Season of the Witch

by Charlee Jacob

  “Okay, sweetie?” Lenora asked. “They’re ready for you.”

  Renae rose, smoothing wrinkles from her satin costume. Her hands trembled.

  “Don’t be nervous, Ren,” Lenora said. “You’ll do just fine. It’s only a few lines.”

  Why had Renae let herself be talked into this? She couldn’t do dialogue. And she’d already been rejected for a role in Fire Across the Brain. But a bit actress had been badly injured in a freak accident just inside The Cove. Sitting in a car, parked in an apartment house garage, the building suddenly collapsed. The authorities didn’t know why. There was no evidence of gas explosion or bomb. A very old building might do this, foundations eaten by insects, rats, and dry rot. But these apartments were only ten years old, built during a brief urban renewal program for The Cove that never really took off.

  The accident messed up the film crew’s already tight schedule. Producers for cheap movies couldn’t spend more than their budget allowed. Lenora asked Renae to do the part.

  She had to step from a doorway, wearing a revealing white gown, breasts heaving behind intricate Victorian lace. The script called for the lead to walk down a hallway in an upscale bordello. Except it was really a hospital. Prostitutes invited him to their beds. Yet they were actually the sick of the charity ward, milling about, begging him to help them or their children. Renae was dressed as one of the whores, but she was to speak as a patient.

  The rest was done. They’d filmed this part where he turned and spied a woman standing alone, her brief speech not matching up with what he saw. Afterward they’d add the scene where he realized his true surroundings.

  Renae was positioned under the door’s arch, light and shadow rippling across her.

  “Go ahead, Miss Hawthorne,” said the director.

  Simple. She had to say, “I am Ondine. You came too late. I am dead. Half of these people are dead, even if they do not know it yet. But I know.”

  She opened her mouth, lips too dry. She wet them with her tongue but found she couldn’t speak.

  “Ren?” Lenora asked. “Do you remember the lines?”

  She nodded. Smiled. Then recalled that her character wouldn’t smile. She made her features go flat. She found a black leaf where her tongue should be. Scratching down her throat, she was sure it owned roots in her stomach.

  “Miss Hawthorne, we’re waiting,” the director prompted.

  It would take her one minute—less—to speak those five lines. She’d timed it while learning them. Just twenty-seven words, none over two syllables. Why couldn’t she do this?

  She kept looking at the camera. The lens was a tiny mirror, smeared with blood and brains.

  Renae shut her eyes, put her hands to her face. Damn it, Lenora. I didn’t want to do this.

  She imagined screaming at her friend until the other woman went deaf, red jelly coming out both ears.

  “Jesus, Lenora…you promised!” the director snapped. “I don’t have til next fuckin’ year!”

  “Colin,” Lenora replied, “for God’s sake, don’t be such a shit. Can’t you give her one more minute?”

  “She’s frozen,” he announced, giving the signal to turn off the camera. “She froze last time, too. Get a clue; she’s a loser.”

  He stalked off the set, calling for somebody to get him so-and-so’s number. Yeah, so-and-so can spit lines through a mouthful of festering zombie crotch. See if she’s free this afternoon.

  Lenora slung her arm around Renae. “You okay? I know we’ve got you chalked up but you’re white as a winding sheet. Your hands are cold.”

  She led Renae to the dressing room. “Need me to help you change?”

  Renae shook her head. “Sorry I let you down again.”

  Lenora smiled. “It’s okay. It’s a turd of a movie. Made for a few thou’ to keep a handful of decapi-maniacs entertained. Why am I doing it? I need the money. All twelve dollars and thirty-five cents of it.”

  Lenora hugged her and then grabbed her purse and keys from the nearby dressing table. “I’ll drive you home. Meet you out front. Go home and take a bubble bath.”

  Renae nodded, then turned back to the mirror. She thought she smelled iron, salt, spoiled meat. She also kept turned from Lenora, afraid to face her lest she raked a manicured talonful across her friend’s cheek.

  Why had Lenora insisted, knowing what happened last time? Renae—a stage-frightened fool, unable to speak twenty-seven words. Was there a reason the bitch put her through this? Did it make her feel superior, acting as Renae’s friend, while secretly placing her in situations where she’d get hurt?

