The Lantern's Ember

by Colleen Houck

  “You should feel honored,” the doctor mocked. “Your death will be the first of many.”

  “But I thought you weren’t targeting Otherworlders!” Ember cried.

  The doctor snorted. “He’s no Otherworlder. He’s a human, one whose twisted and unnaturally prolonged existence came at the cost of many Otherworlder lives. Why do you think he wanted a ban on humans coming in? He sees himself as a being above all the rest. The witches saw him for what he was, but there was no stopping him.” Farragut laughed. “Humans who wander into the Otherworld are fair game, Melichor, don’t you remember? I think it’s about time your own law worked against you.”

  Ember watched in horror as the man’s soul was cleaved from his body and materialized in front of her. Only then did the body relax. It stood immobile and lifeless, the eyes still open.

  Rune stepped closer to the high witch, offering a supporting arm. Finally! he thought. It’s done. The Lord of the Otherworld is gone.

  Dr. Farragut pulled a knife from his boot, walked up to the body, and spat at its feet while the ghost looked on. “I was a slave to you for years. Bound by the agreement we made. Only when you created the doomsday device was I able to figure out a way to free myself from our deal.”

  “I don’t understand,” Ember said. “What deal? How could a mere human hold power over you when none of us could stop you?”

  “You asked me before what I am.” He turned to Ember and smiled. “To answer succinctly, I am the boogeyman, the one and only of my kind, and this man—well, what used to be a man—tricked me. Now I’ll have my revenge.” With that, Dr. Farragut stabbed the body of the Lord of the Otherworld through the heart. “Goodbye, Melichor,” he said. “And good riddance.”

  The body collapsed onto the sand, the open eyes unblinking as blood streamed from the wound. The ghost floating in the air screamed and tore at his hair while the doctor laughed until tears ran down his face.

  “The…the boogeyman?” Rune said. “You…you were my creator?” How had Rune not known this? Had he been an experiment in the doctor’s labs, like his poor invisible servant? Rune swallowed. Manipulating the others was possible, but fighting the boogeyman himself? The man could rip his soul away without a thought. He fingered his earring nervously.

  “Yes,” the doctor answered distractedly as he leaned down and pulled out the knife. “That was immensely satisfying.” He wiped away a tear. Turning to the ghost, he added, “The irony is, I had no quarrels with the human race. But living as your slave all these years has turned my pleasantly wicked heart blackly vengeful. Now I’m going to destroy all humanity, and you can blame yourself, Melichor. Not that you’ll cry over the humans. I know you care not a whit for them.”

  “You’ve got your revenge now,” Ember said. “You can stop this. You can let everyone else go.”

  “Stop this?” The boogeyman turned to her and she drew back, seeing the spark of wild power in his eyes. “There’s no stopping this. Not now. Long ago Melichor could have stopped it. He had many chances to do so, in fact. He made a deal with the devil, you see, and I was sent to collect his soul. Most men know there’s no escape and they come quietly. Not Melichor.

  “He agreed to come with me, but expressed his sorrow at leaving a widowed woman who cleaned his home without recompense. I’ve always had a soft heart when it comes to women—widows in particular—so I transformed myself into a coin so he could pay her. Once she bought her bread, I’d come back for him and we could be on our way.

  “When I changed form, he picked me up and put me into a purse lined with a powder of ground onyx. He kept me prisoner for many years. Then, when he began to age, he thought to use me to preserve his life.”

  “He made you bring him to the Otherworld?” Ember asked.

  “That he did. Not only did I have to make him a ruler, but I had to tell him the secret to maintaining longevity, which was, unfortunately, to bind himself to a witch. I was freed, but the bargain prevented me from doing him harm. The only loophole was that if he did something to injure himself, such as an accidental stabbing or drinking himself to death, then I was under no obligation to save him.”

  Rune mentally filed away the fact that onyx was the boogeyman’s weakness.

  “So how did the device make it possible for you to kill him?” Ember asked.

