The Witch of the Hills

by J M Fraser

  When does a cat become like a man? Brian had never been good at riddles. Both walk, but a man uses two legs and a cat uses four. Both eat, but one sticks its head in a bowl and the other uses a fork. Both sleep. Both grow old and die. So does any other living thing.

  Something Rebecca said about Simon in their very first conversation teased the back of his mind, but he couldn’t get hold of it, even with the ribbon in his hand.

  He put the car in gear and drove away from the house. Within a mile, the snow on the ground thinned and the street dried. In the past, he would have guessed a localized lake-effect storm whitened his parents’ neighborhood, and the brief blackout had been caused by its gusty winds knocking a power line down. That was before his world had changed into an unpredictable land where the real, the imagined, and the illusory could no longer be distinguished, except with a coin.

  He checked in with Saint Brigit.

  Still cold in his pocket.

  He drove to the interstate and headed west.

  Chapter 23

  Within a secret meadow surrounded by thick woods, Rebecca knelt before a weathered statue. She set a purple stone among the other gems adorning the ancient shrine and prayed for strength.

  Aislinn, the witch honored by this shrine, carved a prophecy into rocks and scattered them across Ireland during the age of the Celts. Her Ogham scrawl foretold a girl named Rebecca and a boy named Brian who would save the world from darkness on the five thousandth anniversary of a much earlier witch’s birth—Renin, the greatest of them all. Maddeningly, the date of birth hadn’t been established with any degree of accuracy. But most guesses held the critical anniversary to be right about now, early in the twenty-first century.

  Rebecca had been chasing this prophecy ever since a boy appeared in her cabin window back in the colonies with a promise and a modern-day nickel, proving he’d come from the future. A boy whose very presence convinced her that although ten thousand Brians and Rebeccas had probably lived and died in the many centuries after Aislinn’s foretelling, she and her Brian were the chosen ones. On the day of this realization, her heart had lifted to the heavens.

  Lately, though, a ton of worry pressed its heavy weight on her chest. The void was expanding. It had already swallowed wide swaths of dreamscape. How would she and Brian stop it? Yes, he might solve her riddles, learn everything there was to know about her, accept the worst she’d done, and still take her hand at the end of that journey. But what then?

  “I can erase him, you know. Then where would your prophecy be?”

  Rebecca spun around at Abigail’s unexpected voice. She turned in time to see the imp swing a squirrel by the tail and fling it into a swirling column of blackness.

  The squirrel screeched and disappeared into a portion of the void Abigail had somehow brought here to the waking world. An illusion? How could it be? An imp had as much ability to cast illusions as a fly had to recite poetry.

  The column twisted like a tornado. It lifted from the ground and rose high above them, roaring in anger and spilling waves of cold air in its wake.

  Rebecca wrapped her arms around herself. Something was so very, very wrong.

  The cyclone vanished.

  Abigail gazed up at where it used to be. “I can erase him just like that,” she said.

  Rebecca almost rushed her, but she thought better of it. Unexplained void illusions notwithstanding, imps weren’t known to be terribly bright. An imp could be handled without a ridiculous spat of hair-pulling, slapping, and whatever else they might do to each other. She followed Abigail’s gaze to the point in the sky where the twister had disappeared, and she feigned a gasp of terror. “Storms frighten me. Now you know my weakness.”

  “Storms frighten you?” Abigail dropped her arms and frowned at her. “Doesn’t losing Brian scare you more?”

  “No.” Rebecca fixed Abigail with the most sincere look she could summon. “There’s really no accounting for one’s fears, is there?” She smiled the smile of a confidante, a comrade, a fellow victim of the universe’s random treachery.

  Abigail relaxed her shoulders and hinted at a smile. “With me, it’s spiders.”

  “Spiders, you say?”

  “Indeed.”

  “Oh my.” Rebecca closed her eyes. She imagined arachnids in all colors and shapes. Black, oily ones. Thick, hairy, brown ones. Outdoor spiders with long, spindly legs. Tarantulas. Widows. She pictured spider eggs—disgusting white pods holding thousands of hatchlings.

