My breath deepened and evened out. I let myself sense connections to the energy of the earth below me, and the heavens above me. The beat of the drum reverberated all the way into my bones, and I breathed in mugwort smoke. I was dropping more quickly than usual into that familiar trance state, when it felt like the outlines of my body melted into oneness with everything and that my consciousness floated peacefully there.
I moved my spirit, allowing my vocabulary of body movement to guide me as though my spirit had a form like my body. A shimmering path revealed itself before me and I followed it into the darkness. I had a sense that was like smelling earth and green things and dampness, and then a golden light grew stronger before me. I moved toward it, emerging into a small cavern buttressed by tree roots and full of flowers and thick green ferns growing, all of it illuminated by the honey-gold light that had no obvious source. It was beautiful and comforting.
Around the mouth of the cavern, a mighty tree grew so tall overhead that I couldn’t see its upper branches. The path, now simpler, continued on from it. I kept walking along it. To either side of me, there was brush and tall weeds, wildflowers and occasional trees and boulders.
I knew where I was going. Columbina had helped me go into a trance state to find what she liked to call my “home base”, the place I could start at anytime I was journeying and wasn’t certain where I would end up. It was supposed to be something familiar and safe for me where my spirit could orient itself, where I could call out to helper spirits, where I could center myself and figure out where to go next. She had explained to me that some of its features would present themselves to me, but my own imagination could fill in other details, so it could end up looking like anything I wanted. The appearance wasn’t “real” since it wasn’t a physical location that could be literally seen, but it would be real and meaningful to me nonetheless.
My home base began to take form around me. I had sensed it as a natural, outdoor space, and shaped it to look like one of my favorite places on the island—a wild garden grove outside my Beloved’s house there, lush and green, full of fragrant flowers and cool dappled shade, its centerpiece a small pool of clear blue water fed by a gentle waterfall pouring down over moss-covered rocks. I had spent many happy hours in this space on the island with my Beloved as we learned each other and fell in love. Now, I dabbled my toes in the water and remembered how cool and smooth his wet skin had felt.
I stepped back and mentally shook myself. I couldn’t go down that path right now. I had other things to think about. Opening my hand, I looked down at the seashell figurine—or rather, the spirit version of the one I held in my hand.
At first it just looked like a figurine, and I felt a quick flare of panic. What if this was just some random piece of crap someone had given Lucy that had no connection to her? But then I remembered Columbina’s advice to remember not to focus on its physical form. It would be my instinct to do so, she’d warned, because I had a lifetime more experience experiencing “sight” as a function of my physical eyes. I let my vision drop down to the center of my chest, to my “soul eyes”, and let it get soft and fuzzy. I silently invited the figurine to show itself to me in other ways, to let me see its connection to Lucy.
Columbina was right—it was like sensing it with one of my five physical senses, and not like that at all, and the experience was strange and distressing. I made myself keep trying. I felt a sort of presence there in my hand. It was hard to describe. It wasn’t a weight or a temperature, and yet it did feel a little like something being near enough to touch. It reminded me of the feeling of being in a room and realizing it wasn’t empty, feeling the nearness of someone or something without actually knowing how. This presence didn’t feel familiar, but it felt distinct, and it felt…pensive. Lost in thought. Serious. Not threatening at all, just kind of solid and quiet and deliberate. It felt like Lucy looked in her photos.
I wasn’t entirely sure what to do next. I held it up and turned slowly in place, trying to see if it would guide me like a compass. I felt a little bit of a pull, I thought, but in a very general direction. It wasn’t enough to tell me exactly which way to go.
What if I called out for help? I wanted to be stubborn and self-reliant because who knew if any spirit that responded to me would be trustworthy. On the other hand, I wasn’t really anxious to spend a lot of time wandering the otherworlds on my own, accomplishing nothing, just to prove a point. Columbina had encouraged me not to shy away from seeking helpers, so I decided to give it a whirl. “Is there anyone here who can help me?” I called out into the gentle, fragrant breeze. “I need help finding a trail. Will anyone assist me?”
