8 Gone is the Witch Read online

  Tony took the photo, coaxed Dallas from his chair and nudged him towards the hallway. “Yes she is. Listen, thanks for your help. If you think of anything else, please don’t hesitate to call us.”

  We waited for Tony to return before gathering around the two desks, none of us exactly sure what to say. Dominic broke the awkward silence.

  “I’m confused. Will someone tell me what’s going on here?”

  Tony shot me a look, which I interpreted as him passing the baton. “Sure. It means Doctor Lowell is back.”

  “How? I thought you banished him to the Eighth Sphere.”

  “We did,” said Carlos. “I opened the knot on the witch’s ladder myself.”

  “Then how could he come back?”

  “Who is Doctor Lowell?” asked Ursula.

  “He’s a bad man,” I said, “and we have to figure out how he got here and what he wants with Leona.”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” said Tony.

  “What, how he got here?”

  “No, why he wants Leona. He intends to finish what he started with her four years ago.”

  Ursula came back. “What, pray tell, be that?”

  “It’s complicated,” I answered. “I’ll tell you on the ride out there.”

  “Out where?” Dominic’s expression grew stern.

  “Yeah,” said Tony. “What are you thinking?”

  I walked up to him and snatched the photo from his hand. “I’m thinking….” I held Leona’s picture to his face, “that we need to take a ride out to the research center and find this kid before something bad happens to her.”

  Carlos uttered, “Sounds like something bad already has.”

  “Lilith.” Tony shook his head as if he could dismiss me that easily. “I appreciate your concern, but this is a police matter.”

  “No, it’s a paraphysical nightmare of the third degree. Don’t you see? If Dr. Lowell has somehow managed a trans-dimensional passage, then he’s obviously found a portal between the Seventh and Eighth Sphere. If he’s learned to control that portal, he could facilitate the return of humankind’s most despicable souls back into this world.”

  “You think that’s what happened?”

  “Yes. So you see why this is so important.”

  “I see now. It’s just that for a minute there, I thought you actually cared about Leona.”

  “I do,” I said, shrugging off my apathy. “I mean I have nothing against little Miss Guatemala. She’s a good kid and all.”

  “She’s Honduran.”

  “Honduran, Guatemalan. It’s all guacamole to me.”

  “Ahh, yes. There’s the compassion.”

  “Listen. Compassion is a luxury we can’t afford. We need to get our butts out to the research center immediately to stop Dr. Lowell. If we can rescue Leona in the process, so much the better. If not, then we may have bigger problems to worry about.”

  “Bigger than worrying about Leona getting raped by that sick bastard, or worse?”

  I stepped closer, extinguishing the gap in air space between us. “Tony.” I rocked up on tiptoes and kissed him. “If Dr. Lowell manages to open that portal and keep it open––we’re all fucked.”

  Chapter Two

  Ursula and I took my car out to the old research center. Tony, Carlos and Dominic took a company sedan, followed by three black and whites, all running their lights and sirens.

  I knew Tony would want us to wait outside while they swept the building, so for that reason I didn’t push it. I drove the speed limit, allowing myself ample time to explain the situation to Ursula as best I could, starting with Dr. Lowell.

  “You see, Urs, back then it was a grand experiment in the field of paranormal research. No one had ever assembled so many gifted people for such a comprehensive study before. In that respect, Dr. Lowell was years ahead of his time. Some even called him a genius.

  “He secured the project grants himself and opened the New England Institute for Research of Paranormal and Unexplained Phenomena in just one year. We called the meetings, workshops, but I called them bullshit sessions. I liked to go there just to screw with their heads. We had some real prudes in our class, but we also….”

  I trailed off to reflect upon some of the friends I lost during the worst of those times, the months surrounding some of the most heinous examples of barbarism I had ever witnessed in my life. It’s funny how it has never left me. After all this time, it still makes me pause and take stock of what’s important in life. I took a deep breath to shake off the feeling of insecurity seeping under my skin.

