Got Framed for Murder in a Dementia Village | Finale

 

This blog is moving to hopefully greener pastures, continue following it on Substack: https://osnarchavez.substack.com/

Part 9 | Compilation

I was back at my grandmother’s house. Well, the ruins of it after some hurricane hit it on my last dream. I was dreaming again. I knew she was my grandmother, but I also recognized her as the evil witch that, when I was a kid, threw me from a slide and broke my shinbone. Since then, everything evil or paranormal makes my badly heath limb hurt.

She was in front of me, ignoring me. She was too busy with her enchantment to pay any attention to me. Boulders flew in the night sky, wooden splinters smushed themselves together into complete boards and the mixture used to hold everything in place the first time liquified itself. All the materials swirled in a dance around a levitating and glowing necklace. My grandma kept mumbling archaic sounds as the magically influenced surroundings broke their organized circling path.

Rocks and wood leaped against the foundations that were still discernable on the floor. Nails pierced the planks into place. The gluing mixture started filling each gap between the stones. Floating furniture returned to their places in a delicate and swift, almost cautious walking, manner. Broken candles fixed themselves before diving into the brass candle holders that attached to the walls, before a little spark made them burn.

The mansion rebuilding continued to the second floor, as the materials arranged themselves into a ceiling. Without stopping her quiet chanting, my grandmother moved her arthritic bones and malnourished muscles all the way to the top story. The stairs were forming at the same time she needed to use the next step. She was following the light of her necklace that had been obfuscated by the construction of the house.

I followed her. Old rusty pipes passed beside me on the stairs. A huge fridge fell into place with a rumble. A dented bathtub repaired itself before returning to a small room, just to be followed by a sink that embedded itself to the wall, and soon it was covered by a door that closed as I wandered by. Tables, candles, a mattress and a thousand pots rolled onto the newly erected floor to turn this Victorian residence into a living place again.

On the third story, my grandmother’s studio was coming back into shape. The levitating necklace shone brighter with every difficult step that my granny was taking towards it. I felt the burning scratch in my shinbone, but I was supernaturally compelled to follow her.

Her whispers got louder, almost yelling. Saliva and probably a fake tooth came out of her mouth with every incomprehensible phrase. Once the mansion was practically complete, the necklace energy attracted rocks like it was a magnet and pushed them into the wall, recreating the chimney.

I tried to communicate with my grandmother. But, when the coming-up-chimney was almost closing itself, the necklace flew into it.

A last boulder smashed itself into the hole, blocking for good all the necklace’s light.

The stone fireplace was finished.

The reconstruction was completed.

I expected in shock.

My grandma approached the just-formed sepulcher for her mystical amulet and, as if she was telling it a secret, moved her fragile lips in a prayer.

She turned back to me with her wrinkled face and spotted skin.

“Why?” I demanded to know.

She smiled at me. But it wasn’t, or at least it didn’t feel, vicious. It was like looking at an average old woman before she asks you a favor. Her previously furious eyes were calm. Her frown was now completely relaxed. All apparent evil on her disappeared, letting way for only compassion.

The burning in my shin also went away.

I stared at her, still waiting for an answer. All I received was a soft nodding as she started walking weakly down the enormous house. Now there was no paranormal force urging me to go after her, yet I did so.

She exited and walked a couple of yards into a small cemetery lot. Two gravestones carved and marked with grass on top of the burial place. Just one headstone left without message, in front of a hole in the ground.

My grandmother turned towards me and, even though barely any air came out of her lungs, I heard the instruction clearly:

“Read the letter.”

She dropped into her grave.

***

BEEEEEEEP!

Blinding lights in front of me.

I regained control of the wheel and dodged the vehicle that was coming directly at me.

The adrenaline scared away all the sleepiness I might have left in my system. I retrieved my calm breath and returned my heartbeat to its normal pumping before I exited the highway into a stop in the middle of the mountain.

I didn’t come out of the vehicle I was given by Mrs. Rowen. It was snowing outside, and the lateral I was in could only give a momentary break to two small cars; no restroom nor even public telephone, just a side out of the one lane road.

