Camp Arcanum

by Josef Matulich

  Jeremiah turned to the basement door. It was splintered, and the walls to either side were crushed as if something huge had squeezed its way through.

  Jeremiah carefully crept down the stairs. He had to stop several feet above the floor where the stairs were ripped away to leave empty space. The rents in the basement wall were sufficient to allow the Lexus’ lights in and reveal the damage. Every artifact and case was broken into small pieces. The brass circles and the wooden floor were torn free.

  In the center of the desecrated sanctum was a red glowing pile of something that looked like a gigantic dragon dropping. Steam and sulfur fumes rose from it. Jeremiah retreated back up the stairs with a hand held over his mouth once the smell reached him. He didn’t stop until he was beside his car.

  The Lexus still quietly idled and illuminated the house with its headlights. The sound of settling debris and straining wood built until a decorative turret collapsed and fell into the basement. A cloud of dust and paper billowed out of the windows and breaches in the walls. There was a long moment of silence after the dust settled where all that could be heard was the engine of the luxury car.

  “That’s it, Maggie, darling,” Jeremiah muttered. “Now, I get nasty.”

  * * * * *

  Robin was wading through the SICU paperwork, though there was more than enough for three shift nurses. She cursed budget cutbacks, HIPAA, and Stacy, who had called in sick that night.

  She heard the door to the unit hiss open. When she looked up, she saw the young woman visitor attached to the trauma in number seven. An older white woman—Robin assumed it was the visitor’s mother—walked beside her and held her hand. Another woman, black and about the same age as the mother, walked on the visitor’s other side with an arm around her shoulder.

  “Back so soon?” Robin was careful to keep her voice neutral considering the way the younger woman had sprinted out of the SICU earlier.

  “I am sorry if I interfered with the machinery. I did not realize I was touching anything.” The young woman’s voice was nearly at the point of breaking, not surprising considering number seven’s injuries. “May I see him still?”

  “Sure,” Robin said as she came around the desk. “Who are these people?”

  “This is my aunt.” The visitor pointed to the one Robin had labeled “mother.” “All the family I have left.”

  Robin looked over to the black woman.

  “And . . .?”

  “I’m her aunt’s wife. My name’s Stella.” The black woman’s eyes gleamed as she introduced herself. “How are you this evening?”

  Robin was taken aback for a moment by her attitude, but she let that go. All kinds of people wound up in the SICU, and their injuries made them all equal.

  “Fine, thank you,” she said. “Only two of you can go in at a time.”

  “You two go ahead,” the aunt’s wife told the others. “I’ll wait out here.”

  The visitor and her aunt went through the glass doors of bay seven and, with a grateful look at Robin, the younger woman pulled closed the curtains around the bed.

  Robin settled back at her workstation in the hope of catching up on reports. The third visitor leaned over the desk and gave her a warm, friendly, perhaps even carnal, smile. Unsettled, Robin turned away and hunkered down over her work.

  A minute or so later, she heard the pneumatic doors open again. The aunt’s wife was standing across the unit, just in front of the door. With a shrug and winsome smile, she said:

  “Sorry.”

  The curtains around number seven’s bed fluttered and the door stood open a few inches. Robin looked from the woman to the door and back again. The expression on the visitor’s face was an unspoken question.

  “Never mind,” Robin muttered as she went back to her reports. Some of the other nurses swore that the SICU was haunted by the spirits of those that had died here. Robin, on the other hand, was convinced anything odd in the unit came from staring at hundreds of screens of medical data for hours at a stretch.

  * * * * *

  Robin’s and Karen’s intent was to finish their reports, but the subject of Becca came up. That she was able to maintain torrid relationships with residents in Cardiology and Radiology for over three months impressed both of them, though Robin personally didn’t think all the sex was worth the logistical stress and loss of sleep.

  The nurses both looked up when Dr. Streif, the handsome Orthopod attached to the double amputation in number three, came in through the pneumatic doors. As he turned to engage them in conversation, Robin thought she spotted a shadow sticking close to him, but not his. Again the curtains in number seven fluttered and then the door closed. She chose to not follow up on that insane line of thinking; she didn’t really want to know what was going on in that bay.

