“Let’s just say that I have help. Now that we’re here.”
I gave him a nervous glance, but he didn’t seem to notice. In fact, he barely seemed phased by everything that was happening. Instead, he seemed lost in thought.
“So is this the actual underworld?” I asked, “Like from mythology?”
Rory shrugged, but his expression was tense. “The Hollow Hill equivalent, at least. More than that, it's Gwydion's underworld. Or at least, it should be. I've never done this before, but I imagine that we'll be retracing his exact footsteps.”
“Oh.” His words didn't particularly reassure me. “So how do the trials work? We didn't really have a chance to discuss that when your coven was attacking us. What should I expect?”
“Right,” He said, sighing. “Well, it depends on the witch. But in my experience, the trials consist of reliving your worst memories. Your biggest mistakes. The things that have caused you the most pain.”
I swallowed hard. “And this place just somehow knows that?”
“No,” Rory said, giving me a dark look. “The demons do.”
“Wait — demons? Like forked tails, red skin, pitchforks?”
“Well, they don't look like that, obviously. They can look like anything they want. Each time a witch undergoes the ritual of claiming, a demon enters the trial. Or perhaps they create it. No one is quite sure how that part actually works. They read the soul of the witch and conjure their weakest aspects, generally causing their worst memories to come to life around them. They’re the ones who test the witch.”
An icy chill slithered up my spine and I felt a hard knot of dread form in the pit of my stomach. “And what happens then?”
“The witch needs to battle their way out of the memory. Usually there’s something that is holding the memory together. The symbolic essence of the memory. It has to be destroyed.”
“Easy enough.”
“Well,” Rory said, ignoring the sarcasm in my voice, “They need to be able to overcome the paralysis evoked by the memory and escape it.”
“And if they don't?”
“They become trapped in the memory.”
“They're trapped forever?”
Rory gave me a wan, bitter smile, “I'm sure it's probably not forever. You'd find your way out eventually, but by then it would be way too late.”
“So how do you find your way out? How on earth would anyone be able to escape something like that?”
“Well, that's part of why you need a guide, someone to remind you of what's real and what's not. But even with someone else with you, there's no guarantee of anything. At the end of the day, it's something each witch must do for themselves.”
“So that's what happened to Gwydion,” I said, feeling a sudden and unexpected wave of anger at Rory. How could he have allowed this to happen? “You know, right? Which memory he became trapped in?”
Rory was quiet for a long moment. Finally, he said, “Yes, Kendra. I know exactly which memory he's trapped in. And I have a feeling that, once we find him, you're the only one who has any chance of getting through to him long enough to help him break free.”
We walked in silence for what seemed like forever.
I was trying to hold onto my anger, because something told me that I would need it. Every time I learned something new about the mess that Gwydion had gotten himself into, I felt a new layer of dread and despair settling over me. Anger was the only thing that kept those emotions at bay. It was the only thing that stopped me from thinking the most paralyzing thing of all: what if I'm not enough?
As we walked, I became gradually used to the chill that was seeping into my bones, though something about this place set my teeth on edge. The experience was surreal, but more than that, it felt wrong. The whole place felt like the under-exposed negative of a film strip, something that nobody was ever meant to see. It was like the edges of reality had warped and peeled back, leaving the abyss exposed and staring hungrily down at us.
A small part of me was urging me to run as far and as fast as I could to get away from this place. Except, of course, there was nowhere to run to. It was all around us, inescapable.
Much faster than I would have expected, we descended the mountain. Almost abruptly, the terrain flattened out. The mountain on our right gave way to a flat expanse of fog and darkness. The steep drop on our left also gave way to a seemingly endless mess of darkness and fog. I was noticing a theme about the underworld.
Hollow Hill was ahead of us. Or at least, the underworld nightmare equivalent of Hollow Hill. The lights of the town were ghostly and white. The change in scenery didn't reassure me. In fact, the sense of being watched began to intensify. I fought the urge to look behind me every few seconds. And within moments, I thought I understood why: in the distance, I could see humanoid shapes moving on the road. They didn't seem to be moving towards us, but they chilled me nonetheless.
I was about to comment on them when something strange appeared out of the darkness on our right, appearing out of the darkness like the bow of a ghostly ship sliding through a fog bank. I felt a lurch of dread in the pit of my stomach and I froze in place.
Slowly, I turned to look at it.
It had materialized perhaps ten feet from the path. The darkness and fog had been replaced by something that looked like a scene from an old black and white movie. Except that, despite the fact that the scene was entirely devoid of color, it seemed vivid and immediate somehow. As though it were really there. For a moment, it was blurry – a panorama of gray-toned movement and swirling. Then it suddenly solidified and came into focus, with color seeming to bleed into it all at once.
“Whatever you see or hear, don't move from the path,” Rory said. There was a grim note in his voice, as though he was steeling himself against something.
I didn't look at him. I couldn't take my eyes off of the phantasmal scene that had manifested before me.
