Cassie flung herself across her bed. Staring up at the ceiling, she replayed the argument she’d just had with her mother, dwelling on all the parts where that parent had been unreasonable, and where she, Cassie, had answered with patience and logic and had been overruled as usual.  

“It’s because I’m a disappointment to her,” Cassie thought. “I’m not the kind of daughter she wants. I’m a misfit. A freak.” She paused to savor the tragedy of it all.

There was a flapping noise and a screech. One of her sister’s bats was caught in the blinds again. Cassie groaned through her teeth.  

“Morgana!” she yelled. “Keep your stupid bats out of my room! How many times do I have to tell you!”

“Keep the stupid door to your stupid room shut, then!” Morgana screamed back, running to her pet’s rescue. Cooing, she disentangled him. “Drakkie wouldn’t get caught if you had proper velvet drapes instead of these plastic things, Cassandra.”

“Don’t call me that,” Cassie muttered. “And if you don’t like the way my room looks, stay out of it.”

“You asked me in,” said Morgana sweetly as she carried the bat away.

Her sulking session ruined, Cassie went out, leaving her door wide open—just because. But she backtracked and shut it when she heard the zapping and bubbling noises coming from Mordred’s room. It paid to be cautious where her brother was concerned.

The television was on in the den downstairs. Honoria and Pemberton (or his head, anyway) were watching it. Cassie thought about joining them, but Honoria had the remote and for someone who’d died one hundred seventy-five years ago, she picked up new technology fast. Cassie stepped around them. She could’ve walked right through them—they didn’t mind—but she’d never gotten used to that idea.

Steppenwolf was curled up on the hallway rug. He thumped his tail in greeting when he saw Cassie. She stopped to scratch his muzzle.

“This is turning out to be a rotten day, Step,” she said.

“Don’t worry; things have a way of looking better once the moon comes out,” the werewolf replied cheerfully. Cassie sighed. She was the only person in the house who believed in the motto “early to bed, early to rise.”

As she entered the parlor, a pillow flew up and smacked her in the face. The poltergeists were feeling frisky.

“Do you mind?” Cassie roared. “I’m not in the mood!” The pillow dropped to the floor and looked forlorn. Cassie refused to feel guilty. She stalked over to the back door and yanked it open. The lawn gnomes were watering the fairy rings, soaking everything in their path in the process. No place to mope out there.

What Cassie really needed was someone to talk to. Down at the end of the hall, the cellar door gloomed invitingly. Her mother had just draped it with fresh cobwebs. Cassie turned the knob and winced at the squeal. Taking a candle from the shelf, she started down the rickety staircase.

“Is that you, Cassandra?” Her great-grandmother, known to all as Grandmamma, was sitting up in her vintage ‘forties coffin (the one Morgana always said she wouldn’t be caught dead in, it was sooo Charles Addams). Grandmamma was knitting, as usual. “What’s on your mind, dear?” she asked.

“Nobody understands me, Gram.”

“Everyone feels that way sometimes, dear.”

“Try all the time,” Cassie slumped down beside the casket. “I’m this total freak! I can’t ever get anything right!”

“Now, dear. Focus on your strengths.”

“And those would be…?”

“Well, you make very nice grilled-cheese sandwiches.”

Cassie glared pointedly at the fancy French pastries on the plate at her great-grandmother’s elbow. “Mom hates me,” she said, determined to keep the conversation on track.

“She’s concerned about you, dear.”

“No, she wishes I wasn’t her daughter! She doesn’t like my friends, she can’t stand my music, she won’t let me go anywhere fun, she—”

“This,” said Grandmamma, “wouldn’t have anything to do with the book she found under your bed yesterday? One of Jane Austen’s, wasn’t it?”

Cassie picked at a paint blister on the coffin lid and did not reply.

“What else has it been? Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Descartes? My dear,” said Grandmamma gently, “you have to put yourself in your mother’s shoes. What would you think if you found your child reading Henry James?”

“I think,” said Cassie coolly, “that everyone should be allowed to decide on their own about what kind of books, like, you know, speak to them, without having to worry about, like, narrow-minded people’s opinions.”

Grandmamma put down her knitting and gave Cassie a long and serious look.

“Medusa’s parents don’t care what she reads,” Cassie muttered, but her bravado was fading.

“Cassandra,” said her great-grandmother, “would you reach over to that shelf and get me the brown paper package, there? The one behind my Eye of Newt. Thank you, dear.”

