The horse turned and started eastward.
“Your pardon, Amos,” said Mrs. Makepeace from her delightfully warm position immediately at his back, “but I don’t believe I saw you unhitch this animal.”
“That’s because he wasn’t hitched, ma’am.” He patted the horse’s neck. “Worthless don’t cotton to bein’ tied up. He’s pretty good about staying in one place, though, so I don’t insist on it no more. I only have trouble with him when there’s a mare in heat around.”
“That’s understandable, of course,” she replied gravely, putting both arms around his waist and holding tight.
At which sight the piebald steed of uncertain parentage let out a most unequine laugh….
* * *
—
The Makepeace farm was located beside a burbling little stream not far from the north fork of the American River. Less than twenty years before, the entire length of that river had been aswarm with thousands of immigrants in search of instant fortune, for the bed of the American River had been paved with gold. Now the gold and most of the immigrants were gone. Only the scoured-over river remained, draining farmland that was worth far more than the yellow metal that made men blind. A few, though, like Hart Makepeace, had seen the richness in the soil that had been stripped of its gold and had stayed on in the hope of making a smaller but surer fortune.
Now, however, it seemed that something small and vicious was determined to quash that dream. Malone could smell it as they trotted into the fenced yard. His suspicions were confirmed by the sound of a plate shattering somewhere inside the modest little farmhouse.
“She’s still at it,” Mary Makepeace said nervously, peering around the bulk of the mountain man. “I’d prayed that she’d be gone by now.”
Malone shook his massive head, squinting toward the house. The evil that lay within was strong enough to make his nose wrinkle and start a pounding at the back of his neck. “Not likely, ma’am. Witchens are persistent stay-at-homes, especially if they choose to make your home theirs. They’re not likely to leave voluntarily, nor put to rights the damage they’re fond o’ doin’.”
“Then what am I to do?”
“What we can, ma’am. What we can.” He dismounted and helped her down….
The kitchen had been turned into a wreck worse than that of the Hesperus. Only a few pieces of porcelain and crockery remained intact. Cracked china littered the wooden floor, mixed with the contents of dozens of baskets and jars. Pickles lay scattered among fruit turned rancid. Home-canned jams and preserves had made the oak planks slick as river rock. A butter churn lay forlorn and shattered across the room, below the sink pump that had been torn loose from its mounting bolts. Broom straw was everywhere, sticking to walls and floor alike.
Buzzing and soaring through the air above this culinary wreckage on a sliver of wood the size of a good cigar was the tiny figure of a wrinkled old woman. Her gray hair flowed from beneath a little scrap of a bandanna, and her skirt was stained with pepper sauce. She had a nose the size and color of a rotten grape, and her skin was the shade of old tobacco juice. On either side of that heroically ugly nose flashed tiny eyes sharp and dangerous as the business end of a black scorpion.
“Hee-hee-hee-hee!” she was cackling as she tore through the air of the ruined kitchen like a drunken dragonfly. “More’s the food and more’s the pity, hee-hee-hee!” Crash! A pot of beans went spinning to the floor.
Mary Makepeace huddled fearfully behind the imposing bulk of Amos Malone. “M-m-make her go away, Amos. Oh, please make her go away and put to rights the damage she’s done!”
“Where’s the rest of your family?” Malone asked her.
“Over…there.” She fell to sobbing again as she pointed.
Standing in a far corner of the kitchen, a fistful of cigars clutched in one frozen hand, was a wooden figure of startling realism. It was not made in the image of a stolid Plains Indian, though, but rather in that of a young man clad in woolen white shirt, suspenders, work boots, a pair of Mr. Levi’s revolutionary new pants, and an expression that mixed bafflement with sheer terror.
“That’s my husband, Hart,” Mary Makepeace bawled, “and those large cookie jars at his feet are our sons, Frank and Christopher.”
Malone nodded, his expression grim. “You got yourself a mean’un, for sure.” He readied himself.
They waited while the witchen continued to engage in her orgy of destruction. At last the tiny evilness clad in the guise of an old woman zoomed over to hover in the air a foot in front of Malone’s beard.
