ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
I hope you do too. It is a different take, but I guess every good take is a different take. What's one thing you think is interesting about this particular take on vamps?
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The Old: A Night Novel
- Thread starter ChrisGibson
- Start date
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
That they can be born as well as made.
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
Yeah, I always felt, for sure, that this should be a thing, and that it would be a surprising thing, that vampires could only really be distinct from humans if, indeed, there were some who had never been human Later on I found out that I wasn't the only person to do this. One example if the strange manga Vampire Knight..
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
CONCLUSION OF CHAPTER SIX
“You know that things said in movies and books are not necessarily true. Garlic and holy water don’t do anything. I do have a reflection. I can walk into anywhere I wish. I don’t have to be invited in. I walk through the day or the night, and I do not sleep in coffins. And yet… these things make people feel better, make them believe they have some form of control over something too big for them. And, what is more, they have a share of truth in them. You can forbid me from entering into your house. I do have the ability ot make myself unseen. Now Kruinh was telling me about himself. There were as many questions in my head as are in yours,” Chris said.
“So there are those who were always vampires?”
“Yes,” Chris said. “From the very oldest families, or Houses. But those are small Numbers, not that there are many of us anyway. Kruinh was right. It is hard to stay immortal. Most of us don’t really live very long. And then, with the old families, well, it is not much different. And a family is not a small thing. But… every vampire made belongs to the family of the vampire who made him. In turn, that drinker, should he make another one, belongs to that family as well. There are many rules, and I cannot tell them all to you now. At least, not without you being bored.”
“I do not think I could ever be bored by this,” Lewis said. “But, what else did you say to Kruinh on that night?”
“I asked him how long he would remain in the Bahamas?”
“A long while,” Kruinh said. “Until I and the family move onto another island.”
“To kill?”
“Not only to kill,” Kruinh said. “To do what we always do. To feast on injustice.”
“But,” Lewis said, “there are so many questions I have.”
“But Lewis there are so many questions I have,” Chris said.
“What do you mena?”
“Lewis, love, I have told you much about our clans, and you have told me nothing of yours”
“How do you mena?”
“You recognize the Maid and the Master?”
“Yes.”
“And did you not say that your uncle Owen was the Master. That there is such a person called the Maid? Didn’t I hear that his mother, your great grandmother, was the Maid once?”
“Yes, that’s true,” Lewis said. “But Maid and Master, or Magister and Maid are not terms used only by my clan.”
“Then you do not think this was your clan?”
“No,” Lewis said, realizing this suddenly. “I absolutely think it was. Only, I do not know what they were doing in the Bahams in seventeen hundred. Or how they knew a vampire.”
“Or if that Melek was you.”
“You said he was, but then you said he wasn’t,” Lewis said, “And I am confused by this.”
“Much later I would meet Malachy, and he would recognize me. He would tell me that he had been reborn. It was then that Malachy revealed his past with me. Revealed many things. I suppose the circle had been completed. Malachy was always a big believer in circles.”
“If I utter the phrase I am confused one more time I will slap myself,” Lewis said. “But on the other hand, I am not confused. I am intrigued.”
“And so am I,” Chris said, “because there are many things about your clan and what you do that are… not strange, but… interesting to me.”
“Like?”
“Your clan is Black.”
“Our family is Black, but the clan is the clan.”
“But the ways of your clan are British, Because you do things that British witches do. I remember when I lived in the islands and what the black slaves did was voodoo, or like it. And then the Maid and the Master came, and they did something different still. I have not seen enough of what your clan does to know much more, but much of what you do, what I’ve seen, reminds of something Cornish, or from my part of England. Or maybe What are the origins of your clan? Is your clan and that clan the same?”
“Everything changes. When new things arise they are appropriated, changed, adapted. Doubtless the circle tracing and many other things do come from recent times,” Lewis said, “or have been changed. And we had family that was from the British Isles. But the clan is older than all that. I do know that. I know that the clan, at one point in time was divided, was torn apart.”
“That’s what 0Malachy and the Maid said.”
“And that it came back together. Here. Clans can die. The learning and the virtue can be forgotten, the elements and tools lost. Ours was not. Also, what I know of the clan for a certainty is that, in this country, it originated out of the Carolinas, and it was majority black or mixed race with some white people. It inherited much knowledge from the British Isles, but also from Africa. It came to life after a slave rebellion in the very early 1800s. This is how it gained its name.”
Chris whispered: “The Clan of the Reunion.”
“But I have never spoken it.”
“But you did not have to,” Chris said. “This is the only clan I’ve ever known. And every witch I ever knew came from it. It was not called the Clan of the Reunion until that time because by that time…”
“By that time the sacred implements had been reunited.”
“And so the clan is headed in the Carolinas,” Chris said. “North Carolina or South Carolina?”
“No,” Lewis shook his head. “The clan was reformed there. But the clan is headed wherever the master is, and that is here, in this city. For the Master is Uncle Owen.”
“But why he leave there to come here?”
“You mean why would Black people flee the South?”
“That was a stupid question.”
“It did have elements of stupidity, yes.”
“Well, then let me put it this way: Why here of all places in the North? Or in he world?”
“Chris,” Lewis said, “In some way not only me and you, but the clan and you are linked together and I’m beginning to think the simple answer to why we resettled here, is because of you.”
“What are they up to?” Laurie whispered.
Chris put a finger to his lips and whispered, “Why don’t we just go out and leave them to it.”
Laurie nodded.
On the floor the coffee table had been pushed away, and Lewis and Seth lay hand in hand, murmuring over and over in a circle of salt and tea lights burning at the cardinal directions. Cinnamon smoke wafted up. Even if they were looking, Lewis and Seth would have only wondered mildly at the fact that the two tall men who could not step over them, opened the window and the stepping onto the sill, climbed out of it, Chris last, with a parting look to Lewis as he vaulted off of the ledge.
By then they were in Seth’s dream, and Lewis had said, “Where are we going?”
“We are trying to get away from dreams and phantasms and reach actual vision.”
They rejected unicorns and monsters, dead men with buzz saws in their heads, crucified angels, talking ladybugs, all the usual usual nonsense and, at last, settled on the park.
“There,” Lewis said.
And the park was familiar, because it was the same one by the beach where they held the circles, the same one where he had seen Evangeline, and as they came toward it, Seth said, “Will they see us?”
There were two people on the benches.
“No. Because we are not there, we are only seeing. This is lie ka telescope. We are not astral bodies. We are not any type of bodies.”
And it was true, Seth realized. He was only stretching his sight, not walking, and as they went down the street to the park, he realized it was night, and by the phase of the moon that it was, in fact, this very night, From Lewis came just the dimmest assent to this, but to converse with each other would have been to take from the power of this moment. To even revel in the power of this moment, the power he had never known, would have been to diminish its power and so he simply moved to the moment where he was watching his cousin Eve, who had not let anyone know she was in the city—and who could blame her? Her hands were lightly bandaged still. She was sitting on the bench, waiting, and there was a long slim, wicked wand of black metal in her hands. A shadow spread over her, and she only smiled, looking up at the woman who had just arrived, her white face made whiter by the blond of her hair, and the white of the emerging moon.
“Eve,” the woman said.
Rising, Eve nodded and greeted her.
“Evangeline.”
“You know that things said in movies and books are not necessarily true. Garlic and holy water don’t do anything. I do have a reflection. I can walk into anywhere I wish. I don’t have to be invited in. I walk through the day or the night, and I do not sleep in coffins. And yet… these things make people feel better, make them believe they have some form of control over something too big for them. And, what is more, they have a share of truth in them. You can forbid me from entering into your house. I do have the ability ot make myself unseen. Now Kruinh was telling me about himself. There were as many questions in my head as are in yours,” Chris said.
“So there are those who were always vampires?”
“Yes,” Chris said. “From the very oldest families, or Houses. But those are small Numbers, not that there are many of us anyway. Kruinh was right. It is hard to stay immortal. Most of us don’t really live very long. And then, with the old families, well, it is not much different. And a family is not a small thing. But… every vampire made belongs to the family of the vampire who made him. In turn, that drinker, should he make another one, belongs to that family as well. There are many rules, and I cannot tell them all to you now. At least, not without you being bored.”
“I do not think I could ever be bored by this,” Lewis said. “But, what else did you say to Kruinh on that night?”
“I asked him how long he would remain in the Bahamas?”
“A long while,” Kruinh said. “Until I and the family move onto another island.”
“To kill?”
“Not only to kill,” Kruinh said. “To do what we always do. To feast on injustice.”
“But,” Lewis said, “there are so many questions I have.”
“But Lewis there are so many questions I have,” Chris said.
“What do you mena?”
“Lewis, love, I have told you much about our clans, and you have told me nothing of yours”
“How do you mena?”
“You recognize the Maid and the Master?”
“Yes.”
“And did you not say that your uncle Owen was the Master. That there is such a person called the Maid? Didn’t I hear that his mother, your great grandmother, was the Maid once?”
“Yes, that’s true,” Lewis said. “But Maid and Master, or Magister and Maid are not terms used only by my clan.”
“Then you do not think this was your clan?”
“No,” Lewis said, realizing this suddenly. “I absolutely think it was. Only, I do not know what they were doing in the Bahams in seventeen hundred. Or how they knew a vampire.”
“Or if that Melek was you.”
“You said he was, but then you said he wasn’t,” Lewis said, “And I am confused by this.”
“Much later I would meet Malachy, and he would recognize me. He would tell me that he had been reborn. It was then that Malachy revealed his past with me. Revealed many things. I suppose the circle had been completed. Malachy was always a big believer in circles.”
“If I utter the phrase I am confused one more time I will slap myself,” Lewis said. “But on the other hand, I am not confused. I am intrigued.”
“And so am I,” Chris said, “because there are many things about your clan and what you do that are… not strange, but… interesting to me.”
“Like?”
“Your clan is Black.”
“Our family is Black, but the clan is the clan.”
“But the ways of your clan are British, Because you do things that British witches do. I remember when I lived in the islands and what the black slaves did was voodoo, or like it. And then the Maid and the Master came, and they did something different still. I have not seen enough of what your clan does to know much more, but much of what you do, what I’ve seen, reminds of something Cornish, or from my part of England. Or maybe What are the origins of your clan? Is your clan and that clan the same?”
“Everything changes. When new things arise they are appropriated, changed, adapted. Doubtless the circle tracing and many other things do come from recent times,” Lewis said, “or have been changed. And we had family that was from the British Isles. But the clan is older than all that. I do know that. I know that the clan, at one point in time was divided, was torn apart.”
“That’s what 0Malachy and the Maid said.”
“And that it came back together. Here. Clans can die. The learning and the virtue can be forgotten, the elements and tools lost. Ours was not. Also, what I know of the clan for a certainty is that, in this country, it originated out of the Carolinas, and it was majority black or mixed race with some white people. It inherited much knowledge from the British Isles, but also from Africa. It came to life after a slave rebellion in the very early 1800s. This is how it gained its name.”
Chris whispered: “The Clan of the Reunion.”
“But I have never spoken it.”
“But you did not have to,” Chris said. “This is the only clan I’ve ever known. And every witch I ever knew came from it. It was not called the Clan of the Reunion until that time because by that time…”
“By that time the sacred implements had been reunited.”
“And so the clan is headed in the Carolinas,” Chris said. “North Carolina or South Carolina?”
“No,” Lewis shook his head. “The clan was reformed there. But the clan is headed wherever the master is, and that is here, in this city. For the Master is Uncle Owen.”
“But why he leave there to come here?”
“You mean why would Black people flee the South?”
“That was a stupid question.”
“It did have elements of stupidity, yes.”
