The Witch of the Hills

by J M Fraser

  The sound of hammering rose from inside the barn.

  “Hello?” he shouted.

  The pounding stopped. An old man in worn overalls and a straw hat came out. The source of the gas can?

  Twitchy again, Brian shifted from one foot to the other. Hot on the trail. Closing in. But what would he say when he found her? She’d chosen to leave, hadn’t she? Don’t look for me, she said. Indecision froze him.

  The farmer waited, staring at him with barely a hint of mild interest, as if they had all the time in the world.

  But they didn’t. “Hi,” Brian said, “I’m looking for Rebecca.”

  “Fixin’ to rain later, I reckon.”

  “What?”

  The farmer squinted up at the cloudless sky.

  Who cared about small talk at a moment like this? Let it rain. He’d swim though raging floodwaters just to say, Hey, I get it, Rebecca. You couldn’t spend another day out here. But let’s stay in touch and—

  He needed to stop zoning out and stay focused. “Did Rebecca tell you where she was headed when she came by for the gas?”

  “Who?”

  “Rebecca.”

  No reaction, just the patient stare of a man who probably spent his days counting the same hills over and over again.

  “You know her, right? She’s my age, red hair, about five foot six. She has a thing for plain dresses and loud scarves.”

  The man spat on the ground and ran a heavy work boot over the splotch until it turned from mud to dust. All…the time…in the world. “Ain’t nobody named Rebecca or anyone else around here.”

  “Sure there is.” Brian had gone from twitchy to screechy, but he couldn’t slow down. He swept an arm toward the hills behind him. “She’s been staying in the cabin up that way.”

  “Ain’t no cabin, neither.”

  Wrong guy. Brian needed a sane farmer. He bunched his fists. “Which way is the next farm?”

  The man cackled. Like this was a joke. “You’re in rangeland, son. The soil ain’t suited for much of anything else. I’ve been hanging on to this plot way too long. You won’t find another farming fool between here and Alliance.”

  The dog snarled again, and the farmer’s calm demeanor dissolved into the weary, pressed-lip expression so common in adults when they’ve been asked too many questions. Clearly, this man hadn’t built his day plan around talking to Brian. He had random hammering to do. “Watcha doing out here? You’re way off the main road.”

  “My car broke down.” Brian fished the phone out of his pocket. A blank screen. The battery had died. Not that he expected to find any service bars on it anyway. “I sure could use a landline.”

  “It’s down.” The man pointed to the farmhouse. Wooden telephone poles as gray as the barn tumbled along nearby, but nothing connected house to pole. No wires hung loose, either. The line might have been down for years.

  More cosmic malware. Brian suppressed a shudder. Another eclipse could sweep through any minute. And Rebecca was out alone somewhere in this godforsaken place.

  The farmer turned and walked off. The dog followed him into the barn. A moment later, hammering resumed.

  Now what? The road. He should have headed that way to begin with.

  Brian hurried the way he’d come, but he couldn’t find the trail. Identical sandy hills surrounded him in all directions. The prospect of being stranded in this wilderness did an even better job of making his heart pound than the crazy farmer had.

  He hated to go back to Old McDonald, but that stupid place with its dumb cows, clucking chickens, and insane weather reports would probably be the best vantage point to get his bearings and start over. He turned around and—

  No farm in the distance. Only hills.

  He climbed a rise for a wider view.

  More hills.

  He came back down and found a path of trampled twigs and grass. It led him in a circle.

  Brian fought the panic gurgling in his ears by constructing a list. Find Rebecca. Wish her well. Get the car fixed. Finish the road trip.

  He’d missed some steps. Find the road. That’s where she’ll be.

  No. Stop at the cabin first for the gas can.

  The sun beat down on his brains. The list simplified. Walk faster. Look around that big hill over there.

  He did.

  On the other side, a familiar pair of hills separated by a narrow gap beckoned him.

  Maybe. Please. He hurried between them.

  And saw the cabin.

  “Yes!” Brian punched his fist in the air. His shout stirred a few birds into flight, over the cabin roof, and across the sky.

