The Hex Witch of Seldom

by Nancy Springer

  Without speaking to that Shane asked, “Where is this place we’re going?”

  As best she could, Bobbi told him. She knew that she and Grandpap drove through Crown Stone when they went to see her mother, and she estimated the distance after that to be maybe two days’ ride on horseback. She knew which mountains to cross: Bupp’s Knob, where she and Witchie had found Shane, then Eagle, Blue Baldie and Witherow’s Ridge. She knew the way by car. But following hard roads and following ridgetop trails are two far different undertakings, as she found when she tried to tell the way to Shane. The institution was isolated far out in the country, because peaceful, scenic surroundings were good for the mentally disturbed, the administrators said. Because towns and the people in them don’t want the crazies too close at hand, Bobbi knew from hearing her elders talk. Whatever the reasons, the place was put so far from anywhere that she couldn’t explain to Shane how to get there.

  Finally, in brilliance or exasperation, she said to the walking stick, “Kabilde, can you show him?”

  The surface of the globe swirled as if gray mist or smoke moved there. Shane’s face vanished, and instead Bobbi saw the so-called cottage where her mother lived. Since Chantilly Yandro was not dangerous, she had been placed in a small “group arrangement” at the edge of the campus. The image began dwindling, as if a camera was drawing back to show the larger scale, and hastily Bobbi thrust the cane forward, holding it by the tip, so that Shane could see.

  After a moment its light dimmed, and she drew it back. The globe had gone dark and blank. She could not talk with Shane any longer.

  The mustang walked on. It started to rain.

  A steady, chilly, soaking springtime rain worked its way through her windbreaker, soaking her to the skin even through her boots. Hunched over in mute protest, Bobbi rode. Shane speeded from his walk to a trot only when he reached the base of Bupp’s Knob, where woods turned to small, ragged fields and where a few houses stood, a few small roads ran. He trotted and cantered across the benighted valley to the base of Eagle, where woods began again, before dawn. Then he slowed to a walk again and began toiling his way upslope. The rain went on. Big, secondhand drops of water plopped down from the trees, somehow even colder than proper raindrops. Bobbi set her lips hard. There would be no use complaining.

  She could not tell when sunrise was. Black night turned to gray, rainy day, was all. Sometime still in morning, Shane crested Eagle. Then he stopped. Woods stretched for miles all around. Few people came to the top of Eagle except in hunting season. Bobbi got down, and Shane did something she had never seen him do: lay down flat on his side and fell at once into a deep sleep, the sort of sleep a stallion in the wild seldom allows himself. Or a gunslinger.

  In the pouring rain. Bobbi wished she had something to cover him with, but there was nothing. No shelter for her, either.

  She sat down on the soaking pine needles near him, stuck the end of her braid in her mouth and sucked it. She felt hazy and stupid with fatigue of body and mind. Mostly of mind. Too much had happened, too fast, and she could not focus on any of it, and it took her a while to realize that she was thirsty. There had been no stops to drink at streams during the night, and the rainwater that had dribbled into her mouth was not enough. Nor was sucking at her braid enough.

  She looked at the walking stick lying on the ground. The carved snake looked back.

  “Sorry,” she said, remembering that the staff did not like to be laid flat. She leaned it up against a tree, wondering why Kabilde was so reticent it hardly ever spoke aloud. She positioned it gingerly, then pulled her hands away and wanted not to touch it again, for she could not gauge the staff’s mood, and still felt half afraid of it, though she had been carrying it most of the night. But her throat ached with thirst. After a moment she reached for the crystal handle, unscrewing it. Kabilde, as she had thought it would, knew she was thirsty. The stick presented her with a flask full of clear, cold beverage, and she drank it all. “Thanks,” she said humbly as she replaced the stopper and returned the flask to the staff.

  Her body was confused by nighttime travel and the strain of being a runaway. She felt very tired yet not at all sleepy. Now that there was a chance to sleep, her eyes opened so wide they burned. Her hands fiddled with twigs, and the loud chirp of a bird made her jump. She sat in the rain, uselessly wondering where her bag of spare clothing had been left in all the confusion, whether at the gypsy camp or in the trunk of a gypsy’s car or behind a rock in the abandoned pasture near the buggy. After a while it occurred to her that she was hungry. Her body was not sending her clear signals, but she had to be hungry. Not expecting much, she took the handle off the walking stick again. There was a spiral-striped plastic cannister full of M&M’s in there. She giggled and ate almost all of them, stopping only when she began to feel sick.

