Maple Grove: Chapters 1 & 2

Author's Note: Thank you for having a look at the first chapters of my book. A portion of this book was once published here as its own self-contained short story. Turning it into a book was my project for NaNo. I didn't get 50,000 words done: I'm currently at 30 + thousand, but I'm proud of what I did accomplish. This is going to be a horror novelette, but just to let you know right off the bat, there aren't many horror elements in these first couple of chapters. It gets scarier later on, but keep this in mind if you're a fan of scares that come right away and at a fast clip. I don't usually write that way. Still, if you feel that the first couple chapters are totally dull, and I should insert some more action and creepiness/scares so they capture the reader's attention at all, please let me know. My intention was to start off establishing the characters and human drama. Thus, it will start off more as a drama than anything else.

Please leave honest feedback on writing style, how interesting the story is to you, what you liked, and what you didn't. This is, again, a first draft. Oh! And one more thing: I attempted to write a Southern accent, and just kind of winged it. If anyone can tell me how accurate I was, that would be super. I'm not trying to be offensive in any way. For point of reference, I'm from the Midwest, but my boyfriend is from Mississippi.

Chapter One

Like an old person, or someone with an injury that ached during the rain, the Westcotts' house creaked and moan when its old joints were tested during a storm.

There had been three nights of stormy weather when Sandy first came to Maple Grove. She was already used to the sounds of the house. They made it more quaint and authentic, she thought. And she had wanted an authentic country experience.

The house teemed with an earthy sort of life, belonging with all of the crops around it, as if it, too, were an organic organism, sprouted up from soil, growing, changing, taking in nourishment. It whistled in the wind, like plant stalks being rustled by a breeze. And clinging to the whole house- when not covered up by delicious aromas from the kitchen- was that dank, sort of gritty smell of basements.

Sandy breathed here more easily than she recalled ever breathing in her childhood home.

Kicking off her shoes onto the large, woven mat just inside the screened-in porch, her stockinged feet slid across the wooden floor but did not go out from under her as she raced into the storeroom off the back of the house.

“My Beau’s too smart!” she laughed, as she skittered over the floor to the cabinet where the dog chow was kept. The Westcotts’ large, splotchy-spotted mutt dog looked at her with a twinkle in his eyes while she lugged his bag of food out. “If I’m eating, you’re eating, is that it?”

Sandy was a cat person. She’d grown up with cats, and Beau was the first dog she’d ever really taken a shine to.

Beau wagged his tail, and dove into eating sloppily from his bowl once Sandy had poured the kibble into it. Sandy watched him with amusement for a moment longer before heading through to the kitchen.

Mrs. Westcott had gone somewhere with her husband to see about a tractor, so Amanda was fixing lunch alone. Amanda Hoffman, mid-forties, a lean, hawkish woman, with a more cordial manner than her resting bitch face would let on, part-time cook and part-time housekeeper at the farm. But she didn’t live in like Sandy.

“You know, I think I’m getting to like being summoned for lunch by a cowbell,” Sandy admitted, leaning up against the counter and watching the other woman finish up work on the meal. “Is that weird?”

Amanda turned to her soberly. “Yes.” Her lip quirked into a tiny smile. “But never mind, we won’t tell anybody. Just as long as you don’t tell Margot I got the cowbell out again. She thinks it’s undignified.”

“Different senses of humor, I suppose.” Sandy fetched plates, crocks, glasses, and flatware and placed them on an old sideboard, recognizing the signs that the food was now completely done. “Can I help you take food out to any of the workers, Amanda?”

A wave of the hand dismissed the offer of help. “You do your own thing, girl. I’ve got a short day today, not much to do. I’m hoarding my work all to myself.” She scooped potato soup into Sandy’s crock and motioned her forward to grab one of the dozen roast beef sandwiches she’d made. Then, she sat Sandy down at one of the four chairs surrounding the small, round table in the kitchen.

Though she’d come to know Amanda’s work ethic, still Sandy felt a prickle of guilt, observing how Amanda’s own plate went un-loaded up while the older woman poured Sandy a glass of milk and then began assembling plates for the others and putting them on trays.

While Amanda took the first tray out through the pair of swinging, saloon-style wood doors- to travel the short distance down the hall to the house’s dining room- Sandy pulled out her phone. She was moderately surprised to see a text from her mother.

Hello dear how are you today? Coming back for your dad’s birthday? Call me later.

Sandy bit her lip, her thumbs twiddling in midair above the keyboard, like they were treading water before deciding if they wanted to swim toward an immediate response. Her dad’s birthday? That was a good question. She’d forgotten all about that.

Contacting her mom now with an “I’m thinking about it” was pointless. Sandy sat her phone aside on the table. Mrs. Layne would want a definite answer. She didn’t deal in maybes. And there was certainly no need for Sandy to hurriedly reply with an update on how she was. That might have been the first thing her mother had asked about in the text, but no way had it been the first thing on her mind. It was a polite opener, which Roberta Layne excelled at.

