Page 18 of The Folklore of Forever (Moonville #2)

Eighteen

In July 1952, at a quarter after two p.m., over forty witnesses reported snow falling over Downigan Cemetery, piling thick enough to bury the tombstones. It did not snow anywhere else, and the temperature in town was recorded to be ninety-one degrees. The snow melted by the end of the day, and there remains no explanation for what occurred.

Local Legends and Superstitions, Tempest Family Grimoire

Morgan wrests his arm from my grasp, exasperated. “What is wrong with you?”

“A lot.”

“Never going to sleep peacefully again. Thanks. No wonder you wrote about sleep paralysis demons.”

“I’ve never written about sleep paralysis demons.”

“Yes, you have. Tall, thin, upside-down-walkers with tentacles that transform from solid into gas. In Cave of a Thousand Crystal Wings , they stole Henriette in her sleep and tied her to the ceiling.”

He’s right. “I completely forgot about that.”

“How? You wrote it.”

I shrug. “The demons were just background characters. Second-string villains.”

“The background characters are my favorite. What sort of monsters are you incorporating into the book you’re working on now?”

I flick all thoughts of books and writing away before they can trigger full panic, having already succumbed to the first stage of it, with weak legs and nausea. “Do you think that light looks closer now?”

“Don’t even start,” Morgan scoffs.

“No, really! I’m not suggesting it’s anything creepy.”

“Speaking of creepy. How was your movie date?”

“Don’t know yet. We had to reschedule because his parents decided to drop in from Michigan for a week and are staying with him.” I pinch his elbow. “And Dylan is not creepy.”

“Sure, he’s great if you’re into beady reptilian eyes. His face is like one of those filters that shows you what you would look like if you were completely symmetrical. You know? Which you’d think would be attractive but instead the result is sinister. He looks like he wears a beige backpack around in his own house, and he’s filled it with knives.”

“He does not! Dylan looks like he could do my taxes in under ten minutes. Like he barely watches television, but when he does, it’s the Travel Channel. Which I find hot.”

“He looks like he reads Kerouac in bed,” Morgan replies gleefully. “To his lovers. Then explains the metaphors to them.”

“I’m not listening.”

For the next few minutes, Morgan amuses himself inventing Dylan trivia. “He tells people he’s lower middle class and thrifts all his clothes, but he’s just referring to the one jacket that he stole from the coatroom they put rich people’s jackets in at fancy restaurants. You know, if this whole finding-the-Black-Bear-Witch-and-getting-magic-from-her thing doesn’t pan out, you could do worse than fall in love with me. I’m so much better-looking than Dylan, and I’ve got a friend with keys to the library. I’ll ravage you in the reference section.”

“Stop trying to charm me. You’re so fake, you’ve got seven different names.” I shake my head. “I can’t believe you write that whole newspaper by yourself. You’ve got to be exhausted!”

“Nah. I write in batches, staying up all night churning out enough material to stretch for two weeks. Interviews with made-up people, horoscopes recycled from last year, petty squabbles between neighbors, predictions about the weather based on my mood. I work quickly, then get bored because I run out of stuff to do.”

“You could report on real news?” I suggest.

“Zelda, do you hate me? Do you want me to lose my will to live?”

“Sorry.”

I wish I could stay up all night pounding out ten thousand words. At one point, words were a creative playground of endless possibilities. Now they’re expectations and fear and delete , delete , delete . Words are an ugly comparison game. Not good enough.

I’m not done yet! I want to shout. This is my dream. I’ve still got more to offer!

Isn’t it still my dream?

“Zelda?”

Morgan’s voice is a few hops ahead, and I realize I’ve stopped walking. What if this isn’t my dream anymore? What else am I meant to do? Anxiety surges, zero to one hundred, and I’m not prepared for it. Who am I? Who is Zelda Tempest and what is her purpose? I’ve always been so sure of it before.

“Are you all right? Did you get hurt?”

“No,” I reply dazedly. “I’m fine.”

His hand slips into mine, and when we go on together, moonlight begins to striate our surroundings. At first, I think we’ve reached a meadow in the forest. The next step brings my foot down into water, the level almost high enough to swell inside my boot.

Not a meadow. A marsh.

It extends far enough that the woods continuing on the other side are bluish with mist. Cool air rises off the black mirror, laden with lily pads, cattails, reeds, and ferns. Pink clumps of flowers wave in a gentle breeze. And about twenty feet out, a crystal-ball-sized sphere of light sits suspended low over the water.

“That’s not quite a streetlamp,” I murmur.

Morgan retains a grip on me as he leans forward slightly, drinking up the sight. “What is it?”

We crane our necks, studying the moon, trying to gauge how this could be explained by light refraction. If it were a soft, weak light, that would make sense—but that’s not what this is. It’s too bright, opaque. And the water beneath it shines like white fire, illuminating the tiny fish zinging along. “It looks like…” Morgan says breathlessly.

“A will-o’-the-wisp,” I insert.

