The 5th Witch

by Graham Masterton

  “What could be worse than puking up live iguanas?” asked Ernie.

  “Puking up long-dead ones.”

  “So where do we start?” asked Ernie, as they climbed into Dan’s SUV.

  “We ask my friend Annie Conjure to find this fourth witch for us.”

  “Conjure? That’s her real name?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so. But her mother was seriously into witchcraft and her grandmother before her.”

  “My grandmother could tell fortunes,” said Ernie. “She used these strange old cards with devils and angels on them and people with heads like animals. They used to scare the hell out of me when I was a kid. I was always worried that I would wake up one morning with a goat’s head instead of my own.”

  When they parked outside Dan’s apartment building on Franklin Avenue, they could see Annie in the backyard, pegging up pink and yellow sheets. She was wearing nothing but a man’s shirt made of pale blue denim. Malkin was jumping all around her, trying to catch the drops of water as they fell on the bricks.

  “Hi, Dan,” said Annie, with one eye closed against the sunshine. “Hi, Ernie. How’s it going?”

  “Good news and bad news,” Dan told her. “The bad news is, we have less than nine hours to find the fourth witch. If we don’t, God knows what’s going to happen. Another massacre.”

  He explained what had happened as they climbed the steps to Annie’s apartment. “How about it?” Dan asked her. “Do you think you can find this witch for us?”

  “I think so, if I’m careful. Come on in.”

  They followed Annie into her living room. There were seven sticks of incense burning in a copper vase, and the whole apartment smelled of musk, like a Hindu temple.

  Annie said, “I’ve been looking up Enochian magic. I’ve found all of the sacred texts and all of the keys for calling the angels. I’ve also found the whole incantation for binding a witch—the same incantation that the Reverend Whiting must have used to capture Rebecca Greensmith.”

  A large leather-bound book lay open on the coffee table. On the right-hand page was a detailed hand-colored engraving of five naked women in a wood at night. They were all wearing extraordinary hats—one was embellished with ivy, one woven out of willow branches. The third had upright horns like a bull, while the fourth had curled horns like a ram. The fifth woman wore a monstrously large tricorn, from which dozens of dead mice were hanging from hooks.

  Behind these five women, hidden in darkest shadow, reared a huge black serpent with yellow eyes.

  “Satan,” said Annie. “Satan in the guise of seduction and corruption and ultimate knowledge.”

  Ernie crossed himself again, three times.

  “Is this Rebecca Greensmith’s coven?” asked Dan.

  Annie shook her head. “These five women are all Rebecca Greensmith, manifesting herself in five different bodies at once—The Quintex. But it also proves that she was involved in Satanic magic, as opposed to Native American magic, say, or Nganga, or Xorguinéria.”

  “What difference does that make? It’s all magic, isn’t it?”

  “Not at all. Every kind of magic has different rituals and different spells and completely different chemistry. A spell that works on a Christian wouldn’t necessarily have any effect on a Muslim. For instance, if you made up a charm bag to put a spell on a Christian, you would fill it with dried teasels and recently extracted teeth, to create quarrels; and ferns, to bring on thunder and lightning and heavy rain. Ferns used to be called the devil’s brushes. And you’d probably add blackberry thorns, because the devil once fell into a blackberry bush, and spat on it because he was so angry.

  “But if you were making a voodoo charm bag, you would put graveyard dust into it and beads and dead spiders and the coins from a corpse’s eyes.”

  “Brrrr!” said Ernie. “This stuff gives me the holy creeps.”

  “Me too,” Annie admitted. “But if we’re going to go looking for this fourth witch, we have to be properly prepared. You wouldn’t go looking for a dangerous gunman without wearing body armor, would you?”

  “You kidding me? I wouldn’t go looking for a dangerous gunman, period.”

  “How are you going to find her?” asked Dan. “Salt and needles, like you did before?”

  “No…she tasted the salt, and she felt the needle pricking her, and that’s how she knew we were looking for her. If we try that again, she’ll be long gone before we get to where she is, or—even worse—she’ll be waiting for us.”

