***THE DRUID*** Judgement
resurrection, music, grey, refusal, graves
There was something innately strange yet somehow comfortable about slipping into a coffin while you were still alive. It was late, well past midnight, and it was pretty f***ing cold in that cemetery, so climbing into a padded box in a six-foot deep hole where the wind couldn’t find ya, it wasn’t the worst thing. The coffin had a comfortable little pillow and even though the stiffness and claustrophobic nature of it all was sure to cause a backache in the future, it wasn’t all that bad. Besides, with any luck—assuming that all of this went as planned—Andy wouldn’t have to deal with the backache alone. She would be sharing her new body with its old owner. She had never shared a body before… maybe that made backaches easier.
Andy clung to the old voodoo charm that Dru handed to her before the spell was meant to start and she held it close to her chest. She looked up as he leaned back, and Dru was standing above her outside of the hole. She was looking down and leaning on her shovel. The two women exchanged a long drawn out look that said everything that needed to be said, and Andy gave Dru a thumbs up. She pulled the lid of the casket down over top of her and everything went dark. A few seconds later, she could hear the soft thwud-thwud-thwud of dirt being tossed on top of her box and she could hear Dru chanting the spell.
It was decided, somewhere along the way on Andy and Dru’s journey into supernatural friendship, that Andy owed a favor to the woman who owned her new body first. The more Andy learned about Mia Allen the more she realized just how much of an influence she had on Andy without it being super obvious. The idea of her melting away in Hell or some Limbo… it wasn’t right, so Andy and Dru conceived a way to do right by the lost soul. They found the spell, they found the right night to do it, and now all Andy had to do was slip through to the other side and bring Mia back.
Everything was peaceful at first. It was kind of relaxing. The dark, the closed space, the sound of dirt weighing down on her; Andy breathed in and out nice and slow as she kept the panic away. But then something felt different. She couldn’t hear the dirt anymore, but she could feel it on the box, she felt like she was the box. The weight became too much, and Andy had a hard time keeping her breathing under control. Music started playing from somewhere in the darkness that surrounded her, music that she couldn’t place—some distant hell hymn sung by damned souls—and it caused a panic to rush around her.
“Dru!” she called out, banging on the top of her box. “Dru, I want to get out!” But there was no answer.
The box felt wet after that and dark grey water rushed up around Andy. She had no idea where it came from, but it was coming fast and soon it swallowed her up like a river and she couldn’t hear the music anymore. She thrashed around in that box for a short time until the air left her lungs. Her hand crashed through the top of her coffin and pushed it open, and the grey water went rushing away as she sat up, coughing up her spew to keep from drowning.
Everything was quiet.
Everything was different.
Andy was still in the ditch in the graveyard, but when she looked up Dru was gone. She took a second to catch her breath and then stood up. She went wobbly and felt like she was going to topple over but she caught herself on the wall of the hole. When she managed to climb out of the hole she started to notice that things weren’t as normal as she initially thought. Everything was grey, like a black and white movie, and even though it looked like she was still in the cemetery that she went to with Dru to start all this stuff, she wasn’t. Everything was upside down, and that’s how she knew she was in the in-between.
“You’re wasting your time,” a voice, her voice, called out from behind her. Andy spun around on her heel and saw Mia sitting on a gravestone. She wore a dress that Andy could tell was red despite everything being in black and white, and her dark hair was wet and sticking to her rotting face. It was Mia, the same face Andy wore now, but her skin was rotting away to nothing, and bone was starting to poke through in the cheeks and jaw. Her eyes were empty—black sockets—and when she spoke she only seemed half interested.
“Mia?”
“You’re wasting your time,” Mia repeated. “Go back. Tell your witchy friend that you tried, but that I don’t want to live again.” She looked down at one of her hands and that’s when Andy noticed that it was missing.
“You have to come,” Andy said, “I can do this, I can bring you back. It’s not fair that I get to live and use your body and you have to stay dead and rot. It doesn’t have to be like this, it—”
“We couldn’t share the body,” Mia shook her head and an ear fell off. “It’s already too much of you. Look at yourself. Where we are… only souls can travel. You didn’t bring the body with you, yet look how your soul appears.”
