Originally published 2022, in the Blood Sins anthology released by Eerie River Publishing. Edited by Holley Cornetto & S.O. Green.
First thing you need to know is, my name’s Judson Crane. I’ll be the one telling this story, since I reckon I’m the one that can tell it best. But this story ain’t about me; not really. It’s about my sister, Mirabelle.
Second thing you need to know is, I’m dead. But we’ll get to that part later.
Mirabelle’s story starts one afternoon in July of 1892, when she and I were hunting in the Wytchwood. The Wytchwood is the old forest that surrounds our hometown of Fyffe, West Virginia. That wood was full strange. It seemed to be in a constant tug of war with itself, between the areas that had turned black from the blight spreading from the nearby mountains and the other areas that were still hale and green.
Mirabelle often told me she thought the blight was winning. She could see me just fine and hear me in her head. “Like a pair of second thoughts,” she’d say. We tried our best to stick to the green parts of the wood, but sometimes we couldn’t help it—you had to go where the food was. By that time, though, it felt like there was less and less food to be found in the Wytchwood at all.
That hot and humid July day, I meandered out in the woods while Mirabelle waited under an old pine tree with Daddy’s .22 rifle. Since critters are more sensitive to haints than you’d think, I’d go out and try and spook them back toward Mirabelle, letting her know which way they were coming. It worked pretty well, I thought. So, I let her know the mangy, skinny squirrel I was spooking toward her was coming, and when it skittered across her line of sight, Mirabelle shot it. The sound rocked the wood like a tiny peal of thunder.
It was always a creepy sort of quiet out there; that’s not to say there were never any sounds at all, cause there were, just not much. Birds might chirp here and there, but not often, and when they did, it was short and hushed like they were afraid their song might wake something up.
Good shot, I said, hovering near Mirabelle as she bent over the dead squirrel and tied its feet together with the string she kept in her pocket. She looked terrible there in the sun, wearing a pair of our older brother Henry’s overalls, rifle slung over her shoulder; she was dirty, thin, and barefoot, eyes sunken deep into her face.
Mirabelle sniffled, wiping away the sweat dripping down her blond curls and into her eyes. “Nothing good about it.”
You gotta eat, Belle, I said. She didn’t much like killing things, even to eat.
“Don’t mean I gotta like it. And it ain’t like it’ll be enough for me and Daddy and Henry, neither.”
It’ll have to do.
“Easy for you to say,” Mirabelle said.
“Who’re you talking to, child?”
Mirabelle went still as a beanpole; I could see the little hairs on the back of her neck standing on end, like lightning was about to strike from on high. The voice scared me too. It wasn’t a voice we recognized. And when you lived like us, cast out like lepers, well, you tend not to trust nobody, especially strangers.
My sister turned and pulled the rifle from her shoulder; I peered out from behind her. An old woman stood just a few yards yonder. She had her frazzled, white hair up in a bun, but stray strands shot off in every direction like little forks of lightning. She wore a knitted brown shawl over a dirty dress. She was only a few inches taller than Mirabelle with her back bent like it was, and her spotted skin was as wrinkled as her dress. Her icy-blue eyes hovered like crescent moons above a yellow smile.
A pair of newly killed rabbits dangled from a length of frayed rope she held; they looked too healthy for any critter found here in the Wytchwood.
The old woman looked right at me.
“Oh,” she said.
My belly felt sick; well, not my belly, I guess, me being a haint and all, but I had that bad feeling, like something was terribly wrong. There was this black, oily shimmer around the old lady, which was mighty strange, seeing as most living folk had a faint white shimmer around them.
I ain’t never heard her out there, I said to Mirabelle. That was mighty strange too, since I heard most everything. Ain’t never heard her come up on us neither.
But Mirabelle wasn’t listening to me.
“You’re her,” Mirabelle said, “Old Lady—”
“Granny Bigelow,” the woman said.
Old Lady Bigelow or Granny Bigelow, it didn’t much matter what name she went by: she was bad people. Least ways, that’s what everyone said around town.
Belle, I said, trying to get her attention.
Granny Bigelow glanced at me again, and if my heart hadn’t already been stopped, I’m sure it would’ve stopped right then and there.
“Ain’t none of it true, dearie,” Granny said.
“What ain’t?” Mirabelle asked.
“Well, all of it,” Granny said. “All them things they says about me. I ain’t no witch. Just a lonely old woman, thought poorly of, trying to survive without the kindness of neighbors. Same as you.”
“How’s that?”
“I hear them things they says about you. About your family. The sad, bad things that done happened to you and yours.”
Mirabelle looked away and chewed her lip. I tried to grab her hand to pull her away, but my hand just went through hers like it always has since I’ve been dead. No matter how many times I tried, I was always forgetting I couldn’t touch nothing.
“I know ain’t none of it your fault, neither,” Granny said.
Belle, I said, something’s not—
“Where you find them?” Mirabelle asked, pointing to the rabbits.
“Out here, same as you. Just gotta know where to look, is all.”
