Witch Creek

by Laura Bickle

  He leaned over the body. “Son. Are you still there?”

  “Yes.” The answer was faint. But his son was doing as he was told; he was staying in the body.

  Caleb stood in the doorway. “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Leave us alone.”

  Caleb shook his head so hard his rosary beads rattled. “You’re interfering with something you shouldn’t. If God has taken that boy, you . . .”

  Lev straightened, his hand curling into the Horned Hand. Before the priest could say another word, he flipped him in the forehead. The priest fell through the floor and vanished.

  He glanced around. At least Wilma had enough sense to step away. Maybe she would convince Caleb to butt out . . . he shook his head. That was unlikely. He’d have to take measures against Caleb’s interference. But first things were first.

  Lev turned back and rolled up his sleeves. He undressed the body and discarded the clothes. He washed it, careful to rinse the wound thoroughly. His son had clearly bled to death on the forest floor. Something terrible had happened, something that Ranger Hollander hadn’t been able to wrap his head around in his report. Lev had suspicions, but this was not the time for them. Dealing with the dead was the first and only consideration. For now.

  He applied oil to the body—mint, eucalyptus, sage. He filled the mouth of the body with sage, closed the mouth tenderly. He rubbed the body with sage leaves, tied the limbs with twine, yew, and still more sage. That would help keep the spirit interred in the body. Finally, he wrapped the body in a clean white cotton sheet, tied with more twine and herbs.

  He sat beside the body in his bathtub when his work was done and placed his hand on the shrouded brow.

  “Dad?”

  The voice was faint, but there. “I’m here, son.”

  “What happened? Am I . . . am I dead?”

  “Yes.”

  The spirit voice of his son was silent. “What happens now? Are you going to do one of those green burial things?”

  “This is not the end. Stay here, with me.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I know. But you will. I promise you.”

  “I’m scared.”

  “Don’t be. Just stay here. Conserve your strength. I have this well in hand.”

  Lev lit a jar candle and set it in the porcelain sink. It cast a soothing orange glow in the small room. It was not a good idea to leave the freshly dead in darkness; without a light to focus on, they wandered away easily. He drew a line of salt across the doorway to keep Caleb and Wilma out.

  “I will be back,” he promised Archer.

  He went to his bedroom to change his stained clothes. He smelled cigarette smoke.

  “Wilma,” he said.

  “I’m not judging you,” she said, after some silence. “I know you didn’t kill him. I won’t interfere. I’m just asking you to back the fuck off and think about this for just a minute.”

  “I’ve thought about it. And this is the only way.” He grabbed his jacket and stepped into his shoes. He had work to do. “Tell Caleb to mind his own business, if he knows what’s good for him.”

  There was a soft sigh. “Caleb is going to be an ass. He’s a professional ass. That’s what he does. Doesn’t mean he’s wrong.”

  At least he wouldn’t have to listen to Caleb carping for a few hours. The Horned Hand would drop him out of sight for at least that long. If Caleb persisted after that, Lev might have to take sterner measures, even kick his frocked ass onward to the Light. Which would break Wilma’s heart. But he didn’t have time for this.

  He locked the door behind him and headed downstairs to the bar. He emptied the register and the safe, stuffing the money in his pockets without bothering to count it. His brow furrowed as he dredged his memory for a hundreds-year-old recipe. Lev hadn’t kept notes on this type of thing, thinking he’d never need it. But his memory was long and well-etched . . . he hoped.

  First thing he did was dig around in the basement for a massive glass aquarium that he’d bought ten years ago. He had the thought of adding an aquarium to the bar and getting some fish, and had gotten far enough that he’d set it up. He abandoned the idea when a drunk patron barfed in it before he’d even gotten the tank filled. No sense asking for trouble.

  He locked up and jumped in the truck parked in the alley. He cranked the engine and squealed rubber leaving the alley, heading to the feed store just outside town. He got himself the largest feed tank money could buy without a special order, a two-hundred-gallon black plastic oval container that was larger and deeper than his bathtub. He added to his order several glass windows, glass sealant, and a glass cutter. He drove back, and it took him three trips to the truck to get things unloaded, even parked in the fire lane. He put the items just inside the back door, leaning against each other.

