by Eliza Grace
“I love you.” His words cause the music to fade into a dull hum that no longer matters. It is the most perfect moment.
Then the song is back with a vengeance.
Our dancing is more frenzied.
In a blink, we are joined by faceless figures. They are dark as pitch, swirling around us in a chaos that makes me sick to my stomach. I am twirling in the air again, suspended in nothingness. Hoyt is beginning to shake, his body becoming transparent. He is disappearing. He will leave me alone here.
He’s supposed to love me.
Then he is gone, powdering away into a million particles. I reach out to the absence of him. Instead of his warmth and substance, I feel a texture like glitter hit my fingers and then melt away like dry ice, which leaves no dampness behind. He leaves me alone. Hoyt has left me.
Grief threatens to overcome me.
But…
I am not alone. I have forgotten that I am not alone.
One of the dark spirits still swaying about leaves its partner and comes to me. It grabs me, moves me erratically and pulls me to its body. So fast. We are moving so fast. Despite my protests and desperate clawing to be released, I cannot free myself. The ethereal folds of my dress begin to weigh me down. They alter and darken until they are liquid pitch brushing against the floor. The bodice of the dress barely covers me. Two lengths of narrow cloth ending in sharp points are all that hide my chest.
The thing is forcing me in circles, my body so close that we are extensions of one another. I want to scream, but my throat is coated in tar. It is sticky. And soundless. All I can manage is a soft plea for help. “Hoyt, please come back.”
A large gilded mirror emerges from the floor, which has become liquid—a pool of gloss that’s alive with ripples. It rises towards the ceiling, tall and oppressive. The shadow figure moves us ever nearer to it. Now, more than ever, I am frantic to release myself. My heart is racing. My gut tells me that I do not want to be closer to that bubbled glass and golden frame. Flames spring to life behind our movements; it pushes us onward.
Then I see him.
M.H.
He is standing on the other side. He is reaching for me. Through the mirror into my dreams.
Together We Dream 2
-Hoyt-
Outside of time.
Forever.
Oblivion.
I can still see her.
Yanking against whatever binds me, I yell. I yell her name until my throat is sandpaper.
But I am stuck here, in this nothingness limbo, unable to help her. The shadow dancers are moving around her and Tilda is caught in their movement, trapped at the eye of the storm. Our lovely dream is gone. I try to raise my fists, beat at whatever is keeping me encased. But I feel nothing, not even my hands reaching upwards.
One of the ebony figures has abandoned its partner and it is moving towards Tilda. My Tilda. Its arms wrap around her and she is pushing it backward, desperately trying to ward off its advancements.
And. I. Can. Do. Nothing.
“Just wake up, Tilda! Just wake up!” I know I am screaming at the top of my lungs again; I ignore the aching of my esophagus. I also know that it’s futile; the sound will not escape the bubble that is my prison. “Tilda!” Screaming her name again, I watch as the figure holding her hostage pulls her even closer.
She is pulled off of her feet, slammed against the shadow’s body. It begins to dance with her, so quickly that the two together become a blur, moving color beneath the shining light above.
The silvery folds of her dress are moving like liquid, undulating between a monochromatic scale of whites and grays and blacks until it is obsidian and shines like an oil slick. The colors of it are confusing, at once a void of dark and also a dance of blues, greens, and purples.
“Tilda!” My fists are pounding. I can feel my pulse within them. Thump. Thump. “Tilda!”
My eyes widen as I see the floor transform into a lake. Circles form at the center of a disruption and expand outward until they finally become so large that they fade into nothingness. At the epicenter of the waves rises an object that is narrow in width, but at least four feet across. It grows taller and taller, reaching for the ceiling like kudzu.
It is a mirror, its frame metallic and catching the light of a fire that has suddenly come to life behind Tilda and the dark dancer. Tongues of flame lick at their heels, pushing them ever closer to the newly-emerged mirror. I am frozen, horrified and wondering what is coming next.
