Witch Creek

by Laura Bickle

  The compass led them down the road, directly into town, across the street . . .

  . . . and pointed at the Compostela.

  Petra’s eyes narrowed. “I knew that fucking bartender was shady, somehow.”

  “Well, it’s closed,” Maria said, pointing at the hand-lettered sign in the window.

  That, in itself, was weird enough. If it was night, the Compostela was usually open. Didn’t matter if it was a normal Wednesday afternoon or Christmas Eve.

  Petra stormed up to the doors and tried them. Locked. “Doesn’t matter,” she said.

  She walked around the side of the building, to the back alley.

  There were two doors here. One likely led to the back of the bar, since there was a half-lit EXIT sign above it to comply with fire code. But the other was a puzzle. It was a plain, heavy wooden door. Both doors were locked.

  She consulted the Locus. The drying blood churned toward the wooden door on the left.

  “Door number two it is,” she said.

  She hammered on it with her fist, but no one responded. She gave it a kick, but it didn’t budge.

  She was standing back to make another kick when Nine moved her gently aside.

  Maria stood before the door with her shotgun. At first, Petra thought she meant to go full Clint Eastwood and shoot open the door, but instead she struck it handily with the butt of the shotgun. The knob wobbled on its stem, and another blow knocked it off entirely.

  Maria shrugged. “Cheap locks.”

  The door opened to a landing, before a flight of stairs. Petra fumbled for a light switch. A hazy yellow light illuminated a set of scarred, waxed stairs with a bannister made of iron pipe fittings, leading upward.

  “Very industrial-chic,” Maria muttered.

  Petra put the Locus in her pocket, unholstered her pistols, and headed upstairs. Maria followed Petra to the attic with the shotgun, while Nine remained at the bottom of the stairs to stand guard with Sig.

  There was an apartment here, and a very nicely appointed one. Hand-hewn pine boards made up the floor, and the walls were covered in wood paneling. The overhead lights were fixtures cobbled together of metal pans and Edison bulbs. The yellowish light illuminated a strange furniture arrangement in the living area. The lights were on when the women arrived.

  “That’s not cool,” Maria said, stopping in the living room.

  “No,” Petra agreed, not really able to articulate how much “not cool” was an understatement. “Not at all.”

  There was a body in a glass box in the middle of the floor. At least, that was what Petra assumed it was. Something body-shaped, at least, tightly swaddled in white cloth and covered in a smattering of what looked like herbs, was stretched out in the bottom of an aquarium. Maria crouched beside it, peering inside. “Someone cared about the person who died,” she said, pulling her scarf up over her face, her eyes roving over the mechanical decorations. “Maybe they’re preparing some kind of green burial?”

  Maybe. Petra really didn’t care.

  The whole place reeked. Petra put her shirt collar up over her nose, although that did little to block the stink of sulfur and lime and God only knew what else. The smell seemed to radiate from a black plastic cattle trough on the floor. It was massive, big enough to fit a small cow inside. Petra peered in. It was full of a viscous black fluid. She thought she detected the sparkle of pyrite floating on the surface. This concoction had to be incredibly dense to allow the mineral to float. It seemed as if it had developed some sort of current, as the top of it slowly churned. Was there some kind of pump in the bottom, or a slowly leaking drain? She didn’t know.

  What she did know was that someone was cooking up an alchemical soup. Had her pendant become part of that? She rubbed her face. The fumes were strong, strong enough to make the air hazy and her skin itchy.

  But she thought she spied the glitter of gold in the depths, a fragment of chain. She reached into the tank, into that disgusting fluid. To her distaste, the concoction was warm, like bathwater. For all she knew, it was caustic as hell. But that didn’t matter.

  “What are you doing?” Maria whispered.

  She reached farther in, eyes watering from the fumes. Her fingers reached, and it was as if the tub was deeper than it seemed from the outside. She leaned over just a bit more . . .

  . . . and Sig barked at the bottom of the stairs. She lost her balance.

  Petra fell into the vat.

  The viscous fluid seemed to grab her, pulling her in with a hot splash. It closed over her head, and she felt it rushing into her nose and mouth, filling her lungs with warm darkness.

