Bewitched

by Mark Jay Harris

  “Does it truly contain all the missing spells since the Great Deluge?”

  “Oh, yes, it’s quite complete. It would be most dangerous in the wrong hands and probably most dangerous in the right hands as well. The most frightful thing about the Grimoire is that it contains one fifth of the Licentia Infectus, the Freedom of the Soul Spell. The complete spell has never been recorded anywhere and has never been possessed by anyone ever. Even before the Deluge, no warlock ever knew the entire spell. Baal has sought it through demons and warlocks. He would have had it too, stripped mankind of its agency and marched every soul down to hell, but the Lord flooded the earth and destroyed any chance of it happening. Only one warlock survived...but that’s another story.”

  He leaned back in his chair. “It occurs to me that history is another thing that goes missing. It’s been my experience that when it comes to history, most men are either too apathetic to learn from it, or their sources are too corrupt for them to learn from it. Either way...” He shrugged and looked heavenward.

  “We don’t have time for me to give you the entire history of where our kind came from. Suffice it to say that the one called Cain, who slew his brother, made certain deals with Baal that begat the first warlock. From there is an interesting history of who the Nephilim really are and how our kind survived the Great Deluge. But, if you travel to the far end of the cavern, you should find a library. I’ve left the history there for you.”

  “I’ve already been there,” Samantha said. “But, I don’t know any of the ancient tongues.”

  “Well of course not,” the old man smiled. “They were written in antediluvian languages. But, if you use a summoning spell and request the calculate perceptium, a flat glass eye-piece about the size of an orange should leave its hiding place and come to you. You can use that like the ancients used the Urim to translate languages.”

  He sipped his tea until it was gone. He looked at her as if to offer her more. She declined with a small shake of her head.

  “There is a one-use spell I have prepared for you. It will only work for you one time. Use it when you have no other choice. Utter the words, ‘Necare obinixe’. Remember it, and use it only when you are in the greatest peril.”

  “Is it a death curse?”

  The old man simply looked down at the ground. At length he asked, “I feel our interview must soon come to a close.”

  “So soon? I have so many questions,” she exclaimed.

  “I am sorry child, but I feel time pulling at you. Let me see what I can offer before you go.” He stood and looked upward, raising his hands. Closing his eyes, he began to speak, and Samantha could tell he had invoked some sort of ancient magic:

  “Beware the dangers that await you on the other side.

  The look of fear a dangerous heart doth hide.

  Burning anguish lies beyond and one will die.

  Keep the Warder close for there your futures lies.”

  He shook his head, and his eyes focused back on her. The large ornate book shook in his hands as he handed it to her. “Be wise with this,” he cautioned. “The return of this book to the world of men is the beginning of the end.” He walked her toward the wall she’d passed through minutes ago. “I don’t know what was said during the prophecy spell, but heed any warnings you were given.”

  Samantha could feel herself being tugged back into the room beyond the wall.

  Moloch’s eyes suddenly opened wide as he seemed to remember something. “Beware of the...” His voice disappeared as she was sucked back into the stone chamber where the warlocks and witch stood warily on their guard.

  The first thing she noticed were the purple gasping faces of her friends struggling to breathe.

  “Hand it over!” demanded Bhantu, reaching for the book.

  Samantha hesitated and drew the Grimoire back.

  “Do you want them to die?” he snarled.

  She looked at her desperate friends, their eyes streaming and their tongues protruding from their mouths.

  Think, she told herself. Think! But in the face of their suffering, she was powerless. The warlock was going to win. If he didn’t have that charm, she’d destroy him with the death spell, but it would only result in her killing herself. As it was, there was nothing she could do but reluctantly hand the book over to the leader of the Northern Coven.

  The well-dressed man’s hands actually trembled as he received the ancient tome.

  ***

  Darren woke up feeling confused. How had he ended up on the ground?

