As to what actually befell my friend Wendi Maeloche, I cannot say. What I will tell of her though, you will not believe. You may, and surely will, call me a liar, that I am mad and concocting a fantasy for your distraction and obfuscation of the truth. To be perfectly honest, looking back at our past endeavors and dark works, I would hold the same skepticism. For our lives, hers and mine, have unfolded in odd and terrible ways, far from the scientific rational of the current age. I have often wondered if I myself have not let slip the binds of sanity from my mind, but I have always had the assurances of Wendi who validated and shared my experiences. Paranoid delusions, schizophrenic breaks with reality and all manner, kinds and types of hallucinations may have clouded my consciousness you will profess of me, but they have not.
I stood mute at my trial, resolute and unwavering in the face of the prosecutor’s assault upon the facts of that horrible night not because I had no defense, but because if I had actually spoke of what I witnessed, I would assuredly have been placed into a mental institution for the rest of my natural life. Undoubtedly, they would have drugged me then, subjected me to psychological indoctrinations and held me in isolation as a risk to the health and welfare of those other unfortunates held captive in that institution known as the Eloise Psychiatric Hospital. That I could not risk, escape from a place such as that would have been much more difficult than from a mere prison.
It has taken me many months to acquire the materials I need. Now all is ready and I leave this record for any that would heed it. There is no doubt that those who find the evidence of my crime here in this cell block will say it is yet further proof of my madness. Of course, it is not to say that Wendi and I have not committed atrocities, both against man, nature and possibly God himself, but as for the murder of my closest friend, I am innocent. Most would say, upon reading this unholy confession, that I deserve the life sentence -at the least- for our past transgressions. I say not.
I can escape, so I will. There is absolutely nothing any of you can do about it. I go now, intent on reclaiming Wendi from whatever foul abode she has been unwillingly dragged to. If any should attempt to find or follow me, consider this your fair warning. I will neither brook nor allow any further interference from any of those who steadfastly remain ignorant to the whole truth of our reality.
Certainly, Wendi would not have obtained such power so quickly without such a willing, devoted and complicit compatriot as I. Of course, that also infers that she would not have been condemned to the terrible fate that she has fallen victim to. I imagine her studies would still have progressed, but at a much slower pace, allowing the wisdom that comes with age to mitigate the dangers that are inherent in her chosen profession. She is ever clever and gifted though, cursed with an ambition that knows no boundaries and her destiny may have been preordained from the start.
I may yet be her savior, but for me to affect any sort of liberation I must first extract myself from this prison known as the ‘Phoenix Women’s Correctional Facility’.
First, I shall tell you of her haunted youth so that you may more fully understand the circumstances that led an innocent child such as Wendi down the macabre path of necromancy, sorcery and demonology. In order that you understand me, and how I came to be her devoted and loyal disciple, you need to understand my lover and dark mistress.
Even as a toddler, in fact as far back as she can remember, she has had what she refers to as ‘The Sight’. ’The Sight’ is what she calls her natural ability to see and speak to the dead, and as she grew, so did her powers. You may not believe in ghosts and you may not believe in an afterlife at all, but you are seriously mistaken if you do not. You will know the stark truth of my words when your mortal body finally fails and you find that you yet still walk the earth.
Most of the departed pass on through the veil between worlds quickly, while others willfully decline to journey onward. A few of those corporeal entities who refuse to travel on prefer to stay and seek out a different kind of fleshless enjoyment, discovering death’s various and unusual benefits. Many are lost souls, spirits that are confused and do not realize they are dead or cannot, for one reason or another, accept their untimely demise. Some do not pass onwards out of the fear that they will face judgment for the sins they have committed while they were alive and their great fear of divine retribution holds them chained for eternity to this world. Lastly, there are beings of malice and dark energies that have refused to even been born into this world of pain and sorrow, who have instead chosen to delight in the anguish and sufferings of others and feed off the living.
All of them are drawn to Wendi and have shown themselves to her even as she was a child. Of course her mother and father, unknowing and unbelieving the truth of the matter, simply thought her speaking to unseen presences was but a case of an overactive imagination, just as many children play with ‘imaginary friends’. Of this, you should take a dire warning. Many so called ‘imaginary friends’ of the young are not images of fancy, many are indeed the souls of spirits, drawn to children whose spiritual eyes are yet open, having not yet learned to shut out the dead.
As Wendi never seemed to grow out of the phase, her parents became rightly concerned and did as all misinformed and unbelieving people do. They took their daughter to see a psychiatrist, becoming concerned to the point of alarm when she spoke of things she could not know of with her handful of years. All the laughably ‘learned’ doctor did was convince Wendi that to talk of the spirit world to others was to open herself to scorn, ridicule, fear and a diagnosis of mild insanity. ‘Imaginary friends’ do not show little girls their deaths and certainly do not try to possess them.
