...Waits In The Dark

Quietly, with anxiety sharp as spearheads, I carried out the operation. Shovelful by shovelful, I covered the manifestation of my transgressions. Under the stars, in the quiet swamps. I buried her where no man treads. Some local superstitions, nonsense mythologies invented by long dead Indians,  scared off the yokels. It's the perfect place, because the ground is soft enough to dig in, with enough tree limbs and decomposing foliage to create a solid netting to cover the hole.The difficult terrain kept wandering vehicles from happening by. Moving across the swamp pulled a few muscles in my back.

Once I filled the hole, I covered the work with decomposing, plum colored leaves and fallen branches. I finished, but something in my mouth bothered me. An abscess between two molars. It felt like a small pinprick. I poked the sore gum with my tongue. A faint fever warmed my forehead, but in the late autumn night such conditions comforted me. I went back into the car. I almost lost my mind as i frantically searched my pockets. I forgot to take the keys- but then I found them on the floor! I leaned back in the seat, relieved. I turned on the engine, the lights, and took it slow. The mud road clung to the tires. The pistons screeched. The wheels spun, but the car barely moved.  I worried about the tires succumbing to the mud but the vehicle passed along.  In the cold, the mud stiffened, like rising cake.

The mud became rocky dirt with patches of weeds, and this rocked the car until I cross an old iron bridge. The county name, Alma, at the crown. A Meadowlark nested in the hole of the A. The creek beneath hummed in the night, the yokels said.  Crippled souls of the dead wander blind, and crawl into this creek, and once they fall in, they can not crawl out- only moan in despair. The yokels came up with entertaining fables. I stopped in the middle of the bridge, and turned the heat on. I let my numb fingers thaw. I huddled over driver side vent. The others broke. I shivered in my coat, the fox hair that warmed the collar looked like a new color all together. I brushed it with my fingers and found them painted with red streaks. I kept the jacket on the way out. Looking over the barrier, peering down into the creek. Nothing but darkness, with music of running water clear. One small splash, and some bubbles floating, but no wailing of ghosts in white sheets. I took the coat off. Flushed with bitter winds, freezing ropes winding around every bone. Shivering, teeth chattering, holding my breath, I dropped the coat down for those trapped souls below to keep cozy with.

I drove farther more, until the road smoothed out, and lights from the nearest village speckled in the distance. I turned my lights off. In case anyone saw me driving the car. I kept moving slow, slower than the speed limit mandates. Once the road became gravel, other cars came by. I pulled over for them, and let them pass. Then I started again and continued to her home. A quiet farm house, all to myself.

I parked the car in the garage, closed it. Entered the house, and made sure not to leave my shoes on the mat, and not to turn on a single light. Moon light guided me through the unfamiliar chambers and halls of the house. Not as big as I imagined, but clean, spacious, and comfortable. Not a single locked door.

When I found the bedroom I wasted no time dropping my mud splattered shirts on the floor and laying down. My tooth ached still, and after all the work I carried out, my skin dried to stale flakes- I thirsted for something sweet, but weariness wrapped velvet ribbons around me and pulled me in. I lay in bed, the fever and the cold air made for cool sweat that my hair and pillow soaked.  Yet no sleep came. I climbed up, so weary, so tired, my limbs strained and numbed, my eyes watery. To the kitchen I found luck. Some alcohol, fourth of a bottle left of something brown and strong. I sat there in the fridge glow and drank the bottle. I felt tired after that. I turned on the radio, and flipped through the rural stations. I looked out the windows across the farmland. Some cattle swooned and moaned. Out standing in the star light. Docile creatures. I closed those curtains. Drunken numbness bled slow. My ribs hurt. My back hurt. My legs hurt. I thought I heard a sigh from behind me. I crept to the door in the back of the kitchen, sure my alerted senses caused by being within vicinity of an unfamiliar place. I pressed my ear against the wood. Something inside indeed sighed, something raspy sighed far past the door. I took the knob, but it twisted around freely, fixed to nothing. The furnace, of course, I rationally concluded. I felt like a comedian with no funny jokes. I left the empty bottle to drip in the sink, and I carried my drunken bones back to the stairs. I almost collapsed right there at the foot but I caught myself, and pulled along the railing. Once in the bedroom, I smacked onto the covers. I thought I smelled rain, but every star twinkled. I fell asleep at once.

I awoke with the lightning and its terrible thunder crash. Unlike any thunder I ever heard before, this thunder dropped to the earth with t full weight of the atmosphere above. Rain obscured the glass. The neighbor’s lights caught in streaming beads cast their illuminating ray into the bedroom. I reached to pull shut the curtains. But the illness drained my motor skills and heaviness amplified. My contorted, rail thin arm trembled in the pale blue of nightscape light, the bones unfurled from the rested angle to erect. My elbow joints popped, and fingers extended out like thirsty tongues lapping the window condensation. My body poisoned by a toxic cover resting over my feverish body. I lifted my head from the warm pillow, moist with sweat. My heart jackhammered in the night, my jaw throbbed. The abcess in my mouth beat like a tiny heart in the lower corner of the my jaw. At this waking moment since I collapsed back into the mattress, I believed the abscess awoke me. Its condition worsened. The pain started as a soreness when I bit down, but as this advanced state even the root beat with a rapid pulse. I lay in bed, holding my swollen jaw, dry tear ducts squeezing my eye lids, only spit dribbled from the corner of my mouth - my lymph nodes felt like bolts screwed into my neck. My mouth felt drier than wicker timber. i wiped the drool away, rolling over and finding the spit not to be my own as it tasted like a familiar mouth, one that wore minty chapstick. No names nor faces occurred to me, but the taste I recalled from my nocturnal masquerades.

The storm continued. Branches fell onto the neighbor's roof, and collected together like a beaver bam. The rain flowed in irregular patterns as if intentionally structured. I dropped my eyelids and hoped fortune favored plummeting again to sleep but sleep did not come. Despite the infection eating away at my body, I felt more awake, more alert than ever  before. I wanted to switch the lamp on, and get moving through my stack of unread manuals until the sun rose again, yet as the fork shaped veins on my forehead pressed against my skin like tremors beneath the dirt., i thought, not blood, it isn’t blood at all in my veins but but squirming, fattened parasite worms wriggling through my veins into my brain. A wedge drove between the hemispheres of my brain. The fluid thick and yellow jamming the passage of fluids and chemicals in my brain. The mucus felt like gravel in my sinuses and the whiskey headaches struck like hellish taps. The alcohol pass in my veins, and brew in my stomach like an acid vat. I rested my head knowing that my sleeping hours ended. Something foul arose from inside me, and it reached with virulent fingers from my guts up my throat where its thumb pressed against the back of my tongue. I gagged without sound, emitting guttural calls to the night, speaking insincere and incredulous prayers for my health but the damage already did its work and I mustered what spirit remained in my body and I lifted once again.

