“Come take a look at this,” he said.
I approached, and he was staring at a woman – she was young, maybe in her late twenties – and she, like the others, was also glassy eyed and lost in a daze. But something was different about her. A kind of pale glow shimmered around her. Not quite like a halo, but more like an aura. It was muted, pale and blue, but it was there. Not all of them had it, but she did.
“What do you think that is?” I asked.
“It is their energy,” said Madame Aishe. “The closest they have to a life force. It is the necromantic power that animates them. Us.”
“Do all ghosts have it?”
She nodded.
“So then why do some of them show it and others don’t? You don’t.”
“No,” she said, “The intelligent ones keep it hidden from the rest of us. If one can see your life force, they can steal it.”
“Steal it?”
“A ghost can consume another ghost in order to become more powerful. It is akin to cannibalism, but it is possible. If they have the power to see your aura and interact with it.”
“And they’re showing it because they can’t defend themselves,” I said. “But why?”
“Because that’s how this Shadow is staying alive while Collette dies,” Frank said. “It’s using them. Feeding off them.”
I swept the room and noted the number of ghosts with auras around them. It seemed, now, like they all had one. Seeing their auras was like seeing a planet’s atmosphere from space; a bright thin line of light tracing the body’s extremities. Some had an aura which was vibrant and fresh, while others were subdued and muted.
“It’s feeding off them slowly.” The thought alone turned my stomach inside out.
Frank nodded. “That’s what I’m getting. It’s savoring them. Rationing them. I guess they don’t all taste the same.”
“That is not it,” Madame Aishe said, waving her hand, “Their auras regenerate after a time. It is recycling them… that way, it will be able to use them indefinitely.”
“Is there a way to free them?” Frank asked. “Maybe we can wake them up or something. Maybe they can even help us!”
“I doubt it,” said Madame Aishe, “Whatever magick holds them is strong. I am simply happy it has not also affected me.”
I stared at the woman ghost before us. She was pretty, and I couldn’t see any distinguishing marks on her body. I guess I thought the wounds they died with would show somewhere, but I was wrong. Or maybe her wounds were internal. Maybe she hadn’t suffered any wounds before dying. I didn’t know. All I knew is that I had to get her out. Her and everyone else trapped in this mansion.
“All magick can be countered,” I said.
Frank checked me a look. “Listen, witch, I know you’re going to get all gung ho about this, but do you have any idea what you’re going to do?”
“I’ll carry them out one by one if I have to. Maybe if we get them far enough away it’ll break the spell.”
“Shake enough of them loose, and the Shadow will starve,” said Madame Aishe, all wide eyed with excitement.
I nodded. “That’s the plan.”
“And just how are we going to get all of these people out? There’s gotta be fifty or sixty of them in here. You think the Shadow’s just going to let us walk out of here with them?”
“No,” I said, “Shit, Frank, I don’t know. But it’s all we have.”
Frank, now, nodded too although it took him a moment to muster the gesture. Was it… fear… I saw on his face, now? I wasn’t used to seeing Frank afraid. I couldn’t remember the last time I had even seen him afraid. Certainly not earlier on with the spiders. That wasn’t fear. But his brows were furled, now, and his leer was gone. His lips were thin, eyes narrow. More than once I caught him looking over his shoulder.
“You are not used to so much death,” said Madame Aishe.
Frank turned to her. “I’m alive, so… no.”
“It would do you well, then, to see these people as alive. They were once, after all.”
“I guess you’re right.”
“Stand back,” I said.
Frank stepped away, urging Madame Aishe to move back with a gentle nudge of his hand.
I surveyed the room and took a quick guess of the number of people in here. Fifty sounded about right. That gave me an idea of the kind of power I would need to use. I closed my eyes and took a breath, clenched my palms into fists and allowed the Power to work through me. Buzzing tingles sent my skin flying into a frenzy of goose flesh as I steadily concentrated on producing more power, more energy.
I wouldn’t move them one by one – they would all go at once.
When I opened my eyes I thought I had lost a foot in height. Only it wasn’t that at all. The ghosts surrounding me were floating, now. Levitating a clear foot off the ground. They were all floating!
Frank stared on in awe. His jaw would have dropped all the way through the wooden floor if it weren’t attached to his skull. “Alright,” he said, throwing his hands up in defeat, “Yours is bigger than mine. You win.”
The slightest knock to my concentration could’ve caused my magick to come crashing down like a house of cards, but it held. And it held strong. I could feel it oozing out of me in waves, pulses that travelled all across the length of the massive room. I felt like I could’ve ripped the whole damn mansion out of its foundations and lifted it up to the world of the living if I wanted to.
I turned my head up to the ghost woman to my left and pictured her floating toward the front door behind the rest of her… people. Using only the power of my mind, visualizing what I wanted to happen in my head and then willing it to be real, I spun the woman with a huge, invisible finger, and nudged her in the back so that she would float.
She moved, and so did the others.