  * * * * *

  Brenwyn stood at Marc’s right hand, along with twelve other members of her coven crammed cheek by jowl in a circle around Marc’s bed. Mab, the last of the thirteen and almost as tiny as the Faerie Queen whose name she had taken, squeezed in at the foot of the hospital bed.

  “I apologize,” Brenwyn told Musetta. “You can fit thirteen women into this room.”

  “We can do anything,” Stella stated.

  Musetta laid a reassuring on Brenwyn’s shoulder.

  “Now that we’re here,” Musetta said, “you know what you need to do.”

  Brenwyn knelt to the floor and knotted the red cord that ran around the edge of the room. Chalk dust or any other powder she normally used to mark the boundary of a magickal circle would cause a myriad of problems for the machinery that kept Marc alive. With the barest of rituals, she closed the rounded Magickal Rectangle around one man and thirteen witches.

  Brenwyn looked around the tiny cubicle lined with her entire coven: Musetta, Stella, Amber, Ivy, Crystal, Calipurnia, Jade Rabbit, Xiomara, Olwen, Mab, Hippolyta, and Feather. This was not only her coven but her entire world, her mentors, her friends, even her competitors, with Marc at its center.

  “Knowing and doing are two different things, I would remind you,” she said heavily.

  Musetta clucked her tongue.

  “This is something within your reach. You have all of us here. You have Marc—and his love. Everything else is distraction.”

  The room was oppressively hot with the heat from the machines and fourteen bodies. The steady chirps from the monitors and the hissing and grinding of machines she could not recognize, too, made it near impossible for her to focus.

  “I can barely stand to look at him,” Brenwyn said. “All of his injuries. All those machines.”

  “Marc is the last person who would be bothered by machines, don’t you think?” Stella observed.

  “I suppose so,” Brenwyn replied, though unconvinced. Stella’s point was intellectually sound, but Brenwyn’s problem was purely visceral.

  “You have to just suck it up and do what needs done,” Feather said sternly. “You can’t sit around feeling sorry for yourself. That broken-up boy needs you.”

  “You are right, and as well-spoken as always.” Oddly enough, Brenwyn was grateful for the abuse. “I will do my best.”

  She flicked her eyes around at the others.

  The coven joined hands to form a ring around Marc’s bed. Musetta and Feather, on either side of Brenwyn, clasped their free hands onto her shoulders to close the circuit.

  She laid her hands on Marc: her left hand went to the crown of his fuzzy head, her right rested on his chest over his heart and a stitched-up gash.

  Brenwyn began her healing invocation as little more than a whisper.

  “Magick mend and candle burn,

  Sickness end; good health return.”

  The coven took up the chant, a dozen voices whispering as one.

  “Wind and water, fire and stone,

  Heal the broken flesh and bone.”

  Brenwyn’s chanting slowed to a stop. As she opened herself to the sensations of Marc’s body, she could feel each of his injuries. Bruises,
gashes, and abrasions carpeted his body. His face throbbed from the fractured bones and crushed sinuses. Every limb, restrained in casts and air splints, burned with the pain of broken bones and torn muscles.

  Brenwyn closed her eyes, unable to bear the sight. She could still feel every sensation, including a new flare of pain on his chest and head. She opened her eyes again.

  The hair on Marc’s head and chest shriveled and burned under her fingertips, the flesh turning blood red. It looked just like the handprint she had branded onto Jeremiah’s face. She pulled her hands back as if they were burning and twisted away from Marc and her coven.

  She closed her eyes tightly and willed herself not to dissolve into a pitiful crying jag.

  Musetta took Brenwyn’s shoulders in both hands.

  “It’s all right,” Musetta whispered. “Nobody’s hurt permanently.”

  Brenwyn shook her head.

  “I cannot do this.”

  “Of course you can,” Musetta urged. “You need to look at Marc, not what Jeremiah did to him.”