I had left Morlden Village a couple hours ago. I drove to the airport following how I poorly remember the taxi trip that brought me to that God-less place. But, I took a wrong exit, and found myself in the middle of a blizzard, in a Nordic European country I didn’t speak the language, and the only thing keeping me going was the heated seats of the manual drive I had accepted in exchange of leaving Elisa, Margaret and my ghostly friend Luke in that Dementia Village.

I suppressed my desire to cry and took an opportunity to check the complete documentation I had retrieved earlier from Mrs. Rowen safe.

I already knew the first. The messages exchanged between the immortal, always returning Mrs. Rowen and Luke. The guy who was murdered by an evil spirit on my first night on the abandoned Bachman Asylum more than a year ago, the spirit that had helped me survive and free other trapped souls in this plane of existence, was the one in charge of delivering me to the claws of that evil witch. I dropped the heavy-feeling paper onto the car’s floor in front of the passenger seat.

The other papers were just Morlden Village documentation and permissions. The most relevant of it, the place’s deed. I didn’t think that it would be needed considering the place was a life-energy sucking center for the manager’s everlasting reincarnations. But it surprised me that Mrs. Rowen had acquired it and the medical permissions legally. She didn’t strike me as the type of woman who would have been worried about that.

Yet, at the bottom of all, there was a familiar document. Never had seen it before in my life, but I had in my dreams. The damaged, yellowish and almost inkless old paper crumbled in between my hands as I started to read:

“Dear grandson.

“I hope this letter finds you well and shortly.

“First, I’m sorry I never got to meet you in person. I kept receiving pictures of you from your mother and father, but it isn’t the same. I would have loved to hug you, and kiss you, and spoil you. It may be too late for that now.

“I just need you to know that everything I did for you, which I know it seems like nothing, was to protect you. My past is dangerous and keeps coming for me. I’m going to take care of it, but surely in the future it is going to go after you. I’m so sorry that is how the dices were rolled for you, my dear.

“I hope your two gifts to you will be enough. The only time we met, when you didn’t recognize me and hopefully you don’t remember it by now, was your first. I desire that it gives you warmer protection than the one that I gave you, and teaches you to stay away from darkness. Also, my necklace is a family relic that has been meant for you since the day you were born. I hope you never have to use them, but if that time comes, do it wisely.

“There is so much more I would like to write here, but the time is scarce and I doubt any of this will make any sense to you. Hope you get to read it when the time is right.

“If not, just know that your granny loves you deeply, cares for you infinitely and she is so sorry about everything that will come.

“P. S. Congratulations on your engagement.”

Once I finished, a couple of tears rolled down my cheeks. A faint burn ignited in my shinbone. It was clear now.

I got back on the highway and drove.

***

After a couple of hours in auto pilot, of following my guts with no real knowing, I arrived at my grandmother's mansion.

It was still dark outside, and the streetlights had stopped two miles ago when the pavement turned into an improvised road through the forest. Yet, in the middle of tall pines and nowhere, a Victorian-appearance, three-story house stood up. The wooden walls were half spoilt, the rocks from the foundations had been eroded since a long time ago, and all the metallic accents and decorations were hidden under a thick layer of rust. That thing was just standing thanks to a magical necklace buried inside the chimney bowels.

Any less experienced person would have thought that the building was haunted, but I had a long record of dealing with that.

I gazed at the small graveyard that was just to the West of the main building. As expected, there were three resting sites. Unexpectedly, my shinbone was imperceptible. No burning or throbbing pain of any kind. It had been like that since I parked in the middle of the towering trees. It was a good enough sign for me.

The main doors creaked as I pushed them open. The floor squeaked under my every step inside that echo-filled construction. The only light that allowed me to see in front of me was the faint moonlight filtered through old, cobwebby windows and waving ragged blinds. I adjusted my nose to the humid smell of the place, trying to ignore the rotting one.

As I climbed upstairs, the wood of every step cushioned my weight. Fearful of falling through, I clenched myself to the also spoilt and termite-eaten wooden handrail. Disgust and insects swirled through my arm as I dashed to the more solid-feeling floor of the library.