They were moving! At the edge of my senses I felt for the front door to the mansion and swung it open, despite being far enough away that the distance between me and the door would have left me a little out of breath if I tried to run for it. Frank and Madame Aishe began to walk behind the ghost woman who had been closest to me, and I followed the three of them, watching the catatonic phantom as she drifted listlessly across the room.
But then the ghost stopped floating. It was as if my magick no longer had a hold on her, or my power had been overridden by a stronger power. She craned her neck around with an awful snap, eyes glaring with hate and rage, and that single terrifying movement caused my concentration to shatter into a million pieces.
CHAPTER 23
A shrill, terrified scream escaped my lungs.
The ghosts had dropped to the ground and turned on us. In an instant the room erupted in a cacophony of inhuman hisses and howls. Deafening. I had to grab hold of my ears to stop the pitch from piercing my ear drums, but hot blood was already flowing. It spilled out into the palms of my hands and trickled down my wrists, warm and sticky.
I couldn’t hear, but I could run – and hell if I did.
Ghosts in the underworld, it seemed, conformed to the laws of physics. That was comforting. For a moment I imagined them leaping into the air and floating across the room toward us, descending from the skies like crows to peck at our eyes. But they didn’t.
Frank was ahead of me, Madame Aishe behind me, and being that the ghosts were halfway to the front door before my spell broke, we ran toward the back of the room. Frank reached for the nearest door beneath the veranda and yanked it open.
I ran through and emerged on the other side into a carpeted hallway. The lights –they were lights this time, not candles – along the walls were flickering wildly, punctuating our escape in strobes of yellow light. At the end of the short hall I took a hard right into what looked like an external wing. One side, my left, was lined with windows which led to nowhere.
“Run!” I heard Frank say.
Down the hall, running past the featureless windows, their curtains fluttering with the backdraft I caused as I went. I was aware that
, behind me, Frank and Madame Aishe were running. I didn’t think to stop and look, but I knew it was them. I didn’t have to look. What I had to do was find a way out.
We had a head start on the ghosts but I was certain they were after us, and as I recalled the way the woman’s neck turned around and the look on her face, I decided I didn’t want them to catch me. I didn’t know what would happen to me if they caught me. Would they pummel me to death? Maybe. Eat me? Did ghosts eat? I supposed that some of them did, or at least they pretended to, remembering in the instant between breaths, what I had seen back at the tavern in Missington; ghosts eating and drinking fire water at the bar. But these ghosts weren’t pretending. They were under the Shadow’s spell. If it wanted them to eat us, they would.
A hard right came up and I took it, and I came face to face with the long hallway leading to the front of the house. The front door was open and the coast was clear, so I bolted as fast as my legs would take me. My heart hammered against my chest, ears burned from the pain of the screams and howls of the dead, but I ran and ran and ran until… I realized that the hall was stretching.
It was stretching!
I was inside a nightmare, running as fast as my body would allow but getting nowhere. Worse, Frank and Madame Aishe were behind me, and they too noticed the stretching.
“What the fuck is going on?” I said, heaving.
“It’s playing a trick on us!” Frank said, “We have to fight it!”
Fight it? With what?
The PA system crackled and moaned and that dreadful voice came through. It was laughing.
“How do you like my little abode, little dears?” it asked. “I trust you have had time to consider my offer?”
Running seemed pointless, now. The hall wasn’t getting any smaller and I had no idea how to fight the shadow’s magick. Was I supposed to fight shadow with shadow or banish the shadow with light?
“How long before you tire?”
“Fuck you!” I said, snarling. “Why don’t you come out and face us?”
“Not until you have given me your answer.”
Linezka. It knew. Somehow, it knew. Maybe it was more a part of Collette than I had thought, like a Siamese twin or a symbiont.
Or a parasite.
“We’re done playing your games,” Frank said, “You don’t have the power to bring the dead back to life any more than you can kill us outright.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure,” said the voice. “I may not have the power to bring the dead back to life or kill you outright yet… but I don’t need to do the latter for myself.”
At that moment, I sensed something. A chill ran down my spine like a hundred tiny spiders. It was as if I had picked up on a burst of emotion so powerful I felt it even without looking for it.
Anxiety?
I turned my head and searched Frank and the gypsy’s faces, but neither of them seemed to be the source. At least not to me. Was it the Shadow, then? Was it anxious? And if so, about what?
“Show yourself,” I said again, “I won’t talk to the air but I’ll talk to you.”
For a moment silence fell, and in the silence I could see Frank’s eyebrows curl inward, questioningly. The gypsy, too, seemed puzzled by my sudden change of heart.
The moment lingered, and in the silence I was able to catch my breath, to touch the Power at the core of my soul and tap it as if to ready it. Then a door opened to the left of me and I damn near jumped out of my skin.
The door was brown and covered in the same wallpaper as the rest of the hall. No wonder I hadn’t seen it. Didn’t seem to have a door-knob, either. I suspected it was one of those doors you had to push into until it clicked before it would open. A secret door. But its mouth was dark and ominous, and I had no idea where it led.
