by Tess Lake
There was a broken metal railing surrounding the platform and a pile of rusted metal and other trash sitting near the door. It looked like someone had actually been trying to clean the place up. There was a broom, a bucket and mop and a whole pile of cleaning supplies sitting against the wall. There were even a pair of yellow dishwashing gloves hanging over the side of the bucket. I wondered if that meant someone was intent on restoring the lighthouse.
We wandered over to the edge of the railing and looked out at the silvery ocean. The moon lit up the gentle waves all the way out to Truer Island. The view really was incredible.
“Wow, they really need to make this into a tourist lookout,” Luce said.
“It’s amazing,” Molly agreed.
I looked over at Truer Island and saw a shimmering green glow reaching up from it in strands of light. It looked like Aurora Borealis, which never occurred in this part of the world.
“Do you guys see that glowing light?” I asked, although I already knew the answer.
“Nope,” Molly said.
Magic has many strange features and quirks, one of which is that sometimes if you touch another witch, she can share your experience. I put my hands on Molly and Luce’s shoulders and they both gasped as Truer Island lit up with streams of vivid green light.
“What is that?” Luce breathed.
“Look at the ocean,” Molly said, pointing.
Heading towards Truer Island at high speed was a glowing green ship with full sails and rigging. Even though the bay was perfectly calm, the ship was heaving up and down as though it was riding a rough storm.
“It’s the past,” I said.
As we watched, the ship crashed into Truer Island and smashed into pieces. It was hard to tell from this distance but it looked like a few horses escaped from the wreck and ran off down the beach.
We were so absorbed in this scene that we didn’t see Adams until he stepped out of the shadows and spoke to us.
“The man downstairs lit a fire.”
The three of us screamed in unison and whirled around.
“Adams!” I said.
“What? There’s a fire downstairs.”
Molly rushed to the door and opened it. We heard the roar of a fire and saw the red glow.
She looked down the staircase and then closed the door. She turned to us, her face pale in the moonlight.
“The entire bottom of the lighthouse is on fire. There’s no way out. It’s coming up the stairs.”
I ran to the side of the lighthouse and looked down. The portholes were glowing red from the fire inside. Something metal twanged and then there was a smashing sound.
Luce pushed Molly aside and pulled the door open.
“The stairs broke. The fire is still climbing.”
She slammed the door shut before turning to me in panic.
“What are we going to do? Can we get the fire brigade here before we burn to death?”
She fumbled out her phone and then swore at it. No signal.
I looked down at the ocean. It was cold and flat. There was a fire downstairs. Maybe I could…
I shook my head at myself. There was no way it was safe to try to pull any power out of the fire below. For starters, it wouldn’t put the fire out and honestly I had no idea how Aunt Cass had managed to use a ball of superheated air to lift tens of thousands of gallons of seawater. Even if I knew how to do that, the fact was I couldn’t even take the heat out of a cup of coffee without feeling like I was going crazy unless I did it again.
It was Molly who came up with a solution but it wasn’t one that any of us really wanted. She pulled the broom out of the cleaning products and held it up. It was straw and wood and looked new and fairly sturdy.
“Oh, no,” Luce groaned.
In the distance we heard the howl of the fire engine siren. Someone must have seen the fire and that meant firefighters would be here soon.
Something exploded inside the lighthouse and it shook beneath our feet. We were quickly running out of time. Either we’d burn to death, the lighthouse would collapse with us on top of it or the firefighters would miraculously arrive to save us. Then we’d have to explain what we were doing at the top of the lighthouse, which was currently burning down. We were sure to be blamed for the fire, at the very least.
“Let me have a look at the broom,” I said.
Molly handed it to me. It was sturdy but I wasn’t sure if it would be able to hold the weight of three witches and one cat. But we didn’t have any other choice.
I know witches and broomsticks go together like peppermint and chocolate chip, and it’s true that some witches do use broomsticks to fly around, but it’s mostly showing off. The magic is really tiring and I’m pretty sure that since the invention of cars, very few witches have even bothered to use a broomstick to fly. Growing up we were strictly forbidden from doing it by ourselves. We were only allowed to practice out the back of our property, under direct supervision, never allowed more than a foot off the ground and only under an active concealment spell.
So you can imagine how many times we bothered with it.
I looked over the side and estimated the distance to the ground. We couldn’t go straight down. It was going to be close. We’d have to work together but we were all tired and it wasn’t an easy spell.
“We need to angle it to land on the beach over there,” I said, pointing to a scrap of sand a little down the coast. Below were the cliff face and rocks. Although the water was calm we couldn’t land there without risking breaking our legs.
“Okay, we can do this,” Luce said.
Something exploded in the bottom of the lighthouse again and the entire building shook.
I called Adams over and unceremoniously stuffed him inside my top. He poked his head through my collar and held on to my T-shirt with his claws.
We stood next to the broken railing and the three of us held the broom. Me at the front, Luce in the middle and Molly at the end. With the fire roaring below it was hard to concentrate and for a moment I felt the magic slipping away from us.
