The Witch of the Hills

by J M Fraser

  “Come on in, Abigail,” Sharon said. “This is Brian.”

  He tried to speak. Swallowed. Tried again. “Um, have we met? Sharon said you know me.”

  Abigail looked him up and down, blank-faced. She glanced at Sharon, shrugged. “Maybe you’re a friend of a friend on Facebook?”

  Not likely. Sharon had implied far more than a vague connection the day she helped him with his tire. “Didn’t you tell Sharon you knew I was staying with my aunt?”

  She shrugged again. “I must have read your profile.”

  Dreaming. He had to be. Too much weirdness had been packed into the last ten minutes. “Listen, I’ve gotta run. Good luck with your paper, Abigail.” He headed out the door. “See you at work, Sharon.”

  He should have headed for his next class, but the urge to get in his car overpowered him. The time had come to drive into the sunset and not slow down until he reached the Sand Hills. Maybe the shared dreams had stalled out, but he could still head west and find the real deal. Rebecca. In the flesh.

  He turned toward the hallway doors leading outside.

  “Stay away from her, Brian.”

  Abigail’s voice cut right through him. A nasally tone he’d definitely heard before, on the side of the Interstate in Wyoming. He stumbled, caught himself, and turned to face…who?

  A friend of a friend on Facebook who’d taken stalker to a whole new level, tracking him halfway across the country?

  No. He’d driven away that day. The hitchhiker had faded into the background in his rearview mirror. She wouldn’t have known how to find him.

  But she did find him.

  License plate?

  Abigail closed in, staring with the same dead-eyed expression she’d used when she warned him about the billboard. “Witches are dangerous, Brian. Let her be.”

  He bunched his fists. “What’s your game?”

  She smiled. First time he’d seen her do that, and the difference was night and day. No longer the cult type he’d met on the highway, she came across as the friendly, innocent girl next door. “My game is dots.”

  “What?”

  “You have to connect them.” Abigail turned on her heel, walked to the end of the hall, opened the door, and stepped out of his life.

  He hoped.

  Brian’s legs were jelly. He wobbled one foot in front of the other, heading in the opposite direction. He reached the door, grabbed the bar handle with both hands, and…a few dots came together. He remembered exactly what Rebecca had said about distances that day in the hills. “Let’s put the tree twenty furlongs behind us.”

  But the road had been farther. Rebecca walked a good half mile beyond the circle to meet him by his car. She wasn’t some mythical witch. She was a fantastic girlfriend he’d soon find.

  He pushed the bar…and remembered something so creepy a chill ran down his back. When they found the noose, Rebecca muttered the name of her bully.

  Abigail.

  The dots didn’t come close to connecting. His encounter with the hitchhiker had been random. Same with his detour north into the Sand Hills. What were the odds the same Abigail had been in both places?

  What were the odds she’d track him to Wisconsin?

  And why would she?

  He shuddered. Hurried to his car.

  All four tires were flat.

  Chapter 12

  Rebecca approached a barn-shaped mailbox resting handsomely on its pole at the edge of the street. She matched the address of Brian’s parents with the note in her hand. A rush of giddy relief watered her eyes, and the mailbox swam like a mirage.

  Traveling to and from the World of Mortal Dreams had always been a breeze for her. Just a matter of wishing where she wanted to be. But she did need the general coordinates of her destination. The thought she might never have gotten them, might never have found this house sent a tingle down her spine. She wrapped her arms around the mailbox and hugged it.

  Since dreams were a mixture of fantasy and reality, the World of Mortal Dreams varied from the surreal to the specific. Only within the district where every place on earth was duplicated could she find people and places she hadn’t visited before if given an address. Thank heavens Brian left contact information behind in the cabin. Despite spending an entire evening with him, she’d been too schoolgirl-smitten to probe for specifics about where his parents might live.

  She turned to a white fence, opened the gate, and paused to enjoy the sweet scent of hollyhocks vining up a trellis. Then she followed a tidy sidewalk to the front porch of the Cape Cod—a little brick castle, as if in a fairy tale come to life. How fitting! After all, Brian was her knight in shining armor.

