Wrapped in Black: Thirteen Tales of Witches and the Occult

by Jennifer L. Greene

  When the car came to a stop the window rolled down and a gaunt man with a shock of fluffy white hair leaned across the passenger seat.

  “Looks like you’ve had quite a scrape.” The driver’s voice was deep and raspy, belying a lifetime of cigarette addiction if not throat cancer.

  “Yeah,” Elliot replied, an automatic response. “Just a little scrape, no big deal.”

  “Would you like a ride?”

  Elliot tensed. “No. Thanks, really. I’ll be fine.”

  The man’s gaze fell on the ruined tire and dragging chain, glided over Elliot’s legs, wandered past the abrasions on his hips and elbows, and came to rest on the blood-soaked handlebar Elliot clutched in a vise-like grip. He shook his head slowly, deliberately.

  “And you’re planning on walking back to town?” The driver’s voice had a pitying, amused quality. “How long do you think that will take? Two hours? Three maybe?”

  Elliot had worried about that himself. He had walked for only a short while, and nearly every inch of his body ached and throbbed. But his hands were the worst. He could almost visualize the angry red lips of infection around the cuts. He thought about trying to run explain that he only lived a mile or two away, but if the man was even remotely familiar with the area (the Kansas plates and Delphos Land Trust sticker in the windshield practically guaranteed it), he would know that was a lie. As if reading his mind, the man smiled a patronizing grin.

  “I could see you limping from half a mile away. Your foot must feel like it’s on fire. Have your arches started to burn yet?” Elliot realized that his arches were indeed burning. He shifted his weight to relieve some of the pressure.

  Run

  “And your hands,” the driver continued, “they’re shredded like hamburger all the way to the bone.” The grin was still there, but when he removed his sunglasses, his eyes were like cold black stones. “Nerves close to the surface, raw and exposed. Infection starting to set in. Why I bet even thinking about them must be excruciating.”

  Elliot grimaced. It took everything in his power not to drop the bike and RUN look at his hands. The man returned his sunglasses and leaned back in the driver’s seat. The smile was gone, but his demeanor had softened.

  “There’s a first aid kit and a cooler full of bottled water in the trunk.” He leaned forward and flicked a switch. The trunk yawned open, but Elliot didn’t move. The driver turned off the ignition, got out, and walked around the car.

  “Is pain all you know right now?” the man asked, his voice coming from a few feet above.

  Elliot shivered at how easily the man put his own thoughts into words. Pain was all he knew at that moment. And that moment was stretching out forever. “Yes, sir.”

  “Let go, child,” the man said. His voice was suddenly soothing, compassionate, and only inches away from Elliot’s ear.

  “I can’t,” Elliot wept. Tears streamed down his cheeks in hot little tracks. He felt the man’s hand close over his wrist and instantly the pain evaporated, like a flame deprived of oxygen. Elliot released his grip on the handlebar and the bike fell away, clunking against the side of the car. He opened his eyes and looked at the man.

  He was tall, six feet at least, and appeared to be in his late 60s. His cheekbones poked through a tarp of sun-browned skin. A cloud of white cottony hair receded from the sunlight glaring off his forehead. He wore beige corduroy trousers with suspenders and a wrinkled short-sleeve button-down shirt that looked like it slept outdoors.

  The man let go of Elliot’s wrist, and the pain immediately rushed back. He cried out in agony and fell to his knees as every cell in his body burned white hot and begged for mercy. The man ignored him, picking up the bike and disappearing behind the trunk. He got back in the driver’s seat, started the ignition, and leaned over to open the passenger door.

  “The pain will stop if you just get in the car.”

  To Elliot’s relief and amazement, the pain started to recede almost as soon as he pulled the door closed. He fumbled with the first aid kit and managed to cover the wounds on his hand.

  “My name is Deacon,” the driver said as he turned up the air conditioning.

  “I’m Elliot.”

  Deacon nodded. Elliot was grateful for the respite from the unbearable anguish that had all but consumed him only minutes before, but he didn’t care for the fear that replaced it. “You can just drop me off in town,” he said, trying to sound casual.

