"I just finished blessing the elements," Kevin said.
"Very well, then we shall proceed to warding the house. I want you all to break up into teams and go through the house room by room. Remember to work counterclockwise around each room and ward every window and exterior door."
Miss Price described the ritual as she wanted them to complete it. They would walk the perimeter of each room, starting in the attic at the top of the house and working their way down, with incense. They would then use the salt water that Dirk had prepared earlier to draw a banishing pentagram on each window and door, as well as over any plumbing fixtures, and then ring a bell. Miss Price decided that they had prepared themselves sufficiently, despite Penrose's distractions during the calling of the elements, and needed no further preliminary ritual. She instructed Penrose to stay in the music room and not bother any of the witches, and then assigned the non-pagans present to work with an experienced partner.
Elizabeth was paired with Fox, who pouted at this match (and she wasn't exactly thrilled either). Dirk gave Kevin a matching pout, but his faded much more quickly. Bob had been checking at his watch as part of his efforts to create negative energy, but stopped when Miss Price assigned him to a dark, voluptuous woman with mischievous eyes. Alice kept a hold on Joe and had him carry her bell and salt water.
Most of the group followed Alice, who was bouncing with delight at showing her friends the incredible attics, directly up to the third floor and beyond. Kevin decided that he and Elizabeth should start on the second floor since the upper stories were more than covered. Elizabeth had to agree but she listened regretfully to the thumping of the floor boards under the feet of the others as they scurried from room to room emitting non-ritual cries of "Look at this!"
Elizabeth carried a small bowl of salt water and a bell, while Kevin retained the smoking sticks of incense. They started with her room. She gritted her teeth with irritation as he paused in his circumnavigation of her room to check out some of the titles on her bookshelves. He refrained from making comments with an obviousness that had the same effect as any sniff of derision.
Like you don't read schlock fiction too. She followed with the salt water, ignoring him as much as possible and stopping at each window in the porch door to dip her index finger into the water and draw a pentagram, starting at the lower left point as Alice had told her earlier. "I've never drawn a star that didn't start at the lower left," Elizabeth had said, triggering a lecture on pentagrams and the various ways of forming them.
A faint blue streak trailed her finger. She looked around to see if Penrose was in the room and playing more tricks, but the only creature she saw was Kevin standing impatiently by the door.
They moved on to the bathroom. Kevin naturally was able to complete his circuit with the incense in record time and then he waited by the door to kibitz Elizabeth. "You forgot to ward the toilet, Goat," he said.
"It's the toilet," she said. "I really don't think that anybody is going to break into the house through the toilet."
He sighed. "That's not the point. It's a matter of energies." He reached out to take the dish of salt water from her hand, but she pulled it back out of his reach. Water sloshed over the side and splattered around the room.
"Cut it out," she said. She dipped her finger in the bit of water remaining and quickly signed a pentagram over the toilet. A faint blue star hung in the air.
Blinking, she said, "Do you see that?"
"See what?"
A bell tinkled somewhere in the house. With each ring, the pentagram grew brighter. Elizabeth looked around to make sure she hadn't overlooked Penrose lurking in a corner, but she only saw Kevin standing impatiently at the door.
"Hurry up," he said. "It's going to take forever to get through all those downstairs rooms, especially with the way people keep goofing off."
The footsteps of the others pounded on the stairs as they finished with the upper stories and made their way down. Once the second floor had been warded to Kevin's satisfaction, he finally allowed Elizabeth to go on downstairs where the warding of the first floor doors, windows, and plumbing was going on.
The mood of the group was decidedly festive by this point. Streaks of light lined the walls at chest height where protective perimeters had been walked around each room and glowing pentagrams hung in every window. When she realized that everyone else seemed to take this as a matter of course, or was unable to perceive it entirely, Elizabeth said nothing. She saw the eyes of Miss Price and Bob's partner focusing on the wards in an appraising manner, but the others moved heedlessly on through the massive public rooms of the lower story. A number of the pentagrams were off center in the windows and Miss Price went around behind the others and centered them with gentle pushes.
Elizabeth was grateful. The off-center pentagrams would have driven her mad for as long as they lasted.
She was warding the window of the butler's pantry when she heard the doorbell. She had no idea who it could be, unless it was another member of the coven arriving late or maybe Trip dropping by to see if she was free. She squelched this last notion as she joined the others who heard the bell and headed for the foyer to get the door. The person on the front porch was not Trip, nor anyone that she and the others recognized.
Flamingo pulled open the doors and stood back to reveal a short round man standing on the front porch. He wore a gray overcoat over a gray suit and carried a black briefcase in one pink hand. His round pink head was fringed with short gray hair and his gray eyes blinked mouse-like in the porch light. The hand not holding the briefcase brushed his face like a rodent grooming a set of whiskers. The mouse effect was so strong that Elizabeth was disappointed when he walked in the door and the tip of a gray tail did not flick out from beneath the back of the overcoat.
"My name is Unthank. I'm here from the firm that administers the trust," he introduced himself. "I need to have some papers signed by Thomas Penrose." He spied Bob who stood at the back of the group, holding a dish of salt water and looking relieved at this break in the witching action. "Would that be you? Could we speak privately for a moment?"
Bob said, "No, it's not me. There's no one here by that name."
Elizabeth said, "I know him. I'll see that the papers get signed if you'd like to leave them here."
Unthank said, "Oh my, no. I really should speak with him directly and as it is, I'm in a bit of a hurry. These papers need to be signed right away."
Elizabeth held out her hand. "I'll see that it gets done, and I'll give him any messages that you'd like to pass on. But he's not available right now."
