Season of the Witch

by Charlee Jacob

Burst. Sounds of power tools.

  An eighth grade teacher in the gymnasium, each bloody body cavity stuffed with chalk, her skin powdery white with it, motes clinging to staring hazel eyes, flecks gathered as assam leaves in a teacup’s bottom, shaping to describe her fate. Her pancreas and liver steam high on the bleachers. One of her breasts used for practice (although it couldn’t be dribbled) still hangs precariously upon the rim of the basketball hoop.

  Fade.

  Blast.

  A dissolve to some migrant worker camp in the—Everglades? Bodies hang from trees, some swinging shrouded in Spanish moss like butterflies stuck in defective chrysalises, fly-food now, and all the authorities are likely to find… since those left machine-gunned on the ground are being jerked into the water by happy-go-lucky gators. Grue from blowback holes create strange red orchids in the swamp, opening slickery chum blossoms to call with siren’s song the mosquitos, water moccasins, bats.

  Fade.

  Purl to a blinded saint’s wink, then a women’s clinic with pregnant ladies in the waiting room. They thumb through books on baby names and need refills on prenatal vitamins, their shopping bags full of plush toys and tiny booties.

  Scene change.

  The clinic’s walls and roof flutter before it goes to kingdom cum in an explosion of endless female genitalia. It rises, up to meet God the Father the Tool, then down seeking Hell’s regenerative hole. All due to a rumor that an abortion had been done there.

  Robin saw words flash on the screen. The site claimed to be a war crimes catalog. Then how come the stills and film strips were all in American cities and rural areas? (What’s your favorite vacation spot? What military walks your streets, armed from teeth to groin and each far flung part beyond?)

  Robin watched as a businessman sitting in front of this computer left to go drain the lizard. She wondered how this site, this www.bloodleachsuckingthesuppuratinganusouch.com, had made it past the firewall. The carnage flow, intended to crank ‘nads, looked like snuff. Just today’s underground movie magic making it seem real… right?

  (120 DAYS OF SODOM IN THE 21ST CENTURY—or IT’S A SADE SADE SADE SADE WORLD.)

  A woman—an E.R. doc?—jumped into his seat as soon as the man vacated.

  Fade fade.

  Boom boom.

  A buff male dancer in a G-string stuffed with bills is kidnapped from a club stage by a gang of venereally-diseased women. Nobody jumps to rescue him, laughing because they believe it to be part of the act. The women throw him into the back of a van, drive out of the city, and command him to perform, but he can’t get it up. They put a gun to his head and make him eat their pussies and tongue their assholes. After he chokes to death on his own vomit, his mouth crusted with perfumed shit and his dick wreathed in spoiled cottage cheese, they wait a few hours, then ride his rigor-stiff prick—horsey long, each bending to bite off a vanilla tidbit as their mature bellies and thighs quiver cellulite, his ghostly seed fertilizing each with their own spiritual incubus.

  Fade fade fade.

  The businessman returned. “That’s my terminal.”

  Without taking her eyes from the monitor, the doctor retorted. “Possession’s nine tenths of the law. You got up. I’m here now. Fuck off.”

  He snarled. “I wasn’t finished.”

  “Then you shouldn’t have left, clitlips,” she replied.

  Buzzzz…

  Hollow-eyed children glaring dully at an invisible sick-cam. Pale. Stiff. Like those cute little angelitos in toy coffins and doll burial dress common to 19th century fin de siécle photography, when grieving parents wanted pictures in still life of their still, dead offspring. Yet these subjects were alive…

  Fade. Buzzz….

  Cut to the children herded into a peppermint-striped corral, words tattooed on their arms denoting specialty, that being the diet on which they’d been nurtured for a year to make them succulently precise for a specific dish. Beer-fed Kobe Brat, for example, or cherries and almonds for amaretto flesh.

  The businessman yanked the doctor by her hair until she toppled off the stool. A static-snap, the man shook a few bloody-rooted tendrils from his fingers.

  “Here’s your pinkuccino,” Galt said cheerily, setting a large cup on Robin’s table. He returned to the counter, oblivious to the altercation.

  Robin, shocked, felt it best to follow Galt’s lead and ignored the brawl. She lifted the mug to her lips, blowing at the steamy froth. She sipped, sat up straight, staring at the coralline cream.

