Spellbook of the Lost and Found
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Synopsis
The highly anticipated new book from the acclaimed author of The Accident Season is a gorgeous, twisty story about things gone missing, things returned from the past, and a group of teenagers, connected in ways they could never have imagined.
One stormy Irish summer night, Olive and her best friend, Rose, begin to lose things. It starts with simple items like hairclips and jewelry, but soon it's clear that Rose has lost something much bigger, something she won't talk about, and Olive thinks her best friend is slipping away.
Then seductive diary pages written by a girl named Laurel begin to appear all over town. And Olive meets three mysterious strangers: Ivy, Hazel, and her twin brother, Rowan, secretly squatting in an abandoned housing estate. The trio are wild and alluring, but they seem lost too—and like Rose, they're holding tight to painful secrets.
When they discover the spellbook, it changes everything. Damp, tattered and ancient, it's full of hand-inked charms to conjure back things that have been lost. And it just might be their chance to find what they each need to set everything back to rights.
Unless it's leading them toward things that were never meant to be found...
From the Hardcover edition.
Release date: August 8, 2017
Publisher: Kathy Dawson Books
Print pages: 368
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Spellbook of the Lost and Found
Moïra Fowley-Doyle
PROLOGUE
That night, everybody lost something.
Not everybody noticed.
It was a Saturday night on the cusp of summer and the air smelled like hot wood and burning rubber, like alcohol and spit, like sweat and tears. It was warm because of the bonfire in the middle of the field, and because of the stolen beers, the wine coolers bought with older siblings’ IDs, the vodka filched from stepparents’ liquor cabinets. There was the hint of a strange sound, that some thought might have been a trapped dog howling, but most decided was just in their imagination.
Some kept drinking, thinking this was just another night spent in a field at the edge of town, close to that invisible line where suburbs become countryside.
Some noticed without really understanding what they’d lost. Some kissed each other with cake on their tongues, rainbow icing dissolving between mouths to make new colors. Some took their schoolbooks and threw them on the bonfire, not caring that there were still two weeks before end-of-year exams.
Some turned around and went back home. Some forgot things they’d always known. Others stumbled, just for a moment, not knowing that they’d lost more than their step.
Some hung back, nervous, torn between edging closer to the fire and calling their parents to come get them. Some slipped small pills onto their tongues and swallowed them with soft drinks, the bubbles tickling their throats as it all went down. Some choked on cigarette smoke even though they’d been smoking for years. Some gripped others’ zippers in shivering fingers, lowered jeans or hitched up skirts. Others watched from the shadows.
By the time the fire had burned down to glowing ashes and a pile of charred wood, when everyone was dreaming deep in their own beds or lying through wine-stained teeth to their parents or getting sick in their best friends’ bathrooms or continuing the party in someone else’s house, apart from the few who’d passed out where they sat, there was nothing left in the field but the things we had lost.
OLIVE
Sunday, May 7th
Lost: Silver, star-shaped hair clip; jacket (light green, rip in one sleeve); flat silver shoe (right, scuffed at the toes)
Daylight is only just touching the tips of the trees when the bonfire goes out. I am leaning against a bale of hay upon which someone I don’t know is sleeping.
I roll my head over to look for Rose, who I was sure was sitting, legs splayed, on the ground beside me. The grass is mostly muck at this point, beaten down by many pairs of shoes and feet. My own feet—bare, the nails painted a shiny metallic green that doesn’t show up in the morning darkness—are dirty. So is the rest of me.
Rose isn’t here. I call out for her but nobody answers. Not that I expect she’ll be able to; sometime in the night she lost her voice from shouting over the music, from singing along to really bad songs and from all the crying.
Getting ready to go out last night, Rose told me, “Our plan for the evening is to get excessively drunk and then cry.” She swiped her lashes with another layer of mascara, which seemed fairly unwise, given the aforementioned plan.
“Can we make the crying optional?” I said. “My eyeliner’s really good right now.” It had taken me twenty minutes, six cotton swabs, and five tissues to get it even.
“Absolutely not.”
I sneaked a look at my best friend’s reflection. She blinked to dry her mascara. It gave her a deceptively innocent air.
