Hex Life

by Rachel Deering

  “You are a very practical witch,” he said. He wheezed and coughed and the hollow space behind the wall of bone in his chest whumped and fluttered like a bird dashing itself against a window.

  “Do you know many other witches?”

  “Only in theory,” he said. “I have read a great deal about them.” He swiped at the mingling of spittle and blood on his lips.

  “Folklore,” she said. “No doubt those stories are all very true.”

  “I think I might like to die in battle. In an ancient time. Defending some noble Lord or the woman I loved,” he said, with a degree of mirth that seemed more a distraction from the reality of his physical state than genuine amusement. “Alas, I expect I will cough myself to death instead. Watching the kingdom fall while a bedridden slave to some common disease commands no great respect. At least I cannot seem to find any valor in it.”

  “Count it a blessing your death has come quick,” she said. “Relative to some alternatives.” She swept a delicate arm down the length of her body. The manifestation of her spirit, trapped within the candle, was pure light and heat, swaying on the tip of a blackened wick that slithered its way into the rust-hued heart of a crude assemblage of tallow, impossibly old and now almost completely burned away. The static columnar mass of her own blood and fat was all that remained of her body. By an act of spite, she had been unmade and recast as this maledict vessel to confine her energies, mocked by the suspension of true death.

  “Does it hurt? Your condition? I realize I never considered it. Seems cruel of me,” he said.

  “It does. Very much.”

  He turned his head from her to hide his shame. He gazed out through the window, his eyes fixed on the pallid form of the late-September moon hanging eerie and unwavering in the inky wash of evening sky. “It’ll be over soon.” He squeezed his eyes closed and coughed again, the wet fluttering inside him protracted as he drew cold air into his lungs.

  A hush fell over them and neither said a word for some time, but in that interval of silence both hissed in their way and wondered at what might lie on the other side of the coming night.

  “What are you thinking?” she asked.

  He turned to look at her again. “It’s freezing in here.”

  “Is it?”

  “Mmm.” He cleared his throat. “What’s it like when the candle isn’t lit?”

  “Lonely,” she said.

  “Yes. For me, too.” He reached for the bedside table and rummaged in the clutter there until he found his briarwood pipe. He took it up and held it out in her direction, as if to beg a favor.

  “Haven’t you had quite enough of that?”

  “How can I know what is enough unless I know what is more than enough?” He arched his brows.

  “How unabashedly hedonistic,” she said.

  “It ought to be. It’s Blake.”

  She cast an ember into the chamber of his pipe and he managed a genuine smile. A gale blew outside and the house groaned and so did he. He brought the pipe to his quivering lips and, with some degree of effort, he puffed at it thoughtfully. The glow in the bowl grew brighter and lit his tired features from beneath and in that moment he looked somehow younger and more vital. His jaw hitched and clicked in a playful performance and a set of smoke rings appeared and danced in the air for a moment before losing their shape and dissipating. Warm layers of black Cavendish and cherry scented the room and he puffed again.

  A calm fell over him and he eased back into his pillow and closed his eyes, relishing the burning sweetness that swirled in his damaged lungs. “You’ve been affable company these years.”

  “Is that a compliment?”

  A trail of smoke trickled from his parched lips. “I don’t know, but it’s the truth.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “So have you.”

  He moved to the edge of the bed and redeposited the pipe amongst the clutter on the table. He watched the glow of her flickering presence painting gentle forms upon his hand. Ethereal wisps, barely there and soon to fade forever. A familiar sorrow stirred in the deepest parts of him and he longed to feel her touch.

  “I love you,” he said. And he had, since the day he found her and marveled at the peculiarity of a candle so finely crafted and unique in color, unlit and hidden away in the hollow of a tree. When he had called her out of darkness, alight there in the middle of his dinner table, he was helpless to guard against the enchantment of one who so clearly outshone all other light in his life. Blinded by the beauty he found in the fire, he never took a wife, never sought to make a family or a home for himself. This, she knew, was part of her curse.

