by E J Elwin
Doors, walls, vehicles, and people from visions and memories in the Illusion Room may not have had any effect on us, but smells certainly did. The house stunk. It was a foul mix of cat waste and cigarette smoke, two unpleasant smells which were somehow much worse here.
The smell of cigarette smoke hung thick and stubborn in the air and seemed to be soaked right into the walls and the moldy carpet. The cat waste smell made me guess that more than one cat lived here, and that they were never cleaned up after. The stench was so acrid that it could only be because the feces had festered and aged, and sure enough, as I squinted down at the carpet through watering eyes, I saw the many small piles of waste smeared into the floor. The carpet looked like it had once been a light beige color, but it was now dark brown and even black in some places. That anyone could live like this, let alone with a child, was incomprehensible.
Deidre stood very still, her shoulders tensed, as though scared to move further into the house. She took one small step forward and the floor creaked loudly.
What at first looked like an old mop peaked out of an adjacent doorway up ahead. It slunk out into the hallway and revealed itself to be a fluffy Persian cat. Its gray fur stuck out in all directions, giving it the appearance of having received an electric shock. Its mustard-colored eyes glinted like marbles in the dim light. It padded softly to where Deidre stood and nuzzled itself against her ankles. Just as she knelt down to pet it, a voice tore through the silent fetid air.
“Deidre! Get in here!”
The voice was so raspy and scratchy that I wasn’t sure if it belonged to a man or a woman. Deidre’s shoulders remained tensed as she ventured into the hallway. The floor creaked beneath her graying Velcro shoes but the seven of us moved soundlessly behind her. She had a tight, quivering grip on the handle of her lunch box, as though it would keep her safe from whatever lay ahead.
She came to the wide doorway from which the cat had emerged, and which opened onto a small living room that was as squalid and reeking as the hallway. The windows were so dirty that they barely let any sunlight in, leaving the room in a lifeless grayish haze.
Three people loomed out of the shadows, two women and a man, sitting on filthy torn couches. All three were middle-aged but I could tell that they were younger than they looked. They had the shriveled, dried-up look of people who have aged prematurely due to years of hard drug abuse and a lack of general self-care. The two women wore tank tops and shorts, both of them barefoot. One had dirty blonde hair, the other jet black like Deidre’s. The man was tall and heavyset with a shaved head and a scruffy beard. He wore black suspenders that held up torn jeans, and a frayed gray shirt that had a big reddish-brown stain down its front.
There were half-empty bottles of beer scattered around the room and several dinner plates packed with cigarette butts, clearly standing in as ashtrays. On the dented wood coffee table in the center of the room, there were small plastic bags with different-colored pills spilling out of them. Of all these indulgences, the one currently holding the attention of the three adults was a small glass pipe, which the woman with jet black hair puffed on as she scrutinized Deidre standing in the doorway.
“Get over here,” she said in her raspy voice, patting the filthy couch.
Deidre walked slowly across the room, her small face filled with dread. We all filed in after her, completely unseen by the adults as we stood right in front of them. Deidre approached the woman with jet black hair as if she were approaching a wild animal. The resemblance between them was undeniable, and I guessed that the woman was Deidre’s mother. She clicked her tongue impatiently before yanking Deidre forward by the front of her white dress.
“Gimme that!” she snapped, seizing the Minnie Mouse lunch box.
Deidre let out a small cry and tried for a second to resist the woman before the lunch box was ripped out of her hand and hurled across the room. It hit the wall and burst open with a clang, and a number of brightly colored jelly beans spilled out of it onto the floor.
With a quick flick of her wrist, the woman slapped Deidre in the face.
“Look at the mess you made!” she snarled.
The girls, Harriet, Jessica and I looked at one another in disgust.
Deidre looked terrified but determined to hold back her tears. She hunched her shoulders and looked down at her lap as though this would ward the woman off. The other two adults looked on with bored expressions, as if this were just a vaguely interesting TV show. Deidre’s mother passed the glass pipe to the blonde woman and then forced her daughter’s chin up.