“I don’t know why you want to go to this thing in the first place,” I said.
This thing was the town’s bonfire party. It’s held in May every year. Until midnight it’s filled with sugar-hyper children stuffed dangerously full of badly barbecued burgers threatening to throw up on the bouncy castle. Their parents bop self-consciously to decades-old pop music blaring from rented speakers while the teenagers—our classmates—sneak off to nearby fields to drink.
“I told you why I want to go,” Rose said. “I plan to get excessively drunk.”
“And then cry,” I reminded her.
“And then cry.”
“Well, you know what they say,” I said to the back of her head. “Be careful what you wish for.”
We slept in the field, which seemed like a good idea at the time. There is a growing chill despite the slowly rising sun and I don’t know if it means that a storm is coming or just that I’ve been in the same position for far too long. I’m beginning to lose all feeling in my right shoulder, the one propped on the prickly pile of hay.
When I look down, on one bare and dirty arm I see the words: If you don’t get lost, you’ll never be found. They’re blurry because my eyes are blurry; it takes five blinks for me to make them out. They run from shoulder to wrist and seem to be written in my own wobbly handwriting, although I don’t remember writing them. When I lick a finger and rub at an n, it doesn’t smudge.
For about as long as we’ve been friends, Rose and I have written what we refer to as our mottos on each other’s arms. When we were younger, they were things like You are beautiful or Carpe diem. These days they’re in-jokes or particularly poignant quotes. We both got detention for a week last year because of our matching block capitals reading DO NO HARM BUT TAKE NO SHIT. I must have written this one during the party, although when or why, I have no idea.
My head feels fuzzy. With a wince and a sigh, I drag myself out of the last dregs of drunkenness and shakily stand up.
I take stock: I am missing a shoe (the other is half buried in the muck beside me) and my jacket. My dress is covered in grass stains and smells distinctly of vodka. I have the beginnings of an epic headache forming and I seem to have lost my best friend.
“Rose!” I call. “Rose?”
The boy on the hay bale twitches in his sleep.
“Hey,” I say to him loudly. I poke his shoulder when he doesn’t wake up. “Hey!”
The boy opens one eye and grunts. He has dirty-blond hair, a stubbly chin, and an eyebrow piercing. I vaguely remember dancing with him last night. He squints at me.
“Olivia?” he says hesitantly.
“Olive.” I have absolutely no idea what his name is. “Have you seen my friend?”
“Roisín?” he says in the tone of someone who isn’t sure he’s saying the right thing.
“Rose.”
“Olive,” he says, sitting up slowly. “Rose.”
“Yes,” I say impatiently. He’s clearly still very drunk. “Yes, Rose, have you seen her?”
“She was crying?”
I pick up my shoe and shove it on my foot, figuring that one shoe is still better than none. “I know. That was our plan for the evening. Did you see where she went?”
“Your plan?”
I scan the field for any sight of her. There’s a blue denim jacket crumpled up on the ground not far away. I take it because I’m beginning to feel very cold.
Pale blue light spills over the trees and into the field. My phone is dead so I don’t know what time it is, but it’s probably close to six a.m.
I start to make my way toward the road. The boy on the hay bale calls out to me. “Can I’ve another kiss before you go?”
I look back at him and make a face. Another kiss? “Not a chance.”
“See you around?”
I shake my head and walk away quickly. Most of my memories of last night seem to have disappeared with Rose.
I make my way around the field, scanning the faces of the sleepers (trying to keep my eyes averted from the ones who clearly aren’t sleeping). It doesn’t take long; she isn’t here. I glance behind me and see that the boy on the hay bale appears to have disappeared, probably slumped on the grass. I am the only person standing.
I turn around in a circle, taking in the stone wall and the tangle of bushes surrounding the field, the fence near the empty road on the other side, the small line of trees separating this field from the next one.
There’s someone there, almost hidden between two spindly pines, staring at me.
It’s a boy. He’s wearing a flat cap and an old, holey sweater that might be green or black—it’s hard to tell in the shadows. He has a lot of brown, curly hair under that awful hat and is wearing thick, black-framed glasses. He has a hundred freckles on his skin and a guitar slung over his back. He looks like a cross between a farmer and a teenage Victorian chimney sweep. He is unmistakably beautiful.
