by Dean Covin
She did her best to say, “Water.”
He slapped his head. “Fuckin’ dummy. Of course you need water. I’ll bring you some in a minute.” He was excited about something.
He sat down in his paint-covered office chair and explained his decision. He didn’t want to hurt either one of them, but he couldn’t let them go, no matter how much they promised to be good and not tell. So he was going to sell them.
He was in trouble—what with his wife in the deep freeze and all—so he needed a lot of cash quick, and, for him, his brilliant solution would kill two birds with one stone. He was so proud of himself. He did get angry when the girls wouldn’t stop crying at the news, and, at one point, he even slapped Vicki hard across the face, knocking loose one of her teeth.
“The decision’s final,” he said and left.
The other little girl cried to herself a lot but still wouldn’t speak to Vicki. Her throat was too sore to talk anyway. She tried to sleep, but it was hard being tied, standing up, to a cold pipe. The chill was giving her the sniffles. All night Vicki kept telling herself, “Daddy’s coming. Daddy’s coming. Daddy’s coming.”
The man came back the next morning with two PayDay bars and a Sprite.
He pushed pieces of her candy bar into her mouth with his thumb and then poured too much foaming Sprite. The soda shot out her nose, the bubbles burning, sending her gagging.
“You really are little pigs, aren’t you,” he yelled. “Totally fucking useless!”
She tried not to cry when the hard peanuts pressed against her loose tooth. She was too afraid to talk to him. The side of her face was still burning hot and swollen. But the other painful, building pressure was too great; finally she mumbled something.
“What?” he said.
The agony was too intense not to answer. “I have to go to the bathroom,” she mumbled louder.
“Christ!” He looked at his intricate rope work. He untied her with one hand, keeping her tender throat in his other. This time he chained her to the pipes giving her freedom to move three feet in each direction. “Here’s a bucket and a box of Kleenex. I’ll give you your privacy. But don’t make a mess or I’ll make you eat it, you hear me?”
She nodded and finished her business.
His frustration grew by the hour. He had his brilliant plan to sell the girls but he had no idea how to go about it. He brought down his video camera, assuming someone would want to see them first. Still, he had no idea where to even begin looking for buyers without getting caught.
His aggressive pacing through his vocal rant terrified his captive audience. He considered using the Internet—a Usenet he heard it was called. But he didn’t own a personal computer and all he knew how to use at the office was Lotus Notes—assuring the girls that he’d get caught for sure if he tried it there.
He bloodied his knuckles punching his metal tool cabinet and then screamed at the girls to shut up! He followed with a furious right to an old bookshelf as he left, ignoring the crashing of books, boxes and jars stored up high. He stormed back up the stairs, slamming the heavy door behind him.
That’s when Vicki caught the first whiff: gasoline. She knew the smell from going on errands with Broderick when he had fueled her father’s numerous cars. A weathered plastic gas can sat skewered on an old pickax in the corner by the shelf, the fragile container split wide, spilling its contents as the room filled with the distinctive fumes.
Vicki watched the fuel snake along the gentle slope of the cement floor, pooling beneath the little girl’s cage. Vicki panicked, screaming, but he couldn’t hear her. When he returned, she begged him to get them out of here.
“Shit. I gotta clean this up first,” he insisted. “It’s dangerous.” His agitated hands scurried about his workbench, seeking anything in the clutter to soak up the large spill. Vicki’s frantic pleas were not helping, but she couldn’t stop. Vicki watched his frenzied shuffling cause the claw hammer to fall, striking the table saw’s fuel-soaked power cord. The gasoline ignited.
The man panicked, rushing for the cage, but as the girl screamed, and the cage burned, he stopped, stood and watched her.
“Help her!” Vicki screamed. He ignored her, instead, reaching out an arm without taking his eyes off the little girl’s terror … and pressed Record. He watched with a twisted, newfound, nervous fascination.
Vicki wanted to remain invisible, but once the girl started to burn, Vicki’s screams couldn’t stop, even in the choking smoke. Regardless his eyes never left the girl in the burning cage. He only moved other items away so nothing else would catch fire.
An hour passed, and he remained fixated on the charred cage, sitting on the floor beside his camera, knees pulled to his chest for protection as he lingered on the girl’s smoldering corpse. Vicki couldn’t escape the saturating stink of the girl’s flesh and bone in the gasoline smoke that soaked into her skin and hair.
Unable to fight her tears any more than she could fight her terror, she struggled to keep it muted.
He walked slowly to the door, processing what he had witnessed. He looked back at Vicki with a new curiosity, then climbed the stairs and closed the door.
Vicki allowed herself to scream until she had no more tears and tasted iron—and even then some. She scanned the room through sand-dry eyes, avoiding the charred cage centered on the barren cellar floor. After moving the scattered possessions away from the fire, he had been too mesmerized to remember to move them back.
She was able to reach a tall cardboard box. In it, she found a few tools, enough for her to work the evening hours to release her bonds and pry open the basement window to freedom before dawn. The authorities found him snoring on the sofa, underwear at his knees—a can of lighter fluid on the coffee table.
