Season of the Witch

Part 9

Experimenting on Tommy 😹👎
Word count: 2069

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You had settled on a first-steps plan. First, Stella had to see Ramon off and make sure to give him all her best luck on his difficult journey. All you could really do was hope for his safe arrival back some day. Then, she'd have her dad sit down with your dad and you'd all talk about it; try to get him to see that this was the truth and that the danger was gone, but you had to work together to bring the others back. That talk didn't go over that well.

"What you're suggesting is insane, it can't be real!" Your father said, sternly. "Oren, you can't believe in boogeymen and kids stories. They must have written these after the others went missing or were hurt. I don't know if it was to cope or..." He left an open-ended accusation in the air and glared at Stella. The day was appropriately cloudy. Gray and drab, much like your situation. Similarly, it looked like a storm was brewing.

"I thought the same thing myself, at first." Oren, Stella's father told yours. "But the kids keep sticking to their stories."

"Dad, look at my story. It's exactly what I said happened, remember?" There was a flicker in his eyes for a moment that made you think he believed you, but then he sniffed back his emotions.

"No, no, that could have been written afterwards. How do I know you haven't told Stella about it? You clearly set all this up." He was right, you had talked to Stella and it wasn't just happenstance that she and her father had come over to talk to your dad.

"I know it all seems impossible dad, but why would I be making it up? Why would any of us?"

"I don't know. I don't know what you kids could have gotten yourselves into these days. There's all these damned horror movies lately with ghosts and satanic cults and living dead things eating brains?! Maybe you've just lost your grip on reality. You've always been imaginative, honey. You get lost in your books."

"This isn't just some other book, dad, please." You begged for him to listen, to no avail.

"I blame myself. I've been working too much. I haven't been present enough in your life. I should have talked with you more, especially after your mom got sick."

"This has nothing to do with mom, dad."

"I should have seen this coming. I'm sure things have been rough for you for a long time, but I just didn't see it."

"Dad, no. They weren't. I've been happy here. School is fine, I'm making the grade. I work. I love my friends and we do normal kids' stuff. We're not in a cult, we haven't lost grip of reality. This all just happens to be true! We're all good kids. We didn't suddenly just 'go bad.'"

"And with all due respect, Benetton," Stella piped up, "We didn't fake what happened to Ruth. We didn't put spiders in her face...but we saved her."

"With similar respect, Stella," Your father said aggressively, "I think that could have just been a coincidence. Like I said, you wrote these stories to cope, to interpret what happened." Unfortunately, Ruth's story was the least supernatural and easily had a real-world cause.

"What about me, dad? Don't you think it's so weird to have a coincidence where the next day I was lost in the woods? Or that they couldn't find Chuck? Or that Auggie and Tommy have been missing since-"

"That is enough." He growled in response.

"No, dad! If you don't believe that there's some kind of ghostly story to back this up, doesn't it seem like at least someone is out to get us?" That actually made her pause for a moment, as if he considered that one of those cults he feared was stealing your friends and cutting lines in hospital elevators or something.