  The day felt very long already, and it couldn’t yet be noon. Bobbi sat with the calf muscles of her legs twitching, restless and shivering with cold and bored and feeling very much alone. She wanted something, but she wasn’t sure what. And the walking stick was the only waking person—or at least, companion—on the mountaintop with her.

  “Kabilde,” she requested timidly, “can you show me my father? I mean, when he was alive. What he was really like.”

  Because she had been mostly talking to herself, it startled her badly when the passionless voice of the staff answered her. “What is gone is gone,” Kabilde said.

  “You can’t show the past, then,” Bobbi managed to reply.

  “Only what is.”

  The staff’s white light faintly glowed, the mist swirled in the crystal, then cleared into—mountain mist, rising beneath the rain. Posts of a pipe corral showed faintly through it. The lean, tough, clean-shaven old man stood by the fence, idle, as he ought not to have been idle, and leaning, as he never leaned, as if something hurt him. Staring into the mist, a ravaged look on his face. Her grandfather.

  “No!” Bobbi shouted at her first glimpse of him. She shut her eyes and covered them with her hands. Her shout roused Shane. She heard the black horse stirring, and then she heard the dark rider’s voice speak to her from the walking stick’s globe. “Bobbi.”

  “What,” she muttered. Shane’s voice was low, intense, vibrant. The sound of it always thrilled her. But this time she would not look at him.

  There was silence for a while. Then Shane said simply, “Go to sleep.”

  She did what he said, slumped sideward without opening her eyes, lay in the rain and slept.

  When she awoke at dusk, the walking stick stood looking ordinary, or as ordinary as any carved cane with silver ferrule and crystal handle. The rain had stopped. Shane was on his feet, eating the new leaves, mouthing the twigs for the moisture on them.

  “Shane,” Bobbi said, and she reached for Kabilde. She meant to bring out the flask for the mustang-man. But Kabilde spoke.

  “Strike my tip to the ground,” said the staff, its glassy voice seeming to float through the air like ice on water.

  “Huh?” said Bobbi, though the words had been perfectly clear.

  “Strike my steel tip to the ground.” A trace of bite in the words. Kabilde did not like to speak twice.

  She took the staff by its handle and gave the ground at her feet a hesitant tap. Nothing happened except that water started to seep muddily out of the loam. From all the rain, she supposed.

  “Harder,” Kabilde ordered. “I said strike.”

  Irritated, Bobbi lifted Kabilde and gave the mountaintop a hard whack, then stood aghast. The ground seemed to tremble under her feet. There was a splitting sound, as if bedrock had broken. And water burst out of the top of Eagle mountain, a strong spring where no spring ought to be, forming a clear pool before it ran away downslope.

  Shane came over, lowered his head in a matter-of-fact way and drank.

  “You are strong enough in power, you can do that,” Kabilde said with no passion of any sort in its voice. If Bobbi had hurt the staff, it was not telling. “Mrs. Fensterm
acher cannot.”

  “Huh,” Bobbi muttered, feeling not very fond of Kabilde. And afraid, though not very afraid; she seemed too tired all the time to be very afraid. And if she had thought about it, she would have known her fear was not really of the walking stick.

  That night she and Shane traveled at speed when the forest allowed it; Shane had rested, and his cracked hoof no longer troubled him. Sometime around midnight Bobbi ate the licorice Kabilde gave her, and for the first time in her life she thought with longing of proper cooked food, of hot carrots and potatoes and pot roast. She shivered in her damp clothes. Her arm ached from carrying the staff. Whenever she tried to hold it across Shane’s withers, or against her chest, or any other way than straight down at her side, it caught in the ever-present trees and bushes, and more than once she thought of ditching it, except that she knew Witchie would never forgive her.

  Witchie. How was Witchie doing, she wondered, and where was the old hag? Not in jail, she hoped. Bobbi knew she had to get the pow-wow staff back to Witchie first chance she got, and not just to be nice, either. The thing was weird. Bobbi didn’t want to carry it around for long.

