The Hex Witch of Seldom (15 page)

Bobbi stood feeling chilly. A farrier with—what, a magic hammer? Another sort of witch to deal with.

“Good Lord, Bobbi.” Aunt Witchie sounded annoyed and tender at the same time. “Anybody who can stare my back door silly don't need to be afraid of Samuel Bissel.”

Chapter Eleven

Old Bissel (or the old pisser, as Bobbi took to calling him in her mind) lived half a mile up the Seldom road and back in the woods. She and Shane did not take the road, of course, but walked through the woods, Shane with one hoof in a heavy sock, Bobbi at the horse's side. They had to keep close enough to the road so that they could find their way, but hide from the headlights of the occasional car that passed. Between cars, the night was very dark. Bobbi rested a hand on Shane's shoulder so as to stay with him. The other hand swung empty. Witchie had packed spare clothes and some food in a brown paper bag, but the old Dutchwoman had been so generous with the food, making the bag so heavy, that Bobbi was to stop back for it. Bobbi thought of Witchie with mingled affection and annoyance, remembering the supper of rice soup, the goodbyes complicated by gifts of bananas and cheese and bread and corn chips and Lebanon bologna. Witchie had distracted Ethel with a ringing telephone while Bobbi and Shane had slipped out into the night, just in case old eagle-eye Ethel might see anything.… The day had been tiring, too full of danger and decisions and weirdness, and it was not over yet. Stumbling over rocks and stumps in the dark …

At a small distance, in the black interstices of the woods, Bobbi saw something drift whitely.

“No,” she muttered. It hovered ahead, the way she and Shane had to go, and it seemed to be waiting for them.

“Bobbi.” The voice sounded inside her head—her father's voice, which she had never heard. Not in any real way. Just in this ghostly farce. She couldn't stand it. Too much.

“No,” she said aloud. “No more. Not today.”

“Bobbi!” Urgently.

She didn't like people talking inside her head, and with a surge of angry energy she sent the voice away. Her anger crackled in her mind. She had her own urgent business to attend to.

“I tell you no!” she shouted at the woods. “Not now! I ain't talking to no buck's behind now!”

Scared, the deer bobbed away. If it was a deer. She didn't hear anything above her own noise, and she couldn't tell. A deer wouldn't have waited for them to come so close … she didn't care.

Shane swung his head curiously when she shouted, then continued on his way. She wondered briefly what he had seen or heard. Too much trouble to ask him. She stumbled on through the dark.

Her feet found open flatness, the grit of gravel. Samuel Bissel's long driveway. A relief. But the stones were sharp underfoot; Shane hobbled. Bobbi felt the hitch in his gait through his shoulder, where her palm still rested.

The house loomed dim ahead. No electric lights for the Amishman. Though he was no Amishman in fact, Bobbi knew, but one of the Circle in that form, if she understood correctly.

Old Bissel came out to meet them like a shadow in the night, standing on his rickety porch with a candle in a lantern. He had heard them coming, or perhaps he knew by other means when there were visitors about. Bobbi saw the wild, white bristle of untrimmed beard growing right up to his sharp, dark eyes. She saw the baggy black coverall trousers, a rusty, nearly formless black, not at all like the crisp and shining black clothing Shane wore. She saw the plain green shirt, the homely black hat. She heard no sound in the night except the crunch of Shane's hooves on stone. Samuel Bissel held the lantern and said nothing.

Bobbi said, “Mrs. Fenstermacher sent us. She wants you to care for this horse's feet and be quiet about it.”

Samuel Bissel said, “The forge is banked for the night.”

Something about him made Bobbi afraid, and because she had fear to hide, she spoke brashly. “Fire it up again! We have to be in the next county by morning.”

She saw a movement of the wild white beard. The Amishman was smiling, a sour, knowing smile. He turned, strode the length of the rotting porch, stepped down off it and with the lantern led the way to the forge.

From what Bobbi could see, the place used to be a farm, but cedars and scrub trees were taking it over. The forge was in the barn. Samuel Bissel flicked a switch; a bare electric bulb flared overhead, and he blew out his lantern. A few renegade Amishmen might use electricity in the barn, Bobbi knew, but no Amishman would let his house rot or his land go to scrub. She wondered if Bissel had a wife. He should not have grown a beard until he had taken a wife, and there should be many children, keeping the house trim, making the farm shine.… The smith, the immortal with magical powers, did not seem to fit into the form he had taken the way Shane fit into a wild horse's black form.

