Witch Water (26 page)

“What a way with words you have,” Fanshawe
had to laugh but then reminded himself that incest and having
babies for occult purposes weren’t laughing matters. He also
reminded himself of another of last night’s images:
Rood
was having sex with Evanore…
He read on:
“How then,
Squire,” I replie to this, “wilt we bring to us ye infants so
desir’d to oblayte our Dark Mastur?” and he sayest unto me, “Loyal
and virile Rood, from thence forth it shall be
your
seed which will make my wretched and luvely
dawther great with chyld!”

Fanshawe shot another inquiring glance to
the palm-reader. “And after Wraxall realized he’d become
impotent—”

She finished the obvious. “It was my
illustrious ancestor who stepped up to pinch-hit for Wraxall.”

“That’s a pretty earthy way of putting
it.”

She chuckled. “That was some pretty earthy
stuff they were doing.”

Fanshawe’s brows jiggled. He kept reading
the passage.
Lerning this, I felt no little joye in mine hart,
and stirr’d about my groin, for such consorte wyth Evanore I hath
long dreem’d, but then I feel lowlie in profiting by my Squire’s
loss, so I speek unto him wurds of lamentation that his oncetime
pleshures will be no more, and I say that his grater age having
leeving him no longer able to sire infints doth make me sad to my
marrowe. But then my mentor’s eyes come alighte, and I see no
aspect of sadniss of his ownself, and he say, “Mere age, goodly
sarvant, is no diffurent than tyme and space in that it maye be
ply’d like clay or sculpt’d like woode! In wurds akin,
age,
then, ‘tis as chayngeable as thy cloak!
As thy trousers, I say! But heed me in thiss, fine Rood, sutch
chaynges be constrewed onlie when thy sarvants of our Dark Lord
shew fayth mighty enough and—yea!—a hart
black
enough, for such arre ye admixtures of ye very
thing! Forsooth, Rood, I shalt be vital again, for our Benefactor
whisspers to me in ye manner of
dreems
of
portent,
and he sheweth
that if so ever one’s fayth remane as stronge, then he shalt be
bestow’d the knowledge which maye make away wyth the very prospect
of deth itself!”

Fanshawe was amused by the last segment. “So
the old warlock thought he would live forever, huh?”

“All warlocks thought that,” she said. “Same
way as all condemned witches cast curses.”

Hard as the handwriting was to read,
Fanshawe flipped through more of the scribbling.

Grayte Satan! Ye first chyld borne of my
seed thrugh Evanore came this morn! My Squire very qwikly went up
with it to ye attick to drayne its blud…

Another:
Mine eyes did not lyke the waye
Prudence Cattel didst look at me to-daye at Market Square.
Thencesoever, with the Squire’s permisshin, I did saye ye Hex-wurds
on payge five hundred five of ye Remigius writings and didst putt
upon thiss woman ye burdin of nawseeating dreems and grate paynes
at her womanly regions. In the even-time late I did heer her
screeming from her beddroom window, and this didst make me very
glad…

Another:
Hath just reterned from ye Oldys
cabin ware I bound and silenc’d and came away with their onlie son,
a boye of ten and two yeers. Of his parents, I lash them to-gether
and bury them—stille living—deep in ye woode, and of the boye, I so
forc’d him to watche my burying of them, for it onlie magnify’d the
horrour of ye deed which is mutch lik’d by Lucifer. So pore were ye
Oldys, none will suspeckt mischief but instead beleeve them to have
depart’d for elseware in hope of better harvest-time.

“Some wicked stuff here!” Fanshawe
exclaimed.

“Yeah. Wicked. In this day and age,
Callister Rood would rank high on the list of psycho-sexual
serial-killers.”

In spite of his repulsion, Fanshawe kept
hunting for legible entries.

Mine hart is made to sing by ye Squire’s
aspect to-daye. Ye most reecint letter from Squire Septimuss
Willsun in Angle-land leeve my mentor overcome with joobilayshun,
being that we wilst soon be in possession of a Brydle—

Bridle?
Fanshawe thought abruptly,
but before he could ask Letitia what the bridle was, she came over
and pointed to a particular entry. “There. What do you make of
that?”

Fanshawe squinted.
I must be firm by ye
inwardness of what ye Squire say for me to do in ye ende.

“Hmm,” he uttered.