  “He created it,” the doctor answered. “Once I told him there was a way to split the mortal world from the Otherworld, he became obsessed with the idea. I designed the construct, and Graydon stole the plans from me and delivered them to the Lord of the Otherworld. Because he fashioned the device, I was able to use it against him. I just had to wait for an opportunity to steal it. That’s right,” he said loudly to the ghost. “It’s your own fault, Melichor. I never would have been able to separate your despicable self from your body or save my lovely witch if you hadn’t gotten greedy. Now that the two of you are no longer connected, I can heal her and we’ll be together at last.”

  “W-wait a minute,” Ember sputtered. “This…this is the witch you’re going to rule the mortal world with? I assumed you were talking about me.”

  “Why would I be talking about you?” Dr. Farragut, the boogeyman, spun.

  “Well, everyone else was trying to kidnap me…,” Ember explained.

  He stiffened, raising his chin proudly. “She didn’t always look like this, you know,” he said. He caressed the woman’s cheek. “Once, many years ago, her husband left her alone in a colony while he sailed back to England. He died at sea, unbeknownst to her, and she pleaded with me to tell her whether he was alive. I broke the news to her and held her while she wept. Her unbound hair was lush and thick, like golden honey, her skin firm and radiant. And her power…Her witchlight drew me to her, held me captive.” The witch placed her hand on top of the doctor’s and squeezed. He went on, gazing at her with obvious affection.

  “Soon I’d become quite besotted with the young witch widow. Then I discovered that Melichor was looking for a fresh witch. And of all the witches in the world, he chose to target mine. I wasn’t about to let him have her.” The two smiled at each other, and Ember was surprised to see love in the witch’s eyes.

  “I did what I could to hide her,” he said. “She escaped his attention for a while, thanks to my efforts and to your kindhearted yet very unlucky lantern. But Melichor was desperate. Not just any witch would do. He needed a powerful one.

  “He sent Otherworlders in to raid her colony, and then he used terrible transformation spells to draw her out, draining his existing wife dry to do so. I couldn’t intervene because of my deal with Melichor. When he finally found her and took her away, I chose to condescend, taking on this form and flesh, and followed her to the Otherworld. I had to give up a piece of myself, the most important piece, a secret one, in order to make it so. I—one of the greatest beings in either realm—was suddenly a nearly mortal, humble servant.

  “Since then we’ve shared only stolen moments together. For decades, I’ve plotted and planned and dreamed of a way to steal her away from the true man you should call a monster. I watched him siphon away her energy drop by drop, abusing her until she could barely stand.” His eyes shone with tears.

  “You can’t blame yourself, Monroe,” the high witch said as she trembled.

  Dr. Farragut took the high witch’s hands in his. “I left her, though it nearly killed me to do so. To escape the Lord of the Otherworld’s reach, I fled across the sea, only to find myself surrounded by ghosts wanting to destroy me. They were the accumulation of souls I’d collected over thousands of years, and my presence gave them the power they needed to coalesce. I was imprisoned in the form I’d assumed and couldn’t fight them off. They’d overturned my boat, nearly drowning me, when Nestor came to my aid.

  “Nestor deposited me on an island that just happened to have a few wild cats, but I was trapped there by the storm. Over time, Nestor brought me visitors and dragged in ships and technology
that had been lost at sea. I tinkered and worked on the broken machines for years, always thinking of my witch and wondering how she fared.”

  Ember glanced at the ghost of Melichor. It was slowly drifting toward the cave. She thought of the ghost storm and how all the poor souls had just wanted to be freed. “Wait,” she said to the departing ghost. “I can help you move on.”

  “Leave him!” Dr. Farragut cried, grabbing her arm. “He must be made to suffer for what he’s done!”

  “You forget, good Doctor, that the hundreds of ghosts who were floating above your island were there because you put them there. You are no more innocent than he.”

  “You misunderstand, little witch. I am a collector. It wasn’t I who made dangerous bargains. My duty was merely to deal out the punishment those souls earned on their own.”

  “Be that as it may, I prefer to deal in mercy.” Ember twisted out of his grasp and ran to the floating ghost, who paused, waiting for her.

