“I see,” said Bobbi faintly, though she didn’t really, and the word “power” frightened her.
“That was ten years ago,” said Witchie.
Shane nosed open the back door and came in again, looked at Bobbi a moment with his head held high, then went on into the parlor.
Bobbi said awkwardly, “Just ten years? I mean, the stories I heard made it sound like you’d been here a long time.”
“Must have been another hex witch of Seldom,” Witchie said.
It seemed odd that so small a place would have had more than one pow-wow. But Bobbi had had enough talk, and did not pursue it. Turning away, she took the comb and brush and rosewood hand mirror back upstairs to Witchie’s bedroom. When she came down, the old woman was sitting in the parlor rocker. And near Witchie’s feet, flat on the carpet, lay the walking stick.
Bobbi stopped where she was, staring like a spooked colt at Kabilde, the stick that spoke.
“Step over it,” Witchie told her.
Bobbi gave her a look. “What for?”
“Just do it. You afraid?”
The dare was so blatant that Bobbi continued to balk. “No! But why should I do what you say?”
Witchie harrumphed, but before she could speak Kabilde cut in from its place on the floor. “So the crazy old termagant will let me up, is why.” Its voice was dry, stinging and without texture, like smoke. Nothing about it moved or changed except the tiny mouth of the carved hazelwood snake. “Do what she says, youngster. It won’t hurt one way or the other.”
Bobbi liked the sound of that last even less than she liked stepping over the weird stick. Yet she found herself walking forward. She stepped over the staff squarely, at its middle—pride would not let her do otherwise. And as she passed over it, an odd, dislocated sense washed through her body, something not at all painful yet so uncomfortable that she squeaked and her hands shot up. She could see them for an instant, hovering in front of her face, her hands—but they were not hers. They seemed made of mist, curled and curved and white as crescent moons, and they—they belonged to someone else—
Then she was over Kabilde, and herself again, and furious at Witchie. “What’s the big ideal” she demanded, backing away from the staff.
“Just as I thought,” Witchie said as if to Shane or Kabilde or the parlor walls, not reacting to Bobbi’s anger. The old woman picked up Kabilde, got up from her rocker with a grunt and crossed the room to replace her walking stick in its urn before she said more. Then she turned and stated, “You’re a potent one, youngster. You can do things I can’t.”
Bobbi grew more puzzled than angry. Witchie looked very serious, yet she couldn’t understand what the old woman was talking about. She said with only a small edge to her voice, “Like what?”
“My golly days, girl!” Witchie shuffled back to her rocker, irritated. “Ain’t you noticed you got powers?”
“All I’ve ever noticed is I got craziness.”
“That’s part of it. You stop shrinking back from that, Bobbi, and learn to use it, and you’ll be able to do just about anything.”
Shane stood with his foot in its warm bath, listening, and Bobbi felt a sudden tingle of hope. Including—healing Shane’s cracked hoof in one moment, as if it had never been hurt? Including—bringing him back to being a man again?
If she could do those things for Shane, it would all be worth it, whatever she had to go through.
“How?” she demanded. “How do I learn to use it?”
Witchie’s soft old face moved almost into a smile. She leaned forward in her rocker and started to speak.
The telephone rang.
Shane’s head came sharply up from his hay. Bobbi stiffened, staring at the phone. Witchie looked at it as if it were a buzzing, poisonous black insect sitting atop the white lace doily of her drop-leaf table. Then she reached out to answer it.
From where they stood, listening, Shane and Bobbi heard the cicada-noises of the voice on the other end. Then Witchie pointed and rolled her eyes. It was Ethel next door, wanting to know what was wrong at the Fenstermacher place, that the blinds were drawn and yesterday’s newspaper still on the front porch, as if no one had been in or out.
“I’m entitled to be sick and lazy!” Witchie complained. “Yes. The grippe. No, I don’t want you to pick up my mail. It’s never nothing but bills. Just let it set.”
After more of Ethel’s shrilling, she grumpily declined all assistance and hung up. Bobbi let out her breath as if she had been holding it. She looked at Witchie, then at Shane; the two of them were staring at each other. But oddly, it was Kabilde who first spoke.
