Witch Creek

by Laura Bickle

  Oddly, I will admit the thought made me a bit jealous. There was something that drew me to Lascaris and his strange powers. Perhaps more than anything, that disturbing emotion was what woke me up and made me realize I had to leave. It was getting too dangerous to stay.

  I wrote Pinkerton a letter, telling him that I would be on the train back east within a week with a full report.

  In the meantime, I waited for my chance to gather evidence, which came soon enough. With the aid of my spyglass from my vantage point on the second floor of the inn, I saw them leaving the house one evening. Though I couldn’t tell for certain, I was betting that both the witch and the alchemist were no longer inside. My moment had come.

  I struck out on the road toward his house, walking as briskly as I could. No lights were on. This boded well for snooping and thievery.

  Once again, the coyote had come to walk beside me. He seemed jumpy, whining as he trotted along. I should have listened to his warning, but I trudged up to Lascaris’s fence. The coyote stopped at the fence and turned away. He would not wait for me.

  I knew the evidence I needed was in the basement. All secrets wind up underground. So I tried the basement windows first. They were all locked behind the shutters. I rounded the house to the back door of the servants’ quarters. I knew that the servants kept a key, for their convenience, under a spittoon at the back door. I found the key and let myself in, wandering into the kitchens.

  After some fumbling and searching in the dark, I lit a lamp and quickly located a door beneath the stairs. Predictably, it was locked with an iron hasp. I was not without some lock-picking skill, but it took me longer than I would have liked to work it open.

  Such little setbacks would prove crucial.

  For the time, though, I had just lifted my lamp and headed downstairs.

  I don’t know what I expected to find when I went into Lascaris’s basement, but what I saw was beyond any of my wild imaginings. It was a fully equipped laboratory, with glassware stretching on a table from one end of the basement to the other. A dim fire burned in an athanor in one corner, and powders and elixirs gleamed in amber glass bottles on shelves. Everything was meticulously labeled: sulfur, mercury, potash, fingers of an elderly woman, frog eyes, swan hearts . . . it was a dizzying collection of science and cruelty behind glass.

  I had to work quickly. Lascaris must have kept notes, and that would be the evidence I needed. I searched the lab tables and quickly spied a stack of leather-bound journals. I flipped through them. Lascaris’s wandering script covered the pages. Skimming the dates, I gathered he’d been working alchemy for at least thirty years. I turned away from the pages outlining experiments on humans, searching out the operation for gold . . . there. The most rumpled pages were the most used ones. I saw a thick section of pages, stained by carbon black, that were studded with the alchemical symbols for gold and the sun. This would have to do for evidence. I could translate it later, once I was on a train going east and could gather my thoughts.

  I had no sooner slipped the journal in my pocket and turned to leave when I heard the door at the top of the stairs open.

  I drew my pistol, fearing there was no way of getting out of this without bloodshed. While I had no desire for it to come to that—and though the investors would very much want Lascaris alive—I valued my own hide over his.

  When he came downstairs, there was a profound look of disappointment on his face. “It took you long enough,” Lascaris said. “Everyone betrays me in the end.”

  I aimed my pistol at him. “I am leaving now.”

  “No,” he said with a sigh. “You won’t.”

  Something grabbed my ankle. I looked down, and the shadows on the floor had congealed into a tarry mess. I moved to extricate myself, but the mass grew arms, reaching up to drag me down.

  I shot at it. The bullets and the sound were swallowed up by the cold darkness of the floor.

  I shot at Lascaris. I know I hit him, but the last thing I remember as the darkness devoured me was him standing over me, uttering, “You will be part of the Great Work.”

  It was the most chilling threat I’d ever heard.

  Petra closed her eyes, thinking of the tree, Lascaris’s Great Work, his attempt to create a nexus of above and below. The Lunaria had, when she first met it, seemed inquisitive and playful. But when she’d encountered its burned roots at the Rutherford Ranch and its spiritual image in the Eye of the World . . . she knew it had changed. It had grown grasping. Bloodthirsty. Maybe it had begun that way, and time had gentled it? Or maybe it had begun gentle, and the loss of the last Hanged Man had driven it mad?

