Alondra

  ALONDRA

  A.L. HAWKE

  Copyright © 2022 by A.L. Hawke

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  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author, except by reviewers who may quote brief passages for a review. For permission requests, please write to:

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  A.L. Hawke

  P.O. Box 2253

  Mission Viejo, CA 92690

  Email correspondence: contact@alhawke.com

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  ISBN: 978-1-953919-18-2

  ISBN: 978-1-953919-16-8 (ebook)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2022937294

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  This is a work of fiction. It comes directly from the author’s imagination. Fictional witchcraft is included to infuse a sense of realism to the novel, but in no way is it supposed to represent actual practicing witchcraft, witches or the religion of Wicca. The book also includes fictitious names, characters, places, and incidents. Any public names are used solely for creative purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to companies, institutions, or locales is entirely coincidental or accidental.

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  Line edited by Stephanie Marshall Ward

  Proofread by Alexa B., alexabooks.wixsite.com/authors

  Cover © 2022 by Regina Wamba of MaeIDesign.com

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  Published in the United States of America in May, 2022

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  Learn more about A.L. Hawke at www.alhawke.com

  Created with Vellum

  CONTENTS

  1. Venite Foras

  2. The Psycho Killer

  3. She’s a Witch

  4. The Pool

  5. Emf 101

  6. Whirling

  7. The Good Witch

  8. Her Boyfriend

  9. Alabama

  10. Winona

  11. Ekimmu

  12. Antlers

  13. Pretzels

  14. Abnormal Personality

  15. The Outsider

  16. Myrtle Beach

  17. Taco Tuesday

  18. Whitechapel

  19. Creepers

  20. The Mirror

  21. Abaddon

  22. A Tiki Bar

  23. Trick or Treat

  Also by A.L. Hawke

  Parting Words

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  1

  VENITE FORAS

  I’m leaving Hawthorne. I keep going over it again and again in my head as I ascend this dark path. My tennis shoes crunch leaves and slosh in the mud. My footsteps are the only sound, except for water pelting the leaves. There’s a canopy sheltering me from the downpour. A little. The clouds are stormy, but an occasional sliver of white moonlight slips through the branches above as I walk. To my right, I pass a steep precipice overlooking campus. Far below a few splashes of yellow shine through the woods, lights from our main library at Hawthorne University.

  I’m not wearing a coat, and I don’t have an umbrella. I’m cold, but I don’t care. It’s a foregone conclusion that I don’t belong here. I’m a friendless freshman surrounded by students burying their heads in books, wearing Greek letters, or sporting thick black makeup.

  I mean there’s Alondra. She’s this goth. She’s this girl with long black hair, a sweet smile, and these gorgeous, mesmerizing green eyes…damn. She’s hot as hell. I had a crush, but never asked her out. Now that I’m leaving, I suppose I never will.

  I enter a break in the trees. But then my trail turns into an even denser path. It grows too dark. I take out my handheld flashlight. It’s a little weird that I’m hiking a trail in the middle of the night. I could slip off the slippery ledge at any moment and die, or be attacked by a black bear or rattlesnake. But I’ve got this overall screwed-up feeling tonight, you know?

  I was never assigned a roommate. That was weird. Some people might love that. Not me, but my absentee roommate sort of puts the whole shitty experience into perspective. I tell you, people are way too cliquey here at Hawthorne. This school is deep in the woods, and if you don’t join a group, all the shadowy trees start to feel gloomy as hell.

  My grades are fine, I suppose. Maybe I shouldn’t complain so much? Perhaps I should just keep to myself and study alone like the rest of the nerds on campus.

  Why the fuck am I talking to myself, anyway?

  Because it’s getting that bad, Lee.

  As I traipse up a steeper incline toward the crest of the hill, I freeze—not just from cold. There’s rustling in the leaves, but the foliage is too thick to see anything. I guess it’s a large animal. But then I hear laughter. I catch a glimpse, through branches, of two people running. The odd thing is they’re running through the bushes, not on any of the trails to the hilltop.

  They make it through a clearing. They’re clearly visible now. I jump back at the sight of their naked breasts and asses shimmering under white moonlight. Their skin is coated in filth. One turns and gazes at me. I can swear there’s something smeared over her face. Actually, it covers both of their faces. Their eyes are moving about wildly. They’re high off something. The scene is so weird that I look back into the darkness of the woods thinking I must be seeing things.

  But then they laugh again.

  “Venite foras!” cries one. “Venite foras.” Then the other echoes, more high-pitched, almost sounding like a bird, “Venite foras. Venite foras.”

  The two girls run—knee deep in bushes and reeds—up the rest of the slope until they disappear over a ledge, still laughing.

  Toward the peak of the cliff, a place called Hilltop Bluff, I smell smoke. And there’s a red hue at the summit. I hear more voices. I reach the summit; then I hide behind a bush in a dense thicket. I’m hiding because ten to fifteen girls wearing these weird hooded black cloaks are circling around a huge bonfire. And in the center is another girl, pale, naked, but her body is clean. She is tied to two large wooden beams shaped in an x.

