The Witch and Warlock MEGAPACK ®: 25 Tales of Magic-Users

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  “Step away from the bed…”

  “Not even my own father would help me. And when the sheriff and your daddy are the same person, and neither one of them cares enough to do anything—”

  “I’m only going to say this one more time…”

  “Why, what’s a poor ol’ girl to do?”

  Serinna’s finger jerked sideways, stabbing down into McDermott’s eye. Blood sluiced up and outward, splashing up the witch woman’s arm to the elbow. The man’s scream and the retort from Fargo’s gun filled the air at the same moment. Slowly, Serinna extracted her finger from McDermott’s skull. Lifting her hand, she plucked the sheriff’s bullet from where it hung in mid-air, caught in the scarlet power emanating from the woman’s other hand.

  “I was willing to spare you, sheriff,” said the witch in a curt, but wounded manner. “One girl to another. But you’re just the same as daddy was. And if I was willing to kill him…”

  “Sheriff Duncan wasn’t murdered. He…” Fargo listened to her words. The sheriff had drowned while hunting. He had fallen from a tree he had climbed to watch for game. At least, they had thought he had fallen, the way his body was broken, the way—

  “The skunk-ape! Your own father—” Fargo squeezed off two more futile rounds, again watching them stop inches from Serinna as the witch again spoke the proper words, snapped her fingers and caught the rounds in her scarlet webbing.

  “Stupid bitch,” sneered Serinna. The witch made to eliminate the sheriff, but just before she could another volley was heard. Four bullets were launched at the witch. Three missed, but one entered her shoulder, spinning her around and bouncing her off the rear wall of the room. As the sheriff shook her head, trying to stop the overwhelming flow of contradictory information flooding her brain, Blakley stood up and rushed toward Serinna, his smoking Sig Saur 9mm in hand.

  “Not another word out of you,” snarled the professor. Laughing, Serinna surrounded herself with her scarlet energy. Blakley fired again, but the further rounds were no more effective than any of the sheriff’s.

  “Too late, fool,” sneered the witch. “I would’ve paid my price, been happy with Marsh, but no, everyone had to defend him.” Her free hand covering her wound, Serinna bit her lip against the pain throbbing through her body.

  “Everyone always has to defend him!” Hate crackling through her eyes, the woman in black rose into the air.

  “Well then, everyone can go to Hell!”

  Protected behind her energy wall, Serinna Duncan spoke another ancient phrase. Throughout the hospital lights dimmed, air conditioners shut down, heart machines stopped, elevators jammed. Darkness rushed in, only to be repelled by emergency lights. Then, a new darkness crept into McDermott’s room and all light vanished. The smell of sulfur followed.

  Oh, Hell, thought Blakley. Literally—

  Suddenly the room tiles began to buckle and crack. A thick, red-black ooze bubbled up through the floor, ran down the walls, steaming as it flowed, burning all it touched. A thin finger of the inky sludge touched one of the still unconscious deputies. Contact with flesh drew more of the pulsating ribbons, all of them streaming for the deputy, covering him, burning. The man woke screaming, his flesh and organs dissolving as he watched.

  Blakley threw himself out into the hall, dragging the sheriff behind him. Leaving her to take care of herself, he dodged through the small field of bodies until he reached Boles. Grabbing up the smaller man in his arms, he slapped his face, screaming, “Wake up, you idiot! You wanted a believer—you’ve got one—this is your line! Wake up, wake up!”

  Two more deputies were stripped to their bones as the Para-Psychologist began to come around. His eyes opening, he watched as the red-black sludge grew above the men—expanding, swirling, thickening into a vaguely humanoid shape. Burning red pupils began to form within a set of slate black irises set in the hanging, over-sized head. One of the deputies tried to run from the hall, but a bristling tendril roped out and caught him, draining away his physicality in a matter of seconds. Bones clattered to the floor. Serinna laughed.

  “Souls for the master. All of you will feed him.” Then, through the cries and screams echoing throughout the building, the witch heard the sobs coming from the bed behind her. “But, first—I must attend to my darling Marsh.”

  The main lights began to flicker back to life as the not-quite formed beast followed Serinna back into room 912.