The dust covered every single surface you placed your sight or hands on. The table on which I dreamt my grandma wrote me a letter, so sturdy-looking in Morpheus terrains, now was a barely standing desk that even the slightest blow would cause it to collapse. Yet, on top of it, in a book stand, an open manuscript waited for me.

It was a very old text, composed of hand-written weird hieroglyphic-like symbols I couldn’t read. In the middle of the two pages at sight, a creepy, ink rolled picture of a group of women cutting themselves, with their blood falling into different objects like a chalice and a creepy statue; but the one in the middle, bigger than the others, seemed to be praying with her hands extended to the sky. Thankfully for my understanding, or lack of it, my grandmother (I believe) left an English equation written with red ink, almost black to this point, in the margins of the original text: “COVEN’S BLOOD + AMULETS = ETERNAL YOUTH / ONE MISSING = ETERNAL LIFE THROUGH HELLISH REINCARNATIONS.”

A pinch on my shin broke me out of the mental rabbit hole my mind had fallen into. Everything came into place and sense as I walked away from the disturbing read and went up to the third and top floor.

I knew what I was looking for now, and finding it was easy this time. In a darkness-filled room to the South of the building, the giant stone chimney imposed as an unbreakable monolith. While the whole place was one wrong sweat drop away from collapsing into nothingness, the fireplace seemed good as new. All boulders were in pristine condition, the dust had ignored it completely, and even the arachnids and small pests respected the sacred tomb.

Laying against it, there was pickaxe and an electric demolishing machine. They look newer, just a couple of spiderwebs in them and only one fresh, thin film of dirt covering them. Somehow, they were very worn down. The pick’s point was flat as a pug’s face and the drill from the machine, that had used a mysterious source of electricity in these woods, was completely broken in half. This explained Mrs. Rowen’s missing from Morlden Village for a couple of days around a month ago.

As soon as I was on reaching-length, the stone structure crumbled down. Rocks rolled down, de-stabilizing the floor beneath my feet, and giving way to the hidden necklace of my grandmother. Instinctively, I pulled it out. All the chimney that was held together by its magical incantation, renounced to its architectural form.

Boulders hit the floor planks loudly.

Holes started to appear under me.

I rushed out of the room as the floor that was holding me sunk completely.

My steps down the stairs were followed by the breaking steps I had just used.

Windows around me cracked and exploded under the weight of the unbalanced walls coming down.

I jumped an enormous pit in the second story as I continued my way to the first one.

The clinking of brass furniture and decorations became deafening.

The spoilt handrails broke under my nervous grasp.

I rolled in between small rocks and sharp boards that were projectileing over me like the house was war-bombing me.

I managed to exit the mansion before it demolished completely over itself.

When recovering my oxygen outside, with the necklace still tight in my fist, I stared at the vestiges of the place my grandmother lived in. The freezing air in the snowstorm difficulted the process. The strong windblow forced me to turn to my left.

The tiny autochthone cemetery was exactly as it was when I arrived. Just one difference, now my grandma’s ghost was standing on it. The old, wrinkled witch who had caused me the injury that let me know when evil was near, was staring at me with kind eyes and a playful smirk. She wasn’t translucent or greenish nor any new media depiction of spirits, she was just there. Just the way she looked when I saw her died early that night in my dreams.

I approached her. She did the same towards me.

When standing a couple of feet from each other, my hand went to my jeans pocket, looking for the earphone that helped me talk to the ghouls that were still wandering this realm. I didn’t have it with me. I had abandoned the device, when I did the same to Luke…

Tears blurred the vision of my grandmother, whose lips I attempted to read in what I think was an: “I’m sorry.”

I begged her to wait, to repeat it to me.

She disappeared. She left me completely on my own in the middle of a foreign woods in a chilling storm.

I wiped my eyes with the hand I had holding the family relic. It twinkled against my chest.

I explored the necklace. It was a bright metal locket. It took me a couple of seconds to grasp the complexity of its opening mechanism, but I managed to crack it open. On one side, there was a picture of me when I was just a baby. On the other half, an old handwritten note was tucked in. After struggling a while with it, I managed to take it out.

