The Hex Breaker's Eyes

by Shaun Tennant

  When class lets out I’m the first out the door, even though I sit near the back. I’m halfway down the hall before I hear Ashley laughing in the doorway behind me. Third period means lunchtime, and I finally head over to my locker again, hoping that Ryan will stay in class and that I won’t have to see him. I get my books put away and start heading for the cafeteria when Marlene catches up to me.

  “Where were you this morning?”

  “I went to class early,” I say. “It just sucks not having Tam around.

  “We were looking for you,” she says. “After you left yesterday, Ryan and I read through the spellbook again and we think it should have worked. We did everything right except for the prayer for protection from the Goddess, and that’s not required to actually create the potion.

  I had already thought the same thing, but obviously Marlene hadn’t considered that it’s possible the ingredients were tampered with. I decide to keep my suspicions secret since Marlene has no poker face. If she saw Ryan, he’d know right away that I was worried about him.

  “Well I haven’t seen a single hint that it worked. If there’s any magic in this town at all, I think that potion should have shown it to me, and it didn’t. So what do you want me to say?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “I just don’t want you to think that you screwed up. Don’t blame yourself. You weren’t the one who did anything wrong. I’m the one who convinced you this potion would work, and if I was wrong that’s my fault.” Marlene sounds completely depressed, and that’s when I realize that I’ve been just as sad and mopey. I shouldn’t be focused on self-pity. I should be focused on getting some answers.

  “It’s nobody’s fault. Not mine or yours. There’s only one person to blame and we should only blame them. Not ourselves,” I say.

  I don’t want to get caught up in a circle of everyone blaming themselves for what’s happening to Tam. The only person responsible is the jerk who cast the hex. I’ve been forgetting about that all night and all morning. I’ve been too busy feeling sorry for myself that I’ve forgotten to feel angry at the real culprit. I open my locker again and pull out my coat and my hat.

  “What are you doing?” she asks.

  “I’m getting out of here. I just realized it’s been too long since I hung out with my best friend.”

  “You’re skipping the afternoon?” she says, sounding shocked.

  “Yes, Marlene. I’m skipping class.”

  Marlene looks baffled for a moment, like the idea of not attending class is impossible to comprehend. Then she nods and says “Wait for me. I’m skipping too.”

  It’s a long, cold walk down Main Street to the hospital, and Marlene seems skittish, as if she thinks being out on the town during school hours is a felony offence. We don’t say much. We just keep our heads down so the wind doesn’t freeze our faces and we march across the town.

  In the hallway on the second floor of the hospital, we see Tam’s mom at the vending machine.

  “Oh, have you girls come to visit?” she says, smiling a bit.

  “Yes, but it’s our lunch hour. We’re not skipping school,” Marlene blurts.

  “I won’t tell,” she says. “Tammy’s in room two-twelve.” Nobody but Tam’s mom is ever allowed to call her Tammy. Tam hates it. But I haven’t heard it in a while, and I actually smile a bit as we head into the room.

  Tam’s propped up in bed, watching the TV that’s hanging from the wall. In a second bed by the window there’s an older lady who Tam’s sharing the room with, also watching the TV. I guess we’ll have an audience for this conversation.

  Tam is looking OK. Her arm is still in a sling and her hair’s a mess, but she seems fine. Other than the blue aura that still covers her, that is.

  “Hey,” I say as we enter.

  “Hi,” she says, happy to see us. “Skipping school, Marlene?”

  Marlene blushes. “Peer pressure!”

  “So what happened?” Tam asks. “Ryan told me you guys went to the city for some supplies. Did you try it?” She’s obviously trying to talk in vague, non-magical terms so the lady in the other bed doesn’t realize what we’re talking about.

  “We tried it yesterday,” I say “Didn’t work.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing happened. No effect.”

  Tam’s face darkens with disappointment. “I thought the book said...”

  “I know. We did too. But it didn’t happen. I’m sorry.” I’m not sure what to say.

