The Hex Witch of Seldom (7 page)

The lane rounded a curve, and the shanty where Travis Dodd lived with his parents came into view. Bobbi slowed to a jog. The horse might still be within earshot. “Shane!” she shouted to the woods. “Shane!”

She stopped in front of the shanty, scanning the encircling woods, listening. Nothing happened except that Travis appeared at the shanty door in his ragged pajamas, looking surprised. Bobbi jumped back from him like a spooking colt. She had forgotten he would be home, sick, while both his parents worked. But there was no time to spare thought for Travis.

“Have you seen Shane?” she demanded.

Travis looked puzzled for a moment, until he tore his mind off Bobbi's presence and remembered who Shane was. “The black horse?” His face lighted up. “I thought I heard something! Must have been him. Went by here a minute ago.”

“Shane!” Bobbi called to the woods. “Come here, please!”

“He get loose?” Travis asked. It was not the first time he had asked Bobbi a stupid question, though he didn't seem to have that problem with other people. He flushed, but, preoccupied, Bobbi did not notice.

“I set him free,” she said softly, still watching the woods. Then, before Travis could gawk, she wheeled on him. “Travis, get me something to eat, please. Quick.”

Startled, he didn't move for a moment.

“An apple, a couple slices of bread,” Bobbi expanded impatiently. “Hurry up. I gotta catch him before he gets too far away.”

Travis opened the refrigerator—it stood beside him on the shanty porch—and handed her his school lunch, packed the night before just in case he felt well enough to go. “Thanks,” Bobbi told him. She ran on, and he watched after her as she disappeared into hemlock and mountain laurel. He thought the sandwiches were for the day, until she went home at nightfall. But she knew that this was her food for the foreseeable future, and Lord and the black horse only knew where darkness would find her.

She was a hunter. She knew how to look for sign. Skirting the Dodd clearing, she found the place where Shane had entered the forest, displacing the dead leaves and pine duff on the ground with his hooves. A horse leaves a plain trail in the woods, especially in the soft, moist ground of springtime. Bobbi followed as fast as she could, through grapevine tangles, down damp ravines where the hoofprints showed plainly, along the mountainside on slopes so steep that her feet slithered and she supported herself with her hands. From time to time she thought she heard a crashing noise in the brush ahead. But when she stopped and called, the black mustang did not come to her. Probably it was deer she was hearing. Shane must have been out of earshot. He could move far faster than she could. She had no chance of catching up with him.

But she continued to follow the trail, feeling fear swell in her and dampen her palms. A day, two days, three, and the trail would grow too faint to lead her. Sooner, if rain fell. After that, if Shane caught himself by the halter—

Damn double-thickness nylon halters wouldn't break for anything.

Years later, somebody might find the skeleton strewn at the base of the tree, the bones pulled apart by wild dogs or Pennsylvania coyotes, but the skull still hanging in the bright red halter.

Her mind shied away from the scene and started wandering as her feet carried her onward. She wondered what sort of a ghost a starved or savaged horse that was not a horse would leave. The ghost of a desperado stalking the mountains in his broad-brimmed black hat? She knew people who claimed to have seen ghosts in these hills: the ghosts of the lost children of the Alleghenies, two little boys, brothers, seven and five years old, who had died of starvation and exposure back in 1856. The bodies had been found after two weeks by a man who had seen them in a dream. People still heard the children crying on the hills at night. And there were the ghosts of a murdered hex witch, a man, and his murderer, his jealous wife, who poisoned his food then died shortly after him of his final curse on her name. Her ghost was supposed to haunt the woods in the form of a china cupboard, of all things. A cupboard full of fancy plates, dancing under the moon. What a thing to run into in the dark. Some people were crazier than she was, Bobbi decided, to think of such things.

The murdered man was the hex witch of Ness Hollow, Bobbi recalled from the stories. He had the evil eye and could seduce women without effort. She didn't want to run into his ghost. But there were other hex witches who were worse, and some who were far better. Old Nell the Hill Witch had lived for a hundred years and was reputed to have saved the lives of more than a hundred babies. Bobbi had heard of other witches still living in the mountains: the Buppsville Witch, the Hollis Corners Witch, the hex witch of Seldom—

Where the hun was Seldom, Bobbi wondered. She knew of many towns in Canadawa County with peculiar names: Good Intentions, Cold Bottom, Salamander. She knew where they were, and she had been to some of them. But she had never seen a road sign for Seldom, or known anyone who went there, or seen it on any map. Maybe it was a ghost town. The thought amused her. A ghost town. She could be in the middle of a ghost town right now, walking through the woods, and not know it. The way people talked, there could be a city's worth of ghosts all around her.

She didn't like to believe the stories. Horses that spooked at nothing, she joked, were seeing ghosts. Yet in a way the ghosts were as real to her as the dead butts of giant chestnut trees lying on the mountainsides, trees killed off sixty or eighty years before. Life was different in these parts. Old, like the hills. Deep, like the taproot of a pine. People remembered back a long time in Canadawa County.

Well, maybe they'll remember me when I'm gone, Bobbi thought darkly. Maybe they'll tell stories of how I was never seen again. Bewitched away by a black horse.

She followed the horse's trail through the day as fast as her body would let her, walking along the steepest slopes, jogging when the terrain allowed and the trail was plain. She stopped to drink at every clear-running spring, but she didn't stop to eat. She did not even look into the bag Travis had given her. A few times she crossed a dirt road or a snowmobile path, and a few times she saw the back of somebody's cabin or bungalow, but she never came out of the woods, and that didn't surprise her. A person could go for miles and days in these hills and still be in forest. The valleys between the mountains were mostly cleared for farms and towns, but the mountains didn't lie in neat ridges any more, not once you got west of Canadawa. They lumped and rumpled like a thousand wallowing pigs across the rest of the state, and except for right around Pittsburgh all their backs grew thick with woods.

Shane was heading that way. West, toward Wyoming.

Bobbi followed until it became too dark to see the trail and she was afraid she might lose it. In that last dark ravine, she had barely been able to make out the sign at all. Off to one side she had thought she saw oval prints, dark and moist, as if the black horse had just come down to the stream to drink. But she must have been mistaken, must have been seeing shadowed deer tracks in the dusk. She felt sure the black horse was far ahead. Once out of the ravine, on the dryer ground atop the bank, she sat down on the dirt. She could pick up the trail again at first light.

She thought of the bag of food in her hand, and for some reason her stomach turned. Just as well she wasn't hungry, she decided. Likely she would be ravenous by the next day. She would save the food until then.

She sat, too tired to sleep, and tried to think instead. Where was she going, once she and the black horse had parted paths for good? She had relations scattered all over the map, her father's brothers and sisters, her mother's brothers and their wives, Aunt This and Uncle That. Half of them, she forgot exactly where they lived. There were none of them she felt anything special for or trusted not to send her back to Pap. Then there was her mother, in her ward with the other crazies. And her mother's parents, Grandma and Grandpa Buige, who she sometimes saw when they came to visit her mother on Chantilly's birthday and Bobbi was there too. They lived in Louisiana somewhere, and always sent Bobbi Christmas presents that showed they didn't understand her at all. She had never been friendly with them, because she had sometimes felt that they might like to take her away from Pap. Huh. A good thing, now, if they did.

The night had gotten very dark, and chilly. In her unlined windbreaker and cotton shirt, Bobbi started to shiver. The ground under her was damp. Somewhere spring frogs were chorusing: a sound that Bobbi loved, usually, but this time it felt cold and wet to her. In the cabin, Pap would be lighting a fire in the woodstove to take the chill off the air—

She should not have thought of Pap in that way. All in a moment the full extent of her anger and hurting broke through, like a fire breaking through a thin wall, and Bobbi could have screamed with the sting of it.

I-DON'T-WANT-TO-SEE-YOUR-FACE-DON'T-BOTHER-COMING-BACK.…

The words might as well have been branded on her mind, and still smoking. She cursed aloud with pain. “Jesus Christ!” she blurted at the night. “How could he have
said
that! He might just as well have said—have told me—”

That he didn't care about her. Go away, Bobbi. You Have Done Wrong. I don't love you any more.

