I was so proud of the hard work Eliza had done to make tonight special.
All of that positivity made it easy for me to concentrate on leading the ritual at hand; concentration I desperately needed. So I had allowed myself a moment to breathe and relax before reaching for the small black cauldron at the side of the altar and removing the lid. Inside there was a thick black candle and a holly wreath. Evan, Eliza, Frank and Damien took turns calling the quarters as we had done at the cabin a few months ago. When they were done, I took the holly wreath, presented it to the four corners, and lit the black candle.
"Hark!” I said, “Behold the rebirth of the King of the woodlands! Behold the Oak King, strong and vital he rises! Awake now thy mother, thy lover, thy lady. Awake now, thy Goddess of life, death, and rebirth."
A warm tingling started to rise through my belly and into my chest. Above us the night sky was clear, but a cool wind was blowing from the east. I could feel the Power charging my fingertips, racing through my veins, as if I were on the cusp of performing an act of Magick. Only that I wasn’t. At least, not any that I was aware of.
We continued with the ritual and at all times I felt as though—at any moment—Magick would come pouring out of me like a fountain and spill into the world around. I was like a dam threatening to break from excessive pressure. But I didn’t break. I said the final words and closed the circle and when we were finished with our moment of silent prayer, I stood up and walked across to Damien. He seemed perplexed by my sudden advance, until I took his face and went for his lips.
Then there was only bliss.
“Get a room, you two,” Frank said, breaking the moment.
But Damien was feeling what I had felt. His palms were shaking, quivering against my hips, as if I had somehow shared my power with him. He couldn’t say a word, only look at me dumbfounded. And he had a right to be.
In truth I didn’t know why I had just done that, but my body was on fire. I had never felt so charged during a ritual. This… was something else.
“Alright… so… dinner?” Eliza asked.
I turned to her and smiled. “Yeah, dinner.”
It wasn’t a bad idea, either. Everyone was feeling the cold, and the hunger. Me more than most. And the dinner Eliza had prepared was amazing. Seeing the spread put me in awe of Eliza’s talents, and tasting the food even more so. I couldn’t remember the last time I had a big meal like that one.
Well, I guess I could. Back home, with my folks, Christmas dinners were usually as big as this, but they came with conditions. Or, rather, lots and lots of people. The house would be filled with relatives and distant relatives. People I didn’t even know existed until I met them in person. Thing was, my dad was insistent on keeping the family together. He was like a zealot when it came to family values.
Once he even drove up to my aunt’s house—who was sick at the time—and told her to come to his dinner or else risk being uninvited from future dinners. I never knew if he was kidding of if he really did have it in him to ex-communicate certain people from family activities, but we all suspected that he did.
My dad’s age—he was the eldest of his brothers and sisters—height and girth afforded him a great deal of respect. But after my grandmother died everything changed. She was like the glue that held the family together, and my dad was the hand that put all the pieces in place. You could say that her passing freed my father of his duties to the family, if you’re a naturally positive person. Or you could say that her death allowed the family to crumble like a poorly built shelter. There really wasn’t any right way of looking at things, but the end result was the same.
So I spent the holidays here, in Raven’s Glen, with Evan and Eliza. We had celebrated Yule together before, but there were only three of us at the time and Eliza wasn’t… well, she didn’t cook much back then. I didn’t cook much either, which meant that previous Yule nights consisted entirely of store-bought produce, alcohol and bad movies. This, five people around a table enjoying a tasty meal, wasn’t something I did often; and I guess I was all the more appreciative for it.
After dinner, Evan picked up the Yule log, fit it into the fireplace, and doused it with a special batch of spiced cider before setting it alight with a piece saved from last year’s Yule Log. We sat around the fireplace, watched the log burn, drank mulled cider and listened to some of Frank’s stories; most of which were cause for laughing fits to ensue. What was most important to me, though, was that Eliza was laughing too. I was worried about that most of all, and listening to her laugh herself into a snort at one of Frank’s anecdotes put a big smile on my face. A smile that would last.
At least until I caught sight of a strange shape by the window.
I wasn’t sure what I had just seen. Maybe I had sipped a little too much spiced cider, but I couldn’t shake the sickly feeling creeping over me like a thick fog. My attention darted about, back and forth between the holiday cheer of our warm living room and the bay window to the cold outdoors. Whatever it was that I had seen wasn’t there anymore, but that didn’t leave me feeling great.
The fireplace stole my eyes, crackling and glowing. Sounds muted into each other. That’s when I glanced at the window again and saw him standing there. Tall, broad shouldered, and hooded. My heart shot into my throat. I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t. Time slowed to a crawl. I started to shake my head to break whatever spell I was in and my hearing returned, but Evan had moved into my line of sight and he was blocking the window.
I stood upright to get a look at the window, but I moved so fast I almost knocked the table over in the process and the figure was no longer there. Eyes from all directions landed on me, quizzing but quiet, and all I could do was stare at the empty window. Had he gone around the house? I needed to catch him, but I also needed to do it without seeming suspicious.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” I said, awkwardly.
Good enough.
