Season of the Witch

by Charlee Jacob

  Eddie chuckled. “She’s hot, totally naked. Nobody’s ever been so naked. There’s a sheen of sweat on her skin, smoky, almost platinum. She shines like a bracelet in the light. She bends her knees as she sways her hips. The muscles in her thighs are strong. I see her ass moving back and forth, side to side, one dimple shaped like a crescent moon. Maybe it’s a scar or a tattoo, color of a red rosebud.”

  Renae frowned. She had such a scar, that same color. She’d fallen once on broken glass and it smiled its way into her flesh forever.

  Eddie went on, not a single beat lost. “The rest is flawless. She turns. Her pubic hair is heart-shaped. Black as Valentine space, soft as sable. I can smell it. She shampoos and conditions it so it’s silky and scented with Persian lilac. The length from heart-shaped curls to navel knot is the measure of my hand from the base of my palm to the tip of my middle finger. Her waist is so small… I could put both hands around it and still touch my fingers. She moves the belly muscles in sequence, sinuously, ending with hips jutting forward. Then up and back, a sliding contraction of each satin muscle, until her hips push that black heart toward me… Her nipples are hard as bullets, full of gunpowder. Her breasts bob when her hips come up. Against her sweaty skin they seem to float.”

  Well, at least it’s not a kid’s body, Renae thought, relieved. But she felt herself blush. Her own pubic hair was naturally heart shaped. She shampooed and conditioned it—with Persian lilac scented products. She didn’t shave, pluck, or wax it. Just kept it soft for him to touch—so what turned him on most? I do!

  “Yeah? Go on,” Claire whispered. “What happens next?”

  “She’s driving me crazy,” Eddie said. “I don’t want those bullets to explode without me.”

  “Are you hard?” Claire’s voice was a caress to make it so.

  “Getting there fast. My jeans are tight and my boxers are pulling into the crack of my ass. Ooh, it hurts. She’s beautiful. She’s my goddess of the sexy, witchy moon. Skin like milk. Fair as a Biblical angel, a Renaissance muse, a Victorian spirit… one of Saladin’s brides. I was a child and she was a child, in this kingdom by the sea: But we loved with a love that was more than love—I and my Annabel Lee.”

  Renae had never been more in love with Eddie than at this instant. She’d been so wrong. He’d only used that young girl thing last time because he was a cop—he knew that was the lowest of the low. Now he was doing this as a love song to her. Kinky but just a little. What would he get up to? No pun intended… She had said she would join him in this but where would she break in? What could she say? She simply had to hear more.

  Renae looked down at him through the banister spindles. Lamplight played on a moist trickle running from under his high forehead.

  He said more. “She unties this ribbon that binds her hair. She lets it down. Black waves of it fall across her shoulders, down her back, over her breasts. Those nipples float up through it, hips swaying, snake’s belly coiling. Heaving her white breast to the balmy air. Like guilty beauty… Her tongue darts out. She runs the tip of it around her lips. She knows I’m here. She knows I know. She shakes her head, and that hair falls away from her neck. I could wrap my hands around it and make her stick her tongue back out.”

  “I like that. Then what would you do?”

  “Bite it off.”

  Renae jumped, hand sweating on the phone, pins and needles. What the hell?! This wasn’t funny or sweet or whatever he’d been leading her to think…

  “Don’t look now, lover, but she knows you’re getting stiff in the dark,” Claire said.

  “I feel her perspiration. Every time those hips come forward, then sliiiiiiiide back, then rock forward again.”

  “She’s fucking you from across the room,” Claire crooned.

  “Yeah.”

  “Teasing you.”

  “Yeah!”

  “How does your dream end?”

  “BOOM! I am a bomb. Sky high and down to hell in a pillar of spirit flame. I really make her dance. Only not slowly. Faster, as if she were swirling in a firestorm.”

  “Gooooooood, baby.”

  “I nail her to a board, through her wrists and then with an additional nail in each fingertip. Same basement and underground. Buried alive, all that worldly weight. I stick a nice bare wire up her ass. The electricity lights up the nails.”

  “Hhhhhaaaaa. Oh, that’s it. You’re the master.”