  “We also had some real decent people,” I finished.

  I could see Ursula in my periphery, watching me, her brows gathering tightly, perhaps wondering what secrets I harbored, what details I had omitted when until then, she believed I had shared every aspect of my life with her, both intimate and incidental.

  Still, I knew Ursula better than she knew herself. She wouldn’t ask. She knew that someday when the time was right, I would tell her everything, every sordid detail surrounding the darkest days of my life.

  I waited until her eyes came forward again, until the confidence in knowing I was talking to the only soul incapable of judging me allowed me to continue.

  “There were ten of us,” I said, “in the workshop, I mean. Sure, hundreds of others performed experiments there during the institute’s heyday, but ours….” I shook my head, still finding it hard to believe the talent we had assembled. “Ours was an elite ensemble, exceptional, if not dysfunctional. We proved our abilities in the psychic academia of clairvoyance, mental telepathy, bi-location, and, in my case, witchcraft.”

  “Interesting,” said Ursula, and nothing more.

  “Yes, it was. I had a lot of fun with it, too, until the Surgeon Stalker began killing off members of our workshop one-by-one.”

  “My, sister! I knew not of this tragedy in your life. Why hath thee not the mind to speak of this before?”

  “Because, there are things I did then, things I’m not proud of. Things I wish to forget.”

  “But thou hath not forgotten?”

  “No. I haven’t forgotten, but I’ve moved on, and not all bad came of those times. I met Tony then, and Leona, too. Though I’ll never admit it to him, I do like the little Costa Rica chica.”

  “Methinks Tony said she is Honduran.”

  “Don’t you start.”

  “Sorry.”

  “The point is, that’s when the Surgeon Stalker was running around cutting out livers and consuming them for the purpose of acquiring the psychical attributes of his victims.”

  “`Tis the law of contagion.”

  “Yes, and sometimes called attraction of blood.”

  “Dr. Lowell and the Stalker, they were one and the same?”

  “That’s right. He kidnapped Leona Diaz and hid her in the basement of the research center. He planned to father her child and then eat the baby’s liver in hopes of obtaining a vernal consistence of body and blood.

  “It all culminated in a big send off we had for him when Carlos opened a knot in the witch’s ladder, creating a vortex that sucked Dr. Lowell up into the Eighth Sphere. Until today, we all figured that was the end of it.”

  “As it should be, for the Eighth Sphere, as I know, is a one way trip.”

  “That’s what I believed, too. Apparently it’s not.”

  “Aye,” she said, casting her gaze out the window and losing herself in a field of blue sky as deep as her distant thoughts.

  We pulled into the parking lot of the center a full fifteen minutes behind everyone else. The boys had already made a preliminary sweep of the building by then and were outside on the front steps waiting on us. Tony came up to the car and opened the door for me.

  “We found the place unlocked,” he said. Carlos fell in behind him. Dominic got the other door for Ursula and the two of them came around to join us. “Do you think it’s possible Dr. Lowell still had a key after all this time?”

  “I suppose,” I
said. “He’d have had a key on him when we banished him. I take it he’s not here now?”

  “Doesn’t look like it. We still have uniforms inside conducting a more thorough search to be sure. It’s a large facility though. We called for K-9 backup to come out and help.”

  I shook my head. “They won’t find him. He’s long gone.”

  “Yeah, I think you’re right.”

  “Where would he go?” asked Ursula. “Have we no hope for Miss Leona?”

  “I don’t know.” Tony’s voice softened. “I just don’t know.”

  “Did you check the basement?” I asked.

  “Of course, don’t you think I’d check the most obvious place first?”

  “All right then, maybe the most obvious place isn’t so obvious.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  I gestured into the woods behind us. “Maybe he’s taken her back with him.”

  “Into the woods?” asked Dominic.

  “Back to the Eighth Sphere.”

  Carlos said, “I don’t get it.”

