by Wither
“Hanged, buried, and then dug up again. She survived her reported death. Trust me, I’ve seen it…. Or, actually, dreamt it.”
Frankie said, “But the thing we saw wasn’t human!”
“She’s three hundred years old,” Wendy said. “She’s getting a little long in the tooth.”
Frankie shook her head, struggling to understand. “Wendy, if this monster—this Rebecca Cole—has been around for three hundred years, how come no one’s ever seen it before?”
Good question. Wendy was about to admit she didn’t know when Art provided the answer.
“Someone has.” All eyes turned to him. He seemed to be a little surprised himself, as if he’d just realized the explanation. “Every hundred years, during the last October before a century’s end. It’s the Windale Curse. Just look back at the historical records.
Wendy nodded. “They must undergo some sort of dormancy period…”
“They?” An repeated, the blood draining from his fate.
“It only makes sense,” Wendy said. “There has to be more than one of them.”
“How do you know?” Art asked.
“Because a different one is after me. Jusr like Rebecca Cole has targeted Karen,” Wendy said, feeling a sick lurch in her stomach as she said it aloud for ihe first time, “Elizabeth Wither is after me-,”
She began speaking aloud again, as much to herself as to Frankie and Art. “Wither is the leader of their coven. She recruited the other two. Wendy’s eyes unfocused and her voice fell to a whisper. She spoke as if from a great distance. ”She made them drink her blood, then infected their blood with hers…so they would become—different—just like her.“
Art recalled something he’d seen on a plaque once m Windale’s Witch Museum, a detail he’d never granted any significance. “The other two were young, Rebecca Cole and Sarah Hutchins. Born here in the colonies. But Wither arrived later to the community. Whatever she was, or is, she brought it from the Old World, like a plague.”
His words brought Wendy hack into focus. She met Art’s eyes, the two strangers united suddenly in a moment of mutual understanding. It was Frankie who finally interrupted, with the simplest of questions.
“If Rebecca Cole is after Professor Gltizer, and Wither is after Wendy, then what about the third witch?”
“Sarah Hutchins,” Art whispered and felt his throat tighten as he flashed back in that instant to a hospital room in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit.
“Abby MacNeil”
“Who?” Fiankie asked.
“An eight-yeay-old. I found her sleeping Sarah Hutchins’s grave in the woods. The witch must have kidnapped her from the hospital last night: He flashed Wendy a desperate look. ”The police think I snatched her.“
Wendy said, “So you’re the ”fugitive‘ they’ve been looking for.“
Art caught Wendy’s arm. “Do you think [he little girl is still alive somewhere? What docs Sarah want from her?”
Wendy held up a lock of her prematurely graying hair. “The same thing Wither wants from me.”“
Frankie looked at Wendy’s drawn race, eyes ringed with dark circles. “She’s doing this to you, isn’t she?”
Wendy’s hand went to her cheek, found a new line there, “Draining hit.”
“Why?” Frankie asked, horrified.
Wendy shrugged. “Sapping our-life force, energy, whatever you want to call it. Draining us like batteries,”
“How much longer…?” Frankic began to say, and let the thought trail away. She touched two fingers to Wendy’s face.
“It ends tonight,” Wendy said. “One way or another, It’s the biggest magical night on the calendar” Wendy felt her knees go soft and gave in to it, sitting on the curb, turned to Arc. “You saw it yourself, the ”Curse‘ is an October phenomenon. That means by midnight all three of us will be drained dry. Karen. Abby. Me.“”
She looked up at Frankie and Aat, standing to either side of her. Her expression hardened, eyes narrowing, “At least, that’s what Wither would like to think…”
“You think you can stop this?” Art asked.
I tried once before, but I didn’t know all the facts and I failed. Now I know what I’m up against. Wendy stood suddenly, determined. 1 think it’s time to write a new ending to this fairy tale.“
Twenty minutes later they separated, Art cruising off in the deputy’s patrol car with the headlights off, Wendy returning inside with Frankie in tow to make preparations for battle.
