A Witch's Curse Read online

  Nevertheless, on the second level, there was an old woman dressed in white staring back at them through a cobweb covered window. The stranger then receded into the background’s gloom. The lady is what motivated them to go inside. At this point, they were two lost and alone adolescent girls. The unearthly figure was the first person they had seen besides each other for an hour now.

  “Let’s try and meet her,” Rose said.

  “But she’s a stranger. I was taught not to introduce myself to people I didn’t know without my mother’s permission.”

  “Come on, let’s just do it. I want to go home. She‘s the only help we have.”

  They walked up the cobblestone pathway leading to the wooden entrance. They both knocked on it frantically.

  “Over here,” Melinda said, walking in the hedgerows, crushing plant life with the soles of her feet. “The window’s cracked open. Let’s go inside. Maybe there’s a phone we can use to call our parents.”

  “You mean Amy,” Rose corrected her. “If we call our parents, we’ll both be in a world of trouble. Good catch, though, seeing the window.”

  They crawled inside. As soon as their feet hit the pavement of the main hall, inexplicable noises could be heard in the detachment beyond.

  “This person has more toys than I do,” Melinda said, looking around. “And I grew up in a house with sisters.”

  There were old, abandoned children’s dolls lying everywhere on the floor. None of them looked modern, or for that matter even very American. A lot of them reminded Rose of those ancient Russian tea sets that she had seen on television cartoons, only these were broken and malformed by time.

  “Let’s go upstairs and get her,” Rose said.

  “Do you think she’ll be mad about us coming through here without even asking?”

  “If she has grandchildren, no. She couldn‘t want hurt us.”

  They kicked aside all of the clutter with their feet while making their way to the staircase. After climbing its grubby stone steps, they walked down the wide hallway.

  “I didn’t expect hide and seek to ever have anything to do with this,” Melinda said. “Hey, here’s a door.”

  She twisted the knob and walked in.

  “Is anyone in there?” Rose asked, standing in the passage outside.

  “No,” Melinda said. “There’s not a person in here, except-”

  That was when Melinda fell into the floor. The wooden board beneath her gave, and she bowed through the cracks. Rose screamed, wanting to do something helpful. Yet she also knew that if she were to step into that room then she would find herself in the same predicament.

  “Are you okay, Melinda?” Rose screamed out the words.

  A few seconds passed. “My ankle’s hurt. Find that woman! Tell her I need help!”

  “I’m going right now,” she said, turning away from the empty room and running

  down the vestibule. She stumbled through spiders netting, before finding another doorway.

  Rose opened it and cautiously stepped inside, making sure the ground she was about to cross was not hollow. Finding that it was secure, she entered it. The place had chains hanging from the ceiling. Rose would, later on in life, realize that this room was actually the slave quarters; that was how old this creaking mansion happened to be. Finding no one there, she made her way out into the hallway once again. The place was darker with each step.

  Coming across another access, she opened it and stepped inside, afraid that this wooden bottom would collapse as well.

  This room had nothing in it except a table with ivory legs and a set of primordial, dirt encrusted cups. At first she did not see anyone. A whisper formed behind her.

  Rose could have sworn that an insect flew out of the older woman’s mouth, but thought of it rationally as a gob of saliva.

  “My friend is hurt. We were just playing around in the forest, and we got in serious trouble. Melinda, my friend, fell through your floor.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “We need help. You were the only person we saw for miles. Please believe me.”

  Rose moved a few steps in reverse, feeling the cold window against her skin. She went to grab the woman’s dress, before seeing something out of the ordinary. Her hand went directly through the material, as if it were nothing more than air.

  She looked up to find the woman wearing a sinister smile.

  “You will die,” the woman said. “All of you will die.”

  The stranger released a distraught cackle, before vanishing into a large vapor fog.

  The howling wind picked up outdoors, loudly carrying foliage against the glass.

  Rose ran out into the passageway, and then started running faster than she even knew her feet could carry her, especially after such a wearying time.

  “Melinda!” Rose screamed the name out again.

  She could hear her name being called back. “Rose!”

  After finding the main foyer in a matter of minutes, she discovered her there. Melinda’s foot was bloodied. They hugged each other, not so much to just embrace, but also for Rose to help Melinda carry herself out.

  They escaped the manor, trotting into the empty avenue and going across a vacant dirt lot. Soon they were in a neighborhood, although it looked to be a block full of run down tenements. They found a police car after two streets of carrying along, still filled with panic. The officer jumped out of his vehicle and ran up to them.

  “What are you two doing out so late in a place like this?”

  They didn’t answer him, but they climbed into his car hastily. They shouted their real addresses, and the officer told them something in reaction. “I’m going to take you to the hospital, first. Then I‘ll call your parents to come and pick you up. Is that okay?”

  Both nodded, even though they were dreading having to explain this to their mothers and fathers.

  In the lit up phosphorescent emergency room, however, Melinda had turned to Rose, gazing at her with an expression that was both worried and critical. “Let’s not tell anyone about this. Not even ourselves.”

