by Wither
She extended a dainty bare foot to the top rung and began her slow descent. By the fourth rung she was within Art’s reach, and he lifted her clear of the ladder and hugged her, saying over and over again, “I’ve got you now, it’s okay, I’ve got you…”
She clung to him, and he felt tears well up in his eyes, sharp and stinging. He called to the sheriff, “You’d better hurry and climb down from there—”
He stopped, alert. He heard the little girl draw a sharp breath beside his ear, and felt her pulse quicken.
Abby said, “She’s back.” She was staring up into the rafters at the far side of the barn.
Movement overhead, sudden and violent, the shadows coming alive. Art spun, trying to fix it with the flashlight beam, but the witch was moving too fast. The flashlight bulb imploded with a quiet pop. Art dropped it to the hay underfoot. “Bill, get down from there!”
Too late. They heard a startled cry as the sheriff was snatched from the hayloft and carried aloft high into the rafters.
BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! Three deafening shotgun blasts exploded in quick succession, each strobing nightmarish shadows. The witch shrieked and dropped the sheriff. He fell across the twenty-foot open barn and landed hard on the hard-packed dirt floor. Art ran to him and saw a splinter of bloody bone jutting from his thigh.
The barn shuddered around them as the witch leapt from one rafter to the next overhead. Art tried to track her movement through the dark, but without the flashlight it was impossible. He set Abby down and began dragging the groaning sheriff toward the barn door. Abby held on to Art’s pant leg, whimpering.
Art tripped over something in the hay underfoot and looked down—the old man’s old double-barrel shotgun. He broke it open, saw two fresh shells inside…
The witch had already survived three blasts at close range. He’d have to make these last two count.
Where is she? He could see nothing. The only remaining light was cast by the old kerosene lamp resting on the floor a few yards away. The wick had burned down to a dim blue flame, as if the darkness itself was smothering it. Where are you, Sarah Hutchms? Art thought, hefting the shotgun.< /p>
He shouted up into the rafters, “I know you’re up there, Sarah.”
At the sound of her name the witch hissed from a high corner. Art immediately trained the twin gun barrels in the direction of the sound. “You’ve overstayed your welcome,” Art shouted up to the witch. “There’s a grave waiting for you, Sarah.”
And now came a new sound, echoing from a dozen directions at once, impossible to pinpoint: laughter. A deep, liquid rattle. Art felt his stomach clench at the distinctly human sound and was reminded that his enemy was not some brute animal who could be easily provoked, but a malevolent intelligence…with an equally malevolent patience. She was waiting…
Then suddenly she was in motion. He heard the shuddering thud of her moving from one rafter to the next, tried to track her across the dark. The movement stopped, and as the echoes rippled away the silence returned like a still and impenetrable surface.
The witch could be anywhere now. She was playing with them, enjoying her advantage over them in the dark. Beside him, Abby whimpered. Art picked her up and she buried her face in his shoulder, crying. She wrapped her arms around his neck, accidentally brushing his bandana awry…
And the darkness became suddenly visible.
His injured right eye saw through the shadows. The darkness deepened into a textured landscape of surface and shadow.
Suddenly what had been a blanket of darkness became a terrain of varied night shades, blues and grays and violets. He saw the barn’s complex framework of rafters and supports, saw the ancient hayloft in exquisite detail, saw the old rusted baling hooks dangling by chains high above them…
She was on the ground with them, only a few yards away, crouched beneath the hayloft. Watching them, motionless as a cat. Thinking she remained unseen in the dark, that she alone had the advantage of night-sight.
But the witch was wrong. She herself was indirectly responsible for the gift of this night-adapted eye.
Art let her think he couldn’t see her crouching there, yards away. He fought the impulse to turn and fire at her. He could wait as well. He watched her rise slowly, silently from her crouch and stride toward them.
Closer. Come closer, Sarah.
She stood within three yards of them. “Sarah!” he called up into the empty rafters, as if he thought she was still hiding there. He saw her lips curl back in a snarling smile. Pleased with herself, playing with them.
