Maleficarum: Hunger of the Witch (7 page)

Outside
, the flames of the witches’ bonfire still burned high, and around it the diabolical fiends cavorted. Some rubbed themselves with potent salves and balms made from human fat, and as soon as their naked bodies were covered, they began to transform into beasts of the field. They sprouted hair, claws, and fangs. They ripped at their own flesh, pulling it off as if it was a cellophane wrapper, and they exposed their real natures.

Hegel
strutted among her kind with a determined eye as the smell of sex and sweat wafted about on the musty air. In her left hand, she clutched her pitchfork. It was, as far as she could remember, taken from a farmer during the Great Depression, and what a time that was to be a witch—all of the mass confusion of the Black Plague without all the annoying accusations. She had gutted the farmer with a razor, or maybe she had chopped his feet off and made him eat them? She honestly couldn’t remember the finer details of her life
,
unless they were something special
, but she could still remember Ann and her stupid little pocketknife.

She could also remember that tonight it was her job to provide
for the feast. So far, they had eaten almost all of the hobos and the bodies from the porno store, but witches were nothing if not voracious. Even a few people who were travelling down the lonely road had been taken; however, more was going to be needed and soon.

How was she
supposed to know that they were going to wind up in a place that was fortified against witches? In all her days, such a thing had never happened, but she knew that the holdouts would be subdued as the demons would be raised in mass. Demons were not like the imps and dark earthly spirits that cavorted with the witches as pets and familiars, but fallen angels who have existed since before light separated darkness. These beings did not obey the laws of magic like the lesser beings. They would often pretend to be affected, but no mere circle of salt or iron bars would stop them.

The problem with these demons was that they could not be controlled like the meeker spirits. They could be enticed to do something
only if it was part of their agenda or amused them. Yes, songs and rites would be performed to entice them, but even this was more a form of appealing to their vanity than it was a mystical event. This fact meant that there was always some chance that they might not show themselves, but with tonight being such a large gathering, at least a few would probably have their interest piqued. After all, the witches had s’mores.

Hegel saw
that one particularly ugly witch was chomping at the last bits of flesh that clung to one of the slow-roasted hobos.

“I hunger,
” she yelled.

“Me
, too,” another bleated.

“I
’m not starving, but I could eat,” added another.

“Eat a s
’more,” Hegel barked.

“We want meat,
” the first one growled. Hegel launched her pitchfork as if she was Zeus, and it was a bolt of thunder. The pitchfork smacked the gut of the first witch. She let out “oohhh, it hurts,” but before she could collapse to the ground, Hegel stormed over to her and latched her hands around the end of her pitchfork. With one powerful motion, she hoisted the wailing whore of the devil into the air. The naked, impaled fiend’s feet kicked furiously as she tried to pull herself off the pitchfork. Her bile leaked onto the hot pavement around the fire, hissing with each drip.

“You eat too much, and you think to
o little. I have gone through a lot of trouble tonight, and all you do is complain. I spent a hundred dollars in Solo cups alone. Too good for chocolate and marshmallows, are we?” Hegel growled as she hoisted the squirming witch into the inferno. Her still-kicking legs blistered and peeled, showing the meat underneath, and she screamed in agonizing pain. The fire was so hot that it instantly charred her skin, and the hair on her head melted to her scalp. Soon her cries of pain grew fainter as the fire found bone.

With a powerful swing
, Hegel tossed the charred witch to the pavement. “Here, a new dish—blackened slut,” Hegel said, yanking out her pitchfork. It didn't take long for the others to begin ripping into the cooked meat. As the cooked witch's brains spilled to the pavement like undercooked scrambled eggs, Hegel’s mind drifted back into her past. She was at that age where everything reminded her of something else, and this reminded her of southern Germany hundreds of years ago.

At fourteen her family had been killed by the Black Death. She roamed many villages looking for any kind of sanctuary, but she found only looters and the dead. A young man
of the church by the name of Gaston found her barely clinging to life. His eyes were soft and kind and so was his heart. During their travels she couldn’t help but fall in love with the one person who truly cared for her, the one person who looked to do Good in the face of so much evil, and the one person who had taken vows to never be with a woman.

“I am married to God,”
he would say when she would throw herself at him. Love became desperation and then hate. She met other travelers in those dark times. They said they could give her what she wanted: they could make him love her in all the ways that she deserved. The things she did next were so terrible that not even someone as Good as Gaston could ever forgive her. Those terrible things. She forced her mind back to the present in an effort to forget how she had become a worse plague on humanity than the sickness that took her family. It was time to focus on the task at hand, killing the food that had locked itself in the Black Crystal.

The wound on
Beverly’s shoulder was starting to bubble from the concoction, but no one had any idea if that was a good thing or a bad thing. Mike stormed from boarded-up window to boarded-up window, trying his best to see what was happening. Ever since he had seen the original
Night of The Living Dead
he had wanted to see a zombie apocalypse. It wasn’t the zombies he was interested in so much as the situations that they put people in.

