Night Wraith

by Christopher Fulbright

  Vanessa Maeveen gave the girls a smile that revealed gray teeth and a flicker of wet blackness in the pit of her mouth.

  “The wraith has likely been wreaking its havoc already, with or without your knowledge. And now that it’s come through completely—now that it’s loose—it’s best to fully prepare yourself before planning to send it back. Because it won’t be a simple matter of lighting candles and saying the incantation—it will be a sheer battle of force and will.”

  The woman took another step toward them, leering.

  “A battle which, if you are not properly prepared, neither of you may survive.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Carly felt dizzy as she descended the staircase. The gloom of the house pressed close around her. The thumping of the “cats” in the basement grew louder as she neared the foyer, which was immersed in shadow, only vaguely illuminated by a distant glow of moonlight. She heard Ms. Maeveen’s footsteps and Abigail behind her, but she wouldn’t look back because a bout of vertigo overtook her and stirred her stomach with dizziness. It passed as she reached the floor of the foyer, but the uneasiness stayed with her like a bad memory. She blinked in the darkness of the entryway.

  Abigail stood next to her, holding the old book to her chest as if it could protect her from the world.

  Ms. Maeveen came to the bottom stair. She paused at the sound of more pounding in the basement. She glanced briefly that direction and then walked to the front door. Moonlight through the windows of the big room deeper inside suffused the foyer with an eerie light. The witch placed one hand on the knob to open the front door. She paused and regarded Carly. She felt another wave of nausea, but it passed again.

  Abigail reached for her.

  Vanessa Maeveen seemed to be waiting. “Is there something else?”

  “Ms. Maeveen—”

  “Please,” she said. “Call me Vanessa.”

  Carly felt awkward doing so, but tried anyway. “Vanessa. My mother ...”

  “Your mother. Beth Wagner.”

  “Yes. She ... had chronic depression and she sought some new age treatments from a man who used to work here, when this place was a bookstore.”

  “Yes, Davis Crowley. Only, he didn’t work here, he was part owner. With me. We were partners. At least until ...”

  “Until what?”

  Carly saw a violet flash in the woman’s eyes. A reflection from somewhere? Or some inner power, stirring?

  “Until everything went wrong. Until he betrayed me. Betrayed my trust, and went too far.”

  “Did you know my mother?”

  “I only met her once, when she came for one of her treatments. But then, your father can likely tell you everything I knew. He certainly spent enough time here interrogating me after her unfortunate death.”

  Carly felt Abigail’s arm slip into hers, offering comfort.

  Vanessa saw the gesture and regarded it without emotion. Her voice said more than her demeanor implied.

  “I am truly sorry for how things turned out. A girl should not have to grow up without her mother.”

  Carly’s eyes stung with tears. She wanted to leave, but she wanted more. She strangely didn’t feel that this woman owed her any explanation. What’s done was done years ago, and no amount of accusation or probing could change that, but curiosity drove her to want to know more, from a perspective other than her father’s. And Dad hadn’t said much beyond the well-known facts. But what else could she ask that wouldn’t sound accusatory?

  Vanessa continued: “If I had known ahead of time what Davis had been doing, inasmuch as treating your mother, I certainly would have done something to stop it. As it was, though, even if I had known, I likely would have been helpless to do anything at all. Davis was a handsome, charming man, and just as I had come to love and believe in him, so had your mother. Nothing I could have done would have kept them apart.” The woman stiffened. Her face darkened, as if she’d been somehow supporting an illusion of beauty all this time, and now was willing to let it slip—as moments before in the room upstairs—in an emotional moment, features concealed mostly in darkness. “As it was, we were both betrayed, your mother and I. And he disappeared when the pressure and heat became too much.”

  “What?” Carly’s stunned query was a harsh whisper. Abigail drew closer to her.

