by Tobias Wade
There were similarities to all of the stories he’d shared. He didn’t tell the story about how if you played a musical instrument at the edge of the pool on the solstice, you could supposedly hear your music played back to you during the next one. He never said anything about the supposed cave behind the falls that led to the subterranean ruins of a lost civilization. And not one word about how the Cauldron is supposedly the gathering place of a coven of witches, despite it easily being the scariest legend. He had grown steadily more somber as he went on, and a hint of bitterness creeped into his voice near the end. I think Kylie had the same thoughts that were welling up in my own brain, because she shot me an uneasy look when our eyes met briefly. I had never felt we were as far away and removed from the inseparable trio we had been when we were ten; when our parents joked about whether I or Thorsten would marry Kylie when we grew up. That was before Kylie and I found out we were gay and Thorsten anything but marriage material in our parents’ eyes. I thought I could see some hint of the lonely little boy Thorsten once was as he pulled away from the fire, as if to hide incoming tears from us. But heavy, plodding footsteps that spared no branch underfoot surprised myself and Kylie—but Thorsten was obviously expecting them.
And there he was—the one who’d taken Thorsten’s nascent rebellion and sculpted it into something tangible. I’d heard the phrase “walking hard-on” a few times in my life, but Jerod was just a walking scowl—a concentrated show of displeasure. Everything Thorsten dabbled in, Jerod did with gusto.
“What’s he doing here?”
“Nice manners, queermo,” Jerod snorted, seemingly not offended. Kylie’s eyes flashed; when Thorsten had started to fall in with the wrong crowd, the time that he had fought a kid for calling her a dyke made us both think there was still hope for him. But this slur didn’t seem to register with him now. He just trundled over to the log Thorsten was sitting on and sat his big-ass next to him, cracking open a beer from the cooler.
“He’s here for my big sendoff, the pachyderm between four walls,” Thorsten said diplomatically. “There’s something I wanted to try, since I might not get another chance.”
“You’re not going away forever,” Kylie said warily.
“This town won’t look the same even if I bothered to come back,” he spat. “So I’m not going to try.”
“It won’t miss you,” Jerod agreed. “That’s why I’m bailing too.” He had gotten lucky—despite Mrs. Elkberg’s testimony, the cops still only found enough evidence to connect Thorsten with the vandalism spree that had smashed the windows and bodies of six cars parked in the street.
Thorsten sighed, seeming to decide he could hold off no longer, and slammed back the last of his beer, and stood up. But he didn’t say anything at first.
“And you’re… planning on doing something about it?” I asked, not content to leave the subject hanging.
“Hey, you want me to be completely honest with you?” Thorsten sneered. “Yeah, we did it. We smashed up all those cars outside up and down that block. We were as careful as could be—we wore ski masks, and even used someone else’s car that we had them report stolen, just so it could be ‘found’ the next day, completely unharmed. But somehow, old lady Elkberg was able to give the police every detail. There’s something not right about her, never mind that she got me sent up the creek.”
Ms. Elkberg seemed to perfectly typify every old woman accused of being a witch. Sure, she lived in a beautiful house and was impeccably dressed and groomed, but that didn’t help. She was so aged and weathered that, combined with her sharp features, it made her look like one of the Weird Sisters from Macbeth trying to hide out plain sight in suburbia.
“Taking revenge on a monster ain’t no crime,” Jerod nodded. With that, he got up and went back to the edge of the clearing, and picked up something he had left just out of sight. We knew what it was before we saw it, with a cranky meow making it obvious. It was a small wire cage that just barely gave the black cat inside room to stand. Kylie and I gasped when we got a good look at it. I had seen these in the news, on social media—it had two faces. One was glaring at all of us through jade green eyes above a slightly askew nose and mouth, while a third eye lay closed above another mouth and nose. The second set of features all seemed so tightly closed they appeared to have been glued shut.
