Season of the Witch

by Charlee Jacob

  “X.” She blew the camera a second.

  “X.” She stiffly smacked a third.

  “Where is the book’s writer, Pirsya Profana?” May suddenly demanded.

  Unfazed, Spunk replied, “She gave birth to the first plague and modifies it through each incarnation.”

  “You mean, like the bubonic plague and AIDS…?”

  “Come now, Miss Huon,” Spunk’s eyes were flecks of cold iron. “You said you read necrOmania seXualis. You must’ve understood that man’s ultimate disease is murder.”

  May Huan closed her eyes, tilted her head, listening. She sat for a couple minutes, Spunk’s satisfied smile one for the angels. Too much dead air, the show went to commercial.

  Robin rubbed her neck. “This is a live show—so they said at the beginning—so Calia hasn’t escaped. She didn’t kill Dodge for turning her in.” She looked squarely at the detectives. “Or do you think I did it?”

  “No,” Ed said quickly. “We knew you were there. His neighbor from across the hall says Jensen let you out. He was alive when you left. It was after that the neighbor heard the screams.”

  Tom stared at the TV. “Think Huon was faking? Think she really bought what Spunk was spouting? Maybe she got paid from some big publisher who plans to publish necrO/2. I thought she was a better journalist than that but dollar signs and promos…”

  “Nope,” Robin countered, curling up in a soft armchair.

  Ed and Tom exchanged puzzled looks.

  “Really,” she insisted. “See, with history’s plagues, it’s a biological thing. This other plague, it’s a dream virus in germ symbols. Contagious, sure. It got away from some Lord of the Flies.”

  Ed winked at Tom. “How would that spread? Through dreams, you say? People have to be awake some time,” he asked the nurse blandly. Something Robin’d had too much of lately: awake time. Not enough cathartic R.E.M.s to dull the pain.

  “Yes,” she replied, “but people daydream, too. They go through a series of motions not matched by what they imagine they’re going through. The germ symbol weasels itself in through fantasized episodes, like how a disease finds a cell wall weakness. It locates the fragile compulsion, making it strong. Even to the point of harming another human being.”

  “Okay, right.” Tom suppressed a grin as he and his partner prepared to leave. “Get some rest. Don’t let what we just watched on the interview mess you up so much.”

  Jumping from her chair, Robin grabbed Ed’s arm. “You think I’m ragged out! I could be… I’ve thought a lot about this. In our society, people dream and daydream more than ever. Our entire culture is geared around these dreams, even at their lightest level, when most don’t think they’re susceptible to manipulation.

  “Take visual advertising for example. It goes beyond merely supplying product information and enters the realm of visual enticement. Read the works of Marshall McLuhan, Edmund Carpenter, W. Lloyd Warner. Think about today’s ads: Super jocks flex muscles in underwear. Voluptuous women gyrate in skimpy lingerie ads that only a few years ago would have been banned as soft porn. News magazines secretly print the words FUCK, SEX, HATE into cover photos to elicit subconscious responses of revulsion—as if the image of a grief-stricken mother carrying the corpse of her dead child wasn’t evocative enough.

  “Then there’s today’s music. A perpetual bombardment of sexual degradation from every direction. Audio ads constantly shriek or whisper into your ear: Don’t think about what you’re doing, the work of your hands, the concentration of mechanics. Listen to THIS. Listen to US. Picture in your mind. Imagine. The promise of one more diversion, one more thrill moving another notch beyond what surprised and shocked us last time. We’re all ears, all eyes, focused, weak with no resistance. The contaminated demon kisses us, passing on the disease. We accept that kiss without thinking because we’re primed for accepting another ego orgasm, another sordid blowjob that makes the rest seem bearable…”

  Tom gently pulled Robin’s hand from Ed’s arm where, judging from his partner’s expression, she had cut off circulation. “You’re saying none of this is real? It’s a dream God is having? Heh, like the theory of our universe being toejam under Buddha’s nail.”

  She corrected them, mildly offended, “I never said it was a dream.”

  Ed opened the front door. “Yeah, you only said it was a virus giving people the fever for the flavor of a fatality. Anyway, Miss Pittman, I know right now this makes sense to you but you’re exhausted. I’m sorry we told you about Mr. Jensen’s death, but he doesn’t have any family and you’re a friend. Get some sleep. You need it.”

