by Harper Lin
Once the door slid shut, I let out a deep sigh. I walked to the window, opened the sliding door, and stepped out onto the balcony. The sky looked beautiful, with a thin layer of intense orange then pink blending into indigo before the blackness of night consumed it all. I looked down at my toes. The bright red color stood out against my pale skin like blood. That was when I heard a fluttering sound.
At first I thought a piece of paper had blown in the slight breeze, but when I turned, I saw the little bird on the ground. It must have flown into the glass, because it was lying there barely moving.
“Hey. Hey, little fellow. Are you okay?” I asked in my head.
“I don’t want it to come,” the little guy replied.
“What? Don’t want what to come? I think you hurt your head. Just stay still. You’ll be all right.”
No response. It fluttered and twitched, but it was not going to make it. The thought of picking it up and bringing it to Bea crossed my mind, but before I could make a move, the little beast stopped breathing. Its onyx eyes shone in death. It had brown wings with a little bit of yellow and a white belly. Some kind of finch if I had to guess.
I stood there looking at the little creature. First I’d had to see those cannibal chipmunks and now this. The deer killed all along the drive up here? What the hell was happening? And why was I scared of feeling like I had no feelings?
Exhaustion swept over me. I left the little body on the balcony, closed the door, and locked it. Then I pulled the curtains shut.
The bed was the only place I wanted to be. I didn’t even bother getting undressed. I just kicked off my flip-flops and lay down. Within seconds I was asleep. But it wasn’t a restful sleep. It was a never-ending swirling of darkness, and I kept thinking the door was open. I was sleeping with the door wide open, and things were coming down the hallway. I could hear dragging noises, like someone had a bad leg that was wrapped in a bag of wet, sloshy noodles.
The door is open! I heard my own thoughts cry out in a panic. But I was so tired. My eyes couldn’t be pried open except for a few seconds at a time.
Anyone could walk in if I left the door open. Anyone at all could just come in and shut the door behind them, and then I’d be trapped.
Carcass
No, Cath. It’s just a dream. Open your eyes and you’ll see the door’s closed. It’s closed and you’re already trapped.
My eyes popped open and darted around the dark room. I tried to move and felt the sharp pain in my neck and back. What was going on? Was something holding me down, pulling at my neck and shoulders? Where? What? I flailed my arms, all the while squeezing my eyes tight from the pain. Nothing. I didn’t make contact with anything. Freezing in mid-swing, I strained my eyes through the dark of the room. I was alone.
The door was closed. The orange glow from the switch in the bathroom was the only light I could see clearly. I tried to sit up but couldn’t. Something was pulling my spine, twisting, bending it like a pipe snake.
Gritting my teeth, I slowly rolled onto my stomach. The pressure wasn’t as bad on my stomach. Reaching for the phone, I dialed Bea’s room. Within seconds, she and Aunt Astrid were knocking urgently on my door.
“Okay!” I shouted with tears running down my cheeks. “I’m okay! I’m coming!” I rolled out of the bed and dragged myself along the floor. The idea of standing up straight made me tremble. What had Olga done to me?
Pulling the door latch, I looked up to see Bea and Aunt Astrid looking down at me in horror.
“Get her inside. Quick, before someone sees us.”
“I swear I’m going to sue that masseuse!” I cried. “What did she do to me?”
“It isn’t the masseuse’s fault, Cath. I was afraid of this,” Bea shut the door, locking the deadbolt and setting the security bar in place. She joined me on the bed.
I was still on my stomach, and I felt her hands squeezing my legs. Her hands were warm and comforting, but her words were anything but.
“Here’s one. Another one.”
“What about here?” Aunt Astrid asked.
“Maybe? Yes, another one. I think the main problem is here,” Bea said as if I wasn’t there.
I was starting to get angry. “What are you two talking about?” I sobbed. The pain was terrible. “You both need to shut up and help me…”
“Cath. I need you to lie perfectly still. Don’t move. Don’t flinch. And whatever you do, don’t scream.” Bea’s voice rumbled like the thunder that foretells rain coming beneath dark, low-lying clouds.
