The Honey Witch

Chapter XXIII





I stood at the bend in the creek, where the water's edge widened and formed a deep pool. I contemplated whether I actually paused to consider my course, or simply waited for some indication as to where it was my footsteps might eventually lead. In the solitude of the night under the trail of waxing moonlight, a cooling breeze disturbed the leaves of the maples and swayed the fringe of grasses draping the river’s edge.

And I became conscious of her.

Attentive, I waited and watched the shape of a single, translucent teardrop form from the formless atmosphere and hover over the river pool. I watched, in a state of immovable silence, as the phenomena dropped into the dark water, causing a surface ripple to spread outward from its center, where she emerged soundlessly, breathlessly in my field of vision.

Her naked skin shimmered under the crest of moonlight, the colorless pale tinting the flush of a polished pearl; the hue of her eyes transmuted from violet red, to a deep cerulean blue. In that moment, her beauty was absolute, and I felt the roots beneath the immediate earth convulse...or was it only I, who shifted?

“Ana, who are you?” I heard my own voice again inquire, though it seemed as though I did not speak at all. “In the name of God, what are you?”

And she answered as she had before: “I am nothing, if not your Ana.”

She stepped to the grassy slope of the embankment and fell into my arms, her mouth against mine in a kiss that wormed its way into the very tissue of living cells. I shed the armor of my clothes with scarce an awareness of having done so. In the breath of an incomprehensible moment, she pulled me deep inside her moistened promise, whispering a language that filtered, as would an ancient diapason of a lyre, into the chambers of my ear.

Her lengthening kiss consumed like an opium. I was fully aware, yet not aware at all. The expanding moon’s light became warm, rather than absent of sensation, and blended with the nocturnal singing of a mockingbird, far in the wooded density, beyond the river’s moving water.

I grasped her hair and kissed her more deeply than I imagined possible to kiss another. In some imperishable core, the bursting reverberation: “Oh God, woman, I love you as no other…” I lost the sense of separateness, no longer able to discern between my mind and physical body and her own mind and body.

In that instant, Life. She cried out and I knew, as she knew, in that nucleus of cadence: Life had been seeded between us.

Ana collapsed against my perspiring chest, our bodies yet pulsating from the passion of what now joined our fate wholly together. I felt her breath drifting into a gentle rhythm against my jaw. I felt her fingers entwine her silken hair through the damp thickness of my own.

“I shall love you, Ethan Broughton,” she vowed in my ear, “no matter how far from here. I shall love you for a thousand, thousand miles.”

I laughed quietly, my arm tightening against her spine.

“I’m not going anywhere,” I sighed peacefully, breathing in the scent of her. “I’ll live out my days here on Porringer...together, with you.”

“No,” she murmured.

“But of course I will,” I responded, closing my eyes. “Why would I ever leave?”

The softening moments of silence between us, a silence where I would not consider our separation, were disrupted by the sudden sensation of rustling underneath the ground. I felt something slithering against my legs and stiffened with immediate alarm. Ana raised her body from mine and crouched on her knees and hands. Envisioning some dark and deadly water snake, I tensed quickly to rise with her, but found my ankles bound by a fierce string of lush ivy.

“What the hell...” I tore at the profuse and winding growth even as it climbed above my calves and reached my thighs. The vine whipped around my biceps and forearms from behind and I was thrust back against the ground with such veracity that I lost air in my lungs. I felt myself submerging into the moss and wet earth.

Perhaps in vain hope against such a dire fate, or perhaps out of instinct, alone, I looked to Ana for some rationale, only to find her observing my impossible plight in unreadable silence.

My mouth moved to call out her name, but the sound muffled against the pressure of the savage undergrowth twisting its way around my throat.

“Now, he may die,” the decisive command of a woman spoke. Ana looked around sharply. The air returned to my lungs, to be replaced by the leaden heartbeat beneath my chest wall.

Still, I could not speak.

With the moonlit water mirroring her backside, a tall woman with coils of hair reaching to her ankles, stood draped in blue gossamer. Her skin was as pallid as Ana’s, herself, but with eyes as implacable as a celestial landscape, viewed through an icicle on a winter’s frozen night.

I knew at once, that in the face of my plight, here stood the resister of the grave, the savior of my grandfather, the tormentor of old Fitch’s peace...the slayer of a man who may have come to love her.

Madeline.

“Ana…” I somehow managed to speak, “don’t let her do this to us.” My mouth felt like sandpaper. Any twitch of movement caused the stranglehold of the vine to tighten its menacing grip.

The glacial eyes of Madeline Lagori turned to me. The hardened trace of a caustic smile etched the corner of her mouth. “Your grandfather, rotting in the tomb where all men rot, bore the promise of your seed to me! I knew his blood would be fitting stem to continue our kind, and no man lives to see the birth of our daughters. No man!”

She raised her chin imperiously. “You do not beg for your life, but think in your mind to reason. It is an admirable trait. I am never wrong.”

Madeline turned to Ana, who looked on her grandmother through dispassionate eyes.

“Ana Louisa,” she spoke, “you know the inviolable law. We have been sheltered under our Mother’s breast before the scribes could tell of the rise and fall of the Ages. We have survived the greed and malfeasance of all men who have conspired to destroy us for our gifts.

“Do you not remember that once we gathered in every forest, on every shore, atop each mountain, on each desert oasis until the places of shelter were vanquished by the contagion of men?”

She leaned closer. “You bear his seed, take his blood now. Tear away his flesh, take his beating heart: nourish the daughter you now sow!”

Ana turned to face my eyes, her own eyes prismatic with the swell of reflective moonlight.

“I love you, Ethan Broughton,” she whispered. “I love you.”

“And I love you, Ana,” I told her through the parched constriction in my throat. The resolution in my emotion was no less fierce than my instinct for self-preservation. “I love you and we can share our life. You and I. Our child. You’ll never be alone again. Never alone again.”

“I am ever alone,” she lamented mournfully. “It is the way of our kind. We live to serve and men take. Even the gods, who were the fathers of the first seven daughters, abandoned us here for the sake of a midsummer’s night in our mother’s arms, and scattered us over the lands.”

The monstrous Madeline reached down and with a slow, deliberate slice of a razor sharp fingernail, traced a menacing trail across my skin; from the jugular vein, to the spot where the heart had not ceased its now crushing rhythm. I swallowed what little saliva was left in my mouth.

At its most inevitable peak, the paralysis of certain death becomes an almost clinical state of mind. The most minuscule faction of hope ceases to exist and once reached, that moment of finality is not unlike the rabbit caught in a snare. Whether to fight furiously against the hunter or succumb right then and there, becomes insignificant.

I no longer felt the surface sensation of my skin having been torn, but saw through the muted haze of horrific finality, my blood dripping from the long, sharpened nails of Madeline’s fingertips. She grasped a clump of my hair and turned my face against the slippery earth. Each muscle in my body stiffened. Through the near deafening pulse inside my ears, I scarcely heard her cry: “Slay him!”

I could not discern if my own voice calling out Ana’s name in a rush of traumatic emotion or, if the strangling blast of a screaming wind twisting above me, was the sound piercing inside my ears. I felt a pulling force against the ivy roots, releasing my body from the ground.

“Kill him and outsiders will come!” warned a gravelly voice I recognized, immediately, as belonging to the battle worn, Josiah Fitch. “They’ll come a’lookin for that Yank and doncha know they’ll find the witch livin’ right up there on top o’ his bones!”

The force of the cyclone continued to twist and hover, working as a barrier between the virulent Madeline and my deliverance at the hands of a man who cursed my very existence. Prevented by the obstacle of spiraling air, Madeline could not reach my beating heart with frothing barred teeth nor slash Fitch’s throat in that same instant with her deadly nails.

She could not finish what Ana would not do.

