Cedar of Witchcraft and the Nightmare's Design - Chapter One

Too often, the nightmares would rise up and raid the refrigerator. I would wake up and go downstairs in the morning only to discover that the meat drawer was completely empty and there were cloven-hoofed footprints left in the spray of breadcrumbs on the kitchen floor.

This happened all the time.

Yesterday had been particularly bad, due to the fact that I hadn't been to the grocery store in weeks and the food supplies were getting low. Still, there was enough left to last until Friday, when at least I'd have the spare time to get to the marketplace. Of course, inconvenience is the dearest friend of a nightmare, and so the food was gone. Including my leftover paella, which I shouldn't have to remind anyone costs a pretty penny just for the ingredients, let alone how tedious it is to cook!
Something had to be done.

It was hard to find anyone to blame for this, despite how frustrated I felt over the entire experience. Going after the nightmares with a fully loaded shotgun was one of my most recent daydreams, but I couldn't rightfully yell at anyone in my family for getting me into this. I had no one to blame but myself.

I'd been warned when I bought the place. My aunt Eugene had lived there before moving out a mere six months later. She gave us all the gory details: the way the showers sometimes ran with blood instead of water, the way slime dripped from the ceiling and vines climbed all over the walls, despite how often she trimmed them. And, very often, she mentioned the infestations of nightmares.

"You never see them, of course, but it's obvious they're there," she'd declared during family card night, blowing her cigar smoke out through her nostrils as she picked up my mother's discard. "The little buggers leave all sorts of traces. Even a half-assed huntress like myself couldn't miss them if I were blind and intoxicated." She snorted, puffed at her cigar, and discarded an ace of diamonds.

"I'll buy that," I called, quickly snatching it up before anyone else could say a word. We were playing Liverpool, which was one of the longest, most tedious card games that we knew how to play. One round could last up to forty minutes and there were fourteen rounds in all. My family usually played it due to the fact that it gave us an excuse to gossip. Or, as my uncle Ossifer claimed, "Some women have to get the bullshit out before their eyes turn brown," which was some crap for him to claim, since his eyes were the brownest in the family.

"So what sort of nuisances do nightmares lend themselves to?" inquired my aunt Dynette, picking up my discarded two of clubs. Aunt Dynette was the closest cohort of Aunt Eugene, ever since my mother was little. The two of them had been born so close together that they were doomed to friendship. Mom would still complain to me, in private, how often they forgot to include her on their nightly haunts. Dad would roll his eyes and continue reading the paper. He didn't particularly care for the extracurricular activities my aunts would involve themselves with, but he rarely complained anymore.

"The bond between sisters is too close for any man to understand," she often argued, but the real reason why Dad never said anything was because he was tired of quarrelling. My mother would never admit she was wrong, a trait she shared with her sisters.

"A bunch of harpies, those three," he would mutter, but nonetheless, whenever she would slip out the door sometime past midnight, he was given to turning over and going back to sleep. No use, complaining. He knew what he was getting into, marrying my mother.

Back to the card game. My aunt Dynette was half-listening, half-sneaking a look at my mother's cards while Aunt Eugene gave a detailed list of the problems she'd been having with her nightmare infestation.

"They crawl all over the walls and their feet are so dirty that they leave track marks. I tell you, Dynette, you've never appreciated your house like you would if you moved to a place with footprints behind the spider webs!"

"Spider webs? You allow spiders in your house? Really, Eugene, that's just sloppy."

Aunt Eugene threw up her hands, flashing us all with her run of diamonds before remembering to hid her cards. "I don't allow them in, the damn nightmares bring the spiders with them! And snakes! And centipedes! They bring in anything that could cause a girl to shudder."

She gave an exaggerated tremor and then leaned towards where mom and I were sitting.

"Be grateful you don't have any at your house, Melly," she told my mother in a conspirator's whisper, "or they will frazzle your life till you're at your wit's end! What with their constant taking of food, dirtying the carpets, not to mention ruining a perfectly sound night's sleep.... Just be grateful, Melly."

My mother laughed quietly to herself and then laid down her perfect run, throwing her last remaining card in the discard pile.

"Really, Eugene. I already live with those problems, after all. You forget that I am married."

