Witch Water (18 page)

“But?” Fanshawe goaded.

“Wraxall’s diary gave the real reason. It
was him and Callister Rood, plus the coven members. Every so often
they’d snatch a kid to sacrifice as an offering to the Devil. There
were also entries about certain seasonal rituals they’d perform in
the woods at night, on All Hallows Eve, for instance, and
Candlemas, and the last day of April, called Beltane Eve. And the
rest of the legible stuff is mostly what I told you about the other
night”—she hesitated—“you know, about the incest and the sacrifice
of Evanore’s newborns—”

Mr. Baxter groaned, a hand to his head.

“And he did go into some detail about some
of his rituals and coven meetings,” Abbie added.

Fanshawe now fell unreservedly prey to
Abbie’s sexual aura when she slid him his drink.
Damn…
Her
breasts seemed to lift and then taunt him when she raised her own
glass. “To Jacob and Evanore Wraxall,” she proposed with a
laugh.

Baxter’s face corrugated. “I ain’t drinkin’
to them!”

“Just kidding! Um, to the Witch-Blood
Shooter. Cheers.”

The three of them clinked the tiny
glasses.

Fanshawe felt the sweet concoction slam into
his stomach. The liquor blended with the sight of Abbie coming back
to sit with him made him feel light-headed.

She re-took his hand immediately, which
appeared to buff off some of her father’s displeasure with all the
“grisly poppycock” she’d revealed.
I guess he doesn’t mind his
daughter going out with a billionaire,
Fanshawe thought
cynically. “Oh, what was I going to ask next?” He slid his stool
even closer to Abbie and was suddenly luxuriating in her scents and
exotic warmth. He looked right at her, helpless.
Oh, God,
she’s
so
beautiful…

“Stew?” She was grinning. “
What
were
you going to ask?”

He could’ve twisted his own ear.
Idiot!
You’re acting like an airhead!
“Oh, yeah. You said Wraxall dug
up his daughter’s bones—”

“
Six-hundred-and-sixty-six
days after
she was executed,” she reminded with an elucidating finger
raised.

“What ya got to understand about my
daughter, Mr. Fanshawe,” Baxter stepped back in, “is she likes to
over-dramatize things.”

“Whatever,” she sniped.

“I’m just curious,” Fanshawe continued, “as
to what Wraxall
did
with the bones, like…exactly.”

Abbie’s cocky smile challenged her father
outright. “Dad, why don’t
you
tell Stew what Wraxall did
with Evanore’s bones.”

“I’ll do no such thing, girl!” Baxter
railed. “It’s all a bunch of hokey codswallop anyways.”

Fanshawe went with Abbie’s flow. “Come on,
sir. I’d be interested in hearing your interpretation.”

Baxter stewed in reluctance, then resigned
to the task. “Aw, well, if ya really wanna know… What he done was
he made
witch-water
out of ’em.”

Of course, the term witch-water rang a loud
bell.
The glass,
he thought.
The caption called it a
“Witch-Water” looking-glass…
But he pretended to be unfamiliar
with the term. “Witch-water? What’s that?”

Baxter, not enthused to be coerced into the
line of talk, poured himself a beer. “Wraxall, see, he
boiled
them bones of his daughter’s. In a big
cauldron—’least that’s what it looks like in his dairy.”

“Boiled the bones for what purpose?”
Fanshawe asked.

“Well, after boilin’ ’em, he used the water.
Called it
witch-
water.”

“The water was supposed to have occult
properties,” Abbie augmented. “It’s said to be an invention of the
Dark Ages. Witches, warlocks, and heretics used the water for all
kinds of things: anointings, incantations, channeling with the
dead—”

“—which proves it was all made up,” Baxter
insisted. “In that silly diary, Wraxall claimed that he performed
these rituals in the attic. Said he had a
pentagram
on the
dang floor, written in
blood.
He also said he had a bunch of
big cauldrons up there, and a whole lotta witch-water stored up in
bottles from bad folks he dug up over the years. But ya know what?”
In his pause, he smiled in self-satisfaction. “It was all a bunch
of bull hockey. When the authorities busted into the house in 1675,
they searched the entire place,
including
the attic, and
found nothin’ of the sort. No cauldrons, no witch-water, no
nothin’.”

“It does seem that Wraxall exaggerated some
things in the diary a little,” Abbie accepted.

