The Warlock's Curse

by Hobson, M. K.

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Front Matter

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Part Two

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About The Author

  Colophon

  The Warlock’s Curse is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2012 by Mary Hobson

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Printing: October 2012

  ISBN (electronic edition): 978-1-938860-01-0

  www.demimonde.com

  Translation of “Alcestis” by Rainer Maria Rilke used by permission of A. S. Kline

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2012943773

  The Veneficas Americana Series

  By M.K. Hobson

  — 1876 —

  The Native Star

  The Hidden Goddess

  — 1910 —

  The Warlock’s Curse

  The Unsteady Earth

  Once more he still saw

  the girl’s face, that turned towards him

  with a smile, bright as hope,

  that was almost a promise: fulfilled,

  to come back up from the depths of Death

  to him, the Living —

  At that, indeed, he threw

  his hands over his face, as he knelt there,

  so as to see nothing more than that smile.

  “Alcestis,” Rainer Maria Rilke

  Prologue

  MASSACHUSETTS COLONY

  FULL MOON

  Special Magistrate Anson Kendall sat on the ladderback chair his son had fetched him and watched blood drip from the tips of Aebedel Cowdray’s fingers. Three days ago, the warlock’s hands had been fine and white as a woman’s, framed by pristine silk cuffs edged with Flemish lace. Now the cuffs were soiled and torn, the lace stiff and brown, and the slim fingers swollen and purple.

  Peine forte et dure. Punishment, strong and hard. The practice of pressing a warlock beneath heavy stones was commonly reserved for cases in which the accused refused to make a plea—but in Cowdray’s case, no plea was necessary. He was an unabashed practitioner of Satan’s arts; two score and five had he lived as a warlock, traded as one in South Carolina and Pennsylvania and New York, colonies that reckoned the weight of a man’s purse over that of his sins.

  The colony of Massachusetts, however, was not so indulgent.

  Governor Bradstreet, who had commanded Cowdray’s capture, had also ordered the swiftest of trials and the speediest of convictions. These would have been followed by the hastiest of executions—had the Special Magistrate not persuaded the governor to countenance a delay. A slight delay. Just three days, which Anson Kendall might use to discover how to save his wife’s soul. For Cowdray had laid a bewitchment upon her, a spell that only the warlock knew how to unmake. And no matter how many stones it took, Anson had sworn to learn the secret.

  Three days ago, Cowdray had been defiant. He had laughed as the first stone was placed on his chest and had declared the second “a goose’s feather.” But three days without water, under the ever-increasing weight of the stones, had left his eyeballs bulging, red as grapes, and his tongue as thick as an ox’s. Three days of unrelenting torture had curbed his pride. Anson had permitted himself the luxury of hope.

  But as night had become day, and day had passed to night and back to morning again, and stone upon stone had been added, a terrible certainty slumped Anson’s shoulders, as unbearable as the weight crushing the unholy vault of the warlock’s chest.

  “You will never tell,” he whispered, allowing himself to finally realize it. He watched the man struggle for each breath, cracked lips moistened only by trickles of fresh blood. There was nothing Anson could offer him now. He could not promise to spare Cowdray’s life; he could not promise him ease or even respite from his suffering. The worst had been done—more than the worst—and Cowdray had not broken.

  Anson sank back, releasing a long breath. It was nearly midnight. Over the gallows field the rising moon hung like a ghostly pearl set in battered pewter. A bitter wind whistled off Massachusetts Bay, rattling the winter-bare branches of the hemlocks. The air smelled of smoke and snow-sodden soil and mud-damp stone and blood.

  He could hear a woman sobbing. The shudders and heaves were tinged with a note of frenzy. It was Cowdray’s whore—a dark poxy slut with red hair who had accompanied him from South Carolina, heedless of the dangers of entering Massachusetts. One of his witches, no doubt. Young and foolish. The others of his coven—it was rumored that there were hundreds—had wisely stayed away.

  Anson gestured to his son, who stood with several of Governor Bradstreet’s men, warming themselves around a bright leaping bonfire. James Kendall was thirteen, tall as a man but not yet so broad in the shoulders; the sleeves of his black coat hung down over his hands. He was at his father’s side in two steps. He was a diligent boy.

  Anson spoke so softly that his son had to bend down to hear him.

  “Another stone. The largest that remains,” he said. “And quiet that damned harlot.”

  James swallowed, but did not speak. Then he nodded, once. He went back to where the men were standing, and Anson could hear them murmuring quietly among themselves. No warlock had ever withstood seven stones. No magistrate had ever commanded it.

  Anson passed a hand over his eyes, pressed the aching orbs with his fingers. He heard rough words being spoken to the crying woman, and her answering screams of misery as she saw the seventh stone being lifted. There was the sound of a blow, a muffled thud as the woman was cast to the ground. His head was throbbing. He felt small and empty, keenly aware of his own cruelty. He knew, in that moment, that there was something important in him that he could not find anymore, something that he would not be able to find again, but he did not care. He was watching a house burning, and the screams of the whore were his wife’s screams. Sarah could not be saved. All he could do was throw on more wood so that he might not have to suffer her suffering much longer.

