I could feel something lifting inside—a flicker of hope. “So then … she’ll be okay?”
“Probably.”
Her voice was noncommittal, as if the state of Silver’s health was about as important as a rock, but she also seemed to work with a certain kind of confidence, like she had done such a thing before. When she was finished, she put the spoon back in the pot. Then she took both hands, holding them together loosely as if she was about to say some type of prayer, and settled them on top of the wound. There was a small opening between her thumbs, and she blew through it once, twice, and then a third time. I didn’t know if I was watching some type of witchcraft, or if Witch Weatherly was just an honest-to-goodness nutcase, but I didn’t dare move.
She sat back finally, her eyes moving down to Silver’s wrist, which was still red and raw from the rope-vine. “You use creeper to drag her out of that hole?” she asked, examining it closely.
“Creeper?” I leaned forward in alarm. “What’s a creeper?”
“Trumpet creepers,” she said. “The long vines with the little red trumpet blooms on the ends? They’re all over the place up here, grow like weeds. Where do you think this mountain got its name?”
I moved back again, stunned. I’d always assumed that Creeper Mountain had gotten its name from the fact that Witch Weatherly lived on it. It had never occurred to me that it might be for anything as common as a vine.
She pointed to a pile of logs in the corner held together by a thick cord of twine. “I got creepers put to use all over the place here. They’re as strong as any rope. You braid them together and tie them around a grown man’s belt, and you could pull him up the mountain.”
“That’s what I did,” I said. “We didn’t have anything else to pull her out of the hole, so I twisted some of those vines together until it made a cord and she wrapped them around her wrist.”
Witch Weatherly nodded and released Silver’s arm. “She should rest.” She headed back across the room and set the pot back on top of the stove. “Let her be now. Don’t crowd her.”
I took a few reluctant steps away from the bed as the witch went over to a cupboard covered with peeling green paint, opened one of the doors, and took out a white sack. She opened the sack and pulled out two small buns. Her glittering eyes flicked over at me.
“You going to sit down for a minute and eat something, or just stand there gawking at me like a loon?”
I hesitated, even as my stomach growled, looking at the buns. I couldn’t remember how long it had been since I last ate. The granola bars and cheese sticks hadn’t been the most practical—or the most filling—food for the trip. But was I really going to risk eating something here? What if the buns were poisonous? What if this was a trap so that she could sedate me and then cut my throat and …
“I have butter, too,” the witch said, sliding a plate across the table. She nodded toward a brown earthenware jar with a lid. “And buttercup honey.” She split open one of the buns, spread a thick layer of butter on the inside, and then poured a column of honey over the top. It looked delicious.
I didn’t move. The buns couldn’t be real. Or if they were, they were probably poisonous. Everyone knew Witch Weatherly never went off the mountain. So where did she get things like flour and butter?
“Oh, sit down!” The irritated tone in her voice was back. “You’re making me antsy, standing there staring at me like that. I know you want to eat something. You look like a good puff of wind could knock you over.”
I moved across the room, inch by inch, until I was standing at back of the chair. The witch had moved over to the stove, where she was busy stirring the small pot again. I held on to the sides of the chair and stared at the roll, as if it might disappear if I looked at it hard enough. I could eat the whole thing in one bite. And afterward I would probably keel over, dead as a skunk.
“Go ahead,” the witch said, watching me over one shoulder. “There’s more when you’re done.”
I sat down slowly. It was now or never. I picked up the bun and brought it close to my mouth. The smell of yeast and flour emanated from the soft dough like a faint perfume. I took a bite and chewed. It tasted so wonderful—the bun light and chewy, the honey just sweet enough, combined with the salty butter—that my eyes almost filled up with tears.
As I ate, the witch walked over to the other side of the room and busied herself with something inside a basket. I could feel her eyes on me as I tore off another piece of the roll and shoved it into my mouth, but she did not say anything. After I finished the second roll, she walked back over to the small stove inside the fireplace. Taking the tin kettle off the top of it, she poured a steaming liquid into two blue mugs. One of the mugs was missing a handle. She brought both of them over, placed one in front of me, and then fished two more rolls out of the sack.
