Museum of Magic, page 1
For the people who introduced me to dice:
Alix
Charity
Christine
Jess
Here’s to more inglorious beginnings, wolf pets, and goblin buddies.
Copyright © 2022 by Beth Revis
http://bethrevis.com
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Cover design and art by Jessica Khoury. Chapter header images by Canva, used with license.
Museum of Magic
Beth Revis
Contents
Foreword
Prologue
1. The Sun
2. Two of Swords, Transposed
3. Five of Pentacles
4. The Devil, Transposed
5. The King of Cups
6. Nine of Cups
7. The Hermit, Transposed
8. Four of Wands
9. Two of Pentacles
10. The Chariot
11. Nine of Swords, Transposed
12. Ten of Pentacles, Transposed
13. Five of Pentacles
14. The Knight of Cups
15. The Knight of Cups, Again
16. Six of Pentacles
17. Two of Swords
18. King of Wands, Transposed
19. Six of Cups, Transposed
20. Eight of Swords
21. The Emperor, Transposed
22. The Chariot
23. Three of Cups, Transposed
24. The Magician
25. The Lovers, Transposed
26. Nine of Pentacles, Transposed
27. Eight of Swords, Transposed
28. The Hierophant, Transposed
29. Five of Swords, Transposed
30. Three of Cups, Transposed
31. The Devil, Transposed
32. Eight of Pentacles
33. Ace of Cups
34. The Magician
35. Two of Cups, Transposed
36. Nine of Wands, Transposed
37. The Lovers
38. Six of Swords, Transposed
39. Temperance, Transposed
40. Six of Swords, Transposed
41. Justice, Transposed
42. The Hermit
Epilogue
Historical Notes
Afterword
With Special Thanks
About the Author
Also by Beth Revis
Foreword
The book you are holding in your hands came about due to chaos and chance.
This book, from its very first inception, was designed to be written in a totally new way. Every week, I outlined a chapter with a variety of paths for the characters to take. I drew a tarot card to set the mood and then used elements of chance to determine how the story unfolded. I mostly used dice rolls, but spiced things up with coin flips, more tarot, or by drawing options from a cup. Each chapter ended with a chance for readers to vote on the direction for the next chapter.
The end result is this book, a story that was impossible to plan, guided by fate and readers.
You can see traces of this in the design. Every chapter opens with the name of the tarot card that was drawn as it was written, as well as a quick summary of what the card means. This story was originally published on both Kindle Vella and my Patreon, and the sequel is being written in the same style. You can read House of Hex and vote on the story’s development now!
Please follow me on social media or via my newsletter to discover new, exciting stories as they unfold. Find more information at bethrevis.com.
Prologue
The Unopened, Unshuffled Deck
The little iron bell tinkled as a tall, thin woman pushed the door open. She blinked as she transitioned from the bright, sunny outside to the darkened room, and Emmi knew she had only seconds before the woman spotted her behind the front desk. She allowed herself one deep breath with closed eyes before painting a smile on her face.
“Hi!” she called cheerily in the tone of voice borne from years working in the gift shop.
Emmi could tell immediately that the woman had never worked retail. It had nothing to do with the expensive leather bag on the woman’s shoulder and everything to do with the way she had no idea that Emmi’s bright smile was one hundred percent a customer service smile and not in any way real.
“Oh! I didn’t see you there.” The woman grinned, the edges of her red lipstick straining. “Did you just pop up here by magic?” She waggled her fingers.
“Ha. No,” Emmi said. Three sentences in, and the woman was diving straight for the kitsch. “I just work here.” And live here. The Museum of Magic was built from one of the oldest buildings in America, with the bottom floors devoted to the museum and the top floor—formerly the attic—reserved for Emmi and her grandfather. But Emmi didn’t tell the woman that. Whenever a guest found out that Emmi wasn’t just a summer employee but an actual descendent of the resident historical witch, with the same last name as the one carved in stone over the doorway, the tour turned the spotlight from the various mystical artifacts into an interview about what Emmi knew (not much more than any other seventeen-year-old), whether she had magic (no), or whether she’d ever seen magic (obviously not, since magic wasn’t real).
“Well,” the woman said, her gaze sliding past Emmi and roving around the foyer. “This is just a charming little…museum.”
She said that last word as if she was dubious it was accurate, despite the laminated sign in the window.
“Welcome to the Museum of Magic,” Emmi said, repeating the same words she’d heard her grandfather tell guests for years, the same ones she herself had started parroting once she’d gotten old enough to take over the family business, at least during the summer and weekends. “This building is the former residence of Elspeth Castor, a witch who fled the persecutions of the English witch trials only to find herself accused of witchcraft in the American colonies. Elspeth Castor arrived in America on the Speedwell, the ship that accompanied the Mayflower across the Atlantic, and she was the only person on either ship to disembark at Provincetown instead of Plymouth.”
