Season of the Witch

by Charlee Jacob

  Renae made commentaries in her review notes about the genre itself. Things that came to her as she watched this stuff and wondered why people got into it—why she did.

  As much as people take dying seriously, they don’t take horror seriously—even though horror is all about death. Every subtle or gratuitously graphic aspect concerns dying, with the soul and moral decay accelerated by prose and unmitigated madness.

  One sought to appear intelligent on the subject, flaunting those in the Christian Right who believed all horror writers and actors were Satanists. And there was oppression by the literary community at large: Don’t they know that the first tale ever told around a cave fire was probably a ghost story?

  Renae had tried writing. She’d produced one slim volume of poetry, written three years ago at the tender age of nineteen. There were those—even in the profession—who claimed there was no such thing as horror poetry, insisting it was an oxymoron. She believed that Coleridge, Byron and Baudelaire would rise from their graves to argue the point.

  Hell, her lover’s name was Edgar Allan Poe. And even if he didn’t write, his namesake’s contributions to horror poetry couldn’t be denied.

  Most of her chapbook had been little haikus:

  She sweeps the cloud tops

  dusting pale each restless ghost

  her own pain spotless

  Only 200 copies were published. Only 40 sold. Had they really been that bad?

  Look into midnight

  Far-off tales of vandal haunts

  Skinning sleeper’s dreams

  People cling to life as if it were chastity—and death a violation of it which is almost romantic. Vampiric/gothic in a penetration combining sex, murder, and bestowings of the eternal.

  Pearl Incisors. Foam. Films at opposite ends of a dark spectrum. One highlighted with silver and threads of rich crimson. The other bloated with arterial red, lung blue, sausagey duodenum pink, brain gray.

  Enduring the grimness (even with relish) is perseverence at its most human in the face of the Reaper. Fascinated, for there is only one death we are never indifferent to… and that is our own.

  She ran her hand through her black hair, trying to finger-comb it. She couldn’t check it in the mirror. Not like Lenora who constantly caught glimpses of herself in anything that reflected.

  Renae wondered if Lenora was around. Lenora Strang, actress, probably rehearsing lines from the next movie she’d been cast for. Nothing blockbuster or artsy-fartsy out of nearby New York, no Hollywood treatise. Barely financed, locally produced—as most of the films she appeared in. Fire Across The Brain would be visceral, yet sexy. Based on Charles Baudelaire’s “The Martyr”, a poem about a man murdering his mistress, cutting off her head, then remembering her for the rest of his life. Lenora would play the haunting mistress.

  Renae wouldn’t admit envy, even to herself. Her best friend, Lenora always won the roles because Renae was shy. It was why she’d had no lines in Parts. Lenora’d gotten her that bit. Just a walk-on-get-killed-fall-down thing. Same as her other roles. Renae was approached for a couple others. Meatier parts—no pun intended. When she began to read, she faltered, blushed, paled, mumbled. Almost threw up.

  Renae sat in front of cameras quite effectively to do interviews with horror personalities, to introduce films, and report horror news for The Goth Channel. Why was this different? Maybe she knew she couldn’t act.

  She did straight stuff, presenting facts. People who didn’t see themselves in mirrors couldn’t pretend. Acting was a matter of dancing with your own reflection.

  Like Lenora and her lines: “Mon Dieu, Chéri. It has always been you!”

  Observing her movements carefully in the mirror, she would change her stance, tilt her head, pout her full red lips. Again. “Mon Dieu! Chéri, it has always been you!”

  Shrug one slender shoulder, flip her long hair with her fingers, widen her eyes. “Mon Dieu! Chéri… it has always been you!”

  Throw her hands upward in horror as an imaginary knife flashed. Flashed. FLASHED.

  See? Dancing with her reflection.

  – | – | –

  Chapter 5

  “Hey, Jizz! Off to the git-n-slit? Getting any yet?” Marty Hardisty yelled from halfway across the school parking lot.

  “Man, don’t call me Jizz,” Chaz Chisholm shot back at him.

  “Dude, I said Jazz, I swear.”

  Chaz squinted through soda bottle lenses as he watched his friend trot between the aisles of cars. He’d heard wrong, too sensitive for his own good. With that name—not even Charles but Chaz had his folks dumped on him—he was bound to be dubbed Jizz Jizzum. A kid’s nightmare, if ever there was one. “Where ya been, Marty? Haven’t seen ya in two weeks.”

