Ula

by J. R. Erickson

  He didn’t know what he wanted to accomplish. He knew why Abby had left and he didn’t blame her, the newspaper clippings had stunned him as completely as they’d shocked her. He had been carrying around the book, The Astral Coven, for two years and yet he’d never seen the clippings. He’d leafed through it a few times and read some of the spells. It had been difficult enough trying to get through Claire’s journals; the book had fallen by the wayside. Could he have prevented Devin’s death? He didn’t know. Claire had stressed reading the “signs”, paying attention to every detail. “There are no coincidences,” she once said, but that had been her world, not his, or so he thought.

  Now he had to remember, he had to seek that power within.

  “It is your spirit dwelling, a cave or lagoon or house,” Claire had said. “It is different for each of us. There is you, Sebastian, the human, the man produced by your biology and your environment, and then there is your spirit. Not wholly separate, but separated by your decision to ignore the spirit voice and make decisions based on this material world.” Claire had been rhapsodizing all that evening about the importance of finding his source of power. Sebastian, drunk on wine and candlelight, had drifted in and out of her lecture, listening, but also daydreaming.

  “To go to the place where your spirit dwells, you must detach from this world, blank your mind and concentrate completely on that place. Focus on the image that comes to you. Is it a cave? If it is, then hold only that image in your mind’s eye. See it from your forehead, from here.” She had leaned toward him, the long, thin chain around her neck dangling on the cushions beneath them, and brushed her fingers across his forehead, in the space just above and between his eyes. “This is your third eye. From here you can venture into yourself. It is the voice of your spirit that must guide you. Your mind will fixate on fear, it will rationalize, and it will guide you toward destruction. Ignore the mind and listen to the soul.”

  He slowly released the memory of that night, one of the last he spent with her, and pushed all of his energy into his third eye, imagining, not a cave, but a glacial crevice, a deep tear in an icy mountain, a place that he had gone before. He closed his eyes, tuned out the material world and sank deeper into that split in the mountain, seeing and feeling, not cold, but great warmth, as he grew closer to his spirit and further from his physical being.

  Then he drifted, cut off from his worldly perceptions. When the wind rose and branches scraped the hood of his car, he heard nothing. His eyelids fluttered, his face impassive except for their twitching.

  Sebastian sat on a wide, flat rock, his hands clasped in his lap as he watched a shape move down the icy crevice above him. Claire did not land, she’d not been flying, she simply moved from above to beside him, her own being perched on the rock.

  “I need help,” he told her, flooded by grief and love at the sight of her. He did not know if she was real, but he thought not. Instead, he believed that she took on the form of a spiritual guide for him because she had become that in his physical life. On the rock, he commanded himself to concentrate, it was easy to lose the vision, too much thought would return him to reality.

  “Not my help,” Claire said, laying back on the rock, her long, white robes too thin for the cold, which did not seem to bother her. “Her help.”

  “Abby? I need Abby’s help?”

  “Do you?”

  “Don’t play with me, Claire.”

  “Then don’t play with yourself.” She giggled and blew puffs of icy air out from her lips. They crystallized and formed little shapes, like clouds.

  “Where is she? Do you know?”

  “She is finding herself and then she will find you.”

  “Find me where? Should I go back to the house? She thinks I’m a murderer.”

  “Not a murderer,” Claire said, sitting back up and brushing her dark hair over her shoulder. She braided her fingers through it, turning her wide blue eyes up at the sky. “She thinks you’re deceiving her, and you are.”

  “What choice do I have?”

  “You have a choice, and you made a choice. Sometimes, we have to take them back and start again.”

  “How?”

  She didn’t answer, and Sebastian felt a bead of sweat roll from his hairline, down his forehead. He reached up to catch it as it slid from his nose, and in that instant, the crevice dissolved, and he found himself back in the car.

  “Thank you,” he said aloud, to no one.

  * * * *

  Driving without direction reminded Abby, rather dismally, of her escape from Lansing only days earlier. How had it all gotten so screwed up?