How the ceaseless replenishing need for water stimulated me to lift my aching body and sit on the edge of the bed awake in the darkness with a clock blinking, the default numerals glowed in blinking neon- 12:00. I went to sleep at midnight. Ignoring the clock, my attention drifted to the neighbor's house. The kitchen light on, as always before, with the rest of the house sleeping like nursing calves. For a brief moment i thought I saw the shadow of an occupant, and my heart leapt as I yearned to find the owner’s young daughter up for a nighttime drink, yet this shadow remained frozen on the kitchen floor. Its almost human shape broke apart with another ugly but unignorable flash of light accompanied by thunder stronger than Thor ripping a semi trailer into pieces. The lingering stammer faded into a traveling whisper then echoed back into another bomb strike of thunder that shook the bed beneath me. No lighting cast from the clouds but still the horrendous thunder hung like the hooves of approaching horsemen. My brain split and the fluid flowed inside my thoughts. Demons in the air, such twisted spirits that delight in no more than the decay of the doomed once the fluid entered my brain i did not see any doubt. I watched the storm outside wash down the glass. I opened the window expecting to hear the howl of wind but instead only the delicate showering of easy rainfall. But the clouds above still rolled, forms ever shifting, composed of fists and gnawing teeth scowling, ever roaming across the night sky driven by ethereal colts.

I gave up looking for the lovely maiden next door. My stomach swayed as a boat does on raging seas. I felt those fingertips raise over the crown of my throat. I covered my mouth, and rose to my feet, the cold wood chilling my soles. The lingering growl echoed in the sky. Dense, sticky heat and the patient metronome of the rain seeped through the window screen. Other than the clouds and ripples of dark puddles the night hung still, suspended over some endless crevasse. As the the rain spilled from the gutters and fell through the ground. The cement, roads, grass, yard, all sunken in darkness bur for rippling rings of silver in the middle of dark pools. Condensation built on the glass and all the fingerprints and blemishes reveal  themselves in random but predictable patterns.

I covered my mouth, screws scraping against the roof of my mouth and a noxious gas leaked from between my fingers.. In the dark, my foot found a sharp point- a nail sticking out from the floor or a loose screw left behind- and i cursed, holding my foot, tainted blood trickled down between the floorboards. I held my foot up but saw nothing in the pale light. I reached for the light switch waiting on my toes until i found the buttons. I pressed the switch again and again. The lights stayed off. I cursed again. I didn’t know where the fuse box was. I unbolted my door and entered the hallway, my bleeding foot leaving a trail of spots behind me as i went two doors down to the bathroom. Once inside my stomach settled and I sat in the dark, wiping blood away with tissues and dropping them in a basket. I took medicines from behind the mirror,a little bit of everything, and using my hand to collect water, I swallowed many different capsules. My body handled it well and I just waited for the drugs to take affect. I passed through the dark once more into the kitchen, where I watched the neighbor's house and drank four full cups of water. Still my mouth and lips dried like paper. I passed through the dark once more following my own blood trail back to the bedroom.

I locked the door, and stepped carefully, sitting on the foot of the bed, the bleeding ceased, but the sickness remained every bit and more so. Sweat trickled down my body and as I lay back into the sweat moistened mattress, I imagined myself in a petri dish of septic bacteria, a doctor’s great eye peering down from the microscope. My fluids swirled, the pain in my mouth awoke and stabbed an icepick between my molars. I waited, the alcohol losing its numbing agent. I never longed for sleep more. I watched time move like a rusted raw. I must’ve been deathly ill. I saw another great eye shift across the wall opposite my bed. I law powerless as the lightning erased the moving shadow and as the whiplash of light died to celestial vapor, more dancing shadows twisted and wove between each other like stitchwork of a ruined aristocratic tapestry. Such wonders the shadows bore to me, formless yet striking, paralysing, and near hypnotic. The lighting flashed, and the shadows scattered like cockroaches only to reform under a new network of patterns and motions- assembling into more defined visions. Such curious creatures appeared- things I never saw before nor imagined could be. I welcomed the poison of whiskey and the delusion of illness if only these sights happened more often. I reached out to these dancing demons as I did the shadows jumped back away from my soft, untoned reach offered, not to be taken, but left to drop once more. I rolled over to see the outside world again.

Through the screen, seeping down the window sill, dripping onto the floor. Rainwater spilled out, seeping into the gaps between the boards and racing down in dark lines. I choked back complaints, my medicine doing nothing for me, rolling from bed the sweat stained sheets clinging to me like pine needles. I closed the window. The vents blew cold air. The chilling numbed my exposed flesh. The condensation on the glass thicked, and in a rush of alarm I noticed a new pattern not there when i saw before. Two hand prints, with slender knives for fingers. I wiped away the condensation. It all came off but for the dual prints. For they came from outside. Then i noticed standing idle in the neighbor's kitchen light, what i believed to see before, not the lovely young daughter, but a cloaked and hooded figure watching from outside the kitchen window under its bronze, fluorescent beam. I hid back in, a sudden shock, a sudden horror- the awful feeling that this figure not only saw me, but made and maintained eye contact from the distance. This terror gripped my heart, and festered, as worried more that it mistook my curiosity as welcome.

I closed the window, bolting it closed and closing the curtain, leaving the room in pitch blackness, i moved to the door to check that I locked it tight. I covered myself with blankets and sheets. Only dreams, only the dark- I lay watching the dark, my eyes on the trench black wall opposite my bed. Nothing flickered. Not a hair moved on my body. Then I heard it, that sighing again- but now unmuffled by concrete walls. A much clearer, identifiable sound emerged. A shovel striking the earth. The soft impact penetrating the raw soil, and ripping it apart. That tearing of dirt as the iron wedge bites through. That sound, I knew it damn well by then. I laid still. I locked my door before. The structure solid African Mahogany boards, fastened with three steel bolts that lock on the inside. The sound, I listened carefully, real as my breath, but coming from outside- where I saw it stand. For sure, I felt it still there causing that horrid boring. I lay with eyes quiet and ears shut. Every little sound I bit and swallowed and they made sound no more. Any sound I ignored, the chirp of grasshopper, the bending of beams in the ceiling, the scraping of dust in the vent, but the burrowing remained-  but now it sounded no sharper, and no nearer, but now the sound of the bleeding gums, scoop after scoop, came not from outside- but from above. In the attic. I heard for real the reverberation against the ceiling above me.

Water splashed against my nose and cheeks. I rose, and elt behind me to find everything I touched, wet. I ran my hands up. Streams leaks down the headrest. I put my foot down, and found the the puddle below my window flowing outward as liquid does but then it narrowed and snaked towards my bedside, blimbing the posts and dripping down the headrest. I tore the sheets and blankets away, casting them to the floor, then i pulled the mattress off, flipping it over to the floor and finding it soaked through. Once the mattress lay on the floor, my anger settled to exhausted humiliation. I felt gratified that no one stood to see my tantrum. I sat on the box spring, unsure what to do next.

Then i saw what looked like slow swimming on the opposite wall, the subtle shifting… as if a piece of the darkened wall silently bent and moved on its own.

