Witch Water (21 page)

A final bordered drawing amongst the stolen
pages showed a scene that to even Fanshawe—now, and given his
unease—came as no surprise: a hooded wizard in a surplice of
shining jewels, standing in a pentagram with candles burning at
each point. But the smoke of the candles contorted into thin, lurid
figures like vexatious phantoms; some had warped faces that seemed
to evaluate Fanshawe directly. Nude, sultry witches cavorted about
the circle, some with fangs, some with horns, some with bloody
grins; the artist’s skill hid no details of their physicalities.
Below the scene read PENETR. AD INTER. MORT. - NEK. SEPT. WILS. Of
this, Fanshawe could decipher nothing, but why did the “Wils.” make
him think of “Wilson” or “Wilsonne,” the name of the warlock
Wraxall conferred with in England?
And the “Nek.” must be an
abbreviation for “Necromancer.” 
Whatever the case, the
artist’s rendition of the subject showed only thin, baneful eyes
peering beyond the hood. The warlock’s left hand grasped a limp
loop of something—entrails?—while the right hand held, of all
things, a looking-glass. And in the background?

An erect, orbed object very similar to the
Gazing Ball on the hillock.

This is unreal,
Fanshawe thought. The
hot chill returned, along with the conception that this room was
steeped in evil, the byproducts of a man who truly believed himself
to be in league with forces contrary to all things decent. Fanshawe
entertained that a malignancy hung in the air as thick as the
centuries-old dust that he’d raised. These were not logical things
to think but he couldn’t escape the notion. He put the books away,
his mind racing along with the apprehensions that kept rising with
the dust. He had the impression that the cabineted books were those
which Wraxall valued above the others.
His most important
reference material—
Several more books and folders rested in
the cabinet’s age-scented maw, most protected by fabric wraps half
decomposed. He couldn’t wait to examine these as well, in good
light, but there was something else that further fanned his
excitement, however dark it may have been.

He nearly retreated when a second cabinet
offered a sack full of mummified hands.
Fuck!
he thought,
but then deeper in the cabinet he found a several other small
sacks, but these were full of bones—bones that were beyond a doubt
human.
Wraxall boiled them, for his rituals, for
his…witch-water…
In a third cabinet he found delicate wooden
racks of corked glass cylinders that reminded him of overlarge test
tubes. Could these contain the witch-water Wraxall had supposedly
said was here?

Oh, God—

A gulp and a shudder told him no, for when
he held a tube up to the penlight’s beam he detected a diminutive
form in the bottom of the tube, a form suspended in murky liquid
the color of honey. Fanshawe paled and put the rack back. The form
was a human fetus.

Wraxall purchased aborted fetuses,
he
remembered.
He ground them up and burned them for—

But why finish the awful thought?

One last cabinet sat against the end wall.
When he opened it, the hinge keened so loudly he feared it might be
overheard, but…
I’ve come too far to stop now.
He opened the
cabinet fully.

More verification of what Baxter scoffed at
sat neatly stacked before Fanshawe’s eyes. A dozen exact duplicates
of the looking-glass down in his room.

He picked one out, and a ridge formed on his
brow when it realized its duplicity wasn’t
quite
exact.

A lot lighter than the other one,
he
told himself, hefting it. Then he noticed that it had no lenses in
place.

The explanation was obvious:
These
looking-glasses aren’t filled.

Because that’s what Wraxall did. Abbie
implied that “witch-water” had multiple uses for the practitioner
of the witchcraft, but her words drifted back into his head:
…my
guess is that Wraxall filled the inside of the looking-glass with
the witch-water, and this would somehow produce an occult
effect.

No, these glasses weren’t filled but the one
Fanshawe had stolen was. And when he looked through that same glass
last night…

An hallucination? Or an occult effect?

He deflected a coughing fit from the dust
when he rummaged further, but what he hoped to find wasn’t far to
seek. Several shelves on the bottom of the cabinet were lined with
glass-stopped flasks—much like hip-flasks—sealed in black wax.
Here it is…

His light showed him that yellowed labels
adorned each flask, and on each label someone—probably Wraxall—had
written tight, cursive initials.

