He stooped down and shook a thick line of salt across the path of the door.
“Purifying salt,” he said in a loud, booming voice that seemed to echo off the ceiling and wal s, “al ow positive energy in and negative energy out. Al ow al unwanted energy and entities to leave this house, never to return.”
Part of me wanted to laugh because what he was saying was just so Harry Potter/hocus pocus that it sounded ridiculous. The other part of me felt a tug of trepidation, like there was actual power in the words.
Ada moved an inch closer to me. Evidently, she felt it too.
He got up and smiled faintly at us. “Now we go around the house, clockwise, and do the same at every door that leads outside.”
Ada and I exchanged looks but we walked down the hal to the French doors at the back patio. When we finished with that door, we went to the one at the garage and Maximus repeated himself.
“I’m glad you didn’t use our salt,” I whispered, feeling like my voice should be kept to a minimum. “My mother would have wondered what I was cooking.”
“She’d probably think you accidently used salt for sugar, like that pie you made,” Ada snickered and I joined in, embarrassed at one of my first attempts at baking.
“Ladies,” Maximus said sharply. We looked at him in surprise. I’d never heard him take that tone before and it shut both of us up. “My apologies, but you’re going to have to start taking this seriously. Perry? This means you. This is your ghost. If you aren’t one hundred percent committed and believing in this, then we’re just wasting our time. Or worse.”
I looked helplessly at Ada, then at the floor, chagrined.
“I’m sorry,” I mumbled.
He placed his hand on my shoulder and gave it a squeeze. His face was stil stern, his mouth set in a hard line, but he nodded. “It’s al right. But I mean it. Now, time for the holy water.”
Back at the kitchen, with me feeling like I had my tail between my legs, he picked up a vial of the holy water and in a clockwise direction again, we went to every single window in the house.
He flicked the water on them, the drops sticking and glimmering in the lights of the room, and asked Ada and me to imagine ourselves forcing negative air and energy out of the house, the salt and water combining to form an invisible shield.
We returned to the kitchen and Maximus loudly proclaimed, “I come this night to cleanse this home. This home belongs to the Palominos and negative energy and entities are unwelcome here. They want you to leave. You shall leave!”
The house was silent. Deathly, sickly silent. I was holding my breath and it looked like Ada was too from the way her face was losing color. We were too afraid to move.
Maximus was also stil , his eyes searching the air around us.
Final y, I had to whisper, “Was that it?”
“No,” he said with a shake of his head. “I just thought something would have happened. We now have to go around again and sprinkle the water in every single corner of the house.”
Ada let out the breath she was holding and whined, “Again? I’m getting tired.”
I elbowed her. “Suck it up.”
I don’t know if you’ve ever examined every corner of your place, but there are a lot more corners than you’d think. And we had to go everywhere, even the bathrooms and the icky, spider-webbed crawlspace under the stairs. Together we chanted, “As we cleanse this space, negativity leave this place.” It slowly went from feeling like a childish rhyme to something much more powerful. I could actual y feel it. This push and pul in the air around me, like good and evil were having a tug-of-war and I was their prize.
When it was al over we were back in the kitchen and Maximus was raising the Witch Bottle high in the air. With the overhead light fixture il uminating his flaming hair and submissive posturing, it looked like he was offering the bottle to the gods. In a way, he was.
He declared al negative entities to be drawn to the bottle, where they would remain forever trapped, unable to do any harm.
Once finished, and having ended his speech with “As I wil , so mote it be!” it was my turn. I picked up the bel and began to ring it from my fingertips. It was a light, pleasing noise, not at al like the malevolent clanging I had heard in my dream the other night.
I kept it ringing continuously as we went through the house yet again and through ragged, tired breath, I kept repeating, “As the sound of this bel rings through the house, let it be fil ed with light. Evil and darkness be banished, may goodness and light return,” as we went into every single room once more. It sounds sil y and unbelievable but each room did grow a bit lighter, like the bulbs were suddenly swiped clean of al obstructing grime and dust.
After every room was cleared, we came back to the kitchen, where Maximus said his final words.
He looked at us in the eyes, then around him at the wal s, his steady expression of determination never changing.
