The Witch is in the Details Read online

  In no time, they pulled up to a half-ruined stone structure. Nann saw solar panels haphazardly hung in the trees. An ancient Weber grill sat beneath a rickety shelter. Smoke rose from the grill. Fish hung above. Cricket squawked a quick alarm.

  A man leapt from the stone house. He wore boots much like Nann’s, a crude hide poncho that fell to mid-thigh, and a hunting orange Elmer Fudd hat.

  “‘Greetings,’ he said to the adventurous beauty in the tiny jeep. ‘Why have you called upon the Sorcerer of the Swamp? It is a curative you seek? A love potion, perhaps?’ Did she note the slight emphasis he put on the word love? Only time would tell,” he said.

  Nann wondered if he always voiced his inner narrative. “I’m looking for Brock Miller’s son.”

  “‘I am he,’ he replied, ‘Miller Junior, also known as BJ.’ Knowing his knowledge of the dark arts has spread wide, he invited her inside. ‘Come, let us speak in the castle.’”

  Brock Junior whirled around. The motion caused his poncho to rise, revealing white buttocks. Nann sighed, getting out of the car. She was glad Pokey decided to stay home. Otherwise, she would never hear the end of this.

  Immediately, she understood Pokey’s list of things to bring. Inside the stone house was filthy and stinky.

  “‘Take a seat,” he bid her.

  Nann looked at a greasy log in one corner and a large rock in the other. “No thanks. Here, I brought you some sandwiches.”

  She handed over the bag. “‘From the bait shop?” he asked. ‘Are they minnow sandwiches? Earthworm, perhaps?’”

  “Um, ham and cheese and baloney.”

  “What kind of fish do you catch with ham and baloney?” He mused. “Thank you for your kind gift.” Ravenous, but unwilling to show it, he stuffed only one sandwich into his mouth.

  He was making her dizzy. As he chewed, she cast around the single room. There was a working space of sorts, a small black stove next to a makeshift counter formed of road work sawhorses and mis-matched planks. Plastic pop bottles were filled with icky fluids. She saw brown plant matter in greasy zip lock baggies. She didn’t see a sewing machine, although an old laptop sat on one side of the table. No poppets were in evidence.

  “What do you seek?” he asked the dark-haired beauty. “A fortune told, a palm read?”

  Nann figured this whole misadventure was a mistake. She decided to go with the truth. “I’m looking for poppets—”

  It was with some sadness in his voice that he answered her. “Unfortunately, poppets were my mother’s forte. She has passed from this mortal veil.” He wondered how the comely woman could know of this.

  “Your mother made poppets?”

  He smiled at the obvious. “Of course, I do a little sewing.” Brock Junior made a sweeping gesture in front of himself, like a model might.

  Nann could imagine no one else assembling the rude poncho. “Did she leave any behind?”

  “Alas, no,” he said. “They were but one misstep in her search for a cure.” How much to reveal to the lovely stranger? “She abandoned them when they were no help, and her health continued to decline,” he said.

  Brock Junior was obviously insane, but the story still sounded sad. “I’m sorry. What made her so sick?”

  The sorcerer’s eyes went distant with the memory. “A poison that grew inside her body. It first took my infant sister, then the toddler.” The memory still stung. “Mother sought help, but the Druids had no answer, nor the spiritualists in nearby Lily Dale. Her efforts to find a cure were for naught. I took a chance that Grizelda, former witch of the swamp, had the answer. I studied at her feet after she stopped throwing rocks at me to keep me away. I learned all the secrets of swamp magic.”

  Even though his spoken inner monologue was giving her a headache, Nann waited for him to go on.

  Brock Junior, Sorcerer of the Swamp, continued. “Grizelda did in fact know the cure for mother’s illness. There was a horror that lived in the creek, and near the lakeshore. A curse.” He steadied her features, not wanting the beautiful stranger to see his pain. “Even as her daughters died and my mother was laid low, she refused to believe. The evidence remains visible beneath our former home. She had only to look to save herself. The cure was so obvious.”

  “What was the cure?”

  He gave her a disbelieving look. “Stay away from the frickin beach.” Duh, he thought. “But you didn’t come here to hear my sad history, surely.”