In its glassy-smooth voice, as startling as a snake coming through the parlor, the walking stick said, “Time you three decided what this side of hell you’re doing.”
There was a sound like a small explosion, and the smoky-glass handle of the cane started to glow, and Shane the man appeared in it as if on a tiny television screen. “No need for Witchie to do a thing more,” he said. “She done enough.”
“I’ll speak for myself,” Witchie snapped at him.
As if he had not heard her Shane said, “I’ll be moving on. I’ll be out of here before daylight.”
“Where to?” Bobbi protested. “You can’t travel on that hoof.”
“I been taking care of myself a long time, Bobbi.”
“Would you have some sense? You got a brand on your neck. Even if you was to get all the way back to Wyoming, anybody who sees that brand knows you belong to the government. They caught you once, they can catch you again, and you’ll be gelded for sure next time.”
“The girl’s right, Dark Rider.” Witchie’s voice sounded oddly gentle, for her, old witch that she was. “There’s only one way out that I can see.”
A long pause. Shane, when he spoke, sounded reluctant.
“What way?”
“You know what way, good as I do. Be a man again. Not likely anybody will mess with your balls then.” Witchie was making up for having spoken softly a moment before.
“Just my heart,” said Shane. “And my soul. And my mind, and my life.”
“Who would do that?” Bobbi demanded. The horse looked sidelong at her. When the small Shane in Kabilde’s crystal did not answer her, she insisted, “They’ll be looking for a black mustang, not a man. Who would mess with you?”
Shane did not reply. His image in Kabilde’s globelike handle clouded and disappeared. The mustang Shane carefully removed his foot from its bath, set the hoof on the towel a moment to dry it, then walked to Witchie with scarcely a limp and looked at her.
“I can only do it if you really want me to,” she told him. “Heart and soul and all.”
He lowered his proud head and let his face rest against the old woman’s flat bosom.
“You’re stronger than me,” Witchie said to him. “You have to help me. I’ll try.” Her hands came up to rest on either side of the long, black head. She closed her eyes. Shane had already closed his. Both of them stood very still for what seemed a considerable time to Bobbi, so long that she wanted to find a chair and sit down, but she did not dare move. She watched intently. Shane and Witchie looked as if they had stopped breathing, but their limbs trembled with tension. And Witchie’s hands—when had they started to move? So slow, might have been forever ago. They crept up Shane’s smooth cheekbones to his poll, the seat of every proud horse’s soul. They met at his forelock, and Witchie’s mouth moved, she started to whisper. Shane’s ears quivered and lay back against his neck. With an angry swish his tail lashed against his hind legs.
Witchie opened her eyes. “I can’t help you unless you want it,” she said in a toneless voice, and she stepped back from Shane and sank down in the ladderback rocker. Shane’s head hung low. Bobbi came and laid her hand on the black shoulder.
A knock sounded at the front door.
Bobbi went rigid, feeling Shane jump beneath her hand. But there was nowhere to run to and no place to hide a horse. Witchie bawled out, “Who�
��s there?”
“It’s me!” announced the high-pitched voice of the overfriendly neighbor.
“Ethel, I ain’t decent!” Witchie yelled. “Or the house, neither!”
“It don’t matter! I just want to give you some rice soup!”
“Holy gee, I got to go to the pot again!” bellowed Witchie with convincing desperation. “I got the trots, Ethel. Just leave that there and I’ll get it later!” Witchie thumped up the stairs. Bobbi and Shane stood where they were, not daring to move, staring at the glass parlor doorknob. Ethel tried to come in; the knob rattled and moved. But the door was locked. With relief, Bobbi heard Ethel walking down the porch steps—
“Jesus shit!” she swore softly. Ethel was going around back.
Bobbi saw the neighbor’s shadow cross the side window and thought wildly. Shane could move out of eyeshot of the back door, but there was no way she could move all the paraphernalia, the hay, the oats, the water bucket, the Epsom salts bath in time. And she would make considerable noise if she tried. And—and there was no time.
