by Shannon West
She lifted her chin pugnaciously after that out-of-character pronouncement and glared back and forth between us, as if daring us to say another word. The sheriff looked down at her in disbelief. Here was this little woman, who came up just to his chest, telling him basically to mind his own damn business. I admit I was a little in awe of her.
I wondered what the sheriff would do, and I didn’t have long to wait to find out. He glanced over at me, blew out a long-suffering breath and glanced down at Rose. “Yes, ma’am,” he said.
He turned to glare at his grandmother. “Nana, are you ready to go?” he asked her, his voice deceptively soft, as I suspected he was holding onto his temper and his pride with a herculean effort. She nodded, pulling off her robe and handing the tambourine to Rose.
“Yes, dear. I’m ready when you are.” She came forward and took his arm. “I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind taking me to the Piggly Wiggly on the way to my house. I need to pick up a few things at the store.”
He raised his eyes heavenward. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Thank you, darlin.’” She waggled her fingers at the other ladies and pulled him unresistingly toward the stairs. “Pearl, I’ll see you tomorrow,” she called as her grandson helped her up the first step. I wondered if the shock had rendered him unable to say anything but ‘yes ma’am,’ and hoped my gran hadn’t broken him. But he soon disabused me of that notion. He turned and gave me one last, long, significant look.
“I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Since I was pretty sure that was more of a threat than a promise, I gulped and said, “Yes, Sheriff,” and watched them go slowly up the stairs.
I turned to look at my grandmother, who had the good grace to not be able to meet my eyes.
“Now, Noah, I can explain.”
“I’m breathless to hear it.”
I walked over to the blobby mess that was melting on the floor, the pats of butter having slid off to the middle of the thing’s stomach. “What in the name of God, Grandmother?”
“I can explain.”
“I sure hope so, because I’m about five minutes away from calling the doctor to come out here and bring the commitment papers. And a net.”
“Oh hush, Noah. There’s a simple explanation.”
“Then tell me, Grandma, because I’m at a loss here.”
“We were casting out demons, of course. What did you think?”
Chapter Six
I pulled my phone from my back pocket and started to look through my contacts.
“Oh, stop looking for the number to my doctor. I can explain.”
I sat down at the table and stopped scrolling, but I kept the phone in my hand. “Okay, go ahead.”
Gran glanced over at Rose nervously and then took off her robe and flopped down on the sofa. She looked suddenly very old and tired.
“Gran, are you okay? Do you need some water or something?”
“No, I’m fine. I’m just trying to figure out the best way to explain this. Rose, you start while I gather my thoughts.”
Rose smiled and patted my knee as she took a seat next to me.
“That was awesome, by the way,” I told her. “The way you told Nick it was none of his business.”
She waved her hand. “I taught Nick Moody in high school. Both of you for that matter. He was always a sweet boy but he could get a little bossy. He was so popular with the other students, you know, that it gave him the big head. Football player and all. I’m sure you remember. But he knows better than to try and pull that stuff on me the way he’s been doing. I decided it was time to put a stop to it.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I grinned, and she sniffed.
“Okay, let’s see now. How to start explaining? See, this all started back in 1983.”
“Oh Lord,” I said, dropping my head in my hands again.
“Patience, dear. I’m telling you, but I have to do it my own way, and it’s a long story. Now where was I? Yes, 1983. Emma Mae Millican went to a big flea market out on Highway 9. We used to go all the time and buy fruit and fresh vegetables and well, all manner of things, but I was busy that day and couldn’t go with her. Anyway, Emma Mae loved old books, especially romance novels and cookbooks. Her favorite place to buy them was at the flea market. She’d buy them by the boxful if she could find them. So on this day, she found an old man selling books, and she rambled around through his boxes. They were dusty and old, and he said he got some of them when he cleaned out a neighbor’s barn. He asked her what she was looking for and she told him cookbooks, and he pulled this old, tattered book from the bottom of the box and said, ‘Here. I think this one has recipes, and it’s real old. Almost falling apart.’
