by Wither
And, unexpectedly, found herself relieved. She’d expected it to be like the moment when a drowning victim can no longer hold their breath and gives herself to the water. But it was not. As she gave herself to her grief, it ceased to be an infinite thing, ceased to be the vast and life-smothering blackness she’d feared, and became instead something finite, already lightening at its borders. Something that could be endured. Something that could be survived.
Her eyes snapped open, and she saw with greater clarity now the Volvo’s speckled windshield in need of washing, the cluttered garage in need of cleaning. Spring projects, after a long winter. She felt a strange melodic calm, and far beneath it a counterpart melancholy, barely audible now, only a resonant hum. It was the aggregate sound, she imagined, of microscopic healing. Thank you, Wendy, she thought.
She got out of the car and headed inside with the take-out roast chicken and stuffing she’d bought for herself and the fugitive she was harboring. “Art?” she called, entering the house.
“Hey!” he said, coming across the kitchen toward her.
“Any luck on the ”Net?“ she asked. She’d left him this morning working at her laptop and modem, with an old paisley handkerchief tied across his eye, that made him look like a digital-age buccaneer. He relieved her of the burden of the take-out bag.
“No. I couldn’t get access to any county records on-line. And you can’t exactly do a Yahoo! search for ”Town Curses“”
He was just removing the Styrofoam containers from the bag when the doorbell rang.
They both froze, turning in the direction of the sound.
“Who is it?” Art asked Karen in a frightened whisper.
“I don’t know.” Karen could see a man in profile through the front door’s leaded glass. She pushed Art back into the dark dining room adjacent, out of the line of sight should the visitor at the front door choose to peer in through the windows.
Bracing herself for the sight of a half-dozen U.S. marshals on the porch, she walked to the door and opened it…
And found Paul. He stood shifting nervously under the porch light.
They stood in silence for several heartbeats, already becoming strangers to each other after only a few day’s absence. He looked tired, she thought, and she felt a sudden unexpected tug of longing for him. He hesitated on the threshold of the house, round-shouldered and vulnerable, hands thrust deep within his pockets, as if he couldn’t trust himself in the situation he was entering. As if he was afraid she’d turned to glass.
“You rang the doorbell?” she said, surprised he hadn’t used his key.
“I didn’t think I should just come in…,” he said miserably.
She opened her arms to him and he stepped forward into her embrace. She clung to him, kissed his sunburned ears, smelled the cigarette smoke in his shaggy hair. She clung to him hard, there on the front porch, within full sight of God and all the neighbors, and for the first time she didn’t care.
He buried his face in her neck, and she thought he might be crying. She heard him say, “I haven’t slept… I thought I’d lost everyone who meant anything to me. First you…then my brother…”
“You’d better come inside then,” she said finally, breaking their embrace. “There’s someone here.”
Confusion crossed his face, but he nodded and allowed himself to be led inside by the hand.
Art had been incorrect in assuming his brother would try to talk him into turning himself in to the police.
“We’ve got to get you the hell out of town!” Paul said. “Now! Tonight!”
“I can’t,” Art said. “They’ll have notified all the bus and train stations within a hundred-mile radius. And there’s no way I’d make it past airport security”
“You can take my truck, then,” Paul said. “You can be in Canada by morning.”
“I can’t drive, not with one eye. My depth perception is shot.” He didn’t say that his night vision seemed to be improving in his bad eye. Reminded of his injuries, he adjusted his handkerchief eye patch. Even this tiny bit of movement ignited a roman candle behind the closed eyelid. At least the pain had subsided from the light shows, though.
“I’ll drive you, then,” Paul said.
“Are you kidding?” Karen said, leaning forward at the kitchen table. “I’m sure the police are watching you.”
Paul frowned at this. “They did turn my place upside down looking for Art,” he said.
“Of course they did,” Karen said. “Bill Nottingham went to school with all of us, he knows how close you are with your brother. He’ll expect you to try to hide him.”
Paul sighed, knowing she was right. “He can’t stay here, though. It’s only a matter of time before they come looking for him here. We’ve got to take a chance to sneak him out of town.”
Karen considered a moment, then said, “If you wait until Halloween, there’ll be another twenty thousand tourists here for the parade, you won’t be so conspicuous.”
Art looked at his brother across the kitchen table, and Paul nodded once. It was a plan.
Art said, “I never thought I’d actually be grateful to the stupid fucking King Frost Parade—”
He stopped abruptly as the house lights flickered suddenly and died. The house was plunged in darkness. Paul went to the window, moved the curtain so he could look out at the street.
“Whole neighborhood’s out. Must’ve blown a transformer.”
“I have candles here somewhere,” Karen said, and went to a junk drawer beside the sink where she kept every misfit item she didn’t want cluttering tabletops: old batteries, picture hangers, a tack hammer, flashlight.
Candles. In a dozen loose varieties, birthday, practical joke (they sputtered back to life after you blew them out), plain white beeswax…
She took out two squat candles the diameter of soda cans, and borrowed Paul’s Zippo to light them. She found herself strangely captivated by the lighter’s blue flame as she held it first to one wick, and then the other. The second wick was stubborn, and as she struggled to get it to take the flame she smelled the mingling scents of butane and acrid wax—
And that’s what triggered it.
