She knocked, her knuckles rattling the windowpane.
“This is it,” Carly breathed.
They heard soft footsteps approaching the other side of the door.
CHAPTER THIRTY
The door of the witch house swung open on shadow. A vague figure appeared in gathered gloom beyond the threshold—a thin figure of a woman in white. They couldn’t see her face. Carly’s heart pounded in her throat. Abigail’s voice seemed caught; she was opening her mouth to say something but nothing was coming out except curls of frosty breath.
“Hello,” said the woman. Her voice was strong, but not loud. Aged, but not elderly. “Can I help you?”
“Miss ... Miss Maeveen?” Abigail found her voice. She even seemed a little stunned about it.
“Yes?”
“My name is Abigail. Abigail Holman?”
The figure shifted. They could see an outline of her head, silhouetted gray by the darker shadows deep in the house behind her. She stirred impatiently.
“This is my friend Carly Wagner.”
“What can I do for you?”
“I-I was hoping ...” Abigail stammered. Carly felt the bottom drop out of her resolve, but her pride and her commitment to her friend wouldn’t allow her to turn tail and leave. Or run. She reached out and put a supportive hand on Abigail’s back. Abi’s eyes filled with tears, her cheeks blushed with embarrassment. The next words flowed from her in plumed frosty breaths. “My father died night before last. And I think I caused it to happen. I let something loose. With a conjuring spell. And,” Abigail swallowed hard and wiped tears angrily away. “I was hoping you could help me. Tell me how to send it back.”
Carly didn’t know what to expect. For the old woman to slam the door in anger maybe. Maybe she would curse at them for thinking she was some kind of witch—for believing all the stupid little stories kids around town told about her because she lived in a spooky house. Whatever she expected, it wasn’t what happened next.
The figure backed into the deep shadows of the doorway. The woman’s voice softened as she invited them in.
“Please,” she said. “Come in.”
Carly hesitated, but Abigail went quickly into the foyer of the house. Carly followed. In the foyer, musty shadows enveloped them. Unswept floors, undusted shelves, un-lived-in rooms ... it was the smell of an abandoned house. It was warm at least, and the woman urged them farther in as she closed the door behind them and the darkness was complete for a moment. Carly felt for Abigail’s hand in the dark.
The woman’s voice was a thick tenor. “Come into the back room. The front rooms have been long unused, and I prefer to keep them such.”
Their eyes adjusted only the slightest bit, just enough to see the vague shape of the woman in her long white dress moving through darkness ahead of them like a ghost. They passed a stairway leading up on the left, and a door across from it. Features of the house could be seen only by the distant glow of failing twilight through the scant opening of curtains. Night fell as they went deeper inside.
They crossed two wide open rooms packed with bookshelves, stale with dust, damp books, and old incense. After they passed through the second room, a hallway curved to the left. Slowly, the wooden walls came to life with dim light. Orange flames reflected from a stone fireplace and danced on the furnishings of a warm den. A banker’s light sat atop a grand desk in the far corner, overflowing bookshelves behind it. A couch and love seat faced the fireplace, a round coffee table in the center of the room on what looked like an expensive carpet from some exotic land. A long tapestry of strange symbols and artwork hung along the back wall, and end tables were arranged with black and white family photos in ornate frames. A crystal decanter of amber liquid shone next to an empty glass on the coffee table. It glowed as if filled with celestial power by the light of the flames.
As the girls stepped into the warm room, the woman went to a corner and turned on a second lamp, its light filtered through its dingy cream-colored shade. Carly had to stifle a gasp at the sight of the woman.
Her face was lovely. Her hair was long and silver and her body was long and shapely. But on taking a closer look at the woman’s face, Carly felt dizzy, disoriented. It was like viewing a painting by Cézanne, and only realizing on second look that the angles and lines and slopes didn’t mesh with reality. The woman’s skin seemed thin, old, pale, and yet unblemished by time ... as if she were a strikingly beautiful woman who had aged prematurely on the inside, and only now was age beginning to seep out to the physical surface. And yet again, if she looked close enough, the vision of her youthful-aged beauty seemed to shimmer, like a reflection of light passing over dark water.
