“…you ain’t in Kansas anymore,” said the witch. Or rather, the girl dressed up as a witch. I’ll admit, the outfit looked very well-made, with a mind for practicality not common among most cosplayers. She was dressed for the weather, wearing a heavy-weight black coat with enough flare at the hips to accommodate the skirt she was wearing. Also wool. It only went to her knees, but her outfit was completed with knee-high leather boots that left only a bit of stocking exposed. I noted that despite her reference, they weren’t striped.
“Are you shitting me?”
That’s really all I could say. When dealing with anything weird, or unpleasant, or mildly annoying my language tended towards “coarse.” Which is a polite way of saying I could likely make a sailor blush. Actually, I’m pretty sure a few times I had, hadn’t I? People keep using sailors as a standard of cursing, as if that other branch didn’t…but I’m starting to daydream again. It’s been a stressful day, and now someone’s capping it off with an outright absurd scenario.
I wouldn’t say I completely discounted the supernatural. I’ve seen and heard a few things in my time that couldn’t rationally be explained by science, but it was all minor stuff; footsteps in the back of a building that you had just cleared and locked every door of, objects moved around when no one could have moved them.
But that was still somewhat in the realm of “normal.” I mean, it wasn’t some absurd tale about being spirited away, or falling into the gap between worlds. The noise she mentioned was unexplained, but I had been distracted at the time, so that could have been anything.
“I’m sorry to say I’m not ‘shitting you,’” the witch said dryly “Don’t you feel it in the air? Those who pass through to this side tend to be at least somewhat sensitive to worlds other than their own.”
There was an ethereal feeling to the air, and an itching at the back of my neck that always indicated something was wrong. While I normally put some stock in feelings like this, I was already keyed up from getting lost. And her pointing it out could just be my brain making me imagine the feeling was there.
I turned to the witch and was about to shout, when the feeling intensified, the worst I had ever felt. The witch’s expression changed too, from a smooth but slightly smug expression to one of peak alertness. She grabbed my collar, and pulled me down behind the tree I had previously been sitting against, directing her gaze across the meadow to the tree-line on the other side.
Following her gaze, I saw the underbrush across the clearing begin to shake. Holding my breath, I made a start when out jumped a rabbit. A horned rabbit.
I had a few very different thoughts on this, with my usual meandering brain wondering what a southwestern cryptid was doing in a mid-Atlantic state. I was a little more receptive to the thought that what Miss Witch had said might have a bit more truth to it than I had wanted to believe, and I pulled my dinky 4” CRKT folder in case for some odd reason the thing noticed us and decided something ten times bigger than it would make for good prey.
“What’s that…”
“SHHHHH!” the witch shushed me. I noticed she was fiddling around in the bag she was wearing, pulling out a small envelope. “This should do the trick,” she whispered, dumping it all over me.
Sighing in relief, she turned back to look at the rabbit. I did the same, figuring it’s not common to see a cryptid like this. However, it was just nibbling at some grass. Totally not doing anything threatening enough to justify the amount of concern the witch was showing, or my own feeling of impending danger.
The giant wolf pouncing on the jackalope cleared up that feeling. It was like, twice the size of wolves I had seen in the zoo. It wouldn’t have been out of place in the wilds of Alaska or Siberia, but it was outright anomalous in Appalachia. It tore the rabbit to shreds, and gulped it up so quickly I had to wonder why it even went through the effort. Wolves usually were pack hunters in the first place, and they would normally go after much more substantial game than a little…jackalope.
Catching myself daydreaming again, I brought my focus back to the wolf as it sauntered back into the woods. The witch kept her hand on my back for a few more minutes, then sighed in relief again as she got up.
Dusting the dirt off her coat, she said “Dire Wolves usually keep away, but it must have sensed you crossing over. Your grasp on the other world was rather weak, but you have enough traces of it left that it will attract more troublesome things if we don’t fix that.”
“…”
“Well don’t thank me just yet, we aren’t out of the woods just yet,” she said, chuckling to herself over the joke only she found funny.
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I was not amused. As much as I wanted to deny everything she said, the weird creatures from myth I had just witnessed were more detached from reality than anything I had seen to date in my life.
“First, we need to get you dressed a bit more appropriately,” she muttered while reaching back into her bag. She pulled out a brown wool coat, in a similar style to her own black coat, and a pair of sensible boots. I was almost shocked to see they were bigger than the bag she pulled them from, but at this point I was so far gone that I’d accept anything. Semper Gumby, I tried telling myself, not convincingly. It’s important to be flexible, but right now I was more just in a daze and going with the flow.
“Put those on. Your shoes and jacket reek the most of the other world, and it can’t be easy to walk in those boots anyway.”
In a daze, I took them off, replacing them with the warm and comfortable garments she offered me. I folded the jacket and placed it on the outcropping I had previously been throwing rocks at. My heeled boots neatly on top, I thought for a moment, then placed my car keys in one of the boots, in case Jess and Anna found them and needed to get in my car. At the time, I was unaware of the troubles this would cause in the world I was slowly starting to realize I was leaving behind.
