The Sea Witch - Part 4

A serialized short story.

Welcome to Part 4 of “The Sea Witch.” If you’re looking for the rest of the story, you can follow these links: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

Evangeline smiles, then continues. "But Oprah lives in a fuck-off big mansion. Her problems are mostly to do with covering things in pure gold and trying to live forever, so what does she really know. And if your head and your heart don't agree, then you're at war with yourself, with no way out. You have to step outside that. This is my advice: even if you don't believe in this sort of thing, pretend that the world is full of helpers who want what's best for you. Ask a tree what to do. Ask your dead relatives. Ask a bird, or some old bones. Ask the sea. For something like this, if you truly don't know what to do, what's the harm? Let something outside yourself lend a voice to your intuition and see where that leads you. At the very least, you'll—"

"Evangeline?" A voice calls from outside the front door. "You home? It's Josh."

"Oh fuck it all to hell," she shouts, slapping the table with both palms.

Janet jumps.

Evangeline presses her fingers to her temples, closes her eyes, and takes a deep breath. "Janet, I'm so sorry," she says. "It's been that sort of morning."

---

"Janet, I'm so sorry," she says again as they step outside together. She closes the front door behind them. "Sometimes I forget to flip the sign from 'Please Knock' to 'Do Not Disturb,' and"—she looks at the wooden sign hanging on the door, reading "Do Not Disturb"—"well. Look at that." She glares acidly at the lanky, long-haired man standing beside the door, too enthralled with his smartphone to catch the look. "These things happen sometimes."

"Just a minute," the man says without looking up, earnestly typing with both thumbs.

Evangeline's jaw clenches.

"It's no trouble. Really," says Janet. "This has been very helpful. I should be going anyway, I know you have a lot to worry about this morning."

"Anytime, love," says Evangeline. "If you want to come back, the next reading's on the house, so I can give it the uninterrupted attention it—"

"Sorry. Hi," says the man, pocketing his phone. "Are you okay? I thought I heard yelling."

"Spilled my tea," says Evangeline, with a razor-sharp smile. She gives a mock curtsy with invisible skirts. "Your lordship. What an honor to have you out among the commoners. How fares the day?"

He laughs. "I will never get tired of the way you people talk. I'm Josh, by the way," he says, eagerly extending a hand to Janet.

"Of course. Janet. Charmed." She gives his hand a cursory shake and turns back to Evangeline. "Thank you so much. I'll be back on a day when you're less occupied. I have a lot to think about."

"Ta, love. Hold fast. Careful how you go with the storm."

As Janet makes her way back up the garden path, Evangeline turns to Josh. Him in his expensive-looking windbreaker. Young enough to be a son to her. And yet, through the arcane sorcery of tech start-ups—true black magic—he owns several acres of seaside property, the stately home up the road, and the little cottage that he rents to her. Standing in the chill wind under the darkening sky, with his retro-cool glasses, he reminds her of one of the doomed characters from Dawn of the Dead.

She recalls the character's voice clearly: "They're coming to get you, Barbara." 

He got his head cracked on a tombstone, before being eaten by ghouls. 

The thought makes her smile. 

"Josh. You're looking well. What can your humble tenant do for you today?"

"Well, we wanted to—"

"Wait," she says. "I almost forgot. As long as you're here, I have the perfect job for a strapping young lad like yourself."

She disappears into the cottage and returns with a burlap bag and a pair of leather work gloves. Pulling on the gloves, she hands him the bag. "A fox got into the coop last night. Terrible carnage. You can help me clean it up while we talk."

"I'm not really dressed for—"

"Come now. Those clothes look like they can wash themselves. Give an old lady a hand."

She starts up the path toward the plundered coop without waiting for a response, lighting another cigarette as she goes.

"Indya sends her best," says Josh from behind her.

Indya. Before she can relax her jaw, she nearly bites the filter off her cigarette.

Meeting Josh's partner for the first time had given Evangeline cause to reflect on the life she'd lived. She had spent summers hanging drywall in stifling apartments. She'd cleaned pub toilets in Manchester, on mornings after United won a championship. Once, while splitting firewood, her axe had glanced off a metal spike buried in the log and plunged into her ankle; after duct-taping the wound closed, she hobbled a half-mile to get help, crutching along with a tree branch, shouting the most elaborate curses she could concoct in order to stay conscious.

All these trials had been like summer holidays compared to the forty-five minutes she'd spent with Indya. Hearing all about her collection of crystals. Her transformative globe-trotting adventures. The "deep connection" she felt to the land where Evangeline lived—where Indya and Josh periodically stayed, between music festivals in Ibiza and ski trips in Switzerland—where they occasionally brought their rich friends for "meditation retreats" that seemed mostly to consist of drinking wine and taking long naps. She had offered to give Evangeline pointers on reading fortunes. And, of course, she claimed to have always been extremely intuitive—practically psychic.

After some wheedling from Indya, Evangeline had gotten out the candle and bell and grudgingly read the cards for her. The cards had said that Josh was having an affair. It hadn't seemed neighborly to share this bit of news; instead, Evangeline had flim-flammed her way through a generic reading on the subjects of love and light and destiny, with Indya nodding along enthusiastically. As she departed, jingling like a wind chime from the pirate's ransom of charms and amulets that she wore, Indya had waxed poetic about the special bond that she and Evangeline now shared, as sisters in spirit.

