Season of the Witch

by Charlee Jacob

  Rita looked him up and down as Marty approached from between a few parked cars. Did she know him? He might be one of the little nothing dweebs, no crowd of his own. She hoped he wasn’t buying. Looked as if he’d never done a single push-up in his life.

  He mimicked her, looking Rita up and down. He knew her sizing up of him wasn’t flattery. But he did see her ogle the bulge in his jeans. (Was this scrawny punk hung or what?)

  Still, Rita saw dicks all the time. Big. Small. Size wasn’t what mattered or hadn’t you heard? What she did was for business, not pleasure.

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  He tilted his head. “Don’t ya remember me from Baucum High?”

  She shrugged, peering at him. “Should I?”

  He’d refresh her memory. “I was one of the dead kids.”

  She’d even passed him at the hospital, after she’d just visited Rosie and he was arriving. Dead in school, dead everywhere.

  “If you’re looking for an undertaker, you’ve come to the wrong place,” she said. “And I’m not into corpses.”

  Marty pulled a hundred-dollar bill from his pocket. He’d taken it from the house money he handled for his grandfather. Rita’s eyes widened, flickered from the money to Marty and then back to the money.

  “Just want a blowjob,” he specified.

  She looked across the parking lot. Was Zeke yet in view? No matter, as much of a boner as this geekenstein had, he’d cum in ten seconds or less. Talk about easy money.

  “Won’t you come into the office?” Steel sugar in her voice, opening the van door to a mattress, some pillows, and a few scattered trinkets fallen from pockets or left as token gifts.

  Marty shook his head. He replied with a straight face. “I’d rather just ‘cum’ into the ‘orifice’. In the parking lot. Right here’s where I want it.”

  Rita coughed. “You’re kidding. I don’t suck in the open.”

  “I didn’t say I wanted ya to suck me,” Marty explained. “I said I wanted a blowjob.”

  Rita coughed again, Goddamn freak. She put her hands on her hips above glossy damp thighs.

  Marty tucked the hundred back in his pocket, chuckling as her eyes followed the money as it vanished—and pulled a Dan Wesson 41-VH magnum out of his pants. Something else he’d borrowed from Gramps. The ten-inch barrel had been what impressed Rita.

  Rita screamed, jumping backward into one of the van’s open doors. Marty pressed the barrel to her head, noticing how the bright blue finish went with Rita’s gun-metal eyes.

  He said, “It’s funny. This gun weighs exactly 69 ounces. 69, Rita. Isn’t that hilarious? I didn’t say I wanted ya to suck me. I want a blowjob. Can ya say it? Blow. Job.”

  Rita sputtered, urine running down her legs, bracelets jangling together. No, she didn’t seem able to wrap her lips around that phrase presently.

  Marty smiled, knowing Zeke’d be along any minute. Then he’d get that jock pimp bastard, too. And then he’d hunt down Lysette. Their heads would fountain, right and left hemispheres of brains parting. It’d remind him of Rosie’s sweet face going down before it disintegrated into mermaid mouths in the gory ocean.

  Marty chuckled. “Blow, Maryjane, blow. Suck’s just a figure of speech.”

  His finger started squeezing the trigger. He prepared for a recoil, sure it would knock his lightweight self on his ass, maybe break his arm if he wasn’t careful.

  Then he saw the sparkle off something in the van.

  He stepped close, gun still drawing a bead on Rita’s skull.

  It was a severed toe, still wearing a gold ring. Engraved with ROSIE and a little rosebud.

  Rita followed his stare.

  “Eeeuuuhhh, yeeeuuuchchch! That Goth guy must’ve dropped that.” Her hands fluttered at the mere notion that she’d just screwed a kid who’d been carrying a severed toe. This in her mind, even as she was about to have no other grim thought—or any other kind—forever.

  Marty reached into the van and picked up the toe, fingers trembling, closing around it. The flesh was way too soft, as if it were preserved, something done to it to slow down its decomposition. The ring’s metal felt cool.

  Tears spilled down his cheeks. He no longer wanted to shoot this bitch. The violent passion which had filled him up before had turned to water.

