by Dani Lamia
“Okay,” Dzolali answered dubiously.
“I’ve been having dreams about you since I got here,” Phoebe exuded in a rush, needing to get the words out and to have her questions answered once and for all. “Vivid dreams, too. And then, it just so happens that you liked me, and we ended up spending the night together and this morning, I find that kimono, the same one from the dream. You have to tell me if you somehow got in my head to fuck with me. That shit my Aunt Hester is feeding to Ned, is it a drug?”
“Wait a minute—” Dzolali stepped forward, her arms wide.
“Stand the fuck back!” Phoebe shouted and held out her hand. “Have I been dosed with whatever Ned’s on?”
Unexpectedly, Dzolali’s face lit up in amusement and she laughed. “I don’t need drugs for you, Phoebe.” She took another step, then another. With her copper eyes meeting Phoebe’s, Dzolali stepped past her protesting hand and held her prey still with a mere thought.
Phoebe could not move, not even to look away. She felt Dzolali’s presence in her mind, blatant and bold. Without physical contact, Phoebe’s will was stripped away, along with any doubt that psychic abilities existed.
Dzolali pushed further, and Phoebe was reminded of her undying love, her need, for Dzolali. Phoebe no longer wanted to flee or fight. Locked in her sultry gaze, even her clash with Onenspek was forgotten.
Dzolali planted a kiss, and Phoebe reciprocated.
Phoebe blinked, and she realized that the kiss had ended. Somehow, in the second that passed, Dzolali had stepped away and opened the door.
Oh, no! She’s leaving!
“Hester wanted me to tell you to get back to the laundry,” Dzolali said over her shoulder as she went out. “I left a dress for you to wear tonight. Check your closet.”
With that, Dzolali was gone, and the door swung shut, clanging like jail cell bars. It was a few moments before Phoebe broke the staring contest with the closed door.
She shook her head clear, backed up her story onto her thumb drive, and shut down the laptop. There was a lot of work to do before she had to help Alva in the kitchen. No time to waste.
***
Dzolali entered the parlor with the shadow of concern on her face. Hester was preparing for a client scheduled for a palm reading.
“Did she speak?” Hester asked without looking up from her tarot cards.
“She did,” Dzolali answered.
“But there’s a problem,” Hester concluded.
“There is. She confronted me with the knowledge that I had visited her in her dreams. She’s under the impression that she’s been drugged, like Ned.”
“And what did you tell her?” Hester left her tarot cards on the round table and stood, facing her coven sister.
“I had to renew my spell over her once again,” Dzolali said. “She fought me a little, but I told her that you wanted her to resume her chores.”
Hester smiled, though it was without humor. “Good. Was there any trace of the spirit that entered her last night?”
“There was something,” Dzolali answered. “I just can’t be sure. Phoebe’s just so strong, I don’t think she knows she’s fighting me.”
“I’m sure she isn’t,” Hester said. “If she was, she’d be quite formidable.”
“I can’t read her,” Dzolali admitted. “I can’t tell if the spirit possessed her or just passed through.”
“Or if it remains?” Hester asked.
“Not even that, High Priestess.”
“She will come into our coven,” Hester Pyncheon said thickly. “And when I’m gone, she will make a powerful high priestess.”
14
Acquiescence
Phoebe went on with her chores, her mind distracted with the image of Dzolali and the memories of the previous night’s excursion. She transferred items from the washer to the dryer, added more to the washer, and set both to run.
A whisper at her ear halted her retreat from the basement.
Even over the screeches and droning thrum from the laundry machines, she heard it, as if someone had been matching her walking pace and spoken directly in her ear. Phoebe felt a brief pang of fear, settling to a resigned level of anxiousness. The fight-or-flight response was soothed like a blanket on cold feet. Phoebe looked about the room and even stepped to the dumbwaiter door, opening it to listen.
It was no use. The room was filled with noise. Thinking herself utterly insane, Phoebe shook her head and again, more quickly, headed for the stairs.