My aunts raised their heads, cackling with laughter, not even minding that my mother's apt playing had caught them with their hands full of wild cards and aces.

Both of my aunts were unmarried and lived in their separate houses. Aunt Dynette had lived in the same sprawling mansion since leaving Grandmother's place when she'd turned eighteen. When I was growing up, that had been the main meeting place for cards and gossip. The halls were designed in patterns of black and gray, the chandeliers lighting the dim recesses through the sparkle of their dangling crystals.

Many different cats lived within Aunt Dynette's mansion. When I was younger, I would chase after them, or stroke their fur all during the night while the hunt went on. My father would disapprove, of course. He hated the fact that I was left on my own at the mansion, rather than home with him while my mother was out. That was one of the main things they would argue about, but I didn't side with him at all during those particular fights. I loved playing with the animals, and chasing the shadows in the basement, and making different figurines out of the clay that Dynette would leave me to work with while she was gone.

It wasn't until I was older that I realized what the clay really was for, but that's another story.

My aunt Eugene's houses were another matter. For one thing, she didn't have any cats. Her houses were always cold and silent whenever we would visit, and there was rarely anything fun to play with. The shadows in her basement were stationary and boring. Eugene rarely wasted her energy in making her houses more interesting, mostly due to the fact that she moved all the time. The longest she'd ever stayed at a residence was two years. My mother later told me that the reason she'd stayed so long at that particular house was not due to the fact that she'd liked it any better than her previous homes, but because Grandmother had cut her off of the family money due to some argument they'd had while playing gin.

Her most recently abandoned home, perhaps because of the nightmare problem, or perhaps because of it's dank, swampy location, wasn't selling very well. I was nineteen by then. I'd graduated from the requirement of state-provided education two years ago and, since then, I'd been spending my days working for the local electronics factory that was the lifeblood of Calgary, the nearest small town.

"You're wasting your life," my aunts would say to me during cards. "No one else in our family would ever be caught dead working at that place! You have all these advantages in your life, so use them!"

They didn't speak in unison, of course. But boiled down, the contents of their separate conversations were exactly the same. I was different. I was special. So I had to behave as such, or else I was a disappointment to them, to my mother, and to my entire ancestral line.
After two years of this muttered disapproval, I'd finally sickened of their constant nagging. After working a night shift at the factory, I drove over to Aunt Eugene's new place, some boring 1950s house that seemed entirely composed of cubes and rectangles, and I knocked on her door.

And waited. And waited. Finally, Aunt Eugene opened the door, her robe hastily thrown back on while the muscles of her face throbbed and convulsed in an effort to get back into their original places.

"Do you know what time it is....?" she yelled, stopping almost immediately once she saw who it was who'd knocked.

"Cedar?"

"Yeah. Hi, Aunt Eugene. Sorry it's so late."

She waved one of her hands dismissively and pulled me inside. At least this new house was friendlier than her previous ones, with the lights burning bright yellow and the carpets a cheerful blue. Dripping candles stood on the dining room furniture, their flames dancing in the wind brought in from opening the front door. The air smelled like wax and Lysol and the whole house felt open and welcoming.

"I like your new place," I said.

She rolled her eyes. "Of course you do. I think it's perfectly dreadful. But, until your grandmother gets it into her thick skull that she isn't allowed to draw from the bottom of the deck, it'll have to do."

Sometimes, my mother's side of the family took card games way too seriously.

"So," she said, lighting a cigar with one of the candles burning on the dining room table, "to what auspicious god do I owe your visit? Not that I'm complaining, mind you, but it is rare for you to come see me without your mother in tow, and on the night of the new moon, no less."

I cringed. "Oh shit! Is it?" I snuck a look out of one of the windows and, yeah, the moon was barely a sliver in the sky. "I'm sorry."

Aunt Eugene laughed, punctuating her guffaw with a stream of silver smoke. "Don't worry about it, dear. Come on into the kitchen. I'll get you a lemonade. You look patched."

"Thanks." I followed her into the kitchen and accepted the drink. It was one of the cheaper brands, and the aftertaste was slightly acerbic, but I gulped it down anyway. I'd already been rude once tonight. To refuse the drink after my first social faux pas would have been damn near unacceptable.

