Phantom Constellations is Daniel Braum’s fifth full short story collection of dark, strange tales, exploring the metamorphic tension between the supernatural and the psychological, out now in trade paperback and eBook from Cemetery Dance Publications. Each of these stories, set in locations around the corner and around the world, evokes the Twilight Zone sense of the unreal and that mysterious, unsettling ambiguity found in classic weird and horror fiction.
It is a book of stories of haunted people, ghosts, and the Phantom Constellations all around them, bravely — and sometimes blindly — traversing the phantasmagoric happenings and psychological challenges in situations full of danger, uncertainty, grief, and tragedy, alongside a sense of hope, longing, mystery, and wonder. Appearing in the collection are four never before published stories written exclusively for the book, along with ten more of Braum’s tales including from the Shivers anthology series and a wealth of hard-to-find publications from around the world.
In today’s post is one of the original stories from Phantom Constellations titled “The Exorcist’s Red-Haired Daughter.”
The Exorcist’s Red-Haired Daughter
The French Quarter, New Orleans. 30 years ago.
She watches through the open door to the back room where she’s sitting in the near dark. Long, straight, red hair. Bright primary no-question-at-all-it-is-dyed red. No color on anything in the entire Botanica even comes close.
Her mother, the witch who owns the place, rings up the stuff I’ve placed on the counter. Tiny souvenir juju bags I’ll take home as gifts for my dorm mates. A book on Chinese Astrology. A glass bottle of spell powder.
The guide book entry for the shop said the owner has a short fuse and little patience for tourists, which piqued my curiosity.
“Open Roads, a fine choice,” she says, with just a hint of a Southern drawl. “Be careful what you open the doors to though. Before I pack it up, would you like instruction on how to use it?”
“Oh, I’ve used spell powder before,” I say. “I like to put it in the hot wax I seal envelopes with, you know for special letters or just wishes and things I write and put away for myself.”
This apparently is the wrong answer because she looks offended. I sense a scolding is about to happen.
Through the doorway I notice her daughter watching with devilish delight.
The witch blows a strand of her jet-black bob of hair out of her face and points to a window propped open by a metal hammer.
“I was about to say something very different, then I saw my hammer,” she says. “I bought it for putting in nails to hang herbs to dry on. It’s meant to pound nails. It was created to build things. Yet, see how I’m using it? I’m not wrong. It’s the perfect size and the only thing here strong enough to keep that old window from slamming down when the wind blows. Not every tool needs to be used as intended. Thank you for the unexpected lesson young man.”
“You’re welcome,” I say with a nervous smile.
As she wraps the glass bottle of powder in brown paper the telephone in the back room rings.
“One minute, please,” she says to me then disappears through the doorway. I hear her answer and speak.
“Which year are you?”
It’s the witch’s red-haired daughter. She’s behind the counter across from me running her finger along the cover of the astrology book.
“Pardon,” is all I’m able to say because she’s so attractive.
I can’t stop looking at her. She doesn’t mind. She smiles. Tilts her head like she’s posing.
“Your birth year,” she says.
“I think I’m year of the dragon.”
“Oh, we’re not compatible,” she says. “But I don’t care.”
She touches the top of my hand. Runs her finger up my forearm. It feels amazing.
Rick and Michael are out getting sloppy on Bourbon Street and here I am with this beautiful girl.
“Stay away from him,” her mother commands as she stomps back to the counter.
She gathers my items in one swoop and stuffs them in a bag.
“Here, take your purchase. Time for you to leave my store, young man.”
She escorts me to the door and locks it behind me.
I do not turn around until I’m halfway down the street. The red-haired girl is there gazing out a second-floor window above the shop.
I want to wave but don’t want any trouble with her mom.
I stop at the grocer on Dauphine Street, purchase a half of Muffaletta sandwich and head back to my room.
#
My hotel’s courtyard, an interior oasis framed by three story brick walls, has become a social scene. People are gathered around umbrella-covered tables happily drinking and smoking. The tiny rectangular pool is full to capacity with guests holding drinks in plastic cups above the water line. A man pushes through the glass doors of the pool house and goes into the adjacent changing room trying not to spill a bucket of ice fresh from the noisy old machine.
