The Witch's Will

by Raven Snow

  Lady didn’t have a crowbar of her own, so she simply explored. It wasn’t like there was a whole lot else she could do. Not that she minded. She would have happily spent hours or even days exploring this place. Like Crispin, she found herself drawn to aspects of it. There were old fashioned desks, chairs, a chalkboard that had never been erased. There were still names of herbs listed on it. How cool must this place have been back in the day? It was a shame Lucette had closed it down.

  Dom finished prying windows in the room open and moved for the door as if to head for the next room. He turned when Lady followed him. “You stay here.”

  “What?” Lady froze where she was, only a few steps behind him. As much fun as she was having exploring, she had planned on giving the rest of the area a cursory look over first.

  “If something is going to happen, it would be about this time.” Dom tapped the face of a watch he wasn’t wearing. “We don’t have much time until daybreak either, so we need to keep a lookout starting now. There isn’t time to waste, you get me?”

  Lady thought about objecting. She felt her shoulders sag instead. “I get you,” she grumbled, heading for the window. She didn’t like it, but she did get him. She turned her back to Dom and heard his footsteps fade away.

  The world outside was quiet. Sure, there were some of the usual sounds. Lady heard crickets chirp. She heard what might have been tree frogs. There wasn’t a whole lot to see beyond the darkness. She couldn’t make out much of the grass. That eased up some as her eyes adjusted.

  Footsteps sounded up and down the hallway. Dom was likely retrieving Crispin, stationing him in a strategic spot down the hall. Between the three of them, hopefully they would see something.

  It was late. The minutes ticked by. Lady watched them do so on the face of her cell phone. Each time she glanced at it, she winced and had to wait for her eyes to adjust to all the darkness again. It was late. Time was going by slowly, but it was still very late and Lady had woken up very early. She suppressed a yawn and slapped her hands to her cheeks, trying to wake herself up.

  It wasn’t going to do anyone a whole lot of good if she fell asleep while she was supposed to be on watch. Maybe it would be better to explore a little after all. Dom didn’t have to know about it. If something happened, she would still be able to hear it.

  Lady turned from the window and went to one of the old student desks. The tops of them opened and inside Lady found some neat little oddities. There were old matchbooks and marbles and buttons. Lady found dip pens and inkwells. Some desks had books in them. Crispin would likely be interested in those. Lady stopped at the fifth desk she checked and moved on to the desk at the front of the room. It was a large old wooden desk. It wasn’t much of a stretch to guess it had belonged to their teacher.

  Lady plopped down into the armchair behind it. She immediate threw an arm around her mouth, coughing into it as a cloud of dust went up. If Dom heard her wandering about, he would probably march in there and give her a lecture. It wasn’t like he had any degree of authority over her, but she still didn’t want to hear it.

  Lady kept her coughing quiet, waiting for it all to settle before uncovering her mouth and nose. She began opening drawers then. Papers, folders, books, pens. There was all sorts of stuff to find. There was an especially heavy folder in the bottom-most drawer. Lady chose to remove that first.

  The folder wasn’t like the cheap old office products Lady was used to. It was a soft leather that wrapped around its contents nearly twice. Two leather thongs tied the thing shut, though slips of papers were still threatening to come bursting and fluttering out of the top and bottom. Lady made sure the folder was placed securely in the very center of the desk before letting it open.

  As expected, the contents of the folder avalanched this way and that. Not that Lady minded. She was interested in all of it. Each piece of paper her hand touched was steeped in an antique sort of mystique. This wasn’t just an old boarding school, it was an old boarding school for witches.

  The contents of the folder didn’t look like they had much to do with classes either. Not that they were completely removed from the school. It was only that almost every bit of paper was different.

  Letters, Lady realized. It was letters and photos and postcards. They all had different handwriting. A lot of it was in looping cursive Lady found difficult to read, but she thought she got the idea anyway. These were old students. Alumni of the boarding school who wrote these long after they had left Dark Lake—and some of the postcards did suggest they had left Dark Lake.

  Lady began to make separate piles. She set letters in one pile, postcards and the like in another pile, and photos in a third. She was beginning to notice a theme with the photos. On the back of each photo there was marked a year. Not only that, the photos themselves looked to have all been taken in front of the Antonie Manor itself.

  There were mostly girls in the photos. They all ranged wildly in age and height. There were some boys among them but not many. Students, Lady decided. The adults standing tall to either side of the group, framing the children must be the teachers. A school photo had been taken every year, it seemed. Lady wondered if Ms. Poole was in some of the photos. She must be. The prospect was an entertaining one. Lady found herself scanning each photo for the familiar face of her employer and mentor—which was precisely how she found something she hadn’t been looking for.

  Lady laughed at first. She couldn’t help it. Her mind had made a dumb connection and tricked her eyes, telling her something that couldn’t be true. She steadied her penlight and looking again, but her eyes had not betrayed her. “Weird.” Lady set the photo aside from the other pile of photos and searched for other photos taken during similar years.

