The Witches of Westfleet

The Witches of Westfleet

By D. A. McGuire, excerpt

The marsh below the house was riddled with ditches. Over some of them makeshift “bridges” had been laid; most were soggy, half-rotted pieces of plywood that sagged when any weight was put on them. I made my was across them until I reached the lower fringe of the marsh. Here years of human feet had pounded out a more substantial trail, which branched off and up through some dunes. At the top of one of the dunes I looked down and saw… her.

She was lifting a branch from a tangle of driftwood. As she did so, a dark, fur-covered animal darted out of it. I still wasn’t close enough to see what it was, probably a musk-rat, or a rat.

I half-walked, half-slid down the dune, shouting, “Hey, I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

“Who the -,” she demanded, startled, using some pretty raw language, “are you?”

“It’s probably a rat,” I said. The wind off the water was crisp, cold, and full of ocean spray. I buried my hands deep into my pockets.

“It’s a cat, you fool,” she snapped. “Are you from up there?” She pointed pas the dunes and marsh, up to where Hartington House, the only house in the area, sat on the bluff like a beached four-masted schooner. This was all federal land, the beach, the marsh, the dunes. Hartington House was perched at the very edge of that portion of the National Seashore that extended into Westfleet.

“It’s a cat, it’s probably a feral cat,” I said.

Witches of Westfleet. Photo by Elena

“Feral?” Her whole face squeezed up with irritation.

“Yeah, that means wild.”

“I know what the word means, you idiot,” she snarled. “But it’s not. It ran back that way.” She brushed past me and started toward the marsh.

I need a moment to describe this gem of a girl.

About my age, fourteen or fifteen, wearing a long blue denim skirt with men’s workboots, a black turtleneck, jersey, and a man’s olive-green camouflage jacket. But it was her face that was most remarkable: small, tight, angular, with bright, angry eyes. Her hair was long, black, tied back – or some of it was; most of it was being whipped about by the wind – with a red bandanna. She was smaller than me, about five five, on the skinny side, and fairly attractive, I guess. Well, most of my friends would have agreed she was no “dog,” though what little I’d seen of her personality seemed pretty disagreeable.

Anyhow, I trailed her up to the house and then around to the back, where a small door opened into a crawlspace beneath the house. It was there, as if she knew what she was doing, that she pulled up on a handle. The door fell to one side on a pair of rusty hinges.

“It went in there,” she said, pointing to a hole in a loose board beside the opening. “Well?”

“Well what?” I replied, realizing that her eyes were a dusky blue.

“Well, crawl in there and get it for me,” she demanded. “It’s a cat, not a rat!”

“I don’t know if we should…”

“Are you afraid of a few spiders, a bit of old cobweb? She snapped, swearing again. “It’s November! There’s nothing alive under there!”

“Except the skunk. I’ve been trying to get rid of,” a voice said.

Published in September 2000, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery magazine