Witch Boy

by Russell Moon

  People begin spilling out of the ballroom into the hallway. They are gawking and they are gasping.

  “Take him,” Arj barks. “Take him that way and do it in the kitchen.” He gets Baron to his feet, then points a finger into his gaping mouth, at his dead-meat, mutilated tongue. “Guess you better learn to watch this, huh?” he growls at Baron.

  Arj gives Baron and Mr. Sedaris a shove, and they stagger off toward the kitchen.

  “Everybody go back, go back in,” Arj says, waving the party guests back inside. All but the members of the Council of Youngers retreat. The five of us stand in the foyer. I am in shock.

  “Did you see that?” I whisper. I am staring at the blood on the floor.

  “I did,” he says.

  I am still struggling to work it out. To come to grips with the thing that was me.

  “He’s pretty bloody scary,” I say.

  Arj lets out a respectful small laugh. “He bloody is. You’re going to have to learn to control him, Marcus. Do you understand what I’m saying? Do you grasp the depth of this? You must learn, because he’s not going away. You’re going to have to get to know him, quickly.”

  “Jesus,” I say, the hugeness of it beginning to accumulate in my head. There is a flash of light from behind the kitchen door, followed by an extended scream out of Baron and a lot of thrashing and crashing around. Followed by silence. “Jesus…oh Jesus.”

  Mr. Sedaris comes walking down the hall toward us. His clothes are spattered all down the front with blood, and his hands are blackened, as from a fire.

  “Well?” Arj asks.

  “He’ll have a bit of a lisp for a while. He’ll be all right. He’s out for now.”

  Out sounds like an excellent idea. “I want to go,” I plead. “Can I go now? I mean, without any tricks or spells or confrontations or anything? I just…I really need to get away, home, now.”

  “I guess tonight was kind of a large dose,” Winston says, clapping me on the back. I jump. “Sorry,” he says, and gives me the last of his drink. I take it.

  “May we escort you, Prince?” Eartha says.

  “If you don’t call me that,” I say.

  The sun is up. It is a typically balmy Carolina morning as we walk along the river. Eartha and Marthe lead, followed by me and Arj, and then Winston and Chuck.

  “This is a great dog, “Winston says, throwing a stick into the water for Chuck to fetch. Chuck lets out a little stutter laugh that sounds like “Yeah, right.”

  The farther we walk, the more businesslike Arj gets. He has an agenda.

  “We never told you everything,” he says.

  “I don’t want to know everything,” I say.

  “You need to know something.”

  “Whether I want to or not.”

  “Unfortunately, yes.”

  Our feet are soaking wet, but nobody seems to notice. We trudge along in step, and I realize that I am surrounded like a heavily guarded criminal, or a head of state. I am cocooned.

  I have to say it is not the worst feeling I have ever had, to have a posse of my own. I have never even belonged to a group before, never mind led one.

  And I have never before felt so badly that I needed one.

  “Okay,” I say to Arj, “you tell me I’m supposed to get this…thing under control. How do I do that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What? What do you mean, after all this—”

  “This is what I wanted to tell you. There is only one who can help you, Marcus, and therein lies our quest. You need him. And we need him. A Cern pod in Brittany needs him. And another in the Outer Hebrides needs him.”

  Everyone stops walking at once. My posse, my cocoon, my coven, pack, my pod, is turned inward, in a circle, around me. Even my dog.

  “My father is dead,” I say coolly, though I do not feel any kind of cool.

  “Like hell he is,” Arj says.

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER 8

  I wake up screaming, sweating rivers, screaming.

  “Jules, Jules, Jules, Jules!”

  Then someone is holding me and shushing me, stroking my face.

  Jules. It is Jules.

  “Jules,” I say, and hold her naked body to mine. “God, I’m so sorry, so sorry, I am so sorry.”

  She doesn’t say anything for a few minutes, just holds me, stroking the back of my matted head. Which is just what I need. I don’t need words, I don’t want words.

  “Eartha,” she says. “Remember? Eartha.”