But she come from the blight, I said. We’d never found any critter as healthy-looking as those rabbits out that way.
Mirabelle nodded, finally hearing me. “But you coming from the blight.”
“Ain’t all blight out that way,” Granny said.
I don’t trust her, I said. We shouldn’t trust her.
“I don’t—” but Mirabelle caught herself before agreeing out loud with me.
Granny cocked her head. “What, now, child?”
“I didn’t know that,” Mirabelle said. “About the blight. Thought it was all bad.”
“Aw, honey, ain’t nothing all bad. Most times, it's a bit of both.”
C’mon, Belle. We should get on home…
“Gotta head home,” Mirabelle said. She nodded to the old woman and turned away. We started back the way we’d come, back toward the other side of town. Toward home.
“Not much of a meal,” Granny called after us. “Why don’t you come by my place? I’ll fix you a proper meal.”
Please, Belle, let’s just go, I said. She ain’t safe.
We sprinted through the woods, trying to get as far from the old woman as we could.
I did look over my shoulder as we ran, just once, but the old crone had already melted back among the trees.
***
Mirabelle made a watery stew with the squirrel she’d shot, but there was so little meat to the darn thing it ended up not much more than a mess of murky water flecked with bits of tough, stringy meat. Daddy spat most of his up and refused to finish his bowl; Henry spilt most of his on himself, rocking back and forth like he always did when he wasn’t asleep. Not long after she’d downed her portion of the stew and drunk the water she’d pumped from the well out behind the house, Mirabelle’s stomach was growling again. I could tell it was cramping too, the way she’d bend ever so slightly and place a hand over her stomach.
Still, Mirabelle was strong. She never stopped doing what had to be done.
She got Daddy and Henry all cleaned up and took them both upstairs to the room they shared, the room that had once been our daddy and mama’s bedroom. She got Daddy settled in his cot and put Henry in the corner of the room at the foot of his bed, just beneath the window he liked so much; he wrapped his arms around his knees and went back to rocking. Every now and then, he let out a little moan, but nothing loud. Not like Daddy did all through the nights, when his pain was worst. Mirabelle checked Henry’s ears to make sure he hadn’t been picking at his scars again, then closed the door and we went down the creaking stairs to the main level where she slept.
Like the rest of the house, the main level was dark, and mildewed something bad too. Most of the wood had gone rotten a long time ago, or was working its way there quick. Spiders and silverfish skittered all over the place; when I was alive, I hated creepy-crawlies, so it was a relief to know they couldn’t touch me anymore. Mold grew in the corners of the house, fed by dark and wet; there was some mold even growing in the back of the fireplace, where the rainwater that trickled down the broken chimney grew stagnant.
Seeing as I misted through everything I touched, I couldn’t stand or sit, so I just floated near the foot of the old mattress Mirabelle kept in the middle of the room that included our kitchen. She slumped down onto the mattress and pulled her tattered blanket over herself. Her stomach growled like tumbling rocks.
Want me to fetch you some mice? I asked.
“Uh-uh,” Mirabelle said. “Last time about killed me.”
I’d forgotten how sick the mice had made her. I scratched at my ghostly head. You thinking about that witch?
“Who says she a witch, anyway? What she done that’s so…witchy?”
She disappeared from the Wytchwood as soon as we run off, I said.
Mirabelle huffed. “How you know that?”
She weren’t there when I looked back.
“Listen to yourself, Judson. She a witch cause you lost sight of her while we was running home?”
Something ain’t right about her, Belle.
“But what? You ain’t said what ain’t right about her. Neither do folk in town. You all just say, she bad, and, she a witch. Well, so what? She got enough food to keep us living. What if we over here starving ‘cause of old wives’ tales and rumors?”
Besides telling her about the oily black shimmer I’d seen around Granny, there wasn’t anything I could say that Mirabelle would’ve taken as gospel.
I don’t rightly know, I said. The way I ain’t ever sensed her out in the ‘Wood… That scares me. Scares me bad. Nothing on God’s green Earth that quiet. Nothing but…
I gestured at myself.
Mirabelle said nothing for a while.
“We been all over the Wytchwood, ain’t we?” she asked finally.
Sure, I said.
“And we ain’t never find no healthy critters like them rabbits she found.”
Not ever.
“That full strange.”
Sure is.
“Still,” Mirabelle said. “What if she right? What if she know some place in the ‘Wood where we find good meat like that?”
What if she lying? I asked. What then?
“Don’t know,” Mirabelle said. Her eyes watered. “Alls I know, Judson, I ain’t survive another winter. Not like this. Not Daddy or Henry neither.”
I would’ve given anything to hug her right then.
We could speak to Mr. Grayson again.
Mirabelle laughed, a sound as tired and worn-out as she was. “You forgetting what he said last time.”
I thought for a moment, searching for the memory; since I’d been dead and buried, sometimes my head got all jumbled and things got lost.
Oh.
