Harvest Moon

by James A. Moore

  There were other interesting plants to be found in the area, but that all changed three nights before Halloween. Some might think what happened was an accident, but given the benefit of what occurred over the next few days, there are some doubts.

  It was supposed to be a lark, a quick trip into the woods for some inexpensive thrills and a chance to maybe score a few extra kisses from the girls. Beth Chambers was having a big party, but none of them had been invited. They weren’t quite the right caliber of people for one of the rich girl’s soirees. They couldn’t have cared less, or at least that was what they told themselves, and made themselves believe. Tim MacAteer and his good friends Lance Clemens and Will Hardy thought the idea would be a blast. Their girlfriends were up for it—according to Tim, Liz Walker was up to almost anything—and everyone was set to have a good time. Six in all and with three six packs of Sam Adams to go around between them, they were planning a night of ghost stories, drinking, and heavy petting.

  The fun started at nine in the evening, long after the sun had gone down. Sneaking out of their homes hadn’t been difficult, as the movie playing at the Regal was scheduled to start at twenty after and was almost two hours in length. That was plenty of time for what they had planned. Heather Partridge had the good sense to smuggle a collection of sandwiches out of the house earlier in the evening and so they had munchies. The idea of Lance going without food was practically ludicrous. He was sixteen and well on his way to being a giant. His face was still round and had its share of baby fat, yet his body had matured. The unfortunate side effect of his physique seemed to be that he’d become a bottomless pit somewhere along the way. So while heather was not a big eater, Lance made up for her lack of appetite in spades. But they looked good together and he was quick to defend her when anyone wanted to give her lip about being the daughter of a known criminal. Herbert Partridge was in prison, and likely would be until Heather was ready for retirement, as a result of a double homicide in Utica. She and her little sister made out well enough, but for a while there she’d been the brunt of far too many jokes.

  Liz Walker—who did, in fact, live up to her reputation as a bit of a tramp—was thin, energetic, and very attractive. She was also not exactly the brightest girl out there. But what she lacked in intelligent conversation she made up for by being one of the nicest girls in school. She almost always dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, usually wore her strawberry-blond hair in a ponytail, and tended to like a good make out session more than most of the guys she knew. Tim couldn’t think of a reason in the world to complain about that. If she’d been doing any fooling around on the side, she hid it well. Tim didn’t think she was seeing anyone else. He was right, but her reputation—started in the seventh grade—preceded her. Tim probably wouldn’t have cared either way. Though they both had strong feelings for each other, neither of them really believed that they would ever stay together, even for the four months they had already managed. Tim figured she’d dump him eventually for a guy who didn’t have acne trying to conquer his whole face.

  Kimmie Montgomery was short, cute and very, very chesty. Her hair was deliberately cut in a tomboyish way and tended to change color every week, though rumor had it she was actually a brunette. She had full lips and doe eyes. She also had enough metal in her mouth to make most people think she could pick up radio stations. Kimmie had been wearing braces since she was nine and pretty much figured she’d be wearing them to the grave. Not only had her teeth come in crooked, they’d come in with big gaps between them. Will didn’t mind, and that was all that mattered to her. She and Will had been neighbors for years, and had sometimes been friends and sometimes been enemies. Most of their time spent on opposite sides was a direct result of the early discovery that girls and boys weren’t supposed to like each other. Well, that and the fact that Will was raised in a family of male chauvinists. When he realized that Kimmie wanted nothing to do with that attitude and finally toned it down around her, they started going steady. Will and Kimmie were almost polar opposites in the looks. He was skinny, pale, and very tall. Her father constantly referred to them as “Mutt and Jeff.” They had no idea what he was talking about, but laughed and smiled anyway. Her father had an infectious grin that Kimmie shared, though she was completely unaware of it and often failed to use it when she became too self-conscious about the braces.

