Under My Hat: Tales from the Cauldron Page 22

  “Where is Cawley?” asked Liesl, who sometimes read my mind. I shrugged, and her eyes narrowed incredulously. “Did you guys have a quarrel?”

  “How would I know?” I muttered. That thing at the bar had one hand on Quin’s shoulder and he wasn’t smiling anymore. “We can’t understand a word we say.”

  Madrona raised her sticks, woke the Thunder Gods with them, and announced to us and the cheering crowd, the coven of crows above us, and whatever familiars and aliens were among us, “Which Witch Can Dance.”

  They all took off without me.

  I was still tightening the new string. Worry makes Liesl edgy and feisty. She was all over the notes I needed to tune; I half expected to see smoke rising off her strings, the way her bow danced. Pyx was blasting away at the song with her eerie voice, which could slide deep, then shoot freakily high on the same word. She sparked as she moved, colors from all those cut jewels flinging out spangles of red, green, yellow, and ice white. Archibald must have decided that her bare neck was too slippery. He had crawled down among the pins, hanging on to a diamond with one hind claw, a chunk of topaz with another, his foremost claws on a coil of tarnished silver and garnets. I finally finished tuning and positioned my bow to jump in.

  I saw Cawley then, perched on the beam where the bar glasses hung, right above Quin’s head.

  He might have been carved out of wood himself, he was that motionless. The monster fry cook beneath him still had its hand on Quin’s shoulder, and it was staring across the room at us. I forced myself to look away from the weird little group of Quin and crow and creepy thing. As I started playing, something flashed across my brain, glittery and green, that caught the light like Pyx’s pins. It flew in and out of my thoughts a second time; I saw a golden eye. I hit a sour note, recognizing it. The gecko pin. It was on my hair; what was it doing in my head? Liesl caught my eye and grinned maniacally; she loves it when I screw up. The gecko skittered across my thoughts again. This time it made a sound. I had no idea geckos sound so much like crows.

  My fingers froze. Gecko. Gecko pin. That was what Cawley said to me. The thing at the bar let go of Quin. He swayed a little, blinking confusedly. It was staring at me now, grabbing at me with its eyes. I felt my skin crawl; insects skittered all over me. My bow was still stuck in place. Liesl lost her smile and covered for me. What about the gecko? I cried silently at Cawley. What about the pin?

  The monster took a step toward us, and Quin upended his Toothless Vampire onto its head.

  Then he jumped all over the fry cook, which caused the startled bartender to shoot him with the tonic water hose. The fry cook melted away. A black shape, familiar but bigger than I’d ever seen, streaked over the crowd, aiming not at me and my worthless-but-of-sentimental-value gecko, I realized then, but at Pyx’s pins.

  Cawley came to life, flying off the rafter after it.

  A note came out of Pyx that I’d never heard before. But I recognized its power and so did one of the pins on her vest. The spiral of blackened silver and garnets started spinning, covering the open-mouthed crowd with gyrating red stars. Everybody applauded wildly. I felt the colorful force shoot past me and added something of my own: a shriek of bowed string and a word my mother taught me early on to yell in emergencies. Of course it was the Spinreel G string, and it promptly broke. Liesl added her version to mine, and Madrona walloped a cymbal so hard the reverberations scudded like fast flying golden ripples across the air at the incoming magic. Rune hit the lowest note on the bass while a deep demonic sound came out of his mouth, making the crowd go crazy again. Through it all, Archibald hung on to that pin with one claw, whirling around and refusing to budge, and Graymalkin yowled like the walking dead out for your brains.

  All that didn’t stop the thing flying at us, but it did slow a bit, bouncing over Madrona’s waves and splashing into the wall of power we raised against it. I heard a strange, muffled squawk in my head, which was the only way I could have heard anything in all that uproar. It sounded like Cawley, only sort of squashed, like something was sitting on him.

  Then I saw him, fluttering furiously against the grip of a claw bigger than my head.