Abigail seemed just as awed as Carly. They stood foolishly close together at the entrance to the room.
The woman laughed softly. The sound didn’t entirely set either of them at ease, but it wasn’t threatening either. She motioned for them to join her in the living room. She sat on the love seat. The girls went in and sat on the couch. Carly looked around the room, taking in its details, feeling the blessed heat of the fire, startled by a sudden crackling ember.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” the woman said.
“Yes, ma’am. I mean, I appreciate it. I’m sorry to disturb you, but really ... it was a shot in the dark, but I felt like you could help. Or at least steer me in the right direction.”
Carly thought that the right direction would have been out of this place and away from here. Now that they were here, despite the woman’s disarming, if suspicious, appearance, she felt that nothing good could come of tempting supernatural powers. Black magic or white magic was all the same to her—witchcraft. Besides that, this place exuded a weight of oppression. She imagined her mother here years ago, coming to meet with that man, but she couldn’t see it. Maybe she wouldn’t allow herself to see it. Now that she was here, nothing inside of her felt this was a good place to be.
“Well, I have to say that it’s refreshing to have a visitor who isn’t here to prank me or implicate me in a crime.” Carly might have been paranoid, but she thought the woman shot her an accusing look. Her father had probably gone after her like the Witchfinder General after Mom’s death. She recalled that the man who worked with Mom had disappeared.
The woman leaned forward, pouring herself a splash of the liquid from the decanter. They caught a whiff of alcohol. She drank it quickly, then set the glass aside. Her eyes shone a silvery hazel, the pupils black as the heart of a well.
“You said your father died.”
“Yes,” Abigail said, quiet.
“I’m sorry.”
Abigail collapsed into tears. Hard, shuddering sobs. She gasped for breath and cried hard. She began to make a wheezing, wailing sound that was maybe the worst sound Carly had heard since the sound of her father crying in his room alone after mother’s death. Carly cozied up next to Abigail and put her arm around her friend. Abi covered her face with her hands. The woman drew nearer and placed a long-fingered hand on Abi’s knee. Carly’s gut reaction was to tell her to get away, but one look at the woman now and Carly warmed to her just a bit. She had a genuine look of care and compassion on her strangely beautiful countenance. When Ms. Maeveen met Carly’s gaze, it was not threatening, but soft and concerned.
“I-I killed him. My god I let that thing loose because I didn’t know what I was doing and I let it loose and ... and it killed him!”
“Calm down, dear,” Ms. Maeveen cooed. “Just get your breath. Here’s some tissue.”
Abigail calmed and began to relate to Ms. Maeveen the details of what she’d done that fateful night. The woman asked about her past experiences with spell casting and conjuration, and Carly was shocked to hear that Abi had been messing with this sort of thing for the past year without telling her. Ms. Maeveen nodded, narrowed her eyes as if in thought, and seemed to come to a conclusion.
She stood.
“Follow me.”
She walked back through the house to the staircase. As they reached the base of the stairs, they heard distinct thumping coming from beyond a wooden door across the hall. Ms. Maeveen seemed not to have heard it, or chose to ignore it. Abigail followed the woman eagerly, but Carly looked skeptically up the staircase. She jumped as she heard the thumping from beyond the door again.
“What’s—what’s in there?”
The woman paused. The staircase was a spiral, leading up the corner tower of the house. She looked down at Carly like royalty of some forgotten age, a once regal woman, in a once regal home, pausing with her hand on an old baluster, forcing the illusion of beauty not quite gone, refusing to be tainted by the gothic darkness that engulfed her life.
“That leads to the basement, dear.”
“There’s something down there. Thumping. I just heard it.”
Carly thought the woman’s eyes narrowed just barely.
“Just the cats. Gone after the mice, no doubt. It’s why I put them down there.”
