Witch Water (31 page)

At eight, he had dinner at the pub, tended
to by Mr. Baxter. He made sure
not
to bring up the topic of
Wraxall this time, so not to seem obsessed. Instead, they talked of
things more innocuous, including the weather, and at one point
Fanshawe said, “I was thinking of inviting Abbie to go to New York
with me for a little while, if that’s all right with you.”

Mr. Baxter had
no problem
with his
daughter going to New York with a billionaire. After more harmless
small-talk, Fanshawe thanked the older man and left.

By now, it felt more like instinct that any
time Fanshawe meant to stroll the town, he’d wind up on the walking
trails which led to Witches Hill. When he arrived at its peak, the
sun was setting spectacularly.

Midnight,
 he told himself.
It
only works after midnight.

Through his pocket he felt the tubular bulk
of the looking-glass…

The temptation was there, of course; there
were still two hours to go before the clock struck twelve. As the
sky darkened, and the stars blinked brighter, the many windows of
the town began to blink as well—right at Fanshawe, baiting him to
take out the glass and pursue more of his shame-laden weakness.
Even this far off, with his naked eye, he glimpsed the joggers at
the end of a run, entering the inn, but Fanshawe did not focus the
glass on the window he knew to be theirs. And the Travelodge?

The time couldn’t have been more ripe for a
good long “peep,” but Fanshawe didn’t do it. He
thought
about it, but soon realized he wasn’t going to succumb to the
cheapness
of his addiction. The delicious thrill he normally
experienced did not rear its head.

Instead, he waited for midnight.

He crossed paths with several couples
strolling the hill as well. Fanshawe nodded, engaged in some genial
chit-chat, then moved on. He paused to view the horrific barrel,
then the grave-plots of Wraxall and his daughter, the latter sunken
by what had been plundered from it so long ago. Then he turned and
found himself standing before the Gazing Ball.

What are you?
he asked as if the
arcane object were a person. An orangish moon rose behind it, the
angle coincidently perfect for the metal sphere to eclipse the
lunar body’s glowing circumference. The spectacle lasted only a
moment, but
in
that moment the ball gave off an aura of
shimmering, thread-thin light the color of molten lava.

Fanshawe had no choice but to recall the
diagnosis of his own aura…

Black…

And the words of Letitia Rhodes:
…the
color of one’s aura reflects the true character of their
heart….

But Fanshawe
knew
that he was not a
black-hearted person.

Before he realized it, his watch read 11:55.
Back on the highest peak, he withdrew the looking-glass and raised
it to his eye.

Almost time…

The town
beamed
in the twilight. It
looked beautiful…and modern. He ranged the glass around, never once
coming near the Travelodge, nor the joggers’ window. Instead he
found the clean white town hall. The expansive first-floor windows
blazed, showing movement. Fanshawe focused and saw part of a
conference table, along with several people sitting behind it. One
was Abbie, her hair shining, and her lips moving as she referred to
papers spread out before her.
Her town council meeting,
he
thought. Did anyone on the council know about her problem? Fanshawe
doubted it. But she’d hidden her drug addiction so well, he had to
wonder what else she might be hiding. He knew the trouble he might
be getting into but…

I don’t care.

Fanshawe knew he was falling in love with
her.

He continued to scan the glass until
movement in another window snagged his eye. It was one unit in the
row of red-brick Federal Period town-style houses. The movement he
detected in the window was composed of sleek bare flesh: a nude
woman’s back, presumably, and slick, shining, as though she’d just
stepped out of the shower. But the thrill-surge of adrenalin that
would typically couple such a sight with Fanshawe’s heart…

Never came.

The nude woman turned for a moment, sporting
modest, shapely breasts. It was Letitia Rhodes.

Fanshawe slid the glass away, first out of
respect to the woman and, second, he felt no interest in privately
spying on her. His weakness for such sights seemed neutered. It
seemed like a favorite meal he’d eaten so many times, he’d grown
tired of it.

But you will succeed in defeating this
weakness,
he remembered another of her prophesies at the
parlor.

Fanshawe kept his perfunctory reactions in
check. Some of the things she’d told him during the reading were
quite true but he still knew he might be subconsciously fulfilling
the prophesy himself. Time would tell.

