The Honey Witch (A Tale of Supernatural Suspense)

by Thayer Berlyn

  Ana studied me carefully through the blue lenses of her sunglasses. I could sense the suspicion in those violet red eyes as she raised her chin doubtfully. Though I thought she might respond, she remained steadfastly silent.

  I sighed in frustration, replacing my sunglasses. She was one of the most acerbic human beings I had ever encountered beyond a first impression.

  She turned and began walking again. Again, I caught up with her steps.

  "Look, I know you're not the, "Off with his head," Red Queen you wish for me to believe,” I told her. “I saw you with that boy.”

  She whirled around and her eyes took on the sheen of shimmering ice. I responded with a challenging smile.

  "Come with me to this picnic going on tomorrow," I offered cheerily. “You might even find you enjoy the company of a Yankee escort after all.”

  I sensed I had taken her control away, however briefly, with the added playfulness and unveiled a vulnerability she fought desperately to preserve. With the unexpected change in direction, she appeared almost bewildered.

  "You think you are very clever, Wort Doctor," she remarked irritably. "What if I were to refuse?"

  "You won't."

  "Why?"

  "Because you wish to know what my purpose is," I replied, "more than you want to remain indifferent. You wish to know if I am sincere, more than you want to know if I am a liar."

  Ana narrowed her eyes dubiously and the merest flicker of a smile trembled at the corner of her full mouth. I waited cautiously, yet fairly confident she would agree. But her expression became suddenly unreadable. She scanned the tops of the trees toward the dirt footpath leading into the forest. Like an alert, ferine animal, she remained frozen in place, intent on identifying a sound only her ears, alone, could comprehend. She dropped the parasol and basket of eggs, turned and ran up the forest path with the swift grace of a startled gazelle. I quickly gathered up the discarded articles and followed in her direction.

  Beyond the tall oaks, Ana stood at the foot of her porch steps, holding the infant of a tall, muscular man and a petite, dark haired woman. I could not decode the hushed tones as the three spoke in rapid succession, one to the other, and only when Ana took the child expeditiously into the cabin, did I venture an approach.

  I set the parasol and egg basket on the porch, nodding in quiet acknowledgment to the solemn, apparently trusting couple.

  The man, tall and bold in feature, withdrew a rolled tobacco pouch and a flat stemmed pipe from the breast pocket of his flannel shirt. He walked toward the row of white oaks and soon a spiraling cylinder of contemplative smoke rose in the air. The woman sat down on the porch step and reached out her hand. Taking hold of that frail appendage, I sat easily down beside her.

  The woman tightened her grip against my hand and closed her dark eyes, gently swaying to the rhythm of her own humming. When she finally did open her eyes, she focused on the man’s thoughtful silence at the base of the oaks.

  "Our son was bitten by the brown spider," she informed me. She rose to her feet and said, "Come. Walk with me to the garden."

  Without protest, I followed her to the back of the cabin and through the primitive garden gate. She detached a wicker basket from a short pole and began plucking out the sparse weed growth in and around a row of ruffled radish leaves.

  "You trust this woman with the very life of your child," I remarked, speaking as though I, myself, had no doubt. The woman swung her raven hair over her shoulder with a single sweep of her slender hand. In that single gesture, I came to realize how lovely she was.

  "Ana has medicine," said the woman.

  "And a doctor?" I inquired, tossing a handful of weeds into the basket. "Down the mountain?"

  "Too far and too late," was her simple reply. “The ways of Ana are powerful. All on the mountain know this."

  Time seemed to slow as I tightened the trellis strings of a row of virgin pea vines, content to work quietly alongside a woman I did not know.

  The back door opened and Ana stood with a glazed clay pitcher in her hand.

  "Merilee," she beckoned, "fill with water."

  The woman rose from the patch of spring strawberries and retrieved the pitcher from Ana’s hands; pumping the requested water, vigorously, from the well I drank from only the evening before. She returned quickly to the back door and was ushered inside the cabin without word. I set the basket of garden debris on the outside of the fence, just as the door opened and Ana stepped outside. It was then I witnessed the blood dripping at the corners of her mouth.