“Well, then let me put it this way: Why here of all places in the North? Or in he world?”
“Chris,” Lewis said, “In some way not only me and you, but the clan and you are linked together and I’m beginning to think the simple answer to why we resettled here, is because of you.”
“What are they up to?” Laurie whispered.
Chris put a finger to his lips and whispered, “Why don’t we just go out and leave them to it.”
Laurie nodded.
On the floor the coffee table had been pushed away, and Lewis and Seth lay hand in hand, murmuring over and over in a circle of salt and tea lights burning at the cardinal directions. Cinnamon smoke wafted up. Even if they were looking, Lewis and Seth would have only wondered mildly at the fact that the two tall men who could not step over them, opened the window and the stepping onto the sill, climbed out of it, Chris last, with a parting look to Lewis as he vaulted off of the ledge.
By then they were in Seth’s dream, and Lewis had said, “Where are we going?”
“We are trying to get away from dreams and phantasms and reach actual vision.”
They rejected unicorns and monsters, dead men with buzz saws in their heads, crucified angels, talking ladybugs, all the usual usual nonsense and, at last, settled on the park.
“There,” Lewis said.
And the park was familiar, because it was the same one by the beach where they held the circles, the same one where he had seen Evangeline, and as they came toward it, Seth said, “Will they see us?”
There were two people on the benches.
“No. Because we are not there, we are only seeing. This is lie ka telescope. We are not astral bodies. We are not any type of bodies.”
And it was true, Seth realized. He was only stretching his sight, not walking, and as they went down the street to the park, he realized it was night, and by the phase of the moon that it was, in fact, this very night, From Lewis came just the dimmest assent to this, but to converse with each other would have been to take from the power of this moment. To even revel in the power of this moment, the power he had never known, would have been to diminish its power and so he simply moved to the moment where he was watching his cousin Eve, who had not let anyone know she was in the city—and who could blame her? Her hands were lightly bandaged still. She was sitting on the bench, waiting, and there was a long slim, wicked wand of black metal in her hands. A shadow spread over her, and she only smiled, looking up at the woman who had just arrived, her white face made whiter by the blond of her hair, and the white of the emerging moon.
“Eve,” the woman said.
Rising, Eve nodded and greeted her.
“Evangeline.”
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
Another great portion! I am enjoying learning even more about Chris. His past is even more interesting then what I imagined. I think Evangeline is going to mean trouble but I guess ill have to wait and see about that. Excellent writing and I look forward to more soon!
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
Well, Evangeline is an evil vampire, so she certainly means trouble. What trouble she means, though, you simply have to wait to find out. Chris is full of secrets, but soon you will learn other people have secrets of their own as well.
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
P A R T
T W O
S E V E N
LOREAL
If we do not have the depths, how do we have the heights? Yet you fear the depths and do not want to confess that you are afraid of them.
-The Red Book
Loreal was out of sympathy. Tonight, Amanda was crying again, and she felt bad for saying it that way even if she was saying to TJ, her best friend, and not to the girls, who were in the room with Amanda. They were doing their usual Saturday night thing. Every Saturday night they went to dinner, though Loreal didn’t eat with them. She usually ate with TJ or with Chris and Sara, and then they all went back after dinner, took a nap, sorted themselves out, showered, got dressed again and, around ten o’ clock, Chris and Sara might come to her dorm room, or she might get TJ, or the girls might show up from Justin Hall, and they would begin their night of traveling around the dorms to all of the parties, seeing all the sights, drinking what there was to drink and smoking what was offered.
Tonight, the girls, Tara, Meghan and Amanda, had arrived at Loreal’s door around ten o’ clock, and they had oohed and ahhed over her new skirt, her cute hair, how they wished theye had skin and eyes like hers, golden skin, grey eyes and the puff of soft reddish brown hair that she was wearing in an almost afro tonight. And could I borrow that lip gloss, and did you want glitter or not? But don’t you think everybody looks better with glitter? Sara was coming for just a bit, but not Chris. He never came. Loreal couldn’t understand what Sara saw in him anyway. And then they were off in the night. Fall was having its last hurrah. It had been unbearably cold for the last week, and all dorms were not made alike. She was frozen in her attic room in Saint Ita’s Hall. Tonight, now that the rain was gone, they made their way down the wet lane between Saint Ita’s Hall, the old convent and the rest of the campus, and now they turned through the trees that Meghan designated as, “A good place to get raped,” and came out through them on the other side of the parking lot that led to Justin Hall.
“We just have to get Amanda,” Meghan said.
Get Amanda and then thye would head over to Merlin Hall, the soccer players dorm, the most fun dorm, the most, Loreal had noted, bisexual dorm. Justin Hall had a large fluorescent lit lobby and shot out in two wings. They went down one and came to amanda’s room. She was sitting on the floor amidst her candles and Sara said, “I love what you do to your room.”
Loreal had too, once upon a time. She had loved the Pre raphaelite posters, Ophelia drowning, the lost Lady of Shallot, that one bitch with the sword and knight kneeling before her. You know, that painttng. And she loved Amanda’s Medieval Baebes CDs, those otherworldly women doing their strange wailing and chanting. Loreal loved the inordinate amount of flickering candles, enough to call up several dead people. She loved what some people referred to as Amanda’s witchiness. Along with Meghan’s collection of Tarot cards and her cryptic murmurings, it was what had drawn Loreal ot her and, to some extent, all of the girls.
But Amanda was no witch, Loreal knew that. Her life had been surrounded in witchcraft, and she knew the difference between the look of a thing and its actuality. And tonight, in the hall, she was talking to TJ because Amanda had burst out crying again and everyone was hugging her and Loreal had found her own hug to be… less than sincere.
“Well,” TJ said, trying to be sympathetic, “she did go through something.”
Loreal turned to go into the bathroom and close the door. It was a private bathroom with a tub, and Loreal never quite understood why it was in the dormitory.
“She had an abortion!” Loreal declared.
“Well, that is something.”
“Yeah, but it was three years ago and I’m tired of her crying about it.”
“Ouch.”
“It’s not like I’m saying that to anyone but you, and no one made her have it. Besides. It’s the twenty-first century, no one has to get pregnant.”
“Maybe she used birth control and condoms and got pregnant anyway.”
“Nope,” Loreal said. “And if that happened to me, I’d assume God wanted me to have the baby. I’m just bitching now. I need to get the hell off the phone and be a good girlfriend. Are you going to meet us at Merlin?”
“I don’t even know when you’re going to get there.”
“I’ll call,” she said.
“You know,” Loreal confided before she hung up, “I can’t wait to be done with this girly shit. I’m no good at it. Not really.”
She didn’t mind, not really. She wanted to be left alone. It wasn’t that she hated being with people, she just liked her own solitude, and as she walked from Merlin, across the little sidewalk whose other side was the great field that stretched out to the country road interrupted only by the old fountain and, to her right, the chapel, she felt like stepping out of that noise. She was coming back into reality again.
“I can’t wait to get into the real world,” Loreal murmured. “And when I say the real world, I don’t mean offices and jobs. This is not the real world, not all the talking and the gossip and the bad sex and the weed and the conversations I don’t want to have. This is the real world right here.”
TJ met her at Merlini with the others, and after going through the dorm rooms, they stopped at Ted Waymouth’s for a while. Loreal wasn’t entirely sure why TJ had brought her here. Ted was talking to Sara who had just arrived, and he welcomed them both, but said, “Teej, you came out tonight!”
“This is my friend, Loreal.”
“Pleased to meet you.”
He was courteous, and though he was white, Loreal thought he was, in a way she could not place her finger on, a lot like TJ. But as the two continued talking, and Sara said, “I think we’d better get out of here and leave the boys to their man talk,” Loreal looked to TJ and he said, “Oh, I’d better go.”
“No, TJ,” she said. “Stay. It’s getting late.”
“You going back with the girls?”
“I’m going to head back with Sara,” she said.
“Sometimes you just have to let boys be boys and do what they’re going to do,” Sara said, and Loreal wasn’t entirely sure what she menat.
“Yeah,” she said.
“I think I’m turning into an old lady,” Sara said in a voice that was very much like an old lady’s though loreal doubted she was doing it on purpose. “I think I’m going to have a cup of tea.”
Loreal wasn’t surprised that Sara Branter sat in her room and drank cups of tea because she herself did that same thing.
“You are more than welcome to join me,” she told Loreal.
But Loreal said, “I’d love to if you’re still up later. I haven’t been by myself at all tonight.”
“I know what you mean.”
“I think I need to take a walk.”
Outside were the stars and the moon and the chill in the air and the empty old church whose doors were always open. Sometimes she sat in there by herself at night and talked to God, and sometimes she didn’t talk to anyone at all. She just felt safe. Only once had she been interrupted, when one of the old priest who lived in the large retired priest house next door had walked in and intoned, “I have come to replace the candle,” and then he had lifted the red glass over the old votive before the Blessed Sacrament, replaced it with a new one, bowed before the tabernacle and left.
But tonight Loreal only sat on the steps of the chapel, and she had not been sitting very long when the phone rang.
“For real?”
Loreal didn’t give her number out to any of her friends. There were phones in each dorm room for that, so she looked at the phone, because it had to be something important for any family to call so late.
EVE
“Oh,” Loreal murmured.
She answered the phone and said, “Is there something wrong?”
“Can you pack up and come home for a few days?”
“What’s wrong?”
“Grandma is dying.”
Loreal frowned. It wasn’t a surprise, and it wasn’t really a tragedy. She found herself… ready for it. She didn’t even bother to ask something foolish like, were they sure?
“When are you coming?” Loreal asked.
“I’ll be there by noon tomorrow.”
Loreal nodded and then remembered her older sister couldn’t see her.
“Alright,” she said. “I’ll be ready.”
She was lost in the countryside, the hills rolling past her, the harvested fields going gold- grey to grey, dusted in white, the bare trees brown old long tall men, stretching bony fingers. She was not depressed. She was not sad, really.
“It’s all so beautiful,” Loreal murmured.
“What?” Eve said as she drove.
“Just,” Loreal began, and then coming back to herself and remembering whom she was talking to, she shook her head and said, “Nevermind.”
She remembered the days she had stayed with Grandma, and early in the morning they would wake up to walk through the woods and gather up the mushrooms, and all the plants that looked like weeds to Loreal until her Grandmother taught her what they were.
“Comfrey for healing and headaches. Fly agaric to produce mild hallucinations, or sometimes the rough ones. Assafedida for sickness. And cough. Milkweed for ease in childbirth. Witch hazel keeps the skin clear and removes stretch marks.”
They did not go to church, but Grandma always spoke of God. Sometimes, often when Loreal was older, she referred to God as She. But not always. Early in the morning she would come out onto the porch of the large house in the part of town that bordered the great wood, and she would stretch out her hands like a priest, and she would adore the sun and then bless the fields. Loreal remembered her making porridge with honey and raisins, currants and nuts, and as she got older, a large steaming mug of coffee, and then the house would be quiet, and she would wrap up her long white hair into a crown about her head, and tie a scarf over it and go to her quiet place.
“You need to be quiet in some places,” she said, “to know that God is there.”
Loreal could still smell the sweet scent of her grandmother’s incense.
“What in the world are you thinking?” Eve asked.
Because Loreal did not really wish to discuss it, she said, “What happened to your hands?”
“Oh,” Eve said, distractedly, “they’re almost better now.”
“Well,” Loreal figured, she wasn’t about to tell. But at least that had taken her from trying to ask her questions. She wanted to say, “It probably had something to do with Grandfather.”
“Your grandfather is a different sort,” Grandma had said.
