by Eden Royce
It was like when you pull apart two pork ribs that weren’t quite finished cooking yet. The sound made my stomach do a flip-flop. My legs felt wobbly-weak, and Jay squeezed my hand tight as we watched Susie split her scalp straight down the middle and continue right down her back.
Then, she just shuffled out of her skin, like it was a winter coat that got too hot to wear. She folded up that skin and left it tucked up near the base of one of the largest trees.
Beside me, I heard Jay gasp and felt his body slump, but he stayed on his feet. As we watched, the thing that used to be Susie stood there, all meat and blood, and shook itself like a wet dog, then stretched its arms up to the sky. She—it?—took a running jump and leaped up into the air. For a while it hung there looking at the skin it was leaving behind. Then it flew away, off into the night.
I couldn’t look more. I couldn’t breathe.
Susie was . . . a boo-hag.
“Oh my Lord!” I said, the words feeling like they were not enough for the images I just saw. I stared up at the sky where Susie had disappeared, my head spinning. Boo-hags were real. And Susie was one of them.
Jay was speechless. His mouth opened and closed, but he didn’t say anything. Then he grabbed his head, pushing at his ears, and cursed. “She’s a monster! What we gonna do?”
I tried to get my thoughts straight. Doc told us that boo-hags would remove their skin when they went out to terrorize people. They loved to prey on rootworkers and suck up all their strength. And it was best to get rid of them as fast as you could.
I knew what we had to do. “Let’s get the skin,” I said.
“You fool up? I ain’t touching it,” Jay said. “That thing is nasty.”
I screwed my mouth up. “It’s just skin. It wasn’t nasty when Susie was in it a couple minutes ago. Help me get it.”
As we tiptoed over to the tree, Dinah wriggled up a storm in my pocket, a warning to be careful. We brushed off the few leaves that had fallen on the pile of clothes and skin, then got on either side of it to drag it away. At first, we tried grabbing the hands, but the skin’s fingers flopped like they were holding our hands and I squeaked like a scared mouse. Instead, we grabbed it under the arms. The skin itself was heavier than I thought it would be. We couldn’t lift it all the way up, so we dragged it along from the marsh to Doc’s cabin.
We knocked on the door, but we didn’t hear anyone moving inside; it didn’t seem like Doc was there. So we laid the skin down and I lifted the latch. I held the door open with my back while Jay and me dragged the heavy load inside.
I didn’t even need my notebook—I had just rewritten the information about how to deal with hags. To keep them from coming inside, you painted the house haint blue, or you laid a broom across the entrance to the house. I also remembered what he said about hag skins—there was no way I could forget something so yucky. “Salt,” I told Jay. “We’re supposed to cover the skin in salt.”
We ran around the cabin looking for salt. We knew it had to be here somewhere because Doc used it all the time in his spells. We grabbed all manner of jars, boxes, and bags until finally, Jay found the paper can with the little white girl’s picture on it. We poured a stream of the white crystals into our palms, just like Mama taught us in cooking. And then, together, we sprinkled salt all over the skin.
We almost screamed when the skin reacted to the salt, jerking and jumping like it was caught in a trap. But after a moment, it went still. Jay and I finally relaxed, sucking in deep breaths to get our heartbeats to slow down to normal.
“Now, let’s take it back outside.” Sweat beaded up on my forehead and I swiped at it with the back of my arm.
“We just dragged it in here. Why we wanna to take it out? One time touching that thing is enough.” Jay was wiping his hands on his overalls.
“Well, I don’t want to touch it either. But we need to take it outside. I have a feeling Doc won’t be happy if he comes back to find a hag skin in his cabin.”
Jay sneered. “Jez Turner, always the teacher’s pet.”
I jerked back like he’d hit me. “What’d you say?”
“You heard me.”
I could feel the blood rise to my face. “Just because I’m a good child doesn’t mean I’m a teacher’s pet. You’d know that if you actually listened to Mama or Doc or your teacher for once.”
“So, you’re perfect.” He frowned. “Perfect Jezebel, with a name of a street walker.”