I winced. The memory came back: the pained look on the gray-haired man’s face, the way he kept looking at the floor when he said: “That house is Company property. Belongs to the Grangers. We’d be well within our rights evicting you, since your daddy and brother don’t work for us no more, and ain’t nobody paying us for that house. But we don’t do that, cause it ain’t Christ-like. We’ve more than shown our share of charity to your family, Ms. Crane. Now, please, don’t come back. For your daddy and brother’s sakes.”
Mirabelle was crying now.
Then hows ‘bout Mrs. Hodgkins? I asked. We only asked her that once…
“I ain’t never asking that wicked woman another thing. Not ever.”
Mirabelle squeezed her eyes shut; I wished I hadn’t suggested it.
“Your daddy or mammy must’ve done something unforgivable for God to hate your family like He does,” Mrs. Hodgkin’s pretty face had said. She’d said it loud enough that the seamstresses working in her store on Main Street could hear it clear. “Good Christian woman like myself is charged with staying far away from the likes of you Cranes, lest I soil my own soul. Bad company corrupteth good manners, saith the Word of the Lord. Please leave and do not come back. Not until the Lord has had His way with you.”
I’m sorry, Belle, I said. Sorry I’m so bad at remembering.
Mirabelle shook her head and opened her mouth, but there was a loud thump on the front porch, just outside the door. She cried out and grasped her blanket to her chest.
I moved to the door and put my head through it. I reckon there’s not much in this world that’s as full-strange an experience as floating through solid objects; your brain screams you’re about to hurt yourself, collide with something solid, but you don’t.
A cloth-covered pot had been left on the porch, but the overgrown street in front of our house was empty except for the sound of insects and nightbirds. I popped my head back inside.
It’s just a pot of something, I told Mirabelle. Piece of paper on it, too.
“Nobody out there?”
Nuh-uh. No one.
Mirabelle got up from the mattress, opened the door and quickly brought the pot inside. She set it down on our kitchen table and took the torn strip of paper pinned to the cloth covering it. She hadn’t had much schooling, but she’d had enough.
What’s it say? I asked.
“Give me a chance, dearie,” Mirabelle read.
She uncovered the pot, and her eyes widened as a smile brightened her tired face.
“Roast rabbit!”
***
Granny Bigelow’s homestead wasn’t really a house—it was more a pile of old wood and stone topped by a moldering thatch roof. It loomed dark and lonely on the outskirts of town, on the edge of the Wytchwood. Looking at Granny’s place, I could understand why everyone reckoned her a witch: even her home looked the part. But then, our house didn’t look much better.
Mayhap things ain’t always what they seem, Mirabelle thought, as we approached Granny’s door. Sometimes she’d forget I could hear her thinking just as well as I could hear her talking.
Mayhap they’re exactly what they seem, I said.
“I told you, stop listening to my thoughts,” Mirabelle said.
And I told you, I can’t help it.
Mirabelle huffed and raised her hand to knock on Granny’s door, then hesitated.
Even after Granny had left the roast rabbit on our doorstep that first night, and after she’d come again every night after that, leaving food on our porch, Mirabelle still wasn’t sure of the old woman. Neither of us were. It’s hard getting past things you learn as a kid, especially the prejudices taught as gospel truth. Eventually, though, the roast rabbit, the venison stew, and the cooked ground-birds won out.
Granny had kept my sister and daddy and brother from starving to death.
“She’s our last hope,” Mirabelle said, as much to me as herself.
She knocked.
The door creaked open on rusted hinges and there was Granny, peering out from the dim space between the door and the frame. Fire flickered behind her, outlining her in orange and yellow. She smiled.
“Well now,” Granny said, waving Mirabelle inside. “Been hoping you come on by.”
She shut the door behind us.
Inside, Granny’s home was as old and dark as it was outside. The only light besides what came from the fireplace at the back of the room came in through a dirty window at the other side of the house. Bunches of plants lined the sill, with more arranged in the dirt beneath it. They looked like weeds, mostly—not the kinds of plants someone would keep watered and healthy, especially inside their home. Against the other wall, behind a circular wooden table with three legs propped up by pieces of broken shale, sat a dirty mattress topped with a raggedy blanket.
I heard a skittering sound, like tiny nails clawing dirt, and then a black, plump shape hidden among the plants startled and bolted past the fireplace, disappearing into a hole in a far corner behind Granny. It looked like it might’ve been a rat, but I wasn’t sure. Guess maybe my being there spooked it.
Granny made no sign that she’d noticed the critter. Instead, she hobbled over to the fire, stirred whatever was boiling in the pot there, then moved to the table and sat in one of the two chairs. She motioned Mirabelle over.
My belly started feeling sick again, and it got worse anytime I focused on the black oil shimmering around Granny.
Belle, I said, as Mirabelle sat herself at the table across from the old woman, we really shouldn’t—
“Now, now,” Granny said, looking right at me, pinning me to the door with her gaze. “No need to be afeared, my boy.”
Mirabelle stiffened. “You can—”
Granny nodded.
“I thought I were the only one,” Mirabelle said.
