Witches: Wicked, Wild & Wonderful Read online

  WITCHES

  WICKED, WILD & WONDERFUL

  Paula Guran

  Copyright © 2012 by Paula Guran.

  Cover art by Shutterstock/Bliznetsov.

  Cover design by Telegraphy Harness.

  Ebook design by Neil Clarke

  ISBN: 978-1-60701-350-1 (ebook)

  ISBN: 978-1-60701-294-8 (trade paperback)

  PRIME BOOKS

  www.prime-books.com

  No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.

  For more information, contact Prime Books at [email protected].

  For my new “familiar”: Nala

  “Hasn’t this cat got anything better to do? Couldn’t you give him something to read?”

  —Shepherd “Shep” Henderson (James Stewart) in Bell, Book and Candle (1958)

  Screenplay by Daniel Taradash, Based on the Play by John Van Druten

  Contents

  Introduction by Paula Guran

  Walpurgis Afternoon by Delia Sherman

  Nightside by Mercedes Lackey

  The Cold Blacksmith by Elizabeth Bear

  Basement Magic by Ellen Klages

  Mirage and Magia by Tanith Lee

  Lessons with Miss Gray by Theodora Goss

  The World Is Cruel, My Daughter by Cory Skerry

  Ill Met in Ulthar by T.A. Pratt

  The Witch’s Headstone by Neil Gaiman

  Boris Chernevsky’s Hands by Jane Yolen

  Bloodlines by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

  The Way Wind by Andre Norton

  Poor Little Saturday by Madeleine L’Engle

  The Only Way to Fly by Nancy Holder

  Skin Deep by Richard Parks

  The Robbery by Cynthia Ward

  Marlboros and Magic by Linda Robertson

  Magic Carpets by Leslie What

  The Ground Whereon She Stands by Leah Bobet

  Afterward by Don Webb

  April in Paris by Ursula K. Le Guin

  The Goosle by Margo Lanagan

  Catskin by Kelly Link

  About the Authors

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  In any quest for magic, in any search for sorcery, witchery, legerdemain, first check the human spirit.

  —Rod Serling, “Dust,” The Twilight Zone

  One of the most common characters to be found in fantasy, there are many fictional variations of the witch icon and similar diversity in the themes and meanings represented. The versatility and richness of the image continues to grow, as does the popularity of modern interpretations.

  The idea of witchcraft can be found in nearly every culture and its folklore. This anthology explores only a few permutations of the fictional witch and primarily in the context of Western tradition.

  Our concept of the witch is not only extremely broad, it is also contradictory.

  There is the stereotypical cackling “old hag” riding a broomstick and stirring her cauldron. She often lives alone with a black cat as her familiar. The incarnation of evil, she can hex you or cast a spell that makes your cow go dry—or worse. Sometimes she doesn’t even exhibit magical powers; her sorcery is measured by how she cruelly preys on the innocent.

  But we also know the “good witch”: wise-woman and healer, the elder who possesses helpful knowledge—sometimes arcane and occult, sometimes merely practical—and provides guidance and protection. The good witch helps heroes, saves the day with her own heroism, or assists rightful rulers to regain thrones and rule well. She is often an important figure in the life of a young person.

  The witch has her place in history-based or pseudo-Medieval epics, alternate universes, pastoral settings, urban bustle, suburban neighborhoods, and just about any era or locale imaginable.

  Warts and beaked noses under pointy hats personify one archetype, but witches can also be beautiful: seductive and dangerous; an attractive or plain wise-women/healer; exotic, sexy, and literally bewitching; spunky and cute; chic business witch; urban punk; the girl next door or the demon of your nightmares—the witch has infinite variety.

  Humble and helpful or powerful and manipulative; peasant, queen, or suburbanite—a witch can be the ultimate loner, need a coven, have a family, be part of an international organization, or anything in between. She can be aged or ageless. Lately teen-aged witches, full of juvenile conflict as well as the challenges of dealing with their powers and/or destiny, have started to inhabit a subgenre of their own.