  Marty shook his head mournfully. “Been incarcerated.”

  A horn blew and tires squealed, the hood of a well-waxed Mustang stopping close enough to reflect the pen in Marty’s crisp white shirt. The car’s bumper sticker read:

  BHS

  BAUCUM BATS

  Eat Our Guano!

  “In jail?” Chaz’s anty eyebrows went up. Obviously missed seeing his friend on the last segment of “Most Wanted Teenaged Snot Trail And Split Tail Pervs”.

  “Next best thing—or next worse.” Marty grinned as he came alongside. The two headed for the street, and Chaz’s workplace, neither having wheels nor friends with wheels. “Did an ‘evaluation’ stint at Sadlers.”

  Chaz whistled. “For drugs, crimes against humanity, or bed-wetting?”

  Chaz’s attention swerved, watching Hannah Dowler’s apple ass dip as she wriggled into her Volkswagen. Not a new style Bug but creaking ancient. Late 1960’s or early ’70’s. A color they called champagne. Like the one Ted Bundy drove while trolling, arm in a fake cast. Hannah was also headed for work…same place as Chaz, yet Hannah wouldn’t offer him a lift. Simple courtesy never entered the picture.

  Marty leered. “What d’ya think? My grandparents already considered me to be a damn degenerate.”

  “I’d’ve bet it was crimes against humanity but I guess they sent ya up for bed-wetting.” Chaz slapped his friend’s shoulder, almost knocking over the skinny kid.

  Marty pinwheeled his arms, shouting for dramatic effect. His tone dropped, hushed. “Nah. You remember Seuter Pittman?”

  Seuter died last September. Now it was late May, time for graduation. Seut and Marty had been best friends, having grown up together. One night Seut swallowed the entire contents of a full bottle of Halcion, belonging to his mother’s lover who’d been seriously wounded about a year before.

  School losers tended to gravitate toward each other and, after being friendless for a couple of months, Marty saw the cover of a Maggot Lunch magazine when Chaz dropped his books in the stairwell. Not the average horror rag which might be read even by popular dorks, or at least by some of the less ostentatious Goths. This was penultimate gross-out. The fat boy hurried to pick everything up. He scowled, noticing Marty watching.

  “What?” Deep scarlet flushed across both exaggerated chipmunk cheeks.

  Marty’d smiled, saying, “Let me help ya there.”

  Deliberately dropping his own books, a well-worn copy of Shitflag slid from his German text. The virgin mutilation cover by artist Sextant Blud alone guaranteed this as an item no regular book store would stock. Then a Hot Stumps tumbled from concealment in a library book of Rugmaking, A History. Chaz’s jaw had dropped at the anthology for lovers of the maimed and mangled form. The story illos were quasi-photographs of real human abbreviations by an up-and-squirting artist named T. Spunk, combination photograph (surely intended to resemble the work of a novice—for effect) segueing into grotesque line drawing (also done after the dilettante’s fashion). Chaz’s mortification disappeared behind instant bonding.

  A cheerleader going down the stairwell saw the magazines and said scornfully, “Deviants.”

  Marty sniggered. “So how does it feel having a Bible sewn up your ass? I mean, what with the stit
ches, ya can’t pass it…”

  Thus were fast friendships made.

  “I didn’t know Seuter,” Chaz admitted now. “But I remember him.”

  “His mother was getting rid of his stuff after he died. Finally! She had a trunk full of old board games and pictures of Seut and me from kinder-fuckin’-garten on, ya know? She asked if I wanted it. I said sure. Anyway, I started going through it. Guess she didn’t look before handing it over. At the bottom was Seut’s collection.” Marty’s voice took on a tinge of irrepressible glee. He punched the thick meat of Chaz’s upper arm, solid as hitting a new mattress. Their expressions locked as they crossed the street at the light. They continued to the next intersection.

  “You’re shittin’ me. His mom gave ya a trunk with his grue inside? Some guys have all the luck. Anything you’d never seen before?”

  They passed a billboard for a leather retailer. The ad pictured two gaunt girls dressed in merch. Shadows on faces devoid of innocence, heroin-chic/death-cool. Marty pretended to look up a black suede miniskirt.

  “Hmm. Too much leg for my tastes.”

  “Back to anything I hadn’t seen before,” he said to Chaz. “Maybe.”

