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

  “Do you see the way your Great-Grandma Charity is smiling? How her eyes are wide open, watching us?”

  I nod.

  “But they ain't quite straight, are they? Her left eye is looking over here at the sofa, but the right, maybe a little, is looking at the table?”

  I hadn't ever put my finger on it, but I can't not see it now. Her smile, too, looks off, pulled up at not quite the corners. I look to Mama and realize she's watching me.

  “And the way her hair is almost floating? Spilling out like she was underwater, or maybe lying down? Why do you think that is?”

  I think I know now, but I don't want to.

  “She's dead there, Jesse. Your Grandma, my mama, and me had to lay her out, roll her eyes back and stitch her lips together.” Her voice swells with righteous air. “Do you know why you don't see Beltairs around here? For the same reason you don’t see your great-grandma. It's because Mr. Beltair gave Charity this house, called it a gift, but one day his sons came and told Charity and your grandma to leave. Charity asked them, Don't your daddy's word mean nothing? And they laughed and said words are just words.

  “Well, she should have just said alright and left, but there never was a woman less aptly named than your great-grandma. So she worked her medicine and, after that, what Beltairs weren't dead surely wished they were. But when the rest of the town found out, they came here, all of them. And they would have been right, wouldn't they, to have dragged them both out into the woods and burned them to ashes. But they didn't. Instead, when they were done with Charity, just Charity, they said to your grandma, 'We did you this kindness, so you're gonna do us the same.'

  “So you be thankful that they let your grandma and I live here, let us shop in their town, join their church. That they let us bury your Grandma in the churchyard and not in a hole out back. That they let you and I go to their school and talk to their children, and if you didn't fit in, that's not anyone's fault but your own for insisting on being so damn,” she spits the word like a curse, “odd.”

  And so the night has led back to the place where it always leads.

  “All the Overhold women have daughters, so when you were born I hoped, prayed, that the line was broken and that you wouldn't have the gifts, but you did. And I don't know why, even being a boy, you can't just be real one. It's like you try to undo all of our work, but I won't let you. You have got to do this now, for me, whether you want to or not.”

  I'm over it. My mind is a place of shadows until I realize that Mama is now standing before me.

  “Jesse, honey.” The huckster voice is back. “Will you do this, please?”

  I’m tired of fighting it, so I give in and nod.

  “Good,” she says. “That’s real good.”

  From inside her closet, Mama pulls out a large fur coat, but as it comes into the light, I can see that it isn't an animal's skin. At least not one animal. It's a patchwork of fur and hair, different colors, different patterns, different lengths. As I look at it, it seems less and less like a coat and more and more like a ball of beasts all stitched together.

  “Do you know what this is?” Mama lays it down gently on the bed, like she’s afraid something's going to break or, maybe, fall out.

  “Clearly,” I say, “it's a Bigfoot costume.”

  Mama laughs, an unfamiliar sound. “That's one name it's gone by.”

  Static, maybe, crackles as her fingers run furrows through the pelts and the smell of musk and something sweet, like honeysuckle, sneaks into the room. She smiles in a way I’ve never seen.

  “There's power in the flesh, in the hair and skin. That's old medicine, blood medicine. We don't do that anymore,” she trembles slightly, her fingers clenching. “But this has been in our family since before we had a name. Across the seas, they called it a hair shirt and it made them closer to God. In the swamps, when women who wore it ran like wolves, they called it loup garou.”

  I see now that there's not a rabbit fur nor deer skin among the pieces. These are hunters: a bear's coat, a wolf’s hide, a few patches I can't guess and more than a few long, lanky ones that I can, but don't want to.

  “Generation by generation, my family,” she frowns, “our family, added to it. It grew longer and longer, covering more and more. Size of a bobcat, size of a bear, size of a skunk ape.”

  “And what does it do?” I speak softly, cowed by the only half-ridiculous fear that I might somehow wake it up.

  “It makes the medicine stronger.” She lets go slowly, letting the hair run through her fingers like sand.

  “And you use this in the ceremony?”

  “No, baby, you do.”

