Wither

by J. G. Passarella

  “Thanks,” Alex said.

  “Just relax yourself,” Wendy said. “And touch me.”

  “Touch you?”

  “I need to build my tantric energy, too,”

  “I’m sure you do,” he said, inhaling sharply as he felt Wendy’s fingers stir where they held him.

  The flecks of gold in his brown eyes seemed to grow larger as Wendy fought her own instincts and maintained eye contact. She was aware of his right hand moving, his fingers lighting on her breast, finding her nipple. A chill raced up her spine, arching her back, pushing her breasts slightly against his hands. Now she knew what he meant by a long night. “I’ll let you know if I’m about to lose control,” she said.

  “That’s only fair,” he said.

  At one point, as Wendy’s ministrations became fevered with her own arousal, Alex said, “Slow!” and she stopped stroking him. Her hands drifted up his muscular abdomen, across the broad plane of his runner’s chest, out to his shoulders and upper arms, then back in again. His hands slid down the inward curve of her waist then out with the swell of her hips, along the curve of her outer thighs, rounding her knees and in, along her inner thighs, meeting at the center, where the soft curls of hair hid a surprising warmth.

  After a few moments, he said, “I think I’m okay now.”

  “Good,” she said, and began to gently increase the motion of her hand on him. Her other hand fell to her side, where the small linen pouch of valerian root waited. In moments, she might begin to lose control.

  She fumbled with the lip of the bottle she’d brought for the valerian infusion, poured the ground root down the long neck, spilling some on the ground. She was breathing hard, trying to set her hands to separate tasks, separate rhythms: she clumsily grabbed the bottle of fresh water she’d brought and sloshed it into the spell bottle. The mixture would be the most potent she had ever prepared. She stoppered the bottle, shook it briefly, then dropped it on its side as Alexs hand moved against her, fingers inside of her. She gripped his shoulder with her free hand now. She felt the brittle tensions that had been moving slowly up through her abdomen—balanced as carefully as a house of cards—begin to tremor; she heard rapid breathing, was confused for several instants whether it was hers or Alex’s. And behind it all she was desperately alert to any change, a filament of the supernatural, woven deep down at the core, beneath all this sensation, some sign the tantric magic was working. Was that it? She lost it. There? A ripple, beginnings of the end…

  “We’re almost finished,” she said.

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” Alex whispered harshly.

  “One more spell,” she said, fumbling out her tektite stone, and a piece of stiff sketch paper, twice folded. She worked it open with her free hand, momentarily dropping the stone to the ground. The sketch paper held the frightening image of her dark demon genie, the creature that had appeared to do her bidding, as misguided as it had been. Jen had given her one of the hundred sketches she had made, after Wendy had recovered from her shock at seeing so many faces, all the same, all hideous.

  “What is that?” Alex asked, taking his eyes momentarily from her.

  “One of my nightmares,” she said. “A bogeyman.”

  The branches high above them began to sway and clack together. Down in the clearing, a brisk breeze picked up, scattering dust and fallen leaves. The flames in the candles at the compass points guttered wildly The fire in the burner leaned into the breeze, away from Wendy.

  With one hand occupied with Alex, Wendy hurriedly placed the stone in the center of the paper and refolded it. She held it over her burner as she repeated a banishing spell three times, “Leave us forever, that all the ill may recover.” With each repetition of the spell, the wind gusted more strongly, but the flames remained lit. She let the folded paper fall into the burner flame, and as the edges caught, she said to Alex, “Stop!” She removed her hand from his erection but still felt his heat on her palm.

  As his hands reluctantly fell away from her body, flames erupted from the burner with a whooshing sound, reaching out a fiery, arcing tendril that caught her wrist and swirled up her arm, contorting her body in an instant of agony.

  Wendy screamed.

  Alex grabbed her shoulders and pulled her away from the burner. He tugged on her fallen robe in an attempt to throw the cloth over her burning arm. But as quickly as it had engulfed her arm, the unearthly flame vanished. “What the hell was that?”

  Wendy shook her head, weeping as he held her in his arms. Something magical had happened, she only hoped that the banishment had worked.

