Monstrous Affections

by David Nickle

  The tea-drinking man was breathing hard now. He looked at her like a crazy man, eyes wet. “What if they’d been left on their own?”

  And then he went silent and watched.

  The swamp witch took a breath, felt it hitch in her chest. Then she let it out again, in a low cough.

  “You’re infectious,” she said.

  “What?” said Linda from behind him.

  “Infectious. The dream sickness,” she said. “You look at the past and start to think maybe that could be better than now. You can’t move, it’s so bad — can’t even think.”

  The tea-drinking man shrugged. “I been around, madame.”

  “Around,” said swamp witch. “Surely not around here. This place is mine. There’s no sickness, no dreaming sadness. These folks are happy as they are. So I’ll say it: you’re quarantined from this town.” She glanced back at Linda, who looked back at her miserably, awash in inconsolable regret.

  “That’s how it is.”

  Swamp witch glared once more at the tea-drinking man. The tea-drinking man smiled sadly.

  “I am — ”

  “ — sorry,” finished swamp witch. “I know.”

  And then swamp witch raised up her arms, cast a wink up to her dragonfly, and set a hex upon the tea-drinking man. “Begone,” she said.

  He stood up. Set his saucer and cup down. Looked a little sadder, if that were possible.

  “I was just leaving.”

  And with that, he stepped out the door, through the yard, over the road and into the mist of the swampland.

  “Stay away from my hutch, mind you,” swamp witch hollered after his diminishing shade. “I mean it!” And she thought she saw him shrug a bit before the wisps of mist engulfed him and took him, poor dream-sick man that he was, away from the town that swamp witch loved so.

  Swamp witch left shortly after that, and she didn’t feel bad about it neither. If she’d been a better person, maybe she’d have sat with the girl until she’d calmed down. Maybe cast another little hex to help her through it. But swamp witch couldn’t help thinking that one of the things poor old Linda was regretting was her own complicity in the bunch that’d driven swamp witch from her home those years ago and into the mud of the Okehole Wetlands for good.

  Let her stew a bit, an unkind part of swamp witch thought as she left the girl alone in her kitchen.

  And even if swamp witch wasn’t feeling mean, she felt she had an excuse: after having spent a moment with the tea-drinking man, swamp witch couldn’t be sure what regret was real and what was just symptomatic. So she called down dragonfly to her shoulder and headed off to town. That’s what Saturday was for, after all. It was very bad, worse than she’d thought. This tea-drinking man hadn’t, as swamp witch first assumed, just started his visit to town setting in Linda’s Poppa’s easy chair. That was probably his last stop on the way through, spreading his dreaming sickness all over the town. Wandering here or there, giving a little sneeze or a cough as he passed by a fellow fixing his garage door or another loading groceries into his truck, or worst of all, a woman by herself, smoking a cigarette and staring at a cloud overhead wondering where the years had gone. He would leave behind him a wake of furrowed brows and teary eyes and fresh fault lines in healed-up hearts.

  And those were the ones he’d passed. The others — the ones he spent a moment with, said hello to or spoke of this or that —

  — there would only be one word for those:

  Inconsolable.

  Swamp witch was set to figuring now that the tea-drinking man wasn’t just a carrier of the bug, like she’d first thought. He was guilty as sin. He was a caster.

  And swamp witch was starting to think that he might not be alone. He might not, he might not . . .

  She closed her eyes and took a breath.

  When she opened her eyes, swamp witch headed across the downtown with more care. Her dragonfly hid in the curl of her hair and she kept underneath awnings and away from street lamps, and as she did, dragonfly asked her questions with the buzz of its wings.

  — What does tomorrow bring? he asked.

  Swamp witch opened her mouth to speak it: sorrow.

  But she did not. She simply stopped.

  — And the day after? wondered dragonfly.

  — Who knows? whispered swamp witch. But she did know, and she stopped, in the crook of two sidewalk cracks. All she could see was her boy, whose name would be Horace, lying with the gossamer yellow of new beard on his face and his eyes glazed and silvered in the sheen of death. Her girl Ellen, old and bent, rattling in a hospital bed. These were not tomorrow — nor the day after either. But they were bad days ahead — days she’d rather not have happen.

