cutting them weeds down now.”
“Good boy.”
While Zoey went about the process of setting up the room in preparation of the ceremony, Gina busied herself with arranging her electronic doohickeys. At Zoey’s insistence, she set up the video camera on its small tripod in the hallway just outside of the bedroom, partly because she didn’t want it to be in the way of anything, and partly because she suspected that electronics might have an adverse effect upon the energies she would be working with in the ceremony. She permitted Gina to take her EMF and Geiger counter readings beforehand, and to make her initial EVP recording attempts, but she advised her that once the ceremony had begun, those devices would also have to be moved outside of the room.
She wanted this to go as smoothly and as perfectly as possible. It wasn’t an especially complex process or a difficult one, but she had a distinct feeling that she would only get one shot at this. For one, she doubted that her companions would agree to going through this whole procedure if Zoey felt that it had been completely ineffective. And secondly, if things went wrong in the way that she worried they might, then it was impossible to know just what might happen – maybe something bad, maybe nothing at all. She had never worked with energy this serious before, never dabbled in magick dealings of this scale. She was truly dealing with a lot of unknowns here. But it wasn’t like she could consult with anyone else on the matter. People were generally skeptical enough about the occult in general, but to ask if a consecration ceremony by a not-quite witch would be enough to dispel an evil entity or force that seemed to inhabit a particular place? That was just asking to get locked up in a mental institution.
Being honest with herself, she was fully aware that she was playing with fire, but she was foolhardy enough to still hope that it couldn’t possibly result in anything too terrible. She had beliefs, but they didn’t exactly equate to true faith. As such, if they went through with this and it failed to nullify the forces that she believed were there, then … well, no harm, no foul, right? Or had that been what those hippies had been thinking before meeting their violent ends? Either way, the only thing for certain was her resolve to see that this was done. If this was no more effective than saying “bless you” after someone’s sneeze, then so be it. But if things truly went sideways…
Mike returned from his “mission” outside, declaring that he had successfully hacked a path around the outside of the house and complaining that he was probably going to develop a rash from the poison ivy that he’d encountered. With the light from outside already fading as the sun set, Zoey lit the kerosene lantern with a long-stemmed butane lighter, and she carefully ensured that it was exactly in the center of the square room. She then carefully arranged four of the tea candles around the lantern, making it a centerpiece, and lit those as well. Chad was respectfully quiet and observant throughout this process. Mike was grumbling that he wanted a beer, but Zoey asked him to wait until the ceremony was underway, as there was a point at which it was considered to be appropriate. Gina continued snapping photos until Zoey indicated that they were ready to begin, at which point she then laid the camera underneath the tripod of the video camera in the hallway, switching that on instead.
Zoey also asked that everyone power off their cell phones, feeling more concerned about those devices than the others she’d asked Gina to set outside of the room. Cell phones, after all, involved sending and receiving electronic signals over the air. Though it was probably a bit of pseudo-science, or maybe she was just over-thinking things, she believed that wireless electronics would have an even greater potential for interference because of how they may affect the energies which she intended to summon and redirect. She didn’t bother to explain any of this to them, of course. They wouldn’t have understood and, most likely, would have just rolled their eyes at any such explanation.
She handed each of them small cue cards with handwritten instructions on what they were to do to assist her in casting a circle and calling the Four Corners. She had made their involvement as simple as possible, indicating that all they needed to do was recite the words on their cue cards as she pointed to them, and to repeat them over and over with increasing volume until she grounded the cone of power with her athame (“ath-ah-may”), the ceremonial knife she had brought out. She briefly considered kicking off her knee-high boots and socks, knowing that she would feel more connected to the site with bare feet, but decided against it. They would be walking outside soon, and Gina had earlier warned that there was broken glass nearby.
Lastly, she shrugged out of her leather jacket and slipped on the thin black polyester robe she had stowed her in backpack. Her theory was not that black was a negative color, but rather that it could absorb negativity. While this robe was actually a costume piece she had picked up from the seasonal Halloween section of a department store, she believed that it didn’t matter so much whether or not the item was a genuine religious relic as much as how it was used. Besides, considering that this cloak was supposed to absorb negativity, she fully intended to burn it immediately after the ceremony, just in case any residual energy or influence might have tainted the item. The fire would purify it as it obliterated the material, and she would then neutralize the ashes as she extinguished them by sprinkling the remains with salt water.
Zoey unscrewed the cap on the jug of water, poured a large measure of salt into it, put the cap back on, and then shook it vigorously to help dissolve the salt. She then took one of the four shot glasses they had brought along and set it on the floor beside the jug. Directing everyone to settle into their places near each of the four walls and directly in front of the four tea candles she had lit, representing north, east, south, and west, she handed each of them a stick of jasmine incense. She instructed them to light the incense while she quickly and quietly blessed the salt water that she had just mixed. Once all four sticks of incense were lit, she then asked them to follow her outside to walk deodosil (clockwise) around the house three times.
“Hey, Zoey?” Gina soon asked as they made their way downstairs. “Is it okay to talk?”
“Sure, until we finish casting the circle.”
“Cool. So, how’s about telling us a spooky Halloween story?”
“You mean a ‘sam-hain’ story?” she asked with a smirk, deliberately mispronouncing Samhain (“sah-ween”).
“Halloween, Samhain, whatever. Seriously, what’s the story behind this place? I mean … besides what happened with Zach?”
“Yeah, like, what’s the deal with the chalk outline and the bloodstains?” she asked. “That wasn’t, like … where your brother died, was it?”
“No,” she replied solemnly. “Zach was killed on the road outside of here.”
And so, as they walked carefully around the house with incense and flashlights in hand, Zoey carried her stick of incense in her teeth like a cigarette, tucked the jug of saltwater under one arm, and used a shot glass in her other hand to splash a bit of it around here and there during their rounds. As they walked, she told them what she knew of the history of this site, both what she had learned through her research and what she had experienced firsthand. Her intention was not to disturb them with scary stories as Gina had suggested, of course, but rather to give them a clearer idea as to why she truly believed that they were walking on darkly tainted grounds.
Obviously, it had once been a farmhouse, built and occupied by a German immigrant family – a man, his wife, and their son and daughter – back in the very early 1900’s. When the Great Depression hit and western Kansas became the scene of what was called the Dust Bowl, a great drought and terrible dust storms had claimed all of their crops for season after season. As their finances failed and as lenders threatened to foreclose upon their land, the farmer supposedly had a complete mental breakdown. He set fire to the barn and tool shed, then went into the house and stabbed his wife to death with a field knife, threw his daughter out of the second-story window, and bludgeoned his son to death in the cellar with a hammer. A neighbor saw the smoke fro
m the burning barn and shed, so he came rushing to the farm in his truck. The farmer saw him approaching, hid in the field nearby until he was close, and then threw himself in front of the truck, which crushed him to death under its wheels. It was apparently not the first nor the only time that such a thing had happened during that time period, so it was soon forgotten.
Nearly forty years later, a few flower children found the house and decided to set up shop in there with the intention of using the site as a dope-smoking hangout. No one was completely certain what happened, but a deputy later came across the wreckage of their Volkswagen van just a few hundred feet away from the house, the driver killed during an unexplainable rollover accident. One of the hippies was found dead outside of the house, apparently having jumped head-first through the second-story bedroom window. Another was found dead in the cellar, beaten to death with a piece of wood. The third, a female, was found to have been stabbed to death upstairs in the same bedroom from which the other had jumped to his death. Nobody seemed to have made any direct connection between these mysterious deaths and the murder-suicide massacre perpetrated by