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Witches

Page 25

by Christina Harlin


  “I can’t get to either of them,” Rosemary whispered to Andrew. She meant telepathically, and he understood her, for of course the first thing she’d tried to do was intervene with her own mind, to diffuse the fight. “They’re both protected. If we want to stop this, it’s got to be with our bare hands.”

  Cloda tsked at her daughter. “Still caterwauling about something that happened over fifty years ago. For shame, Delie. You never wanted for anything. Never had to work a day. Never had to lift a finger.

  Cloda said this to Ardelia, then turned her attention back to Rosemary and Andrew. “Our family blood is blessed, and when that’s the case, you keep the blood in the family, something this fool girl has never accepted. What we done was sacred, only she don’t choose to see it that way. She must be the one who cooked up the curse on them poor folk in Slope, just cause she’s shame-faced about what Willie gave her. A life of her own, and then a son who might be as powerful a witch as she is.”

  “I am not a witch!” Ardelia shrieked, advancing on Cloda with her hands wringing together.

  “You’re a mighty witch, my dear girl, and I daresay I couldn’t be more proud. Did you know when you was just a little girl you could summon up the wind? You’d make the leaves fly and you’d laugh and laugh. Now this here? It’s a temper tantrum you’re having, and nothing more, and now you’re gonna stop it.”

  Cloda had the gall to look dismissive, which made Ardelia’s fury worse, as evidenced by the screaming of the storm outside. The house groaned alarmingly. Cloda said, not without affection, “Oh Delie, you are the finest witch of all of us. If only you’d just look and see what you can do. Your beautiful storm. You’ve near brought the mountain down. I almost wish you would, just so I could see it with my own eyes.”

  Ardelia snarled. “I wish I’d brought down the sky on you!”

  Cloda focused again on Rosemary and shouted a question over the whining wind. “Have you ever seen someone who can do what she has done?”

  “She’s a liar,” Ardelia told them before Rosemary could respond. “It was she and Elton made the curse on the workers. I could see when Elton hisself fell underneath his own spell and I was glad. And I was glad when Willie died, you hear me, Mama? I thanked the Lord when that old man died in shame.”

  “Oh, I’m the liar, am I?” Cloda indicated the shuddering house around her. “This here tempest would put that to the test.”

  “I can’t help that,” Ardelia said, and seemed in earnest. “I don’t know how to stop it. I don’t think it stops until you’re dead. So let’s get it done with, Mama.”

  Cloda got about half a sentence out: “It’ll be a cold day in hell when—”

  Then she was either silenced or simply drowned out by the shrieks of a wooden house being torn apart.

  “Oh my gods, we need to get out of here,” Rosemary said, but Andrew was already seizing her hand and guiding her fast, back out the way they had come in. Was this a mistake? Stay in the house that was being ripped asunder, or face the storm? Crouching low Rosemary watched as Ardelia somehow orchestrated a dead-man-walking march of her mother toward the cliffside even as the house was being torn down, its pieces hurtling toward the precipice.

  Rosemary and Andrew dropped together, clinging to each other in the mud and violent wind as the purple house dismantled before their eyes, the roof peeling away, the walls crumpling as if they were made of cardboard, flung aside by the hand of an invisible giant. The air was filled with burned twigs and scraps of cloth, swirling into the clouds to be dropped gods only knew where. The air was filled with totems, the totems appeared to be dancing.

  The wind had the strength of crashing waves. She and Andrew were pushed inexorably toward the cliffside along with everything else. Andrew spoke to her though she could not hear him. Looking into his face, she saw that he was trying to tell her something urgent. But Rosemary couldn’t understand, her attention being blown away along with the deadly winds. In this situation, everything was urgent. This was the textbook example of urgency. They were being dragged by a witch-created tornado toward a merciless drop. They were at its ledge in moments, the drop dizzying before Rosemary’s eyes.

  She watched as a bizarre tableau took place. Two elderly women, squaring off at the edge of a cliff, their clothes and thin hair whipping as if they floated under a violent sea. Despite having nothing but a deadly fall behind her, Cloda remained defiantly unafraid. Today she wore a golden glittering poncho woven with shamrocks as if she were some mad leprechaun queen. She was a jagged glittering blur in the storm. Something about her face hinted that she was fighting not for her life, but simply out of annoyance at Ardelia’s wayward behavior. Rosemary had not considered it until this moment, that the two women looked startlingly alike - two versions of the same person, Cloda the bright unpredictable sorceress, Ardelia the angry, faded and ill-used copy.

