by Wither
As she lowered the cup, Alex stepped into the circle, naked, hurrying to sit down. “Sorry,” he said quickly: either apologizing for waiting till the last minute, for his obvious physical arousal, or for his general embarrassment.
She took his hand, her nostrils flaring with the inhalation of fire and smoke, burning wax and cold, hard Earth. “That’s okay. You don’t have to stand at attention,” she said, glancing down briefly with a grin. He blushed furiously, then said, “Just don’t stare at my webbed feet.” They both laughed together, the tension evaporating like gasoline, up and away, not quite gone but not quite as bad either.
“Alex, I want you to close your eyes. Good. Now, think of something peaceful, a meadow in springtime, or a sheltered cove. Think of your own breathing, your heartbeat as the current in the stream, and flow with it, be soothed by it. Take your time.” Minutes passed she withdrew her light touch, leaving him alone in the circle.
“Okay” she said. “Open your eyes and look with me to the east, to the incense. I want you to picture yourself carried away with the smoke, floating upward into the sky, at peace. Take your time. Tell me when you feel it.” She waited until he had nodded, then directed him to the south point and the incense burner. After he had looked to each of the four elements, turning again to east to close the circle, she nodded and said. “Now we’re ready”
She ground chamomile flowers with the mortar and pestle, enough for both of them, then poured the powder into two ceramic cups and added fresh water. “Drink this,” she said. “It prepares you for magic.” After she drank her potion, he drank his, watching her over the lip of the cup. His lips pursed at the unfamiliar taste.
After placing their empty cups on the ground, she picked up two necklaces with tiny linen sachets of anise fruits. She slipped one over her head, then held one up until he bowed his head, then slipped it down his neck. Likewise, she had prepared two necklaces with moonstones in muslin pouches. In hers, she had added an amethyst to draw dreams. She would prepare the actual valerian infusion and drink it later before she pursued her dreams. Everything had started with the dreams, and in the dreams she believed there was a resolution. But first she would need the insight of divination.
She had powdered henbane in a small jar she reserved for poisonous substances. Turning to the south, the element of fire, she gathered a pinch of henbane between her thumb and index finger.
“Don’t inhale this,” she said.
“Why?”
“Poisonous.”
“Good answer.”
She held the pinch of henbane over the flames. “Henbane go where I cannot be; henbane look where I cannot see.” When the breeze momentarily died, she tossed the henbane into the fire. The flames crackled and danced.
Wendy poured a small amount of fresh water over her hand, then dried it on her robe. “Now we begin for real,” she said. All through the preliminary stages of the ceremony, she noticed that he was being careful not to look below the level of her chin. She almost loved him for how sincerely he was participating, how hard he was trying. But now she needed him to look at her. Now they had to get close. “Look at me,” she said.
“I am looking at you.”
“Not just my eyes,” she said, smiling. “The rest of me. All of me. It’s okay to take a look at the goods.”
“As long as I don’t have to stand anytime soon.”
“It’s a natural response,” she said. “That’s the reason I needed you here. Tantric magic. Psychosexual energy will boost the magical energies we’ve allowed into ourselves.”
“You’re the expert,” he said. “What will you be doing while I look at you?”
“That’s easy,” she said, trying to sound as if she had actually done this part before. “I will look at you. And,” she added, reaching out, “touch you.”
Karen had fallen into a deep, exhausted sleep after returning from the ER following her seizure the previous night, slept throughout the long day and clear on through to the following nightfall. Paul kept a nervous vigil in a folding chair at her bedside, periodically refreshing the damp cloth on her brow. Briefly, at eight-thirty, Karen surfaced from the sleep, and smiled, and gave his hand a squeeze. He held her hand and looked into her eyes, neither of them speaking, and before a single minute had passed on the bedside digital clock her grip loosened and she sank hack under.
Eventually Paul’s own exhaustion got the better of him, and lulled by the sound of Karen’s breathing, he dozed off beside her, still holding her limp hand in his own. A breeze hissed through the window screen and stirred the lace curtains, while somewhere very far away a dog barked its unheeded warning…
This was the moment Art chose to slip away.
He took Karen’s bike, an old ten-speed with its ram’s horn handlebars wrapped in fraying tape. It felt comfortable to be on a bike again (and it was true that you never forgot how to ride one), pedaling silently through the chilly dark. He felt invisible, invulnerable, and noted with satisfaction that he passed a night jogger and his tethered Lab without either seeming to notice.
He could smell winter on the horizon, crouching, impatient; the trees seemed to shiver in frightened anticipation of its arrival. The night was too dark, darker than it should be, given the full moon that hung fat and festering like a rotten gourd just above the rooftops.
But he was grateful for the dark, and the cover it would provide him once he reached his destination.
Ten minutes later he was there, hiding the ten-speed in the pool of shadow behind the town’s municipal building. He removed a flashlight from the backpack he’d brought and ducked up the alley He found the low window he remembered behind a reeking Dumpster. He wrapped his backpack around his wrist and punched out one glass pane, then reached inside and fumbled about until he felt the window latch.