“Don’t scream?”
She quickly grabbed a pillow. I thought she was going to kneel down on it, but she just placed it in front of her. Crossing her legs, she sat in front of me and took my arms, pulling them painfully up alongside my ears.
“Bea, I don’t want any magic! I don’t want any at all! I’m so scared of all this and sick of it ruining my life.”
“That’s fine, Cath. After this, we don’t ever have to use magic again, but right now…”
“I’m serious! I don’t want this anymore. Stop! Stop pulling at me! You’re hurting me!” I was crying outright. I still felt the love for my family. I could feel my voice rising. Soon it would be so loud people would come running. And then my aunt and Bea would be in trouble. Why weren’t they listening to me? I struggled to get up but felt the heavy weight of my aunt plop down on the backs of my legs.
“This is where it is,” Bea said in a low voice, not to me, of course, but to her mother. Rubbing her hands together, she began to mutter some words I didn’t immediately recognize.
“Please, Bea. Please, no magic. Let me up. I’m feeling better. Honest I am. I just want to be normal. I just want this pain to go away.”
Bea held both my hands in one of hers, and I was shocked to feel the viselike grip she had on me. Jake must have taught her that just in case she ever had to subdue a suspect or something. Her knuckles were white and strained, but she wasn’t letting go. With her other hand, she gently stroked my head.
“You just hush now, honey. Don’t you worry about a thing. We’ve got it now,” she soothed.
I managed to get up just a little to my elbows. I looked up at Bea, who was looking down at me like I was a pool of those little plastic ducks and she was sizing up which one would yield the best prize.
“Just let me up, Bea. I’m okay now,” I pleaded. I watched Bea’s eyes, and they seemed to focus on the space just above my head.
“Your meal ticket is over,” she hissed.
Why was she telling me this? I had never thought of her and Aunt Astrid that way. Was this what they really felt about me?
“You’ve been a drain. You’ve been hurting her. Time for you to get a taste of your own medicine. Habathaaa…” Bea said this last word, which I had never heard before, with such hatred in her voice that I began to shake.
I tried to pull away, but she wouldn’t let me go. Aunt Astrid leaned so much farther onto me that she was pushing my hips and stomach into the hard bed. I was starting to have trouble breathing.
“Let go!” Bea said and pulled my arms taut. It felt like my head was being pulled from my shoulders. Bea said more words I didn’t understand. Witchy words and old chants from something that Aunt Astrid had obviously shared with her and not with me.
“I said you let her go.” Bea’s forehead was covered with sweat. She quickly dropped my hands, and before I could squirm or swat her away, she had one knee on them and had her hands on my shoulders. Her grip tore into my shoulders.
My breath froze in my throat. My face was contorted in pain that shot through my spine and could only come out my eyes in tiny teardrops.
“Show yourself, you coward,” Aunt Astrid chimed in this time. She pushed down on the small of my back until I was afraid I was going to suffocate from lack of oxygen.
And just then the image of those cannibalistic chipmunks bounced into my head.
“Oh, no!” My words were barely audible. “I’m the carcass! You’re fighting over
my bones! This is some sick ritual I wasn’t aware of, isn’t it?” It was like those dreams when you are trying to scream. You’re using everything inside you, all your strength and energy, but all that comes out is a whisper too quiet to even be heard in church.
“Breathe, Catherine! Take one deep breath then look in the mirror!”
A floor-to-ceiling mirror stood next to the writing desk. We were right in front of it.
“Take a deep breath and look, now!” Bea ordered.
I did as I was told and turned my head.
“Look, Cath! That’s what’s been hurting you! That piece-of-garbage bottom feeder!”
For a brief second, I saw a shadow, a glint of something around my head and shoulders.
“There’s nothing there,” I whimpered. “You’re trying to kill me.”
