Under My Hat: Tales from the Cauldron

by Jonathan Strahan

  The bottle man shakes his head. “There are ways to bring back the dead, but the one who returns is never the same as the one who died. If you bring Pepé back, you will be more unhappy than you already are.”

  Neither of the girls is surprised that he knows who they’re talking about. The bottle man would know everything that happens in the barrio.

  “Then perhaps, if you could,” Vida says, “might you tell us how to kill a witch?”

  The bottle man nods. “The ways to do so are as many and varied as there are different kinds of witches. The best way is to put some of their hair or nail clippings in a bottle, then put the bottle in a fire. The witch who dies from that little spell never comes back as a ghost.”

  “Will that even work on a vampire witch?” Vida asks.

  He nods again. “I’d heard the body was drained of blood.”

  “I don’t think we can get her nail clippings or hair. Is there any other way?”

  “There are many,” he says, “but there is only one that’s the best to deal with a tlahuelpuchi.”

  “Will you tell us?” Vida asks.

  “Do you trust me? Will you do exactly as I say, no matter how odd or wrong it seems?”

  The girls exchange glances, then nod.

  The bottle man squats on his haunches and puts out a hand toward Angelina. The little dog hesitates. She looks up at Ruby, then slowly moves forward and sniffs at the offered hand. She trembles a little when the bottle man strokes her head, but then she seems to be calmer than she has been since the girls first brought her away from Pepé’s trailer.

  “I will tell you how to kill your witch,” the bottle man says when he stands up once more, “because I like this little dog. And because I liked Pepé Fernandez. And because you have both been so polite. But it will cost you. You must give me something of yours that is precious.”

  The girls exchange glances again. Ruby nods and takes off the Moonstream memory stick and offers it to the bottle man. He lifts it to his nose and smells it.

  “This will be enough,” he tells them. “It holds a piece of both of you.”

  He twirls it by its chain on his finger, then throws it up into the mesquite. The chain wraps around a branch near the top like it’s a little snake, and now Ruby’s Moonstream memory stick has a new home in the bottle man’s bottle tree.

  “Listen closely,” he says.

  He spits in his hand and holds it out to them, palm up. The girls don’t know what they’re supposed to do. Shake his hand? Take the spit? But then the spit moves on the old man’s palm.

  “Kill her with kindness,” the spit says. “But you must show no fear and you must be sincere.”

  The old man closes his hand. He walks past them. Opening the tin door to his shack, he goes inside. When the door bangs shut the coyote painted on it almost seems to dance. Ruby thinks it maybe winked at her as well.

  She scoops up Angelina, takes Vida’s hand, and leads her slip-sliding across the glass until they reach the firmer footing at the top of the wash. They turn to look at the shack.

  “Was that magic, too?” Ruby says. “The spit in his hand talking?”

  Vida shakes her head. “That was just ventriloquism. And stupid. How do you kill anything with kindness? We should just go steal one of Tío Crusher’s guns.”

  Vida picks her way down the steep incline into the wash. Ruby puts Angelina on the ground and follows. She catches Vida’s arm.

  “Remember what he asked us?” she says. “If we trusted him? If we’d do exactly what he said no matter how odd or wrong it seems?”

  Vida considers that. “That was pretty strange, spitting into his hand and everything.”

  Ruby lifts her fingers to her Moonstream memory stick, but it’s not there anymore. She looks up into the mesquite tree and imagines she can see it winking there in the bright sunlight.

  “I gave up my memory stick,” she says.

  She’d liked it, too. It had songs from the album on it, along with a couple of live tracks, a video, and lots and lots of pictures of Anthony Denham.

  “Okay,” Vida says. “We’ll give it a try. But we’ll bring along a bottle, too, just in case we can get a piece of her hair or a nail clipping.”

  They hurry home and spend the afternoon getting ready. In the evening they go to the service at the church. They bring Angelina and Ruby holds the dog on her lap. No one says anything about having a dog in the church. They all know she was Pepé’s dog and that God and the saints won’t mind. In a barrio church anyone who comes with respect is welcome.