  She pressed her hand to her mouth. She had the sense that the Hanged Men had been the Lunaria’s children. It had treated Gabe and the rest of the men with an almost loving attention . . . when there had been men. Now that they were gone, maybe the nest was vacant, and the mother driven mad, staring at the empty shells of what had once been alive.

  In her lap, Sig sighed.

  Petra echoed it with one of her own.

  When I came to, I was outdoors, a cool breeze pushing against my body. We were at the foot of the Lunaria. A rope was around my neck, and Joseph Rutherford was propping me up against the trunk. I stunk like chemicals—like lime and sulfur. My skin was crusted with the powder, and it stung my watering eyes. I wondered what spells had been worked on my body while I was unconscious. I felt weak, as if I had no blood left in my veins.

  Still, I came out swinging . . . or I would have, if my hands hadn’t been tied. Joseph stepped back, holding the length of rope, a look of pleasure on his face.

  Lascaris was there. The side of his head was bandaged heavily. I drew some small satisfaction that I’d managed to hit him. And Muirenn, always beside him, gazed upon me with curiosity.

  “It will be glorious, my friend,” Lascaris said to me. “You will be part of the Great Work.”

  Again, those words chilled me. “People will be looking for me. Alan Pinkerton knows I’m here.”

  Lascaris laughed. “Pinkerton can do nothing to stop me. I have unlimited gold and eternal life. He is just a man. He is nothing.” He glanced at his pocket watch. I could see that it was now noon.

  The rope tightened around my neck. Muirenn stood before us, singing a lullaby. I don’t know if it was part of a spell or a touch of her own madness. Above me, a raven lit in the branches and cawed. Other ravens came, joining in the screeching.

  Lascaris tried to wave off the ravens with his hat. He was shouting at Joseph to do something about them, to frighten them off with a gunshot, I think—between the caws and the singing and the lack of air, words were losing meaning.

  But Joseph was pulling the rope, and no gunshot came. I dangled, suspended between heaven and earth. Breath was driven from my body, and I felt the blood strangle away in a haze of stars and black.

  The last thing I heard as a human man was Muirenn’s lullaby, drowned by the ravens’ screaming.

  But that wasn’t the end.

  I remember bits and pieces of sensation from then on. Lascaris later explained that the fermentation process he intended to work had failed, due to the interference of the ravens. He decided to leave my body to hang, like fruit, overnight. I think he had the intent of cutting me down in the morning, to see what was left. Or perhaps he intended to abandon me there, as an example, some kind of scarecrow to intimidate his enemies. I’m not certain which it was, to this day.

  But it didn’t matter—the tree had its own ideas. Sometime in the night, the rope must have broken. I felt the roots of the tree creeping up out of the ground, consoling me, drawing me down into the earth.

  And I stayed there, underground, for a full moon cycle. I was still somewhat connected to my body, though in a stupor. I was conscious of rotting, of pressure, of the tree roots digging into me, of honey-colored light. I could hear the squawk of ravens in the tree above during the day, as if they wondered what happened to me and gossiped among themselves about Lascaris and his unnatur
al workings. The gossip would be interrupted by the discovery of something shiny and subside, only to begin again. At night, the roots shifted and turned. There was space here in the darkness, and light. The tree had its own world it was building, underground.

  And I was part of it, from the beginning.

  I surfaced in a warm spring morning, blinking rot and dew from my eyes. The tree had pushed me up above the grass. My clothes were disintegrating from the rot, and the whole world smelled like grave dirt. Above me, in the tree, ravens cawed and churned. One fluttered down to pluck the last button from my shirt.

  I was not alone.

  Lasacaris and Rutherford were standing over me.

