the farmer, but the story did briefly make headlines. The authorities’ theory was that the hippie that died in the van had “freaked out on a bad trip” and killed the others before attempting to flee and accidentally wrecking the van during his getaway.
Lastly, almost exactly ten years prior to this particular Halloween night, Zoey and her brother Zach had deliberately sought out the farm house, having read about the deaths in a random magazine article and then learned a few stories from relatives and friends that lived in the area. They had made a road trip out of it and had planned to stay the night there, sort of as a dare to each other. Whoever chickened out and wanted to leave first would lose and owed the winner one hundred dollars. Incidentally, Zach had also brought along a bottle of whiskey. The last thing that Zoey remembered with absolute clarity was sitting in this same bedroom, passing the whiskey bottle back and forth, and telling each other scary stories to try to work upon one others’ nerves. Her next lucid memory was waking up in the wreckage of their car, which Zach had driven straight into a fence at the edge of the farm property, and finding that part of a broken-off fencepost that had speared straight through the windshield and into Zach’s face. Zoey had been seriously injured – she hadn’t been wearing her seat belt at the time of the crash – but she had somehow managed to limp over a mile or so down that dirt road until she came upon a passing vehicle that she managed to flag down.
To that day, she still had a couple of small but visible scars upon her cheek and temple from where the windshield had cut her, and her neck and knee sometimes ached sharply at odd times. Between the time when she had blacked out in the house and the time when she had awoken in the car, there were only vague glimpses, things that she had always doubted were entirely real or accurate. She remembered Zach falling through the floor of the upper story and landing in the kitchen. She remembered being stuck in the cellar. She thought that she recalled there being a little kid in there, or at least she remembered hearing one crying, or perhaps that was only her own sobbing that she'd heard. And she remembered a formless black mist, one that did not simply hang in the air but instead moved with purpose, if not a sort of intelligence. It was all very vague, though, and many of these “memories” usually only came to her when she had nightmares about that day. She couldn't be certain how much of it had been real and how much had been fabricated within her sleep later on.
Oddly, it seemed almost as though the tree branches and weeds that Mike had cut back with the machete were moving back into place, becoming more and more obstructive with every time they walked around the house. As they made their third and final lap around the house, also just as Zoey had finished her tale, the branch of a thorny vine or tree snagged itself upon the hood of her cloak. It surprised her at first, and during her hurried efforts to disentangle herself from it, she received a few scratches upon her hands, forearms, and the back of her neck, all of which burned with an unusual intensity. Aloud, she said that it was probably just the wind that had caused the branch to move out of place, although she honestly wasn’t sure whether that verbal reassurance was for anyone else’s sake but her own. Realistically, she knew that it wasn’t that simple, as there really wasn’t much of a breeze to speak of at that point in the evening, but she didn’t want to alarm the others with her own possibly foolish suspicions and fears. Just the same, she flicked a shot glass full of saltwater directly at the offending branch.
As they made their way back into the house, things had become very, very dark, and so it was a bit more unnerving to cross the threshold of the kitchen and pass over the haphazardly covered hole in the floor. For some reason, even though Chad had made a good effort to check the floors for any other weak spots, Zoey half expected the wood to give way underfoot and plunge her into the cellar. As it was, the house just didn’t look or feel sturdy in any way at all, likely so bad that it would have been condemned if it had been located in a city. The fact that Zoey was increasingly feeling as if their presence and her efforts were agitating the forces or entity residing there only added to her concern. She scattered a shot glass full of saltwater across the opening in the floor, just for good measure. If there was any negativity lingering there, she hoped that it would help to neutralize it.
