09 - Return Of The Witch

by Dana E. Donovan

“I don’t like this!” I yelled, shouting above the roar of the wind. “Looks like we got ourselves a runaway situation here!”

  The ground rumbled with seismic tremors. Theater seats began popping loose from the floor. The walls moaned and buckled, heaving framed paintings, spitting out drywall nails and ejecting chunks of plasterboard across the room.

  I yelled to Ursula, “We might want to evacuate!” But just as I let go of her hands, it all stopped. The wind died. The harmonic timbre ceased. All was again still and quite.

  I was looking up at the chandelier, wondering why it hadn’t fallen on our heads, when Ursula tapped my arm and directed my attention to the screen.

  “Amber,” I said, my voice trapped in a hush. I wanted to call out to her, warn her of what was about to happen. But I knew it was no use. It had already happened. I was there only to see it, not to stop it.

  Ursula cupped my hand and led me to a group of the theater seats that hadn’t popped loose. I sat. She claimed the seat next to me. And there we watched.

  Amber Burns was a pretty thing. Young, petite, more so than Ursula and me, though nowhere as shapely. She took a seat at her computer behind an old mahogany desk; a desk so large it made her look even smaller. We could see her through a window, the same window her killer looked through while plotting Amber’s demise.

  My heart ached for her. I rolled my hands over and looked at them, almost expecting to see her blood upon them. I knew what would happen next. I had seen it before. The outcome would be no different this time.

  Silver moonlight spilled over the treetops in the Georgetown woods the night Amber died. It gave the killer what she needed to navigate the grounds around the house in stealth.

  The front door was open. The killer knew it. She had seen Russell Burns fly out of the house in a rage. He was swearing. Amber was crying. Neither bothered to shut it.

  Evil made her entrance on a thread of air too thin to wake the sleepy floorboards. Night gave comfort to her shadow. Time gave measure to her pace.

  April toiled through her pain, disconnected and unaware. The shout of light from her computer splashed the walls with dancing shapes and forms that chased the phantom spots within. Anguish clouded her periphery; torment crucified her mind. The tears she cried blurred the lines between the two.

  I reached for Ursula’s hand and squeezed it tightly. I didn’t want to see it, but I had no choice.

  The killer came up behind Amber. Probably cleared her throat or made some other noise to startle Amber back to reality. The poor girl spun about in her chair. The look on her face suggested she expected her husband. Awareness grew in the span of a single breath. Fear paralyzed everything else.

  At that moment, a tremendous shockwave picked Amber, her desk and everything on top of it up and plowed it into the wall. Amber fell limp to the floor, her body bent and twisted. If not for the concussion rendering her unconscious, I believe the pain would have killed her anyway.

  What happened next followed the sequence we witnessed with Terri Cotta’s thought form, except the results were uniquely Amber’s.

  It started with her body disappearing. It went up in a flash, leaving a lazy swirl of vapor and hot ash in its wake. Then, as if stewed in an invisible cauldron, the ingredients began to stir. The mix grew hotter. Accretion began. Molten blobs of magma erupted from the center, shaping and reforming a sculpted likeness of Amber.

  It lasted all of a minute, but its destruction came quickly. The entire semblance exploded in a ball of white-hot flames that seemed to evaporate like a dream into thin air.

  The screen went white again.

  “Unbelievable!” I said, jumping up and pointing at the wall with my jaw unhinged. “Did you see that?”

  “Aye, I saw that. How could I not?”

  “No, I know you saw it. I’m just saying…. Did you SEE it? That was Amber, her essence revivified and then…what? Consumed? How spectacular was that?”

  “That was most spectacular and most sad for Amber.”

  “Yeah, you’re right.” I pressed my hand to my chest to quell my pounding heart. “That poor kid. She never had a chance.”

  “What of the perpetrator? Have thee no reckoning?”

  I turned and looked back at the blank screen, perhaps hoping to find something still lingering there, something I had missed before. I vaguely remembered seeing Amber pushed back against her desk in my dream, yet none of what happened afterward seemed even remotely familiar.

