by Michael Rowe
“What about the cloud in the air?” Mikey’s voice was plaintive, wanting to be reassured. “What about the face?”
“Smoke from the fire? How about that?”
Mikey paused to consider that possibility. It made rational sense.
“You said it was a big fire, right?” Wroxy added, encouraged by his silence as he pondered. At this point she was most disturbed by the dread she had seen in Mikey’s face. She had seen Mikey upset before, especially after any bruising encounter with Dewey Verbinski, or some other casual cruelty by one of his schoolmates, but she had never seen him as pale as he was right now. Wroxy liked to play the tough downtown chick trapped in the sticks, but underneath the black clothing and the Goth makeup there was immense tenderness. “They probably put some green branches in there by mistake and made a lot of smoke. That would look weird at night, especially when you were already freaked out by what you were seeing. And,” she added, warming to the soothing effect it was having on Mikey, “maybe there were some chemicals in the fire. You know, like something to make the flames go in different colours.”
“The flames were normal,” Mikey said, calming down. “It was everything else that wasn’t normal.”
“Babe, you had a bad scare. But look outside.” She pointed to the window of her basement room from which ground-level sunlight leaked like weak tea through the smudged glass. “It’s daylight now. There’s nothing bad out there.”
Mikey shivered. “I don’t know that for sure. Wroxy?”
“Yes, Michael?” She suppressed a smile. He hated the name, and no one ever called him that, except his parents when they were angry. “What is it, dear?”
“Do you think they’ll come after me?” His voice was very small. He sounded like a little boy. It broke Wroxy’s heart to hear him sound like that. “Do you think I should tell my parents?”
“That’s two questions, dude,” she said definitively. “And there are two answers, one apiece. No, I don’t think they’ll come after you. I don’t think they saw you. It sounded like they were so into having sex with one another that they probably missed you completely. If you weren’t a virgin, you’d understand what that’s like and why they wouldn’t just stop to peek at you. Besides, you were out of the light, you said. They couldn’t have seen you.”
She took a deep breath, knowing that the next set of truths was going to be more painful for him to hear because they would last long past the time when the confusion over his witch-hunting escapades faded away. “As for telling your parents, let’s lay this out. Larry and Donna, who don’t have the most imagination anyway, already think they’re raising an axe murderer because of all the weird books you read and the horror stuff you—I mean we—are into. If you tell them that you were out on the night of the full moon riding your bike around Auburn looking for witches, much less that you found them killing animals out past Glen Eden, and then—oh wait!—some demon or something reached out of a cloud and pulled a goat’s dead body into the air and—what? Ate it? Come on, Mikey,” she said, more sharply than she intended. “What do you think? Do you think you should tell your parents, or do you think it’s one of those moments you should keep between us? You tell me.”
“You’re right,” he said thickly. “They’d never believe me. They’d just be angry.”
Wroxy was silent. She reached for his hand and held it. His skin was warmer than it had been when he had pedalled over to her house an hour before.
As hurt as Mikey was by the realization that his parents’ comfort and support in this instance, as in so many others, wasn’t something he could count on, it did feel reassuringly normal. A world away from witches and slaughter and demons.
“Hey,” Wroxy said slyly. “I have an idea.”
“What?” Mikey eyed her suspiciously. Something in her tone suggested that the idea she was about to propose would appeal to her far more than to him.
“Look, you know what they say about trauma,” she began. “It might help you if we went to the spot where you say you saw the witches, or whatever the hell those freaks were. We could, you know, look around. You could check out the spot, and you could see there’s no way that any of them could have seen you.” She paused. “What do you think?”
“I think you’re whacked,” he said. “I think you’re asking me to go back and relive one of the most horrible nights of my life so that you can add something unforgettable to your Box of Shadows or whatever the hell you call that witch diary of yours.”
“It’s called a Book of Shadows,” she said serenely. “And no, I was offering out of the goodness of my heart. Look, we’d be together. We could take our bikes out to the escarpment, and we could look for the place. I’d be there for you. Also, I could probably cast a protection spell so that if there was any lingering bad energy from their circle, it would be neutralized.”