It was recognizably Hollow Hill, but different at the same time. It was the same Main Street I was familiar with, which ran parallel to the docks, only one block to the south. In the Hollow Hill I had grown up with, it was a part of what was now called “old town”, mainly a tourist trap filled with boutique hotels, a multi-story flea market that spanned an entire three blocks, antique stores, expensive eateries and cafes, and of course, the local ghost tour. Except this version of main street appeared smaller somehow. It wasn't paved and the walkways in front of the buildings were made of wood. The buildings were mostly the same, but there were fewer of them. I could see the silvered light of a spectral moon glinting on the black waters of the bay like a skeletal finger, clearly visible between the wooden structures.
Abruptly, there were hundreds of people were in the t-shaped crossroads in the center of the down, standing in the middle of the street. They were gathered around something that my eyes could see clearly, but that my mind had trouble processing: a makeshift gallows.
There were seven people hanging from it, both men and women. Their necks were twisted and bent at an unnatural angle.
I stared at them, feeling horror rising within me. Though the bodies were motionless and hung limply from the nooses around their necks, and though their faces were blank masks of agony, they didn't seem quite dead.
Their eyes seemed to be locked on me.
I was certain they could see me.
“What is this?” I whispered.
“It's the history of our town,” Rory said and, though I didn’t look at him, I could hear a note of horror in his voice that mirroring my own.
I wanted to turn away from it, but I felt rooted to the spot.
The dead were staring at me and I couldn't look away from them.
And then the ground cracked apart in the scene before us.
It wasn't an earthquake, it was something else. It was as though someone had ripped a gash in the earth. It wasn't wide, perhaps three or four inches at the thickest point. It hardly made a noise. The townsfolk, al
most as one, took a step back from it.
There was absolute silence for a long moment. And then someone screamed.
A thick cloud of darkness escaped from the depths. It looked like it had the consistency of thick smoke, but it was pure black, shiny and tar-like. It spanned the entire length of the crack, maybe three or four blocks long. There was a wrongness about it and I knew immediately that, whatever it was, it wasn't natural. It didn't disperse as it escaped the ground. It grew taller and taller, elongating and gathering itself together, until it loomed perhaps a hundred feet over the town square.
It's alive, I thought, not believing my eyes.
To their credit, the people tried to run.
The darkness crashed down on the town square. In the distance, I could hear horrified shrieking as the darkness surrounded the villagers. Though the blackness obscured my vision, I knew by the panicked and shrill screams from both the men and the women, that they were dying. Somewhere in the distance, I could hear a child wailing in fear. It seemed to come from all around us.
Barely aware of what I was doing, I moved towards the scene. Though I knew it was hopeless, I had to help them somehow. I had to stop this.
Rory grabbed my arm.
I looked at him blankly, barely aware of what I was doing.
He shook his head, but his eyes were shining and his expression was as horrified as I knew my own must have been.
“Don't,” He said thickly. He swallowed and I could hear the sympathy in his next words, “there's nothing you can do for them.”
I looked back to the scene. I didn't want to, but it had a magnetic hold on me. I couldn't not see it. Several excruciating moments passed. Then, as quickly as it had come, the darkness moved away, coiling to the far end of the street. It moved in a vaguely serpentine way that reminded me the Discovery Channel snakes special I had watched with Gwydion when we were kids. It paused for a moment and seemed to turn back, as though inspecting its handiwork.
Everyone in the town square was dead, their bodies strewn on the ground. Their eyes were vacant and staring. Down to the last, their faces were twisted in horror. There wasn't a mark on them, but I knew in my bones that none of them had died easily. Many of them had attempted to get to the shelter of the nearby buildings and they were piled on top of each other in doorways like haphazardly stacked fire wood. I could see something like streaks of blood on the door closest to us, near the doorknob. Someone had torn their fingernails off in their efforts to get away.
As abruptly as it had appeared, the scene vanished, replaced by that same endless expanse of fog and black nothingness.
“What—” I broke off, realizing that my voice was dangerously close to a scream. I felt like I was going to be sick and I fought the urge to double over. I swallowed bile that burned in the back of my throat. I took ragged gasping breaths and felt like I was on the verge of tears. When I could finally speak again, I managed to choke out, “What was that?”
Rory looked grim, “That was the 'gas leak' that killed most of the original town.”
I stared at him. “The gas leak,” I repeated, stunned.
I'd heard the story. Everyone had. The original town had been built over a pocket of natural gas that had one day erupted and killed most of the townsfolk in a four-block radius. It had supposedly happened in the early morning hours. The survivors, mainly those who lived in the outskirts of the town, had discovered the townsfolk dead in their beds, or at their kitchen tables with half of their breakfast uneaten.
The survivors had, after burying the dead, refused to go anywhere near Hollow Hill. The town had actually been closed off for nearly fifty years. In the nineteen-sixties, the town was deemed safe again and reopened. Hollow Hill was now a tourist trap because of its macabre history. Every year, we'd get an influx of tourists: amateur ghost hunters, history buffs, folks who got off on the macabre, and people who, for whatever reason, felt a burning desire to see the site of one of the worst tragedies in the history of the Pacific Northwest. There were more of these people than you'd think. Every year during the spring and summer, the population of our town would swell from less than ten thousand to nearly triple that. During tourist season, there were a slew of psychics setting up shop in the flea market on the docks. And of course, the ghost tours were always at full capacity.