“She bit a hard to chew family. Especially for her golden tooth.”

Fuck.

I ran towards the vehicle that was now a couple of inches deep in snow, turned it on, and steered to Morlden Village.

***

I parked three blocks away from the compound I had fled. Didn’t want to have the vehicle Mrs. Rowen had given me just laying outside for her to find it. I walked in the almost abandoned streets of the small European town past midnight. The wind almost froze me before I arrived at the South wall of the Morlden Village.

I couldn’t believe I was getting back into the lion’s den again. I got on top of a car that was just parked outside and leaped across the barrier.

Morlden Village was somehow perfect again. Absolutely top-notch maintenance in the parks’ grass, all buildings were crackless and homogeneously painted, and there was no evidence that this place once looked like a dystopian YA stereotypical novel. There were no elders with their reality perception completely altered wandering through the roads, nor brainwashed caregivers trying to make sure no one accidentally killed himself.

The snow hadn’t reached the state-of-the-art cognitive held attention facility, which allowed me to move without leaving a trace. I followed the path in the middle of a green area that delivered me directly to the medical unit.

It was good as new. Amazing white color inside and out. The broken glass doors were repaired, not locked. The main corridor was no longer under twinkling lights; brand new led tubes indicated the way. The treating area, with freshly cleaned and iron blankets, had just Mrs. Mitchell sleeping peacefully in there. At the back of the building, I reached Carly’s quarters.

I closed the door behind me and turned on the lights. My nurse friend woke up.

“Calm down,” I indicated her. “There’s something I need to know.”

“What are you talking about? Who are you?”

Confused, she stood up and approached me as if I was a lost patient from the facility.

“You know me? We were getting out, remember?”

“Are you in pain?” She asked in her health professional manner.

“Fuck this.”

I snatched the locket I retrieved from my grandma’s ruined house and placed it over Carly’s neck. As if it was a switch, her semblance and acting turned completely. She quit the worrying face for my mental state and replaced it with a worrying one for both of our safety.

“What happened?” She asked me directly.

“I fucked up. I got a new plan. Mrs. Rowen isn’t aware of me, I hope. Just something important I need to know: Was there any of my blood left in storage?”

“What?”

“When William was hurt and you took blood from me to give to him, you used it all?”

“Yes,” she answered still confused.

“So, you didn’t keep or storage any of my blood?”

“No.”

“Okay, that’s good. We still have a chance then.”

“A chance for what?”

“Get rid of Mrs. Rowen for good.”

Carly, who had been nodding the last five dialogue interchanges between us, suddenly stopped being in confusion and turned into decisive.

“What do you need from me?”

It felt good that, for once, someone just trusted me and didn’t question anything more than what was necessary.

“I need you to go to the shed. It’s in the North of the village. Shouldn’t be locked and if everything is back to normal it must be perfectly organized. You get a wrench or something like that. Wait for me. I’ll meet you outside Mrs. Rowen’s office.”

“Ok. What are you going to do?” She questioned me (it was too good to be true.)

“I’m going to get us some help,” I answered as vaguely as everyone talked in here. “Just another thing, does shiny things used to go missing here?”

Carly glared at me with the same delusion-induced-patient stare she had used with me for months. Then it morphed.

“Actually, they did.”

***

Thanks to Carly’s direction and the missing shiny objects, I found the way into the extincted goblins’ underground tunnel network. It was like the last time I used it, hard, dark, wet and, for my good luck, lifeless.

I crawled all the way into the center of the maze. I remembered completely the big central cavern with a monolith built of scrap that was now in pieces covering the whole ground. I took the tunnel that ended on Residence Building E.

I directed towards the place where I had slept and lived a couple of months against my will, accompanied by five cognitive held patients. The small bed/cot that worked as trapdoor for the goblins tunnel and resting place for the vigilante caregiver of the night, was in top of the hole when I reached my destination. I peeked my eyes just enough to make sure that it was dark and nobody was awake walking, but wasn’t sure that there was no caregiver sleeping in the bed over my head. I gambled.

