Witch Water (14 page)

Had someone been up here recently?
Probably Mr. Baxter, putting the decorations away after
Christmas.

But Fanshawe couldn’t figure why he’d come
up here. What did he expect to find?
I’m just getting nuttier
and nuttier, I guess.
Still, he walked down the narrow space,
fanning his light. Tree sap—more than likely cooked out of the
rafters and wood slats from hundreds of years of hot
summers—hardened like tinted glue everywhere he looked. When he
made it to the chamber’s end, he stopped, sniffed. He wasn’t sure
but he thought he smelled—

Old cigar smoke?

But the fetid odor was gone just as he
thought he’d detected it.

Enough Nosy Parkering for me.
He
climbed back down and replaced the trapdoor, shaking his head at
himself. Snooping in other people’s business wasn’t like him, but
then he laughed and frowned at the same time when he realized the
outrage of that impression.

I’m a voyeur, a peeper. I’m the worst kind
of snoop.

He went to bed, baffled by his actions. But
at least the trip into the attic, if only temporarily, had freed
his mind of the impossibilities he’d glimpsed—or
thought
he’d glimpsed—on the hill.

Some time later, he was sinking into
sleep—sinking, as if in a trench of slime. He twitched under the
sheets; the darkness clotted around him.

He dreamed…

««—»»

A bright window comes into focus through a
familiar binocular frame. A beautiful woman is undressing, in
seeming slowness, but once she’s nude, she turns toward the window,
showing all—

Behind him a voice trumpets: “Freeze!
Police!”

Fanshawe is slammed against the alley wall,
his cheek rubbing bricks. Snap! Snap! and next his wrists have been
handcuffed behind his back. “How do you like that shit? A peeper…”
Red and blue lights pulse blob-like within the alley.

Next, Fanshawe sweats on the pay phone in
the booking section of the chaotic police station. “Artie, it’s me.
I’m in big trouble. Call the lawyers and get me bailed out…,” and
then he tells his confidante what he’s been arrested for, his voice
tinted by shame. Artie’s initial reaction is only a guttural
silence, as though he were choking on the information—

Next, Fanshawe stands haggard in the foyer
of his luxury brownstone, his shirttail out, his hair mussed. A
Tiffany clock on the mantle chimes three a.m. as Fanshawe’s silk
night-gowned wife stares with a look that’s half-outrage and half
stupefaction.

“
You-you…were arrested for what?”

“
I—”

Next, she’s haphazardly dressed in the
spacious bedroom, her head a blond blur as she maniacally crams
clothes and toiletries into a suitcase. When she slams the case
closed, tears fly off her face.

“
Laurel, please,” he croaks. “Let me ex—”
but the words die as if his lungs have collapsed.

“
You think you know someone,” comes her
shrill sob, “you think they love you so you give your life to him,
and then you find out he’s a pervert!”

“
Honey, I’m sorry, I—”

“
You’re sick!” she shrieks.

He pleads now not to her but into his hands.
“I’ll get help, I go to a counselor—I don’t know how to explain
this to you because I don’t even understand it myself—”

Laurel’s face has contorted into a pink mask
stamped by every conceivable negative emotion. “Explain what? That
you’re a pervert? That you’re a common criminal who gets his
jollies looking at women in windows?” but then the rictus deepens
with a worse thought. “They were women, weren’t they?” She is
teetering in place. “Or were they really children?”

Fanshawe feels flattened, like the ceiling
has just collapsed on him. “No, no, I swear, it wasn’t anything
like that.”

Laurel spins round, grabs her purse and
keys, then the suitcase. She doesn’t believe him. “Don’t ever speak
to me again. Do you have any idea how much this hurts?”

Fanshawe sobs himself now. “Please don’t
leave. I love you. I swear, I’ll never do it again. I-I…I just have
this problem…”

“
You’re sick! And that’s what you make
me: sick! I want a divorce!”

The whole room concusses when she flies out
and slams the door. Their wedding picture on the wall falls down
and shatters.

