Sand Witches in the Hamptons (9781101597385) (4 page)

“Oey? She's gone?”

“For a week now. No one's seen or heard anything of her. The poor old guy spends hours on his deck, calling for her. I know he'd be happy if you came back, even for a short visit.”

Now I had to worry about the professor, too. Jimmie didn't know a lot of people in Paumanok Harbor yet, and Rosehill, where he lived, still hadn't opened for business as the Royce Institute's outreach center. I know Cousin Lily, the housekeeper there, looked after him, but he'd been so pleased to have Oey as a companion. Oey didn't belong to our world, though, being half bird and half fish, half male, half female, with the halves changing places continually, to say nothing of how the whole creature could vanish in an eye blink. I guess she went home, which meant I couldn't ask her about the Andanstans. Bummer. I'd miss Oey, too, so I could imagine how Dr. Harmon felt.

“Tell him I'll come as soon as I figure out what to do about Deni.”

“There is nothing to do except get out of her territory. Besides, I think your grandmother needs you.”

“Grandma Eve needs me to have someone to pick on.”

“No, she's not looking well. And I hear she and some of the others are worried about the Halloween bash they put on. Why don't you call her?”

Because she's a witch, for heaven's sake! Doesn't anyone else worry about that?

C
HAPTER
F
IVE

I
had a grandmother who had a grimoire. The original old volume of enchantments, incantations, and herbal concoctions is kept locked under glass in a climate-controlled room at the library, but Grandma Eve had a copy transcribed, translated into modern English, annotated, and indexed. That one stays in a safe at the farm house, and on her computer. She adds to it constantly. People think she uses parts of Garland Farms to experiment with rare and exotic plants for their curative powers, cheap energy, or to feed the hungry.

I know better.

I know for a fact she caused genital warts in some boys who trashed her pumpkin patch one year. And when a bigger girl shoved my cousin Susan down the school steps, that girl's eyebrows fell out. The fly-by-night driveway paver who took senior citizens' deposits, then disappeared? He really, really disappeared. And that summer we had all those frogs? A neighbor's loud, annoying, and water-fouling flock of geese went missing.

Grandma Eve also mixed potions and read tea leaves. People came to her for headaches, infertility, indecision, and how to invest their IRAs.

I never drank tea at her house unless it was iced, from a pitcher. Before I learned better, I had to listen to her “read” my future, which was all wrong the way I planned it, in her opinion. According to her “gift,” I should avoid a dicey middle age by traveling to England to study at Royce University instead of going to art school. Instead of facing certain misery in Manhattan, I should move to Paumanok Harbor with my mother. And children? She always saw three, perfect little specimens of Paumanok Harbor psi-sters.

Wishful thinking, Gran. Your goals, not mine. Besides, I liked coffee better.

Which is not to say I wouldn't do everything I could to help her. According to my mother, who'd been traveling for months now, looking after Grandma Eve was my duty, even though her other daughter, son-in-law, other granddaughter, and a niece lived minutes away. My mother believes that family watches out for family. That's why she went to Florida to take care of my father after his heart surgery, despite their decades-ago divorce.

So why didn't she come back to look after own mother? Because I could do a better job, she said. And a lot of dogs in the South needed her. I didn't.

Oh, boy.

While my mother thought I was responsible for Grandma Eve, her health and happiness, Grandma Eve believed I was responsible for Paumanok Harbor, its prosperity and preservation. And its population, naturally, both the current residents and my three future children.

A crock. My grandmother was the strongest woman I knew. She half ran the entire village, and everyone in it would gladly eat worms for her. She did not need me. As for Paumanok Harbor itself, the place existed since the Indians—involuntarily—gave way to the British settlers, the ones who left England, then New England, before they got burned at the stake as witches and warlocks. I did not make the tiny village a secret center of paranormal activity, or open the gates between the Harbor and a parallel universe. So how could I have its future in my hands or unfertilized in my womb?

To be honest, some of the weird happenings there did have a hazy connection to what I drew, but not on purpose. I thought I had a great imagination, not that I was a Visualizer, seeing the trespassers from Unity and sometimes communicating with them through my art. I did
not
call them forth to wreak havoc in the Harbor. And I'd done my best to keep the damage to a minimum.

So maybe now I shouldn't go there, in case Deni followed me. Not that there was anything otherworldly about the nasty piece of adolescence, I just saw no need to bring danger to Grandma Eve's front door.