  “And she dances fast. Jerks, bounces, quivers like she’s cum a thousand times. I know I have.”

  “Yeah, she’s a bitch. Do it to her, baby,” Claire moaned into the phone.

  Renae was nauseous, tempted to hang up her end. To shout at Eddie to hang up, too.

  She could do nothing but listen. If there had been a time when she might’ve broken in and altered the scenario’s course, she’d missed it.

  Eddie was a silhouette in the dark. Somehow the wattage on the downstairs lamp had lessened. “Once I gave her a jolt so hard the nails popped out! She fell to the floor.”

  “This didn’t kill her?”

  “Well, sure it did. But I put her back up. She’ll be pretty for a long time yet. And the dead dance, you know?”

  “They do?”

  “Trip along the spark fantastic. They invent new meanings for grace.”

  “The dead can be graceful and pretty?”

  “They have powers to seduce which put the living to shame. And I’ve taken things so she can dance with me all the time, no matter where I am. I have her smile in my pocket. I can stick my hand into my coat and slip a finger between those lips any time I want.”

  “Yeah yeah yeah, baby. Go. It’s what she wanted anyway. It’s what I want you to do.”

  “Guess what I have in my trousers? Her most explosive part—”

  A final jolt torched up Renae’s arm. Her imagination? She shook hard. Was I really shocked…? No, she was just caught up in it. Wait… There were blue sparks. And a sulfuric smell. Brimstone bride.

  “I cut it out and packed her pussy with gunpowder, a nice dick of a firecracker. Exchanging one fuse for another.”

  Claire laughed. “One she could hardly re-fuse, huh?”

  Renae shook again. She felt as if her body were a series of floors. There was a cataclysmic pain between her legs, and then each level collapsed in turn, shoving upward. She smelled a rust-rancid smoke. Before it reached her heart, she dropped the phone, jerked the plug from the wall jack. “Eddie, hang up!” she screamed.

  She still heard him speaking. Saw him downstairs, talking into the receiver. Renae hurried down the steps. Through his trousers was a pronounced erection. “Eddie, hang up!”

  He didn’t seem to hear her. He swayed listlessly on his feet, eyes closed, one hand clutching the receiver, the other clenched at his side. Not even stroking himself off.

  Apparently he was adept at doing it mentally.

  She considered grabbing her purse, getting out. Never returning. This guy and the whole fucking set-up was insane.

  She’d go to Lenora’s… the same Lenora she’d had her own sick fantasy about? No, I couldn’t.

  She looked at Eddie. Her lover. She’d thought she knew him. Yet he’d imagined sticking a wire up her ass, electrocuting her. Then detonating her dead body from the vagina upward. (She’s a bitch do it to her…)

  Renae pressed the button on the body of the phone and held it. Faintly she heard the disconnect hum. The operator had hung up just before she did.

  Eddie leaped, as if jerked out of bed while fast asleep.

  Renae screamed, “What’s the matter with you?”

  He stared at the receiver in his hand, then placed it back in its cradle. The dialtone abruptly terminated, but the imprint in the air lingered like a haunting static melody.

  When he didn’t answer, she stepped into his face. “That was me you described. You even used some of the poetry you said a few nights ago. Was this a joke?”

  Feeling betrayed, Renae’s voice shook the way her body had, imagining a pers
onal explosion. I am a bomb…

  “It’s just a game,” Eddie replied lamely. “I… I don’t even know what all I said—”

  “You sure got into your part this time, darling.” She pointed at his still-tumescent crotch. “Is that what gets you off? The idea of nailing me to a board and sticking a wire up my ass and a firecracker in my…?”

  “This was your idea. Let’s call, you said. And you liked it the first two times.” His erection withered with his defensiveness.

  “I was ambivalent the first time. And the second time I wasn’t the victim. It puts a perspective on things.”

  “It’s still not as active as you handcuffing me, sticking hot sauce in my ass, and then fucking me as you imagined me impaled on a goddamn stake, now is it, dear? Talk about perspective!” He snatched his suitjacket off the floor and stalked out. He slammed the apartment door with enough force that, up in the loft, the poster for Parts fell off the wall and exploded the glass cover for The Nietzsche Worm.

