The Old

Dear friends, I would like to announce to you that we have reached the middle of our story, so thanks for sticking around!If I had been paying better attention, then what you are about to read would have posted with the last section, but this present section was so short, I realized I would have to launch into Part Two right now to make posting worthwhile.

A manner of devil

Conclusion

“What are they up to?” Laurie whispered.

Chris put a finger to his lips and whispered, “Why don’t we just go out and leave them to it.”

Laurie nodded.

The coffee table had been pushed away, and Lewis and Seth lay hand in hand, murmuring over and over in a circle of salt with tea lights burning at the cardinal directions. Cinnamon smoke wafted up. Even if they were looking, Lewis and Seth would have only wondered mildly at the fact that the two tall men who circled opened the window and then, stepping onto the sill, climbed out of it, Chris last, with a parting look to Lewis as he vaulted off of the ledge.

By then they were in Seth’s dream, and Lewis had said, “Where are we going?”

“We are trying to get away from dreams and phantasms and reach actual vision.”

They rejected unicorns and monsters, dead men with buzz saws in their heads, crucified angels, talking ladybugs, all the usual nonsense and, at last, settled on the park.

“There,” Lewis said.

And the park was familiar because it was the same one by the beach where they held the circles, the same one where he had seen Evangeline, and as they came toward it, Seth said, “Will they see us?”

There were two people on the benches.

“No. Because we are not there, we are only seeing. This is like a telescope. We are not astral bodies. We are not any type of bodies.”

And it was true, Seth realized. He was only stretching his sight, not walking, and as they went down the street to the park, he realized it was night, and by the phase of the moon that it was, in fact, this very night. From Lewis came just the dimmest assent to this, but to converse with each other would have been to take from the power of this moment. To even revel in the power of this moment, the power Seth had never known, would have been to diminish it, and so he simply moved to the moment where he was watching his cousin Eve, who had not let anyone know she was in the city—and who could blame her? Her hands were lightly bandaged still. She was sitting on the bench, waiting, and there was a long slim, wicked wand of black metal in her hands. A shadow spread over her, and she only smiled, looking up at the woman who had just arrived, her white face made whiter by the blond of her hair, and the white of the emerging moon.

“Eve,” the woman said.

Rising, Eve nodded and greeted her.

“Evangeline.”

Loreal

If we do not have the depths, how do we have the heights? Yet you fear the depths and do not want to confess that you are afraid of them.

-The Red Book

Loreal was out of sympathy. Tonight Amanda was crying again, and she felt bad for saying it that way even if she was saying it to TJ, her best friend, and not to the girls, who were in the room with Amanda. They were doing their usual Saturday night thing. Every Saturday night they went to dinner, though Loreal didn’t eat with them. She usually ate with TJ or with Chris and Sara, and then they all went back after dinner, took a nap, sorted themselves out, showered, got dressed again and, around ten o’ clock, Chris and Sara might come to her dorm room, or she might get TJ, or the girls might show up from Justin Hall, and they would begin their night of traveling around the dorms to all of the parties, seeing all the sights, drinking what there was to drink and smoking what was offered.

Tonight, the girls, Tara, Meghan and Amanda, had arrived at Loreal’s door around ten o’ clock, and they had oohed and ahhed over her new skirt, her cute hair, how they wished they had skin and eyes like hers, golden skin, grey eyes and the puff of soft reddish brown hair that she was wearing in an almost afro tonight. And could I borrow that lip gloss, and did you want glitter or not? But don’t you think everybody looks better with glitter? Sara was coming for just a bit, but not Chris. He never came. Loreal couldn’t understand what Sara saw in him anyway. And then they were off in the night. Fall was having its last hurrah. It had been unbearably cold for the last week, and all dorms were not made alike. She was frozen in her attic room in Saint Ita’s Hall. Tonight, now that the rain was gone, they made their way down the wet lane between Saint Ita’s Hall, the old convent and the rest of the campus, and now they turned through the trees that Meghan designated as, “A good place to get raped,” and came out through them on the other side of the parking lot that led to Justin Hall.

“We just have to get Amanda,” Meghan said.

Get Amanda and then they would head over to Merlin Hall, the soccer players dorm, the most fun dorm, the most, Loreal had noted, bisexual dorm. Justin Hall had a large fluorescent lit lobby and shot out in two wings. They went down one and came to Amanda’s room. She was sitting on the floor amidst her candles and Sara said, “I love what you do to your room.”

Loreal had too, once upon a time. She had loved the Pre Raphaelite posters, Ophelia drowning, the lost Lady of Shallot, that one bitch with the sword and the knight kneeling before her. You know, that painting. And she loved Amanda’s Medieval Baebes CDs, those otherworldly women doing their strange wailing and chanting. Loreal loved the inordinate amount of flickering candles, enough to call up several dead people. She loved what some people referred to as Amanda’s witchiness. Along with Meghan’s collection of Tarot cards and her cryptic murmurings, it was what had drawn Loreal to her and, to some extent, all of the girls.

But Amanda was no witch, Loreal knew that. Her life had been surrounded in witchcraft, and she knew the difference between the look of a thing and its actuality. And tonight, in the hall, she was talking to TJ because Amanda had burst out crying again and everyone was hugging her and Loreal had found her own hug to be… less than sincere.

“Well,” TJ said, trying to be sympathetic, “she did go through something.”

Loreal turned to go into the bathroom and close the door. It was a private bathroom with a tub, and Loreal never quite understood why it was in the dormitory.

“She had an abortion!” Loreal declared.

“Well, that is something.”

“Yeah, but it was three years ago and I’m tired of her crying about it.”

“Ouch.”

“It’s not like I’m saying that to anyone but you, and no one made her have it. Besides. It’s the twenty-first century, no one has to get pregnant.”

“Maybe she used birth control and condoms and got pregnant anyway.”

“Nope,” Loreal said. “And if that happened to me, I’d assume God wanted me to have the baby. I’m just bitching now. I need to get the hell off the phone and be a good girlfriend. Are you going to meet us at Merlin?”

“I don’t even know when you’re going to get there.”

“I’ll call,” she said.

“You know,” Loreal confided before she hung up, “I can’t wait to be done with this girly shit. I’m no good at it. Not really.”