The Sea Witch - Part 5

A serialized short story.

Welcome to Part 5 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, Part 4.

"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.

---

The surf booms below the cliffs as she climbs the faint path into the hills. Wind-thrown droplets pelt her face. She keeps her pace deliberate: too fast, and she begins to sweat inside her old fisherman's coat—a glorified tarp with sleeves, nothing like Josh's fancy windbreaker.

She looks grimly ahead for the first waystone.

The trio of carved rocks placed at intervals beside the trail aren't for marking out the physical path. She knows from experience that she can find her way to the standing stones on a moonless night, with nothing but a flickering candle to light her way, and never miss a step. Rather, the waystones serve to orient her spiritually, getting her into the right frame of mind as she approaches the place of power amidst the ancient monuments. On good days, she sails past the waystones with hardly a glance, organizing her mind into the proper setting as easily as a child's jigsaw puzzle.

Today, she needs every emotional toe-hold the waystones can provide before she even reaches the secret place in the hills, let alone completes the work ahead.

The sedge whips around her feet, driven sideways by the wind. Her chest aches. The damp chill reminds her scarred ankle of the axe's deep bite. A sudden, hacking cough stops her in her tracks—bends her over—dredges up a gob of slime from deep within her lungs and onto the wet sand at her feet, tinged with red.

She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and climbs on.

Ahead, barely visible beside the trail, the first waystone pokes from the moss: slightly bigger than the pack of cards in her kitchen, carefully scribed with an old iron nail, bearing a symbol that only she recognizes. 

She's long forgotten the specific meanings of the sigils carved into these rocks. The symbols are vessels—emotional catalysts for unlocking the parts of herself that draw up her power. Time has blurred the memory of the words and images that formed the sigils; unbound from their original meaning, they have compounded into something greater. They are armatures of prayer and sacrifice, given form, made real by her hands.

The first one speaks to her of beginning the long journey that brought her here. Encoded in the stone's carvings is her refusal to take one more shitty job, for nothing more than the money to buy more cheap food and more watery beer, to wake up in one more squalid apartment on one more gray morning, with her head once again feeling like it had been scrubbed with a dead fish—to keep herself alive for one more day, just to return to the shitty job and start the cycle over.

She stops, kneels in the wet dirt, bends close to the stone, and lets the memories it contains wash over her: the sharp smell of commercial sanitizer, wiped across a bar's wood surface with a dirty rag; the weight and grinding scrape of a steel keg rolled across a concrete floor; cigarette smoke mingling with clouded breath on a cold night in the pub's back alley. Walking away from all of it.

I wonder if Charlie is still there.

Charlie had been a regular at the last pub where she'd worked—a fixture, a human landmark who persisted year after year. He would either be completely unchanged for eternity or suddenly dead. An enormous, bald, marbled slab of a man, his implacable bulk defied any attempt to gauge whether he was cold sober or dead drunk. Light bent around the well of his ponderous gravity; pint after pint disappeared beyond the edge of his event horizon, as if they had never existed. His working vocabulary amounted to six words: "'nother one," "how much," and "fuck off."

She was the only one of the barkeeps who dared to cut him off. On nights when she worked, after Charlie had drunk enough beer to kill a horse, she would carefully walk around the bar and put her hand on his shoulder. She spoke only one word to him with the same gentle tone: "Hey."

Sometimes he would tense beneath her hand; while she wondered if this, finally, would be the night that he killed her, she calmly repeated herself. "Hey." Eventually, Charlie would sigh, like ice falling deep within a glacier. Heaving himself off the barstool, he allowed himself to be led to the door—still with her hand resting on his massive shoulder—and out into the unsuspecting night, favoring her with a grunt as he went. Then she would return to the bar and finish shepherding the rest of her charges through their own rituals of oblivion.

Once, she'd been drinking off the clock, sitting a few stools away from Charlie while another bartender served them. A wiry man, juiced up on something and heedless of the danger, had latched onto the seat next to Charlie. With too much chemical confidence, the man was haranguing Charlie about something, maybe the football game playing on the television.

