Mark of the Witch

by Maggie Shayne

  “You can talk to him, Padres. Just try not to upset him.”

  That was the officer stationed at the door. Father Dom had decided they should show off their collars rather than hide them on this particular visit. He’d given the police officer some line about the church’s unofficial inquiry into the bombing, and his explanation had seemed to make perfect sense to the cop.

  “Don’t be in there too long,” the cop added. “And quit if he gets agitated. His doctors don’t want him upset. I’m enforcing their rules as much as anything else here. So I’m going for a coffee. You have until I get back. That sound good to you?”

  “Of course,” Father Dom said.

  It occurred to Tomas that though he agreed with the officer, Father Dom would do whatever it took to get the information he wanted and wouldn’t care if he upset the patient or not.

  He’s not always a very nice person, is he? Why haven’t I ever seen that before?

  He’s just focused on the mission, that’s all, he told himself.

  But since when does the Bible teach that the end justifies the means?

  Father Dom opened the door farther, and the two of them stepped inside, letting it close behind them.

  “Hello, Marty. I’m Father Dominick, and this is Father Tomas. I hope it’s all right if we talk with you for a few minutes.”

  The kid’s eyes didn’t move. He just maintained that unblinking focus on the ceiling so steadily that Tomas was surprised when he answered. “I don’t care.” He hadn’t thought the kid had even heard Father Dom’s question.

  There were no chairs in the room. Nowhere to sit down, not even a table or a window ledge. Tomas stood awkwardly, watching the young man, content to let Dom do all the talking.

  “I know that you aren’t the one responsible for what happened.”

  The compassion in Dom’s tone actually surprised Tomas into looking at him.

  It apparently got to the patient, too. He blinked. It was the first time his eyes had moved at all.

  “I know that someone else—something else—somehow got inside your mind and made you do what you did.”

  Another blink. “How do you know?”

  “I just do. It’s true, isn’t it?”

  Slowly, the young man in the bed nodded.

  “Do you remember any of it? Buying the chemicals? Building the bomb? Taking it to the university? To the Statler?”

  The boy’s breath escaped in a slow stuttering sigh. “No. I didn’t even know there were ministers and priests there.”

  “Can you tell me what you do remember?”

  Tears welled in Marty’s eyes. They coated the dull gray, making it shine like wet concrete. “I fell asleep in the hospital. I woke up standing in the middle of a dust cloud, staring at a pile of rubble.”

  Dom’s eyes shot to Tomas’s, then darted back to the boy. “What about before that, Marty? What kinds of things were happening to you that landed you in the hospital to begin with?”

  Marty closed his eyes slowly. “I can’t…”

  “We might be able to help you, if you’ll tell us.”

  “We?” Finally his eyes shifted away from the ceiling, and when he saw Tomas, his expression made it clear that despite Dom’s introductions, he’d just realized that the old priest was not alone. Then he focused solely on Tomas, and something changed. His eyes widened, and dark clouds seemed to gather in their gray depths, darkening them. “You,” he whispered.

  Tomas felt a cold chill go through him, and then realized it wasn’t coming from inside but from without. His breath formed a cloud in front of his face.

  “Where is she?” Again a whisper.

  Tomas’s throat was dry as he replied, “Where is who?” But he already knew.

  “Bring me the witch! She is mine!” The kid’s voice had broken, then deepened, emerged strong and bestial, with a growling undertone. “Bring her to me, or I will destroy you and all you love!” Marty tugged against the restraints, managing to sit up in the bed, trying to reach for Tomas. “Bring her to me, dammit. Bring me the witch!”

  Tomas gripped Dom’s arm and backed toward the door, but before he made it there, the kid suddenly relaxed and smiled very slowly. His look was pure evil. And then the deep growl subsided to a low whisper once more. “Never mind. She’s coming to me. I see her now.” Then Marty collapsed on the bed, eyes rolling back into his head for a moment before he went limp and unconscious.

