The Hex Witch of Seldom by Nancy Springer

Author:Nancy Springer
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781453294079
Publisher: Open Road Media Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Chapter Eleven

Old Bissel (or the old pisser, as Bobbi took to calling him in her mind) lived half a mile up the Seldom road and back in the woods. She and Shane did not take the road, of course, but walked through the woods, Shane with one hoof in a heavy sock, Bobbi at the horse’s side. They had to keep close enough to the road so that they could find their way, but hide from the headlights of the occasional car that passed. Between cars, the night was very dark. Bobbi rested a hand on Shane’s shoulder so as to stay with him. The other hand swung empty. Witchie had packed spare clothes and some food in a brown paper bag, but the old Dutchwoman had been so generous with the food, making the bag so heavy, that Bobbi was to stop back for it. Bobbi thought of Witchie with mingled affection and annoyance, remembering the supper of rice soup, the goodbyes complicated by gifts of bananas and cheese and bread and corn chips and Lebanon bologna. Witchie had distracted Ethel with a ringing telephone while Bobbi and Shane had slipped out into the night, just in case old eagle-eye Ethel might see anything.… The day had been tiring, too full of danger and decisions and weirdness, and it was not over yet. Stumbling over rocks and stumps in the dark …

At a small distance, in the black interstices of the woods, Bobbi saw something drift whitely.

“No,” she muttered. It hovered ahead, the way she and Shane had to go, and it seemed to be waiting for them.

“Bobbi.” The voice sounded inside her head—her father’s voice, which she had never heard. Not in any real way. Just in this ghostly farce. She couldn’t stand it. Too much.

“No,” she said aloud. “No more. Not today.”

“Bobbi!” Urgently.

She didn’t like people talking inside her head, and with a surge of angry energy she sent the voice away. Her anger crackled in her mind. She had her own urgent business to attend to.

“I tell you no!” she shouted at the woods. “Not now! I ain’t talking to no buck’s behind now!”

Scared, the deer bobbed away. If it was a deer. She didn’t hear anything above her own noise, and she couldn’t tell. A deer wouldn’t have waited for them to come so close … she didn’t care.

Shane swung his head curiously when she shouted, then continued on his way. She wondered briefly what he had seen or heard. Too much trouble to ask him. She stumbled on through the dark.

Her feet found open flatness, the grit of gravel. Samuel Bissel’s long driveway. A relief. But the stones were sharp underfoot; Shane hobbled. Bobbi felt the hitch in his gait through his shoulder, where her palm still rested.

The house loomed dim ahead. No electric lights for the Amishman. Though he was no Amishman in fact, Bobbi knew, but one of the Circle in that form, if she understood correctly.

Old Bissel came out to meet them like a shadow in the night, standing on his rickety porch with a candle in a lantern.

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