Witches: Wicked, Wild & Wonderful

by Paula Guran

  “What things?”

  “Oh, just things.”

  Then the witch woman’s voice came from behind us. “Well, children?”

  It was the first time I had seen her out of her room. Thammuz was at her right heel, the fawn at her left. The cats, Ashtaroth and Orus, had evidently stayed upstairs. “Would you like to ride Saturday?” she asked me.

  Speechless, I nodded. She put her hand against the wall and a portion of it slid down into the earth so that Poor Little Saturday was free to go out. “She’s sweet, isn’t she?” the witch woman asked me, looking affectionately at the strange, bumpy-kneed, splay-footed creature. “Her grandmother was very good to me in Egypt once. Besides, I love camel’s milk.”

  “But Alexandra said she was a he!” I exclaimed.

  “Alexandra’s the kind of woman to whom all animals are he except cats, and all cats are she. As a matter of fact, Ashtaroth and Orus are she, but it wouldn’t make any difference to Alexandra if they weren’t. Go on out, Saturday. Come on!”

  Saturday backed out, bumping her bulging knees and ankles against her stall, and stood under a live oak tree. “Down,” the witch woman said. Saturday leered at me and didn’t move. “Down, sorcabatcha!” the witch woman commanded, and Saturday obediently got down on her knees. I clambered up onto her, and before I had managed to get at all settled she rose with such a jerky motion that I knocked my chin against her front hump and nearly bit my tongue off. Round and round Saturday danced while I clung wildly to her front hump and the witch woman and Alexandra rolled on the ground with laughter. I felt as though I were on a very unseaworthy vessel on the high seas, and it wasn’t long before I felt violently seasick as Saturday pranced among the live oak trees, sneezing delicately.

  At last the witch woman called out, “Enough!” and Saturday stopped in her traces, nearly throwing me, and knelt laboriously. “It was mean to tease you,” the witch woman said, pulling my nose gently. “You may come sit in my room with me for a while if you like.”

  There was nothing I liked better than to sit in the witch woman’s room and to watch her while she studied from her books, worked out strange-looking mathematical problems, argued with the zodiac, or conducted complicated experiments with her test tubes and retorts, sometimes filling the room with sulphurous odors or flooding it with red or blue light. Only once was I afraid of her, and that was when she danced with the skeleton in the corner. She had the room flooded with a strange red glow, and I almost thought I could see the flesh covering the bones of the skeleton as they danced together like lovers. I think she had forgotten that I was sitting there, half hidden in the wing chair, because when they had finished dancing and the skeleton stood in the corner again, his bones shining and polished, devoid of any living trappings, she stood with her forehead against one of the deep red velvet curtains that covered the boarded-up windows and tears streamed down her cheeks. Then she went back to her test tubes and worked feverishly. She never alluded to the incident and neither did I.

  As winter drew on she let me spend more and more time in the room. Once I gathered up courage enough to ask her about herself, but I got precious little satisfaction.

  “Well, then, are you maybe one of the northerners who bought the place?”

  “Let’s leave it at that, boy. We’ll say that’s who I am. Did you know that my skeleton was old Colonel Londermaine? Not so old, as a matter of fact; he was only thirty-seven when he was killed at the battle of Bunker Hill—or am I getting him confused with his great-grandfather, Rudolph Londermaine? Anyhow he was only thirty-seven, and a fine figure of a man, and Alexandra only thirty when she hung herself for love of him on the chandelier in the ballroom. Did you know that the fat man with the red mustache has been trying to cheat your father? His cow will give sour milk for seven days. Run along now and talk to Alexandra. She’s lonely.”

  When the winter had turned to spring and the camellias and azaleas and Cape Jessamine had given way to the more lush blooms of early May, I kissed Alexandra for the first time, very clumsily. The next evening when I managed to get away from the chores at home and hurried out to the plantation, she gave me her sapphire and diamond ring, which she had strung for me on a narrow bit of turquoise satin.

  “It will keep us both safe,” she said, “if you wear it always. And then when we’re older we can get married and you can give it back to me. Only you mustn’t let anyone see it, ever, ever, or She’d be very angry.”

  I was afraid to take the ring but when I demurred Alexandra grew furious and started kicking and biting and I had to give in.

