Doubtfully Judge said, “I guess that’s what I can tell myself. If I were a better person, I’d probably really regret how I acted. You know, I’m glad Rosemary stopped me but probably not as glad as I should be.”
Sally considered this, wondering if Judge’s feelings were anything like Irving Howell’s, when that big wolfish man had summoned a demon to wreak vengeance. Their circumstances were somewhat alike, both of them wanting revenge against somebody who had hurt them. To her thinking, Judge had a good excuse (temporary insanity brought on by bee venom, right?) and Irving had no such crutch: he’d planned his vengeance too slowly and carefully. And motives? Well, Judge was avenging the death of a cat, and Irving wanted to hurt the mother who had spurned and forgotten him. Apples and oranges, thought Sally.
“He shouldn’t be out of his kennel,” said the gentle voice of the attendant vet as she entered the room. “He needs his rest.”
“I’m taking him with me,” Judge said. “I’ll need instructions on how to take care of him.”
Rosemary appeared in the doorway behind the technician, peering over the young woman’s shoulder. “Wait – what? Vladimir is on a leave of absence until he’s all better. Judge, I don’t expect you to come to Slope either. I don’t even know why you’re out of the hospital. I know damn well you weren’t released at five in the morning.”
“Sally busted me out,” Judge said.
“Busted you out!”
“I got it on video,” said Sally, handing the camera over quickly.
Rosemary peered at Sally and Judge in turn, knowing she’d been had. “You tricky devils. Damn it.”
“We’re a team,” said Judge. “We’re coming along. Bad things happen when we all split up.”
“Judge, bad things happen when we’re all together, too. Ideally I want the whole team in every episode, but it just doesn’t always work out like that, and your health is more important to me than—”
“Rosemary.” Judge wasn’t even looking up, just rocking his cat back and forth. “We’re coming with you.”
Sally looked from Judge back to Rosemary and bit her lip. She wasn’t sure which side of the argument she should take and rather hoped no one would ask her. Rosemary gazed at the camera in her hand and then swore softly, saying, “Hell, I guess you are.”
Chapter Two
Othernaturals Season 6, Episode 5
The San Francois Mountains, Southern Missouri; June, 2015
The weather was beautiful, warm and balmy, Missouri’s early-summer standard, until they drove into the Ozark Mountains, south of Lake of the Ozarks. They were no more than ten miles from their destination when a storm rolled over them, thunderheads dark green and rain pelting down so hard that the windshield wipers couldn’t sluice it away fast enough. Stefan, driving the van, slowed to a near crawl and then said, “I may have to pull over. I can’t see twenty feet ahead of us.”
The road was no comfortable drive to begin with, curving and bending as it did through a forest that seemed to grow thicker by the mile. Rain had been plentiful this year – in fact there had been flooding throughout the state – and surrounding the road was not so much a forest as a jungle of impenetrable green foliage, a purplish mist of moss and flowers carpeting the ground.
Of course the Othernaturals team had been in plenty of lush Missouri forests and were ostensibly familiar with these country roads. Always, two narrow lanes wove unpredictably, scattered with yellow signs warning of impossible curves ahead, and endless deer crossings. Wildlife everywhere. Dappled sunlight – usually. Not today; today it was dark as a winter evening.
In their history of traveling Missouri and the surrounding states, they had never been this deep into the area called the St. Francois Mountains, simply because there was so little here to see. They’d visited a haunted lead-mine a couple years before, but even that had been near a town big enough for its own McDonalds. Sally had learned that a common standard of measure (and pride) for small towns lay in acquiring their own McDonalds. That was not the case here, so she hoped her friends had no irresistible desire for fries or Big Macs. With every passing mile, their surroundings grew wilder. Civilization as they knew it disappearing behind them.
They were heading toward what could be called a town only because it had a post office attached to it. The place was rather unimaginatively named Slope, and it was located halfway up the side of Eyeteeth Mountain. Slope had a population of 14 people, meaning that once the Othernaturals arrived, they would increase the population by exactly half.
