For several hours, they sat in hopeless silence, wavering in and out of vigilance. Sam had been thrown back into the cell with a really badly broken arm and bruises around his neck. He looked barely alive. Colby was so high on salvia, he could hardly keep his eyes open—not that he wanted to. The hippie ghosts surrounded him, cried for him, offered to get him out. They even sang campfire songs to soothe his broken soul.
Colby knew they weren’t real.
Still, they seemed real, and he was grateful for their efforts, these figments of his imagination. Hallucinations. But…what if they really were spirits of the dead? Maybe the salvia opened him up psychically as much as it spurred on drug-induced visions. How else would he have imagined every detail of their faces, the strings of beads around their necks, the stickers on that one’s guitar?
The Dark Lord is evil…
He will use you for his purposes…
You must resist…fight…
They spoke to him, carrying on over each other, so that after a while, their voices blended as one. But Colby was tired, mentally and physically drained. He wanted to fight—he just knew there was no point. Three of them were restrained or captured, and one was under a spell, which broke his heart more than anything.
When Georgia and Trey finally opened the cell to drag him and Sam out (as Alex watched from a distance through a void of emotion), the hippie ghosts tried to grab, trip, and attack their captors. If Colby’s hands and feet hadn’t been getting tied up with rope, it might’ve even been funny to witness their wispy forms charging toward the living, screaming in their faces, trying to stop them.
Don’t do to him what you did to us!, they screamed.
But Georgia and Trey couldn’t hear them. They tied the five of them up—Colby, Sam, Nate, Pauhi, and Kalani—their feet pointing to the center of the circle, their hands bound on the outer perimeter. Colby hated the feeling of being tied down. He’d always been claustrophobic, but at least he could still see and talk, and he’d use those abilities until his last moment. He’d annoy Georgia and Trey all he could. Fight until the end. He tried not to feel afraid of impending death. In the best-case scenario, his spirit would release from his body and rise into heaven, full of joy. In the worst case, he’d stop feeling and thinking anything at all.
Then there was that in-between state of being a ghost, trapped in the middle plane, lost and confused. Maybe that would be the worst case of all.
He watched Sam a few feet away from him, eyes half-closed from the effects of salvia but also from blinding pain. Whatever they’d done to him, they’d gotten him good. “Sam,” he said, reaching his fingers toward him.
Sam’s lips moved slightly. His eyelids fluttered.
“Sam, listen to me,” he said. “Whatever happens, I want you to know…you changed my life. Hear me?”
Sam’s eyes opened a fraction of a second and then closed again. He muttered something like hello…
“Okay, don’t talk. Just listen. The weird in me found the weird in you. I was a lost kid until I met you, and the best part of my life, hands down, has been you being my friend. What’s that?” Colby strained to hear above the sound of rain now splashing through the top grates and trickling down each of the five stairwells. Drains at the feet of each set of stairs collected the water.
Sam tried again. “Hello, copier.”
“Bro, shhh. You don’t have to say anything. I just wanted to thank you—”
“Helly, pallot,” Sam mumbled.
“Wait… You called the helicopter pilot?” He thought he detected a slight nod from Sam. Well, that was great, but they were about to die. Even if the helicopter pilot arrived soon, which he wasn’t even sure that’s what Sam had said, the guy wouldn’t know where to find them down here in the pits of despair, and Georgia was already beginning her ritual. “I love you, Sam,” he said. “I just wanted you to know that.”
Sam seemed to sigh just then, letting go of all worry and pain.
And the ritual began in awful, rehearsed perfection. It was easy to tell Georgia and Trey had been practicing their moves for years now from the way she whirled this way and that, black velvet robes sweeping along the floor, gold rope sash swinging, long blonde waves stretching down like limp, dead snakes. She lit more candles, squatted near their faces to make them sniff the smoke rising from her abalone shell, and mumbled incoherent phrases.
“There you go…it’s okay,” she cooed.
She looked and sounded like the Georgia they knew, but Colby could tell she was a different woman from the hostess who’d been upbeat and welcoming to them the last few days from the way her usually bright turquoise eyes had darkened with the extreme focus of her actions. Colby tried to get a good look at Nate to give him some final words as well, but Kalani was to his left, and Nate across from him. Lying on their backs in a circle, he couldn’t see Nate’s face.
“Love you, Nate!” Colby called out.
“I’m sorry for this, Colby. I’m so sorry!”
“Don’t be.” Colby’s eyes welled up with tears and spilled over, watery rivulets snaking down his cheeks and grazing into his ear. “Don’t be.”
