Spell Tricked

by Eliza Grace

  I don’t understand it. I remember screaming her name, standing with my body pressing into the fence, knowing what I needed to do.

  And then the book had fallen, landing at my feet. From the moment I’d held it, something had begun to alter my perception of reality. The damn thing is empty. Not a single clue. Pages and pages of nothing.

  Blinking, I realize I am no longer next to the fence line.

  “Dammit!” I harshly expel the word in a rush of breath. “How does that keep happening?” Now that I am yards away from the forest, Tilda is vividly in my mind. I can see her walking... walking... across the meadow, the pale pink of her dress stark against the green expanse punctuated with lavender flowers. This time, I race to the woods. I put my high school track and field training to good use. My body slams into the barrier.

  It is as unyielding as a mountain. “Tilda!” I yell her name. I yell it and yell it until I am once again involuntarily moved away from the forest. Further than ever this time. Nearly to the large oak that lives behind her house. I am standing in the long shadows of it which reaches out like tendrils onto the grass as the light continues to fade.

  “Hoyt?” Jen’s voice, speaking softly as she walks toward me and away from the police. She’s wearing her gown for the gallery show. It drags across the ground, the material dark enough that the dirt that’s fouling the beautiful material isn’t obvious. I know she is as frantic as I am, but in this moment, I cannot see the fear on her face. Only concern. For me. She glances down, sees the burgundy book in my hand. Her face scrunches, wrinkles forming across her forehead, as if she is desperately trying to remember something. As if some important memory is playing at the edges of her subconscious.

  When she is near to me, she holds out her hand for the book. She’s already looked at its blank pages. We’ve both opened and closed it more than once to be sure. Despite the fact that it is useless and empty, we are both unwilling to toss it aside. There is something about it that cannot be ignored.

  “It’s so strange, how familiar this is, yet I know I’ve never seen it before.” Jen fingers the pages again. Fully opening the book, her eyes widen for a moment and her chest seems to freeze in the act of falling with exhalation. But then she looks wilted, crestfallen. “It’s so strange...” She repeats her first words. “That time, I swear there was something written here.”

  “Really?” I move next to her so that I can see over her shoulder. I’d never realized how small Jen is, no more than five foot three at best. She always seemed bigger than life when she brought Tilda to therapy—covered in paint colors and acting in her own unusual manner—I’d never once considered how I towered over her. I don’t know why I move to look. She’s already voiced that she’d been mistaken. Curiosity though, further peaked by a flash of golden light waving across the open pages that is gone in an instant.

  Realizing I am hunched over, I straighten my posture and turn around to look at the police men. There are six now, three patrol vehicles parked behind my jeep. They were ambling about, one talking on a cell phone. They were doing nothing. Nothing to help. They should be racing into the forest. They should be trying to find Tilda. They were getting paid for a half hour of total uselessness.

  Anger flares within me, scorching through my limbs to terminate in my fingers and toes. I am nearly overcome with the need to beat them, force them into being useful. I can’t help Tilda from prison though. And a record would risk my job.

  When Jen’s hand touches my shoulder, I start, and the fury floods out of my body like a great dam has broken. It is gone so quickly that I am left with a pale aftermath more akin to grief. It is almost like I am mourning, looking for closure. But I do not want closure. I want Tilda. Wherever she is. I slump, defeated.

  “We’re going to find her, Hoyt. Even if we have to search every inch of the forest.”

  “It won’t let you in.” I speak quietly, cradling my face with one hand, the words nearly dying before I’ve given them life.

  “What?” She walks around to face me. I am no longer staring at the police men. My eyes are cemented on one small area across the fence. It is almost too dark to see anything at all. Which doesn’t matter, because there is nothing to see. The clearing is empty, so I tell my heart to shut up as it screams at me. Tilda is there! Tilda is there! “Hoyt, what did you mean by it won’t let me in?”

  “I don’t know.” Shaking my head, I start walking toward my jeep.

  Jen has to nearly run after me to keep up; her bare feet impact the ground with thuds muted by soft grass. Her dress heels have long been abandoned. They are forgotten somewhere in the meadow. “Hoyt, don’t go! Please. It’s late and I don’t think you should drive. And,” she hesitates behind me, but I already know what she is going to say “I don’t want to be alone.”

