The Hex Witch of Seldom (20 page)

Nowhere in the world she wanted to go, nobody in the world who—who—

There was one who had loved her once, maybe, when she was a tiny baby.

“My mother's not far from here,” Bobbi said. “But she's no use.” A hidden bitterness hardened and twisted her voice. “She's loony. She thinks she's Scarlett O'Hara.”

Witchie swayed where she stood, and for the first time Bobbi saw Mrs. Fenstermacher use her walking stick as such. The old woman steadied herself with Kabilde, as if her props had been knocked wobbly, and her mouth dropped open, and she seemed to be having trouble getting her breath. Shane stretched his long head toward her anxiously, and for a panicky moment Bobbi tried to remember things she had heard about CPR. Then Witchie found a gulp of air and gasped, “That's it!”

She lurched forward. Bobbi grabbed her by the arm, afraid she was actually going to fall, but Witchie seemed not to notice. “That's it!” she repeated. “The red card!”

“Huh?”

“Huh, hell! The red card!” Annoyed, and therefore much more herself, Witchie pushed Bobbi's steadying hand away. She firmly took her accustomed cookstove stance. “The one at the juncture next to the dark rider's, the one I couldn't interpret! Red, don't you see? Scarlet! Scarlett O'Hara! She's the one you're tangled through!”

Bobbi didn't really see. But Witchie didn't have a chance to explain, because from somewhere down the mountain floated the sound of sirens, drawing closer. Witchie jerked her cornstarched chins in annoyance.

“Either the law tracked us here by that simple-minded gypsy, or somebody saw the fireworks and called in an alarm.”

“Well, let's get moving!” Bobbi exclaimed.

“You get moving. Take Shane to your mother.” Witchie gave Bobbi a shove to emphasize the order. “Go! Ride!” The girl looked at her wildly, then scrambled onto the black horse.

“Wait,” commanded Witchie. “Take Kabilde.” She scuttled to Shane's side and held the pow-wow staff up to Bobbi.

“No!” In sheerest fear. But then Bobbi tried to make it sound as if she had other reasons. “I—I couldn't take your staff. You'll need it! What if Bissel—”

“Bullshit, girl! You want the cops to get hold of it? Take it!”

Crunch of gravel, along with sirens and roaring engines, sounded down the lane. On Shane's back, Bobbi sat frozen. She would sooner have lifted a live rattlesnake than touch Kabilde, after what she had recently seen.

Witchie reached up, grabbed Bobbi's slack hand and put the walking stick into it, hard. “Git!” she decreed fiercely. “Run!”

It was Shane who ran, and Bobbi was on him, with a hand tangled in his mane and the pow-wow stick hanging heavy in the other.

He carried her away. Through the gone-to-scrub pasture he thundered, dodging young hickories and maples under the light of a horseshoe moon, and he plunged into the truer, darker forest just as headlights were brightening the sky.

The fire trucks roared into the clearing and stopped near the parked buggy, but found nothing except an unconscious Amishman and a muttering old woman searching for her purse. They could get no sense out of her. She seemed witless. There were scorch marks all around the Amishman, but no fire. It was anyone's guess what had happened to him. His horse seemed to be gone, they noticed that, but they didn't notice the black-handled hammer lying at some distance in the darkness.

PART 3

The Old Man of the Mountain

Grant Yandro looked out of his cabin at the rain. He should have been out and doing, rain or no rain, but he seemed to have no gumption since Bobbi had gone off. It was a week to the day since the girl had run away, and even to Grant, who prided himself on being a strong thinker, the rain seemed not just rain at all but a weeping of the world. Sky, doing what he couldn't let himself do. Old fool that he was.

On the bare, wooden table stood the coffinlike wooden box he had given the girl, and after a moment he turned slowly back to it. For the past few days, feeling that he had to do something, Grant had been looking at random through the clippings and photos and notes inside it, Wright's things, as if the remnants left by the son might somehow tell him something about the daughter, something he needed to know in his heart to get her back.…

Between two fingers, not for the first time, Grant Yandro lifted the yellowed newspaper clipping, Wright's only published poem.

“The old gods live in hidden forms.

In the autumn night the wild geese fly,

A cat roams under the bloated moon,

The gypsies ride the highways still,

Somewhere the horses run wild.

