Payback's a Witch

by Constance Barker

  “We should rest before we try any travel,” It was unlike Winnie to admit when she wasn’t up to task. I wondered if maybe the moon wasn’t quite at its highest point when we entered the tunnel.

  “There’s a place where we can stay the rest of the night.” I wanted to get to our destination as quickly as possible, but I could tell that we all needed to recharge before traveling anymore. It took a lot out of us to cross, especially if the moon was low. Winnie didn’t look like she’d be able to travel, and I wasn’t so sure that I could right now either. This wasn’t the first time I needed rest after passing through, and I was sure it wouldn't be the last. Maybe someday we would find that fairy ring and it wouldn't be as hard on us getting through.

  The cottage wasn’t too far from the mouth of the tunnel. Admittedly, cottage was a bit too nice a word for the broken-down shelter. I believed it to be a civil war era cabin, built from sturdy logs and with a kind of craftsmanship that had been lost to the ages. For as old as it was and how little upkeep was done to it, I thought it was in decent shape. A large tree had poked through the corner of the roof after being blown over by a particularly nasty storm. The inside was smaller than a studio apartment, but it would do just fine for the night.

  “This is the place?” Winnie asked her lip curled in distaste. I didn’t know where she thought we were going to stay. We’d hiked through the woods to get here. Had she thought we would stumble on a five-star hotel in the middle of the wilderness?

  “Home sweet home,” I nodded. Alan didn’t seem to mind our sleeping quarters, though he would be just having happy in a tree somewhere. He flew inside cawing at whatever critters might be using the cottage for shelter.

  “Ugh,” Winnie groaned as the animals scattered from the dwelling. I jumped out of the way for some of them to pass by. I silently thanked each one for giving up their shelter to us for the evening. I felt guilty for taking it from them, and if we entered without giving proper thanks, it wouldn’t offer us protection.

  “Thank you for offering your protection,” I whispered touching the damp wood of the door frame. Winnie drew another spiral of protection outside the front of the door. The one I had put there long ago had faded, almost gone completely. Had any other human set foot in the shelter since the last time I did the ritual, it would have been gone completely.

  “There’s a candle in here,” Winnie said, as she sparked it ablaze. I had left it there the last time. That was a dark time, I hadn’t known much about myself or either realm. All I had known was that nothing I knew to be true was.

  “Oh good,” I said, as though I hadn’t been the one to bring it there in the first place. I did not want to explain my history to either of my companions. Some things were better left in the past. With a bit of chalk I drew another spiral on the front door. I wanted to ensure our protection, if we had moved through the tunnel at the wrong time, we might need it. Winnie looked worn just from lighting the candle, and I felt tired from casting the protection spell on the shelter.

  “What is this place?” Winnie seemed to have taken to it in the glow from the candle light and the warmth emitted from the protection spell.

  “It was a cabin built in the Civil War era, I believe. I found it on one of my first trips and it asks fewer questions than an innkeeper.” A low profile was essential in our line of work. That could change once we got to Ohio and the town affected by the Hatchet Man. We wouldn’t say who we were, but we’d offer our help and see what information we could get from them. The fewer people who knew who we were the better, and no one was to find out who we really were. It was incredible to me how far a bit of confidence and acting like you belonged got you.

  “That’s true,” Winnie nodded. She had pulled out our sleeping mats from her bag and set them and a couple of blankets on the floor. Her eyes were already closing. “Plus they aren’t going to turn us away because of a certain raven.”

  “It’s not my fault people don’t appreciate me,” Alan replied haughtily. We’d taken to smuggling him into rooms after being turned away by more than one place for having a bird. Even after offering more money we would still be sent off.

  “No, it’s not,” I agreed. Winnie curled up on the floor. We were lucky it wasn’t cold out, otherwise we’d have to make a fire. That was more effort than I was prepared to expel tonight. I shimmied down under the blanket.

