I focused and prayed for one instant of arcana again, hoping a rogue archangel would answer in the aether; a single name of power backed with majiks and I would drive his ribs up out the roof of his mouth.
"You seem to recognize this place," Hopkins said.
He pulled out a copy of the Malleus Malefacarum—the Witch's Hammer—a guidebook for witch-hunters. "What do you know of this book?" he asked.
"Everything."
Rubbing the leather-bound tome in a circular motion, like caressing the flesh of his lover after a long time apart, my heart sank to know he took strength even from touching the book. "God's word."
"The book of madmen," I said.
Printed in Germany, 1486—written by two Dominican inquisitors, Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger—after Pope Innocent VIII's papal edict Bull of 1484 launched the Inquisition. It was soon adapted by Protestant and Catholic Churches, based almost entirely on Exodus 22:18. "Though shall not suffer a witch to live." The three sections of the Malleus dealt with the Devil's temptations of man, his pact and spellwork, and the legalities surrounding the trying of witches, interrogation and the engines of torture.
"Then you know my love for it is nearly equal to my love for the bible. You know it is the most honest account of witchery ever written. It is the salvation of humanity."
I said, "And like the Bible it's filled with contradictions. Witches afflict the good, but only the wicked are vulnerable. Judges are immune but witches can cast spells over them with the evil eye."
He opened a page and quoted. "'Common justice demands that a witch should not be condemned to death unless she is convicted by her own confession.'"
We said nothing for a while as he continued wheeling me towards the witches ward. There, far off from the rest of the hospital buildings, he opened the double doors with a key, and introduced me to the rest of my damnable brethren.
The ones who still had their eyes stared in abject horror and envy. Look here at this freak, the one who is still whole, who might luckily die early in the agonies. I would join and swell their ranks.
"Maybe I should tell you more about myself," he said.
"Maybe not . . ." I croaked.
Hopkins had a staff working for him—four young men and a girl, each dressed in nursing garb, performing their duties as easily as their candystriper counterparts changed bedpans and took temperatures. They spoke in slithery vowels that had no meaning for me anymore, like buzzing insects, more inhuman than any demon. The only word clearly ringing out was, "Confess?" Inquisitive and amiable, like, "Can I get you anything else?"
"Confess?"
The girl looked over and smiled that cheesy smile Self had mocked. The waitress Margo turned her luncheonette attitude on me now in full, then returned to her duties.
She wrote down the mumblings of an old man who sat with his toes in the pinniewinks, spurting blood, his feet mauled and face showing hardly any emotion now. Suffering had its plateaus. When he stopped muttering, she nodded, urging him to continue. He grinned feebly at her.
Another victim swung wildly in a witch's cradle, stuffed in a sack hanging from a bolt in the ceiling, the sack set spinning in the air. A woman by the sound of her vomiting within. The mewling of a name:
". . . Andy, oh lord, Andy . . . ."
The cries and moans and retching continued. Some confessed, others didn't. Questions were repeated as we strolled by, Hopkins pushing me slowly through my own future. Fingers and tongues had been hacked off. The tortures continued.
"Why did you bite her eyes?" I whispered.
He stiffened. "I have no idea what you mean."
The victims were horsewhipped. The spider had been used, a sharp iron fork that mangled flesh and tore nipples off. Hopkins stopped and tsked when we came to a middle-aged woman whose feet hadn't bled quite enough. He used a large, heavy hammer to pound in the wedges that filled the leggings from ankles to knees. While she shrieked, he drew a hand over her face, clearing her hair from her mouth.
The water torture had been used on a few of them, forcing great quantities of water down the throat of the victim, along with a long knotted cloth. The cloth was violently yanked out then, tearing up the bowels. He wheeled me forward.
To witness strappado: I watched as a man's hands were bound behind his back and attached to a pulley—drawn to the ceiling and dropped. The jerk of the rope dislocated shoulders, hands and elbows. He screamed, but apparently not enough. "Confess? Confess?"
"Yes! Anything you want!"
They added weights to his feet for greater severity, and hauled him up for another go.
