Witch Master

by Noah Layton

  ‘Oh, shit…’

  Another voice… No, it was the same one, just overwhelmingly distorted.

  The floor vibrated as the figure rushed over, then was suddenly joined by another.

  All I could make out were floating heads.

  ‘Who is this?’

  ‘-the ceiling-’

  ‘-gotta help him-’

  ‘-we can’t-’

  ‘-must-’

  ‘-swore-’

  My senses crapped out completely, along with my consciousness… Until they came slamming back.

  Now I was in a different room, lit with flickering candles. The small flames were scattered everywhere, and amongst them stood three figures. I was still on my back, but I could make their silhouettes out…

  No… These weren’t silhouettes. That was how they looked. All four of the figures were clad in blackened cloaks and hoods, their faces shrouded in even more darkness, seemingly casting off the would-be invading light of the fire.

  I tried to move, but my arms were restrained; raising my head to look at myself, I found my wrists an ankles bound to the floor with ropes hooked through chains.

  And I still felt like death.

  ‘Let me go…’ I groaned. ‘… I don’t know what this is… Please…’

  ‘Try not to fight it,’ a delicate voice said. ‘It will only make it worse.’

  The politeness of it put my mind at ease a little, but that last part sent a chill through me.

  Then, in an instant, everything went silent. The room seemed to go still; even the flames stopped flickering, holding in place. Except for the figures.

  They held out their arms, raising them to their sides. They stood all around me, framing my body in a triangle… Before they slowly rose into the air, floating in the stillness of the room and looking down upon me the way God might look down upon his minions.

  My body started to shake uncontrollably. I went to blink, but my eyes refused to reopen, along with the doors to every other one of my senses.

  Chapter Two

  My head felt like somebody had dropped a cinder block on it. Not just on my forehead, either – perfectly balanced from a height, smashing and swinging at me from all directions.

  Eyes fluttering open, an awareness of my own breathing – and the sensation of comfort and softness beneath me. My head may have felt like molten lava, but the rest of me, even my arms, felt fine.

  The bedroom was a modern space, the bed I was stretched out on situated against the back wall. A large desk against the opposite wall was scattered with books and papers, while the sleek red walls were adorned with impressionist, abstract artwork.

  A purple sunset soaked through the window, turning the scene into an ethereal moment.

  I sat up, pressing a hand against my forehead to quell the pressure that was squeezing against my skull.

  Groaning, I looked over to my left and out of the tilted blinds. I knew that street. It was the exact same spot where I had been hanging out with Joe just a while ago.

  Which meant I was still in the house.

  ‘How are you feeling?’

  I jumped so hard and fast that I almost fell out of the left side of the bed and onto the hardwood floors. Looking over towards the door, I found something in the way – or someone more precisely.

  A girl in her early twenties was seated in an armchair nearby. Long, flowing blonde hair rested on her shoulders, crowded around a beautiful face and a pair of startling blue eyes. She was clad in a red silk dressing gown that had fallen to the sides of her arms, exposing a huge, busty cleavage that was proudly on display.

  ‘Sorry…!’ She said quickly, holding out a comforting hand. ‘I didn’t mean to scare you.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ I said. ‘Uhh… Where am I?’

  ‘39 Hawthorne Lane,’ she said matter-of-factly, before tilting her head to the side with a relaxed smirk. ‘Shouldn’t it really be me who’s asking the questions here? I mean, it was you who broke into my house.’

  ‘I didn’t break into your house,’ I replied hurriedly. ‘I accidentally threw… Hey, where the hell are my clothes?’

  Sitting in a strange bed in a strange house had made me self-conscious enough, but not as self-conscious as sitting across from a girl who looked as hot as her. She could have walked straight out of a stylist’s room and into a lingerie photoshoot – her relaxed pose alone as she stretched out in the armchair looked like a page from a high-end catalogue.

  I wasn’t wearing a thing except for my boxer shorts. That said, my body felt tight, too. Not unfamiliar, just… Bursting, as if I had just given myself a full workout without the after-aches.

