Witches of The Wood

by Skylar Finn

  “What made you want to leave?” I asked.

  “Margo was into some seriously weird stuff,” she said. “Like always asking me to get these frog legs or whatever so she could put them in the tub—gross. She said she was into this whole gothic vibe for her new album, but it went beyond that. There were like, people going out to the woods in robes at night, and weird dietary practices. I looked it up online, and it said their behavior was…” She frowned, remembering. “Consistent with patterns indicative of cult behavior, I think it said. So then I looked up cults? And I was like, no way. Huh-uh. This girl’s getting out of here.”

  “You think she was forming a cult?” Peter asked.

  “I’m pretty sure that’s what it was,” said Lisette. “And I think she wanted me to join it, cause she was always asking me all these weird questions, like was I satisfied with my life? Had I ever felt slighted? Whatever that means. Stuff about, like, what did I truly desire. Like that was any of her business.”

  “What do you truly desire?” I asked, more out of curiosity than anything else.

  “One million subscribers,” she said. “And I’m not gonna get that from Margo Metal. She doesn’t even have a channel. And she has half the followers I do on social media. What did I need her for? She’s old news.”

  “So you left,” said Peter. “Did Margo say anything to you that made you uncomfortable or afraid? When you put in your notice, I mean.”

  “No, she was cool about it,” said Lisette dismissively, eating a peppermint from the crystal bowl on her glass coffee table. “Cut me a fat check and sent me on my way. She seemed excited about Colin, for some reason. I don’t really get why. Kind of a boring dude.”

  “Do you know where Colin lived?” I asked.

  “Unfortunately,” she said, rolling her eyes. “He was obsessed with hanging out with me. He kept saying that we were practically neighbors, and when he got back to the city, we had to hang out. We’re not neighbors like, at all. He put his address in my contacts—like, basically took my phone from me while I was on it and put all his information in, everything from his email to where he lives. I was like, okay, I’m definitely not ever going to use this, give me my phone back. He was really pushy about it.” She handed Peter her phone and he took a picture of Colin’s information.

  “Thanks for your help, Lisette,” I said as Peter and I stood up to go.

  “Sure thing.” She eyed him curiously. “Is he still working there? Colin?”

  “Not exactly,” I said. “We think he may have disappeared.”

  “Huh,” said Lisette, turning away and opening her laptop. “Well, you know. We all need a break from social media sometimes.”

  We took the elevator down to the ground floor, Peter unable to contain his vitriol with what we had just learned.

  “She thought they were a cult and didn’t bother to warn her replacement? Because she wants to work for Ferrari Xmas? Did you see that self-portrait she had hanging over her couch? Who keeps a giant painting of themselves in their home?”

  “Margo,” I said, thinking of the painting of her that hung above the fireplace at the manor.

  He shook his head. “That girl is going to feel terrible when we find out what happened to this kid,” he said.

  “I don’t know that she will,” I said. “She seemed kind of preoccupied.”

  Colin lived much less luxuriously than Lisette did, in a rundown old tenement building a few blocks from Drexel, one of the city’s most notoriously bleak campuses. Going from Lisette’s to Colin’s was like the difference between night and day.

  Peter knocked on the door. It looked exactly the same as the half dozen other doors that lined the hallway. The door opened a crack. I could just make out the eyes of a kid about Colin’s age. He peered warily through the opening at us.

  “Are you selling something?” he asked. “Because if so, I don’t want it.”

  “We’re not selling anything,” said Peter. “We’re here to talk to you about Colin.”

  “Are you the police?” he asked.

  “No, we’re just two concerned friends of his, trying to figure out where he went,” said Peter.

  The kid opened the door wider, looking confused.

  “I didn’t know Colin had any friends,” he said.

  “Well, he does,” I said. “Can we come in?”

  “I guess.” He opened the door all the way and stepped aside. “What are your names?”

  “I’m Peter and this is Sam,” said Peter, entering the apartment first.

