Ann grabbed her by the back of the neck and cradled her head. “No, you’re not, love. You’re my friend, and I won’t let it happen. I love you so much, and I won’t let it happen even if I have to go and kill them all myself.”
Nick eased over to Beverly and coaxed her out of Ann’s arms. He yanked her shirt back to take a look at the angry wound. It was deep into her shoulder, and the pink flesh around it was starting to turn a putrid gray. The wound wept a thick black fluid that smelled of rot, and it was refusing to even mildly scab over. Red streaks were starting to race up her neck. The infection was running wild in her veins.
Satanic witches were a corruption of the mind, the soul, and the body, and it was now clear to everyone that the witches would stop at nothing to spread it to those who had any goodness or purity in them. Ann watched Nick run to the trash can and pull out some of the fast-food wrappers that they had tossed earlier. He flew around the room, gathering anything that was known to stop corruption either physically or symbolically. He came to her and pulled some of the unused salt packets out of the fast-food bags. He mixed the salt with honey and Saint John’s Wort, and he slathered the concoction all over her wound.
“This will work,” he said. Ann could tell just by the tremble in his voice he was lying. He handed Beverly an assortment of silver charms and necklaces that the store sold and instructed her to put them on. “Bind her wounds,” Nick barked as he ran into aisles, gazing at the books.
“What are we doing now?” Kim asked, poking her head out of her hiding place behind the counter.
“I’m going on the offensive,” he said, lighting up one of the many scented candles that were all about the store. He frantically began rifling through the books, trying to find anything useful. “I know the store well, and I study its contents when I can. So I have a good idea on where I can find the information we need,” Nick roared.
Ann watched Beverly slide her back down a bookshelf, taking a seat. Ann scooted in next to her and tossed an arm around her. She pulled Beverly in close. Ann could feel her heart racing.
“You know, when I was like fourteen, I was out in the field beside my house,” Beverly confided, snuggling into Ann. “I was out there painting a picture of the old shed, and I had my easel and my paint and my brushes all set up. I remember I was almost finished when I saw this lovely little monarch butterfly come floating in. I don’t know why, but it landed right in my red paint, and it just got stuck. It was flapping its wings as hard as it could, but it was just getting sucked in deeper. I wanted to save the little guy, so I reached down and tried to help him out. He was flapping so hard that I couldn’t really grab him, but every moment that passed, he was just digging himself in deeper. So I did the only thing I could. I reached in. It…It smashed him even deeper into the paint, and every time I tried to pull him out, I would just end up pushing him further down. By the end, he was just this little broken thing that had only one wing left and even less life. I just cried as I realized all hope was lost, so I smashed him. I knew then that there was no God. What kind of thing would allow someone’s best intentions to become murder?” Beverly looked at Ann and her brother with tears rolling down her blood-covered cheeks. “These things are from the devil, aren’t they?”
“I think so,” Ann said as she squeezed Beverly.
“Then there might be a God?” Beverly wondered.
“You know I always thought there was, but…Yes, there might be,” Ann said tentatively.
“Fuck, that sucks. I might have to rethink my idea of becoming a stripper.”
“You would have made a terrible stripper, anyway…You've got no rhythm…, or boobs,” Ann said giving her a playful shove.
“Funny how evil made me deny something, and an even greater evil made me confirm what I was denying. You think we should pray?”
“It couldn’t hurt,” Mike speculated as he took a seat next to his sister.
Beverly looked into Ann’s soft eyes. “Do you remember the Lord’s Prayer?”
“Parts of it.”
“I think I’ve seen the exorcist so many times I could say it,” Mike said.
“Go for it,” Beverly muttered as she bowed her head. The rest followed her example as Mike started.
