A Coven in Essex County | Lotte

Below is Part 12 of 18 monthly installments for Visitant.

◄◄  Read the first installment / prologue
◄ Read the previous installment, Elsewhere, It is Halloween

LOTTE

Sunlight seeped into the sky from the horizon, bleaching the mottled purple and perfect black of the night before into a crude imitation of day. The white and jagged veins of stone thrust from deep in the earth threw shadows before their bulks. The creeping luminosity drew the details of the landscape, rendering the headlands into rocky spears. It coaxed the scrubby brush and scrawny arms of grass to reach from the gritty soil clumps in dark crevices. Like a pale, golden wave, it lapped across the shattered grassland, finally running along the clapboards of the three story Uxor home, freshly slathered with a coat of primer that took on the gray hue of dawn.

Within the home, on its second story, Lotte…