  I let go, lean back, and take in every inch of her. Every inch of her is Jules, nonetheless.

  “I forgot,” I say dejectedly.

  “I wish I were, Marcus. More than anything, I wish I were Jules. I want to be your princess.”

  I fall back on the pillow. My princess. My destiny. My god.

  I sit up quickly again. “My mother. Oh god, does my mother know you’re here?”

  “I don’t think so. I heard her go out a while ago. And last night, well, this morning”—Eartha pauses for a brief giggle—“you didn’t even know I was here. Till just now.”

  I lie back once more with my hands over my face. Clouds are coming in over the muggy Blackwater morning. Smells like rain. Eartha scootches over, lies across me, her cheek and her hand flat to my chest.

  I have to ask. “Did we…?”

  “We did if you think we did,” she says, kissing my nipple, holding her lips there in a smile.

  “I can’t stand another one of those answers, Eartha, I swear.”

  “I’m sorry,” she says, and goes melancholic. “We did it as much as we can. That’s part of…the legacy. Try as we might—and make no mistake, try we do—we don’t consummate. We love. We entwine. But when it comes to it, the experience is like disappearing into a blackness, then coming out the other side. There is no joy, no ecstasy. We pass through physical love without existing in it. It’s like having blackouts.”

  She goes quiet. Kisses my chest once more. The rain begins outside, tapping lightly on the sill of my open window.

  “That’s why we might seem a little casual about it to you.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  She smiles, turns her head to face me directly. “You should be.” She is only half joking.

  “This is part of what my father is supposed to have caused?”

  She nods. “Cern law. Unbreakable. You marry within the tribe.”

  “And because my father did not…”

  “That’s right. Because he mated with someone outside, a nonwitch, all of us are punished by Cernunnos himself. A great nothingness of conjugal love. And if we try to do what he did, mate outside our species, legend says that the physical pain is beyond all endurance.”

  Oh yes. Oh yes, this. This, I know. This is where I came in.

  It is starting to appear that I have an awesome load to make up for. I have no illusion, in the light of day, that I am going to be up to it.

  “That’s why, Marcus, you are the youngest Cern left on earth. And the only one of your kind. Regeneration of our people stopped dead, with you, at the moment of your conception.”

  I did not want words today. This is why I didn’t want words today. Everything I hear lately makes things worse, makes them darker and meaner and scarier, and it all keeps leading back to me.

  “I think if you tell me any more, Eartha, I might kill myself.”

  “That’s the main thing we cannot let you do. You have to live, to take care of us. You have a preordained assignment, and if you do not meet it, we are finished. Sins of the father. He made us impure, and you are here to repurify the race.”

  “Why hasn’t someone else tried to bring him back in all this time, huh? And how am I even supposed to locate him?”

  “Same answer to both questions. Nobody can locate him. But he will locate you.”

  “Where, when, how?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.” Eartha gets up on her hands and knees, and I am nearly
blind, with longing for her, with visions of Jules, with longing for Jules. “But at the end of your journey, I am going to be waiting, to make love with you, with you alone, and for real.”

  I am fortunate that my heart is only seventeen years old. It would not survive one day with the Cern people at anything less than full strength. It beats so hard at this instant I think it may shoot out of my chest and splatter Eartha, myself, the walls….

  “Marcus Aurelius,” comes the call from downstairs.

  It’s my mother.

  “It’s my mother!” I jump out of bed, scramble around for clothes.

  I motion silently for Eartha to stay put. She giggles. “And stop that,” I say.

  I throw on the shirt I wore to the party. It reeks. I throw it off, get a tank top out of the drawer and a pair of soccer shorts off the floor, and beat Eleanor to the door.

  I guide her back down the stairs, my arm around her shoulders. “Breakfast?” I ask sweetly.

  “At three in the afternoon I don’t think they call it breakfast anymore,” Eleanor says.

  Whatever they call it, Eleanor and I sit down to it. We’re both having trouble getting around to business.

