Witch Water

Maybe I really am getting cured…

Half-tipsy, he walked down his hall which stood in total silence. The elegant tulip-shaped lamps branched out from the flower-papered walls; they looked a hundred years old, and added to the inn’s rich authenticity. He frowned when he reached into his pocket for his card-key and found a twenty-dollar bill. Unbeknownst to him, Abbie had slipped his tip money back, a pick-pocket in reverse. Classy, he thought.

He went to bed and fell asleep instantly, something that hadn’t happened in a long time.

But it would not be a sound sleep.

— | — | —

CHAPTER FOUR

(I)

The silence stretches like the neck of a decomposing corpse on a gibbet; the darkness brims. And through it, images rise and fall akin to chunks of unclassifiable meat bubbling in a horrific stew. Fanshawe’s dreams whirl slow, putrid: he sees women in windows through the infinity-shaped viewing field, beautiful women, nude, sultry, and, best of all, unknowing. Their sexual features are pinpoint-sharp, focused to a preternatural clarity. One is exercising; one seems to be talking to herself as if in argument, anger coning her nipples. Another lay flushed on a couch, her tight stomach sucks in and out as she masturbates with a peculiarly curved rubber phallus. But then the women clump together, squashed to nauseous misshape, and drain away into a swirl of liquescing breasts, navels, and pubic triangles, to be replaced by more images: faces. The disgusted face of the police officer, the agape stares of residents in lit windows as red and blue lights throb, the vision of pock-cheeked drug addicts, winos, thieves, and, likely, rapists, child-molesters, and murderers. One of them buckles over to vomit, hitching in silence. Some of the vomit splatters noiselessly on Fanshawe’s thousand-dollar shoes, for he sits there with these men in the deplorable holding cell, being appraised by the scum of the earth. A man standing hip-cocked in the cell’s corner looks at him with a smirking grin and mouths You’re MY bitch tonight… Then more faces, a parade of faces: Artie’s face when he bails Fanshawe out, the judge’s face at the arraignment, the faces of the lawyers at the pre-trial conferences…all expressions of blank disgust. But the last face to haunt his dreams is the worst: his wife’s, Laurel’s, a face whose expression radiates heartbreak, outrage, revulsion, and hatred concurrently. She stares as the nightmare stares back. I hate you, her lips speak without sound. You make me siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiick, yet after a moment, the face warps as if before heat-waves on asphalt, then mutates and grows, not like a balloon expanding but instead a tumor or cyst in aberrant hyper-development, and just when the throbbing mass seems about to erupt, it collapses into a black void…

Fanshawe cannot close his eyes against the dream’s blackness, which goes on for what seems hours. He hears nothing save for his anguished breaths and thudding heart. Then—

A voice, echoic, as if speaking in a rock-hewn grotto miles deep.

Abbie’s voice.

“Jacob Wraxall, one of the founding members of the town. He lived here with his daughter, Evanore—”

Fanshawe sees what he believes is the great portrait again, until its subjects move. Wraxall and his tantalizing yet somehow obscenely visaged daughter are taking slow steps up a dark, narrow stairwell, the elder in coattails and ruffled bib, his pendant of stars and sickle moons glittering, the sibling with her blood-red hair and plunging bustline, the smooth stark-white flesh nearly luminous in the plunge. They each hold a candle whose flickering light turns their eyes into green-crystal pools. Jacob’s expression is solemn as an undertaker’s, while Evanore’s is one of deep, intractable rapture. They enter a room…

A black fog sweeps over Fanshawe’s vision, thickens, then dissipates, and now— Wraxall stands in a hooded cloak of sackcloth, in a plank-boarded, windowless room. He reads silently from an old book with a cord holding in the folded sheets in place rather than a typical binding. Candlelight wavers, throwing light that seems leprous; smoke rises from the eyeholes of a skull serving as a censer, a baby’s skull.

Evanore now stands bereft of clothing; her lambent skin shines either in sweat or oil. Fanshawe can feel himself trembling as he looks at her in the dream: the slim, curvaceous body, long white legs, breasts so deliciously swollen she could be lactating yet her abdomen shines lean and flat. It’s a jarring contrast: all that glistening skin, white as fresh snow, shimmering below the dark-crimson hair. Indeed, her hair is combed back wet now, rendering the appearance of actually being dipped in blood; the tuft at her pubis shines similarly. She is reciting words of some unhallowed prayer that Fanshawe remains deaf to. His gaze stays riveted to her stimulating physique until something unsought drags his eyes down to show him that the nude woman is standing within a queerly angled pentagram inscribed on the bare wood floor. The inscription has been fashioned with some black substance akin to char. Immediately he notices the sticks of burnt bones lying aside.

The candle-lit spectacle recedes, to reveal a dozen other cloaked figures looking on from the background…

Abbie’s reverberating voice continues, “They practiced their witchcraft in secret. Years went by, but the town never knew…”

The black mental fog creeps back, then disperses.

The room is gone. The night seems to seethe as Fanshawe is looking at a clearing deep in a woodland where trees hulk like dryadic miscreations. Their knotted arms outstretch, soon to be mimicked by Evanore, now dressed in her own hooded gown, and the remaining twelve in her coven. In gangrenous moonlight, they stand in a circle in the clearing, some bearing torches. But as Evanore raises a newborn babe in her hands—

Chaos unfolds.

More torches plunge into the circle, these held by townsmen with stern, determined faces. Other townsfolk wield pitchforks, and others, muskets. Male coven members are butt-stroked in the face; the women are dragged to the ground and stripped, then slapped dizzy by hard opened palms. The black mass had been encircled without anyone ever knowing, and as remaining members try to flee, they are beaten to the ground by still more men in tri- cornered hats, then hog-tied. Several armed deputies part, allowing the stout and basilisk-eyed Sheriff Patten to enter the scene; he is followed by the black-cassocked town pastor whose large silver cross flashes in torchlight. The infant which had nearly been murdered is delivered to the pastor’s hands. Patten looks this way and that, then his gaze seems to find what it seeks: Evanore Wraxall. She’s already been stripped naked, and stands defiant as one deputy keeps her in place by elbows pinned behind her back. The sheriff pauses to stare at the white, raving body, but then the pastor’s reproving glance reminds him that lust is a grievous sin.

Patten crosses himself. Duly shackled now, the other heretics are being roughly led out of the wood, but three of the sheriff’s raiding party hold several torches together, boosting the potency of their flame, and into this flame, four branding irons are held. Minutes pass.

The pastor nods consent; Patten stands, arms crossed, the fire-light in his eyes. Four of the deputies pull the irons out when they’re smoking hot, then they turn them toward Evanore…

The witch’s nude body seems to relax, even in what she must know awaits her; the guard behind her holds her fast.

The branding irons are each formed in the shape of the cross.

One iron is pressed into the front of the right breast, then another is pressed into the left. Flesh silently sizzles. A third iron burns into her white abdomen, cooking the flesh. But the fourth is handed to Sheriff Patten himself. He whispers a prayer, then approaches, then sinks the iron into the abundant plot of pubic hair, searing