Ms. Maeveen continued up the stairs. She disappeared around the upper curve of the stairway. Abigail turned to her friend and motioned for her to hurry.
“Big cats,” Carly muttered under her breath. She gave the door to the basement a final look and went up after them.
The stairs creaked beneath their weight, old but sturdy. At the top they reached a semi-circular landing that gave way to the open doorway of the tower’s uppermost room. This was the room that they could always see from the street, Carly thought. This was where the woman spent most of her time. It was apparent from the looks of the room.
The room was circular, just as the corner tower suggested from the outside. The window, hung with red velvet drapes, was layered with years of unwashed grime. The rest of the room was relatively clean but still dusty. The furniture was antique and brought to mind again the royal trappings of some forsaken palatial abode on the far edge of its age of glory. There were two plush chairs near a matching divan. Two stools in the corner provided seats for a worktable of sorts, covered in herbs, decanters, bottles of fluids, and bowls of ash. A smell of blossoms and pungent leaves lingered in the room. The walls were dark, polished wood, hung with brass sconces with white candles. A long mirror with an ornate gold frame covered one wall opposite a huge oaken bookcase of moldering books. In front of the bookcase was another desk, this one stacked with books and spiral notebooks that looked heavily used.
Ms. Maeveen went to the far bookcase and searched the old titles, some of which couldn’t be read they were so old and falling apart. Abigail seemed transfixed. Carly looked into the corners. Beyond the window, night had fallen.
“I think this may help,” Ms. Maeveen said, pulling a book with tattered edges from the shelf and sitting on the divan. “Please, have a seat.”
Carly leaned against the edge of the desk as Abigail sat eagerly next to the woman like an obsessed student with her favorite teacher. Her eyes wanted to drink in the content of the book even before the pages were open. Carly wanted to say something, to tell her friend to calm down, take a deep breath, remember that fooling around with magic is what got her into this mess, but she stayed quiet. The room and the woman’s tenuous beauty inspired a persistent kind of awe in her that she couldn’t shake.
Ms. Maeveen held the book closed. She studied Abigail for a few moments of uncomfortable silence.
“Do you consider yourself to be an evil person, Abigail?”
Abigail blinked. “N-no. Of course not.”
“For what purpose had you intended to use the Goetic conjuration?”
Abigail’s cheeks reddened. Carly saw her friend’s jaw flex and tighten. She knew why she’d conjured that thing. She’d been ready to curse Sadie, just as she’d said she would. Just as Carly had pretty much encouraged her to do.
“I—there’s this girl, at school. She ... I ... hate her. We hate her.”
Carly stiffened, but it was true. She was implicated.
“So you intended the conjuration for a selfish act. A childish one at that.”
Abigail’s face twisted with sudden anger. Her eyes filled with tears. She stood stiffly. “I admit I made a mistake. I admit that it was wrong, but now everything’s gone terribly wrong, and my father—”
The woman stood quickly, hunched over them. Carly’s heart stuttered a beat or two and she had to catch herself on the edge of the old desk. The old woman’s face suddenly changed. There was anger there—fury. Something awful lurking beneath that tenuous vision of surface beauty, like shallow water washing momentarily away from something rotten beneath the waves. As the girls felt the woman’s ire rise, heat rose in the room. The lights flickered. She pointed her finger at Abigail and it seemed longer than it should have been, crooked and gnarled.
“You were a fool! You craved a power that is not yours to have. A weapon that is not yours to wield. Your childish vanities caused you to call upon forces you do not understand, and your immaturity unleashed them upon your family. You craved the ability to control your surroundings, but had no time to learn the disciplines that make such manipulations possible. You have no concept of God, of the Universe, of how they are one—inside you, outside you, around and within you.”
Carly pulled Abigail, sobbing, into her embrace. Carly trembled. She felt her bladder uncomfortably full and threatening to release. She took a deep breath and it shuddered in her lungs.
