by John Everson
Marshall thought the “he” was a wizard, but I was sure it was the devil. Marshall thought their trysts were, in his words, “awesome”, but when I watched them together, my heart shriveled up in my chest. It was evil.
But exciting.
So I was going back tonight. Marshall said she had promised him something special tonight, the culmination of all their heaving magic. As his silent partner, he wanted me to see what the witch would create. It would be easier for me to get out of the house this time—I’d just say I was going trick or treating. Ma would say I’m too old for that, but she’d let me out anyway.
It was dusk when I set out across the graveyard and ducked into the foliage beyond. I hoped I could find the trail again. The wind had calmed, but the night felt colder than ever. Leaves rustled slightly overhead, and their fallen brethren crunched loudly beneath my feet. I’d started out early, not wanting to risk the witch getting there before me.
At last I found the trail. It was recognizable only because it stood as a narrow lane in the woods without trees. Something had cut out the forest, but hadn’t stripped away the grass and weeds. I waded through the chest-high stand of brush, all the while moving farther away from the edge of town. And then, as the last deep red of the sunset slipped away from the sky, I was there. At the shack.
The witch’s shack.
It was made all of wood; old wood bleached gray by the years and leaning slightly to one side. A chimney slanted from one side, and branches and rotting leaves all but covered the roof. The glass of the windows was spider-webbed and splintered from the sport of young explorers. I wondered if any of them had blundered into this decrepit cabin after dark. When the witch was here.
I pushed the squeaking door open and stepped inside, waiting precious minutes before moving. When my eyes had adjusted enough to tell my thudding heart that no one was there yet, I walked across the spongy, sagging floor and secreted myself behind the topsy-turvy stack of wooden crate boxes, as I had last time. It wasn’t long before I was shivering, both from cold and, I think, fear. Why had I come here? I knew this was wrong. Miss Carny was evil. The evidence was all around me. Bottles of magic-stuff lined a shelf on the far side of the one-room shack near the fireplace. The floor was scuffed, not only with wear, but with circles and triangles and strange symbols. Miss Carny was more than some child molester (though the molesting was mutually enjoyed). She was a witch. I’d seen it in her eyes over the past couple months in school. They seemed slanted, slightly. And a weird gleam seemed to focus from them on certain students, when they were causing trouble. That look always silenced the room. I suspected it wasn’t a natural thing.
The door slammed open, and I jumped, almost giving myself away at the start. But the protest of the hinges safely masked any noise I made, and it swung closed again. She was here.
Her arms were piled high with tree branches, which she dumped into the fireplace across the room. Thank God! I praised silently at the thought of heat, and then bit my tongue as I thought of the inappropriateness of that calling. The witch, I thought, would be calling on a different deity tonight.
As she bent over the fire, nursing the kindling to hellish life, I squinted at my watch. It looked like another half hour or so until Marshall was supposed to get here. I was starting to wonder if I could hold out that long. My butt was going to sleep on the cold floor, and the spider webs stretching from the boxes to the half-boarded up window over my head were giving me the creeps.
Soon the fire was crackling, throwing red-and-orange shadows at the walls behind me, if not any heat yet. The witch was busy. I watched as she got down on the floor, on her hands and knees and darkened the symbols already carved there with a marker. It occurred to me that she didn’t look like any witch I’d ever read about. Her face was young (for a teacher), and her eyes were…stunning. They flashed a piercing aqua blue that was, literally, spellbinding. I had had a crush on her last year, when I started at Pierson High. After I’d seen her naked with Marshall, and watched her strange mixing and magicking after, I’d become afraid, but yet, still drawn by her. She wasn’t much taller than me (maybe five six or seven, I’d guess) and she still had a thin, high school girl figure. And her hair… God, it trailed in kinky black ringlets down her shoulders and down her back. In school she wore it tied up and pony-tailed, but now, it hung from her shoulders to the floor, masking the characters she drew from my sight.
