by Tony Ortiz
I had to get to Katie. She was still down below, getting jostled around like a tetherball.
“Come on, Lin!” I shouted over the craziness.
Lin was huddled under his seat.
“We have to get Katie!”
I could barely see anything through the flashing legs of the running samhains. However, I caught a glimpse of Dorian appearing in front of Katie, grabbing her hand, and telling her something. She closed her eyes, and they both disappeared just as Jacoby appeared in front of Lin and me.
“W-what’s going on?” I shouted beside myself.
“Close your eyes–” said Jacoby urgently, cut off by a dreadful roar coming from outside.
The stadium began to shake violently until it was swaying side to side, shooting up a huge dust cloud. Large cracks slashed the arena, and the top deck was entirely gone. The stadium was going to collapse any moment.
Jacoby forced me down, knowing what was coming.
BOOOOM!!
“Jacoby,” I wailed in pain, an awful ringing noise was piercing my head.
Jacoby placed his hand over my left ear, which did the trick. The din ceased. He then shut my eyes with his fingers. As I sensed a huge mass flying toward me, he squeezed my hand and yanked me off the ground into an endless black vast. It was a million times stronger than a welgo pull. I squeezed my eyes shut, wondering why I had opened them in the first place.
The terrible shaking had stopped. Was it really over?
“Jesse, you may open your eyes now,” echoed Jacoby’s voice from afar.
I cautiously opened my eyes. Jacoby, Dorian, Katie, Lin, and I were somewhere outside of the festival grounds, standing in the middle of a demolished alley. The stadium was four blocks away, split completely in two. It was a lot warmer here. I foolishly extended my hands out in front of me, as though I was putting them over a fire.
“It’s warm,” I said, catching my breath.
“Psyclining has that effect,” said Jacoby, looking exhausted. “Let’s get to the street. It’s not safe here.”
I remembered from the rules inside the stadium that psyclining was a means of transportation. However, it felt like I had traveled to a different dimension, not just a couple of blocks away. Maybe I shouldn’t have opened my eyes.
“Where’s Kala?” said Katie.
“Where’s Kala?” I repeated.
“He’s safe. Dorian dropped him off in a distant land.”
“Is he going to be okay?” I said.
“He’ll be fine. We have a much more serious problem now. From the looks of it, the city has suffered serious damages. Casualties should be minimal though if Soundrec stayed nearby as he had been told to.”
A large crowd had gathered in what used to be a grand street, now reduced to giant piles of rubble. We were in the middle of an obliterated town. No streets or structures remained – just dust and debris as far as the eye could see. Most buildings had been flattened to their concrete foundations, as if a tornado had just swept through. Uprooted trees were scattered about like spilled matches.
A few costumed pedestrians, covered in dust from head to toe, climbed up the displaced road and slid down the other side, rather matter-of-factly. It was as if they had just happened upon this by accident, passing through.
A tall skeletis emerged from the crowd of samhains.
“Scaley,” greeted Jacoby, bowing his head.
“Hello, Jacoby,” said Scaley, returning the greeting. “Hello, Dorian.”
“We need to move everyone,” said Jacoby. “We can’t have them here.”
“Jacoby,” said Scaley delicately. “It’s a Night Watcher.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The BELLNICSI
Jacoby and Dorian pushed their way through the antsy crowd. As the samhains noticed Dorian’s orange skin, which was the brightest color in the group, they moved aside, their heads down, giving Jacoby and Dorian a clear path to a contorted body sprawled on a pile of twigs and leaves. I craned my neck behind Jacoby to see who it was. Soundrec was completely motionless, except for his heaving chest. His skin was charred, with shards of glass embedded in it.
Jacoby crouched down next to Soundrec. “In two days, you’ll be fully recovered.”
Soundrec didn’t react, looking as though he could die at any moment.
“He protected thousands,” informed Scaley, crouching next to Jacoby.
“Do we know anything else?”
Scaley shook his head. Jacoby stood up and looked around at the crowd, all waiting anxiously for him to speak.
