The Secret of the Sacred Four

by E J Elwin

  “In the dark of this night, under this moon

  I call forth a spirit, taken too soon

  Tragically lost, an innocent child

  While villains remain, spirits reviled

  Revive the heart, return the soul

  Of light and potential untold

  To Earth, from the realm of death

  Back to life and renewed breath…”

  I watched her in wonder, my eyes wide, not wanting to miss a single second of it. The displaced earth of Connor’s grave remained completely still. It occurred to me that we hadn’t brought any shovels, and I wondered how we were going to get Connor out of his grave, before telling myself that Harriet had like already thought of this. She went on:

  “An exchange put forth for the great gift

  Of returned soul and renewed life

  Villainous blood spilled forth, cold and swift

  At the end of a silver knife…”

  At these words, the still dazed Father Gabriel sitting at the foot of the grave began to stir, squinting around him like someone who had just woken from a nap.

  “What— what is this?” It was his first time speaking since before leaving the church. The mention of the exchange had clearly broken the enchantment placed on him by Harriet’s emerald powder. He looked frantically around, at the tombstones, at the moon, and then at me and Harriet. “Arthur, what’s going on? Who is this? Who are you?!” he asked loudly of Harriet.

  He started to rise, but Harriet raised two fingers and pointed them at him. “Sit.”

  Father Gabriel snapped back down to the grass as though yanked by a magnetic pull. Harriet continued as though she hadn’t been interrupted.

  “Blood for blood, and we end this strife

  Soul for a soul, life for a life…”

  She opened her eyes for the first time since she began chanting and reached into the brown leather backpack. She drew out a long shining silver knife, then strode to where I stood with Father Gabriel at my feet.

  “This is where you come in, Arthur,” she said, holding the knife out to me.

  I nodded as I took the knife, then looked down at Father Gabriel.

  “Arthur, w-what are—” he stammered, “Arthur, what are you doing?!”

  He writhed on the ground, struggling to escape from the invisible force that held him there, his face breaking out in a sweat. I grabbed him by the collar, then raised the silver knife.

  “Arthur, no! No, please!” he shouted. Tears streamed down his face, mingling with the sweat, and his breath came in high-pitched wheezes. “Arthur, please don’t! Please don’t!”

  He began to sob, a wailing and unrestrained sob. I held the knife over his chest, tightly gripping the hilt, and caught his gaze. He looked back at me in utter terror, his eyes swimming in tears, and my grip on the knife slackened. No one had ever looked at me that way before. I looked at the knife and felt, for the first time since setting out to do this, a twinge of doubt. Could I actually go through with it?

  “Arthur?” came Harriet’s voice from beside me. “Arthur, are you okay?”

  I looked into the eyes of the crying man. His pupils were dilated, so much so that it looked like he had black irises instead of gray. I stared into his left eye, an inky black well that engulfed me and transported me to a different place and time. To a memory.

  “You’re serving the Lord,” he whispers in my ear. “You have to do it or you won’t get into heaven. You want to get into heaven, don’t you?”

  I only nod because it hurts too much to talk.

  “Good boy,” he breathes in my ear. He pushes me against the polished wooden shelf in his office and my face strikes the oak painfully. I can’t breathe or say anything. Tears stream down my face from the pain as he pushes himself into me. He makes sounds like an animal, like a bull, like a hungry monster. I cry out and he covers my mouth with one of his hands.

  I am helpless. I can’t fight him. He’s too big. I sob from beneath the hand he has over my mouth, but he only holds it there tighter.

  Make it stop, please make it stop, I just want it to stop. I am being eaten by a monster.

  The growling and snorting sounds he makes get louder, and so do my own cries, filling my ears so I can’t hear anything else. I know only pain and helplessness.

  Later, I remember his words:“If you tell anyone, I’ll kill you and your whole family.”

  I reemerge from the deep black well and land back in the present.

