The Witch of the Hills

by J M Fraser

  She grabbed her purse. “Don’t you think this sounds like a ghost story? Let’s go check out that book.”

  An hour later, Brian and Sharon soaked up the Indian summer atmosphere from the top step of his aunt’s porch. The warm weather fooled all manner of insects into swarming out of their hiding places. Fireflies flashed on and off—odd little ones darting so fast he couldn’t grab one. Chirping crickets reminded him of his early-evening walk to the cabin with Rebecca. No gnats, though, and for that he was grateful. Only a cluster of moths dancing around the porch lamp.

  The door opened, and Aunt April burst out, sporting a tight leather skirt and studded jacket. Long hair brushed to a shine tumbled down her shoulders. Date night.

  She came bearing smoothies in glasses cold as ice. Although at least twice their age, April hadn’t lost touch with the modern world. She was a One Republic fan, a serial text-messager, and, above all, a blender ninja.

  Brian slurped at least a third of the chocolaty-banana delight in the few seconds it took April to step around them and hurry down the stairs.

  “Don’t wait up,” she shouted.

  Sharon sipped quietly in her own little corner of smoothie heaven—must have been the hint of rum that pulled her in—until April clicked her four-inch heels all the way down the block. “There goes your hall monitor.”

  “I’m living the dream.”

  Sharon finished her drink, set the glass on the step, and looked up at an awesome sky boasting ten thousand stars plus a full moon. But she sighed. “This street’s awfully quiet, Brian. You should reconsider the dorms.”

  “And share ten feet of space with somebody annoying? Like maybe a Cubs fan?”

  “Abigail’s neither. She’s cool.”

  The roommate, who supposedly knew him. “Hey, I still can’t place her, Sharon.”

  “Really? I’ll ask how she knows you.” Sharon grabbed the book and held it up to the light. She tried to undo the ribbon holding it closed, but a spark shot out of it. “Oh!”

  The book went flying. He caught the thing before it could do a nosedive down the stairs.

  Sharon inched her finger back to the ribbon and gave it a flick. “I’ve been getting sparked a lot lately.”

  “Don’t shuffle your feet when you walk.”

  “Thanks, Mom.” She took the book back, opened it, and fit the ribbon between the pages. “You’re supposed to use this as a marker, see?”

  A mere glimpse at the weird alphabet brought Rebecca right onto the porch. Brian closed his eyes and breathed the strawberry scent of her hair, felt the warmth of her hand in his, heard the laughter he wanted to bottle.

  “Brian?” Sharon’s voice came at him from a thousand miles away.

  Strawberries soured to street exhaust. Rebecca’s hand hardened to the cement of the porch beneath his palm. The sound of her laughter became his own heavy breathing and pounding heart. Brian tightened his eyelids, thought about the hills, the sand, the cabin, her eyes, but Rebecca didn’t come back.

  “Brian?”

  “What?”

  “This is a book of witchcraft.”

  He motioned to Sharon’s empty glass. “How much rum did April pour into that thing?”

  “I’m serious.” She tapped her finger on a circled pentagon in the margin of a page. “This little guy is a pentacle. Wiccans use them to invoke spirits during their rituals.”

  A carload of shouting students raced down the street. One of them flung something out the window. It clattered along until coming to rest against the streetlamp while the jubilant cries faded into the distance. Brian stared at the banged-up beer can left behind. Once in a while a speeding car and discarded can might disrupt the monotony of a quiet street, but how often does a girl in a dream appear in the flesh or a poem write itself on a computer or the same girl get accused of… “One little symbol and she’s a witch?”

  Sharon pointed at a tiny circle sketched in the margin. “How about this one? Ever hear of the druids?”

  “You mean the Pixar movie about cave people?”

  “Very funny. The druids were a class of priests in ancient Celtic society, and this wheel with six spokes was one of their signs.”

  “So they were witches, huh?”

  “Even worse. Supposedly, they practiced human sacrifice.”