  He shook his head against the dizziness buzzing about inside it. Something inside was pressing him, telling him time was important, that he needed to be up and moving; if he failed to get somewhere, there would be horrible consequences.

  Using the wall for support, he struggled to his feet. A wave of dizziness hit him again, and he was afraid he might collapse. After a moment, however, his head cleared. Using his power apparently came with a price. Stumbling forward he made his way through the gigantic hole he’d burned through the door. He looked down the corridor, to the left and then to the right. Which way should he go?

  He quickly decided to head left simply because he thought the hall extended farther in that direction. Much weaker than he would have supposed, he hugged the wall as he shuffled along. As he approached each doorway, he glanced quickly through the barred windows. Many of the rooms were empty, and when he ran across these, he simply pushed himself on to the next. Others contained various strange objects, but no sign of witches or his friends.

  After what he felt was an extremely long time searching rooms, a sour smell of decay and rot assaulted his nose. It was not simply decomposition he smelled, but the bitter tang of bile and partially digested meat. He looked down the corridor and saw it changed color. The gray stone of the cavern abruptly turned to an unsightly yellow-green.

  He skipped a few doors and tottered forward toward the grotesque scene before him. The slime coated the walls and covered the floor. And the smell forced him to breathe through his mouth to avoid gagging. Each difficult step he took required that he place his foot into the muck and then pull it out of a temporary vacuum of sludge that popped as each foot broke free. He leaned against the wall for support, concentrating against gagging, and forced one foot in front of the other. He continued to glance through the doors, and finding nothing, he lurched onward.

  Pausing to catch his breath, he inhaled deeply, telling himself he would not slide to the floor and take a nap. This yellow, mustard goop was repulsive. He looked forward, a bit dazed, when he realized he was staring at something in the middle of the hallway. It was something he recognized, though not in its current incarnation. It was a jacket, but one that was translucent like Samantha had been during the basketball game.

  He knew that jacket; it was Mike’s. His best friend must have lost it in this disgusting nightmare in an attempt to rescue Darren. It was see-through because Samantha had put them all under a blind-man’s spell. But, if they were trying to rescue him, where were they? What if Mike hadn’t taken the jacket off willingly, but it had been torn from him?

  Suddenly, something occurred to him. Julander, the sadistic, corpulent warlock, had been wearing goggles. And those goggles somehow allowed him to see through the blind-man spell. If he hadn’t been so frightened at the time, he might have put this together sooner.

  The squishing sound he made as he walked over to Mike’s jacket was revolting. Fortunately, the jacket was in one piece, no apparent damage, rips or tears. If he put on the jacket, would his upper torso disappear? The thing was so coated in the foul slime of the hallway Darren decided against it.

  Something else took his mind off of it in any case. Inside an interior pocket of Mike’s jacket were some folded pages. Unlike the jacket, they were not translucent. He pulled them out and recognized them immediately. They were the pages of Ethan’s diary Darren had put under his mattress on the day of the funeral. He’d only read the first page that day, thinking he’d read th
e rest later. But he’d totally forgotten about them.

  Apparently Atavus had been correct about them being “spell-proof,” because when Mike had been put under the blind-man spell, the journal pages remained visible. But how had they ended up in Mike’s pocket?

  Perhaps Ethan had left him a message in there, some information about how to use the Warder Fire. But that no longer seemed to be important; he knew how to use it now, how to summon it and send it out. Nevertheless, he scanned the pages quickly, trying to catch a word or two that might indicate something that would be helpful. The last page stuck to another page, like they had gotten wet and dried together. Darren could feel something between them. He might ruin the pages if he tore or yanked at them, so he gently pulled at the edges until he had separated two small flaps. Using these, he tore them apart slowly, assuring the integrity of each page stayed intact. The last page slowly became visible, but there wasn’t much written on it. There were some doodles, some boxes and lines, and the shape of a heart.

  A heart?