I cannot see what Tilda sees within the mirror’s glass, but I see her face contort. I see the horror there. “God, what is going on?” My fists itched to slam against my prison once more, but I knew it would be futile. Instead, I close my eyes—it feels like I am abandoning her, but I do it anyway—and I wish to see what she sees.
And, amazingly, I do.
There is a man in the mirror, tall and dark with silver flecks of power brightening his irises. He’s no one I’ve seen before, but… I’m afraid. The fear is so great and powerful within me that it fills me up, helium going into a balloon, expanding and expanding, until I am ready to burst into pieces. It is not my fear.
It is Tilda’s.
Who is this? I do not expect an answer.
It’s him. The voice is weak, a child’s soft cry in the night, afraid of the monsters under her bed.
I don’t understand?
The witchfinder. The one who brought me to the forest. She goes quiet for a moment; I also stay quiet, hoping she’ll tell me more. Hoyt, how can I hear you?
I don’t know. God, I was useless. I couldn’t help her.
Where are you?
How do I explain that? I’m here. I’m still here. Just… you can’t see me.
I’m so sorry. You shouldn’t be involved. You need to get out of here. I don’t want him to punish you.
Tilda, I can’t leave you. Even if I knew how, I wouldn’t leave you.
I’m sorry, Hoyt. I’m sorry. I feel a rush of wind, a spark of something that tingles along my skin, and I am pushed away from her. We are no longer one. Her voice is gone.
I am wide awake, lying on the couch in her house, my clothes soaked with sweat. The candle long burned out. That was so real. So real. I realize that I’m holding something in my hand, holding it so tight that my fingers hurt. It’s the book. No, the diary.
And it is pulsing with a violent, bright, golden glow. I rocket into a sitting position, but as soon as I open the journal, the glowing dies. It dies. But it was just alive with light and color. It was. So maybe Jen is right. Maybe this book is more than it appears and maybe it truly is somehow connected to Tilda’s disappearance.
Awaken Me
-Tilda-
Outside of time.
Forever.
Oblivion.
As soon as I have pushed Hoyt away, out of the dream, M.H. also vanishes. Along with the mirror, the shadow figures, and the licking fire.
I’m alone in the room, the undecorated space where the dream had begun. “Tilda, come back, darling. Come back, Little Witch.” It is my mother’s voice. Lavender fills the air around me. It is joined by sandalwood and honeysuckle. “Tilda, come back to me.”
My body begins to dissolve. I allow it to, the call of my mother is convincing. The scents mingling around me are soothing. It is a spell. I’m learning to recognize them now. I shimmer and vibrate and the dream room dissolves.
When my eyes open, my mother is standing over me. Her hands hover over my face, her eyes are closed, and her mouth is still calling me back to her. I raise my fingers to graze her palms. They stop in midair and then lower to cup both my cheeks; her eyes flash open as she finishes a final line of incantation. She has taught me that—if a spell is started, it cannot be halted. It must be finished and given its full life.
“…asperatus mondia ascende.” When the final word tumbles from her lips, she smiles wide, teeth bright and white by the candles’ light. There are dozens, burning in a comforting circle around us. White and blue a
nd amber flame. Nothing like the angry fire that chased me towards the mirror in my dream. “Welcome back.”
She helps me sit up and I realize that I’m dizzy. “Why do I feel so shitty?”
“I’d rather you not curse, darling. She brushes my hair back, letting her fingers trail through the dark locks. “As for why you feel bad, that’s not so easy to explain.” Her brow furrows and her hands fall from my hair. “He pulled you into a dream of his making. He… forced you to experience a conscious state while sleeping. It’s a very jarring experience.”
“Hoyt was there.”
“Hoyt?” She frowns. “He’s powerful. More than he should be…” Her voice trails off and she turns from me so that I cannot see her expression.
“Mom, what’s wrong?”
I can see that she’s shaking, her body tremoring softly.
“Mom?” I blink and the action is slow, like my lashes are coated in honey. “Mom!” Raising my voice, I reach out for her shoulder.
