October

by Michael Rowe

  Mikey stepped into the shower and stood under the spray. The hot water hurt too badly, so he adjusted the temperature to a tepid cascade. He massaged shampoo into his scalp, barely noticing that the water ran brown with filth and then faintly pink with dried blood. He turned his face up to the spray and opened his mouth to rise the bitter aftertaste of urine from his tongue.

  Mikey dried himself carefully, dressed in a long-sleeve sweatshirt and sweatpants, then took three painkillers from his mother’s medicine cabinet and washed them down with tap water. He lay down on his bed and closed his eyes, not to sleep but to try to calm the bedlam of thoughts in his head. Over and over Mikey replayed the assault in his mind, remembering every detail of Shawn Curtis’s bellicose red face, his fists flying, finding purchase. In slow motion, he replayed Dewey Verbinski’s vulpine pleasure as he punched Mikey’s arms and shoulders hard. For once, Mikey noted, the supercilious half-smile was gone, the mask of control ripped away to reveal the emerging young monster within, whose capacity to inflict pain and suffering would someday be limitless. And he thought of Jim, beautiful Jim, taking his turn pissing on the jockstrap that Shawn Curtis shoved into his mouth while he gagged. He opened his eyes and looked up to where Jim’s photograph was tacked up on the wall above his computer.

  Wroxy was right. He hates me. He always did. All I ever wanted was to love him.

  A rage unlike any he had ever felt suddenly engulfed Mikey. He sat bolt upright and swung his legs over the side of the bed. He crossed the floor to his desk and savagely ripped the photograph of Jim off the wall and tore it to pieces. He had a sudden, vivid impression of the goat whose throat he had seen slashed, but in his mind it was Jim’s throat, not the animal’s, from which the blood ran. He imagined Jim’s naked, prone body, head nearly severed, being lifted up and pulled into the air.

  And then he froze as the memory crashed into him full force.

  “I did see it,” Mikey said aloud. “It did happen. I didn’t imagine it.”

  Wroxy had told him he had imagined everything, and he had believed her because he wanted to believe it. He wanted to feel safe, like he was living in a sane world. But he wasn’t living in a sane world, and he wasn’t safe. He would never be safe, not in a world where people like Shawn Curtis, Dewey Verbinski, and Jim Fields called the shots.

  Well, change it then. Change your world. Change theirs.

  Mikey turned his head sharply toward the door. The voice had been low and warm, and curiously familiar, each word solid and perfectly formed. But it was as if the words had been punched out of the air.

  “Who’s there?” he called out.

  There was no one standing behind him. He stepped out of his bedroom and peered into the dark hallway. It was empty. He touched the side of his head, feeling a moment of vertigo, wondering if he had sustained a concussion and was now hearing voices.

  Mikey sat down heavily on his bed and stared at the wall of books on witchcraft and demonology. He had read them all, had memorized entire sections. He thought of Wroxy’s well-meaning charms and amulets, her incense and her meditation. A fat lot of good any of it had done for her—or even him, for that matter. She hadn’t even believed him when he’d told her what he’d seen in the forest that night, which meant she had betrayed him. She was a fake, in her way, just like those other people.

  But he had seen power that night, and whether or not anyone else in the world believed him, he knew that it was there to be used.

  “Yes,” he said. “I’ll change their world all right.”

  Mikey typed “Witch+Milton+Ontario” into the window of his browser and pressed “Enter.” The search engine produced 6,420 results, including announcements about a forthcoming Halloween pageant and the private sale of a used Ditch Witch 350 SX tractor plow. By the time he opened the twelfth page of listings, Mikey realized that there was going to be nothing useful on the Internet about the witches of the Niagara Escarpment, and even if there was, it couldn’t rival what he already knew. He wondered idly if Wroxy had been lying to him, three years ago, when she’d said that there were stories “all over the Internet” about the coven.