I rise above the sound of them celebrating the night as I climb the three flights of stairs to my room. The wooden floor is crooked and warped, anything on the floor will roll to one side. Exposed ancient wooden rafters run the length of the low ceiling. It’s what Rick and Michael call French Quarter charm. I don’t see the appeal. Even on our last day of our week here I still don’t see their fascination with everything New Orleans.
The phone rings. Speak of the devil, it’s them at a pay phone on Bourbon Street drunkenly imploring me to come out and party. I tell them I’m in for the night and I’ll join them for breakfast before our flight tomorrow.
I sit in the big bed, unwrap my sandwich, glad to be alone in the peace and quiet. I can’t stop thinking of the red-haired girl. The way she ran her finger up my arm. It’s been three years since Jackie went away to school and her parents made sure she broke up with me. One day on Spring Break when I was home at my parent’s house, she came in through the bathroom window, like the Beatles song sort of, and was standing there waiting when I got out of the shower. I never saw her again after that and haven’t been with anyone since.
The phone rings.
“I told you fools no,” I say. “I’m not coming out.”
“Come to the window,” says a female voice.
I drop the receiver and go. I slide open the black out blinds revealing an alluring female form silhouetted by streetlight. Tall and thin, the hypnotic contour of a woman straight out of my dreams is there behind the diaphanous, sheer curtain.
I push the covering aside and open the window. The witch’s red-haired daughter ducks to avoid hitting her head on the frame and climbs in.
I start to speak. I think I actually mumble a word or two about my ex and the bathroom window but she pushes me, then pushes me again sending me stumbling backwards onto the bed. She holds me down and kisses me forcefully.
“I lied,” she says, allowing me some air. “I think we’re very compatible. I was just trying to throw my mother off.”
She kisses me again. A quick, playful kiss that ends with strong bite on my lip and her backing away.
She lifts her shirt, takes it off, and throws it.
“Can you imagine me with tattoos,” she says.
The concave hollow of her belly is perfect alabaster white. The curve of her hip bone disappears under the top of her faded blue jeans.
She wriggles free of them and jumps back onto the bed. Back on top of me. She’s so tall she can place her palms on the ceiling. She grips the rafters, presses herself onto me and grinds and writhes and moans.
At some point I realize the phone is ringing, then there is only the sound of her telling me how to feel, telling me what to do.
I do my best to comply then disappear into a haze of pleasure.
#
I wake and my first thought is, oh shit I’ve missed my flight.
My second thought is, oh no, she’s not here.
I only see her clothes left strewn around the room.
I check the bathroom. Nothing. Then I notice a note stuck on the mirror above the sink.
I laugh. Such a cliché. Right out of every bad story and urban legend Rick and Michael ever told. At least its not in red lipstick.
Stay in touch, okay? Write to me. Come back and visit anytime.
I pack my bag. I gather her clothes and decide to put them in a drawer. I wait until the last minute to make sure she’s not coming back then I go downstairs to check out and meet the guys for breakfast before our flight.
#
Breakfast is beignets and coffee with chicory in the French Market.
Rick and Michael are hung over as sin but it doesn’t stop them from boasting about their so-called exploits last night. Except for the extreme amounts of alcohol and being on Bourbon Street, all are things I’m sure didn’t happen.
They wouldn’t believe me even if I wanted to tell them about the red-haired girl, so I do not.
#
Back to school in upstate New York is the same old fraternity parties, and other parties, and crowded, loud bars. All of them microcosms populated with those looking to fill the holes in themselves with hedonism, or at least with something. At times the debauchery reaches Bourbon Street levels of abandon. I sense a dishonesty in Rick and Michael in their thinking that this level of inebriation is fun. Maybe it is a tacit acknowledgement that life is something one needs to be numb to, to endure and they are getting a head start. Getting so drunk like that is just… drifting. Letting the current of nothingness take you, nowhere. They’re not alone, most everyone in this “scene” will graduate and drift in different ways, and on different currents into thoughtless, unconscious lives.
I receive a letter from my dear high school pal, Leon who is working in a cannery in Alaska, instead of college. We should all get a job on a cruise ship, together, his letter says. You know, sail the seas. See the world. This is the fastest, cheapest way to do it while we’re still young.
