"For your next victim?"
"Yes. When I worked for my paychecks as a foreman at the sewing factory, I was on the hunt. When I shopped for food, I was hunting. When I finally got a car and took little trips into the panhandle of Florida and down to Mobile and up to Montgomery and Huntsville, I was on a hunt.
"That's why I was never caught, I suppose. I took them from everywhere and brought them dead back here. Back there." He meant the untamed acres behind his house where he had buried the bodies.
"Why didn't you turn yourself in when you…when you stopped?" she asked.
"I didn't want to go to the electric chair. That should be obvious. What happened to me was something unexplainable, something that I had unearthed by killing with my full faculties, a beast inside me that I called forth through vile hatred. I have lived with my guilt after the day I woke knowing what I was and what I had done. That was not punishment enough, I know. But I was a coward. I knew what death was, I had caused so much of it. I feared my own death, what it held for me. It was not until this last year when I knew I was going to die--my heart is failing--that I've faced it. When I heard of your project I knew I had to tell. There are missing people, families bereaved and wondering where their loved ones disappeared. Now you can let them know. I've put things to rest finally."
"Do you know the names of the people you buried in the graves?"
"Yes," he said. "I kept their wallets and identification papers." He stood shakily from the rocker, spit tobacco onto the ground, then moved to the screen door. "You won't leave, will you?" he asked, holding the door open and looking at her. "Will you wait here for me to bring it all to you?"
She nodded. But he saw something waver in her eyes and suddenly he knew she lied, that she would flee the moment he turned his back.
"Why don't you stop the recorder and come with me? It's a large box—a suitcase really-- and I might need help lifting it."
He saw how skittish she was and how unhappy at his suggestion. Nevertheless she halted the recorder and stood to follow.
He smiled inwardly at the wonder of his persuasion. Hadn't he told her how vulnerable victims were, how they were led into danger without a qualm about their safety? Had she some way missed that warning, deluged as it was with his rambling, detailed confessions?
In his bedroom he held onto the polished maple wood bedpost to lower himself to his old knees. He reached under the bed frame into the dusty gloom there and pulled out a metal suitcase, an old tin contraption he had kept from the forties. It was scratched and dented and even the handle was missing. He struggled back to his feet.
"Could you lift it to the bed?"
He stepped away so that she could get a grip on the old suitcase. As she stooped, slipping her fingers beneath the heavy case, his good left hand felt along the dresser near him for the silver-plated letter opener he had bought in Evergreen one Christmas more than twenty years ago.
Just as the girl lifted, using her back, grunting, he closed his fist around the stiletto-sharp opener and plunged it with his remaining strength down into her back.
She screamed, dropping the suitcase with a clatter. She fell onto the quilt-covered bed and the springs creaked in accompaniment. Her hands came behind her feeling for the object sticking in her back.
He sat down on the bed to wait.
He talked to her as she died.
He said, "Don't worry, I'll make sure your things are back in your car, except for the two tapes, of course. I'll have to burn those. I can still drive, you know. I'm old and it is true my heart is in terrible condition, but I can still drive your car into the river where they won't find it for ages. Not until long after I've departed this old Earth. They will probably publish your book anyway. You had enough interviews to fill it already, didn't you? It was grand of you to care so much about this place. This wild, unrestrained, backwoods place."
"I thought…you…said…" She gurgled low in her throat and a scarlet ribbon of blood slipped from the corner of her mouth. She had stopped trying to reach the letter opener in her back. She lay now with her arms at her sides like an obedient child taking a nap.
The light in her eyes was fading, flickering in, flickering out, a candle flame in the wind.
"You should never have taken the word of a murderer, young lady. I never did experience that day of reckoning, that day when the urge left. I wouldn't know what that might feel like and expect that never happens to people like me." He smiled beatifically. "I haven't killed anyone for a long time, though. I'm so old, and yes, I'm weak, and I can't go on the hunt the way I used to do.