  “Boles,” said Blakley, still shaking his partner, “what can we do against this?”

  “First,” insisted the smaller man, pushing against Blakley’s hands, “stop shaking me—for God’s sake.” Pulling himself up off the floor, the Para-Psychologist thought for a moment, then pointed first to one surviving deputy, then another as he snapped, “Blakley, you, and you—follow me.”

  Reaching that floor’s emergency station he instructed his partner to take the axe, shoving the fire extinguisher into the hands of one of the deputies. Then, spotting a bag slung over the other deputies shoulder, he asked what the man had inside it.

  “Tear gas, sir.”

  “Excellent—throw one into 912. Now.”

  “But, McDermott…”

  “Do it!”

  The canister was sent flying into the room. Immediately thick plumes of yellow smoke erupted into the hall through the doorway. Serinna’s voice screamed, then choked. The nearly formed skunk-ape boiled out into the hallway.

  “You, sir,” shouted Boles at the deputy with the fire extinguisher, “Empty it into the beast. Now!”

  Chemical spray splattered the creature, eating into its spectral body. As the few remaining surviving deputies came to the senses, Boles ordered them to direct all their firepower at the thing. The black form slowed, but continued advancing.

  “Keep it up,” Boles shouted over the terrible din. “She can’t control the demon and combat everything we’re throwing at her at one time.”

  She can’t—

  A tendril of black slogged forward out of the skunk-ape and coated the deputy with the extinguisher. Even as he dissolved, however, Boles slapped at Blakley’s back, screaming at him to attack with the axe. The heavy weapon tore through the shoulder of the thing, carving a cruel line down to the wavering form’s mid-section. And then, suddenly, another wave of gunfire was heard.

  In immediate response, the skunk-ape dissolved, the black shape simply folding in on itself until it disappeared. Making their way to room 912, the surviving men stared inside. The first thing that greeted their eyes was the charred remains of Marshall McDermott—his legs, lower bowels, one of his hands and an ear all that remained.

  Then, vision expanded to take in the form of Serinna Duncan sliding down the wall—blood smearing out behind her—and in the far corner, Sheriff Fargo, still pulling the trigger of her long since emptied revolver. Crossing the room, Boles put his hand over the gun and then eased Fargo’s arms downward, finally getting the woman to return her weapon to its holster. As she began to shake, and then cry, the professor embraced her compassionately, whispering softly;

  “Thank you, sheriff. I was beginning to run out of ideas.”

  BLACHARD MENTAL HEALTH INSTITUTE, WAYCROSS, GA—NINE DAYS LATER

  Blakley and Boles stood outside the padded cell which would hold Serinna Duncan. Blakley stared through the door’s tiny window, muttering to his partner.

  “So she traded her life, her sanity, her, her…”

  “You can say it,” coaxed the other man.

  “All right, if you really believe in such things,” Blakley nearly snarled as he spat his words at Boles.” Her soul…she traded her soul for the power to do what she did? To what? Who—the devil? Lucifer?”

  “Let’s not get bogged down in labels,” answered Boles with a bit of compassion. “There are, simply put, dark forces in this universe, just as th
ere are engines working toward the light. Serinna Duncan lived with a cancerous hate for some twenty years. It took her a while, but she finally found a way to channel it.”

  “But now, all she has to do is mumble a few words,” asked Blakley with trepidation, “and the walls come tumbling down. And anyone can do this?”

  “Anyone who believes as strongly as she,” agreed Boles. “Which luckily for this world is not that many people.”

  “But what’s going to stop her?” asked the larger man. “A padded cell? Bars and concrete can’t stop her from talking. She can’t be kept gagged for the rest of her life. She has to eat. Even if they use intravenous lines, sooner or later…”

  “Calm yourself,” answered Boles quietly. “The surgeons saved her life. Since she was quite correctly judged insane, the death penalty could not be administered. Thus, this measure was our only recourse.”

  At the distant end of the hall, a gurney appeared being pushed by an orderly. The surgeon who had saved Serinna’s life was in attendance, as was Donna Fargo. As the group approached, Blakley said, “But this is barbaric. Such a punishment hasn’t been meted out since the Dark Ages.”

