Robin got out, walked around to the other side of the car, and opened the front passenger side door.
She said gently, “We’re here, dear.”
««—»»
“This can’t be the place,” Renae mumbled, looking around. “I grew up in Nubbing Cove. This isn’t The Cove.”
“It is,” Robin assured her. “This is what they do to people and places.”
She pointed to the building so hot and bright it caused the surrounding swirls of particulate to shine like moon mist.
Renae shook her head. “We didn’t have a castle, or that bell tower. None of this… stinking medieval nightmare…”
Robin shrugged. “You haven’t been home in years. A lot changes. Could you have forgotten, being in the hospital?”
Had Renae told her that? Possibly. From her fetal ball after breaking the reflection. Recalling needles, shock therapy, endless black space.
They walked around back. Renae read the brass plate on the door. She couldn’t see a handle to open it with.
Robin nudged her. “This is the place. X-IS-THE-DARK. Eddie’s inside. Why don’t you call and ask to speak to him?”
The nurse handed over the cell phone. “You know the number, right?”
Renae wished she didn’t. Then none of this might’ve happened. She tried to punch the buttons. Her fingers in gauze were too clumsy. She handed the phone back. “Do it for me?”
Robin smiled tightly. “Did you know that among the Siberian Yakuts, the term for vulture stands for mother? Did you know that in Egyptian hieroglyphs the painted symbol for vulture also stood for mother?”
Renae looked at her. “Okay…? And?”
She handed the phone to the young woman again and turned slightly away. She cried out, “My job is done! I’ve laughed; I’ve cried! I’ve made of my cunt both womb and tomb!”
Renae blinked in a rising wind, hissing through branches and trash. She heard a dog howl not far away, sound trailing into a whimper.
The nurse tore open the bodice of her uniform. Renae gaped at the large X slashed across her chest, a nipple bisected clean through with a furrow a good half-inch into the meat of one breast, the other nipple completely gone. The middle point of the letter met off-center, over the heart. A grisly version of Tic-Tac-Toe across her chest.
Robin’s long blond hair came loose from where she’d pinned it. It easily tangled as she tilted her head back, beatific smile on her face, eyes shut in bliss. She was snapped off her feet, going up, up, up.
Renae tried to scream but couldn’t make a sound. Or it might’ve been lost in the wind. She saw the nurse catch on a tree, then hang from it, noose of her own hair around her neck. The body jerked even as the eyes remained open, toes swinging around and around, then back and forth, left and right…even as the smile stayed on her face.
Robin wasn’t alone. Up and down the road, in the stoutest branches of the biggest trees, other women hung, ropes creaking. Renae heard them giggling, sobbing. Some were beautiful, others hideous with scars. Feet swinging north, west, south, east in the widdershins dance.
A line of nuns appeared at the corner of the shuttered, hot building. They wore several different habit styles, modern to centuries old, from simple veils to cumbersome shrouds to broad white wimples.
Renae heard the bell in the tower ring above the wind.
She bit at the bandages on her fingers, tearing gauze. This made her hands bleed again. She picked up Robin’s cell and punched the numbers.
“X-IS-THE-DARK.” The voice was familiar. “There’s a beast inside you, honey.”
“No shit,” was all Renae could reply.
“Do you wish to provoke shock or would you rather be encouraged?”
“I want something different,” Renae answered. She closed her eyes, knowing the time had come for what she believed, what part she truly wanted to play in this game.
She opened her eyes, and breathed: “I want to be the victim.”
There was a pause on the other end of the line. Then she heard, “Go ahead. Make me laugh, make me cry.”
“I was walking through the woods and some son-of-a-bitchin’ soldiers raped me, cut off my arms and legs, buried me where acorns fell. I got off work and while in the parking lot a gang of thugs with metal studs in their dicks choked me to death on their foreskins, then dumped me in a water tank. My boyfriend thought I was cheating on him and dissolved me in a bathtub full of lye. My own kids got pissed when I didn’t buy the right kind of cereal. They stuffed me into the oven and turned the temperature to its max. I was just a child, happy to get picked for altar boy, until the priest showed me his father, son, and holy shit…”
She gulped and kept on. “I’d run away from home and was lost and afraid. This guy started taking care of me, then turned me out to feed his habit by spreading my legs. A john beat me real bad. I couldn’t walk, so my pimp started knocking me up to sell the babies for kiddy porn. He gave me fertility drugs so I’d start producing litters, but the last nine were shark girls who ate their way out. My husband decided one season that I was a witch. He cut me into more pieces than it took to create me, fucking all the pretty bits to find what they added up to. He even wiped my reflection away…”
As if a switch had been thrown, the building’s incandescence went out. Its heat vanished with a frosty whisper crackling the air. The weather itself was beyond sultry, unbearable in fact, but no longer emitted from the shuttered facade.