  As he approached from behind, he noticed a wooden cross he hadn’t seen earlier when chasing down some scraggly-haired girl. A girl who’d done a pretty good job of getting him lost and costing him what little time he had before Rebecca’s trail got cold.

  Nah, he’d done that to himself by wandering off the path without taking note of any landmarks.

  The cross lurched out of the ground, ringed by a circle of red and blue flowers. Not wildflowers like in the kitchen vase. These had been planted and cared for. He bent close but couldn’t make out much of the weathered inscription on the cross, just a portion of the date—seventeen hundred and something. No, that had to be a faded nine, not a seven.

  He headed to the front of the cabin and went inside.

  She hadn’t returned.

  If only he could talk to her for a few more minutes. Are you okay? Here, take my phone. I’ll get a new one, and I’ll call you so we can talk when you’re ready to talk. But she’d left without talking. And what could she have done with a dead phone anyway?

  Please be clever, she’d said. You must figure everything out on your own.

  Figure what out? How?

  She wanted him to take her book. He went inside and got it, came back out, grabbed the can of gas, and headed for the road. This time he stuck to the path and didn’t get lost.

  When he reached the oak tree, the noose was gone. Did Rebecca come this way and take it down? She’d been bullied by someone. A girl named Abigail. Maybe Rebecca had done the best thing by getting away.

  But they’d held hands. She’d hummed. They’d been pioneers.

  He trudged past the noose-less tree.

  Furlong count. What else to do when a morning turned stale? She’d told him two distances. Road to cabin was twenty-four furlongs. Tree to cabin was twenty. So tree to road was four. A half mile. A thousand more steps. The sun was getting hot already. He wiped his brow. Shouldn’t have left his White Sox cap in the trunk. He walked, counted, tried not to think. Six hundred. Eight hundred. Nine hundred. He looked up—

  Brian gaped at a Kia on the wrong side of the road. He and Rebecca hadn’t crossed the asphalt on the way to her cabin the night before, but he would need to walk over it to reach his car now.

  A second impossibility sent his stomach into a dive. The late-morning sun, behind him at the cabin, somehow had gotten ahead of him at the road, traveling way too far for the forty-five minutes or so he’d been walking. He glanced at his watch.

  The numbers blurred.

  A wave of dizziness sent him into a slow, circular spin, as if a gigantic merry-go-round dragged him and everything in sight along the same round path.

  He looked up. Now the sky twirled while he stood motionless beneath it.

  Brian staggered into the car and shut his eyes. The hike from cabin to road shimmered like a fuzzy dream. But he had that gas can as proof he’d been awake, didn’t he? He got out and poured the fuel into the tank.

  Back behind the wheel, Brian turned the key in the ignition.

  The engine roared to life.

  So he had run out of gas, Sidney fill-up or not. A buck ninety-two. That practical joke had started him on one insane adventure.

  He had a hole in his heart now to prove it.

  Still, Rebecca’s notes had been cheerful. And she’d brought flowers into the kitchen. Maybe he’d made her happier in
some small way.

  Her scribbled words carried an oracle’s vague promises of a better future. Keep it for me… I’ll come after you when I can.

  This couldn’t be the end of the Brian-and-Rebecca super team. For sure he’d find her walking along the road.

  Chapter 7

  Rebecca stood a stone’s throw from the end of the world. The darkest cloud conceivable stretched for miles in each direction and all the way from ground to sky. Biting cold radiating out of this void chilled her like a winter wind.

  In the waking world, she could have hurried to the warmth and safety of her cabin a short distance to the west.

  Even here, in the World of Mortal Dreams—the vast dimension created by the collective imagination of everyone who ever lived—she wouldn’t normally worry over finding her home. This place had always contained a fairly reliable duplicate of the waking world in addition to the fantasyland its dreamers constructed.

  Until recently.