  He stared at the gun. At Rita. He’d been about to be a statistic, a copycat act, just another crazed teenager on a shooting spree. One more child settling for a few seconds of vengeful power, then oblivion. First in line gets a TV movie. Last in line is an also-ran. An empty tin can. Just a loser, man.

  Yet now he held part of his Rosie. His talisman. Somehow, it saved him. She saved him.

  Marty stepped away, keeping the gun trained for another minute on the cowering girl as he backpedaled across the parking lot. Just before he turned and ran.

  – | – | –

  PART THREE

  “It was all about calling up what

  could never properly be put back.”

  —Pirsya Profana

  – | – | –

  Chapter 25

  Captain Walch forced himself to remain impassive as his men rounded up the women. Why was he only now giving this order?

  Because of the nuns. The ones Walch and others had seen scurrying across the streets, broad white wimples like parasols catching snow. As shrieks were heard from a decaying castle which rose up in flames one night, strange fire playing through ruined window eyes.

  He’d chased a nun. She wouldn’t stop as he called out. The wind had howled, part weeping and part laughter when he caught up with her at the doorway of the crumbling church. He’d yanked her around to face him.

  It was her.

  The woman whose home he billeted in, inexplicably dressed in a habit.

  “You…!” he whispered in shock. He experienced an even deeper trauma as her pale face suddenly turned burned black. Yes, he’d let go, and quickly. She’d spun about, continued into the church, vanishing into its shadows.

  He’d gathered enough senses to follow. There was no one within. Not in the chapel—the only place to have its whole roof—and not in the tiny rooms apart from it, bared to the elements.

  And that chapel, how defiled! Painted with the graffiti of blasphemies uncountable.

  He’d been a rational modern man, without superstition. But this made his senses reel; he questioned all he’d once assumed as logical. It angered him, having his world challenged, darkness thrust up to squeeze him into a small frightened peasant.

  Walch hurried back to the woman’s house. There she was, no nun’s habit, just sitting on the floor by the fire, odd bird feet slippered, stroking her dog’s head.

  “Mother of Christ,” he murmured.

  “Mother, yes,” she replied. “But it’s more like this.”

  She stroked an X across her breasts with her fingers. Then she pulled up her skirt and spread her legs. Her furrow wasn’t a slit but an X. He watched an egg emerge. It hatched and many little snakes were revealed, snarled like a yarn ball. Another egg rolled out, vulture chick pecking the shell apart to reveal bloody feathers.

  ««—»»

  “Sir, I don’t think they’re dead.”

  The sergeant trembled, staring wide-eyed at the women hanging from the trees. Strung up instead of shot, because Captain Walch saw wisdom in saving ammunition for battle—should they manage to return to the war. The white dog stalked back and forth under the women, growling. Walch did try to shoot the hound. Several soldiers fired muskets but it ran away. They heard it howl, whimpering out in the bog.

  The women didn’t struggle. Some cried, some laughed. Yet they had done this all along. Ropes were thrown across branches of wrestler oaks, snow shaking down. One by one they were hauled up, eyes open and smiles twitching as they strangled.

  “Sir…?”

  How could they be alive? Swinging in the trees, back and forth, side to side, toes pointed and swirling circles. Eyes open—albeit bulging—staring har
d at the British.

  “Cut them down. Draw and quarter each body,” Walch commanded, keeping his demeanor grim, hands clasped behind him so none might see them shake. He’d lain with that, had fondled and been stroked by that. How had he failed to notice the shape of its vessel? Or had it before only been a groove, a slender ‘V’ instead of the double ‘V’… one inverted beneath the other to create an obscenity? He’d been in that death spot.

  What fate awaited him now—or any of them?

  The men did as bid, slashing and beheading the bodies with sabers or bayonets. Still the eyes stared, full of patient hatred. None of these women had attempted to flee or fight as Walch’s soldiers came for them.

  (No, they’re used to it, he told himself. How many times have they been through this?)

  He commanded eyes be gouged out, ocular eggs littering the snow. The pieces were piled together, creating a considerable mound. The snow descended in fury, a swarm of white flies. Then real flies came, unbelievable their presence with how cold it was. Their buzzing changed in the frosted breeze until it sounded susurrously serpentine.

  “Think we ought t’ burn ’em?” asked the sergeant.