Now Fanshawe sits on the couch in Dr.
Tilton’s sterile office, and looking at him from behind the big
desk is Dr. Tilton’s sterile face. “—a sickness, Mr. Fanshawe, a
chronic paraphilic fixation that has reached a transitive state.
This isn’t simple voyeurism, it’s an extremity of late-stage
obsessive disorders such as Scoptolagnia and Parascopily…”

He feels as lost as one sitting in an
electric chair. When he rubs his face, he feels sand-papery
stubble. “What’s wrong with me?” he drones.

“
You’re ill,” she snaps back. “You need
treatment. Otherwise you’ll never be able to function normally in
public… All your money and lawyers may keep you out of jail, but
you’ll always be a pervert in society’s eyes—always, unless you
stop right this instant…”

“
I will!” he pants, “I will!”

The doctor’s elegantly manicured finger
raises up to touch her chin. “But I’d like to ask you something
rather pertinent, as—and don’t be offended by this—most patients
suffering from such anti-social habituations as this generally lie
to their psychiatrists initially, but…are you being honest with me
when you say that it was a woman you were spying on?”

Fanshawe glares.

“
Not a child? Not an adolescent?”

“
No, no, no!” he yells and wishes just
then that he could crush his own head in his hands—

««—»»

—and that was when the clot-like darkness
seemed to force its way down his throat, almost like someone’s
hand, and when Fanshawe began to gag, he sprang awake.

Jesus…

Sweat sopped him like glue, drenching even
the sheets beneath him. His open eyes jiggled in shock.
Another
nightmare,
he thought; he grimaced when he dragged his forearm
across his brow to wipe off the chill sweat. The final
dream-fragment stuck in his head like a shard: Dr. Tilton’s stony
face as she so wanted to imply that it might be
children
he’d been scoping all these years. The notion made him sick—sicker
than he generally was of himself. It made him
hate
her.

The moonlight streaming in seemed lightened
now, pale. Dawn was not far off. He sat for several minutes to
catch the breath that the dream had robbed him of. It was with a
determined force that he struggled
not
to think back to what
he thought he’d seen on the hill, but the harder he pressed that
force, the more the images leaked in. Not the sultry joggers nude
in their room, and not even Abbie and her stunning physique—it was
the
other
images, those that arrived later: the corroded
town, the wild forest surrounding it—a forest that was not there
now—the lampless streets, unpaved, not black-topped or brick-lined;
the handful of windows dimly lit by candles, not electric bulbs.
It’s almost like I was seeing the town as it looked hundreds of
years ago…
Then the final marauding image: the nude woman,
red-haired, standing heavy-breasted and pregnant as if to
burst…

“For God’s sake,” he muttered. He must have
dreamed all that, and just gotten confused.
Yeah…
The
pregnant woman must surely be a product of his
dreaming
mind—some oblique reference, no doubt, to Evanore Wraxall, a witch
kept pregnant by her own father.

He jerked around in bed, close to yelling,
when he suddenly heard—

That damn dog again!

Enraged, he leapt up. Yes, he was sure he
heard a dog barking, not too distant but not too close, either. It
didn’t come from within the hotel.

Outside.

He rushed to the sitting room which faced
the street.
What the HELL is this?
Now Fanshawe was not as
bewildered as he was mad. He’d heard a dog several times during his
stay but had seen not a single one. He threw back the drapes,
glared down into the street…

The street stood still in the vestiges of
nighttime. No people, no movement or traffic of any kind.

No dog…

He could tell dawn was fast approaching. It
seemed impossible that the night had already passed—the dream had
seemed to last for hours. But perhaps, still groggy, he’d been
disoriented, and had misplaced the location of the dog’s barks.
Behind the hotel,
he thought and hurried back to his
bedroom. He grabbed the looking-glass and immediately pointed it
into the rear parking lot—

Fanshawe’s throat seemed to shrivel in on
itself.

There was no dog.

There was no parking lot, either.

But, beyond, he could see the hillocks which
formed the natural pedestal for Witches Hill. The hillocks looked
different: wilder, overgrown, more heavily treed, and he could
detect only one trail, not the webwork he was used to. Then…

Movement.