  “Me neither.” I am at the jeep, pulling open the orange door to retrieve the duffel bag in the back seat that stores my gym clothes and toiletries. Beside that is the lumpy sleeping bag I’ve had since I was ten. Even then, I was too tall for a kid’s size. I really needed an even larger one now, but I couldn’t bring myself to part with the orange bedroll with the many colored patches.

  As soon as Jen sees what I’ve gotten, her body language relaxes. “You can sleep in Tilda’s room. You don’t need that,” she points to the sleeping bag. “I don’t think she’d mind... considering.”

  “No, but thank you.” I can’t imagine lying in her bed, smelling the lingering scent of shampoo on the pillow, seeing her things strewn about like thorny reminders that she is missing. “I’m going to sleep out here.”

  “Hoyt, it’s starting to rain.” And it was. A light sprinkle that seemed to hover in the air for moments before falling to the ground below.

  “She’s not safe indoors. She’s not staying dry. Why should I?”

  Jen looks at me in such a way that I almost relent just to make her expression change. “Hoyt, we’ll find her. And you need your rest. Please, come in the house and get a good night’s sleep and tomorrow we’ll figure out what to do.”

  “She could be states away by tomorrow.”

  “Don’t say that, Hoyt. She’s in the woods. No one took her. And she can’t even walk, Hoyt. She. Can’t. Walk.” Jen is biting off her last words, as if convincing herself to believe them.

  “I told you I saw her walk. I saw her running, Jen. Running.”

  “And I told you that’s not possible!” Her voice is high now, verging on frantic. This is how she’d been the first hour after Tilda had vanished—sobbing and denying and then becoming quiet against waves of oppressive shock. I’d see patients react to this, trying to accept an injury or permanent limitation.

  To calm her, I do give in now. “Come on. I’ll stay in the house with you. Tilda would probably want that anyways.”

  A last look at the officers shows me that they are getting in their vehicles, preparing to leave. They’ve taken our statements, promised to canvas the surrounding neighbors and search the forest tomorrow when they’ve organized more manpower. I wonder if they will be able to enter the woods and walk among the trees or if whatever force is keeping me from my purpose will also keep them from theirs. One of the policemen waves. I do not wave back.

  Placing my hand on the small of Jen’s back, I guide her towards the house, up the ramp, and through the kitchen door. My stomach rumbles in hunger. I can’t eat though. I’m afraid food would unsettle my stomach the way the evening’s turn-of-events has unsettled my psyche.

  “I’ll help you settle into Tilda’s room,” Jen murmurs, moving towards a hall closet just past the kitchen’s interior entrance. I follow closely. She is getting towels, both bearing several paint stains. “If you want to shower, there’s some soap bars under the sink in here and shampoo too. Although, I’m afraid it’s not a very manly smelling.”

  When we arrive at Tilda’s room, I have to force myself to step across the threshold.

  I’d been right. Thorns are biting into my skin as I take in the sight of h
er bed, her things, the shirt and jeans crumpled on the floor next to her wheelchair. I back out into the hallway. “Point me toward the couch.”

  “It’s hard as hell and your back won’t thank you.” Jen hesitates, looking around the room herself; her face crumples in understanding. “Um, I can move this stuff. Really, she wouldn’t mind.”

  I know she’s going to try to convince me to sleep in the bed, to be comfortable, but I start walking away. “I can’t.” I don’t say more and she doesn’t follow. The house is small, finding the living area is no problem. Soon, I am tucked away in my sleeping bag atop the sofa which is indeed stiff and unyielding. I sigh, trying to readjust so I am moderately comfortable. My nose wrinkles as I move and disturb the bedroll’s fabric; it desperately needs a thorough washing; the smells of my last camping trip still clings to it strongly.

  A soft knock turns me towards the entrance to the living room. Jen is standing, her hair wild about her face. She’s wearing a night gown that covers her from neck to knee. “I still have this.” She holds up the blank book. “Do you want it?”

