Bewitched

by Mark Jay Harris

  “Did I just get a fax?”

  The nurse got up from her chair and stared wonderingly at a sheet that was on top of a tray full of papers. She picked it up and examined it curiously.

  “It’s a face,” the woman muttered.

  “Yeah. That’s it.”

  Without thinking, the nurse handed the black and white fax image to the girl.

  “Do you recognize her?” Serena asked the nurse.

  The nurse shook her head.

  “Neither do I. Thanks.”

  Serena caught up with the others, who were holding the elevator door open. She handed the fax over to Samantha, who scanned it quickly, arched an eyebrow at her familiar, and handed it back.

  Serena took the fax, waved a hand down the image as the elevator doors shut. She muttered, “Infucatus.” The black and white image colored into a high quality photograph.

  “Better,” Samantha said.

  Mike scanned the image quality quickly and glanced over at Serena. “That picture of me in Art class?”

  Defensively Serena countered, “Witchcraft is an art, too!”

  CHAPTER 13

  Cat and Mouse

  At first it was just the soft touch of cool air on his face. There was also the subtle smell of old iron. And way off in the distance, he thought he heard water dripping from a pipe.

  Darren came around slowly, taking stock of what his senses were telling him. He was lying on a couch; he could feel the back support to his left, and he perceived that to his right, a few inches beyond his shoulder, the cushion ended. Slowly, he opened his hand and lightly brushed his fingertips across the material: some sort of soft leather.

  He lay still and breathed slowly, pretending to still be asleep. A powerful drowsiness hung on him as if the sleeping spell were an anesthetic that had left a residue in the cells of his body. Peering surreptitiously through the haze of his own lashes, he tried to take in his surroundings without revealing he was awake. He was in a medium sized room painted eggshell white with pictures of a ship and an old house on the far wall. He could also make out a couple of chairs, a table, a refrigerator, and a stove. It made him think of someone’s basement family room turned into a one-room apartment.

  It looked safe enough. He blinked and let his eyes flutter open, then stretched and yawned. The exhaustion in his body was fading, but the heavy feeling of an afternoon nap still clung to him. White acoustic tiles looked down on him as he sat up and leaned against the back of the couch. It appeared as if his captors had left him on his own. But, suddenly, he was seized by a strange awareness. He turned quickly to his right to find a winged back chair, and in it a figure watching him intently.

  “Oh!” He gazed into the smiling face of a young man in jeans and a red polo shirt. His sandy colored hair framed his face, and a soul patch of blonde whiskers punctuated his chin. Darren’s brain sluggishly interpreted the message that shot across his synapses like sunlight bursting above the horizon. He was looking at his brother, Ethan!

  “Darren, don’t be shocked. It is me.” The young man rose from his chair and kneeled beside Darren on the couch. “I don’t know what you must be thinking, but, first and foremost, I’m not dead.”

  Darren’s mouth opened, but nothing came out. He struggled to speak, but only grunts and puffs of confused air spluttered free. “How?” burst from the tangle of words fighting to be the first uttered.

  “I’m sorry; it must be a shock,” Ethan said. “And I should explain it to you, but all I can think about is how much taller you’ve gotten over the last eighteen months.” Ethan smiled at his little brother, and the light in his eyes twinkled with the welling of tears.

  Darren smiled back, and started to laugh, then broke into sobs. “I thought you were dead.” He threw his arms around his brother and hugged him; he was real. Ethan squeezed him back, and they both cried and laughed. Pulling back, Darren said, “But we buried you. I saw your coffin. You were dead.”

  “I know.” Ethan wiped tears from his eyes. “How much has Atavus told you?”

  “About witches? A lot.”

  “Good, you know about witches. Apparently they’re everywhere: from Cache Valley to Huanchaco, Peru.” He stood up and started to pace.

  “Jeff, Tabs, two other students who tried to keep up, and I left the approved excavation site in this cave called the Peligrosa Oscuridad, ‘The Dangerous Darkness.’ Atavus had given me this amulet that was supposed to detect objects imbued with magical properties.”

