Circle of Three #6: Ring of Light

by Isobel Bird

  “Go!” he bellowed. “And don’t come back here again.”

  She opened her mouth to speak, thought better of it, and ran out of the room, leaving the angry old man staring down at the pieces of broken glass. She didn’t know what to do. Should she call a janitor or someone to help him clean up the glass? Should she just leave him alone? She wasn’t sure. He’d been so angry at her that part of her didn’t want to help him at all. But he looked so sad, she thought as she hurriedly pushed the laundry cart down the hall away from his room.

  She turned the corner and almost ran right over Mrs. Abercrombie, who was walking in the other direction, a clipboard in her hand.

  “Whoa there,” the nurse said. “Are you in that big of a hurry to get to the next job?”

  “I’m sorry,” Annie said. “I just had sort of a run-in with one of the patients. I mean, guests,” she added, remembering that she’d been instructed never to refer to the residents of Shady Hills in any way that made it sound like they were in a hospital.

  “Run-in?” Mrs. Abercrombie said. “What happened?”

  Annie explained what had occurred in the room down the hall. When she was finished, she was surprised to hear Mrs. Abercrombie laugh. “That was old Ben Rowe,” she said. “Don’t mind him. He’s the terror of Shady Hills.”

  “I thought you’d be angry,” Annie said. “He sure was.”

  “Well, you shouldn’t have touched anything that belongs to a guest,” said the nurse. “But you didn’t mean any harm. I’ll send someone to help Ben clean up the glass.”

  “I should probably go apologize,” Annie commented.

  Mrs. Abercrombie shook her head. “It won’t do any good,” she said. “Ben hates everyone. We all gave up a long time ago trying to make friends with him. Now we just stay out of his way. Just forget about him. Come on, I’ll introduce you to the joys of feeding Jell-O to people with no teeth.”

  Annie walked away with Mrs. Abercrombie, relieved to be getting as far away as she could from old Ben. That must have been him in the photo, she thought as they walked. Him and his brother. He’d been so handsome in the picture. She wondered what had happened to make him so miserable and unpleasant. It was hard to imagine the old man who had shaken his cane at her and told her to get out of his room ever being a young, smiling man.

  I hope I’m not like that when I’m old, she thought suddenly. Then again, I hope I’m never in a place like Shady Hills. But that was something she didn’t want to think about. Right now there was Jell-O to deal with.

  But you’ll have to change Ben’s sheets again at some point, she reminded herself with a shudder. She just hoped he wasn’t in the room when that time came.

  CHAPTER 3

  “As you can see from the height of the doorways in this room, people were much shorter in the eighteen hundreds,” said Cooper, indicating the door leading from the living room to the little room that used to be Frederick Welton’s study.

  This was her favorite joke, and she always paused after saying it to see if her audience really believed her or not. To her great delight, this group seemed to be buying it hook, line, and sinker. A few of them were even nodding their heads in agreement, as if she had just confirmed something they’d been telling their friends for years. She suppressed a smile as she turned and led them into the kitchen, saying, “And in here you’ll see one of the first coffeemakers in the Pacific Northwest.”

  It was her second tour of the day. The first had consisted primarily of history buffs who had come to see the former home of Beecher Falls’s founding father. That had been a dry affair, as she hadn’t been able to fool them with her usual made-up spiel. She’d just pointed out the various features of the house and then stood back while they snapped pictures. But this second group didn’t have the slightest idea what they were looking at. They were there simply because the house was included in a list of things people had to see when they came through town. She’d told them all sorts of ridiculous things, and they’d eaten them up. Luckily, none of it was too off the mark, and she always remembered to throw in the real information so they weren’t being cheated out of anything.

  At least this beats working at Burger King for six bucks an hour, she told herself as she herded the tourists into the front hallway and up the stairs to the second floor. Sometimes she hated the fact that her family lived in a historic home and was obligated to show people around it, but since she was getting paid for basically giving tours of her bedroom, she didn’t complain too much.

  “Where does the ghost appear?” a man asked as they ascended the stairs.

  “Excuse me?” Cooper said, pretending not to understand.

  “The ghost,” the man repeated. “Of Frederick Welton. I read somewhere that his ghost still haunts this place.”

  Cooper laughed. “If he does, I’ve never seen him,” she said.

  This was the first outright lie she’d told all day. The truth was that the ghost of Frederick Welton did indeed wander the rooms of his old house, and she had seen it. She’d been very little, and she didn’t really remember it, but for a while she’d told her mother that a strange man came to visit her every night in her room—the room where Welton had hanged himself after losing his land in a poker game.

  But Cooper didn’t want to think about ghosts. In fact, she was doing everything she could not to think about them. That was all in her past. She didn’t see ghosts anymore, and she certainly didn’t talk to them. She was through with all of that, through with Wicca and the activities that had led her to see ghosts in the first place.

  “But I’m sure I read about a ghost appearing here,” the man said stubbornly.

