The Honey Witch (A Tale of Supernatural Suspense)

by Thayer Berlyn

  “It was two summers ago,” explained Aaron, “when we were finishing up the renovation of that old church to accommodate some classroom space. Scully falls off the ladder, right on his back. I mean, the man can’t survive being taken down the mountain, much less any paramedics coming up in time to even try getting him to a hospital.”

  He washed down a bite of his roast beef with the last of the bottled beer and poured a glass from the pitcher.

  “There’s blood coming out of this guy’s nose and ears. I mean, he’s as near dead as you’re going to be, right? You could hear the spine crack when he fell.”

  Aaron shifted in his seat and took a quick swallow of the foamed beer in his glass. He sighed deeply, perhaps to erase the full picture of Scully’s broken body from his mind.

  “Someone shouts to go up and get the witch,” he continued. “I hadn’t been here long enough, and thought Ana was just some screwy folk healer that backwoods people called a witch. She comes down and everyone just sort of scatters off like they know something is about to happen. No one seems to notice I’m still there, so I just stay, thinking maybe I might be needed to help, right?”

  He swallowed the last drop of beer and poured himself another. His eyes flickered with a hint of distress, and it seemed he battled to weigh any words he might now speak with extreme discretion. I watched him closely, my appetite slowly abating. I picked off a corner piece of the Philly sandwich and consumed it thoughtfully.

  “I’m going to tell you this,” Aaron began, “because of what you saw with Clem and Merilee and even then, you didn’t see much, ok?”

  “Ok,” I agreed.

  Aaron leaned closer, pushing his unfinished plate aside.

  “Ana, she assesses Scully, right? It takes her maybe ten minutes, I don’t know. It seemed like forever. She kind of crawls around him on all fours, stretching his leg, tapping his leg, things like that. She even rolls him over real careful like and then, oh, Jesus…”

  I waited wordlessly, feeling the intensity of expectation over what he might reveal.

  Aaron’s voice began to tremble, debating, perhaps, whether he had gone too far in the telling of his story. “She grows these teeth, like an animal; like some wolf or something. She bites right into his spine; rips him right open, I swear to God. There’s blood everywhere and Scully, he’s like in some shock and his mouth is wide open, but he can’t scream. He can’t make any sound.

  "Ana, she takes this clear glob of something from her pocket and sort of fuses his spine together with it. After she’s done, she holds his skin together and you know how a spider makes a sticky web? It’s like that same web comes out of the tips of her fingers and she meshes the flesh like she’s weaving a cocoon. Then, she traces this purplish red ink-like substance up and down Scully’s spine. There’s blood all over Scully and all over her.”

  Aaron lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. “She then starts screaming for water,” he went on, “and I mean, screaming. So, I get her some from Pennock’s well. My legs and arms are shaking so bad I can hardly keeping standing, but I bring her the water in a bucket. She drinks it like a horse at a trough and then falls backwards. She’s completely out.”

  He exhaled a low, smoke filled sigh. “Next thing I know, I’m stretched out in the weeds next to the church. I wake up to see Jemmy Isaak and Clara Russell, with her idiot doll, standing over me, asking if I want any plums.”

  I could feel a pulsing rush inside my ears. “What in the damn hell are you saying?”

  “She’s not human,” said Aaron, butting out his cigarette in the fish logo ashtray and lighting another. “Nobody human could have saved Scully Owen that day. Nobody. Not like that. To change, to grow teeth, to stitch and weave like a spider. I wanted to leave that place and never come back.”

  “What made you stay?” I asked.

  Aaron shrugged. “Fear, maybe. Fear, I’d never make it down the mountain, if I ran. Fear, they might think I’d tell somebody what happened and bring outsiders. I don’t know what I was afraid of. Nobody ever talked about it. Nobody ever said anything at all. Just like they won’t now about Clem and Merrilee’s baby and won’t much longer about Jemmy.”

  I exhaled a pent-up breath of my own and tapped my fingers anxiously on the table. It was obvious, by Westmore’s present demeanor, that he was affected by having witnessed something deeply troubling on that singular day. While it was certainly true that Scully Owen had the obvious curvature of a healed spinal injury, I wanted to deny the details as Aaron perceived them, just as I wanted to deny my own the morning of Clem and Merilee’s child’s recovery.