“Eat some more,” she said. “And drink some tea. It helps with digestion.”
I slurped some of the tea—which was a pale yellow color and tasted sweet—and then sat back against my chair. It was not until I was halfway through the third roll that the witch came over to the table again. She sat across from me, and folded her hands on top of the smooth wood. “Good?”
I nodded.
“All right then,” she said. “I gave you something. Now it’s your turn.”
I sat back, swallowing hard. What did she want? A finger? A lock of hair?
“Do you remember where the pit was that your friend fell into?”
My brain began to race as I thought back, trying to place where we had been. “There was a really big tree near it. A pine tree I think, that was kind of bent over to one side. It was right past that.”
The witch’s eyes lit up as I spoke, and then seemed to fade again. “And there was nothing at the bottom of it? Nothing at all?”
I looked at her curiously. “What do you mean? What would be at the bottom? Is it a trap?”
“Well, of course it’s a trap.” She huffed impatiently. “What did you think it was? A swimming hole?”
I was almost too scared to ask the next question. It seemed so obvious. But I wanted to know. A part of me wanted to hear her say it. “What are you trying to catch?”
“Hornet-head snakes,” the witch answered. “The buggers. The mountain is overrun with them. Didn’t you see any on your way up?”
“We saw one,” I answered. “It came pretty close to us, but we didn’t move, and it just slithered away.”
“You’re lucky. I’ve been bitten twice.”
“Twice?” I drew back. “But I thought you died if you got bit by a hornet-head snake!”
“I’m here, aren’t I?” She snorted and took a sip of her tea. “But I’m allergic to their venom. When I got bit, I was in bed both times for three days. Second time, I wasn’t too sure I was going to make it at all. The more of them I catch, the better. I’m trying to create an antidote.”
“An antidote?” I repeated.
“For when I get bit,” she said impatiently. “You know, like when you get stung by a bee. The doctors give you an antidote if you’re allergic, so you don’t die. Same thing.”
I thought about the little book again under her pillow. It was probably filled to the brim with stuff about those snakes and their venom. And how to use them to create spells.
“Why would you dig a pit to catch a snake?” I asked. “That doesn’t make any sense. Wouldn’t they just crawl back out?”
“Most snakes would,” said the witch. “But hornet-heads have a terrible sense of direction. Snakes in general have no depth perception, but the hornet-head snake also can’t see very well. Those two things combined get them very confused when they fall down a large, dark hole. I stick a snake loop in the side of each pit, too, which they thrash around in for a little while, before they fall to the bottom. Which makes it easy for me to scoop them up in my nets and take them to the other side of the mountain where they won’t bother me anymore.” She shuddered the faintest bit, a slight rolling of the shoulders. “T
he fewer hornet-head snakes on this side of the mountain the better. I hate the little buggers. Always have.”
I sat there for a moment, rolling the information around in my head. It was like watching the layers of an onion being peeled away; the more things that I uncovered about Witch Weatherly, the more I realized that none of the things I had heard about her were true.
Or at least, not all of them. I had to get to the part about Momma. And I would. As soon as I worked up the nerve.
“Did you haunt the falls?” I blurted out.
“Pardon?” The witch looked at me sharply.
“The falls,” I stammered. “Shining Falls. Did you haunt them?”
“Why in the world would I haunt them?” Witch Weatherly curled her flat lips, as if tasting something unpleasant. “And how, pray tell, do you go about haunting anything if you’re not dead first?”
“Silver and I saw the lights.” I sat up straight. “We looked into the pool at the bottom, and there were lights flashing. Like lightning, but wider.”
“That’s from the algae that grows on the rocks at the bottom,” the witch said. “They harbor a special organism that gives off light. It’s called bioluminescence. Look it up sometime. It’s not rocket science.”
