The Witch of the Hills Read online

  THE WITCH

  OF THE HILLS

  by

  J. M. Fraser

  THE WITCH OF THE HILLS

  Copyright © 2017 by Joseph Fraser

  Cover art by Elle J Rossi

  Digital formatting by Author E.M.S.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or any means, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without permission in writing by the author.

  All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Published in the United States of America by J.M. Fraser

  ISBN-13: 978-1-946464-05-7

  Table of Contents

  THE WITCH OF THE HILLS

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Also by J.M. Fraser

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  A tiny shape emerged at the shimmery point in the distance where highway squiggled into heat mirage. Brian squinted but couldn’t make it out. Fence post?

  Eastern Wyoming had so much to offer.

  The distance closed fast, and the figure turned into a girl with her thumb out. A stiff breeze scattered dark hair across her face and ruffled her long country dress. She held her ground where the shoulder met the pavement, as if daring the next semi to take her down. Spunky, unconventional, interesting, this hitchhiker had arrived at the perfect time. Brian’s earlier excitement at the prospect of his first-ever road trip alone had more recently faded into a slow slog of highway boredom.

  As foot on the gas became foot off the gas became foot on the brake, the possibilities raced through his mind.

  Together in the car, the two of them could crack jokes about the bland scenery. Bluffs, scrub brush, coal trains. Let’s stop and take a picture of those wicked telephone poles.

  They could swap life stories. Matching sets, most likely—parents, school, part-time jobs, rules, rules, rules, but also a vision of a promising future, a light at the end of the tunnel, the day when they might be old enough to start making the rules themselves or at least wouldn’t have to follow every stinking one of them.

  The universal need for a better half in life’s many us-against-the-world scenarios had been weighing on Brian lately.

  And yet, this girl wasn’t the one who’d been tugging his heart in an otherwise disturbing series of midnight dreams. The hitchhiker’s hair was black, not red. Scraggly, not straight. More importantly, she had rebellion in her eyes, not a calm resolve.

  But this girl on the shoulder was real, not a dream. Whether she’d prove to be a soulmate or merely a passing stranger, if she needed a ride, he was here to help. A desolate road offered plenty of risk. Nobody should be standing alone with their thumb out.

  He braked harder and cut over from the fast lane.

  The girl allowed him some room to get off the road.

  He stopped, and lowered the passenger window. “Want a lift?”

  A car roared by, buffeting them with draft. She waited for it to muscle past them, waited until silence hung heavy in the air. “Not with the likes of you,” she said.

  The line was delivered with an undertone of anger cold enough to send a chill down his spine. Dizzying, almost stupefying in its intensity. Groping for some meaning in her harsh expression, he stumbled into a reboot of a conversation going bad.

  “Aren’t you hitching? I was just asking if—”

  “I said no.” She glared even more fiercely.

  And to think, the day had started so well. His sister handed over the car keys without making him beg. But then came this long, highway trip through nowhere, followed by his big screw-up here—he’d crashed in on the girl uninvited, no doubt imagining she’d had her thumb out in his hope of finding a road-trip companion. The initial promise of a fun-filled day now caught in his throat like a dry-mouth swallow. He’d supremely annoyed somebody who needed space, not a ride.

  “Can I give you some advice?” the girl asked.

  A cold breeze frosted over him, as if her icy expression chilled the summer air. No good could come of this. He steeled himself for the gathering storm.

  She swept a dark bang out of her eyes, freeing them to level an even harder stare at him. “This isn’t a promising day for you. Stay clear of girls on the shoulder and especially ignore any macabre roadside signs trying to lure you in.”

  Macabre? The old-fashioned word summoned a cloud overhead, casting their confrontation into shadows. He tried to rally against the dispiriting gloom with a stab at humor. “What would we see on a billboard? There’s nothing to sell out here but dry riverbeds and scrubby bushes.”

  She stepped back and then shimmered in the heat ever so slightly—just enough for him to realize the obvious and awaken from a dream.

  But he didn’t.

  The girl turned her back on him and trudged away.

  Brian threw the car into drive and tried to make sense of what just happened. Not that he held out much hope. Free phone apps didn’t have a monopoly on pop-ups. Sometimes the real world hiccupped, too, and it didn’t offer an interruption-free version for a buck ninety-nine.

  An hour and a half later, two sodas and a candy bar later, an almost recovered sense of restored spirits later, he rounded a curve.

  Sidney: Lynching Capital of Nebraska

  The wacky message broadsided him with enough force to swerve the car. The billboard displayed a stagecoach, a few cowboys, and a huge noose dangling at the end of a rope. Macabre. The girl nailed it from a hundred miles away.

