The Witches of Dark Root

by April Aasheim [paranormal]

  “Shane heard you leave. He woke me when you didn’t come home.” She pulled the blanket up to my chin. “You’ve got to stop running and learn to face things. You don’t want to be a wild, wilder do you?” We giggled at the joke and she kissed me on the forehead and we promised to never run from each other. Ever.

  I kept my promise and never left her.

  But she left me.

  I could run now, I thought, as I stood in the entryway feeling my mother’s eyes boring into me as she screeched out my birth name. “Magdalene! Magdalene!”

  It would be so easy. Just one little step in the opposite direction, followed by another, and I could disappear into the forests. I could leave Dark Root and Eve and my mother. I could leave them all behind.

  I rubbed my fingers together as everyone turned to look at me, wondering what I would do.

  “Magdalene! Magdalene!” my mother’s voice continued to call out to me.

  I could run.

  I looked from Mother to Merry. I had never been good at keeping promises but I had to keep this one.

  “Hello,” I said softly, stepping forward to face her. “I’m home.”

  She reached a bony hand out to take mine, her skeletal fingers closing around my wrist. I willed my feet to move themselves, not backwards but forwards, over the threshold and into Sister House. My promise to Merry may have stopped me from running but it was pity for my mother that pulled me inside.

  The living room was dark; the curtains were closed and the lights were off. Merry pushed past me and immediately began flipping on switches and opening windows. “It smells horrible in here, Mama,” she said. “Remember, we talked about keeping the windows open to air this place out?”

  She was right; the room reeked of urine, mildew, and dust. I turned my nose towards my shoulder to keep from inhaling the fumes.

  Eve slithered in behind me, avoiding Mother’s touch, and plopped herself onto the sofa. The upholstery had faded and was covered in dust and balls of fur. June Bug whizzed by, latching on to her mother’s hand. Paul and Shane hung back in the entryway, watching the scene.

  A sharp yowl made me jump. As my eyes adjusted I could make out small shapes moving about the corners of the room. Cats. Lots and lots of cats.

  My mother had become the cat lady.

  “My girls have all come back!” She spun in the living room, her night gown and white hair whipping around her. “The circle will not be undone!”

  No, Mother, I thought, as she twirled through the living room. Your girls have not all come back. Ruth Anne was still missing.

  “Still crazy as a Betsy bug,” Eve said, not bothering to lower her voice.

  “Sit down, Magdalene,” Mother said, shooing two cats off a recliner that looked on the verge of collapse. I sat uneasily as several new cats emerged from the shadows to inspect their guests. They were a sickly lot, frail and coughing. They gathered at our feet, meowing and pawing at us expectantly. Eve and I kicked them away, but Merry was brave enough to pick one up. She petted the creature, cooing at it like it were a baby.

  It sneezed in response and Merry didn’t flinch.

  I felt something scurry across my arm and I screamed, slapping it away. June Bug came to my rescue and placed the bug in one of her jars. I pulled my legs into my chest, trying to take up as little space as possible.

  A new scent hit my nose.

  A hefty bag, untied and overflowing with garbage, sat beside the end table. I had been so preoccupied with the cats that I hadn’t noticed the rest of the house. The floor was covered in bins, newspapers, and stacks of empty cereal boxes. A mountain of clothing camouflaged the love seat. Shoes were stuffed into the crannies of the bookcase. The breakfast table––where I had once eaten cereal and biscuits on Saturday mornings––was piled high with dirty dishes.

  My skin crawled again, but this time out of pure revulsion.

  “Our first order of business is to figure out what to do with all these cats.” Merry addressed us as if our mother wasn’t in the room. “It’s a major health code violation.” She faced a window and a beam of sunlight caught her hair, causing it to glow a sunflower yellow. “I’ve been paying a nurse to stay with her, but it’s expensive. I am going to put an ad out for someone to come and sit with her at nights. We can take turns with her during the day.”

  I was about to ask Merry how we could ever convince anyone to come spend the night in this place when Mother reached a hand into the pocket of her house dress and pulled out a handful of dry cat food.

