Witches (6 page)

Mabel had loved to bake German strudels and yeast breads for him before her arthritis crippled her. Mabel had loved Jake, too.

“Being alone’s not so bad,” Mabel declared, wincing from her arthritis, as she lowered herself into the chair beside Amanda.

She gazed at the cooling cups of tea and the empty table. “I wish I could offer you something to eat, but my social security check is so small it barely gets me through the month.”

The basket,
Amanda thought.

“I remembered that, so I came prepared. I brought us something to eat. It’s in the basket by the door.” Amanda got up and retrieved the bundle.

She emptied the contents on the table. “Peach preserves, sausage, crackers, cheese, fresh-baked muffins and that tea you like so much.”

Mabel’s eyes were grateful. “You’re too
good to me. Such a kind person.” She got out plates and napkins and placed them on the table. Mabel had located and put her dentures in.

The way she devoured the food shocked Amanda. How hungry she must be, and her next check wouldn’t come for another week. Yet Amanda knew enough not to say anything, it would hurt Mabel’s pride.

She’d make sure, though, that she didn’t eat much and leave whatever they didn’t eat. She’d bring more later, too.

As they ate, they chatted about trivial things. Amanda poured her more tea. Soon it’d make her sleepy, but that was the magic working. Her pain would be gone.

Amanda suspected that Mabel knew there was something different about the tea, but she never asked questions, never mentioned it, as she never mentioned the rumors spread in town about Amanda being a witch. Mabel believed in such things, Amanda knew that, but she also loved her enough to respect her privacy. They just never talked about it.

“Amanda, I do believe this is the best batch of peach preserves you’ve ever put up,” Mabel judged, yawning, as Amanda made her a third cup of tea.

“Reminds me of the preserves I used to can on the farm when I was a girl. We had, oh, about ten acres of fruit trees—apples mostly—and every year my daddy would hire these migrant workers from down south to harvest the fruit when it was ready. Boy, some of them were characters, some so strange.” She moved her head, rubbing her wrinkled hands down the length of her legs through her faded housedress, as crumbs clung to her chin and tumbled into her lap.

“I remember this one elderly Mexican named Carlos something-or-other when I was about twelve or so. His whole family camped on our property one summer so they could work. There was a mess of them. Lived in a ratty old covered wagon and tents. They had a daughter about my age, can’t recall her name at all, so that’s why I began visiting them.” She squinted her eyes as if she were looking back over the years. “I do recall her grandpa, Carlos, well enough. I can still see him sitting cross-legged, wrapped in blankets, before their campfire at night as he spun his stories. He was blind. Eyes were all white and he wore these gaudy clothes like a gypsy. Wore all these things, talismans he called them, around his neck. To ward off evil. He didn’t talk above a whisper and was always peering around as if he could see. Petrified of something, a demon he called it, that he believed was stalking him. He was into voodoo or something like it.”

Amanda’s hand stopped tapping against her saucer.

“He said he and a friend meddled in affairs he should’ve left alone and a witch hexed him. He never told me exactly what he’d done to that witch, refused to speak any more about it than that, but he did tell me that his punishment wasn’t near as bad as his friend’s…his friend lost his sight and his tongue was torn out by the demon the witch had sent after them. Then the demon took him away. Carlos never saw him again.”

“Did you believe what he told you?” Amanda couldn’t help but ask. She knew of black witches and their demons. They’d call them up from hell, or the world in between, or from another dimension. All were possible and the demons were vicious. Unstoppable.

“Not back then.” Mabel gestured dismissively with her hand. “I was a child, innocent of the evil in the world. I thought the old man was nuts.”

“Now?”

Mabel stared off somewhere past Amanda. “Well, now, I’d believe almost anything. I’ve lived long enough and seen enough strange things. I’ve seen ghosts.” She brought haunted eyes back to Amanda’s face. “Saw Gus out in his garden not more than two days after we buried him. He stood up and waved at me. I ran outside. By the time I got to the garden, he wasn’t there any longer.”

Amanda thought of Jake and of what she’d tried to do the night before. She shook away the vision of Jake half-formed in the circle.

“Must have been quite a shock for you.” Amanda smiled. She wasn’t a hypocrite. She might not scream that she was a witch from the rooftops, but she also never denied what she was, if faced with it, and never made fun of other people’s beliefs.

“No, not really,” Mabel sighed. “It was so good to see him. It was somehow comforting to know that there was an afterlife of some kind. Not merely a black void.” She laid a wrinkled hand on her chest above her heart. “Even though I’m a religious person, it still felt good to have some kind of proof. Seen with my own eyes.

“I’ve been looking for him ever since.” Her face sadder. “But he’s never come back.”

“Maybe he will, someday.” Amanda patted the other woman’s shoulder.

“Maybe.” Then she sighed again, drank more of her tea, her eyes getting heavier. She was fighting to stay awake.

“I’ve been reading the newspapers lately, Amanda,” she said. “This satanic cult stuff is scaring me. They found a family murdered yesterday out by Harbor Light. Four of them. Awful. They were tortured to death.” Her voice fell to a frightened whisper. “Eyes gouged out, tongues torn out. Burned. Awful, awful.” Mabel’s sleepy eyes still reflected horror.

Amanda’s stern expression covered a growing rage. “I hope they catch them soon.” Mentally she made a note to cast out a spell net for them. She should have long ago, but this was the first time she’d been aware they were actually hurting or killing people. It would take some work. They had a strong magic shield up against her kind. She’d have to break it down. It could take days.

“Me too, Amanda. You shouldn’t be living out in that cabin all alone.”

Amanda nearly smiled. “Oh, I can take care of myself. It’s you I’m worried about.”

“They won’t bother an old woman like me. Besides…” Mabel shuffled up from the chair, disappeared into the other room, and returned carrying a huge shotgun. “If anybody I don’t know comes around, or tries to break in... I’ll fill all their butts with what’s in here.” She grinned slyly. “And I’m still a damn good shot. Gus taught me years ago. Haven’t forgot. So I can take care of myself, too.” She laid the gun against the wall.

“I bet you can.” Amanda chuckled and started clearing the dishes off the table, rinsing them in the sink, her back to Mabel. With the talk of witches and cults, something nagging at her subconscious finally surfaced.

“Mabel, do you know anything about a place called Black Pond? About a mile from here?”

“Black Pond?” Mabel responded hesitantly.

Amanda looked over her shoulder at the old woman hovering over the table, and when her eyes met Amanda’s, there was an unusual evasiveness in them.

“Why do you ask, Amanda?”

“Well, because today, on the way here, I stopped a moment to rest there, by the willow tree, and I thought I saw something
above the water. Floating.”

Amanda recognized the fear on Mabel’s face and quickly added, “Ah, never
mind. It was probably just my morbid state of mind.” Her thoughts brushed again across the ill-fated ritual of the night before. “An illusion in the mist.” Amanda shrugged.

Mabel stared at her. “You saw something?”

“In the mist, I saw a woman,” Amanda replied. “She was calling to me. She knew my name. It was the strangest thing. I only wondered what history was attached to that place.”

Mabel got up and fussed with something at the end of the kitchen counter. “Place is haunted,” she said simply. “You know, it’s known by another name. Some of the older people in town still call it Witch’s Pond.”

“Witch’s Pond?”

She nodded. “Has to do with its history. You probably saw
her.”
Mabel chortled softly.

“Her?”

A bony hand settled on Amanda’s shoulder after she’d sat back down and she looked up at Mabel.

“Her.
The witch of Witch’s Pond. You’ve never heard the stories, then, have you?”

“No. Tell me.” She’d captured Amanda’s interest.

Mabel settled tiredly into her chair. “When I was a child my mother warned me about that place. Told me never to go near it. People disappeared
there. The children in town used to dare each other to go there at night and wait...for her. Not me, though, I wasn’t brave enough. There were horrible rumors about that place; about what had happened there.”

“What happened there?”

Mabel inclined her head, her face troubled. “They were supposed to have killed a suspected witch there. The woman’s name was Rachel Coxe, if I remember rightly. The town accused her of being a witch at the height of the witch scare sometime in the seventeenth century.

“You know, though it never got as bad here as Salem or Boston, the witch mania infected the townspeople, sure enough. They believed Rachel was a witch, along with a few others, and the townspeople hounded her. I don’t think there was ever a trial...she tried to escape them.

“They say they tracked her, and drowned her in the pond. Her wronged spirit is supposed to be waiting there to take revenge on those who killed her, or win vindication, so they say.”

Rachel
,
Amanda’s mind whispered. Knowing a spirit’s name was having power over them, like knowing the name of a demon. You could control them.

“Not long after Rachel disappeared, a trapper found body parts strewn along a section of bank at Black Pond. That was the beginning of the legend. Hideous things have occurred there ever since. Some campers were supposed to have disappeared late in the eighteenth century near the place. Three children drowned there when I was a girl. Lots of people through the years have seen things there, like you.

“Did she say anything to you?”

“No, just called my name, then evaporated,” Amanda intoned, thoughtfully. She’d strolled over to the door, was looking out.

“I can’t believe you saw the ghost, and nothing happened.”

I’m a witch, that’s why, Amanda thought. “Lucky, I guess. You really believe that it’s dangerous?”

“Things
have
happened there.”

Outside Mabel’s kitchen, the sun was sliding down into the treetops. Everything had that tint of winter pink, like one of those paint-by-number sets she’d had as a child. Night came swiftly in late October.

“Why did they murder her?” Amanda asked, curious. She hadn’t felt any danger emanating from the ghost
earlier, but then some ghosts could hide their true intentions.

“According to the old stories, she caused the town’s livestock to get sick, did wicked things and cast evil spells, was promiscuous, which wasn’t all that unusual for the times, no matter what you’ve read in your stuffy old history books. They said she was able to see the future. She was a renegade. Extremely beautiful. The women of the town despised her because the men wanted her. Then they claimed she killed her married ex-lover and the chase was on.”

“So they murdered
her for it?” Amanda’s hair rose on the back of her neck. People had treated her cruelly for what they believed she’d done over the years, too, so she could empathize. Boston still haunted her.

“Well, no one knows if they really killed her. The story went that Rachel was a witch. That she’d killed not only her ex-lover in cold blood, but her own children as well.”

“She killed her own children?” Amanda echoed.

“They found their bodies, butchered, and some thought she’d used them in a sacrifice. I don’t recall how many children she was reported to have had, or if they were boys or girls. It’s an old tale. Rachel just disappeared one day, some say she wasn’t seen again; while another version went that the vengeful townspeople did catch up with her—and killed her at Black Pond.

“When the apparition of a woman first appeared at the pond, and evil things began to happen there, people put two and two together and believed the ghost was Rachel. No one knows the real story, except Rachel, and those who killed her, perhaps. If they did.”

Amanda glanced over her shoulder, pretending the story hadn’t affected her. It had.

Through the ages, people had unjustly tormented and persecuted witches for crimes they’d never committed. So much evil done against them: the Inquisitions, the torturings, and the mass burnings. All the atrocities perpetrated on those poor helpless wretches in the name of religion always made Amanda sad and angry. It wasn’t in the name of justice or for God that witches were condemned, but for man’s lust for power or his fear. God was a gentle, loving being. It was man who could be the heartless bloodthirsty beast. It was easier for man to mask his bestiality under the convenient guise of doing what he thought God would want him to do.