The shape came inside, an arm reaching for her. At the same time, the form smudged, like a superimposed blur.
Carly tried to catch her breath, but all she could manage was to stay still, while the powerful thrust of her heart against her rib cage pushed short puffs of breath out of her lungs. She gripped the edge of the vanity as she faced the vision. Frigid air crept around her bare legs beneath the nightshirt.
The dark form came nearer. The lights went dimmer, then flickered. As darkness threatened to take over the room, Carly felt her stomach and bowels clinch at the thought of being alone in the dark with this ... phantom. She tried to speak, to ask it what it wanted, who it was, but its shape, though muddy and translucent, seemed familiar. Blacker pits in the smoky gray swirl near its head formed vague eyes.
Mom.
She couldn’t speak the word, but she knew it was true. Across every inch of her skin, she felt the bristling of tiny hairs. And when a sound issued forth from the dark figure, she swooned, light-headed, on the verge of fainting.
“…or-tek-oo…”
The voice was distant. From someplace impossibly far away. When it spoke again, it seemed to enunciate more carefully.
“…ro-TECK-you…”
Carly stood slowly as the ghostly shadow drew nearer, reaching its tendril-curled limb toward her. Something like slow moving smoke spread out from the proffered appendage. The night table lamp buzzed and went dark for just a moment. She was left in the room, only darkness between her and the apparition.
Carly screamed, sensing the presence very near her in the shadows, barely able to see through the syrupy thickness of the room, tension suddenly all around her, like electricity buzzing from an outlet and tingling her nerve endings.
“Dad! Dad!”
The sound of her father’s footsteps pounded up the stairs.
“Carly!” he yelled. Panic tainted his voice.
He bounded to the top of the stairs. Carly saw his silhouette on the landing. The dim lamp next to her bedside came on as Gavin reached inside the room and flipped on the overhead light. At first the fixture dimmed, as if choking on the energy it required to fully illuminate the room, and in that moment, he too saw the smoky phantom that hovered near his daughter. Then, as soon as the light beamed down, the ghost disappeared. The shape dissolved like mist.
Gavin rushed inside and took Carly roughly into his arms. He held her, pressing her face into his chest. She let loose with tears. She cried as he scanned the room and hallway beyond for signs of threat.
“Oh Dad,” Carly sobbed.
“What happened, baby?”
“I saw ... something.” She sniffed, trying to compose herself.
“Take a deep breath, angel.” Gavin got down on one knee in front of her, holding her at arm’s length by the shoulders. “That’s it. You’re all right now.”
Carly relaxed, having Dad here with her, in front of her, holding her.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I’m okay.”
“What did you see?”
She searched her father’s eyes. They were black, dilated with fear, as if he already knew what she was about to say threatened to unhinge them both.
“I saw a ghost.”
Her father’s eyebrows went up only slightly. His head cocked, expecting more, encouraging her to go on.
“I think it was Mom,” she said it in a half-whisper. “And she spoke to me.”
Gavin was rock-still. “What did she say?”
“Ro tech you ...” Carly exhaled with realization. “‘Protect you.’ Jesus, Dad, she said she wanted to protect me.”
She felt a chill run through her, raising gooseflesh on her skin, and saw the effect it had on her father. He was shaken. “Was this ... ghost a dark shape? Like a shadow?”
“Sort of ... but it was smoky, and thick, I guess, with ... you know, some depth. It’s hard to explain. I ... Dad, have you seen her, too?”
“I-I don’t know.” Her father backed up and sat heavily on the edge of her bed. He stared at her in a state of semi-shock. After a moment, he said, “I’ve seen things in the house lately. The past few days. But they were just shadows. I didn’t know if it was real or my imagination, but I suspected ... I guess I almost even hoped ...”
“Dad?”
When he looked up again, Carly saw that his eyes glistened with tears.
“Do you really think it’s her?”
