Witch Creek

by Laura Bickle

  Shit. She was swimming in some kind of toxic stew. So much for trying to keep this new body in decent condition. She swam as quickly as she could to the opposite bank and tried to climb the wall of roots. She found purchase with a toe, and her heart was pounding as she pulled herself out of the water.

  The roots were warm, like flesh. She was startled by that and nearly let go. But she climbed up higher, her fingers roving over the strange lattice of wood. How had the Lunaria come this far?

  She half expected the tree to attack her, as it had before at its home. But it seemed to have other priorities, now, and it ignored her. Dim light pulsed beneath the skin of the wood, as if it was busily digesting something more interesting. Or someone . . .

  Petra lifted her hand to a niche in the wall. Her fingers brushed against something that felt like flesh, and she squinted.

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  Gabe’s face was embedded in the wood, like a mask jammed in the back in a costumer’s wardrobe. His whole body must be under there, somewhere . . .

  She slapped at his face. “Gabe. Wake up.”

  But his face remained slack and his eyes closed. She was too late. Her heart fell to her feet. After all this . . . he was lost to her. Lost to this stupid tree and the idiot secrets this place kept.

  Her vision blurry, she tore at the roots with her hands. But they were solid as an iron gate. Small gaps and cubbies pierced the surface of it. They were too small for her to do anything other than try to reach in and see if she could detect a heartbeat under soggy flannel. She couldn’t.

  She pressed her forehead to the roots. He had always belonged to the tree. No matter what. It had finally reclaimed him, like a jealous lover, and he was lost to her.

  She was dimly conscious of an itching feeling at her pant leg, and she rubbed her shin against her other calf. But the itch became a sting, and she looked down.

  “Fuck!”

  There was something crawling on her . . . many somethings, larger versions of the creature Maria had stomped in her kitchen. She kicked against them. The little bastards were crawling out of the water. Hot blood ran from the back of her knee, and a weird crustacean-like creature fled away with a chunk of flesh.

  “Gah! Bastards!”

  Maria’s flashlight jogged and rolled on the opposite shore, as if she’d dropped it.

  She turned back for Maria, and she caught sight of her friend’s silhouette slapping at the swarm of creatures. Petra winced again and was reminded of a nature channel show she’d seen many years ago about fire ants plucking a human body clean within a matter of hours.

  She tried to climb higher in the tree roots, searching for some means of escape. But the devouring creatures swarmed up and over her in a seething mass, crawling over her legs.

  Dammit. This was not the way she wanted to go.

  She buried her face in her elbow to shield her eyes.

  In that darkness, something glowed. It was warm, like sunshine, and played red against the interior of her eyelids. She cracked open one eye.

  The roots were glowing, glowing with a brilliant gold light. The effect was like a bright candle behind a pierced metal lantern, seething and swirling.

  Above Petra’s head, a bird shrieked.

  A raven emerged in a void between the roots and fluttered into the darkness, toward the nefarious little creatures. It snatched one up.

  In that golden light, other ravens formed. They flooded out of the gaps and cubbies in the tree, seeking out the crustaceans. Black wings fluttered over her, shrieking in a deafening cacophony, as the birds poured out and began to devour the bugs. Their shadows flickered against the mist clinging to the walls of the cavern, slinging rain back into her face.

  They poured out for minutes—dozens, hundreds of them—a black mass that blotted out the golden light, like a swarm of locusts. They plucked the bugs from Petra’s body and then scattered into the dark, leaving Petra clinging to the tree roots.

  “Oh, my God,” she breathed.

  She reached inside the tree for Gabe, hoping that there was still one more living thing trapped there. But there was only emptiness behind the roots of the tree. Nothing.

  Petra turned back to the bank. The birds had scoured Maria clean, gulping down the bugs in a cloud of black. Before her eyes, they dispersed.

  “Are you okay?” she shouted at Maria, desperate to be heard above the squawking.

  “Yeah!”

  Petra took a deep breath and dove into the water. She swam as quickly as she could to the opposite bank, bracing herself for the stinging bite of those bizarre little creatures. To her surprise, she didn’t feel anything. Just water and whatever crud was in it stinging her wounds.