  “You didn’t know your mother was having an affair then,” Vanessa Maeveen was unreadable, now fully in shadow, as if her head bore no face. “I guess your father chose to omit that from the record. Understandable. I’m sorry if the truth causes you pain.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “Oh I wish I were,” Vanessa said. “Because then, perhaps, we wouldn’t be here—none of us—in this situation. Perhaps things would have turned out much different.” Her voice trailed off into a wistful dreaminess.

  Carly’s fury was sudden. Blood rushed to her face, burning hot in her cheeks, tightening her neck and stiffening her shoulders. She breathed hard and took a threatening step toward Vanessa. Abigail tried to hold Carly back but Carly yanked her arm out of her friend’s grip. Carly took a step, but something else stopped her. A sudden sense of dread, of hopelessness and despair. She swallowed. Tears fell unbidden from her cheeks.

  “I’m leaving.” She turned and the door was open. Cold air of the night, the blue moonlight on the porch seemingly bright compared to the stifling closeness of the closet-like foyer.

  Carly stormed down the steps, crying, trembling with anger. She stopped at the road and looked back. Through the overgrown hollow she could see Abigail talking quietly with the witch, a faceless ghostly vision of white beyond the threshold. And when the door closed, Abigail came running down the steps, the damned book clutched to her chest.

  * * *

  “You’re not seriously going to go back there, are you?”

  Abigail stared into her cup of coffee. They went to Sutter’s Books and Coffee Shop after leaving the witch house on Washington Hill. They were too shaken, too totally ripped apart and lost in emotional junkyards after their encounter with the woman, to go home. They sat in a quiet corner of the bookstore café. The rest of the world ignored them, as if their visit to the witch house had made them invisible, removed them somehow from physical reality.

  “I don’t trust her, Abi. I don’t trust her, and I think that doing anything more with magic, especially anything she decided you should do, is crazy. It’s the absolute wrong thing to do.”

  Abigail shook her head, no. But whether she was answering Carly’s question or denying her assertions, Carly couldn’t tell. Here in the dim light of the coffee scented café, Abi looked even worse than before. Drawn, tired, wrung-out. Her eyes were bloodshot; the bags under her eyes had darkened to purple. Her skin seemed rougher, creased with worry lines. Her hair lay limp upon her head, the customary curls now simple waves that fell about her in disheveled strands.

  “Don’t do it, Abi,” Carly reached out for her friend’s hand. It was cold. “We can’t change the past. You can’t bring your dad back by anything you do. Take it from me.”

  Abigail shook her head.

  “I don’t want to bring him back, Carly.” When Abigail met her friend’s eyes, they were so stark with pain she could barely stand to meet her gaze. “I loved him, but I hated him. And I’m afraid. And ashamed. And utterly fucking lost.” Abi shuddered and Carly found herself crying with her, for her ... for them both.

  She hugged her friend and stared up at the ceiling of the coffee shop, and in her head ran through everything that Vanessa Maeveen had said. As soon as Abigail calmed down, they collected themselves and left.

  When Abigail dropped her off, Carly made Abi promise not to go back to Vanessa Maeveen’s house. After her friend drove away in her dead father’s truck, Carly went quietly inside, and had a deep feeling of unrest as pieces began to fall into
place.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Vanessa Maeveen closed the door behind the girls. She let the latch click into place and stood silently with the shadows for a moment. She gazed up the stairs that spiraled to her place of solace from the world. For the first time in a long time, she did not want to spend her evening there.

  Pounding came from the basement. The force of the blows shook the floor.

  She went to the basement door and opened it. A narrow staircase led straight down into stygian darkness. The dull sound of repeated impacts was louder. Echoing from below, the rhythm was made by the meaty sound of a fist, or head, against a wall. She switched on a light—a single bulb that hung dingy and yellowed at the bottom of the stairs. Her lips curled with loathing as she descended. Her footsteps scuffed on the bare wood steps.