  “I’m the one who should be sorry. I got everyone’s hopes up for nothing,” Marlene says. “Have the doctors found anything?”

  Tam shakes her head. “It’s nothing they can help. They’ll probably send me home tomorrow if nothing changes.”

  “Has it gotten any worse?” I ask.

  “Same. It’s like my hand and leg just stopped talking to my brain. Network connection error.”

  “Dina and Sydney got suspended for that fight. Neither one was at school today.” I hope changing the subject will get our minds off things a bit.

  “Good. I don’t like either one of ‘em.” Tam smiles a little, but I can tell she’s trying to look happy for our sakes.

  Marlene pulls up a chair and sits down, opening her bulky coat a little. I don’t see another chair on this side of the room, So I stand.

  “There’s a chair over here,” says the older lady in the other bed. You can use that.”

  “This is Phyllis,” Tam says. “She had some stomach surgery two days ago. She’s rocking the liquid diet hardcore.”

  “Sounds like fun,” I joke. I head over to the far side of the room and take the chair from the other side of Phyllis’s bed. While I’m trying to lift the chair without knocking anything over, I look at Tam and see something strange.

  Under Tam’s bed there is a small and very, very faint blob of blue light. It’s so pale I can hardly see it, but it’s there. It’s not connected to Tam’s hex, but rather a paler version of the same blue light, floating beneath her but separate from her hex.

  “Marlene,” I say. “Turn the light off for a second.”

  Phyllis objects, but Marlene does what I ask, and in the dark I can see the light a little better. The blob of blue is floating under the bed, and then it floats downward like it’s being pulled by gravity, and begins to pass through the floor. A few seconds later, a new blob of blue starts to droop down from Tam’s blue aura, and I watch as this little ball of light separates from the aura like a drop of water.

  “What is it?” Tam asks.

  “I think the potion worked.”

  “What?”

  “It worked.”

  Phyllis looks at me like I’m a babbling idiot. “Can you turn the damn lights on?”

  I leave the chair where it is and rush over to Tam. “It worked. I can see a trail. A series of little blue lights that are trailing away from you. I think it’s what powers the hex.”

  “The what that powers the what?” Phyllis asks.

  Tam yells at her, “God, Phyllis, keep up!”

  “I can see it, and that means I can follow it back to the source!” I smile at Tam and wave at Marlene to follow me, and then rush out into the hall. We head past Tam’s mom and I don’t stop, just shout over my shoulder. “Tammy’s going to be OK.”

  I take the stairs down to the ground floor, and find room one-twelve, right below Tam. It’s an administrative office, but I ignore that and barge inside, startling the lady who’s working at a desk in the office. I stare at the ceiling, and can see a hint of blue.

  “Can I help you?” the office lady asks. I don’t answer, just turn off her lights so I can see the blue magic better. There are four of those blue lights in here, forming a straight line through the wall to the outside.

  “Outside,” I say to Marlene, and we run off, leaving that lady at her desk, confused and in the dark.

  We get outside and follow the wall until I can see one of those blue orbs pushing its way into the hospital wall. “There�
�s a trail of them,” I say to Marlene. “A trail leading directly to Tam. And I bet the source of the trail is either the talisman or the witch. We just have to follow it.”

  I point at the blue, and then try to follow the trail of lights, and right away I hit a serious problem. The little blue lights are pale blue, and I’m trying to see them against a daytime sky. Other than the one that’s halfway inside the brick wall, I can’t detect a single one.

  “What?” Marlene asks, when she sees the disappointed look on my face.

  “The light is blue. Pale blue.” I point at the sky. “Sky blue. I can’t see it anymore.”

  We have to wait for it to get dark, and hope that the potion will continue to be strong enough that I can still see the trail. We head upstairs to let Tam know that we’ll track this thing after dark, and then we leave.

  We decide to go back to school for the last class of the day, so we only missed lunch and fourth period in our escape to the hospital. When I get home I find a message on the answering machine from the school, informing my dad that I was absent from class. I decide to delete the message so he won’t know. I can’t afford to be grounded when I need to go to the hospital tonight.