  Knight in shining armor. She’d been resorting to breathless clichés when thinking about him. She was supposed to be the one wielding magic, yet he’d been the spell caster from the beginning—first in a long-ago meeting he didn’t remember yet. He’d given her a nickel that day and made her a promise. More recently, he’d been there for her, as prophesied. Ever since, for fourteen lonely days, she longed to study the stars with him again while they cooled their feet in the creek. Or share another poem. Or walk hand in hand through the hills.

  Abigail was wise to keep her distance during the maddening wait mandated by the Witches Code. Rebecca might have throttled the imp if she’d shown her mean face and made one of her many snide comments. But where had Abigail gone? What mischief was she planning now? A noose hanging from an oak tree came to mind. Rebecca clenched her fists at the memory of the prank she and Brian stumbled across during their walk from the road to the cabin that day.

  The little home fluttered like a leaf on a tree in the face of a stiff breeze.

  No! Don’t flit away. She shifted her focus to the house. Remaining long at any one site here in the World of Mortal Dreams required concentration. Otherwise, she might slip into the fantasy realm, where no image could be trusted and an address for locating Brian’s mother would be useless.

  “You won’t find anyone there. I already knocked.” Whomever the speaker was, the ring of her voice firmed the house on its foundation. Dreamers added substance to this realm. In a city neighborhood as thick with people as this one, the dream-eating void kept its distance. But the day would come when even this home got swallowed. Perhaps soon.

  No. Not with Brian and me fighting back.

  Rebecca turned to the woman who’d spoken, a middle-aged neighbor peering over the fence at her. The woman wore only a nightgown, but she’d slung a sizeable purse over her shoulder. Rebecca couldn’t help but smile. One might dream without a dress code, but accessories were always a must.

  “Are you calling on Cassandra or Joe?” the woman asked.

  Rather than shout across the lawn, Rebecca came back to the gate. “I’m looking for Brian’s mother.”

  “That would be Cassie. She uses a lighthouse for her quiet place. Maybe she went there tonight.”

  A lighthouse? Rebecca loved the way people took incongruities in stride during their dreams. Within the waking world, everyone clung to constants and science and cold, hard facts far too readily. By stifling spontaneity, they encouraged the void. “Where is this lighthouse?”

  “You shouldn’t bother people who want to be alone.” The woman lost substance, shimmering to the translucence of a silk scarf.

  One more wrong move and Rebecca might frighten her awake. Then what? Sit on the doorstep and wait for Brian’s mother to come home? When would that be? After two long weeks, a single extra minute would be more than she could bear. Her heart pounded. She didn’t have a clue what to say other than the truth. “I’m looking for Cassandra so I can ask permission to spend more time with Brian.”

  The woman paled even more, turning so sheer that a blooming peony bush behind her showed through as a pink shadow. She pressed her lips tight. She crinkled her forehead.

  Rebecca held her breath. Perhaps she should have made something up. Now, instead of frightening this neighbor awake, she’d confused her into the same co
ndition.

  But the woman came back. Solid. Opaque. She must have found sense in Rebecca’s explanation. What did Henry Stoddard know? He’d warned her how foolish a witch’s method of courting might seem to most people. Yet this woman’s eyes brightened with understanding.

  “How sweet!” the neighbor said. “Is this Sadie Hawkins day? No, that doesn’t fit. You’d be asking the boy for permission, not his mother.”

  Rebecca barely followed, except that last part. “Where I come from, this is how things are done.”

  “Where you come from? Is it a place with more girls as precocious and polite as you? I have a son your age if you have a twin sister.” The woman opened her purse and rummaged through it. She came out with a wondrous device. Something Brian owned, too. A smartphone. “The lighthouse is on Lake Michigan. Let’s see if we can find the address in here.”

  * * *

  Wishing to be at the lighthouse brought Rebecca to the entrance at its base. From there, she climbed up the winding staircase within.