“Look at me,” she said. “You ready to play Birdie Bird?”
Deidre shook her head vigorously and another strangled cry escaped her.
“You have to play Birdie Bird or we’ll be out on the street,” said the woman. “Is that what you want? You want us to lose our house?”
Deidre shook her head again, visibly trembling.
“Then go over there to Uncle Lucas,” said the woman. “Go on.”
Deidre looked around at the man in suspenders who smiled at her in what he clearly thought was an affectionate way, but something poisonous and vicious lurked behind his eyes, like a stirring snake about to strike. He patted his knee to indicate that Deidre should sit there, just like her mother had done with the couch, and she slowly rose from her seat.
“Go!” said her mother, shoving her forward.
The blonde woman held a lighter under the glass pipe, taking a big puff from it as she did so, before blowing a cloud of smoke out at Deidre as she passed. Deidre let out a series of coughs that didn’t sound much different from a baby’s, from a child even younger than she was. The man in suspenders grabbed her out of the cloud of smoke and sat her on his knee.
“There we go…” he said in a low voice.
His hand roved slowly over Deidre’s white dress and then went underneath it.
“Oh my—” Lizzie got out, before clapping a hand over her mouth and turning her back on the scene. Sylvie rested a hand on her shoulder but didn’t turn away herself, even though her eyes were wide with horror. Hortensia had one hand over her mouth and one over her stomach, looking like she was about to be sick. I felt the same way.
A thick block of ice settled in my chest, and the contents of my stomach churned. I knew that this would scar me forever, that I would always remember it in horrifying detail. It was a nightmare, a living hell, one that was excruciatingly familiar. I wanted to cry, to scream, to rip the man in front of me apart even though I knew he wasn’t really there.
At the same time, I saw the black swan in my memory as it was consumed by my yellow orange flames… Black spots popped up across my vision, and the room swayed in front of me. I clenched my fists and took a hard breath, willing myself not to pass out.
She was trying to kill you… She ripped the hearts out of twelve witches and would have done the same to you and your sisters… She stopped being the child you see a long time ago…
I took shaking breaths as the room came back into focus. To our collective relief, the man in suspenders took his hand out of Deidre’s dress and sat her next to him on the couch. She didn’t cry, but her face was frozen in a look of abject terror. Lizzie remained with her back turned. Harriet and Jessica hadn’t turned away but watched the scene with haunted expressions. None of us would ever forget this.
“Told you it was disturbing,” said Jasper quietly. He hadn’t so much as flinched the whole time, his eyes staring and unblinking like they’d been during his Sight Heightening Spell.
It struck me that he had probably seen many a ghastly scene in his life because of his Sight, possibly hundreds of nightmares come true in blistering clarity. He could not only absorb people’s memories, venturing into any traumas they had lived through, but he could also receive visions without warning, unspeakable acts and gruesome sights dropped suddenly into his head. I wondered if I could live like that, witnessing so much horror over and over again. It was then that I gained a whole new respect for Jasper
, and for other witches with the gift of Sight, like Ursula and Harriet’s mother.
The man in suspenders took the glass pipe from the blonde woman’s hands, who hissed at him like an angry viper. He sparked the lighter beneath the pipe and inhaled deeply from the other end, then puffed out a large cloud of smoke before addressing Deidre’s mother.
“Make her do it,” he said.
“It’s extra, you know that,” she responded. She held out her palm to him expectantly, and he grunted as he reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of crumpled up twenty-dollar bills.
Deidre’s mother counted the money and appeared satisfied before stuffing the bills into her shirt. She then stood up and walked to where the man sat with her daughter.
“Do the Birdie Bird,” she said flatly.
Deidre whimpered and shook her head, shrinking into a ball on the torn couch. Quick as before, and as nonchalantly as a magician performing a sleight of hand trick, her mother whipped out a hand and slapped her again in the face.
