October

by Michael Rowe

  He reached for the knapsack and stepped farther into the clearing.

  Mikey looked up again and checked the position of the moon in relation to where he was standing. Pouring salt from the box, he drew two concentric circles on the ground, one seven feet in diameter, one fourteen feet. With a stick he drew several crude symbols inside both circles. Shivering, he moved quickly, gathering up some dry wood into a pile at the centre of the inner circle, and built a small fire. When he was sure the fire was burning strongly, he walked slowly back to the car and opened the trunk. The cat was making low growling sounds inside the bag, but had stopped thrashing. Gingerly he reached over and picked up the bag. Instantly the cat began to fight for its life again. Mikey walked back over to the circles of salt and placed the bag outside the inner circle. He unzipped the front of the knapsack and withdrew the paper with the spell on it. His lips moved as he scanned the paper, checking that everything was as he had copied it down.

  Mikey stripped off his clothes. He was suddenly conscious of the terrible cold, which reminded him of the cold that night behind the boulder, overlooking the meadow. He stepped closer to the fire but it did little to warm him. He reached back into the knapsack and withdrew the heavy leather gloves and the kitchen knife, laying them down on the forest floor beside the fire. The instructions had been quite specific: the cat’s throat would have to be cut, the blade drawn from right to left. Mikey took another deep breath, then put on the heavy leather gloves. He held the kitchen knife tightly in his right hand. He walked over to the bag and began to untie the cords that held the opening closed.

  The cat lurched halfway out of the confines of the bag before Mikey grabbed it and tried to hold it in place. It hissed, its eyes wild with terror. Mikey screamed as the cat’s claws raked across his bare chest. Blood spurted from the line of deep scratches that burned like fire. He’d never known such pain. Frantically he forced the cat’s head back into the sack, pushing down as it sank its teeth into the thick leather gloves. Its claws slashed at Mikey’s exposed arms and hands as he wrestled the bag shut, tying the top. He threw the bag on the ground, panting.

  Mikey was abruptly consumed by black fury. In his mind, the pain of the cat’s attack merged with the pain of his beating the previous week, and with the entire litany of agonies and humiliations throughout the years that had led him to this point.

  Roughly he picked up the bag and threw it into the centre of the inner circle. He knew he couldn’t cut the cat’s throat, but the fucking thing would die now, that’s for sure.

  Mikey reached for a large, heavy rock. With a grunt, he brought it crashing down on the cat’s head inside the bag. He heard a sickening crunch, then he struck again. The bag turned red beneath the blows. It shook once, then it was still.

  He stared down at the bag. Breathing heavily, he picked it up and stepped into the inner circle. He knelt down and reached for the piece of yellow paper and began to read aloud the phonetically spelled incantation he’d written there. When he finished, he opened the bag and dumped the cat’s mangled body at his feet. He forced himself to reach down and dip his fingers in its blood. On his chest he drew the symbol he’d copied onto the yellow paper. He bent down and picked up the kitchen knife again. Gritting his teeth, he cut a deep diagonal line across the centre of his left palm. The pain was incandescent. Mikey cried out as blood rose from the lips of the cut and flowed swiftly down his wrist. Blindly he stumbled over to where he had drawn the symbols in the dirt and let the blood from the wound on his hand spill onto the ground, covering the runes.

  Then Mikey knelt. He closed his eyes and waited.

  “Come to me,” he whispered, using the permitted English words of the spell. His hand throbbed. “Come to me and do my bidding. Be my hammer.”

  Mikey waited in silence for several long minutes. And waited several more. He dared to look up into the air above him. No face had appeared in the smoke from his fire. No fingers reached down toward him from any cloud.

  “Come to me!” he cried desperately. “Come to me! Do my bidding! Be my hammer!”

  The first of the raindrops hit his face. The moon was obscured now by thick black clouds. Mikey flinched as the rain began to lash his naked body in earnest. Before the fire hissed out, Mikey caught sight of the pathetic tangle of wet fur, blood, and brain matter that had been the cat he’d killed. The rain fell heavier and heavier, becoming a torrential downpour. He heard the rumble of distant thunder, and lighting flashed in the distance.