  “I’m David,” he said. “Colin’s roommate.”

  I looked around the apartment and shuddered. Laundry spilled out of the narrow hallway in a pile. Dishes filled the sink and crawled across the counter. Empty pizza boxes littered the coffee table, surrounded by empty beer bottles. David knocked a few boxes and bottles aside so we could sit on the sagging sofa leaking stuffing. I chose to remain standing.

  “When was the last time you saw Colin?” asked Peter, unfazed by the questionable sofa.

  David sat in an equally beat-up chair across from him. I imagined him and Colin dragging it out of a dumpster in the dead of night and hauling it up the stairs.

  “The night before he left for his internship,” said David. “We were Googling pictures of Margo. He didn’t know who she was, but he thought she was hot.” I rolled my eyes.

  “And you haven’t spoken to him since?” asked Peter.

  “Look, it’s not like me and Colin were best friends,” said David defensively. “We didn’t hang out or anything. We just lived together.”

  “No one is questioning your judgement, David,” said Peter. “But no one has seen him for a while, and people are getting concerned.”

  David frowned. “Do you think something might have happened to him?”

  “It’s possible,” said Peter. “That’s what we’re trying to determine.”

  “Could I use your bathroom?” I asked David.

  “Down the hall, first door on the left,” he said.

  The wall of laundry made the hallway nearly impassable. I was relieved that I didn’t actually have to go the bathroom, given the condition of the living room. I could only imagine what horrors the bathroom contained.

  I passed the first door on the left. There was a second door after it with the door open and a third one at the end of the hall with the door closed. I went to this door and pushed it open.

  Colin’s room was neat as a pin. I knew immediately it was his and not his slovenly roommate’s. Partly it was the immaculate condition of the small space, but also a general sense of Colin-ness. His bed was covered in a navy-and-red striped comforter. There was a desk and chair pushed under the window, facing a steam vent in a brick wall. A small bookcase held numerous volumes of science fiction and fantasy, and the bureau across from the bed held a small smart TV and a smattering of change strewn across its surface. Most indicative of the fact that it was Colin’s room was the small framed photograph of My Little Ponies on the nightstand next to his bed.

  I looked for something personal to Colin, some kind of object I could hold that might allow me to see his memories the way that I’d seen Martha’s. That was usually how it worked on TV when somebody tried to see how somebody got murdered. I saw The Gift like a hundred times when I was a kid. I couldn’t have explained then why I was so fascinated by the movie, but I guess in hindsight it made sense.

  Colin’s room was fairly sparse of accessories, but I found a set of what looked like spare keys. I didn’t know how regularly he handled them or how much meaning they might have had, but I picked them up anyway and I sat down on his bed. I closed my eyes and pictured Colin. Nothing happened.

  I sighed, opening my eyes. I admit, some pretty crazy things had happened to me recently, but I always felt doubt when my family claimed I had uncontrollable powers. I was just thinking that this was proof to the contrary when I looked up and saw the mirror.

  The reflection had changed. Instead of my reflection, I
saw Colin, asleep in bed. It wasn’t the bed I sat on, however, and upon closer inspection, I recognized it as the same bed I slept in at the manor.

  Mirror Colin’s door cracked open, revealing a shaft of light that striped the bed. He stirred, but didn’t awaken. I couldn’t tell who, if anyone, had opened the door. As I watched, the door creaked the rest of the way open.

  There was no one there.

  The covers slid sideways off Colin, and as I watched, he drifted upward into the air until he was levitating. Then he floated through the door and down the hallway, down the stairs. The goblin-decorated doors of the parlor swung open, and he floated right through them. He was still asleep.

  As I watched in horror, the wall that held the fireplace opened with a lengthy, ominous creak and the entire wall swung inward, revealing the pentagram room with the torches lit. A group of robed figures stood in a circle, and Colin drifted to the center of it, resting on the floor. He opened his eyes.