And as for time?

His watch-alarm began to beep the arrival of
midnight…

Here goes.
This is it. Here’s
where I prove to myself what I’m pretty sure I already
know…

When he put the glass back to his eye, the
watch-alarm faded away, to be replaced by the floating,
baritone-deep yet uncannily brittle gongs from the church bell that
no longer existed.

Now the town sat huddled, as if pushed down
by the midnight sky; it was half the size of the town Fanshawe had
left just before dusk. Far off, the rolling vista of forest
stretched, where there
was
no forest now. And through the
glass the town’s dirt roads lay tinged by moonlight alone, not
sodium light from streetlamps.

I knew it,
he thought, surprisingly
composed.
There’s no mistake now. This looking-glass is for
real,
he thought, which meant—

His own hands now grasped the proof of
supernaturalism.

The ramifications didn’t occur to him; no
deep thinking accompanied his validation. Those considerations
would come later. Instead, he simply looked—and marveled at—the
utterly impossible.

The town house that would one day be owned
by Letitia Rhodes—and whose taxes would be paid by Fanshawe
himself—stood dreary and dark and weather-stained. In the closest
pillory, a pitiable woman hung, her waste-blotched hair hanging
nearly to the street. A sentinel in a tri-cornered hat, and with a
star-shaped badge on his chest, walked rounds down Main Street, a
lantern in one hand, a billy club in the other. Several horses
stood still as statues while tied to their posts. From the entrance
of the church, a man alighted, no doubt the bell-ringer. He walked
straight from the church to the tavern across the street.

Fanshawe pulled back the focus, then swept
the entire, decrepit town. Tonight, not a single window stood
lit—

Wait!

—save for one.

He brought the glass to bear, and closed the
focus.

A figure was waving at him, from a top-floor
window of the Wraxall house. By now, Fanshawe was not surprised to
see that it was the very room he would rent three-hundred-plus
years later—clearly a room of indescribable horrors. And just as
the room was no surprise, neither was its current occupant, the Van
Dyked and emerald-eyed Jacob Wraxall, dressed in a long-tailed vest
and ruffled linen shirt; around his neck hung the exact same
pendant his likeness wore in the portrait. The cunning grin on the
necromancer’s face made Fanshawe realize this:

He’s aware of me. He knows I’m looking…

On past nights, it had indeed seemed as
though Wraxall and/or his daughter were personally addressing him
through the glass, but this he’d dismissed as paranoia. Now,
however, he knew it was nothing of the sort.

He knows I’m here. He’s back in his time,
and I’m in mine but…he KNOWS I’m here…

It seemed as though Wraxall had somehow
predicted Fanshawe’s use of the glass tonight. Next, Fanshawe
remembered the wretched sorcerer’s epitaph:
Convict’d of
Sorcerie, Deviltrie, & Infernall Prophesie…

Prophesy,
Fanshawe thought.
Could
Wraxall read the future?

It occurred to him that any man who could
make such a looking-glass might well be able to read the future and
quite a bit else.

Fanshawe adjusted the glass’s focus to the
confines of the window. Candlelight wavered from within. Wraxall
maintained the sly grin, but the disposition of his eyes changed,
signaling to Fanshawe to be attentive…

In the window’s eerily-lit frame, Wraxall
raised a hand, showing a scrap of folded paper. His other hand
raised an over-sized black book with what looked like gold flake on
the cover. Fanshawe thought back to his first intrusion into the
hidden attic chamber and the large book kept in a traycase…

Is that the same book?

Wraxall turned the book over in his hand,
opened the back cover, then inserted the folded piece of paper. His
smile sharpened when he reclosed the book.

Fanshawe kept staring.

Wraxall may actually have even winked back
at him. Then he turned and began to climb the rope ladder, taking
the book with him.

The now-familiar drone of Fanshawe’s resolve
filled his head like engine-noise. He ran full speed to the inn,
forewent the elevator to take the stairs two at a time up to his
floor, and barged breathless into his room. He locked the door and
within minutes had slid off the trapdoor, dropped the ladder, and
was up into the attic room that had been known to no one but
Fanshawe for over three centuries.