  “Come to me!” Mikey screamed, jumping up. “Do my bidding! Be my hammer! You promised, goddamnit! Look at what I did for you!”

  The rain came like a waterfall. Gasping in shock beneath the frigid cloudburst, Mikey dressed in his soaking wet clothes in the dark. He ran for the car and opened the passenger-side door. By the interior light he located the knife and the leather gloves on the ground. The rain was already forming puddles near the circles he had drawn in salt, and was washing them away. He threw one more agonized look at the cat’s mangled body, then doubled over in guilt.

  Mikey climbed into the Honda and turned the key in the ignition. He revved the engine, tossing mud up into the air as the car peeled out of the clearing and onto the road back to Auburn. He glanced down at the dashboard clock. It was one o’clock in the morning on the last day of September—or rather, the first day of October—and he had just bashed out the brains of an innocent, defenseless animal in order to cast a spell he’d found on the Internet to make the bullies in town suffer for having hurt him.

  Mikey felt he would vomit. He pulled the car to the side of the road and leaned out of the driver’s side door just as his stomach began to heave.

  All of this for nothing, he thought sickly, retching into the mud. I killed a living thing for nothing. Yeah, I’m a real sorcerer, aren’t I? I am Mikey Childress. Fear me. Christ almighty, what have I turned into?

  On the ride home it occurred to him that the best thing to do would be to drive off one of the cliffs and crash his mother’s car into a ravine. It would solve a lot of problems. At the same time, he suspected, he probably didn’t even have the courage for that.

  OCTOBER

  [26]

  The first day of October dawned crisp and brilliant in Auburn, as though the rain the night before had washed the landscape clean. Many of the townspeople had been woken by the storm, but most had simply turned over on their pillows and returned to sleep, soothed by the patter of raindrops on their roofs and windows. Although the temperature would climb by noon, early risers saw their breath as they retrieved newspapers from front porches or locked their houses before making their way to their cars. The warm days and cold nights of September’s final week had set off a dazzling pyrotechnic display of vivid autumn colours in the leaves of the trees lining the streets, and the escarpment hills surrounding the town burned with cold fire in deep hues of yellow, orange, and red.

  Mikey woke from his nightmares to bright sunlight stealing between the curtains of his room. His first thought was of the dead cat, and he felt his chest contract with grief and terrible guilt. He looked down at his bandaged hand. The bleeding must have stopped during the night because the bandage had dried to the colour of clay. He flexed his fingers gingerly but felt only mild discomfort. He unwound the bandage carefully. When he reached the final level of the binding, he tugged gently where the cotton was fused to the deep, ugly wound so as not to dislodge any scabbing. Feeling nothing, he tugged harder, then ripped the bandage off. He winced, anticipating a torrent of fresh, dark blood.

  The bandage came away easily from the wound. The place where the knife had bitten into the soft flesh of his palm was smeared with dried blood, but instead of the ragged strip of severed flesh he’d seen the night before, there was a faded pink line of healing skin covered with a scab. He turned his hand over and looked at his fingers. The place where the cat had scratched him was unblemished and smooth in the morning light.

  Feeling light-headed, Mikey slowl
y walked into the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror. He pulled his t-shirt over his head and stared at his pale, naked chest. During the night, blood had seeped from the scratches and smeared the skin in a crisscross pattern, but when he touched the place where the scratches would have been, the skin was unmarked, showing no trace of a wound. For several long minutes, Mikey stood in front of the mirror, staring stupidly at his own reflection, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. His thoughts were cloudy and torpid, as though he were still asleep. He turned away from the mirror, reached over and turned on the shower. Testing the water temperature with his hand, he pulled off his boxer shorts and stepped under the spray, letting the water run off the back of his cut hand, protecting the palm. He flexed the fingers again, feeling only the vaguest ache near the wound. He reached over and turned the hot water off. The stream of water ran cold. He forced himself to stand under the icy blast until his skin turned bluish and he began to shiver. Then Mikey turned the water off and stepped out onto the bath mat. He dried himself briskly with a towel until he felt warm again.

