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  WITCHES, by Janet Fox

  Originally published in Tales By Moonlight (1983).

  He sat at the plastic counter, and when his food came everything was in little plastic packets. A look out of the huge plate-glass window showed him the road he’d been driving all day, a featureless ribbon of blacktop rolled out indifferently through gutted hills showing strata of yellow rock. He opened a packet and put the white powder into his coffee, stirring it with a white plastic spoon. He watched the liquid swirl muddily, undissolved granules of imitation cream bobbing on the surface. It occurred to him that he was as close to being nowhere as you could get. He left the turnpike just outside of Commercia, and the trees growing along both sides of the narrower highway engulfed the car in dancing patches of green-gold shadow, even more pronounced now that it was beginning to get dark. In the deceptive clarity of just dusk he saw something along the highway, a figure, slight, in jeans and a t-shirt, the shape seemingly distorted until one saw the canvas backpack. One thin arm was raised, the thumb extended. The same instinct which made him reject the plastic packets, put his foot on the brakes, tires gritting on gravel along the road’s edge as he stopped. The figure, with an aptly feral movement, loped the few yards to the car, grasped the door handle. The light inside the car slid off very straight hair a color somewhere between red and gold. There were pale sun-freckles across the nose and cheeks and a mouth that seemed flexible to many expressions and now wore a furtive smile. The door slammed with an oddly inevitable sound.

  “I’m going as far as Medicine Oaks,” he said, hearing the grouchiness in his own voice with a kind of surprise.

  “Thanks, Mister.”

  He drove on, the car’s interior now a capsule of darkness and silence except for the dim green glow of the dashlights. He’d seen the bud-tips of breasts under the thin cotton of the t-shirt and was filled with a vague unease. Only the nowhere feeling he was trying to outdistance had made him stop at night for a hitchhiker, a risky idea at best. She had put aside the backpack and was sprawled on the seat in apparent comfort. He’d been on the edge of delivering a lecture on the evils of hitchhiking for young girls until he realized he’d compounded the error by picking her up. It wasn’t that she was in any danger from him.

  He’d taught school, had children of his own, almost resented her posture of total relaxation.

  “Are you going far?”

  “I’m just seeing the country,” she said in a rather sleepy voice.

  “There isn’t much country for tourists,” he said, hoping to insinuate that he suspected she had run away from some nearby home.

  “It’s interesting,” she said. “Nobody bothers you.” Just as well she didn’t seem to take his meaning, he reflected, since he might have to turn her over to the authorities at Medicine Oaks.

  “Get many rides?”

  “I didn’t need one till now. I was traveling with someone.”

  “What happened? Or is it personal?”

  “I don’t know exactly. He was nice. He bought me these.” She indicated the clothes and the knapsack. “But this morning I woke up in the hotel room alone; the motorcycle gone—Frankie too.”

  He was silent, with a last-of-the-dinosaurs feeling, wondering why it always surprised him, these girls putting on a casual sexuality with their training bras. But when he thought about it, he’d been left stranded, himself. Not that Cindy had run out on him; she’d done everything by the numbers. That was like her, managing the divorce like an elaborate dinner party—not to create publicity; that would be bad for her business, not to injure the children (they were like potted plants she moved so-delicately to avoid bruising the roots). “They’re young,” she said. “They’ll adjust.” He’d been awed by all of it, so that when the final papers came, he’d wanted to shake her hand, say “well done,” but he’d left instead. He wondered why with all her careful building, he’d been able to see nothing but wreckage.

  His headlights caught the doublestars of animal’s eyes along the road, a blur of something small crouched in the border of weeds. Then, it was gone.

  “What was that?” asked his hitchhiker, her voice a harsh whisper.

  “Nothing. An animal along the road—a cat, maybe.”

  “I don’t like cats.” Her voice had an odd intensity. “Their eyes—they watch.”

  * * * *

  The lights of Medicine Oaks appeared, a starswarm on the side of the dark hills. It wasn’t long before he was rounding the last wide turn and entering the main street, old fashioned buildings the color of dust lining it, overlaid with signs in garish neon. He knew where he was going to spend the night—a small dilapidated motel tucked away on a quiet side street. When he stopped in front of it, he debated for a moment. He didn’t exactly want to drop her off at the police station in the dead of night and it wasn’t safe to leave her asleep in the car.