  “Absolutely. Then grind whatever’s left to powder. Although I’m not sure it will do any good,” Walch replied, thinking of the nun’s face changing to blackened ruin, of the flames and screams from the haunted castle. “I do believe Pirsya Profana and the others have been burned before.”

  ««—»»

  Renae shrieked in her sleep. She dog-paddled toward consciousness, a blind puppy cast out to drown in black water.

  The name.

  Pirsya Profana.

  It jolted her, not too unlike Eddie’s figurative bare wire up her ass. Only then did she recognize the face of Walch’s woman.

  She hadn’t recalled her mother’s countenance since the murder and her own time on the mental ward. Shock treatments could remove memories, so could massive doses of anti-psychotics. So could post-traumatic stress. She’d withdrawn from the memories, from the awful scene which drove her catatonic in the first place: hair across the top of the mirror, partial skull on the dresser.

  Everything had been so gruesome, surreal, Renae must’ve had an immediate break from reality, hallucinating the garbage disposal grinding up the arm, the spattered mess congealing into two women. “Let’s go down there together, Renae,” they’d said, pointing to the InSinkErator.

  In dreams, we’re sometimes other people, at times active participants, or detached observers. We populate night lives with those we know by day, faces familiar to us on some level, even if the roles and settings have nothing to do with our waking lives. In the dream, Renae’d given this woman her mother’s symbol, her face, which her subconsciousness held secret. Walch, too, might’ve been someone she’d known—a school teacher or an asylum doctor.

  Why had her mother’s name been spoken? That was a new, terrifying element.

  Shriek!

  “Wake up! You’re okay. You’re safe,” a voice said.

  Renae opened her eyes and saw a blonde woman in white.

  “I’m sorry. I knocked, then heard you scream. I was afraid you were being killed. I mean, you never know these days. There’s so much going on in the city,” the woman apologized, spreading her hands to show she meant no harm.

  Renae looked around her living room where she’d slept on the sofa, not yet trusting reality. “Who are you? How did you get in?”

  “I tried the door on impulse when I heard you scream. It was unlocked. I’m Robin Pittman. I came to see Detective Poe.”

  Renae looked at her sideways. “How do you know where he lives?”

  The pretty, petite woman gave her a disarming smile. “He’s in the phone book. Not too many Edgar A. Poe’s out there, dear.”

  “Robin Pittman,” Renae repeated, sitting up. She realized the white dress was a uniform. “You’re the nurse. Thelonious Spunk’s—excuse me—I mean Calia Abram’s partner.”

  “The same,” the nurse admitted, looking away.

  “Yeah? And?” Renae challenged, still not pleased somebody’d just waltzed right into her apartment, even if the woman believed Renae was in danger. “Why do you want to see Eddie?”

  “He came to see me yesterday. At the hospital. About Calia calling this phone thing, X-IS-THE-DARK? He always came before with another detective. Yesterday he was alone. After he left, I got the impression he was heading for X-IS-THE-DARK’s office.”

  “You saw Eddie yesterday?”

  “Yeah, then the other one, Larson, is it? He showed, saying he’d just talked to you and nobody’s seen Detective Poe for days. I was pretty hassled with work, and couldn’t talk long. Some psycho opened up at a department store. The ER was swamped. I’ve been working extra shifts and only just got off duty. Anyway, Calia was into this phone thing. Maybe you heard of it. Compulsions, what the night’s made of and so on?”

  Renae nodded wearily.

  “There’s also been a book somehow involved. necrOmania seXualis. Lots of copies of it. I think they come from the same business where they do these calls. I’m guessing it’s some kind of mind control.”

  Renae flinched. “I’d appreciate you’re leaving now.”

  “Have you or Ed Poe ever called X-IS-THE-DARK?” Robin asked quickly, pleading her case before the younger woman shut her out. “Have you had violent fantasies lately? If you have, it isn’t your fault. You may even think you’re losing your mind. A lot of people already have.”

  She sounded like one of those Jehovah’s Witnesses. Pounding on the door and offering salvation to the world’s doomed and gloomed. We know what haunts you, and you need to do something soon before Hell has you for lunch.

  Renae’s eyes riveted to the nurse’s, voice cracking as she asked, “Who are these people?”

  But she knew already.