  “I know,” she said. But that was all she said.

  She looked to him, withering beneath his sheets, tears crowding the corners of his eyes and streaking down his colorless face, set with deep lines from the weariness of existence. He was a specter of the man she had met all those years ago. Yes, it hurt her when the candle was lit, to watch him devoured by the howling maw of this vulgar imprecation. To know that, even if she returned his sentiments, if she told him she loved him deeply, it would only augment his pain.

  “Keep your eyes closed,” she said.

  “What for?” He knitted his brows and coughed, deep and harsh.

  “Please. Dream with me. Dream of some alternate past.”

  “What, sleep? And leave you burning?” he said.

  “Yes.” She closed her eyes and the flames of her figure sank low on the wick. All light but the faintest glow drained from the room and the air filled with a smoke redolent of ancient forests and fresh-turned graves.

  “Listen, I’m sick, not stupid—”

  The smoke invaded his nostrils and he breathed it until all light of the conscious world had given way to a soothing sort of blackness.

  II

  He woke in a room that was not his own. The candle was not there, nor his briarwood pipe, nor even the bedside table. He surveyed the details of the space despite his disorientation and through a window near the bed he could see leaves upon the trees, new and green. September appeared to have flown and the air was thick with the humidity of summer and the myriad voicings of such things that stir by dusk and are compelled to hunt in darkness.

  And then a most dreadful scream.

  He sprang from the bed with all the haste he could muster and pitched himself toward the window. Spurred by an unearthly compulsion to spy the source of the wailing, he scarcely bothered to question his renewed strength. The small stone cottage was situated at the terminus of a rutted dirt road in a secluded hollow, among a copse of trees dressed in the shadows of night. And like the trees, his own clothes were dark and drab and unfamiliar—the full-collared cassock of a holy man of some indeterminate denomination, though again he let these details pass without consideration. He peered through the glass, deeper into the sylvan gloom, his hands cupped around his eyes.

  Some distance into the forest an unnatural light shone out between the trunks and branches of the trees. It was a pale and sickly blue, as if some star had fallen from the sky and come to rest on a hillock there. On seeing this emanation, a chill cut through the summer swelter and settled into his bones, and he found himself shivering.

  He took up arms in the form of a three-pronged fork fastened to the end of a long, wooden handle that rested on a wall near the door, and stepped into the night. Strange, taunting voices drifted to him from the wood, cut through by sobs and a pitiful sort of murmured pleading. It was by these envenomed, almost musical intonements that he traced his path through the barbed underbrush, a guide on those occasions when he lost sight of the strange blue glow. Though the forest itself seemed to claw at him—endeavored to drag him back to the cottage—he pressed into the unknown. At last, he came to a glen and saw there before him a grotesque display, the rival of which he could not have conjured even in his most hideous dreams.

  There was the woman he loved, no longer modeled in flame but in flesh and blood, the muscles in her face drawn down and twisted in
to an expression of exquisite torment. She was quite naked and suspended in the air by some unseen support. Before her were three strange women—also naked—with bones and twigs and mosses and other things natural and unnatural tied up in their hair.

  They stood bent over a great black cooking pot, stoked by that ghostly blue fire, and they passed between them a crude sort of knife, drawing the blade across the flesh of their palms. Each cast into the pot no small portion of their own blood and then they set upon their prey. The knife-bearer pressed the tip of the cruel blade into her inner thigh and with a pop of her skin, dragged it down the length of her leg, opening a crooked wound that wept dark tears. Her sisters shrieked their delight and, with their filthy nails, worked the skin loose on either side of the cut. Then with a sort of efficiency only afforded to hands practiced in such dark things, they stripped her quaking limb down to the muscle and cast the bloodied tissue into the cauldron. Her mouth gaped in a wretched display, as if to call out for help, but she made no sound.