  The man resumed his seat, drooling at the munchkin-munchables, fat as paté de foie gras, and reached between his legs. He failed to notice the doctor standing up behind him, reaching into her clinician’s coat pocket. She withdrew a scalpel sharp enough to bisect an atom with—and cut his throat with one swift movement. Left-to-right, blood rushing out the severed carotid artery to stripe the computer and the plate glass window behind it.

  No one at other terminals reacted (did they even see?), attention on their own screens, full of frozen portraits and moving clips of savagery beyond the borderlands, all pretenses to decency dropped, devouring the scenes of humanity as part of the food chain and as sex toys and butt wipes.

  Only two terminals didn’t show the gruesome site.

  Their users had left their seats, returning to the cafe’s center. Those at middle tables nervously inched toward the door, pinkuccino foam bearding their mouths.

  Robin joined those moving away, but she dared another look at the computers. She noticed a spark whenever someone touched their mouse. How obscene each mouse looked: round as a breast or in a triangle like a cartoon pube. Not static, this spark. It was a firefly’s O-wink (a computer virus?) It was the X-flash announcing a blaze ready to spread. Ignition between participants of a holocaust.

  Suddenly, computers that were off, no customer seated there, came to life. Same thing on their monitors: burst, fade, blast, fade fade.

  Where was Galt? Was he phoning police? She stared into her cup, suddenly doubting he was dialing 911. She looked behind the food counter. There was Galt, kneeling on the floor.

  And Lucy.

  Her father was dipping into his daughter’s body, for her blood to add to foaming milk. He then sawed off a fingertip, one of many as far as Robin could tell, milking the digit like a cow’s teat.

  Robin stood frozen, but her eyes wandered to the big sink. Somebody had thrown up in it. Lucy? Or Galt, after he saw what he’d done to his only daughter—that is, prior to resolving to fully let his mind go. The sink was half full of puke, as if the tosser had been sick for several hours straight—or days. Things were identifiable in the tummy punch: two whole fingernails, a very small rodent’s feet, what might’ve been its droppings, undigested maraschino cherries, a nipple… Niblets of corn? Robin thought through her disgust. No, it was teeth. (Ah! Or corn chowder soup de jour for anyone with no sense of smell), a silver ring (from a clipped finger? Or an adornment for a pierced yet not visible anatomical feature), and the slowly liquefying corpses of several large blue-bottle flies.

  Snap crackle.

  People connecting with the computer mouse-shocks, a tactile downloading of plague.

  Pop!

  (Do you smell something burning? It always kindles first in the short hairs.)

  Finally, Robin walked out of the Sip and Surf Cafe, trying to attract as little attention as possible.

  – | – | –

  Chapter 19

  Mrs. Chisholm knocked on the door. She clutched her religious tract, written on the last night of her son’s life:

  “Never waver from the light, though it blind you and shrivel your tongue and burn you black. The light is salvation served with God’s sometimes ruthless love. Know that those who seek the darkness will fall into it.”

  Had she some presentiment? Burn you black… She’d unconsciously written it for Chaz. Now he’d gone the way of her other children: suicides, all. She counted herself a female Job, called upon by God to suffer grief, yet still praise His
name.

  She and her husband hurried when they smelled smoke that night. They’d smelled smoke from Chaz’s room before. He’d been strange, courted by the devil with filthy evil stories and pictures, hell everywhere, burning himself. Stench of lighter fluid or rubbing alcohol. Smoky curls. She’d tried to believe he underwent rites of purification, ridding himself of wickedness.

  But this—it wasn’t just a little smoke slipping under the door like the other times, not merely a bit of scorched flesh and hair…

  An awful stink. A roar behind the door. Bestial hissing, howling, it wasn’t… human. They’d found a pillar of flame. Nothing else had burned. God’s lightning struck, meant just for him. An immaculate conflagration. She fully understood, seeing her son’s ashes: the boy had wavered from the truth and God was ruthless, His love unequivocal.

  Her husband had trembled yet said nothing. The mark of his suffering: a vagrant muteness. Priests took vows of silence, guarding themselves from blasphemy. Yet her husband had extended his hand, palm down, toward smoldering cremains. Exchanging more warmth than when the boy lived.