I excused myself and crossed the living room, hurried through the open arch into the hall, and rushed for the back-door. The outside was quiet. White. Still and silent save for the breeze. I checked for footprints in the snow. Nothing. I went all around the house and found no trace of intrusion, but I had left without a jacket and the cold was starting to bite at my arms.
“Amber?” Eliza asked. She had followed me out into the front yard.
I spun on my heel. “Yes?”
“Uhm… the bathroom’s inside. I don’t own an outhouse.”
“Oh… yeah, that… I just... needed some air.”
That lie didn’t come out quite as quickly as it could have.
“Is everything okay?” she asked.
“Yeah, fine.” Only that it wasn’t. A growing dread was filling the pit of my already full stomach. Something wasn’t right
“Are you sure? Because I’ve seen this face on you and—” Eliza cut off mid-sentence and clutched her stomach.
“Eliza?” I said.
She groaned and doubled over in pain. I rushed to her side and yelled at the top of my lungs for Evan. Her knees hit the ground and her shoulders followed. Soon she was in the fetal position, clutching her belly and screaming.
Evan arrived, phone already pressed to his ear. Damien and Frank weren’t far behind. I stroked Eliza’s hair while Evan told the ambulance where to go. Her face had gone from pale and flushed to deathly pale in the space of seconds, and when she pulled her hand away from between her legs, I found the reason why.
She was bleeding.
Chapter Thirteen
I decided to go home alone that night. We followed Eliza’s ambulance in a cab all the way to the hospital and sat in the waiting room for as long as we could, but since none of us were family they wouldn’t let us in to go and see her. Evan, being the baby’s father, was the only one of us allowed to go in. That helped. But I still felt terrible. For the both of them. For Evan it wasn’t just Eliza who was in the Intensive Care Unit, it was also his unborn child.
I couldn’t relate to
that kind of pain.
She had just collapsed. None of us knew why, only that she was fine one moment and the next she was down and bleeding. One minute we were all enjoying a meal, talking and sharing, and the next minute we were worried that one of us was going to have a miscarriage. What else could it have been but a miscarriage? Would I find out tomorrow that my sister was no longer pregnant?
Gods. She looked so beautiful tonight. Radiant and full of life. How could this have just happened? I should have been paying more attention. I should have used my Magick to heal her the second she fell over. Instead I just sat there, stroking her hair because I couldn’t do anything else. I didn’t know what was wrong with her, and I didn’t want to risk hurting her more by trying to blindly heal her. I was impotent, and I would have never forgiven myself if...
But nothing did happen to her, thank the Gods.
It was a few hours before I heard news. Eliza was in critical condition, but recovering. She had lost a lot of blood but the baby, at least, was safe. Problem was that the doctor had no idea what had happened to her. They couldn’t find any internal or external lacerations, no signs of infection and no damage to the amniotic sac. The bleeding, they said, had stopped in the ambulance with no trace of how it had started. When they were satisfied that both mother and child were safe, they put her on IV fluids and kept her in the hospital overnight for observation.
Relieved as I was that she was out of danger, none of what the doctor had said sat right with me. Running the facts over in my head was like trying to shove a circle block into a squared hole. I didn’t believe in coincidences. I knew I had seen a man by the window at Eliza’s house. He was wearing a hood and I couldn’t see his face, but I knew he had crossed my path before and, more importantly, that he wasn’t Aaron. I believed, with all my heart that this man had something to do with what had happened to Eliza. Somehow, I felt—knew—that this specter was responsible. But I didn’t have anything else to go on. He was a ghost.
How does one track down a ghost?
A ghost.
Aaron.
When I spoke to him the other day he had said weird things were happening to him at home, that he thought he was being haunted by a ghost. I knew now he wasn’t the only hooded man I had seen skulking around town—especially in the areas I happened to be in and at the time I happened to be in them—but he hadn’t mentioned having seen any others, so I thought a little investigating was in order. Besides, I wasn’t going to be getting any sleep tonight anyway.
So I got out of bed, dashed across my cold living room, grabbed my laptop, and raced back into the warmth of my duvet. A quick Google search for “hooded man hauntings” gleaned about as much information as could have been expected. That is, way too much of it and none of it useful. Narrowing down the search helped, at least a little, but I couldn’t find any articles about dead bodies that had been found wearing hooded jackets.
The search seemed futile. Hours passed. But then I found something.
Buried in the archives of a message board which hadn’t seen use since internet was first commercialized, judging by the shitty web design and lack of new entries, I found a series of posts. The, as I read them, entries told the story of a woman—the author of the posts—who believed she was under attack by the devil.
I read them all. It must have taken me almost an hour to get through them. Coffee helped.
“Shit,” I said, for no reason other than to hear my own voice spoken aloud.
Her accounts were graphic, and twisted. I almost couldn’t absorb a lot of what she said had happened to her, and couldn’t understand why she would put something so private and ghoulish up on the internet, but it seemed to me that she needed help. She was clearly a troubled woman.
