Witches of The Wood

by Skylar Finn

  I was brushing my hair in front of Les’s vanity one morning (this was before I ran into Kimmy, and later Bridget, and later Paulina). At the time, I was mostly just concerned by the fact that he was a man who owned a vanity.

  A bird flew into the window and landed on my hand. I froze. It was so odd I was afraid to move; afraid I was seeing things. It was a cardinal.

  Les walked in and glanced at the bird. He went over to the spinning rack that housed his belt collection.

  “Wow, you’re like Cinderella!” he said. “Is he helping you get ready for the ball?”

  Truthfully, I didn’t really think my mother was crazy, or that I was, either. It seemed like something…else. Something I couldn’t fully articulate, even to myself.

  I studied my silver strand of hair, which glimmered in the soft yellow lights of the bathroom. What did I expect to gain by going home? Was I sure I wanted to know the truth? Maybe I couldn’t handle it…whatever it was. I told myself that at least the trip would get me ahead at work, and that was never a bad thing.

  Les exited the shower in a cloud of steam, wrapped in a white hotel towel, and I avoided looking at his reflection in the mirror. He really was beautiful. It was unavoidable. He was genetically engineered that way. I’m not even kidding. He was actually grown in a test tube, the product of a surrogate pregnancy, so his gorgeous mom wouldn’t have to ruin her beautiful bod bringing him into the world. It accounted for a lot.

  “Is that for me?” He drank my coffee without waiting for a response. “I’m touched. How are you getting to the other Pennsylvania, anyway?”

  I shrugged. “I guess I could borrow my dad’s car.” I paused. I couldn’t borrow my dad’s car. Then I would have to explain I was going to Mount Hazel, which would raise a litany of questions I didn’t want to answer.

  “You can borrow mine,” he said. “I have the Tesla now, so I won’t be using my old one, unless I need a beater to tool around town. I don’t have much time for tooling these days.”

  He finished my coffee and strolled into my closet. There was a suit of his in the way back I’d pretended to forget about. When I did remember, I told myself I didn’t have time to chase Les down and return his wardrobe, which he probably wouldn’t miss, anyway. His closet was larger than my bedroom. Somehow, he knew it was still there. It was like he knew me better than I knew myself, which was chilling to contemplate in the case of a man like Les Rodney.

  He was dressed in thirty seconds flat and I thought of how he seamlessly slipped back into my life. It was better that I was leaving. It had been one thing to be deceived, to not know that I was one of many instead of one and only, but now it would just feel like the saddest form of settling. Yeah, I’m cool with Wednesdays.

  Les’s “beater” was a fully restored 1977 Chevy Nova. It was so well-waxed that it reflected the entire neighborhood in its shiny surface.

  “Have fun in the Batmobile,” he said, waving as he got in his Lyft. He was already on his phone. It could have been any number of business-related things. Or it could be about three non-business-related ones, each of which made me feel more terrible about myself than the last—especially having relented so recently in the face of his charms. I should never drink wine or light my apartment on fire again, let alone do both in rapid succession.

  What had happened last night with the fire? I wondered this as I climbed into the driver’s seat of Les’s car after stowing my luggage in the trunk. Was it a wine-induced hallucination, or had I actually seen something? If so, what could it have been? Was the girl real? For her sake, given what I had seen, I certainly hoped not.

  As I pulled away from the city skyline, I tried to put the following things out of my head: my father’s reaction when he discovered where I was going, my hornet’s nest of a love life (largely characterized by someone who clearly did not love me), and most problematically, what I would find when I arrived—someone who still loved me after decades of miscommunication, or a terrible glimpse into my unavoidable future of insanity?

  I’d forgotten how much I hated traveling. Some people love the sensation of being in liminal space: neither here nor there. I don’t like feeling like I’m in limbo, and the physical sensation of being trapped in a car for endless hours, staring at a long stretch of road, while eating terrible food the entire way is like a one-two punch to my senses.

