An old woman next to him named Agnes Crenshaw shook her head. “Nothing is impossible these days, my dear. I believe the child speaks true.”
Gramps got up and hugged Maria. “My little girl is all grown up. She’s a witch now.” He wiped a gleam of tears from his eyes.
Maria pushed him away. “Oh, Gramps, not in front—Wait, did you say witch?”
He nodded.
There was five of them in total and now they all nodded, too. “So I didn’t hallucinate any of that stuff? It…it was all real?”
Salem nodded. Agnes nodded. Gramps nodded. And the Muffler twins nodded as well.
“I saw you,” Maria said to Gramps. “I saw you when you were younger. You wore a military uniform with armor, and you fought a giant spider-man. How the hell is that not a hallucination?”
“There’s much you don’t know about Ignatius,” Salem said. “He was Dominion’s bravest warrior. When the conflict between the village and the Arachnids got heated and lesser men backed down, Ignatius refused.”
Maria found herself smiling, proud of her grandfather.
“Of course, now he’s nothing but an old fart,” Salem added. The table broke up in laughter and Gramps gave Salem the finger.
Sherlock barked, but inside Maria’s head, it sounded like a chuckle.
“This is too weird,” she said, shaking her head.
Gramps put up his hand and the rest of the group quieted. He had a certain magnitude that seemed to ooze out of him now, one Maria never noticed before.
“I may have been a great warrior, but I was a fool. It was my idea to hide the village in the world in between. I’d forced Zimmy Ba, the one you know as the Queen Witch, to hide them, and because of that, we lost twice that day.”
Salem patted Gramps’s back.
“It’s okay, Ig, it’s okay. If what your granddaughter speaks is true, then there’s hope yet.”
“Yes, and hope is a good thing no matter what planet you’re on. Oriceran or Earth,” Agnes added.
Maria’s gaze shifted to the music box. She reached out and opened it. Everyone’s eyes flicked to the ornately decorated wooden surface. Even Sherlock stood on two legs, resting his front paws on the card table to get a better look.
The sweet melody rang out in the chilly air of the backroom at Salem’s.
“Ah, that does bring me back,” Fredrick Muffler said.
“Me, too,” said his twin sister, Ginny.
When the music stopped, everyone seemed relaxed, including Maria.
“Tell me more,” she said.
The senior citizen ice cream brigade did.
“ ‘Apple’?” Maria said. “You couldn’t have picked a more common last name? Really anything besides ‘Apple’. Do you know how much I’ve been made fun of because of that last name?”
“When the portal threw me and the music box out onto the street in the middle of broad daylight, a cop came up and asked me what the hell I was doing in the middle of the street dressed like Sir Lancelot, and why I had a baby in my arms; I panicked.”
“Ha!” Salem said. “ ‘Panicked’. The old geezer known as ‘the Calm Storm’ panicked. I love this story.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Gramps said. “Laugh it up.” He gave him the Oriceran equivalent to flipping the bird— he flared his thumbs out to the side while the rest of his fingers were in a fist.
He continued. “A young woman was on the street corner. She sat behind a cart full of fresh apples, selling them for a very reasonable price. I glanced at it with the corner of my eye after the cop asked me for my identification, and came up with that last name because it seemed very reasonable as well. I’d said I left my identification in my regular clothes. The cop said if he saw me in the street again, acting like a jackass and holding up traffic, he’d write me up a fat ticket and call child services. Then, he said Halloween ain’t for a few months. Naturally, the last name stuck as I got my new life in order.”
“But ‘Apple’? C’mon, Gramps.”
At least it’s not as bad as ‘Sherlock,’ the dog said.
Maria glared at him. “Thought you liked that name.”
It’s a little too…cliché. I’ve always wanted something more badass, like ‘Killer’ or ‘Macho’.
“But you’re not badass. You don’t even bark at squirrels anymore. You just sniff the dead ones, and let the cars and power lines do the dirty work for you.”
That’s beside the point.
Maria rolled her eyes, and then looked around the table. No one seemed to have paid any mind to her having a conversation with her dog. Yeah, too weird, she thought.
“I didn’t see you with a baby when Duke showed me what happened,” Maria said, wanting to get back to the story. She felt safe in the ice cream shop, surrounded by people who understood.
“That was because the first time I portaled out of the throne room, I’d gone back to Zimmy’s hideout.”
“The Queen Witch,” Maria said.
Gramps nodded.
“May she rest in peace,” the Muffler twins said at the same time.
“What did you find?” Maria asked.
Gramps lowered his head, but a smile came across his face. I found…you.”
“Me!?” Maria said. “What do you mean?”
“The Arachnids had found the Queen Witch’s hideout. She was powerful, but no being is a match for hordes of Arachnids—especially Arachnids whose very blood runs as dark as the magic they use. She sacrificed herself to save a child, the last infant in our village—my granddaughter. When I’d gotten to the cave and I saw the light, that glowing blue orb of light, I rushed toward it. Luckily for me, she’d killed all the Arachnids before she herself passed on.”
“So when Duke went through, you were portaling to the Queen Witch’s hideout?” Maria asked.
Gramps nodded. “Yes. I had the music box, and only she could access the world in between with it. She was my daughter, I had to save her. But I was too late, and there you were, protected by her spell, in a bubble of pale blue light, smiling with no teeth as if
