The windows were beset with a veneer of alabaster – icicles hanging from the rooftops, glistening in the moonlight. The snow spilled from the sky in orbicular clusters, the air was crisp, whisking the arctic ivory throughout the underpopulated Ohio town.
Morgana had a daunting infatuation with the friendly neighborhood serial killer. He was a legend where she came from – the Springwood Slasher is what they called him. It had been over two decades since he was burned to death by the disgruntled parents of the children he had abducted. She spent the majority of her teenage years doing research, scouring the public records for information, collecting news paper clippings and hanging them up on her wall (which was solely dedicated to aforementioned serial killer). It was a demented hobby, though Morgana thought nothing of it as she plotted his resurrection from the day she began to practice witchcraft.
Morgana brought her mortar and pestle to a humble wooden table that was set up in the corner of her murkily lit bedroom; she opened a drawer and withdrew a small zip-bag, then fetched one of the jars from the shelf to her left.
"A little dragon's blood," she whispered, emptying the contents of the bag into the mortar. She peered through the window, studying the full moon, bright as the snow-laden ground. She swiped a match against the soapstone mortar, lighting a black candle, the moon washing over her and the surface of her workplace. She took a deep breath and plucked a black feather from the jar and placed it beside the mortar.
Morgana was an outcast. She never had any friends, nor did she crave the attention which came in conformity with any form of school popularity. Throughout elementary school and high school, Morgana found herself distracted by the Occult. She became utterly captivated by the unknown, reading books on the Salem Witch Trials, exorcisms and paranormal happenings. As if the black clothes, hair dye and heavy makeup wasn't enough, the artistry of magick caught her attention during high school more so than anything taught in school.
Continuing to gather jars from the shelf and baggies from the drawer, she added to the mortar until she was pleased with the mixture of herbs she had mulled together.
"Dried cockscomb petals and the stem of a gladiolus,"
The clouds trekked into a thick bed over the moon; the sky now a lifeless gray.
"Hecate! Goddess of the underworld! I call upon thee! Rise and heed my words!" Morgana took the pestle and ground the herbs into a dusty concoction.
The wooden table now embellished with black candles, sported a pentagram carving on its surface. In the center of the pentagram sat a small iron cauldron, where Morgana set the black feather. Once the gritty confection of herbs were ground to her liking, she lifted the mortar and began to sprinkle it over the feather in a slow, circular motion. She then repeated herself, her voice increasing in volume – "Hecate! Goddess of the underworld! Hear me! I summon you, I summon your power! Heed my words!"
She lit a match once the mortar had been emptied.
"Hecate! Hear me!" She dropped the match into the cauldron, the substance within igniting with a indigo cloud of opaque smoke.
"Hear me!"
Morgana lifted her arms into the air, the moon splitting through the tightly knit quilt of gray clouds, its wan presence glowing through the window.
"Hear me!" She cried once more. The purple cloud twisted and swelled until the form of a three-headed woman became progressively visible. Morgana took a step back, her breath hitching in her throat, her green eyes widening with astonishment.
"Who dare summon I..." A deep, curt and baleful voice erupted from the trichotomic being.
Morgana seemed as though she couldn't find her voice as she fumbled to speak, staring up at the vast anatomy before her.
"Who dare disturb my slumber?" The terse and menacing voice tripled in echo betwixt the three heads as they surveyed the unfamiliar arena for their summoner.
"I... Morgana Claudia Drescher..." Morgana spoke submissively, stunned at the result of her incantation.
"Morgana Claudia Drescher..." The Goddess of the underworld repeated with jeering inquisitiveness.
"I am... in need of your aid..." Morgana hesitantly knelt and reached under her bed, tugging out a heavy, dirty sack which reeked of the dust of the earth.
"Where lies your worth, child?" The three heads asked gibingly.
"My life... my soul, I offer... in exchange for rebirth..." She opened the sack to reveal a pile of soiled, aged bones, the odor of death emanating from the very marrow.
Six eyes glowed a fervid, raging amber, the violet fog swelling, submerging everything in the room.
Then the very earth began to shudder – such a tremor, a rumbling from the core, that could rival a powerful earthquake.
Morgana sat up in her bed to the irritating sound of her alarm clock blaring like a siren. She found herself in a cold sweat, her covers bunched up underneath her, pillows sprawled about her bed. With a trembling palm to her forehead and a shaky sigh quivering from her gullet, Morgana shut her eyes tightly, flashbacks of her dream from the night before haunting her with persistent chills along the length of her spine. The digital clock that sat on her nightstand flashed red with the time. She turned off the alarm and gritted her teeth as she forced herself to get out of bed. She had to be at work in thirty minutes. She hated her job.
