The Poor Witch by Michael Fowler

The Poor Witch by Michael Fowler

“Will we fly out?” I asked old witch Maggid. Maggid had told me that we were going to foil an upstart witch in Kentucky—the reckless sorceress had made a powerful enemy of one of Maggid’s friends, and it was time to put a stop to her mischief.

“Of course we will fly out. Didn’t you bring your broomstick, boy?”

With only a slight cost to my dignity, I deflected the joke. “I supposed one wasn’t necessary, that you would teach me to defy the laws of gravity, with or without a broomstick. I also left my wand behind, gosh darn it.”

“Defy the laws of gravity, shall we, Master what-is-your-name? I’ve already forgotten it.”

“Ariel, Madam.”

“Ariel, you say, a proper name for a sprite. But I will call you Isaac Newton, since you are such an expert on gravity, and I mean of course that you know nothing of gravity, young novice. No, Isaac Newton, you and I will stroll to Kentucky from here in Massachusetts. You will find that we will move right along by moonlight, if my legs don’t fail me as lately they will. As fast as shadows fall in the evening we will go. But I must have my cloak. Find my cloak for me, boy.”

I could see that aged Maggid was going to be a problem, and by the same token why Coven HQ had assigned her an attendant—me, Ariel, though I truly was a beginner. Her black cloak was a wad of wrinkles dropped carelessly on the floor of her untidy condo, next to all kinds of trash including a cat litter box that by its stench hadn’t been refreshed for some days or even weeks. The biddy’s hat, a crushed dark hood as ill-treated as her cloak, lay on her ratty sofa. Her pinched expression made her look mean and crazy.

Worst of all, to my mind, was that I identified as she/her, and considered myself no sort of “Master” or “boy.” Yes, I had been born with a tassel, for all I cared about that senseless bit of flesh, but my heroes were all females, the great sorceresses of lore: Tituba, Isobel, Sybil, Aradia, and so forth. Their historical male counterparts, the wizards and warlocks or however they styled themselves, had no such glamor or power as the females, in my opinion. But how to get Maggid to acknowledge me as a female like her?

“If you’ll pardon me, Madam Maggid, but Ariel is the female name I’ve chosen, and I am a female, like you. I will gladly answer to Mistress Ariel.” I tried not to sound too fussy.

“You are a female? Nonsense. They told me at Coven HQ that you were a male named Ariel, and Ariel is certainly a male name. Read your Shakespeare. You look like a male too, about the face, and all my senses tell me you are male, despite your eyeshadow and curl-toed boots. You even give off a male scent so don’t try to fool me, Isaac Newton.”  

I brushed this off, wanting to stay on her good side. I hoped to learn something from the experienced crone, after all, and her mission, what little I knew of it, intrigued me. There were two dilapidated old manors in the Bluegrass State, that in former times might have inspired Steven Foster to compose “My Old Kentucky Home,” that we needed to visit tonight. The hour was already late, and I hinted to Maggid that we must depart.

“I’m ready,” she said, but she couldn’t find her shoes. I found them, one in the doorway and one wedged under her rocker. But then she had me fix her iced lemon-water for the trip. “I need ice, water, and a slice of lemon in my thermos. You’ll find the thermos in the kitchen beside my traveling bag. You’ll also see my Adderall and four sets of new bedsheets from Walmart in plastic packs. Put all that in the bag, will you, my thermos of iced lemon-water first. I can’t be without it.”

I prepared the thermos in her topsy-turvy kitchen, then stowed it in her light bag that I knew I would be carrying like a flunky. I tossed in the Adderall bottle and the still-wrapped bedsheets, too. Foggy though she was, Maggid had contrived a plan for us involving four beds, or so it appeared. “Is there anything else, Madam?”

“Oh, there was one more thing, but I can’t think of it now. It’ll come to me, let’s be off. We only have till midnight, you know.”