  I stood up and looked down at the wretched creature before me. I grabbed a fistful of his hair and pulled him to his knees, gripping the knife with my other hand. Then, in one swift move, I swiped the blade across his throat.

  Blood gushed from his neck in halting bursts, like it was pumping out of a clogged garden hose. He clamped convulsing hands to his throat in an attempt to stop the blood, gasping for air that wouldn’t come. I let go of his hair and he fell to the ground beside Connor’s grave, twitching and gurgling, a tide of blood soaking his shirt, joining the wine he had spilled there. After a few seconds, the choking sounds stopped, his hands fell from his throat, and Father Gabriel moved no more.

  I was silent, processing what I had just done. This man who had once haunted my dreams and my waking life, who had shown me early on just how cruel and terrifying the world could be, now lay on his side in the dirt like roadkill. His distinctive white collar was now dark red, his life spilled out on the grass. Inside me, a window opened for the frightened child who still lived there, a window that let in light and understanding: the promise that no suffering is forever.

  “Arthur?” I looked up at Harriet, who had stood by my side and watched with me as Father Gabriel died. “Are you okay?” she asked.

  I nodded. She then held out her hand for the bloody knife. I handed it over and watched as she raised it to the sky above Connor’s grave.

  “An exchange of a predator slain

  Return this child to the earthly plane…”

  The Blood Crystal glowed suddenly bright red on the black velvet cloth, as if a flame had been lit inside it. A breeze blew through the cemetery, even though the night had been still until now. The mist that had hung lazily over the tombstones shifted and swirled around us, taking on a life of its own. Harriet’s black robe billowed in the wind, her wild gray hair dancing about her face. Her voice rose to a shout over the wind:

  “Blood for blood, we offer this toll

  Blood for blood, we call forth his soul!

  Arise!”

  With the last word, a bolt of lightning flashed across the sky, lighting up the cemetery just as it had in my dreams. The wind then stopped abruptly as if someone had switched off an electric fan. The Blood Crystal stopped glowing. A cloud passed over the moon, dimming the pale light. The cemetery became silent and still. Harriet lowered the bloody knife and looked at me, her face just visible under the obscured moonlight. She smiled.

  “We did it,” she said.

  I looked uncertainly at the mound of earth that was Connor’s grave, half-expecting his hand to shoot out of it like in a horror movie, but it remained still.

  “What do we now?” I asked.

  “We dig him up,” said Harriet calmly.

  Boom! A crash of thunder followed her words, shattering the silence that had come in the wake of the spell. I looked up and saw more clouds gathering over the moon. The air had that smell of wetness that comes before a storm.

  “Rain,” said Harriet. “Standard after a resurrection spell.”

  Sure enough, a big droplet of water fell from the sky onto my nose. Harriet gathered up the Blood Crystal in the black velvet cloth, then the two white candles from the headstone, and put them back in the brown leather backpack along with the bloodstained knife.

  “We’d better hurry,” she said. “Stand back.”

  I stepped back from the grave as she stretched her arms out in front of her, palms up, as though to catch the raindrops that were now falling scattered around us. She raised her hands slowl
y upward and my jaw dropped as the earth of Connor’s grave began to rise, all of it at once, in one neat rectangular shape, as though it hadn’t been loose dirt that had been used to bury him but one giant solid block. I thought absurdly of an ice cube being pushed out of an ice cube tray.

  The block of earth rose completely from the grave and then was still, levitating just inches above the six-foot deep rectangular crater that held Connor’s casket. Harriet then moved her outstretched palms to her left, and the block followed her movement, hovering smoothly through the air, before being lowered to the ground next to the grave with a muffled thud.

  I stepped forward and looked down into the grave. There was Connor’s casket at the bottom, made of a cream-colored maple of his parents’ choosing, looking as smooth and glossy as it had six days earlier when it had gone into the ground. Was he awake already? My stomach turned nervously at the idea of him waking up in his own casket.