  She dragged herself out of the water, and Maria helped her. Her friend’s face was dripping blood on one side.

  Petra put her hand on Maria’s shoulder. “Really? Are you okay?”

  Maria lifted her hand to her forehead. “I got chewed. But nothing fatal. What the hell was that?”

  “Those biters . . . I figure that more of the Mermaid’s eggs hatched.” She jammed her bloody feet into her boots and laced them. “The birds . . . I think that was what’s left of Gabriel.”

  Maria’s hand fell on her back. “Oh, God. I’m sorry.”

  Petra shook her head, choking back a sob. “We gotta help Lev and Nine get that bitch. We have to . . .”

  She was cut short by a yell upstream, where she’d seen the blue-white light.

  “What the hell is that?” Maria muttered.

  “I have no idea.” And she didn’t. Her imagination and emotions had been stretched to their limits and broken.

  “Probably something that needs to be shot.” Maria ratcheted back her shotgun.

  “I’m in the mood for that. Yeah. Let’s go shoot some things.” She reached for her gunbelt.

  The women moved down the beach. The sand was gritty, containing bones and fragments of what Petra guessed were pieces of pearl shells. Here and there, a fat raven could be found, gobbling down a little biter. A black feather poked up from the sand. Petra reached down and clutched it to her chest. It was the last part of Gabe she’d ever hold. She knew it. She stuffed it into her pocket.

  “Look at that.”

  Maria’s light reached a shape huddled on the beach beside a blue plastic barrel, surrounded by a stain of red. It was a man, covered in blood. Gingerly, Maria reached down and turned the man to face them.

  It was Owen. Or what was left of him. His face was pale, and it was clear that the little biters had been chewing on him. But he was still in one piece. Mostly. His right arm was jammed under his armpit. He pulled it out. His hand was just a bloody stump, from the wrist down.

  “She took it,” he whispered. “She took my hand.”

  Petra regarded him with narrowed eyes. “Yeah, well, you deserved it, you son of a bitch.” Owen deserved this, and much more.

  Owen didn’t dispute it. Petra figured he was in shock. Didn’t matter. She unholstered one gun and pointed it at him.

  “Because of you, Gabriel is dead.”

  Owen tucked his stump under his arm, bowed his head, and waited for her to shoot him.

  Petra shifted her weight from foot to foot. Before she’d come to Temperance, she’d never turned a gun on a living thing. Now, now she was considering plugging Owen Rutherford and kicking his body into the river. She pulled back the hammer.

  “The Mermaid,” he said. He didn’t beg—it was just quiet resignation. “Gabriel said that to kill her, you must put her back where she came from. You have to cut out her heart and deliver it to Heart Lake. And her head to Witch Creek.”

  Petra shook her head. “You gave my husband to that swimming bitch. You kidnapped him, and you gave him to that bitch and now he’s dead.”

  Owen hung his head. “If it matters at all, I’m sorry.”

  “No. No, it doesn’t fucking matter. We three had a deal. Gabriel was going to tell you what he knew. He would have accepted you as his new m
aster, since you own the ranch. And you would have left us alone. Why was that not good enough for you?” She was shouting at him, and her face was wet.

  Owen said nothing.

  Petra shoved her gun into Owen’s face and hissed, “Why was that not good enough for you?”

  Owen licked his lips. “Because I wanted more. She promised me everything.”

  “And now you will have nothing. Nothing.”

  Petra stood back. She didn’t want his pathetic brains splashing on her.

  “Petra.”

  She glanced back.

  Maria stood behind her. Her shotgun was lowered. “I won’t stop you from killing him. He deserves it, and I support your decision to smear him off the face of the earth. I just want you to think about what that means for you. You’ve been given a new life. Scrubbed clean to do anything you want. Just be sure you don’t waste it on a piece of trash like him.”

  Petra took a deep breath. Owen was slime. She felt at this moment what she’d felt at the hospital and in the dark nights when everyone else slept. She felt what she’d felt in Lev’s attic, and when she’d seen Gabriel’s body in the tree. She felt that closeness with death, that still intimacy with the ever after.