  I looked at Ursula and shook my head. “I got nothing.”

  I gathered the remaining two plastic bags from the lectern and closed my fist around them. “I’m not sure I want to see anymore. I mean I can guess what happened.” I opened my hand and selected the baggie containing the white ash. “This is what’s left of Wendy Skye. I’m sure if we set her thought form free we’ll see how she died, see her essence revivified and then poof. We’ll see her scattered to the wind.”

  “`Tis what the prophecy declares.”

  “So it is.”

  “If we set her thought form free, we may yet find proof thou art not a killer.”

  “Really? You’re willing to try it again?”

  “By thine own words, we owe it to them.”

  “You’re right. To hell with it if we bring the house down. Carlos can buy another.”

  I tore open the plastic bag and emptied it onto the lectern. I then drew my best version of a puffy white cloud in the ash and included a sun with shooting rays up in the corner.

  Ursula liked that and even added her own touch, drawing two little squiggly lines above the cloud to represent birds in flight.

  “Nice,” I said. “Seagulls?”

  She frowned. “Doves.”

  I looked again. “Oh, sure. I see it now.”

  We held hands over the lectern. “You ready?”

  “Aye.”

  “Okay. Let’s do this.”

  Chapter 17

  We started humming. Nothing happened, so we fell into a second refrain. Still, nothing. By the fourth chorus, it became apparent that something was wrong.

  I broke our handhold. “It’s not working.”

  “My eyes were closed,” said Ursula. “I did not peek but once.”

  “That’s not it. It’s something else.” I looked down at the ash and ran my finger through it again. “This ash feels different from the others. It’s grittier.” I scooped some up and worked it through my fingers. “You know….” I brought it to my nose to smell it. “I think this is drywall.”

  “Wendy turned into drywall?”

  “No, Wendy didn’t turn into drywall. She didn’t turn into anything. I don’t think she’s dead.”

  “But did we not see her clothes, how they lay on her bedroom floor?”

  “Yes, but you remember I questioned Melody about the way they were laid out?”

  “Aye, perfect, methinks.”

  “Yeah, too perfect.”

  I gathered the dust into a pile using the heel of my palm and plowed what I could back into the bag. The rest I simply brushed onto the floor.

  “You know, I’m wondering if Wendy Skye isn’t the mysterious driver of the Escalade. We may want to go back and revisit Miss squeaky-clean Melody and question her. Maybe she’ll tell us what kind of car Wendy drives.”

  “Shall we leave forthwith?”

  “No. We have one more ash sample. Let’s see what, if anything, it tells us.”

  I opened the last baggie containing what I presumed was the ash remains of April Raines. The texture looked and felt consistent with the first two samples we used. It appeared deep blue in the bag, but it sprinkled out onto the lectern as turquoise, closer to the color of warm Caribbean waters. I looked at Ursula and nodded.

  “This is the real thing.”

  “`Tis pretty, for sure.”

  “Yeah, too bad what happened to April wasn’t so pretty.”

  We assumed positions and began the process of conjuring up April’s thought form. From the very moment
we joined hands, I could feel the energy in the room ignite. The lights began to flicker. The hairs on my arms stood on end. We hadn’t even closed our eyes when the wind picked up and began a cold spiral around our ankles.

  I looked at Ursula and gave her a nod. We each took a deep breath and let it out slowly, harmonizing a note in a natural E.

  Within seconds, the layers of sound began stacking upon one other, freight-training around the room, building in tone and vibration. Once again, the walls heaved. The crystals on the chandelier chattered. Bits of ceiling rained down on our heads.

  The room shook so intensely, I almost abandoned the effort outright. Then the first shapes took form up on the screen.

  “Release,” I said, breaking hold of Ursula’s hands. Suddenly, all the wild energy in the room seemed to slingshot to those shapes. A crisp blue light snapped overhead, blinding us momentarily, and then all fell quiet once more.