In the front passenger seat, Rosemary squinted out at the pounding rain. “Is there a safe place to pull over?”
“No. Then again, I haven’t seen another car for a while.” They crept along, Stefan taking great care. In the equipment truck behind them, Greg and Andrew followed, using the van’s tail lights as their guide. Stefan added, “I think the greatest danger is being rear-ended by our own truck.”
Rosemary texted Andrew and let everyone know what she was typing. “Stefan says stop tailgating. We may pull over until the rain lightens up.” After a moment, her phone blipped and she smiled at the response but didn’t read it aloud.
Sally Friend was in her spot by the second window back, its glass covered with a dark sheet of plastic. That plastic cover was really for her own comfort more than her protection, so she wouldn’t get so hot from all the layers she was forced to wear. Ambient light in the van from the other windows was enough to burn her if she didn’t stay covered and so, as was usual even in the summertime, she was dressed like a Hollywood icon in hiding. Everything she wore was white: scarf, sunglasses, a wide-brimmed hat pulled down low over her blonde curls, a turtleneck, gloves, jeans and custom-made white hiking boots (a ridiculous conceit to her token color - could there be a worse color choice for hiking boots?). Over all of this she had an elegant woven silk poncho, too pretty to be taken seriously as a “last stand” against light, though that’s what it was. The elegant garment was something Scarlet & Black, their clothing sponsor, had knocked out for her specifically and then marketed rather successfully. To her secret pleasure, they called it “the Sally.” In the summertime, it was stifling to be covered in so many layers, but no matter - it beat being trapped indoors for all time.
She was actually quite comfortable right then because of the dark foreboding sky, which blocked out the direct sunlight and let her feel the constant relief of shade. Oh her mother would snap out that warning, “Giselle Friend, you stay covered – just because you can’t see the sun doesn’t mean it can’t see you.” She’d want to sass back and remind her mother that at the age of 21, and having dealt with this condition all her life, she was quite capable of remembering that clouds could not protect her. She’d be loath to admit her Mom had a point. Dark clouds like these treacherous chuckling things above them did give Sally a feeling of safety, like she might just shed her poncho and have a quick run around in the rain because, come on, what harm could a couple minutes do?
She’d never dare, of course, great though the temptation might have been. She was lucky she got to come outside at all. Besides, the moment she did anything remotely dangerous, Kaye and everyone else on the team would give her an ass-chewing, which made Sally pretty sure that her own parents had bribed everyone in the group to babysit her.
The last ten miles stretched out thanks to their crawling speed, making everybody antsy. The rain was wild outside the van, wind whipping through the trees and making them stir up a great vortex of leaves. Soon Sally couldn’t make out details at all; there was a wall of water between her and the forest. Stefan said, “That’s it. I have to stop; I’m driving blind here.” He pulled them as far to the side of the road as he dared.
“Careful, Stefan, you don’t want to get us stuck in the mud,” said Kaye from the far back seat, rousing herself out of a peaceful doze. The rain pelted the roof of the van so hard that it was difficult to hear each other speak.
Fascinated, Sally peered through the rain. “Are we going t
o be flooded?” she asked.
Stefan answered her. “No. We’re in the mountains. It’s the people in the foothills who are in danger of that.”
In the seat between Sally’s and the cockpit, Judge sat up, his dark curls sticking up on one side and his face looking a little mashed. The first thing he did was check on Vladimir, who was peacefully sleeping on fluffy soft towels in his crate, safe in the arms of a sedative. Then Judge asked, “Why are we stopping? Oh, look at that.” He crept into the cockpit and peered out the front between Stefan and Rosemary, whistling at the downpour.
Rosemary texted again. “I’m making sure that our intrepid truckers are remembering to get this on film.” She quoted herself, “Be sure to film.” After a moment, her phone pinged. “Oh, Greg thanks me for reminding him to do his job. Well, yes cos I know u 2 are just talking books.” Another ping. “Oh dear gods, he says they’re discussing whether the books of Edgar Rice Burroughs are in the same universe as Lovecraft’s.”
Kaye frowned. “Aren’t we all in the same universe?”
