strange new world chapter 2 v5

8/9/2019 Strange New World Chapter 2 V5

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STRANGE NEW WORLD V5TERA CASHEN

Chapter 2

Grandma had died only a couple of weeks ago. I still expected her to be waiting

in the living room when I came home from work. I expected to see her on the phone to

her friends every evening after supper. I expected to find her rocking Emma in her arms

whenever the twins had had a fight.

It was cruel to have another guardian leave us. First our parents, both dying in a

horrific car crash, me almost dying with them, then our grandmother, taken by a series

of strokes at 71. It felt wrong to enter her bedroom and not see her sitting up in bed,

bleary-eyed, asking me what was wrong. But I couldn’t focus on how empty the room

was without her. I had a job to do.

I don’t think any of us had entered the room since Grandma’s death. I closed the

door behind me as quietly as I could and became the first person to enter it since her

death. Then I surveyed the room. A typical master bedroom, done in light purple, with

dark mahogany furniture. Pictures of us when we were younger were stuck in the mirror

frame. There was a framed picture of Grandma and Grandad at their wedding sitting on

the bedside table. An unfinished sweater she was knitting was on the stuffed chair. But

no Grandma.

Once I got used to being in such a silent room, I began looking through the

drawers. From what I knew of witchcraft, witches had a spellbook, book of shadows, or

grimoire where they kept all of their spells, rituals, lore, etc written down in. Mom had

told us to look for her grimoires, or ask Grandma for hers, so that meant that there had

to be at least two grimoires for us to use. If Grandma was a witch and she wanted to hide




the grimoires from us, then the most logical place in the house for her to hide them

would be in her bedroom.

I searched the drawers, the storage totes, the trunk, the shelves, even the en suite

bathroom. I got down on my hands and knees to look under the bed, but all I found were

dust bunnies. I searched through the closet last, but found nothing. At least nothing

covered with other stuff. That didn’t mean there weren’t trap doors or secret

compartments.

I felt along the walls of the closet but couldn’t feel anything out of the ordinary. I

got down on my knees and began pushing aside Grandma’s shoes. The door banged

open and I jumped, my head hitting the edge of a trunk stuffed in the closet.

As I clutched my head, I turned to look up at the person standing in the doorway.

Mona was rubbing her eyes, looking annoyed at me. “What are you doing?” she asked.

I straightened, clutching a pair of Grandma’s shoes. “Looking through Grandma’s

things,” I said. “Why?”

“At 2:30 in the morning?” she asked, a touch of grumpiness in her voice.

“I couldn’t sleep,” I said.

She stared at me for a couple of seconds as if I’d gone mad. Then she turned to

the room. Her grumpiness slid away as she looked at Grandma’s things. She hugged

herself before turning away. “Just keep it down,” she muttered before leaving the room.

She left the door wide open. I watched her move down the hall back to the stairs

before getting up. I’d just taken a step when another door opened. Rose peered out,

frowning. I froze, red-handed. She came out of her bedroom and came into Grandma’s,




stepping in hesitantly. She looked around. I’m sure I had put everything back in its right

place, but one never knew with Rose.

I sighed and threw down the shoes. “Did I wake you up?” I asked her.

“No, I was still awake,” she said. She stepped over to the bureau and looked at the

pictures stuck in the mirror.

I wondered if I should tell her what I was really doing. She would probably freak

out at me if she knew I was looking for the grimoires. I’d had enough with fighting with

her for the morning so I decided not to push it. Let her think I was looking through

Grandma’s things for sentimental reasons. It was partially true anyways.

Then she said, “Did you find it?”

Warily, I asked, “Found what?”

“The... grimoire,” Rose said. She watched me like a hawk and I was sure that I’d

fidgeted.

I decided to go for it. “No, not yet,” I told her. “I’m sure they’re here somewhere.”

She nodded. Then she frowned at me. “‘They’re’?” she asked.

“There should be two grimoires, remember?” I said, kneeling down on the floor

again. “Grandma’s grimoire, and Mom’s.”

“Do you think Dad would have one?” she asked.

“It’s possible,” I said. “I was thinking that maybe they’d have just one grimoire

per family, but you never know. Maybe Dad’s is here too.”

She started opening drawers, rifling through the contents like I had done. “They

could be hidden in the storage room,” she suggested.