Twenty-six maimed and in agony.
Twenty-six.
And not one a witch.
"So," Hopkins said. "Let's begin, shall we?"
He had the master's touch.
Our first round lasted twelve hours.
He managed to keep me conscious through it all, until on the third drop in strappado my left shoulder cleanly separated with a loud crack. I shrieked until the back of my head came off, and blacked out.
For a few minutes.
The bullet wounds had already reopened and were squirting blood, and Hopkins occasionally ran a wet cloth over the ripped stitches and washed me like a kindly nursemaid. He kept me awake another two hours, using the red-hot pincers perfectly, thrawing me at the same time. Swish swish, my head snapped hard left and right, back and forth until one of the ropes above my left ear—in the middle of jerking me backwards—snapped and tore my neck until I was looking over my own broken shoulder in an impossible angle.
Margo had smiled through her entire shift. She waved goodbye to me and checked out for the night.
Hopkins and I kept going.
Two days later my soul was stuffed with killing curses. Psalms. Ghosts of men and dogs crept over and hung on me as I laid in the stagnant puddle of sweat, piss and blood. They fell on my back like crosses emptied of the crucified, wooden and without flesh. I tried to crawl to the other side of the room but I couldn't uncurl from the fetal position. By now I was damning all of them—my parents, my love, Self, and Rachel Grantham who had led me here. The other prisoners moaned with me, all of us in a nice blues bass harmony straight out of Memphis. There were only twenty-four of them now. The old man's crushed feet had bled him to death. The woman crying for Andy had never been released from the witch's cradle. Hopkins' men cut the sack down without opening it and left the ward. When they returned the scent of cherries wafted along with them like room freshener.
A teenage hitchhiker had been brought in, shaved, and carefully pricked for Satan's mark all afternoon. She'd put up a hell of a physical and verbal struggle though, which seemed to rouse the other prisoners slightly, enough to at least start them scratching and crying again. Me too.
I trembled uncontrollably on the tile floor. Sweat poured off me. All the power was gone, my majiks, but at least a few of the talents remained.
I drew my index finger through the pink puddle and set about scrying, pressing down into the liquid, shoving past the surface tension and reflections, into the heart of my own defecate.
After a few minutes I gave up and slept. When I came to, I immediately started again. Another ten minutes passed, much more time than should have been necessary. Nothing happened and I quit, and began once more.
Finally, wavering in the scrying puddle, a vision of Sarah Grantham and Maymon solidified. She looked coherent and angry, and stepped closely up into my frame of vision. "You!" she said. "Who the hell are you?"
The angle from which she peered back at me was extremely odd. I realized she was looking down onto the floor of her hospital room into a slanted ray of moonlight slicing between the curtains.
I tried to speak but nothing came up but clotted blood. She drew back from the other side of the scrying puddle. I nearly blacked out. Maymon crooned a song Self had once sung to me, and it helped.
Sarah said, "Oh God, what's happened to you? You were in my bedroom. And in church."
&nb
sp; "Yeah."
She nodded, hoping for more. "Those messages and meanings, all jumbled in my head, they're starting to thin and sort out." She cocked a thumb over her shoulder at Maymon. "Did you do this to me? Give this thing to me?"
"No. Thank your sister."
"You know something about Rachel? Where is she? Why am I locked up in here? What is this I've become?"
Inheritance had made her a witch, not curiosity. She knew nothing; years of study, practice and training went for little, and without control a duke of Hell's four millionth spawn counted for little more now. My own knowledge proved useless. With three of my fingers broken I couldn't even teach her a quick charm or hex, or anything useful to get us out of here. We were all kindling. "You're just one of the gang."
"He killed her, didn't he? He's hurt you. Doctor Hopkins."
"Yes."
"He's hurt me, too, the bastard. Nothing permanent yet. Just pricking with needles, making me walk across the room for hours and hours. My feet are like hamburger."
The face of Maymon's left knee now looked exactly like Sarah. It mouthed to me, You're dying.
I mouthed back, I know.
In the shadows behind her, I caught a hint of sudden movement: the white hospital coat, that pearly smile.