  She found a few. Two to be exact. Both pictures had a lot of the same girls. Lady found the face she was looking for. “The heck?” she asked aloud. She wished someone was there to see what she was seeing. “Crazy,” she muttered, tapping the pictures against the desk to rid them of dust and make their corners even. She slid them into her back pocket, not sure if she would show them to anyone or not. The likeness was uncanny, but maybe the lighting was just bad and the pictures were too old. Maybe they would look different when she gazed on them with a fresh pair of eyes.

  A phone rang. Lady jumped out of the desk chair and wheeled around, searching for the source of the noise. It was a strangled, tinny sound. It certainly wasn’t coming from a cell phone.

  Lady recalled the story Adora and Fabia had told. She abandoned her post further by stepping out into the hallway, penlight in hand. She pointed her light across the walls and floor. There was a table, she noted. On a small table there sat an old phone with more pieces than she knew how to work. She had seen them in movies, but that was it.

  “What are you doing?” Dom’s voice came from further down the hall.

  Lady ignored him and closed the rest of the distance between herself and the phone. She picked up the end she supposed was the receiver. “Hello?”

  There was silence on the other end of the line. For a few seconds, Lady was sure she had answered wrong. She hadn’t picked up the phone right or the thing she was trying to talk into wasn’t a phone at all. In actuality, she was talking into an old spyglass or something.

  “Hello,” said a voice, at long last. It was deep and halting, like it hadn’t expected the sort of answer it had received. “May I speak to the lady of the house?”

  “This is… Lady. I’m in the house. May I ask whose calling?”

  There came a soft hum on the other end of the phone. When the voice spoke again, the halting quality was no longer there. “This doesn’t concern you. I suggest that you leave now and not return.” With that, he hung up. Lady did the same—or thought she did at any rate. She put the phone back on the table. It wasn’t like it had been plugged into anything to begin with.

  “What happened?” Dom was at the table as well. He gave Lady a start when she looked up from the table to see him looming there.

>   “It was a man’s voice. He wanted to speak to the lady of the house. He knew right off the bat I wasn’t her, and that definitely annoyed him. He hung up.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Not much. He said I should leave.”

  Dom frowned. His brow was furrowed. “Did he threaten to call the cops?”

  “He didn’t say anything about that. He just said we should leave. It kind of sounded like a threat was implied, but…” Lady trailed off and merely shrugged.

  “Okay.” It sounded like Dom had made up his mind. “You’re going to leave and go back to the car.”

  “What?” Lady raised her voice above the whisper it had been.

  “Shh,” hissed Dom.

  “Sorry,” Lady hissed right back. “What?” she repeated, quieter this time but no less urgent.

  “Whoever is out there probably has eyes on the house. They know you’re here. You told them as much. They don’t know about the rest of us, though. At least, it doesn’t sound like it. There’s a chance we can salvage this if you act like you’re leaving. Heck, this might even work to our advantage. Maybe we can get him in a kind of… I don’t know—pincer attack.”

  Lady huffed but nodded. She didn’t want all of this to be for nothing. “Fine. But what do I do once I get to the car? I can’t just start it up and leave you guys.”

  “I’ll leave that up to you,” said Dom, pointing her in the direction of the window they had entered the house through. He handed her the keys. “But, yeah. Definitely don’t abandon us, please. Do you need help getting down?”

  “Would it matter if I did?” Lady grumbled, pocketing the keys. “We can’t have our mystery man seeing that there are two intruders, can we?”

  Dom raised a hand, one finger up like he was either trying to silence or still her. It worked on both accounts. “We should send two people, shouldn’t we? You wouldn’t come alone.”

  “I would.”

  “And it is Crispin’s car out there.”

  “I guess there’s that.”

  “Go on. I’ll meet back up with you in a second.” Dom hurried back down the hallway.

  Lady returned to the room with the beds. Crispin had pulled out quite a lot, she noted. One book in particular caught her eye. It was a large black, leather-bound tome like the one Ms. Poole had given her. She went to it and thumbed through the pages. A book of shadows, maybe? The scrawl looked familiar. Not that Lady could read it any better than she could the ancient cursive. It didn’t even look as if all the words were in English. There were characters she couldn’t immediately place.

  “Hurry up,” said Dom. “Both of you.”

  Lady looked up from the book to find both Dom and Crispin coming through the doorway. Crispin looked about as thrilled by all this as Lady felt. The prospect of going down through the woods two or three more times this night probably didn’t sit well with him. “Are you sure you’ll be fine up here alone?” he asked.

  “I’m fine. Go on.”

  “All right.” That obviously wasn’t the answer Crispin had wanted to hear, but he went anyway. He climbed out of the window and onto the roof. Lady followed.

  The climb down was a little more difficult than the climb up. Lady would never admit as much, but it did make her a little uncomfortable, dropping down when she couldn’t see the ground. The penlight had messed with her eyes adjusting just a little. Fortunately, Crispin was there to intercept her. She felt his hands on her waist and felt her own face heat up a little as he lowered her carefully down. “Got it?” he asked, no doubt referring to her balance.

  “Got it,” Lady whispered back to him. “Do you think it would be all right if we used our flashlights?

  Crispin didn’t answer immediately. “Normally I’d say no,” he said, as if he’d given the matter some thought. “But we want to be noticed leaving, right? Maybe we should use one at least.”

