The horse blows at me, and damned if he doesn’t toss his head up and down like Mr. Ed. His mane slaps against his neck.
“I’m just here to take him home,” I say. I avoid eye contact, because I don’t want this seahorse to drag me to the bottom and drown me, like I suspect he did with Georgie and John and Emmie and Jimmie, and maybe some of them Ecobay guys. “This your pond?”
The horse turns his head and looks along his flank at the pond behind us. The water’s more radiant than ever, as if there’s a whole city under there.
I clear my throat and try not to think about me having a conversation with a demon horse on the banks of a glowing pond. “Been here long?”
The horse raises his head and stomps a hoof. I half-expect him to start counting out the years, but nope, that was it, just the one stomp. I hear his drowning, growling noise again. He squints at me, impatient.
“You must be a bit pissed off about all this garbage in your swamp, b’y…”
The horse whinnies angrily, and I apologize right quick with hands and words.
“Pond,” I say, “pond, I meant to say pond. It’s a pretty one.”
He whickers.
“My Jimmie, he…” I point to the pond, because that’s the only place I expect him to be. “He was trying to get people out here to show ‘em what’s been dumped here, because nobody believes him. No—people believe him, but they’ve been bought off and won’t do anything. I don’t know if it’s because the police’re afraid of you or afraid of Ecobay, but Jimmie wasn’t afraid enough. Honest to God, he just wanted to help.”
The horse wheezes and listens.
“Is he in there?” I ask. “Did you take him?”
Another big, splashy nod.
“Well…could I…” I rub the back of my neck. I have to keep talking, or the crazy will set in. “Could I get him back?”
He squints his flaming green eyes at me.
“Did you eat him?” I hear myself ask.
The horse blows and shakes his head and neck.
“Oh, well that’s a comfort,” I say. “You took him because you’re pissed off about what’s happening? You took all of ‘em?”
Another nod.
“Including the Ecobay folk?”
Another nod.
“Oh, well, them you can keep,” I say.
The horse whinnies.
“Listen,” I say. “Those people down there, my people, my folks, they’ve got families, and friends. Jimmie, he’s got five kids, he does! He’s a geological engineer, goes out to find safe places to store waste, to prevent just this from happening. But if you keep him all to yourself…” I wave indistinctly in the direction of His Highness the Whinnying Bog. “Who knows what else creatures like you may have to suffer if he’s not out and helping save them?”
The seaweed sags all around him.
“You want to keep people out of here, don’t you?” I ask. “You don’t want people to know what you are, or you’ll have every man, woman, and dog out here with their cameras. You ever hear of Nessie?”
The horse gives an angry scream.
“Yeah,” I say. “They wanna drain your swa—your pond, so’s they can find the people you took.”
Another angry scream, and he paws the dirt like he’s going to charge me, bull-like.
“Well,” I rush to say, tamping down the nervous air between us with my hands, “well, Jimmie…now, maybe he can do something. He’s smart, and he’s a…” The idea comes to mind at the same time it comes out my mouth. “He’s a prankster. Take me to him, and I’ll tell him what he’s got to do.”
Before I can give it a second thought, seaweed lashes around my wrists, and I’m hoisted up over the horse’s head. Next thing I know, I’m sitting backwards on this truck-sized horse, my hands sinking into its hide like it’s made of molasses, and I can’t let go. My jeans get sucked in, too, before he’s even turned around. My inner thighs fuse to the sides of the horse, and I’m on for the ride of my life. Two bounds, and we leap into the air. I gasp—a good thing, too—and we break through the surface of the pond without a sound. Night turns into day, as phosphorescent beams of light filter through the blackest, coldest, oiliest water I ever been in.
I’m already out of breath. He kicks his lily-pad hooves and Clydesdale legs, while his green tail floats like beautiful streamers behind us. I hang onto my breath as long as we can, but the pressure increases, squeezing out the air I’ve got. Down we go farther, until my ears crackle and air burbles out from my nose. One hand comes free, and I use it to squeeze my nostrils shut, because I know I need to hang onto this air. My jacket and clothes float around me, and my hair waves all over, with bubbles trickling up my neck and over my scalp. My other hand comes free, then my legs. We settle to the bottom of the bright pond, and he bucks me off.
Instead of crashing hard, I kinda float and bump to the silt. But I’ve gotta breathe. I can’t hang on much longer. Glow be damned, the world is going dark.
I feel something touch me on the shoulder. I look up, and there’s a balding old skipper in red plaid, suspenders, and fishing boots. I watch as his mouth makes words into an ever-growing bubble, at first as big as a gumball, then as big as his head, then as big as my chest. He chews off the bubble and lets it float toward me. I close my eyes as the filmy skin passes over me.
“Breathe,” I hear in my ears. Water trickles down my body, so I open my eyes and see that I’m inside the bubble. I breathe, smelling dulse and dead fish. “You’re in the kelpie’s pasture,” I hear the man saying, though his mouth has stopped moving. “You’re safe, for now.” Everything looks warped outside the bubble’s skin.
By God, I wish I had my GoPro.
The bottom of the pond is a glimmering meadow of sea grass as far as the eye can see, and everywhere, I see sluggish figures of men and women working the field. Off to one side is a stable, where the horse wanders, all a-shimmer. A boy and girl are waiting with a pail, out of which the horse eats. Closer by my foot, there’s a pile of dead old men in Ecobay uniforms. One of them rolls toward me, and I use up good air, screeching.
I’m full to the gills with questions and exclamations. I turn to my bubble-blower to see he’s at it again. A second speech bubble merges with the first.
“Why has he brought you here? Why has he let you live?” ask the words in my air.
“Who are you?” I ask instead. He doesn’t look like Jimmie, or like anyone else I know. I wonder if this is his neighbour John. “Where’s Jimmie?”
The man in plaid gestures for me to follow. I bob along behind him like a guinea pig in one of those plastic globes. When I brush too close to a rocky outcrop, water leaks in, and I jump aside. The bubble seals up again, but it’s smaller, and my escaping air rocks skyward.
He leads me to the far end of the pasture where black sludge has been drizzled all over a field of glowing mushrooms. There’s Jimmie, with shovel and bucket, working alongside a few other men. His skin is waxy, and he moves like he’s sleepwalking.
“Jimmie,” I shout at him.
He looks up from his work, eyes smouldering green. He gesticulates happily and makes word-bubbles like his lumberjack buddy, so it takes a second or two for me to hear what he’s said. Bubble after bubble merges with my cocoon, and he gives me the whole story: how he heard the music, how he couldn’t help but walk outside, and how he saw a little boy walking toward a green horse standing in the middle of Cemetery Road. Next thing he knew, he was stuck fast to the horse, riding side-saddle behind the little boy.
“And I found Georgie,” he says. He points to the old skipper, who inclines his head in a sad but friendly way. I’d been expecting the same skinny boy he’d been when he disappeared, but seems he’s aged at the same pace as Jimmie and me. “He’s been here cleaning up the mess since ‘82.”
“And who are they?” I ask, pointing to the other sluggish men with skeletal faces and shining, blind eyes.
“Ecobay technicians who came in second place at the Dunker
’s Pond fifty yard dash,” Jimmie says. “Some of ‘em’s been here since 1942!” He points to the pile of dead men.
“Why do they keep coming back, then?” I ask.
Jimmie explains that they came a few times to dump their crap in Dunker’s Pond, thinking nobody’d ever find out. The last time was in ‘82. After that, every ten years or so, Ecobay would send in investigators to see what happened to the first guys who never came back. One or two would get nabbed by the kelpie—that horse-plant-demon thing—and the rest would come home with a story no one would believe. They came back this year to start dumping again.
My air is getting stale, so I tell him my plan. The horse—the kelpie—comes over to eavesdrop with ears pricked forward. Jimmie explains to him my plan in greater detail, pointing to this person and that. The kelpie cocks his head and considers.
Then the horse comes over, nips my bubble and bursts it. I shoot straight up on out of there, and I don’t look down until my head’s in the open air. I don’t care how much it smells like a latrine, that is the sweetest air a man could breathe. I swim ashore and slither through the mud and weeds before I turn around and see Jimmie right there behind me, pulling one of the Ecobay guys along for the ride. We’re so out of breath that we have to sit on the bank for a bit, swiping slime from our eyes.
Jimmie’s eyes are still green, and though they don’t glow, he looks a bit mad in the head.
“Right,” Jimmie says with a grin. “Let’s take him to the police.”
I cough and say, “I gotta make a couple of calls before we go.”
Back at the Town Hall, our dampish hostage raves for a good ten minutes about a ghost horse and an underwater kingdom. Sergeant Noseworthy and his cops listen hard and take notes while they lean over the box marked Shredding.
Jimmie interrupts the Ecobay guy, because we’re losing our audience. “You remember in ’09 when you caught me sitting naked in the big donut on top of Mudder’s Donuts?” he asks the assembled cops. “And that time in 2010 when you arrested me for filling up Jack Falls’ car with fish heads and seawater, out of spite for him beating up his wife?”
I’ve got an account with ten thousand earmarked for the next time Jimmie gets arrested.
“And back in ’06, that time when I made Janice Bejanice think the whole town was overrun with zombies, and we had to put her in hospital for a month—?”
The cops are getting impatient, so I break in and say, “He made a ghost horse out of an oil barrel, seaweed, and that stuff in glow sticks. This one—” the babbling technician “—got so scared he ran right into the water and knocked himself out and had a bad dream.”
“Why?” one of the cops asks me. “Why the prank?”
“To scare these guys off and stop ‘em from dumping all that poison in our water,” I say. “Since you boys weren’t doing such a hot job of it.” They don’t look convinced.
“Got a better story to give the newspapers?” Jimmie asks. The Ecobay guy is still yammering on, clutching at his skin and hair. When he finds a bit of seaweed, he screams.
“What newspapers?” Noseworthy asks. He has to yell until Jimmie can clap a hand over Ecobuddy’s hollering mouth.
“The ones I just called,” I say. “Should be here in about an hour.”
“You could tell ‘em how Ecobay paid, legally but secretly, for the right to dump toxins in our water,” Jimmie suggests. “Or you could tell ‘em that three people went missing this week, and you didn’t tell anybody—especially the press. Or…” His eyes flash radioactive green when he grins. “You could tell ‘em there’s a people-eating sea monster in Dunker’s Pond.”
While he talks, I “accidentally” bump against the shredding box, and the top unlatches as it falls over. “Oh, lookie dat,” I say, “all of them witness statements. Jimmy-b’y, think I’ll find receipts at the bottom of this? Y’know, for all the kickbacks they’ve been paid?”
Noseworthy moves to grab me by the collar.
“No, I’ve got a better idea,” Jimmie says, grabbing the Ecobay fellow by the arm. “Let’s go tell the kelpie that it was the cops who let you Ecobay folks come in and ruin his pond.”
The Ecobay technician screams and tries to climb up the nearest cop to get away from the invisible kelpie. “It tried to eat me!” he screams. “Underwater!”
“What do you want?” Noseworthy demands. “Do you want to cause a panic?”
Jimmie says, “The kelpie only wants to protect his home. He only takes us when he’s mad about Ecobay.” He gives the whimpering technician a shake. “Keep them out of Witless Bay, do your job, and we’ll never hear from the kelpie again.” He thrusts the technician toward Noseworthy.
“We could just kill it,” says one of the other cops.
“Georgie tells me you been trying to do that for seventy-five years,” Jimmie says. “And I saw a few bodies in uniform at the bottom of that pond.”
Grown men go pale.
“And what do we tell them about the missing people?” Noseworthy asks.
“Which ones?” Jimmie asks. He turns, and we see four people walk into the station, all of them with bright green eyes like Jimmie. They’re wet, tired, hungry, but unharmed, and seeing the world in a new light. “Who, those ones?”
Two more people come in. Laney goes to Jimmie and falls into his arms. Millie sidles up to me and checks me over.
Noseworthy looks from Jimmie to me, asking, “What about the missing Ecobay people?”
“They stay until the pond is all cleaned up,” Jimmie says. “That was the bargain to get our people back.”
“And how are we supposed to explain where they’ve been all this time?” Noseworthy bleats.
“We could tell the truth,” Jimmie says. “But we keep it amongst ourselves. Anybody from away won’t believe a word we say, and that’s good enough for me. Just another Newfie ghost story out of Witless Bay.”
***
Pat Flewwelling is a novelist and short-story author from Oshawa, Ontario. By day, she is a senior business analyst at a major telecommunications company; on her weekends and evenings, she runs Myth Hawker Travelling Bookstore, and is a co-editor at ID Press. Please send more coffee to www.mythhawker.ca or www.patflewwelling.com.
The Horse Witch
Angela Rega
Like a big sugar cake of lights, the carousel unraveled the dark with each rotation. The brightly lit horses and their candy-colored saddles looked out of place in the yellowed paddocks of Coorooma. Wendy watched, perched on the fence, her chin on her hands and her bare feet curled around the bottom rail. Small for her thirteen years, she looked like a little bird resting.
The horses were frozen, it seemed, somewhere between a canter and gallop, some had their long necks arched, others, their necks lowered as if indicating a joyousness that real horses show when they are free. A paradox, Wendy thought, since the poor creatures were all impaled on poles that circulated on cranks. Still, she thought, against the ebony of the night sky clean of stars, they lit up Coorooma like a big Christmas tree.
Soon they might be the only horses of Cooroma, more alive than the wild brumbies that ran free on the land here. “All to be mustered for shooting,” her father had said to her as he took off his oilskins that evening and threw a fish in the pan for their dinner. She didn’t answer him. She had learnt long ago not to reveal things she loved, lest they be destroyed. She kept the photos of her absent mother in a gift-wrapped shoebox under her bed, and now, a tuft of her wild brumby’s tail, too.
“Want a ride?”
Wendy lifted her chin off her hands and looked up at the woman operating the carousel. She was a thin elderly lady wearing an old top hat and a long grey plait slung over her right shoulder and hung long to her waist. If Wendy had a grandmother, she would have liked her to be a bit like this lady, particularly because her gumboots were a bright purple and in the end of her long plait, she wore what looked to be magpie feathers.
Wendy tucked her right hand inside her pocket. All sh
e had was a burnt out cigarette stub she’d been using to practice smoking with Elouise behind the bushes at school. “I don’t have money,” she said.
“I’ll give you a free ride,” the woman answered and she smiled.
Wendy stepped off the fence. “Nobody round here gives anybody anything for free—except Lillian Jones who gives people pumpkins in autumn, but that’s because she’s supposedly Coorooma’s very own fairy godmother.”
“A fairy godmother in Coorooma? Do you believe in magic?”
Wendy shrugged. “I don’t believe in fairies and I’ve never liked pumpkin.” She wasn’t even sure if she liked Lillian. Her father did, though. He liked Lillian very much. She was over at their place a lot these days.
Wendy eyed the empty carousel as the music and the movement slowed and came to a complete halt. Now she was hesitant to step forward. No other children in the town were here. Normally, they would flock like flies to cow pies at anything new in town.
“So where’s the rest of the carnival?” Wendy asked.
“I’m a one women show,” the woman said. “A carousel but no carnival.” She opened the gate and gave Wendy a horsey grin that revealed very large teeth. “Come on in.”
Wendy walked in and put out her hand. It felt right to introduce herself since not many new people came to Coorooma. “I’m Wendy,” she said.
“Devon.” The woman answered. Wendy noticed how warm her hand was, then bee-lined for the silvery grey horse whose reins were long and hung in loops down his neck.
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