The package was tied with twine and covered in dust. Grandmamma was silent as she turned it over in her hands. She started to untie the knot, then changed her mind and handed the parcel to Cassie. Cassie received it suspiciously. In her experience, wrapped packages came with gremlins that bit your fingers if you tried to tear the paper neatly, or doves that flew in your face when you pulled the bow.

“The string,” Grandmamma suggested. “Perhaps my scissors would help?”

Cassie snipped the twine and ripped away the flyspecked paper without encountering even one rude surprise—until she saw what lay in the package. It looked like a pocket watch, if pocket watches were normally the size of dinner plates, and completely lacking in second, minute, and hour hands. Cassie looked up accusingly.

“That belonged to your great-grandfather,” Grandmamma said. “You are familiar, of course, with the story of Magus’s career—or his lack thereof. This was the cause of all the trouble.”

“Where did it come from?” said Cassie.

Grandmamma got a nostalgic look on her face. “When your great-grandfather was a young man in Switzerland (which is every bit as good a heritage as Transylvania, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise!), he happened to strike up a friendship with a minor government clerk named Albert. Now, Albert was not a Practitioner, or even acquainted with the Magical Arts in any way. But Magus always kept an open mind. ‘Lilith,’ he used say to me, ‘there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our sorcery.’ You can imagine how that went over with the family!”

Cassie refused to respond to her grandmother’s meaningful pause.

“What Albert was,” Grandmamma went on, “was a very great thinker. I’ve never known anyone who could think like Albert—unless it was your great-grandfather. They would spend hours walking together. Thinking. Talking. Sharing what they knew of the world.

“Of course, your great-grandfather was very cautious about which thoughts he shared, just as he’d be around any ordinary person. But Albert wasn’t completely ordinary. I could’ve walked up with my head tucked under my arm, and he’d have just said, ‘Hmm?’ His mind was other places. He was trying to solve the mysteries of the universe.

“Not that he’d have put it so grandly. No, he would’ve simply said, ‘I am trying to understand how matter and energy relate.’ Or how gravity works, or how time behaves, or how light is designed. All those visible invisible forces—the ones that make you realize there’s more to the world than what you can see. Maybe that’s why Albert liked talking to your great-grandfather so much.”

Cassie squirmed as discreetly as she could. Was her great-grandmother’s mind finally slipping? Was she going to ramble on forever?

“I won’t say Albert actually asked Magus for help. I don’t really know. They had been discussing the difficulties Albert was having with his theories of light. Magus got it in his head that the Arts might hold the answer. He locked himself in his laboratory for nine days. There were flashes of light…thunder and billows of colored smoke…organ music… Finally Magus came out and told Albert there was something he needed to see.”

“A clock,” Cassie guessed.

“Two of them, actually,” her great-grandmother said. “Exactly alike.”

It seemed to Cassie that the only thing more useless than the overgrown pocket watch on her lap was two of them.

“Gram—how does it keep time?”

Grandmamma hefted the watch and angled it toward Cassie.

“The idea,” she said, “goes like this: sealed inside the glass there is one pure particle of light. There are two mirrors set into the rim, one at twelve o’clock, one at six. The particle of light flashes from mirror to mirror, moving at lux magnus celeritas, as your great-grandfather would say. Albert called it ‘the speed of light.’ This speed is constant at about 983,571,056 feet per second. So to measure one second, the light particle flashes from mirror to mirror that many times.”

Cassie stared at the watch. “So?”

“So? Magus asked Albert to consider what would happen if one clock was carried forward while the other stayed put. You can see that when the clock holds still, the light does not have to travel far to tick out the seconds. It simply flashes up and down, up and down.

“But if it moves,” Grandmamma slid the clock along the coffin lid, “the light’s path gets stretched out. It must zig and zag to follow the mirrors. It actually travels farther. So the moving clock takes longer to count out one second than the stationary clock. But the speed of light is the same for both. So the difference must be a difference in time.

“When Albert saw these clocks, and heard about the pure light particle, he had a brilliant insight. All at once, he realized that time was not fixed and unchangeable, as his people had thought.  If motion could make time appear to slow down—if time and space were thus related—Albert had the basis for his greatest work. ‘Special relativity,’ he and Magus called it.”

Grandmamma sighed, and looked far away.