  Just as the sun is touching the horizon, I get a call. Tam’s being sent home from the hospital. I tell her we’ll just have to track the trail from her house now, and call Marlene to let her know.

  We meet outside of Tam’s house after dinner. It’s quite dark now, and we’re bundled up against the cold. I head inside, telling her folks that we’re visiting Tam for a moment, when really I just want to see what direction the trail is flowing. Tam seems happier to be in her own bed again. “I’ll have so much free time to watch TV now that I’m super crippled,” she jokes. “I’m starting to wish you really did have brain cancer.”

  “Oh, shut up, Tammy,” I say, flipping the light switch.

  I can see the blue orbs again, flowing down and away from Tam in an almost perfect straight line. They head out through the back wall of her house, heading north. I point the direction so Marlene knows, and promise Tam that we’ll stop this thing before it spreads.

  Outside, we run around the back of Tam’s house, where I look up to see a line of blue orbs sticking out of the wall, and floating over the yard. The orbs pass over the neighbour’s yard and into their house.

  “Next street over,” I say. We have to go back to the sidewalk and run around, since I don’t feel like climbing a fence into some stranger’s yard right now. I wish the streetlights weren’t so bright because they drown out the pale orbs of light, but once we get close I can see the blue trail again. They emerge from the neighbour’s house, a little closer to the ground, and run across the street. I let my eyes adjust a little, and I’m able see that there’s a slight curve to the blue line, so it doesn’t run completely straight back to its destination. We’ll just have to follow it.

  We cut through a few more streets before we find a house where the line of blue light goes in one wall, but does not come out the other side. Somewhere inside this house, the blue line stops.

  I know this house. This is where Sydney lives.

  “Isn’t that—?” Marlene starts to say.

  “Sydney’s house. Which has an alarm now.” I don’t really want to get arrested tonight, but I don’t know a polite way to ask Mrs. Leave My Daughter Alone if we can search her house for magic blue light.

  Marlene’s phone rings. It’s Tam. Marlene puts her on speaker.

  “What’s up?” I ask.

  “My other foot just died. I was walking on crutches and just collapsed. I think I might have broken my arm but the whole arm has no feeling so I’m not sure.” She sounds terrified, but manages to turn the fear into anger and mutters “That damn fortune teller...”

  “Crap,” I whisper.

  She lets out a wail of frustration and anguish, like an animal trapped in a cage. “I’m getting really tired too. It’s like I can’t find any energy.” She says something else, but she’s too far from the phone for me to make it out. Then she comes back. “My mom’s running me back to the hospital, guys. If there’s anything you can do, maybe like, get on it!”

  “We will,” I say. Tam’s mother and father are in the background, telling her to hang up.

  “Gotta go,” she says.

  “Stay strong,” says Marlene.

  “We love you,” I say. Tam hangs up.

  I look at the line of blue lights heading into the house and know that we have to get inside. It would be easy to work up the nerve to break into an empty house, or even if we knew that the only person home was Sydney. Unfortunately, there are three cars in the driveway, so the house is busy. I don’t know how many people are in her family, but several of them are home right now.

  “We need to get inside and follow those lights back to the talisman,” I say.

  “How?” Marlene says.

  The line of blue lights shifts a little, swinging to the side, and I realize that Tam must be in a car moving through town now, so the tether to her body is swinging away.

  “We’re going right in the front door. I don’t care if we get arrested. I don’t care if they get in my way. I’m smashing that talisman.” I look at Marlene, who is so quiet, so nice. She never even skipped a class before today, and now we might be walking into a situation where we have to punch someone to get through. “You can stay out here,” I tell her.

  She nods, but after a second, she says “I’m coming with you. I won’t let Tam get any worse.”

  We walk up to the front door and Marlene reaches for the doorbell. I hold her hand back and shake my head. I grab the knob and turn it. The house is unlocked. “When I point to something,” I say, “smash it.”

