The Witches of Dark Root: Daughters of Dark Root: Book One (The Daughters of Dark Root) (20 page)

I must have drifted off because one moment I was staring at the stars and the next I was dazed and lost and wanted nothing more than my sisters and my bed. I cried in silence as I wandered, getting more lost with every turn.

“Maggie! Thank God I found you!”

It was Merry’s voice and I ran towards it, ignoring the branches and shrubs that tore at my bare legs. She had Shane with her, who had been spending the week with us while Uncle Joe was away on business. They escorted me back.

“How did you know I was gone?” I asked as she tucked me into bed.
 

“Shane heard you leave. He woke me when you didn’t come home.” She pulled the blanket up to my chin. “You’ve got to stop running and learn to face things. You don’t want to be a wild, wilder do you?” We giggled at the joke and she kissed me on the forehead and we promised to never run from each other. Ever.

I kept my promise and never left her.

But she left me.

I could run now, I thought, as I stood in the entryway feeling my mother’s eyes boring into me as she screeched out my birth name. “Magdalene! Magdalene!”

It would be so easy. Just one little step in the opposite direction, followed by another, and I could disappear into the forests. I could leave Dark Root and Eve and my mother. I could leave them
all
behind.

I rubbed my fingers together as everyone turned to look at me, wondering what I would do.

“Magdalene! Magdalene!” my mother’s voice
continued to call out to me.

I could run.

I looked from Mother to Merry. I had never been good at keeping promises but I had to keep this one.

“Hello,” I said softly, stepping forward to face her. “I’m home.”

She reached a bony hand out to take mine, her skeletal fingers closing around my wrist. I willed my feet to move themselves, not backwards but forwards, over the threshold and into Sister House. My promise to Merry may have stopped me from running but it was pity for my mother that pulled me inside.

The living room was dark; the curtains were closed and the lights were off. Merry pushed past me and immediately began flipping on switches and opening windows. “It smells horrible in here, Mama,” she said. “Remember, we talked about keeping the windows open to air this place out?”

She was right; the room reeked of urine, mildew, and dust. I turned my nose towards my shoulder to keep from inhaling the fumes.

Eve slithered in behind me, avoiding Mother’s touch, and plopped herself onto the sofa. The upholstery had faded and was covered in dust and balls of fur. June Bug whizzed by, latching on to her mother’s hand. Paul and Shane hung back in the entryway, watching the scene.

A sharp yowl made me jump. As my eyes adjusted I could make out small shapes moving about the corners of the room. Cats. Lots and lots of cats.

My mother had become the cat lady.

“My girls have all come back!” She spun in the living room, her night gown and white hair whipping around her. “The circle will
not
be undone!”

No, Mother
, I thought, as she twirled through the living room.
Your girls have not all come back. Ruth Anne was still missing.

“Still crazy as a Betsy bug,” Eve said, not bothering to lower her voice.

“Sit down, Magdalene,” Mother said, shooing two cats off a recliner that looked on the verge of collapse. I sat uneasily as several new cats emerged from the shadows to inspect their guests. They were a sickly lot, frail and coughing. They gathered at our feet, meowing and pawing at us expectantly. Eve and I kicked them away, but Merry was brave enough to pick one up. She petted the creature, cooing at it like it were a baby.

It sneezed in response and Merry didn’t flinch.

I felt something scurry across my arm and I screamed, slapping it away. June Bug came to my rescue and placed the bug in one of her jars. I pulled my legs into my chest, trying to take up as little space as possible.

A new scent hit my nose.

A hefty bag, untied and overflowing with garbage, sat beside the end table. I had been so preoccupied with the cats that I hadn’t noticed the rest of the house. The floor was covered in bins, newspapers, and stacks of empty cereal boxes. A mountain of clothing camouflaged the love seat. Shoes were stuffed into the crannies of the bookcase. The breakfast table––where I had once eaten cereal and biscuits on Saturday mornings––was piled high with dirty dishes.

My skin crawled again, but this time out of pure revulsion.

“Our first order of business is to figure out what to do with all these cats.” Merry addressed us as if our mother wasn’t in the room. “It’s a major health code violation.” She faced a window and a beam of sunlight caught her hair, causing it to glow a sunflower yellow. “I’ve been paying a nurse to stay with her, but it’s expensive. I am going to put an ad out for someone to come and sit with her at nights. We can take turns with her during the day.”

I was about to ask Merry how we could ever convince anyone to come spend the night in this place when Mother reached a hand into the pocket of her house dress and pulled out a handful of dry cat food.

“Here kitties!” she called out. “Look what mama has for you.”

She flung the cat food to the floor. The tougher cats arched their backs and hissed away the competition, while the weaker ones timidly ran after stray bits that bounced under tables.

“That one...” Miss Sasha said, pointing to a fat, orange cat who looked like it couldn’t be bothered to pry itself up from the kitchen table. “...is Maggie. Isn’t she beautiful?”

“Lucky you.” Eve gave me a sideways look, the right side of her mouth turning up in a caustic smile. “Getting a cat named after you.”

