The 5th Witch

by Graham Masterton

  “Just come down here, or I’ll come up there and get you.”

  The witch said nothing, but she raised her cat’s-head staff above her head.

  “This is your last warning, lady. Come on down.”

  Dan crossed the hallway and started to mount the stairs. The witch swung her staff around until it was pointing at the top of the staircase, and she whispered something in a quick, guttural voice. She sounded more like a monkey chattering than a woman.

  Instantly Dan heard a soft, dry, rushing noise. A huge cascade of insects surged over the top of the staircase and came gushing downward—thousands of them. Dan said, “Shit—” and took one step upward, but as he did so he felt a sharp crunching beneath the sole of his shoe. He looked down and saw that the creatures were centipedes, their antennae blindly waving, tumbling over one another as more and more of them came pouring down.

  He jumped back down again, his heart thumping in panic. Dozens of centipedes were already swarming over his shoes, and some of them were climbing up inside the legs of his pants.

  He thought, They can’t be real. This is magic, they can’t be real. But then he thought of the metallic-tasting quarters that he had puked up. They had been real enough, and so had the toads in Chief O’Malley’s stomach. He stumbled back farther, frantically slapping at his ankles and gripping his pants tightly around the knees in case the centipedes scuttled up any higher.

  Ernie retreated, too, stamping on any centipede that came near him, as if he were performing a heavy-footed Mexican dance. Only Annie remained serenely where she was, the witch compass still lifted in her left hand. Although a few centipedes ran over her sandaled feet, she ignored them.

  “I know what you fear the most,” whispered the witch. “I know what infests your nightmares. You think you can come here and arrest me? Go away, fools! Don’t bother me again!”

  Ernie shouted, “You come down here, lady! I’m not scared of your centipedes!”

  “I know that!” retorted the witch, leaning over the banister. “But I know what you are scared of! If I were you, fat man, I wouldn’t tempt me!”

  “You got ’til the count of three to come down!”

  “Very well,” said the witch. She reached into her raggedy cloak and drew something out of it. From the hallway, they couldn’t clearly see what it was, but it looked pendulous and heavy, and it was swinging from side to side.

  Ernie turned quickly to Dan. “Are you okay?”

  Dan was still crushing the last of the centipedes under his shoes. “I’m okay. Give her three, and then we’ll go up there and snatch her, bugs or no bugs.”

  “Uno!” whispered the witch. She lifted her arm back, hesitated, and then flung down the thing that she had produced from her cloak. It circled through the air and landed with a thump right in front of Ernie’s feet. Before any of them realized what it was, it scurried wildly to one side, and then back again, squealing and chittering. It was an enormous black rat, still slick with sewage, with sharp yellow teeth and a thick ringed tail.

  “Mother of God!” screamed Ernie. “Mother of God!”

  He staggered backward, his eyes bulging with terror. The rat ran toward him, then dodged toward Dan. Ernie pointed his gun at it and fired. There was a deafening bang, and the rat exploded into a bloody tangle of black fur.

  “You witch!” Ernie shouted. “You witch—I’ll shoot you, too!”

  “Bring it all back, did it?” gloated the witch. “That morning when you were five, in the barrio? And you opened your eyes, didn’t you, and there it was, at the end of your bed? And it ran up under your blankets and bit you on the lip?”

  “I’ll shoot you, too!” Ernie screamed at her. “I’ll shoot you, too!”

  “Dos!” whispered the witch. She reached into her cloak and dragged out another rat, which she tossed over the banister without any hesitation. It bounced off Dan’s shoulder before it dropped to the floor.

  “Tres!” She threw another rat over. “Cuatro!”

  She pulled out more and more rats, and they came hurtling down from the gallery, hitting the floor all around them, wriggling and squealing and zig-zagging frantically from one side of the hallway to the other. Ernie fired again and again, until Dan was almost deafened and the hallway was thick with acrid blue smoke. Bloody fragments of rat were splattered across the black-and-white marble like a grisly parody of a Jackson Pollock painting—teeth, tails, quivering hind legs, and scarlet intestines.

