Warlock

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Warlock Page 10

by Ray Garton


  She put her elbows on the dresser, face in her hands, and sobbed. When she lifted her head again, Redferne was gone.

  “Hey,” she said, voice cracking as she left the room to find him. He was in the bathroom standing over the witch compass. “Hey, listen, let’s get things straight. All I want is the bracelet, okay?” Her voice was unsteady and soggy with tears. “Whatever this thing is between you and the warlock—and I get the feeling he didn’t just use your toothbrush—I don’t wanna hear about it, okay? I mean, I just don’t give a sailin’ shit what he did to you. So, soon as I’m twenty again, you’re on your own, bud. Got that?”

  Redferne didn’t seem to hear her, he stared intensely at the compass.

  “East,” he said. “A great distance east.” Redferne began packing up the compass, glanced at her impatiently and waved at her to get ready. “Let us tarry not, woman. We have much traveling to do . . .”

  11

  Another Beautiful Day

  in the Neighborhood

  By dawn, the warlock was entering the barren and inhospitable Mojave Desert, but he did not notice the dry, brutal terrain. He was reading.

  He walked at a steady pace—neither fast nor slow—ignorant of his surroundings, his attention focused solely on the pages of the Grand Grimoire.

  He had two hundred and twenty-two pages—the first third of the book—wrapped in a cloth he’d taken from the girl’s house and he read the pages slowly, absorbing every word.

  Once the entire book was brought together, he knew what it could do; the power of the Grand Grimoire was legendary, said to be so great, so totally destructive, that most believed it to be no more than a myth.

  The warlock knew better.

  Until the book was complete, until the time came for it to be used to its fullest, the warlock planned to read every page and learn from them.

  As the sun rose, vapors began to rise from the pavement like waking ghosts blurring the horizon, and still the warlock read, never lifting his eyes from the page.

  When he finally raised his head, the sun was bright, the air was growing hot, and the warlock felt the beginning of a thirst tickling the back of his throat. Keeping up his pace, he looked around and saw . . .

  . . . Raimie’s Superspot Gas and Garage.

  It was a run-down little gas station with peeling paint and one broken window that had been boarded up instead of repaired because the owner and sole operator, Sam Raimie, only did work for which he was paid, not work that cost him.

  Hubcaps had been strung together and hung from the sign in front to the roof of the office. When there was a breeze, they clanked together gently. Sam hated silence and had put up the hubcaps when his old radio finally gave up the ghost.

  As the warlock approached the gas station, Sam lay under a battered old station wagon jacked up just outside the garage. He’d bought it from a friend who owned a wrecking yard in Needles. The body was shot. Half the roof was gone and all the windows were shattered. It had no bumpers, one fender was missing, and the cab was a mess. But Sam had paid next to nothing for it and was sure some of the parts were salvageable.

  Sam was a pudgy fifty-one-year-old man with permanently tangled hair and a voice like crunching gravel. He’d just rolled under the car minutes ago and was surveying the damage when he heard footsteps. He turned his head and saw two black-booted feet with large brass buckles.

  “Yo,” he said abruptly.

  A deep voice replied, “I am thirsty.”

  “Yeah, funny thing about the desert, huh? Coke machine’s over there by the office door. Drinking fountain’s broken.”

  Sam watched the feet turn and walk toward the weatherworn red and white machine a few yards away.

  “Coke machine,” the man said curiously.

  At that distance, Sam could see the stranger’s whole body from behind. He was tall but . . .

  Dresses funny, Sam thought. Must be from L.A.

  The man held a cloth bundle under one arm and stood staring at the machine; he didn’t fish in his pockets for change, didn’t check for coins in the change slot. He just stared.

  Then he touched it.

  He stroked it, almost lovingly, running his hands over it and mumbling.

  The machine rattled and burped a can of Diet Coke into the tray.

  Then another dropped.

  And another.

  They began to fall from the machine and roll over the ground.

  As the soda cans spilled out, the man picked one up, toyed with the top of it a moment before getting it open, then drank.

