by HC Hammond
washed her face. Page went back to her room and got in bed. She turned out the light on her bedside table after looking around the room, it seemed very silent.
After carefully watching the shadows in her room for scary things, Page's eyes grew heavy and she fell into a restless sleep.
Hours later, Page sat up straight in bed. Sweat glistening on her neck and dotted across her face. Cool air circulated through the room via the air conditioning vents. The only sounds came from her. Panting heavily, she rapidly took air in and out of her lungs. Page clutched her nightshirt. It was another dream. A bad one. Page's head swam in the wake of sharp anxiety. She nervously eyed the dark room. It was too still and too quiet.
"Who's there?" Pages voice rasped. She could swear someone was in the room with her. Some dark presence watching her, but Page couldn't see any movement.
"Who's there?" She asked again more loudly. The presence in the room stayed stubbornly quiet. Page reached over to turn on the lamp, there was no miraculous blanket of light flitting across the room. It wouldn't turn on. Page slide to the back of her bed, pressing herself against the wall. She curled her legs up underneath her body and pulled the blanket over her. She willed her pupils to dilate widely, so she could see better in the darkness.
"Please, whoever's there? Just go away," She whimpered. Across the room, something began to form in the darkness, a soft red glow. Page's harsh breaths grew more and more haggard in response. The form moved towards her. Its glow increased to a violent, bloody red.
Page whimpered and tried to melt into the wall, as the thing came closer and closer. It got to her bedside and stood hovering over her. A vague semblance of a woman's face appeared within the red shadow. It stared at her and it felt familiar. She forced herself to move closer to it, the face smiled. The motherly visage calming to Page. She smiled back at it.
The mouth of the face opened, revealing sharpened teeth. Page pulled back. It started laughing soundlessly. Page scrambled off the bed and ran to her door. She turned the knob and pulled, but the door wouldn’t open. She pounded on the door, crying for her parents. The form stopped laughing and became still again, watching Page as she tried to escape. Page dropped to the floor in front of her door.
"Please...go away!" She begged the form. It continued to stare at her.
"Go away!" Page cried.
The form smiled and rushed at her and Page screamed.
Jackson leaned over the drinking fountain and turned the metal knob. He took a sip of the artificially cooled water arcing out of the fountain. His thirst quenched, Jackson continued on to class.
It was in-between periods and other students were rushing back and forth in the hallway. Trying to get to their lockers for one of a dozen books and then to class, which happens to be on the other side of the school. Jackson walked nonchalantly in the ordered chaos. He didn't really mind if he was late to class. Getting a detention for being late was better than getting a brain hemorrhage trying to keep up with the pressures of school. He walked through the doorway of his English class as the bell rang.
The teacher, Mr. Knight, gave Jackson a look as he strolled to his seat. It almost screamed, "If you come in just one second after the bell. I'm writing you up."
Glancing across the room, Jackson noticed Page’s somewhat hunched posture. She looked angry, almost enraged, but tightly controlling it. Jackson looked at the chalkboard when she turned in his direction. The assignment for the day was a worksheet on a section of poetry in the book. Jackson hadn’t brought his English book with him.
Oh, damn! I didn't stop by my locker and get the book today. He thought sarcastically. Jackson almost never brought his book to class.
He leaned over and took a hardback novel out of his backpack. Jackson opened it and started reading. He was relatively sure the teacher wouldn't notice him long enough to tell him to work on the class assignment. Jackson spent the next twenty minutes enwrapped in a fast-paced murder mystery.
"Jackson Quentin." He looked up as he heard his name being called. Mr. Knight held out yesterday's quiz, freshly graded. Jackson got up to get it. He pulled the paper out of the teacher's hand and looked at it as he went back to his seat. A solid "B" as usual.
"Page Remington." Jackson watched Page stand up and walk leisurely to the teacher. She took her paper and looked at it. Page made a shocked face and turned to speak to Mr. Knight. It looked like she was arguing with him about her grade, but her argument seemed to be futile. Mr. Knight had his hands up in a gesture of refusal. Jackson almost smiled at her frustration.