"So, um, sorry about showing up tonight all out of the blue, but I just got off work and I figured you'd be home."

I stared down at the kitchen tiles, trying to organize my thoughts. I hadn't really planned anything out, but had driven impulsively over to her house without even thinking. Working a 12 hour shift at the factory could do that to a person, though. Two years after getting the job on the assembly line, I hadn't read more than five books in all that time. That was extremely unlike me, and if my mother noticed that I was neglecting my reading, she would have had the perfect ammunition to get me to quit.

Education was important in my family. That isn't to mean my grades at high school were considered important. Quite the contrary. Education, in my family's view, had a radically different definition than any of the tripe my high school had taught me.

But factory work affected a person, no matter what their background was. After staring at the same flow of computer parts on the conveyor belt for twelve hours in a row, the brain was one of the first things to go. It was almost always a challenge to think again, after working.

Standing in my aunt's kitchen, I mentally willed my brain to catch the hell up.

"Aunt Eugene, I want to move out of my house. I...I know that my mother doesn't think I'm ready for it, yet, but you and Dynette were barely eighteen when you two moved out, and I think I'm ready to take on the responsibility of home ownership...."

Wow. Responsibility of home ownership? My brain must be slipping, to come out with an excuse that pathetic.

Aunt Eugene looked at me skeptically. "I can believe the part about wanting to move out. Lord knows I wouldn't want to have to live for more than a second in the same house as your father – " my aunt hated my father, hated the fact that mom had gotten married, and probably would have been fantastically grateful if the entire marriage had never occurred, were it not for the fact that without the marriage, I would never have been born – "and I can certainly understand the need for one's own personal space. Honestly, Cede, I was expecting you to go out on your own an entire year ago."

She paused, staring thoughtfully at her cigar while the ashes fell down upon the clean, tiled floor.

"Well," she said, "I supposed I could rent you the second floor of this house. I don't really use it, anyway, and it has it's own bathroom, so you wouldn't have to bother me in the middle of the night or anything."

I jerked my head up, startled. "What?"

Aunt Eugene looked at me blankly. "What do you mean, 'what'?"

"Aunt Eugene, I didn't come here to ask to live with you! I came to ask if I could buy your old house!"

She smiled and began to laugh to herself. "Darling, do you know how much a house costs these days? Even if I gave you the cheapest possible price, and you know I would for you, Cede, it still would be over a hundred grand. You couldn't afford that."

"Yes, I could," I objected. "Grandmother set up a trust fund for me when I was born and I'm sure she'd let me use it if I explained to her what I wanted it for. Plus, my job at the factory pays really well, so I could probably get the entire place paid off within a year."

The smile faded from Aunt Eugene's face. "You're serious?"

"Yes," I said, as emphatically as I could manage.

"Well then...." She paused. "Does your father know what you're planning?"

"Not yet," I admitted. "I haven't really told anyone, yet. I figured I'd talk it over with you, first, before I made any real plans."

Aunt Eugene giggled to herself and then opened her arms and gave me a hug. "Then, darling Cedar, I would be delighted to help you out."


*~*~*~*~*~*~*


That was a month ago. It seemed longer. The entire "hey, I'm moving out" conversation with my parents felt like it had taken about seventeen years, but then again, I'd always known that time was relative. My dad and Uncle Ossifer helped me carry my stuff into my new house, but even with everything unpacked and put where I wanted it, the rooms still seemed empty. Grandmother had purchased furniture for me when she'd heard the news, and that took up a lot of the extra space, but still, I'd never felt so alone.

I loved the house at first, though. It was small, probably the smallest my aunt Eugene had ever lived in, with only two rooms and a bathroom on the upper floor and the kitchen and living room on the lower. There was an unfinished basement beneath the first floor that had only a single bare bulb to light it. In the back yard was a ramshackle shed that had the gardening equipment in it and a pathetic empty square of a garden. The place didn't even have a garage.

Despite how tiny it was, the house was perfect for me. It was set in the deep woods, surrounded by state-owned trees and a serious lack of neighbors. It would take fifteen minutes of driving just to get to the nearest gas station, and I think the closest residence was a mile and a half away. If I wanted to, I could spend every single morning sunbathing in my front yard completely naked, and I wouldn't even have to worry about anyone seeing me, let alone calling the police. This was freedom and privacy rolled into one, my perfect combination.

