The pain of the knife blade dragging down his arm, from elbow to wrist, is searing. Landis opens his mouth to scream, but inhales a mouthful of dirt instead as Gen kneels on his back, putting her whole weight on him to keep him down. He can still just barely hear Otter struggling - how are the witches holding him back? He’s bigger than almost all of them by at least a foot, but maybe some kind of spell - no, don’t be an idiot, spells aren’t real. They got him over the head with a rock or something. Can’t believe he agreed to come. He wanted to be friends. Now he’s dead. Good going. How does every one of your friends wind up dead?
“There we go,” Gen coos in his ear.
She grabs Landis again, almost choking him with the collar of his shirt, and yanks him upright. He coughs out a mouthful of dirt and moss and blinks, looking for Otter and the other witches. They’re not far - Sparrow and Tara are flanking him on one of the logs around the fire, Aster using him like a chair and bouncing excitedly on his lap. Otter’s expression is resigned, but his eyes are dark and murderous, his mouth tensed halfway between a frown and a snarl.
Gen sees Landis looking. She laughs. “Did you think we were going to kill your friend? Please. As long as you’re good, we’re not going to kill either of you.”
“Why -” Landis starts, coughs again, restarts. “Why did you ask me -”
“Why did we ask you here?” Gen finishes for him. She smiles, but doesn’t answer, and pulls him forward towards the fire pit instead.
The fire is still going, incredibly. Landis stares down at it, wondering vaguely what the witches would do if he threw himself into it without warning. Would they still be able to use my bones and scraps of clothing for whatever ritual they’re doing? Would they kill Otter and use him instead? Or would it be enough of a distraction for Otter to escape, grab me, and run back to the car?
Gen takes the wrist of his injured arm in a vice grip, and holds it over the fire. The flame hisses and sputters as blood drips down into it, then, improbably, turns electric green. Landis can’t manage to peel his eyes away from it. The flame grows, its heat licking at Landis’s wound, hungry for more blood, and he tries to move away but he’s frozen to the spot. His body is tensed up, ready to run, but he can’t force himself to take a step - not away from the fire, and not towards it.
Gen is chanting in a language he doesn’t recognize, something guttural and awful. Aster joins her, more shrilly, then the two other witches, harmonizing with each other and the furious spitting of the fire. As they reach a crescendo, louder than Landis’s heart hammering in his ears, the fire turns jet black and blossoms upwards.
“Yes!” Gen screams. She chants louder, audibly straining to keep her voice from being lost over the crackling flames, and the other witches follow suit. Landis tries to pick out words in what they’re saying, but it’s all a jumbled mess of sounds that he can’t understand. It sounds more like gibbering than an actual language.
Gen is still holding tight to Landis’s arm, and uses it to pull him backwards a few steps. He watches as the fire climbs upwards towards the sky, still unable to look anywhere else. Despite being black, it’s somehow bright - it stands out brilliantly in the otherwise dark night, a furiously whirling pillar of flame at least eight feet tall. It’s going to burn down the forest, he thinks, hysterically. They’re going to set the park on fire. We’re all human sacrifices.
Abruptly, like the opening of a cocoon, the fire unfurls itself and dissipates. Embers scatter into haphazard constellations that glow and die on the ground around the fire pit. Landis hears one of the witches, maybe Aster, yelp as they shower from the sky. The woods are oddly silent, now - no insects buzzing or chirping, no bird calls, not even the sound of cars on the road in the distance. It’s as though all the sound has suddenly been sucked away.
“Did we fail?” Sparrow asks, breaking the silence.
“We can’t have,” Gen says. “We had everything right - the fire, the blood, the - the incantation. We can’t have failed.”
“But nothing happened,” Sparrow says.
Landis’s head feels like someone is hammering nails into it, and he wants to groan, but bites his tongue. The pain in his arm is white-hot.
“We have him!” Gen shrieks, her voice breaking with the effort. She pushes Landis from behind, and he stumbles towards the fire pit, landing on the ground on his hands and knees. He feels bile rise in his throat. “We brought him to you! We gave you his blood! Take your vessel back, and be bound to us, agent of chaos!”
Landis’s stomach lurches as he tries to scramble to his feet. His arms and legs are caked with dirt and ash from his fall. He manages to get upright, and ducks Gen as she grabs for him again, maybe to push him back down. He wants to run, and this time his feet and legs are moving, but he’s as shaky as a newborn deer and only gets a few steps away before tripping over his own feet. What’s the point in running? You wouldn’t be able to save Otter, anyway. You’d have to leave him behind, to die, probably.
He picks himself up and keeps running regardless. Maybe if I get out of here and call the cops, they’ll get here before anything bad happens to Otter. Maybe the witches will chase me and forget about Otter. I should call Austin. Austin will know what to do.
He’s only a few steps out of the clearing - Gen in pursuit with the knife - when the noise in the fire pit starts. It’s a wet, sloshing sound like someone pouring mud out of a bag, and it sets Landis’s teeth on edge as much as nails on a chalkboard, but he still can’t help but turn around and see what it is. Doing so makes him seriously consider the pros and cons of calmly clawing his own eyes out then and there.
Something is standing in the middle of the fire pit. The figure is out of focus, but no matter how Landis squints, or how many steps back into the clearing he takes, his view of it doesn’t sharpen. It’s gray like television static, or maybe like putrid dead fish, and its body is dripping large chunks of itself, globs that hit the ground with wet smacking sounds. The longer he looks at it, the longer Landis feels like he’s losing his grip on reality, and he can’t decide if he wants to run into the figure’s arms and let it embrace him or if he wants to leave Antlers, Colorado and never come back.
He opens his mouth, and he thinks it’s to scream, but his voice comes out even and calm instead.
“I know you.”
The figure begins to shake - Landis can’t tell what it’s doing at first, but then he realizes that it’s raising and lowering its shoulders, pantomiming a laugh. It turns around, to look at him with its vaguely defined face, and then its voice seems to come from everywhere and nowhere at once, a horrible, crushing wave of whispers and screams. Landis sees Gen wince next to him, and knows she can hear it too.
Are you surprised?
well. this is probably not fine