Charlie sat. 

The man poked him in the elbow, jabbering away. 

Charlie drank. 

She flagged down the other bartender and warned him that Charlie was about to go mental, but he waved away her concerns.

The wiry man started to raise his voice.

Charlie shifted. 

The man jabbed Charlie in the shoulder with two fingers, apparently frustrated by the lack of conversation. 

As casually as flicking off a lightswitch—almost without looking, barely moving—Charlie drove the entire rocketing mass of his fist into the man's head. 

She saw it happen in freeze-frame: the man's whole body suspended in midair, parallel to the floor, like a cartoon coyote struck with an oversized mallet. 

Everyone froze.

Charlie spoke into the silence, after the wreckage of his barmate had fallen back to Earth: "'Nother one."

Charlie left on his own that night. The wiry man rode out on a stretcher with a braced neck, staring wordlessly at the ceiling. Not long after, she'd walked away from that job and that life.

And made it here, she thinks, looking down at the stone.

"Thank you," she whispers, and gets to her feet.

As the trail climbs higher, the second waystone waits, telling of the time the sea called to her.

Weeks after leaving her job at the pub, she'd stood in the night-dark ocean with waves breaking over her shoulders, hungry and desperate.

The money she scrounged from telling fortunes on the sidewalk hadn't been enough to buy fuel for her car and food for herself. After sitting next to her rusted Volkswagen for three days, holding a cardboard 'For Sale' sign, she'd sold it for cash to a couple of kids. Without the car, she was homeless. She'd thumbed rides, fought off muggers, and slept rough when she slept at all. 

The money ran out. 

She pressed on, unsure if she was losing her mind or had lost it already. 

Then, one night, finding herself alone on a beach, she'd left her few belongings behind on the sand and waded out into the cold water, commanding the ocean to either give her something or take her away.

And the sea had answered.

There is a place for you, it had told her; not in words, but in a succession of feelings—an unshakeable certainty that erased the hopelessness which had gripped her. There is work to be done.

When she emerged, blue and shivering, all her doubt had been washed away. She followed the sea. Her path was still meandering, but no longer aimless. As long as she stayed within sight of the shore, she would be provided for, would find the place that waited for her. She no longer fought off muggers: she terrified them into submission with the unanswerable fearlessness of the reborn. She told fortunes on the sidewalk with startling clarity. Money returned to her. When there was no food, hunger sharpened the knife of her resolve.

She slept on beaches, fell asleep to the sound of promises whispered between sand and surf. The sea sent her dreams: ancient creatures gliding through darkness; strange lights flickering in the depths; the pallid dead, reclining on their beds of kelp, resplendent, bejeweled in barnacles and crowned with coral.

Always, she followed the sea, along a trail of happenstance and synchronicity and unexpected kindnesses, leading her from the mainland to the island, from the village to the cottage, from the cottage to the ancient temple.

The final waystone marks her calling: to be the first person in centuries to see the standing stones for what they are. To wake them.

Not long after moving into the cottage, she'd been drawn to the old lighthouse; while idly poking through stones at the ruin's base, she'd flipped one over to reveal a carved triskele—the triple spiral, an ancient symbol of power.

The carving set her to puzzling. How would an ancient stone end up in the walls of a lighthouse? How far would the builders have gone to scavenge local materials for the structure? And where would be a likely place for a pagan temple? Her gaze had traveled up to the cliffs.

And she'd found it.

Breathing heavily as she climbs the last few steps up the trail, she pushes through the screen of bracken that hides the entrance to the circle. She longs to clear away the weeds and reveal the site in its full splendor. But it must stay hidden. Her discreet inquiries down in the village tell her that this place is forgotten; while there are children's tales of fairy circles and dark rituals up in the hills, nobody seems to remember the standing stones themselves, or where they might be found.

