Witches

by Christina Harlin

  “You’re not headin’ back up the mountain,” said Ardelia hopefully. “Ain’t safe to do it; you’d just as well stay here. I feel a terrible dread about it.”

  “We’ll be fine,” said Rosemary, touched by the woman’s unexpected concern. “We have to see Cloda again. We want to undo whatever is killing your town.”

  “Then wait and go tomorrow,” suggested Ardelia. “I feel as if this is the end of the world. I don’t know what’s the matter with me.”

  Rosemary tried to be encouraging. “Maybe the weather is getting you down; rain for a week would make anyone blue. We need to be quick about solving this problem in Slope, because tomorrow we’re supposed to go home. I need to get my team back to their lives, especially Judge and his cat, who need some extra rest and care.”

  Ardelia was unconvinced. “You can solve our problems all in one day?”

  Rosemary nodded. “We work fast. Most of the time, once we figure out what the issue really is, it all works out quickly in a fairly dramatic fashion, which can be edited nicely into an hour-long episode, and only about half the time does someone end up in the hospital.”

  Ardelia did not find this funny, so Rosemary rephrased apologetically. “What I meant is, usually figuring out the problem is the hard part. Solving it, not so bad. Plus, just because we leave town doesn’t mean we’ll be forgetting you – I have plenty of resources that can be brought into play.” But Ardelia still looked desolate - Good Lord, Rosemary had thought the woman was mostly disgusted by them all. Now it was as if her own children were threatening to leave home. So Rosemary amended once more, “And, if we’re ready to leave tomorrow and you’re still worried, then you can come with us.”

  Ardelia’s brows lifted in utter surprise, but before the woman could speak, Rosemary’s phone trilled from her jeans pocket and she slipped it out. “Looks like everyone’s up with the storm. This is Greg, probably checking in.”

  She pressed the phone’s receiver as she left the table to talk in Ardelia’s living room. The first thing that happened was another crack of thunder which drowned out her answer.

  Greg laughed. “Is it loud enough up there for you?”

  “I think the mountain’s coming down.” She was nearly shouting so Greg could hear her.

  “It can’t be that bad.”

  “I think that you can be electrocuted on a cell phone during a bad storm,” she said.

  “That’s an urban legend. What are you doing?”

  “Sitting in the dark. Does your motel have power?”

  “The power went off last night but the motel has a generator. I think the manager is a survivalist who is disaster-prepared. He’s making breakfast for us, some of the thickest bacon I’ve ever seen. Judge may convert back to carnivore, it smells so good. How about you?”

  “I have some cheesy crackers in my backpack,” said Rosemary sourly.

  “We’re all fine,” Greg said in answer to a question she’d neglected in her breakfast-envy. “Judge looks better today; Vladimir was up and playing kill-the-socks for a while last night.”

  Rosemary smiled at the thought. “I really am glad. The socks were threatening to take over, without Vladimir’s diligence keeping them in check.”

  “I’m sending you a document,” said Greg. “Sally’s list of questions for the sheriff. I think they’re pretty good, but if you want to add something, she and Judge aren’t supposed to see the sheriff until 9:00. You’ve got loads of time.”

  “I want copies of all the documents,” Rosemary suggested. “The arrest report on Willie Baker, the interview notes – whatever they’ll let us have. I’d like to have copies of the filings from the courthouse – where is the courthouse?”

  “Not in Gully, that’s for damn sure. Look, we can get that stuff online.”

  “No, we want footage of people telling us that we can’t have things! Court clerks can be so fun when they’re disagreeable.”

  “Well there’s no courthouse here, but I could ask Sally to try and get her driver’s license renewed down at the DMV branch; that’s always a surefire argument.”

  Rosemary thought of something else. “Oh, and I want any information they can give us on Cloda’s branch of the Baker family. Who would have that?”

  “Just how much do you expect them to get done? Ask Cloda about her family tree.”

