Night of the Witch-Hunter, page 9
Until, a chance encounter while ducking out for the donuts and coffee needed to fuel a flash of inspiration for a mural he wanted to paint on one side of his family home, caused great change in thirty-something Mundy’s life. The school district’s superintendent spotted the artist in line for coffee, homing in on him like a heat-seeking missile.
“Ever thought about teaching?” the man asked, smiling too wide, breathing too heavily.
Of course, Mundy hadn’t thought of it. He hadn’t been much in the way of long-term planning for a decade or more, seemingly resigned to his fate. But he also hadn’t not thought of it. So he’d taken down some information from the school official, run through some more community college classes, and applied for the job of art teacher at Fallen Church High.
Returned to his old battlegrounds, back where he’d endured so much torment and torture but also experienced his greatest triumphs, Mundy found things somewhat different this time around.
For one, he’d soon realize that he was no longer alone, no longer the solitary outlier in a town of conformed masses. There were others. Kids—he realized he’d been just as much of a kid back in his would-be glory days—who all wanted a chance to express themselves or to show the world what they’d seen reflected back and back and back. With this new understanding came a new life’s purpose. Mundy realized that even if he couldn’t find a way out for himself, even if his destiny and that of his hometown were forever linked, then he could still strive to help others find their escape routes.
So each year, Mundy strove to find the outcasts, the outsiders, and those who thought beyond the limitations of the proverbial box. Through these new connections, he found friendship, mutual respect, and shared in dreams of building something that actually mattered. Some years, there was no one. More of the same from Fallen Church.
But other years? In other years, he’d find creative sparks lighting up the darkness, causing him to remember the twin joys of teaching and making art, as easy as spotting lightning bugs in the summer months.
The two girls in black and dark purples, the pair of them in leather and lace, with collared rings around their necks and so many piercings, their pen and ink sketches of future tattoos rendered with meticulous care on their hands and up their arms, they were the two latest lights that art teacher Mundy had picked out from the darkness. Josey and Nikki—their gothic clothing and put-upon morbid attitudes were not too far removed from Mundy’s hippie past, his forced ideals of “sticking it to the Man”—were the end of the millennium’s version of what he’d seen and been all those years before. Another decade, another cultural disguise. Naturally, he’d done what he could to encourage the both of them, displaying their work in class, getting special dispensation from the principal to show pieces in the front of the school, and even sliding art school brochures into Josey’s locker. Both of them had promise, of course. But Josey? She was the one who seemed to have the spark—that magical something. Mundy was certain she’d change the world. Or at least be someone who got the hell out of Fallen Church.
Perhaps what he appreciated most about both girls was the way they’d lifted him up in response. Despite her protests to the contrary, Josey especially seemed fascinated by the history of Fallen Church, willing to learn more about where they’d come from and how they’d gotten to where they were. She was the one who found out about Mundy’s past artistic triumphs. “I didn’t know you were an artist-artist, Mr. Mundy. That’s sooooo cool.” No amount of practiced cynicism could mask the genuineness of the young woman’s enthusiasm.
It made his heart beat half a beat faster. Eventually, he’d worked up the courage to share more of his past with the girls, giving them a look at his abandoned works, and talking to them about the things he’d planned to do before Fallen Church dug its claws into him.
“So why not do them now? Why not show the world what you can create?” Their questions made it all sound so simple.
And, in truth, he’d had no rebuttal, at least none that seemed capable of withstanding their withering, no-bullshit teenage appraisal. In addition, he’d quickly realized that continuing to abandon his dreams meant he’d give them an out, an excuse, a reason to give up their plans for their futures.
So that was how Mr. Mundy began work on a gallery showing of his art, a showcase to be presented in the town of Fallen Church. He’d converted part of his classroom into studio space reserved for him and his work alone.
And, of course, Josey and Nikki, his students, muses, and friends (though he’d hardly admit that aloud for professional reasons) ended up coming through for him one more time, bringing him the final piece of the puzzle earlier that Friday, arriving late for class and smelling of cigarettes and garbage.