  Did Nann want to spend any more time with this crazy person? Oh, well, in for a penny. “I’m also looking for fossil sponges.”

  “Of course!” He sensed it when she first appeared. “An absorption spell. You are under magical attack. To the creek! To the creek!”

  Nann averted her eyes as his motions threatened to reveal more of him than she wanted to see. He dashed from the stone house. Nann did her best to dash as well.

  CHOKEBERRY CREEK CUT deeply into the ground, the sloping sides treacherous. For all his craziness, BJ Miller knew the way down. Soon, they were at the bottom, searching the rocks. This part of the country was loaded with fossils. Her Uncle Ed had taken her to a creek by Founder’s House many times. Mostly, the fossils were shells, mollusks and bivalves that had once covered the floor of a shallow Permian sea. The Sorcerer of the Swamp studied the flat rocks, tossing several aside.

  Would his wisdom of the natural world impress the woman? He continued to voice his inner thoughts. All would be for naught if he could not uncover a fossilized sponge, or worse! Confuse a fossil coral with a fossil sponge. O! the embarrassment.

  Nann looked at the rocks herself. She saw many perfect little seashells in stone, most of them impressions, but some of them in detailed relief. She didn’t see anything resembling a sponge. After searching for a while, she decided, perhaps unwisely, to ask a question that had been troubling her.

  “Your father is in town, BJ,” she said. “Has he come to visit you?”

  The Sorcerer snorted in contempt. “He has, but only to poison me with the seeds of confinement, numbness and pants-wearing. I don’t want his bland world, his big house above the poisoned sea.”

  Seeds. Nann realized at once what he was talking about. “You mean medicine?”

  “Medicine?’ he spat. “Mind-wiping, thought-imprisoning pills you call medicine?” The Sorcerer wondered if she was an agent of his father. “True medicine is to be found in the wild herbs and plants. Medicine didn’t help my sisters, my mother.” The gorgeous stranger seemed knowledgeable about the dark arts, and yet...

  Unwisely indeed. “Sorry to bring it up.” It was pretty common knowledge that magic could lead to insanity. Nann wondered, in this case, which had come first, the magic or the crazy? Given his sad history, Nann couldn’t be sure.

  “Brachiopod, O! Brachiopod, so numerous once, now so extinct. Aha! ‘Aha!” he said. The Sorcerer, triumphant, lifted the rock.

  As Nann watched, and listened, he lifted the rock and smashed it to pieces. Fumbling in the gravel, he held up a hand-sized slab covered with fossil sponges.

  The Sorcerer finally held what the lovely visitor sought. But he had needs of his own. “I will trade these for you—for a favor,” he said with brows raised.

  Oh, please don’t be something icky, Nann thought. “What favor?”

  “Follow me!” he commanded.

  Brock Junior turned and headed back up the bank. Nann kept her distance, not wanting a surprise peek beneath the hide poncho. Soon, they returned to the ruins of the stone house. Inside, he placed the fossil sponges in a used zip lock baggie. Nann took it reluctantly.

  “‘Now, for the favor.” He leaned closer to her.

  Nann did her best not to back away. Brock Junior did not smell good. “What?” She squinted one eye against the odor.

  Though he was loathe to admit it, the Sorcerer sensed he had not choice. “Despite my conjuring, there is one I have failed to summon, though I have tried many times.”

  Nann waited, a little nervous. The Sorcerer of the Swamp wave
d his hand at a corner of the room. She saw a stack of packages in random wrapping.

  “The mailman will not come. My entire business is based on preparing potions for my customers online,” he admitted. “I think my discovery of fossil sponges is worth a trip to the post office, fair one,” he said.

  Nann sympathized. Her own business relied on the internet, and the mailman. “It’s a deal.”

  BROCK JUNIOR’S PACKAGES stunk up the car. They would continue to. Today was Sunday. Cricket rolled the windows down.

  Still, Nann was curious about Brock Miller’s wife and children getting sick. She drove back to Port Argent, then her usual work route south and east and north through farm country. Cemetery Street was one of Amity Corners’ main drags. It not only went past Tinker’s Auto, Margie’s place, and Amity Center, it went uphill past the truck entrance to the mill on the left, the town cemetery on the right, and came to a T intersection at the top of the eastern Corner Bluff.

