She took it hesitantly and peeked inside while he turned to me. "Do you have the Witch Bottle? Have you created a permanent home for it yet?"
"Say what?" Ada said, but I understood what he was asking. I quickly ran up the stairs to my room to fetch the bottle from my nightstand. As he had asked, it was a gla.s.s bottle and the hair from my family members" heads, plus mine and Ada"s nail clippings were resting at the bottom. It looked like a gruesome rat"s nest of black and blonde hair.
I brought it back down to the kitchen where they now were, lifting items out of the bags and spreading it out on the island countertop.
"Here you go," I said, handing it to him. We all winced at the bottle in unison.
"Lovely," he said. "And the home?"
I told him I dug a hole in the back yard where we could bury it and no one would be the wiser, unless my parents decided to put in an in-ground pool one day.
"Yeah right, a pool. Dad"s salary ain"t what it used to be," Ada said under her breath.
Nothing"s as it used to be, I thought.
We looked out at everything displayed before us. There was a small bra.s.s bell, the Witch Bottle, two unmarked gla.s.s vials filled with clear liquid (which I a.s.sumed was holy water), a box of salt, two small bowls, packets of red and saffron-colored spices, a small bottle of crimson oil and a black candle and a white candle.
"You"re going to do some show and tell with us first, right?" I asked.
Maximus smiled and walked over to the broom closet. He emerged with a broom, which he handed to me, and a mop, which he handed to Ada.
"I will. But first we have to clean the house from top to bottom."
"Perry! You promised me there wouldn"t be any manual labor!" Ada cried out, staring down at the mop in horror.
"I didn"t know!" I shot back and looked at Maximus for an explanation.
"We have to make sure all the affected areas are clean before we do this," he said calmly. "Dust and dirt hold a lot of negative energy."
"Oh, please," Ada said.
"Hey, I don"t make the rules," Maximus said, raising his hands in mock surrender. "And I"m not getting off any easier either. I"ll be dusting."
I eyed the clock. We were going to have to clean in a hurry.
We started with the first floor before we made our way through the house together with Maximus dusting hard-to-reach areas, followed by me with a broom and a garbage bag and Ada with the mop and a bucket. Our house wasn"t a mansion by any means, but it was quite large and there were an awful lot of nooks and crannies. It took almost an hour for us to do the whole house. My parents were definitely going to think something was up when they came back to a sparkling clean home, but I was hoping that by then it wouldn"t matter what we told them our problems would be over.
When we finished, we gathered back in the kitchen, which Maximus deemed as the heart of the home (and probably why the pig carca.s.s was originally hidden there). He organized all of our special items on top of my mother"s navy blue dish cloth so it resembled an Ikea altar of sorts. Then he brought out a pair of nail clippers and small scissors from the front pocket of his black shirt, clipped his nails, had me snip a small chunk of hair from the back of his pompadour do, then he stuck it in the bottle with the rest of our offerings and deftly sealed it with duct tape.
"Now," he said, lifting up the container of salt, "we purify."
He walked out of the kitchen and to the front door. Ada and I followed him, staying a few feet back, unsure of what he was going to do.
He stooped down and shook a thick line of salt across the path of the door.
"Purifying salt," he said in a loud, booming voice that seemed to echo off the ceiling and walls, "allow positive energy in and negative energy out. Allow all unwanted energy and ent.i.ties to leave this house, never to return."
Part of me wanted to laugh because what he was saying was just so Harry Potter/hocus pocus that it sounded ridiculous. The other part of me felt a tug of trepidation, like there was actual power in the words.
Ada moved an inch closer to me. Evidently, she felt it too.
He got up and smiled faintly at us. "Now we go around the house, clockwise, and do the same at every door that leads outside."
Ada and I exchanged looks but we walked down the hall to the French doors at the back patio. When we finished with that door, we went to the one at the garage and Maximus repeated himself.
"I"m glad you didn"t use our salt," I whispered, feeling like my voice should be kept to a minimum. "My mother would have wondered what I was cooking."
"She"d probably think you accidently used salt for sugar, like that pie you made," Ada snickered and I joined in, embarra.s.sed at one of my first attempts at baking.
"Ladies," Maximus said sharply. We looked at him in surprise. I"d never heard him take that tone before and it shut both of us up. "My apologies, but you"re going to have to start taking this seriously. Perry? This means you. This is your ghost. If you aren"t one hundred percent committed and believing in this, then we"re just wasting our time. Or worse."
I looked helplessly at Ada, then at the floor, chagrined.
"I"m sorry," I mumbled.
He placed his hand on my shoulder and gave it a squeeze. His face was still stern, his mouth set in a hard line, but he nodded. "It"s all right. But I mean it. Now, time for the holy water."
Back at the kitchen, with me feeling like I had my tail between my legs, he picked up a vial of the holy water and in a clockwise direction again, we went to every single window in the house.