  — Dream sickness gotcha, said dragonfly. Only you regret what comes, not what’s been.

  — You are wise, said swamp witch, her voice shaking. She tried to think of a hex to drive it off, but the ones she knew were all for others.

  — Think backwards then, dragonfly suggested. Think of the time you were born.

  Swamp witch tried but it was like trying to turn a boat in a fast-moving river. Always she was bent back to forward.

  “Need help?”

  Swamp witch looked up. There, standing in the middle of the road, his hands behind his back, was the yellow-jacketed tea-drinking man. He had a half-way grin on him that salesmen got when they wondered if maybe you were going to buy that car today all on your own, or maybe needed a little help. He unfolded his hands and started strolling up the way to see her.

  “You were banished,” said swamp witch. “I said begone!”

  “I went,” said the tea-drinking man. “Oh yes. I begoned all right. Right through the swamp. Steered clear of your home there too. Like you demanded.”

  “Then why — ?”

  “Why’m I here?” He stepped up onto the curb. He shook his head. “Let me ask you a question.”

  Swamp witch tried to move — to do something about this. She didn’t want him to ask her a question particularly: didn’t think it would go anywhere good.

  “Just hypothetical,” he said.

  Shut up, thought swamp witch, but her lips wouldn’t move, plastered shut as they were by contemporaneous regret.

  “Oh what,” he said, “if the town were left on its own?”

  “You asked me that earlier.”

  “Well think about it then. What if you’d just left it. Left it to have a name and a place in the world. Left the folks to see the consequences of their activities. Vulnerable you say and maybe so. But better that than this amber bauble of a home you’ve crafted, hidden away from the world of witches and kept for yourself. Selfish, wicked swamp witch.”

  “What — ”

  The tea-drinking man leaned close. He breathed a fog of lament her way.

  “I didn’t care for it,” he said. “Tossin’ me out like that.”

  Swamp witch swallowed hard. “I don’t,” she said, “feel bad about any of that.”

  He smiled. “No?”

  Swamp witch stood. “No.” She stepped over the crack. Away from the tea-drinking man. “No regrets.”

  As she walked away, she heard him snicker, a sound like the shuffling of a dirty old poker deck.

  “None,” she said.

  Swamp witch lied, though. To hide it, she meandered across the parking lot of the five and dime, tears streaming down from her eyes, feeling like her middle’d been removed with the awful regret of it all but hiding it in the hunch of her shoulders.

  It was low cowardice. For what business had it been of hers, to take the town and curl it in the protection of her arms like she was its Goddamned mother and not its shunned daughter?

  She took a few more steps, over to the little berm at the parking lot’s edge. Then she walked no more — falling into the sweet grass and sucking its green, fresh smell.

  “You lie,” said tea-drinking man.

  She looked up. He was standing over her now, his grin wider than ever she’d thought it could
be, on one so stoked with regret.

  “You are beset with it,” he said.

  And then he spread his fingers, which crept wider than swamp witch thought they could — and down they came around her, like a cage of twig and sapling.

  “Begone,” she said, but the tea-drinking man shook his head. He didn’t have to say: Only works if you mean it, that hex. And then, it only works the once.

  And with that, he had her. Swamp witch fell into a pit inside her — one with holes in the side of it, that looked ahead and back with the same misery. She shut her eyes and did what the sad do best: fell into a deep and honeyed sleep, where past and future mixed.

  She awoke a time later, in a bad way for a couple of reasons.

  First, she was in church: Reverend Balchy’s church, which was not a good place for her or anyone.

  And second, dragonfly was gone.

  In the church this was a bad thing. For swamp witch knew that Reverend Balchy had against her advice gone in with the snake dancers’ way, turning many in his Baptist congregation from their religion, and welcoming in their place whole families of the Okehole corner rattlers that the Reverend used. Sitting up on the pew, swamp witch feared for dragonfly, for there was nothing that a corner rattler liked better than the crunch of a dragonfly’s wing.