I did know, as Coven HQ had made it clear to me that Maggid only worked her magic between eleven at night and twelve AM. She was beyond elderly, somewhat confused, and needed her naps, they told me, implying all that more than stating it outright. Nor would she receive me, her assistant, before eleven, which accounted for my late arrival at her place. This left an hour-long window of eleven to twelve for our task, a portion of which was already gone.

And there was a further bind. Maggid herself lay under a spell, a curse by a mortal enemy that she was not able to undo, and had to be home by midnight as well, or any spells she cast before that time would become undone and all our efforts go for naught. Those, in sum, were the ground rules.

“Lead the way, Madam,” I said with determination. Weird as I found all this to be, I wanted us to succeed.  

After a false step to the north under the starry sky, Maggid at last turned southward. Now the dark horizon of Kentucky rushed toward us as we raced across the continent, her little black bag tight in my grip. As I watched, the constellations shifted overhead and the moon shot by us like a spiked volleyball. Soon we stepped up to the moonlit form of a one-story country house. Out front was a stone well with a bucket on a rope, and to one side a propane tank the shape of a blimp. A short gravel driveway led to a detached garage on the opposite side, and behind the house was a thicket of trees and a creek I heard babbling.

We entered the house silently, passing straight through the walls like ghosts. By the moonlight that streamed through the closed windows, we explored four small bedrooms within, each containing an elderly person who under a thin sheet lay naked and helpless in bed, most  often snoring. The proprietress herself slept soundlessly in her own tiny bedroom toward the back by the bathroom, wrapped in a cozy blanket as if in innocence. 

“We’re in Noe Town, once a thriving mining community,” Maggid told me in a low voice. “The lady in back, a miner’s daughter and the widow of a miner to boot, somehow figured out a sleeping curse and became an unauthorized witch. She now keeps a houseful of dying old folks and is leeching their remaining days for herself, lengthening her own lifespan as she shortens theirs.”

Nodding my head to show my familiarity with the scheme, though I knew of only one or two similar cases, and those harking back to antiquity, I handed her the thermos of lemon-water from her bag. She had begun to make an arid cackling sound.  

“Ah, that was good, keep that handy,” said Maggid after sipping the drink and spilling it down her front. She took a second swig, handed the thermos back to me, and once more spoke softly. “First I will cancel her paltry spell, then perform an embouchure on the woman…or is it a defacement? Bless me, what’s the word for it? What I mean is, after I stop the hag’s life-leeching, I will mark her face with a sign of her transgressions. She will look as if she were trying to blow a trumpet, or I think better, were tasting a bitter lemon. The sign will remain on her until I or another enchantress removes it with an effacement or an easement or whatever it’s called, and her mouth relaxes once more. Ah, my memory, my memory, where has it flown to?” Her tongue hung from her thin mouth as if in search of the sour lemon she so loved, then curled back into its dry crevice, most like a lizard.

“Is this self-made witch truly evil, though, Madam Maggid?” I put in, not bothering to whisper softly. I saw no reason not to speak clearly, and anyway I liked to argue moral conundrums. I had been glancing at some ledgers I found on the dining room table, and these had led me to a few conclusions. “One might argue that the less time these elderly linger on their deathbeds, the better. They are all over ninety, one or two over a hundred, and the lady’s overall care appears quite good. Her clients are old and frail, amazingly so, but not obviously mistreated, and their own families brought them here. The false witch also conveys them to a licensed mortuary when they pass, her records show.”

“So Isaac Newton is a social worker?” Maggid scoffed loudly, forgoing the whisper like I had. “One problem with ending their lives early is that it enrages the families, the very ones who brought them here, when they find out about it. At least one family has already caught on. The matriarch of this clan, a lady I know well, learned of this woman’s foul play—probably she overheard something—and complained to me personally. She was aghast, and rightly so. But even now she wishes to be lenient, and a defacement won’t harm the woman unduly.” Here Maggid paused to reflect.   