  ‘They were pretty ruined by the dirt and the scrapes that you had. We thought it best to remove them.’

  ‘We? So you live here with somebody else?’

  ‘Yes. There are three of us to be exact.’

  ‘Your family, I guess?’

  ‘No, they’re just girls that I live with…’

  ‘So you’re… Like a sorority?’

  ‘I suppose you could call us that...’

  This is like the opening to the greatest porn film of all time, I thought. But that isn’t real life, unfortunately.

  ‘Right… So…’ And, just like that, the thought of the attic came back to me, and whatever had happened in that other room. Three floating people, three girls…

  Oh, shit…

  ‘Anyway,’ I started slowly, ‘I really appreciate you helping me out after that little fall upstairs, but I think that I should really get going. I don’t wanna take up any more of your time…’

  ‘You won’t be going anywhere just yet.’

  Another voice broke in, this one feminine in the foxiest kind of way. Another girl had appeared in the doorway, even bustier and curvier than the one who sat near me, if such a thing was possible. She was wearing a blue silk dressing gown.

  ‘There’s no need to be rude, Lois. He is our guest, after all.’

  ‘I’m perfectly aware of that, Scarlett, but there are rules. Bringing a man into our coven changes things completely.’

  ‘Wait,’ I cut in, having been on the defensive ever since the new girl, Lois, had arrived. ‘What do you mean, coven? Are you girls actually some kind of off-campus sorority?’

  ‘Uhh… Not exactly,’ Scarlett replied. ‘Well, we are a kind of sorority.’

  ‘I told you this was a terrible idea,’ Lois said, crossing her arms and shaking her head. ‘Look – the process has already had a considerable effect on his physical form.’

  ‘And you’re complaining about that?’

  ‘Well, not exactly, but-’

  ‘What do you mean my physical form?… Woah!’ I exclaimed quickly, looking down at my body with real attention for the first time and suddenly having my question answered for me.

  Plenty of time spent outdoors had given me a look that escaped the confines of being pale, but I had never been muscular – until now. My chest was defined and toned, leading down to washboard abs that were surrounded on either side by arms pumped with thick biceps and triceps. My legs were defined and felt heavy to move, but in a satisfying way to say the least.

  ‘Who are you people?’ I asked, not exactly pissed off but still shocked by the sudden change. I scrambled out of bed in my near-nakedness, feeling considerably less embarrassed in front of the two supermodels standing on the other side of the bed. ‘What did you do to me?’

  ‘All right, don’t lose yourself,’ Lois said impatiently, shutting the door behind her and resting against it. ‘If we tell you, you have to promise not to freak out. I’ve done something today that I swore I would never do, and I really don’t feel like having another drama on my hands.’

  ‘Fine…’ I said, figuring there were worse ways to die than at the hands of two girls as sexy as them. ‘Fine. Tell me.’

  ‘Say you promise.’

  ‘I promise,’ I sighed, raising a sarcastic eyebrow at her.

  Lois took a deep breath, a
s if she was considering something with immense depth.

  ‘When you illegally climbed onto our roof you got your hands covered in saplings from the vines. They’re there for a reason – to stop idiots like you climbing onto our roof. They induce psychosis at the touch, not too much, but enough to make you seem like a blithering dumbass and to go stumbling out into the street before long, making enough noise to warrant having the cops being called. If that wasn’t bad enough you managed to fall through our roof and get into the fight with that creature in the attic. The contagion that it emits with its claws is fatal, and there’s no cure… Apart from what we did.’

  ‘What you did in that room with the candles… That thing, where… No, I was hallucinating.’ The girls shot each other a look that wasn’t exactly subtle. ‘What the hell was that?’

  ‘What was what?’ Scarlett asked quickly, her eyes going wide as she gazed back at me.

  ‘You just looked at each other like…’

  ‘Look,’ Lois continued, crossing her arms beneath her busty chest. ‘The only way for us to save you was to carry out the Warlock Ritual. It inducts you into our people…’

  ‘Your people?’