  He got a double, not quite wanting to pay for two cabins. When he tried to waken her she rolled away from him so that he had to lift her, sleeping exhaustedly, and carry her inside. He’d been a little worried about the arrangements at first, but it was only like carrying a sleeping child to bed. Her face was curiously lax and empty of expression, as if the body were untenanted, the mind wandering some dreamscape.

  When she showed no sign of wakening, he paused a moment, then undid the button and fly of her tight-fitting jeans, pulling them off the slim childish hips in cotton panties, then drawing the blankets quickly up to her chin. He prepared himself for sleep, liking the incongruity of having her there in the other bed. Her breathing was the last sound he heard before he fell asleep.

  And then he was wandering in his own dream country. The winds made a terrible racket moaning and whining, around the angular contours of a strange distorted house. An immense oak tree grew by the door, its bulk seared white on one side by some long ago lightning bolt, and blood-red creepers grew rank along one wall of the structure, fluttering in the constant wind. As he watched, the door opened and three beings came out to stand in the shelter of the tree, their patched and ragged garments tossed in the wind. Their faces were dark and indistinct but he got the impression of age and a grotesqueness that surpassed human ugliness. They seemed to argue over something, skinny arms gesticulating. “You’ve stolen it, you hussy, and you will be made to give it back!” He was awakened by a half-suppressed shriek and it was a moment before he remembered he wasn’t alone in the room. The hitchhiker was sitting up, a hand over her mouth, the other held out as if to ward off some evil, her eyes large and dark with terror. He sat on the bed and put his arm around her. “Just dreams, honey,” he said, as her half-shrieks subsided into sobs.

  “They were going to bring me back there,” she whispered, moving close to him. For a confused moment he thought she meant back to the strange house in his own dream. He became aware of her warm skin beneath the thin cotton shirt, the roundness of a breast against his wrist. It was one thing to tuck an inert sleeping body into bed—this was something else.

&n
bsp; “I like it here,” she said, looking up through the brassy-gold fringe of her bangs. “I like being close to you.” He moved away abruptly. “There now,” he said, feeling stupid as he retreated from her warmth. He was possibly old enough to be her father, but he wasn’t all that old. Christ, but he’d been a fool to even consider this arrangement. He felt vaguely as if he’d been caught molesting a student, but nothing for it but to grit his teeth till morning.

  Then he could leave her here without worrying about the authorities. He wondered wryly if the motorcyclist had been such a moral sort as himself. She only wept a little longer, the sound deadened by the pillow.

  * * * *

  He awoke and was confronted by the prosaic seediness of the motel decor. That weird place and those figures—only a dream, and dreams, for all their clarity, were nothing at all in the morning. In the next bed his hitchhiker was opening her gamine’s eyes. Only a child and even if she were the teenaged queen of tramps, she had nothing to fear from him. He’d never been interested in jail-bait, after all. As a teacher and as a father, he should have learned something about children.

  “How about some breakfast?”

  “God, yes. How did you know I was starving?” she said, bounding barelegged from bed.

  “Just a lucky guess. I’m Michael Payton. What’s your name?”

  “Rue.”

  “Ruth?”

  “No. Rue.”

  He waited for a moment for a last name, but there was none coming. “You can get cleaned up and dressed in the bathroom. I’ll buy you some breakfast, and maybe—well, let’s just let the future take care of itself.” He turned away and heard footsteps and then the sound of the shower.

  Over breakfast in the cafe quaintly named “Mom’s” he assumed his best teacherly manner, feeling now that he was in charge of the situation. “You won’t prove anything by running away. Were they really so bad, your parents?”

  She looked up stolidly. “I don’t have any parents.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Well, who do you live with?”

  “My sisters, but I can’t go back there.” She seemed to shudder a little.

  “Were you mistreated? If you were, you wouldn’t have to go home; there’re places where you could finish school—”