Read Online The Witch's Grave by Phillip Depoy - Free Book Online

“includes all sorts of things we can’t even imagine, completely unlikely, random scenarios.”
    â€œChaos.”
    â€œNot exactly, but nature certainly isn’t required to follow human order.”
    â€œWe’re not dealing with nature,” he insisted. “‘Murder most foul, strange, and unnatural.’”
    â€œHamlet,” I guessed. Even away from university, our Shakespeare scholar’s mind was rarely far from his obsession.
    â€œCorrect. Ghost of Hamlet’s Father, Act I, scene v.” He stretched. “I don’t want to sit in a graveyard with you tonight. I know you’re going to try and convince me that it’ll be all weird and Hallow-eeny, but in fact it will be primarily boring, with a side of soggy cold.”
    â€œI’ll bring some of my apple brandy.”
    â€œSee,” he said, sitting up, “that should have been your lead sentence. That catches the attention. And PS: Why haven’t you dragged it out before now?”
    â€œBecause I know your fondness for it,” I answered, “and I was saving it to bribe you, in a situation like this one.”
    â€œGood answer.” He stood. “It worked.”
    â€œWhere are you going?”
    â€œTake a long hot shower, get the bones warm.” He grabbed the stair rail. “Prep work for the brandy and tombstones. I’ll be having a bottle all to myself, you realize.”
    â€œShould we go over to the Deveroe cabin before?”
    â€œWe’re not going afterward.” He started up the stairs. “Didn’t you just hear Skidmore say not to go there after dark?”
    â€œI mean should we try to get that visit in today before we go out to the cemetery or should we wait until tomorrow?”

    â€œI think my shower is going to take well on toward sunset. Answer your question?” He disappeared upstairs.
    Â 
    One of the many reasons I enjoyed Andrews’s visits was not having to sit in my house alone. Like Truevine’s craft, it didn’t matter to me that I had no genuine belief in ghosts; they came to me nevertheless. My mother sat on the stairs, head in hands, straggled hair brushing the hem of her black dress at the knee. My father banged pots in the kitchen, answering her snarling questions with vague, hollow repetition. Mother’s infidelities, father’s mental absence, money problems all haunted the cabin, hung in the rafters like smoke, waiting for a quiet moment to seep into my skin.
    I turned on the lamp beside the sofa, went to the stereo. Sometimes music dispels the spirits. I put on an older record, Hazel Dickens and Mike Seeger’s Strange Creek Singers. I’d first heard of them at Antioch College in Ohio, where I’d taken a summer semester before starting at Burrison University. There I had the odd fortune of meeting a woman called Mama Jaambo. No sooner had her name come into my mind than I realized music had not dispelled but called forth other spirits.
    Mama Jaambo was from New Jersey. Her gift was reading auras; her session began the second night I was there, at moonrise, in a room with big windows on all sides and two dirty skylights.
    â€œLeave the lights off,” Mama intoned. “It’s easier to see auras by the moon.”
    Her assistant, a slender young woman in a floor-length dress, said, “Now when you want your aura read, just say, ‘Here, Mama,’ and she’ll look.”
    Mama was a large woman in a soft blue dress. Her voice was like an iris petal. Students would sing out, she would turn in her chair. “Your aura is light blue. You are a musician of great tenacity; you are kind, have loving friends.”
    That was the evening for nearly two hours. All were amazed at Mama’s power of insight. I felt above the proceedings, given my knowledge of carnival tricks, but at last other students prevailed upon me to speak the magic words: “Over here, Mama.”

    She turned