  At last the witch stopped throwing rats and held up her staff again. Ernie was pale and sweaty and panting like a walrus.

  “Have you had enough yet?” the witch asked. “I can do worse! How about you, young lady? What is it that terrifies you?”

  Dan glanced at Annie and realized that the witch had asked what frightened her. She didn’t seem to know instinctively, the way she had with him and Ernie.

  Annie stayed supremely calm. She dropped her witch compass into her satchel and took out a folded sheet of paper and a small white silk purse. The purse was embroidered with green petals and seed pearls, and tied at the neck with what look like silvery-gray hair.

  “What’s that?” Dan asked her. “What are you going to do?”

  She gave him a secretive little smile. “You’ll see. But get ready to run upstairs and seize her when the moment comes.”

  She held up the purse in her left hand and swung it from side to side. At the same time, she sang in a high, shrill voice, “Salt and juniper, marigolds and rue! Silver and primroses, red, white and blue! Balsam ash and a copper coin. Seven times shaken, seven times blessed.”

  The witch swept her staff in an angry, chopping pattern. “Do you think you can catch me with garden herbs and pennies, you foolish child? Do you know who I am? Do you know where my magic comes from? It comes from the very wells of hell!”

  With that, she shouted, “Thunder!” and the entire house shook with a devastating clap of thunder. A chandelier dropped from the ceiling and shattered on the floor, and plaster dust came down in billowing clouds.

  Annie remained where she was. She swung her little embroidered bag three more times. Then she lifted the thyrsus, the fennel stalk with the pinecone on the tip, and pointed it directly at the witch. In the other hand she held up the sheet of paper and began to read the words that she had written on it.

  “Busd de yad, the glory of God.”

  “Lightning!” screamed the witch, and the hallway crackled with lightning. It jerked and jumped from the staircase to the front door, setting off showers of sparks. Dan was thrown back against the wall, jarring his back. Ernie’s hair was standing on end, and his mustache bristled.

  “Mykmah a-yal prg de vaoan!” Annie called out. “Ar gasb tybybf doalym od telok!”

  “Storm!” the witch raged at her. At once, it was raining. Hard, cold, clattering rain that came straight out of the ceiling. They were instantly drenched, and Ernie said, “I will kill this woman! I promise you, I will personally drown her with my bare hands!” He said something else, but his words were lost in another crackle of lightning, which dazzled all of them, and another burst of thunder.

  It started to rain even more torrentially, so that water was gushing and foaming down the stairs. Yet as he turned around, Dan could see through the front doors that it was still sunny outside, with only the faintest breeze ruffling the bushes.

  “Mykmah vls de ageobofal y dluga toglo pugo a tallo!” cried Annie, almost singing it. Then she raised the thyrsus and made the sign of the cross, three times. “I reign over you in power exalted above the firmaments of wrath!” she shouted.

  “No!” screamed the witch, and covered her ears with her hands.

  “A power in whose hands the Sun is as a sword, and the Moon as a fiery arrow!”

  “No! Stop! You don’t know what you’re doing!”

  “Which measureth your garments in the midst of my vestures and trussed you together as the palms of my hands!”

  “You don’t know what you’re doing! You don’
t know what you’re bringing on yourself! The power of Satan and all of his demons! The legions of the night!”

  But Annie made the sign of the cross again, then again and repeated the words “Busd de yad. The glory of God.”

  A pure white light appeared on the gallery close behind the witch. It grew brighter and brighter, and it made the raindrops sparkle like diamonds and caught them in midair, as if they weren’t falling at all.

  The light was so brilliant that it was impossible for Dan to make out what it was, but as it shone brighter the witch let out a choking noise, as if she had a fishbone caught in her throat. She dropped to her knees, then tumbled sideways onto the floor.

  “What is that?” he asked Annie. “What’s happening?”

  Annie kept on smiling, but she didn’t answer. The expression in her eyes was almost beatific.

