8 Gone is the Witch (3 page)

I could see
Ursula in my periphery, watching me, her brows gathering tightly, perhaps wondering what secrets I harbored, what details I had omitted when until then, she believed I had shared every aspect of my life with her, both intimate and incidental.

Still,
I knew Ursula better than she knew herself. She wouldn’t ask. She knew that someday when the time was right, I would tell her everything, every sordid detail surrounding the darkest days of my life.

I waited until her eyes came forward again,
until the confidence in knowing I was talking to the only soul incapable of judging me allowed me to continue.

“There were ten of us
,” I said, “in the workshop, I mean. Sure, hundreds of others performed experiments there during the institute’s heyday, but ours….” I shook my head, still finding it hard to believe the talent we had assembled. “Ours was an elite ensemble, exceptional, if not dysfunctional. We proved our abilities in the psychic academia of clairvoyance, mental telepathy, bi-location, and, in my case, witchcraft.”

“
Interesting,” said Ursula, and nothing more.

“
Yes, it was. I had a lot of fun with it, too, until the Surgeon Stalker began killing off members of our workshop one-by-one.”

“My
, sister! I knew not of this tragedy in your life. Why hath thee not the mind to speak of this before?”

“Because,
there are things I did then, things I’m not proud of. Things I wish to forget.”

“But thou hath not forgotten?”

“No. I haven’t forgotten, but I’ve moved on, and not all bad came of those times. I met Tony then, and Leona, too. Though I’ll never admit it to him, I do like the little Costa Rica chica.”

“Methinks
Tony said she is Honduran.”

“
Don’t you start.”

“Sorry.”

“The point is, that’s when the Surgeon Stalker was running around cutting out livers and consuming them for the purpose of acquiring the psychical attributes of his victims.”

“`Tis the law of contagion.”

“Yes, and sometimes called attraction of blood.”

“Dr. Lowell and the Stalker
, they were one and the same?”

“That’s right.
He kidnapped Leona Diaz and hid her in the basement of the research center. He planned to father her child and then eat the baby’s liver in hopes of obtaining a vernal consistence of body and blood.

“
It all culminated in a big send off we had for him when Carlos opened a knot in the witch’s ladder, creating a vortex that sucked Dr. Lowell up into the Eighth Sphere. Until today, we all figured that was the end of it.”

“A
s it should be, for the Eighth Sphere, as I know, is a one way trip.”

“
That’s what I believed, too. Apparently it’s not.”

“Aye,”
she said, casting her gaze out the window and losing herself in a field of blue sky as deep as her distant thoughts.

We pulled into the
parking lot of the center a full fifteen minutes behind everyone else. The boys had already made a preliminary sweep of the building by then and were outside on the front steps waiting on us. Tony came up to the car and opened the door for me.

“
We found the place unlocked,” he said. Carlos fell in behind him. Dominic got the other door for Ursula and the two of them came around to join us. “Do you think it’s possible Dr. Lowell still had a key after all this time?”

“
I suppose,” I said. “He’d have had a key on him when we banished him. I take it he’s not here now?”

“
Doesn’t look like it. We still have uniforms inside conducting a more thorough search to be sure. It’s a large facility though. We called for K-9 backup to come out and help.”

I shook my head.
“They won’t find him. He’s long gone.”

“Yeah, I think you’re right.”

“Where would he go?” asked Ursula. “Have we no hope for Miss Leona?”

“I don’t know
.” Tony’s voice softened. “I just don’t know.”

“Did you check the basement?”
I asked.

“Of course
, don’t you think I’d check the most obvious place first?”

“
All right then, maybe the most obvious place isn’t so obvious.”

“What
’s that supposed to mean?”

I gestured
into the woods behind us. “Maybe he’s taken her back with him.”

“Into the woods?” asked
Dominic.

“
Back to the Eighth Sphere.”

Carlos said,
“I don’t get it.”

“What’s
not to get? We know Dr. Lowell is a brilliant man. Do you think he’d take Leona kicking and screaming all the way back here to the research center if he didn’t have a way out?”

“
You think he’s found a two-way portal?”

“Yes, I think he has.
And if I had to guess where that portal is, I’d say back there in the woods where we last saw him.”

“
How would that work?” asked Dominic. “Did he reopen the portal with another witch’s ladder?”

“
It’s possible.”

“Then what are we waiting for?”
Dominic pushed past me, apparently determined to lead the rescue party through blind conviction alone. “Let’s go!”

“Hold it!” Tony yelled. “No one
’s going anywhere until we strategize a plan.”

“
No, he’s right,” argued Carlos. “We could be losing valuable time.”

“Go on
then.” I dismissed them both with a wave. “Have at it. You’re not going to find anything.”

That stopped
Dominic in his tracks. “What do you mean?”

“Yeah
,” Carlos said, “we know what a portal looks like. It’s a big swirly thing like a black funnel towering over the treetops. You can’t miss it.”

“Nice.
” I shook my head lightly. “I’m surrounded by abecedarians.”

“What?” Carlos
donned his insulted look, though not entirely sure why. “Did she just call us a dirty name?”

“Sort of,” said
Dominic. “She basically just called us neophytes.”

“And that’s a dirty name, right?”

I came around to the back of my car and opened the trunk. “All I’m saying is that the portal isn’t going to look like anything you’ll recognize. It’ll be invisible to the naked eye.”

