“Unfortunately, while this is a very difficult thing to do, not to mention profane and corrupt beyond words, Cat discovered that it was not, in fact, impossible.”
Charlie watched as Cat walked to the edge of the woods near her house, spread her arms wide, and begin to sing a sad wordless melody.
Within minutes a large raccoon came crawling from the forest, low to the ground and quivering, as if trying to to resist the song’s enchantment. Just as it reached Cat’s feet, she pulled a hunting knife from her coat pocket and drove it through the beast’s back, killing it instantly. Unable to look away, Charlie was forced to watch her carry its body into her home, throw it flat on her kitchen counter, and with the same knife, saw off its head, which she then skinned and cleaned until its skull emerged, small, white and hollow.
“Cat had created a vile witch’s receptacle, a crucial tool for her plan.
“Without bothering to wash up after butchering the raccoon, Cat telephoned Miriam and invited her to her home under the pretense of giving the woman a warning about Tom.”
The scene changed to the living room of the witch’s small home. Cat stood facing Miriam, who looked uncomfortable and confused by the blood covering her hostess and the kitchen counter. Cat leaned in to her as if to tell her a secret but instead began to sing the same melody into the woman’s ear.
Charlie watched as a small wisp of white vapor emerged from Miriam’s body while the shocked look on Miriam’s face changed to a vacant expression. Raising one hand in the air, Cat coaxed the vapory substance, the way a child plays with a soap bubble using a plastic wand, down and into the raccoon skull.
Acting quickly, she mumbled quiet Words, whispering her own life force free into the air between the two women, then guided it until it entered and inhabited the rigid shell of Miriam’s body. Through new eyes, she watched as her own form slumped to the floor, red hair spilling everywhere. She quickly dragged the body into a sitting position in the rocking chair, then fled the house in anticipation.
“Using Miriam’s body, Cat deceived Tom into believing that she was his young fiancée and spent several days and nights with him in borrowed bliss.”
A montage of scenes flashed before Charlie’s eyes: the young couple holding hands and laughing as they walked together in town, eating fried fish at a local restaurant, pressing their bodies against each other as they kissed on a couch in Tom’s house.
“But for all of Cat’s strength and ability, she lacked focus and control as well as the experience needed to maintain her trickery.”
Charlie saw Tom extract himself from Cat’s embrace and sit up on the couch, staring in confusion at the person he thought was Miriam. Soon the young man and woman began to yell and shout at each other. At one point Miriam/Cat screamed in frustration, then reached out and struck Tom across the face. With his hand holding onto his cheek, the man stood still and stared at the woman, who returned his gaze with a look of shock. Striking Tom seemed to snap Cat out of her obsessive mindset. She looked around her as if discovering for the first time where she was and what was truly going on. Without a word of explanation, she fled Tom’s house.
“Horrified at what she had done, she forced Miriam’s body to race home, hoping to repair any damage she might have caused. But once there she discovered her own body, rigid and lifeless in the rocking chair, next to the cold fireplace. Most human bodies cannot survive more than a few hours without an internal life force. Cat had vacated her own for days. There was no life left to which she could return.
“With only one able body remaining and no witch available to help her revive her own form or reverse her nefarious spell, she panicked. Picking up the raccoon skull, she released Miriam’s life force and impelled it back into her body.
“Had the young witch stopped to consider her actions, she might have realized the impossibility of two people trying to inhabit one body. The human mind is a complex protective entity. Just as a physical body creates an immune response when it is invaded, the mind reacts similarly. Two human minds, two life forces thrust together in the same physical form, simply cannot coexist. Miriam’s and Cat’s essences attacked each other, forcing the structure holding the two of them together to crumble.”
Charlie watched as Miriam’s body ran helter-skelter inside the cottage, screaming, crashing into walls, throwing things. It slapped and shook Cat’s lifeless form, trying to will it to live.
Cat’s body slumped forward and fell off the chair, while Miriam’s body, filled with two competing life forces, fell to the floor and writhed.
