SHADOWS

by Jonathan Nasaw

  Not so Moll, who was undressing at the foot of the bed; when she reached behind her to unsnap her industrial-strength brassiere her breasts rolled free like melons, coming to rest against a triple-spare-tired swell of belly. A woman of substance; Selene couldn't help thinking about what it would be like to nuzzle up to all that flesh, to bury one's face in that smothery softness.

  But this was not a Sabbat orgy, and it was not Moll's body that required attention. Selene handed Benny the refilled medicine bottle and undressed quickly; she and Moll joined Benny on the bed, kneeling on either side of her, and after another round of Tom Tyffin, the two middle-aged witches exchanged a kiss over the body of the last high priestess of the Village Coven, then stretched out beside her and went to work.

  Selene wasn't sure how to proceed at first. Morgana had always used nine witches to achieve the altered state that prolonged orgasm could invoke in the adept. She would lie on her silken pallet in the middle of the Circle Room floor with a witch at each hand, foot, and breast, one leaning upside down over her face, one at the crotch, and one free to roam, and every so often they'd rotate, as in volleyball.

  But now it was only herself and Moll. Their eyes met. Mirror me, said the once-familiar voice-that-was-not-a-voice inside Selene's head, and with lips, tongues, and fingers the two women began pleasuring Benny's body, starting at the ears, meeting briefly at the mouth, smiling at each other across the papery-soft folds of the ancient neck, kissing the trembling clawed hands, working their way down the torso to the toes, then all the way back up to the ears. When the old woman began to moan rhythmically Moll buried her face between Benny's thighs while Selene positioned her ear near Benny's mouth.

  The crone's orgasms began building not long after that—the abdominal muscles tightened under the slack belly skin, the thighs began to tremble, the toes curled; even the clawed old hands had unclenched, and were opening and closing as rhythmically and peacefully as undersea flowers in a tide pool. Eventually the soft explosions of breath in Selene's ear turned to utterance, mere vocables at first, musical but meaningless, but as the orgasms rolled on and the slender body began to buck, the syllables turned to iambic glossolalia, the rhythm of her speech conforming to the rolling two-beat rhythm of her orgasm, of her heart—da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, but in no known tongue. Selene leaned even closer, felt the warm breath against her ear as the gibberish resolved itself into words—Se-lene, the God-dess of the Moon—and the words into verse.

  Selene had always suspected Morgana of faking this part; how could it be that each of her foretellings just happened to come out in the same meter, iambic, and of the same length, quatrain: the classic witch's quartet described in Enfernelli's Bible as the hallmark of true orgomancy? But Morgana's orgasm had always seemed real enough.

  So did Benny's. And sure enough, her prophecy ran four lines, then stopped abruptly—her teeth snapped shut—Selene barely escaped with her ear intact. She turned her head to see the crone's mouth pulled back in rictus, her back arched painfully, shoulders, head, and heels pressing hard against the bed, pelvis rising in spasm toward the ceiling. Alarmed, Selene grabbed Moll by the hair. Moll's eyes were open, but rolled back, only the whites visible; her tongue continued to thrust rhythmically, involuntarily as Selene tugged her head away from between Benny's thighs.

  Gradually the old witch's spasms subsided; Benny lay on her back, breathing hard, her hands contracting into arthritic claws again. One hand seemed to be beckoning, and she seemed to be trying to speak. Selene leaned closer again. "Tom?" said a weakened, barely recognizable voice.

  "No, it's Selene."

  "She knows who you are," said Moll from the foot of the bed, climbing dazedly to her hands and knees. "What she wants is her goddamned tonic." She swayed there for a moment, jiggling like a seismic event. "And when you're done, dearie, I could use a shot myself—my heart's still somewhere down around my womb."

  A few minutes later Benny was back in her nightgown and Moll in her slip; Selene had put her russet blouse on and buttoned a few buttons at random. The way her hands were shaking, that was all she could manage.

  "Well, how'd I do?" Benny asked Selene.

  "Don't you remember?"

  "Never do."

  "You about scared me to death, for starters."

  "But the oracle? In four?"

