The Witch and Warlock MEGAPACK ®: 25 Tales of Magic-Users

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  They were quiet as Quentin told his story. Jonah, on his father’s orders, had taken Cari. Since he couldn’t drive, he’d had to carry the child over the back of the bluff and across Ruby’s fields on his way to the witch farm, where he’d been told to wait. Irv then intended to stage a dramatic rescue, as he hadn’t meant to kill the child—only frighten me into leaving Peacehaven and incriminate the coven at the same time. Macduff caught up with Jonah and Cari on the Hobbs farm. The terrified boy fled across the barnyard toward the woodshed. But when he saw he couldn’t outstrip the dog, he’d dropped Cari near the barn. It was sometime after that that the great white fighting dog had managed to break through the loose boards and had attacked. While Jonah cowered in the woodshed, Macduff, young as he was, took on the terrier, dodging this way and that to divert him from the child. He was no match for the beast, but he was younger and faster, and by maneuvering kept the bull terrier at bay just long enough. The slashing teeth were at Macduff’s throat when a state trooper’s bullet dropped the maddened animal. Just then Irv Good had burst upon them, and when he saw Quentin and the troopers and the blood from the dogs, he’d panicked.

  “You’ll never catch me!” he’d screamed, dashing into the barn and up the stairs, slamming down the trapdoor. They’d heard him cursing and banging open the cage doors, trying to recruit a defense squad. But he had lost control of his animals. Here was the man who had beaten and brutalized them. One sprang for his throat and then the whole pack was on him. Before the troopers could reach him, Irv Good lay dying, but he’d gasped out a confession in his last moments. With that and what they had seen and what Jonah had been able to tell them, they’d pretty well pieced together the whole puzzle by the time Jim Willard came stumbling into the barnyard, winded and barely able to tell them what was going on up on the bluff. “Get up there with the child,” he’d begged Quentin, who was tending Macduff’s injuries. “If you don’t, something terrible will happen.”

  “What about my Carol?” Homer wanted to know.

  “And my Susie?” Muriel cried.

  “We figure they wandered into the barn looking for the money old Hobbs was supposed to have hidden in there and were killed by the guard dog. Irv didn’t dare have them traced to his barn, so he’d planted the bodies elsewhere.”

  They were still mute with shock after Quentin had finished. Then it came, the instinctive reaction of a people ashamed, each blaming the others. The sickening stench of burned flesh was nothing compared to the stench in our souls.

  Linda broke open the abscess. “It was Iris! She told me my mother would die if I didn’t do what she said,” she sobbed.

  “Like making phone calls.” Debbie.

  “Mother and I made the little car and the poppet of Mitti—with hair Rowan got for us.” Cissie sounded rather proud.

  “We’ll all burn in hell,” Carol wailed.

  “No, we won’t,” Cissie assured her. “Lucian said we were doing God’s work by driving out the unfaithful. The grown-ups were in on it, too.”

  “Iris is guilty,” an older voice cried.

  “And Lucian, too!”

  “And Elspeth!” Muriel.

  “Tyler Bishop!” Damon.

  “Damon and Charity!” Tyler Bishop.

  “Caleb!” Homer.

  “Homer!” Caleb.

  As they turned viciously on each other, my eyes were blinded by the fury and hatred in me. I trembled with a terrible power and I knew that if I just uttered the words I could damn them all. But Dana had forgiven them. “Forgiveness is only a little less strong than Love,” she had said. Love was beyond me at that moment, but forgiveness was just barely within reach, something I, as Mary Esty, had not quite achieved on this side of the wall.

  Charity stood before me, holding her arms out in supplication. “Can you ever forgive us, Mitti?”

  Pushing Greg’s blistered hands gently away, I stood alone. This I had to do for myself.

  “I—I forgive you,” I whispered to them—and to Owen.

  Then the blackness rushed in on me, but following me into the dark were Rowan’s eyes, moist and shining with love.