The vision of the black-haired woman in the nightgown infiltrated her sight, obscuring all that had been real just a heartbeat before. Phoebe cried out in terror and stopped, just as she was about to put her foot on the first step.
Phoebe blinked, but there the image stayed, just as Phoebe had discovered her in the dream. My God, who are you?
Alice.
The reply came to Phoebe as if she had thought the word. The name meant nothing to her, but for certain, she knew that it was the very same entity that had possessed her during Hester’s séance.
“I can’t see,” Phoebe said aloud. She reached out with both hands. She could not see them, but she did catch the railing of the basement stairwell in the palm of her right hand. She gripped it tightly, unsure of her ability to remain fully in her own reality.
You do.
“You’re not real.”
But I am.
Phoebe felt like she might fall. She gripped the railing tighter and stepped forward until her left foot struck the bottom step. Still, the vision of Alice stood before her. The wall behind the woman was stone, not wood panels, and the floor beneath her feet was dirt, not cement.
“Get out of my head,” Phoebe commanded.
In time.
With her other hand, Phoebe felt for the stairs. Her right foot stepped onto the first, followed by her left, which found the next one. Her aim was to find the first floor and put distance between herself and the House of the Seven Gables.
Tears flowed freely down Phoebe’s face, and she sobbed like a little girl drowning at the beach. After a moment, Phoebe realized that she was not crying simply from her own panic. She was feeling Alice’s emotions. Phoebe stopped trying to climb away, fascinated by this development. Instead, she opened her mind to accept Alice’s feelings.
There was a terribly powerful melancholy coming from the ghost. The emotion felt ancient, though not as antiquated as the house itself. It was certain now, that the house bore deep, dark secrets. Phoebe felt it on her being, broadcast to her by Alice.
As Phoebe acquiesced to her situation, her eyesight compromised. Grasping onto the reality of the basement staircase, the vision of Alice and the basement from the past gave way to another scene. Alice again starred in this movie, though now she was somewhere else in the house, surrounded by four people, each wearing masks. Three of them were women, one a man.
Alice was bound by ropes at her ankles and wrists, and her midsection was completely wrapped by another long coil of rope that looped through a hook in the ceiling. Phoebe recognized the room. It was the attic suite, where Alec Holgrave now made his temporary home.
The room was quite different in the vision. There was no bed, no end table, and the walls were unfinished panels of wood, where now there was plasterboard and paint.
The masked people were witches, bound together into a coven. Their masks were hideous distortions of humanity, mixed with animalistic traits. The man, Panas, who stood behind the bound and suspended form of Alice, wore a goat’s face mask with horns.
The tallest woman among them was on Alice’s right, Ceridwen, the High Priestess of the coven. Her mask covered the upper half of her face and swept upward as it went back into what looked like a curled-up hand fan. Her eyes shone through two small, almond-shaped holes.
The witch with the long-nosed mask, Lornabeth, held a bowl in
front of Alice’s throat. The shortest one with the wicked grin, Hepzibah, held a knife.
That’s my mom’s bowl! Hepzibah’s my great-aunt Hester’s aunt!
Hepzibah placed the long, curved blade against Alice’s throat and dragged it. Blood flowed into the bowl and soaked deep into Alice’s nightgown.
Phoebe screamed, unable to pause the movie or change the channel. She thought her eyes shut and felt the lids close and her brow tighten, but the horrifying vision went on.
And on.
Phoebe collapsed onto the stairs. She felt the cool wood on her face, chest, and legs. She felt the rail post in her grip, but her eyes and ears remained back in time, out of her control.
She watched as the coven drained Alice of blood, leaving her to dangle by the thick rope. When the bowl was full, Lornabeth took the bowl away, careful not to spill any more. The light went out of Alice’s eyes, and as it did, Phoebe’s vision then faded to black. It was a moment before she realized that she could again see her reality and that she had shut her eyelids tightly.