Carly knelt in front of her dad as he gathered himself. She clasped his hands in hers and for the first time she felt the weight of his burden as police chief as well as father. It was an oppressive sensation, like suffocating, knowing you could gasp air if only you could step to the side for just one day. She swallowed hard and put her hand on his knee.
“I think it might be.” He summoned a smile and rested a warm hand on her shoulder. “I hope it is. And maybe, with everything going on in town, with all the craziness going on with the teenagers, maybe she’s feeling compelled to return. Maybe she can protect you from ... whatever’s going on.”
“What is going on, Dad?”
Her father gave a sardonic laugh. “If I knew, sweetie, I wouldn’t be so worried about you right now. But damned if I know.”
The look on his face was haunted, stark. Utterly desperate for answers.
Carly hugged her dad. He held her back in a tight embrace.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
After a tense dinner with Mom and Dad silently avoiding conversation with each other, Abi retreated upstairs to her room, closed the door and opened the pages of De Nigromancia. She had been mentally preparing herself to spend the evening invoking elements to seriously curse Sadie McBay, but still wasn’t sure she was ready to go through with it.
A wave of uneasiness washed over her, the spine of the tattered hardcover crackling as she leafed through the pages. She hadn’t practiced any real Black Magic yet. Other than the misfortune spell that sent Dad to get stitches, she’d only cast a simple luck spell that didn’t require any kind of summoning. The De Nigromancia, however, was much more, and she believed in its power enough to be afraid to try any of its Goetic summonings. Still, she hated Sadie enough to revel in the idea of her beset by some demonic wraith. The question was, would Abi’s lack of skill prove disastrous? Lurking in the back of her mind was persistent fear that she wouldn’t do something just right. That one little thing could be out of place, one pronunciation not quite right, and then ...
You can’t think that way, she told herself. You can’t have any doubt.
Abigail turned off her bedroom’s overhead light. She unrolled a large piece of black fabric that she’d stashed under her bed. Over the past few weeks, she had copied the magick circle from The Goetia. The main circle contained four six-pointed stars, a letter of Adonai’s name at each of their points, with denotations of Alpha and Omega at east and west. A serpent’s body scrawled with symbols completed the circle, which was intended to face north. Outside of the circle were four five-pointed stars, in the centers of which each black candle would be placed. Just to the east of this circle of protection where she would sit was a magick triangle in which the summoned entity would appear. The white paint that she’d used to painstakingly paint all of these shapes was stark against the black fabric. She had to admit everything looked pretty good.
Abigail looked down at the symbols. Her heart fluttered momentarily, but her thrill at really going through with this overpowered the fear that lurked at the edges of her resolve. She had the power to make this happen. To make anything happen. She would be the one making Sadie suffer this time. And the best part of doing things this way was that no one would be the wiser. No one would know who did this, or even that a person was responsible. She would summon a minor force—
—a minor force of evil—
&nb
sp; —and then it would be done.
She tried not to think about how the shadows in her room already seemed oppressive, even before she began the ritual. She stripped down until she was naked, and then put on a very thin, white gown. She knelt and lit each of the four black candles, placing them into position on the black tapestry. As their flames grew, she faced the window and saw her reflection, eerie in the candlelit gloom.
She knelt inside the circle of protection. Then, the De Nigromancia in her hands, she flipped open the book to the invocation and supplication she had picked out just for Sadie McBay.
Her tongue hesitated to speak the words. Her pulse raced in her throat. The sheer fabric of her white gown trembled with each beat of her heart. Her black curly hair heaved upon her chest with each breath she drew.
Downstairs, through the floor, muffled, but not enough to obscure the words or their tone, she heard her mother’s voice raised in fury. In quick retort, she heard her father’s barbed response, and then another volley of verbal lashing between her parents. She focused in on the argument, trying to understand the words. The book of ceremonial magic lay forgotten for the moment in her hand. She fixated on one of the black candle’s flames as she listened.
