“Thank you,” she said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.
Jane stood.
“You’re welcome. Are you sure you aren’t ill? Do you need a doctor?”
Again, Anne shook her head, but this time she couldn’t maintain eye contact.
“Well,” Jane began, “I came to say that I am sorry. I know that nothing I can say can take back what I said or what I did, but—”
The woman hesitated and her eyes narrowed as she tried to make sense of the scene before her. While it was clear that her apology had been rehearsed, finding Anne in the bathroom in her present state clearly hadn’t been part of the script. As Jane’s eyes scanned her body, Anne grew uncomfortable and she instinctively pulled her t-shirt over the small bump below her belly button.
This was a mistake.
Despite how subtle she had been, Jane caught this gesture and her eyes grew wide. In a split second, any semblance of compassion or guilt left the woman’s face and it contorted into something else. Her nostrils flared, her nose scrunched, and her lips pressed together so tightly that they quickly lost any of their natural pink hue.
It was the same expression that Anne had seen the night when Jane had accosted her with the horse whip.
“You’re pregnant,” Jane sneered. Her hands fell to her sides, but this wasn’t a defenseless gesture. Instead, they formed fists, and although they were nowhere near the size of her husband’s, they were more pointed and jagged.
Dangerous.
“No,” Anne said. She instinctively shuffled her body in front of Terry, who was breathing heavily behind her. This time, there was no chance for Anne to send her daughter to her room; the doorway was completely blocked by Jane Heath’s tense body.
“You’re fucking pregnant. After all this, you get pregnant. After all I have been through.” She took a step forward. “You already have a fucking kid, you ungrateful swamp whore.”
“Don’t hurt her,” Terry whimpered.
The little girl’s words went ignored.
“You shouldn’t have gone and done that, Anne. You shouldn’t have gotten yourself pregnant. That wasn’t right.”
Still seated, Anne pushed herself backward with her hands, forcing Terry back with her. It was the best she could do; shrouding her child with her own body was her only chance of protecting her. Whatever punishment that was about to be inflicted on her, she could take it, deal with it.
She was numb.
But not Terry.
For some reason, she was struck by the realization that Teresa’s fourth birthday was only a few days away.
Please don’t hurt Terry—she’s just a little girl. She’s innocent, she had nothing to do with any of this.
Jane lowered herself onto her haunches to stare Anne directly in the face.
There was hatred in Jane’s blue irises. Hatred born out of years of abuse at the hands of her husband, at years of being punched and kicked and too scared to either strike back or even to run.
But now... now Jane could do anything she wanted. Jane could seek revenge on all those who had ever hurt her.
Her fists unballed, and her lips turned into a patronizing frown.
“Oh, what, are you scared, swamp peasant?” she asked in a childish voice. Anne cringed and squeezed her eyes closed as Jane’s hand shot out. To her surprise, it didn’t slap or scratch her or even strike her as Anne had expected. Instead, it gently caressed her cheek. “Open your eyes.”
Anne obliged.
All she saw was floating white teeth, gapped where there were several of them missing, locked in a mocking smile. Jane’s hand slowly moved from her cheek to the back of her head, the fingers intertwining between the wet strands as they tightened.
Anne cried out, but Teresa was the one who acted. The girl grabbed Jane’s forearm, her tiny crescent nails biting into her pale skin.
“Don’t hurt Mommy!” she shouted, to which Jane responded with a hiss. With her other hand, Jane lashed out, driving her fist into the girl’s chest, forcing the air from her lungs and sending her careening backwards.
“No!” Anne shouted, but the grip on her hair tightened and she found herself unable to rise.
Terry gulped as she stumbled backward, her eyes wide. It looked as if she might continue in this way ad infinitum, but then her back struck the wall with a sickening thud. Her eyes rolled back as her body slid down the wall seemingly in slow motion, until she rested on the bathroom floor, slumped and unconscious.
“No!” Anne shouted again, tears streaming down her face.
“Stand up, you slut,” Jane ordered. The woman stood first, yanking Anne’s hair, forcing her to rise as well.
An unexpected pang in her stomach made Anne’s legs shoot out and she almost fell back to the ground. She would have fallen if it were not for the impossibly strong grip on her hair. Her left foot struck the basin full of vomit, knocking it onto its side. Anne watched in horror as the thick liquid splashed to the floor, before making a slow, winding course toward Terry’s unconscious body. The girl’s pants, new ones, ones that Anne had spent the last of her money on, began to turn dark as they soaked up the puke.
“You’re lucky I don’t kill you,” Jane said. Her voice was strange, deeper than Anne remembered. When she looked at the woman, she seemed to have changed.
It wasn’t Jane anymore, but Benjamin Heath. Benjamin on top of her, grunting, his hands squeezing her blood=streaked breasts.
“You’re lucky,” the voice repeated.
And then Jane pulled with the hand tangled in her hair and pivoted at the same time, flinging Anne with all of her strength. Anne swiveled on her heels and tried to root herself, but before she could react, she was flying toward the open bathroom door.
Jane refused to let go of her hair.
Anne flew feet first, and when it was her head’s turn to follow the rest of her body, she felt a sharp pain and then sweet release as her hair and part of her scalp peeled away.
