J. G. Passarella - Wendy Ward 01

by Wither

  Froze, as his eye traveled out to Lore Avenue…

  And saw his pickup truck overturned by the curb, resting on its crushed cab.

  As was every other car along the Lore, overturned in their driveways.

  It was October 20.

  Wither is watching the magistrate, Jonah Cooke, as he smokes a day pipe, but the man is unaware of her presence. It is as if she is a ghost in his house. In a very real sense, she is an apparition.

  Thunder rumbles as dark clouds roll across the face of the moon, casting the keeping room in deeper darkness. The candlelight from a single wall sconce is unable to push back the redoubled gloom. Heavy rain begins to sheet outside. In a moment he hears the light rapping on the door. Wither has been expecting the caller, while Cooke seems mildly surprised.

  He places his pipe carefully on a metal charger then rises and opens the door. A figure in a red, hooded riding cloak stands before him. “So, you have come, after all?”

  Hands reach up to reveal the long red hair and fair face of Rebecca Cole. Rain pelts her mercilessly as she stands patiently before them. “If you will stand for me at trial, I am agreeable to your proposition.”

  “The only sensible course” he says. “Come in out of the rain”

  He motions her inside, and she keeps her back to him as she walks to the middle of his keeping room. “My fits have left me but my accusers remain. They say I am cured for pleasing the devil and continue to practice witchcraft. Only you, magistrate, can put an end to these hateful rumors. And save me from the hangman’s noose.” She is shivering. “I fear I have caught a chill.” She wraps her arms tightly around her cloak.

  He lights a stick of pitch pine at the wall sconce then takes it to the fireplace where he gets a steady fire going. Lightning/lashes, but with her back turned to him, he can not see the wild look in Rebecca’s eyes. There is something of the feral animal in that look. “Allow me to take your cloak. Warm yourself by the fire.”

  She clutches the cloak tightly. “Then you will…search me, for the devil’s mark… the witch’s teat. So you will know I am not his willing servant.”

  “So I shall.” The lecherous gleam waxes in his face. “A most thorough examination, Rebecca. Anything less, and the devil’s mark might go unnoticed in my haste. If you are free of his mark, I will use my influence with the other magistrates…”

  “I take you at your word, Magistrate Cooke.” Rebecca opens her cloak and is satisfied with his startled look. She wears nothing but a nighttime shift underneath the red cloak. “I would not falter in haste. Please forgive my inappropriate dress.”

  “Forgiven,” he says, his gaze lingering overly long on the slender: lines of her body. “Ah…but let me hang your cloak to dry.” As he walks to a peg board on the wall beside the door, Rebecca smiles and runs her hands down the sides of her body, taking a deep breath. She whispers, “A fish firmly set on my hook!”

  He turns back to her, his harsh face set in shadows like lumps in his countenance. A thoroughly unappealing face, she thinks, even more so with that hideous smile. “The devil may place the mark anywhere on the body of his servant, a nipple of inhuman, unfeeling fiesh so that he or his familiar may come to suck the blood of the witch, and a measure of her soul along with it. It is a cold bit of flesh, unfeeling to the prick of the needle. Or to the stroke of a hand…” His hands lift hers and he makes a show of searching between her jingers, her palms, wrists, the undersides of her arms. His jrngers are dry and scaly as they sweep over her shoulders and back down to her elbows. He lifts Her long red hair and looks behind her ears, down the nape of her neck. “Obviously, if you wear his mark, the Old Boy has hidden it well.”

  “Search where you will to convince yourself I am free of it! She is still playing her part, the frightened accused, allowing him to think he is in control of the situation. They both know his search is a pretense. Nor is she foolish enough to believe that Jonah Cooke will be true to his word. He will never stand by her if she is accused and goes to trial. His hollow promise is but part of his lecherous game.

