The Underground Goddess
Kevin Hearne
There is a certain joy when the temperature dips in the fall and everyone in Poland decides it’s time for a nice scarf.
You see riots of colors and fabrics, conservative wraps and devil-may-care danglers, and very casual attitudes about it like it’s no big deal, but secretly everyone is happy about scarf season.
We get ideas from one another, like, Ooooh, I want to try wearing mine like that tomorrow.
We admire each other like we admire the trees turning colors in Pole Mokotowskie: Every day we notice something a little bit different but entirely beautiful.
At least that is how it is in Warsaw—perhaps it is different in other parts of Poland. I wouldn’t know, since I have traveled so little. But in Warsaw, when the scarves come out, you notice.
And I think there is a pride to it as well, a societal preparation for winter, an acknowledgment that tough days lie ahead, and we say to one another with our scarves, I am ready, and also, Because I am ready, I will be able to help you if you need it.
I have many theories on the nonverbal cues of scarves—some are bait for compliments, some are cries for help, some are warnings, and some are meant to project professionalism or any number of other things. I could write a thesis on the Scarves of Warsaw.
But mostly they make me think of tea and Babcia, who knitted me a scarf every year, clucked and pinched my cheek whenever she saw me, and made me hot tea with honey and lemon.
When she set down a cup and saucer in front of me and then groaned as she lowered her arthritic bones into her accustomed chair, she always did so with a satisfied smile, tucking her joy into the depths of her crow’s-feet to be carried with her forever.
Her eyes sparkled as she watched me take my first sip.
I knew that having tea with her kochana wnusia, Anna, was her primary joy in the sunset of her life.
Teatime with my babcia reminded me of a verse from a poem by Wis?awa Szymborska, for which my rough English translation would be:
There is no such life
That is not immortal
For at least a moment.
I could see that for Babcia, tea with me was her immortal moment.
She had no idea I was a witch. I did plan to tell her someday, but tearfully, while standing over her grave.
My membership in the Sisters of the Three Auroras was a secret to be shared only with the dead.
She had survived one hell of a lifetime, enduring occupations by fascists and communists and another round of fascists, and now Russia was threatening our borders again with its war in Ukraine.
I could tell that she woke up every morning tired of the world’s endless shit, but at least she had me, her one perfect thing.
I would never rob my babcia of that illusion.
There was someone out there, however, who had no scruples about robbing her.
I could tell something was wrong as soon as I entered the door—the crying was a pretty obvious tell, but her posture slouched in defeat, and the entire aura of her house had become a wet gray dishrag of despair.
“Babcia, what’s wrong?”
“Oh, Anna, I have lost everything. This man on the phone convinced me something was wrong with my bank account and I told him the number to confirm and they cleaned me out. It’s all gone.”
“What’s all gone?”
“My money. I have nothing to live on now.”
“Okay, Babcia, listen. First, you don’t have to worry. I will replace every penny. But I want to know everything he said and when this happened. Tell me everything.”
“How will you replace everything?”
“I have hidden resources. Come. Let’s fix this.”
She talked me through it, and I carefully kept my face neutral and concerned while inside I was screaming with rage.
I had heard of criminals using phone scams to take advantage of the elderly, but had always dismissed it with a perfunctory “Oh, that’s terrible” sort of brush-off.
Now that I personally saw what devastation it wrought, I could not dismiss it—not for anyone, but certainly not my babcia.
This was a particularly modern plague for which the sisters could provide a cure.
We often skimmed the accounts of rich men who exploited others, and took especial pleasure in targeting misogynists, but we never ruined them—at worst we delivered a little humiliation and perhaps a lesson.
Law enforcement would view our coven’s activities as organized crime, but we thought of ourselves as a set of extrajudicial scales.
After reassuring Babcia in calm tones that she would be fine and replacing her savings would be no trouble, I left and worried about how much trouble this would be.
I may have screamed a bit in the car and administered some abuse to my steering wheel that it didn’t deserve, but I needed to release that pressure a bit before driving.