  For a split second, Dan thought he saw a face in the middle of the light—a smooth, dispassionate face, like a Venetian carnival mask—but then it vanished, and the light died away. The rain gradually eased, then stopped altogether. There was one last grumble of thunder, and then the hallway fell silent, except for the witch’s self-pitying moaning and the soft pattering of water drops.

  “The foulest of plagues on all three of you and all of your families and all of your children, for all eternity!” whispered the witch. She tried to curse them some more, but she started to cough and couldn’t stop.

  “You can go get her now,” said Annie. “But be careful…she’ll probably try to bite you, and a witch’s bite can make you impotent.”

  “You mean…?” said Ernie. He held out his hand with his index finger drooping.

  Annie nodded. “It’s the best revenge that any woman can take on a man, don’t you think?”

  “I’ll take her feet,” said Ernie. “What? I’m a married man! I get impotent, Rosa will kill me!”

  Dan and Ernie climbed the staircase, their sodden shoes squelching. When they reached the gallery, they found the witch lying on her back, coughing up strings of pale yellow phlegm and rocking from side to side. Although she wasn’t tied up with cord, her wrists and her knees and her ankles were pressed tightly together, and it was clear that she was unable to pry them apart.

  “I shall make the piss in your bladders boil!” she spluttered. “I shall pull out your guts and fry them in front of you!”

  “You want to tell me your name?” Dan asked her.

  “You will have to guess that, you smear of hog’s excrement.”

  “Wouldn’t be Greensmith, by any chance?”

  The witch went into another coughing fit and rocked so violently that they could hear her spine making a knobbly sound against the floorboards.

  “Well, whoever you are, I’m arresting you on suspicion of conspiracy to commit multiple homicide, as well as all those other crimes and misdemeanors I told you about. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.”

  “You are not fit to lick the devil’s poop-hole.”

  Ernie raised his eyebrows. “Hey, abuela—I’ll remember that. That should go down well at your arraignment.”

  Dan leaned over and forced his hands into the tattered folds of the witch’s cloak, trying not to get snagged on the hooks and the dried herbs that were fastened all over it. The witch had an indescribable smell, stale urine and lavender, but something else, too, something caustic, like oven cleaner, that burned his sinuses.

  “You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you. Do you understand what I’ve just said to you?”

  “You think that I will stand in front of your court? Nobody can judge me except my lord and master.”

  Dan dug his hands deep into her bony armpits, while Ernie took hold of her ankles. “Ready?” asked Dan. “Then, hup.”

  Although she was such a skeletal old woman, the witch was surprisingly heavy. They had to carry her very slowly down the stairs, and at one point Ernie almost lost his footing and had to make a grab for the banisters to steady himself. Eventually, however, they managed to shuffle across the hallway and out of the front doors. She squeezed her eyes tightly against the sunshine, and her lips puckered.

  They carried her over to the Torrent, opened the hatchback, and lowered her inside.

  “You bubbles of dog snot,” she sneered at them.

  “Look who’s talking,” Ernie retorted. “You really need to blow your nose, you know?”

  “How long is she going to stay helpless like this?” Dan asked Annie. “Like, do you think I should put the cuffs on her, just in case?”

  “She can’t get free. Not until I break the spell for her.”

  “What was that, all that buzz-de-yad stuff you were reading out? Was that Enochian?”

  She nodded. “The language of the angels. That particular incantation neutralizes hexes and makes it impossible for witches to cast any spell that might do anybody harm.”

  “And that light?”

  “What are you asking me?”

  “I’m not too sure. I thought I saw some kind of face in it, that’s all.”

  “Like you said before, you’re a little keyed up.”

  Dan cocked his head to one side. “Annie?”

  “I’m not telling you, Dan. Either you believe, or you don’t.”

  Ernie went back to the porch and closed the front doors, wedging an old wrought-iron chair under the handles to keep them together. Then they all climbed into the Torrent, and drove back down the driveway. Dan kept glancing toward the woods, but he didn’t see the pale fawn figure with the pointed head and horns.