  Summer was almost over before my father discovered the ring hanging about my neck. I fought like a witch boy to keep him from pulling out the narrow ribbon and seeing the ring, and indeed the ring seemed to give me added strength, and I had grown, in any case, much stronger during the winter than I had ever been in my life. But my father was still stronger than I, and he pulled it out. He looked at it in dead silence for a moment and then the storm broke. That was the famous Londermaine ring that had disappeared the night Alexandra Londermaine hung herself. That ring was worth a fortune. Where had I got it?

  No one believed me when I said I had found it in the grounds near the house—I chose the grounds because I didn’t want anybody to think I had been in the house or indeed that I was able to get in. I don’t know why they didn’t believe me; it still seems quite logical to me that I might have found it buried among the ferns.

  It had been a long, dull year, and the men of the town were all bored. They took me and forced me to swallow quantities of corn liquor until I didn’t know what I was saying or doing. When they had finished with me, I didn’t even manage to reach home before I was violently sick and then I was in my mother’s arms and she was weeping over me. It was morning before I was able to slip away to the plantation house. I ran pounding up the mahogany stairs to the witch woman’s room and opened the heavy sliding doors without knocking. She stood in the center of the room in her purple robe, her arms around Alexandra, who was weeping bitterly. Overnight the room had completely changed. The skeleton of Colonel Londermaine was gone, and books filled the shelves in the corner of the room that had been her laboratory. Cobwebs were everywhere, and broken glass lay on the floor; dust was inches thick on her worktable. There was no sign of Thammuz, Ashtaroth or Orus, or the fawn, but four birds were flying about her, beating their wings against her hair.

  She did not look at me or in any way acknowledge my presence. Her arm about Alexandra, she led her out of the room and to the drawing room where the portrait hung. The birds followed, flying around and around them. Alexandra had stopped weeping now. Her face was very proud and pale, and if she saw me miserably trailing behind them she gave no notice. When the witch woman stood in front of the portrait the sheet fell from it. She raised her arm; there was a great cloud of smoke; the smell of sulphur filled my nostrils, and when the smoke was gone, Alexandra was gone, too. Only the portrait was there, the fourth finger of the left hand now bearing no ring. The witch woman raised her hand again and the sheet lifted itself up and covered the portrait. Then she went, with the birds, slowly back to what had once been her room, and still I tailed after, frightened as I had never been before in my life, or have been since.

  She stood without moving in the center of the room for a long time. At last she turned and spoke to me.

  “Well, boy, where is the ring?”

  “They have it.”

  “They made you drunk, didn’t they?”

  “Yes.”

  “I was afraid something like this would happen when I gave Alexandra the ring. But it doesn’t matter. . . . I’m tired. . . . ” She drew her hand wearily across her forehead.

  “Did I—did I tell them everything?”

  “You did.”

  “I—I didn’t know.”

  “1 know you didn’t know, boy.”

  “Do you hate me now?”

  “No, boy, I don’t hate you.”

  “Do you have to
go away?”

  “Yes.”

  I bowed my head, “I’m so sorry. . . . ”

  She smiled slightly. “The sands of time . . . cities crumble and rise and will crumble again and breath dies down and blows once more . . . ”

  The birds flew madly about her head, pulling at her hair, calling into her ears. Downstairs we could hear a loud pounding, and then the crack of boards being pulled away from a window.

  “Go, boy,” she said to me. I stood rooted, motionless, unable to move. “Go!” she commanded, giving me a mighty push so that I stumbled out of the room. They were waiting for me by the cellar doors and caught me as I climbed out. I had to stand there and watch when they came out with her. But it wasn’t the witch woman, my witch woman. It was their idea of a witch woman, someone thousands of years old, a disheveled old creature in rusty black, with long wisps of gray hair, a hooked nose, and four wiry black hairs springing out of the mole on her chin. Behind her flew the four birds, and suddenly they went up, up, into the sky, directly in the path of the sun until they were lost in its burning glare.