“Do the Birdie Bird for Uncle Lucas,” she said, her tone only slightly less flat.
Deidre cried out in pain, clutching her face where her mother had struck her. Tears fell down her cheeks, as though they had finally burst through the floodgates she had put up.
“Do it!” her mother suddenly shouted, abandoning her flat tone. “Now!”
The little girl’s shoulders shook with sobs. She glanced at the gray Persian cat crouching in a corner, her only ally, her eyes silently begging it to save her somehow. Her mother raised a hand high, about to deliver a much more severe blow, and Deidre raised her hands to shield herself. Suddenly, she vanished— or at least, the little girl Deidre vanished. In her place on the couch, there was now a tiny swan, much smaller than the one we had met. The sleek black plumage was gone, replaced by a soft down that was a faint grayish-brown, and I guessed that maybe black swans didn’t become black until they matured. The blood-red eyes and matching beak were also gone; instead, the swan had tiny beady black eyes and a short black beak.
The man in suspenders roared with laughter. “That is some fucking freaky shit!”
He gave the glass pipe back to the blonde woman, who grabbed it greedily, then reached out and picked up the swan, which twitched in his hands.
“Pretty little swan, aren’t you?” he said. “Pretty little freak…”
He stroked the swan’s fuzzy grayish-brown feathers almost tenderly, as if it were his pet. Then, his other hand moved to his crotch.
My stomach contracted and Sylvie took a jolting step backward next to me. Hortensia clapped both hands to her mouth. Lizzie, who had managed to withstand watching Deidre being slapped, whipped back around and stuffed her fingers into her ears, her eyes tightly closed.
“Okay, I think we’ve all seen enough of this!” said Sylvie in a loud voice.
“Agreed,” I breathed. Hortensia nodded feverishly next to me, her hands still clutched to her mouth. Jasper raised his palms out to his sides, and the scene before us went suddenly dark.
We all stood there in shock before I realized that we were back in the Irish meadow, the stars glinting peacefully overhead. There was silence as we all tried to process what we had just seen. Sylvie was the first to speak. “Well, now we know why she hated witches,” she said. “I might have too if that was what I’d grown up with.”
“That poor girl,” whispered Jessica.
Sylvie put a hand on Lizzie’s shoulder, who jumped in fright, but then looked around and took her fingers out of her ears as she realized we were no longer in Deidre’s house.
“The woman with the black hair,” she said in a choked voice, “was that… her mother?”
“It was,” said Jasper. “The blonde one was her aunt. Both witches.”
“How could they?” whispered Hortensia, staring off into the distance. “How could a mother do that to her own daughter? How could anyone do that to a little kid?”
“There are some truly monstrous people in this world,” said Harriet.
I remembered her words from the other night when we were in the library talking about demons. Plenty of human monsters walk the earth.
“She was barely more than a baby…” said Lizzie, her voice cracking on the last word. This time, Hortensia put a hand on her shoulder.
“How do you know the blonde one was her aunt?” Sylvie asked Jasper.
“Because,” he said, “two of the twelve witches who were killed were named Lane.”
The girls and I all gasped. Harriet and Jessica registered no surprise at the statement, and I guessed that they had already figured it out based on the news stories they’d read about the twelve women found murdered with missing hearts.
“So it was ten innocent witches killed instead of twelve,” said Sylvie.
“Small consolation,” said Jasper, “but yes. Deidre’s mother and aunt were the first to die in the rampage. I’m sure if that man, Lucas, was still around, Deidre killed him too.”
“They had it coming, if you ask me,” Sylvie muttered.
I’d had similar thoughts about Father Gabriel, and suddenly had the chilling realization that Deidre and I had that in common: we’d both killed our abusers.
