Night Shift at the Triple Crow

Caroline Barnard-Smith

The mushrooms were screaming again. It was a high-pitched, plaintive sound, like frightened kittens mewling. Tattie took a long swig from her hip flask and turned the music volume up on her phone.

“Not long now,” she told the trembling mound of earth. “I just have to finish this. Can’t disappoint the lovely young lady, can we?”

She bent over her parchment, scratched out two more symbols with the fountain pen.

Left hand in half-moon position. Little finger turns inwards.

“These people are ridiculous,” she said, feeling sure the mushroom mound would sympathise. “Their spells would be more powerful if they did this themselves, but the Mistresses and Masters of the Grey Arts obviously have more money than sense, or are too bloody lazy to learn. It’s shameful, really. I taught myself magickal choreography on the internet in a weekend.”

Tattie heard the mushrooms sigh, shivering like skin against silk. They weren’t white-speckled fairytale mushrooms, they were squat and grey and faintly damp.

“Boring you, am I?” she said, reaching again for her hip flask. The rum was fiery treacle in her throat. “It’s all true though, Mushroom Man. Do you know why they call themselves the Grey Arts Council? It’s because they're too chicken shit to call what they do black magick, and too cool to call it white. Twats.”

The mushrooms remained obstinately silent. Perhaps the mound had taken offense to being called Mushroom Man.

Tattie stood to inspect a reddish-brown mixture bubbling above the bunsen burner at her elbow, sighing as she spooned in a quantity of crushed motherwort. The mixture sputtered.

She had worked night shift at the Triple Crow Magickal Laboratory for almost five years and she found the work easy, even boring. Perhaps that was due to the asinine nature of the spells she was tasked with choreographing. A hex for the hapless employees of a dry cleaners who couldn’t get the lark’s blood out of a warlock’s heirloom cloak. A delicate series of inching steps and flickering hand movements to bring an unruly dog to heel. A sequence of undulating arms to push copies of a self-published fantasy novel. No one on the Council knew what real magick was and Tattie wasn’t inclined to educate them.

Satisfied with the mixture on the bunsen burner, Tattie turned down the flame and eyed an emerald green concoction she had set to cool an hour before.

“It's looking good, Mushroom Man,” she said. “If Nick knew what I was doing, he'd piss blood.”

Nick Caggotty was the owner of Triple Crow and Tattie had long suspected him of being a vampire, forever wedded to double denim and rainbow mirror shades. She stirred the green elixir with a long spoon before turning back to the work she was supposed to be doing, the work that kept her in rum and licorice smokes. This was a favour for Caggotty, really. He had a thing for the pretty blonde witch who had requested it.

“Yes, of course we can do that for you, Miss Ursuline,” he had said eagerly. “I’ll put Tattie on it straight away. She’s one of our best and brightest. One of our drear and darkest, if you will.”

He tittered at his own joke and Tattie had fought not to roll her eyes. Caggotty failed to mention that even if he thought Tattie incompetent, she was the only choreographer available until morning because he was too cheap to hire a second night shift worker.

Now she stared at the parchment with the pretty witch’s choreography printed neatly on it, written in demonic script with a fountain pen carved from human bone as was the custom. She found the old-fashioned presentation—the thick parchment, the arduous dipping of the fountain pen into its little bottle of crimson ink—grossly pretentious. The choreography and the list of ingredients for the accompanying potions could be emailed, but that wasn’t the way the Grey Arts Council operated.

Eyes on the parchment, Tattie stood back from the table and lifted her arms, carefully following her own instructions.

Right hand in full moon sweep. Left foot crosses right. Left hand rises, draws the moon down.

“And if she does that last part wrong, she’ll blow her nose right off her face. I should include a warning, I am the Triple Crow’s drear and darkest after all. What say you, Mushroom Man?”

The earth cracked a little as the mushrooms strained against it. Grains of dirt fell in fine brown rivulets to the floor.

“Fine, but if the lovely Miss Ursline ends up needing a plastic surgeon, I’m telling Caggotty it was your idea.”

The brown mixture began to tremble in its glass beaker and Tattie let her arms fall to her sides, content the spell would work.

“That’s enough of that,” she said. “I don’t want freckles. What a stupid brief. Caggotty should have told her to save her money and go stand in the sun for a while instead.”

She reached for the green elixir, cupping her hands around the ornate silver bowl she had mixed it in. “Your turn, Mushroom Man.”

Tattie turned to the mound of dark earth, carefully shovelled onto a steel table, and shook her head as the mushrooms began emitting a thin whine. “Hush up, will you? I’m trying to help.”

Careful not to waste a drop, Tattie spooned the shining green liquid onto each of the mushrooms, dousing each fleshy head like a priest anointing a baby. She poured the remaining liquid over the earth mound and watched it sink into the bitter soil.

“That feels better, doesn’t it?”

Tattie didn't expect a reply. She had sprinkled the elixir with good dreams and pleasant visions and now the body beneath the earth could settle, soothed for a blessed few hours before Caggotty forced it to rise in the morning.

She turned her music up again and went to refill her hip flask.