Chapter 2: Home

Queens, New York:

I'll have to move again soon. The red-haired girl thinks as she sits in a dark, small, cheap and lightly furnished apartment. She is sitting on a worn out brown leather couch that folds out to a bed and is staring at the small antenna TV, although her mind is else where. The small-bared window is open and the wind, which has a faint smell of gasoline on it (as it always seems to have in this part of New York), blows a strand of her curly red hair in her face. She fingers her hair. Red. She is of pure Irish origin. Though she was born and raise in the USA.

I'm all alone. I need to face this to deal with is. She thinks

She draws a piece of ripped paper from the back pocket of her cut off jean shorts. It reads:

MEMORY RITE

You will need:

Yellow candles

Kamea of sol

A box of any shape or size

A solar incense

Music of a childlike nature to enhance the atmosphere

She knows what she must do. She stands and walks to the small kitchenette. She takes a brown paper bag and walks with it to the center of the same apartment. She sits on the floor and extracts a small oak box with a lid. Then she takes four yellow candles, a small clay pot with rice in it and three sticks of sweet smelling incense. She sticks the incense sticks in the pot, and opens the small oak box. The inside of the box it glossy black, and inside it is an ivory square that has numbers in columns that looks like this:

6

32

3

34

35

1

7

11

27

28

8

30

19

14

16

15

23

24

18

20

22

21

17

13

25

29

10

9

26

12

36

5

33

4

2

31

She places the candles in a circle around herself, and the incense in front of her. She closes her eyes.

"Flame." She whispers.

Suddenly the candles and incense are burning and filling the room with a sweet honey like smell. She breathes in and then out several times. Then she moves into a lotus like position with her legs crossed. She meditates for a few minuets then speaks.

"It is my will to greet my past and accept it for what it is," she states evenly then continues in a poetic voice,

"I call the past to meet the present,

That the future may be bright.

I bring myself forth from the dark,

And hold me to the light.

Let not the past control my present,

Let not my future be dark as night.

I meet and greet my with open arms,

And move back into the light."

Her eyes now closed are squeezed tight in anguish, for all around her she hers whispers. Unearthly voices taunting her from afar. Suddenly on familiar voice comes out among the many, it whispers to her,

"Alisa."

Alisa opens her eyes almost tearful but reluctant to cry. She grasps the ivory square in her left hand as she looks into the box. Within it she sees a familiar whitewashed brick, three-story mansion. Alisa closes her eyes again, but when she opens them she is no longer in the cheap, dingy New York apartment, instead she is clad in a white dress out side the house she saw in the box. Though it is no longer day as it was in the vision in the box, but a deep night. An angry scream is heard from inside the house.

"I HATE YOU!" The voice screams. It is the same voice that whispered to Alisa just a few moments ago in the apartment. A look of pain streaks across Alisa's face when she hears the scream, but it some fades, and she stands and waits. Suddenly the front door of the house is flung open. A girl wearing all black and far too much mascara, which is streaking down her face with tears. The girl has a silver pentacle around her neck that bounces off her chest at she runs down the steps outside the door. The girl runs straight through Alisa, whom doesn't flinch in the least. The girl continues running down the street, her short straight red hair bouncing off her shoulders. The door is still open. And crying can be heard from inside.

"Home." Alisa says.