The Witch of the Wood (5 page)

Steps were coming from the hall to his right. His positioning had the arch acting as a shield, a torturous blind spot, and he fixed his stare at the carpet between his feet. Then she was there, dark flat-heeled shoes, charcoal slacks, dress shirt with a high white collar and black bead buttons, a vest. And long red hair, bobby pins, split ends. She had wide set eyes and fat ruddy cheeks; absolute “boy-face,” and homely as hell.

A stranger.

“Rudy,” she said, offering her hand for a good masculine shake. “Nice to see you again. Sorry, I had to run after my little speech last night. I had to get my brother from the airport, just back from Afghanistan. What can I do for you?”

Rudy sat where he was, looking up at her and blinking.

“I . . . uh . . . I was in the neighborhood and just wanted to make sure you got me signed in. I was late and I didn’t want the powers that be to think I was ducking.”

She crossed over to the counter and the old bat had a sheaf of papers waiting. “April” took it and gave a brief study.

“No, I marked you in.” She returned it to be filed once again and came back over, arms folded now.

“How’s the 122 class going? APA updated the manual last week, and I have a virtual copy online. The shelf text comes in next Wednesday—should I mail it to you?”

“That would be fine,” Rudy said faintly. He was still sitting, looking up at her rather helplessly, twisting his fingers in his lap, embarrassed, but he had to say it. “April Orr, right?” She pushed out her lower lip and actually did that thing where she blew upwards to fluff her bangs.

“The one and only. Gosh, Rudy, you’re as forgetful as I am!” She gave a hearty laugh and patted him on the shoulder. “Well, we all love a good conversation around here, but the pile on my desk isn’t getting any smaller. Unless you’d like to help me alphabetize freshman plagiarism forms . . .”

“No!” Rudy laughed, palms out, finally playing it as it was presented before him, then pushing to his feet. “Thanks again, April, for everything.”

The second he made the outer hallway, the plastic smile vanished. What on earth was going on here?

He walked across the parking lot and got in his car.

To go to her house and ask her.

Except there was no house. Rudy reforged the same path that he’d driven last night in the sleet, the right off the main road and then the two lefts, but when he came to the culvert there was no driveway, no residence. Rudy pulled in as far as he could off the road where there were old wear-lanes made in the dirt and wild grass, his tires crunching over morning crystal and frozen mire. He stopped. The exhaust rose from the back left and blew gently over the hood, falling in with this weird staging, this creepy scene unit unfolding all around him like dream theater.

Here in the culvert was a glen of sorts, to the side a river, and crossing it, a walking bridge, the same as last night yet different altogether. Rudy had only caught a glimpse of it in the semi-darkness through the driving sleet, but his impression had been “decorator bridge,” made of the finest woods, newly installed. This ruin was years old, possibly hundreds, all stone, much of the base by the near bank chipped and eroded with lime deposits darkening the curve of the underside.

Rudy got out of his car, breath making little plumes on the air. There were footprints in the newly hardened mud, all his, going up and back into and out of the glen. He put his shoe in one of them and it was a dead match, and then he followed the prints, his breath-plumes getting shorter and harsher.

Like the odd, displaced familiarity of the bridge, the glen was a haunt of memory as well, except the easy chair that had seemed a bit too low to the ground was actually a tree trunk, cut at its base and petrified, the lamp beside it—a small spruce sapling with branches frozen over and cracked, the fireplace—a part of an old fieldstone wall half buried in brambles and overgrowth, and the sofa dipping down on one side—a huge uprooted oak covered in ivy and frozen yellowed moss.

There was a sound, something faint on the cold wind, so slight it was almost lost, to the left where the stairway would have been. It was a suckling sound. Rudy looked over with wide eyes to where the banister had stood and saw a humongous maple, broken at waist height from some past storm and angling up and off into the forest where it had fallen and come to rest on the buttress of other surrounding foliage.

There at the apex of the crack, between stubborn bark on both sides that had stretched and held, Rudy saw something move.