The scene changed again. In a small hospital room, Tom sat on a chair next to a bed where Miriam’s body lay. Several tubes were attached to places on the woman’s arms. Her mouth lay open and her eyes stared out the window, seeing nothing. Occasionally, her body shuddered. Several doctors and nurses came and went, making notes on clipboards and shaking their heads.
“After interviewing Tom, the police concluded that Miriam had run off to Cat’s house in the middle of the night and murdered her, though motive, as well as cause of death, remained unknown. It was assumed that the murder had driven the young Miriam mad. After a week in the hospital, Miriam’s body expired, unable to withstand the war being waged inside it.”
Now Charlie watched as Tom, looking haggard and grief-ridden, walked around the grounds of Cat’s home on a cold gray afternoon. Boards sealed the windows shut while weeds overran the garden. Then the scene changed. Sunlight shone on what appeared to be a spring day. A cleaning crew removed the last bit of debris from the newly repaired storage shed outside of Cat’s home. A smartly dressed older gentleman pounded a for sale sign in Cat’s yard, then got in his car and drove away.
The flames of the campfire grew brighter, and Charlie found himself once again back on Malcolm’s patio. Several of the WITs were crying, including Jenna. A couple of the adults wiped at their eyes and blew their noses.
“I wish this story were fable. But it really did happen. I tell it to you today to remind you,” Rose said, looking each of the young witches in the eye, “that with authority comes responsibility. Cat gained great authority, great power, an ability to do things that were previously unimaginable to her. But she lacked the personal responsibility and fortitude to do no harm, to maintain her concern for other people’s welfare over her own desires.
“I tell you this story because Cat was a fine young woman, with a sense of decency. She cared for her fellow humans. She was not a bad person with evil motivations. But she had no guidance, no one with whom to share her concerns, her fears, even her ideas. Unchecked, she made a series of decisions that led to utter devastation for three people, not to mention Tom’s and Miriam’s families.
“In the coming days, weeks, months, even years,” she continued, “ you will find yourselves in situations where it might seem like a good idea to use your abilities for your own personal gain or maybe to help or hinder the gain of another. The consequences of such ideas, such choices, are far more widespread and potentially damaging than you can possibly imagine. I urge each and every one of you to listen to Malcolm and heed his lessons well, to practice what you have learned in safe supervised environments, with your family as well as other adults in the community, and to only use your legacy for the benefit of the whole world, not just for your own personal advancement. Remember, the ends never justify the means.”
“But wait,” said Little M, where he sat near his mother. He was close to tears but doing his best to choke them back. “Didn’t she, couldn’t Cat use the craft to, to … make everything back like it was?” he asked. His mother rubbed his back. Charlie looked away, unable to bear the expression of heartbreak on the young boy’s face.
“No, Malcolm, she couldn’t,” his mother said. “Some things can’t be undone.” The boy buried his head in his mother’s side and cried.
Rose looked at several of the young witches one more time, then sat down. The people gathered around the campfire stayed quiet, sobered by the story of Cat a
nd the inadvertent devastation she had caused.
Eventually Malcolm stood up and announced that it was time for bed. There would be much more to learn the next day, he explained, and Rose’s story deserved to be pondered.
As the adults cleaned up the s’mores supplies, Charlie followed the other kids, ready to go to bed. But a hand on his shoulder stopped him.
“Can I talk to you for a second?” It was Malcolm, eyes shining in the firelight as he looked down at Charlie.
They walked to the far end of the patio and sat down. A light rain had begun to fall. Malcolm looked up at the sky.
“Quite a story, huh?” Malcolm asked. Charlie nodded, still haunted by Rose’s images. “This won’t take long. I want you to stay dry.”
He smiled at Charlie and looked into his eyes as if searching for something.
“Kid, you did it. You really found a way to make peace with your heart, or at least enough to kick us off today. Well done.”
“Thank you.”
“How’d you do it?”
Charlie looked at the flames for a while not sure how to explain what he had figured out. Then he remembered his conversation with Rose at dinner.