The air was frigid and brisk, befitting the frosted treetops that defined the morning horizon. Morgana shielded her eyes as she stepped outside, the snow-dressed ground as bright as the forenoon sun, striking and bewitching to the languished eye. She trudged down the snowy steps with her hands balled up in her pockets and her face buried in her scarf as she dug for her car keys. Hastily unlocking the door, desperate to get away from the freezing air, Morgana slipped into the old, beat up Silverado. It took her a few times to get the engine going, the muffler sputtering black vapor when she put it in drive.
"Good for nothing car..." She muttered, teeth chattering as she watched the temperature gauge which wouldn't budge.
Morgana stopped at a red light and waited impatiently for it to turn green, her eyes pinballing between the light and the clock; she was going to be late.
When the light turned green, when she pressed her foot down on the gas pedal, Morgana felt something surge over her like a flux of electricity. Her body met paralysis, her eyes dilated, her mouth fell agape. The milieu of a busy boulevard warped and contorted before her – she found herself looking into her bedroom, at the collection of rotting bones that sat in a heap beside her bed.
The bones began to tremble.
Morgana could only stare in awe.
"You shouldn't have done that..." She heard a husky, bantering voice warn from behind her.
The bones began to rattle with vehemence before the joints found each other and connected as if by magnetic force – each bone clicking into place until finally, a skeleton formed.
"Granted." Said the familiar voice of the three-headed Deity – the word rang through Morgana's ears eerily.
She watched with trepidation as the skeleton, branded with aged, russet loam, stood. The bones crackled with each movement – Morgana ogled the abomination, her eyes swelling with fascination. Slowly, she could see muscle begin to form, then skin and features. She found herself frozen with sheer terror – she hadn't seen anything like it in her whole life.
"See what happens when you dabble with things you shouldn't dabble with?" Said the voice from behind her. She turned to face the unfamiliar voice once she had regained control of her senses.
Morgana had witnessed quite a few things in her lifetime – despite her being the ripe age of twenty-two. As many times as she's dyed her hair and watched it fry like an egg under an open flame, or as many times as she's gotten severe conjunctivitis from jabbing her eye with an eyeliner stick – never had she been in such a quandary.
"It was only a dream."
The acrimonious voice belonged to a tall bodied man equipped with a black suit and a Bella Lugosi hairdo.
"But a dream is a wish... your heart makes." The expensively dressed man mocked, showcasing a wide, toothy grin as he brought a long cigar to his lips.
There was something about that man that gave Morgana goosebumps. His air, his presence emanated of pernicious and perverse evil. It was an overwhelming feeling – irrefutable condemnation, a moral deficiency. As if she were stripped naked, bare and vulnerable. She was unaware of who this formally clothed man was, oblivious to what this thing was.
With narrowed eyes and a questioning expression, Morgana asked the man for his name, the entire conversation between them, the whole scene that unfolded before her feeling like a lucid dream.
Cigar hanging from his lips as he clasped his hands behind his back, the man smirked at her inquiry.
"Let's put the pieces of the puzzle together now, shall we?" He took a step back, wrapping his forefinger around his cigar as he pulled it from his lips.
"You're Morgana Drescher, witch, outcast, with an undying passion for... him." He gestured his cigar toward the man standing in the middle of Morgana's bedroom, now dressed in a red and green Christmas sweater, grease-stained work pants and a beaten up, dirty brown fedora hat. With an arched eyebrow he gave Morgana a look of disapproval before taking a long drag from the cigar prior to flicking it out of sight.
"You could do better." He scoffed with a smirk, "however... you realize what you've done, do you not?"
Morgana stared at him with perplexity. "I didn't... I dreamt it. How can you pin something like this on me, when I'm not the culprit!"
He chuckled, licking his lips. "Au contrare, my dear... you, indeed, are the culprit. You've released this abominable soul from the depths of my domain... I have seen quite a few petty beings slip through the cracks of my prison walls, but him...he must go back – his soul is valuable to my compendium, to the bowels of perdition of the iniquitous and the vile."
Morgana's eyebrows knitted together with a conclusion dwelling in the back of her mind, an idea that seemed almost as unrealistic as the sight of Hecate emerging from a cloud of incense smoke.
"Your domain? The bowels of perdition..." She looked down, searching her thoughts until it finally clicked.
With wide eyes she met the man's piercing blue stare whose eerie, reassuring smile returned when she realized who, what he was.
"This doesn't make any sense. You're the... Devil?"
A bolstering titter followed his nod as he opened his arms in a semi-bow. "In the flesh. Well, as of now, this is more of a hallucination which, I suggest you snap back to reality before you hit that car coming directly at you." The Devil snapped his fingers and Morgana was back behind the wheel of her car whilst, heading face to face toward a Subaru, the sound of horns blaring all around her reigniting her senses.