  Rebecca summoned ten million spiders out of the forest in a steady, purposeful march. So many the leaves crunched beneath their feet. So many they covered the ground in a thick, gray, roiling fog of spindly legs.

  Abigail had her back to them. “You’re lying, Rebecca. You fear losing Brian more than anything. This precious prophecy of yours hinges on—”

  A tarantula dropped onto her shoulder.

  She shrieked, brushed it off, and turned to the advancing horde of creepy, crawly, eight-legged nightmares. “Stop them!”

  Rebecca spoke in her lowest, most menacing tone. “Abigail, if you ever so much as utter Brian’s name again, let alone threaten him, I’ll send spiders crawling up your skirts for the rest of your useless life.”

  Abigail shuddered. She sniffled. But then she did something Rebecca wouldn’t have expected in a thousand years. She grinned. “Useless? I am serving someone important, Rebecca, while you chase a long-forgotten witch’s misguided fantasy.”

  She stomped a foot down on the first of the advancing spiders and disappeared.

  Rebecca stared after her. Her heart ticked the time away in fast beats, then slowed. Eventually, she stopped trembling.

  Fear wouldn’t win this game. Answers would. So she took one step, followed by another, out of the waking realm and into the World of Mortal Dreams. She plodded along until the grass scattered into weedy clumps. In time, greenery disappeared altogether in favor of shifting sands hot enough to warm her feet through the soles of her shoes. Calming heat. Purposeful heat.

  She continued her trek, navigating around some dunes and over a few others when jagged rocks blocked her path. She forded a shallow river of flowing cinders and later used a scarf to protect her face from a windblown blizzard of glittering sand crystals.

  Rebecca journeyed on foot all the way to Henry Stoddard’s tower. She found him puttering in a flower garden at its base.

  Stoddard’s unusual height reminded her how short she was. The sorcerer always held the upper hand. Even his costume choice seemed designed to throw her off. He wore a bright orange cape, which, in combination with his curly black hair, brought to mind a pumpkin with a hardy stalk. She tried sarcasm to balance the scales. “I would have expected thorny weeds out here, not flowers, Henry.”

  “You prefer weeds? Well, here’s a little beauty with a thorn.” Always the showman, the sorcerer pulled a purple rose from his sleeve.

  She closed her hand around the stem.

  “Has nature ever created a more enchanting enigma, Rebecca? Behold the exquisite architecture of the petals. Take in the fragrance matched by no other flower. Then press your thumb against the angry thorn until it pierces your skin.”

  She did all those things, but the painful pinch proved no more effective in getting her mind off her troubles than the journey had. She moved her thumb to her lips.

  “I have a name for your rose,” he said.

  She had trouble finding her voice. “What is it?”

  “Rebecca.”

  “Don’t play mind games with me, Henry. I’ve come to ask something important.”

  “Ask away, then.” Stoddard sat on a bench and folded his arms.

  Rebecca came down beside him. “Abigail was your ward once, yes?”

  He nodded. “And her cousin Betty. A pair of more mischievous brats probably never existed. I brought them with me to Salem. But you know this all too well.”

  Rebecca wasn’t sure how to pose the next question without sounding accusatory. She didn’t wan
t an angry sorcerer on her hands. But she had to ask. “What is Abigail to you now, Henry?”

  Stoddard’s scowl said it all. He stalked off the bench, muttering to himself.

  She came up behind him and risked touching his arm ever so lightly.

  He shrugged her off. “How dare you suggest I would have anything to do with this mess, Rebecca? I’ve extended the hand of friendship to you again and again, and instead of thanking me, you suggest I’m a villain.”

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  “She’s feeding the void, Rebecca.”

  Her heart leapt at the unexpected validation. “You know it exists then, don’t you?”

  The white background noise of singing birds and chirping insects died. A cloud blotted the sun. Henry Stoddard turned to her. His face held shadows deeper than the darkest corners. “For too many years, Abigail fooled me into thinking of her as a mere imp, Rebecca. An imp with a crush on me and fierce jealousy toward you. The ruse worked.”

