Half-Witch

by John Schoffstall

  “I know,” Lizbet said, “where there are millions of corpses in the earth. Free for the taking.”

  “Poppycock! Flapdoodle! Delusions! Daydreams!” Matilda paused. “So . . . where are these corpses, exactly?”

  “Ten thousand gold pieces first. Then I’ll tell you.”

  “Not a twice-clipped counterfeit bronze beggar’s penny will I give you!”

  “Five thousand, then. The rest later.”

  “Usurious skinflint!”

  “One thousand.”

  Lizbet let herself be bargained down to a single gold piece, with another nine hundred and ninety-nine on credit. Matilda disappeared into the earth to fetch it. Lizbet didn’t actually have any interest in money—at least, no more than the rest of humankind, who on the whole prefer riches to poverty—but she wanted to convince the earth witches that she was offering something valuable. And also to give them something to cheat her out of.

  To some people, the tang of larceny makes a bargain irresistible. Lizbet hoped witches might be like that.

  Matilda popped out of the earth and thrust a muddy coin into Lizbet’s hand. Lizbet spat on it and rubbed the mud off with the heel of her thumb. It glowed yellow.

  “Now tell me where all these millions of corpses are, sweetie,” Matilda said, longing in her voice.

  “They are in graveyards and burying grounds on the other side of the Montagnes du Monde,” Lizbet said.

  Matilda balled up all of her fists and shook them in the air. “Liar! Thief! Give me back my gold! There is nothing on the other side of the Montagnes du Monde!”

  “You are misinformed,” Lizbet said. “There’s a whole world over there. With millions of people who live and die and fill the churchyards and the cemeteries with their corpses.”

  “No!” Matilda yelled. “It’s all lies. The earth witches tunneled through the entire world, long ago, and there’s nothing over the Montagnes du Monde, just empty sky.”

  She sounded very sure of herself. “How long ago?” Lizbet asked.

  “What does it matter? A year, a hundred, a thousand years, a thousand thousand. Long ago. Before the sun and moon and stars.”

  “I don’t know how you could have missed it,” Lizbet said, “but there’s a world there now. A world of mortals and dumb beasts, dismal forests with bandits, howling deserts full of camels and Mussulmen, oceans with ships sailing, and all sorts of things. The Holy Roman Empire and the Pixie Queen, the heathen Northmen, the Hindoos, wild Americans across the sea who wear feathers in their hair.”

  “You’re making it up,” Matilda said suspiciously.

  “Am not. I came over the Montagnes myself. Look at me.” Lizbet spread her arms. “I’m half-mortal, half-witch. Have you ever seen anything like me before?”

  “You’re a peculiar creature, that’s for certain,” Matilda said. “Maybe you come from where you say. Maybe you don’t.”

  “The only way to find out is to tunnel beneath the Montagnes,” Lizbet said. “On the other side you’ll find proof that I’m right.” She held her breath.

  “It’s an awfully long way,” Matilda said. “And through rock and stone.”

  “It’s too hard for you, then?”

  “I didn’t say that!”

  “I understand if the earth witches are unable to do it.”

  “The earth witches can do anything!” Matilda said angrily. “As the roots of the oak break apart granite, we pass at will through the hearts of mountains! If we feel like it.”

  “If you can’t do it, you’ll be missing out on a ghoul king’s banquet of corpses,” Lizbet said. “Brimming with maggots and rot, shoulder and hip bones falling from their sockets, swollen with the gases of decomposition or liquefied to black pools of decay. Yum! I should imagine, that is. If you enjoy such things.”

  Matilda said sharply, “You swear you’re telling the truth?”

  “If I’m not,” Lizbet said, “you need not pay me a single gold piece more.”

  “I’ll fetch my sisters,” Matilda said, and dived into the ground.

  Shortly earth witches began to pop up through the soil, knotty black and brown root like women, scores, hundreds of them. They pointed at Lizbet, complained about the harsh sunlight and the ugly blue sky, and chattered to each other. “Where?” Matilda asked. “They want to know where? Where do we dig?”