“Oh-ho-hee-hee,” she laughed gleefully. “So the missy of the house has come back, eh? Good! I was so busy, I missed you the first time!” She glared mischievously at the terrified Mary. “What would you like to be? A nice harp, perhaps? You’d make a good-looking harp, missy. Or maybe that’s too fine for such as you, yes, too fine by half. A beer mug, maybe, for some filthy-minded man to drink from? Or how about a slop jar? Hee-hee-hee! Yes, that’d suit you, yes, yes, a green-eyed slop jar!” She whirled around in a tight circle, delighted at her own perverse inventiveness. Mary Makepeace cowered weakly behind Malone.
The witchen tried to dart around him. Each time, he blocked her path with a big, callused hand. Finally the enraged little nastiness floated up to stare into his eyes.
“Now, what’s this, what’s this what interferes with my housework, eh? I think it’s alive. I think it does live, I think. At first I thought it was a big sack of manure the missy had pushed ahead of her to hide behind, but now I see that it moves, it moves, hee-hee-hee. Could it be that it talks as well, could it?”
“You are, without question,” Malone said studiously, “the vilest, most loathsome-looking little smidgen of bile it’s ever been my displeasure to set eyes upon.”
“Flattery’ll get you anywhere, sonny,” she cackled. Then, in a dark tone rich with menace, she added, “Perhaps if I put those eyes out for you, you wouldn’t be troubled with setting them on me, eh?” When Malone didn’t respond, she said, “What shall I do with you, with you? You’re too big to make into a piece of furniture for this besotted kitchen. Maybe I’ll turn you into a kitchen, yes, yes? Yes, with a nice little cook fire in your belly.” Her tiny eyes blazed threateningly. “I’ll bake my bread in your belly, man.”
Ignoring her, Malone whispered to Mary Makepeace, “Have you and your husband been fighting lately, ma’am?”
“Of course not,” she started to say. “We were happily…” Then she recalled what Mad Amos Malone had told her about being able to smell a liar some good distance away and thought better of her response. “Yes, yes, we have been.” She was shaking as she stared at the floor. “But if only I could have him back, Amos! We fought over such little, insignificant things! And the children…I’ll never yell at my dear boys like that again!”
“Most folks don’t think clearly about the consequences o’ strong words when they’re spewin’ ’em, ma’am. That’s what likely brought this badness down on you. Fightin’ can poison a home, and a kitchen’s especially sensitive to it. If the other conditions are right—not to mention the ether conditions—well, you’ve seen what can happen.”
“Please give my family back to me, Amos,” she pleaded. “Please…I’ll do anything for another chance. Anything.”
Green eyes rich with promise fluttered at him, but Malone turned resolutely away from that beckoning gaze with a resolve a Kiowa pony would have envied. “Just stay behind me, ma’am. Just stay behind me.” He turned his attention back to the waiting witchen.
“I don’t think you’re goin’ t’ turn me into no fireplace, filth-fingers,” he told it, “and I aim to see to it that you don’t hurt this lady no more and that you undo the damage you’ve already done.”
“Hee-hee-hee, you do, do you?” She took her little hands off the nape of the tiny broomstick and waved them at him. “Hibble-de-glum,
mubble-me-mock, fire and iron, kettle and stock, make of this mountain a—”
Malone didn’t give her a chance to finish. He had the advantage of volume, if not timing. “Bellow and roar all you wish, balloon-beak, but you won’t sunder me. I’ve been circled round by the five fingers of Rusal-Ratar, Queen of the Kitchens of the Earth and personal chef to Quoomander, Ruler of All the Djinn, Spirits, and Unassigned Ghosts of the Nether Regions!”
“—two-armed stove crock!” the witchen finished emphatically.
There was a flash of smoke and fire as she threw something at him. Mad Amos Malone disappeared in a cloud of green haze. From behind it Mary Makepeace let out a despairing scream, and the witchen’s “hee-hee-hee!” of triumph soared above it.
Her triumph, however, dissipated as rapidly as the haze, for within it Mad Amos Malone still stood in the kitchen doorway, unchanged, unharmed, and certainly unstoved, though a faint fragrance of unholy boiling did issue from the vicinity of his slightly scorched belt.
