Nobody
could see him. Nobody could hear him. He was like a ghost, only he wasn’t. She
had done this to him. How many weeks had it been since he followed that group,
all dressed in dark robes and stepping down those stone steps into the darkened
cavern below? He kept his distance, saw what looked like a person tied to a
wooden table that they carried with them down the long hall lit with black
candles. They disappeared around the corner, and he heard a man screaming. The
chanting grew louder, stronger, more exhuberant. He felt an unearthly wind blow
past him. It knocked him over, and then she had appeared.
"You
aren't supposed to be here," she said, blood dripping down her arms and
splashing off the concrete floor.
"Don't
kill me," he pleaded.
"I
should," she said. "You've seen too much." The unearthly wind
blew all around, sounding like whispers. "A much better idea. Probably
worse than death. Nobody will ever see you again. You will be invisible to all,
like a ghost. No person can hear you or touch you. You can trespass all you
want now, and it won't matter — but never come back here. This place is sacred."
Using
an invisible force, the witch threw him backwards. He flew through the air and
crashed into the wall. When he stood to his feet, he realized he was no longer
in the chamber. He was on a street in the middle of town. People walked past
him, nearly bumping into him without noticing him. He looked down at his hands,
and saw nothing. A woman walked straight towards him, and rather than bumping into
him, she passed right through.
Days
turned into weeks, and life was torture. He had no human contact, and couldn't
touch anything, couldn't pick up anything, couldn't affect anything. He was a
ghost for the most part, except he wasn't dead. He still required food and
water for nourishment, but he couldn't touch the food he saw, couldn't lift it
to place it into his mouth. When he bent down to eat, his lips passed through
the sustenance.
Rain
poured down after a couple of days, and this somehow replenished all the water
he needed, giving him sustainment of life, but he still couldn't get food. He'd
jump into a lake to keep his body alive every couple of days, though the hunger
caused an aching and a pain that eventually would not go away. It stayed with him,
subsiding every now and then but never disappearing completely. Finally, he
knew he had to go back, to find that witch, and get her to undo her curse, to
fix him so he could finally have relief from this agony.
He
walked in the dark, empty chamber. Candles still lined the halls, but they were
cold and their wax had hardened into puddles around them. His steps were
soundless.
"Will
she even know I'm here?" he asked himself. He couldn't hear his own voice.
Everything about his existence was silence. In front of him, on the floor, sat
a pumpkin, or at least what was left of it. There was a circle on the floor
serving as a base, then some sort of rod embedded into this and pointing up
vertically. The cap to the jack-o'-lantern was pressed onto the top of this rod
just where the top of the pumpkin would have been. Thin wires, almost
invisible, protruded out from the rod, and on these were the carved out pieces
for the pumpkin's face — it's eyes, nose and mouth. It looked like a reverse
jack-o'-lantern, a pumpkin with an invisible shell. Beside the rod flickered
the flame of a small tealight candle.
"Of
course I know you're here," she said from behind him. He spun around and
found himself face to face with the beautiful face of evil. She smiled with a
hint of trickery hiding behind her eyes. With the flick of her wrist, he felt
himself thrown backwards. He was pressed with his back against a wall, several
feet above the ground. "I warned you never to come back here."
"Please,"
he pleaded. "Help me. I can't eat. I'm starving. You told me you weren't
going to kill me."
"And
I wouldn't have. I left you still alive. It was the starvation that would have
killed you."
He
felt his arms being pulled in opposite directions. His legs were stretched down
towards the ground, but his body remained stationary. The limbs popped from
their sockets, and he screamed.
"You
know, they're never going to find your body," she said. "But I'm
sentimental. I'm keeping something to remember you by.
He
felt a cutting into the skin on his cheeks and forehead. She marked an x in the
air with her index finger. With the first slash, his face tore from his head,
turning visible and flying across the room towards her. She caught the bloody
skin with her other hand. With the second slash, he felt his body ripped apart
completely like being quartered by horses. A splash of invisible blood
resounded throughout the empty halls.
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