September 5, 1799
Moonlight highlighted the orange undertones of Selah’s fiery, red hair as she knelt by the attic window. She held herself still and listened as she stared at the door. Meanwhile, her fingers crept up the shadowed, wooden wall.
The plank between her fingers ended just under the window sill, and left a dark empty space, barely noticeable, there. She felt her way over to the empty space and crept her fingers over the edge. She closed her eyes and held her breath as she tugged on the plank. The wood gave with only a whisper. Her shoulders relaxed as she let her breath out. Still her eyes remained on the door.
Her other hand reached the bottom hoop of her yellow skirt and pulled out a book a little bigger than her hands. The book was only a little darker than her own pale freckled skin, and stitched in several places. The ink scrawl across the front read “Booke off Shadowes.” Tender fingers and loving stroked the supple cover softened from hours of oiling.
Somewhere deep in the tall mansion below here, the house shifted and creaked. She snatched her eyes from the book and turned to the door. When she was sure there was no threat she placed the book in the empty space of the wall with quick movements and replaced the plank. Then she crawled back over to the ropes that lay slack around the leg of a bed. She squeezed her hands and wrists back into the loops made for them and made sure they appeared tight. Then she sat staring into the shadows.
September 5, 1999
The wind howled outside. Rain pelted the windows and rusted aluminum siding. Raetta sat at the kitchen table. The only light came the flickering flames on the wicks of the black candles that formed a crescent around the Ouija board in from of her.
Her heart hammered. She tugged at the sleeve of her flannel shirt. She had to do it tonight. This was her only chance. Mom wouldn’t get off shift for another couple of hours.
As she looked over the tan and blackness in front of her, she thought about how much work had gone into getting all of it. Money was tight. She’d had to beg, borrow, and steal to get the cash. Even then, her mother, a holy roller, would throw it all away if she knew. She was only 13. Was she selling her soul for this revenge?
Then she remembered all of the times Syballine and her posse, the most popular girls in Merritt Brown Middle School had pulled her hair and pushed her. Catcalls like “Ginger!” and “No soul!” rang in her head. Laughter at her cheap shoes, (“What are those?”), and her Goodwill special clothes. Her bottom lip shook. She choked back a sob. She’d felt so small, so embarrassed, so worthless. She’d wanted to do. No matter what it took, she’d get them.
She placed both her hands on the planchette and closed her eyes. She remembered her Uncle Jed telling her the old family legend at a bonfire one time.
“Long ago, our great-great-great-great-great-great Aunt Selah was sent to this boarding school. It was a boarding school for girls that were troublesome, you know? I think they said it was called the Perfection Institute, or whatever. Girls went there all mad and mean and graduated real dolls, sweet and smart, real well-to-do.
“Selah was an orphan sent to old Francis Soward, remember him? With the dead wife and the four kids to take care of? That’s how our family went from rich to rednecks, remember? Selah’s own mother died not to long before Francis’ wife did. Selah wasn’t anything but trouble. Some family members say she caused the death of Francis’ wife, but we don’t know for sure. Anyway, he sent her off to that Perfection Institute, thinking maybe he could marry Selah off after she graduated to the local rich boy. You know, that way she could keep him and his kids off the streets.
“But then he got a letter from the Institute’s headmistress, Edwina Crane. Selah had been accused of witchcraft by some of her classmates. Ms. Crane investigated those claims and went through Selah’s stuff and found evidence of witchcraft. A local preacher came and tried to get her to repent. However, when he quoted scriptures, she had a seizure or something and died.
“Now, this wasn’t the first time a witch had showed up in the family tree. While Francis was livid that his only lifeline was now gone, he abhorred the shame associated with his niece’s activities. So he just let it go.”
Her meditation on her aunt’s legend complete, she called out, “Aunt Selah.” Outside, the thunder rolled so loud the table shook. Raetta counted to the three and called again, “Aunt Selah.” The rain continued its assault. The candles flickered in a wind she couldn’t feel. She waited a whole minute. “Aunt Selah?” Her voice shook and cracked.
In the living room, the television came on, noise and static at full volume. In the kitchen, cabinet doors creaked open and slammed shut over and over again. Raetta stood up, her whole body trembling.
“What have I do?” Her hands shook. “What do I do? I’m so scared. What do I do?”