“Who did this?” called out a skeleton from the back.
“I don’t know,” said Jacoby, taking off his Kala wristband.
“You do know. You just don’t want to tell us,” said someone next to the skeleton, “afraid we’d panic.”
“Do-Do-Dorian,” mumbled another, “you-you must know.”
Dorian was standing near Soundrec in his bowed-head stance, definitely not going to reply.
“I’m sorry,” Jacoby said, “but neither of us knows what happened at the games.”
“Soundrec, you wake up, you hear,” said Murlie the witch, standing at the front of the crowd. She wore a three-layer brown robe and no shoes. Her small feet were so cruddy they blended in with the street. “Tell us who done it. We will erase the wrongdoer from the face of Halloween. You answer me, Soundrec! I’ve been in the condition you’re in. I know you can speak.”
“Murlie, he can’t,” said Jacoby. “You know it’s different with him.”
More halloweens began calling out.
“Why did you come here, Jacoby? Whenever you and Dorian come out, something bad happens.”
“What’re we going to do now?”
“You all need to go back to your shops and stay put,” commanded Jacoby. “It would be best if you stayed in groups or go to Lurching Hotel or a Dark Hour group for the Dark Hours.”
“Can I come with you guys?” asked a teenage witch. “I don’t want to be killed.”
The crowd clamored. Jacoby turned back to Murlie and asked, “Can Soundrec stay with you for the night? It would help us immensely.”
Murlie grumbled, but nodded in agreement.
“Alright, get moving,” Jacoby said to the samhains. “We’ll know more tomorrow. Four hours is not a long wait.”
The crowd knew it was over and slowly began to disperse.
“We all know it was Jack,” said Murlie. “We just wanted to hear it from you and Dorian–”
“We don’t know for sure that it was him.”
“Who else? No halloween can cast a Bellnicsi, other than Jack and–”
“How do you know it was the Bellnicsi?” said Dorian, coming up to Jacoby’s side.
Murlie must have known he wouldn’t bring up his head because she was looking straight at him.
“The seismic waves were 18.2. There is no other spell that can create such a force. You heard it–”
“Murlie,” Jacoby interrupted, “would you be kind enough to also shelter Kala? He’ll need to be healed, too.”
“Fine,” she replied grumpily.
Jacoby and Dorian walked away. Before Katie could move, Murlie snatched her arm and studied it with her good eye.
“You are no witch,” she growled. “You have no Hallow’s soul.”
“Jesse, Katie,” called Jacoby.
Murlie released Katie’s wrist, and Katie and I ran back to Jacoby, Dorian and Lin, who were heading up a steep narrow street that was unaffected by the Bellnicsi.
“Where we going?” asked Katie.
“Ray’s,” said Jacoby.
“Why does Kala need healing? You said he’s fine.”
“He’s going to be. Murlie can heal him within a few hours.”
“I don’t like Murlie,” I said. “We should find someone else for Kala.”
“She’s okay, Jesse. She’s not always a bad welchick. She knows when to put aside her witchery. Be thankful there are no witches from the Veil around.
Supposedly, wikitch welks ate ten children a day.”
I believed Jacoby, but he didn’t have to tell me about witches who ate kids. I was just glad Kala was going to be okay. I couldn’t imagine what he had gone through during the match and what he was going through at the moment.
“It was the tortics,” said Dorian, walking up ahead with Jacoby.
“But we’re not sure. Soundrec’s injury–”
“Is their Jical’s magic.”
“I know. But they didn’t summon it. There are two other possibilities. I know you felt the second presence. . . .”
I wondered if I felt it, too. I did get goose bumps and cold sweat during the disaster.
“Then explain why the tortics were here,” pressed Dorian. “They were not here for the games.”
“I agree,” said Jacoby, getting agitated.
They picked up their pace as they continued their conversation. On occasion it seemed to heat up, but they never shouted. Katie, Lin, and I always stayed close. Sometimes we had to jog to keep up.