  She picked up a heavy brass compass engraved with a variety of runic symbols and opened the lid. “I borrowed this from a friend of mine. She works for that occult bookstore on Melrose, you know it? The Bodhi Tree. It used to belong to one of her customers who was a clairvoyant, but who knows where she got it from.

  “It’s a witch compass. If you look under the glass you can see that it’s filled with salt. The pointer is a needle that was supposed to have been used to sew the shroud of St. Francis of Assisi. It will always swing toward the nearest witch, or anybody who’s had physical contact with the devil.”

  “Hey, right now it’s pointing at you. You haven’t been doing the wild thing with his Satanic Majesty, have you?”

  “It can sense my occult aura, that’s all. It’s really responsive to any supernatural vibrations. You wait till we take it outside.”

  Dan said, “You don’t have to do this, you know. It could be very dangerous.”

  Annie looked up at him, and again he caught that expression in her eyes.

  “Okay,” he conceded. “But I don’t want you taking any unnecessary risks. If you suspect that something’s going wrong—anything at all—you get the hell out. You understand me?”

  “But not before you warn us first,” Ernie put in. “I don’t want to end up like mush.”

  Annie said, “Give me ten minutes to get dressed and to make up all the stuff we’re going to need. Help yourself to a brewski, if you want.”

  She left them in the living room. Ernie looked around at her wands and her astrological charts and her three-barred cross with an expression of deep misgiving. He returned to the book on the coffee table and studied it for almost a minute, tugging at his mustache. “Satan, huh? I always thought that Satan was just a story. A bogeyman my mother invented to stop me from stealing her chalupas. You think he really looks like this? Like a snake?”

  “I don’t know, dude. I never believed in him either.”

  “You think we’re making ourselves look like ass-holes?”

  “I think we’re the only ones who aren’t.”

  Annie came out onto the sidewalk. She was still wearing the blue denim shirt, but she had put on a pair of yellow capris now, and she had a soft brown leather satchel slung across her shoulder. She was holding the witch compass in her left hand and a short dry stick in the other, tipped with a pinecone.

  “What’s that?” Dan asked her, tossing away his half-smoked cigarette.

  “It used to belong to my grandmother. It’s a thyrsus, the magic wand used by Benandanti.”

  “Ben and Anti?” said Ernie. “Who were they?”

  “Benandanti, one word. It literally means ‘good walkers.’ They were Italian shamans who used to fight evil spirits in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Their wands were made of fennel stalks and pinecones, like this one. If we do find our witch, we’re going to need it.”

  “So? Pretty powerful piece of stick, huh?”

  “Wands in themselves don’t have any power at all. But they concentrate the power of the person who uses them. I guess they’re like guns, in a way. On its own, a gun is just an inanimate object. Wands are the same.”

  “But that’s a good-quality wand? Like a Smith & Wesson wand?”

  “You could say that. But look—we’d better be getting on.”

  Annie tapped the witch compass three times with the pinecone. Then she opened the lid and began to circle slowly around, offering the compass to the north, the east, the south,
and the west. Dan and Ernie shuffled respectfully out of her way.

  As she circled, Annie whispered an incantation under her breath.

  “Salt and needle, show the way, point toward the witch I pray. Salt and needle, spin and spin, find the one with devil’s sin. Find the one who drank his seed, and on whose blackened lips did feed. Salt so white and needle bright, be my guides and be my light.”

  After a while she stopped circling and carefully shifted the witch compass from side to side—first to the left a little, then to the right—until its needle stopped trembling. It pointed almost due west.

  Dan frowned at it, and said, “You think you’ve picked her up?”

  “I’m sure it’s her. The attraction is so amazingly strong. Hold the compass for yourself. Can you feel it? It’s almost like it’s humming. And look—the needle isn’t even swinging from side to side, which it would do normally, because it would be attracted to other witches in the area, too. This witch is totally dominant.”