Phoebe lifted herself up and turned to sit on a step to gather her nerves.
Instead of finding the basement as she had left it moments ago, the walls and ceiling had disappeared. Other than the stairwell on which she sat, any trace of the House of the Seven Gables was gone.
Before Phoebe was the forest, its trees decrepit, and the ground, mostly barren of grass, was in a state between dirt and mud. The air was damp and carried a chill, with wisps of fog stirring about the black limbs of the trees surrounding her.
Phoebe felt a wave of panic strike her. “Oh, my God. Hello?” she called.
At that moment, as if in answer to her call, movement in the field ahead of her drew her attention. It took a moment for her to comprehend the shapes that were sprouting from the moonlit soil. Human forms took shape as one after another rose through the dirt, and oddly, none of the muck clung to them.
Phoebe could not count them, but in her transfixed state, rooting her to the last bastion of her reality, the wood surface of the stairs, she found that the gathering crowd was translucent.
There were men and women, even a couple of children, all looking upon her with silent regard. Some were eyeless, others steadily gazing, but all in some stage of decomposition, some manner of decay. The worst of them were skeletal, wearing antique fashions, stained and in strands, hanging like drapes upon their frail frames. The more recently deceased were contemporary in their clothing, but they differed not in their apparent intent.
They stood, bound together, facing Phoebe as if they were meeting together in a common cause, though in life, certainly, they could not have met. This Phoebe not only deduced from the anachronistic clues they wore upon their bodies, but from the thoughts and feelings broadcast en masse.
Their journey to the surface complete, Phoebe found that she was no longer afraid. The realization that she was calm struck her odd, and she squeezed the skin of her left forearm with her right hand, hard, to take stock of her level of consciousness. The skin ached in response.
Wordlessly, Phoebe cast her eyes over the impossible crowd, each of them still as the moai statues of Easter Island on a blue-tinged, starlit night. Without her addressing the gathering, her mind heard their proclamation.
It must all end.
Phoebe blinked and withdrew a step, drawing herself up and gaining a different perspective of the crowd, which was many bodies deeper than it had at first appeared. Their collective voice, as her mind categorized it, spoke to her at once, in chorus. Though not afraid, Phoebe was uncomfortable, like an infant with young, untested ears at a concert. She heard, yet felt them all, at the same time.
It must all end, they repeated.
“What must end?”
The house. The coven. The tyranny of the Pyncheons.
“But I, I am a Pyncheon.”
On this, the dead were silent, regarding her as they had before.
She had no problem with the idea that the House of the Seven Gables should cease to exist. The place had lost its nostalgic value, what little there had been to begin with, as many of her memories were of sour times, and she would need little prodding to take a match to it.
The word ‘coven’ now grew plainly defined to her. They meant Great-Aunt Hester, Glendarah D’Amitri, and Dzolali Alameda. The congress before her did not intend their meaning to end at a disbandment but a total annihilation of the union, without regard for preserving life.
Phoebe’s heart sank at the thought of murder, for she knew that she was no killer. The prospect of her carrying out such acts seemed to her impossible, as the very act of climbing Mount Everest might be to a quadriplegic. Further, the thought of losing Dzolali when so much was yet to be shared brought her to tears.
“There’s no way I can do it,” Phoebe said, though the intended audience was herself.
It must all end, they repeated just the same.
Phoebe looked away, only to find Alice standing next to her, looking eye-to-ruined-eye. “How?” Phoebe asked.
You are of Pyncheon blood. Few beyond a Pyncheon have the power, Alice replied.
The vision of Alice streaked with blood emerged once again from the wound Hepzibah had inflicted upon the young chambermaid’s throat.
Phoebe covered her face in her hands and begged for the horror to stop. Her voice was shrill and near panic as she shouted through her fingers, her body shaking from the effort.
Having received nothing in reply, Phoebe lifted her face to beseech the gathering for relief from their charge.
