Dispatch 40

The Witches of Cottuff

The one about three witches and a ghost in the house. Dispatch 40 begins with the narrator wandering his hallway in his socks, telling Stella about the apparition that appeared the night before—and taking an unexpectedly serious inventory of Cottuff’s resident supernatural talent. There is Stella herself, whose uncanny intuition about people requires neither ceremony nor explanation. There is Gina Welsh, the town’s bona fide psychic, reputed to know things she could not possibly have learned by ordinary means. And then there is Naïka, who simply calls herself a witch and appears willing to exert a somewhat darker influence over events. Gina is assembling this unlikely collection of gifted people into a mysterious cadre and, for reasons the narrator cannot entirely understand, has invited him to join. The conversation moves easily between skepticism and belief. Extraordinary claims are followed by “allegedly.” A photograph buried beneath a dying tree may have caused a man to move to Oregon—or the man may simply have moved to Oregon. Yet the narrator never ridicules what he cannot explain. He is willing to leave a little room in the world for things that resist ordinary categories. Then the story returns to the ghost. A strange sweetness had appeared in the house. The dogs sensed something. All three stared rigidly at the piano. There were reasonable explanations available—dreams, pipes, wind—except none of them happened to be true. And while he is describing the encounter, a single piano note sounds again. At its center, The Witches of Cottuff is about the pleasure and unease of allowing mystery to remain mystery. The episode neither insists upon the supernatural nor explains it away. Instead, when the impossible apparently returns, the narrator hangs up the phone, gathers the dogs, and goes looking for it. Sometimes curiosity is more interesting than certainty—and considerably more fun.