With her curly dark hair, happy brown eyes, and little snub nose she didn’t conform to anyone’s idea of a hag. I especially remembered her infectious, bubbling laugh. A far, far cry from a witch’s evil cackle. I felt a thrill to this very day when people said I sounded like her. She’d had neither crow’s feet around her eyes, nor even begun to thicken in the middle when breast cancer swept her away from us. She had only been in her fifties then.
“You’re laughing at me, child, as if you think I’m too old or too addlepated to know what I’m saying. I’m not, though. You ought to listen up and try to show a little respect. I believe I’m in a better position to know who and what your mother was than you are.
Remember, I knew her a whole lot more years than you did.”
True. He had. I had been only twelve when Mother passed away; Scott just fourteen. Much too young to have known her secrets. Too young to believe she could have had any life other than one as my father’s wife, or Scott’s and my mother.
“Sorry.” I felt contrition at his reprimand. “Please continue. You know I want to hear everything you can tell me about Mother.”
“I said your mother was a witch,” Dad went on, as though I’d never interrupted him. “I mean it was a calling to her, not a personality trait. I don’t even know if witch is a technical term, but it’s what she called herself. Nowadays people would probably use the word psychic or paranormal to describe her, although I’m not sure that’s the right term either. Not for what she could do.”
“And what is that?” I asked, fascinated by this wholly new look into my mother’s life.
“Well, she could foresee the future,” Dad said.
“Mother could?”
“Uh-huh. Which I guess is what a psychic usually does, but she also had the ability to change what she saw. Sometimes, anyway.”
“But not for herself,” I said, thinking that if she could have saved her own life, she would have. A father may raise his daughter with love and dedication. Dad proved that, but I’m here to say a girl, especially a teenage girl, suffers the lack of a mother’s guidance.
“No, not for herself,” Dad agreed, and I heard regret and sorrow in his tone. He set the gunstock aside and folded his gnarled hands. I noticed they were dyed almost the same color as the wood he’d been staining with fresh walnut juice. “I saw her turn a tornado once.”
“What?” I spluttered.
“Sure enough,” he said, grinning at the memory. “It happened one spring as we were driving through Kansas. We saw this great black funnel cloud swirling and jerking, heading right toward a school bus full of kids. The ground was flat as a pancake far as you could see, neither a dip nor a drop for miles.
“Well, your mother had me stop the car. She got out and started chanting some gobblety-gook thing. Her eyes took on an odd look, as if she were blind, yet could see everything. Then after a while, just when I thought the twister had that bus dead to rights, your mother flung up her arms and spread her fingers. I swear I saw a bolt of lightning hit that old tornado in the ass, and it jumped and passed over the top of the bus, neat as you please. All very fine and heroic, until it snapped back onto the road and headed in our direction.”
“What did you do?”
“Oh, I tried to dig a hidey-hole with my bare hands. Lucky for us that road had a bit of a ditch running alongside because, believe you me, I dug for all I was worth to make it deeper. When the tornado passed over it sucked up the air until I though sure we’d suffocate.”
“Really?”
“Really. That’s what causes buildings to implode, what—”
“No,” I interrupted. “I mean did any of this really happen?”
He sort of grinned. “Oh, yes, Boothenay. This is gospel, I swear to you.” He drew what looked to be a very old, leather bound book from under the blanket covering his lap and handed it to me.
“Here. I’ve been saving this for you. Your mother guarded this old book closer than a mama dog guards her pups. She learned some of the…the spells she performed from this. If I remember correctly, she called it an angel book, or a good grimoire. Something like that. There are chants, herbal lore, and I don’t know what all else written down.
“I’ve flipped through the pages a couple of times, but all I can see is words. She saw more than that, and she could use whatever it taught her. She learned how to turn the tornado from this book, though she didn’t know for sure the spell would work until she tried it. Don’t ask me how.” He held up a hand as though to stop me from interrupting again, although I’d been listening with too much fascination to comment. “I don’t know how. I didn’t want to know then, and I don’t want to know now.”
