Witches

by Christina Harlin

  He glowered at her, the first sign that he was regaining his wits. “Why are you talking to me like I’m a child?”

  “There you are!” Thrilled with his irritation, she hugged him, careful of the bite on his arm. Having accomplished this much, she thrust all the self-confident heroism she could muster into him: he was her elegant intelligent shining-armor knight, who had put himself between her and a boar the size of a minivan, and had protected her from it. She thought, this is how much I love you. Out loud, though, she simply requested, “Please come all the way back? I promise later on you can collapse, but right now I need you up and moving.”

  He did as she asked, coming to his feet, looking positively lively despite a great smear of blood down the side of his head and neck. She promised herself that the rain was making that look worse than it really was. Perplexed, amused, he declared, “All right, I’m up. I feel like I could chop down trees with my bare hands!”

  “Can we first wrap your arm?” she asked. He removed his badly torn jacket and let her wind the scarf around the deep bite. The rows of teeth marks in his flesh made Rosemary light-headed.

  Andrew considered simply throwing the jacket aside but then put it back on. “It might be a bragging point,” he decided. “Not many people have boar-bitten jackets.”

  “I have a new plan,” said Rosemary. “We go back to Slope and wait for our friends. We’re both hurt and I’d be a lot happier moving downhill instead of uphill.”

  He glanced uncertainly around. “What about Ardelia?”

  “I want to help her, really I do. But how much use are we going to be? We’re lost. And you’re bleeding. And I’m bruised from head to toe.”

  “I feel remarkably well.” In one hand he still carried his improvised club, perhaps thinking there might yet be a need for it. He swiped his free hand against his head and it came away bloody. His eyes widened. “How bad is it?”

  She tried to look upbeat. “It’s a gash just at your hairline. It could use a few stitches I bet, but it won’t spoil your looks.”

  “I was more concerned about my brains.” Andrew glanced back at her. “Why do I feel so well, and you look like you’re about to drop?”

  “I’m not as strong as you.”

  “And this doesn’t even hurt.” He inspected the badly torn arm of his jacket and the bloodied impromptu bandage beneath with interest rather than horror. “As a renowned psychic, I predict a series of rabies shots in my future. Romy, did you get into my head and turn me into a Mountain Man?”

  No point in obfuscating. “Yes. I thought you were going to die from shock. Can you be mad at me later?”

  “Mad at you? For rescuing us? You must think I’m such an asshole.”

  “Never – but sometimes, you can do a fairly good impression of one.”

  “I think your mental pep-talk has made me kind of stupid. I feel a little drunk.”

  Rosemary winced. “That might be blood loss.”

  Andrew gripped what remained of his wooden club which, despite being splintered on one end, still had enough heft to do damage if anything jumped at them. “Back to Slope, then.” He set off, and Rosemary stumbled behind. For a few minutes he walked fast, graceful and full of confidence as he descended the mountain. His energized pace was difficult for her to match. She had no way to give herself a mental pep-talk and her body was informing her of just how hard she’d fallen. But she did not want to complain in front of him. She didn’t want to sound spoiled and pampered. Besides, this mess was all her fault.

  It wasn’t until he slowed, looking around, that Rosemary became aware of a problem. Andrew said, “It occurs to me, that I’m uncertain about how to get back to Slope. The rain is really messing up my sneak. This forest is full of spell craft and I may have a head injury, and I can’t find anything.”

  His somewhat loopy, nevertheless optimistic expression undid her self-control. Rosemary sobbed and buried her face into the arm of her sleeve.

  “Are you crying?” He hurried to her side, his touch gentle at her shoulder. Romy yelped in pain. “Oh my god, you poor little . . . why didn’t you tell me you were hurting so much?”

  “It’s all my fault!” she wailed into her sleeve. “I just had to get the stupid pig on film. I was filming him and that’s when I tripped and almost got us killed!” She showed him the camera, which had survived the fall in pristine condition. It hardly even looked dirty. “Look at this! My phone was smashed to bits, but this stupid camera is fine and your arm is bitten in half and I almost got us killed!”