  A tear tickled her cheek. The prophecy foretold a period of creeping decay before full apocalypse arrived, but a dear piece of real estate had already fallen. Her mother’s most vivid dreams took place in this hilly wilderness of northwest Nebraska where she’d spent many years in exile. Yet the last time Rebecca came looking, much of the region had been swallowed by the darkness.

  Did she now have reason to hope? The void had shifted to the north and east. The thriving prairie grass at her feet had been hidden a week earlier. Perhaps she’d find the cabin now. She hurried west along the edge of nothing.

  A mile later, just beyond the westernmost side of the suffocating gloom, the ramshackle structure came into view. Would the void return? Of course it would. Eventually. Just as foretold. Tears blurred Rebecca’s vision.

  Once at the cabin, she settled onto the doorstep and tried to steel herself for the confrontation sure to come. Her mother wouldn’t be happy to see her. Not when she realized Rebecca had traveled back through time from the twenty-first century. “Leave thy dead kin in thy fondest memories, where they belong,” she’d scolded many times.

  No matter. Despite the wooden cross rising from the sand behind her waking-world cabin, she knew she’d find her mother alive in this one. Everyone’s dreams lingered beyond the grave. Interacting with her mother was simply a matter of stepping into those resonating dreams from the past. She still clung to these echoes of her mother’s life, pretending with all her heart they were real, pretending a woman’s life could last forever, at least in this netherworld.

  Rebecca found her mother slicing potatoes in the kitchen. She stood in the doorway and watched, savored, before stepping forward to make her presence known. “Hello.” The word nearly caught in her throat. They’d never gotten along well in the days when they prepared their meals together, so why did the sight of her mother working alone at the table now threaten to melt her heart?

  Her mother beamed at her. She dried her hands on her apron, reached out, and swept a bang out of Rebecca’s eyes. “Why the sadness?”

  “No, it’s happiness! I haven’t seen you in so long.”

  “Nonsense. Art thou not sleeping in that very room?”

  She followed her mother’s gaze to the lump beneath the sheets visible through the doorway to the bedroom…and shuddered. Time travel always brought the surreal possibility of encountering one’s earlier self.

  Her mother narrowed her eyes. “Thy father is long dead, but my grief still bubbles to the surface whenever I visit his dreams. Do not torture thyself in the same way.”

  Another tear warmed Rebecca’s cheek.

  “Store my dreams in the purse of thy mind, but stay out of them, Rebecca.”

  “But Mum, the void might keep me away from them forever.”

  “What void?”

  Rebecca held her tongue. How could she worry her mother over such things?

  “Hast thou found the lad?”

  At last, a happier topic. She nodded, smiled.

  “But why must I capture his heart, Mum? Is this not cruel for both of us?”

  Her mother clucked her tongue. “I see the lad has captured yours already, child. And so he should. Does the prophecy not call for Rebecca and Brian to face the darkness hand in hand?”

  But would they succeed in defeating the void? Rebecca didn’t see how they could.

  “Follow the code in courting him.” Her mother motioned to the thick, leather-bound book resting at one end of a spice shelf, a work handed down from generation to generation and one Rebecca had spent many hours studying in her younger childhood. This book was now a source of frustration, if not outright misery, because of its strict rules for communication between suitors, which it termed a celebratory dance of misdirection.

  Rebecca wrung her hands. Poor Brian. Poor me.

  Her mother had spoken of the book with a note of pride in her voice. And why shouldn’t she? She’d used the Witches Code when landing a husband, raising a daughter, making a life in the wilderness, and any number of other notable accomplishments.

  “Yes, Mum.” But what if Brian forgot about her during the mandatory separation required by the code? What if he found some other girlfriend? Boys did that sort of thing, didn’t they?

  All the time.

  Chapter 8

  With knees pressed against the hard pavement of some random Madison street, Brian ran his hand along the tread of his flat tire. He cut a finger on a shard of glass. “Damn it!” He pulled away, sat on the curb, and daubed a drop of blood against the bottom of his shirt.

  Time for a self-intervention. He belonged on his campus here in Wisconsin, so why keep trying to head out of town where broken beer bottles might be easy to find, but missing girls? Not so much.