  It took very little time to enter Les’s Other Pennsylvania, which I could just as easily argue was more real than the glittering gentrification Les considered both home and the only place worth living. The rest of the state was rolling, pastoral landscape; endless farms and bare tree limbs stretched towards a pale winter sky.

  The thing that Les and his ilk don’t appreciate about remote spaces is the way a place, unaffected by the people who live in it, becomes all its own. It’s a quality of hauntedness you find in the fog rolling over a hill and the empty stretch of road in front of you, uninterrupted by anything but mountains and silence.

  Away from the circuit board of lights and sounds of the bustling city, the peaceful countryside seemed alternately meditative and haunted by comparison. I thought of this most when I drove through Centralia. It was once a flourishing mining town, until the underground mines caught on fire and never went out. The fire was impossible to extinguish and the ensuing fumes drove everyone out of the town until it sat largely abandoned. No one could live in a town on fire.

  I could see the cracks in the pavement, long seams where the asphalt had burst from the underground pressure, and places where the smoke still rose from the ground. I was alone in the car and starting to wonder if I existed, which seemed like a good time to make a phone call.

  “I’m driving through Silent Hill,” I told Jill.

  “Oh god, are you in Centralia?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “That place is so spooky,” she said. “I went there once, for a field study in my Environmental Impact class. It was like a waking nightmare.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, looking out the window as I drove past the cemetery. “It’s kind of pretty.”

  “That’s unsurprising,” she said. “You always were a little spooky.”

  Mount Hazel looked like it was perpetually shrouded in fog. It hung low on the banks of the river that ran through the town and wreathed the small range in the distance, the mountain for which the town was named. The borders of town were demarcated by bare brown forest, and the entrance—flanked by an ancient wooden sign on which only the paint was new, a sign that read Welcome to Mount Hazel, pop. 781—was via a covered bridge over the icy river.

  The bridge freaked me out. It was made of wood, hundreds of years old, and there seemed to be nothing that would prevent it from spontaneously crumbling beneath the wheels of the Nova, plummeting me into the freezing current below. There were probably supports and joists and some sort of historical pride that went into maintaining it, but these were not things I could see, and I closed my eyes as I rolled over the planks of wood, as if this would somehow prevent me from crashing through them into the river.

  I crossed the bridge without incident and glanced at my GPS, which had stopped working. It seemed that service was a foreign concept here. Was there seriously no cell tower? How was I supposed to work, or otherwise generally exist, without a phone?

  My initial foray into Mount Hazel already had the makings of every horror movie ever made, and that was before I saw the house where Margo planned to record her eponymous follow-up, Pedal to the Metal! I found it by pursuing the meandering road around curves, up and over hills, as I looked for the name of the street, Black Iron Lane. There seemed to be only one road through town, which was either highly fortunate or a source of future concern. I decided to pretend it was the former.

  The sign seemed to loom out of nowhere and I almost missed it, even traveling at a crawl. It was tilted sideways in the earth, as if someone had run into it repeatedly on the way down the steep hill it rested in. I hit the brakes and reversed. There seemed to be
little prospect of my backing up into one of the town’s seven-hundred and eighty-one residents, none of whom were anywhere to be seen.

  I crept up the hill through the menacing woods with the optimistic assumption that the road would eventually lead to a destination, and I wouldn’t just climb endlessly through the fog, only to discover I’d drowned in the river and entered purgatory. I was unprepared when the house loomed suddenly through the trees, jutting from the hill, its gables and turrets stabbing the surrounding sky.

  The house was a hulking Victorian monstrosity, black with green trim, like an evil gingerbread house. The windows were stained glass, all of them red. I wondered who designed it, then found I didn’t want to know. The wraparound porch spanned the perimeter of the house, disappearing from sight at the sides. Smoke poured from one of the house’s three chimneys, the only sign of life. None of the blood-red windows appeared lit from within.

  I pulled into the gravel driveway, revising my earlier assessment. There was one other sign of life: the black Mercedes Sprinter crew van parked haphazardly in an invented parking spot. It looked as though whoever was driving had either been in a hurry or incredibly drunk.

