The boy marveled at the bridge as his body blurred and spiraled into a glowing orb. It levitated above the chair for a few seconds before shooting through the ceiling.
Everett released the bridge and sagged against the wall. The bridge winked out as if giant fingers had snuffed it. Everett slid to the floor and pressed his head to his knees until the light-headedness passed. His grandfather swept the salt into a dustpan and refilled Everett’s salt bag. He murmured something.
“Huh?” Everett looked up.
“What?” His grandfather dropped the bag in Everett’s lap.
“Did you say something?”
“I haven’t said a word since the ghost left.”
“I thought—never mind.” Everett stood and used the wall as a prop. “I’m going to bed. Don’t forget to send a report to the Order.”
The Order was the underground witch government, and it required witches to keep in touch. Especially with the bridging of spirits to their afterlives. Anything concerning the afterlife was of high importance. Considering the sacredness of the living touching the afterlife, even if only by creating a bridge that spirits could cross, Everett was amazed the Order allowed regular witches to summon bridges at all.
DURING THE
day, the Ashville public library didn’t look like it neighbored woods that were home to paranormal creatures. Its location received maximum sunlight in the morning and afternoon, and the surrounding trees didn’t impede the natural light until the sun started to set. After that, the trees cast their haunting shadows over the library. Later, when the sun was fully down behind the mountains, they swallowed the library and its parking lot in gray.
At least once a week, Everett walked to the library via the wooded path, his book bag secure. As a child, he had been a popular target of harassment. His eyes were too large, too bright, and they had attracted unwanted attention from kids. At seventeen, he no longer found his bag torn from his shoulders, his hands and knees forced onto coarse terrain, or his skin bruised, but he still kept his valuables close and his eyes open.
Summers in Ashville were often warm, rarely hot, so Everett wasn’t expecting the sudden blast of heat when he left his house for the library. His jeans and T-shirt were overkill in comparison to the current occupants of the library. Some boys were baring as much skin as the girls in tank tops and tiny shorts did.
The study area of the library was packed with people who treated the air-conditioned building as a refuge. A few worked on summer homework, several read, and the others browsed the Web on their devices. Everett took a seat next to a girl reading an untranslated Japanese comic and quietly emptied his messenger bag of his laptop and research books.
“You taking summer courses at GFC?” the girl asked.
GFC was the county’s community college: Greenford College. He’d be attending it in the fall as a freshman to get his associate’s degree in English.
“I’m doing this for fun.”
The girl looked at him as if he were truly out of his mind.
“It’s about the multiple paranormal sightings in Ashville at the beginning of the twenty-first century.” Everett slid one of his historical books over so she could see the cover.
“You’re writing an essay for
fun
?”
“It’s more of a collection of historical facts. I compile different accounts of the same events and compare and contrast.”
“For
fun
?”
“It’s very interesting.”
The girl went back to her comic after a slow shake of her head. Everett used to be embarrassed when introducing his work to uninterested tablemates. Now he didn’t care. Everyone had the same initial reaction: surprise. Then they broke off into one of several branches: confusion, humor, interest, or what-the-hell-is-wrong-with-you? Only one person had been interested, and that was a preteen who was addicted to horror games.
Currently Everett had thirty pages of bulleted facts collected from books and the Internet. Although Everett had often found the Internet had more information than books, while researching Ashville’s paranormal history he had discovered that books had twice the information. Besides, research was more enjoyable when he had a physical book to leaf through. Electronics lost power, needed to be charged, and weren’t always reliable, but a physical book would always be there.
He fanned through the pages of one book and inhaled its musty scent. His grandfather had bought it the day it was published, knowing that Everett was a witch. All witches should know their town’s history, his grandfather had said. It didn’t hurt that Everett inherited his parents’ love of the paranormal.
The girl eyed him when he sniffed the second book. “Does it smell good?” she asked.
He couldn’t tell if she were joking.
“Like history,” he said, then worked on his bullet list.
