The Haunted National Park: A Tale from the Peter Wood Multiverse
Chapter Ten: A Cry For Help

When Peter made it back to the Help Center, he found it was now full of scouts that had also come there to escape the Witch’s wrath. Many scouts were crying and the adults among them were either helping the camp staff with tending to wounds or else helping to reach out to local ranger stations in the area for help with confronting the Witch of the Park. Peter was even certain that he heard someone talking to authorities, beyond the paranormal world.

“Yes, I’m serious.” Came a man’s muffled voice. “Please hurry, someone needs to tell the wizardkin about this! They’ve called for rangers, but we need their wardens. Just tell them the witch is alive. The Witch of Windsor is alive! Carl, I don’t know how!”

When Peter found Lily, Oliver, and Mindy in the hospital wing, he told them all that had happened outside.

“Guys, I think we need to help her.” Said Peter.

“What?” Lily screamed. “Are you crazy? Peter, I’m not going anywhere near her after everything that’s happened tonight.”

“Finally,” Mindy muttered under her breath.

“But guys, we’re the ones who woke her up.” Said Peter. “This is our fault.”

“How is it our fault that she’s mad? Blame Magical Parliament. They're the ones that took her family from her, not us.”

“But we’re the ones who went to her shack and woke her up!”

“She’s gone!” came a voice from elsewhere. They all looked to the door to see a man whose arm was bandaged up and sections of his clothes burned black. One of the center’s medical staff was trying to tend to him as he ranted. “She tried to burn me! I nearly died! Then she went charging off into the woods, ranting off something about a weapon and a dead cat!”

Upon hearing this, Peter started making his way for the exit, only to be stopped by Oliver and the girls. “Look, if you guys don’t want to come then fine, I’ll go out there on my own. But don’t get in my way. Someone needs to talk to her. We’re the ones who woke her up, so we should be the ones to try and fix this mess.”

None of Peter’s friends were happy about it, but in the end, they got out of his way. They refused to let him go along, though. And so, all four of them snuck through the panicking crowd, out of the campgrounds, and back into the woods, to make their way for what was left of the abandoned ranger station up the mountain.

Peter didn’t know for sure that the Witch would come back here. But if what the injured man said about the Witch talking about a weapon was true, he didn’t know where else she would keep such a thing. Peter’s hunch turned out to be a good one; when the four of them came up to the clearing with the demolished, gingerbread-turned remains of the station, Peter’s nose was filled with the stench of something rotting. It was coming from the large globs of green ooze that were splattered on the snowy ground and on many of the trees. Was it ectoplasm from the ghosts? Did something happen to them? Was it the Witch’s doing?

They found her standing on a pile of gingerbread that had once been the ranger station. The Witch was staring up at the night sky, with her magic wand nowhere to be seen. And curiously, the whole stretch of the woods in front of the Witch was glowing an ominous green, and a distant symphony of screams and wailing could be heard coming from that direction as well. The ghosts must’ve been restless. But Peter sighed and relaxed a little. At least she wasn’t going around setting things on fire with her magic anymore. Her hair itself was also back to normal.

Clearly sensing that she was no longer alone, the Witch slowly turned her head to look at them. “Hello, children.”

Peter stopped walking towards her with the others stopping behind him. He wasn’t sure of how close he wanted to get to her just looking at her closely now. The Witch’s eyes had a sunken look to them as both were surrounded by large, puffy red skin. Her face as a whole was a mixture of a painful grimace and a furious frown.

“What are you doing out here?” Peter asked.

“I should be asking you that.” The Witch turned back to the woods. “Go away now. I’m busy…I want to be alone with my cat.”

Peter didn’t see any cats around. Just the Witch standing on a massive pile of gingerbread that was all covered in the stinking piles of glowing ectoplasm. “We just want to talk to you.”

“We’re sorry we didn’t tell you about your daughter.” Said Lily. “Or about how long you’ve been asleep for.”

“We were just worried about how you’d react.” Said Mindy. “I still am if I’m being honest…” Mindy muttered at the end.

“And uh,” Oliver started. “We’re sorry about your daughter—”

“I found her grave.” The Witch started to sob, softly at first, but as she went on the Witch started to lose more and more of her composure. “I used a tracking spell to see if it was true. To see…to see if I could replace any…any trace of her. That’s when I found it. The locals buried her by an old abandoned house just down the mountain. I couldn’t walk when I saw it. Couldn’t stand it. I just collapsed there, seething, and…and…and that’s when I realized that I couldn’t let this injustice go unanswered. And that I must leave this place. Once and for all.”

“Yeah but,” Oliver started. “Even if you want to leave, you can’t. You said it yourself, the ghosts will never let you—”

Olivers were cut off by the echoes of the loudest, ghoulish-sounding meow that Peter had ever heard in his life. He hoped to never hear it again, but it repeated itself soon after, this time accompanied by the deepest of rumblings that shook the ground. It almost sounded like laughter. Almost.

“What was that?” Peter asked.