  “What’s not to get? We know Dr. Lowell is a brilliant man. Do you think he’d take Leona kicking and screaming all the way back here to the research center if he didn’t have a way out?”

  “You think he’s found a two-way portal?”

  “Yes, I think he has. And if I had to guess where that portal is, I’d say back there in the woods where we last saw him.”

  “How would that work?” asked Dominic. “Did he reopen the portal with another witch’s ladder?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “Then what are we waiting for?” Dominic pushed past me, apparently determined to lead the rescue party through blind conviction alone. “Let’s go!”

  “Hold it!” Tony yelled. “No one’s going anywhere until we strategize a plan.”

  “No, he’s right,” argued Carlos. “We could be losing valuable time.”

  “Go on then.” I dismissed them both with a wave. “Have at it. You’re not going to find anything.”

  That stopped Dominic in his tracks. “What do you mean?”

  “Yeah,” Carlos said, “we know what a portal looks like. It’s a big swirly thing like a black funnel towering over the treetops. You can’t miss it.”

  “Nice.” I shook my head lightly. “I’m surrounded by abecedarians.”

  “What?” Carlos donned his insulted look, though not entirely sure why. “Did she just call us a dirty name?”

  “Sort of,” said Dominic. “She basically just called us neophytes.”

  “And that’s a dirty name, right?”

  I came around to the back of my car and opened the trunk. “All I’m saying is that the portal isn’t going to look like anything you’ll recognize. It’ll be invisible to the naked eye.”

  “So how will we see it?”

  “We won’t. Not at first, but we can locate it with this.” I reached into the trunk, removed a small handheld device from a box of gadgets I kept there and held it up.

  “What’s that?” asked Carlos.

  “Looks like an EMF meter,” Dominic remarked.

  “A what?”

  “He’s right. This is a triple-axes electromagnetic field meter. It measures variances in electromagnetic currents in the atmosphere. I use it to locate conversion zones.”

  Tony tapped me on the shoulder. “Mind telling us what conversion zones are.”

  Carlos laughed. “You don’t know?”

  “No. Do you?”

  “No.”

  “Then why are you snickering?”

  “Because, I’m just glad I wasn’t the only one.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I wouldn’t expect any of you to know.”

  I shut the trunk and began filling them in on what was likely the wildest, most far-fetched thing they had ever heard in their lives. Thinking back now, if circumstances were reversed, I’m sure I wouldn’t have believe any of it myself.

  “We’ve talked about how we sent Dr. Lowell to the Eighth Sphere,” I said. “So what exactly is the Eighth Sphere?”

  Carlos answered, “It’s a place where evil––”

  “She knows,” said Dominic, backhanding him on the arm. “It’s a rhetorical question.”

  “Oh.”

  “Go on, Lilith.”

  “Thank you, Dominic. The Eighth Sphere lies in the realm of a quasi-dimensional universe. It’s a shadow sphere, a paraphysical world sub-lineal to the Seventh Sphere, which is Earth.”

  “Paraphysical?” Again, Carlos.

  “It means beyond predictable physics.”

  “And that means….”

  “Will you shut up?” Tony barked. “Let her finish. You can ask questions later.”

  “I was just askin`.”

  “The Eighth Sphere, as I said, is a shadow sphere. It serves as a filter of sorts, purging deviate forms from our existence. Our own moon, by design or coincidence, acts as a counterweight, maintaining the balance between the two dimensions and keeping them separate in the matrix of time space continuum.”

  “Is this sphere on top of us or beside us?”

  “Neither,” Dominic answered. “It’s in another dimension. Now let her continue.”

  I watched Carlos’ face contort in contemplation, but he let it ride. I gave Dominic a nod, acknowledging his answer.

  “Even though the moon serves as a counterweight, it’s not a perfect balance. On the cusp of a new or full moon, the dimensional divide between the two realms is at its weakest and most vulnerable, at which time it takes very little for someone to breach the divide and cross from one dimension over to the other. When that happens, it’s called trans-dimensional travel, or TDT. The conditions necessary to facilitate TDT often occur naturally and without observable indications.”

