The Secret of the Sacred Four

by E J Elwin

  I looked down at the can in my hand. The color was bright green. I shielded my eyes as Connor had and sprayed it into my hair.

  “Nice!” Connor shouted. He dipped his hand in the bucket of blue paint, then smeared it across his face with his fingers like warpaint. He now looked at home among the many partiers.

  I dipped my fingers in the bucket of red paint but then stopped just before I touched them to my face. A memory flashed to the front of my mind. I looked down at my dripping red fingers and was back in the overturned car the night of the accident, the blood running down my face and stinging my eye, obstructing my vision as I looked around for Connor in the devastation… I quickly dipped my red fingers into the blue paint and then smeared the mix on my face.

  “Cool, you made purple!” Connor shouted.

  I began to shout back a question about what our next move would be, when the roaring music suddenly died. There was a collective groan from the crowd. The two young women standing next to the buckets of paint looked around and then pulled something out of their ears— earplugs. That’s how they’d managed to stand so close to the deafening music for so long. Then, somewhere in the distance, the policeman’s megaphone crackled.

  “Party’s over, people,” said the same deep voice. “Everyone clear the street, let’s go.”

  People grumbled in confusion and disappointment as they shuffled toward one end of the street or the other. One of the young women at the paint table looked at her watch and then at her friend. “It’s only a few past one,” she said, puzzled. “We’re not supposed to end ‘til two.”

  “What do we do?” I asked Connor, as people moved past us.

  “We can blend in with the crowd on the way out,” he said.

  “Which way?” I asked. “There are cops on both sides.”

  “Maybe we can go back out through the way we came in?”

  I looked over people’s heads toward the place we’d entered from and then at the red and blue lights at the end of the street. There was confusion and a jam of people at the barricades. Bright beams of light shined into people’s faces, and I realized they were police flashlights.

  They were searching the crowd for us, though nobody else around us knew that. I saw a young man, his bare chest splattered with green paint, freeze up at the sight of the flashlights in the distance and then toss the joint he was holding into the crowd.

  “Let’s go,” said Connor, taking my hand.

  We began to move to the place where we’d come in, but had walked no more than a few paces when the glowing lanterns hanging above the party suddenly flickered and went out.

  People groaned again as they looked up at the darkened lanterns, certain that they were being rushed unceremoniously out of the party. Then, as quickly as they had gone out, the lanterns flickered back to life, and there was a half-hearted cheer from the crowd.

  Then I noticed something strange. Right at the edge of the party, where the police were shining their lights into people’s faces, a single one of the lanterns, the yellow one in the corner, went out. Then the orange one next to it. I turned to the other side of the street beyond the stage and saw that the very same thing had happened there. The first two lanterns in the furthest row had gone out. As I watched, so did the third one. Then the fourth.

  I looked back in the other direction. Four lanterns had gone out there too. Now another one, then the one next to it, until, one by one, the entire first row of lanterns on both ends of the street had gone out. The crowd slowed on its way to the exits as people noticed what was happening and watched curiously as the next rows of lanterns began to go out.

  “What is this?” I whispered in Connor’s ear, gripping his hand.

  He shook his head blankly as we watched the lanterns go out. They began to pick up speed— poof! poof! poof!— faster and faster, row after row, leaving the party in shadows, until finally there was only one row left, directly above us.

  “We have to mo—”

  Before I could finish my sentence, the entire last row had gone out, all except for one— the red one directly above me and Connor, glowing fiercely in the darkness like an alien planet.

  The people around us stared at it and at us, then backed away like we were infected with some contagious disease. The rest of the crowd turned in our direction, trying to get a glimpse of who or what was beneath the glowing red orb. Suddenly, the space around us grew. The entire crowd parted, right down the middle, all the way to the end of the street where the cops stood.

  A cold stab of fear shot through me, but not from the sight of the police officers staring in our direction. Behind them and their squad cars was a black van, and out of it climbed a group of masked figures. They wore all black, and their masks covered everything except their eyes and mouths.

  The Brotherhood had arrived.

  CHAPTER 8

  Fire Fight

  The masked men approached the police officers and flashed shining badges. One glance at them, and the officers backed away and headed for their squad cars. The masked men huddled at the edge of the crowd like a pack of wolves. The man at the front of the pack looked up at the glowing red lantern, then down at me and Connor beneath it. Without a word, he raised his gun.

  I grabbed Connor’s hand and we dived sideways into the crowd as gunshots rang out in the night. The air was filled with screams. Chaos unfolded as people scattered, colliding into each other as they ran for their lives.

  We were pushed and shoved by the crowd, the sea of people now stormy and dangerous, and I clung to Connor’s hand like we were at the end of the world. I didn’t know if anyone had been hit by the shot meant for us but was sure, as more gunshots exploded into the air, that the Brotherhood wouldn’t be bothered by such trivial things as the deaths of innocent bystanders.

  We struggled through the crowd but couldn’t get very far. Terror ripped through me as more gunshots went off behind us, closer than before. The Brotherhood wasn’t having trouble moving through the crowd since everyone was trying desperately to get away from them. Where could we go, anyway? There were more cops at the other end of the street who, based on the ones we’d just seen, would probably gun us down rather than try to help.

