Chapter Text
"Hey Jamie! Jamie! You see this shit? They got one of those slingshot rollercoasters!"
There were exactly two things of which James Carson was sure when it came to the month of June: First, the Doyle Brothers' Traveling Carnival of Mystical Wonders would roll into town promptly in the second week and set up shop next to the old cemetery where St. Finnegan's used to be, just as schools were letting out and parents were looking for any place, anywhere, to shove their hyperactive children for the day. Admittedly, the Doyle Brothers' Carnival hadn't changed much since its creation back who-the-hell-knew-when (it was one of those carnivals with such an original feel that some said it really was around back during the heyday of freak shows, something the carnival felt no need to dispute) and was thus appropriately seedy, dangerous and politically incorrect, but that's all excused when getting a yearly bout of tetanus is part of a tradition.
The second thing he knew without a doubt was that Michael Lucarelli, his best friend since birth, would go to said carnival and get absolutely, impossibly, and very likely inhumanly hammered, in what he assured Jamie was also a measure of tradition. Of course, Jamie was the only one to know that the tradition was having its fifth anniversary today; Mama Lucarelli would have a heart attack to know that her youngest baby boy had been out getting drunk off his ass since he was sixteen, which had always been Mike's way of cajoling Jamie into keeping his secret – well, that, and he knew what really happened to Mrs. Cartwright's favorite cat.
Keeping in step with the aforementioned traditions, it also fit that Jamie was the one to drag Mike's drunken ass home at the end of their day-long carnival trip. He couldn't help throwing up a thank-you to God that he and Mike shared an apartment and could both legally drink now; trying to sober Mike up before delivering him to his doorstep as teenagers was not something he would ever like to repeat again, thank you very much.
Sadly for him, Mike saw their newfound legality, as both had turned twenty-one over the past two months, as the perfect time to do absolutely everything that the Doyle Brothers' had to offer, all in one day, and with added alcoholic fun.
"Mikey, they always have one of those, and besides, I don't want you puking on me when it does the loops backwards."
Mike appeared to be mortally offended, which he probably was. "James Carson!" he slurred loudly, his violent listing to the left as he pointed at Jamie with his beer ruining his attempt at an imposing stature. "I have never once been unable to hold my liquor! Ever! I'm the beer king!"
"You puked all over me yesterday morning when I tried to roll you out of bed for your shift at the garage."
"Morning!" Mike crowed, slinging a warm arm around Jamie's shoulder and tugging him in close. He smelled like his typical mixture of booze, cigarette smoke and sweat, and Jamie only avoided making a face thanks to over two decades of constant exposure and desensitization. "I puked on you yesterday morning. That's hangover time, Jamie-boy, and hangover time is free game for spewing chunks. But I don't ever toss my cookies while I'm drinking."
From his facial expression, Jamie decided that either the very idea greatly insulted him or he was feeling mildly constipated. Possibly both. He decided not to think about it too hard. Instead, he took advantage of that arm over his shoulders and tried to turn his friend towards the exits, a difficult feat when you're trying to maneuver a Michael Lucarelli-sized dead weight.
"I'm still not getting on that coaster with you, man. The guy operating it looks even more hammered than you, and I didn't know that was humanly possible."
As if he had heard Jamie's remark, the man in question abruptly turned and narrowed his eyes at them, even going so far as to lift his eye-patch so his empty eye socket could scrutinize them too. Mike, ever the people-pleaser, grinned widely at the grizzled man and gave him a waving version of the one-fingered salute. For reasons Jamie would never understand, this just made the man smile widely as he gave them a proper wave in return.
Carnies, he thought with a sigh. It was best to just leave them be and save yourself the headache of ever trying to puzzle them out.
Shaking his head, Jamie steered Mike on towards the parking lot, having to first elbow and navigate his way through the narrow aisles of crowded stalls infested with tchotchkes, bad attempts at art and items that were all claimed to have some sort of magical property. He'd always hated this section the most, because it was a huge magnet for the out-of-towners and also had to be passed through to reach the exit, a setup the carnival had used with malicious glee for as long as anyone could remember.
Which meant that trying to push your way through the throngs of people buying shaman-blessed unicorn statues and emo dragon paintings while supporting your drunken best friend was a bitch.
"I'm awesome at making friends," Mike muttered into the collar of Jamie's jacket in regards to his new one-eyed BFF.