  They got to the Witch’s Hollow just after nine-thirty. Tim brought the beer, Lance brought the sleeping bags, and Will drove them all in the family pick-up truck. Will also had the good sense to borrow his father’s camping lantern for the trip, which saved them all the trouble of falling into the numerous watery holes surrounding the thin path to the Hollow.

  Heather and Kimmie were giggling the entire time and whispering about something. Nine times out of ten Liz would have been joining in, but at the moment she was far too interested in holding Tim’s hand. They settled in at the edge of the water in a semi-circle, shivering slightly in the autumn cold. The air was clear and the night was brightened by a moon well on its way to full. According to the calendar, the actual full moon would take place on Halloween, which was just too cool for words. As it stood, the sky was bright enough to almost negate the need for the lantern.

  After a few minutes of sitting on their respective sleeping bags, Heather pulled out the sandwiches and everyone started eating and sipping at beers. Heather hated the taste of beer, but knocked back a few drops for fear of not looking cool. Liz and Kimmie didn’t seem to have that problem. They killed off their first brews with gusto. Kimmie even kept up with the guys when it came time for an impromptu belching contest. She held her own until Tim cut loose with a burp that damn near shook the trees around them. At that point everyone else simply had to concede defeat.

  They didn’t speak much, but it was a comfortable silence, at least at first. Everyone was just glad to escape their houses and crack a few bad jokes with their friends. When they were finally done eating, Kimmie was the one who spoke up about their location first. “Guys? Is it me, or is this place really creepy?”

  Tim laughed and shook his head. “It ain’t you, Kimster. This place is almost guaranteed to give you nightmares.” He looked around and Heather saw the slight worry on his face. In the stark white light of the lantern, his pimples showed clearly. Heather still thought he was cute.

  “Does anyone know where she died? Hattie?”

  Lance was the one who answered her. He looked her in the eyes and pointed directly down at the ground near her feet. “There are mushrooms under the sleeping bags that are supposed to mark where her body is lying. I heard someone say they tried to dig her up in the past, but the ground’s too wet and they never found anything, not even a bone.”

  “Then how do they know she really died here?” Liz spoke with a little more edge to her voice than Kimmie, as if she expected to receive a load of crap from the guys about what had happened. Truth be told, that was really exactly what Heather expected, too. They had all heard the stories when they were kids, and from the same source. Whatever their boyfriends might say, it was likely being made up on the spot. Heather didn’t mind. The guys might have their games set up for the night, and there was surely going to be a little smooching somewhere along the way, but it was almost Halloween and she wanted to be scared.

  “This is the place.” Will’s voice was calm and confident, to the point that Heather had to double check to make sure Kimmie’s boyfriend hadn’t suddenly been replaced by a stranger. The blond boy had always been just a little geeky, and sometimes he could go for hours without saying much more than an occasional grunt. This was definitely not one of those times. “Her house was up there in the woods, on the other side of the Hollow, near the top of the hill.”

  “Yeah?” Liz again, one fine eyebrow raised as she aimed her challenge at Will. “How do you know?”

  Will pointed to the spot he’d spoken about and smiled thinly. “Look carefully. You see a lot of vines up there and a couple of bushes, but there’re no trees. They were
all cut down to make her cabin out here, and none of them ever grew back, even after all this time. Just vines and stuff. Besides, my dad took me out here once and showed me the foundation of her place.”

  That shut Liz up for the moment, likely for as long as it would take her to figure out if there were any flaws in his logic. Will continued, unfazed by the interruption. “Hattie got dragged down here, probably screaming and spitting the whole way. Those trees, the Victims, they wound up in the water ’cause at first they were gonna try and drown the old witch. Old man Habersham says that was one of the trials for whether or not a woman was a witch, trying to drown them, ’cause witches float.” He paused long enough to finish off his first beer, while everyone around him waited. “Thing is, they wound up killing her by making her go under the quicksand. Guess maybe she wasn’t such a powerful witch after all.” He looked at each of the girls and smiled. “Or maybe she just went into the muck to hide herself away until she was ready to come back.”