  The smell of burning leaves drifted across the porch. Halloween lurked just around the corner. People in the neighborhood would start decorating their porches and yards pretty soon, preparing to celebrate a mood, a fantasy, not anything real. “You don’t believe in witchcraft, do you, Sharon?”

  “I kinda do, actually.” She fished a pen out of her purse and jotted some of the markings on a sticky note. “I’ll ask my anthropology professor whether he recognizes this language.”

  “You mean Sociology, right?”

  “No, Brian. This alphabet is primitive. It’s like something you’d see in a cave painting.”

  As ridiculous as the notion sounded, it sent a flutter through his stomach.

  “Anyway, it’s getting late. Tell your aunt I’ll kill for another smoothie.” Sharon scribbled something on another sticky and stuck it in the book. “My dorm room number. Come over sometime, and I’ll sketch your portrait.”

  “You draw?”

  “Not as well as this missing witch of yours.” She stood, started down the steps, but stopped halfway down.

  “What?” he said.

  “Be careful, Brian. Witches are dangerous.”

  No, they weren’t. He closed his eyes when Sharon left, trying to summon Rebecca again. He looked for the awesome girl in a country dress. Not some warty witch on a broomstick. The poet, the translator of strange languages, the girlfriend whose laughter brightened the sun.

  He lifted the book, touched the ribbon. Where did you go?

  Chapter 10

  Professor Sloan used his laser pointer to flash a red dot on a map of Brazil. “Thirty miles from civilization, yet this Amazon tribe still lives in the stone age.”

  Brian stifled a yawn. Stone age loomed in his future, too. The monotonous lecture didn’t merely slow time, it threatened to turn the clocks backward. Try as he might, the tousle-haired, wrinkled-shirt professor couldn’t bring South American jungles alive the way an Indiana Jones might. Not even a floppy hat would have helped.

  Most students lucky enough to sit in the back of the lecture hall had either slipped out the exit, escaped to their cell-phone apps, or fallen into hushed conversations with their friends.

  But Brian had an agenda, supposedly. He leaned toward Sharon. “This is your language expert?”

  “Shh, he’s learned.” She whispered the word in two distinct syllables. Who could blame her for overselling? Students had been sneaking away right and left.

  The idea of escape crossed Brian’s mind, too. Not over boredom. School had always been famous for that. More because uneasiness had been gnawing the pit of his stomach from the minute he sat down.

  According to Sharon, the professor had news about Rebecca’s hieroglyphics.

  What kind of news? Something best left for Rebecca to reveal on her own in the next dream? A secret meant for him alone? Brian slumped in his seat. He shouldn’t have let Sharon untie the ribbon and open that book. Rebecca’s wishes might have been vague, but she didn’t say he should turn her writing over to science. That was probably the last thing she would have wanted.

  Finally, the lecture ended. Everyone gathered their stuff, hustled out of their chairs, and hurried down the aisle toward the double doors in back. Sharon pushed past them, heading upstream, to the front of the hall.

  Brian fought the urge to swim away with her classmates. He lagged behind.

  “Come on,” she hissed.

  By then, Professor Sloan had left the podium and hustled toward them. “Ah, Miss Spencer and Mr.… Danahey?”

  Uh-oh. The professor had life in his voice now, and in his eyes. This same man who recently rafted down a dangerous stretch of Amazon and told that
story without a pulse. Now, he had news.

  Brian stopped walking.

  The professor waved Sharon’s scrap of notepaper over his head like he’d won a prize.

  Double uh-oh.

  “This is Ogham!” the professor exclaimed.

  Ogham?

  Brian couldn’t maintain eye contact. He’d caused the worst possible scenario, allowing all magic to be stripped from Rebecca’s book. Professor Sloan had just categorized, classified, defined, pigeon-holed, boxed, and labeled her slashes and hash marks as a known language. Yes, Rebecca learned the alphabet in a weirdly old-fashioned way. She’d gotten it from her mom, her mom from her grandma, and so on. Yet apparently anyone could have hopped online and nailed it on their own.

