Day Six - Afternoon

     The fact that Casper comes into the pub damp in spite of today’s clear skies causes more than a few puzzled expressions among the earlybirds. Let them stare. They’ll lose interest, as onlookers often do. And if they don’t, then they’re too invested to be mere passersby. Watchmen on the streets, sentries behind every door, why won’t they let him be?

     Casper checks the crowd for familiar faces. He doesn’t recognize any, but he wasn’t in any state of mind to catalogue his stalkers while he was running ragged through the streets. Could be staring them right in the face and he wouldn’t know it. Troubling.

     “You got something to say to me, boy?” Asks one of the patrons.

     Casper being too obvious, looking a little too wary, eyes lingering a little too long. He tries to brush off his suspicious behavior. “Just wonderin’ if I’ve seen you around. You look familiar, you know?”

     “I was here yesterday with the guys.” The fellow motions to others at his table. Some of them wave at Casper, one simply nods.

     “Yeah… That’s probably it.” Just him jumping at his own shadow again. (Get a grip!) Casper cards a hand through his mess of hair. The damp strands stick to his fingers like his already too tight shirt constricts further around his ribs and shoulders. Is it the damp that’s doing it or his nerves? If only he had dry change of clothes. Pity no one left their laundry on the line today.

     The patron calls Casper back before he can leave to make his order. “Now hang on a minute. You wouldn’t happen to be that traveler’s boy Martha’s been a’telling us to keep an eye on?”

     So they were spying on him. No, it’s not all in his head after all, but the relief is bitter sweet. “Look. I don’t know any Marthas. Whoever this lady is, I’ve never met her. Tell her whatever it is she thinks it is I’ve gone and done, I got nuthin’ to do with it.” Casper doesn’t look their way. Alarm bells are ringing and he knows the tension is bleeding through into his expression. Fear is a sign of weakness; he’ll do whatever it takes to hide his own (can’t hide forever).

     “Easy now. It weren’t nothing along the lines of that. We were a’wondering if you were in trouble, not a’making it.” It’s a phrase lightly said and half-jokingly. It’s not taken in the same spirit that it was uttered.

     “What trouble?” His voice is higher than it should be, louder than can be ignored. It’s the same mistake that Smith made, that tipped Casper off about Glenholm’s wrongness even before he had a name. To add to his faults, he’s facing the fellows at the table; he’s exposed himself and they see how scared he’s trying not to be.

     Another at the table speaks. “You been caught up in stuff you shouldn’t be?” The first of their company looks between his friend and Casper. The other two at the table exchange glances over the rims of their mugs.

     Yes. No. Casper’s head spins. The witch man. Eyes in jars. Magic, gold, and more money than he’s seen in his life. The creepy old house he lives in. Casper has no idea what he’s doing, no idea what trouble he’s gotten himself into this time. He sighs. “All I know is that a bunch of creepers-” He glares pointedly at the company at hand. “- have been following me through the streets and I don’t know why.” He paces. “Why is the hill no man’s land? What’s wrong with the witch man? What is the witch man? Why is it so hard to get a bite to eat around here?” His voice keeps cracking the tenser he gets (enough to break. Almost).

     The gentleman at the table talk amongst themselves quietly while he pulls himself together. One of them motions to someone behind Casper. “Go on Alicia. You heard the little guy. Go get him something to eat, would you?”

     “Yeah… Okay.” And the footsteps disappear into the kitchen before Casper can so much as catch sight of her.

     He digs the heels of his palms into his eyes. He messed up. He messed up bad.

     “Come and have a sit,” They offer. An extra chair is dragged over. There’s room enough for him.

     Casper hesitates. “I shouldn’t. I’m not allowed to stay long.”

     “Says who?”

     “Barkeep.” On that topic, Casper sees the man coming in from the backroom, rolling in a fresh barrel.

     “I heard shouting.” The barkeep fixes them with a hard stare. “Is there gonna be a problem here?”