  I looked through the windshield of the car, gazing at the house. I felt strangely reluctant to exit the vehicle. The thing that finally propelled me forward was the thought that I was in a borrowed muscle car belonging to someone more successful than I would likely ever be, someone who wouldn’t think twice about getting out the car to enter an unknown situation in a terrifying building that was possibly haunted by the ghosts of murdered children. The game of What Would Les Rodney Do? was one that allowed me to occasionally surpass healthy, normal human fear while simultaneously skirting pesky ethical questions that might otherwise have distracted me from my goals.

  With this thought in mind, I got out of the Nova and approached the house, boots crunching on the gravel. The wooden steps leading to the front door looked no more stable than the covered bridge that led over the river into town, and I debated whether running up them quickly or slowly and carefully would be more likely to cause me to fall through the stairs into a haunted murder cellar. I went up them slowly, because I was still reluctant to knock on the door, thereby cementing this ominous assignment.

  The door was ornamented with a giant wrought iron knocker decorated with something that could only be described as a goblin’s head. I stared at it.

  “This is really too much,” I said.

  As if the door itself heard me, without my even knocking, there was a rattling creak as it swung inward with a rush of air, as if the house itself was taking a breath before sucking me into its darkened depths.

  4

  The Madness of Margo Metal

  The slim and beautiful man who opened the door was both androgynous and elfin. He looked like he recently escaped Rivendell, and I thought either Peter Jackson or J.R.R. Tolkien would gladly put up a reward for any information leading to his whereabouts. He was dressed in a silver bodysuit, matching tights, and spangled leg warmers. He had platinum hair and pale skin, his bright blue eyes ringed with black kohl liner like a raccoon. He emitted a subtle purple glitter, as if he bathed in the stuff.

  “I put it in my baby powder,” he said with no introduction. I realized I was staring.

  “Sorry?” I asked as I quickly glanced down at my phone in order to mask my rudeness.

  “The glitter,” he explained. “In case you were wondering. Most people inevitably do. You must be Margo’s new PR girl! Or woman. Whatever you prefer.” He rolled his eyes. “People are so touchy nowadays, wouldn’t you agree?” He opened the door wider for me to enter.

  I don’t know who I was expecting—a hunched and one-eyed butler, perhaps—but it wasn’t the love child of David Bowie and Galadriel. I was so fascinated by him that I forgot to be creeped out by the house, which was dark and lit by a combination of black candles and old-fashioned lanterns.

  “Forgive the lighting concept, I know it is so weird, but Margo has this thing about not allowing any invention past the Victorian Age into her ‘space,’ you know?” Here he introduced an elaborate set of air quotes to indicate what was apparently a well-used word for Margo. “What’s your name, by the way?”

  “Sam,” I said. “Samantha Hale, actually. But I usually go by Sam.” Or Sammy, or Baby, depending on who I was talking to.

  “I’m Cameron! Aren’t unisex names just the best? I find they really challenge people’s expectations of gender fluidity and binary identities, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said. It had honestly never occurred to me prior to that moment, but I really wanted him to like me. He was so unusual and different that I felt like having his approval would validate me in some unknown way I was suddenly desperate to know.

  He led me down a dark hallway, past a cavernous room that looked like it was designed to entertain hundreds of people. He was easy to follow. He sparkled in the dark.

  “That’s the ballroom,” he said dismissively as we walked by the enormous room. “It’s hideous, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” I agreed. I was suddenly a vessel of acquiescence.

  “I would just tear this thing down and rebuild my own smart house if I could,” he remarked. “Luckily, we only have to be here for a finite period of time. I can’t handle ugly any more than necessary, can you?”

  “No,” I said.

  “I’m so glad we’re on the same page! Working for Margo can be exhilarating, but also terrifying and taxing. Don’t tell anyone I said that. She should be in here.”

  He stopped in front of a set of double doors, red wood with black wrought iron goblins mounted to the center. He pulled out his phone, encased in silver glitter, and examined something on the screen.

