Witch Clan: Matriarchs, John Stormm [great reads txt] 📗

She drew her long knife from under her apron slicing the orange and yellow banded mushroom shelf off the log into her sack.

“Where did you get that...thing?” Elvyra gaped in horror at the runic blade, backing away.

“It’s a gift from some old family friends,” she remarked casually, wiping the blade on her apron and sheathing it. “No self respecting witch should be without one.”

"You should be careful with that weapon," Elvyra remarked.

"You know, something," she replied testily. "That makes the third time in recent history that you've left instructions that I should be careful about my children and now my tools. If I were the suspicious type, I might construe all this as some sort of vague threat from a sister in the craft." She tucked her hands in her apron meaningfully and gazed steadily at the retreating witch.

"I just know that a wise woman like yourself would never tempt the Threefold Law by working or wishing any ill on a single soul," she said. "So, tell me, sister, what are you trying to say? Are you suggesting that you may possess information that me or mine just might be in some kind of danger?"

"It's possible," Elvyra blurted in obvious agitation. "When you delve into powers that you have little knowledge or control over, awful things have been known to happen."

"I'll be sure to keep that in mind," she replied evenly. Elvyra bustled away in the direction of her house. The children had frozen in mid-step on the log and watched the transaction quietly.

"You two can stop holding your breath now." She smiled at them. "I think we should resume our lessons for today. Have you ever seen a house that wasn't really there before?"

"Wow!" Johnny exclaimed.

"What?" said Leona.

"Follow me, kids," she said. "I need to show you something to forestall a little of the wrong kind of adventuring."

She led them to the back section of the woods where Elvyra's backyard intersected with the woods. The other woman was not in sight and likely preparing her herbs in her kitchen.

"The stone table you see here is used as an altar when she wants to perform ceremonies to get help from eldritch powers," she pointed out. "The shiny glass ball is called a witch ball and has been used for centuries to keep certain types of spirits from hanging around and for catching certain kinds of witches."

"What kind is that?" Leona asked.

"The curious kind," she replied, looking at her grandson. "Now I want you to take a really good look at this house. The color, the shape, the shingles... everything. Can you remember this?"

"That's easy, Grandma," Leona said. "It's not like any other house around here. And the color is so dark."

"Well, I never want you to go too near this house," Emma insisted. "Now follow me and we'll go down the trail and out into the street that goes around the front."

They walked past a fenced tennis court and a small garage and Emma treaded a path between two such garages to the street. The private road circled back on itself to an access road that connected with the main avenue. There were five houses located within this small circle near the woods. Three were white colonials, a fourth was a yellowish chalet style structure and the fifth, nearer to the tennis court was a yellow brick house with shuttered windows. Nowhere on this street was any house that remotely fit the description of the two story, dark shingled, gingerbread style of Elvyra's house.

"It's not here," Leona said, looking about and trying to see if it might be hiding behind the smaller brick structure somehow.

"It's gone," said Johnny, shrugging his shoulders.

"Let's go back into the woods," Emma instructed.

Back between the two garages and on the forest trail they hiked back past the tennis courts to find the dark shingled gingerbread right where they left it.

"How can that be, Grandma?" Leona asked, perplexed.

"Elvyra lives in a rift," she explained. "It's a place where two worlds meet. The front half of her house doesn't exist in our world, while the back yard opens up into our woods."

"How does she do that?" Leona asked.

"Part of it has to do with power channels called ley lines," she supplied. "And part of it has something to do with maintaining some kind of power to hold open an unstable rift that gives her a permanent foothold in both worlds. This hill is a very powerful energy spot, which is why the plants and herbs are so potent from this area. If my house could back up to two worlds, I would pick this spot for my backyard too. Probably for the same reasons."

"There's two worlds, right here?" Leona asked.

"Probably more than that, sweetie," she replied. "When Johnny showed you to the faeries, you weren't in this world anymore, but the Otherworld where the faeries went to live after men drove them out of the land."

"But we were still in your garden," Leona objected.

"Sometimes the Otherworld is a mirror image of this world," she tried to explain. "Things can be the same in both worlds, while some things are very different. Did you notice how much prettier the garden looked when you saw the faeries?"

"It was like out of a storybook," Leona reminisced.

"Well, the other garden probably never needs to be weeded because there are no weeds in that world. There could be hundreds of worlds. Your great grandmother could open doors to different worlds too. That's where Johnny's dad came from."

"Do you know my daddy, Grandma?" Johnny asked.

"I knew your dad, son," she said. "I'll tell you more about him as you get bigger and wiser. Meanwhile you've got Grandma and Grandpa and Leona and your mom and all kinds of family to love you and take care of you."

A slight pang of guilt shot through her for bringing up the boy's father in front of him like that. He had asked about the discrepancy only a couple times before. He knew something was missing from his life and he was trying to identify it. But it was important that she had plenty of time to establish a loving relationship before she had to share his darker side with him. He had some serious choices to make in his life, and she wanted him to make the right ones. That was true with everybody, but then everybody didn't have the potential for good and evil that Johnny had.

“But what I want from you kids,” she said, raising her index finger. “is to avoid doing any crossovers when Grandma is not around. There’s plenty that Elvyra hasn’t said that worries me more than anything she said. Until we get this all sorted out, if you feel you must visit the faeries that badly, then I have to go with you.

“I still don’t feel good about her, Grandma,” Johnny said, indicating the house-that-wasn’t-there.

“I don’t feel right about any of this, son,” she said. “Brother George or no, I want to be with you anywhere you go. I don’t want to lose any of you to anything. Om biggun tu?”

“Tiggum,” the children replied in unison and gave her a hug.


Family History Never Tasted So Good

Leona helped sort out the day's pickings from Emma's sack in the summer kitchen. First, everything was washed under cool running water with a scrub brush to get off any residual dirt in the big, deep sink and then sorted to dry into separate baskets and hooks from the low ceiling. As her grandmother instructed, she took items already dry, from occupied hooks and baskets and transferred them to glass topped jars and canisters in Emma's windowed pantry shelves along the west wall of the summer kitchen. It was about time to begin preparing dinner so Emma brought out some potatoes and some of the sulfur shelves to the kitchen with her. Leona helped by peeling potatoes while she watched her grandmother cut the fungus shelves into small pieces and drop them into a saucepan of boiling water with a little crushed garlic, a bullion cube and some cornstarch to make a thick gravy. Acorn flour was used to make biscuits and added to a meatloaf mixed heavily with mushrooms, bell peppers, onions, eggs and herbs from the garden. Leona made notes on how many wild ingredients were used in the meal into her Book of Shadows.

"You really do use the woods like a grocery store," she remarked.

"In the old days, if folks suspected you of being a witch," Emma explained, "they wouldn't sell you groceries because they feared that God or the church would hate them for helping a devil worshipper."

"That's silly," she said. "We've got no devils in our religion, and if we did, who would be crazy enough