Season of the Witch

by Charlee Jacob

  “What about what went on in your head?” Renae pressed. She knew what she-on-top and in control had experienced. But what about her partner and victim, helplessly bound to the bed?

  “I don’t think I’d like to make a habit out of being chained and having my colon destroyed,” he replied drily.

  “For a guy with a raging hard-on, who came screaming like a bull elephant at a skid row peep show, methinks you protest too much. Baby, that desire for revenge is part of the game’s fun. You were solidly in character. It just isn’t possible to get your dick to cry yes! yes! when it doesn’t want to. It tends to shrivel when confronted with a threatening situation. Pussies can take anything but penises are cowardly puppies,” Renae pointed out. “You flung yourself into pure physical stimulation that had as its impetus a flawless fantasy, an imaginary concept entirely mental.”

  Eddie had applied aloe to every square inch of his frontside and backside, now easing himself into his boxers. “Yes, but, what you said earlier, about decent people playing crime in their heads in order to understand violence. You acted out but you couldn’t perform atrocities like Spunk did.”

  Renae slipped into a loose gown, sans underwear. “Of course not. But I didn’t really stick a post up your butt and set it in the ground like a totem pole. There must be lots of ways to assume a psychotic mindset that doesn’t involve actual sex-bondage or sado-masochism.”

  Eddie leaned forward, expecting to be further tantalized. “Such as…and bear in mind there were cuffs involved here.” This should be good.

  “Well, telling stories,” she suggested.

  He yawned, then made another face. “Providing you know your partner well enough, they won’t think you’re about to run rabid—or bore them to death. Maybe those cuffs weren’t so bad.”

  She shrugged. “Or role playing. Like that freak service… X-IS-THE-DARK.”

  Eddie grinned now, walking down the stairs to the lightless living room. Renae went to the banister, watched him turn on the lamp by the first floor telephone. He gestured for her to pick up the loft’s receiver.

  He punched the number. Renae heard the beep of electronic notes. The line rang twice. An operator answered.

  “X-IS-THE-DARK. Your obsessions are what the night is made of. Do you prefer to provoke shock or would you rather be encouraged?”

  “Let’s go for shock,” Eddie replied.

  “My name is Morgana. I’m your captive audience.”

  “Right up my alley. Captives are my business,” he said snappily.

  Gone was the uncertainty of their first call.

  “Uh… you mean as in people who are a little unwilling, or need real restraint?” Morgana carefully asked, feeling out what he was trying to stage.

  “All sorts of restraints. Duct tape is undoubtedly the best material—stretches when they do, then snaps back on itself because it’s sticky. Snarls, gets even tighter when they sweat or bleed or piss themselves. Like wet leather shrinking under a hot sun, perhaps… cellar lights. It can cut off circulation. And sometimes, if you have them trussed up long enough, sweat and stress pimples their skin under the leather. These pop when chafed, and pimple goo makes a sort of glue.”

  Upstairs, Renae nodded. Eddie was off to a great start, showing himself to be a superior improvisational actor.

  “But that’s dangerous. You could hurt someone doing that,” the operator said innocently.

  “Well, no shit. It wouldn’t be much of a kick if they just said Take me and break me, baby, and then simply turned into amoebas. Where’s the challenge? Who needs to have power over a biped protozoa?” Eddie looked up at Renae and waggled his eyebrows. His grin asked how’m I doin’?

  Renae laughed behind her hand. It was corny but she particularly liked the ‘biped protozoa’ bit. She wondered if the operator understood it. He was an educated fiend.

  “This doesn’t sound like a fantasy, Mister. Have you actually harmed anyone?” Morgana sounded as if she’d met a razorwire-mouthed stranger in a dark alley and taken a step back from him.

  Renae broke in on the extension. “We’ve both done it.”

  How emotionless her voice sounded. Remorseless. Not like freezing up while delivering lines someone else had written. No camera here. It was more like the quirky shit said during sex play.

  Eddie waved, glad she was making it a duet this time.

  “There are two of you?” asked Morgana, not overplaying her shock.

  “We work as a pair,” Renae replied coolly. “There is male and female in all good—and evil. It’s easier that way.”

