Poltergeeks Read online

  I blinked at her a few times. "So what you are saying is… This video was staged and the whole thing is fake?"

  "Oh it is definitely staged," she said. "But what you are seeing before you is not a poltergeist, but rather, a feat of magic. The attack on those dogs is just supposed to look like a poltergeist, that's all. In time, you'll hone your skills to razor-sharp precision and you'll be able to spot a fake from a mile away."

  "I hope so," I said calmly. "So what do you think it means?"

  Betty shrugged as she went back to piling books on the table. "I suspect it means that whoever crafted that spell wanted certain people to understand its true meaning… but not everyone. What is more important, having millions of anonymous people observe what might or might not be a supernatural occurrence or a handful of people who know what specifically to look for?"

  I chewed my lip and reversed the video. I brought my face close to the screen and squinted as I clicked play. I watched the curtains flutter and I jumped when I saw a tiny spark of magical energy a split second before the orb appeared.

  "Look!" I shouted, as I clicked stop. "You were right! I saw an arc of energy."

  "And what does that tell you?" Betty asked.

  I thought for a moment and then gasped. "That we're dealing with some seriously twisted practitioner. But if it's the same person behind the attack on the school, I can't see how they'd have been able to do all that without burning up! It doesn't make sense."

  Betty nodded. "It's true – there are rules for magic. It's possible this might be a dark coven of some kind. Perhaps a group of witches pooled their collective energy to do this. Either way, we need more information."

  I raised a finger. "A broker! We could hit up Holly Penske for information. She's in the know about everything supernatural, though my mother told me that she plays both sides of the fence."

  Betty gave me an immediate look of disapproval. "I'd suggest that you forget about even considering contacting her," she said warily. "Holly Penske doesn't play nicely with anyone and you never want to be in her debt."

  "She deals with desperate people?" I asked.

  Betty's eyes narrowed. "Desperate, ambitious, conniving – she makes no distinction. Holly Penske deals with whoever is willing to pay her fee. She can't be trusted because she's only out for herself."

  I turned my attention back to the video. No real web traffic according to the number of hits. It was almost as if whoever planted it there meant for it to be seen by whoever was at the receiving end of their dark spell.

  "This video was aimed at someone who'd notice."

  Betty nodded. "That's right – someone like you."

  I clicked on the author's profile to see if I could glean a bit more information about him. A page immediately loaded with the username 'Hudibras' framed in a green box along with a link to subscribe to his YouTube channel. The background contained black-and-white woodblock prints showing people in medieval garb. I scanned the background further and my heart nearly stopped when I saw a faint text by a man with a long beard dressed in a capotain hat poking a tormented looking woman with what looked like a dagger. I gulped as I read the words aloud:

  "Has not this present Parliament

  A Lieger to the Devil sent,

  Fully impowr'd to treat about

  Finding revolted witches out

  And has not he, within a year,

  Hang'd threescore of 'em in one shire?

  Some only for not being drowned,

  And some for sitting above ground,

  Whole days and nights, upon their breeches,

  And feeling pain, were hang'd for witches

  "Oh my God! That bearded guy," I gasped. "I saw him in the girls' washroom yesterday. This is the same text that spirit wrote on the bathroom mirror!"

  Betty shuffled over to me and leaned over my shoulder. "I'm familiar with it and as I recall, it was written in 1678. That man in the picture is someone I've seen before… His name escapes me."

  "Whoever it is, they've clearly got a hate-on for witches," I said. "You don't think…"

  "That a spectre is the one responsible for attacking you and your mother at school yesterday?" she said, completing my sentence. "Spirits of the departed can't do magic, but the message might hold the key that unlocks a door to a very harsh reality many witches are in denial about."

  "And that would be?"

  Betty's eyes narrowed again as she pointed to the woodblock prints. "That persecution of witches is very much alive and well in the twenty-first century."

  I chewed on Betty's observation for a moment and then remembered that Marcus and I had sent an email to the video's author. I quickly logged into my email account and waited as ten messages downloaded. The familiar chime sounded to tell me that I had mail. Betty hovered over me, her glasses still perched on the bridge of her nose. I scrolled down past a number of spam messages until I spotted the words, 'Your Request' in the subject line. My eyes scanned to the left and I saw the sender's name was Hudibras.

  "Maybe the answer is in this email…"

  "Julie, don't!" cried Betty as she reached for my hand, but it was too late.

  I felt the hairs on my arms standing on end. The temperature dropped like a stone and a foul stench of rotting flesh filled my nostrils.

  "What's happening, Betty?"

  "Spirits bless us all!" she said.

  My body floated about five feet off the floor. Mom's spell books flew off the shelves and danced around me, the pages fluttering as a breeze appeared out of nowhere, sweeping across the top of the table and blowing all of Mom's beakers and flasks to the far end of the room. My laptop began spinning like a top and then it floated up to the ceiling, the screen blinking furiously. Dust fell from the ceiling as a tremendous rumble shook the room. I glanced over at Betty and watched in horror as Mom's shelf toppled over, burying her in a pile of spell books and jars filled with spell ingredients.