  After the service Ruby uses some of the money she’s been saving for a new skirt from Buffalo Exchange to buy a votive candle for Pepé. She whispers a prayer to the Virgin, then says, “We’ll take good care of Angelina. We promise.”

  Vida nods and adds, “And we’ll kill that witch for you.”

  They don’t hate the witch because, now that they’re witch girls themselves, it would be like hating themselves. At least they don’t hate her for being a witch. Or even a vampire. They hate her for her casual cruelty.

  They listen to Moonstream’s single “The Night Is My Ally” for luck. After midnight they pack up their knapsacks and sneak out to the wash. They’re very careful leaving the trailer because Tío Crusher has now assigned One-Eye Luban as their bodyguard and they don’t want the vampire witch to kill him as well. They planned to leave Angelina behind, but the little dog begins to whimper when they’re going, so they take her with them.

  When they get to where they saw the witch the previous night they build a small fire from dried wood. The flames flicker, casting shadows up and down the wash. The wood crackles. The air fills with the rich smell of the burning mesquite.

  “Don’t forget,” Ruby says. “We can’t show we’re afraid. And we have to pretend to be truthful.”

  “That won’t be hard,” Vida tells her. “We’re going to be great actors someday—remember?”

  Ruby’s not sure Vida will have to act—she’s always so fearless. She’s more worried about how she herself will do.

  But all she says is, “Of course I remember.”

  And then they wait.

  But not for long.

  Soon the smell of the mesquite is overwhelmed by another with a sharp bite that’s like when the switch burned out in Vida’s bedroom last month. They look up to see the tlahuelpuchi approach their fire. She doesn’t seem to walk so much as glide just above the sand and rock of the wash. Angelina crawls off Ruby’s lap and burrows into her empty knapsack.

  “Foolish girls,” the witch says. “What did I tell you about coming to my river?”

  Her eyes flash in the light from the fire. She reaches into a pocket for—the girls aren’t sure what. Perhaps more of her magical pollen to start some nasty spell that will turn them into zombies like what happened with Pepé. Perhaps something worse. But before she can take her hand out again, Vida stands up and smiles.

  “Oh, we’re so happy to see you,” she says. “Look, we have a blanket waiting for you by the fire.”

  The brujá frowns.

  “Please, have some tea,” Ruby adds. “We weren’t sure what kind you like, so we made three different flavors.”

  The mugs are sitting on a stone by the fire, kept warm by its heat.

  “I killed your friend,” the vampire witch says.

  “Yes,” Vida agrees. “I’m sure it was an accident. It wasn’t like you would ever make anyone fall and crack their head open on a rock.”

  “I drank his blood.”

  Vida nods. “Of course you would. He was already dead, so there was no point in it going to waste.”

  “I’m going to kill the both of you.”

  Ruby works hard at not showing how frightened she is. She’d rather crawl into the knapsack with Angelina and pretend she’s invisible. But it was her idea to do what the bottle man had told them, and Vida’s being so brave that she knows she has to be brave, too.

  “Before you do,” she says, “wo
uld you like a cupcake?”

  She holds out a plate with a perfect cupcake on it. The pink and white icing glows in the firelight. The plate only trembles a little in her hand, and the witch doesn’t seem to notice.

  “We also have tequila,” Vida adds. “We stole it from my uncle just for you.”

  Ruby notices a strange thing. She’s quite sure the brujá was much taller when she first approached the fire. But each time they say or do something nice, she seems to shrink a little. And while the witch makes her threats and says her mean things, so long as the girls continue to be kind and pleasant, she doesn’t seem to be able to actually cast a spell.

  “We also baked you a cake,” she says. “You must get hungry walking around in your river all night.”

  The witch’s eyes are like daggers. If she could throw them, both girls would already be dead.

  “I don’t know how you are doing this,” the witch says, “but the moment I am free I will kill you both, and then I will kill all your families. I will bathe in their blood and make a necklace from the teeth of all your little cousins.”

  “Oh, that will look so pretty,” Vida tells her.

