Season of the Witch

by Charlee Jacob

  He feigned shock. “No shit?”

  Renae reached out, playfully squeezing his crotch. “Death’s a universal turn-on, Edgar Allan Poe. It gets the juices sluicing.”

  Eddie stared at the ceiling. “I’ll give you an hour to stop that.”

  Suddenly she pulled her hand away. “Let’s call them.”

  “What?”

  “Let’s call that number.” She wondered what she was trying to prove.

  “What would we say?” he asked.

  “We’ll make something up.”

  “I can’t…”

  “I know horror movies and books, the whole bleeding genre. You’re a cop. You must have plenty of material.”

  Eddie put his hands up. “No way. I may be a cop but I’m no actor.”

  “You could’ve fooled me the other night with that tablecloth cloak and glow-in-the-dark fangs.”

  Eddie hid his face. “Well, you get me in the right mood and…”

  “…the beast takes over?” she finished for him.

  This time he peeped between his fingers. He nodded. Renae leaned against him and gently yet firmly stroked the fly on his jeans. The buttons began to rise. She smiled, whispering, “Just like the dead after sunset.”

  ««—»»

  Eddie dialed. Renae listened in on the upstairs phone, curled up near the rail separating the bedroom loft from a drop to the first floor. He saw her whenever he looked up, pale legs tucked under her, receiver cuddled against her ear.

  “X-IS-THE-DARK,” said the operator. The feminine voice purred. “Your obsessions are what the night is made of.”

  Eddie didn’t say anything. Do I talk yet?

  “Do you prefer to provoke shock or would you rather be encouraged?” the operator asked softly, like an offer to be on the top or the bottom.

  “Uh, oh, I think encouraged,” Eddie fumbled. He glanced up at Renae. “Yes, encouraged. Sure.”

  He put a hand over the mouthpiece and yelled a stage whisper up to his girlfriend. “Shouldn’t we have rehearsed this?”

  “Go with it. Say whatever comes into your head,” she replied.

  “Certainly, lover. I’m Nadia,” said the operator with a hint of accent. “What are you feeling inside, Mister?”

  “I’m…” Eddie’s voice began to crack. Renae palmed out from her chest, indicating he should speak lower. He cleared his throat, dropping an octave. “I’m feeling like I’m gonna explode.”

  Renae nodded enthusiastically. Nervous, Eddie at first sounded like a castrated cartoon character. Now he sounded like he’d just crossed over to the dark side of a long-winded universe. He accepted it, hoping it would release some of his stress.

  “Is it built up inside you?” Nadia asked.

  Now what?

  Stammer stumble fumble. “I—uh—well actually…”

  “It’s okay, lover. Take your time.”

  Sure, take his time at three bucks a minute. Renae furiously scribbled, then folded the note into a paper airplane and sailed it over the edge of the loft.

  “Wait a sec, okay. I’m all twisted up here,” he mumbled as the paper plane drifted to him. Somehow he jumped up and caught it, flattening it open on his thigh.

  “No hurry, doll. Things aren’t always easy to say,” the voice silked through the phone.

  Eddie read Renae’s scrawl under the nearby lamp. Tell her about shooting up a theater. Remember ‘Flashlight’? That awful movie where I lost it in the last row?

  Eddie grinned, recalling the movie’s poor excuse for a plot.

  “I’m confused,” he said, not sure if he spoke to himself or Nadia.

  “You mustn’t feel ashamed,” the operator said.

  “But I get these feelings. Have for a really long time, I guess.”

  “Do these feelings upset you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  “They’re so violent. Can’t be normal.”

  “It’s a reasonable mechanism of the mind, dealing with overload, baby. There’s nothing wrong with it. Do you have a lot of pressure in your life, on your job?”

  How was this any different from talking to the police shrink, except the force shrink was a balding man with a beer gut and a voice like a lawnmower.

  Eddie exhaled heavily. “You can say that again. I see a lot of shit go down every day.”

  “It has to go somewhere, doesn’t it? What you deal with? It can’t evaporate.”

