KISS THE WITCH (12 page)

“
You.” She gestured with a
stab at the circle. “Get in here.”

I did, and when Ursula returned with a bowl
and a dish, Lilith cautioned us against stepping out of it.

“
Once cast,” she warned,
“We cannot break the circle. Doing so will upset the balance of
energy and thwart our efforts to form a new coven.”

“
Forever?” I
asked.

“
No, not forever. For
tonight. If anything interrupts the ceremony we will have to try it
again when the moon is right.”

I know most men might think that would be
okay by them. Playing slip-n-slide on the curves of a beautiful
woman like Ursula is a once in a lifetime opportunity, if not once
in many lifetimes. What guy would not welcome the chance to do it
all again some other night? My problem was that I still had to look
Dominic in the eye the next day. That was bad enough. Looking him
in the eye and knowing I would be oiling up his fiancée’s
nookie-nook again was more than I could bear.

“
All right then,” I said.
“Let’s get on with it.”

We positioned ourselves in front of the
makeshift altar, me in the middle, Ursula to my right, Lilith to my
left. Ursula set the bowl and dish on the coffee table. The bowl I
could see held water, the dish salt. Lilith placed the athame
across the top of the water bowl and whispered, “Mothers of the
Coven, cleans thy waters, make it pure, allow by thrice thy ranks
to soar.”

“
By thrice thy ranks to
soar,” said Ursula.

Lilith nudged me with her elbow. “Oh,
right,” I said. “By thrice thy ranks to soar.”

She places the athame across the dish. This
time I was ready for her. “Mothers of the coven, cast thy salt and
make it pure, allow by thrice thy ranks to soar.”

“
By thrice thy ranks to
soar,” said Ursula.

“
By thrice thy ranks to
soar,” I said.

Lilith took the athame, walked to the east
edge of the circle, pointed it at the yellow candle and shot it.
Seriously. I mean, I know you cannot shoot something with a dagger,
not usually. But Lilith did. She pointed her athame at the candle,
took aim down the length of her arm and unleashed a bolt of blue
lightning that zapped the shit out of it. The resulting discharge
obliterated the candle and set one quarter of the circle, from east
to south, on fire.

She blasted the red candle next, with
similar results, setting half the circle on fire from east to west.
Though the flames were small, barely three inches high, they were
intensely hot, heating the brick dust to a molten mass in
seconds.

Ursula and I stepped aside and allowed
Lilith access to the last two candles. Once she zapped those, the
shallow ring of fire encircled us completely. Why it did not burn a
hole in the floor and drop us into the basement, I could only
wonder. But with Lilith, I have come to trust her more than I trust
my own eyes. For all I knew, we were in the basement, maybe already
dead. I remember thinking that would not be all bad. As I gazed
dreamlike into the flames twitching nervously at my feet, I
considered the possibility. There were worse things I could think
of than spending an eternity with two naked women and an endless
bottle of olive oil.

I might have carried that happy thought
further had I not faded back from the heat of the flames and backed
up into the business end of Lilith’s athame. The point jabbed me in
the left cheek and sent me lunging forward into Ursula’s arms. I
grabbed her around the waist to keep from knocking her over, but my
forward momentum pushed her back to the edge of the circle. She was
leaning backwards, her body half in the circle and half out. Lilith
shouted something at us, but I could not hear her. All I could
think of was keeping Ursula inside the circle. When the flames
began nipping at her heels, Ursula let out a yelp and drove toward
me hard enough to knock me down. I landed on my back, my arms still
around her waist, her body flat against mine.

I felt relieved and embarrassed at the same
time. And when I saw Lilith standing over us, hands on hips, foot
tapping, I felt afraid as well. I looked up at her and stifled a
guilty grin. “Lilith. It’s not what you think. It’s funny
really.”

“
Is it? You and Ursula
lying naked on the floor together? That’s funny?”

“
No, that part isn’t
funny. What I mean is….”

“
Just get up, Tony, and
stop taking advantage of Ursula’s naïveté.”