  Rain pattered down on them while she wept into the crook of her elbow. She didn’t want Andrew to see her crying, so this was the best she could do. She hoped that any moment now, she’d feel his arms around her so she could bury her face against him; this would mean that he forgave her for filming the giant boar. His arms did not come, though, and she began to worry that he was truly angry. She dared to peek up, sniffing.

  Once again, Andrew’s attention had been ensnared by something beyond them. The sense of deja vu was so terrifying that Rosemary turned hard enough to nearly spin herself into a fall.

  It was not Razorback, though. No, this time, it was a smaller creature, dark and horned and matted. Here stood the Reverend: Cloda Baker’s black billy-goat. He was about twenty yards uphill from them, visible between two mighty trees. What in the hell was the Reverend doing out here?

  “Maybe we’re closer to Cloda’s than we thought,” said Andrew.

  “Maybe he came in response to my call for help,” Rosemary suggested.

  The Reverend baahed at them petulantly, tossing his dreadlocked head. He tromped at the ground, turned to walk away. When he turned back to see if they were following, their jaws dropped simultaneously.

  “That goat wants us to go with him?” Rosemary said, putting her hands over her eyes. “Are you seeing this too?”

  Andrew was still giddy from the heavy dose of exuberance Rosemary had fed to him, and he said, “Yes, I think so! We’d better follow him. Literarily speaking, he’s probably trying to lead us to a child who has fallen down a well.”

  Rosemary wiped at her face, tears and rain. “I want to save the kid in the well. I just don’t know if I can.”

  “I’ve got you, sweetheart.” Andrew knelt before her, motioning to his back. “All aboard.”

  She gratefully climbed on, wrapping her legs around his waist and arms around his neck. She hadn’t been on a piggy-back ride since she was a teenager, some silly poolside party for a friend’s birthday. Why did she even remember that?

  “So this is what it’s like to be seven feet tall,” she said in amazement, gazing at the forest floor so far below her.

  “Lead the way, Reverend,” Andrew said to the tangled block of fur that was the black goat. The animal huffed and baahed again, sounding half disdainful, then led them a rather short distance where a mess of forest-floor shrubbery rustled and bustled. It was not the shrubbery itself that was alive, they saw, but the little herd of goats that were sheltering inside. The Reverend instructed his flock to keep quiet and still, in goat terminology that Judge would certainly have understood.

  “What are they hiding from?” Rosemary wondered.

  “I don’t think Ardelia was going to Cloda’s house for a friendly visit,” replied Andrew.

  “Ha, maybe the Reverend there is offering us a hiding spot.”

  No. Momentarily, his flock quieted, the Reverend took a few surprisingly delicate steps and seemed to indicate, with a bow of his head, a break in the thorny thicket.

  “A path,” said Andrew softly. “No. The path. Romy, can you feel this?”

  She could feel it. Now that it had been pointed out to them by a suspiciously well-informed goat, the path lit up like a long neon rope in her telepathic web, singling itself out from the huge wild tangle of trees and old magic spells that had kept her lost.

  The path didn’t look like much to the naked eye, until Andrew stepped onto it. Almost at once the sounds of the thunder
storm dimmed. Looking down, Andrew said, “The ground is dry.”

  Everything was dry. They stared around in wonder. The rain-drenched forest only inches beyond them on every side faded just as the sound had. The path before them sloped gently upwards, dry and smooth, lit from some inner ambient glow. A faint smell of lilacs permeated the air. Huge butterflies danced by - hand-sized, golden-brown things, their wings not quite of the ordinary patterns.

  “Should we follow it?” Rosemary asked. This reminded her eerily of descriptions she’d heard back at the Perkins Institute for Paranormal Studies: descriptions of the Beside, a dimension that lurked just alongside their own, where everything they thought of as othernatural gained its footing, and grew in power.

  Andrew was already walking. His reasoning was sound, considering his frame of mind. “I think we should do what the Reverend says.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Othernaturals Season 6, Episode 5

  Eyeteeth Mountain, Missouri; June 2015

  Sally had to get out of the sun, so as soon as she had given Kaye and the doctor all the equipment she could find, she hurried through the factory’s front door. It took her a couple minutes to comprehend the chaos.