  Hurt. As in the talk show with The Cove’s deather gangs. Lenora’s suggestion. People killed. Renae in a fugue, without the sense to get out of the way. Who would the public blame but the person moderating that ill-fated panel?

  Renae.

  Who couldn’t say twenty-seven piddly words for a movie. Lenora knew that. She pretended to care but set Renae up.

  Lenora’s family, the Strangs, were well-to-do, right side of the tracks. Not Cove trash. Not people who killed their spouses and strewed body parts around their houses. Not folks with no sane ability, who spent parts of their teenaged years in a mental facility, trying to get purer. Not morons who couldn’t look into a mirror.

  Now Renae slowly turned, not of her own accord. There was the mirror above the dressing table where Lenora had put Renae’s makeup on for her.

  Renae could see in it! The gray blot gone, there was her face, image of her rage disappearing into a firefall of shooting retinal sparks.

  Talk sounded in her head:

  She stood in a field, horizon grainy with twilight, the smell of wet grass pungent with feral musk. White wolves chased each other through the spindly ribcages of defoliated trees beyond. They jumped, sportingly nibbling at objects hanging from those trees, making them swing. Renae supervised six monstrous, naked men. Their features weren’t quite primate, backs humped and furred, legs neatly bowed from corded muscle.

  Lenora was lying on the ground, being beaten, savaged, bloodied until her black hair turned copper-red. Renae commanded them to plug every available orifice. When these were used raw—vagina sloppy and ass incontinent, teeth shattered, even nostrils torn back so far the cartilage in the nose had fully collapsed—she knelt beside Lenora, brandishing a stone-honed tusk, worn until brittle yet sharp unto wickedness. She carved valentines with double-silhouetted eclipses to create more holes. Vultures circled overhead—strangely patient for scavenger birds.

  “Here,” she commanded her beasts, laughing, weeping. “Do it here if you love me, if you hate me.”

  Afterward, scraping and plunging through Titian shadows completed, Renae faced the trees and lifted her arm like a scythe, summoning the wolves. The vultures could wait. But they were used to waiting.

  The mirror became gray fog again. Had she seen herself? There’d been movement, a face. Appalling, puffed and venal in its gloat, saying, “Here, if you love me…”

  She’d been furious. Now sparks winked away. She was spent unto zero.

  She shook herself. What the hell was that? An angry daydream. She’d fallen asleep on the set, too. Maybe she was getting sick.

  An angry daydream was being unable to say twenty-seven little words, then shrieking herself hoarse until her sound waves liquefied Lenora’s ears. Nothing more than a trifle hysterical. Yet this other was psychotic. She’d never felt so moved to violence.

  This wasn’t some ticked-off fantasy. Renae had reveled in poor Lenora’s degradation and mutilation, oh my God, her rape, by those beasts, what was I thinking… passionately craving it until she’d momentarily been blinded.

  Momentarily? Renae checked her watch. Twenty minutes were gone.

  Lenora waited for her in the car.

  She hurried to change, not bothering to remove the heavy stage makeup for the shoot that never happened.

  Twenty minutes. She’d fantasized that long? Her dream of Captain Walch was a minute, tops.

&nbs
p; This wasn’t a second’s lapse into distracted thought. It was a full-blown episode, dislocated into trance.

  – | – | –

  Chapter 15

  Robin Pittman sat in Dodger Jensen’s apartment, head in her hands. His apartment décor reflected his performance art chic. Beneath his guest, a decrepit beanbag chair lumped in sagging deposits of foam-pellet cellulite. It reminded Robin of sitting on someone’s dirty laundry.

  Dodge handed her a cold beer. “This must’ve devastated you.”

  “One in a series,” she admitted tiredly. I thought back in September that nothing on this planet could hurt as much as losing Seuter. Then Calia went off the deep end. She was already dangerously depressed, after…” She swallowed. “…what they did to her. Christ, people we saw at that bar on a regular basis, turning into a pack of wild animals…worse than animals.”