The thought of archaeologists descending on the old stones makes her shudder: digging, scraping, measuring, gridding, cataloging—reducing something ancient and powerful to a historical curiosity, an inert subject of study, stripped of all its enchantments.

Please be awake, she thinks, as she steps into her customary place at the circle's center. 

The temple's former attendants had long since abandoned their work. Perhaps they were killed by the zealots of another cult, or overawed by the power of a new deity. Maybe they were simply too old to climb the narrow path into the hills—unable to find fresh acolytes among their impertinent offspring. Regardless, the stones had fallen fast asleep through their neglect, and dreamed of other worlds for centuries long past before she stumbled upon them.

But they still remembered.

After months of patient work, of reaching out her mind to stir their foggy memories, she had gradually roused the stones from their torpor. She could not bring them back completely on her own. Their minds wandered. Only the full strength of the ancient rituals could hold their attention for long. 

And yet. As they murmured half-thoughts to her in their fathomless slumber, she began to glean their secrets.

The stones sketched maps in her mind of the place's hidden contours—secret cartographies traced by the seers who built the circle in the hills. Leylines of cosmic influence refracting through the little island; the melodies of the past echoing into the future. Flows of subtle energies moving across the land, shaped by its denizens and the strands of fate binding them together. The ways in which those forces might be influenced to bring down blessings and fend off disasters. The paths that her mind might go down in order to guide the flourishing of life on the island.

Her stomach plunges at the thought that, someday—not today, please, for the love of everything—she will climb the trail into the cliffs and find that the stones will not wake when she calls. Their secrets could be lost forever. The energy that they contain—concentrated willpower poured daily into the stones by their attendants, for hundreds of years, stored like a battery and shared now with her—would be shut off. The vision that lets her grasp the deeper realities around her will dim into blindness. Returning to the gray inertia of the life she escaped is impossible; after seeing so vividly what the world was meant to be, losing that sight would be a kind of death too crushing to bear.

Even now, barely awake, the presence of the stones fills the space: a deep, subsonic thrumming in her mind, like the engine of a freighter far belowdecks, felt more than heard.

She thinks again of what the place must have been like when it was first built. Time runs backward in her mind. Layers of moss and lichen peel away. Toppled stones fall upward and stand tall above her head. The insolent grass shrinks into the ground and leaves the sacred space clear. Fragrant incense rises into the air, while the echoes of drums and pipes are resurrected, channeled inward and upward by the circle's resonance.

What incredible power they must have called down here, she thinks.

It makes her want to weep.

A team of priests and acolytes, building an engine made from stone and smoke and song and blood… working every day of the year to mark the journey of the stars over this place. Carrying out the rituals that kept the land and its people together. Maintaining the bridge between this world and the next. Charting a safe course through storms and sorrows for the generations clinging to this island. 

All left to me.

Just me.

She looks bitterly at the state of her inheritance—the toppled stones, the creeping moss, the greedy grass, all sodden in the rain. The empty, silent circle, left to decay by an aimless people.

I could do so much with enough time, she thinks.

But now even she will be taken away from this place. Not killed in glorious battle—on her way to the heroes' halls that wait beyond the veil. Not out on the cliffs as her heart stills, giving her spirit up to the vast consciousness that reaches out from the sea. 

Chased away by an up-jumped tourist in overpriced sweatpants, she thinks. Homeless again. The work left unfinished.

"I need help," she says aloud.

The stones listen.

She takes a cigarette from the pack in her pocket and places it in her mouth. Reaching into her satchel, she pulls out a bundle of dried herbs from the cottage's garden: rosemary, thyme, lavender, mugwort. Striking a match, she shelters the bundle within her coat and lights it, followed by her cigarette. Smoke billows around her head.

"I know I was brought here for a reason. I've done my best to keep the balance and help these people. If turning this storm is the end of my work, then so be it. But I need a boost to do the job." She takes a drag. "I'm fucking tired. Done in. I'm not as young as I used to be, and there's too much to hold together by myself."