I lived in a large old house with the rest of the coven, two or three of us in a room, because there were thirteen of us.
Located in the Rado?? neighborhood across the Wis?a River from Warsaw, it was surrounded by a rock wall and offered an acre or so of land screened by trees that provided a nice private space to conduct our rites.
I am the youngest of the Sisters of the Three Auroras, though eight of us are still in our natural twenties.
It’s the original five that are at or near the century mark but still look to be in their thirties.
They were around in World War II. They fought the actual Nazis and endured Russian occupation in Warsaw, and now they have lived long enough to see Russians threaten us again.
The old sisters even call the Auroras—the goddesses who grant us power—the Zoryas, owing to their time growing up saturated in Russian language.
The younger witches and I keep reminding them to use the Polish name, the Zorze.
And they have to be coached on how evil has mutated and twisted itself into a different shape in recent decades.
It does not manifest on our frontiers as a blitzkrieg—though the Ukrainians may beg to differ, facing the tanks and artillery fire of the Russians now.
No, it rather slithers online and burrows into brains with memes and other verbal poisons.
It nests in technology and hatches its malevolence there, striking digitally.
Look at what happened in America: They elected a puppet and now they are a client state of their old enemy, losing their status in the world because the battlefield was social media and their military could not help them fight misinformation.
Our coven leader, Malina Soko?owska, dismissed my plea at first. But I went to the other seven new members, who agreed with me that this was a legitimate concern.
We conducted some research of news articles, and together we convinced the original five—Malina, Roksana, Klaudia, Kazimiera, and Berta—that phone scammers in Poland needed a serious pruning.
They were leeching millions from Poland’s populace.
The old witches needed that kind of old-school evidence-based persuasion to act, but I just really wanted to avenge my babcia.
Together we performed a divination ritual to locate the source of the call to my babcia.
But once we had it isolated, the location pulsed with ethereal warnings and disturbances that went beyond mere human evil.
Something was seriously wrong there, and we all felt the collective push from the Zorze to address it.
We would have investigated anyway, but this was the equivalent of a divine command for us, so we were all in.
“Anna,” Malina said when we emerged from our trance, “I apologize for being so dismissive at first. Thank you for bringing this to our attention. That something this disturbing could be living in our own shadow upsets me. Gear up. We’re going now.”
Gearing up for us wasn’t like those montages you see in military movies with guns clacking and combat boots being tied and muscles flexing.
We were more into cutlery and charms. We simply stabbed what could not be subdued with magic.
And we tended to look fabulous while doing it, dressing mostly in black with purple accents of some kind.
I had a purple scarf of diaphanous material that I wrapped around my neck like a soft twilight cloud.
It said, I may look soft, but I am ready.
The call center, when we arrived at the address provided through divination, was an abandoned brick tenement that the elder witches recognized.
It was in the Wola district, ul. Wolicówa 14, its windows boarded up with sheets of plywood.
Fencing around the property was covered in rather unimaginative if colorful graffiti.
“I remember this place,” Kazimiera said. “It was part of the Warsaw Uprising.”
The other old witches nodded and grunted in agreement, and you could watch their eyes go glassy as they accessed old memories of World War II, seeing the building as it used to be under Nazi occupation, instead of the decrepit hulk it was now.
“Yeah, I killed a Nazi here,” Klaudia said, a sleepy smile on her face.
“That was a good day. Of course, it was a near thing back then. I wasn’t so powerful at the time.
” She looked at me and the other young witches.
“I was a baby witch like you lot. We all were. Can you imagine if we’d been as powerful then as we are now, Malina? ”
“It would have turned out much differently,” Malina said.
“They can’t be using the apartments for a call center, right?” I wondered aloud.
“Doubtful,” Roksana said, blinking through her oversized eyeglasses. “I imagine they’re using the basement space, which is largely open except for furnaces and water heaters and things. We’ll probably find some vampire cables leading in there that are giving them electricity and phone access.”
“Well, let’s circle the perimeter and cut those first,” Malina said. “Over the fence and wards up, knives out.”