  “Look.” I directed Ursula to turn around.

  April Raines was just stepping out of the shower. She grabbed a towel and patted her face dry before wrapping it around her body. I remembered what happened next from my dream. Was it a dream? It seemed more real than the images before me.

  “She is pretty,” Ursula whispered.

  “Yes, she is,” I said, nodding.

  “`Tis a shame her behind is wide like a cow’s behind.”

  “Ursula!”

  “Oh, sister, do not worry, I am sure she cannot hear me.”

  I trained my eyes forward and tried not to laugh.

  April walked over to the vanity and cleared the steam off the mirror with her hand. Then she saw it. Ursula and I moved in closer. We saw it, too. Something in the reflection passed by the door.

  I hurried to take my phone out of my pocket and fumbled to switch on the video, silently cursing myself for not thinking of it earlier.

  April made another swipe across the mirror with her hand, realizing for sure she hadn’t imagined it. She turned abruptly to confront the intruder, her silent scream sending chills up and down my spine. She cinched the knot in the towel and pressed her butt against the vanity.

  Ursula and I could see it now, its reflection in the mirror devouring what little light spilled in through the doorway. It appeared to grow as it approached; its silhouette unrecognizable at first, just a blob of insidious black fog-churning wild as if trapped in a bottle.

  Then something happened. The silhouette took shape and a defined figure emerged, one we both recognized immediately.

  “Blessed be!” Ursula cried. “`Tis thee thy image in yon mirror!”

  I said nothing in response. What could I say? I was just as shocked, just as dumbfounded as Ursula was. I watched, aghast and appalled as the intruder struck April in the face with a bowling trophy. She fell back, caught her balance on the edge of the vanity and tried regaining her footing.

  Then came the shockwave, followed by the vapor resonance. The essence revivification saw April’s ash reconstitute into a liquid vortex that burst in a flash of spontaneous disintegration.

  I remember standing there after the thought form had faded, my mouth open, my mind reeling. Ursula was looking at me, her eyes wide but blinking. I wanted to explain myself to her, to let her know I was not that monster we saw on the screen, but how could I deny it? We both saw what we saw.

  I backed up and sat down in one of the theater seats. Ursula sat next to me. She set her hand on my knee and tapped it gently.

  “Fear thee none, Sister. I know thy heart is good, thy spirit true. I judge thee not, lest I am wrong in what I see.”

  “But seeing is believing, Ursula. You can’t deny what we both saw. And that I have memories of seeing it all before? How else can you explain it?”

  “I cannot, but to say that simple truths lay blind to thee when there is more to know than is to see.”

  “Ursula, what part of that thought form didn’t you see? Would you like to look at it again?”

  I held my phone up for her to watch while I hit the play button on the video I had just taken.

  “Look closely. That is me in the mirror, isn’t it?”

  “It does so appear.”

  “The only other person I know that looks just like me is you, Ursula, and I don’t believe you killed that woman. Do you?”

  “I do not think so,” she answered, and sighed as she viewed the video.

  “Of course not. So the only question remaining now is what to do about it? Should I show the video to Carlos and Dominic and turn myself in? It seems only right. After all, you did say my spirit was true.”

  “That it is.”

  “I mean, it’s indisputable proof.”

  She sat back in her chair and crossed her arms to her chest. “Aye, `tis thee, but for the messy hair one might not know it.”

  I hit the replay button and watched it again. “Oh, yeah, I see what you mean. I can tell you one thing’s for sure. I must have been sleepwalking, because I’d never go out of the house with hair like that.”

  She laughed. “And look at thee, so serious, Grrrrr.”

  “Well, what do you want, I’m killing people.”

  We both laughed at that one, until we realized how insensitive that seemed.

  “I don’t understand it,” I said. “Before yesterday, I didn’t even know about the Guardians of Four. How could I go to their homes and kill them?”

  “Mayhap magick lead thee to them.”

  “But why? I had nothing against those women. As far as I know, they never did anything to me.”