Granny waved me over to the table. “I ain’t mean you or your darling sister no harm, child. You’re safe with ol’ Granny. Promise.”
I shook my head and clenched my jaw shut. There was no way I was going anywhere near that woman, especially now that I knew she could see and hear haints.
Granny sighed.
“Sorry about him,” Mirabelle said. “He just protective, is all. And he ain’t met no one but me as can see or hear him.”
“Oh, I understand,” Granny said, smiling at me. The smile made me feel cold-like. Well, colder than normal; I was always feeling cold. She turned her attention back to Mirabelle. “Did you enjoy the food, dearie?”
“Yes’m,” Mirabelle said. “But why’d you do that? Why now?”
“How d’you mean?” Granny said. “You was hungry, so I brung you food.”
Mirabelle shook her head. “No, I know that. I meant how come you brung us food now, but never before? All them other times we was starving. Why d’you care now, all out of the blue?”
“Aw, honey, it ain’t like that. I ain’t never seen you before, is all. Not til that day out in the ‘Wood. I hear about your family, sure, but I hear lotsa things. Can’t believe it all. And since I ain’t never seen you or your family, at least up close, I never knew what y’all were going through. Soon as I seen you in the ‘Wood, seen you underfed and starving, well, I reckoned there must be some truth to what I hear, and I reckoned you need some help. And when you act so scared of me, well, I reckoned I better make clear I only means you good.”
Mirabelle sobbed like a baby. I was about to move from the door, but Granny got up from her chair, knelt before Mirabelle, and pulled her into her arms. Mirabelle just cried harder and louder with Granny’s arms around her.
“Aw, now, honey,” Granny whispered. “Aw, now, baby girl. It’s okay, now. Granny got you. Just you cry, child. Just you cry. Granny got you. Granny got you now.”
Belle, I said, aching something fierce to reach out and hug my sister, but a look from Granny froze me in place.
After a while, Mirabelle’s crying became sniffling and she stopped shaking. Granny pulled back and wiped hair from Mirabelle’s face, leaving dark smudges from her dirty fingers. I worried some of her oily shimmer might get on Mirabelle, but I reckon it don’t work like that.
“Now, child,” Granny said. “What say you tell ol’ Granny your story while she fix us some supper, huh?”
“What story?” Mirabelle asked.
“Your story,” Granny said. “You and your family’s. I only hear what the townfolk say, and Lord know if that true. I wanna hear you tell it, in your own words. The truth, dearie.”
“The truth?”
Granny nodded and got to her feet. She turned to the pot and ladled stew into two earthenware bowls she kept stacked in the dirt next to the fireplace. With her back turned, I finally got up the courage to join Mirabelle. I hovered behind her chair, peering over her shoulder, always eyeing Granny.
Granny returned, placed two steaming bowls of stew on the table, and sat down.
Belle, I said. Don’t—
“Shush,” Mirabelle said. She took a deep breath, and told Granny our story.
***
It all happened after Mirabelle turned thirteen.
The week after her birthday, Daddy had the accident in the mines that left him crippled, scarred, and in excruciating pain.
Six months after that, Mama lost her mind. She drowned baby Florabelle in a washbucket, slit my throat when I tried to stop her, then hung herself in the Wytchwood by her own apron; I was only eleven and three-quarter years old. I don’t rightly know why Mama only went after me and Florabelle; I reckon maybe she figured Mirabelle and Henry were old enough to hold her off, mayhap overcome her. Mayhap they were her favorites, I don’t know.
I try not to think on it much, truth be told.
I can tell you though, dying was mighty strange. Suddenly you’re there, then you’re not, then you’re wandering through the hills and woods, only a shadow of yourself, solid things passing through you like you’re nothing but a cloud, then you’re falling through the ground or floating above it, always floating. No sense of direction or smell or touch, head full of jumbled thoughts and hazy, half-remembered memories. It took me a good, long while to find my way back home, back to Mirabelle.
Before I returned home, and after Mama went crazy, Henry—he’d been working in the mines in Daddy’s place—up and disappeared. Search parties looked all over for him beneath the mountain, but they didn’t find any sign of him. Three weeks later, he showed up in his old bedroom, rocking back and forth with spikes of coal driven into his ears. He’d stabbed himself deaf, and he ain’t never uttered a word since.
By the time Mirabelle was fourteen, our neighbors had all left for the Granger Mining Co. houses on North Street, afraid that whatever curse had stricken our family would spread to theirs next. The Wests and the Seeleys, the neighbors on either side of our house and the ones we always reckoned as extended family, were the first to leave. I think that just about killed Mirabelle.
In time, our house was the only one left haunting Old East Street. Weeds and vines, insects and vermin, they replaced our neighbors. The house began falling apart, our family’s misfortune writ large in rotting wood.
No one helped Mirabelle. If they saw her around town, they’d just treat her like a leper, a pariah.
No one cared about the Cranes no more.
***
When Mirabelle finished her story, she had second and third helpings of stew. I floated behind her, itching to be gone from Granny’s place. After Mirabelle was done eating, Granny rose from her chair, gathered their dishes, and placed them back in the dirt where she’d gotten them. She returned to the table and smiled, first at me, then at Mirabelle.