Emmi eyed the woman. She looked a little bored, her eyes flitting around the foyer at the pictures hanging from the wallpapered hallway depicting the story Emmi was telling. Emmi skipped some of the details about her ancestor, and dove straight to the salacious points.
“The original pilgrims, as we all know, nearly died that first winter in America,” she said.
“Thanksgiving, Native Americans, all that,” the woman muttered. Emmi blinked several times, but otherwise didn’t let her emotions show—not that the woman noticed. She expected that sort of vague abridgment of history when the local fifth graders came for their annual trip to the museum, but… Ah, well. Emmi still had to get the woman to pay for a ticket into the museum.
“Oh!” the woman said as Sabrina stepped daintily over the counter. The woman laughed. “You’re the wrong color! Why are you orange?”
Oh my god, Karen, you can’t just ask people why they’re orange, Emmi thought, wanting to quote that movie, Mean Girls, but biting her tongue just in time—the joke was old, and she doubted it would land well. “Meet Sabrina,” she said, gesturing to the ginger cat.
“Like the teenage witch?” the woman chuckled. Sabrina jumped off the counter toward the woman, who bent down to make little tsking noises at the cat. Sabrina, who had never met a stranger, butted her head right against the woman’s outstretched hand. Emmi smiled at her cat. Sabrina was the wrong color—Grandfather had taken Emmi to the shelter in the hopes that she would pick a black cat, something very apropos for the museum. But Emmi had fallen in love with Sabrina and her orange whiskers.
The woman looked up, and Emmi knew she was going to ask for either the restroom or the gift shop and then leave. Before she could, though, Emmi rushed in with the rest of her pitch. “So what the history books often leave out—and what’s never mentioned at Thanksgiving dinners—is that the pilgrims blamed Elspeth Castor for their harsh living conditions,” Emmi said. She heard the theatrical pitch to her voice and leaned into it. “Elspeth had joined the Speedwell out of desperation, fleeing the witch trials of England, and although she had thought that she would be safe in America, the pilgrims had decided the strange woman was a witch. Dropping her off, alone, in Provincetown had been their solution. But Elspeth lived. And the pilgrims were convinced that she had cursed them.”
There it was—Emmi had the woman’s attention. “Throughout the first winter, the pilgrims sent hunting parties to track down and kill Elspeth, believing the only way to stop her curse was to kill her. They were, of course, unsuccessful.”
“What happened?” the woman asked somewhat breathlessly. Sabrina wove between her legs, demanding more attention. It was a mark of how much the story had engaged the woman that she ignored the cat.
“Elspeth lived. She became known as a wanderer, and there are records of her as far south as Virginia and as far north as Salem.” Emmi added emphasis to that last word—Salem. She knew what it meant for the tourists. Although the witch trials were most famous in Salem, they had extended throughout the region, the paranoia about witchcraft causing many a smaller village to hang an innocent woman. Just to be safe, of course.
The tourist, however, frowned. She seemed to be counting on her fingers. “But…that would mean Els peth had to have been around a hundred years old. And the date carved in the stone doorway was 1666. The Salem witch trials were in—”
“1692,” Emmi finished for her. And the pilgrims landed at Plymouth in 1620. Great. This woman had a kid’s problematic idea of Thanksgiving with smiling Native Americans passing around turkey, but she skewered Emmi on bringing up Salem. On the one hand, she was right—Elspeth had died before the infamous witch trials. But Emmi hadn’t lied—Elspeth had been recorded as a visitor of the town, just a few years before she died. Not too long before the fanatics started looking for witches…
“Elspeth’s connection with witchcraft extends throughout the region in the earliest ages of America’s colonial history,” Emmi said, switching tactics. “If you’d like to learn more about her and the way this one remarkable woman witnessed history, tickets to the museum are only eight dollars, and…”
Emmi trailed off as the woman shook her head. “Nah, I was just stopping by off the interstate. Saw a sign for this place at the gas station. Do you have a gift shop? And a bathroom?”
Emmi’s smile tightened at the corners. “Sure,” she said. She led the woman to the side room—formerly Elspeth’s sitting room, now converted to a shop with a bookcase full of tomes about history and witchcraft, a table of crystal globes, a carousel of postcards, and a glass case featuring more expensive items, such as handcrafted beaded necklaces and voodoo dolls, which, despite being highly anachronistic and not at all contemporaneous to Elspeth Castor’s history or this region, were their best sellers.
The woman did a quick turn around the shop, then beelined to the restroom. A few moments later, the tinkling iron bell at the door alerted Emmi that the woman had slipped out without buying a single thing or even thanking Emmi for her time. Sabrina mewed at the door, offended at being ignored.