Conscience called on me to call my grandmother. She'd mention my inadequacies; I'd remember why I liked New York City so much. Times like this, I wish I drank. Instead, I decided to fortify myself with a diet soda and a chocolate bar. With nuts, fittingly.

While I nibbled so the treat lasted longer, I thought more about the Andanstans, idly tapping a drawing pen on my sketch pad, in random dots like pointillism, or rain. Pok pok pok. Why couldn't I get a grip on these beings? Pok pok pok. I was the Visualizer, after all.

Professor Harmon's book sat right next to me on the desk, open to the page I had memorized by now. He'd written the slender volume of magical beast stories long ago to show the creative writing students of Royce University in England how far imagination could carry them. He'd quietly published the vignettes under his first and middle names, James Everett, and never took credit for the charming work. Now retired and reestablished in Royce's new outreach center in the Harbor, Jimmie felt able to claim his work, to expand the contents, and have the supposedly fictional creatures illustrated—by me.

His offer thrilled me. His stories awed me. His fooling the entire world amused me. Those wondrous, colorful, universally telepathic beings he wrote of were not from his imagination at all. They were from the magical world of Unity, from his trances, from a hole in the fabric that kept our two worlds apart. Dr. Harmon never spoke to his visions, never knew their real names, so he made them up and wrote Tolkienesque tales about them. Maybe Tolkien went off in trances, too.

I didn't, but I got to illustrate the marvelous creatures he'd seen and remembered with joy and wonder. I'd seen some of them, too, when no one else could. Pok pok pok.

I couldn't see
these.

So I called my grandmother.

* * *

Matt was right: Grandma Eve sounded tired, worried, maybe old, which I had a hard time accepting. I couldn't face her, but I couldn't face a world without her in it. “You feeling okay, Gran?”

“Fine, fine, except for a bothersome rash.”

Uh-oh. “A rash?”

“It's nothing. I pruned a rosebush and got scratched by the thorns. Poison ivy, I suppose.”

“Um, anyone else have a rash?”

“Now that you mention it, Doc Lassiter cut himself shaving and his cheek broke out. I told him being a psychiatrist didn't count. He had to go to a real doctor.”

“What did the doctor say?”

“That it wasn't Lyme disease, psoriasis, shingles, or my poison ivy. He has an appointment with a dermatologist he knows on Shelter Island. Jasmine got a paper cut that turned blistery, but the school nurse couldn't say why, just told her to get antibiotics. Susan cut a finger slicing onions. She's always doing that.”

I rubbed my upper lip. “But she got a rash this time, didn't she?”

Pause.

In a frailer sounding voice, my grandmother added, “And Janie at the salon nicked a mole on the back of Joe the plumber's head when she buzz-cut his hair, and both of them got the rash. Young Kelvin Junior at the garage broke out after football scrimmage, but the team doctor called it early acne.”

Everyone in the village had a rash? Pokpokpok. I didn't want to start any Paumanok Harbor hysteria, not yet. “Why don't you ask around, see if anyone else has a suspicious skin condition?”

“I don't have time for that. We have worse problems.”

I wasn't sure what was worse than an outbreak of blood-borne irritations, but I asked anyway. “What now?” Last time she had a rare bird at the farm and bird watchers trampling her fields.

“The All Hallow's ceremonies might have to be called off.”

Sure, like a canceled witches' convention at a pagan holiday mattered more than an unknown epidemic. So what if they called it a fall festival and held it the night before Halloween. “It's weeks away. A rash isn't going to keep your friends from coming. Mom swears she'll be back in time to help.”

“That's not it.” Her voice trembled. “We have no place to hold it.”

“Of course you do. The village green, the firehouse, the school parking lot. Even the bowling alley ought to be big enough. Uh, how many wit— That is, how many guests are you expecting?”

“Don't be foolish. We live in Paumanok Harbor. We always hold it on the beach where we can make a big fire.”

So they could dance naked under the full moon? I knew better than to ask.

I didn't have to. “Which you'd know if you ever spent enough time here the way you should have. We need the beach for the fire and the water to float our blessings.”

My pen ran out of ink. I grabbed two new ones so I could pok twice as fast. “What's wrong with the beach, then?”

“There is no beach!”

“Come on, we have lots of beaches. The one a block away from Garland Drive is perfect. People can park at the farm stand and walk in. I'll put up signs so they can park in Mom's yard, too.”

“That's what we always did, but the beach isn't there anymore. There's a couple of feet of sand at low tide, but that's it, just a drop-off to deep water.”