Then, something happened. Page's eyes began to glow a soft red.
Jackson's own eyes widened in disbelief. He stared as her eyes practically beamed with red light. Mr. Knight seemed in a trance. Jackson watched as Mr. Knight took Page's paper back from her and wrote something on it. He gave it back to Page, who now seemed placated and went to her seat. Mr. Knight continued handing out quizzes.
Jackson looked about the room to see if anyone else just saw what he did. Students bent over their work and others in the back corner gossiped in soft tones, but no one else was sitting up and looking around the room in a confused manner.
Okay. Jackson spent a minute or so, glancing back and forth from Page to Mr. Knight, before deciding to wait until after class to figure out what happened. He opened his novel and tried to concentrate on it. He was still on the same page when the bell rang thirty-five minutes later. Jackson grabbed his backpack. He slung it over his arms and rushed to catch up with Page as she left the classroom ahead of him.
"Page," He said as he reached her in the hallway. Page stopped and turned to him.
"What?"
"Uhh ..." Jackson was at a loss for words. How exactly does one say to a person that you saw them entrance someone?
"I was wondering what grade you got on the quiz?" He asked.
"Why?"
"Well … Um, I saw you arguing with Mr. Knight-"
"What did you see?" She stepped towards him. Page's menacing face was a far cry from the shy girl he bumped into yesterday.
"Um ... I-"
Page's eyes started to glow. Jackson stumbled back from her. He stared at the ground to keep from seeing the light in her eyes.
"Hey, Page. Are you coming or what?" One of Page's friends yelled at her from down the hall. Page glanced behind her and then back to Jackson.
"You saw nothing." Her eyes returned to normal and she walked off. Jackson stood in the hall in a daze.
"Where did I see that passage at?" Jackson said to himself. He was back in the periodical's room at the library, searching rapidly through a dusty volume on the town's history. It was an account of the night a mob burned the Remington Witch.
Some holier-than-thou participant in the tragic event had written a detailed and lurid description for supposed posterity. Eventually, the story made its way into book-form.
"Here it is," Jackson said. He stopped flipping pages and focused on a particular passage.
“... and when the people came to take the witch. Her eyes became red as blood and lit the night. The spirit of the witch left her body, which then became limp, and possessed the body of John Bonman. He became enraged and attacked several members of the group.”
David Carmichael, the town's priest, was with the mob. Originally against the burning and in favor of an exorcism, Carmichael's mind was changed when the Remington Witch supposedly cast him down with a disfiguring disease. He doused John with the blessed holy water and the spirit was forced to leave him. It returned to the body of the witch and the priest poured the water on her and trapped the spirit in its host body. The group then continued on to the center of town, dragging the woman as she kicked and spit on her captors. Arriving there, they tied the witch to a stake and burned her alive, using one of the traditional methods of killing a witch used by the earlier pilgrims. It was while she burned on the stake, that she uttered the curse on the townspeople's descendants. At the end, the witch's eyes glowed red before the spirit left her body in
death.
"Possession of another person," Jackson leaned back in the chair as he mumbled to himself. "That could be what I saw, or else some kind of mind control."
Jackson closed the book. "So the witch has come back to carry out her curse. She must be going to do it at the festival. I have to stop her."
Wait a minute. Why do I have to stop her? Jackson thought. Because you are the only one who knows. Besides who is going to believe you?
"Oh, yeah" He said. Jackson closed the book and got up from the chair. He grabbed his stuff and quickly left the room.
Okay. It's Thursday and the festival is on Saturday. That means I have two days to get holy water and figure out what I'm going to do, and find out how to get a hold of the witch's ashes. Jackson frowned and talked to himself as he left the library, catching the librarian’s scowling eye.
On his way home, Jackson worked out a plan to get the holy water. He decided that he was going to have to sneak into the town’s Catholic Church. It was the only source of holy water he could think of, without having to ask a minister for help. Breaking curfew was a necessary evil that he didn't like the thought of, but there was no way a minister or priest would just give him the water so he could fight an ancient witch.