  As my hands near the coat, the air between us is writhing. There’s heat and pulse, whispers and growls, dark paws and bare feet on the forest floor. But when I pick it up, it's so light that it’s almost rising up to meet me, clinging to my hands.

  “Do you feel it?” Mama asks.

  “Yes, ma'am.”

  “Be very careful with it.”

  The misshapen bulk looms before me, an untamed bramble of dark medicine. I can see the potential, but it's going to need some alterations.

  A week later, when the full moon rises, Mama stands in a clearing painted red and orange by a singing bonfire. Hidden in the tree-line, I watch the ritual as I dress in my second skin. Fireflies blink like curious eyes, but I feel amazing and have no shame in this form. The changes I've made to the hair shirt were extreme, but no matter how much I trimmed, tightened and realigned, I didn't end up with any more or less than I started. It was like we were working together towards a mutual design. Anyway, I look damn good.

  In the semi-circle of seven or eight spectators watching Mama and the fire, I recognize Emma's golden hair, even in the dark. The others are a mystery since it was hard enough to get Mama to tell me the purpose of this ceremony, much less who's here. She was vague, but it’s some sort of protection rite to reinforce the boundaries of the town. Every generation, a group of them comes to us for the medicine - the big medicine - and the next generation of Overhold women obliges them with a show of power. It's like a black mass cotillion, I guess. From what Gatty said, I'd had my misgivings, but right now I'm too excited by the feel of the shadows and the breeze running through the hairs on my head and the ones on my ceremonial dress, drawing goosebumps where they brush against my naked arms and thighs. I'm a stunning weeping willow made of darkness, just waiting for my cue.

  For once, Mama isn't chanting The Lord's Prayer but a full-on incantation. The fire twists and cackles, driving back the spectators and their shadows. The flame bursts and here I go.

  I strut out into the light and I own this forest. Each step drives like a root into the ground, sending out shockwaves as the night trembles before me. At the fire's edge I see Mama's mouth gaping. The hair shirt isn't a lumpy bear costume anymore, but pure totemic fetish. If she was expecting that homeless sasquatch look, then this high-fashion fur drag priestess must be blowing her mind. Everyone is speechless.

  Short skirt, plunging neckline, thigh-highs and arm bangles all positively coursing with power. The red lips and smoky eye aren't medicine, but they might as well be magic. I plant myself by the fire, hips cocked and arms akimbo to let them finally look upon my realness.

  For a moment, there are no words.

  “Sissy?” Emma is the first to break the spell, forgetting to use my boy name in front of Mama.

  “Holy moly.” That's Tommy Stinz, with the same stunned look I remember from the locker room.

  But that was the preview and now here comes the show. The power courses down from the sky and up from the forest floor, through the dark hairs that stretch outwards, grasping like antennae. All around me the black begins to take solid form as the strength of the beasts and men that I am wearing bends around me. I have wings of night and stars, claws of purest void, and I feel like I could reach through the canopy and pluck down the silver moon.

  “Abracadabra, bitches.”

  But then I am sm
ashed out of my triumph, screaming as something long and heavy whips across my back. I scream and break under the blows.

  “Get him,” someone shouts. All around, flashlights flare like angry stars and I hear footsteps and more voices, older voices, coming out of the trees and into the clearing. I can only make out their silhouettes behind the fire, but it seems like the whole town is here, watching as the thick chain is wrapped around my throat and arms, pulling and spreading me like a deer on a car's hood. It’s heavy and cold, and my skins recoil beneath its touch.

  I recognize Sheriff Turner, Emma's daddy, by his uniform. He grabs the hair on my head and pulls it back, lifting my face to the assembly.

  “Iron binds the witch,” he says.

  “Amen,” the crowd responds.

  Sheriff Turner keeps talking, but the frozen weight of my bindings and the links biting into my bare skin is too much. Rolling my eyes, I see Mama standing off to the side of the group. Her face looks like it's burning the same color as her hair. She looks away when she sees me watching her.

  “Witches have power, but together we are as strong as iron. Come up here,” the Sheriff gestures to Emma and the others. “It ain't nothing to be scared of.”