“That can't be. I walked the dogs on that beach all summer. And there were still tourists and swimmers and sunbathers and joggers past Labor Day.”

“Now there's swimming, nothing else. As you'd know if you spent any time here.”

Poketapoketapoketa. That wasn't fair. I'd been out just a few weeks ago. Granted, Matt and I hadn't left the house much. Or the bedroom, for that matter, but it rained a lot. We had a great time. We'd made plans to go away for Thanksgiving, just the two of us, no dogs, no issues, maybe somewhere rainy.

“It's that last hurricane,” Grandma Eve went on. “Desi, the one that brought the huge tidal wave.”

We both knew the hurricane didn't do it, the sea monster N'fwend did. It sucked all the water out of the bay so it could rise up, and up, and up, a vast fluid tornado ready to rush back in and swallow first the cruise ship we used as a war command post, then the whole town.

Except we vanquished N'fwend before it came to shore.

“The water came back.”

“But the sand did not. It's out there somewhere, where your dragon swept it, clogging the outer harbor. We don't have the funds to dredge all the way across to Gardiner's Bay to reclaim the sand and barge it to shore. The experts natter on about inevitable erosion. We cannot tell them the truth, for obvious reasons.”

They'd put straitjackets on everyone. I added a yellow marker to the pens in my hand. Plok.

“The Engineer Corps claim that more beachfront washed away on the south, oceanfront shore than ours, so they won't help. They predicted the next storm would bring the sand back, but it didn't.”

That had to be the weekend Matt and I stayed inside, which I would not think about right now. “There's always another storm out there.”

“But no sand for the winds and the tides to carry ashore. If we cannot get our beaches back, we have no tourism. No tourists means no money for the school or the streets or the police. Not the arts center or the library. No jobs, either. And no sand means we have no protection from the next hurricane or nor'easter. Any storm surge could flood half the village.”

I knew she was right, but I had to try: “We lose some sand every winter.”

“And gain it back when the storm patterns shift, but not like this. Besides, every other beach up and down the bay coast is fine. Three Mile Harbor, Louse Point, Noyac. The North Fork of the Island barely got Desi's wind or high tide.”

No, the sea serpent came right here, after trying to capsize the ship with the professor on it off Montauk.

If it weren't for help from other beings from the world of Unity, which incidentally banished the kraken to our world in the first place, the ship would have sunk. Instead, a new breed of dolphins pulled the ship's passengers from the cold water, a disappearing parrot guided rescuers to other victims onboard, odd lantern beetles lit the way through the ship's dark corridors . . . and a tall underwater sandbar held it up.

A sandbar that wasn't there the week before.

A sandbar that we blew up to get the cruise ship off.

I threw the pens across the room. Little Red picked one up and ran under the couch. It was too late to take back what I'd unconsciously drawn. Not too late to curse and stomp my foot and bite my lip and scratch at the rash on my fingers. And curse some more.

Dots filled my sketch pad, dots in different colors, dots in loose, random configurations. So loose I could just make out the shapes of tiny people if I squinted sideways, people made of grains of sand. Ann. Dan. Stan. Sand.

Now I knew what the Andanstans were and what they stole.

My life.

C
HAPTER
S
IX

I
had a mission. And a migraine.

The mission: get the sand back, get rid of the Andanstans, cure the rash. Desert fever? Hah. Revenge of the Andanstans, more likely, for miners digging holes, for terrorists and their land mines, for us blowing them and their sandbar to smithereens.

The migraine: why was I in charge? I didn't bring them here. I couldn't talk to them. I never saw them. I had no idea how to proceed, except buy stock in hydrocortisone cream. The simple thought of them tapped inside my skull with sandy sledgehammers.

That's assuming the missing sand, the rashes, and the minuscule thieves were all connected, of course. The odds of there being that many oddball occurrences were as small as the Andanstans. Every cop show and detective novel says coincidences are rare and suspicious. Cops and writers never came to Paumanok Harbor, where situations like this are commonplace.

There were two possibilities. One, the Andanstans had been around our world forever, spreading disease. Two, if mold spores or fungi or naturally occurring toxins truly caused the early documented infections, the Andanstans did not arrive here until last month, at some higher power's bidding, not mine. Sure I'd asked for help to fight the sea monster. How could mere mortals destroy a creature of magic on our own?

I did not ask for nasty, gritty little beings who'd stay here and start rashes. They'd done us a favor, but now they and their plagues weren't welcome.