  “If not an imp, what is she, Henry?”

  Stoddard’s booming guffaw scattered a flock of birds out of the nearest trees. Their screeches ushered sound back into the world, and the cloud moved past the sun. “If I were a gambling man, I’d bet she’s a fallen angel’s apprentice. You don’t happen to know any fallen angels, do you?”

  “What’s so funny? Of course I don’t—”

  Henry disappeared in a cloud of purple smoke. Always the upper hand.

  Chapter 24

  Traffic thinned to a trickle. For long stretches of lonely highway, the porch lights of scattered farmhouses pierced the darkness, serving as random reminders of the glowing-eyed man Brian had seen in his parents’ driveway. He tried to ignore them and focus on the center line. But he had to know.

  He pulled into a rest area near some town called Wyanet and phoned his mom. “I’m assuming that guy outside the house was a sorcerer, right?”

  “Who?”

  “The man with the dog. You waved to me from the window after he left, remember?”

  “Stay the course, Brian.”

  “Come on, Mom, I need more than that.”

  The line went dead. Out of service range. And that was almost as skin crawling as random encounters with sorcerers. His car had always been the absolute epitome of unreliability. Now, the distances between farmhouses in this wilderness of fallow fields looked to be a mile or more in the freezing cold. At such a late hour, most residents probably wouldn’t answer his knock if he broke down and needed help.

  He touched the window—frigid—and turned the heater up.

  By the next way station, his phone had a couple bars. He called again.

  “Where are you, Brian?”

  “I don’t know, Minooka?”

  “Okay.”

  “The guy in the driveway had glowing eyes, Mom.”

  “He’s a bit of a puzzle, that one.”

  She knew him? No way. “Could you, um…elaborate?”

  The long pause on the other end gave him the answer he’d been getting used to. Nothing. But then, “He wouldn’t hurt a fly, Brian. Just so you know.”

  “Okay, but who is he?”

  “Let’s respect Rebecca’s desire for you to learn things on your own.”

  Right. And he was deadheading to Nebraska to do just that. Not without a shadow of regret, though. “What did Dad and Kara say about me taking off without saying good-bye?”

  “I told them enough so they’d get the picture.”

  Probably way more than she’d tell him. This hide-everything-from-Brian game had gotten old.

  “Your aunt is expecting you Sunday night, Brian. Don’t forget you have classes on Monday.”

  About an hour farther west, the darkened countryside turned creepy. Giant wind turbines formed a War of the Worlds nightscape of hulking, mechanical monsters, hinting at their vast numbers each time their strobe lights blinked in unison. His imagination got legs, conjuring images of giant, red-eyed demons skulking in the darkness, ready to crush anyone who trespassed on their turf. He kept his eyes on the road and his grip tight on the wheel.

  He drove across another sprawling wind farm sixty miles down the road. After the last tower in that group blinked good-bye in the gloom, only a few houses with lights on and an occasional barreling truck lingered to kept him company. He made two more calls home. His mom offered advice. Stop somewhere and rest. And encouragement. We’re here for you no matter what. She wasn’t half bad. Just twisted.

  An Omaha station’s top-forty countdown ushered Brian into Nebraska, and the orange glow of a rising sun reflected in his mirror a little past Lincoln. He’d defeated the night.

  Music and a straight-as-an-arrow highway helped put him in a zone through the last long leg of frozen prairie. He daydreamed through York, Grand Island, Kearney—thinking random thoughts at first, then trying to process the bombshells his mom had dropped, later a chill remembering the man and dog in the driveway, before settling on Rebecca.

  Witches had to be rare. They hadn’t topped the charts since the Puritan days. The chances one witch would randomly cross paths with the son of another seemed slim at best, so maybe somebody set the whole thing up. After all, a glowing-eyed man had been pointing to Rebecca on the rock in his recurring nightmare, and his mom apparently had the same guy on her buddy list.