  “The Utor Uti,” Darren said.

  “Yes,” Ethan replied. “Did Atavus tell you about it?”

  “No, that I read about in your journal.”

  “My journal?” Ethan’s look of confusion was quickly replaced with a knowing nod.

  “Yeah, I found a few pages of it in the secret compartment you built into your headboard.” Darren beamed back at his older brother. “I guess it wasn’t that secret a secret compartment after all.”

  “Then, you must understand how the Utor Uti works. The edge was glowing red, and the main indicator pulled us in a direction that was not part of the approved tour. We followed it over a roped off area that led deep into the side of the mountain. This continued for quite a ways until we came to a huge fissure. We shined our flashlights down through a cleft and could see the ground not that far below, so we helped each other drop into it. The amulet began pulling in the direction of this new, smaller tunnel. We were going to explore further, but Tabs told us we were in danger and had to get out fast.”

  “Tabitha is your Oracle, right?”

  Ethan smiled. “Atavus explained all about Oracles and Guardians. Good. Yeah, Tabs is my Oracle. We grappled out of that hole as quickly as we could, even though we must have been close to finding something, and fled back down the dark tunnel. Before we got to the end where it merged with the great tunnel, a rumbling threw us to the ground. It was an earthquake. Dust was flying all around, dropping from the limestone ceiling and puffing up out of the ground like funhouse air holes. We couldn’t see, but we could hear rocks collapsing and breaking against each other ahead of us. We were so scared we didn’t speak. We didn’t move. We just huddled together on the ground, praying we wouldn’t be killed.”

  “That’s amazing,” Darren said. “We were told your body was crushed by the cave-in, you, Jeff, and Tabs, all of you. It was a closed casket. Dad checked the remains when they arrived from Peru. He said you were horribly disfigured, but that it was you. He saw that mole on the back of your right elbow and the scar you got repelling down Sadie’s Bird Cage.”

  “Well, I assure you it wasn’t me.” He held his hands out as if to say, see? “After the cave-in, it was completely dark, the kind of dark that makes it hard to breathe. Electric lanterns ran down the great tunnel, but where we were, there was nothing but our flashlights. We explored the fallen rocks, even tried moving some, but there was no way out. After about an hour, Tabs suddenly screamed, “Jeff!” She’d barely gotten the word out before three warlocks wearing black capes flew into the air pocket where we were trapped. Rocks flew everywhere. Somehow Jeff was able to block them from hitting me and Tabs. He even made it up to the witches and would have taken them out, but they wrapped him in an air cocoon. It was so tight, he suffocated.”

  “What did you do?” Darren asked. “Isn’t there supposed to be a way we can destroy them with fire?”

  “Yes, of course, but I couldn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because Atavus never taught me how. Even now I don’t know how it’s done. I would have been happy to, but I was powerless.” Darren observed for the first time the hollowness in Ethan’s eyes.

  Neither spoke for a few moments. Darren knew if it had been him, and Mike had been killed, he’d never have forgiven himself. His heart sank for his brother.

  “Why did they let you live?” Darren asked at last.

  “I don’t know. They put me into a sleep, like you just came out of. I woke up on the same couch. I’ve been down
here for over a year. They feed me, give me things to read, let me exercise; I even have a television.” He nodded at the table where one sat. “As you’ve noticed, there’re no windows. I’m sure we’re underground. Other than that, I don’t know what’s been going on. They never told me what they did to Tabs. I don’t know if she’s dead or alive.”

  “Ethan, we’ve got to get out of here.” Darren stretched and strode over to the wall behind his brother. “There’s got to be a way out.”

  Ethan frowned and shook his head. “You can look, but I’ve tried. There’s nothing. The wall is sheetrock. I bored a hole through it, ripped out pieces of the wall, and found that the studs are butted right up against cinderblock.” He pointed above his head. “I’ve torn out the ceiling tiles, and found the same thing.”

  “What about the door?” Darren walked over to it.

  “Run your hand down it.”

  Darren ran his palm down the surface of the door.