  Greg, Stefan, Judge and Sheriff Lila had developed a system: in pairs, they tackled the person who was doing the most harm to him or herself, disarmed them, sat on them while someone else tied their hands behind their backs, and then dragged the poor soul outside to Kaye’s triage. With every person they removed from the factory, the din decreased, but trying to stop more than ten adults from sloppily killing themselves was no easy task. Almost anything within hand’s reach could be used as a weapon.

  “Film!” Greg shouted at her.

  Sally did at once. Her hands were shaking only a little.

  Greg worked with Sheriff Lila and explained as best he could while they grappled with a small woman who was trying hard to cut herself with a box knife. “We’re lucky they’re stupid with this spell they’re under. Otherwise they’d all be dead. Look at this - she couldn’t figure out how to get the blade out, or she’d be sliced to ribbons.” To the woman he said, “There there, Babygirl, let us help you out.”

  But the woman screamed and wailed as they took away her useless blade, and wailed louder when they wouldn’t let her claw out her eyes.

  “The two people we need aren’t here,” Stefan told Sally, gritting his teeth as he held down a man while Judge slipped a zip-tie around the poor guy’s wrists. He had done this five or six times already, and was getting quick with the maneuver. The patient subdued, Stefan finished, “Fletcher could tell us what the hell was causing it and Rosemary could stop them from doing it, but oh no, they had to stay in Slope.”

  “Can’t Brentley do something?” Judge had the nerve to ask.

  “Brentley,” said an impatient Stefan, “is doing what he can, but he’s a ghost, not a psychic. If there were another ghost here, then – we don’t have time for this. Help me with—” and they were off to the next victim, a man who was trying clumsily to close a vice on his own head.

  Sally filmed the insanity of the factory until she understood that the sobbing woman in the corner was Tina. Sally intervened just as her – friend? – had managed to open a vein on her arm with a screwdriver and the blood came popping out in a thin but surprisingly high arc. Sally felt a wave of nausea wash over her. She pushed it aside and knelt by Tina. The blood pulsed, but not dangerously, staining the white of Sally’s jacket with crimson roses.

  “Tina, let me have that.” Sally plucked the screwdriver from Tina’s hand. Tina looked up at her, lost in confusion. Before she’d settled on the screwdriver, she’d been hitting herself with a chair arm, and her face was battered. With her own fingernails Tina tried to increase the size of the screwdriver’s wound. She tore at her skin, bright blood smearing.

  “Stop it!” Sally cried. Without exactly meaning to, she smacked Tina hard across the face, and then immediately regretted it. Sally had never hit anyone in her life. Tina’s next option was to smack her head into the planks behind, hard enough to make Sally yelp with distress. This was a nightmare. Cloda Baker should be put in prison, and all of her sticks and strings taken away from her forever.

  Sticks and string. The words vibrated in Sally’s head, and her thoughts were already racing. The auras around the workers were visual disasters, flashing out in jagged spikes, so that Sally almost feared looking too hard and getting her eyes stabbed out. But wasn’t there something even more odd about them? Human auras connected to things - to people, to pets, to things that they cared about, to the things that had control over them, even if was just an overprotective set of parents. Now that she was inside this building Sally could see that every workers’ aura had a thin ethereal rope that led to a central point: a splotch of splinters and blood on the far wall.

  “That’s the spell!” Sally shouted, pointing at the blotch. “We need to destroy it!”

  Stefan somehow managed to shake his head and shout back at her even as he dodged the blows of a man with a hammer. “No way - we already destroyed it - we tore it in half, and that’s when everybody turned psychotic!”

  Sally rolled up her Sally-poncho and crammed it behind Tina’s head - maybe that would keep her from bashing her brains out - then dashed to the fallen bulletin board. She saw what Stefan meant. Whatever the totem had been, the board had been part of it, or at least stuck to a part of it. Breaking the totem had triggered some kind of fail-safe, right? Elton or Cloda must have booby-trapped this spell so that these workers couldn’t disturb it. Sally was glad that Elton had been trapped in his own mess. He deserved no better.