I write my reply and seal my letter with wax and spell powder from the Botanica in the French Quarter. I can’t help but think of the witch’s daughter running her finger along my arm. Of how I felt seeing her at the window. Of her white, perfect skin when she lifted her shirt.
Walking back from film class in the art building I decide to tell Rick about my encounter. His insight surprises me.
“Sex is real,” he says. “We’re young, maybe it’s the only real thing we know about life right now.”
I decide to write to her. I seal my letter with wax and spell powder.
When I return home to my parent’s house for the summer a reply is waiting for me. From her mother.
“Stay away from her. Stay away from New Orleans,” the letter reads. “In fact, never come back.”
My disappointment is muted by the whirl of summer. Beach parties. Chasing pretty girls. Late night conversations with Rick and Michael about photography and film. I have an awareness that times like these are not forever and on the other side of this our transition to adulthood is waiting.
The last semesters of school and graduation and hopes and dreams and the mundane things life is built of eclipse my memories and fantasies of the red-haired girl.
My friendships drown in the rise and falls of love and loss and in the fascination and despair of trying to bring artistic visions to life in a world not built for such things.
Currents take us. Separate us. Scatter us to the winds and corners of the world, even those friends who are just next door become strangers. This is not just my life; this is the way life sometimes goes for us all.
#
New Orleans, May 2023.
I return to the French Quarter after so many years for the occasion of the opening night of the Cure’s Songs of a Lost World tour. A gift to myself, an indulgence to my thirst for travel and in-person experiences after Covid times.
Will it capture the sense of community lacking in my life? Probably not. Will it alter where I’ve found myself, alone at the end of a trajectory I always feared?
No. Of course not.
When I heard Robert Smith sing the lyric, “…it’s all gone…” I felt it. I felt him. I believed despite the successes and luxuries in his life that he knew the same kind of loss as me. The same loneliness after relationships and breakups, after careers and dead ends.
Sometimes people self-destruct. Instead of facing down their problems and working out their issues, they implode. And all that is left for the people who were in their life, the people who trusted them, who gave all to them, is the empty space where a relationship had been. This is the story of my life. Its not unique and it is no longer tragic, it just… is.
The freedom to pick up and go on a trip like this is a small consolation. One I would trade for a life of picket fences and happily ever after without question.
I arrive at the hotel Rick and Michael and I stayed in decades ago a couple of days before the show, to give New Orleans another go; to try and find my connection with the city of art and music and spirit like so many artists before me.
The young clerk at the front desk is strange in all the wrong ways. His stand offish-ness and reserved demeanor is a rarity for New Orleans, and makes me feel uncomfortable.
I decide to take my bag to my room myself. I roll my luggage out of the blessed air-conditioned lobby into the courtyard. I’m greeted with the soft echo of gurgling water from two small fountains, new additions since I was here last. The brick wall of my building is covered with ivy. The pool house has been freshly painted white. There are vending machines, microwaves, and a sleek new ice machine. White venetian blinds, tilted open to let in light, hang in a new large glass window of the changing room.
Despite the facelift it hasn’t changed much in the decades since the night the red-haired-girl came to me.
I was thinner. I had more stamina then. I moved through the world more on instinct than by thought. I remember life having spontaneity and passion to it that I yearn for now, a certain magic and unpredictability I wish I could have again, even if just long enough to capture a fleeting instance of it in a photograph.
I put my bag in my room, cool off with a shower and change then take myself out for a meal at a place on Jackson Square.
“Just one?” my waitress asks.
She’s tall and thin and clad in all black. A tattoo of a snake on her lower leg wraps up and around and continues onto the part of her thigh beneath her skirt.
“Here for the show?” she asks.
“Oh, yeah. Saint Robert,” I say. “I forgot I was wearing my shirt. You going to the concert?”
“No, not me. I gotta work.”
There’s something genuine and vulnerable about the way she says it. I notice the lines not covered by the make up around her eyes. How her hands are the kind that know hard work. At first, I thought she was half my age.
Is it possible she is her? All grown up now and we have met again, here in the Quarter?