“Why are you giving me this, Dad?” I turned the book over in my hands, almost wanting to deny the gift, yet feeling a warmth in the leather like the warmth of a mother’s hand. Like the warmth of living skin. Maybe like the heat from hell if some of what Dad had said was true. Nah. I promptly discounted that idea. The book had a soothing quality that I felt from the first touch. I couldn’t be so far wrong.
Dad fixed me with his eyes. “I think you know, Boothenay. Aside from the fact your mother would want you to have it, you must be aware you need all the help you can get. “
I sighed, even though I had to agree. “My fits.” Scott’s first description had stuck all of these years as a euphemism kinder than truth. “Only they’re not really fits, are they? They must be something akin to what Mother did. In other words, I’m a witch, too.”
He nodded. “You know what you are better than anyone, child. I’ve watched you, though. I’ve seen you sit for an hour or more, blind and deaf and so gone from everything around you that only a shadow remains. Scott gave an excellent account once. He said it’s as if your body becomes an empty, see-through shell. Then, very slowly, you come back and fill the shell up again. You act as if you’re waking up, and you’ll finish whatever you’re doing just as quick and easy as if you’d done it a million times before. Almost as if you’ve been taught how to do the task.”
“Umm. Something like that. Or as if I’m remembering.” I guess Dad and Scott both saw more than I ever thought they did.
“Sometimes you look bewildered. Sometimes satisfied and happy.
But I’ve also seen you look so scared and dazed that I’ve been sick with worry over you. I’ve hesitated to say anything, but today I felt the time had come. I want you to have your mother’s book, her legacy, so to speak. Maybe you’ll find some help with this…business.” He reached down and patted his old dog. Gabe reciprocated by licking at the walnut juice on Dad’s hand.
I went to him then, and put my arms around his shoulders. They didn’t seem as brawny as they used to be, and I hugged him, burled walnut stock and all. I believed I heard sadness in his words, which I attributed to anxiety over this strange ability I had apparently inherited from my mother. Also, I thought in a way he would miss having Mother’s book by him.
“You’re right in thinking I need all the help I can get,” I said. “And I can’t wait to read Mother’s book.” I hoped to find an explanation of what happened to me when I went off, just as Dad had said, into a state of being there, yet not there.
Dad gripped my hand hard enough to hurt. “You know what I’m most afraid of, child? I’m afraid that one of these days you’re going to get lost, wherever it is you go, and not be able to find your way home.”
The old book fascinated me. I was kept up at night reading when I should have been sleeping. It distracted me by forcing me to think about hocus-pocus at odd moments when I ought to have been concentrating on my work. Soon I was practicing the spells an unknown magician from a distant time had written out. I found the information detailed magical stuff, not witchy stuff, and I, for one, saw a subtle difference between the two. And the words meant more to me than just the gobblety-gook my father said he saw. Handwritten, the crabbed script and antiquated words of the manuscript took a lot of deciphering.
But while the book w
as ancient, I knew it wasn’t evil.
I don’t know as the angel book made me a stronger magician. An explanation of why I had been chosen to receive the power might have proved a helpful chapter. The book did aid me in learning to focus my inborn abilities, because I found it easier and easier to slip out of my reality and into the when and what of a different time. All that was necessary was a gentle—or sometimes not-so-gentle—nudge from whatever antique gun I happened to be handling.
The transition always took place within a millisecond. I’d be sitting at the workbench tools in hand, busy with my work, then I’d be somewhere else. I’d find myself standing on the sidelines, watching the most outlandish adventures. Almost like watching television or a movie, or possibly a sporting event, except along with the report of gunfire, I sometimes smelled the sulfurous reek of burned gunpowder and heard the cries of the dying. The sounds of the mourners, too, if I couldn’t get out of the picture soon enough.