“Here ya go, Mundy,” Josey had said, shoving a handful of black-and-gray, shimmering VHS tape unwound from its casing into his hands. “Maybe you can use this for your show.”
Before he could ask his follow-ups, the duo was off in a corner of the art room, sketching symbols that wouldn’t look out of place on the sleeve of a heavy metal album or glimpsed by someone flipping through ancient library books dipped in dust and cobwebs. He’d left the girls to whatever they were planning, knowing that whatever it was, it would at least be interesting.
Besides, he liked the idea of a mystery. That’s how he’d ended up “borrowing” equipment from Mr. White in the AV department and slipping Hoskins the janitor a couple of twenties to keep the side door unlocked on Friday evening so he could sneak back in and work on his exhibit and this new element—the element that would prove to be the centerpiece of the whole damned thing.
White and his AV club had recently purchased a machine that could convert VHS content to “digital.” It was all White could talk about in the teacher’s lounge, though Mundy wondered how the digitized content and machinery might fare once that Y2K bug hit on January first and how it was that the school budget allowed for tech gadgets, but there was no money for extra colored pencils for his art students. Mundy kept both thoughts to himself, having learned long ago not to rock the boat when it came to how things were done in Fallen Church.
Whatever, he’d thought, I’ll get my money’s worth at least.
So it was that after hours of meticulously winding the tape back into the casing, inserting it into the marked slot and carefully following the instructions (with “Property of the AV Club Do Not Remove” stamped on the top) line by line that Mundy captured images from Josey’s tape and made them a part of his own creation.
After spending more time running back and forth between his office and the deluxe printer in the teacher’s lounge, he’d sat back and admired the posterized, printed-out images of oversized figures with slight VHS grain across their visages from the tape transfer. With that last-minute addition, Mundy was certain that next week would be the perfect time to finally share his exhibit and remind the people of Fallen Church that he was much more than some quiet, nervous-looking art teacher.
Then came the shouts and screams from down the hallway, followed by the heavy-handed pounding on the door to the art room, with Josey, Nikki, and another young woman he recognized as Nikki’s older sister—the one who now worked at the gentlemen’s club on the outskirts of town, if what the football coaches said was true—all barging into the classroom, eyes darting this way and that, mouths curling into half-formed questions and renewed pleas for help.
All of it was overwhelming, incomprehensible. But everything slowed back down when Josey walked to the wall where an oversized blown-up image of a Barbie Doll dressed in crudely sewn black clothing and tied to a burning popsicle stake waited for her. She placed a hand on the image of fire.
She drew that hand back quickly as if she expected to be burned.
“Whaddaya know,” she said, seemingly talking to herself. “Maybe this is where they killed you.”
The two sisters also focused on the image of the burning witch doll. When Josey spoke again, two things became clear to Mundy. First: it wasn’t Josey herself speaking. Second: whoever was speaking, seemed to share a kinship with that still image of the molded plastic figure transformed into 2D art.
“Wonderful work,” she said. “It’s almost like you were there. . .”
“Can one of you get Mundy a glass of water?” Josey asked the Farr sisters. Her art teacher—the only teacher she liked in the whole school—looked as though he might fall over at any minute, and, based on the ritual that her ancestor had laid out for them, Josey figured their makeshift coven would need all the help they could get to finish the spell meant to banish Nathaniel Pryce the witch-hunter back into the past, back to the moment of Rebecca’s capture when he would become a part—a small part—of Fallen Church history before being forgotten forever.
Josey snapped her fingers in front of Mundy’s face, trying to keep him focused on the here and now. Snap. “Mundy.” Snap. “Hey, Mr. Mundy!” Snap. “Mundy! You with me?”
By the time she’d got his attention again, both sisters were approaching with glasses of water at the ready. Mundy shook his head at the glass offered by DiDi. “No, no,” he said. “That’s a cleaning jar.”