  “Who are you?” he asked. He didn’t sound afraid, merely confused, as if he thought he was having a strange dream.

  “I am this house, and I am the power,” said one of the hooded figures. “I am me and you and everything else in between. I can take life and I can give it.”

  The voice was unmistakably Gwyneth’s. But when she raised her head, revealing the face beneath the hood, it was Margo.

  “Margo?” said Colin, puzzled. “What’s going on?”

  “I require a virgin for the first ritual,” said Margo in Gwyneth’s voice. “You seemed like you’d do the trick.”

  Rope materialized out of thin air and bound Colin’s ankles and wrists.

  “Oh My Little Ponies,” he said, which seemed to be some sort of oath for him. “Is this an orgy?”

  Margo snickered. “Something like that.”

  A blindfold appeared around his eyes.

  “I’ve read about stuff like this online,” he said excitedly. “Are you in some kind of sex cult?”

  “Yes, Colin,” said Margo. “That’s exactly what this is.”

  The others in the circle laughed their ancient, rasping laughs. They raised their faces to the ceiling, and I recognized none of them, except the two who I had seen once before: in the faces of Bridget and Kimmy, for the briefest instant in the clearing where Margo had shot her music video.

  “What do I have to do?” he asked.

  “You don’t need to do anything,” said Margo reassuringly. “Just hold still, and it will be over before you know it.” She pulled a long knife with a silver handle from her sleeve and approached him on the floor.

  The image in front of me dissolved, and I watched, puzzled, as it was replaced by darkness. Colin as I knew him now appeared in the reflection.

  “Colin?” I said.

  “You don’t need to see that,” he said seriously. “It definitely wasn’t pretty.”

  “How did you get here?” I asked.

  “I was in your room, in front of your mirror, and I saw you here, in front of mine,” he said. “Pretty neat, right?”

  “I guess,” I said. “Your roommate kind of sucks, though.”

  He rolled his eyes. “I hate that guy,” he said. “He never cleans.” He gave a little sigh. “At least I’ll never have to stress about that again.”

  “Do you remember what happened to you now?” I asked.

  “Unfortunately,” he said with a shudder. “It’s weird. It’s like it was Margo, but not Margo at the same time. Like it was her face, but not her voice. And I don’t know who any of those other people were.”

  “They weren’t really people,” I said. “And that wasn’t really Margo. I mean, it was, in a technical sense, but she’s possessed by Gwyneth, who has this entire witch posse trying to gain form corporeally so they can return to Earth to wreak havoc in the bodies of pop stars. I think you were the first step to ensuring that happened.”

  “Can we stop them?” asked Colin.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I hope so.”

  “Sam?” I looked up to see Peter in the doorway.

  “Who were you talking to?” I looked over at the mirror that held Colin, whom Peter obviously couldn’t see.

  I held up my phone. Luckily I still had my air pods in from navigating in the car earlier. Peter said he hated the sound of Siri’s voice because it made him feel like robots were taking over society.

  “I was just talking to my family,” I said.

  “Any word on Tamsin?” he asked.

  “Not yet,” I said sadly. I knew one of them would have contacted me, “in the usual way,” if there had been.

  “Well, this kid is pretty much useless,” he said. “But I do have one more idea. I think we should find the producer who ran into the bar the night he quit. He was saying some pretty crazy stuff was going on.”

  DJ Swann. I remembered what Manny the driver told me outside of the Briar Rose, the bed and breakfast where the majority of Margo’s entourage holed up out of a refusal to work at the house, which apparently everyone found creepy. Manny said DJ Swann had encouraged him to quit.

  I texted Bridget to ask if she had Manny’s number. Bridget was the type of person who friended her mailman on Facebook and exchanged contact information with random strangers she met because she discovered they had the same astrological sign.

  Unsurprisingly, she had Manny’s number saved in her phone. Manny knew not only DJ Swann’s number, but his address, which was what I preferred. I had a feeling that of everyone we spoke to, DJ Swann would be the most reluctant to speak to us.

