Spook Lights: Southern Gothic Horror (13 page)

Grace shook her head.

“He’ll get close to smell you, check you out. Don’t run and you’ll be fine. Run and it’s the end of you, skin or no.”

“I understand.”

“Um hm.” Heat rushed into Grace’s face as the witch’s gaze journeyed over her.  “What do you have to offer?”

“Offer?” Grace’s jaw went slack. “I don’t have anything. I thought—”

“You thought me that generous?” The creature extended a hand ending in gnarled, overgrown claws. “Or were you proposing an exchange?”

This time Grace held her ground. “No!”

“Good girl,” the hag said, approval evident in her tone. “Now what do you have that I might want?”

“Money?”

Another shriek. “Try again.”

“My car?”

“We fly, girl. On the wind or without it.” Her smile returned. “You could owe me.”

Grace rubbed her arms for warmth even in the balmy night air. Part of her wanted to run away and check into a hotel. To leave at first light and forget that she ever lived on this island. Reinvent herself again. “Okay,” she whispered. “But what is a plat-eye?”

“Pieces of dead animals put together and brought back to life.” The hag reached up to her mane of coarse graying hair. As Grace watched, it appeared she was going to smooth it with her palms. Instead, she parted the mass of steel wool hair and pulled. With a sucking pop, the hide separated and the hag shrugged it off like a winter coat. The skin swung in the air like a hanged man. “You don’t know nothing about what you getting mixed up in and well, I’m sorry for you.”

Rogue thoughts dashed through her mind, chased by the thought of Pop’s scrawled words in the old Bible she found tucked in an old shoebox.

I was a good man before you.

Grace reached for the skin and it came toward her, lowering itself several inches to her height. Even with the eye sockets empty, the hide seemed to be looking at her, assessing her worthiness to wear it. Where she touched it, the skin felt cool like crisp bed linen. Her stomach roiled and she suppressed a shudder before she stepped into the opening down the back, clothes and all.

Inside the skin was hot, sticky with blood and ripe with the scent of bowel. Grace gagged at the moist, dank stench. “You can do this, Grace,” she muttered. She held her breath as she pulled it over her face and it sealed itself closed. With a bit of adjusting she was able to breathe from the mouth and nose and see out of the eyeholes, but the world had a strange look, as though it were covered in plastic wrap. For a moment, the skin hung loose as it had on the witch, then it fused itself to her body with a rubbery snap. “Oh God,” she gasped, the shells on her braids pressing into the tender skin of her neck.

The hag didn’t comment on her blasphemous outcry. Instead, she leapt into the air, calling over her shoulder. “Be back by sunup or I’m coming for my hide.”

“How do I get there?”

“Skinny knows the way.” Before she could respond, the hag flew away, leaving Grace alone as the shuffling sounds of the night returned to the woods.

Walking was no easy task in the weighty husk. Each movement was the result of deliberate thought and twice the usual amount of effort. Grace was panting by the time she crossed the woods and reached the borders of the overgrown plot of land where her father had supposedly laid her mother to rest. She’d been so focused on moving that Grace was almost on top of the guard beast before she saw it.

The creature’s wide back reached Grace’s waist and it was covered in various types of fur: long and black and shaggy in some places, smooth and golden and close to its barrel-shaped body in others. She stood stock still as it approached. The plat-eye’s pig snout twitched as it sniffed at her offered hand. Then it prodded her with its yellowing tusks. When it bumped its head under her hand, she realized what it wanted. Grace petted the dog-pig thing, ruffling its dusty, mismatched fur. The plat-eye snorted, sat back on its four hind legs and purred. 

“I can pet you more later, but I need to find the grave you’re guarding.” She saw a mound covered in creeping ivy a few paces away. “Is that it?”

Grace knelt at the bottom of the mound and began to dig. She’d brought the small spade, but the hag skin didn’t need it. It sensed she was trying to break through packed dirt and black earth. It rippled, fusing her thumb to the rest of her fingers to form her hands into makeshift shovels.