  Carlos, “Unlike STDs, right?”

  I ignored him. “All around the world, at any given time, electromagnetic waves converge and intersect, creating harmonic distortions in the quantum particles governing free-radical energy scrolls, known as ringlets.

  “These ringlets act as gate keys to the matrix barrier. More often than not, one achieves such travel accidentally after a plane or ship unwittingly slips into an electrostatic force field known as a barometric vortex. When that happens, we call it spontaneous trans-dimensional travel, or STDT. Such is the legacy of places like the Bermuda Triangle, Japan’s Dragon Triangle, the Devil’s Lair and Uzbekistan’s Door to Hell.”

  “In English, Lilith.” Tony rolled his hand to indicate I should wrap it up. “What does it all mean in English?”

  “What it means is that if we want to find Dr. Lowell’s portal, we need to identify the conversion zones marking its vector points.” I held up my EMF meter. “This will help us do that.”

  I switched the machine on, turned towards the woods and started walking. I took only a few steps with the others in tow before pulling up short.

  Tony looked at me. “Why are we stopping?”

  I turned back to face the research center. “The meter’s telling me to go that way.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Carlos. “We sent Doctor Lowell off in a big tornado back there in the woods.”

  I shook my head. “That’s not where the vector points are, least not anymore.”

  Tony, “You mean they moved?”

  Carlos, “They couldn’t move. Could they?”

  “They could, and they did.” I started towards the front steps. “Remember, these are waves we’re talking about, not fixed anchors. It’s entirely possible they could roam hundreds of feet, yards or even miles.”

  “What’s your best guess?” asked Tony.

  I started up the steps. “I don’t know. Let’s follow the meter and find out.”

  We entered the building, following the signal strength of the EMF meter up to the second floor and down to the large room at the end of the hall.

  “This is your old room,” Tony noted, “where Doctor Lieberman held the workshops.”

>   “Yeah, no shit, Dick Tracy.” I stepped past the threshold and immediately felt the residue energy from recent paranormal activities. “He was here.”

  “Doctor Lieberman?”

  “No. Dr. Lowell.”

  Ursula asked, “Who is Doctor Lieberman?”

  Tony answered, “He worked for Doctor Lowell. He was killed outside––”

  “He was killed,” I said, stomping on Tony’s words. “Let’s just leave it at that. Shall we?”

  I would have thought Tony might have more to say on that matter. I knew it was a particularly sore subject with him. But just as I had buried certain parts of my past, so too did Tony, if not for entirely different reasons.

  The old room looked different from what I remembered, colder, smaller perhaps, even though the big oak tables and chairs were gone now. Late afternoon sunlight tripped into the room at a precarious angle, slanted as if peeking around the corner and through the windows.

  I remembered looking through the glass there one cold night in March after Travis Webber died. The Stalker took him first, slicing his body open on the steps of the research center to harvest his liver. We watched the tragic event unfold in a thought-form manifestation so real it made grown men cry.

  “Hey, look at this.”

  Carlos directed our attention to a full-length mirror he found mounted behind the door.

  “I don’t remember that,” said Tony. “Was that always there?”

  “Don’t know,” I said. “I don’t remember it, either.”

  Dominic pointed to my EMF meter. “Geez, look at that thing. It’s reading off the charts.”

  I held the meter higher. “This is a hot spot. I’ve never seen vector readings so strong before.”

  Tony asked, “So, what do we do now?”

  “We shut the portal down,” Dominic replied. “That’s what we do.”

  “No. We can’t. Leona will never find her way back if we do that.”

  “Leona’s never going to find her way back here.”

  “We can’t just leave her.”

  “Well, we can’t very well go in and get her, now can we?”

  Tony wasn’t buying it. “We have to do something. Lilith, what do you think? Is there any way that I can go through the portal to get Leona myself?”