The village of Stonehurst moaned and shook in the rain, wailing a sorrowful lament to the heavens. Ashen buildings lined the jagged roads, peeling paint and bird droppings caking their walls. Dark windows and cobwebs, all glittering from the raindrops, shrouded each abandoned building; the commonly visited haunts, however, were barely better. The bakery owned by Samuel Roberts seemed concealed in a blanket of dust and dirt. If anything, it was worse than the abandoned bookstore next door, which had no birds chattering around the entrance hoping for a crumb, and no small children rubbing the walls and windows with small bits of chalk taken from their classrooms in one of their silly games.
Mr. Roberts loathed this village, but he kept residence in the upper floor of his bakery because Stonehurst was where his father had grown up. For many of his twenty-six years, Samuel Roberts had hovered at his aged father's shoulder as he stumped around the family bakery with his rusted metal cane. Samuel's father had always insisted that his son accompany him wherever he went, until several weeks before.
In early November of that year, Drake Roberts died of what the village doctor called "natural causes" at the age of fifty-eight. Samuel speculated that as a rather young age to die of those reasons; he instead blamed his father's addiction to his own noxious delicacies, but had hardly commented on Drake's diet due to his father's famous nail-studded tongue. A word in about his inhaling a tray of cookies a day, and Samuel would feel red rashes all over himself where his father's words had hit.
This never meant that Drake was at all headstrong or reckless. To the contrary, he was notorious as the only man in the village who carried his identification card and a short knife everywhere he went (Samuel now carried these items as a remembrance of his father). And, of course, Drake allowed his son to escort him around the bakery lest he fall down and harm himself.
"You, young 'un, what if I trip and fall!" Drake Roberts would say in his creaky, squeaky voice. "What'll you do without your old dad then, hey?"
"I know, Father," Samuel would reply. "I'll always be right behind you."
Drake was never satisfied with this answer. How, after all, could he know if his son really was behind him, ready to catch him if ever he fell? He had no eyes in the back of his head. The only reply he would ever give to his son was, "You better be!"
Samuel always nodded earnestly.
His father was never one to trust, and so would force a smile, slap his son heartily on the back, and say, "Better hope you mean it!" He would then flick his finger in the direction of the oven and set about making an umpteenth batch of dry and callous cookies or muffins, Samuel at his heels.
For Drake, a lack of trust guaranteed a lack of belief. When the old man knelt next to his bed to pray, it was only to a God he didn't believe in. He prayed because his friends did. And Drake Roberts's childhood fears had never been of a monster in his home, or a demon-ghost lurking outside his window, or indeed any of the mythical beasts in fairytale stories. During the months before his death, however, Drake had seemed jumpier than a boy who had trodden barefoot on a hedgehog. Still, he harbored a barbed tongue for anybody who dared mention ghosts or unicorns in his presence.
Drake was as skeptical, scornful, and sarcastic as a body could be.
Unlike his father, Samuel took the beliefs of others very seriously, and even fostered several of his own that went beyond the bounds of science. Perhaps it was his nature; perhaps it was his mother's early death. It is not uncommon for children to shun their parents' words, but once she is gone, a mother's advice becomes much more valuable than it did during life.
To say it simply, Isabel Roberts was religious and faithful, kind and peaceful, and a true angel of what her God wanted this Earth to be. She, as was quite out of the ordinary, never spoke out of turn in a classroom as a child. She danced beautifully, but never jerked too hard or pulled her partner the wrong way. On starry nights, just after an evening rain, the petite and angelic woman would often walk to the outskirts of the village, on a road less traveled even than the deserted streets of Stonehurst. It was into a deep pond that Isabel had fallen and drowned one night, never having desired to learn how to swim—the choking, awkward sport that it was. The icy stars had shone on in the sky, never blinking to acknowledge the passing of this gentle soul, never pleading for any supernatural powers to spare this heart. The crescent moon smiled upon the city, burning a fiery silver candle of flame that could almost throw its shine to the shadowy corners of the dark alleys.
It was one such night that Samuel abandoned his post behind the dusty bakery counter to go for a walk down his mother's well-trodden path. He imagined her spirit weaving around him as he strode across the blue-and-gray checkered floor toward the door, blessing him with each belief that had been in her heart. Once every several seconds, however, he would question her existence in this world. Heavenly she may have been in life, but how could she walk among her old friends in death?
As Samuel traversed the empty street, he couldn't help but wonder, as always, what the village of Stonehurst was. Vacations to New York and Las Vegas when he was younger had shown him hotels, clubs, and busy streets packed with passersby for miles and miles in each direction. Stonehurst, a tiny town with a population of a maximum of one hundred people, lay far from modern civilization. Residents made their way as best they could; there was, at least, an active grocery store, a clothing market, a downsized mall, and one doctor. The necessities of life could be taken care of with quiet simplicity, and for all else the villagers relied on their own resources and ingenuity.
Now Samuel was making his way toward the pond in which his mother had drowned. Beside it was her gravestone and burial spot, for Stonehurst provided no public graveyard. When the villagers died, their own families chose a place for their bodies to lie and decay. The dead with no family were taken away during the annual check of the village by an outside city.