Before I have time to break his gaze, he turns and walks away and I lose him between the trees.
I look down at myself, at my dirty dress and borrowed denim jacket, at my one bare foot and my grass-stained legs. I could be Cinderella, if Cinderella was a short, chubby, hungover seventeen-year-old with smudged makeup and tangled hair. And, while I’m very glad that I don’t have a dead father and an evil stepmother, I’m not entirely sure how I’m going to explain my current state to my parents when I get home. I try in vain to smooth the creases out of my dress and reach into the bird’s nest of my hair to pin it back with the silver, star-shaped hair clip I tied it up with yesterday, but either my tangles have eaten it or I lost it sometime in the night.
My bike is where I left it, chained to the fence by the side of the road, but it takes me several tries to unlock it because my hands don’t seem to want to work properly and my brain feels increasingly like it’s trying to turn itself inside out. When I clamber on, my bare foot sticks uncomfortably to the pedal.
I pass a grand total of three cars and one tractor on the road into town. The clouds above me are getting very gray, almost as if the dawn has changed its mind and wants to revert back to night. My dress blows up in the breeze, but there’s no one around to see, so I keep both hands on the handlebars and try to ride steadily. Under the sleeve of my borrowed denim jacket I can see the tail end of the sentence written there: You’ll never be found.
It comes back to me in a flash. Rose in my bedroom last night, staring at her reflection in my vanity mirror while pouring generous measures of cheap vodka into a bottle of Diet Coke.
She said, “If you don’t get lost, you’ll never be found.”
We’d drunk a fair amount of the vodka already and her words were slightly slurred.
“At this rate,” I said to her, “the only thing we’ll lose tonight is the contents of our stomachs.”
My prediction was accurate: Another flash of memory has me bent over a hay bale, throwing up some unholy mixture of slightly Diet Coke–flavored vodka and the barbecued hot dogs that we all ate on sticks, posing for pictures, holding the phallic meat like rude children. My stomach lurches at the thought and I have to pull over to the side of the road to retch again.
If you don’t get lost, you’ll never be found.
I cling to the low stone wall by the side of the road like a lifeboat, and sigh. Without warning, it begins to rain. Fat drops fall on the mess of my hair, darken my jacket, hit the dry roadside like cartoon tears. Splat. I have to blink them out of my eyelashes. I sigh again and drag my bike from the ditch.
I ride home through pounding rain and with a pounding headache. Maybe it’s that I drank too much and remember too little about last night. Maybe it’s that Rose left without me. Maybe it’s what the blond-haired boy said about another kiss. Maybe it’s the beautiful boy I saw at the edge of the field, looking like he’d lost something. But I feel like I might have lost something myself, and I have no idea what it is.
LAUREL
Sunday, May 7th
Found: Old red leather-bound notebook, thin and worn, secured by a black rubber band; ripped-up pages out of three lost diaries
We went to the party because our diaries went missing.
Holly’s disappeared first. Then Ash’s. I only thought to look for mine when five pages torn from Holly’s showed up in Trina McEown’s hands on Monday morning. And if there’s one place you don’t want to find your diary, it’s in Trina McEown’s hands.
You’d think at our age we’d be too old for gossip and giggling. But Trina stood up on a desk in the middle of the classroom as we were packing away after math and read excerpts to the class. She only stopped when Ash got on the desk with her, red curls flying, and punched her so hard, her nose bled.
We tried to explain, me and Holly, that a bloody nose is nothing compared to your every secret hemorrhaging like a torn artery, spoken in somebody else’s voice, but Mr. Murphy despises both metaphors and emotions, so Ash was suspended and Trina was excused from homework for the day.
That’s when it started.
We sat in Holly’s bedroom and I stroked her hair while she cried and Ash inspected her bruised knuckles. She wears them now like a badge of pride.
“I don’t see why you care so much, Holly,” Ash said. “I wouldn’t, if it were me.”