THE LIBRARY
closed at five. Everett was one of the last people out.
Residents viewed the woods as off-limits when there wasn’t enough natural light for a walk. They spread the word to tourists and warned those who overlooked the warnings. The dark history of the woods was included in quite a few articles about haunted areas in Ashville. But Everett knew the woods weren’t haunted by ghosts, as the articles claimed; there was much more.
Everett stepped onto the path.
His intuition crawled like ants on his skin.
He stepped back and called his grandfather.
“Grandpa, I’m sensing something.” He exhaled shakily.
He had been feeling strong nudges from his intuition only recently. Before, he’d had to use spells to expose threats in the woods.
“Like last week?” If Everett’s grandfather thought his sudden instinctive nudges were worrisome, his even tone didn’t show it.
Everett’s intuition calmed, but his nerves felt as if strings were attached to them, tugging away from the woods. “I feel like something’s pulling me.”
“Where are you?”
He tested the urge and stepped in its direction. The strings loosened, then strengthened. “I think it wants me to follow it.”
“What wants you to follow it?”
“I don’t know but—it’s tugging me, and I think I need to follow it.”
“Where are you?” Concern edged into his grandfather’s voice.
Everett followed the urge until he was on the sidewalk, the strings tensing and loosening as if he was holding the leash of an impatient dog.
“Everett, where are you?”
“It’s going downtown.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m leaving the library parking lot. Going downtown.” He must have looked ridiculous walking down the sidewalk in his jerky motions. “Don’t worry. It gets busy at this time.”
“The shops close on Sunday.”
“Not all of them.”
He crossed the sidewalk without looking down the street and thankfully didn’t get hit by any oncoming traffic.
“Don’t hang up,” his grandfather said. “Tell me where you are as you go.”
“I’m on Jade Street. I can see some of the streetlights now. They’re turning on.”
He could hear the jangle of his grandfather’s keys. “I’m on my way. Don’t hang up.”
“I know.”
There weren’t many people on the sidewalks. Shopkeepers closed doors, got in their curbside cars, and didn’t pay Everett much attention.
He walked past the shops he had familiarized himself with over his lifetime. A bookstore had a summer sale—50% off specially marked items that included paranormal texts—and he made a note to check it out tomorrow.
The urge softened into a gentle tug, and then the pressure lifted away and Everett was alone.
He took small steps on the sidewalk, searching for the urge. Maybe it had run off. Disappointment settled in his bones.
“It’s gone,” he said.
“Where are you now?”
He faced the building next to him. “Four Wings Martial Arts.”
He had walked by this school for years and never stopped to watch. It had opened seven years ago, when he was ten. But he’d never been interested in martial arts.
Its lights were on, but it didn’t look open to random visitors. There were two people inside: a boy and a girl who stood on opposite sides of a stand-up kicking bag. They took turns kicking, sliding forward when they kicked and sliding back as soon as their kicking foot touched the mat.
A window decal declared the school a “2012 DISTRICT WINNER.” Underneath the decal were two more for the previous years.
He touched the window. A chill crawled down his spine.
The boy and girl took a break from the bag and wiped their faces with the hem of their uniform jackets. Their bodies were lean and well sculpted, a sign of their demanding physical workouts. The boy glanced at Everett through the window, connecting their gazes, and Everett’s cheeks warmed.
The girl looked at the boy and followed his eyes to Everett. She narrowed her eyes and shifted her jaw. Were they twins? They appeared to be the same age, and they had the same olive skin and black hair and eyes. Their faces were both oval with high cheekbones, but the boy’s cheeks were rounder, his eyebrows thicker, and his hair wilder.
Everett ducked his gaze to the school’s matted floor and walked out of their sight. He stood next to the hanging sign of the neighboring café and reached inside his salt bag.
Show me the traces.
Strings of paranormal residues spread from the school’s door outward. He backed into one of the café’s outdoor chairs and palmed his neck. Cold sweat broke out across his skin. An incredible, tangled mess of strings led in and out of the school. Everett figured there were two possible scenarios.
