Adele lay her hand on her daughter’s arm. “Sylvie? Sweetheart, are you all right?”

When the girl turned to look at her, she was startled by the brightness of Sylvie’s eyes; normally a clear grey, they sparkled like crystal. Her face was alight and animated; if she hadn’t known who she was, Adele would never have recognized her daughter, who was normally so composed.

“Oh, I’m fine, Mommie, I’m wonderful!” Sylvie said in a breathless rush. “Isn’t everything just so lovely here? Oh, I could just hug the whole world!” The strange young woman who seemed to be her daughter leaped from the park bench to twirl slowly in a wide circle with her arms outstretched. “Hello beautiful world!” she shouted joyfully.

“Sylvie!” Adele cried, plucking at her sleeve, trying to pull her back down to the bench. “What on earth is wrong with you? Asafel! Please help, Sylvie is acting crazy!”

Asafel faded into visibility in the air in front of Adele. “Don’t worry, Adele,” he said, “Let the child go. I know it’s disconcerting,” he explained, “But this is a phase she must go through. She’s going to seem rather childlike for a bit, but when this is over, she will be more fully herself than she has been since the age of three.”

Adele tried to assimilate what Asafel was telling her. “Age three?” she said, “Why, that’s when Sylvie had that terrible head injury! She never was the same after that…she changed, she became so frightened and serious, not the same happy little girl at all. It broke my heart, I remember. Are you saying that whatever happened to her then is somehow now being reversed?”

“Exactly so. She will answer to the name Snowpepper now. I’ve given Sylvie’s dominant personality leave to surrender control for a time; the poor thing has been in rigid charge of herself for far too long. In the meantime, you’ll have your happy little girl back, quite as she was before the accident. Larger, of course.” Asafel’s smile managed to be both gentle and sardonic.

Adele’s eyes widened as she looked at Snowpepper, who danced on the sidewalk, spinning about and hopping with first one foot then the other, with a grin of pure childlike delight on her face.

She paled, her right hand going to her mouth. “Oh, my. Asafel, people will notice, they’ll wonder… what if someone calls the police, what if they want to take her away? She’s behaving so strangely!”

“No, they won’t. In this part of town, people get away with behaving just about any way they want to.” Asafel gestured toward a woman across the street who paced back and forth talking and gesticulating to herself. “Don’t worry, Adele. Sylvie will be fine, I promise. Now, it’s time to return to the house. There’s someone there you ought to meet.”

Guiltily, Sylvie realized that she had reverted to controlling Snowpepper as though they were still two people in one body. What had happened? Snowpepper should be able to speak when she felt moved to just as Sylvie could. That was supposed to have changed. She sighed. It must be her own control issues.

You hit the nail on the head, kiddo, said a voice in her mind.

It wasn’t just a voice. It was the voice. The horrible, slippery, insinuating voice that had tormented her in that strange dream within a dream. She jumped as though she had been pinched.

“Who are you?” she demanded aloud.

“What is it, dear?” Adele stirred. She had been sitting quietly, smoking another cigarette. “Did you say something?”

“It’s… I dunno. There’s a weird voice in my head. I don’t like it!”

“Oh?” Adele’s gaze sharpened. “Ask it who it is, and what it wants from you.”

For lack of any brighter ideas of her own, Sylvie complied.

Okay, who the heck are you anyway? How did you get into my head? And what do you want from me?

Aahh… she’s finally asking the right questions. The voice sounded amused. Your mother must have prompted you.

Yeah, so? What’s the answer, then, if those are the right questions? she demanded.

The voice made a sound like a sigh. All right. I am Asafel, at your service, my dear. I am in your head because I have no place else to be; I’ve always been here, in fact. As for what I want from you, I want us to have the rightful and open relationship we ought to have had if you had been properly introduced to me in childhood. Oh, I know it’s too late for it to be the same as it would have been. But it’s not too late to start fresh.

She gasped. “Mom! He says he’s Asafel!”

“That’s who I thought it must be, Sylvie.”

“Why does he feel so icky? It’s horrible! I feel slimed!”

“You’ll have to ask him, Sylvie. It probably has to do with the fact that you’ve never been properly introduced. My fault, of course.” She sighed, exhaling a puff of smoke. “If you want him out of your head, you’re going to have to formally call on him. Ask him to come out.”

Sylvie could sense Snowpepper’s excitement. She got the impression that Snowpepper hadn’t heard the voice at all, which puzzled her, but right now her priority was to get the voice out. She felt she couldn’t stand it in her head another second.

“All right! Asafel or whatever your name is, come out now! I call you! I conjure you! Whatever!”