  Several things, all of them incoherent, flooded into my head at once. Cawley might be a disaster of a familiar, but he was my disaster, and nothing could break that bond without losing teeth. Or in this case, feathers. I felt myself fill like a balloon with outrage; in the same moment I glimpsed Hibiscus, who was puffed up like a yellow cloud on top of Madrona’s head, facing off something nineteen hundred times her size. A good idea, it looked like, so I puffed, and I puffed, staring that looming monster smack in its moon-black eye, until it seemed that feathers were breaking out all over me. My fiddle wailed a couple of times; more strings broke. I dropped it. A black cloud came down out of the rafters all over the club and covered the gigantic crow-thing from beak to tail feathers, and I discovered, as we started pulling and shredding, that I was one of them.

  A murder of crows.

  The crowd went totally bonkers, especially when Pyx hit the note she did and caused a sizzling short in the stage lights overhead. I hung upside down on the humongous claw, pecking and biting at it, while some gigantic feathers drifted into me from the rumpus on the monster’s back. Cawley got his head free and grabbed a beak full of claw. I couldn’t tell if we were winning or losing. But judging from the things flying around us—high heels, baseball caps, lit keychain flashlights, even a T-shirt or two—the crowd was loving our act.

  Then a wave of garnet came at us like an exploding red star, and all the lights in the club went out.

  I hit the floor and realized that my bones were back where I was used to them being. “Cawley!” I yelled in the dark. I felt claws tangle in my hair. I scrambled to get up, managed an undignified wobble onto my heels, and started off toward where I thought I had left the stage, worried about Pyx and her exploding pin. Cawley squawked in my ear. I said, “Oh,” and turned the opposite direction. His claws left me abruptly. I stepped on someone’s feet, and we grabbed each other for balance. Then a few of the lights went back on, and I found my hands full of Quin.

  He stared at me. His mouth opened, worked noiselessly a couple of times in goldfish mode. Then he got words out. “That was …,” he breathed. “That was … that was … truly awesome.”

  I straightened the gecko pin and smiled, still feeling a bit wobbly. “You were great. The way you tackled the fry cook?”

  Behind him the crowd, dead quiet now and standing in a litter of fallen flying objects, including various drink garnishes, lipsticks, and an order of fried onion rings, still faced the stage, waiting for more.

  “She was evil,” Quin said flatly, and I felt him shudder. “Bad, wicked evil.”

  “I know.” I glanced around. It was gone, whatever it was, and so were all the crows, including Cawley. I wondered if they had finished the brawl or just taken it outside. I listened. But there was no Cawley in my head. I looked for him, saw the bartender, the waiters, the kitchen staff, all motionless, gazing speechlessly at each other, at the band.

  I counted heads onstage, found four humans, to my relief, and four familiars. Four? I counted again. Rune had one, I realized suddenly. He was grinning crookedly at the garter snake wound around his wrist like a cuff. Archibald still clung to the garnet pin; it smoldered, flaring red now and then, like fire dying down. Graymalkin had quit her caterwauling and Hibiscus had dwindled to her usual size, but they still looked alert, tense.

  Pyx cleared her throat but even she was speechless. Madrona brought her sticks very lightly down on the snare and said shakily, “We’ll slow things down a bit for our next number, shall we? Hazel? Are you out there?”

  Cawley! I called again, this time silently, wanting to know what had happened to him, where he had gone, and was he coming back? Every other witch in the band, even Rune now, had a familiar; where was mine? Cawley!

  An eerie image formed in my head: a monster crow under a tree, surrounded by a wide ring of hundreds a
nd hundreds of crows, all watching it while only one spoke. Now and then the huge bird twitched a wing or a tail feather, but it didn’t seem able to fly.

  “… for the terrible deeds upon which all crows should look with abhorrence and which deeds no crow deserving of the name shall commit and still remain crow …”

  Cawley! I cried again into that dark, still place in my head, and the crow voice I heard interrupted itself petulantly.

  “Your witch Hazel seems to be listening in to private coven matters.”

