BRG/TNL/500: 8 The River Witch

HER FATHER was called Engel.  Engel the storyteller.  
8. HIS STORIES WERE TRICKS.
This she learned later.  Fairy tales to which he cast himself.  Always stories from before she remembered.  For a long time, too long, she believed his world stacked up.
He would say, Remember the farm, Maggie?  Remember how the old dirt road forked and to the left the road continued on along the river, and to the right rose up to our old farm?  Remember the rows of poplar that lined the road?  Remember the island in the middle of the river?  We could see it from your room.
And she would claim to remember this, and she meant it.  And none of it existed.
When he had her acknowledging the scene he painted was a true place, he made the leap:  And what lived on that island?
A Witch.


Remember her coming to the house that day, asking for corn?
She invited  you to supper.
She did.
It was a trick.
To trap me in a wager.  She wanted to take you from me.
Her wager, and her trick, was a drinking contest.  But, as Engel claimed to know, she had put an illusion on her cup, so that when Engel took his turn, he would drink from the river, and thus no matter how deep a drink he took he could never win.
Because he knew this, and because he knew the wager would be for his daughter, he made a plan.
What did I do?
Hid me.
Where no one would find you.  And then I went down to the island, and I sat at the table in the Witch's house, and I drank with her.
HE TOLD her this story many times.  So many times.  Maybe she requested it.
He drank.  And drank.  Until he must breathe, and of course there was no drop in the water level in the cup.  He threw the cup at her and ran.  The Witch came on, chasing him out of the house.  Maggie remembered the version of this witch she had drawn in via the listening: A tall hag with a massive belly; a spider of a woman, a dewey silver mommy long-legs.
I leapt into the river, and she followed me.  But I escaped her.
I know how!  She would say to her father.
I turned myself into a trout, and swam away.  I swam three hundred miles of river, until I came up, and hid in a beaver's dam!
She believed this then.  Would swear, as she was she, it had happened.  She memorized this and twenty other tales: he had walked through time,  and this knowledge, her father the shape-shifter, the thousand year old man, and the touch he had with that other world just off to the side of ours, was a secret to protect.
THE REAL Engel Haff, before he died, had admitted these were lies to her as she sat sentry over his death in that small room behind the tavern he ran, but there was more: as he admitted his lies, he also admitted to her that those parallel lies she had attacked others for whispering about him, those sinister claims, the desecrated lives of innocents, were the truth.  The anchored language of her coming up with him he reversed in those musty days he spit blood into soda bottles, and pissed the bed, and, Yes, I did it.  All of it.  That's why these people are outside: to see me through.
HE DIED while she fed him baby food.  He told her it was happening as it happened.  His victims waitedin the yard, some had come weeks earlier, and camped in the parking lot of the bar,  and while she kept them from him while he lived, after he died they passed through the room, and spit on his peaceable husk.  She allowed them the goodbye.
ALL OF THIS thinking again on her father's lies was virgin arithmetic to contrast against this new Roger Kent, the doppelgänger she created in place of him, as she rode south in the truck with the beards; Roger the Liar in correspondence with the great liar.
THE TRUCKS made their Hudson HUB: a stone firehouse had been blasted open, and the 88s had constructed a hallway from the guts of it, that led from the truck stalls of the old fire station, up to another hole blasted through even older stone, at the back rectory of a church -- this was a compound!  Beards loomed above them on every building, and had rigged lights to shine down along the road, like a casino strip in the desert was the changing light here from everywhere else.  And there, on the high spear-tip doors of the cathedral, was the hanging skull candelabra that must be the Saucy One himself.
THE LEAD BEARD whispered to her, Come on in, Maggie.  Let's get supper before we walk back out in the dark.
He took her arm, and escorted her as if to her wedding, up the walk, to the cathedral doors.  Saucy J's smile was gone.  Candles had burned his lips black.  His eyes were lazy from the hours of torture he must have taken before the Eights got tired of it.  Saucy J's head spun right, the door opened, and Maggie followed the Beard to church.