  "Witch's Quartet. Letter perfect. Right out of Enfernelli."

  Benny turned to Moll. "I guess the old gal's still got it, eh, dearie?" Then, to Selene: "Let's hear it."

  She closed her eyes to recite: "Selene the Goddess of the Moon / With two men more must lie / The first of these she must betray / The second man must die."

  When she opened her eyes again the other two women were looking at her strangely. "You just made that up, right, Benny? Tell me you made that up."

  "I don't know anything more about what it means than you do," replied Benny, reaching her hand up to Selene's face, stroking her cheek gently. "But if I were you, dearie, I'd be awfully careful who I slept with."

  PART 3

  Your Book

  of Shadows

  Even as a novice witch, you will recognize the importance of shielding your Book of Shadows from prying eyes. As for letting it fall into the hands of a foe, you would do better to go directly to the devil and save yourself the intervening strife.

  —E. BEATRICE ENFERNELLI

  CHAPTER 1

  « ^ »

  Manny the Mocker had done his usual bang-up job: on Tuesday, November 9th, Mr. Leonard Patch of Croyden, complete with passport, driver's license, and credit cards, slipped out of the UK and into the U.S. as a tourist without attracting more than cursory attention from officialdom, then flew straight on to San Francisco without seeing daylight, thanks to the long night and the westward flight. As the plane passed over the great Midwest he popped a CD of La Divina singing "Dov' è l'indiana bruna?" into his Discman, chuckling delightedly at his own pun.

  A car had been reserved for Mr. Patch at the Enterprise counter at SFO—only a Corolla, but with quite a good sound system, as he had requested. Aldo reached Corte Madera shortly before dawn on Wednesday, and checked into the Travelodge by the side of the highway. His room was plain but quite comfortable; nevertheless he slept fitfully, awoke disoriented, snatched off his state-of-the-art sleeping mask (with thin rubber baffles to shut out even the thinnest sliver of peripheral light) and discovered, to his immediate discomfort, that the Travelodge drapes did not block out the daylight entirely. Quickly he grabbed his watch off the night table and ducked under the covers to check the time—it was only three in the afternoon.

  Aldo's sheets were soaked with sweat. The nightmare that had awakened him, a recurring dream of the Orfelinat, had been unusually vivid. He was around ten years old, he had done something bad again, and the matrona, who hadn't been able to make him cry since he was five, had tied him to his bed and gone off to fetch the sef. Fortunately, he'd awakened before they got back.

  Two hours to kill before sunset. Aldo made good use of the time listening to the radio talk shows, noting local usage and references, mimicking the various local accents and dialects, and left Corte Madera for Bolinas shortly after six, stopping only once to refill his thermos—another hitchhiker—this one he picked up by the side of Highway 1 and discarded over a cliff.

  Aldo spotted the broken signpost that marked the road to Bolinas on the first pass this trip, and when he reached the drive that led up to the A-frame he didn't make the mistake of turning onto it again. Instead he drove on another few hundred yards and pulled off by the side of the road under a stand of eucalyptus, stowed his thermos in his kit bag, then set out on foot for Selene's A-frame, climbing the hill at a bias, using his night vision and other blood-honed senses to find his way through the dark woods. He circled around in order to approach the house from above, and was just about to leave the cover of the trees when he first heard the noise from below—girlish laughter, the hum of a motor, and a roiling, burbling sound that took him a
moment to identify, until he remembered the hot tub on the deck.

  Grinning, Aldo picked his way through the woods, paralleling the path, and stopped behind the last redwood tree before the clearing.

  "So how long before Selene comes back?" asked a girl's voice—she sounded as if she was wearing teeth braces.

  "Who knows?" replied another girl. "Last time I heard from my dear godmother she was on some godforsaken island in the Caribbean, looking for her old boyfriend."

  "Lucky witch," said a third voice.

  Aldo doubled back up the hill a few yards and found a tree that would provide him with both cover and a view of the deck; as he climbed it the girls chattered on, and he was able to match a name to the goddaughter's voice: she was Martha. A few minutes later he was perched high in a fork of a redwood tree, looking down on the softly lit hot tub. It was a situation that would have been a bonanza for most perverts, but coming as it did during the low point of Aldo's cycle, he wasn't noticeably aroused.

