Wrapped in Black: Thirteen Tales of Witches and the Occult Read online

  WRAPPED IN BLACK

  Thirteen Tales

  of

  Witches and the Occult

  Sekhmet Press LLC

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of these authors.

  Sekhmet Press LLC

  99 Rocky Fork Road

  Fairview NC 28730

  HAIR SHIRT DRAG ©2014 Gordon White

  COMES THE RAIN ©2014 Gregory L. Norris

  NUMBER ONE ANGEL ©2012 Allison M. Dickson

  UNTO THE EARTH ©2014 Patrick C Greene

  HÄXENHAUS ©2014 Nick Kimbro

  STORIES I TELL TO GIRLS ©2014 Michael G. Williams

  THE RISING SON ©2014 Suzanne Mazzenga

  BEAUTIFUL, BROKEN THINGS ©2014 Rosalie Rasmussen

  NOT THIS TIME originally titled Ways of Strength and Beauty ©2014 Mike Lester

  INTO THE LIGHT ©2014 Solomon Archer

  SHE MAKES MY SKIN CRAWL ©2014 Shenoa Carroll-Bradd

  PIGEON ©2014 Eric Nash

  PIG ROAST ©2014 Aaron Gudmunson

  ISBN-13: 978-1502512376

  ISBN-10: 1502512378

  Cover Image Credit via http://wall.alphacoders.com/

  Special Thanks to Allison M. Dickson for Cover Design

  PRAISE FOR THE WRAPPED SERIES

  “More than horror, an array of emotions that leak off the pages into your mind and at times into your very soul.”

  “Every single story was a page turner…Don’t miss out on this terrific book!”

  "The Curse of Kirby" by Patrick Greene is darkly twisted in a way that left me vacillating between gales of laughter and horrified disgust.”

  “Allison M. Dickson presents the reader with the complete picture... beautifully described settings of anguish, populated with characters that have a strange and unique story to tell.”

  “Brilliant and artistically woven anthology.”

  WRAPPED

  IN

  BLACK

  Dedicated to Gavin.

  Being your mother is the greatest gift of all.

  We know the legends. Human beings, just like us--but schooled in the ways of circumventing the very rules of nature. They've been condemned, burned, driven underground. But that least understood and most variable of personae, The Witch, remains a source of fascination and fear the world over.

  They walk among us, plying their skills, stealing our hearts -and perhaps other pieces of us- for purposes known only to them.

  In this boiling brew, you'll taste not only eye of newt and wing of bat, but wrathful scorn, summoned spirits, and pierced veils that bleed wonders dark and delicious.

  Straddle the whisk and travel the worlds of Witchcraft, Voodoo and eleven worlds 'twixt. But be careful not to fall...in love or into the abyss.

  Within…

  HAIR SHIRT DRAG by Gordon White

  COMES THE RAIN by Gregory L. Norris

  NUMBER ONE ANGEL by Allison M. Dickson

  UNTO THE EARTH by Patrick C Greene

  HÄXENHAUS by Nick Kimbro

  STORIES I TELL TO GIRLS by Michael G. Williams

  THE RISING SON by James Glass

  BEAUTIFUL, BROKEN THINGS by Rose Blackthorn

  NOT THIS TIME by Mike Lester

  INTO THE LIGHT by Solomon Archer

  SHE MAKES MY SKIN CRAWL by Shenoa Carroll-Bradd

  PIGEON by Eric Nash

  PIG ROAST by Aaron Gudmunson

  MEET THE AUTHORS

  HAIR SHIRT DRAG

  by Gordon White

  I ain't never read the Key of Solomon, but I read the Book of Kings. Rest of the Bible, too, back when Mama thought that'd help me fit in. It didn't, I won't, and, truth be told, I ain't all that broken up about it. It's hard being the only son in a family of powerful women, harder still when people say you aren’t even man enough for that. But I'm just about over it all, really.