Baxter crossed his arms, eyes narrowed. “He
didn’t exaggerate, missy, he lied. He made it all up ’cos he was a
nut. Hell, we been up in that attic a hundred times and looked high
and low, and under the floor planks too. Pentagrams in blood? My
tookus. There’s
nothin’
up there like what Wraxall claimed,
not now, not then.”

You’re right about that,
came
Fanshawe’s private thought,
since I was up there myself.
But, “How interesting,” he said. “Eye of newt and toe of frog,
sure, but I’ve never heard of witch-water. And…” Several cogs
turned. He knew he had to be very careful making references to the
looking-glass.
They must not even know it’s missing…
Of
course it wasn’t missing.

It was stashed upstairs in Fanshawe’s
room.

“Does anyone know what the water from the
boiled bones has to do with looking-glasses?”

“It wasn’t clear in the diary,” Abbie said,
“since that section was so blurred out. But my guess is that
Wraxall filled the
inside
of the looking-glass with the
witch-water, and this would somehow produce an occult effect.”

Fanshawe struggled to sort her words as her
sexual presence continued to blare. Suddenly a consideration broke
through:
Maybe that’s why the glass is so heavy. It’s FILLED
with the water.
“But I assume you don’t know what that effect
was.”

“’Cos there
ain’t
no effect,” Baxter
insisted, then parted to serve several patrons who’d come up to the
bar.

Abbie shrugged. “We can only assume, but
my
assumption is that when filled with the water, the glass
might reveal something supernatural if you looked through it.”

Fanshawe stilled, but Baxter barked from the
bar’s other end, “Which proves even more that it’s just a bunch
more silly drivel.
I
looked through them glasses myself, Mr.
Fanshawe, and so did Abbie. And you know what we saw?” He shot a
half-smirk, half-smile to his daughter. “Jack
diddly,
that’s
what.”

“I can’t deny that either,” Abbie
confessed.

But Fanshawe could, couldn’t he?
Holy
shit…
It took him a moment to recover and seem unimpacted by
this information.

IF I saw what I THOUGHT I saw…

He’d seen the
past.
He’d seen Evanore
Wraxall herself, in the window of the room he now occupied—a woman
dead for over three hundred years.

Sounds supernatural to me…

Abbie jumped up, and said excitedly, “Let me
go get it—”

Fanshawe threw off his contemplative daze.
“Get what?”

“Why, the Witch-Water Looking-Glass, what
else? We keep it in one of the display cases…”

“Oh, don’t bother,” Fanshawe interjected.
Change the subject! Quick!
“It’s just kind of interesting,
like a lot of this witchcraft stuff. But that’s the other thing I
wanted to ask you—”

Abbie ceased her gesture to leave the bar
and fetch the glass.

Fanshawe felt relieved. “The other night
just as I was leaving the pub, you said I should remind you to tell
me about—what was it? The gazing ball?”

Her already bright eyes brightened more.
“Oh, yeah! It’s just off from the graveyard.”

“Yeah, I found it but what
is
it?”

“I only mentioned it ’cos it’s kind of
mysterious, and—just our luck—
that
portion of Wraxall’s
diary is illegible too. But it’s interesting because it was one of
the things Wraxall bought on the trip he took to Europe in
1671.”

Fanshawe nodded at the recollection of the
excursion. “Yeah, I remember you saying that he was abroad when
Evanore had been convicted and executed.”

“Right. But the point is
who
he
visited with during the trip—”

“Aw, Abbie, would ya please stop boring Mr.
Fanshawe with all that witchcraft bunk!” Baxter pleaded while
serving more customers.

“He visited a number of like-minded
folks—”

“Occultists?” Fanshawe presumed. “Other guys
who thought of themselves as warlocks?”

Abbie nodded. “And from these people,
Wraxall not only learned to sharpen his own skills, but he bought
things, things he couldn’t get in the new colonies.”

Fanshawe studied her. “Do I want to know
what
things
he bought?”

“No, he does
not!
” Baxter
insisted.

“It was mostly books about necromancy,” she
continued without pause, “and other things that witches and
warlocks used. Crystals said to possess certain powers, hex-charms,
pendants and bracelets made from metals smelted to special
specifications for the purposes of protection, and of course,
ritual ingredients.”