“I’m leaving this place, I told you this, boy.” Said the Witch. “Did you not wonder what had happened to all the spirits that attacked us here? Here, if you are determined to stay, then let me introduce you to my pet.” Then the Witch turned back to the woods in front of her that were glowing a bright green and filled with wailing, and she said, “Come.”

The light deep in the woods suddenly switched to black as if someone had flipped off a light switch. And in that same instance, the screams and wailing of the ghosts beyond the clearing were replaced by silence. The Witch just continued to stand there in the middle of the clearing with her hand reaching out for something that wasn’t there. Then, in the time it took Peter to blink, something appeared just barely giving Peter’s mind time to register its rush toward the Witch.

The thing in question was some sort of beast that was floating in mid-air, rubbing its nose up against the Witch’s hand affectionately. It looked like some kind of gigantic cat about the size of a bus. It looked dead. Patches of its fur had fallen off and the fur that was left was matted and reeked so bad it made Peter’s eyes water. Its tail had been bent into an odd zig-zag position, and its eyes were gone. In their place were two empty, cavernous eye sockets.

“What the hell…what the hell is that?” Oliver muttered, pointing at the monster.

“This children is what happens when you pickle the body of a dead, North American Cheshire Cat. He is my finest alchemical creation, and he’s the weapon I was working on to use to get myself out of here before I fell asleep. He’s a Soul Bourreau. He was playing with his food over there in the woods where I just called him from. I’ve named him Sweetie.”

“I don’t think that name fits.”

“How’s that going to get you out of here?” Peter asked.

“He eats ghosts. Look around you.” The Witch gestured to the rest of the clearing. “Weren’t you curious as to what caused all of this ghostly carnage?”

A gasp in the woods drew all of their attention to them. High up in the branches of a nearby tree, not too far from where they were standing, a pair of glowing red eyes could be seen hiding just behind the pine needles.

“Oh look, children. It appears you’ll have an opportunity to see my creation at work after all.” The Witch stroked the face of the giant, rotting cat. “Sweetie, there’s another treat for you in the trees over there. Would you go an eat it for me please?”

In a twitchy fashion, the cheshire cat’s body turned to face where the ghost was floating amongst the tree branches, its bones cracking and popping as it turned. The beast let out a low, drawn-out hiss, and charged at the ghost.

The game of cat and mouse took the two on a trail through the woods and up into the air, with the ghost shrieking as it tried—and failed—to shake the monster off its trail. The cat, unrelenting in its chase, would even dive into the snow, sending large waves of snow in every direction, trying to get at the ghost. Finally, the ghost went straight up into the air. Peter watched as it’s body started to glow bright red, and then he watched in shock as the ghost let burst a near-deafening noise like a fog-horn in a burst of red light.

“Well, well, well…” said the Witch.

“What is it?” Peter asked. “What’s happened?”

“That was an alarm. That ghost that my cat was chasing let loose an alarm before it was eaten as a desperate cry for help.”

“Who was it calling to, though?”

“Who else? To the ones who employed it and the rest of the ghosts in this park in the first place. To the government. To MAG-PAR.” The Witch then turned back to face them all, a softer, more relaxed look on her face. “I want you children to leave now. They’ll be coming soon and I did mean what I said earlier in this evening. I don’t want any of you to get hurt tonight. Certainly not by any spells cast by my hand. I made you a promise that I would never hurt another mother’s child. Don’t make me break that promise. By now your supervisors would have gotten the fires I started under control so please, hurry!”

“But why does anyone have to get hurt tonight? I know you’re hurting, but maybe we can talk to the adults and have them see things your way.”

The Witch smiled sweetly. “Oh, someone’s going to get hurt, my sweet ones. I’ll make sure of that.”

A loud boom of thunder came from above, and Peter saw that the once clear sky was now filled with dark storm clouds that had purple lightning dancing within them.

“What’s going on?” Peter asked, as the thunder grew louder and the lightning began striking at the trees around them.

“You must hurry!” The Witch aimed her wand toward them and said, “Obscuration!”

An unseen force grabbed Peter by the back of his jacket. Within seconds he, Mindy, Oliver, and Lily were dragged backwards and behind the tree line hidden safely behind some bushes where they watched events unfold.

All at once, several, giant bolts of purple lightning began striking the earth in the clearing, surrounding the Witch entirely. The light was so blinding that Peter had to shield his eyes. When the light died away, Peter saw that standing in each of the spots where the lightning struck were men and women dressed in hooded cloaks and robes with the letter “M” embroidered on their backs.

The Witch smiled at them—a big toothy grin. “Good evening. Tell me, what brings you fine folk out here to my neck of the woods on a fine night like this? Hmm?”

Out from the crowd of wizardkin stepped forward a man with thin black hair, and a long scar on his right cheek, he was holding a staff in his right hand, and he looked ready for whatever the Witch had prepared. “Esmeralda Fritzler!” said the wizard. “My name is Rolfanzo Johnson and I am the Deputy Warden of Ozerwick Prison. I don’t know how you survived all of these years, but by order of Magical Parliament, you will come with us.”