I pushed the mattress and it lifted itself relatively easily. There was no one guarding. Mrs. Rowen didn’t have the time to replace the staff.

I walked towards the hallway that led to the bedrooms. In one, Mr. Bunn was sleeping deeply and snoring loudly. He was under Mrs. Rowen’s control; he was afraid of sleeping with an open door. I got inside my former bedroom.

You know the drill. Perfect conditions, stereotypical Nordic small cottage dorm, and too everything-in-its-placey that looked like a museum exhibition more than a place where someone actively lived in. I searched in all drawers. In the one under the night table, I found my paranormal communication earphone.

I thanked in my mind Mrs. Rowen perfectionist powers that, as I expected, returned my earphone to its rightful place.

I went back into the cave system that spread across Morlden Village. Reached the center and now took a turn towards the place’s cemetery where empty caskets were buried, so that Mrs. Rowen could keep draining the soul-energy from the dead bodies under the supermarket.

Once I was just below the graveyard, which I knew because Luke had met me there once, I placed my earphone on my auditive canal.

“Luke,” I whispered. “Are you there?”

Silence.

It was fitting that the ghost was sent to the dead place.

“Luke! Please.”

A static sound pierced my eardrum.

“Luke?!”

“Yes…?” he responded me, weakly.

“I’m sorry. Are you in the graveyard?”

“Me too. Yes, I’m here.”

“Great. On my way!”

I exited the tunnel in the closest residence building to the cemetery. Quietly and avoiding any unwanted attention, I headed to the place where my ectoplasmic undead friend was.

The darkness of the night allowed me to get undetected. It was a somber and cold atmosphere there. Luke lying against a tombstone, unable to move, was the most sinister thing about it. Margaret’s bracelet was holding his wrist on top of the gravestone. Elisa’s ring did the same with his finger from his other hand. And Paula’s magical witch-amulet brooch was pinned to his chest, pulling him down against the ground. He seemed like a tortured myth figure.

I took all the magical objects out of him.

“I’m sorry.” I started. “I know that you just wanted to know what happened and that she tricked you and lied. I should have believed you.”

“You should,” said Luke stretching as if his ectoplasmic muscles and joints had stiffened. “But I shouldn’t keep the information from you. I was so desperate to know why that I forgot the good that came with it.”

We smiled at each other in the corniest way ever.

“So, what’s the plan?” Luke wondered.

“We’re going to finish that bitch and get the truth,” I answered. “I need you to go deliver the bracelet and ring to Margaret and Elisa, we are going to need them. Give them the brooch too. They’ll surely meet me at Mrs. Rowen’s office.”

“But,” (always a ‘but’ with Luke,) “what if the windows to their rooms are closed? How I’m supposed to get inside?”

“Not know, but I trust you’ll find a way.” Beat. “You always had.”

Luke’s spirit nodded.

“I just need you to remember. Don’t get them out of their trance until I say your name, okay?”

“You’re the boss,” Luke replied.

He floated away towards residence building A, where Elisa surely was placed in a paranoia state under Mrs. Rowen’s control.

I went towards the eternal-youth-desiring evil witch’s office.

***

Once I arrived at the staff quarters, Carly was waiting for me outside.

“Great!” I extended my hand to receive the wrench from her. “You can go, now. This isn’t your fight.”

She didn’t give it to me.

“No way. We’re going to finish it.”

She was very definitive. There was no point in arguing about that.

We entered Mrs. Rowen’s office. The recently magically repaired window kept the cold wind outside, and the dark blinds prevented even moonlight from filtering into this place. The desk and chairs were in ideal condition. The now empty safe door was closed and just polished. All the pictures of birds and Mrs. Rowen’s old coven, composed of Elisa, Margaret, Paula and my grandmother, were back on the walls. No more “atomic” shadows in the floor. Everything was just as you would imagine a cozy office from a woods camp. Yet something was still off-putting.

Mrs. Rowen’s wrinkled, malnourished and fragile-looking body rested on the floor. Moveless.

I dropped close to her.

No heartbeat. No respiration.

“Open her mouth!” I commanded Carly.

“What?”

“Just do it,” I replied as I attempted to open it and peek inside.