Abruptly, the television went off and the creaking and slamming stopped. She looked around, confused. Then she found her eyes drawn to the old family mirror on the wall, dirt permanently specked on the corners. She found herself walking over to the mirror. The closer she got to her reflection, the more her reflection changed. Freckles showed on her cheeks where they’d never been. Her eyes, sky blue, turned yellow.
A yellow bow showed up just behind the crown of her head. Her flannel shirt was now a yellow dress with peal buttons down the front and up her throat to just under her chin. The sleeves puffed at the shoulder.
Her reflection’s brow became law, eyes filled with a secret knowledge, and smile filled with a bitterness that reached back centuries.
“Boo!” The reflection said.
Raetta screamed.
#
September 5, 1799
After what seemed like hours, the attic door opened, let in a shadow came over to her, knelt and placed what it was carrying on the floor.
“Miz Selah?” The voice frail with age, but deep with race.
“Monemia?” Selah suspected the shadow may be the leader of the house slaves, an elderly woman who was rumored among the students to have been a medicine woman in Africa before she was enslaved and brought over.
“Yes’m.” The shadow nodded.
Selah blinked and stared at the shadow. “I don’t understand. Why are you here?”
“I’z wonderin’ if youze hungry, Miz Selah.” Monemia knelt. Now she could see the woman’s whizened face and maid uniform.
In her house in Massachusetts, before Momma died, they didn’t have slaves. The whole topic made her angry. Now, since she had a choice, she wasn’t going to allow them to serve her.
“No, ma’am. But thank you.”
Monemia chuckled. “I didn’t figure.” Then she reached over to what she’d been carrying and brought it closer. As it got closer, Selah could see that it was a tray covered in a towel.
The towel was removed the towel to reveal a dagger with symbols carved in its wooden handle, a dead rat, some powder, a cup of water and some herbs.
“My athame!”
Monemia nodded. “I found it in Miz Crane’s office, on her desk. She say she found it in your trunk.”
Selah took a deep breath. “Okay. So what are they going to do?”
“Miz Crane went to Orangeburg for Pastor Evans. She’s not going to be too much longer. We have to hurry.”
“What are we going to do?”
“I’m going to bind you to Orisha Chango. He going to help you get revenge against those biddies that accused you of witchcraft. But in return, you got to do something for me. I know you can slip out of those restrains, come one now.”
“What’s that? And how is this Chango going to help me? What’s Orisha?”
“Orisha is kind of like a god or a spirit. Chango is very powerful. I’m going to give you something that will kill you. As a ghost, I need you to kill everyone at this here school except the slaves. We slaves going to run and be free. When you give Chango the souls of them girls, he going give you your body back.”
Selah considered this for a moment. Then she nodded.
#
So here’s the weird part about Aunt Selah’s story, right?” Uncle Jeb continued. “A week after that note was sent, a man passing by stopped at the house. Now, nearly 60 people including slaves were said to have lived there. All the slaves were gone. However, forty one people, students and staff, were all found dead. Only nine students survived and were found in what we would call the shed. They were so terrified, they wouldn’t speak of what happened…”
“So what did happen, Uncle Jeb?”
“Well, I don’t know. But they say if you go out there in early September, you can hear Aunt Selah moaning…”
September 5, 1999
“Aunt Selah?”
The rain pattered on. Otherwise silence hung in the house like an unseen presence.
“Selah Webb?”
The planchette slid across the table toward Raetta. Her breath hitched and the hairs on the back of her neck stood up.
She grabbed the planchette and sat down in front of the Ouija board. She placed both hands on the planchette, took a few deep breaths, and closed her eyes.
“Selah….” Her voice shook. “I need your help.”
The planchette moved quickly and dragged her in jerky motions. She read the letters aloud. “L-E-T-M-E-I-N.” She ran over to the fridge, grabbed a pen and wrote the letters down.
“Letmein?” Her ancestor was Irish, not German, so that couldn’t be right. Wait a minute. Oh. “Let. Me. In.” Her brows squeezed together. “Let you in? Where?” She ran back over to the Ouija board. This time, the planchette moved before she touched it. She sounded out the letters phonetically this time.
“Y-o-u-r-s-o-u-l.”
She thought for a moment. “My soul? How?”
“K-i-s-s-t-h-e-m-i-r-r-o-r… Kiss the mirror?” The idea sounded kind of silly. However, she wanted this revenge. She stood up. Once again, her reflection changed to that of her ancestor’s. She leaned forward.