  He’d picked up a book, lying next to the body, then handed it to her. More of Chaz’s vile books. She considered burning it with every horrid material her son had collected. But there had been enough burning in their house that night.

  The authorities took the mess for the coroner, for forensic alchemists to change into golden answers. As for Chaz’s room, the Chisholms sealed it, taping the door. She had plans for it: She’d have it plastered to look like the other walls. She’d paint crosses over it, nail up some of her religious pamphlets, a few pertinent Biblical sayings, the demon within bound and chained with all her weapons of godliness.

  A white candle flickered on a hall table near the room, warding off horror. It floated in a glass of water, burning… but not the way the boy burned, Hell blazing fire.

  Job, she was. Giving birth to three suicides. Her children’s grievous sin, casting off the gift of life. They had no right. Only God had the right to take their lives, through sickness or by edict to His faithful: Abraham, David, Joshua.

  As Mrs. Chisholm walked to the first door, her legs bowed. She’d rolled Bible pages, inserting them into the womb which had delivered forth doomed babies. Walking down the street on her evangelical route, the rustling gospels rubbed old flesh. She’d filled herself right up, to exorcise the G-(Gomorrah) spot. I, mother to suicides, nothing in my uterus now but prayers.

  She knocked on the door, face screwed into the fanatic’s mask. A woman answered, children playing in the room behind her.

  Mrs. Chisholm said, “Those who seek the darkness will fall into it.”

  She took the knife she’d hidden in her coat and stabbed the lady’s belly. The woman hadn’t time to close the door, nor to scream, darkness rushing out of her proof of what she’d carried inside. Great iron salty waves of night.

  Again Mrs. Chisholm stabbed, striking an artery, spurting as the woman twisted, staining the threshold so the scourge of God mightn’t enter there.

  Wait, was that a different story? Oh, Moses.

  She stepped across the body to tend to the children.

  Hello, little lambs. Your sacrifice will serve Him greatly.

  What God sometimes bade His faithful do.

  ««—»»

  Now home, Marty flipped through a new magazine. It arrived in the mail. Absorbed caring for Marty’s grandfather, Janis no longer bothered checking Marty’s mail.

  Even if he wasn’t glad his grandfather’d almost died, he appreciated the parental pressure was off. He’d never let them do that again. Not a boy anymore, he’d leave. Janis didn’t want him to go. Marty handled everything his granddad used to, plus paying medical creditors, taking the old man to doc appointments, wrestling insurance hassles, running the household as granny played nurse.

  Marty opened the mailer, gently lifting the magazine from bubble wrap. It was the newest crunch-and-munch fest from Walking Sickness Press.

  He perused a twisted tale about a straight-jacket and a pissing contest between two shrinks, next a love story between an inflatable goat and a nearsighted tarantula, then a novelette concerning a cannibal in fifty-pound leg irons and an incontinent woman in an old fashioned iron lung.

  He told himself, Yeah, yeah, profound stuff. Hardcore symphony.

  He couldn’t work up the same old bloodlust. What he’d seen for real was better than this now. Ever since the fuel truck hit the bus on the highway, watching people burn to death. Later? After he’d been in the ER and seen victims carried in.

  And even later?

  He’d still been the same, getting hard—even if unbidden—seeing the carnage. Especially witnessing truncations. (What about how he felt for Rosie with her new petit á petit? That wasn’t the same! It was purer…)

  Marty recalled being pulled down for that kiss, her tongue the flavor of cherry Jell-O and ginger ale—part of her hospital diet. The buoyancy of her breasts, soft plane of her flat stomach, the golden thatch. Almost immaculate hips with gauzy remnants. All the more desirable in abbreviated aspect, as primitive statues of fertility goddesses rendered in terra cotta, often only as torsos or torsos-with-heads, regenerative organs rendered without superfluous limbs. Sometimes… even with limbs, the arms or legs were stubby.

  In the back of the magazine was a full page ad:

  X-IS-THE-DARK

  Compulsions: What The Night Is Made Of

  A half man/half monster punched numbers on a phone, an amorphous troubled and troubling creature. (Or was it a woman? For a ticking blip Marty thought it might even be a slender teenaged boy-beast.)