  He pictured three circles connected by arrows—Rebecca, Mom, sorcerer. Somebody knew way more than they were willing to share.

  So what else was new?

  Brian pulled off the highway at the Sidney exit. The old gas station where he’d stopped seemingly a thousand years earlier was dark. He pressed on, blowing past a motel a little farther up the road without a second glance, even though he hadn’t slept in over twenty-four hours. He wanted to find Rebecca in the waking world, not in a dream.

  Seventy miles farther north, he reached the field of scrubby hills. While he didn’t have a precise way to determine where his car had stalled, the distance from Angora was about right. He watched for a bluff rising above the knobby landscape and hopefully a glimpse of an oak tree. But the undulating wilderness smoothed into cultivated land near the town of Alliance without a sign of either. He’d gone too far north.

  He whipped the car around and headed south. Brian hadn’t paid much attention to his surroundings in August, other than noticing a big hill. Now, the voice of doubt rang in his head. He didn’t know where the cabin was, and he couldn’t be sure Rebecca would be inside, even if he found the place.

  He slowed the car, careful not to miss anything, and he slammed on the brakes at the sight of a treetop poking up from behind the nearest rise. He got out and craned his neck only to see a scraggly birch where a thick oak needed to be.

  At Angora, he made a U-turn and headed north again.

  Brian drove back and forth several times, all the while refusing to let his worries take hold. He would find Rebecca.

  Wouldn’t he?

  Somewhere between Alliance and capitulation, a plume of chimney smoke curled into the sky. He came to a gravel-spitting stop on the shoulder and hurried out of the car to gaze across the frosty landscape. The top of an oak tree did peek up from within the hills, and a higher bluff rose farther in the distance.

  “Yes!” But when he considered the angles, the shadow of doubt grew longer.

  He remembered the cabin being north of the bluff, yet the smoke now billowed from the south. Still, nothing else up and down the road had shown any promise at all. The old Witch-of-the-Hills journals Sharon dug up did mention shifting landmarks near the cabin. Yeah, he was grasping at straws, but what choice did he have?

  Crisp air turned his breath to puffs of fog. He tightened his jacket and weighed the risks. Back in August, he’d almost gotten hopelessly lost looking outside for Rebecca—a bad idea now in cold weather. And this time around, an overcast sky eliminated the possible use of the sun as a compass. Frozen ground, bare of snow, didn’t hold much promise for footprints, either. So how would he find his w
ay back to the car if he didn’t find her?

  The oak tree was tall enough to serve as a marker. It would rise above the bumpy low hills for miles, most likely, if he needed it to find his way back. He grabbed his rucksack and Rebecca’s book from the car. If he did get lost, an enlightening rod might come in handy.

  He locked up and hiked to the tree.

  Winter-bare limbs displayed little more than a couple bird nests and some decaying, leftover leaves. The absence of a rope sent the same tingle through his stomach its appearance had triggered three months earlier. Did Abigail take it away? She had amazing stalking abilities.

  He stopped and glanced around. No sign of anyone. I’m getting ridiculous now. He moved on.

  A new problem popped up a half mile later. The oak disappeared behind a hill far sooner than should have been possible, as if it sank into the ground. To walk any farther would be to risk getting lost. He pulled the ribbon out of Rebecca’s book for whatever enlightenment the crazy thing might come up with.

  Leave a trail of breadcrumbs! Thanks, Hansel. Like the birds wouldn’t eat it. And who carries bread around, anyway?

  But when he shoved the ribbon into his pocket, he found a handful of change. Breadcrumbs. Okay, got it.

  He dropped a coin every fifty paces. That worked for a while, but eighty-seven cents later, he went broke. The smoke was close by then. He had to take a chance.

  Brian continued beyond the point where he could glance over his shoulder and still see the last coin. A straight-line journey would have been the best idea from there—the most easily backtracked—but a hill got in the way after a few hundred yards. He took a key from his pocket, dropped it to the ground, and started rounding the hill. If he didn’t see the cabin from the other side, he could come up with some other plan when he traveled full circle and returned to his starting point.