  We got caught in a wild tangle of people and Connor’s hand slipped out of mine. There was a horrible moment where I looked around and couldn’t see him, and then I was buffeted onto the sidewalk and fell into his arms. We stumbled back against the brick wall of a building.

  “Are you okay?!” he shouted.

  I nodded and looked breathlessly around for the Brotherhood. They were only about fifty feet away from us, shoving people aside and hitting them with the ends of their guns.

  One brave soul, a man in his twenties, drenched in a rainbow of paint, barreled into one of them and tackled him to the floor. His companions looked around at the scuffle, there was a loud gunshot, and the man covered in paint slumped to the concrete and moved no more.

  I felt the loss of the young man’s life deep in my chest. There would be no outrunning the masked men. There were ten of them and two of us. They were armed and we weren’t. I felt the world closing in around me and was overcome with despair at the idea of losing Connor, of the both of us being snuffed out by the Brotherhood right after we’d been given a second chance to be together.

  Then I remembered the spell. The resurrection spell that had done the unimaginable. There was magic in the world. I had to believe in it. I had to believe that an escape was possible.

  I looked back at the brick building that we’d struck. It was several stories high and had stained-glass windows, purple and green, lit softly from within. I was seized with one last desperate, crazy idea.

  “In here!” I shouted. We scrambled along the side of the building, found a door, and wrenched it open. The screaming and gunshots were replaced by music and laughter. We’d fallen into a boisterous, warmly lit pub full of happy patrons swigging from mugs of beer, throwing darts, and playing pool. They clearly hadn’t yet heard what
was happening outside.

  A familiar song issued from the shining jukebox near the pool tables at the far end of the room. It was “Don’t Dream It’s Over” by Crowded House, a beautiful soft rock ballad so at odds with what was going on, that for a moment I was disoriented.

  A glowing display behind the bar read “McFadden’s Irish Pub”, set over a logo that featured a foamy mug of beer and a four-leaf clover. In the far corner of the room, there was a hallway leading off to the bathrooms and to the stairs that led to the upper floors of the building.

  “Over there,” I said to Connor, pointing at it.

  We hurried across the room, attracting the stares of various patrons, and I remembered that we had pink and green hair and paint smeared all over our faces. The bartender, a middle-aged man with a thick red beard, spotted us and stepped out from behind the bar.

  “And just where do you think you’re going?” he asked loudly, in a muted Irish accent.

  “You should lock the doors,” I said. “There’s a shooting going on outside.”

  He looked around baffled at the front door, and Connor and I slipped past him toward the bathrooms. We hurried past two doors labeled “Lads” and “Lasses” and found the narrow wooden staircase at the end of the hallway.

  “Where do we think we’re going?” Connor asked, as we climbed the creaky stairs.

  “Top floor,” I said.

  We came to the dark second floor of the pub which was currently not operating. What little light came through the windows revealed stacked chairs and bottles of liquor behind the bar which looked very much like the one below. We moved on from this gloomy scene to the next set of stairs. At the top, we came to a door with a sign on it that read EMPLOYEES ONLY.

  I reached out and tried the doorknob. It was locked. I turned away defeatedly when suddenly the door swung open with a loud creak. Connor and I looked at each other in surprise and then into the small dim room beyond. There was nobody there. I checked the doorknob again. It had been locked but whoever had last left the room, most likely the bartender downstairs, hadn’t fully shut the door. We hurried inside and I locked the door behind us.

  “A little luck of the Irish,” said Connor, smiling.

  I looked at him, grateful for his smile, and remembered another time when a door I expected to be locked swung open at my lightest touch: the night I first went to Harriet’s house. Was this a sign that magic would save us? I had to believe that it was.

  The room was densely packed with dozens of cardboard boxes, row after row, stacked nearly to the ceiling. Most of them bore the logos of liquor and beer companies, and it was obvious that this was the storage room for the pub below. The only light came from outside through two small windows overlooking the street where so recently there had been a lively party, and where now people were being terrorized by the Brotherhood. I didn’t bother looking for a light switch because there was no way we were going to use it.

  There was just enough room between the rows of boxes for us to squeeze past them toward the two windows. They were regular windows, not green and purple stained glass like the ones on the lower floors. We peered slowly around the edges of the shades out at the street.

  It looked like the Brotherhood had split into teams of two to look for us. I watched two of them barge into an all-night café across the street. Most of the surrounding businesses were now closed, except for the bars and clubs. They could enter the pub downstairs at any second.

  “So what’s the plan?” asked Connor.

  “Do you remember me telling you how Harriet found me?”

  “She came to you in your dreams, right?” he asked.

  “Right,” I said. “She said she could hear me crying out for help. Help that she could give me. She could hear me grieving. She knew I wanted you back.”

  I could see that he understood. “So you want to contact her?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “I thought if I could reach out somehow and tell her where we are, she’ll come flying here on her broomstick to help. That’s why I wanted to come to the top floor. She can land on the roof.”