  Ardelia struggled and moaned, shoving at her mother as the wind screamed. Cloda stood firm at the cliff’s edge, clutching her arms around her thin old shoulders and smirking, and though the power of the wind whipped her hair straight out behind her, and made golden poncho shred golden sparkles behind her in a surreal wave, she stood as if rooted. The sky above spun, green clouds like a stew in a pot. Leaves and whip-thin branches were torn from treetops. The violent wind threw everything over the gulf in a magnificent swooping spiral into the impenetrable darkness of the forest far below.

  But as for the humans here at the cliff’s sickening edge, something held them still. Rosemary felt the wind might tear her hair and skin clean from her bones, but her bones were caught on a solid grip that kept her from going over the edge. It was hard to see past all the mud and water. Her telepathy could see with sharp clarity, though, and it told her what she should have guessed: no one was falling off this cliff. There was a barrier of magic holding them fast.

  Andrew crouched over Rosemary, protecting her from the flying debris, taking a number of hits himself. He was oblivious to them as he tried to convey something to her. At last she had the presence of mind to read his lips and the sound of his shouts finally got through to her. His words: the protections are gone! Make her stop!

  Yes, of course - her telepathic web had already found the cliff’s protection spell. Terror and amazement had stupefied her, but of course, of course, she could stop this now. She reached for Ardelia’s attention, snagged it as it blew past her in the vortex. “Ardelia,” she said, maybe aloud, or maybe just in the realm of thoughts. “Don’t let this be the last thing you ever do.”

  This got Ardelia’s attention. Rosemary saw the storm, a bright white stone of rage in the middle of Ardelia’s thoughts, and put an imaginary hand over it, very gently. “There it is. That’s enough, now. All you have to do is let go.”

  Ardelia did, with a weary shake of her head. The wind ceased so abruptly that the air around them seemed to snap; it took Rosemary a moment to draw a breath, like the oxygen had briefly disappeared. The world went silent and still. The eerie silence of the forest closed in. A second later, a hail of debris fell smartly to the ground, or floated, in the case of leaves and cloth scraps.

  Cloda sighed with exasperation and her voice was particularly shrill in the new emptiness. “Do you think I’d live next to this cliff for my whole life without making it safe? You and Elton both played out here when you was little – did you ever come close to falling? Folks come up here with their children at times; I can’t have the poor little souls taking a tumble. It’s a sticking spell. Stupid girl.”

  The older woman was making her exit a dramatic one and clearly wanted no help, so Rosemary and Andrew stayed by Ardelia, a drowned specter gazing over the cliff’s harmless edge. For the first time in four days, it was not raining. The cliff edge on which they stood was a hazard by any definition except that, if Cloda could be believed, magic was holding it together. Rosemary’s instincts weren’t quite ready to trust it regardless.

  “Miss Ardelia,” she said. “Let’s please come back this way.” />
  “Nana Cloda!” shouted a voice emerging from the forest. A moment later the gigantic Elton burst out of the path, his face showing an awareness that had not been there before. “Nana Cloda where are you!”

  “Oh Elton my baby!” Cloda cried, reaching for him. She had made it to the wreckage of her house and Elton’s massive strides took him to her side where they embraced; it looked like a grizzly bear hugging an ancient bejeweled mummy.

  “They’re ruining it, Nana,” Elton told his grandmother as he clutched her to his massive chest. “They’re gonna let all them workers free of our beautiful spell. You gotta help me stop them.”

  Andrew groaned softly, saying to Rosemary and Ardelia, “I hope this isn’t going to be bad. I can only wrestle one mountain monster a day.”

  In spite of her exhaustion, Ardelia’s conviction was firm. “He ain’t going to do anything. Leastwise not now. He just don’t know that yet.”