  Epilogue

  Peacehaven’s day of penance has ended and Bishop’s Bluff stands brooding over its ugly memories. The dignitaries and reporters and sightseers have all left. Twill surprise me if today’s ritual of penance will be repeated for twenty years as was the one in Massachusetts colony nigh three centuries ago. These people seem not as strict in such observances. Yet I cannot think they will ever be able to look on the scarred and sullied crest of that bluff without paying a silent penance.

  Now, on this warm May Eve, as sunset pales into twilight, Submit—Mitti—that other part of me—lies dreaming on the soft new grass in her sanctuary in the wood. And since she is here, I must be here, too, for she and I are one, though at times we separate as far as the silver cord can stretch. But Mary Eastick is only one part of me, for I have lived before, again and again, and I’ll not know the sum of myself until I have played out all my lives.

  Mitti is but a se’en-night home from the hospital, for she suffered internal injuries that terrible night and lay in a coma for days, during which she slipped through the invisible wall into our world and she and I were one with our memories and our loved ones.

  Greg left town without seeing her after he knew she was out of danger, and returned only today—which saddened Mitti, who as yet doesn’t understand that he had to come to terms with himself before he could face her again.

  Mitti’s forgiveness was more than Lucian could bear. To forgive is godly, to be forgiven, mortal. His body was found the next morning at the bottom of Tomahawk Rock. No one knows where Iris is. She closed the Patch and shut herself up in the old house. When Jim Willard, the new sheriff, went to see her, he found the house vacant. Some think she drowned. Perhaps her lover claimed her and she swims with him now in that shadowy world beneath the waters.

  Dr. Brun still lives in Dana’s house and Mrs. Soames is his housekeeper. He’s Peacehaven’s new minister, at least until the people are mended. He has given up the search for Prince Madog’s descendants, for the tremor that shook the earth when Dana died crushed the thin floor of the upper cave, causing it to collapse inward onto the lower level. To Dr. Brun and Mitti it was a sign that Peacehaven—and the world—are not ready for the truth.

  Folk came from afar to attend today’s service—a few, mayhap, to hear the famous Dr. Brun preach, the rest, sensation seekers. But what began as adventure was transformed into a sobering occasion and all joined in experiencing a collective guilt. And the governor came to announce a new project for harnessing the river and reclaiming lost lands… “As a sign, let the river be turned back from Peacehaven…”

  All the townspeople were there today—all who were able, that is. Mother Carrier, who now lives with Charity and Damon and her great-grandson, was, naturally, too feeble to come. The girls clustered together as usual, but they were no longer a nucleus for destruction. Lucy, who’s being adopted by Dr. Brun, stood fearfully to one side, her face pale and pinched behind those enormous spectacles, until Rowan put her arm around her and drew her gently into the group.

  Conspicuously absent were Rosalind and Tyler Bishop. When the real estate bubble burst, the Bishops tried to flee with stolen funds, but Caleb Toothaker, who knew his half-brother too well, intercepted them as they were leaving the bank, and, as deputy sheriff, arrested them. They, in turn, accused him of having gone to the till himself.

  Endless questions arise. For some the answers will come in time, for others never. Who threw the gasoline bomb? Only the guilty one knows and must live with that knowledge—if he can. Yet even that crime must be shared to some extent by each and every one in Peace-haven.

  “We walked in clouds and could not see our way. And we have most cause to be humbled for error…which cannot
be retrieved.” Thus, with the words of the Reverend John Hale, written nearly three centuries ago, did Dr. Brun begin his homily today. After a brief, eloquent address, he motioned to Rowan. She came forward hesitantly, then faced the crowd, biting her lip, her chin slightly tilted.

  “I desire,” she said in a clear, tremulous voice, “to be humbled before God for the accusing of several persons of a grievous crime, whereby their lives were taken away from them, whom now I have just grounds and good reason to believe they were innocent persons; and that it was a great delusion of Satan that deceived me in that sad time, whereby I justly fear I have been instrumental with others, though ignorantly and unwittingly, to bring upon myself and this land the guilt of innocent blood…

  So far ’twas Anne Putnam’s confession of guilt that Rowan was quoting, but suddenly she burst out with words of her own: “I blamed my mother for Junior’s death—but most of all for my father’s.”

