The Ghostfield

Sheila and Susan looked out through the invisible ghostfield that surrounded
and kept their house and yard in perpetual night, making a strange sort of whispering sound like lots of voices speaking quietly all at once, at the day world outside and the people passing by on the sidewalk; mothers with pushchairs and people walking their dogs; people on their way to work and old aged pensioners smiling and chatting, completely oblivious to their frantic waving and cries for help, and their hearts sank.

 

"Its no good Susan", Shiela said to her sister, "They can't hear us or see us".
"But they have to", said Susan hammering the field with her fists and sobbing, "We've got to make them. We can't just let those...those things in the house get us".
"Perhaps we've just got to accept our fate", said Sheila, sitting down on the lawn in defeat and looking up at the window of her room and the dark thing standing behind it, staring down at
them both and smiling.

 

"This is your fault", said her sister launching  herself upon her and hitting her with her fists, "You did this".

 

Any other time and Shiela might have fought back against her sister but Susan was right, it
was all her fault.

 

It was she who had stupidly gotten into the occult while she'd been studying at college and gotten her little sister into it aswell.

 

It had all been harmless at first, just reading books about witchcraft and the
supernatural but then she'd started performing the rituals and spells in her
books.

 

 She didn't know why she had become so interested in that stuff all of
a sudden; after their mum and dad had died perhaps she had just hoped she'd find
a way of contacting them in the ghostworld.

 

But she should never have involved Susan, making
her perform the spells with her, that was a bad thing for a sister to do.

 

She remembered back to the night before. How it had all started to go wrong
when they'd tried the summoning spell together.

 

 She'd followed all of the instructions to the letter though, at least she thought she had; made a circle of dripping red candle wax upon the floor and a pentacle of menstrual blood within it just
as the book had said, lit a black candle in the north; a blue one in the west, a
green one in the east and a yellow one in in the south; made sure with her
witches almanac that the moon had been in its fourth quarter and that it had
been the third chime after the stroke of midnight when the ritual commenced, she
and her sister sitting cross legged and skyclad within the circle and the window
left open for the night spirits to enter.

 

Then she had started to speak the
words of the summoning:
"We summon you, O spirits of the night.
 Wheresoever you may wander upon the earth, in heaven or in hell".

 

But then, she remembered, thats when her sister had sworn she'd seen someone;
an old man or woman standing in a corner of the room next to the
fireplace.

 

"But how can that be?", she'd said, just dismissing her sisters fears, "I
haven't even finished the spell".

 

Ofcourse her sister had been right. She had seen someone or something in the corner of the room and everything  started going weird after that.
 First it was the door to the living room getting stuck. Her sister was pulling at it getting hysterical and even when she had gotten up and helped her pulling the handle it wouldn't open just as if there were hands on the other side of the door holding it shut.
Then the power had gone out and they'd had to use two of the candles from the summoning ritual to find their way to the fuse box in the front porch.
It was strange how dark it had got
as if there was no light even outside and when Susan had looked out of the
window she'd sworn that she couldn't even see the moon or stars.

 

Then, without her even touching the fusebox the lights had come back on. But
things didn't get any better after that because then they started to hear the
noises coming from different rooms in the house like people moving about and
muffled voices.

 

"Lets just get out of the house", Susan had begged her, "Lets just go, please".
 But then they'd gone outside, heard that strange whispering sound all around them and, trying to run, Susan had bumped into the ghostfield.
"We're trapped", Susan had kept saying like she was starting to lose her mind, "They won't let us go".
Then she had said to Susan that she'd go back inside the house by herself to try the telephone and they'd gotten seperated. 

 

Inside the telephone didn't work; there wasn't even a dialing
tone, just that weird whispering like the sound of the ghostfield and then she
heard Susan start screaming and screaming as if something outside in the yard
was attacking her but then the door to the house wouldn't open and something in
the dark grabbed hold of her aswell. 

 

But it didn't want either of them. Not yet anyway because then the door to the house opened and it let her run back outside. 
Its as if it knew that it didn't have to rush, that they had nowhere to run. 
They'd spent all night in the garden hoping that, if they
were still alive when the sun came up then someone outside the field might see
or hear them and get help. But she knew now that that wasn't going to
happen. 

 

And then, suddenly, Susan saw something, like a shadow, like a group of
shadows coming out of the door of the house and moving slowly towards
them.