“Wroxy, they killed an animal there. I’m more worried about the idea that they’d still be there, or nearby. I’m worried that they might get a second chance to get a good look at me so they’d have a better idea of where to find me if they decided to do . . . something.”
“Feed you to the cloud demon, you mean?” she said, poker-faced. “Or—wait for it!—pull you into the sex circle so you lose your virginity under the next full moon. Like some sort of virgin sacrifice, except instead of sacrificing the virgin, they sacrifice his virginity. You did say that there were a couple of gay guys doing it, didn’t you? Did you, you know, see anything?”
She began to giggle. In spite of himself, Mikey felt the corners of his mouth twitching involuntarily as he tried not to join her laughter.
Wroxy is like that, Mikey thought. It’s impossible to not laugh when she laughs. In that moment he realized that in his way, unconventional though it seemed to him at that moment in time, he loved her.
“Very funny, Wrox,” he said, trying to keep a straight face, but failing. “I’m serious. I don’t want to go back. And I don’t want you to go, either.”
“All right, I promise,” she said. “But sometime, when you’re feeling more like it, I want to talk about what you saw. I want to talk about who those people were, and what they were doing. You realize that you’ve seen something that people in this town talk about all the time, but you actually saw it. They’re real. It’s not just a story.”
Suddenly Mikey wanted coffee very badly. “Wroxy, let’s go to the Milton Mall and see if they’re still serving breakfast at the Golden Griddle, okay? I’m hungry.” He smiled wanly. Wroxy saw that he was still very pale, and there were dark brown circles under his eyes. “I didn’t sleep very much last night,” he said, reading her gaze.
“Let me get some money from my mom,” Wroxy said. She was determined to get control of this runaway train and bring things back to normal. She peered into her mirror. “I think it’s a little early for full-on whore makeup, don’t you? Oh, fuck it,” she said, reaching for her makeup bag. “Those hicks already think I’m a slut, I might as well dazzle them with it.”
“Wrox?”
“Mikey?”
“I imagined most of it, didn’t I?”
He thought of the goat, its throat slashed and gaping, being pulled up into the fog by that arm attached to nothing he could see, nothing his mind could conceive an alternate scenario to. Mikey looked at her for a moment, the horror of what he’d seen skipping across the black surface of his memory like an obsidian stone into his subconscious. He felt cold again, suddenly, although it was August and the basement wasn’t as cool as it could have been. He wanted to be in the sunlight.
“Yeah, you did, Mikey,” Wroxy said as she adjusted her lipstick in the mirror with her little finger. “And the rest of it can’t hurt you. Remember that.”
Later, in Milton, as he walked along Main Street, turning right onto Ontario Street and the Milton Mall, he realized that he was instinctively looking into the faces of every man and woman he passed with an intensity that was previously unknown to him. The sunlight w
as very bright, and his sleepless eyes burned, making him squint. Even if the witches hadn’t seen him, as Wroxy assured him they hadn’t, he had seen them. But he hadn’t, really. They were hooded. In short, they could be anyone. One more layer of invisibility had been ripped away from Mikey like an outer layer of protective, living skin.
[13]
Wroxy stood in the early evening sunlight, still bright, but cooler in the shadow of the escarpment cliffs. The light had turned copper as summer reluctantly conceded its supremacy to the oncoming autumn. There was a chill in the air even in town, but up here, nearly ten miles outside of Auburn, the cold had sharper teeth. She heard the wind high up in the trees behind her, but other than that she was conscious of the vast, imperial silence of the meadow beside which she stood. Wroxy crossed her arms inside her warm fleece sweatshirt and shivered a little. She leaned her bike against the boulder that Mikey had described with his usual exquisite—very gay, she thought, smiling—detail.