I repeated my call a couple of times before I heard a cough from somewhere below me. I looked down and around and finally saw him—he looked like a tiny, nearly naked, very old man, but he also had a beautiful pair of white feathered wings. He perched on a rock beside the water, peeling bits off a small green pine cone and eating them. “What is it?” he said. “Trying to eat here.”
“Sorry to disturb you?” I said. “I’m trying to find someone, or to figure out where she’s been. I have something that was hers.”
“Oh yeah?” He perked up a bit. “Could be I could help with that.”
I remembered the questions I’d been given. “I need to ask you three things first. How shall I address you?”
He stroked his chin and looked me over. “I guess you can call me Ever-be. No! Flit. I always wanted to be a Flit. Who are you?”
“Call me Mari. Is your aid freely given?”
“Of course. You don’t scare me enough to boss me, missy.”
“Do you ask anything of me in return for your aid?”
He rolled his eyes, but said, “Fine, no loopholes. You got any worms?”
Shit. “No...?”
“Then naw, no price. Feeling like a helpful citizen today. Next time, though, maybe bring a worm like someone with manners.”
“Okay,” I said. “I would be grateful if you’d help me, Flit.”
He beamed at the sound of his name. “Let’s see this thing.” The figurine was almost a third of his size, so I set it down on the rock beside him. He handed me the remainder of his pine cone. “Hold this. Don’t eat it!”
Oh, for heaven’s sake. “I promise.”
He peered at it closely, turning it around to examine it. Finally he said, “Well, no wonder you’re having trouble. It’s all murky, isn’t it?” He pulled off the cloth he wore tied at his waist, and began to polish it. He didn’t seem to care that he was naked. I looked discreetly away.
After a minute or so he re-tied the cloth and stepped back. “Good as new! Now give me my dinner back.”
I handed over the pine cone and picked up the figurine. The impression from it, that sense of Lucy-ness, was much clearer and stronger and there was no longer any doubt it was hers. “Wow. That’s great work!”
“You were expecting less?” His wings opened and he lifted gracefully up from the rock. “I can feel it from here. You need to start that-a-way.”
“Thanks,” I said as he darted off in another direction. I walked where he’d pointed. It took me into thick, dark woods that were pierced by the light from the occasional old-fashioned-looking gas lamp. Since he’d gotten me started, I could feel what he meant. It was an almost magnetic pull, like the impression on the figurine wanted to join with the impression up ahead.
I entered into a bit of a clearing that was chilly and silent. Among the tall dark trees, there were crumbled pieces of rock and masonry, some kind of ruins. I saw stones that formed the lowest part of two walls where they joined. There was the remains of a chimney. A wide flat stone dais with an arch above it. Half a dozen cracked and tumbled stairs leading to nowhere. I felt the impression near the arch. I looked around, but found nothing else that would lead me to Lucy. But when I moved away, I could feel another pull coming from beyond the clearing. I moved o
n.
The woods slowly yielded to an open road with flat, open land on either side, covered in dry short grass. The sky overhead had an orange hue to it, as though maybe it were dawn or dusk. The pull led me to a billboard on the side of the road. It was a giant photograph, one that I guessed Lucy had taken. It showed a man sitting in the window seat of a house with a dog in his lap, staring out the window.
I continued to be led down the path, to billboard after billboard. A photo of Arun’s house. A beach scene. A car full of laughing people wearing sunglasses and leaning out the windows. An inner city street in the wake of a protest. A ruined building being demolished by a wrecking ball, at the moment of impact. An old bridge silhouetted under the light of a full moon. A board game set up on a table.
For some reason, that last one called to me. It seemed awfully random, not the sort of thing Lucy seemed to normally photograph. I walked closer to it, and noticed that there was a ladder leading up to the narrow platform in front of it. I climbed up.