  “We should take shifts,” Winnie said with her eyes closed.

  “I cast a protection spell, and no one has been here for years,” I protested, already feeling sleep wash over me. My pounding head welcomed the rest.

  “Are you sure it will hold?” Winnie asked, her eyes now open. She looked apprehensive, and I was reminded that she wasn’t exactly used to roughing it.

  “It was a good one. I can still feel it,” I assured her. “Besides, we’ll be up in a few hours and on our way in no time. If the spell drops, I’ll feel it and wake up.” She nodded, trusting my words and went out like a light.

  “I’ll keep watch a while,” Alan promised, but I was already too close to sleep to respond. I felt him pull my cover up with his beak and I was sure he did the same for Winnie too. “Sleep soundly,” he wished before flying to a high beam and watching over the cabin.

  Chapter Three

  Light poured into the cabin waking me slowly. There was no better way to be woken than by a stream of natural sunlight. I jumped from my pallet when I realized both Winnie and Alan were no longer there with me.

  “At some point she's going to have to tell us,” I heard Winnie through the door.

  “In her own time,” Alan insisted. I moved slowly to the door, making sure to skip over all the floor boards that creaked. Through a split in the wood I could see the pair of them. Winnie sat on a large boulder off to the right and Alan was hopping around on the ground foraging while they spoke.

  “She keeps secrets,” Winnie shook her head. Her arms crossed.

  “She tells us what we need to know,” he disagreed. They couldn’t be talking about anyone but me. What secrets they thought I was keeping, I didn’t know. “She might not even know herself.” Winnie scoffed.

  “She knows,” Winnie nodded with certainty. “I trust her, but I don’t want either of us to get caught in the crossfire of what she’s keeping from us.” Winnie stopped talking suddenly and stared at the door, her eyes stopping right where I stood. I turned away from the door and moved silently back to my bed. Rolling it up, I started to pack everything back up.

  “Good morning,” I said brightly, a little too brightly, when I heard the door open up. There was no reason for us to talk about what I had heard. We all knew I had heard it, and I knew I wasn’t hiding anything from them and that was enough for me.

  “Morning.” Winnie rolled up her mat. Her eye flickered to me as she did so, as if she thought that maybe I hadn’t actually heard anything. “Did you sleep well?” She asked, deciding that it didn’t matter. Either way we weren’t talking about it.

  “My headache is gone, and I feel recharged enough to get to where we're going.” I had slept well, but I’d been plagued with nightmares. They were all about the hatchet man. Nightmares I’d had before when I was a child, after I first heard the tale.

  “You tossed and turned,” Alan noted. “You,” he turned to Winnie. “I had to check and see if you were still breathing more than once.”

  “Slept like a log,” she grinned. Winnie could sleep anywhere, any time and in any position. It was like a special power or something.

  “Good,” I said. It only took a few more minutes for us to finish packing up. We hadn’t taken much out of our packs the night before. There wasn’t a need to, since we were only sleeping. “How do you want to travel?” I asked both of my companions.

  “Flight,” Alan said without a second thought. This didn’t surprise me. It was also the only one that he could do without our help.

  “That works for me,” Winnie nodded her agreement. “It’s not too long of a trip, the weather is nice, and
it’ll use the least energy.” People always think of witches flying on brooms when they imagine them traveling. Truthfully, there are many ways we can travel, flight is just the easiest. Teleportation takes a lot of skill and effort. It’s also the most dangerous form of travel considering that you can leave body parts behind or lose them on the way. I knew a wizard who left his nose behind in a teleportation journey. I joked that it was the second worst thing to leave behind. No, not that....his wand. Gah! His wizard wand...oh forget it.

  “Here,” I passed Winnie her broomstick from the pack. We had splurged on collapsible brooms the previous year, which turned out to be a great investment. It was so much easier carrying around a pocket-sized broom than a full sized one. I tied my pack to the base of the broom, making sure it was secure. The last thing I wanted was for it to fall off mid-flight. We’d have to use a cloaking spell since we were traveling in the day, but that was still easier than teleportation.