  “Lux tenebris!” cries one of the black-cloaked girls. She is standing at the center of the group, close to the bonfire. They all repeat it. Then one rushes forward holding a large golden chalice out to the girl, “Lucifer! Lucifer! Satanas!” She splashes fluid from the chalice onto the girl tied to the stakes.

  The tied girl opens her eyes wide and screams in apparent ecstasy, shaking and twitching, now covered in a sticky brownish-red fluid. The girl at the center of the group moves to a table upon which an animal with antlers is trying to squirm out of ropes. As her cloak shifts, I see her naked breasts. All the cloaked girls are nude underneath their cloaks, I think. Then she pulls out a long, curved dagger and strikes the poor animal dead. All of them cry out as if they feel the animal’s pain. Then she bends over the animal and smears it with the fresh blood. Is this the fluid I saw on the wild girls?

  Another one leaves the circle. The black robe is dropped revealing a naked body, but it’s a man’s. He has short hair, and his skin is pale. He approaches the girl on the wooden beams. She cries out something inhuman. But she’s not crying out in pain or fear. She’s gesturing with wild eyes and a free hand for him to approach closer.

  “Touch me,” she says. “Fuck me. Please fuck me. Venite foras. Venite. Venite.”

  I look around the hillside, then back to the path I came from, ready to bolt. I can’t believe what’s happening.

  I carefully get up to head back down the dirt trail, but then I hear a scream. I look back at the bonfire. I wish I hadn’t. The man is embracing the woman on the planks and flexing his ass tightly, fucking her on this x. The sex drives the rest of the people to move quickly in a circle around them, dancing
, and bobbing up and down and chanting. The girl on the x doesn’t seem in pain. She’s screaming in ecstasy, goading him further.

  I’ve had enough. I rush back down the trail.

  A large animal jumps me… no, it’s not an animal. It’s one of the girls I saw running through the bushes. She grabs me and trips me, and I fall to the ground on some ivy. I drop my flashlight. Then the other girl appears from behind a bush. Their eyes are roaming wildly over me, lit by white moonlight. I see up close that the liquid covering their faces, including their lips, is not just brown, but red. Blood. It’s blood. And it must be fresh to have stuck to them despite the downpour earlier. The blond also has blood staining her hair in auburn streaks. Animal or human?

  “Let me go!”

  “Venite foras,” she says, nodding and gazing at my body with crazed eyes. She’s a dark-skinned girl, running her finger along my hair and cheek. A pale girl with long blond hair is on her knees beside her. The blonde is oddly jerky, reminding me of a bird. “Venite. Delactatio. Venite. Foras. Fructus.” Then the dark-skinned girl runs her hands under my jacket and along my shirt and all over my stomach, chest, and abs and whispers, “Fructus. Coitus fructus.” The pale-skinned girl echoes her words quietly with a grin.

  The dark-skinned girl straddles me. Her eyes are still wandering everywhere as she’s probing me with her fingers as if I were a specimen. Her gaping grin doesn’t seem sane. And her hands and limbs are jerking in odd directions over me.

  “Like to watch?” asks the blonde nodding beside us. She giggles and grabs one of my arms. I’m trying to slide out of their grasps, but they’re pinning me down. It begins to drizzle again.

  The one on top of me brings her mud-caked face closer to me and smiles. “You like to watch fucking, hmm?” she asks. “Maybe you want to fuck us?”

  My jacket’s off; then comes my shirt. The shirt’s torn, I think—everything is happening so fast. I jerk desperately, trying to get her off, but they’re strong—inhumanly strong. And now the girl over me is grinding into me as if she’s having sex with me. Her friend is laughing.

  Rain drips down the nude girl sitting on me, but she doesn’t seem to notice or care. There’s a crack of thunder. Then lightning illuminates her.

  Before I can strike her to get her off, both girls haul me up and pull me toward the yellow-red firelight.

  “Come fuck us by the fire,” says the blonde with a nod, pulling at me and laughing. “Come. Venite. Venite.”

  The group circling the fire is dancing with their heads bucking up and down, moving around the flames and the central wooden x where the couple is fucking. This act, in front of other people, deep in the middle of the woods, before a huge bonfire with circling witches—witches, yes, witches; that’s what their laughter is like now…yes, exactly like cackling witches—while I’m being dragged by two beastly girls...

  I start pulling the girls with all my might. I lift weights, I’m not weak, but these girls seem inhumanly strong. I lift one of them and throw her toward a tree. But as soon as she falls to the ground, she acts like a caged wild animal and leaps back at me.

  I’m in the open grassy field at the top of the summit. I look down and there’s blood on my flank. It’s not their blood; it’s a gash on my stomach from something. A twig that stabbed me? I don’t know. Then the pale girl sees it, runs up, touches it, and licks her finger.

  “Get away from me, girls. Stop it!”

  The goths stop moving in a circle hearing my struggle. Then they all freeze quickly, unnaturally quickly, turn, and stare at me. They’re bizarrely perfectly still. The only movement that continues is the man screwing the girl on the planks. And light rainfall. I’m so disturbed by the whole group of black-clothed witches staring at me that I stop resisting. The naked girls beside me see the group too, and they also freeze. Then each of them hooks an arm in one of mine and walks me, still shirtless, to the bonfire.