  “Uncle Rakl, she became crow and helped us fight.” I realized, with surprise, that I recognized Cawley’s voice. “My witch Hazel earned the right, by the powers that she possesses.”

  “I think he’s right, Rakl,” said an unfamiliar voice, higher and more rattly than the first. “Private coven matters weren’t so private in that place, and she fought well and fearlessly for my great-grandson. And for her friends, who seem to be in possession of ancient jewels of extraordinary power. Now, can we get on with this? My tail feathers are a mess and my claws are killing me.”

  I went back to the stage. The crowd sent up a cheer when I reappeared, maybe just because I made it up the stage steps without toppling over. Madrona clanged the cymbal for me. Liesl handed me my fiddle; she had already replaced a couple of broken strings. I’d have to play around the missing G, but that seemed a piffling matter by then. Rune’s snake flicked its tongue in friendly fashion at me as I passed. It was a sleek, sturdy, pretty thing with a fine golden stripe down its back. Rune grinned proudly. He was True Witch now, and he had earned it with the subhuman growl that had come out of him. Pyx still seemed a little stunned by the ugly old brooches she’d been wearing without a second thought.

  “Sorry,” she said softly to us. “My mother never had time to teach me about them before she died. I just wore them to remember her.”

  Liesl nodded, looking very curious. “Soon,” she promised, “we’ll help you find out if they can do more than summon evil monster-crow-god thingies.”

  Madrona hit the cymbal again, this time a thorough whap to bring the crowd back to life. People were still crowding the floor, wanting more, even while they picked up their stuff and dodged brooms sweeping up the squashed onions. The sweepers watched us mindlessly, running into people as they waited to see what we could follow that act with.

  “Gentle people of every persuasion,” Madrona said into the mike, “ ‘Which Witch Are You?’ ”

  Midway through that song, Cawley fluttered onto my shoulder, where he belonged.

  “Thank you, Witch Hazel. Very impressive work indeed.”

  I wasn’t sure anymore which language he was speaking, human or crow, or if I heard it with my brain or my heart, but I understood exactly what he said.

  THE CARVED FOREST

  TIM PRATT

  CARLOS DIDN’T BELIEVE in witches, of course, but he did believe in crazy old women with shotguns who menaced anyone who wandered onto their property, so he parked his mother’s car some distance away and approached the witch’s house on foot, avoiding the long driveway and cutting through the piney woods that surrounded her property. If he could find Maria and bring her home before his parents realized she’d run away, things might be all right and the holiday might be salvaged—assuming Maria would come quietly. Assuming she wouldn’t denounce their parents as monstrous dictators or whatever over Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow. A lot of assumptions. But finding her was the important thing.

  The witch’s house was old, a weathered gray two-story farmhouse with a wraparound porch. The walls crawled with kudzu, the creeping vine that devoured old tobacco barns and rusting grain silos all over North Carolina. The witch was locally famous, though in a secondhand way, as almost no one had seen her in a generation. The stories lived on, though: The post office had stopped delivering her mail thirty years ago when she shot up the mail carrier’s car. She’d once been married to the richest man in town, but when he died and their baby died, she’d gone mad, and her vast inherited holdings of land had been gradually taken by the county in lieu of unpaid taxes—not that she’d ever noticed, as she never ventured beyond the end of her driveway. She was a million years old; she could call the moon on the phone; she could turn into a possum and stare with gleaming eyes through your bedroom windows if you did something inappropriate all alone in the dark; she wasn’t a witch at all, just a poor misunderstood old woman with a touch of dementia; her hobby was digging tiny graves for her hundred thousand cats. Some people said she’d been dead for years, her house still crammed with the detritus of a life gone cancerous and wild and wrong, no living relatives or else no relatives who could be bothered to sort through the external manifestation of a mad life.

