Callahan: A Gothic Tale

Cemetery Hill

9 Cemetery Hill

"I'm not a stranger/No I am yours/With crippled anger/And tears that still drip sore." –"Cut" song by Plumb

Two Weeks and Two Days, 7 am, Autumn 1994, Cemetery Hill

Sipping her dark roast coffee, Macy placed the biodegradable cup on the grass beneath her feet as she surveyed her grim surroundings, evergreens aplenty, unlike the recreational park's forest, whose leaves had shed with the coming of the cool fall season. Her eyes flickered from amber-orange to brown and back again, as she glanced past the nearest curved rhodolite headstone to the chapel's bulletin board, noticing fliers denoting the college's name torn to shreds, placards and other signage torn off their faded hinges.

Had she done that?

She had been too caught up in her ire to tell, a common refrain as of late. The cubic mounds of uneven, spurious grass, separated by long moss-covered planks, shadowed by the towering tree branches overhead, served as her temporary retreat. From the moment she stepped foot within, she felt more...purposeful? Her anger had still not abated, but there was a sort of targeted directness and a pull toward places she did not recall ever visiting, yet which lured her in nevertheless.

"You can't stay mad at me forever—"

Macy recalled his most recent words. Wanna bet? Her eyebrow arched as she reached for her coffee, relishing in its curlicued steam-puffed patterns that kissed her cheek, imagining for the briefest of moments she were Daenerys, Mother of Dragons, surrounded by a trio of winged flame and fury. He robbed me of my agency. My ability to choose. He took me to his ex-lover's lair—

But what of it? Macy's conscience prickled her. He saved your life in the only way he knew how—and how does 'choice' matter if he nor you had none? He did all he possibly could in his duty as Whitelighter to the Charmed Ones—

By welcoming me into the spider's nest of an ex-lover, long dead?

Her fingers draped along a loose chain hovering above the damp soil, connecting one aged oaken beam to another equally decrepit around a marble pillar that towered above all of the others. Suspecting the surname carved upon its surface, she glanced over anyways.

Callahan.

The loose chain twisted and contorted within her heated grasp, her eyes flashing amber, as her telekinesis yanked it free of its beams, catapulting itself upward javelin-like, through the forest's uncovered space, hammering downward in its descent seconds later, birds fleeing in droves above the momentary chaos. Eyes shut, she waited for the inevitable crash of the iron links and when that did not happen, opened them once more to find a familiar British gentleman waving it in her face. She screamed in frustration, her irises showing a glimmer of gold.

"Who do you think you are, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley?" Ignoring Harry's attempted joke, Macy flounced back to her cup of coffee, now cold, which she downed in a single gulp, turning to face him once more. "Macy, you ought to learn to be more careful," he gently admonished, appealing to her better judgment. "The town's abuzz with rumors of hordes of rabid, caffeinated squirrels—an angry banshee shrieking at 4 am—"

"You ought not to tell me what to do—" she hissed, her eyes flashing. "So let them talk—"

"Mace, this isn't like you—" he began again.

"Neither is any of this—"

Harry paused. She did have a point. "All I ask," he stepped a few paces closer toward her form, "is that you exercise a bit more...what's the word? Ah, yes. Discretion." Glancing at the chain in his hands and the pillared monument bearing the name "Callahan," he put two and two together. "You can't erase Charity by desecrating and defacing town property that bears her name—"