“This house has been cleansed and purified. Negativity is banished. Light and goodness fil this place. This house is now a home.”
Then we walked out of the house through the back door, careful not to disturb the trail of salt across the threshold, and went into the darkness of the back yard to bury the Witch Bottle. I knelt on the cold grass before the smal hole I had dug earlier with a spoon, which stil lay beside it. I picked this spot, near the back of the yard, because it wasn’t as attended by my mother’s black thumb or my father’s lawnmower on the weekends. It was rocky and patchy and no one would ever suspect that something was buried beneath it. Not something that supposedly contained al the negative energy the house had ever seen. With me growing up there, I could tel you that was a lot.
“Maybe I should have dug a deeper hole,” I said, worried now that it wouldn’t be enough.
Maximus handed me the bottle, which was cool and throbbing strangely in my hands. “It wil do.”
“I hope so.” I careful y placed the bottle in its shal ow grave and looked up at Maximus and Ada for approval. The motion sensor light from the house was il uminating their backs and they towered over me like faceless beings. A frigid breeze mussed up their hair, causing the strands to float delicately around their heads like glowing silk threads.
With my hands I piled the frosty dirt and grass and rocks on top until it was fil ed and level and patted it down with my hands, pressing harder and harder, like the force of my hands would keep it buried for eternity.
“Careful, don’t break it,” Maximus warned.
I looked up to give him an agreeable smile when a movement at the French doors behind him made me pause.
I could barely see what it was because the harsh glare of the patio lights created a reflective quality to the glass. But against the light from the inner hal way, I saw a very large, wide silhouette, just standing there. It was at least eight feet tal and built larger than Maximus.
There was no detail to the black mass except for a pair of burning red eyes near the top. They flickered like the ruby-orange embers in a furnace of coal. And they were watching us.
I wanted to scream, yel , do something other than gape back but I was frozen in absolute terror that sucked away my breath and leached onto my bones, holding me immobile.
Maximus and Ada noted the look on my face. They turned their heads to look.
And they saw too.
“What the fuck is that?!”
“Oh shit.” Maximus reached out for Ada’s arm and grabbed it, then blindly groped for mine.
We watched in horror as the creature at the doors slowly grew smal er, as if it was walking backward into the hal .
And then the eyes blinked black and we could see it no more.
I swal owed hard. I didn’t want to get up. I wanted to stay crouched in the yard, low to ground. And then I wanted to run very, very far away.
“You..we…we did al that,” Ada said in a tiny, shaking voice. “Maximus, you said…you said we should be safe in there. Oh God, Perry what was that?”
I found the strength to move my tongue but could only say, “I don’t know.”
Maximus’s strong hands came underneath my arms and he effortlessly lifted me to my feet. He didn’t look as scared as I would have thought. Ada was shivering and white.
“It’s al right,” he said.
“Al right?” I squeaked. I was speechless, my mouth flapping open to latch onto some sort of word or sentence but that’s al I could say.
“Yes,” he said in his sharp tone again. He grabbed Ada and steered her beside me and with one hand on each of our outer shoulders he leaned in. “That was only the first step that we did. We’ve got the powders, the dragon’s blood. We have another cleanse to do. This one is the banishment. He was only showing us his strength. He’s teasing us.”
“He?” Ada asked. “I thought it was that Abby girl?”
“Ladies, sometimes things aren’t so simple.”
No shit, I thought wildly. In my dream Abby had insinuated she wasn’t alone. That there was a he, or an it. I stil didn’t know if my dream was just that, or some prophetic message from beyond the grave, but I couldn’t dismiss it. Whatever we saw inside the house wasn’t Abby.
Though, perhaps it had never been Abby. And then I understood what Maximus meant. It could have been anyone but it was dead and we needed to keep going to get rid of it. Even if it meant doing another ritual, even if it meant stepping back in the house knowing that thing was in there.
“OK,” I managed to say. “I’m ready. Let’s do this.”
I pul ed strength from pockets I didn’t even know I had.
Maximus smiled at me with fierce admiration. I took hold of Ada’s hand and squeezed it tightly.
“We’re going to get rid of it,” I told her. “Now.”
With Maximus leading the way, Ada and I linked arms as we left the witch bottle buried behind us and entered the house.