The Witch's Promise

By Greg Krehbiel

Crowhill Publishing

Laurel
, Maryland 

http://www.crowhill.net

Copyright © 2013 Greg Krehbiel

All rights reserved.

Cover art courtesy of visualarts through fiverr.com.

See
http://fiverr.com/visualarts

An it harm none, do what you will.

- The Wiccan Rede

Lend me your ear while I call you a fool,

You were kissed by a witch one night in the wood,

And later insisted your feelings were true.

The witch's promise is coming.

Believing he listened while laughing you flew.

- The Witch's Promise, by Jethro Tull

CHAPTER ONE

On a living room floor in a small townhouse, three women and a man sit inside a ritual circle, chanting. The smoke from a brazier quietly wreaths their heads before floating out the screen door and onto the porch. After sharing a private concern and hearing counsel from the leader, each of them takes an object that symbolizes their problem and places it in the center of the circle, next to the brazier. The leader instructs them to visualize the object as the problem itself.

One of the women puts the picture of a former lover in the fire. Another woman nods to the man, who takes a picture of the two of them, tears it about half way, slides a playing card between, and adds it to the blaze.

*              *              *

"The train station's just ahead on the right," John Matthews told Al, who was driving his cobalt blue BMW north on Route 197 from Bowie. Al was a friend, and John's first and best client -- a developer who purchased abandoned properties in P.G. County, Maryland, and converted them into small office units. With John's expert assistance as chief architect.

"I appreciate the lift."

"Easier for me and you," Al said. "This way you don't' lose that non-billable time on the train." 

"I bill you for that time. I work on the train." 

Al laughed. "I can picture you between a fat lady and a smelly old man, with your drafting table on your knees in front of you, one hand bristling with pencils and a beer in the other."

"You've seen me?"

Al chuckled. "So are you sure about this weekend?"

"What about it?" John asked, but then he remembered. Al was a great guy, but no Jehovah's Witness was more faithful with his tracts than Al was with his invitations to mass.

"Sorry, Al, but I'm going to West Virginia this weekend. I hear there's been another Big Foot sighting, and ..."

"All right, all right," Al said. "You can just say no, Mr. Skeptic."

"No," John said with a grin, but then his gaze strayed to the train station parking lot and he shouted aloud.

"Hey. What's that guy .... He's in my car!"

"He'll run when we pull up," Al said. "I'll honk the horn."

"No," John protested with devious smile. "I don't want him to run until I'm a little closer. Just drop me off here. I'm gonna catch the bastard."

"Do you want some help?" Al asked.

"No offense, Al, but I think this is going to be a chase, and I don't think you're up for it. Although you would be handy in a fight."

Al laughed and placed a beefy hand on his ample belly.

"I was offering to drive closer and keep a look-out, Mr. Track Team," Al said. "I don't think a car radio's worth the trouble."

"It's not. It's the principle of the thing. Just let me out," John insisted.

"Okay. Don't hurt him too bad, " Al said. "Remember, buddy, you've got a mean streak. Don't let it get you in trouble. I'll keep an eye from here."

*              *              *

The last of the evening sun poured through an open kitchen window and illuminated the thick steam that was rising from a large pot of soup. Both seemed to meet and gently caress the thin, pale but attractive face of Jillian Collins as she savored the heavy smell of garlic and sage. A meager portion of raw goose, cut in small pieces, lay on the wooden chopping block -- right next to an extraordinary meat cleaver. In another setting it might have looked like a prop for a Hollywood version of the kitchen at Camelot, complete with carved, dark-wood handle and a heavy, horror-movie blade.

Soup and deep meditation wove together seamlessly in this kitchen. Jillian scraped the goose into the pot and stirred it once or twice without breaking her concentration or losing her train of thought. She turned back to her kitchen table, which was strewn with colorful cards. An unimaginative soul might have thought that a child was playing solitaire, for the cards seemed out of place, oddly decorated and somewhat larger than normal.

She drew one and placed it face upward on the table, then sighed deeply.

"Sean. What am I going to do about you?"

She looked out the window with a distant expression. Heavy clouds were rolling in quickly. Perfect weather for a pot of soup.

She stirred the pot again and absent-mindedly ran her fingers along a small collection of CDs, just above the portable boom box.

*              *              *

John stepped out of the car on Rt. 197 and tried to ease his way down the wooded slope to the parking lot. His car wasn't five feet from the edge of the woods, and the pine needles on the ground muffled his footsteps. He saw a pair of legs sticking out of the passenger side of his car -- a Ford Mustang convertible.

He's getting my radio, John thought. Perfect. I'll slam the door on his legs.

But pine needles notwithstanding, John's next step might as well have sounded a car alarm. He was so intent on the thief he wasn't watching his steps. He tripped on a root, startled a cat out of the underbrush and caught his balance on a sapling. The noise alerted the thief, who immediately jumped out of the car and started off at a run across the parking lot towards the power-line right of way.

John smiled as he watched the young man's uneasy and somewhat awkward pace. He'd be an easy catch. John tossed his sports coat in the front seat of his car, closed the door, then looked up the hill at Al and gave him a thumb's up and a smile. He set off at a run, quickly shrinking the thief's lead to less than fifty feet, and gaining fast.

The little man headed straight for a clump of trees near the six-foot chain link fence that closed off BG&E's right-of-way. John watched him disappear behind a bush, then reappear on the other side as if he'd run straight through the fence.

John wasted precious moments looking for a hole in the fence, but finally decided to scramble up and jump. He tore his pants leg in the process, but now he was on flat ground again.

You're gonna pay for my pants too,
John thought.

They were on flat ground again, and John was gaining, but the slightly built thief made another detour under a clump of Laurel bushes and into a dark patch of woods beyond. 

John checked himself and re-evaluated. Maybe the thief couldn't run, but he was no fool, and John thought better of running headlong into such a perfect ambush. He slackened his pace and pushed through the hole -- an animal trail, maybe -- with his hands and arms protecting his face and mid-section.

That was a good thing. Almost too late, John saw a 4-foot long piece of 2x4 swinging at his head. He ducked and blocked, remembering a little of the Kung Fu he took as a youngster, but not quite enough. A nail in the wood ripped a gash in his shirt sleeve and a glancing blow sent a searing pain along his forearm. He swore and turned, ready for close-range combat, but the man hadn't stopped to fight. He was already flying farther down the path.

John took up the chase again and suddenly heard his mother's chastening voice in the back of his head.

"John, you've already ruined your pants. Next it will be your shoes. And you barely avoided getting your teeth knocked out. How much is it worth to catch a petty thief?"

"But Mom," he said aloud, not caring who might hear, "this is the best fun I've had in months."

A moment later he crashed through another bramble, heedless of the toll it was taking on his expensive leather shoes.

*              *              *

Only semi-conscious of her actions, the thumb and forefinger of Jillian's right hand hovered between two CDs while her left hand drew another card and set it face upward on the table.

The warrior.

Jillian breathed in deeply and closed her eyes.

*              *              *

John was so intent on the chase that he didn't notice how quickly storm clouds had gathered. An ear-splitting crack of thunder announced the start of a late-summer downpour.

By this time he had lost all sense of direction and had no idea where he was. He'd run at least two miles, but he couldn't possibly point the direction back to his car. The little man was slow, but he could pick a path through the woods like a deer, and when John tried to take a different route to cut him off he frequently had to pull himself out of a ditch full of brambles.

The woods were starting to thin, and from time to time he saw the outline of a solitary house through a bare patch between the trees. Unbidden, for no reason John could imagine, he remembered adolescent fantasies about lonely, witchy women living in secluded cottages in the woods. Snatches of lyrics toyed at the edge of his mind as he raced. Was it Stevie Nicks, or Heart? He wasn't sure.

Few men could have kept up the chase for this long, but John was quite fit for his 33 years and his quarter mile would still place in most high school track meets. He was winded and his feet were aching in his ruined dress shoes, but he could hear the thief coughing and wheezing, not far ahead. If it weren't for the decreased visibility, he'd have had this guy by now. But for all John's speed, he had to admire the thief's cleverness. He used every possible advantage -- the cover of a fallen tree, the shelter of a thick patch of undergrowth, and even the direction of the wind, which blew water in John's eyes and clouded his sight.

But now he had him. The man was out of breath and in pain, bending over and clutching his side. The chase was over. Now John had to plan how he wanted to close in for the fight. For all his tricks in the woods, might he have a knife, or a gun? Was it worth the risk?

John pressed ahead and sprinted the last 20 feet.

Once again, he underestimated the man's cunning. He had appeared more winded than he was, and as John approached he made another desperate sprint -- straight towards a house no more than 50 yards away.

He ran down a fairly flat track across thin woods, and John was catching him with every stride, but just as John closed the gap and was about to grab a flailing arm, the man pivoted on one foot and turned, faster than any rabbit, making the last dash towards a fence, or shed, some ten feet away.

John turned and pursued, running madly around the corner of the fence. He knew it was a mistake even before the metal trash-can lid crashed into his face and chest. The little guy’s blow packed enough force to stop John dead in his tracks, lift him off his feet and send him two feet backwards onto the wet earth. As he saw his own blood splatter his rain-drenched shirt, he laughed at himself, fell backwards and lost consciousness.