No one had mentioned the gallows set up in the town square, or the fact that the townsfolk hadn't died peacefully as they were going about their morning business. No one had mentioned that the townsfolk had been so eager to get away that they had ripped their fingernails off on the door frames. Bad for business, I guess. Or maybe the survivors hadn't told anyone.
After seeing what had actually happened, I thought that the survivors should have taken one good look at the townsfolk who had died and burned the whole town to the ground. Because it was obvious that nothing natural had killed them.
“What was that?” I asked again, sounding calmer this time. I was still fighting the urge to be sick. “It was alive somehow. It killed them and it liked it.”
“No one knows, exactly,” Rory said, turning away from the scene. “But I'll tell you the story of what actually happened. As far as anyone knows, at least.”
He began walking, “You've heard about the flu outbreak of 1918?”
“Yeah,” I said, frowning. “It was pretty nasty. Millions of people died.”
He nodded, “Tens of millions, worldwide. Well, it was never that bad in Washington state. Seattle had some cases, but most of the smaller, more remote towns didn't have much of a problem. Towns like Hollow Hill were largely spared. Transportation back then wasn't what it is now, which probably helped things.” He added, “So when the outbreak came to Hollow Hill, the townsfolk blamed the witches.”
“As one does,” I muttered, feeling the urge to roll my eyes. But I remembered, the terror I had felt at seeing the witches in the diner. Perhaps it wasn't as irrational as it sounded. Diplomatically, I chose not the share that particular thought. “How did the townsfolk know there were witches in their midst?”
“Easy,” He said, grinning at me. “The town was founded by witches. It was always something of an open secret. Most of the folks who live here now are the ancestors of servants who came with the original coven when they migrated from England or they were outsiders who moved to the town after it had already been established. Hollow Hill was built by witches and, back then, everyone knew it.”
“Why would anyone move to a town built by witches?”
“Because it was a prosperous town. No one went hungry. Businesses tended to succeed. Crops flourished. Fishing was always good. Generally, people didn't have accidents or get sick. And if they did get sick, one of the witches would pay them a visit, maybe dropping off an herbal remedy or saying a prayer for them, and they would always feel better after. People didn't mind the witches, so long as things were going well.”
“Okay, so witches built Hollow Hill,” I said, frowning. “And then the townsfolk blamed the witches when people started getting sick.”
Rory grimaced, “That's about the size of it. No one knows exactly how it happened, but when it became clear that the witches couldn't cure the sickness that had afflicted the town and people started dying, the town turned on them.” He added, “You saw what happened next.”
“They hung all the witches.”
“Not all of them,” Rory said. “They didn't know who all of the witches were. Some of the families had been wiser than the rest and they knew from the beginning to keep their mouths shut. They knew that no one trusts witches for very long.”
“And the witches conjured whatever the hell that thing was, in vengeance?”
“I don't think so.” Rory gave me a long searching look. “I don't think that the witches would have even been able to conjure something like that, even if they wanted to. We're not evil, Kendra. That thing, whatever it was that killed the townsfolk and other creatures like it are the whole reason the coven built t
he town in the first place. They're the reason that we're still here, in this town. This land has a deep evil in it. We protect people from things they're not equipped to deal with.”
“That was, what, some kind of demon? You're saying the witches had nothing to do with that?”
“We don't kill people,” Rory said firmly. “And we don't change that much when we become witches. We're still human beings first and foremost. We do, however, destroy the things that do kill people.”
“And all witches are white lights and rainbows like you guys?”
“No,” Rory said. “I can't speak for all witches. Some aren't so benevolent. But I can speak for our coven. We generally try to do good, but mostly we just prevent the dead from eating the town.”
I stared at him and realized, to my horror, that he wasn't joking. He gave me a wry grin. “Hollow Hill isn't like other places,” He said. “The dead don't stay dead here. We've got ghosts and basically any other monster you can think of, but mostly we've got zombies.”
“Zombies,” I said numbly. “Those are a thing?”
Rory nodded, looking strangely thoughtful. “We have no idea why. We do know that the wall between the worlds – what we call 'The Hedge' – is thinner here than basically anywhere else. It was made thin by violence and mass death. From what we’ve been able to gather, this was the site of a great many battles between warring clans, tens of thousands of years ago.”
“But the indigenous tribes in the Pacific Northwest have largely been peaceful,” I protested. “That doesn't make any sense.”
“I’m speaking of the people who existed before they lived here,” He said. “Or maybe the people that eventually became the first of them, depending on how you look at it. This land is cursed - it has been since the beginning of human history. Things happen here that shouldn’t be possible. And people do things here that they might not otherwise do.”
“Like round up the all witches and hang them in the town square.”
“Something like that,” Rory agreed. “And it’s easy for entities from other worlds to pass into this one here. Things that shouldn’t exist in this world.”
The Claiming Page 6