His vigor raised clouds of dust as his feet
scuffed over the blood-scribed pentagram. Fanshawe hacked in the
floating grit; he was delirious to move on and plow forward. His
hand shook when he found the bookcase and then the book itself that
had triggered his memory.
Here it is!
He shined his penlight
down. The ancient traycase crinkled when he lifted it open; gold
leaf sparkled back at him when he read the volume’s bizarre title:
DAEMONOLATREIA.
He lifted the entire book out of the case,
lay it face down, and opened the back cover. There, pressed between
the book’s end pages, lay a dimly yellowed folding of paper…

Parchment,
he realized when he
touched it, and instantly more of Letitia Rhodes’s words echoed in
his mind:
Rood’s diary does say that the key to the Two Secrets
was written down on parchment by Wraxall himself before he
died.

Fanshawe let the invaluable book clunk to
the floor, then rushed back down the ladder. He felt giddy when he
sat at the complimentary desk and carefully unfolded the parchment.
His heart raced.

The short passage commenced:
To whosoever
by Dark Providence and Adventuring Spirit shalt scruple to follow
me: Make thyself sensible to these Words, Venturer, and
Rejoyce!
Be thy Will stalwart, and provideth thy Heart
be
Black
… To larn ye Two Secrets—yea!—ye
Unholiest Knowledge of Extream Evillness of ye sartain Rites of
Transmigration
and
Riches
unto like those of Croesus and all ye Pharaohs
of Antient Aegypt putt to-gether! These Secrets wilt I make knowne
unto thee, but onlie in that they maye be passed from mine Lips to
thine Ears—

“Oh, for pity’s sake!” Fanshawe grumbled
aloud. “Your lips aren’t gonna tell me anything! You died three
hundred years ago!”

But he read on:
Thou must now grasp thy
Intellect as if ‘tis ye throat of an Unhandsome Harlot, and forge
thyself Stoutly Mindfull to my Instructions, which be thus: Taketh
thy Black Heart and thy Bleeding Hand forthwith to ye
Bridle!

“Finally! The Bridle!” Fanshawe exclaimed,
then hoped the volume of his voice hadn’t awakened anyone. But he
wasn’t quite sure what to make of the arcane “instructions.”
Was
Wraxall being subjective? Is there some riddle to this? Or did he
just mean…

He looked at his hand. “Black heart and
bleeding hand?”

A few more lines of the occultist’s writing
remained.
Afterwhilst thee must besmear ye
Mystickal
and
Horrid
Sphere
with thine own Blood
and then thee wilt take into thy Mouth one Driblet of ye Wretched
and most Nefarious
Aqua
Wicce
—

Fanshawe’s eyes peeled open as he easily
translated.
Wicce—wiccan: witch! Aqua: water!
Witch-Water!

And the rest:
Do this, Venturer, and I
shalt gladlie receive thee amidst my Parlour and reveal the Secret
Inwardness of that which I knowe.

That was all.

Fanshawe darted back into the attic, grabbed
one of the flasks of Witch-Water, then drifted back out into the
night.

—
| — | —

CHAPTER ELEVEN

(I)

It was one-thirty in the morning when
Fanshawe stood again in front of the crazily carved pedestal and
the mysterious orb that crowned it. Before re-ascending Witches
Hill, he’d stopped at his car and grabbed a larger flashlight. All
the while, he wasn’t quite sure what he was doing or what he
expected.

The night was still stiflingly warm, yet
when he placed his hand on the Gazing Ball—the bridle—it felt
almost ice cold. He knew it was a trick of the moonlight but when
he stared at the pedestal, the swaths of tiny occult symbols seemed
to exude the faintest pale-green luminescence. But when the time
came to do whatever it was he was
going
to do…he paused.

I could just go back to the inn, get Abbie,
and get out of here. Start a new life…

He raised the looking-glass and aimed it
precisely at his own window at the Wraxall Inn.

The creepily angled roof, gray wood slats,
and black windows sat there like some hulking
thing
in
wait.

Fanshawe, next, was examining the surface of
the Gazing Ball: tarnished, encrusted, weather-pitted. But the
strong white beam of light brought out a blemish that was obviously
new.