  Turning, she had Lake Ontario on her left, taking up the entire horizon like a vast ocean. The cemetery was on the opposite side, maybe five blocks deep. At a stop sign, she looked down Main Street toward the town hall and a few municipal buildings. It was the only intersection.

  Beyond, big houses stood in swaths of yards. Grass was overgrown, windows and doors boarded on near-mansion-sized structures. One of the few occupied places sprouted dusty vehicles on blocks, rusty minivans, and bored people on a wrap-around porch ignoring the view, drinking from cans. Not long after, the road dead-ended in a turnaround below the last house. This had a smaller yard, grass mowed, trees shouldering near the home. A Mercedes SUV stood in an open garage. The Miller house. Nann parked in the turn-around.

  On the other side of the street, she found a wooden staircase leading down to the beach. A chain hung from the railings, dangling a rusty Beach Closed sign. Glancing over her shoulder, she clambered over the chain and headed down the rickety steps.

  From above, she already caught an odor more foul than the packages in Cricket’s cargo bed, more even than the unwashed Brock Junior. A little cove hemmed in a sandy beach. As she got lower, she saw fish carcasses littering the sand. In the distance, a creek emptied into the cove. Nann could track the flow of water in the unhealthy algae blanketing the surface. It was unnaturally yellow green, brighter than Cricket’s paint. An eddy was visible beneath the carpet of algae. It made a big circle through the cove, almost back to the point where the creek dumped its water. It almost looked like some huge creature circled its prey below the vivid green mat.

  Gaining the beach, she found litter fighting with the dead fish for space. Signs warned her away. She got closer to read them. Algal Bloom Advisory: No swimming, one read. Chemical Contamination: No Fishing, read another, followed by a list of nastiness in the water. Cyanobacteria, she read, PCBs, PBBs, phosphorous, organochlorines and a host of other unhealthy-sounding stuff. From up close, the scum on the surface looked thicker, and greener, than pea soup.

  A barrier hung on buoys separated the cove from the rest of the lake. Beyond, the water looked clear. Still, Nann started to wonder about the beach below her own house. She turned away from the sight. It was pretty awful, but she had other worries right now.

  Retracing her steps, she wiped her feet as best she could before getting in Cricket. Someone was out to get her. She was still fairly certain that person was Cindy Paine. But could it be Brock Miller? His insane son talked about his mother, the late Mrs. Brock Miller, having a desperate interest in magic to cure her. From what? The stuff in the cove below? Nann didn’t have to be an environmentalist to know that the toxic creek below must run from near the mill. She didn’t know what to think, or who to suspect. What she did know was that she had to add to her arsenal of protection spells as soon as possible.

  BREAKING ROCKS WASN’T something you did indoors. After parking Cricket, she took her slab of fossil-bearing rock to the other side of the garage. She looked closely at the surface. Three oblong shapes huddled near the edge. Although several hundred million years had flattened them, she could still see a porous pattern. Definitely sponges, each about the size of a half-dollar coin.

  Aunt Nancy’s husband, her Great-Uncle Ed, was a contractor. Tools hung all over the garage. She grabbed a hammer and set to work. The matrix holding the little sponges was light gray shale. It flaked apart under a hammer blow.

  Pokey trotted out through the dog door. He watched Nann for a moment, grunted something, and went back the way he came. Nann shook her head and went to work. In surprisingly little time, she had the sponges free. Pocketing these, she swept up the rock flakes and deposited them on the low stone wall around the front garden.

  She looked at the empty beds, feeling a little guilty. Nann had arrived too late this year to do any planting. It made her sad to see the neglect. In the spring, for sure, flowers would bloom again. For now, she had other tasks to perform. Nann headed for the door to the kitchen, leaving her tall rubber boots behind.

  “You smell kinda icky.” Pokey’s voice came from the radio as he entered. “I told you swamp witches were smelly.”

  “It’s not just swamp witch you smell,” Nann said. She described her visit to the beach.

  Pokey’s eyes went sagacious. “That’s irony for you. The rich guys build their big houses, and they all get flooded with toxic sludge from the thing that made them rich.”