  “Your feet are splattered with mud,” he comments. She has come in bare feet, delighting in the sensuous feel of the earth beneath her feet on this night. “Yet I doubt the Old Boy would stoop himself to suckle at your feet.” Jonah likely does not wish to get his hands dirty in the details of a thorough search. He kneels behind her, content to check her calves and the back of her knees. “I have checked all that I can see. You must remove your shift.”

  “Of course” she says, smiling wickedly. She pulls the loops free under her neck, and the shift becomes loose enough for her to pull over her head. She tosses it aside and stands naked before him, no longer the demure girl.

  He gasps at her brazenness, but he is not about to object to her unseemly display. In a moment he begins fondling her buttocks, the pretense of conducting a search for the devil’s mark immediately forgotten. She smirks in satisfaction. He clears his throat. “I see…nothing here that offends” His hands stroke up and down the back of her thighs, his fingers trembling. Good.

  He comes around before her. His lecherous stare is captivated by her full breasts, his hands tentatively reaching out toward her. Briefly his eyes meet hers, and they are wide with excitement. He gulps and croaks out something she can not understand, yet she knows what he wants. “Be assured,” she says, taking his hand and pressing it to her breast. She guides his hand across her nipples, feels them rise with her excitement, an excitement that has more to do with her power over him.

  “I see a mark,” he says softly, “here and here.”

  “Merely freckles,” she says. “Surely not cold.”

  “No, never cold” His hands wander again to her breasts, her nipples, sliding down her abdomen and even venturing lower. “I… I must have…you understand…?”

  She nods, her hungry smile wide as she unfastens the loops on his jerkin. “You will find no part of me cold to your touch” she promises. She has the clothes off his scrawny, knobby-kneed body even as his pawing continues unabated. “Do what you must,” she says, “take me to your bed.”

  His mouth falls to her right breast, his tongue to her nipple. Odd that he, who searched for the witch’s teat on her, now suckles of her himself. “Ha!” Rebecca shouts as a peal of thunder shakes the house. Lightning flashes brightly enough to fill the room…and reveal Elizabeth Wither—or rather, her apparition—standing in the corner of the keeping room. She nods to Rebecca, whose eyes are locked with her spectral gaze in that split instant.

  “The taste of you” Jonah Cooke says,“…seems strange to me.”

  “Ointments and potions on my body” she says, “to excite you all the more.” Rebecca steers him toward the bed, keeping his eyes away from the corner that hides Withers specter. Simple, since he can not avert his eyes from her nakedness even for a moment. The fire inside him grows higher and she has stoked it well.

  She pushes him back on the bed and climbs astride him.

  “You are a wanton!” he gasps, his breath ragged. “Surely, a succubus!”

  But he is beyond the point of rational thought. As she mounts him, she chuckles, “You have no idea!”

  At the critical moment he grips her waist and attempts to hold her firm, but she rides through his pitiful climax, throws back her head and laughs wildly. He can not control her, ever again. His moan becomes a strangled cry. Thunder shakes the house. His hands fall away from her sides, limp as the rest of him has surely become. The sinews in his neck relax, but his wide, frightened eyes continue to stare at the ceiling, already collecting dust.

  “So much better than you deserved, wouldn’t you say, you disgusting old goat?” She says, leaving his bed with a satisfied chuckle.

  “Attend the fire” Withers specter whispers.

  Rebecca nods. She has already killed him and now she will destroy his corpse. She lights a stick of pitch pine in the fireplace and walks toward the bed…

  Wendy sat up in bed, covered with the damp, clingy
sweat peculiar to bad dreams. The light of the waning moon shone down on her bed, where the sheets were rumpled and…

  She snapped on a bedside lamp and looked down at her bed. The sheets were torn, long gashes as if an animal had smelled raw meat beneath them. She held them up to examine the parallel, ragged tears and discovered the extent of the damage beneath. Furrows had been gouged through the fabric of the mattress, the stuffing exposed in long tufts.

  For a moment she could only stare. When she had fallen asleep, everything had been normal… Except that she had taken an infusion, made from the rootstock of valerian. The cup was still on her night table, sediment at the bottom. She wore her moonstone and amethyst in a linen pouch pendant.