“Is that why you live apart?”
“It’s why it’s strange that we ever lived together in the first place. “Your sister and brother are….” Grandma sighed, “Still enamored of him.”
At that time, Loreal had not known what the word enamored meant. Grandma had said, “His way is easier than mine. And prettier. There is… more will in it. He does not believe in… giving way.”
Loreal had really not known what any of that meant. She understood only that she barely knew her grandfather and heartly disliked him. She only knew that her older brother and sister did what he desired, and she didn’t much like them either. They were from her father’s first marriage, she from the last, and after her father had died, her mother had turned to Grandma, so Loreal had known her. Once she had received a letter from her Grandfather Augustus. It said, “Loreal, I desire to see you.” But in meeting him she felt desired, like a possession, and not like a loved one. She had never wished to see Augustus again.
T W O
S E V E N
LOREAL
If we do not have the depths, how do we have the heights? Yet you fear the depths and do not want to confess that you are afraid of them.
-The Red Book
Loreal was out of sympathy. Tonight, Amanda was crying again, and she felt bad for saying it that way even if she was saying to TJ, her best friend, and not to the girls, who were in the room with Amanda. They were doing their usual Saturday night thing. Every Saturday night they went to dinner, though Loreal didn’t eat with them. She usually ate with TJ or with Chris and Sara, and then they all went back after dinner, took a nap, sorted themselves out, showered, got dressed again and, around ten o’ clock, Chris and Sara might come to her dorm room, or she might get TJ, or the girls might show up from Justin Hall, and they would begin their night of traveling around the dorms to all of the parties, seeing all the sights, drinking what there was to drink and smoking what was offered.
Tonight, the girls, Tara, Meghan and Amanda, had arrived at Loreal’s door around ten o’ clock, and they had oohed and ahhed over her new skirt, her cute hair, how they wished theye had skin and eyes like hers, golden skin, grey eyes and the puff of soft reddish brown hair that she was wearing in an almost afro tonight. And could I borrow that lip gloss, and did you want glitter or not? But don’t you think everybody looks better with glitter? Sara was coming for just a bit, but not Chris. He never came. Loreal couldn’t understand what Sara saw in him anyway. And then they were off in the night. Fall was having its last hurrah. It had been unbearably cold for the last week, and all dorms were not made alike. She was frozen in her attic room in Saint Ita’s Hall. Tonight, now that the rain was gone, they made their way down the wet lane between Saint Ita’s Hall, the old convent and the rest of the campus, and now they turned through the trees that Meghan designated as, “A good place to get raped,” and came out through them on the other side of the parking lot that led to Justin Hall.
“We just have to get Amanda,” Meghan said.
Get Amanda and then thye would head over to Merlin Hall, the soccer players dorm, the most fun dorm, the most, Loreal had noted, bisexual dorm. Justin Hall had a large fluorescent lit lobby and shot out in two wings. They went down one and came to amanda’s room. She was sitting on the floor amidst her candles and Sara said, “I love what you do to your room.”
Loreal had too, once upon a time. She had loved the Pre raphaelite posters, Ophelia drowning, the lost Lady of Shallot, that one bitch with the sword and knight kneeling before her. You know, that painttng. And she loved Amanda’s Medieval Baebes CDs, those otherworldly women doing their strange wailing and chanting. Loreal loved the inordinate amount of flickering candles, enough to call up several dead people. She loved what some people referred to as Amanda’s witchiness. Along with Meghan’s collection of Tarot cards and her cryptic murmurings, it was what had drawn Loreal ot her and, to some extent, all of the girls.
But Amanda was no witch, Loreal knew that. Her life had been surrounded in witchcraft, and she knew the difference between the look of a thing and its actuality. And tonight, in the hall, she was talking to TJ because Amanda had burst out crying again and everyone was hugging her and Loreal had found her own hug to be… less than sincere.
“Well,” TJ said, trying to be sympathetic, “she did go through something.”
Loreal turned to go into the bathroom and close the door. It was a private bathroom with a tub, and Loreal never quite understood why it was in the dormitory.
“She had an abortion!” Loreal declared.
“Well, that is something.”
“Yeah, but it was three years ago and I’m tired of her crying about it.”
“Ouch.”
“It’s not like I’m saying that to anyone but you, and no one made her have it. Besides. It’s the twenty-first century, no one has to get pregnant.”
“Maybe she used birth control and condoms and got pregnant anyway.”
“Nope,” Loreal said. “And if that happened to me, I’d assume God wanted me to have the baby. I’m just bitching now. I need to get the hell off the phone and be a good girlfriend. Are you going to meet us at Merlin?”
“I don’t even know when you’re going to get there.”
“I’ll call,” she said.
“You know,” Loreal confided before she hung up, “I can’t wait to be done with this girly shit. I’m no good at it. Not really.”
She didn’t mind, not really. She wanted to be left alone. It wasn’t that she hated being with people, she just liked her own solitude, and as she walked from Merlin, across the little sidewalk whose other side was the great field that stretched out to the country road interrupted only by the old fountain and, to her right, the chapel, she felt like stepping out of that noise. She was coming back into reality again.
“I can’t wait to get into the real world,” Loreal murmured. “And when I say the real world, I don’t mean offices and jobs. This is not the real world, not all the talking and the gossip and the bad sex and the weed and the conversations I don’t want to have. This is the real world right here.”
TJ met her at Merlini with the others, and after going through the dorm rooms, they stopped at Ted Waymouth’s for a while. Loreal wasn’t entirely sure why TJ had brought her here. Ted was talking to Sara who had just arrived, and he welcomed them both, but said, “Teej, you came out tonight!”
“This is my friend, Loreal.”
“Pleased to meet you.”
He was courteous, and though he was white, Loreal thought he was, in a way she could not place her finger on, a lot like TJ. But as the two continued talking, and Sara said, “I think we’d better get out of here and leave the boys to their man talk,” Loreal looked to TJ and he said, “Oh, I’d better go.”
“No, TJ,” she said. “Stay. It’s getting late.”
“You going back with the girls?”
“I’m going to head back with Sara,” she said.
“Sometimes you just have to let boys be boys and do what they’re going to do,” Sara said, and Loreal wasn’t entirely sure what she menat.
“Yeah,” she said.
“I think I’m turning into an old lady,” Sara said in a voice that was very much like an old lady’s though loreal doubted she was doing it on purpose. “I think I’m going to have a cup of tea.”
Loreal wasn’t surprised that Sara Branter sat in her room and drank cups of tea because she herself did that same thing.
“You are more than welcome to join me,” she told Loreal.
But Loreal said, “I’d love to if you’re still up later. I haven’t been by myself at all tonight.”
“I know what you mean.”
“I think I need to take a walk.”
Outside were the stars and the moon and the chill in the air and the empty old church whose doors were always open. Sometimes she sat in there by herself at night and talked to God, and sometimes she didn’t talk to anyone at all. She just felt safe. Only once had she been interrupted, when one of the old priest who lived in the large retired priest house next door had walked in and intoned, “I have come to replace the candle,” and then he had lifted the red glass over the old votive before the Blessed Sacrament, replaced it with a new one, bowed before the tabernacle and left.
But tonight Loreal only sat on the steps of the chapel, and she had not been sitting very long when the phone rang.
“For real?”
Loreal didn’t give her number out to any of her friends. There were phones in each dorm room for that, so she looked at the phone, because it had to be something important for any family to call so late.
EVE
“Oh,” Loreal murmured.
She answered the phone and said, “Is there something wrong?”
“Can you pack up and come home for a few days?”
“What’s wrong?”
“Grandma is dying.”
Loreal frowned. It wasn’t a surprise, and it wasn’t really a tragedy. She found herself… ready for it. She didn’t even bother to ask something foolish like, were they sure?
“When are you coming?” Loreal asked.
“I’ll be there by noon tomorrow.”
Loreal nodded and then remembered her older sister couldn’t see her.
“Alright,” she said. “I’ll be ready.”
She was lost in the countryside, the hills rolling past her, the harvested fields going gold- grey to grey, dusted in white, the bare trees brown old long tall men, stretching bony fingers. She was not depressed. She was not sad, really.
“It’s all so beautiful,” Loreal murmured.
“What?” Eve said as she drove.
“Just,” Loreal began, and then coming back to herself and remembering whom she was talking to, she shook her head and said, “Nevermind.”
She remembered the days she had stayed with Grandma, and early in the morning they would wake up to walk through the woods and gather up the mushrooms, and all the plants that looked like weeds to Loreal until her Grandmother taught her what they were.
“Comfrey for healing and headaches. Fly agaric to produce mild hallucinations, or sometimes the rough ones. Assafedida for sickness. And cough. Milkweed for ease in childbirth. Witch hazel keeps the skin clear and removes stretch marks.”
They did not go to church, but Grandma always spoke of God. Sometimes, often when Loreal was older, she referred to God as She. But not always. Early in the morning she would come out onto the porch of the large house in the part of town that bordered the great wood, and she would stretch out her hands like a priest, and she would adore the sun and then bless the fields. Loreal remembered her making porridge with honey and raisins, currants and nuts, and as she got older, a large steaming mug of coffee, and then the house would be quiet, and she would wrap up her long white hair into a crown about her head, and tie a scarf over it and go to her quiet place.
“You need to be quiet in some places,” she said, “to know that God is there.”
Loreal could still smell the sweet scent of her grandmother’s incense.
“What in the world are you thinking?” Eve asked.
Because Loreal did not really wish to discuss it, she said, “What happened to your hands?”
“Oh,” Eve said, distractedly, “they’re almost better now.”
“Well,” Loreal figured, she wasn’t about to tell. But at least that had taken her from trying to ask her questions. She wanted to say, “It probably had something to do with Grandfather.”
“Your grandfather is a different sort,” Grandma had said.
“Is that why you live apart?”
“It’s why it’s strange that we ever lived together in the first place. “Your sister and brother are….” Grandma sighed, “Still enamored of him.”
At that time, Loreal had not known what the word enamored meant. Grandma had said, “His way is easier than mine. And prettier. There is… more will in it. He does not believe in… giving way.”
Loreal had really not known what any of that meant. She understood only that she barely knew her grandfather and heartly disliked him. She only knew that her older brother and sister did what he desired, and she didn’t much like them either. They were from her father’s first marriage, she from the last, and after her father had died, her mother had turned to Grandma, so Loreal had known her. Once she had received a letter from her Grandfather Augustus. It said, “Loreal, I desire to see you.” But in meeting him she felt desired, like a possession, and not like a loved one. She had never wished to see Augustus again.
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
That was an interesting and unexpected portion! By unexpected I didn't know that so many more characters were going to be introduced! It will be interesting to see how their story relates to the other things going on in this novel. Great writing and thanks once again for posting so often! It is nice to have a new bit of this story and your other stories and poems to read most days.
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
I do aim to surprise and delight, and I'm glad the introduction of Loreal did that.There is so much more to come and I promise you're going to continue to be very surprised, indeed. I am wlays honored to post and grateful to be read. More tomorrow night. Thank you for coming by.
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
WEEKEND PORTION PART ONE
Her mother was in the house when Loreal got there, and they instantly embraced.
“Eve,” her mother greeted her sister with some coldness.
“Morgan,” Eve returned.
“She’s been waiting for you,” Morgan told her daughter, and Loreal nodded, going down the hall. This was the house where she’d had so many good times, where she had spent half of her childhood, and she left her mother in the living room looking at Eve. The last thing she heard from them was Morgan saying, “Would you like something to drink?” and Eve saying,” I would, and since is my house, I know the way to the refrigerator.”
When she got to the bedroom, Loreal was surprised to see her cousins, Owen and his nephew Lewis.