  Darren continued to pull until he’d completely freed the two pages. There, in the center of the last page near the bottom, was a color picture that had been glued in place. It was of Ethan back when he was in college. He was on a basketball court, wearing gym clothes, a little sweaty but smiling, holding a ball in his left hand. People were moving about in the background as if the game had ended and they were heading home. To the right of the picture was a cute brunette Ethan had his right arm around. Darren knew she must be Rachel, the girl Ethan had referred to on an earlier page of his journal.

  But what almost caused Darren to blackout was that the cute brunette his brother had his arm around was someone he knew; someone he knew very well. He was staring down at a picture of Andrea! Same size, same hairstyle, same smile, and those same amazing eyes. It was Andrea. There was no doubt about it.

  What was she doing in a picture with Ethan, and why was she using the name Rachel? Of course, Darren knew the answers to his own questions. It was painfully obvious and hit him almost as hard as finding out he hadn’t discovered his brother alive a few hours ago. The gravelly voice of Julander echoed in his mind: “How were we to know that Endor had called up a demon who told her she would be destroyed by the Key? Or that she would use the same spell powder and throw the thirteen-year-old child into the Catadromus for a second time? That she would then give birth to another child, one as evil as herself?”

  It was another trick, another cruel and vicious stunt. Ethan was not back from the grave and Andrea, the girl he’d been dating for nearly eighteen months, was a witch. And not just another witch, but Samantha’s sister.

  ***

  Once Bhantu had the book in his hands, he signaled for the others to release their captives. The students slumped against the wall, free of their cocoons, sucking at the air like they had just had their heads underwater. Samantha ran over to them, anxiously checking on their conditions.

  Bhantu took the ancient book to a wooden table in the corner, his coven members following him, no longer concerned about their captives. He sat down and gently ran his hand across the cover in which the Signum Infectus (three overlaid 6’s with a cross and dot in the center) was engraved in each corner. It was dyed dark maroon with panels in relief depicting different scenes: one of a man with a sword, fighting a dragon; another of a vampire with a stake through its heart; down one side, a storm broke limbs from trees. On the other side was an image of an ancient sorcerer, probably Moloch, wearing his dark robe, his hands out before him casting a spell. To the side was a three-tiered image of a man changing, drawing by drawing, from a man into a lizard. Interspersed among the images were ghastly drawings of ghosts or souls in eternal agony. Along the bottom, the creepiest of the drawings were sketched, the patterns of death, the secret forms used by witches throughout the ages to call forth demons and control them while upon the earth.

  “It’s magnificent,” Bhantu said reverently. He opened the book slowly, his cohorts leaning over him. He turned each leaf carefully, fascinated by each ornate, illustrated page.

  To the side, out of mind for the moment, Serena sent a thought to Samantha. “Where did you go? You disappeared once you went through the first ring.”

  “Long story,” she replied. “I met Moloch who gave me the Grimoire and a death spell.”

  “Use it!” Serena implored.

  “Remember the reflective charm? I’d just end up killing myself.”

  “Right. What do we do?”

  “Hey,” Mike gasped. “You okay?”

  “I’m fine,” Samantha said. “Can everybody move?”

  They nodded at her.

  “Andrea, I know you didn’t sign up for this, but you’ve been extremely brave throughout all of this. I promised you this wasn’t over yet. And it’s not.”

  Andrea nodded but didn’t appear particularly relieved.

  “Yes,” Bhantu was saying, and the group responded approvingly, “Quantric Transference.”

  Ms. Vanderhoff looked over at the conspiring students and tapped Julander on the shoulder. He looked back at them and grinned malevolently. He spoke to Bhantu. “Find a spell that’s particularly painful. We need to deal with our friends against the wall.”

  Bantu chuckled. “Yes, I almost forgot they were there.” He flipped through the pages. “Here we go, Belly Fire. That sounds promising. Belly Fire sound painful enough for you?” He hit Julander on the shoulder.

  Julander merely glanced back at the students and smirked. A bloated jackal gawking at raw meat would have been less menacing.

