The Honey Witch

Chapter XXVI





My parent’s brownstone in Boston is vacant for most of the year, and it was with some relief that I entered the foyer to complete silence and a feeling of refuge. Here, there would be neither curious inquiries nor unconcealed reproach over any objection to answer.

I dropped off my travel luggage and took a cab to the university biology lab, leaving the unspecified blue poke specimen with Alan Hughes, who, not unlike my sister, Nina, questioned my appearance. I engaged in the obligations of civilization: balancing bank funds and securing flight schedules, making phone calls, hailing cabs and dodging street traffic.

During the ensuing days, I fulfilled the penalties of urban civilization and at night, I feared to dream. I ordered out for Chinese cuisine each evening and each evening dropped cash into the hands of a bemused delivery boy, who eyed my careworn presence at the Broughton door with marked suspicion.

After four days, I finally shaved off the bristle on my face, which seemed to lighten my mood and the delivery boy’s apprehension.

I stared at the piano, from across the parlor room, on one particular evening and fought an urge to allow my hands to touch the keys. I was grateful when the telephone rang and heard Alan Hughes’ voice on the other end of the line.

“Broughton, where did you come across this extraordinary specimen?”

“In Maine.”

“And it was the only one you found?”

“Yes.”

“Well, we’ve got to find another. Send some people there. The enzymes present in this plant are incredible. It contains antibodies within a bonding agent that could potentially prevent or even arrest postoperative infection. Of course, I will need to study it further, but with only one sample, it becomes problematic. You’re absolutely certain this is the only specimen you were able to retrieve?”

“The only one, yes.”

“What were the growing conditions?”

“A mossy undergrowth.”

“What were you doing in Maine anyway? I thought you talked last March about the Smokey Mountains or some other God forsaken place?”

“Change of plans,” I told him. “It was all quite happenstance, as I explained the other day. The stem fluid appeared to bond to a scrape on my hand, prompting me to get your opinion. I don’t know what else to tell you right now.”

“Well, there has to be others. This can’t just be some anomaly. There weren’t any seedpods in this sample. Are you going back there anytime soon?”

“Not for awhile,” I explained. “I’m returning overseas early next week.”

“I can send some people, maybe, if you could give the location. Hell, I’ll go myself.”

“Hold off on that,” I advised, perhaps too quickly. “I will get in touch with some friends and ask them to keep an eye for any further growth. We don’t need to go on a chase until we have a better idea on the location and quantity.”

“Let me know immediately when you hear anything.”

“I will.”

I hung up the receiver, knowing I would never have the answer for him. What I wanted was the authentication of the plant’s properties, outside any analysis of my own and through an act of artifice, I now had it. Reaching over, I reviewed the printout of extensive lab tests taken the week before. The results were all negative. There was no substance to find. If my experience on Porringer had been chemically induced, the traces had already filtered through.

The pain in my rib had been caused by a hairline fracture, the bruising worse than the injury. The area remained tender, of which I was promptly reminded while taking down a cache of notebooks from the top shelf in the study. I spread the books on the big oak desk, turned on the green shaded lamp and read through the notes, page by intricate page. The background metric of rhythmic ticking from the wall clock pendulum chimed each hour, one by painstaking one.

At the 2:00 AM chime, I found the yellowing page of an unsent correspondence, pressed inside a brittle envelope:

My Dear Friend,

After considering the information contained in Corporal Andrew Selby’s diary, dated the 12th of September, 1863, that so clearly matched my own encounter, I made the discovery of another incident from England in 1580, France in 1656 and Holland in 1732. On a visit to Regensburg, in 1954, I found yet another occurrence had been documented as recent as 1942 and as far back as 1412, at a remote hamlet near the edge of the Bavarian Forest. Each of these tales centered on a strangely pale young woman and the miraculous healing of a mortal wound.

On further study, at the library in Florence, I uncovered 15th Century documents recording what was then regarded as The Evangeline Heresy: a healing tome reputed to be used by particular women healers, condemned as Evangeline Witches during the Inquisitions scattered between the 14th and 16th Centuries. Where the term, Evangeline, originated was never entirely clear, but neither herbal nor reputed witch who utilized one was ever found, and the ensuing centuries made myth of both.

As God as my witness, I believe it to be no myth and that I have committed an unforgivable trespass in sacrificing the unborn of my first son to save my own miserable life.

I separated the notebook with the hidden envelope from the others.

Your grandaddy promised the witch something...

It was through the exchange of blood, by happenstance or purpose, I knew this now, that the women could find what they needed. It was no coincidence that Aaron knew I would be at the conference in Chicago. Being half in love with Ana, himself, he would do anything she required of him.

To have stayed beyond my initial intention, even at my own peril, was simply out of morbid curiosity.

Curiosity killed the cat, Wort Doctor...

Yes, Ana, I know.

But I could not know I would come to care as deeply for you as I do...even now.

She knows about you. She knows all about you.

Yes, Ana, you do.

On the following Monday, I took a cab to the airport. On the flight over the Atlantic, I could not expel the haunt of something vital to my existence having been entirely dismantled.

And I missed her with an ache that felt like a split in the very center of the soul.





~*~