Rosemary’s head cocked to one side. “They want to know if anybody else saw the Civil War Reenactors a few miles back.” Her fingers flew across her phone screen as everyone in the van expressed various levels of incredulity, and no, nobody had seen any such thing. Kaye remarked that people sure did get up to all sorts of strange hobbies. Rosemary waited for a response. Ping “Hmm. They say they saw a bunch of guys in Civil War uniforms not ten minutes ago. In this weather?” She typed again, quoting herself aloud, “If u see cool things u have to film them.”
“I’ll film some too,” Sally volunteered.
“Well sure, Sal, be my guest. That’s awesome. Hell, let’s get some of our intro material while we’re stopped. That’s called multi-tasking.” Rosemary searched around her feet for the camera bag. It was buried beneath sacks full of napkins and sandwich wrappers from their lunch. Eventually it was handed back to Sally, who happily took it and began to choose her new spot to sit. She decided to start with the very back seat, next to Kaye, so she could get a view of the entire van’s interior as they waited out the deluge.
This area might be called the St. Francois Mountains, but Sally wasn’t buying it. In March they’d been in the Rockies in Colorado and those had been mountains, all right. This was just a lot of hills. Geologically speaking, if someone insisted on calling these mountains, it sounded to Sally like that somebody was trying to compensate for something.
Her teammates were uneasy, parked here on the narrow road in a violent rainstorm. Sally was having a fairly great day, herself. It felt good to have the team united. This past week she’d been with Kaye and Stefan in Dallas at the paranormal convention called Necronomi-Con, and while that had been fun, she’d definitely missed having the whole group together. She had grown hungry for the emotions of her friends.
Sally Friend fit the bill of vampire to a small extent simply because the sun would indeed kill her. Regardless, most people (who didn’t watch their webshow) assumed Sally was joking when she called herself a “psychic vampire”. The idea that she fed on the emotions of others was no joke to her - she wasn’t even speaking allegorically. She needed people around her or she’d weaken, even get sick. Being among her friends was her favorite thing; each of them had a different delicious flavor. She’d rather be with her friends in the scariest, dirtiest haunted house in Missouri, than be by herself in a thousand-dollar-a-night hotel suite.
When she found an angle she liked, Sally spoke as she panned the handheld camera over the van. “We’re parked on the side of the highway on the way to a town called Slope in the St. Francois Mountains. We drove right into a thunderstorm with rain so heavy that Stefan had to pull over. Greg and Andrew are behind us in the equipment truck. Rosemary, you want to tell us why we’re going to a place with a population of fourteen people?”
Rosemary held up a finger then rummaged in her bag again, coming up this time with a copy of the information folder about their episode. She said, “In our season six premiere, we were in Colorado where we met groundskeeper Irving Howell, who worked on the Lutilla Heston property.”
Sally felt a blush infuse her cheeks at the mention of Irving. It happened every time. Rosemary had promised, at Sally’s behest, not to make a big deal out of Sally’s brief but passionate (omigod-so-passionate) fling with the man.
Rosemary went on. “Irving – as everybody recalls, I’m sure – had an interesting history when it came to the supernatural. His parents were conservationists in charge of a wolf preserve in this area of the mountains and, to our eyes, he seemed to have picked up a number of behaviors from those animals. Good news for us, as his size and strength came in pretty handy when it was time to try and break up the preta zombie infestation.”
Briefly Rosemary made direct eye contact with Sally. The show had carefully sidestepped the fact that Irving had been responsible for the terrible infestation, and cleaning up his own mess was really the least he could have done. There was a good reason why Sally had cut him so purposefully out of her life.
Rosemary resumed her tale. “Irving also told us about a certain Mrs. Baker, a mountain-woman who declared herself to be a legitimate fam-trad witch – fam-trad is short for ‘family tradition’ - who is able to create complex spells with the use of charms and totems. Anyway, Irving could only tell us that the witch’s name was Mrs. Baker. In this region of southern Missouri, about every fourth person’s last name is Baker. I spent a good part of April tracking down the right woman, to see if she’d let us interview her. Tricia and I,” here she was referring to the Othernaturals’ secretary, “must have sent three dozen letters by snail mail, and I had our detective checking around too. We got lucky, and had an answer by early May.”
