The Void (Witching Savannah Book 3) (7 page)

“Well,” Abby said, a halo of golden light emanating from the crown of her head. “You’ve been there long enough. If you let me, I think I can lead you out of there.” The light grew brighter around her until it shone like a gold and soothing aura. This halo. It struck me that this was what coming home looked like.

Abby took a step toward the metallic face, then another. Rather than drawing nearer the manifestation, Abby herself began to change, growing smaller to my eyes, looking as if she were walking down a long straight path into the horizon.

“Abby, no, you don’t know what you’re doing,” Maisie called, a sense of urgency causing her voice to strain.

“Don’t worry, sweetheart,” Abby said and nodded. “I do. I’m going to help your grandma find her way out of there.”

“No. You can’t just reach in and pull her out.” Maisie turned to me. “Gehenna isn’t a place. It isn’t a realm or dimension. It is a machine.”

“Sweetie, we don’t have time to entertain your fancies.” Iris didn’t even look at Maisie as she said the words. Maisie looked at me as if Iris had struck her.

“This has been too much for you.” Ellen wrapped an arm around Maisie’s shoulders. “You shouldn’t be a part of this. Let me help you back to your room.”

“I do not need help finding the room I have lived in my entire life,” Maisie snapped. She threw my aunt’s arm off. “You have to listen to me. I know things y’all don’t,” Maisie said, then turned to me.

The quicksilver face melted away, first returning to its spherical shape then morphing into a bulging disk. It floated out before us as Abby’s form constricted.

“We have to stop her,” Maisie said, shaking Iris’s shoulders.

The convex face of the disk distorted into an absolute flatness, then began pressing backward on itself until it became concave.

“Abby doesn’t understand. We have to bring her back.” Panic had taken control of Maisie’s voice.

I started circling the gateway, only to realize that while it remained perfectly clear when seen head on, the shape appeared distorted from the side. From the side, Abby’s form was stretching out, falling to a dense point at the front, fainter and more dispersed at back. An arrowhead of light about to pierce a black hole’s event horizon. Then her luminescence began to unwind, like spun gold, into the darkness. Gehenna began to show its teeth, revealing itself as an insatiable devourer, a perverter, of any goodness. The mouth of Gehenna opened wide, readying itself to feast.

My heart beat like mad. The vision I held of Abby hanging before the gate of Gehenna had remained unchanged for several seconds now. I realized, from our perspective, her image would remain there, frozen forever in this hellish event horizon. From her perspective, she might already be eternally lost. A string of light wrapped around me and tugged. I turned back to Iris just in time to see Maisie fling herself in after Abby.

The light that had lassoed me had also attached itself to my aunts. I realized Maisie had bound us all together, linking us to form a type of throw line. A tug pulsed down the length of the binding. As Maisie’s image flattened and superimposed with Abby’s, I tugged back with all the magic in me, but the gravity of Gehenna had no intention of surrendering prey that had come knocking at its door. The strand of light stretched as thin as one of Maisie’s own golden hairs, and I felt certain it would snap, leaving the two lost at the portal of hell. The room filled with the sound of fearsome shrieks and howls. Maisie appeared, her tether wrapped around herself and Abigail, the mouth of Gehenna stretching, its darkness straining to reach into our world and swallow them whole. But then it fell back in on itself, collapsing under its own weight. Like a shattering hologram, the vision of Gehenna broke into pieces, each piece a smaller, yet exact duplicate of the whole, then faded from sight. Maisie stood before me, with her arms wrapped tightly around Abigail and a look of triumph in her eyes.

SEVEN

“All right,” I said, “we are listening. What do you mean that Gehenna is a machine?”

Ellen crossed to the loveseat and sat down. She patted the seat next to her, and Maisie went to join her. Iris seemed unwilling to entertain Maisie’s ideas. Instead she turned away and began to peruse the tomes that lined the wall. I surmised she expected to find more concrete answers therein than she would get from her niece’s ranting.

“I know things you aren’t going to find in those books, Aunt Iris.”

Iris turned back and acknowledged Maisie with a nod. She signaled her acquiescence by holding her hands up toward us, palms forward, then sitting in one of the wingback chairs. Abby took the other, and I lowered myself onto the ottoman. “We’re all listening,” I assured Maisie.