  He then hit up the hardware store for five bags of garden sulfur and one bag of quick lime. The teenage girl behind the counter lifted an eyebrow, as if he’d accidentally hit upon a combination of items that was on a homemade bomb watch list. But she didn’t say anything—this was ranching country—just took his money and went back to reading her paperback novel.

  Last, he stopped at the Gas ‘n Go and cleared the shelves of whole milk.

  Bear, the owner of the Gas ‘n Go, looked at the countertop full of milk with raised eyebrows. “Someone got a baby? Or you doing some baking?”

  “Yeah. Lots of baking. An old recipe. Cookies.”

  “You rock on with your bad self and all those cookies, then.”

  Lev put the milk in the back of the truck and headed home. He parked in the back alley and unloaded all of the newly acquired treasures into his living room. He huffed and puffed, taking the milk first, juggling four gallons at a time. Then, the bags of sulfur and lime. By the time he got to the aquarium in the basement, his arms and legs were shaking. But he was determined to get it upstairs without fracturing it. He wrapped it in a blanket, placed it upright, and slid it most of the way, the bottom of the aquarium sliding smoothly on the worn steps with the aid of the blanket. The windows were awkward, but he got those in without much trouble. He was glad he left the rubber tub and the small bags for last. He was getting old and weak, and he didn’t want to admit it.

  He locked the door and sat down on the floor to catch his breath. His shirt was soaked with sweat.

  “That’s a lot of shit.” Wilma was sitting on the couch.

  “How’s Archer?” he panted.

  “Still in your bathtub.” She gestured with her cigarette. “Caleb hasn’t shown back up to proselytize to him.”

  “That’s my worry,” Lev admitted.

  “That Caleb will convince him to head toward the Light and not . . . do whatever it is you’re trying to do?”

  “Yeah. Men with closely held principles can really be dicks if something offends their sensibilities.”

  Wilma nodded, and the sunlight shone through her Gibson-girl silhouette as she smoked. Lev wished that he could bum a cigarette off her.

  “I’ll do my best to keep him the hell out of the way. But you know he doesn’t listen to me. If he listened to me, he’d have gone to the Light a long time ago.” She gazed out the window.

  “You aren’t afraid of going to the Dark?”

  She laughed, a throaty, sad laugh. “Hon, there’s nothing I could do that would send me deeper into Dark. Besides, I’m curious about what exactly you’re gonna do with that crazy collection of farmboy shit. You gonna keep goats in here or something?”

  Lev smiled. These were the easy things to procure. The rest would require some doing.

  He thought about the best way to accomplish this while he worked on the aquarium. He cleaned the dust from it with vinegar and paper towels. He rolled his toolbox out of the closet. He disassembled the cheap windows to create a crude lid for the box. It wasn’t the glass coffin from Snow White, but it was good enough for his purposes. He carried his son’s body into the living room and put him in the box.


  “What’s going on, Dad?”

  “It will be all right. It will.”

  Lev sounded more confident than he felt. He had seen this done only once. Whether he had the capability to carry it out remained to be seen.

  Wondering when Caleb would be back, he picked out a canister of salt from his spice cabinet and laid down a thick circle of salt around the glass coffin. He couldn’t entirely protect Archer from the sound of Caleb’s voice without kicking Caleb out of this plane, but that would hopefully keep the priest from meddling too much. At least the priest would know he meant business.

  He called up the slaughterhouse that supplied steaks for the bar.

  “Hello. This is Lev at the Compostela. I need something special delivered. Yes. Yes. A rush delivery. It’s a little unusual, but I’m having a Bavarian theme night. I need about ten gallons of calf blood. I know, right? It’s for blood sausage. Uh-huh. Yeah. It’s easier to make than it sounds. Okay, thanks.”

  He hung up the phone.

  Wilma hadn’t moved from the couch. “Curiouser and fucking curiouser,” she said.