She felt a weirdly disorienting sensation like a wind blowing through her mind. She cried out, pressing her hands to her temples, but it lasted only a fraction of a second, leaving her gasping.

“Is he out, Mommie? Where is he?”

“We’re in the city, darling. He doesn’t like to be seen by people who aren’t family. He’s made himself invisible to ordinary people.” A smile came into her voice. “Hello Asafel, dear. I would like to introduce you to my only daughter. Sylvie, this is Asafel, an old family friend and helper.”

Sylvie gaped. As her mother spoke, she began to see a tall, thin, dapper-looking man with a goatee, wearing a rakishly tilted cap, standing about a foot above the ground, striking a jaunty pose and bowing to her with a flourish. He was only partially visible, coloured a uniform shade of translucent red all over. She felt a strange, haunting sense of familiarity, as though she were meeting someone she had known forever.

“Hi, um, Asafel,” she said hesitantly. “How come I can see you if you’re invisible?”

“We’ve been properly introduced now,” he explained. “I am pleased to meet you at last, Sylvie,” he went on with a mischievous grin. “You have no idea how pleased. Thank you for finally calling me out.”

“It’s you!!” Sylvie burst out, surprising herself. It was Snowpepper-in-her coming forward spontaneously. “I know you! You were my friend!” Snowpepper was bursting with excitement. She laughed gaily and bounced in her seat. “I remember! I remember!! You were in that horrid no-place with me, right? I’d forgotten about you! I wasn’t alone at all! You were there!”

Asafel’s red eyes gleamed and he smiled. “Yes, my little friend, and I must say, I am more than pleased, I am ecstatic to see you restored to your rightful self!”

As he spoke, the air seemed to brighten. The sky, which had been overcast, grew lighter and the colours of the drab city sharpened. Sylvie had the sense that the homeless people in the park near them, who had been listlessly filling time, had suddenly become more animated.

“Hey!” Sylvie said, “You don’t feel horrible to me anymore! You actually feel kind of … good!”

“I apologize for that, truly,” Asafel grimaced wryly. “That was a side-effect of my situation, being imprisoned wrongly in your head. My voice, indeed my very essence could not feel good to you there. I was situated inside-out, or outside-in, rather.” His eyes twinkled. “Still, I did remain silent a rather long time. I spent my energies with your subconscious alter ego, who was aware of me before she became conscious again. Being outside-in herself at the time, we had something in common.”

Sylvie’s head began to spin. “Ahhh!” she cried out plaintively, “This is getting really horribly complicated. I don’t understand any of it!”

“Let your otherside self be on top,” Asafel suggested. “She understands perfectly, and her understanding will help you, if you let her be the one in charge of the mind. You have an acquired habit of rigid self-control. It’s not your fault, but it doesn’t help things one bit. I would like to help you lose that habit. You’ll be much happier without it, I promise you.”

As grateful for the suggestion as though the possibility had not existed before Asafel named it, Sylvie surrendered the reins of her body to Snowpepper and let her consciousness drift out of her mind’s control.

“That’s it?” Sylvie demanded. “You gave in and let him have his way?”

“Well, sweetheart, please understand that I have the same ability with people that I do with animals. I could tell that little bear wasn’t dangerous, and I could tell that George was. He meant every word of it. He was convinced that I had put our son in danger and anything I said on the subject—anything—he would have left. With the boys. I couldn’t risk that, even if Asafel hadn’t told me my life depended on staying married.”

“Well, Mom, you have to admit, it must have looked pretty crazy to Dad,” Sylvie said. “It would have to any normal person. I mean, Carl was only four, and you let him approach a bear. I mean, duh, you know?”

“I didn’t mean to do it in front of your Dad. He wasn’t supposed to be coming home for two more days. Breakup started early, he said, and we didn’t have a telephone. I wouldn’t have done it in front of him, not unless he had been prepared first. Of course, I didn’t know, yet, how he felt…and you have to realize, I grew up in the woods, with Asafel… I didn’t know how normal people felt…” Adele’s voice trailed away. “God, I was so naïve!” She fumbled in her purse with trembling fingers.

“Is it all right if I smoke in here, Sylvie?” she asked.

Sylvie was shocked. “No, Mom, it’s not, this is a non-smoking house. But I thought you quit smoking, like, years ago!”

“Well, I started again after Carl left, but I tried to hide it. I guess I hid it pretty well.” Adele’s smile was twitchy. “But now… sweetie, I really need a cigarette.”

“We’ll have to take a walk, then.”