  Lizbet decided it was best to have a corpse ready for them. The nearest corpse she knew was the Outlaw that she and Strix had buried a few weeks ago. She tried to figure in what direction the Outlaw’s cabin would be. She pointed at the side of the Montagnes, mostly west, and a little south. “There. Dig there.”

  Within minutes, a dark hole appeared in the mountain slope. First earth, then cracked stone poured from the opening and tumbled down the mountainside in a vast midden. All day, without cease, Lizbet heard the clatter of stones rolling as the earth witches delved ever more deeply into the living rock of the Montagnes. The heap of stones below the hole grew and grew.

  The earth witches cared nothing for time of day. Into the night they worked. The last thing Lizbet heard before she fell asleep, and the first noise that wakened her in the morning, was the rattle and bang of stone chips pushed out of the deepening tunnel through the mountain.

  While the earth witches dug, Lizbet and Fudge continued their search for the last bits of Strix. Eventually they could find no more. Days passed. The midden of debris stretched half a mile down the mountainside. At last, Matilda reported that her witches were almost through to the other side.

  Lizbet and Fudge rolled the ball of Strix encased in Lizbet’s dress up the mountain to the tunnel mouth. At the dark opening, Lizbet hesitated. The tunnel roof was barely high enough for her to stand upright. An invisible river of cold, damp air poured from the tunnel and made her skin go goose bumps, even in the sunlight. Childhood fears of the dark assailed her. What would happen to her, deep under the mountain? She had tried to stoke the greed of the earth witches, but what if they had tired of digging? What if they decided not to bother with the tunnel, but eat Lizbet herself, “rules” or no rules, deep within the mountain, with none to know?

  Steeling her nerves and gritting her teeth, Lizbet rolled the ball of Strix before her through the dark opening and into the blackness and cold inside the mountain.

  The floor was rocky and uneven. Rolling Strix, whose parts must have weighted fifty pounds in all, was heavy work for a skinny teenage girl. The light from the tunnel mouth faded. All was muffled blackness. Behind her, Fudge muttered to himself.

  They walked for what seemed an endless time. In the darkness, who could tell the hours? Lizbet’s arms and shoulders grew numb and ached with pain from rolling the bundle of Strix over the rocky floor. Her breath came heavy, and despite the tunnel being cold, her undershirt was damp with sweat. What would she do with Strix when they emerged? She thought and thought.

  When her effort and pain and exhaustion had gone on so long that Lizbet thought she would surely fail in her task, she told herself, Just another step. Just one more. And one more.

  In this dream of fatigue and pain, she at last heard a sound: the cracking of rocks like muskets going off, the sarcastic chatter of the earth witches. “Almost through, sweetie,” came Matilda’s voice in the blackness. The witches’ eager voices rose in a din, and Lizbet glimpsed a ray of daylight ahead, through a rock crack. The witches all complained—“Hateful light!” “Nasty, naughty sun!”—but they continued to dig their fingers into the hole. Rock shattered and fell away, and the hole widened until Lizbet could step through.

  She squinted in the sudden daylight. The earth witches pushed out around her. Lizbet stood on the rocky western slopes of the Montagne du Monde, just above the tree line. The day was clear, and although the details of the land below were too distant to see, an occasional tendril of smoke from a chimney rose through the still air, telling o
f human presence below.

  In her exhaustion and despair, it came to Lizbet, at that moment, what she must do with Strix.

  “Now where’s our corpses, honey?” Matilda said in her creaking voice. “You promised millions of corpses!”

  “A deal, a deal, we have a deal!” the other earth witches cried.

  “Follow me,” Lizbet said.

  After a little exploring, Lizbet discovered the path she and Strix had taken on their trip up the Montagnes, the road cut by Margrave Hengest Wolftrow’s army decades ago. She set off down the mountain. The earth witches followed her and flanked her, diving in and out of the earth like a school of leaping fish. By the time Lizbet found the side path that led to the Outlaw’s cabin, the witches had already scented his corpse. With little cries of excitement, they vanished into the earth. The earth churned as they swam through it. Trees tilted back and forth on their roots.