  But she was alive. At least Maria said so. Maria had secretly visited her six months ago with the idea of interviewing her for a school project about “living history,” an attempt to get fourteen-year-olds to interview their elderly neighbors and relatives to get a sense of the arc of progress over generations. And when Maria had run away from home, leaving a note saying she was never coming back (a note that, fortunately, Carlos found before his parents did), it occurred to him that she might have come here, to the witch’s house. Maria had refused to tell him in detail about her conversation with the woman, saying only that “she isn’t the way people think she is.” Maria certainly hadn’t managed to get a paper out of whatever they’d talked about, instead hastily interviewing their abuela about her childhood in Baja California, in a long visit that had bored everyone, their abuela included.

  Carlos crept toward the house from the side, passing a rust-covered natural-gas tank and stepping over a flower bed full of dead leaves. He felt faintly ridiculous, even a little criminal, skulking around like this. He was sure Maria had just marched up to the front steps and knocked. No reason he shouldn’t do the same. Except plain elemental fear of the witch, instilled over all seventeen years of his life.

  He tried to peer in the windows, but they were curtained. He followed the wall of the house toward the back—

  And found a grove of human figures filling the backyard, tended by the witch.

  There must have been a grove of trees there at some point, long ago, but the tops of the trees and any lower branches had been lopped off, leaving stumps that stood five or six feet high, dozens of them dotted irregularly around the yard like oversized fence posts. Almost all the wooden pillars had been intricately carved into the shapes of people, slightly less than life-sized, and about two-thirds of those were fully painted, right down to the irises of the eyes and the buttons on the shirts. The carvings were amazingly lifelike, but the figures were carved only from the waist up: where the legs should have been there was only smooth wood running down to the roots in the ground. They had no hands, either, none of them—the arms were all carved close to the bodies, and the wrists disappeared into the stumps.

  All the stories about this old woman, and none of them had mentioned a forest of statues? How was that possible? Now that he really looked, the stumps seemed to stretch off behind the house forever, more than mere dozens, easily hundreds, maybe even more, and beyond the carved ones there were even more stumps, plain and untouched by knife or paint, waiting their turn to be cut into existence.

  The witch—she could hardly be anyone else, with her wild torrents of tangled gray hair, complete with autumnal dead leaves stuck in the locks, and her faded blue housecoat decorated with hand-painted golden stars and silver moons—walked slowly through the forest of people, touching them on the tops of their carved heads, occasionally taking off a sliver of wood here and there with the knife in her hand. In her other hand she held a paint-spattered tin can with a paintbrush sticking out. She had her back to Carlos, so he stayed still, watching, as she folded the knife and put it in her pocket, then drew the paintbrush from the can. The witch daubed a bit of flesh tone onto the cheeks of one of the unfinished statues, then dipped the brush into the can again and painted in red lips, then dipped again and painted
on brown eyebrows—how did she get three different colors from one little can of paint, without even rinsing the brush in between?

  He began to feel he was being watched, and glanced around, hoping to see Maria—but instead he saw himself, or a carving of himself, right at the edge of the forest of figures, dressed in the same sweatshirt he was wearing right now, staring at him with a carved expression of comical surprise.

  “Hello, Carlos,” the witch said, not looking around. Her voice wasn’t raspy or high-pitched; it was a voice made for singing lullabies, full of soothing resonances. “Maria is in the kitchen having tea and toast. Why don’t you join her? I think she has some news for you. The back door is open.”

  He looked at her, but she didn’t turn around. When he glanced back at the carving of him, it was different, mouth no longer gaping open; now it looked merely confused. Carlos backed away, considered running … but Maria. He’d have to grab her first, take her away, get back home, then he could think about this, figure things out.

  The back porch was screened in, and he did his best to back up the steps so he didn’t have to take his eyes off the witch, who was painting liver spots on the head of a statue that looked exactly like Principal McNeill. Eventually he had to turn around, though, to push open the door and step inside the house.

  The kitchen was rather dim, with an abundance of white tile that made him think of hospital hallways, and counters so spotless it seemed likely the witch never cooked. Maria sat at a square wooden table in the center of the room, a delicate porcelain teacup on a saucer before her, munching a piece of dry toast. She saw him, swallowed, and gave a little wave. “Hey, Carlos. Nice of you to come looking for me. You didn’t have to do that.”