  Which meant that a surprise visit was in order.

  37

  The Unseen

  DJ Swann’s Radnor neighborhood reminded me of Grandma Hale’s, and I was flooded with a slew of unwanted childhood flashbacks depicting my empty, sterile upbringing. I stared out the window, overwhelmed by my baggage. Peter glanced over at me as he navigated the wide, tree-lined streets, but didn’t say anything.

  Peter parked in the sprawling driveway and we got out. I rang the doorbell three times and was ready to sneak around the perimeter, looking for an open window, when the front door opened a crack and a wary face peeped out.

  “Are you DJ Swann?” I asked.

  “Depends on who’s asking,” he said cagily.

  “My name is Samantha Hale, and my associate and I have a few questions about your experience at your most recent place of employment,” I said.

  “What’s your interest?” he asked. He sounded both suspicious and intrigued.

  “We investigate paranormal phenomenon, and we believe the people there are in danger,” I said. Peter shot me a look. It was an impressed one. Ever since I took the job working for Margo, I was getting better and better at lying. Which, as someone essentially charged with lying about famous people for a living, you’d think I’d have been skilled at already, but it took Margo Metal to make me really reach for the sky.

  At this, DJ Swann opened the door wide, revealing a front hallway lined with cardboard boxes. “Come in,” he said reluctantly. He looked more closely at Peter. “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”

  “I have one of those faces,” said Peter. “I get that all the time.”

  DJ Swann shrugged. “Whatever, man. Let’s make this quick, I’m in the middle of moving.”

  He led us into his palatial foyer, down the hallway past a sweeping double staircase, into a dining room ornamented with not one, but several chandeliers. One wall of the dining room was covered in mirrors.

  “I like to watch myself eating,” DJ Swann explained.

  I sat down at the table. Peter sat next to me, and DJ Swann sat across from us.

  “My family are occult enthusiasts,” I told him. Someone once told me that the importance of maintaining a lie is to keep your story as consistent as the truth would be, so you’re not constantly groping for manufactured explanations. “We believe the paranormal exists around us every day. And that sometimes, it poses a threat to our safety and well-being.”


  “I come from a family like that,” DJ Swann said knowingly.

  “You do?” I said, surprised. I hadn’t expected this declaration to be a point of relatability.

  “I do,” he said. “I was raised to believe in the unseen.”

  “The evidence we’ve gathered suggests there’s a malevolent presence in the house,” I said. “Witnesses interviewed have implied that you might have glimpsed this presence, and that was your reason for prematurely terminating your employment with Ms. Metal.”

  “That’s exactly why I quit working for her,” he said. “She was up to something dark in that place. I saw it.”

  “Can you describe what you saw?”

  “I woke up late one night because I couldn’t sleep,” he said. “I never slept well in that house to begin with. It always gave me the heebie jeebies, you know what I’m sayin’? I heard this, like, chanting. It sounded like something weird was going down. I got up to investigate. I saw a bunch of weird shadows in that room with the fireplace and the freaky ass doors. The ones with the little demon faces on them. You know the room I mean.”

  “Can you describe the shadows for us?” Peter asked.

  “They had red eyes, and they were laughing. They were everywhere. The place was crawling with them.”

  “Did you see anything else?” I asked, thinking of Colin.

  “Nah, but there was this kid there, at the same time I was? Little nerdy guy. He was still there when I left. But according to my boy Manny, nobody has heard from him for a while.”

  “What do you think might have happened to him?” I asked.

  “I think you better start checking the basement for bones,” he said.

  DJ Swann showed us out, wishing us luck with our mission on the front steps of his house. “You guys are brave, to be messing with all of that noise,” he said. “I hope nothing happens to you. I truly do. I hope you get everyone out of there before something crazy happens.”

  Something was bothering me, and I couldn’t put a finger on what it was. Just before he closed the door, something hit me. “Did you say there was a basement?” I said.