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Fantasy Stories

The Witch of Waxahachie

Written by Lou Antonelli

Illustrated by Terry Wisenant

February is always cold, even in Texas.

I cupped my hands around my cigar to get a little extra warmth.

What was it the man said?

Oh, yeah. "What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar."

You were right, Vice President Marshall—wherever you are. Dixie Maids cost five cents—but they sure weren’t any good.

Probably tasted like what Sergeant Lucy was dropping beneath the post oak tree.

But I couldn't afford anything better—back then.

Sergeant Lucy's badge on her harness glinted in the moonlight. Deputy Joe was in his pickup having a drink.

The parking lot of the abandoned SSC campus was empty except for four vehicles. I looked across the lot toward the darkened Magnet Test Lab.

I remembered the skit we did at the annual Waxahachie Lions Club musical back in 1990. Brad Vavra, who was the manager of the Accelerator String Test Lab, had put on a blond wig (he looked uncannily like Judge Pennoyer), a blue dress, and waving a magic wand as the DOE Fairy, warbled:

"Superconducting Super Collider . . .

"Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo!

"Smash up them protons and waddya got?

"Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo!

"Crank up those protons, stare at those neutrons,

"Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo!

"Dig a big hole and light it all up!

"Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo!"

I was part of the chorus—a very ugly chorus! I chuckled at the happy memory.

I took a last drag from the lousy cigar and flipped the butt toward the oak. It bounced off in a shower of sparks. In a few months, Monica Lewinsky would almost—almost-—put me off cigars.

Sergeant Lucy nudged my hand and looked toward the ASST lab, where a lone window was lit. We scooted back to the building.

Deputy Joe came up right behind in his rush to get out of the cold and grabbed the door before it slammed behind us. Sergeant Lucy had to tuck in her tail to keep it from getting caught.

Doc Melancon squinted as he looked at the supercooled-magnet control console.

Brad Vavra was at the main power controls. He looked at Doc.

"Glad y'all made it back. We're about ready to power this thing up," said Brad.

I walked over to where the string test tunnel started and leaned up against the wall nonchalantly.

"I'm ready. Let's start your little illegal experiment."

I winked at Deputy Joe. He gave a little redneck snicker. He was quite schnockered.

Doc gave Brad a look. Brad nodded and threw a few switches.

I looked down the tunnel. The target was five thousand feet away, so I really didn't expect to see anything—but I did.

A bright blue glowing wave roiled like the apocalypse at us back up the injection tunnel.

I just had time to blurt "Oh, sh . . . !" before it hit us, and everything went black.

****

Even in Texas, which has towns with names such as Cut 'n Shoot, Dime Box, and North Zulch, Waxahachie is one of the strangest.

The first settlers asked the Indians what they called the place, and were told—truthfully--'Waxahachie.’

None of the Indians told them it means "Place where the buffalo poops."

It was quite accurate. The stream the settlers named Buffalo Creek runs through one of the last forests before the great western prairie begins. The shaggy beasts would wander in from the grassland, drink at the stream, crap, then snooze under the tall oak trees.

It's the county seat of Ellis County, just south of Dallas. I started working as editor at the Ellis County Chronicle in 1986, just before the feds picked the Texas site for the Superconducting Super Collider project.

The Department of Energy would build a fifty-four-mile circular underground tunnel to house the world's largest particle-beam accelerator.

Such a massive project meant billions of dollars in construction and thousands of new jobs. It was six years later—after the DOE had built the magnet lab, dug five miles of the underground accelerator ring, and spent 5 billion dollars—when the funding was yanked from the budget by Congress.

When George H. W. Bush was president, the funding was secure, but it went poof in the first budget under President Clinton.

The Democrat from across the border in Arkansas apparently didn't care if a pet project of his Republican rival from Texas got shit-canned.

I had a field day on the editorial page.

"The congressmen who did this are lower than pond scum," I wrote. The New York Times quoted that. I was interviewed on NBC Nightly News as an example of "local opinion."

Senator Gramm stole my line about the project cancellation being "the technological equivalent of Pearl Harbor" in his speech the next day.

Didn't make a damn bit of difference. The Super Collider was dead.

Almost two thousand scientists lost their jobs; most moved away.

Three years later Doc Melancon walked into my office.

He said he wanted to talk to me in private and offered to take me out to lunch.

A good editor never turns down a free meal.

I sawed away at my chicken-fried steak as he explained what he was up to. He wanted to crank up the string test lab for one last little experiment. He had devised a special target for the proton particle beam. He thought he could use it to create a rift in the fourth dimension.

He wanted to invent time travel.

It was the stupidest thing I'd ever heard. I assumed he was a harmless crank.

Brad Vavra was still around—he'd quit his DOE job in disgust over the project’s cancellation and was selling real estate—so I gave Doc his number.

Melancon promised that if anything came of his plans, "You’ll be the first to know."

Yeah, right.

You can imagine how surprised I was two months later to see Doc stroll into my office. After shutting the door, he explained that he'd hooked up with Brad, and together they'd made a deal with the caretakers of the lab (which involved a considerable amount of money being passed under the table) to turn on the power and get one shot with the proton beam.