He spun and emptied the first barrel into her.
The blast knocked her back a step, roaring in surprise. Furious, she lunged at them.
One shell left. Art didn’t aim at her this time, though, but at a different target.
The kerosene lamp. The blast sprayed flaming kerosene against the witch, setting her tattered rags aflame. The fire spread to the hay beneath her. She bellowed in agony.
Art threw aside the shotgun. One arm cradling Abby, he grabbed the sheriff by the scruff of his jacket and dragged him toward the barn door. Behind them, the witch screamed from within the liquid flame that engulfed her. She staggered, thrashing, trying to beat out the flames, and collided with one of the barn’s support beams. The old barn shifted and groaned, collapsing in on itself…
Even as the flames rushed across dried straw to the four crumbling walls of the dilapidated barn, Art dragged the sheriff clear, then collapsed beside him outside in the witchgrass. Abby sat in Art’s lap and stared up at the fire with solemn eyes. Together, the three refugees of the blaze watched the biggest bonfire any of them had ever seen send hissing embers spiraling up to the midnight sky.
Now that it was too late, Wendy finally understood. Wither’s presence mingled in the confines of Wendy’s body and mind, acquainting her with Wendy in the most intimate way possible. Wither hadn’t been draining away Wendy’s life. Seasoning her maybe, weakening her soul possibly, preparing her body for a demonic transfer of life’s energy—a soul—definitely. But she’d had it completely backward. The witch needed to replace Wendy’s life and soul with her own. There were cycles within cycles. Waking every hundred years to feed, to grow, to change, but every three hundred years the hardened, monstrous body had to be replaced, sloughed off to start a new cycle, when the ancient life fitted itself in the confines of a fresh young body. To start another three-hundred-year cycle of growth in Wendy’s body!
Wendy wondered helplessly if her mind, her memories, her soul would be cast in the discarded, weakened carcass of the witch, a useless husk that would quickly shrivel and die…. Or would the witch consume that which was Wendy, her essence, in the process of taking residence in her flesh. And would anyone, even her family, know that a being of pure evil now wore her skin like a suit of clothes?
The process had weakened Wendy’s will. She felt herself winking out, her consciousness like a flickering fluorescent lightbulb. Each flicker was longer than the last. Wither’s mind raged within her, testing the body, the reflexes, rooting in the corners of her mind, stirring up lost memories and blotting them up, filling them with her own, and revealing herself to Wendy. Wither no longer saw Wendy as a threat or an obstacle. She was making herself at home in a young woman’s mind, a mind that Wendy was surrendering to an ancient evil force. Wendy felt diminished, losing herself, but seeing Wither for what she was at long last…
Another time, over three hundred years ago. A carriage ride… Elizabeth Wither, the woman who was Elizabeth Wither, returning to London, It is night, and the coach careens wildly as the horses scream. The coachman’s scream follows, but it is all too brief. Charles Wither pats her hand in comfort, but his eyes widen in terror. A black arm, impossibly long, bursts through the carriage door, plunges into his chest and pulls him into the night. He is dead before he can scream. The arm comes again, but this time slowly, lifting Elizabeth gently through the shattered side of the carriage into the night for an embrace that Wendy has finally come to
understand…
Other times, other faces, other women in endless three-hundred-year cycles… Wendy looks bach in time through the inverted telescope of Withers predatory mind. In Withers mind, Wendy sees the fall and rise of Rome, she sees the first trilithon of Stonehenge raised on Salisbury Plain, a monument that will require more than fifteen hundred years to construct, she sees the moon god’s ziggurat of Ur in Sumeria. She sees the collapse of science into superstition, technology into barbarism, cities into huts, the countless faces of a line of women stretching back to the belief in pagan gods and demons, and if the gods have proved false, the demons are all too real. And Wither, or that which has become known as Wither, has been there all along, hiding in the shadows, just beyond the light and warmth of the first campfires, preying on humankind. She can not be understood by any one religion because she has outlasted them all, she has always been there… feeding.