“Is this it, then? Is this how you try? How you make things better, Landon? By drinking yourself into a stupor? I really thought that we were going to give this a good—”
“Will you shut the fuck up? Seriously. Just shut the fuck up. You’re the goddamn whore out running around with—”
“And what the hell choice have you given me, Landon? You’re not the man I married, anymore. You’re a weak semblance of that man. A sick, perverted lecher. And may God himself never forgive you for what you’ve done. I swear, I’m taking Abi and we’re leaving here. This is it. I don’t know why in hell I’ve stayed as long as I have.”
“What I’ve done? What I’ve done? You’ve driven me to the brink of fucking madness here, Becca. You leave me here alone. I can’t find a job. You don’t even fucking talk to me anymore except to run me down and make me feel like a worm under your heel. And then you go prancing out of here every morning like some cheap slut, dolled up like a Nevada Avenue whore. What exactly do you expect from me, then, Becca? Where do you expect me to turn?”
Abigail focused on the flame of the black candle. Her eyes shimmered with tears. Her ghostly reflection mirrored her position in the frosty window. Her mother’s voice went lower, but she could hear it through the vent now.
“Don’t tell me that’s why you’ve done what you’ve done. You can never justify what you’ve done to our daughter,” and now she heard her mother’s voice catch in a painful sob. “Our dear sweet Abigail. You goddamn filthy bastard ... our dear sweet daughter ...”
The argument got nastier, but Abigail couldn’t take anymore. She didn’t want to hear the rest. She threw the spell book to the floor, left it lying in the middle of the circle. She blotted out the anguished words of her mother. Abigail’s eyes filled with tears and she threw herself onto her bed and hugged her pillow to her gut. She closed her eyes and tried to fend off the memory of her father’s last touch. The inner pain that throttled her from her guts to her throat at the memory, and the shame that came from knowing that she had reciprocated that last time. She told herself it was just to make it be over, to make it end faster, but deep inside, she realized it was getting love from him that she so desperately craved. And she knew it was sick.
Shame burned her cheeks. She cried harder and buried her face in her comforter, smelling the vague scent of him, and it made her sicker to know that she wanted to hold him and tell him it would be okay. And her heart was ripped by loyalty to her loving mother, who had only ever wanted what every woman wants for her baby.
Abigail felt the blame rested fully on herself. It was her fault it had come to this. Her fault that—
Something happened in the room. The air shifted. It washed over her like a wave of dry water.
She sat up. Wiping her eyes, she focused on the flickering candles across the room.
“Oh God.”
The flames grew. Each candle suddenly began shooting fire three feet into the air. She feared for her posters that papered the angle of her wall, the underside slope of the roof. The faces of vampires and creatures from her favorite films suddenly wavered like onlookers from another dimension as the flames went from orange to green, filling the room with an eldritch light. Abigail felt vulnerable—frozen with fear, rapt with wonder. Logically she knew she should get into the circle of protection, but ... she hadn’t summoned anything.
Nevertheless, something seemed to be coming.
Again the watery wind emanated as a palpable force from the magick circle in rings of thick shadow. They washed against her and forced her back. Then a second force of power lifted her off her feet. She flew across her bed against the wall. Her head struck the wood paneling and then the baseboard as she fell backward. The bedroom filled with strange shadows, as if she were seeing everything through a cloudy lens, and still the columns of witch-light shot from the black candle pillars.
Something manifested in the triangle upon her painted tapestry. It stood, hunched, with long strands of greasy hair. The shape could not be fully discerned, but it had enough substance to reveal curve and tip—curved hips and a slender torso with flat, sagging breasts, but long arms and longer fingers that came to severe points. It stood upon legs that looked at once human and yet reversed, goat-like, and she imagined cloven hooves obscured in the amorphous darkness at its feet.
