Witches

by Christina Harlin

  Stefan toed at the papers on the floor, examining them, murmuring back and forth with Brentley. He went to the edge of the bulletin board and gave it a gentle tug, seeing that the board was only loosely fastened to the wall.

  “Elton, what are the twigs for?” Kaye pointed deliberately at the board. “What do these do? Elton, look at me. Your Nana Cloda says you know magic. So tell us what this does.”

  But Elton was beyond them, perplexed by their questions and eager to get back to work. Longingly he gazed at the factory floor. As if starving for it, he inhaled the scent of the sawdust.

  Stefan’s experimenting with the board made it come loose from the wall and for a moment, clumsily, he tried to balance the large board by himself.

  “Oh, don’t do that,” said Elton. “It’s not supposed to come off.”

  But coming off, it was. Kaye leapt forward to catch the other side of the big cork-board display and they lowered it gently, propping it against the wall and then staring up at what had been left behind. On the plank wall was an astonishing mess that appeared like nothing so much as a crime scene for a murdered tree. There were slivers and splinters embedded in something that looked an awful lot like dried blood, along with a few other ingredients that were luckily unidentifiable.

  Kaye was baffled by its senseless messiness - most of Cloda’s stick-spells had been imbued with a neat kind of logic but this looked more like an accident than anything purposefully created. An idea occurred to her and she inspected the back side of the bulletin board - yes, she was right. Apparently about half of the ‘work of art’ had been torn away, sticking to the bulletin board. Stefan nodded as he saw what she had found, his face growing grim with concern.

  “Oh shit. This seems to be the source of something big - I think we’ve found the—” with a gasp of pain, Stefan clapped his hand to the side of his head. “Ouch! Brentley, Jesus!”

  “What’s wrong?” Kaye asked, reaching for him.

  “I don’t know what the hell he’s yelling about,” Stefan cried, gripping his head in dismay. “He’s shouting landshark, landshark.”

  Greg’s expression turned thoughtful, then concerned. “Hey guys, wasn’t that the safety word?”

  It had been, apparently. A commotion burst out and Kaye whirled to see twelve people armed with wood-working tools and long clubs of wood suddenly turning on each other, either lunging into an attack against their neighbors or, somehow more horrifically, against themselves. She saw the first spurt of blood fly through the air and her instincts charged to life with utter terror - some long-practiced nurse’s voice in her head commenting, this is going to be so bad. Next to them, Elton raised his head and wailed, then his fist rocketed through the air and knocked the camera out of Greg’s hands before he tackled their director and crushed him to the floor.

  *****

  Rosemary had no training as a witch. However, she was fairly certain she had hexed herself and Andrew when she said, “The two of us can catch up with one old woman, easily.”

  She couldn’t blame herself for thinking positively; once under the trees, the muck and mess made by the constant storm was seriously diminished. It was far easier to walk with the bed of roots and plants that held the ground together than it had been to walk on the loose mud of trampled yards, and the great canopy of trees actually kept the rainfall off them about as well as Ardelia’s porch ever had. Rosemary felt that two young, fit people should have little trouble overtaking a frail old woman.

  Except that they could not catch up to her and, what’s more, there were some extremely difficult passages that Ardelia must have known a secret way around. More than once they had to climb steep grades, pulling themselves up by grabbing branches and roots, and after a half hour, they were both filthy with mud and forest debris. Said debris was growing thicker and thornier as they moved along. Every few minutes they would stop to catch their breath and call for Ardelia through the noisy storm, but the woman would not answer them or simply never heard them.

  Rosemary had a camera, and though filming while climbing was nearly impossible, she did what she could. This would be fine for the show, exciting, maybe funny, and maybe heroic, if they managed to keep Ardelia from breaking a leg. No – better yet – she had already broken a leg and they could rescue her, put her in a fireman’s sling and transport her back down to Slope. Damn it, who would hold the camera if she and Andrew were carrying an old woman?

  “Sonofabitch,” said Andrew suddenly, hands on his hips, looking around himself with a highly unusual expression of disorientation. “I think I’m leading us in a circle.”