“. . . They’ve figured it out and we can’t trust them,” said Dorian, looking Jacoby straight in the eyes.
We all dropped our heads.
“Why do you think they tried searching for the woman from Brazil? They’re going after all the most powerful halloweens and trying to kill them off. They want to take over Samhain.”
“Dili wasn’t a threat. You’re the only menala who would be.”
Dorian didn’t have a response. Their tortic debate looked like it was finally over.
“What is a Bellnicsi?” I asked. “Is it bad?”
“Yes,” answered Katie.
“How do you know?”
“Mí papá told me.”
“What did he say?”
Jacoby was staring at us.
“Jacoby, is the Bellnicsi dangerous?” I asked.
“A Bellnicsi is Jical’s magic that disrupts the ears. And to answer your question, it depends.”
“What could they possibly use it for?”
“To cause all halloweens to go deaf.”
“But everyone knew it was coming,” said Katie, confused.
“That’s because Soundrec stopped it for a short time, which produced the warning tremble. However, it was never completely summoned.”
“But it wasn’t the tortics?”
“No.”
I had hundreds of questions. Why would the tortics want to kill Kala if he wasn’t a threat? Who summoned the Bellnicsi? Why did the tortics disappear? Did Jack come? Why did the tortics need to be powerful when they only lived one day a year? What was the average life expectancy of a samhain?
“The tortics hate Jack, too, then?” I said. “Because he’s stronger than them?”
“Yes,” said Jacoby. “They’ve been trying to find him ever since he was linked to the human deaths. But we’re still not sure if he’s responsible for them.”
Before I could ask another question, Katie spoke. “But he’s the only one who lived during all the killings, no?”
“That’s how it seems. But we don’t know that for sure.”
“So,” I ventured, “how can the tortics search for someone who they have never seen before? And if Jack didn’t murder the humans, that means he might not exist, right? That’s the only real evidence of his existence.”
Jacoby stopped at the top of the street. “The existence of evidence doesn’t constitute the evidence of existence, and vice versa,” explained Jacoby. “There is no true evidence of his existence, no. However, he could be here. . . . There are a few ways of detecting powerful magic, or any magic. We don’t need to know what he looks like to sense him. Plenty of halloweens, and even humans, claim they’ve seen him. The story of Jack roaming the Irish countryside is essential folklore to humans and halloweens alike, the kind of folklore that I believe to be rooted in a historical fact. Children of the late Celtic era catching glimpses of an undying man with a glowing turnip roaming the countryside is a very powerful image to us.”
I thought Jacoby was going to say more, but he didn’t.
“Who can conjure the Bellnicsi?” I said.
“Not many.”
“So it was Jack or . . .”
“–the tortics, the demons. They’re all possibilities. Dorian is a possibility, too. However, the Bellnicsi is summoned through the power of hatred and desire, you really must want to hurt the halloween. If you don’t, then it’s nearly impossible to summon the magic. Even for Jack. You truly have to hate a halloween. It won’t be enough to merely be power-hungry, which eliminates the tortics. Alright–”
“Let’s get moving,” ordered Katie with authority, anticipating Jacoby’s next words.
“Come on, you two,” I finished. “The night’s short.”
Katie and I giggled. Jacoby started walking without saying a word, probably annoyed with us.
“Are we going home?” said Katie, chasing after him.
“Not now.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Would you like the real reason? It’s not good news.”
“Hmm . . . yes.”
“Katie? . . . You two were both charged with violating the rules by helping Kala. Not your mistake, I understand. But Irish Scavengers were ordered to find you and take you to the Haunt House, where they will identify you as humans and kill you.”
“What?” I couldn’t believe my ears.
“Jesse, I warned you. But they won’t come near you with Dorian around.”
“Why are we going to Ray’s?” asked Katie, definitely not as scared as I was.
“Because Ray might know what’s going on. He has a second home in Ireland, the most populated halloween country. And he knows the tortics.”
“But what if the Scavengers are not as afraid of Dorian as you think?” I said. “I don’t want to be killed.”