He stumbled away and ran for his car, his foot catching sideways in one of his frozen prints giving one of those twists and yanks he’d feel more tomorrow. He thought suddenly that his car door would be locked, and while he pulled uselessly and bloodlessly on the handle, some spotted arm would come from under the fender, sneaking up his trouser leg, something with nodules and tentacles gliding over the roof, snapping for purchase around his shoulders and throat.

The door creaked open, and there on the wind he heard a moaning sound from behind him. It sounded like
“Rudy . . .”

He bent into the car, dragged his legs after him, and slammed shut the door, all the sounds of the forest cutting off to the quick.

“Rudy,” she said from the back seat.

The car seemed to jerk forward, zero to ninety or more, all G-forces pressing Rudy into the cushions and hard against the headrest. His gritted teeth were exposed, lips curdling around them, eyes wide and tearing. In front of him, the forest remained absolutely stationary, but for all intents and purposes he was being hurtled through space at hundreds of miles per hour. There was movement in the rearview, and though he strained to focus on it, he couldn’t quite get the angle.

“This is an exercise in empathy, Rudy,” she said. “This is a percentage or two of what I’m going through. You can only take a minute or so of the treatment before you hemorrhage, so I’d pay attention.”

“I’m so sorry for what I did!” Rudy managed.

“Quiet,” she said softly. “I was the one who took you by force, at least in a sense, not the other way around. That’s why I wept at the foot of the stairs. Please don’t interrupt me again or you’ll die.”

Rudy tried to will his eyes over just one millimeter further to the right, just to get one good hard glimpse in the rearview, but all he got was a blur, a flicker of bone white, streaks of black. Now she was close, right up in his ear.

“I know it’s rude to lecture you, Rudy, but time is too much of a factor. I’ll do my best to be brief, but I must pause here to ask. May I continue? I need permission.”

“Yes,” Rudy strained. “Please, go on.”

“And I may be blunt?”

“Yes, of course, please.”

Rudy’s eyes felt as if they were going to explode. And when she sat back and went on as if the content of her discourse wasn’t forced and outrageous, he welcomed it. Anything to distract him, take his mind off the motion, the vertigo, the free fall. It sounded like music from the back of his Toyota Corolla, deep and rich and poetic and dark.

“I’m a witch,” she said, “one of millions who were created thousands of years ago for one purpose and one purpose only. To be companions to men, our rougher counterparts. For centuries we lived in harmony, both immortal, the males hunters and conquerors, the witches their sensuous shape-shifters, always adjusting to their ever-evolving sexual need. We didn’t just fulfill fantasies, Rudy; we created them. Tell me, did you ever have a picture of the one you called ‘April Orr’ in your consciousness? Or was it her newness, her subtleties that drew you to her, she who tapped into emotions and attractions you didn’t even know existed? Man’s happiness was always our special art, our tailored craft. I happen to know, Rudy Barnes, that a single year and fifty-two days into the given hypothetical relationship you would tire of April Orr, her newness becoming routine, her spark dulled in your sexual perception. Were I your mate, I would change for you then. I would become the twenty-nine-year-old physical therapist you’d meet after straining a muscle in the arch of your foot. She would still wear a ribbon in her long auburn hair in fond remembrance of her days as an undergraduate varsity gymnast at LSU, and she would be interested in you because of your ability to help her with term papers coming up in the new nursing research classes she signed on for at night so she could eventually become an RN. She would have small firm breasts and legs with beautiful lines, and she would wear eye makeup heavy on the rust and greens, yet no lipstick ever, her mouth so strong, her jaw so defined, her cheekbones so high. She’d be willful and intelligent, knowing just when to praise, to tease, to submit, and when you tired of her, I’d become the porcelain Asian beauty with the stunning waist and velvety voice working behind the desk at the insurance agency, or the bad-girl you’d discover at Repo Records with the nose bud, long black hair, clever eyes, and spectacular ass if you felt like slumming, don’t you see? We were perfect for you, absolute equals, and you betrayed us.”

