Witch Boy Read online

  “Dr. Spence,” Eleanor says, smiling graciously while managing to throw me a look. “This is very nice, but you didn’t have to greet us.”

  “Nonsense,” he says, and hands her a bottle of ruby port.

  This is the man who has hired my mother for the fellowship. He is about five nine, solidly built, and with this amazing, thick, shiny silver hair and a voice like a muffled trombone. You get the feeling right off that this is somehow the smartest person in the vicinity, somehow mentally bigger than the rest of us, even if he didn’t have the heavy, Poindexter glasses, which he does.

  “You’ve already met Eartha, my daughter,” he says.

  “We have,” Eleanor says. “She’s lovely.”

  “Yes, I’ve always thought so,” I say, staring at the girl severely.

  I get pinched again.

  “Won’t you come in, and we’ll open this?” Eleanor proposes, pulling the door open and ushering them in.

  “Really,” Dr. Spence says, “we should leave you….” But he is not leaving us, he is walking into the house.

  Eleanor, who could not seem to locate one box a while ago, has homed in on the glasses within seconds, and suddenly we are all sitting in decrepit Adirondack chairs on what she is calling the veranda, sipping what looks and tastes to me like diluted Smucker’s grape jelly.

  My mother is telling her boss what a magnificent house she thinks this is, and thanking him for hooking us up with it. The girl—Eartha/Jules—is agreeing with her. I am doing a lot of staring, but I cannot help it. Chuck continues sniffing every bit of her he can press his nose to. The two of us are embarrassing Eleanor to death, but for God’s sake, this is Jules. Life and death and Jules.

  “Chucky,” Eleanor says, reaching over and giving him a brisk slap across the head. He cowers and flattens to the floor. She throws me a look that says I am next.

  I try and try and try to keep it together as the girl and her father tell us about the area, the school where I will be starting in a couple of days, and the social circle both Eleanor and I will just have to become part of.

  I put aside the shudder I feel at completing any kind of circle at all and wait for my opportunity to lean closer to the girl. As she describes with relish the classic-movie house in town, I feign great interest and lean close to her, my nose coming within inches of her flowing, chocolate-brown hair.

  Honeysuckle.

  Damn right. Damn goddamn damnit right. She is here.

  It brings a smile to my lips and mist to my eyes.

  “Maybe it’s time we should be going,” Dr. Spence says, getting to his feet and motioning to the girl, Jules, to do likewise.

  I look at Eleanor, who is staring at me so hard that if I were a snowman, I’d be melted.

  “What?” I mime.

  We walk as a group to the door and make all kinds of plans to show each other. Around, the countryside, the town, the ropes, the house, the way.

  “So,” Jules says to me, as the anthropologists study each other down the walk, “I’ll be by, then.”

  “You’ll…be by,” I repeat. She sounds as if this is confirmation of a plan we have already agreed to. It is news to me.

  She reaches out and touches me on the arm, looks me hard in the eyes, and I go weak everywhere I have any feeling at all. “I’ll be by, then we’ll get you caught up in a hurry. Cool with you?”

  “Cool with me,” I say firmly. She is going to get me caught up.

  She seems so collected, so calm and confident, when she touches my arm it is like she shoots sedative through my veins. Telling me it will all be right soon enough.

  Not soon enough. But at least now I have something to wait for. Something with Jules at the end of it. For this I can wait a while longer.

  She leans forward, kisses me. Not on the cheek, not quite on the lips, but just lightly on the corner of my mouth, where the lips come together and become cheek.

  She is so Jules. She is so very my Jules.

  Except the pain is gone. The tremors and terrors that more and more went along with loving Jules.

  Vanished.

  “Have you got an explanation?” Eleanor asks tentatively, like she’s talking to a jumper.

  I am standing in the entranceway of the house, at the foot of the stairs, absorbing this, guessing at which explanation she is looking for. If it’s the big what’s going on here, I’m as stumped as she is. I am hoping it’s a little more manageable.

  “What?” I ask, stalling.

