“Like God?” I asked negligently.
“Sure do,” he returned.
With a weary sigh, I rolled the plastic bag into a cylinder and stuffed it inside my jacket pocket.
“Now, you don’t know nothin’ ‘bout this,” warned Fitch. “Nothin’, ya hear?”
“And if Ana finds we’ve been here?” I asked, only half-curious as to the reply. I examined the area with one final overview.
Fitch shook his head. “Ain’t no way. Janie Connor went into her pains this mornin’. She’s with her.”
I smiled vaguely, feeling numb from the damp and distracted by an inexplicable sense of urgency. What I needed, was a lab technician; what I had, was a monomaniac in the middle of a wet, and covert, forest glade.
“I’m not going to tell anybody,” I assured him wearily.
“Ya got to do somethin’ for me now, Yank” he said.
I took the bag out of my pocket and inspected the contents once more under the muted gray light. “And what might that be, I wonder?”
“Ya got to get off the mountain,” he replied. “Ya got the poke, now ya got to leave.”
I glanced at him rather impatiently. “I need to find out one more thing,” I said, replacing the bag in my pocket. “There remains the question of my grandfather’s recovery here, over sixty years ago. I know you people like to hand down your stories. I know Ana has some idea. Even better, Jemmy Isaak’s grandmother. She just might be old enough to remember.”
“Who else knows the way of the devil’s medicine?” Fitch ground out. “It was the Evangeline! The old woman will tell you the same. You seen it now for yourself. Leave, if you want to go on living!”
The man now had my complete attention.
“What are you saying?”
Fitch’s expression distorted in something akin to agony. “Don’t you see? As long as you stay on this hill, the devil’s work won’t end! None of his work will end!”
I grasped his arm. “What won’t end? What are you talking about?”
“All of it!” he cried, flailing his free arm. “Here be only the work of the devil! They need new blood. Your granddaddy’s life weren’t spared without givin’ somethin’ back!”
“What do you know, old man?” I asked, shaking his arm.
“Nothin’ is given for nothin’!” he shouted, his breathing erratic. “Your granddaddy was a stranger up in these hills. He could’ve lived or died, for all anyone gave a lick about some Yank fool enough not t’look where he was steppin’. He promised the witch something!”
I released his arm with a jerk. “How do we get out of here?”
“Through them trees,” he said, rubbing his arm fitfully. “You're not goin’ t’say nothin’ are ya? About the blue poke? You can’t say nothin’. You got even more to lose than I do.”
I turned to him, exasperated. “What do I lose?”
“She’ll snap your neck if she finds out,” Fitch warned. “Oh, she might wait awhile t’keep lookin’ at that handsome Yankee face of yours, but she’ll gitcha when you ain’t lookin’ for it. That’s the way of the Evangeline. Real quiet like.”
My patience depleted, I turned away and started walking in the direction he pointed toward.
Fitch gripped the back of my jacket. “Take a look, then, “ he begged, tugging the soggy sleeve. “Take a look, if ya think I talk crazy.”
I sighed miserably and followed the old man to a clump of brush. If there was to be any hope of not losing the return route, I’d best humor him.
“There,” Fitch pointed, parting the tangled branches. “That one found the blue poke and never lived to tell of it.”
I looked on him dubiously, but peered through the brush as instructed.
“Jesus Christ!”
Transfixed, I stared at the mossy contour of skeletal remains, partially submerged into the rot of sodden earth. The skull, undoubtedly human, was utterly twisted from the spinal chord; its’ gaping jaw frozen in some moment of sudden and horrific shock.
"This here was before my time,"said Fitch, "but I know it was the works of the Evangeline. They'll kill as well as heal if any threaten their secret ways."
I leaned closer to inspect the bone remnants. I heard Fitch’s anxious swallow behind my back. Had it not been for the moss molding its’ shape, the skeleton might have been only another indistinguishable formation on the forest floor. I eyed the area closely. As the Reverend had observed, these bones had most likely lain here long before he ever discovered them. It was a marvel the frame was still intact, with a forest full of wild animals.
“Leave before it happens to you!” he pleaded.