Andy looked down and got the point. Despite technically having an out of body experience, she still looked like her new self. Her core self was more Mia than old Andy at this point, or maybe the two identities were just becoming one. Whatever the case, bringing Mia into the mix now might be more trouble than good.
“I… I can’t leave you like this…”
“The destiny of that flesh is tied to you now, Andy Barclay,” Mia replied. “My destiny has a different part to play.”
A moment later, everything was grey again. Andy was in the box, it was dark, but things were normal. She sighed, knowing that in some ways she failed and that she couldn’t bring Mia back. She banged on the lid of the coffin and called out for Dru to dig her up.
***CLAIRVOYANT PROTECTOR*** The Sun
crimson, children, success, festivity
VALENTINE’S DAY, 1989
Things weren’t the same. Everyone liked to pretend like they could be the same, but Andy Barclay wasn’t fooled. He was seven years old now, he wasn’t a baby anymore, and he wished that everyone would stop treating him like a baby. The Midtown Children’s Crisis Center tried to pretend like it was home, it tried to pretend like it was school, but really it was neither. Orphanages were for orphans, but Andy wasn’t an orphan. His mom was still out there, still alive, and they were keeping him from her. The Crisis Center was a prison, and it didn’t matter how hard the adults pretended, it wasn’t the same.
He sat in the rec-room making little paper hearts. They told him to make valentines for someone special, but Andy couldn't really see the point in all that. The only person he wanted to give a valentine to was his mother, but he wasn’t confident that any of his gifts would reach her, so he cut little hearts out of red construction paper but left them blank. What was the point anyway?
Every now and then he would look over his shoulder to try and get a glimpse of the adults talking about him in the other room. He would hold the paper hearts and the safety scissors but peek over his shoulder to spy on the adults talking on the other side of the window, and he would stare until they caught him, at which point he would go back to cutting out his hearts as if he had been doing that all along. Usually, when Andy was sent into the rec-room to do something useless, it was so that Ms. Poole could speak to one of the countless doctors or psychologists they sent to talk to him. He hated almost all of them, none of them believed him about Chucky, and any time he tried to talk about his mom they always redirected the conversation back to his thoughts, or feelings, or blah, blah, blah. He only had one thought and one feeling, and that was anger, anger for what they were doing to him and his mother, anger for stealing him away from her, anger for not being believed. He couldn’t tell which of the shrinks was out there now talking to Ms. Poole—he didn’t get a good enough look when he peeked over his shoulder—but more than likely it was someone who wouldn’t be able to do much for him.
Of all the specialists that they made Andy talk to after the incident with Chucky—after they took his mother away—there was only one that Andy thought was nice. She wasn’t like the other doctors. Maybe she wasn’t even a doctor. Ms. Poole introduced her as Mrs. Warren, but she insisted that Andy call her Lorraine. Lorraine let Andy talk about Chucky all he wanted, and when she looked at him it was like she believed him. He only spoke to her the one time and then she was gone. He thought about Lorraine whenever he was forced to sit down with another one of these dumbys, and he wondered if he would ever see her again.
When he snuck another look over his shoulder, he saw that it was a man this time around; a tall man with a bald head, and thick mustache, and big glasses, who was talking to Ms. Poole. Andy sighed and finished up with the hearts. He only had two, but they were big and more or less cut even and clean. He took a crayon and scribbled in names for who they belonged to, and with a little bit of tape, he went over to the window and stuck his valentines on the glass, hoping that maybe the people they were meant for would see them.
One was for mom… who was out there somewhere.
The other was for Lorraine, spelled ‘Lurane’, and Andy hoped that maybe it would be enough to bring her back. With any luck, the sun would catch it just right and Lorraine would see it, and she would come back for Andy and tell everyone that he was not crazy and not making things up. With any luck… she would come back and get him out of there, and then he could spend Valentine’s Day with his mother.