  The chair beneath me lifted off the ground and I ducked as it flew across the room, narrowly missing my head. The supernatural attack was getting out of hand and if I didn't do something, I'd wind up in the hospital too. I clenched my jaw tightly and raised my magic as I reached for my amulet. It tingled against the palm of my hand as I threw up a dome of magical energy to shield my body from the flying debris.

  Betty crawled out from underneath the book-shelf, her eyes blazing with supernatural fury. She furrowed her brow angrily and roared, "Whoever you are, you're not dealing with a novice and this spell ends now!"

  In a surprising display of her power, the chair that nearly took my head off slid across the floor until it was directly beneath me. I watched in amazement as all the beakers and flasks that had flown off the table and smashed against the wall reassembled themselves, the tiny glass shards fusing together. The remade vessels drifted back to the table and into neat and orderly rows. The books that were orbiting me like satellites circling a planet sailed back onto the shelves and the breeze disappeared as quickly as it started. I slowly dropped to the floor. My laptop fell into Betty's hands and she allowed herself a satisfied smile as she slid it back onto the table.

  "Some people need to remember their manners to their betters," said Betty, in an indignant voice. "We're safe now, Julie."

  I lowered my magic as the temperature returned to normal and the stench dissipated. Betty placed her hand on my shoulder and squeezed good and hard. I leaned over to the blinking computer screen to read two words that made my heart sink.

  "Two Days," I whispered.

  Chapter 13

  "Hudibras was definitely behind everything and the email proves it," I said, examining the message. "The time stamp says it was sent the day before the attack at school."

  "Then you're clearly the person that video was meant for," Betty said calmly.

  I glanced at my watch. "It's 11.33 in the morning," I said in a frustrated voice. "Hudibras sent that email more than twenty-four hours ago. That means we haven't much more than a day to do what?"


  Betty shuffled over to Mom's bookshelf and ran her index finger along the spines. "You know what must be done," she said.

  I frowned. "Do I? If he's behind what happened at school yesterday, maybe he's planning another attack or something."

  Betty grunted. "I think we just survived one, now where is that book?"

  "What book?"

  She pulled out a thick leather-bound volume the size of an encyclopaedia from Mom's bookshelf and dropped it on the table in front of her. It landed with a loud slap.

  "Your mother's grimoire – her personal book of magic. Have you started your own yet?"

  I shrugged. "Well… kind of. I mean, it's on a flash drive and everything's in Microsoft Word. Do you think you'll find the answer in there?"

  Betty flipped through the thick pages like she knew what she was looking for and then slapped her hand down on a page about a third of the way through the book. "There it is!" she announced.

  I slid over and squinted at the hand-written entries. Betty's finger pointed to a heading entitled, 'The Nature of the Mortal Soul'.

  "'The soul constitutes the binding of the physical aspect of an individual's humanity with the existence of their spiritual self,'" she read aloud. "'Religious scholars believe as a matter of faith, that our human soul departs the body at the moment of death. However, the soul can be torn from the body by means of dark magic, the darkest of which is the spell known as Endless Night where the victim lingers on in a persistent vegetative state until death claims them. Without the soul, a human body cannot survive more than a few days before physical death occurs.'"

  "Endless Night," I gasped, as my blood ran cold. "A voice bellowed those words just before Mom was attacked. Hudibras used the Endless Night spell to take Mom's soul. But why?"

  Betty closed the grimoire and reached across to hold my hand. I was somewhere between panic and relief if that makes sense. I was terrified that my mother might die, but if her soul had been somehow been taken, then if we got it back she'd recover and everything would be as it was. The big problem though was that we'd have to find this Hudibras guy as quickly as possible. A task that is easier said than done in a city with a million inhabitants, not to mention the fact that time was against us.

  Betty took a seat in the big chair again and stretched her legs out. "The word 'Hudibras' – can you look on that machine of yours and see if you can dig anything up? It would save us the drudgery of researching at the library or even contacting your mother's coven."

  I spun around in the chair and googled the word "Hudibras". Within seconds I had a page with twenty different links, so I clicked on the first one. A page loaded entitled Project Gutenberg, and there was a link to the name Samuel Butler.

  "It says here that a poet named Samuel Butler was the author of a satirical poem on Puritanism entitled 'Hudibras' and… Holy cow!"

  "What is it, Julie?" asked Betty.

  I pointed to the flickering computer screen. "It's the same text I saw on the bathroom mirror yesterday and on the YouTube profile."

  Betty squinted over to read the webpage and her faced turned white. "The passage is a commentary on the activities of Matthew Hopkins. I knew I recognized that woodcut print on Hudibras' profile, but it can't be!"