A long, drawn out sound like the retraction of a lawnmower choke drawn up from the bowels of my throat and out my trembling mouth. Stitch by stitch, my composure gave way to utter anguish. The wall moved. I saw it! The figure into the corner, how with its yellow fox eyes like a rifle round locked and ready to discharge. Though it knew damn well my condition worsened, it did not strike. It stood in the corner, picking at its lower lip, i could hear the elastic snap, standing, waiting, and in my horror I lay frozen, realizing that this spectre waited there since I last locked the door waiting and whispering. The horrid appearance- her pale skin masked with those plum rotten leaves and a coat of mud.

The alarm clock digits faded and the neighbor's light did too, fatally dissipating under a tide of darkness. Thunder crashed without lightning. I noticed the storm already passed over, yet the charge of electric power striking the earth shook the house, and I did not mistake voices in these cannon raptures destroying ramparts in the sky. I clung to the boxspring as it rocked across the floor. Cracks ruptured the dry wall, support beams under the floor dropped and crashed, leaving dipped and sinking parts of the floor. Gases arose from the holes and cracks, buzzing like flies, tiny material, a thousand little monsters floated within. The gas rose and I breathed it in. The shadow creatures on the wall peeled away, and I heard them crawl across the floor towards me.

The last fragments of light I reached for, my fingers extending to touch one ring of light but desperate reac missed the light died away like the closing of  a well and i now saw nothing but felt my body stew in a soup of own infection. The wall, the darkness, the clouds, the awful expressions of malice, vengeance, spellbinding majesty! Beneath me an ocean of green foam over tumbling waves crash. I will not roll away from my bed, soaked in poison or not. Those demons I see yet. They creep into the darkness after me, their burning eyes and seeping claws hook into my weakened body. Piece by piece, I feel it all coming apart, my feet, my fingers, my arms, my organs. She watches me still as I suffer, she waits for the final lasp of strength. For the last demon to take its mouthful. Then I will be in her hands, when I am rendered crippled and helpless. Those heavy, wet footsteps- each one squishing and leaving behind muddy prints. She holds out for me as I shiver, my dripping wet coat.

Bequested

Featured in Midnight Magazine Issue 1

The funeral ended once Grandma’s casket went down. Four of her children each went to the eldest son’s home afterwards. Two of their own children quietly stayed with them as the siblings sat in the dark lounge, all of them thinking the same thing, but no one wanting to say a word of it. The parents sent the two kids outside to play with the others. The bored and docile children did as commanded. The clock ticked, but the eldest son never wound it. It’s accuracy only a shadow of time's likeness.

The eldest son did not attend the funeral. No one saw him that day. They sat there in silence as children played outside in the late evening. A moth batted against the window. The youngest son poured wine for his two sisters and other brother. No one asked for any but their lips quivered for the bitter red anyhow. He dropped back into his seat causing the headrest to knock against the wall. He left his own glass empty.

            “It belongs to us anyway”. The youngest said, “us” being the children from Grandma’s second marriage.

“There’s no reason to fight over it now. The dress is buried with her.” His sister said.

The youngest leaned forward. A duplicitous glimmer shone in his eye that went unnoticed by all but for the eldest sister who swore a rude remark about the youngest’s past convictions, and the four of them once again erupted in argument. They pointed fingers and blamed each other for the manner in which grandma died. Hanging herself in the stairwell where she drooped for a week until meals-on-wheels came to deliver to her farm side home. The estranged nature of the siblings only made the tension fiercer. None cared to visit Grandmother much, and each sibling made cause for the other’s responsibility in the matter. “I wanted to send her to a home!” “Why couldn’t she live with you?” “All you care about is that damn dress!”

Then the eldest sibling came through his front door. The fighting continued until he demanded that everyone keep their gums still and listen to what he had to say.

“And where were you?” One of the middle kids condemned.

“Shut up and I’ll tell you. It’s about Mom.” He pulled out a yellow stained envelope with delicate cursive address. It read: “To be read upon my death”. The eldest held it for them to see.

“I found this note in her old house. I’ve been reading it and re reading it... I don’t know what it means.”

“What does it say? Is it about any inheritance? A secret lover?” the siblings conjectured.

“Everyone, be quiet- I’ll read it you all. Please, just be quiet and let me read it…”

“Dear children, have mercy on me for the time I’ve spent delaying this confession. With every angel as my witness I believe that keeping those days secret is best for everyone, but every day of every year I wanted to tell someone but fought to keep it safe under a rug, locked away in a secret cell where no one could find out the truth. No one ever asked about the Conjurer. No one knows what he did. Once my parents died, few knew I even grew up in the river lands outside of Elkhead. The friends that I wanted to disclosed this to are now dead. Whichever child or grand child of mine is reading this, I swear on my soul that this is the truth.

Our family farmed a modest strip of land. At ten years old, I dreamed of wonderful things. A famous person comes through to take me away. A star streaming from the sky falls in our backyard. One of the old, fat pigs maybe lifts from the ground and flys away. Maybe the rain is golden. Maybe the army drops an A-bomb and we can see the fiery light for miles. But nothing astonishing ever seemed to happened.

I read about the circus, and the theatre, but magicians fascinated me most of all. I practiced card tricks and making things disappear behind sheets, much to the stern revolt of Olka and Hildeman. Both maintained pious beliefs and never failed to attend Sunday service, Thursday service, Easter and Christmas service. When Hildeman caught me using a stick as a wand, he took it from me and used it to whip my the back of my thighs until they bled. I still practiced in secret, usually at night, or when I played outside alone. Same for many of the idle joys they perceived as “dark arts”. When I suggested to Olka that we pay off the farm by turning horse shoes into gold by spell I received a backhand across the cheek that I never forgot to this day because her wedding ring split openthe corner of my lip. This penalty scarcely frightened me from the wondrous, so I went beyond the tree line to the dry creek bed to practice my tricks in secret. My doll served as my assistant, as well as my audience. I looked into it’s button eyes, and said the magic words “Hocus pocus. Come to life!” and it fell from the branch I sat it on to the dirt. I brushed the dust from my doll’s red curls, and decided that I needed to learn real magic. When the Conjurer came, I got my chance.

When news arrived of a traveling magic show coming to Elkhead I begged my father to take me. He went to town on Thursdays anyhow, but he insisted I go finish my chores. But except for watering the apple saplings, I did all my chores early. He took me with him to town, provided I water the trees when we got back to the farm. On the way the longest train in the world passed through, and we waited until the uncountable carts raced by. When we got there we found only oil stains from their cars fresh on the pavement. The magicians already left. I cried the whole ride home.

Behind the barn lay our garden where the apple trees grew. I nourished them with buckets of water from the well. After I watered the second tree, I smelled sweet smoke and heard faint music. I stood still, and listened closely until I recognized the sound of a rainstick emerging from the summer wind- though at the time I never heard a rainstick before. My imagination went wild with possibilities. I dropped the bucket and followed the smoke, taking my doll along past the tree line. The promising scent of cinnamon spice grew stronger. The rattle grew louder. A faint tail of smoke rose from the dry creek. I wandered through the tall grass until I stood on the lip above the creek bed. There I saw him in front of an open tent sorting items on a blanket into wooden chests. A cairn burned between him and I. From behind the smoke he gazed with old souls clouding his eyes, solemn cheeks pondering distant ages, his hair and beard white with black streaks, neatly clipped and combed. Strange foreign rags draped his back. When he saw me climbing into the creek bed from the other side of the fire he bowed in greeting.