  Swamp witch called out softly, looking up to the water-stained drop-ceiling with its flickery fluorescent tubes, the dried, cut rushes at the blacked-out windows, the twist of serpent-spine that was nailed up on along the One Cross’s middle piece.

  She poked her toe at the floor, and snatched it back again as the arrow-tip head of a corner rattler slashed out from the pew’s shadow. Swamp witch wouldn’t give it a second chance. She gathered her feet beneath her and stood on the seat-bench, so she could better see.

  “Dragonfly!” she hissed.

  There was no answer, but for the soft chuk-a-chuk samba of snake tail.

  That, and an irregular thump-thump — like a hammer on plywood — coming from the hallway behind the dais.

  Swamp witch squinted.

  “Annabel?” she called.

  “Yes’m.”

  From around the top corner of the doorframe, Annabel Balchy’s little face peered at her.

  “You come on out,” said swamp witch.

  Annabel frowned. “You ain’t going to transform me into nothing Satanic, are you?”

  “When have I ever done that?”

  “Papa says — ”

  “Papas say a lot of things,” said swamp witch. “Now come on out.”

  Annabel’s face disappeared for a moment, there were a couple more thump-thumps, and the girl teetered into the worship hall, atop a pair of hazelwood stilts that swamp witch thought she recognized.

  “Those your brother’s?”

  Annabel thrust her chin out. “I grew into them.”

  “You’re growing into more than those stilts,” said swamp witch. Like the rest of the Balchies, Annabel was a blonde-haired specimen of loveliness whose green eyes held a sheen of wisdom. Looking at her, swamp witch thought her brother Tommy would no longer hold title as the family’s number-one heartbreaker. Not in another year or two.

  “We got your dragonfly,” said Annabel, teetering over a little slithering pond of shadow. “He brung you here, in case you didn’t know.”

  “I didn’t know,” said swamp witch. “I’m not surprised, though. He’s a good dragonfly. Is he all right?”

  “Uh huh. We got him at the house. Figured you could take care of yourself, big old swamp witch that you are. But we didn’t think he’d be safe among the Blessed Serpents of Eden.”

  “They’re just plain corner rattlers, hon, and I’m no safer than anyone else when one decides to bite. But thank you for protecting dragonfly. Did he say why he brung — brought me here?”

  “Figured it’d be the one place where the angel couldn’t come.”

  “The angel.”

  “In the yellow suit,” said Annabel. “With a vest underneath black as all damnation.”

  “Him. Huh. He’s no angel.”

  “That’s what you say. He’s huntin’ you, and you’re a swamp witch — ”

  “ — so it follows he’s got to be an angel.” Swamp witch sighed. “I see.”

  “Papa said you’d probably be wondering why we didn’t give you up to that angel.”

  “Your papa’s a bright man,” said swamp witch. “The thought did cross my mind.”

  “Papa said to tell you he don’t like the competition,” said Annabel.

  Swamp witch laughed out loud at that one. “I believe it,” she said. “Oh, yes.”

  Laughing felt good. It may not be the antidote to regret, but it sure helped the symptoms fine. All the same, she took a breath and put it away.

  “He sent you to see if I was dead, didn’t he?”

  Annabel looked down and shook off a rattler that was spiralling up toward her heel. “Yes, ma’am,” she said, a little ashamedly. “But he said you might not be. If, I mean, you was righteous.”

  “So I’m righteous then?”

  Annabel crooked her head like she was thinking about it.

  “I expect,” she said. “Yeah, good chance you are.”

  “All right,” said swamp witch. “But if you don’t mind, I’ll take no more chances. You still got that spare set of bamboo stilts I know Reverend used to use in back?” Annabel said she did, so swamp witch held out her hand. “Think you could toss ’em my way? I’d like to go see my dragonfly and maybe your Papa too.”

  A moment later, the church hall was filled with a racket like summer’s rain on a metal shed. Swamp witch was making her escape, and that pleased the corner rattlers not at all.