  “All right, not to be rude, but Cloda is 94 years old and she can’t keep straight whether Ardelia is her sister or her daughter. I’d rather have something solid.” An explosion of thunder hit just then, and the phone line crackled violently between them. Rosemary jumped. “Look, I don’t think it is an urban legend, about the phone thing. Let’s not stay on the line. Just keep in touch and let me know if you learn anything interesting. When you all divide up, make sure both groups have someone with a good camera in charge of filming.”

  “Oh duh, thanks, I’ve never directed a show before. You are super-bossy when you haven’t slept enough. But I still love you.”

  “Oh shut up. Text me when you’re on the way.”

  “Gosh, there is just so much bacon here, I don’t—”

  Rosemary hung up on Greg. Her stomach was rumbling for its breakfast, awakened by the sugar and cream in her coffee drink. She went back to the kitchen to mention breakfast, but once there, was surprised to find Ardelia in tears, her face buried in her hands, and Andrew trying in vain to comfort her. He knelt at her side, his face soft with concern. He looked at Rosemary a bit reproachfully. “She could hear what you were saying on the phone, Romy.”

  She had been speaking loudly, to make herself heard over the storm. She was still half-asleep and lame-brained, so hadn’t been careful about her word choices. But now she couldn’t recall exactly what she’d said, and didn’t know how to begin apologizing. Ardelia sobbed as if no apology would ever suffice.

  “She just kind of broke down while you were talking about the family tree,” Andrew raised a bewildered eyebrow to her.

  Rosemary cringed. She tried to explain her bad behavior to Ardelia. “I get carried away when I talk about the show. Tell me what’s wrong and I’ll fix it.”

  Ardelia scrubbed at her face, shrugging off Andrew’s attempts to soothe her. “Oh leave me be. The world is coming down around our ears. I got tears enough to drown us, so let me be.”

  Rosemary’s fair experience with the elderly had formed within her a general stereotype that they were more nervous about abstract things, convinced that doom was just around the corner. But just as Rosemary prepared to assure Ardelia that there was really nothing to worry about, nature decided to prove her wrong. From outside, there came an alarming sound. Something out there – a tree maybe, a house most likely, had just collapsed.

  She exchanged a quick wide-eyed glance with Andrew and then ran for the front door, onto the porch for the second time that morning. Visibility was markedly bad, but she could see that the third house down Slope’s pathetic row of structures had simply slid over on itself, spilling into the cluttered yard like so much more trash. Only a broken frame remained standing, poking a few boney wooden fingers into the sky.

  “Oh my god, there were people in there!” Rosemary cried as she rushed into the rain.

  Both Rosemary and Andrew were drenched the moment they were under the roiling sky, their boots sinking up to the ankles in loose mud. It made running to the shack a breathless chore.

  “I’ve got them,” Andrew said as he clomped along, “They were eating in the kitchen – they’re under some rubble but they’re okay – most of the house slid away from them.”

  He was right; when they reached the house they saw three filthy wet bodies removing themselves from under a tipped kitchen wall, so thin and crumbled with decay that it was little trouble for them to lift it. None of the three seemed worried in the least that their house had just fallen on them. They disengaged themselves from the rubble. One of them, a woman who might have been in her mid-thirties, accepted Andrew’s hand as she climbed off the rubble; the two men
came behind her, picking their way through the trash heap.

  One of the men was almost as tall as Andrew. He spoke to his companions, “We’ll just wait here until time for work.”

  “You can’t just stand here in the rain,” Rosemary exclaimed. “My god, your house just fell down.” She had hesitated to call it a house, but “shack” would have been rude. “Are you all right? No, look at that scratch.”

  The shorter man had sustained a nasty scratch on his arm, a good six inches long, probably from a nail head. He blinked down at it absently. Blood oozed up from it and then washed away in the rain at once. Indeed, the rain was so fierce that it had quickly cleaned them of all dust and rubble; they were cleaner now than they had last night.

  “Come out of the rain,” Andrew said to them all, motioning to Ardelia’s porch.

  “We have to go to work soon. We work at the rocking chair factory.”