“Good evening, young lady. What is your name?”

I told him my name.

“Such battered eyes! What makes you cry?”

“I missed the magic show.”

“Come into my tent then,” he stepped aside, speaking as a doctor does about urgent treatment. “I have something for everyone. Especially for young magicians.”

The Conjurer held the flap open for me. I hugged my doll and entered the shade of his canopy. On the first table I saw an assortment of junk. A typewriter, old knives, unlabeled bottles of dark fluid. “Stay away from those,” the Conjurer instructed. “These are the cursed items I’ve collected.” Nothing on that table interested me until me mention cursed. I turned to other items with a fresh intrigue. Some books written in ugly languages, models of shipwrecks and ruined castles in glass bottles, a tiny guillotine, a ceramic cat with far too human eyes, a microscope that caused examined cells to die. At last I saw something that enticed me. A long black wand with a white tip.

The Conjurer saw my eyes widen, and he held the wand for me to take. When I grabbed it, cold tingles crept my my arm and down my spine. I bit my upper lip at the feelings.

“I have many magic items here.” he said, and showed me the tarot cards and the crystal balls, a top hat with a hidden compartment for a rabbit, a box that split in half. I wanted them all, but the Conjurer explained. “Some magic is real. These are parlor tricks. Hoodoo. Pseudo sciences. None are real magic…. But this wand is.”

He showed me by waving it over my head. A shower of golden dust rained onto the ground and burned out like sparks. By thrusting towards the ceiling, rainbow light projected from the tip and spread across the canopy. He held it horizontally and a scroll of paper rolled down. When he tore the paper away, a small flock of birds flew out from behind. I wanted to see more, so I told him to enchant my doll. He took it, scratched his beard, and tapped the doll with with the wand. The doll jumped from his hand to the ground, landing on its feet. I clapped and squalled. The doll bent his arms and legs, losing its balance and flopping on the dirt like a fish. I laughed so hard that I lost my breath. The doll flipped until it found itself back on its feet, then it lept for the guillotine, inserted its head, and pulled the chain. The blade fell and the doll’s head fell into a tiny basket.

The conjurer scooped up the body and the head.

“Somethings are lifeless that should live. Somethings are alive that should be dead.” He apologized to the doll and said to me “Please, take any doll you like.”

On the top of a shelf I saw three dolls. One made up of what looked like tumbleweed. The other wore a flat hat and had no mouth or eyes. The last one I wanted the moment I saw it. With green mop hair and a purple coat that covered her body from the neck down just like my grandma used to wear. The coat burned with my grandma when her house burned down the year before. I couldn’t believe it. The doll smiled at me like newborn. Rosy cheeks, shining eyes, without saying a word, I took the doll from the shelf.

“My little rascal! That doll is unlike any you’ve seen before. You must make sure that no neglect befalls it. Just like a special pet, you must take good care of it. And keep it ever accompanied.”

“Can you teach me real magic?” I felt I understood his warning, but I only concerned myself with this possibility though I hardly believed he’s agree.

“Yes. I can. Just one spell. Then you must get home.”

He led me to some trees behind the tent. “If you ever lose the doll, perform this spell, and it will come to you. However this doll has quite the personality. If she sees something she likes, she may take it along with her.”

I laughed at this idea. Excitement burned within me as he ran his fingers through the mop of hair and plucked a single strand of green fabric. He explained to me that one must speak loudly and clearly into a source of flowing air- wind, a fan, a vent- the words Veni vitae exitus mortis. I still remember them because they stayed on the tip of my tongue for weeks. He took the green fiber, ripped it in half, swallowed the strands, and said the magic words. The doll lept from my arms down to the feet of the Conjurer where he picked her up and handed her back to me. The doll hung lifeless once more in my grasp, but it felt so mortal to me.

I left with the doll, and looked back three or four times as I went back home. I wanted to remain there, but once home, I looked back. No smoke, no music. A piece of me knew the Conjurer left at once, but I never knew why he came, where he came from, or where he went afterwards. But I had the doll, and a magic spell with which to play with her. I was the happiest I’d ever been. No Christmas present ever brought me the joy of my doll and the magic that lived within her. I named her Charm Princess.

We played on the farm until Olka rang the dinner bell. I held onto her the entire time because I was afraid that she would run away. I didn’t dare test the spell in the daylight. If either of them found me, I’d be punished- or worse, they take Charm Princess away from me.

I carried my doll in with me- the two of us covered in dirt from our playing. Olka sat me down, and served Hildeman and I dinner. Then she asked where I got the doll from. Hildeman failed to notice the doll until Olka mentioned her. He directed a rigid glance at Charm Princess.

“Such an ugly thing.” Olka said. “What happened to the doll your aunt made for you?”

“I dropped it…” I was a terrible liar. My head sunk, and I spoke quietly. “And a nice stranger gave me a new one.”

“Strangers come up this way?” Hildeman’s eyebrows bent into arrow points when his brow furled.

“It was along the bridge. That’s where I dropped the doll.”

“I thought you were watering the apple trees.” Hildeman asked.

“I finished.”

Hildeman looked to Olka with wide eyed silence. Neither one seemed sure of what to do- though I’ve never doubted that they knew I lied. The usual punishment for dishonesty didn’t follow that night. They sent me to bed, re-enforcing my lie by telling me that they would go looking for my old doll in the morning. They wanted me to believe the lie. Maybe they wanted to as well.

My doll made them nervous, and never did they look at it directly nor did either one touch her. I always held onto her because I became more concerned that Hildeman would take her away from me because she drove him to a simmering rage. He kept his emotions quietly suppressed, but he gripped everything with flesh whitening force, and kicked and threw things across the room, cursing in German, arguing with some awful, invisible force. These rages sent me hiding with Charm Princess. I waited until dark and quiet to come out. Olka and Hildeman went to sleep at eight at the latest. His fits of anger exhausted him and sent him to sleep soon after an outburst. Olka wandered the home among floating whispers of her own passed mother. The house black at night but for her wandering candle.

Charm Princess became my dearest obsession. Never a shadow turned on the dial when I wasn’t brushing the country dust from its face with callused finger tips. Even in the waking hours when the bleating of hungry beasts called me to rise, my doll remained watching me. I placed Charm Princess by the window high in the room where she watched over the shadows and light outside. I held her as I took walks around the blossoming apples trees. A warmth in the drafty night, I remembered the Conjurer’s warning me never to leave her be, and I made certain to keep her as I slept. I placed boxes in front of the door. Latched the window, and locked the shutters. I waited, longed for a moment of enchantment. For its beady eyes to bat and little hands to take hold of my finger tip. I felt so convinced it breathed as I did, that it lived with blood and dream as I do. No matter how many words I whispered to its pocket ears, no how many stars shone in the dry creek bed as I called for magic to enliven my doll, she remained lifeless. But on common nights, I slept with her in my embrace, sealed in my room where she stayed at my leisure, and wades with me across dreamscape.