  She had a curious feeling of separation, moving apart from her body. She felt no pain, no lingering nausea, not even the cut on her hand. She felt apart, as she had in the forgetting place in the hospital.

  Apart and lost.

  The disconnected sense of floating intensified, then just as quickly dissipated.

  Petra found herself on her hands and knees in soft green grass. Her fingers dug into the blades as she twisted around to assess her surroundings.

  She had landed at the edge of a grassy valley, between violet mountains and a pine forest. She guessed that this was some aspect of the spirit world, as this was a place she had never visited. The landscape was too surreal to exist in the real world. A river drifted through the bottom of the valley, reflecting a full moon that didn’t hang in the sky. The sky above stretched shades of pink, but there was no sun or moon in sight, just a distant flock of ravens moving in that surreal light that seemed to emanate from no obvious source.

  She stood to shout at them, waving her arms. In her few trips to the spirit world, birds always had something to do with Gabe. She jumped and yelled, but the birds were too far away to hear her.

  They should have seen her; she became aware that she was glowing, a soft yellow shine that obliterated her shadow. But the birds flew away, oblivious to her presence.

  She lowered her arms and gazed at them. How could she reach them? What was her mission in this place? Was there a way to connect to Gabriel from here, or . . .

  A deep growl emanated from behind her, from the forest. She spun on her heel, expecting to perhaps see Sig.

  It definitely wasn’t Sig.

  An enormous green lion stalked out of the forest, tail lashing. His eyes were gold, but his mane and body were the deep green of corroded copper. Along his back was a pattern of golden stars, undulating along his spine.

  “Oh, shit.” Petra had encountered a green lion in the spirit world only once before. It had turned out to be her father. But this beast did not have her father’s eyes; it had eyes that shone as bright as moons, baring pale teeth as it stalked toward her.

  She reached at her waist for her guns, but she was unarmed. She held her arms out in front of her, backing away slowly. “Nice kitty,” she murmured. This had worked in a James Bond film with a tiger, right? “Sit?”

  The lion growled and lunged for her.

  His massive paws knocked her to the grass, driving the wind from her gut and slamming the back of her skull against the ground. She could smell the breath of the lion, sulfurous and thick. Her heart pounded, feeling the massive paws pressing down on her chest and the claws flexing against her skin, drawing blood that rolled down the exterior of her ribs.

  The green lion drew back his lips and sank his teeth in her shoulder.

  Petra screamed and pushed back at the lion with her fists. Bone cracked and red flowed hotly over her glowing body. The lion, annoyed at the hysteria, severed her neck with a quick bite.

  The pain was exquisite, instantaneous . . . then gone. She lay, paralyzed, as the lion devoured her. He started at her shoulder, cracking open her ribs and crunching through her clavicle. She felt the pressure of his teeth and tongue against her lungs, frozen, as he fed. He ate her arms, beginning on her right side and continuing on her left. Piece by piece of her flesh went down, down into his belly.

  Her consciousness seemed to resid
e in her head, and the lion left that for last. He picked up her head in his jaws and snapped her down in two quick bites.

  The belly of the lion was red and black, but she still glowed. She didn’t have a body, just a gooey mass of energy. The glow that she was moved down the lion’s throat to his belly, where Petra lay like a stone.

  This is it, she thought. I’m finished. Dead and eaten by a lion.

  Despair washed over her, and she wondered if her consciousness would flicker out as the lion digested her. Would that be the end of self-awareness? The end of her everything?

  The glow in the lion’s belly, that glimmer of sunshine, expanded. Her awareness grew from the lion’s belly, up to the lion’s lungs, heart, along the conduit of his spine. She settled in his brain and opened the lion’s eyes.

  She wrinkled the lion’s nose—her nose?—lifting her head to the pink sky. She drew back her lips and roared, shocked by the strength of her voice and the vitality.

  She had become the green and golden lion.

  Petra’s head broke the surface, and she sucked in clean air.