She walked off the road and stepped down onto the path that led into the clearing. Directly ahead of her lay a circle of charred firewood and ash about twenty-four feet in circumference. Forty feet from the outer edge of the circle of ash there were tire tracks in the soft dirt of the meadow that led up to the embankment and vanished when they met the dirt road. Wroxy walked closer to the charred circle, because she had always been a curious girl and not afraid of very much. Suddenly her right foot slipped. She inhaled sharply. The ground all around her was dry—it had been for most of this long, rainless summer. There was no mud anywhere.
She looked down. Wroxy was standing in a patch of wet, dark earth. It was indeed mud, but it looked a richer brown than the soil around it. The dirt was reddish in colour, like molasses or wet rust. She gasped and drew her foot back as though she had stepped on a live wire.
The sun was sinking behind the cliffs. The shadows were growing longer, and it was already darker now than when she first reached the spot she’d promised Mikey she would never visit, directions to which she’d been able to wheedle out of him in his sleep-deprived state as she’d fed him coffee over breakfast at the mall. Wroxy reached inside her sweatshirt and withdrew her pentacle. She held it in front of her and closed her eyes, imagining an outward-spiralling ring of white light that surrounded her and the immediate area around her.
“Mother Goddess, come to me,” she whispered, squeezing her eyes tightly. “I charge that this circle of light shield me from all forces that come to do me ill. I entreat that this be done correctly and for the good of all. So mote it be.”
She squinted into the last vestiges of the setting sun in the west and turned her back on it, facing east, toward the tree line of the shadow-dappled forest. She reached into her pocket and felt around for the crystal jasper she always carried with her. Her crystal was an all-purpose amulet, one of several she kept in her room at home and never left the house without. She’d ordered the North American jasper stone from a gem wholesaler she’d found online. Jasper, according to Wroxy’s books on witchcraft, protected the bearer against entities from any realm. She closed her fingers around its reassuring, cool smoothness, finding comfort in its familiarity as the wind stirred the tops of the darkening branches.
She closed her eyes and spoke softly but clearly.
“Beings of the Earth, Guardians of the North, I ask that you stand firm and protect me in this space.” She paused, then spoke again. “Beings of Air, Guardians of the East, I ask that you stand firm and protect me in this space.” She turned to the left. “Beings of Fire, Guardians of the South, I ask that you stand firm and protect me in this space.”
Wroxy turned fully around, eyes still closed, and faced in the direction where she knew the sun was finishing its descent behind the horizon. “Beings of Water, Guardians of the West, I ask that you stand firm and protect me in this space.”
When she opened her eyes, it was near dark and she was alone. All around her, the night was coming alive. The dark mud at her feet looked black in the fading sunlight. Wroxy remembered what she’d told Mikey about counterbalance in the universe. She wondered what would happen if the balance shifted.
This is a bad place, Wroxy thought. She looked away from the circle of ash and reminded herself that she didn’t believe in devils or demons. She walked to the centre of the circle she had drawn in her mind and spoke again. This time her voice was little more than a whisper.
“Ancient One,” she intoned softly. “The One that binds all the elements into one, I ask that you stand firm and protect me in this space.”
A small bit of white caught Wroxy’s eye, and she leaned down to pick it up. It was a thin, ragged strip of raw flesh from which protruded a tuft of coarse white hair. At the root it was clotted with dried blood. A few feasting ants dropped from the piece of meat, while others angrily scurried up Wroxy’s fingers. With a cry she dropped the disgusting thing, frantically rubbing her hand against her jeans. Wildly she looked up into the empty, dark blue air above the scorched hearth as a line from one of her favourite stories, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tale of dark witchcraft, “Young Goodman Brown,” came to her, unbidden: Unfathomable to mere mortals is the lore of fiends.
The last of the dying sunlight glanced off the tops of the cliffs, then vanished from sight. Wroxy inclined her head toward the boulder where her bike was. Had it been that far away? She turned and walked briskly up the path that led to the road. Something—a shadow? A flurry of motion?—caught her attention just outside her peripheral line of sight. She spun around, staring into the gloom, but whatever she had seen was no longer there. She hurried up toward her bike. Wroxy was sure of one thing, at least. She would never tell Mikey that she’d been to this place, never mind what she suspected about it. Never, ever. It would be the death of him. Better that he try to forget what he’d seen. Better still that he never found out what she’d seen.