"Sure you are," Jamie grunted, wheezing as someone apparently just as desperate to escape as he was elbowed him harshly in the gut. Honestly, why did Mike always come out of these mobs looking as fresh as a (albeit very drunken) daisy while he looked like he'd joined a fight club?
Eyebrows drew together in a Mike version of a pout. "I am. I'm fucking charming."
"I never said you weren't."
He slapped Mike's hand away when he started to reach out towards a display of glass orbs, all labeled as some different variety of a crystal ball. The last thing he needed was for Mike to get distracted by something shiny, and Christ above if he broke one, Jamie was just dumping his ass here and leaving him to it, he was not in the mood to argue over blame and prices with an elderly Carnie woman again. He still hadn't regained his pride after losing last year's beatdown.
"But you're thinking it!" As if to prove this, Mike felt the intense need to poke his best friend in the face with his beer bottle. "Twenty years, Jamie-face, I know when you think I'm full of shit."
"You mean all the time?"
"Shut your trap, I'm spewing meaningful words of wisdom and shit here."
"Or you're just spewing shit."
Mike tried to slap the back of his head and missed miserably while also throwing himself off balance, pulling both himself and Jamie to the ground in a spectacular flail of arms, legs and an afghan with a griffin on it yanked from a nearby stand. The owner of said afghan looked at them reprovingly as Jamie tried to quickly apologize and pull the blanket out from under Mike, who was once again distracted by colors and pretty pictures.
"I'm sorry ma'am, I am so, so sorry," Jamie muttered quickly as he rolled Mike partially under the purple sheet covering the stand like a tablecloth to get at the afghan, which he shook out, brushed off and handed back to its testily waiting vender with a fast smile. "Good as new, right?"
The elderly woman (and really, why were all these Carnie women seventy going on seven hundred?) scoffed at him and rolled her eyes as she snatched back her blanket and checked it over for any damage, as if she could sense that Jamie was the type of person who had no qualms about lying to old women which, okay, he was definitely not, that was one time and the less Sister Mary Francis knew about the frog that may or may not still be living it up in the men's locker room of St. Joseph's Catholic High School, the better.
"I'm not so sure the griffin would agree," she grumbled in a rough voice characterized by the general Carnie Accent for Old Women, which was a strongly affected hybrid of a 1970s sitcom portrayal of a gypsy woman and Natasha from Rocky & Bullwinkle.
Jamie watched her expectantly for a moment, waiting for her to pass judgment. She scrutinized the blanket, glanced up at him and sniffed derisively. "Is not too horribly damaged," she muttered with an almost disappointed air.
Success.
That was one less ridiculously expensive and atrociously tacky fantasy craft for Jamie to be guilted into buying; his older sister the English major was so confused when she got a broken-winged dancing pixie statue for her birthday last year. Then Jamie told her the broken wings symbolized the shattering of human ideals, and she thought it was the best gift ever, which was great, because he had to spend the money he was going to spend on her gift buying it after Mike crashed through that stall.
He needed better friends.
"Jamie! Jamie, check this out!" Speaking of Mike he was still half-under the purple sheet, apparently having a fantastic time lolling around on the popcorn-and-is-that-vomit?-covered ground.
Throwing the still-glaring elderly woman a grimace, Jamie reached down, fished under the table with one hand and dragged Mike back out. Whatever Mike had found, he must have felt it was very important, because he came out clutching it tightly to his chest.
"Dude, you gotta see this," he slurred, accent thickening to the point where if that wasn't Jamie's own South Philly accent too, he would have assumed Mike had forgotten how to speak English.
When he held up his prize for his friend's viewing, however, the elderly Carnie woman behind them made a sharp noise of disapproval.
"Is not yours!" she barked, immediately moving to wrench the object from Mike's hands before he could get a good view of it. All he could see as she tugged it from his friend's grasp was what looked to be a rather large brown leather-bound book with worn, uneven pages.
Mike made a noise like a wounded animal and leaned heavily on the purple stall as he pulled himself staggeringly to his feet. "But I found it! Why the hell wouldya bring it if you're not gonna let people take a look at it?"
