by E M Graham
Clean underwear, along with a fresh bra, t-shirt and jeans, even socks too, for it looked like summer was good and over despite the unnatural sultriness of the wind. I put on the same hoodie and over it, Mom’s jean jacket which had now dried out from the night before.
We headed back in the direction of Dad’s house, but he sped right by it and on up Portugal Cove Road. Soon we were past the airport and Winsor Lake even, right outside the city limits. I didn’t often go this far out of town, having no call at all to go beyond my tight circle of Alice’s house, downtown and the university. There were a lot of trees and fields out this way, but it was a civilized country and had been habited for a long time, not like the unfriendly barrens on the top of the Southside Hills.
Going down the steep hill towards the cove, Hugh took a sudden right hand turn up a side road, and then a left a few moments later, up a gravelled track. I saw now why he didn’t take his Batmobile, for that low slung car would have bottomed out on the first of the many sizable potholes. Even the SUV was having a hard enough time of it.
The lane, if you can call it that, went on and on till eventually we came to a bog, the wet reeds showing lushly green in the autumn landscape. Other tires tracks led past this, but Hugh pulled off and parked over some blueberry bushes. “We’ll walk from here,” he instructed, finally speaking.
He started along the path without waiting for me to catch up.
I couldn’t hold back anymore. This silent treatment was getting on my nerves.
“What’s the matter?”
He turned to look at me as if he’d forgotten I was there. “What are you talking about?” His face was blank, whether on purpose or not I couldn’t tell.
“You’re mad at me,” I said, deciding to get it all off my chest. “What is it? The baby? I told you that wasn’t my fault and besides, I want to fix it. Or is it Sasha and Seth – is that what’s got you worried?”
Hugh stopped in the middle of the track, avoiding a puddle where vehicles had worn away the topsoil and rocks. “Dara, has anyone ever told you that you have too much imagination? If you must know, we’re going to a murder scene.”
It was my turn to look startled.
“Is this the woman who was killed? Oh my God. Yes, Mark said it was behind Portugal Cove, this must be it,” I said in a rush. I was talking too much, I knew, but I was really relieved that he wasn’t mad at me. “Holy shit, are we allowed back here? And why did she die, was it because of witch craft or devil worship? Mark said there were all sorts of weird symbols all over the place?”
“You’re surprisingly well informed,” Hugh remarked drily as he began walking again over the rough path.
“Edna’s boyfriend is part of the investigation team,” I explained as I leaped over a small stream. Hugh didn’t even break his stride. “Not that he usually talks about his work, mind. It’s just that this had him so puzzled, and he was also trying to warn me against going outside at night by myself.”
“She was a half-blood witch, we’ve determined,” he said. “By the name of Tracey. I’m coming out here to see if there is any residual energy at the scene. This could give us a hint as to who was responsible. We couldn’t read anything off the body.”
“Mark said she was burned, as if by lightning,” I replied. “Is that ... could it have been magic scorching her?”
“I’ve seen the corpse. It was definitely magic. Now I have to find out who did it, and why.”
He has seen the woman’s dead body. So was Hugh working with the cops? I couldn’t get my head around this.
“But she died months ago,” I said. “Will there be anything left to sense around there?”
“She died almost exactly three months ago,” Hugh said, nodding his head. “If I’m correct, three months to today and on the night of the Summer Solstice.”
By now even the old cart road had ended and we took a sharp turn, plunging into the tracks left by the passage of recent utility vehicles.
My mind did a quick start. Today was the equinox, and from what I’d read in fiction, the two solstices and equinoxes were important times in the witch’s calendar. I’d learned from experience it was dangerous to delve into Alt Town on those dates of the years, especially if they happened during full moons. Some weird shit could go down then.
“Hugh, why are you here? In St. John’s, I mean. You said you were looking into the prejudice that’s rising up, does this woman’s death have anything to do with all that?”
“This, and other things,” he replied. He sounded almost grudgingly, as if he didn’t want to tell me. But I was going to get it out of him, for my mind was leaping and I didn’t like where it was going.
“Does... does this have anything to do with the weird symbols and graffiti around town?”
“Perhaps.”
“So today is the equinox, the day is equally long as the night. You’re saying this woman died at the solstice,” I continued, hurrying to keep up with him. “God dammit Hugh, turn around and look at me.”
He stepped up his pace and I raised my voice to holler after him.
“Do you think there might be something planned for tonight?”
He had stopped answering me.
I yelled at his back. “Does this have anything to do with Alice?”
That made him pause finally. He waited until I caught up to him, his hands huddled into the pockets of his leather jacket.
“Does it? With what Dirk said...” My voice had grown suddenly smaller, till it was a bare whisper. “Witches? What would they want with her?”
Had they been waiting for me at the bottom of the hill last night? Tracey, that unknown victim, had been half witch, and had been sacrificed in some sort of weird ceremony.
Was I the next intended victim? And not getting me, they had taken Alice. Oh dear God what had I done?
Hugh reached out his arm, as if to hug me and give me solace, and I braced for the rush of tears this sympathy would draw from me, but it didn’t happen. Instead, he patted me roughly on the shoulder.