  “You realize what you’re telling me is profoundly impossible,” I said.

  “Is it?” he asked. “What happened to Scully Owen could very well be similar to what happened with your grandfather.”

  “It might fit, yes,” I agreed. “I just don’t know what to think right now.”

  “You might think about leaving,” advised Aaron. “Leave, while you still have your wits about you. You haven’t really seen anything and at this point, she probably wouldn’t make any attempt to stop you.”

  “Ana?” I asked. “Why would she try and prevent me from leaving?”

  Aaron hesitated. He gulped down another glass of beer, pouring yet another. “Call it a gut feeling.”

  “You’ve had too much to drink in too short a time, Aaron,” I replied. “This is all the result of some type of misinterpretation or hallucinogenic reaction to trauma.”

  “Was it hallucination that saved your grandfather?” asked Aaron. “Or Clem and Merilee’s son? Or Jemmy Isaak?”

  “I do not doubt the existence of some unidentified medicinal plant,” I replied, trying to reason away my own unanswered questions. “There are things all over this planet yet to be discovered. What I am disputing is any miraculous, magical healing power on the part of Ana Lagori or any of her ancestors.”

  “Do you ask me to doubt the evidence of my own eyes?” asked Aaron with some strain in his voice. “Would you? Do you?”

  I pushed my plate aside. Aaron looked more bereft with my argument than annoyed.

  “Look, Aaron,” I said earnestly, “I admit I saw how Ana was that morning after the Clem and Merilee drama, but even in witnessing what I thought I did, I had definite problems with it. You’re from St. Louis, you know what happens in the real world. What you saw, what I saw, both have some rational explanation.”

  “The hell, you say,” retorted Aaron anxiously. “I know what I saw and I’m telling you, that woman is not goddamn human!”

  I could feel a tremor in my fingertips as I traced a hand along my brow line. “What are you saying, then? She’s some kind of monster? Some Lilith out of time and myth, only real?”

  “I’m saying she’s not human,” said Aaron. He pointed at me nervously. “And she knows about you. She knows all about you.”

  I stared at him incredulously. While Aaron’s experience was certainly affecting, had he hoped I would view it as entirely plausible? To Aaron’s perspective, yes, as perhaps it had been to my grandfather’s as well, but I was not prepared to let go of my own rationale. I could sense the clear danger of slipping where Aaron had already slipped: believing what he thought he was seeing without questioning what he was seeing.

  “So, Aaron, tell me,” I asked a bit wearily, “what does she know, exactly.” I, of course, was reminded of the rainy morning spent with the mad Fitch in the forest clearing, but dismissed any notion of Aaron’s knowledge of it. I convinced myself, days earlier, that any recrimination would have already occurred, had the intrigue been discovered. Now that I mailed the specimen to Nina, I was certain no one, outside of Fitch and myself, knew anything about it.

  Aaron stared at me and the sides of his mouth took on the spasms of one who wanted to speak, but couldn’t quite place together the exact wording.

  “I don’t want any ill will between us, Aaron,” I informed him honestly. “You’ve done me an immense favor by inviting me here and
as to Ana Lagori, she is an intriguing woman with doubtless abilities, but no miracle worker and no seeress.”

  Aaron sat back, flushed and defeated...and none too inebriated.

  I glanced up and saw Lacey's attentive approach. I stood quickly and handed her my Visa card. Aaron ordered another shot of whiskey and disappeared into the men's room. I downed two sedatives and signed the card transaction at the counter. Perhaps out of gratitude to be parting in relative harmony with my intoxicated friend, I increased an already sizable tip.

  Once outside, Aaron tossed me his keys and crawled inside the passenger side of his vehicle.

  “You think you'll take my advice, then?” asked Aaron sullenly, leaning against the window frame; staring at the passing gullies and hillside thickets along the roadside.