  He left the lights on, locked up, and headed out again.

  He’d obtained the materials he needed so far through legit means. He opened his wallet, and only ten bucks and some lint was left. He was out of money and out of credit. The rest of the things he needed, he’d have to get creative.

  He jammed his hands in his pockets and walked down the street to Stan’s Dungeon, the local pawnshop. The shop was open. He pushed through the door, and the cowbell tied to the handle moved to jingle. Lev cupped it with his hand to keep it silent and slipped inside. He locked the door behind him and flipped the sign to read closed to passersby.

  The store was cluttered with a never-ending hoard of merchandise. This spring, Stan had gone to an office building auction and had picked up a truckload of weird office artifacts: fax machines, Selectric typewriters, intercom phones, and file cabinets. They warred for floor space with Wild West memorabilia, old vinyl records, militaria, electric guitars, and odds and ends. Lev wove around them to the counter. There was no one behind it. More of the office junk was crowded behind the counter.

  He paused and listened. There was humming in the back, a splash, and a contented sigh. Stan was in the bathroom.

  This worked for Lev. He slipped to the back, to the closed bathroom door. Casting about, he spied a bungee cord on top of an old file cabinet. He wrapped it around the doorknob and looped it tightly around a file cabinet next to the door. Stan would have a helluva time getting out of the can—the door opened swinging inward, and that door wasn’t going anywhere soon.

  He heard flushing, then water running. Stan tried the doorknob. It turned, but wouldn’t open.

  “Hey.” Stan pounded on the door. “Hey!”

  Lev stifled a smirk. He’d never liked Stan much. The guy blabbed endlessly about everything. But he knew he had to move quickly. Stan rejected the idea of cell phones, so there was no danger that he’d dial for rescue from the bathroom. But Lev disliked the idea of thieving in broad daylight.

  He stepped to the jewelry case and peered in. He spied what he needed immediately: a diamond ring, a bracelet with some rubies in it, and an emerald ring. He reached in, pocketed them quickly, and then went to Stan’s antiquated surveillance system behind the cash register.

  A black-and-white television showed an unwavering image of the shop floor, and an old VCR was jerry-rigged to it with a bunch of yellow and red wires, looking like an ’80s-villain version of a bomb.

  Lev popped the tape out of the VCR and stuffed it in his jacket.

  He headed outside, heart hammering.

  The street was deserted. He forced himself to walk nonchalantly back to the bar. Once back home, he heard Caleb’s voice booming from the attic in full-oratory mode:

  “You have to go to the Light, to God for your salvation. There’s no future for you here. You can’t . . .”

  Lev ran up the stairs and burst into the living room.

  Caleb was standing before the glass coffin, just on the right side of the salt line, holding his rosary before him. Archer was sitting up in the coffin. Rather, his body was still lying down, shrouded, but his faint spirit was sitting up, like a child in bed. He had his hands over his ears, as if trying to block Caleb out.

  “You get away from him.” Lev lunged for Caleb. His hands knew more lethal signs than the Horned Hand. Caleb was way over the line, and Lev was having none of it.

  Wilma threw herself between Lev and Caleb. “Don’t. Please. He doesn’t fucking understand. He’s never had a son—”

  Lev’s eyes narrowed. He tangled his fingers between them and muttered in Latin, “Abiurare.”

  Both spirits blew apart, as if they were made of water vapor.

  He sucked in his breath and released it. He would see no more of them until moonrise. He hated wasting that bit of precious energy even to deal with them. But he would not be disturbed. He would not tolerate them interfering with his work, whether intentionally or unintentionally.

  Wilma was right—Caleb didn’t understand. And there was no time to explain things.

  He turned his attention to his stolen jewelry. He pried the gems out of their settings with his pocketknife and cast them into the bottom of the cattle trough. He cut open the bags and dumped the sulfur and the lime in. It reeked, even after he added the cold milk. The blood would be coming, soon, for him to add.

