Spell Tricked

by Eliza Grace

  But I keep moving. I keep moving, because I have to.

  I AM STILL WALKING. I stumble, reaching for the trunk of a nearby tree, and I gasp when it moves beneath my touch and begins to walk away.

  Two trees. Two trunks.

  Two legs.

  The creature is so tall that I cannot see its arms or its face, or even if it possesses these bodily features. The thing strides with ease through the dense woods. From that moment, I resolve to touch nothing save for the ground beneath my shoes. And I fear, even that, is a risk.

  I AM STILL WALKING.

  I feel it has been days, but the sky above me has not lightened or darkened. I do not know if it is day or night. I am caught in perpetual twilight.

  My fingers cling to the diary, but they are hurting and cramping and ready to give up. They are like my legs, exhausted and weak.

  I AM STILL WALKING. I feel I can’t go on. My legs cry in agony; my heart is a race horse that cannot breach the last yards before the finish.

  This is it. It has to be. Walk until you cannot walk anymore. I am at that point.

  As if Arianna has heard my thoughts, she appears above my head, a shining jewel in the diffused light.

  “Why is it so hard to walk?” I stammer out, my breath coming in great, heaving gulps.

  “She, she, she has made it so.” Arianna does not seem as carefree as she did on our first meeting, as if her body has gained a burden that is too much for her shimmering wings. I want to ask where she has gone, if she has seen Tilda, but it is all I can do to focus on moving forward towards my hopeful release from this place. “I must leave you again.” Arianna sing-songs.

  “But you’ve only just gotten back,” I protest, fearing the aloneness that will swallow me as soon as she is gone again. When she left the first time, it seemed infinitely harder to think and speak and move.

  “Keep walking. Walk, walk, walk. She will find you when she wishes.”

  “Please, don’t go,” I hate how childish I sound asking her to stay. I am grown, but feel no more than a kid scared of the dark right now.

  “Must, must, must.”

  “Does Tilda need you?”

  “No. Yes. I go between and around and under. I cannot stay in one place for long. I cannot stay here for long. I am too small, too fragile. And the weight of the Neverwhere...” She shudders, which is an odd thing to witness as she also flits and flutters above me.

  “You feel that too?” I look around, as if the resistance I have been feeling will magically appear, a full and bodied thing.

  “Yes, yes, yes.” Arianna flutters higher and then lower again, acting agitated. “She’s coming,” she hisses out.

  “You sound scared?”

  “I am,” the fairy said before flying fast between trees to disappear once more.

  The first thing I hear is a pair of unsettling growls. Dual warnings of things that should be feared, things that go bump in the darkness.

  A pair of large dogs, not unlike wolfhounds but crimson-furred, come into view. They lope on long, thin legs, and their heads hang lower than their chests, sniffing at the ground. When they are only a few feet from me, they stop and sit down. They lift their gazes to find me. Their eyes are white-washed, glowing in the dimness. I wonder if they are blind.

  Then one of them opens its toothy mouth and a human voice presses beneath tongue and lips. It’s unsettling.

  “Why have you sought me?” The words are warm, inviting, but they carry an undercutting of danger. The speaker is a loosely-caged killer, hiding behind minions. Fear moves like uncontrollable waves inside my stomach. The kind of waves you make as a child in the bathtub, after your mother tells you to not soak the tile floor.

  “I need to leave this place.” My voice is barely a whisper, but it is all I can manage without it cracking and dissolving. I have a feeling that showing overt fear would be a mistake. I have a feeling she can smell weakness a mile away.

  “Why?”

  The question is simple enough, yet I struggle for a response.

  “Because... I don’t belong here.”

  “No one belongs here. Nothing belongs here.”

  “Don’t you belong here?”

  “I belong here least of all,” the voice is taking on more form, more body. The air around me seems to swirl and the two dogs back away in perfect synchronization, increasing the distance from them to me whilst also widening the distance between each other.

