Poltergeeks (11 page)

  DarkChik: I don't know. Why?

  Jules: Not sure. Will talk about it l8tr. Txt me if more weird shit happens.

  DarkChik: Okay. Hey is Marcus okay? He totally saved my life. 'Swoon'

  "Swoon?" What the hell was
that?
I felt my temperature rise and I fired back a text message that was loaded with anger. Okay, so yeah – it wasn't my most shining moment.

  Jules: WTF? You choose NOW to tell me ur into Marcus? WTF?

  DarkChik: Every girl wants to be rescued. Hey sry okay? I thought you weren't into him.

  Jules: I don't know if I am or not. And anyway mom is in hospital.

  DarkChik: No Prb. Sry. But it was kind of hot how he carried me out on his shoulder.

  Jules: Yeah. Marcus is hot. I gtg l8tr.

  DarkChik: CYA.

  Marla Lavik's timing sucked ass. It was good of her to check on me and all, but what the hell was she swooning over Marcus for? She knew I was still con flicted about my feelings. Mind you, I didn't have any claim to my dorky friend so in truth; Marcus was fair game for any girl at school. But
Marla?
Every person with male chromosomes ogled her and secretly fantasized about what she looked like underneath all the shining black latex and white makeup.

  Everyone…
except
for Marcus.

  Maybe it was because of Marcus' apparent lack of interest that he made Marla swoon. (Of course, a good rescue of the damsel in distress can't hurt either, but still.)

  I threw my cell phone across the room and it hit my bedroom door with a loud smack. What kind of rubbish daughter was I? My school was attacked by a supernatural entity that nearly killed me, my mother was lying in the hospital in a coma and I was worried about competition for
Marcus?

  Sometimes I'm an asshole with a capital A.

  Betty got back to my place shortly after 10am and we decided the first thing we needed to do was to look for a motive. She followed me down to Mom's lab and started pulling books off the shelf and stacking them on the big table in the middle of the room. I'd brought my laptop with me so I could show her the disturbing video of the dogs on YouTube.

  "Betty, can you tell me what that is?" I asked as I clicked pause at the precise moment when the blue orb appeared in front of the windowsill.

  She pulled her glasses down to the tip of her nose and tucked her chin to her chest as she scanned the screen. "It's not something that can be explained using non-magical means, that's for sure. What's your gut telling you?"

  "A spirit," I said flatly. "It's just showing itself in the shape of an orb as opposed to who it used to be in life."

  Betty grunted again. "Doesn't it seem rather contrived for a spirit to present itself in full view of a camera or recording device?"

  I blinked at her a few times. "So what you are saying is… This video was staged and the whole thing is fake?"

  "Oh it is
definitely
staged," she said. "But what you are seeing before you is not a poltergeist, but rather, a feat of magic. The attack on those dogs is just supposed to
look
like a poltergeist, that's all. In time, you'll hone your skills to razor-sharp precision and you'll be able to spot a fake from a mile away."

  "I hope so," I said calmly. "So what do you think it means?"

  Betty shrugged as she went back to piling books on the table. "I suspect it means that whoever crafted that spell wanted certain people to understand its true meaning… but not everyone. What is more important, having millions of anonymous people observe what might or might not be a supernatural occurrence or a handful of people who know what specifically to look for?"

  I chewed my lip and reversed the video. I brought my face close to the screen and squinted as I clicked play. I watched the curtains flutter and I jumped when I saw a tiny spark of magical energy a split second before the orb appeared.

  "Look!" I shouted, as I clicked stop. "You were right! I saw an arc of energy."

  "And what does that tell you?" Betty asked.

  I thought for a moment and then gasped. "That we're dealing with some seriously twisted practitioner. But if it's the same person behind the attack on the school, I can't see how they'd have been able to do all that without burning up! It doesn't make sense."