  Andrew stood nonplussed, water sluicing over him, darkened hair hanging in his face as he listened to the psychic messages that the world fed him. Suddenly he looked around at the other shacks, which were still standing but only just. “Where are the others? Romy, where is everybody? I mean, I realize they’re all in their houses. I can feel them there. They’re eating out of cans again and nobody is talking. Nobody came out to look but us. What the hell is wrong with these people?”

  She could see his mind ticking madly at the problem, his sneak free to explore out here in the open. Slowly he turned and focused on Ardelia’s house as if he had not seen it before. “She didn’t come outside either,” he remarked to himself. An idea came to him, lighting up his eyes with understanding and fear. “Shit. Rosemary.”

  “You all,” Rosemary was saying over the storm to her inattentive audience. “It’s not safe out here. At least come wait under the porch.” They would not come. Rosemary sighed and then commanded the now-homeless trio, “Go wait in the post office. It’s sturdy and dry. Go!” A telepathic push, and the three moseyed off toward the miniature brick building as they were told.

  She turned back to Andrew to find out what was upsetting him so much, and found him muttering at the sky. One question he asked was, “When did this start?” and then he answered, “It started the day we came, didn’t it? It’s meant to keep us off the mountaintop, isn’t it, Delia? Romy, she doesn’t even know.”

  “Hey, handsome, want to let me in on your brainstorm?” asked Rosemary, shielding her eyes from the deluge. “From this end of things, it sounds like you’re saying that Ardelia is causing this storm.”

  “Oh yeah. She’s tearing this place out from under herself.”

  “People can’t cause storms. Can they?” A thrill of discovery went through her. Had they stumbled upon an honest-to-God rainmaker?

  Drew listed off some fairly convincing reasons to think so. “Sally knew it was unnatural storm. Have you noticed it gets worse when Ardelia is upset? How it seems timed with her words and actions? But it’s big, unfocused magic. I don’t think she knows she’s doing it. Ardelia is in denial about a lot of things.”

  “Well, let’s go ask her.”

  “She might collapse her house on us,” he warned. “Our questions are making things worse. This storm is supposed to be discouraging us, Romy. We were supposed to give up and go home, and leave her and her crazy family alone with their nasty secrets.”

  “It’s not the witchcraft, is it?” Rosemary asked. Ardelia’s thoughts might have been hidden from them by a protection spell; still, there was something to be said for good old-fashioned conversational intuition. “It’s because of the rape and the incest. Which I assume her brother and sister forced her to participate in. Yes, I caught that too. Ardelia says quite a bit by not saying anything.”

  Andrew, soaking wet and determined, nodded and offered his hand. “Come on, then. Let’s see what we can do to stop her from causing a natural disaster.”

  But when they returned to the house, they found it empty. Ardelia Baker, her galoshes and her raincoat were gone from the pegs in the kitchen. They checked outside, wondering if she’d gone to tend her chickens again, and saw deep footprints in the mud, even now filling with water as they led away from the house. The freshest set led beyond the chicken coop and into the forest, in a direction that would lead her uphill and, they assumed, eventually to Cloda’s house.

  *****

  From the center of Gully, steep hillsides stretched up into the sky, so that the town appeared to be in the bottom of a bowl lined with thousands of trees. As Stefan drove them toward their various appointments, Sally peered up the side of Eyeteeth Mountain, which was all steep tree-covered hillside until it reached the point of the sheer rock wall that made its presence known in all the travel brochures. The rock wall vanished into clouds, not because of its great altitude, but because the storm clouds hung so close to the ground. Here in Gully, the sun shone intermittently through the cloudy sky, and the ground was wet but not saturated.

  “Look there,” said Greg. He gestured to a stream that rushed through Gully, crossed by a concrete bridge. The water was high and violent with runoff from the mountain. The stream’s level had risen to just under bridge itself and was sloshing in wild splashes up onto the banks. Many townspeople were taking advantage of this unusual amount of water by fishing it; they stood in long rows beside the angry stream with outstretched fishing rods, hats perched on their heads, buckets at their feet. Stefan pulled the Mercedes to a stop beside one group.