I stroked and stroked Holly’s hair, long and blond, blond and long and soft under my fingers like my whispered hush. I wanted to say, “It’s okay,” but it wasn’t, not really. There are things you tell a diary that nobody else should know. Not your best friends. Not your favorite sister. Not a classroom full of staring eyes and leering, open mouths.
“They pretend they never think those kinds of things themselves,” Ash said scornfully. “Like they never have sex dreams. Like they don’t have bodies that bloat and bleed. Like they never question the world around them or their own sanity.”
Holly cried so hard, her quilt was soaked with it, salt water in every seam.
“I’ll bet half the girls in that classroom masturbate. And all of the boys.” Ash snorted. “They’re just a bunch of repressed hypocrites.”
Holly sobbed into her hands and rivers ran between her palms. Tears dripped from the bed onto the floor. Pat, pat, pat into the carpet.
“Everybody’s parents fight. Everybody lies. No one knows what they’re doing in this bloody life.” Ash clenched her fists.
I whispered, “Hush, hush.” The carpet was sodden with Holly’s tears. The force of her crying raised the bed and set it bobbing. The bedroom became a little lake. Folders full of school notes, pencils and hair clips, books and tissues and childhood bears floated in it. I held her hair so as not to fall in. Blond and long, long and blond and beaded with salty tears.
“I’d punch her again if I could,” Ash said. “I will. Next time I see her nasty face. I’ll break her fucking nose next time.”
“Hush,” I said to Holly. “You’ll do no such thing,” I said to Ash. “If you get expelled, it’s just the two of us against the rest of them.” Together we are a three-headed dog, facing an army of hundreds of staring eyes and leering, open mouths. Without Ash, we’ve lost our fangs. “It’s hard enough in school already.”
Ash had the courtesy to look abashed. She leaned back on her elbows on Holly’s bed and said, “Then you’ll have to hold me back at the party on Saturday, because with a few beers in me who knows what I’ll do.”
“I don’t want to go to the party, Laurel,” Holly said to me in a whisper. “I don’t want to go anywhere they’ll be.”
“They’re everywhere, I’m afraid,” I said softly, braiding her hair, threading the tears into the braids like pearls. “In a place like this, there’s nowhere to hide.”
“So we won’t hide,” Ash said loudly, and she stood up on the bed, her school shoes scuffing the quilt. She stamped and said, “We won’t fucking hide. Who cares? We’ll go to the party like everybody else, Cinderella; we’ll be the belles of the fucking ball.”
The town bonfire party is hardly a ball. It’s more of an embarrassment. But there is always precious little supervision and often unattended coolers filled with beer. The adults either turn a blind eye or they don’t even notice.
Holly’s tears slowed to a trickle.
“Think about it,” I said. Holly had until Saturday to decide. “We’ll be right there with you.”
I didn’t say that the reason I wanted to go was very similar to Ash’s. I didn’t want to punch Trina; don’t get me wrong. But I did want to know how she got Holly’s diary. I wanted to know what she’d done with the pages she hadn’t torn out. And if she didn’t give them back, well, maybe I could do with a bruised knuckle or two.
That night I tore my room apart. I called Ash around eleven. “My diary’s missing, too,” I said.
She was silent for a moment. “I haven’t been able to find mine since the weekend,” she said.
In our three separate houses, we confronted our parents, we yelled at our siblings, but nobody confessed. I still can’t quite imagine Trina McEown or any of her cronies somehow sneaking into our houses and taking our things, but I don’t see how there could be another explanation. We only know that our diaries have disappeared and pages of Holly’s turned up in hostile hands, that Trina and her friends, or somebody else, have read the missing pages, have torn out entire weeks of our lives to keep like butterflies pinned to a wall somewhere.
I want to know where.
Then we found the spellbook. It was like it’d been waiting for us. Like it knew we’d need it.
I say we found it, but really it was Holly. We were on our way to the lake after school on Friday. Ash, still suspended, joined us outside town and we walked past her house, to where the forest gets thick and dark. It was warm—hot, even—but something in the air felt like rain. On either side of the road there were scraggly trees, tumbledown walls with gaps in the stone like missing teeth, green fields turning yellow under this unlikely heat.