  “Here kitties!” she called out. “Look what mama has for you.”

  She flung the cat food to the floor. The tougher cats arched their backs and hissed away the competition, while the weaker ones timidly ran after stray bits that bounced under tables.

  “That one...” Miss Sasha said, pointing to a fat, orange cat who looked like it couldn’t be bothered to pry itself up from the kitchen table. “...is Maggie. Isn’t she beautiful?”

  “Lucky you.” Eve gave me a sideways look, the right side of her mouth turning up in a caustic smile. “Getting a cat named after you.”

  “I’m sure there’s an Eve cat around here somewhere,” I retorted. “Just look for the one with the long stick up its butt.”

  Mother continued spraying out cat food as Merry spoke to her.

  “We’re here to help you, Mama.” She placed a hand on Mother’s back. “We are going to get you to the doctor, and get your kitties good homes, and clean this place up. Everything’s going to be okay.”

  Mother looked at each of us in turn, her expression almost lucid.

  “Welcome back, girls. Dark Root needs you.”

  “Well, that was creepy.” Eve sipped her coffee, pulling her faux fur collar close around her.

  Dip Stix was chilly but Shane didn’t want to run up the heating bill so he made us all coffee to warm ourselves.

  “The Twilight Zone is creepy,” I said. “That was Rosemary’s Baby.”

  I wanted to shake the event from my head, but I couldn’t erase the images and smells from my brain. It had only been seven years since I left. How had she fallen so far? I was prepared for my mother the ‘crazy witch lady’; I was not prepared to see her so shattered and frail.

  I wasn’t going back, I decided, as I took a long sip of my coffee, emptying my cup. Maybe that made me evil. If it did, I would deal with that later. All I could think about now was that it had been a mistake coming here.

  I had to get out of town, and fast.

  “You think we should have left Merry and June Bug there with her?” Shane asked, refilling our cups. He wore a red apron and looked a bit like a bustling old lady.

  “Mom’s fine.” Eve rolled her eyes.

  I was about to say something, but it was Paul, of all people, who spoke up.

  “Eve, you saw that place,” he said. “That was definitely not fine. I’ve been in some dumps in my time, but that place was so awful I didn’t even want to go inside. And I lived in a squat in Brooklyn.”

  Eve didn’t argue, like I expected. Instead she shivered. “I suppose it was pretty bad. I just don’t like thinking about it.”

  “Me, either,” I agreed.

  “At least she wasn’t repeating things this time,” Shane said.

  He was wiping down a table, the same one he had just cleaned five minutes before.

  “...I took her some food last week and she kept repeating the same words over and over again. Something about preparing for the dark.” Shane paused and looked out the window. “My grandmother had dementia and did things like that. Kept saying things in a continual loop, like a skipped record.”

  “Isn’t she too young to have dementia?” Eve’s perfect nose peeped over the top of her large mug. She was still wearing the red cashmere mittens she had put on in the car.

  “No one really knows how old Mother is,” I said, pressing my hands to my cup for warmth.

  Miss Sasha had never revealed her age or showed anyone her driver’s license.
I did the math in my head. If she had Eve as old as a woman could have a kid, maybe forty-five, and Eve was almost twenty-four that would put her near seventy.

  Maybe she wasn’t too young after all.

  Shane finished his tasks and joined us.

  “That’s how we found out about her,” he said, pulling up the chair beside me. “She was out driving that old car of hers in the country and got pulled over by a trooper. She had no license or insurance and wasn’t sure where she was. I guess they did some detective work and figured out she belonged here. Thank God they did. I’m not for driving without a license and endangering the community, but if that cop hadn’t pulled her over...” He pounded the side of his fist on the table. “...She might have starved to death in that house alone.”

  “She wouldn’t have starved,” Eve pointed out. “She has two thousand pounds of cat food to live on.”

  Paul gave my sister a disgusted look but Eve simply shrugged.

  “Well, she does.”

  “You’re a good guy to take her food,” I said to Shane, a bit embarrassed that he had been taking care of our mother. “Thank you.”