She sniffed as if he was not worth her time, which was not a reaction Mike got from most any woman (for some reason Jamie could never quite comprehend, everybody from the little five year old Castiglione twins up the block to his own seventy-nine year old grandmother thought that Mike was just the most charming young man they had ever met, even once they'd seen him sloppily drunk and swearing like his vocabulary solely consisted of four letter words, which admittedly it usually did when he was sober too). The woman then gave Mike her most scathing glare, which even Jamie, not currently the subject of her ire, shuddered under.
She could teach Sister Mary Francis a thing or two. God forbid the two old broads ever met.
"Do not talk of what you do not know. Book is special, very special, and you are an idiot."
Elderly Faux Gypsy/Pseudo Russian Woman was now Jamie's new favorite old lady, which was okay, because his grandmother had already proclaimed Mike her favorite grandson, which really, what the hell, Grandma?
"I was just looking at it," Mike grumbled, eyebrows pulling together as he ground his teeth in his own version of an annoyed pout. "Thought it looked cool."
"Which is why you are an idiot," the woman reiterated. "Book is not to be disturbed because it is 'cool.' Is to be used for intended purposes only."
Finding himself interested in what about a book could have caught Mike's attention, seeing as the most reading he ever did without an incentive involved the model profiles in porno mags, Jamie peered closer at it from where the woman held it in a stranglehold in her arms.
It was indeed a veritable tome of tanned, weathered and uneven pages bound in soft-looking dark brown leather. What likely caught Mike's attention were the gilded letters shining on the cover in some language Jamie didn't recognize, and the beaten-up golden clasp securing the book closed.
"What's the intended purpose?" Jamie found himself asking before he could stop himself, curiosity weighing out over his wish to grab Mike and get the hell out of there.
Now the woman's attention was back on him. "Not of concern," she dismissed him.
But then she paused for a moment, and Jamie would have sworn the temperature in the air dropped a few degrees. He glanced towards Mike to see if he had noticed it, but his friend was still glowering at the old woman, leaning heavily on the table. How did he not notice how suddenly the air was sharp, almost painful to inhale? It felt charged, acidic, like the time before an oncoming electrical storm.
The woman stared as if unseeing for a pregnant moment, fingers of one hand stroking lightly over the book's cover almost unconsciously, but her other hand held the book in a harsh white-knuckled grip. Then, with startling accuracy, her gaze snapped to meet Jamie's.
"Actually," she began in a softer tone, almost pensively, "May be of great concern to you."
Feeling a headache coming on and his ability to deal with crazy elderly not-Gypsies dwindling in the oncoming night, he raised an unamused eyebrow. "Come again?"
Her gaze flitted from Jamie to Mike and back again before she nodded decisively, setting her sights definitively on Jamie and giving him a heavy look. "Yes, is for you." With that, she thrust it into Jamie's arms, forcing the air out of his gut with the sudden weight to his abdomen.
"Why does he get to hold the book?" Mike whined from his right, now seeming to be testing if the stand could hold his weight as he sat curiously on its edge.
"Because I do not trust idiots with book." She paused for a moment, scrutinizing Jamie before saying, "You are slightly less of an idiot."
He didn't know if he should feel pride or insult. He chose to stick with the former, because Mike was making annoyed grumbles, which was always amusing.
"Book is for you," the woman repeated to Jamie, her unimpressed façade both a comment on his lack of attention to her apparently important message and a judgment on his character. "Is not mine. I receive it long ago, as a girl. I was told to keep book safe until I find who it is for. I find who it is for, I give it to them. Now I give it to you, because book is for you."
"That's very nice of you, ah, ma'am, but I don't need your book-"
"Was not an offer," she growled, smacking Jamie upside the head and ignoring his yelp of surprise. "Book is yours. Now shoo, I have customers who will take good care of my griffin." Indeed, a tourist couple complete with matching fanny packs appeared to be quite interested in her afghan, and she watched them with a smug sort of pride.
"Has protective properties," she informed them with a too-bright smile, to be met with enraptured nods. The man even lifted his camera to snap a picture of her. Joke's on them, Jamie thought with glee, seeing as their picture would be complete with Mike's bitchy expression just over her shoulder, like a pissed-off gremlin with a wicked underbite.
The book weighing heavily in his arms, Jamie glanced down at the worn cover before staring at the woman in confusion. "Who the hell are you?"
She sniffed derisively once more, flipping a multi-colored scarf over one shoulder. "You may call me Madame Doyle."
This drew Mike's attention, and he and Jamie shared a disbelieving glance.