Once I got close, I could see that the surface of the photo was shimmering, the way things do in the heat. I put my hand out to touch it, and it wobbled. I jerked back, and then slowly reached out again. My hand went into the photo; I could see it in there, see how the lighting on it was different than out here under this overripe orange sky.
I took a tentative step forward, then another. The surface yielded to me and sucked me in. Suddenly I was standing on the table with the game, but its scale was so great that I was the size of a Monopoly piece. I couldn’t simply walk onto the board—it was like an invisible wall kept me out. But when I circled around to the starting square, I could move on to it.
The game was laid out with a long twisting path made of colored squares, with occasional shortcuts or dead ends or obstacles or bonuses. I felt the same pull along the path, but I couldn’t move forward. I noticed a pair of dice, quite large for me but still small for the scale of the game, sitting on a corner of my square. I picked up one and then the other and tossed them up as hard as I could. I was able to move four squares for the pips that came up.
I walked forward, pushing the dice ahead of me, until I got to that square. There was a house on it, and when I looked in the window, I saw Lucy’s room, but brightly lit and with the bed unmade. I rolled again and moved forward a few more squares. This time, a graveyard, cold and misty. I could hear the shutter of a camera clicking but couldn’t see anyone.
Square by square, I moved forward, rolling the dice to open the way. Each place I landed seemed to be somewhere that Lucy could have been before she left. Some of them were as mundane as a grocery store, others weird and spooky locations that I guessed might be part of Thinning the Veil. I lost track of how far I’d gone, and the final time that I rolled the dice, I wasn’t able to move the full number of squares. I had one more to go, but the path on the board simply—stopped.
In front of me was nothingness. Not darkness, not a void, just an emptiness. The impression of Lucy ended abruptly here. What lay before me was like if I’d been walking into the horizon only to discover that the road was forced perspective and had simply vanished into the broad expanse in front of me, and I could go no further.
I tried to figure out what to do. And then the nothingness in front of me stretched and moaned.
It was reaching towards me. Pushing, pressing, distorting the already-disorienting view. I heard whispering sounds, overlapping, like many voices speaking at once, all around me. I stepped back, fell over one of the dice, scrambled to my knees, and looked around.
The board was gone. Everything around me was blurry, indistinct. Foggy? Or hidden by translucent veils? It was hard to understand and that was when I really realized that I wasn’t physically seeing anything, that I was just trying to interpret everything as if I was. Panic seized me. I felt like I couldn’t breathe and then I realized that I wasn’t actually breathing here, either. My body didn’t mean anything here— it was just a way to hold on to my own identity. I felt like I was going to simply dissolve into this blurriness.
I ran. And fell, because I realized I wasn’t “running”, just trying to move my consciousness through this space, if it actually was a space at all. But I wasn’t really falling either, because this place didn’t have solid walls or floors. My mind believed that I had stumbled to my knees, but I wasn’t even sure if there was such a thing as “down” or “forward” here. I tried to push myself to my feet, but there was nothing to push against, nothing to grab hold of, no way to orient myself. I flailed my arms and tried to shout, but there was no sound, because I had realized that I had no breath. I was trapped.
The next few—moments? minutes? hours?—turned into a blur themselves. I was a frightened animal, helplessly struggling.
Somehow I remembered the figurine. It was still in my hand. I held it up and focused on it. It had changed. Instead of the glued-together seashells and googly eyes, it was a tiny Lucy standing on the driftwood base. She was looking frantically around and slapping the air with her hands as if she were hitting a wall. “Hello? Hello? Who’s there?” Her voice was thin, distant, distorted.
“Lucy!” Now that I had some focus back, I could “speak” again. “Where are you? What happened to you?”
“Is someone there?” she called, still looking around. It was so hard to understand what she was saying. “Who are you? If you’re here to help me, then you should know—” Her last word, or words, were either unusual or garbled or both. I had no idea what they were.
“Say that again!” I begged, but the blurriness was closing around her, over my hand. I felt like I was sinking even though it also didn’t feel like I was moving. It made me feel queasy until I remembered that I couldn’t feel sick here, not really. I started to panic again.
