The Macabre Case

The cemetery was dark and gloomy. That was a place that not even animals would want to be there, it was dark, dirty, scary and very, very macabre, it gave even the bravest person who ventured to go inside goosebumps. Grace didn't know where she was, she was lost, knowing that she was following a path that she wasn't the one deciding on, something was controlling her without her consent in a subtle way.

A crow cawed on top of a tombstone and Grace was startled, causing her to regain some consciousness. The little she could see was some old tombstones full of dry vines and mud embedded in the cement concrete, in the background the silhouette of the old church for burials and masses for the dead, deactivated for years, now looking more like a scene from a horror movie.

Suddenly, an agonizing pain in his head and a dull ringing in his ear were present. Grace put her hands over her ears and grunted in response to the pain. There were voices and more voices ringing in her mind, calling her name, asking for things she couldn't understand, crying out for salvation. His vision was starting to get blurry and his breathing was getting shallower with each passing second. Falling to her knees, Grace felt as if her brain was coming out of her head, her eyes rolled back in blood cells, and she tasted blood on her lips.

“Look at me, Grace!”

“Look at us, Grace!”

Until, just as it started, the headache, the voices and the sensations she was feeling simply disappeared, leaving a void in her mind. Now, Grace was hearing more clearly how quiet the cemetery was, there was only the sound of her heavy breathing. Removing her hands from her ears, she placed them on the ground, feeling the damp earth and the grasses that still insisted on growing in that cemetery.

Grace took one last breath before raising one of her hands and leaning on the tombstone in front of her, she didn't remember falling in front of it, but that didn't matter now. Building momentum to get up, her gaze passed over the writing on the tombstone and she felt her blood run cold. There was a snake coiled around the tombstone with a name written on it.

“Grace Elizabeth Valefar”

“What the fuck is this?” Before Grace could say anything, she heard a male voice calling her name, this time, it was reverberating through the cemetery.

“Grace!”

The voice was getting closer and closer. The woman stood up, avoiding the tombstone in front of her. She realized that her nose was bleeding which made her place her fingers on her cupid's bow and confirm that it was indeed bleeding due to the blood that stained them. The voice that called her approached her, she knew it due to the silhouette that became increasingly clear in the fog.

“Grace, you are there! What a scare” The man appeared in front of her and she didn't know who he was, until she remembered the boy at her grandfather's house, recognizing him due to a tattoo on his neck that she had noticed on him earlier, but nothing worthy of note.

“You…” Grace swallowed. “You’re the man who was at my grandfather’s house, aren’t you?”

“Yes, it's me. Your grandfather asked me to come here and rescue you after he realized what was happening.” The boy explained.

“What do you mean what was going on?”

“The strange things you saw, what you heard, all of this has an explanation. But come on, I need to get you out of here as quickly as possible, before it gets worse.” He approached Grace, wanting to take her arm to take her away. As soon as she realized his intentions, she moved back, avoiding his hand.

“Hey, hey, hey. Calm down there. I don't even know you, man. I’m not going… with you anywhere.” Grace defended herself, feeling dizzy from his sudden movement.

She watched the boy as he looked at her with an ugly frown, as if no one had ever crossed him. He snorted and said:

“Viktor D’Aragon, nice to meet you. Come on, we can’t stay here too long, the chances of this getting out of our control and beyond what we could handle is very high.”

Viktor was now faster than Grace could be, grabbing her and dragging her between the tombstones to find the exit to the cemetery. The headlights of the boy's car gave an indication of where the exit was, but Grace was still lost there, even though she saw the dim lights of the headlights, for her that was not the exit, in her mind, there was an internal struggle, one side was completely distorted, fighting against the other that wanted more than anything to get out of there.

As they were leaving, Grace realized how far she had come without even realizing it. As soon as they arrived at the cemetery gates, she noticed that the sky was as it should have been since she left her grandfather's house, clear and cloudy as always.

“Viktor… What time is it?” Grace asked as the man reached down and stuck his hands somewhere in the dry leaves and fished out some coral-colored object. Until she realized that it was her own cell phone that she had dropped on the floor when she was running away from whoever was chasing her earlier.