  The sound of hammering flesh ceased. It was replaced by a terrible mewling—a mix between a tortured dog and a grown man, crying sobs of anger. Vanessa’s aching muscles tensed as she reached the bottom of the stairs. The memory of Davis’s betrayal still caused her physical pain. So many promises he’d made to her. They’d been in the prime of their lives. She had been her loveliest, he: handsome and smart. How she’d shuddered at his light touch, how she’d given herself to him completely. The first man she had ever trusted with everything about her—and it had all been a lie.

  Vanessa reached the bottom of the stairs and gazed through the dusky glow. The stench of him wafted to her first. The smell of wet dog, the scent of the decaying meat she’d fed him just to keep him alive. Across the main room of the basement was the cage in which she’d imprisoned him. She hadn’t realized, until the police chief had come to visit and he came out from beneath the porch, how much her spell had begun to slip—how much he’d begun to transform back into a man.

  “Ahh,” she said, a venomous whisper in the gloom of the basement. “But you’ll never be a man again. You’ll always be a dog, dear Davis, for what you’ve done to me, and what you’ve done to the woman you seduced.”

  Vanessa picked up one of several bones that had been flung about the room when the creature in the cage had thrown its latest fit. Her magick had twisted his body to ensure that all he’d ever be was a hideous freak. And so “creature” was fitting. She would not call him a man.

  She threw the bone at his cage.

  The creature flinched.

  Her spell had slipped even more since Chief Wagner saw what was left of Davis Crowley creeping out from under the porch that day. His head was a misshapen mass, lumpy and elongated on one side. A third of his dog-like face had returned like stretched plastic back to its original human shape, leaving the face a mess of uneven features, a patchwork of hair and one dog ear, a pained snarl on a crooked snout. One eye was blue, the other dark brown, almost black, like the darkness of his corrupt heart. As the creature stood, it rose to all fours, but again, the nightmare mesh of man and beast made the vision a wrenching sight to behold. One foreleg was completely human again, if slightly hairier. The other foreleg was still caninesque, but with a small gnarled hand and fingers at the end instead of a dog’s claws. The bones of its torso were twisted and likely wracked with pain.

  Looking at what she had wrought in her former lover, the part of her that loved him once upon a time felt a pang of grief. It struck her blindside, and brought tears to her eyes. What she had done was irreversible, so there was no going back. She tried to summon the rage that had driven her to this make him this way, but those were old feelings and they had lost their fire in lieu of a dull ebb that now pained her in a different way. It was more a mourning of what she’d lost; a love she’d thought was so perfect, so grand. It was the feeling of the death of romantic dreams buried in the graves of days gone by.

  Looking at the beast that had once been Davis Crowley, she could muster no more than a vague loathing. Not only for what he’d done, but what she made him become.

  She tossed the bone into the cage. The creature mewled and looked at her crazily from its one blue, human eye. It reflected a plea, hatred, longing, pain. Vanessa wondered how much he remembered.

  “The girl whose mother you made your private little whore was just here, Davis. It seems your plan is unraveling, despite my best efforts to contain it.” She smiled wistfully. “I guess you should never underestimate the power of a mother’s love for her child.”

  The creature moaned. The sound became a cry from deep within. Then, with an angry flash in its eyes, it bared a mouth of crooked teeth and canines, ramming headfirst into the cage. It growled and then barked a word. Vanessa felt a palpable jab in her heart as she realized what she heard—or thought she heard—was “Beth.”

  She stood in the musty room, thick with the scent of animal carcasses, hands hanging at her side. For all of her power, for everything she had given him in their life together, he still had no remorse for what he’d done. And she refused to believe he’d seen Beth as anything more than a weak-willed woman, a target, a victim.

  Vanessa crouched in front of the creature’s cage. It looked back at her, fire in its human eye, darkness in the inhuman one. Its upper lip was thin and purple, hanging on two jutting teeth, end of the snout twisted, dried hunks of gore from its last feast. It rammed its face against the cage, then threw its body against it, bellowing. Vanessa felt a cruel laugh build deep inside her.