  “If you’ll look at this painting, you’ll see a wonderful example of American folk art,” Cooper said quickly, pointing at a picture hanging on the wall of the landing. Even though the picture was one she herself had done in third grade, she hoped it would distract the man and he would stop talking about the ghost. But he was determined.

  “In there,” he said, pointing to her room. “That’s where he did it, isn’t it? That’s where he killed himself.”

  Now all of the other members of the group were ignoring the painting and looking with great interest at the door to Cooper’s room, which was shut.

  “I’m afraid that’s part of the private quarters,” Cooper said. “We can’t go in there.”

  There were sighs of disappointment from a few people. Cooper knew the man who seemed obsessed with Welton’s ghost was going to say something else, so she added quickly, “If you’ll follow me to the end of the hall, you can see the room where the infamous poker game took place.”

  This seemed to distract them, and she ushered the group along the corridor before anyone could say another word about the ghost. There’s always one in every bunch, she thought. Why couldn’t they just forget about the whole haunted house thing?

  But the man wasn’t through yet. As he walked past Cooper he looked at her curiously. He paused, continued walking, and then stopped and turned around.

  “I knew I recognized you,” he said. “You’re Cooper Rivers, right?”

  Cooper didn’t know what to say. She sensed something unpleasant was about to happen, but she couldn’t very well deny being who she was. After all, her family’s name was on the mailbox on the front porch.

  “That’s right,” she said. “Now, if you’ll all follow—”

  “You’re the one who talked to the dead girl,” the man continued. “What was her name? Elizabeth something.”

  Now everyone in the group was staring openly at Cooper. They’d forgotten all about the poker game and Frederick Welton. Cooper glared at the man who had started all the trouble, wishing she could push him down the stairs.

  Elizabeth Sanger, she thought to herself. You mean Elizabeth Sanger. But she didn’t say anything out loud. If the man wanted to talk about what had happened, he would have to do it on his own. Cooper wasn’t about to give him any help.

  “Sanger,” he said, as if rea
ding her mind. “It was Elizabeth Sanger. She was murdered, and you said her ghost talked to you. I read it in the paper.”

  “They exaggerated a little,” Cooper said curtly. “Now, if we can continue with the tour—”

  “Did you really talk to her ghost?” the man asked, interrupting again.

  “It wasn’t exactly like that,” Cooper said. “But that doesn’t have anything to do with Welton House, so let’s stick with the tour.”

  “I can’t believe you don’t want to talk about it,” the man continued stubbornly. “If I saw a ghost, let alone talked to one, I’d be telling everyone about it.”

  “Then let’s hope you never see one,” Cooper said, her temper getting the better of her.

  She charged past the man and continued down the hallway, hoping the group would follow her. The man was really pushing her buttons. Why couldn’t people let her forget about what had happened with the ghost of Elizabeth Sanger? It seemed the harder she tried to get away from those events the more they loomed over her. Mom was right, she thought angrily. Getting involved with witchcraft just causes problems.

  But then you would never have met Kate and Annie, she reminded herself. That was certainly true. But more and more she was having a hard time figuring out how to fit her friends into her life now that she’d given up her Wiccan studies. She was the one who had decided to stop studying the Craft. She was the one who’d had the horrible experience at the Midsummer Eve ritual in the woods back in June. She had made her choice, and she didn’t expect them to do it, too, or even to agree with it. She knew that following the Wiccan path had to be a personal decision that each person made independently. But she hadn’t even called them since they’d gotten back. She didn’t know what to say to them, and although she kept thinking she would find a way to explain to them how she felt, more and more time went by without their speaking. Now she was afraid that time might have run out.When she stopped at the room at the end of the hall and turned around, she was thankful to see that the group had indeed followed her. They were looking at her oddly, and she knew they were dying to ask her more about seeing ghosts. But she didn’t give them the chance.

  “This is where Frederick Welton and Seymour Beecher played the card game that lost Welton the land that became Beecher Falls,” she said, beginning the rehearsed speech she’d given a hundred times before. She continued talking, not deviating from the official script, and when she was done she smiled brightly. “And that concludes our tour. Thank you for coming. If you go back the way you came you can exit through the front door.”

  She walked quickly past the group, pointedly avoiding looking at the man who had asked so many questions, and went down the stairs. Opening the front door, she nodded politely to the guests as they left the house. When the last one was gone, she went back inside, climbed the stairs to her room, and threw herself down on the bed with a sigh. Looking up, she stared at the beam over her bed. It was from that very beam that Frederick Welton had hanged himself nearly a hundred and fifty years before. She’d slept underneath it since she was a little girl, and she’d always been fascinated by the story of Welton’s death. But now she wanted to forget all about him and his ghost. About all ghosts.

  She sat up and looked at the table where, until she’d dismantled it, her altar had been. Now the things that had once covered the altar were in a box in her closet—the picture of Elizabeth Sanger, the statue of the goddess Pele that Kate had given her, and the scrying bowl that had been a gift from Annie. She hadn’t thrown anything away. The presents from her friends meant a lot to her, even if she wasn’t going to use them, and she still liked to remember Elizabeth and how she’d helped solve the mystery of Elizabeth’s death. She just didn’t want to talk about it. And she definitely didn’t want to do it ever again.