  By dawn, the character of the land had changed. No longer was Bobbi riding a black mustang through miles and miles of mountaintop forest. It went on, sweeping north and eastward, without them, but they had come down into cleared foothills, a maze of farm lanes, cornfield, pasture, and barbed-wire fences. Shane snorted and leaped the first fence from a standstill, dodged the woodchuck holes crowding at the woods line, then struck out with a long, reaching lope across the open expanse beyond, where trees no longer hindered him. Wyoming, Bobbi thought. He’s thinking of running the rangelands of Wyoming. With relief that equalled his, she laid the walking stick across his withers, shook the ache out of her arm, then hung onto the stick with one hand and the black mustang’s mane with the other as Shane jumped fence after fence. Bobbi winced at each fence. Around horses, barbed wire could be trusted only to lay open ugly gashes, bring the animal crashing down in a bloody tangle. She knew Shane was no horse, whatever his form, but still she flinched each time he bunched his haunches to leap.

  He felt her stiffening. At the first farm lane, he changed course to canter along the grassy ruts, following the crazy zigs and zags as the lane followed field lines, cornered around field ends. Down a long hill the lane led to a farmyard, and Bobbi winced again as Shane carried her at a gallop past three barking farm dogs chained to their shelters against the barn. She did not turn her head to watch the lights go on in the house. Shane had struck a dirt road at the head of the driveway, and he galloped along its meandering course, letting it take him, like a stream, in its own winding time down the hillsides.

  As the sun came up, Shane slowed to a walk, then stood still on a rise for a moment, breathing. In the distance, far down the valley, Bobbi could see the blunt redstone towers of the asylum where her mother was kept. “That’s it,” she said to Shane. “How did you know?” Not expecting an answer.

  He went on at the walk.

  It felt odd to Bobbi, a mountain girl, to be able to look around the open farmland and see where she was going and where she had been. Ahead, no bigger than her thumbnail, stood the redstone towers in their fenced park, their haze of greening maple. And glancing behind her, seeing the fields and fences, the fallow, veering course of the farm lane and the house where the three dogs had barked—seeing the soft brown bit of fluff that was one of the dogs—seeing the fencelines (though not the barbed wire fences themselves, at the distance) and the tan sweep of the dirt road into folds and over hilltops, Bobbi seemed to see the tiny figure of a girl on a black mustang, the girl’s head up and facing the wind, the horse’s legs no bigger than eyelashes, seemed to see it clear and wee as if in Kabilde’s globe, the girl and the horse galloping, always galloping. Ghost of her own past, behind her.

  But Kabilde could not have showed it to her. What was gone was gone.

  “Bobbi.”

  The voice sounded inside her head. “Speak of angels,” she said sourly, though she had not in fact spoken of ghosts. The white haze of her father’s presence hovered in air ahead. Shane walked steadily toward it, and it kept an even distance ahead of him.

  “Bobbi, what do you want with your mother?”

  She did not in fact know what she wanted her mother to do about Shane. But the question went deeper, touched a sore spot. There was something she wanted of her mother, a need felt more than thought about. And trying to think about it, to put it in words, tangled her up and threw her and made her mad, just as thinking about her grandfather did. An angry answer jumped out of her.

  “What’s it to you? Why are you always meddling?”

  Shane walked steadily on, ignoring her shout, either ignoring or not seeing the white blur in the air ahead.

  “You may recall that your mother and I were related by marriage,” Wright Yandro said mildly inside Bobbi’s head. “I take an interest in what affects her.”

  Her anger gone, Bobbi looked up curiously, staring at the cloudy whiteness in the air.

  “What were you and Mom like?” she asked. “I mean, really?”

  All at once, though nothing had swirled or shifted in the white blur, she could see her father’s face, as if a puzzle-picture had just come into focus for her. Or as if she had just allowed herself to see him. He looked not much older than she was herself. Of course not; he had been just past his teens when he died. And the look on his face, as if … Bobbi felt an odd tug at her heart, seeing him so young, so—so feeling, as if he could have been—something to her.

