“Follow me, we’re going to my sewing room,” Endora declared, a flurry of scarves marching down a hallway.
“Does your grandmother live here with you?” Jon asked Sarah as the two followed Endora alongside Richard.
“No, why do you ask?”
“Well, she was here first thing in the morning, and she says has her own sewing room in your house. It just seemed weird if she didn’t live here.”
“Oh, she just pops in and out sometimes.” Sarah shrugged. “I don’t know, it’s just what I’ve always grown up with. Is that weird?”
“I think it’s a little weird that your grandmother doesn’t live here but still has her own room,” Jon laughed.
“Young man,” Richard interjected. “Adding a room to my house for a family member is absolutely nothing. I do have a billion dollars, after all.”
“Oh, I’m a family member now, am I?” Endora held back some of the smugness in her voice, but not all of it.
“Endora, I may not have ever,” Richard paused to gesture at Jon, “borrowed your clothes. But I’ve been married to your daughter for twenty-five years. You and I are family whether we like it or not.”
“You know, I didn’t like it at first,” Endora acknowledged as she stopped and reached for a doorknob. “But you have grown on me, Darrin.”
Richard sighed as he followed her into the sewing room. “And you on me, Endora. And you on me.”
Jon was somewhat surprised to find that it was just a normal sewing room. Reams of fabric against one wall. A desk with dozens of little cubby holes, covered in spools of thread against another. A small upholstered chair alongside a coffee table. Everything was made of wood and looked antique, and very nice. But very normal.
“It’s just a sewing room?” Jon asked. “I thought you were talking in code or something. You’re not going to do any magic?”
“I’m not going to do any magic,” Endora chuckled. “Why, listen to you, suddenly an expert.”
Then she clapped her hands once, and in a blink, the reams of fabric became stacks of books. The pools and bobbins became trinkets and relics. And a wall that had once been empty was now covered with Boticelli’s “Birth of Venus” painting, except that a crude drawing of a cock and balls had been painted in thick black lines over Venus’s nether regions.
“That’s the original,” Endora whispered to a gasping Jon.
While the two teenagers marveled at the room’s transformation, Richard picked up an open box with a plush interior that contained five glass orbs. “You’re going to scan Sarah’s memories, right?”
“Good boy, Darrin,” Endora preened as she plucked one orb at a time from out of the box and tossed them into the air. They hung there, in the middle of the room, floating in a vertical circle formation. Like a portal about two feet across.
Endora gave a wave of her hand as the last orb fell into place, and lines of light extended from each orb, connecting them to one another.
Ah, Jon thought to himself. Not a circle, a pentagram.
“Stand on the other side for me, darling,” Endora motioned to Sarah, who moved to position herself looking at her grandmother with the glass orbs between them.
And with another wave of Endora’s hand, the area inside the pentagon created by the light borders materialized into solid glass. And a picture began to form.
