Night Witch: Part X

A short story

Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V | Part VI | Part VII | Part VIII | Part XI | Part X

Photo by Patrick Hendry on Unsplash

Day 8 - The Final Hour

She was panting in the dark. Running back the way she had come on all fours. Following scent on bare feet and hands. Her white sneakers, Keds she had bought the year before, had been lost earlier on the path. Kicked off somewhere in the forest. Her mind hung on those shoes for a moment, balanced on the tension of not remembering where or how. And then, she was all legs. 

The dog was somewhere in the forest too. She could smell it near, the stench of urine and death. The sting of dried blood in her nostrils. Dan’s blood. That drove her on. The knowing that if she stopped she was a goner. 

Despite the vulnerability of being in the paved openness of the carved path, she kept to it. The clean earth beneath her told her she was going the right way. The smell of the leaves and the dirt unearthed by her own feet in the hours before poured into her nostrils and down her throat.

The brushy tunnel felt wider too. She didn’t struggle against the earth on her stomach. The wriggling worms weren’t squeezed tight against her palms. She was as much a part of the forest as any animal. Any tree. A black breeze blowing against the leaves as she ran towards home.

Her ears were perked, listening for the buzzing that had filled her head when the dog had opened its mouth, but there was nothing. She only heard the burbling creek, growing louder as she edged closer to the open black mouth of trees where fireflies had replaced stardust and led her down this way. Their light had long blacked out. The orb, gone just like the dog when she had awoken and smelled a scent, her scent, that led her back to the tunnel.

The walls and ceiling of the arched, branch-formed passage were growing larger, moving out and up away from her body. Still, she remained crouched as she was. Couldn’t stand up straight even if she wanted to. It was strange, but she knew the feeling well. Nights home from the bar, knees and hands tied to the floor. Crawling to the toilet. Then the purging that led to blackest sleep. 

Not blacker than this. 

She knew that in the world outside of whatever this was, the sun was shining. Light would break through the trees, pierce through the blackberry bushes that guarded this place, and she would be home. Animal control would be there. 

In her mind’s eye, she was running to them, up over the hills that led from her house to this place. Pointing and showing the blood on her jeans. Telling them it was the dog. The dog had killed Dan. Snapped. Gone wild. But it was more than that, she knew. It had hunted. Sought an opening. Drawn her out here with the promise of redemption. And she had followed it.

God grant me—

That had been the mistake. She had been pretending all this time. Saying the surrendering prayer, speaking of letting go, but all along clasping tight to the promise of doing this one right. Believing she was the only one that could. The belief that somehow this was her destiny.

(It’s in your name.)

She stopped and turned her ear towards the woods. The voice was so real, so loud, that she thought it had come from somewhere in the tangle of trees and not her own mind. When she heard nothing, not a twig snap or the song of cricket wings, she walked on, slowly this time on padded feet, stepping carefully to avoid any unintended crunch on the path. 

She was looking ahead without seeing, so dark was the night around her. But darkness is relative. Out of the black, she saw a deeper shadow. She blinked, thinking her eyes were playing tricks. She remembered a story about two hikers who had wandered into a mountain cavern and gotten lost. After a few days in the dark, they saw lights. Little twinkling things like static electricity in the dark. They followed them and found their way out.

There were experts who weighed in. They said it was nothing more than the brain’s attempt to see. Hallucinating to prevent total madness from taking over. The escape, they said, was a coincidence. Dumb luck. She had never believed it. Not deep down. Despite the part of her that wanted the shadow to be nothing more than an image conjured by a mind plunged into blindness, she knew that whatever it was, it was real. 

It stood tall in the center of the path, waiting for her to approach. The outline was not an animal. It was a human. As she got closer the details filled in. A woman, slender with long hair. Her arms hung at her side. Her hands were open, non-threatening. When June grew close, the woman beckoned, waving her hand in a Come And See motion before turning and walking ahead. 

She followed the shadow person out of the tunnel and into the clearing of trees. She looked up to see if the stars were visible as she had when she first entered, but all she saw was the black canopy of leaves so thick they blocked out the sun. Dark as night sky and void of all stars. This time, there were no fireflies to keep them alight. She turned her head back to the woman and walked obediently onward.

---

Terry wasn’t good at waiting. 

“Those who can, do. Those that can’t teach.”

