Page 6 of Shadowed Summer Sun

The jagged edge of my obsidian dug into my palm as I squeezed it unknowingly.He doesn’t own me. No one does.

I shook my head, stamping my foot lightly against the mossy Earth as I continued to carefully tread the Shadowed forest. But a pinch in my throat and trembling in my fingers haunted me.

Taking in my surroundings, I realized the wood had led me to The Crying House.

The dilapidated structure was almost entirely grown over. Vines and bushes crawled up the remaining two walls and door frame, slowly eating it up. The back half of the house had fallen into the ground and was smothered in weeds and fallen leaves. The roof sat like a sloppily draped blanket across the standing walls and the earth, busted and broken ages ago.

A stone chimney was the only piece of the house that remained in decent condition, albeit covered in ivy and bird shit. If you blinked at the right time while looking at it, you could see the black smoke curl out of the top.

Wind rustled back behind me, and on it, I heard the wailing.

I could smell the smoke and char and sizzling “meat.” Blacked bricks and soot stains were all that remained of the enormous fire that had claimed the house. The two walls on either side of the door shouldn’t have survived, but word had it that the entry had stayed locked and barricaded right up until the men came to gather up the body.

The broken plank of wood that had been kicked in still hung from the door jam, and I noticed the door itself lay on the ground, covered in muddy bootprints. We got plenty of rain here, and they should have washed away.

But she didn’t want them gone. She wanted everyone to remember what was done.

The Crying House had bothered me for quite some time, the hurt and terror it projected echoing through the surrounding trees. I approached the house, stepping carefully past the door jam and around to the open back of the structure.

For some years following the burning, people tried to repair the place. Pull up the door, set it back on its hinges, and close it. It would never stay closed. Deadbolted, barred, chained, and nailed, the door would always be found open come morning.

They’d trapped her inside, burned her alive for practicing witchcraft, and she would no longer have the door hold her spirit in.

The cries got louder as I stepped past the once-visible back wall and into what I assumed was a kitchen of sorts. A pot-bellied wood stove, blackened and cracked with age, sat in the corner, and dead vines and branches zigzagged across the floor.

Heat began to bellow up from the ground beneath the wooden boards. They didn’t seem to notice the rising temperature, just me. Badb took off from my shoulder and landed on the chimney. Smoke danced behind her as she cawed loudly.

“Yes, I know.”

I closed my eyes and reached into my bag. Feeling for the right thing, the pyrite stone landed in my palm. Pulling it out, I called for her.

“Sarah! Sarah!”

The heat escalated, and Badb’s panicked caws echoed through the trees. All other birds and beasts steered clear of the plagued structure as the Pit worked to pull the house into its domain and create a doorway into the Mortal Realm.

Screams sounded around me, her screams, and they cut a wound so deep in my heart that I began sobbing for her ache. Her bloodshot eyes appeared before my own, rage and sadness swirling within their deep green depths. Tears flowed all the harder as Sarah’s form reached for me, grasping my shoulders with hands as hot as flame.

And I saw it all.

She’d been a healer, a woman’s aide. She mended flesh and controlled pregnancies. She eased someone’s passage into the Hereafter and held a place for the Old Ones. A witch, a good one at that, and a beautiful woman of empathy and compassion. She was different, an oddity in her local village, and the townsfolk hated her.

In the dead of night, her lover, turned sour by the people’s fear and jealousy, helped to set fire to her home, barricaded the door, and did not return with the men to bury her. She’d died alone, carrying his child and slamming her fists into the wooden door that sealed her in.

Overhead, a cloud hid the Sun, and a great shadow melted across me. His talons were back in my hair, and smoke choked my lungs. The taste of ash and iron filled my mouth as the stench of burning flesh twisted my stomach into knots.

“Sarah! Do not stay here,” the words were like sandpaper in my raw throat, “The door is open. Go through.”

“He did this,”Sarah’s voice traveled through the wind,“His line goes on. Just as bad and worse.”

Sarah shook me, ghostly talons scoring the skin of my shoulders. I saw Ammiras Paine morph into his descendant, Zachariah, the parish priest two towns over. The family was a staple, going back generations to the settlers that murdered Sarah.

She showed me Father Paine’s pastimes and indiscretions with his young followers. Innumerable children passed under his tutelage and torture. A comfortable life of family and fortune blessed his time outside the church as he performed his own rituals beneath the chapel at night.

Glee, an ecstatic giddiness at the arrival of each new parishioner of a certain age, choked me as Sarah’s vision bored into my mind. And none looked on with knowledge or retribution, his sins locked away tightly behind his vestments.

“It will end. I will end it.” Fire clawed its way through my lungs and skin, the smell of burnt skin thickening.

“Speak truth,”she howled.

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