  It's a humid July evening, as Mama says, accenting both syllables. We're on the porch, listening to the crickets and the frogs settle into their nightly delirium as fireflies rise up across the tobacco fields like ghost lights. Mama's got a mouthful of needles as she helps me pin the dress I'm wearing. She’s ain’t thrilled to be doing it, but I need help on the back and at least out here the cicadas drown out her disapproving clucks.

  An engine rattling across the field and a red dust cloud barreling down the driveway interrupt our work. It ain't even really dark yet, but the car's headlights are beaming like two wide eyes scared that something's going to jump out at them. As it gets closer, I recognize Emma Turner, a girl I knew from school and the kind that shakes her long, blonde hair when she gets out of her car like this was a shampoo commercial. Almost without thinking, I brush my hand across the nearly shaved side of my own head, bristling out a fine mist of sweat. I'm not petty or anything, but she and I have never gotten along.

  “Evening, Ms. Overhold,” she says to Mama.

  Mama nods. “It is.”

  Emma's mouth hangs opens as she hesitates, deciding how to address me.

  See, Overhold is a matrilineal name, passed on through our family’s women, although I ended up with that gift, too, despite my sex. Which was fine, until I got to Bushrod Johnson High and the kids all started calling me “Sissy,” but since that's a diminutive – sometimes even an affectionate – of names like Melissa or Jesse, I could pretend it wasn't all that bad. You know, if you squinted hard enough. Anyway, I never let it give them power over me because if there's one thing I know, it's this: Words don't mean nothing. It's only intention that makes things happen.

  That's important.

  “Jesse,” Emma settles on my boy name, smiling as if she and I were on speaking terms. “You're looking thin.”

  Her eyes laugh the way her mouth wouldn't dare in front of Mama. I must look a mess, hair frizzed out and make-up smearing in the damp air, probably more than a little five o'clock shadow. But girls like Emma eat weakness, so I lean in and smile back.

  “You, too, Goldie.” It sounds innocuous, but she and I both know the rumors behind it.

  Her smile hardens and she shakes her hair again, probably not even meaning to, yet ruled by an instinctual vanity. She tugs at her curls, a tell she's had since middle school when lying to teachers or her boyfriend Tommy Stinz. “I like your,” her free hand waves, “get-up. Trash chic.”

  Half made-up though I may be, I look good in this dress. The sharp lines, cut-outs, sloping hem and everything else is my design and my construction. So if queen bee wants to start pulling on threads, jealous that I look better than she ever will, well, that won't end nicely. I sweep the longer part of my hair out of my eyes to stare at her.

  “How's your family, Miss Turner?” Mama is louder than the question warrants, pushing herself into the conversation. “Your mother and the Sheriff doing well?”

  I'm over it. I let go of the moisture-swollen railing, peeled paint stuck beneath my nails. It's too hot for this nonsense.

  “Yes, ma'am,” Emma says. Her smile is as thin and painted on as her eyebrows, but she
sounds sweet as honey.

  “That's good to hear.” Mama hands me my pincushion and waves Emma onto the porch. “What can we do for you?”

  “Well, ma'am,” Emma says, “I been told to come ask about your medicine.”

  Now, we call it medicine, but that's just a name to hide behind. Mostly it's little things: minor healing, divination, a love spell or two. But sometimes it's big medicine, the kind that you probably go your whole life never needing, but when you do, you need it more than anything and there's just one place to get it. The Overhold women can do it. I can, too, even though I probably shouldn’t be able to.

  Emma sits down as Mama picks up a ball of beeswax from the porch railing and pulls out the pieces of straw that run through it. Then Mama rolls the ball between her palms, reforming it like it was never any different than the way she wants it now.

  “Tell me,” Mama says, beginning the patter I've heard a thousand times. “Have you ever had your future told?” In Emma's eyes I see the petty war between wanting to believe and needing to doubt.