  With an increasing tightness in my chest, I watched as Ana grasped her convulsing belly and proceed to wretch a vile, discolored substance onto the grass. She inhaled a choking breath and in that one moment, it appeared her teeth were no longer straight, but had shaped into points unrecognizable as human. Beads of perspiration and blood droplets glistened against her brow as she crawled to the well, and weakly attempted to reach the handle.

  I shook off the grip of spurious imaginings and primed the pump until the cold, clear water gushed over her convulsing body. She emitted a scream that quivered the very limbs of the surrounding trees and collapsed forward in a faint…the final drips of the stilled well spattering against the soaked braid of her hair.

  A deafening silence filled the air. I fell to my knees beside her and raised her upper body from the concrete slab. Her arm fell limply at her side. The stalwart father of the stricken infant gripped my shoulder and shook his head deliberately. He picked up the inert woman in his arms and walked, without explanation, beyond the edge of the forest. I felt the compulsion to run after him and shout out my objection, but found myself rendered immobile with that alarming paralysis one often experiences in dreams of flight.

  The creaking sound of the well pump brought my attention back to the moment. Merilee nudged my elbow and held out a chipped enamel cup filled with cool water.

  "Drink the water," she urged.

  "What just happened here?" I managed to ask, clutching her wrist.

  "Drink the water," she repeated.

  "Where's he taking her?" I wanted to know. "Your husband. Where is he taking her?"

  "To the earth," said Merilee, "to sleep. Drink."

  "What are you saying?" I asked, even as I accepted the enamel cup from her hand, drank and almost retched. Merilee offered no reply. The cup slipped from my hands and dropped noiselessly to the ground. I ran my fingers through my hair, sweat mingling with the previous splashes of well water. The agitation in my limbs surged with each shallow breath. "What in the hell just happened here?" I asked Merilee; asked no one; asked, but not fully cognizant as to whom it was I addressed, nor from where the answer might come.

  "I will get my son," Merilee announced.

  She returned to the cabin and exited a moment later with the child wrapped in a soft, clean blanket and sleeping undisturbed in her arms.

  "The poison is gone," Merilee said. "Here, see?" She unwrapped the end of the blanket to reveal a cloth bandage wound artfully around the child's leg. "Clem, look, see."

  The dark handsome Clem, returned and alone, stepped forward and stood towering over the mother of his child with a relieved, satisfied nod. He offered me a tight handshake in a gesture of comradeship.

  "Wait here," he advised, "until Ana returns."

  When I reached the front porch, I sat on the quilted cot in a stupor of revolving scenes parading through my head.

  ~*~

  Chapter VI

  The modulation of grating repetition, of straw sweeping against wood, snapped my senses out of the barrenness of a deadened sleep. For a disarranged moment, I lost comprehension of where I actually was or how I managed to move from the cot, to the braided rug, with no memory of having done so.

  I tossed aside the patchwork quilt that I also didn't remember covering with.

  "Hey,” Jolene greeted wryly. She set the broom against the rim of the door-frame and poured a tall glass of cider from a red tin pitcher set out on a small table.r />
  "You didn't expect to see me, did you, Mr. Boston," she remarked, handing me the glass. She picked up the crumpled quilt and shook it over the porch rail. "You were shivering in your sleep," she added, placing the coverlet on the back of the rocking chair. "And on such a warm day, too."

  I rose to my feet and attempted to sort through the haze in my mind. Jolene withdrew my folded sunglasses from her pocket. "I found these in the garden. Shame to cover those pretty brown eyes. Don't know quite what you're thinkin’, then." Unfolding the sunglasses, I placed them on top of my head and watched Jolene rattle a potted geranium of excess water over the step ledge.

  "Ana?" I inquired, more abrupt than I wished to sound. “How is she?” I was unnerved by a sudden desire to demand answers from this woman, who contemplated me now through dark, attentive eyes and whose very self-possession was no less disconcerting than Ana Lagori's, herself.