  Once both of us mounted our brooms, with our baggage secured, it was time to take flight. I kicked off the ground shooting into the air. Winnie let out a holler as she burst past me. I leaned forward and pushed past her, laughing. Alan glided between us gracefully. There was no bigger joy to me than being in the air this way. Many witches and wizards found flying exhausting, even boring after a time. It was like the equivalent to driving a car. I never took it for granted though. It felt like pure freedom to me. In our world there were rules and regulations to flying, even traffic depending on where you were. Here there was nothing like that, since to most people we didn’t even exist.

  “So, what are we really facing down there?” Winnie asked. We had slowed a bit and were flying side by side. I had told them bits and pieces of the hatchet man story, but not all of it.

  “Andrew Hellman, or at least his spirit. He was alive in the late 1830s,” I swerved to avoid a cloud. I had no desire to get wet this high up. Not all spirits moved onto the paranormal realm, even we didn’t know where all of them went. It was the ones whose souls couldn’t move on that were causing problems that we were assigned to. Most often it was those who died too young, without their loved ones, or just before their time and their souls clung to the world. The rest were vengeful or died violently, evil with a desire to spread harm and hatred. That was the category Andrew Hellman fell into.

  “He killed his wife, right?”

  “Not only his wife, but two of his three children as well. He hated them, abused them for years before this. They did nothing to earn his ire, just existing was enough of a reason for him to bring them harm. First, he tried to poison his wife, Mary, but she inadvertently foiled this plot. Then he poisoned his three children, making them ill. Louisa and John died, but Henry survived. Not only had Mary not died, she’d even managed to nurse one of his children back to health”

  “Where does the hatchet come in?” Winnie asked, puzzled. It was easy to remove yourself from a story like this. Such a horrifying tale, our brains rejected it as fact resisting the terror that Andrew Hellman really brought to his family.

  “Fearing for her sons’ life, Mary sent Henry away to live and work on his uncle’s farm. She knew that Andrew had poisoned the children and tried to poison her. She knew that he would likely kill her should she accuse him, and as long as she protected Henry, she didn’t care what her husband did to her. Not long after Henry was sent away, Mary and Andrew got into an argument. During their argument he went mad and attacked her with an ax, and according to legend, she was hacked to pieces. Once she was dead, he realized that he left a trail of evidence leading right to him. The poison had been a subtle way to get rid of them. It would have looked like they had fallen ill and succumbed one by one. He’d almost look like a sympathetic figure, a father and husband who lost everyone he loved.”

  “It doesn’t sound like he was capable of love,” Alan pointed out as he perched on my broom handle. I agreed with his assessment.

  “I doubt he was,” I shook my head. “Andrew had gone so mad attacking his wife, there was blood everywhere, so much that he couldn’t hope to clean it up. He tried to make it look like a robbery. Trashing every room in his house and covering himself in his wife’s blood.” Winnie made a gagging sound and Alan shook his head in disgust. I was glad for the fresh air beating against my skin, otherwise I might feel sick myself. Images from my dreams popped into view; a blood-soaked room, a child with sunken eyes, a man dipping his hands in the blood leaking from his own wife’s neck. “Then he waited, lying in bed pretending to be injured. As though they had been attacked by a vicious gang of robbers.”

  “The police didn’t buy that right?” Winnie asked with a sigh. “I mean, I know they didn’t exactly have great methods back then, but they couldn’t have been that foolish.”

  “They were suspicious from the start. It wasn’t a secret that Andrew didn’t care for his family. I think more than a few of the townsfolk suspected he had killed his two children. When they found him, he was covered in blood and groaning as though he had been hurt. The police washed the blood from him, to reveal not even a single scratch on the man. He was arrested for the murder.

