Ominous

by Kate Brian

That handwriting was not Elizabeth’s, but it looked familiar. I glanced back at the list of signatures and picked it out right away. The strokes were thick and confident, the uppercase letters overly large. The spell had been written out by Theresa Billings.

  “This is so freaking cool,” I whispered.

  I looked around the room again, hugging myself against the cold. I imagined Theresa, Elizabeth, and Catherine at the podium, jotting down notes in the book. Had they really cast spells in this room? Had any of them worked? Was that even possible? Or was it a game to occupy their time?

  Biting my lip, I flipped to the incantation near the front of the book of spells—the one that could supposedly turn a group of eleven regular girls into witches. I’d found it that afternoon at lunch, when I’d spent the period holed up in a study carrel at the back of the library. The directions were explicit. Eleven girls dressed in white were required. They were to stand in a circle, each holding a candle, and recite the incantation. A thrill of silly excitement went through me. If it required eleven girls in white to work, then it couldn’t do any harm for me to say it on my own, could it?

  “Like it could do any harm anyway, loser,” I whispered to myself. “This stuff isn’t real.”

  I took a deep breath and held it, squelching an embarrassed giggle. Then I moved my candle over the page and read.

  “We come together to form this blessed circle, pure of heart, free of mind. From this night on we are bonded, we are sisters.” My voice shook with giddy mirth at my own childishness, but whatever. This was fun. “We swear to honor this bond above all else. Blood to blood, ashes to ashes, sister to sister, we make this sacred vow.”

  I heard a creak that stopped my heart, and suddenly a gust of wind shot through the circular room, swirling my hair up off my shoulders and extinguishing my candle. Heart in my throat, I scrambled to my feet, the books tumbling to the floor at my toes. The acrid, birthday-party smell of the candle’s smoke curled through my nostrils as heavy footsteps clomped down the stairs, every groan of the ancient planks like an arrow to my heart, every crack heightening my terror. I pressed my back against the wall, wondering if there was any way to use my candle as a weapon. Then, suddenly, out of nowhere, the candle flickered to life again. I stared at the flame, transfixed, my heart seized with fear.

  How could that have possibly happened?

  Just then, Noelle arrived at the foot of the stairs. Her hands braced the walls, level with her ears, and she looked at me with a wry expression.

  “I knew it!”

  “Noelle! You scared the crap out of me!” I blurted.

  “Which you deserve!” she said, tromping across the room. “What are you doing? Please tell me you’re not really taking this stuff seriously.”

  She wrested the BLS book from my hands and looked at it. “What are you, writing a term paper now?”

  I grabbed the book back and, with a trembling hand, shoved the freaky candle at her. As I crouched on the floor, cramming the books into my messenger bag, I took a few breaths to steady myself. Obviously the wind had gusted down the stairs when Noelle had opened the door. And as for the candle … it was just a faulty wick. Or one of those trick candles that could relight itself.

  Except I’d never seen one of those that wasn’t birthday-cake-candle size.

  “I was just messing around,” I improvised, shouldering my bag as I stood. “I was trying to figure out whether those Billings Literary Society girls really believed in this witchcraft crap.”

  Noelle, to my surprise, looked interested. “And? Did they?”

  “Some of them, I think,” I said, lifting my shoulders. For some reason, I didn’t want to name names. I felt like I’d be betraying the BLS girls somehow. Opening them up to Noelle’s ridicule. Which was, of course, ludicrous, since all of them had been dead for probably thirty years.

  “Yeah, well, people were a lot more gullible back then,” Noelle said, turning and heading for the open doorway. “Come on. There’s still a mess upstairs and I am not hanging out here again if it’s infested with mice.”

  “I’m right behind you,” I told her, keeping an eye on the candle, which she held up in front of her. She started up the steps, but I paused at the bottom, glancing around the room one last time.

  It’s just a room, I told myself. Just like every other room at Easton.