“In this neighbourhood? Isn’t it, you know, dangerous?”

“Nah. It’s fine. Come on, Mom.” Sylvie went ahead, not looking back to see if her mother had followed. Her head was spinning with implications she couldn’t sort through. That Asafel character gave her the creeps. Still, she couldn’t help feeling a sense of loss at not having had the chance to know him. Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad, having a real ‘invisible friend’. After her own recent experiences, she didn’t question whether or not Asafel was real, or whether her mother might have made the whole thing up or been deluded in some way. Anything was possible in this new world she had returned to.

They went out the front door just as Squid and Julie were returning. “Hey, dude!” Squid said enthusiastically, high-fiving Sylvie. “This your mom? Hey, Sylvie’s mom, dude, how’s it goin’?”

Adele removed her hand from Squid’s eager grip and slipped quickly past the two street kids, nodding and smiling frozenly. Squid’s high-energy puppydog friendliness made her nervous, not to mention his tattoos and piercings.

“Dear,” she whispered to Sylvie when they had successfully made their escape, “Am I mistaken, or was his tongue, you know…” she trailed off, gesturing vaguely.

“Yeah, his tongue is pierced with a skull. I don’t get it, but he’s into it.” She shrugged. After only a few days in the city, plus a timeless span on the other side of things, she felt like a veteran of the strange. “Squid’s cool Mom,” she said. “Really, he’s just sweet and totally harmless.”

“Yes, I suppose he is,” Adele murmured. As soon as they reached the outdoors she fished in her purse for a cigarette. She lit it with a tiny pink disposable lighter then exhaled a streamer of smoke with a long sigh.

“That’s better.”

Sylvie glanced at her but said nothing. Now was not the time to protest her mother’s smoking habit.

“Mom,” she began. “What happened next? Did Asafel go away?”

“Oh, no, of course he didn’t. He can’t, you know. He’s a part of us, part of our family really. No, he’s still here, right now. All we have to do is call on him.”

“Us? You mean, I could…” The thought chilled her.

“Oh, yes, he’d love it if you did,” Adele said. “He was very upset with me for not introducing you to him while you were growing up. It was too late for Carl, of course, but it seemed the best thing for you and Scotty. The simplest, anyway.”

Sylvie walked in silence for a while. The came to a small barren park; a stretch of grass with a few scrubby trees. Homeless people were huddled here and there with their bundles and blankets. She supposed they had to go somewhere.

“Want to sit here?” She pointed to an empty park bench.

“All right,” her mother agreed, after glancing furtively around. Satisfied that there were no potential attackers lurking near, she carefully brushed loose grit from the seat with a grimace of distaste, then sat.

“Tell me more, Mom. I really want to know. How did Carl manage to keep Asafel a secret from Dad for so long? And did you still talk to him? Asafel, I mean.”

“Yes, I still talked to him, whenever I had that chance, that is. It wasn’t very often though, because things changed after that. Your Dad quit logging and got a job at the mill so he could be home more often. I might have had the opportunity while he was at work, but then we moved in to town because he thought it would be safer there. I didn’t care for it much. I missed our cabin in the woods. I missed the woods, the privacy.” Tears rose in Adele’s eyes as she puffed on her second cigarette.

“What about Carl?”

“I spoke to Carl. I explained to him that Daddy didn’t like magic and it would be better for him not to talk to Asafel or fly or anything like that where Daddy could see or hear him The poor little guy was so terrified by what he’d seen happen to the bear that I think he believed George would shoot him if he caught him behaving against his rules, so he was very careful. It was easier for him after your Dad built his bedroom down in the basement when he was eight. He was a very private boy and Scotty’s wildness in the same room was hard for him. I encouraged George to build the room, of course.”

“Of course,” Sylvie murmured. In her mind, she could feel Snowpepper’s churning excitement. I want to meet Asafel, she urged. Please, Sylvie, let me meet him!

No, Snow. No! I can’t explain why. Sylvie shuddered. He gives me the crawling horrors. Maybe later. Not now.

Sylvie! It could be important! He’s been with your family for so long! Aren’t you even the tiniest bit curious?

Not now!! At Sylvie’s imperative tone, Snowpepper subsided sulkily.

“I…” Adele shook her head, feeling muddled. “George, of course I’m happy you’re home, really I am. But really, you shouldn’t have shot that poor little bear. He wouldn’t have hurt Carl.”

“Oh, give me a break, Adele, it was a bear! A bear in springtime! You couldn’t know it wasn’t going to attack. Don’t hand me that crap!”