  “Did you soak that paper in gasoline?” he asked, staring at the burner in disbelief. Up until the moment the paper had been completely consumed, the flames were wildly agitated, bursting high, sparks crackling and jumping, almost seeming to reach out for something else to burn. Human flesh? When the paper was nothing but black ash, the flame winked out with a hiss.

  Wendy’s arm appeared normal, but it ached, as if with a deep sunburn. She reached out with her other hand, gently touched Alex’s face, which was coated with a fine sheen of sweat, and said, “We can break the circle now. Take me home.”

  After Wendy had dismissed the elements, Alex dressed quickly, then helped her get dressed and pack up her magical equipment. She leaned against him all the way back to the car. Alex offered to drive, and Wendy simply nodded acquiescence. Neither spoke of the fire until they were in the car and had turned around on Gable Road.

  “I remember once when I was about ten,” Alex said. “Playing with a Ouija board with my cousin Adrienne. I was skeptical about the whole thing, making jokes about it. Then that little plastic pointer thing started moving around the board, darting all by itself. Scared the hell out of me.”

  “Is that what this was like?” Wendy asked, smiling faintly as she tried to picture Alex as a ten-year-old.

  “Worse he said, taking his eyes off the road to look at her for a moment. ”Much fucking worse.“

  She took his hand in hers and held it till they reached her house

  Wendy held on to Alex’s upper arm as she pushed open her bedroom door. She was feeling better, but every now and then her legs went wobbly on her. “Thanks,” she said, “I dorit think I could have made it up our ever-so-grand staircase without your help.”

  “You’re sure you’ll be okay up here alone?” Alex asked, concerned. “”When are your parents due back from their fund-raiser?“

  “Not for an hour or two,” Wendy said. “I’ll be fine, but would you mind bringing up my magic stuff. I need that spell bottle. I’m afraid to sleep without taking that valerian potion I made.”

  “I’d be afraid to sleep with it,” Alex said, then shrugged. “Back in a flash.”

  Wendy kicked off her cross-trainers, stripped off her sweater and slacks, then her underwear and socks. She put the pile of clothes in her seldom-used hamper and removed her flannel robe from its closet peg. She wrapped herself snuggly in the soft cloth and lay down on her bed with a shudder, then a sigh. Good thing I had a witness or I might believe I am losing my mind.

  Alex tapped lightly on her door, waited till she called him in. He set the duffel bag on the floor beside her bike. All except for the spell bottle, which he put on her nightstand. “I guess that’s everything,” he said.

  “Not everything,” she said, motioning him over to the bed.

  He sat beside her. “What did I forget?” he asked.

  “This,” she said and reached up to hold his face in her hands. She leaned up and kissed his mouth, his cheek, then whispered in his ear, “Make love to me.”

  He pulled back slightly. “God, don’t think I didn’t come prepared, you know, hope springs eternal and all that. But are you sure you’re up to this?”

  “Remember,” she said. “Seal it with a kiss.” She pulled him down into the circle of her arms, and if he was surprised at all by her strength, he didn’t protest. His mouth fell to hers with a sudden passion as his hand slipped inside
her robe to cup her breast. This is how she would always remember him, his sweet caresses, the way his arms trembled when he was inside her. Later, much later, she would attribute her invitation, her actions, to the henbane divination spell she had cast when they were alone in the circle together. She was sure she would have fallen into his arms eventually, but somehow, from some deep, instinctual corner of her mind came a whisper of mortality, the realization that time is so very precious after all. And never more so for Alex and her than at that moment.

  After he left her—lying in a rapturous state of contentment, a feeling that maybe all the world’s wrongs could be righted just for one day, one hour, one blissful moment of time when two people were so entwined with each other that we became a singular state of being and having—she drank the infusion of valerian. Almost as if she had consumed a fairy-tale sleeping potion, her head fell back on the pillow and the spell bottle slipped from her fingers and fell to the floor with a dull thunk. She slept…and she dreamed…

  Elizabeth Wither is in jail with Sarah Hutchins and Rebecca Cole, her coven. The walls are brick with one small window set high and crossbarred. Rebecca stands on the tips of her toes and forces her forearm through a gap that is barely wide enough to accommodate it. “I hear children playing …” she says wistfully.