  “What’s… easier?” Morgana wanted to know, as if she might not be equipped to hear the answer. Renae thought the operator smooth; she’d reel herself out a little at a time, slowly feel out how many links on the kinky chain the callers went.

  Renae chuckled. “The whole scenario.” She maintained an even voice, low, as if slightly drugged on intramuscular injections of perphanazine.

  She went on. “Being a woman, it’s easier to get kids to go with me. Kids’ll trust a woman faster than they will an unknown man. It’s the mommie-catch. Plus, most of their teachers are women. Women are nurturers, non-threatening. Less likely to be the punishers in households where it’s fathers who mete out justice.”

  Morgana expressed righteous indignation. Shock. “My God, you trick kids? What kind of beastly female are you?” What would she have said had they requested encouragement from her?

  “Not kiddy kids. Not enough meat on ’em. Young girls mostly. About thirteen-fourteen. Some twelve-year-olds if they look mature for their age. Hard to tell these days, since so many parents let their daughters tart themselves up—long before they understand the meaning of ‘provocative’. And if they stuff their training bras, well. That’s what he likes, mostly. And I want to make my man happy,” Renae continued. Suddenly, she felt sick. As if she’d visited some children’s porn site and granted credence to the lowest form of predator on earth. She wished she’d said eighteen or nineteen as the age for their victims. But then they wouldn’t be kids. Her soul now bore a stain that, like Lady Macbeth, could never be washed away.

  Yet all the law, order, and forensics smash hits on television and in the movies—same scenarios. Most enormous gruey hits on small or big screen, people watching in a frenzy of voyeuristic indignation, somehow believing this viewing, sympathizing with fictionalized tender victims, cleansed their souls. For them, it was a form of church.

  “Yeah,” Eddie chortled, “she makes me happy. Besides, if you unwrap ’em right, that stuff in the training bras pops out like snakes in a joke can. Par-tay!”

  The emotion in his voice counterpointed the lack of it in Renae’s. It surprised her he could play into it so well. Yet Eddie’d done undercover work. To merge seamlessly with slime, one had to ooze.

  “What do you do to those poor children?” Morgana whimpered, her tone very maternal.

  Eddie snapped, “Listen, bitch. I don’t do anything that might not have happened to them someday. It’s an ugly world. A jungle out there or ain’t you heard? And it always has been. If you don’t want to worry ’bout your kids, don’t have any! As lions and wolves and tigers become extinct, their appetites go into human souls. What’s inside me? Honey, come here and pick your predator.”

  “Not quite true, shadowmuffins,” Renae crooned. “They might grow up to have somebody hump and bump them along the tiger’s ghostly trail but not too many would have someone drink ’em all up.”

  Eddie’s shoulders shook with glee, and he covered the mouthpiece to laugh silently. He knew his Gothic(k) lady was into that immortal shtick so he wasn’t too surprised she flipped this way for the game.

  “Drink… ’em… all… up?” Morgana slowly repeated, sounding chilled to her marrow—and all of her tomorrows.

  “It isn’t as if we rise from coffins at sunset,” Eddie muttered. “How bourgeois. And the blood ain’t the life either, just the pause that refreshes. Some men like the taste of young lips, s
ome the taste of young pussy. But me? I like the taste of young veins. The nubile Lolita artery as the heart orgasms her out by the untarnished pints.”

  Blood simple. No different than lamb and veil.

  Renae was so grateful to him.

  “You’re making it up. Do you think this is funny? Calling me and telling me this nonsense about vampirizing kids? You’ve seen too many cheap DVD’s or dropped too much acid. Next you’ll be telling me that, afterward, they rise from the dead and follow you.” Morgana gasped, voice catching in so feminine a quaver that the couple practically felt her swoon on the other end of the phone. “Tell me this is nonsense.”

  “It isn’t as if he ravages them, for Vlad’s sake,” Renae said, then realizing her choice of word. Ravages. How Victorian, how positively GOTHIC. As opposed to the more disgustingly expressive: fucks, rapes, plucks a fighting cherry, bags, busts the baby chicken’s head, breaks-slams-and creams in the crib. And all the other sick terms for creeps who stalked children. She was nauseous again. Why had she taken the game down this road?