  Rose shook her head in agreement, wondering if the color that her face had gradually lost was regained at all.

  They would ask around for the next few remaining years about that manor, and everyone claimed it did not exist. They did on-line searches, and even attempted to go back there one day, together, only to discover a barren road. The place where they knew the mansion to be was nothing more than a large square of dirt.

  “What did you experience when you collapsed through those floorboards?” Rose asked years later, after they had agreed to never converse about the incident again. They were sitting in the computer lab during break on a wintry day.

  Melinda said, “I saw what you saw. A ghost.”

  “The same one?”

  “No,” Melinda responded after a long while. “A boy whose skin was burnt.”

  “Melinda,” Rose said, ignoring her observation, “remember-”

  “I know,” she said. “We read a paper about it together. On-line at the school library? The manor we were in did exist at one time, although it‘s not there anymore, and it sure as hell wasn‘t supposed to be standing when we had the bad luck of going around inside of it.” She stopped, before finishing her thought. “The place burned down in the 1920‘s.”

  Rose knew there was an explanation for this, although she would not find it out until much later.

  When two blood related witches who are in discord with one another find themselves in the same area, two things occur to the region they are occupying. Firstly, the dead rise and can be seen by those who practice the paranormal arts. The second thing is that in addition to a slew of unexplained phenomena, a curse of bad luck soon befalls whatever town the family are in. Rose would later theorize that Karen must have been in Lake Pines back when they were in the hide and seek group, for something far worse than the experience in the mansion would happen during her Senior year. Hemera would make a second visit.
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  3

  Rose never knew she was a sleep walker. When finding out, she could not help but speculate on how long it had been going on.

  Her father had once informed her on how it was not uncommon for her to speak in her sleep when she was still young and in the cradle. Becoming a night-time wanderer never occurred to her as even a remote possibility. Sleep walking was for people with a million other disorders, not her.

  The night this concealed secret would become to clear was one unlike any other, where she spent time brooding upon her past shortly before going to bed. She thought about those years as a little girl quite frequently, but never as neurotically as she had been in recent times. Now, at the age of seventeen, Rose often went over in her mind about that final day with her mother. It was three thousand six hundred and fifty days ago, the equivalent of precisely ten years.

  Sometimes those recollections filled her with dread, for it was an early lesson in the brutality of the human spirit. It was so easy to wallow in a cesspool of pure bitterness, seeing as how she was a believer in issues from childhood leaking into one’s adult years was not expected but probable.

  Sometimes Rose would lay in her bedroom late at night and think about Karen as an anomaly. She hoped that whatever it was which made her Mom the way she had been would not affect her. God, hear me out. I don’t want to be like her. Thank you. Amen.

  How come, out of the blue, she could not stop thinking about Karen, after going for nearly a decade of successfully not having that mythically obscure figure on her mind? She tried her best not to recall those early trips filled with, stale coffee, junk food for breakfast, and miserable verbal abuse.

  Sometimes she would feel guilty when keeping in mind her less than perfect childhood. After all, her father, Damian, was a stand up man who treated her with nothing but love and kindness from the time she was a toddler. At least she had the unconditional respect, appreciation, and inexplicable affection from one parent.

  So many counselors had tried to teach him that not having a mother in his daughter’s life would lead to severe psychological issues. Rose thought the other side of the spectrum was true - if her mother had stayed in her life, she would be wrecked inside.

  After making her bed, she sat on top of her blankets and stared out her window, noticing that the wind was shaking the branches of the tree in the front yard.

  Her room reflected the way her mind worked. There were posters of countless bands she enjoyed hearing, painters whose works she always found to be inspiring, and countless stunning pictures of places she hoped to one day visit, every location from Paris to Rome to Napoli. Her two dressers were a bright orange, and only one actually held her clothes.

  The second was a depository, one filled with potions, books on magical craft and spell casting, plus an entire wealth of occultist history.

  When her father asked her why she needed two dressers when she did not have that much clothing, she responded that it was a storing place for her drafts of homework assignments, as well as binders, folders and textbooks for school. Fact of the matter was, this was a stretching of the truth. She was a frantically obsessive writer. Granted, her jottings usually involved ways to bring about manifestations of visions, but still, besides that, she was ordinary. Or so she liked to think.

  Her cell-phone, which was hooked up to a generator in the outlet on the other side of the room, suddenly rang. She walked over and flipped it open, discovering a text message.

  Looking forward to the first day of school tomorrow? Me neither. See you then. -Melinda.

  Rose plugged it back in, walking over to the other side of her mattress, debating with herself on whether or not she should watch television or listen to music, two of her main sleep remedies.

  The room felt a little warm, so instead she opened up the window.

  Her view of the graveyard neighboring her house seemed larger tonight. The under keeper’s cottage in the distance was lit up, its luminescence shining on the sites surrounding it.