  She left downtown Trager, wanting to put distance between the detective and herself. Her head felt funny, like the Praying Mantis had picked through her brain with a rusted nail, and she had a rotten taste in her mouth, which she unsuccessfully tried to slosh out with a swig from a warm bottle of water that she dug out of the backseat.

  Her head hurt, it ached from her brow bone to the base of her skull, and made concentration on the road impossible. She flicked open her glove box and leaned into it, fishing with her hands for a bottle of anything stronger than a cough drop. She pulled two bottles out, an off-brand allergy medicine and chewable vitamins - no painkillers. Her head started to throb. She could feel a pulse beat along her temples and tried to massage them with her thumb and forefinger, which made it hurt worse, like she was pressing bruised skin.

  She had to go home. It was only three hours to her parents’ house. She would park on the street and close her heart to the stale smell of potpourri and the stiff mattress of her childhood bedroom. She would lock the door, tell her mother she was ill and sleep for days. Yes, no, no, she could not go home.

  Tiny, white lights began to prick her eyes, like needles, and she blinked, allowing the tears to roll out, praying that they might lubricate the dry sockets. She groaned, it scared her and reminded her of her cat, her abandoned cat, Baboon, who sometimes cried like that at night when he was locked out of the bedroom. It was a painful, guttural sonnet, a poem of desertion, and she felt it rip across her skull in violent, skipping beats. Wildly, she thought that God or the Devil or some divine, supernatural being was punishing her for her cruelty, for leaving Nick and her mother and Baboon.

  A horn blared behind her, and her heart thudded in her ears so loudly that she could not think to react. Was she driving too fast? Too slow? She looked at the speedometer - a blurred wall of green and black neon stared back at her. She tried her blinker, but windshield wiper fluid sprayed across the windshield, blocking the street, and she panicked, jerking the wheel to the right. She was on the shoulder of the road, sort of, and cars whizzed by, a line that had been waiting impatiently behind her. Up-north, driving settled around eighty-five mph, not the standard forty-five in the city, and she felt the blast of each car, the trucks especially, as they rocketed by.

  She needed air. Her car felt like a sauna, a hot, dry grave, but she couldn’t get out on the driver’s side as a semi barreled by and shook her car angrily in its wake. She crawled over the seat, the armrest digging into her ribs, her feet kicking at the door behind her to propel her on. She pushed the passenger door open and fell out, headfirst, her hands striking the pebbly ground. She gulped for air, felt it fight into her constricted lungs.

  Out of the car, she cried, hands and knees holding her up and the sun gone behind the trees, leaving her in a cold shadow between two ridges of forest. She did not know where she had stopped, but the road stretched out before her and woods lay on either side.

  Driving was out of the question. She tried to stand, to balance against the car for support, but her knees failed her. They pooled like jelly and refused to hold. On hands and knees, she crawled away from the road. Her vision tunneled and then became a single tiny spot through which she made out high weeds and fat cattails. She pushed through them headlong, felt their scratchy flowers on her face and hair. Further in, an eternity of struggling, the forest floor became mossy and soft. She col
lapsed, her fingers sore, and rested on a bed of red pine needles. Curling into a fetal position, she closed her eyes and rocked against the pain. Her head felt swollen and soft like an overripe melon. She slept.

  Chapter 12

  Sebastian ripped through the boxes, no longer handling the journals delicately. He wanted answers now, today, not in six months, not in another year. Two years of his life he’d devoted to finding Tobias, to tracking Claire’s murderer, to learning about the Vepars, and yet he felt as lost as that first day. That first day after she was dead and the apartment stood empty, with hot blasts of air through the open windows, and him, Sebastian, alone forever.

  His hands shook as he gripped each page and stared at it, his eyes willing some new clue to rise from the faded lead writing. Writing, ha! More like chicken scratch. Damn her, damn Claire for her terrible handwriting that left him deciphering each word like hieroglyphs on a cave wall. He flung a notebook against the wall; it hit and smacked the floor, pages splayed, but intact. He wanted to burn it all - to build a fire in Sydney’s pit outside and torch the remnants of Claire and her murderers. Maybe then he could sleep again, maybe he could get on with his life.