  Bhantu stood suddenly, knocking his chair over. He pointed at the students and roared, “Aqualiculus incendia!”

  Instantly their stomach muscles clenched in spasms of pain. The feeling of liquid nitrogen flashed through their abdomens, igniting into a heat so intense they were convinced their organs and blood had burst into flame. Coughing and vomiting, they could only scream and claw for air in consequence of the spell. They writhed uncontrollably on the ground, crying out in their minds for it to stop. They would’ve taken death as an acceptable means of escape.

  Bhantu lifted his arm to cast a silence spell on the howling human-coals, but Julander pushed his arm down.

  “Give it just a few more seconds.” He licked his thick lips, and his expression resembled that of a Tibetan monk who has reached a high level of peace and contentment.

  ***

  Darren made it around a turn at the end of the cavern. In the perpendicular hallway, he saw the white marble stairs that led up and probably out of this underground maze. The walls were no longer caked with mustard colored slime and the fetid smell of rancid beef. It was a relief to breathe air bathed by a cool inviting breeze wafting down from above.

  He was tempted to go up and out but knew it would be wrong, not to mention cowardly. He had to keep going. He headed down another corridor. It led back the other way in a parallel direction to the original tunnel. Apprehension gnawed inside him, and he knew if he didn’t hurry, he’d be too late. He jogged forward with his right hand, brushing against the stone wall.

  In one of the rooms up ahead, Darren could hear voices—at last. But it was at this same moment that little black speckles began closing in from the outside of his field of vision. His legs were weak, and he realized he was about to pass out. He closed his eyes, fought it back, and pushed on toward the doorway. He could hear Julander asking someone to give it a few more seconds and in the distance, like a radio turned to low volume, the shrieks and howls of people in pain.

  Blinking back the weakness invading his body, he staggered to the open doorway. Grabbing the sides for support, he looked in. Straight ahead were two colorful glowing rings that led to the far side of the room where a book sat on a short pillar. To his left he saw the transparent forms of his friends on the ground, writhing about in agony, their mouths open, howling in excruciating pain.

  To his right, five adults gathered around a table. Four he recognized, Coach Hawthorne,
whom he was saddened to discover was a warlock, along with Mr. Whitmore, Ms Vanderhoff, and Julander. They were gathered round a man in a suit, whom Darren didn’t recognize but knew must be their leader. On the ground, a variety of animals moved about nervously, getting under foot. He recognized these as their familiars in their animal forms.

  The warlocks looked up at him in shock, obviously not having expected to see him ever again on his feet. As he brought his arm up, their shock turned to terror. He summoned as much strength as he could and aimed at the man in the suit. The light that shot forth wasn’t as bright or as powerful as the fire he’d produced earlier in his cell, but it caught the well-dressed man in the throat. Flames shot up from where the light landed, and soon the man’s head was engulfed in flames.

  The others fled the burning man who grabbed the book from the table and staggered forward several steps before falling to the ground, giving way to the conflagration that now raged up and down his entire body. The book tumbled beyond him and landed open at Darren’s feet.

  Darren’s vision tunneled in on him, but he spotted Julander and shot a meager ray at him. His beam of light flashed high and to the left, grazing the fat man’s ear, which started to smoke, and scorching a black scar into the stones of the ceiling.

  Blinking furiously, Darren witnessed Julander mutter something and step forward, but instead of moving across the room, his foot, followed by the rest of his body, stepped out of existence. One moment he was there, the next he was gone.

  What had happened?

  Falling to his knees, Darren saw Coach Hawthorne, Ms. Vanderhoff, and Mr. Whitmore duplicate the move, each one stepping into nothingness and winking out of existence.

  For the second time this night, Darren lay on a stone floor, looking across a room. His friends lay sprawled on the ground, still looking like spirits. His last thought was that there must have been two Grimoires, the one at the far end of the room and the one that sat open just inches away from his head. That was convenient; they wouldn’t have to make copies.