Witch Water

CHAPTER EIGHT

(I)

Crickets throbbed; even a few bats flitted. Overhead the near-full moon projected down so much radiant white light, Fanshawe felt apprehensive that someone might see him, but…

Who would be on the trails at this hour?

It was half-past eleven now. After alighting from the attic he’d immediately gone downstairs. The inn was dead-quiet save for dim television squawk. He peeked around the hall from the elevator and saw the night clerk watching a baseball game. Eventually, the lanky man muttered, “Damn Red Sox,” then rose as if irked. When he turned toward a coffee pot, Fanshawe slipped past and out the front doors.

Now he stood amongst the hillocks, gazing back at the inn through the looking-glass. Yeah, who would be on the trails at this hour…besides me?

He felt consumed by the nighttime, as though it had somehow incorporated him into its essence. He rationalized that he wasn’t “peeping” this time; instead, he’d engaged himself in this final experiment before he returned the glass to its proper place and never touched it again. His revelations in the attic had confirmed everything Mr. Baxter had said about it.

Except for this…

It wasn’t quite midnight when he began his “experiment” in earnest. He swept his one-eyed gaze across the town’s panorama. The streetlamps of Main and Back Street shone bright, yet few people were seen strolling the streets, and only one couple had an outside table at the café he’d visited yesterday. He noted the pillory closest to the corner—empty, of course. Again, Fanshawe felt impressed by the archaic optics of the device; something about the lens—or was it the cryptic water behind it?—seemed to magnify all available light to an effect of hyper-concentration. He could see the grid-work of storm screens, smudges on windowpanes, the actual patterns of rust on a ridgepole. Fanshawe focused on an ash tree spiring in the middle of the town square, and could count its individual leaflets. The blade-sharp acuity of the looking-glass made Fanshawe’s mind jiggle.

But the Travelodge windows revealed not a single parted drape tonight, nor any late-night swimmers. Over at the inn, Abbie’s window stood dark and so did those of the joggers, while another window offered only a withered old man—regrettably naked—who stumbled in and out of view. Probably one of the professors, Fanshawe concluded, after a few too many Witch-Blood Shooters. The window blinked out.

“Nothing tonight,” he muttered under his breath, but that was good, wasn’t it? No fuel to stoke his disease. And that’s not why I’m out here anyway…

Of course it wasn’t. He’d come to see if the looking-glass would actually “work.”

As it had seemed to last night.

The town and all its details were as they should be. So it WAS hallucination or a dream… Next, he had to ask himself if he’d genuinely believed that Wraxall’s three-century-old glass might possess occult properties. After all, he’d found the pentagram with its borders of blood, he’d found the other glasses as well as flasks of the witch-water, he’d found bones.

But that doesn’t mean that these things would really show me the town in Wraxall’s time. It was only the possibility that they would, reinforced first by his coincidental dream-mirage last night and, second, by the power of suggestion via the paraphernalia in the attic’s secret room.

Foolishness, he knew, for a fool like me. Who am I kidding? I can’t even kid MYSELF. I came out here to scope some windows, and I used all that mumbo-jumbo bullshit as an excuse…

Just then, Fanshawe’s exorbitantly expensive watch began to beep: the alarm, signaling midnight.

Look for me again, any time thou art inclined, he’d actually believed Evanore’s waxwork had said. And she’d said something else—

After midnight, sir—

“Midnight,” he whispered.

The mirage he’d thought he’d seen last night had only been viewable after the stroke of midnight. Initially, he’d felt sure that’s when the town had changed…

Midnight. The Witching-Hour. Isn’t that what they called it? Fanshawe stood among the brambles, pasty-faced in the moon’s gauzy glare. The looking-glass seemed to grow warm in his hand, as if daring him to raise it…

He determined not to do that, but a moment later he did it anyway.

And stared.

The town, now, stood as it had last night: smaller, dark, dilapidated, its outskirts impoverished; it seemed to huddle in on itself as if against some unspoken fear. A lone horse and rider moved slowly along the dirt-paved Main Street. Another man, with a lantern swinging to and fro, walked in the direction opposite; a long-stemmed pipe in his mouth showed a luminous orange dot that alternately brightened and dulled.

Did Fanshawe hear a faint but desperate mewl?