  “`Tis a shame we cannot ask them.”

  “I know. If only we could…. Hey, wait a minute. Maybe we can.”

  “How so when all are dead?”

  “Maybe not all of them.” I reached into my pocket and pulled out the little baggie containing the white chalk. “This isn’t Wendy Skye’s ash, however, if she’s not dead, it may help lead us to her.”

  “If thou doth wish to find her?”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “I know no reason better than to let a dog sleep.”

  “You mean let a sleeping dog lie?”

  “Aye.”

  “I can’t do that. If she’s out there, I have to find her. She may be the key to this whole thing.”

  “To Newburyport then?”

  “Not yet.” I held the little baggie up. “Like I said, this might be of some help to us.”

  “Ah, we scry.”

  “Exactly, but first we need to find a map, hopefully a detailed one of the entire eastern end of the state. Come on. Carlos has an office upstairs.”

  To most people, Carlos appears to be a man of casual means. His manner of dress is often one’s first clue that he doesn’t put much emphasis on presentation. Yet when you look closer at the things he owns, his cars, his house and such, you see that he really does like everything in its proper place. We found this especially true of his home office.

  Unlike his desk at work, which usually looks as if a small tornado swept across it, we found the one in his home to be immaculate. He kept his padded blotter free of ink spots, scribbles notes and coffee stains, and aligned it perfectly with the leading edge of the desk. His pencil tin contained four pencils and four pens, all exactly the same size.

  His bookshelf, which surprised me because I didn’t even know he liked to read, contained all the great classics from Carroll, Doyle, Dickens and Twain to Verne, Homer, Crane and Melville. It just goes to show, you never really know a guy.

  We found what we were looking for in a section of the bookcase dedicated entirely to charts, maps and atlases, including cosmic reference guides to the solar system and beyond.

  “Okay, here we go,” I said, selecting a triple-A map of Eastern Massachusetts showing road details down to the smallest street corner. I carried it across the room and splayed it out over the desk. “Now then….” I drew a circle on the map with a pencil from the tin. “Assuming Wendy’s still in the area, then she’s likely in this vicinity.”

>   “In Essex County?”

  “Right, her old stomping ground. Probably folks here she knows, maybe helping her hide.”

  Ursula put her hand out. “May I?”

  “You want to do the scrying?”

  “I should like to try.”

  “You’ve done this before, right?”

  “Only one and one hundred times.”

  “All right then.” I handed her the baggie containing the chalk. “Knock yourself out.”

  “Oh, worry not, Sister. I shall remain awake at all times.”

  “No, Ursula. See when I say….” I stopped to look into her innocent eyes, so big and beautiful, blinking back at me with such naiveté. Sometimes there’s just no use in explaining. “You know, that’s good, Urs. I won’t worry about it then.”

  I stood back to give her room.

  When Ursula told me she had scried a hundred and one times before, I naturally assumed she hadn’t scried at all. But then, like Carlos, some things about Ursula never cease to amaze me either.

  She opened the baggie and poured its entire contents into the palm of her hand. Then, positioning her hand over the map, she closed her fist and recited these words.

  “By speed of sound and weight of light, through morning mist and dark of night, guide thee quick thy spirit’s flight through time and space and grant us sight.”

  She turned her hand over and opened her fist. The chalk granules spilled out, splashing in a fan pattern that hovered in mid-air between her hand and the map. As it floated there, she began poking at the pieces, as if counting and repositioning them in a matrix hierarchy. Once satisfied, she waved her hand over the entire array and the spread of particulates dropped onto the map.

  “There,” she said, pointing to a rural stretch of road just outside Newburyport. “That is where we will find Wendy Skye.”

  I looked at the map. The chalk had formed a nearly perfect arrow pointing to an undeveloped spot within a wildlife management area sandwiched between Route-1 and I-95.

  “There? Are you sure?”

  “Aye.”

  “Ursula, that’s amazing. You’re very good at this, you know?”

  “I should think.”