  “Oh, Davis. Was she that good? So good that you needed to make her your spiritual bondservant instead of me? Wasn’t I enough for you? Wasn’t this enough for you?” She reached up to the neck of her dress and unzipped it. She let the garment billow to the wretched floor. She was naked beneath. She stood before the pitiful creature, the dim light of the single bulb at the bottom of the stairs shining on her pale skin. Her body was full and curved. Old age had not exacted so great a price upon her body as the dark arts had exacted upon her soul.

  Vanessa smiled and caressed her body in the shadows. The beast stilled, regarding her silently. As she touched herself, she saw a strand of drool run from the deformed jaws. She closed her eyes and breathed deep. Oh, how long since she’d felt herself this way. She jumped, shivered in ecstasy at her own touch. Her breath came in gasps, and she suddenly realized how cold it was down here, air prickling at her extremities, her breasts jutting, nipples hardened with arousal.

  Vanessa pressed hard against her swollen clit. She massaged herself till orgasm, and came in shudders that almost made her knees buckle at the sound of Davis’s pitiful mewling, which heightened her ecstasy. As she breathed heavily, recovering from the moment, she crouched in front of the cage. A grin broke over her face. Tears filled her eyes. She slipped two fingers inside her. They came out wet. She offered them to the beast. Its tongue lashed between the bars, lapping her juices from her fingertips.

  “Oh, Davis, I could have been yours forever. I would have willingly been your spiritual bondservant. You had no need to enslave the soul of a woman who didn’t even know you, who never appreciated your fullness, your oneness with the universe. She never could have understood you, Davis. But now ... both your magick and mine have come undone.” She laughed. Her eyes rose to the wall behind his cage, chipped stone, staring beyond it to an earlier time. “Now you are trapped here with me—a half-man, half-beast of my own making. And the spirit of the woman you sought to enslave in the afterlife is growing stronger on her own without you to influence her, without you to control her. I thought I could, and yet ...”

  Vanessa’s eyes returned to those of her scorned paramour. Hatred rose in her, and she found that perhaps her hate had not lost its strength after all; it was just buried a little deeper each year. She narrowed her eyes cruelly. “And yet, it seems that I don’t have control over your wraith like you once did. Your little bitch whore. She has slipped through the veil, Davis. Thanks to the meddling of her daughter’s careless friend. And now,” she repeated, whispering, “it is free. She is free, Davis. Your whore, your wrai
th. And I’m inclined to let her kill them all.”

  Trembling, Vanessa let loose peals of cackling laughter. She laughed uncontrollably, tears accompanying her wicked mirth. She snatched her dress from the cold stone floor and staggered to the stairs, switching off the single wan light, plunging the basement into darkness.

  * * *

  The beast smashed itself against the inside of its cage with renewed fury, mewling, pounding with its single fist against the concrete wall, bashing its head against the barrier until it bled. The darkness drove it mad. It still had the scent of Vanessa in its nostrils, the taste of her on its tongue, and the vague memory of Beth from years ago, from newly awakened pockets of memory, returning to him a shred of his humanity.

  The creature thrashed for two hours. Upon one final lunge against its cage, it heard a metallic snap, followed by the clang of something falling to the floor. It paused, searching the lightless surroundings for some clue as to what happened. Then it applied pressure to the side of its cage and felt the barred wall give. It groped and found an opening and leaped through it with a strangled cry of exhaustion, of joy, of tortured hours of madness rewarded with freedom.

  It walked the floor, crawling and limping, crippled and gangly. The creature that had once been Davis Crowley shuffled and dragged itself to the base of the staircase.

  It was loose.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  The night air was bitter, but the lights of the field were bright, the school band was playing strong, and the Carson Lake Wildcats were beating the Cascade Rangers 23-20 at the beginning of the fourth quarter. The crowd was raging, stomping on the metal bleachers to heckle the opposing team. Cheerleaders kicked their legs and rustled pom-poms.