  Tomas looked at Dom. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means we’d better get to your demon-serving witches before he does,” he said.

  * * *

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Rayne had to shout over the roar of the water.

  I nodded in emphatic agreement with her statement of the obvious. The waterfall was narrow, pouring down from about thirty feet above where the two of us stood and plunging into a small pool at our feet, a brief, frothy pit stop on the way to the lake another hundred feet below, cutting deeply into the sheer stone face on the way down. As the water roared down from above us, it hid a rift in the face of the rocky mountainside, a rift that widened as it reached ground level where we stood, a deep darkness cloaked behind the waterfall.

  I stood watching the water for long moments, basking in the natural beauty, letting serenity wash over my body and soul. The mist that dampened my face felt good, cool and bracing in the sixty-degree temperature of an autumn afternoon. It was warm for this late in the season.

  Rainbow prisms appeared and blinked out again as droplets arced in the sunlight. Beautiful stones—some glittering like quartz, others striking in their pink and deep gray striations, some with fossils on their faces—lay at the bottom of the pool, visible wherever the water wasn’t too foamy to see. And where the fall hit the surface, the riotous bubbling froth was almost hypnotic.

  And yet my eyes kept darting to the darkness behind the waterfall. I didn’t know why, but I couldn’t seem to keep my focus from that place.

  “It’s a cave,” Rayne said, stating the obvious again.

  “Have you ever gone inside?”

  She didn’t answer, but when I looked at her, she was staring at the cave and shaking her head slowly.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.” She dragged her eyes from the darkness behind the waterfall, met mine and tried to pull off a sarcastic grin. “Maybe ’cause I’m not six?”

  “That’s not it, and you know it,” I told her, and watched her fake grin die a slow death. “There’s…something.... You feel it, too, don’t you?”

  She shrugged and looked away from me. But I knew she felt it. She was a witch, how could she not? There was something back there. Something…conscious, maybe? I felt eyes watching me, watching us both, from somewhere in that darkness. And I felt whatever it was calling me…pulling at me with some unseen force.

  “I want to go inside.”

  “No, you don’t, Indy,” Rayne said quickly. “Look, okay, I admit, I feel something, too, but whatever it is, it isn’t good. It feels…icky.”

  She tugged my shirtsleeve when I kept staring at it. “Come on, there’s a great vantage point right over here. You can smoke your cigarette and enjoy the view.”

  She knew how to distract me. I’d forgotten about the treat in my pocket because I’d been so entranced by our walk. The woods were wet, the path we took, slick with mud from the recent rainstorm. And I thought the falls were probably running at a higher intensity than usual, too.

  I followed her to a big flat rock. She perched on it, so I climbed up after her, took a comfortable position and lit my cigarette. Inhaled, exhaled, closed my eyes. Damn, that was good.

  “The view from here is the best I’ve ever seen.”

  I looked at her, glad my smoke was blowing away from, rather than toward, her, and followed her blissed-out gaze. And then a long, slow “woooow” came out of me. Because it was beautiful. Beyond beautiful. Cayuga Lake spread out below us, choppy and dark today. Moody. The way our ro
ck jutted, it was almost like we were flying over the water. Floating, at least.

  I pulled my cell phone from the pocket of my denim shirt, which I was using as a jacket, and took a couple of shots that I knew wouldn’t do it justice. “Wish I had a real camera and a wide angle lens,” I muttered.

  “It still doesn’t come out the same. I’ve tried it. There’s nothing like being right here. It sort of feels like—like an energy place. You know? A place of power?”

  “It does.” I looked at the photos on my phone, realized she was right—none of them did it justice—and set it down on the rock beside me. “Speaking of power…”

  “Were we?”

  I met her eyes, saw the teasing light in them, realized how much I truly liked this woman and nodded. “Yeah, we were. So, speaking of power, why haven’t I been able to repeat what I did in the video?”

