Page 1 of Spellbound

“Going so soon? I wouldn’t hear of it. Why, my little party’s just beginning.”

~The Wicked Witch, The Wizard of Oz

The Blue Ridge Mountains are incredibly old.

Older than any mountains in America or even the world—older than the rings of Saturn.

They’ve stood for millions and millions of years and might stand for millions more.

They wear their immense age with grace and majesty and cover their age-marks with a haze that looks like a soft, blue veil.

I dreamed that I was back there again, standing outside the old home of the Cromwell family.

Maybe it wasn’t a dream, after all, but a nightmare, come to think of it, because the walls of the Cromwell house are blackened now; the roof is gone, and only the ruins of the house remain standing. And I’d never wanted to go there again.

But in my dream, ghostly faces peered out of the pieces of the old, wavy glass that somehow clung stubbornly to a few of the windowpanes here and there.

Ghosts flitted under the trees as well, peeking out at me from behind the lacy skirts of the Spruce trees that lined what was left of driveway, or drifting past me through the trees and into the woods beyond.

I wasn’t surprised to see them, because I already knew that the ghosts of Cromwell house were very real.

In the deep woods surrounding the old house, whenever you heard someone call your name or heard whistles and mournful sounds, like humming or moaning, you were warned never to answer or call back.

They might be all that’s left of some poor soul who had died here, a long time ago, starved or lost or frozen or killed by animals or some other kind of wild and savage thing.

They could be the spirits of dead soldiers, frightened and alone and angry that their lives had been cut short, or an indigenous person, bitter about their homes being invaded and stolen from them.

Or a young woman, barely out of her teens, dead in childbirth and mourning for the child she never got to raise.

Spirits like these can grieve endlessly for their losses, though in the end, it changes nothing, accomplishes nothing, helps nothing.

Nevertheless, these souls create powerful and hungry ghosts.

Some of the ghosts who walk there are so old and have been there for so very long that they’ve forgotten their names and who they once were.

They wait in dim, shadowy places and they’ve lost any scrap of the humanity they once had.

All that’s left is seething malice and envy toward the living, and they take every opportunity to feed on any living energy they can find.

They are consumed by greed and hatred and spite.

They tend to linger in the places where they died, though they could wander for miles, invisible during the daylight hours and appearing mostly at night.

They’re especially attracted to practitioners of magic or witchcraft, from whom powerful, elemental energy might be extracted.

They don’t stay long, unless they find a living source to feed from.

Then they might try to attach themselves, and feed until their victim is drained completely dry.

Suddenly, in the way of dreams, I became aware that Ben was standing beside me. He took my hand, and I pulled strength from him and from the etheric flow that ran so strongly through him. “It’s time to come home now,” he said, tugging me gently away. “Time to come back to me. There’s danger here.”

“Yes, I need to go. Away from all these ghosts.”

He slipped his warm arm around me, taking away some of the chill as he drew me away. “No,” he said. “No, don’t give them a name. We don’t know what they are yet.”