I couldn’t believe that she didn’t somehow sense my presence, so close to her, but she worked diligently just a few feet away from me. I could see most of her through a crack of space between two of the crates, and had to keep reminding myself to breathe as I stared at her. The heat was starting to seep into my corner of the room, and I was starting to relax a little, when she stood up and surveyed the floor.
Don’t come here, I begged, but she walked over near the fireplace and opened a cabinet set on the floor. She gathered some things and then walked back to the largest circle in the floor. There was a pentagram inside it, and outside of it, squaring it off, were four smaller circles with strange geometrics inside each. Then I saw what it was she had gathered.
Knives!
With practiced ease, she threw one at the floor, and it stuck, at just a slight angle, right inside one of the smaller circles. She missed the second circle, but levered it out of the floor and threw again, this time hitting her mark. When she was finished, four gleaming silver daggers ringed the large circle. She grabbed a bag from near the door, and then knelt in the circle again. She took a tape measure from the bag, and adjusted it to what looked like about two feet. Then she set a candle at the tip of the internal pentagram on the perimeter line of the center circle. Measuring an exact length each time, she proceeded to space out twenty or thirty other candles, all the color of burnt cherries. When she was finished, she clicked a lighter, lit a spare candle, and used it to light the others in the circle. Now the center of the cabin was bright, and the place was beginning to reek of the tangy wood smoke mixed with the flowery, sweetly musky fragrance of the candles.
What was she doing? I wondered, starting to become afraid for my blithely horny friend. The last time I’d been here, they had done it about where the circle was, but there no candles or knives were involved.
She walked over to the row of jars then, and pulled one down. I thought, from its place on the shelf, that it was the one I had seen her mix before. It looked the same, anyway, when she walked back to the circle and began spreading its dark, muddy contents with her finger on the floor. She traced the triangular patterns within the candle-lit circle, mumbling something to herself the whole time. Then she stood up and stared at the door.
Just stared.
Unmoving.
What the hell, I thought. My legs were cramping up, but I didn’t dare move. And she was really creeping me out now, staring blankly at the door like the walking dead or something. And then she spoke in a language I could understand.
“Hurry, my darling,” she murmured.
Marshall knocked on the door; unnecessary civility, I thought, but the witch strode from her circle to answer it.
“Trick or treat,” I heard him say, and the witch laughed.
“Both,” she said, and a spike went through my stomach. I was becoming very afraid of her promised surprise.
Not Marshall. He stepped inside, and the breeze from the door told me how warm the cabin had quietly gotten. I shivered, and hugged the corner close as he walked into the room just a few yards away.
“You won’t need the mask tonight, Marshall,” the witch laughed. I peered through the crack at that, and saw her pull a rubber Frankenstein face from his head. He really didn’t get it. He called her a witch, but I realized then that he was only humoring her. He took the sex, but didn’t believe she was anything more than a kinky teacher.
I did. More than ever, at that moment.
“Tonight we shall call up a real mo
nster,” she said, wrapping one long, slender arm around his shoulder.
“Good spread for Halloween,” Marshall observed, walking to the candle circle.
“Yes. My book says it must be on Halloween. The other times were to get his attention, but the night of calling must be Halloween. If we are lucky, we have gotten his eye, and he will hear our call tonight.”
“What book?” Marshall asked, playing along. I could hear in his voice that he didn’t care. He just wanted to get her undressed.
“This one,” she answered, picking up a small, dark-bound book from inside the canvas bag that had held the candles. “This is where I learned how to call him. I found it last year when I cleaned out my grandmother’s attic, after she’d died.”
“So that’s like your spell book?”
“And more,” she said. “Grandma had it hidden in a locked safe. I wouldn’t have even found the safe if I hadn’t needed to have the roof redone before I could sell the house. When the builders removed some rotted wood, they found the safe sealed up in a wall. And I found this,” she held up the book, “in the safe.”