J. C., S.O., E. H., and several others. The
initials were obviously people—whose bones Wraxall had culled from
their graves. Fanshawe immediately picked up a flask, knowing what
it contained: water.

But not just ANY kind of water…

He dusted the flask off and shined his light
through it, finding its contents almost but not completely
clear.

Wraxall boiled the bones of witches and
THIS is some of that water.
 

There could be no question: the occultist
had planned to fill these glasses with the water in these same
flasks, and then look through them.

What would he see?

And what did I see when I looked out last
night?

Hunching lower, he quickly examined all of
the flasks, twenty in all. Three of them had been labeled E.W.

“Evanore…”

When Fanshawe reset the hidden door and went
back to his suite, he already knew he wasn’t going to tell Abbie or
Mr. Baxter about his discovery, at least not right away.

There was something else to do first.

—
| — | —

CHAPTER EIGHT

(I)

Crickets throbbed; even a few bats flitted.
Overhead the near-full moon projected down so much radiant white
light, Fanshawe felt apprehensive that someone might see him,
but…

Who would be on the trails at this hour?

It was half-past eleven now. After alighting
from the attic he’d immediately gone downstairs. The inn was
dead-quiet save for dim television squawk. He peeked around the
hall from the elevator and saw the night clerk watching a baseball
game. Eventually, the lanky man muttered, “Damn Red Sox,” then rose
as if irked. When he turned toward a coffee pot, Fanshawe slipped
past and out the front doors.

Now he stood amongst the hillocks, gazing
back at the inn through the looking-glass.
Yeah, who would be on
the trails at this hour…besides me?

He felt consumed by the nighttime, as though
it had somehow incorporated him into its essence. He rationalized
that he wasn’t “peeping” this time; instead, he’d engaged himself
in this final experiment before he returned the glass to its proper
place and never touched it again. His revelations in the attic had
confirmed everything Mr. Baxter had said about it.

Except for this…

It wasn’t quite midnight when he began his
“experiment” in earnest. He swept his one-eyed gaze across the
town’s panorama. The streetlamps of Main and Back Street shone
bright, yet few people were seen strolling the streets, and only
one couple had an outside table at the café he’d visited yesterday.
He noted the pillory closest to the corner—empty, of course. Again,
Fanshawe felt impressed by the archaic optics of the device;
something about the lens—or was it the cryptic water behind
it?—seemed to magnify all available light to an effect of
hyper-concentration. He could see the grid-work of storm screens,
smudges on windowpanes, the actual patterns of rust on a ridgepole.
Fanshawe focused on an ash tree spiring in the middle of the town
square, and could count its individual leaflets. The blade-sharp
acuity of the looking-glass made Fanshawe’s mind jiggle.

But the Travelodge windows revealed not a
single parted drape tonight, nor any late-night swimmers. Over at
the inn, Abbie’s window stood dark and so did those of the joggers,
while another window offered only a withered old man—regrettably
naked—who stumbled in and out of view.
Probably one of the
professors,
Fanshawe concluded,
after a few too many
Witch-Blood Shooters.
The window blinked out.

“Nothing tonight,” he muttered under his
breath, but that was good, wasn’t it? No fuel to stoke his disease.
And that’s not why I’m out here anyway…

Of course it wasn’t. He’d come to see if the
looking-glass would actually “work.”

As it had seemed to last night.

The town and all its details were as they
should be.
So it WAS hallucination or a dream…
Next, he had
to ask himself if he’d genuinely believed that Wraxall’s
three-century-old glass might possess occult properties. After all,
he’d found the pentagram with its borders of blood, he’d found the
other glasses as well as flasks of the witch-water, he’d found
bones.

But that doesn’t mean that these things
would really show me the town in Wraxall’s time.
It was only
the
possibility
that they would, reinforced first by his
coincidental dream-mirage last night and, second, by the power of
suggestion via the paraphernalia in the attic’s secret room.

