Under My Hat: Tales from the Cauldron

by Jonathan Strahan

  Carrying his tool bag slung over his shoulder and one rotting log under each arm was an ordeal, but he crept through the grove and back to his car successfully, placing the carvings in the trunk. He drove a few miles until he reached the desolate field where the county fair had been set up a couple of months earlier. In the first glimmerings of dawn, he set fire to the two stumps he’d cut: one of the witch’s dead husband, one of her dead daughter. They burned quickly and hot, as if soaked in gasoline. The smoke writhed strangely, making human shapes in the air, and it didn’t smell much at all like burning wood—more like burning hair, a stink he’d smelled once as a kid and never forgotten—and he thought he heard a long, low sigh escape as the wood turned to ash.

  After the carvings had burned out, he poked through the ashes with a stick. There were a few bits of white that might have been bone fragments or baby teeth, but nothing else recognizable. He yawned hugely, went back to his car, and drove home before his parents could miss him.

  Carlos crawled into bed, wondering if he’d accomplished anything at all.

  His cell phone rang, and he stared at it blearily, still half asleep. Maria. “Are you okay?”

  “Carlos, can you come? The wi—Nedra, she’s acting really weird.”

  He clamped the phone to his ear with his shoulder and pulled on a clean pair of jeans. “Are you in trouble? Is she threatening you?”

  “No, she’s … she’s crying.”

  His mother was in the kitchen, of course, working on Thanksgiving dinner, and she called to him as he ran through the room, but he didn’t answer. He jumped into the car, driving off while his father yelled at him from the front yard, where he stood holding a rake. Moments later his cell phone started to ring, but a glance showed him it was his mother, so he turned it off and raced through back streets and up the seemingly endless driveway to the witch’s house.

  Carlos didn’t bother knocking, just burst through the front door, and Maria was there in the living room—which was like a time capsule, if someone inexplicably decided to fill a time capsule with hideous country furniture from the 1940s—staring in worry and bewilderment at the witch, who was curled on the floor, sobbing.

  “What’s wrong with her?” He sat beside Maria on the couch and put his arm around her shoulders.

  The witch looked up, cheeks streaked with tears. “I can’t remember their faces,” she said. “My husband, my daughter, for the first time today, I closed my eyes, and they’re gone. I reach for them with my mind, I probe for them, I listen, but I can’t feel anything, I can’t hear them whispering … they’re just gone.”

  Carlos let out a long, relieved breath. “But … that’s good. I think you had them trapped, or some part of them, their spirits, I don’t know, in those carvings you tried to make. That’s why the memories never faded for you, why the pain never stopped.

  Your magic worked, just not the way you meant. You kept them here, but only partway, stuck between life and death, between this world and … whatever comes after.”

  Her eyes widened. “Trapped? Their spirits? You’re sure?”

  “I wasn’t sure. But I thought maybe—you said you could still see them, still hear them, and that sounded like a sort of haunting to me, and so …” He took a deep breath. “I set them free. Cut the wood down, and burned the carvings, and released them. I think I saw their spirits rise into the sky, heard their last breaths.” Carlos braced himself for an attack, but the witch just rose unsteadily and sat on a stiff-backed wooden chair.

  “I never realized,” she murmured. “I never meant … I just wanted them back. I didn’t want to keep them from … moving on.” She looked from Carlos to Maria and winced. “I may have been … misguided, carving the forest, trying to protect everyone from everything. It’s easier to think straight now, without that ache of grief in my chest, that howling emptiness under my ribs, distorting everything, making the world seem ugly and dangerous … but it’s strange. I miss the pain now that it’s gone. I’m not sure I want it back … but I do miss it, in a way. It was reliable. Familiar.” She wiped the tears from her cheeks matter-of-factly. “Maria,” she said in an oddly formal voice, “I will not be able to continue training you. You must go back home to your parents.”