“This is her fucking cat,” Thorsten said. “Never comes out of her house, but somehow she knew all about it. Only one who saw us was this freaky little shit, looking down atop that big wrought iron fence.”
“These cats are supposed to die,” Jerod said. “You surprised that old bat has a little monster like this? She probably dances naked around this same pool with all the other witches in town on the solstices.”
“What are you going to do it?” Kylie asked nervously.
“Test a theory,” was Thorsten’s simply reply. He opened his backpack, and to our horror, amidst the knickknacks inside, was a large, silver, curved knife.
“Ever hear about how animal shelters won’t adopt black cats before Halloween because they’re worried Satanists’ll sacrifice them?” Jerod said, the words rumbling forth from thick rubbery lips stretched into a predatory smile. Only physically pulling his mouth into the crescent of a fake smile would have looked less inviting. “If there was ever the right place, this is it. If there was ever the right night, this is it. And if there was ever the right sacrifice, this is it. This is like the seventh son of a seventh son in terms of currency in black magic.”
A trembling yowl came from the cage, as if the cat understood their intentions.
“I was thinkin’ about this place,” Jerod said. “It has to have some kind of power. It takes, but it gives. That’s what all the stories say. I figured, maybe if I give it something I might get something worthwhile back. Thorsten’s gonna need all the luck he can get.”
I tried to tell myself this was all a prank, but then Kylie acted. She loved cats even more than me, so she immediately dove at Jerod to try and wrest the cage from his meaty paw. He showed more restraint than I expected, merely keeping the much smaller Kylie at arms’ length. But it turned out to be merely an obligatory gesture to his run-around buddy, before he got tired of struggling with her and slapped her across the temple, sending her sprawling into the grass.
He always told me I had more sense than balls—as if that was a bad thing—and I could not forget that Thorsten had about twenty pounds on me and Jerod fifty. The cat was quietly growling at them now. I suppressed similar rage and instead helped Kylie up. He spared her a glance, and then met my eyes. He looked alarmed for a second, before his face shifted into a completely passive expression as he set up the contents of his bag.
It was a dime store Satanic altar that he may as well have bought at a Spirit Halloween store. This wasn’t a prank. He wasn’t going to deal with his impending incarceration by simply freaking us out with an elaborate prank.
“Don’t do this,” Kylie pleaded as she held her head. “Those stories are all bullshit. There’s nothing to them, you’re not going to get anything out of this…” I was certain that if an innocent little deformed cat’s life weren’t at stake, she would have been long gone.
“The price of finding out is exactly one cat. Seems reasonable,” Thorsten said, as he reached into the cage and grabbed it by the neck. It had seemed docile enough, but the second he got a grip the cat went berserk, turning into a snarling black blur in his hand. He was forced to slam it down on the chintzy faux altar he had set up, and as he raised the knife, the moment of truth came: Part of me, deep down, wanted to believe that Thorsten was a little afraid of Jerod, and that was why he had barely reacts to him hitting Kylie. But the moment I realized that I was afraid to get too close while he wielded that knife, I knew our friendship was over. Hell, I had been afraid of him for a long time, which was why I hadn’t protested more. So it was the fear that made me watch helplessly, as Thorsten brought the knife down into the cat’s side. The pitiful creatur
e screeched, and we, the two unwilling spectators, screamed. The screech waned, petering off into a faint, throaty mewl as the expressive face went slack.
“This for anyone who’s listening, who cares to hear my voice!” Thorsten called, before unceremoniously tossing the cat into the water below. I knew it was still alive. Sucks for a animal that hates water that much to drown, was the inane thought that rolled through my head. We all looked down after the splash for a long time, and when the disappointment set in, Thorsten took it out on me:
“Don’t look at me like that. Nobody wanted to help me!” Thorsten screamed. “Dad didn’t even care to look at me when we were kids—“
“Oh, shut it!” I snapped. “Nobody made you do anything. They didn’t make you smash up those cars, rob all those stores—"
“Hey, wait a minute,” Jerod said. “Listen!”