“Thank you, dearie,” Granny said. “I reckon that was right hard.”
Mirabelle nodded slowly.
“Seems I was right,” Granny said. “Them townfolk ain’t been speaking truth about your poor family. You Crane folk ain’t cursed; just unlucky, I reckon. But, someone somewheres mention a curse, and the whole town acts they worst selves.”
“That happen to you?” Mirabelle asked.
“Mayhap, in a manner. But my sister, well, she were a witch. She were a bad woman, hurt lotsa folk in town, long time ago. When they realized what she were, what she done, they… Well, they hurt her back.”
“Then you ain’t a witch?”
Granny smiled and shook her head. “No, dearie, I ain’t. They treat me like I were, just cause I’m blood-kin with one. They ain’t kill me, but they ain’t have nothing to do with me, neither. Sometimes, that’s the same as killing.”
Mirabelle frowned.
“You acting like you disappointed I ain’t a witch,” Granny said, laughing.
“Reckon I am,” Mirabelle admitted quietly. “But only just a little.”
“Heavens, child! Why?”
Mirabelle shrugged, avoiding Granny’s eyes. “I guess… Well, since you can see and hear Judson, too, I thought that mean I were special, like you. That I could do…things. Mayhap heal Daddy and Henry…”
“Aw, honey child,” Granny said, and she grasped one of Mirabelle’s hands with both of her own. “Seeing haints, speaking to them, that some old magic, sure, but… Well, I reckon it’s what you call small magic. Some folk is just…more aware. Like us. We ain’t powerful; we just good at seeing and listening. Most folk don’t pay no attention to the world around them.”
Tears slipped from Mirabelle’s eyes.
Granny withdrew one of her hands and reached out, pulling Mirabelle’s chin up with a finger. “And I pay more attention than even you, Mirabelle Crane. Mayhap, I reckon I can help your daddy and your Henry. There’s things around us, right here in Fyffe, that I reckon can help them. More of that small magic.”
“Really?” Mirabelle said.
Granny nodded and winked at her. “Just gotta know where to look, is all.”
***
No matter what I said, no matter how many times I said it, Mirabelle didn’t listen to me. I wish I could’ve shared the feelings I got around Granny with her, help Mirabelle to feel the wrongness, the bad strange I felt around the old woman. But the truth is, I don’t rightly know if she would’ve listened to me, even then.
The morning after we’d gone to Granny’s house, after Mirabelle had seen to Daddy and Henry, we set out to the mountain in search of the black mushrooms Granny had told us about.
“They be in the shadow of the mountain,” she’d said. “Down a holler not far from the mouth of the mine, near a much older shaft, long closed up; I reckon it ain’t more than a mound of rocks now. We’ll need a bushel-full of the mushrooms.”
“What if I’s seen by a Company man?” Mirabelle had asked. “They come and take our house, they see me around the mines.”
“Ain’t no chance of that,” Granny had assured her. “You’ll be following an old path through the Wytchwood. It lead right to that holler and right back the way you come. Ain’t nobody gonna see you over that ridge.”
That had been good enough for Mirabelle.
You reckon this gonna work? I asked her again, as we wandered down the path Granny had set us on earlier that morning.
The sun was rising over the mountain, but the ‘Wood was still dark where we were, since we were still in the part of the wood bristling with healthy trees. As we went on though, the trees around us died, and plants became scarce, giving way to dry, dusty earth.
“I do,” Mirabelle said, hopping over a log. The old bushel Granny had given her swung noisily from the rusty iron handle she clenched. “I reckon Granny’s right about that small magic she talk about.”
I reckon talking to your haint brother and making a healing elixir from mushrooms is two very different things, I said.
“Maybe you not as aware then. Like me and Granny.”
I reckon I’m probably more aware than you and Granny combined, seeing as I’m the one that’s all floaty-like.
“Granny learnt all ‘bout healing plants and balms and elixirs from her mama, like her mama learn from hers. Besides, don’t you remember our mama talking about folk medicine when Daddy got hurt?”
Yeah, but Mama ain’t never found nothing to help.
“Mama never went to Granny,” Mirabelle said. “She went to townfolk who reckon Granny a witch cause her sister one. Folk like us, like Granny, you and me, we can’t trust townfolk no more.”
But ain’t you scared, Belle? What if it don’t work? What if it just make Daddy and Henry worse than they already is?
“It’s gonna work. I trust her, Judson.”
But?
“I am scared,” Mirabelle admitted.
Then why—
“Cause!” Mirabelle snapped, stomping a bare foot in the dirt. “I’m always scared, Judson! Been scared every moment of every day since I turned thirteen and… And if it work like Granny say, then… Then…”
Then we have a bit of our family back, I said. And you ain’t haveta be scared no more.
Mirabelle nodded and wiped an arm across her eyes.
Okay, I said.