  He rubbed birdlike hands together, gearing up for the juiciest part. “I anticipated a rare jewel. A first printing of Snotbeast would’ve been sweet. Or Outhouse Tombs. Valuable put-myself-through-college collectibles. My palms sweated. My eager tongue hung out, slavering warped gorp down my chin. I had a bottle of antacid and a jar of petroleum jelly, ready for any eventuality. Even if it turned out I already had half and seen 80% of the rest. Ya gotta get into the moment, right? If we’re gonna start our own publishing company, we need a feel for the passion, an understanding of the overall gestalt of the many levels true degradation can sink and slink to…”

  “Get on with it!” Chaz barked, curiosity killing him. He glanced at his watch. How close to 4:00? He didn’t want to risk being even two minutes late. Frank Bunny might be wheelchair-bound, yet be tardy for your shift and Chaz had no doubts the guy used to be a merc demolitions expert, blowing up women and babies in far-off wars. Frank’d get a look, implying he could still do the job on fat slackers. Logic assured Chaz that the old creep was limited to heaps of verbal abuse, but he remained steadfastly intimidated. The watch showed he had ten minutes.

  “Yeah, anyway. I got to the bottom and guess what I found? Go on, man. Guess. Of anything in the whole world you’d crave to find…”

  The way Marty grinned, it might be a life-sized Amanda Lurid doll, complete with sponge orifices and Velcro seams holding in a host of removable, red liquid-refillable organs. Chaz suggested as much.

  Marty giggled. “Man, ya need to get laid. Ya wouldn’t wish for more than that?”

  “Anything? How’s about a copy of necrOmania seXualis?” Marty’s eyes slitted, pupils glittering.

  Chaz’s mouth went dry. “No way.”

  “Way.”

  The book appeared on the shelves at Reddie-Eddie’s last summer. The convenience store owner claimed he never ordered it.

  The boys just happened to be at the corner for the next light, right where the aforementioned store stood, now closed, windows soaped over, shelves empty beyond smears on glass. Gas pumps were removed, leaving scooped concrete like badly-performed mastectomies. It had been the busiest git-n-shit in Euphalia Heights until that book appeared. Eddie yanked every copy, calling his distributor to chew some ass. The distrib swore innocence on a stack of Catholic Country bulletins he’d never heard of it.

  Next morning, it was there again. A few sold before Eddie knew, by a new employee with little English. A twelve-year-old bought it, his mother finding it after he’d skinned alive every dog and cat on their neighborhood street and had performed a strange circumcision on himself with a scout knife and a pair of tweezers. Again the books were there, tucked behind romances and westerns, concealed by spy novels and lurking on the other side of the latest science fiction pulp. The cover was pretty basic for horror. Nothing Chaz or Marty would give a second glance to.

  The title was a play on Psychopathia Sexualis, the classic textbook on aberrant sexuality, written in the late 1800’s by Richard von Krafft-Ebing. Yet open it and the resemblance ended.

  No matter what Eddie did, it wouldn’t go away. He’d even done an all-nighter, maintaining a vigil in front of the magazine stand, sipping poisonous store coffee and waiting for the archfiend who sneaked in to plant this trash. Probably carried it in the same black doctor’s bag in which he carried his Ripper-esque working tools.

  Eddie saw none but the regular midnight-to-seven dopers, night owls, and insomniacs. No ghouls, no feral books levitating through the door to file themselves among the standard inventory. Next morning: back. As he’d blinked or yawned. Six more copies filled with psychotic tales and an abominable array of drawing-cum-photos fit only for an abattoir’s walls.

  Nobody believed Eddie hadn’t ordered them. No more than a dozen sold by accident. Who could guess how many had been stolen?

  One morning Eddie showed to relieve the night shift, discovering it was the only thing left on the shelves. No cowboy machismo, lonely housewife drivel, or space operas. Just two hundred copies of necrOmania seXualis. Happened to be the same morning the recently formed Committee For Decency In Euphalia Heights visited. Followed by the police. Followed by the store closing.

  The boys stared in silence before crossing the street. Both suffered morbid shudders as of passing a murder house, ragged ghosts of butchered victims staring from the windows. Yet nobody died (except the dogs and cats). At least not anybody people knew about.

  “The very book, Jazzy,” Marty replied. “Seut must’ve got one the committee missed when they burned the copies they’d grabbed. He couldn’t have had it long before…before he died. He’d’ve shown me.”