  She rubbed her red eyes. “I don’t blame you. I must sound like some paranoid Van Helsing, raving about vampires and the plague of people risen from the dead. Aging itself is a disease, a plague—debilitative and degenerative. Death is the final part of that illness. Murder as an illness is the degeneration of the morals, afflicting a species whose natural empathy is supposed to cure us of murderous, wanton destruction. Yet there are these buried icons in the collective unconsciousness, priming us to fall.

  “Think about it, a homicide occurs in this country every two minutes or less. Only a plague spreads that fast. More killers flip out every month, every week, each day. Did it used to be this bad? Ask yourselves. How many of these freaks claim they were inspired by another heinous crime, or read it in a book, or say voices told them to do it? Maybe they said they were outside themselves, watching the event, always in some way out of control. All have the same sweaty look and sour smell. You announce they must be sick. Well, they are.”

  She shrugged helplessly as the detectives returned patronizing smiles.

  Then the seemingly endless commercials stopped. The television show returned. Another reporter, Cully McCarty, came on. He looked as pale as aspirin. “May Huon, reporter for In The Vein, has committed suicide—”

  Robin and the detectives flung eyes to the TV set.

  “—She appeared to be ill during an interview with Triple X Slayer, Calia Abrams, then rose from her chair and went to the ladies’ room. There she broke a mirror and cut her own throat with a piece of glass. As soon as we know more…”

  Robin gasped, turning off the TV with the remote. Both detectives stared from each other to the nurse to the TV.

  Robin spoke first, shaken. “Thank… thanks again for stopping to tell me about Dodge. I’ll check into funeral arrangements, see when the body’s due for release.,” she said, apparently trying to keep from screaming. “Please. Go. I’m sorry I blurted out all that craziness. Thanks for listening.”

  The detectives left, feeling subdued after hearing of May Huon’s suicide.

  “Do you think—I mean, didn’t I see this in a movie? A demon passed on from hand to hand? Or a kiss or a look?” Tom remarked after they stepped off the porch.

  “I’ve seen it done a few different ways. Books, movies, the latest supernatural TV shitcom. I don’t think she means actual possession but I get what she means by the ‘germ symbol’. Have you ever seen a lynching start? It isn’t some demon doing the deed. It’s folks themselves. A kind of fever.” Ed smiled. “Churns like a wildfire.”

  “God,” Tom mumbled as they headed down the sidewalk. “You’re not going to tell me you agree?”

  Ed smirked, telling his partner thoughtfully, “Chemical reactions in the body. The sweat of a genuine psychopath does stink. Acidic as salad dressing.”

  “Really?” Tom asked, starting to hum Monk’s “Epistrophy”.

  – | – | –

  Chapter 16

  Rosie was deaf the first time she woke. She saw darkness but smelled nothing, only tasted blood/phlegm/nightshade.

  She heard a soft-edged, weightless buzz. Did she fall or float upward?

  She felt certain she was dead.

  ««—»»

  Later, someone from faraway said, “Shouldn’t they be in the rubble?”

  “Jeez, don’t tell me somebody took ’em as a trophy? Wait—is that one? No, i
t’s another fuckin’ used condom.”

  ««—»»

  Rosie drifted off. Dreamed she was in Hell, one claustrophobic room of it with a gutstopped toilet. All the men who’d died since history began herded to the door where Timmy Yale stood, hollow as a chocolate Easter bunny. As doorman, he let them step inside by turns. Bilious flesh flapped out of gangrenous winding sheets, exposing the thousands of ways they’d lost their wretched lives. As men die constantly, the line was perpetual.

  Rosie applied a fresh crust of plasmic red lipstick before going down on each, leaving smears across every prickly, nodular, scabied, elephantiasis of filarial worms, every sporotrichoid chancred, pink waxy papuled, snotclot leaking, invertebrate member.

  As each put his fingers on her, she wanted to scream. Their hands were withered, dusty-mummified, pitted, oozing wriggly rice, bones pulverized into gummy, useless fingered shells, burned to bacon, flayed and soggy, pierced with nails, sodden-drowned and fishy-nibbled, pesturella pestis pocked in sweaty, sugary arthritic knots.