  “Listen,” Sally called to her extremely busy friends. “Omigod, I think I’m gonna set this on fire. Things can’t really get any worse, can they?”

  Greg, who had a split lip and a huge black eye, yelled back, “Explain, Sally!”

  “I’m looking at auras!” she said. She described fast what she saw, and her hope that burning the totem would break the metaphysical ropes that held the workers prisoner. As she explained, she rushed to a workstation where varnishing chemicals were stacked. Each canister had a bright yellow warning: CAUTION: HIGHLY FLAMMABLE. She snatched up two of them and hurried back to the torn totem where she splashed the chemicals on the stains. Now what? She yelled, “I need a lighter! I need a match or something!”

  Sheriff Lila had plenty to say against this. However, Tina suddenly lunged for the Sheriff’s holstered gun, punching and screaming at anyone who tried to stop her. Greg and Stefan intervened, each trying to pull a struggling woman a different direction. Sally searched desperately on the tables and work stations for something that she could use to start a fire. Then, like magic, Judge slid to a halt beside her with a theatrical flourish: in his hands he had two perfectly useful objects. Here was a lighter, and here was a small fire extinguisher.

  “I just had a quick tour of the break room. You do the honors,” he said, tossing Sally the lighter. “And I’ll save the day if it all goes sideways.”

  *****

  The peaceful path, redolent with the smell of wildflowers and the shadows of tumbling butterflies created by that strange invisible sun, deposited them on the Eyeteeth summit on the opposite side from the road. Andrew emerged barely even winded, the climb had been so gentle, even with Rosemary clinging to his back. The world opened back up to them and together they gasped as violent rain smacked into them, and the previously muffled claps of thunder now rang loud in their ears. For just a moment they looked back to see where the path had gone. Only a thickening of bracket remained behind them, promising nothing but thorns, and possibly snakes.

  Across the summit’s open glade, Cloda’s purple house withstood the ferocious winds of an outright onslaught of storm. Shingles from her roof tore away. The white shutters of her few windows banged and groaned as they were methodically ripped from their hinges. In the air, debris from the forest whipped by, stinging Rosemary’s exposed skin. Above them, the chalkboard-
green sky growled of doomsday.

  Wordlessly Andrew ran for the house. It wasn’t until he pushed them through the front door that they heard the voices of the old women, Cloda’s arguing, Ardelia’s accusing. The pair faced off in Cloda’s front room. Whether the dozens of scattered totems had been hurled by human hands or by the wind that blasted through a broken window was impossible to tell. The women silenced for a moment when their guests arrived. Creepy thing was, neither seemed surprised to see them here.

  “The Reverend came and fetched us,” said Andrew. “I can’t figure why, exactly - are we supposed to rescue one of you from the other, or rescue you both from the Armageddon that’s happening outside?”

  Cloda clucked her tongue. “Well my my! What happened to the pair of you? Meet up with somethin’ bigger’n yourself on the way to the top?”

  Rosemary slipped from Andrew’s back to stand on her own two feet. Nearby Ardelia stood with her face bright in rage, looking stronger than she had in the few days they had known her. Cloda was no less stubborn, despite her hunched posture and the extra twenty years she had on her daughter. Ardelia was the one Rosemary cared about.

  “Hey, Miss Ardelia,” she said. “Everything okay?”

  “It will be soon enough,” Ardelia replied. “I came here fixin’ to kill this old woman, and once I’ve got that done, I’ll be right as rain.”

  Cloda’s attention snapped back to Ardelia, and her voice sounded every bit like a soccer mom scolding her teenage daughter. “Stupid girl. You ain’t killin’ nobody. We’re a family, whether you like it or not. We’ve always only had each other.”

  “No. No, you and Daddy had each other, and did whatever you pleased to me. Made me a witch. Made me—” Ardelia swallowed hard. “Made me a mother when I didn’t want to be. And then took my son and made him a witch too, and the pair of you, cursing all them folks in Slope for telling the world what that sonofabitch was a’doin. I reckon now we all go to Hell, every one of us together.”