Skarlet
Seth Mazzaglia took Kat McDonough under his wing, shepherding her through the “astral plane” and showing her how to use her powers in real life.
Seth said he helped himself make contact with the other world by keeping a dream journal within reach of his futon. The book was green and leather-bound, embossed with a Celtic cross.
Every morning when he awoke, he turned to the next page, put down the date, and wrote whatever he could remember.
“Sometimes it’s a list of names, places, descriptions,” Seth told her. “Sometimes it’s half a novel.”
He told Kat her abilities would take time to develop. He suggested she attempt to channel them when she wasn’t asleep. Seth claimed to be a very experienced “dreamwalker,” but he also used tarot cards to map his future. He said using waking visions or meditations could put Kat in touch with her past lives.
“What you’ll find,” he said, “is that you’ve done all of these things before.”
It was clear that Kat believed the things he told her, believed that his reports from beyond the Veil were true.
Seth told Kat that he had a long game: These spirit personas were going to guide not only his life, but hers as well. The tarot cards told him that he and Kat were soul mates who had been with each other in past lives and were destined to be together in this one. The psychic purpose for joining Seth and Kat was not merely for love. It would be together, he said, that their combined strength would allow them to achieve the ultimate goal.
Seth then said he believed that within four years he and Kat would lay waste to the world and then rule it together.
—
The cast of characters Seth claimed to have living beyond the Veil of Separation was numerous. In addition to Wild Card, there was “Cyrus.” He was a benevolent enforcer, something like a knight. There was “The Nameless One,” an evil, brooding persona—one who emerged when Seth became angry or depressed. “The Hollow One” was even more evil than the Nameless One. There were others, like “Rune,” “Black Knight,” “Powered Achron,” “Scourge,” “Kushira,” “the Arbitor,” “Old Evil Brain,” “Dark Kaiser,” and “the Horror of all Nightmares.” There was even the female spirit, a woman with ebony hair and black eyes named “Eve,” who Seth said was his unborn daughter caught in the Veil. Each had different characteristics, but all sounded menacing. Some posed threats to other personas. Some could foresee the future. Others could affect what happened in the real world on this side of the Veil.
The persona Seth most often took was called “Darkheart.” He was the spirit of a dragon who lived inside of Seth’s mortal coil. Darkheart, explained Seth, was largely in control of his body and his fate.
Darkheart had one important job: to control “the Darkness.” This was the wicked, doleful cloud that would sometimes overcome him psychically and emotionally. It could make him do terrible things. The Darkness was sent by the Nameless One, and Darkheart would have to take any measure to stop it. Any measure. Seth said that Darkheart would often make requests of him and others—all so the Darkness would not consume him.
If Kat were ever to fully believe in the existence of the Veil of Separation and its inhabitants, then she would have to accept Seth as Darkheart. Doing so would give Seth wide latitude to make demands of her, all in the name of keeping the Darkness in check. It would give him a means of control.
There was one more persona Seth cautioned Kat about. He was called “Doomsday.” This was the most powerful of all his personas. Doomsday lurked in the depths of the Veil. Seth said he could unleash Doomsday only once. It would be on the day he would launch his plan to destroy the world.
—
Seth said there was another persona—not his—that was circling him from the Veil. It was a female persona he called “Anay,” a redheaded spirit who he said had followed him through many of his lives, and who had the power to inhabit women’s bodies and become his lover. But Anay never stuck around. She was forever visiting then abandoning Seth. He told Kat that Anay had inhabited his slain love, Natasha. Anay, Seth explained, was the love who had slipped through his fingers for all eternity.
“I think the one you know as Charlotte,” he told Kat, “is actually Anay.”
Seth was co-opting Kat’s persona to make it his own, to further drive the point home that they were psychically tethered. He was creating another way to control her.
After all of Seth’s talk about his different personas, Kat revealed that she too had detected more personas. One was “Kitty.” Simply put, Kitty was Kat’s normal high school self, the antithesis of the mighty warrior Skarlet. She described this persona in terms that implied she found Kitty to be annoying.
One was named “Violet.” She was a healer, Kat said, someone who was good at defending her. Violet had strong powers but she used them only for good, only for protection. Violet was the name Kat’s mother, Denise, had used as her own fantasy persona, as well as the name of Scarlet’s witch mother in her Harry Potter fan fiction. It’s possible Violet’s creation served a real-life purpose for Kat, an emotional projection of something she was missing in her relationship with Denise, or Kat’s way of letting her mother into the secret world she shared with Seth.