“Well, there were some Barbara Cartland books in that box too, so Emma Mae took the whole bunch. Later that night, when she got home, she started looking through them and found the old, raggedy book the vendor had shown her and saw that what she had wasn’t really a cook book at all. Or not exactly.”
“Now here is the amazing part. It turned out that what she had was a book that used to be in our family.”
“Our family? As in my mom’s and dad’s?”
“On your father’s side, dear. Mine and your grandmother’s side.”
“You see, it had been lost. For years and years,” my gran said, taking up the story. “One day while I had gone shopping, your granddaddy decided to clean out the basement. It was when he was fixing up his damn ‘man cave.’ Well, one of the boxes that he decided was just trash, wasn’t trash at all! It was a box of my mother’s and my grandmother’s books, with some of the older books handed down to her through the generations. And I was storing it there in the basement.”
“Oh shit, poor Granddad.”
“You got that right. That fool man took all the boxes he’d cleaned out and hauled them to the junk man, an old guy that lived on the outskirts of town. Lord, that was one of the worst fights we ever had, and we had some doozies. He went tearing back off to the junkman to see if he could find it, but the man said he’d sold the whole lot to someone else. He didn’t know who. We never did find those books, and I was just sick about it. I never really forgave him for that.”
“Then a few years later,” Rose said, continuing her story, “there was Emma Mae at the flea market and she bought those same books.”
“Quite the coincidence.”
“Oh, it was no coincidence. The book found its way home, that’s all.”
“Okay, Gran, that’s taking it a little far.”
“No such thing. My family has long had a tradition of…well, of knowing things and making things happen. My mother always knew when someone in the family had passed, for instance. And she knew other things too, before they occurred. Not only that, but my grandmother was well known as a healer. She could talk a wart off your hand quicker than anybody.”
“Oh, come on.” I knew the old people believed in this kind of thing—it was folk magic, and had been going on in the South for ages, but I was a little shocked to hear my own gran say she believed in it.
“Don’t be sassy, Noah. I’ve seen my grandma do it a hundred times. And never took a penny for it either. She could talk the fire out of a wound too and cure thrush and stop bleeding. Once when I was a girl, I saw my granny heal a young woman who was only a few years older than me. She was putting wood into a stove stove and an ember flew out and caught her dress on fire. The lower half of her body was burned so badly, the doctor said he’d done what he could for her. She was still in terrible pain, and then somebody suggested calling in my grandma. ‘Go get Ms. Bessie,’ they said. ‘She can talk the fire out of it.’ And they carried that poor girl in the house and laid her down. My grandma was an old, old woman by then. But she used lard on that girl’s legs. Pure, white lard, right off a hog, newly butchered. Rubbed it all over her legs and said the words.”
“What words?” I didn’t want to be fascinated, but dammit, I was.
“Nobody knows for sure what healers say. Some say it’s a verse
from the Bible. Some say it’s magic spells. But whatever she said, that girl got up from her bed and walked out of there. She was hardly in pain anymore and she lived till just a few years ago and died of old age.”
“I don’t know if I believe all that, Gran.”
“Believe it or not, it’s true. I saw it. My grandmother used to blow in a baby’s mouth to cure the thrush too. I’ve seen that several times.”
“Okay, that’s disgusting, but whatever you say.”
“My grandma knew things, boy, and saw spirits. Her mother before her did too. And her mother before her and so on, back all the way before anybody could remember. I do too, though I know you don’t want to believe it, and I’m nowhere as good as my mother. That book that Emma Mae found at the flea market was written a long time ago, by one of our ancestors. It was our family’s book. But Emma Mae wouldn’t give it back to us.”
“She wouldn’t give it back? Even knowing where it came from?”
“No, the old bitch would not! We had a terrible fight, but she wouldn’t budge.”
“Tell me about the books in that box.”