  Lady nodded. That sounded sensible to her. Plus, it meant they wouldn’t have to do all that walking in pitch black. She fished the light from her back pocket only to knock the photographs out as well. They fluttered to the ground as she swore.

  “What are those?” asked Crispin.

  “Pictures,” said Lady, stating the obvious. “I found them inside. I… I, uh, thought they were kind of weird.”

  “Weird?” Crispin sounded like his interest had been piqued immediately. “Weird how?”

  “Now probably isn’t the best time.” Lady straightened back up, having gathered her pictures. She held them out for Crispin anyway and shined her light over the faces. “Doesn’t that look like Otsuya, though?”

  Crispin didn’t say anything. He only stared, neither confirming nor denying Lady’s assessment.

  “Crispin?” Lady nudged him.

  Crispin jumped a little. He shook his head and looked away. “Yeah… Yeah, sorry. I just… You’re right. That does look like her.” He turned away from Lady then and headed toward the tree line.

  Lady had to break into a trot to keep up. The mood had changed. Lady wasn’t sure how or why. She knew only that it had. “Does Otsuya have family around here?” asked Lady. She remembered Otsuya telling her initially that she was a tourist, but Lady wouldn’t be surprised if that hadn’t been the full truth. It wasn’t like she ever strayed very far from the inn.

  “No,” said Crispin. “Not that I know of. It’s always just been her.”

  “No relation to the person in the picture then.” Lady really should have guessed as much. She felt stupid for not being able to spot the difference.

  Crispin didn’t respond. The mood was growing stranger with each passing moment. That was about all Lady could take. She stopped midstep, making a point to stomp her foot for effect. It only crunched softly in the underbrush, but it did make Crispin turn and look at her. “I’ve just about had it with people only giving me little bits of information at a time. If you know something I don’t, just tell me!”

  The whites of Crispin’s eyes became very visible and he pressed a finger over his mouth to quiet her. “It’s not really my place to say anything, but… fine. Let’s get further away from the house. I’ll tell you then, all right?”

  Lady wanted to tell him no. She wanted to stand her ground and refuse to budge an inch until he divulged to her everything he knew and then some. Unfortunately, he was already walking away and Lady really didn’t want to be left alone. She hurried after him.

  ***

  They went to the edge of the property but not all the way out to where they had left the car. “Someone opened the gate,” Crispin pointed out. “It wasn’t like that when we got here.”

  Lady looked back in the direction of the manor. “Do you think that means whoever killed Lucette is here and up there then?”

  Crispin brought his shoulders up in a shrug. “Maybe. Maybe they left when you answered the phone. Maybe no one was even murdered.”

  Lady cocked her head at Crispin. “Seriously? How could something not be going on? I answered that phone. It wasn’t even plugged in. Someone talked to me. Something is definitely going on.”

  “That doesn’t mean it’s necessarily murder.”

  “What then? You have something on your mind, so say it. You told me you would when we got further from the house. Well, we’re further from the house now, so—”

  “Look!” Crispin pointed.

  “Don’t change the subject. Do what you promised and—”

  “Look!” Crispin pointed again, more emphatically this time.

  Lady turned to look and, indeed, she saw something. It was bright and humanoid, not unlike the thing she had seen at the graveyard. “Come on,” Lady hissed, taking off after it. It was moving along at a steady speed. If it got out of sight, she would have a lot of explaining to do to Dom.

  “Wait!” Crispin called after Lady, raising his own voice higher than perhaps he should have.

  Lady ignored Crispin. She would keep her distance as best she could. She was aware of how little she truly knew of Dark Lak
e. There were things here that could hurt her, sure. This was why they were here, though. They were here to find whatever had been lurking around the Antonie house. This was it. What else could Lady do but follow it?

  The penlight didn’t help much. Lady was moving too fast to pay much heed to her surroundings. She tripped over roots and flew through trees with branches that whipped her face and legs. How was the thing she was chasing moving so fast, she wondered. Of course, the answer to that was pretty obvious, assuming that it really was a ghost.

  Gradually, Lady began to gain on the shape made of light. She could make out more details the closer she got to it. The figure was slight, feminine. Despite being made of light, hair trailed behind her like dark ribbons. Her clothes were the fashion of a bygone era. Had it been made of real material, that ghostly skirt of hers would have snagged on something.

  “Wait,” gasped Lady. She was running out of breath, but the spirit was showing no signs of slowing down. At least, it hadn’t been. When Lady spoke, it suddenly stopped. Lady stopped as well, her heart pounding loud and hard in her chest. She hadn’t expected it to listen to her. She hadn’t even been aware that it had the capacity to listen and understand. Lady didn’t say anything, didn’t know what to say. She remained very still, and the luminous thing before her did the same.

  “Lady!” It was Crispin’s voice. Lady looked over her shoulder to see the small bouncing beam of a penlight approaching. “Be careful! Don’t get too close to her!”

  Lady faced forward and found the spirit’s face suddenly near to her own. It was the same face from the photograph, the same face Lady had thought she knew reasonably well. “Otsuya?”