“Yeah, kind of makes you think. Like maybe
it wasn’t the townspeople who killed Wraxall at all, but Rood
himself.”

“Under Wraxall’s orders.” Next, his eyes
caught a familiar reference.
After we erlier boilt ye bones of
ye womin from fifty yeers agone known as ye Fenstanton Witch, ye
Squire fashion’d a look’g-glass and after midnighte’s peal, we peer
through it and see ye land in ye witch’s time. Ye Squire’s suksess
leeve me neerly in a swound yet ye Squire himself chukle and speek
that this is a trifle when in compar’d to what he has in his mynd
for future glass he endevers to make.

“What I was leaning to earlier,” Letitia
said, “turn to the last page with writing on it. It sort of
clarifies things.”

Fanshawe did what she said, and here were
the final lines written by Callister Rood:
I needs must admitt
that my spiritt grows disorder’d bye feare in contemplayshuns yet
to come, and ye Squire espies this as plain. He sayeth then, in a
mannur most comfitt’d, “be disheartened not, frend Rood, for all
which we worke for is now in playce, save for my final behest unto
thee. Ye tyme be neerly beside us, and thee hath learnt well! Yet
the corpulent High Sheriff and his bird-witted assizers be already
suspecting of us. Best, then, that you giveth them not the
satisfaction to do away with thee in their manner but instead cause
thyself to cease to be, whilest thou knoweth what must be done upon
me…

Fanshawe thought he understood. “I’d say
this
definitely
clarifies that Rood killed Wraxall. Wraxall
was
instructing
Rood to commit suicide once the sheriff and
his deputies came for them.”

Letitia nodded. “But isn’t the end of the
sentence curious?”

“Yes. That something relevant might be
required
of Rood,” Fanshawe figured.

Letitia nodded. “At least that’s how it
strikes me. Rood killed Wraxall before he killed himself, and cut
out his
heart.
”

Fanshawe hesitated. “What happened…to the
heart?”

“Well, no one knows that, of course, but
hearts were used in sorcery all the time, especially the hearts of
necromancers.”

Fanshawe hadn’t thought of that.
More
occult ritualism, I guess. Didn’t the Aztecs cut out people’s
hearts as an offering to their Gods? To solicit favor and
immortality?
He knew he remembered something like that from
history classes decades ago.

But it was the passage just
before
the last one he’d read that most piqued Fanshawe’s interest.
He
was talking specifically about—

“What do you know about witch-water
looking-glasses?” he asked.

Her expression was one of surprise. “Wow,
you’ve really got the bug, haven’t you?”

Suddenly he felt self-conscious. The
Baxters’ looking-glass was still in his jacket pocket.
Jesus, if
she’s really psychic, does she know I’ve got it?
“Don’t know
why,” he said, “but I’m finding all this witchcraft stuff pretty
fascinating. I saw the looking-glass over at the inn, and they told
me a little bit about it. Did Wraxall really believe that the water
from boiled bones could be magical?”

“He not only believed it, he and Rood
claimed many times that it
was
magical. Witch-water was
fairly common in the fifteen and sixteen hundreds in Europe.
Sorcerers would boil the bones of dead witches, warlocks,
criminals, whatever, and the water would be used in ritualism, sort
of like the antithesis of holy water. Supposedly Wraxall learned
how to make the looking-glasses from other warlocks and ancient
reference books called grimoires. In a looking-glass, witch-water
was said to provide a view through the dead person’s eyes and in
the era of that person’s life. The glass at the inn supposedly
contains witch-water from the bones of Evanore Wraxall. We all
tried it but—no surprise—it didn’t work.”

Fanshawe’s silence at the comment caused an
awkward pause.

“This is really odd, though—coincidental, I
mean.”

“What?” he asked.

“Last week some guy came in here and was
asking about witch-water, too.”

“Eldred Karswell,” Fanshawe uttered. “That
was his name, right?”

“He never said his name. Older guy, though,
and nice enough, I guess. He paid well but he smoked the
worst
cigars.”

Fanshawe nodded. “
Definitely
Karswell.”

“So I take it you know him?”

“No, but—” Fanshawe deliberated over her
exact words.
Know him or KNEW him?
“Didn’t you know that he
was dead?”

Letitia’s face seemed to broaden in shock.
“
What?
”

“His body was found two days ago, on one of
the trails at Witches Hill.”