As soon as Indya had gone back to the cliffside manor up the road, Evangeline had hiked to a secluded spot, dug a hole, and screamed abuse into it until she was hoarse— sealing it with every banishing spell she knew, lest the poisonous energy manifest as some terrible demon and devour the poor girl.

She holds the cigarette carefully between her teeth and unlatches the gate on the fenced chicken run. "How is the dear love?"

"Good. She's away for awhile, at a yoga retreat in Portugal."

"Splendid."

Inside the run are the remains of the unlucky chickens—the ones that weren't able to reach the safety of the coop's small roof, where the two survivors now perch. They'd flown back up to their refuge as soon as she approached the fence; they stare down at her, terrified and accusing. She imagines them frantically scrabbling their way up in the darkness, fleeing the ravenous teeth below, clinging desperately to safety as, one after another, their friends were dragged down to bloody death. Like shipwrecked survivors in a lifeboat, pursued by sharks. Crying out for help—for her help—while she lay ailing and unconscious inside the cottage.

Tears fill her eyes as she looks up at them. She places a hand solemnly over her heart and addresses the two birds: "I am so sorry. Please forgive me."

With a heavy sigh, she flicks away her cigarette and turns to the viscera strewn over the ground. She can't tell from the scattered parts how many were eaten and how many were killed for sport. Despite the personal cost—two of her best layers, plus four that she'd been fattening up for her pot—she envies the fox's uncomplicated ferocity.

Josh looks unsteady when she stands up with a double handful of blood and guts. "Evangeline, I don't know if I'm cut out for—"

"You're doing grand. Isn't this why you wanted to live out here? To get a taste of real country life? This is it. Now, open up."

He involuntarily clenches his jaw and turns his head away.

"The bag, you tit," she says, barely covering her frustration with a forced just-kidding laugh. He manages to hold the bag open, face still averted, while she dumps the feathery innards into it. "There now. Stronger than you were this morning. You'll be the envy of the next shareholder meeting, when you tell the other boys about this." She bends over to scrape up some more of the gory ground. "What was it you wanted to talk about, then?"

"Well," says Josh, a Human Resources tone creeping into his voice. "We wanted to start off by telling you what a joy it's been having you here."

Shit.

"Indya feels like you've"—he pauses as another handful goes into the bag—"like you've really 'elevated the energy of the landscape,' as she puts it. Not to mention all the creative work you've done putting together those incredible shrines around the property."

At Indya's suggestion, as payment in kind for part of the rent, Evangeline had constructed shrines at various scenic spots around the property for the couple's jet-setting friends to admire during their visits. While Indya saw them as mere art installations, Evangeline—working from the theory that accidental reverence was better than none at all—had gone to the trouble of dedicating shrines to the various entities that would have been revered across the island in more enlightened times.

Tinker-toys for children, she thinks. You should see the standing stones. But you never will.

"Still, we did want to revisit our conversation about the lease with you."

She stops her work. "Oh?"

He sets down the bag of filth. "The cottage would make a great vacation rental, and we could charge a lot more per night than we're getting with a long-term tenant. It seems silly for us to leave money on the table."

She very carefully takes off her bloodied gloves, removes the cigarette pack from her shirt pocket, and slowly extracts one from within. With methodical precision, she lights a match—unbroken—and holds it to the tip of her cigarette, delicately kindling it into burning. She takes a long drag. And exhales.

She does not think of the old leather book on her shelf in the cottage, with its collection of poisons and curses and brimstone invocations—its legions of demons, waiting for the proper summons to snuff the life from fragile mortals.

She refuses to think of how she might persuade Indya—dear, sweet Indya—to better her circumstances if Josh were to suffer a sudden, calamitous, extremely fatal heart attack. Or if he was swept into the sea by something dark and ancient and tentacled.

She studies him with what she hopes is a look of patience, and not pure hatred. "Go on."

"We thought…" he swallows. "You know, when you're done doing your thing… well, you don't want to live here forever, right? It's quaint enough for a short-term stay, but it's practically medieval. I—"

"Josh." She takes another careful drag. "I plan to be done ‘doing my thing’ when I gasp my last breath. Which, gods willing, will be out on those cliffs behind you. I know it's hard to imagine, but not all of us have our pick of a half-dozen houses to shuffle around to whenever the mood strikes." She closes her eyes and steadies herself. "This is it for me. This is the end of my road. My work is here. It's your place, and you can do with it what you like, but I don't want you to think I can just pack up and—"

"We want to be fair, but—"

"Fair?" She is dangerously close to yelling. "Haven't you got more money than fucking Solomon? What the fuck do you care if you could rent it for a few hundred pounds more a month? That's pub money for you, but this—" She steps backward, passes a hand over her face, takes a deep breath. "Listen. I apologize. This isn't the best time for me to be talking finances. As you can see"—she gestures around at the red-stained dirt—"I'm having a fuck of a day so far. Let's leave it there for now, and I'll… we'll talk again tomorrow. Will that work? I'm just about done in right now. Please."

He nods curtly. "Sure. I'll come back tomorrow. Like I said, we want to be fair. But our lease is month-to-month. You knew this was a possibility." He turns away, pulling his phone from his pocket as he heads back to the garden gate. "I hope you feel better soon."

And I hope you're swallowed up by the earth.

As he walks down the road toward his own sprawling estate, she looks across the yard at the old cottage: sagging roof, crumbling plaster, cracked windows, drafty eaves; the decrepit lighthouse behind it, and the leaden sea beyond. And above it all—the storm gathering itself together on the horizon like a clenched fist.

Rain begins to fall.