  “You can’t be. We’ve been going uphill this whole time.” Glad for a chance to rest, Rosemary tucked the camera back into her pocket and pulled out her phone, hunching over it to shield it from the rain. Her muddy fingers got the screen filthy and it was almost impossible to summon up the GPS to track their progress. After much swearing and adjustment she finally got it to tell her that they were a fair distance from Slope and no damned closer to Cloda’s house.

  She showed the phone to Andrew.

  He pointed this way and that, establishing something in his own mind and doing an unintentional and adorable impression of the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz. “I thought I was following a trail. It’s this storm. The rainwater is a psychic buffer and the thunder keeps breaking my concentration.”

  “Didn’t Ardelia say something about protection spells? Like, Cloda doesn’t want people just walking up the mountain any old time. I’m feeling around too and there’s all kinds of interference. If we’re turned around, it’s not your fault.”

  Andrew smiled apologetically and then seemed to realize for the first time in a while what she actually looked like, which made his smile turn rueful.

  Rosemary fluttered her eyelashes. “I know, I look gorgeous.”

  “Oh I’m sure we’re both ready for the red carpet. You poor thing. Are you cold?”

  “Cold? Climbing this mountain? I’m sweating.”

  “Yeah, it’s kind of a bitch, isn’t it? Did Ardelia say she climbed this mountain every week?”

  “Well she lives here. She’s had practice.”

  “Yes, that’s what I’ll tell myself when I remember that at 33 I couldn’t out-climb a septuagenarian in a thunderstorm. I thought we were coming out here to rescue the woman from some harm but I think we’re in worse shape, all things considered. We’re lucky we haven’t broken our necks.”

  “Should we go back?”

  “No. I’m worried. My sneak is all frigged up and injured from this storm and the lightning and all the pins and nails pricking at it. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t still working and I’ve got this terrible feeling.”

  Rosemary exhaled. She was tired, sweaty, and her calves were sore from the climb. But she wasn’t going to complain, not to Andy, not when he was this concerned. Instead she nodded to her phone’s screen. “If I’m reading this map right, we’re about halfway between Cloda’s place and Slope. So, you know, if you ignore the fact that the way to Cloda’s is almost all uphill, there’s no noticeable difference in the trips. We might as well go on to Cloda’s.”

  “Assuming that’s where Ardelia is headed. I honestly can’t tell.”

  “Where the hell else would she go up here? Let’s climb.”

  Andrew smiled at her, the devastating charm of that expression shining through the smears of mud on his face. He’d somehow brushed mud into his hair and one shank of his corn silk waves stuck up at a crazy angle, dirty and defiant. It made her laugh – oh, if she was only half as much a mess, the viewers were going to love this.

  She must have been beaming at him in return, sharing her oddball happiness, and then something went wrong with the moment. The sweetness on his face melted quickly into fear. At first Rosemary thought it was a trick of the rain on his face - no, this was real fear. She followed his stare, turning herself around, and saw something about twenty yards up the hill. Her brain could not quite process it. She thought: Bu
ll? Ox? Enormous mutant dog? The thing had moved up on them in silence. Silence like this implied that it had been hunting.

  “Don’t run,” Andrew said.

  “Yeah, no, right,” she said, agreeing in a soft flurry of nonsense. “What is that thing?”

  “It’s a wild boar,” whispered Andrew.

  It couldn’t be. Rosemary had seen wild boars on television and they weren’t this big. The beast was massive, matted, its very breath seemed to make the air tremble. Its haunch was as high as her own shoulder and its ponderously thick tusks jutted before it wide as the bumper of the Mercedes that had carried them up this mountain the day before. She could not see its face in detail for her own fear of looking; she had an impression of a demonic mask from an ancient superstitious.

  A clap of thunder shook the world around them and the beast hunkered, glowering, but did not move from its spot.

  “I believe we are looking at the infamous Razorback,” said Andrew. How Rosemary wished that were good news. A real mountain monster, and they had the misfortune of being both vulnerable and edible. She scrabbled for the camera and wrangled it out of her pocket.