  "Asleep," said Jolene, replacing the blooming plant on the step.

  She sensed my skepticism and raised a brow. Opening the screen door, she gestured inside. I peered into the large, dense room and in the corner, on a metal framed bed, lay a disheveled Ana, curled into a fetal position beneath a down spread. On the bedside table, someone placed a mason jar of fresh spring wildflowers.

  The air was heady, spiced with collected vegetation piled atop a claw foot oak table at the very center of the room. I briefly surveyed the shelves of canned fruits and vegetables near a dry sink; the large cast iron oven at the end of a long counter space, an outdated wooden icebox and the ceiling strung with drying herbs and roots. A massive apothecary cupboard, placed against a back partition wall, was filled with powders and barks in labeled containers.

  I turned away and stood at the top of the porch steps, looking out over the lawn to the towering oaks at the edge. A fire had been lit beneath the iron cauldron and a basket of linens sat waiting beneath the clothesline.

  "You think you've seen a monster and not the woman," surmised Jolene, "but in all this, you forget the child who was healed. A child who would be dead before the road below the mountain was reached." She closed the door and stepped to the railing, leaning her backside against it. "You think you have witnessed something unholy and you fight with your scientific mind: was it real? or, did you simply imagine it? And yet, you know nothing at all. You think you want to know and then you think maybe you don't want to know after all."

  I inhaled a deep contemplative breath, exhaling it slowly. I wanted to say that all I had witnessed was the demonstration of an extremely ill woman. I wanted to say that any truth in what I had seen was possible only in the mindset of a superstitious mountain people who desired, above all, to believe that in the face of poverty and isolation, they did not need the services of qualified professionals. I wanted to say that it was far less despairing to place faith in an uncommon woman who, though possessed of provisional medical skills, was, at best, a mere folk healer and at worst, a proficient actress.

  I wanted to say these things. I wanted to believe these things. In the end, all I was left with was the self-doubt over what I had witnessed being little more than a distortion. I knew the effects of shock: all things vivid, yet blurred at once.

  And I recognized these symptoms now in myself.

  Jolene turned and gripped the wood of the railing. "When you come to call tomorrow, bring some white lilacs that grow on the edge of the Four Corners. They are her favorite."

  "Tomorrow?"

  "The picnic," said Jolene. "You haven't forgotten already? Fickle as any man, you are."

  I smiled with little humor. "Yes, the picnic." I stepped from the porch and slid the sunglasses down over my eyes. "How did you know?"

  "Know what?" replied Jolene pensively.

  "That I asked Ana to this picnic event."

  "Why wouldn't you?" Jolene smiled.

  "Indeed," I responded with a lingering distraction, "why would I not?" Presumably, Ana was in no condition to tell anyone anything. Then again, it would be difficult to sustain such an elaborate ruse alone.

  I looked at my watch and it was three forty-five, which meant I had slept over three and a half-hours on the hardwood of Ana Lagori’s front porch. I glanced up at Jolene, who continued to smile in that fixed, indulgent way of hers, and asked if she didn't find any of this odd. She shook her head with no hesitation, a negative hum her only response.

  "Is she going to be all right?" I inquired.

  For all that reason argued that this was little more than a carnival side show, even given the gravity of the child's condition, Ana Lagori had expended sufficient energy in her demonstration to cause some concern in my mind.

  “Yep,” smiled Jolene, as though the answer were quite clear.

  "Tell Ana..." I began, considering I would extend some sympathetic thought, but thinking twice, simply sad: "Tell her I will see her tomorrow afternoon."

  I turned and walked away.

  "The white lilacs, remember," Jolene called out.

  "I won't forget," I replied.

  "See that you don't," Jolene stated dispassionately. I waved my hand in distracted acknowledgment and kept walking. I could feel her gaze at my back, until I was well out of sight down the dirt trail that gently sloped to the uncomplicated retreat of my own rented space. ***

  Spreading both the floor and table with source material I brought from Boston, I gathered copy notes on known antiseptic plants into one pile, folklore into another and associated notebooks into yet another. Only the written accounts given by the Union Soldier in 1863, and my grandfather in 1935, offered any correspondence to what I had witnessed in Ana Lagori’s backyard this morning.