  Now it was the next day, almost noon. He was headed for the hospital, a gift-wrapped box under his arm, a Victoria’s Secret rose and gold peignoir within, loose but not long. It would come down to Rosie’s hips, revealing tantalizing peach nubs—still swathed in bandages.

  Hotter than blazes outside. Would be a bad summer. People panted in the street. Marty stopped by the ruins of Bunny’s Quick In-N-Out, rubble yet to be cleared. It’d been carefully sifted by authorities, looking for Rosie’s legs. He couldn’t resist the impulse to walk into the mess, once Frank Bunny’s parking lot. He stared soberly where they dug Rosie out, flesh of her stumps a puree anointing the dusty layers of asphalt, cement, and glass.

  That old loudmouthed asshole’s fault, keeping explosives in the storeroom. May the redneck jerk rot in Hell. Frank lost his own legs due to a bomb accident, and caused his daughter to suffer the same fate.

  Marty sat in his gramp’s gas-guzzler, and held the lingerie box to his cheek. He thought of Rosie, then wept against the shiny wrapping.

  A flap caught Marty’s eye through the open car window. All four windows were rolled down, its air-conditioning a bust.

  Nothing there… but that smell. The place had exploded, still stank, okay.

  No, this was lighter fluid.

  What the…? A snake slid through the wreckage. Not some little green garter number but a large sucker, big around as a grown man’s arm and twice as long. Its skin shimmered, scales a weave of overlapping yet individual opals.

  It slithered toward Marty. Over broken cinder blocks and jagged glass shards, never getting cut. It lifted its head, looking at Marty until his skin crawled. The round eyes glittered, the jaw dropped. It hissed out of a sparkling wedge of fire, flickering inside its mouth. Not of breathed flame, no mythical dragon. The tube of its body was wrapped around miniature conflagration.

  The lighter fluid smell hit him again. Marty thought of Chaz, for this had been Jazzy’s signature shaving lotion. A whiff, nothing more.

  And that was only a snake, no fiery breath, just sunlight glittering off venom in its mouth. Somebody’s pet escaped from a cage, searching for live rodents, their itty bitty screams part of the thrill of swallowing, their final movements relaxing as they dissolved within a slow-churning death. Finally, only bones were regurgitated, the closest a snake came to shitting.

  Ma
rty drove away, headed for the hospital. No, heading for Chaz’s house first. He’d never told the Chisholms how sorry he was. Chaz had been his best friend. Marty’s hard-assed grandfather refused to let him attend the funeral, but he could’ve called Chaz’s parents with condolences. It’s what decent guys did. Not that he liked Mr. and Mrs. Chisholm. They didn’t like Marty either, never even cared for their own son. Worse than the Hardistys.

  Marty found the house, parking at the curb instead of in the driveway. He took steps to the porch, knocked on the door. There was no answer.

  “Hello?” he called out, knocking louder.

  Mrs. Chisholm might be out, terrorizing the neighbors with God’s word. But the old man never went anywhere—

  The door swung open. There was nobody there.

  “Hello…?” Marty tiptoed into the living room, expecting to see Mr. Chisholm in his recliner. The chair was empty. The TV was on, screen filled with that X-phone service ad: “Give us your crazed, your violent, your huddled miscreants slavering to be freaks.”

  Marty, in his best Yakov Smirnov, thought to himself, What a country! Gorgeous women begged you to call and tell them the sickest misdeeds you could think of, full of sex and the most damnable ways to get your rocks off.

  Except—why was this ad on in the middle of the day? Weren’t ads for phone services a late night thing? Marty smirked with his thoughts. Maybe it was always late at night now, sunlight a delusion of safety.

  “Mr. Chisholm? It’s Marty Hardisty. Chaz’s friend?”

  He risked walking further into the house, toward the hall. Toward Chaz’s room. He saw balls of masking tape on the floor, pulled from the door to Chaz’s room. As one might use tape for painting. Or to keep air in one place from contaminating another.

  He put an ear to the door, and heard rustling. He opened the door and found the old man surrounded with horror magazines and books. Chaz’s superb collection of grisly tales were scattered across the floor. Marty sniffed. Lighter fluid.