  “What do you mean ‘what,’ Marcus? The way you were staring…and smelling her. Fur was the only thing that separated you from him”—she is pointing at Chuck, who looks fairly embarrassed by the whole episode—“and when you actually took her hair in your hand, rubbing it between your fingers like you were buying bolts of fabric—”

  “I never did that,” I say.

  “You did exactly that,” she says.

  Chuck emits a loud, snappy bark.

  “Don’t you start with me,” she says to him.

  For a minute we all stand there, staring, perspiring, waiting.

  Once again, I am probably the person who should comment. Because once again, I seem to be the only one who was not in the room when I was performing these acts.

  “Sorry,” I say. “Whatever I did…sorry.”

  She sighs. “It’s just…cripes, this is academia, Marcus. By tomorrow morning I’ll already be famous as the mother of the kinky dog boy—”

  “Sorry,” I repeat. “Next time I’ll hump Dr. Spence’s leg if it’ll smooth things over.”

  She sighs. She is not really angry, not really freaked, but perplexed. I need to help, I need to give her at least something to go on.

  “El, listen. I think you were right, that exhaustion and stuff has really taken a toll. I’m not myself. I will be myself tomorrow, I promise. It’s been a heady couple of days.”

  If she even knew the half of it.

  I start up the stairs, toward my lovely, spooky new room.

  Eleanor follows me, catches up and hugs me from behind.

  “It has been,” she says. “I keep forgetting, with all we have had to do…I forget…how it was. And it was only last night…of course you miss her.”

  I want to respond this time. I want to inform her how much bigger and weirder this is than she knows. I want to describe to her my feeling of suddenly being this tiny speck at the very epicenter of a profoundly dark and demonic universe. But a radiant speck, one that cannot hide in any corner of that universe.

  I want to tell her how I am either the perpetrator of absolute evil, or the victim of it.

  But I don’t know which one I am, so I’ll just have to get back to her on that.

  And all this time she thinks it’s all about my lost virginity. Which may just as easily still be with me for all I can figure.

  “Thanks for understanding, Eleanor,” I say.

  Chuck has conceded and has come into the house, but he draws the line at coming upstairs. I leave Eleanor at her door, where she will comfortably and peacefully lay herself on the bed and take her rest among all the untouched boxes. I wish I could do that.

  I go down the hall, toward the darkened rooms.

  Darkened, save one. The attic door is open. The light is on.

  I can feel my heart begin to pound harder. I worry anew about what it all means. Is there no end? Do I merely remain the plaything, the speck suspended in this until whoever is in charge decides to release me? Is the great cosmic cat nearly finished pawing at me, ready, finally, to bite off my head?

  I stand. It may be thirty seconds, it may be ninety minutes. I exist, during this duration, only as a frame to hold up two hot-wired eyeballs trained on a spot at the top of those steep stairs.

  I am supposed to go up there. I feel it as surely as if a great twisted hand were pulling me by the entrails up those dusty old stairs. Somebody, something, wants me up there.

  No way in hell am I going. Couldn’t if I wanted to. I feel as if I just ate a l
ive, beating heart, and it is stuck halfway down my throat.

  Eventually I manage to shut the dry, mewing door. Even that movement feels like a mighty act.

  “Eleanor,” I say softly. I am standing in the doorway of her room. It is dark enough to see shapes and not details. The screenless window is open a few inches, and the lacy curtain hangs defiant, motionless in the face of the powerless night air.

  “Eleanor,” I say, still sort of softly, but not really. “Are you sleeping?”

  She stirs. I can see her up on her elbows, head tilted incredulously.

  “If I say yes, will you believe me?”

  “Ah, listen, I was…I don’t want to seem any weirder than I probably already do…so if you think it’s awful just say so, but…I’m a little uncomfortable just now—”

  “Come on in,” she says casually, throwing down the other side of the covers.

  I sit there for a minute, staring out the window. “It’s just…my rooms are kind of acting up,” I say, figuring this is the moment to finally let the guard down and give her a hint.

