Prologue
Hippies
November 1st, 1981
If you go down three blocks from the start of Main St. in the town of Capulet, South Carolina, turn left, and drive for about a mile, you’ll find a big plaster sign pointing into a little development called Crestview Point. Crestview, to an outsider, would seem the most peaceful, most still place you could find anywhere in the world. The grass trimmed on every lawn; the flowers all perfectly coordinated; and the beautiful houses with their large windows, all painted in various shades of beige.
However, inside one house, with a door painted blue, there was chaos lying dormant. Something that would bring this peaceful, and above all, normal neighborhood to its knees. Right now, it was not a threat to anyone or anything, but it wouldn’t be long before a certain errand into town pulled that trigger and changed everything.
“Mama, my shoes are untied!”
“I’ll be right there, Tallulah,” Candace assured her daughter as she finished slipping her high-heels onto her feet.
The Delarosa house, from the inside, was just as seemly perfect as it looked on the outside. Even with an active three-year-old, Candace Delarosa had the uncanny ability to keep her home meticulously neat to the point of it being near surgically sanitized. The shoes were lines in an arrow-straight row next to the door, from largest to smallest. Magazines were piled in perfect stacks and in alphabetical order. In fact, if a person were to walk into the Delarosa house when it was completely devoid of human life, they might not even think a real family even lived there; that this was just some sort of display house set up to remind people of how imperfect their own homes were.
If a person were to tell this to Candace Delarosa, she would probably take it as a compliment. She may even have gotten some guilty pleasure from knowing that her home made the less-than-perfect feel guilty.
Candace thrived on normalcy and predictability; she craved it, as a matter of fact. She needed order so deeply that it wasn’t enough to simply have it in her own home. She was on the Neighborhood Beautification Committee, which existed for the sole purpose of nagging the neighbors about the heights of their hedges, to the toys on their lawn, to the dirt on their cars.
The smallest little reminder that disorder existed in the world simply drove Candace up the wall. If she had any idea of the whirlwind of chaos that had been growing inside of her house, right under her nose…
But we’ll hear all about that later.
Nearly ready to leave the house, Candace rummaged through the coat closet, pushing Tallulah’s princess costume from last night of to the side as she reach for the coats. In fact, on their way out the door, Tallulah insisted on wearing the plastic princess shoes from the costume.
“No, Tallulah,” Candace answered firmly, as she guided her daughters arms through the sleeves of her jacket. “We’re going to be walking all around town today, so you need to wear your tennis shoes.”
“But, Mama-” Tallulah began to whine.
“This is not open for discussion, Tallulah,” Candace told her, effectively ending the would-be tantrum.
All the way out the door and on their way to the car, Tallulah pouted for not getting her way. In that respect alone, she was truly Candace’s daughter. But there was simply no outdoing the master, and that was exactly what Candace was. She’d never known a time when she hadn’t gotten her way before, and didn’t expect there to be a time when she wouldn’t.
“All set to go, sweetie?” she asked her daughter, as she buckled Tallulah into her booster seat.
Begrudgingly, Tallulah nodded, arms crossed, her lower lip jutting out. But she was in the car, she was quiet, and she was wearing her tennis shoes-that was all that really mattered to Candace at this point.
As she pulled out of the driveway and drove out of the cul-de-sac, she took the time to admire the freshly washed driveway in front of the Hendersons’ house. Yesterday, the children had gotten it into their insane little heads that coloring the entire driveway would make the neighborhood more interesting; but the psychedelic chalk colors only made Candace want to puke. One quick memo from the Neighborhood Beatification Committee, however, had clearly put an effective end to that little delusion.
The sky was a deep periwinkle blue, growing bluer and bluer the closer the drove towards town. Everything was peaceful and everything was perfect. There was not a worry or a fret in the quiet town of Capulet.
In fact, what was happening in the downtown area could easily be described as the opposite of fret and worry. The peace and perfection, on the other hand, did seem to lose some of its meaning. It had only been a few people strolling on the sidewalk at first, dressed in what seem to be robes in the most noxious colors imaginable-worse than the chalk colors on the Hendersons’ drive way. The very sight of them made Candace grind her teeth, but still, it was hardly enough for her to get upset over.
That wouldn’t happen until they got further downtown.
Scores of people in brightly colored smock-like clothing wove through the sidewalks and the streets, all shouting, dancing, and singing in celebration. Little Tallulah found the entire scene fascinating as she waved to everyone she could from the backseat of the car. It all made Candace feel sick to her stomach. What was happen all around her was the very textbook definition of disorder.