  Renae fumed, furious he was the one who walked out. She considered following him so she could scream all the way into the parking lot. She’d throw herself on the hood of his car, and scratch at him through the windshield.

  Instead, she stomped up the stairs. She picked up the fallen poster, saw glass everywhere for the other, caught a glimpse of movement—and turned.

  Fog parted in the loft mirror and Renae saw herself. A bundle of fury in black, a maniacal angel of death. The face looked wicked, smiling, contemplating impalements.

  Was she smiling?

  I’m not SMILING. I’m NOT smiling. I’M not smiling.

  The reflection clouded again.

  All mist. No Renae.

  No angel of death.

  How long had Eddie been lost in the game with Claire? Five, ten minutes? Had he imagined a bare wire in his fingers, sparks (blue ones) and jolts making Renae dance? Near that crescent moon scar?

  Twenty minutes.

  The length of time she’d spent, lost in her reverie about Lenora and the beastmen.

  (Come now, seeing your own image in a mirror wasn’t exactly hallucinating. Unless you hadn’t seen it in a few years, eh?)

  That wasn’t exactly me.

  (How would you know? What do you look like, exactly?)

  Dreamy catharsis. Playing the game. How does it feel to think the way ‘they’ do? No, we aren’t monsters, no…

  She melted into tears. Almost went after him to apologize. To say it’s okay, baby. She’d done it, too. She couldn’t help it. Neither could Eddie.

  It was contagious.

  – | – | –

  Chapter 18

  That night, Renae dreamed she stood in a kitchen. Not just any kitchen. The one in the Hawthorne’s apartment in The Cove.

  An arm stuck out from the InSinkErator. She watched as the fingers began to move, in a gracefully sinuous dance.

  Suddenly the garbage began to whir. The arm went down, grindingly, horribly, flesh and bone stop/start/STOP/START, fingers waving goodbye as they descended. A sickening mess spewed from the drain, splashing meat and blood everywhere.

  That arm can’t go down the disposal. That’s why my father left it there. He tried to get it down—it was too big.

  Clinging to some fragment of rationality. (Her or the arm?)

  Then all that spew came out together, merging—after a fashion—into two young women.

  “Come with us, Renae,” they beckoned. They pointed to the still-whirring disposal. “Down there. Let’s go down there together, Renae.”

  She ran from the kitchen. She woke up.

  ««—»»

  That night Dodger Jensen walked around his apartment, knowing the police had been there earlier, really making a mess of his current project, The Lepers Dance. Fingerprint dust sullied the mannequins, bits and pieces designed to represent the body parts that in The Middle Ages lepers sometimes had fall off, before modern science made it a controllable disease, had been gathered and taken away as evidence. Blood soaked the carpet and splashed the walls, but, the body, his body—with its innards scooped as well—had been removed. That had been strange to watch.

  After Robin left, he’d had a few more beers in rapid succession, stumbling over the bean bag chair. He fell, and when he looked up from the floor, the apartment was changed. The walls were mud, the floor plain dirt covered with a few handmade straw mats. A low fire burned in the center of a circle of stones.

  The lepers came toward him, rags stinking of wasted lives.

  “If ye but sayeth her name, thou shalt be spared,” said one, the only one with a complete enough mouth to articulate.

  What name? Whose name? Dodge tried to understand.

  But he didn’t. What a shame.

  Probably why he’d always held religion in such contempt.

  ««—»»

  “Spunk,” said Thelonious’s lawyer, “you stared at May Huon. She went into a trance and then killed herself. Did you hypnotize her? How? Did you gesture at her somehow? Whisper something to her?”

  Two cops were with him, too. Detective Larson and Captain Prohaska, staring him down for answers. He stared hot-coal eyes back at them. Fools. Like he had the power to hypnotize May Huon (or anybody else) with a mere glance. Didn’t he wish! He was only a hound, a mere pet to someone who could mesmerize with such brief regard.

  Pet?

  Hound? He concentrated on his hands. No giant paws transformed from the laughable putty of his flesh. Sadness overtook his anger at his captors. If his hound form was no more, he was no more.