  He could feel in his heart great bursts of shock and revulsion and rage. And though he quailed at the grisly display before him and felt almost sure his trembling legs might falter, a resolve that came from somewhere beyond his own faculties, and which he could not shake, stirred him to action. He steadied himself on the long-handled fork and dashed headlong and haphazard into the glen.

  The contemptable odor emanating from the pot crowded his senses and caused his vision to betray him and his mind to shift into abstract planes. A cold sweat beaded his forehead and his weapon fell free of his grip, and by degrees he felt a frantic lunacy pervading every part of his being, working to unravel the very seams of decency. He saw his love suspended above the yawning mouth of hell with the heat of its breath rising up around her, reeking of sulfur and sin. And some manner of devil was there with her and she, in profane ecstasy, abased herself with it in ways no sane mind would dare to imagine. She birthed then a set of twin babies, joined at their chest, which fell from her and were cast into the snapping jaws of those demons gathered below.

  On a sudden his sight was restored, and when at last all visions of diablerie had cleared and his temporary mania abated, he saw that the sisters were upon him. With a hateful lust in their eyes, they snatched at his garments and tore them free and clawed at those parts of him which had been rendered bare by their efforts. His body began to shake from head to toe when he realized what black business they must be about. Though his body shook, he kicked out toward the cauldron and landed a blow squarely upon the black iron thing, toppling it and spilling its unholy contents. At this, so too did his beloved topple from where she hung and fell to the earth, heaped upon herself in a shivering mass.

  When they looked upon what he had done, they forsook their ardor and fell about in a mad sort of shrill cacophony, their black tongues lolling from their mouths and slithering over shards of rotting teeth. He worked free of their dominance and took up his fork, then he reeled away from them, points raised and leveled at their bellies. One among the sisters flicked her wrist and a glint of steel flashed in the air for no more than the blink of an eye. The knife bit into his chest. He gritted his teeth and growled—a bestial, involuntary sound—as if to warn the hags away, though the tremors that worked through the long, wooden handle of his weapon cast him as no great threat.

  A sinister fog crept in from the forest on all sides of the glen and carpeted the ground. It clung to the naked forms of the sisters and seemed to soothe their frenzied spirits in some dark way, for they ceased their wailing. Tendrils of mist climbed their bodies like a hellish ivy and soon they were fully cloaked, save for twin sets of pale-green eyes that stared baleful out at him, arresting his gaze. Heavy lids fell slowly over the sickly orbs and when finally they blinked out, the fog began to retreat. When all villainous magic had departed, the moon shone out from behind a wisp of cloud and bathed the glen in its pale brilliance. Sensing they were finally alone, he laid down his arms and collapsed.

  III

  He woke again in the room that was not his own. The open wound in his chest was a ragged thing that wet itself anew with every rise and fall of his breast—a grim and scarlet tide. He imagined he would not wake again in this room. Nor, indeed, in any other room besides.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “For what?” She sat at a table not far from his bed, floating her fingertips over the flame of a lit candle. She relished the heat of it and that it was a thing apart from her.

  “For allowing me to die in my own way. For showing me this dream.”

  “You were brave to dream it with me,” she said. “Such terrors are not easily faced.” She moved to the bed and sat next to him. Her leg was bound tight with bandages but still the red showed through.

  “Who were they? Those terrible women,” he asked. The pain in his wound flared.

  “They are the brides of ancient gods and they are my mentors.”

  He shivered. “If they are your mentors, why were they at you so?”

  “We have a pact. In my youth I called upon the Forgotten Names and commanded them to grant me magic that I might secure my future. They sent their brides to slake my thirst for esoteric wisdom and in return I bore them a child. That was my sacrifice.”

  Those ghastly visions returned again to his mind and he felt his heart seizing.

  “In their greed they cursed me with a beauty no man could hope to deny and they filled me with an unending hunger for sins of the flesh. I was possessed with such lust that I found myself almost perpetually with child. And to my absolute horror they came unto me without fail to harvest the fruit of my deeds. Until the day I mocked those primordial horrors and I denied the child a living birth.”

