09 - Return Of The Witch Read online

  Hours later, when I went to bed, I thought I’d dream of Tony. Hoped I would. Instead, I had another crazy dream, a violent affair reminiscent of the old Surgeon Stalker days.

  I dreamed I was wandering through a strange neighborhood at night in the rain, though as often is the case in dreams, I wasn’t getting wet. A block or so away, a dog barked. A few streets further, another answered. Did they know I was there? Could they hear my muffled footsteps drowning in the patter of rain? I turned my collar to the cold and continued my aimless trek.

  Later, beneath the halo of a streetlamp, I stopped and gave pause to a voice in my head. “Here,” the voice said, and pointed me toward a house. Though I had never seen the house before, I somehow felt oddly connected to it. I walked up to the door. The lights were on inside. Music played softly from a stereo in the living room. I didn’t knock. Instead, I felt along the top of the door casing, retrieved a key and let myself in.

  A black cat greeted me upon entering. It sniffed my shoe, hissed and trotted away. I followed it, grasping at a tethered cloud, floating room-to-room and seeing only her tail as she disappeared around one corner and then the next.

  The wind outside began to howl. Everything inside grew dull and hazy, the way it does sometimes in dreams. A black void cluttered my periphery, allowing only a narrow tunnel of light before me, squeezing my view down to a pinhole as if peering through a straw.

  I continued to search for the cat, wandering the house and finding myself back where I started. On a sideboard by the front door sat a pile of mail. A letter on top addressed to Miss April Raines of Ipswich Massachusetts remained unopened. I inspected it briefly and set it back down.

  At the end of the hall, I found a bedroom, beyond that a bathroom and a woman showering there. I didn’t recognize her, yet like the house, I felt a connection to her.

  She stepped from the shower, wrapped herself in a towel and walked to the vanity. Condensed droplets of steam wept from the mirror as she leaned in and wiped the glass. Something moved behind her. She pressed the heel of her palm to the mirror and cleared another swipe. The shadow grew larger. She gasped, spun about and screamed, cinching the towel tightly at her breasts.

  A sharp blow cut her on the forehead. She fell back, caught her balance on the edge of the vanity and came forward again. The lights flickered. The mirror shattered.

  I blinked and she was gone. Her bath towel lay coiled at the base of the vanity. Traces of blood mixed with wet footprints amid a strange blue powder.

  I reached down to pick up the towel, but the telephone rang and woke me.

  It was Dominic. He wanted to know how I was doing.

  “Fine,” I told him, squinting for the bright morning sunlight blinding me.

  “I’m at your house. How come you’re not answering the door?”

  I looked around, confident I knew the answer to that one. “I’m not home.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Well,” I took a more thorough survey of my surroundings. “I think I’m at Gloucester Beach.”

  Dominic got quiet, and then came back, “Umm, Lilith?”

  “Yes, Dominic?”

  “How did you get to Gloucester Beach? Your car’s in the driveway.”

  I frowned as I contemplated that one. “I’m guessing I flew.”

  “You flew?”

  “Yeah. Now tell me why you’re at my house.”

  “There’s been another one.”

  “Another what?”

  “Disappearance.”

  “A witch?”

  “Ah-huh.”

  “I see. Her name’s not April Raines, is it?”

  “How did you know?”

  “We should talk.”

  Chapter 6

  Two hours, one McBreakfast sandwich and a forty-eight dollar cab ride later, I was at the Justice Center with Carlos and Dominic. Ursula was there, too. She looked a bit pensive, and I bet I knew why.

  I walked up to her and pulled her aside so that the boys couldn’t hear.

  “Urs, are you all right?”

  “Aye, but for want of knowing what wrong I did thee, I am fine.”

  “You didn’t do me wrong.”

  “Surely I have offended thee.”

  “No, It’s I who have offended you.” I cupped her shoulders and pulled her in close, bumping foreheads with her lightly. I dropped my voice to a hush. “I’m sorry I pushed you away. I know you wanted to help me, but I wasn’t in a good place. I needed my space.”