For once, he was grateful the Leeson family’s rugged build had bypassed his genetic makeup, as he wriggled his skinny hips through the narrow window frame and dropped down into the municipal building’s basement.
He switched on the flashlight quickly to banish the claustrophobic darkness. He was in one of the airless rooms Town Council used for their interminable monthly meetings. Spooky as shit down here, he thought, moving quickly in the direction of the stairwell. He ascended to the first floor.
A corridor, with doorways to either side: the offices of the mayor and the sheriff. Weak light spilled out through the glass door from the sheriff’s: someone was burning the midnight oil. Art slid along the wall, feet moving soundlessly over the buffed floor. Or at least, he hoped he was moving without sound; he’d lost all objectivity, given the tympani pounding of his own pulse in his ears.
Finally he reached the door of the historical society. Time now to separate the pros from the petty larcenists. He reached into his pocket and came up with a single key. His hand was shaking. Would they have changed the locks in fifteen years? The key slid inside halfway and stuck. Art’s heart stopped. He jiggled the key. Nothing. He retracted the key, rubbed his fingers on his forehead to pick up oil on the tips, then applied them to the key.
This time it slid in with a quiet snick. And turned.
He slipped inside, and reminded himself to breathe. In the dark the only illumination came from Florence Reader’s screen saver, a broomsticked witch bouncing merrily off the boundaries of the computer monitor.
And to think fifteen years ago he’d considered that internship with the historical society a waste of time.
Two hours later, Art was knee-deep in data, searching town records in the last century for deviations from the national average mortality rate. He was working on instinct, chasing some elusive intersection of hunch and hypothesis that hovered just beyond his reach. Could Windale’s rise in infant mortality rates, birth defects, and unexplained illnesses be linked back to toxic waste from the textile mills?
This was the question that he’d come here tonight to investigate. But just when he thought he’d isolated a single thread of mystery, the image of K
aren’s terrifying seizure the night before kept intruding itself. Why had Karen hallucinated that she was Rebecca Cole, one of Windale’s infamous three witches? (And why, for that matter, was an eight-year-old little girl hallucinating that she was Sarah Hutchins?) Try as he might to filter out these digressions from his pure line of inquiry, Art couldn’t help feeling the two were somehow involved, that the same psychological mechanism that was causing a town to turn an ecological disaster into a “curse” was also causing two of its citizens to turn its witch-hanging legacy into a living nightmare.
Shit, but this was becoming complicated. He felt like a child who discovers too many pieces to a jigsaw puzzle. Tough shit, professor, Art thought, reminding himself that in the real world mysteries didn’t come packaged as concise little thesis statements. figure it out Go back to the data…
He conducted another data sort, looking at death rates in various years over the latter part of the nineteenth century—good old Floss should get a civic commendation for transferring a mountain of old manual records into the township’s computer system. Given the mill fire that had claimed thirty-eight lives, 1899, of course, was a banner year for Windale’s morticians. As Art revisited that tragedy now, though, he saw something in the column of luminescent numbers that he’d glossed over before: the date the fire had occurred. October 28.
He frowned, began typing in commands. Told the database to sort the town’s 1899 deaths by date. The cursor blinked at him as the PC worked, the hard drive humming quietly in concentration.
One hundred and forty-four deaths that year, seventy-eight of which clustered in the month of October. You didn’t have to be an actuary to know that that was more than statistically significant. And you didn’t have to be a physician to know that if these deaths were all attributable to toxic groundwater, they would’ve been more evenly distributed throughout the year…
Unless for some reason Windale’s citizens preferred to die around Halloween.
He didn’t trust the data and decided to repeat the sorted query; but when he typed in the command, he saw that his finger had slipped on the keys and he’d accidentally typed 1799-He was about to cancel the command when the data for that last year in the eighteenth century began scrolling down the screen.
And saw the same pattern the century before.
Art sat very still, staring at the screen as his hypothesis crumbled around him. The year 1799 was a full fifty years before the first textile mill opened in Windale. And while Windale had been a significantly smaller hamlet in 1799, a disproportionate number of its residents had died in the month of October.
October 1799.
October 1899…
You didn’t have to be an actuary to see that this was also statistically significant. And you didn’t have to be superstitious to suddenly start believing in curses.
He logged out of the database, began gathering his notes and shoving them into his backpack. Time to get the hell out of here.
As he retreated through the dark, he collided with something hard and heard the crunch of glass. A display case.
Overhead, an alarm began ringing.
At the sound of the alarm, the sheriff opened his desk drawer and removed his service automatic. He bolted out of his office and scanned the dark corridor, looking for immediate and obvious signs of the breakin. The plate-glass front doors were intact. Must be one of the back doors. He started running in that direction, hoping he wasn’t charging into a situation (without backup, no less) that he’d later regret.
He stopped abruptly as he passed the historical society’s office. Something different about the place, though he couldn’t specify exactly what. Something out of place…
The computer monitor.
It glowed faintly, the only light in the place after hours. Nothing unusual there; Florence always left her computer on, so she could access it from home. Then the sheriff suddenly realized what was bothering him…
Where was the screen saver?