  “Yes, but Arthur…” Connor said, his tone delicate, “she said only witches can fly broomsticks, remember?”

  “I know,” I said quickly, “but she could still come here and help us somehow, right? She can put a force field around this building like she did at the house, or maybe she can bring her two witch friends from Seaside and all three of them can figure something out!”

  “Yeah, but if she’s already in Seaside,” he said, “that’s over an hour away…”

  “I’m sure flying is a lot faster than driving! I’m sure she can get here before they—”

  I broke off. Before they find us. Connor looked uncertain and my already tenuous confidence in my plan started to falter.

  “Alright then,” he said, “do you know how to do it? Calling her?”

  “N-No,” I said lamely. “But how hard can it be? I did it before without even trying!” I looked up at the dark ceiling. “Um, Harriet? Can you hear me? We need your help.”

  I looked around, feeling more ridiculous by the second. What was I expecting? For her to appear out of thin air? For her voice to shoot out of some megaphone like the policeman’s had?

  “Okay,” said Connor, with more of his usual certainty, “you probably just have to focus. I’ll help you. Maybe it’ll work better with the two of us.”

  He positioned himself in front of me, took both my hands, and closed his eyes like he was preparing to meditate. I watched him for a second. Someone else might have ridiculed me. He encouraged me. I closed my eyes with renewed determination.

  Harriet? I thought. Harriet, if you’re out there, please help us. The Brotherhood is coming for us. You’re the only one who can get us out of this.

  I gripped Connor’s hands and concentrated as hard as I could, trying to send out whatever it was that had caused Harriet to hear me the first time. What if Seaside was too far? Maybe she was able to hear me before because we were so close to each other in Wineville.

  Harriet, please hear me, please come and help us.

  I had no way to tell if it was working. I strained my ears for the sound of Harriet’s voice, but heard only the continued yells and commotion outside. Then something occurred to me.

  “Maybe I have to be asleep for it to work?” I suggested. “She appeared to me in my sleep, didn’t she? Maybe I was also calling out in my sleep?”

  Connor looked dubious. I couldn’t fathom falling asleep at the moment in any case, but I couldn’t think of anything else. “But why would she able to hear your call for help when you’re unconscious and not when you’re awake and actively begging for it?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said desperately, “maybe—”

  I was cut off by the sound of a gunshot downstairs. Panic spread through me like wildfire. The Brotherhood, at least two of them, were in the pub. They were about to search the place. They were about to find us.

  “We have to barricade the door,” said Connor, levelheaded as ever.

  I bounded forward to help him push one of the stacks of cardboard boxes toward the door as screams erupted from two floors below us. The boxes were heavy, stacked high and packed with bottles of liquor, but through our combined efforts, we were able to quickly push them against the door.

  “How lucky is it,” said Connor, “that we have all these heavy boxes in here?”

  He was right. These were perfect for barricading the door, and we had enough of them to fill the space between the door and the wall facing it. Was it another magical sign? Was Harriet hearing us after all? Was it Luck of the Irish?

  “Luck of the Irish,” said Connor, voicing what I was thinking, as Harriet often did.

  There came a loud shotgun blast from below, different from the sound the guns of the Brotherhood made.

  “That sounded like a shotgun,” grunted Connor, as we secured the second stack of boxes behind the first one. “It could be the bartender
.” Just as he said it, there was another shotgun blast, followed by the angry roaring yells of a man with an Irish accent. He probably owned the place. He was defending his property and his patrons, one man against two.

  We moved on to the third stack of boxes as the sound of the Brotherhood’s guns resumed from below. I heard shattering glass and guessed that the bartender was taking shelter behind his bar. It was the liquor bottles on the shelves behind him that were exploding, as well as any number of the glass beer mugs lying around the room, and possibly the stained-glass windows.

  We secured the third stack of boxes and moved on to the fourth. The physical effort was helping me to control my panic, and I saw that the fourth stack would be enough to fill the space between the door and the opposite wall. There was another shotgun blast, followed by a barrage of Brotherhood bullets. More of them had shown up.

  Sweat poured down my face, mingling with the reddish, bluish, purplish paint I had smeared there earlier, which smeared back onto my hands as I wiped my face. I remembered I also had green hair and imagined I looked absurd. Connor’s forehead was sweaty beneath his pink hair and the blue paint on his face was also running.

  We secured the fourth stack of boxes into place, effectively barricading the door, just as the bullets in the pub stopped. Connor and I looked at each other, panting in the silence. Then there was the sound of footfalls coming up the stairs, followed by voices from the second floor, from the darkened second level of the pub. Then there was laughter.

  Even though the door was solidly barricaded, Connor and I dove for the next stack of boxes and pushed it as quickly and quietly as we could next to the others. There was nothing else to do. We turned to a sixth stack, and they were either getting lighter or the adrenaline was making it easier to move them. I begged Harriet in my mind to come save us. We leapt toward a seventh stack, then finally an eighth, pushing it into the final slot, forming a barricade of two giant rows of boxes. Connor straightened up, looking pleased with our work, but my spirits fell.