Witch Boy

by Russell Moon

  It is mine. Peace is momentarily mine. For however long, I will take it.

  “Don’t turn around.”

  With a gasp, I clutch the tree branch so hard, either it or my ribs will have to break.

  The deep, calm voice is right in my ear, where my dog is supposed to be.

  “You don’t scare me,” I say.

  “Yes I do.”

  “No,” I say more firmly, “you don’t. Nothing scares me anymore.”

  “That is good. A well-told lie is a fine act of magic. But it is a lie all the same. I do scare you. And you scare yourself.”

  He is getting heavier, pinning me harder.

  “Go to hell,” I say.

  He says nothing.

  “I’m sick of you people. Where’s my dog?”

  “You need to stop worrying about your dog. Your dog knows what he’s doing. Worry about what needs worrying about.”

  “And what might need worrying about then?”

  “Worry about the truth,” he says, whispering ever lower in my ear so that I can hear his tongue making contact with the roof of his mouth. “Worry about knowing. Worry about what you did, about what you might do, and about not knowing. Worry about where you’re going, and who is watching. Worry about friends, worry about enemies, worry about finding out. Worry about who is lying to you, and about why. Worry about your back, Marcus. Worry about your head.”

  It is as if he has taken the events of the journey from Port Caledonia to Blackwater and crystallized the whole thing. Worry about my head? I am way ahead of him.

  “Is that all?” I ask wearily.

  “No. Worry about Eleanor,” he says.

  I am startled at the sound of my mother’s name. There is a rush of something hot through me, all liquid and speed, spreading from my chest through to the farthest reaches of my fingers and toes. I make the effort. I push up off the branch, trying to get up, to get position on him.

  At first, he tries to remain controlled, to hold the balance over me without seeming to try. But I am stronger right now, I can feel it—stronger than I have ever been, and he has to work. I hear him breathing harder, a groan of effort slipping out, as finally with one powerful hand gripping my neck and the other squeezing mercilessly on my kidney, he has me well pinned once again to my branch.

  “The spirit is willing,” he says, puffing through the words. “But you’re not quite The Business yet.”

  I say nothing. It is all I can do not to wail with the pain. I won’t give him that.

  “There is a gift waiting for you at home. Go and claim it.”

  “Go to hell,” I say.

  “Yes. Well. You will understand better, in time. In the meantime—”

  “In the meantime,” I cut in, “I think maybe what I should worry about is you.”

  He breathes deeply, exhales, loosens his grip on me.

  “Yes, I suppose, in your position, it would be foolish not to.”

  There is a pause. Then there is an easing. Then Chuck is again breathing his comforting familiar reek over me.

  I straighten up, slide him off my back, then turn around to face him on our branch.

  “You’re a hell of a watchdog there, Chuck.”

  It’s there on his face. He does know.

  If I’m supposed to be the Prince, why does everybody know what I don’t?

  I turn my back on Chuck and survey the landscape. I am so angry, at I don’t know what. “I am going to move something, goddamnit.”

  I turn and look around. They are vast, these woods.

  “They will all be yours,” he says.

  I whip around again, but there is only Chuck.

  I turn, determined to flex whatever magic muscle I might have. I am going to move something. I am going to control something. I am not going to be the pincushion for God’s voodoo any longer.

  “The spirit is willing,” he says. A mock.

  I don’t even look back this time.

  “All you survey, it’s yours to do with what you wish.”

  A movement catches my eye, a shimmy, a stirring in a bush twenty yards away.

  I lock onto it, burning the bush with my eye. I don’t know what I am doing, but I keep on doing it. I stare, I stare, I want it. I want it. I want it to fall under my command.

  Chuck starts whimpering.

  “Shut up,” I say.

  I concentrate. I focus. You are in there, sonofabitch creature, and I want you out.

  It shoots out, a black zigzag that then spikes into a spear, coming at me.

  I snag it.

  I am holding it by the head, its jaws wide and waiting to strike at me.