In elementary school, mediums, psychics and seers became a fascination to her and she eagerly, and secretly, studied every book and TV program that she could find in an effort to understand fully what was going on around her.
When I first met my dark future mistress in the third grade, she had already assumed the black and gothic style of clothing that set her apart from all of her peers. A somber and mature quality about her caused me to be as fascinated with her as she was with the dead. When other girls her age played with dolls and were delighted by ponies, princesses and unicorns, she was interested in death, the afterlife and ghosts, much to her mother’s dismay.
The dead have ever hounded her though, never giving her much respite. When one of our classmates suffered a loss, with a member of their relatives having passed away, the restless ghosts would always find her and pester Wendi until she did as they wanted. Usually this meant that Wendi had to act as a messenger for the recently departed but was believed only after convincing her wide-eyed fellow pupils of personal things that she could never have known. Repeatedly, through the years, she has engaged in these behaviors to our compeers and they now believe what the adults that surrounded us couldn’t, or wouldn’t, bring themselves to accept. That Wendi is not delusional or lying, that she indeed can speak with the unseen and instinctually feared dead. Unconsciously our fellow students, who knew of her and her unique ‘gift’, gave her a wide berth, out of respect and some small amount of fear I believe, and instead of her gaining favorable approval it instead only increased her loneliness.
Everybody who knew Wendi intuitively understood there was something different about the raven-haired child. There is something about her that causes people who have never met her to tread lightly around her dark figure, that is, at least in those who don’t take an immediate and unwarranted hatred to her quiet presence. Most adults found her a disquieting and unsettling figure, even as a child, while a handful outright feared her while in her presence.
Many times she has lamented when growing up, the fact that while she spoke the utter truth, she was ostracized and often punished by many whom stubbornly refused to open their eyes. Even then as children in elementary, I told her I would never leave her side, that I would always be there for her and never betray her. And I haven’t.
I think her mother and father had viewed her with some apprehension themselves. Her father, most certainly, viewed the dark haired and black-eyed girl with the intense and too knowing gaze that shared his house as an almost incomprehensible stranger that spoke to things unseen. Her mother, I know, loved her greatly but had a hard time showing it and Wendi, as a result, never truly felt loved or accepted. In school, I was her only friend, as most were uncomfortable around her and since I hung around with her, I was also ostracized and she became my only friend.
In time, Wendi coached me in being able to observe the spirit world but never have I achieved a fraction of her power. My raven-haired mistress with fathomless sable eyes has always been far ahead of me in our learnings. Things the rest of the world shuns have always fascinated her. She learned early on to keep her studies private. There lies in Wendi a deep and brilliant intelligence, one that compels her to gather and devour the forbidden knowledge of the mysteries that makes grown men quail.
As fiercely as she is obsessed with her subjects, I am as obsessed with her.
It was in her first year of middle school, in the sixth grade, that Wendi’s life took the turn that compelled her down the abysmal path that she travels upon now. If it were not for her mother’s sudden and inexplicable wasting death, I believe that her obsession with the occult would never have turned to the dread field of necromancy as it did. To be sure, while all mediums and speakers with the dead are necromancers, Wendi went further down into that terrible discipline than any other would seriously dare.
When a baffling and nameless disease turned Wendi’s once vibrant mother into a skeleton covered by loose and dangling skin within the short span of a single month, Wendi felt abandoned. There was nothing that modern medicine could do. There was not even a name for the terrible degenerative disorder that took her mother from her.
Wendi did not feel that her mother purposely abandoned her by dying, she was far too knowledgeable of how death comes for us all by then. It was her mother’s lack of contact with her after death that distressed her. After her mother had passed to the other side Wendi waited anxiously for her mother’s spirit to contact her, as so many spirits had before. When a month had passed and still her dead mother’s spirit hadn’t even attempted to say a goodbye, Wendi became indignant and angry.
Wendi’s mother knew, and had known since Wendi had learned to talk, of her only child’s penchant ability to converse with the recently departed and in Wendi’s eyes her lack of contact was an open refusal and insult. Wendi felt like she had been snubbed by someone that should have loved her unconditionally, betrayed by a mother that was unable to show her love in life and unwilling to show one small bit of consideration to her in death.
The only family support she had left was a father that openly loathed and feared her. Without her mother’s moderation on him and his feelings towards his own flesh and blood, his mood towards his odd daughter soon turned into an almost complete disregard for her on every level.
It was then that Wendi’s fascination with the occult turned into a morbid study of summoning and raising of the dead. She became obsessed with the goal of forcing her mother’s ghost to obey her and speak with her, granting her the final conversation that she thought she was entitled to. Wendi was determined that she was not to be ignored, that even if her mother’s spirit had passed on into the veil that separates this world from the next, she would drag it back kicking and screaming if need be.