“Here’s what you must do, Isaac, and it is all the assistance I require,” she said then. “Gather up the sheets, tops and bottoms, from the four occupied beds and replace them with the clean ones from Walmart, which I hope you remembered to bring. As much as you can, do this without disturbing those lying abed. Next take the old sheets outside and put them in a pile—not too close to the wooden garage—and set them afire. It is these cursed sheets that transfer the life force of the dying to this woman. Do you ken?”

“I ken, Madam Maggid. I read The Book of Spells.”

“So you read The Book of Spells,” said Maggid, “and now you ken everything.”

No,” I admitted. “But I read The Book of Spells. And I think you are not remembering something.”

“Not remembering something? Eh, what, lad, what?”

The old girl seemed to have forgotten that the smoke of the cursed sheets would be toxic to me, and I had to explain that the fumes would cut short my life, if not by years then at least by some amount, though it was impossible to say how much. You could not simply burn a wicked talisman and expect its effects to vanish without a trace, especially if the object were directly inhaled.

“Oh right, right,” Maggid agreed. She then fell into a trance and spoke in an otherworldly voice. “Enter the garage and you will find, under a ragged tarp, a Packard automobile from 1956. In the trunk you will see a miner’s mask with attached breathing tubes, worn by this woman’s father in the mines while he lived. Put this on, making sure you can draw breath, then go back outside and destroy the old sheets as I told you. Meanwhile I’ll think about the grimace I’m going to stitch on her puss.”

I went about it, changing the sheets of the sleeping ones without waking a soul, and finding the car and the miner’s mask with no problem. I donned the latter with a certain bravado, taking a few practice breaths, and found it in good working order. After I stumbled on a box of wooden matches that somehow lit, I set the sheets ablaze outside, and watched them reduce to harmless smoke and ash. Feeling rather good about myself for reminding Maggid to save me, and for wearing the odd miner’s gear with such swagger, I replaced the apparatus in the Packard, a well-preserved car if it ran, and returned to the house. There I looked everywhere for Maggid, front and back, inside and out, without spotting her.

Finally I heard, from within the stone-and-mortar well that stood out front, the sound of a person grunting. I also saw the long rope that held the well-bucket tighten and move by the force of something deep inside the well. As I glanced within the circular opening, plainly visible in the hard moonlight, I beheld Maggid climbing up the rope by teething it. With her arms and hands extended at her sides, and her body spinning around, her bare teeth hauled her up by continuous biting.     

At the winch she climbed out and stood before me wringing wet, though she dried out at once in the night air. “There now, my boy,” she said, “I’ve put a spell on the water. As soon as our lady touches a drop from this well, her face, or part of it, will look like a chewed-up piece of gum.”

“That was spectacular,” I said, and I felt real admiration and wonder. At the same time, I thought there were probably easier methods of inflicting a defacement, which was merely a rictus no ordinary doctor could cure, and racked my memory of The Book of Spells. But nothing in particular occurred to me, and I said, “Why not sneak in on her right now as she sleeps, and sprinkle a little well water on her to test the spell?”

“No time for that,” said Maggid, and we left the place with no argument from me. It was a quarter till twelve, after all. I suspected, though, that an amateur fiendish enough to have figured out the bedsheet curse on her own, or to have found an initiate to teach it to her, could work her way around bedeviled water without much trouble, too. But then perhaps I underestimated Maggid’s cunning. In any case, on she moved, with me in tow like a faithful dog.   

“We go now to Done Hollow for our second appointment, a farming town since the turn of the century, ” said Maggid as we walked the shadowy countryside a further fifty miles, the matter of a minute or two. This time she got the direction right straight off, I was glad to note. “This will be more difficult, and place us in some jeopardy if we are not careful. In Noe Town we dealt with a lay person of no consequence, but in Done Hollow we consort with a most practiced and powerful witch indeed, Taffeta Spool. Do you twig?”