She reached inside her pocket to locate the stones among the jumble of keys and coins. She pulled a handful of debris out of her pocket. The jasper gleamed dully in what remained of the light. Wroxy closed her eyes and sighed with relief as she held it.
The stone jumped in her hand. The tingling warmed the tender flesh of her palm and radiated up her arm; at the same time, she felt the vibration in every part of her body.
Wroxy’s eyes flew open. She drew a sharp breath, dropping the jasper on the ground as though it had burned her. A trail of eldritch green fire sparkled after the stone as it fell. For a few seconds, the jasper glowed on the ground like a trapped firefly. Then the unearthly light faded and died against the black earth of the forest floor.
In that moment, she believed what Mikey had told her—she believed everything.
Behind her in the night an owl barked and Wroxy screamed to wake the dead.
SEPTEMBER
[14]
Right away, Dewey Verbinski and Jim Fields noticed that the faggot and his Satanist girlfriend were back in their sight lines. Mikey’s survival instincts kicked in, and he rapidly computed that Dewey had put on nearly fifteen pounds of new muscle over the summer. Jim Fields (for whom Mikey still harboured a dreamy obsession that Wroxy, likely correctly and with stunningly precocious insight, dubbed “classically masochistic”) seemed to have put on ten pounds of the same. On Dewey, with his thick neck and cold blue eyes, the new bulk just looked terrifying and ogreish. To Mikey’s eye however, Jim looked more impossibly Apollonian than ever before as he strutted through the hallways of Auburn High in wonderfully faded Levis, books casually balanced on one lean hip.
I would die for love. Yes, I would die for it.
“Look at those arms,” Mikey whispered under his breath to Wroxy as they passed Jim in the hallway and were safely out of earshot. Today, Jim was wearing a pair of loose khaki pants held up with a worn leather belt and a tight white t-shirt that set off the burnished walnut of his late-summer tan. Mikey had found out that Jim had worked on a construction site all summer in the sun. He’d promptly made a note to add th
e image of Jim, working shirtless, slick with sweat and wearing a gleaming yellow construction helmet to his playlist of bedtime fantasies. “Look at how buff he is!”
“Jesus, Mikey,” Wroxy said with disgust. “He looks like he should have ‘Mattel’ stamped on his ass. The guy is a dickhead of the first order. When did you get to be such a fag?”
“Since you forced me to come out to you, you bitch,” he said in a low voice. He poked her with his index finger. “Remember? Besides,” he added smugly, “I’m not saying that he’s a nice person, just that he’s incredibly hot.”
“So be gay then. Don’t be such a pathetically shallow fag. Do you remember who you’re asking me to admire? This is the guy who calls me a ‘devil-worshipping whore’ and calls you a ‘fudge packer.’ This is the guy who smashed your CD player the day we met, remember?”
“In other words, we met because of Jim,” Mikey said dreamily. “See? Something good came out of it.”
“If you don’t cut this crap out right now,” Wroxy snapped, “you can fend for yourself this year without me watching your back. I’m sure as hell not going to sit around and listen to you carry on like a battered wife making excuses for the guy who beats the shit out of her every night.”
“You take everything so seriously,” Mikey said lightly. He held to his own idealized, romantic version of his feelings for Jim and he resented Wroxy’s implication that there was something disturbing about his crush.
“Whatever.” By now Wroxy was used to all of Mikey’s moods, even the irritating ones that drove her mad with frustration. She looked at her watch.
“I have to run,” she said. “I have some sort of meeting with the guidance counsellor that my mom set up. Apparently she’s worried about the ‘direction of my life’ next year or something. I’ve got to go blow some sunshine up her ass for an hour or so. What do you have next?”