The pillory he’d previously seen at the corner now displayed the head and hands of some unfortunate woman, not the blonde from his last look, but someone with longer, darker hair. On the ground lay eggshells and husks of rotten fruit where rats frolicked, but the rodents scattered when the lantern-bearer came close. After saying something to the pilloried woman, he laughed and emptied one nostril into her hair by thumbing the other closed, then stepped behind her. Fanshawe anticipated another rape but such was not the case. Instead, the man raised the woman’s tattered skirt and tapped his pipe out on her bare buttocks. The woman bucked in her wooden brace; a shriek wheeled high into the air.

Another sound—like a splattering—urged Fanshawe to incline the glass. At a farther corner yet another woman hung in a pillory, vomiting.

He veered back to the lantern-bearer, who was just turning into the front door of the church. The lantern vanished but reappeared a minute later up in the steeple’s belfry.

Then the bell began to toll.

Fanshawe had heard it last night, the deep sonorous peals that were somehow deep but strangely brittle.

The bell was tolling midnight…

Something rustled behind him; Fanshawe turned, but he turned with the glass still to his eye. It was within a much more distant hillock that he spied the moon-lit crush of naked bodies churning, squirming, and writhing all amongst each other as though they were a single entity of their own.

You’ve gotta be shitting me…

It was an orgy taking place in the clearing, its participants exploring every sexual position conceivable—and some not conceivable—as a taller almost block-like figure looked on from between two trees. Was it this figure they were performing for, or their own unreserved lust? Both, Fanshawe felt sure. Women’s backs arched in orgasmic release, their breasts thrust, while men proceeded like animals in rut. Sweat glazed the mass of fervent bodies, moans rose up, and shrieks of diabolic glee shot out into the hot night. Had cryptic markings been crudely painted on backs, bellies, and faces of the orgiasts? Markings like those he’d seen on the Gazing Ball’s pedestal?

One grinning woman—painted all over with upside-down crosses—allowed her nipples to be pricked by a knife, after which men and women alike took turns sucking out blood. Another woman, staked spread-eagled to the ground, pleaded to be taken time and time again, harder, faster, more, over and over, and there was no shortage of suitors to answer the plea. A woman hanging by a tree-strung noose shrieked gutturally as a man fornicated with her while standing up. Her legs were wrapped about his hips as he deftly thrust, and at special moments he’d lower himself on his knees, to semi-strangle the woman during the process. Each application of the technique caused the woman’s face to bloat and pinken, but it was not a look of horror that came over her expression; instead it was a look of a glutton’s glee. Aside, two more women squirmed panting in the dirt as they alternately slipped their hands into one another’s sex.

Fanshawe’s heart beat faster and faster.

Strange censers of incense eddied trails of greasy mist about the vista of hidden carnality; while men, obviously spent by their previous trysts, re-aroused themselves by applying unidentifiable balms to their genitals. Yet another woman traversed along on dirty hands and knees, to fellate every man in vicinity. Eventually, she made her way to the watchful figure between the trees, and provided the same ministration. The figure stood still as a wood carving, yet its evident orgasm so overpowered the woman that she collapsed in the dirt, a gush of fluid flowing from her agape mouth. Two men rushed up then, grabbed her by the ankles, and pulled her back into the copulative fray, conscious or unconscious—it hardly mattered…

Fanshawe’s mind swam at the sights. The visions stoked his sickness like a bellows to a coal bed; he stared and stared and stared, reveling in every perverse image. He was so intoxicated by the sights that he’d forgotten his purpose, his “experiment.”

He didn’t care.

Eventually, the debauchers slowed, then flopped to a halt, drained of all energy; they collapsed upon one another in a sweating, lust-sullied pile. Fanshawe let the looking-glass’s circular field trail upward. Where the block-like sentinel had stood between the trees, there was now just a drift of sooty smoke that only seemed to adhere in a vague semblance of the figure’s shape.

Did the smoky area where its face had been smile?

Fanshawe was not himself now. He felt black inside, he felt drugged by what he’d seen—

And I want to see more…

In the distance, a dog barked, but Fanshawe didn’t care. He moved to a lower hillock with a more direct view of the inn. All the windows were black, save for one.

Mine, he realized.

