The Hex Breaker's Eyes

by Shaun Tennant

  “I got your friend,” I scream through the open door. “I got the bitch and you can have her back if you let me out of here!”

  There’s a scraping sound like a chair pulled back from a table, and then I hear footsteps. First Sydney’s mother appears outside my door, then the redhead. My eyes have adjusted to the light enough that I can see outside the door. I’m in an unfinished basement: cement floors, stud walls, boxes of junk lying around. The two women stand at the bottom of the stairs and look back at me, and what they see is a crazed, defiant girl crouching over their friend like a primate over a fresh kill. “You toss me the keys, I let myself out and once I’m gone you can have your friend back. That’s the deal.”

  “We don’t have the keys,” Sydney’s mother says. Oh, please. Like I’d believe that.

  “Then how’d I get locked up in here? You have magic padlocks too?”

  “Just let her go,” the redhead says. “Or you’ll be sorry.”

  “Maybe I’ll hit her in the head again,” I say. “Harder this time.” I know that these selfish, crazy old bats will not listen if I beg for mercy, but maybe threatening to kill one of their coven sisters will make them reconsider keeping me hostage.

  “OK,” Sydney’s mother calls. “We’ll give you the keys. Just don’t hurt her again.”

  Both women approach the door of my makeshift prison cell, and Helen reaches into her pocket, pulling out a small set of keys.

  “Just throw them to me and stay away.”

  “I can’t do that,” she says. “You’ll lose the keys in the dark. Just let me hand it to you.”

  “Only you. The other one can stay back.”

  She nods, and the redhead takes a step back. I hold out my hand for the keys, straining against the wrist straps. I feel the small keys, warm from all their time in Helen’s pocket, rest in my palm. And then she seizes my wrist and twists it. The redhead rushes me, grabbing me by the hair. I get out a high-pitched scream that I hope the neighbours will hear, and then I’m fading. She must have given me something.

  So weak...

  20

  I’m still in the little room in basement when I wake up, but I’m alone now. They’ve tied me up, my hands behind my back, bound at the wrists, but at least I’m not chained to the wall anymore. I pull myself to my knees, then to my feet, standing erect for the first time in days.

  How can I still be here, still captive? Aren’t the police looking for me? Marlene must be screaming at the cops, telling them that I’m at this house, and that they need to get in here and find me. It doesn’t make any sense. Could these women possibly be so powerful as to make the entire town forget that I’m missing?

  I stand on my tip-toes, feeling my calf muscles stretch for the first time in a long while. My whole body is sore from lying on that cold cement for so long. They’ve limited my ability to attack them by taking my hands away, but by untying me from the wall they’ve given me a great gift; the ability to stand. I lean on the back wall, feeling for the metal hooks that my chains were attached to. I feel around, up and down the wall, and can’t find them. Maybe I’ve got the wrong wall? No, that would make no sense. I was always facing the door. Perhaps they pulled out the hooks and patched the wall, or used some kind of magic to repair it.

  Or maybe while I was unconscious, they moved me to a new house, a new basement, a new prison. They could have felt that the police would eventually search Helen’s house, so they moved me somewhere else. I think I remember Helen threatening to lock me up at a country house. This could be it. Another small, windowless room, but without the fear of nosy neighbours hearing my screams. If that’s true, if they really have taken me to some new location outside Blue Ribbon, then the police will never find me.

  I’m on my own.

  I walk around my tiny room, bouncing off each wall to test it out. Two of my walls are cement. Two are just ordinary drywall. I know that the sound will draw attention, but I start to kick at one of those walls anyway. Standing with my back to the wall, I kick backwards, knocking at the drywall with my heel. It takes a few kicks before I discover just how hard I can strike before it hurts my foot, but soon I’m breaking through, knocking out chunks of the wall.

  I hear a key in a lock, and the door opens. It’s the redhead again. “What do you think you’re doing, Mindee?” she scolds me. “Don’t make me knock you out. It’s much harder if we have to keep you unconscious on top of everything else.”