  This felt boring. Time to get this show on the road. He said, “But it shouldn’t make you think about walking into a movie theater and opening fire.” He took a breath. “I dream that. If you do it at the right flick—one with lots of firepower, explosions, machine guns—you can take out the back rows before the front even knows what’s going down.”

  Nadia laughed lightly. “They might think those were rockin’ special effects.”

  Eddie recalled the film’s first action scene. A pimply-faced teenaged couple with their heads blown apart like tossed buckets of pink popcorn. (The scene actually intercut the images of their brains with showers of popcorn.) A hallucination suffered by the movie’s nut. “I see them stand as I strut down the aisle, pumping 32 rounds of 9 mm Parabellum from an Uzi Semiautomatic Carbine. I’ve got additional magazines on me. Audience faces glow in flickering lights from the projector beam. They cheer, dying, row after row, as vicariously as they lived. Some asshole usher yells, We shoulda banned them guns! I blow his face into stylish mush, yelling back, Guns don’t kill people; Arnie kills people! They cheer and die, clap and pop apart, thanking me for the opportunity to Die American. Maybe not with fifteen minutes of fame but with fifteen seconds of cinematic intensity. The auditorium lights up and their lives flash before them, not as the depressing crap they really lived, but enobled, bad shit turned into decent tragedy, thin-assed stars gone nova and brightening the universe for light years. Man! They cheer me, all right. Screaming: Me next, shoot me! And I do it because it’s what I’ve come to do,” Eddie rattled off.

  He paused, surprised at himself. Renae gave him a thumbs-up for his rendition of Raymond Bloodworth, the flashlight-toting maniac from the seamy C-movie, out to make sure gun control didn’t challenge his right to bear arms, legs and heads.

  Nadia’s voice was liquid. “You’ve got to do it. That’s the way dreams run. It’s hard to change their course. It’s like a river running into rapids. If its intent is to run a waterfall over a steep cliff, that’s what it’ll do. You know, come hell or high water.”

  Eddie protested, “I’d never really do it. I just dream it.”

  “Blowing off faces into stylish mush?”

  “That, and a lot of other things. I never realized I knew so much about death. Stuff I didn’t think consciously,” Eddie went on, knowing damn well that after the last few days on the Triple X Slayer’s case, at Spunk’s charnel house-cum-photographic studio, Eddie had learned a few lessons in death he’d never forget. That’s what he leaned on now for material. “Did you know that as soon as ten minutes after death, flies are laying eggs in the facial orifices? In just half a day maggots hatch, feeding on the first stages of rot. That’s about the same time the corpse reaches full rigor, which is interesting since where the maggots swarm makes the stiff surface appear frothy, combination steel and fermented cotton candy. Heaven help you if you waited that long to try disposing of the body. Of course, some things are hard to sever. It’s why the gods of surgery invented the bone saw. You can strain yourself, chopping with a knife, taking forever to get certain pieces apart.

  “Others practically melt like butter with a decent scalpel. Wait three days and gas’ll cover them with blisters. The entire cadaver—one gross stinky blister with pus leaking through mouth and cunt. Believe me, removing the sex organs early is no protection from pussy gas build-up. Especially if you stuffed her full of eggs and they’ve spoiled, too. It’s so gross you don’t remember what you saw in her to begin with. And if you knicked the lower intestines while doing her? Forget it, you�
�ll have to burn your clothes and shave off all your body hair to start over—’cause you’ll never get the stench out.”

  Eddie stopped, perspiring. Renae’s jaw dropped as she stared down at him from the loft. He shrugged at her, just a joke, baby, and yet he’d seen the bloody pieces discovered in Spunk’s house, nose hairs still shriveling at the odors not quite masked by bug spray and photographic developer. Nothing funny there. Could it be a sin to be this callous? Cops frequently used morbid humor to get through the horrors, yet what was this?

  Nadia laughed through the phone, low and husky. “Just dreams, lover.”

  “Yeah. Right.”

  “Babies are often conceived starting off with a single kiss.”

  “Those kids in the front row,” Eddie said, getting back to the movie. Which was easier to do than dredging up his own experiences of the last week. “They aren’t supposed to be there. This movie’s rated R. I don’t see any guardians. Look at what they might’ve become if I hadn’t let them go out not-with-whimpers-but-with-bangbangs.”

