Witches of The Wood

by Skylar Finn

  “Yeah, you didn’t know? I guess that doesn’t surprise me. It’s pretty hidden. It’s more of a cellar, really. The only access that I know of is through an outside door. Round back, near the kitchen.”

  “How did you find it?” I asked.

  “I was planning on starting a garden,” he said. “I assumed it would take me months to make Margo Metal listenable again, you know what I mean? I like to grow my own root vegetables. Anyway, I was checking out the soil in the back, and I see these old doors, covered in vines? I left them alone. Me and basements, we don’t get along. Let alone cellars. I was like, forget that. But it’s there, all right. I don’t envy you figuring out what’s in it.”

  It was with these cheery words he left us, disappearing back inside to finish packing. I turned to Peter, troubled.

  “What if that’s where they’re keeping Tamsin?” I asked.

  “We have to get into that cellar,” he said.

  I bit my lip. “Maybe we should call the police.”

  “Our word is not enough for a search warrant,” said Peter. “If they come to the house to question Margo, which is all they’ll be able to do without probable cause, it will tip her off that someone has figured out what she’s up to, and it will give them time to move Tamsin to a new hiding place. Or worse.” He rested a hand on my shoulder at my look of horror.

  “I’m not trying to scare you, Sam,” he said. “I’m trying to be realistic. We’ve got to picture the worst possible scenario, or we might never get her back. If she’s down there, we’ll get her back ourselves. If she’s not, we might find some other evidence of what they’ve been up to. Something we can use.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s go back.”

  Peter thought we should wait till the dead of night to sneak into the cellar, while everyone was sleeping. While it was my first impulse to go flying back to the manor at top speed and pry the cellar doors open with a crowbar in order to get Tamsin back, I knew how reckless this would be.

  Margo, possessed by Gwyneth, had powers I couldn’t fathom. According to Tamsin, Cameron was her familiar. And if all their cronies plus the shadows of the wood were currently haunting the place, I was desperately outnumbered and no match for the lot of them. Even the whole coven might not be enough.

  I felt that our main point of leverage was that nobody knew I suspected anything was going on, and it wouldn’t do to get caught sneaking into the cellar like I was up to something. I proposed that we stop by the Briar Rose, the bed and breakfast in Mount Lenore. That way, I could find out what was going on at the house. Once I’d been reintegrated into the fold, we’d return to the house and find the cellar without raising any suspicions.

  When we walked into the Briar Rose, Bridget and Kimmy were seated in two high-backed chairs in front of the fireplace in the cozy living room that doubled as a lobby. Kimmy was tapping at her phone’s screen with her long red nails and Bridget was sitting sideways reading a magazine, her legs swinging over the arm of the chair.

  “There you are!” She jumped to her feet. “How was the city?”

  “Oh, you know,” I said vaguely. “The usual.”

  She eyed Peter approvingly. “Well, hello there,” she said. “I remember you.” She winked at me. “You have him on permanent retainer now, Sammy?”

  “Something like that,” I said.

  “I know just what you mean,” she intoned in a loud, exaggerated stage whisper. Peter looked at her like she was crazy. “You should see the rough cut of the music video!” Bridget continued. “It’s so dope. Kimmy and I are so, so, happy with it.”

  “It’s dope,” said Kimmy tonelessly from in front of the fire.

  “We’re going to be having a little premiere party tonight at the manor, if you and your friend here want to go and stay over.” She checked out Peter again, undressing him with her eyes.

  “Sure, Bridget, that sounds great,” I said. “What time is it?”

  “We’re leaving super soon, if you want to catch a ride with us,” said Bridget.

  “That’s fine,” I said. “You can catch me up on what’s been happening.” I turned to Peter. “Do you want to follow us?”

  Peter looked wary at the prospect of leaving me alone with two potential cult members, as he now thought of them, but he nodded.

  Bridget took his hand and squeezed it, smiling broadly up at him. “I know you don’t want to be away from her,” she said. “But we’re just going to borrow her. Just for a little while.”

