Chapter 4
Sally pushed opened the door and entered her bedroom, raising a quizzical eyebrow at the her friends waiting inside. She tightened her red towel about her chest and used a smaller, beige towel to dry off her hair.
"Tell me what you got," Sally demanded.
"What?" Bren asked.
"Don't give me that," she paused, her dark eyes spearing his, as she stopped half bowed in the act of gathering her hair. "You know something. Spill it."
Kendra, leaning against the wall shared a look with Bren, after which sje shrugged and Bren went on.
"Maybe," Bren admitted.
"So?" Sally prodded.
"Alright," Bren sat down in Sally's rolling desk chair. "What do you remember about the basement at Connor's party?"
"It was loud and dark?" Sally couldn't see what Bren wanted.
"When you went down
later
," Bren pitched his voice to indicate Sally should have clued in. "When you masturbated."
Sally exhaled softly upward and rolled her eyes to the ceiling.
"I don't know," she rubbed her hair while she thought. "Dark. Halloween decorations. A bit messy and spooky, I guess?"
"Spooky with candles?" Kendra prodded. "Do you remember the candles?"
"Yeah," Sally said, holding a hand out at about the height of her chest. "There were ledges, this high, on all the basement walls. Connor put candles out on them."
"Lots of candles?" Bren asked. "Try to picture it. How many?"
"Ugh," Sally plopped down on her bed, crossing her legs in a manner that opened her towel towards Bren, and stared thoughtfully at the ceiling. "There were a lot. He must have set out three or four on each wall, I guess?"
Bren tried to ignore the view under Sally's towel, but couldn't avoid noticing the little triangle of short, dark hair she'd exposed, and started drawing and taking notes in his book.
"How many candles were still lit when you went downstairs?" Bren continued. "Had some of them gone out?"
"No," Sally replied, leaning forward with confidence. "They were all still lit."
"Damn," Bren grimaced. "I was thinking... Well, never mind."
He flipped over a new page and drew a rectangle on it.
"This," he declared, "Is Connor's basement."
Bren added little circles around the edges of the rectangle.
"Those are the candles?" Sally asked.
"Right," he continued. "Now where was this couch you sat on?"
"When I had my orgasm?"
"Yes," Bren rolled his eyes.
Sally took his pencil and drew a smaller rectangle inside the 'basement', showing that the couch had rested up against one of the short walls.
"And you sat on the edge of it, here?" Bren took the pencil back and made a circle on the inside edge of the couch.
When Sally nodded, Bren went on, "And then you kinda pushed your butt out, this way, into the middle of the room?"
Seeing the circle he had drawn, just off the edge of the 'couch' in his diagram, Sally nodded again.
"Okay," Bren exhaled through his nose, his concentration wearing lines onto his face. "Okay."
"So?" Sally wondered impatiently.
"I think that's how you did it," Bren replied, and started drawing a careful circle on his diagram. "Somehow, you managed to make -- or join -- a circle of candles."
Sally and Kendra leaned over his notepad and saw that he'd drawn a circle through four candles, two on the side walls and two more on the wall farthest from the couch. Bren then added five lines, connecting the candles to each other across the circles, and two more connecting to where Sally had sat.
"Wait," Kendra said, "So four of the points on the circle are candles, and the fifth is, um..."
"My vagina?" Sally raised an eyebrow.
"Speaking of which," Kendra looked up at ceiling and held her palm out protecting her eyes from her friend's parts. "I know we've all seen it glowing and everything, but could you put a pair of panties on or something?"
"Huh?" Sally looked down and realized suddenly that her movements had forced her towel to ride up to her waist. "Oh, whatever."
Adjusting the towel more loosely around her waist, she managed to drape part of it over her privates and continued examining the diagram.
"A pentagram?" Sally asked. "So, like, I'm a witch, then?"
"That kind of explains those three creepy chicks in the Arts Quad basement, doesn't it?" Kendra pointed out.
"Huh," Sally grunted, a smirk on her face.
"Being a witch is not a compliment, Sal!" Kendra emphasized, but her friend remained unphased.
"What next?" Sally asked. "How do we use this?"
"I don't know," Bren said. "The thing is I'm not sure what you're
supposed
to do. Maybe you did something slightly wrong? Or maybe you did everything right and this is the correct result. I don't know. It doesn't feel like you got the full benefit of doing it right, you know what I mean?"
Sally nodded and started to speak, but Kendra got in first.
"Bren," Kendra interjected. "I know you want to Science the shit out of this, but I'd prefer if we could just send the demon back, alright?"
"Yeah," Bren nodded. "But anything we do could make it worse, too."
Bren flipped through his pages, looking at the diagrams he'd drawn, and chose one to show Sally.
"This is what happened just now," he explained. "I managed to get two of the candles lit, and they formed an arc with your, um, vagina."
"You saw this curve?!" Sally asked.
"I didn't see it," Kendra admitted.
"It was on my side of the room," Bren pointed at one of the three points on the arc. "This is your vagina. The other two are candles. I think, if you'd hadn't come so soon, I'd have been able to place the other two candles and finish the circle."
"Or
pentagram
," Kendra rolled her eyes, her voice tinged with anger.
Sally examined the diagram and took a deep breath.
"Alright," she said, "Should I try again?"
Bren watched as Sally's hands drifted under her towel, pushing it aside to expose herself to them again. Instantly, Bren grabbed her right arm as Kendra grabbed her left, pulling her hands away from her vulva.
"No!" they shouted together.
"Christ," Bren added.
"Jesus, Sal," Kendra scolded. "At least give us a day to recover."
"Alright, alright!" Sally reclaimed her limbs and rubbed her upper arms as if they'd bruised her.
"Sorry," Bren's voice came out sheepish. "But we do need to think about this. Try to be as safe as possible."
"Okay, okay," Sally rolled her eyes. "I'm telling you, though. It's not going to hurt us."
"It tried to tear the room apart," Kendra reminded her. "It threw that little stand by the door at us."
"An
accident,