I looked at Ursula. She smiled back at me
the way Lilith does when she knows something I do not. I suddenly
got the feeling the joke was on me and that the whole coven thing
was a setup. Maybe in some weird witchy tradition Lilith was
throwing Ursula a bachelorette party and I was the
entertainment.

I looked up at Lilith again. Her face had
grown several shades redder in the moments it took me to think
about it. Another look into Ursula’s eyes and I realized that she
had not a clue. Every second I wasted only made matters worse.

“
Okay.” I released my
finger-lock hold around Ursula’s waist and pushed her gently off
me. “Back to work now.”

I saw Lilith’s eyes checking out my mid
section after Ursula dismounted to make sure I had not picked up my
spear again. Fortunately, I had not.

We returned to the altar in the formation I
mentioned earlier, Ursula to my right, Lilith to my left. Ursula
picked up the salt dish and poured it into the water. She then
picked the bowl up and handed it to Lilith.

Lilith dipped the athame into the water and
flicked it at the fire bordering the east. She began walking the
perimeter of the circle, flicking water from the athame onto the
fire and throughout the circle as she progressed clockwise. Her
mantra, as before, in whispered rhymes, the likes of which I could
not understand.

That done, she returned the bowl to the
altar and set it on the empty salt dish. Ursula placed the black
mirror against the bowl, leaning it back in a way that she might
see her face in it if she stooped slightly.

Lilith waved the athame over the mirror
three times. “Hear ye spirits through this glass,” she said, her
words decidedly louder and more pronounced than before. “Turn to
night and let us pass.” She pressed the tip of the athame to the
face of the mirror.

“
Let us pass,” said
Ursula, and after she elbowed me lightly, I echoed her
words.

Lilith took my left hand. Ursula took my
right. All around me, tiny lights began flickering in fleeting
specs like shooting stars. I felt a tingle in my stomach and a
numbing in my feet. The room outside the circle faded to black and
disappeared entirely.

Lilith pressed the athame again to the
mirror. Only this time the tip did not stop after touching the
glass. Instead, it passed through it like an open window, the
emptiness swallowing the blade to the hilt, leaving no reflection
and no image beyond.

She withdrew the blade, and the sleek finish
of the black glass rippled. She hesitated briefly before plunging
the blade forward again without stopping. Her hand passed through
the mirror up to her arm and then her shoulder, and in a blink, we
all passed through the rippled blackness and found ourselves
suspended in the middle of absolute nowhere.

I looked down at my feet, felt and saw
nothing holding me up. Above and all around me, but for Lilith and
Ursula, I saw nothing. Felt nothing. Heard nothing. A dim light
illuminated our bodies, though its source proved undetectable.

I started to say something, ask where we
were, when Lilith squeezed my hand and whispered it was all right.
I turned to her. She smiled reassuringly. I looked to Ursula. She
appeared positively radiant, her eyes twinkling in the phantom
light, her skin glistening with iridescent brilliance. I looked
down at my feet again and noticed I could point my toes into the
emptiness. We were floating. Dead, I thought, and I did not
care.

It is hard to say what I expected next. I
guess I didn’t know, a light I suppose, maybe at the end of long
tunnel. You hear stories like that all the time from people who
have near-death experiences. But then this was not a near-death
experience. This was an experience of a lifetime.

While looking down into the depths of
darkness, I saw it coming, a train of fog rushing up from below. It
came at us in a silent rage, encircling us in a column of air so
cold it raised goose bumps on my skin. Behind it came the wind,
trailing the fog like a restless shadow and blowing loose strands
of Lilith and Ursula’s hair from their neat buns.

I watched in awe as the swirling tempest
slow to a meandering ring of drifting curiosity. I knew it had
intelligence. It coiled around us like a serpent, one end the head,
the other the tail. As the shifting presence settled in, faces of
millennia began to appear. The mothers of the coven were upon
us.

The wind lightened to a nuisance breeze when
Lilith let go of my hand and took a step forward. She arched her
back, her hands high above her head, stretching on tiptoes as if
reaching for the impossible.