“Do I know you,” I say. “I mean have we met before? A long, long time ago.”
“Where might that be,” she says.
“I don’t know, here,” I say. “I mean I was once here when I was just a stupid kid.”
“Oh, I just moved here. I don’t think so,” she says.
I fear I’ve made her uncomfortable and I regret it. She was just being professionally friendly and hoping for a decent tip like anyone would.
For a second I think I will compliment her tattoo but I decide the kindness I can give her is to not say anything.
“Ready to order?” she asks.
My meal of shrimp and grits is delicious and the rest of our interactions are with pleasant smiles and no more conversation.
#
I walk back to my room carrying a bag with beignets and a gift can of coffee and chicory from Café Dumond. As I climb the stairs, I realize I have no one to gift the coffee to.
I fall asleep with my clothes on and the bag next to me on the big bed.
I wake sometime in the quiet of night and glance through my window at the courtyard. It’s so tranquil— the perfect place to enjoy my desert alone and in peace.
I plug my phone in to charge, grab one of the clove cigarettes I’ve brought for the concert, and go back down the stairs into the humid night and murmur of the fountains.
I park myself at one of the round picnic tables with the sun umbrella still up and I realize I’m not alone. Someone’s in the pool.
A woman rises from the shallow end, water dripping from her naked form. She’s tall and fit. A tattoo of a serpent is wrapped around her left leg. It winds up her torso, with its head on the bottom of her neck just where the line of her straight, black hair ends.
She’s facing the pool house but I can swear she’s my waitress from dinner.
She covers up in a towel and reaches for something at the edge of the pool. There’s a solid, metallic clang as she picks up a thin sword, the kind one would use for fencing. The polished blade catches the blue glow emanating from the pool lights beneath the water line.
She carries it into the pool house then into the changing room without noticing me, or if she does without a care to my presence.
The blinds are partially open. I can see she’s dropped her towel and has the blade in her hand. She’s moving with it. Practicing moves. Practicing a routine for a show or a martial arts kata.
She tilts her head back and swallows the sword. The entire blade disappears into her mouth.
I know some sword swallowing is real and some is misdirection and showmanship. This has to be an illusion.
She pulls the sword from her throat and runs her finger along the edge of the blade. I recognize the same delight; the same way the witch’s red-haired daughter touched the astrology book; the moment floods back to me.
Is this her? Is this her all these years later? All grown up like me?
#
I don’t mean to intrude. She’s not wearing any clothes. I make noise. I announce myself.
“Hello, hello,” I say, as I walk past the pool and open the glass doors.
She’s there before me, in the room with the ice machine, gracefully twirling the sword above her head in slow, sweeping arcs.
I could have sworn she was the waitress from earlier but it is not her, she’s someone who looks a lot like her but it’s someone totally different.
The woman turns in a circle and lowers the blade, spinning it dangerously close to her legs.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I was out there having a snack and I saw you and I thought you were, that you might have been—”
“Wouldn’t I look better with tattoos,” she says.
The very same words the witch’s red-haired daughter spoke to me. How could I ever forget?
“What? What did you say? Why did you say that?”
She runs the tip of the blade along her foot. A line of crimson wells up.
I wince.
“Oh man that’s sharp, please be careful.”
She moves the tip of blade to her thigh and gives it a thrust. It goes right in. She pushes. It pushes straight through.
“Ahhhh, no. Why did you do that? What are you doing? You’re hurting yourself.”
There’s no blood. It has to be a trick. Something like the sword swallowing illusion.
I try to reach her, try to get her attention. Her gaze is blank. It’s like she’s unconscious. I don’t get any recognition of my presence. Is she in some sort of a trance?
She pulls the blade out. One smooth motion. Blood spurts from the gash.
She stabs herself again. And again. And again. Spraying blood hits the white walls.
“Stop it. You’re hurting yourself.”
A jet of blood splashes the ceiling. The room is wet and red and coated with what was inside her seconds ago.
She thrusts the blade into her foot. Then pierces her other thigh.
“Stop it, stop it, stop it!”
I run to her.
She’s laughing. Covered in her own blood and laughing. Blood on the ceiling drips on me as I grab her arm.