  “No… You cannot mean these blasphemous things. The love I feel for you is not the consequence of some curse.” A torrent of thick blood erupted from his chest.

  She moved to him and took his hand. “I know. That is why I brought you here. Through the gate of dreams we have unmade the past and defied the ancients yet again. They have witnessed my power and yielded to my will.”

  He stared with wide, unblinking eyes—at her, through her, past her—into some hellish vista, never meant for the human mind to behold.

  “You will soon see what lies beyond for yourself. And I will not be far behind. While you slept I took from you all that I need to make a child of our own. My best and my last.” She kissed him and brushed a hand across his blanched cheek. “Thank you again and again.”

  * * *

  In the room where it was September still, the winds beyond the walls moaned like a choir of ghosts and a driving rain lashed the windowpanes. On a bedside table, amongst a clutter of memories, the sweet-smelling ashes in a briarwood pipe grew ever colder and a spent candle cast a thin ribbon of smoke into the air. It danced there for a moment in that dark and lonely space and then it was gone.

  THIS SKIN

  Amber Benson

  I sat down on the chair. I was nervous—my hands were shaking, but I kept them in my lap, my fingers interlaced to hold them steady. I’d thought about sitting on them. Almost did. Finally decided that clasped hands were better than fingers hidden underneath soft, squishy thigh.

  The police officer who brought me into the room had been nice. Got me a Coke from the vending machine and smiled so I could see her eyeteeth. I doubt she realized smiling isn’t a nice thing. Not really. When you smile what you’re actually saying is: there’s no need to go on the offensive, I submit to you, don’t kill me.

  This is why I abstain from smiling. Why I break the social contract everyone else subscribes to. It’s a subtle thing—something a person can’t put their finger on. It unnerves them.

  I practice not smiling in my bathroom mirror. I drain the emotion from my face and work on my dead-eye stare. No smile, dead-eye stare, calm energy. One, two, three… punch.

  The door to the classroom opened and the police officer who bought me the Coke adjusted her posture so fast I heard her back crack. T
he man in the doorway was important. She didn’t want him to see her slouching.

  He looked at me. I could feel his eyes assessing me, probing my features for information. I kept everything calm… my energy, my expression. I didn’t smile, but I didn’t adopt my dead-eye stare, either.

  A happy medium.

  He blinked, giving nothing away. Then he reached for a lab chair, sliding it out from underneath the table behind him. He sat down across from me, the width of one table between us. His chair was shorter than mine. It gave me an advantage—but I wasn’t sure if he realized it, yet.

  He was younger than I would have expected… for someone so important people hurt their backs trying to impress him. Or maybe I’d misread the situation. Maybe the police officer who got me the Coke was attracted to him—that would make sense. He had a nice face and a lean body. Was tall, too.

  Maybe she wanted to fuck him the way my older sister fucked our neighbor.

  They didn’t think anyone knew. Not my mom or his wife. But I’d seen them sneaking into his basement when his wife was at work on the weekends. I’d watched through the basement window, flat on my belly, face pressed against the glass—until my mom had come home from the grocery store and I’d gone inside to help her put things away.

  I’d seen pornography on the internet. What my sister and the neighbor did was tame compared with what I’d watched on my computer.

  The man was still watching me. He’d introduced himself. He was a detective from the homicide department. His name was Harry Longfellow. With a name like his, I knew he got picked on a lot as a kid.

  I didn’t have to introduce myself. He already knew who I was. What he didn’t know was I was prepared to tell him everything. As soon as it had happened, I’d known I wanted to tell someone. What was the point of doing it if no one knew it was you?

  I’d thought about telling the police officer after she handed me the Coke. I was giddy with the need to confess, but something had stopped me. Instinct told me she wasn’t the one. Now I was waiting to see if this new detective would surprise or disappoint. I wanted him to prove himself to me—see if he was worthy of the story I had to tell.