Witch Water

hundred-pound sack. Get some of that liposuction, why don’t ya?”

The woman clopped away on wedgelike high-heels, crying outright.

Fanshawe recomposed himself when she was gone. Did I really say that? It wasn’t like him to be hateful, even when someone was hateful to him first. To do that was illogical. She’ll get over it. He felt half-cooked in his crumpled clothes, tried to brush himself off, but then noticed a flash like a sliver of light.

The looking-glass lay in a clump of grass just off the trail. He picked it up, pocketed it, then took the trail down back toward town.

It occurred to him how calm he was as he walked.

Calm?

How could he be calm, after all he’d seen last night?

Back in town, he righted his hair via his reflection in a shop window, then slipped into the cafe and washed up in the bathroom. The ache in his head receded. His watch told him it was ten in the morning.

He took his coffee to an outside table, and sat down, to think. It only took a few moments for him to realize why he hadn’t freaked out the instant he remembered his visions through the looking-glass: I was afraid I was hallucinating, I was afraid that I’d gone insane, but now? He let every impossible experience thus far flow across his mind’s eye.

I’m NOT insane.

No, he wasn’t hallucinating, he wasn’t suffering from some organic brain defect or some stress-related aberration or a “fugue-state.” It was none of that. Aside from being a voyeur, I’m perfectly normal.

Which could only mean…

The looking-glass was for real, and so was the witchcraft of its origins.

He took the glass out of his pocket and looked at it under the table. He stared as much at the implication as the object itself. It works. The damn thing WORKS…

The only explanation that made any sense was this: the looking-glass was an optical device that displayed the past.

And it means that Jacob Wraxall really was a warlock. And his daughter was a genuine witch.

Fanshawe had no more believed in the supernatural than he believed the world was flat. I’ve GOT to believe it now, he thought, with more of his previous calm. Suddenly he felt just like he had when he’d made his first million in the market.

“Why, if it ain’t the good Mr. Sir!” an all too familiar voice greeted him, “and a pleasant mornin’ it is I hope you’re a-havin’.”

Fanshawe looked up from his coffee. “Hello, Mrs. Anstruther. And, yes, I’m having a very pleasant morning.”

“A pleasanter one couldn’t be asked for, I dare say,” she said, looking up into the sun. She wore a frumpy white dress with black animal prints on it—Fanshawe’s cheek ticked when he spotted a Doberman. But suddenly she took a look at him that seemed concerned. “But, sir, I do hope you’re feeling chipper.”

“Chipper? Uh, sure…”

“I only mean—if I may say it—is you don’t appear the fresher for your night’s rest.”

Fanshawe laughed. That’s because I slept on Witches Hill. “Tossed and turned all night, couldn’t get a wink—too much coffee, I guess. But since you’re here, can I get you a cup?” he offered.

“How kindly you are, sir, but as I’m just off from me break, I’m afraid I ’aven’t the time. Much obliged, sir, much obliged, what of your generous offer. Oh, but since you just ’appen to be stayin’ in the same lodgings”—her voice lowered—“might you have ’eard anymore ’bout that poor man got done away with on the trails, done away so ’orrible like?”

“No, I haven’t, ma’am,” Fanshawe replied, and then the weight of the coincidence hit him. How come that didn’t occur to me before? Eldred Karswell had been found dead with all the flesh stripped off his head. Almost as if he got barreled…

He shrugged away the coincidence for what it was: impossibility. People don’t get ‘barreled’ in this day and age. And Mrs. Anstruther’s question reminded him, I wonder if Artie and the research guys got anymore info on Karswell. I better call him later. “But sometimes I wonder, Mrs. Anstruther. Maybe the horror from one era is no better or worse than the horror of another—it just seems to be.”

The elderly woman reflected. “Why, I never me-self thought on it that way before, sir, but I think it could be you’re right. Might be that our natures are inclined to think things is worse for us than they was for those before us.”

Fanshawe had to mention. “The wax museum might be a good case in point.”

She seemed thrilled. “Oh, so ya finally took yourself a peek in there, did ya?”

“Yes, ma’am, I did, and you were right about it—it gave me a case of the creepers. But, you know, it also showed me—the torture chamber in particular—that humankind has quite a capacity for cruelty.”

“That it does, sir, that it does.” She raised a bony finger. “And maybe if we’se wise, we can learn by what went on back then to make things a sight better now.”

“We can only hope.”

Her voice piped up, and a gleam entered her eye. “And isn’t it amusin’, sir, to consider how folk’d behave if they was able to learn from the past but also from the future? ”

Fanshawe didn’t follow her. “You’d need a time machine for that, Mrs. Anstruther, or a psychic—” but then he got it. Jesus, she’s persistent. “Still trying to get me into the palm reader’s, huh?”

She feigned innocence. “Oh, no, sir. I was just bein’…what’s the word? Suppositional! That’s the word, sir, to a T: suppositional, yes, sir.”

“Yes, I suppose it is, ma’am.”

The woman shrieked laughter. “Oh, my word, sir, you’re quite the quipster, yes you is!”

“You must get a kick-back for every person you send over.”

“On my honors, sir, nothing could be more untrue. But seein’ ’ow you’s already bucked yourself up for the waxwork, why not give the palmist’s a go?”

Fanshawe looked at the woman. She’s nuttier than a can of Planter’s, but… He stood up. “You know what, Mrs. Anstruther? I think I’m going to take you up on your dare.”

“Smashing, sir! ’Tis the kind of man God most admires who don’t dither ’bout havin’ a look-in on his destiny —”

I doubt that God admires me very much right now, Fanshawe thought, almost laughing.

“—for God, too, looks quite high on a bloke with a true heart.”

Fanshawe wasn’t comfortable with all the references to ‘hearts’ lately. If thou dost have the heart, Evanore had said, emphasizing the last word. It seemed that her image from last night was daring Fanshawe to confront something, just as the old lady was.

But…confront WHAT? he wondered.

Knowledge, the idea struck him, but that could mean anything.

Or maybe it means nothing. Maybe it’s just a bunch of bullshit she’s talking, so she can get her commission from the palm-reader. “Well, I’m on my way, ma’am,” he said. “I’ll let you know how it goes.”

“Aye,” she said with a strange emphasis.

Fanshawe crossed the cobbles to the redbrick row house whose neon OPEN sign blinked on and off in the window. The bricks could’ve used a sandblasting, and the trim didn’t look like it had been painted in decades. Browned flowers stood crisp in the planters just outside the first-floor windows. Kind of a dump… But he paused before he knocked on the scuffed Federal Period door. First, the address, No. 13, struck a bad chord. Fanshawe rarely believed in omens, good or bad, but after last night?