She flipped to the next page of her episode brochure. When the show was edited, this would be used as voiceover, and probably footage of the mountains, Mrs. Baker and her home would be shown to keep the viewer’s attention focused.
Rosemary read details from her file. “Cloda Baker, age 94, lives at the peak of Eyeteeth Mountain, one of the tallest mountains in the range, right on the edge of the St. Francois National Park. It has a gnarly-looking north face. Check this out.” Rosemary held up a dusty travel brochure that highlighted the hiking trails throughout the nearby state park. Eyeteeth Mountain was featured on the front of this brochure because photographically it was the most interesting mountain in the range. Some geographical phenomenon millions of year before had left it split almost in two. One side of the mountain was a sheer, terrifying drop.
Rosemary pointed at the top of the mountain’s face and said, “Yeah, a 94-year-old woman lives up there. Here’s a fun fact. The mountain was named by Cloda Baker’s own great-grandfather, because people would ‘give their eyeteeth’ to come visit the place. I don’t know if that’s meant literally. Cloda apparently lives at the top of the mountain alone - except for a herd of goats - and has for years. The town closest to her house is Slope, population fourteen, which lies about halfway up the mountainside. That’s where we’ve been invited to stay with Cloda’s younger sister, a Miss Ardelia Baker, who is, according to Cloda, ‘a good Christian woman.’”
Now Rosemary held up a wrinkled sheet of paper. “Here is Cloda’s letter. I’ll read it to you – it took us a while to decipher her handwriting, but her spelling is perfect. Dear Rosemary Sharpe. I am Cloda Baker. I am the witch you been asking about. I think you are looking for me to talk to me. I got your letter. I talked to my friend Irving. He says you are a good bunch who will treat right with respect.” Rosemary looked up, shrugging at the oddball wording, then went on, “I would be real happy to talk to your show. Will you also help me with a problem when you come. I have a problem that Irving says you can help with. We would be glad to have you on the Eyeteeth Mountain. You can stay in the town of Slope with my baby sister Ardelia who is a good Christian woman.” Rosemary put the letter back in the folder. “Anyway, the rest is just dates and directions, which I’ll spare you. W
e’re all pretty interested in what kind of trouble a mountain witch might be in, but we’re happy to try and help her.”
Stefan commented, “An invitation to stay in someone’s home is kind of unusual. I think the last time that happened was when I got to board in the Tomato Lady’s house, and that was just because she and I were already friends.”
“I think that’s charming,” Kaye said. “It reminds me of – well, not to be trite—but of the olden days, when people would just let travelers come in and spend the night.”
Judge said, “I would be happy to let strangers come in and spend the night with me, but when I make the offer, people look at me funny.”
“Have you considered, Judge, that you may just be funny-looking?” asked Stefan.
“Old man, I’m so pretty that my girlfriends get jealous.”
“So here we sit,” Rosemary mused. She spoke to the camera again. “As you know from the last episode - but no spoilers if you’re watching out of order—”
Judge had turned to face the camera and interrupted Rosemary. “Friends, friends, don’t watch the shows out of order. We’re trying to maintain a continuity here.”
Rosemary agreed with the warning. “He’s right, you know. You’ll want to find out why Judge here looks like he got hit by a truck. Anyway, we just got back together, because last week, Andrew, Judge, Greg and I were at the Perkins Institute for Psychiatric Research in Creve Coeur; Sally, Kaye and Stefan were in Dallas at Necronomi-Con, promoting the show and Stefan’s new book.”
“The convention ended at 4:00 yesterday afternoon,” Stefan said, “And we hit the road as fast as we could. We were worried about you all because—”
“No spoilers!” more than one person warned him.
Stefan put up a hand in acceptance. “Drove almost straight north and rolled into St. Louis eight hours later. The fact that I never got a speeding ticket is a miracle.”
Witches Page 4