“Most of them were just rubbish, really, but they had sentimental value. The only really old book belonged to my three or four times great grandmother, named Elizabeth Seegars. And she lived in Salem, Massachusetts in the late 1600s.”
“What?”
“That’s right. Massachusetts is where our people came from originally. In later years they came south to Alabama for the federal land grants. Back in 1796, I think it was. Rose did our family history once.”
“Yes. It was a little after 1796, closer to 1798.”
“Okay. But I can’t believe she wouldn’t give you a family heirloom.”
Gran shrugged. “That was Emma Mae, all right. It even had my name written right on the inside flap. She had the nerve to bring it to show Rose, since she knew Rose taught History and knew Rose was a lot nicer than me. I wanted to snatch her bald-headed, and if I’d got my hands on our book, I wouldn’t have given it back.”
Rose nodded. “I can tell you, I was amazed by the book. I knew it existed, of course, when Pearl had it, but I’d never really looked at it before. The ink was so faded, it was hard to read, but it must have been stored in a dark, dry place all those years, because it was still mostly intact. I tried to get her to let me take it to a museum if she wouldn’t give it back to us, but she wouldn’t do it. Just wanted me to help her with some of the old words. The book, as it turned out, was part journal and part witch’s grimoire.”
“Witch’s what?”
“Grimoire. A book of magic and spells.” Rose got up and went over to an old bread box that had been on the kitchen counter for years. No one ever used it, to my knowledge. She opened it up and pulled out the same tattered book in an old leather binding I’d seen on the kitchen table earlier.
“This is the book,” Rose said, holding it out to me.
For some reason, I was reluctant to touch it. The leather wrapped around it was faded and incredibly fragile looking. “You’re saying this is a-a grim-whatever, and our ancestor was an honest to God witch?”
“Yes, dear, but not a bad witch. Witchcraft runs in our family—like your gran said. It’s like a fast running stream, and sometimes, it gets narrow, but then sometimes it goes wide and deep. I think Elizabeth Seegars was a folk witch or a wise woman, as they used to call them. Seegars was her married name, and in her, the stream of magic ran deep indeed. She didn’t mean any harm to anyone. Her book had all kinds of recipes in it, and not just for food. There were hand-written potions too. Some for things like stopping a baby’s colic or curing what they called morbid sore throat. Or taking the fire out of a burn and curing thrush and talking off warts—like Pearl told you our grandmother did. There were recipes for making a lotion to cure cracked skin and some for help with skin rashes. Some of them were food recipes. For apple cobblers and blackberry pies and rabbit stews. Yeast cakes and pastries, gingerbread and biscuits and even fried dough. Like your doughnuts, Noah. And mixed in with all of them were a few witches’ spells.”
“You’re kidding!”
“No, I’m serious. They were old, even then. Nothing evil—just love spells and spells for luck and a few spells to ensure a good crop or to make your vegetables grow or make the things you cooked taste good. Things like that. And her journal was there too—just stories of her everyday life. But about halfway through the book, the journal turned dark. Elizabeth Seegars wrote that her husband John—our great-great-great-whatever grandfather, was killed in a farming accident. She was just beside herself with grief and after God ignored her pleas to bring him back, she got a little crazy, and she tried to summon a demon to bring him back to her.
“She consulted her sisters, who also lived in her village. Two of the older sisters lived together. One was a widow and one never married, Sarah Ayers and Jane Hawkins were their names—Hawkins was a family name Rose found on our genealogy. Anyway, somehow the three of them, all witches, came up with a way to conjure up a demon to bring her husband back to her. The sisters tried to talk her out of it, but Elizabeth was half crazy by then with grief.’