“Ana!” I shouted, reaching my hand toward the whirling cyclone that melted her form into a cocoon threading in a thousand strands of silken white hair. My arms were pulled urgently from the tempest, my clothes bundled against my belly.

“Get dressed, get dressed!” Aaron Westmore begged. “Hurry, man, hurry!”

In the concentrated and swirling velocity of wind narrowing into a single raging pillar, I managed to pull on my jeans and somehow slip my arms through my shirtsleeves.

“Ana!” I begged. “Come with me!” My voice lost force in the escalating coil of turbulence, uprooting the grasses and dislodging the soil beneath. A limb from a nearby tree cracked and crashed to the ground.

Fitch drew closer to the whorling obstruction that frustrated the efforts of an increasingly enraged Madeline.

“Git that fool Yank outta here!” he ordered, his face beaded by the spray of spinning waters from the Cutler. “She won’t stop, ‘til she kills him!”

“We gotta get the hell damn away from here,” urged Jesse Lee anxiously, grabbing my arm.

“She won’t kill me!” I shouted at Fitch and reached again for the rushing wind. “Ana!”

Jesse Lee Isaak pulled at my arm with greater urgency. “Not Ana!” he argued. “The dead one!”

“We’re going to all get ourselves killed, if we don’t get out of here now!” Aaron exclaimed, knotting my shirt collar in his fist. “I swear to God, Broughton, I’ll knock you unconscious and drag you out, if you don’t get moving!”

In the first spark of impassioned energy I had seen the passive Dulcy exhibit, the animal growled at Fitch’s side. Madeline, grotesque ghoul or witch she may be, looked strangely uncertain. A guttural, inhuman cry, not unlike the screech of an animal being skinned alive, issued from her throat.

“Go back to the grave, devil woman!” Fitch bellowed just as Dulcy bounded forward. Beyond the rushing wind, the sound of not one, but two canines fiercely battled.

“Git goin’, Yank!” Fitch cried. “She’s still got it in her t’rip your gut out!”

We ran along the creek embankment, Aaron, Jesse Lee and I, the churning cyclone at our heels. Nearly blinded by the stinging debris of leaves and sticks, dirt and river water, we were ushered by the wind in keeping our pace. The sound of Fitch’s buckshot rang through the night, whether meant as a warning to the shape-shifting Madeline or ourselves, we could not know. Only when we reached the threshold of relative safety at my cabin door, did the fierce spiral of wind abate, retreating into the nearby trees until the night air stilled into an emptied space. I swung open the door and braced myself against the dry sink in an attempt to stabilize my reeling balance.

With the threat of collapse, I nearly fell against a chair in an effort to sit. I hunched forward, my head in my hands, breathing so violently that my lungs felt on fire.

“Give him some of that whiskey old Fitch left,” Aaron ordered from the doorway where, it appeared, to my distorted view, he cautiously guarded. Jesse Lee pulled up a chair and sat at the table. He popped the corked jug and handed it across the table.

I took the container willingly and drank the scorching corn brew until no longer able to withstand the burn. Wiping my mouth with the back of my hand, I winced at a sharp pain in my rib cage when I coughed. I slammed the container of whiskey brusquely on the table.

“Damn, Doc,” observed Jesse Lee, taking a good swill of the liquor, himself, “she cut you good and bloody.”

Still shaken, I gazed down numbly at my open shirt and observed the trail of blood trickling down my neck and chest.

Aaron stepped from the door and inspected the precise cut between throat and heart.

“Shit,” I heard him mutter before he took the jug from Jesse Lee’s hand, and poured a stream of the searing liquid over the extraneous wound.

I stiffened with the agonizing sting and grabbed the jug, ingesting another mouthful.

“Looks like a good scrape,” said Aaron, “but you’ll live.”

I grasped Aaron’s forearm. “None of this is happening. It’s all a theatre. I know this, you see.”

Aaron extracted his limb from my grip and stepped back mutely.

“Damn fool, Yank,” declared a delayed Fitch, spitting a splat of tobacco from the doorstep. “Told ya t’leave while the leavin’ was good.”

“Shut up, ya old bastard,” Jesse Lee snapped. He turned to me with the familiar, oddly comforting, Isaak grin and said: “The Yankee Doc, here, thought it was all just crazy hill talk, didn’t ya, Doc?”

I wiped my dirt-splattered fingers on my shirt and took another heated swallow of the stilled liquor, handing the jug back to Jesse Lee. Although feeling sufficiently anesthetized, I felt a contrasting shiver in my limbs and let out a deep, anxious breath.

“Here comes Dulcy girl,” Fitch reported happily from the front step. “Looks like you can sleep tight, Yank. Tonight, leastwise.” Fitch laughed heartily, watching the dog trot up and sit on the grass beside the cabin stoop. “Did ya whoop that ol’ witch, Dulcy? Chase her back to the bone-yard? I know’d she wouldn’t lick ya, Dulcy, though she craved to. Couldn’t bring herself to kill her own kin.”

“Jesus,” I groaned. “Don’t even go there, you demented old man.”

“Who you callin’ crazy?” Fitch demanded, crossing the threshold and flailing his arm. “The crazy one is she what won’t sleep up in them hills with all them other dead witches! The stinking Madeline what refuses to rot in the grave like all them others! The crazy one is you, for not heedin’ my warnin’ when I told ya t’leave!”

“Then why didn’t you just kill me in the beginning?” I shouted at him, gesturing my arm back at him, grimacing again at the knifelike pain in my side with the sudden move.

“I woulda killed ya,” returned Fitch, “if she wouldna have stopped me! I woulda killed her, if she weren’t my own!”

I stared at him, silenced by his implication.

He limped a step forward. “Aye, I’ve wasted in these hills for the love of an Evangeline, and you’re lookin’ at the only man who ever lived t’tell of it, ‘cept now for you.”

My nerves erupted into a tremor so severe, I seriously feared the onset of some form of seizure. The threat to wail like a child, from the strain of exhaustion, nearly overtook my self-possession.

“And you outta thank old Dulcy out there, too,” said Fitch, “for savin’ your skin.”

“Oh God…” I groaned, leaning my head back, “none of this is happening.”

“It weren’t God what come to your salvation on this night, Yank,” Fitch remarked without humor, “but Lily Ann come back in the flesh of old Dulcy there. She, who drowned her own self in the Cutler and come back.”

“F*ck,” I sputtered miserably, leaning forward with a threatened nausea.

“I’m gonna give ya a chance,” said Fitch, “a chance to git away once and for all. If I can do one thing, I can do this.”

I stared at him spiritlessly. “Aren’t you afraid I’ll tell them? Tell the outside what the hell exists up here?”

“Pffft,” Fitch chortled dubiously. “You got the curse of lovin’ that woman. You ain’t willin’ t’risk her refuge for nothin’.”

“Then I’ve got to find her,” I insisted morosely. “I’ve got to see if she’s all right. As impossible as all this is, I can’t just abandon her.”

“Don’t see as ya got much say in the matter, Yank,” observed Fitch. “You leavin’ alive or you leavin’ dead, but one way or t’other, you gonna be leavin’ by mornin’. So, you jus’ drink a little more whiskey and sleep it off.”

Jesse Lee again handed over the jug of whiskey and lit a Camel cigarette. “Best do it, Doc,” he advised, closing his lighter and nodding toward Fitch. “Ya don’t want to end up like that old buzzard, do ya?”

“No,” I agreed dismally, allowing the burn of 100 proof to course down my esophagus, and through the map of my veins until I was absolutely insensate . “No, I do not.”

“Now, don’t get no ideas, Yank,” Fitch warned, patting the rifle in the crook of his arm. “Me an’ ol’ Dulcy, here, gonna be right outside this door.”

I held up the jug in a gesture of salutation and took a bitter swallow.





~*~