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“Honestly, you were asking to end up here, way you were going on,” the witch says in a tone my mind interprets as judging. “Brightly colored clothing like that jacket you were wearing is common when people pass through, although I don’t know the reason for it myself.”
We are walking through the woods, me following behind the witch as she leads the way. The jackalope helped me realize how wrong the world here was compared to what I knew, but now that I was in the woods, it seemed foolish that I ever even doubted the witch. Shadows flitted between the trees, in a manner that would have caused a field day if caught on video and uploaded online. I saw some lights off to the side, and in a vain hope that maybe I had imagined everything up to them, started to step off the path. Maybe they were car headlights on a highway.
The witch stopped me, of course.
“What do you even think you’re doing? I thought you had at least some common sense, the way you held yourself back with the Dire Wolf. Idiot!”
“But…”
“But those are will o’ the wisps. I know they still talk about them back where you came from. They’re often at places where the world is thin, to lure the more perceptive to this side. They would just love for you to follow but it’d be the last thing you do, untrained as you are.”
“Untrained? But…”
“I’m not talking about a fight with humans, or even the minor spirits you find in your old world. Things are dangerous here if you don’t know what you’re doing. Which you don’t.”
She thought for a moment, then continued,
“As I had said, you were practically asking to end up here. Not only was that damn jacket of yours brightly colored, you were completely alone, likely zoning out like you keep doing, walking in a place full of rock outcroppings. Rock features like that are common signs that the barrier between worlds is thin. Plenty of what you’d call mysterious disappearances occur in these places, and the often have names like ‘Devil's Den’ and whatnot to discourage foolhardy people like yourself.” I kept quiet, not wanting to admit that I had though ‘Old Hobb's Hollow Trail’ was an odd trail name this morning. “And the worst of it. To top it all off, you weren’t even carrying iron.”
“Carrying iron?” I had a vague idea of what she was talking about but had to confirm…
“Arms,” she said flatly, “you weren’t carrying arms. I don’t even want to ask why, the way you carry yourself makes it clear you’re no stranger to them. Not only can they defend you physically, they have a powerful grounding effect. I can’t say for certain it would have stopped you from crossing over, what with your airheadedness, but it would have kept you at least a bit more grounded in reality. I imagine your heritage didn’t help either.”
“???”
“For some reason most people who end up here from your side have ancestors from a few different regions. Hell, even my parents were like that, I heard.”
I decided I might need a bit more time to digest what she said before putting up with more lecturing, so instead I decided to go back to my old standby of deflecting.
“By the way, you never really introduced yourself.”
“Oh, sorry about that. My name’s Mary Korppi.”
“Rose Snyder,” I replied
An awkward silence hung between us. At least things were back to something I was used to. I usually made things awkward, often on purpose so I could get back to my beloved books. Oh God. That was going to be something I missed. And my tools. And my collection. Kicking myself for being so unprepared this morning, so stupid, I followed Mary further into the forest.
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After about an hour or so of walking the overall feel of the path began to change. Back where I had initially crossed over the trail had been rougher, less traveled. The trail had perfectly matched what you’d expect from a lesser-traveled state gamelands in the mountains. But as we continued on, the trail got smoother, with the current section showing signs of frequent use.
“I often go out to look for rarer herbs and other supplies,” Mary explained, noticing my reaction. “The path is even more well-traveled past my house, from the customers I get from the village.”
I guess that witch hat isn’t for show. Although I thought originally witch hats were shaped differently, with media modeling them after traditional alewives hats before they started to get pointier, with larger brims as consumer tastes changed and people started being more appreciative of witches in shows and books.
Mary would be a hit online, like a textbook forest witch. While normally I would be on the side of authenticity and historical accuracy, I made an exception for cute witches in hats. But seeing as it was becoming increasingly clear that she is in-fact a magic-using witch, I can’t really criticize anything about the accuracy of her outfit either.
As we continued down the path, I began to smell woodsmoke in the air; not enough for a whole village but certainly enough for a lone person. The trees began to thin out, and eventually gave way to a clearing with a two-story cottage in the center.
In front of the cottage is a sizeable garden. Not big enough for it to be called a farm, but enough to provide food for several people. But not all the plants growing there were food. In addition to corn, pumpkins ready to be harvested, and the remains of some tomato and bean plants that had likely already been picked and stored, there was flax, for linen, and yarrow, a common medical herb. But what really caught my eye was the far right corner of the garden.
Mandrake, henbane, deadly nightshade and wolvesbane all grew, this section full of plants that give rise to some of the most deadly poisons. At least, I noticed, she put up a fence around this section.
Seeing where my gaze was resting, Mary apologetically stated, “I know, I know, those would probably make me look like a poisoner in your world, but I swear I need those for some of my wares.”
“Wares like?”
“Uhm, poison?”
It wasn’t my place to pass judgement, and besides, I had an inkling that she might have helped me out even more than I was aware, so I chose to let it slide.
She walks up to the door, reaches for the door knob then pauses for a moment, as if a thought has just occurred to her. She slowly turns around. The door opens as if by magic which, given everything that’s happened today, probably was just that. She then loudly proclaims.
“Welcome…to the witch's cottage.”
I’m shocked.
Not at the use of magic, but at the fact that she can keep a straight face while acting so corny.