The Witch in the Mountain Pass: Chapter 4
A Novel
It is said that as the Mother of God lay dying, the Apostles were miraculously translated to her bedside to pay their final respects. All, that is, except Thomas who was in India converting the heathen. Three days after her death, Thomas arrived in Jerusalem on a cloud that hovered over the Valley of Kidron. He saw her ascending from her tomb toward the Throne of God. When the cloud she stood on was level to his, he spoke to her and asked: “Where art thou going, O Blessed One?” She removed the braided rope, the Holy Girdle, from around her waist. “Accept this, my friend,” she said. He took the gift from her, and she was gone. The meaning of this parable is simple: The Mother of God had divested herself of the ties that bound her to this world.
(Sermon by Papa Nikolaos of Dagitsidos On the Occasion of the Feast of the Dormition of the Mother of God)
Chapter 4: Feast of the Dormition
Papa Nikolaos laid the fountain pen on the desk and blew out the oil lamp. He was pleased with the sermon. He had absolutely no intention of delivering it to the illiterate rabble of Dagitsidos, but he planned to send a fair copy of it to the office of the Ecumenical Patriarchate on Mount Athos the day after the Feast of the Dormition of the Mother of God, which was scheduled for 28 August (the end of the month).
He’d been on a roll lately, having previously dispatched three indictments with headings beginning with the scornful Greek preposition Kata: “Against Folk Remedies,” “Against Superstition,” and “Against Fortune Telling.” He had written a separate piece (a satirical sendup of the citizens of Dagitsidos) in the style of a Menippean satire. This had been really well received and was of such volcanic eloquence that a colleague in Nafplio had written to tell him that even he had received a copy and couldn’t stop laughing.
The interior of Papa Nikolaos’ hovel by the church was dark—a darkness intensified by the shuttered windows. He’d started writing after lunch. It was 2 August and the sun was only beginning to set, so it was approaching 8:30 p.m. The brick walls of the dwelling had retained the heat of the day. He wore an Egyptian cotton tunic—a galabiyah as they are called. Papa Nikolaos heard the tethered goat outside bleating. He cracked open a window and was startled by the loud flapping of wings. It was those damned doves that always seemed to follow the witch wherever she went. The birds were probably out scavenging for grain or bugs or whatever doves ate. Papa Nikolaos hoped they weren’t shitting on the cupola.
“Filthy creatures,” he mumbled, closing the wooden shutter. With a sardonic smile, he recited a line from the Song of Solomon: “Oh, my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs…”—And the witch in the mountain pass smiled from the mouth of the cave, under the tinkling bronze chimes dangling from the oak branch, and whispered to the black dove, Queen Hecate, who rested in her palms, “Let me see thy countenance. Let me hear thy voice. For sweet is thy voice, and thy countenance is comely.” The dove cocked her head to one side, and in the bird’s flashing black eye the witch saw the face of Elena’s beloved daughter, Philippa of the Holy Vision.
Philippa studied the only two known photographs of her mother—the old woman the townsfolk had affectionately called Yiayia Elena. The first photograph dated from the spring of 1864, Elena’s wedding day. Philippa turned the photograph over. There was nothing written on the back of it. Philippa had never been interested enough to find out the day the ceremony had taken place. The bride was only 16 when she was betrothed to Spyridon’s uncle, Eleftherios, the tenth wealthiest giaour of Epirus. He was 40 years her senior. Eleftherios lived in a sprawling Venetian villa on the Aegean coast, just outside of Parga.
The frowning bride in the photograph wears a floral headdress almost half as tall as she. One arm is linked to the arm of her husband. Eleftherios died two months after the wedding—poisoned, they say, by the witch he had married. The second photograph was taken over a decade later. In it, Elena smiles seductively. She wears an Albanian head-wrap and large earrings. The would have been when she was known throughout Hellas as the sloe-eyed dancer of Epirus.