  Manny came in through the front door, pausing to put a few drops of Visine in each eye. “You girls ready to go? Oh, hey!” He caught sight of me. “Remind me your name again?”

  “Laura Ingalls Wilder,” Kimmy deadpanned, literally behind my back.

  “It’s Sam,” I said, annoyed.

  “Oh yeah, that’s it. I knew it was something bisexual like that.”

  “Wait, what?” I said.

  “I believe he means ‘unisex,’” said Peter.

  “Unisex,” said Manny approvingly. “Homeboy’s like a thesaurus! Y’all wanna get on the road, before it starts snowing again? Manny waits for no man. Or no woman, for that matter.”

  Inside Manny’s car, he craned his neck over his shoulder as he pulled out of the Briar Rose lot. In his rearview mirror, I could see Peter following us.

  “You girls ready to get turned up?” he asked. “Pop some bottles on ice?”

  Kimmy immediately hit the button that caused the partition between the front seat and the back to slide up.

  “Kimmy!” scolded Bridget. “Manny’s nice.”

  “Manny just wants to get into your size double zero Limited Too jeans,” said Kimmy dismissively. “I don’t feel like listening to his double entendre all the way back to the spook house.”

  They both seemed normal and relatively unpossessed. Had Margo not performed enough rituals to affect them? I thought again of them in the clearing. Had that been the second ritual? Would they be safe until the third?

  “What’s been happening at the house?” I asked, feigning a casual air by pretending to be immersed in my phone.

  “Well, while you was out getting your freak on or whatever with Boy George, the rest of us have been working,” said Kimmy snippily.

  “Oh, we have not,” said Bridget with a roll of her eyes. “Everyone slept all day after the last party. We got up and had a moonlight party that night. And the next day, Margo spent like the entire day in a three-way conference call with Les and Pandora, the lady who directed the music video? They were talking about the final cut.”

  “What’s a moonlight party?” I asked, remembering my dream about them in the clearing.

  “Margo’s really into it,” said Bridget. “She says we gather energy from lunar rays, and that the moon is feminine while the sun is masculine. It was almost like sunbathing, but moon bathing.”

  “It’s just another excuse to get drunk,” said Kimmy. “She can dress it up all she wants, but I know an addict when I see one.”

  “You think that Margo’s an alcoholic?” I asked, perplexed.

  “She’s got all the signs,” said Kimmy. “During these moonlight parties of hers, she’s the best she’ll ever be. During the day, she’s out of it, no energy, flatlining. Straight up alkie. Just like my Uncle Tito.”

  I thought of Margo’s apparent weakness during the disappearance of Martha Hope and how after her body was recovered, Margo seemed to immediately, mysteriously recover. Was Gwyneth sucking the life out of her and then stealing the lives of others in order to regenerate her?

  Manny pulled the car up to the manor. It was its usual spooky self. Throughout its incarnations as the Dark Horse Inn, an abandoned house, and the estate where Margo planned to make her comeback (which might result in a comeback of a different kind—an evil one), I doubted that the place was ever what anyone would ever call inviting. And yet somehow, looking at it now, it seemed worse than ever. Almost as if the place itself was decaying to match what was inside of it.
<
br />   There was a new addition to the makeshift lot in front of the manor. A massive white stretch limo engulfed much of the space near the front door. Manny put the divider back down.

  “Will you look at this guy’s park job!” He sounded downright indignant, as if it was a travesty against professional drivers everywhere. “Unbelievable!”

  Kimmy peered through the tinted window, narrowing her eyes.

  “Great,” she muttered. “They’re here.”

  “Who’s here?” I said, alarmed. But Kimmy and Bridget had already piled out of the car and clattered inside on their astronomically high heels. I ran up the steps behind them, arriving breathless through the front door. I forgot to wait for Peter, who’d gotten separated from us at Mount Hazel’s unnecessarily long lone stoplight.

