“Many things happen.”
“He had a definite scar.”
“Well, then.”
“Again, you’re not going to tell me.”
“And what is there to tell?” she asked. “Is it not enough your grandfather was rescued?”
“Perhaps it is,” I answered reflectively. “Perhaps it isn’t.”
“Your grandfather’s life was spared,” said Ana. “Be grateful.”
She replaced the chain of braids inside its hallowed keep and returned the elaborate box to the chest. Pulling out a heavy wooden case, she set the massive object on my knees.
“You love me,” she stated quite suddenly and quite unequivocally.
“As the sun rises,” I replied, “I do love you.”
“And would you give your life for me?” she asked pointedly.
I felt a shudder surge from the center of my belly, as though the very sum and substance of my existence were caught in some singular web of fate, and this woman was the only living salvation in the face of inevitability.
“If it came to that,” I said, “yes. Yes, I suppose I would.”
“And what else would you give?”
“What would you have?”
“What times the beating of your heart?”
“What are you asking?”
“What is there left?”
“My soul?”
“Would you give even this?”
“Would you ask for it?”
“Would you give it?”
“Yes,” I stated, stunned by the ease of my response, given I wasn’t particularly certain the soul existed, “if you asked.”
She looked intently into my eyes and a faint smile twitched at the corner of her tempting mouth. I did not withdraw from her gaze as she took my hand and tenderly guided the tips of my fingers over the carvings of the casing.
“Feel the arteries,” she said with a reverent lilt to her voice. I turned my attention to the magnificent carvings of oak leaves and acorns adorning all sides of the metal clasped box. “You've not seen such a casement before.”
“I have not,” I agreed, captivated by the smooth perfection of carved wood traced beneath my fingertips.
“Go deeper,” she urged, her fingers now pressing against my brow, “and see through here.”
Again, she guided my hand over the carvings until I could see, indeed, touch, the phases of the moon beneath the acorns and feel the sun's warmth heightening and lessening against the seasons and the hours of the day. I felt the quivering of the salamander, the toad, the fish, the frail wings of the dragonfly and the determination of the honey bee; the appeal of desire and the mystery of sexual union, birth and the final passage of death.
One might assume that by virtue of all I had been witness to, such a thing would not further disrupt my sensibility. The mystery that was Ana had only been the changing shadows of a day and now, as night approached and the moon slipped under the mid-June rain clouds, I sensed the story had only really begun.
Startled, I withdrew my hand.
“What is this thing?”
“It is the history of all which has revealed itself to be beneficial,” she stated. She moved to open the heavy casement and I stayed her hand.
Facing a sudden fear of confronting Pandora’s Box, I swallowed a tightening constriction in my throat. How was I to weigh what I dismissed in the beginning as crafted illusion, against the anomalous scenes I repeatedly witnessed these recent weeks? How was I to reconcile, if inside the casement, now under my hands, revealed a mystery that prompted medieval men to design the killing of literally thousands to discover?
“You want to see,” she urged. “You came here to see.”
“Did I?”
“Didn’t you?”
“Sometimes,” I confessed, “you actually frighten me, Ana.”
“Did you not proclaim your love to me from here?” she asked, touching my chest where she could not fail to have felt the increased speed of my heart. “Is not love greater than fear?” She sat back, her eyes intently studying my reaction. “Did you not travel here in your dreams before stepping to the white oaks outside my door? And did I not extract from you, the bitter taste of possessive desire? Did I not do this for love? To take away all fear, so that you would love unashamed?”
“Yes,” I replied.
“Then,” she said, “no fear.”
She moved closer and opened the wooden casement to reveal a bound, foot thick volume of durable vellum I now understood was, in outstanding measure, a healing tome many would still kill to possess.