"Doyle?" Mike squinted at her. "You mean like…?" He pointed at the marquis over the entrance, reminding people to join the Doyle Brothers again next year.
The woman made a face before flipping a disinterested hand at them. "Distant cousin. Now leave, I have customers."
With that she turned her back completely on the duo, who could only share another glance before Jamie shrugged, sighed and shifted the book under one arm before hefting Mike's arm over his opposite shoulder.
"Come on buddy," he said, "time to finish the drunken shuffle."
"I don't need your help," his friend groused, even as he leaned heavily into the redhead's side.
"Sure you don't," Jamie muttered under his breath as the pair made their way, thankfully uninterrupted, to Mike's exceptionally shitty car.
Settling Mike into a heavy lean against the rust-speckled frame that very well could cause it to collapse at any given moment, Jamie held out a hand and muttered "Keys," waiting for said objects to be slapped into his hands so he could go home and sleep off what felt like his own allotment of Mike's hangover, and dammit he couldn't even drink tonight because he was supposed to be the designated driver.
Mike seemed more interested in the book he had just pilfered from Jamie, scrunching up his handsome face in concentration as he worked to undo the latch holding it shut. With a quiet happy noise he succeeded, flipping the latch back and opening the book on the low roof of his car.
Sighing wearily and wondering how he came to be Mike's babysitter even though he was technically the younger one, even if only by one month (and here his parents had somehow used their ages to declare Mike his babysitter when they were preteens), he began shoving his hands in Mike's various pockets with a grimace, seeing as his friend seemed to have no plans of unearthing the keys himself.
"Whoa, at least buy me dinner first, sailor," Mike slurred in a mutter with only partial attention, eyes still squinting at the book as he flipped through its pages with a type of irreverence for its fragility that only he could achieve.
"I did. I paid for your lunch, your breakfast and all of your snacks too."
A pause. "Oh. Carry on, then."
That at least won a snort from Jamie, who had just finished his first circuit of Mike's pockets and had come up empty. After checking his own, as if the keys had somehow jumped to him without his notice (which, after living with Mike for three years, he could attest that they very well could have), he made a second trip through Mike's pockets.
"What the hell did you do with the keys?" he hissed under his breath when his second round also proved to be fruitless. He then abandoned Mike to the book so he could peer into the car's windows. "I don't see them in here…You better not have lost them in the carnival."
"Stop your worrying," Mike grumbled, prodding him sharply in the ribs. A few page flips later, he crowed in delight. "Ha!"
"What?" Jamie muttered, rubbing a hand wearily over his face. "You find the keys?"
Mike looked at him as if he were a particularly slow puppy: adorable, but atrociously dumb.
"Nooo," he said slowly, eyebrows rising as the word drew out. "Better."
"What, does the book have a section on how to teleport yourself home because your roommate is getting pissed with you?"
Mike rolled his eyes. "Stop fucking worrying so much, Jamie, you're being such a killjoy. What I found," he said, placing particular emphasis on his achievement, "is a page in English!"
"That's what you're excited about? Are you kidding me?"
"Shut the hell up, you try reading the rest of this gibberish."
"I don't want to-"
"Hey, look at that! It can get my keys back!"
"…What?"
Once again unable to help himself, Jamie peered over Mike's shoulder, squinting at the thin, faded writing illuminated by the bright flashing lights of the carnival behind them and the parking lot's sole flickering lamppost.
"'To Return What Is Lost.' Dude, what the hell?"
"It's a spell, dumbass. We can use it to find the keys! Lost shit and all that, you know."
"Yeah, I know you're obviously more drunk than I thought if you're turning to voodoo, and you know spells and crap are sacrilege. I mean, Christ, Mike, are you shitting me?"
Mike leveled him an unimpressed look. "Y'know, I heard there was a whole thing about sacrilege and taking the Lord's name in vain and all too, but maybe I was just hearing things."
"Oh shut up, you're the moron who thinks a bit of chanting and a sprinkle of magic is going to save the day."
"Hey, you got a better idea? No? Then suck it up and read the damn book."
Jamie made what he was sure was a really great bitchface and shoved at his friend's arm. "What the hell? You read it if you want to, it's your idea."
"Yeah, but the crazy old lady said it was your book," Mike replied with an air of smug satisfaction, "and besides, between this light and my vision right now I could barely see the title." Ignoring Jamie's victory cry at his admission to actually being drunk, Mike simply jabbed the book into his side.
