Prophesy: The Immortal Witch (30)

Part 29 at: https://www.abctales.com/story/marandina/prophesy-immortal-witch-29

A front door stands slightly ajar, an arcane terraced house seemingly beckoning its visitor to go inside. Standing there, staring, apprehensive, wondering what awaits beyond the pale. The moment is liminal and deceptively unnerving.

After so much anguish, there is a sense that pieces are being reattached, a whole forming from a tortured splintered soul.

It came to her one night, the memory of a journey long lost. A girl on the backseat (Danielle), disembodied eyes in the rear view mirror, a voice in her head. Guiding. Controlling.

She remembers now, a clarity sought on numerous occasions but denied to her. The guilt of handing over the youngster, the inner conflict, the struggle to overcome the power manipulating a misdirected innocent.

Once it would have been possible to call upon The Faith for absolution but those days are gone. All that is left, a slow descent into madness. A consequential departure from the Church. Anxiety and depression have been constant companions for so very long.

Tense conversations in dusty wood-panelled rooms, the soul-searching and recriminations, the theological interrogations and sense checking. Ultimately resignation, to be de-frocked. The shame of it.

She cautiously crosses the threshold, a path chosen at the Crossroads of Life. There is no going back now. The hallway is the same as before. Paintings on walls, plants on surfaces. The entrance clicks shut behind. An eyelid bats.

The atmosphere is strange, shadows alive, crouching in corners and prowling empty floors. Despite the warmth outside, it’s freezing inside this desolate shell. Gleeson shivers, hands rubbing arms to generate heat. There are ghost and phantoms here.

Slowly shuffling, she makes her way to the living room, passing a crucifix hanging from a nail. It swings from side to side, pendulous, like it has just been brushed by forces unseen. It is upside down, momentarily bringing shock. This is an unholy fixture, the mark of Satan. Reaching out to right it, there’s a buzzing noise in her ear. Instinctively, swatting at whatever it is. A large fly circles, one of several hovering close by. The place smells of dust and decay. Like rotting meat left out in the sun.

Inside, a cabinet full of curiosities. She approaches to look closer but a creaking sound stops any progress. Maybe there is someone here after all. Quietly, spinning around to see that a door has opened in the corridor. Part of her does not want to move towards it. There is only darkness there, nothing good. Something inside compels her onwards.

Each steps takes her closer, the gloom oppressive. None of the light switches work. There are stone steps that lead down into a basement. They seem to trail away into murk, consumed by inky blackness, impenetrable towards the bottom of the stairway.

Something moves in her peripheral vision. Is that a chair situated in the bowels of the dwelling? There is something chalked on the ground. A configuration of some kind.

A scurrying sound resonates scratchily from the inky blackness. Rodents occupy the cellar. Rats and mice. The reluctant interloper moves one foot in front of the other, eyes fixed on each step. Her pulse is racing, a heart beating rapidly, breath quickening.

The atmosphere is taut, full of devilment.

There has been misery in this chamber. Unimaginable pain. Suffering stains the carcass of concrete and breeze block. Blood spots flecked on the floor. Fanned. Sprayed wide as testimony to past torments.

Gleeson reflects on her life, her devotions, her flaws, her mistakes and misgivings. She doesn’t know why she is here. And yet….there’s a sense of a perfectly sane reason. What it is avoids being revealed. But not for much longer.

Her sight pierces the gloom. There is the outline of someone in a black cloak. The image flickers, glitches. Saccades. As though time itself is out of sync. As though it’s not real.

It’s an over active imagination. Isn’t it?

Fire, a candle alit ahead. Candles.

The basement doorway slams shut making her jump.

Trapped before. In this instance she has come willingly. 

An altar ahead. Gliding towards it. Floating. Unthinking.

Words uttered break the silence. Looking up, whispers of smoke from burning tallow.

She is the one wearing the cowl; she is the one reading from the grimoire.

The circle is complete once more.

Afterword

So that is that, the end of a journey. I started this in April 2024 and finished it in July 2026. At just under 43,000 words this is my first draft novel and it’s been a lifetime in the making. For anyone that has read and/or commented on it, my grateful thanks.

Anything written in the fantasy/horror space is subject to derivation. I have tried to sidestep the extensive minefield of tropes that comes with trying to pen something original. Notwithstanding, there are pieces that I should acknowledge as influential in both conception and execution.

Mike Flanagan’s screenplay for Midnight Mass (2021) is probably where the original idea was conceived for Prophesy. Carefully paced, it takes the viewer through an exploration of grief, faith, religious fanaticism as well as depicting vampirical creatures traversing soulless desert locations in search of feeding grounds. The isolated island community neatly amplifies the tension resulting from outside influences, exposing relationships and their vulnerability to miraculous events and untethered belief. 

I wanted to tap into that well of ambiguity, the exploration of the ultimate reason why we are here at all as well as the unimaginable thoughts and shortcomings of the notion of eternal life. I suppose there’s an aspect of be careful what you wish for even if, deep down, most of us would take the chance to beat death without thinking too much about the consequences of side-stepping the Grim Reaper. After all, who wants to end up in a casket when the alternative is to keep breathing indefinitely?  

In turn, any literary work associated with blood sucking creatures of the night will be drawn from something earlier. In this case, Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot (1975) is a seminal entry in the genre featuring ageless monsters terrorising a New England location. I discovered SK’s writing way back when and maintain that the height of his powers lies with those first, ground-breaking sorties into the world of fantasy/horror.

Going further back in time, the year 1897 is a watershed through the publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Gothic horror at its most controversial in its day, it is considered now to be a central pillar of vampire fiction. The language used may be staid and stuffy now but the narrative is still exemplary and brilliantly done.

The unnamed demons of the desert in this sprawling tale may have a distant connection to Pazuzu from William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971). It was only recently that I read the 25^th Anniversary edition with revised text and additions. It’s a pioneering work that made its way into infamy through the initially banned movie version in 1973.

Central to this tale is the presence of corvids, crows in particular. In Celtic lore, the warrior Goddess Morrighan could turn herself into a crow. These birds carry significant symbolism, being associated with death, prophesy, wisdom and trickery. They are represented across numerous cultures including Norse, Greek, Native American and Eastern.

It was crows that provided the inspiration for the finale in Stephen King’s The Dark Half (1989). It was also crows that provided the premise for James O’Barr’s graphic novels/comic book series The Crow (1989) that spawned the movie of the same name in 1994. Here again, crows are seen as a conduit to another plane, transporters of souls to the afterlife. 

And finally, an intermittent theme in my ventures into fantasy/horror is the earliest exposure I had to this literary classification i.e. The Devil Rides Out (1934) by Dennis Wheatley. As a kid I was completely beguiled by his work. I remember buying/collating a collection of leather bound editions of Wheatley’s books, excursions into the dark realm of occultism only magnified by Hammer studio movie adaptations that had me mesmerised.  

Most writers talk about converting their debut piece into a trilogy. There’s no plans to do that here albeit by the time the saga ended, it was difficult not to be attached to the characters created. There is scope to document a rites of passage subplot within the overall story arc in tracking Billy and Danielle’s transition through their teenage years with all that entails. Adolescence couched in conjurations.

There’s a certain symmetry in that both come from broken families and both have a down to earth approach to life even if that’s going to be challenged by the trials and tribulations of modern life complicated further by Billy’s erratic forays into the world of the supernatural. The temptation to further develop the profile of the main protagonists and their familial entourage is tempting.

We’ll see.