  Too close for comfort.

  Suddenly he relaxed. Maybe there was therapy to be had here, after all.

  “How humanitarian,” Nadia trilled. Only with her low voice, it was more of a sexy, earthy rumble.

  “It isn’t real. I only dream it. It builds up until, at night, I let it all out with the dream,” Eddie said, glancing up at Renae and grinning. Hey, I’m on a roll. “Must be sexual tension, huh? I shoot ’em up but I really wanna fuck ’em, which—in essence—is what I do. With an Uzi instead of my dick.”

  “Could be,” the operator said tentatively, “but not all violence is based on the sex drive. Don’t sell yourself short with simple explanations. It makes you sound as if you think you’re fucked up. Perhaps you’re not fucked up at all.”

  Eddie chuckled nervously. “What? That ain’t normal, lady.”

  Damn, why did this bitch have to make so much sense? He scratched his head, at a loss for words. What would a freak say? What would Thelonious Spunk say? Or Sam Kriger? Or even Raymond Bloodworth?

  Shouldn’t he be masturbating? Getting turned on, asking what she was wearing? Silk. Leather. Razors through her nipples. What kind of phone-sex service was this?

  “I should be able to exercise that kind of power every day on my job, and sometimes I do. It’s kind of a life-and-death occupation.” Eddie smiled, thinking he’d turn this back his way, to where he had some—confess it—power over this game. He was too uncomfortable with the sense she poured into the theme of a guy cutting loose in a crowded theater with 9mm shells.

  He’d asked to be encouraged. It wasn’t as if she’d said, ‘Yeah, go do it, baby, open fire and rock those buckets of pink popcorn!’ She purred words like normal and nothing wrong with it or dealing with stress and you’ve got to do it, it’s the way dreams run.

  Still, not exactly the sort of material to help a guy stroke himself off.

  It was as close as she could come without actually inciting a crime. That wouldn’t be legal.

  “Why?” Nadia coolly inquired. “What do you do?”

  Here’s where Eddie felt sure she’d hang up.

  He replied, “I’m a cop.”

  “Ahhhh, now that’s a power job, lover!” she cooed into the phone. Not the least bit ruffled. “The beast in you must be a great big hairy one. Alive and inspired yet well-trained and obedient. Beneath your exterior, you’ve whipped it into its place. But at night, after you fall asleep and the chain sags, it comes out to howl. Only you can keep it back, collared and disciplined. It’s a wild one, baby. It wants to wield its potency, find the limits of its force—if it has limits. It’s the very essence of exultant rage. But can you keep it caged? Question is: do you want to cage it and how much do you want to?”

  “Time will tell,” Eddie said, trying to find a cute response and only able to come up with this. Lame!

  “Time always does, lover,” Nadia added.

  “What do I do while watching the clock?” he asked a bit sarcastically.

  “Whatever you want.”

  Eddie hung up. He heard Renae hang up her end.

  “Bizarre,” he heard her murmur from the darkened loft.

  “Not what I expected,” he agreed, even if he wasn’t sure just what he had expected. (Well, yeah, something sexy. Had this been sexy?) He still sweated. His balls steamed, even as his palms were cold. He tried to laugh it away. “Was it as good for you as it was for me?”

  Renae sighed. She knew he’d meant it as a joke, but she couldn’t help wondering whether it had been intended to be good for anyone.

  – | – | –

  Chapter 9

  After Frank fired him, Chaz didn’t go home immediately. He wasn’t due to be off until 10:00. He didn’t want his parents asking why he was home early.

  Should he say he’d quit? If he admitted Frank Bunny kicked his ass out the door, what reason would he give? Not the truth. He’d use school as an excuse. It just wouldn’t be right to endanger his hard-won grade point, and finals, with only a couple of weeks left. He’d find another job after graduation. His folks would respect that; it was so mature.

  Like they’d notice if he came home early. Or on time. Or unfashionably late. Had he even told them about the convenience store job? He’d wanted to be closer to Rosie. But he’d also taken it to be away from the house. Not that he needed a cover story. He could’ve stayed out all hours, been up to anything, and his parents wouldn’t have cared. And if he’d been a popular kid, with people to see and places to get drunk and stoned in, maybe he’d’ve done just that. But there were no whos or wheres waiting for Chaz. And Marty, his only friend, was under house arrest.