“Oh God, give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those that trespass against us. Lord, you are our high tower, and you lead us beside good water and green pastures. Our Lord, hallowed be thy name, and when your kingdom comes, it shall be done on earth as it is in heaven. And Lord, help us kill these savages outside that want to do us harm. I don’t know if they’re from the devil or some kind of government experiment or what, but they need to be taken off this earth and sent to the bottomless pits of hell. I don’t know why you put us through this, Lord, but I mean, come on! Really? Help us out, big guy.” No one pointed out that Mike had gotten most of the words wrong. It was the thought that counted.
“It’s not going to help,” Hegel said, cackling from behind the door. Mike yanked the gun from his waist band.
“Neither will the gun,” she said, now sounding as if she was coming from the roof. Mike tried desperately to follow, but the voice always seemed to be shifting in and out of reality.
“Well, the gun helped out a lot so far, and I know a prayer can’t hurt,” Mike retorted.
“Why do you think a good God would put you in this situation to start with?”
“I don’t know, Maybe he’s got plans for us,” Ann countered defensively.
“Yes, his plan is for you to be raped, butchered, and consumed. I know, because it was your God that sent me here.”
“You have nothing, and we’re not falling for your bluff.”
“It’s no bluff. I only speak the truth.”
“You don’t even know what that is,” Ann barked.
“We shall see,” Hegel taunted as her voice faded.
No one said a word. Beverly felt her body dump all of the energy she had stored in her muscles. The words of the witch cut deep. She slumped onto Ann and only the opposing weight of each other's bodies kept them upright. Beverly’s mind faded back to when she and Ann were kids. There was a massive hill, at least it seemed massive when they were kids, that sat at the edge of the playground next to their homes. They would imagine they were in the Land of Oz as they rolled down the hill pretending to be attacked by the wicked witch and her diabolical magic. Beverly would always throw a fit if she wasn’t Dorothy, but it was a roll Ann had rarely wanted anyway. The Tin Man was always her favorite, either that or Glenda the good witch.
“What did Dorothy have anyway but a dog and some magic shoes she didn’t know how to use? Naw, the Tin Man had an ax, and the good witch had a wand she could actually do things with, and they didn’t whine nearly as much,” Ann would say. The movie was everything that was good about Beverly's childhood, all wrapped up in one wonderful Technicolor package, and so the sights and sounds of Munchkin Land rolled past her mind's eye as she felt Ann snuggle closer to her. She knew why Ann still loved the stupid movie so much. She finally had to admit that she still loved it, too.
They had killed that stupid witch a thousand times when they were kids, and it looked like they were going to have to do it one last time. She didn’t know how, but they’d find a way.
* * *
Outside, the flames of the witches’ bonfire still burned high, and around it the diabolical fiends cavorted. Some rubbed themselves with potent salves and balms made from human fat, and as soon as their naked bodies were covered, they began to transform into beasts of the field. They sprouted hair, claws, and fangs. They ripped at their own flesh, pulling it off as if it was a cellophane wrapper, and they exposed their real natures.
Hegel strutted among her kind with a determined eye as the smell of sex and sweat wafted about on the musty air. In her left hand, she clutched her pitchfork. It was, as far as she could remember, taken from a farmer during the Great Depression, and what a time that was to be a witch—all of the mass
confusion of the Black Plague without all the annoying accusations. She had gutted the farmer with a razor, or maybe she had chopped his feet off and made him eat them? She honestly couldn’t remember the finer details of her life , unless they were something special, but she could still remember Ann and her stupid little pocketknife.
She could also remember that tonight it was her job to provide for the feast. So far, they had eaten almost all of the hobos and the bodies from the porno store, but witches were nothing if not voracious. Even a few people who were travelling down the lonely road had been taken; however, more was going to be needed and soon.
How was she supposed to know that they were going to wind up in a place that was fortified against witches? In all her days, such a thing had never happened, but she knew that the holdouts would be subdued as the demons would be raised in mass. Demons were not like the imps and dark earthly spirits that cavorted with the witches as pets and familiars, but fallen angels who have existed since before light separated darkness. These beings did not obey the laws of magic like the lesser beings. They would often pretend to be affected, but no mere circle of salt or iron bars would stop them.
