Witch Water

This place is even duller than it was when I first came up…

Why he paid this second visit to the attic he couldn’t guess. He came back down, now sweating and irritable, and replaced the panel in the ceiling.

He undressed, presumed to prepare for bed but now…

Same as the impulse to return to the attic, he found himself standing before an opened dresser drawer. He was not conscious of the reason he’d chosen to do so, but then he looked down and saw…

…that damn looking-glass.

He couldn’t even remember opening the drawer that he’d stashed it in. Why haven’t I put it back where it belongs? What might Baxter and Abbie wonder if they discovered it missing, so soon after Fanshawe had asked about it?

Tomorrow! he charged himself, I’ll put it that thing back in the case and never touch it again! Enough screwing around!

Once in bed, Fanshawe found it easy to ignore his previous aggravation, by thinking about Abbie. He smiled in the darkness, sinking into the pillow. My first date in ages… He fell asleep knowing that he couldn’t wait to see Abbie again.

Wouldn’t it be nice if he saw her in his dreams?

(II)

He doesn’t see her, but he hears her, as he did so recently during his first nightmare in the Wraxall Inn. Her voice echoes like drips in a cavern as the black mental fog seeps away to show him a mob of irate townsfolk in colonial dress forming a riotous half-circle on Witches Hill. Two more townsmen drag a distraught young blond woman into the clearing’s center-point. She’s in shackles and dressed in rags, smudge-faced, and beaten.

They drag her to the barrel with the hole in it.

When the blond convict sees the barrel, she silently screams; her face reddens in horror as the townsmen lower her into the barrel.

“They’d put the witch in the barrel,” Abbie’s voice repeats, “pull her head out through the hole and keep it in place by sliding this thing called a U-collar around her neck…”

A townsman’s hand reaches into the hole in the barrel, then pulls the woman’s head through. Someone else immediately locks her head in place with the horse-shoe-shaped collar. The woman’s eyes bulge each time she tries—and fails—to dislodge her head. She looks as though her very spirit is being wrenched out of her.

“Like a pillory only…with a barrel?” Fanshawe hears himself repeat the question he’d asked only hours ago.

“Well, sort of. See, after they did that—”

Sheer horror causes the whites of the blond woman’s eyes to turn scarlet, for she sees something approaching…

“…they’d bring out the dog—”

A husky colonist steps out of the parting crowd, leading a slavering black Doberman on the end of a cord. The animal is gut-sucked, its ribs showing from the time it has been deliberately denied sustenance. Foam flies each time it barks in silence.

The townsman has trouble keeping the animal back, yet he seems amused, as does the crowd, each time he scuffles forward, letting the beast come only an inch from the screaming convict’s face, only to pull it back to prolong her torment. Back and forth, back and forth—he does this for several minutes, until the sullen minister nudges the sheriff. Then Sheriff Patten nods solemn-faced to the dog’s master.

The Doberman is released, and it lunges toward the barrel.

Abbie’s voice seems to spiral away: “The dog would attack and…eat the flesh off the witch’s head…”

The wide-open eye of Fanshawe’s dreaming mind watches the Doberman’s jaws close over the top of the woman’s head—until it yank-yank-yanks off most of her scalp, woofs it down, then goes back for the ears, then the cheeks and lips, then the—

—Fanshawe awoke as if shaken violently by the shoulders. The heart-hammering fright bolted him upright— he actually feared someone was in the room but then he blindly snapped on the bedside lamp, and as he did so his mind raced: what might he use as a makeshift weapon?

Of course, no one occupied the room besides Fanshawe, but he checked the door as a formality, which was still locked. Just what I need. Another whacked out dream. Was it some mode of tactile nightmare that made him feel the impressions of fingers on his shoulders? Did such a type of hallucination actually exist?

It must’ve been backwash from the morbid dream.

creeeeeeeeeeek—

He’d heard the noise the instant he’d returned to the bedroom. It’s just a house noise! he insisted. Old rafters settling! There’s no one in the friggin’ attic!

Still…he had no choice but to look up to the trapdoor.

DAMN it! Not convinced by his own common sense, once again, Fanshawe was standing on his bed, pushing out the panel, and extracting the rope ladder. Penlight in hand, and glazed in sweat from the nightmare, he climbed back into the attic.

The warm, steep-roofed chamber seemed smaller, more narrow than earlier, and hotter even though the temperature had dropped with the sun. Nothing differed about the sight that greeted him: dingy storage boxes, piles of threadbare drapes, and lots of cobwebs. Fanshawe aimed to step into his previous footprints in the dusty floor, but as he looked closer, he noticed prints that couldn’t have been his own from previous visits; they were smaller. He’d thought nothing of them the first time, presumed they were Baxter’s…

But he didn’t think that now.

Hmm…

They seemed to lead an entire circuit about the attic’s outermost walls—and seemed to stop at various places.

At the back of the chamber, his nose crinkled. A faint but unpleasant odor like old cigars revealed itself. Fanshawe recalled smelling it the first time he’d been up, and now he saw why: a fat cigar butt sat in the corner. Using thumb and forefinger, he picked it up and examined the band, but why he was inclined to do so he couldn’t imagine. MONTE CRISTO # 1, the band read. HABANA.

This is a good cigar, he thought. He knew this only because Artie was very much imbued with the current rage of elitist cigar-mania. Yuck, he thought and dropped it.

Of all his bewilderment lately, Fanshawe was conscious of this: what bewildered him most was himself. What am I DOING up here? He felt silly now, underwear-clad, dripping sweat. He leaned back against the bare-wood panel and sighed—

click

Fanshawe felt the wall behind him…give.

He turned, sweeping his light up and down, and found the wall-frame cleverly hinged. Not a wall, a door…

A hidden door, evidently.

Ancient rust grated when he pushed the wall frame back, paused, then stepped into another attic chamber even longer and more narrow than the original. Well, what could this be? Beyond, dust lay inches thick, with no evidence of prints. Where the accessible chamber smelled “woody,” this one smelled interminably stale, such that he gagged. Garlands of cobwebs stretched across his face as he proceeded; he had to push through the webs to make out any details at all…

But there were details.

Long tables, sets of shelves, then rows of wide cylindrical objects too festooned to be identifiable. He waded closer through fetid dark, then began to clear the mass of cobwebs off the arcane objects…