  Drawing from the power inside, Ember felt her limbs hum. She placed her hand on the ghost’s shoulder, and his sad expression became one of contentment. He nodded to her and dissolved before her eyes. When she turned back, everyone was staring at her. The black cat jumped into her arms and meowed, nuzzling her.

  “So it’s true,” the doctor said. “You’ve a strange sort of power. Witches don’t have the ability to help ghosts pass. All this time I thought you had merely dissipated the ghost storm.”

  The high witch put her hand on the doctor’s shoulder. “Monroe,” she said. “The reason she can do that is because—”

  Before she could finish, there was movement at the entrance to the cave, and Ember cried out in surprise. Graydon, Dev, and Finney zipped in on her brooms and mops, circled overhead, and landed next to Ember. A cloud of fog drifted over to the device, revealing the location of the invisible form of Yegor next to it.

  “Thanks, Jack,” Graydon said, dropping his broom. “I think I can take it from here.” The werewolf’s teeth and face elongated and his body erupted in fur as he sprang toward the shadowy figure of a man. Snarling, he bit Yegor’s arm. Blood sprayed on the invisible man’s body, and sand clung to the drops, making him partially visible. Finney shot a dozen revealing spells at the man while Graydon continued to tussle with him.

  Ember watched Jack materialize and thought him such a lovely sight, she’d happily live beneath his bridge just to look at him every day and remember how close she’d come to losing him.

  Jack stumbled at the sight of the Lord of the Otherworld’s dead body, but he quickly recovered and lunged for the doctor. Rune and Dev followed suit, but the doctor clapped his hands and all the men, as well as Jack’s pumpkin, were thrown back. Dev was the first to recover, but when he hurtled his body forward at preternatural speed, his skin steamed and grew red. He screamed and fell to his knees, clutching his head.

  Finney made his way over to the device and began furiously winding levers and shifting nobs. The doctor shouted, “No!” and ran after him, pushing Finney away and quickly adjusting a switch before slamming down a lever.

  “What happened?” Jack asked Ember, followed quickly by, “Are you injured?”

  “No, I’m fine. But, Jack. The doctor…he’s the boogeyman!”

  “What?” Jack glanced at Rune, who confirmed it. He took a deep breath. “Then we’ve got to tread carefully.”

  A counter on the device began moving, and the machine hummed, building power. A satisfied doctor glanced at his witch as the cats nuzzled her. “It can’t be stopped now,” he said. “Five minutes and we’ll have our peace, my dear.”

  “But don’t they have to detonate together?” Finney asked, scrambling to his feet.

  “Well, yes,” Farragut answered. “This one is the trigger, and the other one blocks the signal that would affect Otherworlders.”

  “But Frank destroyed the other one,” Finney declared.

  The doctor screwed up his face in frustration but then relaxed. “Ah, well, then if you lot have destroyed the other device, I suppose everyone in the Otherworld will split from their souls too. Frank, you say? How did you manage to free him from my control?”

  “Hardly seems the point at the moment, Doctor,” Graydon said, shifting from werewolf to man, blood on his face, “if we’re all about to die.”

  Ember scanned the sand and found a strange lump that she was sure was Yegor. The lump rose and fell, so she presumed the injured man was still alive.

  “I figured out how to reboot Frank’s heart!” Finney admitted.

  “Clever. I truly like you, young man. But, Captain, you mean ‘you.’ You’re all about to die. I can tie my witch to me just as a lantern is tied to his ember, and we can depart this realm—we just need your power, Ember. Come now, young witch; it’s time. The device is counting down as we speak.”

  Both Jack and Rune stepped between them. “You’ll have to go through us to get to her,” Jack said boldly.

  “If that is your wish,” the doctor said with a smile. He waved his hand, and both lanterns were tossed aside.

  “Ember!” Graydon pulled something from his broom: her other gun. He tossed it to her. She lifted the weapon.

  The doctor laughed. “It didn’t work on me before, and it won’t work on me now.”

  “I’m not aiming at you,” Ember said, and fired.

  This time it was the spell of immobility. The doctor gasped as his fragile witch fell in his arms. She appeared dead immediately. “You shouldn’t have done that,” he threatened, his face turning dark.