  “Thou wert filled with grief. I know.”

  “No, I was filled with anger: sour-piss and vinegar anger, and I took it out on everyone, including you.”

  “Art thou angry now?”

  “No. I’ve accepted things as they are. I’m at peace now. I got to say goodbye to him last night.”

  “To Master Tony?”

  “Yeah. I built a bonfire and—”

  “Girls?” Dominic came over and put his hands on us. “Is everything all right?”

  I whirled my arm around and dislodged it off my shoulder. “Excuse me. Can’t you see we’re talking here?”

  “I’m sorry. I thought—”

  “Well, don’t think. It just makes you look stupid.”

  He looked back at Carlos, who made a point of looking the other way. Returning to me, he said, “All right, when you’re done. Take your time.”

  I whispered to Ursula, “We okay?”

  She smiled and nodded.

  “Okay, we’re done,” I said.

  “Good. Can we talk about these missing women now?”

  I took Ursula’s hand and walked her back to the desk where Carlos was sitting. His shit-eating grin told me he enjoyed watching me bite Dominic’s head off. It wouldn’t have surprised me to find that he was the one who sent Dominic over to check on us.

  “Lilith,” he said. “You look nice this morning.”

  I returned a manufactured smile. “And you’re a naughty boy.”

  He took that as a compliment.

  Dominic pulled a chair out for Ursula before taking a seat opposite Carlos. “Tell me how you knew about her.”

  “Who?”

  “April Raines. The woman from Ipswich.”

  “Oh, is that where she was from?”

  “What do you mean was?”

  “She’s dead now. Least I think so.”

  “How would you know that?”

  “I’d rather not say. But if she’s from Ipswich, how did you learn about her?”

  Carlos said, “Brittany told us. Said someone called in a 911 last night. A couple of officers rode out to April’s house and checked it out.”

  “Did they find anything?”

  “They found an open front door, some broken glass in the bathroom, a little blood on the floor.”

  “Who did you say called it in?”

  “A neighbor. Seems several people nearby heard a scream and then the sound of breaking glass coming from inside the house. When officers arrived, they found no one there.”

  I allowed my gaze to drift out the window as I recalled the details of my dream the night before. Though I wasn’t ready to accept it, I had to admit to myself that something was just not right. What I was hearing from Carlos and Dominic went way past coincidence, and frankly, it was beginning to scare the hell out of me.

  “Did you hear what I said?” Carlos asked.

  I turned to him. “What?”

  “I said the reason Brittany called us was because she knew we’d be interested once we heard what they found on the woman’s bathroom floor.”

  “Blue powder.”

  “A blue…. Yeah. Hey, how did you know?”

  “Lucky guess. Tell me what else they found?”

  “Nothing.”

  “No forced entry?”

  “Just an open door like I said. It wasn’t forced.”

  “Anything missing?”

  “Nothing obvious. They found her purse with money and credit cards in it, expensive jewelry on her
dresser in the bedroom and a smart phone on the kitchen counter.”

  “Their conclusion?”

  Dominic answered, “They concluded April probably cut herself on some broken glass and hurried off to the hospital, leaving the front door open in her haste.”

  “There you have it then. That’s probably what happened.”

  “Except nobody knows what hospital,” said Carlos. “Ipswich doesn’t have one. Brittany checked with Beverly, Newburyport and Haverhill. She even called as far south as Salem.”

  “Huh? Well that is strange.”

  “So,” Dominic said. “At least now you believe there’s something going on here.”

  I nodded. “I knew there was something going on from the beginning. I just wasn’t convinced it was nefarious. I’m still not convinced.”

  “How can you say that when April is the fourth witch from Essex County to disappear this week?”

  “Allegedly disappear.”

  “Still, I don’t mind telling you I’m worried for Ursula, and frankly I’m worried for you, too.”

  “Don’t worry about me. I’m a big girl. I can take care of myself.”

  “You still think Ingersoll’s Witness has nothing to do with it?”