  She had decided to use dream magic to combat the strange dreams, to free herself from the endless repetition of seventeenth century Main Street. But she had been successful only in moving to another dream. A predatory dream, a murder. Who were these women she kept dreaming about? Persecuted women or accused witches? The Windale witches? Wendy had never given much credence to Windale’s witch persecution era. She chalked up that time in history to hysteria. Besides, white magic wasn’t what those times or witch trials had been about. People used to believe the world was flat, but that was no reason for her to take up the cause. White magic was a natural cooperation with and acknowledgment of Mother Earth. No pacts with the devil, no summoning or demons or dolls stuck with pins. Like it or not, she must be identifying with them, imagining their lives as persecuted outcasts. But, in her mind at least, they weren’t just victims anymore.

  She sat by her window as the sun climbed over the trees, but it did not warm her. Her sheets were curled into a ball in her trash can. She had flipped the mattress over to hide the gashes, laid fresh linens over it, but had not slept upon them. She had outlasted the night, her secrets safely hidden. In that at least, she and those distant women were alike.

  With the arrival of morning, she felt the need for normal routines and rituals. She climbed slowly out of the folding chair by the window, her muscles creaking, joints cracking with an achy stiffness. She might have slept on concrete by the way her body protested.

  With a weary sigh, she straddled her exercise bike, checked the odometer: 1299.1. According to her wall atlas, she was about fifteen miles east of Tallahassee, traveling west on Interstate 10. The Florida panhandle seemed ungodly long, with her next big goal, New Orleans, still hundreds of miles away.

  Closing her eyes, she thought only of Tallahassee. She doubted she’d pull off fifteen miles in her present condition, but reminded herself every long journey starts with the single turn of the wheel She pedaled swiftly, the sound a rachety whisper, a cleansing through exercise. Sweat out the impurities, work out the creak in the joints. Her fingers curled around the padded handlebar grips as she gritted her teeth. Today she was not content with her normal leisurely pace. She pushed herself to the edge, seeking physical exhaustion, a relief to the tension that had been building in her since her ceremony in the woods. Her legs pumped, faster and faster, her feet straining against nylon pedal guards. She was vaguely aware of her forearms cramping, sweat streaming down her face and neck, soaking her gray Danfield T-shirt, the frantic hiss of the belt on the bicycle wheel.

  Why am I seeing these things in my dreams? These Puritan women and their crimes? I never cared that much about their criminal chapter in history. Never obsessed about Windale’s minor bout of witchcraft hysteria. So why am I obsessing over it in my dreams…?

  Knocking.

  Startled her. She shook her head, her thoughts numbed, waking from her trance, and stopped pedaling. Someone was knocking on her door, loudly. “Who—is it?” she croaked, her throat painfully sore. Her tongue was swollen and dry. “Come in,” she managed to say.

  Her father poked his head through the doorway, uncharacteristically angry. “Just how long are you planning on keeping up this racket.”

  “What?”

  “It’s Saturday morning, Gwendolyn,” he said. “Your mother and I would like to eat breakfast in peace and quiet. Give it a rest. Come down and eat something.” He closed the door.

  She stepped down from the bike, and whimpered in pain. Her thighs ached, and now that she was supporting her full weight, her legs trembled. She almost fell but caught herself on the handlebars.

  “I feel like an invalid,” she said, glancing at the odometer. “And I’ve only ridden”—she did the subtraction—“thirty-seven miles.” She looked again at the black and white numbers of the odometer. “Thirty-seven miles!” She checked her alarm clock. “In…an hour” She had pedaled the bike almost forty miles per hour. All in a trance. “Jesus!” She touched the metal tire and yelped as it burnt her fingers.

  Karen was napping in her book-cluttered office when the call came. Her office hours were Tuesdays and Thursdays in the afternoons, at which times students were welcome to seek help on term paper topics, or discuss ways to resuscitate a struggling GPA. This early in the term Karen typically had few visitors, and lately she’d taken advantage of the downtime to catnap, curled up in the comfortably upholstered armchair that had accompanied her through three colleges and a half-dozen apartments.