  Ruby claps her hands. “I wish you’d kill us last so that we could see the necklace before we’re dead, too.”

  They keep it up for hours. The witch curses and threatens them, the girls respond with smiles and cheerful replies, with offers of various drinks and sweets. And bit by bit the witch grows smaller and smaller and smaller.

  It’s near daylight when the witch has grown so small that she can now fit into the empty glass coffee bottle that Vida took from behind the Starbucks over on Mission Street. Easy as you please, Vida sets the bottle over the witch—the way you might trap an angry hornet that’s in your trailer so that you can listen to it buzz against the glass. Vida gives the bottle a quick flip, then snaps on the metal lid and screws it shut.

  “Remember the other thing the bottle man told us?” she says.

  Ruby shakes her head.

  “Oh, you know,” Vida tells her. “We just need to put a bit of the witch’s hair or a nail clipping in a bottle and put the bottle in a fire.”

  Ruby nods. She thinks of a horrible thing and doesn’t want to say it because she knows what Vida wants to do. But she remembers the awful sound of Pepé falling on the rock, how the witch laughed and drank all his blood. She remembers all the horrible things the witch has been saying to them for hours.

  “I bet,” she says, “it would work just as well with the whole witch.”

  Vida smiles. “There’s only one way to find out.”

  She tosses the bottle into the fire. It doesn’t take long for the witch inside to begin to roast. They lean forward to watch the entire process with the same morbid curiosity that would have them poke with sticks at the body of a half-eaten dead snake they might find out in the scrub. The tiny witch bangs at the sides of the glass until she finally falls down and dies. They watch her turn black and shrivel away. The bottle suddenly breaks with a sharp crack, but by then there’s nothing left of the witch but a smudge of black ashes on broken pieces of glass.

  The girls add more wood to the fire. They sit there on the blanket, sipping tea and eating cupcakes as they watch the fire burn. Angelina lies between them, licking crumbs from their fingers.

  “We make pretty good witches ourselves,” Vida says.

  “I think we do,” Ruby agrees. “But we must only use our power for good.”

  “We don’t really have much power.”

  “Maybe the bottle man could teach us how to get more.”

  Vida nods. “Except do we really want to get lessons from talking spit? Do we even want lessons at all? It sounds too much like school.”

  “School’s not all bad.”

  “But it’s not all good, either.”

  Ruby grins. “You seem to like Roberto Sanchez well enough.”

  “I don’t like like him.”

  “But still.”

  Vida gives her a halfhearted slap on the knee and lies back on the blanket. She looks up into the lightening sky. The wash is filled with the cheerful songs of birds. It sounds like there are hundreds of them, but all she can see are a couple of cactus wrens and a phainopepla with his black crest standing at attention.

  “I’m going to miss having Pepé skulk around behind us,” she finally says.

  “Me too. We should tell him that we kept our word.”

  “Oh, I think he already knows.”

  Ruby lies down as well. She puts her hands behind her head. She misses having her memory stick, but she doesn’t mind having given it to the bottle man. She would have given away a million of them if it could have brought Pepé back. But her neck feels bare now. She’ll just have to make herself a necklace out of something else.

  Angelina comes up between them and gives them each a lick. Her tongue finds Ruby’s cheek, but she gets Vida right on the mouth. Vida quickly wipes her hand across her lips.

  “Careful, little dog,” she says as she pushes Angelina away. “We’re the witch girls now. We could turn you into a toad with just a snap of our fingers.”

  “But we wouldn’t,” Ruby says, “because we’re good witches.”

  She turns her head to look at Vida.

  “We’re very good witches,” Vida agrees. She waits a moment, then adds in a stage whisper, “Very good at what we do.”

  Ruby laughs, and the sound of her voice rises up to join the morning bird chorus.

  FELIDIS

  TANITH LEE

  1

  “DON’T GO IN those woods—there’s a terrifying girl—a female there—and she’s a cat.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked, the young man standing on the road. “Do you mean she’s bitchy—catty?”