Hinges creaked, a door opened. Renae turned. The women hanging from the trees watched her. Some wore whole suits of white flies. Again she heard a dog howl.
Renae stepped inside. Whatever she expected wasn’t there. No office with prints of Hell on its walls. No harlots manning phones, horns in their hair or skirts slit up to their navels. No cathedral, vaulted groin ceiling, frescoed by Bosch.
It was a cave. The walls were painted. In portraits of saintly Madonnas, mostly in the flat medieval style, pre-Renaissance. And there were beings one could only describe as angels, some who were emerging (or entering) a fog, others who had—not wings—but a spectral fire.
She went further inside. The art grew crude, pictures of vulture-headed goddesses with decapitated human forms lying at bird feet. There were female forms with griffin and vulture beaks, horns curling from their foreheads, or holding forms that were either horns or crescent moons. Stalactites descended from the roof in glittering crystal jaws, dripping slowly into a clear deep pool. Stalagmites up from the floor were carved into diamond-bright breasts. Faceless heads wore narrow coronets. They bulged as if pregnant or full of unholy dinner. Piles of articulated statuettes lay in a terra cotta mound, epiphanies of pale birds with round human buttocks but scooped-out bellies.
Suns and moons radiated around the paintings, snakes and spirals, zigzags and nets, chevrons and meanders, oculi and omphalos (eyes and navels). V’s right-side up or inverted, some joined to make four fruit sections. X’s and O’s everywhere. Baskets full of petrified eggs marked with a spiral, a cross or X, signifying the energy in those eggs: symbols of becoming. Anthropomorphic jars heaped with bones, each marked with an X: symbols of destruction.
Killer and Regeneratrix.
Renae went to a wall, stepping carefully between shining palatial stalagmites. She touched the symbols, her cut hands leaving spatters of blood. Heat blossomed in her fingers, in her head, in her groin. It felt like her first menses, first orgasm, first time she’d thought she’d die and the time she lapsed into catatonia—and also when she emerged from that madness.
Groin X, egg!
We all were snake, bird, and white death!
We each emerged from these three symbols,
And we return to them!
What Renae tried to understand… what she just couldn’t get… was the violence necessary?
Stupid, cruel game, she thought. Just mindless destruction.
Renae still had the voice on the line. She spoke again into the phone, contemptuous to whoever listened on the
other end:
“Pirsya isn’t the Goddess. She developed her own schism out of self-interest. Like medieval Satanists twisting the Old Religion out of Christianity.” She nearly screamed in to the phone. “What she’s doing, it’s not Wicca! Not the true Craft! Okay, she and her followers suffered for their worship of the feminine archetype. But that suffering led to hate. They learned to hate so much that they focused on only one side of the Mother. The dark side blown out of proportion. Falling victim to the most dangerous game of any religion: using a single aspect of their faith’s origins to excuse their murders.”
Still, how had they done this? How had they unleashed such dark power into the world? They weren’t just ghosts, were they? Such spirits had no hard power. They were little more than smoke and ions.
Renae continued: “You can’t have Death without Life. You can’t have Darkness without Light. Evil without Good is only Evil, serving no purpose except to indulge in senseless suffering. This isn’t the Mother’s way. Mother is Balance. Father, for some, is Balance. This Way, this Balance, it works because it reflects itself. The generative power of this Balance, in all its aspects including inevitable death, must be ultimately positive. It’s why the world goes on after us, why the universe keeps racing out at the edges. Why new stars are born when old ones go nova. Etcetera. It’s strictly a forward movement—” She said through gritted teeth, “not a bowel movement.”
Renae let her insult sink in, waiting for someone to argue.
A voice sounded in the phone. That voice… one she recognized from a long time ago.
“It isn’t a reflection but a rebound, an echo, my child. You can hang up now. I’m here.”
