Charming Obligations

Nikki woke up and found the charm bracelet next to her nightstand. It was not really a charm bracelet, she knew because she also knew how to work it. She knew why her best friend Tish had always worn the thing. She knew what its appearance meant. For seventeen weeks she did not touch the charm bracelet. She let it sit there, on her bedstand, glistening like the stainless steel bit of perfect craft that it was.

Tish had disappeared four months ago. She was presumed dead now. Nikki did not like to think about what might have happened to Tish.

She remembered the day that she and Tish became friends. They lived in this ‘sleepy little town’ with a river running through it. When Nikki was seventeen, she used to ride her bike out to a place where the river got really wide and deep north of town to go swimming. She went pretty early in the morning, before the little kids got there. Years ago, someone had put up a tireswing to jump out into the deepest part on. She’d go there and jump off that thing about fourteen or fifteen times before she settled down just to swim around a bit.

She felt like it helped her imagination.

If she ever met anyone there when she went, it was some middle aged mom and her fat little boy or girl. They would respectfully ignore each other. Then one afternoon in that Summer of 17 she saw a girl sunbathing next to the swimming hole, in a pink bikini, with Audrey Hepburn sunglasses and a pout on. Tish. Nikki didn’t say hello to her, she just hopped on the tire swing and did her first jump, falling into the water with cut-off shorts and a sports bra on. As she climbed out of the water Tish introduced herself.

“Is this your place?” she asked, with a scared note in her voice.

“No, I…. I don’t know who owns it. I just come here.”

“I didn’t know if it was okay to use the swing,” Tish said.

Nikki shrugged, “Yeah, I mean…”

“Do you mind if I jump?” Tish asked. Nikki looked at her. She doubted that anyone who’d sold that pretty pink bikini had meant for it to get run through mossy water like this, but what did Nikki care? That day, each of the girls jumped off that thing about forty times and then they sunbathed or splashed each other the rest of the day. Nikki didn’t have any sunscreen, so Tish let her choose between her SPF 15 for tanning or her SPF 35 for sports. Nikki chose the 35. She didn’t like tans. Tish also gave Nikki half of this really big burrito she had brought for lunch. She said that there was no way she would have been able to eat it.

“Aren’t you worried you’ll lose that bracelet in the water?” Nikki had asked her.

“It’s on pretty tight, see?” and Tish demonstrated how little room there was between her wrist and the chain. Nikki could also see then that it was stainless steel and that it was doubly secured to her hand with a little chain attached to a ring on her finger. Very goth. Not something your pink bikini girl wears, normally, anyway.

Later she would learn what the bracelet was for. In fact, she knew and no one else did, and that’s why the bracelet had appeared on her bedstand one morning. It was not one-of-a-kind, she knew that. It was not a matter of having the things attached to the bracelet. It was knowing how to use them.

Tish’s family was sort-of very wealthy. That is, they were the executors of a two-hundred year old trust that maintained one of the strangest museums in the world. They had money at their discretion do anything it needed, and, as its sole guardians, anything they needed as well. It’s just that money was not really theirs. Legal stuff. We’ll move on…

The museum occupied a space of several acres underneath the little downtown. It really was not a place for the public to visit. It was a place to maintain the work.

The museum existed to preserve the artwork held sacred by a very strange religious sect that was founded in Denmark in the late 1700’s, sort of a Christian — Islamic Dervish hybrid that had a secretive method of discerning divinely inspired works of art. They had been hounded out of Denmark quickly, but they were well resourced. They set up the museum in Nikki’s hometown and then found a family willing to tend to the museum in perpetuity. Nikki met Tish shortly after she moved to the town, having finished fifteen years of preparation to run the museum. Tish’s father died unexpectedly and her mother, not being of the line, had never been taught anything about the museum. Though she was a public librarian.

Anyway, Tish, not having anyone to succeed her, had started teaching Nikki. She had okayed this with the religious order that fed her the money first. Nikki had not taken it too seriously as she’d liked the spookiness of learning the secrets of an underground — well — vault, but then Tish disappeared. See, some folks really wanted to burn a lot of whatever was in that museum. Nikki had only seen a little bit of it.

Now she was the only person known to be alive who knew how to work the charm bracelet. No one in the secret order knew how. Though they had extra copies of the stainless steel key to the secret museum of artwork “painted by the Hand of God.” She didn’t want to pick the thing up. She knew the order wanted her to take up Nikki’s work, to enter training, to protect their stuff. But, she didn’t like the way it reminded her of Tish’s death, or whatever. She didn’t like the idea of that much responsibility. She was still only 19. She didn’t like working for a secretive, creepy religious order. The spookiness was not fun with Tish gone.

She didn’t like that the bracelet had shown up on her nightstand in the middle of the night, either. She had not touched the thing, yet — and she really hated this — every two or three mornings she would wake to see that bracelet had moved to a different spot, as if it were pacing there impatiently, waiting for the little girl to except the inevitable.