  But she couldn’t have imagined the stomach-churning effect this advertised hanging scene might specifically hold on him.

  Brian had suffered through that weird nightmare again the night before. Not the dumb one where he forgot his locker combination. This one had teeth. A redhaired girl clung to a jagged cliff, just above a foaming sea. A girl he knew somehow, but couldn’t remember from when. She meant everything to him, but he didn’t know why. In this dream, a tree poked out of the rocks above her, and a noose hung down from its gnarly limb. Brian thrashed awake every time, before he could save her from hanging, drowning, or whatever the glowing-eyed man had in store. Yeah, like most nightmares, this one had a villain, too.

  First the dream, and now an echo. Time for a break. Again he cut over from the fast lane, this time to get off at the exit and check out a town so desperate for tourists it offered t
o hang them.

  As he glanced back at the billboard for one more peek, the guitar-tone blast of his cell phone startled him onto a rough section of shoulder, rattling him from feet to hands. Luckily traffic was almost nonexistent. He righted the car and glanced at caller ID. Mom.

  The sudden transition from dark reflection to mundane reality almost ushered a sense of relief, except the prospect of a grounding now threatened to swallow him whole. He took a deep breath. “Hey.”

  “Don’t hey me! Where’s your sister?”

  “Kara?”

  “Do you have another one I haven’t heard about?” His mom was the world champion at employing sarcasm to tighten the screws.

  He swallowed. “She hooked up with this girl, Cheryl, from Joliet. They’re heading back in that girl’s car.”

  “And you’re driving a thousand miles alone? Why didn’t you two run that by me first?”

  Because you would have said no? His hands were getting clammy. “It’s not like I don’t have a license, Mom.”

  “You’re only sixteen, Brian. How many times have I—”

  The line went dead. Yay. Whoever forgot to plant a cell phone tower near the booming metropolis of Lynching Sidney just earned a high five. He’d call her back later. Maybe she’d cool off by the time he got to Iowa.

  Brian slipped the phone into his pocket. By then he was off the interstate, cruising into a dusty town. The main street held nothing but the same assortment of fast-food restaurants, hotels, and discount stores he could have found anywhere. No hint of the dark side suggested by the billboard.

  An old service station caught his eye. The shack of a building reflected the downhill slide of his afternoon, with its peeling, gray look of weathering and neglect, well beyond anything a paint job could save. He pulled in for gas.

  But what was with that primo vintage gas pump at the island? The shiny relic stood like a one-armed man, proudly displaying GULF in black letters across its round, orange face. Any picker would kill to wander into an old garage and find that inside.

  Brian got out to put the thing through its paces, but he couldn’t find a slot for his debit card. He headed inside to pay.

  He hurried past the open screen door before a rusty sign above could fall on him—Hal’s—then paused at a soda machine with the same restored look as the pump outside. He opened it, lingered in the cool rush of air, and traced his initials across the condensation on an old-fashioned glass bottle of orange soda. According to the instructions, a mere nickel would release the drink. But the one in the illustration was no ordinary coin. It had a buffalo on its back instead of Monticello. Must have been a thousand years old.

  Big whoop. Add root beer to the wildly overstocked collection of orange crush, and maybe he’d be more into museum pieces.

  He turned from the sodas and took in the sights. The store was sick with nostalgia. A 1945 wall calendar. A roadmap tacked beside it showing U.S. highways, state and county roads, but no interstate. Vintage toys in a barrel—mostly tops and trucks made of metal. Wooden dolls.

  And the comics! Batman and Superman for a dime apiece? In mint condition without plastic wrapping, even though they had to date back a zillion years. Okay, yeah. He was getting into it now.

  A slim man with tufts of graying hair poking out from beneath his Gulf service cap—Hal, according to the name patch—came around the counter and flashed a gap-toothed smile. “What brings you to Sidney, son?”

  “It’s kind of a long story.”

  “Those are the best.”

  Not always. Initial boredom plus mean hitchhiker times angry mom equaled skip to the punch line. “That billboard was different.”

  Hal cocked his head and squinted at him as if trying to decipher a code. “Billboard, huh? What did it say?”

  “Something about lynching.”

  “Ain’t nothing worth seeing here now.” Hal scowled out the station’s sooty window at the shadowy landscape beyond. “Every July, the town hangs a rustler or two in the Wild West show, but you’re too late for that. And Boot Hill’s closed for renovations.”