  Gently, the doctor laid his witch down and pounded his fist in the sand. Cats swirled around her, purring and nuzzling. It seemed they were nullifying the spell.

  Interesting! Ember thought.

  The doctor didn’t seem to notice. When he stood, his eyes were blazing, and the air hummed. The clouds overhead scuttled away, as if they were the only ones with the sense to vacate the area. The sun sank, as if it too wanted to hide its face, and the ground vibrated with Farragut’s footsteps as he approached Ember, hands raised.

  She tried to fight using her power, throwing it at him in great bursts that wrenched her stomach, but they bounced off him like filmy bubbles and disintegrated. Graydon attacked too, but he hit some sort of invisible barrier that knocked him to the ground, unconscious. Clearly the doctor wasn’t as feeble and mortal as he looked.

  While Finney kept frantically trying to shut down the device, Jack and his pumpkin, and Rune and his firefly, tried to use their light to blast the doctor, but he walked through their lantern light as if it was nothing to him, even though it destroyed all the vegetation around him. When Jack’s pumpkin scowled and attacked the boogeyman on its own, it was thrust back. It rolled through the sand and spat out the offensive granules. Ember tried to escape, but the doctor lifted his hand and she was drawn back to him against her will.

  “Enough fighting,” Dr. Farragut said, pinning all the men to the ground with a thought. “I admire your spirit, Ember, but it’s time to give in. You can’t possibly win.” He pulled out a stopwatch and checked the time. “There’s less than a minute remaining, and you’ll all be dead soon anyway. I’m sure you want your life to mean something. Isn’t that right, young witch?”

  Ember couldn’t have answered even if she’d wanted to. Her body was stiff, bending to the doctor’s will. He dragged her over to his witch, who was now stirring, thanks to the help of her cats. “M-Monroe?” she said.

  “Shhh, dear one. The end is near. Soon we’ll be together and nothing will ever keep us apart again.”

  Finney gave up. “The only way to stop the process is to blow up the device before the catalyst ignites the witch power and causes a chain reaction!”

  Ignoring Finney, the doctor threw Ember down to the sand next to the high witch. On her other side, Jack struggled to move but was barely able to lift his arm.

  The doctor placed one hand on Ember’s fore
head and his other on the frail witch. “No, Monroe,” the high witch said, trying to shrug off his hand.

  “It will be over soon,” he crooned. “I promise. Just remain still.” Neither Ember nor the high witch could move with Farragut controlling them.

  Jack strained and managed to stretch out his fingers to touch Ember’s. She looked at him with frightened eyes. Jack’s pumpkin zoomed over them and cast its light on her and then on Jack.

  “I…I love you, Ember,” Jack said; then his eyes flicked up to his pumpkin. The light inside it sparked and cracked, turning red, then white, then ice blue. Finney was thrown back from the device by a thrust of magic and hit the sand hard. Suddenly, the pumpkin raced headlong toward the machine. It was still counting down, the little gears moving to five, four, three….Then the pumpkin hit it and the light inside it erupted quickly.

  Light encompassed the mechanism, circling it, growing brighter and brighter.

  Dr. Farragut looked up. “No!” he cried as he tried to stop the pumpkin, but it was too late. The machine exploded with enough force to lift everyone off the ground and slam them back down.

  Ember looked at Jack and screamed. His body was lifeless, his glassy eyes staring at her and his moonlight hair falling dully over his cheek. With shaking fingers, she touched his full lips, feeling for breath. There was none.

  Ember began weeping uncontrollably. She felt she’d had her future torn from her, and all her fight left her body. She barely even noticed the feeble hand that clutched her arm. Through her tears, she saw the kind face of the high witch. “Don’t despair,” she said weakly.

  “He saved the world,” Ember said. “Both worlds.”

  “Jack was very brave,” the high witch said. “I couldn’t have chosen a better man for my daughter.”

  Both Ember and the doctor froze.

  “D-daughter?” Ember said, swallowing.

  “Daughter?” the doctor echoed, his face slackened.