No one had ever said that to me. Especially not my brother. Not even when we were fighting really hard. I pulled my hand back to box him in his dirty mouth.
“Stop! Stop it right now!”
Both me and Jay froze. We hadn’t heard Doc come up from the cellar of the cabin; we were too wrapped up in our fight. But there he was, half in and half out of the trapdoor. He had heard everything we’d said. “Don’t you see that this is because of the skin? You two aren’t like this. Think. It’s affecting your mind.”
He came fully out of the cellar and slid heavy gloves on his hands. Then he grabbed the skin around the belly area and took it outside himself, throwing it several feet from the cabin but where we could see it from the window. Coming back in, he took the gloves off before he poured water from a pitcher into a basin, then added a pouch of dried plants to it. He dropped the gloves into it and then plunged his hands in.
Doc motioned for us to do the same, and we washed our hands in the smoke-scented water. An oily residue rose to the top of the water. I shuddered.
“Now what I want to know is how did you two manage to get hold of a boo-hag skin?” He poured the dirty liquid into a jar and closed it up. Then he poured salt in the bowl and scrubbed it. “They are very protective of their skins and usually only keep them in a place they feel is safe.”
Jay and I looked at each other, but didn’t say anything for a few heartbeats. “It was in the marsh,” I said, not sure where to begin.
“And what were the two of you doing out there this time of night?”
“We were . . . following someone—” I began, but then Jay jumped in.
“It’s Susie’s skin,” Jay said. “That girl in Jez’s class.”
Doc’s eyes grew huge. “What? You’ve been going to school with a hag in disguise?”
I nodded. “I couldn’t sleep, and I saw something from the bedroom window. When me and Jay got to the woods, Susie was there. We watched her take off her skin and leave it. You said boo-hag skins should be salted.”
“That’s right.” Doc looked concerned, and he bit at his bottom lip. “Well, I suppose we just figured out why she stole those pages from your notebook.”
I’d completely forgotten about that. The way she’d befriended me, all the questions she had about rootwork . . . she’d only been trying to get at me, at my magic. Tears stung the back of my eyes, and I was glad it was too dark for Doc or my brother to see.
Doc took a peek at the sky out the window. “The sun is only a little while away. About an hour or so, I’d say.” He peered at the sky again. “Maybe a coupla hours.”
Just as he said that, the trees rustled. A wind came up that was from a different direction than the rest of the sticky air. A chill ran through me, but Doc and Jay didn’t react.
The thing that was Susie had returned. A screech filled the air—part owl, part hawk, part something I couldn’t name—and it made me tremble, because I had heard that exact same sound before on many nights when I couldn’t sleep. When I was little, Mama used to tell me it was night birds fighting each other. Did she just tell me that because it would make me feel safe?
We all tensed, watching the thing from the window. It looked like a skinned person creeping on all fours, bent, a horrifying open gap where a mouth should be. It looked around frantically, then saw the cabin light in the distance.
It came toward us, walking its hop-limp, until it saw the skin lying in a heap outside the cabin. It touched the skin like sinners touch the Bible, screeching again. Then it bent over the discarded flesh and fussed over it,
doing things with its hands that I couldn’t see.
“What’s it doing?” I asked, scared to breathe.
“It has to pick out every grain of salt before it can wear the skin again,” Doc said, his voice a tobacco-scented whisper.
Jay laughed, but I cut my eyes at him and asked, “And when it’s finished, it’ll just put the skin on and be Susie again?”
Doc sighed. “It won’t finish, Jezzie.”
“Why not?” The thing seemed focused on the task. It looked so small now, tiny and fragile.
“The sun will be up soon. And if that hag ain’t finished picking out every grain of that salt so it can get its skin back on, the sun will burn it up. Ashes’ll be all that’s left.”
I stared out the window to Doc’s cabin, letting that sink in.
“Do we . . .” I swallowed. “Do we have to watch her?” I couldn’t watch a creature frantically trying to live, knowing it only had a short while—an hour or two, maybe. I wasn’t that . . . strong.