  “Yes,” answered Boles. “And if we don’t want to see a return of those splendid times, best we stick to such wise procedures as they mapped out for us back then.”

  Blakley and Boles stepped to opposite sides of the door as the orderly approached. Wheeling the gurney inside, he began to unloosen the table’s restraints so that Serinna could be returned to her room. Blakley looked to the former sheriff of Waycross.

  “It’s official,” she nodded, announcing; “I turned my shield back over to the county office this morning.”

  As the two talked quietly, the surgeon approached Boles. Handing him the jar he had carried with him from the operating theater, he released it to the professor with a grimace of disgust, asking, “And you really think this was necessary?”

  “You saw the remains of Marshall McDermott, didn’t you?” asked Boles. “The men who died with him. Jeff Graham and his girl friend. Can you explain any of it?”

  When the doctor remained mute, his eyes searching for the floor, the professor added, “No, you can’t. But I will tell you that all of that was done with but a thought from the woman in the cell before you, fueled by her hate, trigger by nothing more than the passage of air through her throat, manipulated by her tongue.”

  Boles stared at the flat, semi-oval of flesh floating in the jar of formaldehyde he held. Beyond them the straight-jacketed woman opened her mouth, and began to rage—screaming in silence.

  THE UNBELIEVER, by Janet Fox

  Originally published in Haunted, June 1968.

  A yellow moon hung ripe and full in an empty sky, and the restless wind sent the dead leaves scurrying along the ground with a rasping sound like the scrape of tiny claws. The newly graveled road stretched palely out ahead in the lights of the red Pontiac as Brother Vincent Parter twirled the big car around the looping bend of road above the hollow.

  He was tired—that was why the road seemed so long. There were blue pouches beneath his small, deep-set eyes and a blue shadow of beard along his heavy jaws. He did not look down into the hollow, but kept his eyes on the road that seemed to have no ending.

  At last he saw the faint winking light and pulled up in front of the Witch Woman’s house. The old board shack leaned crazily as the wind slapped at it.

  Brother Parter climbed out of the car and walked up the path, stepping carefully so as not to dim the shine of his shoes or to get dust on his neat, dark suit. One more stop, he told himself, before a hot bath, a short drink, and bed, only one week more before leaving the sticks forever and making really big money with his own radio gospel show.

  He mounted the sway-backed porch and tapped at the door. He remembered the place. As a boy he had sneaked around it, trying to get a peek in the windows. People still told stories about the old Witch Woman on the mountain, but he was beyond that now. He could use that kind of superstition to bleed the suckers, but believe it himself—

  The door opened a crack, and something moved behind it. Suddenly the door was thrust open, and there was the Witch Woman in the light of her kerosene lamp. She was as gnarled and dirty as a root that has stayed in the ground long after the tree it nourished is gone. White hair stood wildly away from a pinkish scalp, and her eyes were like cloudy blue-glass marbles set in her skull.

  “Might I come in, Sister Cullie?”

  It was reassuring to Parter that the Witch Woman had a name like anyone else. It made her seem more like what she really was—a harmless old lunatic.

  “Who is it?”

  “It’s Brother Parter. I’ve been out visiting with my flock, and I stopped by to bring you the comfort of the Holy Gospel.” He was just getting warmed up when the old woman said, in a hoarse whisper:

  “Oh, it’s you agin, come in.”

  “I beg your pardon, Ma’am, but I don’t believe I’ve ever been here before.”

  “Close that door!” she shouted, and gave the door a tremendous slam. “They’re walkin’ tonight!

  “Eh?”

  “Souls, Human souls in torment.” She went over to the window and put her ear to a crack in the pane that let the wind come humming through. “I can hear em cryin’.”

  “You mean ghosts? My dear Sister Cullie, there are no such things.”

  The Witch Woman swung away from the window and looked at him with a wicked smile on her face. “You’ve come a long way from the holler, Rags Parter. You’re dressed in fine clothes and talk with fine words, but you’re the same ragged little boy, the drunkard’s son, what run wild on the mountain. You say they ain’t no ghosts, but down inside ya, you know they is.