  Betty nodded. "It's true – there are rules for magic. It's possible this might be a dark coven of some kind. Perhaps a group of witches pooled their collective energy to do this. Either way, we need more information."

  I raised a finger. "A broker! We could hit up Holly Penske for information. She's in the know about everything supernatural, though my mother told me that she plays both sides of the fence."

  Betty gave me an immediate look of disapproval. "I'd suggest that you forget about even considering contacting her," she said warily. "Holly Penske doesn't play nicely with anyone and you
never
want to be in her debt."

  "She deals with desperate people?" I asked.

  Betty's eyes narrowed. "Desperate, ambitious, conniving – she makes no distinction. Holly Penske deals with whoever is willing to pay her fee. She can't be trusted because she's only out for herself."

  I turned my attention back to the video. No real web traffic according to the number of hits. It was almost as if whoever planted it there meant for it to be seen by whoever was at the receiving end of their dark spell.

  "This video was aimed at someone who'd notice."

  Betty nodded. "That's right – someone like you."

  I clicked on the author's profile to see if I could glean a bit more information about him. A page immediately loaded with the username 'Hudibras' framed in a green box along with a link to subscribe to his YouTube channel. The background contained black-and-white woodblock prints showing people in medieval garb. I scanned the background further and my heart nearly stopped when I saw a faint text by a man with a long beard dressed in a capotain hat poking a tormented looking woman with what looked like a dagger. I gulped as I read the words aloud:

 

  Hang'd threescore of 'em in one shire?
 

  Some only for not being drowned,
 

  And some for sitting above ground,
 

  Whole days and nights, upon their breeches,
 

 

  "Oh my God! That bearded guy," I gasped. "I saw him in the girls' washroom yesterday. This is the same text that spirit wrote on the bathroom mirror!"

  Betty shuffled over to me and leaned over my shoulder. "I'm familiar with it and as I recall, it was written in 1678. That man in the picture is someone I've seen before… His name escapes me."

  "Whoever it is, they've clearly got a hate-on for witches," I said. "You don't think…"

  "That a spectre is the one responsible for attacking you and your mother at school yesterday?" she said, completing my sentence. "Spirits of the departed can't do magic, but the message might hold the key that unlocks a door to a very harsh reality many witches are in denial about."

  "And that would be?"

  Betty's eyes narrowed again as she pointed to the woodblock prints. "That persecution of witches is very much alive and well in the twenty-first century."

  I chewed on Betty's observation for a moment and then remembered that Marcus and I had sent an email to the video's author. I quickly logged into my email account and waited as ten messages downloaded. The familiar chime sounded to tell me that I had mail. Betty hovered over me, her glasses still perched on the bridge of her nose. I scrolled down past a number of spam messages until I spotted the words, 'Your Request' in the subject line. My eyes scanned to the left and I saw the sender's name was Hudibras.

  "Maybe the answer is in this email…"

  "Julie,
don't!"
cried Betty as she reached for my hand, but it was too late.

  I felt the hairs on my arms standing on end. The temperature dropped like a stone and a foul stench of rotting flesh filled my nostrils.

  "What's happening, Betty?"

  "Spirits bless us all!" she said.

  My body floated about five feet off the floor. Mom's spell books flew off the shelves and danced around me, the pages fluttering as a breeze appeared out of nowhere, sweeping across the top of the table and blowing all of Mom's beakers and flasks to the far end of the room. My laptop began spinning like a top and then it floated up to the ceiling, the screen blinking furiously. Dust fell from the ceiling as a tremendous rumble shook the room. I glanced over at Betty and watched in horror as Mom's shelf toppled over, burying her in a pile of spell books and jars filled with spell ingredients.

  The chair beneath me lifted off the ground and I ducked as it flew across the room, narrowly missing my head. The supernatural attack was getting out of hand and if I didn't do something, I'd wind up in the hospital too. I clenched my jaw tightly and raised my magic as I reached for my amulet. It tingled against the palm of my hand as I threw up a dome of magical energy to shield my body from the flying debris.