  “Oh yeah,” she says, her voice already almost asleep. “I know that feeling.”

  CHAPTER 5

  The first few days in the new house pass, if not normally, at least quietly. Eleanor is very good about it. Tolerant, patient, motherly. The second night, and again on the third, when the day is at an end and we go upstairs, we say good night to each other as if it is just another night, and I am just another teenage guy big and bold enough to sleep in his own room. But both nights I reach the end of the hall to find the attic door wide open and waiting.

  I quickly shop out of my still-packed boxes, and I retrieve pajamas, tank tops, running shorts, whatever is closest at hand off the top of one of them. I change quickly and return to my mother’s room.

  She is, as I say, tolerant. Or afraid to say no. But she lets me have this much and does not protest until Chuck gets wind of the goings-on and tries to share the wealth by scooting up onto her bed.

  “No,” Eleanor states on the third night. “This is where we draw the line. Chuck, go.”

  He is crouchy and whipped-looking as he slithers off. He gives me a desperate parting look, and I am almost moved until I think, No, none of us would be in this pathetic scene if you had the balls to come sleep in my room like a decent dog. He senses this, and rightly hangs his head.

  “And Marcus,” Eleanor says in the kindest tone possible. “This goes for you too. Tonight, okay, but this is the end of it. It is kind of unbelievable, after all…I could see how unsettled you were when we got here, but after all—”

  “I know,” I say, fully prepared. I never expected it to last even this long. “Tomorrow.”

  “Yes,” she agrees.

  Tomorrow it is. It is something else, tomorrow. My first day of school.

  “Hello?”

  I can only faintly hear it. It may well be a dream. If I were going to dream, this would be it.

  “Hello?” Jules’s voice calls me. “Hello, Marcus?”

  I am absorbing it, loving it, rolling in it. I turn over, open my eyes.

  “Oh,” I snap, sitting upright in bed and pulling the sheet up over my chest. “Oh, Jules, sorry—”

  “No, I’m sorry,” she says.

  “Oh,” Eleanor gasps, “oh, my…”

  She backs out into the hallway. “I’m so sorry. The front door was wide open. And I called and called, and then the dog led me….”

  Eleanor and I both stare at Chuck, who is sitting in the doorway like a stone lion guarding a palace.

  “Didn’t you close the front door last night?” Eleanor asks.

  “I did.” I did, I am certain.

  “I am sorry. I came a little early…to show you around school, introduce you around—”

  “School!” I say. “Listen, ah, could you meet me downstairs? I’ll just be a second.”

  “Sure,” she chirps.

  When I hear her descend the steps, I stumble out of bed. I am choking, imagining what she is thinking. If I wasn’t already winning the freak-of-the-week award, this was going to seal it.

  “Jesus” is Eleanor’s take on the situation. “The dog-boy thing is going to be nothing, next to this.”

  I grab Chuck by the scruff of the neck and drag him down the hall with me. I sling him into my bedroom and make him stay there while I dress. “Get used to it,” I say. “Because this is where you and I are sleeping, tonight and from now on.”

  I must take my time. So many of my instincts have been wrong. I can fairly well rely on the fact that, whatever thoughts I have about how to proceed, those thoughts are probably ass-backward. So I have to be cool, despite the obvious questions. How can it all be? How can any of it be? How can I be walking here, now, with Jules? How can Jules be here and be calling herself Eartha and getting away with it? How can she be here and in the bay and in Brainwave?

  This is it, you see. The problem. If I can’t avoid coming unglued, there is no hope. And in order for me to hold it together, I have to believe this:

  She can call herself Eartha or Luna or Jack the Ripper if she wants to.

  She is really my Jules.