“Now then, wart-heart,” he whispered huskily as he reached toward his waist, “how’d thee like to try riding a bowie knife for a change?”
“No, no, no, no! Not possible! It’s not possible…eeeee!” The witchen found herself dodging Malone’s huge knife, twisting and spinning for her life as the mountain man sliced and cut at her agile little form.
But she was quick and experienced, and while Malone was so fast that the knife seemed but a shining in his hand, he was not used to dealing with so small a target. “Hold up there,” he finally told his quarry, gasping for breath. He bent over and put his hands on his knees as he fought for wind. “I’m plumb tuckered out.”
So was the witchen. Exhausted, she landed on a shelf and climbed off her broomstick, dangling withered little legs over the edge. “Fast…so fast he is,” she wheezed. “Almost too fast for old Beeblepwist, almost, almost…but not quite, not quite.” A sly grin snuck over her extraordinarily ugly face. “Should be a better way to settle this, settle this. A better way, yes.”
“Don’t listen to her, Amos!” Mary Makepeace shouted from her position just outside the kitchen. “She’ll try to trick you and…”
“No harm in hearin’ what she has to say, ma’am.” Amos took a deep breath, straightened, and was eye to eye with the sitting witchen. “I’ve no stomach for this constant chasin’. What have you in mind, corpse-cleaner?”
“No stomach for chasing, for chasing, eh? Have you stomach for some food? A cooking contest, yes? Yes, me and thee, hee-hee-hee?”
Malone considered the proposal carefully. He was a man of many talents. There were those who regarded him as a middlin’ to clever cook. “Cookin’ contest with what as its aim?” he asked guardedly.
“You win, I’ll put this hovel to rights and lose myself in the Bottomless Jar. I win…hee-hee-hee…I win, and you become part of the decor, along with Little Miss Priss, there.” She threw a short finger of fire in the direction of Mary Makepeace, who barely kept herself from swooning. “And one other thing,” she said, her voice becoming less scratchy than usual, “one thing other. I keep your soul, man, your soul.”
“I thought you wanted me for a stove,” he said nonchalantly.
“I do, I do, but a soul’s no good to a stove, and I can always find a buyer for a spare one.”
Malone scratched his beard. “If you think a good stove don’t need no soul, you ain’t half the cook you think you are. I agree. What kind of cookin’ do you propose? We ought to work similar, or there’ll be no basis for comparison.”
“I’m partial to spicy foods,” the witchen said encouragingly. “Think you the same, the same?”
Malone nodded. “I can handle tol’able condiments in my food.”
“Then something spicy it shall be,” cackled the witchen, adding, unsurprisingly, a “hee-hee-hee!”
Soul or surcease at stake, it was determined that the spiciest dish would be declared the winner. A truce blanketed that abused kitchen then, for both mountain man and witchen needed time to gather the ingredients for their respective dishes. Mary Makepeace saw a few of her precious utensils and pots restored for the purposes of the contest.
Three days slipped by. The sky over the farm grew as dark and angry as the odors that began to issue from it. People remarked on the peculiar scents in the air as far away as San Francisco to the west and Chinaman’s Bar to the east. Rabbits dug their burrows a little deeper that autumn, the birds moved their nests higher in the treetops, and for the first time since its founding, the citizens of Sacramento were not plagued by hordes of mosquitoes from the swamps along the Feather River—all the insects having dropped dead of unknown cause.
The heat that began to rise from two steaming kettles blistered the wood of the farmhouse on the north fork of the American River. Paint peeled off furniture hauled undamaged clear across the country from New England, and rusty iron was scoured miraculously clean. Mary Makepeace huddled on the floor just outside the kitchen, not daring to peer inside, yet she still acquired a tan so deep and permanent that from that day on people mistook her for a Mexican.
By the third night the two dishes were nearly finished. A deep yellow-orange glow illuminated the kitchen, and no bullfrogs called along the length of the American River.
From the kettle above which the witchen danced and flew rose a pink glow alive with tiny explosions of spice. It emanated from a soup the color of pahoehoe, the thick ropy lava that sometimes flows from the lips of angry volcanoes.