  The couple’s moaning is all that’s heard in the woods now. Everyone else is as quiet as the rainfall on the leaves of the trees.

  “Venite foras,” the girls in cloaks whisper—just like the two girls who attacked me. “Venite foras.”

  “Profer extraneo deinceps,” another witch says, raising her hands to the moon with her back turned to me. She has long black hair; she is the only one that hasn’t turned and looked at me yet. She’s facing the couple fornicating by the fire.

  The girl cries out in rapture as the couple climaxes. Then, even weirder, a male witch turns the wooden planks like a wheel so that the girl is hanging upside down before the flames. He leaves her like this, her body still twitching in the firelight, and approaches the witches, grabbing a cloak on the ground. He puts it on and acts like nothing happened.

  The dark-haired girl with her back turned to me holds her arms up high before the symbol, as if worshipping the x and bonfire. Then she drops her arms and turns. I can see her pale skin, including her boobs, in an opening in her black cloak. She has bright green eyes.

  When I recognize the eyes, I cringe. This is my crush. This is the girl I liked in my study class. Then I feel the heavy weight of the crush falling away. It’s Alondra. This is Alondra. And when Alondra recognizes me, her familiar emerald eyes open very wide.

  “Liam?” she asks, shaking her head violently. “No.”

  She runs toward me, shouting at me, “Somnus! Somnus.” She throws her arm before me as if slicing the air. “Somnus. Somnus.”

  I close my eyes. I feel as if I’m falling. I finally stop resisting the two girls holding me and feel them lay me down on the grass.

  I wake up with my head in my arms at a study carrel beside a window of the Jonathan Brewster Taylor Library. I’m wearing someone else’s long white T-shirt. There’s a pain at my right side, and as I touch my skin under the shirt, I feel bandaging. I don’t feel hung over. If anything, I feel good. Refreshed.

  Outside the window of the brick library, the sky is pink through the thick branches of trees. The sun is either rising or setting. There’s no one around me in the library, I’m guessing it’s early morning. I check my watch. It’s around 8:00 a.m.

  2

  THE PSYCHO KILLER

  “Can any of you explain how one controls people? How do you get into someone’s mind?”

  Professor Kriegel’s lecturing. He’s a short, bald, overweight eccentric man wearing gray sweatpants and a T-shirt. Right now, he’s pacing on the stage under a projected image of Charles Manson, who’s sticking his tongue out at us under the tattooed swastika on his forehead. Kriegel’s the main reason I chose this elective. Not because of him, but because of his slides. His slides, I tell you, are legendary.

  “We talked of Bundy. He murdered for sex, engaging in necrophilia. But he did it looking professional.” The slide changes to show Ted Bundy wearing a suit. That’s more boring. “He’s a similar serial killer to Jeffrey Dahmer, only Dahmer ate his victims.” The next slide shows meat and sinew strewn over a table at a crime scene. There are groans from the crowd. This is what I’m talking about. Don’t you love it?

  He paces under the slaughterhouse.

  “Charles Manson manipulated people, but his perversions involved making others do his work. His cult murdered, not him. That was the difference. He was able to get into people’s minds and control them.”

  My professor stands right in front of me, on stage, looking out at the crowd. The lecture hall is packed, and I’m in the front row. The slide changes to a more pleasant picture: a hippie commune. People are sitting around a guy with long hair playing an acoustic guitar on the grass.

  I’m having difficulty focusing. I don’t know what the hell happened last night. For all I know, I could have been drugged and raped. I was trudging through the doldrums of my loneliness, in my first semester at Hawthorne, thinking of Alondra. Seeing my “crush” was helping me get through my days here. Not anymore. Not after seeing her naked leading a psycho-goth cult.

  A picture of a woman unconscious with a plastic bag ove
r her head flashes above. Okay, that’s a bit too much. My classmates think so too. Many students groan. He flashes the slide quickly, as if it was never there, to another crime scene.

  “But I posit all of our serial killers murdered for control.”

  Like Alondra? Maybe that’s what her hypnotic eyes are all about? Maybe she’s a psychopathic killer, like all these serial killers? Maybe the blood last night wasn’t animal blood after all?

  On cue, a girl wearing a black-checkered skirt with black leggings hurries down the dimly lit aisle. Her red sweater says “Hawthorne,” and she’s wearing sunglasses. At first, I take little notice, but then she tips down her shades, revealing bright green eyes. She’s not in her usual black makeup, but it’s Alondra for sure. She smiles and nods at me. I turn away. In my periphery, I catch her quietly sitting down in the only open spot, on the other side of the guy to my right. She puts a stack of books on her desk and takes out a notepad and pen. From the corner of my eye, I watch her carefully preparing for class. I love that. I love watching her obsessively arrange her desk with all her stuff. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s just because it’s her.

  The image on the screen changes to another grotesque scene: a bloody body on a white tile floor.

  The student to my right, irritatingly, hands me a note.