  Liz snorted. “Yeah, well, she’d have to hold her breath for a long, long time.”

  Tim waggled his fingers in the air and grinned like a fool. “Hocus pocus, baby. It’s all about the magic.”

  “What an interesting thing to say, young man.” The voice came from behind them, deep in the woods. It was an older voice, certainly not that of a teenager, and though they did not see the speaker, they heard him very clearly.

  Every last one of the teens jumped. No one was ever out here. That was one of the reasons they’d decided to come in the first place. Tim recovered the fastest, standing up, his eyes looking just a little wild and a little terrified at the same time. Heather thought he looked a bit like a horse ready to panic. He didn’t call out, or make any sort of challenge, but he looked towards the woods where the voice came from and his hands balled into tight fists.

  Heather asked for him. “Who’s there?”

  “Jack.”

  “Jack? Jack who?”

  Will mumbled under his breath. “Jack off, that’s who.”

  “Just Jack will do.” The voice was deep and gravelly, and sounded amused, almost teasing. But as Heather looked in that direction, she saw a flash of light for just a moment. The old man who was speaking didn’t even blink as his face was lit from below. Heather on the other hand, flinched, her pupils dilating quickly in the sudden intense flair. By the time her eyes had recovered, the old man was much, much closer.

  He was dressed in old jeans and a flannel shirt that had probably seen its best days when her parents were in diapers. His shoes were caked with mud and his hands were old and gnarled. He didn’t quite come all the way to where they sat, but he came close enough for all of them to see him in the lamp’s light. “Sorry to bother you children, but I heard you talking about the witch, and I couldn’t resist listening in.” There might be places in the world—well, okay, there are places in the world—where teenagers would feel free to give lip to an adult they didn’t know. Beldam Woods wasn’t one of them. The average parent in Beldam Woods, New York would likely have taken a belt to any child who was not at least courteous to a stranger. The six teens were a bit old for a butt blistering, but they’d been taught well and the lesson hadn’t been lost on a one of them. They mumbled and nodded and said little, as it was obvious by the man’s demeanor that he could tell them a few things.

  It took a little effort, but he managed to crouch down just out of the light of the lamp, his body little more than a silhouette and his face only seen by the light reflected back from his eyes.

  “I know you’ve all heard the stories from Douglas Habersham over the years. He’s certainly good at spinning a yarn or two, but he’s not very good with the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” Those were close to fighting words. Every last one of the teens had been raised and practically weaned on the librarian’s stories, and they weren’t much for the idea of anyone saying bad things about him. Especially not some old man they had never seen before. Maybe the old stranger knew that, because he quickly raised one hand to ward off any protests. “I’m not saying he’s a bad man or a liar, but I’d wager he edited the story down a bit, just to make it a little less gruesome.”

  Heather nodded. That made a fair bit of sense. Tim, who’d still been standing and looked ready to take a swing at the gray-haired codger, nodded as well and settled back down on the sleeping bag, next to Liz. The old man leaned in a little and grinned, his teeth flashing bright and strong in the shadow of his face. “I could tell you the rest of it if you like. I know all the stories.”

  There wasn’t a one of them who protested. There would be time for making out later, but what better place to hear about the witch than in the spot where she lived and died?

  Will rather sheepishly offered the man a beer, and he nodded and came closer, sitting in the stark white aura of the lantern. He took the Sam Adams and nodded his thanks, twisting off the top of the bottle with ease. After he’d taken a pull, he started speaking again.