  “He was incarcerated for a year, give or take a few months, but managed to escape. Andrew fled to Baltimore, where he became Adam Horn. There he remarried and eventually murdered his second wife. Because he killed her in the same manner as his first, they were able to figure out who Adam Horn really was. This time he was tried and hung for the crime, finally paying his debt for taking the lives of so many innocents.” I shivered. The story had always made me wonder if I could trust those around me. Identities were so easy to construct out of thin air. It was impossible to know if the people around you were who they said they were. Adam Horn was Andrew Hellman and he could have been another person before that.

  He could have killed others.

  “What about the folklore?” Winnie asked, all business. “His spirit haunts the burial place?”

  “The road where the cemetery is that holds him, his children and his first wife. It’s said that his headstone give’s off a strange glow, even in the pitch dark of night. Footsteps and mysterious voices are said to come from the house where they lived together. The sound of a hatchet being dragged and swung to hit each headstone late at night.” It was all relatively typical hauntings, though the darkness of the spirit was worse than most.

  “That’s not so bad,” Winnie said, and she was right, only she hadn’t heard the whole story yet.

  “There is legend that says at least half a dozen women have gone missing over the years, always around the time of year that Andrew was killed. The towns around the area have always reported strange occurrences and sightings of ghosts, loud noises, the typical things. There hasn’t been a report for some time though. Once back in the 80s they had an incident, that seems to me like a cut and dry case of possession.” I spoke quickly, as we were nearly there. I wanted to make sure we were all fully informed before we got there.

  “Possession?” Alan said with shock. “A spirit would have to be pretty powerful to manage that.” It was rare that a true possession took place, especially one performed by a spirit. A possession was more often a demonic force of some kind, or a witch turned bad. “But it happened so long ago.” That was the only comforting thing. It had been long enough that I doubted the spirit still possessed the strength to embody someone else.

  “What was the possession?” Winnie asked. We had started our decent, I could actually see the cemetery in question on the ground.

  “A man in town went mad one day, people say mad with grief. His wife had died in a house fire only a few weeks before. A grounds keeper at the cemetery was in the wrong place at the wrong time. The man was there to pay respects but ended up with a hatchet in his hands and a grounds keeper chopped to bits,” I sighed. “Local law enforcement chalked it up to him going insane with grief and local legends being a little too prevalent.”

  “Sounds like that could be possible,” Alan pointed out. It was easier to believe than a sp
irit possessing a full-grown man to the point where he killed another.

  “People go crazy all the time,” Winnie said with hope. Even she seemed concerned with the idea that he might be able to embody one of them. If he somehow took control of either Winnie or I, the consequences could be catastrophic.

  “His statement to the police makes me think otherwise,” I explained as we touched down. We landed in the shade of the forest, not wanting to bring attention to ourselves. We were far enough from the road and the town that no one would see us just yet. We’d walk the rest of the way. “He spoke of losing time, one minute he was at his wife’s grave and the next he was covered in blood. He can remember the attack, but as if he was watching it through someone else’s eyes. Not once before this had he displayed any kind of erratic or violent behavior. By all accounts he was an upstanding citizen.”

  “Death can screw people up,” Winnie pointed out. I didn’t think I’d convince either her or Alan. They were too pragmatic to believe it without seeing it. My goal was only to instill some caution in them when dealing with Andrew’s spirit.

  “You’re not wrong,” I agreed, knowing all too well the truth of her statement. “Let’s go into town.” I forged the way ahead.

  Chapter Three

  Town was generous. MacArthur, Ohio was actually a village with fewer than two thousand residents and barely more than a square mile in size. I hadn’t been sure that we would even be able to find accommodations in town. Eventually we were directed to the house of a woman called Nan who would take travelers in for a small fee.

  “Is this such a good idea?” Winnie asked as we made our way in the direction of Nan’s house. I’d prefer somewhere more private, more anonymous to stay, but this was our only option. It wouldn’t do to stay outside of the haunted area.