  “She” can even be a “he.”

  Witches can be normal humans who agree to a pact with the Devil in order to practice black magic and subvert souls. Or they can simply be mortals who learn the craft of magic, no Satanic deal needed. Witches may be thoroughly human practitioners of a particular religion. There are also hereditary witches born with special powers. In some fantasy witches are a separate species.

  Whether born with supernatural abilities or having acquired them, witches may keep their powers hidden from the misunderstandings and prejudices of the mundane world. Or they may be “out of the broom closet” and openly practice witchcraft. Some of the latter live in worlds where witchcraft is part of the natural order of things

  A great deal of modern fictional witchcraft has been influenced by various neopagan and Wiccan beliefs—including communion with a tri-part goddess. “Domestic” witches—women with magical powers, but who marry or love humans, is another predominately twentieth century invention.

  Unlike other fantastic beings who capture our imagination, witches are not fundamentally supernatural creatures. Vampires? They are no longer human and cannot walk among us during daylight hours (at least not without special provision). Werewolves possess an animal nature usually connected with the full moon. Fairies, although they can look like us, have never been human. Ghosts were once human but, having been transformed, no longer belong to the world of the living. Witches, though, are either humans who practice magic or are born with special abilities, but are otherwise indistinguishable from the rest of us. Witches can live among us without ever revealing their extraordinary powers.

  As Stefan Dziemianowicz wrote in 1995: “For all their remarkable powers, [witches] are accessible, and sometimes vulnerable. It is this dual nature that makes witches so fascinating—and frightening.”

  But as accessible and indistinguishable as they may be—witches are still “other.” Historically, those persecuted as witches, Dziemianowicz reminds us, “shared one common stigma: the perception they differed in subtle and insidious ways . . . their greatest transgression was their simple nonconformity.” Being an outsider is a risky business.

  Nowadays, witches can still be wicked, but they often are used to personify very human evil. After all, we don’t really fear the Devil or uncanny monsters so much as we fear our fellow humans: our own capacity for evil is all too apparent. Fairy tales have been sanitized and given happy endings, but the core truths remain real. Parents abandon their children (and worse), people kill for no reason, power is often misused in horrendous ways, there are cruel and painful dangers in the deep, dark forests of our lives. In modern society, it never hurts to be the fairest or the most skilled or the cleverest. It also helps to know the right people, be special in some way, or find luck in unlikely places. Most of us kiss a few frogs along the way. We may meet up with helpful witches or encounter witches who can destroy us.

  In fantasy these days, more often than not, witches are the “good guys.” Freed from centuries of patriarchy, witches—mostly female—have become a wonderful symbol of the empowered woman. The troubled real world we live in seems to need the power of
magic to solve its problems—rationality just isn’t enough to kick twenty-first century evil’s ass.

  And perhaps we now recognize the “other” in ourselves—our own wild differences, our personal uniqueness—more readily and are willing to learn from it rather than fear it. As with any fantasy icon, through witches, readers can recognize their connection to the rest of humanity as well as discover truths about themselves.

  I hope you find—through the marvelous imaginations of these writers and their amazing stories—some magic of your own.

  Paula Guran

  October 2011

  Delia Sherman’s delightfully domestic modern witchcraft tale takes its title from Walpurgis Night, a spring festival celebrated on April 30 or May 1 in many Northern and Central European countries. The holiday’s name comes from Saint Walpurga, an eighth century English missionary to the Germanic tribes. Walpurga was canonized on May 1 around 870. The first of May (or thereabouts) had a long pagan tradition as a time for spring fertility festivals marking the end of the winter in the Northern hemisphere. Conveniently, Walpurga became a patron saint of pregnant women, good crops, and a protector of peasants, so attaching her name helped Christianize the heathen spring fling. The eve of May Day came to be known as Walpurga’s Night (Walpurgisnacht in German and Dutch). The holiday was (and is) seen in some regions as a night when the barriers between the mundane and the supernatural could be easily breached—like All Hallow’s Eve (which comes exactly six months later). Evil spirits are driven away with loud noises, bonfires, singing, drinking, dancing, and general revelry. In Germany it was particularly associated as a night when witches gathered. Walpurgis Night also coincides with Beltane, a Gaelic festival similarly celebrated in Scotland and Ireland.