She bent and slipped the protective sock off Shane's injured hoof, then stood and studied Bissel. Now that she could see him better, she saw no more than before. His flat hat shadowed his sharp eyes, his bristle of beard hid his face, baggy clothing hid his body. Except … she could see form beyond the form. Dark … no. It was just barn shadows. She was too tired to see more.

Samuel Bissel studied the horse's hooves with a shadowed and glinting glance.

“Too small,” he said curtly. “We'll spread 'em. Quarter crack in the off fore. It'll take clips.”

He said nothing of the strange fact that Shane was standing in his smithy loose, without halter or lead line or even so much as a rope looped around his neck, and with blue eyes blazing.

Bobbi nodded. She did not want to make conversation with this man. She and Shane waited in silence for a considerable time while Bissel heated up his forge. He used a huge, old-fashioned, coke-burning forge, and worked the bellows with his foot. And unlike every other farrier Bobbi had ever met, all of whom started with pre-shaped, factory-made horseshoes, old Bissel started with bar steel. While the first bar was heating red-hot in the white-hot forge, he trimmed Shane's hooves level and even. A good job, Bobbi could see that; Bissel knew what he was doing. But he knew something more, and she could see that too. He picked up Shane's feet without a word or a pat, without preamble, as if Shane was a jointed toy, not a horse that could kick a kneecap to smithereens, break an arm or smash a skull. As if he knew Shane would not harm him. As if he knew Shane was no horse at all.

Just as well, Bobbi decided. Shane would not appreciate patting and sweet talk the way a horse would.

She stood watching the black stud, watching the straight, alert lines of his head and shoulders, knowing she would be with him yet a while. Wearing horseshoes, he could not go off on his own. He would need her or some human to take them off when his hooves grew long. The shoes would have to be removed, the hooves trimmed, and the shoes reset two or three times more before the crack grew out entirely and was gone. Bobbi would stay with him that long, at least.

With tongs and hammer Samuel Bissel shaped the first shoe. Sparks flew, the sound of metal striking hot metal rang through the night, and the hammer shone, flashing in air with every blow; Bobbi had never seen a hammer head shine so, like a mirror. Hazily she watched it dazzle. When the smith put the hammer down and held the hot shoe to Shane's hoof for fitting, a burning smell went up and smoke poured off, cloaking Bissel like a fluid shadow, turning his face and beard dark with soot. His eyes gleamed through the smoke, and Bobbi took a step back, as if she had seen a devil.

Bissel lifted the shoe away from the hoof, studied the dark mark it had left, and went back to his forge to further shape the shoe.

It was all part of hot shoeing, Bobbi knew, though she had never seen it done before. The scorch on the hoof told the shoer what yet needed to be done, and it did not hurt the horse. It was the best way to shoe, the old people said. Yet she found that she was shaking.

Bissel cooled the first horseshoe in water—it hissed like a hundred snakes and clouded the forge with steam. The Amishman came back to Shane and nailed it on, and as he worked he began to whisper to the mustang.

Three more shoes he forged, fitted and nailed, taking the most time shoeing the cracked hoof. On that shoe he pulled clips out of the hot metal, one at the toe and two at the sides of the hoof near the heel. They would steady the hoof and keep the crack from lengthening. All the time, as he shaped the shoes, as he fitted them and the stinging smoke poured up, as he tapped them into final form and as he nailed them on, he whispered to Shane.

Bobbi could not see his face as he bent over his work. His voice came muffled out of his beard, low-pitched, murmurous as wind in the trees, so that at first Bobbi did not notice his whispering. Then, when she grew aware of it, she stood as close as she dared and listened, but could not understand a word of it. Bissel might have been whispering in some foreign language. German, perhaps.