“Mari!” The voice was distant, but clear and distinct. “Mari, reach out to me! I’m here! Mari, focus!”
It was so hard. I couldn’t tell where anything was coming from. I didn’t have a hand. I couldn’t breathe.
“Mari, right here. Mari, focus on me. I’m here. I’m here. It’s Cherry. I’m here for you.”
The voice was comforting, soothing. I remembered Cherry’s face, her sly upturned eyes and her big saucy smile that made her cheekbones round and high, her strong solid body, her big warm hugs, her crackling energy. Memory gave me something to hold on to, and the blurred nothing before me cleared like a steamed—up mirror wiped clean. I could see her face. I could see her hand held out to me.
I’m not sure how I grasped it, but somehow I did. I felt her hand close around my wrist as mine closed on hers. “I’ve got you,” she said, and I felt her pulling me. I reached toward her, wanting the comfort and safety of her presence.
I had a sensation like I was shooting through a water slide tunnel at top speed, and then suddenly my whole body jerked. I felt the beanbag chair under me. I smelled mugwort. The drum beats filled my ears.
Joe and Cherry’s living room assembled itself in my vision. I touched my face, my arms. I was real. I was back. I was safe.
Lucy wasn’t. I was sure of it.
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Acknowledgements
This book was born as a writing exercise, something to keep me coming to the page every single day. The story had been brewing for a long time in my head, and it came from my desire to write the kind of fiction I most like to read when I just want to relax--a little popcorn, a little poetry, a whole lot of paranormal. And a series, because then I don’t have to think about what I’m reading next.
From the time I finally came back to this manuscript and made myself pound out the ending, after writing all but the last couple of chapters and then shelving it for years, I have been cheered on, helped, and supported in this marathon by so many generous, smart, insightful people to whom I truly owe the exis
tence of not just this book or series but the fiction career I’m finally starting.
[Ed. note: This is my first published novel, and I’m 47 years old as I write this. Never let anyone tell you it’s too late for you.]
This book is what it is because of my lifelong partner in art and everything, my person, Sean Butler. He read my pages and begged for more; he spent countless hours digging deep into the development of this book and the Mythfit Witch world with me, and his story editing makes it all infinitely better.
I am releasing this book on the 11th anniversary of the mastermind group I co-founded, Flaming Genius (a day that’s also a new moon, for the other witchbabies out there). Working with my Geniuses has, simply, transformed me and led me into my ideal life at long last. Without my co-founder Sabrina Chase, my eternal champion Karen Abbott, and my most dedicated Geniuses Kelly Brooks, Lee Howard, Lily Arrington, and Peggy Smith-Rowland, I would never have become the person who could finish this book. Karen, Kelly, and Lee in particular offered thoughtful feedback on the draft that dramatically shaped the story you hold in your hands.
For the other aspiring “authorpreneurs” out there, do yourselves a favor and seek out Sterling & Stone’s story studio books, podcasts, and email list. Sean Platt, Johnny B. Truant, and the entire studio’s generous work to share their knowledge of prolific fiction writing and the business of getting it into the world as an indie publisher was the hand-holding and push I needed to navigate this wide new world.
Deep gratitude to my friend the brilliant artist Zephyr Schott, who worked with me to create the beautiful cover illustration, and to the fabulous Karen Fletcher for photographing it for me.
My alpha and beta readers helped me discover what to fix and how to fix it, and their boundless enthusiasm kept me believing that this book was worth sharing with the world. Special thanks to Boneza Hanchock, Eric Golovchenko, Hugh Eckert, Erica Smith, Dave Coleman, and Samantha Nesfield for a mix of above-and-beyond wonderful insight and unstinting excitement that made me feel like a real author. Those readers also included Toni Goldberg, Arthur Rowan, Michael Harrington, Isabelle Epoque, Phil Coursey, and Katie Brown, with heartfelt apologies to anyone I may have missed.
MetamorphosUS: Book 1 of the Mythfit Witch Mysteries Page 51