Chapter Three
Honey’s Helpful Hint, from
Honey Frost’s Southern Cookbook for Recipes Gone Wrong:
Strength in coven, fire in the oven,
for curses most foul, seek cures of fowl.
For the precious wares and the gravest cares,
find thee fast a Farewitch lair.
—a Farewitch fable
On Monday morning, I fasten a note to the Apothakery’s narrow yellow door.
BACK SOON. PROMISE.
Our dangling wooden sign out front seems to scrutinize me from its high ground.
Fine—I know I’m not kidding anyone. I didn’t close the shop today on a whim. Thinking ahead, I delivered this week’s orders yesterday when most folks were sitting down to dinner. Even the banana cake for Nurse Carolina’s niece, who has a very important eighth birthday party on Wednesday.
I didn’t get to bed until the rooster living out back woke up, but what is sleep, anyway? I’m already used to getting less rest than my bread dough. The gluten can relax, but a Frost can’t.
Word will get back soon enough that the Apothakery didn’t open today, that for the first time in its history, it closed without warning or explanation.
As long as the town has feared the Widow Witch, the Frost women haven’t taken a break.
When my mom gave birth, a retired Momaw Frost just stood in.
When Momaw passed, my mom just put grieve on a to-do list.
But I’m ready to see this through, for my mom… even if she has no idea where her daughter is this morning.
Making what is perhaps one of my more foolish decisions, I drive the old Frost family pickup truck to the edge of the Holler. The edge edge.
With shut-eye eluding me since Saturday’s hospital visit, I used what little time I wasn’t baking to research and try to make sense of the Holler’s history with Warlock Knight.
Storms and droughts and crop infestations and barren seasons for livestock, tornadoes and floods, an earthquake or two…
There have been plenty of newspaper-worthy environmental oddities here.
When the online records ran dry, I unearthed Momaw’s newspaper clippings from the attic, ignoring the nostalgic pain.
Having grown up poor, Momaw was a hoarder in her old age, and kept boxes of announcements, births and weddings and funerals. Boxes.
Then I cross-referenced town news with the rumors the neighbors love:
He ruins crops, particularly around the summer solstice.
Hens won’t lay eggs if he’s within fifty miles of town.
He burned the town’s library in a spell gone wrong.
But I quickly hit a wall. If the general assumption is he’s immortal, he could be the destructive magical force behind everything odd. Or nothing at all.
Everyone in the Holler knows why the library burned down twenty-five years ago—reckless magic caused a fire that took several lives—and that it was never rebuilt.
Too expensive, when the town needs to pave roads and keep the hospital running.
The exact cause—Witch magic or Warlock magic—was never determined.
Around the same time, the Warlock simply disappeared from Foxe Holler. No goodbye. Rumors or not, folks love to point fingers, and there’s no counterfeiting the fear I saw in my customers’ eyes. Maybe the blame that hitchhikes to a tragedy like that is enough to drive someone into isolation.
I’m going to say hello and find out.
Eventually, finally, I turn onto a narrow gravel road leading up into the hills, and soon gravel becomes dirt.
By the time I pull up to the iron gate of an estate cocooned in black birch and pine trees, I’m not sure I’m even in the same holler anymore.
The winding, unpaved dirt back roads add time, but this is ridiculous.
No wonder the Warlock never comes to town. The gas money would bankrupt a person.
Dense foliage curtains everything beyond the gate like the stage of some forgotten performance. Any mansion remains completely hidden from view. The iron metalwork of the gate twists in elegant script above its large winged doors.
KNIGHT MANOR
No harm in an informational interview, right?
With the lush woods and flora, oddly thriving for this early in April, anyone monitoring the gate might not see me coming, and in the Holler, a trespasser flirts with getting shot.
No thank you. After throwing the truck into park, I hop out.
The 1968 Dodge D100 pickup is avocado green, freshly washed in preparation for Today’s Ill-Advised Adventure.
I want to make a good impression. For some reason.
Maybe Warlocks are impressed by good vehicular upkeep. Old men like cars…
Approaching the gate with caution, I palm the iron, looking for any intercom system. Then, just like the small black letter, the iron burns a gentle, hot kiss into my hand.
The immense gates swing inward, shrieking. Like someone hasn’t opened them in a lifetime. When was the last time someone visited?
When was the last time someone left?