“I’m sure there’s an Eve cat around here somewhere,” I retorted. “Just look for the one with the long stick up its butt.”

Mother continued spraying out cat food as Merry spoke to her.

“We’re here to help you, Mama.” She placed a hand on Mother’s back. “We are going to get you to the doctor, and get your kitties good homes, and clean this place up. Everything’s going to be okay.”

Mother looked at each of us in turn, her expression almost lucid.

“Welcome back, girls. Dark Root needs you.”

“Well, that was creepy.” Eve sipped her coffee, pulling her faux fur collar close around her.

Dip Stix was chilly but Shane didn’t want to run up the heating bill so he made us all coffee to warm ourselves.

“The Twilight Zone
is creepy,” I said. “That was
Rosemary’s Baby.”

I wanted to shake the event from my head, but I couldn’t erase the images and smells from my brain. It had only been seven years since I left. How had she fallen so far? I was prepared for my mother the ‘crazy witch lady’; I was not prepared to see her so shattered and frail.

I wasn’t going back, I decided, as I took a long sip of my coffee, emptying my cup. Maybe that made me evil. If it did, I would deal with that later. All I could think about now was that it had been a mistake coming here.

I had to get out of town, and fast.

“You think we should have left Merry and June Bug there with her?” Shane asked, refilling our cups. He wore a red apron and looked a bit like a bustling old lady.

“Mom’s fine.” Eve rolled her eyes.

I was about to say something, but it was Paul, of all people, who spoke up.

“Eve, you saw that place,” he said. “That was definitely not fine. I’ve been in some dumps in my time, but that place was so awful I didn’t even want to go inside. And I lived in a squat in Brooklyn.”

Eve didn’t argue, like I expected. Instead she shivered. “I suppose it was pretty bad. I just don’t like thinking about it.”

“Me, either,” I agreed.

“At least she wasn’t repeating things this time,” Shane said.

He was wiping down a table, the same one he had just cleaned five minutes before.
 

“...I took her some food last week and she kept repeating the same words over and over again. Something about preparing for the dark.” Shane paused and looked out the window. “My grandmother had dementia and did things like that. Kept saying things in a continual loop, like a skipped record.”

“Isn’t she too young to have dementia?” Eve’s perfect nose peeped over the top of her large mug. She was still wearing the red cashmere mittens she had put on in the car.

“No one really knows how old Mother is,” I said, pressing my hands to my cup for warmth.

Miss Sasha had never revealed her age or showed anyone her driver’s license. I did the math in my head. If she had Eve as old as a woman could have a kid, maybe forty-five, and Eve was almost twenty-four that would put her near seventy.

Maybe she wasn’t too young after all.

Shane finished his tasks and joined us.

“That’s how we found out about her,” he said, pulling up the chair beside me. “She was out driving that old car of hers in the country and got pulled over by a trooper. She had no license or insurance and wasn’t sure where she was. I guess they did some detective work and figured out she belonged here. Thank God they did. I’m not for driving without a license and endangering the community, but if that cop hadn’t pulled her over...” He pounded the side of his fist on the table. “...She might have starved to death in that house alone.”

“She wouldn’t have starved,” Eve pointed out. “She has two thousand pounds of cat food to live on.”

Paul gave my sister a disgusted look but Eve simply shrugged.

“Well, she does.”

“You’re a good guy to take her food,” I said to Shane, a bit embarrassed that he had been taking care of our mother. “Thank you.”

He smiled and nodded his head. “It’s the least I could do. Miss Sasha was like a mother to me, when I visited during the summers. And Uncle Joe really loved her, despite their frequent quarrels. Besides...” Shane looked from me and then to Eve, his eyes lingering on her face. “She was the mother of you girls.”

I checked to see if Paul had noticed, but his focus had shifted to a commemorative Elvis plate hanging on the wall. This time, the King was wearing a striped prisoner’s onesie. Eve could have run through the restaurant buck naked and in that moment, Paul wouldn’t have noticed.

“How do you think she got that way?” I asked, stirring a sugar cube into my coffee with my pinky finger.

Eve set her cup down and peeled the mittens from her hands. “She was already losing it when I left. Always talking about preparing for the End Times. That’s when she started her cereal collection. Suddenly the house was filled with Captain Crunch. She wouldn’t let us eat that stuff when we were kids and here she was, buying it by the crate. Then she moved on to the harder stuff like Frosted Flakes and Sugar Smacks. By the time I high-tailed it out of there, when I was eighteen, the dining room looked like the Kellogg’s factory.”

“And you left her like that?” I clenched my cup.

“Hey!” she fired back. “Don’t put this all on me. At least I had the decency to say goodbye. I didn’t sneak off in the middle of the night with some crazy cult leader and forget how to use the phone.”

I felt the anger pulse through me, starting in my gut and working its way down into my fingers and toes. The overhead lights flickered off, then back on again.

“Still can’t control it, I see.” Eve stared blankly at me, like she expected no better. “I guess meditation camp didn’t do you much good.”