We all piled into Thomas’s van and took one of the back roads into the swamp. Thomas parked on the other side of the dark street and we walked down into a small clearing beyond the barrier I had jumped earlier that day. Had it only been that afternoon when I’d been chased down by imaginary gnomes? Didn’t feel like it. For several minutes I felt edgy, as if I expected those little goblin things to make an appearance again. But then I reminded myself I had only imagined them . . .
A fire pit, most likely built by the first teenagers who lived in this area eons before, was already in place on the far end of the clearing. As we gathered firewood I kept my eyes and ears sharp for anything unusual. We got a small fire started, and then we all looked up at Robyn expectantly. After all, this was her idea and we all expected some ritualistic words to be spoken or something. Not that any of us took this seriously. We were all just interested in hanging out.
“Um, so I brought some information with me so you guys know what we are doing. Meghan, can you read it?”
Robyn handed me a piece of paper with interlinking runes as a border. It looked like she had found it on some website and had merely printed it out. I shrugged, curious as to why she just didn’t read it herself, but took the paper anyway. I had to squint in order to read the words in the dim firelight.
Furrowing my brow, I cleared my throat and began: “Samhain: The Celtic New Year.”
Well, that explained Robyn’s grumbling on the way to the dance.
“It’s pronounced
sow-when
,” Robyn interjected.
I gave her a harsh look that I hoped said,
then why don’t you read it?
I bit my lip and looked back down at the paper. Sow-when; really? I shrugged. If Robyn said so . . .
“
Samhain:
The Celtic New Year.” I made sure to pronounce it properly that time.
I read the entire first paragraph, which detailed the traditions and history of the Celtic New Year. According to Robyn’s print-out, the ancient Celts claimed that the dark half of the year started during the next few days and that the veil between the Otherworld and this world became more permeable to the creatures and spirits of a supernatural nature. It was actually quite interesting, to tell the truth, and it kind of reminded me of all the other mythologies I had learned about in school. Of course, the sentence about Otherworldly creatures lurking in our world sent a tingle of fear up my spine. That particular description was a little too familiar to me with regards to my tendency to see things.
Once I was finished reading my part, Robyn took her paper back and pulled out a book with a pentagram and some other strange symbols on the cover. I felt Thomas tense up next to me, so I placed a hand on his shoulder. Thankfully, Robyn had picked out a pretty mild passage, something along the lines of asking the Earth spirits to protect us from the evil ones this night. I sent up my own request that the rest of the week prove to be vision and voice free.
“One way to keep the evil spirits away is by carving gourds or pumpkins,” Robyn said after finishing her Samhain blessing. “The Celts used to carve turnips.”
“How do you carve a turnip?” Tully asked.
“With a real sharp knife I guess,” Robyn shrugged.
“How do you even know all of this?” Will added.
Robyn lifted her shoulders again. “I saw something on TV once about it and decided to investigate. It’s amazing what you can find while surfing the internet.”
“So,” I murmured, “do you have any turnips for us to carve?”
We all laughed, but Robyn shook her head. I had never seen a turnip bigger than my palm, so even if Robyn had wanted to carve turnips, I didn’t think we could have made much progress. But I would probably have been the first one to start carving. Call me superstitious, but I wouldn’t mind having a miniature jack-o’-lantern guarding my door for the next week or so.
Instead, she pulled a box of graham crackers, a bag of marshmallows and several bars of chocolate out of her bag.
“I don’t have turnips, but I do have goodies.”
Once we all had our own marshmallow roasting on the end of a stick, we started pestering Robyn for more information about Wicca and her other bizarre interests. Even Thomas took part.
I had never really taken Robyn’s rebellious side seriously. She had a flare for the dramatic, so sometimes I wondered if her Goth look and pagan obsession was just a cry for attention, but it turned out she had done her research. Or so it seemed. I didn’t really have anything to compare it with.
We ate several s’mores and after an hour of watching the fire die down, we decided it was best to head home. None of us was completely comfortable sitting in the middle of the woods with no one else around. We stamped out the fire and started heading back up to the car.
We walked in silence, perhaps all of us listening for the wandering spirits of Samhain. I thought about my family, probably still out trick-or-treating, if I knew my brothers well enough. Mom had likely opted to stay home to hand out candy and catch up on grading. When you taught English Literature to high school students, you had a lot of monotonous essays to peruse through.
I was so lost in my thoughts that I didn’t notice the rustling bushes until we came to the point where the dirt road met pavement. I froze and shushed my friends. They all turned and looked at me with raised eyebrows.
“What is it?” Will lisped through his fake vampire fangs.
I waved my arm at him and told him to be quiet. Several seconds passed and the bushes rustled again.
“Hear that?” I whispered harshly.
Everyone nodded. And then I heard something else. It was the same, strange grumbling I’d heard earlier that afternoon. I felt myself go pale and I looked at my friends. I wasn’t imagining it this time. They had heard it too. Maybe I hadn’t been seeing things after all.
“Let’s get out of here!” Tully hissed.
We started to walk briskly up the slope, the van seeming miles away. The creature grumbled again and we all screamed and started to run. We made it to the van in record time, everyone piling in and not even worrying about seatbelts until Thomas had the car started and rolling back up the street.
“What do you think it was?” Thomas asked, his voice strained.
“The spirits of Samhain,” Robyn said, a mystical certainty tainting her voice.
“Robyn! Seriously?” Tully gave her an exasperated look.
“I bet it was a raccoon. They make a weird noise when they get into fights,” Will added.
When we all looked at him with raised eyebrows he shrugged. “What? They do.”