The plat-eye sat on its rear hind legs and scratched itself with one of its fore-hinds before coming over to investigate. It helped her dig; scratching the black dirt with paws the size of her palm. Movement was no easier as she grunted with the exertion of bending the bulky hide to her will. She was hot, sweating, trapped inside the skin with her own fear and her father’s words.

So I used it, LuAnn. That little bit of magic you taught me. Pieces of animals I found. Only one I had to kill myself. When it rose up from the ground, I ain’t shame to say I almost wet myself. Never seen nothing like that thing. Almost turned on me before I could finish the hex. But I did it. It’s roaming round that tombstone. Nobody can get near, ’cept maybe you.

But you gone, ain’t you, LuAnn? Left me with this child. I can raise her. Done a damn good job so far. But the girl is smart, starting to ask questions about her Ma.

Grace dug faster. Inhaling the turned dirt made her cough. Not enough time. Her digging became frantic as the words that fell from the Bible pages flew at her with each scoop of earth.

Had to make the headstone myself. Couldn’t tell no one. Killing my wife. What righteous man does that?

She hit a hard spot. Grace slowed, used her spade-like hands to find the edges of the wooden box as the plat-eye whined. She soothed it. “Shh. It’s okay, boy. We have to know, right?”

The dog-pig snorted, its tusks dark from rooting in the moist dirt. It crouched close by, red eyes solemn and watchful.

She wedged one of her shovel shaped hands under the lid of the handmade coffin. Grace had to stand up to get enough leverage to wedge it loose. For a moment she paused, questioning her own logic.  Maybe it was better not to know.

What has been seen cannot be unseen
.
Grace couldn’t remember where she’d heard those words, but at this moment, she believed that nothing could be truer. She’d come this far, making deals with blue-skinned crones, digging up her mother’s grave by crescent moonlight.

Suppose Ma was in here and Pop had killed her. She ran the scoop of her hand along the loosened lid imagining a filthy, worm-eaten dress still showing slashes from a knife. Flaky blood dried to a spice color.  She kept up a whispered litany
:
I want to know. I want to know
.
The hag’s hide shimmered again and her fingers and thumb separated into hands.

Before she could change her mind, she threw off the coffin’s lid.

Grace stood over the open box, eyes shut tight. She didn’t open them until she felt the dog-thing winding around her legs, its fur bristly and its heavy tail thumping her leg, pushing her forward and off-balance.

Her eyes flew open. She put out her hands and landed on her knees, braced against the rough edges of the box. Splinters broke off the coffin and stuck in the blue. Grace didn’t have the dexterity with her borrowed fingers to pull them out, so she left them where they were and looked inside.

There was no body.

A dress lay settled into a deep layer of brown dust: delicate white eyelet, now turned dry and tea-colored. Its long sleeves crossed over each other as though the wearer had been laid out lovingly and with reverence. Where the hands should have been, moonlight glinted off a small gold band. Grace plucked it from the box, the touch of her hand causing the papery dress to crumble into powder. 

***

Close to sunup, Grace waited in the fleeing dark for the hag. She wasn’t any wiser than she’d been when the night started. Her muscles hurt. Itchy with sweat, she was boiling inside the borrowed skin. All attempts to relieve her itch were blocked by the hag’s thick hide. It was like trying to scratch herself through a blanket.

Mossy oak branches above her head rustled and the witch glided down to stand across from her. The scent of wood smoke surrounded her and the reflective eyes were sharp, assessing her skin and its wearer.

“Find what you looking for?”

“No.” She was too tired to elaborate or notice the hag had drifted closer.

The hag whistled a short tune and the skin sprang to attention, dragging Grace up in the air, shaking her as it struggled to dislodge her body. She fell to the ground with a grunt.

After she made a sympathetic noise in Grace’s direction, the hag asked for her payment. Grace looked at the bloody body standing next to its blue skin as they both gazed down at her. She pressed her back against the bark of the oak, exhausted and ready for this search to end. “I don’t have anything. There was a coffin but the dress inside crumbled when I touched it.”