  She slipped under the covers, staring at the full moon dormant in the sky through her pane. While enjoying the warmness under the blankets, she brooded over her nervousness concerning tomorrow, and about how the year might go, whether it would be better or worse than the last one.

  These thoughts came to Rose while unaware of the nightmare she was about to enter. There were times when she was able to predict ahead of time whether her dreams would be good or awful. On this night, there was no forewarning of what was about to befall her. In the midst of falling asleep she felt her eyes becoming weaker, her body melting into the furniture.

  In dreams, time has a way of being different in its very perception. Rose felt as if she had been here for a thousand years, despite the true yet contradictory fact that everything she was seeing seemed brand new, a part of the world she had never even known until this singular moment.

  In this delusion she was standing in a hotel hallway. It was large enough to fit inside of a manor’s lobby, but since there were massive doors on either side of the room lined up next to each other, this was not a foyer, but instead an oversized corridor. The ceiling, which was built to resemble the sea‘s surface, possessed large cylindrical chandeliers hanging from it. Numerous lights were held within their bronze metal spaces, like candles trapped inside of a series of bronze cylinders. The floor was shimmering, appearing burnished by the grasping of King Midas himself. Each pillar holding up the wide and choppy upper limit were frames for the entranceways into the chambers.

  At first she was happy to be here. She took delectation from the lights shining at the top and bottoms of the majestic space. It reminded her of vacations with her father, where she was so happy just to be away from the boring confines of her nice suburban town, comforted knowing she could return to it, but at the same time indulging in the rapture of being in a new place rich with undiscovered people and locations.

  She began walking down the vestibule, when she felt something irritating touch her skin. Staring upwards, something appeared on the ceiling. An aquatic orange flame was forming and devouring the wood above.

  Panicking, she saw an elevator at the other end of the area. Deciding to make a sprint for it, she found her feet moving slower.

  Before she could reach the lift, a column located seven feet behind her started to creak. The noise was so chaotic that she had no choice but to turn around with the hopes of seeing what it was. The bottom of the pillar had been lost to the inferno, and as a result of losing its foundation, the post fell into the hallway.

  It brought destruction upon the corridor.

  Rose gasped in shock as an enormous cloud of embers, lumber fragments, crumbled stone, and lumps of smoldering bullion flew in every direction. A plank doused in the combustion emerged from the mountainous conflagration, and like a menacingly swift arrow it headed straight for Rose. She saw it spinning to the fore, an instrument of devastation bound to strike its flames upon her.

  She squinted, woken up by her own fright. Relief, that great abiding liberation which only comes every once and a while in someone’s life, filled her with happiness.

  Rose then opened one eyelid, and noticed that something was off, shredding any ounce of respite that had a moment ago felt so idyllic.

  She sat up, learning that whatever she was lying on had a rough surface.

  Rose learned that she was outside. This was apparent because of the cold breeze caressing her face. Her feet were exhausted, signaling to how she had just walked a few miles, and gazing downwards, it dawned on her that she was wearing the white gown that she had put on before falling fast asleep.

  Taking in the site with still blurred vision, it became unmistakable where she was.

  It was the burial ground next to their house.

  She could tell by the mild chill in the air and the still rising dawn that it was morning. Pressing her body to the left, her toes dangled over the edge of the spot she was resting, and it occurred to her that she was somehow above the lawn. Moving
to the side so as not to step on a sacred place, she landed on her heels and felt an aching soreness. Turning around, she saw that it was a large tomb, one whose formerly chiseled identification of the departed had faded away on the stone.

  Her house was a street away, so she began the small hike, still absorbing the idea that she could be a sleep walker at all.

  Shaken by the dream and making her way up the sidewalk situated on the outskirts of the morose necropolis, she was deep in thought about her current affliction. Ideas around why she could have wandered around in the night while barely conscious began forming in her mind. Rose had cast a spell on herself for more energy in order to deal with whatever stress Senior year might bring. Nevertheless, she had performed that specific incantation many times before, especially last year when the finals were around the corner. It was not uncommon and usually worked well, resulting in very few negative side effects except for minimal insomnia and occasional short lasting outbursts of anger.

  Rose wondered what could have caused it. Sleep walking had never been a bother before. She noticed a higher spastic level within her own body lately, but she was smart enough to attribute that to the fact that school was starting today.

  She was aware the day had not started yet however, because it was way too cold outside, and the sun was not shining yet.

  Walking into her home, she looked around to make sure that her father was not out of bed - a rarity, considering he worked a grueling night shift, and for the most part slept in until late evening.

  She moved upstairs and changed into the clothes she had prepared to wear on the first day of school, which consisted of a pair of black jeans, a black blouse, and all of her regular waterproof bracelets, coupled with a pentagram necklace she always hid underneath her top.

  Moving downstairs after having grabbed her binder, Rose looked at her alarm clock and found that she still had another half hour before class started. She decided there was time to comb her hair, eat breakfast, and brush her teeth.