  Maria shot to her feet. “What? That’s not fair—”

  “What wasn’t fair was me taking a daughter away from her mother,” Nedra said. She raised her hand before Maria could protest further. “Listen. When you’re older, when you’re ready to leave home, if you want to come here, I will teach you then.

  All right?”

  “What, like when I’m eighteen? That’s forever!”

  “Go wait in the car,” Nedra said. “Your brother will be along shortly.”

  Maria shot a venomous glare at Carlos, then stomped out of the room. For someone who barely weighed ninety pounds, she was a magnificent stomper.

  “Go, have your Thanksgiving dinner,” Nedra said. “I’ll restore the memory of your sister to your parents and the rest of your family.”

  “I was wondering about that,” Carlos said. “A lot of relatives from out of town are coming, and surely they would remember Maria, you don’t have carvings of them—”

  “The town is mine,” Nedra said simply. “Things work out the way I want them to here, and as long as they were here, or even calling someone here, they’d forget Maria, and later simply forget they’d forgotten. Listen, though. Come back tomorrow. All right? I could use your help with something.”

  Carlos stood up. “I … all right. Listen, Nedra. I’m sorry. About your husband, and your daughter—”

  She shook her head. “Don’t be sorry. It was a very long time ago. Finally, it was a very long time ago.”

  Carlos took Maria home. His parents were annoyed that she’d left the house that morning without telling them where she was going, but they were too busy getting ready for their visitors to make much of it. Maria sulked in her room until noon, but she came out when the cousins started arriving, and devoured their mother’s apple pie after dinner, as always, and Carlos allowed himself to believe that things might be okay.

  His parents wouldn’t let him borrow the car the next morning, and anyway it was blocked in by the cars of the various relatives who’d stayed the night, so he said he needed to take a walk, and hiked for Nedra’s house. The driveway seemed shorter, somehow, this time. He knocked on the front door, and Nedra stepped out onto the porch. “Come to the back,” she said, and led the way around the house to the grove.

  For a moment they stood by the back steps, surveying the vastness of the carved forest. Then Nedra sighed and handed him a folding knife identical to her own. “Let’s get started. We have a lot of work to do.”

  He looked at the blade in his hand. “Started? Doing what?”

  “Carving legs for all these people. And uprooting them from the earth, so they can go where they will. Do you want to start with your own carving?”

  “No,” he said, opening the knife. “Show me Maria’s.”

  “You’re a good brother,” she said, a bit grudgingly.

  He grinned. “I try. But then, yeah—I’ll do mine next.”

  BURNING CASTLES

  M. RICKERT

  ONLY RECENTLY HAVE I come to suspect she lies about everything. Ever since I was a little kid she has told me not to feel bad about the genes I carry. “They say it skips a generation,” she says. “It doesn’t mean you can’t have a magical life.”

  She even likes to dress her lie, wearing long skirts and flowing scarves; she paints Goodwill boots with acrylic scenes of butterflies, sunsets, black trees, autumn leaves, and snow; she wears her hair long, she smells like fire, her jewelry cackles.

  “Is your mother a hippie?” Shelly Vogle asks me, her eyes wide.

  “No,” I say, watching my mother sweep through the school hallway, scarf, skirt, and sleeves floating as though she is on the edge of flight. “My mother’s not a hippie,” I say. “She’s a witch.” Shelly’s eyes glint wit
h the small flame I ignited, her mouth closes, her lips tight. I like to watch it happen. I like to watch people turn, slowly, to assess my mother with a combination of fear and awe. She thinks she is the one who creates this reaction, but I learned early that in spite of my poor, unmagical nature, I still have power. “Careful,” I whisper to Shelly. “Don’t let her catch you watching.” She turns away, refusing to look at my mother even when she says hello.

  “I don’t know why your friends are so afraid of me,” my mother says, loud enough for anyone to hear. She says it as though it is an upsetting matter, but anyone can see she is pleased. “Are you ready?” she asks. “It’s important not to be late.”

  I slam my locker shut. I pretend that I can’t look at her, as though she has some power over me that I am not equal to.