  He smiled and nodded his head. “It’s the least I could do. Miss Sasha was like a mother to me, when I visited during the summers. And Uncle Joe really loved her, despite their frequent quarrels. Besides...” Shane looked from me and then to Eve, his eyes lingering on her face. “She was the mother of you girls.”

  I checked to see if Paul had noticed, but his focus had shifted to a commemorative Elvis plate hanging on the wall. This time, the King was wearing a striped prisoner’s onesie. Eve could have run through the restaurant buck naked and in that moment, Paul wouldn’t have noticed.

  “How do you think she got that way?” I asked, stirring a sugar cube into my coffee with my pinky finger.

  Eve set her cup down and peeled the mittens from her hands. “She was already losing it when I left. Always talking about preparing for the End Times. That’s when she started her cereal collection. Suddenly the house was filled with Captain Crunch. She wouldn’t let us eat that stuff when we were kids and here she was, buying it by the crate. Then she moved on to the harder stuff like Frosted Flakes and Sugar Smacks. By the time I high-tailed it out of there, when I was eighteen, the dining room looked like the Kellogg’s factory.”

  “And you left her like that?” I clenched my cup.

  “Hey!” she fired back. “Don’t put this all on me. At least I had the decency to say goodbye. I didn’t sneak off in the middle of the night with some crazy cult leader and forget how to use the phone.”

  I felt the anger pulse through me, starting in my gut and working its way down into my fingers and toes. The overhead lights flickered off, then back on again.

  “Still can’t control it, I see.” Eve stared blankly at me, like she expected no better. “I guess meditation camp didn’t do you much good.”

  Shane put his hands on the center of the table, separating me from my sister.

  “It’s no one’s fault,” he said, looking at both of us. “These things just happen.”

  Eve and I stared at each other, neither speaking.

  The silence was broken by the doorbell.

  We all turned to see a pleasant looking woman of around fifty entering the cafe. She had short, dark hair, cut elegantly around her soft face, and wore a long, grey skirt and a purple sweater with a faux fur collar similar to Eve’s.

  “Hello,” the woman said, smiling and looking around the restaurant. “Is this establishment open?” Her green eyes sparkled as she took in the décor.

  Shane practically ran to greet his new guest. He moved to offer her a seat by the window but she waved her hands.

  “If you don’t mind,” she said, nodding to us. “I’d like to join these lovely young people. That is, if you don’t mind the company? I’ve been on the road a while and it would be great to have some conversation while I have my tea.”

  I thought this was strange, but Eve seemed eager to have her sit with us and offered her the chair between us. If the woman had been dressed in rags, instead of expensive-looking clothes, Eve wouldn’t have given her the time of day.

  “My name is Jillian,” the woman said, shaking each of our hands.

  On her right index finger she wore the largest diamond I had ever seen. I couldn't help but gawk.

  “You like?” She smiled, holding her hand up for me to appraise. “A gift from an old admirer. It’s a terrible thing to lug around but I can never bring myself to take it off.” She gave it a look that let me know there was a story behind it, but she didn’t offer to tell it.

  “I’m Eve,” my sister introduced herself. “And this is my friend Paul, my sister Maggie, and of course, the proprietor, Shane Doler.

  Shane opened his arms wide. “Mi Dip Stix es su Dip Stix.”

  “Pleased to meet you all, and I love your name, Eve. Very biblical.”

  “Yes, Mother liked biblical names,” Eve said. “But ironically wasn’t a huge fan of the Bible. Said the only thing she could appreciate about Jesus was his hair. Anyways,” she added. “Guess it’s a good thing I wasn't born a boy, or I would have been stuck with a name like Ezekiel or Jebediah. And then I would have had no choice but to become a farmer.”

  Eve clicked her nails on the table while she pondered this and the rest of us laughed.

  “Sounds like your mother is a colorful woman,” Jillian said with twinkling eyes. Then she turned to peruse the paper menu Shane had offered her. “Now, let me see if I can’t find something to tide me over until I get home...”

