The Conjuring Hour

There's No Time

Mandrake

the voice of Mandrake

The voices quieted when I arrived.

That should’ve frightened me. A house gone suddenly still is not a house at peace; it’s a house listening. But fear is a weather I outgrew in the wet corridors of Meadow shade asylum. There, the air was thick with forgotten names and recycled sedatives. They called them “patients” but I knew better. They were seeds buried alive and expected to forget the sun.

Eight years.

Eight long, root-deep years with nothing but the walls and the soil beneath them to speak with. And they did speak. Oh yes. Whispers from under the tiles. Pleas from the mold in the ceiling. Secrets curled up in the stems of the parsley no one ate. I learned to read the way moisture pooled by a radiator like a bruise, the pattern a person’s hands made in the dust, the way the light in a window tilted when someone left a grief unburied. Those were languages no city school taught. Meadow shade taught me syntax of neglect: how to translate a sigh that had been inhaled too many times.

Then she came—not into my life in any ordinary sense, but through the little square of static on Channel 11. Alicendra Wren in candlelight, framed in shadow, saying things old women say when their tongues are tired and their hands keep doing the work of memory. It should’ve been theater. Another lantern salesman peddling moon water and curated sorrow. But when she reached not to the camera, but to something just off-frame the air in my room changed. The change was so small I could have missed it: the tilt of dust motes, the abrupt hush in the radiator. The kind of shift you feel in your teeth, a small electrical hum beneath the skin.

That night the vines crept through the bars of my window. They moved with intention, slow, patient, like hands uncoiling after long sleep. By morning an orchid bloomed on my sill. Black as ink, throbbing once like the final pulse of something that had been waiting to remember.

The discharge papers were on my bedside table.

I walked to Wonderland Heights. Walked, because wheels move too fast and miss the voices hiding in the gravel, the tiny petitions lodged in gutters and dream-ash at the edge of roads. Walking lets you catch the small things the city tries to hide: the whisper of a sidewalk crack, the soft hush of a fence complaining about the weather. Wonderland Heights is awake in ways surfaces don’t tell you. The town is a dream that doesn’t know it’s sleeping half-rust, half-bloom. Houses like old mouths with secrets between their teeth. Trees that lean close as if to gossip. Wind that carries lullabies in languages no one remembers how to speak.

When I reached the studio gates, the hush came again, like a held breath. Not wanting to be dramatic, the voices told me the same thing in different cadences. Protect her. She is the seedling of the storm.

Inside the lobby, Studio B smelled of coffee, wax, and hot lights—everything you’d expect a room made for illusions to smell like. Alicendra’s presence was quieter than the voices would imply. She didn’t make grand gestures or shout directives. She stepped in like someone who’d found an old doorway and had the right key. She looked at me and narrowed her eyes the way you do when you recognize a melody you haven’t heard since childhood.

“You’re not here for the cameras,” she said before I could introduce myself.

“No,” I replied. “They wouldn’t capture me correctly anyway.”

A thin smile—no pity, no malice, just something like understanding—moved across her face. She had a way of looking that made small things sit straighter. I liked that in a person. It meant they were paying attention.

My first task was dressing the set for the opening ritual segment. They called it “performance”; we both knew rituals are never just performance. Words are seeds, and repetition waters them. I began with the floor—mugwort, willow bark, a line of crushed snail-shell chalk for sigils. I laid foxglove beneath her chair because dead things respect danger. Poison is a kind of language. The dead know the letters. They recognize a toll that wasn’t paid.

Rowan watched me from where she’d stationed herself by the prop table. She’s sixteen and hard-eared, a kid with eyes like bayonets and more empathy than she should legally possess. If she could have drawn a weapon from her gaze, I’d be mulch by now.

“Where’d you learn that?” she asked.

“From the plants,” I said. It’s the truth. Plants speak in slow grammar; they teach you patience. They taught me which root to bind, what to burn, when to be sharp and when to be soft. Rowan didn’t laugh. Smart girl.

Lights warmed the stage until the air felt syrup-slow. Incense bloomed into the corners, a careful fog that smelled of lemon peel and something sweeter and older. Alicendra took her place like someone stepping onto a threshold. The cameras focused. The director whispered into a headset. Somewhere behind the monitors someone adjusted the balance of spectacle and intimacy, always a dangerous negotiation.