  “Hey there!” Stefan called out to them, putting a faint twang in his voice.

  “Heya, there,” replied the de facto leader of the group, tallest and most important, a man of clear social standing and self-respect shown in the relative newness of his fishing gear, his disciplined ability to avoid paunchiness in late middle age. He handed his pole to a companion without even asking, and crossed a patch of grass to see Stefan up close. “You folks on vacation?”

  “We’re visiting up at Eyeteeth Mountain. You like the water we’re sending down to you?”

  “I never seen this much rain coming down off Eyeteeth.”

  “The storm been through here?”

  “It ain’t so much, though it’s rained hard enough off and on. But we can hear that thunder from down here. Of a night, we see the lightning at the top. It’s the damnedest thing.”

  “Fishin’ good?”

  “Fair to middlin’ which is to say a damn site better’n usual. Catchin’ as many frogs and terrapins as fish.” The man had taken notice of Sally sitting patiently in the back seat. He seemed perplexed that she was wrapped like a mummy. Perhaps he felt it was politest to say nothing.

  “Say we was wonderin’,” continued Stefan, who was picking up the dialect with amazing alacrity, “has any of you all been up to Slope of late? Got family up there?”

  “Mostly the folks in Slope come down here,” replied their new friend. “Why’d you ask?”

  “We’re a little worried about them up there, with the storm and all. Seems like their houses are taking a lot of damage.”

  “Lemme ask around here.” The man turned to his numerous companions and repeated Stefan’s question. There was some debate amongst the fishermen and finally they returned with a verdict: none of them could recall the last time they’d seen anyone from Slope in town. But, said the addendum to this mysterious fact, could be that none of the fishers were “particular close” to any of Slope’s folks.

  “You’uns don’t know the Bakers, then? That is, Miss Cloda and Ardelia and Elton?”

  Their new friend’s expression closed up. “Ah, yup, I think we all know’em about as well as we care to. I don’t truck with gossip, myself.”

  “Well, much obliged to you. Good luck with the fish!” Stefan reached out and shook the man’s hand firmly, then pulled the truck away from the curb.

  Kaye asked, “Is it weird that I thought that was incredibly sexy? Well, never mind. Did you see how his manner changed when you mentioned the Bakers?”

  Stefan grunted. “
I would have been blind not to see it.”

  Greg was quite happy. “Town scandals are so cool! I can’t wait to see what you all dig up from the sheriff.”

  Less than a minute later, Stefan pulled into a diagonal parking space as close as he could get to the front of the squat Town Hall, sitting properly in the middle of a quaint, faded town square. Tourism was a factor here too but not a strong one. Sally could see a t-shirt stand and gift shop on one side of the road, a diner she’d seen advertised on billboards, and the town’s attempts to keep the square neat and friendly. That was the limit of it; otherwise it was four one-sided streets facing the Town Hall, a square of local businesses like an insurance agent, a building contractor, a dental office, open only two days a week. There were few people to be seen here. Far more had been down by the stream, capitalizing on the violent rush of water from Eyeteeth Mountain and whatever fish it was bringing down with it. Of the thirty-odd people Sally had seen, she and Judge were easily the youngest. Young adults probably would not stay here; they needed jobs and wanted more of those options. They would leave to have their families and, should they ever return, they would be old and retired, like everyone else here.

  Standard practice for moving from a car to a building: Sally checked the terrain for the fastest way inside, making as certain as possible that she was heading for a door that would open easily. It was a habit her own mother had instilled into her, and the price Sally had willingly paid to be allowed to go out during the daytime, to attend a normal school, to be as much like a daylight person as she could feasibly be. If excessive caution meant she would not have to be locked away from the world, she would cooperate. Almost without conscious effort, she saw how to make her way into the courthouse in the fewest steps.

  Judge knew her system. He waited until she planned her route, gathered her things, and nodded at him. He said, “See you later, kids. Keep in touch. Don’t have too much fun at the rocking chair factory.” Then he took Vladimir’s travel-crate by the handle, and he and Sally leapt from the car and rushed, giggling, toward the courthouse door.