“But, George, I did know. I’ve always been able to know things like that. It’s a sort of gift I have, a… a power. And I’ve been teaching it to Carl, too. He wouldn’t have…”

That was when George exploded. He spun around and whacked Adele on the side of the head so hard it knocked her sideways onto the ground. Carl, already crying, began to shriek in true terror, and Scotty, nearly falling from his father’s grasp, let out a panicky wail.

Adele bit back her own tears, not wishing to frighten the children further. George had never hit her before this. Never! What was more, he had sworn to her that he never would. And the things he was saying! Her ears rang so she could barely hear him, but she could tell it was dreadful. His face was red and swollen; his neck muscles bulged frighteningly. He looked like he was about to have some sort of an attack. A distant, abstracted part of her worried for him.

Some of his words came through the ringing in her ears. “…never want to hear… superstitious BS… won’t have my children … real world and you’d better …”

When he ran out of steam, still breathing hard, eyes glinting like sun on steel, he said, very deliberately, “Adele, I have one more thing to say and you’d better believe I mean it. If you ever pull a stunt like this around my children again, if you ever put their lives at risk because you think some crazy-ass power is going to save you or them, and if you even say one more thing that leads me to believe you might do it again, I will leave you so fast it will make your head spin, and I will take my boys with me. Do you get it? Do you understand?”

She shook her head, confused. He couldn’t mean this. Not her affable and easygoing husband. “George, don’t say these things,” she pleaded brokenly. “Don’t be like this! This isn’t you!”

“Goddamn rights this is me!” he bellowed, shaking in her face the clenched fist that wasn’t gripping the terrified Scotty. “Believe it, woman! I won’t have this superstitious BS in my family! All I want to hear from you right now is ‘Yes, George,’ do you understand me?”

“I … yes, George,” she said meekly.

The bear saw Adele at the same time as she noticed it. It was a smallish black bear, perhaps a yearling cub, and she felt no fear of it. It snuffled, and then began to waddle closer, its round ears perked forward.

Carl laughed delightedly. “Look, Mummy! A doggie!”

“No, sweetie, it’s a darling little bear. See, he’s friendly.”

Asafel had vanished, as he tended to do when not called on for awhile, so he was not present to prevent what happened next. Carl reached his arm toward the little bear, who plopped down on his hindquarters, looking so much like a teddy bear that Adele smiled.

A shot rang out, and the bear slumped to one side, collapsing bonelessly to sprawl on the earth.

“Mummy, wha’ happ’n?  Why de bayer fa’ down?” Adele shook her head, gazing helplessly around. Who had fired the shot? She huddled on the ground, clutching both boys to her breast, when George arrived on the scene, sweaty and furious.

Without preamble, he launched into Adele. “For Christ’s sake, woman, what were you thinking? Dragging these boys this far from safety in bear country? You’re goddamn lucky I showed up in time! That thing could’ve ripped Carly’s face right off his head!” With a steel-toed boot, he prodded the bear’s limp carcass. A thin trickle of bright red blood flowed from a small hole in the bear’s forehead.

“Not a bad shot, though, eh?” he grinned, proud as all get-out. The thing about George was, he never stayed angry for very long about ordinary things like his eldest child nearly getting mauled by a bear. And he loved to kill things.

Adele was too stunned to respond. Her head still rang from the sound of the shot, and the hammering of her heart would not slow down. The little bear’s open, curious expression was imprinted on her retinas like the afterimage after a camera flash.

“Mummy, de bayer bleedin’!” Carl wailed. “Is de bayer hurted, Daddy?”

“Damn rights that bear is hurted,” George said. “That bayer is hurted right to death, honey. He’s not going to hurt you now. Everything’s okay, eh?”

Carl’s shocked face crumpled and he began to wail. “De bayer! I want de bayer! Daddy kiwwed it!” He buried his face in Adele’s breast and sobbed heartbrokenly. Scotty’s ‘welcome home Daddy’ grin dampened slightly and he looked in puzzlement from Carl to George. Then he broke into giggles and waved his arms to be picked up. “Da Da!” he gurgled.

George swung Scottie up into the air, eliciting more giggles. “There, at least somebody’s happy to see me! What the hell’s going on, Adele?”

Adele sighed. “All right. I suppose I ought to tell you. You have a right to know, dear… it happened when Scotty was just little, and you hadn’t come along yet. George worked in the bush then as a logger, so he was away most of the time. It was just me and the boys,  which suited me fine.”