And getting out of the picture was becoming a problem. It seemed as if I had to become a part of the action, as if I no longer had a choice in the matter. I dreaded being drawn into history. One would think being witness—more than a witness if I forced myself to be honest—to murder was enough to help me break free from the compulsion, but evidently not. Anyway, why did history have to be so damn depressing? Did nothing good ever happen back in the old days?
On a gray Friday afternoon in October, I sat hunched over the workbench with my attention divided between watching rain beat down on the road outside our street front window, and taking apart a nice 1870’s .32 Smith & Wesson rimfire revolver. There was still a trace of the original blue finish under the grips when I took them off, along with a darker blob that flaked into dust when touched.
I’ll have to match this bluing, I was thinking, wondering if I had any of the right stuff in the shop. I eyed the barrel, checking the metal for the scratches and pitting the old corrosive ammunition often caused.
I’d have a happy owner when I got done with this one. The gun was in tip-top shape and only in need of a thorough cleaning.
“H-h-hands up,” said a masked man, pointing the pistol at me.
I gazed at him in astonishment. I knew I’d had that gun in my own hands, but now they were empty of everything except some odd-looking currency.
He blinked back at me as the red, faded-to-pink bandana he wore looped over his nose rode up, nearly blinding him. He yanked it down until he could see over the top.
“I beg your pardon?” What in the hell was going on? I shouldn’t be in this scene. This couldn’t be me. Not here.
“Th-this is a st-st-stick up,” he got out. His bright blue eyes, one of which had an alarming tendency to wander, glittered over the mask.
“H-hand over the m-money and n-n-nobody’ll get h-hurt.”
I stood in a sort of barred cage that was raised a little off the lobby floor. Beneath the counter, drawers held packets of the not-quite money. A leap of intuition warned me I was in a bank, smack-dab in the midst of a holdup, while an extremely nervous robber held a gun on me. The year I guessed as being sometime during the late 1870’s. What my intuition hadn’t warned about was that this spell traveling business didn’t always let me be me.
No. That’s not quite true. It let me be me, all right, but made me somebody else at the same time. A him, in this case.
I didn’t think females worked in banks during the 1870s. Or if they did, I’ll bet they wore something other than dark wool pants, hard-toed shiny shoes, and dingy white shirts as stiff and uncomfortable as starched burlap. I was wearing the pants, the shoes and the shirt, all topped off with a vest that had long since developed a distinct aroma—
of what I hesitate to say. And I knew I wasn’t female at this particular moment because I had an almost overwhelming urge to scratch my crotch.
“C-come on. H-h-hurry up,” the thief said, drawing my wondering gaze back to his face. His voice was quivering with nerves or fright.
Probably both.
Through the green visor shading my eyes, I watched my male hands obediently push money, both paper and coins, toward the bank robber.
No hero, then. Well, far be it from me to argue with Smith & Wesson and Company, no matter what guise I wore.
“Mr. Booth.” The bank manager had noticed something wrong and entered the cage behind me. His voice boomed from over my shoulder.
“What’s going on in here?”
Good God, he must be blind. Didn’t he see the gun? The bandana?
Blue Eyes and I stared at each other. The pistol shook.
“Um…ah,” I said.
“D-d-d-d,” said the bandit.
I assumed things were not going according to his plan. He may have meant to say damn. He looked once at the money, but made no move to pick any up.
“What’s going on, I say?” The manager’s chivying voice carried throughout the bank, loud enough to draw at least one customer’s attention. That customer happened to be the sheriff.
Thoroughly rattled, Blue Eye’s arm jerked. The gun went off.
The bars of the cage had been made of hand forged steel, strong enough to resist the bullet’s ricochet as it careened wickedly backwards and across the bandit’s shoulder, gouging a vivid red river of blood.
The gun dropped from his nerveless hand and for a second he looked down at it as though wondering if he should bend over and pick it up.
Instead, he turned and fled, his fingers clamped over the wound.
From the rear he looked young, poor, and badly fed. Pathetic really.