  “Roaaawwrrrr . . . Ohmyfuckinggod,” she gasped, wiping dark sludge from her eyes with paws that were now suddenly hands. She’d found her fucking pendant, somehow—the chain was laced around her wrist and the pendant banged against her cheek. She stared at it, dumbfounded. The green lion devouring the sun . . .

  Sig whined. She followed the coyote’s gaze to the floor outside the plastic tank.

  There was a goo-covered body on the floor. Maria had straddled it and was giving it chest compressions, while Nine was hunched over the head, whispering at it in another language.

  Petra crawled to the side of the tank. “Guys? I—oh.”

  The two women turned toward her, their faces ashen.

  The body lying on the floor looked like Petra. Bloody goo had been scraped away from her face, but it stuck in her hair and on her tunic. She looked as if she’d been retrieved from a bottle of deep red ink, smeared on the meticulously rustic floor.

  Petra covered her mouth with a dripping hand. “Oh my God. I’m dead.”

  She knew it. She’d done it this time. She was watching her friends trying to resuscitate her broken body. She’d hit ghost-level, and it was all over with.

  Nine and Maria looked straight at her, though, in shock. Maria stood first and came to the tank. She scraped the goop off Petra’s face and held her by the chin with one hand. With the other, she aimed the shotgun at her chest.

  “Petra? Is that you?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I think so.” She still couldn’t escape that feeling of being the lion . . .

  Maria ratcheted the shotgun, one-handed, against her hip. Her grip on Petra’s chin shook.

  “Yes! Yes, it’s me! Petra!” she yelped.

  “Give me your social security number.”

  Petra would have thought that was funny, until she considered that this was the easiest way that Maria had to identify her in the real world. She recited it back.

  “Mother’s maiden name?”

  “I feel like I’m at the DMV.”

  “The name,” Maria said, the shotgun not wavering.

  “Jesus. It’s Wallace.”

  Sig jumped to the side of the tank and licked slop from Petra’s shoulder, as if authoritatively confirming her identity.

  Maria appeared temporarily mollified, and she lowered the shotgun. But Nine was frozen in place, gawking at her, and then the body that looked like her dripping on the floor.

  “Come help me get her out of here,” Maria ordered.

  Nine climbed to her feet. She and Maria fished Petra out of the slime, holding her by the shoulders while she tried to get her legs under her on the slick floor. She slipped in the mess and landed on her ass. She discovered that she was naked. What the hell?

  Then she almost laughed, thinking that the lack of clothes was not the weirdest thing going on right now.

  “We have to get out of here,” Nine said, shaking her head. “This is wrong. All wrong.”

  “That sounds like a good idea,” Petra said, as Maria wrapped her in her coat. Sig washed her face.

  “We can’t leave her behind,” Maria said, pointing at Dead Petra on the floor. “I’ll run and get the truck.” Before Petra could say anything, Maria was out of there like a shot, thundering down the stairs.

  Petra sat on the floor, taking deep breaths. “I don’t know what happened.”

  “You came back,” Nine said simply, wiping gunk from her face with her sleeve. “That is something that even my father could not have accomplished.” She glanced at the plastic pool and the glass case. “This . . . apparatus . . . wasn’t meant for you, however.”

  Petra pressed her hand to her roaring forehead. “That guy is gonna be pissed. So pissed.” What little Petra knew of alchemy, she knew that most operations were very complicated and elaborate. Some could take months or years to set up, at great financial and personal price. She’d blundered into the bartender’s home brew experiment, and this was not going to end well. There was no disguising this mess on the floor, unless they had hours and a dozen bottles of bleach. That was barely half of it—the magic was ruined. He’d know it.

  Overhead, the lights flickered ominously.

  “Shit,” she muttered.

  An engine sounded in the alley, then cut off. Nine helped Petra down the stairs, and she left behind a trail of bloody footprints. Maria had spread a tarp in the backseat of the Explorer, and Petra sat meekly on the blue plastic. Sig clambered in at her feet, getting alchemical slop all over him. Maria and Nine returned to the apartment and came back with a very suspicious package rolled in an area rug. They dumped it in the backseat with Petra. Nine shut the door. It was a mess. There was blood that stank like sulfur and lime everywhere—on the door, in the alley. But there was nothing they could do about any of it.