Flying a broom is a complicated spell because it’s really multiple spells strung together. The broom needs to pull up but also move forward and needs to respond to the witch on top directing it. At the same time, the witch needs to keep a strong grip and not fly too high. You need to also strengthen the broom itself so it doesn’t break into pieces.
It was probably only a few minutes of struggling to grab the magic but it felt like an eternity. The fire roared beneath us and the approaching fire engine screamed.
Finally we pulled the magic together and I felt that serene connection between the three of us.
We whispered fly and then we stepped off the edge.
Immediately, gravity tried to pull us down to our deaths. My hands hurt and the broom creaked alarmingly, threatening to smash into pieces.
“Go to the beach!” Molly yelled, kicking her feet. We spun sideways and down, speeding up as we went, heading for the rocks, but then the magic caught us again and pushed us sideways.
We sped up, heading towards the thin strip of beach between two piles of rocks. But the broom couldn’t hold the spell.
The wood was getting hot and we could feel it cracking under our hands. We were over the ocean moving at high speed when the straw end burst into flames. Then the wooden handle broke apart and we plunged down into the water.
I came up gasping for air, freezing cold, and yelled out for Molly and Luce.
“We’re here. It’s okay,” Luce yelled back. I turned around and saw Molly wave at me. Adams pulled himself out of my top and up onto my shoulder, trying to get out of the water, but he couldn’t. He crept around behind my neck and held on.
We paddled towards the beach and soon reached the sand, where we promptly collapsed. In the distance, the bottom of the lighthouse was fully ablaze with orange flames shooting out of the portholes. The fire brigade had arrived and they were shouting at each other as they battled to douse the flames.<
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I forced myself to stand up. We were pretty much still in full view of the lighthouse. If anyone bothered to look down they would see three very sorry wet witches and a black cat sitting on the beach. I’m not sure how we would explain what we were doing. Going for a late-night swim for no reason as a lighthouse burned down nearby?
We were all too exhausted to speak so we trudged our way back up the beach and through the forest in silence until we reached our car. Molly unlocked it and it was then that Sheriff Hardy stepped out of the bushes and shone his flashlight in our faces.
“Care to explain yourselves?” he said, looking us up and down. Before we could say anything a car squealed to a stop and Carter Wilkins jumped out and shouted “AHA!” when he saw us.
Sheriff Hardy waved us away.
“You three get out of here, I’ll deal with him, but I need to speak to all of you as soon as possible.”
Sheriff Hardy went to head off Carter.
We dived into the car and took off. As we drove past Carter, he tried to take a photograph but Sheriff Hardy was blocking him.
We didn’t speak the entire way home. This was an grade A disaster and there’s no way our mothers wouldn’t find out about the fire. Carter was sure to write about it and then the entire town would know we were at the lighthouse the night it burned.
Worse than that was the look Sheriff Hardy had given us.
For a moment, I’d seen doubt on his face.
Chapter 13
The competitors gathered for the Gold Mud Run, anticipation high for the prize available at the end.
I tried again.
It’s five days of grueling endurance competition. For one lucky team who can outrun, outclimb and discover hidden clues, there is gold at the end of that muddy rainbow.
I sighed as I looked over the Gold Mud Run competitors milling around and let all of my terrible sentences slip out of my head.
I hadn’t slept well last night and looking at their drawn faces in the morning, neither had Molly and Luce. We could feel the disaster that was coming.
Thankfully, Molly’s curse had worn off, so we’d been able to talk without her complimenting Aunt Cass every five minutes.
We had a serious conversation about simply going interstate and then some very serious conversation about whether it was possible to wipe Carter’s memory at all.
The best excuse we could come up with for a sudden interstate trip was that Molly and Luce wanted to celebrate their few days of high income and they would take me, their lovely cousin, with them.
We quickly abandoned that plan. A sudden move like that would make the moms suspicious, and if we were over on the other coast when they found out what had happened, the repercussions would be severe. We were sure Sheriff Hardy wouldn’t be happy about us leaving either.
As for Carter – we knew how to cast memory charms but there were none that were as precise as we needed. At best we could make him lose the last three weeks entirely.
I’m not saying we’d do that to save ourselves, but we spent a long time debating it.
So this is where we were. I was at work as though there was wasn’t a tsunami of trouble heading in my direction and Molly and Luce had dragged themselves off to Traveler.
We’d talked over the problem of the blurry photo of Holly but none of us could find a way to tell Sheriff Hardy about it that didn’t implicate me in a crime. The best we came up with was mailing it anonymously with a note saying it was found in Franklin’s room. Given my already close involvement in the case, the sheriff would see through that quickly.
There was also the massive problem that someone had tried to kill us! Whoever had emailed me yesterday had then lit a fire at the bottom of the lighthouse, and if there hadn’t been a broom up at the top, we’d probably be dead.
So when I’d much rather be at home hiding under my bedcovers, I found myself instead out on Truer Island in the early morning, waiting for Marika and the mayor to officially open the Gold Mud Run.
