by Brian Rowe
When she heard a soft tap at her front door, she didn’t even bother to see if someone was standing outside of it. She figured it had been a bird or a gust of wind. But when the knocking became louder the second time around, Aurora sat up from her spinning bar chair and headed to the front door. Still with her second glass of wine in her hand, she opened the door to see nobody standing there.
“Hmm,” was all she said before she started closing the door. But she couldn’t close it all the way. Before she had a chance to scream, two young thugs with ski masks knocked her to the ground, the glass shattering against the hardwood and spinning out into a dozen pieces.
“You go into the bedroom, and I’ll check out here,” one of the guys said.
Aurora tried to stand up, but one of the two thugs kicked her hard in the head. She slumped over, blood dripping off her left ear. She groaned, loudly, before turning over onto her back.
“Take what you want,” Aurora muffled. “Just please don’t hurt me.”
“Sounds like a plan,” the guy in front of her said, wearing nothing but black. She could tell in his voice that he couldn’t have been older than twenty. “Where’s your purse? I want your credit cards, money. Everything.”
Aurora pointed toward the kitchen counter and watched as the thug shook out her red purse, her jewelry and cards and cash falling all over the place. He looked at her driver’s license and laughed—she didn’t know why—and grabbed all the twenty-dollar-bills and credit cards he could find. Then he took her one and only necklace and stuffed it into his back pocket.
“Looking good,” he said. “Looking good!”
“Please take what you want and get out of here!” Aurora shouted.
The guy wasn’t listening to a word she said. “You have any other jewelry?”
“Found some!” the other thug said, entering the room and stepping past Aurora’s legs. She didn’t want to make a move. She didn’t want them to hit her again.
“I found more gold than we’ll know what to do with.”
“Excellent. Take it to the car.”
Within seconds there was just one thug left, pulling out all the desk drawers in her bedroom and living room, and running his fingers along some old artifacts she had cluttering up the shelves near her old-timey television set.
“These worth anything?” he asked.
Aurora didn’t say anything.
“Hey!” He took a few steps forward and planted his leg against her face. “I asked you a question!”
Aurora had tears streaming down her face. She didn’t know if she was going to survive this terrorizing. “The green statue. In the corner. It’s worth at least two thousand dollars.”
The thug was clearly smiling behind his ski mask, and as he turned around, Aurora could see his yellow teeth. He grabbed the statue and brought it over to the kitchen counter to inspect it.
“Looks perfect,” he said. “Absolutely p—”
He slid the statue to the left and accidentally knocked over the paper bag with the manuscript on the floor, just feet away from Aurora’s face. She hoped and prayed he wouldn’t pick it up, but he did.
“What the hell is this?” he asked, opening the bag and pulling out her book. “What is this? A novel?”
Aurora coughed a few times, and then said, “No. It’s non-fiction.”
“Non-fiction you say?” The thug stared at her for a moment. “Wait a second. Does this thing mean something to you?”
“Yes,” she said. “It’s everything. Please put it back.”
“Is it worth anything?”
“It’s worth nothing. There’s no use in you taking it.”
He laughed. “Don’t worry. I see it means something to you, so I won’t take it.”
“Thank you,” Aurora said. “I—”
But before she could say another word, she watched in horror as the thug ignited her stove full blast and dropped the loose papers right onto the fire.
“Nooooo!” Aurora shouted, wanting to jump up and save her manuscript, but knowing if she did this madman could strike her dead.
Once most of the papers were burned to a crisp, the thug guffawed as loud as he could. He grabbed the statue and sped out of the apartment, slamming the door loudly behind him.
“Oh my God… no… no, no, no, no…” Aurora jumped up and raced over to the kitchen counter. She could feel her stomach aching, her head pounding, her pulse racing. She hoped her manuscript would be salvageable.
But it wasn’t. A few select pages hadn’t burnt through all the way yet, but now her kitchen was a mess of ashes and smoke, all but ten pages of her book burnt beyond recognition.
Worst of all, she hadn’t made a copy.
“I don’t believe it,” she said, her fiery temper, which had remained dormant deep down inside for years, returning to the forefront. Her face turned red, and drool dripped off her chin. She didn’t want to avoid these thugs now. She wanted to kill them.
As soon as she heard the car ignition starting up outside, she raced for the front door and leaped through the brown grass at the front of the complex, one thug already in the driver’s seat of his pathetic excuse for a truck, and the other thug calmly setting the statue down in the back seat.
“You burned my book!” Aurora shouted, rushing up to the thug in the back. She head-butted him and then punched him in the nose. He looked surprised, of course, and ran his hand along his bloodstained nostrils.
“You… you bitch,” he said, grabbing a sharp knife from his side pocket and thrusting it into Aurora’s abdomen. He stabbed her twice more, and Aurora fell to the ground.
“Noooooo,” she said, clasping her hands against her bleeding belly.
“The world is going to shit,” the thug said, taking a step closer to her. “It’s the survival of the fittest, babe. And I’m sorry to say, you’re not gonna make it.”
“Let’s get out of here,” the other thug said from the front of the truck, and the two were down the street and around the corner within seconds.