  Two-weeks earlier, the day he lost Rebecca, he’d searched up and down the dusty roads of northwest Nebraska for a whole afternoon. He didn’t find her. She was history, and he had a life. So he limped to Wisconsin, started school, found a part-time job, made new friends. He built the same wall between past and future everyone did when they entered college. Who looked back? Who clung to old girlfriends? Especially girls they’d only known for a single day.

  No one.

  Except him.

  The urge to drop everything and return to Nebraska, the mad impulse to look for Rebecca, just wouldn’t quit. He thought about her, dreamed about her, and even suffered through dreams aimed at keeping them apart. A recurring one, starring the scraggly-haired Wyoming hitchhiker with a brand-new message. “You’ll never find her. I’ll stop you.”

  No, she wouldn’t. Not if he set his mind on going back.

  But his car wouldn’t rise to the occasion. His starter broke a few days earlier when he skipped a class and started driving west. Now a tire had gone flat.

  “Brian?”

  He jumped at the sound and swung around.

  No scraggly-haired villain, that was for sure. Long blonde hair, friendly smile, loud Badgers jacket. This girl seemed familiar. She knew his name…

  “It’s me, Sharon, from the video store?”

  Oh. His part-time job. Remembering all the new people in his world had been a problem at school, too, especially with the girls, unless they looked like Rebecca. This one didn’t. “Hey. Yeah. I didn’t recognize you.”

  Sharon lowered her gaze to her jacket and played with the zipper. “I’m not always memorable.”

  Great. He’d hurt her feelings. “Sure you are. But I’m living the dream at a hundred miles an hour. New city, new school, new job. I’m surprised I can remember my own name.”

  “No, I totally get that.” She gave up on the zipper, glanced into his eyes, looked past him, then at him again. “Anyway, Abigail told me you aren’t in the dorms. You’re living with your aunt, right?”

  “Yeah, it’s free and I get more than half a room.” They’d lapsed into small talk, and he needed to deal with his tire. But something didn’t fit just now. “Who’s Abigail?”

  “My roommate. She knows you.”

  “She does
?”

  “Sure. And she suggested I take you for ice cream tomorrow night. After two weeks alone off campus, it’s time you mingled, right?”

  Mingle. Yeah, in Nebraska, maybe. With Rebecca. He glanced at his flat. Did he have a real spare buried in the trunk or one of those stupid donuts? “You mean, like hanging out? Sorry, I’m kinda—”

  “I mean, like friends.” Sharon shifted around to the trunk. “Come on. I’ll help you put the spare on.”

  They changed the tire together, like friends. Then he went his way and she went hers.

  A few hours later, back in his aunt’s condo, Brian gave up on the textbook in his lap. Supply and demand, market fluctuations, Keynesian theory—seriously? He turned his attention to the PC on his desk and logged on to Google maps.

  Nebraska. For a couple weeks now, he’d been reliving an amazing day by staring at roads and setting his mind on wander. There. He and Rebecca met on Highway 385, a little south of Alliance. The map didn’t show much. No other paved roads. A lonely area littered with random hills. And somewhere in those hills, one very important cabin.

  He had to drive back. But only after he slogged through an upcoming ice-cream date with Sharon in a couple nights, a heavy load of classes the day after, and two eight-hour shifts at the video store over the weekend.

  I’ll find a way.

  He glanced back down at the economics book and fought to keep his eyes open.

  * * *

  Brian’s ear ached. His pillow had gone lumpy. The air changed, too, from the scent of the flowers Aunt April left in vases everywhere to…pine?

  “It’s me,” Rebecca whispered from above.

  He almost shot up. He almost shouted with joy. But Rebecca’s voice left a hollow echo. If he opened his eyes, would he see her standing over his bed? No. He’d been dreaming and probably still was. The merest whisper on his part might fade her into the night.

  He kept his eyes shut. He held his tongue. He listened.

  She breathed above him, steadily, reassuringly.

  Brian ignored his pounding heart and counted to ten, just to be sure.

  More breathing. The pine scent grew stronger.