We continued on in silence. The air grew hot under the morning sun, now that we were surrounded by dead, leafless trees. A while on, we came to a bunch of ruined pines. Beyond them, the ground grew rocky and curved upward. We wandered up the ridge and stopped.
The holler below was wedged between the ridge and the rocky slope that led to the mine’s active shaft on the other side. In the shadow of the mountain in front of us, and the shadows of the dead trees behind us, scores of thick, black mushrooms covered the ground, thicker near the mound of rock Granny had said was probably the old mine tunnel. That old entrance felt rotten to me, like something bad—something evil—was waiting on the other side. I couldn’t be sure, but every now and then it seemed like the black mushrooms shimmered with the same oily dark that shimmered about Granny.
They look like swollen, coal-stained fingers, I said.
Like scores of dead miners beneath the ground were clawing and clambering to be free of their graves.
Mirabelle shivered in the heat as gooseflesh dappled her arms. I shivered too, and I ain’t even got skin.
“C’mon,” Mirabelle said, and she headed down into the holler.
For the first time since I’d come back to her, I didn’t want to follow.
***
Mirabelle said the black mushrooms—I couldn’t help but think of them as corpse fingers—didn’t smell all that different from the other mushrooms we could find growing in our yard, or the dankest places of the house. She said they smelled earthy and musty, almost sour. It was only after Granny had chopped the mushrooms up and mixed them with herbs and boiled them in her pot to create the sticky, black elixir Mirabelle carried home in a glass vial that they smelled downright putrid, Mirabelle said.
I was only half-listening to her as we walked home from Granny’s with the elixir; I was still worrying over what Granny had said: “Now listen, child. Your daddy and Henry may seem to get worse before they gets better. Could seem like the elixir is killing them, but you gotta trust me, Mirabelle. This the only way for them to heal.”
“Yes’m,” Mirabelle had said.
Then Granny had mumbled over the black goop as she poured it from pot to vial. I couldn’t make out the words, but that bad feeling got worse in my haint-belly. For the first time in Granny’s presence, I spoke, and asked her what she’d said, but she’d only smiled and handed the elixir to Mirabelle.
“Just…praying a blessing, dearie.”
I followed Mirabelle up the steps of our house. The sun had gone down, and the overgrown grass was alive with the clicking, humming buzzsaw songs of insects. Seeing the house like that right then, in the near dark, unlit, abandoned, half-consumed by weeds, it sure looked evil. As evil as what had befallen my family.
You ain’t gotta do this if you don’t wanna, I said, as Mirabelle opened the front door and shut it behind us.
She went to the small oil lamp we kept on the kitchen table, took a match from the matchbox next to the lamp, and lit it. The room shone orange-gold. Daddy moaned loudly upstairs in his room, and we could hear the steady thud-thump-thud of Henry pounding his head against the wall as he rocked perpetually back and forth.
“I wanna,” Mirabelle said.
She climbed the stairs to Daddy and Henry’s room and pushed open the door. Daddy was on his stomach on the floor beside his cot, clawing at the planks, drool dribbling out his mouth.
“Daddy!” Mirabelle cried. She hurried to his side and placed Granny’s elixir on his nightstand before wrestling Daddy back into his bed. He’d soiled himself and his sheets.
When she’d washed him and got him dressed in another pair of clothes and got him tucked in fresher sheets, Mirabelle went to Henry. She pulled him to his feet and guided him back to his bed, where she cleaned and bandaged the back of his swollen, bleeding head with bunches of dirty cloth.
Floating there, watching her, unable to help her help Daddy and Henry, well, I felt as useless as a broken headlamp in a mineshaft.
Mirabelle grabbed the vial from Daddy’s nightstand, then wiped her nose with her arm.
“Ain’t you see?” she said. “This the only way. I can’t… I just… I can’t, Judson. Not no more.”
Whatever you say, Belle, I said. I’m with you. Right here with you.
Mirabelle walked over to Henry and unstopped the vial. She took a deep breath, then lifted Henry toward her and made him drink.
When Henry had swallowed half of the elixir like Granny had said, Mirabelle moved to Daddy’s bed and made him finish the rest.
***
I don’t sleep. Not since I’ve been a haint. I just kind of sit there, floating, hovering, whatever you want to call it, doing nothing, thinking nothing, until there’s something to do or think about. Usually, that happens when Mirabelle wakes up in the morning.
But that night—the night Fyffe went up in flames—I was rousted from my thoughtless haint half-life by the creak of floorboards above us. The sound didn’t wake Mirabelle. She just kept snoring contentedly on her mattress, curled up in her ratty-tatty blanket.
At first, I didn’t think nothing of it. Daddy often groaned and moaned throughout the night, so much so you kind of got used to it. And Henry oftentimes would wake up and get out of bed and go back to rocking in the corner under the window, at least until he got tired again and crawled back in bed or passed out on the floor.
But then, more creaks kept on coming, like the wood was groaning beneath a heavy, shuffling weight. I kept hearing strange noises, too. Wet, gurgling noises that didn’t sound like anything I’d ever heard before.