I backed away. “We need to get out of here,” I said. I pressed my fingers to my brow until I lost feeling in my hand, trying to gather the implications of what I had just seen. With Fitch stumbling close behind, I walked swiftly to the edge of the trees where we had entered.
“I got the curse of Dulcy, y’see,” he said breathlessly, trying to keep stride with my accelerated steps through the tall ferns and sapling brush. The forest appeared darker than on our way up to the profane landmark, where the dead oak stood and the secret blue poke fed. The rain was beginning to intensify, spilling through the thick canopy of saturating leaves overhead. I kept an unfaltering pace.
“The dog’s curse, why not?” I stated impatiently. I turned to him, walking backwards. “Are we going in the right direction?” I turned again and walked forward even faster, pushing aside stray, wet branches that slapped against my face and no doubt Fitch’s directly behind me.
“You’ll come to the cross path,” he said, “about a quarter mile ahead.”
I could hear the dog panting at our heels and heard old Fitch’s strenuous breaths in his efforts to keep step.
“You gonna leave now you got the poke?” he asked.
“I might just do that,” I replied evenly.
“But you won’t say nothin’, right?” he asked again. I could hear the hopeful anguish behind his repeated plea.
“I have no intention to speak of it,” I said.
“Not about the bones neither, right?”
“No.”
“I’m gonna trust you, Yank,” he said, “’cuz it’s all I can do. We gotta trust each other, right?”
“It would appear so, yes.”
“Follow straight down that way,” Fitch instructed when at last we reached the cross path. Without further word, I followed the trail toward the Four Corners, too relieved by my sense of deliverance from Fitch’s hell to absorb the full impact of what was experienced back in that forest gap.
I stepped onto the sodden grass of the Four Corners hamlet, feeling baptized under the now forgiving rain. Toying with the idea of a blistering hot coffee from Pennock’s, I spotted Jemmy Isaak stomping through a puddle with his red rubber boots.
“What the…” I frowned. “Jemmy, what are you doing out here?”
Jemmy peered up through the steamed lens of his glasses. “Looking for magic turtles!” he replied excitedly. He heaved a congested cough and jabbed his stick deeper into the mud.
“Magic turtles, my ass,” I chided under my breath and swept the child up on my shoulder. “Come on, I’m taking you home.”
“The turtles,” he coughed. “I know they’re in the mud.”
“You can look for turtles when it stops raining,” I told him and carried him to his mother’s door. I spotted Coobie at the windowpane inside, tracing circles in the fogged glass as I handed over Jilly’s youngest.
“See ya later, Yankee Doctor!” Jemmy called from the threshold, just as his mother pulled him back by the collar and waved with a rather helpless smile.
***
Scrutinizing the plant clipping more closely under the lighted lamp inside my cabin, I reflected on the medicinal latex of the Croton lechleri tree in Peru, pondering that bonding substance against the specimen I now held in my possession. Was this unknown plant merely possessed of a similar binding agent? or did it hold something m
ore? Did this plant hold the capacity to accelerate healing, as the Croton Lechleri did not? or did it merely hold an equal property in a more simple and rare form? Doubtless, a study would be significant. I pressed the plastic bag holding the plant clipping in the pocket flap of my field notebook.
The rain fell continuously beyond the door screen and every now and again, a distant clap of thunder rolled across the hills. In exposing his secret, Fitch condemned his willing accomplice to carry it with him. I refused to accept the old wretch's demons; however, the specter of human remains did not fail to affect my sense of mortal well being. I set my scientific rationalization on the greater purpose, and spent the afternoon on the dry side of Pennock’s storefront window, engaged in yet another game of chess with Aaron Westmore.
In the early evening, I shut out the ghosts of Fitch and his witches with the consumption of five tranquilizers. Beyond the glass of the bedside window, the ripening moon, between dissolving clouds, silhouetted the room with spectral shades that accused of being one ataractic away from too many. I fell into a cadaverous sleep...the misty green clearing, the blue poke clinging and the twisted neck of the moss draped bones, the last conscious visions in my mind.
At precisely two-thirty in the morning, according to the travel clock on the bedside table, the pounding between the inside of my skull and the cabin door startled me into consciousness once again.