  “It’s blank.” I state the obvious.

  “Yes, but... it appeared when Tilda disappeared. Don’t you think that means something?” Jen bites her bottom lip and lifts her right foot, sort of scratching at her left calf with it absentmindedly.

  “I don’t know,” I admit. “Maybe.”

  “Here, you take it then. I feel... really odd holding on to it.” She comes fully into the room and I reach out and take the small leather book from her. It tingles a little in my hand, but I know it’s my imagination coming to life. Jen has suggested that this book somehow connects to Tilda and, because of that belief, I know imagine that I can feel the memory of her hand holding it, like simply by holding it myself, I can let her know that I’m thinking of her. That I won’t stop until I find her.

  That I love her.

  I move for several more moments, turning this way and that, and finally I realize that I will not sleep tonight. Even if my body is relaxed, my mind will not be. Closing my eyes, I think about her. I think of sun warming us in the meadow, of twirling her about until we fall to the earth. I think of our conversations, my confessions, her tragedies. I think of her.

  And when I open my eyes, there is a candle lit across the room. But it is not in the room. It is floating past the window glass, hovering in the air. Another blink of my eyes and it is gone.

  I continue to blink and eventually my lids slow, rising and falling like sap until they are glued together and I drift, unwillingly to sleep. And to dream.

  Together We Dream 1

  -Tilda-

  Outside of time.

  Forever.

  Oblivion.

  THERE IS NOTHING.

  No sound. No movement.

  I am levitating above a great void and it causes an emptiness to grow inside of me that both inflates and suffocates. After a while, when I am nearly hollow, I begin to feel the shimmer of touch. An ethereal and weightless material falls across my body. It rises and falls, threading between my arms and sides, cascading over my hips and thighs.

  And then I am rotating in the air. I do not know what is up or down and it so severely disorients me that I have to close my eyes to keep from being ill. The tilt-a-whirl I am on lasts longer than I have been alive. Or at least that is how it feels.

  I want to be still. I want this to stop. Put me on the ground. If there is a ground. If there is anything in this great nothingness surrounding me. I want to be still!

  Screaming the words in my head, I feel the force of magic snap to me, a bungee cord too long held away, and I am quite suddenly and jarringly still. God, I’m going to be sick. I fight it back, clamping my lips as tightly as possible together, but the weak dam cannot stay the sickly and sour bile that pushes up from my stomach.

  As the wetness exits my mouth, I hear it slap and slosh against some surface beneath me. This means that I am up and there is down. Right?

  Moving again, falling. A slow, controlled descent. And all I can think of is the vomit below me and how I will soon plop face-first into it. I open my eyes, try to see, but I am met by the blackness again. The nothingness.

  I move my hands to cover my face and I try to roll on my side midair.

  Still lowering.

  “Make it stop, please.” I think I whimper the words instead of think them, but I cannot be sure.

  Downward.

  Down.

  Surely I am almost there? Surely I will soon feel the warm sickness dampening my face.

  “Tilda?” Hands and arms curve around my body and support me so that I am no longer descending. “Tilda?” His voice. My name.

  “Hoyt?” It cannot be possible. He is in another world. He is so far away, so untouchable, that the thought of him brings tears to my eyes. Whatever trickery this is, I loathe it and my hatred runs core-deep for whoever is causing the sound of him to float to my ears and the feel of him to spread across my skin like wildfire. “No, it can’t be you. You’re gone. We aren’t together now. It’s cruel. This is cruel.” I am trying to shift my body again, trying to roll away from the apparition. And, with a shock, I realize that I cannot feel my legs. I cannot feel them save for a ghostly sensation, the remnant left to haunt me—the residue of a life spent walking and fully living. “Stop this! Stop it!” My yell echoes around me, bouncing off of unseen walls, ricocheting back to my ears.

  “Tilda, I’m here. I’m here. This is real.” His voice is insistent and I nearly believe him. He begins walking, taking me a short distance. To where, I do not know. I feel that I should lower my hands, open my eyes again, and see if the shadows still live so deeply. I also feel I should be fighting, fighting whoever or whatever is holding me. But instead I go limp, I let the dead weight of me become heavier and hopefully harder for my carrier to manage.

