The Year of the Witching(22)
On and on she went. Brambles snatched at her nightdress, and the cold breathed down the back of her neck. The cries seemed to slither between the trees, though they were softer, dying into gasps and whispers that lost themselves in the hissing wind. She could hear her name now in the chorus: Immanuelle. Immanuelle.
But she didn’t feel afraid. She didn’t feel anything but dizzy and light, as though she wasn’t walking as much as she was skimming between the trees, as weightless as the shadows themselves.
A branch snapped. Her hand tightened around the lantern’s handle, and she winced a little, her burnt hand chafing beneath her bandages.
She smelled something wet and heady on the air, and as the cries quieted, she heard the soft lapping of moving water.
On instinct, she followed the sound, raising her lamp high to illuminate the trees. Shouldering through the brush, she entered a small clearing. At its center was a pond, its water as black as oil. Like a mirror, it reflected the moon’s face back at itself. She paused by the water’s edge, her hand tightening around the handle of her lantern.
“Hello?” she called out into the night, but the forest swallowed the sound. Despite the silence, there was no echo. The cries died. The trees were still.
Immanuelle knew then that she should have run, retraced her steps and fled back to the farmhouse. But instead, she squared her shoulders and braced her feet, finding a scrap of strength to cling to. “If there’s anyone out here, show yourselves. I know your kind lurks in the Darkwood. I know you knew my mother, and you call to me like you called to her.” Whatever evil they sought with her, Immanuelle needed it to be known now and done with.
A great, rippling ring formed at the center of the pond. The waves licked the shore and Immanuelle’s lantern sputtered as if the oil was running low.
In the flickering light, a woman emerged from the shallows. Immanuelle staggered back a half step and raised her lantern. “Who’s there?”
The woman didn’t answer. She skimmed through the shallows like a minnow, her limbs tangling in the reeds. As she drew closer, Immanuelle saw that she was beautiful, with the kind of face that could turn a prophet’s head or snatch a man’s heart from behind his ribs. And then Immanuelle recognized her from the pages of her mother’s journal. She had the same harsh mouth as one of the women in the drawings, which would have been almost comically wide if her lips weren’t so full and beautiful. Her hair was dark and slick, the same color as the pond scum that clung to the rocks in the shallows. Her skin was as pale as a corpse’s, the same as the skin of the Lovers, and like them, she bore a mark between her brows, a seven-pointed star in the middle of a circle.
Immanuelle knew then: This was Delilah, the Witch of the Water.
The woman slid her belly along the slope of the shore and dragged herself to her feet. The black mud covered her naked breasts and modesty, but in the warmth of the lamplight, Immanuelle could distinguish her every cut and contour. As the witch drew nearer, she realized she was not a woman at all but rather a girl of about her age, no more than sixteen or seventeen, eighteen at the very oldest.
Delilah drew so close, Immanuelle could smell her. She reeked of dead things, all lichen and leaves and pond rot. It was then—by the moonlight—that Immanuelle saw her bruises, black splotches as dark as ink stains marring her cheeks. Her right eye was slightly swollen, and both of her lips were split.
The witch extended a hand, fingers folding around Immanuelle’s wrist. In one swift movement, she shredded the bandages, exposing Immanuelle’s burn to the cold night air. Despite all of Anna’s ointments and tending, it hadn’t healed well. It was red and angry and weeping pus, likely to leave an ugly scar once the scabs flaked away.
Gingerly, the way a mother holds a child, the woman brought Immanuelle’s palm to her mouth and licked it. Her lips radiated a numbing cold.
Then Delilah kissed her: first the meat of her palm, then her wrist, the witch’s lips trailing along her tendons to the tips of her fingers. She kept her dark eyes on Immanuelle’s as she did this, never breaking her gaze.
Fear flooded through Immanuelle’s chest and her vision blurred. She caught snatches of the pages of her mother’s journal transposed with the woman’s face—her slim, pale, dead face. The lantern slipped from her grasp and struck the dirt with a dull thud.
Delilah tugged on her hand. Immanuelle took a half step forward, then another, slipping out of her boots as she walked. She entered the water barefoot. She felt the waves rise around her, up to her ankles, her calves, her thighs, licking at the curve of her crotch, the swell of her breasts, until her feet skimmed the bottom and the water kissed her chin.
Delilah led her on, deeper and deeper, wading backward so that she could look at her. Those dead, swollen eyes fixed on Immanuelle’s.
And then they were under, lost to the black and the cold and the shadow. The witch’s grip slackened, her fingers slipping from Immanuelle’s wrist as she slithered into the dark depths of the pond.
Immanuelle tried to follow her, but her legs were dead beneath her, so leaden she had to fight for every step. The cold rose from the depths of the pond, and she was sinking like she had bricks chained to her ankles. Her chest seized as she slipped down into the dark.
She saw faces, passing figments, in the cold blackness: the flash of her mother’s smile, the moon-pale portraits of the Lovers, the wicker corpse of a witch burning on a cross, a baby girl, a woman with her hair shorn as short as a boy’s.