When they returned to the bedroom at last, Zoey took her position in the north side of the room while Chad, Gina and Mike sat cross-legged at their positions of east, south, and west, respectively. She laid the stick of incense across the tin cup of the tea candle in front of her, and the other three followed her example. She then picked up her athame and began the process of calling the Four Corners, gesturing with the blade toward each of her companions as she cued them to begin reciting their part of the incantation. She did this in a crisscross pattern – north, south, east, west – and she increased the pace with every revolution of the calling. For the most part, the others did quite well, following her direction and similarly raising the volume of their voices as they began to all chant together in unison … well, aside from Mike, who sounded distinctly insincere and disinterested with his words as he called the Watchtower of the West. As their pace and volume reached a crescendo, Zoey arose to stand, holding the athame high overhead and moving to stand near the old outlined bloodstain upon the floor. She turned the athame over, pointing it downward, and took it into both hands in preparation to strike.
“So mote it be!” she cried at the apex of the chant, then drove the blade into the floor at the center of the bloodstain.
Gina let out a sharp yelp of surprise and jumped back, and a moment later, both Chad and Mike chuckled with amusement at her reaction. Zoey wasn’t laughing at all. She remained right where she knelt, looking at the athame with stunned disbelief. It took a few moments, but the others finally noticed why she was staring at the ceremonial knife with such a wide-eyed look. In that single thrust, she had somehow managed to bury the full length of that blade all the way to the hilt in the floor.
“Holy crap!” Mike laughed. “That’s some super witchy strength you’ve got there, Zoey.”
“I … I didn’t even do it that hard,” she said, still staring at it with disbelief. “I guess the wood is pretty weak here.”
“Great,” Mike said, “so the weight of all four of us sitting up here is probably going to make this rickety old house collapse or something now, huh?”
“Relax, we’re fine,” Chad grumbled, getting up and moving over next to Zoey. “You okay?”
It took her a moment to find her voice again, but she finally blinked away her surprise and forced herself to smile to him. “Yeah. I’m good.”
Gina rubbed her hands together nervously as she asked, “So, umm … was that it? Did it work?”
“We’re not done yet,” she said as she got up, dusting off her knees, “but that was the hard part of the ritual. Now, we get to the cakes and ale part.”
“Hallelujah! Booze and munchies!” Mike cried out with relieved delight, hopping up and immediately heading over to the cooler. He jerked open the top and began rummaging through the ice inside. “Who else is ready for a shot and a beer?”
Now that the circle had been cast, intended to shelter them from malicious spirits, they began distributing some spirits of their own – those of the alcoholic sort. Cake seemed inappropriate for the occasion, since it didn't exactly go well with beer and whiskey, but a large bag of mountain trail mix that they passed around worked well enough.
“So, what's next?” Gina asked as she watched Zoey unwrap and unscrew the cap on the brand new bottle of Kentucky bourbon.
“Nothing too difficult,” she said, beginning to pour a measure into each of the four shot glasses she had lined up. “Right now, we're each going to take turns expressing our wishes for the outcome of this ceremony. I'll go first.” Finished pouring the shots, she set the bottle down and picked up one of the shot glasses. “It is my sincere hope that, when we close this circle tonight, we will finally be putting to rest whatever restless spirits, forces, or energy that have been trapped within this spac
e in the world for so long. I hope that, after this night, there will only be happiness and harmony to be found here in this place, and among one another.”
And with that, she held up her shot glass and gave a small salute before knocking it back in a quick gulp. The ice-cold whiskey went down smoothly at first, but then the alcohol of it began to burn her throat slightly after a couple of seconds. It was the first time since she'd last been here with Zach that she had ever so much as tasted whiskey, having deliberately avoided it entirely over the years by opting for other alternatives. Here and now, however, it only made sense. It wasn't a taste that she loved, but it did immediately bring back memories.
Mike immediately moved to pick up his shot glass, as did Gina, but Zoey quickly held out a hand to stop them. “Not yet. One at a time. Who wants to go next?”
“Ooh, me!” Gina volunteered excitedly, raising her little glass in a toast. “Here's to, ah … here's to hoping that whatever bad juju is here will go away and never come back. Oh, and also to good times with good friends.”
She downed her shot, wincing at the intensity of it and coughing a bit as she stifled a giggle.