  “They were already that,” Dodge interjected, popping the tab on his own beer, oblivious to the fizz. “A lot of people hide their savage ids well.”

  “I guess. I’d always heard being raped could turn one’s soul inside out. I expected to take that assessment figuratively—psychologically. But something so potentially life-altering has a physical side, too, tangible as scars on flesh. Calia had loved my son as if he were her flesh and blood. His suicide was worse for her than the rape.”

  Dodge’s place was littered with props for a current performance piece he called “The Leper’s Dance”. There were mannequins splash-etched with acid, cardboard cut-outs of Dark Ages flotsam, rubber tidbits of lost fingers and toes/noses and ears. He’d tried cosmetic possibilities on his own face, startling Robin when he opened the door. When he nodded, a fake flap of eyelid bounced and an open jam-sore shimmered. Latex and boysenberry. As big as Dodge was—and as petite as she was—he towered, a retrograde Frankenstein’s monster.

  Robin continued, “I wasn’t surprised when she asked me to call her ‘Thelonious’. We’ve known folks who’ve needed to change themselves on the outside to match who they are inside. Get their mind and body straight, get healthy. She’d never been comfortable as a woman and then, after the attack, she’d had to alter herself. She couldn’t accept, or deny, what they’d done to her, let alone forgive them. She’d already begun focusing on photography as a therapy. But then she started telephoning some number. I eavesdropped one night, figuring it was a sex thing. Told myself don’t go getting jealous… She talked about cutting up women!—the sickest shit—whispering into the phone, teasing, threatening, getting stoked. Scared the piss out of me.”

  Dodge put his steady hand over hers. She stared at wriggly latex hanging from his fingers. Beer sloshed in the can. She took a long, dribbling draught, then set the can down.

  “I approached her about getting help. I know several competent psychiatrists at the hospital,” said the nurse. She swiped a few blond hairs away from her forehead. A strangled sob hitched in her throat.

  Dodge squeezed her hand. “I assume she refused that.” It wasn’t a question.

  Not even a second thought. Just as Calia Abrams had turned down head docs after the gang rape.

  “I confronted her about the calls, what she said, and then she left. That night. She scared me, Dodge. God help me, I should’ve done more. Called an ambulance, guys with a net. Doesn’t that sound professional? I didn’t. I still hurt because of Seuter. Calia and I, well, we hadn’t touched each other since her attack. She wouldn’t even undress in front of me. I crawled into a cubbyhole to hide.”

  Dodge had his own demons. He’d called the cops on her. Not exactly the same as getting his friend, Thelonious/Calia, some real help before the darkness swallowed him. He hadn’t known about the kinky calls. (Would he even care? A purveyor of debauchery himself, would the concept of pretending senseless slaughter be so outrageous?)

  Anyway, he’d thought Spunks’s artwork was just that—art. Technique made it appear murder had been done. Not great technique either. Was Thelonious’s aim to make it look that amateurish? Even unto using the same model repeatedly? Or, at least, hiring models who resembled one another.

  Art was all about illusion: the most evocative for the human psyche about pain and mortality. Sometimes the more primitive the technique, the most evocative of purely primal. The first stories, first cave paintings, first gods…were devoted to death in one form or another.

  “What he did to those poor women,” Dodge said, using ‘he’ when Robin employed ‘she’. “You could’ve ended up being one of them, Robby…”

  (Or would she? She didn’t have the look.)

  He continued, “We did what we had to. I’m his best friend since before the two of you met. He was into designing bridges and shopping malls, facades faintly medieval. I still turned him in when I saw that woman’s picture in the paper, after seeing him with her in The Cowl’s parking lot. I tell myself he was getting progressively more screwed up. He reverted to his college penchant for photography. Then he started seeing it as real, a magic to change everybody, talismanic. He wanted me to touch it. I try to convince myself that some of the victims might be alive if I’d acted sooner. It isn’t true. We couldn’t have anticipated this bloody nosedive. He couldn’t have done it unless he was out of his mind.”

  Dodge touched her cheek. Not a come-on. He was gay. It only hurt him to see her this way.

  Robin licked her lips, malt beer taste turned to rust in her mouth. She looked away a long time. When her gaze met his again, she asked, “Who do any of us truly know these days?”