The cameras hummed. The monitors showed her face, that candlelight making hollows where a cheek should be. Then static. A pulse of white across the screens, a hiss like a lost thing trying to return. In that flicker, frame by frame, I saw it: not a face, not exactly, but a face-shaped absence in the wall behind her. Watching. Older than wallpaper. Hunger or curiosity, I couldn’t tell.

Rowan noticed, of course she did. She has a way of reading the room like people are sentences and she’s been taught to parse clauses before the verbs arrive. She came to me later, voice low, breath smelling like citrus and too much adrenaline.

“You’re bringing something here,” she hissed.

“No,” I said. “It’s already here. I’m just…listening better.”

She bristled with irritation, wanting to know how and why. The truth doesn’t like bright lights. It grows best in the dark, in damp places—like mushrooms. Like secrets. Like roots twisting under the floorboards.

After the shoot, I moved through the set collecting leftover props and the detritus of staged grief—charred candles, a hair ribbon, a scrap of embroidered handkerchief. The world after production whispers its own truths, quieter than the fake heartbreak you edit into a prime-time arc. I took a scrap of the handkerchief and pressed it to my forehead like a blessing. Sometimes these rituals are small and real because they stay unseen.

That night, I slept in the janitor’s closet behind Stage Left. The dust there is thick with memory, the kind of accumulation that becomes soft and meaningful if you let it. I drew a circle in elder-chalk on the concrete and placed a dish of salt and bones beneath the vent—bones I keep for favors and boundaries, not for drama. I wrapped my coat around myself like a cocoon and listened.

The walls breathe when she dreams. I can hear it—slow, shallow, like someone who has been holding their breath for years and is just now noticing they can let it out. She doesn’t know what she is yet, not the way the town does. Not the way the air has already bent toward her presence. She thinks herself a headhunter, a producer, a woman with a way with words. She is more dangerous than that. She is a seed. She is a conduit to things that remember.

And something is looking for her.

Protect her, the gravel said. Protect her, the oak outside the lot murmured. Protect her, the orchid nodded at my window. The instruction wasn’t a command so much as an insistence, like rain. The soil told me to. I always listen.

I don’t make myself soft for strangers, but there were just enough small, uncharted things about Alicendra that made me trust her. Not the quiet authority, but the way her hands hovered over the props like someone trying not to break a memory. The way she corrected a stagehand’s pronunciation of an old word—not to assert dominance but to ensure the thing was said properly. The way she touched a candle and then moved it because the flame’s angle had a history no one else saw. She had children of places embedded in her name; she carried the smell of lavender and funerals like a second skin. She could be dangerous by accident. That’s the worst sort, because you can’t legislate against grace.

At two in the morning, the ventilation started a soft conversation with the floorboards. I took the walkie from my pocket—useless on frequency, but I liked the armor of having a voice at hand—then set it back. I listened instead. The voices were a choir of insistence, soft as thread and ancient as a river: Remember me. Don’t let it take her. Feed the roots. Close the gap.

I whispered into the circle, not for anyone who wore a uniform but for the earth itself. A small, human thing—an apology, a promise. I asked permission before I braided a sigil into the ductwork, tied roots in the metal with copper thread, and fed it salt and a handful of names. Names are currency. We spend them like coins. I spent mine like a miser who knew the value of thrift and the cost of carelessness.

The morning arrived with a thin pink light that made the set look like an elaborate bruise. The crew was late, hungover on success and caffeine. Alicendra walked in as if she’d been awake all night in the shape of the world. She crossed to the janitor’s closet and opened the door without hesitation. Her eyebrow rose when she saw my circle, the elder-chalk in picturesque disarray and the dish of bones.

“You always sleep in odd places,” she observed. There was no judgment in it. She slid onto the mop bucket like it was a throne.

“You always make things happen off-screen,” I said.

She smiled. Not kindly. Not cruelly. Just knowing. “Things are louder when you listen, aren’t they?”

“They’re louder when you ask them to speak,” I said.

She studied me like someone trying to learn another language, then looked down at my hands knobby knuckles, ink stains. “You’re not exactly a typical set decorator,” she said.

“You’re a terrible interviewer,” I replied. It was true. In person she was more jagged. There are edges of people smooth for the light and others they keep for themselves.

We stood there for a moment, two people who’d traded broken rooms for performance and found something resembling purpose in the gaps. Around us, a hundred small duties hummed—a gaffer fiddled with a light, a makeup person swatted at a smudge. The mundane was a counterpoint to whatever else throbbed under the stage like a sleeping animal.