Then things around the house started missing. Idle items such as silverware from the dinner table, the nativity scene baby off the mantle, picture frames from the halls, the loose change jar on the top shelf of the closet along with Hildeman’s box of buckshot. These things are easy to miss, and no one seemed to take it as more than an inconvenience until more valuable things went missing. Like Olka’s pearls, and Hildeman’s truck keys. Once the family heirloom, that horrible wedding dress that they told me went back before my great grandmother, vanished Hildebrand and Olka came into my room. As I was the only other person in the house, they suspected me. I denied it all, and indeed I knew nothing. When Hildeman flipped my bed over, he pointed to the pile underneath with a fuming hatred.

“How did they get there?” He demanded of me over and over.

I stood speechless. I held Charm Princess to my heart, more terrified of my father than I’d ever been before. When he was calm, he was such a gentle and kind hearted man, but when he was mad he became an entirely differently creature.

He looked among the loot, getting down to rifle through it. Some of the spoils did not come from our house. He dug to the bottom, but still he found no Victorian wedding dress.

Hildeman rose his head, his eyes like a cat’s while it pounces, and with unpolluted rage he glared at me. I was so afraid I’d get the belt that I didn’t realize he was looking at my doll.

“Where did you get this demon?” He scolded, moving on all fours across the room as even Olka cowered against the doorway. I tried to keep her away from him and run for the corner, but he gripped my forearm with his farm work-hardened hands and nearly whipped my arm out of the socket to pry Charm Princess away from me. My doll hung limply in his crushing fist. Hildeman’s voice cracked as he damned her, storming out from my bedroom with his bald cranium candy red. I begged him to stop and ran to take hold of his leg, but he shooed me away like a mangy mutt, and tossed Charm Princess into the furnace. He latched it shut, and watched it burn with an amicable pout. The smell of her cherry fibers inflamed filled the house. I pressed my face into Olka’s apron and I cried, and cursed Hildeman for his unreasonable cruelty to my doll. Mother stroked my hair, and whispered “it’s for the best”. I told them nothing of the Conjurer’s warning.

I pretended to pray when they tucked me in that night. The possible repercussions of failing to keep Charm Princess safe tormented my imagination. When they left me in the dark of my room, I remained awake. Shaking, too cold for sleep. I started searching through the sheets until I found a piece of green thread. I took it to the window, opened it, and did it as I practiced.

I waited until the clock struck midnight, and the doll didn’t return. When I did fall asleep, I dreamed all night long of tornadoes splitting and whirling around a pool of sticky mud which I lay in. No matter how hard I tried to tear free, the mud pulled me back in, and powerlessly I watched the murderous cyclones converge around me.

I awoke at the bawling of the cattle. The doll lay in my arms again. Charm Princess came back. I ran my fingers through her hair, looked under her dress. The same one. With no signs of injury.

She became my secret. I never took her outside of my bedroom because I feared what the reaction might be. Hildeman and Olka now made me say prayers four times a day, and now they whipped me even more if I made a mistake. If I made persistent mistakes, then they made me whip myself. They even carted me off to a catholic boarding school in Omaha for a summer to receive indoctrination. The first night there, I again tested my spell. My doll did not come, and so I ran away from that place.

When I arrived on my parent’s doorstep they shuddered as if I were a ghost. I stood on the step, and asked them where Charm Princess was. Hildeman looked at me, and sparing no detail, told me how he put it in a bag, sealed the bag, put the bag into a trunk, then buried the trunk in a place he didn’t name. I went straight to my room.

I woke up in the middle of the night because something that felt like a hand reaching up through my blankets alerted me. It felt warm, and scratchy. I looked under the cover, and there she was. She came back to me again.

Hildeman waited all night, and watched it creep into my room. When I fell back asleep with her, I awoke because I remember the sensation of a huge, black wave hanging above me. I saw Hildeman take my doll, but I didn’t want him to know I saw him take her. I heard Olka’s cleaver hacking away at the cutting board. This time I didn’t worry. I woke up feeling refreshed and healthy. I performed the spell, and I ate my breakfast in relative peace. I refused to pray for thanks with Hildeman and Olka.

“But why?” Hildeman looked frightened and small.

“Because I don’t know why I should thank a god when Mom cooked it, and Dad grew it.” I told them. Both wore a look of fright that made my blood feel sick, and I wondered if I did something wrong. I disregarded it, ate my eggs, and went back to my room. Where Charm Princess sat waiting for me. I heard Hildeman bemoan to Olka in a tone so harrowing I couldn’t believe it was the man that could summon up a typhoon of rage at the flip of a switch.

“I cut it into pieces,” he told her in his shaking tone “and I fed it to the pigs.”

I stroked Charm Princess’s hair, and sat with her until I smelled the familiar smoke and heard wagon wheels moving up the road. I looked out the window to see the canvas covering drawn by two black horses. The wagon stopped before our home. Out climbed the Conjurer.

Hildeman came to the door to greet the strange visitor wearing foreign clothing and smelling of sweet smokes. His robes dragged against the dirt. He asked Hildeman to see me. Of course Hildeman said no, and so the Conjurer explained that he gave me the doll, and wished to see me about it.

“You’ve come to take that fiend away, I pray.”

“I’m afraid that’s what I must do.” he told Hildeman, and they both entered my bedroom, Olka behind them.

The Conjurer looked so sad, as if a hundred tragedies occurred before his eyes. He knelt to my height.

“My little magician,” he asked “Why have you been mistreating your doll?”

“It’s not me. I take good care of her. It’s Hildeman and Olka that’ve been trying to take her away.”

“I see,” he turned to Hildeman. “Does she speak the truth? Are you two the ones that’ve been harming this doll?”

“Just take it and go back to where you came from.”

“I see…” he smiled at me, patting me on the head, then he turned to Hildeman, and pointed a long finger at him. I never noticed, but he had no fingernails, but flat clips of flesh. When he pointed to Hildeman, the Conjurer murmured some foreign verse- and there was a loud pop! And Hildeman vanished- a wild buck in his place. Olka panicked and fled the room. The Conjurer laughed as the buck tried to escape the confines of the house to the outside world. His antlers tore the wall paper and tipped over tables and pictures as it hurled its body against the walls. At last it tried to jump through a window, cracking the glass, and leaving drop of blood smeared across the pane. The buck left behind a trail of blood as it slipped across the hardwood floor. Olka emerged from the closet, Hildeman’s shotgun in hand. I begged for her to open the door to let the creature esacpe, but a wildfire burned in her eyes. She fired both barrels and killed the buck.

The Conjurer came up behind her, and pointed his finger. I hid in my room and cradled my doll. Pop! Then footsteps over the porch, the snapping of reigns, and the dissipation of an outgoing wagon.