The distinctive odor of antiquity emanated with each turn of the page, and it was clear that the entries were drawn and recorded through copious centuries. Chapter upon chapters of text, written in languages varying from the curiously unidentifiable, to the recognizable scripts of Aramaic and Sanskrit, Greek and Latin. Illustration upon illustration of surgical procedures, illumined painstakingly by unremembered hands, marked the central core of the volume’s theme and precise diagrams of herbs, trees and flowers from bulb and root to stalk and seed, accompanied by medicinal properties of each, were recorded in calligraphic expertise. The detailed drawings of human and animal anatomy, alone, rivaled any modern medical manual. Chronologies of names and places, births and deaths, written in languages as diverse as Old English to the West and ancient Mandarin to the East.
“Christ, Ana,” I breathed. “Are you suggesting you can read any of this?”
She pressed the palm of my hand atop a single parchment of recorded mystery by way of answer.
And I heard the voices: voices speaking out of the past, whispering in an ancient tongue and yet translating in my mind effortlessly. I turned to the middle of the book and experienced the same revealed discourse.
A sensation of fire scorched through every sinew of my being. Nothing, nothing, could prepare the human brain to fathom the depth of preternatural dissertation that exhaled breath from this book: this living chronicle of the knowledge of healing from time immemorial. The tome, itself, was the very memory of every living cell that existed on the earth. It was not simply knowledge recorded on a single page, but that each page held a thousand more pages of information, layer under layer under layer.
My expression, an interplay between trembling uncertainty and compelling fascination, mirrored its reflection in Ana’s eyes. Even now, I could see her flesh had taken on a tone more relative to my own and that it was no trick of forest light, which caused an optical illusion of color where there had been none before. Like photosynthesis, she was changing before my eyes as each day passed into another.
“You are disturbed,” Ana observed.
“Jesus, Ana,” I replied in earnest, “what did you expect? This book doesn’t exist. It cannot exist. It’s an illusion. An impossibility. And yet…”
I examined the surface more closely, unprepared in the deepest recesses of my mind to venture even the briefest of touch against its pages once more.
“Yet, here it exists,” she finished for me.
“Where does this book originate from?” I wanted to know.
“From the grandmothers.”
“This is a book any Inquisitor…”
“The evil ones,” she interjected gravely.
“Ok,” I nodded, my stomach churning, “the evil ones. The Church of Rome. The Popes. The Bishops. The Kings and their henchmen. This is a book they would seek.”
“The book they slaughtered the innocent to possess,” she clarified.
“They knew about the book, then?” I next inquired.
“Yes.”
“Some of the grandmothers?” I asked. “Were they slaughtered? Is this why you hate the word?”
“No,” Ana shook her head, “no one can harm the grandmothers.”
“How so?”
“The book.”
“It is then a book of the occult?” I surmised. “Magic, as well as medicine?”
“Magic,” she replied contemptuously. “All men look for magi
c.”
“Then how is it explained?” I questioned.
Who is the magician?
But you ask the wrong question.
“The gift of cleverness,” replied Ana. “The gift of changing. The gift of calling the storm and the mist.”
God help me, I believed her. Had I not witnessed, myself, the storm clouds? the lightning and rain that defied any prevailing atmospheric conditions?
She reached again into the ornate mahogany chest and produced a sealed urn. “But they can harm those you love.”
She placed the vessel in my hands.
“What is this?”
“A story.”
“Tell me the story, then.”
“In a country village,” Ana related, “in a time long ago, a young girl cried to God for mercy in the fires built for those who protected the grandmothers, in the days of plague.”
“Though not even God could save her,” I reflected, regretfully.
“God is not everywhere,” she snapped and pounded her fist against her heart, “if not here.”
I held up the simple, unadorned container. “And this?”
“The dust and ashes of Gredel,” she stated, “gathered in the dark of night by the grandmother.”
“Oh God...” I groaned, stunned as much by the contents as by the sentiment.
I handed her back the urn.
Ana caressed the receptacle as if, by way of her own memory, she could see the living spectacle of its horrific origin and perhaps she did, through some metaphysical avenue of genetic recall.