His shoulder blades pushed out in sharp hillocks under his washed thin shirt. I found myself hoping he wouldn’t infect the wound with his dirty hand.
Amidst all the hullabaloo, I ducked under the counter and retrieved the .32 Smith & Wesson rimfire. A splash of blood seeped under the walnut grips.
Dimly, somewhere in the background I heard the manager saying my name, “Mr. Booth,” for the third time. How did he know my name, I wondered? Booth, Booth, no— Boothenay. I felt a terrific jolt as my spirit returned to my own body.
“Boothenay…so,” Dad said. He sounded shaken, as if he’d be frightened if he just let himself go. “You’re back. Safe and sound?”
I’d have to think about that. I honestly didn’t know.
“I guess.” I felt tired and depressed. The sleeve of my white blouse had a single drop of bright, still wet, blood soaking through the fabric.
Not a dream then. I truly had been there.
Fresh blood, old blood. Stains and a dried flake of one hundred-thirty-year-old blood that crumbled even as my hands, feminine once again, set the .32’s grips aside for cleaning.
Chapter 2
Eventually I recovered my sense of humor. Enough so that, after a while, I could look back and make a passably funny story out my strange misadventure. In the end I got Dad to laugh along with me. A challenge because, believe me, he hadn’t been at all amused when I returned from wherever it was I’d been. And if I thought Dad a hard case, I soon found out he was a marshmallow compared to my brother.
It was Scott who had found me in the throes of this trance. I’d always kept my odd ability low profile with him, dreading the to-do I knew he’d make. His general notion of a recovery technique was to grab me and slap my face, as if I’d swooned or something. Only Dad’s intervention prevented him this time. I really don’t know what my reaction might have been if he’d hit me, but the thought brought some scary ideas to mind.
Still, a stuttering bandit who gets shot by the ricochet of his own bullet is pretty farcical, although I don’t believe any of us found the adventure exactly hilarious. The skinny, young bank robber with his wounded arm tugged at my heartstrings. In retrospect, I wished I’d handed, or perhaps I should say, Mr. Booth had handed him the cash. I fear Mr. Booth had not been as sympathetic. He reminded me of Scott.
“Look at it this way, Dad,” I said. I sat on a stool at the workbench, my hands folded to conceal their tr
embling from the men. “If the bandit had gotten his money and made a clean getaway, chances are I’d never have become involved.”
“I don’t know as I’d call that a bad thing.” Dad had been shaking when I came to myself, his voice hoarse from trying to call me back.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t mean to fret you. But try as I might, I can’t seem to help myself. Something triggers a signal in me and I’m off before I even know I’m gone. There’s always a buzz or—
something—I don’t quite know how to describe the sensation. Maybe I need to tell you when I feel it coming on so you’re not surprised when this happens. I need a code word. A short code word. Like, yikes.”
He didn’t so much as crack a smile, frowning at me instead. “What if you’d been shot, Boothenay? Do you know what would happen? Can you die when you’re in that state? Are you able to get home from wherever you are?”
The thought took away any amusement I’d felt in a hurry. “I don’t know. I guess I haven’t really given that much thought, never having been quite so corporeal a presence before. Anyway, I made it home.” I knew I’d be thinking up a list of everything that could go wrong from now on.
My mind shied away from the Frye murder, conveniently forgetting I had been just about as up close and personal then as you can get, when I let that happen. When I helped it happen. That wasn’t me, I told myself. She did it. I only watched. But I shuddered when I remembered that dark, windy night and the cold steel of the gun.
Of course, Scott got mad. “So what happens if the time comes that you disappear and never get back? Or maybe we find you dead, slumped at your workbench? Wonderful! What do you suppose the cops would have to say about that? What if they investigated and found you’d been shot with an antique gun that not only has no ammunition, but also is in pieces, right there in front of you? Pretty good trick, huh?
They’d probably say I murdered my sister.”
I believe he had the idea under consideration.
In The Service Of The Queen (The Gunsmith Book 1) Page 2