  They smelled, too.

  Oil, shit, chemicals. Stale musty earth, gunpowder, potassium cyanide. Gasoline, creosote, piltdown, thick lymphatic carcinoma, yeasty putrefaction, their open necrotic sores bubbling carbon dioxide from carbohydrate-fermenting clostridial bacteria, oxidized hemoglobin.

  Hopeless diseases. Nameless. Ancient.

  Some didn’t have hands. They bent forward like rubber snakes, guiding with their ruined faces her head to their flaccid loins, biting or gumming holds onto her hair.

  She couldn’t refuse. They groaned and grunted, greasy across her teeth, crawling on her gums. Each became a snake in her mouth, hissing, flicking its own little tongue, biting hers until she tried to shriek but couldn’t with it in there, not with her face pressed against exfoliating or candida loins.

  But she heard it speak inside her, “Thissss issss how we die for love, die for love, die for love… Thissss issss how we die for love, not with a whissssper but a gangbang.”

  On top of all this funk, miasma and sarcasm, Rosie smelled lighter fluid.

  ««—»»

  Waking the second time, she heard glycerin drip. The blast trauma to her eardrums quickly repaired. No internal punctures.

  The dust had been flushed from her sinuses. She still tasted blood and atropine. Rosie was thirsty.

  The white room was half dark, screen pulled around the bed.

  She saw that her right leg was gone, six inches above the knee. The left, three inches below the hip.

  “Where’s my pretty rosie-rosebud toe ring?”

  ««—»»

  The first day she noticed she had a visitor, it was a girl from school. Makita, wasn’t it? A little Goth chick who actually spoke to her a few times before Rosie dropped out of classes. She’d say strange stuff. Like, “Did you know I got my nipple piershed and it infected and I found it lying in my bed thish morning? Don’t let anyone shtick pinsh in your nipsh, okay, Rosheanne?” or, “I didn’t ush’t to believe all that Catholic shtuff, my folksh dragging me to church. I shpent my firsht ten gradesh in parochial shkool and really hated the nunsh. Now I’m in a regular shkool but I shee nunsh everywhere. What do you think of that, Shishter Shophia Roshe?”

  Rosie hadn’t been friendly to her, grossed out by Makita’s hairlip. The rumor was that she’d been locked in a kiss with a boy who had really bad braces and the steel cut her up.

  Makita stood beside Rosie’s hospital bed, hands brown with candy. “Want shum shocholate?” the girl lisped, handing her a piece.

  Rosie took it. “Sure. Thanks.”

  She bit, then began spitting it out. Awful!

  The girl leaned close and smiled. “Shock-a-lot?”

  Rosie furiously buzzed for the nurse.

  The girl swallowed hers, tiny creatures crawling out from the tear between her lip and nose. Ants carried bits of dung and bloody meat bits. She opened her mouth. The gums and tongue were covered with swollen ant bites.

  Makita said then, “C-C-C-Cannibalishm rhymesh with Jish Jish Jish Jishum.”

  The nurse came. Rosie had to be sedated. Her mouth was rendered thoroughly (ant)iseptic. SH-SH-SH-Shqueaky clean.

  To go with SH-SH-SH-Shome boys are jusht plain mean.

  ««—»»

  Hannah, Rita and Lysette visited, wept, wrung their hands, cute and complete.

  Marty Hardisty brought flowers every day. He’d stay for hours.

  None of the Baucum High Batshits paid respects. Either they couldn’t face her for their shame or just didn’t bother since she’d become a double amputee.

  Even though Rosie’s face hadn’t been scarred, she felt ugly.

  (Blisters from the clinch with Chaz had healed. So had the ant bites.)

  Only when Marty was there did Rosie feel right. She couldn’t believe she used to snub him at school. The sweetest boy alive, he made her feel beautiful.

  It was only two weeks after the explosion. Meat throbbed, bones ached from concrete-and-metal chop, even though her legs no longer existed…but they had not been simply removed and chucked down the surgical chute.

  They’d been stolen.

  She’d overheard. No one found the legs at the store. Some deather gang creep had been arrested with one of her feet in his coat pocket. She remembered the rictus gang, buying Crimson Eggs jawbreakers. Drooling bloody saliva. Were they outside when the store blew? Creeping back, dust filming their teeth, poking through debris, stealing pieces as she lay unconscious?