It was for Sandy difficult to decide if she’d make her father’s birthday. On the one hand, out of family loyalty, at least, she wanted to go. She wasn’t sure, however, that she could get away, and so she would give it until the evening and think it over.

Sandy ate every last bit of her lunch and loved it. She’d worked hard that morning, worked up at appetite, and she had to say, she’d never eaten food so delicious on such a regular basis as she had since she started working for the Westcotts. Both Mrs. Westcott and Amanda were very gifted cooks.

Lunch done, Sandy went back out to the porch, and, after saying a “see ya” to Beau, scratching behind his ear where he slumbered on the mat beside the door and just managing to step over him without tripping, she went about the rest of her workday.

##

Behind the main house was a second house, long and skinny like a single-wide trailer. Sandy stalked toward the white structure through grass that went well past her ankles to also graze the calves exposed by the jeans she’d rolled up to just below her knees. The sensation was just a hair rougher than tickling, so it felt like a light slicing. After all the other work that had to be done on a farm, Sandy supposed it wasn’t any surprise that the chore of mowing the lawn fell by the wayside. Besides, it served her right for having to cut through the grass instead of taking the gravel path. Sandy was an impatient creature, always had been, anybody who knew her well would vouch for that.

The sky was a piercing gray like vivid steel. It kept Sandy awake rather than making her feel sluggish; most of the time, the lack of clear skies and sunshine sapped her morale. Of course, that was before she got such a demanding job that waited for no one, but it was more than that. She found gray skies oppressive, and this one wasn’t an exception; but it put the fear of God into, and she was a willing supplicant. There was something about this place...

Sandy shook her head, and walked a little faster through the grass. She needed to stop having such silly thoughts. It was just because her escape still seemed so extraordinary, that now she was ascribing it to shades of the paranormal.

This place was as down-to-earth as it got. She’d made it through the grass, and grabbed the large bucket that was waiting for her just below the small wooden deck to the farmhand lodge. She cringed a little before looking inside of it. It hadn’t happened yet, but she’d been forewarned when she first took this job that she may one day turn up to find this very bucket full of vomit.

“In case any of the workers went into town and tied one on,” Harris Westcott had explained with his rip-roaring laugh, “came home, stumbled up onto the deck and found up-chucking into that bucket a more civilized option than tossing their cookies on the grass. Can’t fault them for trying to be considerate. It’s just right there!”

She grabbed the would-be barf bucket and went into the house. It was an odd structure, for all that it looked like a domestic building on the outside, with its fresh coat of white paint, the black trim giving it a crisply modish appearance, and ornamental hedges at the front. Inside, it more closely resembled army barracks, as nearly every room that had been originally to serve a single-family purpose had been remodeled and re-outfitted to be lodging for a dozen men who didn’t care about things looking too “homey”.

Sandy moved along a narrow, carpeted hall to where the floor plan opened up to two combined rooms floored with tile. On her schedule today was scrubbing the floor of these two rooms. Sandy wouldn’t mind that. She patted her pocket, making sure she had her iPod. She’d already taken care of the bathroom yesterday, which was worse.

In their original forms, these would be the the living room, flowing easily into the kitchen, separated only by a short partition in the form of the kitchen’s bar. The living room was now a sort of common room, far from cozy, with precious little furnishings. A small flat screen T.V. mounted on the wall, a card table beside a shelving unit pushed against the far wall, a pair of old wooden chairs divided into opposite corners, and a worn-out leather sofa taking up most of the room made for an odd, incongruous setting that was evidently designed to provide some basic amenities without letting the hands forget this wasn’t a proper home.

Sandy had never been to a rehab facility, but in her mind, if the rest of the lodgings looked like army barracks, this room looked like something out of what she imagined a cut-rate rehab to be.

She filled the bucket with soap and water in the world’s smallest, most utilitarian kitchen (it only had cupboards, a microwave, and a deep sink; the men weren’t really meant to cook or dine in here), grabbed a sponge, and waddled on back to the common room with it weighing her down. Then, slipping in her earbuds and turning on her music, she got to work.

Losing herself in her chore while blaring her tunes louder than she probably should was easy. She rhythmically scrubbed in firm lines to the beat, and worked at tricky patches of dried-on cola or some kind of sauce with rough swirls that spiraled to the music, too. Time ticked by, and while Sandy wasn’t timing herself, she might have been working twenty minutes. She was almost finished cleaning this floor, and this was when she felt a hand upon her back.

Startled, Sandy gasped and quickly ripped out her earbuds, jumping to her feet. She skittered back several paces, then whipped her head around and took in who had disturbed her. It was Vince, one of the farmhands who lived in these lodgings. She breathed a little easier, placing a hand on her chest over her quickened heart and sighing.

“I scared ya,” said Vince’s Southern accent quite blandly.