  I squeeze harder, and harder, and harder.

  It is going limp. I squeeze harder.

  “I am tired of being watched,” I say, my voice deepening. “I am tired of getting bitten. I am tired of being afraid.”

  I squeeze.

  “Don’t,” he says.

  I squeeze harder.

  “Don’t,” he says.

  I squeeze until I see some sort of pinkish froth gathering at the corners of its jaws.

  “You don’t want to do that.”

  “Don’t tell me what I want to do.”

  His voice deepens. “There is accountability.”

  I hold on. I can detect no life left in the snake. But I can’t yet detect death.

  “Even for the Cern Prince. As your power grows, so does your responsibility. Choices are choices, actions have consequences. You will always have to decide. If an act is not you, do not do it. Once done, the act becomes you. Even you do not have the power to make time and undo actions.

  “Yet.”

  He is gone again, and I am staring at the blunt black head of the snake. The jaws are still wide, but they are not rigid. I take my free hand, and move the jaw with one finger. Closed, open, closed, open.

  This is not me.

  I let go of the head, and hold the entire lifeless thing across my two hands, draped like an old worn belt. I feel a twitch of muscle, then another, as it begins stretching downward, for the branch.

  It catches the branch, coils around it, then makes its way for the trunk.

  God, I hate snakes. But I want them to die of natural causes.

  Behind me, Chuck growls as the snake passes, but leaves it alone.

  Together we watch it disappear into the bushes again.

  “I don’t know,” I tell Chuck. “What’s the use of this power stuff if this is what it’s going to be like? It’s like having the keys to the family car but only being allowed to drive it up and down the driveway.”

  He takes a chew on the back of my shirt, which is pretty bold stuff for Chuck. Then I realize he is not playing. He is tugging and half whimpering, half growling at me at the same time. He is, in fact, pulling me pretty hard.

  “You want to go,” I say.

  He stops pulling. We climb down the tree, and Chuck starts barreling down the path toward home. But this time he’s not panicked. Every time I slow down, he stops, turns, and barks at me. All together, this amounts to a week’s worth of physical effort for Chuck.

  So I have to take him seriously.

  I run.

  “Eleanor,” I call, pushing through the screen door. “Eleanor.”

  No answer. Chuck barks. No answer to him either.

  We go through the business, looking in every corner of the first floor, out on the porch, out over the stream. Then we head to the second floor. No Eleanor in Eleanor’s room, or in the bathroom, or…

  But of course the attic door is wide open. Chuck and I stand there, frozen. The door isn’t slamming itself this time, but it is giving off some kind of funky nasty aura.

  “Go on, Chuck,” I say bravely. I try pushing him from the backside to go up into the attic.

  He resists. Does that slinky dog thing where it feels like you’re moving them but they’re just collapsing their hindquarters.

  “Oh, that’s enough of this,” I say finally. “Whatever it is I�
�m supposed to see up there…I can’t just hide forever.”

  In anger, I shove my coward dog right down to the floor. “You stay, I’ll go.”

  This is fine with Chuck. He stays. I go.

  It takes me about forever to make my way down the last ten feet of hallway. It takes even longer for me to make it up the short flight of dimly lighted stairs.

  I call out, more to keep myself company than anything else.

  “Eleanor?” I say quietly.

  “Yes,” she answers.

  I stumble, retreating back down several steps.

  “Marcus,” she calls, almost scolding.

  I go back up.

  “What were you calling me for, if you didn’t want to find me?”

  “Sorry,” I say. “I just didn’t figure I would. Find you.”

  “Well,” she says, looking back at the small pile of what she was doing, “you did. I guess it’s a day for unanticipated findings.”

  She is kneeling on the dusty, unfinished floorboards, picking through an old pine box about the size of a large television. I look at her, then I look away, then I look at her again, then away again.