We swung our sweaters like skipping ropes, holding the ends of the sleeves and jumping over the body, singing mindless children’s songs. Ash rolled her T-shirt up to make a bikini top and Holly and I quickly followed suit, unbuttoning the bottom of our school shirts and tying the ends in a knot under our breasts. Our bellies white as the undersides of fish, blinding in the sunshine they hadn’t seen since last summer. We imagined what the teachers would say if they saw us now, bare-bellied and skipping with our ugly school sweaters, kneesocks peeled off and stuffed in our schoolbags.
Holly was more cheerful that afternoon. With Ash at our side, we were a three-headed dog once again. We walked so close together, our hair started to tangle. Brown, blond, and red.
Holly wanted to climb trees. She’s always seemed a little younger than me and Ash, even though we’re all the same age. Maybe the skipping made her think of childhood. Or maybe she was trying to become a kid again, to exorcise words spoken aloud about period cramps and fighting parents, about positioning the spray of the showerhead just so between her legs.
We stopped at the giant oak tree in the fork in the road. We clambered from branch to branch, scratching our arms and legs and leaving sap stains on our bellies. Ash is arguably the bravest of us, but Holly climbed the highest. That’s where she found the spellbook: caught between two branches like it’d been left there by a bird.
She called out, “Laurel! Ash!” and dropped it down to us: a small, slim notebook, red and leather-bound, secured by a rubber band. Holly came down and we sat beneath the branches to read it. The first page said only SPELLBOOK OF THE LOST AND FOUND, like a title.
You can’t not read on with a title like that.
We didn’t recognize the handwriting, but Holly said she thought it looked familiar. On every other page were prayers to Saint Anthony, suggestions of offerings to the goddess Mnemosyne, a map to the river Lethe: findings and forgettings. Stuck to the blank pages in between were things that made the spellbook creak at the seams. Prayer cards and candy wrappers with strange symbols on them. Foreign coins. Pressed leaves and strips of bark covered in straight cuts like ogham stones. Or scars.
The spell was on the very first page: a calling for the lost to be found.
We wanted our diaries found. So Holly suggested we try it.
At first it was like a recipe: gathering moss and branches, raiding our cupboards for olive oil, slipping saints medals out of our nanas’ wallets, rooting through the Christmas boxes in the attic, looking for silver string. It was silly and secret and made us feel like kids making mud pies. None of us took it seriously, not even Holly.
By Saturday we had all the ingredients except for the waters of Lethe.
Ash was frustrated. “What does that even mean?”
“We learned about it in Classics,” Holly told her. “Remember? The Lethe is one of the five rivers in the Greek underworld.”
“So we’re unlikely to find any of its waters in Balmallen, County Mayo,” I said.
But then we found some of Mags’s poteen, a can accidentally left at the back door of Maguire’s pub (although Ash, reading this now over my shoulder, would like me to note that Mags rarely does things by accident; Ash sees conspiracies between the trees).
“We can use this instead,” Holly breathed, showing us the spell again. “See? It says poteen can be used as a substitute. It’s got to be hand-distilled—which Mags’s stuff is—and, if anyone infuses her poteen with ancient magic, it’s Mags.”
So we took some of Mags’s poteen to the town bonfire party. We sneaked away from the crowds and slipped into the woods. We cut our fingers and drank the burning alcohol and wrote out our losses on the branches of trees.
And that’s when the weirdness started.
Moss became fur became dead animals on the floor of the forest. The trees became the spaces between the trees. We three held hands and made noises that weren’t words, but that Holly said later were a calling. A calling for the lost to be found.
We came to in the morning, beside the giant oak at the fork in the road, each of us with scraped knees and bloody noses, tied together with silver string.
And, all around us, our missing diary pages covered the ground like a blanket of snow. In the field in the distance, the bonfire was still burning.
Calling for the Lost to Be Found
You Will Need:
A charm or talisman. (A medal or Mass card of Saint Anthony or Saint Jude, a dowsing rod, a crystal pendulum or an arrow-shaped hagstone will work best.)
A glass bottle filled with the waters of Lethe, the underground river in Hades that makes the drinker forget. (Poteen is an acceptable substitute. Must be hand-distilled in a pot still and infused with ancient magic.)
