“I have a half-hour of twilight to work with,” she said. “I need to see the words if I’m going to kill the girl.”
She stopped pacing and glared at the lighted windows of the Lybrook home—the house that belonged to her until her death at the hands of the ancient spirit who had killed and imprisoned others for their misdeeds. It wasn’t long after her death that Reginald Myers’s daughter bought the house and disgraced Margga’s name by moving her family into the place.
“Sarlic is not coming,” a voice said from the darkness that spread toward the trees behind the house.
Onlin stepped past the darkness that didn’t affect Margga’s senses. The ghost witch whirled.
“What do you mean he’s not coming?”
“He is with the girl. She is fixing our ship’s engines. We will leave your planet as soon as she is successful.”
“You fools,” Margga hissed. “She is what I used to be. She isn’t fixing your engines. If anything, she’s sabotaging them. She cannot do anything else but bring harm to you.”
“By what ground do you make this claim?” Onlin asked.
“On the ground that she’s a witch. She will kill you all. If Sarlic had brought me my book of spells, I could have spared your lives.”
Onlin’s visor flashed. “I have seen the book you seek,” she said.
“Seeing and having are two different things, Roualen. You are empty handed. Without my book, this evening has been wasted. Sunset has come. The light of the moon is not enough to power any of my spells.”
“I have recorded the book. And I have the light of your sun with me. Look.” Onlin’s visor cast a bright light across the ground that lit up the air around her and Margga.
“Put that out,” Margga hissed. “Someone will see.”
The light vanished.
“Come, follow me,” Margga said. She led Onlin to and down cement stairs inside the remnants of the house’s foundation. Inside the cellar where she had trapped Charles Erickson’s spirit, she had Onlin repeat her performance with the sunlight.
The place glowed bright. Within the light, Onlin displayed a holographic image of Margga’s book. The book opened and the pages turned by an unseen hand.
Margga looked upon the image and squealed with delight. Then she moaned. “It’s backwards,” she said. “I cannot read it.”
“Stand behind me.”
Margga did and peered over Onlin’s left shoulder. The words righted and she watched the pages turn in front of her and Onlin.
“Stop,” she said after several minutes had passed. “That’s the spell I seek.”
She muttered while she read the page aloud. The light turned red. She hummed a song and manipulated the crimson sunlight particles in her hands as though she were making a red snowball from a handful of red snow. She held the red ball of light in her hands and grinned.
“Tell Sarlic I have something here the girl wants,” she said. “Have him tell the girl her father will remain trapped here unless she comes to me tonight. She has until precisely eleven o’clock. Any dawdling and I will destroy his spirit.”
Chapter Thirteen
VREE FOLLOWED SARLIC and the buzzing sound from the cavern where the spaceship sat with two of its flight engines still out of position.
They followed the widest rivulet and Sarlic led Vree across a wet floor of worn limestone where it steepened and the rivulet flowed faster and deeper.
They ducked into a cramped conduit, squeezing past damp marble and other metamorphic rock. The passageway widened. So did the flow of water, which had become the passageway’s floor and lapped over Vree’s tennis shoes.
Farther in, the floor steepened. A few yards ahead, it angled almost straight down. The water pushed at their feet, making the way difficult.
“Take my manus and hold tight,” Sarlic said, extending an arm to Vree. Then, “No, not manus,” he said. “That is not the correct word.”
Vree clutched Sarlic’s right hand with her left one. “I know what you meant,” she said. “My daddy had a book of Latin in his library.”
Images from Sarlic penetrated her mind when she took his hand, but she shoved them aside. Her father’s spirit was in danger. She would do whatever it took to save him.
Her shoes—those purple and white Nikes—lacked traction against the smooth stone. She slipped easily and fell several times on the water-worn floor that became steeper the farther they went.
She was sore, soaked, cold, and shivering when the wet and slippery stone floor leveled and widened into a streambed that deepened and reflected moonlight at the mouth of an exit straight ahead.
She hurried as best she could as Sarlic led her outside.