“Bear up, Dara,” he said. “The worst hasn’t happened yet.”
“Yet?” I screeched over the wind. We were now out of the stunted woodlands and on to the barrens proper. Conception Bay lay blue before us in the morning sun, with Bell Island sticking out of the water like the prow of a giant old steam ship. “What do you mean, yet? You frigger!”
He stopped short just as I caught up to him. Peering from behind his bulk, I saw the yellow lines of police tape flapping in the breeze. Below us, the mountain dipped into a hollow.
Usually small dales like this in the midst of granite outcroppings became ponds, places where the water collected, unable to escape through the rock. Over time, these tiny stagnant lakes would fill with silt and organic matter to become bogs, and eventually peat. Yet this was a simple scoop of the rock, perhaps thirty feet wide and ten feet deep, and the bottom was just plain grass.
A perfect small amphitheatre, naturally hewn from the surrounding rock. You wouldn’t know it was here until you stumbled over it. And unless someone came right to the lip like we were right then, you could hide a small army down here without being seen.
There were no police there anymore, and nothing to show the presence of human beings save for the faded chalk outlines of symbols on the gray rock faces.
Hugh lifted the yellow tape up and indicated for me to cross it with him.
“Keep your mind open,” he said softly. “Try to sense magic, or the things which passed here.”
“See into the past? I don’t think I can do that.” If I could peer into the past, I would have done so long ago and known what had happened with my mother.
“Just...” He shook his head and moved ahead of me down the steep slope of scree.
When we’d reached the bottom of the pit, he stood motionless with his eyes closed, moving only his head as if trying to hear faint glimmers of the events gone by on the lessened breeze which made its way down here.
I followed su
it. It came to me slowly, then quickly and so intensely I had to back off. It was just like trying to find a radio station on Edna’s old boom box with the volume way up high. Turning the dial, looking for a connection but all I could get was static, static, static until boom! Like an assault to my ears the announcer’s voice broke in from the stratosphere.
Only it wasn’t a human talking on these wavelengths. It was the entire ceremony of that dark night, the pitch torches strung up around the bowl of rock, the costumes of those who participated. The strange chanting, the terror of the person held in the middle, drugged so her body couldn’t move or escape. Though her body was relaxed through the potions, I could feel the surge of emotions running through her, I could see the fantastical forms before her. I knew how, despite her terror, she also yearned for them to come upon her.
And I could feel the blood lust of those who closed in, steadily, like a pulsing beat in their heads it took over their minds until all they could see was their prey.
Like being hit by a bolt of lightning, I fell to the ground, colors dancing on the sides of my visions and the smell of her scorched flesh in my nostrils.
19
DARA, ARE YOU alright?”
He was bent over me, fear in his green eyes. I nodded slowly.
“Sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have subjected you to this, knowing what I knew.”
I sat up. The bowl was as quiet and brightly lit as it had been, with the shadows of clouds as they passed through the sky. No hooded figures, no fire light. No victim in the midst of terror and longing.
“Did I see...”
He nodded. “I’m sure you did.”
After a pause, he spoke again, but hesitantly this time. “I don’t suppose you could tell me exactly what you saw?”
He took a bottle of water out of his knapsack and opened it, offering it to me.
“I’d rather not talk about it,” I said after chugging, a cold shiver running down my back.
“But you must.”
“It was only a split second, I think, though it was so intense,” I began.
He stiffened beside me. “Intense, in what way?”
“I could see everything in the firelight,” I said. “There were torches lit, five of them.” I looked around. Sure enough, there were still two sturdy branches sticking out of the ground, the ends burnt to charcoal.
“Five. The pentagram,” he said, nodding. “What else?”
“The woman in the center,” I said. “She was drugged, so her body was all relaxed, but she was awake, and she could see them coming towards her.”
“Did she know the identities of the people who brought her there?”
“No...”
“Think, girl.” His voice was stern as he commanded me to use my brain. His Scottish accent was the strongest I’d heard it yet. “She must have given you some hint. Go back inside her mind.”
I closed my eyes for a moment, not that I was going to go back into that place. But I tried to remember, when I was her, what else had I noticed?
“She was scared,” I whispered. “But she couldn’t move. And one part of her wanted ... it, whatever this was. And that scared her even more. She’d thought they were her friends, her family, and she thought this ceremony was going to lift her up and give her the power she sought...”
“Who were they? Did you get a picture of them from her memory?”
“No,” I said. “Just the picture of them in their hoods, and how scary they now looked to her.”
“And from your own experience, did you get a sense of them?”
“Only....” I stopped and looked up at him. “Just the feeling from them, and I felt it too.”
He waited, his eyes on mine.
“I... we wanted to... to ravage her,” I said. “And that word isn’t enough, it doesn’t convey, the feeling in my blood as I joined them. I don’t know if I can tell you how...”
I couldn’t go on, for it was bad enough that I’d admitted aloud the hunger I’d glimpsed deep inside me and the horror that I could feel like that.