Georgia stepped over Colby into the center of the circle, knelt, and began loudly. Arms out, she cried, “Guardians of the East watchtower, keepers of Air, I welcome you to this sacred space. I implore you to lend us your intelligence, ideas, and lightness of being, in order to invoke our Dark Lord into this world and make him flesh…”
What could he do? He could heckle her just to anger her. He could distract her in order to delay her, but Colby knew too damn well their deaths had to happen at 11:11 PM, come hell or high water.
She turned her position to face a different part of the circle and held out her arms again. “Guardians of the South watchtower, keepers of Fire, I welcome you to this sacred space. I implore you to lend us your passion, your drive, and your spirit. Help us invoke our Dark Lord into this world to make him flesh…”
Colby tried to wriggle his wrists free. He twisted his hands, suffered burns while biting his lip, all to try and loosen his knots, but Trey had tied him down savagely. His left ankle felt the most loose of his four bound points, as he twisted and pulled and yanked at it without getting anywhere. Next to him, Pauahi, withered and devoid of energy since Colby knew him, was now suddenly filled with adrenaline, fighting against his restraints, wriggling his skinny wrists, as Georgia turned ninety more degrees and carried on with her incantation.
“Guardians of the West watchtower,” she cried dramatically, holding her arms to the sky, that moonless sky that would bear witness to this madness, “keepers of Water, I welcome you to this sacred space. I implore you to lend us your fluidity, emotional wisdom, and mystery. Help us invoke our Dark Lord into this world to make him flesh…”
Behind him, Trey was walking back and forth, preparing other things for the ritual on the floor. Colby could see a bronze chalice, a long dagger with a jagged edge, and the abalone shell, still smoking with smoldering salvia. Next to him, Alex blindly, robotically handed more tools to Trey, his gaze a dead blankness.
“Alex,” Colby said calmly, “you don’t have to do this. Alex, snap out of it, man. You’re on our side. Alex, you’re on our side. Do you hear me?”
“Quiet.” Trey jabbed Colby with the blunt end of the dagger. “Or you’ll get this athame down your throat.”
Colby resisted the urge to spit into Trey’s face. If he was going to die, he wanted it to be as quickly and mercifully as possible. Waiting for his turn with a knife parked down his throat didn’t appeal to him in the slightest. He looked at Alex. “I love you, too, man. Even though this is seriously fucked-up. But I know it’s not you. It’s not you doing this.”
With his soft words, he hoped to appeal to Alex’s memory, but Alex was just a pawn in this game. Trey was too, to be fair, and while he was doling out the benefit of the doubt, so was Georgia. Just a mentally unstable woman who believed she had a job to do, commanded all her life by what she thought was a dark spirit, a figment of her own creation. What kind of disconnect made a person turn this way? Colby swore, if he ever got out of here, he might pursue a career finding out the answer.
“Guardians of the North watchtower,” Georgia said, loudest of all, “keepers of Earth, I welcome you to this sacred space. I implore you to lend us your courage, wisdom, and strength. Help us invoke our Dark Lord into this world to make him flesh. And now we invite you, Spirit, fifth, most compassionate of all elements, to help us draw the circle.”
Pauahi, who’d been pulling and fighting this whole time, went perfectly still as Georgia moved past him, dropped his cheek to the floor, but opened his eyes again when the witch walked by.
“The time, please,” she commanded.
Alex glanced at a clock on the workbench. “10:48.”
“Oh, good, we won’t die for another twenty-three minutes,” Colby said.
“Shut up,” Trey hissed, handing Georgia the athame with the jagged edge, the knife that would be used to carve him up. A wave of nausea rose into his throat. “Stop making things difficult. It is what it is.”
“Is it?” Colby turned his cheek to watch Pauahi, to keep himself out of trouble.
Georgia then slowly moved around the perimeter of the circle, counterclockwise, holding the athame with both hands, as if painting an invisible ring. At this point, Colby could hear sniffling and knew it was Nate crying. “Spirit, we beseech you to bind and hold us together with your kind and willful energy, create a portal through which our Dark Lord will enter…”
When she said the words, Sam suddenly began twisting his face, left and right, his eyes shut tight against something he could see, though Colby couldn’t. “No, no…” he cried, struggling against the ropes.
“Is it the Dark Man?” Colby asked. “Sam, is it him? Tell him to fuck off, go find another intersection of ley lines to come through. Don’t listen to him, Sam. Sam, it’s not real…”
Georgia had almost made her complete circle when suddenly, one of Pauahi’s hands jutted through the ropes, his arm skinny enough to push, and grabbed her by the ankle. With a cry, she tripped forward, dropping her athame near Colby’s hands, and slammed into Trey, who fell backwards into Alex. Colby flicked the athame with his fingertips—it was all he could do—and the dagger went spinning on its jeweled side toward Pauahi.