  “Nah,” said the other man, the old red fat one on his cart, while the fed-up but poorly fed horse shook its ears. “I mean, boy, she’s covered in fur—and her hair’s fur. And she’s gotten herself two ice-green cat eyes. She’s bad—she’s evil. Don’t go in those woods. I’ve warned you.”

  And with a cluck to the horse, off he trundled in his cart, old red Fatty.

  While Radlo still stood on the track in his thin coat, with—he later admitted—his mouth hanging open.

  “He’s mad,” Radlo presently said aloud to reassure himself. In a nearby tree a magpie sounded its rattling scorn. “He didn’t agree to give me a lift to anywhere either. So.” Radlo looked back at the cloud of late summer woodland rising over the hillsides about two miles off. “So, I might as well go on the way I was going in the first place. I like cats, anyhow,” he added, if rather doubtfully. Cats, surely. But girls covered in fur? “To hell with it,” Radlo finished.

  And on he walked.

  The second man Radlo met, three hours later, by then deep in the dusk woods, was the opposite of the other. The second man was thin and young, and pallid as egg white, and it seemed he came from the village just smokily visible over a rise.

  “Here you,” began thin young Eggy. “What you wanting?”

  Lots of things, thought Radlo sadly. A good meal would be nice for a start—or even a friendly word. “Nothing,” he replied.

  “You’re after something,” Eggy insisted. “Be off! You’re not wanted around here.”

  Radlo scowled. He hadn’t meant to but the scowl had been brewing for thirteen days. “You don’t know me,” he scowlingly growled. “So how d’you know I’m not wanted?”

  Idiotic Eggy goggled at him.

  “All right,” Eggy idiotically said. “Better come with me, then.” And led him down through the trees into the village.

  There was dull yellowish lamplight starting in some of the cottage windows; the smoke going up from the chimneys had the tang of early cooking. Radlo’s stomach gurgled. Near the well a few people lingered, women drawing up a last pail of water, and a woodcutter in conversation with a couple of huntsmen.

  “You ought to go have a word with her,” said the woodcutter to the hunters. “S
he’ll put it right. And if it’s a big beast like that you can’t be too careful.”

  This sounded rather odd, but, anyway, having noticed Radlo and Eggy approaching, one of the huntsmen shook his head and made a gesture plainly meaning Shut up. All three men turned and glared at Radlo, while the women with pails stared.

  “What’s he want?” asked the woodcutter. “What you bringing him in for, you blitherer, eh?” This presumably to Eggy.

  “Maybe he wants her,” said the other huntsman. The first hunter shushed him.

  “Says he’s expected,” said Eggy, inaccurately.

  “Who expects him?”

  Radlo, finding all this too tiresome to be funny—hungry and irritated and with nowhere at all to go, and no one at all anymore to want or expect him—lost his temper and roared: “She expects me. Her. The one you keep on about. Who else?”

  It was impulsive and ridiculous. The moment he had done it he felt a complete fool. The Lord knew who this wretched female was they had mentioned. Probably the local jolly-woman, who charged coins for kisses, or worse—some well-off old nag in whose good books they were all trying to stay.

  It wasn’t he had forgotten red Fatty’s natter of a girl in fur. It was only two and two hadn’t yet become four.

  “What do you think?” asked the woodcutter of the huntsmen. “Do we believe him?”

  “Shall I thrash him?” helpfully inquired the bigger huntsman. “That’ll get the truth out.”

  Radlo was not above fighting, but he and the hunter didn’t seem a fair match. Radlo loosened up his muscles, ready to run for his life.

  And just then one of the women by the well called out, “Look over there. Better see what he thinks.”

  At which everybody turned, Radlo too, and there sat a black cat with a white triangle, like a little breastplate, on its chest.

  “Good eve, Jehankin,” chorused the villagers.

  The cat gave a flip of its tail—just one. It sprang away into the shadow beyond the houses.

  Grumbling now, the men frowned at Radlo. To Eggy, the woodcutter said, “See the way the cat’s gone? Better take this fellow up there then. Go on, be quick. She may be waiting, for all we know.”