  One by one, they are buoyed up by the rest of the town’s whispering approval. A girl and a boy I can't place are first and they poke me in the chest, pushing me back. The chains dig in and I can feel the skin beginning to tear.

  Emma comes next and her father pulls my head up so that I can face her as she slaps me, lightly first, then much harder.

  “That's enough,” he says, but he doesn't sound convinced. She gets one more in.

  Then comes Tommy Stinz and I'm afraid he going to punch me, but instead he leans in close and, for a split second, I think maybe he's going to kiss me, but he just spits out an insult. “Freak.” Then he gets right next to my ear and I can feel the tingle of his breath as he calls me the other f-word. At that point, I begin to cry.

  A parade of horribles goes by, laughing and spitting, pinching and prodding. They run together like mascara, but through my tears I recognize the last one by her tight, red hair.

  “Mama?”

  “I'm sorry,” she says, “But we all have to do this. This is how you learn what it means to be a part of the community.”

  She turns her back and, just like that, I'm over it. Really, truly over it.

  The power gathers to me, iron chains be damned, and when I hear Mama gasp, I know she now sees the other alteration I've made to this dress. Like beams of moonlight, the braids of quicksilver trim that I've added begins to tremble and there's more anger here than just mine.

  “Charity?” Mama whispers. The Sheriff's grip tightens but I just laugh.

  “Not on your life.”

  And then I explode. The iron chain shatters, links tearing through my captors like shrapnel. Sheriff Turner staggers backwards, reaching for his holster, but I am that dark place where the shadows move and it ain't safe to be near me. Unseen hands reach through and into him, stopping his heart. The silver strands of my war dress sparkle like razor wires and I close my eyes to finally reveal the second set of black ones I've painted on the lids. Dark eyes, dark hair swirling into the shadows. I am the negative portrait of Charity as I finish her work.

  The bonfire erupts into the crowd, sending screaming matchstick men and women into the trees, carrying the flames like my emissaries. All around, I swing my long dark arms of night, crashing through wood and bone, stone and flesh. Those that don't break are bent and twisted into wrongful, knotted things.

  I hone in on Emma's golden crown and, with a backhanded sweep, she smashes into a tree beside where Mama now stands, dumbfounded. Emma burbles in hysterics as Mama kneels down to her, finally maternal, but to the wrong person. I sashay towards them through the carnage. Even though I can't see myself, their swollen eyes tell me all I need to know.

  I smile. I look great.

  “Sissy, Jesse, please,” Emma screams and grabs Mama like a shield. “I'm so sorry,” she says. “I'm so, so sorry.”

  But I've been pretty clear on the value of words.

  ***

  COMES THE RAIN

  by Gregory L. Norris

  As Grammy Rae slipped closer toward the shroud, the sky over Foster’s Pond grew dark and more threatening, filling with clouds the color of old bruises, jaundiced yellow-green edged in purple. No rain fell and the air thickened with the bitterness of ozone, becoming almost too heavy to breathe.

  Jamison recognized that smell. Four years earlier, Grammy Rae and Momma had taken him to an amusement park for his seventh birthday and its acridity had rained down over the bumper cars, stronger than that of the grease, intensifying with every pop and flash of electricity in the network of metal honeycombs over their heads, those tiny balls of lightning that powered the cars into motion. In the past few days, lightning had crackled and thunder had boomed, but no raindrops fell.

  “Don’t go outside,” Momma said, her voice barely above a whisper.

  “I have to water the pumpkins,” Jamison argued, his not much louder. “They’re gonna dry up and die on their vines.”

  Momma’s eyes darted to the window. Jamison followed her gaze and saw a veil of mist sweep past, framed by the threadbare checked curtains. “No, stay inside.”

  “But Momma…”

  It wasn’t so much the pumpkins, which he had planted and labored over all summer, any more than the drooping tomatoes with their wooden stalks and plump, red fruit, or the carrots he harvested by the handfuls, loving it when they resisted being tugged out of the ground. It was the silence, the stagnancy inside the house. That, and Grammy Rae’s outbursts as the fever consumed her.