It was his own father’s favorite saying. Most commonly at Thanksgiving dinners when his uncle Bill and his wife Kathy were present, both lifelong teachers and fervent preachers on the importance of the profession.  

He was trained from childhood to be a man of action. Solve the problems that came his way. But something in his gut told him to stay out of the forest. Something else, something pulsing and powerful, told him to go in. It spoke in the voice of his own thoughts, but it wasn’t him. The language varied just enough to be a force outside of his own head. 

(She’s coming.)

There was no question in it. It was a sure thing. Terry made up his mind and sat on the porch. He watched the woods while he waited for the sheriff to come. One hand formed a fist and supported his head as he rested it against his clenched fingers. The other rested on the outline of his gun.

---

June followed, first slowly, and then at a trot. The woman’s pace had picked up, grown frantic as they moved wordless through the trees. There was the occasional splash from the creek, some animal lapping water or escaping to a den somewhere in the thickets. June never went close to the woman. She kept her nose and ears tuned in to the forest, waiting to catch the scent of the dog. 

Every once in a while she did. A putrid wall of odor would catch her off guard. She would stop and turn her attention toward it, but it always dissipated before she found the source. The adrenaline was fading. The energy leached out of her legs and into the ground around her. She wanted to stop. To find water in the woods. To rest for a while before continuing.

But her own scent, the one that had led her to the tunnels and out of the deep was fading. The woman was her only hope of finding the way out of here and getting back home. Back to Mike and Amy. Back to the life she was rebuilding. When she got out of here, she could sleep. Until then, she had to press on.

Her labored breathing grew louder. It came out heavy and hot between pants. Her tongue lolled out of the side of her mouth, sticky with webs of saliva that would gather and drop onto her hands as she moved towards the mysterious shadow ahead.

A strange static buzzing had returned. It was the same swimming confusion that had engulfed her before she passed out. 

I had my shoes on then.

She fought to focus on the ground beneath her feet, but the feeling of it was dropping out beneath her. She was floating on legs made of paper, a lantern in the night. A ghost over waters. Those strange thoughts threatened to topple her over, so she turned her mind back to the white farmhouse, the rolling hills, the blackberry thickets. The light of morning.

She thought on it so hard and so long that the outline of leaves backlit by the sun started to perforate the dark. At first, she imagined that she had drifted into unconsciousness after all, and the leaves were part of a dream. They would soon turn to crickets wings, and the buzzing background in her head would grow into a symphony until the ground shook with the reverberation of their instruments. 

But it was real. The woman was no longer shadow, and the forest was no longer black. There was a cool morning breeze that moved against her. The scent of it brought her to reality, and she saw the woman’s clothing. The color of her hair, dark brown and halfway down her back. On the ground beneath her were berries. She stopped and lapped a few up. The taste of them on her tongue was beyond delicious. 

Her legs felt the buzzing energy of fructose, and her mind alighted, alert and pulsing with the realization that she had left that other world of pure black night, and returned to her own. She was at the forest’s edge, close to where she had entered. With each step, the world seemed to grow brighter around her, and she knew that she would make it out of here alive. 

The woman’s pace had slowed to a walk. She relaxed as June had in the comfort of light after a night of bad dreaming. June could hear her shoes hitting forest floor now softly, human footfalls in the wild. She recognized the sound, shoes against the ground, and looked at the woman’s feet. 

Her sneakers were mud-caked and sticks of sharp grass covered the bottoms, raising her height an inch or two. She wore jeans and a T-shirt, white except for a stripe of red down the center of her back where she must have scratched it and bled through. As the light grew brighter, June could see the shoes clearly. They were dirt stained, but the bright white of them shone through in places. 

June stopped. The woman stopped too. She turned and looked at June. Her hair hung down stringy and dirt stained in front of her face, obscuring her features. On her feet were the white Keds that June had worn into the woods hours before. The woman smiled, and June saw that they were at the edge of the clearing. Behind her were thorny berry bushes, pregnant with fruit and sagging. All June had to do was beat her out of this place. All she had to do was run.

---

Before Terry saw them, he heard them. Sly was pacing on the porch, kicking at boards like he was testing their strength. Every once in a while he would kneel down and press one with the palm of his hand, like doing that would take the warp out of it. Terry let Sly blur of focus. His eyes was set on the trees. He was fighting that urge to wander down the hills and into the fold of them. 

(Come and see.)

Knowing that what was in there was rotten. When she burst out of the woods, he stood to his feet. She was far, but he could tell it was a woman. 

