The Firefly Witch (3 page)

She knelt by the tombstone and reached into her coat pockets. She withdrew two squat candles, one black and one red, felt down the tombstone to the wide base, and placed them there out of the wind.

“You’re about to be introduced to the ways of Wicca,” she said. “Would you light the candles for me? Blind people don’t do fire very well.”

“Not crying,
scrying
. It’s a way of focusing magical and psychic energy. Some people do it by looking into a bowl of water, or a crystal ball. I have a different way.”

I didn’t say anything, and she offered no further explanation. I lit the candles as she asked.

She faced me, suddenly grim and serious. “This is what I am, Ry. Wicca teaches you to tune into the world around you. I’m going to be a parapsychologist when I graduate, and I’m also a psychic. It’s the only belief that accepts all that as a blessing.” She held out her hand to me, and I took it. We stood.

“Listen,” she whispered, “I don’t know anything about you, really. But I
feel
things. I feel that maybe you and I--

This time I kissed her. I think I had the same effect on her that she’d earlier had on me. We stood very close for a long time. My life shifted under me in those moments. My world grew bigger, full of wonders I’d never imagined possible. And big enough for two.

“Show me your magic,” I whispered. I’d never meant anything as much in my life.

And she did.

With my help, Tanna drew a circle on the ground around Dennis’s plot. She used our class rings to represent the Wiccan god and goddess, and placed them between the candles. Then she knelt before them, right atop Dennis’s grave.

She whispered, yet somehow the wind brought her words to me clearly. “Goddess of the moon, you of all power, I am here in your honor. God of the sun, source of warmth and light, I am here in your honor. Help me help others.”

The atmosphere inside the circle changed. I shivered. Goosebumps wiggled down my arms.

Tanna put her hands on the ground. “Dennis,” she said sharply. “I know you’re here. We need to talk.”

Nothing happened. Tanna concentrated silently on the ground beneath her. Then, suddenly, she gasped. I jumped. The air around us got much colder. “Well, hello, Dennis,” she whispered.

I didn’t see anything, but I genuinely felt the ghost’s presence. And the urge to get the hell out of there. But I didn’t run this time.

Tanna talked to the guy like a teacher chastising a student. She told him his life was over, he was dead, and it was time to move on. She paused often, as if he disagreed, but I heard nothing.

Later she told me what he said. His spirit was restless because he
didn’t
actually kill himself. He’d written a suicide note, then changed his mind. He believed his family would think him an even bigger coward for committing suicide. He fell over accidentally and broke his neck.

In the end, she convinced him. I guess. The cold went away, at any rate.

I know how this sounds. It’d be easy to say I was under the ordinary “spell” of a beautiful, sexy girl who paid attention to me. The rest could be just mumbo-jumbo. But I know what I felt swirl around and through me that night. It wasn’t ordinary. It was genuine magic.

She was quiet afterwards. We drove to a truck stop, the only place in town open that late, and had a bad breakfast. Even in the harsh fluorescent light, hair tangled from the wind, she was breathtaking.

I took her home. She’d rented a room from a nice couple whose son had grown up blind, so they were familiar with her issues. I kissed her goodnight on the porch.

We didn’t make another date. We didn’t have to. The same chill that woke the ghosts brought us into each other’s warmth.

And a year later, I proposed. On Halloween.

~II~

LOST AND FOUND

When you’re dating a witch--and I mean a real one, not just some temperamental chick--nothing should surprise you, especially frantic knocks on your door at one a.m.

“Yeah, yeah, hold on,” I mumbled as I looked through the peephole and saw that unmistakable red hair. I undid the deadbolt and opened the door.

Tanna Woicistikoviski wore a long black dress with flared sleeves, the dark color offsetting her fire-red mane. She looked damn near panicked to death. “Hey,” I said sleepily, “what’s wrong?”

She looked at me. This was something she could only do in the summer, as the rest of the time she was blind. But on summer nights, as long as fireflies were nearby, she could see, an ability that so far proved impossible to isolate or explain.

“Thank the Goddess you’re here,” she cried, and ran into my arms. She trembled violently and gulped down great mouthfuls of air. I was completely nonplussed; we’d been dating since the previous fall, and in all that time I’d never seen her this scared. I shut the door and guided her to my couch, where I surreptitiously nudged a pillow over the duct-taped patch.

“Yeah, it is,” she said, preoccupied, and whipped it off over her head. She sat there in nothing but black lace under-things, drinking. I could tell by the intense look on her face that she hadn’t even thought about it.

Her near-nudity suddenly made me quiver. We’d been dating, like I said, for months, but we still hadn’t slept together. I know, I know, and she was even a practicing Pagan. But everything else--and I mean everything--was so perfect that I really didn’t mind. We were very passionate, and if the ultimate expression of that hadn’t happened yet, well, I could wait for the right time. But still, with her sitting there right in front of me, all soft and curvy and...I had a hard time concentrating.

She suddenly realized what she’d done, looked up in surprise and kind of laughed. “Ohmigod, I’m sorry, Ry. I feel so comfortable with you, I just--”

“No, no, don’t get dressed on my account. But what happened?”

She pushed a mass of red curls out of her face. “Wow. Where do I start? I think the most amazing thing in the world happened. I think I met the world’s first ghost.”

***

From the personal journal of Tanna Woicistikoviski
:

I am a witch. That one thing defines me. If, as Howard Hawks posits, you are what you do, then every aspect of my life passes through my status as a student of the Craft of the Wise.

I am 25 years old, and a graduate student in parapsychology. This, too, is part of my craft, understanding the nature of the Invisible World and its effect on the Visible one.