"Read," he commanded.
Rolling his eyes, Jamie muttered under his breath, "The shit I do for you," before leaning in to get a better look at the text.
"What the hell? The only English is the title! No way I can read this without phonetic spelling or something."
Mike prodded a silent, proud finger against the middle of the page, smirking all the while.
"…You kidding me? This thing is what, older than either of our family trees and it's got a damn phonetic pronunciation?"
A shrug. "Guess they figured they might get illiterates like you."
"It's not even Engl-"
"Read."
"Fine, fine I'm reading, geeze."
And he read.
And nothing happened.
"Christ, finally. You happy now? We read the magic spell, nothing happened. What do you want me to do, clap three times and spin in a circle? Wave my magic wand? Or can we finally just call a cab or something and get the spare keys from the apartment and come back tomorrow like normal people?"
Mike crossed his arms and stared at Jamie. "Obviously you just said it wrong. Scared off all the little Tinkerbells."
"Yeah, sure, okay. I'm calling a cab."
Jamie had just dug his phone from his pocket and began to search his saved numbers for the local cab company when something caught his eye.
"Hey Mikey, what's that?"
"Huh?" Mike looked up from his continued perusal of the book.
"There, right there, dumbass. That light in the cemetery. What is that, reflection from the carnival?"
Mike squinted for a moment before his face cleared into a grin of success. "Oh, now I see what you mean! I don't know. Looks kinda far in to be from the carnival lights."
"I know," Jamie muttered, taking a few steps forwards before remembering himself. "Looks strange though, doesn't it."
St. Finnegan's Church had crumbled long before either of the boys had been born, its broken foundation and stone remnants left to be speckled with wild grasses as the years went on. A high wrought iron fence had been placed around the small church and its graveyard in the 1920s as both a sign of respect for the dead and a way to keep out vandals who liked to frequent the abandoned church, playing among its ruins and often needing medical assistance because of it. The fence wasn't a complete deterrent, but regular police patrols kept the old parish free of too many intruders, despite the fact that the unused fields next to it, formerly the large unfilled section of its vast graveyard, had been turned into fairgrounds for whatever show, event or musician rolled into town.
That wasn't to say that the used section of its graveyard was small. In fact, when it was listed on the roster for National Historic Places, it had been noted for its extremely large size and well-preserved graves, many with legible dates leading from the last internment in 1901 to the early 18th century. The grasses were an eerie shade of green that appeared almost grey, like the life and color had been sucked out of the perpetually-gloomy lot, despite the fact that a groundskeeper regularly kept the place in fairly good shape.
It wasn't unheard of for kids to sneak into the cemetery when the groundskeeper was out, and when there were events going on right next door it was almost expected, but…where were the cops? There were always cops posted along the cemetery fence's perimeter when the fairgrounds were in use. Beer, young people and a cemetery next door was a fairly obvious equation and usually, the local law enforcement behaved accordingly.
But there was some sort of strange blue glow deep in the rows of slanting grey headstones, dim but bright enough to be seen even at this distance, and not a single officer was in sight.
"Strange," Jamie repeated to himself, voice almost a thoughtless mutter. His eyes never once left the glow.
"Wanna check it out?"
Mike's voice next to him was just the brash, almost-nasal shock he needed to pull himself from his trance-like state.
"What, and watch you skewer yourself on the fence? Not a chance. We're not kids anymore, Mike."
"You make it sound like we're old men, Jamie. Jesus. And I ain't gonna get myself hurt, I'm drunk but not that drunk. You wanna see what's there, I wanna see what's there, cops seem to have taken the night off, let's check it out!"
Jamie found himself torn, not over the legalities of trespassing – Lord knew he and Mike had spent enough of their time breaking into and out of St. Finnegan's in the past – but over his wish to get home and go to sleep and his curiosity over the light.
Mike, ever the best friend, chose for him when he set off at a pace that was rather brisk given the slight drunken weaving of his steps, book tucked firmly under his arm, towards the cemetery. By the time Jamie's brain caught up with the situation, Mike was already slipping the book through the fence's slats and looking for the best place to climb over.
He would tell himself later that he'd had no choice but to follow; he was only being a good friend, after all.
Mike would tell him it was fate, and maybe he was more than a little bit right, but Mike was drunk, so what the hell did he know anyway?