Determined to come in and leave her soup on the kitchen table, Ethel was at the back door. It would just have to be locked.
Bobbi stared. Through the parlor archway she could see the kitchen door, its inside knob, the ornate brass dark with age and shiny with wear, and she watched the door, the knob, with widened eyes, picturing the mechanism within her mind, willing it to be locked. The knob stirred. Be locked. Be locked—
It was.
For a while there was silence, and then Bobbi heard Ethel set down her offering of soup on the back steps and go away.
But—that door could not possibly have been locked. It was a wonder it was even latched. Shane had come in from outside, pushing it open with his head. No one had been near it since.
Witchie came down from upstairs. “I told you,” she said mildly to Bobbi, “you put your mind to it, you can do—”
Bobbi felt half panicked, and not only on account of Ethel’s persistence. She cut in, “We’re leaving. Shane and me got to get out of here as soon as it’s dark.”
Shane swung his head and gave her a look as if to say, Speak for yourself. She ignored him.
“I got to fix up his hoof somehow so he can travel,” she went on. “You got any duct tape?”
Of course she did, in the attic. But Witchie shook her head irritably. “That’s no good. You go to Samuel Bissel.”
“Who?”
“An old Amish blacksmith, lives not far from here. He’s one of the Circle. You’ll have to go along with Shane and tell him I sent you. Then he should help you.”
“A horseshoer?” Bobbi was astonished, not because there was a farrier nearby, but because he was—what Witchie said he was.
Witchie grumbled, “My stars, girl. Smiths have had powers since the day metal was born. Don’t be afraid of old Bissel, or he’ll know it. I’d come with you, but I got to stay home and have the grippe.” Witchie’s tone filled with disgust. “Ethel’s sure to call again.”
Bobbi stood feeling chilly. A farrier with—what, a magic hammer? Another sort of witch to deal with.
“Good Lord, Bobbi.” Aunt Witchie sounded annoyed and tender at the same time. “Anybody who can stare my back door silly don’t need to be afraid of Samuel Bissel.”
Chapter Eleven
Old Bissel (or the old pisser, as Bobbi took to calling him in her mind) lived half a mile up the Seldom road and back in the woods. She and Shane did not take the road, of course, but walked through the woods, Shane with one hoof in a heavy sock, Bobbi at the horse’s side. They had to keep close enough to the road so that they could find their way, but hide from the headlights of the occasional car that passed. Between cars, the night was very dark. Bobbi rested a hand on Shane’s shoulder so as to stay with him. The other hand swung empty. Witchie had packed spare clothes and some food in a brown paper bag, but the old Dutchwoman had been so generous with the food, making the bag so heavy, that Bobbi was to stop back for it. Bobbi thought of Witchie with mingled affection and annoyance, remembering the supper of rice soup, the goodbyes complicated by gifts of bananas and cheese and bread and corn chips and Lebanon bologna. Witchie had distracted Ethel with a ringing telephone while Bobbi and Shane had slipped out into the night, just in case old eagle-eye Ethel might see anything.… The day had been tiring, too full of danger and decisions and weirdness, and it was not over yet. Stumbling over rocks and stumps in the dark …
At a small distance, in the black interstices of the woods, Bobbi saw something drift whitely.
“No,” she muttered. It hovered ahead, the way she and Shane had to go, and it seemed to be waiting for them.
“Bobbi.” The voice sounded inside her head—her father’s voice, which she had never heard. Not in any real way. Just in this ghostly farce. She couldn’t stand it. Too much.
“No,” she said aloud. “No more. Not today.”
“Bobbi!” Urgently.
She didn’t like people talking inside her head, and with a surge of angry energy she sent the voice away. Her anger crackled in her mind. She had her own urgent business to attend to.
“I tell you no!” she shouted at the woods. “Not now! I ain’t talking to no buck’s behind now!”
Scared, the deer bobbed away. If it was a deer. She didn’t hear anything above her own noise, and she couldn’t tell. A deer wouldn’t have waited for them to come so close … she didn’t care.