  “And what advice is that, Aaron?” I asked, twisting the toothpick I held in the corner of my mouth. My mind flitted between the probability of Ana Lagori’s very real, if not limited, skills and Aaron’s conviction of the highly fantastic. Perhaps there was something in the water, as the old adage went; except, in this instance, perhaps there really was.

  “About leaving,” he said.

  “Is there some personal interest in all of this, Aaron?” I asked.

  Aaron laughed doubtfully. “It’s not me she wants, Broughton, and if you’ve any sense, you’ll get out while you can.”

  “You sound as though you can’t,” I said.

  Aaron continued to gaze moodily out the window, breathing in a deep inhalation of smoke. “I wish I’d never heard of Porringer Hill or, the Four Corners. It used to be a mountain pass, but was abandoned decades ago. Why people still live up there, cut off from everything, God only knows.”

  I glanced over at my friend and found him preoccupied in such a way that I felt genuinely concerned for his well being. He sucked in another breath of smoke. He reached and turned on the radio to the steamy voice of Robbie Robertson crooning a lazy river over the FM airwaves.

  Aaron contemplated the burning cylinder between his fingers for a moment and said: “Take my advice and leave with the slate clean.”

  “I’m not interested in Ana Lagori in the way you might think,” I told him. “I’ll not deny a fascination with her method, but I won’t be here long enough to pursue anything beyond that.”

  Aaron sucked in another deep inhalation of smoke. “Bewitched, more like.” He gazed out of the window, briefly diverted by a red-tailed hawk swooping down on some unsuspecting prey, and with a bitter laugh added: “And be warned: Jolene Parker, she’s another one.”

  “Another what?”

  “Damned witch.”

  “A what?” I laughed with an almost exhausted humor. “Christ, listen to yourself. You sound like the lunatic, Fitch.”

  “A goddamned witch, I tell you!” Aaron blasted. He leaned back against the seat and sighed wearily. “A witch’s apprentice, that’s the truth of Jolene Parker.”

  He pointed at the windshield and narrowed his eyes, as though straining to see something beyond his immediate vision. “Not a witch like Ana, no, not like that one, but a helper, you know? Like the guy who eats bugs in those Dracula movies and makes sure no one finds the sleeping bloodsucker in his ungodly tomb.”

  “You’re talking stupid,” I accused decisively, “and you’ve had way too much to drink.”

  Aaron threw his head back and laughed. “You have no fucking idea, Broughton. No fucking idea under God.” He jabbed his cigarette into the ashtray. “And you’re right, I am drunk, but not so much I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about.”

  “You know,” I said, “when you wake up from this, you’re going to feel like shit.”

  “I feel like shit now,” said Aaron, flailing his arm to the left. “Here’s our turn.”

  I turned the Jeep Cherokee up the gravel drive leading to Bernie Lloyd’s, when Aaron gestured toward a barely concealed road that veered off the main route.

  “Go up there,” he instructed. “It’ll take us up the creek. It’ll be closer to drop off the stuff for Pennock, and I don’t want to walk.”

  I steered the vehicle over an estimated half mile of rutted road, and alongside wooded overgrowth continuously scraping the windows, until ending just before the low bank of the Cutler.

  “Well, what now?” I inquired dismally.

  “The Cutler’s low up at least two miles,” Aaron assured, pointing out the incline on the hill. “It’ll take us maybe a quarter mile from the Four Corners. Just drive up over the grass to Pennock’s.”

  I drove as Aaron directed, gratified to note there was an alternate access out of seclusion.

  We dropped off the numerous sacks of supplies at Sam Pennock’s, passing Jemmy’s Grammy Nana rocking on the porch, knitting a walnut dyed wool into what appeared to be a child’s sweater. I nodded in wordless acknowledgment. Perhaps it was only Aaron’s cryptic babble and that, alone, which caused the trace smile at the withered corner of the old woman’s mouth to appear eerily secretive.

  Aaron pleaded intoxication and insisted I return the vehicle to Bernie Lloyd’s without him. I steered the jeep along the river route to the delight of passengers Jemmy, Coobie and a freckled little girl with reddish-blond curls introduced as Cousin Gracie, who, I was informed summarily, was not a mud poke.