Instead, he took the clean water cup from Nikki and drank from it slowly. In that moment of calm, Josey watched her teacher’s Adam’s apple bob up and down with each swallow.
When he finished, Mundy wiped his forearm across his mouth. Then, he got down to business, clearly attempting to play the role of the adult in the room.
“Hold on, hold on, first, what’re you all even doing here? It’s a Friday night. Shouldn’t you be, I dunno, like out celebrating our win at the big game?” he asked, his tone half-jokey but also a little confused. “I mean, I assume we won.”
“Pull up a chair, Mundy,” Josey said. “We’ve got quite a story to tell.”
She quickly noticed how her art teacher did no such thing and how his eyes widened and his bottom lip trembled. Nikki nudged Josey, making a quick head tilt to the side. That’s when Josey looked down and found her hand curled, her fingers crooked and then straightened, undulating like waves. One of the wooden chairs scattered around the art room hovered above the floor, bobbing closer to them, like an unsteady-footed toddler.
“That’s part of the story,” Josey said with a shrug. The chair dropped, four legs clattering against the floor.
Moments later and after some panicked breathing as the seemingly impossible tale was absorbed and processed, Mundy painted symbols on the walls and windows of his classroom, re-creating figures from one of the “spell books” Josey and Nikki had hidden around the room, saving them to flip through whenever they got bored. Using the eyes of her descendant to review these New Age-y texts, Rebecca had vetted the symbols, pointing out which ones were valid and which ones were “codswoddle.”
Josey couldn’t help but wonder if it wasn’t the use of terms like “codswoddle” that’d convinced Mundy of the validity of his pupils’ story.
I’d say it was the magics you performed, her ancestor said, cutting right to the point from inside her head. Now, let’s review the ritual once again. I’m certain we don’t have much time and we can’t afford to get this wrong.
Josey couldn’t ignore the air of impatience heard behind Rebecca’s words. Seeing as she was the only one hearing the words, Josey felt her levels of agitation rising in equal measure to her ancestor’s. “I’m doing the goddamned best I can. . .”
“What’s that, Joe?”
Nikki’s question, the concerned look in her eyes, these were more than enough to break Josey’s heart for the thousandth, maybe the millionth time, that evening. After all, it was Josey and her ancestor who’d pushed Nikki and her sister from their home, forcing them to leave it and all their belongings to burn. Leaving their mother in the clutches of the witch-hunter and his brainwashed army.
And still, there was Nikki. Asking Josey if she was all right, or if she was okay. It didn’t seem fair as far as Josey could tell. She wanted to say something to her friend, offer apologies, maybe some heartfelt reassurances of her own. But before she could, Nikki reached across and held her hand.
Josey was sure Nikki would squeeze it, the way she had earlier in the evening. A quick, tight squeeze to remind her of their bond of friendship.
So it surprised the hell out of Josey when Nikki took her hand and brought the knuckles up to her mouth. Lips parted slightly, the girl Josey spent almost all her time with, the girl who helped her forget the teasing and mockery and complete and utter dismissal of everything she was, everything she wanted to be, by their classmates and neighbors and even family members, kissed that hand she held. Soft, gentle pressure against the thin skin of Josey’s knuckles sent an electric shock sensation through her body.
Whatever Josey wanted to say in reply, it went right out the window. Instead, she brought her hand, the one freshly kissed by her best friend (and now possibly more), to her face. She laid that hand against her cheek like a lovelorn lady on the cover of one of the trashy romance novels her mom kept hidden around the house. Doing so, she smelled Nikki’s peppermint hand cream and wanted the taste of it on her tongue.
“That was nice,” she said.
“Yeah?” Nikki asked with a growing smile to match.
Josey could only nod. The other words she wanted to say just weren’t ready to be said yet.
“I’ve been going through the spell with DiDi,” Nikki said. “You’re sure this is Rebecca’s execution spot? Because if it’s not. . . if it’s actually where you went on your field trip. . .”