And to make the matter even worse, there was simply nowhere to escape from them. These freaks were everywhere: from the bank, to the dry cleansers, to the coffee shop. All of them carrying one some kind of random party that Candace had not been informed of.
My goodness, Candace wondered to herself. Is today some sort of holiday? Why else would these people be making such fools of themselves?
Throughout the entire town, as Candace did her errands, the madness carried on. She breathed a sigh of relief as she pulled into the grocery store, her last stop of the day. As she stepped out of the car, though, she pursed her lips together when she saw she could not escape from the chaos even here. Parked in front of the front entrance of the grocery store was yet another band of these robes-clad people, though these ones had taken their strangeness to a whole new level. There was a group of about seven of them, beating drums and dancing in circles like the flower child used to do in Candace’s youth. They were even taking it upon themselves to hug every stranger that came in or out of the store.
“Dirty hippies,” Candace muttered under her breath as she lifted Tallulah out of her booster seat.
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” the bakery worker shouted. “What was it you said you wanted?”
Candace tried to shout her order for sourdough bread, but eventually just gave up. She couldn’t have made herself heard, even if she wanted to. A boy in royal blue robes was singing songs she didn’t even know at the top of his lungs, dancing and weaving through the shelves of bread and pastries. Yet another weirdo, clearly high on something other than life.
Giving up on her sourdough bread, Candace resigned to rummaging through the bags of sliced bread, hoping she could find something conceivably edible for dinner tonight. She made her way through white, wheat, pumpernickel, rye, potato, sesame, whole grain…
At some point, after giving up on the search for bread, she found herself in front of the dessert case while making her way towards the dinner rolls. Though so many people coveted the bakery sweets, Candace always turned up her nose at them. The though of some minimum wage worker sneezing into the batter, and the flies buzzing around the florescent lights and occasionally sampling the frosting made her physically ill. Tallulah would always ask her mother why they could never buy these sweets from the bakery: and yet every time she explained her reasons to her daughter, the little girl would always forget and simply ask again the next time they came to the store.
At some point, however, she realized that Tallulah was no longer holding her hand. Candace spun around, eyes darting each and every direction as she began gasping for breath and felt her heart start to race. Besides being a meticulous person, Candace Delarosa was also a very nervous person; especially when it came to Tallulah. Tallulah wasn’t even allowed to go play at the neighbors’ houses unless Candace was with her. And with all the weirdoes that were roaming the town today, many unpleasant thoughts were circling around in her head.
Before she could scream for security, Tallulah came skipping out from behind a display of tortillas. Candace probably would have been relived if her daughter had not come skipping out behind that freaky boy, playing follow the leader and copying his every move.
“TALLULAH, GET AWAY FROM HIM!” Candace screamed at her daughter.
Tallulah glanced up with a confused look on her face. When the boy noticed that his new friend had stopped following him, he stopped and spun around with the exact same confused look that Tallulah had.
“Ma’am, what’s wrong?” the boy asked, as though he had no idea of what he did wrong.
“What’s wrong? WHAT’S WRONG?” Candace screamed as she yanked her daughter back from him by her arm. “Stealing a child away from her mother? You should be ashamed of yourself!”
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” the boy apologized with a smile on his face, “but it’s impossible to feel guilty about anything today. For today, mankind is free and all the Earth’s children are celebrating!”
“Celebrating what?” Candace exclaimed, getting sick of all the ‘celebrating’ nonsense. “What happened that is so wonderful that it’s caused an entire town of people to throw common sense and decency to the wind?”
Thoughtfully, the boy put his index finger to his chin, as though answering the question was a lot more complicated than Candace made it out to be. Finally, however, he gave up on his thoughts and began twirling through the aisles with his face and palms turned up towards the ceiling.
“You wouldn’t understand,” he answered in a dreamy sort of way.
As Candace picked up her daughter and turned around, the boy was able to get the last words in the argument. Words that would later make Candace’s blood run cold.
“Your little girl should, though.”
Upon first hearing this, Candace took it as some sort of threat. There were so many stories of children getting snatched from parks and grocery stores; taken by freaks and weirdoes, just like this boy. But the boy, in style with his short attention span, had already began to leave the bakery section and grace his way through the rest of the store.
“Damn freak!” Candace shouted as the boy danced down the frozen food section.