I had to talk to Oey, the male/female parrot/fish who came to warn us about the kraken and ended up adopting Professor Harmon . . . or vice versa. Like all otherworldly creatures, Oey could communicate telepathically with any other species of them. So I'd talk to Oey in English, she/he would talk to the Andanstans in Unity-speak, and we could light the bonfire on the beach. With luck, the rashes would leave when the Andanstans did.

The problem, of course, other than I never seemed to have such luck, was that Oey'd gone missing. If the feathered fish didn't come back, we were sunk. Literally. Unless someone else could speak the mental tongue.

How many people on our Earth could translate a language that was half telepathic? Less than a handful, and I knew one of them. Talk about coincidences.

Grant is the leading xenolinguist from the covert Royce Institute for Psionic Research, as opposed to the overt and respected Royce University, which he'd also attended and where his father was dean. He is also the man I'd almost married.

Sometimes I felt guilty about breaking up and maybe breaking his heart. Sometimes I wondered what if . . .

Most times, like now, I felt awkward calling him, not out of love and affection, but out of need.

As they say, needs must when the devil drives, whatever that means. Someone had to talk to the Andanstans and get them to leave, without taking our sand with them. Someone else. I could not do this on my own.

I had finally visualized the sand folk; now Grant had to translate. That's what he did, when he wasn't being a viscount chatting with the queen or a top DUE agent chasing rumors of ETs across the globe. Well, he could damn straight get his tight linguist butt over here and talk to the tiny thieves.

I left a message, a bit more polite than what I was thinking. Then I took two Tylenols and the last of the Oreos while I waited for him to call back on what I knew to be a more secure, “Men in Black” line. Answering these kinds of calls was part of his job.

He didn't sound happy about it. In fact, he sounded annoyed, exhausted, and ill. Or maybe the satellite communication had interference.

I asked where he was. He'd been at the space station last time I needed him.

“Ireland.”

Oh, no. They had a million Irish tenors, and they raised racehorses, too. “What are you doing in Ireland?”

“I
was
tracking a bogwilly.”

“You had to track a bog? Do they move? Aren't there maps?”

“Not a bog, Willy. A bogwilly, some supposedly hideous beast they use to frighten children into behaving. They should fear the shaggy local ponies instead. I fell off the blasted animal they swore couldn't be spooked by any, ah, spook.”

I knew there was a horse. My father'd said so. “Did it sing?”

“The pony? Bloody thing fainted! Keeled right over on top of me before I could jump off.”

“No, the bogwilly, with which, incidentally, I have no connection except a shared name. What is it?”

“I still do not know.”

“Does it sing?”

“Not that I heard. I didn't pick up any psychic sendings, either, just the light. You know, that peculiar iridescence like a hundred prisms reflecting moonlight.”

I knew it well. I'd been trying to capture it on paper for the professor's book. “Did you find the, ah, willy?”

“With two broken legs and a cracked skull from the rock the deuced pony dumped me against?”

Oh. “Are you all right now?”

He wasn't, and he wasn't pleased about it. “Concussed, seeing double, with an inflammation of the lungs from lying in the blasted bog until they could get a rescue team in.”

Suddenly the rash did not seem as urgent. I told him about it anyway, and asked if he had any idea when he could travel, by wheelchair if necessary. We needed him to get rid of the sand thieves.

He cursed. I couldn't tell if he hated the idea of the wheelchair, or the fact that I only called when I had trouble. Turned out that what he hated, which he expressed in many short words, was missing all the fun.

“Fun? Everyone has a rash, and the beach erosion is at crisis point.”

He didn't care. “If you married me, we could be together on these adventures.”

Like riding a small freaking horse at night through a bogeyman-inhabited Irish bog? Man, did I not regret breaking our almost engagement. How could I have ever thought our personalities or lifestyles matched?

I wished him a quick recuperation and promised to call with updates.

So much for my linguist.

* * *

I tried the professor next. Cousin Lily, the housekeeper at Rosehill, answered the phone instead. Jimmie was out, she told me. He'd been out all day, walking the grounds, calling for Oey. Now he'd gone over to Grandma Eve's farm, the first place people had spotted the rare pink-toed oiaca bird, not knowing how rare it was.

“I'm worried,” Cousin Lily said. “Your uncle promised to drive him back before dark, but Jimmie refused to have dinner at the farm. He hardly eats when he is here, no matter what I cook. He comes back drained and damp, all scratched up, with poison ivy. Then he sits on the balcony outside his bedroom in the cold night air, with a bottle or two, which cannot be good for his lungs, either. He stays out there all night. I can hear him calling and coughing. It's enough to break my heart.”