  “I’m not going to stop,” I say. “You might be able to kill me, but you can’t keep me here while I’m alive. I’ll find a way out.”

  “You won’t make it three steps before Helen floats you back here. The only reason you’re not floating right now is that it’s tiring to work that kind of emotional mojo. But if we have to, we will. So just sit down, wait for your food and stop making noise. You would have a better time if you just learn to behave.”

  “OK,” I say. “I’ll leave the walls alone.” She’s about to say some sarcastic comment, when I break her complacency by rushing at her full-speed. I put my head down and aim to collide with her as hard as I can. But then she whispers Latin and suddenly I’m not on the ground any more. I’m six inches off the floor, my feet kicking under me but not actually stepping. In fact, I’m moving backward, away from the door.

  “I warned you,” the redhead says. “Now you’ll have to pay.”

  She slams the door, and only after the lock clicks does the floating spell end, dropping me to the floor. I don’t even know I’m falling until the floor hits my feet, so I roll my ankle and fall to the floor in a heap.

  They must have done something to me. Some new hex I’ve never seen before. Something to create pain. Because as soon as the floating hex was removed, my whole body began to ache. And now, lying on the floor, it feels like my bones are too big for my body. Every joint is screaming, every tooth feels broken, every nerve ending sending electric jolts to my brain. I weep, but I can’t even properly cry because the hard breaths only burn my lungs. So I lay there, curl up in the fetal position, and endure the agony. It’s pain like I’ve never felt. It feels like every millimetre of my skin is on fire, like I’m covered in napalm.

  I wake up and the door’s open again. Sometime, after I passed out from the agony, the fire and the pain ended, and I can move again. No lights are on out there, but it’s a little brighter than this room, and my dark-adjusted eyes can see the difference. There’s a person in here with me, crouching beside me, gently shaking me to wake up. I pull away at first, terrified that she’s come to cause me more pain.

  “Shh,” my visitor whispers. “It’s OK.”

  My eyes are seeing static in this darkness, but I can make out enough of her to see who has come. “Sydney?” I ask. “Is that you?”

  “Shh. Quiet.” Sydney actually smiles a little and I can see her white teeth in the darkness. “I’ve been trying to see you for three days but this is the first time they’ve all been asleep.”

  “Where am I? What’s going on?”

  “You’re at the farm. My mother’s family’s old house. They’ve been hiding you here.”

  “I have to get out. They’re going to kill me in here,” I tell her. “I know you don’t want that. I know that you aren’t a killer.”

  Sydney nods. “They’re too powerful. I can’t do anything to stop them.”

  “Just cut me loose. I’ll find my own way.” I get up on my knees, my hands turning to pins and needles behind my back. They must have gone to sleep while I was curled up on the floor.

  “It’s minus twenty outside, and you have no idea where we are.”

  “Just get me out of here, I’ll get to somewhere safe,” I hear my voice break up as I beg, and realize that I may have given up hope of survival if Sydney hadn’t come down for this visit. “Please, don’t let them kill me.”

  “Letting you go won’t change that. They can drain your life from anywhere.”

  “We have to try. You don’t want to watch me die, do you? Will your
mother make you dig my grave?”

  Sydney slumps, shaking her head. “There’s no way. . .” she looks back at me again, and perks up. If my second sight showed ideas, I’d be seeing a light bulb over her head right now. “I’ll be back,” she says. “Stay quiet. Don’t wake anyone up.” She gets up and heads for the door, closing it behind herself and locking me in. I want to scream, but I do what she said, and I wait for her return in silence.

  Sydney comes back after about five minutes, slinking down the stairs so quietly even I don’t hear her. She opens my door again and slips into my cell. She’s hiding her hands behind her back, keeping something from my sight. “There is one way you can be free. One way we can both be free.”