Another figure was male, someone Kat said was tied to Skarlet in past lives. He was a brother-figure named “James Sweeten.” James (another name from Kat’s fiction) was not Skarlet’s lover, Kat said, nor did she believe he was Seth in some other form. Rather, James was Skarlet’s partner in mayhem.
In one life, Kat said, Skarlet was captain of a pirate ship and James was her first mate. In another, they were robbers together. In the ethereal world, Kat could sense James was nearby, always watching out for Skarlet and ready to take up arms in a fight.
When she was ten years old, Kat said, she’d had a dream she was walking around colonial Portsmouth and then setting fire to the city. (Such a dream could very easily have been inspired by real-life local history lessons, as the port city burned three times between 1802 and 1813. The worst fire was the final one, a conflagration that destroyed virtually every wooden structure in Portsmouth.)
Though Kat said she’d had the dream seven years earlier, Seth declared that he too remembered having the same dream seven years ago on the same night. They compared notes.
Kat said in her dream, she was Skarlet but was dressed in little boy’s clothes, James by her side.
Seth elbowed in on this too, claiming that he was there in some form as well, and was certain he’d seen Skarlet through the flames. When Kat said she was burned during the fire, Seth insisted he had saved her from the flames, but was himself killed during the rescue. Because of his sacrifice, Seth said, he’d become a kind of guardian angel, who watched over Skarlet and protected her whenever she was in mortal danger.
Kat seemed to believe Seth’s vivid description of the role he’d played in her own dream. She never protested how he inserted himself into every story she told.
The night wore on, and Kat’s Facebook responses took longer and longer to transmit. Seth recognized his young girlfriend was nodding off. He had a standard sign-off he used each night.
“Until the tides bring you back to me . . .”
—
Given the tensions she felt at home, Kat was always happy to be out of the house during the week, either at work or a rehearsal for another play. Seth, who had no steady job or schoolwork to occupy his own time, was persistent when Kat would counter there wasn’t enough time to see each other. He wanted to see her, even if it was only for half an hour.
On the weekends, the plan was always the same. Denise would drop Kat off at Bowl-O-Rama, believing her daughter was spending the afternoon with friends who would give her a ride to work later. (Though she was nearly eighteen, Kat still did not have a driver’s license herself.) Instead, Kat would meet Seth inside the bowling alley, then the two of them would emerge from the side door and begin their date.
Often they chanced detection by walking around Portsmouth’s downtown Market Square, browsing in shops and people watching. They frequented coffee shops, but because neither liked the bitter taste of java, they sipped mugs of hot chocolate al fresco.
Less than a mile’s walk away, beyond the docks where commercial fishermen set off each morning in search of lobster, was the bridge leading to Peirce Island, twenty-seven acres of green grass, boat launches, dog parks, and tree-lined walking paths. Seth liked taking Kat to Peirce Island because it felt far away from the Market Square crowds. On the island, they could spend a Saturday afternoon feeling safely hidden, pretending their fantasy world was real.
Once, while walking along a trail, Kat stopped and stepped off the path. She leaned against a tree and waited for Seth to follow. He approached her and kissed her deeply on the mouth.
“There’s magic in this tree,” he said.
Kat smiled. “Yes, I think so. This is our magic tree.”
The island’s scenic overlook offered 270-degree views of the river and of Kittery, Maine, on the opposite bank. There was a trio of granite benches at the overlook, each just wide enough for the two of them to share. If they timed it right, they’d see a commercial freighter making its way up the river, being nudged around the bends by tugboats, and eventually spurring the alarm to sound on the river’s drawbridge.
New Hampshire’s coastline is the shortest of any coastal state, just thirteen miles along the Atlantic, pinched between Maine and Massachusetts like a finger stuck in a door. Portsmouth’s linkage to the Atlantic is three miles down the Piscataqua River. The body of water is less like a river and more like a vein to the sea. Its brackish waters run upstream when the tides are in, raising water levels by eight feet when the daily surge sends the river in reverse. When the tides ebb, the Piscataqua returns its brine to the Atlantic, leaving behind fresher waters tinged with green, brown, and red seaweed. For centuries, sea captains sailing for Portsmouth have navigated around inconvenient isles with colorful names: Four Tree Island, Pest Island, Smuttynose Island, and the Devil’s Dance Floor.
“My mother said the tides on this river are really fast,” Kat told Seth. “Like the fastest in North America. That’s why there’s never any ice.”
“I know.”
