The Secret of the Sacred Four Read online

  Copyright © 2020 E.J. Elwin

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Paperback ISBN: 9798609507525

  Cover Design: Vanessa Maynard

  Interior Design: Creative Publishing Book Design

  Dedicated to all the children who ask why

  CONTENTS

  PART I. RESURRECTION

  1. Red and Blue

  2. The Spell

  3. Candle, Cauldron, and Crystal

  4. The Sheriff

  5. The Attack

  6. The Escape

  7. Party in Portland

  8. Fire Fight

  PART II. THE SACRED FOUR

  9. Ashes to Ashes

  10. Broken

  11. The Halfway Place

  12. The Purple Haze

  13. Huerta’s Restaurant

  14. The Unusual, Uncanny, and Unrivaled Utterances of Ursula Urry

  15. The Sacred Breakfast

  16. Roses, Caves, and Illusions

  17. Seaside Chats

  18. The Bonding Ceremony

  PART III. TRANSCENDENCE

  19. The Battle of Tillamook Head

  20. Harriet’s Heavenly Hanky-Panky

  21. The Traitor

  22. Eyes Without a Face

  23. Forever

  24. Through the Fire

  25. The Cemetery by the Sea

  26. Magick Malevolent

  27. Hope

  Dates

  About the Author

  PART I

  RESURRECTION

  CHAPTER 1

  Red and Blue

  All I could see was red and blue. Even at night when I lay in my bed in the darkness, I could still see the red and blue lights flashing. That was the last memory I had of him.

  I had opened my eyes and we were upside down. The car had flipped over and I couldn’t remember how it happened. I did remember that we had been on our way to Portland for a concert. We’d been secretly planning our weekend escape for weeks, had devised detailed cover stories for our parents, and had saved enough money to buy tickets and spend two nights in the city together. I had been deliriously excited because I had never been away with him before.

  It was all shattered when, as I later learned, an out-of-control semi truck plowed into us, sending us rolling across the highway at least three times. Neither of us had seen it coming, even though he’d been paying plenty of attention to the road. Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” had been playing on the radio when it happened, and I would come to remember it as the last song I heard before my world crumbled.

  I opened my eyes and was blinded by the flashing lights of the ambulances and police cars. Blood trickled from my cheek up into my right eye and then into my hair, and I wondered why the world had flipped upside down. I squinted against the lights and found him next to me. His face glowed red and blue, red and blue, and he seemed to be asleep.

  His name was the first word out of my mouth.

  “Connor,” I said groggily, as if I’d just woken up.

  Strangers tugged at me and dragged me out of the car onto the pavement. Then I rose up into the air and realized they were carrying me away.

  “Connor?” I murmured again.

  I looked around, trying to find him. The blood stung my eye but I saw the car, battered and broken, upside down in the middle of the highway in a pool of shattered glass. It looked like a child’s toy, a miniature car left discarded on the floor of a messy play room. A barrier of red and blue lights stood around it, keeping the white lights of the other cars away from it.

  “Connor!”

  “Take it easy, son,” said a man’s voice.

  I couldn’t tell if Connor was still in the car, and I started to panic. A fire sprung up on the car’s undercarriage, then the reality of the situation hit me all at once.

  “CONNOR!” My throat tightened up and I couldn’t breathe. I shivered violently, as if I were out in freezing cold weather without any clothes on. My heart hammered like it wanted to burst out of my chest. The world went blurry and then completely dark.

  When I next opened my eyes, it was to harsh fluorescent lights glaring down on me in a hospital bed. Aside from the cut on my cheek and some bumps and bruises, I escaped the crash without any major injuries and left the hospital that same night. The doctors recommended I stay overnight, but when I asked them if I could see Connor, and they told me I couldn’t because his father had forbidden them from letting me, I yelled at them for being so cruel and then stormed out of the hospital, flipping over a few chairs in a waiting room on my way out.

  Five days after the accident, his funeral was held back in Wineville, the small town a half-hour east of Portland where we lived. It was an ugly affair. His parents staged a full on shouting match in the cemetery, twenty feet away from his casket, because his dad didn’t want me there. His dad, like mine, had always been repulsed by the idea of us being together. It was only because of our moms that we were ever able to see each other outside of school at all without having to sneak around.

  In the end, I was grateful to Mrs. Ellis for standing up to her husband and allowing me to stay at the funeral. When I walked up to the sealed casket, their shouts faded away, and I was overwhelmed by the agony of losing the person I loved most in the world. The kindest, sweetest, funniest, most beautiful soul I had ever known. I broke down completely and remained broken. I just wanted to sleep. Being awake hurt too much. Everything hurt. There were stabbing pains in my chest that wouldn’t go away. It felt like someone was knifing me to death but I wouldn’t die.

  My mom let me stay home from school for a whole week after the accident. She told me that even though it felt terrible now, it would get better. Grief is universal, she said. People lose loved ones all the time. They grieve, they hurt, they cry and rage, and then they get better. They move on. They get out of bed in the morning, they go back to their jobs, they go to the grocery store. I couldn’t understand that. I was sure that I would never get better. I would never move on. The part of me that could smile and feel excited about things was dead. Just like he was. Cold and motionless in the ground forever.