  The place is spooking me to no end. The ceiling is steeply pitched, and there are dark spaces, angles, corners everywhere. It is damp from the rain and from the incessant humidity. I can’t stay focused because I can’t shake the feeling that something is going to fall on me.

  “What are you doing up here?” I ask, catching finally the full worry and sadness on my mother’s face. “Eleanor?”

  She does not look up all the way, but offers me an angle on her face, caught by the single bare lightbulb. She cannot pull her eyes away from the box.

  “The door was open. I thought I heard you up here. I know I heard the doors. I cannot understand….”

  I wait for more, for explanation. I wait in vain.

  “You don’t understand, Eleanor,” I say. “I don’t either. Can you tell me…better, let’s go downstairs, and you can—”

  “How this stuff got here. I didn’t move this box here. You didn’t move this box here?”

  She is too distressed for this to be any old regular question. She looks up at me now, a sort of pleading in her eyes.

  I shudder.

  “So,” I say, “it was here when we got here. It was left by the last people who lived here. Right?”

  She stares down into the box. Shakes her head.

  “What’s in there, Eleanor?” I squat down on my haunches, like I’m going to look into the box. But I don’t inch up any closer.

  She is quiet.

  Breath is on my neck.

  I jump.

  “Chuck,” I yelp, straightening back up. “Jesus.”

  Eleanor stays focused.

  “It’s…your father’s old black magic…bullshit,” she snaps. It is meant to be a brave go-to-hell. She sounds scared.

  “My whose…what?” I ask, walking toward her, and it.

  She slams the lid shut, and looks at me sternly.

  “We have to talk,” Eleanor says.

  “Yeah, we do,” I say.

  We are sitting at the kitchen table. Between us there is a carafe of my mother’s homemade sangria, two glasses, a horned helmet, a pewter ring, a gold choker, and a cauldron.

  “How could you forget a thing like this?” I ask her as I finger the wildly intricate scenes molded into the bronze sides of the bowl.

  “With a lot of effort, that’s how.”

  “But why?” I ask. I can’t look at her as she speaks, because I can’t take my eyes off the stuff. The helmet is a bit primitive, but that makes it all the more fascinating. It’s a sort of dirty bronze, but almost looks like it could be petrified leather, with a mountain etched in the front surrounded by loads of trees and overseen by multiple suns or planets. There is a sort of stitching pattern zigging through it all, and the two fat horns sprouting from the top are of slightly differing sizes.

  I put the helmet on.

  Eleanor swipes it off.

  “Not,” she says.

  “Are you going to tell me what the problem is?” I can pretty well tell what the problem is. What I want specifically to know is what her problem is.

  She takes a good long gulp. “The problem, young man, is this stupid witch bullshit.”

  “Um, do you have to keep calling it that?”

  “Yes, I do!” she barks.

  “Okay,” I say. “Go on.”

  Eleanor picks up the cauldron and turns it around and around in her hands. As if she is viewing old family videos in the scenes depicted in the panels of forests full of griffins and snakes, bulls, boars and giant stags. Each panel is dominated by some big-headed character in a helmet, some with horns, others with snaky embroidered Celtic designs banding their foreheads.

  “Crap,” she snaps, like she is speaking directly to one or more of the heads. “All of it, utter crap.” She bangs the cauldron back down on the table, picks up her wineglass. “Your father,” she spits, “drove me insane with this nonsense.”

  “Well, if it’s nonsense…,” I begin.

  “It is nonsense.” She is taking this awfully personally.

  “Then what’s the big deal?” I ask. Again, knowing what the big deal is, but wanting to hear her version.

  “It is what tore us apart,” she says, suddenly twenty fathoms lower than she was. She stares into the bowl.

  This would be a good time to not be pressing for details, judging from Eleanor’s twisted features. I so wish I could let it alone.

  “I thought death was what tore you apart. You never told me you split up, Eleanor.”

  “No,” she says, “I didn’t.”

  “You told me he was dead.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Well, is he dead?”