“Oh, fuck you, dirtball!” Kylie spat.
“The waterfall!” At that, I realized that as relatively quiet as it usually was, it sounded now like a trickle. But we could see plain as day that the water still flowed and fell as freely as always.
Thorsten’s eyes instantly lit up, and he ascended those stone steps far more quickly than was safe, but he had the luck of the devil on his side. Poor choice of words, I know.
One careful walk down later, we found it quickly: the cat was crawling onto the shore, out of the pool. It was barely moving, and yowling pitifully as it pulled itself through the grass. Thorsten was kneeling a car’s length away, fascinated.
“Fucking stomp on it!” Jerod called. Thorsten seemed not to hear him and kept his eyes on the cat. Jerod decided he had to be the one to take action.
“I’ll just break its fucking neck. No big deal.” And when he picked it up, our illusions about living in a sane world were shattered.
Seemingly out of nowhere, the cat’s vitality returned with a screech as it slashed Jerod’s wrist in a flash. We lost sight of it almost as soon as he dropped it, and Jerod grabbed the wound with his other hand.
“Been ten years since I’ve been scratched by a—“ and he cried out in shock as a torrent of blood suddenly gushed from his fingers—this was not a normal cat scratch.
“Oh, god, oh god!” Jerod screeched. We pointed our flashlight, and clear as day, the scratches were unmistakably spreading, deepening. That burning sting of a cat scratch was usually only accompanied by the barest trickle.
And just like that, his forearm was reduced to a stump as all four scratches delved all the way through, causing it all to just drop off in four bloody pieces. Thorsten screamed as his friend fell backwards in a faint into the Cauldron, vanishing into the water as if he was a lead weight and not a buoyant human. We were all screaming then, but somehow we all managed to hear the sound over our cacophony and silence ourselves.
There was a baby crying. And a moment later, a woman. Both could be the quiet somber cries of one grieving on the anniversary of a loved one’s passing. But it quickly escalated, swelling into an agonized din. What I saw next cemented the promise of horrific nightmares for years to come:
A woman was rising from the pool. Everything about her was a dull spectrum of black to light gray. Dark hair fell limply about her face, revealing only silver eyes peering through. In her arms, held against soaked and rotting clothes at least a century out of date, was something wrapped in a dripping, sodden blanket. She held it tightly against her breast, but as she stepped foot on shore, she held it out to Thorsten, opening it slightly. Despite himself, he shined his light into it, and promptly screamed at something that was obscured to Kylie and myself by the angle. And the wailing began, from the woman and the bundle.
Behind her, two boys in a similar state staggered out of the water. They looked to be no older than seven, and they sang a hymn in unison as they marched for the shore, hand-in-hand:
“Up from the grave he arose
With a mighty triumph o’er his foes!”
And last but not least, a tall stately-looking man wearing a fancy, out-of-time suit—albeit one similarly ruined as the others were. Some awareness in that mask of gray and black peered at Thorsten, one that the others lacked.
“It’s about that time,” he sighed in a wet and croaking voice, flipping open a rusted pocket watch. Atop the falls, the now-forgotten campfire flared up, drawing our attention for no longer than we dared look away from the horrors lurching towards us. It shot into the sky in a column worthy of the Old Testament before abruptly winking out.
“No—no, please—“Thorsten was always the fastest of us. He might have gotten away, if the black blur hadn’t zipped past his foot, splitting his work boot open. The heel of his foot followed a moment later, as he toppled, screaming. Instantly, the swarm of wraiths were pulling Thorsten into the Cauldron—they seemed to flow over and wrap around him like water. I realized after a moment that they were—they were de-coalescing into the dark water of the cauldron, sucking Thorsten below. It hadn’t been my imagination—Jerod’s body was nowhere to be seen. Kylie and I made to pull him out, but the cat came between us, glaring a warning at us from three open emerald eyes. We stopped right there. That it was hale and uninjured was the least remarkable thing. Thorsten’s screaming turned into gurgles as the black liquid gushed out of his mouth, his ears, and nose, before finally bursting out of his eyes. The ghosts finally lost their shape and collapsed back into the water with our friend, and the Cauldron was silent and still once more. We ran, of course, back to where we had parked our cars. We dared to think we were home free and ready to mourn our lost friend once we got inside and I put the key in the ignition, but there was quite the surprise waiting for us.
