The Wicked Witch smiled.
She raised her claws to meet the deluge running across her body, black rags clinging to her stick frame. The shape beneath was suddenly too skeletal and bulged in all the wrong places, cancerous and demonic. She licked the stagnant moisture off her lips with a leprous tongue, slurping at the algae.
“Yeah, right,” she said. “Like no one’s ever tried water before.”
I ran but a tree stopped me. Not one of the apple trees. Those were back by the cabin.
The Wicked Witch screamed — “Get him! I won’t lose two today!” — and I looked over my shoulder, trying to spot a pursuer. When I turned forward again I ran face first into a lightning-split oak.
As I lay there dazed, my audience assembled.
“You can’t get away, Michael,” the Wicked Witch said.
“What do you want?”
“I was thrown out of my land a long time ago and I can never go back.” She gestured at the forest, the ramshackle cabin, and the rotting orchard. “This is my home. This is my reality. This is my dream.”
I shook my head. “A dream?”
Dorothy wiped her face and left fingerprints in the wet mascara and rouge. “More than a dream. We play our parts, we keep her from loneliness.”
“Stan was one of us,” the Tin Man said. “He served his time. When she tired of him, she let him serve her outside.”
“Be quiet, beehive!” said the Wicked Witch, pushing him aside. “You’ll learn my ways soon enough, Michael. You’re going to replace him.”
“You’re crazy!” I pulled myself up against the split trunk. “I’ll never do anything you want!”
“That’s why I love you, Michael.” She motioned towards the tree. “Lift him up.”
A noose dropped over my head and cinched tight. At the other end, hidden among the leaves, an orangutan jumped into the air, guiding its descent with spread wings as it hauled the rope across a thick branch.
My neck snapped.
The Witch’s obsession traps us here, and her magic forces us into these forms. When I dream I’m still in my old life, but it fades as her obsession burns, tarnishing the memory. She watches and we try to amuse her. When she tires, I may stop hanging myself. And someday I will escape.
Her madness is contagious.
Мichael Chislett
Mara
Michael Chislett has had his stories published in such magazines as Ghosts & Scholars, Supernatural Tales and All Hallows, along with anthologies published by the Oxford University Press and Ash-Tree Press. A collection is forthcoming from the latter imprint.
He is currently working on two novels, Jane Dark’s Garden and The Night Friends, both of which are set in the same general area of London as “Mara”, though they are contemporary, and another story, “Off the Map”, appeared in Best New Horror Volume Thirteen.
As the author explains: “Axel Crescentius, the hero, if that is what he is, of the tale, features in some other stories, only one of which has so far been published.
“I wanted to write a Gothic vampire story with a London setting and the actual places described in the tale — the hill with its view of the River Thames, the creek and the cemetery — do exist, though not as close to each other as described in the text. Instead, they have come together in the geography of my mind to become one place — Mabbs Hill, which, I have been assured by one who claims to know, exists in some other alternative London in which we can travel usually and fortunately only in the imagination.”
After my involvement in the revolution of 1848 I was obliged to flee Germany and make my way to England and exile. For a time I resided just outside London, south of the River Thames, at a place called Mabbs End.
My custom was, after a day of study at the British Museum, to return by train from London and on reaching Mabbs End have a walk of about fifteen minutes to my lodgings. My journey would take me across a stone bridge spanning a creek, a narrow finger of the Thames that ran through the district. I then had to ascend a steep hill where the buildings gave way to hedges and market gardens.
This rise was called Mabbs Hill and, once on its crest, a short walk along an unpaved road led to my lodging, in a house newly built, one of a row as yet unconnected to the town other than by the way that I had come.
From this hill, on clear days, I had the most marvellous view of London. The dome of St Paul ’s would gleam in the sun and on the river there were more ships than had besieged Troy. Indeed, all of the Thames, both up-and downstream, then revealed itself to me in a most pleasing prospect. I say on clear days, for most often the metropolis was covered by that thick fog for which it is notorious. Mabbs Hill did not suffer so much from this but frequently, at night, the mist would creep from off the river to lie heavy over the creek so that I would have to cross blind to where a solitary lamp stood sentinel in the murk.
One such night the fog had travelled with me from London and rolled in great grey waves that increased by the moment. Shivering at its chill touch, I hurried along the High Street from the station. The glow of gas lamps did little to light my way, and those few others abroad flitted through the fume like phantoms with sinister, muffled footsteps, seeming to be about on fell missions which had but waited the chance of this complicit shroud to be done.
My native land was by the Baltic and I, Axel Crescentius, had been born to mist and fog, for it had haunted those shores. But I had travelled long and far since then.
Uncanny thoughts of how, on misty nights like this, when all becomes unreal, then we are in another world through which we travel not knowing what unseen companions walk with us, fretted me. After blindly crossing the bridge where the fog muffled the usual splash of water, I heard the sound of weeping, the cry of a child lost in murk-black night.
To my left, where the sound came from, lay an alley, narrow and dubious enough by daylight and certainly no place to linger by with this pall about. Sensing danger, I released the catch on my swordstick and held it ready to be drawn. Hearing another cry, sharp as a vixen’s, I stepped back into a doorway where, doubly concealed, I stood to watch and listen.
There was a disturbance at the alley’s fog-thick mouth and a woman passed barely an arm’s length from me. Her movement disturbed the mist, scrims of which detached from the cottony mass to cling about her body, reminding me uneasily of feeding eels, or snakes. She pulled a hood over her head, but not before I had seen a coil of long dark hair hanging down over her breast. Then she vanished into night and fog, becoming one with them.
“Give it back to me!”
The voice wailed and I tensed as, from the alley, a young girl staggered. Her tear-stained face bore the look of one mortally stricken by some deadly pestilence, a wretch under sentence of death from which there could be no reprieve.
She fled toward the bridge, another wraith lost in the mist, but her voice still cried, lamenting whatever had been taken from her.
It was no more than an affair between street women, but that look of desolation on the girl’s face — she was no more than a child — had been terrible to see. Brooding on this, I made a cautious way up the hill as the mist thinned somewhat until, at the crest, the air grew marvellously clear, the sky cloudless and I gazed down at the still and silent sea that covered the world below.