The White Witch

by Rory B. Byrne

  Weatherspoon Guesthouse

  The township of Eskdale was twenty minutes from Inverness, the thriving capital of the Highlands. The Weatherspoon Guesthouse received a lot of overflowing holiday business when hotels in the capital overbooked.

  We arrived a little after five. The sun ran along the sharp tips of the far-off white-capped mountains. Rory grabbed my pack and carried it into the front door of the spacious two-story sprawling building. It smelled like cinnamon and cedar. I detected the aroma of something cooking in the kitchen, and I followed Rory through the corridors that led to the rear of the oversized house.

  “As I live and breathe,” Aunt Beth said. She gasped and looked at me before opening her arms with a generous hug. “You are the spitting image of your Ma.”

  I squeezed Aunt Beth and sighed. It felt right; it felt good. I’d never set foot in the place in my entire life, yet I felt like I had finally come home. Her Scottish brogue made me feel closer to her. I don’t know how to explain it. Hearing the variations and the inflections just made it easier for me to understand them altogether.

  “You are just in time for dinner. We have a few guests from the States with us. Rory, take Harper to her room, please.” Beth looked at me. “You can wash up. Dinner is at six. Call your father; let him know you’ve arrived safe and sound.”

  I followed Rory upstairs. When he walked through the thin hallway over the kitchen and wet wall foundations, I figured the tiny bedroom with the single beds once belonged to the servants from a century ago. They added walls to accommodate privacy and new doors with locks. The shared bathroom upstairs had new fixtures. The water was incredibly hot, and when I showered, I felt like thousands of miles had washed off me and down the drain.

  I texted Dad to let him know I’d made it. I charged the phone while I went back to join the family in the grand dining room setting. The guests from the States turned out to be a throwback hippy couple living on change, stumbling through the Highlands like vagabonds. They were in their late twenties. They looked happy enough, but I saw the far away disinterest in the girl when her boyfriend talked about how much he enjoyed the Highland atmosphere. I suspected the girl wanted the south of France but had to endure the bad to reach the good.

  “You’re from New York?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  It sounded like an accusation and not a question. She had bottle-blonde hair that lost its luster and muted russet eyes. She was pretty in the earthy sense. I don’t know why she gave me that mess with my boyfriend, and I mess with your face look. I wasn’t interested, and I didn’t care.

  I wasn’t interested in small talk. We had homemade biscuits and beef stew, vegetables, and potatoes. Of course, the two were vegetarians and passed on the savory stew. I wasn’t picky, and I wasn’t turning down a meal based on certain beliefs. I couldn’t argue one side or the other when it came to preferences. I felt lucky to have my extended family and complimented Beth on her catering choices.

  Rory sat at the head of the table. He drank draft ale and poured a few for the boyfriend. I had bottled water, and Beth gave me a cup of tea when she served a crumble cake for dessert.

  “What brings you to Scotland?” the boyfriend asked.

  “I’m here visiting my family,” I said.

  I saw the girlfriend glaring at him. I suspected she knew something of his attraction. It wasn’t hard to miss. I saw him ogling me the moment I had arrived for dinner. I had changed into a sweatshirt and yoga pants. I had a few choices, but getting comfortable after a long, crowded flight, I wanted to feel at home. I wasn’t showing off, and I never thought much about my appearance. But I wasn’t a fool; I knew men liked to look. I had pulled back my thick auburn hair into a ponytail after the shower. Still damp on my neck and upper back, it had soaked my sweatshirt.

  “You have family here?”

  “I do,” I said.

  Rory smiled and sipped at the dark alcohol drink. When I didn’t elaborate, the boyfriend stopped asking questions. The girlfriend closed up a little, sitting beside him. They were across from me at the table.

  I collected the dessert plate, flatware, and empty teacup. I carried the items through the passageway into the kitchen. Beth rinsed the pieces and placed them into the dishwasher.

  “I think that young lady thinks you’re competition,” Beth said. She wiped her hands on a dishtowel.