  Two of the men stood holding her tightly, although she wasn’t struggling but standing there, very quiet, while the others searched the house, searched it in vain. Then as a group of them went down into the cellar I remembered, and by a flicker of the old light in the witch woman’s eyes I could see that she remembered, too. Poor Little Saturday had been forgotten. Out she came, prancing absurdly up the cellar steps, her rubbery lips stretched back over her gigantic teeth, her eyes bulging with terror. When she saw the witch woman, her lord and master, held captive by two dirty, insensitive men, she let out a shriek and began to kick and lunge wildly, biting, screaming with the blood-curdling, heart-rending screams that only a camel can make. One of the men fell to the ground, holding a leg in which the bone had snapped from one of Saturday’s kicks. The others scattered in terror, leaving the witch woman standing on the veranda supporting herself by clinging to one of the huge wisteria vines that curled around the columns. Saturday clambered up onto the veranda and knelt while she flung herself between the two humps. Then off they ran, Saturday still screaming, her knees knocking together, the ground shaking as she pounded along. Down from the sun plummeted the four birds and flew after them.

  Up and down I danced, waving my arms, shouting wildly until Saturday and the witch woman and the birds were lost in a cloud of dust, while the man with the broken leg lay moaning on the ground beside me.

  Nancy Holder’s witches fly on jets as well as brooms. Supernatural flight (also known as transvection) on a broomstick is one of the most common attributes of witches. The classic witch’s broom is a bundle of twigs or straw tied around a central pole—a besom or besom broom. From the fifteenth century on, it was thought that witches applied a magical ointment to themselves or the broomstick in order to fly. Flying, however, was a point of some contention among serious demonologists of the day. Some felt witches flew only in spirit, not in body, or that the salve contained hallucinogenic ingredients that made witches think they were flying.

  Nowadays, thanks to J.K. Rowling, we know that flying broomsticks have come a long way—at least in fantasy. In her wizarding world there is a wide range of broomsticks—from the family-friendly reliable Bluebottle model to Harry Potter’s state-of-the-art, Quidditch-winning Firebolt. Still, even the Firebolt is a direct descendent of the medieval besom: its tail is described (in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) as being made of “perfectly smooth, streamlined birch twigs.” In the movie version the twigs aren’t even smooth or streamlined; it looks quite besom-like.

  The Only Way to Fly

  Nancy Holder

  Jessamyne was either gazing out the window or dozing when Drucilla’s scratchy Cockney twang pierced her right eardrum.

  “Blimey!” Drucilla cried. “The movie’s Bell, Book and Candle. Oh, isn’t that just too right?”

  “How nice,” Jessamyne said mildly. Her own accent, very Received Standard, very prim and proper, rang as condescending, though she didn’t mean it to be.

  “Oh, and we’re ’aving eye of newt for tea!”

  That got Jessamyne’s interest. How many years since she’d tasted that delicacy? Of course she knew the answer: Since she had married Michael Wood. From that point on, everything had fallen away, everything had changed, more drastically than she could have imagined.

  “ ’Course it’s airline food,” Drucilla said speculatively. There seemed to be a bit of the old Romany line in her high cheekbones and hooked nose, the wart on the end of her chin. She gave a tug on the brim of her steepled hat (Jessamyne had put her own, newly purchased, in the overhead bin shortly after takeoff, finding the size and weight of it uncomfortable) and looked every part the witch she was.

  Jessamyne was not so lucky. After all the time she had lived undercover, it was difficult to “let it all hang out,” as the kids used to say. The kids of the last century, at any rate. If one looked into a mirror—or, in this case, the window over the ice-coated wing of a large silver jetliner—one saw a rather pleasant, plump old lady with a dumpling face, square glasses perched on the tip of her nose, and gray hair pulled back in a bun. Not the stuff of nightmares.

  She sighed wistfully. Not even the stuff of a second, startled glance.

  “I wonder if it’s fresh,” Drucilla went on. She wrinkled up her fabulous nose and pulled back her lips, showing awe-inspiring jagged yellow teeth. “No doubt they’ll zap it.” She laughed at her double entendre and pantomimed enchanting an object with a magic wand. “Not ‘abracadabra’ zap. I mean microwave.”

  “Yes.” Jessamyne settled back in her seat and thought about taking out her knitting. Michael had loved to watch her knit as they sat by the fire. But everyone else here would probably cackle at her; witches did not knit, not even those on the brink of retirement.