  I open the door, and we barge inside like it’s a police raid. Immediately, we’re hit by a wall of heat.

  The house is lit up by candles. Everywhere along the main hallway and through the living room, hundreds of candles, most of them made from black wax, are burning. It’s as bright as any house I’ve been into, but there are no electric lights turned on. It’s all lit by flame. As the door opens I can hear voices joined together in a rhythmic chant, but the voices go silent when I step into the house. All of the candles are so warm it’s like standing beside a fireplace. The house smells of candle smoke, like a child’s birthday party, but beneath that there’s a smell of something pungent; sulphur or burnt hair or rotting eggs. As I step past the entranceway I see three women in the front room. They are seated cross-legged on the floor, arms out to their sides, holding hands to create a circle with their arms. In the middle of the circle is a small round table, just an Ikea end table or something similar, which is covered in designs drawn by pouring coloured powders across is surface. Resting on this table is a single object, a small clay pot with its lid removed, and the line of blue lights heads straight into the mouth of this little urn. I see one of the lights disappear into it and vanish, not to come out the other side.

  I realize now that the blue lights coming from Tam to the urn don’t simply tie her to the hex. The blue light is Tam. The urn is draining her, taking her piece by piece. The witches are sucking the life right out of her and storing it in this little urn.

  One of the women, the only one I recognize, is Sydney’s mother. When she sees me, her eyes go wide and she screams. I see the red colour of her irises has gotten brighter, and now her eyes glow with the colour of fire. When I met her at school, I thought her red eyes were just a rare eye colour, a disorder of pigmentation, but that’s not true. She must have normal, brown eyes to anyone else. It was my gift that made me see those eyes as red. She glows, just like a hex victim, but her glow isn’t floating outside her body, her red light comes from within. I’ve heard people say that eyes are a window to the soul and now I understand why. This woman is filled with power, and unlike a hex that sticks to you from outside, her power flows inside of her, and only I can see it, and only through her eyes.

  The other women turn around to look at Marlene and
I, and neither of them have similar glowing eyes. I assume that because Sydney’s mother is the only one with the bright eyes, she must have the most power.

  The two nearest women climb to their feet and run at us, screaming as they come. The first one, who has short, spiky red hair, grabs me by the shoulder with one hand, while her other hand grabs at my face, her fingernails digging into my forehead. I scream back, and swing my elbow at her face, clipping her jaw. The woman is knocked a little back, her hand releasing my face, and I lean my weight into her, shoving her into the doorframe. The other witch, who has long grey hair but a relatively youthful face, actually hisses at Marlene when she runs at us. Marlene is completely shocked by all of this, paralyzed by that shock, and the woman punches little Marlie in the belly before grabbing her by the hair. I shove past the redhead and toward the little round table. It’s only a few steps away, but Sydney’s mother is there to protect it. She grabs at me, and pulls a hair or two out of my head. She speaks in Latin so fast it sounds like one long word, while her hand is spooling my hair around something in her hand. Before I even reach the little table, Sydney’s mother stops talking and waves her hand at me in a wild theatrical gesture. It would seem laughable, like a mime playing a witch, except for the effect she has. As soon as she swings that hand up, my feet leave the floor and I can’t move toward the table. I’m floating a foot off the ground while Sydney’s mother calmly watches me, eyes flashing with crimson fire.

  I turn to see that the redhead and the grey-haired woman are both holding Marlene now, each holding one of her arms and a handful of hair. The redhead tugs a few hairs from Marlene’s head and hands them to Sydney’s mother, who begins to spool them around another tiny little talisman she produces from her pocket. Marlene screams for help, but Sydney’s mother whispers another hex and Marlene’s voice cracks and sputters, and soon she’s only mouthing words but making no sounds. I see the hex flow from Sydney’s mother, a little red stream of light, which ties itself around Marlene’s neck like a collar. The connection to Sydney’s mom fades to a dull line, but I can still see it, thanks to the lingering effect of the potion. There’s probably another hex on me, making me fly, but since there are no mirrors around, I can’t see it.