As Georgia scrambled to her feet, she screamed, “Idiot!” at Trey, searching for the missing athame. Pauahi had loosened his hand completely, used the blade to cut his ankle ropes free, but Georgia had spotted him sitting up and was beginning to charge at him to retrieve her knife. As Georgia came closer, he hurried to saw the last rope off his wrist, but when she’d nearly reached him, he lifted the knife high, brought it down forcefully, and hacked off his own hand. Rolling away, he scrambled into one of the pitch-black stairwells.
“Get him!” she yelled. Trey took off. Alex tried to go too, but she pressed a hand into his chest. “You stay.”
Colby heard a loud, metallic screech and then a bang, and then Trey growling after Pauahi. Beside Colby, a puddle of thin blood slowly oozed underneath his severed hand toward the middle of the circle.
“Did you not lock them like I asked?” Georgia hissed at Alex.
“I did, but that gate is rusted from the waterfall, Ms. Georgia. I told you that before—”
She swiped at him with the tip of the blade. “Shut up. Don’t talk to me so casually. Do your job. Is that so hard?” Her chest heaved.
“Yes, Ms. Georgia,” Alex muttered, shaking.
Trey returned, out of breath and seething. “The gate was loose. It’s rusted. He was small enough to climb out the worn corner. I’ll check the gates once more, my darling. I apologize for this idiot’s incompetence.” He glared at Alex.
“We don’t have time.” Georgia paced the floor, squatted to pick up the severed hand, and tossed it onto her desk. “We’ll have to make do. Nothing else can go wrong.” She gritted through her teeth at Trey. “Not a single thing.”
“Guess you won’t be getting a ten tonight, Trey,” Sam muttered from his half-woken state. “Probably a three. Shit, I’d even say a two.”
Colby tried hard not to laugh, though laughing as they died would’ve felt so right and been the most perfect FU to them all. Even Nate was snickering from the other side of the circle. Suddenly, they were all laughing through their tears, mocking Georgia, mocking Trey. Nobody cared. They had nothing to lose anyway. There they were—his friends, fierce and funny brothers, laughing ’til the very end.
Georgia came charging at him, athame in her hand, robes swinging wildly around her tidy feet. “Gag this one,” she ordered. “Gag them all. And use him.” She threw her chin toward Alex.
Before Alex knew what hit him, Trey was tying his wrists together, shoving him toward the fifth set of ropes, as he slowly awoke to the realization of what was happening. He floundered instead of fighting him off, but Trey told him it was for his own good, and he’d still receive his rewards, when suddenly, Alex realized he was replacing Pauahi. “What? No.”
“Told you, bro.” Colby shook his head.
After both of Alex’s wrists had been bound, along with one of his ankles, he suddenly snapped to reality and kicked Trey’s face so hard, blood shot out of his mouth and flew across the circle.
“Yeah, get that bitch, Alex!” Colby shouted.
Georgia had already shoved one cloth gag into Sam’s mouth and was ready to silence Colby with another rag from her workbench when she noticed the fight and sailed over to help. Furious that things weren’t going as she’d rehearsed them a million times over the years, she flew into a rage, kicked Alex in the face with her heel, shoved a rag into his mouth, and sliced his neck with her athame for good measure.
Colby gasped. He stared at Alex, cringing in pain. Blood oozed in a thin line from the wound but the knife hadn’t gone all the way through his skin.
She stood, panting, looking around at the rest of them. “Anyone else want to resist?”
Horrified, Colby watched Alex’s face closely to make sure he wouldn’t pass out. The blood continued to stream, pooling into his shirt. Trey bent to unbutton and expose his chest. Though Colby and Sam were still shirtless from their waterfall swim, and Kalani had been mostly naked all this time, Alex, having re-dressed, apparently, was now just as vulnerable as the rest of them, bare to the sky, ready to be ripped open all for the Dark Lord.
He was alive, badly hurt and unresponsive but alive.
Georgia wiped her brow with the cloth gag, threw it aside, and blew out an exasperated breath. She retraced her steps, inviting Spirit to draw the circle with her again, since it had been broken. In her stress, she had forgotten to gag him or Kalani.
Colby searched his mind, his soul, for an answer.
How could he fight to the end when it seemed so hopeless? They were all tied, ready to be sacrificed. By now, it was certainly after 11 PM, which meant they only had minutes to live. He refused to go out in fear, in hate. Colby had overcome too much depression and sadness in the last few years to end that way. He’d always sworn that if he could make it through the tunnel of despair, he’d help others. But he didn’t have to wait until he was out of that tunnel. He could do it now.
Swallowing his tears, he would do what he did best—use his voice.