“How?” Rudy managed, but barely. The G-forces were overwhelming him, making him dizzy, and consciousness seemed dreamlike at this point. At the same time, he was well aware of the interest he’d maintained from the moment she had described the physical therapist. And just as she’d claimed, he’d never had a “picture” of this woman in his mind specifically, but even the verbal outline had him half in love with her already. “Why?” he continued, neck straining. “Why the betrayal? We had it made.”

“Power,” she said. “Man’s true love. You didn’t want equals in the end, you wanted dominance, even at the sacrifice of your own sexual happiness.”

There was a sound then, a croaking, and Rudy realized that the entity in the back seat was crying. He strained with everything he had to turn, but a bonelike hand rested upon his shoulder.

“It’s all right,” she said. “I’m all right. I’ll have to be. This is hard for me, Rudy, not only emotionally. As I said before, I am under incredible physical duress right now, and projecting my image around is an unbelievable burden.”

Rudy made himself relax as best he could, the pressure on his head making everything tinge at the edges with a creeping blackness.

“They lied to us,” she continued. “They claimed to have discovered, through the art of science and medicine, a flaw in the continuum, a fissure in the chain of female existence, and with their smooth equations and black politics they convinced us to spawn. They gave us wombs, impregnated us, had us birth a new race for them.”

Now she was crying, choking and weeping, her words staggered and stuttered as if ripped straight from her soul.

“The beings you call ‘women’ are the descendants of this heinous experiment. They were our daughters! Sensitive, beautiful, vulnerable, born and bred to be slaves, and taken from us before we could teach and engage their magic. And the result? The real fissure, the introduction of the eighty-year life span on both sides, confusion, horrible inequalities our daughter-race still attempts to rectify, pregnancies lasting nine months rather than a pure-breed’s nine moments, and the whole idea of intimacy redefined to be something fleeting, memories inside those who tire of each other long before they can bring themselves to admit it. You introduced the institution of marriage to safeguard the species, and look where it has gotten you; look at the numbers. Are you happier? Has the power been worth all this pain?”

The pressure suddenly stopped, and Rudy felt he needed to catch hold of his breath. She was next to him now, and he didn’t look; he’d changed his mind, too scary, too strange. And while the little boy inside him kept his eyes down, the long-seasoned teacher held his voice even.

“What happened to the witches?” he said. “Was it some sort of massive, universal holocaust?”

“Worse, Rudy. Prison. Forever.”

“Where? How?”

She paused, then said the words with disgust.

“The trees, Rudy. Your world is not all it seems, and there is atrocity just beneath its surface. Each tree is a jail cell, its stalk above ground mere decoration. The buried roots in reality are hideous arms and gnarled, clutching fingers, each set holding a witch there in her living grave, under the dirt in disgrace.”

“But . . .”

“I know. How about the ones cut down? Well, we are immortal, Rudy, but not indestructible. Any cut or uprooted tree brings about the automatic passing of a witch, no evidence, no trace, at least in any form you would associate with death. You see, we are human, yet not, God’s wondrous mixture of beauty, flesh, spirit, and shadow. We color your world, and when we leave it as a living entity we rejoin it as hue. Every tree houses an imprisoned witch, Rudy, and every shadow is a dead sister. You pass through us every day, wear us on your faces, let us slide down your backs, shade the paths before your feet.”

“And the ones still ‘living’ can never escape?”

She laughed there next to Rudy, and it was a hoarse, bitter sound.

“Oh, we have tried! But wood is our enemy, and we don’t pass through it easily. So many suicides, so many long journeys through the grain, out through the branches and leaves in the formless shapes of poor lonely shadows, only to be projected across the landscape, giving proportion to what is no more than miles and miles of graveyard and prison-city. Why do you think most of your race gets uncomfortable when lost in the woods, Rudy? Because it is there that you feel us the most, wailing and begging from underground. For centuries we have been searching for a way to break the spell that has kept us prisoners of the dirt, Rudy Barnes, and I was the one to finally solve the riddle. You see, it makes sense the way poetry ‘makes sense,’ or anti-poetry, all with a dark universal symmetry, depending on how depraved a vision you are willing to accept.”

Rudy wanted to look at her, but still couldn’t summon the courage. Instead, he stared at his hands, somehow looking old and clawlike there in his lap.