  Mikey deleted that page of listings and opened up a new window. He paused, then typed “revenge spell” into the browser window. This time, the search engine returned 1,420,000 results. Mikey groaned. He clicked on the first link and began to scroll through them. By one o’clock in the morning he had opened nearly three hundred links. Most were for generic broken-heart spells and seemed as though they had been written by teenage Goths in the throes of heartbreak. Even one titled “Ritual to Cause Pain to the One Who Made You Suffer” was primarily a visualization spell that involved staring at the photograph of an antagonist and sending him or her “bad energy.”

  An hour before dawn he clicked the arrow at the bottom of the screen one last time. The computer shuddered, then the screen refreshed itself. Mikey looked down at the screen as a flash of colour caught his attention. All of the websites listed on the screen appeared as blue hyperlinks, yet at the top of the screen he saw a line of red type. Instead of words, the title heading of the link was composed of runic symbols that reminded Mikey less of the ones he had seen in Wroxy’s books on witchcraft and more like Cyrillic letters or samples of ancient Aramaic text he’d seen in history books and on television.

  He stared at the link. There was no website address listed for the site.

  This is impossible, Mikey thought. If a website is listed with a search engine, it has to have a web address. Mikey frowned, then clicked the “Refresh” icon on the toolbar.

  The screen dissolved, then reassembled itself. The line of brilliant red type still glowed at the top of the listed web sites. He glanced up at the “search” box at the top of the screen. The words he had typed—“revenge spell”—were still in the box. There was still no website address. Puzzled, Mikey clicked the link. At the bottom of the screen appeared the familiar words “Website Found. Waiting for Reply.” Then “Loading. Please Wait.” Mikey waited.

  The screen opened onto a red background against which appeared an inverted gold pentagram in a circle. Beneath the pentagram were the words The Doorway. Enter Here.

  Mikey clicked the pentagram. The red background was replaced by a new screen. At its centre was an out-of-focus photograph, a landscape of hills and sky that looked vaguely familiar. Mikey suddenly felt very cold. He was looking at what appeared to be an antique photograph of the escarpment behind Milton and Auburn. More specifically, he recognized the slope of the hills and the basin of the meadow where he had seen the sacrifice. The photograph was framed in pulsing bars of light that marked it as yet another hyperlink. As though in a dream, Mikey dragged his mouse across the photograph and clicked it.

  The lights in his room flickered, then went out.

  The blue glow from the computer screen spilled out across the surface of Mikey’s desk, illuminating his hands on the keyboard, but never touching the sudden yawning darkness at his back. He read the words that appeared on the screen.

  Embrace Hate.

  Mikey began to read the dense blocks of text, clicking the arrow button every time he reached the end of a page. He perused the diagrams; he read the earnest personal accounts of murder and sacrifice, of encounters with malefic demons that walked between worlds delivering unspeakable pain and suffering on behalf of those who had summoned them. As he read on, the revulsion he felt at the profane words and images was replaced by some cold knowing sense of their utter rightness. By dawn, he knew he had found what he was looking for.

  When he reached the words of the revenge spell itself, Mikey did as he was told. He plucked a pen from the coffee mug on his desk and copied the words down in his own hand.

  [23]

  The next morning Mikey told his mother he thought he was coming down with something and ought to stay in bed. He sniffled conspicuously and pressed his tongue to the roof of his mouth when he spoke in order to sound like he had a sore throat. He’d fal
len asleep at dawn and had the dark circles under his eyes that made a convincing case for the onset of illness.

  Since Mikey was rarely sick, and even more rarely faked being sick to stay home (he always wanted to see Wroxy at school, and sometimes even entertained the conceit that he looked out for her), Donna believed him. Mikey was careful to wear his sweats so as not to alert her to the bruises, not that Donna noticed much of anything at seven a.m. when she was getting ready for work. She rubbed her eyes irritably, her hands fumbling around the kitchen counter as she looked for her coffee cup. His father had left the house half an hour earlier.