Philippa placed both photographs on the burning coals heaped in the pan of the Turkish brazier. The four legs of the brazier stood on a slab of gray marble; at some point in the previous century the copper plate that originally served as the brazier’s base had been stolen. The photographs caught fire and curled as they burned. The eye of the dancer, the mother whom Philippa had secretly hated, seemed to rebuke her as it was consumed by the flames—and the eye of the witch in the mountain pass rebuked Philippa, for it was she staring out of the burning photograph. Philippa settled the perforated lid over the coals. She was never warm enough, even in the heat of the summer. A room cooler than 26 degrees centigrade was to her an icebox.
The room she stood in was over a hundred years old. It had once been the harem of the Ottoman pasha who commanded the Turkish garrison that became the village of Dagitsidos. It took up half of the second floor of the house and was thickly carpeted. The house had been given as a gift to the great-great-great grandfather of Philippa’s husband, Loukos, for his heroism during the Battle of Missolonghi. Eugenios—that had been the man’s name—had been a carpenter by trade and had constructed portable bridges and ladders to assist the guerillas and evacuees, since Missolonghi was founded on a swamp.
The house’s walls, beams, and rafters—“the bones” as Loukos called them—were sturdy. The room projected over the side and overhung the base of the house. One of the windows opened onto a view of Uncle Spiro’s plantation. There were only two noticeable architectural differences between the way the room looked now (in 1934) and the way it looked in former times: the lattice windows had all been replaced by jalousies; and a quarter of the room—against the north wall—had been raised and made into a platform to accommodate Philippa’s treadle loom. The sun had set and the wind sighed through the jalousies.
As Philippa finished lighting the third of the kerosene lamps, she noticed a mouse scurry out of a gap under the raised platform. She stomped her foot at it and said, “Ai!” The mouse ran back into the gap.
On the day Yiayia Elena died, the family’s house snake had vanished. It had kept the house free of vermin. Yiayia Elena loved the snake—almost as much as she loved her grandson, Manolios. Some people wondered if the snake had been the old woman’s familiar spirit. Elena had loved all the house snakes; and the house snakes had all been affectionate with her. It would not be difficult, Philippa thought, for a demon to pass from one snake’s body to another, like the sloughing off of skin—like the death of the flesh and the journey into the afterlife.
Loukos came into the room, “Why did you scream?” he asked.
“There’s a rat under the loom!”
“There are no rats in the house,” he said with a grin. “It’s a mouse.”
“It’s disgusting and should be poisoned.”
Loukos heard a knock on the door below.
“I think your friends are here,” he said.
“I have no friends,” Philippa whispered to herself.
Mama Irene and her oldest daughter Clio preceded the three other women who entered the room. Philippa had called the meeting to discuss the witch. Word was getting around. Tourists were coming to Dagitsidos, which was a new thing for the town. Dorcas’s father, the melancholy cobbler, had set up a booth just outside the mountain pass and was selling curly-toed folk slippers and making a lot of money—more than he’d ever made selling workman’s boots and shoes in Glyki.
Summer would soon be over and there was no time for idle hands. While the women talked, Philippa would sit at her loom weaving a blanket for her son, Manolios, and his wife Dorcas. The two lovebirds already had a house. With the uncharacteristically generous help of Uncle Spiro, Manolios managed to build the house in a week. He and his father, Loukos, had spent the weeks since then perfecting it. Dorcas had given birth to a beautiful boy named Tobias.
With the birth of her grandson, the townsfolk were now calling Philippa “Yiayia Philippa of the Holy Vision,” which pleased her. Philippa thought that if tourists were willing to travel to Dagitsidos to consult a witch, maybe they’d be interested in consulting a Saint—especially a “venerable” one as she’d now become. But she was no entrepreneur and feared that if she attempted too grossly to capitalize on her miraculous vision of the Apostle Andrew fishing in the River Acheron, Papa Nikolaos might have a thing or two to say about that.
