Drawtober 2022: Lost and Found

Leah stumbled out from the back kitchen of the Bronze Tiger Taproom, wiping her hands on a towel. It had been a long night of serving, and she was hoping Jack had finished closing up the bar. Then she could stagger home to her apartment and collapse into bed. She sniffed her hair, nose wrinkling, and amended that she’d collapse into bed after a shower.

The front room was much how she’d left it, and she frowned, glancing around for the burly bartender who should have been closing up. Instead, her eyes landed on Claire, who was leafing through a large book at one of the empty high tops.

“Where’s Jack?” she asked.

Claire glanced up, shoving short pink hair out of her eyes. “He left.”

Leah pinched the bridge of her nose, resisting the urge to swear loud and long. Jack had promised not to do that this time. He’d promised that he was going to stay and help and properly clean up. She didn’t know why she believed him every time.

“Well,” she said on a sigh, moving towards the bar, “I guess it’s you and me. Again.”

“Hold on a second, come here and look at this.” Claire was leafing through the big book again, her immaculate nails making a scratching noise as she ran them over the pages.

“Claire, I don’t want to be here all night—”

“Would you just come and look?”

Grumbling, Leah came up behind Claire’s shoulder. “What?”

The waitress tapped the page she was on. “It was in lost and found. It’s been there for, like, a week. Charlie pulled it out earlier.” She turned and grinned at Leah. “It’s a spellbook.”

Leah slid the book closer to her and turned to the cover page. It read:

Witch Tatiana Louse’s

Spells Most Marvelouse and Foule

There was a little illustration of a witch on a broomstick beneath the title. The book certainly looked old—the binding was cracked in places, and the pages were heavy and weathered—but it had to be some sort of elaborate prank.

“Put it back,” Leah said, shutting the book and sliding it to her friend, “and help me get this place cleaned up so we can go home before sunrise.”

“But Leah, look!” Claire was leafing through the book frantically, coming finally to a much-dog-eared page in the middle. Across the top, it read “A Spell for Animated Cleaning.”

“Why don’t we use this?”

“Because it won’t work,” Leah insisted, even as she was reading through the spell ingredients. Lemons they had, salt they definitely had. She wasn’t sure about this “eye of newt” business, but they had olives, which sort of looked like eyes in the right light…

“Please,” Claire said, making her eyes wide and pleading. “I’ve always wanted to be a witch. And it won’t take long: it’s just this one incantation.”

Leah sighed. “Okay,” she said wearily. “Fine. But you’re going to be the one cleaning up the spell when it doesn’t work. Got it?”

Claire, eyes glinting with excitement, nodded eagerly and began running around the taproom gathering the appropriate implements. Leah took a moment to read through the rest of the spell, and she’d almost reached the end when the waitress came back, shoving the book out of the way to lay all the implements out. Lemons went in one corner of the table, salt at another, then olives—apparently Claire had had the same idea about the newt eyes—and finally a dram of vodka. One of the brooms from the back room was laid across the whole thing.

“Okay,” she said breathlessly. “Now what?”

Propping the book in her arms, Leah stepped back. “Now, apparently, we read the incantation.” Clearing her throat, she read.

Salt and lemon, eye and drink,

I give you now the power to think.

Wash and dry, scrub and clean,

Leave us with a house pristine.

As she spoke, the words took on a faint echo. To her left, Claire gasped as the salt rose from the table, wrapping around the now levitating lemons, olives, and a stream of liquid from the shot glass. The strange, floating concoction spun in the air for several seconds before plummeting and vanishing into the bristles of the broom.

The air around them popped. Leah and Claire both stared at the broom. It lay, unmoving, on the table.

“Is it supposed to—” Claire started, and then shrieked as the broom shot up. It quivered in the air, and then sprung behind the bar. The sound of bristles vigorously sweeping, then of the sink turning on, soon met their ears.

Leah stared after the broom, dumbfounded, as Claire clapped and jumped up and down beside her.

“It worked,” she murmured, hardly believing it. People left some weird shit in the lost and found over the years. A full set of dinnerware, a weird goblet with fake emeralds around the rim. This, though, might be the strangest.

“Yeah it did!” Claire shouted, shaking her shoulders. “We don’t have to clean at all! The magic will do it for us. We can—”

She broke off as, behind the bar, the broom swung upward and began knocking bottles of alcohol from the shelf. Booze and glass began cascading down onto the wooden bar, dripping onto the floor.

“Stop!” Leah yelled, dropping the book and running towards the broom. “Stop!”

But the broom didn’t listen. It darted around the bar and began crashing into tables, soaring through the taproom and knocking chairs askew. Leah, without thinking, reached out and grabbed onto the handle with both hands. The broom pulled her along, lifting her into the air. She shrieked as her sneakers left the floor.

“What do I do?” she yelled down to Claire.

“Uh, hold on!” Claire yelled. She dove for the book, the broom narrowly missing her head, and began leafing through it. Her eyes scanned the page of the spell. “It doesn’t have a way to turn it off!”

“It—ah—there must be one somewhere!” Leah shouted back. She was wrestling with the animated broom, pulling herself on top of the handle so that she was straddling it. The broom was bucking and kicking beneath her, trying desperately to push her off while also knocking as many paintings from the walls as it could manage. “See if there’s an index!”

Leah flipped to the back. “No index, but—wait! There’s a counterhex.” She stood, setting the book down and raising her hands.

So things were, now they shall be.

With these words I banish thee!

Claire, who’d been hovering on top of the broom somewhere near the ceiling, suddenly plummeted towards the ground as all life left the broom. She crashed against one of the cushioned seats, groaning. The broom bounced away from her and landed, inert, on the floor.

“Fuck,” she groaned. Her entire body felt sore, her muscles screaming at her. Leah came loping over, book stuffed under one arm.

“Are you okay?”

“Do I look okay?” Leah groaned, sitting up. She looked around the bar despairingly. Glasses lay shattered on the ground, tables and chairs were knocked absolutely everywhere, and the sink was still running, spilling water onto the floor. “I think that’s enough magic for tonight.”

“But maybe we could—”

“No, Claire.” Leah got up, taking the book from her friend. “No more magic tonight.”

“But what are we going to tell Raquel about the mess?”

A smile twitched on the corner of Leah’s mouth. “We’ll tell her the truth. That a couple of would-be witches messed up a spell.”