Page 5 of Wallflower Witch

I turn back to my car and bend down, retrieving my phone from the cupholder. Spinning back around, I pull open the notes app.

“Here.” I hold it out to him.

His shoulders slump, and he shakes his head. He turns toward the side of the road, and I swallow down a scream. An axe is lodged in his back, the handle broken in half.

“Oh shit! I’ll call someone! Hang on! You should probably sit down.” I look down to see a No Signal across the top of my phone. “Shoot! I’m sor—”

The man is gone.

How could he move that quickly when he’s so injured? I’m debating going after him or going farther into town to see if I can find help when the fog lifts like it was never there. I move to the side of the road and look down the wooded path. He’s not there. He’s not walking up the trail or lying on the ground passed out.

“Not again. I thought coming here would give me answers.” I rub my eyes, then check one more time before getting into the car and crawling slowly across the bumpy path that GPS insists is the correct route..

Cresting the hill, I find myself in a dilapidated area that could have been a nice neighborhood at one point. What’s left of the houses sit on lots that have some of the large trees cleared out. The houses look like log cabins, and I’m hit with a wave of nostalgia for simpler times. Most of the windows are boarded up, and the ones that aren’t appear to be broken in their frames. The yards which may have been beautiful gardens are overgrown with weeds. Whoever lived here has been gone a long time.

“What happened here?” I ask Quoth.

He caws, then turns to look back out the window.

I speed up, hoping to find someone who can clue me in on what this town is and why I was drawn here. My car bumps down the road, and I cringe, hoping I’m not condemning it to the mechanics when all is done.

A woman standing in her yard catches my attention. I stop in front of her and roll the window down.

“Hello,” I call out. “I hate to disturb you, but I am hoping you could help me.”

She looks around like she is searching for someone else before turning back to me.

“Are you from here?” I try again.

The lady cocks her head to the side, then points to herself.

“Yes. Are you from here?”

She glides forward toward the car, still scanning around like someone is going to jump out of the weeds and take over.

“I’m sorry if I spooked you,” I try again. “Can you tell me if there’s somewhere I can rent a room for tonight? I work in the city and have been transcribing journals from when the town was founded, and I just can’t get this place out of my mind, so I came to see it for myself.”

She pauses a few feet from my car. She smiles and lifts her hand, pointing farther up the road. Her mouth opens, but again no sound comes out. Her hand moves this way and that, as if she is going through telling me how to get somewhere, but I can’t hear a thing. My brow furrows. What’s happening to me? The woman moves closer to the car and places her hand on the window frame where mine is. A rush of cold, like stepping into a freezer, fills me.

Suddenly, I’m not in my car in the middle of the road; I’m standing in a living room with a glass of champagne in my hand. I’m waiting for someone to arrive, but I can’t remember who. I lift the glass and take a sip. It tastes weird, but maybe it’s a new brand.

I gasp and blink rapidly, bringing my surroundings back into focus. The woman is nowhere to be found, but I don’t care. I hit the gas pedal and shoot up the road. I desperately need to find someone or somewhere normal.

* * *

Coming out of the forest, I find an area that looks slightly better off than the area I left. Ten houses sit in a circle around what could have once been a park. It’s hard to tell. The space in the middle is a large open area filled with… nothing. Well, almost nothing. There’s a wooden structure with what looks like a rope noose hanging from the middle of it.

I park my car, grab Quoth, and get out to take a closer look. After a few steps, I stop looking around. I could swear I feel eyes on me but don’t see anyone. I see a large crack running through the earth in a circle just behind the houses; ranging from a few inches deep in some spots to deep enough I can’t see the bottom from where I stand in others. It’s almost like something attacked this area, or maybe the area beyond. The houses inside the circle seemed to have fared better than the ones I passed on the way in.

I shake my head and continue toward the center. The ground is red dirt, not a blade of grass or weed to be seen in the whole space.

“I wonder why nothing grows here?” I say to Quoth. “It’s like the land is dead.”

He flaps his wings from his perch on my shoulder.

I continue closer, wanting to look at the rope that survived whatever happened here. As I cross onto the dirt, I blink, then startle. I’m suddenly surrounded by at least a dozen people. My breath catches as air refuses to enter my lungs. I spin around trying to figure out how they snuck up without me hearing anything

Men, women, and even some children mill about the area. If I believed in magic, I’d say this place had a concealment spell on it, but I know that’s not real. A few at a time, they seem to notice me. Some smile. Some glare. Some look me over before turning and continuing on with what they were doing beforehand. A woman walks over with a smile plastered on her face. She’s dressed in a long black dress that loosely covers her from wrist to ankle, along with a white apron and bonnet. She looks like she stepped out of a story about pilgrims.

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