  I lifted my foot and placed it on the first stair, and as I did I felt a light breeze against my face. I looked around. There were no openings in the stone wall. No windows anywhere, being that I was belowground. Shrugging it off, I kept walking, but at the third step, I felt it again. And by the fifth it was stronger. By the seventh it was stronger still, the wind right in my face, slowing my progress. By the tenth step, the flame of the candle in Noelle’s hands had died, and by the twelfth, I had to squint my eyes to see. When I got to the top, I slammed the door behind me, breathless.

  “Since when is that staircase a wind tunnel?” I asked.

  Noelle’s carefully brushed hair stuck out from behind her ears, and some of her bangs stood up straight on her forehead.

  “Must be that window,” Noelle said, gesturing at the pane behind the desk. The top was completely bare, as if someone had broken it, removed all the shards, and never replaced it. My insides squirmed as I stared at the bending and swaying branches of the trees outside.

  “I don’t remember that being broken before,” I said.

  “Well, it is now,” she replied casually. “Come on. Let’s clean up and get back to Pemberly. We need to talk guest list for your party.”

  “Okay.”

  I tried to sound as excited as she did, but as we walked out I took one last trembling look at the window, half expecting to see Elizabeth Williams’s ghost reaching out to me. I closed the door firmly behind me and jogged to catch up with Noelle.

  If I really wanted a life with no drama, maybe it was time I stopped walking around in the middle of the night looking for it.

  “Billings will only live on in you, Reed. You’re the only one who can set things right.”

  My breath was a white cloud in front of my face. Stars twinkled merrily through the tangle of branches overhead. I stood in the center of a small clearing in the Easton woods, wearing nothing but my Penn State T-shirt and mesh Easton Soccer shorts.

  “Billings must live on, Reed. The book of spells is real.”

  Someone was speaking, but no one was there. The voice sent a warm, familiar tingle down my spine, but not from fear. It was almost as if I recognized the delicate tones. Like I’d heard them somewhere before.

  “It’s real, and I can show you proof.”

  A sudden movement in the corner of my vision stopped my heart. A young girl, about my age, stepped out of the trees. It was as if she’d materialized out of nowhere, out of the ether, but she wasn’t a ghost. She looked solid and real and three-dimensional as she slowly, deliberately crossed the forest floor. She wore an old-fashioned dress with a blue plaid skirt and a darker blue wool jacket, the hood pulled up to cover her dark brown hair. Her eyes were green, kind of like my mother’s, and as she approached I realized she was almost my height, though far slimmer. I could have placed my hands around her tiny waist and I was sure my fingertips would have touched. She came within two feet of me, but I didn’t flinch. There was nothing threatening in her.

  “You’re very beautiful,” she said, tilting her head to one side. Her lips moved, but her voice didn’t issue from her throat. It came from all around, as if the trees held hidden surround-sound speakers. “But it’s not the most striking thing about you.”

  “What is?” I asked.

  She smiled slowly. “Oh, I think you know. And if you don’t, you will soon enough.”

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “I think you know that, too.”

  She turned with a smirk and walked over to the edge of the clearing. Elizabeth Williams. It had to be. What other specter would my subconscious conjure up for me? Because clearly that’s what t
his was—a dream. Otherwise, how had I gotten here, to the center of the Easton woods? At the foot of an ancient oak tree, she crouched, her skirts billowing before they floated to rest on the ground. Behind her, at a slight distance, the spire of the Billings Chapel hovered above the topmost limbs of the bare trees, its face stark white against the night sky.

  “Here,” she said, touching her suede-gloved fingertips to the dirt. It was untouched by the snow, canopied as it was by a web of thick branches. “Here is where we buried the books and promised never to speak of them again.” She looked up with a wry but sad smile. “Of course, promises are made to be broken.”

  “Books?” I asked. “There was more than one?”

  She nodded slowly, looking at the ground. She trailed her fingers reverently—almost lovingly—back and forth, as if she were remembering something or someone she cared for deeply.

  “Yes. The others have long since gone missing. Scattered on the four winds to places unknown.” Then she looked me in the eye. “But the book of spells, the most vital of the books, that’s in safe hands now.”

