Page 84 of Jingle Spells
“But the sign says ‘Turn Back Time,’” the woman insisted.
“Such is the deceitful tongue of commerce. A linguistic snare crafted to extract currency from the perpetually gullible masses that swarm like mindless larvae across this realm.”
The woman huffed. “Well, there’s no need to be rude!”
“Rudeness is but one of the infinite horrors at my disposal.” Louise snapped her fingers, and the woman vanished with a small pop.
A horrified murmur ran through the remaining customers.
“Uh, what just . . . I mean, where’d she go?” bumbled a man in a “GOT HEXED IN OAK HAVEN” T-shirt.
“She dwells now in what your historians call the Middle Ages,” Louise said with an unnatural smile. “Where she may commune with the pustulant harbingers of plague, witness the exquisite spectacle of public dismemberment, and experience the olfactory symphony that is human existence without sanitation. Who among you yearns to be next?”
The shop emptied with astonishing speed.
As the last tourist fled, Louise turned her gaze on Delilah and Jasper. “Ah I see, you’ve returned. Very well . . .” She made a vague little wave with her hands. “Get on with it, then.”
Delilah and Jasper glanced at each other, then back at Louise. “Get on with what?” Delilah asked.
“Well, I can only assume you’ve come to prostrate yourselves at my feet, expressing infinite gratitude for how I dragged your pitiful forms across the vast temporal abyss.”
“Ah. Uh, right. Yes, we are supremely grateful . . .”
Louise nodded. “Of course. Prostrate away.”
“Sure, right,” Delilah said hesitantly. “Actually, though, we’re here because we need your help again.”
Louise went terrifyingly silent, fixing her gaze directly into Delilah’s soul. “You what?”
“If you could send me back to before Saturnalia . . .”
“You dare petition me for what abomination against the cosmic order?”
“Oh, nothing as big as an abomination, surely. Just a few days, a week maybe? See, then I can warn everyone not to surrender their magic. And none of this would have happened.”
Clocks slowed, stopped, and began to run backward. Louise seemed to grow taller, her shadow stretching impossibly across the floor and up the walls. Delilah feared her anger but the face of the time witch held an expression that was far more terrifying than rage.
She looked . . . disappointed.
“I bestowed upon you a boon beyond mortal comprehension,” Louise said miserably. “I parted the veil between epochs and guided your insignificant forms to the natal moments of your wretched settlement. You fetus, do you not see that I provided you with greater assistance than I have provided any human in a thousand years?! I helped! I never help, but I helped you!”
“You did! You totally did, Louise!” Delilah could feel the conversation going deliriously wrong, but she didn’t know how to reverse course. “And that was really great, Louise. So great. It’s just that—”
“Yet my generosity has failed to slake your thirst?” Her voice was an anguished mix of shock and grief. The tone of a creature who’d never had her feelings hurt before. Of a creature who hadn’t realized she possessed any feelings in the first place. “You are saying . . . I am . . . insufficient?”
“Oh no, that’s not what Delilah means at all!” Jasper leaped in to try and help. “You’ve been enormously helpful. It’s just, we have this new idea about how to fix Oak Haven’s problem. And we just thought—”
Somewhere in the shop, a pocket watch exploded into a pile of gears and springs. “The arcane manipulations of chronological fabric do not exist to rectify every trivial disbenefit your kind inflicts upon itself!” A cuckoo clock began to melt before their eyes.
“But this isn’t some trivial disbenefit,” Delilah argued. “This is the fate of our entire town, our way of life!”
The time witch threw back her head, releasing a laugh like the death rattle of a thousand condemned souls. “You mewling specks, do you not see? Your ‘entire town’ is but a momentary aberration in the cosmic horror that is Time itself. You would have me unravel the fabric of reality because your pitiful holiday ritual yielded undesirable consequences?”
“But—”
“BEGONE FROM MY SIGHT!” Louise thundered, her voice seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. “Lest I cast you into the gaping maw of the universe to witness the final extinction of your species. An event I have joyfully observed countless times across infinite timelines!”
The bell above the door jingled again. A balding man in cargo shorts stepped in, cradling a broken pocket watch. “Excuse me, is this the clock repair shop? My grandfather’s watch stopped working and—”