The problem with these demons was that they could not be controlled like the meeker spirits. They could be enticed to do something only if it was part of their agenda or amused them. Yes, songs and rites would be performed to entice them, but even this was more a form of appealing to their vanity than it was a mystical event. This fact meant that there was always some chance that they might not show themselves, but with tonight being such a large gathering, at least a few would probably have their interest piqued. After all, the witches had s’mores.
Hegel saw that one particularly ugly witch was chomping at the last bits of flesh that clung to one of the slow-roasted hobos.
“I hunger,” she yelled.
“Me, too,” another bleated.
“I’m not starving, but I could eat,” added another.
“Eat a s’more,” Hegel barked.
“We want meat,” the first one growled. Hegel launched her pitchfork as if she was Zeus, and it was a bolt of thunder. The pitchfork smacked the gut of the first witch. She let out “oohhh, it hurts,” but before she could collapse to the ground, Hegel stormed over to her and latched her hands around the end of her pitchfork. With one powerful motion, she hoisted the wailing whore of the devil into the air. The naked, impaled fiend’s feet kicked furiously as she tried to pull herself off the pitchfork. Her bile leaked onto the hot pavement around the fire, hissing with each drip.
“You eat too much, and you think too little. I have gone through a lot of trouble tonight, and all you do is complain. I spent a hundred dollars in Solo cups alone. Too good for chocolate and marshmallows, are we?” Hegel growled as she hoisted the squirming witch into the inferno. Her still-kicking legs blistered and peeled, showing the meat underneath, and she screamed in agonizing pain. The fire was so hot that it instantly charred her skin, and the hair on her head melted to her scalp. Soon her cries of pain grew fainter as the fire found bone.
With a powerful swing, Hegel tossed the charred witch to the pavement. “Here, a new dish—blackened slut,” Hegel said, yanking out her pitchfork. It didn't take long for the others to begin ripping into the cooked meat. As the cooked witch's brains spilled to the pavement like undercooked scrambled eggs, Hegel’s mind drifted back into her past. She was at that age where everything reminded her of something else, and this reminded her of southern Germany hundreds of years ago.
At fourteen her family had been killed by the Black Death. She roamed many villages looking for any kind of sanctuary, but she found only looters and the dead. A young man of the church by the name of Gaston found her barely clinging to life. His eyes were soft and kind and so was his heart. During their travels she couldn’t help but fall in love with the one person who truly cared for her, the one person who looked to do Good in the face of so much evil, and the one person who had taken vows to never be with a woman.
“I am married to God,” he would say when she would throw herself at him. Love became desperation and then hate. She met other travelers in those dark times. They said they could give her what she wanted: they could make him love her in all the ways that she deserved. The things she did next were so terrible that not even someone as Good as Gaston could ever forgive her. Those terrible things. She forced her mind back to the present in an effort to forget how she had become a worse plague on humanity than the sickness that took her family. It was time to focus on the task at hand, killing the food that had locked itself in the Black Crystal.
Chapter 7: Full Bladders
The wound on Beverly’s shoulder was starting to bubble from the concoction, but no one had any idea if that was a good thing or a bad thing. Mike stormed from boarded-up window to boarded-up window, trying his best to see what was happening. Ever since he had seen the original Night of The Living Dead he had wanted to see a zombie apocalypse. It wasn’t the zombies he was interested in so much as the situations that they put people in.
Trapped in a boarded-up farm house, the people in the movie had to use their strength and wits to survive, and he had always fancied himself as having an abundance of both. However, in his daydreams he had more guns and wasn’t scared shitless. The fact that these were witches and not zombies gave him no comfort, and he’d give anything to be sitting on the sofa in his trailer watching TV with a beer in his hands. But he was here, this was happening, and he would do his best to see that as many people could live through this as possible.
Kim sat with her hands over her ears, trying to block out the incessant chanting of the chaotic forces outside. All she had wanted was some light happy reading to make her feel like a deep person; instead she got screaming hordes of devil worshipers. Life could be unfair that way sometimes.