As her lips connected with those in the mirror, her reflection turned into liquid shadow and melted into Raetta’s lips. Once the shadow was gone, she pulled back from the mirror.
She took a deep, rattling breath, then coughed out black smoke.
“Ahhhh…” her voice was now gravelly and deep. “So nice to be clothed in flesh again.”
Septemer 6, 1999
“Must we wear such mannish clothes? We look like a lumber jack.”
“Yes, Auntie. We must. If I change too much, people will suspect. Mom will suspect I’m possessed or something. I had to throw away everything from last night as it was.”
She sighed deeply. “Fine. If you insist. Thankfully, it won’t be too much longer anyway. Thank the stars, too! I do declare this heat is absolutely sweltering!”
“Well, like they say. Ain’t no heat like the South Carolina heat!”
“Who says that? Posh and poppycock! They didn’t say it in my time. You modern people are so odd!”
Raetta sat in a small grove, the oaks draped in spanish moss. The shadows that dappled the leafy carpet began their stretch toward the creeping twiligiht.
“Are they coming?”
“Yes, Auntie. Any minute now.”
Abruptly, the sharp, cruel laughter of girls could be heard.
“Can you believe what Bethany was wearing today?” Syballine’s high pitched valley girl accent made Raetta cringe inside. Syballine was the ring leader of her little clique. “It looks like she went shopping in her grandmother’s closet!”
She thought Bethany’s dress had been gorgeous.
“You know, it’s weird… I haven’t seen a bug, bird, or really any animals for about half a mile now.” If Syballine was the ring leader, Jenny was like her right hand man. Syballine never went anywhere without Jenny tagging along like a lost puppy at her heels. Raetta wasn’t sure if Jenny’d ever had a thought that was truly her own.
Good heavens, they could be exact replicas those biddies that doomed me if they tried!
“They might be,” Raetta muttered. Help me destroy them.
Most definitely!
Now be quiet. It’s show time.
“Huh. Are we almost there? My feet hurt.” Sherri filled her nails and pouted.
June walked with her hand on her hip as she smacked her gum.
The four girls sauntered into the grove.
“I see you received my note,” Raetta said.
“Yeah. We received it.” Syballine’s eyes on her were hard and bitter. “How the fuck did you know that we meet here?”
Raetta smirked. “Magic?”
Someone snorted.
Something like that.
I still think it’s amazing the amount of spying you ghosts can do through mirrors, Raetta thought.
“Mmmm. The note said you had something of interest. Something powerful.”
Raetta nodded. “You know, not far from here is the old abandoned mansion.”
Syballine crossed her arms and shifted her weight from one foot to the other. “Yeah?”
“Back in the day, legend has it, the mansion was a boarding school. The one my great-aunt died in.”
“Okay?”
“She died after she was accused of witchcraft.”
The looks of impatience and irritability all dropped from the faces of the girls in the clique. Their eyes glittered with a begrudging respect as they looked Raetta up and down.
“Legend has it, her Book of Shadows is still hidden in the house.”
Syballine nodded. “Okay. So…”
“I’ll go in and get it for you.”
“What’s the catch?”
“You leave me the hell alone at school.”
The girls cackled. “Why would we do that?”
“Because if you don’t I’ll bind your powers.”
Syballine snorted. Jenny’s and June’s eyes went wide at Raetta’s ballsy challenge. Sherri’s lip lifted in an angry sneer as she glared at her.
“Want to try to me?” Raetta pulled a red ribbon out of her pocket.
Syballine sucked at her lips. “Fine. Let’s go.”
As they walked toward the old school, the sky above turns a cornflower blue. Crickets chirped their southern lullaby. Soon the tress and moss were behind them and the wooden structure stood tall proud. The ancient wood was gray and brown from the elements. A corner of the roof nestled in ivy’s creeping embrace.
Syballine and her friends picked a safe distance and sent Raetta in. The closer she got to the door, the jerkier her movements became. The girls laughed, assumed the jerkiness was her fear. She staggered up the steps and fumbled at the door. The girls’ mean chuckles followed them into the shadowy interior as the door swung shut behind them.
Raetta looked at the dusty great hall she now stood in. Selah showed her memories of the hall where it glistened in the morning light and girls stood in five rows of six, their plain prairie dresses hung about their meager frames, blurry-eyed and shouting maxims in false reverence for this cult of perfection. As memory faded, Raetta’s lip curled in sheer disgust. Fuck the patriarchy! She turned toward the large, elaborate stairwell in the center of the grand hall and climbed.