  "What can't be?" I asked in a half-panicked voice. "Who the hell is Matthew Hopkins?"

  She straightened her back and her eyes narrowed. "A troublesome character," she said. "A self-appointed persecutor not only of witches, but thousands of innocent women he accused of witchcraft during the seventeenth century. He took his position so very seriously that he named himself the Witchfinder General of England and he swept the entire nation into a frenzy of fear and loathing toward witches and those accused of witchcraft."

  I tried to remember everything I'd been taught about the persecution of witches, and it made my skin crawl. Everyone's heard of the mass hysteria that led to the Salem Witch Trials or that Joan of Arc was accused of witchcraft and burned at the stake, but our modern world has closed its eyes to a tainted past where those of my kind were hunted and killed just for being who they were born to be. I didn't know anything about Matthew Hopkins and I wasn't entirely sure where Betty was going with this. The guy had been dead for over four hundred and fifty years, so what was his connection to a person named Hudibras and what did either of them have to do with poltergeist activity or the attack on my mother? I decided to press Betty for answers.

  "Just how old are you, Betty?" I asked.

  She seemed surprised by my question and eyeballed me for a moment. "Why do you ask?" I twirled around in my chair to face her. "Well, Mom didn't exactly school me on spirit guardians, but you seem to know a lot about Matthew Hopkins. Were you around back then?"

  "Age doesn't apply to those of my kind," she said. "You might say that I've been around as long as time itself and I've witnessed humanity's evolution from primordial slime to your current incarnation."

  "So what precisely are you?" I asked in a confused voice. "I know that my mother summoned you to be my guardian but that doesn't give me much to work with. You've occupied a dying woman's body, and oh, by the way, I'm sure her family has probably filed a missing person report with the police."

  "Piff-paff," she interrupted. "If this body becomes a problem I can always find another. Mortals are dying in hospitals all over the city."

  "Okay that's just plain creepy," I said, surprised at her inference that human bodies were on the same level as disposable coffee cups. "Seriously, what are you, Betty?"

  "Fine," Betty grumbled. "I'm an immortal soul; an amalgam of a variety of naturally occurring spiritual energy that exists in animals, plant life, the wind… You know what I mean. I've been here since the beginning and I will be here long after your bones have turned to dust."

  "Gotcha. And the whole Jedi mind trick thing you pulled on that social worker not to mention what you did after you clicked on the message from Hudibras. Your power is probably off the scale."

  She nodded slowly. "Oh, there are others who are far more powerful than me. As for the social worker, well, I didn't perform a magical act; I simply imparted some of my essence to that nasty woman's mind to get a desired result."

  I nodded as I slid the map of Calgary out from under my laptop. "Marcus and I used a pendulata spell to locate where this Hudibras person possibly lives. You can see the drops landed in a section of town called the Beltline."

  Betty hunched over and examined the map. She ran her finger from one drop to the next and said, "You know enough to connect those drops of ink, right?"

  I gave her a sheepish look and I could feel my face turning beet red. "I didn't think of that," I said quietly. "Marcus and I were planning on going down to the Beltline yesterday after school and I'd intended to let my natural sensitivity to magical energy lead me to this guy. That was before I knew he'd attacked Mom, though."

  Betty snorted. "Good thing you didn't because he would have undoubtedly detected your magical signature and it would be you lying in the hospital right now."

  "I know that now," I said, as I reached for a pencil and started drawing a thin line from one dot to the next. When I finished, the lines formed a familiar shape to anyone who knows anything about arcane symbols. The kind of familiar shape that sends a jolt of cold fear straight into the pit of your stomach and makes you want to, I don't know, how about hide under a church pew for a few decades?

  "The Baphomet Sigil," Betty whispered, as she put her hand on my shoulder and squeezed.

  I nodded slowly as the cold fear in my stomach transformed into full-fledged panic.

  "The Left Hand Path," I said with a shudder.

  Oh yeah. Way over my head.

  Chapter 14

  We went to the hospital to check in on Mom and upon our arrival Betty made a beeline to the cafeteria. Apparently even spirits needed sustenance. Food was the last thing on my mind so I wandered up to the intensive care ward and within minutes I was standing in front of Mom's hospital bed. The inhuman soundi
ng hiss of the ventilator along with the high-pitched beep from the heart monitor filled my ears as I took her hand. Gone was the tingling sensation of Mom's magical signature intermingling with mine; that supernatural bond that all practitioners share had been stripped away leaving only a hollow shell that looked like my mother.

  But it wasn't her.

  No scowl or smile formed on her face. Her eyes were taped shut and a plastic tube attached to a mouthpiece was fixed between her lips. I watched her chest rise and fall with each gust of oxygen as the crushing weight of guilt pressed down on me.

  I had caused this.

  I should have done as she'd instructed and simply waited for her to arrive but I just had to take matters into my own hands. Now Mom was paying for my mistake.