She compelled, allowing me to check the inferior molars. As I feared, a molar was missing from her yellowish smirk.

“Shit, we’re late,” I declared.

“Late for what?”

My hands, lying over the inert cadaver, started sweating. My shinbone sent a throb of pain as a rising temperature was detected by my palms.

“Is she getting hot?”

“She is,” said Carly very confused when she touched her gently as a medical professional.

“Give me the wrench!”

She did.

I lifted the tool up in the air.

“Get back!” I warned my ally.

I dropped the cold metal.

It went through the old woman’s skin and cracked her skull.

Blood blotched out as if it was in a pressure cooker. It burst into flames before disappearing.

“What was that?”

The rest of her body kept getting hotter, almost infernally. From the hole in her head, fire was still coming out.

“Internat combustion,” I diagnosed.

“Exactly,” a familiar voice announced that we weren’t alone.

A young and strong, recently reborn Mrs. Rowen, smiled viciously like this was a game she had already won.

She extended her hand towards Carly, and my grandma’s locket flew out of her neck and into the rejuvenated witch’s grasp.

I stood up to confront her.

Carly started coughing, with her hands reaching for her throat. Mrs. Rowen was choking her from the distance as if this was Star Wars.

“I’ll give you my blood,” I started the bargain. “Just let her go unharmed.”

“Why not just killed you?” Mrs. Rowen engaged in it.

“And loose the opportunity of having me here as a tortured prisoner as all other members of your coven?”

Beat. She was considering it. I hit her where her evil nature tickled her.

Carly was running out of oxygen.

“I know you already performed the ritual with their blood and amulets, and now they are wandering around here too mentally damaged to go to the toilet alone. Why don’t you just complete the collection?” I made the offer more enticing through my word selection.

“Deal.”

Mrs. Rowen’s hand lowered, and the almost fainted Carly recovered her gasp.

“Go get the equipment for it,” Mrs. Rowen ordered Carly.

She looked at me for consent (as if it would have made any difference.)

“Do it,” were my only words.

Carly left. I stayed alone with Mrs. Rowen. We sat in silence, at opposite sides of the desk.

After a couple of minutes, I got desperate. I dealt with it to the best of my abilities, using my last result: talking shit.

“So, Mrs. Rowen… I suppose it’s okay for me to call you that. What does it feel like to use your coven, your family and closest friends, for your own selfish youth?”

My heart was pounding out of my chest, but I smiled as mockingly as possible.

Her frown twitched a little. Her smirk went away. No response.

Carly returned with a syringe for extracting blood and approached towards me.

“Wait,” Mrs. Rowen demanded. “I’ll do it myself.”

Carly’s face turned pale as her lips trembled looking for an answer.

“No, I’m the professional…” Carly mumbled.

Mrs. Rowen stood up.

“There’s no need for professionalism in this,” our evil foe declared.

“It’s okay. Let her do it,” I told Carly. “I love you, ever since the first time I saw you in the medical unit. I cannot stand you doing it.”

Carly looked at me confused. Her jaw dropped as her hands, holding the medical equipment, shivered uncontrollably.

Mrs. Rowen’s vicious smile and penetrating eyes returned to her semblance.

“Is that so? Then you’ll do it!”

The ball was back on Carly’s court to perform the blood sucking from my veins.

Carly slowly approached me. I, seated in the chair in front of Mrs. Rowen’s one, waited for her. She stopped just in front of me, blocking our enemy’s sight of me. She leaned into my ear.

“Nice bluff,” she whispered me.

I smiled and nodded gently. She pushed the syringe into the skin.

“You too,” I murmured back.

Carly took the blood-filled tube and needle out.

I placed my right hand over my left forearm.

“Make pressure over there,” my nurse friend indicated me.

“Don’t bother yourself with that,” Mrs. Rowen malignantly intervened.

I grabbed Carly’s right arm with my left hand as she was turning away from me. Her arm extended behind her body. I didn’t allow her to get away from me.

“Don’t be so corny,” Mrs. Rowen grunted as she stepped towards Carly and practically ripped the blood tube out of her hand.