He stared into the looking-glass, more acid
dumping into his stomach. He could see several people stalking up
Witches Hill in the distance, and one of those people was walking a
large black dog that barked viciously.

No…

He lowered the glass; he was shaking. He
could hear the animal’s continued barks but now his head was filled
with that same disorienting drone that had overcome him earlier.
Thoughtless, he stumbled back into the sitting room, and re-aimed
the glass through the window and out into the street.

He heard a moan, and he saw…

The looking-glass was zoomed in, as though
it had
adjusted itself.
He knew this—like everything
else—was impossible, but now he was looking at an abrupt close-up
image, that of a woman in the shabbiest clothes locked by wrists
and neck into the authentic pillory out front. Filthy hair hung
down in strings; she’d been egged, for Fanshawe could easily detect
the presence of eggshells stuck to her hair, while more shells and
apparently rotten fruit lay on the street. Several men in the
strangest attire lingered behind the woman. “Be quick about it!”
shot one man’s hot whisper, for another seemed to be crudely
fornicating with the woman from behind; his face, like his cohorts,
was kept blacked out from the shadows of oddly shaped hats. Now
Fanshawe could hear the woman’s sobs as she hitched in the cruel
wooden brace. Still another man said “‘Tis no transgression to
defile a strumpet whose
very life
defiles our Savior,” and
another, “May we stay in the favor of the Lord thy God when we
acteth out against His adversaries.” “Offenses against the offender
bespeaks a blessing.” They both came around the front and began to
expectorate on the woman’s head; then they began to urinate on her.
Fanshawe made this out very clearly, even with the men standing
with their backs to him. It was the looking-glass, demonstrating
the most precise clarity; Fanshawe could
see
the streams of
urine. Then, only to intensify the foulness of what took place, the
pair of men stepped closer to the woman. Fanshawe didn’t have to
speculate that they were masturbating on her.

Eventually the group sulked away, leaving
the abused woman drenched and hitching in her misery.

Immediately, Fanshawe thought,
Rape.
Strange talk or not, some transients must have abducted the woman,
put her in the antique pillory, and raped her. Fanshawe pulled on
his robe, grabbed his key, and dashed out of the room.

Barefoot, hair sticking up, he took the
elevator downstairs, burst through the atrium, and ran out the
inn’s front door.

I should’ve known…

Before he’d even gotten halfway to the
pillory, he saw plainly that it was unoccupied. No spit, fruit,
eggshells, or other debris was in evidence. The pillory and the
street beneath it was clean.

—
| — | —

CHAPTER SIX

(I)

In the blaze of noonday sun, Fanshawe looked
both ways up and down Main Street, and when satisfied that no one
stood within earshot, he sat down on a bench and hunted for the
number on his cellphone. Out of the corner of one eye, however, he
saw the town church. There was clean white steeple but—

No bell in it,
he
re-verified
.

He’d thought he heard a church bell last
night.

Hmm.
He let the idea slide by, hoped
it would leave his head.

But it didn’t.

Earlier, just after daybreak, he’d slept off
and on in his room’s lounge chair, but awoke around ten feeling
even less rested. His mind raced.

Then he showered, dressed, and let his daze
take him out to the town square. Being in public made him feel
safer from his own thoughts—

And his fears of what he might see.

His hand shook holding the phone. “I’d like
to speak to Dr. Tilton, please. My name is Stewart Fanshawe; I’m a
patient of hers—”

A receptionist told him in crisp monotone
that Dr. Tilton was not available.

“I need an emergency phone consultation,”
his voice rose, desperate. “You have my credit card number in my
file—I’ll pay whatever you want, but,
please,
get me Dr.
Tilton. I need help.”

“One moment, please,” and then music drifted
over the line.

Fanshawe waited, hunched over on the bench
with his foot tapping. Minutes seemed to tick by; his paranoia made
him think they were doing it on purpose. Eventually the line
clicked, and Dr. Tilton’s voice came on.

“Hello, Mr. Fanshawe—I’m sorry to keep you
waiting. I was tending to a chronic patient in need—a unipolar
depressive suffering from delusions of morbidity and suicidal
ideations—”