The Bell Witch

by John F. D. Taff

  All of the week’s pressures surged forward inside Lucy, breaking something substantial that kept her seated.

  The chair lurched back, clattered to the floor, and Lucy stood to face him. “You’ll not do that, Jack Bell, to anyone! Never again! I’ve had enough to last me a lifetime, and I’ll have no more!”

  Behind them, a door creaked open, slammed shut, but neither turned to see Saloma slip away.

  “I’m trying to help Betsy, and all you can do is hurt, hurt, hurt. Dr. Hopson, Naddy, now me. So help me God, Jack, help me or get out of my way. But don’t ever lay a hand on me or anyone else in this house again!”

  Jack stared at her with his anger turning to pure amazement, and his hands twitching at his sides.

  Lucy looked once at those hands, and bored her eyes into him. She dared him to lift them against her; feared that, despite this outburst, he would.

  And what would she do if he did?

  Slowly lowering his hands, Jack noticed that he was shaking, too, as much as Lucy. He looked down at her hands, curled into fists—into fists!—and saw a trickle of blood drip from one. “Luce,” he whispered between dry lips. “You’re bleeding.”

  The whole room seemed to pitch at a crazy angle as she unclenched her right hand, saw the blood. A shard of the broken cup had sliced the base of her thumb, and blood oozed from the wound with every movement of her hand.

  Roughly, she wiped the blood onto her apron, where it screamed like an accusation at him.

  “It’s just that…” he began, reaching to her.

  Shrugging him off, she walked to the table where Saloma had been sealing pies, dipped the edge of her apron into a pitcher of water, and daubed at the cut. “I can’t talk with you now, Jack Bell. I’m so angry. You’ve embarrassed me in front of a good friend, made me take the Lord’s name in vain, and hurt me to boot. If you’re really sorry, and I hope you are, think about what a fool you’ve been over the last week while our daughter could be dying. Then come talk to me.”

  She stared straight at him, walked past him and out of the room.

  He felt the cold air of her passing. Grimacing, he slammed his fist onto the table, upsetting more crockery.

  That seemed to drain the last dregs of anger from him, leaving him with nothing but a sour feeling in his gut.

  And guilt.

  Always more guilt.

  NINE

  Saturday morning came bright and clear as any cold February day. The sky was a deep sea blue flecked with high, wispy clouds that frayed as they stretched to the horizon. The sunlight and a gentle wind made the day balmy in comparison with the last week.

  Jack, John and some of the older black men tramped out at half past four in the morning to take care of the horses, pigs and other animals. Drew, Zach and Williams helped a group of young black children milk the cows, feed the chickens and collect eggs.

  After gobbling breakfast, the three boys excused themselves from the table, headed back outside. Laughing and running, the boys quickly put distance between themselves and the farm, their bright chatter carrying far on the crisp air.

  Williams led them through the bare trees and up ragged hills with no apparent destination in mind. Along the way, one or the other would stop, pick up a stick, and a sword fight would erupt. The wooden clacking and high-pitched squealing disturbed a flight of birds, and drew the wrath of an irate, chittering squirrel.

  As they neared the Red River, which snaked along the northwestern boundary of the Bell property, Williams struck off southwest, down a ravine, and across a dry creek bed matted with damp, rust-colored leaves. Zach and Drew stopped at the crest of the cleft, watching Williams proceed alone.

  Williams, realizing they had stopped following, turned and called to them. “What’s the matter?”

  For a minute, the two younger boys said nothing. Drew corked his thumb in his mouth. Finally, Zach spoke up. “We can’t go there, Willie. Mama says Pa’ll whup us good if we go back in there again.”

  “Yeah,” croaked Drew around his thumb.

  “Aw, you babies! You’re just afraid of going, that’s all. Just chicken!”

  “Am not!” yelled Zach, stamping his foot on the ground and snapping a thick, rotten branch, which startled Drew.

  “Are too!” Williams yelled, but they refused to budge. “All right, I’m going by myself. Anyone who doesn’t go is a sissy, and I’ll tell everyone so.”