  Shadows and pops of brightness knit together until the speaker gains a body. She is tall, abnormally so, in a way that leaves her with over-elongated arms and fingers and legs. Legs, which are revealed by the long slit up the middle of the black skirt she wears. Her upper body is covered by sheer, ruby-hued fabric that gives peeks of a black satin camisole. Her hair is long, nearly brushing the floor, and it is so pale and silvery, that it seems to emit its own inherent light.

  I realize too late that my mouth is hanging open. And it isn’t a ‘look at her’ appreciative guy thing. It’s a scared thing.

  Opening my mouth to speak, I realize that my body’s taken on an odd sensation of floating, as if I’m lounging in deep blue waters looking up at a sky that is starry. Blinking, I give my head one hard shake and I refocus on what’s happening around me. The woman has moved close to me, so close that our noses could touch if she leaned even the slightest fraction forward.

  “It has been a long time since I’ve looked upon a living face.” Her hand reaches up, her index finger extended. She brushes the coolness of it against my skin and fear shoots through my belly like a hot poker shoved into a fire. “I’m fortunate to have it be such a pleasing one.” She smiles and it is so perfectly symmetrical that it reminds me of a doll in a store, something that has been carefully crafted to impossible standards.

  “I need to,” I begin to stammer, “get out of here.” My words sound choked and totally foreign, like someone else’s voice is coming out of my mouth.

  “Do you not like my Neverwhere?” she purrs out, stroking my face again. In my entire life, I’ve wet my pants once. One time. This might just end up being lucky number two.

  “It’s great. Really, but I don’t belong here.”

  “No one belongs here!” she screeches out, backing away from me in a lightning-fast movement that I’d have missed had I blinked. The two dogs are on either side of her, fur standing erect on their haunches. They’re not overtly threatening, at least not at the moment, but I have a feeling that all it would take was the most subtle direction from the woman for the dogs to try and tear me apart.

  “I’m sorry. Really,” I struggle for what to say, anything to calm down the fire I’ve stoked, “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “You’ve not upset me, you silly fool,” she says, her voice dancing between the rage and an underlying weariness. She grows quiet, cocks her head to one side and stares at me a moment before speaking again. I’ve worked with someone like her before in rehab. That person had been bipolar. “How did you get here? You have no magic, none that I can feel upon you.”

  My fingers had gotten tired of holding the diary, so I’d stuffed it into the waistband of my pants at the small of my back. I hadn’t pulled it out when the dogs had appeared, or when she had appeared, because something told me not to.

  “How did you get here?” She repeats, firmness in her voice that borders that screeching anger I’d rather avoid.

  Slowly, I pull the book out and bring it into view. It glows slightly in my hands. Her eyes widen. “I know that book. I know that book,” she hisses. The dogs behind her growl. My eyes flick to them, imagining what it would be like to get eaten alive by giant dogs.

  “You’ve seen it before?” I ask, hesitate, then move back a step. I don’t want her to take it away from me; it is my only tangible link to Tilda.

  “No, not seen. But I feel... myself. My magic. My people upon it.”

  “Your people?”

  “Descendants.” She whispers out, moving forward so fast that I am una
ble to keep the distance between us. Her hands fly to the book and she tears it away from me. Her fingers race across the cover, then flip through the pages, then, finally, she holds the diary to her chest and sighs. “I knew I could not be the last. I knew my daughter survived.” She smiles and it is kind. “This girl you seek, she is special. She is mine.”

  “Who are you?” I hold my hands out for the book, needing the touch of it once more. She looks at my outstretched fingers and I know that she does not want to return to the journal to me, but eventually she does.

  “I am Elisabeth Clarke. I am the witchfinder’s first victim. If I could have stopped him sooner, I would have been the only victim of his fanatic beliefs. He tried to burn me. He did not realize that a true witch could not be burned. I had a plan. I moved my people, and all the supernaturals who desired safeguarding, to a new land, a land of my design. And then I came back. And I found him, still hunting, still killing. He did not realize that he only killed the innocent. They were all humans, innocent, without magic.”