  “Let’s just back away slowly,” Andrew whispered to her. “You go first, and get behind me.”

  “Andy, no.”

  “Don’t argue, I’m bigger than you, I’ll scare it more.”

  She tore her eyes from the massive boar just long enough to look into Andrew’s face, where she saw that he knew very well that his size was an afterthought to such a monster. He was putting himself between her and that thing to protect her, and by some instinct she understood that she must let him.

  “It’ll just take longer to eat me,” he explained wryly, “and you’ll have time to escape.”

  “That’s not funny, you asshole.”

  But the boar, glowering as it was, had not moved toward them. It only watched, hot foggy breath puffing from its snout. Maybe Andrew was right, maybe if they just backed quietly away it would do nothing. Maybe they had wandered into its territory – she did not know if boars had territories – or maybe they had startled it from sleeping in its cave. She didn’t know if boars slept in caves.

  She stepped back, one two three, until Andrew’s body blocked her view. Once she was sufficiently behind him he began to follow, keeping his face to the monster, treading carefully back. Andrew was counting on her to watch their footing; he would watch Razorback. Rosemary looked wildly around and spied a heavy branch on the forest floor – well, she almost tripped on it, and she dared to swoop down and pick it up with her free hand. It was heavy and wet, almost too thick for her hand to go around. She poked at Andrew with it. “Here, take this,” she whispered.

  They made some progress, backing away one step at a time, Andrew crooning reassuring nonsense to the boar, (“Nice monster pig,” he told it faintly, “there’s a nice, nice monster pig,) and Rosemary checking behind them to ensure they weren’t about to step off a cliff. Looking down, the mountain appeared far steeper than it had looking up. But this worked, this was working; the boar began to even look a little bored with it. What fun was a quarry that wouldn’t run? It might momentarily shuffle off on its way.

  Yes. That was good. The boar was not interested in them. Rosemary lifted the camera, took aim and began filming. A real mountain monster, all theirs! Gods but she wished she had something in the foreground for scale. Nobody would believe the size of this mother—

  Then it was like the dominos had been tipped, one disaster leading to the next. Focused on aiming the camera, she tripped backwards on a log. As she sank and fell, she instinctively grabbed at Andrew’s wet jacket; he grabbed back trying to catch her. He could get no better purchase in the unstable mud. The log had been serving as a sort of breaker over a drop of about six feet to the wet earth below. Suddenly, with a scream, Rosemary was dropping backwards into space with Andrew falling over her. She didn’t register the falling so much as the landing, which knocked the wind out of her lungs. The ground was soft enough to cushion her bones but her teeth clacked together so hard that her ears rang from it. Then that same soft ground gave way underneath her momentum and she kept falling in a graceless roll. Her hands grasped, her feet kicked. She found no purchase in the slick mud and its layer of moss. A rock dug into her shoulder hard, but she was too breathless to shriek with the pain.

  Then WHAP like a bowling ball she was hurled into the massive trunk of a tree, luckily catching it with her legs and arms first rather than her head. She felt skin being scraped away from her arms; the sensation was like being burned. Still her ears rang with noise and in an awful moment she understood that it was the roaring of the boar she heard, as it thundered toward them, incited by their shouts and fall. The beast had a slight advantage on the slick ground – four hooves rather than two feet – and its prey had just done something wildly entertaining. Rosemary’s lungs finally unlocked and she screamed Andrew’s name.

  “Over here!”

  He had caught himself, rather than having a tree stop his fall as had been her luck, but he was on his knees still sliding in the mud, gripping the branch she’d handed him. He used it to find purchase. There was blood on the side of his face. This jarred her worse than colliding with the tree. She opened her mouth to ask a hundred questions. There was no time for that. The boar, its eyes wild with excitement, came bounding down, launching itself off the slope. It landed as if it was half mountain-goat, effortlessly, the wet ground shuddering beneath it. It hurtled toward Andrew, who stared at this impending doom as if he did not quite believe this was happening to him.