The basement was again what it had been minutes before. The roar and whine of the laundry machines resumed, as if they had never paused. The light was white, the floor concrete, the walls paneled and near, the ceiling low and wooden.
How can you help us if you can’t accept who you are?
Alice’s question hung thickly in the air, like cigar smoke in a vault. It reverberated, repeated, and floated in her mind. Phoebe could sense the closeness of Alice but saw nothing of the ghost in her reality.
Overwhelmed in the residual emotion of the moment, Phoebe used the handrail to get to her feet. She ascended to the first floor, where she stood in the doorway for a moment before reaching back to shut the door.
***
The dress Dzolali had left for her was satiny black, with a high lace collar and a plunging neckline. As the skirt was knee length, Phoebe added dark stockings and shiny black high heels.
Phoebe had put her hair up with an ornate metal hair clip, revealing her birthmark clearly. She had blackened her eyelids with a smoky eye effect that rendered her brown eyes vibrant in comparison. Her lips were black, and her rouge a deep amber that faded into her jawline. Her earrings were long, dangling upside-down crosses. The charm on the necklace was a bronze-colored pentagram, and she wore a ring on almost every finger. They were quite elaborate, featuring skulls, more pentagrams, and gemstones.
As she set the table, she heard someone walk into the dining room and then come to an abrupt halt. Eyes were upon her, and she turned.
“Good evening, Mr. Holgrave,” Phoebe greeted him with a cold tone. Her eyes held his for a moment, almost daring him to comment on her appearance.
“Good evening, Ms. Pyncheon,” he returned and gave a bow. “You’re looking well.”
“Thank you,” she said flatly, with an expression that invited nothing further. She turned back to the table, continuing to dress it with silverware.
“In case you were wondering,” Holgrave dared go on, “Mr. Onenspek will be fine.”
“That’s marvelous,” Phoebe said stonily.
Holgrave attempted to lighten the mood by smiling humorously. “I was certain that you had broken his nose. When I walked in—”
Phoebe turned to him, stepping closely. “Mr. Holgrave, if you don’t mind, I’d rather not go over the unpl
easantness. I’d prefer to put it behind me.”
“I’m sure Ned Onenspek would like to do the same,” Holgrave added, his smile unfettered.
To this, Phoebe said nothing. She turned away from him and began to unload the dumbwaiter.
“May I help?”
“That’s not necessary,” she answered.
“Right,” he said. “I’ll just stand here, then. Shall I?”
This time, she said nothing. She returned to the dumbwaiter, sent it down, and closed the door. She stepped to the window overlooking the backwoods and stared into it.
“Good evening,” Glendarah greeted them as she stepped into the dining room, followed by Hester.
Holgrave returned the greeting, giving both ladies a slight bow and a smile. Phoebe turned from the window. With surprising confidence, considering how upset she had made her great-aunt by decking her artist friend, Phoebe welcomed the witches with grace and a friendly grin.
Hester and Glendarah smiled guardedly at first and looked to one another. Phoebe took no notice of the curious glance they shared but went about unloading the last of the evening’s meal from the dumbwaiter, placing it on the table with a spring in her step and a renewed poise to her spine.
Holgrave pulled the chair for Glendarah, and Phoebe moved quickly to do the same for her great-aunt. Hester arched an eyebrow as she watched Glendarah’s surprised, pleased face.
“Thank you, Mr. Holgrave,” Glendarah said.
Dzolali entered lastly, and Holgrave noted a shared warm glance between herself and Phoebe. Both ladies beamed upon seeing the other, and when Holgrave made a move to seat Dzolali, Phoebe got there first. Holgrave aborted the act and took his own seat.
Alva arrived to serve, and Phoebe sat at her place.
“I’m almost afraid to ask, but,” Phoebe began softly, and nodded to the empty chair.
“He’ll be fine,” Dzolali assured her. “His pride is as wounded as his face, but it will heal more quickly.” She finished with a giggle.
Phoebe returned Dzolali’s humorous grin, and the two stared for a few heartbeats.