  But he did record every detail of the scene as grist for his fantasy mill: the steam hovering above the black water, the young girls sleek and shiny like some new breed of pale aquatic mammal, their nipples pink and plump on their glistening breasts. California girls. How did that song go? Wish they all could be?

  Aldo watched, as still as the great trunk he clung to, until he had matched the name and voice with a face and body—Martha was the slender, boyish, dreadlocked blonde in the middle. When the girls began climbing out of the tub Aldo shinnied around to the far side of the tree and descended to the lowest branch, waited until the girls had begun giggling loudly at something, then dropped the last six feet, landing lightly on his feet. He waited behind the tree listening to his little birds chirping merrily while they dressed. When the sound of their footsteps had retreated around the front of the house he hurried after them and tailed them from a distance.

  Not the toughest shadowing he'd ever done. The three girls yakked their way down the winding dirt driveway until they reached the A-frame down the hill, where the other girls piled into a Volvo station wagon and drove off, while Martha went inside. Aldo grinned when he realized he'd tailed the girl back to her own house, and although he'd been trying to think in English—or rather, Californian—the phrase that popped into his mind sounded so much better in pure Romanian that he couldn't resist saying it aloud. "Drac noroc," he whispered. The luck of the devil.

  * * *

  Twenty minutes later the grin had faded, and there was no more talk of devil's luck. Aldo stood at the kitchen counter of Selene's house up the hill, his finger still frozen on the play button of Selene's ancient telephone answering machine. There had been several messages, most of them casual—"Where are you, just called to chat, gimme a call when you get back." But the last message had been far from casual:

  "Selene, are you there? It's Jamey. If you're there, pick up. I haven't much time. It's Tuesday, the… what, the second? I'll try to call again."

  A better than amateur, but to Aldo's trained ear somewhat grating Oxbridge accent. Tuesday the second? he thought, reaching shakily for the thermos in his kit bag. Tuesday the goddamn-it-to-hell second was four days after he'd burned the Greathouse.

  As always, Aldo forced himself to banish his fear, send it right back to the orphanage where it belonged. So he's alive? So what? No change in plans—find the striga—the rest will fall into place. He fitted a collar onto his flashlight to keep the beam narrow, and began searching, starting with the base of the ladder where he'd squeezed out the jellied gasoline. The char marks were deep scored and well defined—whatever had gone wrong, it wasn't the fault of Dow Chemical.

  The bottom five ladder rungs had all collapsed. Aldo studied the stub edges under the beam and saw they had broken off downward and inward, noticed the pale splintered wood beneath the layer of char. Somehow she had extinguished the flames before climbing down. But how? Then he remembered the way the bed had rocked beneath her limp form as he pressed the pillow to her face, and shook his head, disgusted at his own carelessness.

  Ignoring the painter's ladder leaning beside the burnt one, Aldo grabbed the charred edge of the platform with both hands and chinned himself up easily. Unlike the ground floor, the loft hadn't been cleaned up after the fire—sure enough, he saw that the plastic mattress of the waterbed had been dragged off the frame. He crawled over to it with his flashlight. The thick plastic was slimy with mildew, and he could see the puncture holes, the long rips; the scissors she must have used still lay beside the bed.

  Clever old thing—had she been in a trance, or only lying doggo? Playing possum, they said here. No matter—he wouldn't underestimate her a second time, not with Whistler on the loose too. For a start, he determined to go over the A-frame with a fine-tooth comb. Informatiune este putere, as they used to say in the Third Branch. Information is power.

  But it wasn't until much later, after he'd gone through the house once top to bottom, glancing at books, patting through clothes, checking into drawers and cabinets and finding little of value to him, then systematically backtracked, bottom to top, going over every item he'd gone over the first time, but on this second pass giving it the full Third Branch treatment, looking under the drawers, tapping the doors and walls and cabinets for hollow hidey-holes and false bottoms, slitting the seams and linings of clothes, and carefully opening and shaking out every one of her books, that he discovered the letter hidden under the snakeskin inner lining of the silk-covered loose-leaf notebook in the damask-draped wicker altar not far from the bed where he'd begun his search hours before.

