Hag

by Kathleen Kaufman

  Catriona felt intoxicated by the strange, forceful woman who gripped her hand tighter and tighter as she spoke. Stay for a gathering tonight, the Russian woman said; you will see the power of the movement, and you will know it is the right time to leave with us. Catriona drank wine and ate a fine dinner with five of the wealthiest ladies in London that evening. They knew of her mother and were delighted she was to be witness to the séance scheduled in the parlor later that evening. The Lady Lily Campbell had lost her husband to what the doctors told her was consumption and what the gossip circles claimed was syphilis. Her grief was muted, but she was extremely concerned with a strongbox he had mentioned in his will. It was missing, and without it, his not-quite-grieving widow would quickly lose the lifestyle he had afforded her thus far.

  Catriona entered the parlor where the dark wood table was lined with candles. Long shadows were cast from the sconces running the length of the room. Something about the scene made Catriona uneasy, but she was merely a guest here, not a participant, so she kept her tongue. The ladies filed in and took their places at the table with soft giggles of anticipation. They waved Catriona into a chair, and all joined hands. It was then that Catriona realized this was a regular occurrence for these women. They were regular guests of the Russian woman, and Lady Lily’s husband was merely the most recent excuse to summon the dead. Catriona realized what was causing her to feel unsettled: this entire thing was a show, a game to them. Her mother’s words rolled back and forth in her ears: they are insulting the spirit realm, her mother had said, and they are mocking it.

  Just then, with a dramatic throw of the large double doors at the end of the room, the Russian woman entered, a serving man closing the doors behind her and enshrouding the room once again in darkness. The squat, stout woman moved gracefully to a seat at the end of the table. Her hands were adorned with rings, several per finger, giving her the appearance that she was manufactured of disconnected metal bits. Her robes were untidy, they lay in disarray, and the stench of tobacco emanated from every pore of her body. The Russian woman fixed her unearthly blue eyes on the ladies sitting at the table, giving each participant a lengthy, unbroken stare before moving on to the next. When she reached Catriona, she held the gaze longer than with the others. Her face was set, but Catriona swore she saw her mouth lift into a sort of sneer.

  Catriona tried to see what had held her earlier, how she had been mesmerized, fixated by this woman. She tried to see the magnetic presence that had captured her and made her want to head immediately to the dock and on to New York. This was false. Catriona could feel the space in the room; there were no spirits, but she doubted very much that the highborn ladies cared at all about that. Their eyes were locked on the Russian woman, and Lady Lily to Catriona’s left squeezed her hand as the Russian woman began to speak in a low, rhythmic voice.

  “There are two sorts of spirit we will communicate with tonight: the control and the guide. The control is merely here as an intermediary between the spirit world and ours; guides come to us from the upper plane and will return there after they have communicated with us. We must concentrate our energy and thoughts. Watch the candle flames, and keep your eyes open at all times. The spirits will show you signs, and you must be ready for them.”

  The sharp sound of the ladies’ intake of breath filtered through the room. Catriona’s nerves were on end. The Russian woman’s gaze was fixed on her, and she could feel her eyes boring into her mind. She knows I know this to be a fraud, Catriona thought; she does not have the gift, but she knows that much. Just then, the Russian woman jerked her head back, and her entire body went stock-still then convulsed forward as though she were being shaken by an unseen force. Despite Catriona’s assertion, she jumped with the ladies as the Russian woman’s eyes rolled back into her skull and she began muttering unintelligible words. The sounds continued, sometimes forming the corner of a known word or with a cadence that made the gibberish sound conversational. Suddenly, her eyes fixed on Lady Lily, and the muttering ceased.

  “My dear.” The Russian woman’s voice was muted, odd. “My dear,” she repeated as Lady Lily gasped. “You’ve come such a long way. I’m learning ever so much here.”

  The Russian woman paused as though listening, and then in her familiar, slightly accented English responded, “Hello, you are learning quite a lot aren’t you?” She laughed as though someone had told a delightful joke.

  Overhead, the chandelier lit with low candlelight began swinging in a slow circle. The ladies jumped, and the Russian woman waved them down. “Relax, my dears. It is only our guide. Mickey is guiding the spirits tonight, aren’t you, Mickey?”

  In a voice that sounded higher and younger than either of the two they had heard thus far, the Russian woman answered her own question as the ladies around the table quivered and Catriona set to seeking out the corners of the room with her eyes, looking for the tricks she knew must be rigged in this space.

  “Yes, Madame. I bring you the departed spirit of Lord Nigel Campbell. He speaks of a message he carries for his wife.”

  “Nigel?” Lady Lily cried out next to Catriona, squeezing her hand as though to break it.

  “My dear.” The Russian woman answered in the same muted voice she had used before. “I’m learning ever so much here.”

  Just then, the overhead chandelier halted its movement, and flashes of light began dancing around the room. One caught Catriona square in the eye, and she was blinded for a split second. The ladies shrieked with delight and fear, and the Russian woman nodded back and forth.

  “My dear,” the Russian woman continued as Lady Lily began to softly cry.

  “Nigel, I’m entirely lost without you,” she sobbed theatrically.