“So how will we see it?”

“We won’t. Not at first, but we can locate it with this.” I reached into the trunk, removed a small handheld device from a box of gadgets I kept there and held it up.

“What
’s that?” asked Carlos.

“
Looks like an EMF meter,” Dominic remarked.

“A what?”

“He’s right. This is a triple-axes electromagnetic field meter. It measures variances in electromagnetic currents in the atmosphere. I use it to locate conversion zones.”

Tony
tapped me on the shoulder. “Mind telling us what conversion zones are.”

Carlos laughed
. “You don’t know?”

“No. Do you?”

“No.”

“Then why are you
snickering?”

“
Because, I’m just glad I wasn’t the only one.”

“It’s
okay,” I said. “I wouldn’t expect any of you to know.”

I shut the trunk
and began filling them in on what was likely the wildest, most far-fetched thing they had ever heard in their lives. Thinking back now, if circumstances were reversed, I’m sure I wouldn’t have believe any of it myself.

“
We’ve talked about how we sent Dr. Lowell to the Eighth Sphere,” I said. “So what exactly is the Eighth Sphere?”

Carlos
answered, “It’s a place where evil––”

“She knows,” said
Dominic, backhanding him on the arm. “It’s a rhetorical question.”

“Oh.”

“Go on, Lilith.”

“
Thank you, Dominic. The Eighth Sphere lies in the realm of a quasi-dimensional universe. It’s a shadow sphere, a paraphysical world sub-lineal to the Seventh Sphere, which is Earth.”

“Paraphysical?”
Again, Carlos.

“
It means beyond predictable physics.”

“
And that means….”

“Will you shut up?” Tony
barked. “Let her finish. You can ask questions later.”

“I was just askin`.”

“The Eighth Sphere, as I said, is a shadow sphere. It serves as a filter of sorts, purging deviate forms from our existence. Our own moon, by design or coincidence, acts as a counterweight, maintaining the balance between the two dimensions and keeping them separate in the matrix of time space continuum.”

“Is this sphere on top of us or beside us?”

“Neither,” Dominic answered. “It’s in another dimension. Now let her continue.”

I watch
ed Carlos’ face contort in contemplation, but he let it ride. I gave Dominic a nod, acknowledging his answer.

“Even though the moon serves as a counterweight, it’s not a perfect balance. O
n the cusp of a new or full moon, the dimensional divide between the two realms is at its weakest and most vulnerable, at which time it takes very little for someone to breach the divide and cross from one dimension over to the other. When that happens, it’s called trans-dimensional travel, or TDT. The conditions necessary to facilitate TDT often occur naturally and without observable indications.”

Carlos
, “Unlike STDs, right?”

I ignored him.
“All around the world, at any given time, electromagnetic waves converge and intersect, creating harmonic distortions in the quantum particles governing free-radical energy scrolls, known as ringlets.

“
These ringlets act as gate keys to the matrix barrier. More often than not, one achieves such travel accidentally after a plane or ship unwittingly slips into an electrostatic force field known as a barometric vortex. When that happens, we call it spontaneous trans-dimensional travel, or STDT. Such is the legacy of places like the Bermuda Triangle, Japan’s Dragon Triangle, the Devil’s Lair and Uzbekistan’s Door to Hell.”

“
In English, Lilith.” Tony rolled his hand to indicate I should wrap it up. “What does it all mean in English?”

“
What it means is that if we want to find Dr. Lowell’s portal, we need to identify the conversion zones marking its vector points.” I held up my EMF meter. “This will help us do that.”

I switched
the machine on, turned towards the woods and started walking. I took only a few steps with the others in tow before pulling up short.

Tony looked at me.
“Why are we stopping?”

I turned
back to face the research center. “The meter’s telling me to go that way.”

“I don’t understand,” said
Carlos. “We sent Doctor Lowell off in a big tornado back there in the woods.”

I shook my head. “That’s not where the vector points are,
least not anymore.”

Tony, “You mean they moved?”

Carlos, “They couldn’t move. Could they?”

“They could
, and they did.” I started towards the front steps. “Remember, these are waves we’re talking about, not fixed anchors. It’s entirely possible they could roam hundreds of feet, yards or even miles.”

“What’s your best guess?”
asked Tony.

I started up the steps. “I don’t know. Let’s follow the meter and find out.”

We entered the building, following the signal strength of the EMF meter up to the second floor and down to the large room at the end of the hall.

“This is your old room,” Tony
noted, “where Doctor Lieberman held the workshops.”

“Yeah, no shit, Dick Tracy.” I stepped past the threshold and immediately fel
t the residue energy from recent paranormal activities. “He was here.”

“Doctor Lieberman?”

“No. Dr. Lowell.”

Ursula
asked, “Who is Doctor Lieberman?”

Tony answered, “He worked for Doctor Lowell.
He was killed outside––”

“He was killed,” I said, stomping
on Tony’s words. “Let’s just leave it at that. Shall we?”

I would have thought Tony might have more to say on that
matter. I knew it was a particularly sore subject with him. But just as I had buried certain parts of my past, so too did Tony, if not for entirely different reasons.

The
old room looked different from what I remembered, colder, smaller perhaps, even though the big oak tables and chairs were gone now. Late afternoon sunlight tripped into the room at a precarious angle, slanted as if peeking around the corner and through the windows.