  “It is so difficult.”

  Brenwyn glanced over at Marc’s face and the blue plastic breathing tube held down with tape.

  “Jeremiah did his best to make this impossible for you,” Stella said. “Don’t look at Marc, then—feel him.”

  “That is exactly what I did,” Brenwyn sobbed. She could feel her last bits of control slipping from her grasp.

  “You love him,” Musetta said. “Remember how that feels.”

  “The day you first met,” Stella added, “the sensation of your hand in his.”

  “Think of the first time you kissed,” Mab suggested.

  “Or how you feel watching him walk away.” That was Jade Rabbit, dirty old lady that she was.

  “Or how about the time you saw him walking away naked?” Feather leered. “His huge vocabulary and all?”

  That was the morning Marc answered his door stark naked and fully erect. Brenwyn stifled a giggle at that memory.

  “That is better.”

  Brenwyn took a deep breath and then a moment to ground and center.

  “Maybe we could try this again?” she said. She did feel slightly less awful now, just embarrassed instead of devastated. She looked around her circle of friends, her coven, and saw only expressions of gentle forgiveness and support.

  The circle reformed around Brenwyn. She lovingly stroked Marc’s forehead.

  “Once more for you, my love,” she whispered.

  Again, she laid hands on his head and chest. Closing her eyes, she led the coven in the chant.

  “Magick mend and candle burn,

  Sickness end; good health return.”

  The healing invocation whispered in the tiny room sounded to her like wind through the trees.

  “Wind and water, fire and stone,

  Heal the broken flesh and bone.”

  The color drained from Marc’s bruises. The blood dried and resorbed into the bottom of the wounds.

  “Goddess heal him.

  So mote it be!”

  She opened herself to Marc once again and was awash in the feelings of his broken body without the blunting influence of painkillers. It was agony, but she could feel it subsiding.

  Brenwyn picked up the pace of the chant. The coven followed her lead as if it were a creature of a single mind.

  “Magick mend and candle burn,

  Sickness end; good health return.

  Wind and water, fire and stone,

  Heal the broken flesh and bone.

  Goddess heal him

  So mote it be!”

  Marc’s wounds stitched themselves closed slowly. The swelling gradually drained from his face.

  Brenwyn was drawing power from the Earth three stories below. Under its influence, she increased the pace of the chant even more:

  “Magick mend and candle burn, Sickness end; good health return. Wind and water, fire and stone, Heal the broken flesh and bone. Goddess heal him. So mote it be!”

  The power of the earth and the coven flowed up her spine and through the crown of her head. She felt it like ecstatic fire that pushed her even further and faster.

  “Magickmendandcandleburnsicknessendgoodhealthreturn. Windandwaterfireandstonehealthebrokenfleshandbone. Goddesshealhimsomoteitbe!”

  A deep sound rang through the cubicle. The coven, caught up in Brenwyn’s ecstasy of the ritual, was buoyed by this sign of the presence of power. Still, they kept up the chant at her pace. The medical monitors faltered and blinked. Lights and equipment throughout the cubicle went crazy.

  “Goddesshealhimsomoteitbe!”

  “Goddesshealhimsomoteitbe!”

  “Goddesshealhimsomoteitbe!”

  The fountain of power and pain flowing through Brenwyn became too much. She cried out and succumbed. The SICU fell into total darkness just a moment before she did.

  * * * * *

  The emergency lights engaged. Robin rushed into Bay Seven with a flashlight.

  Though, for some strange reason, she expected to see a dozen people huddled there in the dark, there was only the patient in his bed and the two visitors on the floor. The older woman knelt beside the younger and pressed her hand to what looked to be a bleeding scalp wound.

  “What happened in here?” Robin asked.

  “She fell down,” the aunt stated matter-of-factly. “You have a doctor in the house?”

  * * * * *

  The all too familiar sounds of medical monitors filled the darkness as Marc slowly pulled himself out of unconsciousness. His eyelids peeled apart as if glued in place.