  ‘Witches.’ Lois said it quickly and sharply, tilting her head to the side and staring back at me. ‘That’s what we are.’

  I looked between the girls with a serious expression before scoffing and shaking my head.

  ‘You’re insane,’ I laughed. ‘You really expect me to believe that? I mean, I know that this town has a history of supernatural shit but using that as your reason for-’

  ‘Scarlett, honey,’ Lois said casually, ‘would you pass me that book from the top shelf?’

  ‘Of course,’ Scarlett replied just as casually. But she didn’t get up – she simply raised a hand, pointing her index finger lazily to the desk opposite the bed that I had awoken on.

  My confusion was fast replaced with complete and total awe. The book that she had mentioned, hardback and leather, a doorstopper of a volume, levitated smoothly into the air and began to float towards Lois. Scarlett, all the while, beckoned it to them with a come-hither motion of her finger, quietly guiding it along the air until it landed in Lois’s awaiting, outstretched palm.

  ‘Satisfied?’ Scarlett asked, raising an eyebrow.

  Remember what I said a little while back about Ashwater having way more than its fair share of tales and rumours about the supernatural? Well, that’s why this didn’t hit me as sharply as it probably should have.

  The problem, of course, was that a book had still literally floated across the room at the behest of one of these… These…

  ‘Witches?’ I repeated slowly, sounding like a complete moron. My jaw was still hanging open far enough to park a truck inside my mouth, but after a few seconds I gulped and managed to get my act together. ‘Okay… Okay… You guys actually exist?’

  ‘Yep,’ Scarlett replied, taking the lead. ‘Along with all of the other stuff that goes bump in the night.’

  ‘Is it really wise for us to tell him that?’ Lois asked.

  ‘Men are curious creatures. Show them one thing out of the ordinary and they will chase the story to the ends of the Earth. It’s better that he finds out now rather than having him discover these things on his own.’

  ‘All right,’ I said quickly, fearing for my safety even more. ‘So what happens now? Are you gonna… Kill me, or something? Chop me up and use my bones for one of your spells?’

  ‘Why the hell would you say that?’

  ‘That’s what my grandma always used to say, to scare me into not talking to strangers as a kid.’

  ‘Look, there’s no sense in asking us to give you a run-down of witch-lore and practices,’ Lois said. ‘We’ve been studying it for years. What would you like to do?

  ‘… Excuse me?’

  ‘What do you wanna do?’ Scarlett asked. ‘Tell us. Bear in mind that we can’t let you go from here until you promise not to say anything about us.’

  ‘I could just lie…’ I said. ‘What would happen then?’

  ‘Then,’ Lois interjected. ‘You would go to the cops and say ‘the girls living at Hawthorne Lane are witches that can make things float’. And they’ll laugh in your face, just like every other idiot that has tried to out a witch in the past hundred years. And even if you somehow managed to convince them to come here, what do you think we would say? ‘Yes, officer, we’ve seen him before. He illegally trespassed on our property, damaged our plants and destroyed one of our windows. Then, out of the kindness of our hearts, we took care of him, and now he’s accusing us of being supernatural beings.’ Who are they really gonna believe? You, or the innocent college-girls in a quiet neighbourhood who were just minding their own business?’

  I ran her words over in my head, frowning and nodding.

  They had a point. No matter what happened, nobody would believe me.

  ‘All right… In that case I think I’d just like to get out of here.’

  ‘Really?’ Scarlett said, her face suddenly falling with disappointment. ‘You’ve been out cold for eight hours and your wounds are still healing. Are you sure you don’t wanna stay for dinner?’

  Whether it was deliberate or not I didn’t know, but Scarlett pouted lightly and brought her arms up, pushing her busty chest up and exacerbating her cleavage so much that it looked as if her large breasts would burst free from her silk robe at any moment.