Mama Irene sat on the floor near the loom. Beside her was an open basket full of coarse wool. By the basket were two flick cards. She picked them up and set about carding the wool. Philippa stepped up to the loom’s platform and took her seat on the leather-padded, three-legged stool.
Old Agatha, with her clay pipe in her mouth, sat down on one of the cushioned seats under the bank of windows. She slapped the cushion next to her, signaling that Clio should sit there. Mama Irene nodded and the girl went to Agatha. At Clio’s foot was another basket—this one full of carded wool. Agatha removed her spinning-bobbin from a homespun bag she’d brought with her. She was going to show Clio how to spin out a thread.
Cora belched and apologized, then said, “Dorcas isn’t here.”
“No,” Philippa said. “She’s at the taverna.”
Cora was useless but a good conversationalist, so the women tolerated her company, even though her contribution to the evening’s work would be to walk around making suggestions, fists on her hips. After a few minutes of this, she would take a seat on one of the cushions “to take a breather.”
“Dorcas is working at the taverna with her baby?” Agatha asked.
“Yes,” Philippa said.
Agatha was surprised. “So she takes the baby with her?”
“Of course,” Philippa replied. Then the loom made a click-clack sound as the shuttle slid along its tracks.
“It’s hot in here,” Cora remarked, fanning herself with both hands.
Agatha removed her pipe and then blew a puff of smoke out of the corner of her mouth so as not to get smoke in the yarn. But the smoke went into Clio’s face and she coughed.
“If Dorcas is getting paid to cook at the taverna,” Cora remarked, “then her work is respectable. She has a job. You’re lucky!—Your daughter-in-law is not an idle cow—like mine! I feel I’m the only one that does any work in my house. Both my son and his heifer wife don’t even seem interested in finding a place of their own.” Cora collapsed on the cushion next to Clio and shook her head resignedly.
Sofia, who was middle-aged and worked—along with Mama Irene—on Uncle Spiro’s plantation during the day was trimming the wicks of the kerosene lanterns and holding them advantageously to ensure everyone had adequate light. Then she spoke: “I don’t know that it’s respectable to derive income from a witch! You should see the sour face Papa Nikolaos makes whenever he sees tourists heading up to the taverna.”
At the mention of Papa Nikolaos, Mama Irene (a widow) blushed. Her husband had been dead for three years and she wasn’t getting any younger. She’d made overtures to Papa Nikolaos, but he seemed uninterested. The old priest had never married. It wasn’t normal. He needed to be taken care of—and so did she!
“I can’t believe how hot it is in here,” Cora said, cracking open the window behind her.
“I think the witch looks dirty,” Clio said. The women stopped what they were doing and looked at her, stunned. It was unseamly for a girl child to speak so freely in the presence of her elders.
“I agree,” Philippa said. “She’s not presentable.” Then she raised her index finger, as if daring anyone to interrupt her. “We must not take this matter lightly. Not only is she physically dirty, but her spirit is unclean.”
“Are you saying we should kick her out of the town?” Sofia asked.
“No,” Philippa said. “I’m saying we should cleanse her. We will take her to the ancient chapel at the mouth of the cave on the River Acheron. There we—that is to say, all of us here—will wash her as a corpse is washed.” Philippa ran the shuttle again. The women looked at one another uneasily. “Then we will burn those rags on her body and dress her in the hooded black robe my mother died in.”
The visitors went silent, horrified.
“If the witch is going to make money for this town,” Philippa added, rising from the stool, “we need to scrub her up thoroughly so that she doesn’t smell. And we need to put her in a costume that people expect to see a fortune teller dressed in.”
“I’ve got a sponge,” Agatha said.
“Who’s going to tell the witch?” Cora asked.
“That’s unnecessary,” the witch said, although they could not hear her. Her spirit body stood by the entrance to the room.
“Do you see that shadow on the wall?” Clio asked Agatha, pointing toward the door.
Agatha removed her pipe. “Yes,” she said. “Stop gawking at the ghosts in the room, and pay attention to what I’m showing you.”