In the silence, I came out from under my covers, taking Charm Princess with me, and entered the parlor where we examined the buck. Both eyes that of a human’s. As I stood in the blood pool drying around my bare feet. i peeled apart its lips see see he molars and canines- with Hildeman’s fillings. I turned to look for Olka, but all I saw was folded quilt work laying on the dust of the floor. I unfurled it, the smell of an attic’s must and of Olka’s hair spilled from its folds. The fabric grew lighter as a piece of solid metal dropped from the heart of the quilt and clanged against the wood panels. With the quilt tight in my fingers, I bent down to inspect what dropped from it. A doll in mothers gown.

Years of being passed from foster family to foster family, and the stress from that day kept me from remembering it until I was in my thirties. When I became a teenager, I lost interest in the doll. I kept her stored away in a box of keepsakes that to this day I’m too afraid to open. Because I know the doll is not in there.I know because this very morning, I awoke with that old wedding dress across my body laid out in the manner which my mother carefully displayed it. Even as I write this letter, I can hear her sliding through the vents. If I look down now, I will see her eyes through the cover. I’m beginning to misplace more and more things, and I don't know how much of it is my age or the doll.”

The room filled with anxious silence. The eldest put the letter down. The siblings each looked at each other, confusion and doubt convecting in their brains. The earth darkened. The moth lay dead on the window sill. 

Everyone left as night fell- but the eldest sibling tapped the youngest and asked him to stay. They planned to leave once the others left. The shovels ready to dig dirt and a tarp ready to plant it on waited in the vehicle.

They spoke no words to each other on the way. The two only met enough times to know that they both wanted to preserve the traditional dress, and didn’t need to share it with the others.

They drove to the country cemetery Grandma wanted to be buried at. Nothing but darkness went on for miles. The brothers followed their flashlights to the grave, still sharp and glossy as the day they commissioned it, then they got to work. They found the soil still loose from its earlier filling, and it made their work easier until they reached three feet under where the weight began to compress the dirt underneath. The brothers stopped once. They thought they heard people, but it turned out to be birds flying south for winter. They resumed their task, greedily shoveling dirt until at the moon reflected in the glossy cover of the casket. They removed the lid, and silently looked from the contents to each other with the same pale aspect of mortality. They found no body- and no family wedding dress.

Only a single green thread.

The Cradle

The inquisitors wore heavy black robes that obscured their faces. The Grand Inquisitor lead them, his bright, hopeful face uncovered, exposed by the candelabra in his hand. The castle depths stunk of mold and moist earth. Their prisoner dragged her feet. One blackened eye slipped from her blindfold. Barely focused, she rolled it around to collect any details she saw. The candle light revealed layers of smooth blocks with wetness that reflected the noxious gleam of flame. An exhaustive noise like escaping of bad air from a hidden vent filled the corridor. One of the inquisitors took hold of her head with his gauntlet, and reapplied the blindfold to keep their captive confused- most important among the other tortures. Pain compels confession...but confusion invokes honesty.

Their Captive struggled to breath. Her exhausted body reduced her movements to short limps. Exertion hammered sharp pains into her joins. They stole her ability to stand up straight with their machines. Every muscle ached with malnourishment, and her skin festered from twilight pale to lake shore green, covered in a web of lacerations and contusions. Her dangling thumbs split by screws. A cage around her mouth kept her jaw shut. Boot steps on slick stone went on and on. She welcomed this brief pause from their interrogations, but she lost track of how long the procession to the deeper dungeons lasted. Time escaped her. The moons and suns lost to her. She hadn’t seen either one for so long that she began to wonder if they even still scoured the heavens. Her mind, it felt, seeped from her ears. Drip, drip, blood leaked in softening beads. A muffled ocean left her head as her ear drained and she heard clearly once more in her eclipsing moments of awareness the echo of the heavy boots and their sudden stop. A jingle of delicate metal, and the snapping of a latch. The agony of grinding latches and a tunnel of air rushing into a pit. The odor of stagnant water stabbed her nostrils like a trident.

“This will make her talk.” The Grand Inquisitor turned to the captive, and said into her ear. “A device of my own design.... Take her blindfold off. I want her to see it.”

One strong hand took the blindfold and tore it away with a strand of her hair.What she saw filled her with a jolt of soulless lightning. The curved rails of a rocking horse- but without the playful pony seat for a child. Confines for hands and feet on each end. In the middle of the contraption, an erect skewer pointed straight up. The mechanism sat above a pool of dark, murky fluid with unidentifiable floating meat bobbing up and down in the green foam. Small bubbles rose to the surface and popped. She thought she saw an eye attached to the meat but the firm gauntlets wrapped the blindfold back around her face. They carried her to the contraption, but the shock renewed her vigor. She kicked and swung her body weight against the hold of the inquisitors but they only held tighter as the door closed and latched behind them.

“Save your strength. This one you will not be able to use your magic on, witch. These walls have been blessed by Tomas De Torquemada, his holiness in flesh. ”

She tried to say something but the cage kept her jaw in place- she mumbled, pleading what they already heard before “I'm no witch- I'm no witch” The Grand Inquisitor understood.

“Still, she resists redemption. Then who was it that summoned the locusts to eat the crops? Who invoked the cursed air to cause every birth in your hamlet to be born inside out? Who then? Because it was you that they saw naked in the woods dancing with forest animals. It you they saw flying across the moon at night.”

The captive wanted to weep but they only provided her with enough water to keep her tongue wet. They gave her more wine than water hoping the alcohol would loosen her tongue- the drunkenness eased pain, but only for fifteen minutes before her body began to revolt with alcoholic poisoning. Sometimes they poisoned the water with bitter drops. She dumped most of what they served down the drain outside her cell.  She knew who the witch was- not the name, but she had seen her too. She already tried to explain that the witch hexed her, and used her shadow as a catalyst for her dark arts. The Grand Inquisitor grinned knowingly when she brought him this argument. He persisted his practice with full enjoyment. The Captive’s resilience impressed him. “Not many have your spirit, witch”.

The inquisitors took hold of her by the shoulders and ankles. With her face towards the ceiling, they latched her palms onto the rails with her fingers pointing to the length of her body. The binds felt rigid and rusted. The binds around her feet felt almost loose, but the inquisitors tightened them by twisting in the screws until her feet felt firmly secured. With her back arched, emaciated stomach in the air, she held herself up with dreadful anticipation- imagining the blade barely kissing the flesh of her back. In her strongest state, the position might be maintainable for a few minutes. But being isolated in a cramped, damp cell with only moldy bread to eat and drinking water dripping from the ceiling- her arms and legs trembled the very moment the inquisitors took their arms away from her. They observed as they always did, listening and losing patience, but for the Grand Inquisitor, who crossed his arms, standing before his subordinates, presenting himself as fair judgement- waiting for her to lose composure and confess at last. The Captive tried to hold still, but the cradle rocked back and forth, tipping her balance, thrown onto a scale she could not control. A cold tickle shaved a strip of flesh from the crease of her spine. She tried to breath through the mask. Upside down, the metal rested on her face. Hot breath made the grainy iron wet and slippery. Her lips felt like the cups of a tentacle. Blood rushed to her head. Back and forth- her shoulders trembled. Her ankles almost snapped into splinters by the confines. She corkscrewed he waist but it did nothing for her. The rails creaked as they swayed. A slow, lazy song. She tried to hold her back up, but she moved it no further upwards. The durability drained from her body. She felt it with every tessellation of her bones. She tried to tear her body away. The restraints kept her body well in place.  The water beneath her bubbled. Not the little bubbles that she thought she noticed- a slow boil that increased as if something rushed to the surface. A whipping splash sent cold waters across her body. She gasped thinking of the hot irons they inserted in her armpits. How cold they felt at first… something beneath her gargled, and squirmed back down with a following splash.