“I guess I realized that I had to stop saying the Words and instead let them say themselves, through my mouth, you know? It felt really weird, but right, too, when the Words started making my lips move.”
Malcolm nodded. “Yep, that’s part of the trick, isn’t it? But that isn’t what I was talking about. I meant that you figured out something about the conflict inside of you, didn’t you? About that boy?”
Charlie looked away, feeling embarrassed. As usual, there wasn’t anything clear inside his head to say. But he knew that Malcolm expected something from him.
“I thought a lot about what you said, about not being able to be one person while hiding another part of myself. I didn’t know what to do about any of it. But that boy, he sort of, uh, he brought it up.”
“What do you mean?”
“He asked me if I liked him. You know, in that way? I wasn’t sure. I mean, I thought I did. Or I think I do. But it all felt so confusing.”
“So what happened?”
Charlie didn’t want to say more. He wanted to run away instead of having this conversation with a man who was still a relative stranger. But he felt sobered by Rose’s story and was tired of playing at hide-and-seek. Additionally, he had begun to trust Malcolm, with his consistent encouragement and the no-nonsense way he talked. Charlie figured he could be no-nonsense too.
“He kissed me.”
“Wow, kid. Are congratulations in order?”
“I don’t think so. I didn’t really want it to happen.”
“He forced himself on you?”
“What? No, nothing like that. He didn’t understand me, and I think he thought I wanted to. The thing is, I kissed him back. Later. In the park. A lot.”
“Oh.”
Charlie turned his head, unable to look Malcolm in the eye.
“It’s okay, Charlie. It really is. You acted on your heart, and you have the guts to tell me about it now. Your honesty will help you go far, kid.”
“Really? You don’t think that I’m, like, gross? Or weird?”
“Of course not. Who knows why we like what we like? Look at us, a pack of witches, kings and queens of the air. And we can’t figure it out either. I think we’re all pretty clueless when it comes to this stuff. So if anyone tells you what you’re doing is wrong, just remember this: What the hell do they know?”
Malcolm tousled the top of his hair. Charlie pulled away, but grinned in spite of himself.
“You do realize, don’t you,” the man said to him, “that because you were brave and honest with yourself, you cleared things so the Words could find you?”
“What? I don’t understand.”
“Kid, remember what we talked about? I told you that you couldn’t be a witch while hiding something big from yourself. You stopped hiding, which let everything inside of you relax. That made it easier for the Words to find the witch in you.”
“Oh. I guess I hadn’t thought about it that way.”
“Well, that’s how it works,” Malcolm said, folding his arms across his chest and nodding as if he were explaining the laws of gravity.
Charlie smiled in response to Malcolm’s praise, even as his face turned red.
“Go get some sleep, kid. You deserve it.”
“Okay,” he said, standing up.
“Malcolm?”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks for today. It was really, really great,” he said.
“You’re welcome, little man.”
CHAPTER 5
Philosophies
“SO DID HE HAVE THAT whole conversation with you about Maria Callas and Michael Jordan?” Beverly asked, the liquid in her wine glass swirling plum-red as she brought it to her mouth.
“You mean about whether witchcraft is a religion or just a skill?”
“Yeah, that one. Seems like he’s been using it forever. No offense to Maria or Michael, but you’d think he’d come up with new examples after all these years.”
“I didn’t even know who Maria Callas was at first until he explained everything.”
Aunt, uncle, and nephew sat together at the dining room table the Sunday night of Charlie’s training weekend. Rain pelted the windows at the back of the house. The temperature had dropped from chilly to downright cold. A fire blazed in the fireplace, where Amos lay kerfuffling in his sleep. They ate a shellfish stew, red and savory, with thick slices of bread and a leafy spinach salad.
“Um, this is really good,” said Charlie, his mouth full of bread.
“It is, isn’t it? Thank you,” Beverly nodded. “I’m happy to feed my two guys.”
“Wait a minute. What’s the story about Michael Jordan and Maria Callas?” Randall asked, a look of disbelief on his face. “Are they witches too?”