  “Ew, no, thank you,” I said. Beth giggled. “Where’s Gramma?”

  “Marcia’s up at the cabin,” Beth said. “She comes down sometimes to help clean and do laundry. We’re expecting a houseful in a few weeks when summer visitors arrive. She’ll spend more time with us then.”

  I didn’t know how to break into a conversation about Mom. I saw the look on Beth; she’d glimpsed the ghost of her sister in me. It wasn’t easy to talk about my mother, her sister, for either of us. It was the reason I’d traveled so far. Perhaps if I gave it another day or so, we’d broach the subject naturally.

  Beth finished cleaning the kitchen. She handed me a warming plate with separate compartments. It had samples of everything we had for dinner.

  “You can take that to Marcia,” Beth said. “I’ll have Rory take you to her house.”

  “Is it far from here?”

  Beth shook her head. “Straight up the road to the left. She has a blue post box and a white fence around the cottage. The bluebells are blooming in front of her fence.”

  “I can walk, I don’t mind.”

  Beth wrinkled her nose. “It’s dark, and you don’t know the way.”

  “That sounds like a fairy tale beginning,” I said. “You have any trouble around here?”

  Beth shook her head. “Just the werewolves during the full moon,” she said. She snatched back the warming plate. “Go get your coat and boots.”

  We laughed. Beth showed me to the front door. She waited downstairs as I went up. She caught the boyfriend watching me ascend the stairs. I think the girlfriend saw him watching me. I thought if they survived their travels together, if she stopped being jealous, they might stay together after all.

  Fairy Tales

  Gramma Marcia’s cottage was nothing more than a studio apartment chipped out of white rock with a new roof. It had a kitchenette, bathroom, a curtain separating the bedroom from the sitting space, and Marcia in her lounge chair. The woman smoked like a Victorian chimney. I knew when I left her house, I’d need another shower to rinse the clinging tobacco smoke.

  Marcia was a curious older woman. She scrutinized me while sitting in her chair with the tray table. She spooned in stew, vegetables, and biscuits equally. I don’t know how many teeth the older woman had left in her head, but I wasn’t counting. In any case, it didn’t stop her from finishing the meal.

  “Your father still hurting ’cause of your Ma?” she asked.

  It took a moment to decipher Marcia because her Scottish accent strung words together more than Rory or Beth. It sounded more like ‘Yer Da be a hurtin’ on account of yer Ma?’

  I shook my head. “Dad got married two years ago. Her name’s Shelia. She works at the college’s registrar’s office.”

  Marcia winced as my words stung her. Smoke filtered around her head once she’d finished her meal. She was a round woman with thick thighs and dense breasts. She had large flat feet inside black socks under the house dress. She sat back and watched me like it was a test.

  “He and your Ma, they had their troubles,” she said.

  “I was too young to understand what their relationship meant to each of them. I think when Mom came here, it was a way to get away from Dad.”

  Marcia nodded, puffing on the filterless cigarette. White smoke haloed her curly gray hair.

  “I spent a lot of time with Phoebe when she came to stay.”

  “I thought she lived in Edinburgh when she came to do research.”

  Marcia shook her hea
d. She pointed to the dingy lace curtains at the front of the house. “Phoebe spent more time at the daoine sìth than in the city.”

  “I’m sorry, what was that?” I asked, shaking my head to clear my ears of smoke.

  “It’s Gaelic, lass,” she said. “Daoine sìth, D.A.O.I.N.E S.I.T.H. pronounce the second word as shee if you see it spelt. The factory workers from the city, they built that place on the daoine sìth—the fairy mound or fay folk, wee people.” Marcia rolled her hand as if to have me keep up. “We stayed off the place as youngsters, and we weren’t allowed to go near in case the fairies catch us and drag us back to Elphame—Faërie Land.”

  I waited, allowing it to sink in, giving Marcia enough time to reveal the punchline. Instead, the old woman regarded me with one eye, squinting.

  “You think I make a joke,” she said. I saw the seriousness of her face. “We know of the old magic in the mounds. You live here with your speedy autos, your intellect phones, and the twinkling of an eye access to the rest of the world with your interweb, but we know the truth.”