  “Anything,” I say. “Anything.”

  She comes even closer, whispering, “You have to understand. I’ve been my mother’s hostage my whole life. I’ve been locked down here, subjected to all manner of curses. I’ve had my blood drained for their rituals.”

  “So...?” I don’t know what she wants from me.

  “Long ago, I took rites that make me my mother’s servant. She is the coven leader, the other two are apprentices, and I’m merely a slave to them. I did everything I could to uphold that. I took part in their rituals, I tried to have the perfect outward life so nobody would ever know that witchcraft exists. I built a whole life around my mother.”

  “Sydney,” I whisper.

  “Shh. The whole time, all I wanted was to get out, but I can’t. I can’t escape after all the rites I’ve taken, all the blood-oaths I gave. I could never kill her.”

  “What?”

  Sydney pulls her hands from behind her back, and shows me what she’s brought. It’s a dagger, made from black rock, with a red jewel embedded in the end of the handle.

  “If we want to be free of her, no matter where we go, then she has to die.” Sydney spins me around, grabs the straps around my wrists, and cuts them away. That black blade must be incredibly sharp to slice the leather so easily. Once my hands are free, she spins me around to face her again.

  “I can’t betray her like that, it’s impossible.” She places the dagger’s handle in my palm, and closes my fingers around it. “But you can. You can kill her.”

  I can’t believe that this is happening. Sydney’s offering me a way out but at a cost I can’t even process. Kill someone to save myself? I couldn’t possibly do that. But then again, if I run away, what’s to stop Helen from hexing me and draining my life anyway? I could still end up dead, and so could all of my friends. Maybe, to protect them, this has to be done.

  The dagger feels so light in my hand, like it’s barely there at all. The whole thing, blade and handle, is carved from a single piece of some kind of rock. The jewel is embedded at the very bottom of the handle, and somehow, the jewel feels warm to the touch. I touch the fingers of my left hand to the blade, and discover that it’s razor sharp.

  “Where did you get this?”

  “If we had a gun or a kitchen knife I would have brought that, but nobody lives here anymore. There aren’t any regular knives, just magic stuff from all the rituals they do. That’s the only thing I could find.”

  She takes her hands off of mine, and I’m holding the dagger all on my own now. Somehow, this thing feels sort of natural, like an extension of myself. It’s not cold, or heavy, or off-balance. It just fits my hand perfectly.

  “Let’s go,” Sydney says.

  Leaving behind the straps that bound me, I leave the tiny little prison cell, and for the first time in days, I can see farther than a few feet away. It’s so strange that something as simple as peering down a basement hallway feels like freedom, but after all that time spent locked in a little eight by six room, it’s like I finally have my eyes back.

  The hallway leads down to some kind of large fruit cellar, but we’re not going that way. Sydney leads me toward the stairs. This is an old farmhouse, and the bare foundations radiate cold out here more than they did inside my little cell. I guess maybe my body heat was keeping that small space warmer than it would otherwise be. We begin to quietly slip up the stairs. The risers are just bare wooden boards, and even though we’re both in sock feet, our steps make noise because the wood creaks and groans underfoot. Sydney opens the door to the ground floor, and light floods in on us. There are no electric lights on, not even so much as a candle, but after days in that windowless cell, just the moonlight through the windows looks like floodlights to me. As I step through the doorway and into the old country home, the world seems coldly beautiful. Outside, the sky is cloudless, allowing the full moon to shine down like a pale sun, its light amplified and reflected by the perfect, untouched snow in the fields outside. We emerge from the staircase into a large room, where one side is kitchen, and one side living room. There are still signs of life here, but it’s obvious nobody really lives in this house. The kitchen has an old stove, but there’s an empty gap between cabinets where a fridge should be. Many cabinets and drawers are open, revealing that there’s nothing much inside. Perhaps they’re open because Sydney was searching for a knife, or maybe they’re just always like that. In the kitchen, a garbage bag and packages of paper plates and plastic forks are the only signs of the women who have been keeping me hostage.