  I knelt down across from her. Although I could still see my breath and there were goose bumps visible on my skin, I didn’t feel the cold at all anymore. Nor did I feel hot. It was as if I were somewhere outside my body, and nothing that touched it mattered.

  “Why are we here?” I asked.

  “Because you are a skeptical girl, Reed Brennan. You need proof.” She lifted her hands and clasped them atop her knees. “I’ve come to tell you how to find it.”

  She said this last bit in an excited tone, as if she were a little girl proposing a new scheme. I was about to answer when my eyes flicked past her shoulder. Something had just moved, there in the trees. A figure. A girl. I was sure of it. But when I stared into the darkness broken by tree trunks and underbrush, I saw nothing.

  “Tomorrow night, you will return to this place,” Elizabeth instructed. “Bring a shovel, and a candle to light your way. If you dig in this very spot, you will find what you are looking for.”

  A shock of blond hair ducked behind one of the trees. My heart skipped and I stood up. A branch cracked. I caught a whiff of a scent—something earthy and sour—and my senses recoiled. It smelled like death. Leaves rustled. The sounds grew closer. There was someone out there. Someone moving toward us through the trees. I opened my mouth to warn Elizabeth, but suddenly my throat constricted. It was as if someone had curled their fingers around my throat and started to squeeze, but no one was there. When I tried to call out, all that I could manage was a croak.

  I waved both my hands, trying to get Elizabeth’s attention, but her head was bent toward the earth. She was stroking the ground with her fingertips again. Behind her, the branches swayed. The crunch of footsteps approaching grew louder still, but she didn’t flinch. Didn’t look up. There was no air, and I couldn’t move. Not to defend her, not to defend myself.

  Suddenly someone sprang from the underbrush and pounced on top of Elizabeth, wrestling her to the ground. A blur of blond hair and pale skin. The girl closed her fingers around Elizabeth’s neck, slammed her head into the dirt floor of the forest, and whipped her head around to glare over her shoulder at me.

  “Ariana!”

  My door banged open and I sat up straight in bed, my hand covering my heart. Ivy stood in the doorway, her hair knotted with sleep, her nightshirt falling off one shoulder. She held an aluminum softball bat over her shoulder.

  “Reed! Are you all right?”

  She pulled the bat back and looked quickly around the room, as if ready to destroy the first thing that moved.

  “Why?” I asked, trying to catch my breath.

  Her stance relaxed slightly. “Because you were just screaming about Ariana.”

  My cheeks warmed with embarrassment. But the memory of what had just happened in my dream was burned on my brain. Elizabeth Williams had been dying at the hands of Ariana Osgood. It was all so impossible, but it had seemed so real. I remembered exactly where we had been when Ariana had attacked. Just north of the Billings Chapel, at an untouched clearing in the woods.

  I glanced at Ivy’s concerned face as she lowered her bat to the floor.

  “It was just a dream,” I said.

  She sat down at the foot of my bed. “Not a good one, from the sound of it.”

  My heart still pounded fretfully. “Yeah. No.”

  “What was it?” Ivy asked, shifting slightly. “Do you remember?”

  I chewed on the inside of my cheek, drawing my knees up under my chin. I wanted to tell her about it before the details slipped from my mind. Tell her about the clearing and the spot Elizabeth had indicated. She’d probably tell me it was just a dream—that I was crazy. Which would probably be a good thing. Because would a sane person actually be considering following a dead dream-girl’s orders?

  “Ivy, there’s something I need to tell you,” I said seriously. “It’s about the BLS.”

  Ivy placed the bat aside, leaning it up against the sliver of wall between the end of my bed and my closet.

  “Okay,” she said, matching her tone to my own. “I’m listening.”

  Josh had looked at me like I was crazy more than once in our year-and-a-half-long on-and-off relationship, but never for so long, or with such complete conviction. We sat at our private table in the corner of the dining hall, while the rest of Easton Academy laughed and chowed down and checked over homework around us.

  “What?” I said finally, turning my spoon upside down to suck strawberry yogurt off of it.