“You did,” Sandy agreed, though she hardly need confirm. She cursed herself for being so jumpy, while simultaneously reminding herself that it could be quite sensible to be on one’s guard, way out here in the middle of nowhere, when you thought you were alone in a building. She laughed a little to play it off. “I didn’t know anybody else was in here.”

Vince just stared for a moment, then seeming to notice that Sandy expected a response out of him, he shrugged his lanky shoulders loosely.

“I didn’t think any of you spent lunch in here,” said Sandy. She’d never had many interactions with Vince-- not enough to make her feel at ease in his company. What’s more, with what little she had seen seen of and heard from him, she didn’t think she liked him. She clutched her sponge and squeezing it reflexively, nervously. It was full of water, which was wrung out onto the floor to form a little puddle.

They looked down at unison at it.

“We’re allowed to, though,” said Vince, almost defensively.

Sandy quirked an eyebrow. Great, was he now going to get argumentative over nothing? “I suppose so,” she replied. “Why not? Now, did you need something?”

Vince reached up and scratched his fingers through the dull brown hair that clung to his head like straw in an unflattering bowl cut. “I dinnit know if I should walk ‘cross the floor while you’re scrubbin’ it, but I need sumpin’ from the kitchen.”

“Oh,” said Sandy. She plunked the sponge into the bucket and looked around. The linoleum was all wet and clean behind her, where she'd already washed. “Sure, I can do that for you. What did you need?” She frowned down at her sneakers, yanked them off with her socks, shoved the socks down deep in the shoes, then threw them underhand past Vince and into the hall. She started toward the kitchen, mindful of the wet floor beneath her feet.

“Corn chips and beer,” Vince called to her. Was there something wrong with his nose, it sounded like he was calling through a drain pipe? Sandy turned back. He was staring at her shoes like they held some kind of fascination for him.

Sandy located the corn chips easily in the limited cupboard space and grabbed them. She had to hesitate when thinking about the beer.

“You off work today, Vince?” she hollered back to him.

“No,” Vince replied, still checking out her sneakers. “Why?”

Sandy looked at him over the counter partition separating the kitchen from the common room, took a can from the fridge pack, and shook it slightly in his general direction. “I’m not even sure you should have this in this...house...type...thing. But I think I’ve heard that you’re not supposed to drink during the workday.”

Vince finally looked over at her. He resembled nothing so much as a literal rat, with beady eyes that bore a furtive expression even when his face was at rest, and that face was distinctly small-featured altogether, and pointy. He wore a patchy little mustache and goatee, which for their sparseness, looked somewhat greasy.

He seemed irritated with her. “There’s no trouble wit dat! I ain’t gonna get drunk, just have a beer!”

For several moments, Sandy didn’t respond, more because she was rooted to the spot by the strange anger in his voice. He seemed to have gone from his usual shuffley, barely awake manner to making her the target of a focused grudge in the blink of an eye.

Vince must have taken her hesitation as reluctance to comply with his request. And sure, she was reluctant. Farm work could oftentimes be dangerous work, but then, the beer was already in the house, and if the men were determined to have it there, they would. She could refuse to hand him one, but he could still get at it for, for Pete’s sake. She picked up a can and walked out of the kitchen.

He was speaking to her again, still in a bitter voice, but more subdued.

“You- you thought I was runnin’ heavy machin’ry? I ain’t doin’ that today.”

Sandy didn’t reply, only approached him somewhat warily, holding the beer out at arm’s length to him. He accepted it with a defensive, “I said I only wanted one beer. Who gets drunk offa one beer?”

“One beer, there you go,” Sandy said lightly, hoping she could be done conversing with him now. “And your corn chips.” She passed him those, as well. And then she bent back to her task, scrubbing the floor with soapy water, but not putting her earbuds back in just yet.

She didn’t even look up at him again. For some time, his jean-clad ankles remained within view when she turned at certain angles, and she wondered what he was doing, hanging around, when he’d gotten his snack. A stab of impatience coincidence with a stab of her tooth against her lower lip as her mouth clenched involuntarily. Sandy turned her back on him again, scrubbing X-shaped patterns against the floor. When she turned back around to get at the bucket, she didn’t see him anymore. Sitting up further, she craned her neck to examine the length of the hallway. He wasn’t there.

Her shoes, blessedly, still were.

Sandy finished wiping down the floor with soapy water, and then decided, to hell with it, she’s already crossed most of this room before with the floor damp, she’d do it again. She padded to the kitchen carefully and out from under the sink, she brought the sanitizing solution she'd need for when the linoleum in the next room dried. She then plunked down cross-legged on the kitchen floor, waiting out the common room, and taking a mini-break.

The sound of the door bursting inward startled her, and she shot to her feet. Had Vince gone out? Whoever had opened that door had done so roughly, yanking on it with enough force to make it hit the wall. Then, she heard it shut. That wasn’t done quite as loudly; it was something shyer than a slam, as if whoever it was had gotten self-conscious about making a racket.