“Yes, there’s our pet. Sinister little thing. It will eat anything.”

The Captive felt her body sink.  The tip of the blade pierced her spine and she shot back up as warm wetness trickled down her back. With a scream she resisted the pain and tried to remain solid. This captive was no old woman- nor a helpless heiress. Her shoulders and back muscles broadened by field work- legs thick and muscular from walking several miles with buckets of water. A princess would’ve given up and let her body be impaled. The Captive remembered cold nights suffering with deadly infections, winters with only roots to eat- none was enough to kill her. She maintained her determination and rose with a jolt up. The cradle rocked, throwing her body back against the blade. It pricked her open wound, causing the mask to ring as she groaned. Her elbows cracked and her weight gave in again onto the blade. Screams rippled against the pool. Blood blossomed as it dripped.

“Maybe she’s ready.” One inquisitor said.

“No. Not yet.” The Grand Inquisitor replied.

The slobbering smack of water returned as the freezing breath of what lived below her returned. The sound it made in the water- the captive imagined but only could fear as much because her senses bounced between failure and activity- a damp slurping. With the blade in her body, she twisted her hips. Momentum swung back and forth, back and forth- but what if… she kept the blade with its point in her flesh. With her weight centered, the rocking stopped. She rose from the blade with a fatigued growl. Only 16 years old- but her voice broke and sunk back into her lungs as if cancers infected her throat.She swung from side to side, the flexing hammering bolts of pain across her midsection, and even deeper into her bones. But she understood that her interrogators didn’t care about her innocence or guilt- no one would save her, if she couldn’t save herself. The wood of the rails felt heavy. They intended to keep the device in place, but she once hauled a middle aged tree that fell up a slope to her hamlet for a christmas fire. With a strong thrust one way the rail lifted but fell back down. The skewer found a piece of the sheet she wore and tore into it. She pressed the otherway, the rails lifted, and dropped once more with the blade piercing a new hole into her body.

“Escape is impossible. Tell us, tell us now…”

With a last force, she exerted so much strength that her joints popped and snapped as the rails lifted. This time the rail didn’t fall back into place, but hung suspended, the balance compromised on the edge of a knife. either way. A terrifying thought occurred- that it would fall back and her body would be thrusted onto the skewer and when the blindfold fell from her eyes a spike would be protruding through her stomach. Her fears eased when the mechanism tipped towards the water. Now she feared drowning as the rails dropped. She gasped and confined the air to her lungs. The device cast her into the pool, upside down, but still attached. The water filled her nostrils and ears. The mask caused significant trouble, but it also formed a small bubble through which she took tiny breaths. Not enough air to fill her lungs, but with precious seconds she welcomed the relief through the weight of the mask now fell from her jaw to her throat. She heard the scrambling of the inquisitors, but something else stopped them. The blindfold feel loose, though the pit absorbed any light and left her in a blinded state nonetheless she felt it’s presence slither through the water, felt it nibble at her hair, and at her toes. The inquisitors stopped at the pool. The grand inquisitor hollered, “Stop! or this was all for nothing!”

The tentacles wrapped around the rails and constricted until the wood cracked. The metal gear on the captive pulled her down, but for a brief moment she was free in the water, sinking lower and lower. The creature swam down, and she grabbed for it- taking a chance that maybe this pit lead to a lair. She landed on the floor and moved along the bottom, hands out, feeling the ridges and a gaps for a way out. Water flowed into her mask. Her lungs burned for oxygen. Her arms lost control, and dangled in the water, as her feet lifted from the rocky bottom, and her head sunk downward. Yet she moved. She felt the sand grains scraping against her. Her organs adjusted to movement. A tentacle wrapped around her waist pulled her into a deeper, darker crevice, and took her into a darkness she never thought possible, yet cold as a frozen pond. Wounds itched, and sediments in the water bounced from her nose.

The creature pulled her to the surface. No light but for a a few glowing fungi along the jagged edges. She gasped for breath, her wounds throbbing from the contamination of the pool, her flesh shivering. She looked around, her hands attached to pieces of rail. She pulled the away and left it. The creature snarled, and with what sounded like a thousand small pegs, it beat around her in a circle, prodding her with a pair of pincers away from the bubbling hole she just entered through. In the center of the room, she found a sticky nest- adhesive pastes held her in place. In the light of the mushroom above her head, she saw a host of skeletons among her- and  nests of bulbous eggs inside of them. Her panic subsided when she realized that she was beneath the castle- no longer inside of it. Despite her hunger, and enduring the pain of tarnished extremities she drew a circle and a star with her own blood on the mask over her face. She called in the Enochian tongue- and from the dark, scaled hands with three fingers came and took hold of her constraints. The metal rusted away and broke into a cloud of powder. The wooden restraints rotted, and the latches fell with a rattle. The monster lurked nearer. A slushing gargle rolling from its hungry jaws. She backed away, loose, but mere feet away from the flat, mashing rows of subterranean teeth. Her hands stumbled around rocks and puddles. She smashed a glowing mushroom, leaving pieces of illuminating tissue smeared on her palm, and along the tatters of her sheet. The creature snapped, and took a piece of fabric and tore it away,  snarling with confusion, as it leapt to a wall and began racing around the perimeter. The captive rose to her feet. She felt a stream of cold air, and she meandered after it with the monster following. Its heavy, amphibious pods pedaled towards her. She only saw the bits of it that the glowing revealed- scales and fins, gills, and a long tail with a spearhead shaped tuff at the end. A water creature, not equipped for being on land. She felt safer, the sensation crumbled to dust  as a sizzling string of drool splattered from the ceiling onto the bald spot on her scalp. A talon took hold of her arm, and but she took a rock and smashed into the talon. A face emerged, and she struck the creature into the mouth- breaking a row of teeth out as the monster tumbled to the ground she turned around and hurried like a blind person in a burning building. The stream smelled fresh as summer rain. She padded further, a pale gleam shone down a faint stream trickling down misting rocks. Sunlight.