  Jillian ran her finger down the list and finally decided on the waffle sticks, no syrup or butter, please, and a cup of hot tea.

  I’m not sure why, but I felt an immediate liking for Jillian.

  She was warm, personable, and unlike most of the other women of her generation I’d known, sane. She told us that she was from Linsburg, twenty-five miles away, and was out doing a little shopping in neighboring towns. She saw this quaint little place and ‘just had to come in.’

  “It reminds me of the diners from my high school days,” she said, smoothing the paper napkin onto her lap.

  I looked over at Shane and raised a wicked eyebrow. He really needed to update the joint.

  “This your first time in Dark Root?” Eve asked, mirroring Jillian’s way of drinking from her cup with her pinky finger up.

  “No, dear, you caught me,” she laughed, her voice like a tinkling of bells. “I used to come for the Haunted Dark Root Festivals years ago. I’ve been nostalgic lately and I was hoping to grab some fliers to take back to my nieces, but, by the looks of things, it doesn’t seem to be happening this year. Too bad. They were always so much fun.”

  Shane frowned. “I wish it was still going on, too. Good for business, great for the town. But I can’t seem to convince anyone it’s worth the effort. The folks that used to run it are getting old and...” He looked at me apologetically. “...Sick. So...”

  He spread his right hand, helplessly.

  “I see.” Jillian took another sip from her cup and set it carefully back into its saucer. “I don’t mean to be a Meddling Merriweather, but it seems to me there’s a new generation of young people who care about this town.” She looked around at all of us. “Why not revive it? It could be fun.”

  Eve, who had spent more time watching Paul than listening, was suddenly interested. “What a great idea! We could put on plays, like historical reenactments of the town’s history. I could write them and star in them.”

  “What if I wanted to star in them?” I asked.

  Of course, I had no intention of being in anything Eve had written, but I didn’t like the idea that she was making this all about her.

  “Don’t be silly, Maggie. I’m the logical choice. I’ve starred in many off-Broadway plays.”

  “Way, way off, I bet.” I laughed, thinking about it. “...Like in Milwaukee.”

  “Now, ladies,” Shane interrupted. “We can hammer out thos
e details later, but since you both seem so eager to do this, I say we give it a shot.”

  “I didn’t actually volunteer,” I reminded him. “I was just trying to prove a point.”

  I was planning on leaving as soon as I figured out where I was going, and I couldn’t get involved in something so silly as a Halloween carnival.

  Shane just smiled. “Now, there’s only six weeks before Halloween, so that means we need to work fast. We are going to have to work hard and get everyone, including the Mayor, on board. When he learns the Maddock girls are back and willing to do their parts, I’m sure he will jump at the chance.”

  “Whoa!” I placed both hands on the table. “One mention of reviving this thing and you all pounce on it? Isn’t that a little crazy? And I never said I’d do my part or anyone’s part.”

  “I’ll take whatever I can get from you, Mags.” Shane put a strong hand on my shoulder, pushing me deeper into the chair as if to say you aren’t going anywhere yet.

  Eve and Shane chatted excitedly about what needed to be done; they had more ideas than Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin combined. Shane would rally the shop owners. Eve would write her plays. Maggie would...well, they never figured out ‘what Maggie could do.’

  I stifled a sigh and looked out the window at the road that led out of Dark Root.

  “Don’t worry, dear,” Jillian said, placing two hands over one of mine. She had a warm, soothing energy to her. “Things will work out. You will see.”

  “Yeah,” I sighed.

  Well, if Shane and Eve wanted to resurrect that old festival all the power to them. I would be long gone six weeks from now.

  “Well, everyone.” Jillian stood and pushed in her chair. “Sorry to rile up the hornets’ nest and leave, but I must be going. Linsburg’s Homecoming is tonight and I’m tailgating.”

  I wasn’t sure what tailgating was, but I wished I were going with her. It seemed far preferable to what I would be doing the next few days.

  “Maggie, do you mind walking me out to my car?” she asked.

  It was another strange request, since it was still daylight and Dark Root was not known for its muggings, but I agreed. Just being around her lightened my mood.