“Look at them, Cath. And help us get rid of them once and for all.” Bea’s weight on my hands was making them tingle.
I shut my eyes tight, feeling the hot rain of tears spill over. When I opened my eyes and looked in the mirror again, I gasped in horror.
A Feast of a Lifetime
It was on my back, its eight legs digging into me—but not into my skin. It was digging into my soul as it flickered and blinked in and out of view. My eyes widened, and I wanted to scream as I saw not just the two huge, round eyes staring at me but the four little ones underneath them as well. Its fangs were buried deep in my shoulder blades.
It was the size of a healthy teenager. That was bad enough. But I saw smaller ones, too, the size of rats. They ran up and down my body as if I were some jungle floor they were used to scurrying around on.
Bea began to chant while I began to hyperventilate. I had never seen or heard of anything like this before. My breath wasn’t filling my lungs. My face was turning beet red. Aunt Astrid leaned and reached over me, pulling the pillow into my face. I thought for sure she was trying to smother me until Bea gave a loud command, and the searing pain in my legs stopped. I looked in the mirror again even though I didn’t want to.
It glowered at me. It wasn’t exactly like the thing I had seen on the tree, but it was similar. The two big eyes were bottomless. Its fangs hung down like the jowls of an ogre, and it sneered, pushing itself farther into my shoulders. I screamed into the pillow, thankful that my aunt had put it there. Had she not, there would have been police breaking down the door by now for sure.
“Let her go!” Bea let go of my shoulders, rubbed her hands together quickly, and placed them on my shoulder blades, where the fangs looked to be pulsing and throbbing inside my aura. “You Habatha can feed no more. Go! Leave her and starve!”
It was almost instantaneous. After Bea said those words, I felt a flash of blinding pain. I wasn’t sure what happened after that, if I was out for a few seconds, minutes, or hours, but when I opened my eyes, I felt as if I had been asleep for days.
I pulled my head out of the pillow and saw it was drenched in sweat. Carefully, I pulled my arms in and put my hands underneath me to push myself up. I felt no pain of any kind. I looked up and saw Bea, sitting on the floor next to the mirror, covered in sweat, too, and breathing hard.
Quickly I rolled over to see Aunt Astrid leaning against the closed sliding door to the balcony, also disheveled and worn out like a used and discarded bathroom towel.
I tried to speak. I wanted to know what had happened. But as I saw my aunt there, the only woman I had ever known to take care of me, to love me, to protect me after my mother had gone, I was overcome with shame. All those horrible thoughts, those cruel remarks and hateful feelings, came crashing back to me as if a wall had been smashed to pieces by a big steel ball to let them all through.
“I didn’t mean it,” I begged. “I didn’t mean any of it.” She opened her arms wide to me. Quickly, I crawled over to her and fell into them as I had done many times as a child. Burying my face in her neck, I cried and cried until I didn’t think I had any liquid left in my body.
“It’s okay, honey. It’s all right. You don’t need to apologize. We knew something was wrong with you. We just didn’t know what.”
“We still think there is something wrong with you,” Bea said, her voice giving away the smile on her face. “But it’s a thing even magic can’t fix, so, well, we’re just used to it is all.”
I turned around and finally got a grip on myself.
“I have been horrible to you guys. I am so sorry. I didn’t mean any of that stuff I said. I was just feeling so…”
“We know, honey.”
I took a deep breath.
“Bea, what in the world was that thing? Those things?”
Bea cracked her knuckles and pushed herself off the floor.
“Astral spiders.”
“What?” I felt my body convulse involuntarily, as the idea of any kind of spiders gave me serious heebie-jeebies. “What the hell is an astral spider?”
“They are pretty rare, but they are parasites, plain and simple. They break into this dimension, look for a person with low energy, latch on, and, well, do what spiders do,” Bea said matter-of-factly while walking over and plopping down on the bed.
“And that is?” I wasn’t sure I really wanted to know, but I had a pretty good idea what Bea was going to say.
