Mercury sat and peered through the dark room to see that Stella was curled on her side, sound asleep. Her gaze went to Karen’s bed, but the older woman had pulled the privacy curtain.
Quietly, Mercury crouched beside her backpack, unzipped it and pulled out the empty water bottle. Then she tiptoed to the door and opened it carefully, closing it softly behind her as she headed to the end of the hall and the water fountain located outside the girls’ restroom.
The building had that eerie silence that permeated all public schools when they weren’t filled with teachers and students. Mercury had long thought that empty schools felt haunted by the dreams of generations of young people. As she padded in sock feet silently down the hall to the water fountain, she found herself listening for the voices of those long-gone students, which reminded her of how much she missed her own classroom and her own students.
They’re dead. They’re probably all dead.
Mercury shut down that thought fast. Later. She’d think about her students later and leave an offering to the Goddess in their memory. But now she’d fill up her water bottle and try to get a little more sleep before whatever was going to happen that would tell their little group it was time to leave.
She held her bottle under the arched stream of water, and as it filled, her gaze wandered over the lockers. She smiled nostalgically at the posters, which clung stubbornly to the walls. Some called for students to audition for the spring musical, Camelot, and others announced that Mrs. Rowland and Mrs. Wente were planning a summer trip to Italy and gave a time and date for the informative meeting about it.
Her gaze continued down the hallway, and she felt a little jolt of happy surprise as a sign over an inside door at the dead end of the hall proclaimed in red letters on a white metal sign: “Roof Access/Do Not Enter.”
Fuck it! I’m going up on the roof!
Mercury willed the water to run faster, drank several long chugs from the fountain, capped it, and turned to tiptoe to the closed door to the roof—then she heard the sobs. Mercury froze and held her breath while she listened. Yes, the sound of a woman weeping was coming from the open door to the girls’ bathroom beside her. Her first thought was that it must be Moira. Those assholes! They didn’t let her leave! As Mercury entered the bathroom, she decided that Moira must be the reason they hadn’t left yet. I’m supposed to find Moira crying and sneak her out with us!
So it was a shock when Mercury’s eyes acclimated to the little nightlight-like lamp that was the only illumination in the windowless bathroom and she realized the woman sobbing on the closed toilet lid in the last stall wasn’t Moira, but Karen.
Mercury must have made a small sound of surprise, because Karen’s tear-streaked face lifted from her hands. Hastily, she unrolled a wad of toilet paper and wiped at her nose.
“Oh my Goddess, Karen, what is it? What’s happened?”
Karen shook her head back and forth, back and forth. “Nothing. I’m fine.”
“Don’t do that. You’re obviously anything but. Talk to me.”
Karen looked up and met Mercury’s gaze, and her eyes welled and overflowed again as she spoke. “W-why is it so easy for you and Stella to let me go?”
“What?” Mercury moved closer to Karen and leaned against the open stall door.
“I know I’m not best friends with you two, but I—I thought we were becoming close—all of us.” She dabbed her face with the toilet paper again.
Some of the toilet paper stuck to her damp face, and Mercury leaned forward to brush it off. “I thought we were too, and then you returned to being cold and shut off right before we got here. Stella and I realized that you were really unhappy, and if this place makes you happy—which it seems to do—then you should stay.”
Tears washed down Karen’s round cheeks. “I wasn’t unhappy. I was frightened.”
“Frightened? You mean of the green fog and the men out there?”
Karen shook her head and slowly said, “No. Of you.”
“Me! Why?”
Karen drew a long, quivering breath. “I—I saw you. Out there in the shadow of the canyon. After you peed you made Satan’s horns with your fingers and then traced the sign of the devil’s pentagram. And then I saw it—the glowing thing, door, entrance to Hell, whatever it was, and that little sparkly goat trotting through it.”
Mercury just stared at Karen.
“Then tonight, when you were over by the firepit with Ford, I saw you throw sparks into the air like it was nothing. I don’t know why Ford didn’t see it, but I did,” Karen insisted.
“Karen, holy crap, you’re blowing my mind. I hardly know where to start. Um, okay, first—this,” Mercury held up her right hand, pointing finger and little finger extended and the other fingers held down by her thumb, “isn’t the sign of Satan’s horns. It represents the Lord of the Woods, the Green Man, the incarnation of the masculine aspect of nature. It’s a ward against evil—a protective sign. Karen, most Pagans, especially those of us who follow Wicca or any of the many forms of witchcraft that blur the line between Pagan traditions, do not believe in Satan. He is a Christian creation, not a Pagan one.”
“But I saw you make the sign of the pentagram.”
Mercury nodded. “Yes. In the Pagan tradition, the five points of the pentagram represent the five elements: air, fire, water, earth, and spirit. A pentagram can help call the elements. It can also be used for general invocations or banishments. When I used it yesterday, I invoked the protection of the elements as I bid the spirit of the newborn goat I’d found dead on the road to cross over to the Summerlands to be with the Goddess.”
Karen sniffled and blew her nose. “It—it wasn’t Satanic?”
“Absolutely not. Karen, please listen to me—I do not believe in Satan. I do not believe in hell. I try my best to live by the main tenant in the Pagan Rede of Chivalry: “Always contemplate the consequences of thine acts upon others. Strive not to harm.”