The Hex Witch of Seldom Page 8

  “Shane,” she demanded, “stop.” She wanted to see how badly his hooves were damaged.

  The stallion responded only by speeding his walk into a trot. Hooves struck the ground in hard-driving rhythm. Bobbi felt the slight unevenness of that rhythm.

  “You’re going lame,” she stated. “Let me down. I’ll walk.”

  Shane lifted his head angrily and trotted faster. Bobbi put her arms around his neck, slid down over his shoulder and hung there, dragging her heels in the dirt until the horse came to a stop. Then she stood up, wobbling a little. Shane faced her with his blue eyes blazing, plainly furious. He stamped his hind feet.

  “Kick me if it’ll make you feel better,” Bobbi retorted, and she stooped to examine his hooves. “God,” she added in a different tone. “I could kick myself.”

  All four hooves were worn and ragged, but the front ones were the worst, because they bore the most weight. Shane’s front toes were worn so short that his hooves stood almost upright, straining his pasterns. Far worse: up his left front hoof ran a crack, and the pressure of every step widened it and forced it longer.

  “I bet that started yesterday. I should have seen it before. I shouldn’t have been riding you. Now it’s worse.”

  Bobbi turned away with tears stinging her eyes and began to walk. After a moment Shane followed her down the overgrown tram road.

  By midday, with no food in her stomach, Bobbi was reeling, but she kept stubbornly on. She stopped being aware of the forest around her and saw only the ground beneath her feet. Another damn creek. Down the bank, slosh through the water, don’t bother to find the driest way, up the other side, good. Shane, following her, stepping clear of the rocks in the creekbed, plodding through the water. Cold water probably felt good on those hooves. They had to hurt.… She didn’t look at his head, his eyes, only glanced back at his legs from time to time as he followed her. She felt her feet starting to stumble and tried to correct them, but it was all she could do to put one in front of the other. She concentrated on that. Left foot step, right foot step, left foot again. Staggering a little. No longer much aware even of the black-horse-not-a-horse behind her—and then a gentle nudge in the middle of her back sent her toppling onto the ground.

  It was soft as a bed down there, springtime-damp and leafy. Bobbi lay blissfully still a moment before she realized what had been done to her and pride made her move.

  “Hey,” she protested weakly, rolling over to scowl at Shane.

  Looming above her, he seemed gigantic. His eyes, a blue glow—no, white. Shane was the world. Shane-blaze took her, she saw nothing else, and in it, in his eyes, she saw—the gypsy dancers, the dragon with gray hair, the old woman with the walking stick that moved, the young beauty in the flounced and ruffled dress, and—and the man in the black shirt. He had turned to look straight at her, and his eyes under the broad brim of his black hat blazed piercing blue, fire and ice. The shirt glistened; silk. Something white glinted at his neck, under the open collar.

  “Bobbi,” he said.

  She felt her mouth fall open in astonishment. “Shane,” she blurted, “you can talk to me!”

  “Sometimes. Listen. There’s no need for this. Get up on me and ride. It’s not much farther.”

  “But you weren’t meant for that!” Still lying on the ground, looking up at him, too weak and dazed to care that she was being crazy and seeing things again, Bobbi said, “You were meant to be the rider. You had—a big horse, the best in the world. You rode—”

  “Hush,” he said. His face was youthful but not boyish; it was hard, clean-shaven, lean and sunburned. The lines of his brows and nose and jaw were straight, with a set look about the jaw. Small weather-marks showed around his eyes; perhaps he was not young after all, but ageless. His mouth was strong, somber. The form behind his form was that of a horse, a black mustang. Bobbi had no trouble thinking of him as man and mustang both.

  He said, “I’ve been eating. I can go for the little while longer it will take. You can’t. Get up and get on me.”

  “The crack will get worse.” Bobbi’s eyes never left his.

  “It will be only for a few hours. Until the tram line ends.”

  “And what is there?”

  “A friend. Shelter, food.”

  Bobbi had not blinked, but the blue-white blaze vanished, and with it the man in the black silk shirt. She was staring up at Shane the wild horse, and the mustang had turned his head away.