“Christ, she’ll swallow her tongue!” Paul said as he and Art crouched beside Karen on the kitchen floor. Her eyes were rolled back in their sockets so that only thin crescents of white showed beneath fluttering lids; her convulsing limbs drummed the kitchen’s linoleum. It was a tonic-clonic seizure, and as the electrical storm cascaded through her nervous system she alternated between stiffened limbs and spasming.
Art began searching for something to wedge between Karen’s clenched teeth. He snatched a hand towel from the refrigerator door and stretched it tight between his hands.
As he crouched down to try to wedge it like a horse’s bit into her mouth, Karen suddenly froze, her face snapping toward Art.
“No!” she barked, and her voice was gravelly and deep, a guttural sound.
Art froze. In the flickering candlelight, Karen showed a horrible grin, and she fixed him with a hateful and pupil-less gaze.
“I did not!” she said again, filled with fury.
Paul recoiled from her, watching her head loll from side to side, as if a captive enemy of this spasming body. Finally he mustered the courage to try to approach her again.
“Karen, it’s me, it’s okay—”
“Stay back,” Art said, motioning Paul to keep his distance. They watched as Karen dragged herself backward across the linoleum, like an animal with a broken back trying to crawl to the roadside.
When she reached the corner where counters came together she pulled herself upright into a seated position and lay there with legs splayed, a feral rag doll.
She glared at them, panting.
“Release me!” she roared, and Art felt his hackles rise as he realized there was a fourth person in the room with them.
“Who are you?” Art asked, trying to control the quaver in his voice.
“You know us!”
she said, head thrashing side to side in agony. “You have accused us!”
Art shot a helpless glance to Paul. He began improvising, hoping if he stalled long enough the seizure would abate…
“I don’t understand. Accused you of what?”
“Malefic doings…congress with the devil…murder!”
Art had a flash of inspiration. “State your name for the record!” he shouted imperiously
“Rebecca Cole!” Karen shouted back at him. She’d hooked her fingers through drawer handles to either side of her, and thrashed now, as if manacled there. Art was glad for the delusion. “Would you? Would you?” She glared at him with lethal rage. She spat, catching Art on the cheek. Her saliva burned like molten wax.
“What’s wrong with her?” Paul asked as Art wiped his cheek
“She thinks she’s one of the Windale witches. I don’t know why-”
“WOULD YOU?” she barked at him from her corner, and when she’d gotten Art’s attention again: “Would you send a child to your gallows?”
“What child? I don’t understand”
“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. But what of her unborn child?” She strained at her imagined manacles. “Would you cast your own babe into the Pit? Would you…,magistrate?” She pronounced the title of office with equal parts venom and derision.
Paul had inched his way toward the phone. “I’m calling an ambulance,” he said in a harsh whisper. “We can’t let this go on any longer!”
Art raised his hand. “I have an idea how to end it.” Karen had begun screaming a torrent of obscenities at them both. He picked up one of the candles still burning on the table and held it out before him as he slid across the floor toward Karen. Her fury intensified, and dark blood began pouring from her nostrils. It stained her teeth a glistening crimson.
“Rebecca Cole!” Art said sharply, stilling her like a thunderclap. He held the candle up, and she fixed on it, following its slow hypnotic trajectory through the air. “Rebecca Cole, you stand accused of betraying your God and murdering the innocent—”
“Ah! WHORE-LOVER! YOU FUCKING—”
“If it is Satan’s embrace you cherish, then it is into Satan’s arms we shall send you—”
“I SHALL GIVE THEE BLOOD TO DRINK!” She screamed, and the kitchen drawers rattled as she convulsed, the first spilling free. Art didn’t back away, even as she reached for him.
“…and so I sentence you to be hanged from the neck until dead!”
“NOOOOooooo!”
And Art blew out the candle. Instantly she slumped, going limp on the linoleum. Paul rushed to her, cradling her in his arms as she whimpered and drew herself into a fetal ball.
When her eyes fluttered opened moments later, she looked at them blankly. “What happened to me?” she asked, searching Paul’s face. “Where am I?”
Paul threw his brother a helpless look, and so Art answered for him:
“The twentieth century.”
When Wendy sat down to change the gauze bandage on her thigh that night, she was amazed that the parallel row of deep cuts had almost completely healed, leaving four five-inch-long red lines no more threatening than paper cuts. With a disbelieving shake of her head, she rolled up the bandage and tossed it in the trash can.
Just as she was buttoning her black jeans, her mother knocked on her bedroom door, leaned in, and told her that Alex had arrived. “Don’t sound so surprised, Mom,” Wendy said.
“Stop being so sensitive,” her mother said. “You are going to see him, aren’t you?”
“Yes, Mother, we reached a detente,” Wendy said. “Actually, I invited him over.” And was she feeling a bit of “stage fright” now? She wanted to show him all of her magical items, try to make him understand, convince him to help her. But what if he thought all of it was ludicrous? Was she prepared for that? No holding back, she thought. No turning back.