Later that night, after a supper of roast lamb, potatoes and zucchini (but no sourdough bread), the small Delarosa family had gathered in the living room. A fire was lit, crackling and licking against the back bricks of the fire place. Candace alternated between her latest knitting project, and watching Tallulah and her husband; the former who was playing with her dolls, the latter who was reading the newspaper.
Thomas, Candace’s husband, worked as an accountant at firm in a glass tower three cities over. It was a long drive back and forth between work, and many days, it seemed like Thomas spent more time out of the house than he spent in. Whether or not this was by his own design was a subject of debate.
“So,” Thomas began lazily, “did anything exciting happen today?”
Thomas had asked the question with the full intention of the answer only taking a few sentences to communicate. On any other day, this may have proven true, but Candace had been storing up the entire day’s events in detailed record, just waiting for her husband to ask this question.
A half hour later, Tallulah had left the living room and Thomas sat clutching the arms of his chair like someone who had just gotten off a roller coaster; but the entire days events had been reported. Instead of the rant helping to calm Candace down, however, reminding herself of all the madness that had interfered with her life today merely caused her to anxiously pace the floor and her heart and breathing to race all over again.
“We have to move, Thomas,” she urged her husband. “That’s the only solution. If people like that are what this city has come to, I don’t see how we can continue to live here!”
“Mama,” Tallulah called out from the kitchen, “there’s water spilled on the floor.”
“I’ll get it in a minute, sweetie,” Candace answered, without any intention of leaving until her husband agreed with her. “I’ll call a real estate agent tomorrow and we’ll have a new house in Greenville before the week is through!”
“Don’t call anyone, Candace,” Thomas told his wife. “Let’s not do anything rash. We don’t even know what really happened today.”
Upon hearing his husband disagree with her, Candace became distraught. Throughout their marriage, the times when Thomas would not give into his wife’s demands were few and far between. So whenever it did happen, Candace would throw tantrums that even Tallulah could learn something from.
“Are you serious?” Candace asked, a look of pure disbelief on her face. “You can’t be serious! I know you are not serious!”
“Mama,” Tallulah shouted again.
This time, Candace didn’t even bother to answer her daughter. She was too caught up in her own situation with her husband to worry about a little puddle on the floor. Talking about Candace, this truly meant something.
“Well,” Thomas argued nervously as he shifted in his seat, “we really don’t know what happened today. Maybe the high school went to state for something, or some beautiful celebrity divorced her husband and now she’s back on the market. For all we know, this was a once in a lifetime event and we’ll never see anything like this ever again.”
“Mama!”
“Thomas, it happened once already, it can happen again!” Candace shouted, now truly resembling a tantrum throwing two-year-old. “I DON’T WANT TO LIVE IN A STATE OF CONSTANTLY WONDERING WHAT-IF!”
But Candace was far from done. She couldn’t afford to leave any wiggle room for negotiation.
“I am calling a real estate agent, and the three of us will be out of this God forsaken town by the end of the week!”
“MAMA!”
“Tallulah, I said I’d be there in a mi-”
Candace’s words stopped dead in her throat as soon as she saw what her daughter was trying to tell her. The kitchen was a good fifteen feet away from the living room, and already the floor was becoming soaked with the water pouring out from the kitchen door. Now that the arguing had stopped, she could hear the water gushing from the kitchen faucet and her daughter crying as she tried to make it stop.
Thomas pushed his way into the kitchen, sliding across the slippery tile floor. He lifted Tallulah off her blue plastic stool where she was trying desperately to turn of the spraying faucet. However, Thomas’ own tinkering only seemed to make things worse as the faucet itself came off in his hand. The water shot from the sink like a decorative fountain. Candace ran for the paper towels, but as soon as the cascading water touched the surface, it froze nearly as fast as it has spurted from the fountain.
Thomas and Candace both stood back in a type of quiet awe. In total silence, the observed the frozen spectacle as though it were some bizarre piece of modern art.
Candace watched her daughter curled up on the floor, in the corner between the counter and the pantry, in a state of fear. Something Candace noticed was that nothing her daughter said seemed to make sense:
“I’m sorry, Mama. It wasn’t my fault. The boy said it wasn’t my fault…”
Whiskey Springs Pass by OliveOil_Med
Chapter Notes: Tallulah is three years old when she and her mother have the first experience encontering wizards...among other things.
Thanks, once again, to Anna, who rocks!