  The rain was coming faster. I felt the heavy droplets on my head and saw them speckle the smooth surface of the casket. Harriet put out her arms again, palms up, and the casket slowly rose from the bottom of the grave, as easily as the block of earth had risen. I felt a sudden stab of panic. Would it really be him in there? Thoughts of zombies, of glazed-over dead eyes, of demons and vampires, flashed through my mind. I told myself to get a grip. I trusted Harriet.

  The casket rose until it was clear of the grave, hovering a few inches above it like the block of dirt had. It looked just like it had the previous week during the funeral service as it was being prepared to be lowered, only this time there was no device supporting it. Instead of moving the casket away as she had with the block of dirt, Harriet left it where it was, levitating motionlessly above the grave.

  “Go ahead,” she said, with an encouraging smile.

  The rain was falling in earnest now, and it dampened and tamed Harriet’s wild gray hair. I stepped toward the hovering casket and reached for the metal latch that kept the lid secure. I clicked it into the unlocked position as another boom of thunder rolled across the sky. Raindrops poured down my face like the tears that had fallen on this very spot six days ago. I took a deep breath, gripped the metal handle, and opened the casket.

  I screamed and stumbled backward.

  It was Connor. Still dead and decomposing. The skin that remained on his face was ghostly gray and thin, and shriveled like dried fruit. His eyes, or more accurately his eyeballs, stared blankly in front of him, a much paler blue than they had been in life, the skin of his eyelids shrunken and pulled back. The only other parts of his body that were visible from beneath the black suit his parents had chosen for him to be buried in were his hands, as dried and shriveled as his face. The black suit, along with his blond hair that sat limply on his head, were the only things that looked as they had in life.

  I turned away from this sight in horror. “What happened?” I asked Harriet. “Why didn’t it work?”

  “It worked,” she said quietly.

  “What do you—?”

  “Look,” she said.

  I looked back at Connor’s body, now being pelted with raindrops, and my heart skipped a beat. The skin was changing, shifting. The shriveled lines on his face were smoothing out, the ashen gray color brightening. His entire body expanded before my eyes, becoming fuller, no longer shrunken and emaciated. His face as I remembered it reformed in front of me. The last thing to transform were his eyes, remaining vacant and staring, until at last, the milky pale blue changed to the deep ocean blue that I recognized, and a light turned on behind them. He blinked.

  I gasped, my eyes wide with shock. “Connor?”

  He blinked again and lifted a hand to shield himself from the rain. “Arthur?”

  My breath caught and a strangled cry escaped me. “Connor?” I said again, tears falling down my face, lost to the rain.

  “What happened? Where are we?” He squinted around in the rain at where he lay, and pushed himself up into a sitting position. “Arthur, what—?”

  I threw my arms around him, and he laughed his familiar laugh.

  “Arthur, I love you too,” he said, bemused, “but what happened? Why are we in the rain? Did we get really drunk or something?”

  I pulled back and looked at his face. “You were in an accident. But you’re okay now.”

  “Accident, what— is this a coffin?” he asked incredulously, putting out a hand to grip the cream-colored maple.

  “A casket, technically,” said Harriet from behind me. “There is a slight difference.”

  She was looking at us both with a tender expression on her face.

  “We’ll explain it all,” she said to Connor, “but right now we have to go.”

  I nodded and turned back to Connor. “Can you walk?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  He looked from me to Harriet, bewildered, but as alive and sound as he’d ever been. I lifted open the bottom half of the casket lid, then held out my hand to him. He took it and gave me that joyful smile that always made him even more beautiful than he already was. As he stood up in the rain and stepped out of the casket, a bizarre sight in his nicest suit that his parents had once bought him to wear to a wedding, I fell in love with him all over again.

  He stepped onto the wet earth that surrounded the grave and looked around. “Who is—?”

  I followed his gaze and saw that he was staring at the corpse of Father Gabriel.

  “We’ll explain later, remember?” said Harriet brightly. “Just be cool, as the kids say.”

  Connor looked uneasily at me, and I gripped his hand reassuringly.