  The door is iron-bound oak with a single opening, a narrow slot for the passage of meals. Sunlight dapples the cell, which smells equally of old urine and fear, a stale melange of odors.

  Sarah Hutchins sits on the fresh bundle of straw that has been forked into the corner. Sarah hugs herself and rocks slightly. “So it has come to this,” she says to no one in particular. “We are to be hanged tomorrow.”

  Rebecca looks to Wither, both hands now framing the child within her. “Elizabeth, you believe they will truly hang us?”

  “All of us” Wither says. “Even you, Rebecca.” But Withers mind is awhirl with other plans. It is better that Windale put an end to this chapter in its history, better that the coven disappear and be forgotten. And that is Withers secret, even from the two closest to her. Wither has gloried in the feast of fear and terror. But this need not be the end to them. Wither has one bit of cunning left to offer them here, now in their midnight hour. She has brought them to this place, where what she has to offer them will be their only escape, if she has chosen well, they will not resist an escape from the death and damnation that circumstances have brought them. They have been helpless victims empowered by her and would be empowered one last time, one final way. To escape death they must choose to surrender their humanity. “Would you die tomorrow for their amusement?”

  “1 spit on them” Rebecca says. “Even with my tongue swollen . out of my mouth.”

  “And you, Sarah?” Wither asks. “Will that be your satis/action?”

  “You have a plan, Elizabeth?”

  “I will let them hang me,” Wither says mysteriously walking over to an iron ring bolted to the wall and flipping it with her fingers. Rebecca looks in surprise at Wither, then Sarah, and back again. Wither meets her gaze. “But that will not be the end for me.

  “Speak it, Elizabeth” Rebecca urges. Sarah nods slowly.

  “We are sisters,” Wither says. “But what I propose requires us to become true sisters of the blood …of my blood.” Wither pushes back her sleeves and shows her forearms to them, where the veins are closest to the skin,… the black veins. When Wither clenches her fists the black veins throb. Her fingernails are as black as pitch now. “1 am more than what I seem, sisters. Even now you see the transformation within me. It will make me stronger and live long beyond the day when even their memories are forgotten. But first I must sleep for long and long, safely tucked away. When I emerge all that you see around you will long be forgotten to all but the scholars and their dusty books, yet even they will not know the whole truth of it.”

  “You will rise from death?” Rebecca asks, awed.

  “Not death,” Wither says, excitedly. “But so it will appear to them, for my nature is as strange to them to be as unknown. I would need to sleep soon anyway, lest my different nature show too much upon me.”

  “Are you immortal, Elizabeth?” Rebecca asks.

  “There are cycles even to this life, but there is something to the immortal in it, though I be not immune to death.”

  “You say you sleep but do not sleep, die but do not die, yet there is nothing of this for Rebecca and myself,” Sarah said.

  “There is if you choose it” Wither says, taking Sarah’s hands urgently in hers. “I do not bear children, that is not my way, yet each kind must spread itself as it must.”

  Rebecca says softly, “We may become as you.”

  “If you choose quickly, there is time for the change to begin in you” Wither says. “You will hang with me but will not die, though all who fear you think it so. Once the change is upon you, hanging will be as nothing to you. A gentle tug on your altered flesh and sinew, an unpleasant tightness, but no snapping of the neck.”

  “Then a spelled sleep placed upon us” Sarah says, ever the logical one, guessing the way of it. “We will sleep and seem to die. And they will bury our bodies. Alive and nothing but the cold earth for comfort. I would not live entombed in a much smaller prison than what these walls afford.”

  “Good, Sarah, you think ahead, but so, too, have I,” Wither says, “I have made certain arrangements with a … gentleman in my employ. They will bury us quickly that is their custom. Our sleep shall be short. As will be our entombment.”

  Rebecca steps forward. “I choose.”

  Sarah nods, a fateful gesture. “An easy choice when no other affords.”