He skirted the streetlights in the parking lot. The dark night enveloped Jack as he ran towards the side entrance of the church.
Jackson gasped, leaning against the brick of the church when he got there. He'd run most of the way to the church from his house. Jackson only had a few hours of night left and he wanted to get home before his parents discovered that he had snuck out. He put his hand against the door and pushed slowly. It came open easily. Earlier that day Jackson had scouted the church and wedged a stick between the door and the door jam, so that it wouldn't close all the way.
He poked his head inside the building and peered about the darkened interior. A bright red exit sign glowed softly above his head, emitting a soft electrical buzzing. That was the only sound in the place. Jackson hesitantly stepped inside. He slid as quietly as he could through the short hallway and into the main congregating room.
It was large and open with one lone light at the altar. He ran to the font of holy water near the front entrance, half afraid some soul would jump out of the darkness of the empty pews and drag him to the underworld for committing sacrilege. Jackson took a large water bottle out of his trench coat pocket and dunked it in the small pool of liquid. In front of him, Christ stared down from his cross with questioning eyes.
"Err, sorry ..." Jackson whispered to the figure. He put the full bottle back into his pocket. Jackson looked around the room before rushing back the way he came, eager to be away from the scene of his crime.
Jackson dozed through his first three classes the next day. Only waking when one of his friends jabbed him with a pencil to ask why he was so out of it. In Mr. Knight's class, Page seemed almost normal and he nearly convinced himself that his mind had been playing games on him yesterday, until he happened to catch her staring with those horrifying red eyes during a test. It sent chill up his spine and he resolved to maintain his present course of action.
After school, he went down to the town's historical museum. Jackson wandered around the old building until he came to the section on the Remington Witch.
"Just what I was looking for," He said. In the very center of the display stood a small urn, supposedly filled with what was left of the Remington Witch after they burned her.
Now to break the law … again. He thought, grimacing slightly. Jackson looked around the rest of the area filled with things about the Remington Witch, making sure no one else was around. When he was sure that he was alone, Jackson snuck into a janitor's closet to the side of the room. He checked the face of his digital watch in the darkness. It was four-thirty, the museum closed at five and the curator, an absent-minded man who rarely stuck his nose out of his office, would leave about an hour after that. Jackson set his watch and settled into a crouching position behind some brooms and a mop, preparing to cool his heels for an hour and a half. He had stayed up so late the night before that Jackson soon grew tired and was asleep within minutes in the dark closet.
Beep! Beep! Beep! Jackson jumped at the sound. He floundered about in the dark for several seconds until he realized where he was and turned off the alarm on his watch. He made his way to the door and cracked it open, poking his head outside.
It was still daylight though the lights in the building were all off. He walked out into the open, peering about. Everything was silent, the building completely empty. Jackson took a deep breath and went up to the display with the witch's urn. He unhooked the velvet ropes surrounding the urn and carefully picked it up.
I should take a peek, just to make sure. He thought, lifting two latches that held on the heavy lid of the urn.
Inside it, sat a pile of inconspicuous dust. All that remained of an evil witch. Except for her spirit. Jack figured to himself. He put the lid back down, putting the whole thing inside his backpack. He put the backpack on and replaced the velvet rope. Jackson started towards the entrance only to realize that it would be locked.
"Shit!" He cursed. How could I have forgotten about the locks? He halted, panicking. He would be caught when the curator came in the morning he'd find him dozing on the floor with the Remington Witch's Urn. The cops would arrest him and he'd be stuck in Juvenile Detention while the spirit of the witch took over the stupid town.
Jackson remembered the fire escape, with a smile he turned and headed back down the hallway he had hidden in. At the end was his salvation, the exit. He leaned against it, getting ready to run. Once he opened the door the alarm would go off and he'd only have a few minutes to get the heck away from the place. Jackson hit the latch running as a ruckus of sound erupted.
Carnival music floated over the evening breeze carrying the townspeople’s laughter with it. Jackson mingled in the crowd, his shoulders hunched under the weight of the Urn in his backpack. He was dead tired; sleep eluded him the previous night. He kept thinking the police would come and arrest him or worse, Page might decide to come after him.