  I think that if she could crawl into that cauldron right now and dissolve, she would, no matter how much she hates the bullshit.

  “I would be very surprised, Marcus, if he were not dead.”

  Neither one of us is particularly convinced by that answer. But I am not prepared to provoke her any further right now.

  “Why didn’t you tell me any of this before?”

  “I didn’t want to upset you.”

  I can’t let this one go.

  “Eleanor?” I say firmly.

  She refills both our glasses. “What do you think?” she asks. “Needs a little more triple sec and a splash more tequila, I’d say.”

  I pick up the choker.

  “His torque,” she says bitterly.

  “Yeah?” I ask. It is deadly cool, a twisted gold tube an inch in diameter, with two fists meeting in the center where there is a gap. There is a hinge at the back, and I open it, clamp it shut around my neck.

  Eleanor shuts her eyes, shudders.

  I take advantage of the moment and slip the ring on my middle finger. It is a starkly gorgeous thing, heavy weathered bone carved into the shape of a stag horn, knotted and twisted into itself, around itself, and me. It is a little loose, but it feels right, there on my hand.

  “I wish you would just leave it alone, Marcus,” she says sadly, weakly. She could certainly put up more fight than this. “I mean, it all belongs to you, I suppose, but—”

  “Have you been keeping it all this time?” I am modeling the stuff now. I cannot help it. Creepy as it may sound, I feel a power and a ghoulish thrill coming over me as I turn this way and that, feel the stippled scratch of the gold at my throat, feel the heft of the ring.

  “I haven’t seen any of it since the day he left,” she says. “I thought it all went with him.”

  This, to me, is not shocking. Not after all I have been seeing. But to Eleanor, feeling the way she feels, this cannot make sense. Eleanor likes sense, and she makes sense.

  Anthropologist Eleanor. Making sense is her life, and she has devoted herself to it.

  “So do you have a theory?” I probe cautiously.

  I count on Eleanor. She is and always has been keeper of the Se
nse, as far as I know. Her reason is my reason, and if I am going to return to any form of reason now, it is she who will have to bring me to it.

  “Eleanor?” I ask.

  I watch the twitching of her eyes and facial muscles like I’m watching the blips and bleeps of a computer, as she tries to come to logic.

  She takes a deep drink.

  So do I.

  “No, I don’t,” she says flatly. “Obviously somebody put it here. Either whoever was living here before us, or somebody who got up here in the short time between the previous occupant and us. I will ask Dr. Spence about the previous residents and who might have had access. When I see him tonight.”

  I gulp. Dr. Spence? Seeing Dr. Spence tonight?

  The voice is behind me again, distantly. “Worry about Eleanor,” it says.

  I turn, and only Chuck is there. His ears are way flat to his head, and his eyes watery.

  I turn back to Eleanor, who is looking brighter. She has fought it off for the time being, filed it away where it cannot hurt her.

  “Oh,” she says, smiling a cracky smile, “I almost forgot. Jules called while you were out.”

  Jules.

  Jules.

  I no longer even know what meaning the name has. Love. Nightmare. Lovenightmare. I go simultaneously numb and sweaty at the sound of it.

  Jules called. Test? Joke? Sangria-fueled psychosis? Whose psychosis, Eleanor’s or mine, or some poetic symbiotic mutual dissolve because we just can’t take any more of whatever it is we are taking?

  “I’d think you’d be more excited than that,” she says dryly.

  “Sorry,” I say, trying to snap back. “Jules, my god. Jules? Are you certain it was Jules?”

  “I know Jules, Marcus.”

  “I know you do, but—”

  I have to cut myself off. Which of the various buts would I dare go into?

  She gives me a look, then goes on. “Says she misses you. And she wants to see you.”

  It’s all falling away quickly, all the spooky business, all the might have’s and the surreal head-splitting fear of it all.

  Jules.

  “She wants to see me,” I say, my voice half choked. I can’t fight a smile, even if every sensible impulse tells me to duck and cover.