There were heavy footfalls, and Sandy moved over to the bar counter, peering over it as another farmhand, Judd, plodded down the hall. He walked as though he thought he was John Wayne or somebody. He paused by one of the bedroom doors and spoke into the room. Well, more like snarled.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, can this patch of hell get any more damnable?!”

Vince might be in that room, but he made no response that Sandy could hear, and Judd hadn’t waited for one, anyway. He walked up to the threshold to the common room, and made eye contact with Sandy, standing in the diminutive kitchen and leaning over the bar.

“Oh...pardon me, miss.”

“No pardons necessary,” Sandy answered easily, but she reflected that they were appreciated. She liked it when people remembered their manners. Both the Professors Layne had been big on manners while Sandy was growing up. They’d been big on education, too, of course, and Sandy had gone to a private school where almost none of the students had any manners, and the male ones spoke quite freely and vocally in the hallways about what they wanted to do the various female ones. There had been no reprimand for that-- not like Sandy had gotten at home for reaching way over the table for the green beans instead of asking somebody to pass them.

Then again, Judd was no high school boy. He was somewhere near to forty, bald either by choice or by razor, with a short-cropped black beard made of tiny curls.

And today he looked pained and pissed off. His face was flushed and shiny, but the jerk of the head he gave to her was controlled. As was the one he gave over his shoulder.

“Rough day in town,” he mumbled. “I was just tellin’ Vince about it.” He scrubbed his hand over his whiskered chin, seeming awkward.

“Well, don’t mind me, then,” Sandy encouraged. She pushed a lock of hair that had fallen loose from her ponytail back behind her ear. They had the same hair color and texture. “I’m just here to clean. Would you like something to drink?”

“Just a bottle of water’d be great. I keep one in the fridge at all time. It’s that blue, subzero thing. Is it okay to cross the floor?”

“Just stay right there; I’ll bring it to you.”

In a matter of five minutes, Sandy was deep in sanitizing the common room floor with her earbuds plugged comfortably back in. The two men who had each individually surprised her were either relaxing somewhere in the building or had gone out.

She discovered which when, suddenly, in a pause between songs, she heard Judd and Vince quarreling. She cut off the music and waited to hear more.

“And I better not hear anything else about your little crew that makes it sound like what I suspect is going on actually is going on! I’ll kick your ass from here to Timbuktu, boy!” Vince roared, so much so that Sandy flinched.

A small stretch of silence seemed to creak with the need to break, and then Sandy literally heard creaking as Vince marched heavily out of one of the bedrooms and headed for the back of the lodgings.

“I can handle myself!” he shouted back, marking the first time Sandy had ever heard him raise his voice. This perhaps shouldn’t have been surprising, since, after all, nobody yelled and was argumentative on the job constantly, but she so closely associated Vince with his quiet, mumbly voice. Even when it had been filled with ire when talking about the beer, he hadn’t yelled. It had been a soft, angry rasp.

“What does that mean?” Judd demanded, appearing outside of the door of the same room Vince had emerged from. “Huh? Huh?!” But Vince was out the door, closing it with a boom.

Judd leaned his large frame against a wall. Sandy looked at him for a time, discreetly, as she began to clean the counters. He stayed there for longer than she expected, his chin tucked into his chest. It felt sort of awkward after awhile, and she gave up on watching him, completing her task and then going to return the chemical bottle to the kitchen.

After doing so, she peeked around the partition into the common room.

She jumped at the sight of him, feet away.

She then laughed in embarrassment, and he let out his own hoarse chuckle, although it sounded forced.

Sandy walked around the partition to stand directly in front of him

“You go into town much?” he asked without preamble.

“I guess when I need to go...anywhere,” Sandy replied slowly, while inwardly hoping his boots weren't as dirty on the bottoms as she suspected them to be. “Since I don’t have a car, I can’t go much further.”

Of course, how long did I expect the floor in a farmhands' lodging building to stay pristine?

Judd nodded several times in quick succession, almost frantically, while repeatedly rubbing his hand over the lower part of his face. His eyes met hers. His were slightly wild. “Right. Mmhm. Right.”

“Is something wrong? What did you want to say about...town?” Something must have happened there today. And it was something that had gotten on the normally mild-mannered Judd’s nerves enough to make him not only yell at Vince- who probably figured into the mishap somehow- but confide in Sandy, a person with whom he’d only had a polite, glancing acquaintanceship.

Well, perhaps he’d chosen not to confide, after all. He stalled at her prompting, gnawed on his lower lip, his eyes bugging slightly at being put on the spot, although she was simply providing follow-up questions to a subject he’d introduced.

“It’s just...” He was hedging, Sandy could tell. “I had a bit of a run-in with some of the young folks. Not much younger than you, miss, if they’re younger at all, but they don’t have no maturity. None at all...” His voice inhabited a gloomily thoughtful tone at the end of his speech. Whatever these “young folks” had done to rile him up, it had sure put him in a serious mood.