  ««—»»

  Ed Poe and Tom Larson went to interview Dodger Jensen again, a bothersome routine cops were forced to do to death.

  They discovered him within, de facto. Gutted, intestines unraveled and painstakingly laid around his body in a gristled, cherryclot chalk line.

  Larson bent to get a better look at loose envelopes of flesh and open wounds. Had he been stuck with an ice pick, gouged with a knife, scraped with a potato peeler? “What did they do to his face?”

  Poe pointed to special effects makeup laid out on the coffee table. “Isn’t real. Pots and tubes of latex and paint. Stage blood and fake scars.”

  “Well, that sure as shit is the gooseberry McCoy,” Tom remarked, indicating the sausage border, wrinkling his nose at the fecal matter menudo.

  Ed stared at the mutilated mannequins, a Dark Ages cast to Jensen’s deliberate scenario around the living room. Fiendish touches the man did to his own face. Nobody had ever called Jensen’s art ethereal.

  ««—»»

  “Come in,” Robin told the detectives when they arrived at her house. Still in her nurse’s uniform, she’d taken down her hair which fell in ripples to her waist.

  Calia Abrams was on TV, interviewed by May Huon on the highly rated news forum, In The Vein.

  “Dodger Jensen is dead,” Poe informed the nurse.

  She clutched her throat. “Dodge? I was there today. Was it an accident? Did he OD?” Her voice trailed off.

  “Murdered,” Tom Larson replied grimly.

  May’s TV voice cut in. “You admit you killed those women?” she asked the restrained prisoner.

  “Yes.” Calia smiled for the camera. She was scrubbed, short hair shiny clean. She blushed, like a child getting too much attention. “The ones from this year—which I planned for the second book of necrOmania seXualis. The first book’s models, too, even though some so-called experts swore the photos were faked.”

  “Well, Miss Abrams, I’ve read the first book and surely you can’t deny that the women bear a striking resemblance to one another. As if it might be the same person in wigs and different clothes—the ones wearing clothes, that is.”

  “Please call me Thelonious. That other person, Miss Abrams, no longer exists.” She, or he, edged the words past her wired jaw, broken during her arrest. “The models were chosen because of their resemblance, not to one another, but to the book’s author. It was done to illustrate her own relationship to some of the book’s contents. It isn’t that hard.
There are only a few basic facial types. Cosmetics and lighting do the rest.”

  “But why did the models have to die?” May asked. “Wouldn’t your artwork have accomplished the same purpose if you’d let them pose, then sent them home?”

  “I’m carrying on a longstanding, long-crouching tradition of love through negative creation. Emotion generated through chaos, we sacrifice what we love to what we adore—representatives of the same thing—so that we ourselves will be sacrificed. There’s no greater honor than to be chosen for the altar, to be incinerated by desire back to one’s primal atoms. It’s how you can be assured you’ll come back.”

  Doubtful, May asked, “There’s a tradition of this?”

  “Cyclicly, the list of faithful is endless. One ignites the next and the torch passes, inspired by whoever consecrated the crossroads and lonely woods before them.”

  “You’re copy cats of copy cats?” May suggested, half smiling.

  Spunk was beatific. “Ad nauseum divinum infernum.”

  May reminded her guest, “You make it sound religious yet—for this second ‘book’—you left body parts in plain brown paper. Quintessential pornography. You even labeled them Triple X.”

  Spunk’s head shook patiently. “No no no no no no no. That isn’t what it means.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “XXX Kiss kiss kiss. I actually labeled them XXX/OOO, The cops left the O’s out of the stuff they gave the media. It’s like my middle name. Thelonious OOO Spunk. Thelonious Monk’s middle name was Sphere. What is a sphere but something round? My Thelonious still had the female inside him, even if I tried to cut her out. The old X chromosome. Those were my kisses and hugs.”

  Spunk formed an O, touching the tips of her forefinger and thumb. Then she bobbed the other pointed forefinger through… the old gesture for intercourse, best she could do with manacled hands.

  “X.” She puckered, blowing the camera a kiss.