  “Dominic, I’m still not sure what it is.”

  Ursula said, “Mayhap a common thread doth tie what we see not together.”

  “What do you mean, hon?”

  Dominic said, “She’s right. There is a common thread linking all four women.”

  “Let me guess. Paige Turner.”

  He woke up his laptop, loaded her web page and turned it toward me. “I showed you this yesterday and mentioned that the other three missing witches all had member profiles on this site.”

  “I remember.”

  “Yeah, well guess who else has a profile there.”

  “April Raines.”

  “You know it. And look. Paige just posted this on her blog this morning.”

  “What?”

  “Read it.”

  I took a seat, slid the laptop closer and began reading Paige Turner’s blog aloud. “Blah, blah, blah recent discovery, blah, blah–”

  “Lilith.”

  “All right. Fine. ‘…Recent discovery suggests the realignment of celestial bodies was caused by an unnatural tipping of Earth’s counterbalance.’” I looked up. “She means the moon, you know.”

  “We gathered that. Keep reading.”

  “Just saying. Let’s see…. ‘This tipping, apparently caused by a recent breech in the matrix barrier, likely occurred after a forced trans-dimensional passage by a yet unknown witch or witches. The anomaly almost certainly heralds the prophetical warnings of the Pendle Six, signaling the fateful battle between a powerful witch and an evil force that will ultimately affect the survival of every witch on the planet.’”

  “Pendle Six.” said Dominic. “Do you know what she’s talking about?”

  Ursula replied, “Only the most powerful of covens what hath walked this Earth ever.”

  “They were the most powerful,” I said, “until the Lancashire witch trials of 1612.”

  Dominic asked, “What happened then?”

  “What do you think? They hanged them?”

  “All six?”

  “Yes, but it wasn’t just them. Others were tried, found guilty and hanged. Only six were actually witches, though. Since then, it’s been a coven of ancestral lineage. Its member count varied through generations, but they’ve always called themselves the Pendle Six after that.”

  “Aye,” said Ursula, “and a fine lineage it is what doth follow in their martyr’s footprints.”

  “You mean footsteps, Urs.”

  She looked at me funny. “Sister, one cannot see a footstep if it leaves no print.”

  “Huh. You’re right. I never thought about it like that. You know I bet the original saying—”

  “Please!” Dominic steadied his breath with a silent three count. “Lilith. Continue reading. You’re almost to the good part.”

  “Fine.” I squinted at the screen again. “Let’s see, prophetical warnings, yadda, yadda…. Ah, yes, ‘It has begun as prophesized with the assimilation of the guardian’s prime essentials, whereby no physical body shall remain and the dust of life shall scatter here and yon.’”

  “You see?” said Dominic. “No body. Only dust. It’s the prophecy.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know, Dominic. I never heard of any such prophecy. A powerful witch, a fateful battle…it all seems so over-the-top. Don’t you think?”

  “Yeah? Then explain how Paige knew about someone breeching the matrix barrier and pulling off a trans-dimensional passage to the Eighth Sphere.”

  “She doesn’t mention the Eighth Sphere.”

  “She did yesterday. Besides, just that she knew about any of it supports her credentials.”

  “All right, I’ll give you that, but what are you going to do about it?”

  “Me? I can’t do anything. I told you I’m on desk duty until Internal Affairs completes its investigation on me.”

  “What about Carlos?”

  “I can’t do anything,” Carlos complained. “It’s out of our jurisdiction.”

  “What, so you’re telling me I should investigate the case?”

  “Not investigate. You can’t do that. You’re not a cop.”

  Dominic added, “But you could go and talk to Paige Turner. Find out if she thinks there are other witches in danger.”

  “You mean if Ursula is in danger.”

  “Anyone. You. Ursula. The witch down the street.”

  “You know another witch down the street?”

  “You know what I mean. Here.” He handed me a slip of paper. “This is where Paige lives. I tracked her down through her computer’s IP address.”

  “Okay, fine.” I took the paper. “If Ursula can go with me.”