  Mikey taped a large Band-Aid over the cut on his palm, which now seemed even less raw than it had been before the shower. His rational mind told him that the speed of this healing was impossible, but the practical convenience of having one less thing to explain to his parents overrode any disturbing questions that his mind whispered to him.

  He looked down into the wastepaper basket in his bedroom, where a yard-long blood-soaked cotton bandage lay like a dead snake amid the paper and debris. Carefully he retrieved the bloody wrapping from the wastepaper basket and stuffed it into an empty manila envelope lying on his desk. He stapled the envelope shut as a final security measure, then shoved it to the bottom of the basket, covering it with paper. In the unlikely event that his mother came to empty the trash when she and his father returned from Windsor, she wouldn’t take note of it.

  He dressed quickly and went into the kitchen. The answering machine light was blinking. He pressed the button and waited. There was one message: his mother telling him that she and his father would be home late tonight, and not to wait up. Mikey, who had never felt less like seeing his parents, or anyone else, sighed with relief.

  He had left half a pot of cold coffee in the coffee machine on Sunday morning. Mikey poured himself half a cup and gulped it down, nearly gagging at the bitter taste. But it served its purpose. As he gathered up his books and stepped outside into the cool October morning, his head was clear and he was fully awake.

  The walk to school was blissfully uneventful. The residential section of Auburn was usually full of teenagers on their way to school at that hour, but Mikey encountered no one as he hurried down Webster Avenue toward the interlocking streets that led to Auburn High School. The books in his knapsack felt sharp and heavy against his back as he hurried along with his head down.

  Wroxy was waiting for him just off the school property, nervously puffing on a cigarette. When she saw him, she dropped it to the pavement and ground it out.

  “Mikey, where have you been?” Wroxy’s voice was urgent. “What’s wrong with you? I’ve been calling you for days. I’ve been worried sick.”

  He shrugged. “I’m sorry. I guess I just haven’t felt like talking to anyone. I’ve been dealing with some shit, and I didn’t want to get you involved. It’s okay now, though.”

  “Involved?”she nearly shouted. “I’m your best friend! I’m already involved, wouldn’t you say? You disappear for a week, you don’t even call to tell me if you’re alive or dead, and when I go over to your house, your fucking mother tells me that you’re too sick to come to the door. And you and I both know she doesn’t like me, so don’t tell me that isn’t part of why she didn’t let me in to see for myself. What the hell is going down here?”

  “Look, Wroxy, I’m really sorry about this. I really was sick, and I just didn’t want to talk to anyone. Not even to you,” Mikey added, remembering the negative thoughts he’d had about her during the past week. The concern and pain in her face struck him like a blow.

  “What about these rumours I’ve been hearing?” she asked.

  “Rumours?”

  “Don’t play stupid with me, Childress. I’ve been hearing rumours that you got the shit beaten out of you a few days ago, but everyone is being very cagey about it, and no one will mention any names. Did something happen? Is that why you were ducking school? Did somebody hurt you? You fucking tell me, and right now.”

  Before Mikey could answer, the nine o’clock bell rang. Scattered groups of straggling students hurried past them through the main doors. Mikey stared mutely into Wroxy’s face and was moved by what he saw there. She was paler than usual and looked as though she hadn’t slept well. There were bluish-purple smudges beneath her eyes that even thick makeup couldn’t cover. He wondered once again, as he had on so many previous occasions, whether he and Wroxy had some sort of psychic bond that would have allowed her to share some of his own pain without even knowing it.

  The sheer awfulness of the night before rose up in him. In the face of Wroxy’s concern and obvious love, it threatened to drown him. His eyes blurred, and he bit down hard on his bottom lip so as not to cry.

  Wroxy saw this and winced. She reached out her hand as if to touch his shoulder. Mikey flinched. “Look,” he said tentatively. “Let’s talk about this at lunch, okay? I don’t want to get into it now. It’s too complicated. All right?”