Her sight hadn’t adjusted after being inside the skin for so long. Everything still had a tight, shiny look to it and it was giving her a headache. Grace closed her eyes. Funny how the pain only started after the skin left her.

“All I found was this.” She held the ring aloft.

With surprising gentleness, the witch accepted her payment. She was quiet so long that Grace opened her eyes. The world was lighter. Morning would break soon, but Grace was the only one aware of it.

“Your Pop was the kind of man all the girls wanted. Good-looking and didn’t know it. But he saw me one night when I was wearing a new skin. Told me right then he was determined to marry me.” The hag laughed without mirth, her voice thick with emotion. “Like a fool, I let him.”

Grace sat dumbfounded, covered in foul-smelling gore, dried leaves and grit. And listened.

“Even wore this ring for a while. He had a root lady put a love spell on it, but I didn’t mind him trying to trap me.” She twisted the band of metal in her bent claws. “I already loved him. But soon, it was too much. Too tight. I got tired of that skin. Never taking it off. Never changing.”

“What did you do?” It was her own story spoken to her through wide blue lips and she knew the answer. Run. Just as she’d done before this trip home.

“I wanted to tear it loose. Fling that skin far as I could. But one full moon Sunday night, you came, all sweet and fresh and new. And the feeling went away for a while. Then it returned, stronger.” The hag took a deep trembling breath. “I had to go.”

“Pop must have hated you.”

“He knew one day I’d leave. Knew I’d try to come back, too. So he made me shed the face he loved, my whole skin.” Her laugh was bitter. “Without me inside, it couldn’t last. A few days, maybe. Then it dries up into nothing.”

Grace pressed her fingertips to her temples to stop the heated throb behind her eyes. “I don’t understand.”

“It was so I couldn’t be ‘her’ for anyone else.” She knelt in front of Grace. “He buried that skin like he was having a funeral for me. Then he painted the house blue—my blue—knowing I couldn’t enter after he did it, so I could never come back for you.”

“He wouldn’t,” Grace pulled crumpled oak leaves from her pants. “He used to say he wished LuAnn could be here.”

“He didn’t consider me to be LuAnn any more. That was what he called me up until I was leaving.” She stood. “Won’t tell you what he called me then.”

Grace remembered the falling pages. Shaky confessions written in knife-sharpened pencil. “He knew you were a… a….”

“Yes, and he thought he could fix me. Stop my roaming. But no.” No-longer-LuAnn lifted her moist, patent leather eyes and Grace saw the muscles in her jaw and neck tighten. “Now do you understand why you can’t stay with no man? His love gets too tight for you and you have to get loose or choke to death.”

Grace leaned her head back against the tree, the shells on her braids a wind chime in the night. Memories of men she’d cared for danced to the unbidden tune. She was happy until they wanted to know where she was and what she was doing. They wanted to be able to tell her no and it was then she had to leave. Now her memories no longer included any of the men’s names or faces. “But I want someone to love me,” she whispered, ashamed of the admission.

“Never said you couldn’t have love. Just not the choking kind.” The witch blinked as the darkness of night lifted. “A time comes for all of us to change. No one is the same always.” Quickly, she stepped into her skin, the one that changed—shed each person she no longer needed to be.

“Are you leaving?” Grace asked. She was full of more questions now than she’d been before she’d come.

“I have to go. For now.” Grace thought she heard a hint of hesitation in her mother’s smooth voice. “But I’ll be here… around.”

“Do something for me?” Grace asked.

“Not screaming to be rid of me yet?”

“You’re my Ma,” she said. The exertions of the night had caught up with her and she yawned. “Free the dog-thing. Nothing should be forced to stay in one place.”

“Think you already did, my girl.” 

Grace turned and watched the plat-eye chase the last of the fireflies through the woods, leaping and pawing at them until he faded into the morning. When she turned back, her mother was gone.