A trap, maybe. Its lair, possibly. I didn’t think the Shadow was stupid enough to not have a contingency in mind, should I decide to attack, though. It knew who I was, after all. Knew I was the red witch. Wherever the dark passageway led was its domain. I would be no better off down there than I was up here. The choice was obvious.
I moved toward the door.
“You’re not thinking about going down there, right?” Frank asked.
“I have to,” I said, looking over my shoulder. “Collette is dying. For all I know she’s already dead.”
“She isn’t,” the gypsy said, “Have faith, and we will make it through this.”
I nodded. As long as I had friends beside me I knew I would be ok. Damien and Frank had followed me all the way into the underworld, despite their stunted ability to do magick. For a witch, that was like stepping out into a cold winter street without clothes.
And still, here they were. Here Frank was. Tall and lanky and, for lack of a better word – impotent – but here all the same. And then there was the gypsy, who could have easily stayed in Missington and forgotten this whole thing, but she risked her life, her second chance at existence, for me and for Collette.
I turned toward the open black maw and stepped inside.
The darkness was total. I had to feel with my hands for the walls to keep me steady as I descended down a flight of stairs to which I couldn’t see an end. I turned my neck up and saw the gypsy’s shadow breaking the light coming from the hall. She took a few steps down too. But before Frank’s comforting silhouette could break the light pouring through the opening the door slammed shut and we were plunged into an even thicker, more complete darkness.
It wasn’t just the absence of light. It was the absence of sound, air, and feeling. It was the absence of life.
“Frank!” I said, but he couldn’t hear me. “Madame, are you there?”
Maybe I hadn’t spoken at all, only thought that I had. What if the door I had stepped through wasn’t a door into a basement at all, but rather into some under layer of the underworld? A dark space within the darkest of places.
But I had spoken, because the gypsy had heard me, and replied. “I am here,” she said.
“Thank the Gods,” I said, “Can you get the door open?”
“No,” she said.
“We have to get out of here. Now. We can’t just leave Frank out there on his own. He’s defenseless!”
“And in here,” the gypsy said, “So are you.”
In one fluid movement the gypsy pressed the heel of her shoe into my chest and pushed hard. I could feel myself tipping over, my arms pin wheeling back in a desperate attempt to balance my imminent fall, but I couldn’t stop what was about to happen. I never got the chance to see the steps rise up to greet my face, shoulder and back as I collapsed down them like a rag doll, but I felt the pain of every last knock. Hot and sharp, stiff. I saw stars. And when I hit the ground I blacked out.
Or at least I thought I did.
In the darkness of the cellar I had fallen into it would have been impossible to tell whether your eyes were open or closed. But as the moments passed I became aware that the world around me was spinning. The shadows around me began to shift and move just as the real world would after taking such a tumble.
I tried to sit up but my body was wracked with pain. Every joint, every muscle in my body felt like it had been softened with a mallet as a butcher might tenderize a cut of beef.
Then a light clicked on above my head. It buzzed and glowed dim and orange. And in the light I saw the gypsy, staring at me from the top of the stairs. Only she wasn’t glassy eyed like the rest of the ghosts in the mansion. Her movements were lucid, intelligent, and she looked every bit the same person she had been the whole time we had known her. She had chosen to do this to me.
I thought back to that night when the mad Sheriff had tied me up and thrown me in the back of his car. I didn’t suspect him of being capable of doing what he did and never really learned the reasons why he did it, but I saw much of him in her eyes. That same desperate look shone through her face like a beacon.
A figure broke my line of sight and my eyes were pulled to it. To her. Her.
It was Collette.
CHAPTER 24
No, it wasn’t Collette. It couldn’t be.
The French Necromancer was with Damien, away from the house and outside of the Shadow’s influence. At least, this was my hope. I could have laughed at how my mind prioritized the wellbeing of my coven over my own. Here I was, in a dark, dank cellar, hurt, betrayed, and face to face with a powerful entity—which looked remarkably like Collette—and all I could think about was Damien, Frank, and, of course, Collette.
“Bonjour,” she said, “That was quite a tumble.”
Struggling against the pain, I put all of my effort and magick into an upward thrust that sent me hurtling to the other side of the room and on my feet. I turned, opened my palm, and raised it toward the Shadow, alternating between aiming my imaginary weapon at the ghost and the shadow.
“Such power,” said the Shadow, “You truly are an impressive specimen, red witch. Even here, in the depths of the underworld, your power flourishes; unaffected by death’s draining energies.”
She wasn’t entirely right. I felt like I could collapse at any moment. My body ached, my mind felt like wet cake and I just wanted to go home and sleep, but I couldn’t. I had to stand and fight. Show no weakness.
“Was this your plan?” I asked, “To trick me into separating from my friends?”
She shook her head. “Your friends were of no consequence,” she said, “But I wanted to make sure you and I could have a conversation without distractions.”
“And your lackey? She’s a distraction.”
“Again, she is of no consequence. A pawn in this game.”
“So why don’t we skip to the end part and we finish this game so that I can help my friend?”
“Collette?” she asked, waving her hand in a dismissive gesture. “She is no friend of yours, red witch. She is a Necromancer. A black witch. She’s using you for your power.”