Frankie watched horrified as Elizabeth Wither held Wendy in a bizarre lover’s embrace, her nearly hairless, black head poised inches from Wendy’s face, their mouths parted, as if in anticipation of some unholy kiss between woman and demon. From the witch’s mouth came a long, guttural, clotted sigh, and the air between them rippled like heat waves, but Frankie knew it was something else moving between them, some vital energy. Wendy had said Wither was draining her life force like a battery, but it looked to Frankie as if the transfer was moving in the opposite direction. Wendy seemed to vibrate with energy, while the nine-foot-tall monster that held her in its grip appeared to be diminished with each passing moment. Wendy’s eyes bad rolled back in their sockets, her head lolling from side to side in a weakened struggle, even as her limbs trembled with nervous energy. Slowly, Frankie was coming to a horrible realization, but the progression of her thought was interrupted as the ceremonial dagger fell from the frayed pocket of Wendy’s robe.< /p>
Frankie saw the flash of metal. The blade struck haft first, fell with the point facing her. No magic in the dagger, Frankie now realized. She had reserved a small corner of faith for Wendy’s magic circles and banishments, had believed Wendy might somehow be able to protect them from a real witch—hell, a coven of them. But Frankie’s belief had crumbled as each gesture and incantation had proved empty and useless against the witch’s evil.
But a knife was a knife, magic or not.
Frankie crawled forward, reached for the dagger, then winced at the sharp pain in her side. She clutched the dagger within her intertwined fingers, both hands trembling violently. She raised it above the knotty span of the witch’s clawed foot, then slammed the point of the dagger down.
In a last fading moment of coherent thought, Wendy understands she is just the latest victim, one more sacrificial host to Wither, in a line stretching back over five thousand years. Wither is a plague on mankind and an abomination to nature, which she has always had the ability to pervert in the service of her evil. She is a malevolent force that has never been denied. All thoughts of resistance slip through Wendy’s ability to concentrate. She is almost gone…
A shaft of pain lanced through the darkness. As Wendy’s eyes fluttered open, the witch drew her head back. Wendy felt an echo pain in her own foot, and the more immediate agony of the witch’s crushing grip on her arms. A smothering veil of despair had been lifted from “Wendy’s mind, providing an instant of clarity. She had snapped back from the brink of oblivion. The witch had been suppressing Wendy’s ability to resist, her ability to even consider the possibility of resisting, by making her believe, truly believe, her situation was hopeless. The reprieve might be short-lived. Wendy didn’t hesitate. She reached for Elizabeth Wither’s gnarled face and plunged her thumbs, with their mutated nails, deep into the witch’s bulging yellow eyes.
The witch screamed, dropping Wendy as both clawed hands reached for her own damaged face. Wendy fell to the ground, momentarily blind as well, rolling quickly out from under the witch’s stomping feet. She heard the witch bellowing in pain, the heavy thudding blows of her feet as her long arms lashed about in their blind search for her prey.
Wendy focused on her own identity, to seek her sense of serf, independent of Wither. Her self. Her family, her friends, her profs, her classes, her stupid Gremlin, but more deeply, her hopes and dreams, her happiness at what she and Alex had shared, followed by her grief and guilt over what had happened to Alex. She climbed to her feet. “Quiet!” she shouted to Frankie. Her vision began to clear. She searched for a piece of deadwood, found a branch Wither herself had broken from a maple tree, and began to swing it back and forth, thwacking it against the trees, the dead leaves at her feet, until finally, Wither followed the sound.
Wendy ran through the trees at full speed and burst onto the cracked blacktop of the condemned Windale Textile Mill’s parking lot. Raging and blind, Wither swatted trees from her path and followed Wendy’s noisy retreat, the witch’s loping strides quickly closing the distance.
Wendy’s immediate goal was to lure Wither as far from Frankie as possible. Beyond that she only wanted to stay out of that fateful embrace. She felt as if shed been given a death row pardon, and she would rather kill herself than let the evil of Wither creep into her mind again, to devour or discard her soul as she took up residence in Wendy’s body.