The next day in the mountain pass, a British woman sat at the broad wooden table under the pergola of the taverna. Her husband stood behind her and her sister sat to her right. The witch was sitting on the other side of the table next to Dorcas, who understood English. The woman wore a Eugénie hat. She smiled indulgently as she peeled off the white glove on her right hand.
“Why do they always give me their palms?” the witch complained. “I don’t read palms.”
“Just pretend that you do,” Dorcas snapped.
The witch looked at the woman’s palm and mumbled, “I don’t need to look at her palm. Her husband fancies the sister. He hates his wife, and he’s going to run off with the sister by the end of this year. In fact, the two of them are already having it off in the hostels they’ve been staying at during their trip. The wife’s also dying of cancer—but she’s got 4 or 5 years left in her.”
Dorcas said in English, “The witch—she is saying that you are blessed and having long life and you will be having many childrens, and make rich.”
The woman turned to her husband, and said, “Well, then. I guess that settles that, Charles! It’s all roses and lollipops going forward. And apparently you’ll be richer than you already are.”
The witch laughed, “You didn’t tell her what I told you.”
“Shut up,” Dorcas said.
The husband put five drachmas in the witch’s hand. The witch gave them to Dorcas.
“Smart place to put your little sideshow,” the husband said. “It’s atmospheric—very macabre!”
“Thank you,” Dorcas replied, although she didn’t really understand what he’d said, but the intonation sounded complimentary.
“Did you see,” the sister said, “that there are candles burning by the cave?”
“It’s like something out of a Radcliffe novel,” the wife replied. “Pleasingly dreadful.” Then she rose and embraced her husband.
Manolios was standing next to the taverna’s grill just outside of the pergola. He held his son in one arm and was poking the chicken breasts with a two-pronged fork. Dorcas told him not to let the meat burn. There were a few other customers—mostly locals, although an old Albanian man had tethered two sheep to one of the poles of the pergola and was drinking a bottle of Italian beer. The sheep bells clonked and one of the animals emitted an irritable baa.
The British tourists departed and, moments later, the delegation of women (Philippa at the forefront) entered the enclosure. Philippa wore a white caftan and held her mother’s black robe clenched to her breast. Agatha gripped a large ocean sponge in her left fist. With her tongue, she moved the pipe in her mouth from left to right as if she were in a showdown. Clio held a bucket of lye with both hands, and seemed ashamed. Mama Irene and Sophia brought towels. Cora held nothing.
“Mom?” Manolios asked, handing Tobias back to Dorcas. “What’s this all about?”
Philippa ignored him and pointed to the witch. “You are dirty. You will come with us.”
The witch sighed and rose from the table. The doves on the ledges overhead took flight, but the witch calmed them with a flick of her wrist. She went toward the women, and then walked by them, leaving the enclosure without a word. The delegation followed.
“She’s fast for an old coot!” Cora remarked, wiping her brow.
They passed by the stall that Dorcas’s father ran. The melancholy cobber was selling the same British tourists cheap curled shoes from a string of them. Dorcas had made an English placard for her father that read “LOKOL SHOOZ.”
The tourists turned and regarded the procession of women with bemusement.
“Where on earth are they going?” the sister asked the cobbler.
“No understanding,” the cobbler said with a smile and shrug.
Out of the mountain pass they walked and began their descent toward the town below. The witch seemed to know where she was expected to go, because when she got to the steps leading down to the Church of the Dormition of the Mother of God, she pointed toward the river at the bottom of the graveyard. The women looked at one another curiously, wondering how she’d known to go that way.
On the other side of the steps the obese baker had set up a booth from which he sold bourekas and (incongruously) Turkish cigarettes. The cobbler had proposed that the baker set his booth up next to his shoe stall, since they’d be able to help each other. But the baker declined, saying that it was hard enough work for him to bring his wares halfway up the hill. The cobbler nodded and had to admit that the baker was in no condition to make such a long trip. The baker had originally tried to set up his business on the low wall beside the steps leading down to the church. But this had enraged Papa Nikolaos who had kicked over the tray of boureks and said, “My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves!”—So the next day, the baker set up his booth on the other side of the path facing the steps. Although Papa Nikolaos seemed to regard this as provocative, he tolerated it.