  “He’s a very thirsty boy. And the young ones are more likely to be virgins, blood untainted by the impurities of earth and atmosphere. It isn’t healthy to drink just anyone or haven’t you ever watched a Halloween special on cable? History Channel, The Learning Channel, Discovery, even the fucking Travel Channel does specials on modern vampires. Kids, don’t try this at home. Well—maybe. Who knows where some of them have been. It really does feel fine… Besides, it isn’t really a sex thing. It’s practicality. You wouldn’t order a burger in a dump known to serve e-coli, would you? Talk about eat shit and die!”

  Rated PG. Parental Godawfulness Required.

  Eddie shrugged up at her and quickly contradicted, voice syrupy, “Don’t let her soft-pedal my vices. It’s the product of a long process of earnest, athletic sucking and a deep love of sharp, oral penetration. The throat fetish is for old-timers.”

  “That’s horrible! I’ve never heard anything so degenerate,” Morgana mewled into the line. “You’re both loathsome, victimizing the rest of us, keeping us afraid to go outside. It turns my stomach.” Her voice seemed far away as she softly sobbed. Both Eddie and Renae thought they heard the sound of a tissue being pulled from a box to dab at flowing eyes. “How can you do that? What kind of mind does it take to dream up such atrocity, then commit it?”

  Renae froze, the operator repeating the same words she’d earlier spoken herself. Even Eddie frowned, glancing up at the loft. He was a small point of light, there with the shaded lamp, shrouded by the dark living room. He might’ve been standing on an island of world, surrounded by a menacingly negative twilight—a realm with no substance.

  “He likes to make me jealous. He knows how crazy I get when I’m jealous,” Renae mouthed into the receiver. She felt as if she were doing an automatic response to someone who’d eavesdropped on their evening.

  “It’s so evil,” Morgana murmured, voice wracked with tangible emotion. The wire fairly crackled with it, heat lightning striking the line. “Damnable. And to innocent, helpless little children.”

  “Yeah, pretty soon I’ll have to start autographing milk cartons. See that one? Some of my best work. And this one from the In-N-Out? Red all the way to the last pulpy mouthful,” Eddie growled. “Tattoos and piercings, boo-boos and G-strings. Little girls are sugar and spice and everything nice, also salt and rust to make up for no bust.”

  Morgana wretched. Was she truly throwing up? The idea was to provoke shock. Had her part called for nausea and what sounded like gargling curds? (How Renae felt. Again feeling spied upon, she looked behind her in the dark.)

  Both hung up, then simultaneously stared down from the loft and up from the living room. Renae giggled first, as one would while passing a rundown cemetery, a casual whistle not being enough to stop the shudders.

  Eddie laughed. “Crazy!”

  “Beats the hell out of charades,” she agreed. She snickered as she sat by the banister, fingers tapping uncontrollably on her knees.

  Eddie wiped his lips. “The ol’ nudie deck for playing rummy won’t be the same either.”

  They went on as if this was terribly funny. Yet later, when the couple went off to bed, they slept with their backs to each other. No goodnight, midnight kiss. Renae considered what this mental/criminal exercise really meant.

  Why had she felt compelled to clarify fictional crimes? To make it plain the victims weren’t sexually molested?

  (We can’t go far enough to do the deed because most of us aren’t monsters…)

  Decent ghouls, why sure. Capable of imagining kidnapping, terrorism, bleeding out a victim. But not quite ready to taint their souls with images smacking of actual venereal perversion.

  Yet Eddie’s side of it indicated the sexual from the onset—although Ren brought in the tender age group. And even after Renae claimed it never happened, Eddie prolonged the impression.

  Most men fantasized about young girls, didn’t they… if they owned up to it. Wasn’t it a traditionally male thing? Why the anorexic look was chic, making them appear as if they hadn’t hit full puberty yet. It was why older men dumped wives to chase girls who could be their daughters—even their granddaughters. The infusion of new blood and sex at its pinnacle, instead of its end. Why, entire nations and religions, historically and presently, existed in which the virginal young girl was the sexual ideal.