  Bobbi rolled to one side and got up off the ground with an effort. She steadied herself with one hand against the nearest tree.

  “I hate to do it,” she told Shane. “If I had any choice, I wouldn’t.”

  There was no fallen tree nearby, and she knew she couldn’t vault on from the ground this time. She walked as far as the next cut, holding onto Shane’s mane at the withers to support herself. Then he stood partway down the bank and she eased onto his back from above.

  That afternoon seemed very long.

  Giving up her pride, Bobbi had laid her head on Shane’s neck when she felt his already-slow walk turn yet slower, then stop. It took her a moment to gather the strength to sit up and open her eyes.

  Shane stood within the last fringe of trees before a tiny mountain town: just a dozen tumbledown buildings, half of them empty, strung along a narrow, winding dirt road that vanished back into forest again. It was dusk. For some reason Bobbi noticed with great clarity the minute, white spring flowers blooming in the woods trash at Shane’s feet. Yellow light glowed gently from the windows.

  The woods pressed on the town the same way they pressed on the Yandro farm, so that the trees seemed to push the shacks and trailers, the vacant single-room store and the square wooden post office down the steep slopes toward the road and creek at the bottom. The nearest house, a plain, two-story frame house, stood half in forest. Its front porch faced the downhill slope and the town. Its back stoop stood hidden in laurel, and taller trees fingered its roof, leaving mossy marks.

  Shane looked at the lay of the land a moment, then drifted forward as silently as a mountain cat toward the back stoop, that house.

  Though she could not possibly have heard them coming, a square-built old woman came to the back door, the one facing the woods, and looked out at the twilight. She stood in the doorway with the light streaming through from behind her back; Bobbi could not see her properly, only her housedress and her smooth silver hair. Shane had stopped. The old woman turned her head, and Bobbi knew she had somehow perceived the black horse standing in the nightfall, and though Bobbi could not see the old woman’s eyes, she felt as though they had looked on her naked.

  The old woman beckoned, reached inside the door and turned off the brightest light, leaving the porch in near-darkness. Then she went back inside.

  Shane carried Bobbi forward.

  Straight up to the stoop he took her, and the fast, half-frightened beating of her heart gave her strength to dismount lightly, stand on her own and slip quietly in at the open door. The kitchen door. In the soft light coming through an inner door from what seemed to be a parlor, she could see the oilcloth-covered table, the ladder-back chairs. A good smell of cooked chicken greeted her. “Set down there at the table,” a throaty old voice told her. But Bobbi froze where she was, on the braided rug. The old woman standing at the cookstove was the one she had seen in Shane’s eyes.

  Shane came in behind her, up the wooden porch steps and right into the house, and the old woman scuttled over and shut the door behind him.

  PART 2

  Witch Hazel

  “The trickster must first win trust,” the bearded man whispered to his wand at midnight. “It is tiresome, I know, my beauty, but ’twill be worth it in the end. And the years are short to an immortal.”

  The wand lay in his callused hands without moving or speaking. It was made of wood stolen centuries before from a tree in a cemetery in Italy, a cypress then already old, with its roots deep in the dead heart of a Borgia, stolen in the dark of the moon, r
umor said, with a sacrifice of human blood. The staff was black with age, thick as a blacksmith’s arm and very powerful, but still and mute as the tomb.

  Bearded nearly to his waist, but with no mustache on his upper lip, the whisperer turned the death-wand in his hands. He caressed its steel-clad head between his palms. He murmured to it as if to a lover. Overhead hung a single dim, bare electric bulb, casting a sheen in the polished metal. The whisperer held the wand upright between his two hands, scrying in the steel, and there he saw a black stallion with a white brand on his neck and a tired girl on his back. And he saw an old woman in a mouse-colored hickory rocker, waiting.

  He smiled and lowered the dark cudgel so that his shadow fell across it and the sheen in its metal sheathing dimmed. “I knew he would come to her when he needed help,” he whispered. “I knew it before she knew it herself. Simple-minded old woman. Stupid with her own goodness.” Whispering, he sibilated the words, sending forth stealthy, snakelike sounds into the night.