  Lascaris looked disgusted. He flung his hat on the ground. “It didn’t work. Look at him.”

  I looked down. My body was studded with the quills of pinfeathers, and I was coated in some kind of albumenic goo. The pinfeathers seethed and retracted in and out of my skin in time with my breathing. I felt as if I were an egg not fully cooked, runny and incomplete.

  “Shoot him. Take him out of his misery,” Lascaris ordered.

  Rutherford had squatted to squint at me. “He may still be of some use to you.”

  “How?”

  Rutherford just shrugged, eyeing me thoughtfully.

  And thus began my service to Lascaris and my tie to the Rutherford lands.

  Petra put the pages down. It had grown dark, the last bit of daylight drained out of the day.

  “Maria will be home soon,” Nine said, and she began to gather the papers to hide them.

  Petra gave them to her. She glanced sidelong at Sig, who was sleeping on his back with all four feet in the air. She wondered how much he had gotten around, if he came from a family of coyotes who had become fascinated with humans who traveled the road from Temperance to her trailer. She rubbed his belly and sighed.

  “What’s wrong?” Nine asked her.

  “I just wish . . . that Gabe had told me this himself. In person. I thought we had time, time to resolve all the questions between us and leave things in a good place. I really did.”

  Nine paused to put her hand on Petra’s arm. “You have his stories. That is his person.”

  Petra looked through the window to the purpling sky on the horizon. She thought about Nine’s words, but shook her head. She didn’t have him. Not really. These pages were cold consolation, a hollow reflection of what he had once been. Though they would likely outlast them both.

  Chapter 15

  The Pearl

  There was not much time.

  Lev had to act quickly. He strode into the front door of Harrington’s Funeral Home, a Victorian house decked out with heavy-duty gingerbread architectural trimming just outside the county seat. The county coroner, Susan Harrington, was also a funeral director, as so often happened in rural places like these. There were, after all, only so many places one could legally keep a body fresh outside of a hospital. Lev had checked with the nearest hospital about his son’s body, but then got referred to the funeral home for inquiries. Some business about running out of room.

  A viewing was in progress for an old woman. He’d seen it in the paper. Raina Sue Carpenter. She’d passed away at home, peacefully, survived by a metric fuckton of relatives and friends that took up a whole newspaper column. He would have preferred to come to the funeral home when no one was around, but he didn’t have much choice. There was a long line to sign the guest book, and Lev stared forward, listening to bits and pieces of gossip:

  “You know, I heard she took too many hydrocodone tablets.”

  “I heard that she went to that Pain Management Clinic. Those places are always scams. The one she went to got raided by the DEA last week for Medicare fraud.”

  “Can you believe that she didn’t leave her money to her daughter?”

  “Her son said that she left it all to the humane society. How selfish is that?”

  “Yeah. What about her children?”

  Lev rolled his eyes. Gossip always came to him, no matter how much he tried to avoid it. He rubbed his forehead as the people at the front of the line were complaining loudly about the guest book pen being out of ink.

  He felt a voice close at his ear, a spectral voice. He glanced to his left, and there was the ghost of an old woman wearing a velour jogging suit standing there, giving dirty looks to the mourners. Her hair was tightly permed, and she was wearing sunglasses. “Fuck this. I got no peace from these assholes while I was alive, and now this bullshit?”

  Lev snorted, causing an elderly man beside him to give him a sour glance.

  “I’m not kidding,” the ghost of Raina Sue said. “When my cat died, I was ready to shuffle off this mortal coil. I sure hope that there’s a section in heaven of cats where I can get away from these fucking people.”

  Suppressing more laughter, Lev slipped in behind a family with children whining about wanting water. Instead of signing the guest book, he slipped down the hallway, past the restrooms with the patterned carpet designed to hide stains, to the part of the funeral home where the filthy work of preparing the dead to be seen by the living went down. The ghost of the old woman followed him.

  “What are you up to, young man?” she asked.

  “Don’t you have a funeral to attend?” he muttered.