***CHERRY BOMB*** The Hanged Man
punishment, knowledge, nature, halo, sacrifice
Maintaining a partnership, or even—dare it be said—a friendship with someone like Jennifer Check was a challenge worthy of a Homer-esque epic tome. Deep down, like very, very deep down, Jennifer was a good person/monster, and in a lot of ways Andy really enjoyed hanging around her. But it should be noted that Jennifer was still very much a handful. Hell, Jennifer was like two handfuls; two handfuls of like something really heavy that should really be lifted by at least three or four more hands, but for the most part it was all worth it. Jennifer was a good partner and it helped to have a monster fighting the good fight out there. Andy and Jennifer stopped a good amount of evil together, but when Jennifer went into one of her moods… that’s when Andy started to wonder if it was all worth it.
“Jennifer, come out of there,” Andy banged on the big metal door that Jennifer locked herself behind in the basement of the house they had been squatting in. “You can’t stay locked in there forever. That sub-basement doesn’t even have any windows! You can’t see in the dark, at least I don’t think you can, and you’re going to get hungry eventually.”
Jennifer was punishing Andy, that much was clear, though Andy had a hard time comprehending why exactly. She remembered them getting into a little bit of a disagreement about the Spice Girls and the next thing she knew, Jennifer was storming down into the basement and locked herself away like some sort of supernatural pre-teen who was quick to anger. Banging on the door wasn’t doing much good though. Andy banged and banged and yelled and yelled, but Jennifer wasn’t giving her the time of day. But it was all good; Andy knew the nature of Jennifer’s… condition. It would take a little work, but she would get her to open that door eventually.
Andy left, and when she came back an hour later she wasn’t alone. It took a little doing, but she used the back ramp to wheel someone down into the basement. This particular someone was bound by the legs and wrists to the wheelchair that they came in on, and they had a bag over their head. Andy gave Jennifer’s door another knock.
“Come out, I brought you a sacrifice, er, I mean, dinner…” Andy pulled the hood off the guy’s head and he snapped with panic, shaking against his bindings and looking around to see where he was. He tried to yell but he was gagged so it all came out as muffled nonsense. “I was saving this one for a rainy day, but I guess this counts as much as anything. He’s a real scumbag, Jenny… He’s the weirdo in town, likes to show his ding-dong to little kids, but there’s never been enough to convict him. I’m sure he tastes delicious… by your standards.”
But again, Jennifer didn’t answer. Andy waited a bit longer, tried again, but nothing. She sighed, “F***, fine… I’ll be right back.”
This time Andy was gone for about ten minutes and when she came back she was wearing a ridiculous Halloween costume. Wearing a short white skirt and a shoulderless tube top, her sexy angel costume came complete with plastic wings she wore on her back and a halo headband that bounced above her head from the clear pipe cleaners that held it in place.
“Come on out, Jennifer,” she called again. “You might be angry at me for some really stupid reasons but it doesn’t mean you’re still not you. I know you, better than most, I think, at this point.”
Andy started rubbing up on the creepo-perv she had tied to a wheelchair, running her hand over his chest as she straddled his lap. “I’m doing some weird, kinky sex sh*t to your dinner!” she called out again. “I know you’re getting hungry and I know you’re too weird to not be into this! Come on! You know you’re sick of being in that room!”
Andy made over-dramatic moaning sounds as she unceremoniously rubbed herself up against the confused pervert. There were a handful of scenarios in the past where Andy could honestly say that she was incredibly embarrassed with herself, but this didn’t really rank. Sure, it was not her proudest moments, but she made a commitment to Jennifer that went beyond one stupid fight about the Spice Girls. Despite everything, they were sort of friends, and sort-of-friends did embarrassing things for one another. That’s how it worked. So Andy rubbed, and poked, and licked the weirdos cheek, and made goofy grunting noises, and she did it all for a monster, her monster.
It was one of the worst five minutes of Andy’s new life… but eventually, Jennifer opened that door.