Bright sunshine slanted through the cabin’s tiny streaked windows. Though snow still lingered in the deep woods, the meadows and cleared area around the cabin were greening up nicely. Adele loved this time of year. Her soul was well suited to this North country; its extremes of seasons thrilled her. Even the bitter cold and long darkness of winter seemed beautiful to her, with the brief hours of mid-day sunlight sparkling in rainbow brilliance from bright impossibly white snow. Spring, though, was her favourite.

She dressed the little boys, who had caught her excitement and were in a boisterous fever to escape the tiny bounds of their cabin.

They spilled out the door into the muddy yard. Adele carried Scotty, who wasn’t yet comfortable with walking through the deep mud. She extricated Carl once when his boots became stuck in the calf-deep muck, which made him giggle, and her swear under her breath. She decided to take the boys for a real walk, out of the mud and into the meadow down the path behind their cabin. George didn’t like them to venture far from home; the meadow was frequented by bears, who would be emerging from their winter hibernation, thin and hungry.

He would be angry to learn she had taken them this far from home in bear country, but she knew they would be in no danger. Asafel would protect them. She hadn’t told him about Asafel; the occasion to do so had never arisen. Spending as much time alone had given her a sense of freedom and independence. When George was home, her life revolved completely around him, and Asafel was forgotten. Carl, too, was normally so excited to have Daddy home that he didn’t think about Asafel.

Soon it would be breakup in the deep woods where George worked, and he come home for two or three months. Even during breakup, however, Asafel had so far not been an issue. Last year they had traveled out to Alberta for an extended visit with George’s relatives, and the excitement of a holiday on the farm with horses and cows had occupied all of their attention until it was time for them to return home, and for George to return to the bush.

Now it was George who was forgotten, far away from her, and Adele was free to do as she pleased. Carl was a bright and venturesome four, curious about everything. She was in the habit of speaking with him as an equal, and often called Asafel out to talk with him too.

“Mummy, is As’fel a angel?” Carl asked her.

“I don’t know exactly what Asafel is, Carl honey. Let’s ask him. Asafel?”

He was right there, of course. He always was. To speak his name was to invoke him, and he had never failed to respond to her invocations. It was a point of pride for her not to invoke him for petty things, like pulling Carl from the mud; she wanted to be a strong and competent mother to her children. She didn’t hesitate to invoke him to answer any question Carl might want to ask, though.

Asafel appeared as a thin smoky wraith, visible in the sunshine as a reflective, pearly swirl in the air, approximately human-shaped.

“Yes, dear one?” he responded in his silky, caressing voice. He felt so good to her! Carl loved him, too; of course, he did. To speak with Asafel was to feel deeply known and loved without question.

“As’fel, is you a angel?” Carl repeated his question.

“I suppose you might call me that,” the wraith chuckled affectionately. “I’m your angel, in any case. I’ve been with your family practically forever. All the way down to the beginning of time. It’s my job to guide and protect you.”

Carl frowned. “How ‘bout Auntie Clare? An’ Jeff an’ Joey?” Clare was Adele’s younger sister. Carl was not sure he wanted Asafel to live with his cousins the way he did with his own family.

“Clare has the option of calling on me if she wishes, and if she did so, I would come. She does not; she doesn’t choose to remember me, and her sons have not been taught my name. Always it is the elder child, especially if she is a girl, who has the strongest claim and bond with me. You are the eldest, even though you’re not a girl.”

“What if Mummy has a baby who’s a girl?” Carl asked, curious. He knew that Mummy and Daddy wanted another baby, especially a little girl. They had been preparing him for the possibility for some time now; in fact, Adele had already conceived Sylvie, although she had not yet told anyone, including George.

“Then she, too, will have a claim on me,” Asafel laughed. “I have always followed the female line, from mother to eldest daughter. It is less likely that Scotty there,” He indicated the little boy who was giggling and batting at Asafel’s swirls of creamy mist, “will feel as drawn to me as you do, or as your little sister would. He simply won’t feel me as strongly. Even now, he does not hear me in his mind the way you always have. It tends to work that way.”

“If I have a sisser, will you still want to be wif me?” Carl asked anxiously.

“I promise you, little one,” Asafel said, very seriously so that Carl would know he was telling the truth, “For as long as you want me, I will be there for you when you call.”

Asafel smiled, an expression not visible on what passed for his face, but was felt instead, palpable as sunshine through cloud. “Your Mummy will indeed have a little girl, and very soon; a baby sister, and she is going to love you with all her heart. You will be her guide and protector, her beloved big brother. Do you think you will like that?”

Carl frowned. “I dunno. Maybe.” He thought a moment, then grinned. “Yah. If she loves me, den I’ll love her too.”