  “More coffee?” she asks.

  I shake my head, stuffing in the last piece of my bacon-and-egg sandwich.

  “Really? You look like you could use more coffee.”

  “Okay, I’ll have more coffee.”

  She pours and takes the opportunity to ease into what she wants to say.

  “A person normally has to work at it, to wind up looking like you do. What time did you get home? I never even heard you come in.”

  “Neither did I,” I say. This is not the right tack. Eleanor gives me a very long leash, but if I give her cause to worry, she will worry with the best of them.

  “When I said I wanted you to start mixing socially, Marcus, I didn’t mean you had to dive right in at the deep end.”

  I reach out and put my hand over hers. “It’s not like that. Okay? Relax.”

  “All right, then. What is it like?” She leans back in her chair, away from me. She is regarding me with the most suspicious look. Like I am giving off some kind of scent and she is a police dog.

  “Where’s Chuck?” I ask.

  “He’s under your chair. The party, Marcus?”

  I look under my chair. What do you know.

  “It was…fun. It was…interesting.”

  “Perhaps I’m being too vague. Is there anyone in your room, Marcus?”

  I am still trying to find that corner of my life where I can crawl and hide and find things a little easier. It is not in sight.

  “No,” I say weakly.

  “I see,” she says. She has a deeply dubious look on her face. She has somehow caught my trail and won’t settle for crap.

  I am opening my mouth to say something anyway, when I see Eartha, outside the window behind Eleanor’s shoulder. She smiles, she waves. She vanishes.

  “There is nobody in my room,” I say with conviction. “First, Eleanor, do I lie to you? Mostly, no. And second, how often is anybody in my room? Honestly. And if you don’t believe me you can just feel free to go right up there and check.”

  I am sounding pretty well indignant, I figure, when Chuck lets out one of those superior, disapproving dog groans. I kick him.

  “Hmm,” she says, her tone capturing that limbo I’m in, between being accurate and being believed.

  “So how was your night?” I ask, easing us out of the deep water.

  She holds for an extra beat, holding me in her stare to let me know she knows there is more. Then she releases me. For now.

  “It was lovely,” she says, clearly happy to finally have somebody to share it with. I am pleased to be that somebody. “The entire department is lovely. As far as I can tell, not a bad apple in the bunch, and that is an amazing thing in this field. Now, my position is primarily research, but the possibilities are very broad. I might wind up taking over one section of a course, and Dr. Spence is already talking to me about possibly sitting on some committee things.”

  “Committee things,” I say, nodding. “This is good, yes?”

  “Oh yes, well, it may sound dull, and may in fact have some dull elements…but yes, this is all very good. Dr. Spence says he will be watching me closely, taking me under his wing as it were….”

  Eleanor is still talking, but my mental train has jumped the tracks. Dr. Spence. Dr. Spence, as in Eartha’s father. As in, if I am the only mortal/Cern crossover there is…

  Dr. Spence, the witch. Is taking my mom under his silver wing.

  I feel a chill.

  “What…Jesus, Marcus, what did you do to yourself last night?” Eleanor asks, coming over to feel my head and rub my back. It is pure Eleanor, scolding me with her tone and soothing me with her hands. “Your skin feels like fish scales.”

  “Sorry,” I say.

  “What are you apologizing for?”

  “Sorry. Habit. I mean, I’m all right. I just…you know what it is, I think I just still haven’t gotten myself acclimated here yet. I didn’t realize how much I had come to rely on my time in the woods in Port Caledonia. I need to get outside more, is what it is. Nightlife…not for me, you know?”

  “It certainly is not. This is a good lesson for you. Don’t get caught up in whatever nonsense is going on with the kids here, Marcus. You be your own man. Make new friends, partake fully of the life around you, but in the end you need to remain you. You have never been a follower. I don’t expect you to start now.”

  She rubs my back the whole time she is speaking. She, in fact, rubs harder and harder as she goes along. I look up at her.

  “You’ve been waiting to give me that speech.”