“Cool,” Marshall said. “So are we gonna do it in the circle tonight?”
“Yes. Take off your clothes and lie down.”
As Marshall tossed jacket and flannel shirt to the side, Miss Carny also began to remove her clothes. Her own long coat hit the floor by Marshall’s. She wore nothing, I soon saw, beneath a sheer black blouse. Her breasts were breathtaking; deliciously pendulous and darkly nippled. I could see the gooseflesh on her white skin in the dancing arcs of firelight. She kicked off her shoes and shimmied out of her jeans. Her naked thighs and buttocks created an uncomfortable stirring in my pants. They both stood naked in the circle now, and she ran a fingernail from his chin to his already pointed penis.
“Hmmmm,” she smiled. “Lie down now. I’m going to paint you before we begin.”
Marshall didn’t even flinch. If he got sex out of it, she could probably tattoo him and it would be the same.
He stretched out on the floor, and she straddled him, using her finger to trace circles and squiggles on his chest and belly, periodically dipping her finger in the same black mixture she’d used on the pentagram. When his body was a mess of black hieroglyphics, she placed the black book above his head.
“Don’t move,” she cautioned. “Don’t say a word.”
Marshall grinned, obviously thinking this another part of her kinkiness that he could take advantage of. So, spread-eagled and naked, in the center of a pentagram, Marshall was mounted by a witch. Her foreplay amounted to a brush of lips against his, and then she was slowly rocking atop his crotch. My pants suddenly seemed incredibly restrictive as I watched her breasts jiggling faster and faster above Marshall’s muddied chest.
Suddenly, she dropped her hands to pin his wrists at the edge of the circle. Her hips never stopped bucking, but her face lost some of its look of pleasure. She began to read from the book above Marshall’s head. Strange, tough-tongued stuff. It was no language I’d ever heard.
“Gutta, hruth sreighvit ciccilis tor,” she growled.
Marshall eyed the breasts bouncing just out of reach of his mouth, and chased them unsuccessfully with his tongue.
Her guttural reading continued, her voice gaining in volume as her hips’ motion grew wilder. As she read, I began to feel strange, almost dizzy. I thought it was the scent from the candles, or maybe just the combination of autumn cold and fire. But as her voice rose to a scream, her figure swam out of focus. I steadied myself on the floor with my hands, praying that I wouldn’t fall into the boxes in a faint.
Which is exactly when it happened.
As I swayed, and she screamed, the witch suddenly reached above and ripped a blade from the floor.
“I love you,” she cried out, and then brought the blade down straight into Marshall’s amazed and open mouth.
His screams were horrible. He started thrashing, but the knife had gone all the way through the back of his throat. He was now pinned grotesquely to the floor, with blood spurting and bubbling down his cheeks. I was frozen by the horror of the scene. It was really too late to help, I realized. Marshall would be dead in minutes. There was no way out.
She took another blade then, and again held it high above her head as she said, “I love you.”
She brought that one down on his chest, and then she was awash in his blood. His screams were already subsiding as she drove the third knife into his belly. As she raised the fourth knife over his groin, and again pledged her love, I realized that she wasn’t proclaiming her love for Marshall. She was calling “him”.
As Marshall’s movements died down to a few feeble twitches, the witch knelt at his side, and dipped her hands into his opened belly. They came away dripping crimson, but instead of holding them away from her in disgust, she began methodically to paint herself. Her cheeks acquired geometric rouge, her neck crude stars. Around her left breast, she drew a circle, and then bisected it, sketching a bloody nail across that creamy flesh, across the wide nipple and back down. She repeated the process with her right breast, and then began to smear the blood without regard for form, until her belly and thighs were a bright, slow oozing paint of blood. Then she raised her arms above her head at the center of the circle and chanted some of the same things she had screamed moments before. Again I began to feel dizzy. But this time, as her chanting rose in volume to a scream, I didn’t fall back. I found myself standing up.