  “Were you out riding around in the cold again, Mikey?” Donna demanded. “When are you going to get some sense? You know how the weather is this time of year. Warm all day, then . . . pow!”

  “A lot of kids are coming down with something, Mom,” he said. “It tends to only last a couple of days, but it wipes them out. I really feel like crap. If it’s okay with you, I’m just going to go back to bed.”

  “Okay honey,” she said absently. “There’s juice in the fridge and there’s some soup in the bowl with the plastic lid. I think it’s still good. Call me at work if it gets worse. I don’t think there’s ice cream, but I’ll try and bring some home with me when I get off tonight. Remember, I have choir practice and your dad has that farewell party for his supervisor at the plant. We won’t be home till very, very late. Rest, okay? We don’t want you missing too much school this early in the year.”

  “Okay, Mom. I’ll probably just go to bed and stay there.”

  He lay in bed staring at the ceiling even after his mother popped into his bedroom to say goodbye. Only when he heard her car pulling out of the driveway did he throw back the covers and walk to the window. He looked up into the sky where the waxing moon had gone down only a few hours before. It would be full in a few days. Mikey smiled to himself thinking of it. He crossed to his desk and reached for the piece of yellow foolscap on which he had written the night before and looked down at his notes. Mikey had drawn a crude replica of the diagram he’d found there. The website had provided phonetic spelling for the words of incantation, though it neglected to identify the language of origin.

  Mikey wondered idly where he was going to find a cat, and how best to kill it.

  [24]

  Wroxy phoned several times during the next week. Mikey let the machine take the calls during the day. His mother told him “that girl” was clogging up the answering machine with her plaintive calls asking how he was doing. Donna was surprised when Mikey told her to please answer the phone the next time Wroxy called, and tell her that he was sick and not up to talking or visitors. This, Mikey knew, his mother would relish. Donna had never made much of an attempt to hide her profound dislike of Wroxy Miller, whom she considered a bad influence on Mikey.

  Each evening Mikey watched as the September moon climbed the night sky outside his bedroom window, growing gibbous and ever brighter, even as the cruel black bruises on his body yellowed and faded from sight. He consulted his lunar calendar and saw that the moon would reach the zenith of its fullness on Sunday night. The irony of what he was planning on what Donna never failed to refer to as “the Lord’s night” filled him with both dark pleasure and an odd sense of sacrilegious dread.

  On Thursday night his parents called him into the living room and asked him to sit down. Both looked serious, and for a moment Mikey thought that somehow his parents had stumbled across the piece of yellow paper locked in the top drawer of his desk.

  “Mikey, your dad and I have some sad news,” Donna said. It looked as though she’d been crying. Her eyes were puffy and her nose was red. “Please brace yourself. It’s about your Nana.”

  “Mom, what’s wrong?”

  “Just listen, and your mother and I will tell you,” his father said brusquely. “Just keep quiet, Michael, please.”

  Mikey said nothing. He looked from his father to his mother, then back again. He barely knew his grandmother, Rose, who lived on the border of Windsor and Detroit. His father wouldn’t have Nana Rose in the house for reasons Mikey had never really understood, though he’d guessed it was another sore spot in his parents’ marriage.

  “Your grandmother, Nana Rose, has had a heart attack,” Donna said in a wavering voice. “It’s serious. She isn’t expected to live past the weekend.” She broke into fresh sobs and reached for a tissue and blew her nose loudly. This seemed to irritate his father, who scowled at Mikey.

  “Your mother needs to go to Windsor to be with her,” his father said. “Your grandmother has apparently asked to see both of us before she passes on.” His mouth tightened. “I can’t imagine why, but apparently this is important to her. It’s clearly important to your mother that we both travel to your grandmother’s . . . to her deathbed, even thought it means that I’ll have to miss three days of overtime during our busiest time.” His father glared at his mother, then looked away.

