The Hex Witch of Seldom (12 page)

And then Witchie was holding the walking stick up in front of her, though not too fearsomely close. Above its silver ferrule the small, round, smoky-clear handle seemed to glow and swirl. Roundness disappeared; Bobbi saw something like a soft gray mist swirling and glowing in a quiet sunrise. And then she saw the man dressed in black.

That was all she was to remember about his clothing afterward: that it was black and fitted his broad shoulders and slim legs beautifully. The broad-brimmed black hat, was it the hat of a Spanish rider, a western gunslinger, a riverboat gambler, a gentleman from the deep south? Did he wear a cloak, or some sort of elegant jacket? She couldn't remember. She did recall a glint of white at his throat. But for the most part her gaze was caught on his face, the face she had seen only once before, and on his ice-blue, fiery eyes.

“Bobbi,” he said.

It was as if he stood before her at a small distance, in a misty place she could not name, an anyplace. Walking stick, horse, hay-cluttered parlor and Aunt Witchie had all disappeared, and though Bobbi still felt mane and hard muscle under her hand, she was not conscious of them.

“Bobbi,” the man in black said, “you were never afraid of me, and I've killed more men than Mrs. Fenstermacher.”

She swallowed. What was he saying, now that they could finally, truly talk? “Shane?” she faltered. “Is that your real name?”

“As real as any of them.”

“But—who are you?”

“I never tell anyone that. Not even you, Bobbi.”

“He's Shane.” Aunt Witchie's voice sounded plainly to Bobbi, though she either couldn't or didn't see her standing nearby. “He's the gunfighter who gave away his heart. Besides that, he's Zorro. And Rhett Butler. And Paladin, the black knight, and Hal, the tavern prince, and a hundred more.”

Stories. Misty legends, tales told around hearthfires, forms in the flames, no more. Insubstantial forms seen beyond what was real. Yet Shane was as real as the hard, supporting withers under her hand. And Witchie—what was Witchie?

“Even in movies.” The old woman's voice sounded dry and disapproving. “Han Solo and them. Copies.”

“They're entitled,” said Shane, or said the man with the blue eyes blazing under the black hat.

“They're miserable shadows.”

“It doesn't matter.” Shane's eyes held steady on Bobbi, like blue flames with no wind blowing, and in a crazy moment she knew that he was even stronger than Witchie, yet more vulnerable. She knew that she could hurt him—no. Fear clawed her at the thought. But she knew that someone had hurt him, sometime.

“Why are you a mustang?” she whispered.

“How else can a man roam free any more?”

She knew that there was more to it than that, much more to drive him to the harsh life of a wild horse running on the upland plains of Wyoming. In an eerie, wordless way, yet as clearly as she knew anything about him, she understood that his being a wild, black stallion had something to do with women, or a woman. She knew it because she stood beside him in a low-cut, rose-colored gown. She was not a woman yet, not really, but a virginal girl still, horse-crazy; she had never wanted anything to do with men. But the way she loved wild horses … intuitively she knew the truth: it was the same way women loved a certain sort of man.

Wanting to touch him and tame him and make him their own, heart and soul, and no one else's.…

She pressed one hand to her head as she clung to black mane with the other, pressed her palm against her forehead and eyes as if trying to force down what she was seeing and thinking.

“Bobbi. What's the matter?”

“Shane … Nothing.”

He said, “Tell me. It's my fault you're in this mess.”

“It—it's not that. I feel like I'm going crazy.”

Witchie's throaty old voice came through to her again, like the voice of an offstage narrator. “A person has to have madness or poetry in them to see in my walking stick. You got both, Bobbi. Your father was a poet, did you know that?”

“No,” Bobbi mumbled, though she did know, if only lately, though in fact it was her dead father and his poetry who had gotten her in “this mess.” No, she said, because at that moment she wanted nothing to do with madness or magic or any of what was happening to her. She had closed her eyes, leaning against the horse, and everything looked as black as the black shoulder under her head.

Shane the man-legend said, “You were the only one who could see me, Bobbi. Who could see what I am.”

Witchie said to Shane, “She needs time, Dark Stranger.”