  I saw her crack a smile. Marcia had one of those faces that was hard to read. Through the mask of weathered wrinkles, she’d seen much in her eighty-six years. No one told her the dangers of smoking. She knew about the progress of humankind, yet something ancient and forlorn clung to her words like the tarnished paisley wallpaper in her tiny cottage.

  “I know you’re kidding, Gramma,” I said. “You know I’m not a little girl anymore.”

  Her eyes softened when Marcia stopped squinting at me. “I think you are the spitting image of your Ma. You think I’m a daft old woman living in a shoebox. I got cable telly. I know what smartphones are, and I know all about the internet. But there’s more to life than technology, lass. There’s a line between what is and what was,” she said. “Your Ma, she came here to work on her thesis for quantum physics. There’s more—much more—to why she actually came here.”

  Dealing with Weatherspoon girls, we were a cunning lot. Gramma Marcia played the feeble older adult, but the burning intelligence shone brightly even if cataract turned her elderly eyes milky grey. She snubbed out the cigarette in the overflowing ashtray on the handmade table at her elbow by the recliner.

  “Do you know what happened to my mother, Marcia?”

  “Aye, lass, I do.”

  It was like the world just dropped out of the sky and landed in my lap. She’d waited eight years to tell me face to face.

  “Your Ma went into the Elphame. Those people, those greedy bastards from the city, they got a way into the mound. They’re using Phoebe’s theories to get into Faërie Land. They want to open the door.”

  Marcia found my hands. I’d leaned closer to her, sitting on the ottoman beside the chair. Her hands were velvety soft with thick ragged nails Marcia had no interest in trimming.

  “I know your Ma, Harper. I know her as well as I know me own. She’d not abandon you, not willingly. She loved you more than life, more than her breath. I don’t care what the police detective says, nor your belief that Phoebe went to Demark. It’s those people she worked for who covered her tracks. They made it look like she left Scotland, went far off. But you know, don’t you? If you didn’t think your Ma still here, you’d gone off to that Scandinavian country. We both know that.”

  I nodded and tried swallowing the dry ball of fear caught in my throat. Marcia saw me struggling with her words. She rocked herself out of the squeaky chair and shuffled to the sink. She poured tepid tap water into a clean glass and handed it to me. I sipped at the water. It smelled lightly of sulfur and tasted like minerals.

  “I don’t talk about it with Rory or Beth. You look at me like I’m a crazy person. Think what they’d see if I shared that with them.” She dropped her heavy backside into the chair. The scent of soap and cigarettes puffed out of the housecoat and cushions. “I was the last person in the world to see your Ma, Harper. I know what they work on up there at the mound. I know the day she left here; they made something of a breakthrough.”

  “What about the police?” I asked. “Did they talk to the people at Equinox Technologies?”

  “You know what money does, Harper? When you have enough, you can do anything you want. Even if the police wanted to investigate the mound, they’d need a warrant. Those people made it look like Phoebe left here, left the country. They don’t want anyone to know what they’re doing up there.”

  “What are they doing, Marcia? You know how weird it sounds?”

  “I know, lass. I get it, but I know when I was a girl before anyone in the world found Inverness on a map, we had our stories of Elphame and the daoine sìth. I know of a few people who went looking in the mounds and never came back.”

  “This is insane,” I said. I put down the glass and stood up. The ceiling in the tiny house brushed the hair on the top of my scalp. I suspected when Rory came to visit, he had to fold in half just to walk around inside the place. “You’re saying my mom went into the Equinox Technologies buildings, and she’s still in there.”

  “I believe your mother went into the mounds, Harper. She’s in Elphame now.” Marcia worked on lighting up another cigarette. I needed fresh air to clear my head. “What do you expect me to do with that information? I can’t tell anyone. I’ve been through years of counseling for abandonment issues, and now you’re telling me that Mom went into a hole in the ground, and she’s still in there.”