  Deacon frowned and shook his head. “No, I won’t be doing that.”

  Elliot instantly regretted getting into the car. “Am I gonna be okay?”

  “Of course, Elliot.” Deacon’s expression softened. “The nearest hospital is 50 miles away in Salina and those wounds need to be treated right away. We really don’t have any time to spare.”

  “So where are we going?”

  “A safe place. Just up the road from here. There are some people I’d like you to meet. They’ll take care of that hand and see about fixing your bike.”

  Elliot decided not to argue, so the two rode in silence for a couple miles before Deacon turned onto an unmarked drive that cut through a wheat field.

  The aged Lincoln lumbered over the uneven road, the springs of the cracked vinyl seats squeaking with each bump and divot. Dead wheat stretched as far as the eye could see on either side. Rusting silos and dilapidated wooden structures were slowly being devoured by the earth. They eventually reached a bump-gate over a cattle guard that probably hadn’t warded off a single hoof in over a decade. Deacon nudged through, careful not to scrape the side of the car, and headed toward a boarded up farmhouse.

  In the clearing to the east of the house, three women were busy setting out plastic plates, wooden bowls, and flower-printed pint glasses on a long wooden table.

  The tallest of them approached the car as the two men got out. She looked to be in her mid-50s with long wavy brown hair streaked with white, and sun-kissed skin more orange than brown. Her wiry forearm muscles flexed as she dried her hands on a brown apron.

  “Janice, this is Elliot. He took a nasty fall and his bike appears to be in pretty bad shape. Would you work some of your magic on it?” The woman smiled. She hefted the bike over one shoulder and headed off toward the barn.

  “Come. Meet the others,” Deacon said as he walked toward the table. After a moment’s hesitation, Elliot followed.

  The other two women were younger than Janice. The first, whom Deacon introduced as Rain, was at least ten years older than Elliot, but still had a youthful, vibrant look. She wore cut-off shorts with pocket linings poking out on her thighs and a white tank-top showing off well-toned biceps. Her dark brown complexion and twinkling eyes gave her a vaguely Native American appearance. Elliot returned the hand she raised in greeting.

  Deacon stood behind a girl who could not have been more than twelve with black hair and hazel eyes. “And this young jewel is Sylvia,” he said, laying his palms on the girl’s shoulders. She blushed, bowing her head. Deacon placed a hand under her chin and gently lifted. “Now dear, let’s remember our manners.” His smile made Elliot uncomfortable.

  “Good evening, sir,” Sylvia said, attempting a smile. He smiled back, more to appease Deacon than her.

  “Excellent!” Deacon laughed, rubbing the girl’s arms vigorously as if warming them. Until she said it, Elliot had not realized the time. He was surprised to find it was nearly six o’clock and he started to panic.

  “It’s been really nice to meet you,” Elliot blurted. He looked toward the barn where Janice and his bike had disappeared. “All of you, but I’ve really got to be getting home. My mom is gonna start worrying soon, and I’d hate for her to send out a search party.” His attempt at humor fell flat.

  “Your mother will be fine,” Deacon said dismissively. “We have more pressing matters at hand right now, don’t we?” He smiled, nodding to Elliot’s bandages. Elliot grimaced as a fresh wave of pain signaled insistently from his palms. Deacon motioned to Rain, who nodded and walked briskl
y off toward the house.

  “Sylvia, would it be a bother to set another place at the table? Elliot will be joining us for dinner.” Deacon cut Elliot off before he could protest. “You will honor us with your presence, won’t you, child?” Deacon asked, though it was not a question.

  “Uh, sure, if it’s not going to be a bother,” Elliot replied, increasingly wary but also drawn curious. Rain returned with a granite bowl filled with a chunky green paste that looked like a side dish at a trendy restaurant: Wasabi Oatmeal, maybe. She had him sit with his hands palms up while she knelt in front of him.

  “What is that?” Elliot asked, wrinkling his nose at the concoction.

  “You really don’t want to know,” Rain replied, her smile almost reaching her eyes. She set the bowl down and began to remove his gauze. Her hand felt like a cool bracelet on his wrist, and he only winced when the last sticky remnants of the cloth bit off whatever dead skin was already caked to it.