  Rosemary could hear his thoughts as if she were psychic herself: But I own a used bookstore. People who buy and sell used books aren’t killed by wild boar!

  Then he wound his arms back like an all-star batter and swung the heavy branch at the boar, catching it upside its massive head as it was almost on top of him. The branch splintered across one tusk, and the boar stumbled, tripping and sliding in the mud headfirst. A spray of blood arced out from where its skin had split. Razorback shook its head, grunting, and Andrew backed away the best he could, holding his thick broken branch out before him. Razorback kicked its hind legs with a snort. It was the strangest thing but the beast seemed to be considering options here. It had been hurt only slightly, it’s tusk taking the brunt of the blow, and being attacked had made it angry, but then again, the big blond human still had a weapon whereas the smaller magenta-haired human was helpless, stunned even, on the ground.

  “No!” Andrew shouted at it. “Over here!” He waved the stick in the air, trying to keep the boar’s attention on him. Contrary to what he’d said before, he yelled, “Romy, run!”

  She had an awful memory of a night in Colorado when she and her friends had been surrounded by hungry preta zombies. It had seemed ridiculous, the thought of dying that way. The very idea that she could get her whole team killed, eaten alive by people under a spell – well, she had simply refused to believe they could all go out that way. But there had been eight of them together that night, Irving the massive groundskeeper lending a hand, and nine if they counted Vladimir, who had done his share of fighting. This was just her and Andy, and an impossibly large monster. Her brain, traitorous thing that it was, chided her, this is all your fault - you just had to get it on film, didn’t you?

  The boar focused again on Andrew. Rosemary thought its grunts had begun to sound like chuckling.

  With telepathy, simple was better; the simpler she could keep things, the more likely shit would get done. She wasted no energy on using her voice. She shouted with her mind. Her mind was powerfully loud. Rosemary imagined herself in a stadium like the ones in which her Poppop had played with his band, with a microphone in front of her projecting her voice loudly enough to be heard beyond the highest seats, the nosebleed seats, all the way up to airplanes that might be flying above. Was anyone else on the mountain? Was there possibly anyone, anywhere nearby, much less anyone who might be able to do something about a monster pig? Like Judg
e, her thoughts mocked, the one who can reason with animals. She sent out a message into the universe: HELP, it boomed, to anything that might be listening. HELP HELP HELP.

  Razorback heard the noise though it hardly understood the sentiment. For a predator, a cry for help just means that the prey is nice and weak, ripe for the picking. Andrew heard it certainly. He cringed and cried out, then laughed like a maniac and took another great swing at the boar. Razorback snapped his jaws at the stick and rutted at the ground, preparing to charge. Andrew was making it furious. He stood his ground there, her bookstore owner, with a splintered club in his hand and his face void of color save red blood and black mud. He took one step back and then turned to run, it seemed, to lead the boar away from her. It charged and knocked him flat to the ground, a blow that might have broken his back if not for the mud, which made the boar clumsy; it slid into Andrew more than plowed into him. Nevertheless he was down underneath the hideous thing and she heard Andrew cry out in pain. Rosemary went cold with terror.

  “Get off him!” Rosemary shrieked, scrambling to her feet somehow and then landing WHUMP on her side as the ground gave out from under her again. The jolt disoriented her and she couldn’t find her way up. She heard crazy noises; and at first she thought it was Andrew dying, a dozen wails of pain at once as he was crushed beneath the boar. But then she realized, no, the sounds she heard were other animals. A lot of them. As time around Rosemary slowed and her thoughts raced through ideas borne out of adrenaline and terror, she wondered if she was only imagining what she saw.

  Razorback, too, raised its head in alert curiosity, one derisive snort blasting from its snout.

  Then over the bridge of the mountain Rosemary saw the astonishing appearance of eight – no, ten, wild dogs, in their own way as massively built as the boar, the hellhounds of Slope, mixed from twenty different breeds of hunting dogs. They bounded down on the boar, howling and barking savagely, fearless in their pack and their stupidity. The great mountain monster lowered its head and bellowed.