There were hundreds of competitors but they were split into two groups. The first group were the hardcore athletes who were going for the big prize – an actual bar of gold (worth about $200,000). They would be running obstacles every day and if they hit their times they’d be given GPS locations to hidden caches of tokens that added to their score.
The second group were the casuals who were doing single days every day from now until the end. They’d be swimming dark tunnels, climbing high fences and slogging through mud for the joy of completing a mud run.
My job today was to watch the opening, take some photos and then head back to the mainland to write about it. My plan had been to come out a few more times during the competition to take photographs and maybe even video of the various obstacles, but honestly I didn’t really want to do it.
The fact that someone had tried to burn down the lighthouse with me at the top of it wasn’t sitting well.
It seemed crazy. I mean, why target me? I had written only two articles on the remains that had been found and that was it. Sure, Holly was talking to me, but no one else outside the family could know that.
On top of all this danger and possible death I hadn’t seen Jack since the night of the festival, when he’d bolted off somewhere.
I enjoyed a nice long wallow in my misery until the mayor and Marika took the stage. The mayor was dressed in an all-gold suit that shimmered like the sun. Marika was dressed in full combat gear with glittery stuff all over it.
“Gold Mud Run competitors, welcome!” the mayor yelled. Everyone cheered in reply. I started to feel my spirits left. It was impossible to be around the mayor and feel sad.
“Welcome to the inaugural Gold Mud Run on Truer Island. This island has long been the home of legend. Pirates buried their treasure here. There are gold and jewels and diamonds spread from one end to the other. Fables and myths, curses and ghosts. For those who are running to find treasure, do not dig too deep, lest you find something unexpected.”
The crowd cheered at this although some of them seemed a little unsure. The whole point of the Gold Mud Run was to compete and dig in certain areas to find tokens.
“I give you Marika, CEO of Gold Mud Run International and our special guest!”
Marika took the microphone, but not before grabbing the mayor and dipping him. She kissed him passionately before standing up straight. The mayor stumbled away, looking a little dazed but fairly happy. At this, the crowd went wild.
“Live life with no regrets!” Marika shouted into the microphone. The crowd echoed back, NO REGRETS!
“There are no limits!”
NO LIMITS!
“Run!”
They must have turned the speakers up because that final word boomed across the competitors. The sound of it hit me in the chest and almost pushed me over.
There was an explosion somewhere to my right as some of the stewards fired starting guns and suddenly the competitors all took off at once, heading for the first obstacle.
I took a couple of photos but soon the staging area was empty. The next group wouldn’t be starting for another hour.
I was wandering around over near the stage, wondering whether I should take more photographs, when someone tapped me on the shoulder. It was Marika.
“Harlow Torrent. My staff advises me that you live in a cursed mansion that is now a bed and breakfast. Is that true?”
“Possibly. The Torrents have lived there for a very long time, so who knows how many ghosts there are?”
“Good answer,” she chuckled.
Then she turned serious.
“Harlow, I met a very odd man by the name of Franklin. His head was bandaged up like a mummy. He asked me about you. He was very insistent.”
I could practically feel my heart constricting. Franklin, who had been attacked and had a photo of a murdered girl in his bag. Could he have been the one who set the fire?
“What did you tell him?”
“Oh, don’t worry, I told him you’re a loca
l reporter working on covering the Gold Mud Run and it was a coincidence that you were there on the day the bones were found.”
An assistant with a clipboard tapped Marika on the shoulder and whispered in her ear.
“Sorry, I have to go. The competitors are about to hit their first ice bath. It’s my favorite!”
She patted me on the arm and walked away to a waiting golf cart, which took off with a squeal of tires.
Okay, I had to stay calm. Sure, the guy had a photo of Holly and now he was out asking about me after I’d broken into his room. That could be a coincidence, right? My intuition wasn’t so much whispering that I should tell Sheriff Hardy as screaming that I should.
In the midst of a small freak-out, I saw a man on the far side of the stage staring at me. At first, I figured he was one of the Gold Mud Run competitors given the way he was dressed.
Some of the competitors took it seriously and dressed in wetsuit-type materials that would help them stay warm as they slogged through icy water and mud. Others came in costume, dressed as Roman gladiators or chickens or pretty much anything you’d find on Halloween. I’d even seen four guys dress as full Victorian gentlemen, complete with pipes, top hats and monocles.
This man was dressed as, well, a pirate. But not a pirate the way we think of them, with a giant shining cutlass, large coat with gold buttons and that devilish sexy smile.
His clothes were filthy and matted and he was skinny to the point of starvation. He had a scraggly beard and missing teeth. He did have a sword that hung from his belt, but it was short and rusted in spots, with a worn handle.
He walked towards me, beckoning furiously for me to follow him.
I took a few steps back, about to scream out, when he vanished.
That was it. I had to talk to my family about what was going on with this power. He definitely wasn’t a ghost but somehow he’d seen me. I also couldn’t ignore the fact that he’d left footprints in the dirt.