  “Hey!” Sam called. “The hell’d you do to my Coke machine?” He began to roll out from under the car when the man tossed him a fiery glance and—

  —waved an arm in an abrupt half circle and—

  —the jack blew out from under the car as if kicked and—

  —things got suddenly dark for Sam as—

  —the car dropped and—

  —he heard and felt his ribs crunch and splinter and—

  —no one was there to see Sam Raimie die except . . .

  . . . the warlock, who took another long draught of the strange ale called Coke and walked away from the gas station.

  He walked on down the long straight road that disappeared into a blur of heat vapors.

  He read more pages, so enthralled by the words of the Grand Grimoire that he did not even hear the coaches pass by, and some of them were monstrous.

  He did not notice the sign he passed miles later:

  SANDROCK

  Pop: 1120

  But he did notice Sandrock itself when he got to it.

  It was a tiny town with small buildings scattered on either side of the road and houses beyond them. There was a small church up ahead to the right and to his immediate right was a sign that read SANDROCK MOBILE HOME PARK.

  Between two of the box-like houses, the warlock saw an oval-shaped object shoot up into the air, then drop back down . . .

  . . . into the hands of eight-year-old Kevin Donaldson, who quickly threw the football back into the air and stepped this way and that, tracking it, then caught it again.

  Kevin hated Sunday mornings because all the other kids in the trailer court went to Sunday school and church and he had no one to play with. He usually played catch with himself or hung out at the shaded picnic table in the back corner of the court.

  He was on his way there now as he threw the ball up and caught it again. In the pocket of his green windbreaker, he had the hand held video game he’d gotten for his eighth birthday.

  As he approached the picnic table, he threw the football up again—

  —and above his head, a big hand caught it.

  The hand wore a ring with a tiny scorpion inside.

  “Hi,” Kevin said cautiously, stepping back to take a look at the tall, oddly dressed man. “Who’re you?”

  “A traveler passing through your village,” the stranger said with a smile and nod, handing the football back to Kevin.

  “Must be, ’cause nobody ’round here dresses like that. You from L.A.?” Kevin’s dad had said a lot of very iffy people lived in L.A. Kevin wasn’t sure what “iffy” meant, but maybe this guy was it.

  “No. And who might you be?”

  “Kevin.” He held out his hand to shake like his dad had taught him. “Nice to meetcha.”

  “And what are you doing?” the stranger asked, holding Kevin’s hand a little too long.

  “I was ’bout to play Space Invaders.” Kevin took the small rectangular video game from his pocket, put it on the picnic table, and turned it on. “You wanna play?”

  He stared at the beeping game with puzzlement, touched it carefully, and whispered, “What magic is this?”

  “S’not magic. It’s Space Invaders. See?” Kevin started playing, holding the game so the stranger could watch.

  Above the beeps and buzzes of the game, reverent organ music floated on the breeze.

  “See?” Kevin chirped. “You gotta keep the space invad
ers from getting all the way to the bottom. Or else they’ll waste you. See how I’m doin’ it?”

  But the man was not watching. He’d walked to the shrubbery that grew along the back fence. Tearing off a leaf, he broke it in half and passed it beneath his nose, sniffing.

  “Hey, what’re you doin?” Kevin asked impatiently.

  The man was frowning at the sky.

  “Whence comes it?” he asked.

  “Huh?”

  “The music.”

  “Oh. From the church. Over there.” He pointed, then said, “You talk weird.”

  “How is it that you’re not there?”

  “What, in church? I never go. Dad doesn’t want me to. Hates all that stuff about Jesus and the twelve apostrophes. How come you’re not there?”

  “In church?”

  “It’s Sunday.”

  He smelled the broken leaf again, crushed it between thumb and forefinger, and took a taste. “Because no witch can set foot on church ground,” he said quietly as the organ music played on.

  Kevin put Space Invaders back on the picnic table and thought. Maybe he’s retarded. Maybe he’s like that guy who cleans the vegetables over at Turner’s Market . . . always smiling and a little slow.