“Get me all the bottles you can find. I have something that might work,” Nick shouted as he poked his head out from behind one of the bookshelves with a stern look on his face.
“What?” Ann said as she ground her blade into one of the overturned bookshelves she was sitting on.
“Witch bottles,” he answered with a smile as he held up a book on the history of witchcraft. “It will work; so let’s snap to it.” Since no one had any better ideas, and they were all feeling powerless, it didn’t take much coaxing for Nick to get them to go along with his plan.
As they frantically gathered up every bottle they could find, Nick explained what they were doing. “Witch bottles are a type of protection from witchcraft; not only do they stop the witches from casting spells, but also they can sicken or even kill the spell casters. Now I’m betting that every one of those witches is casting or has cast a spell at this place and at us. If this works, then we might be able to hurt a good chunk of them.”
The dwindling group worked rapidly, gathering any kind of container they could find, and in a place like the Black Crystal, it was a simple task. The store itself offered a dozen different kinds of bottles and jars for the storing of herbs and the casting of spells, and the bottles containing the herbs themselves could be emptied and used. All of the cleaning products from the janitor’s closet were emptied, as well as every bottle in the soda machine. Nothing escaped the grasp of their eager hands, and if it could hold liquid and have a top placed on it, then it was snatched and brought to Nick. Nick grabbed a cleaning bucket and sat it in the middle of the room.
“OK, everyone come over here,” Nick ordered, waving them in with his hands. The battered group gathered around him, their eyes fixed on the bucket. In Nick’s right hand, he held a pair of scissors. “Hair, toenails, fingernails, and piss in the bucket. We’ll do the piss last, one at time, to keep at least a bit of modesty about us, but everyone has to squeeze out every drop they have.”
“I’m not chopping off my hair,” Kim argued defiantly.
“You will or I will make you,” Mike barked, grabbing the scissors out of Nick’s hands. His eyes went cold, and his voice was as hard as steel
. “Now cut,” he demanded as he handed her the scissors. She cried as she made the first snip, and the tears rolled down her youthful cheeks.
“Quickly,” Nick urged. “Witching hour is closing in, and we don’t have much time.” Feverishly, they cut and clipped their hair and nails, tossing them into the bucket. Ann’s shoulder-length blonde hair that perfectly framed her face was soon gone, and she was left with a gnarled mess of patchy hair of wildly different lengths. All of them were starting to look as if they were exposed to radiation. No one said a word as they dumped handfuls of hair into the blue mop bucket, and when it came time to piss, they did it unceremoniously and without comment.
When they had finished, Nick looked down at piss-soaked globs of hair. “We’re going to start filling the containers with this crap, and once we start, we can’t talk. If one of us makes a sound, it won’t work, and we’ll have made ourselves look stupid for nothing. We’ll need a few more things to complete the witch bottles. All of the cast-iron cauldrons we have will have to be brought to the center of the room, and then we need to start fires in them. Candles, too. What we are going to do is fill these bottles with the concoction we’ve made, and then two of you will put any kind of sharp object you can find in the bottles. Pins, needles, broken glass, pointed chunks of wood, and bits of plastic. Anything you can find that will cause injury. We then will dangle these bottles over the flames of the fires and candles.” Nick grabbed a bottle.
Looking confused Mike asked, “What does it do?”
“The objects that you put in the bottles will be put into the witches’ bladders, and they have to piss them out. The fire will boil their bladders, and when the bottle burns or explodes, so will the bladders of the witches.”
A devilish smile spread across Mike’s lips.
“What do you mean?” Kim said.
“Like I said. Whatever you put into the bottles, the magic will do that damage to the inside of the witch. If you put a roll of quarters in the container, it will be like putting a roll of quarters in the bladders of the witches, and they will suffer the same pain as if they actually had a roll of quarters in their bodies.”
Maleficarum: Hunger of the Witch Page 6