  She said, “I mean, did you—love each other?”

  “Nah. People just get married because they detest each other. Judas Priest, girl!”

  The tart reply sounded so much like something her Grandpap might have said that it made her angry again. Her jaw clamped tight, and her father’s face was gone; only a cloudy whiteness remained.

  She said, “Go away. Quit bothering me. You’re dead.”

  “Bobbi, if you’d just give it a chance I wouldn’t have to be dead to you!”

  “You’re messing around in my life. Pretty soon you’ll make me as crazy as my mother. Are you the one who drove her crazy?”

  She said that just to hurt him. But he answered her with a trembling voice. “Bobbi, you know she—she lost it after I died. The war—the war did it to her. It was a dirty, stinking little war, and she had ideas—of what a war should be—and when they sent me home in pieces—”

  “Go away!” she shouted at him. “What’s gone is gone.” She shut her eyes and willed him away. When she opened her eyes again, the white haze of Wright Yandro’s presence had disappeared.

  Swiveling on Shane’s back, she scanned the land behind her. A shadow lay over it. A cloud was passing.

  She turned to face forward, looking out over Shane’s fox-pricked ears. What lay ahead, lay ahead.

  Chapter Sixteen

  By midmorning she and Shane had reached the Safe Haven Home for the Chronically Disturbed.

  A gaunt, gargoyled structure, massively built of brick-colored Pennsylvania redstone on a foundation of gray granite, it loomed four stories high, plus towers. The small, iron-barred windows and the dark weather stains on the stones made it look like some glowering, weeping house out of a Gothic horror story. Not a place Bobbi had ever very much liked, but the fence around it was only the usual wrought-iron manifestation of wealth, dating back to the time when the mansion had been built by some rich steel magnate from Pittsburgh as a summer home. The ostentatious gates stood wide open in expectation of deliveries. Shane trotted in and up the paved, curving drive. A man in coveralls stared at him and Bobbi. Neither of them stared back.

  “Over there,” Bobbi said, pointing with the walking stick. But Shane had already recognized the cottage and was heading that way.

  Built of the same redstone as the rest of the place, it might once have been the caretaker’s home. Now it housed six of the less violent, though not necessar
ily housebroken women. Shane stopped close by the door, and Bobbi slid off him and ran in, taking Kabilde with her. Wobbling, because she had not even waited to get her land legs back, she ran. The coveralled fellow would be talking with his boss by now. And a black horse standing at the cottage doorstep was hard to miss noticing. There would not be much time.

  A middle-aged patient shuffled past her like an old woman, muttering to herself and rolling a sizable ball of lint and carpet fuzz and hair combings between her forefinger and thumb. Her hand was misshapen from a lifetime of constantly gathering and holding such balls. She had been at the home for as long as Bobbi could remember, but neither of them looked at or greeted the other. Somewhere in one of the rooms the screamer was screaming. Bobbi knew better than to pay any attention. There was always a screamer in residence, and there always would be. A chunky nurse in white pantsuit and thick-soled white shoes came out of a room, saw Bobbi and nearly dropped the tray she was carrying. Bobbi ran past her to find her mother.

  Chantilly Lou Yandro was in her room, playing with makeup while her roommate crooned and rocked, mostly naked, in the middle of a rumpled bed. Chantilly Lou at least was fully clothed, Bobbi noted thankfully. She had on a silk-look emerald-green evening gown, Cinderella style, as if she were going to the prince’s ball. Her slightly pouting lips were perfectly outlined in vivid scarlet, but she had other colors of makeup clownishly smeared all over her face. Her mane of brunette hair hung wildly tangled, full as a horse’s tail before a lightning storm, above her slender, narrow shoulders. She regarded her daughter reproachfully. “Melly,” she drawled, “why have you taken Ashley away from me?” She fluttered her eyelashes, black and thick, courtesy of Cover Girl. One thin hand languidly moved an invisible fan.

  Invisible except to Bobbi. She saw the form behind the form—

  No time for that. “I’m not Melly,” Bobbi told her impatiently. “I’m Bobbi. Your daughter, Bobbi.”

  “Of course you’d say that, Melanie Hamilton. You always were a fool. A simpering, mousy little fool.”