  “All right, then. Let’s go.”

  They climbed into Dan’s Torrent. Annie held the witch compass in the palm of her hand and directed them.

  “Turn right onto Sunset, that’s it. Keep going.”

  Traffic on Sunset was crawling along at its usual laidback pace, and Dan impatiently drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “You still got her?”

  “No problem. Stronger than ever. She can’t be too far away.”

  A ’73 Eldorado convertible with seven young students in it was driving in front of them at less than ten miles an hour. “Look at these bozos,” Dan complained, and gave them a piercing whup-whup-wheep of his siren. Immediately, a scattering of hand-rolled joints were tossed out into the road. Dan overtook the students and left them looking at each other in relief and bewilderment.

  They drove as far as Stone Canyon Road, and then Annie said, “Right here. Up toward the Hotel Bel-Air.”

  “Looks like they’ve given this witch a pretty ritzy place to stay,” Ernie remarked, as they drove between the palms and the jacaranda and the fragrant orange-blossom bushes.

  “Not the hotel, though,” said Annie. “Farther up the road, to your left.”

  They passed the entrance to the Hotel Bel-Air. Somebody was holding a wedding by Swan Lake, and they could see a flower-decorated pavilion and the bridegroom in his white tuxedo, waiting for his bride to appear.

  “Don’t do it, muchacho,” Ernie muttered under his breath. “One day for sure you will wake up and find a two-hundred-seventy pound woman lying next to you, with a long hair growing out of the mole on her chin.”

  “What are you talking about?” said Dan. “Your Rosa, she’s absolutely beautiful.”

  “You never met her mother. I have seen the future, and it grows a hair on its chin and puts on weight.”

  Beyond the hotel, Stone Canyon Road became steeper. On the right-hand side, the houses were huge and immaculately decorated in pink and cream stucco, with sprinklers chuffing softly onto their emerald lawns. After they had taken the left branch, however, the road became narrower and overshadowed by oaks.

  They found themselves driving between two gray stone walls. The roadway was unswept, and their tires crackled on dry twigs and swathes of fallen leaves.

  “Are you sure this is the right way?” Dan asked Annie.

  Annie held the witch compass to his ear. “No doubt about it. Can you hear it?”

  Very faintly, the witch compass was giving out a high-pitched whine, like somebody circling the rim of a wineglass with a moistened fingertip. “It’s actually excited,” she said.

  They turned a corner and found themselves faced by two cast-iron gates. Beyond the gates, the driveway sloped even more steeply upward until it reached a large yellow house with flaking yellow shutters and eight tall chimneys. To the left of the driveway was a thick wooded area, and it was obvious that neither the woods nor the gardens had been tended for years.

  Ernie said, “Hey, I know this house. It used to belong to Ben Burrows when he was starring in Friends and Family. I had to come up here when I was a rookie because some young guy had been sexually assaulted with a snooker cue and drowned in his pool.”

  “I remember that,” said Dan. “Pretty much finished Burrows’s career, didn’t it?”

  “Well, people’s private life, that’s their own business,” said Ernie. “But he always used to make out that he was so straight.”

  Dan climbed out of the SUV and went across to the intercom box beside the gates. He pushed the button and waited, but there was no reply. He pushed the button again. “Don’t think that damned thing’s working.”

  There was a heavy chain wound tightly around the gates to hold them together, but there was no padlock. Dan opened the Torrent’s tailgate and took out his tire iron. It took him three or four minutes of wiggling and grunting to lever the chain loose, but eventually it rattled to the ground, like a thick metallic snake. He pushed the gates apart, and they drove slowly up toward the house.

  “This place has such a bad aura,” said Annie. “I mean, is it my imagination or is it actually chilly?”

  “You’re not imagining it, it’s cold. It’s these trees, blocking out the sunlight.”

  Dan glanced toward the woods. As he did so, he thought he glimpsed a pale fawn figure between the oaks. It flickered so quickly between the tree trunks that he couldn’t be sure if he had seen it at all, but it looked tall and attenuated, kind of stretched out, with a pointed head or maybe horns.