The vibrations along her skin halt. She freezes, a statue whose curves and angles are highlighted and darkened by the flickering blue and white around us. Yet… she still has not answered me. I have not touched her yet. My fingers are hovering two inches from her skin. The space that separates us feels like a chasm. And I feel like I should not touch her. That I should not touch my own mother.
But I also need to touch her.
It is a desperate compulsion that tingles from my scalp to the soles of my feet.
So I bridge that gap.
I brush her shoulder with the barest hint of touch.
And she whirls.
She whirls on me and her face is a contorted mask of pain. Her eyes are wide, obsidian orbs. I can see myself in them, the way I am staring at her in horror and shock. When I scream, she mirrors my action and a stream of blood-flecked flies swarm from her mouth in a great wave of buzzing blackness.
“Tilda! Tilda!”
Someone is shaking me hard; their fingers dig into my shoulders painfully.
“Wake up, darling! Wake up!”
But there is another voice, shouting at me to wake up. That is the one that I listen to. That is the one whose urgings I heed.
My eyelids part as if struck by tiny lightning bolts. Gasping, my mouth opens and closes repeatedly like I have never breathed. I have never been birthed. My spirit has been caught in a void of nonexistence. “Mom. Oh, my God, Mom. You’re okay. You’re okay.” I slam into her, our bodies thumping on contact. “That was… so awful.” I am the one shaking now, violent earthquakes that I can’t control.
“Sweetie, I’m fine. I’m fine. Are you okay?” She pushes me away so she can see me; her eyes are lovely and normal. My mother’s eyes.
“I’m—” I cut my sentence off, because I’m not sure how I am. I feel terrible. I feel empty. I feel too full. My head aches like it has been hit with a jackhammer. “I feel strange.”
“Oh, baby.” She strokes my hair and I flinch at first. It reminds me of the terrible nightmare. The swarm of flies. Her glassy black eyes. “I was pulling you out of it. I was trying. It wasn’t working.”
“But it did work. I woke up and you finished the spell. You told me what he did.”
“No, baby. You didn’t wake up. He pulled you deeper. God, he pulled you deeper. Something else helped you escape. Not me… not me.” She pulls me to her again, wraps her arms around me and they feel so warm and strong. “I’ve got you now. We’ve got to protect you. You have to shield your mind so he can’t do that again.” Mom held me even tighter and kept talking. Talking and talking and I felt her tears, as real as she seemed to be, dampening my clothes. “I’m sorry, Tilda. I should have felt him interfering in the dream sooner. I wanted to protect you, give you something lovely after all the terrible stuff. And he warped it. He warped it and I wasn’t fast enough. I don’t think I could have stopped him even if I was.”
“It’s okay,” I whisper, remembering the empty start to the dream, the way I had floated and been caught in a void. I remember being held in Hoyt’s arms. And then I remember how the dream had changed at the barest hint of a thought- the ball gown, the chandelier, the music, the globes dancing with memories. It was something straight out of one of my favorite childhood movies. “It wasn’t all bad.”
“It was, Tilda. It was for me.” Mom lets go of me and stares into my eyes. “It felt like I was losing you.”
“You can’t lose me, mom. You’re the one who might get lost. You’re not even real… not alive.”
“I am alive, my love. I’m alive and I’m going to make sure you can protect yourself from that son of a—”
“Alive for now.” I cut off mom’s speech. There’s something wrong about her cursing. Something that doesn’t feel like her, but other. Like the forest has changed her in more ways than I’ve already realized. I push closer to her, closing the gap she’d created by letting me go. I cuddle my nose against the crook of her neck, tendrils of her soft hair brushing against my cheek. I can feel mom’s body rise and fall and shift as she goes to speak once more. Again, I keep her from talking. “How,” I whisper, pausing to take in the lovely scent of her, “do I protect someone who knows me? He has my magic. He has my power? How do I protect myself against… myself?”
She hugs me even tighter now.
“We’ll find a way, baby. We’ll find a way.”
How long have I been here already? How much time has passed? How long can I take this torment before I break…?