Mad Amos Malone stood like a russet cliff above his own pot, stirring the contents occasionally with an iron bar until the mixture was thick and sizzling and the bar had melted clean away. The glow from both kettles suffused the room with the hues of Hell. So spice-ridden were the two concoctions that the wood fires burning beneath each pot had begun to cower away from the metal bottoms, so that witchen and mountain man alike had to chide the flames back into heating them.
And when the smell and temperature were at their highest, when both courses were ready for the tasting, the witchen floated in the hot air rising from her own pot and said with great anticipation to Mad Amos Malone, “You…go first…hee-hee-hee.”
Mad Amos somberly removed his wolf-skull cap and unbuttoned his buckskin shirt. Ceremoniously, he downed half a gallon of cold stream water from a still-intact jug. The soup ladle burnt his fingers slightly when he picked it up, but he held tight to it. Cupped in the scoop of the ladle was something that bubbled and burst into little sparks. He brought his lips to the edge of the spoon. Mary Makepeace peered fearfully around the corner of the open doorway, one hand shoved reflexively into her mouth.
Malone hesitated. “What is it?”
“Why?” the witchen challenged him. “You afraid of a little soup, hee-hee-hee?”
“Nope. Just like to know what I’m eatin’.”
“It’s soup,” she cackled, her eyes bunting evilly. “Just plain red pepper soup, seasoned with brimstone and jellied kerosene and a few other personal spices. A delicate consommé sure to please as rugged and discerning a palate as yours, man. My own recipe…hee-hee-hee.”
Malone nodded once, his face aglow with the light rising not just from the boiling kettle but from the liquid frothing on the ladle, and downed the contents in a single gulp. He smacked his lips and put the ladle back in the pot.
Water started to stream from the corners of his black eyes, to cascade down his cheeks and into his beard. The tears were so hot that the hairs of his beard curled aside to give them free passage and the hair on his head began to writhe desperately as if trying to flee his skull. Smoke began to rise from the region of his belly, and the leather there darkened ominously. The veins in his eyes swelled until there wasn’t any white for all the red. A fingernail fell intact and smoking from the fourth finger of his right hand, leaving a steaming scar in its wake.
Malone opened his mouth, and a
gust of fire issued forth that put to shame the roaring of the falls of the Yosemite—a great, intemperate blast of flame that turned the iron pump on the edge of the sink into a tired lump of slag. A sharp explosion shook the house as the heat of that exhalation blew out every one of the house’s twelve imported windows, and Mary Makepeace held her head and screamed and screamed. Outside the kitchen, where the blast had struck, twenty-five feet of grass and brush was vaporized in a swath five feet wide.
The force of his reaction had propelled Malone into the far wall of the kitchen, cracking a support log and threatening to bring down the whole upper story along with the roof. The log creaked, but it held.
Slowly, Malone picked himself up from the floor, his eyes still watering, and rubbed at his throat as he nodded admiringly toward the aghast witchen. “Not bad. Not bad at all.” The lining of his mouth had gone numb, and his tongue felt like what a match is like after it’s been used. “Now,” he said softly, “it’s your turn.”
“Hmph! Waste of time this now, waste of time.” She flew over to float above the steaming kettle at which Malone had labored. Some of the bravado had fled from her cackle. Malone ought not to have been alive, much less offering comments on the quality of her most incendiary dish. She stuck her bulbous nose downward and sniffed contemptuously, then dropped lower and studied the simmering surface. “Maybe you survived the tasting,” she said dangerously, “but you won’t survive the contesting, hee-hee-hee.” Using the end of an unlit match for a spoon, she dipped out a sample of the concoction and popped it into her mouth.
For a moment she chewed reflectively. Then it hit her. Her eyes bulged enormously, and her mouth dropped open, for what Malone had wrought was as feral and fey as it was flamboyantly effective. “Ohhh myyyyy!” she exclaimed sharply. Her skin turned from brown to pink to cherry red, and her tiny body ballooned up like a pig bladder. Bigger and bigger she swelled, until at last she burst in a cloud of red heat that filled the whole kitchen.
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