“Ingredients?” Fanshawe smiled and repeated
his previous reference. “So he really
did
need eyes of newts
and toes of frogs—”

“Nope, none of that. Try vials of elixirs,
suspensions, and distillations used for soothsaying, alchemy,
divination, stuff like that. The dried blood of virgin gypsies was
big back then, oh, and in the diary Wraxall said he bought a lot of
aborted fetuses.”

Fanshawe gaped.

“Warlocks and witches would burn the fetuses
in a crucible and inhale the vapors, supposedly to see the image of
Lucifer himself.”

“Abbie!” Baxter barked, “if you don’t stop
talkin’ all of that bucket-of-blood claptrap, I’m gonna—”

“But it wasn’t the
things
Wraxall
bought on his trip that were so important,” she talked right over
her father’s objections, “it was specifically the
people
he
went to talk to.”

“So you’ve said,” Fanshawe pointed out. “He
went to see other warlocks.”

“Yes, a number of them, but there was
one—above all the others…”

Fanshawe waited, tapping his fingers on the
bar and knowing she enjoyed stringing him along like this.
“
And?
”

“This guy was the Mount Everest of
warlocks,” she said in a hushed tone. “His name was Wilson—I forgot
his first name, but it was something unusual. There’ve been whole
books about him. He was regarded as the most powerful sorcerer in
England; he even turned lead into gold, and became very rich.”

“The only thing he turned lead into,” Baxter
piped up, “was
baloney.
”

“Wraxall bought the Gazing Ball from him,
but when he got it back to Haver-Towne, he told the residents it
was like a wishing well.
That’
s
the baloney, if you
ask me. Why would someone like Wraxall, at the least a devotee of
the occult, go all the way to Europe to consult with other
occultists, then, on his last stop, visit someone as notorious as
this man Wilson, just to buy some weird variation of a wishing
well?”

“That explanation does sound fishy,”
Fanshawe agreed but still he was nagged by the sudden distraction
of Abbie’s beauty.
I went all through dinner without lusting
after her, but now it’s bowling me over.
The calamities of last
night and this morning, then the wax museum and his fears of
becoming hallucinatory, and now this revelation about the
looking-glass supposedly being possessed of supernatural
characteristics? Everything mashed into his head like a logjam, and
leading the jam, all of a sudden, was his steaming attraction to
Abbie.

I need to think straight…

“There was another rumor that supposedly
goes back hundreds of years,” she added, “that the Gazing Ball,
instead of being a map of earth, was a map of hell—”

“Know what
I think,
missy?” Baxter
chided. “I think it’s a map of your backside, showin’ my foot
kickin’ it!”

Abbie just chuckled and shook her head.

“I couldn’t see that it was a map of
anything,” Fanshawe offered. “There were some markings on the
pedestal but as for the metal globe itself—”

“Right. It’s so tarnished you can’t make out
anything.”

Fanshawe’s observations began to settle
down. “It’s just another thing about Wraxall that’s curious.”

“Yeah,” Abbie said. “Intercontinental travel
was no easy feat back then. It was dangerous. One out of every
twenty ships either sunk due to poor maintenance or went down in
storms. It would have to be important for Wraxall to make a trip
like that.”

Baxter was beginning to enjoy his
chastisement of Abbie. “And you’re gonna go on a trip to the
moon
if ya don’t stop all this witchcraft ballyhoo. Damn,
girl, why can’t ya tell Mr. Fanshawe about the
nice
things
we got in this area? Mount Washington, the Fire Quacker Festival,
the steam-train tour?”

“There’s lots of time for that, sir,”
Fanshawe informed. “I think I’ll be staying awhile.”

Both Mr. Baxter and Abbie seemed pleased by
the remark and the change in subjects. Fanshawe asked for a soda
water next; he didn’t want to look like a lush. But as Abbie helped
her father tend to a sudden rush of customers, Fanshawe wound up
recollecting his hallucinations at the museum…

Ascend, if thou dost have the heart,
and—ay—partake in the bounty that ye hast earned,
the mannequin
of Wraxall had said.

Then the mannequin of Evanore:
Go
thither, if thou dost have the heart, to the bridle—

Fanshawe stroked his chin.
What did she
mean by that?
but then he sighed at the ridiculous thought.
She didn’t mean ANYTHING, you dunce, because it was an
hallucination!
Dummies don’t really talk!