  With that, he turned and walked off, knowing they’d follow.

  Zach watched Williams’ back with wide-eyed uncertainty. He couldn’t believe that Williams would actually go into that dark, awful cave alone. An almost awestruck pride of his older brother possessed him, and, without a word, he trotted down the hillside after him.

  Williams, hearing footsteps behind him, smiled.

  Seeing the other two leave without him quickly changed Drew’s mind. He was afraid, very afraid of the cave. In fact, it had been his nightmares that had gotten them all into trouble after their last visit late in the summer.

  His fear of being left alone in the woods, however, outweighed his fear of the cave.

  “Wait for me!” he yelled, taking off in pursuit. “Willie, Zach, wait! I’m coming, too!”

  * * *

  The three formed a ragged line as they climbed the side of a steep hill, using exposed tree roots. They reached the top, huffing and puffing, and paused to look down the other side at the entrance to Mud Cave.

  Entrance may have been too grand a word. It was little more than a small, dark hole in the side of the hill, with nothing to mark the spot. The hole was roughly three feet across and vaguely oval, its greater dimension being vertical. The grass grew right up to and into the hole, making it hard to find but also giving it a strangely pleasing, organic look.

  A thin mist rose from it, moist and warmer than the surrounding air, carried aloft by the winds that raced through the caverns from other, unknown entrances.

  Williams climbed carefully down the steep hill, watching his brothers as he did. He knew that if anyone got hurt they’d all get punished, but since he was the oldest, he’d get it worst.

  They gathered around the hole. Williams bent and looked in. A narrow pillar of light fell into the cave through the hole, exposing the slick sides of a sloping chute that opened into a central cavern with a 20-foot ceiling.

  “It looks really muddy in there,” said Williams.

  “But Willie, if we get all muddy, Mama will know we’ve been here,” whined Zach. Drew said nothing, merely watched the exchange with the dawning realization that he really would have to go in with them.

  “No, she won’t,” laughed Williams, peeling off his coat and hanging it on a nearby tree branch.

  “What’re you doing?” asked an incredulous Zach.

  “We’ll leave our coats and stuff up here. That way, when we get dirty, we’ll just cover up with our clean stuff when we leave.”

  Zach looked at Drew, who hadn’t yet realized that Williams expected them to strip, too.

  “Come on, take your stuff off. Or are you gonna chicken out?” Williams asked, hanging his sweater and scarf over the same branch with his coat.

  Goaded, Zach stripped off the coat, two of the three shirts, and the heavy scarf Naddy had layered him with.

  Drew looked on, feverishly sucking his thumb.

  “Drewry, take your clothes off, boy,” Williams chided, swinging his feet into the opening and sitting on its lip.

  Zach looked at Drew and shrugged, then helped the smaller boy off with his things. Drew was little help, and Zach, in exasperation, nearly ripped one of the shirts from his unbending body.

  When all their clothes hung like foliage on the skeletal tree branches, they huddled together in their underwear, shivering in the cold afternoon sun. Smiling fiercely at his brothers—a smile that in itself was a dare—Williams sat on the grass, scooted towards the hole. Then, he disappeared with a wet PLOOSH! and a peal of laughter.

  Zach bent and looked. The sunlight fel
l on Williams upturned face; he was grinning broadly.

  “Come on down, Zach. I’ll catch ya!”

  Zach repeated Williams’ earlier movements, and hurled himself down the muddy channel.

  Drew followed Zach before his fears had time to overwhelm him. He was crying softly when his feet touched the relatively level landing, slipped on the muddy surface. There was a pause in his sobs as he fell forward onto the slimy rocks, which knocked the wind out of him.

  “Come on, Drewry,” hissed Williams, dragging him to his feet.

  “But Willie, I’m all dirty,” he cried, echoing shrilly in the darkness.

  “Be quiet. Remember, the ghosts are listening, and they love to eat babies. If you cry, they may think you’re one and eat you up.”

  “Nuh-uh,” sniffed Drew, looking around warily, his cries fading.