It only took two days to completely set up everything. Afterwards, Mom and Aunt Dynette blessed the house, sprinkling the corners with holy water and burning sage grass in every room to rid it of evil spirits. I was grateful. Cleansing rituals were one of the hardest things to do, and I knew for a fact that Aunt Eugene had never been very good at them.

Maybe it would help a little with the nightmare problem. It couldn't hurt, anyway.

Then, finally, they got into their cars and drove off and I was officially on my own, in my new house. Despite what I said I could do, I decided not to wander around my property naked on the first day. Rather, I sat down on my spiffy new leather couch and enjoyed the silence, only occasionally punctuated by the rattle of new ice adjusting in my refrigerator's ice machine.

That night, the nightmares came.

It was about two A.M. when I first woke up, aware that something was wrong. There were noises coming from the kitchen. It sounded like what an infestation of mice conceivable sounded like – I wasn't sure, exactly, since mice had never been allowed within my parent's house. What was the point of being able to cast spells if you couldn't keep your pantries free of rodents, after all? – and I decided the best thing to do was ignore it and go back to sleep. After all, by the time I got downstairs and turned on the light, the mice would just scamper back into whatever hiding places they had found. It wasn't like I had any mousetraps anyway. Why even get up if I was just going to stand around uselessly?

That morning, I went down into the kitchen to discover my leftover Taco Bell burritos were missing.

Also, a small puddle of slime had dripped from the ceiling onto my new coffee table and there were a few splatters of blood in the bathroom tub, but I didn't care too much about that. Ectoplasmic slime naturally evaporated in a few hours without even leaving a residue, and the blood was easy enough to wash away down the drain.

No, no, the thing I was pissed about was the missing Taco Bell. That was the only food I had left for breakfast and if I stopped to get something to eat before work, I'd be late. Stupid nightmares! I hated missing breakfast!

This had happened a month ago and I still hadn't come up with a solution. Almost every single morning, something was missing from the kitchen. Always, the damn nightmares would steal the very best food. Oh no, no cheap cans of lima beans for them. No, they had to steal my leftover filet mignons and my boxes of fancy chocolates. The worst part was, every possible solution I'd tried had failed.

I'd borrowed one of Aunt Dynette's best mousers, but it didn't do a damn thing. The tabby would just sit there and purr in the mornings, instead of bringing me the corpse of one of the food thieves. The traps I set out, baited with snippets of lobster or cheddar cheese didn't catch a thing. The padlock I put on the refrigerator door was unlocked by the morning and the video camera I left on all night didn't record a single second, despite the fact that the little red light was on and I had pressed the "play" button.

So when I woke up to find my homemade paella gone and my floor dirty again, I decided to call someone who would at least show a little sympathy towards my plight. Whenever I complained to Mom, she would pretend to listen while actually watching TV, or doing one of her crossword puzzles. Dad was no help either.

"Just don't buy any expensive food. That should at least cut some of your losses."

"Dad! I don't want to 'cut my losses.' I shouldn't have to compromise with friggin house pests!"

Dad snorted, which was always an impressive sound considering how big his nose was, and said, "Then why did you spend all of your trust fund on that stupid house in the first place? You knew that it had these problems before you bought it."

I fell silent, my witty retort dying an early death on the edge of my tongue. He was right, of course. Aunt Eugene had told me all the horror stories, and I knew her well enough to know that she didn't completely make up fictional accounts of all the things that had happened to her. She embellished things, of course. Her 'hoards of tax auditors pounding at the door' had just been one elderly man with a clipboard and a pen. Her 'horrific demon' that she'd told us haunted her attic in one of her previous houses had barely been a level three imp.

It figures, the one time that she decided not to embellish was the one time that I assumed she was.

Well, you know what they say. Assuming makes an ass of out u and me, right?

So, with my parents a bust and it being only ten in the morning, I figured on giving Aunt Eugene a call. Unlike Aunt Dynette and my immediate family, Aunt Eugene usually slept until at least noon, and oftentimes much later. She was almost certain to be dead asleep now.
Smiling grimly to myself, I dialed her number.