Hot liquid immediately soaked the back of her neck.
And then Anne really was completely airborne.
She tried to twist in the air to avoid the narrow door frame, but her efforts were futile. Her right shoulder struck the frame, and she heard a loud crack that was too thick and organic to be the wood. This contact sent her spinning in the air, until she eventually landed on her stomach in the middle of the kitchen, the air forced out of her lungs in an audible whoosh.
For a moment, time seemed to stop. Darkness threatened to overwhelm Anne, but she forced it away.
No, not while Terry is still here.
She hoped that it was over. That the damage had been done, that Jane would leave, and that this was the last time she would ever see her.
But a sound, a roar of sheer fury, filled her modest house and she knew that this wasn’t the case.
“You fucking slut!”
Jane stomped toward Anne, but even raising her head and twisting it around proved difficult. Blood was streaming down her back now, and her shoulder throbbed with intense pain.
“You fucked him? You fucked him!”
Anne wasn’t sure what the woman with the blazing eyes meant, but she didn’t care. All she cared about was making sure that Terry was safe.
Jane was beside her again, crouching down.
She was smiling a wild smile.
In one smooth motion, Jane pulled the sleeve of her dark dress up, showing Anne her forearm. Her arm was so close to Anne’s face that, at first, she had a hard time focusing.
And then she saw it and her heart sunk.
On Jane’s forearm were two thick pink scars. Ones she recognized.
BH.
When she had been thrown into the kitchen, her shirt must have teased up at the back, showing Jane her matching scars.
“I don’t know how you did it, but you fucked him—I know it, because he branded you as his own. I came to you for your help, but you tricked me. You fucking tricked me and you stole him from me. You stole him and my
child.”
Anne barely felt the woman’s hands on the back of her head this time, her scalp so tacky with blood as it was. The fact that her head was lifted off the wooden floor barely registered.
“I don’t know how you fucking did it, but I’ll be back for you.”
Jane leaned in close and whispered in her ear. Her breath was hot and sour, like warm milk.
“I’ll be back for you, witch.”
It was the last word Anne LaForet heard before the floor rushed up to meet her.
Her mouth hit the hardwood, her front teeth snapping and falling inward, her lips splitting wide from her lower teeth.
And then the darkness that she had so desperately tried to resist, for Terry’s sake, was all-encompassing.
Chapter 20
Anne awoke to one single thought: pain.
Every single bone in her body seemed to be either bruised or broken. Blood filled her nose and mouth, and she had to snort and hawk a large glob onto the floor to take a full breath. Despite the darkness of her house, she could still make out several large flecks of white in her bloody spit. She knew that her teeth were smashed, and a cursory probing of her tongue proved as much. Both front teeth were gone, and the teeth on either side were at most half their normal length.
Her head throbbed from the crown all the way down to her hairline at the back of her neck. Remembering the way that the tension had released as her hair and scalp peeled back caused her to shudder.
Blood; she had lost a lot of blood.
Rivers of it filled her mind, and she imagined it leaking from her every pore, winding like snakes across the floor, until it was soaked up by—
Teresa!
An image of her daughter, slumped, unconscious, ignited another flash of pain.
Anne tried to roll from her stomach onto her right side, but she found herself unable to lift or even move that arm. A sliver of moonlight spilled in from the kitchen window as a large cloud rolled by, and she afforded herself a quick look at the damage that Jane had inflicted, if for no other reason but to figure out the best way to make it to her daughter.
Her shoulder was pushed backward at an awkward angle, the joint so far behind her that she couldn’t see all of it. Anne knew little of how her body worked, how her bones and muscles operated in concert to allow her to move, but she knew enough to know that that her shoulder was completely broken.
Shattered, even.
With a groan, she turned her head to the other side, feeling an uncomfortable squishing sensation as the congealed blood on the back of her neck twisted and chaffed.
“Careful, Mom.”
It was Teresa’s voice, and Anne hesitated.
“Shhweetie? That you?” she asked in a lispy, wet whisper that she didn’t recognize as her own.
Anne turned her head all the way, and what she saw answered her own question.
Despite all that had happened, she felt her mouth forming a toothless smile.
Teresa was sitting cross-legged, wearing nothing but a t-shirt and cotton underwear, staring down at her. The girl had taken a cloth from the kitchen and, judging by the bloodstain on the corner, she had been doing her best to clean Anne up.
It was a losing battle. There was so much blood from Anne’s torn scalp alone that it would take more than a cloth, or even ten, to clean it all.
Terry’s eyes were red; she had been crying. But to Anne, she looked like the most beautiful thing in the world.
She looked like an angel.
Then reality took over, and questions flooded her mind.
How long has she been sitting there? How long have I been out?
Judging by the dark night sky, it couldn’t have been more than four or five hours at most; if it was the same night, of course, which was something that she couldn’t count on.
The good news was that Jane was gone again, and they were alone.
“I didn’t think you were ever going to wake up, Mommy,” Terry sobbed.
Anne grunted and groaned as she turned onto her left side and tried to push herself to her feet. Her first attempt failed.