(June Huntsman.)

Yes. 

He stepped forward and watched as she ran, turning her head back every few steps, looking for something that was following. 

(June Hunts Man.)

She disappeared behind a hill. He could see her climbing it in his mind’s eye. Sweaty and caked in dirt from the forest. Her muscles ready to give way. Just as she made it to the top of one mound, another figure emerged from the trees behind her. It was large and black. A dog, he guessed, but enormous. Almost the size of a wolf. 

“That’s it.”

He said it to Sly, who stood and turned to see what Terry’s eyes were fixed on. Without another word, they broke out into a run. June was running fast, but a dog could outrun a human easy. Add in the hills, and she was as good as dead. He pulled his pistol without thinking, his finger ready to click off the safety. If he let the dog get too close, he risked shooting June as well. He would have to be fast.

He was closer now, and could make her out. She was a thin woman, middle aged. Slender and fast on the hills. She wore jeans and white shoes that kept flashing in the sunlight as she ran towards him and away from the animal behind her. The dog was closing the distance. Its tongue flapped out of the side of its mouth. Even from here, he could see trails of foamy spit flying through the air as its legs pushed powerfully against the ground and towards June.

The dog was gaining on her. He didn’t have time to think. He knelt on the ground and aimed his handgun at the dog’s rib cage. He hoped it would hit its heart and take it down easy. He clicked off the safety, aimed, and fired. The sound rang out in empty field. The dog jumped, startled, then kept running. Terry breathed and aimed again.

June was almost to him now and the dog wasn’t far behind. He would have to shoot it head on. The heart wasn’t exposed. He closed one eye and steadied his hand, waited for the dog to fall in line. 

“Steady,” said his father’s voice in the tree stand when he was twelve years old. His first hunt.

Steady, he repeated to himself. 

His finger touched the trigger. He watched the dog as it came pounding towards him, the scene unfolding in slow motion. As its hind legs kicked forward, its front reached back. The motion was like a piston in an engine, flawless and machinelike. He pressed against the cool metal with the pad of his index finger until the gun kicked back in his hand. A sound filled his ears. It wasn’t the high pitched ringing he expected, but the maniacal buzzing of flies.

---

At rock bottom, as they called it in June’s meetings, she had though of dying many times. Fantasized about it even. Some days, it was a rollover crash off I-70. No one hurt but the drunk driver. Dead on scene. Others times, it was alcohol poisoning. Alone in her bathroom, choking on vomit. Never in her wildest dreams did she picture it like this. 

She was running, chasing the woman who wore her face but smelled like death, out of the woods and into the daylight she had been searching for all this time. The only thought in her mind was getting home. Into the house. The only sanctuary that had truly been hers in her entire adult life. Mike and Amy hadn’t even seen it yet.

The woman kept turning back, an insane smile spread across her face. The gleam of metal in sunlight kept glinting off her neck where thick metal links bound one to the other. When the shots rang out, June had jumped, but relief flooded her body. She thought the dog — the woman —was dead. When her eyes turned and saw Terry Herman crouched and aiming at her, she realized her mistake. 

She ran towards him without thinking. Away from the woman and towards safety. She begged him not to shoot, but the words were only in her mind. Her long black snout, caked with Dan’s blood, could not form the words. Her black eyes would not convey innocence. 

The bullet hit her chest and ricocheted in her ribs. Her legs crumpled beneath her. She fell into soft green grass. Her breaths came heavy. Her tongue laid lazily outside of her open mouth and in the dark fertile earth around her. 

So this is it. 

The fear was gone. The revelation of enfolding darkness was clouding her eyes. The sun shone brightly above. The breeze moved against her black fur. She remembered summer days of childhood, her head resting against folded arms and staring at endless blue. That blue turned to a pinhole as her vision faded, and warmth spread throughout her chest.

Terry Herman’s face appeared above hers, blocking out the sun. He stared into her eyes for a moment. His own were watery blue. When he pointed the gun, she felt no malice. He was a man doing what he had to do. Even good people could get it wrong sometimes. That made her smile.

June said the prayer in her head one last time. 

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I can not change —

She thought of Amy and Mike as she had so many times when the urge to drink threatened to consume her. 

— the courage to change the things I can —

But this time, her thoughts landed on the end of the prayer, and stayed there as all the lights in the world blinked out.

— and the wisdom to know the difference.