  Catriona heard the tinkling of tiny bells and remembered what her mother had always told her about the charlatans of her day, the thin wires invisible in a dark space running up a wall and controlled with the medium’s foot. Just then the table began to shake, and the women broke their link of hands and ran to the door.

  “My dear.” The Russian woman intoned. “You will come again, won’t you?”

  With that, the ladies ran shrieking into the next room, leaving Catriona and the Russian woman alone.

  “You’re a fraud,” Catriona whispered, her voice shaking.

  “My dear,” the Russian woman said in her natural voice, the corners of her lips curled ever so slightly. “That doesn’t matter in the least.”

  Catriona returned to Glasgow on the next train, the world of the spirits and the energy of all the things her mother had taught her ringing in her ears. She chose a quiet life; the big house on Cathedral Court that her mother had so prized held no interest for her. Most of the young men who hung about lost interest when they saw that Catriona had no interest in the money and estate that would be passed one day from her mother. She was unmarried and entirely scandalous when her own daughter was born. Catriona didn’t care a bit about that. She bought a shop with a flat overhead on narrow High Street, where the tenants hung their laundry across the lane. It flapped and fluttered in the Scottish breeze, and Catriona heard the words of the poem by the American writer: a flag of my disposition, he had written. And so it was such.

  Catriona settled in this humble place that folded her in as though she had always belonged. She sold herbs to help babies with the grippe and ease heartache. She read palms and cards for those who needed answers. She lived a long life free from illness and full of peace. The vibration of the bloodline rang clear and strong as she taught her daughter the lessons of truth and clarity. And somewhere in the rocky crags, the Cailleach knew that the matriarchal power had been passed and she breathed a sigh that blew as a gentle breeze across the lowland fields.

  THE VISION CAME STRONG and fast, nearly knocking Alice off her feet. The woman was lying on a worn wooden table, her cracked climbing helmet still on her head, blood leaking out from the edges. Alice leaned against the banister of the manor house to steady herself, grateful for the ragged antique cha
ir that sat by the foot of the stairs. With her head in her hands, the vision clarified. The woman’s skin was already turning greyish, and the blood was pooling beneath her, its source a mystery, as her face looked serene, her body posed in such a manner that she might have just lain down for a nap. That had been done on purpose; Alice could see on the backs of her eyelids the scene play out as though she had been in the room. A man and another woman; the man carried her gently, the woman shaking and crying. They laid her down softly, as though afraid to interrupt her slumber. They knew in their hearts that she was gone, so they left her alone in the hunting cabin to go get help. The woman on the table lay still; she would never move again.

  In the vision that played out with a startling degree of clarity, Alice walked around the table, regarding the woman from all angles. She was somewhere in her thirties, maybe forty. Her hair was short and stuck out from under her cracked helmet in sticky tufts. Her slate-grey eyes stared at the ceiling. Faint lines criss-crossed the skin around her eyes; too much sun, too much cold winter air. Her arms and legs were muscular. She was a climber; this was not the result of carelessness or ignorance of the mountain. A freak accident, something had gone wrong, something no one would have seen coming.

  Alice could feel breath over her right shoulder. Without even looking, she knew the woman was standing here, staring at her body.

  “I don’t understand,” the woman said softly. “They left me here. Why did they leave?”

  Alice turned to face her. The woman’s eyes were wide, scared. She wore the tight-fitting activewear and helmet, but there was no blood; her skin held a sun-kissed glow that Alice knew was her natural complexion, not the grey pallor that was steadily overtaking the shell on the table. In a rush of images, Alice saw what had happened: an errant crag of stone falling from above; another climber had left it loose, not knowing what his mistake would cost the next to scale the mountainside. The woman had never even known what had happened. She had reached for the next handhold, her mind focused on the sharpness of the air, the familiar weight of the ropes and harness holding her safely in place. The rock above her had splintered and fallen, killing her instantly. Her friends screamed her name and eventually lowered her body to the ground. Night was falling, and they needed to get help. They’d moved her to the little cabin left here by the forestry service and set out on foot together. No one would return until morning, when the frame on the table would be stiff and pale, the blood congealed around her. It was cold tonight; her husband would worry that she was not back yet. Her friends wouldn’t reach a phone until late, long after this woman’s loved ones, a man and a small child, would have spent the night calling anyone who might know anything. She would be greatly missed, a hole would be left in her absence. Her spirit, as wild as it was gentle, would not go quietly.

  But now this woman stood here in the ice-cold cabin, regarding her own dead body with fear and confusion. Alice reached out and took her hands. They were warm; a force stronger than blood was coursing through her veins now. Soon it would carry her away entirely.

  “You died, love,” Alice said softly, the twitch of Glasgow from her childhood making its way into her speech. “They didn’t abandon you; they went for help.”

  The woman shifted her gaze to Alice. “Who are you?” she asked, her voice shaking.

  “No one of consequence,” Alice whispered, and in that moment, she knew exactly why she was here. “It’s time to leave this place, love. You’re free now, and you can feel it already, yes?” Alice took the woman’s other hand and looked into her grey eyes.