A length of silver string.
Red ink.
Olive oil.
A handful of rowan berries.
A hazel branch.
A vine of ivy.
As many rose thorns as you have losses.
Moss gathered from under an oak tree.
Human blood.
To Cast the Calling:
Gather fresh moss from under an oak tree.
Soak it in olive oil and crushed rowan berries.
Anoint it with human blood.
Snap a hazel branch in two and form an equal cross.
Bind the bloodmoss to the center X with an ivy vine.
Tie one end of a length of silver string tight around it.
Fix the cross to the branch of a tree.
Write your losses in red ink on the branches around it.
Pin each word in place with a rose thorn.
Wind the string around each thorn.
At the opposite end of the string, attach your talisman.
Let neither the cross nor the talisman touch the ground.
Wait for a sign.
If the lights go out, you will know the lost are listening.
If you hear dogs barking, you will know the lost have heard your call.
If you hear the howling, you will know the lost have answered.
Be careful what you bargain with;
Every lost thing requires a sacrifice—
A new loss for every called thing found.
What will you let go of?
What can you not afford to lose?
Consider carefully before you cast the calling:
It may not be for you to choose.
Be careful what you wish for;
Not all lost things should be found.
OLIVE
Sunday, May 7th
Lost: Parents’ trust (not for the first time)
My parents are early risers. Every morning the smell of fresh coffee sneaks into my dreams before my dad’s voice booms through the house. He throws open the doors to our bedrooms and stands on the landing, loudly reciting whatever his favorite poem is that week.
When I walk in the kitchen door, grass-stained and hungover, he is three stanzas into “The Stolen Child” by W. B. Yeats. My mom is sitting at the table, reading the paper. She raises her eyebrows as I come in. The clock above the kitchen door tells me it’s ten past seven. And yet I’d dared to hope that this one morning they’d sleep in.
“In pools among the rushes / That scare could bathe a star. / We seek for slumbering trout / And whispering in their ears / Give them unquiet dreams,” intones my dad’s voice.
“I always thought this one was kind of depressing,” I say.
My mom sips her coffee. “Aren’t they all?”
I pull my borrowed jacket tight around me to hide the state of my dress. I hope I smell of the strawberry bubble gum I found in one of its pockets, but in reality I probably just stink of vodka.
“So, on a scale of one to that time Rose threw up in your car after a party, how in trouble am I?”
My mom folds over the paper to the next page. “We’re rapidly approaching Rose-vomit territory,” she tells me.
“Right.”
My dad appears in the doorway from the hall. His voice gets progressively more ominous as he approaches.“For he comes, the human child, / To the waters and the wild / With a faery, hand in hand, / For the world’s more full of weeping than he can understand. So. I see that you’re home in one piece, albeit a relatively ragged piece,” he says. “And by ragged I mean tired, dirty, drunk, and grounded.”
I abandon any pretense and slump into a chair. “Not drunk,” I mumble. “Hungover.”
“Oh, well, in that case forget I said anything; please go about your day.”
I drop my head between my folded arms on the kitchen table. I turned my hearing aid off sometime during the party because the speakers kept making it scream tinnily in my deaf ear. With my good ear against the table and silence in the other, every sound is strangely magnified: my dad’s heavy footsteps across to the stove; my siblings clattering down the stairs; my mom’s coffee cup clinking quietly against her plate as she raises it to her lips; my own breath rasping between my teeth.
There’s a thud on the table in front of me. “This’ll help,” comes my dad’s loud voice. I raise my head and see a giant mug of black coffee. “Freshly grounded, get it?” says Dad. He chuckles to himself.
My sister, Emily, bursts through the door as I take the first tentative sip. She stares at me.
“Whoa,” she says. “You look like shit.”
“Emily!” Mom says sharply.
“Sorry, Mom. Olive, you look like defecation.”
Dad hides a laugh behind his beard. Mom’s mouth twitches. “Slightly better,” she says. Then she trains her eyes on me, and there’s something to the slant of the lines around them that makes me wonder if I’m in even more trouble than I thought.
My brother, Max, materializes bleary-eyed in the doorway as I
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