Witch Water (3 page)

“How charming!”

Abbie made to leave with the book, smiling
over a shoulder. Her eyes sparkled, a lavish dove-gray. “I have to
check in more guests now but I can tell you all about it later if
you’d like.”

“I’d love that, thanks. And what’s this
relic display your father mentioned?”

A sharper, almost mischievous grin. “It’s a
little museum that showcases torture devices and witchcraft
paraphernalia… ’Bye!”

She drifted out of the room, leaving some
vague but erotic shampoo-scent in her wake.

“Torture devices.” Fanshawe chuckled.
Meeting Abbie left him upbeat. He went back to the bedroom to
unpack but he hadn’t even gotten the suitcase open when that
unknown impulse revisited him, goading him to look up…

At the trapdoor in the ceiling.

—
| — | —

CHAPTER TWO

(I)

Later in the afternoon, Fanshawe meandered
downstairs, aiming to have a stroll about town.
But first,
he thought and searched off the now-noisy atrium, noisy due to an
influx of guests waiting their turn at the front desk. But from the
plush atrium, small coves branched, each lit by the familiar bow
windows, and furnished with leather arm chairs. It was in these
coves that the display cases were found: great shining intricate
cases with gold-painted frameworks, curved glass, and mirrored
shelves. The cases alone looked fabulously old and valuable, but
then so must be the relics and books they quartered.
This place
really IS a museum,
Fanshawe thought, stooping before a case.
Each object was displayed upon trivet-like pedestals, and bore an
information label. First, a pair of iron rings the size of medium
hose-clamps, each fitted with a hand-forged screw whose
turning-head had been hammered flat. THUMBSCREWS, 1649, the label
notified. When Fanshawe imagined his thumb within the tiny
contraption, his stomach flipped. Next was a narrow metal spike
with a wood handle: BODKIN DAGGER, 1669. And next, a pair of crude
pliers: TOOTH-BREAKERS, 1697. Worst of all was a contraption akin
to a tiny, jawed animal trap but with a handle on one end like a
spade: TONGUE-PULLER, 1658.

The contemplations dizzied him.
People
must’ve been nuts back then.
Believing in witchcraft was bad
enough, but then to actually
use
these things on people…
Fanshawe shuddered when he imagined it: the amount of aberrant
will
necessary to do something like that, to break someone’s
teeth, to pull out their tongue.
Did they really believe the
victims were witches, or were they just sick in the head?
What
had attracted Fanshawe as a mere novelty now left him disturbed,
and the effect doubled when he realized that all of these morbid
tools had most likely been used for the precise purpose indicated.
More, even nastier-looking implements sat in the case, but Fanshawe
turned away before discerning what they were. He didn’t want to
know.

So much for that…

But in another cove, he found a case free of
such heinous devices and filled instead with time-worn books. It
was here that Abbie had obviously replaced
Ye Witch-Tryalls of
Haver-Towne,
next to
The Diary of Jacob Wraxall,
Tephramancy: the Magick of Gems & Ashes,
and
The
Slate-Writings of Jacob Wraxall,
among a host of others of
similar themes.
Jacob Wraxall?
Fanshawe questioned, but then
he remembered the engraving in the first book, of the
poshly-dressed nobleman with the Van Dyke, being shackled by the
town sheriff.
For a billionaire, I’m pretty damn dense,
he
thought when the obvious struck him. The name of the hotel was the
Wraxall
Inn; it had taken him till now to put two and two
together.
This place is NAMED after this guy,
but…why?
 Given the titles of the books and their
insinuations, Wraxall had clearly been arrested for witchcraft.
Why would somebody name their hotel after someone like
that?

A small plaque read: PLEASE HANDLE BOOKS
WITH CARE. Fanshawe was astonished; he would expect lock and key.
In a New York hotel, books this old sitting out like this would
get ripped off in two seconds.
But he saw no harm, so he opened
the case and removed a volume larger than most.
Compendium
Maleficarum,
the spine informed, yet when he opened the book,
he found it full of tight, double-columned type too monotonous to
read. One section, however, seemed devoted to warlocks, and
Fanshawe amused himself by scanning the various engravings of
somber-faced men in queued wigs and ruffled collars, holding
scepters or crystal balls. The more Fanshawe perused the book, the
more foolish he felt.
I guess people really did believe in this
stuff back then.
 He put the book away, noticing a damp,
vaguely rotten fetor.