The women followed the witch down the steps. As they passed the church, Philippa, Mama Irene, Agatha, Cora, and Sofia began to shout imprecations and curses against the witch. Their voices got louder the closer they got to the church’s folding doors. The reason they did this was to prove to God that they were not friends with the witch and that they were frankly disgusted by her. When Mama Irene saw Papa Nikolaos emerge from the church, she ran ahead of the group and spat on the witch’s ear. Then she smiled at Papa Nikolaos, who folded his arm approvingly.
They passed through the gate of the cemetery. Midway down the steps, Philippa paused and looked over at the grave of her mother which stood next to that of her father, Elena’s fifth and final husband, Mihalis whom she had loved. “Papa,” Philippa said. She frowned at her mother’s black robe, because she believed her mother had murdered her father. Philippa had begged Papa Nikolaos not to let her mother be interred in the graveyard. But the priest had told her that, since no shred of evidence had ever surfaced incriminating Yiayia Elena in the death of Mihalis; since Yiayia Elena had confessed her sins before her death; and since no one had witnessed firsthand the old woman’s alleged suicide, ecclesiastical law stipulated that she should be buried as a Christian.
Philippa snapped out of her reveries when she heard the women stepping down into the river at the bottom of the cemetery. She looked at them and noticed that the witch was looking up at her with a grim smile.
Philippa didn’t expect the water to be so cold.—True, she was always cold, but this didn’t feel natural for this time of the year. Her jaws tightened. She wore her sandals and felt the firmness of the sunken walkway under her feet. Cora looked behind her and seemed distressed. “Are you okay?” she asked. “I’m fine!” Philippa snapped, but she didn’t feel fine. The underwater weeds seemed to linger on her ankles like palpating fingers. Did the others not feel how ice cold the water was?
When they reached the waist-deep water at the end of the sunken walkway, Philippa drew herself up imperiously. She would not show weakness now. The others were looking to her for guidance. The witch stood near the mouth of the cave. The icon of St. George, which was bolted to the outside of the cave over the water, was tilted at an angle. Mama Irene made a fatuous comment about how she would have to go tell Papa Nikolaos that the icon was tilted so that he could fix it or have someone fix it for him. The figures in the faded fresco on the cave chapel’s walls seemed to be looking down on the witch with their scratched out eyes.
“Disrobe here,” Philippa said, teeth chattering. “And put your clothes on that boulder—the one there.” She pointed at it. It was the same boulder Yiayia Elena had laid Uncle Spiro’s yataghan down on when she’d found her husband’s body floating in the river. Philippa had no knowledge of this (because she had not yet been born), but as she looked at the boulder it stirred something inside of her. She pushed the thought from her mind and barked out orders: “Irene! Cora!—Since you are both wide, stand over here in case anyone is on the river. That way they will not see her nakedness.”
Cora and Irene took up their positions. Although Clio was tall for her age, the water was still too deep for her to be of any practical use in it. So she waded to the mouth of the cave, set the bucket on the floor of it, and climbed out of the water. The witch looked over her shoulder and smiled kindly at the girl.
Agatha was complaining to Sophia that she had forgotten to remove her pipe tobacco from her pocket before stepping down into the water and now it was ruined—just ruined. Philippa quietly made her way to the boulder, her limbs shaking from the cold. The others seemed to have acclimated to the water’s temperature. When the witch had disrobed, Philippa snatched the heap of clothes from the boulder and put the black robe down in their place.
“You won’t be needing these clothes anymore, witch.” Philippa said. “Cora, take these rags and burn them.”
Cora took the greasy clothing and curled her mouth into a frown. “The fabric smells of death!”