She took a moment to compose herself. She drew a breath and spoke to us all, although she looked only at me. “You know Ginny taught me things only an anchor, like you, should know. Things about the line and its limitations. She stopped just short of telling me how it was created. You have the right to know everything, but the other anchors, they don’t trust you. They’ve decided to keep you ignorant of these truths.”

“Gehenna, baby,” Ellen prompted. She was not going to sit through the unexpurgated version while her mother suffered through endless torment.

“Gehenna,” Maisie echoed. “I’m getting to that, but you have to know the whole story.”

“Okay.” Ellen acknowledged the need for patience. She reached up and ran her fingers through Maisie’s hair.

Maisie seemed oblivious to this sign of affection. A small line formed between her brows as she concentrated. She tugged at the collar of her T-shirt. “The line has limitations. Witches created it to protect this reality, our mortal world, from the old ones.” She peered deeply into my eyes. “Like I said, I don’t know how they did it, but I think deep down you do. I think the line has been trying to tell you. I know you’ve had the dream.”

As she spoke the words, memory of the dream I’d been having on and off, sometimes remembering I’d had it, sometimes not, reached up to my conscious level. The sight of pyramids and obelisks being struck by lightning, silence giving way to the whirring sound of energy rushing around stone circles, a filament of energy racing along a magnificent stone wall. A faceless man, slithering away. Yes, I’d been having the dream, but I still had no idea what it had to do with the line. These places, these monuments, at least the ones I recognized, were built at different periods in history, epochs separated by millennia. It made no rational sense to me that Giza, Monks Mound, and Teotihuacan could have all played a role in the line’s creation.

“The anchors would be furious I’ve told you about Gehenna,” Maisie said. “I’m sure the only reason I am still breathing is because they believe y’all think I am crazier than a bedbug.” She paused and examined each of our faces. “They will kill me if they learn I’ve shared what I know. They’ll kill you if they realize you have listened. Except Mercy, of course. They won’t kill her. They’ll bind her. Y’all need to decide if you really want to hear this before I go on.”

My heart sank as it acknowledged the truth behind her words. The other anchors should be my allies, not my enemies, but they seemed to have it in for me as much as my declared enemies. Maybe even more so.

Iris and Ellen looked at each other. Ellen placed her hand on Maisie’s knee, and Iris relaxed back in her chair.

“Well, I sure as hell ain’t going nowhere,” Abby said. “Let’s have it.” She had been shaken by her experience, but she was determined not to show it. Still, her hands trembled, and the static electricity that had built up around her caused a slight pop as she tugged the last curler from her hair. Her eyes remained as wide as saucers.

Maisie licked her lips. “Gehenna lies beyond the line’s reach, not even a hair’s breadth beyond this physical dimension, but it isn’t a place. Gehenna is a machine, a power plant. The old ones created Gehenna. Before Gehenna, when a person died, their essence could freely return to its source. The old ones realized if they could trap a person’s essence, it could be converted to power. When it comes to magic, if the power of blood is like oil, then soul magic, the magic of Gehenna, is nuclear. Our world’s is not the sole Gehenna. There are multiple ones, surrounding multiple worlds. Our souls, and the souls of sentient beings from a million different planets, a billion different realities, provide the power for much of the old ones’ magic.”

“If this is true, if Gehenna is a dynamo of some sort, why would Mama be trapped there?” Ellen’s guileless eyes moved past my sister to me, carrying the wordless question of whether I believed any of this. I answered with a slight shrug. My brain was telling me it sounded pretty far-fetched, but my gut told me it felt all too true.

“When a person dies, the vibration of their essence speeds up, kind of like a jet engine coming to life before takeoff. If the essence doesn’t reach the right frequency, it doesn’t ascend. It was in this in-between frequency the old ones built the Gehenna machine. It is voracious. We all felt its gravity. People wonder why Savannah is so haunted? It’s because in the same way the line’s power is anchored by witches, Gehenna is anchored to this world at certain places. Savannah is one of those places. Gehenna may fail to capture a soul, but its pull may still keep a spirit from reaching the vibrational wave it needs to achieve to transcend our realm.”

“What would stop a soul from ascending?” My lower back began to hurt from sitting on the ottoman. I leaned back against my hands to relieve some pressure.