Foolishness,
he knew,
for a fool
like me. Who am I kidding? I can’t even kid MYSELF. I came out here
to scope some windows, and I used all that mumbo-jumbo bullshit as
an excuse…

Just then, Fanshawe’s exorbitantly expensive
watch began to beep: the alarm, signaling midnight.

Look for me again, any time thou art
inclined,
he’d actually believed Evanore’s waxwork had said.
And she’d said something else—

After midnight, sir—

“Midnight,” he whispered.

The mirage he’d thought he’d seen last night
had only been viewable after the stroke of midnight. Initially,
he’d felt sure
that’s
when the town had changed…

Midnight.
The Witching-Hour. Isn’t that
what they called it?
Fanshawe stood among the brambles,
pasty-faced in the moon’s gauzy glare. The looking-glass seemed to
grow warm in his hand, as if daring him to raise it…

He determined
not
to do that, but a
moment later he did it anyway.

And stared.

The town, now, stood as it had last night:
smaller, dark, dilapidated, its outskirts impoverished; it seemed
to huddle in on itself as if against some unspoken fear. A lone
horse and rider moved slowly along the dirt-paved Main Street.
Another man, with a lantern swinging to and fro, walked in the
direction opposite; a long-stemmed pipe in his mouth showed a
luminous orange dot that alternately brightened and dulled.

Did Fanshawe hear a faint but desperate
mewl?

The pillory he’d previously seen at the
corner now displayed the head and hands of some unfortunate woman,
not the blonde from his last look, but someone with longer, darker
hair. On the ground lay eggshells and husks of rotten fruit where
rats frolicked, but the rodents scattered when the lantern-bearer
came close. After saying something to the pilloried woman, he
laughed and emptied one nostril into her hair by thumbing the other
closed, then stepped behind her. Fanshawe anticipated another rape
but such was not the case. Instead, the man raised the woman’s
tattered skirt and tapped his pipe out on her bare buttocks. The
woman bucked in her wooden brace; a shriek wheeled high into the
air.

Another sound—like a splattering—urged
Fanshawe to incline the glass. At a farther corner yet another
woman hung in a pillory, vomiting.

He veered back to the lantern-bearer, who
was just turning into the front door of the church. The lantern
vanished but reappeared a minute later up in the steeple’s
belfry.

Then the bell began to toll.

Fanshawe had heard it last night, the deep
sonorous peals that were somehow deep but strangely brittle.

The bell was tolling midnight…

Something rustled behind him; Fanshawe
turned, but he turned with the glass still to his eye. It was
within a much more distant hillock that he spied the moon-lit crush
of naked bodies churning, squirming, and writhing all amongst each
other as though they were a single entity of their own.

You’ve gotta be shitting me…

It was an
orgy
taking place in the
clearing, its participants exploring every sexual position
conceivable—and some not conceivable—as a taller almost block-like
figure looked on from between two trees. Was it this figure they
were performing for, or their own unreserved lust?
Both,
Fanshawe felt sure. Women’s backs arched in orgasmic release, their
breasts thrust, while men proceeded like animals in rut. Sweat
glazed the mass of fervent bodies, moans rose up, and shrieks of
diabolic glee shot out into the hot night. Had cryptic markings
been crudely painted on backs, bellies, and faces of the orgiasts?
Markings like those he’d seen on the Gazing Ball’s pedestal?

One grinning woman—painted all over with
upside-down crosses—allowed her nipples to be pricked by a knife,
after which men and women alike took turns sucking out blood.
Another woman, staked spread-eagled to the ground, pleaded to be
taken time and time again, harder, faster, more, over and over, and
there was no shortage of suitors to answer the plea. A woman
hanging by a tree-strung noose shrieked gutturally as a man
fornicated with her while standing up. Her legs were wrapped about
his hips as he deftly thrust, and at special moments he’d lower
himself on his knees, to semi-strangle the woman during the
process. Each application of the technique caused the woman’s face
to bloat and pinken, but it was not a look of horror that came over
her expression; instead it was a look of a glutton’s glee. Aside,
two more women squirmed panting in the dirt as they alternately
slipped their hands into one another’s sex.