~*~
Chapter IX
As abrupt as my awakening was, I had quick enough wit to consider if the wrath of Fitch’s devil came at the door, at best, or Ana Lagori straining to break my next, at worst. I slid into a pair of jeans and opened the door, struggling with the buttons on my shirt.
“Yiddy! Yiddy! Yiddy!”
An hysterical Coobie Isaak tugged at my sleeve. Jolted into coherence, I grasped the child’s shoulders.
“What is it? What’s wrong?”
“Yiddy! Yiddy! Yiddy!” the boy begged louder, pulling at my wrist with remarkable command.
“Is it your mother?” I asked. “Coobie, calm down. Is it your mother?”
“Yiddy!” he replied succinctly.
“Jemmy?”
“Yi, yi, yi, yi, yi, yi!” he cried, yanking my sleeve.
“Ok, ok,” I told him. “Let me get my shoes on and I’ll come with you.”
I could hear the loud chirp of the katydids among the lighted clusters of fireflies in the brush, but the all-encompassing darkness of the mountains was as compressed as what I imagined death to be. I could feel my insides shudder. Like a rabbit with night vision, the boy found his way with an astonishing ability to my front door and with that same sight, pulled my hand through the equal density of blackness back to his own front door.
With some measure of relief, I could just make out the singular light of a kerosene lamp on the Isaak’s settling doorstep.
The air inside the house was contrastingly humid to the cool of the night; the dimly lit corners thick, almost oppressive in uneasy motion of shadow. Jilly Isaak stood disheveled in her long cotton nightgown, her features morbidly nondescript behind the light of the lantern.
“It’s Jemmy!” she informed me frantically. “He can’t breathe!”
She reached for my arm and led me to a corner cot where Jemmy sat pale and snotty nosed, heaving congested breaths in short, strenuous bursts. I took the rag Jilly offered and wiped the mucus from his nostrils and mouth.
“This child needs a hospital,” I said. “What medication is he on?”
“Don’t have none,” said Jilly.
Abruptly, I asked: “What do you do when he gets like this, then, Jilly?”
“Steam roots,” replied Jilly, “but they’re all run out! He ain’t been sick in a long time. I thought maybe he was cured.”
I sighed heavily. “Jilly, we’ve got to get him into town. Pennock has a phone. We'll go wake him up and have him call emergency. We'll get Aaron. He has a vehicle.”
I felt for Jemmy’s collarbone where it met just above the chest, and lightly pressed my fingertips against the fragile structure.
“Try to breathe in slowly, Jemmy,” I instructed. “Then let the breath out.” He caught his breath quickly and coughed up a good amount of mucus. His skin was clammy, his breathing husky and sparse.
“You’re a doctor!” Jilly exclaimed in a shaky, hopeful voice. “I heard everyone say!”
“I’m not a medical doctor, Jilly,” I told her succinctly, watching Jemmy closely. I could feel the frail weakness in his limbs and the tightness of his chest wall. “Try to breathe slowly, Jemmy. In. Out. That’s it. Try to be as quiet as you can.”
I demonstrated my instruction, by breathing steadily in and out, and then addressed the child’s mother as calmly as I could manage. “Jilly, he will be all right, if we take him down the mountainside as quickly as possible.”
“There’s no time!” Jilly cried out. “What are we going to do? Only Possum knows how to help him! I could heat some soup and we could take him up the hill first thing when the sun comes up.”
“She’s not a physician, Jilly,” I replied impatiently. “And no soup is going to help this little boy.”
Jemmy coughed, wheezed tightly and inhaled a quickened breath, unable to exhale completely. He started sobbing and I wiped the mucus that strung from his nostrils to his chin.
“He ain’t never been this bad before, Doctor,” Jilly repeated, in a way I knew she still failed to comprehend my lack of medical qualification. “You got to do something.”
“You say Ana has helped him before,” I stated.
“She knows how to make him well,” Jilly nodded.
With slow deliberation and hoping Jilly would understand simple directions, I said: “You run and tell Aaron to go up and get Ana. I'll take Jemmy to Pennock's and call for an ambulance. If Ana can stabilize him, even a little, we can get him down the mountain, to the road, and meet the paramedics there.”