  “They closed a cemetery?”

  “Progress.”

  Hal opened the soda case and jimmied a bottle from its clutches with a pocketknife. “Coin thing’s broken.” He used the jaw-toothed opener on the side of the case to snap the metal cap off. “Want a swig?”

  “No thanks.” Brian eyed the exit. “So this town is just another dead end, huh?” The time had come to gas up and head on down the road.

  “Huh. You made a joke there, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah, I suppose.” Brian couldn’t drum up enough enthusiasm to fake a laugh.

  Hal gulped his drink, came up for air, eyed him. “Where you headed, son?”

  “Wisconsin.”

  “Whew, that’s a hike. What’s waiting back there?”

  “College.”

  “You look kinda young, son.”

  “I skipped a year.” Two, actually, counting kindergarten. His parents had thrown him on the fast track from day one.

  “In a hurry, huh?”

  Not lately. High school had been okay, but college led to harder stuff. Brian cringed at the prospect of an eventual briefcase, two-point-three kids, and a mortgage in some ordinary suburb. How was it that because his dad had carved out a boring career in accounting, he was supposed to follow in those footsteps?

  But just try arguing the point. Or—gasp—suggest taking a year or two off to sort things out. Bring up becoming a cop maybe, or a fireman. And duck. No way would his parents ever get how success was spelled out in the comic books back on that rack. Be the hero the girl in his nightmare needed, or some girl needed. Number crunching was more of a Clark Kent existence, without the great alter ego.

  Hal drained the rest of his soda and set the bottle on the counter. “If you ain’t in a hurry, the northern route’s a lot more interesting.”

  “Yeah?” Spam emails would be more interesting. Shopping for socks would be more interesting. The I-80 experience had been like drinking sparkling grape juice. “If that means getting me off the interstate, sign me up.”

  “Off what?” Hal traced a leathery finger along a line on the old wall map. “This road here leads you up the western edge of the Sand Hills to the town of Chadron. Stay there overnight and take Highway 20 east tomorrow. The hills are full of legends. You might find a few ghost towns if you watch for the signs.”

  “Works for me.”

  “You’ll wanna fill up here first, though, for the drive.”

  “Okay. I need about ten gallons.” Brian pulled his wallet out.

  “Couple bucks oughta cover it.”

  Not a bad deadpan delivery for such a lame joke. He did the polite thing by playing along. “I never heard of a sale on gas.”

  “You angling for a discount?”

  “No, really, I’m almost on empty.”

  “Just two bucks.”

  Enough already. Brian handed over a couple dollars. “Okay. We can settle up the difference after the fill-up.”

  “The price ain’t gonna change.”

  “Whatever.”

  Hal followed him outside and ran a hand along the hood of his car. “Ain’t never seen one like this before. Can’t be American.”

  “No, it’s Korean.”

  “Korean.” Hal stared at it for a long moment, as if trying to work something out in his head. “Huh.”

  How did a gas station attendant not know a Kia when he saw one? They were all over the highway. He got back in the car, waited, glanced at the meter on the pump. Nineteen-point-nine cents per gallon? The numbers must have been stuck in place for decades.

  After a few minutes, Hal tapped on the window.

  Brian rolled it down.

  “She took about ten gallons. Here’s your change.” Hal dug in his pocket and came out with a nickel and three pennies. He just wouldn’t quit with his comedy routine.

  Brian fumbled the coins around in his hand. “Hey, that’s a good
one, but these are old. I bet they’re valuable.” He reached to give them back. “Seriously, how much do I owe you?”

  “Have a good trip, son.” Hal slapped the hood of the car and motioned him to pull away.

  The station seemed too small, but, “Wait, are you setting this place up to be a theme park?”

  HONK! The booming horn of a semi drowned out his voice.

  Hal signaled the trucker toward the pump with one hand and again urged Brian away from it with a sweep of the other.

  Okay. Somewhere along the line, lame humor had been blown away by skin-crawling creepiness. Come to think of it, maybe as far back as that girl in Wyoming. With random pop-ups now filling the screen, the world needed a malware sweep real bad.

  Brian drove the hell out of there and didn’t look back.

  Chapter 2

  Rebecca traced a smile on the pane of her cabin window. Across the glass, the sun cast her Nebraskan hills in bountiful light, bringing out the gold and green of scrub brush and the white hints of sand beneath.

  She twirled away, lifted a book from her shelf, and basked in the scent of old leather. A pitcher beckoned. She sipped its cool water, then filled Simon’s bowl.

  The cat lapped the drink greedily.