  “Then we begin, so that my blood may acquaint itself with yours before our hour of reckoning.” Wither pulls her sleeves back again and uses the hardened nail of her left index finger to slice open her skin in a line from the bend of her right elbow to her wrist. Then she repeats the procedure on her other arm.

  Sarah gasps. Rebecca speaks with awe. “It is wonderful!”

  Wither bleeds. But she bleeds unlike any human, her Uood a swirling black that races with intent down her arms across her palms and out to her fingertips. Withers eyes flutter up inside their sockets. Sarah realizes—even if Rebecca does not—that this is a natural process for Wither. She is not diminished by it. Rather she is aroused. Wither offers a hand, palm up, to each of them. “Drink it,” she says breathlessly, “first drink, to prepare yourselves for mingling my blood with yours.”

  Rebecca grabs Withers right hand and brings it to her mouth, the look of the lover in her eyes as she places her lips to the black-coated fingers. She takes them in her mouth and closes her eyes. The streams of black blood appear to hurry on their course to her mouth. Rebecca moans pleasurably, even as droplets of black blood stain her lips and run down her chin. Her legs swoon, and Wither allows it, falling on her knees beside the red-haired woman.

  Sarah hesitates, staring at the fingers and seeing a final damnation…and a final salvation in equal balance.

  Her eyes still closed, Wither says, “Quick, Sarah. It is the only way. My blood will prepare the way for your blood. Drink before the mingling of blood. Now!”

  Sarah nods, takes the offered hand in each of hers, delicately at first, mesmerized by the black droplets of blood pooled there, waiting for her. As her mouth hovers close, Wither surprises her by shoving her fingers forward. A drop of the strange, black. Hood reaches her tongue and her inner struggle is over.

  She falls to her knees, elated and trembling with exquisite exhaustion. Each of the fingers finds their way into her mouth, one after the other. The black blood races down her throat and fills her with an aching pleasure. She trembles on her knees, swaying back and forth and, though she doesn’t realize it, in perfect rhythm with Wither and Rebecca.

  Long moments pass, but Wither has not yet finished with them, though they lay besotted with her inhuman blood. She rouses them with gentle prodding until they kneel obediently be/ore her again. “Now we
mingle your blood with mine” Wither says. “Bare one of your forearms to me.” They do as instructed, unquestioning. “The pain will be less than you would have felt before tasting of my blood.” Withers coarse fingernails poise over their arms, one index finger over each, near the bend of their elbows. She cuts them quickly in a parallel motion.

  Both women gasp. “It stings,” Rebecca says. Sarah grits her teeth. Wither bares her own forearms again. Whereas their red blood simply drips down to stain the straw, Withers blood, which had already begun to settle and heal the self-inflicted wounds, becomes agitated again, as if sensing the presence of their blood so close. Black droplets chase around her arms, seeking…

  Wither holds her forearms under theirs. “Clasp my arms as I clasp yours. We will become true sisters of the coven.”

  Rebecca and Sarah nod. Withers black blood almost seems to leap upward, defying gravity, straining to meet theirs. Wither grabs their arms with a fearsome grip, even as they grip hers. When skin and blood contact each other, Wither hisses a single word, her eyes blazing. “Coven!”

  As white-hot pain explodes within their bodies, scorching every nerve, Rebecca and Sarah scream! It is their last truly human act.

  The pain was a burst of fire within Wendy, recalling the fiery tendril that had leapt out of her burner and threatened to consume her. She screamed and convulsed, writhing off the bed to escape the agony. Her head struck the end table, gashing her forehead just above her right eye. She roused slowly, propped against the unforgiving metal handles on the drawers of her end table. Naked and trembling with a new chill that seemed to seep down deep into her bones, Wendy was unaware that her pentagram had fallen to the floor.

  She rolled into a fetal position, released from the dream, but still in a quasi-sleep state where reality and imagination overlapped and played tricks with her unconscious, fragmenting the details of the dream.

  Memory, flying over Windale, spiraling down among the trees. She sees him perched on the roof of the trestle bridge. She scoops him up, her clawed fingers digging into his screaming flesh. Below a pale girl-face watches in honor, mouth agape. And the memory ends.