  It was difficult for her to realize that less than two weeks before she had been excited about going up into the woods with her friends to celebrate the sabbat of Litha. That seemed like such a long time ago. But that one night in the forest had changed everything. She’d been chased around by a bunch of insane kids calling themselves faeries, made to act the part of a hunted animal in some bizarre ritual they’d concocted to tease her. It had been a horrible experience, one made even worse by the fact that Annie and Kate had both had incredibly life-changing nights and that when Cooper had told the organizers of the event about what had happened to her they’d told her that none of them knew any kids like the ones she described meeting. Even though she gave them all the names she could remember, and described in detail what the so-called faeries had looked like and what had happened, they kept telling her that they didn’t know anyone who fit her descriptions.

  Frustrated, she’d decided to give up on Wicca. If getting involved with rituals and the people who participated in them could land her in that kind of trouble, she didn’t want any further part of it. She’d been really upset by what had happened to her, and it bothered her that no one could give her an explanation for the events or help her find the people who had done those things to her.

  What she hadn’t told anyone—not even Kate and Annie—was that she wasn’t entirely sure what had really happened that night. It had all seemed so real at the time, and she could still recall the faces of Bird, Spider, and the other kids she’d been chased by. She remembered sitting in the Cave of Visions and being surrounded by weird purple smoke, and she recalled jumping from a high place into a pool of cold water. She even remembered snatches of the beautiful music Bird had been playing on her flute, the music that had lured Cooper into the woods in the first place.

  But somewhere, somehow, things had changed. She’d lost control of what was happening to her, and that was the part that really frightened her. At some point she had been swept up in whatever magic was running wild in the woods that night. She had felt hunted by the very thing she’d been seeking out through her own magical work. The kids pretending to be faeries had laughed at her, chased her, and made her feel like a fool. In the end she’d escaped them, but in the process everything she’d ever thought she knew about Wicca and magic had been turned upside down. That’s why she needed to get away from it.

  Her parents, if they noticed that she’d taken down her altar, hadn’t said anything. And she certainly wasn’t going to bring it up, especially after all of the trouble her involvement in Wicca had caused in the first place. It had taken enormous amounts of effort to convince her mother that going to the weekly study class was a good idea, particularly after her brush with Elizabeth Sanger’s ghost had resulted first in her name’s appearing in the local paper and then in Annie’s being kidnapped by the girl’s murderer. Mrs. Rivers had her own doubts about witchcraft stemming from a long-ago argument with her mother over teaching Cooper spells when she was a child, and seeing her daughter involved in the same thing had been a lot for her to deal with. Cooper didn’t want to admit that perhaps her mother had been right about the dangers of practicing magic, even if she herself had similar doubts.

  Instead, she had poured herself into her music. Now that she was spending less time reading about the Craft and experimenting with the different aspects of it, she had more time for her songs. She’d been writing a lot, and had come up with a bunch of new lyrics and music that she was anxious to experiment with. There were a couple of open-mike events coming up at local coffeehouses, and she was thinking about maybe trying out some of her stuff there in the next couple of months.

  She picked up her guitar and started fooling around with a melody line she’d come up with the night before. It felt good to just play, to let herself get lost in the music. The notes seemed to fall into place easily, and soon she had turned the short phrase into a longer one. She played it again and again, trying it out and changing a note here and there until she had something she really liked. She played it again.

  Something about that sounds really familiar, she thought suddenly. But what was it? She played the music again, listening carefully. Was it something she’d heard on the radio?
She didn’t think so, as she usually always remembered other people’s songs. But there was definitely something about the music that she had heard before.

  Then it hit her—she was playing part of the faerie music. It was a snippet of the song that Spider and the others had played as part of her “test” to see if she was good enough to join them. She had re-created it almost exactly as she’d heard it. Although she’d done her best to push that night from her mind, here it was coming back to her, and through the one thing she thought was hers and hers alone—her music.

  Angrily, she put down the guitar and stared at her hands. Why couldn’t she get away from the memories of that night? Why did she have to keep thinking about it? The song had seemed so beautiful to her before she remembered its true source. It hadn’t come from her own imagination; it had come from Spider’s, and from the instruments of the awful kids who had put her through such a terrifying ordeal.

  Great, she thought, now you’re in my music, too.

  She sighed. This wasn’t like her. Normally nothing could get to her. She’d always prided herself on being tough, invincible. She liked it that the other kids at school were sort of afraid of her. She’d even liked it in the beginning when Kate had been afraid of her, and the reason she’d taken to Annie so quickly was because she’d been strong enough to stand up to her. Very few people could do that. Just as very few people could make her doubt herself. But that’s what Spider and the others had done. Even Bird, who had helped her out in the end, had left her with more questions than answers. Nothing about that night made sense, and now she was being reminded of it all over again.

  Just then the phone rang, interrupting her thoughts. She was glad to have a distraction, though, and she picked it up with a relieved “Hello?”