At the mention of the word “death” Philippa gasped. Something wasn’t right. She had to rest one hand on the boulder to support herself.
Sophia moistened a rag and dipped it into the bucket of lye. The witch extended her arms. Philippa looked at the witch’s shriveled breasts, and noticed that the nipples were dripping milk. A school of fish swam around the witch’s waist. They broke the surface, apparently attracted to the milk. Agatha and Sophia did not seem to have noticed this and Philippa wondered why. Now Philippa could hear her own heartbeat, then she heard the witch’s heartbeat as well.
Why did the others not hear what she was hearing? Why could they not see what she was seeing? Agatha wiped the sponge over the witch’s neck and a lather formed.
“Shall we synchronize our heartbeats as we do our menstrual cycles?” the witch asked. Philippa looked into the old woman’s eyes. The face that the witch had turned to Philippa was her spiritual face. The old woman’s bodily face whistled a mournful tune as she yielded to the cleansing. And now their heartbeats were one. Philippa looked down at the water. The fish at the witch’s waist were now gray faces grouped together with gills on their necks—Demons! They were staring at her with their unfeeling eyes. As Philippa opened her mouth to scream, the fish faces opened their mouths too. She could not emit a sound, no matter how wide she opened her jaws.
The women looked at Philippa in astonishment, as the witch regarded her cleansed forearms.
“What’s wrong?!” Agatha shouted as Philippa collapsed backwards onto the boulder.
“She’s going into shock!” Mama Irene said. “It must be the water!—It’s too cold for her!”
Philippa could not respond—but she sensed the witch’s spirit body drifting toward her. All Philippa could hear as her eyes closed was the sound of the two heartbeats. And now she was receding 40 years into the past; and her second sight seemed red and bloodshot, edged with the hues of the setting August sun. She had withdrawn into her mother’s womb, and now the second heartbeat was the heartbeat of Yiayia Elena. The heartbeat was rapid. Something was happening.
It was a gray and overcast morning. Spyridon, Mihalis, and Elena had been sleeping in the enclosure of the mountain. Elena was pregnant and Philippa now tried to stretch her arms, discomfited by her mother’s rapid heartbeat and sudden movements. But it was only Philippa’s bodily form making these movements. Mihalis had accepted a wager from Spyridon. He would fetch the icon of St. George at the mouth of the cave on the River Acheron and bring it up through the cave. He would hang it on the oak tree in the enclosure—the same oak tree they’d huddled together under the previous night. They would call it a miracle. It would be a great joke, and Papa Andreas would have to admit that God had forgiven the trio of any outstanding picadillos or trespasses they might have been guilty of. But something had gone wrong.
“Mihalis!” Elena shrieked into the cave.
Spyridon backed away.
Elena ran to the low boulder where Spyridon had left his pistol and yataghan. She seized the yataghan and drew it from its scabbard.
“What are you doing?” Spyridon asked frantically.
Elena plunged into the cave.
“Elena!” Spyridon cried out. “Elena!”
And now Elena ran as fast as she could through the pitch black cave, blade in her hand. The pale dawn light shone at the base of the declivity. She hit her head and it drew blood but she ignored it. The sound of the Souliote music had not frightened her—she was not afraid of ghosts. What had frightened her was the silence that preceded this. A silence mixed with a distant voice—or voices. She could’ve sworn that it had been Mihalis speaking, that he was angry or scared. And now, the horror of the scene was disclosed to her as she stepped down into the cave chapel at the mouth of the cave. The young man—the beautiful ferryman—lay in a crumpled heap, his throat slit. And in the death-bearing Acheron floated the body of Mihalis, whom she had loved. She splashed down into the bloody water and rested the yataghan on the boulder close by. She drew her husband’s body to her breast. His throat, too, had been cut. His lips and eyelids still quivered spasmodically. Then Elena emitted a scream unlike any the town of Dagitsidos had ever heard—a scream that echoed through the cave and caused Spyridon to run out of the mountain pass in terror. Amidst the commotion Philippa’s bodily form moved against the contracting muscles in her mother’s womb, and tore at the membranous wall enclosing it.