She put her head on her knees and cried. Crying made her feel angry at herself as well as at Pap, but she couldn't help it. She hurt all over, inside and out, as if she had taken a licking. Pap had never done that to her, but this was as bad or worse.

“Hell,” she muttered to her knees when she was mostly done crying.

Something howled in the woods, not unlike the way she had been howling, but with an animal voice. Her head jerked up. Pennsylvania coyotes had interbred with Canadian wolves on their way east, and they were big.

It howled again, farther away. This time Bobbi paid no attention, for beyond the wash of tears in her eyes she saw a whitish blur in the air. She dug at her eyes with her knuckles. Her vision cleared, but the blur was still there: a dim, floating face. Something like Pap's, yet—not like Pap's exactly. Hazy. She did not want it to become any clearer.

“I'm tired of seeing things,” she said fiercely, aloud, yet more to herself than to the face. The voice, when it answered her, seemed to sound inside her head.

“Seeing things is your gift.”

She knew him now, though the misty whiteness in the night was no clearer than ever. She knew him because she had heard the voice before, in her dreams. Her father. Wright Yandro. She felt too heartsick to be afraid; and why, anyway, should she be afraid of her own father?

“Go away,” she told him bitterly.

“But I can be with you, because of your gift! Why won't you let me?”

“Gift, my eye! Look where seeing things has got me. Grandpap—” She couldn't say any more.

“You've got to understand about Pap. He says hard things sometimes, but he doesn't mean it. He's sorry already, though he'd never admit it. He's so worried he can't sit down, wondering where you are. He won't be able to sleep tonight.”

She found this news gratifying, but she only said, “Serves him right. I'm never going back there.”

“I'm not saying you should! You have to help Shane. I'm the one who sent you to help him, remember? And you have to follow where your gift leads you. Pap never understood about me, either.”

For the first time she began to wish she could see him more clearly. Her own father. From his photographs she knew the look of his strong-boned face, but—what was he like, really? The white blur in the night told her no more than the newsprint blur had. She could not see its eyes. When it spoke, no mouth moved.

It said, the words sounding inside her head, “But you have to understand, he loves you just the same.”

“Who you trying to kid!” Suddenly she was furiously angry, and stiffly she struggled to her feet, and for the first time her voice rose. “Loves me, my eye! He can make me cry, but he don't cry. He can say all sorts of things, but I never heard him say he loves me. And he never—” She could not say it. “Hell!” she shouted to the woods.

Hell was feeling sure he never would.

She watched as the white blur, frightened, bobbed away into the night with a crashing of bushes and a soft scuttering of cloven hooves. “Jesus shit,” she said to herself. “I'm loony, all right. I been sitting here talking to a deer's behind.”

She wiped her nose with her fingers and sat again, curled up and shivering, trying not to think or see any more.

She did not expect to sleep, but after a while she did. She lay on her side in the pine needles, and every time she moved any part of her out of the small spot she had warmed, she half woke, and when the side of her not next to the ground grew too cold, she woke up completely and turned over. At first light she stood up and jogged in place and pumped with her arms, trying to come alive. She felt chilly pale, like the dawn sky. She felt empty with an emptiness food would not fill.

It was almost light enough to see the trail. She stood still and looked around her, and suddenly she felt warm as the colors of sunrise.

No more than ten paces away stood the black mustang, watching her.

“Shane,” she whispered.

The horse did not move. He stood with his head up, his blue eyes wary.

“Shane,” said Bobbi again, this time loudly enough so that he could hear, “Shane, I've got to get that halter and lead rope off you before they hang up on something.”

His blue stare blazed into her, and Bobbi felt an odd, inward fear. She knew Shane would never hurt her. But she felt as if he was scanning her soul.

She was the one who had put him in the stall.

“Shane,” she said with a small catch in her voice, “I know I haven't earned it, but you're going to have to trust me, or you might not get very far. You think maybe Pap made me change my mind and come after you, but that's not it. I just want to take that halter off you so you have a better chance of getting back where you belong. Then I won't follow you any more.”