  Rain examined his hand, turning it gently this way and that, peering closely at the damage.

  “You’re lucky Deacon brought you here,” she said, digging paste from the bowl with her fingers. “A hospital would have messed this up for sure.” She paused with a dollop of the green goo a couple of inches above his palms. “This is gonna sting…” she mused. Elliot had anticipated this and had a half-way decent macho response ready, but it was drowned out by his screams.

  Over the next several months, Elliot met with the group frequently. Their weekly gatherings restored in him a sense of belonging that had been missing since before his parents had divorced. The members of his group became his second family, more available than his own mother, whose attempts to connect with him after the divorce were clumsy, ineffective, and increasingly rare. She had tried to get him to go to the county fair in Topeka, but he snipped that he had no interest in driving 150 miles to get sick off deep-fried Twinkies or see the world’s fourth largest pig. Over that summer, they continued to drift apart.

  And so it was in late July of his first year in Kansas that Elliot finished a late afternoon dinner with his new family, on “Deacon’s Farm.”

  As the sky slowly bled to death under a harvest moon, Elliot felt his anticipation grow. The others had gone ahead along the path to prepare. On that night, Elliot would be reborn. He would receive the gift Deacon promised Mother would give him.

  When he arrived, the pit was ablaze, and the others stood ready to receive him. Rain and Janice helped him don his own robe. Until now, they had only spoken of the ritual, but he had no difficulty following along. Reciting the chants in a foreign tongue from Deacon’s leather bound tome, drinking the sap of the tree, and mixing the blood of his self-inflicted wounds with the blood of the others all felt second nature to him, as if it had been in him all along, waiting to be tapped. Finally, he offered the warm and wet sacrifice, which was still struggling weakly inside its burlap sack.

  At first, nothing happened. Then the bundle ignited, begging for release from the fire with its bleating and screaming. Elliot saw some faint movement from within. But as soon as the thing in the sack was still, the fire roared to life and burst into a dance of blinding blue and white. The orange glow from the embers reached up longingly into the inferno and weaved into the vortex of light rising from the pit.

  A few of the lesser logs buckled, spewing a volley of sparks toward the heavens. The lower branches of the tree shook in response, fanning the blazing tresses of the flames into a single column of serpentine light that weaved drunkenly around the pit before stopping in front of Elliot.

  A tentacle of flame shot out, touching his forehead. It didn’t burn, but rather explored his face with a gentle, curious caress. Within moments a dozen more blazing limbs reached out from the pit to join the storm of light swirling around his head. Transfixed by the display, Elliot made no attempt to retreat. He had no fear, so overcome with euphoria that he smiled for the first time since the start of the ritual. His lips parted almost imperceptibly, but that was enough. The fire rushed into his mouth and snaked down his throat, entering with such force it brought him to his knees.

  A million points of bright red light swam up from the roots, traveled through the trunk, and poured into the branches. The giant leaves shook, their veins pulsing as if filled with lava. Droplets formed on the waxy surface of a leaf directly overhead and fell into Elliot’s greedy mouth. He was unaware until that moment just how thirsty he had become. Thirsty for knowledge. For belonging. For power.

  In that instant, he felt more powerful and alive than ever. He stood and faced the group, seeing them as if for the first time.

  Deacon stepped forward before Elliot’s gaze shifted to him and put both palms on the boy’s shoulders. Immediately, Elliot’s deeper vision receded and he blinked his mortal eyes as if waking from a dream. When he started to fall Deacon caught him and lowered him to the ground.

  “My God,” he whispered. “I can see so much…”

  Deacon reached into the fire and traced on Elliot’s forehead with the ashes. “Mother has given you the gift of sight, child. Blessed be.”

  Above him, the branches and leaves erupted in a flurry of sound and motion, as if a thousand birds had suddenly taken flight. The other members of the group looked around, trying to divine what Elliot was seeing.

  The night grew still, not even a breeze stirred in the valley, but the leaves of the great tree shook and shimmered.