The people of Dagitsidos gathered around the gory scene. Elena looked up and stared in anguish at Spyridon. Then she cried out again and plunged her arms into the bloody water, bending at the knees. When she pulled her arms from the water once more, she held her newborn daughter. Elena seized the yataghan and raised it over her head. Everyone watched in awe as Elena severed the umbilical cord and then cast the blade away. Those that were present that day agreed that, at the very moment the cord was cut, Philippa of the Holy Vision opened her eyes and became ensouled.
The blind priest, Papa Andreas, was led to the front of the crowd. Elena handed the baby to the priest. He took the child tenderly into his arms. Then he dabbled the surface of the water with the tips of his right fingers. He could not see that his fingers were near the open wound on Mihalis’s throat. With the bloody water he baptized the child. And now Philippa recalled that day, when she had opened her eyes and seen the cloudy eyes of the old man. And without the process of language, she asked the priest, “Who are you?” The priest handed the baby back to Elena and said to the newborn, “My name is Andrew. And I am a fisher of men.”—And then the ghost of Mihalis, Philippa’s father, took the priest by the hand and guided him back to the church.
“She’s alive!” Mama Irene exclaimed. Philippa of the Holy Vision opened her eyes, which were red and bloodshot. Tears of blood coursed down her cheeks. She lay supine on the boulder, looking up into the face of the witch who had just breathed life back into her. Philippa sat up. She could no longer hear the beatings of the two hearts. She touched her face and stared at the blood on her fingertips.
“It’s a miracle!” Agatha said and crossed herself. “The witch has saved your life!”
“Take me to my home.” Philippa said. “Fetch Loukos and Manolios.”
The women helped her up. They abandoned the materials they had come with: the bucket of lye, the sponge. But Agatha took a cloth and ran it through the water to wipe the blood from Philippa’s face. But her eyes remained red and her pupils were black and pulpy like new-formed scabs.
When the women were gone, the witch reached for Yiayia Elena’s hooded black robe. She stepped out of the water and stood in the cave chapel. She put the robe on and covered her head with the hood. When she had done this, Yiayia Elena’s house snake slithered over the witch’s right shoulder. The witch held up her hand so that the snake would wrap itself around her arm.
“We’ve done well, sister.” the witch said.
The ghost of Yiayia Elena stood before the witch. She was dressed as the sloe-eyed dancer of Epirus and wore an Albanian headwrap decorated with coins. “I don’t know how to thank you,” she said. “My daughter now knows that it was not I who killed her father. I feel that I can leave this world in peace—that I can divest myself at last of the ties that bind me to it.”
“Not yet,” the witch said to the house snake. “The Feast of the Dormition of the Mother of God is coming up.”
The witch and the ghost walked side by side into the cave.
Philippa of the Holy Vision from that day forward donned her mother’s last remaining hooded black robe. She fasted for the duration of the Feast of the Dormition. She did not even drink water and this did not seem to affect her constitution. She spent the days—sunup to sundown—muttering prayers in front of the icon of the Mother of God on her deathbed surrounded by the Apostles. It was the oldest icon in the church. It dated back to the Middle Ages. Before he died in 1899, Papa Andreas told Papa Nikolaos to cover it in glass to protect it. The glass was often smeared with the lip marks and fingertips of the faithful, and sometimes weeks passed before Papa Nikolaos remembered to clean it. The icon stood in a privileged place in the narthex of the church.
Papa Nikolaos had never seen anything like the strange transfiguration that had deformed the eyes of Philippa and left her body paler than he had ever seen it before. He was too frightened to speak to her, too frightened to send her away. Even last Sunday when he’d delivered his sermon to the citizens of the town, she had not budged from in front of the icon. The other congregants had tried to pretend they didn’t notice her, but it was impossible.