Mrs. Rowen placed the necklace on the desk and opened the little container with scarlet liquid.

“Wait!” I interrupted her action. “Before going cognitively held for ever, can I say goodbye to Luke?”

Carly’s face turned into confusion again. Mrs. Rowen’s became even more nefarious looking.

“No,” the witch coldly responded with an almost cartoon-villain laughter.

She let the red substance drip into my grandma’s inherited relic, that swiftly got lost under a flood of viscous human fluid. Some pagan enchantments accompanied the spell, sounded like a mixture of Latin with Celtic, but really couldn’t be nothing more than gibberish. Mrs. Rowen’s opened her body ready to receive the eternal youth when…

Nothing.

“What did you do?” The furious manager that had trapped me wanted answers.

I uncovered my left forearm.

It was un-poked.

I released Carly’s right arm.

A couple of blood drops rolled out of a small hole in her skin.

Mrs. Rowen’s mind at a thousand revolutions per second was trying to make sense of how she had been bested, when a magical plasma ball shattered the window and impacted her face.

Elisa, an old, yet strong and mentally capable version of her, entered the room.

A disk-like glowing magical mandala flew into the office and gashed Mrs. Rowen’s arm.

I snatched the wrench from the floor.

Margaret, also in her old sorcerer form, joined the party.

I pushed the necklace out of the desk.

Elisa and Margaret used her magical abilities to hold Mrs. Rowen against the wooden table.

I placed the wrench into her mouth, directly over where her cadaver had a missing molar. I twisted the tool a little to make her feel it on her golden tooth’s root.

Mrs. Rowen’s semblance, for once, expressed fear. No confusion, frustration nor surprise. It was absolute and unfiltered terror.

“Why you sent him to that island? Why him specifically?” Now it was my turn to demand explanations.

Luke ectoplasmic body materialized in the office. He stared at the scene as if it was the final of the World Cup and his team was on the brink of finally winning.

“Why?!” I yelled at her.

“You’ll never know,” she pronounced as best as she could with a small wrench in her mouth, spitting a lot of saliva in the process.

“Tell me, or I’ll pull your tooth out!”

“You’ll do it anyway.”

“TELL ME!”

“Sleep.”

***

I fell back into my dreams, back in the ruins of the old Victorian mansion.

My grandmother’s specter was there. My mom’s one too.

Tears rolled down my face uncontrollably.

“You did good,” grandma told me with a gentle smile.

***

I woke up back in Mrs. Rowen’s office. I was over her. My hands had twisted the wrench and ripped her golden tooth out of her mouth.

I command my body to drop the weapon and back up. It didn’t.

Mrs. Rowen shrieked in agony.

Luke’s spirit flew out of my body.

Mrs. Rowen’s fresh skin started to fill with spots and wrinkles. Her muscles’ fibers teared into a snapping symphony, making her dermis hang from her bones like it was wet laundry on a clothesline.

I got away from her.

The suffering cry obfuscated the rumble of the wrench hitting the ground.

Mrs. Rowen’s bones started tightening against each other with untreatable arthritis, making her column bend in a perfect roman arc. Her pupils disappeared in the whiteness of cataracts that relentlessly formed over each other in her eyeballs. All her abundant hair fell in big bunches until her scalp ended up as smooth as a bowling ball, while her ear and nose got filled with thin white tentacle-like hairs. All her nails grew so large that pierced her weakened body.

Margaret and Elisa let their containment spells go.

The knees of the witch that had brought me here and had kept all of us prisoners gave in, making her collapse to the ground. A big hunch formed in her back as a mountain under the pressure of two opposing tectonic plates. Her skin turned ashy, blisters erupted all over her body and unoxygenated thick blood splattered out of every one of them. The rest of her teeth fell one by one with a clanky sound, almost like a kid’s happy melody.

The screaming stopped when her lungs collapsed with one final and almost imperceptible breath.

***

Later, we were all back in Morlden Village’s cemetery. The cutting-edge compound was back into ruins, as if in all the time under the perfection enchantment it had never been truly maintained.

