disabused herself of any hope for Dickon’s change of heart. How to get away from him was another matter. She felt the old helplessness steal over her, the weakness that had come with being younger and frailer than her brother and her father. Unaware of her facial change, Vanna frowned. Painful, angry, memories of being an impotent girl child flared along her synapses.
Dickon droned on. Some nonsense about the balm of Gilead. He’d started off quoting Jeremiah, a book Vanna particularly detested because Dickon loved it. Then he’d begun by describing Commiphora Opobalsamum, the little tree that provided the balm. The congregation seemed interested, but Vanna drifted into a haze. She spent most of the sermon detached from the church, reveling in her anger’s building.
She heard his voice change through the haze of her anger. Dickon was winding up whatever raft of nonsense he’d been laying on the congregation. She returned to the room, and to the hard pew that cut off the circulation to her legs.
“There is a balm in Gilead,” Dickon proclaimed to the congregation. “Whenever the darkness threatens to overwhelm us, there is a way out. Whenever our wounds seem too grievous to bear, there is a balm of Gilead to make the wounded whole.”
For a change, Dickon had said something in a sermon that resonated in Vanna’s perception. There was a way out. She didn’t know what it was, yet, but she would not be yoked to this yokel preacher forever.
Vanna went to the coffee hour, said all the proper things, smiled at the proper people, pretended to care what they answered about their health, or mental state, or the price of eggs on the wholesale market. Her inner mind was working furiously. There was a way out of the prison of her wedded distress. She needed to get a job.
Clara Dee (From the Book of Bygone Days)
On the night Vanna was born, her grandmother, Clara Dee tottered through the frost-dried stalks of corn. Smut had blighted the crop before the frost came. The black spores rubbed off on her long gray skirts staining them as they swirled around her unsteady feet. The old moon’s sliver cast a shadow of light across the sky just bright enough to pale the stars.
Clara didn’t look up at the sky. She had little use for celestial machinations--especially not now, when her laboring lungs struggled to suck in enough air to keep her moving.
Her ankles were thick with dropsy, and her body swelled with edema under the gray skirt and black bodice stained with scraps of several meals. She knew her time was upon her, and welcomed it, if she could only hold it off long enough to complete her revenge.
Oh, revenge, yes, on Yuna Dee, her daughter-in-law. The bitch had just whelped again, tying herself ever more tightly to Clara’s beloved son Perry. She should be especially vulnerable, now, while her soul was closing the gaping hole bringing a new life into the world tore in a mother.
Clara grimaced, as her left foot caught in a twisted pumpkin vine hardened in the cold. It almost tripped her. She cursed it, mechanically, as she swayed, barely catching her balance in time to prevent a fall. Her foot throbbed with pain. She spread her arms out at her sides, and then closed her eyes to squeeze the red pain from her foot. She extricated her swollen ankle from the dead vine with great care and lifted her foot over it. She opened her eyes and peered into the dim moonlit night.
Beloved Perry had been a young man of so much promise, before Yuna Darien had bewitched him with her mincing ways and pious demeanor. Clara had tried to drive her off, and then to scare her off, and had even bluntly told her to leave poor Perry alone. Poor addled boy, he had been no match for the wily wench. She inveigled him into her church, and into a marriage, and altogether out of his mother’s control. The fierce loss still infuriated Clara, even ten years later.
Not far now to get out of the garden patch. Just the bean rows ahead. That meant more stepping over things. Her knees trembled with the effort. Then she stood on the gravel drive. The pebbles poked at the soles of her feet and seemed to be struggling to get between her toes in her slippers. She wished she had her shoes, but they no longer fit her swollen feet. She bit her tongue, and persevered over the rutted drive to the opposite side. Here the grass, though brown and brittle, was almost soft and comforting after the garden and the drive.
She went forward up the hill. From time to time, she stopped to breathe. Once an owl flapped by her. She took it for a good omen, and smiled grimly. She patted several times at the pocket of her skirt. The necessary things were there, spiderwort and St. John’s wort, with dogbane, stinging nettle, and miner’s lettuce. All she needed to work her hedge witchery.