"I have to wait for the prey to come to me."
She cried tears that wet his bed, she whispered a curse against him, and then she died.
After the tedious efforts of disposing of her car, catching a ride back to his house, and burying her in the woods behind his place, Hank Borden decided not to burn the tapes she had made of his life. He opened the tin suitcase and dropped them, along with a driver's license from her purse, onto the mounds of material he had collected over a long lifetime of carnage.
Some day someone would find all this.
After he was gone, after his pitiful old pump stopped pumping and he stepped into that void, they would come here and go through his things and they would find out about his past. Only then would they know the real Hank Borden. The tapes would help them.
And all except for the profound remorse he said he had experienced, and the resultant change he claimed came over him, everything that he confessed on the tapes was God's gospel truth.
THE END
NEEDING A WITCH
by
Billie Sue Mosiman
Copyright Billie Sue Mosiman 2012
First published in "100 WICKED LITTLE WITCH STORIES," edited by Stefan Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg, & Martin Greenberg, as "Gather Round and You Shall Hear," Barnes and Noble Books 1995
Too many people were dying.
Dessy felt Jake's hand brush over her naked left breast, but it was a mindless action. He was deeply entrenched in a paperback vampire novel and not really noticing her. He often did that, touched her as if to be sure she was there, and it made her feel beloved. If she came near him while he worked on the Volvo's old worn-out engine, he would forget the grease on his hands and reach for her hip, patting it a bit, the way you pat the head of a faithful dog. Or he might be watching a late-night horror movie and have his hand pressed between her thighs, warming her. At night in bed he couldn't sleep unless he had his arms cocooned around her body.
"Too many people are dying," she said now, unable to repress her thoughts.
"Hmmm. What people?"
She reached over and took the paperback from his hand. He didn't want to let go so she had to tug at it. He frowned, looking at her in consternation. "What people?"
She ticked them off on her fingers. "Last year I lost Uncle Ray. Remember the drowning accident, the riptide down at the beach?"
She waited until he nodded before going on.
"Then three months later it was my cousin Jamie. It was liver failure, but of course it was AIDS that killed him."
"I don't think I want to talk about this," Jake said, taking back the book from her. "It's morbid."
"Then my grandmother died," she said, pulling down the third finger and holding it to her palm. "I loved my grandmother so much."
"She was old. I liked her too, Dessy, but she was very old." He tried to find his lost place in the book, riffling through the pages until they made a whirring sound.
"Today I found out my cousin Lily has melanoma. Knots rose up all over her neck. She has maybe two months to live."
Now he looked up at her, the book forgotten. "Lily? The one with five kids? Lives in Tennessee somewhere? Jesus."
"Yeah, she called yesterday and told me. Then there's your buddy, Connor. Got himself run down by a Metro bus. Now that's just crazy, Jake. Walking in front of a bus that way. He must have meant for it to happen."
"I sur
e don't want to talk about Connor." He brought the book close to his face, blocking her out.
He and Connor had been friends for more than ten years.
"Don't you think that's too many people?" She couldn't let it go. She had never been able to let anything go until she'd resolved it to her satisfaction.
"When it's somebody you care about, it's always too many." Jake wouldn't meet her eyes.
"Do you believe in witchcraft, Jake?"
"Hmmm."
"Black magic? Bad mojo or juju or stuff like that? I mean, you read about it all the time. What do you really think about the supernatural?"
"I wish you'd let me read this, that's what I think."
Dessy let him read. She couldn't tell him about the woman down the hallway, could she? Couldn't tell him she'd struck a bargain and a bad one.
That strange, glowing afternoon in her cramped apartment more than a year ago Vera had promised, "I can get you a man."
"I feel like such a ninny talking about this," Dessy had replied. "I know I'm not pretty. There are hundreds of pretty girls in this town and I'm not one of them. I'm overweight--okay, I'm fat. No one's ever been able to do anything with my hair. The cut's never right, the permanents frizzle. I buy good clothes, expensive clothes, and they hang on me like rags."