The coffee in my gut churns. That was too easy. Someone’s expecting me.
He’s expecting me.
No turning back now. That would be rude, girl, comes Momaw’s voice.
Back in my truck, I creep through the gates, only a big toe to the gas pedal.
Edging up the gravel drive, I think I spot an old tobacco barn, but the woods and landscaping aren’t just thriving.
They’re overgrown. Finally, the meandering drive comes to an end.
I park at the steps of Knight Manor’s front entrance, and slide-fall out of the truck. All I can do is stare.
When my mom said the Warlock didn’t spend a single penny on that decrepit old mansion, I thought she was exaggerating. But Marigold Frost is a baker, and a teaspoon is a teaspoon, not a smidge more. Precision is ingredient number one.
The town rumors got decrepit right. But everyone got everything else wrong.
Before me is an old behemoth of a house with a wide porch that disappears around either side of the place.
Every surface and support beam seems made of wood, and it must all be original, because it’s now more mushroom than bone colored.
The only parts of the house that aren’t wood are the one-two-three-four-many stone chimneys.
I can’t tell if the house is supporting them, or if the chimneys are the only thing keeping the whole place upright.
Knight Manor isn’t a mansion. It’s a farmhouse.
A memory takes me so quickly, my sharp laugh sizzles out.
This farmhouse reminds me of Momaw’s. Same screen doors, same decaying carved window eaves, same rocking chairs on the front porch.
With Momaw retired and able to babysit while my mom ran the shop, I spent endless time there as a girl.
Even nights. Those sleepovers are my best memories of Momaw.
I can almost hear the reruns of The Golden Girls.
We’d play gin and rummy until Mom picked me up.
I barely catch the sob before it escapes my chest. Breathe. If I’m having this much trouble outside the house, I’ll be doomed inside.
The rumors suggested some haunted hellscape. All I’m seeing is a Southern Living cover reject. How much do the folks of the Holler really know about the Warlock they fear? Or do they just listen to Gertha Fudge’s rants?
But as I focus, I notice the abnormalities.
What started as a traditional two-story, probably nineteenth-century farmhouse now has a dozen additions tacked onto the original heart of the structure.
Like the first godawful, confused layer cake I ever baked.
A house this size is expensive. Big like old money, not new money, Momaw would’ve said.
There are no fancy cars in the driveway, or any cars at all.
Odd, since the Holler’s public transit system consists of the church van or the bed of someone’s pickup.
The cracked, wavy glass windows were once elegant, but now vines rip at the rotting window frames and shutters, and birds’ nests barnacle for purchase. Ivy crawls between cracks in wood, threatening to pop loose a nail like floss hunting between teeth for a poppy seed.
I would know. Lemon poppy seed is a favorite flavor for the Frosts.
But the Manor banishes any hunger. My gut knots as a crisp April breeze edges under my clothes.
It’s cooler up here than it is in town. Wild vegetation infests the sprawling grounds (farmland?), but this grand house is the first infected molecule of the plague.
Now, truly realizing how far out here and alone I am, I feel silly, way in over my head.
If the house looks this sick on the outside, what is the Warlock like on the inside?
If my mom’s right about the suspiciously aggressive isolation, is she right telling me to refuse his offer altogether?
By trying to save her life, am I just going to risk mine?
What am I doing here?
I could turn back. Tell the nurses to keep trudging along, trying the same solutions, give Mom the same Jell-O, in the hopes she might get better.
Keep combing through cookbooks and recipe journals and grimoires for that fateful recipe I know has to exist. We could all simply return to the usual routine.
Screw that.
My mom has until July, if we’re lucky. I know exactly what I’m doing here. If I help this Warlock, he might help my mom in return. Or his archive could. Shoot, at the least, he could pay well enough for me to shuffle more money toward her care.
Behind its screen, I knock on the main front door. When there’s no answer, my nerves make me try the door, just in case.
It swings open without resistance.
Relief quells my panicky stomach. Interesting. But also unnerving. Am I being watched, or is the house always this hospitable? What if I hadn’t come? Would the Warlock have stomped into my shop this morning to track me down?
“Hello?” I call into the foyer.
Black-and-white tile bounces the echo back to me. Empty.
Lord, the sudden aroma of the cedarwood takes me right back to Momaw’s. All that’s missing is sugar and cinnamon toast.