I sat quietly, mulling this over. She sounded pretty convincing. And there was a pretty good chance that she knew what she was talking about, since she’d studied botany all those years ago. Still …
“So you girls were just exploring the mountain, eh?” she asked. “Out for a walk?”
I looked down at my hands. “Yeah. Kind of.”
“Not much to see up here,” the witch offered. “Unless you’re looking for hornet-head snakes, of course.” She placed her hands carefully on the table before her. “Or me.”
I fixed my gaze on a stray crumb in the middle of the table.
“You come up on a bet?” she pressed. “A dare?”
I shook my head.
“Were you supposed to grab something from my house and bring it back down to school? Show everybody, just to prove you’d been here?” Her eyebrows narrowed.
I sat back, scared by the sudden aggressiveness in her voice. “No, nothing like that.”
“Then what?”
I opened my mouth to say something about Momma, but it wouldn’t come.
“Silver has this history project … ,” I said instead, taking Momma’s bird necklace out from inside my shirt and rolling it along my fingers. “You know, for school. We have to do a report about the history of anything, as long as it’s from Pennsylvania. And Silver and I thought that, since you …”
I stopped talking as I realized Witch Weatherly wasn’t listening to me. Her eyes had dropped from my face down to the necklace. As she looked at it, the color seemed to drain from her cheeks.
“Where did you get that?” she whispered.
My fingers froze around the locket.
“Where did you get it?” Her voice was a hiss.
“From my mother.”
“Your mother …” The witch’s eyes moved slowly around the table. “Who’s your mother?”
“Greta Baker,” I said automatically. “She used to be Greta Woodbine.”
The witch’s eyes bloomed wide. She opened her mouth and shut it. Once and then again, like a fish gasping for air. “She’s alive, then?” she whispered. “She’s still alive?”
For a moment, I was too taken aback to speak. “What do you mean, she’s still alive?” My voice was a whisper.
Instead of answering, the witch got up from her seat. My eyes followed her as she moved across the room and reached for a small box on the mantelpiece. Her skirt swished around her ankles, and her white hair peeked out from beneath her handkerchief. She came back over to the table and sat down, holding the box between both of her scarred hands. The top of the box looked like a miniature version of her headboard, etched with daisies and petunias, leaves and vines. Her fingers trembled as she lifted the little lid, dipped a hand inside, and then took something out.
I leaned in as she held it out to me, hardly daring to breathe. There, in the middle of Witch Weatherly’s hand, was the other half of Momma’s bird necklace.
“But …” I sat there for a moment, too stunned to move. Then my hands flew up to the back of my neck as I struggled to unclasp the chain, to prove her wrong. But even as I set the medallion on the table in front of us, I could tell that it was a perfect match. Witch Weatherly’s half of the medallion had the other end of the bird; its missing tail feathers, and the remaining section of branch it was sitting on. Even the broad, jagged edges were a mirror of the other half—a missing puzzle piece forgotten long ago.
What was going on? I didn’t understand. “But this can’t be the same necklace. Momma told us that it broke in a bicycle accident. She said she could never find the other half.”
“A bicycle accident?” Witch Weatherly shook her head. “I don’t know why she’d say that.” She sat down in her chair again. “No, I gave it to her a long time ago. All the way back when I lived in Sudbury.”
“You gave it to her?” I stared in amazement. “Why?”
“She was lonely.” The witch stared at a spot beyond me. “She needed a friend.”
“She was lonely?” I repeated. “What do you mean?”
Witch Weatherly stared down at her piece of the necklace, as if it might help her get her thoughts in order. “I was twenty-three,” she began. “I’d just finished college when I got the news that my father had died. He’d left me the family house in his will, and so I came back to Sudbury and moved in upstairs.” She looked up at me and smiled the merest bit. “I’ve always liked being up high.”
I didn’t move.