  Ogham. So what else? Did she really conjure the bread and cheese in her kitchen, or did she order carryout from a store he hadn’t noticed just over the next hill? Did she meld into his mind to type a poem through his fingers, or did he download it before falling asleep?

  No, I’d remember that.

  “Brian!” Sharon’s voice was unaccountably shrill. “Did you hear what the professor just said?”

  Yeah. He slapped the kind of name on Rebecca’s language you’d find on a gourmet cheese.

  Sharon shook her head like a girl scolding a bad puppy. “How can you not be listening?” She turned to the man with the answers. “Sorry, Professor, I’m working with Brian to help correct his attention problem. Would you say that again?”

  The professor folded the paper and pressed it into Brian’s hands. “Ogham fell out of use after the sixth century. No one can translate it.”

  “Huh?” Brian would have elaborated his grunt into something resembling a question, but the sudden resurrection of magic caught in his throat, preventing any coherent words from escaping his mouth.

  “The alphabet you found predates medieval times. Some scholars think the symbols formed a hidden language used by the Celts for keeping the Romans in the dark regarding military plans.”

  The professor slipped into lecturer overdrive, pacing back and forth, waving his hands. “The only Ogham inscriptions remaining are thought to be names and dates, not meaningful sentences. They’re etched into stone monuments throughout Britain and Ireland.”

  Brian caught his breath. Not meaningful sentences? Or poems about medieval derelicts shanghaied to fight dragons? He reached deep to find his missing voice. “Wait. That can’t be right.” Not much better than huh, but the best he could come up with while fighting off a seizure.

  The professor clutched his arm. “Until this morning, the world thought of Ogham as dead and buried, but Sharon says you have an entire volume of it.”

  “I do, but—”

  “Bring it in. You might have the key for translating a dead language!”

  Brian pulled away. “I get why you want the book, but it isn’t mine to give.” He turned to Sharon. “Or show.”

  The professor and Sharon reacted in slow motion, first staring with widening eyes as the news sank in, then gasping, and finally, in Sharon’s case, exploding into sound. “What?” She seemed fully capable of blasting death rays out of her eyeballs.

  The professor spread his arms—a sad, rumpled shepherd hoping to pull one lost clown of a sheep back into the fold. “Your book could be groundbreaking.”

  “I’m sorry.” Brian hurried down the aisle before they figured out how to turn him to stone.

  “Wait!” Sharon caught up with him in the back of the hall. “What’s wrong with you, Brian?”

  He pushed through the double doors and stepped outside. “When Rebecca left that book behind, it was a for your eyes only kind of thing.”

  Sharon gaped at him like he’d confessed to a triple murder. Storm clouds gathered. Birds dove for cover.

  He cringed.

  But instead of pummeling him, she let out a long, stifling sigh. “You might have a CNN story. Don’t you get it?”

  Boy, did he ever. Rebecca’s talents didn’t start and stop with the ability to conjure a meal out of thin air or beam herself into his nighttime dreams.

  Where did they start and stop?

  Chapter 11

  After the Professor Sloan debacle, Brian fell off Sharon’s list of peeps. She gave him the cold shoulder at the video store and steered clear of him on campus. Even worse, Rebecca went silent, too. Not one single dream about her or with her or whatever they’d been doing.

  Dead silence. For days.

  He couldn’t sleep. Or when he did, he couldn’t remember his dreams. School became a blur of half-heard lectures, sloppy homework, and tortured daydreams about his amazing Ogham-speaking girlfriend and what he might have done to chase her away. The list was short.

  I let Sharon look at her book.

  Then, a week after the Ogham incident, Sharon texted him.

  Can you meet me at Grainger Hall right away? I’ve been helping Abigail with a research paper on American myths, and you won’t believe what we found! First study room upstairs. Don’t bring anyone.

  No chance. He’d already messed up by letting a secret see the light of day. Best to keep his distance now. He texted back.

  Can’t make it.

  Fifteen seconds later:

  Don’t make me kill you, Brian.

  Okay, so this was big enough to prompt death threats. But his lips were sealed. No more book showings or other Rebecca info of any kind.