  Swamp witch dropped the two stilts by the Reverend’s porch and went in for her meeting. The porch was screened in and the Reverend was there, sitting on an old ratty recliner covered in plastic. Dragonfly was sitting quiet on the table beside him, in a big pickle jar with a lid someone had jammed nails through, just twice. Reverend looked as smug as he could manage, his face stiffened like it was with all the rattler venom.

  Swamp witch understood there were days he’d been different: all stoked with holy-roller fire, straight-backed with a level gaze that could melt swamp witch where she stood. That was before he’d found the serpent spittle, before swamp witch had found her own calling.

  Did he have any regrets? she wondered. Maybe taking the snake tooth into his arm, letting it course through him ’til he couldn’t even sit up on his own? Raising his young by nought but telepathy and bad example?

  Did he regret any of it? She thought that he didn’t.

  “Papa says you look like hell,” said Annabel.

  “Thank you, Reverend. You are as ever a font of manly righteousness.”

  Reverend lifted his hand an inch off the armrest, and his lips struggled to make an “o.”

  “Papa’s cross with you,” said Annabel. “He called you a temptress.”

  “Well make up your mind,” said swamp witch, laughing. Then she made serious. “We got problems here, Reverend.”

  The Reverend agreed, making a farting noise with his mouth.

  “This tea-drinking angel,” said swamp witch. “You reckon you know what he’s here for?”

  “You,” said Annabel.

  “You answered too fast,” said swamp witch. “What’s your Papa got to say?”

  The Reverend’s hand settled back onto the arm of his chair, and he sighed like a balloon deflating. Dragonfly’s wings slapped against the glass of the jar.

  “Angel wants Okehole.” Annabel put her head down. “All of it.” She looked up between strands of perfect blonde hair. “Its souls.”

  Swamp witch rolled her eyes. Everything was about souls to the Reverend. Flesh to him was an inconvenience — a conveyance at best and lately, a broken down Oldsmobile. The tea-drinking man wasn’t an angel and he didn’t want souls. But she nodded for the Reverend to keep going.

  “He’s aiming for y
ou,” said Annabel, “because you got all the souls.”

  Which was another thing that Reverend believed. This time swamp witch would not keep quiet. “I do not have all the souls, Reverend. You know what I done here and it’s not soul stealing.”

  “Ain’t it?” said Annabel. “Puttin’ us all in a jar here — just like your bug! Comin’ to visit each Saturday and otherwise just keepin’ us here? Ain’t that soul stealin’?”

  Swamp witch sighed. “Tell me what you know about your soul-stealin’ angel.”

  The Reverend sighed and coughed and his head twitched up to look at her.

  “He came by here this afternoon,” said Annabel. “Annabel — that’s me — brought him some iced tea made like he asked. He talked about the Garden — about the day that Eve bit that apple and brung it to Adam. He asked me, ‘What if Adam had said to Eve: I don’t want your awful food; I am faithful to Jehovah, for He has said to me: “Eat not that fruit.” What if Adam had turned his face upward to Jehovah, and said: I am content in this garden with Your love, and want not this woman’s lies of knowledge and truth. She has betrayed you, O Lord, not I. Not I. If that happened, would you sustain on serpent venom? Would she be the keeper of your town’s souls?’” Annabel nodded and looked right at swamp witch. “By ‘she’ I took him to mean you. That’s what Papa says.”

  “So what did you say to that, I wonder?” said swamp witch.

  The Reverend’s lips twitched, and Annabel hollered:

  “Begone!” The Reverend’s eyes lit up then as his little girl spoke his word. “I am not some shallow parishioner, some Sunday-school dropout, some holiday churchgoer — oh no, the venom as you call it is holy, the blood of the prickly one and I am His vessel! Begone! Git now!”

  “Your faith saved you,” said swamp witch drily.

  “Papa ain’t finished,” scolded Annabel. “He says the tea-drinking man got all huffy then. He was calm up ’til then and suddenly his face got all red. The rims of his eyes got darker red, like they was bleedin’, and the lines of his gums got the same colour as that. And his teeth seemed to go all long and snaggly with broke ends. And he said to my Papa:

  “‘You don’t tell me what to do. You don’t tell me nothin’. This town will weep for me, like it wept for her.’”