“Isn’t it the same way everywhere?” Sandy put in sympathetically. “Teenagers, especially. Didn’t like them when I was one.”

Judd smiled wryly at that. “It’s not...” He sucked in a breath and tried again. “The young people around here are a special case. Ya gotta believe me. I’m from Texas, and I seen a lot of crazy stuff there, and I’ve gotten farm work nearly all over the country, come across plenty of trippy things...” He shook his head, looking quite plagued. “There’s just something about this place. The Westcotts been good to me, and there are friendly people in town, but sometimes I think there’s poison in this backwater. And some of these young folks’re up to some bad stuff, and I’ll just leave it there.” He nodded to himself resolutely, broad shoulders sagging, as though proud of the vague indictment he’d given.

“Oh...” Sandy, frankly, just felt awkward. What was he trying- and failing- to refer to? Bad stuff? Was there a meth lab somewhere around? It was about her best guess. She gathered that happened in the country fairly often.

She was spared from having to come up with anything else to say by Judd unexpectedly deciding to resume talking. He asked her, abruptly, “Have you met the Griggs family yet?”

Sandy shook her head. “No. No, I haven’t.”

Judd had begun to pick under his nails in a fidgety way. It seemed incongruous to Sandy that such a big man should have such a nervous energy when rattled.

“You will,” he said with certainty and without looking over at her. “Small town...can’t avoid anyone in such close quarters. Anyone. I myself, though, I often have personal dealings with Bryce Griggs.”

There was a shift in the atmosphere. Before, everything had been held in suspense. Then, it was like, all of a sudden, Judd had flipped a switch and decided that nothing was bothering him, and that he was chatting with Sandy quite casually. His entire posture seemed to relax and his voice relaxed, too, as he looked her in the eye and said,

“Oh, well, they’re one of those families that’s a bit too lenient with the kids, you know. I’ve kept you from your work too long. Selfish of me, on my day off. I should remember you don’t have time to waste like me. Apologies, miss.”

He was soon gone as swiftly as he'd appeared, but it took Sandy a little longer to slip back into her efficient, merry maid mode. The dual interruptions she’d encountered today from Vince and Judd were unlike any she’d met with in a workday before. They had been very peculiar, to be sure, but ultimately could probably be brushed off. She had to get back to work in any case, and she did so, though her conversations with the two men- and their confrontation with each other- stayed in her mind for some time as she slowly got back in the zone. Their behavior was almost as much of an anomaly as one or both of her parents contacting her.

##

Chapter Two

She felt her heart beat against the ground. The earth and grass smelt vaguely wet. She’d come away from this with grass stains on her clothes, but she comforted herself with the knowledge that they weren’t her favorites. The gray T-shirt was even so plain and sack-like as to be a little ugly. Crickets sang in the background, and she was reminded of other insects, too. Her grandmother would say not to lie on the grass like this because of jiggers, and Sandy had to admit that was a prudent concern. Of course, her grandmother and most everybody else wouldn’t approve of her spying, either. Well, her mother might.

Sandy breathed deep in the night air, mesmerized as she stared down the hill. Was she the first to wander upon this scene? It seemed hard to believe she was. No Man’s Land Field. Places that were unknown didn’t have names. But the people at the Westcott farm knew it by a name, as did the townspeople.

Empty and isolated this space might be, but not as secret as Celeste Tilney probably liked to imagine it was.

Sandy had only met Celeste once, in town. The other girl was a recent high school graduate who’d been shopping at the general store the same time Sandy was. She was a very friendly girl, immediately striking up a conversation and talking about her diner job, urging the out-of-towner to stop by and try the smothered hash browns sometime. She’d gone on about Bicentennial Days, a celebration that had just happened that past summer, and how the feed store down the road sold a certain type of candy that she liked to buy.

Nothing much about Celeste had interested Sandy until she saw her in the field.

Celeste seemed to be a Wiccan or something, which fascinated Sandy. Her eyes were magnetized by the spot where the younger woman stood, on a wide plot devoid of grass, and lit her fire. Sandy had to agree with her that fire felt spiritual. Not that Sandy would know from spiritual, really. She’d been raised agnostic.

It had been the end of Sandy’s first week on the farm when she’d first caught Celeste doing this. She’d been taking a walk in the countryside, just before twilight, after her shift ended. Sandy had still been processing the change she’d undergone, moving here, and needed some time alone, some peace and quiet. She’d aimlessly wandered around, past her employers’ property, all the while with a slight fear prickling at her heart, questioning the safety of her own actions.

Mr. and Mrs. Westcott assured her that the farm, Maple Grove, and its attendant lands were as safe as it got, but Sandy saw plenty of opportunity to run into danger in the secretive quiet of the remote environment.