  “It’s plated with some sort of metal. Steel probably. And before you ask, I’ve tried to remove the hinges, which wasn’t easy without proper tools, but no use. I think they’ve been enchanted somehow. I fashioned a useful tool out of a butter knife once. The knife eventually broke, but the screws in the hinges didn’t even get scratched. Sorry, bro, but we’re locked in.”

  “What do they want with us?” Darren returned to the couch and flopped down.

  “I’m not sure. We’re their mortal enemies. Or, we would be if we knew how to burn them. Did Atavus tell you how to destroy witches?”

  Darren shook his head. “I wish. I was going to ask him outright, but he ended up in the hospital.”

  “Yeah, that was unfortunate,” agreed Ethan.

  “You know Atavus was hospitalized? Did the witches tell you?”

  “Yeah, of course. They were quite happy with themselves.”

  “Oh.” Darren nodded.

  “Darren, you sure he didn’t mention something? Did he tell you anything about how we burn witches?”

  “I haven’t the slightest clue. Atavus never said anything about how we handle fire or use it. I have no idea. He never told you either? I wonder why.”

  An eerie cackle burst out of the corner of the room by the refrigerator. Both boys looked to where the sound came.

  “Did you hear that?” Darren asked.

  “Of course,” Ethan replied.

  What happened next caused the room to feel like it was moving. An old woman dressed in a dirty black frock faded into view by the refrigerator. The cackle continued to escape through her rotten toothless gums. She was stooped over, gray tousled hair dangled out from under a black hat. She had an old mat she was waving at the ground. After a few moments of her wafting air, it became clear she was putting out the flames that were burning beneath a large kettle. She kept cackling, and as she waved the mat, the clear image of a stone room where the old lady stood opened up around her. It spread out and replaced the comfortable living room the boys were standing in, blowing away the refrigerator and stove and leaving cobwebbed rocks and a few rusty pipes in their place. With each wave of the ratty mat, the flames grew smaller, while the stone room swept around the walls and across the floor. It was as if she were blowing dust off the walls to reveal the stones hidden beneath.

  Darren glanced over at Ethan, but he wasn’t the least surprised at what was happening. The swirling motion-of-change gathered around his brother. The blowing off of the room continued right across Ethan, who began to change, and the dust of Darren’s brother speckled away. Standing before him was Mr. Whitmore, his English teacher, wearing a black cassock with the hood over his head, his eyes glowing in the darkness like low overheated charcoal.

  And, suddenly, Darren was no longer looking over at his teacher but up at him. He’d somehow ended up lying down. After closer inspection, he discovered he was chained to a large stone table. At last, the old witch finished putting out the fire under her cauldron, and the real room came sharply into focus.

  He was locked inside a stone dungeon manacled to a stone table.

  “Thank you, Darren,” Mr. Whitmore said with his just recognizable British accent. “We weren’t certain if the old man had told you what you were capable of doing.”

  Darren’s chest grew tight, and he struggled to breathe. His emotions were as raw as his abraded wrists in the iron manacles.

  “You lied to me!” Darren screamed. He yanked at the chains, but only got chafed for his efforts.

  “I lied to you. Oh, my dear boy, I did much worse than lie to you. I pretended to be your dead brother.” He leaned down into Darren’s face. “Ethan is dead, by the way. Remember? You saw him buried.” The English teacher chuckled as he walked in the direction of the old hag.

  Darren turned his head, tears of frustration and sadness streaming from his eyes. He caught a blurry view of the old crone suddenly straighten up and shake off the years of age. Standing over the cauldron was a thirty-five-year-old woman, fairly attractive with auburn hair and glasses that hung from a chain around her neck. He recognized her as the nurse who’d called him from the waiting room. But she looked familiar for another reason as well, as if he should know her from somewhere else, but he couldn’t quite place it.

  The woman moved closer. “Don’t you recognize me? I shouldn’t wonder, you keep missing appointments I set for you. I’m your guidance counselor, Ms. Vanderhoff. But don’t let it bother you, not now. You won’t need any guidance unless you plan on being around. And I wouldn’t count on that if I were you.”