“They suck your energy out little bit by little bit. You know how so many people today claim to have depression. No, they don’t. They have astral spiders sucking the life right out of them.” Bea yawned as if the conversation was about watching paint dry.
“You saw it first, didn’t you?” I looked at Aunt Astrid.
She smoothed my hair away from my eyes and rubbed my cheek gently. “I had a feeling something was there,” she said, narrowing her eyes. “It was hiding pretty well. You hadn’t been yourself, and we both knew something was wrong. We just hoped it was something we’d be able to deal with.”
Bea added, “That massage was just the thing to get your energy flowing. The spider was gorging itself and got very careless. It obviously thought it could fight us off through you, but little did it know we rarely listen to what you want anyways. We would have gone against your wishes as easily as if we were changing our shirts.”
I chuckled.
“Where did I get this thing?”
“Toilet seat,” Aunt Astrid said.
I whipped my head around to see her smirk spread into a smile until she burst out laughing.
“I’ll give you one guess as to where you picked up that creepy crawler.”
My body slumped.
“Don’t tell me it was the Prestwick house,” I said, feeling exhausted just saying the name of that place.
“That’s what I think. That place changed all of us a little. But you seemed to suffer the real brunt of it,” Bea said. I saw her eyes flick to my aunt’s face then back to me again.
“Why do you think that is?” I said humbly. I clenched my teeth, bracing myself for what I was going to hear. I was the weak link in the group. My powers were limited, and I was stubborn and could sometimes be rude, and I thought of myself almost all the time. Sheesh, what did anyone see in me anyways? My family? My friends? I was a big mess and caused more trouble than I was worth.
“If I had to guess, it is because you are a good person. I’m old. An astral spider isn’t going to waste its time on someone like me. Bea has the gift of healing, so she’d spot the thing right away if it latched onto her. You? You are so alive. Full of piss and vinegar, as my old grandma used to say. It saw the feast of a lifetime with you.”
“So it isn’t because I’m weak? Because I ruined the spell on the house and now we have to go back every once in a while for paranormal upkeep?”
“No, honey. It has nothing at all to do with what you did at the house. It has to do with the fact you were at the house. That’s all.” My aunt patted my back.
I pushed myself up and turned, offering both hands to my aunt to help her to her feet as well. Sniffling back a few tears, I nodded.
“So, now that that thing is
off you, how do you feel?”
I rolled my head, shrugged, stood on my toes, and stretched my arms over my head.
“Feeling good. I guess I won’t be suing Olga after all.” But my eyes widened with worry as I was hit with a memory. “But I saw something like that, that astral spider outside on a tree. I swear it was the same kind of thing.”
“Oh, I believe it was,” Bea said, standing up from the bed. “I saw a few along our walk. This is obviously a feeding ground for them, since people are opening up and letting the positive energies flow all willy-nilly. They won’t be bothering you anymore, Cath. I can promise you that.” Bea looked very sure, but I couldn’t say I was totally convinced.
“That house!” I said, stomping my foot. “That house hurt me…really bad.” I stood straight and looked my family in the eyes. “Everything fell apart in there. I messed up going after Blake, then you all had to come rescue me like a rookie, and you guys couldn’t get prepared, and I can’t shake the feeling that something, something bad, has planted a seed, you know?” I said, rubbing a spot in the middle of my chest. “And I’m terrified it’s going to take root and grow into something…horrible.”
“It got to all of us, Cath. There was just something about you, like Mom said, that it wanted. It tore you up, left an open wound, and that spider found it.”
I shivered again.
“We also know that the whole Blake and Darla thing has been eating away at you.”
I bit my lower lip and shrugged.
“You save a guy’s life, and this is the thanks you get,” I mumbled, making circles in the carpet with my foot. “I guess he’s just more into the high-maintenance, damsel-in-distress type.”
My family said nothing, but I knew what they were thinking. Poor Cath.
“I’m hungry. Anybody want to go downstairs and grab a late-night snack? Those greens for lunch just didn’t do the job.”