He flicked the water on them, the drops sticking and glimmering in the lights of the room, and asked Ada and me to imagine ourselves forcing negative air and energy out of the house, the salt and water combining to form an invisible shield.
We returned to the kitchen and Maximus loudly proclaimed, "I come this night to cleanse this home. This home belongs to the Palominos and negative energy and ent.i.ties are unwelcome here. They want you to leave. You shall leave!"
The house was silent. Deathly, sickly silent. I was holding my breath and it looked like Ada was too from the way her face was losing color. We were too afraid to move. Maximus was also still, his eyes searching the air around us.
Finally, I had to whisper, "Was that it?"
"No," he said with a shake of his head. "I just thought something would have happened. We now have to go around again and sprinkle the water in every single corner of the house."
Ada let out the breath she was holding and whined, "Again? I"m getting tired."
I elbowed her. "Suck it up."
I don"t know if you"ve ever examined every corner of your place, but there are a lot more corners than you"d think. And we had to go everywhere, even the bathrooms and the icky, spider-webbed crawls.p.a.ce under the stairs. Together we chanted, "As we cleanse this s.p.a.ce, negativity leave this place." It slowly went from feeling like a childish rhyme to something much more powerful. I could actually feel it. This push and pull in the air around me, like good and evil were having a tug-of-war and I was their prize.
When it was all over we were back in the kitchen and Maximus was raising the Witch Bottle high in the air. With the overhead light fixture illuminating his flaming hair and submissive posturing, it looked like he was offering the bottle to the G.o.ds. In a way, he was.
He declared all negative ent.i.ties to be drawn to the bottle, where they would remain forever trapped, unable to do any harm.
Once finished, and having ended his speech with "As I will, so mote it be!" it was my turn. I picked up the bell and began to ring it from my fingertips. It was a light, pleasing noise, not at all like the malevolent clanging I had heard in my dream the other night.
I kept it ringing continuously as we went through the house yet again and through ragged, tired breath, I kept repeating, "As the sound of this bell rings through the house, let it be filled with light. Evil and darkness be banished, may goodness and light return," as we went into every single room once more. It sounds silly and unbelievable but each room did grow a bit lighter, like the bulbs were suddenly swiped clean of all obstructing grime and dust.
After every room was cleared, we came back to the kitchen, where Maximus said his final words.
He looked at us in the eyes, then around him at the walls, his steady expression of determination never changing. "This house has been cleansed and purified. Negativity is banished. Light and goodness fill this place. This house is now a home."
Then we walked out of the house through the back door, careful not to disturb the trail of salt across the threshold, and went into the darkness of the back yard to bury the Witch Bottle. I knelt on the cold gra.s.s before the small hole I had dug earlier with a spoon, which still lay beside it. I picked this spot, near the back of the yard, because it wasn"t as attended by my mother"s black thumb or my father"s lawnmower on the weekends. It was rocky and patchy and no one would ever suspect that something was buried beneath it. Not something that supposedly contained all the negative energy the house had ever seen. With me growing up there, I could tell you that was a lot.
"Maybe I should have dug a deeper hole," I said, worried now that it wouldn"t be enough.
Maximus handed me the bottle, which was cool and throbbing strangely in my hands. "It will do."
"I hope so." I carefully placed the bottle in its shallow grave and looked up at Maximus and Ada for approval. The motion sensor light from the house was illuminating their backs and they towered over me like faceless beings. A frigid breeze mussed up their hair, causing the strands to float delicately around their heads like glowing silk threads.
With my hands I piled the frosty dirt and gra.s.s and rocks on top until it was filled and level and patted it down with my hands, pressing harder and harder, like the force of my hands would keep it buried for eternity.
"Careful, don"t break it," Maximus warned.
I looked up to give him an agreeable smile when a movement at the French doors behind him made me pause.
I could barely see what it was because the harsh glare of the patio lights created a reflective quality to the gla.s.s. But against the light from the inner hallway, I saw a very large, wide silhouette, just standing there. It was at least eight feet tall and built larger than Maximus.
There was no detail to the black ma.s.s except for a pair of burning red eyes near the top. They flickered like the ruby-orange embers in a furnace of coal. And they were watching us.
I wanted to scream, yell, do something other than gape back but I was frozen in absolute terror that sucked away my breath and leached onto my bones, holding me immobile.
Maximus and Ada noted the look on my face. They turned their heads to look.
And they saw too.
"What the f.u.c.k is that?!"
"Oh s.h.i.t." Maximus reached out for Ada"s arm and grabbed it, then blindly groped for mine.
We watched in horror as the creature at the doors slowly grew smaller, as if it was walking backward into the hall. And then the eyes blinked black and we could see it no more.
I swallowed hard. I didn"t want to get up. I wanted to stay crouched in the yard, low to ground. And then I wanted to run very, very far away.
"You..we...we did all that," Ada said in a tiny, shaking voice. "Maximus, you said...you said we should be safe in there. Oh G.o.d, Perry what was that?"
I found the strength to move my tongue but could only say, "I don"t know."