  Whatever admonishment she readied to make died, cancelled out by another plaintive cry from the top of the staircase. The voice was Grammy’s, sweet to the ears as it normally was, but beneath the near-musical tones lurked another, sharper chord. At its utterance, sparrows darted out of cover from the cool green folds of the two stately willow trees that bookended the farmhouse and, for an instant, the sun broke through the sallow mists, forming prisms through the back windows that faced out across the pond. A ribbon of fresh air stirred through the house; the breeze, Jamison noted, smelled of roses and almonds, like Grammy Rae’s hand lotion.

  Kitten raced out of the back room and into the kitchen, panic written across her tiny face and obvious in her wide eyes. She dropped the rag doll Grammy Rae had made her the previous Christmas in her haste to reach the safety of Momma’s arms.

  “It’s okay,” Momma soothed.

  But Jamison knew it wasn’t. He patted Kitten’s back and dropped the subject. For now.

  “I need you to talk to me,” Momma urged.

  Kitten shook her head. She possessed quite the vocabulary, far bigger words and meanings than many of the older kids in Jamison’s class. But she had stopped speaking the moment Grammy Rae fell ill. That had been a week ago, and the storm clouds had soon followed.

  “Take your sister,” Momma whispered. She handed Kitten down.

  Jamison recovered the rag doll and Kitten, who could recite entire poems and whole pages of stories from memory when she wanted to, clutched at it, her eyes sealed as tightly as her lips. The unexpected whistle of the kettle on the stove made Jamison jump.

  Momma prepared another cup of tea for Grammy Rae. Mint, he could tell by the sweet fragrance as she passed by, balancing a tray between her shaking hands. The miserable silence that had blanketed the house resumed, its ominous weight not stopping flocks of invisible butterflies from fluttering their wings beside both of Jamison’s ears.

  In the late morning, while Momma napped with Kitten clutched protectively beside her in the back room’s antique brass bed, Jamison snuck up the staircase to check on Grammy Rae. To accomplish this, he quietly unlaced his sneakers and left them on the landing. Stocking feet would pose less of a problem on the ancient risers, of which the seventh, ninth, and tenth out of thirteen tended to groan the w
orst, beneath any amount of weight.

  Jamison performed a giant step over the seventh, making it onto the eighth, no sweat. Going from eight to eleven posed a problem, so he carefully shuffled up the betraying stairs, one at a time. Even that small amount of noise in the tenebrous silence of the house caused his heart to gallop. But breathless seconds later, he found himself standing on the second floor.

  The banister swept in a half-circle toward the spare room, what had once been Momma’s when she was a young girl, then in a straight line past the library from whose many books Kitten had absorbed knowledge about Earth science and Earth magic, Grammy Rae’s sewing room, the tiny bathroom that was a closet until 1952 and, finally, Grammy Rae’s bedroom.

  The two windows at the front of the farmhouse, located dead center between the willow trees, stood open. But their curtains, which Grammy Rae had sewn by hand, hung flat, the nearest stirring only when Jamison crept past.

  The air this high up was only slightly less stagnant. The humidity engulfed him as Jamison slid along the course of the wooden rail. That fragrance of roses and almonds along with a hint of lily of the valley grew stronger the closer he got to Grammy Rae’s door. The door, painted white with a wreath of dried wildflowers, grapevine, and a few coils of bittersweet picked last autumn in the lush meadows of the farmstead’s northern acreage, was ajar by a space of inches. Jamison reached his trembling hand toward the cut glass knob and pushed.

  It was still recognizably Grammy Rae’s room, with its bed made from rough-cut posts hewn right out of the farmstead’s timberland, the quilt Grammy Rae had stitched together with increasingly brittle fingers, the familiar walnut furniture, and vases filled with cut flowers; great handfuls of white and yellow daisies, black-eyed Susan, and buttercups. The teacup Momma had carried up earlier that morning sat untouched on the nightstand. But…

  Grammy Rae floated above the bed, a vision dressed in diaphanous white lace. As she levitated, unconscious with fever, tendrils of unhealthy yellow-green energy flicked at her outline, like spitting vipers. To Jamison’s horror, the light-snakes had uncoiled through the open windows.