In the light of many candles, Jacob Wraxall sat at a desk, writing with a quill pen. A shadow slinked across the back of the room but Wraxall remained intent on his writing. Then, hands landed on Wraxall’s shoulders from behind—small, graceful white hands, connected to lambent white arms; the contact sufficiently surfaced the Van Dyked man from his writing muse, and then he turned.

He turned to embrace his naked daughter.

Evanore moved around into view; she was naked, glittering in a mist of sweat. Her breasts seemed inflamed, nipples jutting conspicuously as pink rivets, which Wraxall leaned upward to take into his mouth. The witch’s long, shining hair spilled over her bare shoulders like blood. Her eyes closed to slits as she focused on her father’s tendings.

Fanshawe zoomed in closer, in spite of the impossibility of what he was seeing.

He’d seen porn movies less overt. Evanore’s curvaceous form turned, leaned, and then she brushed her father’s sheets off the table.

Then she traversed, facing him as he remained in his chair. Her thighs parted automatically, and then her fingers clasped behind her father’s head, urging him forward and down.

Her stomach sucked in and out, her breasts heaved. Wraxall performed oral sex with the voracity of an animal eating…and apparently with some exactitude. The younger woman’s head rolled around, her body grew more and more tense from the waves of pleasure. Then, as the crescendo approached, she locked her ankles behind her father’s neck, lifted her buttocks off the table, and…

Fanshawe heard her shrieks of release all the way up on the hillock.

This can’t be…but it is…

Finally, he allowed the impossible truth to consciously occur to him: I’m watching a warlock go down on his daughter three hundred years ago…

Evanore lay back flat, hanging off the table; Wraxall seemed pleased in the aftermath, and slowly glided his hands adoringly over his daughter’s body, which lay out before him like an opened newspaper. Eventually he rose, leaving Evanore immobile and quite sated. Aside, he poured himself a glass of wine.

What’s going on now, I wonder, Fanshawe thought, his eye glued to the glass.

Wraxall had looked upward, and called something out. Behind the desk, then, a rope ladder fell into view, and down the ladder came another man, much younger than Wraxall, dark-haired and clean-shaven. The man, like Evanore, was naked; he was also obviously aroused from some activity in the attic, yet Fanshawe didn’t want to think why he was aroused. Callister Rood, Fanshawe realized. Wraxall’s apprentice. But whereas Evanore’s body was glazed in sweat, Rood’s was splattered in blood.

Wraxall, with his glass of wine, stood back in the attitude of a spectator. At once his gaunt face was overcome by the lewdest grin. No words were spoken; Rood acted through the instinct of experience. He stepped up to the table where Evanore lay worn-out, placed her ankles on his shoulders, and—

No holding hands in the park for this guy…

Rood’s rough, automatonic intercourse revitalized Evanore to her former promiscuous self. She squirmed on the table, back arching, her hands smearing the splatters of blood across Rood’s muscled chest. Each hard thrust vibrated the woman’s breasts and inched the table across the floor. Wraxall’s mouth was moving—was he giving verbal orders to his apprentice? Corrupt delight filled his sharp green eyes and, next, he’d approached the writing-table with a candle, tilted it, and let scalding droplets of wax land on his daughter’s belly and breasts. Evanore was soon shrieking again, contorting on the table, her toes curling; Rood contorted a bit himself, his own back arched now, cords in his neck standing out. When his thrusts grew almost too brutal for Fanshawe to watch, they slowed to a halt. Rood fell into the chair behind him, exhausted. But Evanore only leaned up, grinning and licking her lips, and diddling with some final sensations with her own hand.

Fanshawe felt winded himself watching it all.

Yet there was still more to watch. The following effort seemed like something in concert: the blood-smeared Rood stood up, Evanore rose with him, then Wraxall himself came around. The three of them stood directly before the window.

They looked right back at Fanshawe and smiled.

Fanshawe wobbled in place and stumbled backward. The impact of what he’d glimpsed—those three grinning faces—made his heart skip beats; it took several moments to straighten himself and realign the looking-glass, but when he did so—

The trio had dispersed from their place at the window. Wraxall was now standing in the background, as if in supervision. Meanwhile, Rood was ascending the rope ladder, after which Wraxall tossed a length of rope upwards. The rope was snatched, then it tightened, as the now unseen Rood began to pull on it. Slowly, and in hitches, a slim, nude figure—a teenaged girl or boy—rose upside-down, gagged, tied up, eyes wide in horror.