  “The witchfinder?” I question.

  “The woods were his prison, where he should have stayed for all time, along with others so corrupt that they could not be loosed on the world. The spell was unbreakable, strong, because the magic of my ancestral lands poured into it daily. Only one of my blood could free him or break the spell. I never thought... He learned enough to use my bloodline magic. I felt when he left the forest. I felt it.” She hisses out the last.

  “If he was trapped in the woods, and this is the woods,” I turn in a slow circle, taking in the dark backwards forest and the house in the distance that was so like, yet unlike, Tilda’s, “is she here?”

  “I believe someone already told you the girl is not here.” Elisabeth smiles. “Although, I do not blame you for believing the fairy capable of lying. They are most pernicious, incorrigible creatures.”

  “Then what is this place? It’s not the words in...” I hesitate, looking for the word, “my reality and it’s not where she’s trapped.”

  “It is the place magic goes to die,” she also looks around. “We witches create our afterlives. We mold them after memories, good or bad, and it is the only power left to us once our mortal bodies are shed. We control our own particular Neverwheres. And this one is mine.”

  I frown, wondering why someone who could design their afterlife would choose a place so dark and oppressive.

  “You’re wondering why I didn’t choose to make my afterlife rainbows and sunshine?” She smiles again, wistful and sad. “These woods, this place, it is the shadow of the place of my ancestors. Here, I can remember their power, their spirits. The heaviness of the air, the feel of the trees, the creatures that move about like wraiths, they all remind me of what I was. And that I can be nothing else. This is it. The wholeness of what I am.” She gestures to the woods around us. “And that house,” she points, “reminds me of humanity and why I came back to stop the witchfinder from killing innocents. I never knew, didn’t hope, that one of my lineage would survive and still exist on this land. It is meant to be. Our power will always be drawn to the past.”

  “This is home to you.” It’s not a question. If I’ve learned anything in my years as a physical therapist, helping people deal with the changes of a physical disability, it’s that everyone has to find a way to cope with the alteration in their own way. They have to find what drives them to embrace life again. Elisabeth’s version of the afterlife, her Neverwhere, is the way she has dealt with the physical disability of death.

  “If my bloodline still walks among the living, then there is hope. This girl you seek, she is mine. When he became free, when I felt the ripple effect of that all the way here, into my death, I thought it impossible that he harnessed enough magic to accomplish it on his own. But he didn’t, did he? He lured this girl into the woods somehow, didn’t he?” She spoke quickly, putting puzzle pieces together that even I had not figured out.

  “We were going to this event and Tilda and her Aunt were getting dressed. When I pulled up to go with them, she was running towards the woods. She was running.” I realize after saying the last, that Elisabeth might not understand the significance of Tilda running. “Tilda’s paralyzed, Elisabeth, from the waist down.”

  She nods, slowly. “Then that is what he promised her. To walk again. And, in the prison forest, it would only take a little stolen magic to give her that gift. But he should have aged, he should have died quickly after leaving the forest. But he didn’t. That, too, I would have felt here. Even in my death, we are linked.”

  “I’m still confused.” I admit, holding the journal to my body like a security blanket.

  “Do you love this girl? Do you love Tilda?”

  I nod. “Yes. I mean, I think so.” I swallow. “Yes, I love her.”

  “Then think of her. Hold her in your mind. Every piece of her. Time will have sped or slowed by the time you arrive. That, I cannot change. Let us hope it is not too late.”

  I close my eyes, picture Tilda. I hear her voice in my head. Her laugh. The curve of her jaw. The color of her hair and skin.