“I love Halloween. It’s my birthday,” Kat said. “Well, not actually. My birthday is November first, but I always considered Halloween to be my birthday.”
“It’s your strong psychic ability. You have a connection to Ol’ Hallows Eve.”
“I sometimes have nightmares that I miss it, that I miss Halloween and my birthday.”
Seth raised a knowing eyebrow. “You’ll be eighteen in a couple of weeks. An adult.”
—
Seth announced to Kat that he planned to change his career path. He’d decided to become a police officer, and he wanted to do all he could to prepare himself for any upcoming department entrance exams. Seth believed his EMT experience gave him an edge, and he began working out—lifting weights and running on a regular basis—to stay trim.
Seth told Kat he wanted to sign up for a local Citizens Police Academy. This wasn’t a formal police academy; it was a nine-week public outreach program demonstrating various aspects of law enforcement to curious residents and business owners. Participants got a behind-the-scenes look at everything from constitutional law and restraining orders to crime-scene investigation and defensive tactics. A ride-along in a patrol car was usually the highlight of the course.
“This is the first step to making it all happen,” he instant messaged Kat.
“The Plan,” as Seth referred to it, was both elaborate and far-fetched. It called for Seth to cut his teeth in law enforcement, where he would join a SWAT team. When the time was right, he’d use his reputation as a “veteran police officer who has seen the dark side of life” to start a private security firm. The people he’d hire would serve as Seth’s private army, and among their ranks, he would plant those he called “minions.”
To Seth, minions were men and women who would do his bidding without question. The men would follow his orders with a cultlike discipline. The women would serve as sexual playthings. Minions were to be collected and groomed. Seth thought college protest groups, their minds open to influence, would be a source to find potential minions. They’d be more reliable in the revolution, he explained, than “allies from overseas.”
The beauty of collecting minions, Seth wickedly told Kat over Facebook, was that they were expendable—particularly the ones used for sex.
Seth would release Doomsday from the Veil, along with his army of bone rippers, to raze the world. What would rise after Doomsday’s campaign of destruction would be a far better world. In his vision, the “outsiders” would inherit the Earth. His visions said that Skarlet would be fighting alongside him.
“It should be a world where people can be who they want to be, without having to deal with abuse and misery and aggravation.”
To someone older and more experienced, Seth’s words would have been more than a red flag, they would have sounded like an alarm screaming, “RUN AWAY!” But when she heard about Doomsday and the Plan and the role Seth wanted her to play, Kat McDonough was ensorcelled.
—
As fall progressed and Seth focused on passing police department tests, Kat had her own exams to worry about. The SATs were administered the first weekend in November, and how she scored on the test would likely determine what college she could get into. Kat still hoped to take a year off after graduation to work at Walt Disney World before going to school in New York, but Seth was skeptical of her plans.
“Darkheart doesn’t see Florida in our future.”
Seth promised to lay down tarot cards to seek an answer as to whether he would follow Kat to an out-of-state college, or whether she should abandon her plans altogether.
“It’s probably out of the question,” typed Kat, with one short sentence letting go of her dreams of Florida, college, and Broadway. She was going to let Seth determine her future now.
—
One evening, Kat messaged Seth that there was a boy at school who had psychic powers of his own, someone who could talk to Skarlet. Kat called the boy “Mr. Valentine,” although it wasn’t his true name.
“Even his dark ones knew how to talk to Charlotte,” she wanted Seth to know. “Oh, and he wanted me badly.”
Here was a flip of the script. Seth had been testing her, looking to see whether Kat could be influenced by what he said was happening beyond the Veil of Separation. This time, it appeared Kat was testing him. It could have been a simple teenage ploy to make her boyfriend jealous. Or was she doing to Seth what he’d been doing to her: measuring how seriously he took this talk of a spiritual world?
Seth downplayed this boy’s psychic abilities. He explained that people with his and Kat’s aptitude would always attract those who could sense their power and try to prey upon it. Seth even suggested that “Mr. Valentine” might really be temporarily possessed by one of Seth’s own personas trying to reach out to Skarlet and Charlotte from beyond the Veil. As he had with the Portsmouth fire story, Seth was taking something Kat had claimed as hers and trying to convince her it was his.
As the nightly messages continued past midnight, Kat’s IMs got shorter and slower in coming. It was time to say good night. Over the weeks in which he’d been drawn more deeply into talking about the Plan, Seth’s once romantic sign-offs had devolved considerably.
“Sleep well,” he wrote. “Dream of dark, bloody, and psychotic things.”