I am in love with a good, true, and strong man who doesn’t know he is any of those things. I will become part of his life, because I always have been. He doesn’t remember; I do, misty memories of warm embraces from earlier lives that I long to relive. But my Lady, who looks down with the face of the Moon, tells me to wait. So I wait.

I have to write all this down, to state what should be obvious to me, so there will be a record. Tonight, my identity was taken from me. It was at my request, and with my permission, but with a totality that still terrifies me. I knew thoughts that weren’t mine, and feelings that tore open my heart as another’s had once been torn. I was released, returned to myself, but not without the sure knowledge that my greatest challenge lay before me: to give this spirit, possibly the first restless spirit of humanity, some kind of peace.

And survive.

***

As the beer took hold, she calmed down. “I-I had this...assignment from my teacher in the Craft, Lady Nighthawk. You’ve heard me talk about her, right? I had to find a sacred place, where spirits naturally congregate, and open myself t-to whomever might be there. I th-think she wanted me to learn how the spirits felt, since my path is to help them. But....” She shuddered and drank some more. “I found something more powerful than anything I’ve ever experienced in my life, a spirit as old as...as the
world
. It was a woman, and she was young, and she was spurned for...for
being
.” Tears filled her eyes. Huddled in her underwear, she seemed small and vulnerable, a new look for her in my experience.

“I still don’t understand what happened. Where were you?”

“I found this old abandoned church, down on Alabaster Street. You know, the one by the convenience store? It’s all overgrown and everything?”

“You went in there
alone
?” I knew from my job at the paper that the place was routinely vandalized and used for some pretty unsavory activities.

She waved her hand dismissively. “That’s not important. I was drawn to it, it was where I needed to be, understand?”

No, but I didn’t say anything.

“I could feel it was holy ground, a place of the spirits. It was probably why they originally picked that spot for a church. Anyway, I went in, put up my circle, and waited to see who would come.”

***

Journal entry
(continued):

The place drew spirits from everywhere, and I felt them around me. Many were lost, confused and afraid; I understood. I spoke to them in my secret voice, told them my secret name, asked if I could help. They all fled from me, except one that lurked just outside my senses, like a starving, mistreated pet offered a savory treat. I opened myself completely, and told the spirit to come. I offered all I had: perfect love and perfect trust.

At first it spoke to my mind, with a woman’s voice. It said
, I was created from the elements, given the breath of life, intended as the consort of a man created in the same way. We were to dwell in Paradise.

Then, with a rush so strong I felt myself pushed from myself, the spirit came to me fully. I felt the pureness of her, the unconditional love for her companion. How could she not love him, she’d been created for him. And then pain like I’ve never known, an agony as strong as the love it mirrored, tore through my soul
. The man was repulsed by me, by my need to exist as he did, with the same bodily functions and desires. He saw me full of secretions and blood.

And then came the worst moment, the instant when the pain threatened to tear my own soul free from myself
. And then my creator, The Creator, looked down on me and saw that I was not good.

“
Who are you?” I asked over the roar of her betrayal.

She replied
, I was never given a name.

***

Tanna slept on the couch. I lay on the floor beside it, in case she had nightmares, but I don’t think she moved the rest of the night.

It took a while for me to go back to sleep. I knew Tanna was, well, a little different; but this was the first time I’d seen her freak herself out. Had she just hallucinated the whole thing? I mean, sure, I’d seen some weird things with her, but there could’ve always been prosaic explanations. I just wondered if this was the first symptom of some mental crack-up.

I hoped not. I wanted desperately to believe Tanna was exactly what she claimed: a witch, a scientist, a woman, a whole, multifaceted person. If she turned out to be just some New Age hippie-chick weirdo...well, better to find out now. I hadn’t fallen all the way for her, but the ground was rushing up fast. I even had a ring in mind.

In the morning I made coffee and called the Weakleyville Press to say I’d be late for work. When I brought Tanna a cup she was just waking, clad in my battered old Roxette t-shirt, hair tousled in an absolutely adorable way. I wrapped her hands carefully around the insulated mug; with the fireflies gone at dawn, she was once again blind.

I kissed her forehead. Now that she was awake and rational, my 2 a.m. doubts dissolved. “You know anytime you need me, Tanna, I’ll be there. You’re never alone.” She lay her head on my shoulder with a sleepy smile.

***

Journal entry
(continued):

I spent the morning in the West Tennessee University library following my one clue: the spirit’s odd statement about “secretions and blood.” It rang a distant bell in my memory.

Many books mentioned Adam’s first wife, the infamous mother-of-demons Lilith, but only obscure Jewish scholars, in passing references to the Talmudic commentary known as the Midrash, made any mention of another wife between Lilith and Eve. I was surprised, in a way, because she seemed the exact opposite of Christ: Jesus was the “son of man,” rejected by mankind, while this nameless woman was the daughter of God, rejected first by Adam, then by God himself. Feminists should love this story, but my research found so little evidence I’m sure most of them have never heard of it. The very reason for Adam’s rejection--God created the woman right before his eyes, and he was disgusted at her fluid- and tissue-filled body--seemed relevant to contemporary sexual differences.

The undergraduate assigned to assist me for the day expressed her opinion that the Nameless Virgin, as one source called her, was part of a logical patriarchal progression. First Lilith, created at the same time as Adam, and rejected because she believed herself his equal (famously telling him, “I will not lie beneath you,” and choosing damnation over subjugation); then the Nameless Virgin, whose creation, identical to Adam’s, disgusted him; and finally Eve, created from Adam and clearly subservient to him. Also mighty convenient for blame, the girl added. I told her that her observations were very astute.