Trapped in a boarded
-up farm house, the people in the movie had to use their strength and wits to survive, and he had always fancied himself as having an abundance of both. However, in his daydreams he had more guns and wasn’t scared shitless. The fact that these were witches and not zombies gave him no comfort, and he’d give anything to be sitting on the sofa in his trailer watching TV with a beer in his hands. But he was here, this was happening, and he would do his best to see that as many people could live through this as possible.

Kim sat with her hands over her ears
, trying to block out the incessant chanting of the chaotic forces outside. All she had wanted was some light happy reading to make her feel like a deep person; instead she got screaming hordes of devil worshipers. Life could be unfair that way sometimes.

“Get me all the bottles you can find. I have something that might work
,” Nick shouted as he poked his head out from behind one of the bookshelves with a stern look on his face.

“What?” Ann
said as she ground her blade into one of the overturned bookshelves she was sitting on.

“Witch bottles,
” he answered with a smile as he held up a book on the history of witchcraft. “It will work; so let’s snap to it.” Since no one had any better ideas, and they were all feeling powerless, it didn’t take much coaxing for Nick to get them to go along with his plan.

As they
frantically gathered up every bottle they could find, Nick explained what they were doing. “Witch bottles are a type of protection from witchcraft; not only do they stop the witches from casting spells, but also they can sicken or even kill the spell casters. Now I’m betting that every one of those witches is casting or has cast a spell at this place and at us. If this works, then we might be able to hurt a good chunk of them.”

The dwindling group worked rapidly
, gathering any kind of container they could find, and in a place like the Black Crystal, it was a simple task. The store itself offered a dozen different kinds of bottles and jars for the storing of herbs and the casting of spells, and the bottles containing the herbs themselves could be emptied and used. All of the cleaning products from the janitor’s closet were emptied, as well as every bottle in the soda machine. Nothing escaped the grasp of their eager hands, and if it could hold liquid and have a top placed on it, then it was snatched and brought to Nick. Nick grabbed a cleaning bucket and sat it in the middle of the room.

“O
K, everyone come over here,” Nick ordered, waving them in with his hands. The battered group gathered around him, their eyes fixed on the bucket. In Nick’s right hand, he held a pair of scissors. “Hair, toenails, fingernails, and piss in the bucket. We’ll do the piss last, one at time, to keep at least a bit of modesty about us, but everyone has to squeeze out every drop they have.”

“I
’m not chopping off my hair,” Kim argued defiantly.

“You will or I will make you,
” Mike barked, grabbing the scissors out of Nick’s hands. His eyes went cold, and his voice was as hard as steel. “Now cut,” he demanded as he handed her the scissors. She cried as she made the first snip, and the tears rolled down her youthful cheeks.

“Quickly,
” Nick urged. “Witching hour is closing in, and we don’t have much time.” Feverishly, they cut and clipped their hair and nails, tossing them into the bucket. Ann’s shoulder-length blonde hair that perfectly framed her face was soon gone, and she was left with a gnarled mess of patchy hair of wildly different lengths. All of them were starting to look as if they were exposed to radiation. No one said a word as they dumped handfuls of hair into the blue mop bucket, and when it came time to piss, they did it unceremoniously and without comment.

When they had finished
, Nick looked down at piss-soaked globs of hair. “We’re going to start filling the containers with this crap, and once we start, we can’t talk. If one of us makes a sound, it won’t work, and we’ll have made ourselves look stupid for nothing. We’ll need a few more things to complete the witch bottles. All of the cast-iron cauldrons we have will have to be brought to the center of the room, and then we need to start fires in them. Candles, too. What we are going to do is fill these bottles with the concoction we’ve made, and then two of you will put any kind of sharp object you can find in the bottles. Pins, needles, broken glass, pointed chunks of wood, and bits of plastic. Anything you can find that will cause injury. We then will dangle these bottles over the flames of the fires and candles.” Nick grabbed a bottle.

Looking confused
Mike asked, “What does it do?”

“The objects that you pu
t in the bottles will be put into the witches’ bladders, and they have to piss them out. The fire will boil their bladders, and when the bottle burns or explodes, so will the bladders of the witches.”

A devilish smile spread across Mike’s lips.

“What do you mean?” Kim said.

“Li
ke I said. Whatever you put into the bottles, the magic will do that damage to the inside of the witch. If you put a roll of quarters in the container, it will be like putting a roll of quarters in the bladders of the witches, and they will suffer the same pain as if they actually had a roll of quarters in their bodies.”

“I want to be the one
who picks the objects to put in the bottles,” Mike requested, rubbing his newly bald head.

“O
K, we’re going to need some others hanging the bottles and keeping the fires going. Me, Beverly, and Kim can do that while you and Ann start putting the shit in the bottles,” he said, pointing to the bucket. “Once we start, we can’t stop, and once the cap is put onto the bottle, the witches who have tried to cast a spell on us will feel the objects inside them. They’ll run to us and scream and beg for us to stop, but we can’t stop. They’ll say anything to get to us, but we can’t listen to them. Not if we want to live. We can’t fucking talk either. It’ll stop the spell. So I think we should put some duct tape over our mouths just so we remember. Do not talk. I cannot stress this too much, and if one of us forgets, that person has to wait for the witches to kill you. I’ll do it myself. Are we all clear on what it is that we’re doing?” Nick looked at the nervous crowd of soon-to-be spell casters.