She’d felt sure she’d stumbled into her death when she’d heard somebody out on that lonely stretch of land with her. She could already hear her parents chastising her, as she’d never get to hear them, over her casket. They would mourn her stupidity more than anything else.

Sandy had crouched down low in the grass, pulled out her cell phone, and activated the flashlight app. She’d pointed it around as stealthily as possible while a finger hovered over a keyboard she’d already dialed 9 and 1 on. And the flashlight had revealed pretty Celeste Tilney,who bore a resemblance to Amanda Seyfried with her heart-shaped face and sweet, wide-eyed expression, in the process of lighting a fire.

Was she wearing some sort of ritualistic costume, or her ordinary clothes? No telling in a matching white crochet skirt and crop top. The wide sky stretched out forever above her, an unreachable corner of it displaying a vibrant, burning orange, mirrored on the ground by a bowl in the earth, glowing bright.

Sandy hadn’t remained watching for long that first night, and she wouldn’t tonight, either. She’d be too afraid if it was pitch black.

But then would that even be long enough to unravel Celeste’s secrets? Or did Celeste’s knowledge of magic keep the fear of the dark away?

How much was she sniggering at this? She couldn’t say. The sight before her was compelling, Sandy had to say. Anesthetically pleasing, at the very least. It could be a stock photo of a modern day witch working her mystical ways. Sandy could recognize it as something she might have found on a Wikipedia page or About.com if she had looked up witchcraft like so many curious teenagers looking for a more “badass” way to live in their seemingly interminable teen routines.

But it was also like nothing she recognized ever having seen before. For all that Sandy hadn’t spent much time in churches, she supposed that the rituals and worship of her Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist, Catholic and one or two Jewish classmates growing up would’ve seemed just as esoteric to hear about as what she was seeing now. And yet they hadn’t.

None of them were solo practitioners, for one thing.

Living in the country, it was somehow easier for Sandy to believe in more than just what you could see. When what you saw were endless stretches of sky and field, all dominated by an industry focused on what the land gave...maybe it was to be expected that you simultaneously marveled at the natural world and wondered what was beyond it.

Still, if there was going to be any kind of sacrifice here, tonight or ever, it would quickly break the spell. Sandy swore to herself that she would intervene in that case, no matter what demon might rise up out of nowhere and attack her in vengeance. It wouldn’t even be a choice, if it meant helping an innocent.

All Celeste was doing at the current moment was throwing handfuls of a powder into the fire. It came from a black bag she had with her and looked something like sand. Sandy thought she saw the younger woman’s lips moving, so she could have been speaking, though it was nothing Sandy could hear from her position. Celeste than knelt down on her plot of earth and- Sandy had to shift further up onto her elbows and stick out her neck to see- took what appeared to be three stones out of a red box.

This was different from when she’d seen Celeste worship before. Then, she’d sat before the fire with a necklace in her hands, and she’d poured a liquid from a little bottle onto the ground and into the fire.

Celeste Tilney was getting up and dancing before the flames. Slow, graceful, ethereal movements, whirling, back-lit by fire. That was a similarity to last time. Perhaps she made dancing a part of every ritual.

The darkness was increasing, and consequently, so was Sandy’s discomfort. She would have to give up her watch. An owl periodically hooted in the near distance. She had never cared much for owls. Movement in the brush-- not too far away, either, and probably belonging to a small animal. Small didn’t mean safe, however, and there might be- literally- bigger threats out there

It made Sandy feel like a wimp to be so jumpy out here. But while she might be a small town girl, she wasn’t a country girl. Overall, she enjoyed her new lifestyle, but she didn’t presume to fully know or understand it.

A chill was creeping through the air, anyway. Sandy crawled downhill in the opposite direction, like she was on some kind of military mission. She had her flashlight to see by, but as she shivered and scolded herself for not bringing a jacket, she imagined all kinds of unseen dangers that lay outside her tiny circle of light.

Was Celeste conjuring any otherworldly ones into her large circle of bonfire light? Funny, how light was considered the enemy of darkness, but there was such a difference between holy light and hellfire. There was a call of a human voice in the night, and Sandy was rendered immobile immediately. It was like the sound impaled her, skewered her to the ground.

But as she took her next, shaky breath, she determined this was probably not the voice of a spirit from the fire, but the voice of Celeste herself. It sounded like her, and, moreover, it didn’t sound like she was even talking to Sandy.

Of course not! How could she see me from here? Sandy was blocked from view by being on the other side of the hill that separated them.

She had to laugh at herself; she did, literally, do just that, letting out a low chuckle as Celeste loudly chanted unintelligible gibberish. It was something she hadn’t heard her do last time, nor to start up in plain English and almost bellow,

“Your servant, I am your servant! I speak for my allies, and we ask humbly to be empowered to be yours! My God! My Goddess! Strength! Protection! Glory! With your gracious aid, we will ascend to know the truth! And we defy and silence all those who would silence us!”