  “Now then,” said Harriet. She put out her palms once more and lowered the casket a few inches, both halves of its lid still propped open. She stopped when the bed of it was just beneath the ground. “Drag him over would you, Arthur?” she asked, indicating Father Gabriel’s body.

  I walked to the body as Connor watched us wide-eyed, the rain soaking all three of us. I pulled Father Gabriel from the position he lay in on his side and turned him so he faced upward. He looked grotesque, even more so than he had in life. He stared bug-eyed in front of him at nothing in particular, his mouth and slash wound gaping open, reminding me of a pig on a spit. I gripped his blood and rain-soaked shirt and dragged him the few feet to where Harriet indicated.

  “Go ahead and shove him in,” she said dismissively.

  I put out my right foot and shoved Father Gabriel’s body into the casket. It rolled over and landed facedown on the sodden lining of the casket with a wet thump. I closed both halves of the lid and switched the metal latch into the locked position again.

  “Good,” said Harriet.

  She raised her palms and the casket began to descend slowly back into the earth.

  “You said I was in an accident?” Connor asked me, as we watched the descending casket.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “So this is real, right?” he asked. “I’m not in a coma dream or something, am I?”

  “This is real, I promise,” I said, squeezing his hand again. “We’ll tell you all about it once we get out of this rain.”

  The casket settled at the bottom of the grave, then Harriet turned to the block of dirt. It was still completely solid despite all the rain. She levitated it a few inches off the ground, guided it easily over the grave, then lowered it into the hole. It settled seamlessly into place and, except for the thick shower of rain, the grave looked just as it had before the spell.

  **

  “Well, I think a drink is in order,” said Harriet.

  We had crossed the rainy cemetery, plodded through the overgrown weeds of Harriet’s front yard, and made it into her house. We were now huddled in her kitchen, Connor and I sitting at the dining table while she rummaged around in a cabinet.

  “Does whiskey sound good?” She held up an ornate, exotic-looking bottle of whiskey.

  “Yes, please,” Connor and I said together.

  We grinned and squeezed each other’s hands. We hadn’t l
et go since leaving the cemetery. Harriet made a noise like the one people often make when they see a puppy.

  “Oh, you two are so adorable, my heart could just burst.” She set three glasses of whiskey down on the table and then raised hers. “To love,” she said.

  We clinked our glasses together and drank. The whiskey was delicious and unlike any drink I’d ever tried. It tasted smoky and sweet, and reminded me of eating roasted marshmallows around a campfire as a child. The same feeling of pleasure and contentment kindled inside me.

  “Okay,” said Connor, setting his glass down. “What the hell happened?”

  Harriet and I took turns telling the story. We began with the part about her and I having met briefly all those years ago when I had coming knocking at her door. Then she explained who she was and what she could do. Connor took the news that witches were real with impressive calm. Harriet explained that witches were capable of many things: of brewing potions that could induce uncontrollable laughter, cure the common cold, or cause someone to burst out in spontaneous expert-level tap dance. Witches could perform spells that defied the laws of physics.

  One of the most notorious and difficult was the resurrection spell. Connor seemed to sense where this was going and gulped some whiskey as Harriet went on. She told him that she’d heard a boy crying out for help, that she’d sent dreams to this boy which would lead him to her.

  Then I told him about the accident, how the semi truck had come out of nowhere, how we’d ended up upside down in the middle of the highway. I told him I’d been left with a few bruises and a cut on my face but that he had died on impact, even though we’d both been wearing our seatbelts. I held his hand as I spoke, and Harriet prompted both of us to drink during this part of the story. She told Connor that it was a lot to process and that he was handling it very well.

  I described his funeral, how I had wept beside the maple casket, and how his parents had shouted at each other because his dad didn’t want me there. Connor shook his head bitterly.

  “Unbelievable,” he said quietly.

  I described how I had taken a chance, had gone out into the night with a bottle of whiskey in search of the woman from my dreams, with the desperate hope that she could help me.