  “You tellin’ me you’re a witch?” Kevin asked.

  The man only smiled.

  “You ain’t no witch. Witches’re girls.”

  “Some are men.”

  “Yeah? So where’s your broomstick?”

  The man frowned.

  “Witches fly on broomsticks. Didn’t you see The Wizard of Oz!”

  “I need no broom to fly.”

  “Yeah? So what do you need?”

  “Well . . .” The man returned to the shrubbery and began gathering leaves. “Some roots and leaves are needed for the potion. These will do, I suspect.” He put a bundle of leaves on the picnic table.

  “Okay. What else?”

  He stared down at Kevin, smiling, working his jaw back and forth thoughtfully.

  “There is one ingredient more important than the rest,” he said, hunkering down in front of the boy. “It is something difficult to obtain, yet ’tis the most potent ingredient.”

  “Yeah, so what—” Kevin stumbled on his words when the man began to stroke his blond hair, brushing bangs from his eyes. “—what . . . is it?”

  The man’s hand stroked Kevin’s cheek as it worked its way down—

  —“ ’Tis something”—

  —to his neck—

  —“you can give me . . .”

  Kevin tried to back up and run, but the man’s fingers plunged into his throat, tearing through the skin before he could scream and . . .

  . . . the organ music played on and the congregation began to sing “There’s Power in the Blood,” their voices a distant drone . . .

  . . . and when the warlock had what he wanted wrapped in a soggy torn section of the boy’s green jacket, he walked on, leaving the small dark red heap named Kevin to the flies, leaving the trailer court behind, passing the church where the preacher’s voice rose and fell in a heavenly furor.

  The warlock whistled contentedly as he passed through the little town and, after a while, when Sandrock was behind him, he heard . . .

  . . . a scream rise toward the still blue sky when Vicki Donaldson found her son Kevin lying bloody and skinless in the back of the court.

  12

  On the Road

  As she drove down the highway through the Mojave Desert, Kassandra kept a curious eye on Redferne. She’d lost most of her fear of him, but not her caution. She was especially cautious now.

  Redferne was spitting repeatedly onto the leather of his whip. After several moments of spitting, he removed the carton of salt from his coat, dipped moistened fingers into it, and began to knead the salt into the leather, spitting now and then.

  Kassandra finally said, “Look, if you’re hungry, we’ll just stop.”

  He spit some more, dipped into the salt again, and continued kneading.

  “Okay, Redferne, what are you doing?”

  “Salting the leather.”

  “No shit. You wanna stop for some ketchup?”

  “Witches loathe salt,” he said.

  “Don’t blame ’em. Salt, sugar, sulphites—all that shit’ll kill you.”

  Kassandra checked the gas gauge; the needle was sneaking up on E.

  “We’ll have to stop at the next town to fill up,” she said.

  “Fill up?”

  “Yeah. Gas. Makes the coach run.”

  Steering with one hand, Kassandra began to prod through her overstuffed purse which sat between her and Redferne. Everything in the purse was at her fingertips except what she wanted: some gum and her MasterCard. She dredged through the mess more intently, her eyes off the road.

  “Tell me,” Redferne said, “must we travel on just one side of the roadway? Or is’t whichever we choose?”

  Still searching, Kassandra said, “One side.”

  “Which side might that be?”

  “The right si—”

  Redferne slapped a hand onto the steering wheel and jerked it to the right.

  Kassandra’s head snapped up as she rocked behind the wheel just in time to see—

  —an enormous eighteen wheeler roar by in the opposite direction, horn blaring, driver violently stabbing the air with his middle finger.

  “Jesus,” Kassandra gulped, clutching the wheel with both hands.

  Recovering from the shock, Redferne said, “Let your attention lie before you, not beside you.”

  “Oh, check this, some guy from the seventeenth century’s tellin’ me how to drive now. How quickly they learn.”

  Keeping her eyes on the road this time, Kassandra reached into her purse again and removed a piece of gum, handing it to Redferne.