“No one goes up there at night,” she replied anxiously. “No one ever goes up there at night!”
“And why is that?” I asked remotely, concentrating on Jemmy’s direful breathing.
Jilly hesitated.
“Well?”
“Something’s up there,” she said.
“And what is exactly up there, Jilly?” I asked quietly, watching Jemmy carefully, even as I steadied the firm pressure of my fingertips against his chest bone. “Keep breathing quietly, Jemmy. In. Out. You’re doing good, Jemmy. Just keep breathing as slowly as you can. In. Out. Calm.”
“It’s the grave’s own she-wolf,” whispered Jilly hoarsely. “It protects the witches at night!”
“Christ, Jilly,” I complained irritably, “you don’t really believe that.”
Either Jilly was too simple-minded or, too flustered to think beyond the pale reasoning of this disengaged place, but time was drawing a critical line. I wrapped Jemmy up in the thin quilt and picked him up in my arms. I couldn’t fight Jilly’s fervent abstractions. In the urgency of the moment, my own mind began to weave imaginings of Ana as our only hope and the only chance Jilly was capable of understanding. I only prayed Coobie’s radar could get us to the destination intact.
“Look, Jilly, you win. We are going up the hill,” I stated. “If there’s some strange animal, we will deal with it when we get there. Now, if you won’t go and wake Pennock, at least you can go and get Aaron to do it. Tell him Coobie and I took Jemmy up to Ana's and he will need to call an ambulance.”
Jilly grasped Coobie’s hand and lifted the lantern. “We can’t find the way without a light.”
Oh God, I breathed, my head beginning to spin, this kid is going to die in my arms, and I can’t get it through the sediment of this woman’s head her son is in imminent crisis.
The night takes on a penetrating menace the deeper one descends into its darkness. I considered, with fleeting introspection, how vividly removed the parting clouds seemed through the starlit heavens in our moment of plight.
If wrong in my desperately de
ranged decision of the moment, Jemmy would not survive. If it turned out to be fortunate, what would happen the next time the boy couldn’t breath, and Jilly would not go down the mountain nor climb up the path to seek some measure of help after sunset?
At the clearing beyond the oaks, I found Jilly’s fear of some phantom canine to be no figment of local myth. A haunting, almost melancholy howl issued from Ana Lagori's front porch. In the reflected light of Jilly’s lantern, each of us could define the shape of a white furred, wolf-like animal running in our direction with an almost dreamlike motion. None of us made a sound, but our own breathing became a sparse unison, broken only by the critical rasping from Jemmy’s constricted lungs.
“Damn,” I cursed under my breath. And then, without conscious forethought, I astonished myself, in the face of all I held sane and rational, by pleading: “Get Ana for us. Jemmy is seriously ill!”
If, indeed, I had suddenly lost my reason by explaining my purpose to an animal, no one appeared to take notice, least of all Jilly, who did not question my method. I could hear her swallow the anxiety in her throat. The child, Coobie, remained as silent and attentive as the impenetrable night, itself.
The white furred canine moved a cautious step forward and I felt an erratic skip in my heartbeat. The animal sniffed at a trailing tear of fabric in the quilt I wrapped around Jemmy and in a swift turnaround, ran toward the barely visible outline of the cabin. The three of us, Jilly, Coobie and myself, stood together in the heightened alertness of our uncertainty, and Jemmy’s rattling chest, when we heard another plaintive howl sailing through the dark.
At last we saw the bobbing light of a lantern at the cabin door. We ran quickly with our failing patient to the foot of the porch steps, where Ana stood blanketed in a heavy knit shawl over a long white nightgown, her hair tangled from sleep.
“It’s Jemmy,” I breathed, as Ana took the child in her arms and handed me the lantern.
“Come inside, quickly,” she commanded. “Keep the light close.” Once inside, Ana pushed aside a crock bowl filled with pungent rosemary sprigs and laid Jemmy on the wooden table. She unwrapped the child carefully from the cocoon of the quilt, her assessing eyes never leaving him.
The Honey Witch (A Tale of Supernatural Suspense) Page 7