Shane swung his head curiously when she shouted, then continued on his way. She wondered briefly what he had seen or heard. Too much trouble to ask him. She stumbled on through the dark.
Her feet found open flatness, the grit of gravel. Samuel Bissel’s long driveway. A relief. But the stones were sharp underfoot; Shane hobbled. Bobbi felt the hitch in his gait through his shoulder, where her palm still rested.
The house loomed dim ahead. No electric lights for the Amishman. Though he was no Amishman in fact, Bobbi knew, but one of the Circle in that form, if she understood correctly.
Old Bissel came out to meet them like a shadow in the night, standing on his rickety porch with a candle in a lantern. He had heard them coming, or perhaps he knew by other means when there were visitors about. Bobbi saw the wild, white bristle of untrimmed beard growing right up to his sharp, dark eyes. She saw the baggy black coverall trousers, a rusty, nearly formless black, not at all like the crisp and shining black clothing Shane wore. She saw the plain green shirt, the homely black hat. She heard no sound in the night except the crunch of Shane’s hooves on stone. Samuel Bissel held the lantern and said nothing.
Bobbi said, “Mrs. Fenstermacher sent us. She wants you to care for this horse’s feet and be quiet about it.”
Samuel Bissel said, “The forge is banked for the night.”
Something about him made Bobbi afraid, and because she had fear to hide, she spoke brashly. “Fire it up again! We have to be in the next county by morning.”
She saw a movement of the wild white beard. The Amishman was smiling, a sour, knowing smile. He turned, strode the length of the rotting porch, stepped down off it and with the lantern led the way to the forge.
From what Bobbi could see, the place used to be a farm, but cedars and scrub trees were taking it over. The forge was in the barn. Samuel Bissel flicked a switch; a bare electric bulb flared overhead, and he blew out his lantern. A few renegade Amishmen might use electricity in the barn, Bobbi knew, but no Amishman would let his house rot or his land go to scrub. She wondered if Bissel had a wife. He should not have grown a beard until he had taken a wife, and there should be many children, keeping the house trim, making the farm shine.… The smith, the immortal with magical powers, did not seem to fit into the form he had taken the way Shane fit into a wild horse’s black form.
She bent and slipped the protective sock off Shane’s injured hoof, then stood and studied Bissel. Now that she could see him better, she saw no more than before. His flat hat shadowed his sharp eyes, his bristle of beard hid his fac
e, baggy clothing hid his body. Except … she could see form beyond the form. Dark … no. It was just barn shadows. She was too tired to see more.
Samuel Bissel studied the horse’s hooves with a shadowed and glinting glance.
“Too small,” he said curtly. “We’ll spread ’em. Quarter crack in the off fore. It’ll take clips.”
He said nothing of the strange fact that Shane was standing in his smithy loose, without halter or lead line or even so much as a rope looped around his neck, and with blue eyes blazing.
Bobbi nodded. She did not want to make conversation with this man. She and Shane waited in silence for a considerable time while Bissel heated up his forge. He used a huge, old-fashioned, coke-burning forge, and worked the bellows with his foot. And unlike every other farrier Bobbi had ever met, all of whom started with pre-shaped, factory-made horseshoes, old Bissel started with bar steel. While the first bar was heating red-hot in the white-hot forge, he trimmed Shane’s hooves level and even. A good job, Bobbi could see that; Bissel knew what he was doing. But he knew something more, and she could see that too. He picked up Shane’s feet without a word or a pat, without preamble, as if Shane was a jointed toy, not a horse that could kick a kneecap to smithereens, break an arm or smash a skull. As if he knew Shane would not harm him. As if he knew Shane was no horse at all.
Just as well, Bobbi decided. Shane would not appreciate patting and sweet talk the way a horse would.
She stood watching the black stud, watching the straight, alert lines of his head and shoulders, knowing she would be with him yet a while. Wearing horseshoes, he could not go off on his own. He would need her or some human to take them off when his hooves grew long. The shoes would have to be removed, the hooves trimmed, and the shoes reset two or three times more before the crack grew out entirely and was gone. Bobbi would stay with him that long, at least.
The Hex Witch of Seldom Page 11