     “We all be friends here Frank, rest easy. Kid’s been havin’ a tough go of things. You know how it be.”

     The barkeep grunts. Might have been laugh, might have been a sound of disregard. Either way, he goes about his business and pays them no further heed. It’s a miracle.

     The men at the table repeat their invitation. Casper abstains. Something in him balks at the thought of sitting shoulder to shoulder, closed in on both sides. He takes the offered chair and pulls it farther away, far enough that he isn’t confined, yet close enough to talk comfortably. He makes a place for himself there. “You got somethin’ to tell me? Well, I’m dyin’ to hear it.”

     The men give him funny looks. “You sure you aren’t a’wanting to join us at the table? You’re allowed,” they add.

     Casper’s sure.

     They shrug, get themselves settled, and introduce themselves. Casper forgets the names as soon as they’re said. They mean nothing to him, a chance encounter with passersby he’ll never talk to again. Only the one fellow stands out to him: stout man, broad across the chest, grim in a quiet way. He’s the religious sort too. Casper dubs him ‘Brute’.

     Turns out, they’ve dragged him over to their corner to tell him a story. It’s not a happy story. They don’t tell it well, but they say enough. It starts off fairly innocuous, as most fairy tales do: a stranger comes to town one day, many years ago, and brings disaster with him, as strangers are known to do in ole times past. Naturally this stranger just so happens to be Glenholm’s own witch man.

     Casper doesn’t pay it any heed and treats it like dinner theater, all fun and games and rumor and nothing he need concern himself about. Then they mention a monster on the hill, a demon brought or summoned by the stranger to do his bidding. A slaughter that same night at the house on the hill. Resistance made in vain against the evil that seated itself there. A devastating defeat and a tenuous truce made to bring the dead home to be buried, bodies burned beyond recognition, arriving by the cartful.

     As much as Casper would like to brush it off as an old wife’s tale, or ancient history at least, there are small, personal details that say otherwise. Brute was the one to bring them back, he went where all others balked and lived to tell the tale. Alicia speaks softly of fuzzy childhood memories about a mother that’s no longer there, painfully absent. Pa slows and stops whatever he’s doing behind the counter as he’s pretending not to listen; he leaves altogether when Alicia begins to speak. The rest chip in their two pence as well and it dawns on Casper this isn’t something he can ignore and hope it goes away. Too much fact to be a pure fable. As for the dead themselves, they’re all named and accounted for in the cemetery behind the church, there for anyone who wishes to seek them out.

     Casper’s glad he’s already eaten because he his prodigious appetite is suddenly nowhere to be found. They still haven’t told him the most important part however. “Why? Why’d he do it?”

     Out of all the living souls in the tavern that day, not one answers him. Nobody knows. No one except the witch man on the hill and not a soul goes up there and comes back alive unless they’ve a prior arrangement or struck a deal of some kind. Like Casper’s own arrangement with Balor, sealed with a handshake like the naïve, unsuspecting idiot he is.

     The truce between manor and town still stands in strained silence. Nobody goes up the hill and they leave the witch man and his accomplices be when they come by. There’s a clear line drawn in the sand; there’s no standing on both sides. Question is, which one is Casper on? Casper himself doesn’t know, doesn’t want to decide. “I gotta go now.” It’s a thin excuse from a question he’ll have to inevitably answer, but sun’s on its way to setting nonetheless. Balor will expect him to be back. (Does he want to go back? Should he?)

     They nod understandingly. “You go do what you need to. And kid? If you get to a point where you need to get help, go to Martha,” they advise. “She’s the old missus who’s runs the grocer’s. She’ll get you on the straight and narrow.” ‘For when you come to your senses and join our side’, they mean. But they mean well… Don’t they?

     Casper mutters the appropriate ‘okays’, ‘thank yous’, and ‘goodbyes’ automatically. There’s a hurricane inside him, too much to consider and too many questions to ask in too short a time. He still can’t believe it, nor does he want to. What did you do, Balor? What did you do and why? But most of all, why?

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