"Behind you!" I cried.
Maymon fluttered his wings, invisibly helpless, beaks working at once. I watched Hopkins tugging Sarah off the bed, his skilled hands knowing where to touch, to pinch and to caress. I called Maymon to me but he didn't respond. Screams in the puddle. All the pent-up frustration and lust exploding at once as Hopkins left his witch-killer's tools in his pocket this time, folded his clothes neatly over the bed railing, and made his brand of love to her. I watched his teeth but he never bit her. His kiss was uglier than that of Iscariot's ghoul. When he was done, he left her unconscious and moaning.
After that, he came to the ward, freshly showered, wet hair slickly combed back and his breathing returned to normal. Squatting beside me, he lifted my chin and stared into my face, searching for something I obviously didn't have, and not finding it, simply shook his head like a disappointed father. He looked at me as disgustedly as Self had at the end.
"Why did you bite Rachel's eyes?" I asked.
He swallowed and said, "Because I loved the witch."
Hopkins yanked me off the floor to my crushed feet, held me up until we were nose to nose. Broken ribs grated together in my side like ground glass, sawing through my lungs, puncturing my heart. I could feel my life sifting out through all the wounds. "Confess?" he asked.
"Oh," I said, "oh yes."
I had skills. Dying now, the other end of life opened up like a funnel before me, so beautiful and terrifying, the vacuum of heaven and hell foisting my soul forward—but as the doorway to death opened to allow me entrance, the last gasp agonies of Panecraft exited and backwashed the ward.
All of them came flooding out at once: a living, thriving asylum spirit of the Hexenhaus' insane and murdered. Good, at least I was dead enough to let them come home. I had talents.
Hopkins shook me. "What's happening? What did you do?"
I laughed.
It was the ugliest sound I'd ever heard, and listening to it made me laugh even harder.
A sudden burst of black energy in the center of the ward sent shadows and ghosts roaming the setting of their defeat. We kept reliving and redying in the Panecraft circulatory system, all of us connected. We were the blood of its veins, tissues of the same brain, cells of its maligned soul.
Hopkins shot backwards as if I'd given him an uppercut. He growled and dove at me, but as my blood ran over his hands he balked, listening to the noises growing around us. All the prisoners began to mutter and giggle, the dead here with us in the room.
"What have you done?" he whispered.
Rachel walked among us, and he knew it. Backing away step by step, the eye-biter searched the shadows for his own lost love, whirling, glaring as his victims' blood made dainty dripping sounds around him. The girl hitchhiker chuckled once, gave a short bark, and the others followed suit, all of this so very funny until the ward was filled with shrieks of glee and insanity. I laughed louder than any of them.
The entire building groaned, and we groaned with it—all of us tied together, the dead and dying, our rage swirling. Hopkins spun and said, "Rachel?"
She reached for him out of the darkness, and he turned tail and ran.
I staggered a few heartbeats closer towards death: time enough for a final thought, or a last stroll through good memories, but all I could do was laugh.
And it echoed in my mind.
You been having fun? Self asked.
He sat on my chest, plying my wounds, before burying his fangs in my throat. My back arched wildly and I heard my vertebrae crackling like broken pottery. My shoulders reconnected, snapping back in place with solid pops, torn muscles healing. I shrieked. Flesh resheathed all the empty, infected areas, my nails regrowing. "No," I begged, "leave me." He'd been juiced, and fed well on the outside without me, oh God. I fell further out of my own death, abandoned once again. Black motes of arcane energy floated from our eyes and lips, bubbling and flaming in the air. The healing hurt nearly as badly as the vises and machines. His strength drained into me, and he wavered and fell against my heart, grimaced and ground his cheek into my chest hair. Coils of flashing majiks spun against us, retying us tightly. An overwhelming hunger invaded me, my Christ, all the blood and beautiful murder made our mouths water, hot spit washing out over his fangs. Soon my hands were completely healed. A flood tide of sorcery burned in my fists. Self stroked my forehead like a mother tending to a feverish child.
I backhanded him. You little bastard!