His body unwinds, upright, every atom of his being fixated on the scene. “Witchlight.”

“What?”

“A fragment of a witch’s magic, which roams free after the witch is deceased. It wanders until it finds other witch magic to cluster to.”

This sounds familiar. “They’re supposed to accumulate to form poltergeists, right?”

He only nods, as though afraid the witchlight will hear us. And then he lifts one foot and steps into the water.

“Morgan!” I bend, hands on my knees. “What are you doing? You’re wearing loafers!”

“My poor choice of footwear is an inadequate reason to not investigate,” he replies without glancing back, slowly wading toward the light. With every gentle slosh, his black trousers grow even darker, water spreading up the fibers.

I begin to argue that this is a bad idea when cold water spills up my legs and I look down to discover that I, too, have begun walking toward the light. My thoughts uncurl like a flat, reaching fog, going a bit dreamy. It’s impossible to tell if I’m walking of my own subconscious volition or if I’m being pulled. Water splashes around me.

“Shhh,” Morgan chastises me quietly. “You’re being too loud.”

“Do you think it has ears?”

“We don’t know what it has, or what it is for sure. Could be a fairy.”

It is ludicrous that my knee-jerk reaction is excitement, but here we are: I am swishing through wetlands in the dead of night with Morgan Angelopoulos, potentially ruining these glorious boots so that I can get a closer look at some bright, shiny thing, and that means I am nothing less than ludicrous.

Ah, well. I suppose I’m just going to go with it now.

We walk for a few minutes but still haven’t reached our destination. “Is it moving?” I say, puzzled.

“It looks like it’s staying still,” Morgan says, “but also kind of receding?”

I move faster, not caring if it makes my splashing louder. Soon I outstrip Morgan. Still, we don’t get any closer to the light; it’s the same distance away as it was when we stood on dry land. “Strange.”

“Magic,” he counters.

With an unearthly glow like that, one has no choice but to allow for the possibility of unearthly answers.

A massive, dark shape lumbers into my periphery, and I immediately shoot out a hand to seize Morgan’s sleeve. He falls still beside me just as a bear slaps its heavy paw into the water, head down, and roots around by the light.

How is it that an animal can get near to it, but we can’t?

I’ve never been this close to a bear before. It’s smaller than I would have expected, but clearly an adult, black all over except for its light brown muzzle.

And then Morgan moves.

My muscles tense, thinking he’s going to bolt, that the bear will give chase—but no. Morgan sidesteps behind me, hands capping my shoulders.

I turn to stare up at him, aghast. “Are you hiding behind me?” I whisper.

Morgan swallows, then returns to my side. “Of course not, gorgeous.”

“Call me ‘gorgeous’ again and I’ll punch you.” I don’t like that I still like it. I want to put a bag over his pretty head—it’d make it easier to keep my thoughts organized.

“Sorry, bad habit. Let’s move on.”

“You were totally hiding behind me! You want to sprinkle me with salt and pepper so that I’ll be more appetizing for the bear!”

“If anything, I’d decorate you with fish guts,” he hisses back, as we both shuffle away slowly. “Bears would appreciate that more than seasoning.”

The bear stalks closer to the light, head bobbing as it sniffs around. For the first time, the light visibly spasms.

“It moved!” I whisper.

“So should we.”

Right.

The light swerves, sharply enough to elicit a gasp from both of us. The bear makes a frustrated snuffling noise, batting at it, mouth open. And then…

Well, there is no way to describe this except that the bear appears to be eating the light while the light hops frantically, trying to get away. Its glow flutters and dims, becoming a half moon, then a crescent, as bites are taken out of it.

“I wish I had my phone so that I could record this,” Morgan utters quietly.

Not quietly enough. The bear looks up.

Goose bumps erupt. Its eyes reflect the last wisp of light streaking the fur of its muzzle like ghost blood, and it freezes just as I do. There is something so wrong about the bear that my body doesn’t do the human-reflex thing and run for my life. Rather, I take a step closer . Morgan snatches me back, I hear a series of loud splashes, and once the mist resettles on the water, the bear is gone.

The spell breaks.

Land, which took several minutes to wade away from, takes mere seconds to reach again. The hairs on the back of my neck stand up, and I feel as though I’m being watched. The sensation is inexplicable. It isn’t terror. It’s curiosity and compulsion. Sixth sense. I know something, but at the same time, I don’t have it figured out yet.

“Did that bear look weird to you?” I ask as we empty marsh water from our shoes. Lily pads cling to my boots.

“Besides the fact that it might have eaten a ball of energy left behind by a dead witch?”

“No. It didn’t look…completely like a bear.”

Morgan’s brow furrows. “How so?”

“I can’t explain. It felt like I was looking at one type of animal, but a different type of animal was looking back at me. One hidden inside it.”

“You think it might be the Black Bear Witch? Or a paranimal. Like the squirrel that isn’t a squirrel?”

I’m not certain. Now that I think about it, I can’t quite remember what was wrong about the bear.