  Robin could see the young woman’s defensiveness subside. Now she just looked defeated, tired. At Robin’s suggestion, Renae called The Goth Channel and asked about The Fillin’ Station, the movie show where Renae and Eddie had first seen the late-night commercial.

  “X-IS-THE-DARK, you said? We’ve never heard of that sponsor before, Miss Hawthorne,” she was told.

  “I saw it,” Renae insisted. “You were showing Fatal Subtraction. Will you check again please?”

  There was a pause, then, “Okay, we televised the movie but not the ad. We’ve got three phone sex accounts and two psychic hotlines. No X-IS-THE-DARK. Nothing in the 900’s.”

  Renae hung up.

  “Well?” Robin asked.

  “They never heard of it. Neither has the phone company.”

  “The phone company?”

  “A bill came in and I saw thousands of dollars in charges. Then they were gone. Just like that.” Renae snapped her fingers. She also wondered if she looked as ragged out as she felt. Not that any mirror would inform on her.

  “You and Ed called them. You know they’re really out there. They’re playing head trips. Calia called them, too. And my son, Seuter. He saw their commercial last summer, then committed suicide in September. I know how real they are.”

  “I’m sorry about your son.”

  No wonder the nurse wanted to see Eddie. She must be ready to wage war.

  As if on cue, the telephone rang. Renae darted to answer it.

  Robin grabbed her arm. “Don’t. It might be them. They have your number now.”

  The phone kept ringing.

  Renae pulled free, annoyed again. “It might be Eddie. Or Tom Larson.”

  Renae picked up the receiver, pressing it to her ear. Her mouth hovered, breathing hotly into it. Please let it be Eddie. “Hello?”

  It wasn’t.

  Voices all summer wind… oceans rolling… grasses rustling in a provocatively urgent breezy whispering. The noises changed, grew cold, set hard into solid winter storm, bare rocks and barer trees… ropes creaking… the sounds of wolves running through those dead grasses. Renae stood, transfixed, ear press
ed to plastic, unable to pull away.

  Robin pried the phone from her fingers and hung it up. She steered Renae toward the sofa. “Sit down, honey. I told you not to answer. Think I’ve never seen this before?”

  Renae blinked, taking in the room and its mundane objects. Oh God… Where was Eddie? Would she ever see him again? “Why me? Why are they doing this to me?”

  “To strengthen the degree of infection,” Robin replied.

  “Right.” Renae rolled her eyes. “Eddie mentioned this being a disease.”

  “Not the way you think. Not like a cold or the flu. It sounds nuts…”

  Renae smiled thinly and nodded that, yes, it sounded certifiable.

  “It isn’t like that,” Robin insisted. “It has to do with symbols and a reservoir of images we’re born with. Let me put it this way: When chicken hatchlings come out, so new they’ve still got eggshell on their fluff, they’ll scatter if a hawk shows overhead. Did you know that? Before they could’ve learned anything about hawks. Even if it were a fake, the shape or shadow of a hawk makes them run. The chicks don’t react that way with ducks or cranes or any other bird—only hawks. It’s sign stimuli, imprinting from symbolic stimuli. Chicks react to hawks. What do we respond to? What better way to reach us than through the primal centers of our nervous systems? A physical disease goes after bodily functions. The soul disease strikes primals, the blood-death-and-sex that arise from a single compulsion.”

  “That compulsion being survival?” Renae offered, figuring she was up on her basic psychology.

  Robin shook her head, smiling faintly as if that would seem to be the logical response. She said, “No. The compulsion is frenzy. Fundamental, heart-racing, noradrenalin producing excitement. Scientists, whoever, tell us it boils down to the instinct for survival, the need to propagate…to continue your genetic line. But it’s really just because it’s a rush and it feels good.”

  Renae nodded as this sank in. The game had been played—not to gain sympathy for the devil, not to spread understanding about how killers could commit their grisly acts—but for laughs. What a joke and choke. A buzz. Kinky hot fever-sweaty-good, finger-lickin’ sex rush. Riding the hot sauce impaled on Eddie’s stake, seeing thousands all fucked and fucking and having orgasms so great it had t’kill ’em. And the more she’d tasted, the more she’d wanted. Even the dreams, visions, hallucinations of the grassy field that shocked her had been great when they occurred. Powerful, sating—rush.