The girl might be in the thick of her spell, but she had broken whatever spell she’d had Sandy under.

Now this just sounds dorky, thought Sandy to herself, clutching her phone tightly as she climbed to her feet and jogged, hobbled over, across the fields. She was willing herself to appear small and inconspicuous, in contrast with Celeste Tilney making an exhibition of herself.

##

Sandy sneezed, then glared at her snot-covered cell phone screen. Making a huff of annoyance, she hoisted herself up off her bed to go dig in her desk for a screen cleaning wipe. She hoped fervently she hadn’t caught a cold during her walk to No Man’s Land Field. On top of colds just being unpleasant things to get, she hadn’t been at the Westcott family farm long enough to get sick. If she was out of commission, no one was going to decide she was indispensable. They’d just think the new girl was a burden.

Once she’d gotten her screen all cleaned off, she returned to staring at it blankly; or, that was, trying to summon the strength to dial her mother. Perhaps she should pray to the God and Goddess for said strength.

She sucked in a breath, and, after several more long seconds of dithering, she bit the bullet and did it. She held the phone to her ear and listened to it ring.

Professor Roberta Layne answered fairly promptly, after four rings.

“Hello? Sandy? You waited long enough, didn’t you? It’s almost 10 o’clock.”

“Mom.” Sandy smiled into the phone, trying to be at least a little genuinely happy to speak to her mother. “Yeah, I’m sorry. I’m glad I caught you before bed.”

“Why the hell aren’t you in bed? You’re keeping farm hours now, aren’t you? Don’t you have to be up at the crack of dawn?” It was amazing how acidic and critical she could sound while at the same time sounding so bored.

Sandy rolled her eyes and bit back on a smart remark that would get them nowhere, sliding across her bed over to the other side, planting her feet on the floor and facing her window.

“Don’t worry, Mom, I don’t usually stay up late,” she replied calmly, lifting the curtain and peeking around it into the night. “But I’ll have no trouble getting up in the morning. I set an alarm, and anyway, it’s easy to get motivated around here.”

Around here... “Here” might almost as well be “there”, as she gazed out into the night, across the expanses of farmland, into a distance she hadn’t revisited since she arrived at the farm. That was the direction from whence she’d come, having gotten picked up from a nearby town from an obliging Harris Westcott. She vividly remembered traveling down that dusty rode to her ultimate destination. Looking off in that direction, Sandy thought of it as her way in, and she wasn’t ready for a way out yet.

But her mother’s voice, it resonated so powerfully for her- in mostly unpleasant ways- that it seemed to pull across a distance, like pulling on the path that Sandy had stitched together, and pulling aggressively, so the fabric of the journey was all bunched, rendering the moving project into almost nothing.

“Well, of course, they won’t stand for any lollygagging, will they? They’re quite no-nonsense, farm people. They need to get the job done, Sandy.”

Sandy leaned against her window frame and gave way to the impulse to sigh in frustration into the phone. “I know, Mom. So about Dad’s birthday...”

“You’re going to say you can’t make it,” Roberta interrupted crisply. “I can hear it in your voice. You’re going to offer me some paltry excuse, and shame on you, Sandy. You shouldn’t have made your father wonder all day if he could expect his own daughter at his birthday party-”

Now it was Sandy’s turn to cut across her mother’s words. “Oh, please, Mother, Dad isn’t five years old! He’ll get over me missing his birthday. And don’t even try to tell me that if I were someplace else...in college, for instance...some impressive school across the country and couldn’t make it due to my classes...”

“But you’re not,” Roberta returned, a twisted smile in her voice, a singsong, mocking quality. “This is just a job that they can let you off of for a couple days. There’s someone else to do that manual labor, I’m sure. Don’t you have any money on you at all? Transportation of some kind can be arranged, can’t it? You’re not stranded there.”

Sandy’s eyes roamed the scenery before her. The insect noises singing out en masse seemed to her like a drone. She let herself feel it as well as listen to it, striving to detach herself from the situation. Stranded... Isolation... It didn’t sound like such a bad concept, if it meant that this place could be her sanctuary. She registered her mother’s words, but tried to tune out the tone of them in favor of the insect symphony going on outside her window.

“No, obviously I’m not stranded here. But that still doesn’t mean it would be practical for me to come.”

Roberta scoffed. “I doubt it would be all that difficult, either, and if you can’t endure a little difficulty for the sake of your father, who has always provided for you, and looked out for you- as have I- and sacrificed so much for you... You’re not a parent, you can’t know the amount we have to sacrifice for you- ”

Sandy’s heart rate ticked up, her eyes still fastened to the outside scene, thinking again about how the distance between her refuge and her former home seemed shorter. And yet, she still wasn’t willing to travel it. She could become entranced by her simple life here. She could be the salt of its earth. But if she was going to speak with the voice of the land, she’d have to achieve enough detachment from the artifice she’d left behind.