His jaw dropped, eyes wild. Why did I even come back? I don't need you!
Of course he did.
Of course we did.
All right, it's been coming to this. Let's do it.
Yes! He screamed and launched himself at me.
Strangling Self, we struggled on more planes than I thought possible, like all the love and hate in my head unleashed in self-loathing. Egos lost and colliding, his claws hooked in my nerves, our pulses in perfect sync. I wondered if he wanted to bite my eyes. Our systems clashed, shared soul stretched to the breaking limit, each of us arguing I'm in charge. Holy Christ, I'd let it go on for too long. He'd healed me too many times. "It is essential that the witch remains the master of all that he beholds, hears, or conceives; otherwise he will be the slave of illusion and the prey of madness." It was true. I'd been the prey.
Slowly, the fighting of ourselves ended, and we both fell forward and held each other crying.
The other prisoners railed and gibbered and begged; I had no idea how many could be saved or would want to live, but the doctors—so close at hand just a few building away through all the days of mutilation—would try.
Whole again, I rushed down the corridors, through the atriums, searching for Sarah. Now it took only a moment to open a scrying portal in one of the windows, and I saw her already running outside. I followed her out down the hills into the cherry orchard, heading towards Potter's Filed. In the distance, I could see Maymon flying beside her. I called her name repeatedly, but she kept running into the night, away from whatever sins her sister, and Hopkins, and I had left with her.
I sprinted across the field and put my hand on her shoulder. She turned in a daze; being raped left her looking as dead as anyone on the ward.
"Sarah, it'll be all right."
"No," she said, "never again. I've got to leave. I've got to get out of here."
Branches heavy with cherries drooped over us; the sweet powerful scent of summer and childhood washed over me in a deluge of memories that seemed closer to the surface than they had been in years. Hopkins had brought me full circle. All the beauty of the worlds we'd lost seemed hidden out in the black orchard. In there was every reason why people hung Rockwell on their walls. Graves in Potter's Field lay freshly turned. We looked off in
to the shadowy trees together.
"Where will you go?" I asked.
"My family's gone. There's nothing left for me here. Where do we go?"
"I don't know," I said. "But if you want me to help teach you I can. . . ."
Maymon's knees glared at me and snarled, Shut up.
"Maybe we'll see you again," she said, and left me there as she crossed the field.
I watched her go before turning to the Hexenhaus.
Panecraft stared back at me.
When I returned to the witches ward, the ceiling and walls had new, beautifully painted intricate designs on them. Self stood before the senseless, quivering mass of meat on the tile floor, grinning. He'd done quick and proper work, moving from item to item and using them all perfectly—the turcas, strappado, bootikens, all the vises, the thrawing ropes—everything.
Now that's vengeance, he said.
We waited and watched the mess on the floor as it made abrupt, shuddery movements and feeble, inhuman sounding entreaties. One of its shattered hands reached out to touch my ankle. It opened its bitten eyes and tried to find me, perhaps to explain more about its love. Maybe to make a confession.
Self turned to me and asked, You going to lecture me again?
There we stood as, perhaps, we always had. Facing each other, but together. He'd taken so much from me, and given more back, so that even separated, after all this time, we were inseparable. Maybe he should have let me die. I knew that no matter what I was, what my Self was, he existed because I'd sold something else that demanded replacing. Because I needed and loved him. Because I'd laughed.
"No," I said.
LIKE A HELL-BROTH
Eighteen years old, five feet tall, and tipping in at perhaps one forty of solid muscle, Claire Marie Rundlemann had taken a shine to me somewhere near Chattanooga and hadn't quit talking since. I nodded a lot and offered monosyllabic words of interest and understanding. She'd been chatting for more than a hundred miles as we headed north through the Appalachians, taking a red-eye Greyhound bus. Her incessant giggling, grousing, and bellowing laughter didn't bother me. The occasional rock-hard elbow in my ribs did. Other passengers sighed and muttered ineffably, hoping to get some sleep as we rolled over midnight through the shadows of these empty mountain passes.
Pentacle - A Self Collection Page 11