  He took a swig from an open bottle of wine beside him, gulping the bitter red liquid and caring not that some splattered on the Book of Shadows. He didn’t give a damn if it was old, let it smolder with the rest of the junk, with his sanity.

  He flipped the pages, glanced over spells that he didn’t understand and suddenly didn’t care to. He’d read the newspaper clippings, read about Aubrey and the fire that had consumed her. It enraged him all the more. Death seemed to be the only constant on his crusade for revenge. He stood and walked again to the window, scanning the driveway for Abby. She still had not returned. Was she dead? Murdered like Claire and Devin? Maybe she had returned to her boyfriend and her family. He hoped for that choice, he prayed that she was making amends with her boyfriend, even if he was an asshole, because it meant that she was alive and safe and he didn’t have to face another body, another departed soul.

  He had boxes of paperwork, journals and books. He had read more witchcraft books than he could count, but still felt no closer to Tobias, to the Vepar who had stolen his sister’s life. He picked up a photo of Claire and sighed; her bright blue eyes peeked from beneath a straw sombrero. It had been her sixteenth birthday, and they had gone to a Mexican Restaurant. She had laughed when they placed the colorful hat on her head and sang Las Mananitas. Then she and Sebastian devoured their fried ice cream and went home to watch movies and pretend that their life was normal.

  He set the picture aside and picked up a binder stuffed with newspaper clippings. Many were articles from the days after Claire’s death as the local cops fumbled with the case and eventually arrested and convicted some poor chap who had nothing to do with it. But what could Sebastian say? My sister was a witch and she was murdered by a group of evil demons called Vepars? Oh, and by the way, the Vepars don’t look evil, they look totally normal, but if you stab them, their blood is black? Ha!

  He drank more wine and examined each clipping. He had looked at them all, but not closely enough, never closely enough. He found more photos with the detective, Detective Alva, they called him in Trager, but Sebastian found no mention of him in any of the articles, despite his image appearing in more than one picture.

  As he looked at the last clipping, he saw the detective again, tucked into the scenery like a potted plant. He leaned in and studied the man, his long body and short, stunted arms. He had to speak to him. He knew it was risky, that the detective might be a Vepar, although how could that be? Why would he risk getting so close to the dead?

  * * * *

  Abby touched her head, smoothed two fingers along her brow-line, but felt no pain. She stared around her at the craggy rock walls, some slick with algae. She was dreaming. But how could she know that? Except – yes – she stood again in the dark cave, and like her previous experience, she did not feel real. No – touching her head was no more than vapor pressed against vapor. No physical body greeted her fingers.

  She moved forward, unafraid. She wanted to return to the fire, to the yawning cavern of cloaked figures and the warmth that pulsated around them like a shield. She would be safe there. She took the familiar route, followed the path to the right, and slipped silently along as the passage narrowed and then opened wide. But the fire was gone, and the figures were gone. In the center of the room stood a small, round pool of water - shallow - a puddle really. Had she taken the wrong tunnel? Was she lost? She moved forward, drifting not of her own volition, and she stopped at the water’s edge, staring down at the shining surface. It reflected a high, white moon lost in a black universe.

  She slipped her fingers into the water and watched as it crawled over her hands and wrists, like a cloth slowly saturated. The water, icy, climbed along her forearm and up her bicep. She shrank from it as it edged up her neck, but it continued, enveloping her head. As it rose over her eyes, she closed them tight, and it covered her entirely.

  For several minutes Abby swayed in a state of suspension. The water buried her and then she was moving, flowing with the water, as the water. It raced along the cave floor, snaked along walls and around bends. She could see the fine grains of sand on the floor; feel the smoothed edges of pebbles beneath her. She picked up speed and then exploded into the sky, water spewed fourth in a gush that flowed out of the mountain and rained into the sea. She was every part of the waterfall, the mist, the spray, the thick stream of water like a snake. And then she was whole again, but moving beneath the water like a creature, an animal that must have gills - for how else could she breathe? But then she was not breathing, only moving, slowly now, sifting along the seabed like a current.