  Nann thought it was ironic, but also incredibly sad. People had gotten sick and died. It was a kind of balance, in an out-of-control way. She thought about the kind of person who would put wealth over family. That was who she was up against—a greedy sociopath who was also probably a witch. Nann headed to the craft room.

  For a while, she sat at the closed sewing machine cabinet, thinking. There was no particular ceremony for her to perform. But part of her apprenticeship taught her the Druid way. Mainly, this was about how small, ordinary things represented larger things, extraordinary things. This was not the same as sympathetic magic, where, say, a poppet represented Nann directly. The Druid way involved manipulating the world through the five elements, through shape and color, scent and texture, intention and will. She formed tiny cogs, infinitesimal bearings, that could slightly shift the world.

  Nann leaned back and cracked her knuckles. “Here goes nothin.”

  She put some paper down on the top of the cabinet so the rocks didn’t scratch. Focusing on them, she thought about energy, magical, electrical, magnetic. Mentally, she recited the red-haired Druidess’ poem like a mantra: As once the great Tlachtga found/Creature a thousand eons gone/Softness recast in rocks of bone/Absorption in bodies of stone.

  Ideas coalesced, a list of ingredients, the way to properly assemble these to obtain the effect she wanted. She found a big hunk of natural sponge. One facet of it was stiff, used for sponge painting, she thought. This crust she cut away, and continued to cut a pocket in the softball-sized puff.

  Nann put the fossil sponges in the pouch of the natural sponge. She thought of energy, how it was conducted, how it traveled. A spool of thread seemed to illuminate. Nann grabbed it. Copper, she saw; copper conducted electricity.

  A model of the atom occurred to her out of nowhere. Nann did her best to wrap the wire in a similar pattern, squeezing the sponge closed and binding it. Magic, energy, electrons, conductivity, power, absorption in bodies of stone...

  Her hand stole into a button box and came up with a crystal bead. She threaded it on the gold wire. The electron, she thought. Still, she needed something more. Even as she had concentrated on energy, the sponges seemed to call out to her. She cradled the awkward amulet. What would a sponge need?

  Oh. Duh. She took the sponge down to the kitchen. Rummaging through the cupboards, she found a big bottle of sea salt. In the cabinets below, the biggest container she could find was the dome of a plastic cake container. She filled this with water and a fistful of salt. After blessing and charging the contents, Nann stirred and stirred until she thought she had brine. The sponge went i
n, swelling but still bound by the copper wire.

  The shape of it pleased Nann. It felt right. When she looked out the window, she was surprised to see she had been at her ceremony for hours. The sun had set, the moon rising. Well, a little moonlight made everything better. She went out to the porch and caught the moon’s reflection in the surface of the water. Words flowed into her.

  “Let this crude charm alter the natural state

  From the wielder, the magic assimilate

  Absorb the power to your servant translate

  To recharge and protect this humble oblate.”

  A heartbeat passed. Nothing happened. Nann wasn’t sure something was even supposed to happen. Then, with a hissing whoosh, the briny water burst into steam. Inside the cake dome, the sponge rattled around, nearly spherical, perfectly dry. But still, it was the size of a softball.

  Out in the woods, she heard a twig snap. Nann looked around. She suspected raccoons of planning a compost-binge heist. Maybe it was skunks. Heck, up on the bluff, it could be deer stealing apples off the trees in back.

  Shrugging, she returned to the craft room, rummaging around until she found a ball of twine. She tied two ends to the sponge charm and hung it around her neck.

  “Stylin.” Pokey said when she went back downstairs. “That’s even prettier than my necklace.”

  “I just need it to work, not look fashionable.”

  “Good thing.” Pigs didn’t have much in the way of facial expressions, but Nann was pretty sure Pokey was smirking at her.

  She looked at the poppet hanging from her familiar’s neck, down at her own bulky amulet, at her conjure bag hanging on a chair, the mirror charm inside. However any of them looked, she felt prepared, protected. Also...

  “I’m starving. What a long day.”

  “I’m totally starvated,” Pokey said. “Maybe you could go get a pizza. Show off your new accessory.”