  “Larry, please. She’s my mother.” Donna composed herself, then went on. “What your father and I want to know, Mikey, is whether you’d be all right for a few days by yourself? It’s almost the weekend and there’s plenty of food in the fridge. You’ve been sick, so it might be a good idea for you to keep resting until school on Monday. If we left for Windsor tomorrow morning, we’d be home on Monday night.”

  Mikey steeled himself not to reveal the overwhelming sense of relief and euphoria that threatened to swamp his composure. He adopted what he hoped was an expression of sadness mixed with bravery.

  “Yeah, Mom,” he said. “Not a problem. I’ll be fine. You and Dad just do what you have to do. Don’t worry about me. And tell Nana I love her.”

  “I will, Mikey,” Donna said, patting his knee. “You’re a good boy.”

  “No parties,” his father said without a hint of irony. Then, contemptuously, “I guess parties are the one thing we don’t have to worry about with you, are they, Mikey?”

  His parents left the next morning before the sun came up. His mother left him instructions on how to microwave the leftovers in the fridge, and a twenty-dollar bill. They took his father’s car. Mikey was relieved to see his mother’s Honda in the garage.

  Wroxy called four more times, then left one last angry message: “Mikey, this is Wroxy. I don’t know what’s up with you, or why you don’t call me back, but I’m beginning to think you’re mad at me for some reason.” Her voice sounded hollow and bewildered, and Mikey felt a twinge of guilt for the sadness he heard. “Since I don’t know what it is, and since you don’t seem to have the decency to call me up and tell me so we can fix it, I’m beginning to wonder what this friendship of ours has been worth all these years. It’s Saturday night. I’m home. If you don’t call me before Monday . . . well, I don’t know what. Okay, call me. Bye.”

  Mikey pressed the “Erase” button on the answering machine, then pressed it again, deleting all her messages.

  On Sunday Mikey spent all day inside. At dusk he dressed in dark clothes and shoes and went out to the garage. Rummaging through the drawers in his father’s workshop, he located a pair of thick leather gloves, which he placed inside his knapsack along with a can of tuna, a can opener, a kitchen knife, a box of salt, some matches, and a thick canvas sack that had once held a sleeping bag.

  In the front zippered compartment of the knapsack was as sheet of yellow paper folded over twice. He patted the bag to make sure it was there. When he felt it, he reached through the open window and placed the knapsack on the floor beside the passenger seat of his mother’s car.

  Then he opened the car door, slid in behind the wheel, and went hunting.

  [25]

  Mikey found the cat near the entrance to the dump where it had been foraging for rats. He opened the can of tuna and crouched down into what he hoped was an unthreatening position. “Here, kitty,” he crooned, tapping the can. “Come and have some nice fish.”

  The cat had taken some coaxing, but after a few minutes the smell
of the open can of tuna proved irresistible. It was clearly used to people, likely a family pet judging by the way it came to him once it was convinced he meant it no harm. It licked its lips and began to nibble at the tuna.

  Mikey fought the urge to stroke it before he jammed the canvas bag down over its head, flipping it backwards inside the bag and closing up the opening. He found himself in awe of the cat’s strength as it fought inside the bag. His stomach churned as unexpected remorse crashed over him. It had been one thing to read about this on the website in context as he planned his revenge. It was something else entirely to hear the terrible sounds of rage and terror coming from inside the bag as the cat thrashed and rocked inside.

  “Shut up,” Mikey pleaded softly. “Just shut up. Stop screaming. I’m sorry, cat. I’m so, so sorry. It’ll be okay. Shhhhh.”

  Mikey opened the trunk and placed the bag on the floor as gently as he could. Then he closed it. Above him, the September moon hung full and fat in the night sky. He wiped his eyes, took a deep breath, and then climbed back into the car. He started the engine again and began to climb the roads that would take him to the highest point of the escarpment.

  Mikey drove for twenty minutes till he reached his destination.

  He pulled into a clearing and turned off the ignition. His legs trembled as he stepped out of the car and listened. The silence was broken only by the sound of the wind in the trees and the occasional scream of a night bird.