  The two women piled in. Maria cranked the engine, and they tore through the alley.

  Petra’s heart was in her mouth. “I don’t understand any of this.”

  Maria glanced back through the rearview mirror. “That makes three of us.”

  Petra looked down at the rug-wrapped bundle spread across her lap. She pulled back the corner of the carpet to peer at Dead Petra. It was horrifying, seeing herself this way. Her face was too thin, ravaged by leukemia, but it also seemed rubbery and swollen at the same time. She touched it, and it felt too cold to be real.

  “Fuck,” she said. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

  “That makes three of us,” Maria muttered.

  They took the back roads to the reservation at top speed. When they reached the house, Maria pulled the truck right up to the front porch. No lights were on in the nearby houses, thankfully. Maria unlocked the front door and shoved Petra inside.

  Petra tracked blood into the house. She tried to stick to the areas of hardwood floor and not the rugs, not really sure that made too much of a difference—Maria wouldn’t be thrilled about a bloody mess in any part of her house. Yet another thing to worry about later. For now, she made a beeline for the bathroom. She put Maria’s ruined coat in the sink and hopped over the bath mat into the shower.

  With the water going full blast, globs of black-red material came off. She hoped to hell she wasn’t going to destroy Maria’s pipes, because there was no good way to explain this to a plumber, short of confessing to murder. The crud sluiced off her hair and body in layers, like skins of gel. She scrubbed with her hands under the scalding water, pulling off the scabby material with her hands and scraping at it with her nails.

  She didn’t hear Maria knock. A pair of hands appeared behind the shower curtain with a bottle of vinegar, a bottle of dish soap, and a mesh scrubbing sponge from the kitchen.

  “Are you doing okay?” she asked.

  “Yeah. No. I think so. For the Swamp Thing.”

  “Okay.”

  Maria disappeared, and Petra continued to scrub. She had the feeling that she’d fucked up something very, very badly. But the p
rocess went better with the dish soap, the vinegar, and the nylon scrubber. Bits of skin were revealed, pink from the scrubbing. Her skin looked healthy and normal—no marks. She breathed a sigh of relief at that.

  She poured vinegar over her hair and tried to work it free of the muck. To her startlement, hair just kept coming as she scrubbed. It came loose, falling beyond her shoulders, past her waist as she freed it from the goo. Some was even stuck under her arm.

  Holy shit. What had happened?

  She rinsed again and again until the water ran cold. She stared down at her body. It looked . . . healthy. Muscular, as she might have been in her prime if she’d been hitting a gym daily, which had never happened. She ran her fingers over her arms and legs. Though red from scrubbing, there were no freckles. No scars on her arms from the handprint of an ex-lover, no acid speckles from a basilisk . . . nothing. Her skin was as soft and unmarked as a baby’s.

  She stepped out of the shower and dried off. Her hair was like Medusa’s, hitting the back of her knees, as if it had never been cut. She swore at it and piled it on top of her head with a towel. Some of it still stuck out.

  She stared at herself in the mirror, and what stared back surprised her. Her face was paling since she’d finished scrubbing. There were no sun freckles, no nothing. Just milky paleness. No wrinkles, no laugh lines. She looked as if she’d just hatched from an egg that she’d been living in for decades, as if she’d never seen sunshine, broken a bone, or needed stitches. Even the sewn wound at her side was gone. It was as if she were some . . . avatar or simulation of herself, created in a video game, unblemished and perfect.

  “Shit. Shit. Shit.” All she could seem to do was swear. She wrapped a towel around her body and came out into the living room.

  Nine was scrubbing her bloody footprints from the floor. Maria had leaned the shotgun against the refrigerator, within easy reach, and was halfway to the living room with a bucket.

  Both women looked up. Sig trotted up to her and leaned hard on her leg. She reached down to pet him. Some of his fur was stiff with dried gunk.

  “Well, I’m glad to see it’s you underneath that,” Maria said, visibly relaxed. Then she tensed, as she approached Petra. Like a mother inspecting a child who had returned from a long trip, she looked at her face. The towel slid, and out tumbled a waterfall of hair.