“Jesse, you’re beginning to sound like Kala. If you want to go home, you can.”
“Stop being scared, Jesse,” said Katie. “I’m not going home.”
“How are we going to get to Ray’s?” I asked.
“Lin,” said Jacoby.
“Lin?”
“He’s great at psyclining. Could–”
“Could get you anywhere you want,” finished Lin, jumping in front of the group. “Why didn’t you tell me this earlier? I had just walked a billion blocks!”
“We’ll do it there.” Jacoby pointed to a deserted park with a playground and grass field. “It’s secluded enough.”
“This is nuts! We can psyclin anywhere. No one will see us. So, where are we going?”
“Ray’s!” Katie and I said in unison.
Jacoby stopped near a broken swing set, and we all held hands while Lin sang. “Ray’s house we go. Don’t forget your friend to hold. Here we go, so hold on so – Ouch! Jacoby, that hurts! Fine. One, two, three.”
The psyclin didn’t feel like moving or traveling at all. It just felt cold, warm, and then cold again. But I did smell something nasty.
“Jesse!” said Katie’s voice in the darkness. “Ew! Jesse, move! You’re standing in welgo’s poop.”
I opened my eyes and looked down. “Ah man!” I groaned.
We were back in Ray’s weedy back yard.
“Friends!” shouted Ray excitedly from the back porch. “You survived the Bellnicsi! The second one in Halloween history! Who summoned it?”
“We don’t know, Ray,” said Jacoby. “That’s why we’re here. We thought you might have some clues.”
“I don’t know. Who do you think it was?”
“What do you think about the tortics?”
“Oh, I don’t know. They don’t really hate anyone. Who was at the festival?”
“One of the tortics almost killed Kala,” said Katie.
Ray went over to my welgo and rubbed her head. “All of the tortics were there?”
Jacoby nodded.
“What happened to Kala?”
“Kala was badly injured in the game.”
&n
bsp; “I don’t know why they would be there. They don’t like the games or the festivals. Who interrupted the summon?”
“Soundrec is believed to be the one. He was injured in the process. We’ll have to wait two days for an answer.”
“Oh, my, that’s a while. I say, you’re just going to have to go talk to Lorseria. But he doesn’t want to kill Kala. He is intrigued by the menalas. But we did disagree on some matters at our last meeting. I say, if Silky hadn’t been there to whisk me away, I’d be dead now.”
Ray rubbed her head. I couldn’t believe he also called her Silky. What a weird coincidence.
“They are unreliable,” Dorian said, “and can’t be trusted. I doubt he completely confides in you.”
Ray stopped rubbing Silky. “Well, sometimes I do sense their hatred toward you. But not toward Kala or Meesi. Or Dili.”
“Do you think Dili was murdered by a tortic?”
Ray didn’t have to think about it. “No.”
“Thanks, Ray,” said Jacoby.
“Are you really going to see Lorseria? He’s become quite dangerous lately.”
“We must. I can’t afford to wait for Soundrec to recover. You know a Bellnicsi at a festival is an act of genocide.”
“Okay, but it would be extremely wise for Dorian to stay behind.”
“No, we’re all going.”
Why? If Dorian stayed at Ray’s house with us, the scavengers wouldn’t touch us. We could even dig a hole right here under Ray’s backyard and hide. I picked up a handful of dirt and studied it carefully. I was sure it could be possible–
Katie hit me.
“Oww!” I cried out.
“Ray’s talking to you.”
“I see you’ve taken interest in my fertilizer,” said Ray.
“Oh, uhmm . . . no, I just . . .”
“His mind wanders a lot,” said Katie. “You don’t know if he’s listening or daydreaming.”
“Really? . . . Well, you better get going. You don’t want to still be there during the Dark Hours.”
“Jacoby, are the welgos taking us?” I asked, watching Silky yawn.
“Yes.”
I walked over to Silky and started to pat her. “Ready for another trip?”
She kept her head in the tall weeds, moving only her eyebrows to look at me.