Unthank hesitated for a moment, his eyes blinking furiously. "Oh no. I really can't leave these papers in anyone else's hands. I'll try again another time." He backed out on to the porch, stumbling over the raised doorstep. He scampered down the front steps with a deceptive lightness and hurried out to a silvery gray sedan double-parked in front of the house.
Flamingo closed the door.
"What was that all about?" asked Dirk. "No one from the trust has ever come over here. I thought they handled everything by mail."
"Are we done yet?" asked Bob plaintively.
"No, we have not done the basement," said Miss Price. She took his elbow and propelled him back towards the kitchen and the basement door.
The warding of the basement went quickly. There were only a few windows on that level and they were unable to open the door of the sand room to get it warded. With everything seemingly done, the others filed back upstairs while Dirk tugged on the knob of the sand room door until it threatened to come loose in his hands.
Elizabeth watched him. "I don't think you should go in there anyway. The floor isn't stable anymore and it's too dangerous."
"It should still be warded," said Dirk.
"Can't you just ward that door?" asked Elizabeth. "That would keep anything that comes up in that room from getting out into the house, right?"
Dirk shook his head. "Once it's in, it's in. I don't know if we could keep anything contained in an interior room. Not with this spell anyway." He dipped his fingers in the dish of salt water Elizabeth was holding for him and signed a pentagram onto the wood of the door. His fingers left a weakly glowing trail of blue. Elizabeth rang the hand bell she carried and the pentagram brightened.
A low rumble and a hiss came from behind the door of the sand room. The door jiggled in its frame. Elizabeth and Dirk exchanged glances and backed away from the door.
"What do you think that was?" Dirk whispered.
"The house shifting? The sand?" Elizabeth whispered back. "What else could it be?" As the words left her mouth, she felt that she really did not want him to answer.
Evidently of the same mind, Dirk tugged on her sleeve. "We're all done here anyway. Let's get back upstairs."
They hurried up the steps, Rififi shooting between their feet. Elizabeth wondered if he had been there throughout the ritual. It was strangely not comforting to find him in the basement.
The rest of the coven was in the kitchen, helping themselves to the traditional cakes and wine, which also included pie and herb tea. The final banishment of negative energy involved merriment. By unspoken agreement, Elizabeth and Dirk said nothing about their experience in the basement and separated when they entered the kitchen. Dirk made his way to Kevin's side and was offered a slice of the cake Kevin had brought. Elizabeth joined her sister and helped herself to a slice of Joe's apple-cranberry pie and a cup of tea, which she found at first sip to be heavily fortified with bourbon. She knocked it back and got a warm-up.
The conversation centered around two main topics. The very interesting contents of the attics, which Alice and Dirk were scolded for never having invited the others up to see, and the spirit discovered by Miss Price.
"Was the cone of power really just a trick?" Kevin's face fell all over again.
"Yes, I'm afraid so. It seems that the spirit has a rather obnoxious and juvenile sense of humor." Ms. Price sipped her tea with her pinky extended.
"Are you the only one who can see him?" Flamingo asked.
Bob's partner, the dark-eyed woman whose name turned out to be Charlotte, gave Elizabeth a rather grim look.
Miss Price's eyes slid towards Elizabeth as well, but she said nothing.
Alice said, "I'm not surprised the house is haunted. With the strange things happening here, we should have guessed it was a ghost right from the start."
"He's not a ghost," Miss Price corrected her. "An astral presence such as this spirit is something else entirely."
"So he's some kind of haint?" Officer Joe looked interested. "There's a couple of them at my grandmother's house, but I don't think they're same kind."
Bob rolled his eyes and started to edge his way to the door. Elizabeth wished she had an excuse to leave the room that was half as good as having to go to a hospital and save lives, but she was stuck here. The way Miss Price was not even looking at her made her more uncomfortable than if her boss had pinned her to the wall and demanded a full rundown of Penrose's activities.
Miss Price finished her piece of pie and thought for a moment before she tried to explain the difference. Even if Elizabeth had been about to duck out, she would have stayed to hear this. After all, Penrose had never said more than that he had never died.
"A ghost is the spirit of someone who's died, only the spirit has remained in this world without passing on to the next, as would be the natural order of things. Ensorcelling is even more unnatural than ghosting. It's like death through the looking glass. The corporeal body is thrust from this world into the next, while the astral body is left here, tied to some artifact, and more often than not enslaved to the sorcerer who so cursed him. Or her."
The group fell quiet. Dirk and Kevin, and a few other couples drew closer to each other. Elizabeth felt a cold knot form in her belly.
Alice did not appear impressed. "Well, what I want to know is how come you can see him, but the rest of us can't."
"I'd like to know too," said Miss Price. "But I'm afraid I can't answer you. Mr. Penrose has had rather more time to make a study of the matter than I have. He might be able to tell you."
"What does he say?" asked Alice.
Miss Price answered, "Nothing. He is making himself conspicuous with his absence."
Bob stopped in the doorway and looked more closely at Elizabeth, who was trying to make herself invisible without help from the ring. "Is that who you were talking to? That time I saw you arguing with the floating violin? I thought I was going nuts."
No, I'm going nuts, thought Elizabeth, as all eyes in the room were turned towards her. She stammered, "Well, that time? I thought you were asleep. Are you sure you didn't dream it?"
The next half hour was excruciating. Elizabeth had to answer a number of questions from her increasingly hostile sister and Dirk, who wanted to know if Penrose was cute.
"He's the guy in the portrait. Go look for yourself," she said finally, exasperated.
Bob, evil thing that he was, slipped away to go to work and did not bother to explain his remark about the floating violin, leaving that ball in Elizabeth's court as well, but at last the torture ended and the witches straggled on home. Miss Price lingered after the rest to help with some of the cleanup and give some last-minute instructions to the housemates about maintaining the spell.