Ida and the Poppet

I would like to start by telling you the following is a true story in all senses. Believe or not if you like, but the truth is unchangeable.

It all started when I was 11 years old. I was a quiet child and always kept to myself. I had a dream one night in which I was riding in a Jeep into the outskirts of the small rural town in which I lived. My father was uncharacteristically silent during the ride.

We continued down the old, mostly dirt road until the Jeep rolled to a stop into a driveway of a very nicely kept, plantation style home. We approached the door and entered without a knock.

I stepped into an eerily familiar living room where we found a smiling, wrinkled older lady with long gray hair and a very warm affect. I knew not her name and it didn’t bother me. She was familiar, kind, and welcoming.

She asked me to check on her daughter in the kitchen. “Ida” was standing over a stove stirring a 1930’s era medium sized saucepan. She never told me her name, I simply knew it. I knew it in the way you know if an animal is tame or if rain was coming; it was as if it were written on her face in letters only my mind could see.

“It’s so good to have you here now. We have been waiting.” Said Ida in a sweet buttery tone.

“You’re a ghost aren’t you?” I knew without a doubt the words were true the second I spoke them

“Yes; In a sense I am.”  She replied.

Suddenly my focus was forced into the saucepan where crimson liquid began to violently boil, and I looked up to see a slightly twisted yet satisfied smile upon her face.

I was jarred awake in my bed as if someone pulled a cord attached to my soul itself. I lay in bed, out of breath, simultaneously creeped out and intrigued. I had to know about Ida and the dream led me to my father.

I told him about the dream that day. He turned white as a ghost and before I could speak her name he said: “Ida”. My older sister had had the same dream the same night and she had approached him moments before.

That night we got in the Jeep and drove down those same, now rutted and worn, sepia toned road out into the driveway of the now run-down and weather-aged plantation style home.

We approached the door and entered again without knocking. Together my sister and I walked through time into an untouched living room. “Mother” sat quietly in a rocking chair facing the wall while slowly rocking and stitching some project we could not see.

Ida called from the kitchen for us by name. We walked in to see her stirring her saucepan full of blood. She wore the same warm, satisfied smile that slightly contorted her face into something darker, more sinister, and somehow more familiar.

“Mother” walked up behind us and between us to the saucepan in which she placed a small poppet which eerily resembled my father. It slowly sank and disappeared beneath the blood. A foreboding feeling engulfed me like a blanket made of fire ants. I had a sudden and Herculean urge to run as fast as I could out the door in which I came.

But I stood there in awe, in fear, as if I was frozen in a block of ice. I don’t remember breathing. I can’t remember my heartbeat. I do, however, remember the sheer fear I felt in that very moment as Ida’s grey pupil-less eyes twinkled and cold sweat beaded down my spine.

I knew my father had done something to anger the witches either in their lives or in death. But I knew there something sinister in store when Ida retrieved poppet from the pan of blood,completely unstained by the blood, and completely clean save 2 numbers written upon its chest. 47. That is all it said.

I ran out of the house as fast as I could closely followed by my then 13 yo sister. I climbed in the back of the jeep as my sister climbed into the front seat. I yelled “floor it!”  to my father who, with a confused look, put the Jeep in gear and slowly drove onto yet another gravel road and parked the Jeep.

My father asked me what I had seen. He became a shade paler after I told him. I looked at my clothing and noticed the cobwebs that covered me nearby head to toe. My sister said she only saw an old, creepy, run-down plantation while she was inside.

My father drove us to a field so grown up that you could barely make out there were gravestones. He told me this was the witches’ cemetery and that few knew where it was located. It was a place for those who the church would not allowed buried on hallowed ground.

We stepped out of the jeep and he showed me a grave marked “Ida” with an unreadable last name as if it was worn off by weather. However, there was a very large pentagram etched into the gravestone. As I looked around most of the graves had pentagrams.

He then tells me a story about an old witch and her daughter who were shunned by the townspeople and forced to live in the country. The story was that if u walked by her house and she saw you, she would make a poppet in your image and upon it your age of death would be written. When you die your soul would be trapped within the poppet. This story was told to him by his grandmother who was one of the townspeople that shunned Ida and her mother.

Fast forward 19 years. My father and quit talking years ago. He became less himself and more someone else each time I saw him. I couldn’t trust him, I couldn’t stand to be around him, and it hurt because he was a shadow of what he could have been.

I received a call from my mother yesterday. My father died 2 weeks after his 47th birthday. This dream and memory is all I can go back to. The poppet, the number, the cold, dead, yet inviting eyes of Ida and the warm smile of her mother. I still see it in my dreams.

I’ve driven by that house a hundred times. Wondering why it happened and why I was chosen. I’ve dreamed of walking down that road a hundred times since, seeing “mother” stitching a poppet and smiling that warm smile that beckons you come in.

Be it glamour or genuine curiosity, I was drawn to “mother” and Ida. And I have wondered since if the 47 was for him or for me... but I guess I can ask her in my dreams.

All I know is each day I have less of myself. And I become more of something else. I see shadows in the dark, I feel the air move when it’s still, I know I have a familiar of sorts watching me and waiting for me to go back into that house. But I dare not know what is written on my poppet. I dare not see how she reveals my number. will she burn it? Will she drown it? With it be cleaved in two? I dare not ask. I dare not know.