Bright moonlight lit behind the mackerel sky—rows of cloud, like a thick weaved scarf tinted with the fading remains of a midsummer sunset. The night’s darkness hid details of the stream and ground where boulders reared like fat monoliths and groves of conifer trees blocked the north and south sky on either side of the stream.
Vree estimated that they had traveled twenty minutes and that it was close to nine thirty. She had left her cellphone with its clock in her bedroom.
“Where are we and how much farther?” she asked. She shivered, though the night was warm.
“We are at the foot of Myers Ridge near Myers Creek,” Sarlic said. He extended an arm at the grove of trees at their right. “The road you need to travel on is that way. Follow it west until you come to an intersection. Home is less than a mile north.”
“I remember the road,” she said, wading to the stream’s edge nearest her. She stopped and shivered again, but not because she was cold.
“I can’t believe someone wants to hurt my father,” she said.
“Margga wants your power,” Sarlic said. “She claimed to want it so she could save my people and me from you. But I am certain now that she wishes only to use it to escape her imprisonment.”
“You mentioned Margga in my bedroom. You called her a spirit, a remnant of someone horrible. Lenny called her a witch imprisoned to the property next door to my grandparents’ place. He said she wants to kill him and his family.” Vree recalled the vision of the woman running from a witch who filled her heart with fear. “Both of you said she wants to kill me, too. But if it means saving my dad, she can have my power. But then she will kill Lenny and probably my family as well. And who will set the proper sequence of your engines?” She rubbed the back of her neck.
“Margga would rather see us dead than help us go home,” Sarlic said.
Vree groaned. “Is there no one else like me?”
Sarlic said nothing.
“I’m sorry, Sarlic, but I need to do this,” Vree said. “My father means everything to me. I would rather be with him in spirit than to have him destroyed.” She lifted her right foot to step onto the foot-high embankment when her left foot slipped and her leg buckled. Her kneecap struck a rock when her leg plummeted into the stream, and pain gripped her knee, causing her to turn and sit in the water.
“Ow,” she cried out. “I can’t straighten my leg. It hurts.”
Sarlic hurried to her.
“Where does your leg hurt?”
“My knee,” she said through clenched teeth.
Sarlic gently felt her knee and said, “I have studied human anatomy and I am certain I know what the problem is. The knee joint is locked. But these wet pants pressing against your kneecap are hindering my diagnosis. We need to get you out of the water so you can take off your pants.”
“I’m not taking off my pants.” Vree closed her eyes and pictured in her mind a healed leg. A wave of dizziness fell on her.
“I feel so tired,” she said.
Sarlic felt the sides of Vree’s knee. “The patella is dislocated.”
“It’s dislocated?”
“Yes … all the way to the side. I must push it back in place and straighten your leg by pulling. It will hurt. And your wet pants will make the going slow and more painful. But it is your decision to make
.”
Vree was quiet for almost a minute while she struggled to stay awake. Using her powers on Sarlic’s ship had exhausted her.
“How do you know it’ll work?” she asked. “You aren’t human. And don’t say you read about fixing dislocated knees in a book or that you saw it on TV.”
“Our skeletal structures are similar,” Sarlic said. “My mother had the same thing happen when I was young. I watched my father put it back in place.”
Vree swallowed. “Tell me what to do,” she said.
“Take off your pants.”
“Don’t look.”
“I will not look at you as long as you remember not to look at me,” Sarlic said. He lifted her legs and removed her shoes without untying them. She wore no socks and Sarlic saw that she had cut and bruised the soles of her feet, perhaps by running without wearing shoes. His visor flashed while he quickly studied her feet. Then he placed her shoes on the bank while he held her feet with his other hand—or manus, as he had called it—and returned to studying her feet. He rubbed the foot of her injured leg, pushing at the sole of her foot.
“What are you doing?” Vree asked.
“Your feet are cramped and tense,” Sarlic said. “This will release the tension going up your leg and loosen the muscles around your knee. It will make putting your kneecap in place easier.”