  “Soon,” he whispered to the wand. “Very soon, now. Goodnight, my beauty.” Then with casual ease he passed one hard hand down the length of the wand while he held it in the other. Without even looking he laid it down, turned out the light and went away, out the large barn door, up the unlit yard to the house.

  In the dark a cypress-handled hammer lay where he had left it, on the anvil.

  Chapter Eight

  Bobbi looked around uneasily for the walking stick and saw it in the next room, standing near the front door in a green ceramic urn shaped like an elephant’s foot, along with several umbrellas. She turned her eyes away quickly and did not look at the staff again.

  “Set down, Bobbi,” the old woman repeated. “Ain’t you hungry?” She placed a large bowl of homemade chicken corn soup on the table, then brought saltines.

  Bobbi stood where she was, staring because she saw the form moving behind the form. More plainly than ever before, she saw it, and her head fuzzed in confusion; a stumpy old woman in a housedress stood before her, but another woman stood there as well: hunchbacked, in a robe of white calfskin edged with the fine fleece of lambs, in a pointed hat and lappets of white fox fur. A veil covered her face. Her flowing silver hair rippled down her back to below her waist, a thick waist rounded by a belt of silver links; on each link was etched a mystic sign. From the belt hung a gleaming silver knife with no scabbard. On her spraddling feet were tall, white boots, fox-furred and leather-laced. In her white-gloved hand she held the sensate staff.

  Though it neither moved nor spoke, Bobbi shook her head hard at the sight of the staff, sending her own hair flying across her eyes. When she blinked and looked again, only an old Pennsylvania Dutch woman stood on the braided rug, holding a box of crackers. But what she had seen—it was like nothing she had ever seen before, or imagined. She could not possibly have dreamed it out of her own mind.

  “I know you’re hungry,” the old woman insisted, taking Bobbi’s gesture for refusal.

  Bobbi still didn’t move, but for some reason she blurted out, “Shane has a cracked hoof.”

  “I know it.” The old woman’s eyes, Bobbi noted now that she could see her clearly, were of an odd amber-brown color, almost yellow.

  “Epsom salts,” said Bobbi breathlessly. “You have any Epsom salts? He should soak it in a bucket of warm water with Epsom salts in it.”

  “I’ll take care of it. Stop your fussing.” Rotating her whole thick body, the old woman turned toward the horse. “Go straight on through to the parlor, Shane. The drapes are drawn in there. One of them nosy neighbors of mine might see you in here wunst I turn a light on.”

  Shane walked through into the next room.

  “This here’s Seldom,” added his hostess with rueful amusement, “and folks watches out for each other all day long. Seldom anything better to do.”

  Bobbi trailed after Shane. She felt spooked and did not want to be separated from the horse, but what she saw in the parlor spooked her more. Loose hay lay strewn on the camelback sofa. Bales of it stood stacked behind the glass-topped end tables, sweet-smelling and greeny-gold under the glow of ginger lamps in velvet-swagged shades. A metal bucket of water and one of oats stood on the carpet. Shane swung his haunches past a breakfront full of knick-knacks, lowered his head to the oats and started to eat.

  Standing there and gawking, Bobbi felt more woozy than ever. She wobbled back to the kitchen, sat down in front of her cooling soup and started to shovel at it with her spoon.

  “Here,” said the old woman rather sharply, “let me heat that up for you.”

  Bobbi shook her head, then thought of being more polite. Better be very polite to this person. “No, thank you,” she said, gulping soup with an effort. “It’s fine.” Her voice came out strained and mumbling.

  The old woman scooped the bowl away from in front of her with a motion like that of a bear clawing for grubs. Bobbi held her dripping spoon in one hand, afraid to put it down even on the oilcloth. She caught the drips in the palm of the other hand, and she sat that way without moving as her hostess reheated the soup, tasted it, then finally stumped over to the table and gave it back to her.