The cat was standing in front of the open back seat window of my truck, the eye from the dead face closed again. Kylie and I froze in terror as it took a quick glance at either of us, before letting itself in to curl up on the large armrest between us. We looked at each other, prepared to get out, to chance running home, when it laid its head down and started purring loudly.
“It wants to go home,” Kylie said. Giving it what it wanted seemed like a good idea.
We were silent the whole way back to town. It was past midnight at this point. A few jack o’lanterns still glimmered their pulpy grins, but we both knew the occasional small hooded form staring at us from the sidewalk wasn’t unusual for Halloween. When we arrived at old lady Elkberg’s place, the wrought iron gate in front of the old Tudor was open. I knew we were expected, so we both headed out, hand-in-hand, a silent promise that this time, whatever happened would happen to both of us.
The front door slowly opened, as if pulled on a wire. Blackness was all we saw, and we didn’t dare get any closer. The cat followed us from the truck and stood between us expectantly. We knew we were being watched, and spoke into the darkness at the same time:
“We—we have your cat. We didn’t mean—“
“We didn’t have anything to do with—“
“I know,” came the matter of fact pronouncement from the blackness within. “Just let her in. Morrigan, come!” And the cat happily disappeared into the house. “There’s a third kitten inside of her, you know. A second she absorbed in the womb. She’s a fighter. A survivor. Tonight, of all nights, even more so. Take care to never forget that.”
And the light of a passing car illuminated the living room. For a split second, we saw the decrepit woman still clad in a resplendent blue dress sunken into an easy chair. And on the armrests, the headrest, on every side, were at least fifteen more black cats scattered about. Fifteen pairs of green eyes scrutinizing us before the front door slowly pulled closed on its own, the locks promptly clicking and sliding into place.
I still wonder if it was the animal or the place. I don’t have an answer. All I have is a lesson learned—to tread carefully when it comes to the ancient and arcane on All Hallow’s Eve. If you can learn the same lesson, then I’ve done all I can.
Adrian J. Johnson
The Elevator in the Woods
The last thing I remember hearing once I ran out of the school building were the excited shouts and screams of every student around me, trying to start their summer break right away. Many people are trying to push and shove their way through the exit doors, swarming out like flies, wanting less of the constant, boring school days and more of the exciting fun outside of school. It's insane, everyone is desperate to start their summer vacation like there is no tomorrow. To be honest, I don’t mind school much, so I didn’t really care if it were to be the last day of school or not. Probably the one guy that I know who’s crazy about breaks from school, or basically any day without school is my best friend, Barry Amsterdam.
Barry is the kind of guy who got into detention countless amounts of times for, well, a lot of reasons actually. Most of those reasons were because of slacking and not doing much of his school work. Some other reasons involve skipping classes by hiding in the boys’ restroom, texting during class, and being disruptive for fun. Even though he does these things at school, he’s actually a great guy once you get to know him.
I became best friends with Barry when I started middle school a few years ago; he sat with me at lunch for absolutely no reason and started talking to me. I was just flat out confused because he was talking to me as if he knew me, about what he did before school started. What happened was that he had brought a stray cat he said he found outside on his front porch, he had dressed it up in a skunk costume, and had let it roam free around the school. It had surprised a lot of students; they ran away thinking it was a skunk, teachers too had freaked out. The principal had found out and gave him a few weeks’ worth of after-school detentions. I remembered that day, someone came up to me and told me there was a “wild animal” roaming around in the school, and it ran past us. It took me a minute to realize that it was too big to be a skunk.