  A large white and black blob in the center of his field of vision gradually resolved into Brenwyn. There was the same dark, heart-shaped face he remembered, set off by pale eyes and waves of dark brown hair. But he saw a white square up near the top he didn’t understand. After several moments of tortured concentration, he recognized it as a large gauze bandage on her forehead.

  Brenwyn eagerly scooted her chair towards the bed as he opened his eyes. He felt a light touch on his forehead.

  “Good morning, Sleeping Beauty,” Brenwyn whispered.

  Marc focused slowly on Brenwyn. His first thoughts made him laugh. His mouth didn’t work quite just yet, making his laughter sound drunken, at least from where he laid.

  “What is so amusing?” she asked.

  Marc spoke slowly to avoid stumbling over his own tongue:

  “I wake up—I hurt everywhere—cervical collar on my neck, oxygen hose up my nose and you’re the first thing I see. And I think to myself: “That figures, she’ll kill me yet.””

  Brenwyn grinned and leaned in to kiss him on the cheek.

  “If I were to kill you, beloved,” she whispered in his ear, “I would make sure you enjoyed it. Shall I do something to help with the pain?”

  Marc did a quick assessment of the damages: his belly button and a small patch above his left elbow seemed to be the only parts of his body not screaming in anguish. He wondered how the other guy felt.

  “I would be grateful,” he said finally.

  Brenwyn reached across his body and tapped twice on the round plastic button on Marc’s left wrist. Liquid heat seeped into his blood just downstream of his IV and dissipated across his arm.

  “Ow. Burns,” Marc muttered. Within seconds, the drug took effect on Marc’s blurry mind. It did nothing to numb the pain, he just didn’t care about it anymore.

  “Morphine: Breakfast of Champions,” he said with a smile.

  “You can give yourself another dose just by pressing this button.” Brenwyn leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms. “Just restrain yourself.”

  Marc couldn’t focus on her face that far away, but that mattered less and less.

  “Don’t worry,” he replied. “After three days, morphine makes me itch.”

  “You are in familiar territory, I see.”

  “I can’t win all my fights.” Marc remembered snatches of the battle: the unearthly noise, his own screaming, s
teel and flying wood and white paint. None of it made much sense.

  “Did I win this one?”

  “You slayed another dragon for your damsel in distress.” She smiled again and he felt warm inside. “I will thank you properly later.”

  “Thanks.”

  Marc tried to point at the white square of gauze on Brenwyn’s forehead, but he discovered most of his body was somehow restrained. He tried to gesture with his chin.

  “What happened to your head?”

  Brenwyn touched the bandage with a wince of pain and embarrassment.

  “The procedure was a success,” she said, “but we nearly killed the doctor.”

  “Eh?”

  “My coven got together to perform a healing ritual,” she explained. “I passed out at the end and hit my head on the bed.”

  Marc looked around the tiny cubicle. He couldn’t imagine fitting thirteen hamsters into the available space.

  “You got your coven in here?”

  “Sometimes, it takes a miracle to arrange a miracle.” She reached out a hand to stroke his forehead. “How are you feeling?”

  “Like I just got face-planted by a giant, invisible monster,” he said. “Besides that, I’m fine, I guess.”

  “I mean us,” she said with catch in her voice. “The last time we actually spoke, it was all chainsaws and thunderbolts. If you still want some time apart, I can let you rest.”

  “Please, don’t.” Marc realized that he couldn’t reach out to stop her if she chose to leave. All he had was his voice, which wasn’t doing so hot right now. “I need—a friendly face. They only have machines and angry nurses in IC wards.”

  “I thought you liked machines.”

  “I like you butter—better.” Marc smacked his lips together. They felt like they were getting thicker and less responsive to commands. “Can’t talk.”

  Brenwyn smiled again. She must have been amused to see him stoned.

  “The extract of poppy is taking effect,” she said. “Close your eyes and rest.”

  “Don’t leave me,” Marc said, more urgently than he intended.

  Brenwyn kissed Marc on the forehead and then on the lips very gently. She whispered in his ear: