Sorcerie

by Russell Gilwee

  The wind whispering in the aged foundation.

  Finding those odd gaps in the old stone blocks.

  Seemingly whispering to him his name.

  Seemingly softly encouraging him, perhaps.

  He’d almost abandoned the task right then.

  Almost returned the moving boxes.

  Almost rushed back to the kitchen above.

  To that narrow rectangle of gray light.

  Only to find himself getting to work.

  Shading the runes onto a piece of binder paper.

  Doing so with a dull yellow No. 2 pencil.

  Frenetic motions over the uneven stones.

  The binder paper tearing in places.

  Gouging, slashing, ripping.

  The runes, meanwhile, somehow seemed even more enigmatic and mysterious transcribed from the strange stone column.

  The binder paper was with him now.

  Folded. Slid neatly into a trouser pocket.

  Despite weighing nothing at all, it felt heavy.

  Quite heavy in his pocket. Like a stone.

  As he stood at the classroom windowpane.

  Staring out at the world turned fuzzy.

  And slowly fading before his very eyes.

  Hovering between here and there.

  Wherever there might turn out to be.

  Oliver tried to focus on that horizon.

  But as he’d discovered before--

  Found it difficult to ascertain.

  Quite difficult, if not impossible, to determine where that gray sky and that gray sea finally met. More so than ever. He tried to tell himself it was still out there somewhere. Not unlike the playground equipment and the sandbox falling fuzzy around the edges.

  Not unlike his own bleary sanity.

  He inhaled deeply. Exhaled.

  Moved away from the window.

  The outside world fading even more.

  Fading even more beyond the glass.

  Beyond the distorting film of glaze.

  Beyond the swirling gray fog.

  But still there. Still there.

  Oliver found himself holding a textbook, momentarily forgotten until now. He slowly turned back toward the classroom to find his students silently watching him with those taciturn eyes.

  Rows of taciturn unblinking eyes.

  Ages eight to eleven years old.

  As quiet as tiny church mice.

  He blinked. Cleared his throat.

  “Right, then, where were we?” he said.

  Before thinking to refer to the textbook.

  The textbook resting in his hands.

  “Ah, yes,” he said, sighing. “Charlemagne. King of the Franks and Lombards. The Dark Ages. Illuminated manuscripts. Preservation of knowledge over the damnation of ignorance.”

  Meanwhile, Abby, his wife, was enjoying a second cup of coffee and a ciggie at the kitchen window back at the small stone cottage. She’d fancied the same earlier as Oliver had warmed the Audi in the muddy driveway before leaving for school. When he’d finally driven off into the cold wet mist, she’d quickly busied herself with two urgent tasks: First. Unplugging the TV and turning its hideous screen to the wall. Then second. Hiking upstairs, and without looking inside, closing the spare bedroom door and locking it.

  Done and quite done.

  She’d then dressed in faded jeans and an old comfy sweatshirt with mysterious faded stains, probably wine. Her hair in a ponytail, her feet snug in her new pink galoshes, she’d treated herself to that second cup of coffee and cigarette before eventually finding herself standing before the wild overgrown garden, her shiny new gardening equipment in a wheelbarrow she’d found in the barn.

  That gray weather-boarded barn.

  Standing silently before the woodline.

  Hipped roof hidden in the fog this morning..

  Along with its high empty hayloft.

  She’d found the wheelbarrow just inside.

  Just inside the barn’s giant buckled doors.

  Along with other odd farming things.

  Rusted things decaying into rusted dust.

  Half-buried in the barn floor’s rusty earth.

  The wheelbarrow was also badly rusted.

  Huge patches flaking off like grafts of skin.

  Exposing shallow reddish-orange wounds.

  Its original paint a dull green. Faded.

  Nearly non-existent in the sea air.

  Still, the thing was sturdy and its wheels up-for-the-job, if a bit wobbly here and there over all the uneven muddy ground. Frankly, Abby was just glad to get the thing out of the barn, the lean of the structure more obvious inside its timbered walls, the wind causing those timbers to softly creak and moan, and maybe sway. Like it all might just come down in a storm of kindling at any moment.

  Burying her there in the rusty earth.

  Along with those odd farming things.

  Things half-buried and half-dead.

  She sighed. Grabbed a hoe. Shiny new.

  Back at the primary school in Peel, while his wife toiled in the cold fog back home, Oliver handed out a quiz to the class.

  “You have thirty minutes,” he said.

  The kids bent their heads down. Got to it. Pencils scribbling. Yellow No. 2’s. Oliver grabbed his coat. Exited the classroom.

  He had thirty minutes.

  He headed down the hall. Spied Charlotte in a classroom writing out a lesson on a blackboard. A bemused grin appeared to pull across her lips as she wrote out the lesson in perfect penmanship. Somehow aware of Oliver’s passing attention in the hall outside her door without even the need to glance over in his direction.

  Oliver exited the building.

  Moved through the fog to another.

  Entered the school library.

  A small building made for the miniature. Low shelves and low tables and low chairs for small children with little low bodies.

  A librarian glanced up from a book cart.

  Round thick eyeglasses. Stereotypically owlish.

  Oliver found himself out of breath after only the short walk. “I’m looking for anything you might have on hand on ancient local languages, writings,” he managed. “Manx runes. The like.”

  She frowned. If pleasantly.

  “I have Harry Potter,” she said.

  Oliver checked his wristwatch.

  Marched over to the parking lot.

  Exactly twenty minutes later, and even more out of breath, he exited a small local bookstore in town with a shopping bag.

  He hustled back to the Q5.

  Wondering if he’d be late.

  Wondering if he’d make the bell.

  Be there for his next arriving class.

  Wondering if his morning class sitting there quietly over their finished tests would know to pass their test papers forward. Place them neatly on his desk at the front of the classroom and to excuse themselves without his explicit permission. Or if they would somehow just sit there blankly and wait for him despite the bell.

  He imagined they just might.

  And felt a cool shiver run his spine.

  All those taciturn unblinking eyes.

  Just staring blankly forward.

  Waiting. Waiting so very patiently.

  Back at the small stone cottage, after a quick lunch involving a cheese sandwich and pickle, Abby found she already had a heap of pulled weeds with long pale knobby roots featuring thistle-like hairs growing beside the low crumbling stone wall bordering the garden. She stepped back and surveyed her efforts and decided she’d barely made a dent and that the chore would take days, if not weeks. She wiped sweat from her brow with the thought. Felt perspiration beneath that comfy sweatshirt, her undershirt sticking against her pale skin that had already begun to feel chilled as the sweat dried.

  She shivered. Leaned on the hoe. Only to rather suddenly feel eyes upon her. Even worse than the day before back in town.

  She slowly turned toward the barn.

  That old dilapidated gray barn. />
  The gray fog shifted about, revealing a handful of black birds observing her from the barn roof. Silent. Curious. Jostling.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” she said to the birds appearing and disappearing on the roof in the shifting gray fog. “I should just mow down everything and be quite done with it, then.”

  She chuckled at her own plight.

  Only to have a woman’s voice startle her.

  Though initially she believed the voice might somehow, inexplicably, be coming from one of those jostling black birds.

  “Bushwah, love,” it said. This voice.

  Echoing to her from the gray brume.

  “You do that,” it drolly added, “you’ll miss the odd treasure or two. One can only guess what mysteries do lie beneath.”

  The black birds continued to stare.

  Silently. Appearing and disappearing.

  Abby’s gaze dropped from the barn roof to find a gray silhouette standing in that ever-shifting gray fog at the edge of the narrow path leading into the dark woods. An indistinct figure made almost wraith-like by the swirling gray mist. It slowly pushed forward from the dark trees and mist to reveal itself to be, in the end, Fay.

  Abby realized she was holding her breath.

  She exhaled. Lifted a hand in greeting.

  The sprite old woman wore a rugged gray raincoat over a dark knitted sweater, dark green wool skirt, and comfy two-tone brown country walking shoes. Her gray hair hidden in a gray scarf.

  She carried a wicker basket before her.

  Overflowing with small delicate white flowers.

  “Elderflowers,” she said, nodding at the basket. “Their honey-scented blossoms make a simply magical keshal. Divine.”

  It was only then Abby noticed elderflowers in her own garden and wondered if she’d managed to destroy any with her aggressive weeding. Fay, meanwhile, as if being able to read Abby’s mind with her flat gray eyes, stepped over the wall and began to slip about the overgrown garden inquisitively. As if shopping at the market.

  Appearing and disappearing.

  In the mist and amongst the brambles.

  “Lilac,” she eventually pointed out in a friendly, if instructive manner. “Intoxicating aroma. But bad luck to bring indoors.”

  “And why would that be?” Abby said.

  “It is often used to mask the smell of someone who has died. Hard to grow and rarely seen, it is a harbinger of death.”

  Fay brushed this aside with a grunt, however.

  Moved on to more esoteric blooms.

  Blooms thriving despite the cold gray mist.

  Despite the oft-absence of the sun.

  A pale ghostly thing beyond the brume.

  “Guelder Rose,” she now said, pausing over a white-flowered shrub. “Use the bark for hiccups. Aches. And this here is dandelion root. Good for fever and jaundice,” she said, referring to a weed-like plant with a jumble of bright yellow dandelion flowers.

  She finally passed the pile of pulled weeds.

  The spoils of Abby’s hard sweaty work.

  Only to make a scolding “tsk, tsk” noise.

  Before once again moving on.

  “Bilberry,” she revealed, meaning a wild thorny-looking shrub with dark blue berries. “Good for eyesight,” she advised.

  The shrubs all seemed to part for her.

  Seemed to provide for her a path.

  The same thick briery shrubs that had seemed more than happy to scratch and claw mercilessly at Abby all that day long.

  “Burdock,” she subsequently gestured contently. “Eat the root raw to eliminate toxins. Psoriasis. Gout. Even arthritis.”

  She moved deeper into the garden.

  Deeper into the snarly primeval jungle.

  Before she suddenly fell still.

  Very still, indeed, as if in reverence.

  Over a dense bloom of black flowers.

  Black flowers with deep crimson stamens.

  She fondled the plant almost lovingly.

  “Fairy’s Breath,” she then hushed.

  Punctuated with a soft nostalgic cackle.

  “Crush the stamens,” she stated as the gray fog swirled around her. “Steep them in hot water with wild honey over an open candle flame. I spied a hive behind your barn,” she advised solemnly while still fondling the strange plant, those black flowers seeming to lean into her caress, the deep crimson stamens seeming to dance to her adoring dulcet whispers. “Walk counterclockwise around the steeping cup thirteen times for a boy. And clockwise for a girl.”

  “My grandmother,” Abby said, voice becoming plaintive. “She swore one only needed to sit in a pregnant woman’s chair.”

  “Bushwah,” Fay responded. “Trap a spider in a bag and place the bag at the end of your bed. Do not open until it’s dead.”

  Another soft cackle. Flat gray eyes sparkling.

  Only to find tears welling in Abby’s eyes.

  “If only it was as easy as all that,” Abby said from behind the low crumbling stone bordering wall. “A silly old wives’ tale.”

  She shrugged. Embarrassed. Ashamed.

  Fay sighed. Exited the garden.

  A silent understanding passing between the two women in the shifting gray brume without the need for further elaboration.

  Fay drew close to Abby now.

  As she had the first night they’d met.

  As before Abby felt no urge to back away.

  Wanting to be this old woman’s friend.

  Perhaps even needing it in the end.

  This woman with the friendly smile.

  Who managed to twinkle even in the fog.

  As if she were illuminated from within.

  She smelled of lavender and Abby could still see peeks of it in her gray hair tucked up in her gray scarf as she drew ever closer still to Abby and softly whispered into Abby’s ear a Gaelic ballad.

  Poetry lilting off her dry tongue.

  As the pale silhouette of the sun faded.

  Faded down toward the distant horizon.

  A distant horizon lost in all that grayness.

  All that grayness now turning dark.

  The day just suddenly falling away.

  And where had it suddenly gone? The day?

  Or so Abby absently meditated.

  As she listened. Spellbound.

  Afterward, she said of that enchanting Gaelic, having not understood even but one word of it: “I’m not certain I want to know its meaning. It’s so beautiful without even the knowing.”

  “‘tis,” Fay said, nodding.

  “‘tis a proverb?” Abby wondered.

  Fay’s flat gray eyes sparkled again.

  Sparkled in the fading light.

  “‘tis not,” she hushed.

  15.

  THAT VERY NIGHT, as fortune would have it, long after Fay had vanished back down that narrow path into the dark woods, a large round white moon peeked down through the black night fog as if the black night fog were parting just for it. Just as the thick briery shrubs in that overgrown garden had seemed to part just for Fay after mercilessly scratching and clawing at Abby all day long and leaving in their unkind wake by nightfall long and thin scabby scrapes and bumpy itchy welts up and down her legs.

  Abby observed that moon.

  That large round white full moon.

  Peeking down from above.

  Oliver had decided to stay late at the school, wanting to better organize his classroom apparently and prepare lesson plans.

  Or some such silly nonsense.

  As fortune would have it, anyway.

  Abby found herself in the kitchen in the much-too-quiet stone cottage beneath that round white full moon peeking down through the black night fog. Crushing red Fairy’s Breath stamens.

  “I’ve gone mad,” she said.

  A moment later she was outside in the sinking cold behind the barn, hugging herself, her teeth chattering, considering the beehive hanging heavily from a low limb of one of the withering oak trees
. A soft and ominous buzzing could be heard inside the hive.

  “Truly. Quite mad,” she said.

  She had the hoe in hand.

  Albeit no longer shiny or new.

  The blade caught the moonlight.

  Peeking down through the black fog.

  Sighing, she closed her eyes.

  And blindly swung the thing.

  A quarter hour later, she found herself methodically scooping with a tea spoon the crushed Fairy’s Breath stamens into an empty tea bag. She then steeped the tea bag in a mug of heated water over a flickering open candle flame, adding a dollop of wild sweet honey to the concoction from a thick sticky wedge of honeycomb shaved off the beehive from the withering oak tree behind the barn.

  While holding the steeping mug of Fairy’s Breath tea over the flickering open candle flame, Abby walked thirteen times around it, as instructed, muttering Fay’s ballad as best as she could remember it that was less lullaby, in the end, and more incantation.

  The tea water began to slowly bubble.

  The Fairy’s Breath producing hazy colors.

  Purple and marigold. Red and blue.

  A maelstrom of swirling dull hues.

  Swirling faster and faster still.

  She then lifted the bubbling mug.

  Lifted it from the candle flame to her lips.

  She sipped the strange brew. Bitter on her tongue as the large round white full moon peeking down through the black night fog mischievously decided to illuminate for her a rather quite beautiful silky spider web in the highest corner of the kitchen window.

  That window then began to spin, too.

  Slowly at first. Round and round.

  And then faster and faster still.

  Or maybe it was she who was spinning.

  Round and round. Faster and faster still.

  And from above the narrow staircase--

  Also now spinning. Faster and faster still--

  There came the sound of a lock bolt popping open.

  And then the most gentle creak of a door.

  And the hollow echo of tiny footsteps.

  Abby heard herself maybe scream.

  Or perhaps she was laughing.

  Meanwhile, at the primary school in town, Oliver, at just that very moment, was sitting alone behind his desk at the forefront of his small classroom, staring out past the glazed windowpane at that round white full moon (a large hazy thing on the other side of that distorting glass) peeking down through the black night fog.