  I could hear voices from the ballroom, and I went down the hallway. Kimmy and Bridget had already gone in, Bridget looking giddy as a school girl. Kimmy was now slumped in a chair looking miserable and put-upon. Margo was sitting on the giant black trunk that housed her stylist Cameron’s extensive hair, make-up, and wardrobe collection, while Cameron fussed with her hair. She was surrounded by not one but three inhumanly tall women, like she was Earth’s emissary between us and a new Amazonian alien race.

  I picked out the first one immediately: this was Les’s third and final girlfriend, Paulina. She was a half-Russian, half-Japanese supermodel who spoke rarely and ate even less often than she spoke. During a particularly ugly fight between the two more combative of Les Rodney’s girlfriends, Kimmy suggested that he’d purchased Paulina from the Dark Web. Bridget, in a moment of uncharacteristic wisdom, said Kimmy was lashing out due to insecurity because Paulina had walked in both Fashion Week and the Victoria’s Secret Runway Show, which was apparently harder to get into than Fort Knox.

  “You have to be superhuman,” Bridget had said knowledgably. “And Kimmy will never be tall enough.”

  The other two Amazons had extensions down to their respective waists, one with red-and-orange ombre flames, and the other’s black as night with ice blue highlights. They were strapped into some ostentatious-looking couture that looked like dominatrix wetsuits. Even before they turned around, I knew who they were: Ferrari Xmas and Tapia, the number one and number two sellers on the Billboard Hot 100.

  For Kimmy, the appearance of the three meant only competition: competition for Les’s fickle attention, and competition for relevance as Margo’s newest back-up vocalist, which would almost certainly be obliterated by a collaboration with her equals.

  To me it meant something very different. If Margo—and therefore Gwyneth—succeeded, she would have an entire coven of dark witches at her disposal.

  38

  Gwyneth’s Plan

  Upon sighting me, the pop stars toddled over in their towering heels and landed phony air kisses on either of my cheeks. I met them at a Christmas party with Les last year and to them I represented a connection to the press, their favorite thing.

  “Samantha! So good to see you again,” said Tapia. While Margo favored an affected British accent, Tapia sounded vaguely Eastern European. If one was extremely resourceful and dug very deep, one might discover that she was born Stephanie Peters of Milwaukee, but it required considerable dedication. Coco’s former partner, Zsa Zsa, left the firm to work for her exclusively and had somehow successfully scrubbed the Internet of all evidence pertaining to her personal history.

  “What has it been? Total ages,” said Ferrari. Formerly Brandy Myers of Canton, Ohio, she’d never altered her flat Midwestern cadence. I guess in this respect, she was the most sincere.

  “Hello again,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

  “We’re forming a super group,” said Ferrari brightly.

  “We’re collaborating on a track for Margo’s new album,” added Tapia. In the background, Kimmy sulked behind her over-sized sunglasses. “It’s about vengeance and female empowerment.”

  “Cool,” I said. “I’m going to the kitchen.”

  I ran into Peter in the hallway. “There are more of them,” I hissed.

  “What do you mean, more of them?” He peered into the ballroom. “Wow, this thing is really veering into Manson territory. How many of them are there now?”

  I tallied the current count in my head: Margo, Ferrari, Tapia, Bridget, Kimmy. “Five?” I said uncertainly. I was trying to remember how many followers Gwyneth had. Was that the number she needed to possess the bodies of the living?

  “This is getting serious,” said Peter. “I don’t think we should wait until tonight.”

  The fact was I could barely stand being in the house, knowing Tamsin might be nearby and I wasn’t doing everything in my power to find her.

  “Can you distract them?” I asked. “Go in and interview them; they love the press. If you can get me twenty minutes, I can get into the cellar.”

  Peter nodded, looking concerned. “Be careful,” he said.

  He disappeared into the ballroom. I could hear him introducing himself, followed by a round of delighted clamoring to speak first. I went down the hallway, through the kitchen, and out the back door through the patio. I stuck close to the walls of the house, eyes fixed to the ground. I didn’t see anything that looked like a set of double doors leading to a cellar. How had DJ Swann found them?

  On my second trip around the house, just as I was getting frustrated, I tripped over something hard. I looked down, but all I saw was a mess of dead branches and vines. I tore at the brown and decaying shrubbery with my gloved hands. After a few minutes, I could just barely make out the shape of an ancient-looking wooden door.

