Ken Douglas - Nightwitch

“ Wow, just like I saw,” Arty said.

“ Wow and double wow,” Carolina said.

“ Now let me tell you about the Nightwitch, the witch that can’t die.”

“ The Nightwitch, the witch that can’t die. She’s a soucouyant, or maybe I should say, The Soucouyant, because she’s the last of her kind. At least that’s what they say in the small towns and villages outside of Port of Spain,” John Coffee said, “but nobody believes anymore, except a few of the very old, and those that have seen. They believe.” He was sitting, crosslegged on the ground, opposite Sarah in the small two man tent, hands folded in his lap.

“ And that’s what you’ve been fighting all this time?” Sarah asked, sitting up in the sleeping bag. She yawned. It was a cool afternoon, but the chill felt good on her skin. She was surprised that she’d slept the day away, and a little miffed that he’d allowed her to do it.

“ Not fighting, running from, would be a better way to put it,” he said.

“ And this Nightwitch can change into anything she wants?” It was hard to believe he was still going on with this. She rubbed the sleep out of her eyes, yawned, and stretched, pushing her arms and elbows behind and thrusting her breasts forward. She appreciated the fact that his gaze never left her eyes. Miles had had his eyes everywhere when she was naked. At first she liked the way he took in her body, but now she realized that he only saw a naked woman, not a helpmate or a partner.

“ Most anything. It can’t be a sea creature. Salt water can destroy it, but other than that, yes. However she usually picks something nasty-you won’t find her as a horse or cow. She’s very carnivorous,” he said. He started wringing his hands, like he knew she was having a hard time believing what he was saying.

“ And she can’t die?” Sarah yawned again. She was amazed that she hadn’t sought something to cover herself with. She felt natural with him, because clothes or no clothes, he treated her like a human being, not a sexual object to be ogled and used. However, she was going to have to do something about clothes soon. She couldn’t spend the rest of her life in the buff.

“ Not if they’re careful. Silver is kind of like their Kryptonite. It won’t kill them, but it makes them weak enough so that a wooden stake in the heart might work.”

“ So now you’re telling me that vampires and werewolves exist,” she said, trying not to associate the man telling her this fiction with the man who made slow wonderful love last night.

“ Not exactly,” he said. Now he was twisting the front of his shirt with his thumbs.

“ Then what are you saying?” She looked into his sweet eyes and tried to see beyond his words. He was a troubled man, but his eyes said that he was telling the truth, or at least the truth as he believed it.

“ I’m saying that this thing, this soucouyant, is real. It did this.” He pulled his fingers away from the front of his shirt and ran them along his scabbed check and bruised neck. “I know that even after everything you’ve seen, everything that’s happened, you still don’t believe. But I’m telling you it’s real. I’m not making this stuff up.” His hands went back to his lap, clenching each other tight enough to turn his knuckles white.

“ Silver Kryptonite, wooden stakes, come on, John, you have to know how this sounds?” She reached out and took his tense hands in hers, pulled them apart and met his liquid stare with concern.

“ I’ve kept this bottled up for a long time, because I know how it sounds. Do I look crazy to you?”

“ No,” she said, but he did kind of look crazy, with his disheveled hair, wringing hands, pleading little boy stare, and the way he was sitting, almost in a lotus position, looking like a firecracker about to explode.

“ Then let me finish what I have to say. Your life may depend on it.”

She kept a firm hold on his hands and nodded her head.

“ Legend has it that the soucouyant is the old woman that lives at the end of the road,” he went on, “and that she lives the day away in her house, shut up against the sun. But when night falls, and bats replace the birds in the trees, she sheds her old shriveled up skin and hides it away. Then she rises through the roof in a ball of flame to seek out a young victim.” He saw the look in her eyes and stopped the telling. He met her gaze head on, till she was forced to look away. She took her hands back and folded them in her lap.

“ Go on,” she finally said.

“ You sure you want me to?”

“ I’m sure.”

“ Okay.” Then he continued. “After the soucouyant finds a victim, usually a young woman, it flames down to earth, arriving as a carnivorous animal, where it hunts the girl until she’s crazy with terror, because the soucouyant needs the terror as much as the young blood.”

“ It sucks out the blood?” Sarah interrupted.

“ Yes.”

“ Like a vampire?”

“ Yes.”

“ And you want me to believe this?”

“ Yes.”

“ Because that’s what the wolf and the bear were, your soucouyant?”

“ Yes.”

“ Why couldn’t they be just what they appeared to be?”

“ You saw the ball of fire?”

“ I saw something. We were going so fast. I closed my eyes.”

“ Do you want me to finish?” he asked.

His smile was forced and Sarah thought he was treating her like a kid with a simple math problem. The answer appears obvious, but the kid can’t seem to grasp it, so you keep explaining away, attacking the problem from different angles, until you see the light in the child’s eyes. Well, if John Coffee wanted to see that light in her eyes, he was going to have to do a heck of a lot of explaining.

“ After the soucouyant has fed, it returns to the ball of fire, seeks out its skin and becomes a simple old woman again.”

“ There are no males?” Sarah asked.

“ I don’t know, maybe, but this one’s definitely female. And she’s one tough old bird. My personal theory is that soucouyants have been around for a very long time, coexisting with man. I think they could be the source of all of the shape changing legends. Vampires. Werewolves. They’ve always been with us, we’ve just never understood them.”

“ So how do you kill them? Silver bullets?”

“ You know, I could slap myself, that one seems so obvious. I’ve got a silver bladed knife that sent it flaming away the other day, but I’ve never considered silver bullets.”

“ I was kidding,” Sarah said.

“ I know you were, but silver does weaken it. The old folks in Trinidad use a silver cross to protect themselves against it. But if you want to kill a soucouyant, you have to find the skin.”

“ Then what do you do?” Sarah found herself getting interested, despite herself. He was a powerful storyteller and she was hanging on his words.

“ You fill the skin with rock salt and hot pepper.”

“ And?”

“ When she returns to her house and slips into the skin, she starts to itch and burn and she literally scratches herself to death.

“ And of course there’s the locket and the necklace. The Soucouyant wears an old locket dangling from an old necklace that’s been dipped in a magic potion. When she’s wearing it, she can’t age. Take it away and they grow old, like us. They grow old and they can die.”

“ Why don’t you carry around a jar of salt water and just throw it on the animal when it comes?”

“ We’re talking a lot of salt water. She’d have to be immersed. However I do carry a jar of cayenne pepper and it saved me the other day. A good slap in the face with that stuff will cause the old woman to start scratching and flame away.”