  The door of the Outlaw’s cabin was open: Lizbet and Strix had not bothered to close it when they left. Lizbet squeezed the bundle of Strix through the doorway. She found the Outlaw’s flint and steel, and after she and Fudge had gathered tinder, she started a fire in the fireplace. She needed fire for what she was going to do.

  The floorboards creaked, cracked, and broke. Matilda thrust up her body up through the hole. She wiped her mouth with her hand. “That was delicious!” she said. “More, please!”

  “There are no more corpses in the neighborhood that I know of,” Lizbet said, “but there are churchyards and burying grounds all over the earth. There are some in Abalia, which is just down the mountain. And now, the rest of my thousand gold pieces?”

  “The gold, eh? Oh, someday, someday,” Matilda said. She cackled, and laughter echoed from under the earth. “We promised to pay you later, but we never set a date. Not as clever as you thought you were, sweetie?”

  “Clever enough though,” Lizbet said. “Farewell, then.”

  Matilda regarded Lizbet out of her depthless black eye sockets. She tilted her head back and forth. “Hmmm. Farewell, baby. You’re a strange one, half witch and half mortal. Come, girls! We’ve a world of sweet corpses to find and eat, yes, we do!” She dived into the earth beneath the cabin. The cabin trembled on its foundations as the witches swam off through the earth. Gradually the trembling died away.

  In making her deal with the earth witches, Lizbet had worried whether having the world’s corpses eaten by witches might cause problems on Resurrection Day, when the earth was supposed to give up its dead. However, she reasoned, if God were able also to raise the dead from the sea, and raise martyrs after they had been burned by Mussulmen or Protestants, surely He could raise a dead man eaten by a witch.

  Of course, now that God was confined in the devils’ prison, having any Resurrection Day at all was looking less certain. People might be obliged to stay dead indefinitely. It would cause complaints.

  Fudge waddled up and tugged at her undershirt. “The Margrave’s library in Abalia calls to me!” he exclaimed rapturously. “Biographies! Travelogues! Cookbooks! Diaries! Plays! Poems! Belle lettres!” His feet danced on the floor and his furry toes curled. “I surely shall die in a frenzy of anticipation if we do not expeditiously make our way with all due speed! I can almost smell the great library from here. Why do we tarry? We must be off!”

  “Soon, Fudge, soon,” Lizbet said. “There’s something I have to do first. I have to burn Strix.”

  Chapter 21

  I am the rose you cut, that soon must die,

  The letter that you penned, and threw away,

  And every time you told your friend a lie,

  And burning tears upon your wedding day.

  —a rhyme of Strix

  Lizbet had decided what to do with the sack of Strix. Strix wouldn’t have wanted a Christian burial. And she had denied being an atheist. Perhaps she was more like a heathen, or a pagan. How did the heathens dispose of their dead? By fire.

  The great war chiefs of the Northmen, it was said, were burned in their own longboats. The Hindoos burned their dead on wooden pyres. Strix was rather like a Northman, Lizbet thought, fierce and proud. She would appreciate a fiery end.

  Lizbet’s plan was to set fire to the Outlaw’s house, with the bundle of Strix inside.

  “Gather more tinder,” she said to Fudge. “Put it in all around the house, inside and out. I am going to burn everything down.”

  All that would remain of Strix were Lizbet’s memories.

  Maybe those should burn as well. In the Indies, they said, people put a man’s wife on the fire alongside him when he died. As she imagined the fire to come, Lizbet felt a terrible urge to stay in the house and join Strix in the flames. There would be the agony of burning, but then there would be release. Release from the pain of friendship found, but lost. Release from the pain of guilt for not having been able to save Strix. Release from the guilt of having caused Strix’s destruction by teaching her friendship, friendship that had led her to betray her masters.

  Lizbet sat at the table, her cheeks damp with tears. She took Strix’s seashell eye from her pocket and placed it on the tabletop in front of her. It was a thing of shocking beauty, lustrous white and umber, with a pupil of the deepest jet. Lizbet caught one of her own tears on a fingertip and touched it to Strix’s eye. It trickled down the pearly shell. Was this the first time Strix had been able to cry? The thought made Lizbet’s tears come harder.