  “Have you been trying?”

  “Of course I’ve been trying. Hell, who wouldn’t? I keep going back and watching the damn thing, trying to move just the same way, you know? But nothing.”

  Rayne nodded. “Well, you know power is never about ‘stand here and hold your hand this way and say these words.’ I mean, that’s rote. Magic comes from within.”

  “I know that.”

  “The words we say, the ways we move, those are just tools—tricks, really—to make our psyche relax enough to let the true power flow.”

  “I know that, too. I read all the same books you did, you know.”

  She smiled, nodded. “So then I guess the pertinent question is, why do you think you can’t repeat it?”

  Because it’s not real.

  But I’m way past that now, aren’t I?

  I took a deep drag, enjoying the hell out of my smoke and wondering if they trained high priestesses to act like shrinks, because she sure seemed to know how to make me find the answers inside myself. “I think it’s because I’m not that person. I think she’s the one with the powers. Not me.”

  “‘She’ being…”

  I was looking toward that cave again. Rayne’s voice got lost on the breeze.

  “Indy?”

  “I’m sorry, what?”

  “Who is she?” she asked.

  “My past self. The one who was shoved off a cliff in Bumfuck, Babylonia, a gazillion years ago.” I smoked some more. My cigarette was burning away while I was talking, and I hated like hell to waste it.

  “But you are her. Part of you is, anyway.”

  “I guess that’s where the disconnect is for me. Despite the dreams, I don’t feel like I’m her. Even partly her.” Trying pretty hard to convince yourself, aren’t you, Indy? “I feel like she’s a person I wouldn’t even like all that much. Like if I met her, I’d want to backhand her, you know?”

  “Well, that might be it. If you feel conflict with her, then you’re not accepting the part of you that is her. And if you can’t accept her, then you can’t accept her powers. But they’re your powers, too. And you can tap into them if you just let yourself. That video proves it.”

  I lowered my head, took the last few puffs and then rubbed the cigarette out on the rock. I tucked the butt into my pocket. Far be it from me to go polluting such a beautiful spot.

  As if I couldn’t help it, I looked at the cave again, then forced my eyes back to Rayne. “She was…is…in love with your brother,” I told her. “If I let her in—I’m afraid I will be, too.”

  She was silent for a long moment. I was looking down at the boulder beneath me, studying the patterns in the stone. Or pretending to.

  And then her hand covered mine. “I think he’s having doubts about continuing in the service of the Guardians, and maybe in the priesthood itself. And I think those doubts were happening before all this started. At least, that was the impression I was getting from our conversations.”

  “Really? Because I sure as hell don’t want to be the cause of him doing something he thinks will damn his soul to hellfire.”

  “Oh, come on, we both know there’s no such thing.”

  “Do we? There’s a freaking demon trying to get out of some sort of underworld. Doesn’t that sort of shake your confidence in everything you thought you knew before? ’Cause it sure as hell shakes mine.”

  She hesitated, nodded. “Yeah, I guess it does.” Then she sighed. “He can leave the priesthood and not be damned, though. I know there are ways....”

  “He will never do that.”

  Last time he killed me rather than give up his calling, after all.

  The dark cave drew my eyes like a magnet.

  I couldn’t even resist it long enough now to hold Rayne’s gaze. I tried, several times, but my own kept shifting back to that black maw behind the falls. “I have to go inside.”

  And with that I slid off the rock and started forward, skirting the bubbly pool until I got as close to the cave as I could, and then sloshing through the icy water the rest of the way. I had to walk straight through the waterfall. There was no other way to get to the darkness behind it, and I did, even while Rayne was shouting at me to come back and calling me a friggin’ idiot, among other things.

  I entered the cascade, darting quickly through it, but feeling the jolt of the frigid water all the same. It soaked me to the skin, and I emerged shaking myself and rigid with the shocking cold. And then I stood there, looking into the pitch-darkness, my entire body leaning forward, my feet itching to walk deeper inside, as if they had a will all their own.