“
Oh, mothers of the coven
receive us. Hear our plea. Embrace us thee as thou
wilt.”

At once, a thousand souls appeared in human
form. Women of all ages materialized before us, all naked and
glowing in the thick of the fog from which they came. Some looked
like Lilith and Ursula, tall, young beauties with black hair and
dark eyes, and bodies so perfect only a witch would know they were
dead. Others looked older, graying, hunched and feeble, as if death
advanced their years only after they crossed over.

And then there were the children,
prepubescent girls who, like Ursula, bore rope scars around their
necks. I let go of Ursula’s hand and covered myself. She smiled
thinly at that, panning a side-glance down at my hands.

“
`Tis no shame here,” she
said. “They appear as we do for our sake, is all.”

I smiled back. “They are still children,” I
said. “And last I looked, we were not in Europe.”

“
Aye, that we are not.”
She looked around at the emptiness. “We are not of that world at
all.”

Lilith dropped her hands by her side and
relaxed her stance. “Have thee the will to receive us?” she
asked.

One of the women who I thought resembled
Lilith the most stepped forward. The two embraced, and a feeling of
deja’vu struck me. I had to look to make sure Ursula was still
standing beside me. She was.

“
Lilith of New Castle,”
said the woman. “Thou art well I see.”

“
Katharine of
Newburyport,” said Lilith. “It has been a few years.”

“
Aye, sixty and one
hundred, I believe.”

“
Shush now, Katharine. You
spill my age to my man and he may leave me for another yet
younger.”

The two laughed. Katharine came around
Lilith to me, stopping at arm’s reach. “And by what name doth he
answer to?”

“
That’s Tony of New
Castle.”

Katharine reached for my wrists and pulled
my hands away from my body. After gathering a full look at me, she
said, “Tony of New Castle. Thou art a witch?”

“
Yes,” I said, feeling
conspicuous about things.

She looked back at Lilith. “You have done
well, Sister.”

Ursula said, “Oh, and he can do a most
amazing thing with it, too. If thou wish, I can show thee––”

“
Thaaat won’t be
necessary,” said Lilith. “Ursula, I’m sure Katharine knows what it
can do.”

“
Ursula?” said Katharine.
“Ursula of Salem?”

“
Aye, of Salem before New
Castle. Dost thou know me?”

“
Only by lore. How is it
you are flesh and bone? You were hanged, were you not?”

“
She was,” said Lilith.
“She moved from Salem to escape persecution, only to be hanged in
New Castle for being a witch. I came across her bones a couple of
years ago and cast a resurrection spell.”

“
You returned her to
flesh?”

“
Yeah, it seemed like the
thing to do at the time.”

“
Oh my, Lilith of New
Castle, thou art truly a worthy practitioner of the
craft.”

“
I know,” said Lilith.
“That’s what I’m talking about. So, what do you say? Are you going
to let us form a new coven under the guidance of the great mothers
of the coven?”

Katharine turned to the sea of faces
watching us, presented her hand in a broad sweep and asked, “What
say you all?”

A soft but clear response from all around us
cried out, “So say us all.”

“
Okay, great,” said
Lilith. “That was easy.”

“
Wait,” I said. “Is that
it?”

“
That is it,” said
Katharine. “Go forth now, Lilith of New Castle, be strong in thy
coven and may thy mothers guide thee always.”

“
And may they guide thee,
too,” Lilith replied.

She stepped back in line and took my hand as
before. Ursula took the other. Lilith pointed the athame at
Katharine. “Would you do the honors?” she asked.

“
Of course,” she answered,
and she touched the tip of the athame with her index
finger.

At once, the faces, the naked women, the
mysterious fog; it all disappeared in a swirling blink of light. I
felt a quick tug and the sensation of falling as if the bottom had
dropped out from under me. I gasped, but did not scream, feeling
inexplicably safe as long as I held Lilith and Ursula’s hand.

The next thing I knew, we were back in the
house. The room was spinning, or perhaps it was my head. I could
not be sure. The candles had burned down to almost nothing, and the
ring of fire, though still alight, had faded to a sputtering
flicker.