“Albert promised to keep Magus’s name out of it. The findings were published as if they were the result of purely theoretical research. But anyone who knew Magus could tell who was behind the ‘experiments…’

“We Practitioners had always known that time was a little more flexible than ordinary people thought. But we never could understand why. Then Magus comes along, makes friends with an outsider, and helps him discover something the greatest magicians didn’t know—well. That was the end of Magus’s career and reputation.

“Eventually we got tired of slammed doors and public snubs, and left Europe. Magus was terribly frustrated. Also lonely. He never tried to see Albert again, you know. He was sure his friend would never forgive him for allowing the Council to destroy the clocks.”

“But—” Cassie held up the watch. Grandmamma raised a be-ringed finger and overrode the interruption.

“Oh, Magus built more. He spent his whole life building more. It became a point of honor to him. A challenge. He had something to prove: to the Council, to Albert, to himself. If he, through sheer force of abracadabra, could blow open every mystery that existed—then what would they have to say?”

Cassie stared at the clock, her mind in a whirl. Light. She’d always been fascinated with it herself, ever since age seven when she’d started sleeping with her bedside lamp on. Sometimes she would lie on her back in the haunted forest, watching the sunbeams dance through the leaves (even though she knew it was this kind of behavior that worried her parents).

Lux magnus celeritas…a constant speed…feet per second, let’s see, in miles per minute that would be…numbers clicked in Cassie’s head. The smallest shape-shifting spell gave Cassie all kind of difficulty, but numbers were hers to command.

Grandmamma had a sad smile.

“Your parents only knew Magus when he was a bitter old man, obsessed with the past and his eccentric ideas. They’re a little frightened for you, Cassie. They don’t want you to end up feeling like a failure, also.”

“Failure?” Cassie gestured toward the watch. “This is a failure?”

“Well, yes,” said her great-grandmother.  “It doesn’t work.”

Cassie opened her mouth. Then she shut it. Then she opened it again.

“Oh, Magus tried every spell he knew of,” Grandmamma sighed, “but he couldn’t even capture one pure particle of light, much less make it tell time.”

“But—but—but—” Cassie was now completely bewildered. “What about the first clocks? The ones Albert—? How did—? ”

“Plain old ordinary clocks,” said Grandmamma. “With no hands. Magus was using a different secret of the Arts when he brought Albert to his laboratory: the secret of smoke and mirrors. Lights and magic. That way of making an audience believe they see more than they really do. Albert’s mind did the rest. The best magic always happens in your mind anyway; sometimes you just need a little help getting started, a quick peek at what ‘impossible’ looks like when it’s backstage.”

“That was Magus’ real talent,” Grandmamma added dryly. “He was so good he fooled everyone—including himself, for a time. He thought he could find a way to make the rabbit really come out of the hat. Why not? After all, Albert had shown that the hat and the rabbit were both made of the same particles.

“He never quite gave up on this. But I think he did slowly come to realize that the work needed something he didn’t have. Some way of thinking and looking at the world—a way most Practitioners might call freaky or misfit…”

Gently, Grandmamma slid the clock across to Cassie.

“It’s interesting, what happens when people look at things in a different way. If someone, for example, was to think rationally and test everything, disbelieve her eyes and follow her head…well, it’s a very big universe. Lots of mysteries and magic waiting.”

“But I haven’t learned…” Cassie whispered. “Math, science, the right tools… I’ll need so much before I can even begin…”

“Good gracious, you think Magus couldn’t foresee that?” Grandmamma sniffed and resumed her knitting. “He was a magician, after all. He sealed a whole physics lab in a Pandoran box. It’s in the attic.”

Cassie stood up. The family ectoplasm, known affectionately as Hector the Specter, chose that moment to swoop in and blow out her candle. Usually Cassie hated it when he did that. But today she just stared at the thread of smoke streaming from the wick.

“Do you know,” she told Hector, “that energy can never be destroyed? It can only change form. Because energy equals mass times the speed of light squared!”

Hector stopped writhing and hung in the air, obviously thinking hard.

“Be patient with everyone, Cassie,” said Grandmamma, counting stitches. “It will take them a while to admit they have a scientist in the family. But they’ll come around. They’ll be proud.”

Still gazing intently at the candlewick, Cassie took her clock and started for the stairs.

“Will you tell your father,” Grandmamma called after her, “that the pipes have stopped dripping again? I don’t know what I shall do.”

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