“You’re going to make me feel guilty because you had to carry out your parental responsibilities?” Sandy asked, words filled with blatant incredulity. She heard her mother’s gasp, or maybe it was merely an intake of breath before she launched into an argument she was sure would silence her daughter. But Sandy went on.

“Like what? Feeding me? Clothing me? Not beating me? The things that all parents have to do if they have a shred of decency and if they don’t want to be arrested? Or are you trying to make it out like you were parents of the year, every year? That you went above and beyond? I don’t know what you ever sacrificed for me, but if that’s just something parents have to do sometimes, I don’t know why you can’t just get over it.” One large stride took her to her bed, which she collapsed upon, fraught hands weaving their way through tangled black curls. She was both fired up and exhausted.

She kept talking. Her throat felt hoarse, although she hadn’t even been yelling. She talked with force, and force nearly always had a price.

“‘Just do it; it needs to be done.’ Isn’t that what you guys always said? And you follow your own advice. You understand what’s necessary- the bare minimum of what’s necessary. So, you should understand that I don’t need to do this.”

Sandy swiftly poked at the key to end the call and then tossed her phone gently to her side.

Her words would ring hollow with her mother, she knew they would. They would only confuse that highly-educated woman with her big brain. She knew only two well that her parents regarded her as the one who did only what she must to get by.

Sufficiently rattled by that phone call, Sandy acknowledged ruefully to herself that she wouldn’t get to sleep for a little while. She groaned and stretched out on the bed, arms raised above her head, legs straight out in front of her, heels kicking the mattress in exasperation. She propelled herself into a sitting position, bounced off the bed, and took a seat at her desk.

A little mindless internet browsing would put her to sleep eventually. She sighed and cracked her knuckles, ready to check her email, watch cat videos, and read the latest news story while avoiding the arguments in the comments sections. She’d had enough arguments for one day.

Time passed more quickly than she had expected. Enough passed to tucker her out more quickly than she expected, too. At some point, she found herself nodding in her seat, in that curious limbo between awake and asleep. She checked the clock on her screen and was alarmed to discover that it was nearly 1 a.m.

She ached a little, the result of having fallen asleep in her desk chair, or her physical job, or both. She also had that slight disoriented feeling that sometimes accompanies people waking up after an unscheduled sleep.

While Sandy sat a moment to get her bearings, she noticed that the house felt somehow...stiller than usual. Well, of course it was quiet, who would be moving around at this hour? But there was something almost...tomb-like about it. When she listened for them, it appeared that even the noisy insects outside had ceased their interminable chirping.

She lifted up a hand to close the lid of her laptop, when she thought she saw a strange slash of white light move across her darkened screen.

A burst of cold electricity bloomed in her chest, but she must have been seeing things. She was still in a fog from being nearly asleep.

In the bathroom, she brushed her teeth with the door flung open, bathed in the glow of the ceiling light above her, with the hall light casting a wide spotlight several feet in front of her. Down at the opposite end of the long hallway, she could just make out her bosses’ door. There was another light down there, but it was never on at night, because it apparently seeped underneath the door and affected Mr. Westcott’s sleep.

Light is supposed to be able to drive the dark forces away, she thought to herself, when it was time to patter back to her room. She turned the bathroom light off.

She was half a dozen feet from her door when it swung shut for no reason whatsoever that she could work out.

Sandy nearly jumped out of her skin, gasping loudly and standing there, cowering in the hall, staring at that door.

What was her next move? Now she was alone in the dark. Her first impulse was to rush back to the bathroom and flip on the light, but what was she going to do, sleep in the bathroom? Was she supposed to run down the hall and knock on Mr. and Mrs. Westcott’s door, like a child going to her parents after a nightmare?

Why did the door shut? She crept toward it. Nobody was in there; they would have had to pass the open bathroom door. She would have seen them go in. Unless- oh, God, what if someone had sneaked in her bedroom window and shut her door?

In that case, though, surely she would have heard glass shattering. She hadn’t left her window open.

She continued to approach her bedroom door, and eased it delicately open, ready every instant to feel somebody else opening it from the other side, and when it was open far enough for physics to let it finish opening on its own, she jumped back fast in case anyone was waiting to grab her.

There was no one. After an extremely nerve-wracking search of a small room with few places to hide, Sandy decided that some weird vibration going through the old farmhouse had caused the door to close. Perhaps even the motion of her moving down the hall.

Despite her recent fear that the window was some portal to danger, Sandy went and parted the curtains to let in some moonlight by which to see before she went and shut off the main light. She never ordinarily slept with a night light, but tonight she had a notion that one might be a good idea.

Sandy laid down on her bed, face turned toward the silvery light entering the room. As her anxiety mitigated itself, she listened, half-attentive, for a lullaby from the returning crickets and their kin...locusts?...while her eyelids drooped. If they showed up again, they were no longer needed for the job Sandy had wanted them for, however. She fell asleep in short order and in total silence.