  Bobbi ate. The old woman ponderously circled the table and turned on a plastic wall lamp with a faded motto on the shade, “Let there be light.” Bobbi watched her the whole time. The old woman was built like a cookstove: not fat, but short, flat-bosomed, thick-waisted and broad, with a capacious belly. Her legs, poking out from under her housedress, were set so far apart that they seemed like cookstove legs, canted, bowed and attached to her corners. She wore nylon stockings rolled brownly down to the tops of cheap, black vinyl slippers with a seam running up the center from the toe. A segment of her sturdy legs showed white and hairy between the nylons and the hem of her cotton housedress. She had three chins arching down her neck; wisps of caked cornstarch lay in the creases. Bobbi noticed that and the safety pin holding the front of the housedress together. She tried not to stare at the safety pin as the old woman sat down across from her and watched her spoon the soup.

  “You want a glass of milk?”

  “No, thank you.” In fact, at the mention of milk she felt weak with longing, but the sharp, yellow-eyed gaze on her frightened Bobbi, making her feel as if that old-woman stare could see everything about her. Maybe it was the effect of food after extreme hunger, but she felt half sick. She set down her spoon in her bowl and demanded, “Who are you?”

  “Hazel Fenstermacher’s my name.”

  “Mrs. Fenstermacher—”

  “Just call me Aunt Witchie. Everybody else does.”

  Bobbi stared, her breath taken away, as if someone had hit her in the stomach. After a moment the old woman understood and laughed, a quiet laugh, not unkind. “It ain’t like that, Bobbi. They called me Witchie from little on up, because my name is Hazel, see? Witch hazel.” Witchie got up and brought her the glass of milk anyway, even though Bobbi had said she didn’t want it. Aunt Witchie’s arms swung outward when she moved. She carried things with her elbows pointing sideways.

  “Thank you,” Bobbi mumbled. She drank the milk and finished her soup. Witchie sat on the rocker near the cookstove.

  “You can stop worrying about that motorcycle rider Shane killed,” the old woman said after a while. “Them kind ain’t going to the police. They buried that body deep, and good riddance.”

  Bobbi set down her spoon, on the oilcloth this time. “If you’re not a witch,” she burst out, “how do you know so much about me and Shane? How come you were expecting us?”

  “I never said nothing about what I was or wasn’t,” Witchie replied. Her voice was low and filled with phlegm, as gruff as her manners. “But for the matter of knowing things, how did you know Shane’s name?”

  The abrupt question and the hazel-eyed stare that came with it made Bobbi sweat and start to stammer. “It—it’s just—what I called him.”

  The old woman looked back at her out of a softly folded face with shrewd eyes that knew better. “It’s what h
e is,” she said. “Or part of him. It’s his name. Or one of them.”

  “But—what—”

  What is he? she was going to blurt out. But Shane appeared at the doorway between the kitchen and the parlor, his blue eyes on Witchie, ears at a troubled sideward angle.

  “He don’t want us to talk about that right now,” Witchie told Bobbi. “You want something else to fress?” Eat, she meant. “I got some sweet bologna here, and red-beet eggs.”

  Bobbi shook her head.

  “What’s the matter, girl? Your tongue need scraped?”

  It was hard to think of a reply to that. Bobbi said nothing. She really did not want anything more to eat. Her stomach, long deprived, was making an uproar over what she had already put in it.

  “I guess you’re tired. Better have a bath before you go to bed. Give me them filthy clothes, I’ll wash them. What you want to sleep in?”

  Bobbi said, “Anything.” She ruefully expected that her hostess would loan her an old woman’s nightie, frumpy and several sizes too large. At home—but it wasn’t her home any longer, she remembered, her gut twisting; too much food, she told herself—when she had a bed to sleep in, she usually slept in a man’s teeshirt in the summer, boys’ flannel pajamas in the winter. The pajama legs always twisted up around her crotch, and she hated them.

  Witchie was looking at her. Almost defiantly, Bobbi looked back.

  Abruptly, and without another word, Witchie swung into action. She heaved herself out of the rocker and beckoned Bobbi to follow her upstairs. While Bobbi waited uncertainly in the cluttered spare bedroom, she stumped up another steep flight of stairs to the attic and came down a moment later carrying a gown that took Bobbi’s breath.

  “I can’t wear that!” she exclaimed, though in fact the gown called to something unacknowledged inside her and her body sent up a warm flush, a tingle of excitement, in answer. A long spill of rose-colored satin …