“How did she know?” I asked. “Gredel. How did she know about the grandmothers?”
“Always there is one,” Ana explained. “Always one whose heart holds the spirit of the earth. One whose purpose it is to heal the plagues; to bring hope to the dying and to comfort the grieving.”
“Faith and medicine?” I wondered aloud. “But this book,” I emphasized, “this book is more than mere faith.”
“Did I not warn you to understand the question,” she said, “before you look to the answer.”
“Men killed for this book,” I said.
“Men have killed for less,” she replied.
A sudden flash of light seemed to sear through my brain, electrifying the senses, blinding the veil between all that is possible and that which is only dreamed.
“What or who is the Evangeline?” I asked suddenly, feeling the weight of the incomprehensible tome against my thighs.
Ana stared at me with a hint of exasperation in her softly glistening eyes. She glanced at the book and then into my eyes once more.
“But how?” I wanted to know.“How is it possible?”
“How is anything possible, Ethan Broughton,” she stated, closing the book. “Look around you and ask yourself how any of it is possible, and yet, here it exists.”
Ana set the book inside the guarded repository, wherein it would rest again with the legacy of the grandmothers: all the brocades and braided hair, the ashes and perhaps, too, the memory of lovers who once sat, as did I, before a forgotten book of consecrated medical wisdom. How was anything not possible after knowing such a reference existed? In a twist of irony, the very men who killed to discover it, unwittingly erased the memory of its existence.
But what they could not have known, is that the measure of the book surpassed the very reality of its endurance. The vehicle of its worth rested only through the aegis of the woman in whose keeping it was left, and they would have savagely annihilated the very key to unlocking its mystery.
My mind and body, together, began to settle into that bewildered state of sensory overload.
“I need air,” I announced, feeling the sensation, not unlike panic, of capillaries beneath the surface of my skin bursting and slowly seeping through the pores. I leaned on the porch rail, hearing the heavy lid close on the fabulous mahogany chest from behind the screen door. The very sound of that closure, like an echo down a fathomless cavern, vibrated between my ears.
I grasped the supporting pillar of the porch structure, mindless of the saturating rain and experienced an overwhelming sense of dread.
There would be no return to the familiar perception of the life lived beyond the confines of this hill. This simple truth rested equally now among all the legacies and age-old heresies kept under Ana’s sanctified guardianship. When I contracted my soul in poetic metaphor to love’s devotion, I had abdicated my own mortality. I knew this now. I had known it the instant I touched the page and was revealed a labyrinth of such fantastical depth, it would render the voice mute, though fire or steel blade threaten to condemn the very beating of the heart if not confessed.
I was illumined: a man possessed of unutterable secrets and yet I breathed. Why this contrast should have affected me so profoundly in that moment, I dared not answer.
Ana did not question my appearance nor the chasm of silence when I returned through the door, but wordlessly draped my soaked clothing on a wooden rack set before the cast iron range and wrapped my body in the comfort of a summer’s quilt. I welcomed the warmth of the elderberry wine she placed in my hand and allowed, in unspoken acquiescence, when she towel dried my hair and trimmed half an inch off the ends.
The clock chimed the tenth hour.
“My lover wearies with the night,” she remarked.
More than I can possibly confess. “Yes.”
“I can show you a secret,” she confided, leaning close to my ear from behind. “A secret for you to bide by.”
The elderberry wine slipped smoothly against the tongue. “You have many secrets, Ana,” I acknowledged wearily. “I’m not sure I’m up for another one.”
A breath of girlish laughter brushed the side of my face. “How dear you are to my heart, Ethan Broughton,” she said, and gently twisted my left hand to expose the blue veins of my wrist. With a quick and unanticipated prick of her fingernail, she slashed open the vein.
Instantly alert, I jerked backwards. The wine glass rolled across the table, its contents pooling against the wood surface. “Christ, Ana, what are you doing?”