  **

  Four days after the funeral, I lay in bed shutting out the blaring early morning sun. I’d duct taped the edges of my curtains to the wall to shut out the light completely. Even so, it creeped in around the edges, and I hid under the sheets. There was a knock at my bedroom door.

  “Arthur, honey,” came my mom’s voice, “come to church with us. It’ll do you good.”

  Bullshit. Sitting on a hard wooden bench listening to the ramblings of an old pervert would do me as much good as cancer.

  I was silent, pretending to be asleep as I had so often done the past week. I heard my mom sigh and then her footsteps as she walked away. I heard her go down the stairs and say something to my dad that I couldn’t quite make out. He snapped something back at her and then the two of them bickered until the front door slammed shut.

  I scowled under my sheets. I could picture them all at the church, dressed in their Sunday best, heads bowed and hands clenched, wearing artificial looks of piousness on their faces. After the service, they’d all head out to the park next to the church where the adults would gossip and talk about their new cars and home renovations, while the kids ran around looking for plastic eggs that had been hidden around the park, their understanding of this ritual limited only to the fact that they were getting candy. I could see Father Ga
briel playing the doting chaperone, a wide clownish smile on his face that couldn’t entirely hide the greed in his eyes as he watched the children run through the park with their baskets.

  Anger flared up inside me like a blowtorch. What justice was there in a world where a depraved child molester lived into old age while an innocent sixteen-year-old boy rotted in the ground? I wanted to yell at my parents and at all the other adults who were at that church. They were at that moment putting their sons and daughters under the eye of a pedophile so they could search for plastic egg shells in commemoration of a man rising from the grave.

  Resurrection, they called it.

  **

  My eyes shot open hours later. I didn’t remember falling asleep. Sunlight no longer creeped around the curtains. I blinked up into the darkness, at the ceiling I couldn’t yet see.

  I had been dreaming of cemeteries, unfamiliar ones that looked like they were in different towns. I walked through them under the light of a half moon, going seamlessly from one to the next as if they were all side by side. Finally, I arrived at the one I knew, the one in town where Connor was buried. I moved through the labyrinth of tombstones topped with crucifixes and statuettes, feeling the eyes of the stone angels on me, their chipped faces shrouded in darkness.

  I reached Connor’s grave and stared down at the freshly displaced earth, at the scattered bouquets of flowers that had been left behind, strewn carelessly across his grave like trash. I was angry as I knelt down and arranged the flowers more neatly. When I stood up, a flash of lightning illuminated the cemetery, casting everything into daytime for a fraction of a second, just long enough to reveal someone standing a short distance away beyond the grave.

  It was a woman, standing completely still amongst the tombstones. I moved toward her, unable to see her face, but certain that she was staring at me. I was only feet from her when a second flash of lightning allowed me to see her clearly. She looked to be in her sixties, with wild gray hair that looked like it had been electrified by the lightning. She looked me straight in the eyes and I had just enough time before waking up to register that she was smiling.

  It took a few seconds of lying there in the darkness for me to realize that I’d seen the woman before. When I was about eight years old, some of the neighborhood kids and I were told a story about a small crumbling old house across the street from the cemetery. This tall tale, passed down to us by mischievous older siblings, claimed that a witch lived there, an old woman with gray hair who had the power of magic. She could curse you if you made her angry, could change her appearance to look like another person, could summon and talk to the dead, could even raise the dead…

  Naturally, we thought it would be a fun game to challenge each other to get as close to the house as possible. The front lawn was overgrown with weeds that were as high as the windows and the place seemed to be abandoned. One boy, Nolan, managed to wade through the thick weeds and get as far as the front stoop before losing his nerve and darting back out to us.

  Determined to beat his record, I gathered my courage, stepped into the weeds, made it to the front stoop, and knocked on the door. There was no response. I turned to look boastingly back at the other kids who cheered in admiration, when suddenly there was the loud creaking of a door. I nearly soiled myself as I turned to look into the eyes of the woman with the gray hair. Her face was lined in anger, but before she could say anything, I bolted back through the weeds and out onto the road after the other kids who had scattered like frightened kittens, screaming for all they were worth.

  It felt like a million years ago that this happened, and I hadn’t thought about it much since, and yet there she had been in my dream, smiling. I wondered what it meant. She had nothing to do with Connor or his death. I hadn’t met him until high school.

  Of course, within a few years, we all grew past the age where we believed witches were real, but I started to wonder… Who was that woman anyway? In the years since that day at her door, when I passed by her house, I often saw some lights on inside but never, not once, did she emerge. Wineville was a pretty small town, with one major grocery store, and at some point, you would eventually run into everyone you knew while buying food or other things in the main part of town. I had never once seen the woman anywhere. How did she support herself? Did she have a family? How was it that no one in town seemed to know her or anything about her?

