Page 43 of Big Witch Energy

“Yeah…it’s more a nightly show inside my head,” Caroline admitted.

“Caroline!” Riley exclaimed. “We don’t keep things like that from each other! That was the agreement!”

“I know, I know.” Caroline nodded. “But I was still processing everything, and I felt like I was going crazy after the accident, and with Ben in town, and I’ve just been so scattered. And since the dreams weren’t waking you up, too, I figured it was just a psychological thing. And I didn’t want to bother you with it if it was all in my head.”

Riley threw her arms around Caroline, quickly followed by Alice. Edison stood on the periphery, awkwardly patting Caroline’s shoulder.

“You’re never bothering us,” Riley said. “That’s the point of this whole thing. We’re in it together, or it’s dangerous and scary and it doesn’t work. So, if something wakes you up in the middle of the night and you’re scared, you call us.”

“If you see a creepy ghost in a place you’ve never seen one before, you call us,” Alice said.

“If you and Ben hook up again, you call us,” Riley said. “Because we’re going to need details.”

“I would like to be left out of that call,” Edison noted. “I do not need the details.”

Laughing, the hug broke, and they separated to examine the painting. There was no artist’s name scribbled on the back or the bottom corners, which seemed unusual. The painting was also lacking a date and the name of the subject—which would have been super helpful. Edison guessed from the style and the clothing that it was late 1700s to early 1800s, which told them relatively little as that was a big boom period for the island’s colonization.

“So, um, can you make her talk to you?” Riley asked. “Because I’m not feeling a lot of ‘ghost energy’ coming off the painting, like I normally do with our, uh, guests. It’s just sort of residue, like a dish that wasn’t washed properly.”

“That was one coffee cup and I said I was sorry,” Edison sighed. Alice snorted.

Caroline shook her head. “She only seems to talk to me at the bar.”

“Well, let’s see if we can force the issue.” Riley disappeared inside the house and came back moments later with a Welling lock. Plover and Riley both seemed to brace themselves as she walked out of the kitchen door.

“Plover, any change?” she asked over her shoulder.

Plover attempted to push his hand through the kitchen doorway but was blocked by an invisible magical wall. He shook his head.

“Feels normal to me!” Natalie told them.

“So…removing one of the locks from the house doesn’t release a thousand-plus ghosts onto the island, good to know,” Riley said.

“Is that one of those things that we should have tested on the fly?” Alice asked.

“Probably not,” Riley admitted. “And we should probably do this as quickly as possible before some Welling heir senses a disturbance in the universal energy that only seems to be detected by dedicated assholes, or something.”

“So what do we do?” Caroline asked. “Shake the lock at it until some demon face appears in the paint?”

Riley poured a careful line of salt in a near-perfect circle around the easel and the lock. “Well, I’ve been reading up, and I think the closest thing we could do would be a ‘summoning.’ Basically, we try to force the spirit to materialize in front of us, in the circle.”

Riley spent a few minutes reviewing the hand gesture necessary to complete the ritual, a pinched position of the right hand, drawn toward the chest. If it had been a shadow puppet, their hands might have looked like a bird’s head. The three of them took their places outside the circle and took some clearing breaths. They made the drawing gesture and…nothing.

They tried again. Caroline focused on listening to her sisters’ breathing, on the cool wind on her cheeks, and the light shining down on them. They made the gesture again and the lock sort of jolted on the grass. But the ghost lady didn’t materialize, and the painting was unaffected.

“Well, that’s something,” Alice said, frowning.

They repeated the drawing gesture and the lock rose from the ground, nearly to eye level. It seemed to glow, first red and then bright-yellow symbols stood out against the copper. The lock dropped to the ground and where it had levitated, a little pinhole light had formed.

“Oh,” Caroline said, swallowing thickly. “What is that?”

The light expanded into a vortex the size of a grapefruit. Inside of it was…nothing. No light, no sound, no stars. It was a void, and it filled Caroline with a sense of dread so profound, she wanted to run from it, screaming. But she wouldn’t leave Riley and Alice behind to deal with this.

Riley didn’t seem concerned so much as repulsed. Alice was staring into that nothingness with her head tilted to the side. “I think it’s a doorway. There’s something on the other side. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not…good. But it doesn’t have to be bad, I suppose?”

“I am getting a very different feeling,” Edison said.

Riley nodded. “It wants us in there. And I don’t like it.”

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