"How could you drown?" Samuel murmured softly. He knelt by the rough, black stone with his mother's name carved into the rock. The wind whistled off the trees nearby, casting an eerie silence upon him when it passed. Closing his eyes, the son of the dead sat silently at the bank of the pond, watching the shadows stir in the water.
The moon above continued to glimmer, but it did not light all shadow. An opaque façade of a woman was slithering slowly toward Samuel, who was still lost in the pain of his mother's passing, an agony reawakened once more as he saw her grave again. The shadow looming closer was as black and blurred as the wings of a swift, but the distinct curve of its outline betrayed the dark woman's identity.
Her small feet crackled on the autumn leaves dumped to the ground by the hard rains earlier that night. Samuel turned to look at the woman.
"Son," growled a raspy voice, full of barely containable wrath. Samuel was surprised this voice was so solid as it emerged from the skewed shadow. "My son."
"Mother?" replied Samuel. He had no trouble believing in her, no trouble believing that she had become one of the spirits she'd always told him about during her time of living. "Why are you here tonight? Why—why are you a shadow?"
The dark outline cackled, its throaty laugh echoing off the water. "No shadow am I."
"What are you, then, Mother?" Samuel inquired softly. He was staring with rapt attention at the gross miracle before him.
Her eyes—or at least the empty places where eyes should have been— glowed gold. "Witch I was in life, with the power to charm. And witch I am in death, with the power to destroy."
"What are you talking about? Come home with me, Mother; come to Father's old bakery. He's gone now, but he is buried in—"
"Silence, fool," hissed the mother suddenly. "Have you never wondered why stupid Drake died so young of 'old age'? It was not his cookies, the fat oaf! I killed your father after he killed me. And I will kill you, his son."
"Don't! Stop," pleaded Samuel. "You're talking nonsense. Come home with me. We can figure everything out there."
"I do not need to figure anything out." The voice of the dead Isabel Roberts was flat and emotionless, but frosty at the same time. "I know it all. I caused it all."
"You didn't," moaned Samuel. "You were drowned, and Father was too old. Please, come home with me, and we can start over. I need you."
"You need nothing!" The mother snarled. "Nothing but death to avenge what your father did to me!"
And the shadow was growing now, stretching to each side until she resembled a human form of thirty feet or higher. She was raising her arms, and the water in the pond was rising, and then it wasn't water—it was fire. A pool of fire swirled like a river of rapids higher, higher, into the sky. The trees were catching fire; soon the blaze would reach the heart of the village.
"Die!" Isabel screamed. "Burn, like my heart did when your father pushed me into this pond. Burn, like what your father felt when I attacked him from within. And let him burn too, from whichever Hell he is at! Let him watch his dear son die before his eyes."
Rings of fire arced through the night sky, as radiant as two tons of fireworks, but holding none of their pride and celebration. These flames were pure reflections of malevolence and death. A barrier of fire was being erected behind the shadow that was Isabel, and in the center of it, like writing on a wall, words were beginning to appear, weaving themselves through the fabric of the flames.
Chasing through the worlds of Curse
He who was raised in a river of lies
With power given for the evils of Death
One and more shall lose the gift to rise
Virtue of spirit, blessings of soul
Arise; farewell to thee, but a mortal
"A prophecy, stating your death, given to me from the one you know from you dear mother as God!" Isabel shrieked with the air of a wild animal about to close in on its prey. "You die tonight!"
Samuel had fallen down, and was struggling to get back to his feet. "No— please!"
"Let her blood meet the flame," When the familiar voice spoke inside his own head, Samuel stumbled, allowing himself to fall to the ground.
"Father?" gasped Samuel. It was surely Drake's voice, yet there was an ethereal air to it that had not been there before.
"Do not think of her prophecy; listen to my words. You must know that witches are forever mortal, even after death, if they decide to haunt their old paths of life. But should you touch her blood to fire, she will not be able to return to your world. Because I but drowned her, she could come back with full strength."
Samuel shook his head. How can I kill my own mother? But he had no choice. He could die, strengthening both the evil of his mother and the grief of his father, or he could fight.
Let her blood meet the flame? Letting out a sharp cry of both pain and hostility, Samuel snatched the tiny knife that had once belonged to his father out of his coat pocket. He lunged blindly for the shadow, feeling crushed under despair when it passed straight through the gaping darkness.
Isabel laughed maniacally, but her moment of triumph was short-lived. Dark red blood, rather darker than was normally seen, poured like rain from the gash Samuel had unknowingly swiped through her.
A drop broke apart from the waterfall of blood. Like a gentle spark, it fell into the spreading fire. With a quiet sizzling sound, the words on the wall of fire melted slowly back into the twinkling flames, that now seemed somehow friendlier.
"Turn away," Samuel's father whispered to him. "If you watch a witch die, she can take you with her."
Shakily, Samuel faced away from the flames, the screams, and the pond. Thanks, Dad.
"Leave now," instructed the spirit. "Leave this village to burn. With it will burn the curse of the witches, and Isabel's prophecy. Other men will never be bewitched as I was, up until I discovered her secret and killed her… and until she killed me…"
From hundreds of meters away, Samuel turned back one final time. The entire village was engulfed in flames, and with no firemen, it would soon be reduced to nothing more than ashes... Nothing more than a memory.