One: There were multiple weak creatures that frequently visited the school.
Two: There were a few powerful creatures that frequently visited the school.
He watched the strings until his head hurt and he was forced to pull the spell. The strings didn’t disintegrate as fast as they did for lesser creatures. There was a direct relationship between strength and the duration of the residue. It was likely his second scenario was correct. He waited for his head to clear before checking the strings a final time. They remained, but this time he could find the end of one of the strings. It eroded slowly, confirming Everett’s thoughts.
Whatever had visited the school hadn’t left that long ago.
He fiddled with the buckle on his shoulder strap until his grandfather picked him up several minutes later. As they drove by, Everett got a glimpse of the boy and girl rolling the kicking bag to the wall.
AT HOME,
he told his grandfather of the leash-like tugs of the urge. He drew a crude body outline on paper and indicated where he had felt the tugs that had pulled him to the martial arts school. It was difficult to completely convey his descriptions through his drawing. He left out the strings that led in and out of the school; the urge was worrisome enough.
“Is this normal? The instinct?” Everett asked.
His grandfather pushed the dining chair back with a screech on the wooden flooring.
“Grandpa?”
“If I explain to you now, I will keep us up all night.”
“It’s only six.”
His grandfather sighed. “Tomorrow, then. There is someone who I think will better explain it.”
“Is this about the Order?”
His grandfather shook his head. “Do you recall the witchtales you read as a child?”
“Not clearly, but I have all of them in my room.” He hadn’t touched them since his parents left.
His grandfather stood and pushed his chair in. “Reread them tonight. I’m going to get dinner. What do you want?”
“Anything’s fine.” Everett looked down at his sloppy drawing.
“Sandwiches?”
“Sure.”
“Veggies with pepper and oil?”
“As always.”
Everett waited for the front door to lock before he went to his room. He changed into comfy clothes and sat in his computer chair, the first volume of his witchtales propped on his desk.
When Everett had started to read, his grandfather gave him two volumes of witchtales. They were hardbound and stained orange with age. After they were almost ruined by bullies, he never took them outside again. He kept them on the cramped bookshelf in his room, on the bottom shelf among dictionaries and reference books, where no one would bother to look. The books had been handed from generation to generation, their pages touched by the hands of history’s most powerful witches.
Witchtales were to witch children what fables were to human children, except witchtales had a touch of historical accuracy. They were the foundation of witches’ cultural understanding and were meant to ingrain the basic morals and ethics of witching.
One tale told the story of a young witch who sold her services to village people. The success of her spells filled her cottage with riches but also garnered unwanted attention. Her customers became wary of her magical strength. Several men invited her to a tavern, where they poisoned her drink. After she fainted, they beheaded her and cut out her heart. They burned her head and heart and spilled her ashes at sea.
Another tale told of a child witch who used necromancy to contact his dead father. He kept it hidden for years, but the truth eventually came out, and he was forced into decades of servitude. For every year he kept silent, he owed a year to his people for betraying the natural order of life. This tale was almost completely fictional because the energy required to bring back the dead would kill any witch.
Underlying all the witchtales was the message that when witches were involved with humans, chaos followed. The witchtales didn’t explicitly condemn public knowledge of witches, but the Order still buried the witching world under human gazes and punished those who disobeyed. Punishments were relative to the magnitude of the offense, as determined by the Order, but forced servitude was the most common.
Everett had read through half of one volume by the time his grandfather returned. Their dinner was silent, broken only by dry chewing.
As he lay in bed that night, he thought of the boy in the martial arts school. His face was already slipping from Everett’s memory, but his wild black hair and black eyes remained. There was a possibility the boy was attached to one of the strings. Everett wasn’t able to tell because he hadn’t taken a look at the strings inside the school. He hadn’t felt an urge of paranormal presence, so the boy could be human.