  “All right.” Wroxy sighed. “I can’t make you talk to me. All I can do is ask you to remember how long we’ve been friends. You owe me that at least.”

  “Yeah. I owe you that at least.”

  “You know what?” Wroxy said. She looked miserable. “I’m going to bail on morning classes. If any of the teachers ask you, tell them I had a dentist appointment or something.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I don’t know. Around. It doesn’t really matter, does it?”

  Mikey shook his head.

  “I don’t think I’d be able to concentrate very well. You think about what I said, and we’ll talk at lunch. I’ll meet you right here.”

  As Mikey entered the school, Wroxy hurried across the parking lot toward the street. She couldn’t remember a moment when she felt further from him.

  [27]

  Mikey was lost in guilty thoughts about Wroxy when the new boy walked through the door of his homeroom class. His first impression was that the boy—if one could even call him that, since nothing about him remotely suggested callow vulnerability, or the tentativeness of a teenage male scenting unfamiliar territory—must be an adult, perhaps a young substitute teacher.

  But no, there was Mrs. Wood, his homeroom teacher, sitting at her desk leafing quizzically through a folder full of papers that had arrived from the principal’s office.

  Unable not to stare, Mikey took in the square jaw, the thick, close-cropped white-blond hair. He guessed the boy’s height to be six feet, maybe taller. He wore a black leather biker jacket over a plain red t-shirt. The wallet in the back pocket of his faded Levis was attached to a length of chain clipped to a black leather belt that enclosed his narrow waist. Lowering his eyes, Mikey saw that the boy wore heavy black boots, the cracked leather polished to a high shine.

  When he looked up again, the boy was walking directly toward him. Mikey’s eyes widened. In that instant, the boy met his gaze directly and smiled down at him.

  “Hey,” the boy said, extending his hand. His voice was a man’s voice, not a boy’s, deep and mellifluous, with no scratchy adolescent breakage. “I’m Adrian. And you are . . . ?”

  There were several heavy silver bracelets encircling his wrist. Mikey gaped at the proffered hand as though he had never been asked to shake one in his life. He looked up at Adrian’s face to see if there was any mockery there, if he had mistaken Mikey for someone else, and if there was a punchline forthcoming. Adrian met Mikey’s quizzical stare with a gaze that was full and blue and warm. Mikey saw
that his eyelashes were thick and dark, darker than he would have imagined against such white-blond colouring. Adrian looked German or Swedish. Or, at least, the way Mikey imagined Germans and Swedes looked based on movies he had seen.

  Adrian half-smiled, then reached down to where Mikey’s hand sat limply on his desk and grasped it gently, raising it to the shaking position. He squeezed it once, firmly. Mikey sensed enormous strength in Adrian’s grip, but strength held under control for his benefit. In that second, all thoughts of witches, black magic, dead cats, bullies, or loneliness were driven from his mind.

  “I’m Mikey. My name is Mikey Childress.”

  Mikey was suddenly aware that the entire classroom had gone silent. Across the aisle from where he sat, Tina Mitterhaus and Gwen Horlick were whispering to each other as they stared at him and Adrian. But instead of the derisive smirks that usually accompanied their whispers, they appeared unable to look away from Adrian. Mikey saw Gwen lick her lips.

  Farther down the row Shawn Curtis seemed to be taking Adrian’s measure as well.

  At first Mikey thought it might be fear he saw in Curtis’s eyes, but then he realized it was the sizing up of a potential adversary, the way boxers did in the ring before a match. In any case, whatever he saw there clearly gave him pause.

  “Anybody sitting here?” Adrian said. He indicated the seat next to Mikey with a sideways glance. The seat was occupied by a thickset hockey player named Chad Smith, whom Mikey barely knew, a buddy of Dewey and Jim’s, though not one of his regular tormentors. Adrian didn’t look at Chad when he asked the question.

  “Yeah, asshole,” Chad said. “I’m sitting here. Are you blind? This is my seat.”

  “Not anymore it isn’t,” Adrian said softly. He turned away from Mikey and gave Chad his full attention. “Find another seat.”