“You’re here,” Lewis said, and Owen only nodded. Neither one of them went to hug her. It would have been too much. In the corner of the room, hugging himself, was Seth. Like her mother, like the old woman lying in the bed, her face craggy, Seth was white, or nearly, and the old woman said, “Well now the Dunharrows are all together.”
Owen stood and kissed the woman on her wrinkled head, “You need to be with your granddaughter,” he told her, and he squeezed the old hand, blue with veins, and walked around the bed, leading Seth out, followed by Lewis.
Loreal nodded, kissed lightly on the cheek by Lewis, and she pulled a chair up to the bed.
“My child,” the old woman said, and then she didn’t say much for a long time,
“You need to be a priestess,” she said. “To be a true witch, you must be a priestess. Or else you’re just a girl with some parlor tricks. Like Eve. That was her problem, and she had the blood twice over. You must be initiated.”
Loreal nodded, and her grandmother said, “If you aren’t initiated, all of my blessing will mean very little. You understand?”
Loreal nodded.
“Your grades are good?”
Loreal nodded again, mildly surprised in the mundane shift in conversation, and then she said, “Yes, Grandma.”
The old woman said, “Ah… what do I care about grades? Are you? No, listen. Look at me.”
Loreal looked into the clouded grey eyes of the old woman.
“You are so beautiful,” she said. “So many things were done wrong. So many things that I hoped would turn out different… I cannot even count them.But you, you were certainly the good thing.”
Loreal nodded, and then her grandmother said, “Call them in. Call all of them in. There is very little time left.”
Loreal stood up. “Yes, Grandma.”
She left the room and went down the hall to the living room.
“You all have to come,” she said, surprised at how small her throat felt. “Now.”
She turned not waiting for them, and she came back into the bedroom thinking, well she can’t die alone. Loreal sat on the bed and took her grandmother’s cold hand.
“Don’t leave me, Grandma.”
“Loreal!”
“I know you have to go. But… always be with me. Don’t…don’t go too far away.”
She said no more as the first footsteps came, her mother’s followed by Owen and Lewis, Seth and now Eve.
“I want everyone,” the old woman said, “to see this.”
She coughed and said, “Owen, prop me up.”
Owen came forward and propped up the woman, and she coughed a little and then she placed her hand on Loreal’s shoulder.
“My child,” she said, and her voice gathered a strength it had not possessed, “in these last moments,” and her hand, so weak, took on a great pressure, almost pushing Loreal to the floor. Her grip was like iron and she declared, “All of my power… I do… place upon thee.”
Loreal felt as if she had been pushed into the floor, and had to stop herself from falling. But then her shoulder throbbed and the weight was gone as the dry weak hand slipped fomr her back onto the bed. By the time Loreal opened her eyes, Owen was closing her grandmother’s.
“We’ll drive you back to college,” Lewis said. “If you want. You’re on the way back home.”
“Thank you,” Loreal said. Her head was on her cousin’s shoulder. “I can’t go back tonight. No one’s going to understand.”
“No, no, of course,” Lewis said. “That’s why I said we’ll take you back. We’re all staying. We can take you back tomorrow or the day after.”
“You’ll bring me back for Nine Night, right?”
“Of course.”
“Grandma said I need to be a priestess. She said I need to be inititated, or none of it, none of what she did will mean anything.”
“What she did,” Lewis said, “her blessing, it may turn on you without proper training.”
“Will you initiate me?”
“Me or Owen. It is time for you to be taken into the clan. At the moment I am training Seth as well.”
“That’s the thing,” Loreal said. “I know everyone has a grandma that dies, but right now I just feel like no one would understand. But what she did, the change. I can feel it, and I feel different, different from all the other people I know, like I only make sense here with you all. I feel too different and too strange right now to go back.”
“Of course you do,” Lewis said.
“I’m so tired,” Loreal said, “I don’t even know what to think.”
“Go rest,” Lewis said. “Go to your room and take a sleep. Owen’s going to go out and get dinner.”
“When I wake up, will I feel better?”
“You’ll feel better than if you hadn’t slept.”
When she awoke, she could hear singing downstairs. It was low and stately and strangely jubilant, and there were no instruments. She lay on the bed, blinking up at the ceiling and listened to them downbelow.
“Come, come with me out to the old churchyard
I so well know those paths 'neath the soft green sward
Friends slumber in there that we want to regard
We will trace out their names in the old churchyard.”
She rose from bed lightly, almost like flying, but there was that moment of remembrance, when she came out of her reverie and was struck by the sadness of Grandmother’s death. The moment she awoke she felt less tired, but clear headed, sitting in the dark bedroom she’d always had in her grandmother’s house.
As she walked out of the dark room and down the darkened hallway, she could hear them singing and there was a light on in the hallway and one in the old bathroom, but out of all the darkened bedrooms, a low light came from her grandmother’s, which she entered while the singing from downstairs moved through the floors.
”Mourn not for them, their trials are o'er
And why weep for those who will weep no more
For sweet is their sleep, though cold and hard
Their pillows may be in the old churchyard!”
The family had cleaned the room and changed the sheets and made the bed, and on the comforter of the bed, hands at her sides, in a white gown, white hair fanned out across the pillow lay Susanna Dunharrow. Noble she seemed, and full of power if not at deep rest. A candle burned on the table at the side of the bed, and another tall taper before the great dressing table, reflected in its mirror. They must have all done this while she was asleep, and though Loreal had to look, she did not have to stay, and she bowed to her grandmother, and then turned to go downstairs.
“….And I know that the joy of life is marred
When we follow lost friends to the old churchyard.”
The room was filled. Not only were Lewis and Owen, Seth, Mother and Eve there, but neighbors from all around, and the friends of her grandmother and some who looked, like Grandmother had, wild and of the country, more at home in the trees than in the cities, both black and white and some neither. Which of these were witches, Loreal could not say. But as Lewis, beside Seth, raised his glass, then, in a high tenor sang, she remembered her grandmother saying, “Without initiation, my blessing means nothing.”
Owen got up and moved around the group of mourners sitting in the candle lit room singing and passing bourbon about, and came to Loreal.
“There is chicken in the kitchen, with potatoes and biscuits, and if you don’t feel up to it, there is soup and a macaroni casserole too.”
“I don’t really feel up to anything,” Loreal admitted.
“Well, that’s fine too,” Owen said.
Loreal looked around.
“Where’s Eve?”
“Oh,” Owen said with disapproval, “she’s gone. She had other things to do. She’ll be back for the funeral after Nine Night.”
Loreal felt the same disapproval, but she only said. “I think I need to go outside. I feel hot in here.”
Owen nodded and kissed her on the cheek.
She sat outside on the back porch, and for just a moment she started. Then she shook her head. She had taught herself to take serious so many illusions. Her grandmother had said illusions were how the truth that did not want to be seen looked, and for a moment she had seen a man sitting outside plain as anything before she realized it was the old dead lamp post, and its shadow on the old bench in the yard.
She checked her messages and saw one from TJ. That was just this morning, and it was now late Sunday night. Only a few hours ago she had been in a car with Eve, on her way here believing but not quite believing that her grandmother was almost gone, and a few hours before that, she had not even suspected she would be here. She had left TJ in Merlin hall and gone to bed.
“I have so much to tell you!” the first excited message came. “I mean, not so much, but it’s a big deal, and it’s about last night.”
And then the next message said, “Hello! Hello! Loreal. Where are you?”
Shit. She had meant ot leave a message, but her tiredness and her preoccupation had driven it from her mind, and now there was another message from TJ.
“Loreal, if I don’t hear from you, I’m going to call the cops.”
He sounded in equal parts angry and concerned, and this was followed by a message from Meghan.
She couldn’t talk right now, so she texted TJ.
“I had to leave. My sister came to get me. I’m at my Grandma’s house. She just died. I’m sorry I forgot to message you. I’ve been asleep half the day. I’ll be back the day after tomorrow. Let Meg and the girls know. Love, L.”
Only a moment later her phone whistled with a response, but she didn’t feel like reading it right now. Instead she sat in the dark, and now she looked at the black bench. As she sat staring, she reminded herself of what Grandma had said and how Grandma would also say, “Sometimes we agree to illusions because we are afraid.”
As she looked on the bench, slowly what she had first seen resolved itself into a tall man in black with a slender white face and pale hair, and Loreal told him, for his eyes were downcast, “I can see you, so you can look at me.”
When he did, she suppressed her fear over a power she had not possessed before, and over the power this creature had to hide himself so well. She rose, and she said, “You may come forward,” her thin voice seemed more like a little girl’s than ever. She added, “It would be best if you did.”
“I can come forward, young witch,” she said, “but only so far, for this is a house that is not yet yours, and it is not yours to invite me in.”
“Then you a vampire,” she said simply.
“I prefer the term drinker.”
“Why are you here?” Loreal asked, and realized she was no longer hiding fear. She was not afraid.
“I am with a friend. He is inside. He knows I am out here, and outside shall remain.”
“A friend? One of my cousins?”
“Three of them, actually,” he said, “Seth and Owen know me as well as Lewis.”
“Then…” Loreal cocked her head, “My Uncle Owen… he’s my cousin really, he could have let you in. I think. He’s the closest thing to an owner of this house now.”
She said this because she was still suspicious, even though she sensed that the creature could not harm her.
“It’s not only that,” he said. “This is a house of death. Death is something I cannot do, and so I am forbidden from entering it because of that. A woman has died here. She had given up her place in this world and is in the process of moving to the next. It is a sacred thing, and the opposite of what I do. So I am forbidden entering.”
“By whom?”
“By his own taboo,” a voice spoke from behind her, the first voice that actually had frightened her.
“Lewis!”
“They have their rules as we have ours,” Lewis said. “And to respect them, I must stay somewhere else tonight. I am staying with Chris at the hotel down the road. I will be back in the morning.”
“Chris?” Loreal said.
Chris nodded.
She stepped down the from the porch into the yard and offered her hand.
“Loreal.”
He took it, and then kissed it.
“So,” Loreal turned from him to Lewis, “The two of you?”
“Yes,” Lewis said.
“I didn’t even know there were real vamp—drinkers,” she said
“Neither did I,” Lewis said. “and yet, as soon as I met Chris I knew what he was, and I wasn’t surprised. It was the strangest thing.”
“Yes,” Loreal said. “That’s how I felt too.”.
Lewis was about to tell his cousin goodnight when he sensed that she had something to say or something to ask.
“You two will come back in the morning, right?”
“Of course we will.”
It was Chris who spoke.
“You love him,” Loreal said, slipping her phone into her pocket.
“I think that means that he should come into the house no matter what his customs are. He is family.”
Lewis could not read the look on Chris’s face, but Loreal continued, “You have to understand, In my whole life Lewis has never brought anyone to a family gathering, I mean, we’re witches. We really don’t like other people, so if you’re here, you must be family.”
Her mother was in the house when Loreal got there, and they instantly embraced.
“Eve,” her mother greeted her sister with some coldness.
“Morgan,” Eve returned.
“She’s been waiting for you,” Morgan told her daughter, and Loreal nodded, going down the hall. This was the house where she’d had so many good times, where she had spent half of her childhood, and she left her mother in the living room looking at Eve. The last thing she heard from them was Morgan saying, “Would you like something to drink?” and Eve saying,” I would, and since is my house, I know the way to the refrigerator.”
When she got to the bedroom, Loreal was surprised to see her cousins, Owen and his nephew Lewis.
