As the man sputtered out apologies, and nervously danced in place, I was connecting spells in my mind, linking them together with black smoke. The words appeared in ashy letters as I spoke the spell aloud, sizzling in the air between the man and me.
“Christ almighty,” I heard the man whisper as the letters floated up and disappeared above his head.
“Try to run,” I rasped out.
The man’s pupils expanded as he jerked his legs and twitched in place. With no amount of effort could he lift his feet off the floor.
“I-I can’t,’ he sobbed. Spittle gathered at the corners of his mouth.
“No, of course you can’t,” I replied, laughing.
I made a dipping gesture with my hand and the man sank to his knees upon the floor. He cried out in surprise as his bones made contact with the wood.
“In fact, you aren’t going to go anywhere ever again,” I told him.
I rolled my hands over and over each other until black smoke appeared between them. Sending my strength into the smoke, I walked in a circle around the man, enclosing him within the mist.
The man started at the smoke, looking horrorstruck. Tears leaked onto his ruddy colored cheeks. His lips moved silently in prayer.
I continued to walk around him, adding layers of spells and dark energy into the circle. I made a series of gestures, feeling the spells connect and intertwine into a metaphorical fabric, ballooning around the sobbing man.
Even so, the spell cast would not kill him. I wanted to do that the hard way.
Bit by bit, she watched the man grow weary, slumping forward within the circle. His heart felt weak, and his forehead broke out into a sudden sweat. With every passing minute, his body gave into fifty-four years worth of service, pumping and pulsating and expanding to keep him alive. But no more.
The blood smoke permeated into his skin, coaxing his overworked heart into spasms and arrhythmias. Inch by inch his body betrayed him into noncompliance. Hours later, when the police would find him, he would be nothing more than a pile of most peculiar dust.
The man looked to Constance once more, watching her dance around the layers of smoke that continued to swirl around them. He had a sudden vision of her back in the familiar backdrop of a cemetery—only he imagined her dancing and offering herself up to the night on the sacred ground where his body would lie.
“Please,” he whispered. “Spare me.”
With a soft scraping sound, Constance dug into the waistband of her dress and pulled out a dagger, made of a light blue glass. She brought the tip of the dagger to her mouth, and dug the point into the swollen gums that surrounded her pointed, yellowing teeth.
“Evil spares no body,” Constance said matter of fact, and licked the blood that ebbed onto her teeth. “You sir, you have crossed a very delicate line, I’m afraid,” she sneered. “And it is just not in my nature to be sparing.”
She turned so she faced the man, his bent head was level with her waist as she hovered on the perimeter of the circle. She brought the glass blade from her mouth and ran its jagged point against the pad of her thumb. Her eyes dazzled as she watched him cower.
“You walked into the graveyard this evening with temptation and lust in your heart, in your loins,” Constance whispered, staring down at him.
“You dug into my trenches, pried my tomb in two. As your body grew alive inside of me, your excitement lulled you into stupidity. You did not feel my body twitch to life beneath you. You did not feel my body whisper warnings to you as you spent your seed inside of me. You came to the graveyard with desire, and you left with a death wish,” she sneered.
In flash of movement, Constance lifted her left hand and waved once. The smoke that swirled between the witch and the man parted, suspended by her sheer will.
She stepped into the circle, letting her body brush against her spell casting as if it had been a spider web. Spells crawled over the curves of her body, sinking into her purple-toned skin.
The man cried louder as the blood witch stood over him, and considered the knife she tossed from one hand to the other. This moment was nothing short of a cat playing with its meal.
“Lord, forgive me,” the man whispered. With one last grunt of effort, he tilted his head up toward the ceiling. He knew he wanted the last thing he saw before he died to be the giant fresco. He wanted to look upon the smiling faces of the dancing couples.
“By dagger’s edge, you will die slow, Until your brains rot in the ground below,” Constance said.
And she plunged the glass dagger into the man’s heart. His ventricles severed, as the blade slashed through him and once more as the witch withdrew the blade. Blood raced through his wound and out onto the floor, as if it had been a river following the trail downstream.
Constance watched as the man swallowed, blinking up at the painted ceiling. Every moment he grew weak, she felt the blood in her veins cry out in delight, in her reunion with the magic of the world.
The pain of my body felt distant and foreign as I died in the ballroom. The potent teals and golds of the fresco grew dull and hazy in my eyes as everything around me grew black.
I breathed in the cold, clean air of nothing, in search of a light, an explanation that hovered in front of me in space.
Where was I?
My memory fractured and disappeared as if I had awoken from a dream. Time grew long and unmeasured.
And then I forgot my name.
THE CLARION CALL
I barely heard it at first. It seemed so far away, but then it got louder and louder and louder until whoever played that trumpet sounded like he was sitting on top of me. A sudden earthshattering blast from that horn made me bang my head against the steering wheel as my body jerked forward. I blindly punched away for the radio’s off button, but that was futile. My car radio stopped working months ago. I meant to take it in… just never got to it.
I could still faintly hear trumpet music.
My car was still idling, too. It must have been doing that for hours because it was dark when I first parked here. I turned the ignition key and shut the engine off, yet I still had this sensation of the car moving.
Groaning, I gritted my teeth and hugged the steering wheel as if it was a pillow until everything stopped moving; except I couldn’t do anything about my stomach. I swallowed hard, but that didn’t prevent the nausea from creeping towards the surface along with that bitter salty taste clogging my throat. I angled the rearview mirror towards me and what I saw was a bleary-eyed black man with a steering wheel imprint embossed on his forehead. I rubbed the area until it finally faded.
The horn music didn’t, but now I was kinda digging it. It had a nice mellow groove to it… the kind that made me want to kickback in my Lexus and let it serenade me back to sleep. Except all those martinis I drank at Harry’s Bar had a few words to say about that — get the hell out of this car before you throw up.
Disoriented, I wrestled with the door handle as my forehead heated up and the world spun violently around me. My head felt like it was about to implode when I heard the latch click and I laid my shoulder into the door like a fullback in football. The car door flew open and I tumbled onto the grass. I didn’t care who walked by on the sidewalk as I unashamedly flopped down on my hands and knees to regurgitate my guts and treat the flies to a “Happy Meal” special. But I guess the chilly morning air did me some good because the best I could do was muster up a lot of dry heaves.