He thought Shane was a horse after all, Bobbi decided, her mind sluggish from smoke and weariness and the rhythmic coruscation of the hammer. He thought Shane might bolt, and he was trying to gentle him. She had heard about horse tamers who worked that way; people called them “whisperers.” There was once one in England people thought was a wizard. He could go into a stall with a killer, a horse everyone else had given up on, using nothing but his voice to tame it, and come out leading it by the forelock. No matter. Nothing like that could work with Shane—

Bobbi's half-lidded eyes snapped open, and she jerked rigid, staring. Shane's head was nodding at the level of his shoulders. The horse's lower lip had gone as loose as that of an old plug pulling a junkman's wagon. The blue fire had faded out of his eyes.

“Shane!” Bobbi yelled. “Wake up!”

Shane did not move. Only Samuel Bissel moved, straightening up from pounding the final nail in the last shoe. He loomed tall and terrible in his dull black coveralls and his soot-blackened face and beard, with eyes gleaming red in the ruddy light of the forge and teeth flashing, bared in a grimace or grin. He held his hammer in one hand, and with the other he grasped Shane by the forelock.

“Stop it!” Bobbi shouted. “What do you think you're doing?”

The Amishman brushed past her without replying, walking toward the door, and Shane plodded placidly where the man led him. Bobbi stood thinking wildly. What could she do? Knock the man away from Shane? He still had his hammer; he could defend himself from anything she did to him. And the hold he had on Shane was not merely one of the hand.

Samuel Bissel and Shane were disappearing into the night.

Bobbi ran after them. “Shane!” she called again. But Shane did not seem to hear her. That Bissel, she would like to—

Something crackled inside her mind.

“You Samuel Bissel!” she shouted so fiercely that the Amishman stopped and turned to face her. “Let go that horse! I'm telling you by the Twelve of the Hidden Circle.”

She saw darkness swirl in the night, as if Bissel stood cloaked in smoke again, even though there could not have been any. Something flashed like fire or lightning: the terrible bearded man's eyes, or his bared teeth.… Bissel raised his hammer, its handle blacker than the night, its metal head shining fit to blind her. Sparks flew as if it clanged against hot steel, and though she stood a good ten paces away from the smith, Bobbi fell down as if she had been struck. There was no pain, but the great weakness she felt was as bad as any pain. She could not move, no matter how her heart ached and struggled. The man, the devil, trickster, villain, blast and damn him, he was leading Shane away.…

She blacked out for a short while, then opened her eyes again and blinked at the blackness of night. Shakily she got up on her hands and knees. Somewhere not far away she heard a rattling sound and the rhythmic clop of hooves. A lantern swayed, hanging from a buggy hood. The black Amish buggy passed Bobbi, a spidery shadow in the night, and between the shafts trotted a horse in full harness and bridle, bit and blinkers, stretching out briskly into a smooth trot—and at the crest of its neck, glimmering in the lantern light, Bobbi saw a white brand.

By the time Bobbi had wobbled to her feet, trying to stagger a few steps after the buggy, it had disappeared far down the lane. The rattling of its hard, spoked wheels and the ringing of hooves were fading away swiftly, and she knew she would never be able to catch up to them.

She forced herself into a lurching run, bound back toward Seldom. Even if she could have caught the buggy, there was no way she could deal with Samuel Bissel. She needed Witchie.

Her heart hurt, but not with running. Her breath rasped in her chest.

Inside her mind a voice said, “I tried to tell you.”

Eyes straining straight ahead through the tunnel of the night, she had not noticed the pale, hazy face floating to one side. “Go away!” she screamed at it. “You're the one who got me into this mess!” Father or not, she hated it. Its presence seemed the utmost insult to her heartache.

“Bobbi—”

With a surge of self-will she shut her mind against its voice so that she could no longer hear it. Anger combined with her panic to send her into a strong run, and she did not look back.

Not bothering to hide any longer, she pounded into Seldom on the main road. She darted straight toward the Fenstermacher house, thudded through the side yard and slammed in at the back door.

Witchie sat waiting in the hickory rocker, holding the overstuffed brown paper bag, heaving herself up when she heard Bobbi coming. “The police was here,” she said, “right after you left. Going house to house, asking. It's a good thing I had just cleaned up the parlor. I put some more deer bologna in here, and some apples, and—”

Between panting breaths Bobbi burst out, “That man took Shane!”

If she had known how hard it was to dumbfound Witchie, she would have savored the moment more. To the end of her acquaintance with the pow-wow, she was never to see her nearly so taken aback. But at the time the old woman's floundering amazement made her stamp with impatience.