  “Did you find it?” asked Williams, turning to Zach.

  “Yeah.” He pressed a wooden box into Williams’ hands.

  Opening the box, Williams pulled out a clump of candles, a tin candleholder, and a bundle of cloth holding about twenty sulfur matches. The boys had smuggled the box from home the previous year and secretly left them in the cave.

  Sticking a candle into the holder, Williams lit the wick. The match flared loudly. Touched to the candle’s wick, the flame grew stronger, illuminating the boys’ grimy faces.

  Details jumped at them from the darkness.

  The entire cavern shimmered with wet mud, glistening in the yellow light. From all around came the sounds of water, plopping onto rocks, dripping thick droplets of mud down from the ceiling, slipping along the twisting, smooth-curved walls, pooling in depressions in the floor.

  The centuries of water flowing over the insides of the cave rounded its edges, gave it a flowing, sinuous look that added to the atmosphere of being inside something alive, like a great womb. Other than the echoes of their voices, the only sounds in the cave were the steady plip-plip of dripping water and the trill of the wind.

  “Follow me,” ordered a breathless Williams, and he set off into the darkness.

  Without hesitation, Drew and Zach grabbed hands, followed the bobbing globe of light emanating from the sputtering candle.

  * * *

  “I’m cold,” whispered Drew, careful to note Williams’ warning against loud, babyish noises.

  “Stop whining.”

  “Where are we going?” asked Zach, feeling cold, too, but unwilling to reveal this.

  “Shh, we’re getting close. Careful of that step,” Williams warned, but too late.

  Zach felt the floor squelch out from under him. Pinwheeling his arms backward, he smacked Drew, who yelped more in fear than in pain, careened to the muddy floor. Drew followed, shrieking like a ghost himself, and the two boys ended up in a muddy tangle on the ground.

  “We’re here,” Williams whispered.

  Zach pulled himself up; his clothes were wet and heavy with mud. He helped Drew up, too. “Mama’s gonna whup us good,” he said to no one in particular, scraping the thick, cold mud from his elbows and legs. As he did, he looked around at what the candlelight revealed.

  The ceiling had descended precipitously from the main cavern and fractured; a slice of it pushed into the chamber until it became a shelf extending out over a smooth pool of dark water.

  From the bottom of the shelf, stalactites hung over the water like venomous teeth, dripping milky fluid into the clear pool. Each plop of water was amplified, pinging loudly off the close walls, the low ceiling.

  The candlelight danced on the surface of the pool, which looked only an inch or two deep, but extended into the distance as far as the light could reach.

  Drew wandered forward to wash the mud from his hands, but Williams caught him by the shoulders.

  “Careful, boy, that’s real deep,” Williams said. He stared at Drew hard and solemn, and Drew pulled free, crept to the edge of the water, knelt and washed his hands.

  “It’s icy cold,” Drew shivered, splashing a bit onto his legs and shoes. A brown ribbon drifted away into the pool. The sound of his splashing seemed unreasonably loud.

  Zach knelt next to him, washing some of the mud from his own clothes.

  Williams carefully placed the candle on a nearby outcrop and sat down.

  The room was devoid, for the most part, of the slippery mud that was the cave’s namesake. Its walls were a pristine, crystalline white, dotted here and there with gnarled clumps of rock like the one the candle sat upon. There was a smell, too, in the room, sharper and earthier; a mineral tang that tickled the back of their throats.

  The most notable thing was the absence of the wind. Elsewhere, it raced through the caverns, scouring the tunnels and passageways, strong enough in some places to extinguish candles and even lamps. Here, however, the air was still and calm, a little warmer even than outside in the corridor.

  The chamber seemed a fine and private place, secure and apart from all others.

  Zach and Drew had finished cleaning and were exploring the small room.

  “Careful of the water,” Williams warned again, this time more sharply. “I told you once, it’s deeper than you think.”

  “It don’t look deep. How do you know?” asked Zach.

  “I fell in once and nearly drowned,” he answered, which was the truth. “This is a special place. Do you know what happened here?”

  His brothers shook their heads in silence.