"I can still get you one," Vera said, standing by a scarf-draped table. "A man." She glided to a wall of shelves and took out one of the glass-stoppered bottles there. She sat at the table again and her face looked aged in brine in the soft amber sunlight spilling across from the windows.
"What's that?" Dessy felt hesitation setting in. Did she really want to be involved in witchcraft? It felt so archaic. It also felt dangerous, like walking along a railroad track on a trestle bridge, waiting for a train.
Vera smiled. It was like watching an icicle first crack and then hang precariously from an overhang. "It's what you drink to have a man love you. Take it."
Dessy licked her lips and thought this had been one of her more lame-brained ideas. Imagine going to a witch who advertised spells on a hand-painted sign in the door glass of the apartment vestibule's door. She didn't even believe in witches. She believed in palm readers. One had told her when she was sixteen that she would move away from that two-horse, dry, West Texas town into Houston. And she had--was offered a job when she was eighteen and took it. Predicted she would go on a trip to an exotic clime, and the first year she worked for the oil company, her boss, impressed with her capable and efficient skills, took her along as his secretary to Mexico City for a conference. It had been a fabulous trip, broadening her horizons.
That must have been what caused her to timidly knock on the door of Apartment 311 and ask for a session from the witch. If a palm reader could tell the future, couldn't a witch arrange the future? And her future was so bleak, so empty, it needed the utmost arrangement.
"How much does it cost?" she has asked Vera that day. "I don't have a lot of..."
"The fee is nominal. The monetary fee, that is." Vera smiled and unease spread through Dessy like a chill from swallowing a chunk of ice.
"What do you mean? What other fee is there?"
"Love is paid for in blood, dear Dessy."
There it was. Dessy wanted to head for the door.
"I still don't know what you mean. Maybe I should go...I don't know why..."
Vera took hold of her hand across the table. The light was fading fast from the room. Shadows advanced from the corners, gathering like whispering old women at the funeral of a madman. Vera leaned forward and lowered her voice. "Not much blood. Just some, Dessy. A life on its way out anyway, one life here...and there. You'll hardly notice."
Dessy left then, her heard like a stone lodged hard beneath her ribs, a thing big enough and cold enough to kill her. "I can't," she had said, "that's unspeakable." She escaped Vera's grasp, hurrying from the dim, dusty room for the hallway and her own apartment.
A week later she was back. It was the loneliness that took her feet tracing the way to Vera's door.
"Remember me?" She peered through the gloom at Vera's knife-edged face at the door crack. "The potion?"
"Ah, yes, the man to love you." Vera stepped back and swung the door wide to sweep her inside.
It had been explained to Dessy the deaths would come to those she knew, but it was coming anyway for everyone, and soon for these--the ones Vera must take in order for Dessy to pay for the potion.
"But why must you?" Dessy asked, still distraught and not sure if she could actually go through with it.
Vera shrugged. "Blood has to pay," is all she would say.
Dessy knew that was cryptic and evil and if she took part in this...agreement...she would also be taking part in evil. Her mind was a swirl, tormented with morality, with the possible ramifications of her selfishness. Her need.
In the end Dessy signed the pact by nodding her head. That was all. She relented, feverish for a lover, for a friend and a mate, for someone to look at her the way men looked at women they loved.
Didn't she deserve love? She nodded her head in acquiescence, took the stopper from the bottle, her hand shaking, and drank down the sweetly vile potion from the blue bottle, gagging at the last, and then she had wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and asked, "Will I meet him soon?"
Vera smiled that smile that set Dessy to wishing she hadn't done any of this, took the few bills from Dessy's trembling fingers, and led her to the door. "It will be soon. No more than a few days."