  We are walking along the charming back roads between the house and school, chatting about the local flora and fauna, avoiding any meaningful conversation or much eye contact. I am instead drawn for the first time to our surroundings. There is a sleepy, almost southern quality to the place, even though we are only about seven hours south of Port Caledonia and twice that far from the Mason-Dixon line. But the place feels foreign to me in a way I had not expected. Is it hotter? Are the trees dipping their branches just a little further down into the water from the banks of the stream? Maybe it’s that Blackwater is a little farther inland, that makes everything feel warmer, soupier, slower than in P.C. In both places the water is the thing. But the water of Blackwater seems a lot less in a hurry.

  The school building is coming into view before I manage to bring up either of the massive issues. We have meandered our way, along bank, out onto pavement, back through unkept fields of chin-high wheatgrass, and back onto the paved, settled grid of streets, and every change of scenery has been another excuse to talk about nothing. From the air the town must look like a patchwork quilt.

  But it must be done, so I come out with it.

  “That wasn’t what you probably thought it was,” I say, gesturing back in the direction of my house, which is actually about four changes of direction away now.

  She will not let me off easily. “What wasn’t what I thought it was?”

  “You know,” I say, my embarrassment deepening. “The, ah, sleeping arrangement.”

  “Hey, don’t worry about it,” she says.

  “I will worry about it. I am worried about it. Very worried about what you think.”

  If this is what people in Blackwater are all like, Eleanor need not be worried about whatever impression I’m going to make. The girl is unimpressed with my kinks. She takes my hand, barely looks at me as she leads on, and enlightens me.

  “Whatever you do is cool by me. You’re going to find, Marcus, that we are some fairly free thinkers in my circle. Oh, I’ve seen loads stranger stuff than you sleeping with your mom. Loads and loads.”

  “Loads? And loads? I don’t…wait, I was not sleeping with her. It’s just…well, the house has been really creepy, and some freaky stuff has been happening to me….”

  She stops, stands squarely in front of me, and puts a cool hand to my cheek. “I know,” she says sympathetically.

  I am held there. Unable to move, unable to speak. Literally. It is like one of those scary nightmares where you are half aware, frightened completely out of your skull, and you are trying desperately, vainly, to wake up. But you cannot shake yourself, and you cannot scream.

  Until, then, her hand is down, and I am released.

  The first thing I do with my new freedom is, I shudder. The second thing I do is blurt out the Other Thing.

  “You do know,
Jules. So why don’t you tell me what’s going on?”

  “Eartha,” she says ultracalmly.

  “So why do you look exactly, I mean, exactly”—I lean over and sniff her hair again—“like my Jules? Why are you doing this to me? I loved you…love you, and you know it. You loved me. What happened?”

  At this moment, something happens to her. A softening, a saddening.

  “I’m sorry, Marcus,” she says. “Honestly, I am sorry about all this.”

  Frustrating as it is, unenlightening as it is, it is something. It feels like something.

  But then she starts quick-walking away from me, toward the school building.

  “What, that’s it? That’s all you are going to say?”

  She stops, whirls around to face me, and, with a sweet smile, walks back, then lands a hard and deep full-on kiss on me. This lasts ten or so seconds, and I am nothing but hers the whole time. I wish I could stay here forever and ever, and never once open my eyes or ears to anything else again.

  “No, Marcus,” she says when it’s finished. “There is a lot more. Trust me for now that I am going to get you through it. But a step at a time.”

  Even if I had a choice—which I don’t think I do—I would trust her now. I was lost in her once she kissed me.

  “But Jules—”

  “And start by calling me Eartha. You are in Blackwater, and I am Eartha.”

  “Okay,” I say, grabbing her arm as she starts off again. “I’ll be patient, and I’ll trust you. But you can answer me this one for starters. Am I crazy because I think you are Jules? Or are you crazy because you think you are not?”

  She squeezes my hand and pulls me along quickly, like we are about to hit the scariest part of the scariest-ever roller coaster.

  “Neither one of us is crazy, Marcus. That would be way too easy.”

  We have reached the parking lot. There is a lot of buzz. This is a much bigger place than Port Caledonia, a much bigger high school, even a much bigger parking lot. The lot abuts the school’s impressive football field, and they are both the same size. Most of the students seem to have cars.