  It took three of Governor Bradstreet’s men to hoist the largest of the flat stones they had retrieved from the banks of the Forest River. As they settled it carefully atop the others, Cowdray released a long, wheezing groan, a bitter note on a cracked pipe. His eyes closed, lids barely stretching over the grossly protuberant orbs, and then he was still.

  Anson waited a few moments then leaned forward to confirm that the warlock was finally dead. But as he brought his face close, Cowdray’s blood-red eyes flew open. He spat. Blood and spittle thick as porridge flecked Anson’s cheek.

  “More ... will come ...” Cowdray rasped, pu
shing out each word on a wave of pain and fury, like a woman birthing a child. “Cannot ... kill us ... all.”

  With the back of his hand, Anson wiped away the bloody spittle. Whatever part of his humanity had fled had taken his sanity with it, and now all was burning in the house of his imagination with his wife’s living, breathing, dead body.

  “Yes, I can,” he said. “I will.”

  His own father, the great Determination Kendall, used to have visions—divine visions, gifts from Almighty God. Now, looking into the bloody depths of Cowdray’s eyes, Anson was struck with a divine vision of his own, as sharp and staggering as a hammer-blow to his forehead. He saw bodies. Hundreds of bodies, thousands of them, slack and lifeless, witches and warlocks, swinging from gallows against skies aglow with flames and smoke.

  Anson Kendall had never been a cruel man, and his father had despised him for it.

  Determination Kendall had been an inquisitor of highest renown, in great demand throughout the colonies as a Special Magistrate for the Courts of Assistants who had witches to be tested and tried. Anson could not remember a time when he did not travel with his father (his mother having died in childbed), but the beginning of his service as his father’s assistant—and his father’s harsh assessment of him—he could trace with painful clarity to his eighth year. Lacking other assistants, his father had deemed him a big enough boy to turn the thumbscrews on a young witch. Oh, how the girl had screamed. Anson could not bear it. He fled the room in tears. Determination found him vomiting behind a hayrick.

  “God hates a coward,” Determination had sneered. It was the first time Anson had heard those words, but it would not be the last.

  Determination’s belief in the unredeemable evil of witches was brilliant in its purity. His ears listened for accusations of milk-souring and cattle-foundering and babe-smothering as if they were a melody that pleased him. He was deaf to sweeter notes; tales of nurse-women who used magical arts to succor the ailing, or cunning-men who read the weather to augur auspicious times for sowing.

  Anson, though, had wondered. Perhaps such creatures could not be said to be in God’s favor, but were they truly in Satan’s service?

  He never shared such doubts with his father, of course. Determination would have accounted them blasphemous; proof of a weak, unguarded mind tainted by close proximity to the evil they faced every day. He might begin to look for marks or blots on his son’s Body for any special fondness for cats or rats or black dogs. And looking for them he would find them, and Anson might find himself in thumbscrews, facing the flames.

  His father served a fierce and implacable God, the kind that sacrificed sons.

  But Anson was a clever enough boy, and remaining beneath the threshold of his father’s scrutiny was as simple as keeping his lips pressed tightly together. Determination’s righteous mind was far too occupied with higher pursuits to even notice his son’s persistent silence, far less attempt to prise out whatever seditious thoughts might lay behind it. What small free time he had was dedicated to penning his magnum opus, a treatise he called the Malignia Veneficas Americae. He wrote at night, by the weak flickering light of a tallow candle, after the subjects of that day’s inquiries had been locked away to suffer ‘til cockcrow.

  His great addition to the scholarship of witchcraft was to delineate its schools. He detailed the unique practices of blood witches and earth witches and showed the ways in which they differed. He wrote of less common kinds of witches, those who could turn the Bible itself inside out to summon power—speaking the Lord’s Prayer in reverse, or confounding sensible individuals with stories and follies that left them dazed and vulnerable. These last, Determination wrote, were the hardest to detect, for their sorcery was exceeding subtle and sometimes barely distinguishable from mere politics or persuasion. Much simpler to uncover were the blood witches, barbarous fiends who drew their power from the living, agonized blood of humans.

  Witches like Aebedel Cowdray.

  When they first heard of Aebedel Cowdray, Determination was at the zenith of his power and prestige. His treatise had been published to great acclaim. England’s Witchfinder General himself, Matthew Hopkins, had proclaimed it a novum malleum—a new hammer in the never-ending battle against sorcerous criminality. Determination found himself in greater demand than ever, each day bringing a fresh batch of summons from villages and towns desperate for aid in their prosecution of local malefactors.

  Travelling to answer one such, they had stopped for the night at an inn, where Determination had happened upon an old colleague, a German witch hunter by the name of Eisenbach. As old men will, the two had fallen into commiseration about the wicked ways of the world. Eisenbach had lamented particularly the New World’s lax attitude toward der hexenmeisters, so different from the admirable strictness of his own native land.