“The demon was furious at being summoned and captured, because the spell they used trapped him too, so he couldn’t leave. She wrote in the journal that they used agate stones to protect themselves from him. She even stuck a tiny one between the pages of the book to illustrate. The demon, whose name she said was Falalaba—”
There was a distant rumble of thunder outside, but I ignored it, both fascinated and appalled by their story, but Rose glanced at the window, looking worried before continuing. “This demon told her he couldn’t bring back her dead husband. He said he could only be brought back if he was newly dead and still near the realm of the living. He told her that her husband was already too far gone. The land of the dead was forbidden, he said.”
I made a hurry-up motion with my hand. “Well, go on. Don’t stop now.”
“The demon told Elizabeth he couldn’t bring back her husband, but that he could help her in other ways, if only she’d release him. Her sisters warned her he was a deceiver and a liar and not to listen to his promises. They helped her come up with a powerful spell that would release the demon once he’d done what she asked. The demon was furious, but the other two told her he would eventually agree to help her, especially once he realized he’d be forever bound to the book if he didn’t.”
“And did he ever help?”
“Yes, he did. But he was right when he told Elizabeth her husband was too long gone. What he brought back…well, it wasn’t her husband any more. She had to kill him, and then the poor woman killed herself.”
“Oh my God! That’s a horrible story!”
“Yes, it is. The two old women, her sisters, took up the story in the journal after that. But Sarah Ayers said to beware, because if the demon ever escapes the book, he’d kill whoever he can to get free. The old lady forced him to use his demon’s magic to fuel all the other spells in the book that now belonged to her. Even the recipes. And the magic they all had was passed down through the family.”
“Well, that’s…that’s got to be just about the craziest shit I ever heard.”
“Hmmph,” my gran said. “Emma Mae thought so too. Until she made her first cherry pie.”
“What? You mean Emma Mae’s pies were made from the recipes in that old book?”
“Yes, they were.”
“And you’ll have to admit they’re the best pies you ever tasted,” Rose suddenly spoke up. “That anybody has ever tasted.”
“Well, yeah, they’re pretty damn good. But demonic magic? Come on, ladies.”
“Noah, might I remind you that Emma Mae Millican won every baking contest since 1983 with that cherry pie recipe. And the magic wasn’t all demonic. It helped, of course, but our ancestors were witches too. Their magic made those recipes what they were.”
“Well, yeah, so you said, but magic? C’mon, ladies…”
“Open your
mind to it, boy,” my gran said. “’There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ That’s from Shakespeare son, and he knew a thing or two about witches. He wrote Macbeth, you know.”
“How did the journal end? What happened to the other two old ladies?”
“They died, as old ladies do, Noah. They never released the demon from the book, and he’s still in there to this day. The only way he can be released is to fulfill the owner of the book’s wishes, and end the curse by bringing back the one she loves from the realm of the dead.”
“But-but Elizabeth Seegars is dead now. She’s been dead for hundreds of years.”
“Exactly. The only other way is to destroy the book. That’s why the demon wants it so badly. And if he succeeds, he’ll be free, and he’ll try to kill the owner of the book and anyone else who gets in his way. That’s why he killed Emma Mae.”
“Okay, not buying this, Gran. Not any of it. There are some weird coincidences here with the book, I admit, but that’s all there is to it.”
“No, Noah. What do you think killed Emma Mae? It was the demon.”
“She had cancer, Gran.”
“Yes, but that wasn’t what killed her. We saw her die right in front of us.”
“Gran, good Lord!”
“Listen to me, boy. We saw it with our own eyes! We all did—every member of our book club. Claudia was there and Sylvia Taylor and Janet Hicks and Helen Meyers. All of us. Emma Mae had called a special meeting, and we were all having a little late afternoon pick me up.”
“With margaritas,” Rose clarified.
I rolled my eyes, though I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. “Maybe you all just got drunk then and had some kind of mass hallucination?”
“Don’t be crazy, boy. No, listen to what we’re telling you. Emma Mae said she called us together to tell us she had cancer, and the doctors had only given her about six months to live. She was finally going to give the book back to me, because there was no one else in her family to pass it on to.”