Vanishing Act - Part 4

In case you missed the first three parts of Vanishing Act please visit the links below:

Stooping to the floor, my hands flailed for the purse and the precious doll. But instead of finding either, my hands plunged into sand. “Hey Kat,” I shrieked.

“Don’t worry, love,” she quietly replied, “she’s gone. They’re both gone.”

Something in her voice shook me. “Gone, gone?” I whispered.

“No, silly. Gone … not here.”

Slowly standing, I looked at my new environment in bewilderment. “Where did you take me?” I whispered with a shiver.

Hey Kat shrugged. “Don’t worry. Orfy will move heaven and earth to find you. Follow my instructions and he will never desire Lila again.”

Our surroundings shone with an other-worldly yellow light, as if someone had plunged the sun into the earth.

Natural columns of stone dotted the plains like a petrified army and in the distance trees lined the horizon as if a promise of water and life. Everything else was sand.

She took my hand, and we began to walk toward the woodland, a light breeze rustling the sand around our feet. Occasionally, a dust devil would glide haphazardly into view and just as unpredictably disappear again.

On the far horizon I saw gulls riding the wind above an invisible ocean but could not hear their cries nor the sound of the waves beneath them.

But I felt a worrying hollowness, as if a doorway had opened to my past and all my former troubles now threatened to return. Hekatos’ whispered comment, ‘I dare not even imagine the true cost,’ had lodged itself in my thoughts like an unwelcome guest.

When I was eight, my mom took me to a large antique store. In one of its many rooms the display tables and cabinets had a collection of spirit dolls from all over the world. Carved wooden Kachinas from the American Southwest, Ashanti Akuabas with large disk-shaped heads from Ghana, Daruma good luck dolls from Japan, Haitian Vodou dolls, carved root Poppets from Northern Europe as well as many others long since forgotten.

When I spotted the dragon doll lying on the floor beneath the table covered with Poppets, I felt compelled to pick it up when my mother wasn’t looking and hid it under my shirt.

But I was only a little girl. I signed no contract in exchange for my soul nor made any explicit request to injure or kill others.

Madam Hekatos was right, however, Hey Kat’s magic came at a price. It was innocent fun in the beginning. When she first began to appear to me, she was little more than a shadow on the wall.

But before long bad things began to happen to those who hurt me. A few months after I read my father’s letters he was diagnosed with cancer and was dead within the year.

The leader of a group of girls who frequently made fun of me at school tripped and fell down the stairs and broke her back.

Our sadistic gym teacher in the tenth grade was hit by a car after making me run so many laps around the school track that I vomited.

Shortly after my father died, Hey Kat manifested herself physically to me for the first time. Each time someone else was hurt she would appear in physical human form, as if feeding off the suffering of those who abused me.

It wasn’t difficult to draw the obvious connection. I never explicitly condoned Hey Kat’s actions, but I did not condemn them either. I simply chose to pretend it was only coincidence.

But after Orfy left me, something snapped within. I had allowed myself to believe that he had begun to love me the way that I loved him.

The pain of his rejection hurt worse than learning that my father left my mother because of me.

Weeping does not begin to describe the tears I shed at his betrayal. I wailed at the top of my lungs till my voice gave out. I beat my breasts with such fury that they turned purple with bruising.

After four days of excruciating grief, I begged Hey Kat to return him to me. “No price is too great,” I whispered. “I’ll do anything, agree to anything.”

Her plan was both simple and terrifying. “Only if you disappear will Orfy recognize your true worth.”

Because I loved him so loyally, I suppressed my jealousy and hurt and dropped everything whenever he needed me. Vanishing would make me more inaccessible than the imperious Lila. “Only then,” Hey Kat explained, “will he finally compare your love for him with Lila’s and grasp the enormity of his mistake.

“He will come for you,” she promised, “but others will come for you first. Be careful whom you follow. And whatever you do, do not say Orfy’s name until you have safely returned.”

But that seemed hours ago now. Now that the darkness has fully engulfed the night, I look up again at the limitless expanse of the stars above me.

No matter what direction I turn, I cannot see reflected light on any horizon. I am deeply lost in a huge and desolate place. If I had not regretted my bargain with Hey Kat before, I begin to regret it now.