  Renae wondered, and worried. After all, Eddie was considerably older than she. He could be interested in a younger female. How much younger?

  The original Edgar Allan Poe married his thirteen-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm.

  Renae wasn’t being fair. She shouldn’t set limits on the mind’s graphic elimination of taboos. Wasn’t that the plan? To imagine what she’d never do? To understand what possessed one to commit heinous crimes the news was full of? Just because it went too far for her didn’t mean Eddie must follow her rules. Maybe to him the notion of thousands impaled like a forest of gore was more repulsive than vampires in some virginal seventh heaven. After all, in Renae’s revel, she’d fancied being fondled by her torturer.

  And how was this normal?

  Maybe this was the point. It was normal as long as it stayed in the mind. Because absolutely anything and everything went on inside there.

  – | – | –

  PART TWO

  “Uh oh, here she comes again…”

  —Pirsya Profana

  – | – | –

  Chapter 12

  Rosie stood in sneakers behind the counter at Bunny’s Quik In-N-Out. Now that she’d given up her precious toe ring, why show her feet? Besides, the sandals were high heeled and—barring the funeral’s dress-up occasion—she was forbidden high heels.

  She couldn’t believe her life had been ruined in only two weeks. Once she’d been popular, making money, wearing great clothes, and planning on buying a used red Grand Am SE she’d had her eye on. Now everything was shit. Thanks to Chaz Chisholm, instead of working for herself, she worked for the old man making Sluggs. Selling snuff to guys with rotted lips who tried to blow her a kiss when they had nothing to pucker with. Her dad didn’t even pay her. Said he was keeping an eye on every move. Weren’t their laws against slavery?

  Frank stripped her closet bare of her outfits, donating them to the Paralyzed Veterans Association. What could they do with Rosie’s leather miniskirts? And he’d found where she hid her money. Two stuffed socks worth kept in boxes of deodorant tampons.

  Rosie wanted to hate Chaz, but he’d died of love for her. It was easier to hate her father for taking what she’d earned (and had every right to!) so she must learn to become a minimum wage, fat-assed secretary or peroxide-stinking hairjockey. She hated him for damn near beating her to death when he came home after talking to Chaz. Rosie still bore the greenish ghosts of bruises. Most of all she hated him for forcing her to work behind the counter, daily facing those same boys who’d paid their money and used her for the wadshot.

  Rosie
’d believed they liked her. Sure she’d been doing business, but the boys were nice. Now when they came into store… so humiliating!

  (The smoke from the casket. Those nuns there, then not there. The guest book. Sister Sophia Rose. What did it mean? They said grief and guilt did funny things to people. She wasn’t laughing.)

  Rosie cringed. Dean and Don Warvel. Strutting right toward Bunny, eyes scanning. Was Frank around? Just graduated, they thought mighty highly of themselves. They wore matching yellow shorts and white tank tops, muscular skins gleaming with scented oil, guaranteeing super tans by the time they left home for college in August. Purely Ivy League. They flexed glossy biceps in mutual self-admiration and flashed evil twin smiles.

  “Hi, Rosie,” Dean winked lewdly. “Lonely? Pretty dead in here.”

  “Business not this hot?” Don chimed, sweeping his hand over his own form. “Different from when school was in session, huh? Oh, that’s right; you weren’t in school. But I’d still’ve thought it would get busier, not slower.”

  Rosie ignored them. She suffered their tired routine several times each night. She busied herself spraying ammonia on the counter, following with swipes of cheap brown paper towels to remove sticky banana Slugg.

  “Wanna go out back? Parallel bars still up?” Dean offered.

  They weren’t. Frank’d burned them.

  Don added, “Wha’dya say, Rosiecozie? Wanna fuck?”

  Her face steamed between her ears. She refused to meet their eyes. How could they be so cruel?

  “No,” she said under her breath.

  Dean leaned on the counter. “Come on, baby. It’ll only take five minutes for us both if we skip the bars and go for that backflip of yours. It’ll take me a minute in your tight Rosiecozie cooze. Don’ll take four ’cause he’ll be sloshing through my copious sloppy seconds.”

  “Me? I don’t want your wad all over my dick. You take the seconds,” Don protested.