Sighing, Emmi crossed over to the front door. It was summer, so the air was warm and muggy, the sunlight lingering heavily in the sky. She checked her watch. Emmi had been at the museum all day, and the woman from the interstate had been the only person to come inside. It was still technically an hour before she was supposed to close, but Emmi went ahead and flipped over the sign in the window and locked the door before drawing the black curtains in the front of the house closed.
“Boring day, huh, Sabrina?” Emmi told her cat. Sabrina rolled on her back, paws up and belly exposed. For most cats, this would be a sure trap to a clawed hand, but Grandfather often joked that Sabrina was half-dog. Emmi gave the ginger cat a good scratch on her white belly, and the cat’s rumbled in a purr of bliss.
Standing back up, Emmi put her hand on the stone doorway, one of the more unique features of the house. Like many of the colonial houses in New England, the Castor house was made of planked wood. It retained much of its original charm, from the gabled roof to the massive chimney in the center of the house. And those original features included the stone doorway. Carved from one massive, solid boulder, the square stone had been roughly chipped away to the proper shape and then jammed against the wooden planks. The small stone landing and steps were made of the same material, an ostentatious detail on an otherwise typical colonial house.
As with many of the buildings of the time, the house had grown in size as it grew with age. Perhaps if Nathanial Hawthorne had gone a bit more south he would have become enamored with the rambling, multi-leveled house with six gables rather than the seven gabled one he wrote about. Still, despite its age and quirks, Emmi loved her home.
Even the museum part of it.
With her grandfather away for the summer, Emmi had become accustomed to the shadows in the corners, the creak in the floorboards, and the drafts around the chimney that seemed to loom larger when she was alone. Growing up in Nick Bottom, Massachusetts, every kid in school had known Emmi to be the weird kid who lived in the witch’s house, and no one—no one—ever had a sleepover at the Castor house. But none of the items on display ever bothered Emmi.
It helped that she knew they were all fake.
Not fake in terms of history—the pointed black hennin hat had been verified by a textile expert to have been made in the late medieval period. Several larger museums had offered to buy some of the books in the library, a few of them handwritten from the seventeenth century. The clippings of herbs carefully compiled in jars had labels written with Elspeth’s own hand, dating from 1616 to 1670. They were all real.
But they were not magic.
Emmi made her way through the museum, cutting off the lights in each room. The house was labyrinthine, some rooms requiring a slight step up or down as they’d been added on by subsequent generations. Emmi’s grandfather had remodeled the space for a final time, converting the old sprawling homestead into the museum and restoring as much of it as possible to its original state, an enormous project that had left them teetering on the edge of broke for as long as Emmi could remember. The sitting room was the gift shop. The dining room now charted the progression of religious fanaticism and the shifting perspectives of witchcraft. The conservatory displayed Elspeth’s personal garden of herbs used in potions. One bedroom showed how witch practices shifted as they moved from England to America in the colonies. Another displayed torture devices used to draw out confessions from accused witches—that was always the most popular room with the elementary school visits.
It was all a matter of history, a history Emmi loved and respected. She knew Elspeth Castor’s past about as well as she knew her own, and she valued that history deeply. But while the fifth graders who giggled at thumbscrews were charming in their own way, and the people like the woman from the interstate were always a bit of a bother, the guests who aggravated Emmi the most were the ones who believed.
As a descendent of Elspeth Castor—and as the heir to the Museum of Magic in the tiny town of Nick Bottom—Emmi was absolutely never supposed to tell anyone how little she believed in magic.
But she knew, without a single doubt in her mind, that it was all nothing. It was the one truth Emmi believed more than anything else:
Magic. Was. Not. Real.
The Sun
illumination and an important journey
Twilight fell fast. The windows were nearly all the original glass from the seventeenth century, little diamond shapes framed by black-stained wood, the uneven thickness casting weird shadows across the thin carpets covering the hardwood floors. There were no overhead lights in the lower floors of the house. While the attic had been remodeled to be a more modern living space, careful placement of lamps and candles served to set the mood in the museum area. The lingering scent of smoke from the candles drifted through the museum.
It was long past time for Emmi to go upstairs. There was no reason for her to dawdle in the museum area. She had dinner—leftover Thai food—in the fridge. She could stream a show, blast some music, eat, fall asleep with Sabrina on the couch. Again.
But Emmi couldn’t seem to talk herself into turning in for the night. Instead, she checked the computer behind the desk in the foyer. Sabrina hopped up on the counter to watch Emmi’s fingers dance across the keyboard. Grandfather always told her that she was supposed to only use the computer for keeping track of sales and updating the museum’s webpage, but Emmi always ignored him, quickly closing tabs whenever her grandfather came by.