I moved toward the ceiling, deciding to poke my head through the floorboards into Daddy and Henry’s room to see what was making such a racket. But as I passed through the wood, I heard a mighty loud crash and the shattering of glass, then a heavy thud and scritch-scratch scuffle outside the house.
I pulled myself fully up into the room. Henry’s bed was empty, the window broken, jagged shards of moonlight still dangling from the frame and glistening on his bed.
Then I was rushing out the window, soaring after my brother as he loped and skittered toward town like a spider running upright on two legs.
Henry! I called after him.
He couldn’t hear me, of course; old habits, I reckon.
I should’ve known something was wrong from the start, but it wasn’t until I caught up with him that I was sure it was wrong. That he was very, very wrong.
Henry?
His eyes, the color of his skin, they weren’t right. He was a blossom of bruises and dried blood. The way he moved, like there was something inside him, steering him, it was bad-strange. He shifted in the moonlight and I saw them—fungal growths rippling through his skin from head to toe. A stalk was speared through the top of his head and jutting out his chin, ending in a shiny black cap I swear was moving, like hundreds of things inside it were raring to break free.
He gargled and chittered in a throaty, wet voice, and stumbled toward Main Street.
When Henry rounded onto Main, he burst through the front door of the first house on the corner, splintering the wood like it wasn’t nothing to him, even as it gouged his flesh. His blood dribbled in steady tattoo on the floor. Whoever lived there was up and screaming now, and a man came rushing down the stairs, his wife and several children behind him.
With a loud, gurgling cry, Henry rushed forward.
No! I said.
I lunged at Henry, throwing my arms around him and his many growths, but I didn’t do anything but tickle the air; my arms went right through him.
Henry convulsed like he was full of snakes, and then silvery strands of living gossamer were shooting out from his skin and coiling around the man, forcing the man’s mouth and eyes and nostrils open.
Henry, please, stop! I cried, throwing my arms through him again and again to pull him back.
Then Henry bent his head and the black cap at the end of the stalk burst open as a fountain of black spores erupted from it.
***
Mirabelle woke with a start. I was hovering over her, zipping this way and that, agitated out of my mind. I’d been trying to wake her for several minutes since returning to the house.
She rubbed her eyes and yawned. “What time is it?”
Sun’s coming up, I said, but never mind that. Something bad happened, Belle. Real bad.
Mirabelle sat up. “What?”
She gagged, her eyes watering, and she placed her hands over her nose and mouth. “Ugh! It smells something awful in here!”
I looked at her blankly.
“Oh. You lucky you ain’t smell nothing no more.”
Belle—
“Sorry. What is it? What’s going on?”
Follow me, I said, and rushed for the stairs. Hurry!
“I’m coming,” Mirabelle said, creaking up the stairs behind me, two at a time. I seeped through the door and then she pushed it open and joined me in the room.
I floated over near Daddy.
He lay motionless, blood pooling on the floor where it dripped from his sheets. Fungal shelves had broken through the skin of his neck. Dark mushrooms flowered from his eyes and mouth. They budded from his face, his chest, his arms, his legs, between his fingers and toes. Beneath his pale and bruised skin, pulsing silver streaks branched every which way like a network of glimmering spiderwebs. A stalk grew through Daddy’s head, the black cap on the end swelling and compressing with the black spores I knew were roiling inside it.
Mirabelle couldn’t hold back the sobs that racked her frail, little body. She gasped for breath.
But I wasn’t finished bringing her bad news. Not yet.
Belle, I said.
“What?” Mirabelle asked, voice hoarse. She tore her eyes from the thing in Daddy’s bed.
I motioned to Henry’s empty bed and the broken window.
***
Fyffe was on fire.
We could see towering columns of black smoke rising from the center of town as we raced to Granny’s house. Even there, on the edge of the Wytchwood, we could hear the wails and screams and angry shouts filling the morning air.
We’d barricaded Daddy’s body in his room before leaving for Granny’s. I don’t know why his body didn’t take off like Henry’s, but it bothered me bad. As far as I could reckon, it had something to do with Henry taking the elixir first and with Daddy’s body being so broken. But I wasn’t sure the things living inside him weren’t just pretending to sleep, either.
Mirabelle pounded on Granny’s door; it creaked open on its own.
“Granny?” Mirabelle called.
We stepped into the dark beyond the door when she didn’t answer. The fireplace was cold, like it hadn’t been touched in years. Dust blanketed everything. The weeds at the window were dead and wilted. Behind Granny’s little wobbly table, her mattress lay abandoned.
Mirabelle picked up a folded piece of old paper lying on the table, blowing away the dust that covered it. She opened it and read; a moan escaped her lips.
“No,” she said. “No, please. No…”
What, Belle? What Granny say?
Mirabelle sniffled, tried to calm her shaking so she could read me the letter.
“Mirabelle,” she read, “This town… My sister’s dug her claws deep into it. She like a diseased tick dug into the skin, sucking on the lifejuice of the place and poisoning it at the same time. Sometimes, there ain’t nothing left to be done except to burn the whole damn thing to ash. Signed, Granny.”