The rain patters on the leaves that shroud the circle.

"I haven't asked for much since I've been here. I've done the work as best I can with what I have. But I can't go back to sleeping on the beach. I can't be jerked around by every bored spirit strolling through the place. I can't have my chickens getting torn apart. I know this probably all seems like piddling nonsense to such as yourselves, ancient as you are, but I would respectfully remind you that this isn't the old days. There aren't twelve of me taking this in shifts. It's just me here. So if this needs to be done—if this storm needs to be turned, if this place needs to be tended—I need you lot to open up the throttle a bit. Please."

She stands, and smokes, and waits. The rain soaks into her pants. The smudge bundle smolders at her feet. When the first cigarette is finished—after grinding out the filter and carefully wrapping it into an old cloth in her satchel—she lights a fresh one.

The rain falls harder.

Her mind drifts.

What if you're just crazy?

She tries to push the thought away, but it persists. 

What if this is all just in your head? 

What if you're just a deluded con artist, selling false hope and fantastic lies to people like Brian and Janet, not to mention to yourself? 

She shakes her head briskly.

The sea never wanted you here.

You're just a lunatic who talked herself into feeling special and got lucky. 

There are no ancient powers calling to you. 

It's all in your head.

You have no place here.

Standing out in the rain chasing ghosts, pretending this is all some fucking fairy tale. Like a child. Except even children have sense enough to know that none of this is real. 

Josh should have thrown you out months ago.

Back to the pub, which is all you deserve, and from there to the asylum, which is where you belong.

Just a foolish woman with no home, no family, no savings, no plan, no retirement. Bound for one of those beige-plastic penal colonies, where the elderly poor are warehoused until they expire, where nothing waits for them, where there is no veil to cross through, where there is only a zippered plastic shroud and an industrial incinerator and the suffocating, silent void.

Tears gather in her eyes.

She recognizes dimly that this must be the match-breaking imp, seeing her vulnerability, stirring her doubts to feed off her frustration. Even knowing this, she's too exhausted to fight it off.

"Please," she whispers.

A rustle of feathers pulls her back to herself. Looking up, she sees a raven perched on one of the still-standing stones.

Her mind fumbles for a formal greeting, flowery and dignified. "Hey," she says.

A second raven alights next to the first.

Her heart swells.

Still favored.

As she sinks to her knees on the wet ground at the circle's center, her mind is filled with thoughts of all those others who came before her.

Here are the ones who quarried the stones and pulled them upright, gave them purpose—made them greater than the simple rock still bound within the earth. 

Here are those who gave their lives to carving the pathways between this world and the realms beyond, through doubt and darkness, so that we might be lifted up from this muddy world.

Here are the people who found themselves tossed from an angry sea onto this narrow spit of land, and dug in, and buried their parents and their mates and sometimes their children in its gravelly soil; who cursed and struck futile sparks from unforgiving flints, until the damp wood they dragged from haunted forests finally kindled and burned away the fog; who raised up a camp, and then a settlement, and then a village.

Here are the circled stones, reminding the island that it is more than just an undrowned patch of dirt, and reminding its people that they are more than just the not-yet-dead who toil on in rugged fields.

Here am I, to carry on the work.

She takes a deep breath and climbs to her feet, ignoring the ache in her bad leg. The ravens watch her patiently. As she stands, she feels her fatigue fall away, washed by the rain. Her vision snaps into sharp focus. Auras glow everywhere she looks.

Maybe all you get is a story, she thinks. But sometimes a good story is all you need.

"Thank you," she says to the stones, bowing deeply. "I'll be back with more offerings once I've dealt with this fucking storm." 

Gods willing, she thinks. 

Thunder booms. 

The ravens fly off to find better shelter as the rain falls harder. She hunches into the thin cover of her coat and turns back toward the path to the cottage, down from the cliffs, leaving the circle of stones empty and silent once again.