  ‘We’ve got plenty,’ Lois said, raising an eyebrow and tilting her head to the side. ‘Mexican food and strawberries and cream for dessert. Hate for it to go to waste…’

  I exhaled deeply, looking down at myself briefly. I was still healing, that was true, and who the hell was I to turn down dinner with two smoking hot girls, even if they were witches?

  Even if that word sounded ridiculous to not only say, but to think.

  ‘All right,’ I smiled. ‘Guess I can stay for a little while.’

  ‘Great!’ Scarlett said excitedly, clapping her hands together and looking over her shoulder at Lois. ‘Where’s Brianna?’

  ‘In the basement, I think. There’s a lot of work to do on… Our project.’

  ‘Right,’ Scarlett said, ‘I’ll go grab her when it’s ready.’

  ‘What’s the other witch who lives here like?’ I asked.

  ‘You’ll meet her when you get downstairs. Come on.’

  ‘Shouldn’t I get dressed first?’

  ‘I’ll handle that,’ she replied casually, jumping up from the armchair and pulling her silk robe up over her shoulders just before it slipped away completely. She took my hand in her soft, slender fingers and led me out of the room and out into the unknown.

  We crossed a corridor that stretched from one end of the house to the other. To my right were a series of doors that led into other rooms, while on my left was a grand staircase that led down to the reception hall and the front door. The place was minimally decorated, the walls dotted occasionally with more abstract artwork. Looking down to the ground floor, I caught sight of Lois slipping through an archway and into another part of the house, likely the kitchen – but that wasn’t where we were going.

  Scarlett led me to the end of the corridor, past a pair of red double doors locked tightly that I thought better than to ask about, and turned right onto a smaller passage, opening an out-of-the-way door and heading into the darkness without reluctance.

  I couldn’t say the same thing about myself – even if Scarlett metaphorically had her hand wrapped around my dick, which I was struggling to keep under control considering her pert, round ass swinging back and forth in a totally unsubtle way, the bottom seams of her small robe hardly covering her up, there was still some small voice of reason in the back of my mind that was keeping me on the alert.

  I had already seen them command an object through the air… Who was to say this wasn’t all a ruse? They could have something terrible awaiting me at any turn, all part of some elaborate plan for some other ritual.

  But then the w
itch turned on a light, illuminating a huge walk-in closet lined with immaculately-kept clothes and shoes.

  The problem was, they were all for girls.

  ‘We had to cut your clothes off when we were patching you up,’ Scarlett said, twirling to face me. ‘And to carry out the ritual properly… And may I say it went much more successfully than I would have expected…’

  She gave me another totally unashamed look up and down before biting her lip.

  ‘What exactly was it that you did to me?’

  ‘Brianna is the ritual expert,’ she replied. ‘She’ll be able to explain it you much more clearly than I can. What we have to do is find an outfit for you to get home in. Any preferences?’

  ‘Anything that will actually fit me. With this new body I don’t think any of my clothes will fit anymore.’

  ‘There are worse problems to have,’ Scarlett smiled, crossing to a nearby closet that was much dustier than the others. She opened it and retrieved what looked like an old pair of pyjama pants and a pressed white t-shirt. ‘These are a little old but they should fit.’

  A few minutes later I was dressed, albeit still being barefoot. The witch retrieved a pair of sandals, which I resigned to using just to get home.

  ‘Have you got a coat or something, too? Just so I can cover my arms until I get home. These bandages might set off some alarms to my roommate…’

  Shit, Joe. He would be wondering where the hell I had gone…

  ‘Hmm…’ Scarlett muttered, returning to the closet and standing on her toes, arching her back and sticking out her behind as she delved into the depths of it.

  Okay, there’s no way that isn’t deliberate…

  ‘Here!’ She said excitedly, pulling a large, navy blue coat out. It looked ultra-modern, almost too much for something pulled from a closet in the back of a house that belonged to a group of witches...

  ‘You get that recently?’

  ‘No, this is older than almost everything in here.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  I tried it on, finding the material immensely comfortable, as if it was settling around me.

  ‘Jeez, this is nice… If I was any ruder I’d ask to keep it.’