Witch Water

(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 cafe 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,