  “Where are we going?” I say.

  “Marissa, you can’t be serious.” I’m not, but I don’t let her know. She doesn’t know anything, it turns out. All those times when I was a little kid and she said she could read my mind, she did nothing of the sort.

  “You know we’re meeting Duke’s mother today. You know he doesn’t want us to be late. Don’t do this to me, Marissa, not today.”

  We walk down the long blue hallway together. In spite of my mother’s floating way, she is a noisy walker. Her boots click across the linoleum, her bracelets clank. In the otherworldly silence of the mostly empty school, my mother announces our passage; beneath all her other noise I think I hear the bell-like sound of her earrings, which are long and shaped like Christmas trees. When we emerge from the school into the light, I squint and lower my head; my mother groans. That’s something we share; neither of us likes the sun very much.

  When I was a little kid, I thought she was perfect, better than any fairy-tale queen, my mother and only mine, with her beautiful long hair, her layers of silk that brushed my skin when she leaned down to kiss me with her cinnamon lips. I misunderstood the way strangers looked at her, thinking they were seeing what I saw: the most amazing woman in the world, my mother, who could make birds sing, flowers open, stars fall. Though, strangely, none of this magic helped our circumstances; we frequently moved from rental to rental, dingy house with poor plumbing to even dingier house with better plumbing. Once we had a bathtub, and twice we had a porch. Currently we live in an apartment with neither, but we’re moving after the wedding.

  “Just be nice,” my mother says as she backs out of the parking space in the school parking lot. I sink down into the seat, not wanting to be seen in this car that looks like something put together in pieces. My mother says it was a blessing that Duke found it for us when he did, but I have reason to suspect this is another of her lies. She is careful to keep mud smeared across the license plate and she slows down considerably around police cars. “I know you have doubts, Marissa, but don’t blow this for me, all right? You can have your little teenage breakdown in a few weeks. That’s all I’m asking. Just pretend for a while longer.”

  I nod solemnly, having learned from the master that it means nothing at all to say yes, to say no, to lie.

  “What you’re feeling is perfectly normal,” she says, tapping the steering wheel with her long fingernails, painted a subdued pink. “It makes perfect sense that you would be jealous.”

  “I’m not jealous,” I say. I can’t stand the way she talks lately, as though everything I say has a reason beyond the reason I say it does.

  “Well, whatever it is you are. It’s normal. I mean, look at us, kiddo. It’s just been you and me all these years, and now I bring this man into our lives. Of course you’d feel … whatever it is you’re feeling.” She grabs my knee with her pink manicured hand and smiles down at me, revealing, in this bright light, never-before-seen dimensions of her face. “What?” she says, concern making everything worse.

  “Nothing. I hate it when you do this when you’re driving. Just keep your eyes on the road, Mom,” I say.

  She knows I’m lying, I’m sure, but isn’t it easier to go along with it? When she looked at me in that bright afternoon light, her face was lined with tiny cracks as though she’d broken it and glued it back together again without me even noticing.

  Maybe it’s a past-life thing. Maybe for a moment time broke open and I saw her from a life before, when she was an old lady and I was someone else, like her dog, maybe. Maybe, in some past life, I was my mother’s pet. My eyes slide sideways as I consider the other option: maybe she was mine. It is obvious she doesn’t know what I’m thinking. She looks happy.

  I have had much reason lately to think of past lives, ever since my mother brought him home and the dreams returned, the ones I’d forgotten for years.

  “Night terrors,” my mother said. “You used to have them all the time. They don’t mean anything real. The doctor told me it was just your way of dealing with your father leaving us to join the circus.”

  “But I never knew him,” I said to her, sitting at the kitchen table, staring at the candle there, lit against the gray morning light. It had taken all my courage to tell her what I remembered.

  She shook her long hair, then rubbed her fingers over her head in this weird gesture she had of both tousling and tidying as though she never could make up her mind. “These are dreams,” she said, barely opening her mouth to let out the words.

  “But it really happened.”

