Drellan felt contempt for the witch and also for the people of Tyldan-town. He’d always thought civilized people soft, and yesterday his opinion had been resoundingly confirmed. He’d ridden into a tiny town looking for a tavern and the leading citizens had come to him promising the profits of three years’ harvests if he’d slay a witch. He’d said, “I’ll take the job if you’ll pay me a lifetime share of your crops, the finest house in your town, and the pick of your daughters.”
“Bring justice to the witch,” the mayor had said, “and all that you’ve asked is yours.”
The villagers had started chattering about their failed assaults and exorcisms, and Drellan had laughed and tapped the hilt of his broadsword. “A length of steel is all the exorcism she needs.”
Raising his sword, Drellan slipped into the corridor. As the weird green light washed over his skin, he had the sudden sensation that he was passing into a submerged castle.
* * * *
At the heart of the fortress, Alisha watched the barbarian enter her home and came to a decision. She raised her hands and gestured, unbinding the spell-strands of her defenses. The web of protections which had taken hours to weave came apart in seconds.
Alisha was an herbalist, a wood-witch, but she was not without greater resources. She had turned to healing because it had been the art furthest from the necromancy she had learned from her mother, one of the mightiest wizards of ancient Reztakel. Her mother’s grim sorceries had terrified her, and when her mother had spoken of betrothing her to a powerful soul-slaver, she had fled far away.
Alisha unlocked a cabinet that contained a single item, a small, empty crystal jug with a neck like a trump, long and slender and flaring in a wide bell. She carried the jug to her stone worktable and put the stopper in a rare clear spot amidst the alembics, retorts, mortars, and dirty dishes. The jug’s slim neck felt like an icicle in her left hand.
Alisha heard a faint knocking and looked in the mirror, to see the barbarian standing with his head cocked, listening as he tapped his sword-pommel against the door of her sanctum. He lashed out with his foot. Wood splintered like parchment-thin board as the barbarian burst into the room.
“Burn in hell, witch!” he cried, and charged her with sword raised.
Alisha swept up her right arm, her fingers curling as if beckoning him. When her fingertips touched her palm, the barbarian froze with one foot in the air, a statue of a running man.
His eyes bulged and his face paled. He choked out, “It can’t be!”
Alisha closed her fist and the barbarian toppled forward like a tree severed at the roots. He struck the floor with the loud meaty crack of a beef slab falling from a smokehouse hook. His sword rang on the stone like a bell.
Life was fragile, destruction quick. Had not Reztakel the Magnificent, a city ten centuries old, been reduced to blackened rubble in a day as the indirect result of Alisha’s struggle to win free of her mother’s spells? Their combat had reminded Alisha of what had frightened her most about her mother’s sorceries -- the rush of excitement, the taste of power, the intense pleasure of destruction.
That pleasure frightened her still. And though she knew she made a futile wish, she hoped she would not have to kill again.
Alisha brought her clenched fist to the mouth of the jug, relaxed her fingers, and immediately laid her palm over the mouth. She got the stopper in the jug without allowing the mouth to ever become completely uncovered.
Within the crystal jug swirled a tiny mist, grey shot through with red. It writhed and twisted, swirling with strange, abrupt motions.
The corpse had become a man-shaped layer of dust on the floor. Alisha got her broom and swept the dry pale powder onto a dirty plate for later disposal.
Then she spelled herself and the soul-jug up onto the roof, to summon the four winds and bargain for rain.
DEMONS ARE A GHOUL’S BEST FRIEND, by M.E. Brines
Originally published in Tales of the Talisman, Summer 2010.
I was sitting at my desk with my feet up reading a crime paperback and trying to decide if the prohibition bootleggers in the book were easier to deal with than the voodoo cultists I was used to when the door opened. Steadying myself for the usual complaints about abusing the furniture I didn’t notice at first that it wasn’t my partner.
An older couple stood in the doorway, both wearing boots, jeans and plaid shirts like a pair of retired rodeo riders. He eyed the place like an elderly spinster eyes a bordello. I wasn’t sure if it was contempt for other people’s weakness or pining for the good old days.
But she smiled and walked right up to the desk.
“Are you Mister O’Brien, the private detective?”
“Actually, I’m not a detective. We’re paranormal investigators. But if your problem is supernatural, we can help.”
She nodded but he gave her a hard look. I gestured at the faded easy chairs we kept for clients.
“How can I help you?”
“Do you want to tell it, Everett?”
“No, Sara, this is your idea. You go right ahead.”
“Well, Mister O’Brien…”
“Call me Ed.”
“Ed, we own a granite pit over near Florence…”
“Have for years,” interjected Everett.
She nodded. “Yes, and we’ve been trying to sell the place…”
“Made good money but it’s time to move on,” said Everett.
She frowned but continued. “But not too long after we put the place up for sale, bad things started happening. First our cat disappeared. Then somebody killed our dogs.”