“I’m a bit short on details,” I confessed, since Coven HQ had not so much as mentioned to me the name of this eminent witch, let alone clarified her business with us. Maggid said not a word to enlighten me, either, as once more we penetrated the homestead in ghostly fashion, this one a squat farmhouse in an overgrown field with a barn out back, the field silvery in moonlight.

The house was stuffed from floor to ceiling not with elders expiring between thin sheets, but with the decorations and furnishings from a hundred other homes, varied and nonmatching, all out-of-date and used in appearance, as we saw with a flick of the light switch. I noticed a shelf containing polished conch shells from some distant beach visited years ago, a table lined with dusty glassware, several scarred chairs and rockers, and a stack of multicolored rugs. I had to suppress a sneeze.    

“The owner of this establishment,” Maggid said to me in a low voice, though not really whispering, “is a middle-aged woman asleep upstairs in a room crammed with jewelry and clothing, most of it of only sentimental value, but some quite precious. She buys all this junk on the cheap from aged homeowners before they pass on, and resells it as curios and antiques to travelers or to the homeowners’ families themselves. The families often find that they were not informed of the sale beforehand and now miss the articles from their loved one’s estate, and want them back. One such family included Taffeta Spool.”

I nodded my head to show respect for this powerful lady, whom I and every witch had heard of, but in all honesty I didn’t know her from Eve.  

“Taffeta Spool wants me to release the owner from a defacement she’s borne for six months now—it’s one cheek on her face that either twitches or has gone rigid—and get this, the spell is Taffeta’s own work. Taffeta stamped her with it after the dealer acquired an antique church bell from the estate of one of Taffeta’s old aunts. Seems the bell was all that remained of a church that once stood on the aunt’s property, and was rung profanely at the time that Taffeta was initiated into the Coven. The item therefore is of great value to Taffeta. But the lady here has sworn to Taffeta that she will return the bell and not sell it, and so I will lift the curse with an easement or effacement or whichever. Taffeta would do it herself, you understand, but she’s indisposed with the gout. Am I going too fast for you, Isaac Newton?”

“I’m glad that the situation can be resolved amicably,” was all I said, wondering what my role in this would be. Maggid’s bag now contained only her thermos of lemon-water and her Adderall, and if we needed any extra charms such as bedsheets to undo the spell Taffeta Spool had cast, I might have to go a-hunting. And how, come to think of it, would we move a heavy church bell, if we were required to do so? I doubted the two of us could budge several hundred pounds of metal an inch. Walking through walls was one thing, but lifting massive weights was another. Thus pondered Isaac Newton, master of gravity.

“Pick up that conch shell over there,” Maggid suddenly ordered me. “The one with the pink inlay that’s ringing like a phone. Don’t you hear it? It’s Taffeta, I believe. She wants to talk to you.” Here Maggid cackled with what I took to be high glee, pointing with a gnarled finger at a polished pink conch shell. Was she joking?    

I walked over to the shelf of shells, picked up the one indicated, that to me seemed as silent as the ocean floor, and held it to my ear. I heard the sea, as expected, and then a feminine voice over the crash of waves saying, “Is that Ariel? Listen, dear, this is Taffeta Spool. I wish I could be there to do this myself, but you need to go out to the barn and ring that darn church bell. That’s all, dear. Just one good clang with the hammer Maggid gave you if she didn’t forget to, since the original clapper is missing. That’ll restore the home owner’s pretty face, and in a few days a man called Olmstead will bring a truck over and haul the bell away. Do you have  that, honey? Be certain the bell gets rung while you’re there, and share my thanks with Maggid.”

With that the shell went dead and the sea came on the other end. I replaced the pink spiral on the shelf and turned to find Maggid in the homeowner’s kitchen, handling a can opener and a can. “Madam Maggid, I need to go find that church bell, but I’ll be right back. Is there anything you need right now?

“Look, Isaac Newton, the lady has Campbell’s Chicken and Stars soup, my favorite since girlhood! I’ll just heat this up on her stove and add it to my thermos for our return trip. You hurry back.”