It wasn’t the first time that question had come up. Fleeing from their second burning home of the evening, Josey had thought she was taking her rag-tag group of witch-hunter resistance to the spot she’d visited on that infamous field trip in middle school. After all, that was the place they were told that Rebecca Wesley had been killed, where the veil separating past and present was first severed, and where Josey had glimpsed her ancestor’s grim fate.
They’d elected to travel by foot, after glimpsing the ransacking of Nikki’s car by riotous youths in front of her burning home. They’d kept to the shadows, following hidden pathways between houses in the connecting, overlapping neighborhoods of Fallen Church. Fleeing from the broken glass smashing against asphalt, and from the polluted fire stench of burning houses that seemed to chase them, the three young women and one young woman’s detached spirit unmoored from the past were like children engaging in a life-or-death game of freeze-tag or hide-and-seek.
But when Josey tried to move them in the direction of the reenactment site, her raised foot seemed to freeze mid-stride. A dull ache rose from her leg and up through her body to her head. That’s not where I’ll be killed, her ancestor said from inside Josey’s head.
Well, where then?
Do you trust me? Rebecca asked.
Josey was slower to answer. After all, she’d seen the violence that the witch-hunter was capable of. Two homes destroyed, each burned to the ground moments after Josey had occupied them. People injured, dead. Including, quite likely, a loved one of someone she cared very deeply for. But not once in all the chaos of the night had she sensed any sadness, any regret, anything coming close to sympathy or pity for those people and places upon which the witch-hunter had left his mark, coming from her ancestor. Worse still, she’d found herself hard-pressed to conjure those same emotions inside herself. The dark emotionless void inside went beyond feigned indifference and play-acted cynicism. It was a sub-zero temperature drop deep in the pit of her stomach.
Do you trust me? There was Rebecca again. Rebecca the Fallen Church Witch. Trained and instructed in the dark arts by Nathaniel Pryce and then betrayed by him. Of course, she’d want revenge. Of course, she’d want him stopped.
But instead of looking inward, instead of confronting her ancestor in the shared strange and nebulous dreamscape that’d become commonplace for her in almost no time at all, Josey returned her attention to her friend’s ethereally beautiful face. There, she found a look of trust, the other girl’s features hopeful—not for abstract ideas like the future, but for Josey herself.
Nikki believed in her and in seeing that Josey had felt the final decision being made for her. If Nikki could believe in her, then she would believe in herself. She’d open herself to trusting the voice within.
With conditions, of course.
I will, she said to the ghost in her head, but you have to promise me you’ll do whatever it takes to keep my friend safe.
Having secured that concession, Josey had allowed Rebecca to take over. Her body remote-controlled across time, she’d found herself moving faster and faster. The Farr sisters struggled to keep up. As she moved, Josey heard place names familiar and not-so-familiar buzzing around in her head spoken aloud in the Old World dialect of her ancestor. The path they blazed seemed somewhat familiar, but all she’d had time to do was let her body go with the flow. It wasn’t until she heard her ancestor whisper, Here. Here’s the spot of execution, that Josey recognized where she and the other two living young women had been led.
“The school?” Nikki asked, beating Josey to the punch.
Josey had shrugged. Then, she’d noticed the lights on in the art room and a plan leaped from her skull fully formed, just waiting to be put into action.
Soon, all that remained was the waiting. And luckily (or perhaps unluckily) enough, that period didn’t last long at all. The next stage of the now townwide conflict kicked off with the revving of engines, the howl of police and fire-truck sirens, cacophonous voices in mumbling prayer—spouting generic Bible verses, and all growing louder and louder in volume. DiDi parted the blinds, the plastic snapping under her fingers, and peered out to the front of the school. She turned away quickly.
“It’s not just your classmates anymore,” she said. “Looks like that bastard’s brought the whole damn town over to his side.”