Aurora tried shouting for help, but she couldn’t speak. She tried to crawl back to her apartment to call 911, but she couldn’t move. An hour later, a woman walking her dog finally came across her and called an ambulance, but it was too late.
By the time she reached the hospital, Aurora Newt was pronounced dead.
Her obituary mentioned nothing about her being a writer.
9.
“It’s not working,” I said. I was restless and tired. It had been two days, and I still hadn’t been able to re-create that original spell. Worse, I could sense that the outside world was devolving into chaos, and that we were taking too much time with this embarrassing training.
“It’s coming,” Liesel said. “You’ll get there.”
“There’s no time,” I said. “Leese, we have to leave now. We have to find Hannah now. Everyone’s counting on us.”
“Just give us through Sunday, Cameron,” Liesel’s sister Yolanda said on the other side of me. “By the weekend we’ll have you ready to go. And then they’ll be no stopping her.”
“I don’t really believe that.” He stared at the two, then shrugged. “OK then. Let’s hurry.”
We tried the levitating spell. Liesel said it was the easiest to accomplish, although all I’d been able to do so far was knock a few glasses off the stool in front of me. Yolanda had a bunch of glasses in her Jeep Wrangler, and she brought yet another one out to the stool.
“I know this is difficult, Cam,” Liesel said. “But you can do it.”
“Easier said than done,” I said. “I just found out two days ago that I’m a witch. In a year I’ve seen age one and age eighty-five. How much can a guy take?”
“Apparently a lot, in your case,” Yolanda said. “Now stand up straight and concentrate.”
I did as the strict young lady said. I brought my hands to my sides and stared at the large plastic cup on top of the stool. It was half filled with water, making it heavy enough not to be blown down to th
e ground by a gust of wind.
It still hadn’t sunk in yet, but I had to believe it. I had to admit to myself sooner or later that in my occasional moments of anger, I would notice funny things happen. I had never performed a spell on the level of what Liesel and Hannah could accomplish, but I did remember the occasional paper getting tossed off my desk or a bird slamming into my windshield, usually in those moments when I was at my most hot tempered. I never thought anything of it, though. If a green light had shot out of my hands, I definitely would’ve taken myself to the local doctor, or the local psychiatrist. But there had never been anything to make me worry. I found all the strange happenings before Liesel came into my life to be coincidences. Little did I realize then, though, that there truly was no such thing as a coincidence.
“Concentrate, Cam,” Liesel said. “You’re not concentrating. What are you thinking about?”
“I don’t know. I’m drawing a blank.”
“Well if your mind’s a blank, we’re not going to get anywhere!” Liesel was clearly annoyed by how long the training was taking, too. “Remember? Whenever I made something happen? It was when I was feeling really, really good about something, or really, really bad. If you’re somewhere in the middle, not even the most talented witch can sum up a spell. The reason Hannah is so good at what she does is because she feels only pain and hatred and anguish and cruelty. If she has a heart buried deep down in her body somewhere, I’d be surprised. The girl feels nothing but the negative, and so she’s able to create a spell that can destroy the world. You need to pick, Cam. You need to go down deep into the bowels of Hell, or you need to feel the kind of unconditional love that most people rarely feel. Make a choice, and stick with it!”
“It’d be easier to go the darker route,” I said, sort of jokingly. Of course, nobody laughed. I started to concentrate again. “OK, OK. Just give me a second. I’m going to think about my family.”
“Specifically?”
“My sister. I’m gonna think about Kimber.”
“OK,” Liesel said. She nodded to Yolanda and then took a few steps closer to the stool.
I closed my eyes and tried to picture my sister at the Washington D.C. recital. She looked so confident up there, so sure of herself on that wide open stage. It had been a thrill of mine to follow her musical journey over the years, from the first time she ever picked up the violin, to watching the President of the United States applaud the talent of my little sister.
Before I could open my eyes, I could sense the cup rising.
“You’re doing it,” Liesel said. “Just keep steady.”
I opened my eyes, slowly, to see the plastic cup rising five, maybe six feet up above the stool. I stared at it now, but I kept my mind fixated on my sister, on the kind of future she would have if we found and defeated Hannah in time. I managed to turn the cup to its side and dump all the water to the dirt. And then I brought the cup back down to the stool. I wanted to applaud for myself.
“Perfect,” Liesel said.
“That was perfect!” Yolanda shouted.
“You got anything heavier?” Liesel asked, turning to Yolanda, who was already running for her car.
“Do I get an A plus?” I asked Liesel.
She raced up to me and gave me a big hug, the first time she had done so since we had started the training. “I know this is a lot to take in. But you’re doing great. You keep thinking about your sister when you do these spells, OK? It’s obviously working.”
“Speaking of…” I trailed off for a moment. “I really need to call her.”
“No, Cam. You can’t make any contact with your family. Not yet.”
“I have to know they’re OK,” I said. “What if something’s happened to them?”
“Nothing has.”
“How do you know?”
“I just do. Not enough time has passed yet. Your parents are young. Your sister is capable. No matter how much Hannah may want to see us and your family suffer, I think they’ll be able to pull through this. I think they’re probably going to be OK.”
