David Nickle - Monstrous Affections

“We got your dragonfly,” said Annabel, teetering over a little slithering pond of shadow. “He brung you here, in case you didn’t know.”

“I didn’t know,” said swamp witch. “I’m not surprised, though. He’s a good dragonfly. Is he all right?”

“Uh huh. We got him at the house. Figured you could take care of yourself, big old swamp witch that you are. But we didn’t think he’d be safe among the Blessed Serpents of Eden.”

“They’re just plain corner rattlers, hon, and I’m no safer than anyone else when one decides to bite. But thank you for protecting dragonfly. Did he say why he brung — brought me here?”

“Figured it’d be the one place where the angel couldn’t come.”

“The angel.”

“In the yellow suit,” said Annabel. “With a vest underneath black as all damnation.”

“Him. Huh . He’s no angel.”

“That’s what you say. He’s huntin’ you, and you’re a swamp witch—”

“—so it follows he’s got to be an angel.” Swamp witch sighed. “I see.”

“Papa said you’d probably be wondering why we didn’t give you up to that angel.”

“Your papa’s a bright man,” said swamp witch. “The thought did cross my mind.”

“Papa said to tell you he don’t like the competition,” said Annabel.

Swamp witch laughed out loud at that one. “I believe it,” she said. “Oh, yes.”

Laughing felt good. It may not be the antidote to regret, but it sure helped the symptoms fine. All the same, she took a breath and put it away.

“He sent you to see if I was dead, didn’t he?”

Annabel looked down and shook off a rattler that was spiralling up toward her heel. “Yes, ma’am,” she said, a little ashamedly. “But he said you might not be. If, I mean, you was righteous.”

“So I’m righteous then?”

Annabel crooked her head like she was thinking about it.

“I expect,” she said. “Yeah, good chance you are.”

“All right,” said swamp witch. “But if you don’t mind, I’ll take no more chances. You still got that spare set of bamboo stilts I know Reverend used to use in back?” Annabel said she did, so swamp witch held out her hand. “Think you could toss ’em my way? I’d like to go see my dragonfly and maybe your Papa too.”

A moment later, the church hall was filled with a racket like summer’s rain on a metal shed. Swamp witch was making her escape, and that pleased the corner rattlers not at all.

Swamp witch dropped the two stilts by the Reverend’s porch and went in for her meeting. The porch was screened in and the Reverend was there, sitting on an old ratty recliner covered in plastic. Dragonfly was sitting quiet on the table beside him, in a big pickle jar with a lid someone had jammed nails through, just twice. Reverend looked as smug as he could manage, his face stiffened like it was with all the rattler venom.

Swamp witch understood there were days he’d been different: all stoked with holy-roller fire, straight-backed with a level gaze that could melt swamp witch where she stood. That was before he’d found the serpent spittle, before swamp witch had found her own calling.

Did he have any regrets? she wondered. Maybe taking the snake tooth into his arm, letting it course through him ’til he couldn’t even sit up on his own? Raising his young by nought but telepathy and bad example?

Did he regret any of it? She thought that he didn’t.

“Papa says you look like hell,” said Annabel.

“Thank you, Reverend. You are as ever a font of manly righteousness.”

Reverend lifted his hand an inch off the armrest, and his lips struggled to make an “o.”

“Papa’s cross with you,” said Annabel. “He called you a temptress.”

“Well make up your mind,” said swamp witch, laughing. Then she made serious. “We got problems here, Reverend.”

The Reverend agreed, making a farting noise with his mouth.

“This tea-drinking angel,” said swamp witch. “You reckon you know what he’s here for?”

“You,” said Annabel.

“You answered too fast,” said swamp witch. “What’s your Papa got to say?”

The Reverend’s hand settled back onto the arm of his chair, and he sighed like a balloon deflating. Dragonfly’s wings slapped against the glass of the jar.

“Angel wants Okehole.” Annabel put her head down. “All of it.” She looked up between strands of perfect blonde hair. “Its souls.”

Swamp witch rolled her eyes. Everything was about souls to the Reverend. Flesh to him was an inconvenience — a conveyance at best and lately, a broken down Oldsmobile. The tea-drinking man wasn’t an angel and he didn’t want souls. But she nodded for the Reverend to keep going.

“He’s aiming for you,” said Annabel, “because you got all the souls.”

Which was another thing that Reverend believed. This time swamp witch would not keep quiet. “I do not have all the souls, Reverend. You know what I done here and it’s not soul stealing.”

“Ain’t it?” said Annabel. “Puttin’ us all in a jar here — just like your bug! Comin’ to visit each Saturday and otherwise just keepin’ us here? Ain’t that soul stealin’?”

Swamp witch sighed. “Tell me what you know about your soul-stealin’ angel.”

The Reverend sighed and coughed and his head twitched up to look at her.

“He came by here this afternoon,” said Annabel. “Annabel — that’s me — brought him some iced tea made like he asked. He talked about the Garden — about the day that Eve bit that apple and brung it to Adam. He asked me, ‘What if Adam had said to Eve: I don’t want your awful food; I am faithful to Jehovah, for He has said to me: “Eat not that fruit.” What if Adam had turned his face upward to Jehovah, and said: I am content in this garden with Your love, and want not this woman’s lies of knowledge and truth. She has betrayed you, O Lord, not I. Not I. If that happened, would you sustain on serpent venom? Would she be the keeper of your town’s souls?’” Annabel nodded and looked right at swamp witch. “By ‘she’ I took him to mean you. That’s what Papa says.”

“So what did you say to that, I wonder?” said swamp witch.

The Reverend’s lips twitched, and Annabel hollered:

“Begone!” The Reverend’s eyes lit up then as his little girl spoke his word. “I am not some shallow parishioner , some Sunday-school dropout , some holiday churchgoer — oh no, the venom as you call it is holy, the blood of the prickly one and I am His vessel! Begone! Git now!”

“Your faith saved you,” said swamp witch drily.

“Papa ain’t finished,” scolded Annabel. “He says the tea-drinking man got all huffy then. He was calm up ’til then and suddenly his face got all red. The rims of his eyes got darker red, like they was bleedin’, and the lines of his gums got the same colour as that. And his teeth seemed to go all long and snaggly with broke ends. And he said to my Papa:

“‘ You don’t tell me what to do. You don’t tell me nothin’. This town will weep for me, like it wept for her .’”

“Her being me,” said swamp witch.

“Ex-actly,” said Annabel.

“So how’d you best him?” asked swamp witch.

“Didn’t,” said Annabel. And the Reverend grinned then. “Just agreed to keep you occupied. ’Til the tea-drinkin’ angel were ready to finish you off.”

The Reverend’s hand rose up then, and fell upon the jar. His fingers covered the two air-holes in the lid. Dragonfly fluttered at that, then calmed down — no sense in wasting oxygen.

Swamp witch reached for the jar. But the Reverend found the rattler’s quickness in his elbow and snatched it away so fast dragonfly banged his head on the side and fell unconscious.