As we came to the end of the road and pulled out onto the highway, I listened as my friends babbled on about what had disturbed our party. No one noticed I wasn’t talking and no one perceived how unnerved I was. I had thought I’d imagined it, I was certain. But if all my friends had heard it too . . . ?
“I’m telling you,” Robyn insisted stubbornly, her voice only slightly tinged with amusement, “it was the spirits of the dead from the Otherworld.”
Everyone just laughed and Tully even gave her a shove. I was the only one who didn’t laugh, because I felt strangely compelled to agree with her.
Encounter
The next day was pretty laid back in the Elam household. All my brothers were recovering from their candy hangover from the night before and my parents were still in their pajamas at noon. I spent the morning cleaning my room and trying to get ahead on my homework. I hadn’t had a party for my birthday the day before, but that night I was having Tully and Robyn over for a girls’ night in.
My friends ended up staying late, during which time we gave each other pedicures and talked about which boys at our high school were the cutest. Too bad they never showed any interest towards us. Robyn surprised me when she fessed up to having a guy outside of our school.
“Seriously!” Tully said, smacking her with one of my pillows.
“Why didn’t you tell us?”
Robyn shrugged and grinned sheepishly, a look that did battle with her dark eyeliner and lip ring. “It didn’t start out as anything serious.”
“And now?” I pressed.
“We have a date tomorrow night.”
The movie we had been watching became nothing but background noise as we prodded Robyn for more information. I was happy for her, I really was. But something deep down, perhaps something instinctual, prickled with envy. I wondered if I would ever find anybody to make me feel as giddy as Robyn sounded.
Eventually the movie ended and our night came to a close. Tully and Robyn were gone by midnight and I went straight to bed. I remembered falling instantly to sleep and waking up on the dirty streets of Los Angeles. Wonderful. That annoying dream of my past again. It was essentially the same as always, but something was different this time. I looked down at my feet. Yup, they were still bare, but for some reason the distance from my eyes to my toes seemed greater. I held my hands out in front of me. Not a child’s hands, but a young woman’s. That was odd. I was always a toddler in this dream. At least I had my pajamas on this time.
Suddenly, without warning, the scenery changed and I was standing in my back yard. The moon was nearly full so its silver light cast long reaching shadows as it splintered through the silent trees.
I heard the near quiet huff of an exhaled breath and I glanced up from my self-examination. A great white dog was standing on the edge of my backyard, his ears perked forward and his black eyes watching me. He was as still as the night but somehow I knew he was beckoning me. I moved towards him and he turned and descended down the steep slope that led into the swamp below.
I knew I should have stayed put, but it was only a dream and I had absolutely no control of myself. I followed him without a second thought.
The leaves and branches crunched beneath my feet as I tried to keep up with the specter-like dog. Thank goodness he was so huge or else I might have lost him. Had it been a moonless night, he’d be easy to spot, but his pale color nearly blended in with the white pools of light.
He led me further along a trail, one I was familiar with; the same one where I was chased by a pack of warty gnomes just the day before. We walked for five or ten minutes, my spirit dog always staying twenty feet ahead and never looking back. Finally, the slowly descending trail ended and the dog took a sudden left, cutting across the small land bridge that split the lowest part of the bog. I followed him, eyeing the willows and oaks forming a dark, leafy bower overhead.
I ended up on the other side of the marsh, very close to the place where my friends and I had had our Samhain gathering the night before. A tall mix of eucalyptus and oak trees spread off to my right and the other section of the swamp continued far into the distance. Just off the main trail I spotted the small clearing where we had gathered. In the center of the clearing sat the dog, right where our bonfire had been, waiting silently for me to approach. I moved forward, my hand outstretched. Even sitting down, his shoulders came up to my waist.
Just as I placed my hand on his scraggly head, I woke up.
I was standing, in my nightgown, in the middle of the swamp behind my house. At first I was confused. Was this another part of my dream? But the sharp itch of a mosquito taking advantage of my bare arm brought me to my senses. I slapped the insect away, but my confusion was quickly being replaced by panic. Did I really sleepwalk from my room down into the swamp? I must have, how else could I have gotten here, barefoot, without a jacket, and standing upright no less?
I pulled my arms close to fight the chill and quickly darted my eyes from side to side.
There is nobody here,
I told myself,
stay calm, Meghan
. But it didn’t help. I tried to tell myself that the moonlight was bright enough to light my way home, and that the only thing in the swamp that I should fear were the mosquitoes. Unfortunately, I had seen some weird things in this swamp during the last few days, and I had a feeling that it wouldn’t be any better at night.
I took a tentative step forward and felt the sharp bite of a stick. Chewing my lip and cursing silently, I tried another, gentler step.
A low growling sound in the bushes behind me caught my attention. I stiffened and felt my blood freeze. It didn’t sound like any dog I’d ever heard and I knew that we occasionally got black bears in the swamp. I tried hard to put that thought out of my mind. Unfortunately, in order to do that my memory decided right then and there to conjure up the images of the gnomes again. Would I be able to see them in the moonlight if they started coming after me?
The growling intensified and the snapping of twigs and rustle of leaves told me that there was more than one of whatever it was I was hearing. I cursed for real this time, something I rarely did. I glanced over my shoulder, back into the thick brush that lined the far edge of the wetlands. That was when I completely lost it. I knew animal eyes tended to glow orange or green if they were caught by your headlights or a flashlight, but only when the light hit them. Within the dark bushes I spotted several pairs of eyes, glowing continuously in the strangest shade of violet I had ever seen. I blinked to clear my eyes, hoping it was a result of my delirium from sleepwalking and the strange silvery light of the moon. I was wrong, as usual. There really were violet eyes staring back at me, at least five pairs.