“I’m here,” Anne said, spraying blood from her split lips with every word. “I’m awake.”
On her second try, she managed to bring herself to a seated position. The effort made her head spin and stars flash before her eyes.
I’ve lost a lot of blood.
In addition to a splitting headache, she realized that there was also a strange tightness to her head, as if someone had pumped air into her ear, filling her skull with it like some sort of organic balloon.
“Don’t try to stand, Mommy.”
Anne started to shake her head, but based on how the pain behind her eyes exploded with just the subtlest of movements, she decided against it.
I’ll be back, witch.
“We musht go, Terry. We musht.”
The sound of Anne’s own voice made her cry. Despite what she had felt and what she had seen, she had a hard time contemplating how much damage had been inflicted on her body.
But one thing was certain; it was too much, far too much. Maybe even more than what Benjamin and his disgusting henchman had—
The baby!
Anne’s hand went to her stomach, rubbing the extra skin there. There was no way of knowing if it was still alive in there. She moved her hand to between her legs, lifting up her skirt and lightly touching her underwear. They came back red.
Part of her wanted to cry, while the another part was relieved. She didn’t want to bring another baby into her world, especially not one that was the product of rape... that was part Benjamin Heath.
But it was still a baby, and it was a part her, too.
And that made her sad.
“Mom?” Terry said. “Where do we go?”
I’ll be back, witch.
Anne somehow managed to ignore the pain for long enough to scramble from a seated position to hunching over on her knees. It didn’t matter how long she had been out, Anne realized; it only mattered that they get out of here as quickly as possible. She remembered how Jane’s eyes had blazed, how much hatred had been buried deep within those blue eyes. And she remembered the words of the strange woman in the swamp, the ones that had predicted that something like this was inevitable.
“Anywhere,” Anne whispered. “Anywhere but the swamp.”
Together they shuffled across the floor toward the bedroom door. As they passed beneath the window, Anne couldn’t help but straighten her hunched form and take a peek outside.
A modicum of relief struck her when she saw the dark swamp and no horse and carriage. But this feeling was fleeting. She had learned her lesson; she wasn’t going to wait around this time for Jane to return.
Anne pulled Terry into the bedroom with her.
“Fill one of the bagth with thum clotheth; thum underwear, a thirt and a pair of thorts,” Anne instructed.
Terry looked confused, but moved to grab one of the bags from beneath the bed.
“Dresses?”
Anne started to shake her head again, but the pain almost sent her crashing to the ground. Her head was just so tight. Rational thought was becoming increasingly difficult.
“No, no dretheth. Be quick—we need to leave now.”
Terry’s expression turned serious, and she poked her tongue into her cheek like she always did when she was concentrating. Anne watched as she retrieved the bag, before she turned and headed for the dresser. She yanked open the top drawer and grabbed the small bag of money from inside, which suddenly felt very light in her hand.
Should have saved more, shouldn’t have spent so much damn money.
Anne hooked the thin drawstring around her limp right wrist and then turned back to Terry.
“Tereshhha? You—”
A flicker of light caught her eye, and Anne immediately stopped speaking. Their small bedroom only had one window, a perfect square just above the bed. But when Anne peered out through it, she only saw blackness.
She waited a
s Teresa stared at her, mimicking her mother’s frozen posture.
There.
Anne saw it again, a shimmer of light somewhere deep in the swamp. A torch. And as her eyes focused on that torch, she caught a glimpse of another. And then another.
As she watched in horror, her disfigured mouth going slack, she realized that the torches were actually becoming larger and more distinct. They were coming toward the house.
“Tereshhha! Get over here!”
Terry, seeing the expression on her mother’s face, dropped the bag that was half stuffed with her clothes and hurried to her side.
Anne knew that her daughter was begging to be held, but she couldn’t seem to draw her attention away from the window. In addition to the dots of light coming from deep within the swamp, there was something else about the whole scene that was off.
It took a moment before Anne realized that in addition to the typical swamp noises, she heard another, deeper, more rhythmic sound.
They were chanting.
Whoever was out there with the torches coming toward her house, toward Anne and Teresa LaForet, were chanting.
What the fuck?
The people were still too distant for Anne to make out the exact words.
“Let’s get out of here, Tereshhha,” she said again, wrapping her left arm protectively around her daughter. Together they moved out of the bedroom toward the kitchen. Anne had no idea where they would go once outside, but the swamp was vast enough for her and Teresa to hide in it for a very long time, if need be.
Something told her that if she didn’t leave now, she never would.
They were halfway to the door when a shout from outside stopped them both cold. Terry started to tremble, which rubbed off on Anne as she slowly raised her eyes to the window.
The moonlight illuminated a figure from behind, brightly outlining her thin frame that was clutching a large, burning torch. Behind her was a horse and carriage that Anne immediately recognized.
Jane had returned, and if her voice was any indication, the anger and hatred that had driven the woman to smash Anne’s face into the floor and to knock Teresa unconscious hadn’t faded in the least.
“Anne LaForet, I demand that you come out of your home. In the name of the Lord, I command you. Witches are not welcome in the swamp. Come out, and bring your daughter with you.”
Witch Page 8