  She stopped to wipe away the tears coursing down her cheeks. “Mother never told me the truth about my father because she didn’t want me to think badly of him. And I probably would have, but now I know he fell into error because he was afraid of failure and of not being able to provide for mother and Cariad and me. Dr. Brun says God has surely forgiven him because he didn’t know what he was doing, therefore so must I. I only hope God can forgive me for what I have done. I can’t bring back those for whose deaths I must share the blame, but I can spend the rest of my life trying to prove to my mother how much I love her.” The last whispered words were all but lost as she rushed into Mitti’s arms.

  All the while Will—nay, Greg now—stood there, knotting and unknotting his fists. “I can’t let this child take all the blame,” he spoke out. “I helped sow the seeds of this thing with my blind prejudice and my obsessive promotion of the pageant.”

  Still the implacable judge, poor Will! Someday perhaps he will learn to forgive himself. Yet better the man who takes others’ sins as well as his own unto himself than he who tries to slough his sins off on others. For in the tragedies of Salem and Peacehaven look not for one villain—look to us all.

  As for Mitti, she has learned what I could not in this life—to forgive. Perhaps, before she and I are one again on this side, she will have learned to love all humanity—but if not, the stars will come round again.

  So Mitti still dreams in her sanctuary. I can feel the strength flowing into her from the wellspring of nature, for this is Beltane, when all things burst forth in renewed splendor and the dead, dry deeds of the past are cast aside. The last fingers of pink in the western sky have grayed and a soft breeze is filtering through the leaves to brush Mitti’s face. And I must hurry to rejoin her, because he—her love and mine—has made peace with himself at last, and at this moment has just entered the woods.

  THE INN OF THE TWO WITCHES: A FIND, by Joseph Conrad

  This tale, episode, experience—call it how you will—was related in the fifties of the last century by a man who, by his own confession, was sixty years old at the time. Sixty is not a bad age unless in perspective, when no doubt it is contemplated by the majority of us with mixed feelings. It is a calm age; the game is practically over by then; and standing aside one begins to remember with a certain vividness what a fine fellow one used to be. I have observed that, by an amiable attention of Providence, most people at sixty begin to take a romantic view of themselves. Their very failures exhale a charm of peculiar potency. And indeed the hopes of the future are a fine company to live with, exquisite forms, fascinating if you like, but—so to speak—naked, stripped for a run. The robes of glamour are luckily the property of the immovable past which, without them, would sit, a shivery sort of thing, under the gathering shadows.

  I suppose it was the romanticism of growing age which set our man to relate his experience for his own satisfaction or for the wonder of his posterity. It could not have been for his glory, because the experience was simply that of an abominable fright—terror he calls it. You would have guessed that the relation alluded to in the very first lines was in writing.

  This writing constitutes the Find declared in the sub-title. The title itself is my own contrivance (can’t call it invention), and has the merit of veracity. We will be concerned with an inn here. As to the witches that’s merely a conventional expression, and we must take our man’s word for it that it fits the case.

  The Find was made in a box of books bought in London, in a street which no longer exists, from a second-hand bookseller in the last stage of decay. As to the books themselves they were at least twentieth-hand, and on inspection turned out not worth the very small sum of money I disbursed. It might have been some premonition of that fact which made me say: “But I must have the box too.” The decayed bookseller assented by the careless, tragic gesture of a man already doomed to extinction.

  A litter of loose pages at the bottom of the box excited my curiosity but faintly. The close, neat, regular handwriting was not attractive at first sight. But in one place the statement that in A.D. 1813 the writer was twenty-two years old caught my eye. Two and twenty is an interesting age in which one is easily reckless and easily frightened; the faculty of reflection being weak and the power of imagination strong.