  “Hoyt is gone.” My voice is so sad and so soft. I’m sure that it will die, the spirit of it floating away from my mouth. A ghost like my legs.

  “I’m not gone. I’m right here.”

  I don’t argue with the voice this time. It’s all a lie. There’s no point.

  When whoever... whatever... stops walking, it bends, lowers me to the floor, and I am finally anchored to a solid surface. I can breathe again. I can banish the nausea that is creeping back into my body. I lower my hands, folding them across my stomach. You’re not Hoyt. I don’t know who you are, but you aren’t him. He isn’t here. He is free. He’s free and I am not.

  “Open your eyes, Tilda. Please.” A hand goes to my face; it pushes the strands of hair away. They were tickling my cheek, my eyelids, my nose, but I had not moved them. I don’t care anymore. “Tilda, sweetheart, please.”

  It’s the sweetheart that gets me, that causes me to open my eyes and find his face. His handsome, lovely, guileless face. My hand lifts to rest against his cheek; it is solid and warm. “But you can’t be here.”

  “Tilda, what happened to you?” Hoyt is stroking away the tears that have begun to rush down my face. I do not try to quell them. “Where are you?”

  Sitting up, Hoyt supporting me, I look around. We are in an empty room, large and pale—the walls seem to be illuminated, giving off a faint glow. “I... I don’t know.” Shaking my head, I try to remember. Where am I? Where is my body? Because this is a dream... it must be a dream. “How did you get here?”

  “To be frank,” Hoyt uses the hand that is not gripping my waist to run thick, long fingers through his hair, “I think...” he hesitates, then takes a deep breath, “I’m pretty sure I’m asleep. How crazy is that? Asleep and dreaming about you and it’s so damn real; it’s like I could reach out and touch God with heaven so close.”

  That strikes a chord with me. Hoyt feels so real, the pressure of him pushed against my body, but I know he can’t be. Sometimes my heart hates my rational head. “The last thing I remember is falling asleep next to mom.” I close my eyes, feeling the skin between my brows furrow. “She said something, just as I was drift
ing off. She wanted my dreams to be beautiful. And...” I part my lids and look at Hoyt’s face; he is focusing on me intensely, “you’re here.”

  “It may be a dream, Tilda, but it feels real. We’re together.”

  I look around the room again. “It’s not very beautiful, is it?”

  “I don’t know; it has a certain charm. The way the walls seem to shine with light.”

  “Still.” Images begin to flash through my head, thoughts of what the space around us could look like, thoughts of what wonderful things we could be experiencing together. Like gossamer, what I am thinking begins to smoke into the room on waves of silk. A chandelier with thousands of brilliantly-shining, faceted stones suddenly shines above us; its light seems to push against the already-glowing walls until they begin to expand outward, further and further, until the room seems never-ending and the walls are now layers of translucent, diaphanous material.

  Below our bodies, the floor begins to change. It becomes glossy, veined marble. And then we are changing, together, rising off the floor and supported by unseen strings of puppetry. We hang in the air as shimmering gold particles undulate around us. When they disappear, I am dressed in a silver gown that makes my blush-hued one seem like a dreary rag. It is, I suppose, less beautiful than it was only a short time ago—when the fabric was a soft pink, crisp and without stains. I put the original gown, the one that made me feel unbroken, out of my mind. The silver one I now wear hugs my body as if it is painted on and it bears a lace overlay that sparkles in the rainbow lighting bouncing around the room that I have imagined into reality. Or have I done it? Is this my mother’s doing? Her soft chant as I fell asleep...

  Hoyt is dressed in a white tuxedo with a silver vest and tie. His hair is slicked back and I find it becoming. Yet, at the same time, I find that it ages him and every once in a while, a ghost of another face comes to life. A different nose, a different curve to the mouth. At first, I think it is him, my captor. But... no. I am just seeing the apparition of an older Hoyt, debonair and wise. As I continue to watch him, an intricate mask spreads from the space between his eyebrows to stretch upwards and outwards. A masquerade. But what’s a dance without...