  Chaz kept a sanctuary in his room, one of hell’s little closets for the shadow seeker. A place where his mother’s cold god didn’t rule supreme and where his father—if he dare venture inside—would find himself screaming.

  Aimlessly wandering the streets for two hours, from the neighborhood’s center to its edge, Chaz heard distant gunfire. It was barely audible as bee fart staccato, probably originating from the next hood over… a run-down, gang-infested slum called:

  Nubbing Cove.

  The place was legendary. During the Revolutionary War, a Brit Captain named Walch had led a redcoat troop into deep woods to take out a suspected town of rebels. But when they arrived, they only found women. Most were real babes, weeping and laughing musically from the trees. Others were mangled from Indian attacks or fire, or simply from accidents of birth.

  The men took to them anyway, drawn by inexplicable allure. Winter set in suddenly, trapping the Brits, waiting out the snows, suffering the strangest cabin fevers. Some killed one another, going on gibbering rampages. Walch, a manor-born and educated man, had never believed in the supernatural. Yet he began seeing things he couldn’t rationalize. He blamed the women, ordering his soldiers to round them up, hanging them from the forest’s starkly bare branches. They were drawn and quartered, beheaded with sabers. Eyes were gouged out. The snow beneath such a quantity of bodies melted for a mile around. A mountain of rotting flesh and spilled guts strewn by dogs, the resulting swarm of flies could be seen as far away as Ilksbury and had been mistaken for a storm cloud on the horizon.

  So the story went, getting grislier, no doubt, every time it was told. Could it be true even if it wasn’t in the history books? Chaz suspected part was real but not the mountain of guts. It had been a small colonial village. There wouldn’t be enough corpses. More’s the pity, he thought. He’d love to believe it true, living right next to the place. But he’d been in the Cove lots of times. Never saw a single ghost. That would leave a potentially negative psychic residue, right?

  Oh, and the name. Nubbing Cove. The place was no cove. There was no bay. No water of any kind nearby, although the place used to be a swamp. Nubbing Cove was a nickname from Tyburn where the English used to take the condemned, what criminal riffraff sometimes called the hangman.

  Myth or not, the middle to up
per-middle class stiffnecks of Euphalia Heights—especially those living in neighborhoods bordering the Cove—weren’t comfortable. Not because of that story… if they even knew it… but because the Cove was the poorest section of the city. Yet they accepted it as the urban decay that was the great yuppie burden. Lately, city smog was so bad you couldn’t see the Cove anyway.

  If Chaz’s folks knew he walked after dark, alone and unprotected, near where east met west, Mom would be on her knees doing her stoop-crawl praying gig and Dad would be going mutely grayer. Chaz would retire to his room, which they never entered—fearing what they might find.

  He bit his lip. He knew better.

  There were some strange gangs these days and nights. He’d seen them peeking through the store window as he found the book. He saw more during his walk. Eight kids in black baggy clothes, hair shaved off until scalps were shiny. They’d painted their skin white, thin black circles around the eyes. And they had their jaws… wired open? Each mouth in a perpetual -O-, all made to look like that famous Munch painting, The Scream. They drooled over their lips, down their chins, pale make-up running in pearly drops, their throats gulping in the effort to swallow.

  “Had you guys considered a strong antihistamine?” Chaz brought up. “Or ya could rig a tube…”

  They swung as if joined at the hip, in a line like a marching band or the Rockettes. They pointed at him, then really shrieked, banshee-loud, pupils rattling in eye socket cups like dice.

  Unnerved, Chaz quickly walked away. He looked back over his shoulder twice, sure they’d come after him and beat him into a mushy, rictal footprint. But they still stood, pointing, voices emergency sirens. Did they stop to breathe or could they exhale like that indefinitely?

  In the screeching noise, Chaz was reminded of the voices he’d heard at the store. Yet those had been sweet, breathy—not raucous.

  (But you heard ’em, my man. You one crazy fucked-in-the-fruitloop bastard.)