Charlie laughed just as he was taking a drink of water. He was barely able to keep from spraying it all over the vase of flowers at the center of the table.
“Honestly, Rand!” said his aunt, laughing too. “No, they are not witches.”
“Well? How am I supposed to know? Are you two gonna have all of these mysterious conversations now? That I won’t understand? All these secret witch handshakes?”
“Probably. What are you gonna do about it?” Beverly teased.
“I’ll make up my own stuff. And only talk to Amos about it. Isn’t that right, Amos? Abracadabra bark bark!” Charlie’s uncle turned his head and broad shoulders to the fireplace. Amos thumped his tail on the ground but remained prone, the warmth of the fire too satisfying to warrant standing up.
“Some witches believe,” said Beverly, ignoring her husband’s antics, “that our craft is a religion, or at least lends itself to religious doctrine. Others completely disagree. No research has come up with anything definitive on the nature of God in relationship to witchcraft. They feel that it’s more like a unique talent not limited to one philosophy.
“For example, I can take this here …”
The silver napkin holder next to her soup bowl rose a foot into the air and began to spin in place, throwing shadows from the candlelight against the wall.
“… and do this. But does it prove the existence of God? Does it show me what will happen in the afterlife? No, it doesn’t. I can do this and call myself a Christian. Or a Muslim. Or an agnostic.”
“Or a Jew,” Randall added.
“Or a Jew. I can do this thing, then attribute it to whatever philosophical or religious beliefs I have. The opera star Maria Callas had a freakishly good singing voice. That didn’t make her a devotee of the religion of opera. Michael Jordan’s basketball skills are superhuman. He practically flies through the air. But it doesn’t mean he has to see life a certain way. He could be a Buddhist or an atheist and still have made slam dunks and winning seasons for the Chicago Bulls. That’s the debate.”
Randall made a tut-tut n
oise, raised his eyebrows at Beverly and pointed to the napkin holder still spinning above their plates.
“Oh. Sorry,” she said. The metallic ring floated back down to her place mat.
“What do you believe?” Charlie asked.
“I believe it’s a little of both, actually. I mostly agree with Malcolm, who thinks our craft is just a unique ability. Especially when I look at the demographics in our community. We have some highly philosophical witches among us, while others are much more secular. Some of them have strong religious practices. Others have never stepped foot into a place of worship in their lives. What we can do isn’t necessarily affected by what source we believe it comes from.
“But,” she added, looking into Charlie’s eyes, “I do believe that our craft affects how we view the world. Before I was popped I had never heard that music, that song that seems to come from all living things. Sometimes when I hear it today, I find myself weeping because it’s so beautiful. I believe it allows me to sense a certain beauty in the world that I wouldn’t have been able to if I didn’t have this legacy in my blood or if I wasn’t a full witch. I care deeply for this planet and its welfare. It definitely has affected my philosophy of life.”
Randall interrupted. “Yeah, but Grace can do all the stuff you can. Doesn’t sound like she has much concern for the planet other than what she can get out of it.”
“True. To me it isn’t as cut and dried as the people on either side of the debate try to make it. I mostly know that I stand with the secular side. But I can’t help wondering how Maria Callas’s talents affected her worldview. Or Michael Jordan. Look how strong, how elegant, he is. His ability to manipulate the ball like that, or his shooting precision—don’t you think that if he were just an average guy, he would experience life differently?”
They ate in silence for a while, each lost in thought.
None of them noticed the slight change in the way the fire flickered in the fireplace as if a sudden draft made the flames flutter.
None of them noticed one flame licking at the air, higher than the others, stretching slightly, becoming more solid. As the three people continued to eat their dinner, they were unaware that several flames leaned in together, looking for a moment like bound stalks of fiery wheat, bending forward as if listening.
The Boy Who Couldn’t Fly Home: A Gay Teen Coming of Age Paranormal Adventure about Witches, Murder, and Gay Teen Love (The Broom Closet Stories Book 2) Page 5