  He headed to the appointed meeting place and opened the door.

  “Quick! Close it behind you!” Sharon stood before a table so cluttered with documents and news clippings, some had fallen to the floor.

  She flashed a sunny smile, chasing away whatever cloud of ill will had been hovering between them before. Wider than she’d been smiling when lights turned a poster girl’s lips from blue to yellow to purple during their ice-cream date a thousand years earlier. “Look who I found!”

  Not the cleaning crew. They would have swept the mess away. But seriously, only a surprise of massive proportions would have anyone this ready to jump onto the table and tap-dance.

  Surprises hadn’t been his friend lately. He almost didn’t ask the question begging to be asked. “Who did you find?”

  “Rebecca!”

  Geez. He should have ignored the death threat and stayed away.

  Sharon thrust a copy from some old journal page into his hands. “Remember the research I was doing for Abigail? Well, did I ever find a smoking witch! Her legend dates back to the days when the first trappers traveled across the Great American Desert.”

  This conversation could only be heading toward the revelation Rebecca’s cabin sat on the gravesite of some mythical witch. He’d seen the marker. And now, he groped for the doorknob behind him.

  “Don’t even think about bolting.” One after another, Sharon held up copies of maps, beginning with one so old it didn’t define anything west of the Mississippi, to another segregating the Nebraska and Kansas territories, and finally to a map showing all forty-eight contiguous states. The same general area had been circled in orange on each. “The Witch of the Hills has been haunting the region you visited for centuries!”

  He had to humor her. Sharon was too jacked with insane enthusiasm to let him out of the room without a fight. So he took a closer look at the highlighted sections of each map. Yes, his car had stalled somewhere in there, but the circles were big. Maybe fifty miles across. Besides, did she say centuries? “Rebecca’s our age, Sharon.”

  “Who says witches show their warts and wrinkles?” She gestured to a pile of newspaper clippings. “Those accounts date back two hundred years, and they all describe a teenage girl. She provides food and shelter to anyone who finds her cabin. Sound familiar?”

  Right. If he’d met Rebecca in Oregon, Sharon would have called her Bigfoot. Other than the mild coincidence that Rebecca had been in the same general area as this mythical witch, he probably wouldn’t find a single thing on the table linking her to the legend.

  He grabbed the neares
t clipping to prove his point. “Okay, Sharon, I’ll read this one and you tell me how—”

  A single word jumped out at him. Furlongs.

  His voice caught in his throat.

  Sharon’s eyes widened. “What’s the matter? You look like you saw a ghost.”

  Yeah, something like that. He had two choices. Turn and run or peer down into the chasm. Option one was awfully tempting but, “Can you…read this? I got something in my eye.”

  “Sure.” She took the clipping, read in silence, looked up. “Okay, listen. According to the legend, the witch camouflages her cabin, spins compasses in the wrong directions, and shifts landmarks from place to place. We haven’t found a single report mentioning multiple sightings by the same person.”

  The room swam—just as the sky had that day in Nebraska. After he’d had an impossible time trying to find the cabin from the farm. He reached for the back of a chair to hold steady. “No, Sharon, lower down.”

  “Oh. Twenty furlongs but never more, the circle at the edge and the cabin at the core.”

  Furlongs. Rebecca used the same term. His hands tingled.

  She looked up at him. “Rebecca can’t step outside the circle.”

  “Don’t say Rebecca, Sharon. This is some myth about—”

  “About a random girl who just happens to write a dead language in her book and sketch Wiccan symbols in the margins?”

  Somebody knocked on the door.

  Brian swung around…and caught his breath.

  The scraggily-haired girl in the prairie dress stood in the doorway.

  No, not that girl. Had he totally lost it? This girl did look vaguely similar, but she wore a skirt and blouse. And her hair was curly, not scraggily. Same brunette color, but was today the day for taking wildly circumstantial evidence as gospel? This girl stood here, a thousand miles and a whole different world away from the other girl, the crazy hitchhiker he’d met on the side of the highway in Wyoming.

  Right?