  In another place the phrase: “At night we stood in again,” arrested my languid attention, because it was a sea phrase. “Let’s see what it is all about,” I thought, without excitement.

  Oh, but it was a dull-faced MS., each line resembling every other line in their close-set and regular order. It was like the drone of a monotonous voice. A treatise on sugar-refining (the dreariest subject I can think of) could have been given a more lively appearance. “In A.D. 1813, I was twenty-two years old,” he begins earnestly and goes on with every appearance of calm, horrible industry. Don’t imagine, however, that there is anything archaic in my find. Diabolic ingenuity in invention though as old as the world is by no means a lost art. Lost art. Look at the telephones for shattering the little peace of mind given to us in this world, or at the machine guns for letting with dispatch life out of our bodies. Now-a-days any blear-eyed old witch if only strong enough to turn an insignificant little handle could lay low a hundred young men of twenty in the twinkling of an eye.

  If this isn’t progress!… Why immense! We have moved on, and so you must expect to meet here a certain naiveness of contrivance and simplicity of aim appertaining to the remote epoch. And of course no motoring tourist can hope to find such an inn anywhere, now. This one, the one of the title, was situated in Spain. That much I discovered only from internal evidence, because a good many pages of that relation were missing—perhaps not a great misfortune after all. The writer seemed to have entered into a most elaborate detail of the why and wherefore of his presence on that coast—presumably the north coast of Spain. His experience has nothing to do with the sea, though. As far as I can make it out, he was an officer on board a sloop-of-war. There’s nothing strange in that. At all stages of the long Peninsular campaign many of our men-of-war of the smaller kind were cruising off the north coast of Spain—as risky and disagreeable a station as can be well imagined.

  It looks as though that ship of his had had some special service to perform. A careful explanation of all the circumstances was to be expected from our man, only, as I’ve said, some of his pages (good tough paper too) were missing: gone in covers for jampots or in wadding for the fowling-pieces of his irreverent posterity. But it is to be seen clearly that communication with the shore and even the sending of messengers inland was part of her service, either to obtain intelligence from or to transmit orders or advice to patriotic Spaniards, guerilleros or secret juntas of the province. Something of the sort. All this can be only inferred from the preserved scraps of his conscientious writing.

  Next we come upon the panegyric of a very fine sailor, a member of the ship’s company, having the rating of the captain’s coxswain. He was known on board as Cuba Tom; not
because he was Cuban, however; he was indeed the best type of a genuine British tar of that time, and a man-of-war’s man for years. He came by the name on account of some wonderful adventures he had in that island in his young days, adventures which were the favourite subject of the yarns he was in the habit of spinning to his shipmates of an evening on the forecastle head. He was intelligent, very strong, and of proved courage. Incidentally, we are told, so exact is our narrator, that Tom had the finest pigtail for thickness and length of any man in the Navy. This appendage, much cared for and sheathed tightly in a porpoise skin, hung half way down his broad back to the great admiration of all beholders and to the great envy of some.

  Our young officer dwells on the manly qualities of Cuba Tom with something like affection. This sort of relation between officer and man was not then very rare. A youngster on joining the service was put under the charge of a trustworthy seaman, who slung his first hammock for him and often later on became a sort of humble friend to the junior officer. The narrator on joining the sloop had found this man on board after some years of separation. There is something touching in the warm pleasure he remembers and records at this meeting with the professional mentor of his boyhood.

  We discover then that, no Spaniard being forthcoming for the service, this worthy seaman with the unique pigtail and a very high character for courage and steadiness had been selected as messenger for one of these missions inland which have been mentioned. His preparations were not elaborate. One gloomy autumn morning the sloop ran close to a shallow cove where a landing could be made on that iron-bound shore. A boat was lowered, and pulled in with Tom Corbin (Cuba Tom) perched in the bow, and our young man (Mr. Edgar Byrne was his name on this earth which knows him no more) sitting in the stern-sheets.