  “Angels got their wings,” Mama goes on. “But I got my ball of wax. You just pick a piece of straw from that broom there and I’ll push it through, bending and crossing, twisting and turning. We call it riding the broom, but it's just following the path and reading the passage. Ain't none of us can fly, but this is like seeing everything from above.”

  I'm over this, too.

  Back inside the house, I let the screen door slam and Gatty, our dog, comes into the kitchen. She cocks her head at that angle that dogs do so well and I bend down, take her ears in my hands and rub our faces together. That warm dog smell surrounds me as I tease the fluff on the sides of her neck.

  “Why don't you go keep an eye on Mama, girl?”

  Gatty shakes out from tip to tail, then trots over and noses the screen open. I can rest a little easier, but the house isn't any cooler than outside and there's no chance for a breeze, so I head towards the back. It's straight through the kitchen and the living room where we got a fireplace which we never use on account of the TV's giant silver ears only get reception right in front of it. Above the fireplace, though, is a photograph of Great-Grandma Charity, still smiling down over her house, every bit the proud Overhold matron. I never knew her, but Grandma said that Charity’s hair was the silver of thermometer mercury, and that in the moonlight you could see her moving like a star across the fields. It must have been too bright for the black and white film, though, because the crown of her head seems to fan out and disappear into the photo's borders.

  Although this house was a tight fit when it was Grandma, Mama, and me, it's a bit more tolerable ever since Grandma passed. With those two taking turns trying to scare me straight with the fear of Jesus while still learning me the Overhold women's medicine, I didn’t get a moment’s peace. I would lie here on the fold-out at night and stare up at Charity shining like a blown-out star and think how things might be different if she were still around. Sometimes I’d fall asleep and dream of her whispering secrets to me and holding my hand, smiling all the while.

  You see, Charity got this house and this land from the Beltair family when old Ms. Beltair had a sickness no doctor nor preacher could cure. Finally, Mr. Beltair, with his wife shrunk to skin and bones, went out into the woods where Charity lived with her daughter, my Grandma. Mr. Beltair asked her real nice – you didn't ask Charity any way but real nice – to come and use her powers, but she just laughed and said she didn't have no powers, only the medicine. But, like I always say, the words ain't the important bit.

  When she got there, the Beltair house was on the edge of mourning. The roosters had been taken away and thick linen sheets sat next to every mirror. But Charity told the men there wasn't nothing to fear just yet. They took her to the sick woman's bedside and Charity had a long, loud conversation with the airs around her as Ms. Beltair shook and moaned. Then, fast as you please, Charity plucked a mouse from out of the sick woman's forehead, put it in a mason jar, took it home and buried it at the edge of the woods. Grandma used to say that mouse was the sorriest looking thing she'd ever laid eyes on and sometimes, at night, she used to imagine that she could still hear it tapping against the glass underground.

  Two days later the Beltair woman was out of bed and the day after that the Overhold women were in this house. It was smaller then, a sharecropper's shack that’s now the living room which we’ve built up around, but Charity's portrait still watches over its old heart. Nowadays, though, nobody knows Beltair but as the name on the road that connects the interstate to the bypass, but Grandma's in the churchyard, Charity's in the plot out back, Mama's on the porch, and I'm here in between.

  I blow a kiss to Charity as I step out onto the back porch, where I can still hear Mama and Emma on the other side, oohing and ahhing, riding that broom. It's a ridiculous name and, frankly, a ridiculous method. There's plenty of other ways to do it. For example, Gypsy girls use cards and balls. English ladies look at tea leaves. I tried that once, when I was working the dinner shift at the Pig-Heaven-Q, cleaning out a 5-gallon cooler of sweet tea dregs and watching this whole town's future spin down the drain of an industrial sink. That was enough for me. Nowadays, I find the best way to learn things is just to ask the right person.

  Gatty comes running around the house and jumps up, pawing at my bare legs. I bend down and scratch her chin to calm her.

  “What is it, girl?”

  She whines and whimpers.

  “I see. Well, then.” I rub her down real quick, shedding tufts of fluff into the thick air, and then she walks off.

  I walk past the fenced-in garden where there's a pumpkin growing that literally has Ms. Cherise's daughter's name on it. It's growing well and, right on schedule, Ms. Cherise has got a grandbaby due in November, just so long as I get this one up before the frost comes. But straws, pumpkins, balls of wax - these are all props and misdirection. They ain’t the power itself and they don’t control the outcome. For instance, Grandma healed plantar warts by laying on hands and speaking in tongues. Mama does it while she rubs your heel and says The Lord's Prayer. Last time I did it was by giving Tommy Stinz a handjob in the locker room while humming Smells Like Teen Spirit. Sure gym class was a little awkward after that, but all three of us had a one-hundred-percent success rates and repeat customers.

  All that, though, is still easy medicine. Broomsticks, warts, talking dogs, changeling gourds – that's just toying with intent. Something bigger is on the horizon, but it’s a dark shape whose edges I can’t quite see. I ponder this as I head towards the small gravestones at the woods’ edge.

  Mama and I are sitting at the table after a mostly silent dinner when she looks at me real serious. “Jesse,” she starts with my name, which is never a good omen. “We have to do some big medicine.”

  “For that girl who came by today?” I push my chair back to stand. “Uh-uh. That bitch-”

  “Boy, you watch your language. You think your great-grandma would have tolerated that in this house?”

  From my seat, I see Charity smiling back at me. “She never complained before.”

  “Boy,” Mama says, and I can tell that I shouldn't push her, because she's always in a foul mood when she starts harping on my sex. “You’re awfully presumptuous. Do you think you know her?”

  I could push the issue, but I'm over it. “No, ma'am.” I settle down into my chair, waiting to follow Mama's lead.

  She smoothes the front of her blouse and adjusts the pins holding back her auburn hair. Queen of the house, primping to deliver her address.

  “Now, like I said,” she finally says, “we're going to have to do the rites.”

  “What rites?”

  She ignores me, standing instead to clear the dishes, so I do the same and follow her into the kitchen. I watch her reflection in the window over the sink as she sets to washing them, scowling down at her busy hands and speaking to the wall.

  “It takes a lot of work, because of the gifts we got, to be accepted in t
his community. We keep hold over the medicine, but it hasn't always been easy.” She puts her dishes in the drying rack and takes mine from me, making eye contact for just a second before turning away. “You see, each Overhold woman, well, each Overhold, has got to undertake a certain rite of passage and protection. It helps us and it helps the town.”

  Her voice is that tired timbre on the verge of cracking that I remember hearing say 'Why can't you be normal?' more times than I’d like to count. It doesn’t make me inclined to listen.

  “This town can screw-”

  Dishwater droplets burst like stars as Mama slaps me, hard. My hand goes to my face and my eyes are watering and I don't know whether to laugh or cry or take her head off.

  “Oh, baby,” she says, like it suddenly hit her, too. “I'm so sorry.” Her hands are cool and wet from the dishwater against my burning cheek, but I pull back. I've heard these words before, seen these gestures, and I'm over it.

  “You can't ever talk that way.” She reaches for my arm as I back into the living room. ““You have to appreciate what the folks have done for us. You have to do this for them. For us.”

  My fire is gone, but the anger is changing its shape, becoming something tall and dark.

  “Why? Ever since I was born, nobody here has ever made me welcome. “

  “That's not true, honey.” She uses that placating tone usually reserved for Emma and the others that come asking for help. “They let us live here.”

  “What do you mean?” I pull my arm from her, sweeping it to encompass the room and Great-Grandma Charity looking down. “This is our house. We don't owe any rent, we don't need permission.”

  A strand of Mama's hair has come loose and hangs across her face like a scar, splitting her in two. She pushes it back and, in the same slow gesture, points to the faded portrait of my great-grandma – Mama's grandma – with the bright eyes and halo of quicksilver hair bleeding out into the over-exposure.