Bobbi heard the old woman's slippers shuffling as she crossed the room to return the walking stick to its urn. Opening her eyes, Bobbi saw hay-strewn parlor again, and a black horse, and found that she was clinging to the mustang's neck with both arms. Abashed, she turned away and went up to her room to put on her new clothes.

They fit perfectly. She went back down to the kitchen, where she and Witchie ate scrapple and pancakes with maple syrup Witchie had made herself, boiling the sap from the huge sugar-trees that nodded over her roof. Bobbi changed the soak for Shane's foot, and watched for a moment as the black mustang set his hoof in the bucket of fresh warm water and Epsom salts, carefully, so as not to upset it on Mrs. Fenstermacher's parlor carpet. Then she went and offered to do the dishes. Witchie turned on a huge, old TV in the parlor and settled into a front-room rocker, a cane-and-ladderback one, to watch the late morning news.

Time, Bobbi was thinking. Sloshing around with her hands in warm dishwater soothed her, and so did her full stomach. Her aches from too much bareback riding were disappearing. Time was a heal-all. It took care of things no pow-wow woman could.

“… Bobbi Yandro,” the TV said, startling Bobbi so badly that she squeaked. At first she thought the television was—bewitched, though she hated even to think the word. Peculiar, as some other things in this house seemed to be. Talking to her. But then, peering through the door to the parlor, she saw her school-picture face flashed on the screen as the familiar Pittsburgh announcer went on with the news story about her.

“… no recent developments in the disappearance of the Canadawa County girl. State police have expanded their search to include the Scubber's Creek and Parsimony areas following a report by an area man that he saw a girl on a dark-colored horse crossing I-72 on the Bell School Road overpass in Blessing Township early yesterday morning. The massive search effort in the Canadawa and Mandawa Mountain area has been called off, since it is now believed that the girl is not in fact lost, but ran away following a dispute with her grandfather. Anyone who has seen Bobbi Yandro, or who may have information concerning her whereabouts, is urged to contact …”

Bobbi found that her feet had carried her into the parlor as she listened. Shane had gone rigid, his head lifted high. Witchie turned the set off. “They'll be putting your picture on milk cartons next,” she remarked to Bobbi. “And grocery sacks.”

Bobbi asked, “How far from here are those places? Scubber's Creek? Parsimony?”

“Not far.”

With a dry mouth Bobbi said, “We don't have time, then. For Shane's foot to heal. For whatever it is that I need time for.”

Chapter Nine

Witchie did a peculiar thing. She heaved herself up out of the rocker, whisked the oilcloth off the kitchen table and plopped it in a corner, then got four new, white candles out of the drawer of a huge, carved, claw-footed, great-bellied, oval-mirrored, dark-veneered, monstrously imposing piece of furniture called a buffet. She put the candles in star-shaped glass holders, the kind sold at McCrory's, and set them at the corners of the square slab of oak, the tabletop.

“Girl's right,” she remarked to the house at large, perhaps to her walking stick or to Shane. “There ain't much time. By tomorrow old Ethel Schroyer next door will be on the phone wanting to know why don't I pull the parlor blinds, am I sick. And when I tell her I got the grippe, she'll be over here with some fool thing to eat, in a bowl I got to wash and return. And she don't miss much, so she ain't likely to miss noticing a horse in the parlor. Bobbi, come here. Set there.”

She placed Bobbi in a chair at the table, facing the window. She lit the candles and turned on the lamp that said “Let There Be Light.”

“This is to tell you what you ought to do,” she explained to Bobbi, “or to help you make up your mind what to do, however you want to look at it.” Out of the buffet drawer Witchie pulled a deck of cards.

They were the oddest cards Bobbi had ever seen. They were circular. And as Witchie fumbled through them, looking for something, Bobbi glimpsed pictures on them, and the bright-colored, symmetrical hex designs she had sometimes seen on old barns.

Witchie found the circle she was looking for and handed it to Bobbi. It was a perfectly plain, empty white circle of rich-feeling, heavy rag paper. A white nothing. A naught.

“That's the innocent,” Witchie told her. “The petitioner. That's you. Put it in the middle of the table. Smack dab in the middle, now.”

Bobbi turned the white circle over and around in her fingers, feeling serious in spite of herself. “Does it matter which side is up?” she asked Witchie.

“That one, no, it don't matter which side or how you turn it, long as it's right in the middle.”

Bobbi placed the card. It lay like a white zero against the dark wood, and Witchie handed Bobbi the rest of the cards.

“Don't look at 'em. Look at the light while you shuffle 'em.”

Bobbi mixed up the cards as best she could. It was hard to handle them. Their circular shape made them seem to have minds of their own. “Is that enough?” she asked after a while.

“I can't say,” Witchie replied. “You say.”

Bobbi glanced at her. The old woman's face was set in quiet folds, and her braided hair lay calm and sleek in loops around her head, but her yellow eyes glinted bright as sunlight. Bobbi handed the cards back to her, and Witchie laid them out.

She laid them with care in a certain pattern and order. When she was finished, they made a large wheel with twelve spokes, and Bobbi's white card formed the hub.

“Tell me what you see,” Witchie said to Bobbi.

There were faces on some of the cards, or stylized drawings of people, animals or birds. Some of the cards were simple discs of a solid, bright color. Others were painted with vivid hex designs or the primitive, exuberant flower-forms called fraktur lilies. Also, Bobbi saw later, there were pictures of a crown, a six-pointed star, a sun, a moon, a water cup, a five-pointed star and a black heart. But at the time she noticed none of those. Her glance was caught on one circle which showed a man in black clothing riding a black horse. Even in the tiny ink drawing she seemed to see the fire of blue eyes.

“Shane!” she exclaimed to Witchie, pointing.

The old woman nodded. “The hero in black. He's at the juncture of a spoke. He's important, but you've put him off to one side. What else do you see?”

Bobbi scanned the dazzle of bright colors and designs, searching for something familiar. Then her finger shot to the image of a veiled, hunchbacked woman with some sort of stick or staff in her hand. “That's you,” she said.

“Huh,” said Witchie, taken aback but not caring to show it much. “That's the sorceress, all right. How'd you know?”

“I saw her! Or you. Right when I first came in.” Bobbi felt cold, telling Witchie what she had always hidden from everyone else, but she could not seem to stop herself. “In a white robe with fleece on it, and pointed hat and veil like that, and a silver belt with, like, hieroglyphics.”

“Runes.” Witchie was giving her a sharp look. “My stars, girl. You have the sight. That's how you knowed Shane, ain't it, by seeing him in his true form. What else ain't you telling me?”

Bobbi jerked her gaze away from Witchie's and looked down at her hands, not speaking.

“You see things like that often?”

Bobbi didn't say anything. Witchie peered at her. “You saw yourself, I'm the white witch,” she complained. “I ain't going to hurt you.”

“I don't want to talk about it!” Bobbi flared.

“Whatever.” Without reacting to Bobbi's tone, Witchie turned back to the cards. “Where were we. You found me, and I'm ascendant. That means I'm not real important to you right now, though I could be. Pay attention, Bobbi. What else do you see?”

Bobbi blinked and looked at the cards again, pointing to the first one that caught her eye. “Who's that?” Her hand hovered over the picture of a straight-browed, golden-haired young man.

“That's the golden hero. He's ascendant, too. So's magic.” Witchie indicated the five-pointed star, located midway up one of the spokes.

“There's the distelfink.” Bobbi had spotted the familiar bird.

“That's your luck, and it's low right now.” The bird was located at the base of a spoke near the bottom of the wheel. “The old trickster, the villain, he's at the rim, and I don't like that.” Witchie indicated the black heart. “But you've put him in opposition to Shane, so maybe that's all right.”

The villain. “Grandpap,” said Bobbi darkly.

“Guess again. Look who you put right at the top. The most important person in the world to you.”

Bobbi looked, and saw the picture, of a dragon perched on a mountaintop with strong handlike claws, a dragon with gray hair and a face through which a human face looked, form behind the form—she knew that face. She felt a jolt and a rush of fear, anger, hatred, something else, a tangle of emotions so strong that it set her shaking. She started to jump from her chair to run away—Witchie's bent, bony hand on her shoulder prevented her.

“Grandpap,” Bobbi whispered. And she saw, plainly drawn on the heavy circle of paper, the form she had seen behind his form so many times, misted with her own fear. The huge thing jagged as the mountains. The dragon.