  “I won’t bore you with the parts you’ve already heard. I’ll just fill you in on a few details that Douglas overlooked. First, he got the names all wrong. The witch’s name wasn’t ‘Hattie,’ he made that up. Probably because it was easy for little ones to remember. Or maybe because all the witches in pictures these days have those stupid, pointed hats.” He took another sip of beer. “Her name was Alvina Bathory. She was from England, and she came over to the New World on the Mayflower, just like several other people did. She stayed in New England for a while, and then when the folks up that way decided she was a little too strange for them, she moved down here.” He smiled almost wistfully, the unshaved stubble on his chin glowing silvery in the light. “She wasn’t a young woman when she came here, and she didn’t get any younger after she settled in. Most of the folks around here looked on her as a burden that they didn’t want to deal with.”

  He leaned in closer, his eyes squinting just a bit. “Any of you have grandparents off in a nursing home?” Liz nodded, lowering her eyes a bit. It was not something she was happy about; her grandmother had long since become a burden to her father. “Well, back then they didn’t have nursing homes. If you got old and didn’t have kin in the area, you had to count on the charity of your neighbors. Some of them didn’t much like being charitable. She had no one to chop wood for her or help her in any way, and that was hard for Alvina.” He shrugged and leaned back into the shadows again. “So she made herself a new family; one child at a time. Only Douglas left out the part about her sleeping with the men in town to get them going. She was a witch, not a god. She needed help with making a new life, so she seduced a few of the men and they made her pregnant.”

  He sighed again and sipped at the beer. His head shook from side to side before he spoke again. “You kids know what a witch is? A real witch?”

  “You mean like a Wicca?” Heather leaned forward a bit. Her aunt Margherita was a practicing Wiccan. “A nature worshipper?”

  The old man shook his head. “No, child, I mean a real witch. The sort that can work real magic, but pays a price for it.” He shuffled around in the near dark and then he put a cigarette between his lips. A moment later he had a flame in his hand and was lighting the thing. It gave off a thick, sweet odor. “Real witches are closer to what they talk about in fairy tales. She had to sell her soul and make sacrifices to keep her power. Just to get the men to look at her, she had to kill a young girl she found out in the woods. That girl was an innocent, you see, and by killing her and offering her body and spirit to the right powers, Alvina got to share in her beauty and youth for a while. Not many a man would have looked on Alvina as a lovely way to idle a few hours, but when she was properly disguised there were few who could resist her.

  “She found three men to seduce and used the oldest trick in the book on them. She let them think they were the ones doing the seducing. Don’t ask me all the details, because I don’t know them all, but she used her witchery to hold the seed of those three men inside her and then she called on her mast
ers, and asked them for a favor. The ones that answered didn’t care if she was fair or foul, young or old, and they gave her what she wanted: three children were born to Alvina on a Halloween night, their spirits summoned from different places in the world and given form in her womb.”

  He sipped at his beer again, and his eyes tracked from one teen to the next. When he looked at Heather she thought she’d pee her pants. There was something about him that was deeply unsettling, though he’d been nothing but pleasant.

  “She gave birth to her three children in the same night, screaming and howling in pain.” He looked at the teens and then directly at Heather again. “Think about that for a minute. Can you imagine what it must have been like to have three children grow inside you in just a few hours? Then to give birth to them as they clawed and kicked and tried to all but eat their way out?” Heather shuddered at the thought. Her cramps were bad enough and she’d already heard from her mother that childbirth was not exactly a pleasant romp through the rose bushes. “They were not normal babies. Oh, I know, you’ve heard the stories, but they don’t do justice. Each one had a special affinity with something different. Robert, her first born, was pale and thin and seldom ate anything other than bones. There were a lot of bones to be had around here, too. That young girl she’d sacrificed was his first meal. Old Bones, as your Mister Habersham called him, ate the bones in big, broken pieces, and what he did not eat he made a part of himself.”

  “What do you mean he made them a part of himself?” Tim spoke up, his face looking younger than usual. Heather could see he was caught up in the story.

  The old man cackled, his eyes glistening in the semi-darkness. “I mean he took the bones he liked and added them to his own. He’d just grab a thigh bone if he decided it suited his fancy, and place it where he wanted it and it became a part of his body.”