Another verification. Abbie said the diary they have verified that Wraxall snatched local children… But was something different? Fanshawe wasn’t sure but it seemed that the candle light was darker now, and Wraxall’s clothes were different. Then he noticed another window—on a lower level—with a light on that hadn’t been on before. In the frame, Evanore could be seen fully clothed in a plaited dress with puffed shoulders. She was intently reading a large book.

Fanshawe took his eye away. Evanore seemed to have gotten dressed and moved downstairs very quickly.

He looked again. Evanore’s window was dark, and so was the window where Wraxall and Rood had been raising the abducted child aloft.

Logic, of course, did not register with Fanshawe now. How could it? How can I expect things to make sense when I’m insane? he was candid enough to ask himself. He lowered the glass, took a breath and rubbed his eyes, then looked again.

The scene in the room that would eventually be his shouted back at him. Instead of frenetic sex taking place on the writing-desk, a body lay sprawled, its ruffled shirt ripped apart, revealing a chest that looked rotor-tilled. The face of the corpse remained out of view, but great jettisons of blood seemed to have been fired against the papered walls. A bloodbath, Fanshawe thought. But who is it? Again he lowered the glass, to think.

What’s happening to me? Why am I seeing this? I HAVE to be insane, he thought, but he didn’t finish the rest of the intimation:

What if he wasn’t insane?

He got the gist now that each time he lowered the glass and then re-raised it, some shift in time took place—not time now but the time-period he was viewing. That would explain Evanore’s near-instantaneous relocation, and Wraxall’s different apparel so quickly after he’d been grinning out the window. Now Fanshawe saw Evanore naked in yet another room, on the far end, lowering herself into a wide-lipped bathtub, but in this glimpse, her breasts were even larger, and she was extremely pregnant. The next glimpse showed Wraxall himself strolling about the yard, pipe in mouth, as he contemplated the stars.

And the next glimpse?

He heard a creaking sound, yet all the windows of the house were dark. Fanshawe scanned the yard with the glass, then caught a slightly swinging form of some kind. It was in the back yard, where the parking lot existed now, and from a tree that was no longer there, a man hung from a rope around his neck. Fanshawe zoomed forward in the moonlit dimness. The hanged man was Callister Rood.

For shit sake, what IS this?

Fanshawe paced the hillock’s meager clearing. Beyond, and without the aid of the glass, Haver-Towne stood well lit in the sodium light of its street lamps. He picked one such lamp out and raised the glass to look at it specifically.

The street lamp disappeared.

He wasn’t even surprised now. One of Dr. Tilton’s “fugue-states?” He’d seen on TV once that a rare tick passed a virus that caused hallucinations, but at this he laughed even as he scanned the town’s three-hundred-year-old streets. Yeah, that sounds JUST like my karma, yes sir. A fuckin’ TICK-bite is making me see all this.

“Sir, pray allow me?” a soft voice drifted behind him. “Thou oughtn’t take away the glass if thou wish to fancy my aspect. You need only turn, and elevate thy gaze.”

Fanshawe froze in place at the sound of the exotic, accented voice. It was a voice he’d heard before—at the waxworks—but his disorientation blocked out the impossibility of everything now. Oh, what the hell? he thought, laughing. He followed the instructions.

Evanore Wraxall smiled down at him from the next hill; she wore a tight black cloak, and was no longer pregnant. The moonlight somehow made her green eyes look larger, like an erotic yet vampiric caricature—the image stole Fanshawe’s breath. Her crude gown stretched against the solidity of her curves; and the facial expression he’d previously noticed suggested a classical beauty jammed together with abominable knowledge and sick-in-the-head carnality.

The image mesmerized Fanshawe.

“Alight from thy deceptions on which thou hast been weaned, and arise to thy true self, sir,” the woman—or apparition—said. “Steel thee against the sheep and hypocrites and weaklings, and stake out the bounty and claim it as thine own—if thou dost have the heart…”

Fanshawe stared, shaking.