  Only this time, she could stop it.

  She released the hammer and holstered her gun. “Let’s go.”

  Maria nodded, and they headed back out the way they’d come.

  Owen might well bleed out on his own. But she had done no harm to him, and she could live with that.

  It began to rain inside the cavern, rinsing the blood and chemical residue from her face. Maria put her arm around her.

  They trudged wordlessly to the gate, but increased their pace as they saw Lev and Nine struggling with the net in the light near the river.

  “We have her!” Lev gasped.

  Petra reached for the net. Inside snarled a creature with blue-green scales, hissing and shrieking. She was gnawing at the polyester cording, flipping and snarling like a swordfish in the ocean.

  Maria aimed her shotgun.

  The net ripped . . . then gave way, and the Mermaid tumbled into the creek.

  “We don’t have her,” Lev growled.

  Lev grabbed the kayak, jumped in, and started paddling. The Mermaid was fast, he would give her that. He would have been unlikely to catch her in a boat on a level playing field. But she was injured. She’d come out of the cave covered in some blue-crystal crud, and bleeding black into the water. Because of that, she was easy to track as he followed that blue-black ink in the water. She’d been shot, he had guessed, as he heard gunshots echoing from the cave.

  He followed her for almost a mile. He heard the others crashing through the underbrush behind him. They were falling behind, unable to keep up.

  That was fine with him. The Mermaid was his.

  He was gaining on her. The kayak cut smoothly through the water, and he paddled furiously.

  Her head broke the water at last. She opened her mouth to draw breath, her crystalizing hair curling around her in a miasma. Whether it was to sing, cough, or ensorcell him, it didn’t matter.

  She turned to him and whispered with wide black eyes, “He’s awake.”

  He had no idea who she was talking about. The only “he” that mattered to Lev was Archer.

  “My son is dead.”

  And with that, Lev lifted his sword and swung as hard as he could. The blade bit into her neck, barely slowing as it severed her spine, and her head came clear off. Dark blood stained the creek, from shore to shore, rendering it as black and opaque as the underground river.

  He exhaled for what had to be the first time in days, his heart pounding.

  It was done. The revenge he sought. But it had been so sudden, he thought, as the kayak drifted in the suddenly quiet water. Ripples from the violence pushed against the banks, disturbing the cattails. And then all was still.

  His mind, though, wasn’t.

  He was pulling the body to shore by the time the women and the coyote caught up with him. He was up to his knees in mud, dragging the body of the Mermaid by one arm. He held her head by the hair in the other hand like Perseus with the Medusa.

  It had been a long time since he’d killed anything. This feeling sang in him, as if it were the righting of some great injustice. He had never been a warrior; he didn’t fool himself about that. But this felt as if the injustice was balanced. He rubbed his face on his shoulder, threw the body in the reeds. Where the black blood fell in a slap, the plants curled and withered.

  “Wait,” Petra panted. “To be truly finished with her, she has to go back to where she came. Put her heart in Heart Lake. And her head in Witch Creek. The problem is . . . I don’t know where those places are.”

  “They are west of here. Many miles west. But I can do that.” Lev stood over the body a moment before plunging his blade into the Mermaid’s chest. Dark blood leaked out of the wound. He reached in and found the warm heart, cut it from the center.

  Maria and Petra looked away. But Nine and the coyote watched solemnly, the way that animals did. Animals never shied away from death.

  Lev tossed the head and heart on the skirt of the kayak. They landed with a thick splat. He covered them with his jacket, obscuring them from any passersby that he might meet on the journey.

  “Gabriel?” he finally thought to ask. “And Owen?”

  Petra took a deep breath, and it looked as if she fought tears. Maria and Nine put their arms around her.

  “Gabriel is dead,” Maria said. “Owen lives, for what it’s worth.”

  “I am sorry for that. For both of those pieces of news.”

  Petra blinked back tears. “Thank you. For everything.”

  Lev put a hand on her shoulder. He nodded at Nine and Maria. Their deal was done. He turned away.