  She surveyed the others. Pointed hats, a few white ruffled bonnets on the really old witches. Some wore buttons they had purchased at the airport gift shop: I SURVIVED THE INQUISITION, OLD WITCHES NEVER DIE, THEY JUST LOSE THEIR MAGIC. I ♥ BLACK CATS. They were chatting and laughing, milling in the aisles, waving at ancient friends now reunited with them—in short, having a high old time.

  Jessamyne only dimly remembered a few of their faces. Along with everything else, she had given up attending Sabbats and Samhains. All Hallows’ Eve found her handing out candy to little mortals. And how many times had she hidden her tears from Michael on the various Friday the Thirteenths, remembering all the fun she used to have? Curdling milk, backing up chimneys—ah, those had been good days!

  And now those days were nothing more than memories. Michael was gone the way of all mortal men, and she, old before her time, was on her way to the Royal Home for English Witches in Kent. Gathered with some other British war brides—those wars ranging from the French and Indian War, the Revolutionary War, the War Between the States, and so forth—she was going home.

  But could it be that she and she alone was the only witch who had stopped using her powers to please her husband? Surely not; there had been an American television series about that very thing. Bewitched. She had watched it not so much for amusement as for instruction, and had found it soothing on those days when it just didn’t make much sense not to launch her husband to the top of his profession, conjure up expensive cars and beautiful clothes and gems for herself, and keep them both young-looking as long as possible. No, no, no, he had insisted. And, because she loved him, she had obeyed him.

  Now, her powers fading both with disuse and with age—though she was only three hundred and twelve years old—she wondered if she had done the right thing.

  “Miss, miss!” Drucilla cried, waving her hand in the air. “Miss!”

  “Yes, ma’am?” A flight attendant bustled over. Oh, fabulous creature. She wore a short, tight black dress draped over her bosom and a heavy necklace of jet shaped into a bat. Her black hair fell to the small of her back. Jessamyne’s hair had been black. At first she had had
to bleach it gray to match Michael’s as he aged (so rapidly!) but very quickly it began to lighten and to dull. It would take powerful restorative magic to blacken it now. That, or a visit to a beauty parlor. How they would laugh at her for that.

  “The newt, is it fresh?”

  The stewardess smiled kindly. “I’m afraid not, ma’am. But we do have a nice dessert of floating toad.”

  “Oh, bloody good!” Drucilla clapped her hands together. “Jessamyne, isn’t that wonderful?”

  Jessamyne winced. She had never fallen into the American habit of calling perfect strangers by their first names. But they were all wearing name tags emblazoned with HELLO, MY NAME IS and their names printed in thick red ink. (It was supposed to look like blood, but it didn’t. It didn’t smell like blood, either, so what was the point?)

  “Oh, yes, yummy toads for all you nice ladies,” the beautiful young attendant went on, including Jessamyne in her smile. Jessamyne had a dismal image of someone in a nurse’s cap and dress saying exactly the same thing in one or two days’ time.

  She shifted uncomfortably. Perhaps this was all a big mistake. She had thought that returning to the Sisterhood would be a wonderful thing. Her thirst for coven life had gone unquenched for over sixty years, and the idea of spending her last century or so with rooms and rooms of other aged witches had been nothing less than an oasis to her. But was it a mirage? As she looked around at the humped old ladies, she thought, Am I like that? How did it happen so soon?

  As the kids of today also said: Use it or lose it.

  “More Bloody Marys!” an old crone shouted three rows away.

  The stewardess smiled again at them both and said, “Anything you ladies need, y’all just let me know.” She had a slight Texas twang. Michael had had relatives in Texas.

  Oh, Michael. She pushed the recline button on her seat and closed her eyes, allowing his image to enter her mind’s eye even though it still hurt. She remembered when she had first seen him, fresh from battle—he had conquered the beach in Normandy! She was visiting a cousin in the London hospital, a warlock once removed who had insisted on doing his bit for Britain, and had actually been wounded. (No one knew how that had happened! There had been a few jokes about his patrimony—the milkman, the mailman, the Grand Inquisitor, and so on, but he had taken them all with good grace.)