Not even on the evening of the Feast of the Dormition could Manolios, Philippa’s son, persuade her to leave the church. She remained on her knees praying.
“Mama!” he said.
She did not respond.
“They’ve set up tables in town for the feast…Do you want me to stay with you?”
Philippa stopped praying, but did not turn around. “No, my love.”
It was the first time Philippa had ever said that to Manolios.
“Go be with your son and wife. I must beg your grandmother for forgiveness.”
Manolios left.
The wind had picked up and the citizens of Dagitsidos, who were gathered together in the town square, commented to one another how uncharacteristically blustery it was that night. The town had purchased a cheaper icon of the Dormition of the Mother of God that they used for ceremonies such as this. The icon had been standing under a flowery canopy, but the canopy’s poles kept collapsing in the wind so Papa Nikolaos directed the young men to move the icon and canopy inside the barber’s shop and they would just have to make do without it.
“Are we still going to eat outside on the tables?” Mama Irene asked.
“I don’t care,” Papa Nikolaos said and walked away.
“The candles keep blowing out!” the baker shouted. As he said this, there was a rumble of thunder.
“That’s not good,” Manolios told Dorcas. Little Tobias started to fuss.
The witch in the mountain pass watched as the covering of the pergola blew off. She paid this scant regard. The doves had taken flight and flew into the cave and out over the River Acheron. The bronze chimes dangling from the oak tree clanged loudly. The witch went to the middle of the enclosure and looked up onto the top ledge. The other doves were gone, but the black Queen Hecate stood flapping her wings against the gusts. And then the wind stopped.
The witch drew the hood of the black robe over her head. From the sleeve of the robe, the house snake coiled its length around her right arm. She raised her hand until the snake’s head was level with hers. The witch opened her mouth and the house snake slithered into it. Her throat expanded as it passed down her esophagus into her gut, the seat of inspiration. Then the witch spread her arms and slowly floated into the air. When she hovered at the height of Queen Hecate, her body slowly turned to face the town of Dagitsidos on the other side of the mountain.
The townsfolk were shocked by the abrupt way the wind had stopped. Papa Nikolaos told the boys to go ahead and bring the canopied icon back outside. The people began lighting their candles again. Suddenly, the barber shouted “Look!” and pointed toward the Church of the Dormition of the Mother of God. The church could not be seen from this vantage at the bottom of the hill. But flying over the cupola were thousands of doves and in their midst there appeared what seemed to the townsfolk below to be a hooded figure in a black robe with outstretched arms.
“It’s the Mother of God!” Clio screamed.
Everyone began to cross themselves, except Papa Nikolaos who exclaimed, “It’s not the Mother of God! It’s those doves from the mountain pass! It’s an illusion!”
It was neither the doves from the mountain pass, nor the Mother of God. It was the ghost of Yiayia Elena floating over the church. As the flocks of doves grew denser and denser, and as the spectators below gaped in astonishment at what they saw, the apparition opened wide its jaws and the house snake slithered out of Yiayia Elena’s mouth. It coiled its length around her right arm. And then a booming voice seemed to reverberate throughout the humid August sky: “Accept this, my friend.” The ghost cast the snake downward.
“What is that bolt falling down on the church!” Manolios asked.
“There is no bolt!” Papa Nikolaos shouted and smacked Manolios on the cheek.
Then the shrouded figure hovering over the church rose up into the clouds and was gone.
Philippa of the Holy Vision screamed in pain. It was as if a viper had bitten her on the navel. She leapt to her feet and touched her stomach where she had felt the pain. But the pain was gone as quickly as it had come. And around her waist was tied a braided rope.
Continue to Chapter 5
Ooh, so many enigmatic threads running through this! And I especially enjoy the way you color the story with local history and culture of the time. Such great, picturesque detail here.
Great chapter, Daniel! Looking forward to the rest. Are you planning on publishing this as an ebook? If so, I’d love to help out with that. Even if it’s only to walk through the process together and figure it out.