She sought out and studied every scrap of information on the frightful subject that she could find. Endless hours that turned into days and days that slipped into months, she spent searching the internet. Most of what she found was utter fantasy but occasionally, she came across something that actually held the veracity of truth. With a slow and tedious methodology, she experimented and tested, augmented by her own natural adeptness.
I had never, and still haven’t, found anyone like her. Her beliefs go completely against the grain of modern science and religious theology and her theories are both brilliant and startling. None had ever expressed such radically alternate views of our reality like she, and I was fascinated and completely engrossed by her. That she was willing to challenge everything the world tried to tell us and delve deep into the world of the paranormal and supernatural impressed me. Wendi has a boldness and courage that goes far beyond the pale of most humans. Her willingness to analyze and undertake the forbidden and banned trials and rituals, that many profess black magic, at once scares and delights me. Her thirst for what she has termed ‘The hidden knowledge of creation’ knows no bounds and she is quite willing to go wherever that notorious education will take her.
By the time we were twelve years of age and in the seventh grade, I became her devoted apprentice. While all the others in our school started showing an open revulsion of us, teachers included, I found I had developed a slight ‘crush’ on her that took me years to express.
Seventh grade was also when the former respect of our classmates started turning into something much more sinister. It was the first time we started hearing our peers calling us witches and other such foul names. Specifically, we were blamed for all manner of things that happened to people we knew in this random and chaotic world we exist in. When someone hurt himself by doing something foolish, instead of taking responsibility for his own actions, Wendi and I were to blame. When someone had a spell of bad luck, we were accused of witchcraft. When someone fell ill or even received a bad grade for shoddy class work, we must have cast a hex on them. Never had we, at that point, done one thing to cause anyone harm, though none believed us.
In fact, Wendi hadn’t yet studied Santeria, voodoo or any of the vengeful disciplines in any depth. At that time, all of her mental resources were focused on the ritual summoning of entities from within the spirit world and our first real test wouldn’t happen until the eighth grade. The only workable response we had, that is, the only argument that we found that worked against the worst of our abuser’s accusations was to question them if they were foolish enough to believe that magic was real to begin with.
Wendi is a small girl and at that time, she was the tiniest girl in her class and would have had a hard time winning a fistfight against a mouse. I was hardly any bigger, and though never had we shown any inclination for violence we were often bullied and physically assaulted for absolutely no reason.
By the eighth grade Wendi had become a different person, extremely introverted and private to the point of secrecy. No one besides myself was ever allowed into Wendi’s personal thoughts, not even her father, who had also turned against her.
Her pater, for that matter, had also undergone a personality change of his own. With his wife’s sudden death, he soon sought solace in the depths of the bottle. Within a year, he had become a selfish and mean-spirited alcoholic that visited physical abuse on the daughter he couldn’t understand. When the lout wasn’t insulting her, he was ignoring her. I had even then, repugnant suspicions that his mistreatment took a more personal exploitation of his young daughter, as Wendi’s feelings towards him were more complicated than any simple daughter / father relationship should be, regardless of whether he was a practicing alcoholic or not.
Wendi grew cold to the world and while mine own situation wasn’t as bad as hers was, I found I hated most of the people around us. Maybe that is the reason neither of us cared one iota for the vile things that we released into the world with our failed experiments into the black arts. It wasn’t until we entered high school that Wendi finally perfected her methods for summoning and in those two years of dark research, we accidently released a number of horrid and terrible nightmares. Some of which still lurk and hunt among the living today.
At the tender age of thirteen, while Wendi and I were both yet in the eighth grade, Wendi made her first attempt at summoning spirits from beyond the world of the living. When she asked me to attend her in her perilous and forbidden task, I of course agreed.
Into the darkness of a moonless night, she led me. Into the depths of the forest that surrounds our small community of superstitious and overly religious farmers, to a place of long abandonment she took me. There, in an open field, upon the remains of a farmhouse’s old and cracked foundation far from prying eyes, she made preparations.
The darkness that night was overwhelming, so black was the evening that I stumbled and tripped constantly and needed assistance from my stealthy and sure-footed friend just to keep up with her. I must confess, that night, while I never doubted her beliefs or abilities, I was full of fear at what we were about to do. It is terrible enough to know the restless dead are all around us at all times and quite another thing entirely to endeavor to pull one from the nether that exists between the worlds and bring it back into ours.
Between two and three o’clock in the morning, in the hours of the dead, as Wendi informed me that it is only then that the near impenetrable curtain betwixt the worlds of the living and the dead is at its thinnest, she started drawing disturbing diabolic symbols. In chalk, she drew a dreadful pentagram for our protection and to focus her spell on the weathered cement of the long ruined abode. In the center of that dread thing we stood, candles flickering at the five points of the central star and I chanted verses in Latin as Wendi had instructed me.