“Hush,” she replied, gripping my wrist with her astonishing strength.
All sound deafened against the pounding inside my chest. I stared frigidly at the spectacle of my own blood catching in a small earthen bowl set on the tabletop.
“You promised to die for me,” she stated, “and you tremble at the first opportunity.”
“Ana, another fraction and you’ll cut the artery,” I warned, swallowing against the tightening constriction in my throat. I feared if I made an unexpected move to wrest her hold, she would sever the crucial vein.
“Hush,” she repeated, almost tenderly I thought, and turned my wrist again upward. I inhaled a forced breath as I studied a fine, sticky web-like substance seeping from beneath her fingernails.
Battling between an almost clinical observation and sickened apprehension, I sat mutely as she stitched the slit of vein and flesh together with the unnatural silken thread. Ana slid on the bench next to me and clenched her fist over the bowl. Puncturing the soft cushion of her palm with her own fingernails, she dripped her own blood into mine.
Numbed now to familiar sensation, I watched her blood trickle by single droplets into the shallow receptacle. Satisfied she had let enough of her own vital fluid mingle with my own, she worked the find webbing into her own skin. She then poured the elderberry wine from the bottle into the bowl, slowly and precisely blending the two, the blood and the wine.
Although I already considered the outcome of such an ancient and mythic ritual, I winced inwardly as she raised the glass to her lips and drank half of the mixture. I wondered, even as she took my hand and guided the bowl to my mouth, if she deliberately led me to this point of fatigue so my protest might be delayed until the deed was done.
I stayed her wrist. “Ana, I…”
“Hush,” she urged once more. “Drink.”
Drink, yes drink. You’ve already fallen too far to react with any untowar
d dismay now.
As prisoner of her mystery, I drank the aberrant elixir.
~*~
Chapter XVIII
The resounding pound of footsteps on the front porch startled me from the formless vapor that infiltrated my sleep for days. Ana, always rising under the first hint of daybreak, set her measuring cup of flour in a bowl and walked to the door.
“Brother Randy took a fall!” declared the older of three children standing on the other side of the screen. “Ma’s all out of sorts. Knocked himself clean out, Miss Ana!”
“Fell from the tree, Miss Ana,” clarified a small waif of a girl with thin blond hair.
“Ma’s fearin’ he’ll go feeble,” the older boy breathlessly continued.
“Your pa still down to the mines?” asked Ana, wiping away the dusty white powder from her hands on a sun-faded towel.
“Four days now, Miss Ana,” replied the boy. “Ma’s sorely worried, Miss Ana, what with pa not due back ‘til Sunday. Says to quick fetch ya.”
Ana ushered the children inside and ordered the eldest to prepare a basket of biscuits, jam, jarred broth and milk. She set about adeptly blending a dried plant concoction from the shelved cabinet.
“That your Yankee beau, Miss Ana?” asked the little girl, staring through saucer-wide blue eyes as I leaned on my elbow atop the rustled bed linens.
“Hush up, Effie Jean,” chided the eldest. “That ain’t no concern of yours.”
“Ma says you got good bones,” said the little Effie Jean placidly, “for a Yankee man, anyways.”
“Effie Jean!” snapped the boy. “Come fetch this basket now. Keep your nose outta other folk’s business.”
Effie Jean squinted with a bemused expression and inclined her head to the side.
“Why you sleepin’ in Miss Ana’s bed? You sick or somethin’?”
The middle boy, in worn overalls, tugged his sister’s arm. “Don’t pay no mind, Mister Yank,” he interjected apologetically. “Effie Jean’s jus’ an ignorant child.”
“She’s just curious,” I smiled. “I’m a friend of Miss Ana, Effie Jean. My name is Ethan.”
“You really a Yankee?” she asked, surprised, perhaps, that a Yankee, a term she undoubtedly parroted, appeared distinctly human.
The Honey Witch (A Tale of Supernatural Suspense) Page 15