“—a heart so black as to be stygian, sir, a black blacker, too, than the very abyss…,” and then the woman began to peel the crude gown slowly down her body until she stood nude in the moonlight.

“A heart black enough to butcher babes, sir, babes in their cribs—yea, black enough to see the blood of the innocent without a falter, and to dis-entrench the corpses of your loved ones as they still lie ripe, and to do so smiling.” Her lips and nipples looked black in the moonlight, while her skin seemed luminous. “All this we do in ebullience, so to praise our Master and clutch our reward so devoutly earned.”

She pointed toward another hillock, a sudden breeze billowing her blood-red hair. Her voice flowed like some tenuous dark fluid. “Lower the glass, sir, and then look, to descry the quality on mine own heart…”

Mechanically, Fanshawe lowered the looking-glass, let a moment pass, then aimed it where she’d just pointed.

Flaming torches bobbed amid rancorous shouts as colonists stood crowded about the hill. Men in tri-cornered hats and canvas trousers wielded pitchforks and muskets. From the mob came salvoes of invectives: “Witch!” “Idolater!” “Fornicatress!” “The Divell’s concubine!”

Wedges of shifting light and shadow diced up Sheriff Patten’s badly complected face; his girth threatened to pop the copper buttons of his star-badged vest. Two other men held Evanore fast by her arms, forcing her to face her accusers. She’d been stripped, her initial punishment of branding having already been administered: blistered shapes of crosses showed on her breasts, abdomen, and pubis. Her eyes remained narrowed throughout, and her lips were set in a narrow smile that could only be described as mocking.

The dour-faced pastor approached with a small Bible, and when he began to read the Rites for the Condemned, she parted her thighs, pushed her groin forward, and urinated.

“Despicable harlot! Evil’s sarvant who lives and breathes to transgress the Creator! May thee be damned to torment eternal!”

Evanore answered in a throaty voice, “Drink thee of this, heartily,” as she urinated harder. “’Tis of youthful boys you dream, father. And do please enlighten your devout High Sheriff that his arousal wilt soon be betraying him—”

Patten nodded to a deputy, who promptly brought a knurled cudgel across Evanore’s jaw. After the sick smack! loops of blood and several teeth flew out of her mouth. The only reaction she provided, however, was a scarlet grin.

Patten opened a scroll of parchment. “Evanore Wraxall, child of God agone, who so of thine own free will hast embraced Satan and his minions, and his imps and his divells, this just Tribunal of Assizes, in the name of our Savior, and in service to His Majesty the King’s New Colony of Hampshire, I hereby administrate thy sentence.” Patten’s eyes seized the woman, flicking once to her bosom. “Dost thou have any words to descant in thy defense?”

“Thou shall take thyself of thy hand tonight, good Sheriff, and of my body thou wilt muse, just as have you many, many times before,” Evanore calmly said.

It was Patten’s good fortune that the shifting light hid his blush. “By decree I am so ordered to say thus: may the Lord thy God grant mercy on thy soul.”

Evanore shrieked laughter as blood drooled off her lips.

“Let’s be about this,” the Parson whispered with a grimace. “There be no Godly justice so long as this intercourse-soiled attendant of Lucifer doth live…”

Another directorial nod from Patten, and his deputies dragged Evanore to the side, where a wall of flinty-faced spectators parted—

Fanshawe’s heart seemed to hiccup.

—to reveal the barrel with the ten-inch-wide hole in it.

The mob’s commotion rose. Evanore didn’t resist as she was hoisted up and then shoved down into the barrel. A rough hand reached into the hole, snatched her hair, and yanked her head out. When the horseshoe-shaped collar was slipped over her neck, the crowd cheered.

Aw, no, aw, shit… Fanshawe knew what came next; impulse urged him to pull the glass away but when he tried, it was as though it had been glued to his eye. He detected, first, the hush of the crowd, then—

The growls of a vicious dog.

The parson exclaimed, “May thy death be as revulsive as thy abominable sins…”

A slavering snarl fluttered through the air; it sounded monstrous. Another flank of spectators parted. Fanshawe half-fainted when he saw the size of the Doberman that was then led through the divide. The stout-armed deputy holding it back on its chain could barely manage to keep on his feet. It’s the size of a small horse, Fanshawe thought in dread. The animal’s eyes looked insane, which was understandable since it had clearly been deprived of food for some time. When the beast spotted the barrel—and the head sticking out—it surged forward by instinct, paws kicking up great scoops of dirt. Just as bad as the anticipation were the looks on the faces of the townsfolk as they watched:

They looked giddy with excitement.