A soft laugh bleeds into my ear. It is haunting and mocking. It is him, strong because of what he has stolen. Strong because, within his veins, runs the essence of who I am. A witch.
Inner Sight
-M.H.-
Three days after Tilda’s disappearance into the woods.
Admiring myself in the tinted glass of the café, I brush a hand through my hair that now bears not a single grey. I smile, the expression full and unashamed.
Warmth blooms inside my chest cavity like a flower grown too swiftly. It presses against my lungs with a firmness that is impossible to ignore.
It is not just the warm mug between my fingers that causes the sensation. It is the buzz. It is the rush of blood flowing through so many veins of so many people.
The human activity.
It is the feeling of freedom that has been just beyond my fingertips for so long. I could not feel as a shadow. I could not live as a shadow. Life is not observation. Life is… is tactile. Life is not remote. Life is… a crowd of bodies pressed together in such a way that they become a singular, undulating entity. And I am once again part of this land of the living. The hardness of tabletop pressing against my wrists and hands reminds me. The way I can inhale and exhale without pain reminds me.
Lifting the warm espresso with cream to my lips, I take a long draught. The liquid pushes down my throat and lands in my belly with a reassuring slosh. It is my third cup and likely not my last. A devout man would call me a glutton. But this age is different, the rules are different. Gluttony is almost something to be admired, not something to be admonished.
A group of men exit the shop, coffee cups in hand. They speak briskly, too busy and consumed to feel the slight breeze on their faces, too busy to smell the world around them, or recognize that they are part of a larger whole. I was like that before imprisonment. I was focused, determined, consumed.
I continue to watch them in the reflective surface of the windows and then I tilt my head back and enjoy the sunlight. It is early in the day and the sun has not gained its full strength yet. And it is my favorite time of year. The time where the leaves are just changing, where the mornings and evenings are becoming crisp. It would be nearing harvest time, preparations for the winter commencing. As I close my eyes, I see my world, the one I truly belong in. England. My homeland. She could not even be so kind as to place my cage there.
No, when I failed to kill her, she relocated herself and all in her bloodline to this place. And then she bought the land, the forest that
became my shackles. I place the cup onto the table. I need my hands. I need to ball them into fists as I think about her trickery. An 80-year-old woman with one leg. That’s the guise she assumed in East Anglia so very long ago to recruit me to her cause, a venture that would spiral me down into madness. I killed innocents. So many women that I believed to be witches so she could absorb their essences and expand her power.
When I’d found out, I’d tried to end her. When I could not, I tried to end myself.
It was a beautiful seductress, full of fire and life, not an elderly spinster that came to punish me. But the eyes were the same—piercing and magnetic.
Shaking my head, I try to dislodge the past.
But, God forgive me, it is always so vivid. And she who caged me is always so lovely in my memory. A lovely siren calling me to the rocks of my doom. It is an odd thing, this new world I’ve been freed into; here, it seems that the presence of the supernatural has waned drastically— like they have left in a great exodus of magic and peculiarity. And, although I could feel the seductress of my memory within the forest, I could not see her… not until I’d gained enough knowledge and siphoned enough magic to draw her, a part of her, back into the human world from wherever she’d been.
She roamed the woods now, a shadow of what she’d once been, trapped in the hag-like, crumpled form she’d used in East Anglia. I’d not been able to amputate her leg, although I wanted to. God, I wanted to. To punish her how she had punished me.
And there are others in the woods. She is not the only one. Forest spirits that I experimented on as I honed my craft. In truth, I have escaped my prison just in time. It was becoming harder and harder to keep the twisted, hungry creatures from finding me. They all wanted vengeance.
My eyes quickly open and I lick my lips as a life force, one that is strong and vibrant—one that is different from the others surrounding me—slips past the café and towards a building on the other side of the street. She carries a scent with her; it clings to her curls and her clothes. Paint, every color of the rainbow. An artist. She is carrying a stack of papers. I know who she is. I’ve known her since she was a child. I remember the first time she walked beneath the shadow of the trees.