  “First, you’ve got to swear that you’ll never tell anyone about this place. It’s a secret place. Understand?”

  Zach nodded, and Drew, watching him first, did likewise.

  “Say it.”

  “I swear,” they said in chorus.

  “If we ever need to get away, if any of the bigger kids ever are after us, we’ll just run here and hide. Or if any Indians attack our farm.”

  Zach frowned, his features accentuated by the flickering candle.

  “Pa says there ain’t no Indians in these parts. They left a long time ago.”

  “Maybe so and maybe not,” Williams confided. “Maybe Pa’s just saying that so’s you won’t be afraid at night when you go to bed.”

  Considering his words made Zach feel colder.

  “These caves belonged to the Indians. They used to live here, hide things in here, spend the winters in here sometimes when it got real cold. And right here,” he gestured around the room, “they used to kill their prisoners and throw their bodies into the water.”

  Williams face was calm and serious, and Zach knew immediately that he was telling the truth.

  “Yep, every time they captured someone, a white man or an enemy Indian, they’d bring him here and slit his throat with a knife,” Williams said, drawing a finger across his own throat and making a wet, slashing sound.

  With a little moan, Drew sidled up to Zach, wrapped his arms around him. Zach was too scared to protest.

  “They say, if you look closely into the water, you can see the skulls of all the dead people the Indians killed.”

  Zach swallowed, tried to keep his mind from reminding him he had washed his face in that water. Unable to contain himself, he turned toward the pool.

  Drew, his grip tightening, turned, too.

  Although the bottom looked very close, Zach realized that what he was seeing was a reflection of the ceiling on the surface of the water. After a moment, his eyes adjusted to this illusion, and something else appeared, indistinct and blurry.

  The outline of the room’s walls thrust deep into the water. Here and there along their lengths were spherical shapes, over which shadows and ripples and the reflection of the ceiling played.

  Skulls.

  Hundreds of them––grinning, leering, swaying back and forth in rhythm with some deep current. They seemed to be moving, getting closer. Approaching the surface.

  Drew must have seen them, too, because he screamed, pulled at Zach to come away from the water.

  Zach was suddenly gripped with unreasoning fear. He screamed
with Drew, turned and ran toward the passageway.

  Drew stumbled, followed in his wake, wetting his already soaked long underwear in the process.

  “Zach! Drew! Wait!” cried Williams, who had begun to laugh until he realized that they were running from the room without a candle to guide the way. His heart almost stopped beating when he thought of the sinkholes—quicksand-like mud pits—and the drop-offs that were all over the cave.

  Jumping up, he grabbed the candle from where it sat on the white mineral outgrowth—the same kind of clump that covered the walls all the way down below the surface of the water. As he approached the passageway, he paused with the hairs on the back of his neck standing.

  He’d heard something, a sound that was unlike the dripping water or the soft roar of the wind in the corridor. It was breathy and nearby and unmistakably a person.

  “Zach? Drewry?” he asked, turning to the dark pool, thinking they might have found their way back.

  But there was no one between him and the water.

  Then he heard it again, weak but distinct.

  What are you doing here?

  Goosebumps erupted so fast on his body that they hurt. His mouth went dry and his legs wobbled beneath him.

  “Nothing,” he whispered, his teeth chattering. “Wh-who are you?”

  The witch of the cave. And I’m not receiving visitors… yet.

  “O-o-okay.”

  Leave. Now!

  Williams cast one look back at the water. For a moment, he almost expected to see the skulls he had told his brothers about come shooting up from the depths of the pool.

  He wasn’t going to wait around for that.

  Too scared to scream, he raced from the room, the candle flame sputtering and threatening to throw him into total darkness. Twenty feet up the passageway, he nearly ran over Zach and Drew, who were cowering and sobbing in the pitch black. “Hurry,” he shouted, and he pushed them ahead of him.

  They ran back to the chute, and Williams, looking behind to see if they were being pursued, pushed Drew up first. He didn’t object or whine; he simply clambered up the muddy canal, pushed into the cold sunlight above.