I can’t stop her; I can’t take the blade. She’s too strong.
“You’re hurting yourself, stop, stop, stop!”
Her laughter continues as if I’m not there. I slip on the slick floor trying to wrest the blade away and crash down on my ass.
I slide around trying to get up as she keeps stabbing herself. I get to my feet and run for help.
The front desk guy is cool and composed and says nothing at the sight of me covered in blood.
“There’s someone in the courtyard,” I say. “She’s hurting herself. She needs help, I mean she’s hurt, call an ambulance.”
“Yes, sir,” he says. “Don’t worry. We’ve got it under control.”
“Under control? Call an ambulance, do something.”
“I got this,” he says.
“No, you don’t. I need you to do something. This isn’t a leaky toilet, call the police.”
“You were told never to return here,” he says.
“What? What did you say?”
“Sir, I said I got this,” he says, in a flat monotone.
I dash back to the pool house. My bloody foot prints are all over the place. A line of blood has leaked through the bottom of the glass door and is seeping towards the pool.
The woman is motionless on the floor, the blade next to her. She’s almost bled out. I’ve never seen so much blood.
#
I race up the stairs to my room to call the police.
I grab my cell, bobbling it with my bloody hands. I wipe my hands on the sheets and fumble the phone trying to dial.
There’s no signal. I move around the room, dialing 911. I can’t get signal. I go to the room phone. There’s a tone. Will 911 work on it? I try.
It’s ringing and ringing and ringing.
There’s a knock on the window.
How can that be? I’m three stories up. Bars appear on my cell. I dial 911 again. No one picks up. There’s only ringing and ringing and ringing.
There’s another knock at the window, more insistent.
I see from across the room a woman is there. The witch’s red-haired daughter, looking as she did decades ago, her red hair bright and distinct against the darkness of the night.
I go over and let her in.
“How’d you get up here,” I say and I realize I’m asking the question to myself.
All those years ago when she came in through the window, I never even questioned it. I saw what I wanted to see. And in all the years since, I never gave it a second thought.
“Was that you? At the restaurant. Down in the pool house?”
I don’t even know her name. I never asked her name. She never gave me her name. Never said it. I never used it. But I sent her letters, I must have wrote something.
Behind her through the window I see the courtyard is clean, no blood, no bloody footprints. The pool house is quiet and still. And empty. No exsanguinated woman. No blood. No blade.
“What year were you born,” she asks.
The question is just… off. What kind of question is that after appearing like this in the middle of the night. It’s a fucking weird replay of our first interaction from that day back in her Mother’s Botanica.
It’s all wrong and I’m afraid.
“Year?” I ask.
“Yeah, year, the astrology book,” she says.
There’s no astrology book here, only me panicking at the woman about to die in the courtyard. Yet I’m caught in the unnatural gravity of the dialog.
“Year of the… dragon,” I say.
“We’re not compatible,” she says. “But I don’t care.”
She pushes me. Pushes me again and I stumble backwards onto the bed.
She pounces. Her hair catches on something. It’s a wig. It slides off center revealing a bald head beneath. It’s scarred with lines— old incisions traversing patches of stubble.
Her back too is a patchwork of old cuts— a pink and white map of surgery incisions, a history in flesh.
A solitary scar thicker than all the rest runs up her belly and into a Y on her chest. She’d been opened up. Slit up the middle, like for an autopsy.
The moment I first saw her forces its way into my mind.
She’s sitting in the dark of the Botanica’s back room, then in an instant she just appears behind the counter. I never gave a second thought how that happened. What else have I disregarded, what else have I been unconscious to, in my life?
The epiphany is stifled with the pressure of her body pushing down on me.
She lifts her hands like she did that night, reaching for rafters that are not present, and grinds.
I can’t get her off me, she’s too strong.
She grinds, and writhes, and moans.
The door flies open. Someone bursts in. A woman. Her skirt, her hair a black swirl of motion.
“Get off of him,” the woman shouts.
It’s her mother, the witch from the Botanica.
She rushes to us, plants herself at the foot of the bed.
She has things in her hands. A bottle of orange powder. A bottle of murky liquid.