“That’s the way it works, isn’t it?” Adele laughed. “We love the ones who love us. It’s a lovely way to live.”

“As’fel, lift me up!” Carl cried. Asafel was teaching him to fly, but he hadn’t quite got the hang of it yet. Once he was assisted into the air, though, he could maintain his own altitude. Adele smiled to see him cavorting in the air. She and her sister had flown with their ‘invisible friend’ as children too, though he had cautioned them to be careful not to be seen by anyone except their own mother. Now, Adele felt flying was beneath her dignity as a grown woman, a matron, but she liked to see her own child delighting in that breathless freedom.

The path was muddy, an old logging track that in the summertime would be thick with grass. She was so tired of mud! She allowed herself to levitate a little, enough to avoid sticking in the mud, but not so high as to obviously be flying.

The woods here were thick, spruce and fir mostly, with some barren poplars and alders interspersed. When they got to the meadow, an old logged-out area that would soon be full of fireweed, she breathed a sigh of relief and let herself sink back to earth. Instead of the god-awful muck underfoot, she now walked on springy damp turf. She plunked Scottie down on the ground so he could toddle about, and sat on the stump of a tree to breathe in the fresh air and bask in the sunshine.

Just when it seemed like  my life couldn’t get weirder, Sylvie thought. She struggled to make sense of what her mother was telling her.

“But… Mom,” she said finally, “Why are you telling me all this now?”

“I was so desperate after you left. I think I went a little bit crazy,” her mother confessed. “I did something I hadn’t done in many years. I called on Asafel to show me where you were.” Seeing Sylvie’s look, she said, “Asafel is a, I don’t know what you’d call him. A demon, a spirit, a helper, a guide? All I know is, when I ask in a certain way, he comes and tells me what I need to know.

“It must have been Asafel Carl was talking to the night your father… you know,” she said. “I grew up with Asafel and I wanted my children to have his help and guidance too. But George, well… I got afraid and stopped calling on him. Until last week, that is. And Asafel told me you needed to be told. So, that’s why.”

“I don’t get it, Mom. I mean, if this Asafel character was so important to you for so long, how could you give him up for a guy? Even for Dad? Why didn’t you just divorce him? People get divorced all the time for stupider reasons than that!”

Adele sighed. “That’s a very modern attitude, Sylvie, but I’m an old-fashioned woman. I grew up in the bush, and I had very romantic notions as a girl, mostly from books; I read a great deal. But also, I’ve always known that when I married, it would have to be forever. You see, Asafel always cautioned me to be very careful choosing a husband because I’d be stuck with him for life. He told me that…” she hesitated. “If my marriage ever ended, so would my life.”

“What?”

“It was a prediction, a prophecy. And Asafel is always right. He always has been.” She looked at Sylvie pleadingly. “Sylvie, your Dad is a good man. I was careful choosing him. I love him with all my heart. I didn’t know about his phobia, you see. It didn’t really show up until we had children, when things like Santa and the tooth fairy started to become issues. Before that, I was sure he would come around. I really believed it was ignorance talking when he would go on about ‘irrationality’ and ‘superstition’. I kept waiting for the right moment to reveal to him what I could do, to offer it to him as a gift. I was never quite sure what held me back, until…

“Well, I found out it’s a seriously deep-seated phobia for him. I couldn’t leave him, but I couldn’t let him leave me, either, and he would have. He almost did, once.” Her voice sharpened. “My life was at stake, do you understand? What would you children have done without a mother?”

Sylvie picked up the thread of what her mother had left unsaid. “He almost left you… what do you mean? What happened?”

Rocked as she was by these revelations, Sylvie burned with curiosity. “Mom,” she said, “I do want to hear more about all that, and it’s interesting and all, but I’m dying to know, how did you find me here? What’s going on?”

Her mother assumed an expression of put-upon patience. “Yes, Sylvie, I know. Please bear with me. I’m getting to it.” She sucked in a deep breath, her chest expanding to its fullest, then released it in a long, slow sigh. “All right. Here’s the short version. Sylvie, it was me who taught Carl magic. I did it when he was very young, but it seems he never forgot. And, to answer your question, I used magic to find you here.”

Sylvie couldn’t believe her ears. She sat up straight on the bed, electrified with shock and horror. “What are you saying, Mom? Are you telling me you’re some sort of witch?”

Her mother’s face flushed and she waved her hand as if to bat the word away. “Oh, Sylvie, please don’t call me that. I honestly don’t know what I am. But if your father ever found out what I’ve done, he would hate me. He would leave. I couldn’t bear that! He must never know.” Her eyes held Sylvie’s. “He must never know,” she repeated deliberately.