  Walpurgis Afternoon

  Delia Sherman

  The big thing about the new people moving into the old Pratt place at Number 400 was that they got away with it at all. Our neighborhood is big on historical integrity. The newest house on the block was built in 1910, and you can’t even change the paint-scheme on your house without recourse to preservation committee studies and zoning board hearings.

  The old Pratt place had generated a tedious number of such hearings over the years—I’d even been to some of the more recent ones. Old Mrs. Pratt had let it go pretty much to seed, and when she passed away, there was trouble about clearing the title so it could be sold, and then it burned down.

  Naturally a bunch of developers went after the land—a three-acre property in a professional neighborhood twenty minutes from downtown is something like a Holy Grail to developers. But their lawyers couldn’t get the title cleared either, and the end of it was that the old Pratt place never did get built on. By the time Geoff and I moved next door, the place was an empty lot. The neighborhood kids played Bad Guys and Good Guys there after school and the neighborhood cats preyed on its endless supply of mice and voles. I’m not talking eyesore, here; just a big shady plot of land overgrown with bamboo, rhododendrons, wildly rambling roses, and some nice old trees, most notably an immensely ancient copper beech big enough to dwarf any normal-sized house.

  It certainly dwarfs ours.

  Last spring all that changed overnight, literally. When Geoff and I turned in, we lived next door to an empty lot. When we got up, we didn’t. I have to tell you, it came as quite a shock first thing on a Monday morning, and I wasn’t even the one who discovered it. Geoff was.

  Geoff’s the designated keeper of the window because he insists on sleeping with it open and I hate getting up into a draft. Actually, I hate getting up, period. It’s a blessing, really, that Geoff can’t boil water without burning it, or I’d never be up before ten. As it is, I eke out every second of warm unconsciousness I can while Geoff shuffles across the floor and thunks down the sash and takes his shower. On that particular morning, his shuffle ended not with a thunk, but with a gasp.

  “Holy shit,” he said.

  I sat up in bed and groped for my robe. When we were in grad school, Geoff had quite a mouth on him, but fatherhood and two decades of college teaching have toned him down a lot. These days, he usually keeps his swearing for Supreme Court decisions and departmental politics.

  “Get up, Evie. You gotta see this.”

  So I got up and went to the window, and there it was, big as life and twice as natural, a real Victorian Homes centerfold, set back from the street and just the right size to balance the copper beech. Red tile roof, golden brown clapboards, miles of scarlet-and-gold gingerbread draped over dozens of eaves, balconies, and dormers. A witch’s hat tower, a wrap-around porch, and a massive carriage house. With a cupola on it. Nothing succeeds like excess, I always say.

  “Holy shit.”

  “Watch your mouth, Evie,” said Geoff automatically.

  I like to think of myself as a fairly sensible woman. I don’t imagine things, I face facts, I hadn’t gotten hysterical when my fourteen-year-old daughter asked me about birth control. Surely there was some perfectly rational explanation for this phenomenon. All I had to do was think of it.

  “It’s a hallucination,” I said. “Victorian houses don’t go up overnight. People do have hallucinations. We’re having a hallucination. Q.E.D.”

  “It’s not a hallucination,” Geoff said.

  Geoff teaches intellectual history at the university and tends to disagree, on principle, with everything everyone says. Someone says the sky is blue, he says it isn’t. And then he explains why. “This has none of the earmarks of a hallucination,” he went on. “We aren’t in a heightened emotional state, not expecting a miracle, not drugged, not part of a mob, not starving, not sense deprived. Besides, there’s a clothesline in the yard with laundry hanging on it. Nobody hallucinates long underwear.”