  Marcia shook her head. She drew a deep breath on the cigarette. The ember glowed brightly.

  “The mound isn’t a hole in the ground, lass. It’s a doorway to the other side. My granny talked about fairy folk coming here when she was as big as a gnat. She said the people once traded with the folk, sharing their harvests. It was the greed of man who corrupted the treaty. Humans want more than they need. They take and take and forget about giving back.” She pointed the smoldering cigarette toward the curtained window again. “Your mom loved her work. They knew about her work in quantum entanglement and how our world interacts with the Elphame on a subatomic level.”

  I laughed. I didn’t mean it as an insult. It erupted out of me like a joke that came from the side. Gramma Marcia, a fuddy-duddy old lady, talking about a twenty-first century theoretical physical phenomenon made me think I’d fallen into some strange place that wasn’t earth anymore. It wasn’t Marcia’s Elphame—it was a place where elderly people knew about shared spatial proximity.

  “I need to go, Marcia.”

  “I know, lass.” She sat back, pushed off the rocking lightly with her wide feet. “I know you do.”

  I went to the door. I looked back at Marcia. She appeared collected and knowing.

  “You know what it sounds like, don’t you?” I asked.

  “I know, lass. As well as I know, you’re going to the mound.”

  Equinox Technologies

  I didn’t have a lot to say to Beth upon my return to the Guesthouse. I heard the television in the parlor. Rory and the boyfriend sat watching the soccer game—the football match—between England and Belgium. The girlfriend sat with her knees drawn up to her chest at the cleared and clean dining room table. She stared at her smartphone.

  I had echoes of Marcia’s voice in my head and cigarette smoke clinging to my clothes. The girlfriend looked up when I walked by the dining room archway. I wanted to take the back stairwell up to my room, but she called to me first.

  “Harper?” she said.

  I sighed and turned around in the hallway. Beth went back to preparing the items needed for a continental breakfast. It was a little after eight in the evening. I needed another shower and about twelve years of sleep.

  When I returned to face the girlfriend at the table, I pulled the hair tie from my head and shook out the smoke-soaked damp hair.

  “Your family owns this house?” she asked.

  I nodded. I think she needed a friend. I was the closest to her age by five
to eight years her junior. I wasn’t interested in making friends. I wanted answers.

  “The Weatherspoons are from my mother’s side of the family.”

  “That’s so cool,” she said.

  “I guess so.”

  “Do you come to Scotland a lot to visit them?”

  “No, this is my first time here.”

  “Mine too.”

  “You don’t seem to like it,” I whispered.

  She nodded. “It’s not my kind of place. Too rural for me,” she said.

  I leaned against the archway and crossed my arms over my chest. “I don’t mind it. It feels like I’ve been here before.”

  “I think a lot of what made Scotland appealing got lost on the internet. People can read all about the place and never set foot here.”

  “You’re here,” I said.

  “It’s Bill’s big plan. He wants to walk all over Europe.”

  “You don’t like the idea?”

  “I don’t like the cold and damp.” She pressed a hand to her breast. “I’m Amy, by the way. Your aunt told me your name. Am I keeping you from something? You must be tired.” She thumbed in the direction of the wall that separated the dining room from the parlor. “I think Bill made a new friend. I’m surprised they’re not down at the pub watching the game.”

  “Rory’s my cousin. I think he’s too busy to know how to relax. If he’s not working here or taking care of the farm, he’s working at the grocer’s market down the street.”

  “Three jobs, just like me,” Amy said.

  “Are you taking a long break before you go back?”

  “Bill’s big plan has us leaving here in a few days and hiking back to Inverness to catch the train down to Portsmouth. We’re supposed to catch a boat or something to France.”

  “Sounds complicated,” I said.

  Amy nodded. I saw the tears brimming before she sniffled. “It’s a mess.”

  She needed female companionship. I was supposed to share something about myself with her. I didn’t know what it meant to follow a man across the planet. I didn’t need to know a lot about their relationship. The lack of an engagement ring on her finger suggested Amy jumped through hoops for Bill, but to what end?