Vicki had been praised a hero—an extraordinarily brave little girl who had saved herself and had helped apprehend a killer. All she could think about was the other little girl—and the smell.
Her career path had been set in stone. She had been in therapy for over twelve years, and still she had trouble at the gas pumps.
“Of course you do, you poor child,” Sky said.
Being referred to as a child by a woman who only looked a couple of years older than her was surreal. “But you’re right, that would be a darkness in my life. How could you tell?”
“I can read a lot of things, Vicki. A lot of things.” She held out her hand. “Come, I have something to show you.”
Fifty-one
Vicki couldn’t believe she had accepted the woman’s hand.
There was something dangerously intoxicating about the woman leading her into the night. But the powerful pull was not sexual attraction. The draw was something else, something deeper. Magic?
Her mind raced at the possibility that she might be charmed somehow, even though she didn’t believe in magic. A deep stirring in Vicki wanted to fully open up to Sky, tell her what the hell was happening to her … seek her help, her guidance—her protection. This had to be within her realm. Yet a deep fear, a mistrust, of this woman lingered, like a dark shadow around the corner of an unfamiliar street—a street where bad things always happened. As the two women folded into the blackness of the night, Vicki realized she hadn’t called anyone to let them know she was here.
The night should have felt cooler, but the gentle movement of the air was comfortable as it flapped her short robe.
The gnarled limbs of the dead trees ringing Sky’s home reached in every dark direction. Shivers explored Vicki’s flesh as she recalled the hateful place in the daylight. She scanned for movement between the trees. Night should feel far worse; but from this side, walking with the witch of the woods, the trees stood as sentry rather than threat.
“Shouldn’t we bring a flashlight or something?”
“Luna and Her sisters provide all the light we’ll need.” She pull
ed something from a small leather pouch she had tied around her waist and handed it to Vicki. The pea-size nugget looked like a balled-up mash of berry skins, mixed with crushed seeds, nuts and blended flecks of herbs, smelling of sweet mint.
“I’ve adapted to Her light, but that may help you,” she said, nodding for Vicki to eat it.
The woman could have poisoned Vicki with the home-brewed tea earlier, so she decided to trust Sky.
The tiny ball was sour with a gritty texture, though otherwise inoffensive, but it warmed her mouth like a bite of cayenne. The heat morphed into tingles that flushed up her cheeks, into her nasal cavity and then up behind her eyes. The deep contrasts of the forest came into sharp focus as her pupils opened to draw in the echoes of moonlight. Her surroundings remained dark in the night, but her vision sharpened to a manageable level. Not a magical difference, but a marked improvement regardless. Like carrots on steroids, she thought.
As they walked through the dark, Sky shared her reverence for her sacred grounds beneath the moonlight. Vicki was entranced by the woman’s passion and belief in her ancient practice. Sky claimed she stood apart from the majority of Wiccans, employing part of their practices and implements, but insisted that her much-older craft was more powerful.
“You will not find my brand of magick in any book.”
While Vicki was impressed with Sky’s deep devotion to nature and the spirits of the natural world, the unnatural magic and occult that weaved throughout her beliefs didn’t resonate with Vicki. What did catch her attention were the warlocks. While uncommon, these male witches did exist.
“Are there warlocks around here?”
“There are three true warlocks within five hundred miles of here, but no more. They come for rituals, but the closest would be Calvin Gray, just north of the city.”
“Did any of them know Ivy?”
“No true Wiccan male would have harmed Ivy. They revere the feminine,” she insisted. “Dabblers, however, are a different story.”
“Dabblers?”
“People interested in the craft for the wrong reasons. They toy with parts of it without understanding and respecting the whole. They’re usually youths with a perverse viewpoint. They seek dark thrills or surface-level gratification, trying to fulfill some sexual fantasy they equate with the Magicks. It’s usually harmless, unless they become frustrated and angry.”
“Do you know any of these dabblers?”
“There are a few in New Brighton. They like to spy on my rituals, fueling their memory for their masturbatory nights.”
“That doesn’t bother you?”
“The fantasies? No. They’re just being boys. It robs me of nothing if they use me in their dreams. Problems come from their feelings of shame brought on by society’s heavily conflicted and twisted views of sex. Sexual desire is fine and expected. They’re healthy boys. What’s not healthy is their skewed view of the craft and refusal to listen to reason. They didn’t like what I had to say, and I told them not to return.”
Vicki couldn’t reconcile the woman’s relaxed point of view. “So you were alone, naked, around these horny young men, and you weren’t afraid of being raped?”
“Rape is an act of violence. They wanted to have sex with me, so I was in the position of power. If they had wanted to harm me, I would’ve been worried—but they wouldn’t have gotten far.”
She grinned and took Vicki’s hand. “Come, we’re close.”
† † †
Vicki froze, jerking the witch back. She stared at the stone altar, black against the darkness of the night. Fear seized her. Terror consumed her body.
Sky’s soothing voice offered, “Fear is powerful. And we fear what we don’t understand.”