  I looked where he was pointing, and sure enough, a pair of scarlet long johns was kicking and waving from an umbrella-shaped drying-rack, along with a couple pairs of women’s panties, two oxford-cloth shirts hung up by their collars, and a gold-and-black print caftan. There was also what was arguably the most beautifully designed perennial bed I’d ever seen basking in the early morning sun. As I was squinting at the delphiniums, a side door opened and a woman came out with a wicker clothesbasket propped on her hip. She was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, had fairish hair pulled back in a bushy tail, and struck me as being a little long in the tooth to be going barefoot and braless.

  “Nice legs,” said Geoff.

  I snapped down the window. “Pull the shades before you get in the shower,” I said. “It looks to me like our new neighbors get a nice, clear shot of our bathroom from their third floor.”

  In our neighborhood, we pride ourselves on minding our own business and not each other’s—live and let live, as long as you keep your dog, your kids, and your lawn under control. If you don’t, someone calls you or drops you a note, and if that doesn’t make you straighten up and fly right, well, you’re likely to get a call from the town council about that extension you neglected to get a variance for. Needless to say, the house at Number 400 fell way outside all our usual coping mechanisms. If some contractor had shown up at dawn with bulldozers and two-by-fours, I could have called the police or our councilwoman or someone and got an injunction. How do you get an injunction against a physical impossibility?

  The first phone call came at about eight-thirty: Susan Morrison, whose back yard abuts the Pratt place.

  “Reality check time,” said Susan. “Do we have new neighbors or do we not?”

  “Looks like it to me,” I said.

  Silence. Then she sighed. “Yeah. So. Can Kimmy sit for Jason Friday night?”

  Typical. If you can’t deal with it, pretend it doesn’t exist, like when one couple down the street got the bright idea of turning their front lawn into a wildflower meadow. The trouble is, a Victorian mansion is a lot harder to ignore than even the wildest meadow. The phone rang all morning with hysterical calls from women who hadn’t spoken to us since Geoff’s brief tenure as president of the neighborhood associat
ion.

  After several fruitless sessions of what’s-the-world-coming-to, I turned on the machine and went out to the garden to put in the beans. Planting them in May was pushing it, but I needed the therapy. For me, gardening’s the most soothing activity on Earth. When you plant a bean, you get a bean, not an azalea or a cabbage. When you see that bean covered with icky little orange things, you know they’re Mexican bean beetle larvae and go for the pyrethrum. Or you do if you’re paying attention. It always astonishes me how oblivious even the garden club ladies can be to a plant’s needs and preferences.

  Sure, there are nasty surprises, like the winter that the mice ate all the Apricot Beauty tulip bulbs. But mostly you know where you are with a garden. If you put the work in, you’ll get satisfaction out, which is more than can be said of marriages or careers.

  This time though, digging and raking and planting failed to work their usual magic. Every time I glanced up, there was Number 400, serene and comfortable, the shrubs established and the paint chipping just a little around the windows, exactly as if it had been there forever instead of less than twelve hours.

  I’m not big on the inexplicable. Fantasy makes me nervous. In fact, fiction makes me nervous. I like facts and plenty of them. That’s why I wanted to be a botanist. I wanted to know everything there was to know about how plants worked, why azaleas like acid soil and peonies like wood ash and how you might be able to get them to grow next to each other. I even went to graduate school and took organic chemistry. Then I met Geoff, fell in love, and traded in my Ph.D. for an M-R-S, with a minor in Mommy. None of these events (except possibly falling in love with Geoff) fundamentally shook my allegiance to provable, palpable facts. The house next door was palpable, all right, but it shouldn’t have been. By the time Kim got home from school that afternoon, I had a headache from trying to figure out how it got to be there.

  Kim is my daughter. She reads fantasy, likes animals a lot more than she likes people, and is a big fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Because of Kim, we have two dogs (Spike and Willow), a cockatiel (Frodo), and a lop-eared Belgian rabbit (Big Bad), plus the overflow of semi-wild cats (Balin, Dwalin, Bifur, and Bombur) from the Pratt place, all of which she feeds and looks after with truly astonishing dedication.