  “What? No. I don’t think—”

  Ursula cleared her throat, and that’s all it took. Dominic reeled his words back in and swallowed them down.

  “Don’t think what?” I said.

  “I don’t think… that’s such a bad idea.” He looked at Carlos. “Eh?”

  Carlos leaned back in his chair and cracked an imaginary whip. “Wha-cheee,” he said, and smiled.

  “That’s what I thought.” I turned around and left, towing Ursula behind me by the arm. “Come on, Urs. This could be fun.”

  On the way out to Paige Turner’s place, I filled Ursula in on some of the strange dreams I’d been having, including the one about April Raines.

  “It’s like I was there, but I wasn’t,” I told her. “Yet how else would I know what happened to her?”

  “`Tis more than coincidence, I should think,” she said, displaying her mastery of the obvious.

  “Yeah.” I rolled my sleeve up and showed her some scratches on my arm. “What do you make of this? Looks like fingernail scratches, doesn’t it? I don’t remember getting them.”

  She examined the scratches with a light touch, spacing her fingers over them and tracing the lines softly. “Aye, `tis scratches. Four by finger, one by thumb.”

  More astute observations. She was on a roll.

  “There’s something else. Those other dreams I had. The more I think about them, the more I think some of them had to do with those other women.”

  “For the violence?”

  “Yes. I thought those dreams were driven by my anger over Tony’s death, but now I’m not so sure.”

  She shook her head. “Think naught of it, Sister, lest thy worry be the death of thee yet.”

  “Easy for you to say. You weren’t there. I was. At least I think I was.”

  Paige Turner lived in a ground floor unit at a low-income apartment complex. Four two-story buildings there formed an angular horseshoe shape with parking in both front and rear. There were few trees and even less green space to break up the concrete monotony, yet the renters there seemed to take enough pride in their domiciles to keep th
e grounds looking clean and neat.

  Paige’s apartment was in the third building, second unit on the left. Though it looked like all the others, Ursula and I would still have been able to pick it out of the lot even without the apartment number stenciled on the door.

  “Cute, isn’t it?” I said, pointing to the ceramic garden gnome standing sentry by the door.

  “Aye, reminds me of Jerome.”

  I smiled at that, noticing how one of its eyes appeared to follow our movements in that odd lizard-like way that Jerome’s did. “Yeah, I see what you mean. I take it back now. He creeps me out.”

  I wasn’t sure what to expect, except to say that the woman who answered the door wasn’t at all what I imagined. I guess I figured that anyone running a blog under a clever name like Paige Turner would have to be younger than say thirty. No reason for such an arbitrary assumption, but that’s what I thought. I mean, let’s face it. You don’t generally see octogenarians mastering internet technologies. Yet, that’s how old this woman appeared to be.

  She answered the door in a typical old woman stoop, a knitted shawl gathered around her shoulders, a crooked cherry wood cane clutched in her hand. Three black cats followed her to the door, but stayed inside, uninterested in the freedom of the outdoors that younger felines might have preferred.

  “Aye?” The old woman cawed, her scratchy voice way beyond the help of a lozenge. “May I help thee?”

  “Yes, ma`am. We’re looking for Paige Turner?”

  “I am Paige Turner.”

  I turned to Ursula. She hooked her brow. I said to the woman, “Mrs. Turner, my name is Lilith Adams. This is Ursula Bishop.”

  The woman looked up from her stooped posture and smiled. Her teeth were small and crooked, but her own. I saw her gnarly index finger tap the ball of her cane. Her cats ran off. The door opened wider without so much as a breeze to help it along.

  “Come in, my dearies,” she said. “I have been expecting you.”

  I felt a sudden Hansel and Gretel chill tickle the hairs on the back of my neck. I don’t know why. Between Ursula and me, I figured we could pitch that old woman’s scrawny ass into a fiery oven if it came to that.

  Still, I stepped back and presented Ursula with first right of entry. She obliged and followed the invisible trail of gingerbread crumbs into the parlor, carefree and oblivious.