  She untied the sack and took out Strix’s other eye. It was a white china drawer knob with a brown and black tortoiseshell center. She put it beside the first one. No wonder Strix’s eyes hadn’t matched. Lizbet found herself laughing through her tears.

  How many times had she looked into those brown eyes? This was the last time she ever would.

  They didn’t look right without eyelids or eyebrows though. Lizbet found, mixed in with the pile of Strix, two arcs of fur that she remembered as Strix’s eyebrows. Weasel or mink, perhaps. She placed them on the table above the eyes, in the position they would have had in life. Eyelids? One of the scraps was cloth from a gunny sack, the frayed edges making eyelashes. Lizbet arranged it atop the left eye. The other eyelid was the dried brown petal of a rose, with curled bristles from a worn-out paintbrush glued to it. A draft fluttered the right eyelid, almost as if Strix were winking.

  With eyebrows and eyelids in place, the effect was remarkable. Looking into Strix’s eyes, disembodied and sitting on the table, was almost like looking into them when Strix had been alive. Memories poured over Lizbet. She angled the right eyebrow up, as Strix had used to do when she was being skeptical. Oh, it so reminded her of Strix. The right eyelid fluttered again. Where was that draft coming from? Lizbet got up and checked the door. It was tightly closed.

  Wink, went the eyelid. Wink.

  Lizbet wet a finger in her mouth and held it up. No movement of the air.

  Wink.

  Wink.

  Lizbet stared into Strix’s eyes. She held her breath.

  Wink.

  Trembling so hard she could barely speak, Lizbet said, “S-S-S-Strix?”

  Wink.

  “Um . . . if you can understand me, wink once for ‘yes’ and twice for ‘no.’”

  Wink.

  “You’re really there?”

  Wink.

  “You’re . . .” She scarcely dared say it. “You’re . . . alive?”

  Nothing.

  “I mean, in the sense that Strix could ever be said to be alive, given that she was made of paper and string and whatnot.”

  Wink.

  “OH MY GOD STRIX!!!”

  “Strix,” Lizbet said, “I was planning on burning you, and myself as well. Can you forgive me?”

  Wink-wink.

  “But I didn’t do it. Doesn’t that count for something?”

  Long pause.

  Wink.

  T
wo-sided conversation was almost impossible. Lizbet tried to get Strix to spell words by winking once for A, twice for B, and so forth, up to twenty-six times for Z, but Strix didn’t have the patience for it. Lizbet would just have to guess Strix’s side of the conversation.

  “What can we do, Strix? Is there . . . is there some way to get you back together again?”

  Wink.

  “If I take you back to Mrs. Woodcot, can she—”

  Wink-wink.

  “You didn’t let me finish.”

  Wink-wink.

  “You really don’t want go back to Mrs. Woodcot.”

  Wink.

  “All right. Is there another witch who could remake you?”

  Wink.

  “Really? Who? Certainly not the Pope of Storms. I wouldn’t trust the earth witches to do it either—they’d turn you into a root or something. Who? It’s not like I can guess, because I don’t know any other witches.”

  Wink-wink.

  Lizbet had an idea. Out of the pile of Strix’s parts, she found Strix’s lips: two wads of oakum molded and shaped. Lizbet had to guess what bits of paper or leaves had covered them. She placed them on the table where she thought Strix’s lips should go. Without mouth, voice box, windpipe, or chest, Strix still couldn’t really talk, but if she could form words with her lips, Lizbet might be able to lip-read. A little.

  “Strix,” Lizbet said, “who can we get to remake you?”

  The lips pursed briefly.

  “Yes, ‘who.’ That’s what I said.”

  Wink-wink.

  Strix’s lips drew back, then formed what Lizbet thought was an s, then a p or b, and a spitting motion, like a t.

  What was she trying to say? Lizbet tried to imitate the motions with her own mouth: ssbt.

  Oh no. Not ‘Lizbet.’ Strix hadn’t said ‘who.’ She had said ‘you.’

  “Me?”

  Wink.

  “Strix . . .”

  Wink.

  “It’s one thing helping make a horse . . .”