  “Did you see that?” he asked Ernie.

  Ernie was busy peering at the house. “What’s that, muchacho?”

  “I saw somebody in the woods. Or something.”

  Ernie turned around in his seat and stared for a while. “I don’t see something. You sure you saw something?”

  “Don’t worry,” said Dan. “I’m a little keyed up, is all. Most likely it was only a deer.”

  Chapter Twenty

  They reached the wide-shingled turning space in front of the house and stopped. Close up, they could see how neglected the property was. The yellow stucco was flaking off the outside walls, and the chimneys were throttled with ivy. The windows were dusty and blind as an old woman’s eyes, and many of the shutters were hanging at crazy angles off their hinges.

  They climbed out of the Torrent and walked up to the front porch. Annie was still holding the witch compass, and she suddenly said, “She’s close, Dan! She’s very, very close!”

  They approached the double front doors. The varnish was peeling off them in shriveled ribbons, like a skin disease.

  “Dan, be careful,” Annie warned. The witch compass was singing so loudly now that all of them could hear it. It set Dan’s teeth on edge.

  Ernie unholstered his gun and cocked it.

  “Dan, she’s here!” said Annie.

  Dan glimpsed a quick, blurred movement on his left. He swung around and glimpsed a pale face staring at him out of one of the grimy downstairs windows. The face vanished almost at once, but he had seen who it was. The fourth witch, in her strange overhanging bonnet, her eyes narrowed with suspicion.

  He strode over to the doors and furiously jiggled the handles, but they were locked.

  “Ernie,” he said. The two of them stood side by side, and gave the doors a hefty double kick. They heard a thunderous echo inside the house, but the doors stood firm.

  “Again!” said Dan, and this time they heard one of the catches splintering and a bolt pop out of its socket, and the doors shifted inward by two or three inches.

  “Again!” The doors burst apart, and the two of them nearly lost their balance.

  They found themselves in a musty, high-ceilinged hallway, with a black-and-white marble floor and a wide staircase that led up to a second-floor gallery. The floor was littered with dried eucalyptus leaves and streaked with grit, which the wind had blown under the door. The black cast-iron banisters were caked with elaborate lumps of quail droppings.

  “Where is she?” Dan
asked Annie. He approached the first door on his left with his gun upraised. “I saw her at the window—she must have been in this room here.”

  Annie was slowly waving the witch compass from side to side. “No…she’s not in there, not anymore…but she’s definitely near.”

  The witch compass started to sing yet again. Annie pointed it toward the far end of the hallway and then gradually tilted it upward.

  As she did so, the fourth witch materialized on the gallery overlooking them. She was silhouetted against a yellowish stained-glass window, but they could tell who she was by her bonnet and her tattered cloak and the staff with a cat’s head on top of it she was holding in her left hand.

  Dan pointed his gun at her and shouted, “You! Come down here! Make it real slow. I want both hands where I can see them.”

  “You’re trespassing,” said the witch. Although she was at least twenty-five feet above them, Dan felt as if she were whispering close to his ear, and he was tempted to turn around to see if she was standing right next to him, too.

  “This is a private house, my friend, and you were not invited in.”

  “We don’t need an invite. We’re police. You’re under arrest!”

  “Under arrest? On what charge?”

  “Make that ‘charges’—plural. Conspiracy to commit multiple homicide, for beginners.”

  “Oh, yes? And what else?”

  “You want the whole list? Conspiracy to commit arson, conspiracy to commit assault, conspiracy to deal in narcotics and illegal firearms. Not to mention larceny, fraud, forgery, pandering, criminal damage, and threatening behavior.”

  “You’re going to prove that I’m guilty of such misdeeds? And how exactly are you going to do that?”

  “I’m not here to discuss this with you, lady. I just want you to come down here with your hands where I can see them.”

  “Or what? You’ll ask your pretty young friend to put a spell on me?”