“A sense of guilt. A soul ends up in Gehenna not because of what she did in life, but because of the shame she feels for her choices, her failures.” She looked up at me. “Most of these people aren’t evil. They aren’t even bad. There’s a story of a man whose soul spent years in Gehenna because he felt guilty over having his badly injured dog put to sleep rather than putting it through a painful surgery that offered only a slight chance of saving its life. The dog’s spirit waited for him, just beyond Gehenna’s gates, until it got tired of waiting and went in to pull his master out.”

Abby held up her hands. “Wait. So where do the truly evil—the ones with no sense of remorse—go?”

Maisie shook her head and shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t think anyone knows. But they don’t end up in Gehenna.” She lowered her eyes and bit her lip. I knew she was weighing her words. “The crimes of those in Gehenna may be real or imagined, but Gehenna is full of people like us. Like Grandma. Like you.” She looked at Ellen. A sudden sob escaped Ellen. She pulled her arms tightly around herself, and she averted her gaze. We knew the guilt she carried with her for not saving her son. “Like Oliver, who, despite what he says even now, carries the shame of what happened with Grace.” She turned to me. “Like Peter, who knows deep down he raped you.”

I nearly jumped off the ottoman. “Peter did not
rape
me.”

“He had a spell, a magical roofie, put on you, then took you to bed. You may have managed to rationalize what he did, but I can see the shame in him even if he can’t.”

I struggled up from the ottoman and went to the window. I stared out at the garden. I had never allowed myself to look at Peter’s actions in this light. But today was not the day to do so. At the moment, I could not even begin to consider the feelings her words had stirred up. I’d file them away and look at them another day. After all, what was one more item on the list of things I’d queued up on my “to be processed” list? I kept my eye on the greenery on the other side of the glass.

“The dog.” Iris’s calm voice came from behind me, leading me to turn back to face her. “Is that just a sweet story, or is there actually a way to get Mama out of there?”

I could feel Maisie watching me. Her thoughts telegraphed her regret for having gone too far about Peter. Her unspoken apology caused the tension to leave my shoulders. The breath I’d been holding escaped.

“Some souls eventually let go of their pain and find their own way out,” she said, slowly turning her attention from me to Aunt Iris. “Others stay trapped. The demonic faces you saw there—they aren’t demons. They are humans who have been in Gehenna too long. Gehenna has twisted them. Squeezed every last drop of humanity out of them. They grow so dense, so dark, so heavy that sometimes one will drop out of Gehenna and back into our reality. Their perversion causes them to tempt others into doing things that may land them in Gehenna too.” Maisie shuddered. “You’ve seen them,” she said addressing Abby. “The shadow people who always seem to be flitting at the corner of your eye. They crave the light you carry.” Abby shifted in her seat, pulling her robe more tightly closed.

“Your grandmother?” Iris tried to rein Maisie’s thoughts back in.

“Grandma,” Maisie said and nodded. “I’m afraid the only way to help her is to go in after her.”

“How?” Ellen tensed and leaned in toward Maisie.

“Getting into Gehenna is easy. To get into Gehenna all you have to do is die.” Maisie waited for us to absorb this.

“We can do this,” Iris said. “We can stop my heart, and I will go to her.” She focused on Ellen. “Once I have her out of there, you’ll bring me back.”

A crease formed between Ellen’s eyes. “No. It’s too risky. I won’t risk losing you. Not even for Mama.”

Iris stood and stepped quickly across the room. She knelt before Ellen. “We have to. I cannot live with myself knowing we never tried.” She reached up and grasped Ellen’s shoulders. “I’ll never make it past Gehenna myself if we don’t try.”

“It’s more complicated than you think.” Maisie leaned toward Ellen and Iris. “Anyone can enter Gehenna, but only someone who has no sense of shame can leave.” She focused on Iris. “You wear your guilt like an overcoat, and I am afraid most of it is about me.”

“Who doesn’t feel guilty about something?” Abby gave voice to the question nagging at my own mind. “Only babies and sociopaths, and chances are the sociopaths ain’t gonna be lining up to help us.”

“It’s true,” Iris said, sounding defeated. “Anyone who’s lived long enough has some regrets, no matter how hard they have tried to do the right thing.”

Anyone who’s lived long enough . . .
The words bounced around my mind. I knew someone who was constitutionally incapable of causing others pain. Someone who truly was an innocent. Someone who had only been in this world a matter of months. “Call Rivkah. Emmet has to come back to Savannah. He has to come home.”