And so it had been. Dessy met Jake at the company Halloween party. She was dressed as a ghost; she knew she hadn't any imagination, so why try to disguise herself as someone pretty like Cleopatra or a rock singer? Besides, the flowing white shroud covered her heavy hips, the football captain's wide shoulders, and full, ponderous breasts.
Jake stood in the corner, dressed as Count Dracula--for she came to know he loved vampires. He watched as she entered the room. He wore a black suit, cape lined in red satin, and fake fangs that made him look boyish rather than sinister when he grinned.
He followed her to the buffet and offered to pour her wine (dyed black for the occasion) into the crystal goblets. He talked to her all night about vampires and sex and bats and old movies and sex, and finally Dessy was so hot for him she thought she might fling off the shroud and grapple him to the floor right in front of the company president if he didn't stop talking.
Now they'd been together for more than a year and she had seen too many people die.
It had to be her fault. It ate at her like a slow fire, burning and smoking low in her midsection so that she couldn't enjoy being loved. Jake's attentions only reminded her people were paying with their lives. Every time he touched her, she cringed, thinking of another funeral, another casket, a grave yawning. Would it never end? Would the debt never be repaid?
She might have been able to live with the guilt--might have--for she loved Jake and their life together. She couldn't contemplate a time in her life without him. She might have found a way to accept the deaths if it hadn't been for the headaches.
"I can't read anymore, it hurts so bad!" Jake threw the latest vampire fiction across the room from the bed and grabbed the sides of his head with both hands. He shook himself as if to shuck off the pain and then he groaned.
Dessy went for a cold wet bath cloth to bathe his neck and forehead. She brought back aspirin and a glass of water. Nothing seemed to help.
"You'd better go to a doctor," she said, worry creasing her face.
#
Weeks later, after a series of debilitating headaches, Jake let himself me taken to a doctor--who sent him to specialists. Brain tumor, they said. Three of them, consulting, rubbing their chins, standing around his bed in the hospital where Jake lay nearly comatose from a morphine drip. Definitely a brain tumor, that's what the scans showed. It was large. It was deadly. It was like a fat hand with extended claws reaching out into all areas of the brain.
Jake was going to be taken away from her.
>
She must set it all straight again if she could. That first fear had turned her heart to stone and now there was volcanic lava scoring her, leaving her racked with tremors, her cheeks wet with tears. She rushed home to the apartment house, ran up two flights of stairs to the third floor, to Apartment 311.
She knocked, banging on the door with both fists, screaming with the terror and dread of losing all that she had ever loved, all that had ever loved her in return.
The battering went unanswered. Dessy called and no sound came from within 311.
Down the stairs again, racing, leaping down them three at a time, staggering, she hit the first floor and banged on the super's door. "Let me in! I have to talk to Vera. Let me in now!"
The door opened on a chain and Mr. Caramini looked out at her, concerned and not a little frightened. "What's all this about?"
"Where's Vera? Three-eleven!"
"Dessy Mitchell? What's wrong with you? You look a mess, crying that way. There ain't no one in three-eleven, you know that."
Dessy's voice rose an octave. "Vera, the woman in three-eleven who put the sign in the lobby door..." She turned to point and only then did she see there was no sign. But it had been there just the day before, she was certain of that. She swallowed past a lump in her throat and put a cap on the panic that was trying to shatter her mind. "Vera." She said it just as plainly and unemotionally as she could so he could understand. "She had apartment three-eleven, third floor, down the hall from my apartment.
She kept a sign in the window. Right there." Now she did point. "It was there for months."
Mr. Caramini closed the door, undid the chain, and stood facing her. "Honey, you're mistaken.
Three-eleven's empty. Been empty for a couple years. You never heard from the other tenants about the murder happened in there?"
Dessy felt her knees go weak. She sagged against the door frame, her breath whistling out of her like steam from a kettle.
THE SUBWAY COLLECTION-A Box Set of 8 Dark Stories to Read on the Go Page 7