“Laid ’em right open like with a machete.” He shook his head. “Can’t abide anybody mistreats an animal like that.”
“Yes, and the horses. Tell him about the horses, Ev.”
He leaned forward in his chair. “What they done to the horses was unspeakable. I’m an old ranch hand and I ain’t no stranger to blood. But you could tell whoever done this, done it while they was still alive and kicking. Now, we called the sheriff after the dogs and again for the horses. Both times the deputy said it was probably some kind of weird cult or maybe juveniles looking for a thrill. But ain’t no junior high school cow tippers ever mutilated a horse like that.”
“And worse,” she said. “The deputy said they wouldn’t do anything about it.”
“And why not?” I asked.
“We live too far out in the county. They can’t station a deputy way out there every night, especially since there’s only trouble maybe once a month. We need you to figure out who is doing it and make them stop.”
I took in their faded jeans and equally faded hair. But needy people who couldn’t pay had burned us too many times in the past. Ann might have a charitable heart, but all I could think of was the stack of unpaid bills in the desk drawer.
“Before we can get started on your case we’ll need a retainer.”
The old fellow pulled a roll of bills out of the pocket of his jeans and dealt me ten of them.
“Is a thousand dollars enough?”
I stared at the pile a moment. Ben Franklin stared back.
“The granite business must be pretty profitable.”
He nodded.
“Yep, we started out thirty years ago as a copper mine but after a while the quality of the ore declined. Lucky for us that was about when the building boom really started to take off.”
She continued.
“You know how it is in Phoenix, so dry. People started putting in lawns of crushed rock instead of grass. It not only saved water but they didn’t have to mow it. Pretty soon most new houses had yards of decorative crushed rock. You might say we got in on the foundations of that industry.”
He patted her hand.
“But now it’s time to enjoy the frui
ts of our labor.”
She smiled.
“What he means is that he’s tired of having to get up at four in the morning and deal with idiot dump truck drivers all day in the heat.”
“Thirty years is a long time, Sara. I’d like to take it easy while I can still appreciate it.”
I slid the money into the drawer where it could subdue those wild and ravenous bills. Then I made them a receipt. As I wrote I asked, “So this problem started when you put the place up for sale? Have you had any offers?”
He nodded.
“Yes, a big corporation from back east. But it looks as if the deal is not going through.”
“Because of the violence?”
“No, they’re not convinced they can get the sales they want to recoup their money.”
She leaned forward.
“Everett cut operations back to two days a week when we decided to sell. Sales are way down. I keep telling him we should go back to the old schedule but he’d rather spend the time at the Indian casino.”
“I keep telling you, woman, we’ve broken our backs for thirty years. Let’s enjoy life while we can. We got so much money now there’s no point in killing ourselves to earn more.”
That was music to my ears. I handed out business cards. Then I got directions to their place. It was pretty far out.
“My partner and I will be out this afternoon to look the place over, if that’s all right.”
He scowled. “Naw, how about tomorrow? Today’s casino day.”
“Everett, they’ve killed all our animals. We may be next.” She looked at me. “I’ll be there. You just come out whenever you can.”
* * * *
We drove out that afternoon. It was a long drive on the highway to the turnoff that soon became a dirt road through a desert populated by little more than scrubby mesquite bushes and scattered saguaros.
Several miles from the highway the road topped a rise. Spread out below in what looked to be a little valley was the mine. We pulled up next to a little tin shed by a truck scale.
The valley floor was dotted with piles of tailings. A huge machine sat near a pile of crushed rock. Someone running a big front loader dumped a bucket of boulders into a hopper at one end while a conveyer out the other spewed decomposed granite onto the pile. The place was hot and dusty. There wasn’t a tree or a shrub in sight taller than my knee.
In the distance stood a neat little house with window boxes full of flowers. Next to it was a red barn with a white horse fence surrounding. That scene amid the barren wasteland of the mine looked like a landscape artist had begun a painting on a large blank canvas but never finished anything but the house and barn.
The figure driving the loader waved and drove it over towards us. We waited and saw it was Sara wearing the same outfit she’d had on that morning with the addition of a straw cowboy hat. She stopped the big machine on a nearby concrete pad between a water tank and the truck scale, then hopped down and strode over to our car.
“She must be younger than she looks,” I said.
“Anybody living on the backside of the desert like this would end up looking like a dried up piece of jerky in no time, the poor dear.”
I smiled back. Ann was my partner, in more ways than one. We got out of the car and I introduced her to Sara.
She waved an arm behind at the panorama.
“Doesn’t seem like much but a lot of material has gone out of here. This valley used to be a hill.”
“Impressive,” I said.
Ann asked, “Where were the dogs found?”
Sara gestured at the house. “Chained up outside, right where we left them.”
“You live on-site, don’t you? Did you hear anything?”
“No, it was Halloween and we were out late in town at a party. We found the dogs when we got home. It was terrible.”