  I deluded myself into thinking there was some revelation to be uncovered; some clue overlooked in the shuffle of the papers. As the afternoon faded, I was left with what I already knew: that a medicinal plant referred to as blue purse was rendered ambiguous as far back as the 12th Century. Yet, there were those herbalists who apparently did not dispute its existence even by the 16th Century, referring to...an efficacious property of the blue purse.

  The lowering sun and I are not always compatible, and I pushed the papers aside. I ingested two sedatives with a contemplative swallow of lukewarm water from a corked bottle. I thought of Ana Lagori, and how, during those moments under the cold well water, she appeared utterly disconnected from her surroundings. I could not entirely dismiss the evidence of my own eyes, but neither could I wholly dismiss the entire drama; that, if not staged, was certainly some form of derangement.

  "Hey Doc," Aaron Westmore grinned from the door, left open to circulate the congested air of the cabin room. By what I presumed to be an offering of peace over any controversy between us the evening before, Aaron held up a paper sack, pulling out a loaf of French bread.

  I greeted him with the local, "Hey", and invited him inside.

  "I see you've been busy," he said, dodging the piles of papers and books strewn about the floor. He reached into the paper sack and extracted cheese, grapes, ham slices and pears: "...fresh from the grocers," and a bottle of California wine. "What have you been eating around here?" he asked dubiously, and picked up an apple from a wooden bowl. "Apples?"

  "Breakfast at Pennock's," I replied, picking up the scattered papers. "Sandwiches from Pennock's. And apples..."

  "From Pennock's," Aaron finished with a grunt. "Well, sit down and have some decent food from town. Pennock's lucky if he gets supplies twice a month. As it is, he scarcely gets to the mail below the mountain twice a week. I usually bring it up or send a couple of the boys." He tossed an unfolded newspaper on the table. "Today's."

  I pulled the only two glasses, included with the residence, from the cupboard and set them on the table.

  "What are all these papers?" asked Aaron.

  "Copies of documents I explained in Chicago."

  He raised a brow and picked up several from a stack on the middle of the table. "Do you mind?"

  "Go ahead," I said. "You might find what I don't seem able to."<
br />
  "And what is that?" he asked curiously, skimming the documents, pausing here and there to read an insert.

  "To validate, I suppose, a rather disturbing exhibition I witnessed this morning," I said, lighting the lantern against the dimming light of the hour. I sat at the table and picked up a single grape, toying with it between my fingers. I looked over at Aaron to find him waiting for some sort of elaboration. I turned my attention again to the single grape. "At Ana’s," I continued. "A young couple came with their infant son, who had apparently been bitten by some venomous spider. A recluse, I imagine. Ana took the infant inside and, after a little while, came back outside."

  "And?" Aaron wanted to know.

  And so I told him the story of what I had seen. The drama, the blood, the seeming trust of the young couple, the apparent cure of the child, the scream, Ana’s faint and the man, Clem, carrying her into the forest. To my astonishment, I told Aaron, after having witnessed all this, I then proceeded to pass out on the woman's front porch.

  "You found nothing to connect to this morning in these?" he asked, thumbing through the papers curiously. "Nothing at all?"

  I shook my head, popping the grape into my mouth. "The only thing even remotely similar is my grandfather's account and that of the Union Soldier, who credits his miraculous recovery to the mercy of some unexpected, if not divine, intervention." I referred him to the documents in a yellow folder at the bottom of the stack. "Thanks for all this, by the way. It's good to have some return to normalcy after this morning’s affair."

  "Yeah, sure," Aaron replied absently, examining the two accounts. He sighed with some distraction and then, in a moment of what I imagined to be private consideration, he placed the folder on top of the pile of documents. “There’s some history or folklore associated with the plant, then?”