  The woman nodded. “But they won’t know what happened to me …. I have to tell them not to worry.”

  “That’s my job, love,” Alice said, and the woman gave her a small smile.

  “I don’t understand how this happened,” the woman repeated.

  “None of it makes any sense. A loose stone fell and you died. There are worlds within worlds beyond this one, but you have to let go of this place first. Stay too long and you’ll find yourself stuck. No need to stay.” Alice spoke the words with a certainty whose origin was a mystery.

  “Tell them to keep the fire lit; they’ll know what it means.” The woman took one last look at her steadily greying corpse and turned, walking out the door into the woods. Her form disappeared into night, and in a burst of golden firefly glow, she was gone.

  Alice fell forward in the chair, catching herself on the flats of both hands an inch before she would have slammed headfirst into Miss Lettie’s wooden floor. She knew immediately what she needed to do. This hadn’t happened here. She needed to get the message to her mother. This was something from home, something from the Colorado mountains. The tiny hallway table held a rotary phone. A few operators later, racking up a long-distance bill that would make Miss Lettie grimace, Alice had her mother on the phone. It was the middle of the night there, and Mum’s sleep-filled voice was filled with fear and confusion. Yes, she did know what Alice was talking about, as a matter of fact. She’d gotten a call from Caroline Sempsy’s husband not an hour ago: she’d gone rock climbing with friends and hadn’t returned; none of them had come home yet. The husband was calling everyone in his wife’s address book, desperate for a reasonable answer but knowing that something terrible had happened. Alice carefully told Mum about the cabin and the message that the woman with the grey eyes had relayed.

  In the weeks to come, Mum would send a letter telling her that the forestry service had found Caroline Sempsy’s friends half-frozen to death on the trail. They’d been trying to hike out and had gotten turned around in the dark. Caroline’s body was exactly where Alice had said it would be, and her bereaved husband had turned three shades of pale when Mum had told him to keep the fire lit. Mum still didn’t know what it meant, but it had definitely meant something of significance. Mum never asked Alice how she had known, although she did get a letter from one of Caroline’s friends some time later. It was short and written in neatly printed text, the type of print that one uses when they are trying too hard to maintain control. The woman wanted Alice to know that they hadn’t wanted to leave her there, all by herself. She wanted to know if Caroline had blamed her. Alice responded as best she could, but with a flash of the children in that classroom so long ago, and the unconscious men in the street in Caracas, she knew the guilt of the living far outweighs the concerns of the dead.

  Any further discussion of the strange incident was soon over-shadowed with news of a different sort. The bouts of nausea and dizziness that Alice assumed were a lingering spring cold were diagnosed in a very different manner. She was pregnant, a miracle considering how scarce and scant any intimacy between her and Paul had been. But Alice knew that this baby had been written in the stars long before. She had seen her sweet brown eyes years and years before; she had appeared to her on that lane in Glasgow. This was her daughter who would carry the moon on her shoulders, her daughter whose words would change hearts and minds, her daughter who would feel the ugliness of this world like she was walking on a thousand shards of glass, her daughter who would spend her days half in this world and half in her own head.

  As her belly grew steadily rounder, Miss Lettie would pamper her with special teas and meals. Paul would never speak of Sylvie again, would promise that this was the change they both needed. Alice would believe him for a time, and later on still, as she watched him with their infant daughter in Miss Lettie’s ancient rocking chair, singing her songs of spiders and flies, she would see the pain and sadness lift, and the promise that had danced in the mist back on that lane in Glasgow would seem somehow possible.

  THE LITTLE SHOP ON the lane was well-known throughout Glasgow. Some knew of it by association: the daughter of the great Moira Blair ran it and lived in the flat overhead with her own daughter, who had the trademark fiery hair and dark eyes of her mother and grandmother. Some knew it for Catriona, herself, and her indelible ability to know all that was troubling you without ever hearing a word. Some knew it for the strange stories tha
t swirled around the daughter, who was swiftly becoming a woman. Muriel had been named for a many-greats grandmother around whom swirled stories of ancient witchery and a mysterious cult of powerful women. There was no saying if the stories were true, but Catriona had hoped that her daughter would find strength in her family name and not be swayed by frauds as she herself had been once.

  It was a difficult time. The séances and spiritualism that the Russian woman claimed to hold power over had become overwhelmingly popular, especially among the wealthy women of Edinburgh and London. Glasgow held a more working-class sort of sensibility, and as such, Catriona’s shop was publicly an entirely unmagical apothecary, as held with the ancient and outdated witchcraft laws. However, anyone who paid the least bit of attention knew its real intent. The authorities looked the other way, and a wary peace held. Catriona was approached frequently, as many had heard of her one-time association with the Russian woman, and even though the Russian had been proven a fraud long ago, her philosophy lived on and her followers were seemingly everywhere.

  Muriel was a curious girl; she took to the herbal mixtures and teas her mother taught her easily. She grew a line of herbs in her bedroom window and collected flowers from the fields outside of town. The teenager seemed to have little to no interest in others her age, and even though she attended the newly formed higher primary school and was subject to all manner of compulsory social interaction, she always seemed to exist in her own world.