Selah remembered her body convulsing as the poison took hold. The pastor as he gently laid her down on the wooden floor, deep voice soft with words she didn’t understand. The pain, oh, the pain as she convulsed had been excruciating. The tears that rolled down her cheeks as bloody specked foam bubbled past her lips.
She arrived at the first landing. A great gaping hole separated one end of the hallway from the other. She turned and climbed up another flight.
Selah remembered killing the students, one by one, saving her accusers for last. One she’d choked with her necklace. Another she suffocated with a blanket. She bludgeoned one with a poker, another she chased out of a window. Their terror had been delicious! She’d savored the suffering of those who’d stood by and done nothing while her accusers destroyed her way of life. She would have gotten her actual accusers had it not been for that meddling priest. He’d returned, found all those she’d killed and the girls she hadn’t. He’d taken them far from her reach, her soul bound to the structure until Raetta had called her. For centuries, her spirit paced the hallways and howled over her lost revenge. Would Chango accept those biddies outside as acceptable replacements?
Finally, Raetta pulled opened the door and walked up the pitch black staircase up to the attic. She opened the attic door. She could see that starry, inky night had come. Moonlight peered through the dirty windows and glistened on the cobwebs. She walked across the room and knelt in front of the window. She found the right plank, moved it aside and reached in.
Selah’s Book of Shadows came out of the dark recess. Gray dust coated the book. She gently brushed away the layers of dust bunnies. Underneath, the cover was brown and curling.
“This fabric… It feels weird. What is it?”
“Skin.”
“You mean…?”
“Yesss…”
“Oh. Oh my.”
Selah giggled in response.
As they walked down the stairs and out the door, Selah chanted something unintelligible. Something about the words made the hairs on the back of Raetta’s neck stand up. She hunched forward, her step quick, her eyes nervous. She cast furtive glances about her.
Finally, she reached Syballine and the girls. Relieved, she handed the book to them. Syballine snatched at it with greedy hands. Raetta quickly backed away into the shadows.
Syballine traced the letters on the front, nearly faded, with reverent fingertips.
Raetta knelt and dry heaved. Selah poured out of her mouth and nose in liquid shadow. Once she was done, Selah stood beside her in her dress and bow. Raetta shivered and cold sweat appeared on her brow as she tried to catch her breath quietly.
As Syballine opened the book, her clique gathered around her. Then, bit by bit, particle by particle, they were sucked into the pages. Once they were gone, the pages fluttered, then closed and clattered to the ground. With each particle of those girls sucked into the book, Selah became flesh again, with red locks, yellow eyes and yellow clothes. She reached down, grabbed her book and tucked it back into it’s pocked near the bottom hoop.
“I suppose we’re finished, then?” Raetta still knelt on the ground.
“Not quite.” Selah walked over to her niece and knelt in front of her.
“What-?” Raetta looked up at her ancestor, confused. Selah grinned.
“There’s still our deal darling…” Selah caressed her neice’s cheek.
“Deal? What deal?”
“Remember? You said you’d sell your soul for this revenge?”
“But… But… That was just a thought…”
“Was it? Or did you mean it, heart and… soul?”
Raetta trembled. “You weren’t even there…”
“My darling… Have you not heard the phrase, “Speak of the devil and he’ll appear?” She leaned over to Raetta’s ear. “Stop stalling.” Then she kissed her neice and breathed in the smokey blue vapors of her spirit. Raetta’s green eyes glazed over, empty, and she collapsed.
Selah stood up, her eyes cold as she considered the child’s body. “Poor little fool. When they accused me of witchcraft, I never said it wasn’t true…”
Then she turned and walked away, relished the beauty before her, her pagan heart lifted in joyous prayer.
Selah, selah.
[bctt tweet=”OCTOBER TERROR 2018 Short Story Award – Entry #64 ‘Selah’ by B. Sharpe – Enjoy all this terrific, disturbing material you have in your hands, lots of horror stories at your disposal for your dark delight and vote!” username=”theboldmom”]
On October 23rd we’ll close submissions and open a poll for the readers to choose their favourite one! You’ll have a week to make your choice and on October 31st we’ll announce the winner!!!