Leaving behind the bag with the thermos inside it, I left her there at the stove, not mentioning the bell-ringing hammer she was supposed to have brought along, and made my way to the barn. The rustic structure stood not a hundred yards from the rear door, and though likely painted red, looked brown in the drab moonlight. Inside it I lit a lantern with matches that, with admirable foresight, I had pocketed in the kitchen, and began looking for a large bell. Obviously there was no tower or steeple in the barn, so I didn’t know where it might be. I did locate a croquet set in a corner of the structure, the balls discolored and the hoops rusted, and I picked up a wooden mallet, one not too warped, to clang the bell with when I found it, assuming I did.

Now where would a big church bell be hanging or otherwise supported in a barn? I saw all kinds of mowers and scythes and garden tools and even a rusted old tractor and plow, but nothing that resembled a bell, until I climbed up a rickety ladder and looked in the loft. And there it was, between two bales of straw, itself the size of a bale, resting upright on the wooden floorboards. I gave it a good whack with the mallet, producing more of a clack than a clang, and decided that did it. Descending the ladder and replacing the croquet mallet, I doused the lantern and ambled back to the house.  

Maggid now had company. The lady of the establishment, perhaps having heard a ruckus downstairs, had joined her in the kitchen. Both sat at a table cluttered with salt and pepper shakers, sugar dispensers, gravy boats, butter dishes, and cream pitchers, spooning steaming soup into their craws from a couple of dissimilar bowls like old friends.

“Until tonight I had to take soup through a straw,” the proprietress said, turning to me and smiling. “But my face is cured, thank you very much! I couldn’t resist joining dear Maggid for a bowl after she spoke of her favor to me. My, she’s a hungry one, isn’t she?”

“Ravenous, it would appear,” I thought but didn’t say aloud, and for Maggid’s benefit made a show of checking the position of the moon and stars outside the kitchen window as she slurped from her spoon. We had zero minutes and some seconds to be home before midnight, and already some of the lady’s many clocks in the outer rooms had begun to chime twelve…the witching hour in both Kentucky and Massachusetts, in accordance with Eastern Standard Time.

Maggid took the hint. She poured what remained of her soup into the thermos that already stood on the table—I presumed she had already drunk down the lemon-water it held too—and handed it over to me, the assistant. I stashed the thermos in her bag, and she snapped her bony fingers twice. With that we were outside and moving along a long, dark road. I adjusted her course with a slight tug on her cloak, or we would have arrived in Montana rather than Massachusetts. But we made it home thirty seconds before the witching hour. Had we not arrived in time, all of our work, including that performed on behalf of Taffeta Spool, would be cancelled and go for naught, as needs no further explanation.

Our thirty-plus minutes of nocturnal activity had worn Maggid out, and inside the door  the poor witch collapsed in my arms. After depositing her bag and thermos on her kitchen counter, I carried her the last steps to her rumpled bed and waiting cat, laying her down carefully. What, I asked myself as the clock in the  living room chimed twelve, had I learned from my time with her, in case HQ asked, as they undoubtedly would? Nothing at all, really, and everything we had accomplished together, I could have done alone. But that in itself was an important lesson to me, since I knew now that I could act independently, at least on cases that primarily concerned facial tics.

But what of Maggid’s performance? Would the Coven retire her if I told them how eccentric and forgetful she had become? How easily she tired? That her situation was so much worse than they let on at HQ? But then I had never heard of a witch being forced into retirement. Defeated, even destroyed, yes, but not forced to step aside and decay in idleness. It simply didn’t happen that way, and could not. The Book of Spells was clear on that point: the work of the elderly was not to be denied, except in the direst cases. And I had read The Book. So I wished Maggid a sound sleep, and I hoped to meet her again. And when I did, she could call me Isaac Newton or call me Marie Curie. I wouldn’t care a whit.  

* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright Michael Fowler 2024