“Well…” I said, taking a step back and kicking a rock on the ground, “thinking they’ll probably be OK isn’t helping me sleep at night.”
“Sunday, OK?” Liesel begged. “Let’s get through this week. Let’s get you prepared. And before we leave to track down Hannah, once and for all, you can talk to your family, OK?”
“I’d at least like to talk to Kimber before then. You know, get all the scoop on not just what’s happening with them, but with everyone in Reno.”
“Soon, Cam. You have to stay focused. You have to keep your emotions out of this.”
I stared at her, dumbfounded. “I thought it’s my emotions that are the only things controlling these spells.”
She sighed. “You know what I mean.”
I shook my head. “Whatever. What’s she bringing over to the stool?” I looked up at Yolanda, who was looking ready to break her back from the weight on top of her. “Is that a clock?”
“A grandfather’s clock,” Yolanda said.
I chuckled and marveled at the large item. “Couldn’t we have moved to, I don’t know, a grapefruit or something?”
“Come on, Cam,” Liesel said. “Time’s a wasting.”
---
I spent twelve hours each day for the next three days in that cavern, Yolanda and Liesel working with me to the point of exhaustion. But I could take it; I knew what it was like to train. I played basketball all throughout high school, all the way to the end, even when I was in my mid-seventies and waiting for my heart to give out. I trained in my younger years for football, baseball, soccer, and tennis, and I spent three summers as a camp counselor at Lake Almanor running around with kids all day every day for months on end.
I had to admit, though, that I had never experienced anything like this: the concentration, the determination, the pressures, the risks. Growing up I knew I had athletic abilities; I just never knew I had these witchly abilities. Hell, I didn’t even think there was such at thing as a male witch, or a witch, for that matter! It wasn’t about performing jumping jacks all day, or sprinting from one side of this large cavern to the other. It was about using my head, and trying to focus on specific images. Spending all these endless hours working on expanding my abilities was absolutely grueling, and what kept me going was the thought of everyone I knew, including my close friends and family, suffering in agonizing pain if I didn’t perform up to Liesel’s high standards. I didn’t want to disappoint anyone. I wanted to become the most powerful witch in the western hemisphere, and I wanted to take Hannah down before anything tragic was to happen to anyone I loved.
By Friday I was lifting three hundred pound rocks, with only the power of my mind. By Saturday night I was shooting the green lights out of my palms, albeit chaotically, and without a proper target. On Sunday, our final day of training before we left for God knows where, Liesel’s mission was to make it so that I could shoot these green lights out of my palms at a specific target. It felt so strange to be capable of this miracle, to do something almost no one else in the world could. I kept asking Liesel why I hadn’t been capable of these powers before, and she kept telling me this specific cavern brings out the hidden abilities of all witches. But then I kept asking her, if that’s the case, once I step back into the real world, aren’t the powers going to hide themselves again? She said no. She said since I was finally aware of my capabilities I would be able to bring them to the forefront day or night, in public and in private, for the whole world to see.
“But don’t think that means you should,” she said. “I don’t want to sound like a hypocrite, Cam, but, except for the case of Hannah, unleashing your powers in public is a recipe for disaster. Once we take her down, you’re going to have to control yourself. These powers are not meant for show and tell, or for entertainment value.”
I just nodded and told her, “I know,” even though, deep down, I knew I was going to have to give Kimber and Wesley a fun magic show on a wee
kend after Hannah was defeated, and everything in life had gone back to normal.
Now here I was, on Sunday afternoon, trying to shoot the green light out of my right palm into another one of those plastic cups, which was sitting up top the bar stool about thirty feet away from me. I was only able to shoot the light once every five minutes or so. Liesel told me once I could get the concentration down pat, that I could shoot as many as one every five seconds. I didn’t believe I would ever get to that point in such a short time, but it gave me hope. By 2 P.M. I had skimmed the right edge of the cup.
By 2:30 P.M. I finally hit it, directly in the center, making the water inside come streaming out of the smoking hole at the front. Liesel jumped for joy, and Yolanda raced to her Jeep Wrangler, leaping up and down as if she had just been proposed to. Liesel and I hugged, and I tried to keep from crying.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“Fine. Great, actually. It’s finally hit me, what I can do here, and I’m ready, Leese. I’m ready to take your sister down. I’m ready for this to be over, all over. Finally. So we can get back to our normal lives.”
“I’m so glad,” Liesel said, turning around. “Where’d Yolanda go?”
I looked past Liesel to see Yolanda in her car, talking animatedly to someone.
“She’s over there,” I said, pointing. “She’s on her phone.”
“What?” Liesel turned around and crossed her arms, suspiciously.
I followed suit with my arms. “Who do you think she’s talking to?”
Liesel shook her head and started walking toward her sister’s car. “I don’t know. But I’m gonna find out.”
As Liesel headed across the cavern toward the car, I heard a scary noise come from my left, up the hill toward the exit. At first I thought it was my imagination. But within a few seconds, I knew it was the real thing.
Oh my God.
“Oh my God,” I said out loud.
It was the sound of footsteps.