She came to the gate into the pasture, and struggled to open it. It was a heavy wooden gate on rusty hinges, and Clara opened it no more than she must to pass through. When she felt strong enough, she shoved it closed. She leaned on it to gather her breath.
It was only a little way, now, to the top of the pasture hill. Why one had to perform this particular spell on a hilltop Clara did not know. The oral grimoire her mentor in the dark arts had forced her to memorize had been very clear on this requirement. The sheep had bedded down at the top of the hill, instinctively guarding against canine kind. Clara had expected them to be here, and struggled between them, using their backs occasionally as leaning posts. The sheep bleated a little, but they knew Clara and were not greatly disturbed.
At last, Clara reached the hill’s high point. The lead ewe slept there. She nudged her aside and sat down with a great snapping and popping of her joints. She’d worry about getting up when she had finished.
She took the plastic bags of dried worts from her skirt pocket and carefully packed them in a pipe she took from another pocket. She packed dried plants in layers, first the miner’s lettuce, and then the St. John’s wort, and then the stinging nettle, and then the spiderwort, and topped it all off with a layer of dogbane. She lit a match and applied it to the pipe, sucking the smoke in through the stem. She coughed and wheezed. Slowly she drew on the pipe again, and began muttering the spell to twist her daughter-in-law’s spine.
Halfway through the stinging nettle layer, Clara lost consciousness and entered into a dimension she had never entered before. A great force she did not recognize, but knew was not Yuna, engulfed her little spirit. The force greedily sucked all the malice from her and dropped her down through the ether into an abyss.
Perry Dee heard a mournful cry on the hill. He grabbed his jacket and dashed out to check his sheep. The cry had sounded very like a coyote, the bane of sheep kind. He found his mother among the sheep, stone dead. In the big house, the newborn whelp, Vanna, smiled an eerie smile at the flaking ceiling over her as she embraced her grandmother’s malice.
Vanna’s Dreamtime
Vanna had excused herself from the Sunday evening women’s meeting, pleading a headache. In truth, she couldn’t stomach any more talk of babies and diapers and ways to please cantankerous husbands. Dickon was working on his next sermon in the study. To avoid him, Vanna went to bed early. She slipped into a dreaming sleep. We are, the bard has told us, the stuff whereof the mind constructs dreams.
The mouse, gravid with young, nibbled at the muffin crumbs on the plate by Vanna’s bedside. Poor mouse; she had only lately taken to visiting this old house, since the more familiar one next door had gone vacant of cheese and supplying tenants. Across the plate from her, a cockroach, black, shiny, and ugly, worked at a smear of butter. Tonight his brethren were pillaging elsewhere.
Nervously the mouse looked about her. Strange currents charged the atmosphere. A lingering stale odor of cat, though very old, still tinged the air with danger. She glanced at the sleeping Vanna, and suddenly scurried down the lamp cord to safety behind the baseboard molding. A chartreuse phosphorescence suffused Vanna’s aura, making an eerie witch light in the room. The cockroach clambered down the nightstand to a haven under the bed, its tiny claws clicking in the oppressive silence of the night.
Vanna was dreaming. She dreamed she was a kitten, with gray and white stripes. She wa
s playing with a large red maple leaf, batting it back and forth through the dust motes swimming in a ray of sunlight. Suddenly the leaf escaped her paws as she felt herself hoisted through the air by a string around her neck. She was swinging from the string, hung over a nail, her thrashing tail swirling the dancing dust motes into frenzy.
And then she transcended her kitten form, metamorphosing into a bat. With a rabid shriek, she flew her claws into the face of the neighbor boy who was tormenting her kitten. She gouged his eyes with the taloned hands at her wing joints. Blood ran down his face, red in the sun, black in the shadows. Flies gathered--hordes of flies--to feast on the stringy things that dangled from the sockets where the boy’s eyes had been. The bat Vanna chittered in glee, and flew into the shadows of the hayloft to lurk in its murk until the moon should rise bloody over the eastern hills.
Then Vanna sat suddenly in human form on a dais. Her dress was a black velvet sheath. Around her neck she wore three strands of black pearls. One by one the men she had known came before her to plead their innocence. Tears stood in many of these helpless creatures’ eyes. Several fell to their knees, begging her mercy. Every one of them was nude, with a flaccid penis and
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