  Betty crawled out from underneath the book-shelf, her eyes blazing with supernatural fury. She furrowed her brow angrily and roared, "Whoever you are, you're not dealing with a novice and this spell ends now!"

  In a surprising display of her power, the chair that nearly took my head off slid across the floor until it was directly beneath me. I watched in amazement as all the beakers and flasks that had flown off the table and smashed against the wall reassembled themselves, the tiny glass shards fusing together. The remade vessels drifted back to the table and into neat and orderly rows. The books that were orbiting me like satellites circling a planet sailed back onto the shelves and the breeze disappeared as quickly as it started. I slowly dropped to the floor. My laptop fell into Betty's hands and she allowed herself a satisfied smile as she slid it back onto the table.

  "Some people need to remember their manners to their betters," said Betty, in an indignant voice. "We're safe now, Julie."

  I lowered my magic as the temperature returned to normal and the stench dissipated. Betty placed her hand on my shoulder and squeezed good and hard. I leaned over to the blinking computer screen to read two words that made my heart sink.

  "
Two Days,"
I whispered.

 
 

 
 
 

"Hudibras was definitely behind everything and the email proves it," I said, examining the message. "The time stamp says it was sent the day before the attack at school."

  "Then you're clearly the person that video was meant for," Betty said calmly.

  I glanced at my watch. "It's 11.33 in the morning," I said in a frustrated voice. "Hudibras sent that email more than twenty-four hours ago. That means we haven't much more than a day to do
what?"

  Betty shuffled over to Mom's bookshelf and ran her index finger along the spines. "You know what must be done," she said.

  I frowned. "Do I? If he's behind what happened at school yesterday, maybe he's planning another attack or something."

  Betty grunted. "I think we just survived one, now where
is
that book?"

  "What book?"

  She pulled out a thick leather-bound volume the size of an encyclopaedia from Mom's bookshelf and dropped it on the table in front of her. It landed with a loud slap.

  "Your mother's grimoire – her personal book of magic. Have you started your own yet?"

  I shrugged. "Well… kind of. I mean, it's on a flash drive and everything's in Microsoft Word. Do you think you'll find the answer in there?"

  Betty flipped through the thick pages like she knew what she was looking for and then slapped her hand down on a page about a third of the way through the book. "There it is!" she announced.

  I slid over and squinted at the hand-written entries. Betty's finger pointed to a heading entitled, 'The Nature of the Mortal Soul'.

  "'The soul constitutes the binding of the physical aspect of an individual's humanity with the existence of their spiritual self,'" she read aloud. "'Religious scholars believe as a matter of faith, that our human soul departs the body at the moment of death. However, the soul can be torn from the body by means of dark magic, the darkest of which is the spell known as Endless Night where the victim lingers on in a persistent vegetative state until death claims them. Without the soul, a human body cannot survive more than a few days before physical death occurs.'"

  "Endless Night," I gasped, as my blood ran cold. "A voice bellowed those words just before Mom was attacked. Hudibras used the Endless Night spell to take Mom's soul. But why?"

  Betty closed the grimoire and reached across to hold my hand. I was somewhere between panic and relief if that makes sense. I was terrified that my mother might die, but if her soul had been somehow been taken, then if we got it back she'd recover and everything would be as it was. The big problem though was that we'd have to find this Hudibras guy as quickly as possible. A task that is easier said than done in a city with a million inhabitants, not to mention the fact that time was against us.

  Betty took a seat in the big chair again and stretched her legs out. "The word 'Hudibras' – can you look on that machine of yours and see if you can dig anything up? It would save us the drudgery of researching at the library or even contacting your mother's coven."

  I spun around in the chair and googled the word "Hudibras". Within seconds I had a page with twenty different links, so I clicked on the first one. A page loaded entitled Project Gutenberg, and there was a link to the name
Samuel Butler.