The witch, you see, has eyes of gold, eyes like lamp lights or an arctic wolf’s. They shimmer and gleam, and if you look too long into her gaze, she will steal all you are and all you hoped for, and for just one more day the witch will go on living.
It’s how she lasts. How she keeps moving on in this modern world, unburdened by time’s decay. Joshua Preston was twenty-six when first he encountered her. When first he met the Sanity Thief.
It was early October, 2010. The New York roads were a nest of taxicabs and pedestrians, bustling about in the shadows of those great glass and steel towers which reached up to scrape the sky. Faces looked down from the billboards, male and female, young and old, laughing and smiling and talking, speaking on cell phones and huddling around laptops, so many lives in so many snapshots, frozen up high for all to see.
The pigeons squabbled over every morsel they could find.
And past the traffic and through the crowds, through it all walked Joshua Preston. Taller than most, in his denim coat with faded jeans, his dark hair just so slightly curled, he strode ahead, underneath the shadow of the skyscrapers, and ducked into the first bar he saw to take the nearest open seat.
Beside him sat the witch.
Painted fingernails tapped an olive-skinned cheek, as dark red curls spilled over slender shoulders. She was small with a face like porcelain. She fastened deep blue eyes upon him and, for the briefest of moments, he thought he caught a glimpse of gold. When he blinked, those eyes were blue once more.
“Buy you a drink?” she said with a friendly grin. “I hope you don’t mind if I offer.”
The half-filled glass slid towards him. The alcohol burned.
The witch spoke again. “Would you mind if I asked for your story?”
“Not much to tell,” said Joshua. “You know the way the world is. Work’s damn difficult to find.”
He’d been laid off earlier that week, but rent was coming due and he was determined not to linger unemployed for long.
“And what about you?” he asked. “Speaking about stories.”
“More than I can count,” she answered teasingly. “Some you might even find interesting.”
“Go on,” said Joshua as he finished his glass and set it empty on the table. “I suppose one of us should have something worth talking about.”
The witch smiled. She wove magic as she spoke.
That night he dreamed of golden eyes and olive skin and hair as red as a setting sun. His head was filled with muted whispers.
He woke up wild-eyed and unsettled. And at the same exact time, far away on the other side of town, so also woke the witch.
She felt properly sated–for the first time in years.
The next morning, Joshua once again dragged himself up from the subways, out beneath the sky. His feet dragged him forward through the crowds, forward towards another bar. And there, sitting alone at a table in the back, again he stumbled upon the witch. Her head lifted and their eyes met and, for just a moment, he could have sworn those eyes glowed gold, but only for a moment. She held up her glass, ice cubes floating on the surface, and wordlessly he shuffled near.
Something deep inside his mind insisted he turn around and head back out the way he came. But he set those instincts aside and took the next seat over.
“Ah, Joshua,” she said, smiling warmly. “Fancy meeting you again. I hope your day’s gone well so far.”
He frowned, saying nothing as a bottle was set down before him. He hadn’t made an order.
“No matter,” she said. “We all go through the occasional rough patches, don’t we?”
He swigged a drink and slammed the bottle down. He tried not to think of the interview: of his stuttered stammers and the sweat which went drip drip dripping down the back of his neck. It had been just another failure, just like all the rest.
“Say,” said the witch, leaning over the table, “why don’t we talk about more interesting things? Got a family?”
“No,” he said.
“Ever leave the country?” she asked, after a momentary pause.
“No,” he repeated, taking another drink. “I take it you have, though? Traveled, I mean.”
She nodded. “I’ve been to many places. More than I can count. I’ve seen the Great Wall and the Pyramids and the Nazca Lines. The Sahara and the Himalayas and the Amazon.”
He gave her a long look. “You seem awfully young, to have traveled so widely.”
A glimmer of something playful flitted across her face, and she leaned in towards him. “And how old would you guess I am?”
He would have guessed somewhere in her twenties, but he could not be certain she was not older. “You know what they say. It’s rude to guess a lady’s age.”
The woman laughed merrily over her drink, but when she spoke again her expression had gone grave, as if all that airiness had departed her. “True. Still, the world’s changed an awful lot since I was a girl, and oh the things I’ve seen. It’s enough to drive you mad. You know what that feels like?”
Joshua was silent for a long moment. He shook his head. “Can’t say that I do.”
The witch nodded and when she spoke, she seemed subdued. “That’s good. Insanity, it’s not an easy thing. Scares the hell out of me, if you’ll forgive the language.”
“I’ve heard worse.”
She smiled sadly. “I’m sure you have. And I’m sorry if I’m unloading a bit on you.”
They chimed their glasses together and drank long into the afternoon.
Again, he dreamed of her. He dreamed she towered above his head, vast as a living, breathing Colossus of Rhodes. Her eyes resembled vast windows which shone like lamps, and in them he saw visions of the past unfold, flickering about like old film rolls played on a projector.
He dreamed of wars and devastation. He saw a Library burned. He saw Rome sacked and pillaged. He watched Genghis Khan pass by with his hordes, leaving once great cities in pillaged ruins. In France, the guillotines screamed for blood.
And then he awakened, still alone, feeling hollow and more tired than he had ever felt a day in his life. For the first time in a long time, he stayed in his apartment, trying his hardest to not remember.