  Clearing his throat, Josh shimmied forward on his chair, shoved his tray of half-eaten turkey sandwich aside, rested his elbows on the table, and leveled a dubious stare at me. One dark blond curl fell over his forehead and I smiled slightly, feeling that little tingle I felt whenever something particularly Josh happened—something only I would know was particularly Josh.

  “So let me get this straight,” he said. “After everything that’s happened on this campus—the murder, the stalking, the kidnapping—you want to go up into the woods—by yourself, in the middle of the night, based on something a ghost in a dream told you—and dig a hole?”

  Well, when he put it that way …

  “Come on. I basically have to do it,” I said, placing the spoon and yogurt cup down. “If I don’t, I’ll always wonder if there was really something there.”

  It was Ivy who had convinced me. That morning, as I’d gotten dressed, I’d railed on about how it was only a dream. And you didn’t see me running around Croton, Pennsylvania, looking for a river made of marshmallow fluff, did you? (That was a recurring dream of mine when I was in kindergarten.) No. You didn’t. Because dreams are complete insanity conjured up by our subconscious, not treasure maps to be followed in the dead of night. Ivy had listened to all of this patiently before saying the magic words—the ones I had just repeated to Josh.

  “Yeah, but if you don’t go,” she’d said, her arms crossed over her chest, “you’ll always wonder.”

  “Can I ask you something?” Josh said, dusting some cookie crumbs from the corner of his mouth. “What time did you have this little nightmare?”

  I narrowed my eyes, wondering why that could possibly matter. “Um … it was this morning. When I woke up the sun was up. Like … six thirty?”

  Josh’s green eyes widened. He picked up another cookie. “That is so weird.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “I had a nightmare this morning too, and you were in it,” he said. “I don’t remember what it was about, exactly, but when I woke up I looked at the clock and it was exactly six thirty-two.”

  I felt an eerie tingle all down my back and froze with my spoon halfway to my mouth. “Really?”

  He smirked and popped the cookie into his mouth. “No.”

  “Ugh.” I balled up my white linen napkin and chucked it at him. He ducked to the side and the napkin fell innocently to the hardwood floor behind him.

  “Okay, about this plan of yours,
can I just say … no?” Josh said. He used his napkin to wipe his mouth, then tossed it down and chugged a glass full of whole milk.

  “No?” I asked incredulously. “Since when do you tell me what I can and can’t do?”

  Josh laughed, pulling his head back and shaking it in an amused way. “Like I’d ever try. No. I wasn’t telling you no, you couldn’t go. I was telling you no, you’re not going alone.” He paused and wiped his mouth with the napkin again, this time clearing away a milk moustache. “I’ll be coming with you. As of now, I’m not letting you out of my sight for one second.”

  “Oh,” I said, feeling silly.

  “Unless you think ‘Elizabeth’ would mind,” he added, throwing in some air quotes.

  I laughed and rolled my eyes at him. “I don’t think she’d mind at all.”

  The snow on the quad was frozen solid across the top, so that the crust would hold for a moment with each step before the crunchy layer gave way and my boot sank into the softer, wet snow beneath. Every now and again, if I stepped just lightly enough, I left no footprint at all. My trail appeared as though I had played a sporadic game of hopscotch: a two-footed jump here, a one-footed hop there. The moon shone down on campus, reflecting off the otherwise smooth snow, brightening the sky and giving almost the illusion of day.

  As I approached the landscapers’ storage building on the outskirts of campus, everything was still. No night owls, no crickets, not a living thing stupid enough to be out and about and making noise. Not one except for me. And …

  “Josh?” I whispered harshly, creeping around the corner of the building, which bordered the woods. “Josh, are you—?”

  A crash loud enough to wake the dead stopped me in my tracks. I briefly considered bolting, but then the side door slowly creaked open and Josh poked his head out—along with the heads of two rather large shovels.

  “Sorry. Did I scare you?” he asked.

  “Me and half of Connecticut,” I said, glancing back at the darkened windows of Hull Hall, my hand over my heart.