  We sat there in silence. The gray light changed to a lighter gray, but we were trapped in the fog that always seemed to reside in the dingy rooms of our apartment. I didn’t say anything for a long time. What else could I tell her? Even so, after sitting in silence, watching the candle burn low, my mother blew out the flame, pushed her chair back, stood up, and said, “Not another word. Not another word of your lies.” She left me alone there, with my memories of being murdered and the acrid scent of smoke.

  “This looks like the place,” my mother says, turning into the driveway marked with a sign: Senior Glow Retirement Living. “Senior Glow,” she snorts, and I almost laugh with her before I remember what she is doing to me. She parks the car in the first open space. In spite of myself I do laugh, a short, quick bark. “What?” she says.

  “You don’t want her to see the car?”

  My mother shrugs, even as she smirks. “Come on, let’s get this over with.”

  We walk up the driveway, our heads bowed against the light.

  “Is he going to be here?” I ask.

  “Well, of course he is.” She rolls her eyes but, when she sees me watching, tries to cover it with a hair toss, rubbing her fingers through the long strands.

  She’s made every attempt to look normal—her fingernails painted a virginal pink, her hair brushed tame—but my mother has been a witch for so long she’s lost perspective. She still looks wild. Realizing this, I feel the pain in my chest. I want to protect her. I hate her. How could she do this to me? I consider stopping right there, refusing to go in. She hops over the curb, in that way she has, for a moment all jangled and afloat. I cannot make myself abandon her the way she’s abandoned me.

  She holds the glass door open to let me pass. She’s right about one thing. For so long it was just the two of us. I was her dancing partner, the one who made her laugh, her valentine, her darling, her date.

  We click past the receptionist, who peers over her dark glasses at us. My mother wiggles her fingers and the woman offers a tight smile.

  “Have you been here before?” I ask.

  Even before my mother speaks I know I have given her this opening. “Isn’t that what you’ve been saying? Haven’t we all been here before?” She smiles at her own joke as we click down the long hallway and I try not to remember.

  I was raised on a policy of no rules. I learned early to put myself to bed when I was tired rather than collapse in strange locations: the couch, which was comfortable enough, the floor, which was not. My mother thought it was funny that I chose the bed. “I’m afraid you’re going to be ordinary,” she said. “You take after your father.”

 
We celebrated the seasons with fire and wine, though I was instructed to lie about both. “You don’t want the government to take you away from me,” she said. “Do you?”

  I did not. She fed me cake for breakfast, laughed at my jokes, decorated all year with Christmas lights, danced like something tossed by the wind, and told me that we had more than one chance to get it right.

  “We live many lives,” she said. “This is not our only shot.”

  “Here we are,” she says, and we turn into a room, immediately too warm, with a strange odor, a room where the windows have never been opened, a room where people come to die. She clicks and jangles her way over to him, where he stands in front of the window. “Duke,” she says, brushing his arm with her strange nails, turning to swoop down on the old woman sitting in the chair, planting a kiss on her cheek. “Mrs. Lavish,” my mother shouts, “how are you? You look like you’re feeling better.”

  “Who are you?” the old woman says.

  My mother extends her jangled arm and flaps her fingers at me, a signal to step closer. “This is my daughter. Come here, Marissa. She’s a little shy.”

  I do not move. I am sure my mother thinks this is a defiant act, an attempt to destroy her, but the stifling room, all of us together again, the way he watches me, it’s just too much. I spin on my heels and run.

  “What on earth?” I hear the old woman say.

  “She hasn’t been feeling well,” my mother says smoothly, so comfortable with her lies.

  I wait for her in the parking lot, too hot to sit in the car, which she’s left unlocked, of course. I sit on the curb, wiping my nose with my sleeve. This, I think, is the nightmare, not those terrible memories that are in my dreams. This is the reality I cannot escape.

  “You’re not listening,” I told my mother at our kitchen table.

  “I remember him. He’s a murderer. He murdered me. You can’t marry him. He’s not the way he seems.”