On the tenth ring – Aunt Eugene had never invested in an answering machine, claiming that if the call was so important, they could damn well call again later – the phone finally clicked and a tired voice whispered, "Hello?"

"Hi, Aunt Eugene!" I chimed out in my most chipper voice.

There was a bout of slurred swearing, followed by a thud and then, the dial tone.

She'd dropped the phone, then. No surprise. This wasn't the first time I'd talked to Aunt Eugene in the mornings. Keeping a firm grip on things was never her strong suit, not even when she was awake.

Counting to fifteen, I hung up the phone and then, clicking it back on, pressed 'redial'.

Only seven rings this time. She was waking up.

"'lo?"

"Aunt Eugene? Try not to drop the phone this time, okay?"

"Who is this?"

"Cedar."

"Who?"

I rolled my eyes. "Cedar McCavity, Aunt Eugene. Your sister's only child."

There was a pause and then Aunt Eugene's voice came in a lot clearer.

"Don't get smart with me, young lady. You know how I hate these god awful mornings."

"It's lunchtime, not morning. Right now, I'm having tuna fish and pickles."

That was a lie, but I wanted to see if I could get her to vomit while on the phone. It had happened before, during our phone calls. Like then, she sounded like she'd been drinking the night before and plus, she absolutely hated tuna fish. Unfortunately, she only snorted.

"Did you have anything of importance you actually wanted to say on this phone call, or did you just miss the lovely sound of my voice?"

"Well...."

"Spit it out."

"Fine. You sold me a house full of nightmares and I'm sick of them stealing all the good food and leaving me the crap."

"Hah! I told you so!" She was definitely wide-awake now. I could tell by how she was laughing at me.

"Yes, you did. Anyway..."

"You didn't believe me! None of you!" she interrupted. "I told all of you, in detail everything that happened and you all thought it was just Eugene, full of deceit and hyperbole, as usual."

"I believed you," I protested.

"Sure, sure. Whatever you say, darling. But if this isn't an angry you-tricked-me phone call, then why did you ring me up?"

I got up and started pacing in my living room. It wasn't easy, as my furniture took up most of the room and it wasn't that wide in the first place. "Okay, my problem is that I want to get rid of the nightmares and I've run out of ideas."

I gave her a run down of all the different things I'd tried, including the cleansing ritual and the padlocked refrigerator door. "So what should I do? Is there anything left, that you can think of?"

There was a long silence.

"Hello?" I said, thinking that maybe we'd been cut off.

"No, no, I'm here," my aunt said. "Have more patience. I'm thinking."

"Oh."

I got up and, still holding the phone to my ear, snagged one of my last bottles of iced tea from the fridge. By the time I'd wrestled the plastic safety cover off and forced the lid opened – damn you, food safety laws! – Aunt Eugene finally began to speak.

"All right, darling, I've thought this problem through and the only option left to try is your grandmother."

"Pardon me?" Grandmother hadn't participated in a haunt for several years, and I couldn't even recall the last time I'd heard of her doing a spell. Sometimes Mom and my aunts would talk about to one another in hushed voices, worrying over how old she was getting. Uncle Ossifer wouldn't even talk about it at all. Aunt Dynette said that this was because he was always scared of Grandmother, even when he was little, but I think it's just because he hates gossiping.

"Do I have to repeat myself, darling?" my aunt drawled over the phone, interrupting my thoughts, "Go visit your grandmother. Maybe, if we'd been on speaking terms when I'd owned the house, my little nightmare problem could have been solved."

I thought about it. "Okay, at least that's an idea. Thanks, Aunt Eugene. I'll call Grandmother and ask if I can come over."

"Oh, please. You're family, darling. Just drive over there. She'll be pleased to see you. You haven't visited in ages, you know. Been neglecting your familial obligations."

"I have not," I argued, "I called her last month to thank her for the furniture!"

"A telephone call is not the same thing as a visit. Believe me. If you were visiting me right now, I'd have the pleasure of throwing an ashtray at your head for waking me up so early."

"Sorry, Aunt Eugene."

"Very well, then."

"Thanks for the advice," I said and hung up.

Going over to grandmother's house, then. Well, even if it didn't work out, at least I'd be doing something.

...