  Marty glanced back at the closed store, sadly expecting to see Seuter’s spirit amid the soapy window swirls.

  “And ya didn’t call me?” Chaz asked, blinking, cut to the quick.

  “I didn’t get to see it myself yet. Listen—my grandmother knocked on the door just as I found the book. I covered it back up and closed the trunk. I called your house but there was no answer. You’d’ve been at work. I guess your mom was out spreading the Gospel.”

  “And my dad doesn’t talk.”

  “Yeah, so I waited so we could see it the next day together. Man, I was making a great sacrifice. But I didn’t see ya at school the next day. School let out, still couldn’t find ya.”

  Chaz snorted. “A jerkwad filled some salt shakers with sugar in the lunchroom. I put a bit on my salad and woke up in an ambulance.”

  “Jesus,” Marty gasped, turning pale at the thought of losing another best friend. Chaz, despite his girth, never ate sweets due to a sugar allergy.

  “So go on,” Chaz encouraged him.

  “I stopped by your work. Got cornered by the jocks in the store who dumped my book bag out. They all saw it. Rosie was working that day. She saw it, too. She practically pissed herself. They laughed at the pictures, saying they were just cheap Polaroids, and all of the same woman dressed up in different ways. But—Rosie claimed I’d changed one of the pictures to be her. She freaked so much I thought her dad would roll out of that back office with an Uzi busting caps in everybody’s asses. I didn’t see a resemblance at all. Neither did her friends. It was some older chick with dark hair, purple I think, surrounded by drawn snakes. Rosie knocked the book out of one of the jock’s hands, squealing her head off. I snatched it up and hightailed it while the Nazi’s Uber-Daughter had ’em distracted, trying to shut her up.”

  Chaz said, “That’s fucked.”

  “Anyway, since I couldn’t get in touch with ya—and I did call again that night…”

  “…I was in the hospital for three days.”

  “Yeah? Shit. Ya should sue the school. Anyway, I decided to look through the book. Just seeing it opened at Bunny’s In-And-Out got me crazy.”

  “Details,
man!” Chaz clutched Marty’s wrist.

  “I opened it up somewhere in the middle and started reading a story about a shit goddess…”

  “Shit?”

  “Waste and stuff. How it has a lot to do with death. And where hell and all the other underworlds send their rejected stuff. It was really deep. I mean philosophical. The artwork was weird. Polaroids but I got dizzy. I stared until it seemed to move and I heard voices. I think it—sort of—scared me.”

  Chaz gasped. A real confession for Marty. They’d both read and viewed much. He found it difficult to imagine evils the genre hadn’t capitalized on yet. Still, his legs and ass tingled, as when he sat too long viewing back-to-back showings of the cult Japanese gross-out Entrails Of A Virgin. He’d never believed the rumors about necrOmania seXualis, probably because he didn’t know anybody who’d seen a copy firsthand. Just an urban legend about a horror writer who’d tapped into Hell for inspiration and was herself butchered. Pirsya Profana was a modern myth, a feminist version of Lovecraft’s mad Arab, Alhazred. Standard literary device.

  “Like how scared?” asked Chaz. “Projectile-barf-fest scared? Peed-your-shorts scared? Gone-postal-and-shot-the-family scared?”

  The skinny teen stopped, face dead serious. Behind him a bus let off passengers. It bore a long ad for a movie titled Skinning Candy. A woman with big breasts and bathroom plunger lips lay supine, surface of her bare skin a rainbow patina, as oil on water, lightning through smoke. Underneath it read: Never Take Your Flesh for Granted.

  “Out-of-body-experience scared,” Marty admitted. “Ya can’t imagine what a boner feels like under such circumstances.”

  Chaz tried not to laugh. He also looked at his watch, without intending to be rude. “A story and art gave ya a stiffy? Wouldn’t have taken ya for a copraphile.”

  “I’m telling ya, Jazzman, made me hot. It isn’t like I stalk diaper bins or cream my jeans changing the paper in the budgie’s cage. I’m really not into this,” Marty insisted. “It was Pirsya Profana’s prose. I read another story… Which one? ‘Faith’ or ‘Cognoscente’? Imagine the most gorgeous woman you’ve ever seen. She’s dead but whispers secrets to ya from her grave. She’s still beautiful only now she’s ice. Her breath is rotten yet ya still want her to blow ya.”