  “Please, Sister, let me help you get these foolish notions out of your head. The Lord Jesus Christ will—”

  “I can prove they’s ghosts walkin’ tonight.”

  “Please do so.”

  “It’s not time.”

  He laughed. “I suppose midnight is the witching hour.”

  “Reckon it was about eleven. Not long from now. You’ll see.” Her voice rose to a scream. “You’ll see!” She poked a crooked finger toward his nose so that he flinched, “An’ you deserve it, too, for you’re the one that killed my Toby. I knowed you done it, but I couldn’t ketch you. Wild and tricky as a young boar you was then!”

  Parter thought back and remembered the speckled cat with glassy blue eyes. He remembered he had dropped it into the cistern. It had hooked his arm with its claws, but he had put it in. He could still hear it yowling and thrashing around in the water. For a little while he felt uncomfortable, but then he smiled. “Now, Miz Cullie, that happened, a good many years ago.”

  “You was an evil boy and you growed up to an evil man. Do you believe in ghosts, yet, Rags? It’s about time.”

  “No, I don’t believe in em!” he shouted, his voice losing its smoothness.

  She gave a laugh that became a hysterical shriek. “Wal, you’re a ghost yourself, Rags Parter! You died four years ago!”

  “The hell I did!”

  “Hell, hell, hell!” shrieked the Witch Woman. “What do you know about it? You drove your fancy car right off the road above the holler. It burned. I listened to your screams.”

  “You crazy fool!” said Parter, feeling a chill run up his back.

  “You come back here ever year and say the same things and take the same curve and die all over again. People don’t change, Rags. You were evil, and your ghost has a bad smell about it. Git outta my house.”

  Parter turned and left the house. He didn’t want to run, but somehow he had to. His hands clammy on the wheel, he jerked the car in a lunging circle and roared away, the gravel smoking under his tires. The road was white and it reached away forever. Even though it had bee
n newly graveled that year, there were deep ruts in it and weeds growing along the edges as though it were an old road. Around the looping bend he went, tires screeching.

  The old Witch Woman leaned her face close to the window and listened to the buzzing of the wind as though it bore her a message. From far away came the crash and tinkle of glass and metal hitting rock and the high, thin sound of screams. The old woman squinted her eyes toward the hollow where a red glow was beginning to appear.

  “See you next year,” she croaked.

  THE ROBBERY, by Cynthia Ward

  Originally published in 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories (1995).

  Sarah Martin unlocked the front door of her tract house and stood staring: the kitchen door had been broken open. She’d been burglarized. Again. A month after she’d bought this house in a “safe suburban neighborhood,” someone had broken in when she’d gone to Chicago for the weekend. They hadn’t taken anything except the coins on her nightstand, but still she had felt furious and violated.

  This time Sarah had told no one she was going away except her neighbors, the Armstrongs: a friendly, nervous blonde housewife named Trisha and her pompous lawyer husband Carmichael. They’d known about her previous break-in, and they’d agreed not to tell anyone she was going away. They wouldn’t have told anyone. Except, Sarah suddenly realized, their son.

  She’d never met the boy, but when she’d invited the Armstrongs to dinner, Carmichael had boasted at length about his only son, Thomas. About what a great athlete and terrific quarterback, what an over-achieving student and well-behaved Christian his son was. Because Thomas was so good, Carmichael Armstrong had bought his son a Corvette and, if Thomas didn’t get a full scholarship, he would pay his son’s way through college and law school. “I had to drive a dangerous junk car and pay for my education with lousy back-breaking labor,” Carmichael had told Sarah over dinner. “Why should my son suffer through some low-paying menial job when he doesn’t have to?” Sarah had said nothing, though she’d been angry at Carmichael’s scornful dismissal of labor--all her relatives back East worked hard jobs, lobstering, logging, driving trucks, waiting tables, and they deserved respect. Sarah had held her tongue and, remembering the brawny, sullen youth she’d seen working on the sports car in the Armstrongs’ driveway, she had thought that Thomas would benefit enormously from working like every college-bound teenager she’d ever known.