  “Dammit, Indy, I don’t want to take an ice-water shower today!” Rayne shouted from just beyond the falls.

  “Just wait out there!” I called, turning back and becoming momentarily transfixed by the sight of the waterfall from this perspective. It was beautiful, like looking at the world through a crystal prism. I could see her on the other side, a blurry form done in muted colors. She looked a lot like the depiction of loved ones waiting to greet the newly dead at the far end of the proverbial tunnel.

  That thought gave me a shiver that was unrelated to the cold.

  “I won’t be five minutes, okay?”

  “Fine. Whatever.” She sounded pissed, not like an angel guide for the dear departed.

  I turned away and started walking. The darkness was almost heavy, closing up around me, enfolding me in arms of black. The perception of “density” wasn’t so much due to the presence of anything but more to the absence of everything. There was no light. The roar of the waterfall drowned out all other sounds. There was no scent here. And the walls of the cave were beyond the reach of my hands as I groped in the pitch-darkness. The air was so still I couldn’t feel it on my skin. I felt cold, and I felt my feet pressing soundlessly against the floor beneath me. Nothing else. There was just nothingness. Even the sound of the rushing water faded behind me as I ventured deeper.

  I moved slowly, my hands out in front of me now, until I felt the cold stone wall against them and wondered if I’d reached the back of the cave. But then something caught my eye from the left, and I turned to see a slightly lighter shade of black, as if there were some faint source of light in that direction.

  Keeping one hand on the wall, I moved that way, inching my feet ahead of me, in case the ground fell away suddenly. But it didn’t. I kept going, and then I was standing in front of the unimaginable, staring right at it and still not believing it was real.

  It was a little taller than I was, and oval in shape, widening to about two feet in the middle. Its surface was watery, only not made of water. It rippled with translucent strands of gray—pale gray, and paler gray, and darker gray—and violet and blue, and seemed not to be backlit but lit from within by its own swirling colors.

  “What the hell is it?” I asked aloud.

  It looked as if it was made of some combination of smoke and water. It looked as if I could put my hand right through it if I wanted to.

  And I wanted to.

  I reached out. My fingertips inched closer and closer. I was almost touching it, swallowing my fear and forcing myself on
ward.

  And then a face appeared on the other side, and I screamed and jerked my hand away, stumbling backward and falling on my ass on the hard stone floor.

  It stared at me. A shapeless, formless being whose only clear feature was its eyes. And they were eyes I’d seen before, but I was damned if I knew where. Human eyes, though. Very human. Very…beautiful. And roiling with pain.

  I saw them in my cauldron. And somewhere else, too…

  And then I heard a female voice, not from the thing on the other side of the fog-and-water curtain—that thing was most certainly male—but from above. And it, too, was familiar.

  He needs your help, Indira. You must find the amulet and return it to him.

  I blinked, shaking my head and returning my gaze to the soulful eyes gazing back at me. Tomas wanted me to find the amulet, too. To hand it over to him so he could destroy it, preventing a demon from crossing through some portal and—

  I examined the misty, watery oval again. This is it. This is the Portal.

  And then I looked again at the being beyond it. And this is the demon? This blob with eyes that look like they belong in some rescue-the-kids commercial? This is the big bad threat to mankind?

  You must help him, the woman told me again, and knowledge washed over me. My sister. Lilia.

  “I don’t fucking know how, and frankly, I’m getting sick of all these mind games. If you can talk to me like this, why not just tell me how to call forth the freaking amulet so I can get this the fuck over with?” Assuming I wanted to, of course.

  Don’t you think I would if I could?

  Her answer came in an angry shout that seemed to echo from the walls of the cave like an explosion, deafening. I clasped my hands to my ears, but it did nothing to dampen her volume. She was screaming at me now. You hid the amulet in the astral plane! Only you can call it forth! You have to remember!