  “Bubblegum,” she said instructively. “I usually buy Carefree, but sometimes I get this stuff and have someone chew out the sugar first. Sugar—something I loathe.”

  He stared at her curiously.

  “Go ahead. You start, I’ll finish.” When he started to put the wrapped piece in his mouth, she said, “It’ll help if you take the wrapper off.”

  As Redferne put the gum in his mouth and began to chew, Kassandra spotted a gas station on the right—they were suddenly in a small town—and slowed the car. When she came to a stop at a pump, she saw Redferne bob his head once and touch his throat.

  “No. Tell me you didn’t swallow it,” she said.

  “ ’Twasn’t . . . meant to be eaten?”

  “Jesus. Takes seven years for that shit to digest.” She looked at her hands on the steering wheel and saw the minute beginnings of liver spots.

  Seven years you won’t see, babe, she thought, saying softly, sadly, “Oh, well. Guess I’m too old to be chewin’ bubblegum anyway.”

  A red haired boy with freckles made his lazy way to Kassandra’s side of the Corvair, picking at his palms.

  “Yeah?” he said, bending toward the window.

  “You take MasterCard?” Kassandra asked.

  The boy’s name was on his shirt: BOB. He squinted at Redferne, looking him over suspiciously. “With plenty of I.D., we do.”

  “Fill it up.” She flashed the card to Redferne. “Twentieth-century money. Great shit. You can spend as much as you want until you hit your limit. Then you go fifty bucks a whack. Whatta you say we stretch our legs.” She got out of the car.

  With the wooden box containing the witch compass tucked beneath his arm, Redferne started behind the gas station.

  “Hey, where you going?”

  “To check the warlock’s direction,” Redferne said over his shoulder.

  Kassandra watched him go, then began searching her purse for quarters so she could get a Pepsi.

  “Ma’am?” the boy called.

  Kassandra searched—

  —“Ma’am?”—

  —pulled out a couple of stray necklaces and pushed aside her makeup—

  —
“Um . . . ma’am?”—

  —and wished somebody would answer that freckled dink so he’d shut up and—

  —someone touched her shoulder and she turned—

  —and Bob smiled nervously and said, “Um, ma’am, you want me to check under the hood?”

  He’d been talking to her. No one had ever called her ma’am before. Ma’am was her mother, or her Aunt Grace—Yeah, she thought, Aunt Grace was born to be called ma’am—but not her. She was miss or honey or sweetheart, not—

  —“Ma’am? Under the hood?” Bob asked again.

  “No, that’s . . . okay.” She handed him the card and joined Redferne.

  He looked up at her ominously. Nudging the compass’s pointer with a finger, Redferne pulled his hand away and the pointer snapped back into place, pointing out the direction they’d been following.

  “We gain,” he said, standing. He pointed toward a small group of people at the bottom of a slight decline. They were coming down from the hills beyond the town and seemed to be carrying rifles. Redferne said, “But this troubles me.”

  “What is it?”

  “T’would appear to be a hunt. A successful one.”

  Two of the men were carrying what looked like a dead animal between them. One of the men gave a hoot of victory and fired his gun at the sky.

  “You look worried, Redferne. What’s wrong? What does this mean?”

  “Let us inquire.” He gathered up the compass and returned to the gas pumps with Kassandra at his side. “Do you know of the hunt?” he asked Bob.

  “Oh, yeah. Fellas went up in the hills hunting coyote.”

  “You eat coyote around here?” Kassandra asked.

  Bob shook his head, wiping his hands on a rag. “Boy over in the trailer park was killed by one. Sometimes they do that, coyotes. Come down, carry off a child. This boy was chewed up fairly good, I heard. Heard his skin was taken clean off.”

  Kassandra saw the dark shadow that passed over Redferne’s face; it frightened her.

  “Skinned,” he whispered.

  There was more hooting in the distance and Bob said, “Guess they got their man.”

  Redferne’s eyes held doubts that Kassandra wasn’t sure she wanted explained.

 

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