In the light, the monster stopped, sitting still, its forked tongue hanging, its chest heaving, desperation pulsing in its eyes. The captive climbed up the rocky path towards the opening. The monster panted, heavy and slow, desiring and starving, but unable to pursue as it released an anguished groan when it tried to transit. Her limbs barely took hold. She stopped, and invoked a source of energy, anything to get her just a few feet forward. Her entire body ached and trembled in pain. She caught her reflection in the stream, and she didn’t see a face she knew as her own- but the scarred, grime coated face of a hag. She didn’t know how much to attribute to the techniques employed by her hosts, or to the passage of time. Her youth, she could recapture. She did it before many times. In the fresh cold water, she slurped and slurped until her stomach hurt. She soaked her hands, and scrubbed her face, digging her nails into the wrinkles and digging out the encrusted filth. She peeled away strips of flesh like dried glue. She looked again, and in the reflective surface she saw the young woman once more. She exited the cave with an agonized grunt into the grassy swamp between the coast and the ramparts of the castle. The inquisitors would be searching, she knew. But she had so much more work to do. As she marched through the mud of the swamp, she felt the spark revive in her blood. The tingle of lightning, the kiss of night rain, the whisper of the dark grew stronger with every beat of her heart. She heard horses neigh from the castle. The shadow from the sentinel towers crossed the swamp. She slipped into the much, and crawled into the shadow to conceal herself better. Exhausted. Hungry. Injured.  The sunrise clouds brightening through a red veil of bending light. The wounds in her back wreaked by the cradle hurt the most. Almost with a crippling agony did the pain develop, as if a poison had been smeared onto the blade remained and burrowed into her marrow. Her spine ached as she stressed her lower back. She felt something adjust and pop. Scars from weights and clamps branded her mashed elbows, knees, ankles. To avoid the agony, she tossed her upper body back as she stepped forward. The pain minimised, but still present. She took a branch from a fallen tree and used it as a cane, stabbing it into the mud and leaning on it as she pulled one leg after the other.

The swamp thickened, but over the mud and patches of weed she saw the forest. Horses cried. The gates of the castle clanked in the distance. She looked back at her progress. A trail about a mile long ran from where she emerged.

The deep swamp felt different. Still,  windless, not even a chirp of a cricket or screech of a vulture. Only the slushing mud. That’s where she spotted the outer rampart, hollow, half of the stone facade gone and sunken, iron pikes prodded outwards towards the trees. As she entered the shadow of the rampart, leaned against a fallen block, fighting aches, breathing slow though air felt like pins in the vulnerable crags of her throat. She looked out over the deep end of swamp and saw the countless bones, and tattered flags of an army long since swallowed by the mud of the swamp. She didn’t rest long. Horsemen galloped from the castle.

The Captive struggled to hurry. Her injuries nearly crippling, she dropped down, and dug her malformed fingers into the mud, and dug out bone after bone. Some bodies had sunk in neat piles, others fell in in pieces, all of which she dumped back into the mud with desperate growls. With each approaching sound of the horses, the agonies of their techniques recurred and materialized at a physical level. The condition of her fingers, barely able to open and close them, hardly affected her excavation. Some places of the swamp, she found the mud to be like a thick cake, but as she moved towards the forest it became more runny and watery. Dark brown, to a fine green- yellow like the skin of a rotting squash.

Once she found the remains of the horse, she hurried to compose. “No one ‘dabbles’ in necromancy.” someone told her once. “because the simplest spell requires the offering of blood to spill”.

She dabbed her finger into her ear, reddened with blood she drew the circle on the skull of the horse. Holding it tight, and proclaimed an invocation- every vein in her neck throbbed as she sung the words. She howled like an animal, digging her hands into the bone- her finger printers filled with bone and mud, until she could feel the body of the horse through her hands. She repeated the words. Again and again.

Whips lashed at the horses.

Worms surfaced, hundreds of them squirming up like flower stems towards the sunlight. Bones wearing rusted armor arose, chunks of mud dripping from their hips and ribs. The horse skeleton remained in the mud. The captive focused, repeating the words. Skulls dropped from the shoulders of the dead soldiers, and the bones sunk back into the mud. The captive considered the complications of such efforts, the risks, the sweet entertainments, and broke her concentration because the ripping of hooves interrupted the squirming of the worms.  She bit open both palms with what teeth remained in her head, and used the blood to cover the exposed bones of the horse. She coated the skull, the spines, the ribs, widening her wounds until her head almost floated away. With the skeleton painted, she tried once more with the incantation, sitting on the horse's back, she felt it rise against her body as if lifted from the mud. She let a triumphant squawk escape as the horse trotted away from the castle towards the forest in an unlaboured manner impossible for a living horse. Without fatigue, or consideration for what lies in front of it. It moved at a faster pace than the captive. Her hair fluttered in the speed the horse carried her on. Weight off her body at last, her feet almost dropped off they felt so relieved. She held tight, hooking her fingers into the empty eye sockets, saddling her legs around its ribs. The momentum slid her from the back of the horse, but she hung on, and climbed back on top. The bare spine irritated the wounds created by what her captors called the “spanish horse”. Such pain meant nothing to her in the excitement of her escape. She smelled the trees.

The dead horse cut through brush and overgrowth like fire. It took her into the woods until the cover of leaves blocked the sun. The horse moved forward, until she whispered a secret into its ear socket. The skeletal horse then took a new direction, away from the Captive’s home, and towards the most ancient part of the forest. The trees grew thicker, and taller. Little men, long since cursed, trapped in the shells of tree bark marked her path until the forest air began to sour.  Here she climbed away. The horse collapsed into a pyramid of ash as she made her way to the hutch underneath the roots of a great tree. She smelled the burning herbs, the boiling water, the rapping of winged creatures against the wires of their cages. A hanged rabbit swung by its feet, its ears harvested. Smoke rolled from the opening of the hutch. Feet shuffled within. The Captive held out her bloody, crippled hands as if they held candles in the dark. She took enticing steps, cracking branches and leaves with her bare feet. The Witch heard nothing. She rummaged around the hutch, a shrill of a woman she used to be, her mind completely occupied with the majesties of her darkest ambitions. When the Captive entered, the witch dropped the rabbit ears into the fire. The smoke concealed the Captive, but her form emerged from the smoke as she came inside. The witch continued her work. The Captive sealed her attention onto the hag. She took the cauldron by the rings on the side and tipped it over. The foam rose over the rim, and a steaming curtain filled the hutch as the the liquid unleashed a wave of skin melting fluid across the dirt floor. The witch screamed and lost control of her body, falling to the ground, her magic unable to save her as what remained of the Captive stood above her.

“You’ll lead them here. They’ll find me now.” The Witch said to the Captive, her

raw throat choking on dry air.

“You betrayed me.” The Captive looked down at the sweltering hag as the skin bubbled and dripped from muscle. The hag took a few final breathes and lay still as the steaming puddle soaked into the dirt.

The Captive faced for home, but she knew that she could never return. Her escape confirmed to the inquisitors their suspicions, and in her small village there could be no hiding. She pondered, while looking over the lifeless witch, whether or not the Grand Inquisitor hoped for her to escape because to do so required her use of archaic secrets. She anticipated the shame from too many sinister glances, too many unwelcomed noses poking in. Freedom at last, her valued reward, before the predator’s night. The wolves and rats stalk, and the enchantments of the forest animates what has died for the time the moon shines on the remains. A dangerous place, somewhere no one treads. The Captive left the hutch, taking with her what she coveted from the witch, and what she needed to mend her wounds. She looked in every direction, smelling encroaching smoke all around her.