  As she moved, she gained momentum and felt control return to her. She could direct herself, and she darted up from the floor and then back down again. She reached out with invisible hands and slid her palms along the oily seaweed. Her eyes devoured the sights, the tiny gray zebra mussels and thick-bodied, brown fish. In her mind she laughed, almost expecting a surge of water to flush into her lungs, but none came.

  As a child, she'd dreamed of living in the water. For hours she would swim along the lake's edge, goggles and snorkel securely attached, watching the tiny specks of sparkling sand like sea creatures crawling across the lake bed. She would pretend that she'd been shipwrecked on an island, and after years of isolation had grown able to breathe beneath the water, a mermaid with legs. She'd slide her fingers along the shining stones; pretend the large rocks were oceanic monsters stalking her in the summer sun. She got so frightened of her make-believe monsters that she would move close to the shore and swim with her body nearly scraping along the beach bed before returning to the depths. In her case, the greens, because even Sydney would not allow her to swim by herself in the dark, blue waters where the lake bed steeply dropped off.

  She propelled her new liquid body forward, gaining speed as she shot across the dark lake. Algae fingers and darting fish parted an open path before her. She could feel the grin on her nonexistent face. She came to the shadow of a small metal fishing boat and drifted directly beneath it, able to see the tiny blotches of rust decorating its belly. She could hear the laughter of two lovers as they whispered in their metal retreat. They had slipped away, seizing the solitude of the shadowy bay, completely unaware of her silent intrusion on their romantic escapade. She moved away, her mind abuzz with a dream so real that she dared not consider it.

  Abby turned over in the lake and stared up through the water at the navy sky. Thousands of gaseous balls, only specks to her earthbound eyes, blinked back at her. The moon - no longer full, but still plump and radiant - cast a single streak across the dark water. Below her, a fish floated lazily in a mass of seaweed, his white underbelly drifting above glossy tentacles. She expected him to dart away, but he remained unmoved, and she slid closer, slipping her fingers over his greenish bronze scales and feeling the prickle of his barbed skin. H
is yellow eye stared past her, searching for more menacing or appetizing lake life.

  As she glided further into the lake, swirling water caught her attention. She dived towards it, watching as the small tornado gained in size, grasping sand and seaweed and spinning them in a white cone of bubbles. The tornado began to burrow, sand lifted from the sea floor, blinding Abby, and she started to swim away, afraid of being sucked into the vortex. But then the sand started to clear, and she saw the tornado disappear into a crevice that started as a black split and grew wider until she looked down into a long, dark hole that ran jaggedly along the sandy bottom. The hole emitted a blue light that became an image, like a movie, and she watched, awestruck.

  She could see Detective Alva, his bony fingers tapping thoughtfully on the hood of a waxy black car, recently washed and shining like a beetle’s shell in the sun. His eyes scanned the empty dirt road before him, but no cars drove along the dusty street. On either side of the road, woods bore down. It was a three seasons road, clearly not often used, and snakes of green vine crawled across it, smothering the ditches on either side.

  The detective cocked his head and smiled.

  “Is that you, Tobias? Stealthier every day, my son.”

  Behind the car, a tall man, black clothes sheathing his bone-white skin, stepped from the trees. His eyes looked bloody, red pupils with black irises, and he grinned at Alva, who had turned to greet him.

  “My child, you need to eat.”

  Tobias nodded and ran a slender hand through his black hair, slick and brushed back from his forehead.

  “I should have kept Devin for myself,” Tobias said, striding to the car. The men did not touch, but stared hard at each other for several minutes, a long time to Abby, who watched from another world, from a dream, she thought.

  Tobias scared her. Something sinister leaked from him, but also something familiar. She had sensed him before, in the woods when Devin died, in the grocery store–the man hidden behind the freezer. She was looking at her ghost, at the thing that had been stalking her. She recoiled when his dark tongue darted from his lips and almost lost the image. For a moment, the sea flickered before her, but she concentrated on the men, and the vision returned.