The monitor glowed at the log-in screen. Someone had been using it recently.
The sheriff fumbled for his keys, unlocked the door, and slipped inside, his gun arm rigid at his right thigh. He scanned the historical society’s single large room. No furniture besides Florence’s desk, so there was no place to hide…
Except the Witch Museum. He could see the first two manikins—dressed as colonials—just inside the museum’s entrance.
The sheriff chambered a round, and entered the dark museum.
Seen from above, the floor plan of the Witch Museum resembled, appropriately enough, the ideographic symbol for “female,” so that visitors eventually were forced to exit via the same short hallway they’d first entered. Within the “loop” was a minitheater where an old PBS documentary on the Salem witch hysteria played continuously on a wall-mounted television, and it was in here that Art was hiding when he heard the sheriff call out, “This is the police. There’s only one way out of here, and I’m standing in it with a gun. You understand?”
Art didn’t answer. He slid along the round carpeted wall, hoping the sheriff wouldn’t try to be heroic and come in after him.
Suddenly, the television in the minitheater winked to life. Art heard an electrical breaker being thrown and saw a row of theatrical lights just outside the minitheater brighten, throwing violet spotlights on a chamber-of-horrors-style black mass. On the TV, the documentary narrator said, “While the Salem hysteria looms large in the American collective conscience, the episode merits barely a footnote in the greater European tragedy of seventeenth-century witch purges…”
Art slipped out of the minitheater, clinging to the shadows. He scanned this part of the museum, looking for a fire exit, a window— anything. But the walls here were smooth, the windows plastered over and painted—
[“In this so-called Age Englightenment, one province of Alsace alone saw the public burning of more than five thousand…”]
—like a stage backdrop to create an illusion of sky. Art found himself before the big showstopper of the tour: three manikins standing on a papier-mache gallows, while a fourth—the Puritan hangman, perhaps a distant ancestor of the sheriff’s—stood frozen in the act of lowering a noose around the neck of the youngest witch. The witches were portrayed here sympathetically, three young women sent to an ugly and untimely death by a paranoid mob. Art hesitated for a moment, face-to-face with the coven’s supposed ringleader, Elizabeth Wither. She stared at Art with painted, lifeless eyes.
[“… and though few today believe these women were responsible for the supernatural crimes for which they were hanged, many historians agree that at least some were in fact practicing witches, devotees of a domestic religious cult that predated Christendom”]
“Freeze!”—Art heard behind him, and when he began to turn. “Don’t fucking move! Show me your hands!”
Art did as he was told. He felt the barrel of the sheriff’s gun press against the back of his head.
“Put your hands there,” the sheriff said, and Art placed both hands in front of him on the papier-mâché gallows. The rickety structure shifted beneath Art’s weight, threatening to tip. The sheriff kicked Art’s legs apart into a spread-eagled stance. Art heard the rattle of handcuffs being removed from the sheriff’s belt.
Art gripped the gallows in both hands and gave a sharp sudden tug. The whole display toppled forward, crashing down on top of them. The crosspiece hit the sheriff in the face with a soft whump—knocking him backward. Art rolled free and came up in a crouch. He saw the sheriff’s gun on the floor and kicked it away into the shadows.
Then he began running.
Wendy was conscious that her breathing had quickened. She was nervous but hoped Alex was too distracted to notice. This is just like heavy petting, she told herself. And you have tried that a time or two before, kiddo. She nodded slightly to herself. Okay, just like heavy petting. Very bizarre heavy petting. You can handle it, no pun intended. One step at a time. Center yourself. Hope he doesn’t think you’re
a nutcase. Center. Here goes…
Wendy reached out her hand and closed her fingers gingerly around Alex’s scrotum.
He gulped convulsively. “Let me guess,” he said. “This is where the self-control comes into play”
She nodded, smiling. “We have to … build each other’s arousal level. As the psychosexual energy increases so, too, does the magical energy. Both energies travel along the same pathways in the body. You have to touch me, too—but don’t break eye contact or we’ll have to start all over again. Maintaining eye contact is … very important.”
“What happens at the…peak?”
“I’ll prepare an infusion of valerian to drink before I go to sleep.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Alex said. “I mean between us. Do we ever…?”
“Oh, no,” she said. He couldn’t hide his disappointment. “That would dissipate the magical energy too soon.”
“Oh. I just thought,” he began, “You know, seal it with a kiss.”
“Not while we’re in the circle,” she said.
“We won’t always be in the circle,” Alex said.
“Good answer,” she said with a smile.
“O-kay,” Alex said. “Maintain eye contact. I think I can remember that. Self-control and eye contact. No problem.”
“Good,” she said, her hands moving lightly over him.
“So what happens if I… lose my self-control?”
“You can’t!” she said quickly. “That would dissipate the magic.”
“Not to mention other things,” Alex said, then cleared his throat and shifted uncomfortably on the ground. “I’ll try to keep that in mind.”
“Let me know if you feel yourself losing control,” she said. “I’ll slow down until you’re ready again.”