Both Jay and Doc were silent. Maybe they didn’t know what to say. I tugged on one of the braids Mama put my hair in to sleep.
The thing outside was a boo-hag, a monster I’d been hearing about my whole life. One that could feed on the power of rootworkers. But . . . it was also Susie. Who had spent hours running and playing with me. Who had sat with me at lunch every day. Who had stood up to Lettie and her friends when no one else would. I could still see the edge of her striped dress poking out from under the pile of her skin.
Even if she’d done those nice things to get at me and my magic . . . she still did them.
Jay looked on, his eyes dark and closed off, as what used to be Susie continued to clean the salt out of her skin. The creature’s fingers worked faster than hummingbird wings, pinching and tossing each particle over its left shoulder.
“We can’t watch her burn up,” I said, barely louder than a whisper.
“It, Jezebel,” Jay said. His voice was cold. “Remember, its skin tried to turn us against each other a few minutes ago.”
“Yeah, but . . .” Doc was quiet and I shook his arm. “What do we do?”
Faster and faster, the little hag’s fingers flew, but the dark was already lifting from the night. What used to be Susie was shaking, crying. And it began to speak through the tears in a sweet, singsong voice.
“I’m sorry,” it said. To itself or to us, I couldn’t tell. “I didn’t want to. I’m so sorry.”
I stood up.
“Jezebel, where are you going?” Doc asked, reaching for me.
I sidestepped him, opened the cabin door, and walked out to Susie. I didn’t care in that moment what she’d done to me, what she’d tried to do. I couldn’t sit by and let her burn up to nothing while I watched.
“Susie?”
The monster didn’t look up from its movements. Pick, toss, pick, throw. It looked like the drawing of the skeleton with muscles on it from my science book, only covered in red paint. If I thought about it like a science lesson, I wasn’t scared at all.
“Susie?” I said again.
“What?” she choked out. “You did this, didn’t you?” Her voice was hard on the edges, still soaked in tears, but somehow accepting. “I should have known.”
I couldn’t lie to her. “Me and Jay did it, yes.”
She stopped then and looked toward the cabin, her body without skin slick under the still-dim light. Then she went back to her picking.
“Did you take the pages from my notebook?”
She nodded, still picking salt. “I didn’t want you to know how to do this, in case you found out.”
“I remembered it anyway.” I rocked back on my heels. “What did you mean before?” I asked.
“When?” Pick, toss.
“When you said you didn’t want to. What did you mean?”
Susie-thing sighed, her arms moving slower now, but still faster than mine ever could. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“I understand from my uncle that boo-hags are a threat to rootworkers. You try to take our power.”
“I know how most of us treat most of you. Sometimes we have a choice about that; sometimes we don’t. But I never wanted to hurt you.”
I poked out my bottom lip. “But you did.”
“I am sorry, Jezebel. But I was desperate.”
I waited until she spoke again. The dark was lifting, and we both knew there wasn’t much time. “I’m trapped,” she said. “For years now, I haven’t been able to leave this island, even after my kin departed. I think . . .” She swallowed hard. “I think a rootworker—one of your kin—stole a piece of my skin. I don’t know how they got it. Maybe they wanted it for a spell. I thought if I could understand your magic, I could find out what they were doing with it and how to get it back, so I can be whole again.”
“A piece of your skin? But no one—” I began. I was about to say that no one in my family would do something like that, but I knew that wasn’t true. Doc had said that animal sacrifices were a part of rootworking. And several spells, ones I didn’t know yet, used animals. I didn’t like the thought of it, but that’s how it was. It was a practice older than I was, older than anyone I’d ever known. And if they used animals, I imagined they wouldn’t hesitate to use parts of a monster, especially one that they thought was a threat.
“Who has it?” I asked instead.
“I don’t know who. I just know it’s here, hidden somewhere on this land. For a long time, I didn’t know where it was, I couldn’t see it.” Her fingers moved as she talked. “But a few months ago, I started having visions about where it is.”