True to his word, he wanted me to be there to record the occasion for posterity.

He explained to me how it all worked. It had something to do with excited neutrons and high-resonance electron shells—I think. He could have been talking about hominy grits for all I really understood.

When he came up for air, I pointed out that any unusual activity at the lab site was sure to attract the attention of adjacent ranch owners, who'd call the Sheriff's Department.

That's how we came up with the idea of getting someone from the Sheriff's Department involved, someone who could block any inquiries with a fake cover story. That how Deputy Joe Winters got in on the deal.

The DOE was planning to auction off the cryogenic-magnet modules and the sophisticated equipment that summer, before the land reverted to the county. Our cover story was that the folks from the auction company were conducting an inventory.

Deputy Joe happened to be Sergeant Lucy's handler—she was the county's drug dog—and whenever he was on duty, she went with him. Which explains why she was with us that night.

When the black Lab had started scratching at the door of the string test lab (we'd made a few lab jokes that night, believe me), I suggested to Joe she could come with me as I took a smoke break. I knew Joe probably wanted to go to his pickup and sneak a drink. That's how Luce and I had that quiet moment under the post oak before, well, everything changed.

****

I saw when I came to and as my vision cleared that we all seemed to be in the same relation to each other as when the beam was turned on—but everything else was gone.

No building. No parking lot. No SSC. We were all sprawled around in the tall grass.

Doc put his hands on his knees and stood up. He started running his fingers through his silver hair.

Sergeant Lucy whined as she rolled over and stood up. She looked off across the field.

I looked in the same direction—and saw the post oak tree.

"Doc, look!" I pointed. "The tree that was in front of the parking lot—it's still there!"

Brad and Deputy Joe looked too. The gnarled tree had an unmistakable shape, and you could see them stiffen as they recognized it.

We all went over. Doc walked slowly around the tree.

"The tree sure looks the same," he said almost to himself. "In fact, most of the landscape looks the same."

Deputy Joe was quickly sobering up. "Yeah, well, where did the lab and the cars and the parking lot and the power lines and every-damn-thing-else go then?" he rattled off as quickly as possible for someone with a thick drawl.

There was a full moon that night, and the top of Doc's hair gleamed as he walked around the tree.

"I don't know," he said rather softly.

Sergeant Lucy sniffed the ground. I looked and noticed there was no sign of either her turd or the cigar butt I had tossed away just minutes earlier.

Brad pointed in the distance.

"The road's still there."

Sure enough, you could clearly see the fence line alongside the road to Waxahachie. Without another word we all started in that direction.

We found a simple barbed-wire fence at the edge of the field. Brad leaned over the gate before unlatching it.

"What happened to the pavement? The road's dirt."

We went through the gate and latched it back up. We started walking toward Waxahachie—the four of us at a brisk walk and Sergeant Lucy at a bouncy trot.

No one said a word. Back then, cell phones weren't nearly as common as they are today, and none of us had one with him, anyway.

After a mile or so we saw a farmhouse in the moonlight. We knocked politely at the door. After a short while a lamp appeared in the window.

An oil lamp.

In a moment the door opened. We saw that the lamp was in the hand of a very old man with a long and pointed beard. He had a rather ferocious shotgun tucked under his arm

"What y'all want at this ungodly hour?"

Doc spoke up. "We broke down. We hoped you could give us a ride into town."

"Not at this time of night but you're welcome to bed down in the barn until sunrise," he said as he waved us in with the lamp. "Then we can ride in."

The old man set the lamp on a small table by the door and lit a pair of candles on the fireplace mantel.

He introduced himself as Malcolm Bratcher, adding that he was a widower and lived alone.

He nodded to us as he left to get some bedrolls.

The room looked about a hundred years behind the times. But nothing looked old.

Just very old-fashioned.

After a while Doc, Joe, and I noticed Brad staring and not moving from in front of a place on the wall.

"What's that?" Doc asked.

Brad stepped aside and nodded toward a calendar.

It had the right date, all right—February. 26, 1997.

The picture showed a handsome middle-aged man with streaks of silver in his dark pompadour. Underneath it said, His Excellency President Charles Hardin Holley.

I clenched my teeth as I stared at the photo. "What happened to Bill Clinton?"

That was my first thought. My second thought was, "This guy looks real familiar."

Brad looked at us, and then—I guess he could see our puzzlement—he took a No. 2 pencil from his shirt pocket and quickly drew heavy horn-rimmed glasses on the "president's" face.

As soon as he pulled back his hand, we all recognized the man.

Deputy Joe whistled. Doc put his hand to his mouth.

"Buddy Holly died thirty-eight years ago," I said rather uselessly. "I mean, he's president of the U.S. now, instead of Bill Clinton?"

Brad pointed with the pencil to a longer and smaller line of type underneath the first. I leaned forward to read it in the dim light.

President of the Republic of Texas.

I finished that "shit!" I had started when the collider blew up.