“The guy they found there was
him?
Holy shit. As of today, the paper didn’t give his name. I assumed
it was just a transient or someone like that.”

“No, it was Karswell, the same man who spoke
to you,” Fanshawe felt certain, “and he was no transient—he was
rich.”
Some psychic,
he thought.
Karswell was sitting
right in front of her, but she didn’t predict his death.
“Did
you tell his fortune?”

“No, he just wanted to ask me stuff about
Wraxall, said he was willing to pay for the information, which now
that I think of it was kind of bizarre. He seemed to know a lot
about the occult.”

“Well, he
wrote
 about the
occult; he was a writer, had a bunch of books published. He was
also a
Christian mystic.
”

This took her aback.

“I have this feeling he was writing about
Wraxall himself,” Fanshawe added.

“But if you didn’t really know him, how do
you know he was an occult writer?”

Fanshawe gave the question honest thought.
“You might say…I had some researchers pry into the dead man’s
privacy.”

The look on her face told him: Why? Why
would Fanshawe want to know anything about Karswell? “This is
getting more interesting by the minute. I got bad vibes from the
guy the minute he walked in here, and now I’m getting more.” She
stared right at him. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing. I’m just curious about some
things.”

“Well, I’m curious too, about this Karswell
man,” she said in a drier and almost demanding tone. “Do you know
how he died? The papers just said he was found dead, said it was a
robbery-related homicide. His wallet was missing.”

“His
face
was missing too,” Fanshawe
said. He watched closely at her reaction.

Her mouth fell open, then closed.

“I’m not trying to make you sick
but…Karswell’s face, scalp, and most of the flesh on his head had
been torn—or
chewed
—off, as if by a wild animal.”

“Almost like…”

“Yeah, almost like he’d been ‘barrelled,’”
Fanshawe said.

Another silence followed. Their eyes met,
then flicked away, but Letitia made no comment. Fanshawe used the
now-unpleasant silence to feign interest in some of the other
pictures on the wall. One was a picture of Letitia holding an
infant. She didn’t look any younger in the picture than she did
now. “What a cute baby,” he offered.

When she didn’t reply, he turned.

Her appearance had changed completely. No
longer the off-beat, quirky “palmist,” now she looked wilted,
crushed.

Oh, no,
Fanshawe thought, his guts
sinking.

“His name was George Jeffreys Rhodes,”
Letitia said in a dark wisp. “He died in May, he was only eight
months old.”

“My God, I’m sorry,” Fanshawe struggled. He
wanted to kick himself. Yet he had to wonder about the dead
infant’s father, since he saw no trace of him in the pictures.

He didn’t have to ask, though. “The
biological father left when I told him I was pregnant,” she
said.

Fanshawe’s tongue seemed to adhere to the
roof of his mouth. This time the silence turned excruciating, and
for all he was worth he struggled for something to say, but before
he could—
clack!
—the lights and air-conditioner shut off.
Letitia shrieked at the initial startlement.

“Just a blown fuse, I think.”

“I should be so lucky,” she said with a long
smirk. “The bastards could at least have waited till the end of the
month.”

“Forgot to pay your power bill?”

Letitia, smirking, picked up several letters
on the end table, then flapped them back down. “Yeah, I ‘forgot’ to
pay a bunch of them—a
delinquent customer
is what they call
me after all these years of giving them money. I’ve got bills
stacked up till Judgment Day. It’s this damn recession. When
there’s a recession, the last thing on anyone’s mind is getting
their fortune told.”

“Sorry to hear you’re so having such a tough
time,” Fanshawe said.

“The power bill’s the least of my worries,”
she remarked with some cynicism. “I’ll be kicked out of the house
before long ’cos I can’t afford the damn property tax. The bastards
assess this house for three times what it’s worth, and nobody’s
buying houses now anyway, not in this economy, so I couldn’t sell
it if I wanted to. But they don’t want to hear that, oh, no. I
gotta pay taxes on what they
say
it’s worth, whether I like
it or not. Bunch of pirates, bunch of damn blood-suckers.”

Now Fanshawe felt twice the bad luck magnet.
First, he reminded her of her dead child, and now this.
Shit…
But he still had questions, about Wraxall, about Rood.
Can’t ask her about all that now.