“I thought about that,” I began, “but we go into the storage room frequently, so

she wouldn’t want to hide it there. And we were never allowed in her room when she

wasn’t there, so I figured she’d hide them here.”

She closed a drawer. “Have you looked through this stuff?” she asked.

I nodded. “But I haven’t looked for secret compartments or secret drawers and

stuff,” I told her.

She looked a mite bit confused, but she opened the drawer again and felt along

the top. I returned to pulling the shoes out of the closet. Then I slid the trunk out of the

closet, which wasn’t as hard as I thought it was going to be. I took another peek inside

the trunk. Blankets. Since it was the dead of winter, we would need those. I pulled them

out and set them on the bed.

“I still don’t think we’re doing the right thing,” Rose suddenly said. I looked up at

her, a little annoyed. “But you’re right. It would be safer for us to learn magic and to be

able to use it.”

I nodded. “Yes, it would be.” I pushed the trunk away and crawled closer to the

closet.

I felt the floor from the entrance to the wall for any niches or grooves in the wood

that would give away a trapdoor. My fingers found a long groove near the baseboard of

the wall that suggested the wood was slightly raised on that side. I pried at the edge of

the wood, hoping it was a trapdoor. After awhile, the wood finally gave way and rose up

like a door on hinges to reveal a large compartment under the floor.

“Oh score!” I breathed looking into the compartment.




“What is it?” Rose asked as she joined me by my side, looking in. “Oh,” was all

she said next.

The compartment was packed with stuff. Candles, incense, herbs in jars,

gemstones, crystals, and last, but not least, books. I pulled the books out. There were

three of them: one was a binder filled with photocopied pages, another was an older,

leather-bound book that had seen its fair share of use, and the last was a small, diary

with flowery covers. Each had similar title pages on the inside with family histories

written in ink underneath the titles. The family history of the leather-bound book

started in the 1300s.

“Wow,” Rose breathed, taking in the long list of names.

I turned the page. The next few pages were covered in detail family trees that

branched down from the 1300s to our own births. On the very last page of the tree, there

we were: ‘Jasper Barstowe m. Amelia Saunders’ with the names of all five of us with our

birth dates. Our parents’ deaths had been written in, but Grandma’s hadn’t been. Then I

did a double-take.

“Holy shit!” I exclaimed.

“What?” Rose asked, anxious.

“Grandma was 91 years old according to this,” I told her. I pointed to the birth

date. It was twenty years earlier than she’d given us to believe.

“No,” Rose muttered. She looked at the date, frowning. “Oh my God... but that

would make her our great-grandmother.”

“Or not,” I said. “Maybe Mom and Dad were older than we thought.” I checked

out their birth dates. “Yep, they were both born ten years earlier than we thought.”




“Why would they change their ages?” Rose asked.

I thought about it. “Maybe to hide their real ages from normal people,” I

suggested, shrugging. “Grandma didn’t look 90 years old.”

“I guess so,” she said. She flipped through the binder grimoire. Then she looked

over my shoulder as I leafed through the leather-bound grimoire. “These look like

photocopies of that one.”

“Maybe that one is Dad’s,” I said. I picked up the flowery diary and looked

through it. “These must be Mom’s. It doesn’t have a family tree, but there’s a lot of

spells, correspondences...”

“That’s Mom’s handwriting,” Rose agreed. She looked sad. “I’d recognize it

anywhere.”

“So this is her grimoire, copied by hand,” I said, closing the book. “I guess her

parents have the original grimoire. I wonder where her parents are, if they’re still alive.”

“Don’t bother thinking about them, Lizzy,” Rose muttered. “They don’t care about

us.”

I frowned at her, but didn’t say anything. It had long been a rule between us to

never mention Mom’s parents. We figured they were still alive, and we knew our mother

had had a sister, but even when our parents’ death made the papers, none of them came

looking for us. We hadn’t even met them anyways. Rose always got angry when we

talked about them.

I put Mom’s grimoire down. “Do you still want to tell the others about being

witches?” I asked her.




She nodded. “Not today though,” she said. “We have work, so does Mona, and the

twins have school. It’s better if we tell them after school when everyone’s together.”

“It’s Friday,” I said, “there’s a good chance Alix won’t be home after school.”

“Then we’ll tell her to come home before she goes to a friend’s house, that we

have something important to tell them,” she said. Her lips pursed. “With any luck, she’ll

stay home tonight.”

strange new world chapter 2 v5

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