Witch Water

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?