  Indeed, Elton seemed only after a moment to notice that he was standing amidst ruin, or that Rosemary, Andrew and Ardelia stood nearby watching. He held his grandmother away from him and inspected her. “Nana Cloda - where did your house go?”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Othernaturals Season 6, Episode 5

  Eyeteeth Mountain, Missouri; June 2015

  Kaye healed the abdomen of a groaning woman, which had been punctured by a blade and spurted blood in unpredictable pulses which were, fortunately, caused by muscle contractions rather than heartbeat. No artery hit, then. Nothing vital. Kaye had the disturbing thought that some deep instinct inside these people was fighting the hideous spell, keeping them from doing fatal damage. Self-preservation was an incredibly strong force.

  The woman was bound on the ground before her, moaning pitifully until Kaye removed her burning-hot hands from the healed wound and said, “Just rest here for a moment. Lay on your side. We’re getting help.”

  She rose to her feet and a wave of dizziness overtook her. She’d healed too many people and her blood sugar was suffering; her hands shook violently. The paramedics had arrived, from somewhere far beyond Gully, and it had taken them damned well long enough. They were ill-equipped, in Kaye’s opinion – two young men who probably completed their six-week training course last weekend, with room for three patients in their van at the most. But at least they had first aid supplies and were four more hands that could hold these people down. Only once had they made the mistake of cutting the zip-tie on a suicidal worker, forced then to wrestle the poor woman back under submission so she’d stop hitting herself in the face.

  Stefan and Greg were hauling another man out – good Lord, how many more of them could there be? They dragged the man to the next parking space in line, the next victim for Kaye to heal.

  “Only one left,” Stefan answered her, as if he’d read her thoughts. “Sally’s setting the whole thing on fire, she thinks that will stop it.”

  To his rapidly retreating back, Kaye barked, “Wait - what?”

  She quickly examined her patient and was horrified clear to the bone at the blank, empty look in the woman’s face, as if somehow death had snatched her away in the last few seconds when Kaye was distracted. Then suddenly, the woman’s face cleared. Emotion and life seemed simply poured back into her, and she demanded, “Let me up!”

  “Just stay calm,” Kaye replied in her most soothing tone, admonishing herself as much as her current patient. She surveyed her surroundings. The parking lot triage had shifted in tone. The bound victims were beginning to express their outrage in an entirely new manner.

  “I will not stay calm!” shouted Kaye’s current patient. “I want up out of this mud this very second, or I am calling the sheriff!”

  This was a more rational thing than anyone had said in a while, and Kaye wondered if an instant, miracle-cure might be too good to be true. Yet her patient sat upright, slinging the wet strings of her hair out of her face. “Dr. Patterson, thank god,” the woman said upon recognizing a local. “You know me. Marlene Burris.”

  “Marlene,” the doctor said with a noncommittal nod. “Are you all right?”

  “Hell no I’m not all right!”

  “You know me too,” said a nearby man, struggling to right himself. “What in the hell is happening? Do you people have any idea what has been going on in that factory? Twelve hour workdays, seven days a week, and not a penny for it!”

  “Starving us and leaving us to rot in our own rags!” someone else shouted.

  Sheriff Lila smirked. “How could they have been starving you?

  “Well, why on earth didn’t you say something?” asked Dr. Patterson.

  The man stared at the sheriff and doctor, bewildered by their doubt. “We’ve been under a goddamned magic spell, that’s how!”

  More bodies sat up now, and the air was filled no longer with wails but with angry, coherent sentences. “I’ll sue the pants off them,” and “God knows how long it’s been since I talked to my daughter,” and “Will you look at my hair! What am I wearing?” and “We’d have a right to march up that mountain and burn them witches!”

  “No,” Kaye announced loudly; she could shout sternly enough to silence a room full of interns, and it worked here too. “Nobody is burning anybody. I’m with the paranormal investigation team, and we have no definitive proof as to who caused this.”

  Though cowed by Kaye, and sounding a little whiny, the man insisted, “Beg pardon ma’am, but I’ve had Cloda and Elton’s filthy curse in my head for a goddamn long time now and I’m tellin’ you, it was them.”

  There was consent all around him, Cloda’s name batted back and forth, the anger growing by the moment. Twelve people, just now waking up for a nightmare that had apparently been going on for almost a year, had plenty of anger to spare, and they were eagerly joining in the idea of taking it out in a gigantic bonfire on which Cloda and Elton Baker could roast like marshmallows.