Renae turned, saw the woman with the dark hair cascading across her shoulders, X on her jaw.
Could it be the mark of Cain? Or was she branded, like those angels who’d lusted after Cain’s daughters as God unleashed the flood on Noah’s world? Or even the sign marked on they who fell with the rebel, Lucifer?
Renae stared hard at the woman before her. Her complexion, utterly flawless, white as milk. Yet, upon scrutiny, Renae glimpsed the subtle webwork of cracks, as if she were made of old porcelain, even if it was still very fine.
A shudder convulsed up Renae’s spine, landing in a hard block of ice at the back of her neck. She whispered a word:
“Momma.”
And in answer: “Darling, you’ve finally come home.”
Pirsya’s voice was the voice of chimes. Was it English? Did she speak any mundane, human planetary vowels and consonants? Was it a glossolalia of the fanatic mad (yet still human)?
Or was this the language of the spheres?
Barefoot, she had bird feet, three toes on each. She came toward Renae, saying, “We rejoin what has been apart.” With her words, all light reflected in and from this crystal palace’s prisms of stalactites and stalagmites shot out to join a beam, enveloping Pirsya in radiance.
The apartment strewn with gore.
It flashed in Renae’s brain as she bit her lips in prayer to a Mother who would protect her. All the pretty bits. She prayed harder. Mother, please. Be a Mother of Life/Light/Good/Balance/ Forward Time.
Renae heard the dog again. It whimpered, growled. It leaped over jars and figurines, paws smashing a few. A giant, pale hound with an odd-shaped head came out of the dark. Renae ducked in fear, but the dog wasn’t after her. It struck Pirsya, knocking her into the pool, locking its jaws onto her throat, thrashing her like a bone until both dog and woman blurred.
Renae screamed. “Pirsya! Momma!” She saw the dog drop the body and climb out, shaking water and blood out of its fur in every direction, spattering cave paintings of ghostly bison, mammoths, owls. It gazed up at Renae, howling mournfully, tongue lolling red foam from its mouth.
It had Eddie Poe’s face.
Pirsya submerged in the pool. Renae ran to the edge and looked in. At first she thought she saw many bodies, slowly moving around one another as something flowed in to fog the depths. Soon there were no bodies at all.
Up near the surface the water was still clear. She spied only her reflection, crystal sharp and bone white.
A sound. What was that? She listened to a diamond voice reverberating from stalactites and stalagmites, from cave walls and icy depths.
“…what has never been apart…”
– | – | –
Epilogue
Third floor of the Luther Building.
The doors opened at Suite 350, and the wind blew in, carrying in it odd smells of frankincense, greasy tallow candles from rendered animal fat, burning cedar. It was high summer yet somehow autumn-colored leaves pursued in a dervish swirl out of the elevator and down the hall, brilliant as doomed and fallen rainbows.
A dark-haired woman, white hound trotting beside her, marched straight for the studio.
“Uh, hi, Miss Hawthorne,” muttered a surprised secretary. “We weren’t expecting you back yet.”
Lenora jumped out of her chair where she’d been interviewing Colin, director of Fire Across The Brain. She grinned with sincere delight. “Ren! I’m glad you came in. Shedu’s not coming back, you know. Love that cool beauty mark. Why didn’t I think of that?”
Colin (the same director who’d so cruelly disparaged a troubled actress who couldn’t even say twenty-seven words) sneered.
“Yours…?” he murmured to the hound.
The dog leaped at him, jaws flashing the end of the world.
Into the studio, catching up with the pair and the brightly dying leaves came brown-gray clouds of mist, funnels of white flies droning strange choruses, battalions of snakes and vipers—mambas doing mambos.
Lenora shrieked, backing away from the dog and flailing director. The cameraman froze as Renae tossed black hair from her face, smiling into the camera. Tears streamed from her eyes. But she laughed, telling the audience beyond: “Welcome to the new season of Eden. Welcome to…” She smiled broader. “…The X Channel.”
– | – | –
Charlee Jacob wrote Season of the Witch almost 30 years ago—her initial foray into horror, then proceeded with writing in the dark between about 1990 and 2004. Garnering some 1,000 publishing credits and four Stoker awards until virtually disappearing from the scene following a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease.
She is a native Texan, born in 1952.
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