepted to state college, rather than having him fight to get into the dorms. This was great until his younger sister, Penny, had matriculated at the same college. Now he had to share the little two-bed place with her.
Somewhere, in the two years he'd been away, his sister had changed. He remembered Penny as a girly-girl, in pink dresses who was into boy bands. They'd had the usual sibling disagreements, but nothing like the level of snark she displayed to him now. Of course, it didn't help that his attitude wasn't that great at having to share the place.
The other thing was, in her junior year in high school she'd turned into a goth girl, dressed all in black, with silver rings on her fingers and dark mascara. In college, her friends were of a similar bent and she quickly made connections with a variety of other girls who affected a "Halloween chic" vibe. Chief among them was an intense art student who insisted her name was "Star".
Star lived off-campus not too far from their house, in a rented townhouse. She was taller than Penny, but just as thin, with more prominent boobs jostling about in her loose-fitting black shirts. She was a natural blonde, so her black hair often had discordant light-colored roots, and wore a pentacle on a black leather strap around her throat.
"I'm not a witch, Aaron, I'm a Wiccan... from a long line of priestesses in service to the Goddess," she told him.
Star's roommate, Melissa, sometimes tagged along as well. Like Star, she was an art student, rarely without a pencil or stick of charcoal in her hand, and she was less interested in the rebellious black theme. The day that he met her she was wearing a plum-colored sweater. Usually her wardrobe had some purple or lavender in it. Next to Star and Penny, she was hefty, big-boned, stolid. "Not hot," thought Aaron before basically ignoring her as one of Penny's friends.
More annoying was Penny's new boyfriend, Mark. Aaron wasn't sure what he was studying nor how he was making it through school, because Mark seemed a dumb as a rock. But Penny didn't pick him for his brains. He was built like a truck, six or so inches taller than Aaron and solid as a bull rhino. Penny's room was not nearly soundproof enough to hide how she was using that strength.
Thus, a typical Friday evening might find the five of them drinking cheap beer and eating pizza. The girls would be chattering about spells or potions or the Secret Mysteries. Mark would be an amiable lump on the couch, chugging beer after beer and waiting to take Penny to bed. At first Aaron watched what the girls were doing out of the corner of his eye, laughing to himself about "spells" and "potions".
"It really works!" Penny would exclaim, but to Aaron's eye, the spells they found on the internet didn't appear to do anything at all.
This changed one night when Star brought out the grimoire.
"My grandmama gave this to me, because true power skips generations. This book has been in our family forever."
It certainly looked old. The outside was a scuffed, thick black leather, stiff with age and flaking off bit around the tarnished copper bands that bound it. There was a hasp where a lock would go, but any lock was long gone. The pages inside were a disturbing beige color.
"They're parchment," Star said, "tanned from living human skin."
"You can't tan skin while it's, you know, alive," Aaron said, skeptically.
"Not any way you know, you mean."
The pages were disturbingly warm when you touched them, and here and there they had moles and blemishes like a person's skin might have. One page had a dried-up brown blemish that looked exactly like a man's nipple in the lower right corner. Star let Aaron handle it once, and, as he paged through it, he found touching the pages slightly revolting. The original writing was hand inked and only slightly faded. Here and there, there were crude illustrations. These varied in quality from stick figures to highly detailed. The text was written using symbols Aaron didn't recognize, long rows of hand drawn symbols less fussy than hieroglyphics, but more pictorial than an alphabet. Star said it was ancient Minoan. It would have been useless, except that cribbed into the margins were translations. Many were themselves in other languages--low German or perhaps Lithuanian--usually inked in a thin, spidery hand. The more modern bits were in English, and many of these were written in pencil.
Most of the long pages of text had been ignored by the translators. Only the headings and the "recipes" had received much attention. These meandered across the esoteric: amulets and potions and spells and curses and cantrips, each under headings like "animals", "love", "protection", "strength", "sleep" and such. Each page seemed to deal with a basic "recipe", with variations to achieve different effects. Unlike the store-bought books or internet sites they'd played with before, this had an air of verisimilitude.
The first time she brought it out, the girls used it to fashion an amulet that it said would let you call a bird down from the sky. They'd let the book fall open to this page and it certainly seemed innocuous. It also used ingredients they had ready access to: twigs and feathers and spit and some herbs. A candle. A small hammer. Star produced a silver bell, which was one of the requirements. When it was complete they decided to wait until morning. Then they took it outside to test it. Aaron tagged along, ready with a skeptical barb for when it failed to work, like so many other "spells".
Star looked around for an appropriate bird to call. A trio of crows were circling around a cypress tree nearby. She held the amulet aloft and said the words from the book. One of the birds squawked indignantly, veered from the other two, and flew down to land right at the startled girls' feet. It stood pacing back and forth, looking hostile.
"Thank you. Now shoo!" Star told the bird firmly. The bird bounded into the air and all three crows flew immediately away without a backward glance.
Aaron frowned at where the bird had been. Clearly something had happened.
"See, bro? Feminine power is real," Penny snapped at him.
