meat for its supper…”

Fanshawe’s eyes popped. He could smell his own flesh burning, and as for his genitals, they shrunk and bubbled like marshmallows dropped in a campfire. Amid pain a thousand times worse than anything he could imagine, his fiery face turned to something like slab-bacon and his mouth opened and he screamed louder than a trumpet—

««—»»

—and collapsed, rolling in turmoil. Each time he let out a breath, smoke expelled. But as he flailed in the dirt—

What the—

He realized that the pain that had cocooned him was gone, and where his eyes had popped, he could now see the perfect, star-flecked twilight above. Fanshawe turned over and sat up…

He was intact.

No oil soaked his hair and clothing, and the porky smell of flesh roasting had vanished. His hands went to his crotch to find it dry and his slacks still fastened.

Then he looked up and saw the Gazing Ball. The metallic orb atop the pedestal was stained and tarnished, not clean and brand-new as he’d seen it last. Fanshawe heaved a sigh and dropped his face into his hands.

“I’m back…”

Rood’s and Evanore’s words refreshed his memory: Yet if thy heart be so black as to please ye Benefactor, then back to thy strange time thou wilt be proper put—

But not before thee hath screamed to rouse the dead from their graves…

“Well, I sure as shit screamed loud enough for that when I was on fire,” he muttered. In spite of all he’d experienced, he jumped up, frenzied with excitement. A glance to his watch showed him it was ten minutes past midnight. It was a lot later than that when I was in the town…, but then he recalled what Wraxall had told him about time:

He who masters it OWNS it.

Fanshawe rushed out of the cove and dashed up to the highest point of Witches Hill.

Below, the town glittered in its lights. He stared down, knowing that this was the town of today, with its asphalt streets, its sidewalks, its streetlamps, its tourist hotel complete with swimming pool.

But that’s not where I just came from…

He squinted and could easily make out late-nighters sitting at the cafe, and several more crossing Main Street into the tavern. He even saw the annoying woman in tights, and her even more annoying dog, out for a nighttime stroll. At the town hall, the lights were blinking off, and several people were dispersing from the front doors. One of them seemed to be heading toward the inn. Probably Abbie, he guessed, now that her meeting’s over, but he couldn’t be sure.

Fanshawe reached into his pocket and withdrew the looking-glass. He raised it to his eye and looked at the exact same place in the street where he’d thought he’d seen Abbie…

Now, of course, she wasn’t there. The town of three hundred years ago was there instead, and what Fanshawe saw specifically, on the unpaved street, was the same torch- and pitchfork-wielding crowd that had just doused him with oil and set him aflame. At this moment, though, many of the townspeople were running away as if terrified, while the others stood with fear-stamped faces and mouths agape. Fanshawe thought he could even hear them—

He kept the glass to his eye and cupped his ear.

“By his magic, he’s escaped into thin air!” someone shouted.

Another voice: “And out of it he may reappear when we least expect!”

In the viewing field, Patten waved a torch back and forth. “Hear me, good Christians—the devil be near at hand tonight! Take to thy beds! Bolt thy doors and keep thy Bibles close!” and the parson added with a stammer, “If our pruh-prayers be sufficient intentful, then God shall keep ye adversary at bay!”

The remainder of the crowd scattered in all directions, boots tramping. Seconds later, the street stood empty and in utter silence.

Fanshawe could hear his own eyes blink.

What now? he asked himself, but he already knew the answer…

He swerved the looking-glass to the Wraxall house.

One window after another stood dark; some were even shuttered closed. But…what did he expect to see? More of the atrocious sights he’d witnessed personally? Evanore, nude and beckoning? Instead, he found the drab, weathered windows blank, and shutters pale. None were lit—

Wait…

Fanshawe had lost track of which floor he was surveying; nevertheless, one window seemed to emerge from its own uniform darkness until the most wan candlelight flickered within its frame. Soon, in a slowness that could be called ethereal, a shape moved from within—the shape of a man.

It took Fanshawe’s eyes a minute to acclimate.

Why am I not surprised?

The man in the window was Jacob Wraxall. The cuffed and collared sorcerer leaned out the window, peering for something. His narrowed eyes scanned back and forth, up and down, until—

He appeared to have found whatever it was he sought. Very slowly, he smiled, raised a similar looking-glass to his eye…

Chills that were strangely scalding flushed their way up Fanshawe’s back. For some inscrutable reason, he felt that Wraxall’s gesture of raising his own glass served as a cue for Fanshawe…

Fanshawe zoomed tighter, until the window came in close, then Wraxall’s face came in close…

Then…closer, until only a third of the necromancer’s face filled Fanshawe’s circular viewing field, then—

Even closer.

More. Closer.

Fanshawe zoomed directly into the lens of Wraxall’s looking-glass, then he kept turning the supernatural ring tighter and tighter, delving deeper and deeper, such that he thought—impossibly—that he was actually zooming in through the iris of Wraxall’s eye itself…

More!

…then deeper and deeper and deeper, into the warlock’s very optic nerve and straight into his brain…

Holy shit…

…then out of his brain and down, down as if down into the earth. Fanshawe’s vision descended akin to a drill, boring through, first, soil, then the rocky crust of the world. He stood electrified as he was forced to bear this resistless black witness, yet soon the notion of what propelled him…changed. Where first it had been actions of his own will that had begun this phantasmagoric trek, he now realized it was another will which had superseded: his vision through the glass was no longer doing the delving but instead it had been commandeered and pulled, as though a berserk pair of hands at the bottom of this seemingly bottomless journey were pulling on a rope, and the rope was Fanshawe’s eyesight.

Sensing a terror, he willed himself to retreat but all that responded to his efforts was an increase in the evil velocity that had taken over. Helpless, came the whimpering thought, but with it came a sound like a distant yet incalculably vast chuckle. From here, Fanshawe descended fast and sure as a stone dropped into a mineshaft miles deep, dropped, yes, into darkness.

The darkness was just as incalculable as the speed by which he plummeted; it was a blackness that existed as far more than an absolute absence of light but as an entity of its own, that magnified as the screaming, plunging lightlessness rose. Fanshawe was deafened by this speed; he felt his psyche begin to boil from the unearthly, brain-jarring friction. Was he going mad? He may have even shrieked laughter as his senses were pulled further; he managed to think of a roller-coaster car fired through a cannon barrel, but just when the “car”—Fanshawe—would make impact and explode—

His soaring vision stopped.

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