“Got it,
” Beverly chirped as everyone else slowly nodded.

“O
K. Let’s do it.” Nick slapped a large piece of tape over his mouth. The rest followed suit and quickly went about their assigned tasks. Nick had a plan of action now. He felt whole once more. He had something to work toward and maybe a way out.

Mike grabbed a rather larg
e glass bottle and ran about the store frantically looking for something good to shove in it: chunks of broken wood, bits of glass, and anything he could find to fill the containers. He ran to the knife counter that Ann had broken and started shovelling chunks of glass into the bottle.

Ann jogged up next to him and reach
ed into the display cases, pulling out a bunch of Swiss Army knives. Quickly, she opened the attachments and chunked a few knives into her small container. Mike smiled as he watched her open the blades before shoving them in.

He ran to fill his bottle with hair and piss, and not seeing a good way to pour the concoction in
, he simply reached down and grabbed a handful of the grotesque substances and slapped it into the bottle. Ann visibly cringed a bit when she saw him do it, but she, too, repeated the act for the sake of time.

Mike screwed the lid on
to his bottle. As he tightened the top, a tremendous scream came out of the darkness, and before he could even get his deadly magic bottle back to the others, there was a hurried knocking at the door.

“Please
, no. I didn’t do it. They made me,” a woman’s voice screeched as she banged on the wall. Nick pulled a massive cauldron into the center of the room as Beverly shredded books for the fire. Nick slammed the cauldron down, and Beverly chunked the paper in and lit it up. The fire cast thick black smoke into the room.

Ann and Mike quickly filled their bottles as the rest hung and cooked what they were given, and for each bottle that was hung
, another screaming witch bashed at the building. The other witches didn’t seem to mind that their satanic brothers and sisters were having their insides ruptured, and they continued on with their diabolical hymns around the fire.

“We
’ll let you live if you stop,” one pleaded. “I never wanted to hurt anyone. Please, I beg you.” Pop! The first bottle exploded from being boiled with its top on, and it shattered into a thousand pieces. Glass and piss-covered hair flung in all directions, and one of the screaming voices went silent.

Almost a dozen bottles swung from the ceiling now, and new candles and cauldrons had to be lit
constantly. The smoke burned their eyes and filled their lungs so much that Nick started busting the glass out of the windows just so they wouldn’t die from smoke inhalation. With the protection of the cold iron and the boards that had been placed over the windows, he was not too worried that any of the witches could get in.

Mike scooped up the glass from the newly broken windows, as the howling witches tr
ied to poke their heads in through the barricade so that the group inside would have to see them die. Blood shot from their gaping mouths like twisted geysers and ran down their legs as they screeched.

“Murderous. You’re all murderous.”

“Killers are sent to hell, and that’s where you’ll go if you kill us,” some of them shouted in pain. Ann ignored their cries as she filled a new jar with tacks that she had been pulling from the posters that hung on the wall. Thinking that was not sufficient, she snatched a bit of the sword that she had shattered earlier and shoved it into the bottle before handing it off. The smell of burning hair and urine filled the room as the fire cast its flickering orange light onto the walls.

The plastic bottles melted quickly. The glass ones took more time, but they exploded like miniature grenades. All the survivors were bleeding
: the ones who tended the fire were pierced by the shattering bottles and jars, and the ones who filled the bottles and jars were cut by haphazardly grabbing every sharp object they could find. Blood ran down their arms and legs and cheeks in small streams.

“Die,
” Beverly repeated in her head. They had seven or eight cauldrons going now and about a dozen candles. Several small fires from flaming bits of paper that floated on the smoke had to be stamped out. Blood poured from the windows, and greasy pools of piss flowed from under the door; the building shook from the relentless pounding of the witches. The chanting from the monsters at the fire was starting to be drowned out by the screams of agony that came from the dying witches. The lower parts of their bellies popped like blood-filled balloons as their bottles popped. The ruptures sent them to the ground, only to be trampled to death by the other desperate witches as if it was a Black Friday Super Sale.

The store began to resemble the darkest images from D
ante’s Inferno, as more and more bottles were hung over the fires, casting a shimmering light onto the walls and ceiling as if they were at an indoor pool. Several dozen witches now cried out for mercy, and a few of the meaner witches cursed and flung threats as they met their grisly end.

Covered in blood and piss
-soaked hair, the five trapped people worked at a terrible pace. Sweat poured off them as the heat of the fires seemed to boil the air in the room. The smell of death and burning paper and plastic coated everything. They broke whatever could be broken and used it to either fuel the fires or fill the bottles, and like a death-dealing assembly line, they sent as many witches as they could to hell.