“Send him up, Mom,” she said.
“Wendy,” her mother said, slipping into her cautionary mode. “Don’t forget your father and I have that fund-raiser tonight. You have the house alone for the night… so please don’t make me regret it.”
“I won’t, Carol. Believe me, I won’t.”
“Don’t take that tone with me, young lady!”
“Sorry,” Wendy said. “I just wish you would learn to trust me.”
“Trust has to be earned,” her mother said, then nodded.
Wendy rolled her eyes and sighed.
A moment after her mother left, Wendy examined the scattered books and clothes, the soda cans and paper cups from a fresh perspective, and decided that some careful weeding might be in order. She picked up her trash can and quickly filled it with paper, plastic, and aluminum; a recycling sort could come later. She gathered clothing from her headboard, bookshelves, chair back, and exercise bicycle. She carried the bulky pile to her door, but heard athletically quick footfalls coming up the stairs. She’d never make it to the bathroom hamper unseen, so she turned 180 degrees and headed for her closet, wedging the wadded ball of clothes in among her shoes and trash bags full of sweaters. Knuckles rapped on her door. She kicked at the clothes avalanching out of the closet. “Just a minute,” she said, forcing the door shut. “Coming.” She ran to her bedroom door, took what she hoped was a calming deep breath, then swung the door open.
Alex stood there, smiling nervously. He was carrying a small paper bag.
“Come in,” she said. “I work better sitting in the clutter.” She closed the door. “Have a seat,” she said, indicating the wicker chair by the window.
“Um, I brought you something,” he said, looking down into the bag he was carrying. “I’ve been carrying it around most of the day.” He took out a single red rose, stem cut short so it could be worn as a corsage. “Guess it doesn’t look so hot anymore…” Discouraged, he dropped the rose back into the bag; Wendy took it from him, smiling, and carefully fastened it to her hair. She gave him a slightly awkward thank-you kiss. She didn’t feel it so much as experience the brief pressure, the skip of her heartbeat. Her imagination raced ahead to a time when they might be comfortable at this.
Alex smiled and stumbled a bit as he sat in the chair, his eyes scanning the room, gaze resting briefly on the wooden pentagram.
“So, what do you think?”
She tried to examine her surroundings from his perspective. Scattered magazines. A large poster of a forest view pinned to the back of her bedroom door, a nature calendar on the wall by her closet. Aside from the unusually titled books and the wall pentagram, she saw nothing really bizarre. He asked about her exercise bicycle facing the wall map of the United States, and she explained her mental journey on the bike. “Can’t wait to get to the French Quarter in New Orleans,” she said.
“You’ll probably make it to the Grand Canyon by the end of the semester,” he said, chuckling.
“And not one sacrificial altar in the whole mess.”
He took a deep breath and said, “I wasn’t sure what to expect.”
“All of my—” She was about to say magic, then realized how ridiculous that might sound to him. “Everything I do is related to nature, recognizing the power of nature, which feeds and nourishes us, and interacts with it.”
“How so?”
“Long ago, some plants and herbs were identified as having certain medicinal qualities. Some could make you drowsy, or alert, or even heal you, like aloe heals burned skin. What I do is based on that foundation but extended to include other areas of life, such as emotions, luck, success, fulfillment. Extend that again to other areas of nature, bringing in the four elements: air, fire, water, and Mother Earth. So a diamond aids strength and builds everlasting ties, laurel promotes fame and victory, quartz is used to aid concentration.” She smiled, touched her hair, and looked away briefly. “A rose facilitates love.”
“And how do the elements figure into this?”
“The elements are the expression of the…magic,” she said. “In magical grammar, the items—herb
s or stones or whatever—are like words, and the elements are the sentence structure. Fire is used in banishings because it burns away whatever it touches.” Alex frowned. “Say you had a bad habit you wanted to quit, you would write it on a piece of parchment, then burn it over a flame.”
“Oh,” he said, still slightly confused.
“Or water,” she said, trying to clarify “To receive the healing properties of parsley, you would measure the proper dose, grind it to powder, mix it with fresh water, and drink it.”
“So you’re absorbing the magical property because you’re drinking it.”
“Just like taking a pill,” she said with a smile. “Except staying in touch with nature, instead of the machine that stamped out the pill.”
She hopped off the bed, opened her cedar chest, and showed him some of her brass candleholders and burner. “I use these when I’m performing…incantations,” she said, watching his expression intently for signs of disapproval.
“Why antiques?”
“They were made by hand more than machine, so they’re closer to nature than assembly lines. The older, the better.” She put everything away and closed the lid of the chest. “Let’s go to the basement. Don’t worry, no altars down there either.”
Down in the basement, Wendy didn’t comment on The Hunting Horror of her father’s side of the basement except to ask, “You’re not a hunter, are you?” Alex shook his head. “Good,” Wendy said. She bypassed the old frame pyramid and continued on to her desk and wall shelves. She pulled the dividing curtain along its track to isolate her and Alex in her special place. “I keep all my herbs, seeds flowers, and stones here.”