  As they turned onto Stone Canyon Road, they heard the witch kicking and moaning in the back. “I curse you forever! You are no better than cat’s vomit! I curse you from the scurf in your scalp to the bunions on your stinking feet!”

  Ernie thumped on the hatchback cover and shouted, “Shut up, bruja! I’ve had enough of you for one day!”

  Dan said, “Those other three witches are going to be pretty pissed, don’t you think, when they find out that all of their extra power has been taken away.”

  “Well, yes.” Annie smiled. “They won’t be very happy. But you don’t want to underestimate them, even now.”

  “They won’t be able to do what they did to those SWAT teams, will they?”

  “No. I don’t think so. It takes such an enormous amount of magical power to raise the Night Wind, and those kukurpas that follow them. And once you’ve raised them, you have to be able to control them and send them back to where they belong. Otherwise they won’t hesitate to tear you apart, too. They’re not very big on gratitude, creatures like that.”

  “How about blowing people up in midair and setting fire to them and making them cough up toads? Can they still cast spells like that?”

  “I don’t know for sure. Probably. But they won’t be able to cast them at any great distance—not like they’ve been doing up until now. Like I say, they’re all very skillful witches, and we still need to be careful. But now that we’ve cut them off from this witch’s magical energy, they’re going to be much easier to trap.”

  They drove slowly along Hollywood Boulevard and turned into the parking lot at the back of police headquarters. It was crowded already in anticipation of this evening’s operation at West Grove Country Club. Four black SWAT vans, eight squad cars, three unmarked Crown Victorias, and more than fifty officers talking and drinking coffee and checking their equipment.

  Dan climbed out of the Torrent and saluted four or five of the officers he knew. Then he turned to Ernie and said, “See all these guys here? They don’t know it, but I think we’ve already saved their lives.”

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Ernie climbed the steps into the station and came back out a few minutes later with two female police officers, one big and blond with hefty hips, the other black and skinny with prominent teeth. When Dan opened the Torrent’s hatchback and they saw the rancid, ragged c
reature hunched inside, the blond officer said, “Oh my God,” and the black officer flapped her hand in front of her face in disgust.

  For her part, the witch blinked furiously into the sunlight, grinding her teeth.

  “Come on, sweetheart,” said Dan. “Let’s get you out of there.”

  The witch spat and spat again, until she had long strings of saliva trembling from her lips. “I curse you all! I curse you all forever! May your skin bubble with pustulent buboes and your tongues turn into the slimiest of slugs!”

  “Where did you find this charmer?” asked the blond officer.

  Dan took hold of the witch’s ankles. “I know she looks like a street person, but she’s anything but. So treat her with caution, okay? Ernie, want to give me a hand lifting her out?”

  “Hey—” Ernie reminded him. “I’m at the feet end, remember?”

  The two female officers kept well back as Dan and Ernie lifted the witch out of the Torrent. The witch kept jerking and twisting and swinging herself from side to side, but they managed to carry her up the steps and through the front doors.

  “Can’t she walk?” asked the blond officer. “It’s not like she’s restrained or nothing.”

  “Oh, she’s restrained all right. And lucky for us that she is.”

  As they passed the front desk, Sergeant Mullins said, “What you got there, Detectives? Last week’s dirty laundry?”

  “Female prisoner, name unknown. Just book her for us, will you? Conspiracy to commit homicide, plus about two dozen other offenses. I’ll give you the full list later.”

  “You will suffer, just like these poor fools!” the witch whispered at Sergeant Mullins. “Your fingers and toes will drop off and woodlice will crawl out of your anus!”

  Sergeant Mullins raised one eyebrow. “It’s been a pleasure to meet you, too, ma’am.”

  Every step was a struggle, but Dan and Ernie managed to carry the witch down two flights of stairs and all the way along the gray-painted corridor to the cells. She spat and cursed and swore at them without pausing for breath, and if she had still been able to invoke her magical power, they all would have been struck down on the spot with strokes or heart attacks and a whole variety of debilitating diseases from leukemia to leprosy.