“Come on, Abi.” Carly urged her friend toward the door. But Abi wouldn’t budge. Instead, Abigail whirled around, a fit of anger overtaking her. She spat at the woman.
“Fuck you, bitch! Don’t you think I know what I’ve done? Don’t you think the weight of it bore down on me the minute that thing came through the fold and ripped my father to shreds? He may not have been a good man, or the best father, but he was the only one I had, and he didn’t deserve that! I’m not evil. I’m not stupid, but ... but I am naïve. I’m naïve because I did what I did thinking it would end well. And for thinking that coming here was a good idea.”
Carly braced herself. Every muscle in her body was tense. She took a backward step toward the door, one hand reached out instinctively for Abi. She realized with horror in her heart that she was ready to leave Abi behind if she had to. To run down the stairs and out that door, past whatever the hell was thumping down there in this witch’s basement, and leave her friend here. It gave her a cold feeling in the pit of her stomach.
Abigail stood her ground, shaking with fury.
The woman’s countenance solidified again into that soft beauty. She smiled.
“There is no magician,” said Ms. Maeveen, “who considers himself evil. They are men or women who seek to saturate themselves in whatever supreme force unifies the cosmos, who seek to put themselves in the seat of God, who envision their places as gods themselves. They seek to become one with the universe, to understand its forces, to internalize them, and bend them to their will. Their purposes are good and evil, to call down curses or grant mercy as they see fit. The driving force behind mastering external, or supernatural, forces, is a hunger for power.”
Abigail shook her head slowly. “I don’t see how this—”
“You have a need for power. The circumstances of your life are out of your control, and you felt the call of the magicks. You were seduced by forces yearning to be unleashed, which preyed upon your desperation. Until you recognize that you have been used, and practice disciplines to ensure it can’t happen again, I wouldn’t advise you to utter another single word of incantation.”
Ms. Maeveen flipped quickly though the book in her hand. She marked a page in the book and extended it to Abigail. She took the book. Held it in her hand, looked at it, and then looked back up at Ms. Maeveen.
“I’ve marked a banishing spell on those pages. This is a
very ancient book, with incantation by Cornelius Agrippa himself, one of the most powerful sorcerers ever to live.”
“But, what should I do?”
“Study the incantation, internalize it. But do not attempt the banishment until you’ve come back to visit me twice more.”
“Abigail,” Carly found her voice. “I don’t think this is a good idea. We should go. Thank you, Ms. Maeveen, for your time, but—”
“Wait Carly. Just wait a second.” Abigail shook her head. She addressed the old woman again. “But the thing ... the wraith. It’s loose. It’s free and God only knows what it might do next.”
Ms. Maeveen smiled with a touch of sorrow. She went to the window and gazed wistfully out of it. It was almost impossible to imagine her as the same woman who’d become so imbued with wrath just moments ago. Lines of sadness deepened her countenance and though her eyes gazed through the window, what they saw must have been something in the past, something painful. Something gone forever.
“Whatever it does next,” she said, “It would have done regardless if you had set it free. In one form or another, it would have fulfilled its desire.”
“I don’t understand,” said Abigail.
“A man named Cavendish once wrote a book called The Black Arts. A damning treatise, but despite its prejudice, it had its moments of poetic insight. In one passage he explained that ‘in this unified magical universe mysterious forces are at work, moving beneath the external fabric of things like invisible currents of the sea.’ You have to understand, De Nigromancia which you used to set up your magick circle is primarily concerned with the conjuration of wraiths. They are the ghosts, or the residual energies, of those who have passed. But wraiths are messengers of death, as well.” Ms. Maeveen blinked and seemed to come back from the place to which she’d drifted. “Sometimes, they are imprisoned spirits, yearning to return to Earth to protect their loved ones, but enslaved by a bond to another sorcerer—someone who imprisoned them spiritually while they still lived in the physical realm. Their spirits become part of the force that moves beneath the external fabric. Those especially determined are looking for a tear in that fabric through which to escape. They seek to free themselves to exact their own wills.”
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