  “Been working on it all day,” she says, letting out a gasp of breath that she has also been holding all day.

  I stand, feeling more steady already. “Well, it was great. And dead-on. Thanks, Eleanor.” I kiss her on the cheek. “I am dying to hear more about Dr. Spence and all later. You’ll tell me everything, right?”

  “Maybe,” she says coyly.

  I get a smaller chill, but a chill that’s unmistakable.

  “And you will tell all as well?”

  “Maybe,” I say, trying to sound coy myself, but probably sounding more motion-sick. “But right now, I’m going for a long walk in the forest with my faithful companion.”

  My faithful companion whimpers and stays under the chair.

  I pull him out by the collar.

  “I’ll be a new man when I get back,” I say.

  “The old one will do just fine,” she says.

  Come to think of it, that would be fine. Into the woods, locate the old life, the old simple Marcus, and bring him back alive.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” I say, dragging Chuck out the front door.

  Chuck continues to be reluctant the whole way. He is not fighting me so much as he is dragging along. I keep turning to him, talking to him, threatening him, without stopping while I do it. I was not joking about my need to get into the woods.

  “I’m not in the mood, Chuck, you hear me?”

  He hears me fine. His step quickens.

  We have to walk briefly through neighborhoods, past corner shops, the post office, the whole movie-set town center, all the opposite of woodland, to get to my woods. When we do reach the edge of the forest, and the scent of pine and turf and dry end-of-summer oak leaf hits me like a bracing slap in the face, I stop and close my eyes.

  If there is an it for me and Chuck, then this is it—this smell, this feeling. I can tell he is with me on this. He is leaning into the scent now, not pulling back. It is drawing him like it does me.

  “Don’t worry. Nobody’s going to pull you down again.”

  It may be the forest filling me with strength. But now for the first time I allow myself to embrace my…situation, a little bit.

  “Nobody’s going to screw around with my dog. In my woods.”

  I cringe almost ph
ysically, waiting for something. Waiting for my comeuppance. For a tree to fall on me, a broom to swoop out of the sky, or my dog to burst into flame. Nothing happens. I have gotten away with it.

  An Obair. I am The Business.

  “Come,” I say to Chuck, returning to my real status, “allow the Prince to carry the stinking beast on his back up a tree. What a glorious kingdom it is I rule.”

  Chuck doesn’t laugh, but he does follow me farther in. The whole thing stops being funny to me too in short order. We skulk through the woods with all the seriousness of hunters tracking deer. Every time one of us makes an unusually loud snap underfoot, we freeze. We wait. We start again.

  What is it? Are we afraid of spooking our quarry?

  Or are we afraid we are the quarry and don’t want to give ourselves away?

  Either way, the forest still doesn’t feel completely mine, the way the old one did.

  “This is silly,” I say and hoist the dog on my back. I have chosen an oak, thicker, taller than the one we adopted in Port Caledonia, and ten times the tree we climbed last time in this very wood. It is a long, long, exhausting shinny, and Chuck must be eating bark on the way up, because he is gaining weight rapidly.

  We are probably forty feet off the ground when we sling ourselves over the broad, smooth, muscular arm of a branch. I lie flat on my belly, my chin on my hand on the branch, wiped out with the effort. Chuck remains draped over me like a caveman’s bearskin. He is snoring like a sawmill, as if he has done something.

  I look out at the view and like what I see. I see as much treetop as anything. Oak and beech and silver maples, punctuated with the arrowheads of a million pines, sliced through with bolts of white birch, here, and here, and here. There is one perfectly oval clearing of meadow a quarter-mile west, and another, more raggedly shaped clearing off to the north. The rain has stopped for now, but the air is thick enough with moisture that you can hold up one finger for seconds and then lick off the sweet, piney dew. The woods are orchestral with the tip-tapping of billions of droplets rolling off leaves, and of hundreds of bird species singing over them.

  Everything that has been happening to me, around me, because of me, is for the moment behind me. This is not Port Caledonia, but it is starting to feel like my place.