  He stared down at the brew. It was still missing things. Some of the materials he had on hand—mixtures of common and rare herbs that had legitimate culinary purposes. Others he should be able to lift without much problem. Lev didn’t want to get arrested for something as bizarre as stealing human hair from the barber shop, so he’d have to be careful. Still, ingredients like cows’ hearts and human hair and ram’s horns could be found in many places. His odds of finding these things were high. If he failed to snag enough human hair from the barbershop, he might have to resort to ripping off the postmaster’s screaming-red wig, which he was pretty sure was made of well-tortured human hair. Point was, he had options for most of these things.

  But the hardest ingredient to acquire would be alchemist’s gold. He pinched the bridge of his nose.

  There was only one way to get that. And that was from Petra Dee.

  The woman wore a gold pendant around her neck, depicting the green lion of alchemy devouring the sun. Lev doubted that she really knew the significance of it. Her father had been rumored to be an alchemist. Lev was counting on the idea that it came from him. She had worn it whenever he’d seen her prior to her illness, and he wondered if she had lost it. Maybe she pawned it to pay for her treatment, but he hadn’t seen it in Stan’s shop. Maybe she had taken it off because she hadn’t been allowed jewelry at whatever hospital she was being treated at. Maybe the chain had just broken and she hadn’t had time to fix it. The last two possibilities were strongest.

  Whatever had happened to cause her to put it down, Lev needed it. Alchemist’s gold was critical to this operation.

  He descended from his attic once again, to look down the road. Petra Dee’s trailer was within sight in the fading light. There was one truck parked before it, in the same position that it had been for days. With luck, nobody was home. Hopefully, Lev would strike it lucky, and she had left the pendant in a jewelry box somewhere. He wanted nothing more than to get in and out without drama and without anyone getting hurt.

  He struck off down the road. In the distance, he heard yelling. Sounded like Stan. It had taken him less time than Lev had thought to get loose. He glanced back. Stan was standing outside his shop, his rant unintelligible from this far away. The girl who worked at the hardware store had taken his arm and was leading him inside, likely to call the sheriff’s deputies.

  It was reckless to commit two robberies in a day, but Lev was desperate. He looked away and shuffled quickly down the gravel road.

  This had been a weird road, he knew. Though it had been given a charming
rustic name when it had last been surveyed—Snortin’ Ridge Road—it had clearly once been something more. Lev knew that the original alchemist of Temperance had a house here, back in the day. And the road leading to it was something of a spirit road tracking a ley line that smacked right into the Compostela. Before Petra Dee had come to town, he’d often seen a coyote pacing up and down the road, sometimes sitting in the dirt, as if he was waiting. It was no small coincidence that Petra had adopted that coyote soon after she’d moved in. The coyote now traversed that road leaning out the window of a slow-moving truck when Petra drove the Bronco into town.

  He increased his pace and came to Petra’s front door. He noticed that her mailbox was full, but he still knocked politely. If she was home, it would be awkward as hell, but there was nothing for it. He guessed he’d just announce that he’d come here to rob her. Regretfully, of course. But no one came to the door. He took a breath, looked behind him, and kicked the door in.

  It took a couple of tries; the lockset she’d used was likely the best one that could be gained at the hardware store. But it gave way eventually. Lev shouldered inside and closed the door behind him.

  The place was dark and cold, like a crypt. Lev flipped on the kitchen light. Opened mail was spread on the kitchen table. The place was in a bit of disarray, as if no one was really living here, just passing through once in a while to make sure the rent was paid and a bear hadn’t gotten into the refrigerator.

  Maybe it would be awhile before anyone realized that he had tossed the place. One could hope. He methodically started with the kitchen, going through the cheap silverware and cutlery. He tried not to destroy anything as he went, but his primary aim was efficiency. He swept the cleaners out from under the sink, peered into the fridge at a bottle of expired ketchup and some flat beer.

  He moved on to the sleeping area. Nothing under the mattress except dog hair and dust bunnies. The dresser was full of rumpled clothes. Tool cases held geology picks and instruments. Nothing, nothing . . .