“You’re here,” Lewis said, and Owen only nodded. Neither one of them went to hug her. It would have been too much. In the corner of the room, hugging himself, was Seth. Like her mother, like the old woman lying in the bed, her face craggy, Seth was white, or nearly, and the old woman said, “Well now the Dunharrows are all together.”
Owen stood and kissed the woman on her wrinkled head, “You need to be with your granddaughter,” he told her, and he squeezed the old hand, blue with veins, and walked around the bed, leading Seth out, followed by Lewis.
Loreal nodded, kissed lightly on the cheek by Lewis, and she pulled a chair up to the bed.
“My child,” the old woman said, and then she didn’t say much for a long time,
“You need to be a priestess,” she said. “To be a true witch, you must be a priestess. Or else you’re just a girl with some parlor tricks. Like Eve. That was her problem, and she had the blood twice over. You must be initiated.”
Loreal nodded, and her grandmother said, “If you aren’t initiated, all of my blessing will mean very little. You understand?”
Loreal nodded.
“Your grades are good?”
Loreal nodded again, mildly surprised in the mundane shift in conversation, and then she said, “Yes, Grandma.”
The old woman said, “Ah… what do I care about grades? Are you? No, listen. Look at me.”
Loreal looked into the clouded grey eyes of the old woman.
“You are so beautiful,” she said. “So many things were done wrong. So many things that I hoped would turn out different… I cannot even count them.But you, you were certainly the good thing.”
Loreal nodded, and then her grandmother said, “Call them in. Call all of them in. There is very little time left.”
Loreal stood up. “Yes, Grandma.”
She left the room and went down the hall to the living room.
“You all have to come,” she said, surprised at how small her throat felt. “Now.”
She turned not waiting for them, and she came back into the bedroom thinking, well she can’t die alone. Loreal sat on the bed and took her grandmother’s cold hand.
“Don’t leave me, Grandma.”
“Loreal!”
“I know you have to go. But… always be with me. Don’t…don’t go too far away.”
She said no more as the first footsteps came, her mother’s followed by Owen and Lewis, Seth and now Eve.
“I want everyone,” the old woman said, “to see this.”
She coughed and said, “Owen, prop me up.”
Owen came forward and propped up the woman, and she coughed a little and then she placed her hand on Loreal’s shoulder.
“My child,” she said, and her voice gathered a strength it had not possessed, “in these last moments,” and her hand, so weak, took on a great pressure, almost pushing Loreal to the floor. Her grip was like iron and she declared, “All of my power… I do… place upon thee.”
Loreal felt as if she had been pushed into the floor, and had to stop herself from falling. But then her shoulder throbbed and the weight was gone as the dry weak hand slipped fomr her back onto the bed. By the time Loreal opened her eyes, Owen was closing her grandmother’s.
“We’ll drive you back to college,” Lewis said. “If you want. You’re on the way back home.”
“Thank you,” Loreal said. Her head was on her cousin’s shoulder. “I can’t go back tonight. No one’s going to understand.”
“No, no, of course,” Lewis said. “That’s why I said we’ll take you back. We’re all staying. We can take you back tomorrow or the day after.”
“You’ll bring me back for Nine Night, right?”
“Of course.”
“Grandma said I need to be a priestess. She said I need to be inititated, or none of it, none of what she did will mean anything.”
“What she did,” Lewis said, “her blessing, it may turn on you without proper training.”
“Will you initiate me?”
“Me or Owen. It is time for you to be taken into the clan. At the moment I am training Seth as well.”
“That’s the thing,” Loreal said. “I know everyone has a grandma that dies, but right now I just feel like no one would understand. But what she did, the change. I can feel it, and I feel different, different from all the other people I know, like I only make sense here with you all. I feel too different and too strange right now to go back.”
“Of course you do,” Lewis said.
“I’m so tired,” Loreal said, “I don’t even know what to think.”
“Go rest,” Lewis said. “Go to your room and take a sleep. Owen’s going to go out and get dinner.”
“When I wake up, will I feel better?”
“You’ll feel better than if you hadn’t slept.”
When she awoke, she could hear singing downstairs. It was low and stately and strangely jubilant, and there were no instruments. She lay on the bed, blinking up at the ceiling and listened to them downbelow.
“Come, come with me out to the old churchyard
I so well know those paths 'neath the soft green sward
Friends slumber in there that we want to regard
We will trace out their names in the old churchyard.”
She rose from bed lightly, almost like flying, but there was that moment of remembrance, when she came out of her reverie and was struck by the sadness of Grandmother’s death. The moment she awoke she felt less tired, but clear headed, sitting in the dark bedroom she’d always had in her grandmother’s house.
As she walked out of the dark room and down the darkened hallway, she could hear them singing and there was a light on in the hallway and one in the old bathroom, but out of all the darkened bedrooms, a low light came from her grandmother’s, which she entered while the singing from downstairs moved through the floors.
”Mourn not for them, their trials are o'er
And why weep for those who will weep no more
For sweet is their sleep, though cold and hard
Their pillows may be in the old churchyard!”
The family had cleaned the room and changed the sheets and made the bed, and on the comforter of the bed, hands at her sides, in a white gown, white hair fanned out across the pillow lay Susanna Dunharrow. Noble she seemed, and full of power if not at deep rest. A candle burned on the table at the side of the bed, and another tall taper before the great dressing table, reflected in its mirror. They must have all done this while she was asleep, and though Loreal had to look, she did not have to stay, and she bowed to her grandmother, and then turned to go downstairs.
“….And I know that the joy of life is marred
When we follow lost friends to the old churchyard.”
The room was filled. Not only were Lewis and Owen, Seth, Mother and Eve there, but neighbors from all around, and the friends of her grandmother and some who looked, like Grandmother had, wild and of the country, more at home in the trees than in the cities, both black and white and some neither. Which of these were witches, Loreal could not say. But as Lewis, beside Seth, raised his glass, then, in a high tenor sang, she remembered her grandmother saying, “Without initiation, my blessing means nothing.”
Owen got up and moved around the group of mourners sitting in the candle lit room singing and passing bourbon about, and came to Loreal.
“There is chicken in the kitchen, with potatoes and biscuits, and if you don’t feel up to it, there is soup and a macaroni casserole too.”
“I don’t really feel up to anything,” Loreal admitted.
“Well, that’s fine too,” Owen said.
Loreal looked around.
“Where’s Eve?”
“Oh,” Owen said with disapproval, “she’s gone. She had other things to do. She’ll be back for the funeral after Nine Night.”
Loreal felt the same disapproval, but she only said. “I think I need to go outside. I feel hot in here.”
Owen nodded and kissed her on the cheek.
She sat outside on the back porch, and for just a moment she started. Then she shook her head. She had taught herself to take serious so many illusions. Her grandmother had said illusions were how the truth that did not want to be seen looked, and for a moment she had seen a man sitting outside plain as anything before she realized it was the old dead lamp post, and its shadow on the old bench in the yard.
She checked her messages and saw one from TJ. That was just this morning, and it was now late Sunday night. Only a few hours ago she had been in a car with Eve, on her way here believing but not quite believing that her grandmother was almost gone, and a few hours before that, she had not even suspected she would be here. She had left TJ in Merlin hall and gone to bed.
“I have so much to tell you!” the first excited message came. “I mean, not so much, but it’s a big deal, and it’s about last night.”
And then the next message said, “Hello! Hello! Loreal. Where are you?”
Shit. She had meant ot leave a message, but her tiredness and her preoccupation had driven it from her mind, and now there was another message from TJ.
“Loreal, if I don’t hear from you, I’m going to call the cops.”
He sounded in equal parts angry and concerned, and this was followed by a message from Meghan.
She couldn’t talk right now, so she texted TJ.
“I had to leave. My sister came to get me. I’m at my Grandma’s house. She just died. I’m sorry I forgot to message you. I’ve been asleep half the day. I’ll be back the day after tomorrow. Let Meg and the girls know. Love, L.”
Only a moment later her phone whistled with a response, but she didn’t feel like reading it right now. Instead she sat in the dark, and now she looked at the black bench. As she sat staring, she reminded herself of what Grandma had said and how Grandma would also say, “Sometimes we agree to illusions because we are afraid.”
As she looked on the bench, slowly what she had first seen resolved itself into a tall man in black with a slender white face and pale hair, and Loreal told him, for his eyes were downcast, “I can see you, so you can look at me.”
When he did, she suppressed her fear over a power she had not possessed before, and over the power this creature had to hide himself so well. She rose, and she said, “You may come forward,” her thin voice seemed more like a little girl’s than ever. She added, “It would be best if you did.”
“I can come forward, young witch,” she said, “but only so far, for this is a house that is not yet yours, and it is not yours to invite me in.”
“Then you a vampire,” she said simply.
“I prefer the term drinker.”
“Why are you here?” Loreal asked, and realized she was no longer hiding fear. She was not afraid.
“I am with a friend. He is inside. He knows I am out here, and outside shall remain.”
“A friend? One of my cousins?”
“Three of them, actually,” he said, “Seth and Owen know me as well as Lewis.”
“Then…” Loreal cocked her head, “My Uncle Owen… he’s my cousin really, he could have let you in. I think. He’s the closest thing to an owner of this house now.”
She said this because she was still suspicious, even though she sensed that the creature could not harm her.
“It’s not only that,” he said. “This is a house of death. Death is something I cannot do, and so I am forbidden from entering it because of that. A woman has died here. She had given up her place in this world and is in the process of moving to the next. It is a sacred thing, and the opposite of what I do. So I am forbidden entering.”
“By whom?”
“By his own taboo,” a voice spoke from behind her, the first voice that actually had frightened her.
“Lewis!”
“They have their rules as we have ours,” Lewis said. “And to respect them, I must stay somewhere else tonight. I am staying with Chris at the hotel down the road. I will be back in the morning.”
“Chris?” Loreal said.
Chris nodded.
She stepped down the from the porch into the yard and offered her hand.
“Loreal.”
He took it, and then kissed it.
“So,” Loreal turned from him to Lewis, “The two of you?”
“Yes,” Lewis said.
“I didn’t even know there were real vamp—drinkers,” she said
“Neither did I,” Lewis said. “and yet, as soon as I met Chris I knew what he was, and I wasn’t surprised. It was the strangest thing.”
“Yes,” Loreal said. “That’s how I felt too.”.
Lewis was about to tell his cousin goodnight when he sensed that she had something to say or something to ask.
“You two will come back in the morning, right?”
“Of course we will.”
It was Chris who spoke.
“You love him,” Loreal said, slipping her phone into her pocket.
“I think that means that he should come into the house no matter what his customs are. He is family.”
Lewis could not read the look on Chris’s face, but Loreal continued, “You have to understand, In my whole life Lewis has never brought anyone to a family gathering, I mean, we’re witches. We really don’t like other people, so if you’re here, you must be family.”
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
I enjoyed this first weekend portion. It was nice to see where Loreal fits in with the other characters. I am glad she has support around after the death of her Grandmother. It was also interesting to read about her Grandmother initiating her. Great writing and I look forward to the next portion whenever you post it!
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
Well, I was just about to post the next part, So here is some more Loreal... and everyone else too. Secrets. So many secrets.
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
END OF SEVEN, BEGINNING OF EIGHT
Back in the house, Seth was scooping potato salad onto a plate and he said, “You alright?”
“I’m fine.”
“You wanna take a walk or something?”
“Not really,” Loreal said. “I don’t want to be sad right now. I was wondering if you would help me with something else.”
“Anything.”
“Help me to dream. I want to find out some things. Go into a trance with me and help me dream.”
Seth stood there with a clump of yellow potato salad hanging from a fork and Loreal realized what he’d wanted to say is, “Anything but that.”