  A figure plodded forward in the mud. Owen. He staggered forward, fell to his knees, gaping at the figure of the Mermaid.

  “I can fix that second piece of news for you,” Lev offered, pausing in wiping black blood from his blade on the cattails.

  Owen’s eyes were glazed. One hand was tucked under his arm in a spreading red stain. He was mumbling to himself. “She’s dead. Yes, she’s dead. And you can’t . . . I can’t deliver you from this place without her. She was our only hope.”

  Petra gazed at the sheriff with narrowed eyes. “He thinks he talks to a ghost. The ghost of a little girl.”

  Owen lifted his eyes. “I was never able to solve her murder. The Mermaid said that . . . she could help her move on, to stop this haunting. It’s been so many years . . .”

  Lev knelt before Owen. He gazed at the sheriff with a deep sense of pity, pity and loathing. “Owen. I speak to the dead.”

  Owen gazed at him frantically. “You can?”

  “I can. Do you believe me?”

  Owen reached out and clutched at Lev’s shirt with his good hand. “You see her? You know, then. I have to help her. She needs to move on, to go to heaven or wherever good souls go. She’s innocent, and she doesn’t deserve this. She doesn’t deserve . . . me.”

  Lev looked down at him, his jaw hard. “There are no dead speaking to you, Owen. Only your own mind.”

  “She’s not . . . she has to be real! She has to be! For years, she’s been speaking to me.” Owen’s brow wrinkled.

  “The only dead here, Owen, are the ones you’re responsible for. Those dead are silent.”

  Lev shook him off. Owen would suffer more as an insane man than if Lev killed him outright.

  Lev strode to the boat and got in. Without looking back, he paddled down the river.

  He wasn’t sure what to do next. Should he return to the life he’d conducted a week ago? Strike out on the road again? He knew that he had to speak with Bridget. Maybe a road trip was in order, and he could see where life took him then.

  He paddled for days, through forest and mountain passes. He dimly remembered going this way, many years before. He gazed upon the bison in the fields, watched the eagles fis
h. He emptied himself of his emotions, washing himself in the water and foraging for food by the shore. When he had to pick up the kayak and walk, he dragged it behind him. He slept beneath the pines and listened to the frogs. It had been a long time since he’d set himself upon a path like this, and he felt his ragged emotions smoothing as he worked his muscles and navigated by the sky. Out here, there were no ghosts. He encountered no people. Just him and the land and sky. He remembered how Archer had said he loved the outdoors for just this reason, and it made him feel closer to his son. He picked up stones, held them, allowed them to blossom into flowers, and skipped them across the surface of the water.

  By the time he reached Witch Creek, the bundle in the skirt of the kayak had begun to reek, and he would be glad to be rid of it. This part of the water was lovely, on the other side of the mountains in shaded lowlands. It reminded him very much of the places that the rusalki were said to haunt, in Eastern Europe.

  He unwrapped the head and chucked it into the water without ceremony. He felt, though, that he should say something:

  “Water, take your servant and never release her again.”

  The waters closed over it greedily. A tortoise caught one of her braids and towed it deep beneath the surface.

  It was the following night by the time he reached Heart Lake. This area was more populated, and he was glad for the cover of darkness. The water shone in the light of the waning moon, lapping waves against his boat. Only a faint shimmer-stripe of sunset shone in the west. Lev took the heart in his hands and cast it into the lake.

  “Water, take your servant and never release her again.”

  Fish swarmed, ripples in the dark water. They ripped the heart to pieces, as if it was the most luscious delicacy they’d ever encountered.

  He took a deep breath, the paddle stretched across his lap. It was accomplished. He floated still, serene, on the water.

  What would come after was anyone’s guess.

  The women hauled the Mermaid’s body back to the gate, taking turns, two at a time, one at each arm. Sig led the procession, slinking through the blades of new grass. Petra wondered how she would explain Gabe’s death to him, or if he already knew in that mysterious coyote way that he had about him. Owen drifted at the fringes. No one spoke to him. He just shadowed them like a bleeding vulture.