  Eighty, ninety, one hundred stairs. Brian’s mother certainly didn’t make the going easy for anyone wanting to visit. Rebecca leaned against the banister and waited for her heart to stop thumping in her ears.

  She resumed the climb. Ten more stairs, twenty, thirty. She reached the top landing and opened the door. “Hello?”

  A dark-haired woman in a floral dress sat in a rattan chair, the only stick of furniture the little round room had to offer. That and a cuckoo clock on the wall were the sum total of adornments in an otherwise empty space.

  The woman gazed through a picture window at a sweeping view of an angry lake. Row after row of white-capped waves marched to the shore.

  Brian’s mother at last! Rebecca’s heart raced, and this time not from climbing that impossible stairway. But she had rules to follow. She lingered in the doorway, waiting for permission to enter.

  Cassandra didn’t favor her with the slightest glance. “I come here when I want to be alone. Go away.”

  What? Rebecca’s temples throbbed. She hadn’t come this far to be dismissed like an unwanted servant. The room took on a magenta hue, as though her rising anger had painted the walls a matching shade.

  Yet this woman, Cassandra, was Brian’s mother! Rebecca looked down at her hands. She closed one into a fist. Slowly. Then the other. She took a deep breath. She reopened her hands. There. This meeting was too important for her to let her temper take over.

  She stepped into the room. “I can’t leave. I have an important matter to discuss with you.”

  “Fine. Pull up a chair and speak in a softer voice. I was enjoying the moment before you banged your way into my room.”

  Another challenge. Pull up a chair in a room that had no extras. Very well. Cassandra was dreaming, and dreamers never took note of impossibilities. Rebecca conjured a second chair next to her reluctant hostess.

  Cassandra glanced over her shoulder. “Well, that settles that. I pegged you as a witch. What other wisp of a girl would have the fortitude to climb so many stairs?”

  Rebecca gasped. She shouldn’t have been pegged as anything. Dreams were supposed to be her turf. With her in control. No surprises.

  Now what? Regain control. She went to the chair and sat. She rested her hands apart, one on each arm of the chair, so as not to fidget. She took a deep breath and turned to a surprisingly formidable woman. “You’re just having a dream, that’s all.”

  “Whether I’m sleeping or not, you just produced an entire chair. Mortals don’t conjure in my dreams.”

  Rebecca gripped the chair arms. Mortals didn’t refer to others as mortals. Witches did. But how could Cassandra be one? Witches didn’t have sons. They only had daughters, like in the nursery rhyme she’d learned as a child. Marry a mortal and bear a girl. She’ll help cook the meals, and you’ll iron her curls.

  She never heard of a boy being borne by a witch. No one had.

  The implication burst into Rebecca’s heart like fireworks. What better sign Brian was a chosen one than to be a boy borne by a witch? She restrained herself from leaping off her chair and pirouetting across the room. She had the code to follow. Dancing could come later.

  What powers did Brian have? She fought the urge to pepper Cassandra with questions. Instead, she loosened her grip on the chair arms, took another deep breath, and tried to think of the best way to make the request she’d come to ask.

  Cassandra leveled a steady gaze on her. Friendly? Hostile? Perhaps a little of both. “You travel from dreams to reality and back, always knowing the difference. You conjure illusions so real you can sit in them.” Cassandra reached over and touched the arm of Rebecca’s chair. “I know what you are. A witch. So why don’t you tell me who you are, young lady, and why you’re here.”

  Rebecca swallowed. “My name is Rebecca Church. I met your son, and—”

  “You’re seeing my son?”

  “No, we met and spent some time together in my cabin. The Witches Code is clear on the matter of courting. A fortnight must be waited between the first meeting and the second.”

  Cassandra lifted a mirror and brush from her lap. She began primping her hair. “Let me get this straight. You like my son, but you’re keeping your distance because of an archaic code?”

  Rebecca’s stomach quivered. She turned away in case worry showed in her eyes. Had she truly followed the code? That question had been weighing her down like a ship’s anchor for days. She tried to find her voice. “I’m technically following the code, but I missed Brian so much that I did visit him, ever so briefly, in a dream or two.”