“Okay,” Loreal said. “Howabout we wait for Lewis to come back tomorrow and then we try it.”
“That,” Seth said, picking up a piece of fried chicken, “I will do.”
“Great,” Loreal said. “She could wait a day, and if Seth wouldn’t want to do it at all, Lewis would. After all, he was going to be her Master.
“Do you understand?” Chris asked.
“I understand that you have certain ideas,” Lewis said. “Traditions, I guess. And I can respect them.”
“That’s sort of a cold answer.”
“Well, it’s sort of a cold feeling when the person you love sits in the backyard in November while you are in the house with your family mourning.”
“The cold doesn’t bother me,” Chris said, placing a hand on Lewis’s shoulder.
Lewis removed the hand.
“That’s not the point.”
“I have never entered a house of death.’
“You are a house of death,” Lewis said, unsympathetically.
“You kill people. You are always walking away from dead bodies. Are you telling me you are afraid of them? Of dead bodies?”
“Fear has nothing to do with it,” Chris said, sounding a little impatient. “That’s not what it’s about. I cannot die. Not easily at least, and for one such as I—“
“It sounds so poetic when you say it like that.”
“Would you stop interrupting? Fine. For someone like me to walk into a house of death, where a death is being mourned, where a spirit is passing on… It just seems unfitting. We were always taught it was unfitting to do so lightly.”
“Well, you’re not doing it lightly, and I’m not spending every night in a hotel while we stay here. I can’t afford it.”
“You’re not paying for it. I am.”
“Well, you can’t afford it either.”
“I can afford it more than you.’
“You know what?” Lewis said, “I’m about done with this conversation. I’m not going to force you to do anything. I can’t really do that.”
Lewis turned over and turned out the light.
“Lewis,” Chris said. “Lewis, we never go to bed this early. We don’t even go to bed until almost morning.”
“I’m tired,” Lewis said.
Chris lay on his back for a while, his hands folded over his chest.
“Lewis?” Chris said, at last, “it’s been a very long time since I’ve had someone in my life.”
“Yes.”
“Since I’ve had to change. To rethink things. You know?”
“Yes.”
“I will, I will go into the house with you. If you wish.”
“You don’t have to. I just want you to know you can. I just want you to be able to stay there the night. With me. You know?”
Chris nodded, but did not speak.
“Thank you,” Lewis said.
E I G H T
ENTER SETH
He who enters into his own must grope through what lies at hand, he must sense his way from stone to stone.
-The Red Book
Seth imagined Loreal was in bed if not asleep. He didn’t think it appropriate to wake her. Down the hall, resting in her own room, the candles out now, was the deceased Suzanne Dunharrow. Lewis was gone to bed, and Owen and everyone else, and Seth thought, I am tired of being afraid, tired of being the only member of this family who is always terrified. I’m tired of hiding behind Owen and Lewis. And now it seems I will hide behind Loreal.
“I’ll do it,” Seth said pushing the sheets back. He’d known little sleep. “I’ll do it tonight. There is no night better. There’s no time like the present.”
It had stopped raining for about a half hour when he trusted the clouds enough to go out. It was almost as if something had known that this was the night he had planned, and chosen this night to open the heavens and chill the air. It was so close to the year’s end, and for the last few weeks, the green leaves had turned yellow and red and brown, and begun their fall. When the rain began, he had been irritated, and then, as it went on, he was resolved, and now that it stopped, he did not wish to go out, but knew that this was not the time to break his commitments. His commitments had brought him here.
“And what if it was You who brought the rain? What if You anted to know that my word was not light.”
Your word is all you have. He remembered hearing. Your craft is a strong as your word.
But the air was fair, warmer than it had been as he left the house and went down the main street and out into the fields. The high grass bent, wet as he passed through it, and beads of water came from the limbs of the trees, but the air did not possess the near November chill. As he went to the trees he thought, The time will come, the time will come, and the time will come.
Over the dark night, pictures of the trees against fire, their limbs branching, changed to the light on the antlers of a stag.
His eyes were used to the darkness now, and by darkness he took from his bag, five tallow candles, not cheap, saved over time, and placed them in a ring. One by one, after having made a spark, he lit them, and then stood in the circle, stripping till he stood naked, and even this night’s warmth of the air was a little chilly. Under the trees, and in the light of the fire, he lay himself down on his back, the grass wet on him, wet under his buttocks and thighs and between them, wet all along his arms as he stretched out arms and legs like a starfish, like a star, like the star, and looking up to the black limbs and to the black grey sky above, he began to sing, “I give myself to you. I give myself to you.”
Before any formal ceremony, before any great initiation, he must offer himself to the Outer One, the Fearful One, the Unnamed One. No one built a temple to him. His places were not the walled and inner places, but the outer ones, and this night was his. No baptism but to come alone, and lie alone, right here, in this darkness.
He turned over long enough to sniff the poppers he’d used for sex sometimes that burned his nose and sent fumes through his head, They made the bones of his skull elastic and lifted him out of his body. Seth lay lay feeling the poppers pulse through him, heating his veins. He lifted a little out of his body.
I give myself to you! he sang, and he could almost feel… No. He could feel, the presence of his Lord coming, the weight of His feet on the earth, now the heaviness of His torso’s shadow stretching over him. He could nearly feel His breath, and was it the breath of a man with horns or a great goat with the body of a man? He did not open his eyes ,and it did not matter.
“I give myself,” he murmured.
Now, as he sniffed the drug again, it came to him, as his whole body warmed, that to truly give youself, as a man, you must turn over, and he turned over on his stomach, feeling terrified and vulnerable because, at that moment, he was offering himself to not only the God, but to whoever came and saw him, whatever came.
“I give myself,” he murmured again, and the wind upon him was like fingers, like the fingers of Pan on the pipe, and Pan was one of the names the God was given.
The first time he had met Lewis was after his parents died, when he had come here, to Suzanne’s house. Old Suzanne was a relative. This was all he knew, and Owen and Lewis and Lewis’s mother were visiting at the time.
“He will come with us,” Owen said, and Suzanne had not declined.
Seth had been living in that house for a few weeks. He had met Eve and her father and the young Loreal. He had even met Augustus. That side of the family was odd to him, but then with a sort of urbane sophistication, and ease and laughter the other Dunahrrows did not know, Owen had swept in with his sisters and his nephew Lewis.
Referring to Owen’s penchant for city life, Suzanne said, “I had always thought a witch should be close to the land.”
“Suzanne,” Owen reminded her, “the land is everywhere. Earth Water, Air and Sky are in the city as much as the country.
That had been the end of it, and the agreement had been that Seth would go back to the city. This farm house, Seth had always found stifling, the trees the meadows, the largeness of the house, the old town were not open to him but odd and ghostly, and the moment they had driven away, although they were driving over country roads, Seth already felt like they were coming back into the city.
“You should be with us,” Lewis had said. “We’re closer kin anyway.”
While they were driving a police car had stopped them.
Owen had sighed and rolled down the window while the patrol man, smacking his gum and hiding his eyes behind aviator glasses said, “Would you step out of the car?”
“I most certainly will not,” Owen said.
“Are you refusing the resquest of an officer?”
“I am,” Owen said.
Lewis leaned over toward his uncle and said, “We are.”
“I’m going to have to ask you again to step out of the car. Both of you?”
Had they seen him? Seth wondered. No one seemed to.
“You haven’t even given us a reason.,” Lewis said.
“Look,” the officer said, “there was a time when you people knew how to behave.”
“My dear officer,” Owen began, “we are the Dunharrows, and we are behaving the same as we’ve done for two hundred years.”
That’s it,” the officer took his gun out. Seth let out a cry.
“You niggers think you can just come in here and and take everything. Don’t talk down to me, Get out the goddamn car.”
“Put the gun in your mouth,” Owen said, simply.
The officer twisted his mouth to say something, but just like that, the gun was in his mouth. He was shoving it firmly down his own mouth.
“Undo the safety,” Owen continued, “like a good man. There you go. Now squeeze.”
While the officer watched his own fingers, his body trembled, and now Seth saw his trousers darken with a path of urine.
“Hold it right there,” Owen continued. “Now, for a moment I’m going to let you contemplate how close you are to death, how, at any moment I could command you to end your life, and end it in a most horrifying way. Are you thinking about it? Nod your head if you’re thinking about it.”
The officer’s helmeted head nodded and Owen said, “Now take the gun from your mouth.”
The man did, trembling his amr shaking, the gun almost falling, but it was gripped tightly in his hand and Seth thought that this was Owen’s doing. Even from his seat in the back of the car, the man stank of fear and piss to Seth.
“What do you say,” Owen asked him, “about harassing people on the road for your own amusement? What is the proper thing to say?”
“S-s-s-sorry.”
“Yes,” Owen returned like a grim school master, “sorry indeed. You may go,” Owen told him. “Go. Now.”
As the patrolmen tottered away on unsteady feet toward his car, Owen said, without malice “Watch your step.”
As they had driven toward the city, Seth was exhilarated by this casual display of power and terrified all at the same time. Such casual, almost nonchalant expression of the Craft were common for Owen and for Lewis as well, understated, almost unamazing, but ever present.
Back in the house, Seth was scooping potato salad onto a plate and he said, “You alright?”
“I’m fine.”
“You wanna take a walk or something?”
“Not really,” Loreal said. “I don’t want to be sad right now. I was wondering if you would help me with something else.”
“Anything.”
“Help me to dream. I want to find out some things. Go into a trance with me and help me dream.”
Seth stood there with a clump of yellow potato salad hanging from a fork and Loreal realized what he’d wanted to say is, “Anything but that.”
“Okay,” Loreal said. “Howabout we wait for Lewis to come back tomorrow and then we try it.”
“That,” Seth said, picking up a piece of fried chicken, “I will do.”
“Great,” Loreal said. “She could wait a day, and if Seth wouldn’t want to do it at all, Lewis would. After all, he was going to be her Master.
“Do you understand?” Chris asked.
“I understand that you have certain ideas,” Lewis said. “Traditions, I guess. And I can respect them.”
“That’s sort of a cold answer.”
“Well, it’s sort of a cold feeling when the person you love sits in the backyard in November while you are in the house with your family mourning.”
“The cold doesn’t bother me,” Chris said, placing a hand on Lewis’s shoulder.
Lewis removed the hand.
“That’s not the point.”
“I have never entered a house of death.’
“You are a house of death,” Lewis said, unsympathetically.
“You kill people. You are always walking away from dead bodies. Are you telling me you are afraid of them? Of dead bodies?”
“Fear has nothing to do with it,” Chris said, sounding a little impatient. “That’s not what it’s about. I cannot die. Not easily at least, and for one such as I—“
“It sounds so poetic when you say it like that.”
“Would you stop interrupting? Fine. For someone like me to walk into a house of death, where a death is being mourned, where a spirit is passing on… It just seems unfitting. We were always taught it was unfitting to do so lightly.”
“Well, you’re not doing it lightly, and I’m not spending every night in a hotel while we stay here. I can’t afford it.”
“You’re not paying for it. I am.”
“Well, you can’t afford it either.”
“I can afford it more than you.’
“You know what?” Lewis said, “I’m about done with this conversation. I’m not going to force you to do anything. I can’t really do that.”
Lewis turned over and turned out the light.
“Lewis,” Chris said. “Lewis, we never go to bed this early. We don’t even go to bed until almost morning.”
“I’m tired,” Lewis said.
Chris lay on his back for a while, his hands folded over his chest.
“Lewis?” Chris said, at last, “it’s been a very long time since I’ve had someone in my life.”
“Yes.”
“Since I’ve had to change. To rethink things. You know?”
“Yes.”
