anything like that.”
Laurel spins round, grabs her purse and keys, then the suitcase. She doesn’t believe him. “Don’t ever speak to me again. Do you have any idea how much this hurts?”
Fanshawe sobs himself now. “Please don’t leave. I love you. I swear, I’ll never do it again. I-I…I just have this problem…”
“You’re sick! And that’s what you make me: sick! I want a divorce!”
The whole room concusses when she flies out and slams the door. Their wedding picture on the wall falls down and shatters.
Now Fanshawe sits on the couch in Dr. Tilton’s sterile office, and looking at him from behind the big desk is Dr. Tilton’s sterile face. “—a sickness, Mr. Fanshawe, a chronic paraphilic fixation that has reached a transitive state. This isn’t simple voyeurism, it’s an extremity of late-stage obsessive disorders such as Scoptolagnia and Parascopily…”
He feels as lost as one sitting in an electric chair. When he rubs his face, he feels sand-papery stubble. “What’s wrong with me?” he drones.
“You’re ill,” she snaps back. “You need treatment. Otherwise you’ll never be able to function normally in public… All your money and lawyers may keep you out of jail, but you’ll always be a pervert in society’s eyes—always, unless you stop right this instant…”
“I will!” he pants, “I will!”
The doctor’s elegantly manicured finger raises up to touch her chin. “But I’d like to ask you something rather pertinent, as—and don’t be offended by this—most patients suffering from such anti-social habituations as this generally lie to their psychiatrists initially, but…are you being honest with me when you say that it was a woman you were spying on?”
Fanshawe glares.
“Not a child? Not an adolescent?”
“No, no, no!” he yells and wishes just then that he could crush his own head in his hands—
««—»»
—and that was when the clot-like darkness seemed to force its way down his throat, almost like someone’s hand, and when Fanshawe began to gag, he sprang awake.
Jesus…
Sweat sopped him like glue, drenching even the sheets beneath him. His open eyes jiggled in shock. Another nightmare, he thought; he grimaced when he dragged his forearm across his brow to wipe off the chill sweat. The final dream-fragment stuck in his head like a shard: Dr. Tilton’s stony face as she so wanted to imply that it might be children he’d been scoping all these years. The notion made him sick—sicker than he generally was of himself. It made him hate her.
The moonlight streaming in seemed lightened now, pale. Dawn was not far off. He sat for several minutes to catch the breath that the dream had robbed him of. It was with a determined force that he struggled not to think back to what he thought he’d seen on the hill, but the harder he pressed that force, the more the images leaked in. Not the sultry joggers nude in their room, and not even Abbie and her stunning physique—it was the other images, those that arrived later: the corroded town, the wild forest surrounding it—a forest that was not there now—the lampless streets, unpaved, not black-topped or brick-lined; the handful of windows dimly lit by candles, not electric bulbs. It’s almost like I was seeing the town as it looked hundreds of years ago… Then the final marauding image: the nude woman, red-haired, standing heavy-breasted and pregnant as if to burst…
“For God’s sake,” he muttered. He must have dreamed all that, and just gotten confused. Yeah… The pregnant woman must surely be a product of his dreaming mind—some oblique reference, no doubt, to Evanore Wraxall, a witch kept pregnant by her own father.
He jerked around in bed, close to yelling, when he suddenly heard—
That damn dog again!
Enraged, he leapt up. Yes, he was sure he heard a dog barking, not too distant but not too close, either. It didn’t come from within the hotel.
Outside.
He rushed to the sitting room which faced the street. What the HELL is this? Now Fanshawe was not as bewildered as he was mad. He’d heard a dog several times during his stay but had seen not a single one. He threw back the drapes, glared down into the street…
The street stood still in the vestiges of nighttime. No people, no movement or traffic of any kind.
No dog…
He could tell dawn was fast approaching. It seemed impossible that the night had already passed—the dream had seemed to last for hours. But perhaps, still groggy, he’d been disoriented, and had misplaced the location of the dog’s barks. Behind the hotel, he thought and hurried back to his bedroom. He grabbed the looking-glass and immediately pointed it into the rear parking lot—
Fanshawe’s throat seemed to shrivel in on itself.
There was no dog.
There was no parking lot, either.
But, beyond, he could see the hillocks which formed the natural pedestal for Witches Hill. The hillocks looked different: wilder, overgrown, more heavily treed, and he could detect only one trail, not the webwork he was used to. Then…
Movement.
He stared into the looking-glass, more acid dumping into his stomach. He could see several people stalking up Witches Hill in the distance, and one of those people was walking a large black dog that barked viciously.
No…
He lowered the glass; he was shaking. He could hear the animal’s continued barks but now his head was filled with that same disorienting drone that had overcome him earlier. Thoughtless, he stumbled back into the sitting room, and re-aimed the glass through the window and out into the street.
He heard a moan, and he saw…
The looking-glass was zoomed in, as though it had adjusted itself. He knew this— like everything else—was impossible, but now he was looking at an abrupt close-up image, that of a woman in the shabbiest clothes locked by wrists and neck into the authentic pillory out front. Filthy hair hung down in strings; she’d been egged, for Fanshawe could easily detect the presence of eggshells stuck to her hair, while more shells and apparently rotten fruit lay on the street. Several men in the strangest attire lingered behind the woman. “Be quick about it!” shot one man’s hot whisper, for another seemed to be crudely fornicating with the woman from behind; his face, like his cohorts, was kept blacked out from the shadows of oddly shaped hats. Now Fanshawe could hear the woman’s sobs as she hitched in the cruel wooden brace. Still another man said “‘Tis no transgression to defile a strumpet whose very life defiles our Savior,” and another, “May we stay in the favor of the Lord thy God when we acteth out against His adversaries.” “Offenses against the offender bespeaks a blessing.” They both came around the front and began to expectorate on the woman’s head; then they began to urinate on her. Fanshawe made this out very clearly, even with the men standing with their backs to him. It was the looking-glass, demonstrating the most precise clarity; Fanshawe could see the streams of urine. Then, only to intensify the foulness of what took place, the pair of men stepped closer to the woman. Fanshawe didn’t have to speculate that they were masturbating on her.
Eventually the group sulked away, leaving the abused woman drenched and hitching in her misery.
Immediately, Fanshawe thought, Rape. Strange talk or not, some transients must have abducted the woman, put her in the antique pillory, and raped her. Fanshawe pulled on his robe, grabbed his key, and dashed out of the room.
Barefoot, hair sticking up, he took the elevator downstairs, burst through the atrium, and ran out the inn’s