  In the living room, it’s a different story. The walls are painted with symbols, including pentagrams, hieroglyphs, and several circles. There’s no furniture to get in the way, so the empty floor is covered in several concentric circles. Some of the circles are painted on, while the smallest looks like it was created by pouring salt on the floor. In the middle of the ring of salt is a plate, holding a blob of reddish clay about the size of a fist.

  “That’s the clay they’ll shape into a new urn. First they have to add the last few ingredients and incantations, before it’s ready to be shaped and fired. In another day or so, they’ll be able to drain your life away,” Sydney whispers when she sees where I’m looking. “If you leave them alone, if you let them live, they’ll just kill you anyway.”

  “I could take it with me, get rid of it,” I say about the ball of clay, stepping towards it.

  “Don’t go close. It’s protected by a sacred circle. If you breach it, they’ll know. And it would only take another week or so for them to replace it anyway.” She places her hands over my right hand, making me squeeze the dagger’s handle. “This is the only way your friends will ever be safe.”

  She pulls me by the hand, leading me across the kitchen and to the bottom of another staircase. These steps lead up to the top floor, to the bedrooms where my would-be-killers are sleeping. Sydney lets me go, and guides me to take the first step. She slips around behind me, her hands on my back pushing me up the stairs. I know she’s right, that the only true way to ensure that we’re safe is to get rid of these witches, but my feet just don’t want to take the steps. I’m not scared. I know they’re sleeping, that with the blade in my hands, I’m the one in the position of power right now. It’s just that I’ve never had to do anything like this. It’s one thing to know that it’s necessary; it’s another to actually kill someone.

  “You have to get my mother first. She’s the most powerful. Once she’s gone, the others will be easier.”

  We reach the top of the steps, and before me there’s a hallway with five doors. Four of the doors are closed, and one—the bathroom—is half-open. Nothing up here makes a sound. Sydney pushes me past the first few doors, all the way to the end of the hall. The master bedroom. She turns the knob and swings the door open. I was worried an old door would creak, but it swings in perfect silence. Inside, the moon peeks through the blind, drawing horizontal lines on the floor. The room is sparse, containing only an old dresser and double bed, where Helen sleeps. There’s a duffel bag of clothes in one corner, and a few pieces of art on the walls, but I can tell that this isn’t a place where anybody normally lives. I walk into the bedroom, and stand at the foot of the bed, looking down on the sleeping form of the woman who is trying to kill me.

&
nbsp; “Don’t think about it. Just kill her,” Sydney whispers in my ear.

  I wish I was stronger, but still I hesitate. I look away, not wanting to look at Sydney or at her toxic mother, and something catches my eye. In the darkness, I’m seeing everything in virtual black and white and shades of silver, but when I turn my head I see a glimpse of bright yellow. I look closer, and it’s a mirror. In this whole house, in all the darkness, one thing shines brightly.

  Me.

  In the mirror, I can see the hex that flows all around me, a yellow flourish of light that looks like someone shining a golden beam of light through a thick fog.

  “I’m hexed,” I say.

  Sydney leans around me and sees the mirror. “Well of course you are,” she says. “They had to keep you weak and tired, keep you from making too much noise. I bet you’ve spent most of the last four days sleeping, haven’t you?”

  I don’t know how many times I’ve slept, or for how long. In the perpetual night of the prison cell, there was no way to know. “I guess so,” I say.

  “So why are you surprised? You made three powerful witches target you. It would be a shock if you weren’t hexed.” She touches my right hand again. “Don’t get sidetracked. We have to act before they wake.”

  “We should find the talisman,” I say. “Break the hex. I mean, break this one before I…”

  “There is no talisman,” she says. “My mother has grown beyond the need to channel her emotions through magical objects. The only way you’ll ever break the curse is to stop her from willing it. You have to destroy her.”