“I will, I will go into the house with you. If you wish.”
“You don’t have to. I just want you to know you can. I just want you to be able to stay there the night. With me. You know?”
Chris nodded, but did not speak.
“Thank you,” Lewis said.
E I G H T
ENTER SETH
He who enters into his own must grope through what lies at hand, he must sense his way from stone to stone.
-The Red Book
Seth imagined Loreal was in bed if not asleep. He didn’t think it appropriate to wake her. Down the hall, resting in her own room, the candles out now, was the deceased Suzanne Dunharrow. Lewis was gone to bed, and Owen and everyone else, and Seth thought, I am tired of being afraid, tired of being the only member of this family who is always terrified. I’m tired of hiding behind Owen and Lewis. And now it seems I will hide behind Loreal.
“I’ll do it,” Seth said pushing the sheets back. He’d known little sleep. “I’ll do it tonight. There is no night better. There’s no time like the present.”
It had stopped raining for about a half hour when he trusted the clouds enough to go out. It was almost as if something had known that this was the night he had planned, and chosen this night to open the heavens and chill the air. It was so close to the year’s end, and for the last few weeks, the green leaves had turned yellow and red and brown, and begun their fall. When the rain began, he had been irritated, and then, as it went on, he was resolved, and now that it stopped, he did not wish to go out, but knew that this was not the time to break his commitments. His commitments had brought him here.
“And what if it was You who brought the rain? What if You anted to know that my word was not light.”
Your word is all you have. He remembered hearing. Your craft is a strong as your word.
But the air was fair, warmer than it had been as he left the house and went down the main street and out into the fields. The high grass bent, wet as he passed through it, and beads of water came from the limbs of the trees, but the air did not possess the near November chill. As he went to the trees he thought, The time will come, the time will come, and the time will come.
Over the dark night, pictures of the trees against fire, their limbs branching, changed to the light on the antlers of a stag.
His eyes were used to the darkness now, and by darkness he took from his bag, five tallow candles, not cheap, saved over time, and placed them in a ring. One by one, after having made a spark, he lit them, and then stood in the circle, stripping till he stood naked, and even this night’s warmth of the air was a little chilly. Under the trees, and in the light of the fire, he lay himself down on his back, the grass wet on him, wet under his buttocks and thighs and between them, wet all along his arms as he stretched out arms and legs like a starfish, like a star, like the star, and looking up to the black limbs and to the black grey sky above, he began to sing, “I give myself to you. I give myself to you.”
Before any formal ceremony, before any great initiation, he must offer himself to the Outer One, the Fearful One, the Unnamed One. No one built a temple to him. His places were not the walled and inner places, but the outer ones, and this night was his. No baptism but to come alone, and lie alone, right here, in this darkness.
He turned over long enough to sniff the poppers he’d used for sex sometimes that burned his nose and sent fumes through his head, They made the bones of his skull elastic and lifted him out of his body. Seth lay lay feeling the poppers pulse through him, heating his veins. He lifted a little out of his body.
I give myself to you! he sang, and he could almost feel… No. He could feel, the presence of his Lord coming, the weight of His feet on the earth, now the heaviness of His torso’s shadow stretching over him. He could nearly feel His breath, and was it the breath of a man with horns or a great goat with the body of a man? He did not open his eyes ,and it did not matter.
“I give myself,” he murmured.
Now, as he sniffed the drug again, it came to him, as his whole body warmed, that to truly give youself, as a man, you must turn over, and he turned over on his stomach, feeling terrified and vulnerable because, at that moment, he was offering himself to not only the God, but to whoever came and saw him, whatever came.
“I give myself,” he murmured again, and the wind upon him was like fingers, like the fingers of Pan on the pipe, and Pan was one of the names the God was given.
The first time he had met Lewis was after his parents died, when he had come here, to Suzanne’s house. Old Suzanne was a relative. This was all he knew, and Owen and Lewis and Lewis’s mother were visiting at the time.
“He will come with us,” Owen said, and Suzanne had not declined.
Seth had been living in that house for a few weeks. He had met Eve and her father and the young Loreal. He had even met Augustus. That side of the family was odd to him, but then with a sort of urbane sophistication, and ease and laughter the other Dunahrrows did not know, Owen had swept in with his sisters and his nephew Lewis.
Referring to Owen’s penchant for city life, Suzanne said, “I had always thought a witch should be close to the land.”
“Suzanne,” Owen reminded her, “the land is everywhere. Earth Water, Air and Sky are in the city as much as the country.
That had been the end of it, and the agreement had been that Seth would go back to the city. This farm house, Seth had always found stifling, the trees the meadows, the largeness of the house, the old town were not open to him but odd and ghostly, and the moment they had driven away, although they were driving over country roads, Seth already felt like they were coming back into the city.
“You should be with us,” Lewis had said. “We’re closer kin anyway.”
While they were driving a police car had stopped them.
Owen had sighed and rolled down the window while the patrol man, smacking his gum and hiding his eyes behind aviator glasses said, “Would you step out of the car?”
“I most certainly will not,” Owen said.
“Are you refusing the resquest of an officer?”
“I am,” Owen said.
Lewis leaned over toward his uncle and said, “We are.”
“I’m going to have to ask you again to step out of the car. Both of you?”
Had they seen him? Seth wondered. No one seemed to.
“You haven’t even given us a reason.,” Lewis said.
“Look,” the officer said, “there was a time when you people knew how to behave.”
“My dear officer,” Owen began, “we are the Dunharrows, and we are behaving the same as we’ve done for two hundred years.”
That’s it,” the officer took his gun out. Seth let out a cry.
“You niggers think you can just come in here and and take everything. Don’t talk down to me, Get out the goddamn car.”
“Put the gun in your mouth,” Owen said, simply.
The officer twisted his mouth to say something, but just like that, the gun was in his mouth. He was shoving it firmly down his own mouth.
“Undo the safety,” Owen continued, “like a good man. There you go. Now squeeze.”
While the officer watched his own fingers, his body trembled, and now Seth saw his trousers darken with a path of urine.
“Hold it right there,” Owen continued. “Now, for a moment I’m going to let you contemplate how close you are to death, how, at any moment I could command you to end your life, and end it in a most horrifying way. Are you thinking about it? Nod your head if you’re thinking about it.”
The officer’s helmeted head nodded and Owen said, “Now take the gun from your mouth.”
The man did, trembling his amr shaking, the gun almost falling, but it was gripped tightly in his hand and Seth thought that this was Owen’s doing. Even from his seat in the back of the car, the man stank of fear and piss to Seth.
“What do you say,” Owen asked him, “about harassing people on the road for your own amusement? What is the proper thing to say?”
“S-s-s-sorry.”
“Yes,” Owen returned like a grim school master, “sorry indeed. You may go,” Owen told him. “Go. Now.”
As the patrolmen tottered away on unsteady feet toward his car, Owen said, without malice “Watch your step.”
As they had driven toward the city, Seth was exhilarated by this casual display of power and terrified all at the same time. Such casual, almost nonchalant expression of the Craft were common for Owen and for Lewis as well, understated, almost unamazing, but ever present.
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
I enjoyed that 2nd portion just as much! It was nice to read more from Seth's point of view. I was glad that the group was able to get away from the cop without harming him or getting themselves hurt but still teaching him manners. Excellent writing and I hope you have a relaxing weekend!
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
I don't know that the cop was harmed or not. Personally I hope he was. Owen never leaves anyone completely unharmed, but his touch is fairly gentle. We will meet in other characters, and other Dunharrows, some who are much less gentle.
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
FIRST SATURDAY NIGHT POSTING
In the night, Seth is not sure if he has fallen asleep or not. Feet move past him. He opens his eyes to see hooves glinting in the moonlight, but there is no moon and by the time he realizes this, the hooves are gone. Cold and aching, he turns on his back, and he has heard on again, off again voices.
“There he is.”
“He is there.”
“Let him sleep.”
“So young. So young.”
“It has been a long while since such a one has come to us.”
“The Hunt and the Harvest. The Hunt and the Harvest.”
“You’ve taught me so much, but its just teaching. What of the doing?”
There can be doing,” Lewis said. “There is always doing, but you must give yourself first. They say there are three rituals. The Initiation, where you go out to meet him, where you toss away everything you have, all of your stake in the normal world, and then the offering, where you dedicate yourself, and after these the initiations into the Orders.”
“And you are in the Clan.”
Lewis smiled and showed the bronze disk inscribed with the labyrinth, hanging at his throat.
“I am.”
“Would you teach me.”
“I will teach you. Or someone else. But first you must let the Teaching teach you. First you must give yourself. Before you give yourself to the teaching, you must give yourself to the God.”
Give yourself to the Teaching.
To the Teaching.
All sound and all dreaming was gone. He was merely cold. The candles burned low, shining dimly on the matte brown bark of the trees.
“I’ll get my death of cold,” he said, and wrapped himself in his cloak, lying back down, still naked, but not on his way to freezing.
“Nothing has happened!”
“No?”
“Why are you…” he began, then, “Lewis, you said I was witch blooded. You said the power was in me, but nothing happens. Not a single spell has come out. I’ve learned a few things A lot of things. But nothing has come.”
Lewis sat on Seth’s bed his legs wide apart.
“Is it because I have not been dedidcated?”
“In a manner of speaking,” Lewis said, “Yes.”
“In a manner of speaking… What do you mean? Why don’t you speak straight?”
“I speak straight most of the time,” Lewis said, “And what I mean here is you have not dedicated to yourself.”
“What?”
“Magic is an act of the will,” Lewis said, “and as of yet, you’ve not the will.”
Seth waited for Lewis to continue, and the older man said, “You treat your altar like everyone who comes to a church. Begging the Gods to do something, asking, pleaded, hoping. Asking, there is goodness in that, but you must have a will in it. You must learn to call upon those things you desire.”
“If it was that easy, everyone would be a powerful sorcerer.”
“But it is not that easy,” Lewis said. “Very few people have a will, know their will. You must know yours.”
Seth said nothing and, now Lewis said, “Spells are no easy thing. They are what they sound like, a spell, a moment in time, and magic often takes a great deal of time. It is a long hall thing. The spells turn out or they don’t.
They sat silent together and, at last, Lewis said, “You want the story of power thrust upon you. You want to say, I don’t want it. I don’t want it. But, oh, I suppose I’ll take it. It does not work that way, my lad. You have to want it.”
“And now you are leaving,” Seth discovered. “You are going away.”
“You’ve done it all,” Lewis said. “I taught you well. I will move on.”
“But I will go too. When I go to learn, for there is much to learn, they will be with… But,” Seth said. “I am just talking. I am just talking because I want you to stay.”
“Well,” Lewis said, sounding as close to at a loss as Seth had ever heard him, “I will stay the night.”
Seth nodded. Wise, sage, so different from his usual self that Lewis forgot he was so young. When he had come here, this was just a boy of perception and gradually Lewis understood he possessed skills. Now he had raised a storm and the power he promised was behind him. Lewis stood, appraising the boy before, at last, Seth stood up and closed the door, locking it behind him. Lewis was surprised by this, but said nothing. Now Seth stood before Lewis and then, with deliberateness, he raised his shirt and placed it on the bed. While Lewis waited to learn what was about to happen, Seth unlaced his pants, and he pulled down his light trousers, and then, with a swift movement, his small black briefs so that he stood before him naked.
“What are you…?” Lewis began. “What do you?”
“You said it,” Seth said, moving to touch Lewis’s shoulder, to began to pull up his shirt, to respond to the heat of his body. “You said we must know our power, know our will, and bring it into being. I know it,” Seth said as he raised up the great tunic of Lewis so that his older cousin brown skinned, smooth chested, stood before him, so that he saw his sex rising, stretching out of his trousers, “This is my will.”