“Well, I’m not going to tell, if you’re worried about that,” Sylvie said, offended. “I know how to keep a secret. But…” she stopped for a long moment, then burst out with what was bothering her. “Mom, why didn’t you ever teach me about magic ?I mean, I needed to know about that stuff!” Her heart was full of things she didn’t know how to express. She was sure that if she had known such a thing as magic existed in the world, she  she would have been far better equipped to handle the strange events of the past few days. She felt betrayed to her depths by what her mother had hidden from her. And to find out that her beloved Carl had also conspired to hide such an important secret from her burned like napalm in her soul.

A terrible ache grew in her chest. “Mom?” she whispered. Adele’s face was turned away. Her shoulders shook again.

“I’m sorry, Sylvie,” she cried. “I couldn’t. I should never even have taught Carl what I did. When I learned how strongly your father felt, how violently he hated anything that even pretended to be magical, I stopped showing Carl the things I could do and I told him we couldn’t play that game any more. I was just showing off, anyway. It was so wrong of me, I was so selfish, I shouldn’t have!” She sobbed woefully into the now-mostly-shredded wad of tissue.

Sylvie discovered a folded white handkerchief on her bedside table and handed it to her mother. “Here, Mom, use this,” she said softly. Adele accepted it without comment and blew her nose. “Thank you, sweetheart,” she hiccupped. She was distraught, hands shaking, lips trembling. “If I could turn time back,” she sobbed, “I would undo it all. But that’s a magic I could never master. I’m not really very good at it, you know. I just knew a few tricks.

“But Carl was gifted, and once he had the idea he continued to practice in secret, even after I forbade him.”

Episode One
Episode Two
Episode Three
Episode Four
Episode Five
Episode Six
Episode Seven
Episode Eight
Episode Nine
Episode Ten
Episode Eleven
Episode Twelve
Episode Thirteen
Episode Fourteen
Episode Fifteen
Episode Sixteen
Episode Seventeen
Episode Eighteen
Episode Nineteen
Episode Twenty
Episode Twenty-One
Episode Twenty-Two
Episode Twenty-Three
Episode Twenty-Four
Episode Twenty-Five
Episode Twenty-Six
Episode Twenty-Seven
Episode Twenty-Eight
Episode Twenty-Nine
Episode Thirty
Episode Thirty-One
Episode Thirty-Two
Episode Thirty-Three
Episode Thirty-Four
Episode Thirty-Five
Episode Thirty-Six
Episode Thirty-Seven
Episode Thirty-Eight
Episode Thirty-Nine
Episode Forty
Episode Forty-One
Episode Forty-Two
Episode Forty-Three
Episode Forty-Four
Episode Forty-Five
Episode Forty-Six
Episode Forty-Seven
Episode Forty-Eight
Episode Forty-Nine
Episode Fifty
Episode Fifty-One
Episode Fifty-Two
Episode Fifty-Three
Episode Fifty-Four
Episode Fifty-Five
Episode Fifty-Six
Episode Fifty-Seven
Episode Fifty-Eight
Episode Fifty-Nine
Episode Sixty
Episode Sixty-One
Episode Sixty-Two
Episode Sixty-Three
Episode Sixty-Four
Episode Sixty-Five
Episode Sixty-Six
Episode Sixty-Seven

Instead of answering her, Adele said, “Sylvie, why did you run away from home?” She asked the question so straightforwardly, even innocently, that Sylvie found herself answering before she could think about it.

“I wanted to find Carl,” she said. “I didn’t like our family without him. I just had to go.”

Her mother flushed and cast her eyes down. “Yes, I thought that’s what it must have been. Things haven’t been good the past couple of years, have they?”

“You and Dad… well, Dad especially, have been just horrible about Carl.” Sylvie felt her hurt and resentment rising, surprising her Snowpepper self. “Dad even… Dad…” she wanted to tell her mother about the slap, but her throat tightened and she couldn’t force the words out. Her hand floated up to touch her cheek, as though she could still feel the slap’s sting on her skin. Tears smarted in her yes.

“Yes, he slapped you, I remember. He cried about that later, did you know? He felt so terrible. He really didn’t mean to hurt you, darling.”

“He never let me know that!” Sylvie exclaimed angrily. “He never even apologized to me! He acted like a, a big bully! I hated him for that!”

“He knew you did, sweetheart, and I swear to you, it hurt him terribly. But he just couldn’t be rational when it came to Carl. He couldn’t see straight. It drove him out of his mind to even think about it. He would go a little crazy, he couldn’t help himself.”