Nowhere to hide…but inside the long, sprawling building. The nearest door was hanging from one rusty hinge. Wendy slipped through the opening with a squeal of protest from the door, then into the shadowy darkness of the condemned mill. Most of the windows, high and low, had been shattered over the years by bored teenagers throwing rocks. The machinery of the mill had been removed long ago, along with copper tubing and anything else of even marginal value.
By the time Wendy had surveyed her enclosed surroundings, the door screeched as Wither slammed into it, ripping it off its one remaining hinge. The walls of the building seemed to quake with the impact. Dust rained down on Wendy’s head, along with several chips of plaster. The witch hurled the metal door into the building and smashed her way through the door frame after it.
Wendy could hear a low, keening moan in the building, decayed metal straining to hold its form as the witch battered against the walls. Wendy worried the place would come down on her head any second.
Suddenly it dawned on her. She’d read that a pile of stones had crushed an accused Salem witch or a wizard in an attempt to extract a confession. And right this moment, Wendy was fresh out of bullets, stakes, or fire.
She looked around quickly. How to bring down the house, collapse a building, even a condemned one? She had seen the implosions of demolished buildings on the news all the time, but that involved the strategic placement of explosives. Think, she told herself. How—?
Now that Wither was inside the building and not pounding against the door frame anymore, the vibrations had begun to subside. The imminent danger of collapse had passed, unless she could help the process along by knocking out a load-bearing wall. She remembered their old house, before they’d moved to the president’s mansion at Danfield, how her mother had wanted to knock down a wall between two small rooms to make one medium-size room.
The contractor told her the wall had to stay, because it was a load-bearing wall, supporting the weight of the upper floor.
Wendy realized that the second-floor row of offices was held up by the line of four plaster columns, probably with a girder of steel at their core. She walked carefully behind the first one and rapped on it with her branch. Bits of lath fell from the crumbling column. Wendy just hoped the process of entropy—nature’s most unrelenting force—had had sufficient time to work its decaying magic. Wither came charging at the rapping sound, like a bull spotting the toreador’s cape. The witch seemed to loom incredibly larger with every loping stride.
At the last moment Wendy dodged toward the second column. Wither hit the first with the force of a locomotive. Lath exploded in a cloud of debris, and the steel underneath was dislodged from its mooring. Incredibly, Wither wrenched the girder even farther out of position. The
creak and moan of steel above Wendy’s head became a discordant song, punctuated by the crack of splitting plaster and crumbling cinder blocks. She would die, but she would take Wither with her.
The second column had already begun to buckle. Wendy swatted it with her branch. “Over here!” she shouted. Black blood oozed from Wither’s gaping eye sockets. She bared her teeth and charged, lowering her shoulder as she reached for the sound of Wendy’s voice. But Wendy had sidestepped, and the second column crumpled under the witch’s onslaught. The witch grinned through broken teeth, pleased with this intimidating demonstration of her power, that ramming herself into human constructions wasn’t hurting her at all, probably thinking to demoralize Wendy.
The groaning above became more pronounced, and the far end of the row of offices seemed to lean downward. Popping, crunching sounds rang out above. Wendy didn’t think shed need to have Wither charge the remaining two columns. Just keep her under here! Chips of stone and dust began to rain down on them. “Over here,” Wendy whispered. Wither slowed, as if warned by Wendy’s cautious tone, perhaps thinking there might be a hole in the floor before her. The witch’s feet lifted off the ground and she moved forward, floating. Her head just inches beneath the crumbling ceiling. The third column was bending, twisting, lath popping and spraying as the tortured metal underneath slowly gave way under the pressure from above. Wendy backed away, the sounds of her cross-trainers crunching bits of debris now drowned out by the sudden, escalating roar above her. Wither was still unaware the ceiling was about to come down on both of them. And Wendy was looking for a corner to hide in when she realized the window behind her was broken, a V-shaped hunk of glass missing. A last chance, maybe, but she would have to wait to the last second or risk Wither following her out into the safety of the night. Wendy slipped out of her robe and wrapped it several times around her forearm, creating a thick padding.