For over a half an hour I canted as Wendi commanded while she petitioned the deceased to part the shroud and bring forth her departed mother. Just as I was giving up hope of anything happening, the whole atmosphere changed and took on an oppressive and unnatural feeling. As Wendi implored the unseen to part the veil between worlds and called upon her dead mother’s wraith to come to her I felt a supernatural terror creep into me. Goosebumps rose and all of the small hairs upon my body and the back of my neck arose, the air around us becoming as cold as the grave.
My heart literally stopped and jumped into my throat with terror as two piercing and glowing orbs of red light appeared out of the dark mist that had formed just outside of the protective symbol. I was positive that whatever was leering menacingly at us mere feet away was not, nor had ever been, human. That it was not the spirit of Wendi’s mother was obvious to us both. After I shortly paused in my chanting, Wendi gave me such a stern and disapproving look that I quickly continued, and I became for the first time viscerally afraid of my unique and rare friend that I had not wanted to risk her ire.
Wendi, ever curious and completely lacking in the fear of the unknown, wanted to see just what it was that had responded to her summoning. Her tenor changed along with her words. While I was horrified at what Wendi was doing, I was also astounded by the fact of what she had accomplished already that night. She no longer implored the spirits to show themselves. Instead, she horribly started granting whatever it was permission to enter our world; in fact, she started verbally commanding it to do so, pulling it through the normally invisible veil.
Here was the truth of the matter, coming to reality in the shape of a horrendous and hideous abomination to be sure. From then on I nevermore doubted anything Wendi told me. She had, in one night, proved all the scientists and teachers wrong.
A thing of nightmares strode forth, a thing that was composed entirely of shadow and darkness that could not logically exist. Its eyes radiated such a deep red that it illuminated its bestial face and colored it as if it were bathed in blood. The monster had the form of a great black wolf, larger and clearly more malevolent than any that had ever walked the earth before it. It was wholly composed of shadow, evaporating into nothing wherever the light of the weak candles touched it. The unholy beast hated the light and it maintained as much distance between the flickering small flames as possible. No sound left its throat and it moved in complete silence. If not for the blazing points of scarlet light where its eyes should have been, none would ever know of its deadly presence until it was far too late to escape it, as it was nothing more than a patch of blackness in the dark of the night. Sharp obsidian canines and fangs snapped and tried to get to our flesh and it was only stopped by the outer circle of the protective pentagram that Wendi had meticulously drawn around us. Against this invisible barrier, it struggled, biting and clawing at the air, desperate to attack and maul us.
Both Wendi and I had stopped, fear and amazement ceasing our tongues. While Wendi and I fraught over what to do, as the dire shade stalked around the flimsy chalk pentagram, I asked her how long the symbol would keep the foul thing at bay. I was struck with mortal fear then as Wendi informed me that a pentagram’s strength is directly related to its permanence and a chalk symbol is one of the weakest.
When the fiendish thing started pushing up against the unseen barrier and its mass seemed to be slowly pushing inwards past its previous border, as if the circle were already weakening, Wendi at last found us salvation. Out of her worn backpack, she produced a flashlight and as soon as the bright light struck the vile wolfen nightmare, it soundlessly howled and jumped away from the beam. I swear I saw a small stream of whitish smoke come from where the repulsive thing had been struck by the concentrated beam of light, as if it had been painfully burned by it.
It ran around chaotically then, not wanting to leave its prey and trying to stay out of the flashlight’s ray. Finally, after having been twice more affected by the intense light it fled into the impenetrable gloom of the surrounding forest and was gone.
Nervously we made our way back home, jumping and nervously shining the flashlight’s bright beam whenever any noise startled us or occurred anywhere near us.
Neither Wendi nor I have entirely figured out what it was that we set loose upon our world in the small hours of that dark night but I can tell you it still roams and stalks the town. Every couple of months since then there have come reports of brutal and vicious slayings of various farm stock and pets that confound the community. Even in the heavy snows of late January, bloody and mutilated corpses of chickens, sheep and other creatures are found lying in the blood-drenched snow without a single foot or paw print or clue as to what attacked and fed off them. The attacks are always in the moonless and darkest of nights and never are tracks left behind. I am positive that these are the victims of the shadow beast we summoned, but I am sure none will believe my confession. I am also sure that it is only a matter of time before it finds human prey, and then the bloody death will be blamed on wolves, coyotes or a pack of feral dogs.
From that night on, after seeing Wendi’s power, I became both terrified of her and loyally devoted to her. There is none else like my dark mistress and I shall do whatever I must to bring her from what has befallen her.