  “What do you want from me?” he asked from between clenched teeth.

  Mr. Whitmore dusted off some rust from a pipe he’d run a finger along. “We don’t want a thing from you. You’re no danger to us, being a Warder without the fire. You can stay there and die for all we care.”

  “Then, why did you bewitch me?”

  The warlock and witch shared a look. Mr. Whitmore continued. “What made you think you were bewitched? We had a spy watching you; that was enough.”

  “Then, what do you want? Why am I here?”

  The guidance counselor answered this time. “You might have avoided all of this, but unfortunately you made friends with someone very important. She seems to be quite taken with you, which means she’ll come to get you. It’s the Key of Endor we need, not you.”

  “You’re bait, my dear boy,” taunted his former teacher.

  The warlock and witch crossed the room and up two steps to a large wooden door. Mr. Whitmore unlocked a gigantic padlock, and the hinges creaked as the door swung inward. “If it’s any comfort, I’m excusing both of you from the oral presentation next week.”

  The witch laughed, bringing to bear the same cackle he’d heard when she was in the form of an old crone. The creepiness of it made Darren’s skin crawl.

  The door clanged shut behind them, and suddenly Darren was alone. Alone with his thoughts and his gut wrenching readjustment to the fact that Ethan had not magically survived, but was really buried in the cemetery, victim to a now even more mysterious death.

  ***

  The five of them sat huddled in Mike’s Jeep in a dark area of the Logan Regional Hospital parking lot. Together they scanned the photo of the ‘nurse’ from the hospital. Mike and Samantha were in the front seats. Crissy sat on Samantha’s lap. Andrea and Serena leaned forward to examine the picture.

  Samantha didn’t recognize the face at all, despite the high quality of the photograph. Mike shook his head stumped. Serena had no idea. Andrea, however, stared steadily at the picture and finally said, “I thought she looked familiar when I saw her at the hospital, but I didn’t make the connection. It’s Ms. Vanderhoff. She’s a guidance counselor at school. Come on Mike, certainly you've met with her.”

  “Uh, I think I was supposed to have met with her. I just forgot to go.”

  “This all makes sense. They must have followed the thaumaturgical vibrations to Sky View just as we did. They knew the cavern was underneath the school. What better way
to gain entrance to it than to pose as teachers?”

  “And counselors,” Mike added.

  “Yes, but how many of the faculty members are witches and warlocks?” Serena asked.

  “You’re telling me there are more witches?” Andrea looked crestfallen. “What is going on? Why are there witches in Cache Valley?”

  “I’m sorry you’ve been dragged into all this, but I promise you we’re the good ones,” Samantha said. “That means, of course, that there are evil ones. We’re all looking for a spell book. If these other witches get it first, they’ll have the first part of a spell that could be used to enslave mankind. And the first part will lead them to the next part. With all of them, Baal will bring mankind down to hell, and demons will take over the earth.”

  “Baal?” Andrea looked pained as she swallowed hard.

  “The devil,” Mike said. “Not me after all, Andrea, but the real guy with the pitchfork and horns on his head.”

  “Actually he looks nothing like that,” Samantha corrected him.

  Andrea sat back in her seat, grabbed her knees, and rocked back and forth. In a low keening voice, she began to moan.

  “It’s all right.” Serena patted her affectionately. “We’re going to get the book first. Don’t worry.” She wrinkled her pert little nose. “Do you have a mouse on you someplace?”

  Andrea looked at her like she was crazy. “I have a pet mouse named Lili. Why?”

  “You smell like a mouse, that’s all. I’m usually a cat, so I’m sensitive to that smell.”

  Andrea stared at her, unable to respond, then curled back up and started to moan even louder.

  “Serena.” Samantha looked back over her seat. “Have you witnessed any signs of witchcraft in any of your classes? Anything to indicate who else might be a witch or warlock?”

  “Julander. Tell me Julander’s one of them,” Mike said. “That guy is pure evil; if he isn’t a warlock, he should be. How can you tell if someone’s a witch or a warlock?”