Everything is moving so fast. She’s spraying us with the water. Shouting words I’ve never heard.
Her red-haired daughter continues moaning, writhing, grinding, not reacting to a single thing. Then in the blink of an eye she just stops moving, disappears, and is gone.
And I’m lying there in the bed with the witch from the Botanica standing over me.
She looks… exhausted.
“Thank you,” I say, grateful for the stillness. “You saved me. What was…? I mean, how…Your daughter—”
“You stupid fuck. That’s not my daughter. I don’t have a daughter. I would never bring a child into this sick, fucked up world. You couldn’t just go to Bourbon Street like the rest of the sheep, and stay where you’re supposed to and do what you’re supposed to, no. Don’t you remember me? You must not remember me. I told you never to come back. I even sent you a letter.”
“I’m sorry. I should have never come to your shop. I would have never met your daughter then. She’s like a disease I caught or something, one of those things that stays with you.”
“You’re the disease. You’re damn right you should have never come. You can see things. Things can see you. You don’t get it. You don’t understand. She’s not my daughter. You brought her to me. She’s something you manifested. You left your sick manic pixie fantasy in my shop.”
“I did what?”
“She’s the unwanted gift that keeps on giving. Just when I think I’ve done her in. Bam, she’s back.”
“I didn’t do this. I didn’t do anything—”
She takes a deep breath, opens the bottle of orange powder and throws it all on me.
“Be gone. Be gone from here,” she says. “Get out of my city. Go. Go home, go anywhere you want. Anywhere but here. Get out and never come back.”
I’m still speaking, asking her a barrage of questions as she turns her back and just walks away.
#
I take the longest shower of my life and then I shower again. I think about packing my stuff and leaving right now. I decide I will stay one more night, for the concert, as sleep takes me.
I wake before dawn. The red-haired girl is standing next to my bed watching me. She’s pristine and unscarred. Her red wig is combed and in place.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“It’s not your fault,” she says. “Don’t believe what my mother says. She’s a monster. I had cancer and she couldn’t wait for me to die.”
“That’s so awful,” I say. “I didn’t know.”
“I’m the one who came to say I’m sorry,” she says.
“I have to go,” I say. “Your mother tried to banish me or something. I’m leaving after the concert. I guess that means I’m never going to see you again.”
“That makes me sad,” she says. “But I understand. People come and people go. Do you find that too?”
“I do,” I say. “It’s the way it’s always been for me.”
“If you must go there’s one thing you can do for me before you do.”
She rambles a list of instructions. Something to buy in a shop on Royal Street and where to take it. I’m so exhausted I fall in and out of sleep as she’s speaking and I’m not convinced she is even real or here at all.
#
I sleep the day away and wake in the afternoon. The courtyard and pool house are all cleaned up. Or was there nothing even to clean at all?
I go down into the shady oasis and sit at the same table as last night and smoke that clove cigarette.
Was it all some sort of a waking dream? All of it. Long ago. Last night. Even in my room at dawn, was she a projection from my own mind? Could it be?
A couple of guests wearing Cure t-shirts stop and say hello to me and make a moment of small talk as they cross the courtyard. Music and bands and concerts can be quasi-religious like that. They can fill the holes in us left from a lack of ritual and bring a modicum of a sense of belonging to our detached, modern lives. The friendly chit chat is welcome.
I finish my smoke and head out to make my way to the Super Dome for the concert. As I pass the young man at the front desk, he looks up from what he is doing.
Our eyes meet and he gives me a nod. There’s something good about it, none of the discomfort of our previous interactions present.
The concert is cathartic. I follow the flock of fellow concert goers back to the Quarter and find myself inspired. I keep walking.
The night air and moving does me good. I enjoy passing the storefronts and the open doors into all kinds of different spaces, all full of culinary and musical delights.
I follow a low rhythmic beat into a clean, narrow alley and found I’ve wandered into the entrance of an almost hidden bar all tucked away. I park myself on a stool at the polished wooden bar top and admire the glow of the place’s tea light candles in the copper wrought, low ceiling.