  What were they doing with her legs? Unspeakable things. The one arrested had tried selling it to an undercover cop, advertising it as a relic from a modern Magdalene saint.

  All she owned now were green ghosts of bruises and minor scrapes, almost healed. The benefits of youth.

  One night, Marty started to leave and bent to kiss her a modest goodbye. A peck on the cheek.

  “No you don’t.” Rosie pulled him back for a real kiss. She slipped aside the thin hospital blanket, hoping her bandages wouldn’t frighten him away—wasted space at the foot of the bed.

  He was quiet and looked only at her. He helped her with the strings on the backless gown. It was the tenderest sex she’d ever known; the only sex he’d ever had.

  Her stumps were weak but she held him against her, as with a baby’s arms. Eventually she’d have prosthetics, plastic stems, an artificial flower.

  When Roseanne quivered, Marty anxiously asked, “Am I hurting ya?”

  She nudged him with the left leg remnant. “No.”

  Afterward he touched her gently, everywhere, fascinated by her body’s geography. His fingers brushed the gauzy layers.

  “Does it turn you off?” she asked, seeking his revulsion.

  He shook his head. “I can hardly wait until these bandages come off. I want all of ya.”

  She shuddered. “Then I’ll be really hideous.”

  “Stop thinking like that. You’re a gorgeous girl. We’ll have fun when ya get out of here.”

  Marty grinned as he kissed the tip of her nose.

  “What’ll I be able to do?” she wanted to know.

  His eyes lit up. He gestured broadly. “Everything. Wait til the therapists show ya how to use what you’ve got. You’ll be great, you’ll see. Look at how great ya were now.”

  “Really?” Rosie said in her tiniest voice. “Was I?”

  He stroked her blond hair. “It’s making love to a woman who has four hands. It’s incredibly erotic. A regular Venus de Milo. No arms but she’s still revered for her timeless beauty, Beauty. I’ll be here when they release ya. And every minute afterward. Try getting rid of me now that I’ve made love to a goddess.”

  Rosie sighed. “It’s sad that this is what brought us together. I was such an asshole. I don’t deserve you.”

  “But you do deserve lingerie!” Marty laughed as he touched the generic gown. “This’s part of what’s getting ya down. Who could look like a lady in that rag? I’m gonna buy ya a negligee. Victoria’s Secret. Sexy, fri
lly. Hot as ya are, baby. I’ll get it tomorrow.”

  He got off the bed, then tucked her in. He left whistling, waving one more time before he went out the door.

  During their night together, they’d been lucky. No disturbances, no nurses or parents stopping by. With his grandfather’s heart attack, Marty’s strict home curfew was hard for his grandmother to enforce, so he’d stayed with Rosie all he wanted. Besides—he’d graduated. No longer a kid. And he felt the timing was right with Rosie, even if she had her doubts. If Granddad hadn’t approved of Seuter or Chaz, what would he have made of Rosie after the git-n-slit scandal? Marty never could’ve known her.

  And she needed him. It was good to be needed.

  As Rosie watched him go, she tingled, soft. In a good way this time, she thought. She wanted to treasure the sensation. Soon the nurse would bring Rosie’s sleep meds and the dreams… She’d taste every snake. But presently, Rosie reveled in the lingering heat from where Marty had pressed against her.

  “I don’t deserve you,” Rosie repeated, but after he’d gone, afraid if he heard it a second time, he might believe it. He’d never come back.

  And that would kill her.

  – | – | –

  Chapter 17

  Captain Walch opened his eyes.

  Am I home?

  He’d awakened to a scene reminding him of England. Until he felt the chill of these infernal colonial winters. Until he saw the woman with her black shawl, setting the kettle in the hearth, flames adding no color to her white face.

  Once awake and up, he stepped outside, circumnavigating the building, footprints in the snow smoking from the chill.

  He thought upon his woman. She hadn’t moved as if in pain. The night before, he’d twisted her arm, slapped her face, even choked her. She’d revealed nothing. Perhaps she didn’t know why the men lied, acted like confused animals. It was the sort of witch-as-scapegoat hysteria people had indulged in for centuries. No basis in reality.