Witch Water

after someone like that?

A small plaque read: PLEASE HANDLE BOOKS WITH CARE. Fanshawe was astonished; he would expect lock and key. In a New York hotel, books this old sitting out like this would get ripped off in two seconds. But he saw no harm, so he opened the case and removed a volume larger than most. Compendium Maleficarum, the spine informed, yet when he opened the book, he found it full of tight, double-columned type too monotonous to read. One section, however, seemed devoted to warlocks, and Fanshawe amused himself by scanning the various engravings of somber-faced men in queued wigs and ruffled collars, holding scepters or crystal balls. The more Fanshawe perused the book, the more foolish he felt. I guess people really did believe in this stuff back then. He put the book away, noticing a damp, vaguely rotten fetor.

Boredom shadowed him. He wandered to a third cove to look out the window. The main thoroughfare stretched quietly off in clean cobblestones while invigorated tourists began to window-shop. When he craned his neck—

He frowned.

—for here, at just the right angle, he noticed apartments sitting atop the street-level stores, all older-style architecture but clearly being lived in. On a balcony, an elderly man sat reading in the sun. Fanshawe’s eyes widened. Damn. He hadn’t noticed these residential windows previously. Thank God they’re not facing my hotel room. In one such window, a curtain swayed— Fanshawe saw a woman look outside for a moment, then disappear.

He wrung his hands.

When he turned from the bowed panes, his eyes lowered to yet another display case. No instruments of cruelty were present, just old pocket watches, compasses, quill pens and standish-style ink-wells, and the like. However, on the bottom shelf…

Fanshawe gulped.

At first he thought the object was a “ship’s glass,” that is, a portable telescope designed for hand-held use, about a foot long, with a collapsible draw-tube. It shined, evidently made of brass and possibly silver fittings. Then Fanshawe read the label: WITCH-WATER LOOKING-GLASS, MADE BY JACOB WRAXALL, CIRCA 1672.

Witch-Water? he wondered. What the hell? He imagined Wraxall himself gazing at the heavens at midnight and contemplating astrological formulae. But the image, once formed, snapped to something else against his will: it was no longer the flamboyantly attired Wraxall he saw…but himself; and in his hand he held not an antique looking-glass but top-of-the-line binoculars.

Just another flashback to his jaded past, for Fanshawe had strolled the Upper Westside streets of his own neighborhood too many times to count, ducking into an alley whenever he spotted a “promising” window, and raised the binoculars to his eyes…

“Ah, Mr. Fanshawe. You’ve found our displays, I see,” Mr. Baxter said, slipping into the cove.

The flashback corroded just as Fanshawe had zoomed in on a naked woman in the window of a brownstone on W. 66th Street.

His heart had quickened as though he’d been caught red-handed in the fantasy. The portly Baxter smiled, thumbing the suspenders.

“It’s, uh, quite a collection…”

Baxter chuckled. “Some of ’em are a little on the morbid side, a’course.”

“Can’t argue with you there, but I guess those were morbid times.”

“Just different, times, Mr. Fanshawe—was only morbid to those who made it so. Probably a lot to be said for livin’ back in those days.” His eyes scanned some of the relics. “Speakin’ of all these geegaws, though… Well, it’s all kind’a dumb tourist stuff if you ask me. But you’d be surprised how folks take an interest in it nowadays, ’specially the witchin’ and warlockin’ items, and a’course the implements that were used to counter all of that silly drivel.”

Fanshawe nodded, still unconsciously eyeing the looking-glass. “Yeah, Abbie pointed out the pillory.”

“We got several about town. Pillories were for minor offenses: stealin’, adultery, lyin’ to the church council. It was pretty commonplace back then. For harder crimes, there were the whippin’ posts. Now we’ve got detention centers with cable TV, conjugal visitation rights for convicted murderers, and tax-dollar-funded rehab. Kind of makes you wonder. The shenanigans we’ve got going these days were seldom seen back in Colonial times. Deterrence meant something back then, and the law meant business.”

Not if you can afford the best lawyers, Fanshawe thought, though he didn’t know if he agreed or disagreed with Baxter’s insinuations. Fanshawe avoided ideological conversations at all costs. “So I take it this man Jacob Wraxall was some kind of magician or wizard? There are a number of books here about him.”

“He fancied himself a warlock, not a magician. Come round here, and I’ll show you.”

Fanshawe’s curiosity urged him out of the current cove to the next one that Baxter strolled to, this one being windowless. Immediately, Fanshawe looked up and said, “Wow.”

The elder man indicated an elaborately framed oil painting which occupied half the wall. A lenient light shined down from a bracket on the ceiling. “Sunlight can damage it, so we keep in here ’cos there’s no window; that special bulb up there won’t make the paint fade. The canvas and frame are over three hundred years old…”

Within the painting posed the same Van Dyked man from the engraving, in the extravagant attire of the day. Sage-like, he held a feather-pen, and about his neck, over the ruffled bib, hung a pendant of stars and a sickle moon. Thin pale lips turned up into the faintest smile that could be thought of as condescending. Well, hello there, Jacob Wraxall, Fanshawe thought. What is the big whupdeedo with you? A shorter woman stood stern-faced at Wraxall’s side, much younger than the painting’s central subject, with long flowing hair that too similarly matched the color of newly spilled arterial blood. Fanshawe’s stomach tossed.

The woman posed in a velvety blue dress with billowed shoulders; a plunging neckline made no secret of a robust bosom. Fanshawe at once felt jarred by her image: she looked tantalizing, voluptuous, densely erotic…and atrocious. Her narrow face and thin lips suggested a hereditary connection, and so did the high cheekbones. His daughter, not his wife, Fanshawe supposed; and, like Wraxall, she was not without some occult regalia: several rings on her raised right hand possessed geometric designs of an astrological bent. Standing well behind Wraxall, however, was a dark-haired, clean-shaven man whose dark sulk and heavy jaw suggested subservience. Large eyes and a rather wide face were the subject’s most salient features.

“They were quite a trio, I’ll tell ya,” Baxter remarked.

Fanshawe felt particularly taken by the painting’s indeterminate visual effect: dark, dark colors made darker by age seemed on the other hand queerly bright in certain details. The woman’s rings, for instance, seemed painted with such exactitude they could’ve been photographs; the same went for Wraxall’s pendant, and the same, too, for their eyes, a stunning sea-green. But the background existed in such sheer murk that nothing at all could be made of it, and the more Fanshawe peered, he thought that other faces might lurk there, as if in smoke or shadow.

“That’s Wraxall there, and his daughter Evanore,” Baxter explained. “And that unhappy looking fella standing behind is Callister Rood, the family man-servant.”

“But why name your hotel after Wraxall, of all people?” Fanshawe asked.

“Wraxall built this house in the 1650s, and lived here till his death. It’s all been refurbished, of course, but the outer structure has barely been touched—didn’t need to be. It’s all mortised oak, and sealed with insect sap, the best kind of weatherproofing. They built houses right back in them days. Wraxall was a well-respected member of the community…for a while.”

Fanshawe peered at the hesitation, which may have been deliberate. “For a while? ”

“Until the town found out the truth about him.”

“His occultism, in other words?”

“Oh, yeah, all that and a good deal more.”

For whatever reason, Fanshawe felt intrigued. His gaze kept switching back and forth between Wraxall’s eyes and his daughter’s. He was about to ask for more details, but a bell from the front desk rang.