  But then another voice sounded: Sheriff Lila, holding up her hands and shouting them all down. “I better not hear one more word about anybody going up that mountain to accuse anybody of anything! You think I’m kidding around, you just test me. I s’pose you’d all like to face an assault or a murder charge when your excuse is that an old woman cast an evil spell on you. So not one more word.”

  The talk died down into grumbles, then returned to conversation about more pressing issues, such as how they might get untied and get up out of the mud.

  Kaye just realized that it had stopped raining.

  Stefan came outside soon, accompanied by Tina, the last wretched worker, the only one who’d been spared the application of a zip-tie. Stefan was speaking with Judge, who carried a fire extinguisher. As they moved out the door; they surveyed the bizarre scene on the parking lot and affirmed that, as they had assumed, the spell had been simultaneously cancelled. Greg brought up the rear with a camera in hand, the surest sign that he was no longer concerned, keeping his focus on the sheriff, a woman who clearly thought that this day was far outside her job description. Kaye thought the sheriff might be surprised at the number of strange things Kaye had seen over the last year. Finally Sally came, her formerly white clothes ruined with blood and grime, her enormous sunhat perched on her head.

  The sun was out, and so Sally dutifully made her way to the shade of the Mercedes. But Tina followed her, curious, and Kaye heard their words.

  “I know you. I know your white clothes. You’re the one who was in my house,” said Tina.

  Sally graciously took the offered handshake. “Yes. That was me. I’m really glad you’re feeling better. Here’s your phone back. We charged it for you.”

  Tina accepted the pink, sticker-covered phone. “You rescued us, didn’t you?”

  Sally said, “I told you we would.”

  Stefan was at Kaye’s side, putting a hand on her arm to steady her. She hadn’t realized until that moment that she badly needed steadying. “Are you doing all right?” he asked, checking her face and eyes, forcing her to be still while he checked
her over. “No. You’re shaking and you’re getting all clammy.”

  “Don’t try to flatter me, you red-headed devil.”

  Stefan smiled quickly and then looked to Judge, “Hey kid, go fetch my amazing girlfriend something out of the trunk, wouldja.”

  “Oh sure thing, Old Man,” Judge said, griping, “I like how you manage to announce to everybody that she’s your girlfriend, by the way. Very smooth.”

  “Burns a lot of calories, does she?” Dr. Patterson asked nearby. “I never seen a genuine healer in action before. It was quite a sight.”

  Stefan answered for woozy Kaye, bless him. He said, “Thank you. You eat something, Katie, before you heal one more bump or bruise.”

  Greg was a few yards away, speaking to the Sheriff, catching his breath as he spoke. ““You should have seen Judge’s swarm last week. This was actually kind of a cake walk compared to that - no wasps or bees, you know. Not that I’m afraid of bugs, exactly, I just don’t like them.”

  Judge returned to Kaye with two cans of warm soda and a box of snack cakes. Once Stefan cracked a soda open - her hands were shaking too hard to do it - Kaye slammed it back, gulping greedily until the can was empty, then accepted the next one and did the same. She caught her breath, belched like a champion, and received applause from Judge and, after a moment, from Stefan.

  “Ooo, are those cream-filled?”

  Judge could hardly open them fast enough for her.

  “I assume the spell is broken, then,” said Stefan. Kaye would think about that later and laugh at him, for sounding so logical. Speaking to the crowd, he said, “If we begin cutting off those ties, do you all promise there won’t be any violence? To yourselves, or to anyone else?” Pulling a pocketknife from his jeans, he started at one end of the yard, freeing people from their ties.

  They each rose and began vigorously, angrily snapping among themselves, and comparing notes, as if every one of them had just been through a grueling ordeal with airport security and they wanted to know to whom they should complain. Her wits were steadying thanks to the influx of sugar, so Kaye kept an eye out, watching for signs of madness. But no, these people were alert, cognizant. In a short time, they’d all realize how exhausted and hungry and filthy they were. Kaye couldn’t imagine what that must be like, to have one’s free will snatched away for so long. Like being in prison, mind and body both.

 

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