Before I could respond, shadows fell over Mirabelle, cast by two figures standing outside the open door.
Oh, no, I said, able to make out their faces before Mirabelle could.
“The hell you doing here, girl?” the taller of the two shadows barked.
“Told you!” the other figure said. “Told you I seen her ‘round here, conniving ‘bout with that ol’ witch!”
“She weren’t no witch!” Mirabelle cried. “She the only person in this town that give a damn about me!”
Belle, I said, aching to do something—anything—to protect my sister.
The tall man stepped into Granny’s house. Mirabelle’s breath caught in her throat when she saw the rifle leveled at her. Then she recognized him.
“Mister Seeley?”
“Knew we shoulda burned what was left of your family in that damned ol’ house,” he said, stepping closer. Mirabelle moved back, edging toward the fireplace. “Knew it come back to haunt us, letting you and your daddy and your brother live on.”
I couldn’t do anything to help Mirabelle. My hands were useless. I was useless.
Belle, I’m sorry—
“Just shoot her a’ready,” the other man said, as he entered the house behind Mr. Seeley.
Mirabelle’s eyes widened when she recognized the second-oldest West boy. They’d been so close before she turned thirteen and everything done gone to hell. “Eustis?”
Eustis West brought his rifle up to his shoulder and aimed at her face. “Henry dead, and her following, mayhap that’ll stop this mess before it get too far gone.”
“Here’s to hoping,” Mr. Seeley said. He aimed down the sight of his rifle.
I’m so sorry…
“No, please,” Mirabelle cried, squeezing her eyes shut. “Please—”
A terrible ruckus pierced the air around us and then silver tendrils were wrapping around Mr. Seeley and Eustis and dragging them both kicking and screaming out of Granny’s house toward the feet of a terrible figure covered in mushrooms.
Mirabelle screamed as another mushroom creature joined the first. We watched in horror as both creatures bent forward and sprayed black spores over Mr. Seeley and Eustis. The spores spread like a black rot over the both of them; they screamed and writhed, gagging as their throats and eyes and ears and nostrils were filled with hungry, black fungus.
The window, I said, catching sunlight glinting off glass across the room. The window!
Mirabelle turned and saw it. She hefted a pot from the fireplace and sent it crashing through the glass in a spray of twinkling quicksilver.
Then she was jumping through the broken window, and we were running, running, running past the stilled bodies of the freshly dead mushroom creatures, even as the bodies of Mr. Seeley and Eustis West began bearing fruit.
***
The house shook as Mirabelle shut the door behind us. The wood creaked and splintered loudly; the floorboards overhead groaned and shuddered as the thing that used to be our daddy flung itself again and again at the door we’d barricaded.
Outside, over the sounds of Daddy’s tantrum, angry shouts grew louder. Closer.
The floorboards moaned and the thing upstairs roared. I moved to the kitchen window and peeked my head through curtain and glass. Uh-oh…
“What?” Mirabelle asked, frantically searching for anything she could use as a weapon. She had a rusty knife, a pot, a broken floorboard with a nail stuck through it, a fireplace poker, and Daddy’s rifle: nothing which would give her much help for long holding off the mushroom monster upstairs or the angry townsfolk flooding down the road.
She joined me at the window. A ways off, a mob of people poured down our old, abandoned street with torchlight tongues dancing above their heads.
We gotta go, I said.
“But Daddy—”
That, I said, pointing at the ceiling, ain’t Daddy. Not no more.
“We can’t—”
We can’t stay here! They will kill you, Belle. Or that thing upstairs will. We have to go now!
“I hate this goddamned place,” Mirabelle sobbed. “This town, this house, Granny; all of it.”
Me too.
The front door splintered in a cyclone of broken wood and Daddy roared into the house, and I realized in horror that we’d forgotten to board up the window Henry had broken through.
No! I cried, swinging at Daddy, jumping on his back, slipping through every time. No!
Mirabelle screamed and bashed the rifle against Daddy again and again, careful not to break open the black bulb at the end of the stalk growing from his head. His tendrils reached out and coiled around her as the both of them rolled across the floor. She kicked and scratched at him and shoved him toward the fireplace. Daddy hit a corner beam and it snapped in twain, and the chimney collapsed on him as Mirabelle hurled herself away from it, toward the kitchen table.
We could hear the townsfolk on the road. They were almost at the house.
Sobbing, Mirabelle got to her feet, found the oil lamp and screwed the lantern off the bulb of oil. She splashed the oil over the kitchen and fireplace and the rest of the main level.
Daddy roared, heaving beneath the rubble of the chimney as he tried to push it off himself. The tendrils that weren’t severed or wounded whipped about like blind snakes, searching for Mirabelle.
She ran to the window on the other side of the room and used the butt of the rifle to knock out the glass. She grabbed the box of matches from the kitchen table.
“I’m sorry, Daddy,” she said.
Then Mirabelle struck a match and set her world on fire.