****

Old Man Bratcher returned with a pair of lamps and led us out to the barn, which was quite sturdy and windproof.

There was a pair of docile horses in their stalls. Sergeant Lucy quickly curled up in a corner and dozed right off.

We snapped our bedrolls out in a nice, dry, warm corner of the barn that smelled of new hay. We set down our lamps and sat around them.

Joe was so nervous the ends of his long mustache were twitching. "What's happened?" he whined.

"We seem to be someplace that's very nontechnological," said Doc. "Either we somehow changed the past and now are living in a different present, or we've gone sideways into a different world."

"We need to get into Waxahachie tomorrow as quietly as possible," he continued, "and collect information. Then we determine what to do next."

Sergeant Lucy whined. We looked over and saw that her eyes were closed, and she was wiggling her paws. Chasing rabbits in her dreams.

"Smart dog," I said. "We need to sleep, too. There's nothing that we can do for now."

****

I woke up to the smell of frying sausage and bacon. Old Man Bratcher was a good host. He had built a campfire under a tripod outside the barn, and had a large cast-iron frying pan full of sizzling meat.

He looked more curious as he got a good look at our clothes in the bright daylight, but he didn't say anything. Being nosy would be impolite.

After we ate and wiped our faces with a linen rag, Bratcher went behind the barn and fetched a wagon as we gathered up our bedrolls and took them back into the house.

Bratcher's rig looked like it could have come from a hundred years ago—except the wagon wheels had hard rubber tires.

The farm-to-market road that ran from the collider site into Waxahachie didn't have many homes on it before—and there were fewer now.

The road was dirt but well packed and well maintained. There were no telephone poles or lights of any kind.

There was no Interstate 35 as we approached the city, and the county courthouse loomed especially large as we approached. We saw no automobiles—just horses and wagons like you would have seen at the turn of the nineteenth century.

"Please drop us on the town square," I said, as we entered the outskirts. "We have business there."

Bratcher nodded but I also thought I saw him smile.

It was Saturday, and the bright sunlight took the sharp chill out of the air. Children played on the sidewalks. I noticed one girl in pigtails—she couldn't have been more than ten or eleven—rolling a hoop with a stick.

I nudged Doc in the back and pointed. "I haven't seen that in a while."

He turned and smiled. Suddenly he sat up straight. I looked at the girl again. Then it hit me, too.

She wasn't touching the hoop with the stick.

We both turned around and stared as the wagon went past her. She just smiled and waved with her free hand as she held the wand with the other.

We drove onto the town square. Bratcher pulled in front of the courthouse and tied his hitch right front of the statue of Richard Ellis, the signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence, who was the county's namesake.

We thanked Bratcher and shook his hand. He said he had business in the courthouse, and walked inside at a brisk trot while we stood outside the looming red sandstone building.

The courthouse was built in 1882, and it appeared unchanged.

"Where to now?" asked Doc. "You know the city."

"The county library," I said. "It's a quiet place to hide, and I'm sure has the reference books we need."

We were just crossing the street down the block from the library when we heard a deep growl.

Sergeant Lucy had turned and taken off at full speed back toward the courthouse as . . . well, herself . . . ran back across the lawn.

A sheriff's deputy with a broken leash was running down the courthouse steps.

Our Sergeant Lucy (wearing a harness) crashed into the other Sergeant Lucy (wearing a black collar) on the opposite sidewalk. A snarling dogfight was on.

"Crap, I guess that cinches the other world theory," I said. "Let's take advantage of this distraction and get into the library, quick! Lucy's on her own."

We trotted the rest of the way down the block and into the library, which was in an old historic building.

It also seemed pretty much unchanged. I led the way toward the reference reading room after nodding to the librarian.

I pulled the "US–UZ" volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica off the shelf and plunked it down.

Doc and Brad also pulled some books off the shelves. Joe looked out the door nervously into the main reading room.

I read quickly, then pulled the "SC–ST" volume down, quickly followed by the "MA–MN."

It took me less than fifteen minutes—according to my cheap quartz watch—to figure it out.

I had slammed the last volume shut and was standing up when Joe came back to me.

Brad and Doc were in front of some shelves and turned with books still in hand as Judge Pennoyer walked into the room.

She was now a brunette.

I faked a smile. "Hello, Penny."

"Hello, whoever you are," she said. "I don't believe we've ever met."

I saw Old Man Bratcher walk up behind her.

"That's the posse," he said to her. "I smelled them out."

"Bratcher here is a Master Grade Wizard," she said, "and he says you're obviously up to no good."

She took a step forward and wrinkled her nose. "You don't smell so good to me, either."

Doc looked at Brad, and they both looked at me. I gave a little nod. Joe blurted:

"You're some kind of witch?"

"Quite right," she said, gesturing to some deputies behind them. "Run them in, boys. I will not allow that kind of language to be used in public."

****

Being a newspaper editor, I'm a fast reader, so I had plowed through the most in the short time we’d had in the library. I told the others what I thought was going on.

I had some time; we sat in a cell in the courthouse basement jail for