  When the phone rang she’d just been drifting off, lulled by the sound of a brisk October breeze stirring the loose windows in their panes. She came awake with a start at the sound of the old-fashioned telephone clanging in the cloistered silence of the cinder block office. (The English Department needed to update its office equipment, but when it came to the distribution of infrastructure funds, Danfield gave preferential treatment to its big grant-winners, like Biophysics and Women’s Studies.)

  She unfolded her legs from under her and crossed to her desk.

  “Ms. Glazer?” the voice on the phone asked. “This is Renee from Dr. Labajo’s office. Doctor Labajo would like to schedule a time for you to come in and discuss the results from your amniocentesis.”

  Karen felt a sudden knot of dread. “What were the results?”

  “I’m not allowed to give out test results on the phone. Doctor Labajo would like to schedule—”

  “But they’re my fucking results!” Karen said. She heard the girl on the other end of the line suck in her breath in surprise. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

  A cold silence. “Ma’am, don’t yell at me. I’m not allowed to give out test results.”

  Especially when there’s a problem…

  “I’m sorry, you’re right.” She put out a hand to steady herself against the desk. The room felt suddenly too small. “When? Can I come in, I mean.”

  “Doctor Labajo has cleared her schedule for you after three-thirty this afternoon.”

  Cleared her schedule. Normally, Karen had to make appointments weeks in advance to get an audience with the obstetrician.

  Karen closed her eyes and said into the phone, “I’ll be there”

  “This is quite a place you live in,” Alex said as Wendy led him to the spacious kitchen of the president’s mansion. He was lugging his astronomy text, a couple notebooks, and a scientific calculator. Wendy had already set her stuff out on the long table.

  “Four spare bedrooms upstairs,” Wendy said. “Huge foyer and entranceway, a den, and a library. Everything about this place is huge. Sometimes, when I’m alone, I yell and I can hear an echo.”

  “You yell when you’re alone?” he asked, smiling.

  “Primal yelling,” she said, grinning. “Scream therapy. Never heard of it?”

  “No,” he said, setting his books down catty-corner to hers.

  “You should try it sometime,” she said. “And of course, I only yodel when no one else is in the house.”

  “Now you’re joking,” he said, catching on.

  “Yes, but not about the screaming part,” she said. “This house is like a big, empty cave half the time.”

  “A cave with central air and heating,” he said.

  “Well, a nicely appointed cave,” she said.

  A few minutes
later, they were each drinking Diet Coke from a glass and looking over their astronomy lab instructions in the kitchen. Alex flipped through several pages of his textbook and said, “So we’re supposed to find the exact time of sunrise and sunset for the day we graduate, which is the second Saturday in May, three years and seven months from now. Can’t we look this up in a farmer’s almanac or something?”

  “We could, but remember Gorgas said to show our work.”

  “Well, I would list the page number in the almanac.”

  “It won’t be so bad,” Wendy said. “I think it only has to be accurate to within one minute.”

  “Oh, so it’s no biggie, then.”

  She smiled. “We can be wrong by sixty whole seconds and still pass with flying colors.”

  “Color me relieved,” Alex said, shaking his head. Then he read the lab assignment again. “I think we need to calculate the coordinates of the sun for the midnight before and the midnight after.”

  “No, she’s given us those figures, right ascension and declination. That’s the alphas and deltas. Oh, and we’re to use Boston, level horizon at sea level. And she gave us the latitude and longitude.”

  “Well, that Professor Gorgas is just taking all the fun out of it.”

  Wendy ignored the comment, except for the quirk of a smile. “We calculate the local sidereal times, then”—she flipped back a few pages in her text—“convert those to Greenwich sidereal times. Well, those conversions don’t look so bad…comparatively speaking.”

  “Mind if I take those,” Alex said. “I’m a finance major, and we’re not supposed to get much fancier than accelerated depreciation calculations.”