“When were the other incidents?”
She gave us dates and Ann copied them down on a note pad. There had been several at roughly monthly intervals where animals had been killed or equipment vandalized. But they’d never heard anybody or seen anything until afterwards.
“We tried everything to put a stop to it. We locked the gates after dark; the whole perimeter’s fenced off. After they killed our pets we got a couple of guard dogs and let them wander the property after hours. But they ended up dead, too. The strangest thing was every time something happened this concrete pad always ended up wet. They’d hose it down every time and usually left the water running. We’d have to refill the tank the next morning.”
Ann knelt to examine the cracked concrete while I continued to question our client.
“That company that made an offer for the place, are they pressuring you to lower the price?”
“No, they actually accepted our asking price. But they’ve been calling around to our customers and nobody is willing to pre-order hundreds of tons of rock. The stuff is used in construction, you know? And building is down. And since my husband insisted on closing most of the week, most of our remaining customers have switched to using other colors from other mines that are available whenever they need it, rather than just when Ev feels like working.”
“How about disgruntled relatives? You got any ungrateful kids or crazy uncles?”
She smiled.
“No crazy uncles, but we do have two grown children. Our son, William, lives back in New York. He’s a stockbroker. He comes out sometimes for Christmas, more to escape the cold weather than to really visit. He usually stays at a resort in town. We also have a daughter: Mary.”
“Where does she live?”
“Uh, Apache Junction, I think. We haven’t seen her since she got married six years ago. We didn’t go to the wedding. She married a witch.”
Ann suddenly got interested in our conversation.
“You mean a Wiccan?”
Sara waved a hand dismissively.
“Wiccan, witch, whatever. We raised her to be a good girl, sent her to Catholic school and everything and how does she repay us? She gets involved with some guy who wears black and dances naked in the moonlight. She wouldn’t even get married by a priest; she had to have it all done in some big pagan ceremony up in the mountains. They were probably naked.”
“Animals slaughtered in the moonlight. That sounds like some kind of sacrifice to me,” I said.
But Ann shook her head.
“Wiccans don’t do animal sacrifices. They’re not into that kind of thing. Their philosophy is summed up in the phrase, ‘An it harm none, do what ye will.’ A lot of them are vegetarians and pacifists.”
“Yeah, but what about the witch part?”
“You’re just hung up like most people are with the Halloween stereotype of some old crone in a pointy hat. And anyhow, she said the guy was the witch.”
“You mean a warlock?”
“No, witch. They’re all called witches, male or female. That warlock stuff is straight out of Hollywood. No, a Wiccan is about as likely to be behind a string of animal killings as a Buddhist monk or some vegan valley-girl who drives a hybrid with a PETA sticker on the bumper. It’s just against their whole philosophy.”
I scowled and turned back to Sara.
“Well, how about personal enemies?”
She thought a moment, mopping at the sweat on her forehead with a colored handkerchief.
“Well, there is Granite Mountain.”
“What’s Granite Mountain?”
“They’re a retail rock yard. They stock different colors of crushed granite from various mines and resell it to homeowners and landscapers. We used to sell to them by the truckload but we had a lot of trouble getting paid and Ev cut them off. We just don’t deal with them anymore.”
“When was that?”
“Maybe a yea
r ago? I don’t quite remember.”
“We’ll check it out.”
* * * *
In the car on the way back to town Ann asked how I was going to check them out.
“The same way I do everything. By using my amazing detective skills.”
“Okay, Mickey Spillane, you go do that. Meanwhile I’m going to look into the dates of the attacks and see if there’s any occult significance.”
I dropped her off at the office and consulted my Rolodex of former patrons I’d kept from when we ran a local tavern. Sometimes it wasn’t what you knew, but who.
The card read ‘All-About Hauling’ and I dialed the number.
“Yellow?” The voice was scratchy and overlaid with background noise from a laboring diesel.
“Hey Billy, it’s Ed O’Brien. Remember me?”
“You got the Panther reopened?”
“No, I’ve got another gig now and I need some information. I figure you, being in the trucking business, are my best source. What can you tell me about Granite Mountain?”
“They’re broke or near to it. The suck-hole that owns the place owes me plenty for delivering his rock but he’s so far behind paying the pits he’s never going to pay me. I quit running for him a while back.”
“Do you think he’d stoop to murdering somebody’s dogs to get back at a pit owner who cut off his supply of granite?”
“If he was into that he’d have to kill half the dogs in the county. Most people won’t deal with him as it is, not if they’re smart. And even idiots like me eventually wise up. No, Bob ain’t the revenge type. He’s so crooked if he was going to do something to somebody’s dogs, he wouldn’t kill ’em. He’d figure out some way to steal ’’’em and then try to pass ’em off as purebred’s someplace else, even if he lost money on the deal.”
The Witch and Warlock MEGAPACK ®: 25 Tales of Magic-Users Page 64