The dark forest opened to an expanse fifty yards in diameter. A ring of heavy stones, set six feet apart, each linked by a deep channel of charcoals and ash, formed a circle in the center that was ten yards in diameter. A large, seven-foot-wide flat stone sat at the center with its surface leveled at three feet high.
As they approached, Vicki saw it was piled with ashes. She felt as if something was watching her from the spent coals. A gust pushed a swirl of ash and a fanged moonlit smile snarled at her. She screamed.
Sky laughed. “It’s a wolf skull.” She drew it from the black ashes and presented it to Vicki, unconcerned with her soiled hand.
“No thanks.” She looked closer at the ashes as Sky returned the skull. There were charred bits and blackened remains of bones throughout the large pile.
Vicki’s flesh went dark and rigid. “What is this?”
Sky patted the massive stone. “This is my fire altar. It’s where I have my bone fires.”
“Bone fires?” Vicki shivered.
“The true origin of bonfires, my dear.”
She thought of the skulls on the bridge, branded inside for fair purchase. “No one alive, I hope.”
“Of course not.” Sky laughed. “We burn bones in ceremony to ease the passing of the dead, or carve messages or runes into the bones and burn them to open communications. They can only be short, direct messages to the spirit world. Think of it like Twitter for ghosts.” She smiled. “Only we burn our bone-tweets, sending them via smoke.”
Vicki thought she’d stick with her iPhone. She pictured a roaring bone fire reaching for the heavens as the ring of stones came alight in a brilliant circle of flame forming a protective moat around this witch and her skyclad rituals beneath a sable sky.
“With all this lit, it must seem magical.”
“No, it is magickal.” She grinned. “It also keeps me well lit for the horny little tree-watchers that brave the woods on just the right nights. A minor consequence.” She shrugged. “While I come here to communicate with my Goddess, we also use the altar during sex rites.”
Vicki fought her overwhelming curiosity.
“My hair is bothering you.” Sky plucked a few platinum strands. “For your sanity.”
Vicki nodded, pretending that was it. A memory of Ivy tugged at her. Vicki returned her gaze to the ash. “The bone fire—”
“Yes, I used it to release Ivy.”
Vicki whispered her shock. “You burned one of Ivy’s bones?” Vicki remembered the severe wound on Ivy’s shin.
“It gave Ivy the power to ease her passing.”
Vicki spun with nothing to grab on to.
“Her shinbone was substantial enough without having to further desecrate her body.”
Vicki fought to keep her tone low. “That’s part of a murder investigation!”
“Ivy was already dead. She had already left her vessel behind. I wasn’t doing her any harm—I was building a bridge.”
The inexplicable horrors of Vicki’s bloody torments came crashing down on top of her. “You. It was you! You attached her to me!”
The self-assured woman went white. “That’s—That’s impossible. A soul will never bond with strangers.”
Vicki’s scream was held bound in invisible chains, and the story of her terrifying hauntings on three occasions was locked in her psyche, so the only argument that would form sounded ridiculous in context. “You can go to prison for this.”
The witch smiled, blind to Vicki’s mental anguish. “That would be unpleasant.”
† † †
They didn’t speak for the rest of the night. Vicki’s mind ran scared. She didn’t know if her experiences had been a result of Sky’s ritual, touching Ivy’s amulet or a more sinister trigger. Vicki had no context, nothing to grab hold of—no rational explanation. The only thing she knew was that it threatened to destroy her, and she appeared helpless against it. She just prayed it would release her, alive and well, when the case was solved.
Vicki took the offer of the sofa but was too afraid to sleep—not realizing she had until she felt a cool slice
on her forearm. “Hold still,” Sky snapped. Vicki froze.
Sky traced a slender feather along the inside of Vicki’s left forearm. The black ink soaked into Vicki’s skin. “Ivy’s didn’t work because it could be taken off … this is better.”
“Let go of me!”
“In a second.” She dipped her feather into a second vial and brushed water across the long onyx talisman etched into Vicki’s flesh.
“What are you doing?”
“Protecting you.”
“I didn’t give you permission!”
“I shouldn’t need it.”
Vicki was startled by the gentle kiss Sky used to seal the symbol on Vicki’s arm.
“No need to thank me, Vicki. It’s the least I can do.”
† † †
Vicki emerged from Old Church Road into the morning sun—the traumatic crossing no easier than the first—wearing Sky’s jeans, T-shirt and boots—all only one size too big.
She drew out the gifted strands of platinum hair, now black as night. “Impossible.”
“What is?”
She was startled to see Hank leaning against his car across the street, observing her attire.
“Do I wanna know?”
“Someone took my gun.”
“Oh, shit.”
She nodded. What the hell is he doing here?
And he was about to ask where the hell she had been all night when she said, “Do you hear that?”
“Yeah.”
The sound of fire engines always threw Vicki’s gut on tilt.
Hank looked concerned. “Sounds like a lot of them.”
“Look!” She pointed through the trees, toward downtown.
He saw the growing charcoal plume.
She was already running for his car. “It’s the school!”
Fifty-two
They drove up into mayhem, blocked by a wide flow of students crossing the street. Hank pulled off the road and parked on the grass. They cut through the excited swath of gawking teenagers.