  “One need only look at Aebedel Cowdray to see how servants of evil are coddled in America!” Eisenbach had seethed, slamming down his tankard so hard that foam flecked his grimy sleeve.

  Cowdray’s name not being familiar to father or son, Eisenbach proceeded to outline the specifics of the man’s notoriety, how he lived and traded openly as a warlock in the lower colonies, keeping homes and offices in both South Carolina and New York.

  “He’s a slave trader. His great success comes from the fact that he performs some sort of unholy rite upon his blackamoors. It makes them wonderful placid, far more than such beasts are by nature.” Eisenbach leaned forward, relishing the telling as much as Determination did the hearing. “He does a thriving trade with the plantation owners in the Carolinas and the West Indies. They have thrown their fortunes in with his, and as they have no wish to see their investments ruined, he will never be prosecuted, howsoever rank his sins!”

  Determination snorted with outrage. Eisenbach, baring his rot-pitted teeth in a grimace, had further inflamed him with tales of Cowdray’s riches, of his fine velvet coats and his cuffs of silk edged with lace, of how the warlock had ruined scores of virgins and lured good married women from their hearths to dance with the devil in the full moon’s light.

  “And naught can be done about it,” Eisenbach had concluded, eyes sparkling as he looked over his tankard at Determination. Determination had said nothing in answer, but Anson had always remembered that moment. His father, like God, would not be mocked.

  Later, as they were preparing for sleep, Determination had been strangely pensive.

  “The abomination’s very name chilled me,” he mused, as he removed his heavy boots. “As if I had heard it before. But I am sure I have not. And yet”—he dropped a boot to the floor with a thump—“I feel as if someone has walked over my grave.”

  But the morning brought them renewed vigor and work, for they were to interrogate a whole family of witches, sin-shackled from the centenarian grandfather all the way down to the newborn infant son. And with such pleasures facing him, and many similar subsequent pleasures, Determination put Cowdray out of his thoughts.

  It was, Anson often reflected, surely the happiest time of his father’s life.

  It had been the happiest time in Anson’s life as well, even though he was plagued by night-horrors so extreme that the brightest light of day did not completely dispel them. Even though he could never stop his hands from shaking. Even though the screaming of tormented witches had taken up residence in his brain, and sometimes the only way he could find peace was to cut his own flesh with a sharp knife, releasing the screams on a warm trickle of blood. Because it was at that time, in Anson’s eighteenth year, that his father decided he must take a wife.

  The Inquisitors Kendall, as they were coming to be known throughout the colonies, were amassing a respectable fortune. Anson must produce sons to carry on their good work. No one—least of all Anson—expected that it would be a love match.

  It was certainly not love at first sight. Sarah Roarke—the youngest daughter of the modest, observant Roarkes of Salem—was not at all beautiful. But she was lively and spry, with a tendenc
y to laugh more often than was theologically approved. When they were together, they never spoke of witches or sin or what methods of torture were best for small children. His hands shook less when she held them, and once, when they were allowed to sit up together after the rest of the household had retired, he fell asleep with his head on her shoulder and did not dream at all.

  Money was settled on them from both sides of the family, and the newlyweds took a fine house on Port Street. Years passed and children followed: James, and then Abigail. Anson began to think of how he might use his growing stature as a householder to petition for a release from his father’s service. He began to imagine himself pursuing a new career, one more suitable to his nature—binding books or keeping a coffeehouse.

  But the demand for the services of the Inquisitors Kendall did not diminish; rather, they increased with each passing year. And each year, Aebedel Cowdray’s name came to them more often, from the gossiping lips of the men who were his father’s closest associates. The wickedest man in the New World, he was called. A blood-sorcerer whose hand no earthly authority can stay.

  It was an outrage. Unlike their usual targets, Cowdray was no crook-backed old woman who dabbled in herbs and spoke to her cats; he was a true demon, worldly and sly, infamous as a brute fornicator and worse. And yet, the law could not—or rather, would not—touch him. Cowdray’s protected existence made a mockery of all their efforts. What good their prosecutions, if the worst of the sinners was forever beyond their reach?

  Determination’s outrage did not become obsession, however, until Old Mother Grax told them of Aebedel Cowdray’s snuffbox.

  Old Mother Grax was a hunchbacked hedgewitch accused of causing her neighbor’s chickens to lay black eggs with serpents in them. The Kendalls hung her strappado to extract the names of her confederates; it was one of Determination’s favorite methods of interrogation. By this time, Anson had well-practiced techniques for distancing himself from the horror of it. He would pretend that he was simply watching someone else’s hands. He would imagine Sarah singing to him, as she did sometimes at night. She sang terribly, tunelessly and without rhythm, but it was the most beautiful thing in the whole world. He could lose himself in that remembered song, and it felt as if he was no longer even in his human Body and something else managed his brutal tasks. His father had accounted this a great blessing, believing that it was evidence of the Divine Spirit working within his son, but Anson had his doubts that the Divine Spirit could be so cold; distant and passionless as a frozen moon in a winter sky.