The cunning mustangs defy you on the mountains.

You have heard the dragon roar in the dark …”

“What nonsense,” the old man muttered, dropping the clipping to the top of an untidy pile, though he had in fact sometimes heard strange noises in the dark. He did not like the night, and he regarded sleeping as an unpleasant necessity. He had uneasy dreams whenever he slept. They troubled and annoyed him, and he took care not to remember them. The way people sometimes told tales of ghosts and supernatural things annoyed him as well. Simple-minded Dutchmen and their talk of hex … He let no thoughts of such nonsense enter his head. Never had. Never would.

A knock sounded at the door, and without waiting for an answer the Dodd boy came in out of the rain. Travis had been spending a good deal of his time at the Yandro cabin since Bobbi had disappeared. The boy seemed to feel somehow to blame because he had been the last one to see her.

“Morning, Mr. Yandro,” he said awkwardly.

Grant nodded. Travis sat down across the table from him, knowing without asking, by the set of the old man's face, that there had been no further news of Bobbi, not since the police had picked her up at Veto and lost her. Travis looked over Grant Yandro's head out the window, and the old man knew without saying anything that Travis was thinking the same thing he had been thinking a few minutes earlier. And hating to think it, the same way. That Bobbi was out in the chill rain somewhere.

“She'll be fine,” Travis said, meaning, I hope she's OK.

“Hell, yes,” Grant Yandro grumbled, promptly and with more conviction than Travis had been able to muster. “She's a Yandro. Wherever she is, she's damn well fine.”

Silence, except for the patter and trickle of the rain.

Grant Yandro added quietly, “I just hope she forgives me and gets her butt back here sometime before she's old and gray.”

Travis got up to go out. “Time for school, boy?” the old man asked him.

“Huh? Oh. Yeah, sure.” Travis lifted a hand in a hesitant goodbye and let himself out. A moment later Grant Yandro saw him walking down the lane toward the bus stop, disappearing behind trees. The boy carried no books. But then, it was not unusual for a boy to bring no books home.

The last thing Grant Yandro would have thought was that he was watching the departure of another runaway.

Chapter Fifteen

Bobbi laid her head against Shane's neck and felt her heart go hot.

To keep her head from being hit by branches in the dark, her eyes from being injured by twigs, that was why she rested her head on the horse's neck. Stallion who was Paladin, Zorro, Dark Rider. But feeling the pull and surge of the hard muscles as Shane galloped, the rhythmic rocking of the body between her knees, she thought briefly of the arms of Shane, the man, around her, and her thighs seemed to turn to water, and she pushed the thought away.

Shane slowed to a walk even before the sirens were out of earshot. Bobbi knew then how bone-tired he was. Cautiously she sat upright on his back, her left hand shielding her face.

“I can walk,” she said to the black, pricked ears showing in front of her, blacker and more shining than the night.

Faintly the globe of the staff in her right hand began to glow, and in it Bobbi could see Shane's face. Shane the man, dimmed as if he stood in twilight. His forehead, deeply shadowed beneath the brim of his black hat. The straight lines of his face, weary. But his fire-blue eyes blazed as bright as ever, seeming as always to consume her, to take her in, so that she could see nothing but Shane. And all the while the horse between her knees walked on.

“A man's got to carry his burdens,” Shane the man said to her, “and pay his debts.”

“Bullshit,” Bobbi said promptly, though her heart had started pounding like a hundred hooves at the sight of him and she would not have thought she could reply. “I don't plan to be anybody's burden, and you don't owe me a thing.”

Shane said, very low, “I owe you plenty. What you done back there—”

“It doesn't matter. You're tired. I've been sitting in a car. Let me walk.”

“Proud as a stud with seven mares,” said Shane wryly. The low, tight tone had left his voice. He spoke easily, friend to friend, and Bobbi retorted in the same way.

“You should talk!”

“Have some sense, Bobbi! What if the posse comes? You got to be on me and ready to go.”

He was right, and she knew it, and she sighed. “All right,” she said reluctantly. “But as soon as it's daylight, we start looking for a place to hole up so you can get some rest.”

Without speaking to that Shane asked, “Where is this place we're going?”