Before answering him, Viktor handed him his broken cell phone. Grace turned it over a few times analyzing the damage done, she didn't know that her fall had been so strong to have completely broken the screen, but that was one of the smallest problems she realized she had after receiving her response from the boy.

“It’s 7:40 pm”

Grace got a little stuck, what do you mean it's 7:40 pm if she left her grandfather's house at 7:30 pm? It wasn't possible for all of that to have happened in 10 minutes. She opened her mouth to want to say something, even ask a question, but she was stopped by the sound of thunder that ripped through the sky, announcing the arrival of heavy rain clouds that were forming to the north, above the cemetery.

Viktor wasted no time in pulling her back to his car, taking her to the passenger door and opening it for her to get in, which Grace didn't protest doing, getting in as soon as she was offered the ticket. She had questions, many questions, and just as her doubts were running around in her head, the certainty that the man outside had the answers was right there with them.

It didn't take long for him to get into the car and start it. While driving the steering wheel with his left hand, he fidgeted with his cell phone with his right, writing something quickly before dropping the cell phone on the dashboard. Grace glanced at him sideways before leaning toward him to use the center mirror to assess the state of his nose. She felt Viktor give her a side glance too, probably wondering what she was doing, but Grace didn't care, if he had insisted so much on her coming with him in his car, she would also enjoy the car.

“I have some tissues in the glove compartment, if you want them to clean yourself, just take them” Viktor offered her. It didn't take long for Grace to open the glove compartment and be surprised by the contents inside.

There was a gun, a police badge, some papers and tissues.

“Are you a police officer?” Grace asked without even thinking about the question, whether she was being nosy or not. She grabbed the tissues and closed the glove compartment.

Viktor let out a snort that could be taken as a laugh before responding to her.

“I’m an investigator for the London police department.”

He turned the car to the left and Grace already knew where they were going. Your mansion.

“And what are you doing here then?” Grace asked as she bent back to use the mirror, folding the tissue several times as she wiped the dried blood from her face.

“Didn’t you hear about the missing persons cases that were happening?” Viktor waited for a response from her before continuing and when he heard the quiet 'no' she had said, he continued. “Disappearances have been happening in the city, more specifically in the cemetery, it happened three days ago, that's why I'm here and that's why your grandfather sent me there to recover you. Didn’t you notice anything wrong while you were there?”

Grace turned her face to him and furrowed her eyebrows. If his grandfather had sent him there, it meant he knew more than he was letting on.

"Yes. I saw and felt some strange things while I was there, but nothing that would leave me at the mercy of a serial killer, if that's what you're trying to say. And I didn’t see any bodies either.” She decided to give the game away.

"Naturally." Viktor stopped talking as he avoided a hole in the road, entering the dirt road that led to his mansion. It wasn't a very long way, short enough for a person to walk and not complain. “You were placed under an illusion enchantment, these are things that black magic witches can do.”

“Witches!?” Grace cut him off from his speech.

“Yes, Grace, Witches. The woman you saw, I know who she is. Her name is Elisa Devereux. She does this to people, sucks their life energy after she drives them crazy in the cemetery.” Viktor explained.

Grace was stunned, she didn't know what it meant, but something in the back of her mind was clicking, memories, memories of the stories her grandmother told her before bed, about witches and spirits, stories so detailed that they could only have been experienced to have such rich detail.

“And how do you know all this? Why are you telling me this?” Grace became defensive.

“Because I'm one of them, Grace. Don’t you recognize my last name?” Viktor looked at her sideways, finding it strange and hating the direction this conversation was going, if the girl knew so little about her own world, he was afraid that there wouldn't be enough time to train her and let her know everything she would face.

“Of course not. I don’t even know you.” A little fed up with what was happening and with Viktor looking at her as if she were an anomaly, Grace was already feeling stressed about the situation.

“My god… What did Dante do…” Parking his car in front of the woman's house, he turned to her, looking her in the eyes before saying. “I'm telling you this because you are one of us, I am a wizard and you are the heir to a lineage of wizards.” Viktor spoke seriously.

“It has to be a joke.” Grace spoke before realizing it might be true.