Maximus"s strong hands came underneath my arms and he effortlessly lifted me to my feet. He didn"t look as scared as I would have thought. Ada was shivering and white.
"It"s all right," he said.
"All right?" I squeaked. I was speechless, my mouth flapping open to latch onto some sort of word or sentence but that"s all I could say.
"Yes," he said in his sharp tone again. He grabbed Ada and steered her beside me and with one hand on each of our outer shoulders he leaned in. "That was only the first step that we did. We"ve got the powders, the dragon"s blood. We have another cleanse to do. This one is the banishment. He was only showing us his strength. He"s teasing us."
"He?" Ada asked. "I thought it was that Abby girl?"
"Ladies, sometimes things aren"t so simple."
No s.h.i.t, I thought wildly. In my dream Abby had insinuated she wasn"t alone. That there was a he, or an it. I still didn"t know if my dream was just that, or some prophetic message from beyond the grave, but I couldn"t dismiss it. Whatever we saw inside the house wasn"t Abby.
Though, perhaps it had never been Abby. And then I understood what Maximus meant. It could have been anyone but it was dead and we needed to keep going to get rid of it. Even if it meant doing another ritual, even if it meant stepping back in the house knowing that thing was in there.
"OK," I managed to say. "I"m ready. Let"s do this."
I pulled strength from pockets I didn"t even know I had. Maximus smiled at me with fierce admiration. I took hold of Ada"s hand and squeezed it tightly.
"We"re going to get rid of it," I told her. "Now."
With Maximus leading the way, Ada and I linked arms as we left the witch bottle buried behind us and entered the house.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN.
I felt all my bravado fall off me the minute I stepped over the undisturbed salt and into the house but Maximus sensed it and reached back for me, grasping my hand tightly. The air inside was so cold that our breath froze in fragmented clouds and it only got colder as we got back to the kitchen, like we were making our way into the depths of an ice cave.
Ada made a point of flipping on every light she could find, and even though the kitchen was brightly illuminated, I still felt like I could see lurking shadows in my peripheral vision. Maximus scanned the room and then set about mixing the powders into one of the bowls. We didn"t say much to each other but I made sure Ada and I were standing as close together as possible.
What was that thing? My mind had been constructing it to look like some sort of monster, but all we really saw was a large dark shape. I guess in some ways that was worse. My imagination was filling in the blanks and if I let it run away on me, it would probably come up with something more horrifying than the reality. Whatever the reality was. It had glowing eyes and all.
Maximus mixed the powders with a spoon and a ghastly stench of cinnamon and rotten eggs fluttered in the air.
"Gross," Ada muttered, but even her comments had lost their edge. Her voice trembled with fear.
"It"s sulphur," he said quietly, patiently. "Now we have to sprinkle this in all the corners."
To her credit, Ada didn"t complain. We slowly made our way around the house, jumping at every unexpected touch of each other, hearts hammering at every squeak of the floor. The large, black monster was nowhere to be seen and the only thing we felt was the everlasting chill that seemed to seep into my bones and sting my eyes. We followed this up with a ritual of sprinkling salt water and more chanting.
Finally, we came to the end of the banishment, which involved the black candle drizzled with crimson dragon"s blood oil and sprinkled with the powders. Maximus pa.s.sed it to me in a silver candle holder and instructed me to hold it in my dominant hand. I actually had to think about which hand that was for a moment. I knew I was right-handed but lately I"d found myself becoming ambidextrous, using my left hand for more and more things, like a new-found strength was found in my tendons, or my brain was rewiring itself.
I took the candle and he lit the wick, which sparked and popped and then calmed down to a clean, yellow flame.
"As this candle burns, so are negative energies from this place," he said stridently. He looked me in the eyes. "You repeat it. And then you, Ada. We could use the extra help here. Once every five minutes. Let"s go."
Ada and I both repeated the phrase and I anxiously eyed the clock. My parents would be back in forty-five minutes at the most. We didn"t really have five minutes. But we really didn"t want some monster in the house either.
After the five excruciating minutes were up, five minutes of nervously eyeing each other, listening to every twitch in the house, watching our breath catch and freeze in the air, shivering close together, he had me place the burning candle on the counter and then handed me a white candle to hold with my right hand again.
Together we said, "A white candle to fill the empty s.p.a.ces with light and hope."
It took five matches for this candle to light. By the last attempt, I was feeling the trickles of helplessness on my spine, wondering what we could do if we weren"t able to complete the ritual. But the last match worked; the stubborn wick took hold of the spark and a flame danced weakly before us.
Maximus said, "As this candle burns, positive energy will fill this place, giving negativity no safe harbor," and we repeated the mantra after him. He indicated I should put the candle down, and then we watched and waited for the candles to burn out on their own.
"Is that it?" I asked him quietly, his face aglow from the hypnotic flames. The dance of good. The dance of evil.
"Then we bury them in the yard again. It doesn"t have to be near the bottle."