“Why? What did Carl do that was so horrible? Why wouldn’t anybody tell me anything?” Sylvie’s face was hot, her heart was racing, her hands shaking. She wanted to cry but she wanted answers more. This was the first time either of her parents had been willing to talk about Carl since that terrible night. She didn’t want to lose the moment. “Please, Mom, I need to know.”

“It’s difficult to explain, Sylvie, and I’m not entirely sure I understand it myself. You see, something happened that night. Your father saw something that he couldn’t reconcile with the son he loved.”

“Tracy said the other guys were saying it was because Carl was gay,” Sylvie muttered.

Her mother smiled a little sadly. “I wish that was it,” she said. “I’m sure George could have accepted that. He’s not a Neanderthal, you know. But what really happened… was much more difficult.”

“Well… what?” Sylvie couldn’t stop the impatient rise in her voice. “Was Carl a werewolf or something?”

Her mother’s eyes widened. “Well, no,” she whispered. “But Sylvie, you’re not too far off the mark with that wild guess.”

Sylvie felt her mouth close so suddenly that she bit her tongue. “Mom, please, will you spill it? What are you getting at?”

“Carl was becoming something strange to us,” Adele said softly, looking down at her hands, which writhed as though each finger had a separate will of its own. “He … well, he didn’t do anything so terrible, I thought, but you know how your Dad is about anything that seems irrational or superstitious, don’t you?”

“I know he’s an atheist, and he used to get mad whenever anybody talked about magic or faeries or anything like that. He was weird about it. He wouldn’t even let us believe in the tooth faerie or Santa.”

“Yes. It’s a blind spot your Dad has. Really, it’s a phobia. He’s absolutely petrified of magic, the supernatural or occult, anything that smacks of what he calls ‘blind irrationality’. He’s tried to convince himself he didn’t believe in it, and he tried very hard to teach you children to be rational, logical creatures. I once asked him how he could be so frightened of something if it wasn’t real, and he became so enraged that he scared me. So I let him have his way with you children, though I personally saw no harm in Santa Claus or faeries. But with Carl, he failed.”

“Well, I guess he failed with me, too,” Sylvie muttered under her breath. When her mother glanced sharply at her, she said, “Yeah, Carl used to tell me stories about magic and werewolves and faeries and things. Scary stories, some of them.” She shuddered, remembering the werewolves in particular.

“That was part of it,” Adele sighed. “Carl had an instinct for the strange, the magic side of life. As convinced as your father was that it was all nonsense, Carl was equally convinced that there was more to the world than what could be seen or heard. And…” her voice trailed away again, her face tense and drawn.

Sylvie made herself be patient. She let Snowpepper-in-her come forward, watching and listening intently without pressure. She could see the pulse beating erratically in her mother’s throat, the fine sheen of sweat on her brow. Adele blinked and rubbed her eyes heavily. “Oh, Sylvie, this is so hard for me. It just sounds so crazy. I’m about to tell you things that I can’t imagine you’ll be able to believe.”

“Hey, Mom, don’t worry about me,” Sylvie assured her. “You’d be surprised at the kinds of things I’ve learned to believe in. I’ve changed a lot.” She moved closer to her mother’s chair and opened her arms to her. Adele startled at first, but returned the hug gratefully.

“Thank you, darling,” she whispered. “You are a sweet girl. I’ve missed you terribly.” The hairs on the back of Sylvie’s neck lifted. She had the eerie feeling that her mother was talking to Snowpepper—to the sweet innocence that had been missing in her for twelve years.

She stayed where she was, resting loosely in her mother’s arms. She was surprised by how natural and normal it felt. She had no conscious memory of ever being this close with her mom. It had always been Carl for her, for as long as she could remember, anyway.

Adele continued. “George saw Carl do something that frightened him terribly, that enraged him, drove him to a state of temporary insanity. And in that state, he disowned the son he loved, and he forbade me to have anything more to do with him.”

“What did he see?” Sylvie asked.

“Carl was practicing magic in his room,” her mother said calmly. “He was calling up spirits and talking with them. Your dad walked in on one of those sessions, and he saw some sort of shape hovering in the air, talking with Carl. He watched for a moment, too shocked to move or speak, long enough to be certain of what was happening.” Her face softened. “It’s not really his fault, sweetie. I hope you can forgive your father. I hope Carl can forgive him too. Mostly, I hope he can forgive himself. Something happened to him when he was young, I’m certain of it. Something magical and strange, that frightened him so badly he’s never recovered. And what he saw in Carl’s room reminded him of that experience.”