He massaged her foot for a few minutes before he told her again to take off her pants.
Vree undid her jeans and, while Sarlic looked away, she braced her back against the embankment, lifted her buttocks, and pushed down her pants. Her underwear went down too; she fought to keep them on while she struggled to get her jeans past her hips.
Every movement seemed to amplify the pain while Sarlic lifted her feet and tugged down her pant legs while looking away from her. Finally, he worked her jeans over her wounded knee and slipped off her pants. He laid them with her shoes on the embankment.
Vree squirmed back into her underwear, pressed her thighs together, and awaited his instructions.
“I am going to place one of my hands on your kneecap and the other around your ankle,” he said. “Then I will pull on your leg,”
“Will it hurt?”
“Yes.” Sarlic knelt in the water, tucked her calf under his right arm to keep her leg elevated, then hunched over her knee and massaged the kneecap, working it back in place. Then he pulled her leg to straighten it.
Vree cried out, but only for a moment.
Sarlic kept her leg extended.
“You cannot bend it yet,” he said.
“For how long?”
“I will let you know.”
He said nothing more while he counted off the seconds in his head. When he reached three minutes, he helped her to stand.
“Lean on me and head to the trees. The pine needles will make a warm bed.”
“Bed?”
“You need to rest.”
“I don’t have time to rest.”
“You need to rest and stay off your leg while I splint your knee.”
“I need to keep Margga from destroying my daddy’s spirit!”
A swishing sound came from somewhere nearby. It took Vree several seconds to recognize the sound of an automobile’s tires passing over a road’s rain-soaked blacktop.
She estimated that the road was a half-mile away—hopefully less.
She sat and struggled to put on her jeans. Her knee throbbed angrily at times, pounded like a jackhammer when she put on her wet shoes, and beat her spirit with crushing blows whenever her jeans pressed against the injured bone and cartilage as she hobbled away from Sarlic.
She fell after taking three steps.
“I can do this,” she shouted at Sarlic when she heard him approach her. He stopped and she searched the ground for a branch long and strong enough to use as a crutch. She found none, so she used her arms and good leg to lift her backside and crawl backward toward the sound of another car passing along the highway.
Lift, move, stop, rest, and catch my breath in between the pain. Then go on.
Every lift, every jostle across the terrain of field grass and rocks, made her cry out until she was hoarse.
But her chances of making it to the road increased with every move, so she crawled on until she came to the bank of another stream.
She crawled backward into the cold water and urinated before she crawled on. Sharp stones bruised her hands, and the rocks she crawled over worsened the pain in her knee.
She screamed at her misfortune, bullying her body to go on, pressing upwards along the embankment on the other side until she was across the stream and out of breath. She rested for several minutes until shivers wracked her body and tore at her knee. Determined to save her father, she pushed along, going up a hill and resting once when the pain became unbearable. At the top, she rested again before she made her way down, into a black field of brush and scattered trees.
The road beckoned below her. She heard the swish of a vehicle’s tires passing over the blacktop. She pushed on, her back forever facing her destination. Her hands were numb now. So were her buttocks. Her arms and lower back cried for her to rest.
No.
She pressed on instead. The wet field grass almost made the going easier until she pushed her way into brambles that grabbed her, cut her, slowed her. Dense tangles held her by her shirt and hair for many minutes, and kept her from the highway.
Another car passed her, one more fleeting hope for salvation from this hell. She tore loose from the brambles and crawled into more. But she fought her way through until she was free and on her way through sparser grasses.
She came to the top of an irrigation ditch. There, she turned around and dangled her legs over the edge of the concrete precipice. Gravity pulled at her knee, but she refused to cry out.
The drop looked to be about seven feet but she saw no easier way down to the highway. She shut her eyes, pushed herself from the ledge, and clenched her jaw as she waited for an explosion of horrible pain inside her knee. It came swiftly as she landed feet first in the ditch.