“It wasn’t you,” he said, gently. “Not you. You just picked up on the mass hysteria of the spell they were all under.”
“But who was responsible for this?”
“That is why I’m here,” he said. He helped me back to my feet, and we walked toward the scree slope.
“Hugh.” I hesitated but plunged on. “The woman? She was a stranger to me, I really think. She wasn’t... Alice.”
“No.”
“But, could she be Alice?”
He thought a moment, she shook his head. “I really don’t see it,” he said. “Your friend is not a witch, or even a half-blood witch? You would have told me if she was.”
“Not witch blood, no,” I said. “But I suspect she might have elf-blood in her. From Nan Hoskins’s line.”
He stopped halfway up the slope, his back stiff.
“But it’s pretty diluted after all those years,” I hastened to add. “Besides, why would they care about elves? Surely they’re only concerned with witches?”
I was growing greatly confused by all this.
He waited until I caught up with him, then he placed his arm around my back, helping me up over the steeper parts of the hill.
“If there are supernatural powers to be used, they will take them, no matter what the source,” Hugh said in a low voice.
I grew cold, even in the warmth of his protective arm. This was Alice’s life he was talking about. Where was she?
SO,” I SAID AS HE started up the SUV again. “Alice.”
“Yes.”
“Who are those people who’ve taken her?”
I was met only with silence. He put the vehicle in gear and turned it around in the narrow space. I could hear the bushes scrape the bottom, then we bounced as the right rear wheel rolled over a rock. Slowly we made our way back down the track.
“Do you think it’s the same ones who did this... this thing?”
I turned to look at him as I did up my seatbelt.
He nodded, slowly.
“Why?”
“You know why,” he said. “You felt it, that evil back there.”
“Not why are they doing it,” I said with a shudder. “I mean, why do you know that?”
“The timing,” he replied. “It’s the Equinox coming up, this marks a time of power, when the forces are heightened. The halfway point. It’s important in witch lore, even if it’s only because it’s believed to be important.”
“So this woman was killed on the Solstice, another important date for witches?”
He nodded.
“We have to find Alice. Before they do that to her.” I was fretting, of course I was. Not only was she my best friend, but this too, was all my fault, for Alice would never have been hanging around waiting at the foot of the Southside Hills at night, if I hadn’t gotten her mixed up in all of this. If we didn’t get to her in time, I couldn’t bear to live.
“You know what we haven’t discussed,” he said as he continued down the rough lane. “Why did Alice get in the car with them?”
“She wouldn’t go with strangers! Oh my God, why didn’t I think of that before?”
“Does she know any witches?”
“Only...” I almost couldn’t say it, but forced the words out. “Only Sasha.”
He said nothing but the SUV picked up speed, bouncing from pothole to pothole. I held on to the overhead strap, not trusting the seat belt to keep me from jolting off the roof.
“And Sasha knew we were going to the fairy den, and what time we were meeting,” I said. “I’d asked her for help, and she laughed at me, and then...”
And then her friends got even creepier and began talking about Alice. Oh shit. Alice’s abduction and possible sacrifice, they really were my fault.
ARRIVING AT DAD’S, Hugh jumped out of the truck without even waiting for me, and ran to the back entrance, the one off the driveway. I followed close at his heels.
“Sasha!” The roar could be heard throughout the mansion.
Cate appeared at the door from the sunroom, a mug in her hand.
“Hugh,” she said pleasantly enough till she saw me tailing him, then her face soured as if her coffee had turned to vinegar.
“Where’s Sasha?”
“Really Hugh, what’s this noise about?” Cate came into the room, managing to turn her back on me at the same time and exclude me from the conversation. “I just made coffee, sit and have a cup with me.”
“Cate, where’s your daughter?” This was said through tight lips. It was the first indication I’d seen that Hugh didn’t like the woman, and my heart warmed to him yet again.
She waved her manicured hand as if to say she couldn’t be bothered keeping tabs on all her offspring. “I haven’t seen her this morning,” she said. “I don’t think she even came back last night.”
“Think, woman! Where could she be?”
“Good Lord, Hugh, why the rudeness? She’s twenty years old, how am I supposed to know where she is at any point in time? It’s hard enough to get the family together for Sunday dinner once a week.”
He took a deep breath and continued in a more reasonable, socially acceptable tone. “Did she mention any plans for the equinox this evening?”
“She usually comes to the Gathering at the Temple, the Kin always have the service and social afterwards. I told her she needed to come this year, especially with ... you know, you being here, a representative from an international house and all. Can’t it wait till then?” She turned a magnanimous smile towards him, forgiving him his ill manners.
“No, Cate, it can’t,” Hugh said tersely. “Where’s Jon?”
“Oh, squirrelled away in the office, as usual, anything to get away from his family.” This was said lightly, tossed off as a joke, the bitterness only coming through in the appearance of a finely drawn net of wrinkles on her top lip.
Hugh disappeared into the depths of the house, leaving me along with the woman who hated my guts. I busied myself pouring a coffee, anything to avoid her glare, yet I could feel her loathing like dark slime dripping down my back.