“After a while, I rented the room downstairs to a little girl and her father so I could make ends meet. The little girl had big eyes and brown hair. I would see her from my kitchen window, walking to and from school each day. She was quiet. Never smiled. I think she missed her mother, who had moved away, and her sister, too. Pretty soon, I began to notice that her father, who was a traveling salesman if I remember, didn’t come home every night. Then I realized that sometimes he’d be away longer than one night. A few times, it was almost a week. Those nights, I could hear her downstairs, crying in the dark. I tried to go to her, but she wouldn’t let me in. She said her daddy had told her never to open the door while he was gone.”
I was barely breathing. It was almost impossible to believe that Witch Weatherly was talking about Momma. Or Grandpa William.
The witch opened her hand again and looked down at the medallion. “My father wasn’t around very much when I was growing up, either. He gave me this necklace when I was a little girl. It was something he wore in the army, and he thought it would help things if we both wore parts of it. When he died, I took the other half back. But one night, as I heard that little girl crying, I just couldn’t stand it anymore. I took my half of the necklace and put it in an envelope with a note that said, ‘From Bedelia, upstairs. Try to be brave.’ And then I slid it under her door. If she couldn’t open the door for me, I at least wanted her to know that she had a friend.”
Why hadn’t Momma ever told me such a thing? She couldn’t have forgotten. Had she felt so badly about what had happened afterward that she couldn’t bring herself to speak of it?
“We started talking a little bit after that,” the witch went on. “Just outside on the porch, a hello here, a good-bye there. She told me her name was Greta and that she had an older sister who lived far away. I met her sister once, if I remember right, and her mama, too. They didn’t stay long; just a week or two.” The witch’s face darkened. “Why someone would split up a family like that is something I’ll never understand. Children need their mothers. And their sisters. But that’s how it was for Greta. She still never let me inside when her daddy left town, but she’d come out on the porch when I went out to read, and we’d talk some, here and there. She told me once—and I’ll never forget it—that I was the only person who
’d said a single word to her that day.” Witch Weatherly shook her head. “I don’t know if I’ve ever met a lonelier child. I found myself beginning to watch for her, making sure she got down the road safely every morning, and waiting by my windowsill until I saw her after school let out again.” Her eyes squinted. “I was glad to be her friend. She was my friend, too, but I don’t think she ever knew it.”
The witch stood up and walked over to the window. She rolled the bird medallion between her gnarled fingers and gazed through the glass.
“And that was why, when I came home from work one day to find the whole house in flames, all I could think about was her. I’d been experimenting that morning with some nettle leaves, trying to boil them down and make a poultice, and I must have left the stove on. Greta’s father had gone off on one of his sales trips, and no one else but me knew she was in there. I heard firemen yelling as I ran through the front door, and a policeman grabbed my arm, but I kicked him right in the groin. My only thought was to get to her. To take her out of that burning building and get her somewhere safe.
“The inside of the house was black with smoke. It crawled inside my mouth and stuck in my throat, swallowing every last bit of air. I could feel my lungs starting to squeeze and burn as I raced from room to room. I screamed until I was hoarse …” She stopped here and dropped her eyes. Her mouth was trembling, and she moved a hand to tuck a wayward strand of hair beneath her handkerchief. “And then I heard her. A little voice, coming from the next room. I ran toward it, but just then, the ceiling groaned overhead like the beams of a ship starting to give way. I looked up just as the whole thing fell in on me. And that was the last thing I remembered. Until I woke up in the hospital a few days later. My face and arms were wrapped in bandages, but it felt as if my whole body was on fire. Still, I was awake. I was alive. When a nurse walked into my room, the first thing I said was, ‘The girl? Greta? Did she make it?’ And the nurse shook her head. ‘No girl here,’ she said, and walked out of the room.”
The witch stopped talking then and gazed at me. The faraway look in her eyes made it almost impossible to decipher what she was thinking. But my own brain was going a mile a minute. Witch Weatherly said she’d heard Momma somewhere in that dark, burning building. Which meant that someone else had gone back inside and rescued Momma—a fireman, most likely. And that, based on three little words that a hospital nurse had said, Witch Weatherly had never known it. She thought Momma had died.
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