  “Cameron,” I asked, voicing what seemed like a relatively safe and obvious question, given his evident disdain for the house. “What’s with the goblins?”

  He gasped theatrically and rolled his eyes. “I know! They’re hideous, aren’t they? Don’t tell anyone I said that. Margo simply loves them. You might even say she worships them. But that’s the vibe she’s going for, spooky and eclectic. Chilling and terrifying. Make-out music for industrial goth clubs and Halloween forever, you know? So weird. But she seems like she’s onto something. Maybe only in her brain, but definitely something, you know?”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. Had Margo Metal lost her mind? It sounded like it. I thought of my passionate (and admittedly drunken) phone call to Coco on my birthday, pleading with her to let me represent Margo in her glorious comeback, and felt the first surges of trepidation about my decision.

  “Listen, I just have a few things to go over before you meet Margo, okay?” Cameron was now speaking in the hushed tone you would in church, as if he didn’t want to disturb whoever was behind the double doors.

  “Sure,” I whispered. “What’s up?”

  “Margo is very sensitive about the following things: her age, her weight, her hair, and her diet, which is sometimes vegan, sometimes paleo, and sometimes purely carnivorous. Try to avoid commenting on any and all of these things. If she throws the milk out of the window in the morning and tells you that she’s vegan, and you see her in the kitchen eating bacon in the afternoon, be like, ‘would you like tomato, lettuce, mayo, and sourdough?’ Not like, ‘I thought you were vegan.’ She doesn’t like for us to question her habits or imply there’s anything hypocritical about what she’s doing. And please do not—do not—under any circumstances whatsoever refer to her as ‘ma’am.’ That’s what’s known around these parts as GFID.”

  “GFID?” I whispered, baffled.

  “Grounds For Immediate Dismissal. It’s one of the many handy acronyms we use to make life managing Margo a little bit easier.” He raised his hand with his pointer finger and thumb about a millimeter apart as if to indicate how little a bit it was. “Also, some of them we don’t tell her, so if she ever overhears you using one and asks for clarification, try to remember to lie. Not that she’s unreasonable, mind you,�
� he said at the look on my face. “It’s just that she’s an artist, and she has a temper. She’s sensitive and delicate and emotional.”

  “Of course,” I said. In my mind, I thought difficult and high maintenance and demanding. Check, check, and check.

  “All right,” he murmured, as if resigned. “Are you ready to enter the belly of the beast?”

  “Um…yes?”

  “That doesn’t sound very ready, but I guess that it will do,” he said. With that, he opened the goblin-embossed doors and swept ahead of me into the room.

  My first impression was of blood-red carpeting and heavy black drapes. The room was lined with candelabras filled with black candles. As if it couldn’t get any more eccentric, there was a massive velveteen portrait of Margo Metal hanging over the fireplace. She wore a high-necked velvet jacket over a ruffled white shirt and glowered down at the room like the lord of the manor.

  There was a velvet magenta armchair facing the fire. I couldn’t see who was in it. Either the person was very tiny or Lord Voldemort.

  “Turn me,” a high-pitched, childlike voice in the chair ordered Cameron.

  Voldemort! I thought.

  Without hesitation, Cameron ran to the chair and lifted it with a grunt, spinning it to face me. Seated in the chair was both the smallest and most beautiful woman I had ever seen. She looked like Sade had a baby with Prince and that baby was born under a bad moon. Even tinier and more fine-boned than Cameron, she was dressed head to toe in black. Like Cameron, she wore a bodysuit with matching tights and leg warmers, but hers were black as night and matched her luscious black curls. Her eye make-up was also black and smoky, her eyes glittering in her face like obsidian. The only color was her bright red lipstick and her sparkling gold hoop earrings.

  I recognized her from her videos, of course; there was a point in time where I couldn’t go without hearing Margo’s music in whatever store I was shopping in or seeing Margo’s videos in whatever club I was drinking at. She was forever performing live on New Year’s Eve or Spring Break or the Super Bowl halftime show—until she wasn’t.