  Elisabeth puts her hands over my hands so that we are both pushing the diary harder into my body. “Now, take a deep breath. This is going to hurt.” That warning is all I get. When she lifts her hands and slams them back down, it is how I imagine it would feel to get shot. Hit by a large gauge bullet square in the chest. I launch backwards, an invisible fast-moving train pushing me through the viscous, molten cold lava again. The deep breath is long gone, expelled when Elisabeth had hit me so hard. I’m suffocating after only seconds; the solution is seeping into my nose, pushing against my eyes, sticking too my lashes.

  It goes on forever, a much longer journey than the first.

  And then it is over.

  Fourteen days after Tilda’s disappearance.

  And I am stood in the woods again, this time with my feet upon the ground, this time with everything oriented correctly against the canvas of the world. And this time... Tilda is only a few yards away from me, stood beside someone who looks remarkably like her, except older. She hasn’t noticed me yet. Neither of them have. None of them, I realize, seeing the shadow of a third person not too far behind the women.

  “Tilda,” I whisper her name.

  She doesn’t look at me. She’s walking away from the woman that looks like her, walking towards something at the center of the open field. She raises her arms, begins to beat at what seems like empty air.

  I look back at the other two figures. The one that was stood in shadow has come forward. He’s a boy, or at least he is not yet a full man. Not past eighteen or perhaps even sixteen. The woman Tilda has walked away from is beginning to fade, like she will vanish as I watch. Yet she is also coming back to full color. It is like a TV not getting good reception during a program. The people on the screen come and go, replaced by silvery gray lines and white noise. And then they are back as someone shifts the metal antennae above the television box. We had a TV like that when I was a kid. Antiquated, not the fancy flat screens everyone else already had at that time for a pretty penny. It was at my grandparent’s house, one they’d picked up at a church rummage sale. I was the one that stood next to the tube and moved the aluminum-foil-wrapped rabbit ears until I got a picture. And then I moved them again when the picture disappeared.

  My neck hurt all the time when I tried to watch TV at my grandparents’; craning down to watch the television as I shifted the antennae.

  Poor reception— that’s what is happening to this woman, or that’s what it is like. She is fighting to stay, moving her own rabbit ears around so she will not disappear. It isn’t working though. Even at a distance, I can tell that it isn’t. When she becomes so weak she cannot stand on her own, the boy wraps his arms around her. Tilda is so focused, still beating at the air, that she does not see what is happening behind her. I know, though I do not know the woman or the boy, that whatever is going on will hurt Tilda greatly.

  Second Chances />
  -M.H.-

  Twelve days after Tilda’s disappearance.

  I CAN FEEL THAT SHE is trying to settle into a life without the girl, the girl that I’ve taken, but I can also feel that it is a false settlement, an acquiescence to circumstance that will not stick.

  I have driven to her home, this time parking at her house rather than hiding the vehicle some ways away and arriving on the pretense of needing her telephone. No, this time everything will be direct. Everything will go right.

  The satchel I placed on the sofa in her studio will have made her more open to my charms, to my illusions and manipulations. I have been with her as she lay dozing. I have strolled about her mind and discovered hidden places even she cannot consciously reach.

  I go to the back door even though I feel the front door would be more ‘normal’ for a stranger to approach. I knock. Slowly, leisurely. I rap my knuckle three times against the door and then I push my hands into my pockets. My forearms pin the sides of my jacket against my body and reveal the pale blue shirt that covers my torso. I listen to her moving inside the house, knocking something over again as if we’re in a repeat of the other day I came here, when both the girl and the officer interfered. That is not this day though. This is not déjà vu. This is a new beginning. She calls out ‘just a minute’ in her lovely voice and I hear another clatter, like the sound of falling brushes. When she eventually opens the door, there is no resistance this time. The girl is not watching me and trying to thwart my efforts. Or, she might be, and she cannot get past the safeguards I have placed around my body. She will not ruin this for me. Not now.

  “If you’re selling something, I’m afraid I’ve about busted my budget this month and can’t buy anything.” Jenn smiles and gestures to her paint-splattered jeans and light green top that is, remarkably, paint-free. “plight of a starving artist.”