Boredom shadowed him. He wandered to a third
cove to look out the window. The main thoroughfare stretched
quietly off in clean cobblestones while invigorated tourists began
to window-shop. When he craned his neck—

He frowned.

—for here, at just the right angle, he
noticed apartments sitting atop the street-level stores, all
older-style architecture but clearly being lived in. On a balcony,
an elderly man sat reading in the sun. Fanshawe’s eyes widened.
Damn.
He hadn’t noticed these residential windows
previously.
Thank God they’re not facing my hotel
room.
 In one such window, a curtain swayed—Fanshawe saw a
woman look outside for a moment, then disappear.

He wrung his hands.

When he turned from the bowed panes, his
eyes lowered to yet another display case. No instruments of cruelty
were present, just old pocket watches, compasses, quill pens and
standish-style ink-wells, and the like. However, on the bottom
shelf…

Fanshawe gulped.

At first he thought the object was a “ship’s
glass,” that is, a portable telescope designed for hand-held use,
about a foot long, with a collapsible draw-tube. It shined,
evidently made of brass and possibly silver fittings. Then Fanshawe
read the label: WITCH-WATER LOOKING-GLASS, MADE BY JACOB WRAXALL,
CIRCA 1672.

Witch-Water?
he wondered.
What the
hell?
He imagined Wraxall himself gazing at the heavens at
midnight and contemplating astrological formulae. But the image,
once formed, snapped to something else against his will: it was no
longer the flamboyantly attired Wraxall he saw…but
himself;
and in his hand he held not an antique looking-glass but
top-of-the-line binoculars.

Just another flashback to his jaded past,
for Fanshawe had strolled the Upper Westside streets of his own
neighborhood too many times to count, ducking into an alley
whenever he spotted a “promising” window, and raised the binoculars
to his eyes…

“Ah, Mr. Fanshawe. You’ve found our
displays, I see,” Mr. Baxter said, slipping into the cove.

The flashback corroded just as Fanshawe had
zoomed in on a naked woman in the window of a brownstone on W. 66th
Street.

His heart had quickened as though he’d been
caught red-handed in the fantasy. The portly Baxter smiled,
thumbing the suspenders.

“It’s, uh, quite a collection…”

Baxter chuckled. “Some of ’em are a little
on the morbid side, a’course.”

“Can’t argue with you there, but I guess
those were morbid times.”

“Just
different,
times, Mr.
Fanshawe—was only morbid to those who made it so. Probably a lot to
be said for livin’ back in those days.” His eyes scanned some of
the relics. “Speakin’ of all these geegaws, though… Well, it’s all
kind’a dumb tourist stuff if you ask me. But you’d be surprised how
folks take an interest in it nowadays, ’specially the witchin’ and
warlockin’ items, and a’course the implements that were used to
counter all of that silly drivel.”

Fanshawe nodded, still unconsciously eyeing
the looking-glass. “Yeah, Abbie pointed out the pillory.”

“We got several about town. Pillories were
for minor offenses: stealin’, adultery, lyin’ to the church
council. It was pretty commonplace back then. For harder crimes,
there were the whippin’ posts. Now we’ve got detention centers with
cable TV, conjugal visitation rights for convicted murderers, and
tax-dollar-funded rehab. Kind of makes you wonder. The shenanigans
we’ve got going these days were seldom seen back in Colonial times.
Deterrence meant something back then, and the law meant
business.”

Not if you can afford the best
lawyers,
Fanshawe thought, though he didn’t know if he agreed
or disagreed with Baxter’s insinuations. Fanshawe avoided
ideological conversations at all costs. “So I take it this man
Jacob Wraxall was some kind of magician or wizard? There are a
number of books here about him.”

“He fancied himself a
warlock,
not a
magician. Come round here, and I’ll show you.”

Fanshawe’s curiosity urged him out of the
current cove to the next one that Baxter strolled to, this one
being windowless. Immediately, Fanshawe looked up and said,
“Wow.”