  Elliot drifted off to sleep, a beatific smile on his lips.

  In the beginning, the gift had indeed been a blessing. His newfound ability to see through the eyes of others vastly improved his performance at school. Within a few weeks he had mastered the skill of staring at his test paper with his own eyes while simultaneously overlaying the perspective of another. In biology, he borrowed sight from Janet Crane, the future valedictorian, who rarely scored less than 98% on any assignment.

  Elliot’s initial fascination with his second sight was tempered by his awareness that the visions were neither constant nor completely under his control. He sometimes concentrated for an hour or more only to end up with dry, tired eyes and a headache. Still, with practice he found he could summon the power of sight with at least as much reliability as a can opener might summon a cat.

  And that power grew. He saw beyond what others were seeing to what they wanted to see. Things reached a head for Elliot when he found himself trapped for twenty minutes in his sociology teacher’s inappropriate fantasies about the Asian girl with braces in the front row.

  Elliot had increasing difficulty focusing on routine chores or simple errands. After a time, the thoughts and feelings of others filled his mind without any prompting on his part. Generally, the intrusions fell into one of two categories: the mundane and the perverted. The former consisted of ruminations of regret or empty wonder. They danced around in his head incessantly like reluctant partners in a ballroom from hell.

  But if the mundane was irritating, the perverted was downright frightening. Those thoughts and images, almost all projected from men, assaulted his consciousness in a frenetic mash-up of pornographic fantasies dredged from the detritus of shameless, instant gratification that littered the human brain. Their sick needs thrumming just beneath a friendly smile or chivalrous gesture, which they considered their golden ticket to act on whatever impulses most readily satisfied their primitive urges.

  The worst part was suffering through these visions alone. He dared not talk to his mother about it and he had no real friends other than the coven. He rarely saw the others outside of the ceremonies anymore, and even when he did there was an unspoken agreement to not acknowledge one another. Their bond existed only when they gathered for a purpose, and broaching the subject of his second sight as anything but a blessing bestowed by Mother was unthinkable if not blasphemous.

  On the eve of his 19th birthday, Elliot fell into a deep sleep. In his dream, he wandered through a dark labyrinth of rooms in a spacious mansion that had fallen into disrepair. Tattered wallpap
er peeled from walls infested with mold; a dim flickering chandelier swayed drunkenly from a stripped wire that gripped it like an exposed nerve stubbornly refusing to relinquish a rotting tooth. His bare feet slapped on the stone floor, its cracks and chips swollen with black mortar. The place was unrecognizable, but his dream knowledge insisted it was his home.

  Littered throughout the endless hallways on the main floor were the carcasses of naked and emaciated children, all of them boys, none older than twelve or thirteen. Their bony jaws yawned open as he passed, trying to gulp one final breath. He moved quickly, filled with an urgent need to locate a particular room, the one room in the house that was not touched by decay and death.

  But all of the rooms were empty. Weeds pushed up through the floors and vines spread over the walls like an aggressive infection. Somewhere in the farther recesses of the house, he heard thumping followed by suppressed giggles and he knew the time was growing short.

  In his frantic search, he came across a door with water spilling over the threshold. He opened it to find a basement full of his childhood belongings circling down a whirlpool of churning sewage. In the center, arms flailing wildly in a futile attempt to keep from being pulled under, was his father. His eyes unseeing white orbs, his mouth a ruined hole of shattered teeth. He called to Elliot, but his words were unintelligible and all that came out were feces-smeared dollar bills. Elliot shut the door as his father was sucked under.

  He picked up his pace, running through the halls until he happened upon a flashing yellow arrow pointing up a spiral staircase. The marquee hanging at the top blinked “Heart of the House.” Elliot bounded up the stairs two at a time and emerged into a cavernous kitchen. Pale white moonlight reflected off stainless steel tables and row after row of pots and pans suspended in mid-air under the naked night sky. In the center, he found Deacon leaning over a cake, painstakingly decorating it. Elliot recognized him even though the man’s back was to him. He approached cautiously as Deacon pushed miniature green army figures knee-deep into a sea of white frosting.