  I was now consumed with questions about the mysterious woman. A crazy thought then occurred to me. What if she sent that dream to me? What if it was a message? What if there was some truth to the stories about her? Maybe she could summon the dead? Maybe she could help me contact Connor? Or what if she could actually raise the dead—?

  I shook my head in the darkness. I wondered if the pain of losing Connor was threatening my sanity. Magic wasn’t real. The old woman was probably just sick and bedridden, and that’s why I never saw her around town. Maybe she’d even moved out of the house and I hadn’t noticed. I rolled over in my bed and wished for a better dream, one where Connor was alive.

  **

  I was a zombie the next day. I had absolutely no desire to go to school but both of my parents agreed that a week away was enough. I stumbled tiredly through the streets, not paying much attention to where I was going. If I’m killed by a car, so be it, I thought wearily.

  My first class was US History, a notoriously boring fifty-eight minutes on any other day, but now, nothing more than a blur of meaningless shapes and sounds. I stared blankly ahead at the wall, wondering if Connor still existed somewhere and wishing I was there with him, wherever it was. People stared at me as I walked through the halls, not bothering to keep their voices down as they talked about me and Connor.

  “His boyfriend died in that car accident…”

  “I heard they were sneaking away for the weekend…”

  “Did you hear Connor’s dad didn’t want him at the funeral?”

  I didn’t care. None of them mattered. Nothing they said would change the fact that Connor was gone. I spoke to no one and then had lunch alone behind the school.

  A few minutes into my final class of the day, Chemistry, I finally gave in to the tiredness and fell asleep on my desk. As soon as I closed my eyes, I was back in the dark cemetery, looking down at the flowers strewn over Connor’s grave. Again, I was angry, and again I knelt down and arranged them more neatly. When I stood up, there the old woman was beyond the grave. Again, the lightning flashed, and I saw that she was smiling just like before.

  “Arthur?”

  I jerked awake, my cheek pressed against the cold surface of my desk. I looked up and saw my teacher, a short elderly man with small silver spectacles, looking down at me with disapproval. The students around him watched me with expressions of eager anticipation, as if they were expecting me to break down in tears or lash out at the old man. I felt like a caged animal at a circus being ogled by compassionless spectators. Whatever. The feeling wasn’t new. I sighed as I sat up in my chair and looked at the clock. Fifty-four minutes to go.

  **

  I went straight back to bed as soon as I got home. I landed back in the loop of cemeteries, and this time I ran through them, jumping from one to the next, knowing I would end up right back in Wineville Cemetery in front of Connor’s grave.

  I looked up from the carelessly arranged flowers to see the old woman yet again, lit briefly by the flash of lightning. I walked quickly around Connor’s headstone, wanting to ask her what she was doing there. I opened my mouth to speak, and then a knock at my bedroom door startled me awake.

  It was my mom, bearing a tray of food. There was no light around the edges of my curtains and I realized it was after dinnertime. She had let me sleep through it. I knew it was her because my dad had made it clear over the past week how rude he thought I was for skipping mealtimes with the family.

  I pretended to be asleep, but somehow my mom knew that I was awake.

  “Arthur, I understand if you want to be alone,” she said. “But could yo
u please eat?”

  I owed her for keeping my dad at bay. I opened my eyes and sat up.

  “Thank you,” she said, placing the tray across my lap.

  I had no energy to talk, so I ate the vegetables and grilled chicken in silence, but it seemed to be enough for her. When I was done, she gathered up the tray.

  “It’ll get better, honey,” she said. “It will.” I didn’t say anything, and she left, closing the door softly behind her. I turned over and immediately fell back to sleep.

  Once again, I was in front of Connor’s grave. I quickly arranged the flowers, then dashed around the headstone to where the woman was. The lightning flashed and I saw her smile.

  “Why are you here?” I asked.

  She only smiled and then glanced at Connor’s headstone behind me.

  “I want him back,” I said.

  She smiled wider and then looked up at the pale half moon and spread her arms wide. Another flash of lightning lit up the cemetery, followed by an explosion of thunder which vibrated through my very bones and shocked me back into consciousness.

  I lay there in the dark, wondering why, after eight years, the woman from the crumbling house had suddenly invaded my dreams. The crazy idea crept back into my head. Was it possible? Was it so difficult to fathom that magic was real? Why not? The more I thought about it, the less my chest hurt. The idea that the woman might actually be a witch, that she might actually have sent that dream to me, filled me with a warm feeling that I recognized— hope.

  I realized then that I didn’t care if I went insane. So what if I lost my mind? I’d already lost Connor, and with him, the faith he’d awakened in me that the world was a good place. I could no longer handle the pain. I wanted it to be over.

  I sat up, wide awake, my eyes now adjusted to the darkness. I would go to that old house again. I would knock on the door and this time, I wouldn’t run away. I would meet the witch.

  **

  It was nearly midnight, according to the digital clock on the kitchen stove. My parents had gone to bed early. Not even the muffled sounds of late-night television could be heard coming from their bedroom. Guess the egg hunt really wiped them out, I thought disdainfully.