When she came out of the red jaws of agony, she found that she was on her stomach and lying in bitter-tasting rainwater. Hand over hand, inch-by-inch, she crawled out of the ditch until she rested at the shoulder of the highway.
She waited. No vehicle passed, no car stopped—no one came for her.
She placed a hand against the highway and felt warmth there. She hugged the road’s glorious heat, and wept to feel it kiss her face.
When she opened her eyes, rainwater and exhaust fumes covered her. A car had passed along the highway’s other lane. It took the last of her energy to crawl onto the road, onto warmer tarmac. She welcomed the heavenly heat as she lay on her stomach and prayed that the next driver would see her and not run over her.
She heard Myers Ridge laughing at her.
She would not make it in time. Margga would destroy her father’s spirit.
She wished to be in her father’s arms, and for him to take her away from here.
Suddenly, the heavenly warmth of two strong arms lifted her from the road.
“Daddy?” she managed to say before darkness wrapped like a blanket around her and took her quick and without warning into the great oblivion of unconsciousness.
Chapter Fourteen
FOR TWO HOURS, Lenny bussed tables, washed dishes, and wondered about his new neighbors, especially about Verawenda Erickson.
Now, while Vree still followed Sarlic through the cavern at Myers Ridge, Lenny took a seat at the counter in the foyer that his mom had turned into a gift shop months before her death. The digital clock behind the cash register read 9:17. The place had plenty of customers still in the dining room, except for Mr. Phillips, a night janitor at Ridgewood Hospital who was just leaving.
Mr. Phillips, bald, squat, and wearing his usual navy blue work clothes, stood at the counter and received change from Lenny’s oldest sister, Lynelle. “Delicious as usual,” he said before he shuffled out in the night
and left Lenny alone with Lynelle.
She saw him and disappeared through a doorway behind the counter. She emerged moments later with a plate of the evening special of two pork chops, a scoop of mashed potatoes and gravy, and a spoon of green beans that their father had held for him in the kitchen. She also brought him a glass of milk, which he drank greedily before attacking a pork chop.
“Chew before you swallow,” Lynelle said before wiping the countertop with a damp dishtowel she carried over a shoulder. Her long auburn hair was tied in its familiar ponytail and she wore a short-sleeved printed blouse and black Capri pants over her slim frame. She stopped cleaning and glanced at her slim gold watch. Lenny knew her on-again off-again boyfriend Henry James was coming for her at 10:30 and taking her to a late feature all the way over at the theaters at New Cambridge Mall.
“May I have some more milk?” Lenny called out, holding up his empty glass.
Lynelle took his glass and disappeared into the kitchen. When she returned with his refill, she met a thirty-something couple entering from outside. She put on her happy face and led them to the dining room. Lenny ate alone.
He thought about the curse on Myers Ridge, the one that the witch Margga had put on his great-grandparents long before his birth. He didn’t know the details, but a feud had developed between them. Margga killed his great-grandparents and was imprisoned on their property for her crime. Now, her spirit returns to the old property this time every year to kill his great-grandparents’ bloodline. So far, his mother, his father’s parents, and Gam Gam’s parents had died on July 5. And all between nine and nine thirty p.m.
He finished eating at nine thirty. Lynelle returned and took away his plate and glass, told him there was a German chocolate birthday cake upstairs on the table, and wished him a happy birthday before she entered the double doors of the kitchen and left him alone again. He left through the unmarked wooden door behind the restrooms, took the oak stairs to Lynelle’s apartment. Inside, he crossed the living room’s white shag carpet that matched most of the furniture there, and entered the kitchen where he flicked on the light inside the small cream-yellow room. A glass tin of chocolate cake sat next to a pair of glass salt and peppershakers and a glass sugar bowl on the glass table. Lenny almost tiptoed to the cake, afraid he might bump against the five-foot tall, white refrigerator along the way and knock over and break any of Lynelle’s glass animal figurines on top. Although it had been two years since he last broke anything, he dared not to risk paying to replace any of Lynelle’s expensive décor.