  It was on the long walk back to the Four Corners behind the chattering Jemmy and Gracie, trailed by a dreamily detached Coobie, that I came to fully recognize my position as a man sailing uncharted waters.

  Blue skies gave way to a slow, but persistent cloud cover through the advent of early evening. I ingested one more sedative and decided to bestow the white lilac bush on Ana before any rain set in.

  Perhaps I was compelled only to satisfy any final inquiry that distracted my mind or, perhaps I wanted to prove she was no monster. Perhaps I was seriously reconsidering what was becoming a navigation through complexity.

  Perhaps I wanted to know that my interests remained purely academic.

  ~*~

  Chapter XI

  I found Ana Lagori sitting on the front porch cot, as though waiting patiently for someone to arrive. She watched my approach in immovable silence and when I handed her the greenhouse pot, she not only appeared surprised, but graciously pleased.

  “No one has ever given me the likes of a white lilac before,” she said, admiring the virgin green leaves as she might the fragrant blooms, themselves. “It is beautiful, Ethan Broughton, it is beautiful.”

  “I’m afraid it won’t blossom again for another year,” I told her a little apologetically, “but I thought you might wish to have one of your own, just the same.”

  Ana nodded, her pleasure not diminished. She set the container reverently on the front step and took my hand. “Come in,” she said, “the evening grows damp.”

  She lit the table lantern, filling the darkening room with a soft, amber glow and covered her shoulders with a long knitted shawl. She pulled a sturdy captain’s chair from the head of the oak table, which was otherwise equipped with long wooden benches. “Sit,” she offered.

  I observed her movements, without further word, as she set about doing things that a woman often does when a man sits at her table: slicing bread and cheese, setting out a bowl of fresh wild strawberries and measuring dried leaves for the teapot. She set an enameled water kettle over the flame on top of the massive iron range.

  Her home held a singular charm for all that appeared to be her simple living needs, but it was the ancient art of the apothecary that captivated the imagination. I observed the jars and stems, the hanging bundles and powdered roots all before, but now, at closer inspection, I could see it went far deeper than mastery; it was a way of life.

  As a man of science, I felt the heightened anticipation of an observer about to learn something heretofore unknown. That she was transforming from a woman of knowledge and skill, during our brief acquaintance, to a woman intriguing to the intellect and hypnotic to the senses, was something I would allow to pass. I w
as not cavalier enough to begin something that could not be pursued.

  “I need you to talk to me, Ana,” I finally spoke.

  With an almost ethereal grace, Ana walked passed the table and stood before a heavy mahogany wood chest, carved with an impressive Gothic motif. The leaf friezes on the panel appeared so intricate that I could assess, even under shadow of lamplight, that the furnishing was an accomplished work of art. Ana caressed the faded threads of an embroidered tapestry draped over the lid.

  “The memory is in the blood,” she murmured so softly as to barely be audible. “The blood is in the memory.”

  Before an inquiry into her sentiments could formulate itself in my mind, the water in the kettle began to boil. She poured the steaming water into the teapot filled with the dried leaf blend and sat at the table bench, warming her hands around the belly of the earthenware container.

  “Tell me how you knew about…” I began, but then finished more thoughtfully: “Jemmy Isaak.”

  Ana tensed, but then, just as suddenly, appeared more reflective. “The boy is full of life, but frail,” she said. “I opened his body to breathe.”

  “Yes, you told me you did that,” I reminded her, “but how, Ana? How did you know what to do and more than this, how to do it?”

  I leaned my elbow against the table and watched her intently for a moment. She clearly had no intention of telling me anything beyond her familiar and private confidence.

  “During the evening of the dance,” I ventured, “you became upset with me over my use of the term Inquisition. Why was that?”

  She looked at me sharply. “Blink your eye once and a thousand years have passed. Blink twice, two thousand.” She turned her attention again to the warmth of the teapot. “The earth consumes, but does not forget.”.

  Had she not engaged my senses earlier, I’d have dismissed her as poetically insane. And if she played a farce with me, she was very consistent.

  “So, tell me about this Reverend Fitch,” I said, examining a single and perfect strawberry between my fingertips.