Abigail shuddered, crying fitfully. She could neither speak nor move except to tremble violently. She faced a creature from the realm beyond the veil. Be it demon or something else she couldn’t say.
As soon as its wicked green eyes flashed into view, like magic orbs ignited by the witch-fire, they fixed upon her. The creature’s featureless face was obscured beneath the grotesque strands of clumped “hair” through which the angry eyes glowed. It made a hollow moaning growl.
The dark energy of the room exploded in concentric shadow rings. Abigail was blasted against the wall once again. Her cry of fear ended in a whimper as she impacted with the wall.
The flames of the black candles went suddenly dark. The light bulb in her lamp shattered. Her window cracked. The door to her bedroom swung rapidly open and then flew off its hinges, clattering against her wall, tearing two posters into tatters and knocking over a bookshelf.
The shape went out into the hall.
She heard it descending the stairs.
It was all Abigail could do to drag herself up by the cover of her bed.
“Mom!” She screamed. “Dad!” Her voice broke with strain.
Downstairs, she heard her parents begin a different kind of screaming: abject terror. And pain.
“Mom! Dad!” Abigail’s frantic shrieking followed her into the hall. She ran down the stairs in her bare feet and saw the lights of the living room flickering at the base of the stairs. As she came down onto the landing, she paused in mid-step. She gripped the banister with one hand to steady herself. Consciousness threatened to leave her at the light-headed rush of terror that overcame her, eyes riveted to the horror playing out in the living room.
The creature, half-darkness, half-ethereal—a ghastly female demon—rushed at her father. He reeled backward and stumbled against the entertainment center. The flat screen television spun sideways and crashed to the floor. Books and curios fell from the shelves. Her father drew in his breath to scream as the otherworldly creature rushed him with those terrible long fingers and ripping claws and swept him back into the air. It slammed him against the wall unit, which crashed against the wall, spilling more treasures. A second blow knocked her father’s skull hard against one edge of a shelf. It made a meaty sound like a fist against a desktop. He gave a terrible moan. His eyes rolled in his head, trying to fix on his unnatur
al attacker.
Abigail scanned the room for her mother. She was sunken into a corner of the sectional couch, hunkered down, holding her hands to her mouth, eyes glistening with fear. Just as Abigail was about to call out to her, the creature turned. Its jaws opened in a silent scream, viscous strands stretching between its jaws as they parted in a strange, hissing roar. Its twisted legs did not encumber its movement, although the knees did indeed bend backward, and the feet were an unholy cross between talons and hooves. The floor was blackened by its steps, as if hellfire scorched all in the creature’s wake.
Her father turned with it. She realized that it sank its dark talons inside of his abdominal area, and the lower portion of the sweater he’d worn at dinner—one that Abi had picked out for him last Christmas—was spreading with brackish blood. The creature’s wickedly long, razor tipped fingers were buried deep inside of him. As it turned with him on its hand, it seemed to use him like a morbid puppet, slinging him from the entertainment center to the opposite wall near the door.
Abigail squealed and lurched backward up the stairs as it swung her father into the foyer. The slim nightdress that she’d donned to perform the magic ritual bunched up around her thighs as she slipped and then caught herself before sliding down to the landing near the foyer. She could smell the foul stench of the creature, just five feet away from her now.
It rammed her father’s back onto the coat rack. She heard his spine snap like an old branch. His eyes were wild. They fixed on Abi. Her own eyes filled with tears as she realized the hooks of the coat rack had impaled him. Still, the hellish fiend was not done with him.
The she-devil yanked its misshapen hand from his abdomen and brought with it tangles of his intestines and wet gobs of internal organs that spilled from a ragged hole in his gut. It grabbed him with its other hand, pulled back his head, gripping it with giant spidery fingers, and then snapped the neck.
It screeched.
The awful sound made Abigail scream. She gripped her ears and shook her head. She vaguely heard her mother gibbering in madness, going hysterical, screaming out an incoherent prayer.
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