She had no kids and had married twice, though both of her husbands had died on her. A few weeks after her second husband met his fate thanks to a head on collision with an eighteen wheeler she started to believe he hadn’t really ever left. She would hear knocks and bumps, whispers in the night, that kind of thing. The woman hadn’t gone out and bought an Ouija board, hadn’t gotten in touch with a spirit medium, and hadn’t bought any specialist paranormal investigation equipment to try and listen to the voice of her late husband.
All she did was talk to her empty room.
At night she would sit in bed and tell her dead husband about her day, pretend he was in the room by snuggling into his pillow—which still held his scent—and letting herself drift off to sleep with his image in her mind. She would also leave an open book on his side of the bed and occasionally turn the page for him; he was a reader, and she reveled in the fantasy that he could still read the pages even from beyond the grave.
Soon, the knocks and bumps in the night weren’t scary at all, but comforting. It was, to her, as if he had never left, and she was happy with her new living arrangement. It got to the point where she was convinced that her husband would come back one day; that he would just walk through the front door if she wished for it hard enough.
But, as these things had a tendency to do, everything took a turn for the worst.
One night, while reading with her husband, she heard a knocking coming from her window. She approached but didn’t open it. The woman said she felt an impulse to turn on the backyard light, so she did, and there was someone standing there. By her accounts it was her husband, but her description of that man gave me the sensation of spiders crawling on my skin. My cup of coffee went cold before I could move again.
She had described, almost exactly, the man I had been seeing; the man wearing the hooded jacket.
The woman invited him in thinking it was her husband because, why wouldn’t she? She was dreaming. Of course she was dreaming. The woman knew that much. But how could she say no to holding and loving her husband one last time? It was after that night that her life changed. Her job, family, and physical health deteriorated as if they had been, one by one, thrown off a cliff. Sleep became impossible, the ability to hold food down was a luxury, and—of course—her house came alive most nights with terrible voices, knocks, and bumps.
The rest, I didn’t want to think about.
“Shit, shit, shit,” I said.
Dawn was approaching. The swallows were beginning to sing and, slowly, Raven’s Glen was starting to wake up. I, however, was up and ready to go. I couldn’t remember the last time I had been awake this early where I didn’t need to go to class or work, but I didn’t have to work, nor did I have to go to class.
I had the whole day ahead of me. A day for answers. A day for Magick. It was early, but I picked up my phone and called the one person I knew would answer my call no matter what time of the day or night it was.
“Amber?” asked the croaky voice on the other end of the line.
“Hey,” I said, “Are you free?”
Today was a day for Aaron.
Chapter Fourteen
The hour or so I spent waiting for Aaron to arrive went by in a blink. I must have spent a lot of my time glued to the laptop screen because I was snapped out of some kind of deep trance by the sound of Aaron’s knocks against the front door. I closed the laptop before answering.
Aaron’s vitality hit me like a warm summer’s breeze. His cheeks were flushed red, his hair was clean, and the beard had been trimmed to light stubble. Wow. A few days ago he looked like a bum on the side of the street; unkempt, needy and sickly. Today he reminded me of the man was before we… stopped being whatever we were; tall and strong and handsome. But the tiredness clung to him, still. It was in his eyes, in his slumped shoulders, and in his voice.
“Hey,” I said, stepping aside to let him in. “You look… better.”
“Thanks,” he said, “You too.”
I didn’t look great. I knew I had bags under my eyes and I wasn’t wearing any makeup to cover it up, but whatever. I wasn’t trying to impress him.
“How have things been at home?” I asked.
“I’m feeling better. The fever’s stopped but I??
?m still not able to sleep at night.”
“What’s going on?” I asked, sitting down by the kitchen table. “Things have quieted down at my place ever since we spoke, but I’m still not sleeping right. Some nights it’ll be fine, other nights I’ll wake up in pain and alert… and I’ll be ripping things up.”
For a moment it sounded like Aaron was having night terrors. I didn’t get them, but I had read about them. Night terrors weren’t anything like sleep paralysis, which is what I had suffered from a few times. A person experiencing sleep paralysis wakes up in the middle of the night unable to move or speak. Often they see demons and other strange things in their rooms and think they’re being haunted.
Night terrors were way worse.
A person stuck in the middle of a night terror wakes up screaming and kicking in the dead of night, unable to recognize what he’s saying. Sometimes they run out of the house, or they thrash around and break whatever they can find. Then when they wake up in the morning to see the destruction they have caused, they can’t remember having done any of it.
“It could be a bunch of things that’s doing this to you,” I said.
“What do you mean by things?”
“Well… you’re not crazy. In all the time we were… us… you never exhibited this kind of behavior, so I know it’s not in your head; unless you’re going through a whole lot of stress I don’t know about?”
“Stress? You mean besides the pain and the sleepless nights?”
“No, what I’m saying is that I thought maybe some other stress could be causing the pain and the sleepless nights… but it isn’t stress.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because… I just can.”
I wasn’t about to disclose my status as a real Witch who can do real Magick to Aaron. As much as it would have made things easier, I didn’t think he would have understood. He would sooner lose his mind than accept the truths I could have shown him; the truths about the invisible world that existed all around him.