  I looked around the yard and spotted a broken old rake that looked like it hadn’t been used for about a decade. Mindful of splinters, I grabbed the rake and used it to pull off the remaining branches. I managed to expose one of the doors and paused, looking at it dubiously. It occurred to me just then what might be waiting at the bottom of the stairs. Cellars are creepy enough, but this one had ten times the potential to be horrifying. I thought of Tamsin. It took all my strength to lift the door, but finally it creaked open, as if resisting my efforts.

  I shined the light on my phone onto the leaf-and-dirt covered cement steps. I reminded myself that it was winter and all the bugs were dead. Certainly there was nothing hibernating in this cellar, waiting to bite me. I went down the steps quickly rather than slowly so that if there was, it wouldn’t have the opportunity to attack me.

  “Tamsin?” I called, my voice wavering and uncertain. “Are you down here?”

  There was no answer. The cellar was silent. Wooden shelves were built into the walls, holding mason jars of what might have once been preserves. Old farming equipment hulked in the shadows, looking like something straight out of a horror movie. The cellar was not particularly large, and it took only a few minutes to sweep my light around the entire space.

  Disappointment mingled with frustration and sadness. If she wasn’t here, where was she? Tamsin would never voluntarily disappear. They had to be keeping her captive somewhere, but where? I thought of the room behind the wall in the parlor. Could I make it in and out while Peter distracted the others? There seemed to be no other alternative.

  I turned to leave and froze. Blocking the way to the cellar steps was a shadow. I shined the light on it. Was someone there?

  At first, the shadow had no form. It was vaguely human-size and human-shaped, but it had no other distinguishing features. As I stood, shining my light on it, a face began to emerge. Bright green eyes and a mouth. Nothing else.

  I was paralyzed with fright. As I stood, quaking with fear, the shadow spoke.

  “So we meet at last,” it said. “Samantha Black.”

  “What are you?” I asked, terrified.

  “I think you know the answer to that question. You, the descendent of my greatest enemy. But I don’t hold a grudge. I’ll give you a choice: join my dark coven, and you’ll get your cousin back and powers beyond imagining. Conspire against me, and I gua
rantee you a world of pain. It’s up to you.”

  “Where is Tamsin?” As I spoke, I reached into my jacket, my fingers fumbling for the lining with its inner pocket.

  The shadow laughed. “Why would I tell you that?”

  My hand closed around the pouch my grandmother gave me before I left for the city. “How do I know you’re not lying? I want proof.”

  “Fine.” I could hear annoyance in the shadow’s voice. The twin green lights that shined from the center remained fixed on me. “You want proof?” The shadow wavered a little and then an image was projected between it and me: it was Tamsin, who looked deep in sleep, a troubled frown on her face.

  “Enchanted sleep,” said Gwyneth. “It’s a little old-fashioned, but it never fails to do the job.”

  I thought of the elaborate images she’d conjured for Martha in the clearing. I knew how capable she was of lying.

  “What say you, Samantha Black?” she asked. “I have six powerful witches at my disposal. But seven is a magical number. You’ll never win against us, anyway.”

  “I was planning to use your cousin as a vessel for your little ghost friend,” said Gwyneth. “I could be persuaded to renege on the deal. If the right offer came along.”

  It occurred to me then that she might be reading my mind. Scared, I tried to block out all thought. It only made things worse, and my fears and thoughts of my family flooded my brain.

  “Imagine if you never had to feel fear again,” said Gwyneth soothingly. “Imagine if you felt only power. And how well do you really know your family, anyway? What makes you think you can trust them?”

  Another image appeared unbidden before her: Aurora, Minerva, and my mother in the apothecary.

  “She can’t know,” my mother was saying. “It will only put her in danger.”

  “Consider the danger that Tamsin is in,” Aurora said. “Do you really want to keep deceiving her?” The image dissolved.

  “Abandonment, deception,” said Gwyneth. “Are these the people you wish to sacrifice your life for?”