The burial hole in front of us contained two corpses. Both belonged to the same person. One old. The other one was already inhuman. None of us even considered marking a name on the tombstone.

Elisa took the ring out of her finger. Her body weakened but not her cognitive state.

“Already lived for long enough,” she declared.

Carly and I smiled and solemnly nodded at her.

The old woman, who I encountered in my first night here and had helped me through multiple misadventures, threw the jewel into the grave. She strolled away slowly.

Margaret, with waterfall eyes, held Paula’s brooch. The last memory of a friendship she experienced for probably longer than anyone else could, went the same way that the ring.

“Thank you,” were Margaret’s last words before taking her bracelet out of her wrist.

“Thank you,” Carly and I responded in unison.

Her body lost strength and her column hunched a little. She was still psychologically capable. The bracelet went also into the pit. She wandered back into the village.

Carly and I remained; also, Luke, but he was out of Carly’s senses.

She threw a golden tooth into the darkness of the tomb.

I took a last look at my grandma’s relic, with a soaked in blood picture of baby me inside it. It followed the way of all the coven’s amulets.

Once the crater-filling with soil was done, the atmosphere became lighter.

“So, what’s next?” I asked Carly.

“I’m staying. Someone needs to take care of this place and its patients, now with no magic nor supernatural shit involved. Just the plain and boring dealing with dementia.”

She smiled subtly. I did the same.

“Well, if the State would let me…” she continued.

“It would,” I responded.

I handed her the property deeds and all the permissions that I had unknowingly taken with me last night when I abandoned the village.

“I’m sure that with a fake letter from Mrs. Rowen, that should be enough.”

I winked at her.

She hugged me.

“Thank you.”

I nodded uncomfortably. Not much into human contact. And I have just been possessed by a ghoul, which tends to make you feel somewhat dirty.

Once she left me go, I started walking towards the exit.

“Feel free to come visit anytime!” Carly excitedly yelled at me.

“Not soon,” I responded without looking back.

***

Just outside of the Morlden Village, Luke and I got inside Mrs. Rowen’s vehicle. I opened the driver’s door to enter; he just phased through the passenger’s one. I stared at my old friend.

“I’m sorry you’ll never know the truth about why it was you she sent there,” I whispered to my ghostly ally through the supernatural communication earphone.

He smirked. Or an approach to it that his torn-apart manifestation allowed him.

“It’s okay,” he assured me. “I was thinking that maybe it was just bad luck. Or perhaps I had very cheap fees for, no-questions-asked, travel to an abandoned island to kidnap a guy into Europe.”

We both giggled at his recovered sense of humor.

“But, I like to believe that it was just meant to happen.” Luke concluded.

“I like that.”

We both nodded for a second. I was just ready to turn the keys when…

Knock! Knock!

I turned to my window. It was Dalia. She was outside of the vehicle. Pavlo was behind her.

Shit.

I rolled down my window.

“We need to talk to you,” Dalia informed me.

I exited the car and shook hands with the two police officers that had accused me of murder after my first night in this motherfucking place. Was like if Morlden Village didn’t want me to leave.

“I’m not tied anymore to this,” I explained them while pointing at the dementia village that was now under new management. “The charges against me were insufficient because there was no way that I could have caused a spontaneous internal combustion inside her body.”

“How you know that?” Pavlo asked, truly surprised and pumped of genuine curiosity.

“Doesn’t matter,” Dalia got in the way.

“Exactly! Nor the fact that I also know she was missing the last left lower molar.” I delighted myself in teasing them a little.

“Maybe that’s why they want him back in the States,” Pavlo quietly told Dalia his theories.

I heard him fine and smiled, pleased. Dalia, in response, made an upset gesture.

“You know some Russel guy?” Dalia finally asked me.

Russel? Like my probation officer that got me trapped on an island, doing his dirty job of taking care of the abandoned and haunted Bachman Asylum? He must have died on his yacht that sailed into the open ocean, at the hands of a greed hunting creature.

“I knew one,” I replied cautiously.

“They found his body. And they want to ask you some questions.”

Shit. I’ll keep you posted about that.

*

*

*

To be continued on: “Paranormal Road Trip”