As best she could, Bobbi told him. She knew that she and Grandpap drove through Crown Stone when they went to see her mother, and she estimated the distance after that to be maybe two days' ride on horseback. She knew which mountains to cross: Bupp's Knob, where she and Witchie had found Shane, then Eagle, Blue Baldie and Witherow's Ridge. She knew the way by car. But following hard roads and following ridgetop trails are two far different undertakings, as she found when she tried to tell the way to Shane. The institution was isolated far out in the country, because peaceful, scenic surroundings were good for the mentally disturbed, the administrators said. Because towns and the people in them don't want the crazies too close at hand, Bobbi knew from hearing her elders talk. Whatever the reasons, the place was put so far from anywhere that she couldn't explain to Shane how to get there.

Finally, in brilliance or exasperation, she said to the walking stick, “Kabilde, can you show him?”

The surface of the globe swirled as if gray mist or smoke moved there. Shane's face vanished, and instead Bobbi saw the so-called cottage where her mother lived. Since Chantilly Yandro was not dangerous, she had been placed in a small “group arrangement” at the edge of the campus. The image began dwindling, as if a camera was drawing back to show the larger scale, and hastily Bobbi thrust the cane forward, holding it by the tip, so that Shane could see.

After a moment its light dimmed, and she drew it back. The globe had gone dark and blank. She could not talk with Shane any longer.

The mustang walked on. It started to rain.

A steady, chilly, soaking springtime rain worked its way through her windbreaker, soaking her to the skin even through her boots. Hunched over in mute protest, Bobbi rode. Shane speeded from his walk to a trot only when he reached the base of Bupp's Knob, where woods turned to small, ragged fields and where a few houses stood, a few small roads ran. He trotted and cantered across the benighted valley to the base of Eagle, where woods began again, before dawn. Then he slowed to a walk again and began toiling his way upslope. The rain went on. Big, secondhand drops of water plopped down from the trees, somehow even colder than proper raindrops. Bobbi set her lips hard. There would be no use complaining.

She could not tell when sunrise was. Black night turned to gray, rainy day, was all. Sometime still in morning, Shane crested Eagle. Then he stopped. Woods stretched for miles all around. Few people came to the top of Eagle except in hunting season. Bobbi got down, and Shane did something she had never seen him do: lay down flat on his side and fell at once into a deep sleep, the sort of sleep a stallion in the wild seldom allows himself. Or a gunslinger.

In the pouring rain. Bobbi wished she had something to cover him with, but there was nothing. No shelter for her, either.

She sat down on the soaking pine needles near him, stuck the end of her braid in her mouth and sucked it. She felt hazy and stupid with fatigue of body and mind. Mostly of mind. Too much had happened, too fast, and she could not focus on any of it, and it took her a while to realize that she was thirsty. There had been no stops to drink at streams during the night, and the rainwater that had dribbled into her mouth was not enough. Nor was sucking at her braid enough.

She looked at the walking stick lying on the ground. The carved snake looked back.

“Sorry,” she said, remembering that the staff did not like to be laid flat. She leaned it up against a tree, wondering why Kabilde was so reticent it hardly ever spoke aloud. She positioned it gingerly, then pulled her hands away and wanted not to touch it again, for she could not gauge the staff's mood, and still felt half afraid of it, though she had been carrying it most of the night. But her throat ached with thirst. After a moment she reached for the crystal handle, unscrewing it. Kabilde, as she had thought it would, knew she was thirsty. The stick presented her with a flask full of clear, cold beverage, and she drank it all. “Thanks,” she said humbly as she replaced the stopper and returned the flask to the staff.

Her body was confused by nighttime travel and the strain of being a runaway. She felt very tired yet not at all sleepy. Now that there was a chance to sleep, her eyes opened so wide they burned. Her hands fiddled with twigs, and the loud chirp of a bird made her jump. She sat in the rain, uselessly wondering where her bag of spare clothing had been left in all the confusion, whether at the gypsy camp or in the trunk of a gypsy's car or behind a rock in the abandoned pasture near the buggy. After a while it occurred to her that she was hungry. Her body was not sending her clear signals, but she had to be hungry. Not expecting much, she took the handle off the walking stick again. There was a spiral-striped plastic cannister full of M&M's in there. She giggled and ate almost all of them, stopping only when she began to feel sick.