  This must be my lucky day, thought Aldo as he read through the letter, which was handwritten in faded lilac ink, and began to appreciate just how much information he had attained. And how much power as well. Then he glanced at his watch and saw that it was nearly 3:00 A.M. But it was the date and not the time that caught his attention. November 11th. Armistice Day. Better known as Piss-Pants Day in the Orfelinat.

  Aldo winced at the memory. In the sixties, as part of the drive toward "National Communism" as opposed to the preceding, but now entirely discredited "Proletarian Internationalism," only Romanian history was allowed to be taught in the schools—or at least in the orphanage schools. And only positive aspects of Romanian history at that, which drastically limited the curriculum.

  So every Armistice Day the orphans were forced to sit in the auditorium and listen to hour upon hour of boring speeches celebrating the heroic defenders of Moldavia, without whom the war would surely have been lost, etc., etc., during which time the children were not permitted to go to the toilet. Hence, Piss-Pants Day.

  After all, it's not as if the fucking day doesn't owe me, thought Aldo, folding the letter carefully, and slipping it back under the inner cover of the loose-leaf. Then he slid the book into his kit bag, blew a kiss to the heavens, and climbed back down the ladder as far as the rungs would allow before leaping lightly to the charred floor.

  And his heart was as light as his leap, for he could see it all clearly now. The letter would fetch him the girl, the girl would fetch him the striga, and the striga would fetch him the strigoi.

  "Drac noroc," whispered Aldo again, delightedly.

  CHAPTER 2

  « ^ »

  "Oh my stars and garters, that feels good," moaned Selene.

  Wednesday evening. She and Moll were on either end of the white sectional sofa in the living room of Moll's apartment on the Upper East Side, watching the sun set over New Jersey through a picture window the size of a multiplex movie screen. Selene's bare feet were in Moll's lap; Moll was massaging them with the balls of her thumbs only, so as not to bring her wicked mauve nails into play.

  The next time Selene spoke both the park below and the sky above were dark, while the rest of the city was lit up like—well, like the New York skyline. "You know I'm going to have to leave soon," she said softly.

  "Why?"

  "You know why: because I have to find Jamey before they do. I'm worried about Mart
ha, too."

  Moll slid over to the middle of the couch and slipped her arm around Selene. "Martha's not involved in this. You said it yourself, nobody besides the two of us even knows Jamey's her father. Besides, you've been calling her twice a day. You're the one who might be walking right into a trap."

  "So what do I do? Disappear? Just walk out of everybody's life the way you did?" It was the first time since they'd reconnected that Selene had brought up the topic that had never really been out of her mind.

  Moll pulled her arm away. "I had reasons."

  "So you wrote me—a month after disappearing without a word to anyone. From Winnemucca, as I recall."

  "Yes, from Winnemucca. And if I'd taken Martha with me, she'd have grown up in a whorehouse." Then, when Selene said nothing, "Didn't know that, did you?"

  "I suspected. I didn't judge you, though."

  "You didn't have to. I judged myself plenty. I sure judged myself unfit to raise a child."

  "So you let us raise her for you. Fine. But let me ask you this: just exactly who was it who forced you into that life in the first place? It couldn't have been money; all you'd have had to do was let Jamey know he was Martha's father. The child support alone would have…"

  "It was the Test."

  "… been enough—What?"

  "The Test. The Test of the Fair Lady."

  "I think I'll stop talking now," said Selene.

  "You always were a smart one," Moll replied.

  It was quiet inside the apartment for a few minutes; through the thick glass of the picture window New York sparkled like a diorama in a World's Fair—a vast silent clockwork city. "At thirty-six I'd about reached the point you did at fifty," Moll said eventually.

  "Forty-eight."

  "Sorry, forty-eight. First the coven started falling apart, then I lost every cent I had when the club went belly-up. I came out to the Coast, you took me in—"