  Cassandra clucked her tongue. The universal damning tsk of annoyance.

  “Please don’t say I violated the code.” Rebecca barely managed to choke the words past the lump in her throat.

  Cassandra dragged the brush the length of her straight black hair, once, twice, three times before speaking. “I suppose a pure witch does her best, following the spirit of the law if not the letter.”

  No sweeter words had ever been spoken. Rebecca would have basked in their echo, but even the spirit of the code still mandated that permission be obtained from the mother before a witch dated the son. “I want to see Brian again—more than once, actually. I’d like to start—”

  “Are you asking permission to see a boy perfectly capable of choosing girlfriends without his mother’s help?”

  “Yes. The Witches Code requires—”

  “Again with the code.” Cassandra returned her things to her lap and folded her arms. “Tell me, Rebecca. What word does the code use to describe this first meeting between a witch such as you and a mother such as…me?”

  Rebecca’s head swam. How could she remember the precise words from a thousand-page book? She hadn’t prepared for a quiz. She would have steeled herself if she expected this meeting would be such a challenge, such a contest of wills, such a… “Trial! The code calls it a trial.” Obviously for good reason.

  Cassandra left her chair, stepped to the window, and pressed a hand against the glass. The foaming waves below whipped higher, into a frenzy of whitecaps. “You’d date him no matter what I say.”

  “Date?”

  “No one calls it courting anymore.”

  Rebecca fell back on her deep-breathing exercise, but neither that nor the slow closing of her fists could fend off the red anger clouding her sight. “How dare you suggest I’d violate the code, Cassandra? I will not court Brian without permission. You can be sure, though, I’ll come up here asking, every single night, until you say yes. You can’t imagine how patient and purposeful a pure witch can be.”

  Cassandra turned from the window. Her eyes flashed with the fires of a hundred foundries. “Are you implying I am not a pure witch? And who allowed you to speak my given name?”

  “No one, Mrs. Danahey.” Rebecca stomped to the door.

  Cassandra’s own footfalls beat just as loudly from behind. “You are a stubborn, willful, and mean young lady.”

  Rebecca grabbed th
e door handle and wrenched it down. “Pure witches don’t have mean bones, Cassandra.”

  “Argumentative and rude, too.”

  She tightened her grip on the handle. “I stand up for myself. Get used to it.”

  Two hands came down on her shoulders. Not heavily. Soft as a mother’s touch. So unexpectedly gentle the anger drained out of Rebecca in an instant, leaving her spent and wobbly.

  “My son does need a challenge,” Cassandra said. “He moped around the house all summer, and he’s been in a daze since he started school. Thinking about you, perhaps?”

  If only half as much as she’d been thinking about him. Rebecca kept her grip on the door handle to keep from falling.

  “Yes, you may court him.”

  She couldn’t have heard that right. She swung around on shaky legs.

  Cassandra stood tall with head held high. Yes, a formidable figure but far less intimidating with the smile now spreading across her face. “As you said, the code required you to have a trial. So I gave you one.”

  Rebecca’s knees buckled.

  Cassandra took her arm. “Come and sit with me before you leave.”

  She scarcely felt her feet hit the floor as she walked to the window and again sat with Cassandra. Her hands trembled. She settled them on her knees and gazed at the bluest, calmest lake she’d ever seen.

  “Brian has been seeing someone who works at a shop with him.”

  “What?” Rebecca hadn’t detected any sign of another girl in Brian’s dreams. Did the parade of surprises never end?

  “He claims she’s just a friend. I’m sure you’ll shoo her away once you step in and take control of the relationship. This Sharon isn’t the real problem.”

  Rebecca caught her breath. If a rival wasn’t the real problem, what was?

  Cassandra lapsed into silence.

  The cuckoo clock marked time. Tick, tick, tick. A flock of seagulls arced across the water from north to south. The birds circled twice, dove low, and resumed their journey.

  Rebecca was in no hurry for bad news. She didn’t say a word. The other shoe could take its time falling.