I order a French 75. The bartender is elegant. All in dark clothes with long dark hair back in a tight pony tail. She pops the cork on a bottle of champagne and makes my drink. She’s attentive and professionally friendly and courteous. I tell her my story about the witch’s red-haired daughter, and she listens.
“You know, I think maybe I know who you’re talking about,” she says. “It’s possible I went to high school with her daughter. She was the one who had cancer and her mother was all over-protective and didn’t let her go out or do anything before she passed away.”
She returns to my place at the bar after a few minutes and checks on me and my drink.
“There’s a story that says she haunts the Quarter,” she says. “One of those urban legend things. Like, she lures young men to their deaths, or something. I mean there are so many stories, so many ghost stories, it’s hard to keep track.
Her mother though, yeah, she’s for real and is a real piece of work. I know her store. I know exactly who you’re talking about. It’s a dice roll with her. She might tell you a wonderful fortune or might yell at you to get out of her store, I guess that’s the New Orleans equivalent of get off my lawn.
Yours is a hell of a ghost story. If you ask me ghost stories aren’t true. There’s always something else behind them, especially around here. You know, they’re all made up or embellished to sell things.”
I tell her I’m ready to pay for my drink.
“You barely touched that. I’m sorry. Did I offend with my take on your story? I didn’t mean to.”
“No, it’s just, I have somewhere to go. Something important to do.”
“At this hour? I can make you another or something different if you didn’t like the drink.”
“Someone asked me for a favor,” I say. “And I’ve decided that I’d like to go and do it before I go home.”
#
The witch’s Botanica looks that same as it did those years ago. I spy the array of powders, and jars, and talismans and shelves full of all sorts of books and esoteric things to shop for the through the front window.
The little window on the second story, where the red-haired daughter watched me from, is dark.
Her mother lived there then and lives there now. I know she’s up there. Sleeping.
It’s okay. I’m not here for spell powder.
I grip the knife in my hand. It’s a finely made thing. An antique machete I purchased on Royal Street as the witch’s red-haired daughter told me at dawn. It just needs a bit of a cleaning and some polish.
It’s meant for cutting brush. It was created to clear vines and branches. To make paths through swamp.
Will it open roads for me? Or new paths? It may be time to cut a new path through life.
I try the door of the Botanica. It is locked.
I just need it to open this door. So I can complete the favor I promised.
Bring it to her mother, she said. And you’ll know what comes next.
It’s not a sword, but it will do. Not all tools are meant to be used as intended.
I try the lock with the tip of the blade. It doesn’t give. It doesn’t open.
I realize I’ve got a paper bag with handles in my other hand. I look inside. It’s the can of coffee I bought as a gift. Did I come here to give the witch the coffee, and apologize before leaving town? Or to show her the blade like her daughter asked of me. I’ll have to figure it out.
I sit down on the curb to think about it. I put the bag and knife down, light up a clove, and take a long drag.
How did life take me to this moment? With everything gone. How is it that I’m out here in the dark, wondering how I got so old.
About the Author
Daniel Braum writes short stories that explore the tension between the psychological and the supernatural. He intentionally adopts the term “strange tales” for his “Twilight Zone-like” stories in homage to author Robert Aickman and the intentional ambiguities of his work.
His debut short story collection The Night Marchers and Other Strange Tales (2016) was re-released in 2023 in a new edition from Cemetery Dance Publications.
His short fiction can be found in his collections including Underworld Dreams (2020) from Lethe Press, the illustrated chapbook Yeti Tiger Dragon (2016) from Dim Shores Press, and The Wish Mechanics: Stories of the Strange and Fantastic (2017) from Independent Legions.
His novella, acclaimed in venues such as Rue Morgue Magazine, The Serpent’s Shadow was released as a Cemetery Dance eBook in 2019 and as a trade paperback in 2023.
An illustrated volume of his work titled Creatures of Liminal Space was released by JackanapesPress in Spring of 2025.
His stories have also appeared several times in Cemetery Dance Magazine and anthologies including the The Best Horror of the Year Volume 12 edited by Ellen Datlow and Shivers VIII edited by Richard Chizmar.
Braum is an American writer who lives and writes in New York. You can find him at his column on Cemetery Dance Online as well as at https://bloodandstardust.wordpress.com.