I didn’t regret it, mainly because it had brought Connor back, for a short while at least. But hadn’t it set off a sequence of events that led to the deaths of innocent people? Deidre’s rampage was set into motion long ago with the destruction of an innocent child, just as the seeds for my killing Father Gabriel were planted the day he first took me into his office. Were she and I really all that different?
I tried to think of what Harriet would say, how she would comfort me the way she had when I talked to her about the Cloaking Crystals. She would tell me it was the Brotherhood who killed those people in Portland, not me… And she was right. I hadn’t killed them. If I’d had my power of flame at the time, I would have used it to try to save them. I hadn’t enjoyed the act of killing Father Gabriel, had never fantasized about murdering him as a form of revenge; it had been incidental, a means to an end, the trade of a horrible person to bring a good one back into the world. Deidre’s murders had also been a means to an end, except hers was to summon demons and to cause even more harm. If she was the vile villain referenced in Ursula’s prophecy, her ultimate end had been to wipe out an entire race of people.
I decided that yes, we were different.
“What we just saw,” said Jasper, “showed us why Deidre hated witches enough to kill them, even though she seemed to have fully embraced her own gifts. The next vision will tell us why she was working with the Brotherhood when she didn’t need them to perform her Malevolent spells. I can guarantee that this one is a lot less disturbing.”
He looked around at us all, checking to see if we were all prepared for the next vision. He caught Lizzie’s eye and she nodded at him, then he raised his palms out to his sides once more.
The Irish meadow faded into a blur before a fiery orange sun bloomed on the horizon to our left. The girls and I shouted in amazement as we blinked around at the new environment.
We had entered a place of breathtaking beauty, a lush green wooded area with thick oak trees and long grass that swayed in a gentle breeze. The grassy terrain was similar to the Irish meadow, except here there were flowers scattered among the sea of green, wispy dandelions and white daisies like the ones growing on the wall in the Rose Room. Bees buzzed about, hovering serenely over the flowers. The setting sun bathed everything in a blazing orange glow.
In stark contrast to the nauseating stenches of Deidre’s childhood home, this place radiated the delicious fragrances of the earth, the incomparable aroma of pure, thriving nature. We all took deep whiffs of the air, enjoying the heady cocktail of scents. Then I picked up on another one, the wet earth smell of a river or stream, and knew there had to be one nearby.
“Over there,” said Jasper.
He pointed at an area between the trunks of three closely growing oak trees, beyond which somethi
ng glimmered in the orange sunlight. We followed him through the narrow spaces between the trunks and came out onto the edge of a wide creek bordered tightly by trees and large masses of rock. The creek was shaped in an almost perfect circle, and it reminded me instantly of the clearing in the Tillamook Head woods, except instead of smooth dirt, there was glassy, crystalline water.
A small waterfall cascaded down the highest point of rock directly across from us, landing in the creek in a flurry of mist. I inhaled deeply, taking in the damp earthy smell that was a mix of wet stones and greenery, and it suddenly struck me that I had smelled this exact smell before. It had been in the white smoke coming from underneath Jasper’s bedroom door as I’d walked past it the previous day. I’d rightly guessed that he was working on the spell whose results were now playing out around us.
The sound of rushing water reminded me of the ocean waves outside Jessica and Jasper’s house, as well as the ones in the Halfway Place, and I realized that I had come to find the sound comforting. I watched the gentle ripples emanating from the place where the water fell, and felt an urge to step into the creek. I was sure I wouldn’t get wet since the water wasn’t really there, and was curious to see what it would feel like to be submerged in this illusion water…
“Where is this place?” Hortensia asked Jasper, bringing me out of my reverie.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Could be California again, or anywhere really…”
“Look!” Lizzie whispered. She pointed to a space in the trees across the creek.
Goosebumps sprung up on my arms as I saw Deidre’s dark swan form creep out from among the trees, just like she had the first time we’d seen her. She was now the adult that I recognized, with the sleek black feathers flecked with white, and those gleaming blood-red eyes.