“Are you sure?”
“I am almost eighteen,” he said.
When he said it, Lewis felt his penis stiffening even more.
“I think I can trust you,” Seth said.
Lewis allowed Seth to undress him, while he felt his own trousers fall, his cock bob up, thick and hard.
“Of course you can,” Seth said, his voice half a whisper.
“Please,” he said, “Kiss me. I’m not a slut, I promise. I’ve never done this before. But I must. If you’re to go. I must.”
Lewis bent down and kissed him, greedily, hungry and thirsty, holding his face to him, the body of the chaste wizard, so used to restraining his desire, thrumming with need and desire. He pulled the boy into his arms, holding him, and pulled him, almost roughly to the bed. He lay Seth on top of him, and the boy spread across him, kissing him deeply, thrusting his tongue into his mouth. And then Seth moved down, and Lewis’s eyes closed tight and his mouth opened in a silent gasp, as Seth pulled his naked, throbbing cock into his young mouth.
Lewis lifted him to his feet, pulling his dick back into his pants.
“Come on,” he said, his breath baited, and he took Seth out through the kitchen, past the back porch and into the yard. He fucked him under the stars and Seth’s breath heaving.
“Don’t hold back,:” Seth hissed under him, “Don’t hold back.”
“I’ve always wanted to fuck you,” Lewis growled in is hears. They gave themselves up to it and Seth did shout but he sighed and cried out in silence while Lewis moaned thrusting into him over and over again. Lewis hands gripping his shoulders, Lewis cock thick so that it hurt stretching him, filling him. The trembling and desireo f Lewis’s so often controlled body, Seth, mouth open looking head ot the side crying out.
“Please, don’t stop. Please don’t please…”
“Teach me to be the witch. Teach me to live as the witch. Teach me to be the witch. Teach me to be the witch…” Seth hears himself whispering over and over again.
Wrapped in this blanket and passing in and out of sleep, he does not know how long he has been doing this. He does not want to be aware of this, to ask how long this has been going on. He is sure that this is what magic is, that the moment he is conscious of it, asks too many questions, it will be gone from him. He keeps whispering:
“Teach me to be the witch.
Teach me to live as the witch.
Teach me to be the witch.
Teach me to be the witch.”
His eyes open, and there is sunlight touched with silver, and the dry grass growing up out of it, and now there is the shadow of a man. He can tell the man is not very tall, but he sees very little. As he squints, he sees the man has a warrior’s bodies, he wears boots but the feet are bare, and though leather bounds his arms in the same away, he is naked otherwise save that white paints makes a rayed sun about his navel and across his eyes is painted a stripe of white paint. There are hands. The first reaches from between his thighs and cups his sex, shielding it obscenely. Next, long hands, reach from around his back and splay across his chest like a breastplate, and on their backs are painted, no…. are winking… eyes. The man’s actual eyes close under his spiky hair. He is sharp nosed and sharp faced and while Seth barely dares to look at him, suddenly his eyes flash open, and he speaks the word, the secret name he never speaks.
In the cold purple darkness, Seth blinks aware that all before was a dream, and that now he is half frozen and the true morning is coming. As cold as it is, he dreads dressing again, dreads rising and the stiffness of joints after the night, the wetness of clothes sitting in dewy grass. He blows out the candles, but cannot stand to wait for them to harden again. He will come back for them later. He tramps home, cold and tired, vowing to sleep for true all day.
THE SECOND SATURDAY NIGHT POSTING WILL NOT BE THE OLD
In the night, Seth is not sure if he has fallen asleep or not. Feet move past him. He opens his eyes to see hooves glinting in the moonlight, but there is no moon and by the time he realizes this, the hooves are gone. Cold and aching, he turns on his back, and he has heard on again, off again voices.
“There he is.”
“He is there.”
“Let him sleep.”
“So young. So young.”
“It has been a long while since such a one has come to us.”
“The Hunt and the Harvest. The Hunt and the Harvest.”
“You’ve taught me so much, but its just teaching. What of the doing?”
There can be doing,” Lewis said. “There is always doing, but you must give yourself first. They say there are three rituals. The Initiation, where you go out to meet him, where you toss away everything you have, all of your stake in the normal world, and then the offering, where you dedicate yourself, and after these the initiations into the Orders.”
“And you are in the Clan.”
Lewis smiled and showed the bronze disk inscribed with the labyrinth, hanging at his throat.
“I am.”
“Would you teach me.”
“I will teach you. Or someone else. But first you must let the Teaching teach you. First you must give yourself. Before you give yourself to the teaching, you must give yourself to the God.”
Give yourself to the Teaching.
To the Teaching.
All sound and all dreaming was gone. He was merely cold. The candles burned low, shining dimly on the matte brown bark of the trees.
“I’ll get my death of cold,” he said, and wrapped himself in his cloak, lying back down, still naked, but not on his way to freezing.
“Nothing has happened!”
“No?”
“Why are you…” he began, then, “Lewis, you said I was witch blooded. You said the power was in me, but nothing happens. Not a single spell has come out. I’ve learned a few things A lot of things. But nothing has come.”
Lewis sat on Seth’s bed his legs wide apart.
“Is it because I have not been dedidcated?”
“In a manner of speaking,” Lewis said, “Yes.”
“In a manner of speaking… What do you mean? Why don’t you speak straight?”
“I speak straight most of the time,” Lewis said, “And what I mean here is you have not dedicated to yourself.”
“What?”
“Magic is an act of the will,” Lewis said, “and as of yet, you’ve not the will.”
Seth waited for Lewis to continue, and the older man said, “You treat your altar like everyone who comes to a church. Begging the Gods to do something, asking, pleaded, hoping. Asking, there is goodness in that, but you must have a will in it. You must learn to call upon those things you desire.”
“If it was that easy, everyone would be a powerful sorcerer.”
“But it is not that easy,” Lewis said. “Very few people have a will, know their will. You must know yours.”
Seth said nothing and, now Lewis said, “Spells are no easy thing. They are what they sound like, a spell, a moment in time, and magic often takes a great deal of time. It is a long hall thing. The spells turn out or they don’t.
They sat silent together and, at last, Lewis said, “You want the story of power thrust upon you. You want to say, I don’t want it. I don’t want it. But, oh, I suppose I’ll take it. It does not work that way, my lad. You have to want it.”
“And now you are leaving,” Seth discovered. “You are going away.”
“You’ve done it all,” Lewis said. “I taught you well. I will move on.”
“But I will go too. When I go to learn, for there is much to learn, they will be with… But,” Seth said. “I am just talking. I am just talking because I want you to stay.”
“Well,” Lewis said, sounding as close to at a loss as Seth had ever heard him, “I will stay the night.”
Seth nodded. Wise, sage, so different from his usual self that Lewis forgot he was so young. When he had come here, this was just a boy of perception and gradually Lewis understood he possessed skills. Now he had raised a storm and the power he promised was behind him. Lewis stood, appraising the boy before, at last, Seth stood up and closed the door, locking it behind him. Lewis was surprised by this, but said nothing. Now Seth stood before Lewis and then, with deliberateness, he raised his shirt and placed it on the bed. While Lewis waited to learn what was about to happen, Seth unlaced his pants, and he pulled down his light trousers, and then, with a swift movement, his small black briefs so that he stood before him naked.
“What are you…?” Lewis began. “What do you?”
“You said it,” Seth said, moving to touch Lewis’s shoulder, to began to pull up his shirt, to respond to the heat of his body. “You said we must know our power, know our will, and bring it into being. I know it,” Seth said as he raised up the great tunic of Lewis so that his older cousin brown skinned, smooth chested, stood before him, so that he saw his sex rising, stretching out of his trousers, “This is my will.”
“Are you sure?”
“I am almost eighteen,” he said.
When he said it, Lewis felt his penis stiffening even more.
“I think I can trust you,” Seth said.
Lewis allowed Seth to undress him, while he felt his own trousers fall, his cock bob up, thick and hard.
“Of course you can,” Seth said, his voice half a whisper.
“Please,” he said, “Kiss me. I’m not a slut, I promise. I’ve never done this before. But I must. If you’re to go. I must.”
Lewis bent down and kissed him, greedily, hungry and thirsty, holding his face to him, the body of the chaste wizard, so used to restraining his desire, thrumming with need and desire. He pulled the boy into his arms, holding him, and pulled him, almost roughly to the bed. He lay Seth on top of him, and the boy spread across him, kissing him deeply, thrusting his tongue into his mouth. And then Seth moved down, and Lewis’s eyes closed tight and his mouth opened in a silent gasp, as Seth pulled his naked, throbbing cock into his young mouth.
Lewis lifted him to his feet, pulling his dick back into his pants.
“Come on,” he said, his breath baited, and he took Seth out through the kitchen, past the back porch and into the yard. He fucked him under the stars and Seth’s breath heaving.
“Don’t hold back,:” Seth hissed under him, “Don’t hold back.”
“I’ve always wanted to fuck you,” Lewis growled in is hears. They gave themselves up to it and Seth did shout but he sighed and cried out in silence while Lewis moaned thrusting into him over and over again. Lewis hands gripping his shoulders, Lewis cock thick so that it hurt stretching him, filling him. The trembling and desireo f Lewis’s so often controlled body, Seth, mouth open looking head ot the side crying out.
“Please, don’t stop. Please don’t please…”
“Teach me to be the witch. Teach me to live as the witch. Teach me to be the witch. Teach me to be the witch…” Seth hears himself whispering over and over again.
Wrapped in this blanket and passing in and out of sleep, he does not know how long he has been doing this. He does not want to be aware of this, to ask how long this has been going on. He is sure that this is what magic is, that the moment he is conscious of it, asks too many questions, it will be gone from him. He keeps whispering:
“Teach me to be the witch.
Teach me to live as the witch.
Teach me to be the witch.
Teach me to be the witch.”
His eyes open, and there is sunlight touched with silver, and the dry grass growing up out of it, and now there is the shadow of a man. He can tell the man is not very tall, but he sees very little. As he squints, he sees the man has a warrior’s bodies, he wears boots but the feet are bare, and though leather bounds his arms in the same away, he is naked otherwise save that white paints makes a rayed sun about his navel and across his eyes is painted a stripe of white paint. There are hands. The first reaches from between his thighs and cups his sex, shielding it obscenely. Next, long hands, reach from around his back and splay across his chest like a breastplate, and on their backs are painted, no…. are winking… eyes. The man’s actual eyes close under his spiky hair. He is sharp nosed and sharp faced and while Seth barely dares to look at him, suddenly his eyes flash open, and he speaks the word, the secret name he never speaks.
In the cold purple darkness, Seth blinks aware that all before was a dream, and that now he is half frozen and the true morning is coming. As cold as it is, he dreads dressing again, dreads rising and the stiffness of joints after the night, the wetness of clothes sitting in dewy grass. He blows out the candles, but cannot stand to wait for them to harden again. He will come back for them later. He tramps home, cold and tired, vowing to sleep for true all day.
THE SECOND SATURDAY NIGHT POSTING WILL NOT BE THE OLD
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
Well that was unexpected! So Seth and Lewis had sex? Interesting. I wonder what Chris will think of this? I can't wait to find out. Great writing and I look forward to whatever else you are posting tonight! I hope you are having a nice weekend!
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
Well. of We course, this is in the past before Lewis ever met Chris
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
Oh ok. Don't know how I missed that. Thanks for clarifying.
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
I thought I should.There is a lot of time slippage, it's easier to tell on paper than here. By they way.... there's a new posting.