Throughout Windale, jack-o“-lanterns grinned from porch stops while paper skeletons waved from parlor windows. Downtown, the King Frost Parade had spilled outside the boundaries of the square and into side streets. As the hour grew later the costumed crowd grew rowdier with alcohol and adrenaline, seething now with something slightly feral as the clock crawled toward the witching hour. There were no police now to control them; the sheriff had departed moments earlier in response to a panicked radio call from deputy Jeff Schaeffer, something about the WDAN radio station, and an officer down…
At 11 p.m., Mayor Dell’Olio felt something hard ping him on the top of his head. He pulled off his rubber Ted Kennedy mask and searched for the offending projectile…and saw it bounce off through the crowd.
A golf ball—?
Then the turbulent skies opened, and the hail began.
CHAPTER TEN
* * *
The bruised sky above Windale roiled like something alive, the heavy clouds pregnant with ice. When they finally burst, the hailstones spilled forth in a single biblical tumult that scattered the twenty thousand downtown and sent them screaming for shelter. Several paraders were knocked unconscious by the larger hailstones, and two were blinded when they looked up in fear at the angry sky. Hailstones pelted sidewalks and shattered streetlamps, ricocheting through storefront windows. The crepe paper floats were battered to wet pulp; scraps of costume were left in sodden heaps by the fleeing paraders.
In the outlying neighborhoods, those few residents of Windale not in attendance at the King Frost Parade downtown emerged in confusion on doorsteps and lawns beneath a brilliantly clear night sky and listened to the faraway screams, commingled with the otherworldly chorus of a thousand blaring car alarms.
Racing across campus with headlights extinguished, Art found himself in a sudden skid as the hailstorm started, “What the—!” He fought to regain control over the patrol car as it fishtailed, back wheels spinning on the hail-riddled asphalt. Hailstones big as chestnuts drummed off the roof and dimpled the hood. A dozen starbursts freckled the windshield.
The patrol car went into a spin and did a complete 360 in the intersection of Montgomery and Old Winthrop. In one of those magically cooperative moments between fate and physics, the patrol car came out of its spin and to a final stop pointing westbound on Old Winthrop—precisely where Art had been headed in the first place. He gave a nervous hiccup of laughter and stamped on the accelerator…
One hour until this was over—which meant only one more hour until the witch finished draining Abby dry. One hour left for Art to try to find the little girl and wake her from the nightmare she’d been living. As he drove, he remembered the day he’d first stumbled across Abby in the woods, sleeping sweetly on the grave like some spellbound fairy-tale princess. It was back to these woods that he was now driving, recklessly and with only a vague sense of a plan; back to the place where this had all begun for him.
He had no idea if he would find Abby held captive there. But he knew the grave site in the woods had been her special place, and perhaps it held some sentimentality as well for the witches—their intended graves. Their first victim had been snatched nearby…. Wouldn’t it be reasonable to assume that the newly woken witches, still sluggish from their long dormancy, wouldn’t venture far for their first feedings?
But how did you kill a witch? She wasn’t like any of the other monsters out of folklore, defeatable with silver bullets or crucifixes. In fairy tales—“Hansel and Gretel,” say—she was
vanquished by guile. Lured into her own oven by the ingenious siblings…
Art doubted if guile would work against one of the creatures he’d met earlier that evening. So he was hanging his hopes on the deputy’s pump-action shotgun he’d found in the trunk and carried now on the passenger seat.
He wouldn’t get to use it.
Suddenly, another patrol car roared out from a cross street and broadsided Art. He had a split-second’s glimpse of the sheriff behind the wheel, and then he was slammed sideways and sent spinning.
The patrol car slammed into a utility pole. Art’s consciousness blinked out with the collision. Some uncertain amount of time later he awoke to the sound of a car horn blaring a single unmodulated wail. He couldn’t see anything; the world outside the car was obscured by spiderwebs of shattered safety glass. He raised the back of his hand to his lip and it came away bloody.
The driver’s side door was suddenly wrenched open and An was hauled out unceremoniously He heard the menacing shunk-chunk of a pump-action shotgun chambering rounds. He winced, rolled over onto his back in the sandy grit of the roadside.