No! I railed against myself, but my limbs suddenly were not my own. She heard me rise, and stepped backwards. I saw the recognition in her eyes, the sudden fear that another of her students was about to ruin all her plans.
“You! What are you doing here?”
“You called me,” I said, but the voice was not my own. It was heavier, throatier. My hands began unbuttoning my jacket. Hands ignored my commands and flung it from me and then ripped off my shirt. They quickly dropped my pants and I stood cold and whitely nude before my bloody teacher. The witch.
I could feel my erection stirring, though my stomach was aching in horrific complaint.
“You have possessed the boy?” she asked, and squinted at me, looking deeply into my eyes. I felt a heat in them, and she seemed to see something about them that convinced her. For without another word spilling past my unwilling lips, she dropped to her knees. Her naked skin glistened with blood, and the body of my best friend lay gutted behind her, but the demon within me discounted that. I strode forward, pushed her shoulders with unhuman strength and was on top of her in an instant.
“You have earned my love, woman. And now I will give it,” my throat growled.
Her mouth opened in rapture as I began to work my groin against her own.
“Yes, master,” she cried. “Take me, I am yours.”
I laughed. An evil thing. A sound I hope never to hear again. In it I heard barbed wire sawing through bone. The snap of a neck as the noose constricts. The scream of a man dropped into boiling acid. Its tone opened her eyes, and she, perhaps, had a few seconds of time more to realize her mistake than poor Marshall had. But the knife was already in my hand, dripping Marshall’s lifeblood on her already crimsoned chest.
“I love you,” I laughed and brought the blade down.
She didn’t struggle nearly as much as Marshall had.
As her last moans gurgled to a hush, I stepped outside the cabin. The cold air whipped my body with lashes of ice, and I cried out inside for clothes, for warmth. The demon the witch had called didn’t seem to notice. My mouth opened again without my permission.
“I love this night,” my voice yelled to the stars as my legs began walking away from the shack and into the forest.
I couldn’t have disagreed more.
I couldn’t wait for this night to end. My best friend was dead. I had killed my teacher (at least, my arm had). What if they locked me away fo
r the murders?
And then a thought colder than the Halloween wind struck me. What if the possession didn’t end with this night?
Inside my stolen body, I began to cry.
Still, They Go
I loved her, but I wanted to kill her. Maybe that’s what saved her life. Maybe that’s what doomed mine.
I always was indecisive. Maybe just once, in those interminable, circular arguments when she’d called me an ass and I’d called her another word for a dog, if I’d just had enough backbone to answer her slaps to my face with an all-out punch to the jaw, things would have worked out differently. Maybe then, she would have respected me. I know, it’s heinous to hit a woman. But I’ve got the flip side for you: spare the rod and spoil the child. And too often, Janice acted like nothing so much as a brat.
But I never put her in her place. Not really.
Janice is moving out today and there’s nothing I can do to stop her. She doesn’t even look back as she pulls the last suitcase through the door. I remember that one…it was mine. She always made fun of me for the color, as if having a purple case was somehow unmanly. I always said the color made for an easy spot on the baggage claim.
She would snort. Now she had no qualms with walking away with it, as I watched. Billy followed her, a beat-up brown box in hand. I wondered if I’d ever see him again. He was so tall now. All grown up.
All grown up but not quite a man, I’d like to tell him. But he wouldn’t listen if I tried.
I remembered when he was just a boy, sitting here on this couch next to me. Janice hadn’t wanted the couch, so she was leaving it behind, though she’d emptied the rest of the place. I’m glad because this couch holds a lot of memories for me. I think a piece of my soul is lost in the lint between its cushions.
When Billy was just six, he’d sat here playing a video game on the big screen TV. Racing cars. He was so cute at that age…particular in a precocious way. Determined. Caught up in his realistic-looking NASCAR race, he passed two cars and moved quickly closer to usurping another. As he neared the turn at the end of the track he suddenly shouted out, “I’m coming for you, bitch!”