Mine, too. “But he has other friends now.”

“Yes, Chief Haverhill and the mayor are always calling, the other poker players too, and every widow in the vicinity. Matt brings Moses whenever he can. The dog drools and sheds, but I put up with it, hoping Jimmie will not feel so melancholy and lonely.”

“You say he has poison ivy?”

“I haven't seen it, but he asked what we use here for a blistering itch. They have nettles in England.”

Which was another reason for being glad I didn't marry Grant. “Um, do you have a rash, too?”

“Not poison ivy. I did get a bad reaction at the site of my flu shot, though. So did a bunch of others from the Harbor. The weird thing is, we all had different batches of the vaccine. Some from the senior center, some from the drugstores in East Hampton and Bridgehampton. A lot of people went to their own doctors for the shots. I understand the County Health Department is looking into it. Why did you ask?”

“Just a thought, that's all.”

“Well, think about getting out here soon. Jimmie needs you. And Eve is running herself ragged about the erosion.”

“I'm working on—”

She didn't let me finish. “Now that you mention it, I think she had a rash, too, from the rosebushes, she told me. And Joanne at the deli had her arm bandaged when I went in for potato salad the other day. She said she scratched a mosquito bite and it turned lumpy. She had it checked out, so she could keep serving food. The physician's assistant said it didn't seem contagious, but to keep her arm covered. And Alan from the liquor store closed early yesterday. He's diabetic, you know. Said he got something wrong when he tested his blood sugar last week, now his finger's all puffy and sore. His doctor sent his testing kit back to the manufacturer to test for bacteria. Then there's— Wait. Willy, you know something more about the rashes, don't you?”

I rubbed my itchy lip with my itchy forefinger. “Nothing certain yet. I hoped the professor could help.”

“You do know! You've brought something else dreadful here, haven't you?”

“No! I'm not there, I'm in New York. And I didn't draw them”—until an hour ago—“and I'm not sure they caused the problem in the first place.”

“You do know!” she yelled. “You've gone and done something awful again, and we'll all have to suffer, then wade into ugly, impossible situations to pull you out.”

“No, I didn't—”

“And now that dear old man is losing his will to live and you give him a cough and rash?”

“I didn't—”

“You get out here and fix it, damn you, Willow Tate, or I am calling your grandmother.”

“I already spoke to her. I'll be there tomorrow, if I can.”

“You can't not.”

* * *

My next call was to Oey. I'm no telepath, but she is. I did not know how far away she was, or how far away her powers worked. I tried anyway.
ET, phone home. We need you.

Stupid. I'm no telepath but I am the Visualizer. So I grabbed a pencil and a fresh sheet of paper, drew a willow tree, a weeping willow, then added three little people made of dot sand. They wore scraps of seaweed to hide their privates. They carried shell hatchets and rock hammers in their tiny hands, battering at the tree. I fixed the image in my head, then silently called,
Help!
I added a magnificent parrot with a forked, scaled fish tail and shouted in my head,
Come back
. Then I drew a handsome glittering fish with a long feathered tail, swimming in the water that lapped at the tree.
Please, Oey.

No response reverberated in my head or in my thoughts, just that painful pounding. Shell hatchets and stone hammers, all right. I was out of Tylenol and didn't know if I could mix them with the Advil I had, whose expiration date was long past. Worse, I was out of candy and cookies. If I was leaving tomorrow, I needed snacks for the three-hour bus ride, too. Maybe Mallomars to get me through the night. And treats for Little Red so he'd stay quiet on the Jitney. The dog needed to go out before September's early dark, too.

I packed him in the carrier, went to the drugstore on Third Avenue, bought enough goodies for a week, unless I got desperate, and then freed Little Red to do his stuff near some sidewalk trees.

I put down my bags and his carrier to pick up his leavings. He walked on the leash nicely until we neared our building, where I put down my bags, his cleanup bag and his carrier. He got in without protest for once, because he knew it was suppertime and we'd get home sooner that way. So I picked everything up again and went home, cursing the need to hide a six-pound dog from the building manager.

Then I cursed the man and his custodial staff some more when I saw garbage on the building's doorstep. No, that wasn't garbage; it was a big rat, as common in Manhattan as taxis. This one was dead, though, with its head cut off.

Anybody would have freaked out. I screamed and dropped all the bags, except Little Red in his carrier, thank goodness. Between the missing sand, the missing bird, and the bogwilly, I'd completely forgotten about Deni.

She hadn't forgotten about me.