The sheriff stood over him, and said with deadly calm, “On your belly. Hands behind your head.” Art was stunned, hurting. “Do it!” the sheriff said, and jabbed the shotgun at him.
Art obeyed. The sheriff straddled him, twisting first one and then the other hand around painfully behind his back. Once handcuffed, Art was jerked roughly to his feet and thrown against the sheriff’s car, which had survived the collision with only a crumpled grill and one shattered headlight.
“I didn’t…kill him…,” Art said, having trouble breathing. His ribs hurt. “The deputy… I didn’t…”
“Shut up,” the sheriff said. He returned to the open driver’s side door of his patrol car and talked quietly into the radio. Art could just make out Nottingham’s words to his lone remaining deputy: “Ran into him. Literally. I spotted him fleeing in Reed’s patrol car…”
Art leaned back against the car and looked up at the menacing sky. The clouds that writhed like a canopy over downtown Windale were spreading now, passing overhead in a kind of meteorological race for all horizons. They devoured the stars and screened out the moonlight.
Art heard the sheriff say, “I’m bringing him in.” Then the crunch of the sheriff’s boots on the roadside gravel.
“C’mon,” he said, and gripped Art’s arm hard. He maneuvered him in through the back door of his car, careful to keep Art from banging his head on the frame. The back of the patrol car was fitted with hard plastic bucket seats with a deep well to accommodate handcuffed fists.
“Bill, listen to me—” Art began once the sheriff had climbed behind the steering wheel. “We don’t have much time. The little girl, Abby—there’s still a chance we can save her—”
The sheriff ignored Art. He slipped the car into gear, executed a U-turn in the middle of Old Winthrop Road. “Bill, please!”
Nothing. A brick wall. Art slumped in the backseat. No time for this…
Then, an idea. He leaned forward, speaking through the perforated Plexiglas separating them.
“I’ll take you to her right now,” Art said, then steeled himself for the lie. “I’ll take you where I’m hiding her.”
The sheriff didn’t turn, but his foot eased on the accelerator. Debating. Art upped the ante.
“She’s still alive. You can still save her.”
The sheriff stood on the brake, and Art was thrown facefirst into the Plexiglas. He bounced back against the bucket seat, his nose streaming blood. The sheriff turned around to glare at Art. Calling his bluff.
“Show me.”
Ten minutes later they were tramping through the woods, Art in the lead with the flashlight, the sheriff following with the shotgun. The trees had shed their leaves during the previous week, and now dead leaves crunched underfoot as the two men walked in single file. Art played the flashlight’s tight beam over the deer path they were following. His heart was hammering high in his chest and his mouth was dry. His mind raced through scenarios of what he’d say once they arrived at the grave site and found it empty.
“How much farther?” the sheriff said.
“It’s just up ahead,” Art lied. Nothing looked familiar, and he wondered if he’d gotten them lost. It had been weeks since he’d last navigated these woods successfully, and back then he’d had the advantage of daylight.
They tramped on, their footsteps hypnotic. Art saw a clearing ahead, but when they arrived at it there were no gravestones, and no little girl. Art slowed, and felt the shotgun barrel butt him between the shoulder blades.
“Where is she?” Nottingham asked.
“Not yet,” Art said, trying to invest his response with a confidence he didn’t feel. He took up his forced march again, resuming with it his old appeal to reason. “Please, Bill. You’ve known me for twenty-five years. Do you really think I could’ve done that to your deputy? Or the little girl’s father? Do I really look like that kind of monster to you?”
The sheriff said, “If you don’t show me where the little girl is in the next five minutes, you won’t leave these woods alive.”
Art turned suddenly to face him. The shotgun resting lightly against his sternum. “If we find her, neither of us will.” He saw the sheriff frown in confusion. He said, “I’m telling you, Bill. Turn around. Go back to your patrol car. And go home to your family. Because if we find Abby, the thing that killed her father, and killed your deputy, and has killed god knows how many other people in this fucking town over the last three centuries is going to be there guarding her.”