Two days passed before he went out once more, and again he ran into the young woman with the red hair and the blue eyes which, occasionally, he could have sworn shone gold. This time it was in the Bronx.
“Strange how we keep running into each other,” Joshua said, and there was no levity in his voice. Not anymore. As soon as he had entered the bar, had seen her sitting at the front, laughing at something the bartender said, his mind drifted back to those dreams, and another wave of exhaustion struck.
She frowned and crossed her arms. Her eyes narrowed. “Don’t make me out to be the stalker here. If anything, I’d think you were trailing me.”
She rose from her stool and ambled closer. He wanted to flee but his feet seemed stuck. He stood dumbly before her, and for a moment their gazes met, and the past began to stir. It swept forth in waves, all at once, in people and places, in scattered snapshots which swam together, far too much and far too fast for him to comprehend. He tore his eyes away and the panoply ceased, but his head still pounded. He grabbed a chair to keep from falling.
“Are you all right?” the woman asked.
“You know, I’m pretty sure I’m not.”
He opened the door and stumbled through, not even looking back. A phantom wind howled in his ears, and his stomach growled empty. He held his head and tried not to think about withering crops and the slow agony of starvation. He tried to banish far from his mind those phantom memories of dark and fear-plagued nights.
The witch took another drink, watching him leave. Her eyes were shadowed with what might have been guilt, or might not have been anything at all.
For an entire week, he stayed to his apartment, sitting upon his bed or in his chair, occasionally watching television or searching the internet or rereading the same books and magazines, only going out when needed. Each day he felt cold, feverish and shivering as often as not, and his dreams came laden with nightmares.
The witch still made her appearances, sometimes dressed like something from an Ottoman harem or a Renaissance court. She’d wear Egyptian linens or Chinese silks, and though her height and hair color and even the shading of her skin shifted with every passing moment, her eyes were always gold.
“What did you do?” he asked.
The dream-woman, who was sometimes Caucasian, sometimes Arabic, sometimes Egyptian or Turkish or African, took his hand and met his eyes unflinching. “We share a connection, you and I. I’ve seen too much, done too much, lived too long yet not long enough.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Living,” she said. “It’s exhausting. Yet it’s all I know to do.”
He sprang awake, his pulse racing, his heart making off like bucking horses behind his ribs. The room was dark and he found it difficult to breath. He ran his fingers over five o’clock shadow and through his grimy, sweat-slicked hair, and he tried to put the dream far from his mind. Tried to tell himself he was jumping at shadows, getting spooked over nothing. He remained unconvinced.
Each time he went outside, he could swear he saw her watching. Sometimes her skin was dark, sometimes sallow; sometimes she was tall and sometimes short; sometimes her hair ended above her shoulders and others it spiraled down her back in waves of gold or black or auburn, but always could he see sparkling in her eyes an occasional glint of gold.
He stopped looking for work, and he kept a gun concealed beneath his coat. He startled at the slightest of noises and stayed far away from bars. He avoided the subways too. There was no telling who you might bump into in such public spaces.
So autumn turned to winter, and he spent the days holed up in his apartment, for as long as the money held up, which unfortunately wasn’t all that long. He spent that Christmas in a shelter. He took his place in line, as the volunteers offered their helpings of holiday turkey, and froze at what he saw.
His server smiled sadly. “You know, I remember when we celebrated Yule.” Her eyes went slightly dreamy, and she laughed lightly to herself. “It’s funny, you know. The star never shone this day.”
He looked away, took the plate, and stumbled towards the nearest table. He shoveled down his food with all the passion of an automaton. It tasted like chalk.
The witch stood beside him.
“Why?” he asked, still keeping his eyes fixed on the meal.
Her words came quiet, and she sounded weary as she gave them. “As I said before, I must keep living, but it’s so difficult. So very difficult.”
“That’s not an answer,” he growled.
“No,” she said. “I suppose it’s not.”
And so it went. They met in dreams and in parks and out in the streets, where he’d rattle his cup for spare change, and often she’d stop by, with a soft whisper and a rolled-up hundred dollar bill. Winter gave way to spring and spring to summer and, within a year, Joshua had died.
He was only twenty-seven.
He seemed much older.
As for the woman with the red hair (or perhaps it was black), and olive skin (or was it pale or was it dark?), tall or short, but always young and always old and always (if you happened to look at just the right moment from just the right angle) with those golden yellow eyes. Well, some say she appeared at his funeral, holding an embroidered handkerchief which could have come from the Victorians (which perhaps it did). Perhaps she spoke a eulogy to a man she knew only briefly, but whose memory she’d carry with her until the end of time. Or maybe she didn’t speak at all. Maybe silent tears said more than words ever could.
Maybe she haunts another bar, or a college campus, a stadium or a park. Maybe she meets with other golden-eyed stalkers, those would-be immortals who weather the centuries by casting their burdens aside, handing them off on those who, to them, may well have lived mere seconds by comparison. Maybe that’s how they’ve justified all they’ve done and all they will do in years still to come.
Millennia pass, and still she lingers. Still she goes on.
Another year older and nothing’s changed.
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S. Cameron David can often be found watching the deer ambling about outside and looking for paths into Faerie. You can find him online at scamerondavid.wordpress.com. |