A few months ago? That was when Gran passed away. Could Gran have been the one who took a piece of the hag skin? “What’s it for? I mean, what could a rootworker do with it?”
“I don’t know how root magic works, that’s why I took your notebook. I wanted to see if there was anything in there that could tell me what my skin would be good for.” She chuckled, but it wasn’t a happy sound. “All I know is not having a whole skin keeps me from going where I want to. Keeps me from seeing my family.” Pinch. Throw.
I understood that. Despite all that had happened, my heart ached for her. I couldn’t imagine never seeing my family ever again. I still missed Daddy and Gran, and I guessed I always would. But the thought of never being able to see Mama and Doc and even Jay again too was terrible. “Keeps you from being free,” I whispered.
Being held down by the poppet. Being forced to watch as Deputy Collins searched through our house. The trapped feeling I had from those experiences still made my breath catch in my throat and my heart thump in fear. I wanted to be free of those situations, and they had only lasted a short time. I couldn’t imagine how Susie felt being trapped in one place, alone.
“Yeah.” She stopped trying to clean out her skin for a moment and sat back on her heels. The muscles moved easily under the slick layer of what I thought must be blood. “I guess I’m going to die here, huh?”
“Not if you tell me how to help you.” I couldn’t let her stay trapped in a place she didn’t want to be. And I couldn’t let her die here.
“If I knew that, I would do it myself.” She sounded older than twelve now, older than Mama or Doc. “Then I could get my skin back and go home.”
I bit my lip, thinking. The sky was getting lighter and I saw Doc come out of his cabin, the door creaking softly.
Susie-thing, a monster with a beautiful singsong voice, looked up at me. “Can I tell you something? You have such wonderful, strong magic. I can feel it.”
“I do?”
“Yes. You and Jay both do, though he doesn’t trust it yet. He likes the newness of it, he likes being able to show off, but . . . well, I guess we’ll see how it develops in him.” She looked up at the sky and I saw her eyes were a solid, tarry black. “Or maybe you’ll see.” She went back to picking.
“If I can get that piece of skin for you, will it help?”
She let out a sob then, so full of tears that it
broke my heart. She swallowed, and the muscles in her neck tightened. “Would you really do that for me? Even though I—hurt you?”
I didn’t answer in words but in actions. I turned away and went toward the water pump in the yard, filling the bucket we used to give water to the chickens.
Doc approached me while I was trying to lift the full bucket. “What are you doing?” He pulled my hands away. “Her kind feed on rootworker magic. Some have even killed us.”
“I think we can trust her.” I pressed my lips together. My intuition was telling me that I should take the chance on Susie. Another creature trapped in a situation she didn’t want to be in. Alone, without any of her people around. Desperate to feel whole again. I understood those feelings. “Yes. We can.”
Doc stared at me hard for a moment, and something seemed to shift in him. He picked up the bucket I was struggling with, and I thought he was going to toss it off into the trees, but he didn’t. He carried it over to the skin and poured the water out in a huge wave, washing the rest of the salt away. Susie let out a glad cry and picked up the skin, shaking it like a coat that had been in a storage box all winter. She stepped into it and it closed around her, sealing shut just as tiny smears of yellow touched the sky.
“Thank you.” She looked like the girl I’d gone to school with, mostly. “I have to go now, but I’ll be back. Thank you for saving me.”
We watched as Susie ran off, her feet barely touching the ground as she did.
“Y’all stupid.” Jay’s angry voice came from behind us. His arms were folded over his chest and a frown creased his face as he looked at me. “Why you let it go? To kill somebody?”
I hated that he called Susie it. “She’s never killed anybody. She had plenty of chances to kill one of us, didn’t she?”
Doc just looked at the road where Susie had disappeared. “I hope we did the right thing.”
“Nope,” Jay said. “She’ll be back all right. With an army of them things.”
I took a deep breath. No matter what they said, I knew we did the right thing. Watching someone, or something, suffer wasn’t in me.
I didn’t think Susie would be coming with an army. But something told me she would be back.
