The Conjuring Hour

There's No Time pt. 2

Mandrake

I told her what I’d done that night—softly, in fragments. I didn’t tell her everything. Parts of this work are private, like folding clothes for a stranger. But I told her enough: the elder-chalk, the foxglove, the bindings in the vent. I watched her face for a reaction. It didn’t twist with fear so much as fold into a strange, reflective calm.

“You do this because you used to listen to walls?” she asked finally.

“Yes,” I said. “You speak to things. They answered. They liked what you said.”

“Good,” she said. “They can like me all they want if they leave my viewers with a sense of wonder and not a trip to the ER.”

That night I woke up to the sound of laughter that didn’t belong.

It wasn’t human not entirely. Too many teeth in it, too much echo. It came from the walls again, though not the same way as Meadow shade Asylum. That place whispered like a dying man trying to remember his name. This was… hungrier. Playful. Like something just starting to learn how to use its voice.

The salt dish was overturned. The bones gone.

I sat up slowly, not panicked. Panic is for people who think they still have time. Instead, I reached into my coat pocket and pulled out the sprig of rosemary I keep for such occasions. Fresh, clipped that morning from the garden behind Set B the one no one planted and no one tends, but still grows.

Whispers like wind through teeth: She dreams loud. Alicendra.

I crossed the corridor, stepping lightly. The studio was asleep in the way beasts sleep: one eye open, heart thudding slow but ready. The air near her on set office pulsed, warm and wet like breath on glass.

I knocked once. Twice. No answer. I opened the door.

The room was dark, but not empty. Candles had burned themselves down to wax puddles, casting the scent of beeswax and rosewood into the stale air. Alicendra was on the floor, not collapsed, not harmed. Curled. Like a seed. Like someone waiting to be born.

And around her, a circle. Not one she’d drawn. The dust had formed it, precise and fine as lace. At each cardinal point: something left behind. A strand of her hair. A drop of blood. A shard of mirror. And a small, shriveled violet.

I did not step inside.

Instead, I knelt at the threshold and whispered: “What do you want from her?”

A silence followed — thick and total.

Then, from the ceiling vent, a voice like cracked porcelain: Not from her. Through her.

I reached into my other pocket. Pulled out the bell.

Small, bronze, older than truth. Given to me by a woman with no shadow and eyes like hollow moons. I rang it once. A clear tone, high and thin. The dust trembled. The air shifted.

The circle dissolved.

Alicendra gasped and sat up, blinking wildly. She looked at me, wild-eyed, halfway between fury and confusion. “I was dreaming,” she said, voice hoarse.

“No,” I replied, standing. “You were remembering.”

She didn’t ask for an explanation. She’s smart, too. Instinctively so. Her hands went to the amulet around her neck — obsidian strung on spider silk. It had begun to crack.

I made her tea. Mugwort, lavender, and a pinch of something

I didn’t name. She drank it without question. We sat for a while. She told me nothing, but her silence was weighted.

The next day, Rowan was gone.

Vanished. Her trailer unlocked. Lights left on. Camera bag open and untouched. No note. No call.

Just… gone.

The others thought she ran away. Maybe a boy, maybe a breakdown. But I know better.

She saw too much. She asked too many questions without learning the right way to listen.

Now, every time I pass Stage Six, I feel her. Not alive. Not dead.

Somewhere… sideways.

She still has time. But not much. And time here doesn’t move in straight lines.

So tonight, I’ll go back to the garden.

Not the fake one we shoot in — the real one, behind the broken fence and under the half-dead oak that still bleeds sap in the shape of eyes.

I’ll plant something.

A binding root. Old magic. Not to trap what’s coming. To invite it in.

Because the storm needs a vessel. And if I can’t keep it from

Alicendra, maybe I can teach her to ride it.

And maybe, just maybe, Rowan will hear me calling —

from underneath.