The sheriff looked at Art strangely then, though it might’ve been a trick of the shadows thrown by the flashlight. For a moment it seemed like he might be considering Art’s words. Then he poked Art with the gun barrel, uttering his one-word refrain: “Where?”
Art sighed, turned, and resumed his march. Ahead, something resolved out of the darkness, a great ramshackle outline behind the screen of trees. Art felt his scrotum tighten, a primal reaction to something sensed just below the level of conscious perception: a smell, a subliminal sound.
A barn, standing alone in a clearing in the middle of dense woods. A barn that seemed to hold contained within its rotting boards a darkness deeper than the night’s.
He lifted a hand and pointed at the barn, and gave the sheriff his answer: “There.”
As the ER house staff welcomed the hailstorm’s first walking wounded, Karen was being transported from her private room to the hospital’s new Childbirth Wellness Center.
Annexed to the west wing of Windale General, the Wellness Center had been built the preceding year according to a more enlightened paradigm of childbirth, eschewing the chilly tile delivery rooms of yore for the kinder pastel schemes of “birthing environments.” The facility was state-of-the-art and even boasted a large heated tub into whose gently circulating waters Essex County’s more adventurous mothers could expel their progeny. (The idea being that the transition from womb to water exposed the newborn to a lesser shock.) And yet, despite the center’s soothing murals and discrete natural lighting—provided by skylights in each suite—technology was never far from sight, and at a moment’s notice any room in the center could be converted into a fully equipped surgical unit.
Karen was wheeled into Birthing Suite D. The room was decorated in a simple abstract print wallpaper, was scented lightly with something artificially floral, and lighted at a more muted wattage than elsewhere in the hospital. There was nary a stainless steel instrument to be seen. From somewhere unseen overhead they were piping in Lite Jazz—a sax solo so chastely inoffensive it would never grace a love scene. Maybe that was the idea, to subliminally snuff out any conflicting stimuli below the waist.
And yet, despite the center’s best efforts at concealment, Karen noticed in one corner of the suite a “crash cart,” complete with shock paddles and defibrillator; and over there, behind a scrim of surgical drape, wasn’t that an anesthesiologist’s
ventilator?
Suddenly another contraction seized her, and Karen was wrenched away from any interest in her surroundings.
“Breathe through the pain,” she heard one of the RNs say. “No pushing yet.”
Fuck you, no pushing, she wanted to say, but she kept quiet, focusing her energy on the task of clamping down on this pain. Her breath hissed through clenched teeth. Around her, the KM was busying herself like a scrub-clad chambermaid, humming along with the Lite Jazz.
The contraction subsided, and Karen tipped her head back into the damp pillow. Maria appeared at the bedside, wearing surgical scrubs.
“Not much longer now,” the obstetrician said, glancing at the wall clock. “The pain will be over before midnight.”
She fed Karen ice chips from her hand. Karen tasted latex from Maria’s gloves. Another contraction coming. Less than a minute apart now. She tipped her head back and saw the ceiling overhead, painted to look like a sunny afternoon sky, complete with air-brushed clouds. It would’ve been a more complete illusion if not for the skylight amid the clouds, like a dark hole punched through the midday sky.
It was the biggest magic circle Wendy had ever drawn. Big enough to accommodate her Gremlin within its circumference. She had parked on the shoulder of the back road, more than a hundred feet from the covered trestle bridge that had serviced the Windale Textile Mill once upon a time. The place where Wither had attacked and captured Jack Carter. The place where she first appeared, Wendy thought, I suppose it’s only appropriate that it end here. Silently, she began laying out her magical implements.
Frankie watched as Wendy poured flour through a paper funnel, fiddling with the disposable camera she had insisted they stop for at a convenience store on the way to the mill road. “I want proof,” she had said adamantly. “No one’s going to believe this shit without some hard evidence.” Now she was a bundle of nerves. When the flash went off in her face she nearly dropped the camera. Satisfied with the camera’s operation, she slipped it into the pocket of her jean jacket. She rubbed her arms to ward off a chill that had less to do with cold than fear. Wendy had watched her confidence dwindle the closer they came to the covered trestle bridge.