  Oh where, oh where has my little dog gone?

  Oh where, oh where can he be?

  He followed a cat ‘cross a phantom’s lawn

  and chased it right up a tree.

  He replied to his lawyer, to these cops, who tried appearing stern yet really were only superstitious villagers. “Fulmina micant. Tempus matufinum, meridianum, vespertinum, nocturnum. Per somnum, dea mundum aedificavit!”

  (The lightning flashes. Morning, noon, evening, night. Through a dream, the Goddess created the world.)

  Thelonious stretched his mouth as wide as he could with his wired-shut jaw. He bayed, loud.

  Then he told them, “Oppido! A mortuis evocare! Dolorum abicere ululatis!”

  (Yes! To summon the dead! Howl to banish grief!)

  He still felt sorrowful.

  ««—»»

  Robin Pittman sat in the Sip And Surf Café, a corner coffee-and-sandwich shop offering computers for their customers’ use. They could check e-mails, click on ‘approved’ chat lines, surf the Web—within limitations. The Internet Service had firewalls to prevent inappropriate material.

  It was a small place, ten tables in the center for those who only wanted to dine. The computers sat on counters stretched along both outside walls with windows and barstools. Since it was open a good part of the night, Robin’s usual shift, she dropped in when she had a break, the cafe being across the street from the hospital.

  Tired of dietician-correct cafeteria food, here she’d get coffee and a BLT with a sidecar of chili, and smoke cigs before returning to the insanity of rounds.

  Robin herself was tired, too. She’d already put in her graveyard hours, now working a second shift that would sweep her into the afternoon. This was her fourth day in a row this week, hardly a record or even unusual for medical personnel. When the shifts dragged out this long, it felt like every day, blood boiled down the wards or turned to red frost upon deathbeds.

  The nurse whose shift Robin covered had been attacked by a patient who stuck her with a hypo full of antibiotics. No big deal—except the crazed patient had stuck her in the eye. Not so deep it entered the brain but they worked feverishly to save the eye. Every expert in the country wanted to take a stab at it.

  It was about 11:30 A.M.

  “Hey,” the owner, a man named Galt, greeted from the counter. He grinned coffee-yellow teeth and waved.

  The nurse managed a wan smile. “Hey yourself. Where�
�s Lucy?”

  Galt’s daughter. She’d dropped out of college last year when they couldn’t cough up her tuition, and now helped out at the café. This after Galt’s wife had been critically injured in a vehicular hit-and-run. The woman remained comatose on the hospital’s third floor, prose of vital signs nothing but an unintelligible murmur.

  “Just me today,” he replied with a shrug. “Lucy’s feeling a bit down. You eating?”

  Robin sighed. “No. Just a cup of the usual.”

  Her thing was a double cappuccino, hold the cinnamon.

  “Just invented one I call a pinkuccino. Wanna try it? On the house.”

  “Sure. Thanks.”

  Robin sagged into a chair at a center table. She rested her elbows, cupping her hands around her ears.

  Sometimes one heard a roar in the head, an ocean containing all the noises of the world. This wasn’t a quiet earth, not any place where people lived. We’re a noisy bunch, Robin thought. Just not given to that much quiet introspection. The brainpan’s cloister echoed with daily thunder and nightly screams. Sometimes stars spoke through noon and smog. At other moments it was cracks in cement, bubbles and rifts in asphalt whispering a millionfold. The spirits of the dead haunted this planetary soil, crying to be bound and tormented just for a little S&M variety out of mortality’s boredom. For sensation.

  Numbness was a bitch.

  Robin didn’t surf the Net when she’d come in, always too tired. But she watched others. Most on-screen was information: news, shopping. Blah blah blog. There would be music videos and movie clips. Essays, fiction, poetry. Churchy stuff, sports, art. Auctions. Nothing the whole family couldn’t view. No porn.

  From the corner of her eye, Robin glimpsed a disturbance on one monitor. It sailed past her brain, virtually (ahem) unnoticed. Simply an additional atrocity in a life full of them. The daily grindstone. A series of images too thick for watercolor: