Season of the Witch

by Charlee Jacob

  This woman didn’t like him. If he visited Renae, he sensed Mom’s disapproval as his stomach grew queasy and his bowels grumbled. But perhaps she hated all men, considering she’d married such an asshole.

  ««—»»

  Flashing back—

  And flashing and flashing…

  Horse wouldn’t forget that night.

  He’d taken Renae down the coast for a couple weeks—even though she was underaged—playing on the beach, eating at a hot dog stand, sleeping in his car as the ocean tide sang sly songs. Renae put on her makeup in the rearview mirror and they took salty baths in the sea. Even at that tender age, the girl’s body gave any man an instant stiffy. Horse thought of turning her out. She’d make him a fortune! Her lips were a natural cherry red, like her mother’s. When she’d put on cosmetics, she’d use pale pink lipstick, trying to hide the red lips she hated. She’d use peach frost, beige, mauve—and once tried on a blond wig to see if she wanted to bleach her hair. Horse did everything he could to talk her out of that. Something like Renae, as she was, well it was ART, man.

  They got stoned and stayed stoned. He finally nailed her, and a sweeter, tighter bit of snatch he’d never had. She considered never going home. But she did, on a very foggy day. Then wished she hadn’t. Horse figured if they’d returned any sooner, the old butcher would’ve done them, too.

  “All the pretty bits that make up the whole. All the pretty bits and what do they add up to?”

  That’s what old Mr. Hawthorne was saying. In his fist, he held a flat lump of dark-pink flesh with oyster-shaped lip attached to it, moving it rhythmically along his shaft. There were maggots in his pubic hair. The place stank like a meat packing plant as if about a thousand guys with intestinal cancers all farted at once.

  “All the pretty bits are just bits, the total is coital, unity with impunity, the whole to wit is tit and clit, the sum is cum. It’s as old as it’s bold, zigzag, cunt on the rag, Z-Y-X, her circle always ends with sex…”

  Nudie mags everywhere, torn up, pegged on bone splinters. Other books, too, but pages were too scattered to see anything but a word here, there. Words of damnation.

  Some of Renae’s childhood dolls had been cut up, just torsos, no heads or limbs. Others that had legs sat with these apart, an egg set between plastic thighs, an X painted on the egg in magic marker. A psycho’s Easter hunt?

  Horse giggled, walking from room to room in a stinging pharmaceutical fugue. He couldn’t help it. Anything this extreme had to make you laugh to prevent your going insane. Anything this graphic turned a corner out of tragedy and into cosmic humor. He stepped in blood pudding, in giblet mash, in flesh turned into cheap wine. Flies and beetles crawled on him. He scratched until even his bitten nails drew blood. The flies zoomed in on that, too.

  Hard to believe this much carnage came from a single body, one that looked—although older—like Renae. Too much, an amount he’d have expected from several bodies. Long toes were tossed like crayons into every corner. Nails painted red. Blue. Black. Too many.

  Part of an arm stuck out of the kitchen sink like absurdist modern art, fingers bloated and gray. Hawthorne had tried shoving it down the garbage disposal. Bone bits still plastered the counter and cabinets where the InSinkErator spewed them out in ruddy froth.

  Horse threw up in that sink, then stumbled into the bathroom to vomit again in the toilet, jammed with ropes of intestines that wouldn’t flush.

  Room to room and he counted at least eleven breasts. And there were literally buckets of viscera. This didn’t come from one mere bitch.

  He heard the old man groan, laugh, howl, weep, spurting a slightly off-color cum halfway across the living room. Flies also zeroed in on that, like raisins on rum ice cream. He sat down on the floor with his naked fuzzy balls lying in shreds of pancreas or liver.

  “All the pretty bits that make up the whole. All the pretty bits and what do they add up to? Everything I ever told you. Everything you ever wanted to hear. Death and the ancient game. Uses an ‘X’ ‘cause she can’t sign her name! Season of the witch, trixie clits bitch…”

  Shut up, you old loon!

  “Ren, where the fuck are you?” Horse cried, bile sour in the mouth. Starting not to be funny any more. “Renae, we need to get our asses outta here.”

  He found her in her own tiny bedroom. Strands of her mother’s long black hair draped across the dresser mirror. A segment of the partly defleshed skull sat on the dresser. The single eye socket remaining in the smashed cranium and brow turned toward the glass, to see what had been made of it. But what could it see? There was no reflection. Blood and brains had been wiped across the mirror itself, smearing every inch. Flies had laid eggs in the blackened craters. Maggots swarmed across the length and breadth.

  Renae stared at the mirror, motionless until it freaked Horse out. Shouldn’t she tremble? Shouldn’t she shriek? She didn’t. She hadn’t even spoken to her father. Neither had she attacked him with any of the many items he’d apparently used as his weapons.

  She was spellbound by what she saw. Or by what she couldn’t see.

  Damn, Horse thought, Fuck! So much for turning her out as prime property. Now she’d only be worth selling to crazies for underground thrills, ending up snuffed when she’d been rendered good for nothing else.

  Nothing as weird as this shit. No one wanted to do this much clean-up or risk the authorities taking it up as a ‘cause’.

  Horse started murmuring something soothing in order to lead her out and down to his car. He wouldn’t sell her in The Cove where too many knew him… and her, he’d take her back down the coast.

  ««—»»

  The cops finally showed at the door. After somebody called about the stench.

  The old loon had boarded up the door, barricading himself in after Horse and Renae left. They lobbed tear gas through the window. Not easy since the apartment was five stories up and there’d been that heavy fog for days.

  So, who were the other women Mr. Hawthorne slaughtered up there, with Mrs. Hawthorne, and in the same obliterating fashion? The police never matched the parts (at least six or seven more victims) to any missing persons or known felons. And there were ample fingers for taking prints.

  There was one photograph Horse remembered from the newspaper’s front page. The reporter (who got the tip from a police scanner) had snapped it a split second after the tear gas canister busted the first window.

  Of flies coming out through the shard-grin of the hole, in a gigantic black streak.

  ««—»»

  Renae Hawthorne was institutionalized. Even after they released her, she didn’t return to The Cove.

  Now he heard she was banging some old cop. That figured, little traitor. Did it make her feel safe from her father’s specter—who’d been carved inside out in prison by a couple Gothic transvestites, steroid-Goblins, Smashing Pumpkins with Nine Inch Nails. Times they are a’changin’! Now it would be pure Evanescence in perfect beauty, troglodyting Queens of the Stone Age hooked on My Chemical Romance with a pair of razor can tops from Blackeyed Peas.

  Cons swore Hawthorne now haunted the prison yard, heard him singing, “You’ve got to pick up every stitch…”

  Was Renae with someone who could protect her from the ghost-man with the bloodshot eyes and sparkling synapses who gutted and jugulated and came rum raisin?

  Horse doubted the cop knew her background. He considered writing an anonymous letter. To the detective himself or to the newspaper. “Local Television Personality Once Catatonic, Drug Fiendess…”

  Naw, jack up her backstory to shit brown.

  Say she’d been high priestess for devil-worshipping biker pedophiles who tippled in blood, bathed in butter laced with ergot, and chewed blackmarket baby cartilage to attain the magic power to zoom donuts over The Cove… stalking kiddies they’d steal off back yard swing sets and out of nursery windows… she was really three hundred years old but kept herself young by bathing in a vat rinsed and scraped out of an abort
ion clinic’s dumpster, ah-ah-ah-ah-ah; oh-oh-oh-oh-oh! Yeah, and who’d believe such trashy nonsense? Some tertiary-stage syphilitic-brained herpes wart clawing at Renae’s door with checks to pay for more and spoons to eat it up with.

  Thanks, Geraldo, for all you have given us! Hail, Mighty Mouth—he’s come to save the day!

  Wait… Horse would remain anonymous, right?

  He thought about Renae, how she’d be sorry she didn’t return his calls. That she hadn’t returned to Nubbing Cove to be with him and take care of him as a woman should her man. That she’d gotten high notions about herself, even if she was just a lowlife deather who couldn’t act her way out of a paper sack filled with coke and powdered sugar… even when all she did was get slashed in the first act so her career was ultimately lifeless, ha! She’d end up taking care of Horse one way or another… because wouldn’t The Enquirer be interested? Inquiring minds liked stars even if they weren’t *Big Stars* mixed up with sex and blood… and Renae’s piglover would suffer a coronary on some talk show, and she’d end up in a padded room again being butt-fucked by a conga line of orderlies.

  He had this other idea he really liked better. Horse and a few of his dogs would wait outside the TV station, kidnap Renae when she came out, and drive her down the coast. Wanna make movies, sweetheart? Real horrors without special effects and fake blood and chicken parts… let’s see how good you are at really playing dead, hey, think the snuffs ever did one where the star drowns in the final cum shot?

  Was it his mistake or was Horse really coming on now?

  Am I high?

  Am I high?

  Am I so high I could fly over the Vatican and shit on the Pope’s head?

  Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah; oh-oh-oh-oh-oh!

  Stream of consciousness rushshshshshshshsh as he reached down and rubbed his dick through the fashionably frayed crotch of his jeans hanging down low to show his ass crack… easy to hide a weapon swinging in the breeze… and were those deathers down at the end of the alley? Their lopey arms too long and their heads… short shadows, shadows we all fall down…

  If they saw him they didn’t seem to care… didn’t come down the alley to attack him… had somewhere to go all right… anywhere aberrant because the whole neighborhood was turning deviant lately… because they were high.

  They were high.

  They were so high they were going to shit on the Pope’s head.

  That Lady Pope was lying only a few streets from here, giving birth to a baby as the crowd threw stones.

  One deather turned to look at Horse and he shot a real good-un back. Short shadows. Legs cut off at the knees, jeans cuffed and bloody as moon-mad snatch. It was a syndrome, wasn’t it? About people obsessed with becoming amputees. Fluke in the brain, he’d seen it on TV. So why were their heads long? The backs of their craniums appeared to blossom—but into what? (Had they used dry ice to induce necrosis in the legs?)

  At times Horse woke up and there was a new element outside… places that had been yellow brick were now stone… cracks and mold in the foundations of even new buildings, and the donut shop had sunk… as he saw bats roosting under the eaves… had it always had eaves?

  The flow of the drug in his system ebbed. It wasn’t real consistent shit. Horse stretched, swallowed, mellowed a little, leaning against the brick wall of X-IS-THE-DARK. He quickly pulled back, ouch, he forgot how hot the bricks got on this side of the alley. Early June, worse than usual for not-quite summer. Gonna be a devil of a hot spell.

  No front entrance, nothing streetside but shutters. The door that used to be there, before X-IS-THE-DARK bought the place, had been cemented and bricked over. Bricks on a shadow side were usually cool, almost like being underground. Nestled in a cave, an ancient tunnel where ancestors reveled in the carcasses of their kills. Cozy as a grave. Not his own—someone else’s. Just trying it out before dumping the debauched and shabby booty, no desirable junk left in the trunk.

  Horse snickered at his thoughts. Man, sounded like the sort of bullshit you’d call up X-IS-THE-DARK with. Spouting vanilla bondage wet dreams, as S&M as people that straight could conceive of while shivering under the shadows of their own boners. The confession probably costed a hundred bucks, maybe more. Less to see a qualified analyst, providing the doc didn’t have any best-selling books to his credit. Only difference was, telling the dark-nasty to a qualified anal shrink, you couldn’t jerk off. So what good was it?

  Some of Horse’s brothers had called the X-exchange, usually a joke as they coasted the crack edge, ranting crap, popping in an occasional gory anecdotal half-truth for seasoning. He’d never never. Big Bro might be plugged in. Whole thing smacked of classic sting, thrush-throated agents eh-huh’d to confessions of rapes and blasts. Like that Homeland Security squarehead who thought he’d found his fourteen-year-old porno dream queen on the Net—only to discover he had an F.B.I. agent.

  Horse hung near the corner building with no-front-entrance and the metal reinforced windows, hoping to meet and meat a sleek. Curious. What went on inside a place where not a creature was stirring? The only place in The Cove where nothing stirred, considering the deather gangs creeping around.

  Cut off their own legs, man, right at the knee.

  He coughed in the dense pollution the summer percolated. Gathered sticky drainage in his throat, hocked it out. Then painted a personal slogan in broadstrokes, shaking the can, rattling thready red dribbles down an unrusted shutter:

  COME WORK FOR ME, HONEYS

  I’LL SHOW YOU A SICKOPATH’S GOOD TIME

  The dope in his veins? Or did the spray paint sizzle?

  He’d tried breaking in yesterday, convinced there was nobody there to stop him or call the cops. He couldn’t find a hole, slot or mechanism. No cracks. Some simulated door… not real… painted on, like in cartoons when a tunnel appears in the mountain… but there isn’t really and the coyote runs snout-bonk smackface into stone and his mucousburst spells out SPLATT!

  (Stop. Quiver. Snort. Little one yet it felt good. The shit had been cut too much. No continuity.)

  “Gotta be a way in and out,” he told himself. “Nobody’s invented teleportation yet.”

  Unless it was another trick the government hid from the public. Could the door be—fuck him, what did they call it?—hermetically sealed? How about the way the hatch fastened on a submarine so water didn’t leak in? So he couldn’t pop it with a prick.

  Why would some phone-smut service need security this sophisticated? Granted, they did business in the worst part of town, but why not shell out for a security guard and a half-starved pit bull? Could it be what was on the other side of the door? Cyberhulks sitting on ass-swollen nuclear piles, hissing for a meltdown with unauthorized intruders?

  Or some highly territorial archfiend.

  Heh, maybe they didn’t need a door to the place. They came and went inside the building, through doors that went straight down into the hell.

  Horse ran his hand down the wall, skimming molded clay and Oreo-fluff mortar. The fever in the bricks baked across his palm. It tingled into the pads, seeping cauterized pins into the grooves of braided heart- and life-lines. That couldn’t be natural egg-frying heat, not here on the shadow side.

  Was it hard to score dynamite? He’d blow the jackin’ door open, face the bitches on their own turf and see if they had cloven pussies.

  Horse noticed a box by the door. Huh? The door never opened for someone to set the box out. Nobody’d driven into the alley to deliver it. He’d have seen. Even while rushing (intermittently, he might add) on this piss-poor come-and-go headslop.

  He carefully approached the box. Open-topped cardboard. Full of books. He turned his head at an uncomfortable angle to read the upside down title:

  necrOmania seXualis

  He’d never been much of a reader. He picked one up and leafed through it. Women, in death poses. Some looked so damn much like Renae, that he damn near threw up.

  He read a few words: Uh oh, here she comes again, literally with f
ingers clawing spider strands of pubic hair, figuratively with sleek legs through the ass-crease envelope of a gateway between savage worlds. Pretty, pretty, out of the sea: Venus with nails.

  (Am I high?

  Am I high?

  Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah; oh-oh-oh-oh-oh.)

  …lap dance on the babbler at the center of the universe, coaxing comets with her tingling bush. Then the vortex mouth of absolute zero sucked the idiot head until it blew queer rainbow snot and acid-fast dreams. She licked its fungal breath clean, chewing longer to break apart between her teeth the warts of crawling chaos.

  Say what? Didn’t even make sense! Maybe it was the shit in his veins making it read crazy.

  And the artwork positively ate shit! And he oughta know. Graffiti was an art of which Horse was a master.

  Yet these photographs… maybe she’d ended up doing snuff-n-stuff anyway. Which made him feel hysterical with the giggles.

  Well, there were too many women for all those snuffs to be her. It was the makeup. Tom Savini-style (talk about an art king). Chicken parts and bologna for the original Night of The Living Dead.

  Then, near the end of the book, Horse saw a story called “Fog”. He read: All the pretty bits and what do they add up to?

  It was a story about a woman describing her own murder, only… it was like the homicide… when Renae’s father butchered her mother. All the same shit: too many fingers and toes, arm in the sink, almost a dozen severed breasts, the mirror smeared. Then the woman in the story (even after death) gets a psychic flash of her runaway daughter on the mental ward.

  And the other remarks… were they about him?