Not Page … the witch. He corrected himself. Jackson continued through the crowd, giving a pair of Policemen wide berth. People crowded him from all sides giving him the strange sensation being trapped with no way out. Jackson sat on a concrete divider after almost an hour of searching for Page. Maybe she wasn't going to use the festival to take over as he had thought. Finally, across the crowd, he saw her. Page stood alone, glaring at him. Her eyes, glowing brightly enough to see from afar, froze him to the very core.
She turned and walked away, leaving Jackson to stare after her. He shook himself out of his stupor and chased after her.
Page weaved through the crowd, staying just enough ahead of Jackson stay keep him out of breath. Several times, he thought he had lost her only to see her cross his path again. It was as if she did it on purpose. She led him to a small ally a couple hundred yards from the farthest reaches of the festival. It was dark inside, a separate world from the gaiety of the celebration outside.
"I know what you've been doing," The creature inside Page said.
Jackson blood ran fear slithered its way through his suddenly cold veins. He attempted to swallow a couple of times to clear his now dry throat, but it did no good. He slid the backpack off his shoulders and slowly unzipped it with shaking hands.
"I brought you here to tell you it will not work. I haven't waited for hundreds of years to accomplish my goal only to have a boy stop me."
Jackson pulled out the water bottle and unscrewed the top. He stepped back instinctively as Page moved towards him. She saw his nervousness and began to laugh.
"How do you intend to stop me when you can't even make yourself stand still? I know, I'll make it easier for you." As she spoke, the light in her eyes dimmed and went out. A hazy form appeared in front of Page's face.
Jackson realized it was the spirit of the witch. The witch's face in the red cloud smile
d at him. It hovered a few seconds, doing nothing. It rushed at him; Jackson let a scream as the form rammed into his body.
Suddenly he felt very crowded, as if he were sharing his body with something else. It dawned on him that he was not alone. The witch was inside his body. Pain hit him; he struggled against the pressure of the spirit. He quickly found himself winning the internal battle. The creature seemed itself to be in pain, it writhed in agony as he fought with it. Jackson gave one final mental push and was by himself. He came to, flat on his back in the ally. After a moment's confusion, he scrambled to get up and found he still clutched the water bottle, though there was only half of the holy water left. The rest of it had spilled on him as he fell.
He shook with relief; the holy water must have pushed the witch out of his body. He looked around nervously but didn't see her. Page was passed out on the concrete opposite him. Jackson went to her, checking to see if she was still alive. He noted the beating of her heart, and tried to wake her but could not.
"Stay away from my body!" A voice yelled. Jackson glanced up at the sound and saw the red fog of the witch coming at them. He quickly spread some of the holy water over Page, preventing the creature entrance. It roared, rushing past them.
"You and I both know there's only one place left for you to go!" He said, pointing to where his backpack had fallen, the urn had come out of it and knocked over spilling some of its contents on the ground. The red haze roared again, rushing back and forth into the alleyway. Jackson started to fear it might have some other plan in mind as it halted right in front of him.
"This isn't over," The visage inside the haze said. It roared once more, rushing into the ashes by the urn.
Jackson’s breath raged heavily into the silence that followed. His blood pounded in his ears when he stood. He staggered over to the Urn and collapsed to his knees in front of it.
Setting the Urn upright, he swept up the ashes with his hands and put them back inside. All the while fearing the spirit of the witch might pop out and get him. He didn't let out a sigh of relief until the latches were closed back over the lid of the Urn. Jackson jumped as a light flashed in his eyes.
"Hey, what’s going on back here?" A voice asked from behind the flashlight.
Jackson closed his eyes, resting his head on the cool metal table. He was at the police station. The officer who had found him and Page brought him there after discovering that Jackson had the missing Urn from the museum. What followed was an hour and a half of questioning. Jackson refused to talk; the police would never believe his story. He barely believed it himself. So here, he was stuck in an empty