  “The service isn’t until five. Besides, I don’t want to hang out with that motley crew of liver-spotted dicks.”

  He rolled his eyes and continued down the hallway. He wished he could introduce her to Wilma. They might be able to have a swear-off that would send Father Caleb into ghostly apoplexy.

  There was a little morgue tucked away in the back, hidden by a nondescript door with a sign that announced funeral home personnel only. He let himself in and flipped on the lights. Raina Sue’s ghost drifted in behind him.

  The fluorescent lights buzzed to life overhead, illuminating in cold light an area that might have originally been a kitchen. Stainless-steel sinks and cabinets lined one wall, and there was a garden hose attached to one sink fixture. A floor drain pierced the center of the tiled floor. A stainless-steel coroner’s slab was perched in the middle of the room, spotlessly clean. Various mismatched file cabinets stood around shelves of chemical bottles and plastic tubing.

  The place was organized in the physical world. But it was chaos in the afterlife. The ghost of an elderly man paced around the floor in a circuit, mumbling to himself. The ghost of a young woman in a hospital gown sat on the coroner’s slab, holding a baby.

  Raina Sue was at his elbow. “What are you doing here, anyway? I don’t think you work here.”

  Lev took a deep breath. Best not to acknowledge them. Best to get in and get out.

  A large steel door, like the kind Lev had behind the bar, signaled that there was a refrigeration unit humming at one end of the room. Lev opened the heavy door latch and peered in.

  Ghosts were crowded in here, especially for such a rural place. The county must be having a run of very shitty luck. The ghosts from the freshly dead were always stronger. There was a man rubbing his hands over his chest, hollow with what looked like a gunshot wound. A middle-aged woman was plucking at a seat belt embedded in her shoulder, ignoring the fact that her legs were missing.

  And a dark shape was folded up in the corner, sitting on the floor. Lev knelt before it.

  “Archer?”

  The young man looked up, confused. “Dad? Where am I?”

  Lev assessed the strength of the ghost’s aura. It was weak. There wasn’t much time. “I’m getting you out of here. Come with me.”

  “Okay.”

  He stood and counted five body bags stacked on metal and wire shelves. He flipped through the toe tags, found the one he was looking for. “John Doe 32” had been crossed out and replaced with “Harker, Archer.”

  Lev took a deep breath and pulled the zipper, just to be sure.

  His son’s face was quiet in repose, pale. His neck, however, had been torn out. His clothes were stained the color of d
ark corn syrup.

  Lev groaned inwardly. Those injuries . . . but he reached forward to touch the young man’s brow.

  “Is that me?”

  “Yes. I need you to do something for me. I need you to get back inside your body, as deep as you can get.”

  The ghost’s brow wrinkled.

  “Just lie down and rest for now. I have this in hand. Go to the body and don’t let go.”

  The ghost reached for the body. As if he was climbing into a sleeping bag, he lay on the shelf. Soon, Lev could not see the spirit at all.

  “Good.”

  Lev zipped the body bag back up and slung the body on his shoulder. He retreated to the main room, looked about.

  He heard a rustling from inside the body. Faint, like a bird fluttering in a cage.

  Good. It hadn’t escaped.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Raina Sue stood before him, her tiny fists planted on her hips.

  Lev cast about. A large plastic trash can, about forty gallons, stood in the corner. Unceremoniously, Lev dumped the body into the can and did his best to cram the bulk of it inside. To obscure its contents, he arranged a sheet on the top.

  “Are you trying to steal that body?” Raina shrieked. The other ghosts turned toward him, eyes narrowed.

  “I’m taking him home,” Lev said simply.

  But the ghosts were getting agitated. The ones in the cooler stepped through the metal door to the floor and had begun waving their arms around, as if trying to shoo away a bird caught in a house. A woman stepped through the wall, drawn by the commotion. She must have been in the process of getting makeup—her face was half-painted, and her hat was askew.