I can’t watch this, Fanshawe knew but, still, he could not take the looking-glass away. Enthused squeals rose up when the deputy lost hold on the leash, and—

Holy Mother of—

The dog was so large its jaws were able to take nearly all of Evanore’s head into its mouth in a single lunge. Ropes of foam poured from its black lips; the sounds were nauseating. Fanshawe managed a blink, after which his vision registered just in time to see the ravenous animal peel most of Evanore’s face and scalp off like pulling off a stocking mask. The animal deftly swallowed the macabre meal in reversed heaves, hair and all. The crowd “Oooooooo’d,” paused, then cheered.

Evanore’s head now existed as a skinned skull. It hung limp as the dog devoured what it had torn away but then—impossibly…

The head moved in increments—

Holy SHIT!

—and looked up.

The lipless grin and lidless eyes very slowly scanned the crowd.

Evanore’s fleshless mouth moved to laugh as blood squirted out of the space where her face had been. She laughed for a long time.

On the next strike, the dog’s jaws collapsed the convict’s skull altogether, then the creature began to snuffle for collops of brains, but many of the townsfolk had already rushed off the hill, too unnerved by Evanore’s laugh. One woman shouted “’Tis a curse the witch hath put upon us, a curse!” and then a man fretted, “Where is ye difference betwixt this and Divell’s work?”

Patten, the Parson, and the deputies remained, looking on with grim expressions as the great Doberman returned to pick scraps off what little remained of Evanore’s skull.

Fanshawe wanted to be sick; his vision faded in and out like a dimmer switch. “Eat with heartiness, Pluto,” the sheriff said of the dog. “Even as thou slake thy appetite on unholy flesh, God be finely appeased…”

By then, the deputies had hauled Evanore’s near-headless corpse from the barrel and let the dog eat to its heart’s content. The men wish-boned the corpse’s legs, then pointed to the furred groin, which was promptly ripped out and swallowed by the dog. The breasts were tugged off, then the arms and legs were attacked.

“When the beast hath reached its glut,” the parson directed Sheriff Patten, “I want the carcass of this diabolical bitch buried in double-quick time, Sheriff.”

“Granted, my lord, it shall be.”

Fanshawe seemed to feel something in the air, something like a bad portent, and at that identical moment, in the circle of the looking-glass, the Doberman abruptly stopped its rending of Evanore’s now-stick-like remains…and shot its gaze right at Fanshawe.

“Of a sudden, our animal hast grown listless with its meal,” Patten observed, “nearly as if…”

“Aye, nearly as if its senses, which be many times more acute than ours, hath detected a peculiarness of a kind,” said one of the deputies.

A concern stiffened the pastor’s posture; he looked sharply in the direction of the dog’s stare. “’Tis perhaps a black spirit, as such spirits be in specter-haunts such as this”—his suspicion lowered to an etching whisper. “Of mine own self, and though my eyes perceive nothing at odds, I swear verily that I too hath been made sensible of a most unnatural stir…”

The dog’s keeper—the largest of the men—took on a look of panic. “A black spirit, you say my lord? In our midst as we speak?”

“Aye, an entity most evil, son, and lacking all corporality…”

Now the dog’s ears stood up, and so did the short fur on its long, sloped back. Its eyes remained fixed…on Fanshawe.

Oh, my God, it can’t really—

The dog vaulted down the hill, releasing barks like gunfire. Each bound of the Doberman took up fifteen feet, as the men trotted clumsily down after it.

Fanshawe screamed, the glass still to his eye. Just as the dog’s snapping jaws would hit his throat…

“Behold, how it bounds!” Patten yelled, fat riding as he jogged forward, “as of at the thin air alone!”

“’Tis a spirit, yea!” snapped a deputy, “too foul to be observed by Godly men such as we!”

Fanshawe was knocked down like a hinged duck, the looking-glass flying off. When the back of his head slammed the hard-packed dirt beneath him, everything turned black.

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