The elder man indicated an elaborately
framed oil painting which occupied half the wall. A lenient light
shined down from a bracket on the ceiling. “Sunlight can damage it,
so we keep in here ’cos there’s no window; that special bulb up
there won’t make the paint fade. The canvas and frame are over
three hundred years old…”

Within the painting posed the same Van Dyked
man from the engraving, in the extravagant attire of the day.
Sage-like, he held a feather-pen, and about his neck, over the
ruffled bib, hung a pendant of stars and a sickle moon. Thin pale
lips turned up into the faintest smile that could be thought of as
condescending.
Well, hello there, Jacob Wraxall,
Fanshawe
thought.
What is the big whupdeedo with you?
A shorter woman
stood stern-faced at Wraxall’s side, much younger than the
painting’s central subject, with long flowing hair that too
similarly matched the color of newly spilled arterial blood.
Fanshawe’s stomach tossed.

The woman posed in a velvety blue dress with
billowed shoulders; a plunging neckline made no secret of a robust
bosom. Fanshawe at once felt jarred by her image: she looked
tantalizing, voluptuous, densely erotic…and atrocious. Her narrow
face and thin lips suggested a hereditary connection, and so did
the high cheekbones.
His daughter, not his
wife,
 Fanshawe supposed; and, like Wraxall, she was not
without some occult regalia: several rings on her raised right hand
possessed geometric designs of an astrological bent. Standing well
behind Wraxall, however, was a dark-haired, clean-shaven man whose
dark sulk and heavy jaw suggested subservience. Large eyes and a
rather wide face were the subject’s most salient features.

“They were quite a trio, I’ll tell ya,”
Baxter remarked.

Fanshawe felt particularly taken by the
painting’s indeterminate visual effect: dark, dark colors made
darker by age seemed on the other hand queerly bright in certain
details. The woman’s rings, for instance, seemed painted with such
exactitude they could’ve been photographs; the same went for
Wraxall’s pendant, and the same, too, for their eyes, a stunning
sea-green. But the background existed in such sheer murk that
nothing at all could be made of it, and the more Fanshawe peered,
he thought that other faces might lurk there, as if in smoke or
shadow.

“That’s Wraxall there, and his daughter
Evanore,” Baxter explained. “And that unhappy looking fella
standing behind is Callister Rood, the family man-servant.”

“But why name your hotel after Wraxall, of
all people?” Fanshawe asked.

“Wraxall
built
this house in the
1650s, and lived here till his death. It’s all been refurbished, of
course, but the outer structure has barely been touched—didn’t need
to be. It’s all mortised oak, and sealed with insect sap, the best
kind of weatherproofing. They built houses
right
 back
in them days. Wraxall was a well-respected member of the
community…for a while.”

Fanshawe peered at the hesitation, which may
have been deliberate. “For a
while?
”

“Until the town found out the truth about
him.”

“His occultism, in other words?”

“Oh, yeah, all that and a good deal
more.”

For whatever reason, Fanshawe felt
intrigued. His gaze kept switching back and forth between Wraxall’s
eyes and his daughter’s. He was about to ask for more details, but
a bell from the front desk rang.

“That’s for me, Mr. Fanshawe. Hope you enjoy
your stay!”

Baxter lumbered off to tend to more guests,
leaving Fanshawe mystified amid a flurry of questions. He examined
the painting for several minutes more before he finally left the
cove.

They must be having a convention here or
something,
he guessed of the next crowd of patrons waiting to
check in. They were mostly older men, dressed in suits, but many
bearded and long-haired. Immediately Fanshawe thought of
academicians. He glanced down another short hall, then felt
instantly enthused. SQUIRE’S PUB read a transom sign, and within he
could see a small but neatly appointed hotel bar bearing the same
decorative motif as the hotel.

Behind the bar top, Abbie was polishing some
glasses; she smiled at him and waved, silently mouthing,
Hi,
Stew
.

Her eyes glittered.
Man, she’s
attractive,
Fanshawe thought,
and she DID promise to tell me
more about the town’s history.
It seemed a perfect excuse to go
in, but just as he would do so, at least a dozen guests beat him to
it and filled the bar in only moments.
Damn it,
he thought.
Guess I’ll go for a walk instead. I can talk to her later when
there aren’t so many people in there.